I waited, but he said nothing more.

We drove on in silence. I resumed my original position: staring out of the window, my face turned from Joe, my shoulders aching with tension. We rattled along the slow lane of a dual carriageway, and were overtaken by a variety of ramshackle trucks, including a three wheeler towing a flatbed stacked with tractor tyres. The driver, a swarthy young man in overalls, grinned and saluted as he went past. Joe touched his forelock in response. I had a flashback to a holiday sixteen years previously, when Joe and I spent the summer driving around Ireland in a campervan; the windows open, my belly swelling with Daniel inside it, music playing on the radio and life feeling so good, so easy. I remembered the braids in my hair, the cotton pinafore I used to wear, the cheesecloth shirt, the sun in my eyes, Joe’s hand reaching across the hot leatherette of the bench seat, to take hold of mine; how happy we were.

The happiness was long gone. Daniel was gone and our love hadn’t been strong enough to survive the aftermath of his death. Now we were merely two people with nothing in common, save an inheritance that had been foisted on us in a clumsy attempt to make up for something that could not be compensated for; an inheritance I couldn’t wait to offload.

5

Back in Bristol, when I was planning for this trip, I’d borrowed a linen trouser suit from my colleague, Meg, to wear to the meeting with the Sicilian lawyer. The suit was a mistake. It was of good quality, but it wasn’t my style and it didn’t fit. Beneath the jacket was a sleeveless, polyester shirt with a bow at the neck. I had to hold the ribbons of the bow to stop the wind blowing them into my eyes. Sweat was pooling in the ridge of my back. Meg always looked well-dressed, she looked right in her clothes. I’d thought that if I borrowed them, I’d look right in them too, but I didn’t. I tucked the ribbons inside the shirt, sweated in the suit and watched the countryside pass by.

Soon, we left the flatlands behind and drove a winding road that led into lusher countryside. We passed a hobbled donkey and Joe’s fingers clenched on the steering wheel. I remembered something I hadn’t thought of in years. When we were eleven years old, Joe and I rescued a starling from a cat and put it in a box in the shed at the back of Joe’s family’s house in Muswell Hill. Joe looked after it, bringing it food and water, checking on it several times a day. The starling, which we named Stanley, was recovering and we had hopes of a successful return to nature, until Joe’s father, the psychiatrist Patrick Cadogan, discovered it.