“I’m on maternity leave now actually. Just popped in.”

There came the sound of loud swearing in French from the kitchen, and Fintan immediately headed off in the opposite direction, shouting, “Flora, can you see what that is?”

“You know,” said Pam, “I never put Christabel down. Never! It’s called attachment parenting? It’s how our ancestors would have done it in the old days.”

Before catching scrofula and dying at thirty-two, Flora almost said, but managed not to.

“We’re always together, she and I. Mummy and baby! How it’s meant to be.”

Christabel screwed her face up crossly.

“Of course it’s different with girls.”

“Is it?” said Flora, genuinely curious, then annoyed with herself that she’d fallen for it. She knew she should always keep her distance. The problem was Pam was the only person she knew with a baby, and she would have loved to have asked her lots of things—like was it normal to want to get away from your baby sometimes, and was it all right to be a bit resentful of being knackered all the time? But Pam was obviously having an absolute ball.

“Oh yes. Girls and their mums. It’s a special thing.”

Flora thought about her own mum, who had died far too young, and smiled ruefully.

Pam was now talking to the baby.

“Poor little Douglas doesn’t get to spend time with his mummy, does he?” said Pam in a baby-waybe voice, bouncing Christabel’s fingers up and down. “Poor ickle baby Douglas.”

“Is there something you want, Pam?” said Flora, realizing too late she’d betrayed her frustration, which in Pam’s world she’d totally chalk up as a win.

“Oh. Yes! Dinner for the Outward Bound sponsors. But, Flora, these are . . . these are important people. Sponsors and people coming from the mainland. You know, the Seaside Kitchen is all very adorable and so on, but these people . . . they’ll be expecting something quite good?”

Flora tried to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth. The most annoying thing about this was that they needed a soft launch, a chance for the kitchen to run through its paces before they opened properly at Christmas.

“Well, we have a new chef, so we’ll have a menu for you to take a look at.”

“Oh, good, ” said Pam, clapping Christabel’s little fingers together. “Not that you’re not, you know, wonderful, at what you do. But a real chef . . .”

There was a bang from the back of the kitchen. Gaspard marched into the main hallway. Despite the fact that there were brand-new whites ordered in for him with his name on them, he was wearing a pair of filthy old checked trousers with a packet of cigarettes clearly hanging out the back of them.

“Your fridge—no good. Your oven—no good. Your cupboards—no good. You need to change—poof! —everything.”

Pam blinked. “Yes, I’m sure that’s true.”

Gaspard stopped. “’Ello, tiny baby,” he muttered in a soft voice much different from anything Flora had heard so far. “Ah, she is very sage.”