‘Don’t give me that! You know very well. How could you, Louisa? How could either of you do that to me? You knew how I would feel. I know Christopher spent the night with you.’

There was a drumming in Louisa’s ears. She heard her own voice speaking as though from very far away, as though she were under water. She felt very tired.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He did. He spent the night here – and do you know why he stayed? He stayed to look after me . . . not to go to bed with me. I might have liked to sleep with Christopher, but there was never any question of it for him. He stayed to hold my hand – if you like to put it like that – because I’d just been told my cancer has returned and I’m dying, that’s why. Christopher slept in the spare room.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Marnie, some three thousand miles away. ‘Oh my God.’ An image of a dead owl came into her head. She was appalled. ‘Oh, Louisa . . . I don’t know what to say . . .’ But for the second time in twenty-four hours the line went dead because someone had hung up on her.

Marnie went to find her stepmother, looking quite distraught. ‘Toni – please help me. I’ve messed up big time. I’ve done something awful and made a terrible, terrible mistake about someone – about two people actually. I have to get back to London as soon as it’s humanly possible. Can you help me get on a flight?’

‘Sure,’ said Toni, breathing a huge sigh of relief that whatever black misery had been bearing down on Marnie, it had at least been acknowledged so that some action could be taken. ‘I’ll get straight on to your dad’s office,’ she said. ‘No worries.’

Later Marnie had poured out the story to her stepmother, and wept tears of real anguish for Louisa and bitterly remorseful ones over her own misplaced mistrust of Christopher.

‘Is he worth it, this superman?’ asked Toni, remembering the last, disastrous man in Marnie’s life.

‘Oh yes – he’s worth it,’ said Marnie, ‘and I’m sure going to have to try to make amends for my awful, habitual jealousy. It may be too late.’

Marnie’s text to Christopher consisted of just two words. Coming home, it read.

Christopher heard the key turn in the lock at two o’clock in the morning. He’d had no idea when to expect her, but he was standing in the hallway when she came through the front door.

‘I’ve come back – if you’ll still have me,’ said Marnie.

Christopher opened his arms and she walked straight into them.

Chapter Thirty-three

Isobel and Giles were the first to arrive at Carafini, the restaurant in Lower Sloane Street that was a favourite haunt of theirs when they stayed at the Sloane Club opposite.