Vincenzo shook his head urgently and plunged down the hall to the bathroom. A moment later came loud groans followed by the sounds of repeated vomiting. Rodolfo sighed and returned to bed, locking the door behind him.

‘I don’t like your friend,’ said a quiet voice.

‘He’s not my friend. We share this apartment, that’s all.’

Flavia edged herself upright in the bed on each elbow alternately, the fleece of dark-red hair tumbling over her shoulders and breasts. She cleared it off her face, lay back on the pillow and reached for the pack of cigarettes on the bedside table.

‘Why?’ she asked.

As so often, out of sheer ignorance of the basic logic of the language, she had wrong-footed him. That was what happened if you had affairs with foreigners, Rodolfo reflected sourly. Next thing you’d be falling in love and deciding that their banal gaffes were actually profound insights into the human condition.

‘Why what?’ he asked irritably, his idyll now completely disrupted. He was equally angry with Vincenzo for waking Flavia, and with Flavia for allowing herself to be woken.

‘Why do you share with him?’

Rodolfo lay down on the bed beside her.

‘I don’t know. It just happened. Like you and me.’

Flavia smoked quietly and made no reply, her startling blue eyes regarding him with no little concern.

‘I got back after Christmas to find that there’d been a fire in the building where I had been living,’ Rodolfo went on. ‘It was a question of finding alternative accommodation, and fast. On the allowance my father gives me I didn’t have a lot of choice, and of course most places were already let for the whole academic year. So I photocopied some ads with those tear-off strips and pinned them up all over the university district, but nothing came of that. Then someone who was moving out of this apartment tipped me off about it.