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the bus. We hovered around, making excuses to get back on, even the miners, looking for things they might have lost. All day we sat there, until he had to shoo us away.’
    Lara had a sudden memory of her mother, white-faced, setting off through the city, gripping on to her arm, with people all around them thrusting out their hands, calling, smiling, teeth stained red. They climbed into a rickshaw and trotted out into the traffic, but every time they stopped they were surrounded again, the same thin hands pushed against their laps. Cathy was frightened, so frightened in fact that she abandoned her search for the friends of friends they were hoping to stay with and booked into a hotel. It was a small hotel, only half built, but the room was clean and the door had a lock, and in the morning they were brought a tray with tea and a banana. Bananas were in fact the one thing they dared to eat, sealed safely as they were inside their skin.
    ‘How did you get back?’ Ginny was leaping forward in her concern, and so Lara told her about the very different driver they had a year later, who stopped the bus only where it suited him, in back streets and corrugated yards.
    ‘He was smuggling or dealing, and if anyone said anything, like maybe we could stop near a hammam , you know, to wash, he just shouted at them. In fact, the journey was so awful that once we got to Germany we got off the bus and hitched.’
    ‘Hitched?’ Ginny looked alarmed, and so Lara explained about their house on the hill in Scotland and how they would hitch lifts up and down to London every summer.
    ‘Sometimes,’ she said, although it probably wasn’t true, ‘we made it faster than the train.’
    She told Ginny about the goat they kept for milk, the yaks the Tibetans imported, and how when they moved to London Cathy missed her goats so much she decided to keep bees. They already had a cat, but she wanted something that gave produce, so now they had two bee hives on the flat roof above the bathroom that made enough honey to last most of the year. When the bees swarmed they hovered in a great black ball of buzzing in the fork of the lilac tree at the end of the garden and someone from the Inner London Beekeeping Association would drive round and, dressed in a white suit with a hat and a veil, would knock them into a sack.
    It was easy sitting there, enveloped by the smells of food, the sweetness of the onion softening and the bitter peel of the fruit. She could tell Ginny about Clive. She thought about it, but found she couldn’t focus on him here. Dusty, he seemed in his donkey jacket, and far away.
    Outside the day was heating up, the air growing denser as it neared noon. Lara changed into her bikini and went down to the pool. She practised her new streamlined swimming, gliding through the water with barely a splash, and when she’d done enough lengths to feel bored, she got out and lay on a towel in the full glare of the sun. She could feel it prickle her, seal heat into her body, and when she was baked through she rolled over to feed the scorching rays into her back.
     
     
    ‘Oh my dear!’ Caroline said at lunch. ‘You have caught the sun!’ And it was true, there was a red stripe along the bridge of Lara’s nose, and under each eye, a sweep of pink.
    ‘Where did you go?’ she asked to divert attention.
    Caroline told her that they’d driven into Siena to talk to a man about a horse. ‘I’m hoping my horse will be chosen to run in the Palio. It was chosen once, three years ago, but since then it’s been overlooked.’
    Lara looked round. ‘You have a horse?’
    ‘Not here.’ Caroline raised her eyebrows in a flicker of amusement. ‘It’s a racehorse. My husband used to own several and I keep one, in his memory. It was his greatest wish’ – she looked wistful – ‘that it win the Palio.’
    ‘The Palio,’ Lambert told her, ‘is a horse race that takes place in July and again in August in the main square in Siena.’
    ‘A