‘I fear it’s come with a receding hairline and a grizzled beard; all my edges have been softened.’

‘I rather like your grizzled beard,’ she said, ‘it makes you look—’

‘If you say it makes me look like a cuddly teddy bear, I shall throw you over my shoulder and dunk you in the sea.’

‘You wouldn’t dare.’

‘No, I wouldn’t, not when I’m now officially a year older; my back would probably give out.’

‘Thinking of your birthday, I have an idea. In the morning, while I make you a birthday cake, why don’t you move some of your things in from next door. How does that sound?’

‘It sounds good. Especially the bit about a birthday cake. I can’t remember the last time I had one made for me.’

‘Then I shall bake you a cake to remember!’ she said with another happy laugh. ‘And guess what we should do now.’

‘Go on.’

‘We should go for a swim.’

‘A swim, you say. In yonder actual sea just some few yards from our feet and which is no doubt colder than the Champagne we’ve just drunk?’

‘Yes,’ she said with what sounded like a sparkle of challenging mischief in her voice. ‘Just like that time when a bunch of us booked a long weekend in a holiday camp on the Norfolk coast at the end of the autumn term and we all decided that what we needed was a refreshing swim to wake us up.’

‘God yes, it was bloody freezing. We must have been mad.’

‘And do you remember how Andrea and Suzie kept complaining about the smell in their chalet?’

‘I do. We were really mean to them because the rest of us pretended we couldn’t smell anything.’

‘Whereas the truth was it smelt like there was a rotting body hidden under the floorboards!’

They both laughed.

Then: ‘That was the weekend I planned to ask you out,’ said Ellis, ‘but Stewart beat me to it.’

‘And so you hooked up with Mandy instead,’ said Naomi.

Ellis frowned. ‘Was it Mandy?’

‘It was. I remember thinking what an attractive couple you made.’

‘Well, I think you and I make a much more attractive couple all these years on.’

Naomi smiled. ‘So how about that swim?’

‘I’m game if you are,’ he said.

Within no time they had stripped off and, clasping each other’s hands, they ran pell-mell into the sea. When they were fully submerged and gasping for breath at the coldness of the water, they swam to keep themselves warm. After some minutes of swimming in the still quiet, save for the lapping of waves on the shoreline, they swam towards each other. Linking her hands around Ellis’s neck, Naomi kissed him. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘What for?’

‘For being mad enough to do this with me.’

‘Happy to oblige the future Mrs Ashton. If that’s how the lady would like to be addressed.’

She laughed and threw back her head with an expression of joyful abandon, the moonlight casting a silvery radiance over her face so that for a split second she resembled a glistening marble statue. ‘It sounds perfectly wonderful!’ she said.