The bedroom had grown very hot, and the bed was rumpled. I asked Will to get up and led him into the bathroom and made him wash.

I remade the bed, pulling the sheets tight and smooth. I threw open the shutter and let in the night air. I folded clothes and closed drawers.

I went downstairs and put the kettle on to boil. I poked at the tea bags in the mugs and the water turned from amber to brown – the brown that Meg had so despised.

Oh Meg, I thought, with a wild and terrible sense of loss. Oh, Meg.

‘Sacha?’ I shook him gently. ‘It’s seven thirty and things are done early here.’

He turned to me with big, hot-looking eyes. I swooped down and felt his forehead. ‘You’re ill.’

Sacha was clearly feverish and I ordered him to remain where he was, then went down to take charge of Will, who was wrestling with the stove. ‘Poor Sacha. He’ll feel he’s letting Meg down.’

We drank our coffee on the loggia. Unable to sit still, Will paced about. ‘I like it here, and I like this house. We should have come here with your father.’ He looked away. ‘But I would have invaded the private club of two.’

Surprised, I looked up. ‘You minded. I’m sorry.’

Will decided to view Meg’s body alone, and emerged composed. We negotiated with the police and struggled to short-cut delays. Once the suggestion of foul play had been eliminated, the doctor signed the relevant certificates and we made arrangements for the body to be flown home. Then, it was a question of waiting for the authorities to release it.

Meg was to be buried at Stanwinton. As Sacha pointed out, it had been her home. Working together, Will and I shared the endless phone calls back to England. Mannochie. The funeral director. The vicar. Will had a knack of dealing with emergencies, but with this one he was too tired and sad. Once or twice I had to intervene when he lost the thread.

Will also phoned Chloë and, having told her the news, passed the phone to me. Chloë was almost incoherent. ‘You won’t die on me, Mum, will you, or Dad? Promise.’

I did my best to calm her, and wondered if we should encourage her to get on a plane, but Will anticipated what I was thinking and shook his head.

‘Poor, poor Sacha,’ cried Chloë. ‘I can’t bear it for him. Tell him I love him.’

‘He’ll ring you,’ I said, ‘when he’s feeling better. I promise.’

Rob rang several times and Sacha staggered downstairs to talk to his father. Will and I retreated out of earshot. When I broached the subject of his father, Sacha said only, ‘He’s left it all up to me. He says he doesn’t feel he should interfere.’

I urged him back into bed and dosed him up. ‘Your father’s trying to make it easier for you by not getting in the way.’

I reported this conversation to Will, who went straight upstairs and spent over an hour talking to Sacha. When I took up more tea, I discovered him sitting on the edge of the bed and a red-eyed Sacha propped up on the pillows. Both of them looked dreadful. I stood over them, and fussed and bullied them into drinking it. After a couple of mouthfuls, Sacha grimaced. ‘Give me the stuff the spoon will stand up in.’

In the morning, Sacha was better but still weak, and agreed without too much argument to remain in bed. I fed him more tea, made him change out of his sweaty T-shirt and insisted on brushing his hair.

‘Thanks,’ he said, leant back on the pillows and closed his eyes.

The police told us, ‘Only two days.’ But this was Italy and two days stretched into three, then four. Meg would have appreciated the joke.

The convalescent Sacha was content to sit it out on the loggia at Casa Rosa. ‘I need to get my head straight,’ he said, and it was clear that he preferred to be on his own.

In contrast, Will was restless, had not eaten much and was sleeping badly. I said to him, ‘There’s something I would like to show you if you’d like to come.’

He showed only a polite interest. ‘Let’s do it, then.’

We left Sacha well supplied with iced drinks and a cold pasta salad. Armed with maps and guidebooks, I drove Will to Tarquinia. The car skidded a little as I forced it up the slope leading out of the valley and down the other side, past poppies, clumps of herbs, wild lavender and the olive trees, their bases plastered with summer dust.

Will slumped back in the passenger seat and wiped his sunglasses. ‘Italy’s too hot.’

‘You get used to it,’ I said.

‘For God’s sake,’ he said, and fell silent.

The museum in Tarquinia was cool and almost empty. We did not linger over the exhibits – I suspected Will’s concentration was not good. Eventually, I led him up to the funerary couch. ‘There. Do you recognize it?’

He looked blank. Then he said, ‘It was on your father’s desk. He was very fond of it.’

‘The real thing is better.’

‘She’s no beauty.’

I nudged him gently. ‘Nor is he.’

I went to inspect an exquisite bronze candelabrum, worked with bunches of grapes and vine leaves. ‘Will… come and see this.’

But Will was rooted in front of the funerary couple, eyes narrowed, his face a mask of distress.

We returned to the car and consulted the maps, for I was anxious to visit the Etruscan tombs. Chloë and I always teased Will about maps but, truth be told, his skill had got us places. Now I waited for him to say that women have no spatial awareness and for me to reply, ‘Women are better team players.’ But he didn’t and I didn’t.

On his instructions, I drove far up into a maquis of rock and scrub. Here the land had a blind, bitter, cussed feel. Yet the books reported that, all those centuries ago, the Etruscans had made it fertile and fruitful with trees, pasture and crops. Their lovely Paradise. Their Elysium.

We drove into a clearing and parked close to the remains of an Etruscan town, which didn’t amount to much – a hint of a mosaic pavement and the suggestion of a stone wall running at an angle up the hill. Drinks were being sold under a cluster of umbrellas, and an overflowing rubbish bin was sited next to an ancient brick arch. Otherwise the scene had an abandoned, desolate quality.

We followed the track up into the hills. The going became precipitous and it was very hot. In my sandals, my feet grew slippery with sweat, and Will was panting. An arrow indicated a steep incline and a second pointed yet further up. The heat seared into our backs.

‘Over there.’ I pointed to a dark opening, partly obscured by vegetation.

Will smiled grimly. ‘This had better be worth it.’

He pushed back the vegetation to let me through, and we found ourselves in a large rock chamber lined with stone shelves on which the Etruscans had laid out their dead.

There was no mistaking an odour of semi-stagnant water and rock that never saw the sun. The smell was the essence of extinction. I laid a hand on a cold shelf. The ghosts of the Etruscan dead were locked into this place, far, far removed from the banqueting and harvesting, the wine, lovemaking and married love depicted in their painting and sculpture.

‘I don’t know why we make such a fuss about the afterlife,’ said Will. ‘Once you’ve gone, that’s it. Meg has gone, so has your father. What’s left?’ he reached for my hand.

But I fled from the tomb and scrambled back down the path. I heard Will come after me and, by the time he caught up, I was breathless. I gasped for air and the heat whistled painfully into my lungs but I welcomed it. Far better to be here in the open, burning hot but alive.

I lifted my face to the sun. To emerge from the dark cave into the light was to know that I was free.

On the way back, Will asked, ‘Alfredo’s ashes… have you decided?’

‘No. Silly isn’t it?’

‘You can’t put it off for ever.’

‘I know.’

Over supper of grilled veal chops and roasted peppers, Sacha told us that he would be moving on. ‘To Manchester. I think,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a couple of gigs lined up. After that… well, I’ll go and see Chloë in Oz. Hitch around a little. Take a look.’

‘That would be nice.’ I kept my voice neutral.

‘I miss her,’ he said simply.

‘So do we.’ Instinctively, I glanced at Will and our eyes locked. ‘Don’t’ was the message in his. A mental nudge, I suppose.

After supper, Will said to me, ‘Fanny, go and get your father’s ashes.’ I stared at him. ‘Go on.’

I went upstairs, retrieved the small wooden casket and carried it down to the loggia. ‘May I?’ asked Will. I nodded and he took it from me. ‘Now we’ll find a place for Alfredo.’

Holding the casket under one arm, he propelled me out of the house with the other.

We walked up the dust road, and the residual heat cradled our feet. ‘I should have paid more attention to the descriptions of Fiertino,’ Will said, in a conversational way. ‘Then I would know where I was. Where did your father’s family live?’

The moon was as bright as burnished silver as I pointed down the road to the ugly replacement fattoria. ‘It was burnt down at the end of the war,’ I explained.

‘I see.’ Will considered. ‘I don’t think that would be right. Nor, I think, is the churchyard. I think your father would prefer to be free.’

I blinked back tears. ‘Yes, he would.’

At the fork in the road, Will ignored the route into the village and we picked our way up the rise where the cypresses and chestnuts grew in clumps and the vines swept past them down into the valley. It was a mystery to me how anyone slept in the deep, perfumed Italian nights, and I said so to Will. He smiled.

‘I don’t believe you said that.’

Down below, the lights of the village were tucked into the slope of the hillside under a starred palanquin. The moonlight worked its usual deceptions and Fiertino seemed to spring out of the landscape, untouched and complete. ‘I love this place,’ I confessed.