‘Five brothers!’ Surely one of them is single. Another version of him! An identical twin, perhaps? Perfect! She hadn’t made such a mistake in the cab. She’d just had a slight, understandable mix-up between brothers.

‘Yep. I’m the baby. We’re all married with kids now. Jake is the youngest of sixteen grandchildren.’

Of course not. There is no such thing as a single man. They’re all gone. They were sold out by the early Nineties.

‘Gosh. Fifteen cousins.’

Callum is re-filling Sophie’s wine glass with the sauvignon blanc. He takes a sip from his own glass and smacks his lips. ‘Even a philistine like me can tell this is really good wine.’

‘I’ve been trained since birth. My parents used to take me on wine-tasting trips for school holidays.’

‘That’s the difference. My parents took me to Budgewoi Caravan Park. Were you a spoiled little princess?’

‘If you hid a pea under my mattress I wouldn’t sleep a wink.’

This is most certainly not chemistry. This is a beautiful woman’s husband who is so happily married he can afford to be nice to plain, single women.

Sophie looks down at the baby and finds herself doing that thing women do where they ask babies who can’t talk questions meant for other people.

‘Who do you look like, Jake? Your mum or your dad?’

Callum obligingly answers her, leaning forward to look at the baby in Sophie’s arms. She can smell his aftershave. ‘I’m hoping he’ll get Grace’s looks rather than mine, for obvious reasons. I don’t think he really looks like either of us at the moment. I think he most closely resembles an elderly monkey.’

‘A little monkey, eh?’ Sophie bares her teeth in a monkey-face and makes a chattering sound at Jake. The baby looks up at her with wandering dark eyes, and all of a sudden they pause and it’s like he’s caught sight of his first ever fellow human being. His eyes lock on to hers and a corner of his mouth curves up tentatively in a wonky attempt at a grin.

‘Was that a smile?’ Callum leans forward on his chair, his arm pressing against Sophie’s. ‘I think that was his first smile!’

Jake’s eyes waver and then focus on Callum. He gives his father an even bigger lopsided smile. This time his eyes crinkle at the corners. Callum almost tips forward off the chair in ecstasy. ‘Hello there, mate! You don’t look like a monkey at all! No, you’re a good-looking guy!’

There is a tender, teary feeling in Sophie’s chest.

Grace walks in at that moment, carrying a gigantic platter of food.

Callum grabs Grace around the waist. ‘He smiled at us! You should have seen it. Sophie made a monkey face and he smiled for the first time! Do it again, Sophie!’

Feeling like an idiot, Sophie makes a half-hearted monkey noise, thinking, I’m sure she’s really going to appreciate missing her baby’s first smile.

But the effort of trying out brand-new facial movements has obviously tired Jake out and he is suddenly fractious. As Grace leans towards him he throws back his small head and gives a screeching, red-faced wail.

‘Oh,’ says Grace.

Sophie expects her to take the baby from her, but she just gives a wintry smile and sits down on the other side of the dining-room table, indicating the platter.

‘Just a few starters. Those ones are tuna spring rolls, that’s bruschetta, of course, and those there are egg rolls with smoked salmon. The rest is self-explanatory, I think.’

‘Gosh,’ says Sophie feebly. The baby continues to cry and she experiments gamely with a few ineffectual rocking motions.

‘Let me take him, so you can eat,’ says Callum. He casually swoops the baby up and out of Sophie’s arms and plonks him over one broad shoulder, rapidly patting his large nappied bottom. The baby whimpers a bit and then stops crying. Callum caresses the back of Jake’s downy head and says, ‘You’ll have to smile for your mum later, or she’ll think we made it up.’

Grace is not even looking at her baby. Sophie has seen all types of new mothers: the ones with besotted, glazed-over eyes; the cool, casual ‘this is a piece of cake’ types; the teary, terrified ones, and the exhausted, overwhelmed ones who speak obsessively of how many hours’ sleep they managed the night before. Grace doesn’t seem to fit in any of those categories. She’s like a woman playing a mother in a moisturiser commercial. Actually, thinks Sophie, she’s quite weird.

Sophie hears herself start to gush. ‘This food looks wonderful, Grace. That’s so impressive when you have a new baby. I have some friends who say they don’t even have time to get dressed in the morning, or go to the toilet, or comb their hair!’

‘Oh, well, none of this was very difficult.’

‘Grace’s family take food very seriously,’ says Callum. He takes an enormous bite of an egg roll. ‘It’s like my family and music. What’s your family’s obsession, Sophie?’

‘I don’t know if we’ve got one. Oh, yes, I know. We’re hedonists. We take pleasure very seriously. My parents have always meticulously planned their weekends for maximum pleasure.’

‘They sound great,’ says Callum. ‘My parents get nervy if things are going too well for too long.’

‘What’s the opposite of hedonism?’ says Grace. ‘Masochism, I guess. That’s my mother. She plans her life for maximum misery.’

She is smiling at Sophie, folding a piece of prosciutto in half and wrapping it around a sun-dried tomato. She is not weird at all. She is perfectly normal. Sophie is obviously prejudiced because of her beauty. Beautiful people probably suffer from terrible discrimination just like other minority groups. Sophie should think of Grace’s beauty as a handicap, like blushing. Ha, ha.

‘Isn’t your mum travelling around the world at the moment?’ asks Sophie. ‘That doesn’t sound too masochistic.’

‘Everywhere is too dirty, too expensive, too hot or just too different. She’s revelling in a sort of exotic, international misery now.’

‘I think he’s dropped off.’ Callum turns his shoulder slightly to show them Jake’s flushed, sleeping face. ‘I’ll put him down.’

‘No, no,’ says Grace. ‘I’ll do it.’

She disappears from the room with Jake and is gone for ages. Callum refills Sophie’s glass again and starts interrogating her about her taste in music. She receives a thumbs-up for Cowboy Junkies, a quizzical eyebrow for Pearl Jam and a pained wince for Shania Twain. When she reveals that she has the soundtrack to Titanic he writhes, waving his arms at her to stop while he chokes on a mouthful of wine.