“Matthew!” Emma shouted again, more sharply now. “We’ve really got to go. We’re going to be late!”

“Just coming!” he called back. “Sorry, Mum, I’ve really, really got to go now. I’ll phone you later, okay? Bye, Mum, I love you.”

He pressed the off button on his phone and sagged into a chair.

“Thank you,” he said quietly, “for saving my mother’s life. If you hadn’t come in just then, I was seriously about to reach down the telephone line all the way to Bath and throttle her.”

She tousled his hair gently as she went behind him to the coffeepot to pour him a cup. Matthew’s parents’ divorce ten years ago had been a bitter one. Matthew’s father, having stayed dutifully married to his wife until Matthew had left university and begun to make his way in the world, had moved out of the family home exactly one day after Matthew had moved into his first adult flat. Matthew’s mother had not spoken to Matthew’s father since the divorce had been finalized. When Emma talked to Matthew about the situation, she tried, out of female solidarity, to take Matthew’s mother’s side. It was not always easy.

“What’s the fuss about this time?” she asked.

“Her hotel,” he said grimly. “The one where she usually stays is full up with a urologists’ convention, of all things, and her friend Trish, The Woman Who Knows, has told her that the single only other hotel where it’s possible to stay in this crime-ridden and dangerous city without being robbed and murdered in the night by drug-addicted foreigners is in Westbourne Grove, which is far too close for Mum’s liking to where Dad will be impossibly selfishly staying with his friend Ian, a mere hop and a skip of three miles away in Shepherd’s Bush, and what on earth would she do if, perish the terrible thought, she happened to walk past her ex-husband on the street and was forced to undergo the dire and horrible torture of saying hello to him?” He ran his hands through his hair and groaned. “And we’ve got four more weeks of this to look forward to before the wedding.”

“I feel sorry for Caroline,” said Emma. “I know she’s difficult, but you and Andrew are so close, and she must feel quite left out a lot of the time.”

Matthew and his father, a sweet-natured semi-retired general practitioner living in York, had always been very good friends; Emma sometimes wondered how it must have been for Caroline to have spent all those years outnumbered by men, and how much that might have shaped the way she was today.

“And Andrew’s got a friend to stay with in London and she hasn’t,” she continued. “He’ll have been here for a week, having a great time catching up with Ian, and Caroline’s only coming for the wedding. She’s all on her own, she hates London anyway, and she’s having to stay in a hotel, which must be lonely. I’d offer her Lulu’s old room at Mom and Dad’s, now that the ceiling’s fixed, but my cousin Susan’s got it.”