‘I was supposed to leave him with my mother,’ Edie explained, still jiggling. ‘But she’d gone out.’ She felt like killing—first her mother for being unavailable when she needed her and then Lee. Why couldn’t her husband have just looked after their son for a couple of hours so she could have some freedom? Was it too much to ask? She looked at Pip guiltily. Freedom to do what exactly?

‘It’s fine,’ Pip said, sounding as if it wasn’t fine at all. If he’d been harbouring any thoughts of a cosy lunch between the two of them—like she had—they must have flown straight out of the window the minute he saw Archie wrapped round her. ‘I haven’t had a lot to do with children.’ He looked as if it wasn’t a regret.

He extended a tentative finger towards her son, but then withdrew it quickly when Archie looked as if he might be inclined to bite it. ‘Lyssa said you have loads of kids.’

‘Six,’ Edie said, suddenly appreciating that out in the normal world it was ‘loads’.

‘Wow.’ She was sure she saw Pip’s eyeballs rotate. ‘Six.’ It was breathed more in horror than admiration. ‘So all those kids at the party were yours?’

‘Every last one of them.’

‘Wow,’ Pip breathed again.

Edie felt tears prick at her eyes. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be at all.

She tried Archie in the high chair again and, more by good luck than good management, this time he acquiesced. Edie gave a nervous laugh.

‘Drink,’ Pip said. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘White wine, please,’ Edie said. A bottle or two wouldn’t go amiss.

The waitress approached them again cautiously, giving Archie a wide berth, and took their order.

‘Can you bring some ice cream, please?’ Edie said, without adding ‘fast’. It was a tried and tested way of pacifying Archie.

Pip was looking gorgeous. He was wearing black velvet trousers and a black-and-white shirt that looked like the pattern of interference on a television screen. Everyone here was unspeakably well dressed, most clad in black, themed to complement their surroundings and none of them wearing loud, geometric-print dresses. Edie felt like a country hick up from the sticks. She wondered if she’d ever been trendy. Or had being pregnant with alarming regularity since she was a teenager somehow blighted her ‘trendy’ sensors? Now she never had the money or the cause to be the height of fashion. She left that to her fourteen-year-old daughter and that was a truly terrifying thought.