Feeling awkward, she smiled and waved. Pax looked away without reacting.

‘Stuck-up bitch.’ Bridge turned back and trotted on.

*

Pax usually parked in the tree-shrouded lay-by on Luddford Hill to listen to her husband shouting at her on hands-free. There, she could get a four-bar signal and privacy. But today she’d been turning into Compton Bagot when Mack called, and by the time she’d passed the Old Post Office, the light-up icicles had been a blur. Tears still stung, hot and wet on her cheeks, the lump in her throat like a clenched fist.

‘– you have no idea how damaging this is –’ Mack bellowed on ‘– the sheer madness of this whole fucking week.’ He hammered the emphasis every few words like a Scottish Peston. Pax tried not to jump each time.

The two women on horses were riding away now. How she envied them their freedom. When she’d ridden, all those years ago, she’d felt mythical, like a female Centaur. She wanted to gallop very fast in open country right now, not feel buried up to her neck in a toxic relationship.

A marriage breaking up over Christmas was such a cliché. It happened in soap operas, not to a calm, well-brought-up family tactician like Pax. The festive fight was so not her style, that crazy, wine-fuelled argument in paper hats that ended with the scream, ‘This marriage is over!’

This year, however, Pax Forsyth had, in her husband’s words ‘completely lost it’.

Every day that had passed since made bigger strangers of them. Their week of putting on the ultimate pantomime.

At the most sociable time of year, with its stack of invitations, play dates and family commitments, the ‘Christmas Day Episode’ as Mack called it, had been kept rigidly hidden from view while the Forsyths spread Tidings of Comfort and Joy around their Cotswolds circle with boxes of Prestat and bottles of Moët, but it was a wound bleeding beneath the Boden perfection.

Even at home, they’d remained acidly polite, putting on a united front in front of five-year-old Kes, whilst studiously avoiding being alone together. Pax spent late evenings on the running machine in the garage; Mack glared at a screen or retreated to his parents’ bungalow in the neighbouring village to lick his wounds. He was waiting for a retraction she refused to issue. Not Talking About It was a tacit pact. But as soon as she left the house alone, stepped out of the Safe Zone, he seemed to snap. First came texts, offended questions – Have you really thought about this? Do you realise what you stand to destroy? What do you think you’re doing to our son? Is there someone else? – followed by the call, a sanctimonious monologue.

Today’s, delivered from the loo of the sleeper to Edinburgh, was typical.

‘– you’ve said that you would never put Kes through what you went through when your mother abandoned you, and now this?’

Pax listened, tearfully watching the two riders disappearing from view.