‘Asyndeton?’ queried the godmother (not this child’s godmother). ‘What – I mean, who? A person called Asyndeton?’

‘He’s the enemy,’ the child repeated patiently. ‘Why, have you heard of him?’

‘Yes,’ she said, wondering why not this child entrusted to her, why the difficult, older one? ‘Where did you?’

‘From Julia. She told me. Julius Caesar came and saw and conquered him.’

‘Julia?’

‘She tells me things.’

‘Of course.’

‘What do you mean, of course?’

‘Just, I suppose, it’s good that you and Julia talk. About this sort of thing, I mean … not all sisters do.’

‘Who doesn’t’ – the child looked fit to burst – ‘like to talk about enemies? Though Julia only talks. She doesn’t come up here.’

‘No?’

‘Her enemies are on the bus.’

‘Ah, the bus. But not Asyndeton?’

‘He doesn’t go on the bus!’ The child’s look accused her of imbecility. ‘Anyway, it’s not a normal bus.’

‘No. Of course. It would be difficult.’

‘What would?’

‘For Asyndeton. On the bus.’

‘He doesn’t go on buses, I told you.’

She had misjudged, she realised, poked too hard at the mesh of the child’s dazzling world. The child gave her a brief, despairing look but let it pass.

‘Before, he used to be called Kraker. That was a girl enemy though. Then Alexander, which was quite good but not sly.’

‘And now he’s Asyndeton? An excellent choice.’

No enemy, she was certain, had a finer name.

 

Elizabeth glanced around the garden: long and ragged, a few faded, blousy roses still hanging on. Lots of dandelions. Blackberry brambles somewhere, surely. A fence that announced, rather pointlessly, the boundary between the garden and the more overgrown grass. It was, she guessed, what Amy and Raj were proudest of about their home, Much Chuttering being more overspill suburb than true village these days. The house itself was only mid-war. But the straggle of garden looked almost the real thing.

 

‘Listen, I was meant to tell you it’s lunchtime.’

Sighing, ‘I bet it’s chicken.’

‘I think you’re right. It smelled a lot like roast chicken.’

‘It’s local chicken. We always have local chicken when visitors come.’

 

At lunchtime, Julia, the designated godchild, descended and permitted Elizabeth a kiss. Coaxed to held forth on her schoolwork, she did for a good five minutes, on the antics of the Bolsheviks, of whom she seemed a harsh judge – they tried her patience with their infighting – then, as if she’d given them more than any reasonable person could expect, Julia retreated into her slump. Elizabeth, who wanted to like her but was new to fifteen-year-olds and hadn’t read the latest research, smiled and said the history department at Birmingham was excellent if Julia would like to visit. Julia, head bent, ate a chicken wing (local, Amy assured them) and stabbed at the more difficult salad leaves.

The apple crumble was excellent and united them in praise.

‘Made with the apples from the tree?’ asked Elizabeth.

‘What? Oh, that tree. No, it’s long past fruit, sadly.’

‘Good for other things, though,’ said Elizabeth, with a sidelong smile at the younger child.

‘Oh?’

‘For watching enemies.’

The family, including the child, all looked at her as if she’d gone mad. Nobody spoke. Amy scratched her soft freckled arm. Then, finally, Raj said, ‘It’ll have to come down one of these days.’

 

• • •

 

At her desk in the department on Monday, Elizabeth ate the blackberries Amy had insisted on her taking home in a plastic tub. They’d gathered them on Sunday morning. Dorothy Finch, the sixtyish psychologist who headed the Youth Research Unit and specialised in risky behaviours, happened to stop by and spotted the blackberries.

‘Good weekend?’

‘Very. I visited my goddaughter,’ Elizabeth said, trying the phrase for fit.

‘How nice,’ said Dorothy, with clear suspicion that she should only now reveal such homely proclivities. ‘I didn’t know you had one.’

‘Oh yes. It’s been a while now, years.’ A stupid thing to say – a godchild wasn’t something you took up, like yoga. ‘Her mother and I were friends at university. I try to get there once a month.’

Over the coming weeks, the autumn deepened and Elizabeth made a point of dropping her goddaughter, casually, into conversation. She even attempted a mention during a discussion of Dorothy’s current research (vandalism on public transport), but it didn’t seem very related to Asha and Julia and she backtracked before they were in any way implicated. On Thursday she did what she’d been intending to do all week: she went to the campus bookshop and chose presents for both girls. The exercise took her entire lunch hour and left her hungry but satisfied. Tales of Norsemen for Asha and a book token for Julia, who was more problematic. She placed her purchase on the desk ready for packaging in a jiffy bag. ‘For my goddaughter,’ she said casually to anyone who paused to give it a glance.

People, departmental people, began to respond to her differently. At first, she stuck to dropping mentions of Asha once or twice each week, and then almost daily. It was amazing how easily she could be introduced into the conversation! But then it occurred to her that her colleagues with families had discovered this long ago. There was almost no discussion that could not be hijacked and bent to accommodate their offspring, who were uniformly brilliant, though modest, young people, triumphing weekly in netball, cello, debating, and cross-country. To listen you would think the whole of childhood was a giant amphitheatre hosting a series of contests into which these offspring were thrust.

October, Elizabeth recalled, was when Asha’s birthday fell. She began to check regularly for an email or text from Amy inviting her to Much Chuttering for the celebrations. Since the children were no longer very young, the routine invitations to birthdays had dried up, but she had a feeling the child would want her there this time. Before the apple tree visit, Elizabeth would often return baffled from her forays to Much Chuttering, for all that Amy tried to include her. She’d been consulted on her views on ovens (AGA versus range), on private schools versus the local village one, and the Suzuki method versus traditional violin tuition. And felt more outside the fold than ever.

Now though, casting her mind back to previous visits, Elizabeth saw them all in a fond haze, Amy and Raj and the girls. There had been a weekend of shifting clouds and sunbursts three or four years back, when Elizabeth could have done with the extra time to mark exam papers, but honouring her promise, she’d taken the train to Moreton-in-the-Marsh where Amy and the girls had met her. They had only just moved into Sycamore Cottage, and Amy admitted in the car it was a bit of a state. ‘You’ll see. High gloss and fitted carpets. My mother approves, which says it all.’ In time, they would make improvements, take the shine off, the carpets up, and replace the kitchen units with mismatched freestanding cupboards. Turn it into the home they saw themselves suiting. Let the garden grow out …

 

• • •

 

Saturday brought rain, and Elizabeth took down the box of photographs she kept in the top of the wardrobe. Inside were pictures of the girls’ naming ceremonies (secular, god-free – Amy and Raj being from non-practising Christian and Muslim backgrounds). Amy had been faithful at following up family gatherings with a few well-chosen photographs, by email these days.

In the first packet, Julia’s naming, fifteen years ago, Elizabeth herself looked, she thought, not fully formed, almost foetal. She had been still in her twenties, her hair unnecessarily large somehow. But even at the second naming ceremony, Asha’s, to which they’d invited her as de facto family, hadn’t they given her the baby to hold too …? (Who was the actual godparent? One of Raj’s old friends?) Yes, there it was! She was holding the newborn Asha comfortably in one arm. The other was looped around Julia’s shoulders at her side, the expression on the girl’s slight, bony face caught in a split second of anguished excitement giving her a freakish appearance, all jawbones and teeth. Elizabeth couldn’t recall Julia ever looking that animated in real life. Funny that they’d asked her to hold the baby instead of the godparent designate. Had Amy sensed it too, the connection between them? Hadn’t it, when she thought about it, always been there? Memories of Asha began to resurface. There was a time she’d climbed into Elizabeth’s pull-out bed and asked if she might draw on her face, and hadn’t there been a fascination with worms or insects …?

 

• • •

 

Tales of Norsemen was still on Elizabeth’s desk. Until she knew for certain whether she was going for the birthday weekend, she deferred the decision over posting it.

‘Branching out?’ enquired Darius Seemly, stopping by her desk, picking up the Tales.

‘Just something for my goddaughter,’ she said, not looking away from her screen, which was difficult because the mere mention of the child excited her.

The consensus in the department was that people found her aloof. This Elizabeth had been told by Darius Seemly, the twice-divorced Chair of Sociology, at a drinks reception for a visiting American scholar at the start of last term. To a certain type of man, however, she was highly attractive, he’d assured her. This type, it turned out, included him. Previously, she’d rebuffed his advances, but now, when he commented on the book, she allowed the conversation to be drawn out. The following day he emailed asking if she was going to a screening being held in the Bowen Centre. We might grab a drink after, he suggested. A whole evening in which the talk would turn to their personal lives; she would have his attention. His was a concentrated attention that, when focused on you, made you feel like the single object worthy of real interest in his world. And his was a large world – he was eminent in social attitudes and voting polls, youth and social exclusion – or was it urban morphology and transport? It was a few things.

‘Give me half an hour on the number 50 bus between Hedgecomb and Digbeth and I’ll give you the outcome of the election,’ Darius had famously said, years earlier. By observation and overhearing he claimed he could discern the political mood of the electorate. (The route was important, the number 50 being an uninhibited bus that wandered through leafy bohemian well-heeled Moseley, through Kings Heath, on the up and finding its edge, before making nonchalantly for its grittier inner-city neighbours.) The claim reached significant ears and made Darius’s name. He was invited to talk to policy units. He became an authority on radical fieldwork, on ethnography, on social attitudes, on bus routes. He was rumoured to be a regular at Downing Street.

 

After the seminar, Darius drove them to a wine bar on the other side of the campus. He had two adult children whom he talked about with a casual boastfulness. One was a postgrad in philosophy (‘wasted – she was born to boss people about’), the other, a boy, was a management consultant. In return, she told him about Asha and Julia, her weekends with them in Much Chuttering, in broad, cheerful brushstrokes, glossing over the girls’ actual names and ages. It was possible that one Platonic composite godchild emerged; Elizabeth fleetingly saw her take shape and hoped that she wasn’t as off-putting as the department children. When it came to the part about the tree, she hesitated. No, she was not ready. Another time.

‘Elizabeth,’ he said, placing his hand on hers, ‘this evening has come as a surprise to me. Such a rich life you lead. Would you like to read my paper for the Stockholm conference? Make some comments?’

‘Of course,’ she said dreamily. ‘Darius, did you ever climb trees?’

Later that night, alone, a horrible thought: what if the child had outgrown the tree, outgrown her enemy? She knew children went through stages and grew out of things. So fast, though? She tried to recall Julia’s stages. Nothing sprang to mind. One continuous stage. Nothing about Julia’s childhood had been as memorable; she certainly hadn’t talked about the Bolsheviks when she was seven.

When by the following Friday no invitation had come from Much Chuttering, Elizabeth called Amy. Amy said Julia was bogged down with her GCSE coursework. She didn’t offer much about Asha, made some weary-sounding comments about the child blocking the sink and trying to poison herself with Borax, without sounding too worried. There was something Elizabeth very much wanted to discuss with Amy. A future weekend at Much Chuttering she imagined where, after a couple of glasses of wine, children in bed, she might turn the conversation to what arrangements the couple had put in place in case of their sudden deaths. But that could never be truly tactful, could it, over the phone?

For now, it was enough for Elizabeth to relive Asha in the tree. The Enemy, Asyndeton. It synchronised perfectly to the rhythm of the train. One evening on the way home from the campus, just before the clocks went back, a woman sitting opposite looked at her strangely as she edged out of her seat at Bournville Station. Elizabeth guessed she’d been mouthing the phrase to herself and felt her face flush.

Darius invited her to dinner. Then there was a lunch and a visit to an exhibition. Darius Seemly liked to talk, about his work, his ex-wives, his personal theories about the education system, and future of work; occasionally about his children. And she would let him. In return, he would listen, with that attentive manner that seemed twice distilled. (She wondered, did he retain much of what she’d said?) There was an economy here that she was banking on. Other women, she thought, strike bargains. My price is freedom to talk about a child in a tree. Though she still wasn’t quite ready for the tree.

After the exhibition they had a glass of wine. Darius was giving a paper at a conference next month in Nottingham. ‘Make a weekend of it, I thought. Go walking in the Peaks. You look like a woman who’d own a decent pair of hiking boots.’

Elizabeth hesitated. Late October. ‘I might be away that weekend. At my goddaughter’s.’

But despite her phone calls and emails and even postcards, no invitation appeared from Much Chuttering. Perhaps arrangements were being left till last minute. Amy liked spontaneity, or the appearance of it. They must have taken for granted that Elizabeth would be free. She usually was.

So she went to the Dales with Darius Seemly. At the cottage there was an old spinning-wheel, a stack of board games, and a pod espresso machine. They lined their hiking boots up in the porch. Dressing-gowns hung side by side on the bedroom door. It all seemed quite sudden, the miniaturised domesticity of cooking together, discovering there was no mustard, figuring out the boiler settings. Over breakfast a shyness crept over Elizabeth and occasional stabs of self-loathing for noticing Darius’s repetitions, his unnecessary throat-clearing before launching into the most ordinary observation. Why had she come here to be horrible to the man who’d expertly poached eggs and was offering to make proper coffee on the stove (he’d poured the pod offerings down the sink in disgust)? She knew she had less colour than his usual women. Why pretend? By Sunday she longed for the sanctuary of her flat, the camouflage of its dull furniture and faded rugs and familiar sounds – its space. She headed off Darius’s suggestion of a seven-mile walk, suggesting they browse in the nearby town where there was bound to be a bookshop or two. She wanted to buy a present for her goddaughter. ‘Ah, the young bibliophile,’ said Darius, not unkindly. ‘Finished with the Norsemen, has she?’

She couldn’t bear him to misunderstand Asha. But the tree? Must it be sacrificed, offered up as entertainment? Memory came to her aid. She told him instead of the greyish day in Much Chuttering. Amy had left her with the girls while she went to Sainsbury’s. Julia assented to baking fairy cakes, an operation undertaken without joy or spillage, then took herself off outside. She’d found the girls beyond an overgrown rosebush, Asha in wellingtons, a seaside bucket in her grasp. ‘Catching caterpillars.’ ‘Oh. D’you like caterpillars?’ Stonily: ‘Not really.’ ‘Then why are you catching them?’ ‘Because they turn into butterflies.’ ‘And you like butterflies, do you?’ ‘No, I don’t. They’ve got wings and legs.’ ‘Why are you hunting for them, then?’ A look almost of disbelief: ‘Because they turn from caterpillars.’  The child crouched, pointing at a greyish butterfly. Later, Elizabeth understood; it was the transformation itself that had fixated Asha.

 

One night she woke from an exhausting dream in which they were at the check-in desk at an airport, she and Asha. She had chopped down the apple tree and packed it in pieces in her carry-on bag – something to do with Brexit – and Asha was very upset. The dream went on relentlessly, without resolution. In the morning she had to call Much Chuttering. When she heard the child’s voice in the background, Elizabeth cut across what Amy was saying.

‘Oh, Amy, put me on to Asha a minute.’

‘Hello?’

‘Asha! It’s Elizabeth. Liz. I had a dream about you last night, you and your tree.’

‘Oh, I’m not allowed up there anymore. It’s too prongy. It could snap and that would be that.’

Amy reclaimed the phone. ‘What on earth was she telling you?’

Asha had become very interested in the wives of Henry VIII, Amy said. ‘She can recite them all with dates and heads.’

‘Amy – Asha’s birthday?’

‘Asha’s? What about it?’

‘You hadn’t … forgotten then?’

‘Forgotten?’ Amy laughed. ‘How would I forget my own child’s birthday? It’s not for ages.’

‘But I was looking at her naming pictures. They say October.’

‘They were October, but she was three months old then! Asha’s a July baby. Don’t worry, you can make it up to her next year. Did I tell you about Julia’s ankle?’

‘No, but we haven’t finished with Asha and Henry VIII.’

A sigh. ‘I think it’s the wives as much as Henry. I mean, she’s quite a morbid child. Her imagination …’

‘Oh, Amy, it’s so much more than that!’  Imagination was such a misdiagnosis of the seething inner brilliance of the child, which her mother seemed incapable of perceiving. ‘Asha has something quite rare. You must see that.’

‘You think so?’ Amy lowered her voice. ‘Because between us, she’s not doing all that well at school. We’re not sure it’s the right environment for her. I don’t know. Julia thrived there; it’s very good. And it has special needs, not that Asha’s that. But we wondered, maybe ADHD or something. Raj thinks we should get her a pet. She doesn’t make a lot of friends. Anyway, tell me about this professor of yours. Raj says he’s one of those media intellectuals? Something to do with voting on buses? You must bring him down next time …’

 

Re-examining the photograph later, Elizabeth saw that only someone very unused to the stages of infancy could have mistaken a three-month old for a newborn.

 

• • •

 

The craft section of the bookshop was a disappointment. Something constructive instead of ruining things, Amy had suggested for Asha. Paint your own teapot, piggy bank, sew your own purse? A kit for making pom-pom animals, wool and full instructions included, was the least offensive thing on offer. The finished articles were depicted on the front. Asha would probably prefer a kit for making moderately dangerous explosives to these sickly concoctions, but there was no such item for sale. Because she couldn’t face the defeat of leaving empty-handed, Elizabeth bought the pom-pom kit. There was just a chance Asha would see the absurdity and find it entertaining. A slim chance.

 

Darius was due to arrive, and she would rather die than let him see her slopping dish cloths, emptying the bin, and scraping around. (How, she wondered, did people like Amy and Raj manage to maintain any semblance of a personal, intimate life if they were subject to the sight of one another daily engaged in such things?) But in the middle of chopping carrots, the knife slipped and cut her finger, and when Darius arrived, she was patching herself up with a plaster.

‘That knife’s blunt. I should get you a proper set,’ said Darius. ‘Here, let me do it.’

She took olives and hummus out of the fridge and spooned some into a dish.

‘Remind me and I’ll show you how to make your own hummus,’ he murmured. ‘It’s very simple. Far superior.’

‘No, don’t please,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I don’t mind mediocrity. I like the convenience of it, in food anyway.’

He smiled. ‘Well, how about you let me take you out for a steak? You look like you could do with one. It will be convenient, I can’t promise mediocre. I know a good place nearby, actually.’

 

It was while they were at the restaurant that inspiration struck her. Among Elizabeth’s books were two first editions, a rare, illustrated edition of The Characters of Theophrastus and an ancient copy of Alice in Wonderland that an elderly aunt had passed down to her as a child. Asha would like these, she felt. She would leave them to her in her will. Alice in particular was probably worth a lot. Taking herself off to the Ladies, she googled it. A near-identical copy was priced at £380 on eBay! But why wait? The act of giving could be done now, this very evening. She declined more wine or dessert, suggested they call it a night, hoping Darius would drop her at the door. He didn’t; he sauntered in after her and set about making coffee. While he was in the kitchen, she took her Cross pen and before she could stop herself, wrote inside the book, To my goddaughter. Pause. Asha, she added, then signed and dated it. One day they would find it and decide she’d lost her mind young.

 

Darius flipped the cover back and forth, his eyes on her. ‘Why are you bequeathing your belongings? You’re in good nick, aren’t you, nothing worrying you?’

‘Please don’t flip the corners like that, you’ll ruin it. It’s worth four hundred pounds.’

‘Lucky little bookworm. I don’t think you ever mentioned her name before. Asha.’

It was said. With Asha’s name out in the open, she could no longer contain herself.

‘She has a friend. Well, no. He’s her enemy, actually.’ She paused, took a breath, and launched. ‘She watches him from a tree. You’ll never guess what he’s called …’

Several minutes later, when Elizabeth had finished, Darius nodded.

‘She doesn’t sound like any young person I’ve come across.’

‘Asha’s a child, not a young person,’ Elizabeth snapped. ‘And please don’t say she has a marvellous imagination either. It’s who she is, not some … some childish quirk. Why are you looking at me like that, Darius?’

‘Sometimes I wonder, Elizabeth ...’ Darius began calmly, infuriatingly equably.

He didn’t need to finish the sentence. There would be a discreet conversation, Elizabeth foresaw, possibly over coffee on campus, or an email in which he confided that people expected a great deal of him; it was a lot to live up to and he was sorry but it was almost certainly for the best. And that would be that.

Later that evening, alone, Elizabeth called Amy, only to be intercepted by Asha. It was after ten, late for the child to be awake.

‘How are you, Asha?’

‘Controversial,’ said Asha, briskly. ‘I’m getting guinea pigs.’

Amy took the phone off the child (‘Go away please’), listened while Elizabeth explained that she would be coming to Much Chuttering alone that weekend.

‘Oh, well, you can have your usual bed. (‘I know you’re under the table’) And to be honest, he sounded a bit old for you. If you … you know. Might want kids. Though we’ve probably put you off.’

‘Ah, well. Yes and no.’

‘That sounds like a discussion for the weekend. Jesus, that child.’

 

• • •

 

Since she had ruined Alice with her inscription, the pom-pom kit would have to be reconsidered. But it had not improved on second inspection. In fact, the thought of handing it to Asha paralysed her. It would ingratiate her with Amy perhaps, but earn Asha’s rightful contempt.

Not with any great hopes of the weekend ahead, and empty-handed, Elizabeth boarded the train on Saturday morning. It lunged past scrappy fields that looked unclaimed, unfarmed, the hinterland between city and countryside. Elizabeth took it all in. Ponies with shaggy coats. A burnt-out car. A pram. What chain of events had put them there? Some people’s lives were so manifestly physical, so unlike hers, culminating in wrecks and ponies and abandoned buggies in hedgerows. She wasn’t even equal to chopping carrots or bringing her goddaughter a present. It began to seem that she had a lot of catching up to do in terms of physical living. Would it come in a concentrated burst – a cataclysmic accident perhaps? She’d made a precautionary survey of the carriage already. Two youngish men, one with earphones, and an elderly man, smartly dressed, with a mild reflective expression that probably came from having witnessed unthinkable atrocities in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. If it comes, the crash, it’s you and me, she’d decided. He’d be the one she’d risk life and limb to save.

In the event, she didn’t have to save anyone because they arrived at Much Chuttering without incident, a minute early. Crossing the carpark, she spied only one face, Amy’s, through the windscreen of the SUV. The perpetually worried expression morphed into a bright smile for her benefit, Elizabeth noticed, with a rush of fondness for her old friend. Asha lying across the backseat, suddenly sat bolt upright and bellowed, ‘Surprise! We thought you’d be late so we’d get hot chocolate. Can we anyway?’

‘There’s been a mix-up,’ said Amy. ‘My fault. One of Raj’s old university friends is coming. I thought we’d put him off till next weekend, but apparently he can’t be put off. He’ll have to have the sofa.’ She lowered her voice. ‘He’s separating.’

‘Like an egg?’ Asha piped up. ‘Can people do that?’

‘Not like an egg, Asha, don’t be ridiculous. He’s a person.’

‘He used to be an egg, then.’ Asha, undeterred. ‘Imagine how gross if you actually separated a person!’

Amy rolled her eyes at Elizabeth. Poor Amy, she thought. Asha wears her out. And now an unexpectedly separating man. And I am not a very easy guest either, always turning up alone, at the wrong intervals, offering myself awkwardly, secretly attached to the wrong child.

Asha draped herself over the seatback, her sharp chin digging into Elizabeth’s shoulder. ‘Guess what. We’ve got an industrial staple gun.’

‘That sounds pretty serious, Asha. What’s it for?’

‘The hutch! We’re making it this afternoon. We’re making Sachin the egg-person do the dangerous bits.’

Elizabeth did not recall any mention of a carpenter among their circle of friends.

 

Sachin arrived after lunch. Elizabeth saw him climb out of his car; a long man, his overcoat encasing him like a shell, lending him a hermit-like appearance. He swung a duffle bag out with a downcast grace. But before he got as far as the front door, Raj intercepted him and dragged him round the back of the house and set him to work on the hutch. Ragged, yelled instructions (Asha’s) reached Elizabeth from the patio, interspersed with the firing power-tool. ‘Hold the chicken wire in place!’ ‘Staple onto the top corner!’ ‘Pull the trigger!’ ‘Now the top-left corner ...!’ ‘Fire!’

Julia, whose hair had turned pink, appeared noiselessly and stood next to Elizabeth at the kitchen window. The duffle bag sat on a wooden chair outside, socks and a bottle of Head & Shoulders cascading out.

‘Is he a carpenter? An odd-job man?’ A passing saint?

‘Something to do with IT,’ said Julia. Then, a touch acidly, ‘How come they didn’t rope you in?’ And trudged back upstairs, her expression signalling she was not to be further engaged. Elizabeth was, on balance, grateful to have been overlooked.

Oncoming darkness brought them inside. Raj, Amy, and Asha became absorbed in defrosting chicken curry, drying duvet covers, and thumping spare pillows to test for feathers (Elizabeth was allergic). Sachin had shed neither his coat nor his duffle bag when Raj called through from the kitchen, ‘You’ll have to come and help yourselves to wine. And generally sort yourselves out, won’t you?’

And so it was only fleetingly, wheeling back round to the kitchen, that Sachin paused to say, ‘Right then, red or white? I’m Sachin, by the way.’

‘Elizabeth. Liz.’

‘I think I’ve met you before, haven’t I?’ He smiled and his tired, kind face lit up. ‘Oh yes, I remember. The christening thing – the naming do – for Asha. Weren’t you the godmother?’