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accomplishments . . .’
    Recognising that the siblings were about to reach a critical mass and explode, Nina desperately tried to change the subject. ‘So, Holly, you, uh . . . like sending text messages, huh?’
    To her astonishment, Holly didn’t consider the question to be as hopelessly lame an attempt at distraction as Chase and Elizabeth obviously did. ‘Oh, yeah! I mean, I prefer instant messaging, because who doesn’t? But Mum won’t let me on the computer much any more because I’ve got exams coming up, so I have to use texts, but my phone’s so old and rubbish.’ She held the offending item out as proof. To Nina, it looked a perfectly capable piece of technology, but she imagined someone half her age would have a very different idea of a good phone. ‘I mean, it doesn’t even have video! All my friends have better phones than me. It’s embarrassing.’
    ‘It’s just a phone , Holly,’ said Elizabeth, exasperated. ‘It makes calls, it does texts, that’s all you need. Anything else is just an expensive gimmick.’
    ‘But gimmicks are part of the fun, right?’ Chase said, winking at Holly. He pointed at a mobile phone shop up the street. ‘Tell you what, seeing as I didn’t bring you a present, how about I get you a new phone? Something flashy, with all the bells and whistles. Including video.’
    Holly’s eyes widened. ‘Really?’
    ‘Yeah, course! Wouldn’t be much of an uncle if I couldn’t do something cool for my niece, would I?’ He led her towards the shop, looking back at Nina. ‘I’ll give you a call when we’re done, come and find you. Shouldn’t be too long, we’ll just get whatever’s the most expensive!’
    Nan watched them go with an admiring smile. ‘He always was such a nice lad. It’s lovely to see him again. Don’t you think, Elizabeth?’
    Elizabeth’s only answer was silence, but Nina didn’t need to hear any words to know that she could have quite happily killed Chase at that moment - and probably his fiancée as well. ‘So, ah,’ she said weakly, unable to endure her future sister-in-law’s thunderous glare any longer, ‘what’s the view like from that balloon?’
     
    The view from five hundred feet up was actually quite impressive, Nina decided. The park below was a long finger of grass and trees with a small river running down its length, angling away to the glinting sea a quarter of a mile to the south. It was encircled by weaving, narrow roads - apparently the broad avenues and straight lines of Manhattan were anathema to English town planners. She could even see her hotel, a recently built octagon of pinkish stone overlooking the pier to the west of the park’s far end. The only blot on the landscape was a hulking glass-fronted block dominating the pier approach, a disused Imax cinema which, according to Nan’s ongoing and increasingly vitriolic tirade against it, had once been voted the ugliest building in England. Nina nodded and made ‘Uh-huh’ sounds at appropriate moments, though she had to concede that Chase’s grandmother did have a point.
    But even that rant was preferable to the alternative. The view had done nothing to defuse the argument between Chase and his sister. And in the confines of the balloon’s gondola, there was no way to escape it.
    ‘I am so mad at you right now,’ Elizabeth hissed to Chase. Holly and Nan were at the opposite side of the gondola, just out of earshot, but Nina was an unwilling eavesdropper.
    ‘For fuck’s sake, Lizzie,’ Chase replied irritably. ‘I bought my niece a present. So fucking what?’
    ‘Because you didn’t ask me, and if you had bothered to ask me, I would have told you not to, because the last thing Holly needs right now is yet another distraction when she needs to concentrate on her schoolwork.’
    ‘Nan said she was doing fine. So did you. Sounds like she’s doing okay.’
    ‘I don’t want her to do “okay”! She can do so much better than “okay”, Eddie! But she’s a