‘Are you guys seeing your folks at all?’ Becky asks Alice.

Alice nods. ‘We’re going up tomorrow.’

‘Oh, lovely.’ Becky pouts at me sadly. ‘Aw, you must miss your mum terribly at this time of year, Ben?’

‘Yes, I … Yeah.’ I scratch the back of my neck. ‘Christmas was always—’

‘So, how’s the wedding prep going?’ she asks, turning to Alice.

‘Good! So good!’ Alice trills. ‘I meant to tell you: we had a bit of luck with that string quartet. They’re available! Oceano Strings!’ She wrinkles her forehead. ‘I think maybe you guys were thinking about them for your wedding, weren’t you?’ She looks genuinely unsure, and despite everything, I can’t help marvelling at the performance. She’s definitely matured as an actor since The Carol Revisited.

Becky’s eyes are seething above her rictus grin. ‘Oh. Wow. Amazing! Yeah, we did consider them, but I think in the end we just felt a DJ was a bit less … showy. A bit more us. Didn’t we, Phil?’

‘Yeah,’ Phil agrees through a mouthful of vol-au-vent. ‘He was a bloody good DJ, too, wasn’t he?’

‘Amazing,’ says Alice.

‘You know he did Dermot O’Leary’s wedding?’

‘Yes! Becks mentioned that. A few times.’

I watch Alice closely as she continues this passive-aggressive rally against the woman who is supposedly her best friend. And all the time, I can’t help thinking: was she like this in Paris? Or at Marek’s wedding?

I’m positive she wasn’t like it at uni, when we both lived in scruffy hoodies and subsisted on roll-ups and sausage sandwiches. But having just relived Paris, I could definitely see glimpses of this new side of her: the snarkiness, the competitiveness, the fixation on work and money. But I guess, first time around – just like at the wedding – I was so totally, dumbly preoccupied by the fact that she seemed to fancy me. Everything else had just been background noise against all her arm touches and smiles.

Now, though, that attraction seems to have been replaced by irritation and frustration and boredom. She’s marrying me – she wants to start trying for a baby with me – but she doesn’t seem to actually like me.

It makes me long for Daphne in a way that is physically painful. For her goofiness and her genuineness and her … Just her.

We all sit down on the Mad Men sofas – girls on one, boys on the other – and as Becks and Alice continue their game of fixed-grin verbal tennis, Phil asks me, ‘How’s work then, mate?’

‘It’s, erm …’ I think of the swarm of red exclamation marks in my inbox. ‘Stressful.’