Ben grinned. ‘Sorry about that.’ He clearly wasn’t either.

Ellen rolled her eyes good-humouredly and laughed, at which point her bladder throbbed again. She had worked out that if she crossed her legs and squeezed her thighs, then she might buy herself a little time before she inevitably had to relieve herself in the stacks of Elias’s junk. But it wasn’t going to work for ever.

She was not surprised she was going be the one who broke first. It was a running joke in Ellen’s family that she always, always, needed to go to the loo. Throughout her childhood, on any car journey of half an hour or more, she would inevitably find herself leaning forward to stick her head between the driver’s and passenger’s seats and put in a request for another stop. Her father would jeer, her brother would laugh and her mother would say, exasperatedly, ‘Oh, Ellen – didn’t you go before we left?’

The worst trips were the long drives to Brittany, where the Fishers rented the same souped-up caravan every summer. On one occasion, nearing the home stretch, her father refused to stop. She had been caught short and had to sit on a picnic blanket for the home stretch to the campsite, near Roscoff. She had been fifteen, which was definitely too old to wet yourself in the car. She had sat there, mouth set in a line, wishing her father would take the corners even faster.

‘How was the night, El?’ Alexa asked, solicitously.

‘Big, I think. I woke up with a shoe on.’

Ben snorted.

‘Was Lee around?’ Alexa asked, conspiratorial now.

‘He was not.’

Alexa had an expression of pleasant interest, though Ellen could see that she was distracted by Ben kissing the skin of her bare shoulder.

Ellen squirmed a little, recrossing her legs in an attempt to postpone the inevitable, and wondered idly whether her parents could have been persuaded to come and rescue her. After some adolescent turbulence, Ellen’s relationship with her parents had settled into what was best described as ‘fond, mutual irritation’, which only occasionally boiled over into a vivid argument. Ellen would make no effort to conceal her eye roll when subjected to one of Linda’s meandering anecdotes about the boiler; she was still too quick to take John’s characteristic grumpiness personally. But mostly, their interactions were affectionate. Despite their suspicions about London and their utter bemusement at her job – her father couldn’t talk about it without going magenta – she was glad to know they were there, at the other end of the phone, or forty minutes or so on the high-speed rail link from Gillingham. It was enormously comforting to think of their lives continuing in her absence: John going to his job as an administrator at Medway Council, Linda still teaching History part-time at a girls’ school in the next town.