‘Every summer,’ Lisabetta went on, avoiding Speranza’s eyes, ‘Salomé went off to cry. She was a proud girl, so she chose to hide rather than see Paul kissing his wife on Alga beach. Or see him playing with his children. So she wouldn’t feel like poking her own eyes out at the sight of the happiness that should have been hers. That, my darling, is why you hardly ever saw her.’ She slid the cubes of panzetta and the onions into a frying pan and added olive oil. ‘But time was Salomé’s ally. Between the Penelopes and the whores, the Penelopes always win out in the end.’

The word ‘whore’ coming from old Lisabetta’s mouth made Clotilde jump. What hatred must a grandmother feel to use such a coarse term? Speranza punctuated her words with the sound of plates being stacked.

‘After ten years or so,’ Lisabetta continued, ‘all of Palma’s trump cards began to fade. Everything that had charmed your father. The unfamiliar, her difference, her exoticism, call it what you will. Paff! It’s always like that here. The Corsicans become sailors, teachers, businessmen, so they can leave, because they’re young, they feel as if they’re suffocating on the island. They think they’ll be able to breathe better elsewhere, somewhere that smells different, but in the end all that remains are the scents of childhood. You see, my darling? His Austro-Hungarian princess had sentenced him to live not in a palace, but in a detached house in the Normandy suburbs. With a garden twenty metres by twenty, when eighty hectares awaited him here. The view of cornfields rather than the Mediterranean, not to mention the lack of sun, his childhood friends, or his job as a turf salesman. So yes, he missed Corsica, but he was trapped and inevitably, unconsciously, he blamed Palma.’

She checked the heat of the stove, stirred the chopped tomatoes, and then gently took Clotilde’s hand again.

‘I don’t know anything more than that, my darling. Was it your father who beckoned to Salomé? Or did she come to him? I can’t tell you which summer it was when they started talking to each other again, which summer when they kissed, which summer they fell in love once more, whether it was all on the same day or took years.’ She glanced briefly at Speranza. ‘I can’t even tell you if your father was sincere, whether or not he still loved your mother, whether he really loved Salomé again, I don’t know anything about that, no one knew, not me or Speranza, when Salomé jumped from the Revellata lighthouse at Christmas 1988. Dr Pinheiro took us aside and told us that Salomé would survive, that there was nothing wrong with her, that the broom bushes had broken her fall … but now she had to have additional tests, not for her but for the baby. It was the baby he was worried about.’