Joan and Henry ran a B&B from a house they couldn’t afford, a sprawling seven-bedroomed place on the edge of a town once famous for its salty hard cheese and its Sunday market. Three of its rooms were let out every night, usually to travelling businessmen, small-timers who still used a Filofax, whose client base was dying off, and also to older couples on modest holidays, walkers, people Joan needn’t worry about; though occasionally a younger pair came through, professional, sometimes southern, in town for a friend’s wedding. These younger couples looked impossibly clean and arrogant to Joan. They breezed in and out with matching smirks on their faces; they appreciated the John Lewis salt and pepper grinders at breakfast, the Farrow & Ball paint on the stairs, but she could see them thinking that they’d never end up like this, serving strangers in their own home, running down the clock. They were expecting to live lives in which the end is never in sight until it’s upon you.

Claire had loved these guests when she was little. She’d make a nuisance of herself, bothering the girls about their jewellery, until Joan would have to send her out of the breakfast room on some mission or other. When she’d gone, the couples would look knowingly at one another across their poached eggs, basking in Claire’s admiration for them, flirting with the idea of themselves as mothers and fathers, ones who’d do anything to make their child feel loved. Just you wait, Joan had thought, skimming off the poaching water. Just you wait till you’re settled and the girl’s your own.

She’d got one of those couples staying at the moment. Two nights. She didn’t think it was a wedding. They had arrived yesterday, after eight o’clock and smelling of wine, though they’d driven up in the boyfriend’s car. He was very upright and very slim, with a permanent smile, as if to say, My life’s wonderful, isn’t yours? The girl was one of those executive types: even here, on a Sunday morning, she’d come down dressed as if she might’ve been going to a business meeting. Maybe she was. But these days there was nobody around to admire her silver tennis bracelet, her polished bag. Tessa, Joan’s youngest, was seventeen, so shy she avoided the breakfast room at all costs, and – as it happened – still asleep, though it was nearly midday.