And Holly had been a revelation. The sunshine on his back as he headed up the High Street was a warm reminder of everything she’d done for him; the light she had shone, and continued to shine, on his life. As he’d got to know her better, his own confidence had increased, and, although it might just be the hormones talking after a night of making love, he felt as though he could take on the world.

Wishing a good morning to a somewhat surprised Mrs Holderness, out early with her two Border collies, he walked down the garden path to his house and fumbled in his pocket for his keys. Once through the door, the coolness of the stone hallway brought him up short. The house, unlived in since Friday evening, and even then only briefly, smelt still and almost damp, in spite of the warm weather outside.

As he wandered through the hallway and into the kitchen, he realised with a start that he’d yet again left his bag on the scrubbed oak kitchen table instead of putting it safely away in the study. Smiling to himself, he remembered just how desperate he’d been to get over to Holly’s place on Friday evening and how he had literally just dropped everything and dashed over there. Seeing his bag there, though, brought him back down to earth; he still had a mountain of work to do and he needed to be on the evening train back to London, too.

Resolving to bash on through what needed to be done and then get back to Holly as soon as he could, figuring he could sleep on the train later, he pulled the buff-coloured document wallet out of his bag and settled down at the kitchen table for a quick scan through before he made himself a coffee. The documents were all the usual stuff: requests from constituents for meetings, a couple of lobbyists representing various industries and, his heart turned over, a reminder about his scheduled question at Prime Minister’s Question Time that coming Wednesday.

Charlie hoped his father and mother, two long-serving doctors, both of whom had worked until their retirement in the same GP practice in the village in Yorkshire where he’d been brought up, would be proud of the stand he was taking on the cystic fibrosis drug-funding issue. He’d always had a keen ear for the changes in policy of successive governments around the NHS. Although the medical side of health was a mystery to him, the funding and maintenance side was an area he was endlessly fascinated by, and one of the reasons he’d gone into politics was to get the inside track on how the NHS could be made to work more effectively, but not at the cost of its patients.