‘Well the background is certainly authentic,’ he said. ‘Horribly so. No one could have researched that better, but I’ve discovered that writing fiction is a very odd process and I don’t really know myself where all the characters come from. I suppose inevitably you draw on your own experience – not necessarily first-hand experience, though, so it’s not as autobiographical as everyone thinks. Some of it’s what you’ve gathered from other people. Then you add some purely imaginary ideas. It’s a bit like watching my mother making soup. She chucks a whole lot of ingredients in the blender plus some stock she’s brewed up out of leftovers, perhaps adds some fresh vegetables, seasons it liberally with this and that, churns the whole thing up – and what comes out is quite different from what went in.’

‘And does she make good soup?’ asked Marnie.

‘She does actually. Perhaps it’s her soup-making gene, transmuted a bit, that I’ve inherited. When we were children and we asked what she was concocting, she’d always say, “Oh, it’s just bits and pieces,” and “bitty soup” was always what we asked for when we came home from school. It was ages before I discovered it wasn’t a proper culinary term.’

‘I can’t imagine having a soup-making mother,’ said Marnie. ‘I guess it’s kind of symbolic. Steaming bowls of soup for comfort and nourishment . . . not my experience!’ Then she laughed. ‘Your book’s quite steamy in places too,’ she said, raising an eyebrow at him.

Christopher grinned. ‘Just authentic research.’

It was a source of enormous pleasure to Christopher that she got on so well with both his parents, challenging his father at Scrabble and playing duets with him in the drawing room after dinner – rather badly, but with a lot of laughter – and gardening and chatting endlessly with his mother. But when his sisters made a great effort to come over to see him (and to inspect the new girlfriend, thought Marnie suspiciously) her prickles immediately sprouted again and everybody got scratched.

It was perhaps unfortunate that they all managed to arrive from different destinations within minutes of each other and the sound of the shrieks of greeting and laughter, the babble of reunion, the wild exchange of hugs had left Marnie standing halfway down the stairs in a state of actual physical paralysis.

From then on the day had been a disaster. She had been chippy and touchy, argued needlessly with bossy Penny, clashed with confident, dashing Kitty and been unnecessarily offhand with Jess, the favourite sister, whose efforts to be specially friendly had shamed her and made her feel infinitely worse about her own gaucherie and lack of grace.