When Cass stood and began to clear the plates, Stephen got up to help, as did Helena. Georgie was holding Hamish in conversation and didn’t join in. Cass set down used crockery on the kitchen table and picked up the big bowl of new potatoes that were being kept warm on the top of the range. She smiled faintly as they passed. Helena brushed against him as they both moved to pick up the larger of the two casserole pots and he felt a little jolt of involuntary desire. Where did that come from? He didn’t even fancy Helena, or he hadn’t thought he did. Not that she wasn’t pretty. Technically, if you saw the three of them lined up in a photograph, you might even have thought she was the prettiest. But the Clarke girls just had something, something else about them; and it was more intense because there were two of them. He wasn’t sure if he really even liked Georgie, there was something in her, a flicker of spite perhaps, that he didn’t trust. But still.

In the end room where the television was, there were art postcards propped up along the bookshelf. One of them was a picture of a young man leaning into a pond full of topless girls. It was as if the artist had caught the youth just before he toppled into the pool; as if the girls were tempting him in with their beauty and their silent, watery pleading and the gorgeous paleness of their naked flesh. The girls in the painting looked really similar to Cass and Georgie – the one on the left was especially like Cass – which was maybe why they liked the picture enough to display it in the first place. He’d turned it over to see who had painted it: J. W. Waterhouse, Hylas and the Nymphs. The nymphs were eerie because they looked so like one another. There was an otherworldly quality too, to the Clarke sisters. It pulled at you.

Back at the table, he glanced across at Cass. He hadn’t had a chance with all these people around to consider what he felt about her liking Hamish. He wondered if everyone else knew that she liked the boy, or whether it was just he who’d noticed, because noticing things about her had become what he did with his time. He wondered how long she’d been interested in Hamish and whether Hamish reciprocated her feelings. Surely he did? He couldn’t help hoping that she didn’t actually love him, that it was just a crush.

Down at the far end of the table, Bruce was remonstrating with Celia about something. It had probably started as a jest, but now the volume and insistency had the taint of anger. Celia’s features looked slightly smudged; from too much red wine, Stephen guessed. She tended to get that look, in the evenings.