By the time he set Clotilde down in the Aryon, like a cargo of dynamite that must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to get wet, the water had reached his chest, and even though he had held his cargo tightly in his arms, they were both as soaked as each other as they dropped into the hull. Lying there, the boat’s sides shielded them completely from the dancers on the beach.

The sea wind chilled them.

Clotilde felt intoxicated. She had a sense that she was living out the final moments of a long nightmare and that, in a few hours, the truth would finally emerge. Perhaps, however stupid it might seem, that idiot Cervone might finally confess that her mother was still alive, that she had been waiting for her all these years.

One last time, Clotilde glanced at her mute mobile phone, before sliding her wet shorts down her legs like a snake sloughing its skin. She was much worse at striptease than Maria-Chjara, she realised. She made up for it with self-mockery.

‘So, did you find our beautiful Italian arousing at all?’

With the same reptilian wriggle, Natale removed his shorts. His polo shirt, which he had already pulled over his head, had been used to sponge his body before being draped carefully over the rail.

‘Hm … molto molto,’ said Natale. ‘And if you could go on calling me Brad …’

‘No way! For me, you are and will remain Jean-Marc. More than that, my Jean-Marc in his unique role as the dolphin man.’

They lay down side by side without another word, silently shedding their underwear. Clotilde, pressing her cold, wet body against Natale’s, understood that they would have to make love like that, side by side. She imagined that if they ever made love again they would always have to do it like that, as sardines (the image made her smile), and find even more unlikely places – in a grassy field beside a busy road; on the top bunk, right under the ceiling, of a sleeper train on the way to Venice; under the stage of a theatre with the performance going on above them …

The boat rocked gently.

So did her life.

~

‘What if we loosened the moorings?’

Clotilde and Natale were lying in the bottom of the Aryon, naked, on their backs; swaying in a cradle beneath the stars. Clotilde could no longer recognise Betelgeuse among the myriad points of light.

‘What if we loosened the moorings?’ Clotilde repeated.

The Aryon was held only by a single rope. A pen-knife, teeth, a sharp fingernail would have been enough to sever their bond with the land.