He might have been asking about my holiday plans, or he might have been asking something quite different because he had seen the softening in my face. I told him that I didn’t know yet. Then I added without having given it an instant’s prior thought, ‘I might take Jack and Lola – they’re my children – to the south of France. To Grasse, maybe.’

Recollection and longing struck me with such an unexpected jolt that I almost rocked in my seat.

When I was fifteen, I spent a whole summer near Grasse. It sounds unlikely, but I did. There was a square house set in fields planted with centifolia roses and jasmine bushes, and there was Madame Lesert. She was – I was told – an old business friend of Ted’s, and he sent me out there to stay with her for reasons that I didn’t and still don’t fully understand. I do know that those weeks were a happy time for me, the best that I can remember between my mother’s death and the year I met Tony. I arrived at Madame Lesert’s house a troubled child, and by the time I left I had been thawed by warmth and simple affection. I have never been back there, perhaps because I didn’t want to trespass on the perfection of the memory. Yet all of a sudden, sitting in a shaft of sunshine in a Thai restaurant, I was overtaken by a powerful desire to see Grasse again.

Mel and Jasper were both looking at me.

Jasper nodded. ‘I should think they’d like that.’

I blinked, momentarily lost.

‘Going to France,’ he added.

I collected myself. ‘Yes. Well, nothing’s fixed yet.’

Jasper knew about Lola and Jack. He remembered what Mel had told him, but it wasn’t so much that I felt unduly talked-about.

Jasper was easy to talk to and I liked the way he listened with his head on one side, paying full attention to the conversation. He had a hearty appetite and I liked that too. His movements with the cutlery and when he lifted his hand to the waitress to order coffee for Mel were precise. For all his bulk there was something neat and well-ordered about him. Jasper wouldn’t be hasty or clumsy in anything he did.