‘I seem to remember your saying to me repeatedly, “If she wants to diet, let her!” And with some force,’ Laura retorted.

‘By then it was too late. The reason I didn’t interfere at the start was that it could have caused trouble between you and me. Your habit of indulging Bessie’s every whim isn’t how I dealt with Janis and Jeremy.’

‘I see.’

Trouble there nonetheless was, nor had they left it at home, Marianne registered. Had she doubted it, Jake’s tight-lipped expression while he signed the book, and Laura’s hurt silence, would have told her so.

Gliding upward in the sleek lift that epitomized the hotel’s glossy decor, Marianne recalled the afternoon when first Shirley and then Jake had visited her.

Laura’s marriage had since appeared no more prone to ups and downs than any woman might expect. It was plain that she and Jake were still in love – but what did Marianne know of the separate and private feelings of either? Or, indeed, of what went on within their own four walls in their everyday life with their children?

Marianne would not have thought Laura capable of bending her life to accommodate her marriage as she had. A reliable daily housekeeper had replaced the long line of au pairs, and she was continuing to refuse work that would take her out of the country.

She’s now more of a family woman than I ever was or could have been, Marianne reflected. On the surface, that is. The inner Laura, that independent spirit, had to be still there. And there must be times when that person strains at the leash that’s the price of her marrying Jake – whom Shirley had thought was secretly bedding the current au pair.

Anything more out of character would be hard to conceive, and the mystery of Laura’s suddenly firing Ingrid was eventually solved for Marianne by Janis, in a conversation on the theme of justice.

Janis had cited Ingrid’s fate as an example of injustice. ‘My dad caught her bringing her boyfriend into the house when she thought we were all asleep. Letting him in, actually. But if Dad weren’t such a killjoy, she could’ve done it openly, like her friend was allowed to. Dad’s making Laura fire her wasn’t fair.’

Since Jake wasn’t what Janis called a ‘killjoy’ towards the world at large, his reason was clear. He would not have that example set to his daughter in his own home, thought Marianne, eyeing him as they stepped out of the lift. And it was fortunate for Janis that she herself apparently qualified for the description ‘an old-fashioned girl’.

The porter led them along a thickly carpeted corridor to the two lavish and interconnecting suites reserved for them by Karin’s parents.