‘Right.’ Jess shoved Norman into the back seat. He brought with him an almost overwhelming scent of wet dog. She checked that Tanzie had done up her belt, climbed into the passenger seat and finally turned to Ed. Her expression was unreadable. ‘Let’s go.’

Ed’s car no longer looked like his car. In just three days its immaculate cream interior had acquired new scents and stains, a fine sprinkling of dog hair, jumpers and shoes that now lived on seats or wedged underneath them. The floor crunched underfoot with dropped sweet wrappers and crisps. The radio stations were no longer on settings he understood.

But something had happened while he had been driving along at forty m.p.h. The faint sense that he should actually have been somewhere else had begun to fade, almost without him being aware of it. He had stopped trying to anticipate what was going to happen next, stopped dreading the next phone call, stopped wondering whether there was any chance that Deanna Lewis would decide not to drag him down with her … and he had just started existing. Ed Nicholls drove mile after easy mile through the early-morning mist, slow enough to notice the landmarks, the subtle changes in landscape, the lives around him in little market towns, huge cities. He found himself glancing at the people they passed, buying food, driving their cars, walking their children to and from school in worlds completely different from his own, knowing nothing of his own little drama several hundred miles south. It made it all seem reduced in size, a model village of problems rather than something that loomed over him.

He drove on, and despite the pointed silence from the woman beside him, Nicky’s sleeping face in the rear-view mirror (‘Teenagers don’t really do Before Eleven o’Clock,’ Tanzie explained) and the occasional foul eruptions of the dog, it slowly dawned on him, as they crept closer to their destination, that he was feeling a complete lack of the relief he had expected to feel at the prospect of having his car, his life, back to himself. What he felt was more complex. Ed fiddled with the speakers, so that the music was loudest in the rear seats and temporarily silent in the front.

‘You okay?’

Jess didn’t look round. ‘I’m fine.’

Ed glanced behind him, making sure nobody was listening. ‘About last night,’ he began.

‘Forget it.’

He wanted to tell her that he regretted it. He wanted to tell her that his body had actually hurt with the effort of not climbing back into that sagging single bed. But what would have been the point? Like she’d said the previous evening, they were two people who had no reason to see each other ever again. ‘I can’t forget it. I wanted to explain –’

‘Nothing to explain. You were right. It was a stupid idea.’ She tucked her legs under her and stared away from him out of the window.

‘It’s just my life is too –’

‘Really. It’s not an issue. I just …’ she let out a deep breath ‘… I just want to make sure we get to the Olympiad on time.’

‘But I don’t want us to end it all like this.’

‘There’s nothing to end.’ She put her feet on the dashboard. It felt like a statement. ‘Let’s go.’

‘How many miles is it to Aberdeen?’ Tanzie’s face appeared between the front seats.

‘What, left?’

‘No. From Southampton.’

Ed pulled his phone from his jacket and handed it to her. ‘Look it up on the Maps app.’

She tapped the screen, her brow furrowed. ‘About five hundred and eighty?’

‘Sounds about right.’

‘So if we’re doing forty miles an hour we’d have had to do at least six hours’ driving a day. And if I didn’t get sick, we could have done it …’

‘In a day. At a push.’

‘One day.’ Tanzie digested this, her eyes trained on the Scottish hillsides in the distance ahead. ‘But we wouldn’t have had such a nice time then, would we?’

Ed glanced sideways at Jess. ‘No, we wouldn’t.’

It took a moment before Jess’s gaze slid back towards him. ‘No, sweetheart,’ she said, after a beat. And her smile was oddly rueful. ‘No, we wouldn’t.’

The car ate the miles sleekly and efficiently. They crossed the Scottish border, and Ed tried – failed – to raise a cheer. They stopped once for Tanzie to go to the loo, once twenty minutes later for Nicky to go (‘I can’t help it. I didn’t want to go when Tanze did’) and three times for Norman (two were false alarms). Jess sat silently beside him, checking her watch and chewing at her nails. She was still wearing flip-flops and he wondered fleetingly if her feet were cold. Nicky gazed groggily out of the window at the empty landscape, at the few flinty houses set into rolling hills. Ed wondered what would happen to him after this was over. He wanted to suggest fifty other things to help him, but he tried to imagine someone suggesting things to him at the same age, and guessed he would have taken no notice at all. He wondered how Jess would keep him safe when they returned home.

The phone rang and he glanced over, his heart sinking. ‘Lara.’

‘Eduardo. Baby. I need to talk to you about this roof.’

He was aware of Jess’s sudden rigidity, the flicker of her gaze. He wished, suddenly, that he hadn’t chosen to answer the call.

‘Lara, I’m not going to discuss this now.’

‘It’s not a lot of money. Not for you. I spoke to my solicitor and he says it would be nothing for you to pay for it.’

‘I told you before, Lara, we made a final settlement.’

He was suddenly conscious of the acute stillness of three people in the car.

‘Eduardo. Baby. I need to sort this with you.’

‘Lara –’

Before he could say anything more, Jess reached over and picked up the phone. ‘Hello, Lara,’ she said. ‘Jess here. I’m awfully sorry but he can’t pay for your roof, so there’s really no point in ringing him any more.’

A short silence. Then an explosive: ‘Who is this?’

‘I’m his new wife. Oh – and he’d like his Chairman Mao picture back. Perhaps just leave it with his lawyer. Okay? In your own time. Thanks so much.’

The resulting silence had the same quality as the few seconds before an atomic explosion. But before any of them could hear what happened next, Jess flipped the off button, and handed it back to him. He took it gingerly, and turned it off.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I think.’

‘You’re welcome.’ She didn’t look at him when she spoke.

Ed glanced into his rear-view mirror. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought Nicky was trying very hard not to laugh.

Somewhere between Edinburgh and Dundee, on a narrow, wooded lane, they slowed and stopped for a herd of cows in the road. The animals moved around the car, gazing in at its inhabitants with vague curiosity, a moving black sea, eyes rolling in woolly black heads. Norman stared back, his body rigid with silent, confused outrage. Tanzie took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, gazing back at them, half blind.

‘Aberdeen Angus,’ said Nicky.

Suddenly, without warning, Norman hurled his whole body, snarling and growling at the window. The car physically jolted to one side and his deafening bark bounced off the interior, amplified in the confined space. The back seat became a chaotic mass of arms and noise and writhing dog. Nicky and Jess fought to reach him.

‘Mum!’

‘Norman! Stop!’ The dog was on top of Tanzie, his face hard against the window. Ed could just make out her pink jacket, flailing underneath him.

Jess lunged over the seat at the dog, grabbing for his collar. They dragged Norman back down from the window. He whined, shrill and hysterical, straining at their grasp, great gobs of drool spraying across the interior.

‘Norman, you big idiot! What the hell –’

‘He’s never seen a cow before.’ Tanzie, struggling upright, always defending him.

‘Jesus, Norman.’

‘You okay, Tanze?’

‘I’m fine.’

The cows continued to part around the car, unmoved by the dog’s outburst. Through the now steamed-up windows they could just make out the farmer at the rear, walking slowly and impassively, with the same lumbering gait as his bovine charges. He gave the barest of nods as he passed, as if he had all the time in the world. Norman whined and pulled against his collar.

‘I’ve never seen him like that before.’ Jess straightened her hair and blew out through her cheeks. ‘Perhaps he could smell beef.’

‘I didn’t know he had it in him,’ Ed said.

‘My glasses.’ Tanzie held up the twisted piece of metal. ‘Mum. Norman broke my glasses.’

It was a quarter past ten.

‘I can’t see anything without my glasses.’

Jess looked at Ed. Shit.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Grab a plastic bag. I’m going to have to put my foot down.’

They drove at speed, half frozen, the wind from the open windows a buffeting roar that thwarted conversation. The Scottish roads were wide and empty, and Ed drove so fast that the satnav had repeatedly to reassess its timing to their destination. Every minute they gained was an imaginary air punch in his head. Tanzie was sick twice. He refused to stop to allow her to vomit into the road.

‘She’s really ill.’

‘I’m fine,’ Tanzie kept saying, her face wedged into a plastic bag. ‘Really.’

‘You don’t want to stop, sweetheart? Just for a minute?’

‘No. Keep going. Bleurgh –’

There wasn’t time to stop. Not that this made the car journey any easier to bear. Nicky had turned away from his sister, his hand over his nose. Even Norman’s head was thrust as far out into the fresh air as he could get it.

Ed drove like someone in a luxury car advert, speeding through empty bends, along the winding base of ancient windswept hillsides. The car gripped the greasy roads as if it had been meant for this. He forgot he was cold, that his car interior was pretty much destroyed, his life a mess. There were moments, in that astonishing landscape, his whole being focused on driving as fast and as safely as he could, when it felt like an almost spiritual experience. A spiritual experience broken only by the occasional sound of a child gagging into a fresh plastic bag.