Score!

Maria, the cook, loved watching the French crew. She loved the sensual way they tore apart their bread, and undressed their prawns with beautifully manicured fingers, knotting their napkins round their necks to protect their perfectly ironed shirts, propping their knives and forks up on their plates, savouring what they were eating, drinking each glass of wine slowly and reflectively, chattering all the time.

Tristan, although he often forgot to eat, would make love in the same leisurely fashion, imagined Maria. Happily married, with a baby on the way, she could still allow herself to daydream. She had been to the hospital for a scan the day before and proudly produced a photograph of the baby.

‘Oh, how lovely!’ cried Lucy ecstatically. ‘Look at its nose, and its head and little legs.’

‘Rather like E.T.’ Meredith took the photograph gingerly as if it were a newborn baby.

‘What a little angel,’ said Oscar, who was the proud father of five.

‘Hello, Tab,’ shouted Griselda, as Tabitha half sheepishly, half defiantly, sidled into the canteen and dropped her bag on an empty table. ‘Come and look at this sweet little babba.’

‘Oh, no,’ Lucy muttered. But it was too late.

As Tab gazed at the photograph, tears trickled down her cheeks.

‘It’s adorable,’ she whispered. Next moment she had fled.

‘What is the matter with that girl today?’ grumbled Ogborne.

‘Someone’s left a bag,’ said Simone, who noticed everything.

Inside were only a tattered Dick Francis, a bottle of Evian, a Coutts Switch card and photos of Isa, Sharon and The Engineer.

‘It’s Tab’s,’ said Wolfie.

‘Not the sort to bother with a compact, lipstick or even a comb,’ said Chloe dismissively.

‘She doesn’t need to,’ Wolfie was amazed to hear himself saying.

Behind his smooth, broad, fast-browning back, Meredith and Baby exchanged glances.

‘Do you think he and Tab are going to be the next item?’ Griselda whispered excitedly to Simone, who was suddenly looking very sad.

Tab refused to answer her telephone but, seeing her dirty green Golf outside Magpie Cottage, Wolfie decided to return her bag in the tea-break. Through the car windows, he breathed in great wafts of wild garlic pestled by rain and the soapy smell of the hawthorns. In the lane up to Magpie Cottage, light brown puddles reflected hedgerows and overhanging trees like an album of sepia photographs.

Tab’s lawn was blue with speedwell. A few white irises were fighting a losing battle with the nettles round the egg-yolk-yellow front door. The reek of more wild garlic from the woods behind didn’t altogether disguise the stench of unemptied dustbins. No-one answered the bell, so Wolfie let himself in.

Tabitha, cuddling Sharon on the sofa, was wearing a pale green vest, a bikini bottom, dirty gym shoes and was watching racing on television with the sound turned down. Her face was deathly white, except for her reddened eyes, but nothing could take away the beauty of her long pale legs.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

Sharon, who had better manners, jumped down and brought Wolfie a small rug, revealing a pile of dust. Wolfie handed Tab her bag.

‘I brought this back.’

‘Thanks.’ Staggering to her feet, kicking an empty half-bottle of vodka under the sofa, antagonism fighting with loneliness in her eyes, Tab asked him if he’d like a cup of tea.

Wolfie followed her into the kitchen and nearly fainted.

‘I’m sorry.’ Tab smashed a cup, as she tried to get the kettle under the tap in a hopelessly overcrowded sink. ‘I only tidy up before Isa comes back.’

She had cut herself on the cup. Tugging off a piece of kitchen roll, Wolfie wrapped it round her finger, then started to load the contents of the sink, mostly glasses, into the dishwasher, which was empty except for a shoal of silver on the bottom.

‘How’s your marriage?’ he asked.

‘A bed of roses.’

Wolfie looked sceptical.

‘With the thorns sticking upwards,’ said Tab.

‘You could stop drinking.’

‘I don’t drink at all, I’ve given up.’

‘What’s this, then?’ Wolfie produced the Evian bottle out of her bag.

Tab brightened. ‘I’d forgotten that. I think we’re out of tea-bags.’ Fretfully she opened a cupboard and a lot of pasta packets descended on her head. ‘Oh, Christ, we’d better have a slug of that instead.’

But before she could grab the Evian bottle, Wolfie had emptied it into the sink.

‘Whydya want to waste perfectly good alcohol?’ screamed Tab. ‘Now what am I going to do?’

‘Go to AA.’

‘One is supposed to meet rather nice men there. I might find a new husband.’

‘I’ll take you along. There must be a Rutminster branch. I’ll check out the time of the next meeting.’

‘Just stop it,’ Tab flared up again.

Hearing a patter on the trees outside, Wolfie glanced across the valley at tassels of rain hanging from the clouds. They wouldn’t be shooting for a bit.

Why had she been so upset at lunchtime? he asked, knowing the answer, but feeling she needed to talk.