Thoughts that had been shifting like sea-sucked shingle for months gathered force, that ever-louder shanty echoing through her mind: You don’t love him, you don’t love him, this can’t go on, he undermines you, you don’t love him, leave him, leave him, leave him.

I will never again love Mack, she finally admitted to herself. I don’t even like him.

Their drifting, shipwreck marriage splintered in front of her eyes.

Awash with hip flask Cointreau, post-lunch Armagnac and most of Mairi’s cooking sherry, she’d gulped for air, a silent storm raging, sentimentality and regret wrenching great rips through her calm surface.

Barely able to breathe, she’d watched Mack take the turkey fat and pour it down the sink with a self-important swagger, saying over his shoulder, ‘You sound like you’re coming down with a cold, wee bird.’

‘This marriage is over!’

‘You’ll regret saying that.’ Placing the gravy strainer carefully on the draining board, he’d left the room.

That night, he’d slept in his parents’ spare room.

In the Mack Shack, Pax had let Kes crawl into bed with her and cuddled his small, solid warmth tightly, anticipating a sleepless night of guilt and turmoil, but instead she’d slept better than she had in months. Just briefly, the answer was so simple. All she had to do was stick to her word.

Gazing unseeing at the lane ahead, hearing her husband breathing heavily, Pax berated herself for joining in the pretence that she’d never said it, for her overwhelming need to keep the peace.

Just a few hours later, on the other side of her hangover, in the cold light of day and after a muttered apology from both sides, they had called a truce of sorts to be on show for her family at the stud, too shell-shocked to do anything other than carry on with the festivities.

This, the first Christmas since the legendary Captain’s death, had been the first without a traditional Percy family gathering on the day itself, no Grumps carving the meat in the green-walled dining room. Instead, Pax’s prodigal mother was back, and while Ronnie had wanted all her children to join her at the stud, those bridges would take a long time to build. The hastily cobbled Boxing Day get-together in Compton Magna had been fraught with tension, Pax wearing a fixed smile throughout, ‘This marriage is over!’ still ringing in her ears, grudgingly grateful to Mack and his parents for behaving impeccably amid the cross-currents.

The gathering had deepened her sense of isolation. She needed the stud to stay in the family; it was her bedrock, and her mother’s decision to stay changed things. Ronnie might be a nebulous, turbulent presence, but she was the only one of them equipped with the knowledge and contacts to save it.

Pax remained the only one of Ronnie’s children willing to hear her out and help her out, and whilst it hurt quite a lot to do so, it was already starting to heal old wounds. Her oldest sister Alice’s resentment of their mother burned on unabated while their brother Tim was hiding in South Africa, his second marriage already failing, his inability to commit almost certainly a throwback to their mother, escaping their father’s cold detachment, abandoning them as young children. Maybe that’s what made Pax find her own marriage so hard, her need for perfect harmony too perfectionist? In their glory days, Mack had called her his swan, always outwardly calm and serene while her legs kicked frantically beneath the water. Swans mated for life, didn’t they?