‘Don’t worry, darling. What’s the fun of class traps if nobody falls into them?’ She patted Petra’s hand. ‘Anyway, Worthing wasn’t at the most venerable college there. Greville.’

‘Venerable enough,’ Ben countered. ‘Despite all the authors sullying its pedigree.’

He was one of those Englishmen, Petra had quickly realised, who don’t laugh when they’re joking. She’d never quite cracked the English code of humour. Where she came from, when you were making a funny, you overcompensated with confirmatory laughter, exclamation marks or smileys, just so everyone knew it was a joke. When they’d first met, Suki had told Petra something: England can feel like a party you haven’t been invited to. She’d never forgotten that. It had seemed like a shallow quip, but sometimes it perfectly described her experience.

Petra smiled thinly, then hid it behind her glass of iced tea. ‘Barford School? So Curtis was born and bred here?’

‘Yes, the Worthings own a nice little pile at Haseley Knob, just up the bridle path.’

‘That makes sense,’ Petra said. ‘It helps explain why he’s buying property here. But he really could afford to buy any property anywhere, couldn’t he?’

‘Yes, I think it’s some sort of homecoming. This I’m hearing from scuttlebutt – one of his solicitors, Busby Catte, is a member of the Society and we’re good friends. Of course, Catty shares nothing that’s beyond the public record, but it saves one from looking it up, doesn’t it? At any rate, Worthing’s retiring and consolidating his personal investments here. It could be worse. I often think I should leave the clogged gutters of Mayfair and come visit my darling sis in her bucolic countryside.’ Ben shrugged and cast a look around him, as if the blue-tinged cafeteria metonymised this shire town in the middle of England. Maybe it did, with its busy staff hurrying through with their pastel scrubs of different hues and a full spectrum of the town’s local inhabitants, from down-and-out people patiently nursing long-term injuries, through unfit families squabbling in packs, to stressed middle-aged white collars, to the well-heeled elective surgery candidates counselling each other before their procedures. But where the MyHealth Clarendon differed from Leamington at large was that all of them had to eat here, in this bog-standard canteen, a tease when outside there was a range of much better fare to suit all budgets. ‘Do you know what a treat it is to stroll ten minutes from your doorstep and see actual arable fields where groweth sustenance for the glorious nation? I so seldom get the chance to escape.’

‘Thank God for that,’ Suki said, but Petra felt strangely proud. She and Helena had wound up in a town that one of the richest men in England envied.