Then she had laughed out loud. ‘Don’t be daft,’ she said. ‘I’m joking. I’d love a lift. The walk would kill me.’

In Appleworth he had bought her lunch in a pub crowded with drunken farmers. She drank pints of bitter and seemed perfectly sober. Afterwards he asked her when he might see her again.

‘Are you sure you want to?’ she said. ‘ What will your family say? I’m hardly the girlfriend they would choose for you.’

He could not tell if she were teasing again, but he took her seriously.

‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘ Really. I don’t care.’

It was his mother who had insisted that he bring Eve to the Friday night dinner party. She had found out, somehow, that he was seeing a girl. His mother had a network of spies in the valley and though she never left the house she seemed to know, magically, what was going on.

‘It won’t do, you know,’ she had insisted. ‘ You can’t keep her a secret. Perhaps you are ashamed of her?’

When she spoke to him like that she could still make him feel like a six-year-old, and the stutter, which had made his childhood so miserable, returned to him.

‘N … no,’ Jeremy had said. ‘ Of course I’m not ashamed of her. But don’t you think the family is a little d … daunting, to meet all at one go?’

She had shrugged. ‘Daunting? No, of course not. How ridiculous!’

So the invitation had been given to Eve and surprisingly she had accepted.

‘You don’t have to come,’ he had said, anxiously, ‘if you don’t want to. I can make an excuse.’

‘Don’t you dare!’ she had said. ‘It’ll be great fun. I want to see how the other half live.’

Since their first meeting at New Year she had acquired a car, a rusting Deux Chevaux with windows that would not fasten properly and an exhaust that almost touched the ground. Jeremy sat in his bedroom, waiting for her to arrive, listening for her car to rattle up the drive, growing more nervous and certain that the evening would be a disaster.