She fell silent, looking pensively into space.

After some resistance, Emma cracked.

“If you don’t like it,” she said, “then … why do you do it?”

“What?” Alice looked up at her, puzzled. Then, “Oh, for Johnny,” she said. “He loves it. Always has.”

Johnny Genovese was Alice’s husband, a much-feared director of action movies. Emma wondered just how deeply Sophie would disapprove if she were to spread the word that he kept his glamorous wife chained to the ironing board on Saturday nights.

“Poor lamb,” continued Alice. “He lost his mum when he was only twelve—can you imagine, poor little mite—and he’s generally frightfully brave and manly about it, well, you know Johnny, no talking about emotions there, thank you very much, but he did let slip just the once that the smell of ironing reminds him of her, and it does cheer him up so wonderfully when I do it. It makes me want to tear my hair out, but it means so much to him that it’s worth it.”

Suddenly, Emma felt ashamed of herself and rather small.

“That’s nice of you,” she said quietly.

“Well, you want to do things for them, don’t you?” said Alice. “They’re so nice to us, after all, and there’s really not much point if we can’t be nice back. And, poor darling, Johnny goes through hell sometimes, well, can you imagine being married to me? Think of your sister, then imagine her after ten years of being spoilt rotten on film sets and with no elder sisters at home to slap her down. Yes. Quite.”

Despite herself, Emma had winced.

“But you know, Josephine,” said Alice slowly, “if you’ve found a way to find ironing therapeutic, then you’ve hit on a really very good idea. I find a lot of things can be therapeutic if you find a way to make them so, don’t you? Darlings, look at the time, I must fly!” She leaped to her feet and swiftly kissed both Emma and Mr. Herringe, who blushed like a boy. “I wonder where we’ll run into each other again?” she said to Emma. “Isn’t it fun to guess?”

Emma paid for the drawer handles, walked out of the shop, and turned left onto Upper Street. She walked past the stop for the 19 bus, which for the flash of an Oyster card would take her clear across town, down Rosebery Avenue, and past Grays Inn, through Hol-born to Charing Cross Road, around Piccadilly, along past Green Park to Knightsbridge, and all the way beyond Kensington Gardens to Chelsea; past the graceful white facade of Islington Town Hall with a brightly colored party gathered on the steps for someone else’s wedding, and the small side street beside it that until recently had held a small farmers’ market, now swallowed into the larger market on Chapel Street, where the cookery columnist for the Guardian had shopped and where Matthew had sometimes gone to buy a meat pie for Sunday supper; past Ottolenghi, where last week she had had coffee with Alice and Colin and Nigel and where next month she planned to buy Ottolenghi: The Cookbook for Lulu’s birthday present; past the pub by the corner where, on a dusky winter afternoon in their childhood, she and Lulu had once found a five-pound note in the gutter and wondered what to do with it, since it was not theirs but did not appear to be anyone else’s, either: they had finally taken it into a bakery shop and stuffed it into the charity jar, which she now thought had been honorable of them.