The miniature ladies had been coming to the Villa Soleil on Friday mornings for a year, ever since Mrs Burton suffered the stroke that made it impossible for her to attend the miniature meetings at the other ladies’ houses. On Beth’s first Friday, they alighted in the spacious high-ceilinged front room of the villa like bright birds, all chatter and flap. Caroline, Erica and Jane.

First names will be fine, darling, they told her, we don’t stand on ceremony out here. There used to be more of us, they said, ‘us’ meaning English ex-pats, but ..

. time and tide, they sighed, time and tide. And Brexit, said Erica.

Oh yes, and Brexit, agreed Jane and Caroline sadly. They double-cheek-kissed Mrs Burton (Beth didn’t think she’d ever be able to call her ‘Annie’) and settled in their usual places around the mahogany table, talking nineteen to the dozen as they hovered with their paint brushes and tweezers over the small-scale medieval French mountain village they were building. They giggled a surprising amount, at least the three visitors did, and Beth, only a fortnight into her agency job caring for silent, aphasic Mrs Burton, could already tell that Friday mornings were going to be a blessing on the week’s schedule.

All she needed to do, apart from carefully removing the dust cover from the diorama before they arrived at nine, was make their tea the way they each took their tea at ten thirty, and wheel it through on the trolley. Otherwise, Beth was free to sit at t.