She was out when they all arrived in two taxis, carrying cases and presents and bottles of champagne and duty-free extra-dry gin, spilling out into the heat of the late afternoon with cries of greeting, exuberant hugs. She’d planned it that way, leaving the house on Juliet’s bike half an hour after their plane touched down at Montpellier airport, calling over her shoulder to Jem that she’d be back soon, an hour or two at the most, better to give everybody a bit of space.

She cycled down the hill and took a small, shaded lane that wound its way through vineyards, not pausing until she was out of breath and thirsty. At a tiny village – just a squat grey church with a clock whose hands pointed to twenty past eleven, and a few run-down houses – she stopped at a bar where several men were standing around a fruit machine, smoking cigarettes, and asked for an Orangina. She drank it sitting on a bench by the small stream where ducks were grouped, making their soft querulous noises, and took her time. Now they’d surely all have arrived, even allowing for the time it takes to collect baggage. Now they’d have arranged where they would sleep, have put up the tent. Now they’d have washed, changed into fresh clothes. They’d be standing in the garden with damp hair and open-necked shirts, and Jem would be pouring cold white wine into glasses and Juliet would be doing her ‘I’m not ill’ act, hands defiantly on hips and thick brows sardonically raised.

‘I’m not a bloody invalid!’ said Juliet, raising a glass in salutation. She had returned home half an hour before they arrived and changed into shorts, brushed her hair out into a crackling nimbus. She surveyed her guests: her cousin Neil, who was about the same age as her and whose four-year-old daughter, Katherine, now clinging shyly to her mother’s skirt, was her godchild; Neil’s wife, Lorrie. Then her friends she had grown up next door to: Mary, Mary’s younger brother, Mickey, and taciturn Luke. These were people who – apart from Lorrie – she had known for almost the whole of her life. They had gone in different directions. Sometimes they’d lost touch; months, even years, could go by without contact. But they were more like family to her than friends. They were who she wanted around when she got married; they were who she wanted when she got ill and was scared in spite of her stalwart bravado. They were her gang.

Jem was busying himself with pouring wine and moving chairs round the table unnecessarily. He was a bit shy, she realized, and she went across to him and put her arm through his, pulled him across to her friends.