‘Don’t worry about coming in, querida. I know that you saw the doctor and I know also what he said to you, because he had already spoken to me before he called you in to see him. I only went with you today because I knew that I must convince you. And now that I have, we will speak no more about it to anyone. Especially not to your father.’

Bel felt the heat of her mother’s glance and the desperation contained within it. ‘But surely—’

‘When it is necessary, we will tell him,’ Carla said, and Bel knew it was her final word on the subject.

Bel returned that night to the Casa, feeling her world had tipped on its axis. For the first time, she was being forced to face her mother’s mortality. And, through that, her own. She sat down to dinner that evening and glanced at Gustavo next to her, before gazing across the table at Maurício and then Luiza. Both her husband and her mother-in-law had known where she was this afternoon. And yet neither of them cared enough to ask after Carla’s health, enquire of her what had happened at the hospital. Gustavo was already inebriated and incapable of lucid conversation, while Luiza probably considered that touching on a distressing subject would upset her digestion of the beef, the texture of which would challenge the most cannibalistic of incisors.

After dinner, and the endless rounds of cards, matched in numbers by the glasses of brandy downed by her husband, she accompanied him upstairs.

‘Coming to bed, querida?’ Gustavo asked her as he divested himself of his clothes and fell back onto the mattress.

‘Yes,’ she replied, walking towards the bathroom. ‘I will be there in a few minutes.’

Shutting the door behind her, Bel slumped onto the edge of the bath and put her head in her hands, hoping that by the time she emerged, Gustavo would be fast asleep and snoring. As she sat there desolately, she remembered Carla talking to her before her marriage of the fact that she had needed to grow used to Antonio and learn to love him.

However much Bel had inwardly derided what she had seen as her mother’s subservience to her father in the past, and wondered how she could tolerate his arrogance and never-ending desire for social acceptance, for the first time she understood the strength of the love her mother had for her husband.

And Bel had never admired her more.

‘How is she?’

Laurent’s concerned face greeted her at the door of his apartment as he ushered Bel inside a few days later.

‘She’s dying, as she told me she was.’

‘I’m so sorry, chérie. So what will happen now?’ Laurent asked as he led her into the drawing room.

‘I . . . I don’t know. My mother is still refusing to tell my father,’ she murmured as she sat down abruptly in a chair.