Charles has moved on from Gabriel Denham, and is now gazing into the little pond with Marcia Campbell at water boatmen, Canadian pondweed, a black-spotted water-lily leaf, and a small pale fish. He too is speaking about Liz. He is telling Marcia about the first time he met her, thirty-odd years ago, when she was the newly separated wife of Edgar Lintot. Dr Liz Lintot, house physician at St Michael’s Hospital. He had met her at a noisy party in Greenwich, given by a bunch of young barristers and a journalist from the Telegraph. He had spent the evening telling Liz about the death of his wife, about his three little motherless boys. She had listened greedily, had nodded and prompted, had been fascinated by his tale of sorrow. ‘She was a bloody good listener in those days,’ says Charles, with a heavy sentimental sigh. ‘With me, it was love at first sight.’

‘Why don’t you two get together again?’ asks match-making Marcia, with mock-innocence.

‘I’ve thought of it,’ says Charles. ‘I’ve thought of it. But you can’t wind back the clock, can you? You can’t make water flow uphill. No, I’m afraid we buggered that one up. Shame, really.’

‘Yes,’ echoes Marcia, ‘it’s a shame.’

Up on the best spare bed, Hattie is telling Aaron that she feels odd. Low back ache, might even be labour pains. How’s the traffic, she wants to know. She doesn’t fancy giving birth in the Fiat. On the other hand, what if her waters break all over Liz’s smart white drawn threadwork fake-Victorian cotton counterpane? In the bathroom, the vampire is perfuming herself with Liz’s Eau de l’Herbe Bleue. In the kitchen, Deirdre Kavanagh is gazing in dismay at the pieces of a gold coffee pot that she and Jonathan have in their passion dislodged: its fragments lie on the floor amongst the crushed Venetian glass roses.