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‘And I can’t?’ Irma asked airily but before Fleur could respond, she shrugged. ‘Fine. Is a dozen enough, my dear?’

Henry smiled wanly. ‘Perfect. Thank you, both. Always nice with a dark ale,’ he said, as though trying to appease each of the women in his life. He changed the subject. ‘Where’s your young man then, Fleur? Didn’t you say five?’

‘I did,’ she agreed, glancing at the clock as her father checked his gold fob watch. She knew it would tell him that Tom was running late.

‘Not a very good start, is it?’ Irma said, leaping onto any opportunity to wound. ‘I mean, here we all are, ready to receive. To keep one’s hosts waiting is just rude.’

Receive? Fleur wanted to laugh. Instead she stood. ‘I’ll go and look out for him, in case he’s lost,’ she said, glad to avoid the snide attacks and Irma’s pretentiousness.

Outside she scanned the street leading up towards Alberton and then the other way down to the port. There were plenty of people around, moving into and out of the pubs or cutting down streets on their way home, and traffic had thinned as it always did at this time. There was no familiar tall man striding towards her. She waited, all but counting the minutes until it was twenty past five. She knew something was wrong, but she had no choice but to return inside and do her best to rescue the situation.

‘No sign?’ Irma asked none too sweetly. ‘Fancy standing you up, Fleur. James Coglin didn’t.’

‘He also didn’t entertain me, include me, or even care about me. What he did do is bore me . . . when he wasn’t annoying me. Let me add, Irma, in case you think I’m being churlish’—she deliberately used a word she hoped Irma did not know—‘I bored and annoyed him just as much. We are not a good fit.’ She looked away from Irma to her father. ‘There is surely something amiss for Tom to do this.’

‘You barely know him, you admit yourself, so how can you possibly know what he may or may not do?’ Irma continued.

Fleur looked on with horror as her stepmother reached for a small bell and gave it a solid jangle. ‘I think we should get started. Your father needs his food.’

Nan hurried to the doorway, glancing at Fleur and then at the bell, which was now back on the small side table, but still beneath Irma’s bejewelled sausage fingers.

‘We’re ready for our meal to be served, Nan.’

‘But what about—’

‘Please get on, Nan!’ Irma snapped.

Their cook fled with another anxious look, blended with sympathy, towards Fleur.

‘Don’t yell at her,’ Fleur appealed to her stepmother. ‘She does her best. Irma, you are not going to do that with the bell each evening, surely?’

‘Why not? Saves me having to get up and fetch her.’

Fleur closed her eyes momentarily to find her calm. She would be playing right into Irma’s trap if she began to argue in front of her father. ‘Whatever suits you, Irma.’

‘Thank you, I shall suit myself,’ she said, and paused as Mae’s china sauceboat from the good set was plonked down on the table by Nan. ‘Oh good, I must admit I am a bit partial to gravy.’

They stood and made their way to the table, Henry gently shaking off Fleur’s help to find his seat.

The meal would have been delicious in its simple, clean flavours – and cosy in its familiarity – but Fleur might as well have been eating the wood shavings from the coffins. She tasted nothing but an increasing sourness that had begun to leak into her mouth. Something was wrong. There was no chance, she was sure, that Tom would have carelessly stood her up . . . not after the two of them had found each other again. It was as though Irma’s and Jimmy’s underhanded plotting was all part of fate’s plan to bring her and Tom together, from their first sweet kiss when she was eight to their deeper, more affectionate kiss of a couple of nights ago.

‘Coffee, Henry?’

Fleur came out of her thoughts and realised the meal was finished. She’d pushed her food around her plate, eating no more than a couple of mouthfuls.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Henry replied. ‘It gives me stomach acid.’

‘I’ll make it milky, dear, just as I take mine,’ Irma said with her back to them both.

Fleur stood and cleared the plates to the end of the table. ‘I’m very sorry that Tom is not with us. I feel something is wrong, so I’m going to look for him.’

Her father smiled with sympathy at her.

‘A woman should never chase a man, Fleur,’ Irma said, over her shoulder.

Fleur had hoped Tom would be around this evening to support her in her suspicions, but she would have to handle this alone. Despite her misgivings, she intended to test Irma – to test her own theory, in fact, which was feeling like a demon in her mind, laughing and pointing at her.

‘Here, let me help,’ Fleur said, arriving at Irma’s side.