‘Well, remember us poor souls chained to the checkout listening to Jingle Bells for the umpteenth time, while you’re lying in the sun, won’t you?’

‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ she replied, with the grin of a woman with a week in the sun ahead of her.

And it was true; this was going to be an unbelievable experience. Rose had offered her the chance of a dream holiday in the desert. An entire week of undiluted luxury in which she was going to be wearing designer clothes-not copies run up by her mother-and treated like a real princess. Not some fake dressed up to look like one.

The euphoria lasted until she reached her car.

She’d told her colleagues at work that she’d been invited to spend a week at a friend’s holiday apartment, which was near enough to the truth, but she hadn’t told a soul where she was really going, not even her mother, and that had been hard.

Widowed in the same accident that had left her confined to a wheelchair, Lydia’s ‘Lady Rose’ gigs were the highlight of her mother’s life and normally they shared all the planning, all the fun, and her mother’s friends all joined vicariously in the excitement.

But this was different. This wasn’t a public gig. The slightest hint of what she was doing would ruin everything for Rose. She knew that her mother wouldn’t be able to resist sharing such an incredible secret with her best friend who’d be staying with her while she was away. She might as well have posted a bulletin on the wall of her Facebook page.

Instead, she’d casually mentioned a woman at work who was looking for a fourth person to share a last-minute apartment deal in Cyprus-which was true-and left it to her mother to urge her to grab it.

Which of course she had.

‘Why don’t you go, love?’ she’d said, right on cue. ‘All the hours you work, you deserve a break. Jennie will stop with me while you’re away.’

That the two of them would have a great time together, gossiping non-stop, did nothing to make Lydia feel better about the deception.