I was lifting Cassie to my shoulder and rubbing her back to soothe her but I did turn my head now to look straight at him. He had neat, unremarkable features and a mouth with a long top lip that looked tucked in at the corners, as though he were used to suppressing his amusement. There were fine laughter lines at the corners of his eyes too. He oughtn’t to have looked distinctive, given the ordinariness of these separate components, but somehow they added together to make a good face. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed this before.

He said quickly, ‘It’s where I come from. My part of the world, I mean. Near Ipswich. I could … I could have shown you some nice country pubs.’

I breathed in hard, making myself concentrate, and the distracting waft of perfume faded a little. ‘That would have been nice. But Cherbourg beckons, doesn’t it?’

‘Oh God, yes. Trying to stop them doing all the things school trips are really about for just long enough to pick up some French vocabulary or a few cultural impressions. I shouldn’t be saying this, should I?’

‘It’s nothing I don’t know already. I’m Lola Bailey’s mother, remember.’

‘And Lola turned out fine. Much more thanks to you than to the school, I suspect.’

We both hesitated, but neither of us chose this moment to mention Jack. The bass vibration that shook the step and the closed door at my back had now stopped.

Mr Rainbird stretched his legs in the cramped space and eased himself to his feet. ‘I’ve got to go and play the trumpet.’

‘Thanks for keeping me company.’

‘Sadie? May I call you Sadie?’

‘Of course.’

‘Shall I give you a ring?’

I remembered the evening in the new restaurant with Mel. I looked around my life that spring night and thought this is good, this is what I want – family and friends, work and the calm satisfaction generated by these things. But the weeks since then seemed to have stripped away several layers of comfortable, thick, nerveless skin. I felt exposed now, and shivery with a kind of feverish, naked anticipation. I guessed that I must look different to the world as well as feeling unfamiliar to myself, because I had never been asked out by any of Lola’s teachers even though I used to spend half my life at the school, explaining away her latest transgression. But I did remember – of course I remembered – that this was how it went. You were asked for your telephone number. You gave it, or not, or you played a withholding game. It was that simple. Just as it had seemed, looking in from the outside, for Mel and Jasper.