Dean peers at his watch. ‘School starts at ten o’clock,’ he says. ‘It gives the kids time to work in the fields with their parents. Most of them will have been out there since before dawn.’

I can just imagine Edie’s brood dragging themselves out of their pits at dawn to do a few hours’ hard graft before going to the local comprehensive—I don’t think Kelly, like most teenagers, ever surfaces before noon. And it makes me think how easy our kids have it.

‘Can we visit the school?’

‘Sure, if you’d like to,’ Dean says.

‘I would.’ I want to know everything I can about these lovely, hospitable, gentle people. ‘We should think about getting up.’

‘I guess we should.’ Dean throws his arm across me, pinning me to the bed and covering my lips with insistent kisses. ‘But not just yet.’

Chapter fifty-six

Chapter fifty-six

Edie couldn’t move. None of the normal reflexes she used for creating movement were working. Oh my word. Somewhere, somehow, between leaving the nightclub and waking up, she’d become paralysed. Everywhere. There was no feeling in her arms and legs, although there seemed to be far too much in her brain.

She turned her head. Her husband was lying next to her in the bed, prone and unmoving. He was still wearing his shirt and a faintly dazed expression. His eyes were open, but she wasn’t sure if he was awake.

‘I’m paralysed,’ she muttered through lips that had also become thickened and numb.

‘Paralytic more like,’ Lee mumbled.

Edie groaned. She would kill Pip. When he had told her to go out and get drunk, he’d forgotten to tell her how bad hangovers felt the next day.

‘My feet hurt,’ her husband complained. They had danced, if not quite until dawn, then certainly until about three o’clock.

‘My everything hurts,’ Edie complained back.

Lee stuck his feet out of the bed. He was still wearing his shoes.

There was a gentle knock on the door, followed by it cannoning open and crashing against the wardrobe. Archie toddled in, chewing on his dummy and naked except for an artistic smear of Marmite. Daisy followed, gingerly, carrying a tray as if it were a case of dynamite. She took step after careful step until she reached the bed.

Edie struggled upright, and Lee, wearing his shirt and shoes, did the same.

‘I brought you breakfatht in bed,’ Daisy said, the words failing to break her utter concentration.

Edie formed her lips into speech shapes. ‘Thank you, darling.’

Daisy placed the tray on the bed in front of them as if she were dismantling an unexploded bomb. Edie’s red eyes took in the breakfast set before them. Lee, scratching his head, stopped in mid-itch. Edie tried to pin a smile on her face.