My eyes filled, too, but we didn't fly across the kitchen and hug each other: we nodded tersely, and I made the tea and she busied herself with our terrible old CD player on the shelf by the cookery books. Fleetwood Mac filtered through and we hummed along.

Hugo didn't mention it again either, at the carols at the Fosters’ house, which I'd never been to before principally because I'd never been invited, but there was no way I was going to let a tiny detail like that stop me. I rang Babs, who I knew went every year, and asked if I could go with her.

"Of course, darling!" I could hear ice tinkling in her glass as she knocked back her six o’clock tipple. "Is it Sabrina's solo rendition of ‘Silent Night’ that attracts you? Or have you got the hots for Hugo Bellingdon?"

“Sabrina's solo," I told her sternly. She roared, and I knew she absolutely couldn't be trusted not to make trouble, but she was all I'd got.

Babs was not a natural carol-concert-goer either, but aside from the Cheshires, this was the only event at which Belinda had to be in the same room as her, and Babs enjoyed it enormously. Sabrina Foster was Belinda's best friend, but she was also Babs’ sister, and much as Sabrina regarded her as a bad influence and rarely had her in the house — which actually hurt Babs, Mum said, more than Sabrina could know — at Christmas she could not in all conscience exclude her.

There we all were, gathered around the huge twinkling tree in the Fosters’ splendid oak-paneled hall, various select families from the county (of which we were not one), everyone looking shiny and bright-eyed. Well, the parents anyway, thrilled to have their offspring around them for a change, and the offspring, mostly teenagers, were not that dismayed either, if truth be told, to put the alcohol and the relentless competitive partying aside for a few days, with the biggest excuse in the world to be children for a brief spell. The excuse Himself was before us in the crib, at the center of the charming nativity scene of wooden figures that Sabrina had arranged at the foot of the tree.

"It's mine, actually," Babs told me when I admired it. "Belonged to our paternal Danish grandmother. But Sabrina claimed it on the grounds that I don't have children to enjoy it. Hold on, here we go."