Although they hadn’t had one for so long Pauline had always liked planning the garden party, she liked arranging it all: the invitations, the food, the wine, the garden. They’d stopped them for some time, not for financial reasons, although like everybody else they’d felt the recession, but because in the summer Pauline and her two younger children had started going to France for long periods so that the children’s French could really improve. Sometimes even Portia came in her designer leisurewear, taking brief time off from her public relations job (actually it’s called corporate communications now, my work, she would say to her mother’s friends), but she and her mother snapped at each other, old battles unresolved.

‘Please, please, please, please,’ Viola had begged them months ago, ‘won’t you have a garden party again when our last term starts in the first week in September; you haven’t had one for years and years. Don’t you want to see all your old friends again? And it’s so important for all my classmates to meet people in the profession, we’ll be on our last lap at the school. We all know nepotism rules, it’s all right for me, I’ve got you two and know lots of people but some of them know nobody and it would be so important for them, there’s only ten in my class now, please please please!’

‘I hope you don’t expect me to be there if you have it,’ Benedict had said gruffly when they first talked about it, sprawling at the kitchen table with his maths homework, long legs reaching almost to the door.

‘I would expect you to be there young man,’ said Anthony, ‘a seventeen-year-old should have some social graces.’

‘He’s got social graces,’ protested Pauline, ‘he just finds actors boring because they’re not computers, in fact knowing actors all his life probably sent him screaming into computers.’

Finally it had been agreed; Viola had whooped with delight and kissed her father, and Benedict had finally been persuaded that it could hardly proceed if he wasn’t there pouring wine, as he had done with great enjoyment every year when he was a little boy.

Now Pauline read out the order to their wine merchants on the telephone, confirmed it should be delivered tomorrow, Friday.

‘Didn’t you know Terence Blue?’ said the vintner, who used to take great personal interest in the Bonhams’ garden parties, often contriving to be there on the day with the excuse of an extra order, extra glasses, something.

‘He was in my class at drama school, years and years ago.’

‘And often at your garden parties. So pleased you’re having one again.’

‘That’s right, yes.’ She realised with a start that Terence would have received an invitation to this one. But he wouldn’t come, surely.