‘Does she need a house that big?’ he asks.

He doesn’t ask if she can afford it. Everyone knows that the prices of properties in Salcombe are off the wall, but it’s none of his business.

‘Of course not. But Judith thinks that all of us visiting will be an added attraction. I know that Cara’s got to make a life for herself but it’s still going to be a shock. I’m trying to think how I can warn her – how to break it to her gently rather than Judith just coming out with it – but I can’t quite see how it’s to be done. And I don’t want her agreeing to it simply because she thinks it will help us out.’

They stand in silence together.

‘If there’s anything I can do,’ Jack says at last, but Max shakes his head.

‘Thanks, old man,’ he says, ‘but this is my problem and I’m going to have to try and sort it.’

Jack claps him on the back, tries to think of something encouraging and helpful and gives up.

‘Let’s have another,’ he says.

Amy is listening to her music – Joss Stone, ‘Pillow Talk’ – and checking her phone. She’s been FaceTiming with Charley, who’s over the moon with joy because it seems that Simon might be coming home for Christmas.

There’s still nothing from Cosmo. His phone has been switched off for the last twenty-four hours and she veers between a mixture of anger and hurt, and anxiety that something might have happened to him.

She wishes for the thousandth time that she hadn’t told him that she was in love with him, that they hadn’t made love. It all seems cheap now. What was special, magical, now is revealed as a chimera; something that didn’t really exist. She feels ashamed, fooled, and she can’t believe that she’s been so stupid. Yet she can’t quite deny the happy times they shared: driving in the car, walking Reggie, suppers in country pubs. She was so sure that he was in love with her. Yet he can simply walk away like this, without a word.

It was easy to tell from Al’s face, when she spoke to him in the pub at Dad’s party, that he hadn’t known what excuse Cosmo had given for going away so suddenly. Al was covering for him. Earlier in the week she turned up at the barn conversion to ask where Cosmo was and why his phone was switched off, but whether Al was there or not, she got no answer to her knock.