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time, setting the paperback aside. ‘We’ve enough to get by. I’ve told you, let me take care of the cash. You’re ten. You can start worrying properly in about eight years’ time, when we have to stump up for your student loan.’
    ‘I’m not going to university,’ said Ryan. ‘I’m going to get a job and help you.’
    ‘Over my dead body. Finish your croissant.’
    ‘I’m not hungry.’
    ‘You wanted an ice cream half an hour ago.’
    ‘That’s different.’ Ryan stared dolefully at the picked-apart croissant. ‘Only the French could invent bread that explodes when you try to eat it.’
    Madeline looked into the sky. ‘I wanted a child, I got Noel Coward,’ she complained.
    ‘Who’s Noel Coward?’ Ryan asked.
    ‘A very funny man who lived a long time ago, to you anyway.’ She reached across the table and stole the remains of the croissant. ‘If you’re not going to eat it, I will.’
    ‘How long do we have to stay here?’
    ‘It’s a holiday, Ryan, you’re meant to be having fun.’ She tore off a buttery flake and chewed it, watching him. The blue bruise over her right eye was fading. The grapevines in the trellis above them patched their shoulders in green and yellow light.
    ‘I don’t know anyone.’
    ‘Then go out and make a friend.’
    ‘There’s no-one here my age. They’re all in school.’
    ‘Yeah, it’s not exactly high season. You’ll be at a new school as soon as we’ve found a place.’ She squinted up at the deceiving sun, then resettled her sunglasses. ‘Meanwhile we have to make the best of it. Besides, we’ll only stay for a few more days, until the cheque comes through.’
    ‘What if it doesn’t?’
    Madeline sighed. ‘It will. Your father is required by law to pay up. It’s called a divorce settlement, and it should have been cleared by now. So we just sit tight until it arrives.’
    ‘If you hadn’t left Dad—’
    ‘If I hadn’t left him I’d be in A and E with my arm in a sling or worse, so drop it, okay?’ She softened, aware of his growing alarm. Her lies about the origins of her cuts and bruises had made him realise the truth. ‘I’m sorry, baby, I don’t mean to shout at you, it’s just—everything at the moment. Look, I can pay the bill without managing to get us thrown in jail, and if the sea’s too cold to go swimming we’ll take a walk, all right?’
    They descended to the steep pebbled beach and strolled across banks of rank-smelling olivine seaweed, passing through pools of shadow cast by the cypress trees that grew behind the walls of secretive villas. Out of the sunlight, the air was chill.
    ‘Who do you think lives there?’ asked Ryan, jumping in an impossible attempt to see through the railings.
    ‘Rich people, honey, no-one we’re ever likely to meet. They hide behind their high walls and don’t talk to people like us. Actually, I don’t think they’re here out of season. All the windows are shuttered, see?’
    ‘Then where are they?’
    ‘At other houses, in other countries.’
    ‘What do they need more than one house for?’
    ‘Good question. To get away from each other, I guess.’
    She thought about the world she had left behind. Back at the Elephant & Castle, Madeline’s days were split between her supermarket shifts, working afternoons in East Street Laundromat and evenings in The Seven Stars, a deafening bar popular with the area’s young professionals. Jack, her husband, changed oil and tyres at the local MOT centre, answering to a boy ten years younger than himself. The marriage had failed years earlier, largely because Jack could never control his drinking or his unfocussed anger, and after one remorseful fight too many she had pushed for a legal separation. Things had soured between them when her promised support payments failed to materialise.
    When Jack’s brother turned up in the bar to tell her that she was a headcase, and accused her of trying to destroy their family, the escalation of hostility was