I sit back on the bench and feel my body relax beneath the August sun. It’s nice to be here, finally, after such a stressful morning. Léa screaming that she didn’t want to go. Refusing to put on her tennis outfit until Julia threatened to take away her new Harry Potter book. And then Julia rushing around, harried, because an important package for her event that day hadn’t turned up in the post. She’d had it sent to the house specifically, she’d told me, because time was tight and she didn’t want to have to drive to the office before the event if it arrived on the Saturday morning.

Are you sure nothing came in the week, Jess?

I shook my head, unable to even mutter a response. Sickness grew in my stomach as I pictured myself putting the packet in the recycling bin near the pool. The deviousness of it. The pointless stupidity. But I know I can’t go back on it now.

Léa and Céline get up from their chairs and throw each other evil glares as they prowl to their respective ends of the court. It’s Léa’s serve. She throws the ball high in the air and pummels it down, but it’s slightly long.

‘Maybe she could be the next Graf.’

Michel laughs. He takes off his baseball cap and wipes the sweat off his forehead. I think of Jorge by the pool, water droplets on his tanned skin. ‘I don’t know, I don’t want to push her too hard. She’s only eight,’ he says.

‘Got to start them young. She’s got less than a decade if she’s going to beat Martina Hingis’ record as the youngest Grand Slam singles winner in the modern era.’

He laughs. ‘You really know your stuff.’

‘Like I say, I’ve watched a lot of tennis.’ A memory drifts into my head of a brown box television set in the mid-eighties, the vivid green swatch of the grass, the thick-thock of the ball, the polite applause, Mum coming to sit on the shag pile carpet beside me, a bowl of strawberries in her hand for us to share. Me teasing her for shouting at the telly when her favourite player was losing, her smiling in self-awareness at her rampant competitiveness. The memory settles on me like a warm blanket.

‘Je veux faire pipi,’ Luca says, and the scene evaporates and I’m back on the bench on the side of the arid red clay court.

‘Zero-trente,’ the umpire says after one of Léa’s serves sails out.

‘Attends, chéri,’ Michel says to Luca, not taking his eyes off his daughter as she prepares to serve again.

‘This is an important game,’ I say to Luca. I don’t want to miss Léa’s impending triumph because I’m helping a small boy go to the toilet.