They had only stayed in Honolulu one night, Waikiki beach awash with golfers and Japanese honeymooners. They had taken a tiny plane to the smaller island of Maui, to a small remote hotel on a small remote beach. Nevertheless at the end of the unpaved road, through the palm trees, past the brightly coloured hibiscus flowers and the frangipani blossoms blooming in clusters, there was a bar with sophisticated American video machines. So Benedict wasn’t completely deprived of the things close to his heart.

She had also brought her mother. Whose face had crumpled when Pauline had said that Christmas would not be celebrated in Chiswick this year; whose old eyes had widened in amazement and something else, perhaps approval, when Pauline said she was leaving Anthony. And then her whole face had sparkled in frail delight when Pauline had finally said, ‘You come to Hawaii too Mum.’

Now Mrs O’Brien had found a cool place on the verandah of the hotel where frangipani-laden air drifted about her brandy glass and friendly Hawaiians, passing slowly by, stopped to listen to her stories of tap dancing in England long ago.

‘Merry Christmas Pauly, I’m having such a lovely time,’ she had said so simply this morning that Pauline had bent and kissed the old lady and saw, suddenly, the young laughing tap dancer from Colchester shining there somewhere out of the old wrinkled face. And Pauline had thought in surprise, she never complained about how things turned out. It wasn’t just my father who was brave.

Somewhere, as usual, someone was strumming a guitar and people were singing, soft voices in an unknown language; it sounded beautiful and Pauline smiled to herself as she thought she caught the strains of ‘Silent Night’ in the sun-drenched morning. They said this was the rainy season, but there was no rain, only sunshine. She could feel the sun on her shoulders, and hear the waves breaking gently, soothingly, on the shore just a few yards away. Frangipani bushes laden with flowers grew everywhere, even right outside the windows of their rooms, the heavy voluptuous fragrance wafted into their dreams. Her dreams were odd, languorous, unreal. And when she woke in the scented night, as she often did, as her body adjusted to its journeying, she thought, almost in disbelief, about how it had all happened.

She thought about it again, lying in the sunshine.

All she had done was beat Anthony at his own game.