Everyone left late, one by one or in pairs. Irene watched them leaning over Adrian where he lay back on the sagging sofa and patting his shoulder, hugging him, kissing him and telling him it had been a treat, he’d been fabulous, brilliant. It was the start of great things, they said, not really believing it because he’d only appeared twice and the second time was as a dead body in the corner of the tv screen, his legs shockingly white and hairy. Irene saw the way he’d smiled up at them a bit drunkenly, not really believing it either but loose with alcohol and hope, watching the way Sarah’s shirt was stretched tight over her pregnant stomach so that he could make out the shape of her belly button; breathing in Greg’s nicotine-and-aftershave smell and the astringent subtlety of Mona’s perfume.

Everyone else looked sloppy and relaxed, blurred in the firelight, worn round the edges with drink and weariness, but Irene felt vigilant and alert, made up of hard edges and precise angles. As if it were happening to her, she knew the way Adrian was feeling now. A faint, insistent headache pulsed above his left eye. Tomorrow, he would be dry-mouthed and nauseous and sour with anticlimax. He would snap at the children, cut himself shaving, stare more anxiously than ever at his hung-over face in the mirror. Now he smiled some more, feeling the skin stretch around his mouth, poured himself another glass of wine and swallowed it down in rapid gulps, ignoring Irene’s anxious glance, shook Gary’s hand, kissed the corner of Lisa’s mouth, told everyone they didn’t have to go just yet. They should stay a bit longer. He didn’t want the evening to end and it to be tomorrow, the chilly pewter light of morning.

Then a child cried in the distance, a sobbing call for ‘Mummy! Mu-ummeee!’ Irene at once stood up, turning her back on the sprawled remainder of guests, and made her way upstairs, along the balding carpet of the corridor, into the bathroom where Clem knelt on the cold tiles, leaning over the toilet bowl and whimpering in the half-darkness. Irene crouched down and put her cool hand on her daughter’s clammy forehead, murmuring soothingly. ‘Poppet,’ she said. ‘Little love.’ She heard doors open and close, voices calling goodbye. ‘It’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Everything will be all right.’ She knew she was talking to herself as well as to her daughter. She didn’t really want to go back downstairs, not just yet.