At school the following day, Veronica watched the door for Sarah, hoping she wouldn’t appear. Part of her did want to apologise, to explain – about Harry, about Amelia. Part of her wanted to tell Sarah how often she’d thought about her and her family over the years, how precious that time, how jealous she had been. And still was. How that envy made her do things she regretted. But, the greater part of her decided that it was better to simply stay away. To detach herself from her own unravelling. Besides, more urgent matters were occupying her mind.

Veronica avoided David when he dropped Amelia off that morning. She avoided him at pick-up too. And then all at once it was Saturday, and no more avoidance was necessary because she and George were no longer in the busy bustle of London but sat sleepily outside, in the glorious garden terrace of the famous Colombe d’Or.

Their table was perfectly shaded. A vast Fernand Leger mural presided immediately over them, peeking through ivy, and as always they basked in the legend of it all. This was why they loved it here – not for the simple, rustic charm of what was in essence a small hotel/restaurant in the South of France; they came for the art, for the history, for the folklore. Nestled just outside the walled village of Saint-Paul de Vence, myth had it that almost every artistic icon of the last century had come to this hotel to meet and play and work, and often, paid for their meals or lodgings with a piece of their own art. Now, original works by Matisse, Chagall, Braque, Picasso, hung casually throughout – up-lit in the restaurant, suspended over white sheets in the bedrooms, offering visitors a nonchalant slice of the extraordinary. George and Veronica had visited the Colombe d’Or together on at least four previous occasions, and now, unfailingly, it filled them with all the promised stimulus that such rare brilliance beholds. They held hands over the terrace table as they consumed Burgundy snails and rare-cooked steak, rich cheeses and dry wine. They allowed their legs to intertwine in the swimming pool beneath the Calder. They lay on fresh, soft sheets, staring up at a heavily gilded Chagall, and they felt their bodies turn towards each other like the easy brushstrokes of a master painter: confident, practised, surprising.

They felt like naughty schoolchildren. She was not ovulating, it would be another week until then, and the results of both hers and George’s tests had not yet arrived, but their hands crept over each other. The prospect of sex, unrequired, titillated them as though it was a fresh discovery, pleasure pulsing back and forth in the empowerment of choice. They lay afterwards, heads propped on plush pillows, secrets spilling out of their mouths: how isolated they had each felt, how guilty, how sad, how fresh each month’s disappointment, how strong remained the desire to grieve, how vivid their dreams of that room in the hospital and the blood on the floor of their old flat, how weak they felt in the wake of it all. Unpacked at last, their eyes met with the old openness, and in the air was a palpable scent of triumph: their childhoods did not rule them after all, they had proved it, there was always chance for escape.