I was checking my passport details, and not paying much attention. ‘If you don’t mind, Meg, I think not.’

‘I wouldn’t be any bother.’

‘No,’ I said, with only a hint of panic.

‘I think it would be a good idea.’

I shoved my passport into my pocket. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I have to go alone.’

‘That’s quite clear, then.’ She pulled at a finger until the joint cracked. Her eyes narrowed and darkened.

To my astonishment, Will turned up at the airport. ‘I didn’t think we’d said goodbye properly.’

Weak with relief that I had got this far, I leant against him. ‘Must be a first.’

‘I’ve run away from school and the diary secretary was not amused.’

He felt warm, firm and, despite everything, reliable. The uncertainty had vanished and he was under control. Here was the embodiment of a successful politician who had come to see off his wife at the airport; the well-cut suit symbolized the fusion between his energy and achievements. It was Will at his most attractive and I never failed to respond.

‘Go carefully with the car tax, won’t you? Don’t lose patience and make a muddle,’ I said, then added, ‘If that’s what you want. If that’s what you still believe.’

‘I do.’ His gaze fixed on the bookshop behind me. ‘Why are you going, Fanny? Truthfully’

‘My father… I would like some breathing space. I want to get away.’

He frowned. ‘Oh, well, then,’ he said.

A family group, pushing two trolleys with suitcases wrapped in plastic sheeting, shot past us. Will stepped back. I watched as he detached himself mentally from me and what I might be feeling. That was the way he survived. The mobile phone shrilled in his pocket and, with obvious relief, he dived for it. ‘Sorry, darling.’

I picked up my hand luggage. Inside, wrapped in bubblewrap, Sellotape and one of my father’s jumpers was the casket containing his ashes. ‘’Bye,’ I mouthed, and moved towards Departures.

‘Fanny,’ he called sharply. ‘Fanny’ He clicked off his phone and caught my arm. ‘Don’t go. Don’t go without me. Wait until I can come.’

‘No,’ I said, panic-stricken that I might be persuaded to stay, and guilty that I did not wish to. ‘Please… let me go.’

And I shook him off and fled in a manner that – clearly – shocked him.


*

I was too tired to read on the plane and for the first slice of the journey I dozed and woke with a start from a dream where dank grass and grey mud clotted my shoes. I waded into a river of dead leaves, fighting for breath as the level went over my head. A little later, I found myself wreathed in a white river mist and its cold slid deep into my bones. In that dream, I cried out for the sun.

I woke and the Mediterranean coastline, vividly coloured and fringed by a bright blue sea, came into view and I breathed in deeply with relief. The stewardess dumped a tray of food in front of me. ‘Enjoy,’ she said.

I inspected a plastic lump, a roll attached to some dubious cold meat, drank the orange juice and found myself thinking of Caro. Her final words to me – her wedding present, which had been so crude and hurtful at the time – made better sense with experience. Nails screeching against the surface, wincing at the sound, Caro had attempted to wipe the blackboard clean of my father to begin again.

I could have explained how I felt to Will. I could have said: ‘When I married you and I was swept up by the tempestuous emotions of early passion, of coming together in love, it was irrelevant (apart from the obvious physical mechanics) who belonged to which sex. It was a meeting of souls and minds. But once the marriage was made, the duties allocated, it mattered very much to which sex I belonged.’

What was more, when he had taken Liz into our bed Will taught me that to be a wife was separate and distinct from being a woman.

I looked down from the plane window at the green and brown of the Italian peninsula. I wanted a rest from that part of my life.

As the plane began its descent, I uttered a silent thank-you to my father.

‘Fanny… Fanny!’ To make up for not getting to the funeral, Benedetta had insisted on travelling from Fiertino on the train to meet me. She carved a swathe through the clumps of spectators gathered around Arrivals and folded me into an embrace. It combined the sensations of plump arms, sweat, heat, and a base note of garlic – and I was transported back to the child with plaits, wadded in a Chilprufe vest against the cold.

We queued for a long time at the car-hire desk. ‘Let me look at you,’ she demanded, and looked long and hard, laid a hand on my arm, touched my shoulder, caressed my cheek. The gestures were careful, loving and, like the best cough medicine, soothing and sweet.

Her English had deteriorated. So had my Italian, but some important facts were soon established. Her arthritis was bad, her son never wrote from Milan, where he now lived, much of the hillside surrounding Fiertino – which had been open and free – had been carved up by city-dwellers for summer residences, and you never knew who you would stumble across in the valley. But I was not to worry – she grabbed my hand: the house where I was staying was old, a strange preference she knew my father and I shared. For herself, she was happy in her modern bungalow.

On the drive out of Rome, past dusty oleanders and fields of mass-produced tomatoes and courgettes, Benedetta chattered. Casa Rosa had been bought by an inglese couple who, failing to secure the money to repair it properly, had retreated back to England. Now it was empty, except for an odd letting or two during the summer. Not that the agent knew her job – ‘Santa Patata, she was born with no brain.’ Anxious in the unfamiliar traffic, I listened with only half an ear.

Two hours later, Benedetta instructed me to turn right into a valley running from north to south and we drove between fields of corn and of vines. They were small and immaculate, cherished pockets of maize and grapes. Even so, it was noticeable that the machinery being used in them was elaborate and expensive.

Olive trees shimmered silver-white in the heat. The road wound through the valley and, on the slopes above it, the crete sensesi, the ridges on top of the hills, were dusty brown -‘old leather that has done good service,’ said my father – and the river, which dropped into the valley, was a twisted ribbon of smoothed, burning rock.

The gearstick was slippery under my hand. I coughed a little and Benedetta clucked. ‘You are low from Alfredo’s death. It is to be expected.’

I turned and smiled at her. ‘Probably. It was a great shock.’

‘It is best for him,’ she said, and tapped my thigh. ‘Slow down, Fanny. We are coming to Fiertino.’

Stomach contracting a little with nerves, and frightened that Fiertino would not match up to all those years of thinking about it, I obeyed.

And… yes, there was the church, and the piazza, hemmed by dusty-looking plane trees, and the jumble of narrow streets that radiated out from the centre.

And… no. The Fiertino of my father’s childhood almost certainly had no traffic, no garish adverts, or the sprawl of squat, modern housing that pressed for space up against the elegant architecture and stone of the old centre.

No matter.

We drove past the church and skirted the piazza, and Benedetta did not let up with her stream of information. The builders had cheated the inglese - anyone could have told them: the new wall they built developed cracks and fell down, and most of the plants in the garden died during an exceptionally hot summer. Her worst scorn was reserved for their sin of failing to ask the locals for help. ‘They ran back home and, now, the house is in trouble.’

Casa Rosa was set back from the road about quarter of a mile out of Fiertino to the north. A dusty track sloped steeply upward and I was concentrating so hard on negotiating the rough surface that I missed the first sight of the house. This I regretted, for I would have known five seconds earlier what I knew the minute I got out of the car and walked up to the front door.

Painted a pink-orange, which had weathered in soft, subtle streaks, Casa Rosa was a flat-fronted two-storey house. Nothing magnificent, nothing special – except that it spoke to me in a manner that made me catch my breath. It said, I should be yours.

OK, I thought. At least that’s clear. It’s a little inconvenient since I live somewhere else, but at least it’s quite clear.

It had long, shuttered windows on the ground floor and smaller echoes upstairs. The tiled roof had weathered as subtly as the stucco, and they matched each other for disrepair. There were ugly holes in the stonework, telltale scars from damp and missing tiles, and a plant grew out of the masonry by the chimney. Even the kindest eye could not ignore the raw, unfinished look, its air of desperation and need.

Benedetta shrugged. ‘You need la passione to make it good.’

I shaded my eyes and counted the windows. It seemed a good thing to do, a good first thing to have under my belt.

The front door needed persuasion to yield. ‘Alloral,’ said Benedetta, ‘it is the pig.’

As we went in, there was a rustling of insects and our feet kicked up dust. Benedetta clicked her tongue. ‘Very bad. But no worry. I shall come and clean.’

‘No, you won’t.’ I slipped my arm round her shoulders. I sounded proprietorial. ‘I will.’

‘No good,’ said Benedetta flatly, when we inspected the kitchen.

‘There is hope,’ I contradicted her. If the cooker was both ancient and well used, it was clean; and if the taps were fur-encrusted, the sink was usable. A selection of crockery had been stacked on a shelf, and a box of matches with a saucer full of spent ones had been placed beside the cooker. A candle had been wedged into a Chianti bottle and the wax had splashed over the wooden kitchen table.