She glanced down at her engagement ring, then up at him. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it ridiculous, to have got this far without me ever having seen where you live?’

‘I guess we have form when it comes to doing things in an unconventional order,’ he said.

‘You’re not wrong there,’ she said. ‘You’d better lead the way. Don’t go too fast. Or too slow. Let’s aim for nice and steady, OK?’

‘OK.’

Ellie and I got into Mum’s car and she followed Mark out of the landscaped grounds and onto the main road.

Ellie said, ‘Is that it?’

Mum didn’t respond, and Ellie repeated herself. Mum said, ‘Is what it?’

‘About the girl. Mark’s little girl. The one he doesn’t see, and didn’t tell you about. You aren’t even angry with him?’

‘You sound as if you want me to be,’ Mum said.

‘Well, are you?’

‘I can’t talk about it when I’m driving.’

‘Then you’re just going to let him off the hook?’

‘Look, good people sometimes end up in bad situations, OK? And he’s a good man. His mother might be a little difficult… She really shouldn’t have come out with all that stuff in front of you. But she has, and now I know and I need to digest it and talk to him about it. But there’s no reason why it should have any effect on you, so can we please drop the subject? At least for now?’

I turned round and pulled a face at Ellie. She shrugged. ‘OK. I was just trying to clear the air.’

‘I don’t think it’s that big a deal,’ I said to Mum. Then I said to Ellie, ‘How’s your headache?’

‘Headache? What headache? You didn’t say anything about a headache,’ Mum said.

Ellie frowned at me to signal that she didn’t want Mum fussing about it. ‘It’s gone now. I just didn’t feel too good when we were at Ingrid’s. What kind of operation was it they used to do there? You know, the one Ingrid didn’t want to talk about?’

Mum started telling us about an aunt of Mark’s who’d had a lobotomy there in the fifties, and then Ellie wanted more details about what kind of operation it was and how it worked and Mum ended up telling her to look it up. I tuned out. The idea of people sticking sharp objects into other people’s brains didn’t really sit well with smoked salmon and summer pudding, and Mum was having to drive a bit faster than usual to keep up with Mark, which wasn’t great round the bends.

Once she’d got the grim medical information she wanted, Ellie went very quiet and fell to looking out at the view and periodically rubbing her temples, as if in sympathy for Mark’s mutilated aunt. We drove the rest of the way in silence. It wasn’t far – not far enough, in my opinion. I could have done with Ingrid being a bit further away.

Then Mum pulled up behind Mark’s car in a cul-de-sac of identical-looking detached houses, brand new but built in creamy stone so as to look traditional, and all crammed in with about a foot between them.