I wanted to throw myself in front of my husband like a fire blanket to protect him from what was about to be revealed. I tried to speak but seemed to have a live eel halfway down my throat – that’s what it felt like, anyway. ‘I . . . I . . .’ I was suddenly sweating more than a Russian athlete about to take a drug test. ‘I met a man,’ I began, finally grabbing the elephant by the trunk. ‘On the ship. I was going to tell you—’

‘Oh, and, what, you decided not to tell me until now so that I could have a heart attack at leisure in front of your entire fucking family?’

‘Somehow I don’t think this is quite what’s meant by Secret S . . . S . . . Santa,’ Emerald slurred, in a drunken attempt to alleviate the tension.

I glanced towards my mother, expecting sanctimonious fury. But she was wearing the smug expression of a preacher, or a saleswoman; someone who knows they’re about to command the room. In fact, it turned out that my mother had been waiting for this moment for a quite a while. The baby bit was news to her. But it didn’t compare to the information she’d been nursing like a precious piece of porcelain, a treasure, to be revealed when the time was right. She’d obviously fondled the evidence regularly, weighing up its worth, evaluating its price and its power.

‘Harrison,’ she said, in a measured voice, her eyes glittering with spite. ‘I never thanked you for your old iPhone, which you kindly passed on to me. It’s been an invaluable source of information.’

‘What? Oh . . . good,’ Harry said, distractedly, his eyes welded to my stricken face.

‘Yes. Especially about you. I know you told me you’d erased all your . . . “data”, I believe is the right word? The grandkids might say I suffer from a technology deficit disorder, but when my daughters abandoned me to go on their luxury cruise I was forced to teach myself to use the contraption. One day I was pressing things randomly and a message popped up on the screen from something called “WhatsApp”. I followed what you might call a text chain . . . A chain that led me to a very startling conclusion.’

Harry’s eyes now darted towards Ruth. A layer of sweat glistened on his tanned face, wet moons rapidly appeared in the armpits of his shirt, and his thick, sun-bleached blonde hair suddenly seemed to stick in lank strands to his forehead.

‘You see – the thing about men, girls, is that they’re lazy. They’ll just make do with whatever’s lying around the home . . . even when it comes to gratifying their carnal appetites.’ Ruth’s bejewelled hands twitched like spiders on the tabletop, and a malicious smile shrieked across her face.