‘Well, I was going to decorate the kitchen and parlour with those paper chains we made when we were kids. They’re up in the attic along with the sparkly things and the tinsel you always put on the tree . . .’ she cast him a twinkling glance, ‘when you’ve pinched one from the plantation t’other side o’ fen,’ she concluded in her best Norfolk accent.

‘We’ll decorate the place the day after tomorrow, then,’ Jonty said. ‘Don’t be such a perishin’ fusspot! Leave everything to me the same as you always do.’

Tess tipped the potato peelings into the big black pot already half full of chopped cabbage leaves, apple peel and other waste. It would be cooked until it was just a mush, then thickened with poultry meal and fed to the hens which clucked constantly around the yard.

‘Well?’ Jonty said. ‘Haven’t I been efficient? All you’ll have left to do is pack your case, say your goodbyes, and get into the car . . .’

‘And explain to Pamela how it comes about that I’m stealing her beloved and ruining her Christmas,’ Tess pointed out. ‘She’ll be mad as fire, and probably want to stick a knife in my ribs.’

‘Her beloved? Whatever makes you think that?’ Jonty asked. He sounded disproportionately astonished. ‘She’s a damned good friend, my girl, but that’s all there is to it.’

Tess goggled. ‘But – but you wrote that you’d got a new girlfriend! And she comes here so often . . . She’s going to give your mother a helping hand to clear up after the party . . .’

Jonty grinned. ‘Oh, that. We changed our minds,’ he said.

‘Changed your minds? But . . .’ Tess said stubbornly, though her heart was singing. She was pretty sure Jonty did not love her, but it was like a bright light on a dark day to know that he did not love Pamela either.

Jonty heaved a sigh. ‘To be honest, we said it to make one of the doctors at the hospital jealous,’ he said. ‘He’d been dating Pamela for some while but then he met another girl and began to go out with her. He was only here on some sort of specialist course and has now gone back to his hospital in London, but Pamela means to follow him there in the New Year and hopes that their affair – if you could call it that – will rekindle. I don’t think it will myself, but maybe I’m wrong.’

‘Ye-es, but that doesn’t explain your part in it,’ Tess said doubtfully. ‘Why did Pamela choose you to be her – her pretend boyfriend?’

Jonty shrugged. ‘I dunno; it just seemed like a good idea at the time,’ he said. ‘Pam and I have always been friends, and of course when you stopped coming to the farm I suppose I was at a bit of a loose end. So when Pamela asked me to help her out the obvious thing to do was to pretend that she was planning to marry me.’