‘Yeah, right! I’ve been asking you for like two years and you just keep telling me how your parents wouldn’t let you drive their car, and how you had to wait until you were in your twenties and able to afford your own—’

‘All right, all right,’ he said, uncomfortable at having his own words repeated back to him in front of Ross.

‘Mark’s terrified she’ll scratch the car,’ Abi offered.

‘No, I’m not—’

‘Honestly. You’ve no idea. If he had his way, we’d all have to walk up one side of the stairs and down the other so the carpet would thin evenly. And we’d never have taken the shrink-wrap off the furniture.’

Ross roared with laughter. Mark glared at his wife, who ignored him.

‘So what do you think, Ross?’ Abi asked. ‘Reckon you’d be able to teach this young lady to drive?’

Ross nodded, glancing up at Eva again, a little shyly, Mark thought.

‘Why not? I’m game if you are,’ he said.

It was a straightforward arrangement. But Mark saw the lift in Eva’s brow, caught the quick movement of humour in her eyes. Something was unexpressed between them, and Mark felt the weight of it. He didn’t like to think about what it meant.

8

There was a Benjamin Franklin quote that Eva’s aunt Melissa used to trot out whenever she came to stay: ‘Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.’ Every year, she would arrive on Christmas Eve, sleeping on the fold-out bed in Abi’s home office until the morning of St Stephen’s Day, even though her own home – a mid-terraced two-up-two-down – was less than four miles away. Eva’s parents would always press her to stay longer, and that’s when she’d make the remark about the fish.

Eva thought there was truth to the phrase. Even someone as peaceable and familiar as Melissa became an irksome presence after a while. The same, she found, was true of the French girl. After the first couple of days Corinne began getting on Eva’s nerves. She was pass-remarkable which had been kind of amusing at first, but now seemed just plain rude. Her laugh was irritating – a sudden high-pitched honking that could be heard all over the house. Also she had zero respect for people’s personal space. Eva avoided engaging her in any kind of conversation, made uncomfortable by the way Corinne leaned towards her when she spoke, so close that you could feel the heat of her breath. And twice now, Eva had walked into her own bedroom and found Corinne there, fingering an object on her desk or just gazing dreamily out the window. She had cornered Beth about it.

‘Keep that fucking freak out of my room, okay?’

‘She’s not a freak,’ Beth had said, rising to the defensive.