Philippa gave her a look across the table that could have curdled milk. ‘It’s meant to be cold,’ she said. ‘It’s gazpacho.’ Philippa’s eyes dropped to the spoon in Shauna’s hand. ‘And that’s a dessert spoon. That one’s the soup spoon.’

‘I get ’em mixed up myself,’ said Dave kindly. ‘All the time! Phil bends my ear about it too, but does it matter what you eat the damned food with? I don’t think so.’ He sent his wife a warning look.

But the warning didn’t seem to get through. Despite Dave trying gamely to hold up the conversation and keep it civil, Philippa pulled Shauna up on her use of the wrong knife and fork: ‘You work your way inwards, it’s quite simple,’ she said.

When Shauna tried to refill her own glass of water and the waitress hurried forward and took it out of her hand, Philippa said in a patronizing voice: ‘That’s what she’s there for, Shauna. You don’t have to do that yourself, really.’

Towards the end of the meal, when Shauna had fallen silent and was simmering away like a bloody volcano – Josh knew the signs so well – Philippa dropped her final bombshell.

‘So you’re gypsies, David tells me. How intriguing.’ She turned her baby-blues on Josh. ‘Bare-knuckle fighting, how macho. And what about Shauna?’ She gave Shauna a wide-eyed look. ‘What is it? Mud-wrestling? Selling pegs or lucky heather? Something like that?’

And that was how Philippa Houghton ended up wearing the pudding course.

50

50

‘How bloody dare she! That fucking cow!’ spat Shauna in a loud whisper when they got back home and she was yanking off her earrings in their bedroom. They’d paid off the babysitter and she’d gone. The baby was sleeping peacefully in his cot. Now Shauna was kicking off, big time.

Josh said nothing as he pulled off his clothes. Shauna had ranted all the way home in the car but he had sat silent at the wheel, thinking, Well, that’s fucked then. Dave Houghton wouldn’t want his services now that his wife had been on the receiving end of a bowl of strawberry pavlova. Philippa’s shriek of outrage still echoed in Josh’s brain, cream dripping off her face and strawberries lodged in her hair – and in fact it could almost have been funny, if it wasn’t such a pain to lose a contact like Dave when they so badly needed the extra income.

‘Well say something,’ Shauna demanded.

‘What do you want me to say?’ Josh tossed his shirt on to the chair. ‘You just fucked up a good earner, is that what you want me to say?’