Five hours later, they were full of fish pie and apple crumble, and the twins were drunk. Somehow, even though Andrea was on the sparkling water, they seemed to have got through the two bottles Meredith bought earlier, plus the one that Andrea had brought as a gift. Meredith kept wailing that she mustn’t drink any more as she was going for a run in the morning, then topping up her and Pete’s glasses. Her leaden misery of earlier had changed into an alcoholic sort of mania that, Pete knew, was her way of coping. He wondered if Andrea could tell that Meredith was far from her usual self.

Pete was struggling to take his eyes off his glamorous neighbour. She was wearing some sort of shimmery short dress that emphasised her neat, round bump, full breasts and long bare legs. With her long hair cascading down her back, he thought she looked like a sixties icon; a more beautiful Cher, perhaps. Despite being sober, Andrea had become so giggly that she couldn’t fail to cheer them both up. Pete had put on a playlist of mostly Meredith-approved music – The Cure, Gil Scott-Heron, Tower of Power – but a couple of choral pieces had slipped through, and Meredith had pounced on something.

‘Did I just hear them singing about a pelican?’ she’d said. ‘What the actual fuck are we listening to now?’

‘What is a pelican?’ Andrea asked.

She was on the sofa next to Pete, shoes off, her legs curled up under her, twiddling a strand of hair, her bare arm tantalisingly close to his. Meredith was sitting in the armchair next to the unlit stove, elbow on its arm, her wineglass at a perilous angle.

‘You know, that sea bird with the massive double chin for storing fish in,’ Meredith said, sketching a pelican’s bill in the air in front of her own neck.

‘Ah, that,’ said Andrea, nodding. ‘Yes, is same in Hungarian. Pelikan.’

Pete googled the lyrics to the song they’d been listening to. Finzi, ‘Lo, the Full and Final Sacrifice’. ‘Yup. It’s “O soft self-wounding Pelican! Whose breast weeps Balm for wounded man”.’

‘What the hell is a self-wounding pelican?’ demanded Meredith.

‘Is like self-harming penguin perhaps?’ Andrea said.

‘Or a self-service parrot?’ Pete suggested, and they laughed, although Meredith’s hoot sounded contrived, like someone had pinched her hard and told her to laugh.

Andrea glanced first at her then, with raised eyebrow, at him. He shook his head briefly and smiled, touched by her concern.