‘I contributed to her death and nothing can change that.’

‘Oh, Fleur! You can’t keep five-year-olds under lock and key. You did not take Saffie’s life. Someone else did that and he could have done it at any time…anywhere. How on earth were you to know there was any danger in that peaceful backwater? It was not Peter’s or Laura’s or your fault…’

Of course, in the end it did not matter what anyone said because you knew the truth of a thing in your heart. But you had to go on living and breathing and getting leadenly through the days if you had other children, and Fleur knew she could not have done that without Fergus.

She had not heard Jack coming back looking anxious with his mobile in his hand. He entered the room and Fleur jumped and turned her face, naked with sorrow, and Jack, seeing it, suddenly thought: What on earth does losing a yacht mean against Fleur and Nikki’s horror?

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you jump,’ he said.

Fleur tried to smile. ‘I didn’t hear you, Jack. Is something wrong? Where’s Nikki?’

‘She stayed on the beach. I’ve just got a call on my mobile. Someone has holed one of our boats…’

‘I’m so sorry, Jack—’

‘Fleur,’ he interrupted. ‘It’s nothing…a yacht can be mended…You look…all in. Can I get you something?’

‘No, I think I’m going to go and lie down for a bit. It’s coming up for midday, Nikki should not be out in this heat.’

‘I’ll go back and haul her in, I promise.’

‘Good.’ Fleur smiled vaguely at him and went into her room, thinking as she lay thankfully down on her bed, Poor Jack. Catapulted into a tragedy not his own. How the past goes on and on changing the shape of our lives. She wondered how Nikki had been when she met Jack? Had the loss of Saffie affected their relationship, or had Nikki managed this time, in a new life, in another country, to leave the shadow of her twin behind her?

Fleur thought of all the disparate men Nikki had brought home from university, as if to illustrate clearly to her mother what her life was turning out to be. Look…all I can manage is to form relationships with no-hopers, men with towering personality disorders. Many had been laughably dreadful.

Fergus, ever patient, had given her a year and then he had driven down to Bristol without telling Fleur. He had had enough of Nikki punishing her mother for a perceived wrong she would not let go of. He had caught her with an entirely reasonable set of friends in her rented house. Friends who had no trouble meeting his eye and were perfectly articulate. The life she wanted them to believe she was leading bore no resemblance to the actual one she was living in Bristol.

When her friends had gone out of the room, he had, he told Fleur, laid into her for the first time in her life. He had told her to grow up. He’d told her that tragedy happened to other people too, or hadn’t she noticed? She had no right to decide Fleur must be punished for the rest of her life, or him, for that matter. She had no right to judge a past that was not hers and that she knew little about. She could either make something sensible of her life or screw it up. He told her he was not going to stand by watching her intent on wrecking their lives as well as her own, and she could keep her so-called friends, wherever she found them, to herself from now on…