Christopher had not kissed like this that one time she had allowed him up here. He had not been a fast learner like Claud. Laura kissed Claud back. ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘Very nice.’

‘Not boring?’ He leaned over her smiling.

‘Not at all.’

‘So who did you bring here? Who lay with you in this bed?’ He watched her, trying to read the thoughts behind her eyes, very black in the pre-dawn light.

‘Nobody.’ She remembered Christopher on that wet and stormy afternoon in their teens when she had let him come here to her secret place and they had, for the first time, experimented with sex. She had not let him come again; his presence had disrupted her privacy. He had denigrated the loft. Instead, they had rolled about in his bed when his parents were out and he had declared himself ‘in love’. Great fun was had for a time by both, she remembered, until—until what? For the life of her she could not remember what snide remark, spoken by whom, had caused her brain to click and realise that quite a lot of people believed that she and Christopher were brother and sister and that subtly, by not denying, Emily encouraged the idea.

Looking at Laura, seeing her frown, Claud tried to guess what went on behind those eyes. Laura was not thinking of him. He felt anxious, excluded.

Then her mother’s complex relationship with Christopher’s father had entered a new dimension. She knew then, she thought, why Ned paid her school bills. It was not goodness of heart, but a guilty response to blackmail. Why else should he have forked out for an expensive education at Cheltenham Ladies College, and a whole lot more? As she had often done since, Laura found herself admiring her mother’s effrontery, her unorthodox method of raising funds for her daughter’s education. But at the time, recoiling priggishly from what she thought she saw, she had choked Christopher off, brutally telling him that any warmth she felt for him would freeze to hate if bound by marriage.

Remembering the scene Laura smiled and Claud, watching, wondered.

Christopher, in the heat of first love, imagined in his innocence that love entailed marriage. He had been hurt, angry, refused to accept, become boring, and she had grown mocking, distant and in her turn cross. For not having been in love with him, she felt guilty.

Then in a rage she confronted her mother, and Emily laughed. Thirty years on Laura could hear that laugh. Emily had laughed from relief.

‘What a bitch,’ Laura muttered. Claud strained to hear, but could not.

Suspicious now, she had become aware of a groundswell of gossip. Whispers, suggestive wagers as to her provenance, and it was not Ned Peel who was hinted at, but Nicholas.

Laura closed her eyes and drew a long breath, as Claud watched.