‘And dogs!’ Kes loved her two Lancashire Heelers, although the older bitch, who thought children unnecessarily bothersome, pulled nasty faces at him that made Pax overreact protectively. Lots of things made Pax overreact these days.

She was fussing now, saying that Kes should change, and that he needed food and orientation. ‘And there’s lots to do on the yard, Mummy.’

‘I want to see the horses with Gronny!’ Kes shouted again, beaming at Ronnie.

‘We’ll all go together!’ Ronnie offered.

‘Someone has to stay and help Luca.’ Pax was doing her martyred, jaw-set face, big eyes sorrowful with a touch of passive aggression. Ronnie knew that she was meant to offer to take that on. But if she did, Kes wouldn’t see the horses.

‘We’ll be back before you know it!’ She hurried him away before his mother could protest more.

Time with Kes would never make up for her absence from his mother’s life, but she saw some sort of redemption in him nonetheless. The fact they adored each other was a very good start.

Ronnie longed to make a better fist of being a grandparent than she had a parent. Having married Johnny at just nineteen and borne their children by twenty-five, glamorous grannydom was always on the cards. Her dismay at becoming a grandmother for the first time had been a result of her total exclusion from the process, not her young age. Alice was adamant she should play no role in her three children’s lives. Now lanky teenagers, they barely knew Ronnie. Equally, Tim’s ex-patriot life had made it difficult for her to see his two children more than a handful of times, and divorce had taken them even further out of reach, her sixth grandchild currently on the way from his second wife who she’d met just once, at her own father’s funeral.

With Kes came Ronnie’s first opportunity to be involved, and she was determined to embrace and enjoy it. He was about the same age Tim had been when her marriage had ended, but Kes was nothing like the boisterous blond dynamo she’d kissed goodnight that heart-breaking March night, her plan to leave his father and take the children with her about to backfire horribly.

While her own son had always been a typical Percy, even at five – witty, mischievous and sporty, his generation still one of Swallows and Amazons, Kes was a solitary, defiant little character, fiercely stubborn and clever enough to carve tantrums and demands into a fine art. His bull-necked father might claim the Forsyth genes dominant, but Ronnie suspected Kes owed his brooding good looks less to Mack’s black-browed Gaelic colouring and more to his grandfather, Johnny Ledwell; the affinity with horses surely stemmed from there.

‘Here he is.’ She led Kes into the barn where Spirit, the dun colt, strutted across to them eagerly, nipping rivals out of the way, eyes gleaming with mischief and self-belief. That was the look she wanted to see on her grandson’s face. Everyone loved Spirit, knowing he was going to be something special one day. He knew it himself.