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share a joke or a story. I saw how the mothers loved their children and how the fathers indulged them. Perhaps it was that, and the fatherly talk from Luca Valletti, that made me call home the next day.
    The conversation started badly. “You’ve remembered us, then,” my stepdad said.
    I think I had disappointed Ken. I don’t know when or how it started. He was a thoroughly decent man who had provided everything for me and my mother. Ken had spent his life developing his construction business. Raised in poverty, he knew the value of a good roof. I think he was always afraid that some misfortune, or a thief, or bad luck would come round and steal some of the tiles from the roof of our own home. Yes, he was a workingman made good, but he was the kind who wants to pull the ladder up behind him so that no one else from a similar background can make good.
    It was somehow assumed that, as an only child, I would follow him into his business—he had no biological children of his own. I’d surprised him by wanting to go to college andby standing up to him. He took it badly, as if my rejection of his trade was a personal insult. I don’t know why—I’d never once played that despicable game of saying you’re not my real dad and so on. Now that I was old enough to understand what he’d done for us, I was grateful to him. But he seemed to take the whole college thing as a rejection of all he’d done for me and my mother, too.
    I knew that his plan for me to work for him that summer was part of a deeper scheme to embroil me in his business. Presumably he thought I would come to my senses after I’d finished my three years at college. In a sense I had run away from all of this; run away to sea, or at least to the seaside.
    The conversation with Ken was short and stilted. He passed me on to my mother, who asked a lot of questions about where was I washing my laundry and where was I doing my shopping. She finally came to the point. “Why Skegness? Why have you gone to Skegness?”
    “I told you. There’s a job here. Plus I’ve got one of the better jobs going.”
    “It’s an awful place.”
    “No, it isn’t. It’s a lot of fun.”
    “Of all the places you could choose,” she said. “Of all the places.”
    THE DAYS WERE getting hotter. The thermometer was reading in the upper eighties day after day. It was all highly unusual for this temperate island of ours, so the cool shadows of the empty theater were a regular seduction. I still wasn’t sleepingwell, and during one of my breaks I knew I could find a seat in the dark corner of the auditorium as a comfortable place to take a nap. I was snoozing in there one evening, drifting in and out of sleep, disturbed now and again as the theater acts began to arrive to make preparation for the big variety show we had that night. It was too early for any of the holidaymakers to be inside so the acts breezed in through the front of house, walked down the aisle and up the stage steps to go into the wings.
    I woke properly to the sound of an industrial vacuum cleaner. It was Terri, pushing the machine around the carpet in front of the musicians’ pit just below and in front of the stage. I smacked my lips and rubbed my cheeks, thinking I’d better go and throw water on my face. Then to the left of the stage the emergency doors swung open and Colin came striding in. He spoke to Terri. The hoover was still roaring so I couldn’t hear what was said, and I was pretty sure neither of them knew I was in the upper auditorium watching them from the shadows. Terri opened her mouth and said something in reply.
    It was like watching a dumb show. Colin seized his wife by the throat with one hand. He shook her side to side and lifted her a few inches off the ground. It was like seeing a dog shake a rabbit. Then he dropped her back on her feet, turned around, and marched out of the theater the way he’d come in.
    It all happened in a second. Terri stood with her hands on her hips, looking at