It always made her laugh, too, that the French for chest of drawers was commode. She certainly hoped her guests wouldn’t emulate the use of a commode in her chests of drawers! They’d had one guest who’d thrown up after much too wine at dinner, leaving the mess for Steph and David to deal with; and another had dropped black eyeliner on the pale carpet and hidden the resulting stain under a stool.

She looked at her watch. Five o’clock. Meredith would be here any minute.

She thought about when they’d first met and decided not to compute how many years ago it was. Far too many, anyway.

Meredith had only arrived at Meads House in the sixth form. She was a spiky girl: tall and slender with extremely straight fair hair, which Steph had suspected her of ironing (quite common at the time even if it sounded barmy now, not to mention downright dangerous). She was not well off and had only come, Steph later discovered, because her father had insisted on it, borrowing against his pension to pay the school fees. He believed in education above all, and Meads’ teachers had a towering reputation locally. If anyone could get his daughter into university, they could, he was convinced.

Meredith had obviously felt way out of her depth surrounded by posh Pony Club girls, some of whom had known each other forever. For a while she had kept herself to herself and stayed silent, burying her head in her studies. She had always been the last to leave the library.

And then she’d discovered Steph – and they’d just seemed to click. As her father had told her, you only needed to make one friend and then everything would change. Later on, Joanna had joined their little group and they’d suddenly become quite a force: three pupils who were actually interested in their work and loved to argue about Jane Eyre and Lizzie Bennet from Pride and Prejudice, and whether Mr Darcy was A Good Thing.

Meredith was convinced it was he who had almost single-handedly – maybe with a bit of help from Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester – provided the stereotype for most subsequent romantic heroes. ‘And why any sane woman would want to live with a dark and handsome but proud and moody man, God alone knows! Even if he did get a bit nicer in the end! Just the profile for a stalker, if you ask me. Once phones came along Mr Darcy’d be checking up on poor Lizzie all the time and asking her where she’d been!’