Jason stepped forward towards her. ‘Actually, I’m Jason Danes and I’m very much still here.’

Seemingly not hearing him, she went on. ‘The Skiver has such a sense of character. Danes caught this fellow quite exquisitely. Just by his very posture, you can sense the man’s lazy personality.’

‘Hello!’ Jason said.

No one took any notice of him as they all turned to look at the painting.

‘Jason, I want to go,’ Emily said.

‘This is my private view!’ he said. ‘We need to be here.’

‘They don’t want us. We’re irrelevant.’

‘Em! Babes! I’m – this – these are my pictures! We have to be—’

But she was already out in the street.

He followed her. ‘Em! We can’t just leave!’

‘They didn’t invite us,’ she replied.

Now he knew for sure he was dreaming. Had to be. ‘We don’t need an invite for my own private view, Em!’

‘We do for this one.’

They walked on a short distance, then he stopped again, staring, puzzled, at the cottage which, last time he had passed, had a sign outside saying, BED & BREAKFAST – VACANCIES.

The sign was gone.

The white-picket fence at the end of its cute front garden had gone, too, and so had the garden. It had all been paved over, and parked on it were two cars, squeezed together: a Porsche and a Mini Countryman.

‘What’s happened there?’ she asked.

‘We’re going to wake up.’

‘I am awake.’

‘No, this is all too weird,’ he said. ‘Two big changes to the high street in the past week.’ He pointed. ‘That was a B& B when we arrived here. How could it have changed so quickly? There was a garden out front. How can they have paved over the entire front garden so quickly – and over Christmas?’

As they walked on, he felt increasingly disoriented and light-headed. As if he was drunk or stoned. ‘Maybe whoever’s bought it is a builder,’ he suggested, ‘and perhaps they did do it during the Christmas break, Em? Perhaps the owners of the village store owned the B& B too, and sold both of them together?’

‘I’ve no idea – I just don’t think anything around here can surprise me any more,’ Emily replied. Then, an instant later, she stopped in her tracks and exclaimed, loudly, ‘Oh shit!’

‘What?’

‘That does.’

She pointed ahead, on the other side of the road. ‘Look! Look!’

He looked. At the pub. The Crown.

But it wasn’t the Crown now.

A large, chic, grey sign with black lettering said, prominently, BISTROT TARQUIN.

Several flash cars were parked outside.

Jason looked at Emily, bewildered.

‘We were here a week and a half ago,’ she said, dumbfounded. ‘We had Sunday lunch here. And then you had a sandwich here a couple of days later.’

‘Maybe the landlord—? Maybe he decided to spruce it up?’

‘Also in the past week? Is the whole of Cold Hill having a makeover?’

They went in through the front door. And stopped.