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CORBODÉRA’S first tremor was so slight that those who felt it at all, introjected it, imagining themselves touched with vertigo.

Corbodéra’s second tremor was severe.

In the Polonaise dining-room, Mrs Carter sat aghast, her nose covered with jam, watching the tea service bounce and clatter across the table, two cups crashing to the floor at her feet.

She wasn’t sure when it started whether it was actually the island or a poltergeist, but when the chair beneath her began jumping like a pogo-stick, careening crazily across the room, she knew it was Corbodéra.

Before her eyes, the pink plaster wall on the sea side of the hotel split down the middle in an instant forked fissure. It was so like a stroke of lightning that she waited breathlessly, almost expecting to hear a resounding crack of thunder.

There was no thunder, no sound at all for several moments: only a fantastic motion beneath her, rather like a sudden dizzy drop in an elevator. Then, after a final jolting shudder, the island became still.

Surely it had burst every pipe in the hotel! She could hear it distinctly – but was it the plumbing? – like a thousand drowsy bees: the murmur, the bubble, the rush of distant water.