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two know each other?’ Lara edged her way in.
    Caroline laughed and glanced quickly at Lambert. ‘We’ve known each other for ever, haven’t we, darling? My mother was a cousin of Anne Holt. We met when we were children. Well, I, apparently, was never a child’ – she winked at Lambert – ‘but your father was a mere boy.’
    ‘Nothing mere about me,’ he smiled dutifully.
    Caroline, her eyes lit up, leant forward. ‘You remember that awful Peregrine? Well, I don’t know why, but I was thinking about him the other day and I suddenly remembered that night when he caught us, arriving back from Paris – about a year after the war – with the most ridiculous amount of shopping. All the bags seemed to say things like Champs-Elysées and Boutique Parisien but very politely he asked how it had been, my week in Wiltshire, at my mother’s.’ She began to laugh. ‘What were we thinking of, sneaking off right under his nose like that? God, after you’d gone, there was the most awful row.’
    ‘I do remember.’ Lambert looked at her affectionately. ‘We stayed at the Crillon.’
    ‘So we did.’ She sighed. ‘If only he’d known how innocent it was,’ and they sat for a while in silence.
    Lara excused herself and went up to her room. She took out the book she was meant to be reading for college on the French Revolution and lay down with it, but before she’d even raised her arm to turn the first page she found that she was whirling, sinking, spinning until with a jolt she heard the book fall to the floor and in the split second that followed she was asleep.
     
     
    By the time Lara came down the next morning breakfast was over and cleared away.
    ‘Where are the others?’ Lara asked, and Ginny told her they had driven into Siena.
    ‘They left early before the heat becomes unbearable, but they’ll be back,’ she said, ‘by lunch.’ Ginny was already cooking, cutting vegetables, making pastry, stewing a pan of clementines for a cake.
    ‘Did you swim?’ Lara poured milk on to cornflakes, and Ginny said that yes, she’d done a hundred lengths.
    She set her mixing bowl down on the table and as she stirred she began to talk, about her garden in the Cotswolds, her mother who was insistent on living alone at eighty-seven, her admiration for Lady Diana Spencer. How beautiful she was. And pure.
    ‘You can tell she’s a virgin.’ Ginny looked at Lara as if she was used to being contradicted. ‘Even my mother agrees and she’s beady as a hawk.’
    ‘I’m sure you’re right.’ Lara had never given it a moment’s thought, so instead she told her about her own mother, how they were such good friends, how they’d gone to India together on the Budget Bus from London to Delhi for £50.
    ‘Return?’ Ginny asked and Lara laughed because people always asked her this.
    ‘One way.’ It wasn’t just the idea of the bargain being any greater than it was, but the idea of any of the people travelling on that bus to India knowing when, if ever, they were likely to come back.
    She remembered the Welsh miners, sprawled across the back seats, swapping their clothes, even their jeans and jackets, in Afghanistan for opium and hash. By the time they arrived in Delhi they owned nothing more than their underpants and T-shirts, and their rucksacks when they hoiked them on were light as air. Were they still out there, she wondered, five years later, roaming semi-naked through the streets?
    ‘Our driver on the Budget Bus was called John,’ she told Ginny. ‘He was like our dad. He found the best places to camp, always near a market, with somewhere to wash, and when the van broke down he could always mend it. Even if once it took three days.’
    Lara had kept a diary with felt-tip illustrations of butterflies and birds, tents and veiled women, and carefully written accounts of her travels to make up for missing school.
    ‘When we arrived in Delhi, we were all so attached to our dad no one could bring themselves to leave