Esther’s stomach performed another lurch of anticipation. She had no birthday plans and was starting to dread the fact. Dylan would still be in Cambridge, and Lily was about to head off backpacking with Matteo, her boyfriend since their days of hand-holding in a school lunch queue. It wasn’t fair to expect Viv and Brian to fill the blanks in her diary, just because Richmond was a stone’s throw from Kingston – nor her parents, for that matter, who lived in Amersham, an hour down the motorway. Proximity to both had been a key factor in Esther’s decision to settle in West London, but such dependence, almost two years on, was starting to feel like failure. In desperation, she had that morning emailed Shona, a long-silent friend from uni days, suggesting they fix something up, not just with her birthday in mind, but in the hope of rekindling the friendship generally.

‘Sorry,’ Chris announced suddenly, ‘I need the little boys’ room. Would you excuse me?’

‘Of course.’ Little boys’ room. You couldn’t judge someone on one piece of terminology, Esther scolded herself, seizing the chance to sneak a check on her face in her handbag mirror. No specks between her teeth yet. No smudges on her nose. Hair good. The lack of a social life was why she was here, she reminded herself firmly, scrolling her phone but finding nothing new except a couple of work emails.

Esther steepled her fingers, trying to look composed, instead of like a woman wondering when her blind date would emerge from the toilets. As more minutes passed, she fiddled again with her phone and then pretended to read a junk mail envelope in the bottom of her bag, while continuing to brood on the embarrassing narrowness of her social circle. The falling away of Cambridge friendships had been something she was prepared for – that it had always been so much more Lucas’s world than hers had been a consistent thread in their tapestry of difficulties – but the continuing challenge to fill the void remained an unwelcome surprise. It was because she worked mostly from her laptop, Esther brooded, and because Dylan’s vast, impersonal, West London sixth-form college meant barely encountering a teacher, let alone other parents. Her five little piano students were dropped off and scooped up like parcels; while her neighbours were exactly what she remembered from her early post-uni days in London, exchanging nods and names, but bent mostly on keeping to themselves. The pair on her left, Dimitri and Sue, both worked nights, he as a taxi driver and she in a care home, and Carmela, the old lady on the other side, emerged only to issue squeaky summonses for the large tabby that used Esther’s overgrown back garden as its toilet and hunting ground.