Emma looked at him and shook her head.

“I can’t do this,” she said. “I can’t let another woman walk into a trap like that. I don’t care if she gets angry with me, and if she does choose to stay away, that’s her decision, not mine. I’m going to phone her.”

“Be my guest,” said Matthew.

Caroline Morrison answered her telephone on the second ring. Emma pictured her sitting upright in the spick-and-span living room of her house on the outskirts of Bath, where never a paper was misplaced by a careless hand, or a coffee cup set hastily down to cast a friendly circle on the polished wood table.

“Hello, darling,” she said, when Emma identified herself. Emma knew that Caroline liked her; even so, she occasionally reflected, when they spoke, on the surprising degree of chill with which it was possible to infuse the word “darling.”

“I’m just calling for a chat,” said Emma. “It’s not too long till the wedding, and I felt we hadn’t talked for a while, so I thought I’d see how you were doing.”

“Well, I’m glad someone’s interested.” A brittle laugh tinkled down the telephone line. “I was beginning to wonder if my son even remembered he had a mother.”

Not for the first time, Emma found herself wondering whatever had possessed Matthew’s kind and jocular father to marry Caroline Morrison.

“Did you hear the drama about the hotel?” said Caroline.

For Caroline, the smallest inconvenience was a drama.

“I heard they were booked up, yes,” said Emma.

“With bloody urologists!” said Caroline. “You’d have thought it was bad enough to have to do that sort of work at all, without getting together to hold a convention about it. And Trish tells me the only possible other hotel in London is in Westbourne Grove. Not an area I care for, but Trish seems to think it’s okay so long as you stay inside the hotel. So I suppose I’ll be under house arrest for the duration.”

“Westbourne Grove has come up quite a lot over the years,” Emma told her. “And the good thing is it’s closer to Paddington than Piccadilly is.”

“If we ever manage to get out of the train station!” said Caroline. “The taxi queues are always endless, and Matthew’s refusing to bring the car when he comes to meet me, because he says he won’t have time to go home and get it. Oh, well, at least it’ll give us time while we wait to catch up on our news, because I gather that’s as much as I’m going to see of him. He’ll deign to come into the hotel to check me in, but he says he can’t stay for the afternoon because he’ll be too busy.”

“Well, he will have a hundred things to do,” said Emma. “But I’m sure he’ll have time for a cup of tea before he rushes off.”

Across the room, Matthew stared at her in protest: she faced him sternly down.