Castiglioncello was as Aidan had described. Fashionable hotels catered for fashionable visitors who walked with their small dogs or small children, or both, by the sea and through the pine-shaded gardens. Flocks of swifts wheeled in the sky and settled on rooftops. Around the bay nestled private villas. Secretive, mostly hidden by greenery, it was only when the sunlight flashed upon their windows that they could be seen. When I asked who lived there, Aidan said simply, “Millionaires.”

“Like the director of your film? What’s his name again?”

“Giovanni Bassini.”

“And how do you know him?”

“Through his son, Stefano. He and I were at school together. They live partly in London and partly in Italy, you see.”

He seemed in a loquacious mood, so I continued my questioning. “So he gave you this part even though you were sacked from Innocence?”

“Thanks for reminding me, dearie.”

“A pleasure, dearie.” I was learning to speak to Aidan in a way I had never spoken to anyone else. He had the knack of freeing his conversation from polite restraint while remaining inoffensive.

“Well,” he said, “I came out to their place here a couple of years ago for a holiday, and when Giovanni heard I was an actor he said he’d keep me in mind the next time he was casting. I didn’t think anything would come of it, as in this business people promise you things all the time, but I received a telephone call from the casting director just after Christmas, so I did a screen test for Giovanni and you know the rest.”

Aidan himself could have rented a villa or stayed at one of the expensive hotels. But he had taken the modest apartment for the same reason he wished me to attend Italian lessons. Verisimilitude. Not attracting attention. An ordinary actor and his unmarried female cousin with too much time on her hands. We did not eat in well-appointed restaurants or visit the bathing stations. We were not there for a holiday – Aidan did not need to remind me.

Although we were further south than Lerici, Italy’s north-western coast was exactly as the picture in the book had shown. Every day the air was sweeter, the sun higher, the ocean warmer than the day before. Each morning a cheerful driver called Angelo would arrive to collect Aidan, who would climb into the car, his camera swinging on a strap round his neck, and he and Angelo would roar off, spraying dust and small stones behind them. Aidan was never without his camera. When I questioned this, he asked, “How can anyone not wish to capture this enchanting landscape?”

“But in photographs everything looks grey,” I protested.

He gave me an exaggeratedly exasperated look. “Spoken like a true philistine, who cannot see art when it is under her nose.”

I tried to remonstrate, but his next words silenced me. “What do you think the art director, the cinematographer and the lighting designer do while a film is being made? Sit and eat chocolates? And do you think you are any less riotously beautiful on the screen because you appear in tones of grey, as you say?”

And then there was the language school itself. Its proprietor was nothing like Signor Lingo; Signora Carro turned out to be a petite, unassumingly charming woman of about forty who spoke English and French well – she had studied in Paris and London, she said. I was assigned to the beginners’ conversation class, which took place each morning at eleven o’clock. My fellow students were well-to-do ladies of several nationalities. The wives, I concluded, of the millionaires. We sat in a circle and, guided by Signora Carro and our textbook, began very soon to communicate with one another in almost-recognizable Italian. It was so interesting that I was sorry I would not be there long enough to learn the language properly. But when I asked Aidan how long we would be here, he shrugged, smiled sunnily and said, “How long is a piece of string?”

In truth, I did not care. A feeling of predestination had descended upon me in Castiglioncello. Whatever happened would happen. Aidan, Giovanni Bassini, his son Stefano, my dear mam and da, Frank and his framed cells, Florence and her perceptiveness – everyone who had shaped the events of the past few months must play their roles. Italy, I knew without question, would provide a dramatic, perhaps even the most dramatic, scene in the story of us all.