I look at Julia and she nods. ‘Absolutely,’ I say. ‘You can show me your favourite animals.’

‘What’s your favourite animal, Léa?’ Julia says.

‘Les éléphants.’

‘Ah, me too,’ I say, and she beams back.

‘Éléphant, éléphant,’ she chants as she runs away from us into the living room, Luca chasing after her.

‘They are a bit excited today,’ Julia says. ‘First day of the holidays. Eight weeks off. They will calm down.’

‘No problem.’ I think of Nicky in Year 9 at St Mary’s who set fire to the boys’ toilets on the final day of term before Easter. ‘They seem great.’

Michel returns to the terrace with a bottle and three glasses. ‘To welcome you.’ He smiles. ‘This is local. A Chasselas from Lavaux, just over there.’ He pours the wine with one hand and gestures to our right with the other. In the distance I see vines strung in orderly terraces along the hillside.

I didn’t know Switzerland had vineyards.

Excitement flickers again, sputtering into life like a creaky old banger. Not for the wine, but for the prospect of discovering so many more things I didn’t know about this place. I have eight weeks to do things that are new. Eight weeks away from the flat that held me prisoner with memories, away from the job that failed to distract me from myself, away from the hollowness of so many endings.

Maggie was right about this. I need to be here. I need a temporary respite from everything back home in a brand-new country – and of course it had to be this country.

FEBRUARY 1976 London, UK

SYLVIA

After a reluctant Saturday afternoon in the office, Sylvia squeezed herself onto a packed tube carriage. Over the shoulder of a fellow passenger, so close she could see dandruff speckling his dark coat, her eye caught a story on the front page of The Times:

STARS LINE UP FOR LAST NIGHT AT OLD VIC

After nearly 13 years, the National Theatre Company takes its final bow at the Old Vic tonight in view of its move to…

The doors opened at Embankment and Sylvia was propelled out of the tube and up into the cold, early evening air. She took the steps up to Hungerford Bridge and there it was on the other side: the Denys Lasdun building, which was to be Maggie’s new workplace, its Brutalist towers an unapologetic presence on the South Bank. She walked across the bridge, down Waterloo Road and into The Cut, breathing in the buzz of a city supercharged by Saturday night fever.