No sooner had Bridget imparted her news than Romy shouted ‘POO!’ and needed her bottom wiping. I’d barely promised Bridget I’d be home by five at the latest when she hung up and my phone vibrated again.

‘Hi, Seth.’ I waited for him to relay the same bulletin that my sister had, and was taken aback when he said, ‘Tilly, I know this is asking a lot, but my mother is keen to see you in action with Jack before she goes home, and I wondered whether you might be free to come over.’

A knot tightened in my stomach. ‘When is she going?’ There was no way I could convince Felicity that I was a bona fide nanny – or magically gain a qualification in childcare overnight.

‘Around five,’ said Seth.

‘Today?’

‘My father just called her to say there’s a problem on the work front she has to get back for.’ His tone conveyed an apology, mild despair and a touch of irritation. ‘I hate asking, but since we’ve set this particular ball in motion…’

‘Aren’t you taking my sister out this evening?’ I said. ‘She just phoned me.’

‘Oh, Christ.’ It sounded as if he’d already forgotten. ‘I’d assumed my mother would be here to babysit Jack.’ He made a frustrated noise. ‘I’ll have to call her and cancel.’

‘Don’t do that,’ I said quickly, imagining Bridget’s disappointment – which she’d no doubt blame me for. ‘I’ll look after him.’

‘You will?’ I couldn’t work out whether he sounded hopeful. ‘But I’ve already asked you to come over and pretend to be Jack’s nanny, it’s too much to expect you to babysit for real.’

‘I don’t mind,’ I said, deciding quickly. There was nothing I could do at the café for the moment, other than hang around. ‘Just give me half an hour and I’ll be there.’

I scrambled into my car, pretending not to notice that Rufus was watching from his living room window, and drove past the tightly packed houses to the end of the street, where I stopped and pulled on the handbrake. It felt as if there wasn’t enough oxygen in the car, but when I opened the window cold air rushed in, so I closed it again and called Gwen to tell her I wouldn’t be coming back. Jerry answered the phone. ‘She’s having a one-to-one with Dickens while it’s quiet,’ he said, relief seeping into his voice. ‘I told her I’d heard him miaowing as if he was missing her, and she shot off to give him a cuddle.’

‘Nice one.’ I smiled as I imagined his shock when Gwen made her move on him at the party. ‘You are coming on Christmas Eve?’ My smile faltered as I pictured everyone turning up to find the function room cold, damp, empty and dark.

‘I expect so.’ He gave one of the world-weary sighs I’d frequently overheard since he started working at the café. ‘Gwen’s asked me to help serve drinks, and I don’t have anywhere else to be so I thought, why not?’ It struck me he could have invented somewhere else to be, and I wondered again whether he was as impervious to Gwen’s ‘charms’ as he made out.

‘Tell Gwen I’ve got some things to sort out for the function room, but that everything’s in hand, will you, Jerry?’

‘Will do,’ he promised, and released another hefty sigh. Maybe he was short of oxygen too.

‘Thanks,’ I said, and after calling my broken-armed electrician, to be told he was still trying his best to find a replacement, I resisted the temptation to Google how to behave like a nanny, and drove to Seashell Cove with an image in my head of Mary Poppins sliding down a banister, holding her umbrella aloft.

‘Thanks for this.’ Seth held the car door open as I got out. I’d parked beside his car on a patch of flattened grass at the side of the cottage. There was a silver Land Rover there that I guessed belong to Felicity, and I had to make a mental adjustment as I’d pictured her being chauffeured around, rather than driving herself.

‘Thanks for asking my sister out to dinner.’

‘I said I would.’ He didn’t seem too thrilled in the flesh, but I knew that once he clapped eyes on Bridget, he’d realise I’d done him a big favour.

‘Nice outfit.’ I eyed his furry trapper hat and fleece-lined parka with slight envy. I’d almost forgotten that a British winter could be just as unforgiving as a Canadian one. ‘Or is it another disguise?’

He gave a sheepish grin. ‘I’ve been for a walk,’ he said, glancing around him. The sky was a chalky-white that seemed to go on for miles, and the sea was thrashing the empty beach below. ‘I needed to get out of the house.’

‘No Jack?’ I followed his gaze back to the cottage.

‘My mother’s giving him a haircut.’

‘I didn’t realise she was a hairdresser.’

His smile was fleeting. ‘She actually runs an equestrian centre,’ he said. I could easily see her bossing around young, posh girls on ponies. ‘She’s not as hands on these days, which gives her more time to interfere in my life,’ he went on. ‘And I don’t think she realises there are hair salons in this part of the world.’

‘Don’t you have any say in that sort of thing?’

‘Not if I want Jack to stay with me.’

‘Does he have any say in the matter?’

‘Hang on, you have met my mother?’ He tilted his head, his expression warily playful. ‘Nobody has a say when she’s set her mind on something.’

‘Well, maybe they should.’

‘Oh boy.’ Seth dropped his head down in mock-despair. ‘Don’t go thinking you can change her,’ he said. ‘Many have tried and been wounded in the process.’

‘How did Jack’s mum get on with her?’

‘Don’t even get me started.’ He dug his hands deep into his coat pockets. ‘She never thought Charlotte was good enough for me, and she only met her once.’

‘At your wedding?’ I had no idea why I was asking, especially while standing outside with freezing toes and glowing ears. At least, it felt like my ears were glowing. A benefit of growing my hair out was that they weren’t always visible.

‘At our wedding,’ he agreed, and seemed to shudder. ‘Let’s just say, Mum wept through the ceremony, and they weren’t tears of happiness.’ My bubble of sympathy for his wife popped when he added, ‘Mind you, Charlotte didn’t do herself any favours by telling my mum her outfit made her look fat, then announcing that she’d found out that morning that she wasn’t really pregnant.’

I stared. ‘You married her because she was pregnant?’ I was focusing on the least bad part of his admission. ‘That’s a bit old school, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t get me wrong, I was madly in love and thought I was ready to settle down,’ he said, moving from foot to foot in a subconscious attempt to keep warm. ‘She was gorgeous too, she’d appeared on America’s Next Top Model—’

‘Oh, what a cliché,’ I couldn’t resist saying. ‘Sports star meets model and they don’t live happily ever after.’

To his credit, he looked a bit shamefaced. ‘I know,’ he said, mouth turning down. ‘I was a living cliché back then and the terrible thing is, deep down, I knew it.’

‘So… Jack?’

‘He came along the following year.’ His face softened. ‘Things were really good after that for a while, he brought out the best in us both, but I was hardly ever at home, and… another cliché alert… Charlotte ended up having an affair and so did I and—’

‘What the blazes are the pair of you doing out here?’

We started violently as Felicity hurried over, sporting a pair of green wellies, her expression as flinty as if she’d caught us dancing naked. It hit me that she was the reason we’d been reluctant to go indoors, and why I’d been grilling Seth about his marriage – and probably why he’d responded.

‘You shouldn’t be over-familiar with the staff,’ she admonished Seth, and it took a second to realise she was referring to me.

‘Tilly isn’t staff,’ he said – which was at least true. ‘And it isn’t nineteen twenty-two, Mum. People don’t have staff, at least not in their homes.’

‘Of course they do,’ she snapped. ‘What else do you call cleaners, cooks, gardeners and so forth?’ I assumed she was referring to her own army of helpers, and wondered who the so forth were. Maybe she had a butler, and someone to operate the remote control for the television. ‘I wouldn’t call them friends, it blurs the boundaries.’

‘Staff sounds stuck up and snobbish,’ Seth persisted. ‘It’s embarrassing, Mum, and I won’t have you talking like that around Jack.’

It sounded like an old argument, and one Felicity didn’t seem keen to participate in. ‘Come on, Miss Campbell,’ she said to me.

‘Please call me Tilly.’

‘You’ll be no good to my grandson if you catch your death of cold.’ She scanned my duffel coat – the coat I’d been wearing the last time we met – and I supposed, in her world, there were a multitude of coats to be worn on different days, and in different situations. I wondered whether she’d have approved had I turned up in a grey, button-up jacket and ankle length skirt, and wished I had a more up-to-date reference than Mary Poppins. ‘What are you waiting for?’

A miracle. ‘Just letting you lead the way,’ I offered, extending my arm for her to go ahead. ‘There is rather a nip in the air.’ My voice sounded different. Was I starting to talk like Mary Poppins? Seth gave me a look, as if to say what the hell was that? but Felicity tightened the belt of her heavy cardigan and merely nodded. ‘Jack’s waiting,’ she said.

My heart juddered. ‘Does he know about all this?’ I whispered to Seth as we followed Felicity’s jaunty stride to the cottage.

He lowered his head close to mine without breaking his pace. ‘I asked him whether he’d mind you looking after him now and again and he said it’s fine.’

‘He did?’ I remembered his presence in the kitchen while we’d been talking. ‘Do you think he understands what’s going on?’

‘I’m sure he does.’ Seth slowed down. ‘He doesn’t say a lot, but I think he takes everything in. Even though we’ve not spoken about my mother having custody in front of him, I’ve a feeling he gets the gist.’

‘You don’t think she might have talked to him behind your back?’

He looked stricken. ‘God, I hope not,’ he said. ‘But I think he would have said something if she had.’

‘And you haven’t spoken to him openly about it?’

Seth shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start, to be honest, and I don’t want to confuse him any more than he probably already is.’

‘But what if he’d like to stay with your parents?’

He stopped abruptly. ‘As long as I’ve breath in my body, I’ll fight to keep my son with me.’ His voice was low and urgent. ‘There’s no way he’s going to end up living with my mother.’

‘Now what are you two talking about?’ Felicity was in the doorway, her tone bristling with impatience. ‘Anything that needs to be discussed can surely be done where it’s warm?’

We looked at each other a moment longer, Seth’s face a determined mask, before turning as one and heading into the cottage. Inside, Felicity’s team of workmen were banging and hammering, and a smell of emulsion wafted from the nearest downstairs room. I sniffed appreciatively and Felicity gave me a funny look. At least, I assumed it was a funny look. It was hard to tell in the dingy hallway – though I guessed it wouldn’t be so dingy once her team had worked their magic.

After she’d removed her wellingtons, and Seth had taken my coat and hung it with his on the banister – to his mother’s narrow-eyed disapproval – she said, ‘Jack’s in the drawing… I mean, living room.’ She flapped her hand and tutted. ‘I can’t get used to this place not having a drawing room,’ she said, flicking the overhead light on and glowering at the bulb.

Seth rolled his eyes in such a teenage way, I had to hide a smile. ‘Most normal houses don’t have a drawing room, Mum.’

‘That’s rich, coming from you, when you had a… what did you call it?’ She puckered her cinnamon-lipsticked mouth. ‘A mezzanine floor at your place in Italy, not to mention a games room and a cinema.’ She directed a snooty gaze my way. ‘A mezzanine is a raised platform that creates additional space, dividing the floors—’

‘I know what a mezzanine is.’ I was about to add that I’d worked in a new-build in Vancouver with a mezzanine floor (one of the few projects I’d committed to while I was there) when I remembered I was supposed to be a nanny, not an interior designer. ‘It’s… quite a common word around here.’ It was clearly a ridiculous statement. No one would drop the word mezzanine into conversation unless they happened to have one, or to be building one.

Seth’s eyebrows rose and his lips clamped together, while Felicity studied me closely, perhaps trying to work out whether or not I was taking the mickey out of her.

‘Your place in Italy sounds amazing,’ I said to Seth, after a long stretch of silence broken only by one of the workmen whistling ‘Jingle Bells’ over and over. ‘Not at all the sort of place I’d expect a champion racing driver to live.’

To my surprise, Felicity picked up on what I’d intended to be a lightly teasing tone and gave a bark of laughter. ‘Everyone can see your playboy lifestyle for the shallow pool it was,’ she said to Seth.

‘Was being the operative word,’ he replied, and I realised with a lurch that I’d given the impression I was being sarcastic; looking down on him like Felicity was, and in much the same way that Bridget looked down at me. ‘This is my life now.’ He jabbed a finger at the floor. ‘Where I’m staying.’

‘But for how long?’ Felicity placed a well-manicured hand on the wall, as if to support herself. ‘That silly ex-girlfriend of yours called the landline while you were out. I expect you’ll be back in Italy with her soon.’

‘Dad?’ We turned to see Jack, framed in the doorway of the living room, in dark blue jeans and a top with a Star Wars ship on the front. Beneath his newly cut fringe, his face was pale and tense. ‘I don’t want you to go away,’ he said.