Though Isobel and Giles were too conscientious a host and hostess to allow private tensions to make them anything other than attentive to their guests, they were both as taut as fiddle strings themselves. Isobel looked exhausted. Rory had followed her miserably round all afternoon, clutching his beloved rabbit and sucking its one remaining ear till it finally came off in his mouth and Isobel had to administer instant surgery and sew the sad and soggy appendage back on to Rabbit’s threadbare pate. She and Giles had both read him a bedtime story, but whereas he usually fell asleep within minutes of his head touching the pillow, this evening she’d finally had to give him a dose of Calpol and then sit with him while he whimpered himself to sleep. To make matters worse she’d been driven to shouting at Edward, who had asked her with the regularity of a clock chiming the quarters why Rory had to go away.

‘I’m not going to tell you again, Ed,’ she’d snapped, more sharply than she intended, anguished for Edward’s own puzzled misery at Rory’s impending departure. She knew it was from his own rather than Rory’s point of view that he was so upset, because Edward had problems identifying with other people’s emotions. He found all changes very hard to cope with, and because he also found his anxieties impossible to articulate, he usually drove everyone demented when he was upset. ‘I’ve explained to you a hundred times already. We none of us want him to go, but he has to go back to his mum and that’s that – now SHUT UP!’ Edward, who had never outgrown the need to suck something himself in times of stress, had stuck his curiously long, misshapen thumb into his mouth and withdrawn into his own world. He sat in front of the television fast-forwarding and replaying a video of Buffy the Vampire Slayer without really looking at it, as distant and uncommunicative as if no one else existed.

Amy had come to the rescue. She put her arm round Isobel’s shoulders and gave her a hug. She couldn’t bear to see her bubbly, laughing mother in such a state of distress.

‘Poor old Mum, don’t let it get you down. The Fortescues have asked me to supper this evening because Emily’s home this weekend and one of the boys is going to collect me. Why don’t I suggest they come early and we all go to a film and take Ed too? It’d take his mind off Rory and get him out of your hair for a bit. You know how he loves going to them.’ Emily’s family were particular friends of all the Grants’ and lived a few miles away, the other side of Blairalder.