Maria and I sat on a hot rock and looked out to sea. Berlusconi’s yacht was moored out near the horizon. Well, it was a big yacht and it could have been his. The children, six of them altogether, were jumping in and out of the emerald Sardinian Sea from a wooden jetty and a cormorant dived for fish near by.

There was a hot breeze and the sea was cool and clear. The kids found shells, crabs, sea urchins and anemones (called sea tomatoes here) and we all went home at sunset, burnt and salty, dreamy from a day half-asleep in the sand.

Maria (a tennis friend whose daughter invited my daughter to stay and the rest of us just muscled in) had all the kit. Matching dresses and sandals, beach bag, smart umbrella, pedicure. She only paddled (claiming she got too cold if she went in — hardly possible) and she spent all day immobile, gazing wistfully at the horizon. I fiddled around with my bikini straps, scratched my mosquito bites, read a huge fat book about women in psychoanalysis and had to keep rolling around to keep it in the way of the sun.

I got water in my ears and a sea urchin spine in my foot, I needed a wee, got starving hungry and had a row with my daughter when she jumped in to the sea off a rock wearing her new watch. Maria was silent and serene.

That is, until late evening, when the children were all up on the roof under the endless velvet sky singing Abba songs around a citronella candle and looking at the stars. Then Maria came out of her coma and started talking to me, eyes bright, dishcloth in hand. She told me about her anorexia, her bulimia, her separation from her husband, her relationship with her cold and abusive mother, her strange parents-in-law, her failure as a mother and her longing for a different life if only she were strong enough for change.

My Italian was barely up to this, but we sat at the edge of the table and talked, the lighthouse flashing in the distance and the lights of the boats twinkling through the darkness.

She was considering a reconciliation, she said. She just feels so sorry for him. Sorry for him? “He didn’t feel sorry for you the whole time you were up there on your own with the kids!” I pointed out. “Why do you feel sorry for someone who obviously doesn’t care about your feelings at all?” Somehow these things are easier to say through the mask of a foreign language. The shield of the language and of the expectation that you’re a bit mad because you’re foreign is always helpful.

It sounded so depressingly female, this pity for someone who’s treated you badly, the desire to show them that you won’t behave as badly as he did. That you are empathetic even if he is not.

Every night the dads phoned and talked to the kids. There were three dads involved, and Maria and I watched silently as they were told about the snorkelling, the trampolining and the various injuries (one little girl always came away in tears, her little pink mobile with bright bobbly decorations hanging off it trailing sadly in her hand).

The men said they wished they were here. But what they meant was that they wished they were on the beach, diving off jetties and all that, not cooking for eight, cleaning the loos, finding the goggles, going back for the bodyboard left behind the rocks, wiping down the table for breakfast.

It was strange and interesting that behind that Italian glamour and composure that magazines are full of was all the same old crap that women suffer all over the world (if not slightly worse for being so hidden) and that, staring out to sea at a certain age, we all feel the wistful longing for lost lives and potential selves. It’s the 40-year-old female condition that starts when it finally sinks in that, for better or for worse, this is it.

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