‘But seeing him again afterwards, didn’t that help you to remember?’

‘I don’t remembering him coming back-but he may have done. I kept blacking out. When I awoke properly it was some time later and he wasn’t there. I never saw him again. Perhaps he couldn’t bear my not recognising him any longer. I can’t blame him for leaving.’

Pietro was getting a very bad feeling about this. Gino’s story that he’d been jilted had always sounded unlikely. In truth, he seemed to have deserted her when she most needed him.

‘And you had nobody to help you? No family? Nothing?’

‘After my parents died I was raised by my mother’s sister, who didn’t really want me. She died while I was away at college. Then I discovered that she’d known for months that she was dying, but never told me. It was like the final slamming of a door.

‘So there was nobody who’d known me in the past. I had blinding headaches. There was a lot of pressure on my brain because I’d been beaten so badly about the head. They had to operate to relieve it. I was better after that.’

‘But-alone,’ he murmured, stunned by the horror of it.

She gave a little wry smile.

‘I looked awful. I was rather glad there was nobody to see me.’

Pietro was speechless. Perhaps, he thought, it was a good thing Gino wasn’t present right now. He might have said or done something he would later regret.

‘All my hair was shaved off,’ she recalled. ‘I looked like a malignant elf.’

Something in her self-mocking tone inspired him to say absurdly, ‘Why malignant? I always thought elves were nice.’

‘Not this one. I even scared myself. My memory started to return in bits. It was odd, I’m a language teacher and I found I still knew the languages, but not my own identity.