‘Yeah. Yeah, I’m doing okay. I’ve been keeping busy.’ Chris smiled a smile designed to suggest that although smiling was difficult he was damn well going to man up and smile anyway.

But as soon as the conversation moved away from Leah it became painfully spasmodic. Chris and Tamsin had so rarely spent any time alone together that they almost felt like new acquaintances. They were both nervy, taking it in turns to talk too much. Tamsin would monologue for several minutes about Amad and Hortensia Court, then exclaim that she’d been going on about herself for ages and what did any of this matter anyway in comparison to Afghanistan? After insisting that Tamsin’s work did matter, it would be Chris’s turn to take to the floor, speechifying on about preparations for the upcoming tour, with Tamsin nodding slowly throughout to show that she understood how serious it all was. Eventually he too would grow embarrassed by the sound of his own voice, and so Tamsin would take over again.

And throughout all this a subtle pressure building between them, a steady thickening of the air.

‘So … would you like to see the rest of the house?’ Tamsin asked after a particularly awkward pause, wincing inwardly at the overtones of her mother. But Chris immediately brightened.

‘Can you show me your piano?’

Tamsin lead the way through to the music room. It was the largest room on the ground floor, dominated by the Bechstein grand in the middle of the floor. Against the far wall there was also a battered old upright and a newish cedar-wood harpsichord inlaid with mother-of-pearl butterflies. On the window seat lay assorted sheet music, some of Serena’s reeds, an old accordion and a ukulele. Plenty of conversational fodder: the accordion alone kept Chris occupied for the best part of ten minutes, face twisted in concentration as he tried, under Tamsin’s patient instruction, to change fingerings at the same time as he compressed the bellows. Tamsin remembered the first time she had brought Callum back to Ashcombe Mews. He, too, had been fascinated by the accordion, but in contrast to Chris he had used it as a prop, incorporating it into a long-standing private joke in which Callum was a lecherous Frenchman called Georges. At the time Tamsin had found the whole Georges-with-an-accordion routine charming, but now it struck her as silly and even a little bit selfish. This was her music room, her instruments, her world – yet Callum had immediately claimed it with his clowning. Chris, on the other hand, was taking her seriously, listening, enraptured, to everything she said.

Once all the other instruments had been exhausted, Chris turned to the grand piano. The inevitable question was asked, and Tamsin obliged him far more willingly than usual, with a showy blast of Scott Joplin.