And all this was without the added factor of (g): that he was obviously crap at relationships, had only just come out of the two most disastrous examples anyone could imagine, and the odds of him getting it right with someone else on the basis of a lengthy car journey that had begun because he couldn’t think how to get out of it were lower than a very low thing indeed.

Plus the whole horse conversation had been, frankly, weird.

And these points could be supplemented by the wilder possibilities that he had completely failed to consider. What if Jess was a psycho, and all that stuff about not wanting a relationship was just a way to reel him in? She didn’t seem that sort of girl, sure.

But neither had Deanna.

Ed sat pondering this and other tangled things and wishing he could talk a single one of them through with Ronan, until the sky turned orange then neon blue and his leg became completely dead and his hangover, which had formerly manifested itself as a vague tightness at his temples, turned into an emphatic, skull-crushing headache. Ed tried not to look at the girl sleeping in the bed a few feet away as the outline of her face and body under the duvet became clear in the encroaching light.

And he tried not to feel wistful for a time when having sex with a woman you liked had just been about having sex with a woman you liked and hadn’t involved a series of equations so complex and unlikely that probably only Tanzie could have got anywhere near understanding them.

‘Come on. We’re running late.’ Jess shepherded Nicky – a pale, T-shirt-clad zombie – towards the car.

‘I didn’t get any breakfast.’

‘That’s because you wouldn’t get up when I told you. We’ll get you something on the way. Tanze. Tanzie? Has the dog been to the loo?’

The morning sky was the colour of lead and seemed to have descended to a point around their ears. A faint drizzle promised heavier rain. Ed sat in the driving seat as Jess ran around, organizing, scolding, promising, in a fury of activity. She had been like this since he’d woken, groggily, from what seemed like twenty minutes’ sleep, folding and packing, dragging bags downstairs, supervising breakfast. He didn’t think she had met his eye once. Tanzie climbed silently into the back seat.

‘You okay?’ He yawned and looked at the little girl in the rear-view mirror.

She nodded silently.

‘Nerves?’

She didn’t say anything.

‘Been sick?’

She nodded.

‘It’s all the rage on this trip. You’ll be great. Really.’

She gave him the exact look he would have given any adult if they had said the same, then turned to stare out of the window, her face round and pale, her eyes mauve with exhaustion. Ed wondered how late she had stayed up revising.

‘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.