‘Oh. You didn’t tell him what it was, of course?’

‘Of course not. I didn’t say. Conspirators, remember?’

Her eyes were wide, clear, intensely blue. She touched his hand. ‘I nearly said, “That’ll get cold.” But it is.’

He looked down at the small bird on the white plate. ‘Yes. Covered in jelly stuff.’

‘Aspic. Don’t forget the Chablis.’

‘I’d better take it. Get his wine.’ He turned and went away.

Car doors slammed, a final farewell through a rear window.

‘And do remember, darling; any day next week. Supper, or lunch … and bring your guests. It was a divine picnic, better even than last year, how you do it…’

Bruna closed the kitchen window and turned into the room, hands on hips. ‘That’s the last. All over. Fanny! Maria! Come along! Into your aprons. I want to collect our things before the caterers steal them. The silver and the crystal. Don’t sit there like sides of pork! There’s a lot to do: ten for supper, all those Italians …’

Taking up a large tin tray and a wooden spoon she marched to the door into the yard and beat a sharp tattoo. ‘Tonnino! Tonnino! It’s all over. We’re going to clear the house-things. Come and get your plants before the caterers steal them all. That man! That man! He would have slept through Agincourt!’

On a little bluff, high above the point and overlooking the pines to the bay far below, Leni and Wolf had settled themselves on a carved stone seat and sat in weary, but relaxed silence, after the steep climb up from the pool. Above, a clear sky; to their right the shadowy lawns and quietly moving waiters, the occasional clink of glass or metal as they cleared the tables. To the left beyond the rocky point, the tumbled boulders, the yellow broom, lay the sea, smudging away into the summer sky: no horizon.

Wolf lay back, legs splayed, hands behind his head. ‘And over there,’ he nodded towards the sea, ‘in the haze, faraway.’

Leni looked up. She had kicked off her sandals, pushed her feet into the prickly grass.

‘Over there? Where you can’t see? Corsica … and then, in a straight line, you would come to Africa. Tunisia. So they say.’

‘I have never been there.’

She pulled the skirt of her camisole up to her thighs, closed her eyes. ‘Maybe you will one day. On a film. Film stars go everywhere, don’t they?’

‘I’m not one. Not yet.’

‘You look like one.’ She half-opened her eyes, glanced at him through lashes. Sprawled back, legs apart, shining skin. From far away, as if at the end of an echo-chamber, Marcus’s voice: ‘Pretend, Leni! Pretend! What is he like beneath that smooth white uniform, what do you invent him to be like?’ She smiled to herself, turning her head away. Wolf Hagel was real. ‘Blond, god-like … all Germans are.’ He was.

‘Should you be sitting here like that? In the sun … bare? You said Grottorosso forbade you the sun.’