‘I really am very tired. Goodnight, Danvers.’

‘All right. You get your beauty sleep and be perfect for tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘We’re having dinner with the chairman of the bank. You can’t have forgotten.’

‘Of course not. I’ll be there, at my best. Goodnight.’

If he didn’t go soon she would scream.

At last she had the blessed relief of solitude. She turned out the lights and went to stand in the window, looking out at the lights of London. They winked and glittered against the darkness, and in her morbid mood it seemed as if she was looking at her whole life from now on: an endless vista of shiny occasions-dinner with the chairman, a box at the opera, lunch in fashionable restaurants, entertaining in a luxurious house, the perfect wife and hostess.

It had seemed enough before, but something about tonight had unsettled her. That young couple with their passionate belief in love had reminded her of too many things she no longer believed.

‘Becky’ had believed them, but Becky was dead. She had died in a confusion of pain, misery and disillusion.

Yet tonight her ghost had walked through the costly feast, turning reproachful eyes on Rebecca, reminding her that once she had had a heart, and had given that heart freely to a wild-eyed young man who had adored her.

‘A kid, who doesn’t know much about the world,’ had been Danvers’ verdict on ‘Becky’, and he was more right than he knew. They had both been kids, herself and the twenty-year-old, Luca, thinking that their love was the final answer to all problems.

Becky Solway had fallen in love with Italy at first sight, and especially the land around Tuscany, where her father had inherited the estate of Belleto from his Italian mother.

‘Dad, it’s heavenly!’ she said when she first saw it. ‘I want to stay here forever and ever.’