‘There are napkins in the drawers of the sideboard in the dining room,’ she said. ‘And we use the raffia mats. Oh, and Georgie, can you take the side-plates through? The majolica ones, you know.’

‘No,’ said Georgie.

‘Yes you do! The green ones that look like leaves.’

‘Oh. OK.’

‘She’s always especially useless when she has a friend staying, have you noticed?’ Celia remarked, to no one in particular.

The history teacher and his wife arrived first and were introduced. Stephen never caught their names. The wife was pretty, with freckles and a small nose. They’d moved from East Anglia and were in love with the hills here, the walking. As Nick was refilling their glasses their other friends appeared: the adults in early middle age, a daughter of about thirteen and, lastly, a boy in his late teens. Stephen sensed the change in Cass as soon as they walked in, when a sort of stillness settled on to her. It would have been imperceptible to any other onlooker, but Stephen had made himself a connoisseur of Cass. He had been studying her out of the corner of his eye, looking whenever he knew she was absorbed and would not notice. He knew now what she looked like when she was reading, when she was exasperated, when she was about to contradict something someone was saying. He knew that the right-hand side of her face was ever so slightly more beautiful than the left, when viewed in profile; he knew that she moved the tip of her left thumb over the philtrum of her lips when she watched TV.

Now he understood why she’d suggested making an ice-bowl for tonight’s pudding and had devoted so much of yesterday afternoon to it. She had gathered young vine leaves from the dilapidated greenhouse, and small blue flowers and daisies from the garden, and then she’d gone through all the mixing and serving bowls to find two that fitted into each other with a suitable gap. On the kitchen table she had poured water into the space between the bowls, then fixed the small one in place with masking tape she’d fetched from her father’s studio, so that it wouldn’t bob up. She’d pushed the leaves and flowers ever so gently into the water. Then, holding the bowls with both arms, she’d asked Helena to open the chest freezer in the outhouse. Stephen had never seen a bowl made of ice and couldn’t imagine that it could be worth all the faff. You wouldn’t want to eat it, after all; it didn’t have any flavouring, it wasn’t like ice-cream. But now he realized that she’d made it to impress the visitors’ son. It was a sort of offering. A crystal chalice.