‘A place where they have to let you in, even if they don’t like you.’

Home was Belluna, the great farm in Tuscany. If he knocked on the door, his brother and Alex, his brother’s wife-for so he must force himself to call her now-would let him in. They would have to, since he owned half the property.

They would smile and say how good it was to see him, how concerned they’d been while he was away, how they’d thought about him every day.

And it would all be true.

But there was something else, also true, that nobody would mention. They would worry, lest he rock the boat of their happy marriage with his bitterness and anger, his anguished, unrequited love. They would look at each other behind his back, and know that an alien had come among them. And they would long silently for him to leave.

‘I could never love you,’ Alex had said. ‘Not as you want, anyway.’

But even she had never understood how deeply in love with her he had fallen. Before that he’d loved as a very young man, plunging into infatuation and out again, like the giddy whirl of a carousel.

But when he met Alex the carousel had stopped, tossing him to the ground so that he rose into a new world, one where she existed. The one. The only one, for, like many young men who love lightly and carelessly, he had been struck by the real thing like a thunderbolt. After that no more carelessness was possible.

‘Not as you want,’ she had said.

He had wanted everything from her, love, tenderness, passion, a promise to last a lifetime.

And he’d thought he had them, until the night he returned to find her in his brother’s bed.

CHAPTER TWO

SOMETIMES the dreams were worse than the waking memories. If you were awake you could decide not to think about it, but dreams were remorseless.