She slipped back onto the bed, put her small hand on Will’s stomach, the fingers tangling in the damp hair beneath his navel, and although he couldn’t help but respond, he didn’t want to. He moved away from her. The room was so small that there wasn’t space to stand up on his side of the bed. Instead he shuffled to the end and reached down for his boxers.

‘Oh!’ Alice said. ‘Do you have to go?’

He nodded. He couldn’t bring himself to speak to her.

‘Is something wrong?’ she asked, and he saw a flicker of panic cross her face that she immediately disguised, turned into an expression of concern. But it was enough for him to know that she was wondering if he’d overheard what she’d said to Marnie. The fact that she didn’t immediately explain, or laugh it off, was, to him, absolute proof that she was hiding something from him. Not that he needed any more proof.

‘Where are you going?’ Alice asked, sitting up on the bed, one leg on the floor, the other on the bed, bent at the knee, so that he could see between the legs of the towelling shorts. Her hair was all tousled. She had never looked sexier.

‘I have to work,’ he said, and then he added, as a test, ‘I’ll come back later. We can do something this evening.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, not this evening. I’m busy.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, tucking her hair behind her ear. She picked absent-mindedly at a fingernail.

‘Busy doing nothing?’ he asked coldly, and Alice shrugged.

He’d left her and gone back to work in the funfair gardens; he’d been deadheading flowers, cutting back plants that had grown leggy or twiggy or gone to seed and with every snip of the secateurs he’d grown angrier and more afraid until in the end he couldn’t hold his emotions in and he’d gone back to Caravan 49.

He couldn’t be sure what time it was. Evening was coming in, the dew was settling on the grass in the way that it does on late summer evenings, previewing the approaching autumn, and the air was midgy. Families, fresh from the shower, the children’s hair combed while it was wet, were making their way across the site from the caravans to the bar and the holiday club because there was a family fun show every Friday evening and it was always popular. The site was unusually quiet because so many people had caught the coach to Weston-super-Mare for the beach festival. Will had gone in the opposite direction, away from the bar and towards Caravan 49. He’d seen that the lights were on inside but the curtains were drawn and the door was closed. He’d strode up to the door and hammered on it with his fist.

‘Alice, it’s me! Open the door.’