Aha! It’s the Kook! Enigma is delighted to have the opportunity to give this silly fellow a piece of her mind. ‘I am the Munro Baby sitting right here in front of you,’ she says firmly. ‘I’m afraid you are a con-man, young man, and goodness me, you’re not dressed nearly warmly enough!’

Sophie looks at her watch. They say that the time it takes to recover from a relationship is half its length, and she dated Rick the Gorgeous Gardener for approximately three hours, so by her calculations she has approximately twenty more minutes of grieving left to do. She takes another mouthful of her mulled wine. It really is the best mulled wine she has ever had in her entire life. It gives her a warm spicy glow right at the centre of her chest, which is now spreading to her knees. She tries to identify the red wine they’ve used. Definitely a Shiraz.

She probes tentatively at her heart. Yep, she’s over him. Ahead of time! The man was entirely inappropriate. They were completely incompatible. He didn’t ‘especially like eating out’! He got up at six a.m. and did yoga each morning! How irritating. He was a vegetarian! She couldn’t stand vegetarians. Clearly, he wasn’t the ‘young man’ mentioned in Aunt Connie’s letter. He was a red herring. A vegetarian red-herring. Now, where is that Ian the Sweet Solicitor? He’s meant to be dropping by tonight. Sophie has always had a very clear, very definite preference for Ian. Could it be that Aunt Connie had a premonition that Grace was going to leave Callum and she actually meant…? It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility, was it? Oh, yes, Sophie, Connie was really hoping that Grace and Callum’s marriage would break up just after they’d had a new baby. I’m sure she would have approved of that. Definitely. Good one. You THIRTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD LOSER.

‘Sophie! Hi!’

It’s Thomas and Deborah, and baby Lily in a stroller–a stern message from the cosmos about thinking of breaking up happy families, when you could have been the mummy in this one and you let the chance go because you thought you could do so much better. The three of them are wearing matching raspberry-coloured jumpers. Lily is an adorable munchkin with creamy skin and huge chocolatey eyes. Looking at her, Sophie experiences one of those unexpectedly painful bursts of longing and regret that makes her dig her nails into the palms of her hands. Stuffed it up, buttercup.

‘Well, hello there! Let me get you all some fairy floss,’ says Sophie.

‘Oh, no, Lily is much too young for fairy floss!’ Deborah leaps in front of Lily’s stroller with arms outspread to save her child’s life.

‘Gosh, just in the nick of time,’ says Sophie. ‘I was about to ram it down her throat.’

Thomas, Deborah and Lily all stare blankly at her, and Sophie laughs merrily to try and make it sound like that was a clever witticism rather than the bitter barb of a childless ex-girlfriend.

‘How are you, Sophie?’ asks Thomas stiffly. ‘All settled in to the house?’

‘Yes, I am. I’m very happy.’ She overdoes the charm trying to make up for her earlier remark. ‘I’m so grateful to Aunt Connie. I’m very…blessed.’

Blessed? Where did she unearth such a word? She sounds like a middle-aged spinster in a cardigan and pearls. She is, of course, a middle-aged spinster in a fairy costume.

‘Good!’ Thomas rubs his hands together like a country minister. ‘Great!’

Sophie has a sudden memory of sitting on a kitchen bench with her legs wrapped around Thomas’s waist and watching his pumping bu**ocks reflected in the kitchen window. They had both been proud of themselves for having sex in the kitchen because it was proof of a proper movie-style passion (although they never did it again). Afterwards Thomas had made her fantastic scrambled eggs with Tabasco sauce and she had really thought she loved him. It is so strange that you can end up having such polite, awkward conversations with somebody with whom you once shared such intimate moments. She feels this is so interesting that it really should be commented upon, and nearly does, before realising it is perhaps not appropriate and perhaps she is a little tipsy. A drunken Fairy Floss Fairy is probably not good for Scribbly Gum Island’s corporate identity.

She notices that Deborah is also holding a glass of mulled wine. ‘Deborah!’ she cries rapturously. ‘Isn’t this wine extraordinarily good?’

Deborah grudgingly smacks her lips. ‘It is quite flavoursome.’

Thomas frowns. ‘Not enough nutmeg. Too much lemon.’

‘That’s exactly what Veronika said!’ Sophie feels suddenly very fond of them both and turns to Deborah. ‘Don’t you just love the way this family talks about food? They get these irritable, earnest expressions, like scientists.’

Deborah opens and shuts her mouth. She breathes in deeply through her nostrils as if she’s about to sneeze. Then she says, ‘I’m the sort of person who says exactly what she thinks, and I think I should say this.’

‘Deb!’ Thomas’s face contorts and his arm shoots out and grabs her elbow as if to save her from falling off a cliff. Some wine spills onto Deborah’s hand and she glares at him. ‘Now look what you made me do!’

‘We’ll get you some more!’ says Sophie helpfully. ‘Thomas, why don’t you get us both some more?’

‘Because I’m starting to suspect they’ve overdone it on the brandy,’ says Thomas.

‘Rubbish!’ says Deborah.

‘Oh definitely not!’ says Sophie.

‘Oh Jesus,’ says Thomas.

Deborah drains the rest of her glass, hands it to Thomas, licks her lips and says to Sophie, ‘He’s still in love with you. Did you know that? You’re the love of his life.’

‘Where are you?’ asks Ron. ‘Tell me where you are, right now.’

He has become icy calm. He is going to find this man and kill him with a single, efficient blow to the head.

‘No need to get your knickers in a knot, Ron. We’re here at the Hilton. Why, do you want to come and watch? It’s no problem.’

‘COME AND WATCH?’

Ron slams his expensive mobile phone to the ground and grinds it beneath his heel, much to the pleasure of a group of boys who assume he’s a street performer beginning some sort of violent skit.

‘Oh Deborah, I’m not, I know that I’m not!’ says Sophie.

‘She’s not,’ says Thomas. ‘I swear to you she’s not.’