‘Five eights?’ Bell said, knotting the girls’ scarves.

‘Forty-eight.’

She hitched an eyebrow fractionally as she pulled their hats down over their ears.

‘Forty! Five eights are forty,’ he corrected himself quickly, the panic evident in his voice.

‘Good boy. Don’t worry. It was just a slip. Remember to breathe.’

He shot her an annoyed look. Nine-year-old boys didn’t appreciate mindful reminders such as remembering to breathe.

‘Okay. Have we got everything?’ She assessed them swiftly. Everyone was clean and bundled up. ‘Right, quick march. We’ll have to walk fast if we’re not going to be late.’

‘Did you oversleep again Bell?’ Elise asked.

Bell shot her a bemused grin. ‘Cheeky . . . And yes, I did.’

‘I can take my board and go on ahead,’ Linus said immediately, as though helpfully.

Now it was Bell’s turn to shoot him a look. He knew perfectly well his mother’s views on that, with all the hills in their neighbourhood.

‘Fine,’ he muttered, walking to the back door and holding it open as the twins followed after him – a reluctant young gentleman, but a gentleman nonetheless.

‘Twelve eights,’ Bell said, locking the door as the girls ran down the steps to see whether the birds had eaten any of the seeds they had left out on the bistro table overnight. The frosts were still hard at the moment, and all four of them had been broken-hearted to find a dead sparrow on the ground the other morning.

Inside the house, the phone started ringing just as Bell pulled the key from the lock. She sighed and hesitated, staring back in at the superficially tidy kitchen – the dirty dishes hidden from view here, the crumbs too small to see on the counters. But the signs of a sprawling, unwieldy life lay scattered everywhere: a basket of laundry had been brought up from the utility room, ready for ironing; a raincoat from last night’s showers was slung across the back of a hemp linen armchair, rather than hanging from its designated hook, no doubt leaving a water mark. The weekend’s newspapers had been carried through from the living room, almost but not quite making it to the recycling bin. The water in the glass vase of lilies had been used up, she saw, and needed immediate refreshing . . .

She dithered as she listened to the phone ring on the other side of the glass. They would be late if she answered it, but there was something always so urgent, so insistent about a ringing phone. The ringtone for her mobile was set to ‘Lark’, far less . . . pressing. What if it was Hanna or Max? Had they forgotten something? Hanna had been in her version of a rush, with that emergency . . .

‘. . . Ninety-four.’

Huh? She glanced back towards the outdoor table. The girls were kneeling on the cafe chairs, freeing the sunflower seeds from their stuck-down positions with little fingertips. She made a mental note to remind them to wash their hands if they handled the chicks that had recently hatched at their nursery; now that the babies were a couple of weeks old, the children were allowed to pet them.