Henry was tidying the living room: she could hear him pummelling cushions. Richard, back from university for the holidays, had gone out already for a bike ride, and the eldest, Neal, wouldn’t be home for another two days, if he made it at all. Joan allowed herself to believe that he would; she allowed herself to imagine all six of them under the same roof for Christmas that year, and rolled her pastry a fraction thinner. Richard would come back muddy and hungry from his ride, he’d stuff the pies without thinking into his mouth, and she couldn’t begrudge him that. She sealed them with egg wash and put them in the oven, and then she heard tyres on the gravel outside.

‘Henry?’

‘It’s just Room Two,’ he called.

That was the couple, back already. They’d only been gone three hours. It was something the younger ones did, coming and going through the day, as if it was a hotel. They disappeared up to their rooms, and there might be noises. Joan was not an idiot. She knew people had sex in her house: she was the one who stripped the bedclothes and put them in the wash. It was not a pleasant fact, but it was part of the business she’d chosen to run. It seemed unnecessary, though, for guests to do it in the daytime, then lounge in bed when Joan was up and working. It suggested that they thought of her as a cleaner, an invisible member of their hospitality staff, rather than – as she considered herself – a landlady or proprietress.

‘Tessie?’ She knocked hard on Tessa’s door, then pushed inside. Sleepy stillness greeted her, a stale smell, and something rumbling away on the laptop, rain and thunder, because Tessie claimed she couldn’t sleep without background noise. ‘Tessie, get up. Your sister’s coming round.’

Normally Tessa would lie and doze, but today she sat up quickly, as if she’d been pulled on a string. ‘Claire’s coming?’

‘What other sister have you got?’

Joan gathered dirty mugs from the shelves and took them back down with her. Science experiments, Henry called them. They were part of the stale smell, the green powders they contained; but not the whole of it. Tessa’s was not a clean shyness. There was something furtive and greasy in it, something Joan didn’t want to know.

Claire was twenty-five; the man standing beside her was clearly past forty. ‘Mark,’ he said, putting out his hand, and Joan recoiled. He looked heavy – not fat, but muscular, broad-shouldered, large-boned, with an oddly narrow, fluted nose. And was that a tattoo snaking down his wrist? Claire appeared delicate beside him, though she wasn’t. She stood in the middle of the kitchen as though it wasn’t hers, as though she’d never seen the place before. It was Mark who looked at ease: a studied kind of looseness, challenging somehow.