Evelyn and Penny were both in the kitchen when I called in on the evening after my trip to Ted’s house.

It had been another long day and Colin had only just gone home after a lengthy visit to check up on the progress of his book. I had given the job to Andy, who made up most of our boxes. He had made a start on cutting the boards, but this wasn’t nearly fast enough for Colin. ‘My mum’s waiting to see it,’ he shouted.

‘It’ll be another week or so yet, Colin.’

‘A week? It doesn’t take a week to publish other people’s books, I bet.’

‘No,’ I said irritably from behind my bench. ‘It takes months to publish a real book.’

He ignored this. ‘I don’t like being without my recipes, you know. What if I wanted to cook one of them?’

‘You could take it away with you right now,’ Andy offered.

He wasn’t enjoying the job – it involved a lot of work and the end result wouldn’t deliver much satisfaction to the binder. The plan was to paste the greasy pages to sheets of stiff card, and the resulting sheaf of card would then be stitched and cloth-bound into a thick volume, which would have a substantial matching slipcase with Colin’s name on the front. I had decided to give the job the full treatment, on the grounds that he would have nothing to complain about once it was finished. Andy took the view that as we’d never be paid for the work anyway, the standard didn’t matter too much.

Colin certainly refused to listen to any discussion about money or even to consider an estimate. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he crowed. ‘If I took it away you couldn’t get on with publishing it, could you?’

I went to put on a CD, searching the rack for something very soothing for us all. I wasn’t sorry when the end of the day finally arrived and I could make a ten-minute visit across the yard.

Cassie was sitting on her booster seat at the table, doing her favourite puzzle. Shiny painted fruits and vegetables had to be fitted into the right outlines in a wooden board. ‘Here’s the carrot,’ she told me when I sat down next to her.

‘So it is. What about the apple?’

We put our heads together and sorted through the shapes.

Evelyn was standing at the cooker dreamily stirring pasta sauce for Cassie’s supper. She held her flowing velvet sleeve out of the way with her free hand while she gazed out of the window. ‘‘Lo, Sadie,’ she murmured. She was wearing big silver hooped earrings that swung when she moved her head.

Penny was peering at her computer monitor by the front window. It was coming up to VAT time and she had insisted on doing the company books herself, but even though she was tapping away at the keyboard I could sense that her attention wasn’t on the job. The atmosphere in the kitchen didn’t feel comfortable.