She stole another look at Pax, quietly relieved to find that she wasn’t nearly so hot at close quarters – the pale marble skin, dotted with freckles, was waxy, there was a spot on her chin, hair was unwashed, eyes bloodshot – although her voice was pure honey. ‘Do your children come here?’

‘Not yet, but friends’ kids do. One has a little boy who started here last year and she reckons it’s given him bags of confidence, stopped him being so aggressive. He was a right thug, apparently.’

‘I blame the fathers,’ Pax muttered.

‘Me too usually, but this one’s dad’s pretty cool,’ she sighed. The bare-fist fighter with the bare-faced cheek, and hands of a surgeon. ‘So’s his mum, come to that.’ She pulled herself together. ‘Total angel. Terrific with horses. A natural, everyone says.’

Pax was looking at her curiously. She really stared, Bridge noticed, her big, fawn eyes not looking through her as Carly described, but instead seeming to see into her thoughts, that shameful medley of sex toys, skin glue, Ash’s finger in her mouth and lust leaping to her groin. Her sore lip throbbed.

‘So this is a lovely learning environment as you can see!’ She tried to think educationally worthy thoughts, but instead found herself imagining Fantasy Ash was taking the PE class outside, all steamy clouds of breath and muscly football legs. ‘You can just see how much fun all the little ones have, whilst still benefitting from first-class teaching.’ She marched Pax across a covered courtyard so she could look in on the deserted school hall set with lunch tables. ‘And we feed them too!’ she improvised badly. ‘Nutritionally balanced superfood, not any old shi – sh – she— shish kebab, you know?’

Pax was staring at her intently again. ‘Have we met before?’

‘Sure, I don’t think so.’ Bridge hoped she couldn’t pick her out of a line-up of riders in bobble-topped helmets who might have gawped at her weeping in her car a week earlier. She recrossed the courtyard at a wobbly high-heeled jog, starting to feel out of her depth. ‘It’s Reception your wee man’s going to be in, is it not?’

‘That’s right.’ Pax paused to admiring a sensory wall. ‘Kes never stops; he’s got no off button.’

‘I’ll bet there’s plenty here like that.’ Bridge led the way back along a corridor lined with small, brightly coloured coats on pegs, abandoned backpacks and wellies, pausing as she tried to remember which classroom Reception was.

‘His current school tries to run his batteries flat with rugby,’ Pax was saying, ‘French vocabulary and choir practice. He’s five.’ She picked up a brace of fallen Mini Rodini coats to hang on neighbouring empty pegs labelled Ignatius MacMaster and Inigo MacMaster.

‘Pair of iMacs,’ Bridge registered breathlessly.

Pax tilted her head, eyes lingering on the labels. Then she looked away with a low, amused hiccup Bridge caught like a sneeze.

Without warning, infectious laughter seized them both, a silent, rib-pinching intimacy they didn’t know what to do with. They turned in opposite directions to bring it under control.