Instead they lay across the sofa and the floor, occasionally basting the turkey, wrapping more little things for Mrs Kitson, as though she was their child and Christmas was for her. As though they weren’t missing Emmy Lou.

The central heating was turned up full, they ate chocolates and drank champagne, laughed at Franny’s ludicrous adventures making Triumph Telephone adverts: on the first day a telephone had suddenly burst into flames. They gossiped about the affair that the fiftyseven-year-old leading man in Harry’s Thomas Hardy serial – who had a second wife and two young children – was having with the young heroine just out of drama school. As though they weren’t missing Emmy Lou.

They discussed Terence’s trial and Pauline’s sudden elevation to celebrity.

‘I’m glad,’ said Frances firmly, ‘she was such a good actress and she didn’t work enough. And what about Nicky Abbott, Harry? Fancy she and Terence having been married all those years ago. Isn’t it odd to know that after all these years?’

‘I always knew,’ said Harry.

‘Did you?’ said Frances staring at him in surprise.

‘Franny I think there’s something about you that precludes filming being done in a straightforward way, I’m never around when phones blow up or directors vomit and you’re the only person I’ve ever heard of going on a chatshow with a Croatian nun who turns out to be someone you sat next to at primary school.’

‘What, Beryl Makepeace? Yeah, wasn’t that a hoot, they used to live near us, Mum swears her mother used to drink! Beryl only went to Yugoslavia when she was nine, course she wasn’t a Croatian at all really, her father ran a bar in Dubrovnik or somewhere, handy for Mrs Makepeace.’ But she added curiously, ‘you never told me about Nicky and Terence.’

‘No,’ said Harry. And she saw something there in his face, some closed-up look, unlike him. I will ask him about it another time, she thought.

Mrs Kitson arrived in a taxi at 1 pm as arranged. She tottered fraily in the snow as Frances ran down the stairs to meet her, to pay the taxi; the taxi-driver held the old lady’s arm or she would have fallen.

‘Merry Christmas Mum,’ called Frances, tottering herself down the snow-covered path in her high-heeled shoes.

‘The vicar came,’ said Mrs Kitson, ‘I wished him Merry Christmas but I told him I wasn’t leaving him my money.’

Slowly they progressed to the first-floor flat.

‘Hello Mabel,’ said Harry loudly, kissing her at the doorway.

‘Hello Harry dear, I’ve brought you something nice. Ooooh isn’t it cold, I didn’t want to get out of bed,’ taking off her coat, putting on a cardigan.

‘You did so Mum, it’s Christmas.’