It irritated him, the way she was always harping on about Beth – how vulnerable she was, how impressionable. Just leave the child alone, he wanted to say to her. And now he had Helen Bracken on the phone stirring up his anxiety. Sometimes, when he dropped the girls to school, the feeling crept over him of other parents casting their gaze in his direction, judging him. He almost imagined their thought patterns: ‘Oh, so that’s the father …’ Paranoia, that’s all it was.

In the quiet of the hallway, he thought about Abi’s assertion. Tentatively, he remarked: ‘You have a lot of influence over Beth, I’ve noticed.’

‘You think?’ she asked, raising her eyebrow. She couldn’t seem to help her flirtatiousness.

‘What’s your secret?’

She laughed and sang in her soft, husky voice:

‘Let’s play “Master and Servant”.’

He smiled with surprise.

‘You like Depeche Mode?’

‘I like Nouvelle Vague. They cover it.’

‘Have you heard the original?’

‘No.’

His smile broadened. ‘Come with me,’ he instructed.

She followed him into the studio and perched on the arm of a chair while he fiddled with his iPod until he found the track. When the opening lyrics sounded in their falsetto pitch, Corinne laughed, moving her head in time to the beat as the synthesizer kicked in.

‘I like it,’ she told him.

‘Yeah?’

Both of them were raising their voices to be heard above the music blasting through the speakers.

It surprised him, the rush he felt – youthful nostalgia, an old euphoria – as the sounds filled the room. But after a moment, he began to feel embarrassed, and so he turned down the volume and watched as she walked around the room.

‘These are so good,’ she remarked, pausing in front of the design models he’d displayed along a shelf. ‘They were for your job?’

‘Some of them, yes.’

‘You must miss it,’ she said, and he was surprised by her perception.

‘I do,’ he admitted. ‘I’m looking forward to getting back into it.’

Since the night out with Andrew, the idea had grown larger in his brain, taking up more and more of his thoughts, his imagination. He’d read through the script twice now, and, excited by the images that sparked to life, he’d taken to sketching out a few ideas on paper, firing off some observations in an email to Andrew.

‘It must be lonely for you,’ she remarked, ‘here, on your own in this house, this room, every day with no one to talk to.’

‘I manage,’ he said, trying to laugh it off, but in truth he felt moved by her assertion. How strange it was that she should see this in him, that she should be aware of this hole inside him while his own wife and daughters seemed blind to it.

‘I get lonely sometimes,’ she told him now.

‘You do?’