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Their order came quickly. Charlie saw the olives from afar, or smelled them perhaps, as he started to gurgle in anticipation even before they arrived.

“He has some sort of sixth sense when it comes to olives,” said Isabel. “An intuitive knowledge of olives.”

Jamie laughed. He took an olive from the plate and cut the flesh from the stone with his knife. A small drop of oil fell from his fingers; Charlie watched intently.

“Olive,” said Charlie.

Jamie dropped the knife, which fell on the plate below with a clatter. Isabel’s mouth opened wordlessly, and she reached out to grasp Jamie’s forearm. “Did he?”

Jamie beamed at his son. “Olive, Charlie?”

Charlie looked at his father briefly, and then transferred his gaze again to the fragments of black olive on the plate. “Olive,” he said again. It was unmistakable.

“At last,” said Isabel, and bent her head to plant a kiss on Charlie’s forehead. “You spoke, my little darling. You spoke!” They had been waiting for Charlie to say something and, although they had been reassured that first words at eighteen months, even if late, were still within the range of normality, they had been concerned. His gurgles were expressive, but they were impatient to hear Mama or Daddy; olive was a surprise, but a welcome one.

Jamie grinned with pleasure. “I wouldn’t have guessed it would be olive,” he said. “What a clever little boy.”

They tried to coax more out of him, but Charlie, now engrossed in the large quartered olive passed on to him by Jamie, was having none of it.

“He doesn’t need to say olive again,” said Isabel. “He has what he wants.”

They began their own lunch, while Charlie investigated his quiche, quickly reducing it to a pile of sodden fragments.

“I don’t want to spoil the party,” said Isabel, “but there was a rather unpleasant surprise in the mail this morning.”

Jamie raised an eyebrow. “A bill?”

“Well, there were two of those. One for much more electricity than I think we’ve actually used, but that’ll be sorted out. No, something to do with the Review.”

Jamie frowned. He enjoyed reading the Review, or the readable bits of it, and he took pride in Isabel’s ownership of it, but he was concerned about the burden it represented. Isabel worried about her Review—he knew that from her occasional muttering in her sleep—fragments from anxious dreams: revisions, proofs, deadline, words that revealed the tenor of at least part of her subconscious. He thought of the Review as some sort of presence in the house, rather like a demanding domestic pet that required to be fed and exercised and was always causing difficult dilemmas. By contrast, Jamie’s working life seemed to him to be so simple: he taught his pupils, he played the music put in front of him by the conductor, and when he put his bassoon back in its case then he could put it out of his mind.

“You worry too much,” he said. “There’s always something, isn’t there?”

She picked up a small piece of quiche and handed it to Charlie, who examined it, cross-eyed; he was looking for olives. “Maybe. But then it’s the sort of job that never seems to finish. You get one issue off to press and then there’s the next one to think about—and the one after that. It’s a bit like Sisyphus and his rock—pushing it up to the top of the hill and then having to do the whole thing all over again once it’s rolled down.”

Jamie shrugged. “Yes, I can see that.” He thought for a moment. It seemed to him that just about everyone’s job was a bit like that; repetitious. He glanced at Russell Glass, the proprietor of the café, serving customers at the counter. It was the same for him; he served one mozzarella salad, somebody ate it, and then he had to come up with another one. Or if you were a judge, for instance: you decided one case, disposed of it, and there was another one in front of you.

“We’re all Sisyphus,” he said. “Don’t you think? So isn’t the answer not to allow our jobs to prey on our minds too much? Sisyphus doesn’t have to think too much about what he’s doing