‘What do you think?’ she said to me.

I shrugged. ‘Yeah, it’s cool.’ I stared pointedly at Adam. ‘Do you bring lots of people up here, then?’ Secret shags with his secretary on plastic sheet-covered sofas, the smell of sex overpowered by pinewood flooring and his repellent aftershave.

‘Not really.’ He half winked at Lottie. ‘You two are special.’ She blew him a kiss. I felt like hurling. ‘Anyway.’ He looked at me, his smile not quite making it to his eyes. ‘Shall we go have a drink?’

Adam and Bev’s own house, which I’d managed to avoid so far, was a converted barn in the village proper. It had a lofty main room, beams and several slightly amateur, swirly paintings on the walls that made me think of being on a fairground ride when I was little. They owned a completely bizarre lizard with a saggy neck and a gleefully demonic expression that was sitting frozen in a glass tank in the hallway. I’d thought it was a Damien Hirst rip-off until the tissue paper eyelid had come down.

Bev had made a massive casserole packed with herbs from their garden, loads of plant in with the meat.

‘Have you ever cooked with ribwort?’ I asked her, while Adam’s artsy jazz-wank darted round in the background.

‘Ribwort?’ She looked into the middle distance. ‘I’m not sure you can eat that. Just a weed, isn’t it?’ She looked at Adam. He pursed his lips and shrugged.

I sawed through the flesh of a sausage, pronged it on my fork and eyed it. Deer intestine. Hare guts. Fish heads. I stuffed in a gobful.

The evening degenerated into gossip and drinking port on the sofas. An old-school chill-out track came on and Lottie and Bev made big cooing sighs, reminiscing about some dawn rave in a field a thousand years ago. I pictured Lottie with limp daisies in her hair, twirling her blotchy, tie-dyed skirts, sparklers going in her eyes. God, I so wanted some weed.

Bev pulled Lottie up and they flung arms round each other and swayed. Adam was looking at me from the opposite sofa, his ankles crossed, that maddening semi-arranged expression on his face. I imagined digging my thumbs into his eyes.

‘You two as well, then,’ said Lottie dreamily, burying her face in Bev’s circus-coloured cardigan.

His eyes changed then, focusing sharply, though his voice stayed deadpan. ‘I don’t expect Polly’d be too keen.’

I was still sulking over losing a heated argument to him about the threat of fascism in middle England, where I’d ended up shouting and wanting to catapault lumps of vanilla pod ice cream into his smug fucking face.

I stood up. ‘Yeah, come on then.’

A vein swelled in his temple like a river after rain and his smile looked the most unhappy I’d ever seen it. Brilliant.

The music swirled, jellified beats and washes of sound, the sort you just melt into in your own little universe of one and is completely impossible to dance to. Still, it was totally worth it for Adam’s extreme discomfort. He had one hand lightly on my waist, the other holding mine, as if we were waltzing and not moving to the musical equivalent of a lava lamp.