Paula sat down beside him, trying to put herself in her mum’s shoes, doing her best to imagine how she must be feeling by now, out in her self-imposed Madeiran exile. If this had been Paula and Matt, how would she have liked things to be resolved? With a big, romantic face-saving gesture at the very least, she realized. ‘I think you’re going to have to go out there, you know, Dad,’ she said after a moment. ‘Try and put this right together, face-to-face. Mum’s upset, she’s angry – and you know what she’s like, she’s proud, too. Perhaps too proud to come home without knowing what she’s flying back to.’ She patted his arm, feeling sorry for him. ‘Shall I fetch the laptop so that we can have a look at flights out? See when you might be able to go?’

He nodded, looking resigned. ‘I suppose so,’ he agreed. ‘If it means she’ll come home, then yes. Let’s give it a whirl. In the meantime . . .’ He scratched his head and pulled a rueful face. ‘I reckon John and Robyn have had their fill of me by now. Don’t suppose you could put your old man up for a few nights, could you?’

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen

It was two o’clock on Monday afternoon, the lunchtime rush was over and Bunny had nipped out to get some fresh air, in the hope that it would clear her head. Since the disaster that had been her Gloucestershire SlimmerYou talk, she had felt as if her composure was crumbling on a daily basis. Vivid memories of the man shouting at her would surface without warning when she was trying to serve a customer, leaving her distracted and forgetful, muddling up people’s orders or accidentally overcharging them. ‘Everything all right?’ her boss Jasmine had asked, overhearing one customer complaining that she’d been given the wrong food, and then another that she’d been given the wrong change. Bunny had blushed scarlet and apologized in a fluster, but knew she’d have to pull her socks up if she wanted to avoid her manager’s bad books.

Outside now, she marched past a tempting-looking bakery, deliberately not looking at the flaky sausage rolls in the window, or the traybakes and cream cakes. Since losing all the weight, she had developed a strategy towards food like that: she visualized a massive block of lard, and then imagined the sausage roll or cake or brownie tasting of the lard. It worked well enough to keep her walking on, most of the time, and today she headed resolutely instead towards Museum Gardens, clutching the takeaway salad that staff were allowed to have free for their lunch.