I got on a plane to my mother’s hospital and my husband was eleven rows in front of me with my best friend. There was a note of hers in my handbag that she’d written on my fridge that morning.

I took a phone out of a man’s hand, face down, and I said:

“Give me that — come on, Dev. Not at a barbecue.”

And then, with my hand on his arm, warmly, in front of my sister and Corin’s brother and about four other people standing by that gate:

“You’ve had a few, mate. Go and sit down. You’ll say something you’ll regret.”

You’ve had a few.

He had had about two.

I know that because he was driving, and because Saskia told me so herself about forty minutes later, when I went and found her and said her husband was being odd.

And I want to put down what his face did when I said it, because I have it now and I did not have it then.

He did not argue.

A man who has been working up to something for a fortnight, who has been told in front of eight people that he is drunk, had about one second to decide whether to say I’ve had two, Fran in a garden full of his wife’s friends.