Lorna saw her mother coming through the crowd. With a sidelong glance at the woman eating soup, Lorna hastily slipped what was left of the sandwich into a napkin, transferred the napkin into her coat pocket and rose from the table. She met Anne in the middle of the room.

‘I need some air, I think.’

‘Oh, OK,’ Anne replied. ‘What about my tea?’

‘Stay and have it if you want, or bring it.’

They walked out across the links. The sandy cavities of the bunkers were lightly dusted with snow and looked phosphorescent. The snow on the open stretches of fairway grass, exposed to the wind slicing in off the sea, had settled in nervous patches. The wind was like ice. Lorna folded her arms tight to her body as she walked.

‘Where do you want to go?’ Anne asked.

‘Are your hands not freezing?’ Lorna asked. Her mother’s hands were ungloved and exposed. Anne had brought her ­tea – a ceramic cup and ­saucer – with her.

‘They feel like they’re burning,’ Anne said.

She took a sup of the tea and tossed the dregs. They were passing a putting green with a hole and a flag sticking out of it. Anne detoured on to the green and set the cup and saucer down by the hole.

‘Remind me to get that on the way back,’ she said. ‘Speaking of which, did you find Luke’s hat?’

‘In the car? I forgot to check,’ Lorna admitted. From the vantage of the links, the sea looked to Lorna like a vast, pitted slab of vitreous ­dark ­blue rock, like something that, once you reached it, you could walk right out on to.

‘We’ll go as far as we can,’ she said, ‘and when we get back, I think it’ll be time to leave.’

They followed one of the improvised trails that led off the links, down between a gap in the sand dunes. There was no one else on the strand, the surf a sickly yellow foam bubbling between the matted black hanks of seaweed heaped on the beach. Lorna had to screw her eyes against the grains of sand zinging through the air.

‘What did you make of Lydia Healy?’ she asked her mother.

‘Well now,’ Anne said, folding her own arms against herself, ‘I don’t think I knew her enough to form a meaningful impression.’

Lorna glanced at Anne.

‘That’s an excessively careful way of putting it.’

‘I do have a story.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s a little story. It’s nothing scandalous.’

‘Go on.’

‘In fact it’s not even a story. There was just this . . . moment.’ She shook her head. ‘It was Bonnie Walshe’s wedding, you remember the reception was at the Pontoon Hotel back when the Pontoon was still open? This must have been a good ten years back. Do you want to hear this?’

‘If there’s scandal.’

‘I told you there’s no scandal.’