Gordon and Kelly sipped their drinks and shared a companionable moment, he imagined, going Dutch on victimhood. Kelly’s feud with her stepmother had a long history in which the punishment for her infidelity was the latest outrage. Its roots lay in jealousy, originating when Leonie married Kelly’s father: logistically convoluted but psychologically simple. By contrast, Gordon’s relationship with Leonie, as well as being hard to explain in a family-tree botanical sense—she was the foreign-born second wife of his deceased father-in-law—eluded pat explication. Leonie had gifted him one of the three issued shares of the company that owned The Lodge, a port in the storm of his marriage breakdown, and with it responsibility for its insurmountable bills, knowing full well that Gordon was the type of man who, having been given this extraordinary bounty, would be reluctant to ask her or anyone else to fund the maintenance costs which she, Leonie, so airily overlooked. In one act, giving Gordon a share in The Lodge had made him a rich(ish) man on theoretical and unredeemable paper, while stripping his cash reserves to the bone. He could get why Leonie wanted to fuck with Kelly. But whether she wanted to help or punish him, give him the chalice or the poison in it, he had not the faintest idea. She had saved him out of sympathy; it was not beyond her to be ruining him out of carelessness.

‘Can I make a radical suggestion?’ Kelly said. ‘Get a job. I did. It can’t kill you to try.’