People arrive and the revels begin. For the first day, Finlay ministers to his guests with a spectral attentiveness, mimicking the serving staff in high-class restaurants who refill your glass with such subtle frequency that you begin to believe it is a fairy-tale receptacle, refilling itself. But soon he is softly guiding his old friends to top yourself up, won’t you and please feel at home and shortly Jules discovers them hovering in the kitchen, doing just that. She finds Phil staring into the open fridge like a forlorn teenager, wondering what he might snaffle. She nods and smiles but feels invaded. What does Finlay mean to achieve, visiting their old life upon them with such gusto? What can he expect from her, chopping her into the soup of their long-ago friends, stirring, heating, and adding alcohol? Though he, she notices, is barely drinking. The guests run through a case of Davenport Limney, a bottle of Laphroaig, while Finlay, without comment, makes himself another cup of tea.
He stays up with the menfolk till two and three a.m., nursing a tumbler of straw-coloured ginger cordial in a colour-match that keeps his guests comfortable. The other wives surrender to beauty sleep. Jules takes herself off to bed with a book, but lies there propped up on pillows, not reading a word. She listens to the gales of mannish laughter that blow up the stairs, straining to get the joke.
The effect of the alcohol is much like it is in school chemistry experiments: a drawing out of impurities. Or perhaps the alcohol is merely a catalyst, and her husband is the solvent? For where he was once a complexity of words and thoughts, there is now a neat-ethanol purity about him; an emotional clarity that has his guests dissolving into his arms one by one. On the very first day, Pat reveals to the assembled company that she is having tests. Something nameless is tiring her out, lowering her lymphocytes. It is Finlay she tells first, down at the end of the garden, coming in with her head on his chest, his arm round her shoulder.
The next day it’s Sue – whose permanently manicured precision suggests she treats social occasions as interviews – who ends up ragged and red-eyed in Finlay’s arms, sobbing with the grief of her infertility. An hour with Finlay in a quiet corner and she is at peace. She has also told him – and this he recounts with hilarity – that she is the ‘S’ who sent him the Post-it note about God in the brain that he got so worked up about. They’d had some conversation that touched on the subject, months and months ago. She was shocked he’d forgotten about it.