‘Like ours? Did we have one?’

‘Well. Not a storm. Thunder somewhere. My fault. But it’s gone now, Like on the tape.’

‘I didn’t think so.’

‘Oh well, being stupid about the Film Star, and you going to the boat, and everything. I was being very boring. Bor-ring, as Cuckoo would say. She nearly did.’

‘Say so? When?’

‘When you were on the boat. We had a talk.’ She got off his lap, walked to the windows, stood with her hands on the balcony rail.

‘What about?’ He sprang the cassette of ‘Equinoxe’ from the machine, put it in its box. ‘Want to hear a bit of “Evita”? She’s given us that as well.’

Leni shook her head. ‘No thank you. I can’t hear the words anyway.’

Before she left for Rome, Minerva had dumped, as she called it, all her ‘toys’ which she had brought along to help pass the time on the Papageno. A stack of paperbacks of various persuasions, the cassette-player and a rack of tapes. ‘Scrabble’, three straw hats, a viciously ugly Greek vase from Piraeus, a donkey-cart from Taormina, a shell-box from Elba. ‘I’m God’s gift to the tourist touts: I don’t need them now and I didn’t when I bought them. Why do I do it? But keep the ‘player, it might give you some fun.’ And she had left on the afternoon flight for Rome with Hagel and a pale nurse, asking that no one should go with her. ‘I can’t bear any kind of farewell, even if it’s only for a forty minute flight to Rome, so just let me go on my own. I’m very capable; but if you came I’d fall apart, lose the tickets and weep floods. Stay here and look at that clear, beautiful, empty bay below. Don’t you love it!’

Early that morning, before anyone but Bruna was awake, the Papageno had raised anchor and slipped away at first light.

‘Where did it go?’ cried Minerva.

Bruna shrugged, threw open the shutters of her room. ‘I don’t know where it went, but it turned to the left at the end of the Cap.’

‘Rome!’ said Minerva, climbing out of bed and hurrying to the windows to see that, indeed, the ship had gone, and the bay lay still and serene in the early sun.

Looking down from her balcony in the dark, Leni experienced the same feeling of calm and relief at its absence: the only thing now which hung over her head was the passport, which might, indeed, provoke a real storm, and the fact that tomorrow marked the arrival of ‘Uncle’ Desmond; time was limited.

‘Why did Cuckoo nearly say you were “bor-ring” then? Tell.’ He came across to the windows, leant against the folded shutters.