He came across her when she wasn’t expecting him. She was on her knees washing the kitchen floor, wearing her shorts and an ancient tee-shirt she’d borrowed from Jem, with the legend ‘I climbed Snowdon’ across the chest. Her feet were bare, with filthy soles, and she had tied a scarf that she’d found in a basket in the hall, peasant-style, round her head. Her face shone with sweat, and perspiration trickled down her breasts. Upstairs, someone was using the shower. Through the double doors, she could see that Neil and Mickey were trying to stuff the badly folded tent into its impossibly small bag while Luke was rolling up the sleeping bags, and that Katherine was sitting on the grass with Lorrie and eating last night’s bread for breakfast, dipping it into a bowl of hot chocolate to soften it.

‘A sight for sore eyes,’ boomed a voice behind her and she started, slopping sudsy water over the floor.

At first glance, she thought that he hadn’t changed at all, but then she saw that his boyish face was more florid and slacker, with red veins on his nose, new wrinkles around his eyes and lines across his forehead; that his hair was grey in new places and his belly was straining against the belt of his trousers – she could see a pale triangle of flesh beneath his shirt’s last button. Behind him stood Toni. She had a look that Irene thought of as uniquely American, with boyish hips and full breasts, like two different bodies joined together to create some kind of impossible ideal. Sasha had a book like that, its pages all dissected in three, so you could turn the sections and create strange concoctions: pirates in dresses, fat men with skinny legs, a clown with the queen’s head …

Toni’s dark hair was pulled back in an immaculately mussed bun, and she wore a biscuit-coloured linen shift that showed off the tan on her legs, long painted nails, gold studs, high-heeled sandals, and a glossy, anxious smile. Behind her, hovering in the door, were two little girls with high pigtails.

‘Hello, Dad,’ Irene said, standing up hurriedly, scrubbing brush still in hand. ‘I – er – I wasn’t expecting you just yet.’

‘We all woke early with jet lag,’ said her father. ‘The kids have been up since four. And I couldn’t wait any longer to see the groom – and my first lady, of course.’

He opened his arms wide. She stepped into them, letting the brush dangle by her side dribbling its dirty, soapy water down her calf, and was squashed in a bear hug. If she closed her eyes, she could have imagined herself back thirty-odd years, with that unforgettable smell of his: wine, whisky, spearmint, cigars, shaving cream. His daughters – her half-sisters, when she came to think of it – stared at her as he let her go.