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poison-tester.
    The leggy puppy, whom Niall had named Beetroot, sat on Tash’s lap throughout and was stuffed with turkey breast. She munched happily, her white teeth and pink tongue working furiously, and showed no more signs of nausea, for which Tash was relieved, having no desire to change yet again.
    ‘Do you really like her?’ Alexandra asked again over Christmas pud, anxious not to inflict an unwanted burden upon her youngest daughter.
    ‘I love her – we love her.’ Tash grinned at Niall and then her mother. ‘I’m so sorry about Rooter, Mummy. He was a lovely character.’
    ‘’E smell like a pissoir ,’ Pascal pointed out, dousing the pudding in brandy for the third time and applying his lighter.
    The two magnums of champagne were polished off with wildly indulgent speed and followed by several bottles of Chianti which Niall had bought for the occasion and which Pascal, who was a Gallic wine snob, pronounced ‘undrinkable’.
    Etty by far out-drank anyone and became quite raucous over Niall’s sublime Irish coffee and Sainsbury’s discount petits fours. Her bearskin and fur discarded, she turned out to be wearing a rather creased silk handkerchief dress and to have Carmen waves as even as corrugated iron in her gun-grey hair. Her face flushed from the booze and the heat of the fire, she watched Tash and Niall with her clever green eyes, liking the way they touched so often, passed glances as instinctively as two old carpenters working a double-handed lathe together. They weren’t so silly and infatuated as to finish one another’s sentences and call each other by sickly nick-names, she noticed with approval, but they had a simpatico rhythm, a way of reacting to one another, which denoted people so similar they could almost share identical genes.
    As she settled in front of the fire with Alexandra and Pascal while the others started wrapping up for a cold, dark post-prandial walk with the kids, she caught her daughter’s hand and squeezed it.
    ‘I think we’re going to have another family wedding soon,’ she whispered in a very loud stage hiss, nudging her grey-pencilled eyebrows towards Tash who was trying to fit Tom into a pair of her wellies, and Niall who was tickling Tor until she dissolved into shrieking, delighted giggles.
    ‘Really?’ Alexandra looked terribly excited.
    ‘Oh, yes.’ Etty hiccuped slightly. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already asked her. I expect they’ll announce it tomorrow – with the whole family gathered.’
    ‘Gosh, do you think so?’ Alexandra found she couldn’t stop smiling. Whether it was from the champagne or her mother’s certainty, she couldn’t work out. Tash getting married to lovely Niall! The thought filled her with warm little shivers of hope.
    ‘What makes you so sure, Etty?’ Pascal puffed out his cheeks sceptically.
    ‘Once one reaches my grand age, chéri , one knows it all,’ she said haughtily. ‘Besides,’ she hissed under her breath, ‘she ees wearing a ring on her engagement finger. One of those modern, trendy designers, I think. Probably Tiffany’s.’
    ‘What?’ Alexandra and Pascal both craned around to gape, but Tash had pulled on her gloves and had Tom’s hand in one furry mitt, the door latch in the other.
    Sally, who hated walking and was afraid of the dark, plumped down beside her mother-in-law, certain that she had just caught the tail end of the most riveting piece of gossip.
    ‘I think I’ll stay here and chat, Matty.’ She smiled blithely at her husband as he donned his crocheted hat once more. ‘Keep an eye on Linus in the face of all this drunkenness.’ She nodded towards Pascal, who was vaguely trying to offer his step-grandson a champagne cork instead of his dummy to stop him bawling.
    ‘Sure,’ Matty struggled into his cord jacket, unaware that Polly had tied the sleeves together.
    ‘We’ll only be half an hour or so,’ Tash told her mother as she wandered out, letting in a rush of cold air