Marianne said, with as much dignity as she could muster struggling into Ellie’s pyjamas, ‘I’m – trying to think differently. I was trying to be different. I don’t want to have a cold. I’m sorry, Ellie. I’m sorry.’

Elinor looked across at her. The pyjamas were very old, made of brushed cotton and patterned with teapots. They had always been too big. But even dressed in them, with her hair in damp ropes on her shoulders, and her eyes circled with fatigue, Marianne looked, well, outstanding. Elinor sighed.

‘Get into bed,’ she said. ‘Right in. Properly. I’m going to get a hot-water bottle and some paracetamol and you are going to swallow it.’

Marianne attempted a smile.

‘Of course,’ she said.

Bill Brandon tried to make Elinor have some whisky. ‘Just a weak one. Medicinal. You look worn out.’

‘I don’t really like it.’

‘Even if I add ginger ale?’

‘Even then.’

‘I suppose I couldn’t take some up to Marianne …’

Elinor smiled at him. She said, ‘I hope she’s asleep.’

Bill Brandon said, ‘I don’t want to fuss but shouldn’t we get a doctor? Or ring NHS Direct or something?’

‘She’s got a cold,’ Charlotte called from the other side of the kitchen, where she was feeding the baby, a cream pashmina shawl draped decorously over the child and one shoulder. ‘She’s not dying, you old fusspot.’

‘She’s asthmatic.’

Tommy came across the room, put a glass of wine into Elinor’s hand and clumped Bill Brandon on the shoulder. ‘Don’t be an old woman, Bill. She’s got a cold. Listen to the sister lady.’

Elinor took a sip. She said to Bill, ‘I’ve lived with asthmatics all my life. Honestly. She’s got a cold because I expect her immune system’s a bit shot after everything this winter, and she just needs to sleep. She’ll be fine in the morning.’

‘I still think—’

‘Too awful,’ Mrs Jennings said, sweeping into the room. ‘Why do I watch the news when it just makes me despair? I’m sure the Greeks hate austerity but your father, Charlotte, always maintained that if you haven’t got it, you shouldn’t borrow to spend it. I’m with Mrs Merkel, all the way. Now, Tommy, it’s a Friday night so I think something serious is called for.’

‘Gin and serious?’

She gave him a wide smile.

‘Lovely. Just go easy on the serious. Elinor dear, you look a wreck. How is that sister of yours?’

‘I want them to get a doctor,’ Bill said. ‘She’s asthmatic.’

‘She’s OK,’ Elinor said. ‘She’s asleep. She’ll be fine by the morning.’

Mrs Jennings nodded towards her grandson. ‘Let’s hope she hasn’t given him her lurgy, poor mite.’

‘Not while I’m feeding him, Mummy. He’s immune to everything. Tommy, is that glass just neat gin, really?’

‘Pretty well.’

‘Perfect,’ Abigail Jennings said with satisfaction. She raised the glass towards the assembled company. ‘Chin chin dears. Happy weekend to us and happy futures all round.’ A thought suddenly struck her. ‘Bill,’ she said. ‘Bill. Wonderful of you to give that boy a job. Wonderful.’

‘And a flat,’ Charlotte called.

‘Which I’m doing up,’ Bill said, smiling. ‘I couldn’t ask any girl to put up with it as it is. I was going ask Elinor to help me, as it happens.’

‘Oh—’

‘Perfect,’ Abigail said again, swinging round to beam at her. ‘The perfect person. Our tame architect! Ideal. And the more you two see of each other, the happier I shall be.’

‘Abi—’

‘Mrs J.—’

She waved a plump hand at them. ‘Oh, get on with you both. We need cheering up in the romantic department after all we’ve been through.’

Elinor put her wine glass down on the nearest kitchen counter. Tommy Palmer, she noticed, was holding his son’s tiny feet and smiling down at what the cream pashmina hid from view. She said, ‘I’ll just go and check on Marianne.’

Bill touched her arm. ‘Can I help? Can I do anything?’

She shook her head. ‘No. But thank you.’

‘Just call me. If you need anything …’

‘Of course.’

He looked at her, suddenly intent. ‘Give her my love,’ he said.

Across the room, Charlotte and Mrs Jennings rolled their eyes at one another. ‘Not a hope,’ Charlotte mouthed at her mother.

Tommy Palmer turned his gaze from his son’s shrouded head to his wife’s face. His expression was reproving. ‘Don’t you, either of you,’ he said clearly, ‘be so sure.’

Someone, somewhere in the cloudy confusion of Bill Brandon’s dreams, was knocking. He couldn’t tell where the knocking was coming from, or what it was made by, but it was persistent, on and on, and then somebody was calling as well as knocking, calling him by name and suddenly his eyes were open and he was abruptly awake, staring into the darkness of the single bedroom at Cleveland Cottage where Tommy Palmer kept his weekend clothes.

He was, as a soldier, alert and out of bed in a second, grateful to have remembered – being in someone else’s house – to have put on at least pyjama bottoms the night before. The knocking was on his bedroom door, and the voice was Elinor’s. He flung it open and said, in a voice that was not quite as steady and purposeful as he had intended, ‘Marianne?’

Elinor was dressed in an oversized T-shirt and her eyes were enormous with distress. ‘Oh, Bill, thank goodness, so sorry to wake you, but she’s awful, awful, can’t really speak, all blue round her mouth, like Dad was, like—’

He put a hand out and gripped her shoulder. ‘We need an ambulance.’

‘Her nebuliser doesn’t seem to be working. We’ve tried and tried. I think she needs oxygen, like – like Dad did. And that beta agonist stuff. Bill, I’m frightened—’

He stepped forward and, oblivious to his naked chest, put his arms round her. He said, as reassuringly as he could, ‘I’m going to ring the B.R.I. – the hospital in Bristol. I’m going to do it right now. Is she wheezing?’

‘Hardly at all.’

He let her go. ‘Then it’s severe.’

She gazed at him. ‘How do you know that?’

He gave her the ghost of a smile. He said, ‘I’ve learned a lot about asthma since I met your sister. I – I made it my business to. Now scoot back to her. I’ll come in the minute I know an ambulance is on the way.’

The far end of the landing, another door opened. Mrs Jennings, upholstered in a quilted dressing gown patterned with peonies, her hair endearingly on end, emerged into the dim light Charlotte now left burning all night as there was a baby in the house.

‘Elinor?’

Elinor swung round. ‘Is it Marianne?’

Elinor nodded, unable to speak. Mrs Jennings came quickly down the landing. She put her arms round Elinor as Bill Brandon vanished back into his bedroom to find his phone. She said, ‘You poor child.’

‘It’s Marianne that’s poor—’

‘It depends’, Abigail said, patting Elinor’s back, ‘on who you think has really borne most.’

Elinor relaxed a little against the comfort of the peony quilting. ‘Oh, Mrs J …’

‘I know, dear,’ Abigail Jennings said, still patting, ‘I know.’

‘I’m going to cry.’

‘Why don’t you?’

‘It’s just – just like Dad, hardly speaking, battling for breath …’

‘There, there, dear.’

From the bedroom, Tommy Palmer’s Madras bathrobe now added to his pyjamas, Bill Brandon emerged, his phone in his hand. He looked at Mrs Jennings with approval. He said, ‘Ambulance is on the way.’

Elinor tried to speak, and nothing happened. Her throat seemed to be full of something that obstructed her muscles, and tears were pouring out of her eyes and soaking into Mrs Jennings’s shoulder.

‘There, there,’ Mrs Jennings said again, patting. ‘There, there. Poor girl.’

Bill Brandon put his phone in the bathrobe pocket. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back to the patient, shall we?’

‘Oh my God,’ Charlotte Palmer said to her mother. ‘Intensive care! I can’t believe it! One minute she’s got a cold coming, and she gets wet in the rain, the next it’s ambulances at dawn. Mummy, I didn’t hear a thing. Not one thing. Isn’t that awful? But when Tomkins sleeps through, which is practically never, we all sleep like the proverbial. But honestly. All that drama and we hear not a dicky bird.’

Mrs Jennings, still in her peony dressing gown, but with her hair combed into its customary bouffant, and her pearl earrings added for dignity, was cradling her grandson.

‘There was nothing you could do, Char. Nothing. Elinor sensibly alerted Bill and there was an ambulance here in seventeen minutes – I timed it – and she got whisked off. Elinor and Bill went with her, thank goodness, Elinor looking simply terrible, poor lamb. I don’t think she’d even brushed her hair.’

Tommy Palmer was absorbed in reading the weekend edition of the Financial Times on his iPad. He said, without looking up, ‘And who would have noticed or cared if she had?’

Mrs Jennings continued to look down at her grandson. She said imperturbably, ‘She never thinks of herself, that girl. It’s time she did. Do too much for other people and all they do is take you for utter granted. At least Bill sees what a darling she is.’

‘Mummy,’ Charlotte said, hunting for coffee in her well-stocked cupboard. ‘Mummy, just give over on that topic, would you? Bill Brandon only has eyes for Marianne.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘He thinks Ellie is wonderful, Mummy. Which she is. But he doesn’t fancy her.’

Mrs Jennings said firmly to her grandson, ‘It isn’t all about sex.’

‘It mostly is,’ Tommy said, his eyes still on his screen. ‘And if it isn’t, it should be.’