The Best Of Times

CHAPTER 1

Laura Gilliatt often said-while reaching for the nearest bit of wood-that her life was simply too good to be true. And indeed, the casual observer-and quite a beady-eyed one-would have been hard-pressed not to agree with her. She was married to a husband she adored, Jonathan Gilliatt, the distinguished gynaecologist and obstetrician, and had three extremely attractive and charming children, with a career of her own as an interior designer, just demanding enough to save her from any possible boredom, but not so much that she could not set it aside when required, by any domestic crisis, large or small, such as the necessity to attend an important dinner with her husband or the nativity play of one of her children.

The family owned two beautiful houses, one on the Thames at Chiswick, a second in the Dordogne; they also had a time-share in a ski chalet in Meribel. Jonathan earned a great deal of money from his private practice at St. Anne’s, an extremely expensive hospital just off Harley Street, but he was also a highly respected NHS consultant, heading up the obstetric unit at St. Andrews, Bayswater. He was passionately opposed to the modern trend for elective caesareans, both in his private practice and the NHS; in his opinion they were a direct result of the compensation culture. Babies were meant to be pushed gently into the world by their mothers, he said, not yanked abruptly out. He was, inevitably, on the receiving end of a great deal of criticism for this in the more vocally feminist branches of the media.

The beady-eyed observer would also have noted that he was deeply in love with his wife, while enjoying the adoration of his patients; and that his son, Charlie, and his daughters, Daisy and Lily-his two little flowers, as he called them-all thought he was absolutely wonderful.

In his wife he had an absolute treasure, as he often told not only her but the world in general; for as well as being beautiful, Laura was sunny natured and sweet tempered, and indeed, this same observer, studying her quite intently as she went through her days, would have been hard-pressed to catch her in any worse humour than mild irritation or even in raising her voice. If this did happen, it was usually prompted by some bad behaviour on the part of her children, such as Charlie, who was eleven, sneaking into the loo with his Nintendo when he had had his hour’s ration for the day, or Lily and Daisy, who were nine and seven, persuading the au pair that their mother had agreed that they could watch High School Musical for the umpteenth time until well after they were supposed to be in bed.

The Gilliatts had been married for thirteen years. “Lucky, lucky years,” Jonathan said, presenting Laura with a Tiffany eternity ring on the morning of their anniversary. “I know it’s not a special anniversary, darling, but you deserve it, and it comes with all my love.”

Laura was so overcome with emotion that she burst into tears and then smiled through them as she looked at the lovely thing on her finger; and after that, having consulted the clock on their bedroom fireplace, she decided she should express her gratitude to Jonathan, not only for the ring but for the thirteen happy years, in a rather practical way, with the result that she got seriously behind in her school run schedule and all three children were clearly going to be late for school.

Laura had been nineteen and still a virgin when she had met Jonathan: “Probably the last in London,” she said. This was not due to any particular moral rectitude, but because until him, she had honestly never fancied anyone enough to want to go to bed with him. She fancied Jonathan quite enough and found the whole experience “absolutely lovely,” she told him. They were married a year later.

“I do hope I’m going to cope with being Mrs. Gilliatt, quite an important career,” she said just a little anxiously a few days before the wedding; and, “Of course you will,” he told her. “You fit the job description perfectly. And you’ll grow into it beautifully.”

As indeed she had, taking her duties very seriously; she loved cooking and entertaining, and had discovered a certain flair for interior design. When they had been married a year, and their own lovely house was finished to both their satisfaction, she asked Jonathan if he would mind if she took a course and perhaps dabbled in it professionally.

“Of course not, darling, lovely idea. As long as I don’t come second to any difficult clients.”

Laura promised him he wouldn’t; and he never had. And neither, as the babies arrived, in neat two-year intervals, did they; for many years, until Daisy was at school, she simply devoted herself to them, and was perfectly happy. She did have to work quite hard at reassuring Jonathan that he still came absolutely first in her life, and was slightly surprised at his impatience and near-jealousy created by the demands of the children. Clearly her mother had been right, she reflected-all men were children at heart. For the first few years, therefore, she employed a full-time nanny; for the demands of Jonathan’s professional life on her time were considerable, and he liked her to be totally available to him.

But when Daisy went to school, she began quite tentatively to work. She had a particular flair for colour, for using the unexpected, and she was beginning to earn a small reputation. But it all remained little more than a pleasingly rewarding hobby, very much what she did in her spare time: which was not actually in very large supply.

But that was how Jonathan liked it; and therefore she liked it too.

Spring that year had been especially lovely; it arrived early and stayed late, perfect green-and-gold days, so that as early as April, Laura was setting the outside table for lunch every Saturday and Sunday, and as May wore on, she and Jonathan would eat dinner outside as well, and watch the soft dusk settle over the garden, listening to the sounds of the river in the background, the hooting of tugs, the partying pleasure boats, the raw cries of the gulls.

“How lucky we are,” she said maybe a hundred times, smiling at Jonathan across the table, and he would raise his glass to her and reach for her hand and tell her he loved her.

But now it was midsummer and the rain had arrived: day after relentless day it fell from dark grey skies. Barbecues and summer parties were being cancelled, floaty summer dresses put away, the shops holding what they called end-of-season sales, and a stampede began for flights to Majorca and Ibiza for long weekends in the sun.

For the Gilliatts there was no such stampede; Laura was packing, as she did every year, for their annual pilgrimage to the lovely golden-stone farmhouse in the Dordogne, where the sun would shine down unstintingly on them, heating the water in the pool, ripening the grapes on the veranda vine, and warming the stones on the terrace so that the lizards might siesta in the afternoons along with their landlords.

“And thank goodness for it,” she said. “Poor Serena is so dreading the holidays, keeping the boys amused all those weeks, well, months really…”

Jonathan said just slightly shortly that he had thought the Edwardses were off to some ten-star hotel in Nice, not to mention the week they would spend with the Gilliatts on the way down; Laura said, well, that was true, but it still added up to just over three weeks, and that left six or even seven in London.

Jonathan said that most of his NHS patients would not regard that as too much of a hardship, given the three and a half weeks of luxury sunshine; he was less fond of Mark and Serena Edwards than Laura was. Mark was a public relations consultant for a big city firm, oversmooth and charming, but Serena was Laura’s best friend and, in Jonathan’s view, made Laura the repository of just too many confidences and secrets.

Jonathan was not able, of course, to spend nine weeks in the Dordogne; he took as much of his annual leave as he could and, for the rest of the time, flew out each Friday afternoon to Toulouse and back each Monday.

And so, as she read reports of what appeared to be almost continuous rain in England, and indeed listened to friends in England complaining about it and telling her how lucky she was not to be there, Laura savoured the long golden days even more than usual, and even more than usual counted her own multiple blessings.

Linda Di-Marcello was aware that she also was fairly fortunate, which meant that, given her line of work, she was doing very well indeed. Linda ran a theatrical agency, and as she often said, her role was a complex one. She was, in almost equal parts, nanny, therapist, and hustler; it was both exhausting and stressful, and she threatened repeatedly to give it up and do something quite different. “Something really undemanding, like brain surgery,” she would say with a smile. But she knew she never would; she loved it all too much.

The agency’s name was actually Di-Marcello and Carr; Francis Carr was her nonsleeping partner, as he put it, a gay banker who adored her, had faith in her, and had put up the money for the agency, in return for “absolutely no involvement and forty per cent of the profits.”

So far it had worked very well.

She was thirty-six, an acknowledged beauty, with dark red hair, dark brown eyes, and a deep, Marlene Dietrich-style voice, and she had been to drama school herself before deciding she really couldn’t hack the long, long slog into nonstardom and that she rather liked the idea of agenting. She had had the agency for five years; before that she had worked for several of the established organisations before setting out on her own. And she had proved to have a talent for it; she could look at an apparently plain, shy girl and see her shining on the screen; at a charmless, ungracious lout and know he could play Noel Coward.

She didn’t have many big stars on her books-yet. She had Thea Campbell, who had just won a BAFTA for her Jo in the new BBC version of Little Women, and Dougal Marriott, who had just been cast as the grown-up Billy in the sequel to Billy Elliot, and three or four more who were almost as successful, but she had a big battery of middle-rankers, mostly picked out by her from the drama schools, almost all of whom were carving out good careers for themselves. But her younger clients particularly found it hard to face reality; they were inevitably disappointed with the slow progress, and while most of them did part-time jobs in bars and restaurants or worked as runners for the TV companies, a handful were emotionally needy, impatient, and at worst disparaging of the work Linda could get them.

“You know,” she said irritably to Francis Carr, “I long to tell these kids that thousands and thousands of young people can do what they can do and do it superbly well; they need an awful lot of luck and star quality to stand out. And most of them don’t have those things. They’re an ungrateful bunch on the whole, you know; nothing’s ever good enough for them.”

Francis said that the same could be said of his clients, who never felt their money was invested quite well enough or that he gave any of them quite enough of his attention. “It’s human nature, Linda, fact of working life.”

“I suppose so. I’m obviously making a big fuss about nothing. And when somebody does take off and I know I’ve been a key part of that, it’s a great feeling.”

“Well, exactly. Has anyone taken off recently?”

“Not exactly. It’s all been a bit run-of-the-mill this summer. If you can call it summer indeed… Probably that’s what’s getting to me.”

“I don’t think so,” he said with a grin. “You’re always complaining about it.”

“Am I? God, how depressing for you. Sorry, Francis. I’ll try to be a bit more positive in future.”

Linda lived in a mansion apartment just off Baker Street: large and luxurious, expensively furnished-in a mix of antique and contemporary-and absolutely immaculate. Her office-a sleek, modern suite near Charlotte Street -was equally so. Linda was a perfectionist in every aspect of her life. She was, by any standards, a hugely successful woman. And yet she quite often felt she was actually a failure.

She was lonely, and however much she told herself that she was lucky, that she had a far better life now, happily single rather than unhappily married, she didn’t really believe it. No amount of looking at the rows of designer clothes she was able to buy, at her collections of art deco figures and lamps, at her growing gallery of modern paintings properly made up for it. She would have given all of it-well, most of it, anyway-not to be alone, not to be lonely.

She did have a social life-by most people’s standards a glamorous one. But it wasn’t quite the sort she wanted. Of course, Sex and the City had made singledom fashionable, which helped. Nobody had to sit at home staring at the cat anymore; you could lift the phone, call girlfriends or man friends, propose any kind of outing. You could do what you liked, when you liked it. During the week it was fine: she often worked late, and there were theatres and film screenings to go to; and she made sure her weekends were fully booked weeks or even months ahead. She did a lot of quick trips-flips, as she called them-to Paris, Milan, Rome, usually with one of her single girlfriends to visit galleries and shop; she was a Friend of Covent Garden, of Sadler’s Wells and the RSC. It would certainly take a fairly remarkable man to deliver so indulgent a lifestyle.

But… it wasn’t actually what she wanted; it was cool and demanding, and somehow self-conscious, when she yearned for warmth and ease. She wondered if perhaps she should have given Mr. Di-Marcello another chance instead of throwing him out of the house at the first discovery of his first affair.

But she knew, deep down, that she shouldn’t; it would have been only the first one; he was about as monogamous as a tomcat. But the divorce had hurt horribly, and had been followed by a second bad relationship, with another charmer who had been seeing another girl almost before he had moved into Linda’s apartment. She had an eye for a rotter, Linda often thought gloomily.

She didn’t exactly want domesticity, she didn’t want children, and she certainly didn’t want to take on a man with a ready-made family, as so many of her friends seemed to be doing; but she did want someone to share things with, pleasures and anxieties, jokes and conversations-and, of course, her bed.

Nor did she meet that many men she fancied; the world she moved in contained an exceptionally large number of gay men, and still more addicts of one kind or another: “The London branch of the AA is incredibly A-list,” as a young actress had astutely remarked (and indeed the meetings were regarded as an excellent opportunity for networking).

“I want a solicitor,” she wailed to her friends. “I want a bank manager; I want an accountant.” And they would tell her that she wanted no such thing, and of course they were right in one way and quite wrong in another, for what were accountants and bank managers and solicitors but synonyms for reliable and sensible and loyal?

The fact was, she no longer felt free; she felt lonely, no longer self-sufficient, but insecure. What was the matter with her? Was it such a big thing to ask? Not just to fall but to be in love. Wholeheartedly, wondrously thunderously, orgasmically in love. It did seem to be. She really couldn’t see how it was ever going to happen again.

“Only five weeks to the wedding. I absolutely can’t believe it.”

Barney Fraser looked at his fiancée, in all her absurd prettiness and sweetness, and sighed.

“I think I can,” he said.

“Barney! That doesn’t sound very… positive. Aren’t you looking forward to it?”

“Yes,” he said quickly, “yes, of course I am.”

“It’s the speech, isn’t it? But you’ll be fine; I know you will. It’s all going to be wonderful. If it stops raining, that is. Pity it’s not September; that’s usually more reliable, much better than the summer, actually. Wouldn’t you say?”

“What? I mean, no. I mean-”

“Barney, you’re not listening to me. Are you?”

“Sorry, Amanda. I was… well, I was thinking about something else. I’m very sorry.”

Actually he wasn’t. He was thinking about the wedding; he thought about it more and more. Well, not the wedding. More the marriage.

“What?”

“Oh-just work. Sorry. More wine?”

“Yes, please.”

He grinned at her and refilled her glass; there was nothing he could really say about his misgivings over the wedding. It was too late and it wouldn’t help. It wasn’t his wedding, for God’s sake, that he had misgivings about; it was Toby’s, and Toby was old enough to look after himself.

And Amanda was so thrilled at being maid of honour, and the bride was one of her very best friends. And when she and Barney got married the following spring, Tamara would be her maid of honour. And Toby would be Barney’s best man.

Toby wasn’t just one of Barney’s best friends; he was absolutely his best friend, had been ever since prep school, when they had lain in their small beds the first night, side by side, smiling gallantly, refusing to admit either of them felt remotely homesick. And the friendship had never faltered, intensified, Barney always thought, by the fact that they were both only children, and were soon spending time with each other over the holidays as well as the term. They had stayed cheerfully together right through prep school and Harrow; then after the separation of universities, Toby at Durham, Barney at Bristol, the delight of discovering that they were both applying for jobs in the city and managed to end up not at the same investment bank-that would have been too much of a cliché-but at closely neighbouring establishments either side of Bishopsgate.

Toby was just the best: clever, funny, cool, and just plain old-fashioned nice. Barney didn’t like to think of their friendship in terms of love-these days if you said you were terribly fond of another bloke, people presumed you were gay. But he did love him, and admired him and enjoyed his company more than that of anyone else in the world-except Amanda, obviously. Not that you could compare how you felt for your best friend and your fiancée: it was totally different. What was great was that despite their both being engaged and setting up home and all that sort of thing, they were still able to see an enormous amount of each other.

And the two girls were great friends; both worked in the city as well. It was very neat: Amanda in human resources at Toby’s bank, Tamara on the French desk at Barney’s. There was no reason they should all not remain friends for the rest of their lives.

Barney didn’t just think that Tamara wasn’t good enough for Toby-no, he knew. OK, she was gorgeous and sexy and clever, and their flat in Limehouse was absolutely sensational, more to Barney’s taste, if he was honest, than the house he and Amanda had bought in Clapham. It was a bit… well, a bit too fussy, full of clever ideas that Amanda had found in the house magazines and copied, without considering whether it all worked together properly. But still, she was great and he loved her, of course, and not having much of a visual sense himself, he just accepted it all. There were more important things in life than decor.

Amanda was solid gold, through and through; Tamara, he felt, was composed of some rather questionable nickel under her lovely skin. She was selfish, she was spoilt-first by her doting parents, and now, of course, by Toby-extremely possessive, dismissive of Toby’s feelings, given to putting him down, albeit with her rather sparky humour, when it suited her. Toby really loved Tamara; he told Barney so repeatedly, almost too repeatedly, Barney thought sometimes. He had been an angel over the buildup to the wedding, agreeing to everything she wanted, even their honeymoon in the Maldives when Barney knew that sort of place bored him. But, “It’s her wedding,” he would say easily, apparently unaware of the irony of it: that it was his too.

And with the stag do-a long weekend in New York -only a fortnight away, it was really much too late to do or say anything about it at all.

Barney just remained uneasy about it, and couldn’t discuss it with anyone. Not even Amanda. Actually, least of all with Amanda. That was a bit worrying too.

CHAPTER 2

Well, she’d done it now; there could be no turning back. Mary took a deep breath, turned away from the letter box, and walked home through the pouring rain, hoping and praying that she had done the right thing. In four or five days, the letter would arrive in New York, at Russell Mackenzie’s undoubtedly grand apartment, bearing the news that yes, she thought it would be lovely if he came to England and they met once again, after all these long, long years.

More than sixty years since they’d said good-bye, she and Russell; she’d stood in his arms at Liverpool Street station, surrounded by dozens of other couples, the girls all crying, the soldiers in their khaki uniforms holding them close. It was almost unbearable, and when finally she had to let him go, it was as if some part of her had been wrenched off, and she’d stood watching him walking down the platform, climbing into the train, waving to her one last time, and she’d gone home and run up to her room and cried all night and wanted to die. Literally. She had loved him so much, and he had loved her too. She knew he had; it wasn’t just that he’d told her so-he’d asked her to marry him, for goodness’ sake. But it had been too frightening, too unimaginable to go away, all those miles away from everyone she knew and loved. And anyway, she was spoken for, engaged, even if she didn’t have a ring on her finger: engaged to Donald, sweet, gentle Donald, who was coming home to her to make her his wife.

She had been wonderfully surprised when Russell continued to write to her; he had done so almost as soon as he arrived back in the States.

“I want us still to be friends, Mary,” he had said. “I can’t face life totally without you, even if I can’t be with you.”

She had agreed to that, of course: what harm in letters? Nobody could object to that, think it was wrong. And the letters had flown back and forth across the Atlantic ever since.

He had sent pictures: first of himself and his very grand-looking parents and their very grand-looking house, and later, as time passed and wounds healed and lives inevitably progressed, of his bride, Nancy; and she had written of her marriage to Donald and sent pictures of the two of them on their wedding day, and of the little house they had bought in Croydon. And later still, they exchanged news and photographs of their babies, her two and Russell’s three, and sent Christmas and birthday cards to each other. Donald had never known; she had seen no reason to tell him. He wouldn’t have believed that Russell had been only a friend, and he would have been quite right not to believe it either.

The letters arrived about once a month, usually after Donald had gone to work. If one did happen to arrive on a Saturday, and he saw it, she would say it was from her American pen-friend. Which was true, she told herself. He was. In a way.

Russell’s stories of splendid houses and Cadillacs and swimming pools were clearly true; his parents were rich, with an apartment in New York and a house somewhere called Southampton, full of big houses, and people played polo there and sailed on the ocean in their yachts. He and Nancy spent every weekend at the Southampton house.

It had been a happy marriage, as far as Mary could make out; as hers to Donald had been. But Nancy had died when she was only fifty-two, of cancer, and Russell had married again, to a woman called Margaret. Mary had been absurdly comforted when Russell told her it was only so the family had a mother figure.

Donald had died on his seventy-fifth birthday, had had a heart attack while the house was full of his beloved family. He had been a wonderful husband; he had never made much money, had worked away perfectly happily at his job in an insurance company, and had no ambitions to change it.

As long as he could come home every night to Mary and the children, he said, and knew he could pay all the bills, he was content.

She had kept all Russell’s letters, and photographs, safely hidden in her underwear drawer, tucked into an empty packet of sanitary towels; Donald would no more look in there than fly to the moon. And every so often, she would get them out and relive it all, the wonderful, passionate romance that had led to a lifetime of secret happiness.

And then last year, Russell had written to tell her that Margaret had died. “She was a very loving wife and mother and I hope I made her happy,” he wrote. “And now we are both alone, and I wonder how you would feel if at last we were reunited? I’ve been thinking of making a trip to England and we could meet.”

He had been over occasionally on business-she knew that-but of course they had never met.

Mary’s initial reaction had been panic; what would he actually think, confronted by the extremely ordinary old lady she had become? He was so clearly used to sophistication, to a great deal of money, to fine birds in very fine feathers; she was indeed his “Little London Sparrow,” the name he had given to her all those years ago. And all right, she lived in a very nice house on the outskirts of Bristol, where she and Donald had moved when he had retired, to be near their beloved daughter, Christine, and her family, and she had a few nice clothes, and she had kept her figure; she was still slim, so if she did get dressed up she looked all right. But her very best outfits came from Debenhams, the everyday ones from Marks & Spencer; her hair was grey, of course, and a rather dull grey at that, not the dazzling white she had hoped to inherit from her mother; and she had very little to talk about: her most exciting outings were to the cinema, or playing whist or canasta with her friends. And Russell spent a lot of his life at things called “benefits,” which seemed to cover all sorts of exciting events: theatrical, musical, even sporting. Whatever would they talk about?

But he had rejected her argument that they might spoil everything if they met again now-“What’s to spoil? Only memories and no one can hurt them”-and gradually persuaded her that a rendezvous would be at worst very interesting and fun, and friendship “at best wonderful.”

“I want to see you again, my very dear Little Sparrow. Fate has kept us apart; let’s see if we can’t cheat her while there is still time.”

It hadn’t been fate at all, as far as Mary could see; it had been her own implacable resolve. But gradually she came round to feeling that she would greatly regret it for whatever was left of her life if she refused.

And so she had written to tell him so, and that he should go ahead and make the arrangement for his visit-“ideally at the end of August.”

Which was only a few weeks away.

On that same morning, Linda received a phone call from an independent production company; they were casting a new six-parter for Channel Four, a family-based psychological thriller.

“Very meaty, very raw. We need a young black girl. Obviously pretty, but cool as well, properly streetwise. First casting in three or four weeks’ time. If you’ve got anyone, e-mail a CV and some shots.”

Linda did have someone, and she sent her details over straightaway.

She’d had Georgia Linley on her books for just over a year, and she was beginning to think it was a year too many. OK, she was gorgeous and very, very talented; Linda had picked her out from a large cast at an end-of-year production at her drama school, put her through her paces, and taken her on. Since then it had been an uphill struggle. Georgia had not only been something of a star at college, and hated the crash down into bit parts and commercials; she was also extremely impatient and volatile. After every failed audition, she would turn up at the agency and weep endlessly, bewailing her own lack of talent combined with her bad luck, and Linda’s inability to help her or even understand the idiocy and blindness of the casting director she had just been to see. Linda was initially patient and was very fond of her, but a year on and she actually dreaded her phone calls.

Of course, Georgia had problems-“issues,” as the dreadful expression went-about her colour, about the fact she was adopted, about her hugely successful, brilliant brother. But as Linda had tried to persuade her many times, none of those things were exactly professional drawbacks.

“There are dozens of successful black actors these days-”

“Oh, really? Like who?”

And, of course, there weren’t. There was Adrian Lester and there was Sophie Okonedo and Chiwete Ejiofor… and after that the list tailed to a halt. Dancers, yes, singers, yes, but not actors. She had tried to persuade Georgia to go for some chorus parts in musicals, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

“I’m a lousy dancer, Linda, and you know it.”

“ Georgia, you’re not! Maybe not Covent Garden standards, but extremely good, and you’ve got an excellent singing voice, and it’d be great experience; you’d almost certainly have got a part in Chicago, or that revival of Hair, or-”

“Which folded after about three days. Anyway, I don’t want to be a dancer. I want to act. OK?”

She still lived at home, in Cardiff, with her adoptive parents. Her father was a lecturer at Cardiff University, her mother a social worker: charming, slightly hippie middle-class folk, unsure how to manage the ambitions of the beautiful and brilliant cuckoos in their nest. Their other child, Michael, also black, blacker than Georgia, who was actually mixed-race-a fact that added to her neuroses-was five years older than she was, a barrister, doing well in a London chambers; he had gone to Cambridge and was acknowledged as extraordinarily clever.

Well, maybe this production would be Georgia ’s big chance, Linda thought; and much more likely it would not. She decided not to tell Georgia about it yet; she couldn’t face the unbearable disappointment if the production company never even wanted to see her.

People-nonmedical people, that was-always reacted the same way when they heard what Emma did: “You don’t look like a doctor,” they said, in slightly accusatory tones, and she would ask them politely what they thought a doctor did look like; but of course she knew perfectly well what they meant. Most doctors didn’t look like her, blue eyed and blond and absurdly pretty, with long and extremely good legs. And she had learnt quite early on in her career that she might have been taken more seriously had her appearance been more on the… well, on the earnest side. Now that she was a houseman, she wore longer skirts-well, on the knee anyway-and tied her hair back in a ponytail, and obviously didn’t wear much makeup; but she still looked more like a nurse in a Carry On film than the consultant obstetrician she was planning to become.

She was a senior houseman now, working at St. Marks Swindon, the new state-of-the-art hospital opened by the health secretary earlier that year. She knew she was very lucky to be there; it was not only superbly designed and multiple-disciplined, with extremely high-calibre and highly qualified staff; it was just near enough to London, where she had first trained, for her to see her friends.

She was really enjoying accidents and emergency-A &E; apart from obstetrics, it was her favourite department so far. It was so different every day; there was always something happening, and yes, you did have to cope with some awful things from time to time-major car accidents and heart attacks and terrible domestic accidents, burns and scalds-but a lot of the time it was quite mundane. And the whole A &E experience was very bonding; you shared so much, day after day; you worked together, sometimes under huge pressure, but it had a culture and a language all its own, and you made very good friends there, lasting relationships. And you felt you really were doing something, making people better, mending them there and then, which sounded a bit sentimental if you tried to put it into words, but it was the reason she had gone into medicine, for God’s sake, and it was far more satisfying than orthopaedics, for example, seeing people with terribly painful hips and backs and knowing it would be months before anyone could do anything for them at all, and then it wouldn’t be you.

She had been three of the statutory four months now in A &E, as senior house officer, and she was really dreading moving on. Especially as her next department would be dermatology, which didn’t appeal to her at all. She had even considered, very briefly, becoming an A &E consultant, like Alex Pritchard, her present boss, but he had told her it was a mug’s game and that she’d never make any money.

“Not many private patients come into A &E, and as we all know that’s where the money is.”

“Money isn’t everything, though, is it?” Emma had said.

“Perhaps you could try telling my wife that,” he’d said, and scowled; she never knew whether he was going to scowl or smile at her. He was a great untidy bear of a man, with a shock of black hair, and beetling eyebrows to match, and very deep-set brown eyes that peered lugubriously out at the world. Emma adored him, though there were more scowls than smiles at the moment-he was reputedly going through a very unpleasant divorce. But he was immensely supportive of her, praised her good work while not hesitating to criticise the bad, and when she removed a healthy appendix unnecessarily, having put down the symptoms of IBS to acute appendicitis, he told her he had done exactly the same thing when he had been a junior surgeon.

“You just have to remember everyone makes mistakes; the only thing is, doctors bury theirs,” he said cheerfully as he found her sobbing in the sluice, “and that woman is far from being buried. Although with her weight and her diet she probably soon will be. Now dry your eyes and we’ll go and see her and her appalling husband together…”

But obstetrics had remained her first love, and the following summer, she would start applying for a registrarship.

Emma was twenty-eight and, as well as her exceptional looks, was possessed of an extremely happy, outgoing personality. She had grown up in Colchester, where her father had worked for a finance company and her mother was a secretary at the junior school that Emma and her brother and sister had all attended before going on to the local comprehensive. It had been a very happy childhood, Emma often said, lots of fun, treats, and friends, “but Dad was very ambitious for us, quite old-fashioned; we were all encouraged to work hard and aim high.”

Which Emma, by far the cleverest of the three, was certainly doing; a Cambridge place followed by a Cambridge First. In medicine, a subject acknowledged as very tough, she was about as high as anyone could have hoped for. She had never thought for more than five minutes that she might have preferred to do something else. She loved medicine; it was as simple as that. She enjoyed-almost-every day, found the life hugely satisfying and absorbing, and remained extremely ambitious.

Emma looked at her watch: three o’clock. It was Friday and it seemed to be going on forever. She was on the eight-a.m.-to-six-p.m. shift, and it had been one of the slow days. Tomorrow she was going to London and out with her boyfriend. She’d been going out with him for only three months, and he was the first she had had who wasn’t a medic. She’d met him in a bar in London; she’d been with a crowd of friends from uni, and one of them, a lawyer, had worked with him briefly.

His name was Luke Spencer, and he worked for a management consultancy called Pullman. He earned what seemed to her an enormous amount of money and worked tremendously long days-almost as long as hers, but then, while she went home exhausted and slumped in front of the television, Luke and his colleagues went out for dinners at hugely expensive restaurants like Gordon Ramsay and Petrus and extremely trendy clubs like Bungalow 8 and Boujis and Mahiki. Occasionally Emma and other WAGs, as Luke insisted on calling them, rather to Emma’s irritation, were invited along on these evenings. The first time Luke had taken her to Boujis, Emma had practically burst with excitement, half expecting to see Prince Harry every time she turned round. How Luke and his friends got on the guest list there she couldn’t imagine.

She liked being with Luke; he was cool and fun and funny, and he threw his money around, which was rather nice; he hardly ever expected her to pay for herself, and he wore really great clothes, dark suits and pink shirts and silk ties done in a really big loose knot. He took all that very seriously. He wouldn’t be in his suit today, she reflected, because it was Friday, which was dress-down day, and they all wore chinos or even jeans. Not any old jeans, obviously, not Gap or Levi’s, but Ralph Lauren or Dolce & Gabbana, and shirts open at the neck, and brown brogues. Dressing down or indeed up on any day was not something that figured large in Emma’s life.

She wasn’t at all sure if she was actually in love with Luke-although she had decided she would really like to be-and she was even less sure if he was in love with her; but it was very early days, and they had a lot of fun together, and she always looked forward enormously to seeing him. He was very generous, always tried to take her somewhere really nice. The other thing that was really sweet and that had surprised her was how much he respected her work.

“It must be absolutely terrifying,” he said, “life and death in your hands. And surgery: cutting people open, how scary is that?”

She said it wasn’t that scary-“What not even the first time?”-and she explained that you arrived at the first time so slowly and so well supervised, you were hardly aware at all it actually was the first time.

She was certainly looking forward to seeing him; they were going to have quite a bit of time together, not just Saturday night, but the whole of Sunday and Sunday night as well; she didn’t have to be back at the hospital till ten on Monday morning.

So she’d be able to stay in his flat for two nights, which was a really cool studio apartment; and obviously that meant they’d be having sex, quite a lot of sex. Luke was good at sex, inventive and very, very energetic, but also surprisingly considerate and eager to please, Emma thought, smiling to herself as she looked at the text he’d sent her that morning: Hi, babe. Really looking 4ward 2 tonite. I mean really. Got some news. Take care Luke xxx.

She wondered what the news was: probably something to do with work. It usually was. Anyway, only seven more hours… There’d been a few kids with broken bones, a couple of concussions, and a boy of seventeen with severe stomach pains. It turned out he’d drunk two bottles of vodka, three of wine, and a great many beers over the past twenty-four hours, celebrating his A levels, and seemed surprised there could have been a connection. And then there were a few of the regulars. All A &E departments had them, Alex Pritchard had explained to Emma on her first day, the Worried Well, as they were known, who came in literally hundreds of times, over and over again, with the same pains in their legs or their arms, the same breathlessness, the same agonising headaches. Most of those were seen by the resident GP in A &E, who knew them and dispatched them fairly kindly; Emma felt initially that she would dispatch them rather more unkindly, seeing as they were wasting NHS time and resources, but she was told that medicine wasn’t like that.

“Especially not these days,” Pritchard said. “They’d be suing us, given half the chance. Bloody nonsense,” he added. It had been one of his scowling days.

Anyway she might not look like a doctor, Emma thought, but she was certainly beginning to feel like one. And even sound like one, or so Luke had told her last time he’d had a bad hangover and she’d been very brisk indeed about the folly of his own personal cure: that of the hair of the dog.

“You’ve poisoned yourself, Luke, and swallowing more of it isn’t going to do any good at all. It’s such nonsense, and it’s so obvious. The only cure is time, and lots of water for the dehydration.”

He hadn’t liked that at all; knowing things, being right about them, was his department.

“If I want a medical opinion, I’ll get it for myself when I’m ready,” he said in a rare demonstration of ill humour. “I don’t want it doled out in my own home, thank you very much, Emma.”

And he poured himself a large Bloody Mary and proceeded to drink it with his breakfast eggs and bacon.

Alex Pritchard, who adored Emma, and had never met Luke, but had heard more than he would have wished about him, and referred to him privately as the oik, would have interpreted this as proof, were it needed, of his extremely inferior intelligence.

CHAPTER 3

The thing most occupying Laura’s time and attention as the long summer holidays drew near to their close was Jonathan’s surprise birthday party; he was forty in early October and had said several times that he didn’t want any big festivities.

“In the first place, I’ll feel more like mourning than celebrating, and in the second I find those big-birthday parties awfully selfconscious. So no, darling, let’s just have a lovely family evening, Much easier for you too, no stress, all right?”

Laura agreed with her fingers only slightly crossed behind her back, for what she had planned was very close to a family evening, just a dozen or so couples, their very best friends, and the children, of course. She was sure Jonathan would enjoy that and would actually have regretted not having a party of any kind; and so far the preparations were going rather well. Before their return from France, she had already organised caterers; Serena Edwards had been enrolled as her helpmeet with the flowers and decorations (it was most happily a Saturday, when Jonathan was on call), and Mark, Serena’s husband, was compiling a playlist and organising and storing the wine. Everyone invited could come; and Mark and Serena had also been enrolled as decoys, and had invited them both for a drink before dispatching them home again for dinner with the family. All the children were in on the secret and thought it was tremendously exciting.

Would she recognise him? Well, of course she would. From the pictures. Only people did look different from their photographs, and Russell had clearly selected his with great care over the years.

The day was nearly here; only two and a half weeks to go. And after they had met at Heathrow-and for some reason she had insisted on that; it was neutral territory-they would travel together to London, where he had booked rooms at the Dorchester-“two rooms, dearest Mary, have no fear; I know what a nice girl you are!”-for two days, while they got to know each other again: “And after that, if you really don’t like me you can go home to Bristol and I shall go home to New York and no harm done.”

She still thought much harm might be done, but she was too excited to care.

She had told no one. She didn’t want to be teased about it, or regarded as a foolish old lady; she had simply told her daughter, Christine, and a couple of friends that she was going to London to meet an old friend she’d known in the war. Which was absolutely true.

But she had bought a couple of very nice outfits from Jaeger-Jaeger, her!-where the girl had been so helpful, had picked out a navy knitted suit with white trim and a very simple long-sleeved black dress; and then, greatly daring, she had asked Karen, the only young stylist at her hairdressing salon, if anything could be done to make her hair look a bit more interesting.

“Well, we can’t do much about the colour, my love,” Karen had said, studying Mary intently in the mirror, her own magenta-and-white-striped fringe falling into her eye, “although we could put a rinse on to make it a bit blonder-looking. Or some lowlights,” she added, rising to the undoubted challenge, “and I do think you could wear it a bit smoother-like this,” she said, putting a photograph of Honor Blackman in the current HELLO! in front of Mary.

Mary heard herself agreeing to this; after all, Honor Blackman was almost as old as she was. “You going to meet someone special, then, when you go away?” Karen said, as she started leafing through the magazine for more inspiration.

“Oh, no, of course not,” said Mary, “just an old friend, but she’s rather… rather smart, you know?”

“Mary, you’ll look smart as anything when I’ve finished with you,” said Karen. “Now let me gown you up and we’ll start with the colour. Very gently, then if you like it, we can push it a bit. When’s the trip?”

“Oh-not for another two weeks,” Mary said.

“Well, that’s perfect. We can sort something out, see how you like it, and then keep improving it.”

“And if I don’t?”

“You can go back to your own style, no problem.”

“Bless her,” Karen said, smiling after Mary as she walked out after the first session. “That took real courage, but you know, she looks five years younger already.”

They had met on a bus, Mary and Russell; he was on a forty-eight-hour pass and wanted to take a look at Westminster Abbey: “Where England ’s kings and greatest men are buried,” it said in his booklet.

“Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain, 1942” it was called, and all servicemen had been given a copy on departing for Europe. It had produced a lot of cynical comments on the troopship, with its warning that Hitler’s propaganda chiefs saw as their major duty “to separate Britain and America and spread distrust between them. If he can do that,” the booklet went sternly on, “his chance of winning might return.”

To this end, there were many and disparate warnings: not to use American slang, lest offence might be given-“bloody is one of their worst swear words;” not to show off or brag-“American wages and American soldiers’ pay are the highest in the world, and the British ‘tommy’ is apt to be specially touchy about the difference between his wages and ours.” And that the British had “age not size-they don’t have the ‘biggest of’ many things as we do.”

It had warned too of warm beer, and of making fun of British accents, but most relevantly, to Russell, of the British reserve. Soldiers should not invade the Brits’ privacy, which they valued very highly; and they should certainly not expect any English person on a bus or train to strike up a conversation with them…

The bus he was on made its way down Regent Street, stopping halfway. Several people got on, and Russell realised a girl was standing up next to him; he scrambled to his feet, doffed his cap, and said, “Do sit down, ma’am.” She had smiled at him-she was very pretty, small and neat, with brown curly hair and big blue eyes-and she thanked him, and promptly immersed herself in a letter she pulled out of her pocket.

The bus had stopped again at Piccadilly Circus. “See that?” said one old man to another, pointing out of the window. “They took Eros away. Case Jerry ’it ’im.”

“Good riddance to ’im, I’d say,” said a woman sitting behind, and they all cackled with laughter.

The bus continued round Trafalgar Square, and Russell craned his neck to see Nelson’s Column: he wondered if Jerry might not hit that as well. They turned up Whitehall; about halfway along, a great wall of sandbags stood at what one of the old men obligingly informed the entire bus was the entrance to Downing Street. “Keeping Mr. Churchill safe, please God.” There was a general murmur of agreement.

Everyone seemed very cheerful; looking not just at his fellow passengers, but the people in the street, briskly striding men, pretty girls with peroxided hair, Russell thought how amazing it was, given that thousands of British civilians had already been killed in this war and London was being pounded nightly by bombs, that the city could look so normal. OK, a bit shabby and unpainted, and everyone was carrying the ubiquitous gas mask in its case, but on this lovely clear spring day there was a palpable optimism in the air.

The bus stopped and the woman conductor shouted, “Westminster Abbey.” Russell was on the pavement before he realised the girl he had given his seat to had got out too, and was looking at him with amusement in her blue eyes.

“Are you going into the abbey?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You know,” she said, “we do speak to strangers. Sometimes. When they’re very kind and give us seats on the bus, for instance. I bet you’ve been told we never speak to anyone.”

“We were, ma’am, yes.”

“Well, we do. As you can see. Or rather hear. Now, that’s the abbey to your left-see? And behind you, the Houses of Parliament. All right? The abbey’s very beautiful. Now, have a good time, Mr… Mr…”

“Mackenzie. Thank you, ma’am. Thank you very much.”

Her amusement at what he had been told about her countrymen had made them friends in some odd way; it suddenly seemed less impertinent to ask her if she was in a great hurry; and she said not a great hurry, no, and he said if she had just a few minutes, maybe she could come into the abbey with him, show him the really important things, like where the kings and queens were crowned.

She said she did have a few minutes-“only about ten, though”-and together they entered the vast space.

She showed him where Poets’ Corner was; she pointed out the famous coronation stone under the coronation chair, and then directed him to the vaults where he could see the tombs of the famous, going right back to 1066.

“I’ve never been down there myself; I’d love to go. You know Shakespeare is buried here, and Samuel Johnson and Chaucer-”

“Chaucer? You’re kidding me.”

She giggled again, her big blue eyes dancing.

“I never thought anyone actually said that.”

“What?”

“‘You’re kidding me.’ It’s like we’re supposed to say, ‘Damn fine show,’ and, ‘Cheers, old chap.’ I’ve never heard anyone saying that either, but maybe they do.”

“Maybe,” he said. He felt slightly bewildered by her now, almost bewitched.

“Now, look, I really have to get back to work-I work in a bank just along the road, and I’ll be late.”

“What…” Could he ask her this? Could he appear possibly intrusive but… well, surely not rude… and say, “What time do you finish?” He risked it. She didn’t seem to mind.

“Well-at five. But then I really do have to be getting home, because of the blackout and the bombs and so on-”

“Yes, of course. Well-maybe another time. Miss… Miss…”

“Miss Jennings. Mary Jennings. Yes. Another time.”

And then, because he knew it was now or never, that he hadn’t got another forty-eight for ages, he said: “If you’d accompany me around all those people’s graves for half an hour or so, I could… I could see you home. Through the blackout. If that would help.”

“You couldn’t, Mr. Mackenzie. I live a long way out of London. Place called Ealing. You’d never find your way back again.”

“I could!” he said, stung. “Of course I could. I found my way here from the States, didn’t I?”

“I rather thought the United States Army did that for you. Sorry, I don’t mean to sound rude. Where are you stationed?”

“Oh-in Middlesex.” He divided the two words, made it sound faintly exotic. “Northolt.”

“Well, that’s not too far away from Ealing, as a matter of fact. Few more stops on the tube.”

“Well, what do you know?”

“Goodness, there you go again,” she said, giggling.

“What do you mean?”

“Saying, ‘what do you know?’ It’s so… so funny to hear it. It’s such a cliché somehow. I didn’t mean to sound rude, to offend you.”

“That’s OK. But… maybe in the cause of further cementing Anglo-American relations, you could agree to meet me. Just for half an hour.”

“Maybe I could. In the cause of Anglo-American relations.” She smiled back at him. “Well… all right. I’ll meet you here at ten past five. Anyway-better go now. Bye.”

And she was gone, with a quick sweet smile, half running, her brown curls flying in the spring breeze.

And so it began: their romance. Which now-most wonderfully, it seemed-might not be over…

Patrick Connell was tired and fed up; he’d stopped for a break on the motorway, and was drinking some filthy coffee-why couldn’t someone provide some decent stuff for lorry drivers? They’d make a fortune.

Life on the road wasn’t a lot of fun these days, and you didn’t make the money either, because you were allowed to work only forty-eight hours a week, and that included rest periods and traffic jams, and the traffic just got worse and worse…

And so did the sleep problem.

It was turning into a daytime nightmare. It started earlier and earlier in the day, a dreadful, heavy sleepiness that he knew made him a danger. Even when he slept well and set out early, it could catch him halfway through the morning; he would feel his head beginning its inexorable slide into confusion, force himself to concentrate, turn up the radio, eat sweets: nothing really licked it.

He’d actually gone to the doctor the week before-without telling Maeve, of course; she was such a worrier-to see if he could give him anything for it. The doctor had been sympathetic, but couldn’t. “If I give you pep pills, Mr. Connell, you’ll only get a kickback later, won’t be able to sleep that night, and that won’t help you, will it? Sounds like you need to change your job, do something quite different. Have you thought about that?”

With which unhelpful advice Patrick had found himself dismissed; he had continued to take his Pro Plus and drink Red Bull and eat sweets and struggle on somehow.

Everyone thought lorry drivers could do whatever speed they liked; everyone was wrong. The lorry itself saw to that: a governor in the fuel pump that allowed exactly the amount of fuel through to do the legal fifty-six mph and no more. Some of the foreign drivers removed the fuse, or adjusted the pump, but Patrick wouldn’t have dreamed of doing that. Not worth it. You got caught, you lost your licence. And anyway, then there was the tachograph fixed in your cab that told it all: how many hours you’d done, how long you’d stopped, whether you’d speeded at all. So you literally got stuck in some god-awful place, unable to leave because your hours were up. And they could be up simply because of being stuck in traffic, not because you’d made any progress.

What he longed for more than anything right this minute was a shower and a shave and a change of clothes. Life on the road didn’t do a lot for your personal hygiene. On the English roads, anyway; it was better in Europe. Like the food. And the coffee…

CHAPTER 4

“What a perfect summer it’s been,” said Jonathan, smiling at Laura, raising his glass of Sauvignon to her; and, “Yes,” she said, “indeed it has. And it’s even nice here now. For our return.”

“I thought maybe in future we could spend Easter in France, as well as the summer,” he said.

“Well… well, that would be lovely, except-”

“Except what?”

“Well… the thing is, Jonathan, the children are growing up so fast, they’ve got lives of their own now, and they want to be with their friends.”

“They can be with their friends the rest of the year,” he said, sounding mildly irritable.

“I know, but…” Her voice trailed off. How to explain that a remote, albeit beautiful farmhouse for weeks at a time wasn’t going to be quite enough for children approaching adolescence? She’d hoped Jonathan would realise that for himself, but he didn’t seem to.

He had a very strong controlling streak: everything had to be done his way, and she could see that already Charlie was beginning to kick against it. And, of course, the girls, while wonderfully sweet and biddable at the moment, would inevitably reach the same point. But it hadn’t happened yet; and Laura was quite adept at ignoring difficulties. She had even considered having another baby, in order to ensure that at least some of the family remained small and compliant; but babies weren’t that compliant, and Jonathan found them difficult anyway. Probably best to enjoy the near perfection of the present.

“Oh, now, I hope this is all right, darling,” he said. “I’m going to have to be away next Thursday night. Big conference in Birmingham: old medical student chum’s gone over into the pharmaceutical business; he seemed to think if I spoke he’d get a better attendance rate.”

“Well, of course he would,” she said, smiling at him. “You’re such a draw these days at these things, such a big name-I was so proud of you at that conference in Boston. That was fun; I loved being there with you. Maybe I should come next week…”

“Oh, darling, I hardly think Birmingham could compare with Boston. Not worth you packing your bag, even-”

“I wouldn’t mind,” she said, “if you’d like me to come.”

“Darling, don’t even think about it. I thought you had enough to do next week, what with getting the children fitted up for school and seeing that madwoman in Wiltshire about doing her house up for Christmas. What an absurd idea! Paying someone to put up a few garlands and fairy lights…”

“Jonathan,” said Laura, almost hurt, “not everyone has the time to do it for themselves. Or the… well, the ideas. That’s what I’m for.”

“Of course. I’m sorry, sweetheart, stupid of me. And you’ll make it look so lovely. Do you have any ideas about it yet? I’d love to hear them; you know I would…”

He did that sometimes: professed interest in what she did. It was only professing-he didn’t really care if the Wiltshire house was decked out with barbed wire-but it was very sweet. He was very sweet… She was very, very lucky.

Georgia knew virtually every word of every character already. Linda was right: this was a fantastic part. The series was a thriller about a grandmother who vanished from the family home without a trace. She could have just wandered off, she could have met with an accident, she could have been murdered. The part Georgia was up for was the granddaughter, Rose, very close to her grandmother, angry at the way her dad belittled and bullied her, convinced he had something to do with her disappearance. The more she read it, the more excited about it she became; she could really develop the character as she went along. She couldn’t think of anything else.

The first audition was a week from Friday; it was at the casting director’s office, and there would be loads of girls there, anywhere up to twenty or thirty. Tough as that was, Georgia didn’t mind the first audition as much as the later ones: it was less tense; the chance of getting the part seemed really rather remote; it was possible to relax just slightly. But it was still hideous.

The first thing that always struck her was how many girls there were, all looking rather like her. Which was logical, but always seemed surprising. And her next reaction was invariably that they were all much prettier than her.

Then there were all the awkward little conversations, the longest with the girl immediately ahead-Oh, hi, how are you, what have you been doing, love the dress/boots/hair. And then the long wait while she did her bit, and came out smiling, or looking really tense. And then they called you in and it began. At this stage, it was usually just you and the casting director, who would read a scene with you. With the camcorder running, of course. And then you waited-and waited. The first callback came within a day or two; if it didn’t, forget it. And if it did come, that audition was much scarier: you knew they liked you; the pressure was on. And there were still five or seven or even eight of you. All, it seemed, better actors than you. You just felt sick for days and days, waiting. And quite often for a big part-like this one-there was a third call, with the choice whittled down to maybe two of you. That was really agony.

But… it would all be worth it if she got this part. She’d be on her way at last. And Linda did seem to think she had a real chance.

“You can act. You look perfect. And you’ve certainly got plenty of attitude, which is what they’re looking for. D’you want to come up the night before, stay with me?”

“No,” Georgia said quickly, “no, it’s really kind, but I’ll get the coach from Cardiff first thing.”

She didn’t like staying with Linda; she was nice, she was really fond of her, but her flat was so bloody perfect, Georgia was scared to move in case she made it untidy or knocked something over. The audition wasn’t till three thirty: she could get to London in loads of time.

“Fine,” said Linda. “As long as you’re not late.”

“Linda! As if I would be, opportunity like this. Do you really think I’ve a chance-”

“ Georgia, I really think so, yes. But there are lots of other girls. What do you think of the script?”

“I think it’s great.”

“Me too. And directed by Bryn Merrick. It should be superb.”

It was all absolutely amazing, really. She might actually be getting a part in a brilliant, high-profile Channel Four series, directed by one of the most award-winning people in the business. She might…

Georgia went back to her lines.

“Not long now, Toby,” said Barney.

“No. Absolutely not.”

There was a silence. The stag weekend had been a great success: they’d done all the touristy things in New York, Barney had managed to organise a Marilyn Monroe strip-o-gram for Toby, and they’d got some pretty good pictures of her-only Toby had got into one hell of a sweat over that and made them all swear to make sure Tamara never found out, or saw the pictures.

Tamara’s hen weekend didn’t sound exactly great; Amanda was very loyal about it, but even she admitted that an alcohol-free weekend at a spa retreat near Madrid, however wonderful the treatments, and however grand the clientele, ran out of fun.

Several of the girls suggested at least one trip into town, maybe for a meal or a bit of clubbing, but Tamara had said slightly coolly that of course they should do whatever they liked, but for her the concept of the whole weekend had been a luxurious detox, and she didn’t want to undo all the benefits for one night of what, after all, they did all the time in London.

And as the date of the wedding drew nearer she had become increasingly possessive of Toby, disturbing client evenings with endless phone calls, relentlessly e-mailing him about absurdly detailed arrangements, and even arriving at his desk in the middle of the morning with a handful of ties for his consideration; Amanda had struggled to explain this to Barney.

“I know it’s all a bit much, and she seems so cool and self-contained, but she’s actually a mass of insecurities. She’s absolutely terrified something’s going to go wrong, and she only feels better when Toby’s actually with her.”

Barney didn’t trust himself to speak.

Emma wasn’t sure how she felt about Luke’s news. Which was that he was going to Milan for six months. Seconded-that was the word-to some car manufacturers, called Becella: “They are the greatest cars in the world, you know. I’d have one while I was there.”

“Goodness.”

“Yeah. It really is a fantastic opportunity, Emma. I’m well chuffed.”

She had said it sounded great, yes, really wonderful, congratulations-while wondering if actually he was getting around to saying he thought they should stop seeing each other now, before he left-and then he said he knew she’d be pleased, and of course there’d be loads of trips back home-“every other weekend, actually, or they’re pretty good about flying people out. So you could come over whenever you wanted.”

Not finished then, which made smiling and seeming pleased easier-but how often did she have a whole weekend in which to go to Milan, for God’s sake? She’d thought at last she’d found the perfect boyfriend, settled in London, always around, and now he was going off for at least six months. It was… well, not very nice.

But no worse than that. Which probably meant she wasn’t actually in love with him. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that either.

It had been a particularly happy weekend. Jonathan had been relaxed and not even on call, which meant Laura could relax too, and at breakfast he had offered each of the children a treat of their choice. He did that occasionally: loved the conspicuous spoiling and role-playing of the perfect father.

“But it has to be in London -no point struggling out; the roads’ll be jammed. London ’s great in August; my treat is going to be-”

“You’re not a child,” said Daisy.

“I’m still allowed a treat. It’s a ride in the Eye, so we can have a look at everything. We haven’t been on it for ages. Any objections?”

“We’ll never get on,” said Laura.

“We will. I’ve bought tickets.”

“Oh, Jonathan, how lovely. When for?”

“Tomorrow morning. Eleven o’clock. And they’re VIP tickets, so absolutely no queuing. Now, then, what would Mummy’s treat be?”

“Um… a picnic. Which I didn’t have to prepare. In… let me see, Kew Gardens.”

“That’s easy. We’ll make the picnic, won’t we, kids? Lunchtime today, Laura?”

“Yes, please.”

They had their picnic; Lily’s wish was a rowboat on the river; and then they all went for supper on the terrace at Browns in Richmond, watching the sun set on the water.

“It’s so lovely,” said Daisy. “It’s all so lovely, I feel so happy, I don’t really want a treat.”

“That’s very sweet, darling,” said Laura, “and very grown-up of you. But how about you and I go shopping, just for a little while, in Covent Garden tomorrow, after the Eye? We could get one of those lockets you liked so much, from that jewellery stall. You too, Lily, if you want to come. Otherwise, Daddy can take you and Charlie to watch the buskers. Or on the roundabout.”

“I’ll come,” said Lily.

Charlie’s wish was a ride on the bungee jumps just beside the Eye, and after their ride they watched him soaring skywards, laughing, his skinny legs pretending to run, his brown hair shining in the sun, while they drank hot chocolate with whipped cream on top.

And then, after the shopping excursion, they went home for a late lunch in the garden, cold chicken salad and strawberry meringues, and then for a walk along the river, all holding hands.

I’m so happy, Laura thought, so happy and lucky. I wish these years could last forever…

CHAPTER 5

This was even worse, Patrick thought, than the week before. He had left London on Wednesday morning and now it was Thursday afternoon, and the night drive he had planned to get him home for Friday morning had been scuppered by a five-hour queue at the warehouse for loading up and a stroppy manager, with the words they all dreaded: “We’re closing, mate.”

Useless to argue, although Patrick tried to point out that it was only four thirty, with half an hour to closing; the man was unmoved. “I can’t get all that on board in half an hour; come back in the morning.”

Well, nothing else for it; he’d just have to bite the bullet and call Maeve; and then get some food and start looking for somewhere to spend the night.

And-wouldn’t you just know it-the weather was getting hotter and hotter.

This time tomorrow, Mary thought, she would be with Russell. She felt alternately terribly excited and terribly nervous. But now, actually, the excitement was winning. Her greatest fear-that they would be complete strangers, with nothing to say to each other-seemed suddenly unlikely. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t been in contact all these years. And how odd that was, she thought, their two lives and lifestyles being so utterly different. But then they always had been; there had been nothing actually in common-unless you counted the war. Which had, of course, bound people very tightly together by its shared ideals and hopes, dangers and fears. Russell and she, growing up thousands of miles apart, in totally different cultures, had found each other through that war, found each other and loved each other; at no other time and in no other way could such a meeting and consequent relationship have taken place. And it was one of the things that had convinced Mary that their lives together could not be shared, that when the war was gone, much of the structure of their relationship would be gone too, the differences between them increased a thousandfold.

But now… well, now they had their past to bind them: the wonderful bridge between any two people, however different, who had raised children; seen grandchildren born and partners die; lost the strength and physical beauty of their youth; faced old age and loneliness; and shared, inevitably, the broader ideals of love, of loyalty and family, and wished to pass the importance of those things on to the generations that followed them, their own small piece of immortality.

All these things Mary thought that night as she lay in bed, unable to sleep and looking forward only just slightly anxiously to tomorrow.

What was she doing here? Georgia wondered. What? She must be totally, utterly, absolutely mad. Out clubbing in Bath with Esme and Esme’s up-himself boyfriend, drinking cocktails that she couldn’t afford, when she should be at home in bed in Cardiff, her alarm set for seven, giving her plenty of time to get to the coach station and take the ten-o’clock to London. Shit, shit, shit. It had seemed such a good idea at the time: an evening with Esme in her parents’ house; she’d even thought she might run through some of her scenes with Esme-it would help with the awful nerves-and then she could get the coach in the morning from Bath. Her mother hadn’t tried to stop her, just told her to be sensible and not miss the coach-as if she would; and then Georgia’d arrived and Esme was all stressed out because of the boyfriend, who she thought was about to dump her, so that when he called and asked Esme to meet him in town at some bar or other, Esme had acted like it was God himself, and insisted Georgia go too-“Honestly, Georgia, it’ll only be an hour or so; then we can come back and you can get to bed. I can’t go alone; I just can’t.” So she had gone, and how stupid had that been? Because now it was almost two, and no prospect of leaving, and she had no money for a cab, and the boyfriend kept saying he’d get them home.

What would Linda say, if she knew? The chance of Georgia’s life and she was risking throwing it all away… Well, she’d just have to get up early somehow, get some money out of the hole in the wall, and then sleep on the coach. She’d drink loads of water now-and anyway, none of them had any money left for cocktails, thank goodness-and just demand they leave. Only-God, where was Esme now? She’d been on the dance floor a minute ago, with thingy’s tongue down her throat, and now she’d vanished, must have gone outside-oh, God, oh God, what was she doing here, why had she come…?

“God, it’s hot.” Toby pushed his damp hair back off his forehead. “Might take a dip. Fancy one, Barney?”

“Sounds good.”

They were in the garden of Toby ’s parents’ house; Toby had asked Barney to stay there with him the night before the wedding. “Stop me running away,” he said with a grin. But there had been something in his voice, a slight catch. He’d been a bit odd altogether, actually, all evening: quiet, edgy, jumping whenever the phone rang. He’d left twice to take calls on his mobile. “Tamara,” he’d said both times when he came back.

Carol Weston had served a delicious dinner for the four of them-poached salmon followed by raspberries and cream-which they had eaten outside, burning copious candles to keep the insects at bay; Ray Weston had served some very nice chilled Muscadet, and proposed the toast to “the perfect couple. That’s you and Toby, Barney,” he said, smiling, and they had sat there, chatting easily until it was dark, reminiscing. But then Toby became increasingly silent, almost morose, and Carol and Ray went in to bed, with strict instructions to them both from Carol not to be late.

“We don’t want any hitches tomorrow, any hungover grooms.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Toby said, and then swiftly, apologetically, “Sorry, Mum. But do give me a bit of credit. We’ll just have a couple of quiet ones and then bed, Barney, eh?”

“Absolutely.”

They climbed out of the pool and sat, briefly cool, on the terrace at the back of the house.

“Quiet one then?” Toby said and, “Yes, great,” said Barney. He’d expected Toby to fetch more wine; was a little alarmed when he saw him come out of the house with a bottle of whisky and some tumblers.

“Tobes! You heard what your mum said.”

“Oh, don’t you start. There’s no nightcap like scotch. Neat scotch. Want some?”

Barney nodded.

“That’s better,” Toby said, taking a large gulp, then leaning back in his chair, studying his glass.

“Better? You’re not nervous, are you?”

“Well-a bit. Inevitable, really. Lesser men than me have run away.”

“Tobes. You wouldn’t.”

“Of course not. What, from a girl like Tamara? God, I’m lucky. So lucky.”

A second whisky followed the first; a silence; then Toby said, quite suddenly: “I’ve… well, I’ve got a bit of a problem, Barney. Actually. Been a bit of an idiot.”

“How? In what way?”

“I… Oh, shit, I should have told you ages ago. Well, weeks ago, anyway.”

He was staring into the darkness, his hands twisting.

“Toby, what is it; what have you done?”

“I’ve… well, I’ve made a complete fool of myself. With some girl.”

Barney stared at him in total silence for a moment, then said, “Fuck!”

“Well, exactly that. Yes. I… well, I got incredibly drunk one night with some friends round here. Anyway, we went to a club near Cirencester, and this girl was there. On a hen night. She lives in the next village, actually. Dead sexy, works for some local builder, you know the sort of thing.”

“Think so,” said Barney. He was feeling rather sick.

“Anyway I… well, I screwed her. I… gave her a lift home, in a cab. Well, it seemed a good idea at the time. When we got back to her place, she said why didn’t I come in for a nightcap, her parents were away for the night, and-well, one thing led to another.”

“Toby, you lunatic!”

“I know, I know. Anyway, I felt pretty bad in the morning, obviously, hoped she’d see it my way, just a bit of fooling around-she didn’t.”

“Oh, Tobes-”

“She knew where I lived, or rather where my parents lived, became a complete pest, always calling me, at work as well, on my mobile, actually turned up here once or twice. I… well, I tried to get rid of her, but it didn’t work. She got quite unpleasant, started accusing me of treating her like a tart-”

“Well-”

“I know, I know. God, what wouldn’t I give to have that time over again. Anyway, next thing is, last week she calls, says she’s pregnant.”

“Shit!”

“I tried to call her bluff, but… well, unfortunately, I… well, I left all that sort of thing to her; she said she was on the pill-”

“You idiot,” said Barney, “you total idiot.”

“I know. I know. I can’t explain it. I’ve never done anyting like that. Ever. Well, you’d know if I had. No secrets from you, Barney. I s’pose… I suppose it was a combination of last-fling time, nerves about… well, about being married-”

“You mean to Tamara?” said Barney quietly.

“Yes. At rock bottom. I do love her-but she’s quite high-maintenance. Bit of a daunting prospect. Anyway-that’s not an excuse. I… well, it was an appalling thing to do. I know that.”

“So-what’s happened?” It seemed best to stick to practicalities.

“I told her to have a test, all that sort of thing. Anyway, she’d gone all quiet. I thought it was OK, but… well, anyway, she called me tonight. That was what those calls were. She wants some money. So she can have a termination. She wants to have it done properly, as she puts it. At a private hospital.”

“Well, tell her she can’t.”

“Barney, I’m in no position to talk to her like that. Even if none of it’s true, I daren’t risk it. You know what Tamara’s like-”

“Well-yes. I do. But-”

“Anyway she wants a couple of grand.”

“Blimey.”

“Moreover she wants it tomorrow morning. In cash.”

Barney felt sick, oddly scared himself.

“You can’t give in to that sort of thing,” he said finally.

“Barney, I have to. Otherwise, she’s threatened to come to the church. It wouldn’t look good if she turned up at my smart society wedding, as she called it, would it?”

“No,” said Barney, after a pause, “no, it wouldn’t be great.”

“So-I’ve got to give her a grand in the morning. In cash. Which I don’t happen to have about me. Do you?”

“Nope. Got about a hundred, but-”

“I’ll have to go to a bank, get it out. The most I can get on my card is four hundred quid.”

“I can get that too. But-”

“No, no, Barney, it’s my problem. And then I’ll have to take it to her. To her parents’ house, fifteen, twenty minutes away. So-”

“Toby, you do realise it may not stop at this, don’t you? That’s the whole thing about blackmail.”

“Yeah, but whatever she does next, I’ll be married, the wedding’ll be safely over, Tamara won’t have to be confronted by it-literally. I’ll deal with it somehow. Anyway, I’ve got a feeling she’ll back off. Meanwhile-busy morning.”

“Yeah. Well, look, surely I can deal with that. I can get the money; I can take it to her-”

“No, that’s just too complicated. I’ll do it. I should be back here by ten thirty, eleven, latest. Then I’ll just change and we can go. We might be a bit late for the ushers’ lunch, but that won’t matter.”

“We need to leave by eleven, really, for that, mate.”

“Well, maybe we’ll have to drive faster. Oh, God. What a total fucking idiot I’ve been. Let’s have another of those, Barney. Then we’d better turn in. Busy day tomorrow.”

He nodded at the whisky bottle; Barney poured the drinks out, his hand shaking slightly, wondering how he could possibly have got Toby so wrong. He’d have trusted him with his life, always regarded himself as the slightly wild card. And now…

Laura was just drifting off to sleep when the phone rang.

“Darling?”

“Oh, Jonathan, hello. How did it go?”

“Oh-pretty well, I think. Yes. Jack seemed pretty pleased.”

“I bet he was. I bet you were wonderful.”

“Hardly. Anyway, you’re all right, are you?”

“I’m absolutely fine, darling. Just a bit hot. But we got all the uniforms, then I took them out to supper-”

“Let me guess. T.G.I.’s.”

“Correct.”

“God, I don’t know how you can face those places.”

“Well, the children love them. And I love the children.”

“So do I. But… well, you’re a saint. They’re lucky to have you. I’m lucky to have you.”

“And I’m lucky to have you.”

“Well-as long as everything’s OK. Night, darling. I’ll be home tomorrow, around six, going straight up to St. Anne’s from here.”

“Fine. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

That was done then: very unlikely now that she would call him again.

Jonathan walked into the foyer of the Bristol Meridien, so nicely anonymous, so filled with pleasurable associations.

He checked in and went up to his room, had scarcely pushed the door open when she walked out to greet him, stark naked, holding out a glass of champagne.

“You’re very late,” she said. “What kept you?”

CHAPTER 6

When all else failed, Georgia prayed. Not because she believed in God, exactly, but because He did seem, on the whole, to be very good about listening to her and letting her have what she wanted. Which meant, she supposed, that she really ought to believe in Him a bit more, and be a bit more grateful.

Well, if He answered this particular prayer in an even half-positive manner (she promised both herself and Him), she would make a much, much greater effort not just to believe in Him, but to behave in a way more appropriate to the belief. Because He most definitely would deserve it.

What she was going to ask of Him today, she thought, eyes screwed up, fists clenched in absolute concentration, was not actually that difficult to grant. She wanted a car: a car driven by someone else, on its way to London, and with a spare seat. And actually, since she was standing just above the approach road to the M4, it would not be a miracle on the scale of the loaves and fishes. All God had to do, in fact, was point her out, perhaps nudge the driver into thinking some company would not go amiss, and He’d be free to get on with whatever other tasks were on His mind.

After half an hour, her arm aching, her bare legs drenched in dust, it began to seem that God had better things to do that morning.

At this rate she just wasn’t going to make it. She had to be there, actually at the audition, by three; it was already twelve, and her father always said you had to allow two and a half hours minimum from the Severn Bridge. And that was when you knew exactly where you were going; she had to find some obscure place in the middle of London, and get herself tarted up before she could present herself to the snooty cow-they were always snooty-in reception. She was almost thinking of giving up. Of going home again, telling her mother that she had missed not just the early coach but the later one and that it was absolutely, yes, her own fault. Only actually it wouldn’t be that easy to get home again; she’d need another lift just to get back to Cardiff; she might as well carry on, get to London anyway.

God, she was so stupid. Why hadn’t she stayed safely at home in Cardiff and gone to bed early, so she’d have heard her phone when it went off? Only she wouldn’t have had to; her mother would have made sure she was awake and driven her to the coach station in plenty of time. But it had been after two when they got home, and her phone had failed totally to wake her until almost nine. Esme’s mum had been very sympathetic, but she didn’t have a car; Georgia ’d gone out in a panic to find a cash machine and catch the next coach, only it spat her card out, and she couldn’t get any money. Her only hope now was the train; she’d gone back to Esme’s in tears, hoping to beg some money from her, but she didn’t have any either. She’d hoped the boyfriend, who’d stayed over, might lend her the money, but he was clearly tight as well as a complete wanker. In the end, he did offer to take her to the M4 in his car and drop her there so she could hitch a lift.

And here she was, on the side of the road, praying…

Maeve Connell had also been calling upon the Almighty-not for help, but to be her witness in an ultimatum to her husband.

“I swear before God, Patrick Connell, you don’t get home in time for my mother’s birthday dinner and it’s the last meal that’ll be cooked for you in this house. Because I’ll have gone, left you for good. I’m sick of it-sick to the death of looking after the kids alone, and sleeping alone, and coping alone, and I don’t want to hear any excuses about how we’ll soon have a great house and a fine car. So is that clear, Patrick, because if it isn’t I’ll say it all again, just so there’s no doubt in your mind whatsoever…”

Patrick had told her it was quite clear, and that of course he’d be back in Kilburn, and in good time for the birthday dinner. “And I have a great gift for your mother as well; just wait till you see it. So kiss the boys for me and tell them I’ll see them tonight. Now I have to go, or I’ll get pulled over for using the phone and then I’ll never arrive in time. Bye, darling. See you later.”

He snapped off his mobile, pulled over into the middle lane, and moved up to the fifty-six miles an hour that was his top speed.

He was dead tired. But he should be home by seven at this rate. If only it wasn’t quite so hot…

Georgia looked at her watch again. Twelve fifteen now; it was hopeless, completely hopeless. She gave up praying, gave up smiling at every car that came along, gave up hope, sank onto the grass verge by the lay-by, buried her head in her arms, and started to cry.

Rick Thompson was in a foul mood.

He was supposed to be getting home early; he’d got up at bloody dawn to finish a job in Stroud-some silly cow had decided at the beginning of the week she wanted the fence he’d put up for her painted white instead of stained brown, and it had meant an extra day and a half’s work. He wouldn’t have minded so much-it was all work, after all, all money-but she liked to chat, and it was, well, boring, mostly about her husband who was away “on business, in Japan actually,” and his views on life in general and how he liked her garden to look in particular. When she was through with that, she moved on to her children, who were all very musical, especially her eldest…

Anyway, he’d finished that morning in record time, mostly because she’d gone to Waitrose in Cirencester-“I know it’s a bit of a trek, and terribly wrong of me, environmentally, but it’s just so much better quality”-and he was waiting for her to get back so he could hand her the invoice, when his boss phoned and said he wanted him to pick up a load of timber from a yard outside Stroud and drop it off with him before the end of the day.

Since the boss lived outside Marlow and Rick lived in Reading, this was not too great an imposition, but the yard had been closed when he got there, bit of paper pinned on the door saying, “Back by one thirty,” but it was nearer two when the lumber yard guy arrived.

“Sorry, mate, got caught up with something.”

“Yeah, well,” Rick said, his face assuming the expression that sent his wife diving for cover, “some of us like to get home before midnight, specially on a Friday, OK? Let’s have it, PDQ.”

There was still some wood from the last job lying around in the bottom of his van; the man suggested he clear it out before putting his new timber in.

“Yeah, well, I’ll leave it with you, then; you can dispose of it for me.”

“Oh, no,” said the man, looking at the assortment of dusty, split planks, some of them still stuck with rusty nails, “you dispose of your own rubbish, mate. Sign here, please.”

Swearing under his breath, Rick signed, and then found the back doors of the van no longer shut properly.

“This is all I need. Got any rope? I’ll have to tie the fucking doors together.”

“You ought to tie those old planks down, mate. Not have them rattling around like that.”

“Look,” said Rick, “when I need your advice, I’ll ask for it. Right now I don’t, all right?”

And he pulled out of the yard, with Rudi, the black German shepherd dog that was his constant companion, on the passenger seat. He turned along the A46 in the direction of the M4, cursing the heat, his own misfortune in not having a van with air-conditioning, and the fact that his windscreen wash was almost empty.

And that he couldn’t now be in Reading much before four.

Patrick saw her as he stood in the queue at the tea stall; she was only a few yards away, her face tear streaked, clutching a mug of tea. Gorgeous, she was, black, no more than twenty, wearing a very short denim skirt and then those funny boots they all seemed to like: sheepskin, not ideal for a hot August day, but then that was fashion for you. She was small and quite thin, but she had very good boobs, nicely emphasized by a pink low-cut T-shirt, and her wild black hair was pulled back into a ponytail on one side.

He picked up his own tea and a couple of bottles of water and went over to her.

“Not a serious problem, I hope?”

“Who said there was a problem at all?” she said. “I’m just waiting for someone.”

Her voice was surprisingly posh; he was surprised. Then he chided himself for being classist or racist or whatever such a reaction might be labelled. Soon, he reflected, you wouldn’t be able to say anything at all without upsetting someone.

“Your friend late, then?”

“I’m-” she said, and then stopped, smiled reluctantly. “I’m not waiting for anyone, really. I’m just hoping to get a lift back to Cardiff. You’re not… not going that way?”

“No, sorry, my love. Going to London.”

“Oh, God,” she said, and her huge eyes filled with tears again, “if only I’d met you just half an hour earlier. I was trying to get there.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Well-yes. Yes, I had an appointment.”

“Important, was it?”

“Terribly,” she said, and started to cry in earnest again.

“Come on,” he said, sitting down on a bench, indicating to her to join him. “Tell me all about it.”

“Linda, I’ve got Georgia on line three-”

“ Georgia,” Linda said, picking it up, “what is it? Are you in London yet?”

“Linda, don’t be angry, please, please don’t. I’ve… well, I’ve had a difficult day so far, and… and, well, I’m on the M4.”

“The M4! God in heaven, whereabouts on the M4?”

“Um-almost in Gloucestershire. The Bath turnoff.”

“ Georgia,” said Linda, trying to keep her voice under control, “do you know what you’ve just done? I worked so hard to get you that audition. I lied; I practically bribed. What am I going to tell them? I hope you realise this damages me and my reputation as much as it does yours. Rather more so, actually, since you don’t have one. Now get off this line and out of my life. I-”

“Linda, please. Please listen to me. I’m so, so sorry, I know everything you say is true, and I don’t deserve any more of your help or kindness. But… it really wasn’t my fault. Really. I was staying with a friend in Bath and-”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“But isn’t there anything you could tell them? That will just make them wait a couple of hours for me? They’re seeing lots of girls; couldn’t you ask if I could be last? I know I can be there by five thirty…”

There was a long silence; then Linda said, “I don’t know, Georgia. I don’t know.”

“But you’ve got to talk to them anyway, tell them I’m not coming. Wouldn’t it be better for both of us if you told them I had a tummy bug or something? Please, please?”

Another silence; then Linda said, “Well, I’ll consider it. Are you on your mobile?”

“Um, no, someone else’s. Mine had-had just died.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Give me the number. And if you don’t hear from me, don’t be surprised.”

“No, no, all right. Thank you, Linda. Thank you so, so much.”

Georgia switched off the mobile and handed it back to Patrick rather shakily.

“I think she’s going to try. You were right: it was worth calling her. So… can we go, please? I mean, will you take me? I’d be grateful for the rest of my life…”

He had to finish it: absolutely had to. For the sake of a few dizzy days and nights of novelty, the absolute adrenaline rush of danger, he was at serious risk of losing everything he had.

He looked across at her as they drove along, this raw, sexy, not even very beautiful young thing, only twelve years older, dear God, than his son, and saw his life, its perfect edifice, being rocked to its foundations.

It wasn’t even as if there was anything wrong with his marriage. It was perfect; Laura was the perfect wife, caring, loving, beautiful… Everyone told him so, told him how lucky he was, and he was. It was just that… well, it was all a bit predictable. Their conversations, their social lives, their family lives, their sex lives. Especially their sex lives. He supposed that was what had actually led him into this heady, dangerous situation… Laura knew sex was important, she wanted to please him, she claimed he pleased her, she never refused him; but she never initiated it, never suggested anything, never wanted it moved out of the bedroom… He felt every time that she had ticked the experience off, seen yet another duty done. Which had been the charm of Abi, of course; with her demands, her inventiveness, her risk taking. Sex was at the centre of her.

And what kind of bastard set those things before love, before loyalty, before family happiness…?

His sort of bastard, it seemed…

Initially he had tried to excuse himself, to tell himself it was only a one-night stand, or at the very most, the briefest fling, purely sex, that it would revitalise his marriage, make him more aware of the treasure he possessed.

But Abi was more than a fling; he felt increasingly addicted to her. She seemed to be completely amoral: she had lost count, she once told him, of how many men she had slept with; she drank too much; she did a lot of drugs. She was the sort of woman indeed that he despised and disliked, and what he was doing with her, he had no real idea-except that he was having fantastic sex with her. And finding a huge and dangerous excitement in his life.

He had met her only two months before, when he had been (genuinely) at a medical conference. The conference organiser, one of the big pharmaceutical companies, had wanted some photographs taken of the speakers and people at the dinner; the photographer had been an annoying little chap with a nasal whine, but his assistant, following him round with a notebook to record the names of subjects, and a second camera, had been… well, she had been amazing. She was dark, tall, and very skinny, with incredible legs. Her long hair was pulled back in a half-undone ponytail; her black silky dress was extremely short and, although quite high necked, clung to a braless bosom. Jonathan could see it was braless because her nipples stood out so clearly. She wore very high-heeled black boots with silver heels, very large silver earrings, and quite a lot of makeup, particularly on her eyes, which were huge and dark, and her lips, which were full and sensual.

As she bent down to speak to Jonathan to ask his name, her perfume, rich and raw, surrounded him, confusing him.

“Sorry about this,” she said, “but it’s my job. Do you mind telling me how you spell Gilliatt?”

He spelt it for her, smiling. “Don’t apologise. You make a nice change from all the other obstetricians.”

“Good.” She smiled at him, stood up, and walked away.

He sat and stared after her, suddenly unable to think about anything else. She walked… How did she walk? Rhythmically, leaning back just a little, her hips thrust forward; it was a master class (or mistress class? he wondered rather wildly) in visual temptation.

As dessert was served, he saw her working a table in the far corner of the room. He excused himself from the male midwife beside him (now waxing lyrical about womb music) and headed for the gents’; on his way back he spotted her working another table, went over to her.

“Hello again.”

“Hello, Mr. Gilliatt.”

She had a very slow smile; it was extraordinarily seductive.

“I… wondered if you had a business card. I… well, I speak at a lot of these conferences and very often they want pictures, for the local press and so on. It’s… always useful to have a name up one’s sleeve.”

“Yes, of course. That’s great; I’m supposed to hand them out, so you’ve just won me some brownie points from my boss. That’s his number and this is mine-Abi’s my name. Abi Scott.”

“Thank you very much, Abi. Nice to have met you. Maybe we’ll meet again.”

“Maybe,” she said. With another slow smile.

He went back to the table and engaged very cheerfully in a heated debate on induction, fingering Abi’s card and telling himself that he would pass it to his secretary at St. Anne’s the next day.

He stayed the night at the hotel; he had strange, feverish dreams, and woke to an appalling headache. He showered and dressed and scooped up Abi Scott’s card, along with his keys and his wallet, which were lying on the bedside table, stared at it for a moment, then sat down again and, before he could think at all, rang her number…

They had an absurd conversation, both of them knowing exactly what it was actually about, while dissembling furiously.

He’d like a copy of a couple of the pictures for his wife (important to get that in-Why, Gilliatt, why?); could she perhaps e-mail them to him? She could do better than that: they had prints ready-she could drop them off at the hotel; it was only round the corner from her office. That would be extremely kind. Yes, she could be over in half an hour.

She’d been waiting in the foyer when he came down, leaning on the reception desk, fiddling with a long strand of her dark hair; she was wearing the tightest jeans he’d ever seen-they were like denim tights, for God’s sake-with the same silver-heeled boots worn over them, and a black leather jacket. Her perfume hit him with a thud as he neared her, held out his hand.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning,” she said. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Gilliatt.”

Her eyes moved over his face, rested briefly on his mouth. She smiled again, and the invitation in the smile was unmistakable.

“Maybe I could buy you a coffee,” he said, the words apparently leaving his mouth entirely unpremeditated, unplanned. “To thank you for bringing the pictures.”

“That’d be… yeah, that’d be great.”

“So,” he said as they settled at a table, “do you live in Bristol?”

“I do, yes. But I come from Devon. Born in Plymouth.”

“Oh, really? How interesting. I come from Devon, too. I was born in Exeter.” God, he must sound ridiculous to her. Pathetic. “So… what were you doing before you worked for Mr… Mr…”

“Levine. Stripping,” she said briefly.

“Really?” He could hear himself struggling to sound unsurprised, unshocked.

She laughed out loud.

“Not really. Although it wasn’t a hundred miles from that. I was an underwear model. I worked for some cruddy local photographer who specialised in it. Publicity, you know. It meant having representatives from the manufacturers at the sessions. They liked to adjust the bras, that sort of thing. It was gross. What I do now is quite civilised.”

“Yes, I see.”

There was a silence; then he said, “Well, I should be getting along, really. Back to London. Back to the real world.”

“OK,” was all she said.

Right, Gilliatt. It’s still OK. You’re still safe. Go and have a cold shower and get off to London. But-

“I’ll be down here again in a couple of weeks, another conference, in Bath. Staying here, though. Maybe we could have a drink.”

“Yeah,” she said with the slow, watchful smile, “yeah, that’d be great.”

And that had been that really.

That had been two months ago; since then he had thought about her obsessively, all the time. He longed to be with her, and not just for sex. He found her intriguing, almost frightening, so unlike anyone he had ever known. She excited him, she shocked him, and while he did not imagine himself remotely in love with her, he was certainly in her thrall.

She made him run appalling risks; she would stop suddenly as they walked through a dark street, force him into a doorway, pull him into her; she brought cocaine to the hotel rooms where they met, and made a great play of laying out the lines while the room service meals or drink were wheeled in; she called him on his mobile when she knew he was at home, claiming to be a patient, refusing to get off the line until he had made some arrangement to see her.

The terror of it all made his adrenaline run high; the comedown was fearsome. She had become his personal, addictive drug; he needed her more and more.

But the fear had perversely given him courage; he was resolved that this had been the last time-had begun to try to tell her so as they ate breakfast in bed this final morning. It had all been wonderful, he said, really wonderful, but perhaps the time had come to-

“To what?” she said, looking at him sideways, picking up a croissant, dipping it in her coffee.

“Well, to… to draw a line.”

“What sort of a line? I’m afraid we used all mine last night.”

“Abi, please don’t be… don’t be… difficult. I think you know what I mean. We have to finish this.”

“What on earth for, when we’re having such a great time? Or did I miss something last night? Were you trying to get away from me, escape into another room or-”

“Of course I wasn’t trying to get away from you. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Well, then, Jonathan, I don’t get it. Now come on, let’s get rid of this tray and have one last glorious fuck. Then I’ll leave you in peace. For now. Oh, no, not quite-I forgot I want a lift to London. Presume that’s OK?”

“Of course it’s not OK. I can’t possibly drive you into London. Someone might see me-us; you know the rules.”

“Oh, yes, the rules. It’s all right, Jonathan. Don’t look so frightened; I’m not proposing a visit to your very lovely home in Chiswick. I want to do some shopping, meet up with a girlfriend, maybe go to a movie.”

“Oh-right,” he said, “but still-maybe I could drop you at the station; you could get the train-”

“I don’t like trains. And I don’t really think it’s very likely that out of the millions of people in London this afternoon we’re going to be spotted by one of your chums. No, I’d prefer you to drop me… well, Harley Street would be fine; how’d that be?”

“Abi, I am not taking you to Harley Street.”

“Why not? I like it there. I’ve been there before, remember?”

He did remember-remembered her coming to his rooms, claiming she was a patient, pulling him into her on the examination bed; he still felt sick just thinking about it. Sick and… amazing.

“Well, you can’t come today. Someone might recognize you. Abi…” He took a deep breath. “I really do want to talk.”

“We can talk in the car. Waste of time talking. Now come on, what can I do to interest you…”

She turned him on his back, began toying with his cock with her tongue. He struggled briefly, then gave himself up to the pleasure of her. It could be the last time… He would take her to London and they would talk in the car. He would retreat from the madness and rebuild his life. It would be tough, and he would miss what she did for him, but a few weeks from now it would seem like a dream. A disturbing, dangerous dream. And it would be over, with no great harm done-to him or Laura or the children or his marriage…

The possibility of his harming Abi never occurred to him. And if it had he would have dismissed it utterly. She really was not his concern.

CHAPTER 7

Linda had made the phone call. She told the casting director that Georgia had been up all night with food poisoning, but that she was struggling to get to London just the same; however, there was no way she’d be there by three. It would be more like five.

The casting director said that since Georgia would hardly be at her best and they were seeing three more girls the next day, then she could come along in the morning.

“At-let’s see-ten thirty?”

Linda thanked her not too effusively-she didn’t want to appear grovelling-and tried to ring Georgia back on the number she had given her. It was on message; Linda said could Georgia ring her immediately and get to her office in London as fast as she could. That way she could keep her literally under lock and key until she delivered her personally to the audition in the morning…

“So is it films you’re looking to get into?”

She was a nice kid, Patrick thought, very appreciative, sitting up there beside him, doling out his sandwiches and his jelly babies, his chosen sweets on the road, so sweet your blood sugar level-and thus your concentration-went up just looking at them.

“It’s what everyone wants, actually,” said Georgia. “Actors might say they just want to play Hamlet at the National, but really and truly they all want to be big names in films and TV.”

“I’ll look forward to your first premiere,” said Patrick, grinning at her.

“Well, I’ll certainly invite you. I’d never have made it, if it wasn’t for you.”

“I’ve enjoyed the company.” He added, “And that’s the truth. But we’re not there yet. Mind if I put the radio on?”

It was eleven thirty; Toby had still not returned.

What the fuck was he doing? Barney wondered, pacing the house desperately.

They’d all had breakfast together-Toby had said it was important to appear normal, and anyway, no point getting to the bank before it opened at nine thirty. After which he set off, telling his parents some cock-and-bull story-or so it seemed to Barney-about having to collect some currency from the bank.

“But, Toby, no one gets currency from the bank anymore; that’s what plastic’s for,” his father said.

“Not in the Maldives; no cash machines where we’re going, and I can fill the car up at the same time. I meant to do it yesterday, but I forgot.”

Toby had always got himself-and very often both of them-out of scrapes at school by lying; Barney had always been awed by how accomplished at it he was. It was very rare for him not to get away with things: in no small part because he was a successful boy very good at games and bright, and the staff therefore liked him and were inclined to believe him anyway.

The Westons left at about ten thirty; they had a couple of things to pick up on the way, they said, before meeting their friends.

It was after twelve before Toby got back.

“Barney, I’m so sorry. She wasn’t there-no one was; she made me go to her office-”

“Couldn’t you have left it at the house?”

“No, she said she wanted it in her hands. Even then, I had to wait there for about ten minutes as well.”

“Yeah, all right, all right. Go and get changed, for Christ’s sake. We’re supposed to be having lunch with the ushers at one.”

“Well… we’ll have to cut it. Barney, the wedding’s not till four thirty. We’ll be fine…”

“OK,” said Barney reluctantly, “I’ll call them. Now, please. Hurry up.”

Toby, clearly shaken, was a long time in the shower; then he couldn’t find the Paul Smith socks he had bought, the only ones fine enough to make his new, stiff bridegroom shoes comfortable.

“Tobes, mate, we’ve got to go. And I’d better drive; you look bloody awful.”

“Yes, OK, OK. Oh-shit. I still haven’t filled the car up.”

“Toby! For Christ’s sake. Well, come on. Let’s go. Back way?”

“No, let’s nip along the M4. It’s only one junction, and we can fill up at the service station.”

“Toby, it’s Friday. Motorway’s not entirely the best idea-do we really have to get fuel?”

“We really have to. It’s bloody nearly empty. Anyway, we’ll be heading towards London, not out of it. It’ll be fine. Much quicker anyway than all those country lanes. We could just as easily get stuck behind a tractor-”

Barney was about to say that you could always get round a tractor if it was absolutely necessary, but Toby suddenly said he needed the lavatory. He disappeared for almost five minutes, came out looking very shaken.

“Sorry, Barney. Just been sick. Nerves, I suppose. Still don’t feel great. In fact-” he disappeared again.

Well, at least there’d be plenty of lavatories at the service station…

Georgia had discovered a message from Linda on Patrick’s phone. She looked at him, smiling radiantly.

“She doesn’t exactly say it’s all right, but she still wants me to get to London, so I think it must be, don’t you?”

“So tell me about yourself,” he said. And she did.

How she had wanted to be an actor all her life; how she had been the star of all the school productions, especially as Juliet. “Some of those bitches there said, ‘Oh, you can’t have a black Juliet,’ but our drama teacher was a complete legend, and she said of course you could; it was no stranger than all those white actors playing Othello.” And how she had then won a place at NAD, as she called her drama school, the National Academy of Drama, and how she had been spotted by Linda at the end-of-term performance.

“I’d like to be able to say the rest is history,” she said, biting into an apple, “but I can’t. If I get this thing today, well, it’s my big chance; it really is.”

She told him she’d been adopted when she had been a baby. “My birth mother was only fourteen and she couldn’t keep me-well, didn’t want to, more like it-so Mum and Dad took me on. They gave me a really happy childhood; I felt really safe and loved, had lots of nice things, went to a good school, you know? I think I was a bit of a disappointment to them, though. My mum dreamed of me being a teacher. God. I couldn’t do that. No patience. Not with little kids, anyway.”

Patrick agreed that you did indeed need a lot of patience with little kids. “I have three boys all under eight; life isn’t exactly peaceful.”

“I bet it’s not. Your wife must get quite… tired. What’s her name?”

“Maeve.”

“Maeve, that’s pretty. Does she work at all?”

“What, with three kids? She does not, although nothing makes her more annoyed than when people ask her that. ‘What do you think I do all day?’ she says. ‘My nails?’”

“Oh, sorry. Stupid of me. I should know; I get all that sort of shit as well.”

“What sort of shit would that be?” said Patrick, amused.

“Oh, people saying things like, ‘How lovely for you to live in Roath Park.’ That’s the really middle-class bit of Cardiff where our house is. Or, ‘Wasn’t it lucky for you that Jack and Bea adopted you?’ What they mean is, ‘How lovely for you to have been adopted by white, middle-class people, instead of dragged down by your black birth mother.’ Well, it is in a way, but it’s bloody hard as well.”

“And why should that be?”

“Well, if you’re black, you’re black,” said Georgia slowly, “and it feels odd to be all the time with white people. You have no idea what it was like, as I got to four or five, to go to a kids’ party and be the only black face there. You feel… I don’t know… terribly on your own. And a bit bewildered… as if you shouldn’t be there, not really. Can you imagine that?”

“I… think I can, yes.”

“Thing is, you’re only there because your own mum and your real family have failed you and someone’s conscience meant you got rescued. And you feel you ought to be grateful all the time, and you really resent that. It got better as I grew up, because Cardiff ’s a pretty mixed community and there were lots of black and Asian kids in my school. But then I thought, Well, what does that say for my relationship with my mum and dad, if I don’t feel good with the people they know and like?”

“Did you ever go and find your birth mother?”

“Yes,” said Georgia flatly, “but it didn’t work.”

“And did that upset you?”

“Yes, of course. Well, at first. Then I just sort of… pushed her back where she’d been all my life. Nowhere.” She looked at Patrick and smiled. “I never usually talk about all this stuff till I’ve known someone for ages, and not always then. You must have some kind of magic, makes people talk.”

“I’m just naturally nosy, I suppose. We’re doing well, you know, Georgia. You’ll be there by five, the rate we’re going. Here, your phone’s charged. Best take it; don’t want you leaving it behind. Oh, Jesus, these people…”

A van had cut them off, overtaking from the inside; Patrick had to brake quite sharply.

“That was hideous,” said Georgia, adding, “White van driver, are they really all bad?”

“Most…”

Something had fallen on the floor. Georgia bent down to pick it up; it was a small box.

“What’s this?”

“Oh, now take a look; I’d be glad of a woman’s opinion. It’s a present for my mother-in-law, for her birthday. Her fiftieth. We’re having a bit of a celebration tonight; it’s one of the reasons I have to press on.”

Georgia opened the box; it was a very pretty watch on a silver bracelet.

“It’s lovely, Patrick. I do like watches. My last boyfriend had bought me a beautiful one the very night I decided to dump him. I had to make him take it back; it nearly killed me.”

“So, why did you dump him? Or is that just one nosy question too many?”

“No. He was just… boring.”

“Well,” said Patrick firmly, “you did the right thing. Even if you did have to give up the watch. Maeve and I, now, we drive each other mad sometimes, but we’re never bored. Now just keep hold of that watch, would you? I should have stowed it away a bit better than that.”

“I’ll put it into my bag-it’ll be safe there-and give it to you when I get out.”

“Fine. Don’t go running off with it, will you?”

“Don’t be silly; of course I won’t.”

“Oh, Jesus. Oh, dear sweet Christ, it’s the fucking police. Right behind us. Jesus, that’s all we need.”

Barney pulled over, guided by the relentless blue light onto the hard shoulder, wound down the window.

“Afternoon, sir.”

“Good afternoon, Officer.”

“Perhaps you’d be kind enough to get out of the car, sir. Do you have any idea the speed you were doing then?”

“Er-not quite. No.”

“Ninety-eight, sir. Little above the speed limit.”

“Yes, yes, I’m sorry, Officer. I… well, I was in rather a hurry.”

“I could see that.” A half smile crossed his face. It wasn’t a very kind smile. “Going to a wedding, are you?”

“Er, yes. Yes, I am. I’m the best man. My friend here is the bridegroom.”

Surely, surely they’d get some points for sympathy.

“Could I see your licence, sir?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. Toby, could you give it to me, please? It’s in my wallet. I put it in the glove compartment.”

He passed it over; the cop looked at it carefully.

“So you are Barnaby John Fraser? This is your licence? And it’s your own car?”

“No, it belongs to Toby here. Mr. Weston.”

“But clearly you are insured to drive it, sir. I’ll just take down the details, sir. I see you live in London.”

“Yes, that’s correct. But we were staying with Mr. Weston’s parents in Elcombe.”

“And the wedding is?”

“In Marlborough. Well, just outside.”

“So why did you come up to the motorway, sir, I wonder… seeing Elcombe is on the south side as well.”

“Well… we thought… roads all windy and narrow, we thought the motorway would be a better bet.”

He knew why the policeman was keeping him talking: so he could smell his breath, see if he’d been drinking.

“Well, you could have made a mistake there, sir. Now I’m afraid I shall have to Breathalyze you.”

“But I haven’t had anything to drink.”

“Regulations, sir. We have to do it. Won’t take long.” And then, as Barney handed him back the tube, “What time is the wedding, sir?”

“Four thirty.”

“In Marlborough? That’s cutting it a little bit fine. Right, well, there’s no alcohol registered in this. You’d better be on your way, then. Good luck. You will be hearing from us, of course.”

They’d be watching them, Barney thought. Even though they were going ahead, he couldn’t risk overtaking them. Buggers. Total buggers. God, the petrol was low. Well, they were nearly at the service station. And it was still only just after three. OK, ten past. Should still be all right…

“Bastards,” Toby said, pushing his hair back as they swung onto the motorway. “Think we should call someone?”

“’Fraid so, mate, yeah. Who, though? Tamara? Her ma?”

“Jesus, no!” Toby turned white. “Whoever you called about the lunch.”

“Pete. Well, you’d better do it. Get it over.”

“OK. Christ, I’m sweating. Shit, Barney, how did this bloody well happen? Fine best man you’ve turned out to be.”

He thought Toby was joking, and then realised he wasn’t. Not entirely.

Just after three Jack Bryant pulled onto the motorway. He’d been looking forward to today for some time; he was driving up to Scotland for a bit of grouse shooting with some chums, which would be great fun, and moreover, he was able to drive up in the E-Type. She really needed a good run.

The E-Type was his pride and joy: bright red, not a scratch on her-well, not anymore there wasn’t-soft top, the works. She went like the bloody wind too, hundred and twenty easy, not that you could do that often these days.

He’d bought her after his last divorce: three years ago. He’d always wanted one, and after the handout he’d had to give his ex-wife, he felt he deserved something for himself.

Hard to believe he and the car were roughly the same age-well, he was a good bit older, truth to tell.

Jack had fallen on slightly hard times; he’d made a fair bit of money out of the first property boom, but not sufficient to keep him for the rest of his life, or support his ambition to lead the life of a country gentleman. He wasn’t a country gentleman, of course-he was a grammar-school boy made good-but he had a lot of friends who were, and though he now lived rather modestly in Fulham, he was to be found most weekends in the country; he was useful, as a single, socially acceptable man always is, and besides, it was impossible not to like him-he was so good-natured, so energetic, such a fund of good stories.

He had been in Bristol for a couple of days staying with friends; hence his presence on the M4 that afternoon. And while there, had had the E-Type overhauled by a very good mechanic he knew, and then had given her the final once-over himself. Well, you couldn’t be too careful with these old ladies, and it was a long way.

Mary was feeling a bit sleepy. It was the heat, of course; and the fact that she’d been awake most of the night. With excitement. She might have a little nap-it couldn’t do any harm, and it would make the journey seem shorter. The driver would tell her when they were nearly there, so that she could comb her hair and so on-not that there wouldn’t be lots of time when they arrived. The plane wasn’t due till six, and the taxi company had advised allowing an extra hour just in case. Mary had allowed an extra two.

“So, how are we doing?” she said.

“Fine, love.” Her driver, who had told her to call him Colin, was very nice, she thought. And middle-aged, so almost certainly a better driver. It would have been awful if he’d been one of those tough young ones, with a shaven head. “An hour and a half at the most from here. Even if the traffic snarls up a bit nearer London.”

“Is that likely?” said Mary anxiously.

“If I knew that, my love, I’d be a rich man. That’s what every motorist wants: to know how the traffic is going to be, whether there’ll be an accident, that sort of thing.”

“An accident! Oh, dear, I hadn’t thought of that…”

“Look, Mrs. Bristow, we’re in the inside lane, as you requested, doing a nice steady sixty-five. Not much chance of an accident happening to us. And even if there was an accident, the speed I’m going and us being right next to the hard shoulder, there’d be no way it would affect us.”

“Do you think so?”

“I know so, my love. Look, why don’t you have a little sleep. We’ll be there then before you know it.”

Mary settled herself peacefully in the corner. It had got very dark suddenly. Maybe it was going to rain; it was close enough for thunder. He was right, her nice driver: they would indeed be there before she knew it. And then she’d see Russell and… and…

Mary drifted into sleep smiling.

Thank Christ for that, Colin Sharp thought, put his foot down hard, and pulled over into the middle lane.

“Maybe we’d better have that chat now?” said Abi as they swung onto the M4.

They were in his new car: a Saab. He had had it only a week, and was still not entirely comfortable with it. The car itself was fine, but the sound system was slightly faulty, and the hands-free phone didn’t work at all.

Abi had turned on Radio I: very loudly. He turned it down; she turned it up again.

“Abi, I can’t think against that sort of noise. Let alone talk.”

“You’re showing your age, Jonathan.”

But she turned it off and picked up his phone from the dashboard, started fiddling with it.

“Abi, put that back.”

“Why? I was going to take a photograph of you. You look so sweet. All stern and distant. So different from an hour ago. There. That’s great. Now I want to check if you got that text I sent you-”

“What text?”

“While you were in the shower. Yes, here it is; you can look at it later. It’s a very nice text.”

“Abi, put that back, please. Now.”

“OK.” She shrugged.

“He took a deep breath. “Abi, I think it’s time we… we stopped this.”

“Stopped what?”

“Our… this… this relationship.”

“Why?” The question sounded very aggressive.

“Well, I think it’s run its course. I’ve been feeling increasingly… unhappy about it. It’s great-you’ve been great-but I think we should say good-bye before… well, before we regret it-”

“I’m not regretting it, Jonathan.”

“Abi, I… Look, you don’t understand.”

“I think I do,” she said, and her eyes were very hard. “You’ve had your fun and now you’re getting windy. The excitement isn’t quite enough anymore, so I’m supposed to let you just walk away into the sunset, am I? Just because you’re feeling a bit flaky”

“Well, you can’t have imagined there was any kind of future in it.”

“I might have done,” she said. “You came on pretty strong to me. As I recall.”

“You didn’t exactly hold back yourself either. As I recall.”

Her voice was very tense, very angry. “You’ve got a fucking nerve, Jonathan Gilliatt. For weeks I’ve been providing sex on demand-”

“I seem to remember you doing quite a lot of the demanding.”

She ignored this. “Now I’m just to fuck off, leave you to go back to perfect little wifey pretend I was never there. Well, I just might not do that, Jonathan. Sorry, but none of this strikes me as quite… fair.”

She was right: given how zealously he had pursued her, it wasn’t fair.

“Well, I’m sorry. But, Abi, you must see it can’t go on forever. It’s not… not realistic.”

“I don’t see, no. And what if I’d prefer it to continue? Had you thought of that?”

He felt a stab of absolute panic.

“I… well, I-”

“You hadn’t, had you. You thought because I was easy meat, what I felt or thought didn’t matter; you thought that I’d just go quietly, say, ‘Yes, Jonathan, no Jonathan, three bags full, Jonathan, good-bye and amen.’ Well, I’m not going to. I don’t see why I should. Actually.”

He glanced at her; she was white, her features taut with rage.

“Look-are you saying you want money or something? Because if you do-”

“No, I don’t want any fucking money. That’s a filthy thing to say. What do you think I am, Jonathan? You’re scared, aren’t you now? That I’m going to turn into some kind of bunny boiler?”

“No,” he said, realising this was exactly what he was afraid of, “of course not.” And then, looking at the clock on the dashboard: “This traffic’s horribly heavy. I’m going to be late. We need some fuel too. I’ll have to call; we’ll go to the next service station.”

“Who are you going to call, your wife?”

“No, my rooms in Harley Street. I’ve got a clinic at four.”

He pulled in at the service station; while he filled the car, he called St. Anne’s. His secretary sounded brisk. “You have quite a big clinic, Mr. Gilliatt; do you want me to ask people to wait, or shall I just reschedule?”

“Get them to wait if they will. I should be there by four thirty, five at the latest. I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, and Mr. Gilliatt, your wife called. Asked if I’d heard from you; apparently she’s called you a couple of times. Shall I call her, explain or-”

“Yes, that’d be great, Jane. Hard for me to talk; my car phone isn’t working properly. Thanks.”

He felt odd, confused; the conversations with Abi had scared him, and at the same time had thrown all his emotions into sharp focus: the longing to finish it, to be safe again-and, absurdly, the misery of losing her.

She got out of the car as he approached it.

“Where are you going?”

“To the toilet. That OK? Or do I have to get permission?”

“Abi, I’m in a desperate hurry.”

“Well, so am I. To get to the toilet.”

He felt like hitting her.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Well, get a move on.”

He sat fuming, half tempted to drive off and leave her. But he was scared of what she might do. He was scared of what she might do anyway.

Might be an idea to call Laura, in case she called him. He dialled the house; it went straight to the answering machine. The same happened with her mobile.

“Laura, darling, it’s me. Just to let you know I’m on my way, bit late. Don’t call me, will you; the hands-free’s not working properly. I’ll call you when I can.”

He saw Abi coming back, her face stormy, obviously gearing up for a fight…

CHAPTER 8

Mary woke up feeling uncomfortable. It was her bladder, not strong at the best of times, and when she was under stress, distinctly weak. She would never get to Heathrow without going to the toilet; she’d have to ask Colin to stop at the next service station and hope he wouldn’t mind. Donald had got irritated when she was constantly asking him to stop on journeys.

But she was paying Colin, she told herself; he’d have no business being irritated. She was sure Russell would have said that. She had a quick worry about whether Russell would get irritated with her constant need for the toilet, and then, after about another few minutes, took a deep breath and said, “Colin, I wonder if you’d mind very much pulling in at the next service station? I need to go to the ladies’.”

Colin said he wouldn’t mind at all, and in fact he could do with a break himself; he’d got through his bottle of water already and they were only about halfway there.

“It’s this heat. All right if we just go to the fuel section? Takes so long if you have to park up in services.”

“Of course. And I’ll get you the water, Colin. Unless you want to… to get out yourself, that is.”

“No, no, Mary, that’s fine. Bladder of steel I’ve got. Yes, if you would, couple of bottles and maybe some chewing gum? I like to chew when I’m driving; helps my concentration.”

Mary hoped that didn’t mean his concentration was flagging. She’d seen some very alarming driving since she’d woken up: cars speeding, motorbikes weaving in and out of the traffic, lorries sitting horribly close behind cars-all with foreign number plates, she noticed-and just now, a white van sitting on their tail, flashing furiously into Colin’s mirror before suddenly accelerating into a very small space alongside them and then shooting into the outside lane against a background of furious hooting.

“What very unpleasant behaviour,” she said. “My husband always said that bad driving was really little more than bad manners. Would you agree with that, Colin?”

“I certainly would. Right, here we are, Mary. Doesn’t look too busy, considering; shouldn’t hold us up much.”

“I do hope not,” said Mary.

“So-what do these things do for you then?” asked Georgia, helping herself to a handful of jelly babies.

“Wreck my teeth. Make me feel sick. Keep me awake, mostly…”

“How? I’d have thought coffee would be better.”

“I’m practically immune to coffee, Georgia. These are the thing, pure sugar. Don’t you eat them all, now.”

“I won’t.”

“In fact, I’m surprised to see you eating sweets at all. You’re so skinny.”

“I’m incredibly lucky. I just don’t seem to put on weight. Other girls are really jealous of me. They have to work at it so hard, hardly eat at all, some of them, exist on cigarettes and lettuce. I would say at least half the girls in the business have an eating disorder. It comes from casting directors and agents and so on going on and on at you-‘You must keep the weight down, you’ve put on some weight.’ So you see how lucky I am.”

“I do indeed.”

She was silent for a while, munching the sweets; then she said, “You can see a lot from up here, can’t you? It’s amazing, almost like flying.”

“It is indeed. And you can see a lot of what’s going on in the other vehicles as well as you pass them. I find that the greatest temptation, to peer into people’s cars and their lives.”

“Well, why don’t you?”

“Because I’m busy keeping my eye on the road, that’s why.”

“Well, I’ll do it for you for now. Oh, now, here comes a coach driver up beside us. He looks well bored, all those old grannies sleeping. S’pose they’ve been on some tour or other-oh, God, that looks like a real nightmare. Poor bloke.”

“Who’s that then?” said Patrick.

“A bridegroom. All done up in his monkey suit, top hat on the backseat, and another beside him, best man, I s’pose. They look well stressed. Late, I s’pose. Too much last night, probably. They’re coming up so fast… God, how awful. Late for your own wedding… Hope the cops don’t stop them. How are we doing?”

“Pretty well. Reckon you might make it yet.”

“Mate, I need the toilet; can you do the petrol?”

“Sure. How’re you feeling?”

“Not great. But I’ll make out. Could do without this gut rot, though.”

Barney resisted the temptation to point out that it was stress rotting Toby’s guts, not some malign fate. He still felt very shocked and confused by Toby’s revelations. Toby, on the other hand, seemed much better, more normal; it was as if, having dealt with the situation as best he could, he could set it all aside and return to his role as model bridegroom. He didn’t seem the Toby Barney knew anymore; it was almost scary.

Barney filled up the car, and then thought that he might take a look at the tyres. He’d felt the car pulling a bit. The way they were driving, they needed twenty/twenty wheels.

“For God’s sake, what are you doing now?”

Toby had reappeared.

“I want to check the tyres,” said Barney. “The front offside’s a tad soft. Look, you go and pay, and get some more water, will you? Time you’ve done that I’ll be through.”

“OK.”

Toby went back into the building. He grabbed two bottles of water, and found himself behind an old lady in the queue. There were three people in front of her-Jesus, this was taking forever. He looked at his watch. It was OK. It was fine. Hours yet. Well, an hour…

As he stood there, trying to keep calm, his phone rang.

“Toby Weston.”

“Where are you, you little shit?”

It was Tamara’s father. Who doted on her to an absurd degree, who clearly considered Toby to be a most unworthy contender for her hand…

“I’m… we’re just on the motorway now, George. Should be with you quite soon.”

“And what the fuck are you doing on the motorway?”

“Well, I-Sorry, I did phone Pete; you obviously didn’t get the message. Be there in no time. Just filled up, want to check the tyre pressures-”

“The tyre pressures. What the fuck are you doing checking tyre pressures? An hour before your wedding, for Christ’s sake.”

“Yes, George, I know, but one’s a bit down-”

“Look, you just forget the fucking tyres. You get over here right now. This is the biggest day of my daughter’s life and I’m not having it wrecked for her. Now, you listen to me: I don’t care if the tyre’s right down on its rim; you just fucking well get here, you understand?”

The phone went dead.

Toby looked at the queue of people in front of him-now down to two, one nice-looking girl and the old lady-and said, easing his way forward, “Look, can I go first, do you mind? Emergency, must get away-”

The girl stood aside at once; the old lady gave him the sort of look that he could remember his grandmother giving him when he was naughty and said, “I do mind, yes, as a matter of fact. We’re all trying to get somewhere important, and I have a plane to meet. You must wait your turn, like everyone else. I’m sorry.”

And then she spent an inordinate amount of time counting out the exact money for her purchases.

The other queues were all longer; Toby just had to wait.

Mary felt mildly remorseful, watching him haring towards a car parked up by the air line. And more so when she realised he was wearing the striped trousers and braces of a wedding guest. That hadn’t actually been very kind of her, and neither was it in character. But he had been rather arrogant. If he’d asked nicely she might have felt differently. Although… she knew why she’d reacted like that, really. It was because she was on edge herself…

“Barney, come on, come on, we have to get the fuck out of here. Just get in, for God’s sake. I’ll drive…”

Toby threw himself into the driver’s seat, slammed the door.

“But-”

“I said get in. Look, I’m off. You can stay here if you want to.”

Barney got in, telling himself you could only die once. And sending up the closest thing he knew to a prayer that it wouldn’t be today…

Laura frowned when she heard Jonathan’s message. It was all very well, him telling her not to call in that rather high-handed way, but she needed to know when he would be back. He did obsess over the mobile business; he could surely take a quick call-it would be over in a second. She’d just give him maybe another fifteen minutes and then…

“Give me some more of those jelly babies, would you?”

Georgia looked at Patrick; his eyes were fixed on the road, oddly unblinking. Was he sleepy? She felt sleepy herself, thundering along, the road shimmering in the heat haze. And was it her imagination-was it getting darker; were they losing the sun-

“We’re running into a storm,” Patrick said, wide-awake suddenly. “Dear God, will you look at that-”

And, in an odd yellow blackness, great sheets of rain came beating down on the road, turning it to glass and then seeming to wrap around them, crash after crash of thunder; and then the rain turned to hail, the stones hitting the windscreen, vying with the thunder for noise, whiting out the road markings.

She looked anxiously at Patrick, and his face was tense, his hands on the steering wheel white knuckled; all she could see of the approaching cars were their headlights, some on full beam, an endless procession, and in front of them nothing but spray-thick, impenetrable spray, only half pierced by the long red of the brake lights.

And then it was over as fast as it had begun; they ran out of it into brilliant sunshine, the thunder gone too, and the sky a sweet, clear blue.

“Wow,” she said, “that was kind of… scary.”

“So…” said Abi. They had driven through the darkness of the thunder and the hail; the sun was shining again. “So… what do you want me to do?”

Relief flooded him. She was going to be all right after all; she’d just been making a point.

“Well… nothing, I suppose. Just… just-”

“Go quietly. Is that it?”

“I… suppose so. Yes. If you put it like that.”

“I can’t think of any other way to put it, Jonathan. You want out. If I don’t, that’s my problem. You have a marriage to look after. And I only have me. Poor little old me.” She sighed.

He felt a pang of remorse and irritation in equal proportions. He hadn’t behaved entirely well. He could see that. But… she was hardly in a vulnerable position. She was financially self-sufficient; she had a flat; she had a good job, a car; she was young, sexy, tough-she didn’t exactly need him. As Laura did…

“Abi, I’m sorry. I shall miss you. But… I don’t really have any alternative. Our relationship can’t go anywhere. And it’s very wrong. You must see that.”

“Well, why start it then?” Her voice was ugly, harsh.

“I…” He felt very tired suddenly, unable to deal with her arguments. The late night, the drive down from Birmingham, the lack of sleep, the stress of the journey, the shock of the storm: it all combined to confuse him. He slowed the car down.

“What are you doing?”

“Moving into the slow lane.”

He moved behind a red E-Type-lovely old car, he thought, surprised that he could notice it even, given his turmoil-then eased himself into a large space in the slow lane in front of an old Skoda.

“You know it’s bloody unfair,” she said, lighting a cigarette.

“Abi, I said not in the car.”

“Yes, I know you did. It’s all totally unfair, Jonathan. What do you think I am, some kind of automaton? Didn’t you ever think that I might have taken what you were doing just a little bit seriously? When you sent me flowers and bought me expensive dinners and the odd bit of costly stuff? Did you see doing all that as a substitute for just paying for me, the price of the sex?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You know perfectly well I’m very… very”-careful, Jonathan, don’t start claiming affection, could be very dangerous-“very concerned for you.”

“Oh, really? Well, I don’t think I do know that, actually. I think that because you’re rich and successful and you’ve got a wife who believes every filthy fucking lie you tell her, you can spend nights away in pricey hotels, get your sexual pleasure that way, rather than a quick screw with a tart. Well, it sucks, Jonathan. It’s filthy and I think your wife ought to know what a filthy slob she’s married to; I think you should have to deal with that and her. And I think maybe I should tell her.”

“Abi, don’t be absurd. What good would that do?”

“Quite a lot-in the long run. Not to you, or to me, but to her and any other poor bitch whom you might fancy fucking in the future.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Of course I’d dare. What have I got to lose? Nothing at all.”

“But… but…” He found he was pleading with her. “But, Abi, you couldn’t do that; you’d hurt her so much.”

“No, Jonathan, it’s you who’s hurt her. Not me. So-”

Jonathan’s mobile rang sharply; he shouldn’t-he was driving-but he was in the slow lane, going very slowly… He picked it up, looked at it. It was Laura. Without thinking, wanting only to reassure her, and to somehow be safe with her, he pressed the button.

“Hello, darling-”

“Darling!” Abi was shouting, her face ugly with rage. “How can you do that, you rotten bastard? How can you talk like that? Give me that phone…”

“Hello! Hello, Jonathan, is that you?” Laura’s voice was faint, crackly “Jonathan, what’s-”

The traffic was very thick; a huge lorry was alongside them, travelling at the same speed, the red car in front pulling ahead now-nice, that old Jag; he’d love something like that-the one behind too close on their tail, really, all of them part of a great orderly mass of power, riding the highway in the dazzling sun: he took it in with some strange detachment, trying to think, absurdly, what to say… And then…

“Jonathan, be careful, look out, the lorry, what’s happening to it-”

“Patrick, look out, look out, what’s happening, what is it, be careful, look out-oh God-”

“Shit! Fuck! Jesus Christ.”

“Toby, stop, hold it, for Christ’s sake, hold it.”