‘If I hadn’t left him I’d be in A and E with my arm in a sling or worse, so drop it, okay?’ She softened, aware of his growing alarm. Her lies about the origins of her cuts and bruises had made him realise the truth. ‘I’m sorry, baby, I don’t mean to shout at you, it’s just—everything at the moment. Look, I can pay the bill without managing to get us thrown in jail, and if the sea’s too cold to go swimming we’ll take a walk, all right?’

They descended to the steep pebbled beach and strolled across banks of rank-smelling olivine seaweed, passing through pools of shadow cast by the cypress trees that grew behind the walls of secretive villas. Out of the sunlight, the air was chill.

‘Who do you think lives there?’ asked Ryan, jumping in an impossible attempt to see through the railings.

‘Rich people, honey, no-one we’re ever likely to meet. They hide behind their high walls and don’t talk to people like us. Actually, I don’t think they’re here out of season. All the windows are shuttered, see?’

‘Then where are they?’

‘At other houses, in other countries.’

‘What do they need more than one house for?’

‘Good question. To get away from each other, I guess.’

She thought about the world she had left behind. Back at the Elephant & Castle, Madeline’s days were split between her supermarket shifts, working afternoons in East Street Laundromat and evenings in The Seven Stars, a deafening bar popular with the area’s young professionals. Jack, her husband, changed oil and tyres at the local MOT centre, answering to a boy ten years younger than himself. The marriage had failed years earlier, largely because Jack could never control his drinking or his unfocussed anger, and after one remorseful fight too many she had pushed for a legal separation. Things had soured between them when her promised support payments failed to materialise.

When Jack’s brother turned up in the bar to tell her that she was a headcase, and accused her of trying to destroy their family, the escalation of hostility was so unnerving that she had grabbed Ryan from school, borrowed some cash from her mother and booked an easy Jet flight from the nearest Internet café. They had ended up in the South of France because a flight to Nice was affordable and available, but living here was almost as expensive as in London, and she was running low on funds.

All she could do was wait for the cheque to clear in her bank account, knowing that Jack would try to cancel it when he realised where she had taken Ryan. They had caught a train east, along the coast, looking for somewhere cheap to stay, and disembarked from the first tiny station they reached, the village of Eze-sur-Mer.