I had no regrets about not swimming back to the Big Silver, but I did regret not finding the white Egyptian cotton tablecloth on Christmas Day the year before. In the end I’d had to use a white paper tablecloth. It didn’t look that good, though I had suggested to my daughters that our table looked like the sort of French brasserie where the waiter writes our order on the corners of the paper cloth and then comes round later to add up the bill. They did not recall the sort of brasserie I had in mind and asked if I was going to charge our guests for Christmas lunch. This year the white Egyptian cotton cloth would be adorned with candles, red berries, holly and mistletoe. Their father would join us and I would invite the man who cried at the funeral and his new lover to join the table. And Celia, obviously, if she could fit me into her busy schedule. We decided to make cranberry as well as bread sauce, and swapped tips on how to make both. There was no way we could console each other for the undisclosed hurt that had contributed to sinking the boat, or for our lack of desire to swim back to it. Yet it was true that the societal mask of husband and wife, which we had worn for so long, had slipped, and we could see each other again. Perhaps what we saw was too human to bear. We stood up, put on our coats and kissed each other goodbye.