‘But fun,’ beamed Liv, ‘with a really lovely terrasse.’

‘You two enjoying yourselves?’ Griff asked, tapping the arm of his chair, eyes darting at Dan and Bea.

‘We only just got here,’ said Bea.

‘What is this, a holiday?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Alex said six months.’

‘No, three.’

Griff stared from her to Dan and back, and moved on. ‘Alex, how’s the cellar?’

‘It sort of flooded, a couple of months ago,’ said Alex. ‘The temperature’s OK, I think.’

‘We picked up a case of Chablis on the way,’ said Griff. ‘And some Corton.’ He blinked, ending the exchange.

‘I won’t be a minute,’ said Bea. She got up. Dan started from his chair.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Don’t get up.’

She went to the kitchen and safe behind the fire door finished making supper, not thinking about the conversation in the sitting room, just focusing on that. She even sang to herself. There were open bottles of wine and jugs of water. They had put two tables together to hide the mess from the paint. They had scraped it off the grass and hosed it, but it still showed. She took cloths from the sideboard in the dining room. They smelled of damp wood as she shook them out over the tables. She carried the dishes out into the garden; thin ham rippling on a long white plate, and roasted vegetables from the supermarket.

‘Dinner’s ready,’ she said, putting her head round the sitting-room door.

Liv inclined her head wearily. She took Alex’s arm and they went out together, followed by Griff and Dan, Griff talking non-stop, firing questions, and Dan politely at his side.

They all sat down; Bea next to Dan, contained and still, and Liv next to Alex, twisting towards him and smiling constantly. Griff ate and talked and talked and ate. All through the first course he held forth. Football. Nuclear power. Useless wind turbines. The absurdities of recycling. The misguided regulation of the financial sector. Lobbyists. Petrol. Socialist Europe. His voice was a sandpaper baritone with a diesel boom, consistently aggressive, the difference between a joke and an attack not easily felt out. Liv pushed her food about and said how delicious everything was, as if saying it were eating it. Every now and then she would start talking, as if Griff weren’t already speaking, knowing it wouldn’t interrupt him. She talked about recent holidays or exhibitions she’d seen, decorating, but it was the names connected to them that were the topic, not the things themselves, and Alex, Bea and Dan were a disappointing, irritating audience.

‘You must know Jasper,’ she’d say. ‘You remember.’

Griff’s voice dominated and the others’ wove through it, with Alex laughing at his jokes, out of time, like a drunk musician in a string quintet.

‘It’s so boring, this sanctity of every human life bullshit,’ Griff was saying. ‘Thousands stranded on the borders of wherever, hundreds drowned – I’m sorry, nobody likes to say it, but none of these people are essential. They’re not useful – so what? The planet is horrifically overpopulated. Horrible for them, personally, obviously, but wouldn’t any eco-warrior see it the same way?’ He looked around, and landed on Bea. ‘Bea? We’re parasites, aren’t we?’