Page 34 of The Island of Lost Girls

She doesn’t look at him. Just stares at Benedict Herbert’s retreating back. The cocktails here are – she calculates quickly – eighteen pounds each, and she’s been made to look like enough of a dick already today. ‘No, thanks,’ she says. ‘I’m off in a second.’

She keeps her emotions under control as she crosses the lobby. The eyes of passing flunkies scan her, find her wanting, turn away. By the time she reaches the revolving door, her cheeks are flaming. She’s so flustered that she tries to push it open clockwise, and finds herself struggling, face to face across the glass divide, against that wine merchant from the boat. Laurence somebody. Looking remarkably cool in forty degrees of heat while every inch of her pulses crimson.

He stops. Raises his hands. Grins and steps back. Points a finger at the ground and draws a circle, anticlockwise, in the air.

Robin stops pushing. Turns round. Pushes the other side. The door turns, smooth as silk, a tiny sucking noise as it opens and hot air meets cold. She steps out.

‘Sorry about that,’ she says.

‘That’s okay,’ says Laurence. ‘Happens to everybody at some point. Been for a drink?’ he asks.

‘Sort of,’ she says, and bursts into tears.

Laurence’s face drops. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Oh, dear.’

Her embarrassment soars. Crying on the doorstep of a hateful hotel, in front of a strange Englishman, while women in dresses that cost her annual mortgage payment stalk past and avert their gaze. ‘Sorry,’ she mutters. ‘Sorry.’ Dashes the tears from her cheeks, tries to hide her face.

‘You clearly need a drink.’

She shakes her head. ‘I’m fine.’

‘No, you aren’t,’ he says. ‘Look, come on.’

‘Not in there.’

‘No? Okay.’

He leads her across the street, away from the hotel, to a bench by the cliff wall. Helps her sit, solicitously, as though she were an old lady with a wheelie bag. Fetches a Kleenex from a little pack in his pocket and offers it to her.

She blows her nose. ‘Sorry,’ she says again.

‘So, can I get you a drink?’

‘No. Thank you.’

‘Some water, at least?’

‘No, I—’ But he’s gone already, hurrying over to a street vendor who loiters by a chunky, fifties-retro coolbox in the shade of a large red parasol.

Robin sniffs. Blows her nose, tries to compose herself. The view from where she sits is quite spectacular. The geometry of the marina, the funicular crawling through the palm trees on the hillside like a silver millipede, the blue-black Med spreading unbroken to the horizon. Wherever Gemma is, Robin hopes she has a view like this.

He returns with two little bottles of Evian, hands her one and sits down. ‘Feeling better?’

She opens the water, takes a sip, realises that she is very thirsty and half-drains the bottle. ‘Yes, sorry,’ she says. ‘Encounter with an arsehole.’

Laurence watches the passengers debark from the funicular. ‘Plenty of those around to choose from.’

‘You’ve probably come across him,’ she says. ‘Chap called Herbert?’

‘What, Benedict?’

She nods.

‘Oh, now,’ he says, ‘that really is an arsehole,’ and she finds herself smiling. ‘God only knows how he got that job,’ says Laurence.

‘He went to school with the duke,’ she says.

‘Mmm. Honestly, though? All the money washing about here, you’d have thought we would have upgraded to an actual diplomat by now. I don’t suppose he knows one end of an attaché case from another.’