“No, I suppose we wouldn’t have welcomed you in,” Nory said guiltily. “I’m sorry about that. We didn’t think we were being arseholes at the time, but that’s not really a defense.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He smiled. “We were arseholes too. But we certainly wouldn’t have been seen dead drinking snowballs,” he added, clinking his glass to hers and taking a drink.

“I suppose you were all drinking tequila and riding around on motorbikes, like rebels without causes.”

“Something like that.” Isaac smiled. “Watching your lives was like climbing inside a book. Those kinds of things didn’t happen in real life. Not in my life anyway.”

“Isaac, you literally lived in a castle garden. You weren’t exactly watching us from your inner-city tower-block window.”

Isaac laughed softly. “Touché.” He took another sip of his drink. “There’s something I’ve always wanted to know . . .”

“Yes?”

“Why did you play croquet in the snow while drinking snowballs under a full moon?”

Nory felt a pang of something, not sharp like it used to be, more a lament, which sang a cavernous sorrow through her insides.

“Tristan,” she replied. “At least, it started on Tristan’s birthday. It was the night of his fifteenth birthday. It was April, just before Easter, and we were all due to go home for the holidays that Friday. And then weirdly, it started to snow—in April! It was so unexpected because it had been sunny all day. So then obviously we started drinking snowballs . . .”

“Obviously,” said Isaac.

“And then someone, I can’t remember who, said we should sneak out for a game of croquet in honor of the snow on Tristan’s birthday.”

“And you did.”

“And then after that, if there was ever a full moon and snow, we played Snowball Croquet. Huh,” she said, almost to herself, “funny how these things come about.”

The court was set up, and after a brief explanation of the rules for Isaac’s benefit, the game began. Isaac was on Nory’s team with Jeremy and Pippa. Most of them were still a little drunk from earlier in the evening and the snowballs kept them topped up enough that they didn’t feel the cold.

It was fun, even though the game had fairly quickly dissolved into anarchy. Nory liked having Isaac there with them. It felt as though the divide between them, which had seemed so prominent at dinner, was blurring, or maybe it was simply the alcohol blurring her powers of observation. Isaac seemed less guarded, but then it was easier to feel you were on a level playing field when everyone was wearing pajamas. Maybe, she mused, if all the attendees of the G8 summit came in their pj’s they’d get more done.