‘It’s made from Turner cider, so it’s bloody lethal!’ Carly warned loudly. ‘Luca just made everyone laugh their heads off pretending he and Pax don’t – oh, hi.’ She spotted the elderly gatecrashers.

‘These are Kes’s grandparents!’ Pax’s predictive text was going rogue, her fingers shaking too much to hit the right letters, her son rechristened ‘Ken’ in her haste.

She could hear Bridge introducing her in-laws in her Belfast brogue. ‘Murr and Merry, this is Luca and Carly.’

Mairi’s reply was drowned out by the hurdy-gurdy hotting up. Still typing, Pax edged closer and walked straight into a tree’s cage of branches, poking herself in the eye, phone flying from her hands.

‘We’re all Pax’s bezzies,’ Bridge was exaggerating on the other side of the tree before stage-whispering to the others. ‘There’s been a bit of a mix-up over dates!’

Pax dropped to her knees and searched around in the dark grass, grateful to find her text still beaming from her phone screen in badly typed readiness.

‘What are you doing down there, Tishy?’ Muir demanded from beyond the canopy of branches.

‘With you in a tick!’ She waved at them, closing one streaming eye anxiously to see Luca offering up his beakers to the Forsyths, violin case under one arm like a mafioso.

‘Can I tempt you to a mulled cider?’

They both stepped back as one and Muir held up a Puritanical hand. ‘Certainly not.’

Backing up to get one signal bar, Pax could see she had mistyped so many words, the message looked Dutch. Through the tree branches, somebody said ‘Sláinte! She heard Carly’s creamy voice ask, ‘Have you ever been to a wassail, Murray?’

‘Feck, but I need this.’ Bridge was soon making slurping noises as she knocked back her steaming cider cup.

Through her one good eye Pax could see her in-laws now backed up against a stone wall, looking mutinous. As she pressed ‘send’, she felt a little gloved hand slip into hers. Kes’s eyes brimmed up at her.

‘I want to go, Mummy.’

‘It’s not the right night, darling.’

‘Oliver wants to go too.’ He tugged at her hand.

‘Oliver’s not here, Kes.’

‘He is!’ Wrenching away, he ran back to his Grandforces.

Pax followed, covering her streaming eye with her hand, tripping again.

Muir muttered something at his wife, questioning her sobriety.

‘You heard the boy, Tishy.’ Mairi was impatient. ‘He wants to go with us.’ She gripped Kes tightly to her. ‘He needs his father.’

Muir’s amen was worthy of a pulpit. ‘A drunken night out’s no place for a bairn his age.’

‘It’s not even five o’clock.’

‘And the alcohol flowing!’ Mairi shuddered.

No matter how many episodes you cry side by side through Call the Midwife, to have married a mother’s son was to make a secret enemy of her, Pax realised forlornly. Especially if you are the second person to do it.

‘We’ll bring him back here tomorrow to try the wee village school as agreed,’ Muir reassured her unenthusiastically.