Cathy Kelly is a number one bestselling author. She worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist, and has published ten novels. She is an Ambassador for Unicef in Ireland, helping to raise awareness of the plight of 12 million children orphaned across Africa through AIDS. She lives in Wicklow with her family.

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By the same author:

Woman to Woman
She's the One
Never Too Late
Someone hike You
Just Between Us
Best of Friends
Always and Forever
Past Secrets Lessons in Heartbreak
CATHY KELLY

What She Wants

HARPER

Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercoiiins.co.uk

This paperback edition 2008 1

Copyright Cathy Kelly 2001

Cathy Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 00 7273935

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are
the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is
entirely coincidental.

Set in Sabon by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or
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To Francis and Lucy, with much love.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

People always want to know if you put real people in books. And the answer, for most writers, is no. But I've found that readers come up to me later and say 'you know that TV reporter woman in the last book, the vindictive, horrible cow with the platinum hair and the lisp? Well, we all know she's meant to be so and so . . .'
This is the sort of comment that makes me go pale with fear. There's no point babbling that you didn't mean it to sound like any particular person. Nobody will believe you. You live in fear of meeting a TV reporter with platinum hair, a lisp and a strong right hook. Which is why I decided to write a book where I could make up things left, right and centre. Just in case anyone in a village in Kerry got upset with the carry-on in the village in my book, I invented my own village.
The other problem with writing fiction is that you do a teeny bit of research and then go off and invent things merrily. This is a problem when the people who've given you the benefit of their experience actually read your book and say, shocked, 'something like that would never happen!'
So apologies to all my friends in Sony Music Ireland in case there's a bit that makes them go pale. I'm sorry, but I just made lots of things up! And thanks to Hugh Murray and to Angela for the detective work.
Writing books involves lots of people and I'm lucky in that I work with some of the nicest book people ever. Thanks to my dear friend and agent Ali Gunn and all at Curtis Brown, especially Carol Jackson, Diana Mackay and Doug Kean. A huge thanks to my editor, Rachel Hore, for her kind words and encouragement. Thanks to Jennifer Parr for making editing such fun, thanks to Fiona McIntosh for all her hard work, unfailing good humour and kindness, thanks to everyone at HarperCollins UK for their incredible efforts, especially Nick Sayers, Adrian Bourne, Victoria Barnsley, Maxine Hitchcock, Anne O'Brien, Jane Harris, Martin Palmer, Moira Reilly, Tony Purdue, Lee Motley, Venetia Butterfield, Phyllis Acolatse, Tilly Ware, Esther Taylor, Leeza Morley, and especially all the sales team who do the really hard work. Thanks also to Tony, Dave and Barry for making the M25 fun, thanks to the RNA for giving me the thrill of winning the Parker RNA Romantic Novel of the Year award (I'm using my gorgeous pens to sign contracts and big cheques for handbags).
Thanks to everyone at HarperCollins Australia for all their support, especially Christine Farmer, KarenMaree Griffiths and Sarah Ward. Thanks to marvellous Deborah Schneider, and my American family at Dutton, especially Carole Baron, Laurie Chittenden, Seta Bedrossian, Stephanie Bowe and Lisa Johnson.
Thanks to the wonderful people in Gummerus, Empiria, The House of Books, Emece, Bertelsmann, Kadokawa Shoten and Norsk Ukeblad for all their hard work on my behalf.
Thanks to my writer friends who write, phone and send cheering e-mails. Thanks for that go to Kate Thompson, Marian Keyes, Sheila O'Flanagan, Patricia Scanlan, Jenny Colgan and Martina Devlin. Thanks to dear friends like Sarah, Lisa, Susan, Esther, Joanne, Yvonne and LisaMarie for all their support. Thanks to Stella and John O'Connell for dinner parties that would be entire novels on their own! Thanks to my Powerscourt friends, especially Angela and Eddie, thanks to Siobhan O'Reilly for the ballet on the ball lessons, also hi Damyen and Bev!
Thanks and love must go to my family for always being so supportive. Thanks Mum, Francis, Lucy, Anne and Dave. A big hello to Laura, Naomi, Emer and Robert.

via

Thanks to darling Tasmin who keeps me from turning into a couch potato, and thanks and much love to John for everything.
Finally, a huge thank you so much to the people who read my books. And to all the lovely people who write nice messages on my web site. You have no idea how cheering it is to log on and find people have said kind things. Hope you enjoy this one.

IX
PROLOGUE

As yet another noisy Cork and Kerry tour bus crunched gears over the hump-backed bridge, belching out diesel fumes, Mary-Kate Donlan closed the door of her chemist shop and locked it. If any Redlion inhabitant wanted either lipstick or flu remedies in their lunch break, they could go without. Ever since her assistant Otis had been on holiday, all she'd managed for her lunch for the past few weeks was a bit of a sandwich munched between customers and she was fed up with it. Today she'd arranged to meet her niece, Delphine, for a leisurely lunch and a chat.
Wrapping her coat around her, she hurried down the village to the Widow Maguire's, a pretty stone pub with window boxes, traditional music sessions twice a week and the best pub food for miles. She ran across the main street, a slim middle-aged woman with plain bobbed hair and not a speck of make-up on her shrewd, inquisitive face. She hurried past 'Lucille's: Fashions For All Occasions' with just a brief glance in the window. Lucille's fashions were always a little on the eccentric side. This week, the window sported plenty of knobbly knitwear in jewel colours, along with one magnificent cruise wear rig out that would probably look fine in the South of France but was a little skimpy for Kerry in October.
She slowed down when she spotted Emmet from the convenience shop ahead of her. A crotchety old bandit with a fondness for porter, Emmet would talk the hind legs off a donkey and made for a very irritating luncheon companion on account of his tendency to wax lyrical about the rare
ould times as he sank his lunchtime two pints. When Emmet had nipped into the pub, Mary-Kate speeded up again. He'd have met some other poor soul by the time she got there, so she was safe.
'Hello Lara,' she greeted a tall red-haired woman in a stylish trouser suit who was just climbing out of the sleek silver Mercedes she'd parked outside the pub.
'Hi,' said Lara warmly. 'How's business?'
'Mad. The place is full of hypochondriacs. I should have bought shares in a drug company.'
They both laughed. 'How are things going for you?' Mary-Kate asked.
'Marvellous,' Lara said. 'Just sold the old O'Brien place.'
'Shanrock Castle?' asked Mary-Kate, impressed. A crumbling castle set in fifty acres of weed-infested parkland, only someone very rich could have afforded to buy it because they'd need to spend two fortunes renovating it. 'Another rock star I suppose?' The district surrounding Redlion boasted four rock stars, at least six novelists and one eccentric classical composer. The rock stars all lived sedate lives while the crazy parties took place at the classical composer's home. Helicopters bearing Hollywood producers were always landing on his helipad, trying to get him to write music for their blockbusters.
'No, an actress this time. I can't name names but she's one of those who keeps her Oscar in the toilet.'
Mary-Kate grinned. 'They all say that. I'm meeting Delphine for a sandwich. Do you want to join us?'
Lara said yes just as a battered beetle pulled up and a voluptuous red-head in a purple velvet coat emerged.
'Hi, girls,' Delphine Ryan greeted her aunt, Mary-Kate, with a kiss and hugged her old school friend. 'I haven't set eyes on you for ages, Lara. What's the gossip?'
In the Widows, they discussed everything from the price of property to the appalling state of the roads.
'There's a pot hole on the Blackglen road the size of a swimming pool and I spend my life avoiding it,' Lara
complained. 'If I destroy a wheel on the Merc going into it, I'm going to sue the council.'
'I love the Blackglen Road,' sighed Delphine. 'There's a beautiful old period house out there that Eugene and I would have loved to buy, but it was way beyond our price range. It was fabulous, lovely old fireplaces and a big, sprawling garden with a bit of wood at the back.'
'You mean Kilnagoshell House, the old B &c B,' Lara said. 'I sold it six months ago. A woman from Dublin bought it, a widow actually. Virginia Connell is her name and she's lovely. Lonely too, I daresay. You should call out and see her, Mary-Kate.'
'If she doesn't want to meet people, that's her business,' Mary-Kate said wisely. 'It would be wrong to intrude. When she needs people, we'll be here.'
Lara finished her sandwich.
'Must fly, girls. I've got to value the sweetest little cottage on the Killarney Road this afternoon.'
'Not old Gearoid's place?' inquired Mary-Kate. 'Are they selling it or what?'
'Or what, I think,' Lara said. 'Apparently the house will belong to Gearoid's nephew from Britain once they've got probate. God love him,' Lara added with a shudder. 'Gearoid left it in a terrible state. Then, I've got a viewing at the Richardsons' farmhouse. It's a pity they're leaving the village, they're nice people.'
'I should go too,' Delphine said, getting to her feet. 'I've a facial peel, two manicures and a bikini waxing this afternoon. Bye Mary-Kate.' She kissed her aunt goodbye fondly.
'I am going to finish my coffee in peace,' Mary-Kate smiled up at them, her grey eyes warm. 'Age must have its compensations. Take care, girls.'
The two younger women walked outside.
'It's a lovely day, isn't it?' said Lara as they stood for a moment enjoying the pale October sun. 'When the sun shines, Redlion is magical. I think the Richardsons are mad
for leaving. I don't know why anyone would ever want to sell up and leave.'
'I know what you mean,' Delphine said, gazing fondly up the winding main street where pastel-coloured houses appeared to doze lazily in the sunlight. 'It's got a healing, comforting sense to it or does that sound crazy?'
'Not at all,' Lara said ruefully. 'I was on ten cups of coffee, one Prozac and at least half a bottle of wine a day when I lived in Dublin. Since I came home, I've discovered the calm side of myself.'
'Lara Stanley calm!' teased Delphine. 'That'll be the day.'
Lara grinned. 'Calmer, then,' she said. 'But it is down to this place. It is special. You know, when I left my job in Dublin, all my colleagues thought I was mad burying myself back in the country. "Dullsville" they called it. And I told them there's nothing dull about Redlion.'
'We could do with a bit of dull,' Delphine pointed out. 'Too much happens round here. There's going to be another one of those political think tanks in the hotel next week and the place will be swarming with media and politicians desperate to get their faces in the paper. And Mrs Rock Star up the road was in having her nails done yesterday and she told me they're having a huge party for the album launch in November.'
'All go as usual,' Lara said. 'So much for the quiet life in the country. Still, I don't want to tell the people in the city what it's really like here or else they'd all up sticks and move down.'
Delphine laughed. 'And we want to keep Redlion a secret, don't we?'
CHAPTER ONE

Hope Parker let the shopping bags sit in a heap at her feet as she stood in front of the cookery books section. Her eyes flicked past Perfect Cakes, The Definitive Chinese Cookbook, Catering for Parties and Easy Meals. A recipe book full of easy meals was not what she was looking for. They were all she ever cooked in the first place. No, she wanted a comprehensive and simple cooking book, something big, fat and informative and full of explanations of what a bain marie really was and precisely what you did with yeast and did you have to have an airing cupboard handy when you cooked with it? That was all she wanted: a book that would finally explain how to cook something that didn't involve chicken pieces and a can of ready-to-go tomato sauce.
Her gaze moved past a massive advanced French cooking manual and she leaned closer to the shelves, trying to ignore the bookshop's lunchtime rush. Then she spotted it, a fat tome with bright gold writing on the spine: Cooking for Cowards: Become the Queen of Your Kitchen.
Queen of her kitchen? Yes, that was exactly what Hope wanted. No more ready-made lasagne and frozen solid stuffed chicken dinners in tinfoil. But lots of home-cooked meals that would have Matt beaming from ear to ear, no longer able to tease that he never put on weight because she couldn't cook.
Hope pulled it free from the other books and stared at the cover, hoping there was no mention of the word 'advanced'. There wasn't. Instead, there was a picture of an ordinary
looking woman standing smiling behind a veritable feast of glistening, delicious food.
Hope flicked inside and found an introduction that was funny, easy to understand, and made no mention of buying complicated utensils before you started. She couldn't afford to buy lots of new pots and pans and strange things for chopping up herbs.
'Cooking really is easy,' cooed the introduction. 'If you're one of those people who've never had the chance to learn, then let me show you how, the easy way.'
There was no implication that you had to be a twenty- something newly-married to be buying this book, no implication that thirty-seven-year-old women should be ashamed of themselves to be purchasing a cookery bible that included a section on 'how to buy meat'.
Hope never bought meat from the butchers'. She never knew what to ask for or even what you'd do with rack of lamb if you got it. She bought her meat ready packed from the supermarket where nobody could look down on you for not knowing what a gigot was.
'There's no need to be scared of buying meat,' continued the introduction, as if the writer had read Hope's mind. 'It's easy once you know how.'
Sold. Hope collected her shopping, paid for the book and hurried up to Jolly's department store, already lost in the fantasy of being a superb cook. Imagine the dinner parties they could have: Matt wouldn't have to entertain important advertising clients on his expense account in Bath's elegant restaurants any more. Instead, he could bring them home, and she, dressed in something elegant but sexy, would waft out of the kitchen with the scent of creme brulee clinging to her while jaded businessmen gobbled up melt-in-the-mouth things in delicately flavoured gravy, asking her why she'd decided to work in a building society instead of starting up her own restaurant?
And Toby and Millie would love it. Well, when they were older, they would. They'd think that home-made chutney
and made-from-scratch mayonnaise were the norm and would smugly tell their schoolmates that their mother was the 'best cook in the world, so there!' Hope remembered this type of culinary boasting from her own schooldays. But she and her sister, Sam, had always stayed out of the 'whose mother is the best cook' arguments, knowing that whatever could be said about their aunt Ruth, that she was an excellent cook wasn't one of them. Hope wondered, as she often did, if her mother had been any good at cooking? Aunt Ruth had never talked about things like that. Maybe Mum had been a wonderful cook. It might even be genetic: all Hope had to do was move beyond instant chicken sauces to discover that she was the next Escoffier.
In Jolly's, she got sidetracked in the women's department. She couldn't resist stopping a moment to finger the pretty floral skirt, running her fingers wistfully over the soft cotton with the delicate sprigged pattern of roses. In the middle of all the new season's dark wintry clothes, the rail of prettily patterned skirts had stood out like a wildflower meadow in a landscape of muddy ploughed fields.
Feeling the plastic grocery bags threatening to cut off the circulation to her left hand, Hope unhooked them from her wrist before indulging in a proper examination of the garment. The background colour was the pale blue of delicate Wedgwood with tiny lilac flowers mingling with tiny raspberry pink ones. Hope sighed wistfully. This wasn't a skirt, it was a lifestyle. A lifestyle where the wearer lived in a pretty cottage with lovely, well-behaved children, cats, maybe a rabbit or two, and an adoring husband who appreciated her. This woman sewed her own cushion covers, knew how to dry lavender and could bottle fruits and vegetables instead of buying them from the supermarket. She didn't need a safety pin to hold the top of her skirt together and she never raised her voice at the children in the morning when an entire carton of milk was spilled all over the said children's clothes, necessitating a complete change. No. This woman wore floral perfumes that came in old-fashioned
bottles, never got angry with her children and wafted around with a basket as she bought organic vegetables that still had bits of earth clinging to them. People would say things like 'Isn't she lovely? Wonderful mother, fantastic cook, have you tried her apple crumble? And she still manages to work . . .'
Yeah right. And pigs might fly. Hope patted the skirt one last time and picked up her shopping. She wasn't Mrs Floral Skirt and she never would be. She was Mrs Tracksuit Bottom, whose two children were quite accustomed to her roaring 'Stop that right now or I'll kill you!' She never wafted anywhere - difficult when you had a spare tyre and stocky legs - and she never talked to the neighbours long enough for them to have an opinion of her. Apart from the woman two doors up who let her dog do its business in Hope's garden, resulting in an un-neighbourly stand-off one morning. And as for sewing cushion covers she still hadn't managed to sew the button back on her work skirt and it had been held up with a safety pin for months. Although the good part of that was that the safety pin was of the big nappy variety and was more comfy than the constricting button had been. Thinking of work, she'd be terribly late back if she didn't get a move on.
She shook her head as if to rid it of the remnants of the idyllic floral skirt fantasy and, collecting up her shopping, hurried into the men's department and over to the ties. It took ages to find one she thought Matt would like: an expensive buttermilk yellow silk with a discreet pattern. Hope held the tie up against every shirt on the display; it looked lovely against the blue shirts and went particularly well with an azure striped one. She groaned in indecision.
Matt didn't go in for blue shirts much. The grey tie was more versatile, definitely, and cheaper, but Matt loved expensive things. He'd adored that ugly key ring his boss had given him one Christmas, purely because of the designer logo stamped into the leather. She held both ties up and squinted at them, dithering as usual.
OK, the yellow it had to be. So, it cost more than the coat she was wearing, but what the hell.
The woman behind the counter daintily placed the tie in a box. Perfectly coifed, she had lovely cared-for nails, Hope noticed, and her lipstick looked faultlessly applied; as if she'd just that minute rushed out from primping in the ladies'. Hope was conscious of the fact that her own windswept fair hair was dragged back in a pony tail and her morning lipstick a thing of distant memory.
Sales assistants invariably made her feel like an unkempt road warrior. She remembered a time when she herself was always beautifully groomed, those far off days before the children, when giving herself a French manicure had been a prerequisite on Sunday evenings. These days, she spent Sunday evenings sweating over the ironing board, worrying about the week ahead and trying to match socks from the enormous laundry pile.
'Is it a present?' inquired the sales woman, her tone implying that there was no way someone like Hope would be coughing up for such an expensive tie otherwise.
'Yes,' said Hope, stifling a wicked urge to say, no, it was for her, she dressed up in men's clothes at the weekends and, actually, was looking for a partner to go with her on a Harley-Davidson-Lesbian Day Out on Sunday.
Instead, she arranged her face into a polite expression. Being honest, there was no way she'd pay that much money for a tie otherwise. Even if as a fortieth birthday present, it was still ridiculously expensive. The only consolation was that Matt would love it. It would go with the very sophisticated new suit he'd just bought and with his image, also highly sophisticated. The only unsophisticated part of the Matt Parker experience was Hope herself. Was that the problem? she thought with a pang of unease. Matt hadn't been himself lately. Usually he was one of life's optimists, happy, upbeat. But for the past few months, he'd been listless and moody around the house, only content if they were doing something; filling their time off with
endless activities. He didn't seem happy to sit and blob around on those rare occasions when the children weren't murdering each other. Edgy, that was it. Matt was edgy, and in her dark, terrified moments, Hope was scared that it was something to do with their marriage. Or her.
'Shall I gift-wrap it?'
'No, I like wrapping things myself,' Hope confessed. Anyway, getting the shop to wrap things was always a waste of time, she'd discovered, as she could never resist trying to open a bit of the wrapping paper when she got home so she could admire the gift. Invariably, the paper got ripped when she was trying to shove whatever it was back in, so why bother?
She added the tie to her selection of plastic bags and left the shop hurriedly.
Hope rounded the corner at Union Street and collided with a gaggle of tourists oohing and ahhing over the city's elegant sandstone Georgian buildings. It was a beautiful place to live but after five years there, Hope was guiltily aware that she took Bath's beauty rather for granted. For the first six months, she'd walked around with her neck craned, but now, she raced along like all the other residents, almost immune to the city and constantly cursing the tourists who straggled across the streets like wayward schoolchildren. She pushed open the glass door into Witherspoon's Building Society, conscious of the fact that it was now twenty to three and she should have been back at half past two.
Mr Campbell, manager and assiduous time-keeper, was also conscious of the time.
'You're ten minutes late, Mrs Parker,' he said mildly.
Hope gave him a flustered look, which wasn't hard after her dash down Union Street. 'I'm so sorry, Mr Campbell,' she said breathily. 'It's my husband's fortieth birthday and I was buying him a present. . .'
'Never mind,' Mr Campbell said soothingly. 'Don't let it happen in future.'

She rushed into the staff room, stowed her shopping in locker, wriggled out of her navy woollen coat and hurried back to her counter.
'How can you get away with being late and not get the face eaten off you by that tyrant?' demanded Yvonne. Yvonne had worked at Witherspoon's for five years, the same length of time as Hope, and complained she was still treated like a delinquent probationary by the manager.
'Because I have an innocent face,' replied Hope, managing to smile all the while at Mr Campbell, 'and you look like a minx.'
Yvonne was placated, as Hope knew she could be. Yvonne liked the idea of looking minxy. And she was so good humoured that she never took offence; not like Betsey, Hope's other good friend. Betsey took offence at everything and would have demanded to know what Hope had meant by calling her a minx.
Hope knew that she'd never look like a minx in a million years. Minxes did not have fawn-coloured curly hair with lots of wispy tendrils that you could do absolutely nothing with, nor did they have rounded comforting faces with large, almost surprised hazel eyes, and small delicate mouths like shy girls from 18th century French paintings.
Matt had once told her that he'd fallen in love with her 'other worldliness'. 'As if you've got lost from a historical mini-series and have stepped out of your gown to appear in the twenty-first century,' he'd said lovingly. Matt was given to saying wildly romantic, unusual things. He was wasted in advertising, she thought fondly.
All five counters were frantically busy for the next half an hour, with huge groups of time-pressed tourists arriving to change their traveller's cheques into hard currency, all frantic to get some cash so they could buy huge quantities of Bath Abbey tea towels, T-shirts with the Abbey printed on them and decorated mugs before they were due back on the coach.
Finally, there was a brief lull in custom. Hope sat back

in her chair, feeling drained and wondered how she'd last till her four o'clock tea break.
'What did you buy for Matt?' asked Yvonne, sneaking a forbidden packet of toffees across to Hope. Eating was forbidden behind the counter but Hope reckoned her blood sugar needed a top-up.
'A tie, a bottle of that wine he likes and some aftershave,' she said as she surreptitiously unwrapped a toffee.
'That's nice,' mumbled Yvonne, her mouth full.
They chewed in silence for a while and Hope began to mentally plan her evening, the highlight of which was to be Matt's special birthday dinner. Just the two of them, assuming that Millie didn't kick up a fuss and refuse to go to bed. She was only four but she already ruled the Parker household with a chubby little iron hand in a velvet glove. Two-year-old Toby was such a contrast to his older sister. He was so quiet that Hope worried about him being at the day nursery every day. She knew Millie was well able to stand up to anyone who'd look sideways at her but would she stand up for Toby? You heard so much about children bullying other kids and Hope would kill any child who'd hurt her beloved Toby. With his pale, sweet face and watchful eyes, he reminded her of herself as a child. She prayed he'd grow up to be stronger and more forceful, like his father.
'Presents for men are so difficult,' sighed Yvonne. 'I love the idea of those women who say things like "I'm wearing your present." You know she's wearing some basque or suspenders and stockings and that's his present. I might try that with Freddie.'
'Lovely,' said Hope automatically, a bit embarrassed to be getting so much detail about Yvonne's sex life. Yvonne was twenty-nine, Welsh, and very open about everything, in direct contrast to Hope. Hope liked to keep her personal life personal, although it was difficult when you worked with someone as inquisitive as Yvonne, who was quite capable of asking questions like what would Hope do if Matt ever had an affair or had Hope ever used a Dutch cap.

'Er, no,' Hope had said, going pink, on that particular occasion. Aunt Ruth had not brought her up to be chatty about sex and things like that. When she'd had her first period, Aunt Ruth had said nothing but had given her a book on girls growing up. Well, she'd actually shoved it into Hope's hand and gone off abruptly to her bridge class. The subject had never been referred to again. Hope was fascinated when she read those 'how to keep your sex life alive' articles in women's magazines, although she'd never have dreamed of trying any of it out with Matt.
'You should give Matt that sort of present tonight,' Yvonne nudged her.
'What sort of present?'
Yvonne lowered her voice because Mr Campbell had come out of his office and was standing near the photocopier. 'Wear something sexy and tell Matt it's the final bit of his present.'
'Honestly, Yvonne,' whispered Hope, 'you've a one-track mind.'
'Yeah, one track and it's a dirt track,' giggled Yvonne, flicking back a bit of jet-black poker-straight hair.
Three customers arrived all at once and Hope managed to put Yvonne's suggestion out of her mind. It wasn't that she was contemplating wearing sexy underwear and surprising Matt. She was uncomfortably aware of the fact that Matt would probably be much happier with a new tie and a decent bottle of wine.

Two hours later, she'd braved the traffic going out of the city towards Bristol and was turning into Makings Lane. One of the more modern streets in Bath, it was a winding road of pretty houses built in the fifties with honey-coloured Cotswold stone. Because the houses were small and reasonably priced, the street was full of young, professional couples with small children, two cars and no time for doing their handkerchief-sized gardens.
When they'd moved in five years ago, Hope had had great

plans for becoming a gardening expert and had bought a gardening encyclopaedia along with a book dedicated to creating a haven from a small suburban plot. These books were currently jammed into the bookcase on the landing, alongside the home decorating book she'd got in a jumble sale. Hope rarely even looked at their patch with its overgrown sliver of lawn and weed-encrusted rockery where four stunted conifers sat huddled together in tight misery and refused to grow taller than six inches. Hope didn't look at the garden tonight either: she was too late even for her usual guilt-laden 'I wish I had time to do something with the garden this weekend'.
Marta would be furious if she picked the kids up after six fifteen. Marta ran Your Little Treasures, the nursery where Toby and Millie spent every week day. The nursery was so well-run and well-staffed that Hope couldn't afford to voice the opinion that Marta herself was a bad-tempered bitch when it came to dealing with her charges' parents. There was such fierce competition for places in YLT that she daren't risk antagonizing her. If Hope's children left the nursery, there would be thirty families queuing up to fill their places. 'Marta is definitely short for martinet,' joked Matt every time Hope came home on the verge of tears because of a dressing down from Marta for being late. Matt didn't understand how Hope hated those confrontations.
The nursery closed at six fifteen and any parent who arrived a second later was treated to a lecture of the 'if you think I'm going to be taken advantage of, you've got another think coming' variety.
Hope couldn't imagine a single person who'd dare take advantage of Marta. Pity.
She unpacked the shopping from the Metro's boot. Next door's cat sat plaintively on Hope's doorstep, sheltering from the icy late September wind and generally giving the impression that he was a candidate for an animal shelter despite being so fat that he no longer fitted through his cat flap and had to be let in through the windows. Hope dragged the

shopping to the door, hoping that a few hours in the locker at work hadn't made the milk go off.
'You can't come in, Fatso,' Hope told the cat, trying to open the door and insinuate herself inside without letting him in. She managed it, dumped the shopping on the kitchen floor and looked at her watch.
Six o'clock on the nail. She wasn't going to be late. Relieved, she shoved the milk into the fridge and raced out of the house.
She hurried round the corner to the nursery which was, as usual, surrounded by double-parked cars, weary parents and cross toddlers. Hope had found it was easier to walk there instead of spending ten minutes trying to park.
'Hello,' she said with false cheeriness to Marta, who stood like a rottweiler at the door, grimly working out whom to bite and whom to suck up to. 'Cool isn't it?'
'It is nearly October,' Marta snapped, gypsy earrings rattling furiously.
Hope grinned inanely and then hated herself for it. If only she had the guts to tell Marta where she could stuff her sarcastic remarks. Not for the first time, Hope indulged in her favourite daydream: where she and Matt had won the lottery, thereby allowing her to give up work and devote herself to the children full time. In her fantasy dream world, being a full time mum included help from a cleaning lady, an ironing lady and someone to trail round the supermarket doing the grocery shopping. It also meant being able to tell Marta to take a running jump because Hope wouldn't need the nursery any more. She'd look after her children herself, thank you very much. She'd be able to spend hours every day with them, doing finger painting, making up stories and doing things with cooking chocolate and Rice Krispies when the children could help stir the mixture without her shuddering at the thought of cleaning bits of cereal and slivers of chocolate off the kitchen floor for hours afterwards. She'd get to serve wonderful home-cooked food instead of making do with convenience stuff, she'd learn

needlecraft and the garden would be a riot of beautifully tended plants. Bliss.
In the main section of the nursery, a bright cheery room decorated in warm colours and with plenty of toddler-sized furniture, Millie and Toby were waiting for her, clad in their padded coats and looking like baby Eskimos. Dark-haired Millie, as impatient as her father, had an outraged expression on her rosy-cheeked face. Her brown eyes flashed at the indignity of being made to wait in a restricting coat when she could have been in the play corner wreaking havoc with the bouncy cubes. Toby, pale like his mother, stood quietly with his hat in his hand. When he spotted Hope, a great smile opened up his chubby little face.
'Mummy, got a star,' he said delightedly.
'No you didn't,' said Millie indignantly. Even at four, she had a perfect command of the English language. 'I got a star.'
Toby's face fell.
'Millie,' said her mother reprovingly. 'Be nice to your little brother.'
'He's a baby,' sniffed Millie, wrinkling up her snub nose.
'He's your brother,' Hope said. 'You have to look after him, not be unkind to him.'
Millie
took Toby's fat little hand in hers and looked up at her mother expecting praise.
Despite herself, Hope grinned. Millie was as bright as a button.
She said goodbye to Marta, who was hovering with intent outside the door, jangling her keys like a warder.

Holding hands, the family walked slowly home: Millie chattering away happily, Toby silent. It was the same every evening. Toby was very quiet for about half an hour, then, as if he'd been frozen and finally thawed out in the warmth of his own, safe home, he began to talk and laugh, playing with his favourite toy, currently a violently purple plastic train with endless carriages that were always getting lost

under the furniture. It worried Hope. She was afraid that he hated the nursery, yet she was just as afraid of asking him in case he clung to her and begged her not to send him every morning.
One of the women at work had gone through two horrific months of her small daughter doing just that, sobbing her little heart out every day, begging her mother to 'stay, Mummy, stay, please!' until she was hiccuping with anguish.
The mothers with young children had all sat in silent guilt when they heard that story in the canteen.
'I hate leaving my son,' a single mother from accounting had said tonelessly.
Then just don't feel it the same way,' added an investment advisor who was also a mother-of-three.
They had all nodded miserably, united in agreement.
After that, Hope had spent weeks anxiously scanning Toby's face every morning for signs that he was about to cry. If he did, she knew she'd have told the building society to stuff their job and told Matt they'd have to manage the mortgage some other way, because she couldn't bear to go out to work when her darling little boy was sobbing his little heart out for her. But Toby never cried. He went off every morning, snug in his anorak, big eyes wide when Hope gave him a tight hug goodbye with Marta watching over them.
'He's just a quiet little boy,' Clare, one of the teachers, had reassured her when Hope had voiced her fears, 'but he enjoys himself, honestly, Hope, he does. He loves playing with the Plasticine and he loves story time. We all know he's a shy little fellow so we really look after him, don't worry. Millie is totally different, isn't she?'
Yes, Hope had agreed, Millie was totally different. Boisterous and confident compared to her little brother. They reminded Hope of herself and Sam when they'd been kids: Hope had been the quiet, placating sister, while Sam, three years older, had been strong, opinionated and sure of herself.
Tonight, Millie wasn't inside the hall door before she

was off into the playroom to collect her dolls, bossing them around, telling them to drink their milk and no being naughty or there'd be trouble. She sounded a lot like Marta bossing the parents around. Hope got down on her knees to undo Toby's coat.
'Did you have a nice day, sweetie?' she asked softly, helping him wriggle out before pulling him close for a big cuddle. Toby nodded his head. Hope planted a kiss on his soft, fair head, breathing in the lovely toddler scent of him. He smelled of classroom, baby shampoo and fabric conditioner.
'Mummy loves you, Toby, do you know that? Loads and loads of love. Bigger than the sea.'
He smiled at her and patted her cheek with one fat little hand.
'Mummy has to make a special birthday dinner for Daddy but I think we have to play first, don't you?'
Toby nodded again.
'Shall we have a story? What one would you like me to read? You pick.'
The three of them sat on the big oatmeal sofa, cuddled up companionably, as Hope read Toby's favourite story about The Bear With The Magical Paw. Millie always started by saying it was a baby's story, not for big girls like herself, but by the end of the first page she was engrossed, chewing her bottom lip anxiously and listening to the bear's adventures. Hope followed the magical bear with The Little Mermaid, which was Millie's favourite. She slept in Disney Little Mermaid pyjamas and her bedroom was a shrine to Mermaid merchandising.
After twenty minutes when she knew she should have been starting Matt's birthday dinner, Hope finished the story and began to make dinner for the kids. They were fed tea at the nursery at around half four but Hope never considered a few sandwiches enough for them. Children needed hot food in her book. As the children played, Hope prepared chicken breasts and vegetables, thinking that if she was Mrs Floral Skirt, she'd be giving them organic carrot puree made

from her own carrots with delicious home-made lasagne or something equally made-from-scratch.
Mind you, Millie hated home-made food and was passionate about fish fingers and tinned spaghetti shaped like cartoon characters so there wouldn't have been any hope of her eating anything organic.
Hope thought proudly of her new cookbook still in its plastic bag in the hall. Soon, she'd be making fabulous meals that everyone would love. She undid the cling film covering the steaks. The instructions looked simple enough but steak was so difficult, so easy to ruin and cook until it tasted like old leather. She'd have loved it if they were going out to dinner instead but Mart's colleague and best friend, Dan, was organizing a birthday dinner on Thursday, in three days' time, and that was going to be his party. The agency had netted a huge new account and it was going to be a joint celebration. Hope knew it would be childish to say that she'd prefer a private birthday dinner with just the two of them. After all, Matt was a much more social animal than she was and he loved the idea of a big bash where he could charm them all and get told he was the cleverest ad man ever. Hope always felt a bit left out at these fabulous advertising parties. Even though, as a working mother with two small children, she was the Holy Grail for advertisers, they weren't nearly as interested in her when she was physically present as they were when she was represented as the target market on a graph in the office.
She'd better buy a dress for the party, she reminded herself. Adam, Matt's boss, had a new glamorous wife, Jasmine (Matt had, in an unguarded moment, described her as 'better than any of the women on Baywatch'), so Hope planned to doll herself up to the nines for the occasion.
Thinking of the party to come, she dished up dinner for the children and brought it and a cup of tea for herself to the table.
'Dinner! Toby and Millie,' she called.
The dinner routine involved Toby and Millie sitting

opposite each other at the small kitchen table so that Millie couldn't reach Toby's mug of milk and spill it. Their mother sat at the end, refereeing. Millie, as usual, played with her food and demanded fish fingers in between sending bits of carrot skidding across the table. Toby loved his food and ate quickly, his Winnie the Pooh plastic fork scooping up bits of cut-up chicken rapidly. He drank his milk and ate his entire dinner while Millie bounced Barbie backwards and forwards in front of her plate, singing tunelessly and ignoring her meal.
'Millie!' remonstrated Hope as Barbie kicked a bit of chicken onto the floor. 'Eat up or I'm going to have to feed you.'
She whisked Barbie from Millie's hand and the little girl immediately started to roar. More bits of chicken hit the deck.
'Millie! That's so naughty,' said Hope, trying to rein in her temper and wishing she didn't feel so tired and cross. So much for quality time with the kids.
At this point, Millie wriggled off her chair and pushed herself away from the table, jerking it and spilling her mother's cup of tea.
'Millie!' shouted Hope as scalding tea landed on her uniform skirt, which she knew she should have changed as soon as she got home.
'I always know I'm in the right house when I hear screaming as soon as I get home,' said Matt caustically, appearing at the kitchen door looking immaculate and out of place in the small kitchen which was always untidy.
Hope ground her teeth. This wasn't the homecoming she had planned for his birthday. Candlelight, the scent of a succulent dinner and herself perfumed and in grape velvet had been the plan. Instead, the scene was chaos and herself a frazzled, frizzled mess scented only with perspiration from running round the shops at lunchtime. Children and romantic, grown-up dinners were mutually exclusive, there was no doubt about it.

Millie stopped wailing instantly and ran to her father, throwing her rounded baby arms around his knees and burying her face in his grey wool trousers.
'Daddy,' she cooed delightedly, as if she hadn't just been flinging her dinner around the room like a mischievous elf moments before.
He picked her up and cuddled her, the two dark heads close together, one clustered with long curls, the other a short crop with spreading grey at the sides. Matt was tall, rangy and lean, with the sort of dark, deep set eyes that set female pulses racing and a solid, firm jaw that had stubborn written all over it. The scattering of discreet grey in his new, very short haircut suited him, transforming his handsome good looks into something more mature and sexier. Even after seven years together, the sight of him all dressed up with his eyes crinkling into a smile and that strong mouth curving upwards slowly, could set Hope's heart racing. The terrible thing was, she didn't think that his pulse still raced when he saw her.
'Are you in trouble with Mummy?' Matt asked.
Millie managed a strangled sob. 'Yes,' she said sadly.
'She wouldn't eat her dinner, she was throwing it everywhere and she's just spilled my tea,' Hope said, knowing she sounded shrewish but unable to help it.
'Never mind,' Matt said easily without even looking at his wife. 'It's only a bit of tea, you can wash it.'
Still cuddling Millie, he ruffled Toby's hair and walked into the living room, his big body cradling Millie easily. Toby clambered off his seat and ran after him. In seconds, the sounds of giggling and laughter could be heard.
Hope looked glumly down at her cream uniform blouse which was now stained with splashes of tea. One corner had escaped from her skirt and hung out untidily. Very chic. Ignoring the tea things, she went upstairs and stripped off her uniform. She'd have to sponge the skirt because she only had two and the hem was down on the other one. In her part of the wardrobe, she found the grape velvet two-piece

and pulled it on. She brushed her hair, put on her pearl earrings and spritzed herself with eau de cologne, all without looking in the mirror. It was only to apply her lipstick that she sat at the small dressing table and adjusted the oval mirror so she could see herself.
She was old fashioned looking, she knew. Not the showily beautiful and spirited leading lady of romantic novels: instead, she was the quiet, sober Austen heroine with expressive, anxious grey eyes. Empire line dresses would have suited her perfectly because she could have shown off her generous bosom and hidden the slightly thick waist and sturdy legs. She looked her best in soft, muted colours that complemented the thick-lashed, eloquent eyes. Her grape outfit fitted the bill, while the dark navy and maroon of her uniform clothes made her look dull and middle-aged.
Now she put lipstick on and pinned her hair up. Piled up, it showed off her slender neck. Finished, she touched the small silver and enamel pill box on the dressing table for luck. It had been her mother's and touching it for luck was as much a part of Hope's day as brushing her teeth after meals. She didn't remember her mother so the box with its orchid illustration was special, the only thing she'd got left really. Sam had a matching box only hers had a picture of a pansy on it.
The pillboxes were among the only things they had of their mother's. She and their father had been killed when the girls were small, when they'd been driving home from a night out and their car had been hit by a drunk driver. Their father had been killed outright but their mother had lived long enough to be taken to hospital and died soon after. Not that Sam or Hope remembered much about it and Aunt Ruth, left to bring them up in her austere house in Windsor, had been very keen on 'not dwelling on things' and had disposed of most of their parents' personal belongings. Consequently, they had very few mementoes of Camille and Sandy Smith. Except that Millie was named for her grandmother. Dear naughty little Millie.

Hope smiled and wondered what she'd leave her children to remember her by if she died suddenly: a dirty dishcloth or a basketful of ironing probably.
Downstairs, Matt was watching CNN with the children sitting either side of him, both utterly content. Hope stood behind the sofa and planted a kiss on his head.
'Sorry I was a grump when you came in,' she said softly. 'Let's get this pair to bed and I'll make you a lovely birthday dinner.'
'Daddy, you have to read me a story,' said Millie querulously, knowing that the treat being discussed didn't involve her.
'I will, honey,' Matt said absent-mindedly, still watching the news.
'A long story,' Millie said, satisfied. 'Really long, about trolls and fairies . . .' She shuddered deliciously.
'No trolls,' Hope said automatically. 'You'll have nightmares.'
'I won't,' insisted Millie.
'No trolls,' said her mother firmly.
Matt did his bedtime story duty and when he came downstairs, the steaks were sizzling deliciously under the grill and Hope was wrestling with a recipe for herb and garlic butter she'd found in a women's magazine. Fresh herbs, honestly. Who could be bothering with fresh herbs when they cost so much in the shops and went limp and tasteless after two days.
'Smells good,' Matt said, returning to his seat in the sitting room. He flicked around with the remote and found the sports channel. Through the double doors between the sitting room and the kitchen, Hope could see him put his feet up on the coffee table. He'd changed from his suit into his oldest jeans and a faded sweat-shirt she could have sworn she'd thrown out. She shrugged. It was his birthday, he could wear what he wanted to.
She took in the bottle of special birthday wine, eager for praise. 'Will you open it?' she asked, producing the madly

expensive corkscrew that Matt had seen in a restaurant and had insisted on sending off for.
'Yeah,' he said absently, still watching the TV. He opened the bottle and handed it back to her. When she'd poured two glasses and assured herself that the steak was getting along fine without her, she returned, gave Matt his glass and curled up beside him on the sofa.
'Nice day?' she asked.
Matt grunted in return.
Hope tried again. She was absolutely determined they were going to have a lovely coupley evening in for his birthday. She adored nights like this. She and Matt having a companionable dinner together and their beloved children asleep upstairs - that was what happy families were all about. She knew it, she insisted on it.
But Matt was having none of it. He watched the television intently, his lean body sunk back against the sofa cushions, his handsome face in profile with his eyes hooded as he concentrated.
After a few more of Hope's attempts at conversation, he sighed and asked when dinner was.
'Now, soon,' Hope said, jumping off the sofa and heading back into the kitchen.
She lit the candles on the kitchen table, repositioned the burgundy linen napkins someone had given them when they'd got married and dished up the second dinner of the day.
Instinctively, Matt appeared as soon as his plate landed on the matching burgundy linen mat. He dug in hungrily.
'This is lovely, isn't it?' Hope said.
'Mm,' grunted Matt, one eye still on the television which was visible from his seat at the table. News had been replaced by the monotonous roar of motor racing.
He cut his steak into small pieces so he could fork it up without missing a bit of the action.
'Is everything all right?' Hope asked.
'Yeah, it's lovely. Nice bit of steak,' he replied.
'I didn't mean the steak.'

Matt sighed and took his eye off the TV for a brief moment. 'Hope, do we have to have one of these "is everything OK?" conversations tonight? I'm tired, I've had a hard day and I'd like to relax if that's not too much to ask.'
Her eyes brimmed.
'Sure, fine.'
The commentator's voice droned on and Hope ate her meal mechanically, not tasting anything, worrying.
There was something wrong, she knew it. Had known it for weeks. Matt wasn't happy and she was sure it was nothing to do with his job. It had to be personal, something about him and her, something terrible.
He'd been depressed since his favourite uncle had died in Ireland two months ago, and at first, Hope had thought Matt was feeling guilty because he hadn't seen Gearoid for years. Mart's family were terrible for keeping in touch and when they'd first been married, Hope, who'd expected to be welcomed into the bosom of a real family at long last, had been astonished to find that the Parker family had only one trait in common: apathy about family get-togethers. His parents were remarkably self-sufficient people who'd had Matt, their only child, late in life and clearly weren't pleased at the intrusion of a small child into their busy lives. Now that he was an adult with a wife, they appeared to think they'd done their bit. Hope found it impossible to understand this, but was grateful that, despite his upbringing, Matt was so passionate about her and the children.
Sam wisely said it was clear that Matt was determined to live his life very differently from the way his austere and cold family lived. 'He's insecure about people loving him and he needs you. That's why he's so controlling,' Sam had added, with a rare touch of harshness.
Hope just wished she was sure her husband needed her. If she was sure of that, she wouldn't be so nervous about asking him what was wrong. Was it Gearoid's death? He'd been incredibly fond of the eccentric uncle he used to spend summers with as a child.

But when she'd tried to comfort him about Gearoid, Matt had snapped at her, so perhaps it wasn't that. What was it, then?
She knew she should be quiet, that it was fatal to probe at this unknown awfulness, because once she'd probed, she'd know and she wouldn't be able to bury her head in the sand and pretend everything was OK. But she had to probe.
'Don't tell me it's nothing,' she said quickly. 'I know you're not happy, Matt.'
'OK, you're right, you're right,' he snapped, slamming down his fork. 'I'm not happy. You win first prize for noticing.'
'I just want to help,' Hope said in a small voice.
'I'm just . . . oh,' he threw his hands in the air, 'I don't know. I'm a bit down, that's all. Unfulfilled, pissed off, depressed, I don't know what you call it.'
She stared at him mutely, not knowing what was coming next.
'Don't say it's a mid-life crisis,' he added harshly. 'That's what bloody Dan said. Said I'd be running off with a seventeen-year-old soon.'
Hope flinched.
'He was only joking,' Matt said, seeing her face. 'Who'd want me?' he added in a voice resonant with bitterness. 'I mean, I'm forty and what have I done? Nothing. Worked my butt off for years for what? A decent car and the chance of a good pension. I haven't done anything, not anything I'm proud of.'
'You've got Millie and Toby,' Hope said weakly, not wanting to add '. . . and me,' in case Matt didn't feel as if she was much of an asset.
'I know, I know, it's a ... male thing.' Matt seemed lost for words, possibly for the first time in his life. He couldn't appear to say what he meant. Or perhaps he knew exactly what he wanted to say but wanted her to figure it out. He was leaving, that had to be it.
Hope waited, guts clenching in painful spasm. This was

it: Matt was leaving. People left all the time. Her mother and father had left before she'd had a chance to know them, just when she needed them. All right, they'd died, so that was different. But Hope had been expecting Matt to leave almost from the moment she'd fallen in love with him. History repeating itself. There had to be a price for winning such a handsome man - you could never be sure of him, never keep him. All the fears Hope had successfully kept to herself over the years were coming to the surface.
Matt was watching her across the table. He knew her background, knew her horror of being abandoned. 'It's alright,' he said sharply, almost harshly. 'I'm not going to leave.'
The tears Hope had been successfully holding off now flowed unchecked. She knew he was lying: it was obvious. There was someone else, he wanted to leave her and it was just a matter of time. He'd merely decided not to dump her on his birthday.
'I'm going through a bad time and I'm trying to deal with it,' Matt said. 'I'm better if you leave me to it.'
'But I can't,' whispered Hope. 'I love you so much, and I can't bear it if you feel upset. I mean . . .' she pushed aside her plate, her appetite gone, 'I'd do anything to make it all right.' She was too scared to ask him if there was someone else. Too afraid that he'd tell her the truth.
'You can't make it all right,' Matt said bluntly. 'I'm the one suffering the mid-life crisis, not you. You can't magic it away so we can play happy families. Life isn't like that. Now can we just have our dinner and try and have a relaxed evening? Please,' he added more gently. 'I don't feel up to talking about it.'
Hope nodded. She poked her steak around the plate, trying to pretend she was hungry. Matt went back to eating and watching the television.
She watched him surreptitiously, her nerves in tatters, wishing she wasn't so needy and pathetically hungry for love that she'd take any excuse. She didn't believe a word of it.

Matt was lying. If only she were stronger, she'd demand the truth. Someone like Sam would have sent the entire dinner flying and demanded an explanation. She'd have yelled that he wasn't moving from his seat until he told her exactly what was wrong and cut all the crap about how he was better off dealing with it on his own. Hope knew how Sam would handle this situation, because Sam's responses were programmed into her brain. You didn't grow up practically joined at the hip to your older sister without knowing everything about her. But that didn't mean you could apply her no-holds-barred type of reaction to your own life. Sadly no.
Hope, hating confrontation and loving Matt almost obsessively, was content to know nothing if that was what Matt wanted.
Matt finished his meal and smiled at his wife. 'That was lovely,' he said kindly. 'Let's forget about everything and watch a video. I stopped at the shop on the way home.'
'I can give you your presents,' Hope said, eager to leave the desolate place she was currently in. If they had a nice evening after all, it meant their marriage was OK. Didn't it?

Matt was up early the next morning. An early meeting, he said as he threw back the duvet at half six instead of the usual seven. Hope, head heavy after a practically sleepless night of worrying, couldn't move. She was exhausted, her head throbbed with tiredness and her eyes felt piggy, as if someone had injected them with some type of swelling agent. She knew she should get up and talk to Matt - anything to convince herself that it was all okay - but she was too tired. The speediest dresser in the world, Matt was showered, shaved and ready in twenty minutes. Wearing the black Armani suit with a white shirt and his new tie, an outfit that made him look like he was auditioning for an Italian James Bond, he stopped by the bed to pick up his watch from the bedside table. Hope sat up on the pillow and rubbed frantically at her sleep-filled eyes.

'Bye darling,' she bleated. 'Love you.' She hoped he'd kiss her goodbye but instead he smiled briefly and busied himself with his watch strap.
'Bye, I'll see you this evening,' he said and he was gone, without kissing her.
Hope remembered a time when they'd been so in love that some mornings Matt had ripped off his suit and got back into bed with her to make mad passionate love, not caring that he'd be late for work. She bit her lip miserably. The seven year itch wasn't just an itch: it was a damn outbreak of eczema.
Her only consolation was that he had looked tired too and clearly hadn't slept well. Whether it was because he longed to make it up, or whether he'd been mentally going over the various ways of informing her their marriage was over, she couldn't tell.
As usual, Millie was naughtier than usual because she sensed that Hope was tired and cross. Millie may have looked like an angelic child model from the Pears soap adverts, but there was definitely a vein of sheer mischief running through her body that belied her sweet face. Hope knew from experience that whenever Millie was looking particularly innocent, with her full bottom lip jutting out and her dark eyes round with naivete, she'd undoubtedly done something very naughty. Like the time she put the plug in the upstairs bathroom sink and set the taps running full blast until water poured down the stairs. The carpet had been ruined.
This morning, she belted downstairs and started to make cakes out of tomato ketchup, mayonnaise, broken up biscuits and breakfast cereal, squelching out an entire bottle of ketchup with the subsequent splodges getting all over the kitchen floor, while Hope was upstairs getting Toby ready.
'Millie,' was all Hope could say when she got downstairs with Toby to find an ocean of Millie's ketchup cake covering the table, a good deal of the floor and most of Millie's lime

green fluffy jumper, clean on half an hour ago. Even worse, it was a jumper that had to be handwashed and spent much of its life at the bottom of the laundry basket with the other handwash items until Hope had the time to tackle them.
'You're a very naughty girl; you're all messy and I'll have to clean this up. Go upstairs immediately and take off that jumper. We're going to be late.'
'Shit,' said Millie mutinously.
Hope's jaw clanged so low she could hear the joint creak.
'What?' she gasped, appalled. Where could Millie have learned that?
Even Millie seemed to realize that this was a very, very bad thing to say.
She scampered upstairs like a greyhound. Hope stepped over the ketchup cake blindly and switched on the kettle. Very strong coffee was the only answer. She had a husband who wanted to leave her and a delinquent four-year-old daughter who had apparently picked up the worst swear words in the world at the nursery which Hope had to shell out most of her salary to pay for. Wonderful.

Hi Sam, how's the new job? Is everyone friendly? Stupid question, Hope decided, deleting it. People were friendly to newcomers in offices but not to new bosses.
We're all great and looking forward to Matt's birthday dinner. I did plan to buy a dress but decided against it. If only I could fit into your designer outfits. Next time you have a wardrobe clear out, send a plastic bin liner of stuff down to me and I'll diet!
Talk soon,
Love Hope.

By the Thursday night of Matt's birthday dinner, Hope had lost two pounds with the stress of it all. Normally, that would have thrilled her, but when her weight loss was connected

with the fact that Matt had been almost monosyllabic since his birthday, it wasn't a cause for celebration.
Over the last couple of days, Matt had been very quiet and had stayed very late at the office on two evenings, ostensibly to get some work done on an important campaign they were presenting on Monday.
Hope was convinced he was going to see her and had resisted the temptation to follow him in the Metro. But it was impossible to play private detective with two small children in tow. Hope could just picture Millie announcing loudly over breakfast the next day: 'Daddy, we saw you and a strange lady and Mummy cried and said a rude word.'
Even more telling, he'd been looking over some papers in their bedroom and had quickly stuffed them back in his briefcase when Hope walked in unexpectedly. Distraught, Hope had walked out again. They had to have been divorce papers. What else would he want to hide?
She longed to confide in someone, but whom? Sam had never approved of Matt and would probably arrive in fury from London with a top lawyer in tow and order Hope to screw everything she could out of Matt in the divorce settlement. Betsey, her closest friend, was married to Matt's friend and colleague, Dan, so there was no way she could tell Betsey of her fears. In fact, she was scared that if she said anything to Betsey, the other woman would take her hand pityingly and say yes, she'd been dying to tell Hope that Matt had someone else. She had other friends but they were mainly couples that she and Matt went out with, friends of both of them, in other words, so unsuitable for spilling the beans to.
How could she phone up Angelica and Simon and say that no, the Parkers wouldn't be coming for dinner in three weeks' time and had they heard anything about Matt and some bimbo?
So Hope did what she'd been doing all her life: she bottled it up inside herself and lay wide-eyed in bed at night, listening to Matt's even breathing beside her and wondering what the

hell she was going to do with the rest of her lonely life without him.

The restaurant was buzzing with a glam Thursday night crowd but even so, other diners looked up when the Judd's Advertising crew were escorted to their table. Most of the eyes were on Jasmine Judd, new wife to the boss, a radiant, satin-skinned blonde who was spilling out of a dusky pink sequined dress and made Hope feel more than a little inadequate in the safe jersey number that had looked sophisticated and modern at home but had been transformed into several-seasons-out-of-fashion in this elegant setting. She never got clothes right, she sighed. But then, Hope was beginning to feel as if she never got anything right.
If the male diners were all open-mouthed at the sight of Jasmine swaying on her high heels, the female diners were able to feast their eyes on Matt, who was looking particularly good in a fawn-coloured suit that made him look even more matinee idol than ever. His hair suited him in the cropped style; it made his deep set eyes look darker than usual and showed up the firm, he-man jaw that made lots of the women in Makings Lane wave at him too energetically when he was out cutting the grass in his shorts and T-shirt.
He certainly looked after himself, fitting in three nights a week in the gym come what may. Hope now knew he wasn't keeping himself fit for her. But at least he was wearing his birthday tie.
'George Clooney eat your heart out,' Yvonne had joked the first time she'd clapped eyes on Matt at the annual building society barbecue.
Hope knew this was high praise indeed but hadn't liked to tell her that Matt considered gorgeous George to be common and modelled himself more on Cary Grant. If his temples weren't already greying in a distinguished manner a la Cary, Hope wondered if Matt might start bleaching them himself.
Many times in their marriage, she'd wondered how she'd

ever managed to end up with Matt. Quite a few other women wondered that too, she felt, judging by the calculating gazes she got from them at parties. Hope never realized that the calculating gazes held plenty of envy for her. Convinced she was frumpy and dull, she had no idea of her own attractiveness. To her, beauty meant the glossy sophistication and superb bone structure of people like Jasmine. It couldn't possibly mean a sweet, kind face or big anxious eyes or a soft mouth that constantly twitched up at the corners into the most bewitching smile.
Nor did Hope realize that while Matt might sometimes look briefly on the stunning creatures who flirted with him, he needed a yielding, gentle woman like Hope as his partner. The strong, glamorous women who eyed him up boldly, simply reminded him of his strong, glamorous mother, a woman who wore signature red lipstick, kept her dark hair in a sleek bob and flirted with all and sundry. Hope, who was scared of her mother-in-law and always felt deeply inadequate beside her, never realized that one of the reasons Matt loved her so dearly was because she was the direct opposite of his mother.
Hope walked behind Matt to the table, miserably thinking that maybe she should announce that her delectable husband was back on the market. She'd be flattened in the rush, that was for sure. Matt was a nine on a one-to-ten scale of attractiveness while she'd been maybe a five when they'd married. In her black dress with her hair refusing to behave and a pre-menstrual spot emerging like a beacon on her chin despite all the concealer plastered on it, Hope currently felt as if she was a two. Compared to Jasmine, she was in minus figures.
She stared at Jasmine jealously. Was she the one? No, Hope decided. Matt was a career man first and foremost. Having an affair with the boss's wife was career suicide.
A long table against one wall was reserved for the party of ten. Dan had organized the dinner party and was now telling everyone where to sit. As the others obediently went

to their seats, Hope's prospects of a red-wine fuelled evening where her mind would be taken off her troubles vanished. Dan told her to sit in the centre with her back to the wall and she realized she was going to spend the evening hemmed in by people she didn't like.
Lucky Matt had Betsey, the flamboyant journalist who was married to Dan, on one side. Betsey was one of Hope's closest friends, although she was a teeny bit self-obsessed and tended to swing all conversations back to herself. Hope would have loved to have been able to sit beside Betsey and confide in her: she was almost desperate enough to do so.
On Matt's other side, he had Jasmine. Both women were chattering away happily to the birthday boy. Hope, on the other hand, was stuck with the art director's husband, an eternal student with a goatee and dirty finger nails, who could bore for Britain in the Olympics on the subject of the changing face of industrial architecture. Hope didn't give a damn about industrial architecture and could see nothing interesting in Victorian glassworks.
On her other side was Adam Judd, the agency boss, who never had anything to say to her and who was now avidly watching his luscious wife, Jasmine, flirting with Matt.
Across the table, Dan smiled at Hope. She automatically smiled back, thinking 'you pig? you've stuck me with the most difficult people at the table.' Sam would have said something sarcastic to him: Hope knew she'd never dare.
Dan immediately turned to his neighbour, the agency's commercials director, a quiet woman named Elizabeth.
Soon, she was laughing too.
Hope sighed and took another big slug of wine. She wasn't a heavy drinker but the thought flitted through her mind that perhaps tonight was the night to get plastered and confront Matt. She'd never have the nerve unless she was drunk . . .
Then again, Matt would go ballistic if she got drunk and made a fool of herself. These people were Matt's colleagues,

she must make an effort. But it wasn't easy. Tortured by thoughts of Matt's infidelity and watching all the women at their table like a hawk, in case she was one of them, Hope was not enjoying herself. The silence at her side of the table was deafening, made all the more obvious by the machine gun rattle of conversation on the other side. Adam ate like he was starving, only speaking when he wanted butter, pepper for his smoked salmon, or the bottle of wine passed down his end. Hope gave up trying when her third stab at conversation ('Are you and Jasmine going anywhere nice on holiday?') was deflected with a grunted 'no'. Adam looked grim at the notion, as if he wasn't letting Jasmine go anywhere she'd be able to stun passing men with the sight of her in a sliver of uplift bikini.
Peter, the student, was eager to discuss his thesis whenever Hope turned in his direction.
'I'd really like to develop the idea into a book,' he was saying grandly in between hoovering up goats' cheese salad, 'but bizarrely, I can't get anyone interested.'
Hope had tuned out by now but nodded and said 'Really? How interesting.' She wished she was more like Sam who could invest the words 'how interesting' with an iciness that would freeze the Pacific Ocean and immediately make the other person realize they were the exact opposite of interesting.
'Funding is the problem, control of funding,' Peter said, tapping his bony nose mysteriously. 'It's impossible to get funding for the really worthwhile projects like mine,' he added pompously.
'It is outrageous that so many commercial books get published when worthy, unsaleable books like yours don't,' Hope said gravely.
Peter blinked at her, unsure whether she was serious or not. But Hope's face was the picture of earnestness.
'Well, yes,' he drivelled on, satisfied that Matt Parker's quiet little wife couldn't possibly have been mocking him. 'You see, if you let me explain my theories . . .'

In desperation, Hope turned to find that Adam was now talking business to Sadie, the art director. Sadie's eyes caught Hope's briefly but as Adam was talking, Hope couldn't interrupt. Adam ignored Hope completely. Just like Matt, she thought bitterly. He'd barely looked at her during the first course, concentrating on making everyone else laugh and have a great time.
'You can see the problem,' Peter continued as she turned back to him.
'Of course,' Hope said, wondering why the hell she'd been looking forward to an evening out when it was proving as thrilling as having her blackheads squeezed. She'd thought it might be more enjoyable than enduring another silent evening of telly-watching at home. But at least at home, her mind was taken off its problems thanks to prime time viewing.
'More wine, Hope?' asked her husband from the other side of the table, seeing no-one else had bothered to refill her glass.
She nodded glumly.
Matt's long fingers reached across the table and touched hers. He winked at her and mouthed 'thank you'. Thank you for being bored senseless on my behalf, she hoped he meant. She smiled weakly back with relief. He did love her, he did. She knew Matt well enough to know he was trying to make up. Even if there was somebody else, she could weather it as long as Matt loved her. Hope gave his fingers a final squeeze.
It wasn't too much of an effort to be nice to Matt's colleagues and their spouses. It was the least she could do. She only had to put up with Peter once or twice a year.

Long fingers twirling the stem of his wine glass, Matt watched Hope doing her best to be charming to boring Peter Scott. She was great at that sort of thing, he thought fondly. You could always rely on Hope to do the polite, decent thing no matter what. Nobody else in their right mind would let Peter start off on his 'my thesis' saga but Hope was too

kind to stop him. That was her problem: she was too kind. She let people walk all over her.
He didn't know why she'd worn that clingy dress. Tight stuff didn't suit her. His wife had an other-worldly air that made her look nice in flowy stuff, long dresses, that type of thing. Not like Jasmine. You had to hand it to Adam, he knew how to pick them. There wasn't a man here who hadn't thought for one brief, erotic moment of what the new Mrs Judd would look like without that sparkly dress. Probably cost more than all the dresses in Hope's wardrobe put together. Anyway, Hope would never wear such a thing. That dress was a statement: Look at me, it said. That wasn't Hope's scene at all. She was much more of a background person, happy to be out of the spotlight.
It was a pity she didn't realize how gorgeous she was. He was always telling her but she just didn't get it. He'd seen scores of men eyeing her up over the years and Hope never, ever noticed them. When people looked at her, she checked to see if she had her skirt tucked up into her knickers or had gone out in her slippers.
'Great night, isn't it?' Dan said, leaning over and touching Matt on the shoulder.
'Yeah, fantastic night,' Matt said automatically.
It was a great night. He had his colleagues here, cheering him for his birthday, and his boss who'd just brought him into the boardroom that day to say he was giving Matt a raise. Two lovely kids, a nice wife . . . everything a man could want. Only he wanted more.
Matt stared into the middle distance and thought about how his perfect, wonderful life was choking him. He'd had a crazy and impulsive idea about how to fix it, well, how to fix some of it, but how did he break it to Hope? He didn't know where to start. Confiding in Jasmine had helped a bit.
She'd promised to put a good word in for him with Adam if he ever actually made the break. Telling Adam would be a doddle compared to telling Hope.

By the time people were staring happily into their liqueurs, Hope had finally managed to move seats and was now between Jasmine and Dan.
Jasmine was very nice, Hope decided, convinced now that there was nothing between her and Matt. She could see how other women would feel threatened by her: that amazing figure, tiny waist and gravity-defying boobs, not to mention a sweet face with huge blue eyes. But she was funny, unaffected and not at all the predatory bimbo that Betsey had initially dubbed her. Well, she wasn't predatory, anyway.
'Your husband's wonderful,' Jasmine said in between sips of sambuca. 'I was telling him how I wanted to write a book and he said "snap!" The last person I said it to told me not to bother my head with books when I could be on the cover of one.' Jasmine looked vexed at this.
'Matt said what?' Hope asked, curious and hurt at the same time. How had Matt discussed this with Jasmine and not with her?
'I daresay it's a pipe dream,' suggested Jasmine. 'It is for me too. But Matt writes for his job, he's got a better chance than most. I'm thinking of doing a creative writing course, myself. I know it's tough. Like selling records. I went out with a musician once and he was obsessed with record sales.' She laughed ruefully. 'Oh, speaking of music, Matt was telling me about your older sister and this great job she's just got in the record company. I love the sound of that. What's she like? Very clever and high powered, I suppose?'
'The opposite of me, you mean,' said Hope automatically. And it was true . . . Sam was a human dynamo, all fire and energy. Now she was running a label at Titus Records. Hope still wasn't exactly sure what the new job entailed because Sam had only been there a week and their emails had been short, but it was demanding, that was for sure. Sam couldn't bear to be free of pressure. She'd worked herself into the ground for five years as marketing director of another

huge record label and now, when Hope thought her sister should be slowing down a bit and perhaps thinking about settling down, Sam had moved companies to another, bigger
job.
Jasmine was back on the subject of writing: 'Matt told me about his plan to take a year out and live in the country. I know it's only an idea and you've nothing settled yet but I think you should go for it. It'll be easier for him to write with no distractions. Harder to see your sister, mind you, if you were to move abroad. Matt was telling me your parents died when you were kids and that you've only got one sister.'
Hope's heart missed a beat. 'What are you on about?' she asked, feeling a queasy sensation in the pit of her stomach, a sensation that had nothing to do with drinking too much.
'It's fine, really,' Jasmine assured her in a stage whisper. 'You don't have to pretend you don't know. I won't say a word to Adam about it, I promised Matt I wouldn't. I'm sure that Adam will go ballistic when he discovers Matt wants to take a year's sabbatical but you have to pursue your dreams, don't you.' She got misty-eyed. 'I'd love to move somewhere remote to write but I'd hate to be away from twenty-four hour shops. Won't you mind?'
Hope recovered her composure. This was not the moment to say the notion of Matt taking a year out was news to her. She tried to look resigned instead of astonished. 'Who knows what'll happen,' she shrugged. 'The whole idea is very much aspirational right now. We love Bath and . . .'
'Jasmine, time to go,' announced Adam suddenly, looming behind his wife and putting proprietorial hands on her slim, golden shoulders.
With Jasmine and Adam gone, the party deflated. Betsey insisted to Dan she was tired and had to go home.
'We should go too,' said Elizabeth, reaching under the table for her handbag.
With the wisdom born of being slightly drunk, Hope

realized that her husband's colleagues weren't so close to him as he thought. Their eagerness to party only lasted as long as the boss's presence. When Adam was gone, so was the party spirit. But Matt didn't seem to mind and waved everyone off with great bonhomie.
In the taxi, Hope sat quietly as they drove out on the Bristol road. Matt lay back against the seat with his eyes closed, his face expressionless now they were alone. As houses sped by, Hope worked out what she was going to say when they got home. It went against the grain to start an argument in the back of a taxi with the driver listening to every word.
The pieces of the puzzle had fallen painfully into place thanks to the artless Jasmine. Matt was dreaming up an enormous career change and Hope and the kids didn't figure in his plans. Would she stay on in the house in Bath or move to London to be near Sam, Hope wondered in shock. She'd move, definitely, she couldn't stay in the house where they'd been so happy. Correction; where she'd been so happy. Matt obviously hadn't been happy or he wouldn't want to leave it and her.
The children had been little lambs and the chocolate biscuits had been great, Elaine, the babysitter, said when they got home.
'Good,' said Hope absently, getting out her purse. Her hands were shaking, like an alcoholic's before the first drink of the day. 'Matt will walk you home.'
'It's only across the road,' protested Elaine.
'Better safe than sorry,' Hope said. 'It's half twelve, you know. Time for the deviants of the world to emerge.'
'In Makings Lane?' asked Elaine incredulously.
When Matt came back, Hope was sitting waiting for him at the kitchen table. Her hands were still shaking, so she put them on her lap and clasped them tightly together as if she was praying. Perhaps if she had prayed, none of this would have happened, she thought wildly.
'I thought you'd be on your way to bed by now,' Matt

remarked, pouring himself a glass of milk. It was the longest statement he'd made in about a week.
'Jasmine said a very strange thing to me tonight,' Hope said evenly. 'She said you were taking a sabbatical to live in the country to write a book - not this country was the implication. I just wondered when you were going to tell me of this plan and if I and the children were actually included.'
'Ah.' Matt sat down with her. 'Too much red wine is a terrible thing.'
'You mean Jasmine misunderstood?' Hope could barely get the words out.
'Not exactly,' Matt said slowly. 'I'm afraid I got a bit carried away and said too much.'
'So it's true.' Her legs began to shake too with fear.
'Hope,' Matt wasn't sure how to start but he knew he had to. Telling Jasmine had been a decision fuelled by too much wine but it had been a relief to talk about it with someone other than Dan. It was time to tell Hope. 'It's been a dream of mine for years and you know me, respectable family man, I'd never do anything wild or out of the ordinary, anything that would jeopardize our future but now I've got the chance and I thought, why not take a year out. I know that Adam would keep my job open for me - he'd have to, I'm the best he's got,' he added, proud of the fact.
'But what about me and the kids?' asked Hope, eyes wet and filled with terror. Was Matt drunk? Didn't he care about them at all?
'I mean all of us going away. You, me and the kids for a year. To Ireland; Kerry, in fact. Uncle Gearoid's solicitor phoned me on Monday about the old house. I know it's sudden but it's like the answer to my prayers. I've been so down, Hope, so depressed and then he phones to say the house is officially mine. I haven't been able to think of anything else all week.'
Hope's whole body was shaking now; she could barely take in what he was saying because her mind was so befuddled with fear and anxiety.

Gearoid had been a poet who, over forty years before, had left his home in the UK for a small town named Redlion in Kerry, where he lived a bohemian life with gusto. Hope had never met him because he'd refused to leave his beloved adopted country to come to their wedding but he'd always sounded like a mad old rogue who pickled his liver and wrote bad poetry that nobody had ever wanted to publish. He'd even changed his name from Gerald to the Irish and unpronounceable Gearoid, which Hope still found impossible to say, no matter how many times Matt said it phonetically: 'Gar, like garage, and old like haemorrhoid.'
Matt had spent a few summers in Redlion as a child and still talked mistily about what a wonderful place Kerry was. But as Gearoid became more eccentric with age, he refused to travel to stay with Matt, who, in turn, never seemed to have the time to visit his ageing uncle. When he died, he left Matt everything; partly because he didn't have any children of his own and partly, according to his solicitor, to annoy the other distant relatives who'd been hanging around like vultures hoping for a piece of property in a popular tourist destination in south-western Ireland. 'Everything' turned out to be a run-down house the solicitor imagined wouldn't fetch much. Hope had assumed that Matt would simply sell the house. They could certainly do with the money.
'Probate's finally been sorted out,' Matt explained. 'The house is mine. And yours, of course. There's a bit of land but only an acre or so. It all seemed much bigger when I was a kid. I thought he had loads of land. Anyway,' he paused, 'this is my idea. I've told you about the writers' community there that Gearoid helped start up in the Sixties?'
Hope nodded, still looking shell-shocked, although Matt didn't notice because he was fired up with the enthusiasm of telling her his plan.
'It's spooky because this is so coincidental,' Matt went on eagerly, 'but last week I read an interview with the novelist, Stephen Dane - you know the guy, he writes those literary thrillers. Anyway, he's just sold a book to Hollywood. We're

talking millions, Hope. And in the middle of the interview, he mentioned that he wrote his first novel in Kerry, in Redlion, actually, in the writer's centre. Don't you see, it's got to be a sign.
'We'd both take a year out and go and live in Gearoid's house. I'd write a novel. I've got one in me, I know it. Imagine it, Hope,' Matt said, his eyes alight with enthusiasm, desperate to transmit his excitement to her and unaware of what she'd been thinking since his birthday, 'we could be with the children all day. I could get some part time copy writing work and we'd live cheaply enough. We could rent out this place for a year and cover the mortgage. We wouldn't lose out. This is our big chance.'
And it was, Matt was convinced of it. He'd slay the demons that lived in his head and told him he'd never amount to anything but a bitter old ad man. And he'd get the chance to live another life, even if only for a brief time.
Hope stared at him, hardly daring to believe that it wasn't the death knell she'd been expecting. Matt wasn't leaving her; he wanted her and the children with him. She leaned her hands on the table. Her sleeve immediately stuck in the sticky patch left behind from Millie's morning yoghurt.
'Why couldn't you tell me?' she said, her voice unsteady. 'I didn't know you felt this way.'
'I'm sorry I kept it to myself. It's embarrassing to talk about your dreams like that, Hope, but I want to write and I'm never going to do it here, not with a full-time job, not in this house. You need a creative atmosphere. It would be fantastic for us as a family. Having the house there in Redlion takes all the hassle out of it. It's perfect.'
'Why didn't you tell me any of this on your birthday?' she said helplessly. 'I knew there was something wrong, I asked you what it was then and you wouldn't tell me! I thought you were having an affair.'
It was Matt's turn to look astonished.
'An affair! Whatever gave you that idea?' he said incredulously.

'Everything,' Hope said. 'You told me there was something wrong but that I couldn't fix it. And you didn't kiss me or touch me and I was just so sure
Her voice broke off and Matt sat down at the table and took her hands in his.
'Darling Hope, what a crazy idea. I was killing myself wondering whether I could do this to you. All I could think of was that you'd hate it, that it was such a huge step to go abroad for a year. I kept telling myself it was a stupid idea, that I shouldn't do it but I've been talking to Dan about it and . . .'
'Dan!' Hope felt a spark of fury that while she'd been dying inside at the thought of Matt leaving her, he could have saved her a lot of anguish if only he'd told her the truth. Meanwhile, he'd actually been asking other people's opinions on a move that affected her more than anyone else. 'Is there anyone you haven't discussed this with, apart from me, of course?' She ripped a tissue from the box on the table and rubbed violently at the yoghurt marks on the table.
'I need you to understand, Hope,' Matt said quietly.
Hope thought she understood all right: Matt had made another unilateral decision about their lives. There had been the time a mere month after their marriage when he said he'd accepted a job with the ad agency in Bath even though they'd both decided to travel round the world for a year. (Well, the trip around the world had been his idea initially, but she'd agreed to it, had bought the rucksack and got the typhoid injection.)
Or the time he'd agreed to rent a holiday cottage in France with Dan and Betsey, without even discussing it with Hope. And what had she said on each occasion? Had she roared: 'It's my life too, Matt. I don't agree with your plans so you'll have to unmake them?' No. Anger and neediness had fought and neediness had won. Too scared at starting a battle with the one she loved, Hope had smothered her upset and said: 'Of course, that's a good idea. Let's do it.'
Sam had been furious with her: 'How dare he bloody give

up your year travelling for some crappy job without talking it over with you first!' she'd raged.
'Marriage is about give and take,' Hope had countered.
'What percentage applies to each person?' Sam had demanded. 'You give ninety-five per cent and he takes ninety- five per cent? Is that the way it breaks down?'
'You don't know anything about marriage,' Hope had replied, stung by the unfairness of her sister's comments into saying something sharper than she'd ever normally say to Sam.
Her sister was quiet for a moment. 'Neither do you, sis,' Sam remarked sadly.
Unspoken between them was the knowledge that happy families was a game they hadn't grown up with. Brought up by their strict, middle-aged maiden aunt who thought that children should be seen and not heard, their vision of happy families came from watching Little House On The Prairie.
'Penny for them?' Matt put an arm around her shoulders. She leaned her head against it. He was so demonstrative with her, a fact which had thrilled her when they'd first met. Matt linked his arm through hers from the first date, squeezed her fingers affectionately just for the hell of it. Hope, brought up in austerity where hugs were for Christmas, had loved his touchy-feelyness. After six years of marriage, he had been as affectionate as ever. They had slept spooned together and on the odd occasions Matt was away working, Hope found it impossible to get any sleep without the sensation of his body next to hers. Until the past painful few months.
Hope remembered the sheer fear of thinking their marriage was over. She adored Matt, she couldn't live without him. Now, relief that he still loved her too was flooding through her limbs, filling her with the sweet sense of release that all her worst nightmares weren't coming true.
'I wish you wouldn't make decisions without consulting me,' she said, head still resting against his arm.
As if sensing that the worst was over, Matt stroked her hair with his other hand. 'I am consulting you,' he said.

'Only after you've talked about it with other people, including Jasmine.' She was still hurt that he'd talked about something so personal to a woman he barely knew. Jasmine had learned all the facts while Hope, whose life it involved, was still ignorant of them. Despite her relief, that still rankled. 'We can't have a very good marriage if you never discuss the big issues with me, Matt. Why couldn't you tell me what you were thinking in the beginning? I couldn't begin to tell you how awful it's been for me, knowing there was something wrong but not what.' She didn't want to mention her affair fears again. It sounded so stupid now she knew the truth.
'It was only an idea then . . .'
'That was when you should have talked it over with me, then. What am I? Your wife or your landlady?'
Matt moved his arm away. 'I thought you'd jump at the idea. You're forever going on about how you never get to spend time with Toby and Millie, how they'll grow up thinking Your Little Treasures is their real home and we're the night-time babysitters. And you hate your job.'
'Sometimes I do but that doesn't mean I want to stop doing it,' Hope protested. 'And I doubt very much if I could get a sabbatical; I'm hardly a top flight executive they can't do without. So you're asking me to dump a good job. And all our friends are here,' she added, 'not to mention the children's friends. Toby's only just settled properly into the nursery and I have to drag him out again.'
'It's only for a year, not forever. Unless of course, I get a good publishing deal. . .' Matt's face lit up at his daydream but Hope was even more horrified. Perhaps the move would be forever. . .
'What if I don't agree to it?' she asked.
Feeling a bit guilty about blackmailing her, Matt launched his final, lethal weapon. 'Don't be angry, love. Think of what it could mean to us. We could bring the children up as a real family, in a real community environment. Not with both of us working so hard that we're too tired to get

involved with the outside world. Wouldn't you love to live in the country and be a part of the children's lives?'
Hope wavered. Family: that was her Achilles' heel. Aunt Ruth had been the most unmaternal person on the planet and Hope had longed for a family atmosphere like something out of a Disney movie. Picnics with homemade sandwiches, walks along the sea shore, great excitement hanging up stockings over the fireplace at Christmas. She and Sam hadn't experienced any of that, which made her all the more keen to give it to her children.
'We could look after the kids ourselves, not work each other into the ground,' Matt said fervently, warming to his theme. 'Think of it, fresh air, no pollution, good food . . .'
'Bath is hardly covered with industrial smog,' she pointed out.
'I know, but this would be different.'
'What about our families? We'd be so far away from everyone.'
'I never see my lot anyway - you know we're not close - and Sam can fly over and see us in Ireland. They all can, it's not a million miles away. Besides, my parents haven't been to Bath since the Christmas before last, they'll hardly miss us.'
Hope knew what he meant. Matt's parents were chilly and reserved, and not too interested in spending time with their only son and his family. Since his father had retired, his parents had spent much of their time travelling, saying that they had neither the time nor the money to travel when they were younger.
'Sam jets off all over the world for work,' Matt added, 'it'll be easy for her to hop on a plane and visit us. The trip would be an hour and a half, max.'
Hope thought about it. Imagine being able to take care of the children, giving them quality time, learning tapestry, sitting in a rural garden with butterflies dipping in and out of the flowers, birds singing and not a sound of cars roaring up and down the motorways.

Hope thought of the floral skirt she'd admired in Jolly's and her plans to become the queen of her kitchen.
And she and Matt would become closer than ever. After nearly a week of fear when she'd thought her marriage was over, she desperately wanted to work on it, to make sure they stayed together. She took a deep breath.
'OK, let's investigate it. But stop making plans without asking me, will you?'
'I promise.' Matt buried his face in her neck, the same way Toby did. And in a rush of warmth she felt her objections melt away.

CHAPTER TWO

That same Thursday, Sam Smith sat in her office and put her head on her desk for one wonderful minute. Not on the desk, exactly: the bleached maple was hidden by layers of paper, mostly marketing reports, spreadsheets of expenses and letters she had yet to read. She had to clear it all before seven o'clock that evening, an impossibility since her assistant, Lydia, was off with flu. Sam's own throat ached and a dull throbbing behind her eyes convinced her that she was next in line to get it. Only she simply couldn't afford to take any time off. She had a gig tonight, one that would go on until the wee small hours, and an eight-thirty meeting the following morning, followed by a three-hour budget meeting. Illness, like tiredness, was not an option. Not when you were barely two weeks into the job, a job people would kill their grannies for.
Sam rubbed her eyes, not caring for once whether she'd smudge her mascara and give herself racoon eyes. Why did she have to feel ill now? Everything had been going swimmingly for the last eight working days. She loved Titus Records, adored her new job as managing director of the LGBK label, got hugely excited at the idea of developing people's careers and making them international stars. It was a huge step up from being director of marketing at Plutonious Records. Despite the long hours she'd been working, she'd gone home every night buzzing with an inner electricity at the thrill of the job she'd been fighting for every day of the past fifteen years.
But Lydia had been snuffling and sneezing all day Wednesday and had given Sam her germs. Lydia, a carefree

twenty-five-year-old, could afford to take a few days' sick leave. Sam, teetering on the abyss of forty and the most recently hired executive with a lot to prove, couldn't. Illness in female execs was viewed with as much disfavour as working mothers racing home from important meetings to take care of toddlers with high temperatures. At least Sam, childless by choice, didn't have to worry about the latter.
The telltale click of her door handle alerted her to the fact that someone was about to enter the office. Immediately, she jerked upright, flicked back her glossy dark blonde hair, and opened her eyes wide to banish the exhaustion from them.
The door opened abruptly to reveal Steve Parris. Sam mustered up her best, most professional smile. When the company chairman himself deigned to arrive at your office at half-past five on a Thursday evening, it was your duty to look alert, on top of things and enthusiastic. Not half-dead with flu symptoms.
Sam shoved her seat back and got to her feet in one fluid movement. 'Steve, what can I do for you?' she said, hoping to infuse her words with the correct amount of deference. In her two weeks at LGBK, the biggest label at Titus Records, she'd divined that Steve Parris, no matter how much he slapped workers on the back and went about with his hailfellow-well-met routine, was a control freak who needed subservience the same way other people needed oxygen. Short and skinny, he was still a formidable presence in his black Prada suit. People who underestimated Steve because he was so physically unprepossessing rarely made the same mistake twice.
With his shock of hair, heavy eyebrows and disconcerting habit of smoking a cigar the size of a nuclear weapon all along the no-smoking corridors of Titus, Steve was the sort of man who made people nervous. Sam was no exception.
She was no coward but she knew Steve didn't like her.

He'd wanted a man for the job. The Titus European President, who was Steve's superior, had wanted Sam. Steve had given in but he wasn't happy about the decision.
'Just dropped by,' he said now, small black eyes constantly moving over Sam, her messy desk and the office, .which was still only half-furnished. Sam had dumped the previous incumbent's furniture, an act designed to show people that she was the new broom.
Sam smiled at him as warmly as she could manage. Steve never 'just dropped by'.
'You're going to see Density tonight,' he said, half- question, half-statement. . .
That was it, Sam realized. Density, the band Steve himself had signed at huge expense, and who had just finished recording their first album, were performing in a small club in Soho. Sam, as head of the label they were signed to, would be very involved with their future, so it would be interesting to see them live for the first time. A future that would mean big trouble for Steve and Sam if they didn't make it. He was in her office to make sure that she was giving his proteges every help, so that their album would be a mega success and he'd get the kudos for signing them. If it wasn't, someone's head would roll and Sam would bet her enamelled golly badge that it wouldn't be Steve's.
For the first time, Sam felt the strain of being the boss. Suddenly she wondered why she hadn't stuck with her enjoyable first job all those years ago in the film distributors where the biggest stress was looking after some neurotic movie star on a promotional tour who wanted Earl Grey tea and lemon in a motorway cafe where the only serious menu choice was what sauce you got with your deep fried chicken. But no, she'd wanted power and a fabulous career and had left the film industry to spend fifteen frantic years in the music business. Fifteen years of hard slog to end up with Steve Parris growling at her every day. Had it been ambition or masochism? It was the flu talking, she thought, angry with herself for such weakness.

'I'm really looking forward to seeing Density live,' she said now. 'I love the parts of the album I've heard.'
Steve's beetle eyebrows bristled and the small black eyes got smaller and meaner.
'You mean you haven't heard it all before?' he barked.
'I've heard most of the tracks but they're remixing three. The producer is going to send the final version tomorrow,' Sam said, trying to remain cool.
'Jeez, you should have heard it before tonight. It's out in a month. I'll see you at the gig tonight and we'll talk about the album tomorrow,' he said, slamming the door shut on his way out.
Sam sank back into her chair and automatically put one finger to her mouth to nibble the nail. Shit, shit, shit.
She shuffled her papers again and then made up her mind. An executive decision. After all, she was a bloody executive, so she could make a decision. She was flu-ey, she had a gig to go to and she really needed to change her clothes if she wasn't to look like a complete dork at the gig. The change of clothes she'd meant to bring was still sitting in the hall of the flat where she'd left it this morning. Wearing a suit, even if it was a pretty slick grey one with a discreet DKNY label, she'd stand out like an elderly sore thumb amidst crowds of combat-trousered trendies with Kangol hats and trainers. Bugger the paperwork: she was going home to mainline anti-flu products and to change her clothes. She locked her door and walked past the glass offices, and past the open-plan section of the fifth floor, LGBK's centre of operations. Luckily, Steve's office was on the seventh floor, with all the Titus presidents, vice presidents, and other assorted control freaks. She hoped nobody was looking at her, sure she had a guilty look on her face that said 'Going Home Early'.
But even though she didn't know it, as she strode along the glass corridor, people were looking; people just looked at Sam Smith. Not that she was beautiful or supermodel- tall or startling in any movie star way. But because energy

emanated from her like electricity and because she moved like a dynamo.
At five foot six, Hope was two inches taller, physically bigger, and yet when the sisters were together, Sam was the one people noticed.
While her sister was a mixture of pale shades, with fragile colouring and a rounded, welcoming face, Sam was the opposite: all strong colours and strong features. Sam's hair, mouse at birth, was long and a gleaming dark blonde. She had it blow-dried at a salon most lunchtimes and it fell in severe, gleaming straightness to her shoulder blades. It was a classy look, one which she'd deliberately chosen so that people would look at her and instantly know she was a player: a somebody. Her face was oval with a strong chin, a long straight nose and slanting eyebrows that showed up intensely coloured tawny brown eyes. Her skin was darker than Hope's, almost olive. In the summer, she could pass for an Italian because she went a rich, golden brown. At school, people never believed she and Hope were sisters. Only their mouths were similar: they shared the same soft plump lips, a feature which made Hope look unsure and innocent and which gave Sam the look of a woman who'd had collagen injections. To counteract this model-girl plumpness, Sam drew her lipliner inside her natural lip line and only ever wore pale lipstick so as not to draw attention to her mouth. Hope's mouth was vulnerable and slightly sexy, both looks Sam was keen to avoid. As far as Sam was concerned, once you let your hard-as-nails facade down, you were finished in business.
Slim, due to hyperactivity rather than because of any time spent in a gym, Sam looked like the perfect career woman in her tailored grey trouser suit, with a sleek nylon mac, mobile phone and briefcase as accessories. Straight out of Cosmopolitan's career woman pages, except that at thirty-nine she was a fair bit older than the Cosmo babes. The vibes she gave off said 'unapproachable' and that suited her just fine.

'If you were seaside rock, you'd have a line through you saying "tough cookie",' joked her best friend, Jay, on those nights when they shared dinner together in the local Indian restaurant they both loved.
Sam always laughed when Jay said that but lately it didn't sound as funny as it used to. Jay was a willowy Atlanta woman she'd met in college, part of a small group of people who were Sam's closest friends. Jay who wore bohemian chic clothes, worked in a bookshop and was only interested in her job as a means to pay the bills. She admired Sam's single mindedness but said the career fast track wasn't for her. Tonight, Sam didn't feel as if it was for her, either.
On the packed underground train, she clung to the side of a seat as they hurtled along. Sam hated it when the train was full. She got off at Holland Park, bought some anti-flu capsules in the chemist, and trudged through sleeting rain to the flat, one of four in a huge, white-fronted converted house in an expensive, tree-lined street.
The place looked as if it had been burgled, which was pretty much the way she'd left it that morning. A huge pile of ironing lay on one corner of the dining room table; the previous few days' papers were scattered on the rest of it and the coat she'd been wearing yesterday was thrown on the sofa. Usually chronically tidy, she hated mess with a vengeance. And when the flat was messy, the cool, clean lines of the all-white rooms looked all wrong.
Since starting her new job at Titus, Sam had been working horrifically long hours and the housework had fallen by the wayside. Her cleaner had left a month before and Sam hadn't managed to find a new one. The flat wasn't enormous or anything, but doing any housework at the end of a murderously hard week was the last thing she had energy for. The flat was a two-bedroom, financially crippling, investment in a posh bit of London and the living room cum dining room was the only decent-sized room in the entire place. The kitchen was so small that two people really needed to know each other intimately if they wanted to spend any amount

of time in it together, while the bathroom was minuscule and without one of Sam's favourite amenities: a bath. Showers were functional, she'd always thought, but a bath was luxury. Still, with her mega new salary, she'd be able to move soon, to somewhere bigger, more opulent and with a bathroom where you couldn't stand in the centre of the floor and touch both walls with your outstretched hands.
She couldn't face the effort of sticking anything in the microwave, so she spread a few crackers with cream cheese, poured herself a vodka and red bull to give herself energy and took the first dose of her anti-flu medicine.
In the bedroom, she sat down at the computer and connected to Outlook Express.

Hi Hope, she wrote. How's it going with you, love? I'm a total grump today because I'm feeling fluey and work is a nightmare. Sorry, shouldn't be bothering you with this but I've got to tell somebody. Going mad. It must be my age. I am running out of the ability to talk crap to people, which is worrying in this business. Talking crap is how I got hired in the first place. (Only kidding.) Plus, I've got to go to a gig tonight and the band in question make the sort of music that Toby and Millie might make if you left them alone in a room with two guitars, an effects pedal and a drum kit. Just as well there's paracetamol in the flu stuff I've taken. Talk more at the weekend,
Sam xx

She had a speedy shower to rinse off the sweaty flu feeling and dressed quickly in black nylon trousers, a small orange T-shirt and a long black leather coat that clung to her like it had been tailored to her body. The stuff in the bag in the hall would be creased and would have had to be ironed again. Wearing crumpled clothes was not her style. Draining her vodka, she was out the door only an hour after arriving.

'I hope you're not going to have any wild parties this week,' yelled a reedy male voice from the landing above hers. 'I've got guests and they couldn't sleep last night with the noise.'
Sam resisted the impulse to answer back. There was no point. Mad Malcolm, as the rest of the residents called him, was oblivious to reality. He lived on the top floor flat and spent his life accusing the other residents of having orgiastic late-night parties and disturbing him, which was utterly untrue. The most noise Sam had ever made since moving into her flat a year ago had been the night she'd dropped a saucepan of hot pasta sauce and it had splashed onto her leg, making her yelp in pain. Used to getting up at dawn to be at her desk by seven thirty, her idea of a late night at home was being in bed at half eleven watching the late movie. The people who lived downstairs were similarly quiet and it was only Mad Male himself, who had wooden floors, bad taste in music and a constantly barking Pekinese, who disturbed the peace. Neighbours. As if she didn't have enough on her plate without a nutter living above her.

The club was hot, sweaty and already full of Density fans when she got there. Her name was on the guest list and she slipped past the queue near the backstage area.
Backstage, long-haired roadies humped equipment around, biceps glinting with sweat in the hothouse club environment. They ignored her completely. Sam had no idea where she was going and had no intention of asking.
She blindly followed a winding corridor and found herself in a big cool room where tables, plastic chairs and two kegs of beer were positioned. Two record company people were sitting in a corner, drinking beer from cans and chatting to a skinny young bloke with a shaved head.
She didn't know the Titus people very well yet but at least she recognized these two. Darius was a handsome, upper-class sort of boy in his late twenties from Artists and Repertoire, commonly known as A & R. Normally young,

musical and deeply hip people, A & R staff trawled clubs and venues spotting talent. They worked on the road and were rarely in their offices before half ten, arriving with tired eyes and demo CDs people had pressed on them the night before. A & R people sometimes resented people like Sam, whom they saw as 'suits' who screwed up their wonderful signings and who refused to sign up avant garde stuff the A & R people were passionate about. Sam had heard that Darius was brilliant at his job and had a fantastic ear for music; vital in a job which involved working closely with bands, songwriters and producers.
The other Titus person was a publicity woman whom Lydia had said was nicknamed Cher because she looked exactly like the American singer as a thirty-year-old and loved wearing Seventies hippie clothes to emphasize the effect. Sam couldn't for the life of her remember Cher's real name.
'Hi guys,' she said, pulling a chair up. 'You been in to see the band yet?'
'They don't like seeing people before a gig,' said Cher severely. 'Except Steve,' she added reverently, as if Steve Parris was God. Steve certainly thought so, Sam thought ruefully.
'Is Steve here yet?' she asked, knowing she'd have to stand beside him during the gig.
'No, he's delayed,' said Darius. 'Would you like a cigarette?' he added politely, proffering a pack.
Sam momentarily wished she still smoked. Everyone else was dragging deeply on full-strength cigarettes. At least it gave you something to-do.
'Given up,' she said. 'But thanks.'
What she could have killed for was a cup of tea to soothe her throat. There was a huge hot water urn in one corner complete with teabags, plastic cups and sugar but in this beer 'n' fags atmosphere, Sam felt it would mark her for ever as a dorky 'suit' if she had tea now.
After fifteen minutes of chat, the support band went on

and the room cleared while everyone went to stand backstage and look at them. The noise was terrible. Like the sound of two wrestlers having a fight in a saucepan factory. Sam managed to look interested for two songs, then sloped back to the hospitality room and made herself a cup of tea. Who gave a damn who saw her. She wasn't a kid who had to pretend to be cool, she was probably fifteen years older than most of the people backstage and if she wanted tea, then she was going to have tea. Age had to have some compensations.
When the support band were mercifully finished, she rejoined the others at the side of the stage and waited for Density. Finally, after ten minutes of screaming and clapping from the fans, they appeared, none of them looking over the age of twenty-one, all lanky young guys with weird haircuts, mad clothes and strange piercings. Their music wasn't her scene but she could sense the raw intensity of it. She only hoped that the people who bought CDs agreed with her.
Steve appeared, deep in conversation with the band's manager, so Sam was able to just nod hello to them. She'd have to speak to them both later and say how wonderful the band had been, but for now, she wanted to listen and not have to make polite small talk.
After half an hour, she decided to go down into the club itself and watch the band from the audience's point of view. She liked doing that: seeing how the fans reacted was one of the essential litmus tests for a band. Seeing if people bought their album was the other, more important one.
Telling the backstage bouncers that she'd be back, Sam slipped out into the crowd and was hit immediately by the scent of young bodies, sweat mingling with perfume and the tang of dope. She stood at the back and breathed in a waft of what smelled like l'Air du Temps.
The smell of floral perfume at gigs always astonished her. There she was, surrounded by gyrating young bodies, a mass of humanity in leather jackets, hipster trousers and death- defying heels with hard young eyes staring at her arrogantly.

Then she smelled the fresh scents of their perfume rising in the heat: floral bouquets from their mums' dressing tables mixing with the fresh scent of carefully applied deodorant, innocence meets sexy. Suddenly they weren't tough little cookies any more, but vulnerable young girls anxious before they went out, hopeful that they were wearing the right clothes, yelling that 'Honestly, Dad . . .' they wouldn't be home late as they blasted themselves with a spritz of something suitable for a wood nymph.
They were all so young really; trying hard to be grown up. And she felt so old. Sam rubbed her temples tiredly. What was wrong with her? She'd been feeling so old and worn out all day: too old to be standing at a heavy rock gig trying to get it. She didn't want to get it any more, she didn't want to have to stand in a smoky club and tap her foot to some incomprehensible beat.
She wanted to be sitting at home, drinking a nice glass of red wine, perhaps listening to some mellow Nina Simone and feeling relaxed.
Sam closed her eyes and gave herself a mental pinch. Get a grip! she told herself. You're a working woman, so work. She went looking for Steve to tell him he'd signed the band of the century.

The following morning, the flu hit her like a ten-tonne truck. She woke at half past five, bathed in a cold sweat with her head aching and her throat the consistency of rough gravel. Moaning as she dragged herself out of bed, Sam stumbled into the kitchen and boiled the kettle. Hot lemon and honey might help. So much for the anti-flu stuff she'd gulped down the night before.
Enveloped in her big navy towelling dressing gown, she slumped in front of the television with her hot lemon and flicked through the channels.
'Useless rubbish,' she muttered as she discovered that the breakfast television shows hadn't started yet and the only alternative was Open University or news. After half an hour

watching a programme about mountain gorillas, Sam still felt physically sick but mentally much improved. She never read anything any more apart from marketing reports and Music Week, and her daily culture came in the bio yoghurt she tried to eat most mornings. She really must learn more stuff. It was terrible to be uninformed, capable only of discussing sales, royalties, budgets and the marketing spend per unit of the latest hot CD. She dimly remembered a time, fifteen years ago, when she went to museums and galleries; when she had a bit of a life.
She went into the bathroom and showered, determined to make herself feel ready for work. Calling in sick so early in the new job was not a possibility, no matter how swollen and painful her head felt. Then, wrapped in her dressing gown again, she slumped down in front of breakfast TV. Just another little rest and she'd be ready to leave the house. Seven ten, Sam's normal time for leaving for work, came and went and she still felt as if her head was the size of a basketball.
She'd call a taxi instead of going by train. She was sick, she had to cosset herself.
The taxi driver finally arrived at half eight and turned out to be one of the cheeky Cockneys so beloved of tourists and so hated by anyone with the flu and a thumping headache.
'. . . so you see, they nicked him for having six people in the cab even though they were all one family. Ridiculous, it is. You can't break up a family who've looking for a cab, even though the rules say you can only carry five passengers. Mad, that's what I'd call it. . .'
Sam sat in the back and made heroic efforts with her Clinique base. However, being mere base and not miraculous make-up straight from the Jim Henson creature shop, it couldn't hide her blotchy, feverish skin, or make her look anything other than a sick, 39-year-old woman who hadn't slept well. To compensate, she made her eyes up heavily, hoping they'd distract from the rest of her.

'. .. so I says to him, don't go busting me, mate. I'm just doing my job . . .' said the taxi driver.
She got into work at ten past nine to find a chirpy Lydia behind her desk.
'You look rough,' Lydia said.
Sam glared at her and wondered where she'd gone wrong in the choice of this particular assistant. Normally, her assistants would never volunteer such personal opinions. She must be getting soft in her old age. The only consolation was that Lydia was proving to be very efficient, despite her breezy, carefree demeanour.
'Thank you for that, Lydia,' Sam replied, 'and thank you for giving me your flu.'
'You poor love,' Lydia was sympathetic. 'It was a bad dose. Do you want me to get you tea or some tablets?'
'Tea would be nice,' Sam said tiredly. 'Any calls?'
'Yeah, Steve Parris's assistant's assistant, wondering where you were because you'd missed the half eight meeting.'
'Shit!' Too late, Sam remembered the all-important breakfast meeting. She was forty minutes late, unforgivable. Well, unforgivable when the person you were meeting was Steve. Her mind sprinted through several plausible excuses but the only real one was a no-no. She'd already heard that Steve was phobic about illness. He'd have the entire office fumigated if he thought anyone in it was ill. Not for the rest of the staff's benefit, mind: for his own.
Lying was the only option. She phoned his assistant and lied that she'd been sure the meeting was for half nine. 'It's my fault,' she said apologetically, 'my assistant was away and I mistakenly scribbled it in the wrong line of my appointments book.' She dutifully wrote 'Important meeting with S Parris - NNB' on the half-nine line of her book just in case Steve appeared and asked for proof. She wouldn't put it past him.
'The meeting's over and Steve isn't happy,' said his assistant in nervous tones.
Steve was never bloody happy, Sam groaned. He'd been

born bad tempered. After knowing him for two weeks, she knew this to be true.
'Oh gosh, I'm so sorry. What do you think I should do to make it up to him?' she asked sweetly, knowing that if anybody knew how to handle Steve, it was the poor woman who had to put up with him all day.
'Grovel,' was her advice.
Grovelling didn't work. Steve roared into her office just before lunch, evicting the two publicity people who'd been discussing a forthcoming album release with Sam. He hadn't waited until they'd fled before he'd started shouting abuse at her. Sam sat calmly, then apologized for her mistake.
'But,' she said, naked steel in her voice, 'coming into my office and screaming at me is not the answer. That isn't the way I run my office and it's not the way I expect to be treated, Steve. I am not some junior you can intimidate.' Her tawny eyes were as hard as nails. She glared at him.
Faced with resistance, Steve backed down. 'Yeah, I guess I get a little riled occasionally.'
Sam smiled glacially, wishing he'd lose the American accent. He was from Liverpool.
'I'm glad we understand each other,' she said, then, knowing that it was time for her to kowtow a bit, added with a large dollop of fake enthusiasm: 'and I loved Density last night. They were incredible on stage, they just blew me away. They were one hell of a find.'
Steve smiled smugly. 'It was a good gig, wasn't it?'
'We're going to make a fortune with them,' Sam added.
Steve practically swelled with pride.
He was so pathetically easy to manipulate. Was it because he wasn't used to women standing up to him? Most of the female staff were so many levels below him that when he barked at them to make him a coffee, he almost expected them to hop. A woman who gave as good as she got unnerved him. Perhaps that was why Steve had been so keen to hire a man and not Sam. She sighed silently. This job

would kill her if she had to go up against Steve Parris every day.

It was a frantic Friday. Sam managed to eat half a sandwich at her desk before she had to attend the weekly marketing meeting. Then, she had to work on paperwork, talk to someone in production about a glitch in an album cover and return all her phone calls and internal e-mails. Lydia went at six and so did most of the rest of the staff but Sam stayed at her desk until half seven, wearily returning e-mails. The pain of her sore throat and throbbing headache were almost eclipsed by her exhaustion. On her way out, she popped into the loo and grimaced at her reflection. She looked like death microwaved up, all pale and pasty.
The security guard nodded as Sam left. Outside, it was dark and raining, typical October weather in London. It was hard to remember that only a month ago there'd been a week of Indian summer sunshine. Feeling miserable, Sam trudged along to the Underground, stopping only to buy some milk and a couple of lemons for her lemon and honey tea.
She got a seat on the train and sank into it gratefully. Around her, people were visibly relaxed, happy that the week was over. A crowd of young women all dressed up to the nines stood like colourful birds of paradise just inside the train doors, too fired up to bother sitting down even though some were wearing ankle-breaking stilettos. Sam leaned back in her seat and watched them laughing and chatting. She remembered being like that once, young and thrilled to be going out. Full of joie de vivre and enthusiasm for life. Now, the only thing she felt full of was flu remedy. What was wrong with her? It wasn't just being sick; it was something more. But what? At home, she boiled the kettle and made herself some lemon tea before heading to her bedroom to change clothes. On the off chance that Hope might have sent her an e-mail, she switched on the computer while she drank her tea. Hope had been in touch. Sam grinned. Why was it that she loved the words: 'you've got

mail' when she was at home and hated them in the office? Probably because the home mails were nice, friendly ones and the office ones were generally staccato demands to get statistics, information and updates now!

Hi Sam,
You sound terrible, you poor thing. I bet you're not looking after yourself at all. I know you: all work and no play. And never feel you can't moan to me about work and stuff. That's what sisters are for. Matt says thank you for your card. He had a dinner party that was more corporate hospitality than wild fortieth birthday party. But I do have one piece of news. Matt and I are thinking of moving to Ireland for a year. I know it sounds a bit sudden but we've been thinking about it for ages and now seems like a good time.
He thinks he can go on sabbatical and it's not as if I'm exactly on the fast-track to promotion in Witherspoon's. It's still only a plan right now so I'll tell you more when I know more. It's a bit of a long story. See you soon, love, Hope.

Sam stared at the screen, stunned. Move to Ireland? Matt taking a sabbatical and Hope giving up her job? Weird wasn't the word for it.
Hope always discussed things with Sam; it was so strange of her not to have even mentioned this startling new plan, unless . . . unless. Sam's eyes narrowed. Bloody Matt. This was some damn fool plot of his, she'd swear to it. As ever, Hope was going along with it. Sam quickly checked out the train times to Bath on Saturday mornings, then phoned her sister. Flu or no flu, Hope needed sense talked into her and face to face was the only way to do it.

They stowed Sam's small weekend bag in the boot of the Metro with the groceries, Hope marvelling that her sister

could always look so immaculate and yet bring so little with her. To look half-way decent when she travelled, Hope needed a giant suitcase and would still forget something vital. Though very pale, Sam looked Vogue-fresh with just a small, squashy bag. Her flu had improved miraculously, probably due to the quantity of anti-flu capsules she'd been consuming.
'Let's go for a coffee in town before heading out,' suggested Sam to her sister, pleased that, for once, Hope hadn't brought the kids, which gave them the opportunity to have a private chat about the madcap idea of moving away for a year. In fact, Hope hadn't told the children their beloved aunt was coming so she could have some time alone with her sister. If Millie had heard the news, she'd have thrown a complete tantrum wanting to go along too. Hope had also told Matt she preferred to pick up Sam alone: Matt wouldn't have been able to resist arguing with Sam if she criticized his precious plan.
'Is this quiet cup of coffee on our own so that you can give me the "are you insane?" lecture without Matt butting in?' inquired Hope with a faint twitch to her mouth. She wasn't stupid. Her sister wasn't given to last-minute visits and you didn't need to be a nuclear physicist to figure out why she was here now.
'Yes Sherlock, that was precisely the plan,' admitted Sam, grinning. 'I'm shocked that you saw through me that quickly. I must be losing my touch. I can remember the far off days when we were small and I could make you do anything I wanted purely by using the correct tone of voice.'
'I remember that too,' Hope remarked, 'and I have moved on a bit.'
'Only a bit,' Sam retorted. 'Matt certainly manages to make you do exactly what he wants.'
Hope locked the car. 'How about we have a cease-fire on the question of our trip, at least until we've got a cup of coffee in our hands.'
'Done.'

It was only half ten in the morning: a crisp early October day with a watery sun low in the sky. They strolled past the Abbey, vast and majestic in the sunlight.
'This is such a beautiful city,' Sam sighed. 'I never seem to get the chance to spend any time here, just wandering around like a proper tourist.'
Hordes of tourists meandered through the streets, some excitedly wielding high-tech cameras and taking endless photos, others looking weary, as if the tour bus had just dumped them there and they were feeling the strain of a whistle-stop tour of the hot spots of Britain.
Hope and Matt had done all the touristy things when they'd moved there first. They'd sipped the sulphuric water in the Pump Room. 'Disgusting,' gasped Hope, wishing she could spit it out. 'A bit like tonic water,' said Matt, reflectively. They'd toured the Roman baths and listened to stories about when the city was Aqua Sulis, the Roman stronghold with lots of gracious villas complete with proper underfloor heating. Mart's favourite part of the tour had been the Roman sites, while Hope's romantic soul loved the Georgian history of Bath. As a teenager, she'd secretly adored the Georgette Heyer romances where Bath often featured as the fashionable watering hole for wealthy aristocrats. She was fascinated by the Assembly rooms where both Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer's heroines had swirled around in Empire line dresses; she loved the Museum of Costume and she liked nothing better than idling around the pretty, curving streets with their yellow sandstone colonnaded buildings, imagining ladies stepping from carriages and sedans into the houses.
The sisters walked past a trio of classical buskers playing something that Sam instantly identified as Mozart. Two years as product manager of a classical label had taught her a lot, and she no longer immediately thought of the Lone Ranger theme music when she heard the first strains of the 'William Tell' Overture.
'It is lovely here, isn't it?' said Hope, who practically

never came into Bath to do anything other than rush into work or rush into some shop or other. Simply coming in to wander around aimlessly was sheer heaven.
Sam insisted on going into Sally Lunn's cake shop, a spot where Hope insisted that true Bathites would never set foot.
'It'd be like you walking round London's Piccadilly Circus with your mouth open in awe or having your picture taken right outside Buckingham Palace,' she said as Sam dragged her into the cosy, tourist-filled spot where the scent of the unique Sally Lunn buns rose into the air. 'My reputation for being cool and trendy will be ruined. Locals don't "do" Bath!'
'Don't be a spoilsport,' said Sam, suddenly aware that she'd eaten practically nothing for the past few days because of her flu. She could murder one of those Sally Lunns covered in salmon. 'Next time you come to London, I promise I'll get my picture taken with a Beefeater. Deal?'
'And in Madame Tussaud's and outside Harrods too?'
'You drive a hard bargain,' Sam sighed. 'I'll even buy a "My friend went to London and all she brought me was this lousy T-shirt" T-shirt, OK?'
Sam ate her Sally Lunn and had the left over half of Hope's too. Hope was currently on what she called her 'half diet: she got to eat half of anything she fancied. Half her dinner, half a biscuit, etc. It was very difficult.
Sam chatted as she ate, being funny about work, how she'd missed an important meeting and how her social life was suffering as a result of the new job.
'Mad Malcolm upstairs accused me of having a party,' she said, licking crumbs from her fingers. 'Honestly, I'm in the office so much, there's as much chance of me having a wild party as there is of Steve Parris developing a nice personality.'
'That bad?' Hope asked, knowing that her sister used humour and funny stories to hide how she really felt.
For a moment, Sam's eyes were opaque. 'We're not here to talk about me,' she said quickly.
'Pardon me,' said Hope. 'As you've come all this way to

deliver a lecture to me on living my life, at least let me get my two penn'orth in about your life.'
'I don't have a life, I have a career. There's a difference,' Sam said sourly.
Hope leaned forward over the little table in a 'spill the beans' manner.
'It's this flu,' Sam said quickly, sorry she'd revealed so much. 'I've been feeling a bit low lately, I don't know why. I've had two 24-hour bugs since September, although it's one way of keeping my weight down. I keep getting the most awful periods that put me out of commission for two days each time, and to cap it all, Steve Parris, my new boss, is a complete asshole, excuse my language, but he is. I'm going to have to keep proving myself until I'm a hundred, which feels like it'll be any day now.'
Hope reached over and squeezed her sister's hand.
'Sam, you should go to the doctor and have a check up. That's three bouts of illness in nearly two months, it's not good. And the periods . . . you need to get it checked out. I bet you're anaemic, heavy periods can do that. You need a tonic or something.'
'Don't mind me, I'm grumpy today. There's nothing wrong with me. I'm strong as an ox,' Sam said. She managed to laugh convincingly: 'Too much sex and not enough sleep, probably,' which was a lie. She couldn't remember the last time she'd had sex. Well, she could; she and Karl had been in Paris. That was the last time, the last bittersweet time.
'You're seeing someone?' asked Hope delightedly.
It was time to change the subject. 'I'll tell you about my love life another time,' hedged Sam, who didn't want to have to admit that her last relationship had ended two years ago. Career women appeared to scare men off faster than saying you had herpes. 'So, what are you going to do in Ireland? I know Matt has it all worked out but he hasn't thought about you.'
'He has,' protested Hope. 'I've wanted to spend more time with the children for ages. You've no idea how soul

destroying it is to send them into that nursery every morning when I'm going into work to smile at total strangers, knowing Toby's doing new things every day and I'm missing it. Somebody else saw him walk for the first time.' That memory still haunted her.
'Fair point,' Sam conceded. 'But you like going out to work, it's part of your life too. How will you cope in a strange country with no work mates, perhaps no nursery nearby and no old friends to rely on when you're miserable?'
Hope had no real answer to this.
'What about at night, what about going to the theatre, or the movies, or to the latest restaurant?' Sam continued.
'Oh come on, Sam, let's be real here,' interrupted Hope. 'This is me you're talking to. I'm a woman with two small children, not some socialite who spends her life in the Gucci shop wondering what dress to wear to the movie premiere. I can't remember when I last went to the theatre. We saw Miss Saigon in London with you that time and I haven't been since. And as for films, by the time we get the kids in bed, I'm too tired to think about going to see a film. I prefer to get videos.'
'Oh well, that's OK, then,' Sam said fiercely. 'You'll settle in fine as long as there's a video shop in this village at the back end of nowhere.'
She knew she sounded cruel but she had to say it. Hope wasn't one of life's outward people. Well, she was chatty and bubbly when she was with Sam, but with other people she was one of the quietest women imaginable. Hope was the woman who liked sitting in corners at parties, watching others instead of joining in. Some people would thrive in a new country, relishing the opportunity to meet new friends and become part of a thriving community. Hope was not such a person.
'You've never been the sort to join in,' Sam pointed out. 'You're not into amateur dramatics or joining the choir or becoming the stalwart of the parents' association. That's fine and dandy when you've got a job and you live on a housingestate beside a hundred other families, but not when you're in the middle of nowhere and you're not working.'
There, she'd said it.
Hope didn't react for a moment. 'I can learn,' she said finally. 'Anyhow, I'm going to be with Matt and the children, that's what I'm doing this for.'
'But what about you?' Sam said earnestly.
'It is for me,' Hope repeated. 'Haven't you been listening, Sam? It's for them, for me, for all of us.'
She'd have loved to have told Sam about how terrified she'd been when she thought Matt was having an affair but Sam was brittle and sharp today. Hope was convinced her sister would briskly tell her that gratitude because her husband wasn't cheating on her was no reason for upping sticks to live in another country.
Sam would have loved to have told Hope that she was feeling miserable, middle-aged and somehow unfulfilled despite her fabulous new job. But Hope had enough problems of her own to cope with without hearing Sam's. Ever since Hope's wedding day, Sam had been convinced that Matt was trouble. He made all the decisions and he was far too good looking to be trusted. But then, Sam never trusted any man.
Millie threw herself delightedly at Auntie Sam as soon as they arrived home.
'Auntie Sam!' she squealed, before realizing that there had been more to her mother's trip than buying groceries. Her bottom lip wobbled ominously.
'Auntie Sam wanted to surprise you, darling,' Hope said brightly.
'A nice surprise, I hope,' Sam said gravely. 'Won't you say hello to me?' she said to Toby.
He gave her a small hug and showed her his toy train. 'Look Auntie Ham.' He never could say Sam.
'Hello,' said Matt guardedly, appearing from the kitchen.
'Hello you,' she replied, just as guardedly.
If Sam and Matt did not get on, it wasn't because they

were so different. It was because they were so alike. Both were strong-minded, a bit bossy and capable of being jealous. Neither seemed happy about the presence of anyone else important in Hope's life. Their rivalry was a source of anxiety for Hope, although neither Sam nor Matt seemed bothered by it.
'So what brings you here, or can I guess?' Matt said sarcastically.
Hope glared at him. 'Sam's only here until tomorrow lunchtime so let's have a nice weekend, shall we?' she said in the voice she used when she was trying to get Millie to eat broccoli.
It wasn't the best weekend ever. Sam was furious with Matt because of what she thought of as his 'crazy plan'. Matt was furious with Sam for daring to put a spanner in the works and on Saturday night when he and Hope were getting ready for bed, he said he hated the way her sister barged in and tried to tell people what to do.
'She's the most bossy woman I've ever met in my life,' he snapped, walking round their bedroom somehow managing not to look ridiculous in socks and a shirt.
As Sam had said practically the same thing about Matt only hours before, Hope just gritted her teeth and prayed that she'd be able to survive the rest of the weekend. Normally she loved it when Sam visited. They spent lots of time on their own, going for walks and talking. But after that first morning, Matt seemed to be there all the time, as if he didn't want to give Sam the opportunity to put her sister off the trip to Ireland. He nagged Hope about Sam who, in turn, nagged Hope about Matt.
Like piggy in the middle, Hope felt weighed down by their disapproval and broke out her secret supply of dark chocolate soft centres to comfort herself. She couldn't bear to upset either darling Sam or her beloved Matt, so she did her best to stay out of it and spent her time saying 'more tea anyone?' or 'look at what Millie's up to,' in a cheery manner every time the other pair began to argue.

They were all relieved when Sunday afternoon came and Hope drove Sam to get the train.
'I'm sorry we were all a bit tense over the weekend,' Sam said as they stood in the station.
'Don't be silly, it was great,' lied Hope, who hated acknowledging that things were ever less than perfect.
'Will you try and get to London to see me before you go?'
'I hope so.' Hope's eyes filled with tears. 'And we can have a proper visit.'
They hugged each other and then Sam turned and walked away, elegant in her shearling coat and buttermilk cashmere wrap, her pale hair gleaming as she walked. She waved as she got on the train.
Hope fought a losing battle not to cry as she watched her sister disappear into the carriage. She wished she saw Sam more often; she wished Sam and Matt didn't fight so much; she wished . . . she didn't know what she wished any more.

On the train back, Sam thought about Karl. She tried not to think about him these days. Karl. Even his name sent a shiver of remembered pleasure rippling through her. She'd met him at a sales conference in Brussels and they'd hit it off immediately. In fact, a lot of the record company women had liked the idea of hitting it off with the tall, blond Swede but he'd had eyes only for Sam.
They'd delicately side-stepped around each other for the entire week, talking about their respective jobs (Karl was with the international office and travelled a lot) and sitting beside each other at dinner, but nothing more. It was only afterwards, when Karl arrived in London for two months, that they began to see each other properly. He had the use of a company apartment in the Barbican but he spent most of his free time with Sam, curled up in her bed in the old mansion flat she lived in then. They did things like HaagenDazs couples did in adverts: feeding each other take away

food in bed, drinking wine while dressed in knickers and T-shirts, lounging around with the newspapers and watching old movies on late night TV.
In spite of his cool, measured demeanour, Karl had been impetuous and deeply romantic at heart. He saw their future together and begged Sam to follow him to Paris where he was going to be based for at least two years.
Something in Sam had recoiled at the idea.
Give up her job to follow Karl, to be his girlfriend, his companion, a hanger on instead of a mover and a shaker? No way. He'd pleaded with her, pointed out that with her skills and experience she'd get a job in a shot, a better job, perhaps. But Sam was having none of it. She wasn't going to be anybody's accessory, their significant other instead of a person in her own right. She'd always wanted to stand on her own two feet and she wasn't about to change the habit of a lifetime.
It had taken a week of arguments before Karl had realized she meant what she said. That had been two years ago. Last she'd heard, he'd married a French woman who worked in the couture business. Now there was a job with little possibility for relocation. Let him try and move her to his next posting.
A woman with a toddler got on the train and sat opposite Sam, the woman pale and makeupless, the toddler rosy cheeked and up to mischief.
'Sit Lily, don't mess, please,' begged the mother. 'It's only for half an hour. We'll get into trouble with Mr Train Driver if we don't behave.'
She produced several books for Lily to read.
'Juice!' demanded Lily loudly, clearly not bothered by idle threats about Mr Train Driver. To prove her point, she shoved the books out of her way and stared big-eyed at Sam.
She was just like Millie, Sam thought with amusement, utterly sure of herself and determined to get what she wanted. How had poor insecure Hope ever produced such a confident child?

The woman extracted a carton of juice from a huge shoulder bag, the same sort of bag Hope always seemed to drag around with her, Sam noticed. Mothers were all lopsided from schlepping round giant shoulder bags that contained everything from toddler outfits to entire meals with plenty of toys, books and bumper boxes of baby wipes thrown in for good measure.
Sam looked out of the window and tried not to notice Lily staring at her while sucking on her juice straw. The more Sam gazed out of the window, the more Lily leaned towards her, standing up on the seat beside her mother and leaning over the table until she was lying on it. Her big eyes were fixed on Sam, willing this new grown up person to look at her, intent on being noticed.
'Lily!' warned her mother.
Lily moved back a fraction and stopped sucking on her straw. She inadvertently squeezed the carton and an arc of juice sailed up in the air like a fountain and then down onto Sam's beige shearling coat.
'I'm so sorry,' said the child's mother with a deep weariness.
Sam, thinking of Hope dragging Millie and Toby around, desperately hoping they wouldn't cover other people with orange juice or smears of chocolate, shook her head. 'It's fine,' she said. 'It needed to be cleaned anyway.'
The woman shot her a look of such gratitude that Sam was pleased she'd been polite. Once, she'd have snapped about people not being able to control their children in public. It must be age creeping up on her. She was getting mellow now that she was on the brink of forty.
Forty. She shuddered. It sounded so old. Karl would never fall for her if she met him now, she thought ruefully. It was odd thinking about him: he never crossed her mind most of the time. She didn't miss him per se, just the experience of being with somebody. That was nice; cuddling up in bed with a man, having someone to share the day with, someone to occasionally buy coffee or milk when she forgot.

She liked that side of things but not all the other hassle that went with it. All that crap they were forever talking about in women's magazines or at women-only dinners: maintaining relationships, worrying about whether he felt happy or not, trying to keep the spice in your sex life . . . sheer hell. Sam couldn't see why women were supposed to do all the hard work. Men carried on doing whatever they felt like while women did questionnaires to see if He was happy or if He would stray or if He needed to talk more. Why the hell bother? Sam thought. Let Him worry about Himself, she wouldn't.
What she needed was a virtual boyfriend: a sophisticated robot who could cuddle her, make love to her and ask her about her day at work, and who shut up when she was tired and who never said things like 'I've been thinking about our future and I want to take up this job offer on Mars . . .'
She grinned to herself. How weird that nobody had ever thought of it before. A virtual boyfriend would be perfect for millions of women. No emotional hassle but all the physical advantages.
Lily smiled engagingly at her.
Sam smiled back. 'Sweet, isn't she?' she said.
'When she's asleep,' Lily's mother said with feeling.

Back in London, Sam picked up some groceries from the nearest shop and cooked herself some vegetable pasta with organic pesto sauce. Stir-frying vegetables, boiling pasta and adding a sauce and some parmesan shavings was the nearest thing to cooking that Sam ever got.
She piled it all onto a large white plate and sat down at the table with her favourite Nina Simone CD playing softly in the background and the Sunday papers spread out in front of her. But strangely, she didn't feel hungry. Normally, she adored pasta and hoovered up anything with pesto sauce on it but tonight her appetite had deserted her.
After a while, she gave up and shoved the almost untouched plate away from her. If she wasn't hungry, it was

her body's way of telling her she didn't need any more food. Anyway, after two days with Hope shovelling down Sally Lunns, she could hardly expect to be hungry.

On Monday before lunch, Steve held a top level meeting where the subject was company cutbacks. Ten senior executives sat around the glossy boardroom table and focussed on their departments. All present looked outwardly unconcerned but quivered inside their designer jeans and hoped they personally weren't for the high jump. All except Sam. She was fed up with quivering at things Steve Parris or anybody else said. She'd had a hellish morning and didn't care a fiddler's toss if she was fired at that precise moment, not least because she'd just signed a three-year contract. She'd spent the entire morning on the phone to Density's manager who was explaining all the things that his charges wouldn't do to promote their album. So far, the 'wouldn't do' list included talking to any interviewer who hadn't been at one of their live gigs and doing any breakfast television or any other media the band described as '. . . facile and cretinous . . .'. They didn't want to pose for any photos on the basis that they liked the publicity ones and couldn't go through all that hassle again of having make-up applied and having to look moody for hours. And they were not, absolutely not, letting any tabloid journalist near them.
Sam had tried pointing out that this little list would make the record company's job extremely difficult but the manager was having none of it.
'Steve Parris said we could have what we wanted,' he hissed down the phone. 'This is what we want.' With that, he hung up.
Because she didn't want any blood spilled just yet in relation to Density, Sam hadn't rung him back and threatened the manager with a do-it-yourself vasectomy. But she was tempted to. Now she sat at the meeting and caught a sympathetic glance from the publicity director, who had heard all about Density's can't-do list. In Sam's first weeks

at Titus, the LGBK publicity director, a tall black American woman named Karen Storin, had been the friendliest of all her new colleagues.
'Welcome to Steve's elite club,' Karen had joked quietly the first time they'd met.
'Elite club?' inquired Sam.
'The women execs club,' Karen explained. 'Steve's not big on female empowerment.'
'You mean I'm here because I'm a woman and you're here because you're a black woman?' Sam joked.
Karen grinned. 'We're here in spite of those facts - and because we're damn good.'
Sam knew there was another reason she was there: because the European President had put his foot down.
'OK?' Sam asked Karen now, hiding a smile because they'd just had a variation of this conversation minutes before on the way to the meeting, safe in the knowledge that they could talk freely before they reached the boardroom where Steve's earwigging second-in-command would be listening. Karen was handling Density's publicity schedule and was encountering the same problems Sam had.
'Everything's under control. The schedule for Density is working out just fine,' Karen said gravely, which was a million miles away from what she'd said originally.
Then, she'd been in a rage. 'I've just been on the phone to their manager and I have never dealt with anyone like him in my life. If I didn't know he was working with them, I'd swear he was trying to sabotage them. They refuse to do anything I ask. Do they want the album to flop?' she'd hissed at Sam.
'How about you?' she said now to Sam across the board room table.
Sam smiled: 'Utterly under control too,' she said deadpan, as if moments before she hadn't told Karen that the Density manager was ruining her entire week. Maintaining the facade that everything in your label was hunky dory was vitally important when you worked under Steve Parris.

The great man himself arrived bringing with him the noxious smell of a cigar. Sam quite liked cigar smoke, having once been a twenty-Dunhills-a-day woman, but she objected to the fact that Steve ignored all the office signs and smoked anywhere he liked. Everyone else who smoked had to rush downstairs to the street so that at coffee break time, the pavement outside the Titus office was jam packed with hollow-cheeked people inhaling furiously to make up for the previous, stressful, nicotine-free hours.
Steve threw himself into a leather chair, shoved it back from the table and put his leather-booted feet on the blotter his assistant had neatly laid out in front of him. 'So what's happenin', gang?' he asked.
Sam could hear a growl deep inside her body. Where did he think he was? A biker's club with a bottle of beer in front of him? He was such a weedy little shit. She hated him.
'Great, just great, Steve,' said Zak, the Titus A&R director, who probably did think they were in a biker club with beer in front of them. Too much cocaine in the eighties, Sam had been told. If he hadn't been one of Steve's personal pals, he wouldn't have been in the job.
'Cutbacks and reorganization,' Steve intoned gravely. 'We have to lose at least ten senior people to go along with the global restructuring.' Everyone stared at him, stricken. Ten jobs. Ten senior level jobs. That meant ten people in their building, people who worked for them, people they liked. People they would have to sack. Sam felt the by-now familiar clenching sensation deep in her insides, a painful knotting spasm that she'd half-diagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome. What else could it be? And she felt nauseous too. She still wasn't over her flu, that had to be it. She hadn't been able to touch her wholemeal toast this morning and she'd felt so exhausted, it had taken three strong mugs of coffee to get her out the front door.
'The staffing levels in Europe are way too high and we've got to cut back,' Steve said. 'The international office say we're top heavy with staff and this is the only way. Making

our powerbase smaller is going to streamline the whole organisation, stop us getting lazy.'
'Have you identified any particular departments or is it going to be across the board?' Sam was amazed to discover that she'd spoken.
Steve cleared his throat. 'Your label is going to be badly hit,' he said. 'The ratio is way off compared to the American offices. You need to cut four people.'
Sam felt sicker.
'We've got four hundred people working for us in this country, so it's not that big a percentage,' cut in Steve's favourite yes-man, a smooth guy from finance.
'But it's a big deal,' snapped the company's head of legal, a dynamic dark-haired man named Curtis. 'We're talking about your colleagues, not worker ants. What about my department?' he asked Steve.
Steve was nervous of Curtis, Sam had noticed. Probably afraid to browbeat a man who knew employment law backwards and could draw up a constructive dismissal suit in ten minutes on the back of an envelope. 'You're fine, nobody from your department,' he said now.
The meeting lasted another twenty-five minutes with Steve giving them the party line on how this was to be dealt with, both within the company and publicly. The trade papers would have a field day speculating on the company's bottom line if the cutbacks were explained incorrectly. Personnel had already identified the people who were first on the list: they'd inform each department head at a private meeting. Sam's was scheduled for an hour and a half later.
As they all left the boardroom and walked to the lift, nobody spoke. Suddenly she couldn't face standing in the claustrophobic lift. She needed some air. Turning away from the lift, she hurried to the stairs and practically ran down four flights to the street. Curtis was there already, lighting up a cigarette.
'Can I scab a cigarette from you?' Sam asked, hating herself for having one after all these years.

'I didn't know you did,' Curtis remarked, handing her the pack.
'I don't. Not any more. That was a bit rough, wasn't it?'
He nodded silently.
'I don't know how I'm going to sack four people. Sorry, "lose four members of staff to keep us in line with company guidelines",' Sam said bitterly. 'I haven't been here long enough to make any judgements on the staff and yet, now I'm going to be the bitch from hell and get rid of some of them. That'll be great for morale. And Steve looks as if he doesn't give a shit about them. He almost smiled when he said I had to lose four people. I swear he hates me.'
Curtis smiled slowly. 'Steve doesn't like anybody,' he said. 'Understand that and you're going to be fine, although it's no secret that you're not on his Top Ten list because he wanted someone else to get the job.'
Sam rolled her eyes. 'Tell me about it.'
'I've known Steve for ten years and he's always been the same,' Curtis added. 'He's good at his job, though. This company was screwed up when he took over. He's hell to work with but he gets the job done.'
'He enjoys making people sweat,' Sam sighed. 'He deliberately told us there was a redundancy meeting this morning but never said who was going to be made redundant so that everyone would be nervous.' She didn't mention that since she'd just signed a three-year contract, she'd known that she, personally, wouldn't be on the list. Just her staff.
'Psychology,' Curtis shrugged. 'Steve's plan is that by the time he tells you that you have to fire four people, you're so pleased that your name isn't on the list, you agree to it like a shot. Steve rules by fear. He likes terror and arguments among the staff: divide and conquer are his management rules. That's the way he learned and he thinks it's the only way things work. He's terrified that if he ever tries to be nice, he'll be taken over in a bloody coup.'
Nauseated after her forbidden cigarette, Sam went back to her office feeling nervous. She shouldn't have said any

thing to Curtis about Steve Parris. That was stupid, unprofessional behaviour. She hadn't been at Titus long enough to understand where allegiances lay and was only guessing that Curtis and Steve didn't get on. They could be bosom buddies behind it all. She really was losing her marbles when it came to how to behave in the corporate jungle. What was happening to her? It must be the after effects of the flu. She'd better get some perk-you-up supplement in the chemist.
At three o'clock, Sam steeled herself to enter the lions' den. Steve and the personnel director were sitting in front of a list of names and the personnel director launched into the list of people Sam was to make redundant even before she'd sat down.
Sam listened calmly, hiding her distaste. One of the women on the list had just made it public that she was four months' pregnant. A young guy in publicity Sam had been very impressed with had just bought an apartment and had signed up for a huge mortgage. Sam's insides did their clenching routine.
What could she say? Nothing. She was a boss now, she had to make tough decisions and implement them if necessary. Four people from her department had to go and if she balked at it, all she'd be doing was undermining her own position. The personnel guy kept talking and Sam listened, feeling wooden.
When he was finished, she coolly pointed out that there was a pregnant woman among the names. 'You should check whether she could sue us for getting rid of her at this time,' Sam said unemotionally, as if she was talking about squashing a spider instead of discussing another person's life.
Steve laughed from behind his vast desk. 'I told you Sam Smith would be able to sack her entire department and it wouldn't bother her in the slightest,' he said triumphantly to the personnel guy. 'We did good the day we hired you, Sam. We needed somebody who understands the game. Not some dumb cow who's going to sob her eyes out whenever she has to sack people.'

Sam blinked. She remembered back to her final interview, the one where Steve had delicately - well, as delicately as someone as bull-headed as Steve could manage - tried to find out her views on kids. They couldn't ask outright, of course. Asking a woman if she planned to have children, and was therefore looking for maternity entitlements and leaving them with six months of a problem, was illegal. Sam had always understood this interview difficulty and had made it plain to prospective employers that she was not one of those biological-clock-about-to-go-off women. It was an advantage and she used it. Always had.
She remembered giving Steve and the other board members her steely look as she had said 'I'm not the mumsy type.'
They'd all breathed a sigh of relief, and Steve had given her a matey look.
'Tough as old boots,' he said now, looking as if, under other circumstances, he'd pat her shoulder in a friendly manner. But Sam wasn't the demonstrative type. Shoulder patting, double kissing and all that stupid, fake affectionate stuff drove her mad. She shook hands. Why pretend to be best pals with people you didn't know? It was hypocritical.
'That's what I like about you, Sam. You don't take any prisoners. That's what they say and it's true. I like that in my team. Sacking people isn't easy but we've all had to do it.'
Steve waved his cigar, leaving a trail of smoke. Sam was dismissed.
She went back to her office thinking of the irony of Steve saying there was anything about her he liked. Yeah, right.
She also wondered what else people said about her. Tough as old boots. You don't take any prisoners. Hell, she sounded like a hoary old sergeant major at a boot camp who scared the hell out of the rookies and who could drink rotgut with the best of them. Smith is tough as old boots but boy, can she do the job. There's a heart in there somewhere, if you

can find it. Not bad looking but too tough for any man . . . Women like her always end up on their own.
Being tough had seemed like a good idea when she was twenty or thirty and desperate to prove herself in the corporate jungle but now, with forty facing her like the north face of the Eiger, she wasn't so sure. Tough but able to carry off a trendy designer dress was one thing. Tough but wrinkled like an old chicken was another thing entirely. How would she come across at sixty-five when she was tougher, older and with a hard little face grooved into a lifetime of wrinkles?
At that moment, she thought of Aunt Ruth. Ruth Smith, civil servant and scourge of those beneath her in the planning department, had not been the maternal type either and having two small children unceremoniously dumped on her hadn't changed that. She'd continued to live her life exactly the same way as before her brother and his wife had been killed. To cap it all, Ruth had never even looked motherly: she'd looked like an eccentric maiden aunt from a novel.
Sam could remember the boys across the road teasing herself and Hope about their mad aunt.
'She's a witch, she is, eye of bat and leg of toad!' they'd chant nastily at the girls.
Secretly, the girls had to admit that their aunt bore more than a passing resemblance to a witch, mainly because she insisted on wearing her hair in an antediluvian bun and fancied herself in pince nez spectacles which did nothing for her pinched, narrow face.
Sam felt weary. She'd always had a difficult relationship with her aunt, and swore she'd never be anything like her. And here she was turning into a carbon copy. Aunt Ruth would probably have run Titus Records with a rod of iron and made it the most successful record company ever.
There was a giant skip outside the house next door when Sam arrived home that night. The builders had finally moved in. Sam glared at the rather run down building which was the next in the terrace. For the two years she'd lived in

her flat, she'd been irritated by the dilapidated state of the adjoining house which was owned by a dotty old lady who clearly had no time for painters, window cleaners or gardeners. When she'd died, the house had been put up for sale and all the neighbours watched the property pages with interest, dying to know how much it would go for so they could figure out how much their own places were worth.
It had taken ages, but when the sold sign was finally pasted on, all breathed a sigh of relief. Except now, Sam thought grimly, there would be building work going on for ever as the new owners ripped it apart. Kango hammers thumping at dawn and scaffolding positioned so that builders could peer curiously through her windows, not giving her a moment's peace. Feeling put upon and miserable, Sam stomped up the stairs.
'Stop making noise,' roared Mad Malcolm reedily from the top landing,
Sam growled deep in her throat and just managed to stop herself telling him what orifice he could stick his head into.
Inside the sanctuary of her own apartment, she dropped her briefcase wearily, shed her coat and sat down on the big pale couch in front of the fireplace. Determined to ignore the fact that the place was a mess, she switched on the television and watched the end of the evening news. But when it was over, she couldn't relax. It was no good, she had to tidy up. Compulsive tidiness, Karl had teased her when she'd start changing the sheets on the bed while he was still in it.
Pulling on an absolutely ancient pair of jeans and .a threadbare old grey jumper, Sam planned the clean out. The bedroom to start, she decided, tying her hair up into a ponytail.
It took two and a half hours to clean every area of the apartment to her satisfaction. By the time she was finished, the kitchen was restored to its sparkling, pristine perfection and the sitting room was once again a restful, Zen-like spot

with all clear, white surfaces free of old newspapers, magazines and scribbled yellow post-it notes about work. The four big modern oils that hung on the warm cream walls stared down at a tranquil, clutter-free room furnished cleanly with big white couches, a low pale wooden coffee table and a muted cream rug on the pale floorboards. The grouping of fat creamy church candles on the fireplace was dust free and perfectly aligned, while the blond driftwood carving on the windowsill had been dusted to within an inch of its life. Even the big Indian silver elephant that stood in the corner beside her towering ficus plant gleamed. Sam knew that not everybody liked the clutter-free look but she adored it. She liked the order and the sense of calm that it brought.
Hope hated it.
'You've no ... stuff, no knick knacks,' Hope had said the first time she'd seen the apartment in all its spartan modern glory. 'It's all too perfect for me,' she'd added, eyes sweeping over heavy cream brocade curtains that would be speckled with grubby fingerprints if Millie and Toby were ever let run riot there.
Seeing the place through Hope's eyes, Sam had to agree. Hope would have had tonnes of junk on every occasional table, instead of simply placing a lamp or a piece of sculpture there.
When they'd been kids, they'd shared a bedroom and Hope's side had been a riot of cuddly toys, empty boxes kept because they were pretty, bits of tangled up jewellery and hand-sewn lavender sachets for her clothes, most of which were hung on her chair.
Sam's side had the only colour co-ordinated wardrobe in their school. Graded from white to black, Sam's clothes hung in a regimented line that awed Hope just to look at it.
Tidying her wardrobe properly would have to wait tonight, she decided, as she finished the bedroom. It annoyed her when the wardrobe was messy with the greys infiltrating the rail of blacks and skirts hanging with the trousers, but she'd do that tomorrow.

In the kitchen, she put away her cleaning equipment and put some cheese on a couple of water crackers. She poured herself a glass of crisp Sancerre and sat down on the couch again, this time content. As the strains of Mozart echoed softly around the apartment, Sam finally felt herself relax. She willed herself to forget about work and the job losses.
Then, the noise started. It was strange, because at first she wasn't sure where it was coming from. Surely not upstairs? Even Mad Malcolm wasn't mad enough to be playing loud rock music at ten o'clock at night. And then the penny dropped. Next door. Still clutching her glass of wine, Sam stared out the front window at the adjoining house and saw two young women lugging a crate of beer up the path. Standing beside the window, the music seemed louder. A taxi pulled up and disgorged more people, all happy and clearly party-bound, judging by the number of off-licence bags they were carrying. Sam felt the veins in her head throb. This was not wild party land. This was a wildly expensive neighbourhood where the notion of a wild party was one where the caterers served too much Bollinger or where guests tripped on their Manolos while staggering out to the chauffeur-driven Mercedes.
Whoever had bought the house couldn't, wouldn't, dream of ruining the discreet peace of Holland Park with a party? Or if they thought they could, they'd soon discover the error of their ways, Sam snarled.
Just as abruptly as it had started, the music stopped and Sam felt some of the anger leave her body. Good. Some other resident had complained; therefore she didn't have to go in and do so. In her current mood of pent-up tension, who knew what she'd have said. The police would have been called sooner rather than later.
She curled up on the couch again, sipping her wine and letting the Mozart soothe her.
With a loud bass thump, the music next door cranked up even louder this time, sounding as if Black Sabbath had turned up and were playing a live gig.

As the music reached a crescendo, so did Sam's temper. Downing half her wine in one gulp, she grabbed her keys, slid her feet into the espadrilles she used as slippers and rampaged downstairs and out into the street.
'Oh no, a party,' sighed one of the nice couple from the basement flat, who were just coming in after an evening out. 'Have you rung the police, Sam?' he asked.
'No,' snarled Sam. 'But phone for an ambulance because whoever's having this party will need it when I'm finished with them.'
With giant strides, she raced up to the other door and pushed. It wasn't locked and opened easily. From here, the music was eardrum-splitting. The house, which was just a shell with stripped walls and bare, elderly floorboards, had excellent acoustics. Sound reverberated through it. Sam stepped over a rolled up rug and a crate of beer. The place was a disgusting mess. She could just imagine the thought process of whoever had bought it: have the party now, before the wallpaper was up and the carpets down. Or rather, Sam thought grimly, the spoiled teenage children of whoever had bought the house had thought it was a good idea to have the party now and their stupid parents had agreed, not caring about their new neighbours. Big mistake.
In a huge airy room, fairy lights were strung from the high ceiling and a gang of people stood around, smoking furiously and drinking beer from bottles. The scent of marijuana was heady. Nobody took any notice of Sam. In her jeans, she fitted right in. All she needed was a beer and she'd have looked like the rest of them, except for the fact that she had to be up at six a.m. and needed to get some rest, Sam thought furiously as she searched through the throng for her quarry.
The noise was coming from another room. Sam pushed through into what was obviously the nerve centre of the party. It was barely recognizable as a kitchen because most of the units had, been ripped out by builders but there was still an island unit piled high with bottles of booze, six

packs of Coke and a half eaten loaf of tomato bread. Sam ignored the people in the kitchen and headed for the dining room.
There, behind a bespectacled youth with a pile of CDs she found it. The stereo system.
'Is there anything you want me to play?' yelled the disc jockey eagerly.
'Yes,' hissed Sam. 'Cards.'
With one expert movement, she wrenched the plug from the socket and all was quiet.
'Why did you do that?' asked the DJ in shock.
Everyone stared at Sam, bottles of beer held at half mast. They saw a small, slim woman with a blonde ponytail who wore ragged jeans and worn espadrilles and had what looked like newspaper smudges on one cheek. 'I live next door and I don't want to listen to this sort of crap late at night, do you understand?' she yelled, not in the least perturbed to have at least twenty curious thirty-somethings staring at her. Sam had bawled people out in public before.
'Sorry. . .' said the DJ politely. 'We just thought it wouldn't matter because nobody was living here yet. ..'
'Nobody may have been living here but there are eight people living in the house next door, an adjoining house,' Sam pointed out, 'where you can hear every bass thump.'
'So you thought you'd come in here and pull the plug instead of calmly asking us to turn the volume down, did you?' said an amused, low voice.
Wearing jeans that were astonishingly more torn and faded than hers, jeans that clung to a long, lean body, and a white creased shirt with most of the buttons undone to reveal a hard, muscled chest, was a man who made Sam's breath suddenly catch.
He wasn't handsome and he wasn't a mere twenty- something either. His face was too long, his eyes too narrow and his nose was too hooked to be model material, yet he was somehow the most incredible looking man she'd ever seen. Around her age, she guessed. Sam, who spent hours
looking at pictures of male singers who sent other women to paroxysms of joy and left her utterly unmoved, could
only stare.
If he could sing, she'd bet her bonus she could sell millions of albums with his face and body on the cover. Even if he couldn't sing, come to that. Still smiling, the corners of that fabulous mobile mouth twisted up into an ironic little smile, he ambled towards her. The tawny rumpled hair and the barely buttoned shirt made it look as if he'd just dragged himself out of some bed or other. Narrowed, treacly eyes surveyed her lazily as though he was eyeing her up with the intention of dragging her back to bed with him.
Sam objected to being surveyed. She was not some bimbo: she was a managing director, a woman who made subordinates flatten themselves against the walls in fear when she was angry. She drew herself up to her full five foot four inches and prepared for battle.
'I live next door -' she began fiercely in her killer boardroom voice.
'Do you?' he interrupted, still unhurried and unperturbed. 'Is it a nice neighbourhood?'
He stopped right in front of her. Even though he was barefoot, he still towered above her. Sam hated that. It was why she liked wearing perilously high shoes for important meetings so only the tallest people ever got to look down on her.
it used to be,' she hissed. Talk about invading her personal space, his body was only a few inches away from hers. Normally, she'd have slayed him with an icy word but feeling strangely vulnerable out of her normal habitat, Sam took a step back. The wall was behind her, she couldn't go any further. Retreating was a mistake in business, it was now too. She stuck her chin out defiantly and the hand clenching the stereo plug tightened.
Is this your house?' she said, trying to stay fearsome in the face of this Adonis invasion.
He ignored the question. 'You have something of mine,'

he said, his voice almost a drawl. He reached long arms around her, and for a second Sam's breath stilled. He wouldn't, he couldn't. The charismatic, mocking face was close to hers as he reached down and she felt her stomach contract. His mouth was laughing and it was getting close to hers, so close she could feel the heat of his breath and smell a sharp citrusy tang from his warm body. Without knowing why, she closed her eyes. Then she felt the plug being pulled from her hand.
'Mine, I think,' said the man. With one graceful movement, he reached down, brushing against her leg, and plugged the stereo in again. He flicked a switch and loud music pumped into the room.
'You bastard!' screeched Sam, shocked and embarrassed. 'You absolute bastard.' She had to really yell now to make sure he heard her. 'How dare you . . .'
'I think you're the one who dared,' he said, faintly amused. 'If you wanted us to turn the noise down, you should have asked me. I wouldn't have refused you.'
Impotent rage surged through her and for one terrible moment, Sam forgot all about good business, about how revenge was a dish best served cold and how any corporate raider needed a cool, calm mind.
He was using his physical presence to intimidate her and she reacted in the age-old, instinctive way of a woman confronted by a larger predator. She kicked him. In the shin as hard as she could, the blunt end of her espadrille connecting with hard bone and sinew.
'Ouch!' His yelp of pain could only be heard by her as the current song was at an eardrum-splitting decibel level.
That got rid of the mocking smile. Sam smirked. It had hurt her toe too, mind you, but now was no time to think of her own personal pain. Those years of ballet meant she had tough little feet.
'Who the hell do you think you are shoving your face in my personal space, you asshole!'
At that precise moment, the DJ unaccountably turned

the music down. Sam's roar reached the entire room and provoked some giggles.
What the hell was the sound down for? Sam wondered blindly before she spotted the one soberly-dressed person on the premises.
The policeman stood in the doorway and hovering behind were the couple from the basement apartment in Sam's building, who were watching the proceedings anxiously.
'We've had a complaint about a party and loud noise,' said the policeman in a calm voice.
Sam shot her opponent a triumphant look and was enraged when, instead of looking worried or ashamed, he smiled lazily back at her.
'Yes officer, I'm afraid we turned the music up a bit high, I'm sorry,' he said and led the way into the kitchen.
Sam sniffed and held her head high as she marched out of the house and back into her own, followed by her downstairs neighbours. That bloody man. How dare he make so much noise. How dare he humiliate her like that. And her foot hurt . . . ouch.
'Are you OK, Sam?' asked the wife from downstairs as Sam hobbled up the stairs.
'Fine,' she said breezily.
In the hall mirror, she caught sight of her face. She looked as if she'd been slapped. Both cheeks were as rosy as bramley apples. As she thought of the scene next door, her cheeks blazed some more in sheer embarrassment. She grabbed the wine from the fridge and poured more into the glass. You moron. Imagine turning into some cretinous, violent bimbo just because some he-man sticks his hairy chest in your face?
Anyway, you're hardly a bimbo, she groaned inwardly. You're staring into the abyss of forty.
Sam took a large gulp of wine. How could she have let herself down like that? She should have fixed him with a steely glare and told him exactly what forces of the law she'd use to make him stop his horrible party. When she'd suitably reprimanded herself, Sam went to bed. But sleep evaded her.

It was like being fifteen again, fifteen and horribly embarrassed because the boy in chemistry class had overheard her saying she fancied him like mad. Even twenty-four years later, that memory could still make her burn with shame. Now she'd done it again.
Finally, Sam got up and took one of the sleeping tablets she kept for emergencies. This certainly qualified. She slept eventually but her hot fevered dreams were full of a tall, laughing man in a soft, loose white shirt, a man who laughed at her for behaving like a petulant, hormonal fifteen year old.
When Sam left for work the next morning, she waited to check her mobile for messages until she was outside. She wanted to be doing something when she passed the house next door, she didn't want to be vulnerable and on her own in case she met him.
'You have no messages,' taunted the impersonal voice on her phone almost before she'd got to the front gate. Instead of hanging up, Sam was forced to listen to all her old, undeleted messages in order to keep up the pretence of being a busy, high-octane career woman who wasn't interested in men. Suddenly she noticed the dilapidated house's front door swinging open. Quickly averting her eyes in case she saw him again, she began talking into the phone.
'I'll be there soon, we'll have the meeting if you've got all the documents lined up from New York,' she blathered. A taxi sailed up the road and Sam stuck out her hand to hail it.
'Bye, talk soon,' called a female voice behind her.
Sam automatically turned to see a beautiful dark-haired girl leaving the house, smiling at the man in denims and bare feet who was holding the door. Bare chested too, Sam noticed with a jolt, and blowing kisses at the girl who looked around twenty-two at most, a stunning doe-eyed twenty-two who'd clearly stayed away from home all night if the silvery dress she was wearing under a big, man's coat was anything to go by.

'Take care,' the man said in that caressing voice, but he was looking mockingly at Sam who stood there, mobile in hand and her mouth open.
'Do you want a taxi or not, love?' demanded the taxi driver.
'Oh, er yes,' stammered Sam, pulling open the door and half falling in, with her raincoat trailing after her.
'Late night?' inquired the driver with a smirk.
'No,' hissed Sam, reasserting herself. 'Covent Garden please.'
What an asshole, she thought. Loud parties, having flings with women half his age. I mean, that girl was twenty and he has to be late thirties at least. Bloody playboy. Probably some trust fund moron who'd never had a job in his life but lived off inherited cash. Sam stared grimly out the cab window and simmered. She hated men like that.

CHAPTER THREE

'I can't believe you're moving in a little over two weeks. I can see it now,' sighed Betsey dreamily. 'A summery little cottage in a beech glade, with a thatched roof and pretty sun-bleached rooms, gorgeous home grown food and quaint little pubs where you can sit outside and eat oysters and watch the world go by with the Riverdance music in the background.'
Hope glared at her over a plate of fisherman's pie. 'It'll be November, not summer.'
'I think that's Hollywood's version of rural Ireland,' laughed Dan from his position beside three-year-old Opal where he was attempting to clean up the mess she'd made squelching the insides out of several packets of brown sauce. Despite his efforts, Opal managed to fling a few opened packets on the floor before he could tidy them all away.
'No,' joined in Matt, 'it's the tour operator's version of Ireland when they're trying to sell you a time share. You know, Dan, maidens at the crossroads, sheep in the middle of the road and a friendly local with no teeth, a pipe and a tweed cap welded to his head waving at you!'
'Haven't we made an ad like that already?' Dan asked.
'Don't think so. But we will, we will. I love the originality of advertising,' Matt joked.
Matt, Betsey and Dan all laughed merrily. Hope stabbed her fish pie. Hilarious. Trust them all to make a joke about it all. It was her life they were talking about, not a location shoot for a bloody commercial. She was the one who'd be transported into another country, away from her friends and

Sam, so that Matt could live the advertising man's dream. His dream, her sacrifice. A fortnight after her sister's visit, her delight that her marriage wasn't over had disappeared to be replaced by a gnawing fear of the unknown. Matt and Millie were thrilled with the idea of moving; Toby was thrilled because he was going up in an aeroplane; Hope was terrified.
'It's going to be great, love, isn't it?' Matt said, noticing the tautness around his wife's jaw. 'You'll love Kerry, I promise you.' He was about to reach over and hug her, but Millie, sitting between them, catapulted her plate of chips all over the table.
All four children started giggling.
Hope sighed, grabbed a handful of kitchen towels out of her bulging, ever-present toddler bag, and began cleaning up.
Sunday was family day in the local pubs and that meant a war zone of small children rampaging up and down the premises while their exhausted parents rocked irate babies in their pushchairs and mashed up food for toddlers who were strait jacketed into high chairs, in between trying to shovel some pub grub down their own throats.
Hope, Matt, Betsey and Dan had often shared Sunday lunch together but the birth of Millie, Toby, Ruby and Opal meant lunch no longer took the form of a civilized clinking of wine glasses over sea bass fillets in elegant restaurants. Now, Sunday lunch was a grab-while-you-can bean fest in whichever local child-friendly establishment wasn't jammed by twelve thirty.
Today, they were in the Three Carpenters, a huge pub with an adventure playground outside. This was very useful for exhausting small children but it was raining today, so the kids had turned the inside of the pub into an adventure playground.
There was always one family, Hope thought crossly, who let their kids run riot and didn't move a muscle to stop them. Millie and Toby weren't saints but she wouldn't dream of

letting them behave like those brats who were now trying to dismantle a high chair in the corner after spending at least half an hour ripping up beer mats.
'Seriously though,' said Betsey, waving at the harassed young waitress in the hope of getting more wine, 'I've always had a yen to live in the country. There's something about the whole rustic life that appeals to me.'
'Betsey, honey,' Dan said affectionately, 'you couldn't survive without the buzz of traffic, a shop that sells the perfect cappuccino around the corner and your monthly waxing or whatever it is you do in that wildly expensive beautician's emporium.'
Not to mention a hairdresser to transform her hair from brown to a glossy chestnut every six weeks, thought Hope with unusual bitchiness.
Betsey, with her perfectly styled short hair, tiny personal-trainer-honed body and predilection for weekly massages, was a high maintenance woman. Hope, who got her bikini line waxed when she went on beach holidays and who'd had one massage in her life when the girls in the building society had bought her a voucher as a birthday treat, felt like a no-maintenance woman.
'Anti-ageing facials not waxing,' Betsey said unperturbed. 'You make me sound like a yeti. Anyway, I have sugaring done these days. It's much better.'
The talk turned to business, with Matt and Dan discussing work before Betsey made them all laugh by telling them about an interview she'd done with a TV comedienne.
Hope half-listened because she was keeping an eye on the four children. The two men and Betsey seemed to think that as long as none of the children were actually choking to death, they were fine.
Beside Hope, Toby was half asleep in his high chair. Opal and Millie were, for once, playing together, and even Ruby, a four-year-old terror with her father's innocent gaze and her mother's devil-may-care attitude to life, was busy investigating something under the table. For once, Hope

didn't feel like checking what it was. Ruby was Betsey's daughter: let her sort it out. Hope was fed up of being the designated babysitter at these gettogethers
She ate the rest of her lunch, half-listened to the chat going on around her, and wished she felt more cheerful.
It was two weeks since Matt's bombshell and he'd made startling progress for someone who'd spent a year promising to do something about bleeding the air from the bathroom radiator. He'd got Adam Judd to, reluctantly, give him a year's sabbatical, although the sporty company Audi had to go back. The only caveat was that Matt had to promise to help on certain campaigns if necessary and he'd be paid on a contract basis, which suited Matt fine.
He'd also found an estate agent who assured them there'd be no problem letting the house for a year; he'd checked out transporting their belongings to Ireland; had told his uncle's solicitor that he'd be flying over to take possession of the house shortly. In short, Matt was on a high, joyous that he'd made the move and was now on his way to making a long-cherished dream come true. Hope felt the way she had three days after Millie had been born: depressed and liable to burst into tears at the slightest provocation. When she'd mentioned the fact that Millie should be starting primary school the following September, Matt had merely nodded and said they'd be back. Probably.
Probably? thought Hope weakly.
It was after two when Dan went to get the bill and Matt went to the gents. Betsey turned to Hope.
'You're a bit down in the dumps,' she said. 'Is it the move to Ireland?'
Hope nodded, not wanting to say too much in front of the kids. Little pitchers had big ears.
'It's such a big step,' Hope whispered to Betsey now. 'I feel as if I'm being swept along on a tidal wave and I can't stop it, do you know what I mean? It's frightening. A new country, new people, a new home and I won't have a job there. Matt knows what he's doing but I don't.' She stopped

miserably. She didn't want to say too much but she was sure Betsey would understand. Betsey knew Matt and knew how much Hope adored him, but she'd surely see Hope's side of things and would know how scary it felt to be swept along on somebody else's dream. 'I mean, imagine if you were expected to give up your job to travel with Dan? That would be tough.'
'It's a bit different, isn't it?' Betsey said. 'It's taken me a long time to get where I am on the magazine. I mean, I could work anywhere in the world, obviously, but I've got a great career here.'
'And I'm only working in the building society,' Hope said acidly. She was still steeling herself to hand in her notice. Mr Campbell would not be impressed.
'Don't be so touchy. I didn't mean that at all but our situations are rather different after all. You've got to learn not to be so uptight about everything, Hope,' she added. 'Go with the flow.' She waved one hand languidly. 'Treat it as an adventure. You'll have a ball. I'd adore a year off to have fun, play in the country and get out of the rat race.'
Hope looked Betsey straight in the eyes but Betsey had finished draining her wine glass and was looking around for her handbag. Had the other woman heard one word she'd said? She'd hoped for female bonding over how she was going to deal with this enormous upheaval in her life and instead, she'd been treated to Betsey's views on how much she'd have liked a year in the country. And been told in no uncertain terms that Betsey did not consider working in the building society to be a career on a par with the fabulous world of magazine journalism.
'Ruby, what are you doing under there? Is that my handbag?' Betsey said sharply. A heavily-made up Ruby emerged from under the table, her face plastered with Clarins base, vampish dark Chanel eyeshadow and plenty of Paloma Picasso red lipstick. Betsey only used the very best cosmetics.
Her mother gasped with rage and pulled her neat little Prada handbag from Ruby's red-lipsticked grasp. The bag


was smeared with base and lipstick and had obviously been sitting in a pool of brown sauce left by Opal's earlier game.
'It's ruined,' Betsey shrieked. 'Three hundred pounds worth of handbag ruined!'
Hope patted her arm. 'Oh well,' she said benignly, 'you've got to go with the flow when you've got kids, haven't you, Betsey?'

Matt sang along to the children's tape they played on the drive home. Millie and Toby sang along too, making Hope feel like old prune-face in the passenger seat because she wasn't deliriously happy too.
'Dan told me he's dead jealous about what we're doing,' Matt confided as they pulled up outside their house.
'Why doesn't he give up his job for a year, then?' Hope demanded. 'Betsey wouldn't stand for it, that's why. She'd have heart failure if Dan suggested upping sticks for a year in the country.'
'Betsey was very enthusiastic,' Matt pointed out helpfully. 'What was it she said: she loved rustic things.'
'Betsey doesn't know the first thing about living in the country and would hate it,' Hope hissed. 'Her idea of rustic is jam pots with gingham covers on them. She thinks the country will be like Bath with livestock and handsome farmers in Range Rovers thrown in.'
Matt annoyed Hope by laughing heartily. 'Oh darling, you're so funny sometimes,' he said. 'You're the one who should be in advertising and not me.'
Proving that she wasn't quite as thick-skinned as a rhinoceros, Betsey phoned Hope at work the next day and apologized for upsetting her.
'I'd hate you to think I didn't value your career. I didn't mean to imply that my career was worth more than yours,' Betsey said, while Mr Campbell, Hope's boss, looked on disapprovingly. Personal phone calls were a no-no unless the person at the other end was about to drop dead and was phoning with details of where they'd hidden their last will

and testament. Despite having his own office, Mr Campbell never received any personal phone calls. Yvonne and Denise, the other woman who worked on the counter, had decided that he was secretly gay and too scared to come out publicly, so he ruthlessly instructed his lovers not to phone.
Hope thought it was because Mr Campbell was very keen on rules and regulations and wouldn't dream of asking his staff to follow a dictum he wouldn't follow himself.
'I think we should meet for lunch,' Betsey was saying, blithely oblivious to the fact that Hope couldn't really talk. 'I'm working from home today and I've got my eye on these fabulous kitten heels in that new shoe shop near Pulteney Bridge and I feel today's the day to splash out. Do you fancy a trip up there?'
'Betsey, I can't talk at work,' whispered Hope anxiously.
Betsey commuted to London a couple of times a week to work in an office where making personal phone calls was part and parcel of the day. She didn't understand Hope's office environment.
'Outside Accessorise at one, then?' said Betsey.
'Yes,' Hope answered. Anything to get her off the phone before Mr Campbell self-combusted with disapproval.
The morning flew past, giving her little time to think. So it was only when Hope was belting out of the office door buttoning her coat, that she realized she wasn't in the mood to go shopping for extravagant shoes. And that she wasn't really in the mood for Betsey either.
She liked Betsey, had considered her her best friend, really, but there were days when she wondered was their friendship one of those which existed purely because their husbands were best friends and therefore, the four of them spent a lot of time together. After that infamous holiday in France which Dan and Matt had arranged one day at work without asking, she and Betsey had been great pals. Mind you, Hope thought, it hadn't bothered Betsey to go on holiday with someone she barely knew. Quite happy to relax from noon on with a bottle of Burgundy and a paperback

while the children splashed about in the toddlers' pool, Betsey was very laid back about holiday companions. Hope always felt that nothing much upset her, except when somebody else got a better assignment in the women's magazine she wrote for. She was great fun and an amusing friend. But, Hope wondered, with Dan and Matt out of the picture, would she and Betsey ever meet up to have lunch or to trail around the shops together? Was Betsey really her best friend, either?
No, she decided an hour later as she sprinted back to the office, trying to eat a Mars bar simultaneously because they hadn't had time for lunch.
'Did you buy anything?' asked Yvonne as Hope slid into her seat behind the counter at one minute past two.
Hope shook her head. 'Betsey was on a shoe shop trawl. We trekked round four shops and ended up buying the ones she'd tried on in the first shop. Pale blue leather and very dainty. Plus, we didn't have time for a sandwich so I've just eaten a Mars bar,' she added guiltily.
'She's a selfish cow, that Betsey,' Yvonne remarked. 'When she meets you for lunch, she knows she can swan off home and have lunch whenever she wants to but you daren't have so much as a bag of crisps here.'
'She just didn't think,' protested Hope, used to standing up for Betsey because Yvonne didn't like her. They'd met once and it had been handbags at dawn. With her black curtain of hair and dancing green eyes, Yvonne was far too vampish for Betsey's tastes. Plus, she was younger than Betsey. Yvonne hadn't taken to Betsey much either, because she had a better job than Yvonne and kept boasting about it. Proof positive that trying to link up friends from different parts of your life didn't work.
'She just doesn't care,' Yvonne retorted. 'She's out for one person and that person is her. I bet you a tenner she'll be the first one who'll put her name down for a free holiday in Ireland with you. You wait and see, Madam Betsey will turn up with hubbie and kids, stay for a week and not lift

a finger except to ask for more drink and another blanket for her bed.'
The thought had crossed Hope's mind.
'Well, if she's so keen on the country, maybe we can do a swap and she can stay in the cottage while I live in her place back here,' Hope remarked.
Yvonne shot her an inquisitive look.
'You don't want to go, do you?'
'That obvious, huh?' Hope stopped trying to look merry and let her face reveal how she felt: utterly depressed.
Yvonne's bosom welled up with indignation like an enraged bullfrog. 'Why didn't you tell me? You can't go, Hope,' she said, 'not if you don't want to. You'd be mad.'
A cluster of tourists, just disgorged from a tour bus, swarmed into the building society before Hope could answer.
Hope, Yvonne and Denise expertly changed travellers' cheques for the hordes and engaged in a bit of friendly chatter. When they'd all cleared out, one of Hope's favourite customers, a sweet little old lady who wore a fox collar wrapped around her neck come rain, hail or shine, arrived to discuss how much money she should take out of her account to go on holiday.
'Where are you going?' Hope asked Mrs Payton.
The old lady's dark eyes sparkled under her felt hat. 'The Greek Islands,' she said. 'I'm going with a friend. I haven't been there since the Fifties. We're going to do the Oracle at Delphi first. Can't wait.'
My god, I'm turning into a boring old cow, Hope told herself as she processed Mrs Payton's savings book. This woman is eighty if she's a day and she's all fired up about a trip to Greece, while I'm only thirty-seven and I'm whinging about going the short trip to Ireland.
When she was gone, Yvonne was busy with some teenage boys, and then a stream of people kept coming into the office, all with complicated business. It was nearly closing time before they had a chance to talk. Denise was making

tea in the cubby hole kitchen behind the photocopier because they'd been too busy to have their afternoon tea break.
'Don't go,' said Yvonne.
'It's not that easy.' Hope was fed up with the whole subject.
'It is,' asserted Yvonne. 'Can you imagine what you'll feel like when you're there if you're this depressed now? You'll be down the doctor looking for tablets for your nerves like a shot.'
Hope laughed. 'I think I need tablets for my nerves as it is,' she joked.
Yvonne didn't laugh. 'Yeah and you'll be on double strength ones when you're dying of depression next month. Think about it, you'll be away from your friends, your sister, everyone. It's not fair to expect you to go along with this.' Yvonne scowled. Then can be right bastards, you know.'
'It is only for a year,' Hope said.
'Hope, you're the sort of person who wouldn't expect someone to sit through a two-hour film you'd like in case they didn't enjoy it. You never ask anyone for anything. Matt's asked you to do this huge thing and you don't want to go but you don't want to say no either. There's a fine line between keeping the peace and getting walked on, as my mother would say. And what are you going to do? You love working, even here, you'll go out of your head with no job. Matt's asking too much.'
Hope took her tea from Denise and thought of what Yvonne would say if she knew that Matt hadn't really asked her anything: he'd told her, wheedled a bit, and had assumed she'd go along with it. She was so happy that he wasn't having an affair, she'd said yes quicker than a hooker touting for business on a rainy night.
Yvonne would levitate with temper if she knew the truth. 'My Freddie wouldn't dream of doing anything like that,' she'd say, and it was true. Freddie had to work hard to keep Yvonne. She was not the sort of person who got walked on.

As far as Yvonne was concerned, if anyone was going to do any trampling over anyone else, she'd do it, thank you very much.
'It's what everyone dreams of, Yvonne,' protested Hope. 'Giving up the rat race to live in the country, spend quality time with the children and not work.'
'Yeah right,' said Yvonne grimly. 'You and your winning the lottery dream. Except if you won the lottery and bought some palatial mansion down the road, you might not be working but you'd have the cash to do whatever you wanted and you'd be able to afford to have someone look after the kids if you wanted to get the chauffeur to drive you into town. You haven't won the lottery, but I reckon Matt has.'
For the rest of the afternoon, Hope thought about leaving Witherspoon's. She did love her job, Yvonne was right. She didn't want to be some high flying executive like Sam but she enjoyed working, enjoyed having her own money and her independence, and liked meeting new people. Of course she adored the children, but surely she wasn't a bad mother to want to combine loving them with a job?
Right on cue, the heavens opened as Hope ran, raincoatless, to her car after work. It was only a five-minute walk but by the time she wrenched the door of the Metro open and flung her handbag onto the passenger seat, she was soaked.
Shivering despite having the heater on at full blast, she drove home in worse than usual traffic. Yvonne didn't understand. Yvonne was a blunt person who said what she thought. Hope was exactly the opposite. She longed for some way of telling Matt she didn't want to leave Bath, but without the inevitable confrontation. Ideally, she wanted him intuitively to work out what she wanted, the way men did in films, and then agree that it was all a mad idea and that they should stay at home. No hassle, no arguments.
Only it wasn't working out like that. Matt appeared to be taking her stoic silence for a thoughtfulness, as if she was busy mentally working out what the family would need to


take. Why didn't he see that she was upset? How could he be so blind?
The clock on the dashboard said it was six fifteen when Hope pulled up outside Your Little Treasures, not caring that she was double parked. Head down against the rain, she ran up the path to the glossy pillar box red door.
Marta was standing sentry in the small hallway, looking less Rottweiler-like than usual on account of her upswept hairstyle and a very un-Marta-like lacy dress. She was obviously going out for the evening.
'You're late,' she snapped as Hope reached her.
The build-up of misery over the past few days came to a triumphant head in Hope's mind. 'So sue me,' she snapped back with unheard of venom.
Marta took a step back at this unprecedented attack from the meek and mild Mrs Parker.
'As long as it's just this once,' she muttered, giving Hope a wide berth.

Matt couldn't remember when he'd felt this fired up over anything. Not the local television ads they'd won off a top London ad agency, not the excitement he'd felt when Hope had first become pregnant. Nothing had ever given him the buzz that this new adventure was giving him.
He arrived home with a bouquet of flowers for Hope and a bottle of rose wine. She loved rose. She was a bit unsure about the whole trip, but that was just Hope. Dear Hope, he loved her despite her nervousness about things and her fear of the unknown. She'd love Kerry when she got there.
Matt remembered when he was nine, and his parents, to whom he'd been an unexpected interruption in their marriage and careers, had shipped him off to Uncle Gearoid's. At first, he'd hated the idea of leaving his home to travel to Ireland, but after that first summer, he'd wanted to go every year.
There was something magical about Redlion. Maybe it was the fact that Gearoid didn't believe in rules so there was

none of that palaver about being in by a certain time or eating three meals a day, but Matt had loved it.
Meals were whenever Gearoid took it upon himself to open a tin of beans and nobody batted an eyelid when the nine-year-old Matt was brought into the local pub (shop at the front and small snug at the back) to have his first taste of porter. They'd gone on fishing expeditions, on wild adventures to the Beara Peninsula, where Gearoid had practically gone into a coma after a drinking session with a fellow writer in a small hillside dwelling that Matt's mother would have disapproved of no end. Matt had grown up with a mistily romantic memory of sitting on cracked leather stools in the dim, stained snug, listening to farmers talking of their herds and the trials of bovine mastitis, while Gearoid and his cronies rambled on about novels and poems, their plans for being the next Yeats, and how they'd got a consignment of good quality poteen and maybe after the next round they'd take a ramble back to Curlew Cottage for a wee dram.
Gearoid, with his wild woolly hair, long beard and fondness for brown corduroy suits he got directly from Dublin, had been an idol to his nephew. He lived outside the system, he told Matt proudly, which was why he'd left his home in Surrey to travel to Kerry and become a writer. Taking the Irish version of his real name had been part of the fun. The one-time Gerry had become Gearoid, more Irish than the Irish, a man who could sing old Irish songs for hours on end and knew the location of every stone circle in Munster. Gearoid supplemented his income by giving tours to the hordes of tourists who came to Kerry searching for their roots, but, as he got older, his fondness for the jar meant he was quite likely to turn on them and tell them they were all a pack of feckers and should feck off back wherever they came from.
To his shame, Matt hadn't visited for over four years and he'd felt terrible about the fact that when Gearoid had died, he'd been in the middle of a vital campaign and hadn't been able to make it to Redlion for the funeral. He'd make it up

to Gearoid, he promised, by becoming a writer. Turning his back on Bath and his career, albeit only for a year, was his tribute to his maverick uncle.

CHAPTER FOUR

Virginia Connell stood in the garage of her new home in Redlion, looked at Bill's golf clubs and smiled wistfully. She'd hated those bloody things all their married life. Well, maybe not hated but certainly felt irritated by them. Every weekend, come rain or shine, Bill had played golf. A brilliant man, he never managed to remember anniversaries, parties and dates she'd put in his diary months before, but thanks to some male instinct, he never forgot an arrangement to play golf.
They'd never really argued about it. Virginia had been very self-sufficient; you had to be when you had three small children and a husband who worked away from home a lot, she always said briskly. When Bill forgot a date she'd made with him, she'd wag a reproving finger and tell him she'd reschedule when he had an opening in his diary. He'd grin, kiss her and promise they'd go somewhere really exciting, which they never did, naturally. Steak and chips in the local had been a treat. Virginia hadn't minded. She loved Bill and he loved her in return. That was all there was to it. What did posh dinner dates matter when there was much more to life? She much preferred their quiet evenings in the local dunking chips into garlic mayonnaise to those high-powered affairs where Bill's business partners insisted on bringing the entire company, plus wives, out to four-star restaurants. Virginia hated those nights where the conversation was brittle, every subject was a potential minefield and where the only fun was watching which of Bill's partners could pretend to know most about wine.

The food was just as good in the pub and when she and Bill were alone together, they could relax and be themselves.
Over the years, Bill did his best to get her to learn golf. She laughed and said he was only suggesting it so they'd see each other in the golf club instead of blearily in the kitchen in the morning over coffee.
Virginia gently pulled the suede cover from his driver, stroking the polished club head and remembering how delighted he'd been when he bought it.
'This is space age technology,' he'd said gravely that glorious Saturday morning in April more than eighteen months ago, before going on to explain how he'd had a nine degree driver before but this one was eleven and a half.
'And that's better?' Virginia had teased as she made them both tea.
'It's about the degree of loft. ..' Bill had begun to explain before he noticed her grinning. 'What am I explaining it to you for, you philistine,' he laughed. 'Some wives take an interest in their husband's game.'
'Yes, and some husbands get home occasionally,' she retorted. 'I'm thinking of having an affair if you don't get home tonight before eight. Would you mind?'
Bill pretended to consider this, angling his grey head to one side and screwing up his brown eyes. 'Could you have an affair with the golf pro?' he suggested. 'Then I might get preferential rates on lessons.'
'No problem, darling,' Virginia smiled. 'Biscuit?'
He didn't get home before eight that night. He didn't get home at all. He'd crashed the car on the twenty-minute drive home and the only thing to remain unscathed were his clubs, safely in the boot.
The front of the car was destroyed, as was her darling Bill. But he'd never felt the pain of the crash: he'd died from a massive heart attack, they told her. As if that made it better.
The police thought she'd like the clubs. Virginia threw them into the garage with fury because she needed to hurt

something. She was in such horrific, numbing white pain that something or someone else must suffer. Bill's precious clubs seemed like the only obvious candidates.
The boys, Dominic, Laurence and Jamie, all in their 20s now, had been wonderful, towers of strength through it all. They'd arranged the funeral because Virginia hadn't been able to. For the first time in her life, the eminently capable and sensible Virginia Connell fell to pieces. She could barely make a cup of tea; she, who was known for her exquisite baking and fantastic Beef Wellington so tender you could cut it with a spoon. People phoned with shocked, murmured condolences and she barely heard them. Once, she left someone hanging on the other end of the phone while she went into the kitchen to try and boil the kettle. She hadn't managed that either: boiling the kettle and managing to put a teabag in a cup was beyond her. Choosing what to wear in the morning was a momentous task. Remembering to brush her teeth was impossible.
She stopped bothering with her hair and it hung in dank grey curls around a drawn face that was the same shade of grey. Laurence had insisted on driving her to the hairdresser one day, three months after Bill's death, shocked when he'd seen how terrible she looked.
'I can't go in,' she said simply, sitting in the car outside the hairdresser in Clontarf with Laurence wringing his hands beside her. 'What's the point?'
To add to her misery, a month after Bill's death, their beloved Spaniel, Oscar, had been run over. Without even Oscar's warm, velvety body to comfort her as he lay on the bedspread and licked her hands lovingly, Virginia felt there was no point to the world at all.
Time was a great healer, Virginia remembered her mother saying. She didn't agree precisely. Time didn't heal, it numbed. Like a good anaesthetic, it made the pain more bearable but it never went away.
She'd never balanced the bank statements or talked to the insurance people about the car or the house contents.

Bill had handled all that. When the letters surrounding his death began to flood in through the letter box, Virginia realized just how much Bill had done. She'd often teased him that he was a lucky man coming home to a clean, tidy house where there was always food in the fridge, ironed shirts in the wardrobe and plenty of toothpaste in the bathroom. Now, Virginia realized that he'd been just as busy on her behalf as she had on his. She'd never even seen a final demand bill for electricity or handled a single query from their accountant. Now, she had to open all the mail and deal with it herself, inexpertly and bitterly. Bitter because Bill shouldn't have been gone in the first place. The phone was nearly cut off in those first six months because Virginia had taken to sweeping the mountains of post into a drawer, refusing to look at any of it. She couldn't cope with the kindly meant letters of condolence and she didn't want to cope with the stilted letters from the bank, the insurance people and the lawyers. There was so much to do when someone died. She could barely believe it. The awful irony was that Bill had left her a wealthy widow thanks to a huge insurance policy. He'd looked after her even in death. But money couldn't compensate for the pain and the trauma that went with sudden death.
Bereaved people were suddenly supposed to lay aside their grief and deal with employers, the tax office, government departments, an endless list. It was cruel, cruel and unnecessary. She wouldn't do it. A horrified Laurence had gone through it all one day, six months after his father's death, when he'd discovered what she'd been doing.
'Mum,' he said wearily as he sat in Bill's big recliner chair surrounded by opened envelopes and official looking letters, 'you can't go on like this.'
Virginia had shrugged listlessly. 'Why not? It doesn't matter any more. Nothing matters. And anyway,' her eyes had a spark of life in them momentarily, a spark of fury, 'what else can they do to me? Your father is dead. That's the worst that can happen. Do you think I care a damn if they lock

me up because I haven't declared that I'm not entitled to a married person's tax allowance any more?'

After a year of not bothering, Virginia had made scones on the morning of her husband's first anniversary. Her sons were coming to Clontarf for the day and she didn't have anything in the house. The boys ate the scones with thankful smiles on their faces, grateful that their mother was finally coming out of the tunnel she'd been in. Virginia was astonished how easily she slipped back into her role of gracious hostess. On the outside, at least.
She wondered if it had been she who'd died, how would Bill have coped? Would he have spent a year in mourning, worn down by grief and unable to take an interest in anything? Their first grandchild had been born just eight months ago, an adorable poppet named Alison who had her parents - Virginia's eldest son, Dominic, and his wife, Sally - in thrall. Virginia had been godmother and managed to get through the christening service dry-eyed, despite crying inside at the thought of how happy she'd have been if only Bill had been with her.
'He is with you, Ma,' Laurence, the sensitive one, insisted. 'Dad's still here, watching over you.'
But he wasn't with her. That was the hard thing. Virginia didn't bother telling Laurence that his words of comfort did no good, he wouldn't have understood. She'd gone to church all her life and yet now, when she needed it most, the very idea of God and the afterlife had deserted her. There was no sense of Bill anywhere except in her memory. She couldn't feel him in the room with her, she took no comfort in going to church and talking to him. He was gone. It was over, that was it. And that really was the most awful part of her grief.
That was why she'd sold the house in Dublin six months ago and swapped the suburban calm of Pier Avenue for a rambling old house in Kerry. The boys had been upset at first, Laurence had said she couldn't run away. But Virginia

had told them she wasn't running away: she just needed to start again, in Kerry, where she and their father had come from all those years ago and to where they'd always had this distant dream of returning.
They'd both been farmers' children, madly keen to get away. Kerry had seemed like the back end of nowhere when they were young. In their fifties, though, Bill and Virginia had thought they might like to retire back to where they'd come from, a place that didn't seem anywhere near as dull and quiet to them now as it had when they were younger.
They'd never been sure whether they'd go back to their homelands near Tralee where only a couple of relatives now lived, or whether they'd start again somewhere else in the county. Somewhere without second cousins once removed living down the road.
Bill's death made the decision for Virginia. She would sell the house and move to Kerry but far away from Tralee. She couldn't face living near where they'd grown up, places redolent of their courtship and awash with memories of the first time they'd met at a dance in a small parish hall. No, that would be too painful. When she saw the advert for Kilnagoshell House in Redlion, a long way from Tralee and yet still in Kerry, her mind was made up. In May, fourteen months after being brutally thrust into widowhood, Virginia had up sticks and moved to the small Kerry village where she knew nobody and where, she hoped, nobody knew her.
The rambling old house was in a good state of repair but could have done with some decoration as the previous owners were very keen on flock wallpaper and swirly, seasickness carpets. The wash hand basins installed in the bedrooms for the B & B guests didn't suit the grand old house but Virginia had done nothing to restore its beauty so far. She felt weary enough from simply moving in. She didn't have the energy to decorate or even remove the numbers on the bedroom doors. Besides, she had the rest of her life to do it, she thought sadly.

The boys were still getting used to the idea. Relief, Virginia felt, was a part of it. They had felt guilty with their interesting lives in London (Dominic and his wife, Sally) and Dublin (Jamie and Laurence) while their mother grieved in her suburban semi. She knew that Jamie and Laurence had shared a rota whereby each tried to visit her every couple of days, keeping in contact by phone the rest of the time to make sure she hadn't downed a packet of sleeping pills in misery. Now she was hundreds of miles away, the duty visits would have to stop, which would be better for all concerned.
She'd meant to give away most of Bill's possessions when she moved, but she'd found herself unable to throw out his clothes. And thinking of the pleasure they'd given him, she hadn't thrown out his precious clubs.
Now she held Bill's driver in her hands and tried to remember the all-important grip. Was it too late to take up golf at the age of fifty-eight? Bill would have loved her to. Maybe he could see her, was grinning with that irrepressible twinkling grin of his to see her holding his clubs in that professional manner. She liked the idea of Bill grinning wherever he was.
The bell rang. Virginia raised her eyes to heaven. Tourists, she'd lay a bet on it. Kilnagoshell House had been a noted bed and breakfast establishment in the past and people with fond memories of it kept turning up on the doorstep, smiling and wondering if she had a double with bath for two nights and 'do you still make that lovely black pudding for breakfast?'
When she'd moved into the house four months ago, she'd smiled apologetically in return, saying 'sorry, no, it's not a B & B any more.'
Now, she felt like throwing burning tar out the top windows and yelling 'leave me alone!' every time a fresh influx of visitors arrived with their five-year-old B & B guidebooks and hopeful expressions on their faces. It was beyond her why the owners had sold up in the first place. Judging from the amount of walk-in custom they were getting, even

in October, they could have run a hundred-bed hotel and still be busy.
She put the driver carefully back in the golf bag and walked round to the front door where a gleaming people carrier was parked. Four people were standing on the gravel.
One man was stretching aching limbs and another was hauling bulging suitcases from the vehicle. A small, dark- skinned woman was peering at a guide book, reading out bits in heavily-accented English, while a taller woman looked over her shoulder.
'Can I help you?' inquired Virginia.
'Excuse me for not phoning,' said the woman with the guide book. Italians, Virginia thought, judging by that lyrical accent with its exotic rolling consonants. 'We hope you have rooms we can rent tonight.'
'I'm afraid this isn't a bed and breakfast any more,' Virginia said apologetically polite in spite of herself.
The foursome looked crestfallen.
'We have been driving for so long,' said one of the men tiredly.
'There is another place you can stay in the village,' Virginia offered and went on to tell them about Mrs Egan's De Luxe B & B down the road, just the other side of Redlion. No, it wasn't in the guide books but if they needed somewhere in the locality, Mrs Egan would definitely have rooms.
She felt sorry to be turning them away; they looked exhausted and she was no longer sure if it was fair to direct people to Mrs Egan's premises. She'd met Mrs Egan in the butcher's and hadn't liked either the way she ordered the cheapest rashers for her breakfasts, or the way she snapped at the butcher himself, a friendly giant of a man who didn't deserve to be given out to because he'd forgotten to put aside a leg of lamb for her.
From what the constant stream of visitors said to her about Kilnagoshell, Virginia felt it had been a welcoming place where nothing was too much trouble and where the

owners wouldn't have dreamed of giving guests fatty, cheap rashers for their breakfast.
The foursome wearily packed up their belongings and waved at her as she watched them drive away. Virginia waved back, thinking that she mustn't look quite as decrepit as she felt if these people wanted to stay with her. In her mind, she was still light years away from the tall, handsome Virginia Connell who'd always been perfectly dressed, not a silvery grey hair out of place as she helped out in the local Oxfam shop. That Virginia was the old one. The replacement was darker, sadder, with hollows under her hazel eyes and pain etched on every inch of her fine-boned face. She didn't bother any more setting her thick hair in the gentle waves that managed to look so elegant: she tied it back in a taut knot. But that would have to change. She'd lived as a recluse for long enough and if she was to put a tentative foot back into the real world, she needed to look normal instead of like some loopy old dear with Miss Havisham tendencies.
She closed the garage and went inside to the kitchen to pull on her walking shoes and old waxed jacket. The waxy smell always reminded her of Oscar. He'd been such a darling little dog, a soft fawn coloured spaniel with velvety ears and a melancholy expression that made him look like a dog from a chocolate box. Every weekday of his life at half eight in the morning, Virginia had taken Oscar for his walk and when the weather was wet, she'd worn this very waxed jacket. Oscar had only to see it to go berserk, circling her feet with delight, barking and bouncing deliriously. The jacket still smelled of him. Virginia still tortured herself with the thought that if only she'd kept walking him after Bill's death, Oscar might have still been alive.
It was her fault, all her fault. With enough exercise, Oscar wouldn't have been so keen to escape the garden and run out onto the main road. She was glad that her local vet had offered to bury his silky little body in their plot in the mountains, otherwise he'd have been buried in the garden


in Pier Avenue and she hated to think of the new owners digging him up in some garden revamp and dumping him.
'Get another dog, Mum,' Laurence had advised. 'You and Dad always had dogs, you need one. It'll be company for you; go on, you really should.'
But Virginia wouldn't dream of it. A dog was something to care for and she was far too afraid of losing anything else to commit to any new responsibilities. As it was, she was possessed of a great fear that something would take the boys, Sally or baby Alison away from her. A fat tear fell onto the jacket's worn corduroy collar. Virginia wiped her eyes fiercely. She wouldn't cry, she wouldn't. She'd go for her walk and try and forget Oscar.
She walked briskly down the avenue, past the beech trees with their glorious russet leaves. The last glow of autumn was still everywhere; trees and bushes holding onto their golden leaves, the single copper beech still a fiery bronze in the middle of the silver birches. In another month, the landscape would have changed totally, Virginia knew, with banks of leaves underfoot and every tree stark and bare against the hills. But for now, it was magnificent. She crunched through a stretch of road strewn with chestnuts. The boys had loved chestnuts, she thought fondly, picking one up and rubbing it until it gleamed like mahogany.
Onto the main road, she marched firmly towards Redlion. Her house was a mile from the village and she'd decided that she should walk there and back every day, if only to buy a newspaper. It was all too easy to bury yourself and see nobody.
She liked Redlion: it was quaint and somehow untouched. The winding main street, called, for convenience, Main Street, probably looked much the way it had fifty years ago, with small terraced houses on either side interrupted only by shops and pubs. There were three pubs, rather a lot for a small town, tourists were always saying in surprise. Virginia knew from experience that visitors were fascinated by the number of pubs in Irish towns. She remembered a friend of

Bill's from London being astonished by that. They'd taken him on a short trip down to Kilkenny and he'd kept remarking on the fact that they'd driven through several tiny hamlets that consisted of a scattering of houses, but which still managed to support two pubs.
'How do they stay in business?' he'd asked Bill in bewilderment.
Bill had laughed his warm, deep laugh and told his friend that he was in Ireland now and the usual rules didn't apply. 'There are different sorts of pubs for different people,' Bill explained. 'The old farmers might use one because it hadn't changed since they were lads, and the younger people might go for another one with music and bar food. Real ould pubs only serve drink and cigarettes, you see. At the first sign of music, bar food or young women in short skirts, the ould fellas would take their custom elsewhere.'
Madigans in Redlion was a real ould pub in Bill's definition of the word, Virginia thought. With its red and white lettering over the door and an elderly Guinness sign hanging outside, it looked like the pubs of her childhood.
On her walks, she'd often seen men in heavy boots, farm clothes and old caps ambling in for a quick lunchtime pickmeup of porter. Her father, who'd been a farmer, had been fond of the odd lunchtime drink himself and she reckoned he'd have liked Madigans, which was the sort of place where you could happily go in with your trousers held up with baler twine and nobody would pay you the slightest bit of attention. The only part of the experience that required utter and complete attention was the pouring of the pint, which could take ten minutes of the barman's loving art, meaning that wise drinkers ordered the next pint a good fifteen minutes before they'd need it, giving it that much needed time to settle.
The Widows, on the other hand, was a modern phenomenon complete with a bar food menu as exotic as you'd find anywhere. It had traditional music nights, quaint Oirish interior decor straight out of The Quiet Man, and a proprietor

who understood that money in the pub business was trying to please all the people all the time. Virginia had been in there a couple of times and had marvelled at the modern take on an old-fashioned idea.
Virginia had never walked as far as the third pub, which was right at the other end of the village over the humpbacked bridge. That would be her mission today, Virginia resolved: to walk right through the village. It would make it a longer walk, certainly three miles all told.
She passed the painted sign that told her Redlion was twinned with a French town she'd never heard of. Redlion wasn't at its best in the lashing rain but on a clear autumn day, the village was pretty and somehow timeless. Virginia walked past the chemist with its big side entrance for animal foodstuffs, past a row of whitewashed houses with a brightly painted blue one in the middle, and along past Lucille's, a fashion emporium with a window display that changed weekly and was always wildly glamorous. This week, Lucille was showing off low-cut tops and mohair sweaters with an animal print theme. The centrepiece was a fake fur coat in dramatic leopard print with a matching Russian style hat. Virginia resolved to watch out for the ensemble at Mass. She wasn't quite sure who actually bought any of Lucille's extravagant outfits, but she knew she'd recognize anyone who did at fifty paces.
She walked on, keeping her eyes trained firmly on the distance in case she met anyone on her side of the street. People were very friendly, always smiling and saying hello, but she didn't want to get dragged into friendships, and answering a simple 'isn't it a grand day?' could be disastrous. Replying would mean a full-blown conversation and she didn't want to talk to people, she wanted to be left alone.
It wasn't hard today. The village was quiet. At this time of year, the tourists were few and far between. But Virginia knew that once Easter came, the place would be crammed with people stopping at the Widows for a plate of smoked salmon and a blast of traditional music. They clambered out

of cars and buses in droves to admire the painted houses and the quaint arts and crafts shop which did a roaring trade in hand-knitted sweaters, bits of lace, plaques with Irish family names on them, and odd pottery bits and bobs made by the hippies who lived in a commune far up the mountains. The hippies were tolerated, Virginia knew thanks to overhearing a conversation in the post office, because they kept themselves to themselves.
But the hard-working local people with businesses were always nervous of a whole tribe of crusty travellers arriving and setting up messy shop in a field somewhere and ruining the successful business of tourism.
Virginia had seen one of the hippie women once: tired- looking with yellow dreadlocks, tattoos on her arms and a child glued to each hip. Close by, a business-suited young woman marched out of the estate agent's and climbed into her Mercedes sports car, rushing and ignoring everything around her. Both would have looked out of place in the Kerry of Virginia's youth.
Today, Virginia had the place pretty much to herself, apart from a couple of women standing outside the butcher's with their striped plastic bags, having a chat now that they'd bought the dinner. As she walked, her hip twinged a bit. Why you got arthritis in one hip and not the other, Virginia didn't know, but that was no excuse for not getting her daily walk. She walked firmly on. She was nearly half way there after all.
The phone was ringing furiously when she got back and she raced into the hall, still in her leaf-covered walking boots.
'Mum,' said the chirpy voice of her daughter-in-law Sally in London, 'how are you?'
'Fine, Sally,' Virginia answered, pleased to hear from the only member of her family who didn't say hello with the expectation that Virginia would burst immediately into depressed tears. 'How are you lot? Is Alison still ruling the roost with Dominic wrapped round her little finger?'
Sally groaned. 'Don't ask. He ruins her. She'll have a bike,

a pony and a toy motorbike before she's two if Dominic has anything to do with it.'
They chatted away for a few minutes, talking about how Jamie had been in London and had come round to dinner one night with his new girlfriend, 'very pretty and clever. Dominic kept teasing that she was much too clever for him.'
Virginia smiled a little wistfully. That was what she missed: being a proper part of her sons' lives, being there to meet new girlfriends and give her opinion on them. Laurence, who was a dentist, had told her about Barbara, the fabulous dental nurse he'd only just met and how Virginia would love her to bits, but the three of them hadn't managed to meet up yet. Still, she mustn't dwell on things. She'd chosen a new life because it was a break from the pain of the past. What was the point in whingeing about parts of the old life that she missed?
They talked about Alison's sleeping pattern or rather, her non-sleeping pattern; how tired Sally was from looking after her and working from home; and how much she and Dominic were looking forward to their skiing holiday in Austria over Christmas.
'Virginia,' Sally said suddenly, sounding anxious. 'We won't go to Austria if you'd like us to come to you, you know that. I don't want you to think that we wouldn't want to come to you. We'll cancel Austria and hop on the ferry. ..'
'Don't be ridiculous,' Virginia interrupted. 'I wouldn't dream of it. You need a proper holiday as a family, not one where you're forced to visit me. I've told you I'm spending Christmas here this year and you're all to stop feeling guilty about it.'
Virginia thought of a fridge magnet she'd seen: 'my mother is a travel agent for guilt trips.' She'd laughed heartily at the idea because it had been a fair description of her own mother.
Therefore, Virginia had been determined never to lay guilt

trips on her three boys. Even in the darkest days after Bill's death, she'd refused to let herself beg for their help. Laurence had stayed with her for a week but then she'd sent him back to his apartment in Swords.
'I'm the mother and you're the child,' she'd told him firmly. 'It's not your job to mind me. I've got to get on with it myself.'
By the same token, Dominic and Sally deserved to spend Christmas any way they liked without worrying about her. Besides, she felt even more wretched than ever when the kids were tiptoeing around her. The joy of having them to stay was overwhelmed with the sense that Bill should be there too, which was just too painful.
At least when she was on her own she could deal with her grief on the bad days. If that meant spending the entire day crying with her face as red and raw as beetroot, then she was free to do just that. When there were other people around, pride made her stifle the tears.
Virginia changed the subject. 'I've just come back from a long walk and I'm looking forward to having a hot bath and curling up with my new book.' This wasn't entirely true. Virginia hoped that a hot bath would ease her aches but she couldn't cope with reading any more. Her favourite novels just made her cry at their memories of happier times. She managed the newspaper and that was it. Even the crossword reminded her of Bill asking for help with eight across.
'It's great that you're walking again,' said Sally. 'Is your hip bothering you much?'
'Not at all,' lied Virginia. 'There are some very pretty walks around here. The village is lovely. You'll have to come and stay. In the summer,' she added rapidly, in case she sounded all needy again.
'We can come ...' Sally began.
'Sally love, I need this time alone,' Virginia interrupted. 'I really do. Please make Dominic see that, you know I can't tell him myself.'

'I know. He only wants to help,' Sally said quietly. 'We all do.'
Virginia shrugged. 'Nobody can help me but myself.'

CHAPTER FIVE

Nicole Turner looked as if she was working - for once. Her dark head was bent over her desk and there was no telltale grin on her impish face which would have been a sure sign that she was telling jokes with her next-door neighbour, the equally feckless Sharon Wilson.
From her position at the top of the room, Ms Sinclair, claims department supervisor, narrowed her eyes as she looked at the bane of her life. Nicole Turner could look demure and hardworking even when she was secretly planning some prank that would cause uproar in the busiest department of the London headquarters of Copperplate Insurance. Like that time she'd rigged the big clock behind Ms Sinclair's desk so it was half an hour early, meaning that everyone left for lunch at half twelve instead of one.
Naturally, Nicole had switched the clock back during lunchtime, so that when everyone arrived back at two, they'd actually had an hour and a half for lunch. In Ms Sinclair's eyes, this was a sacking offence but she had no proof that Nicole was responsible so nothing could be done. And the section head pointed out that Nicole's work was always excellent, so there were no grounds for firing her.
You had to watch her all the time, Ms Sinclair decided darkly. It was a task she relished.
At her desk at the back of the room, Sharon Wilson's phone rang and she picked it up.
'Hello, claims department,' she trilled.
'Is that old bitch still watching me like a hawk?' asked Nicole, who was less than three feet away but who knew

that clerical staff talking without actually being attached to their phones were in for a big black mark from Ms Sinclair.
Sharon peeked up the room. 'Yes. Actually, she's really staring at you now.'
'Shit.'
Out of the corner of her eye, Sharon could see Nicole stand up and search through some files on her desk, her brow furrowed as if she'd been asked a sticky question by a customer and needed to check it out. Nicole located the big Copperplate Insurance manual and sighed theatrically as though her greatest wish in the entire world had been granted because she'd found the manual. She flicked through the pages and stopped in the middle.
'Ms Wilson,' she said now in her best placate-the- customer voice, 'I'm afraid we won't be able to cover your claim for the deer running out onto the road and flattening your Mini Cooper .. .'
Sharon giggled and had to hide behind her computer so nobody could see her.
'You see, Ms Wilson, we happen to know that you were down the Three Crowns public house on the night in question and had seventeen pints of best bitter, before you climbed into the driver's seat and drove home, with your boyfriend in the seat behind you attempting to remove your brassiere; a feat not recommended in the Rules of the Road handbook. Therefore, we feel unable to cough up the twenty- seven thousand pounds you feel entitled to. We will be, however, paying for plastic surgery for the deer, alright?'
Sharon giggled some more.
'Seriously.' Nicole had switched into her normal voice although to any onlooker, her expression was as grave as if she was on company business. 'I've just got an e-mail from my pal Bacardi King. One of his friends is getting married and the stag party's in the Red Parrot tonight and if you're interested, we can go.'
'To a stag party on a Thursday?' said Sharon dubiously.
Nicole allowed herself to smile. 'Ms SinFreeZoneClair

isn't in tomorrow so we can be as hungover as skunks and nobody will mind. And all Bacardi's female friends are going. Having men only at stags is very old fashioned.'
'OK,' said Sharon, who adored Nicole and who felt that in the three years she'd worked with her, her own social life had improved no end. Nicole hung up and returned to her email.

'Hi B-King, love to hit Red Parrot with u. Is dressing up part of plan? Haven't dressed up since I went to hallowe'en night party as a mummy - all rolled up in loo roll taken from the last pub. The bouncers in the night-club didn't see the funny side of it, for some reason. Said I could be charged with robbing loo paper! No sense of humour. See u at 8.
Nicole.

Thursdays were perfect for going out. Her gran came over on a Thursday, so Nicole didn't have to worry about who was going to be babysitting five-year-old Pammy.
At six o'clock on the nail, Nicole got up from her desk, dragged her backpack from underneath it and stalked off to the loos on her gravity-defying knee-high boots, regardless of the fierce glares from Ms Sinclair.
Sharon watched her friend enviously. Nicole just didn't care about what people thought. Nicole never got embarrassed when she went to buy her round and found she didn't have enough cash, and she'd just laughed the day they'd been running for the bus and she fell into a puddle of water, with at least thirty people watching. Sharon would have been puce with embarrassment. Nicole groaned good humouredly because the entire front of her skintight jeans were damp.
'I'll look like I wet myself,' she said, 'and we haven't even had a drink yet!'
At five past six, having delayed for a few minutes because that way, it looked as if she was so engrossed in her work that she hadn't noticed the time, Sharon gave her desk a

cursory bit of tidying and rushed to the loos. Nicole was
there, having a forbidden cigarette before she put on the
minuscule amount of make-up she wore.
That was another reason to be jealous of her best friend,
Sharon thought with a resigned sigh as she compared their
reflections in the mirror. Nicole was so beautiful. Her cafe
au kit skin glowed no matter how exhausted she was, and
the tigerish amber eyes with their feline tilt at the outer
edges dominated her triangular little face. Her concession
to make-up was lots of glossy lipstick because her mouth,
inherited from her mother instead of from her Indian father,
was on the small side.
Her hair was her one vanity: she spent a fortune on conditioning
treatments and shine products and it hung in a
long, glossy curtain down her back. Even her body obeyed
her. Tall, and slender as a reed, she had fantastic legs that
looked scarily long in the black PVC mini-skirt she'd just
changed into.
But Nicole was just about the best friend in the entire
universe, which meant you couldn't be jealous of her.
'Want a fag?' Nicole asked now in her husky voice.
Sharon took one, lit it and went into a cubicle to pee.
They weren't supposed to smoke in the loos but if Nicole
could do it, so could she.
'Are you up for karaoke tonight?' Nicole said, pulling off
her cream work jumper and wriggling into a small pink
T-shirt with glittery stars emblazoned all over the front.
From behind the toilet door, Sharon groaned. 'You know
I can't sing and I'm not making a fool of myself in front of
all those guys at the stag night.'
'Oh come on,' Nicole begged. She needed someone to get
up and sing with her or she'd feel stupid doing it. She hated
show offs. Nicole adored singing and had been exercising
her raw husky voice in private since she'd been a child. She
often wrote her own songs but it was only for fun. Singing
publicly was another matter. There was nothing worse than
people who thought they were Kiri Te Kanawa getting up

at family parties and sounding like a collection of drunken
crows. Nicole couldn't bear that. But since, at the age of
fifteen, she'd sneaked into the local pub for an illegal drink
and discovered karaoke, she'd loved it. While the other
people she partied with thought that the sing-a-long part of
an evening was just drunken fun, for Nicole, it was the best
bit. She adored singing to Tina Turner and Whitney Houston
tracks and loved having her pals waving their beer bottles
up at her happily as they hummed along and cheered. But
you had to get someone to get up there with you in the first
place, Nicole felt. Otherwise you looked like a stupid show
off.

'Ready?' she asked Sharon.

'Just a minute,' said Sharon, struggling with mascara that
promised lashes like Cindy Crawford's.

'Right. I'll phone my mum,' Nicole replied. Using the
office phone saved her from spending too much on the
mobile.

She slipped back into the office where Ms Sinclair was
still at her desk tidying up. Nicole immediately crouched
down and crept along behind the desks until she reached
her own. She took the phone down and wriggled into the
space underneath where she'd be safe from detection. Sinclair
would kill her for using the phone for personal purposes.
At least during office hours, you could always pretend
you were on a work call. It was annoying that Sinclair hated
her so much. It wasn't that Nicole didn't work hard: she
did. But Sinclair didn't understand that Nicole could finish
her work more quickly than most people in the department,
and then she got bored. She couldn't help the practical jokes,
they helped pass the time.

Her mother answered on the first ring. 'Hello love,' she
said to Nicole's whispered hello.

'Hi Mum,' hissed Nicole.

'I can't hear you,' said Sandra Turner in her soft, breathy
voice. 'Speak up love.'

'I can't,' hissed Nicole. 'I'm at work.'


'Oh yes,' said Sandra vaguely. There was a pause.
There were always pauses in conversations with Nicole's
mother.
'I'm going out for a bit tonight, Mum. That's OK, isn't
it. I know you've got Bingo but Gran's coming over for a
few hours, isn't she?'
'I suppose. She didn't phone.'
Another pause.
'Shall I check if she's coming over, Mum?' Nicole volunteered.
'We can't leave Pammy on her own and she hates
bingo.'
'OK. You do that. Oh, the doorbell. I'll get it.'
Nicole heard the phone drop and then her grandmother's
voice with the strong accent that was a strange hybrid of
Cockney and Irish even after fifty years in London. A few
minutes passed before her mother picked up the phone again.
'Your gran's here so I'm going out. See you later.'
She hung up before Nicole even had a chance to speak
to her grandmother to ask what time she was staying until.
Slowly, Nicole put down the receiver. She was glad her
grandmother was there: it gave her a chance to have a night
out without worrying about Pammy. She needed someone
looking after her and sometimes, even though Nicole hated
to admit it, her mother wasn't up to it.
She crept back the same route to the office door where
Sharon was waiting for her, all done up now and reeking
of Eternity.
'Let's hit the pub, babes,' Nicole said brightly.

The Red Parrot in Camden was not Dickie Vernon's idea of
a nice venue. It was a young people's pub for a start, full of
computer games, with lots of different coloured condoms in
the dispenser in the loos and very loud karaoke. But in his
job as a talent scout, Dickie had been in lots of headache
inducing places. Not that he ever said he was a talent scout.
No, he was a manager, or so he told people to impress them.
It was a great pity that his greatest find, the golden-voiced

Missy McLoughlin, hadn't had the balls for the music
business. She was something else that girl. If she'd made it,
he'd have been home and dry for life. Fifteen per cent of
millions, he'd been sure of it. No more sitting around horrible
old clubs looking for the next Celine Dion. The independent
record label had been so interested until he'd got
greedy and asked for more money. He wouldn't make that
mistake again. When they backed off at his increasingly outrageous
demands, Missy's nerve had failed her and she was
now the proud mother of a toddler, lived in an Aberdeen
semi and sang at weddings and funerals.

Dickie was back to managing the Val Brothers, a barber
shop quartet, and taking care of the affairs of a country and
western girl singer whose only resemblance to the successful
Nashville ladies was her big, blonde hair. Anyone listening
to her murdering 'Jolene' would immediately start looking
for cotton wool for their ears. Still, she looked the part and
that was half the battle, wasn't it?

His trip to the Red Parrot was to meet up with a small
record shop owner who was going to introduce him to a
teenage rock band who were all still at school. The record
shop guy was late and Dickie, bored rigid now he'd done
the crossword in the Daily Star, was sinking whiskies. The
karaoke machine was switched on and two drunk rugby
playing types were howling their way through 'Purple Haze'.
Jimi Hendrix would turn in his grave, Dickie thought.

It was definitely a stag party. There were around thirty
lads, all plastered, and one with a blow up rubber doll on
his lap. The stag himself, stupid git. Dickie looked away and
ordered another whisky. It was half nine, he'd give the record
shop owner another half an hour and he was gone.

He blanked out the dreadful singing from the stag night
people who were performing one dreadful rendition after
another. A curvaceous brunette wearing spray-on jeans and
a clingy red top sat at the table next to his. Dickie admired
the way her small waist made her bum look curvier. She
turned round and smiled at him. Dickie smiled back, giving


her the full works, gleaming capped teeth and the Jack the
lad cheeky grin that had been working since he was fifteen,
a good twenty-five years before. The brunette winked at him.
He might stay a bit longer after all.
The strains of the old Al Green hit, 'Let's Stay Together',
drifted out from the karaoke machine and Dickie didn't
notice. He was considering asking the brunette if she wanted
a drink when the vocals started. Two voices were singing,
one flat and terrible, the other husky and rich. The husky
voice penetrated the room, soaring above the music.
Dickie stared, the brunette forgotten. There, on the Red
Parrot dais, stood a tall dark-skinned girl belting out this
incredible noise. She was young, maybe twenty. But that
voice: throaty and full of age, experience and sex. She sang
like a world-weary divorcee who'd had it up to here with
drink, drugs and men. Life in the very fast lane. If he hadn't
seen her for himself, Dickie would have sworn blind the
singer was at least forty and a chain smoker with tired, hard
eyes. Her voice resonated with experience, sex, excitement
and power.
And incredibly, it was coming from a young, slim girl
with an unlined little face that reminded him of a cat's,
slanting eyes and a profile like an Indian princess. Watching
that tiny little face transported as she sang, Dickie felt the
hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He'd found her. His
star. His ticket out of here.
'I haven't seen you here before,' said the brunette flirtatiously.
'Wouldn't
be seen dead here normally,' Dickie said flatly
and went back to watching Nicole Turner. The brunette
flounced off.
When the song ended, the audience applauded loudly and
Nicole and Sharon bowed happily.
'Sing another one,' roared Bacardi King.
'You sing on your own, Nicole,' urged Sharon. 'You're
so much better than me.'
'No,' insisted Nicole. 'You've got to stay.'

Normally, the sound of 'The Power of Love' at a karaoke
session promised the sort of drunken howling that put you
in mind of dogs at the full moon but not the way Nicole
sang it. Dickie smiled beatifically as her lovely voice reached
every high note, swelling where the song demanded it and
fading down to gentleness at exactly the right moments. He
watched her, mesmerized. He had to talk to her.

She was perfect, made to be a star. But he'd had too much
to drink and probably looked more than a little worse for
wear. He'd just hit the men's loos for a minute and make
himself respectable, then he'd approach her. After all, who'd
believe he was a top-flight manager if he looked seedy and
pissed. It would only take a minute.


Nicole flopped onto a seat and fanned herself with the cocktail
menu. She felt exhilarated and tired. Now that the fun
of the evening was over, she thought she might go home.
Duty called, the way it always did. It was half ten and Gran
liked to be in her own bed by eleven, come what may. Who
knew if Mum was home yet.

The stag night boys were playing a drunken party game
that involved discussing your wildest dreams.

Nicole was beside the groom-to-be, who was now wearing
a pirate's hat and eye patch. The blow up doll was sitting
on his other side and had a pair of black lacy knickers on
her head. The stag put an arm around Nicole and grinned
drunkenly at her. With her little cat's face glowing from the
lights and her eyes glittering from her singing triumph, she
looked stunning.

'What would you really want if you could have anything
in the whole world?' he said, pulling Nicole closer to him
and breathing in the scent of her hot, slender body, a musky
scent mingled with Sharon's Eternity.

Nicole smiled wryly. She knew what he was thinking: the
stag wasn't ready for the night to end yet. He was getting
married in two days and yearned for one last wild fling to
finish off his days of bachelorhood. Nicole was mildly


amused that he'd even dreamed that she'd be up for it. He
absolutely wasn't her type and he was roaringly drunk. What
a plonker.
'Go on,' he crooned, obviously thinking he was onto a
good thing. 'What would you like?'
'I'd love a place of my own,' she said suddenly. 'My own
flat where I could come and go as I liked and didn't need
to be there for anyone, total freedom.'
'Wayhay!' roared the groom. 'I've got my own place and
we could go back there now, I've got drink and everything
. ..'
'That's not what I meant, you toe rag,' Nicole said, calmly
emptying the remains of her beer all over him. She'd had
enough to drink.
He squealed with horror and Nicole daintily leaped up
from the seat beside him, blew him a kiss and then tapped
Sharon on the arm. 'I'm outta here,' she said, ignoring the
furiously mouthing groom.
Dickie Vernon came out of the men's room, looking much
more together, much more like a successful manager of
incredible talent. Thank God they still sold those mini toothbrush
and toothpaste combos in toilet dispensers. Slicking
back his dark hair, he made his way over to the stag party
and looked around for the young, dark girl. But she was
gone.

Nicole locked the front door and pulled over the curtain
that kept the draught from blowing straight up the stairs.
12a Belton Gardens was a great place for draughts. Sometimes,
the winter wind whistled from the front door right
through the flat and out the back door again, making the
kitchen and the narrow hall no-go areas. Nicole had tried
draught excluder but it kept falling off so she'd bought a
big curtain for over the front door instead. If only her mother
would remember to draw it.
She walked into the small cosy sitting room where her
mother was sitting on the old flowery couch wrapped up in a

tartan blanket and watching a late night film. A mug of tea sat
in front of her and she had a bowl of popcorn on her lap.

'Hello love,' she said, not taking her eyes off the screen.

'Hi Mum,' Nicole said, sitting on the faded pink armchair
beside the fire. Her mother's collection of china pigs glared
down at her from the mantelpiece, alongside several scented
candles which Nicole was always in mortal terror would set
the place alight.

Her mother kept chewing popcorn. Nicole picked up the TV guide to see what was on. It was a 1970s Goldie Hawn
film. Her mother loved Goldie Hawn. With her baby-soft
blonde hair and sweet, faded smile, she liked to think she
looked like Goldie too. Only in Sandra's case, the kookiness
wasn't an act. Sandra Turner was kind, terribly naive and
possessed of a vague dizziness that made her utterly unsuited
to dealing with normal life. She felt helpless around domestic
problems or money matters, hated confrontation of any kind
and was addicted to the herbal tablets she took for her
nerves. Men, especially, adored her helpless female act, until
they discovered it wasn't an act.

If Nicole didn't do the grocery shopping and make sure
that the bills were paid on time, the small Turner family
would never have survived. Not that Nicole ever complained.
Fiercely protective of her lovely, dizzy mother, she
wouldn't let anyone say a word against her. There may have
been just the three of them but they were still a family and
Nicole dared anyone to say otherwise. She knew that it had
been hard for her mother to rear her on her own and that
many men over the years had steered clear of dating a single
mother. Sandra's one chance at happiness had been with
Pammy's father. He'd been a nice man, Nicole remembered.
But it had somehow gone wrong and the Turner girls were
on their own again.

The film cut to a commercial break and Sandra Turner
came to life.

'Have a nice evening, love?' she asked, turning to her
daughter.


'Lovely, Mum. How about you? Did you win?'

Her mother's face scrunched up into an irresistible grin:
'100, love!' she said jubilantly. 'I'm going to get my hair
permed and buy new shoes. They've got lovely ones down
the market, just like Versace but they're not the real thing.'

'Good for you, Mum,' Nicole cheered, mentally chocking
up some more overtime. They were late paying the electricity
bill.

She watched a bit of Goldie and then decided to go to
bed.

'I'm knackered, Mum,' she said, leaning over to give her
mother a kiss. 'I suppose Gran's asleep in my bed?'

Her mother bit her lip, like a small child asking forgiveness.
'I was a bit late and you know she hates getting a
cab home after eleven. You can sleep with me,' she added
eagerly.

Nicole checked the kitchen to make sure everything was
switched off then climbed the stairs. She passed her own
tiny bedroom and went into Pammy's. Barbie predominated.
There wasn't any bit of Barbie equipment that Nicole hadn't
bought her little half-sister. Quiet as a mouse, she peered
down at her fondly. In sleep, Pammy looked even more
angelic than she did awake. Her tousled white-blonde hair
stuck up at all angles and her soft, babyish cheeks were
plump and innocent. She was only five and Nicole completely
adored her. She thought guiltily back to what she'd
said to the drunken groom in the pub: yes, she'd love a place
of her own, somewhere she could be utterly on her own and
not responsible for any other human being. But she'd miss
little Pammy so much. And her mum. No matter what her
gran said about Sandra being a few sandwiches short of a
picnic, she was a good mum and she did her best. She was
Nicole's responsibility and that was that.


Pammy woke Nicole up at half six by climbing into the small
double bed and bouncing up and down. Sandra moved just
enough to pull the duvet closer around her neck.


'Nicole, wake up!' sang Pammy before she started trying
to tickle her big sister under the arms.

'C'mere, brat,' she growled in her best tiger voice and
pulled Pammy's small, squirming body under the covers
where she began to tickle her, much more successfully.

'Lemme go! Lemme go!' squealed Pammy delightedly as
she tried to wriggle away.

'No, the tiger has got you!' growled Nicole. 'Grrr, grrrr,
I love yummy little girls in the morning . . . I'm hungry,
grrrr. . .'

After a bit more growling, she let Pammy go and then
swung her legs out of the bed, shivering in the coolness of
the bedroom. She pulled on her mother's dressing gown and
went downstairs with Pammy to get her breakfast.

By seven forty-five, they were both fed, dressed and ready
to leave the house. Nicole took a speedy cup of tea up to
her grandmother.

'Thanks love,' said Reenie Turner, sitting up in Nicole's
bed. 'You're a good girl.'

'Sorry I didn't see you last night, Gran,' Nicole said. 'But
I'll see you on Sunday. Don't forget to wake Mum before
you go. She's due at work by ten today.'

She ignored her grandmother's snort of disapproval.
Despite being mother and daughter Sandra and Reenie
Turner were like chalk and cheese. Keeping the peace
between them was a full time job. Reenie disapproved of
Sandra's part-time job as a manicurist and the way that
Nicole took care of Pammy as though she were her mother.
And Sandra hated Reenie's comments about her occasional
men friends.

'Once in a blue moon I meet a nice man for a drink, once
in a blue moon, that's all. Just because I've got kids doesn't
mean I have to live like a nun, you know,' she'd snap.

'Fat chance of that,' Reenie would sniff unfairly.

Nicole hated her grandmother criticizing Sandra. For all
that her mother was dizzy, she'd worked hard to bring her
and Pammy up and hadn't so much as dated a man when


Nicole was a kid. It was only when Nicole was a bit of a
teenage tearaway that Sandra had met Pammy's father.
Pammy danced along the wet footpath with Nicole, singing
tunelessly to herself. She'd settled incredibly well at
St Matthews, for which Nicole was grateful. Apart from the
first day when her lower lip had wobbled when Nicole finally
left her in the capable hands of Miss Vishnu, she'd run
happily into school ever since. Miss Vishnu was very young
and sweet and the children appeared to love her.
Once Pammy was dispatched into school with her Pokemon
lunchbox, Nicole had to rush to the bus stop to catch
the five to eight. She had to stand for nine stops but finally
got a seat on the top deck where she could sit and listen to
her CD Walkman as West London rolled by.
She enjoyed those moments to herself on the bus or tube,
even if she was surrounded by people. There was still a
solitariness to it that she liked: listening to music and not
having to talk to anybody.

Copperplate buzzed with the usual Friday morning excitement
of 'only a few more hours and it's the weekend!' In
the canteen, plans were being made for lunchtime shopping
expeditions for new clothes and discussions were going on
about what everyone was doing that night. Top Shop had
a sale and there was great enthusiasm for butterfly tops like
one Jennifer Lopez wore which were reduced to twenty quid.
Nicole bought a cup of tea and sat in the smoking section
of the canteen. She flicked through a paper that someone
had left on the seat beside her, scanning the news rapidly before reaching the horoscopes. Leos were in for a good
day, she read. Be prepared for breathtaking news to hit you.
How you react could be very important but remember not
to do anything rash.
Breathtaking news could mean she got the sack, Nicole
thought, lighting up another fag even though she didn't
really want it. Sharon appeared at the canteen door, face lit
up with excitement.


'You'll never guess!' she yelled at Nicole as she ran over
to the table.

'We've been given a day off?' Nicole suggested. 'Ms Sinclair
Bitch has been run over by a truck? You're engaged to
Leonardo DiCaprio?'

Sharon slid into the seat beside her friend and passed a
small, rather grubby card over to her. 'Better than that,' she
smirked.

'Dickie Vernon, manager,' Nicole read. 'What's this
mean?'

Sharon beamed. 'He heard you sing last night in the
Parrot. He's a top class band manager. He told me about
some huge band he managed but I can't remember which
one. Anyway, he wants you!' Sharon could barely contain
herself. 'He thinks you've a wonderful voice and you could
be a pop star! Imagine it.'

Nicole laughed. 'This is mad, this is. Just have a look at
my horoscope. It says I better not do anything rash.'

'Rash?' demanded Sharon looking up from what the day
foretold for Geminis. 'They'll never let you on Top of the
Pops with a rash.'


Nicole had never felt so nervous in her whole life. Her hands
were actually shaking as she peeled the cellophane from the
cigarette packet. She'd better get a grip or she'd sound like
one of those dolls who stutter 'Mama' when their string is
pulled. Taking a huge drag of Rothmans, she let the nicotine
enter her system and give her the hit. The drug did its thing.
Great. She sagged a little in her new high leather boots and
leaned against the wall as her body relaxed. Then she jerked
away: this place was such a dump. Who knew when it had
last been cleaned. You'd probably get rabies from just leaning
against the scummy wall.

From the way Dickie had spoken about the small recording
studio owned by a friend, Nicole had been under the
impression that she was practically going to Abbey Road.
Instead, she was in a dingy old premises in Guildford with


a warren of rooms and a studio that looked as if it hadn't
been used since the sixties. And the equipment looked even
older, like stuff from the Antiques Roadshow.

The man who owned it seemed nice enough, though: a
skinny old guy who wasn't exactly threatening, which was
good. Nicole had been a bit nervous about going there on
her own with Dickie.

'What if they're rapists who just use this "you could be
a singer" line to get you on your own?' Sharon had protested.
'I'll go with you; you need moral support.'

But Nicole had insisted she went to the studio on her
own. 'If we both take a sickie on Tuesday, Sinclair is going
to figure something's going on. She's not that stupid,' Nicole
pointed out. 'I'll be fine. I'll take my army penknife just in
case.'

'I thought the actual knife fell off,' Sharon said suspiciously.
'I'll
stab them to death with the bottle-opener bit,' Nicole
retorted.

She had the penknife in her bag but she didn't think she
was going to need it. Dickie may have looked like a total
sleazoid but he seemed genuinely only interested in her
singing ability.

'You shouldn't be smoking,' he'd said, scandalized, the
first time he'd seen Nicole light up, the seventh of her twenty
a day.

'Who the hell are you? My bleedin' mother?' she demanded.
'It's
bad for your voice. No top singer would ever smoke,'
Dickie said.

Tough bananas, Nicole thought, stubbing out one cigarette
and extracting another from the packet. She needed to
smoke. She'd never be able to sing otherwise. She had the
words and music to one Whitney Houston song ready not
that she could read music, but it looked good.

Dickie came back into the studio. 'Everything's ready to
go,' he said breezily. 'Just one more thing.' He casually held


a piece of paper out to Nicole. 'You just need to sign this,
love. To make it all legal and formal, you know.' He held
out a pen with the other hand.

The corner of Nicole's mouth twitched. Did this guy really
think she was that dumb? Just because she'd taken a chance
by going to a studio with him, he couldn't honestly think
she would blindly sign a bit of paper that would undoubtedly
give him rights over her and her unborn children for the rest
of her life?

She gave him her Bambi look, the one where she widened
her eyes and blinked slowly, as if blinking quickly was too
much of a mental strain. 'Sign this?' she repeated.

Dickie nodded, more confident now.

'I don't know,' Nicole said, still in Bambi mode.

'It's legal stuff, nothing to worry about,' Dickie urged.

Nicole took the paper and skimmed over it. What did
Dickie think she did at Copperplate Insurance: make the
tea? She may have been on the bottom rung of the office
ladder but she still spent enough time dealing with insurance
claims to know about the law. Plus, she could probably
work out percentages more quickly than Dickie could and
fifty per cent was a bit steep in her opinion. All at once, she
decided that it had been a mistake to come here. If she
wanted to be a singer, she'd have to approach it another way.
She folded the piece of paper up and stuck it in her handbag,
while Dickie stared at her openmouthed.

'Wha . . . ?' he started to say.

'I'd never sign anything without getting a lawyer to look
at it,' Nicole said with an impish grin. 'And I think that
asking someone to sign something without explaining what
they're signing, is described as "sharp practice".'

She waved at the skinny guy behind the glass plate.
'Thanks but no thanks.'

'You can't do this!' roared Dickie as the penny dropped.
'You can't walk out like this. I've invested time and money
in you, I've talked you up.'

Nicole gave him a wry look and headed for the door.


'I've got people interested in you, you stupid little black
bitch,' he shouted.
That did it. He'd been fine until he'd called her that. How
dare he? She was proud of her Indian heritage and her
colour, not that she knew much about India really, but she
was proud of it anyway. Rage coursing in every vein, Nicole
whirled round. She wanted to hit him but pride stopped her. He could behave like scum from the gutter but she wouldn't.
'When I'm famous, Dickie, I hope you'll remember that
you could have been a part of it.' She gazed at him superciliously.
'Except you got too greedy. And I will be famous, I
promise you.' With that, she left, her long silky hair flying
as she strode out of the building.
She would be famous. She knew it in her bones. Dickie
had done one good thing for her: he'd shown her that she
wanted to make it as a singer. She'd been hiding from it for
years but he'd helped her see that she could do it - and that
she wanted to. She owed him that. Maybe she'd send him
a ticket for her first gig.

Sharon was furious. 'The scumbag,' she raged. 'I knew he
was trouble. I'll go round and kill him meself. No, I'll get
my brother to do it.'
'Don't waste your time,' Nicole said. 'No, what I need
you to do is help me with some research. I need to make a
demo tape and I want to know where I can do it cheaply.
Secondly, I've got to find out who to send it to. Put your
thinking cap on, Shazz. Between the pair of us, we must
know somebody who can help.'

Sharon's second cousin's flatmate knew a studio engineer
who wouldn't mind a bit of moonlighting as a one-off. He
knew who to send demos to but warned Sharon that record
companies got zillions of tapes every year. 'They probably
file them in the black plastic filing cabinet,' he said.
Nicole shrugged. 'I'll take that chance.'
The cheapest studio time for recording sessions was in

the middle of the night, so at two a.m. two weeks later,
Nicole, Sharon and Sharon's second cousin, Elaine, lined
up in Si-borg Studios. The engineer had drummed up four
musicians to play along with her and, to hide her nerves,
Nicole whispered to Sharon that the musicians mustn't be
much good if they were prepared to play in the middle of
the night for damn all money. The money was from Nicole's
building society account and she still felt anxious every time
she thought of spending it on something so ephemeral.

'Shut up,' hissed Tommy, the engineer, 'or they'll all go
home. They're not that desperate.'

Embarrassed, Nicole lit up. Nobody looked askance at
her. At Si-borg, it was the people who didn't smoke who
looked out of place. The musicians, engineer and even the
receptionist all puffed madly so the entire premises was fuggy
with smoke and the walls were stained a cloudy vanilla
thanks to years of late-night Marlboro sessions.

The first hour was hell for Nicole. Used to launching into
a song as soon as the karaoke machine played it or singing
her own compositions alone in her bedroom, she found it
impossible to stop and start as the real musicians warmed
up by snapping strings, getting riffs wrong and grumbling
about unfamiliar songs.

'What's wrong with them?' she whispered to Tommy as
they took a break, mindful of keeping her voice down in
case the musicians walked out.

'Whitney Houston and Sade are not their thing,' he
grinned. 'If you wanted to launch into something by the
Manic Street Preachers, these would be your men.'

'Charming.' Nicole stomped off to the loo. She leaned
her head against the mirror and closed her eyes wearily. This
wasn't working out as planned. She'd taken Tommy's advice
and had gone for covering other people's songs instead of
her own ones because he said her voice was the main thing
and the demo would have greater impact that way.

She'd been so excited at the thought of working with real
musicians and had had visions of herself belting out flawless


hit after hit with everyone in the studio watching her in
admiration.
Instead, all she had was a sore throat from the combination
of singing and smoking too much, and she really
wished she hadn't worn those ultra tight pink snakeskin
jeans and high-heeled boots. She felt bloated because she
was pre-menstrual and the waistband of the jeans was cutting
into her flesh like cheese wire. Why was she doing this?
She must have been mad. Just because she could hold a note
didn't make her Mariah Carey. Would it be awful if she told
them all to go home because she couldn't keep going?
'Nicole!' said Sharon, dancing into the grimy loo clutching
a can of beer and a roll-up that Nicole would swear was
filled with more than just tobacco. 'Isn't it exciting? God,
they love you. I just overheard the bass player telling Tommy
that you had a fantastic voice and wondering if you needed
a band?'
Nicole stood up straight and blinked tiredly. The harsh
fluorescent light hurt her eyes: they were red-rimmed with
tiredness, no matter how much kohl she'd painted around
them.
'They said what?'
'That you're marvellous! That you've got "star quality",'
Sharon said happily. 'Well, I could have told them that but
it's good that they think so, don't you think?' She prattled
away about the bass player and how he'd said that Nicole
was 'mega'.
Nicole half listened and stared at her reflection in the
mirror. Underneath the tired face and the weary eyes, there
was a certain radiance. She smiled and the radiance shone
out at her, bypassing the tiredness instantly. Star quality,
huh?
'Have you got any of that bright red lipstick on you,
Sharon?' she asked. 'I left my bag downstairs and I look like
death warmed up.'
Sharon rummaged around in a handbag the size of Santa's
toy sack and found the lipstick in question.

With a slightly shaking hand, Nicole applied a thick buttery
layer. On her dark little face with her eyes glowing like
jet, the rich crimson looked incredible. Sexy and mysterious
at the same time. Nicole pouted theatrically at herself. 'Let's
go get 'em,' she said with a huge grin.




CHAPTER SIX

Millie's roars could be heard in three counties at least.
'Don't want to be in the car!' she bellowed, her small
face screwed up with anger and rage.
'Neither do I,' muttered Hope tight-lipped as she negotiated
the hire car along the winding road, oblivious to the
wind and rain swept scenery they were passing by. When the
plane had banked before it arrived in Kerry's airport, Hope
had done her best to peer out the window and see what sort
of fabled, emerald isle she was landing on, but Toby had
chosen that moment to grizzle miserably at the jerking motion
of the aircraft, so she'd dragged her eyes away from the slightly
bleak looking patchwork fields and comforted him. Now the
rain was lashing down, giving the whole place a dismal air
that was at odds with Matt's description of it.
'I remember sitting with Gearoid on the steps in the sun,
him with a bottle of Guinness, the sound of the bees droning
around us and the smell of hay being cut in the fields nearby.
Everything was rich greens and soft golds . . .'
They must both have been drinking Guinness, Hope
reflected, because there was nothing sunny or golden about
the modern version of Kerry, even allowing for the fact that
it was a blisteringly cold November day. Any bees buzzing
around would have been drowned in the downpour.
This was not what she'd hoped for. Definitely not.
'It's going to be fabulous,' Dan had said enthusiastically
at the Parkers' leaving do in the Three Carpenters two days
before Matt's departure. 'The way Matt has described Ireland
to me makes it sound magical.'

'We all envy you so much,' said a swaying Betsey, who'd
come from a publicity launch in London for a new perfume
and was half-plastered on free champagne, not to mention
reeking of free scent. 'You'll have a blast.'

Hope, still exhausted from the stress of packing up the
house and the misery of having to hand in her notice in the
building society, sincerely hoped she would, although she felt
that a week in a health farm was probably what she needed
to relax her.

'You will keep in touch, won't you?' begged Yvonne, who
was unexpectedly tearful at the thought of Hope leaving.
'I'll miss you, you know.'

Hope hugged her. ' 'Course I will. I'll be back in no time
at all. And you can come and visit us. Matt tells me it's a
beautiful place.'

He'd talked longingly of sitting on the coast on the Beara
Peninsula looking over the rugged Atlantic, listening to the
sound of the curlews as you created perfect prose. And he'd
told her how Redlion nestled in a valley that protected it
from the cruel winds that blew in off the sea. 'Idyllic' had
been his word for it.

It didn't seem very idyllic at the moment, though. Hope
began to think that the original idea of Matt driving her
Metro via the ferry to Ireland ten days earlier to get the
cottage shipshape hadn't been such a good idea. Travelling
with the children was always a nightmare and she could
have done with some help. It would also have been nice to
have some reassurance that it didn't rain all the time and
that this downpour was unusual she hoped.

But Matt had insisted that someone had to do some work
on the cottage because the lawyer had mentioned it was a
bit 'uncared for.' And he'd also been keen to meet the artistic
community people he'd been corresponding with, in relation
to working in their centre, as soon as possible.

Hope tried to concentrate on the road, which wasn't easy
with Millie yelling. Their progress since landing had been
slow to say the least. Just when Hope was panicking about


being stranded without their luggage, her five suitcases had
finally turned up. Battling through the small but incredibly
crowded airport with two fractious children, she'd picked
up the sturdy four-wheel drive vehicle she'd booked in
advance and had just managed to hump all their cases into
it without giving herself a hernia when Millie decided to
throw a tantrum.
A visit to the ladies, bribery involving biscuits and juice,
and the purchase of a cuddly bear in an Aran sweater
had all been useless. Millie had decided she was not in a
good mood, wailing so hysterically that a cluster of little old
ladies disembarking from a coach at the airport doors had
looked at Hope as if she was wearing a sign saying 'unfit
mother.'
True to form, Millie had yelled and cried at full blast for
the last hour as her harassed mother read the map, worked
out where she was going and made it out past the lunchtime
rush in Killarney. Trying not to mow down pedestrians had
been the biggest problem. People in Killarney just seemed to
walk out in front of the car, not caring that she was a few
feet away from them in a deadly piece of all-terrain vehicle
with bull bars on the front. Did they look right and left
before crossing the road? No, they just threw themselves
blithely into the traffic, hopping over puddles and treating
the passing cars like nuisances. The Irish were all mad, she
decided darkly. She wished Matt had been able to collect
them but as the Metro had burst a gasket and was currently
languishing in the local garage, it made more sense to rent
a car because they'd need transport until the Metro was
fixed.
Toby sat quietly in the back, strapped in carefully. Millie,
feeling liberated because the car seats were coming later,
kept trying to remove her seat belt until Hope had to stop
the car and attach her even more firmly. Outraged at being
unable to move so freely, Millie decided to roar even more.
Finally, Hope could stand it no longer. The rain had
practically stopped and they all needed a bit of fresh air. A

few miles outside Killarney, she stopped the car by a gate
at the side of the road, got out and unhooked the children.

It was windy and there was still a fine mist of rain that
dampened the children's hair immediately, but Millie didn't
care. Delighted to be free, she bounced over to the big rusty
gate, surprising the herd of muddy black and white cows
huddled next to the ditch.

'Cows,' she said as happily as if she'd just discovered a
herd of rare beasts.

Toby clung to his mother nervously. He wasn't keen on
big animals and when he'd been taken to the zoo, he'd
sobbed at the sight of the elephants. Millie, on the other
hand, had had to be restrained from clambering up the
monkey enclosure, waving her ice cream enticingly.

'It's all right, darling,' Hope said now, hoisting Toby onto
her hip and carrying him to the gate. 'They're friendly.'

As if to disprove this point, one of the cows lurched
towards the gate in investigative mode.

Millie squealed with delight and Toby hid his face in
Hope's shoulder, shuddering with fear.

'Mummy, will we have cows?' demanded Millie excitedly.

Hope had absolutely no idea. If cows were included in
the property, Matt hadn't mentioned them. His memory of
Uncle Gearoid's had included a quaint cottage covered with
old fashioned roses and an expanse of wild looking garden
out the front. He'd been a bit woolly on the other details
although the lawyer's letter had mentioned four bedrooms,
a kitchen with a genuine iron range and a bathroom with
an antique claw foot bath. It all sounded lovely, but then,
so did novels about the Middle Ages where nobody mentioned
the pain of not having dentists and how women
routinely died in agonizing childbirth. Hope thought about
her lovely, only-just-paid-for modern freezer and the shower
in their house in Bath where you'd swear you were being
stabbed with millions of exquisite tiny needles when you
turned it on at full blast. She didn't hold out much hope
for a quaint cottage having such a marvellous plumbing



innovation. But then, who knew? Uncle Gearoid could have
been a modern sort of man with a passion for Bang and
Olufsen stereos, giant kitchen equipment with icemakers,
and a Jacuzzi. The unknown was exciting, Matt had said
before he left.
However, on the phone since then, he'd sounded a bit
dreamy and short on facts about things like plumbing and
installing two phone lines for the e-mail so he could correspond
with the office. Men liked the unknown, women
didn't, Hope decided.
'It's so unspoiled,' he'd said the night before over a crackly
phone line. 'You're going to love it.'
Mind you, he'd thought she was going to love the black
lace thong underwear he'd purchased for her birthday on a
trip to Bristol. Sam had insisted that if you wore thongs for
two weeks, you never went back to normal knickers again.
Hope had given up after two days.
Still, they had the house in Bath. If the rural writing retreat
proved too rural, she could always up sticks and bring the
children home. So, they had rented it out for a year but
Hope was sure she'd find a way round that. That's what
lawyers were for.
'Come on,' she said now in bright Mummy-speak. 'Back
to the car, we've got a bit longer to go and then you can
explore our new home!'
The children clambered back into the car and Hope
strapped them in, thankful they'd fallen for her faux enthusiasm.
Back on the road, she admired the scenery and tried
to pretend that it didn't look very bleak. Beautiful, certainly,
with those majestic purple mountains looming in the horizon
and a faint mist covering them like icing sugar rained down
by some heavenly cook. Everywhere was astonishingly green
in the rain but a tad desolate. Not really like the idyllic,
sun-drenched place she'd seen in the Discover Ireland travel
book.
So far, Hope couldn't imagine the sun ever shining in this
remote part of the world. She liked visiting romantically

desolate spots for cosy weekends, enjoying going for a walk
in the woods as long as there was a glorious hotel complete
with log fire in the bar when they got back so they could
roast their wet socks, giggle over a couple of hot ports and
plan what to wear for dinner.
Real life desolation all the time was a different proposition.
The scenery around her looked so ... well, untamed.
The countryside around Bath was green too, but it seemed
more laid out and more normal. Here, the fields were all sizes
with stone walls and briar hedges going off in all directions.
The drivers were all mad too: she'd nearly been forced off
the road by some little old man in a van who could barely
see over the dashboard and at least six flashy new cars had
overtaken her in exasperation on dangerous bits of road,
obviously furious to be behind a hire car going at a respectable
forty miles an hour.
At a tiny crossroads with no signpost at all, she consulted
her map again. If it was to be believed, she had to take the
right turn, follow the road for a few miles and then she'd
come to a town. She drove carefully until she came to the
first signs of habitation.
'Quaint, untouched,' had been Matt's verdict on Redlion,
the small town where their house was situated.
'Really quaint,' Hope thought grimly as she drove into it
a few minutes later.
She had to turn off before she got to the main street,
therefore not seeing all of the place, but on first viewing
with the rain pelting down in a sheet, Matt's quaint town
was anything but. What she could see consisted of a winding
line of terraced houses, one battered pub, a tiny post office,
a convenience shop with security bars that looked capable
of stopping a tank, and a caravan park with its signpost
hanging drunkenly from one corner. Thinking she must be
in the wrong place, because this could hardly be the pretty
place Matt had described, she came to a hump backed
bridge. An elderly green water pump over the bridge signalled
that she was, indeed, in Redlion. Matt had mentioned

both the bridge and the pump and according to him, she
had to take the next left which was a winding road that led
away from the town to her new home. It was official, she
decided: she was now in The Back Of Beyond.

With an increasing sense of doom, Hope drove down a narrow
lane with a grass spine in the middle and big puddles
of mud either side. She felt the same way she'd felt when
she and Sam had gone to big school for the first time: a little
bit excited at the thought of being a big girl, a bit more
excited about her school uniform with the dark blue jumper,
and absolutely terrified at the thought of all those other girls
with their normal families who'd think that she and Sam
were weird having no parents and only a mad old aunt to
pick them up from school.
She rounded a corner, past a giant monkey puzzle tree
that bent out over the lane, and then she saw it. Her new
home.
If the outskirts of Redlion had been given a grievous
battering with the ugly stick, Curlew Cottage had escaped.
Gloriously pretty, it sat snugly in a wilderness of hedges and
beech trees and looked as if it been drawn by an illustrator
who was trying to imagine a home for the Seven Dwarves.
From the small windows with their latticed shutters to the
fat wooden door with black iron fittings, it was adorable.
The pretty climbing rose that Matt had waxed lyrical about
had been cut back and, as it was November, there would
have been no flowers clustering round the door anyway, but
that was the only negative thing she could see. It was a bit
run down but what would you expect from an elderly man
living here on his own for years?
Hope sighed with relief. At that exact moment, an unseen
cockerel loudly proclaimed that this was his territory and
that they better back off. Toby shrieked with fear and Millie
shrieked with delight.
'Let me out Mummy,' she roared, desperate to explore.
The cockerel crowed again.

An attack hen, Hope decided, feeling her sense of humour
return.

The rain had stopped, so she let the kids out, warning
them to stay close. Toby didn't need any telling and clung
to her trouser legs. Millie, on the other hand, raced off after
the cockerel.

'Come back!' yelled Hope nervously with her city-mother
mentality. 'Right now!'

Millie wavered long enough for her mother to grab her
anorak hood. With Millie reined in and wriggling crossly
and Toby sucking his thumb nervously, they made their way
to the front door.

'Where's Daddy?' Millie said with interest.

Good question, Hope thought. She'd hoped he'd be waiting
for them, ready to run out, throw his arms around his
family and say he'd missed them desperately for the past
ten days. She'd been watching too much TV, she reckoned.
Husbands only ran out in thrilled delight on made-for-TV
movies or romantic dramas. They never did it in real life
except when they were famished and you'd just been at the
shops buying food.

She knocked at the front door. No reply. After a moment,
she turned the handle and the door creaked open a fraction.
Should they go in or not? She dithered until an ominous
rumble in the sky signalled an end to the brief interlude of
dry weather.

Rain started pelting down again like a tropical storm.
'Gosh, isn't this exciting,' Hope said gaily to the children as
she pushed the door fully open.

Inside, the adorable cottage scenario went awry. The first
thing to hit Hope was the cold. Still warm from the
steamed-up atmosphere of the car, the cool November air
had barely registered with her at first. Now, standing inside
the cottage she was struck by an arctic sensation. Stone
floors, stone walls and no visible source of heat made for a
combination of bone-chilling damp and cold. In fact, everything
in the cottage looked damp and cold. Instead of the
hand-crafted wooden furniture, lovingly made frilled curtains
and air of sparkling cleanliness she'd prayed for, she
was faced with a big bare room with no curtains at all. The
only furniture was a coffee table and two elderly tweedy
armchairs with disturbing dark, oily patches on the cushions.
Hope held the children's hands more tightly as she gazed
around her in horror. This wasn't fit to live in: it hadn't
been painted for years and was completely filthy. The cobwebs
that festooned the ceiling were the least of her worries.
Matt had made the entire family emigrate and their new
home wasn't a cosy cottage but a dishevelled shed. She
wanted to cry. Her thoughts were broken by the sound of
a car engine and a slamming door.
'Millie, Toby! Sorry I'm late, love. Just got caught up
with the gang!' Matt rushed into the room, hair plastered
down on his forehead, wearing an unfamiliar sludge brown
jacket, mud splattered corduroys, Wellington boots and a
welcoming expression.
He gave Hope a brief warm kiss and then picked a child
up in each arm, hugging them to him.
'Did you miss Daddy?' he demanded.
'Yes,' said Millie huskily, burying her little head lovingly
in his shoulder. 'Lots and lots and this big.' She demonstrated
how much she'd missed him by holding her arms wide.
Hope didn't want to break up this cosy family thing. She
felt like the bitch from Hell about to remind Snow White
that it might not be a good idea to shack up with seven
small men who were looking for a cheap housekeeper, but
it had to be done. Besides which, Matt hadn't thrown his
arms around her.
'Matt,' she said in her everything-in-the-garden-is-rosy
voice so as not to alarm the children, 'we need to talk about
the cottage.'
'Isn't it lovely,' he said. 'So naif.'
'What?' she said, rosy garden voice disappearing to be
replaced by sour-milk voice.
'You know, unspoiled,' he said artlessly.


'How about unclean, unpainted and utterly unsuitable
for two small children,' she snapped back at him, tiredness
and a general feeling of being unloved making her cross.
'Not to mention freezing. We'll all get hypothermia if we
live here. This is a dump. I don't suppose you were roughing
it here?'

'Well, no, I was at Finula's and I know we have a lot to
do here and I'm sorry I haven't really got started but I
thought we could manage for a few days with those portable
stoves and then get some work done on Monday . . .'

'Matt, you mean you haven't told Hope the place wasn't
ready yet?' said a low, throaty female voice. 'How bold of
you. Slap, slap.'

They both turned to face the newcomer. Tall, rotund and
exuding rural friendliness, she was forty-something and wore
a selection of flapping garments that all appeared to be patterned
by the hand of Laura Ashley. Hope identified pyjama
style trousers, a voluminous shirt and a rakishly-angled hat,
all flowery and pink. A big tartan shawl completed the outfit.

'Hope, meet Finula Headley-Ryan, the leading light of
the artistic community in Redlion and the lady who's been
so kind about getting me into the writers' centre at short
notice.'

'Tsk, tsk,' said Finula, clearly delighted with this description
but pretending she wasn't. 'I'm only an old dauber,
hardly an artist at all.'

She sailed over to Hope and held out a freckled hand,
weighed down with elaborate old gold rings. The glamorous
effect was slightly ruined by chipped scarlet nail varnish that
revealed yellowing nails underneath.

'I'm sure you're not so pleased to meet anyone when this
house is like the wreck of the Hesperus,' she said in that
low, thrilling voice. 'Matt, you are a melt for not telling the
poor girl that the place isn't habitable. Think of the shock
she got when she thought this was her new home in all its
freezing glory. What are you like?'

'Well, I wanted Hope to come and I knew she'd hardly


be keen if I told her what was left to do,' he said, giving
Finula the benefit of his handsomest smile. 'Anyway, Hope,'
he added, slightly wheedling, 'I'll get the workmen to start
on Monday.'
'Obviously, the children can't stay here,' Hope said, her
shock at the state of her new home overcoming her dislike
of getting personal in front of strangers. 'We'll have to stay
in a hotel.'
'Nonsense,' Finula declared. 'You'll stay with me. The
only hotel round here is five-star and would cost a bomb.
We'd love to have you. A couple of days and we'll have this
house spick and span. It's not at all fit for children.' She
leaned over and rubbed Millie's cheek.

Instead of scowling the way she usually did when someone
she didn't know touched her, Millie dimpled up at
Finula.
'Little dote, isn't she?' sighed Finula. 'My Cormac is
twelve now, too big for cuddles but they're lovely at that
age.'
Thinking of Millie's waking-the-dead tantrums on the
journey from the airport, Hope managed a weak smile and
said yes, lovely.
'Now, follow me,' Finula ordered.
Within minutes, she'd bundled Hope and the children
into her car, a battered green station wagon that had been
side-swiped so often there were only stripes of green paint
on the doors.
'Matt can take your car,' Finula said, crunching gears as
she drove over a few bushes doing a five-point turn. 'My
house is down an awful pot-holed bothreen and you'd be
tortured following me.'
The inside of the car was as messy as the outside, with a
filthy pair of Wellington boots on the back seat and several
smelly waterproof coats, exuding a scent of mud and wet
dog, crumpled up on the floor.
Hope sat in silence as they drove at high speed along a
narrow road. She was suddenly exhausted after her journey

and so angry with Matt for expecting her to live in such
squalor that she was incapable of making polite conversation.
Finula, however, kept up a stream of talk that, luckily,
required no response.

'There are seventeen of us in the community who live
here full time. Mainly artists but we've got three novelists
and two poets. I'm sure you've heard of Maire Nic
Chinneide.'

Before Hope had time to nod dishonestly at this, Finula
was off again.

'Amazing poet, so lyrical. Her poems about the traffic on
the Killarney Road would bring a tear to your eye. Anyway,
as I was saying, as well as the full timers who live in the
area, at least two hundred artists and writers come during
the year, and we have a wonderful time. I've been here ten
years and I feel like part of the furniture. Myself and Ciaran
- Ciaran's a novelist by the way - came from Dublin originally.
I wouldn't go back for all the tea in China. There are
no twenty-four-hour shops here or high rise buildings: it's
heaven.'

Hope, longing for a twenty-four-hour shop and a couple
of high rise buildings, said nothing.

Finula described the entire artistic community, how often
they met in the Creativity Centre (every day, as far as Hope
could make out) and what sort of wonderful entertainment
was available (weekly dinners during the high season and two creativity workshops during the year when the place
sounded as if it was over-run with would-be writers and
painters.) Matt had explained all this to Hope previously
but when he'd said how it worked, it hadn't sounded like
some demented religious commune. Feeling more and more
anxious, Hope wondered if there were other women with
small children.

'The locals don't bother with us much, they think we're
all mad artistic types,' Finula tittered.

Hope privately thought that Finula relished being a mad
artistic type. Compared to Finula's flamboyant floral rig out,


Hope felt like a mouse in her serviceable navy chinos, navy
wool polo neck and beige casual jacket. Would she have to
start wearing loads of mascara, plenty of shawls and her
Liberty nightie to fit in?
'I'm sure Matt has told you all about us,' Finula said,
swerving rapidly as she made a right hand turn into a
beautifully-kept driveway.
'Not really,' Hope hedged, vowing never to get in a car
with Finula ever again.
They pulled up outside a big homely farmhouse set amid
a forest of pine trees. Unlike the cottage, this was beautifully
maintained, with big planters full of dwarf conifers in a
regimented line beside the porch and ornamental wagon
wheels set along a veranda. A swing seat took pride of place
on the left of the veranda, complete with stripy canopy. The
entire premises would not have looked out of place in a
Doris Day movie.
'Let's get you all in and get some food into the little ones,'
Finula bossed.
Finula's home was everything Hope wanted in a rural
retreat. Rambling yet cosy, with plenty of squashy sofas,
Turkish rugs on the stone floors and lots of pictures, ornaments
and books to enliven the place. Her kitchen was the
sort of place that highly successful television cooks always
seemed to have: a triumph of golden wood complete with an
Aga, butcher's block and bulbous copper saucepans hanging
from the ceiling. Hope had always wanted one of those
saucepan-hanging things.
'I know it's a shock when you up sticks and move to the
country for the first time,' Finula said when Hope and the
children were installed at the huge wooden kitchen table,
the children with home-made yoghurts and homemade
apple juice, Hope with a big glass of red wine - thankfully
not home made.
'But it's so good for the children. You can have a chance
to bring them up the right way here, to teach them about
life and nature, to feed them natural, organic foods and to

be with them all the time. It's a quality of life you can't get
in the big city. No rapists, murderers or burglars.'

Hope took a slug of wine and mused on how the locals
had managed to keep murderers, rapists and burglars out:
with an electric fence, perhaps?

'Of course, personally, I think those degenerate hippie
people up the road aren't to be trusted,' Finula added nastily,
'but we've had no trouble with them yet. Matt's been telling
me how you've longed to spend time with the children, that
you were tired of the rat race.'

Hope wished Matt hadn't been quite so free with his
confidences. Finula already seemed to know everything
about her. She idly wondered if he'd mentioned her premenstrual
tension or that time he'd had shingles and been
off sex for a month, just to give a rounded psychological
picture of them as a couple.

'Wait till you've had the thrill of growing your own vegetables,'
Finula sighed.

Now did not seem like the time to mention that Hope
only liked her vegetables fresh from the supermarket counter
and that the last thing she'd grown was a peace lily given
to her when Toby was born. It was long since on a tip
somewhere, withered because she'd forgotten to water it.

'And hens, you'd love hens,' Finula said. 'Old Gearoid
had a lovely hen house out the back and you'd be mad not
to get hens. Think of it,' Finula's eyes went misty, 'your own
free range eggs. You have to watch the foxes, mind,' she
added, waving a finger to illustrate how dangerous foxes
were. 'Matt really needs a gun, you know. For the foxes,
although I doubt if he'd get a licence for one.'

'I can't imagine Matt shooting anything,' Hope ventured.

'Well, he's great at fishing so I assumed he could shoot
as well.'

Hope stared at her. 'Fishing? I didn't know he could fish.'

'There's no point hiding your light under a bushel here!'
Finula wagged a finger. 'He's wonderful fisherman. He didn't
let on at first, but we soon got it out of him. There are no


secrets in Redlion. I'm sure you're very into organic food as
well. I wouldn't dream of having anything else in the house.
And as for convenience foods, tsk!' Finula's snort indicated
what she thought of convenience food. 'Shop bought meals
and tins of food, they rot your insides, believe me.'
It occurred to Hope that she'd have to visit the village
shop under cover of darkness if she was to purchase things
like fish fingers, Lean Cuisines and the tinned spaghetti
the kids adored. Then again, maybe the village shop didn't have things like fish fingers or tinned spaghetti. Maybe it
only sold tofu, yak's milk and bean sprouts. And not a single
packet of crisps and Hula Hoops. Suddenly, she yearned for
a delicious packet of Hula Hoops, full of non-organic preservatives
and things Finula would disapprove of. Gorgeous.
Finula was still talking. Did she ever shut up? 'Cormac
has done so well since he came here. We spend quality time
together. You don't get that when you work outside the
home,' she said beadily.
Hope wanted to stand up for working outside the home.
Millions of women have to work, they have no choice, she
wanted to say. And many more want to work, they want a
career. That doesn't mean their children suffer. But she said
nothing. Matt had obviously painted her as an earth mother
who couldn't wait to give up her job, so there was no point.
She hardly knew this woman after all and they were her
guests. So Hope smiled her polite smile and wished she was
at home in her own kitchen in Bath, doing the ironing. Yes,
that would be a suitable swap. A mound of ironing as big
as a house would make up for being in this mad woman's
kitchen feeling her life spiralling out of control.
At that moment, Matt arrived and to Hope's utter surprise,
started to make himself a cup of tea, seemingly completely
at home in Finula's kitchen. 'Ciaran and I put the
cases in the two back bedrooms,' he said. 'Finula's been
putting me up since I got here. Isn't she wonderful?' he said
to Hope, patting her arm affectionately.
'Yes,' said Hope, tightlipped.

Tired from their journey, Toby and Millie miraculously
went to bed without a fuss. Hope would have loved to have
thrown herself onto the double bed in her and Matt's room
and joined them in the land of Nod, but she knew she had
to have dinner with the others.

Ciaran, who turned out to be a short, bald and spectacled
man looking a million miles away from his description as
an arty type who wrote historical novels, was making his
special beef in Guinness, the family's favourite recipe.

'You'll adore it,' said Finula throatily to Hope. 'Oh my
dear, do meet my lovely little Cormac'

Cormac was a big, sullen lad who was anything but
lovely. He wolfed down his meal almost before the rest of
them had picked up their forks and immediately shoved his
seat back from the table and left.

'Homework,' said Ciaran.

Bad manners thought Hope.

It was a strange evening. Over dinner, Hope watched her
husband laugh, joke and tell stories about the advertising
rat race and how he was glad to be out of it. There was
no trace of the focussed, ambitious ad man who lived and
breathed for his job and who read the advertising magazine, Campaign, as if it were the Bible.

She also watched Finula gaze raptly at the handsome
happy face like a dog drooling for a marrow bone. Matt
seemed utterly unaware of Finula's admiration.

'I love this place,' he said, squeezing Hope's hand. 'It
makes me feel alive.'

Hope squeezed back. It was wonderful to see Matt happy
again and to feel that there was new life in the marriage. It was only for a year after all.

The local people were, according to Ciaran and Finula,
all very boring. Having overheard herself being described as
boring more than once, Hope felt a glimmer of pity for the
locals.

'I have tried, believe me,' Finula said querulously after
her sixth glass of wine. 'I've tried to get them involved in the


community. We had that That evening in June and invited
everyone to come. I even got a Tai Chi teacher to come in
for a demonstration, I thought it would be lovely to start
local classes. But no.' She sniffed. 'Only a few came and
they were out the front door like a shot as soon as Su Lin
started the demonstration. Although my tiger prawns went
down well. They're all only interested in business and the
prices of property. Honestly, we came here to get away from
all that. And the women are always on about this Macrame
Club they have going. I ask you, macrame. That went out
in the seventies.'
'Not everyone's into stuff like Tai Chi,' volunteered Hope.
'I mean, I'm not. I love aerobics though. I hope there's a
class round here, otherwise I'll balloon. I could certainly do
with a few sessions of turns and bums.'
She looked up from her meringue with blackberry coulis
to see Finula staring at her in shock.
'Aerobics,' said Finula as though she was speaking of
tertiary syphilis, 'is hardly the same as Tai Chi.'
'I know, I know,' said Hope, backtracking, 'but that's
what I like. Everyone likes different things. You can't make
people interested in Tai Chi if they're not. . .'
She felt Matt's hand gripping her thigh under the table.
'Hope, love,' he said, 'that's the point of the community. It's
not just about letting a group of artists work in a supportive
atmosphere, it's about fostering culture in Kerry. Teaching
people that there's more to life than existing in the humdrum
working world.'
He sounded so earnest when he spoke that Hope wondered
if her real husband had been body snatched and
replaced with this look-alike. And no wonder the locals
weren't keen on the artistic gang. It was a bit rich to turn up
in an area and basically accuse everyone of being culturally
illiterate.
'I understand,' she said gravely.
In the end, Matt drank so much of Finula and Ciaran's
lovely wine that he got plastered and by the time they

climbed into the comfortable big bed, Hope knew there was
no point in raising the state of Curlew Cottage again, and
adding that she'd be on the first plane back to Bristol if he
didn't take immediate action to make it habitable.

The next morning Hope got up at seven with her energetic
offspring and went downstairs to make them breakfast. Her
reserved soul didn't like the idea of pottering around in
someone else's kitchen. There was no sign of Finula or
Ciaran. Sleeping off massive hangovers, she supposed. Being
artistic seemed to mean sinking an awful lot of booze.

Coco Pops were the current favourite breakfast with
Millie. But true to her beliefs, Finula didn't have a single
packet of manufactured cereal anywhere. Not even cornflakes,
which were practically a health food in Hope's book.
There was just a big jar of home-made muesli that looked
for all the world like mouse droppings.

'Want Coco Pops,' whined Millie after a few minutes'
waiting. Toby sat quietly as usual, turning the pages of his Silly Pig Finds A Friend picture book.

'I can't find any,' Hope .said. She opened another cupboard
and bingo: no Coco Pops but lots of lovely home
made bread.

They breakfasted on toast and jam, with milk for the
children and coffee for Hope.

Afterwards, she wrapped them all up in anoraks and
Wellingtons and they set off to explore. If the previous day
had been dismal and wet, this was the perfect example of a
glorious winter day. Crisp and cool, with a bright wintry
sun shining low in the sky, dusting the landscape with piercing
light. It was beautiful. Today, the hills in the background
looked picturesque instead of brooding and Hope could pick
out a myriad of colours in the landscape instead of yesterday's
dull, rainy grey. She could see warm peat browns, soft
umbers and rich plums. The stone walls that crisscrossed
the land were a flinty grey and there were traces of green
everywhere, from the gleam of dewy grass to the faded verdigris
of moss clinging to the walls. It would be a wonderful


place if you were a painter. She breathed deeply, letting
the sharp country air permeate her lungs. In the distance,
she could see two cottages and one two-storey farmhouse
but for at least a mile on either side of Finula's house there
was nothing. Incredible, she thought. This really was the
country.
'Let's go for an adventure,' she said. 'We might find some
animals.'
Toby looked unsure. 'Mummy will pick you up if you're
scared,' Hope told him gently, 'but we've got to get used to
cows and things. Maybe we'll find some baby cows.'
She had no idea if this was possible. Did cows have calves
in winter? Or maybe they had them at Easter. Or was that
lambs she was thinking of ? Who knew. The countryside was
very mysterious.
The ground crunched as they walked down the drive and
out onto a lane bordered by a low stone wall. Holding both
the children's hands, Hope walked slowly, admiring the
stark leafless trees, bent and gnarled as they clung low to
the ground.
The ground was mucky after the previous day's rain and
she stepped around puddles delicately, while Millie struggled
to jump in them.
A car drove past and the driver raised a hand in greeting.
When the driver of the second car waved, she decided that
the local people were simply friendly and waved to everyone.
The next vehicle was a tractor with a grizzled old farmer
sitting on it.
'Let's all wave,' said Hope enthusiastically.
'Helloooo!' they all yelled.
The farmer kept both hands on the steering wheel and
looked at them as if they were mad.
They found a herd of cows clustered around a trough of
hay, all up to their hocks in mud. Millie was fascinated as
to why they were all so dirty.
'Mud, darling,' Hope said.
'Oooh look!' Millie yelled as one beige coloured cow

lifted her tail and let forth a stream of manure. 'Cow pooh
pooh, Mummy! Cow pooh pooh! Can we smell it?'

Back at the house, Finula was up and already organizing.

'PJ Rice will be down at the cottage at eleven and he'll
discuss what work you need done,' she told Hope bossily.

'Is he a contractor?' Hope asked, extracting Millie from
her Wellington boots and hoping that she didn't have cow pooh on them.

'He does a bit of everything,' Finula said.

'Surely we need a separate plumber and heating man . . .'
Hope began.

'Nonsense. We'll all muck in with the painting and as for
heating, sure Gearoid had a great range that'll heat the entire
cottage. All it takes is to get it cleaned out and a bit of a
knack to keep it running.'

'We saw cow pooh pooh, Daddy,' squealed Millie happily
as her father appeared, clutching a glass fizzing with soluble
painkillers.


Hope had had her suspicions about PJ, but after three days of
back-breaking work from all parties, the cottage was looking
better. Homes and Gardens wouldn't be desperate to photograph
it for their latest issue, but at least Curlew Cottage
was fit for human occupation.

PJ had installed a new shower in the bathroom and the
pipes in the kitchen no longer rattled ominously when you
turned the taps on. The big cream range was going and
indeed, it did heat the whole cottage, although it gobbled
up fuel at an horrific rate.

Matt had rented a sander and the floors upstairs were
soon smooth and pale gold. The downstairs flooring was icy
stone slabs and Hope vowed to buy nice rugs for them as
soon as she got a chance. PJ's two colleagues, a couple of
hard working teenage lads, painted the entire inside of the
cottage with white paint because Matt said it would be a
good idea to lighten the place up as the windows were so
small. However, as the two painters painted any dirt and


dust into the walls at the same time, Hope soon learned that she had to scrub and clean each room before they started.
The bathroom was the biggest nightmare because under the
infamous claw footed bath was a thriving and wriggling
community of bugs.
'Clock beetles,' PJ remarked laconically as several jet
black insects scurried out from under the bath, frantically
running in different directions. 'They're lucky, you know.'
'Not in this house,' Hope said with feeling.
Worn out and with reddened hands from plunging them
into buckets of soapy water, Hope insisted that Matt deal
with the wild life in the bathroom.
'I hate creepy crawlies,' she shivered, handing him the
soapy cloth and the bucket, 'even lucky ones.'
On Thursday, Matt bought three beds and a secondhand
couch in Killarney, along with a fridge freezer and washing
machine. All were to be delivered on Friday. The few bits
of furniture they'd had shipped from Bath were due to arrive
at the same time.
'What about a cooker?' asked Hope suddenly, realizing
that there was one vital omission from Matt's shopping list.
'We can cook on the range,' Matt shrugged. 'Anyway,
I'm too broke now to buy anything else. Paying PJ and
paying for this lot cost a bomb.'
Hope bit back the retort that it had been his idea to come
here in the first place and if he hadn't thought they could
afford it, they shouldn't have come. He wasn't going to have
to cook on the horrible old range, that would be her job.
She stormed off to their bedroom. So much for the
wonderful revitalization of their marriage.

By Friday evening, five days after their arrival, the family
were finally installed in their new home. Matt's computer
was set up in the tiny box room, ready for the consultancy
work he was going to do part-time for Judd's, and the kids'
rooms were as perfect as they could be under the circumstances,
full of their toys and pictures, if a little barren.

Their own bedroom was a bit of a mess with just an old
rail for hanging clothes and two upturned boxes as bedside
tables. Everything was still a long way from her vision of
country life with the cosy cottage, Hope thought. Instead,
she'd found herself in what looked like a barren holiday
cottage where the owners had never really made themselves
at home.

'It's a bit sparse,' she said, looking around the sitting
room with its meagre furniture and no pictures on the
walls.

'Yeah, I remember Gearoid having lots of oil paintings,
stuff his friends had painted. I suppose he had to sell them
in the end. Money was always tight with him. I thought he
was brilliant but he never had much success with his poems.'

'How many books did he have published?'

'Three and they're out of print now,' Matt said sadly.
'Poor Gearoid. He was talented. Still, let's not get maudlin.
We'll be so happy here.' He hugged her. 'Thank you for
this, Hope. I know it's been strange for you this week, but
it'll be fantastic for us all from now on. We need this, I need
this.'

He kissed her tenderly, the way he'd kissed her on their
wedding day: as if he didn't believe it was all for real. For
the first time in ages, Hope felt her insides contract. She
hadn't felt even vaguely sexy all week. It was the strain of
sorting things out. But she felt a definite frisson now. It was
wonderful the way he could do that to her. They loved each
other, she knew, they'd survive anything.

'Let's go to bed early tonight,' Matt murmured.

As he pottered around in his study, Hope walked through
the cottage thoughtfully. She had plans for it. She'd drape
throws over things, the way Finula did to such effect. The
modern silver frames with their wedding photos and pictures
of the children looked somewhat wrong too. Perhaps she
could learn how to make curtains. It couldn't be too hard,
it was a challenge. Hadn't women always travelled to strange
destinations to be with their menfolk. They had followed


armies in centuries gone by, enduring enormous deprivations
just to be with the ones they loved. They had in Jane Austen's
time, Hope reflected trying to feel suitably noble. If they
could do it, she could.

She fried some of Finula's homemade sausages and free
range eggs for dinner. It was the only thing she could think
of to cook as she had no idea how to deal with the range.
It could take twenty minutes to boil the kettle on it - Lord
knew how many years it would take to cook a chicken
casserole.

After dinner, she sat in front of the range with a cup of
cocoa and watched Matt fiddling around with the television
trying to pick up a signal. There was no noise outside, no
sound of other people or car doors slamming or horns blaring.
Nothing. Just the silence of the countryside.

Used to the madcap atmosphere of Ciaran and Finula's
where people arrived at all hours, unannounced and wandering
into the kitchen to make themselves tea, it felt strange
to be on their own again.

Finula had been very kind but she was so overbearing,
as if she wanted to lay claim to the newcomers as her own
possessions. Matt couldn't see it and felt that any criticism
of his new friend was a sign of ingratitude after all she'd
done for them. Well, they wouldn't see that much of Finula
from now on, would they?


Matt cursed under his breath as the snowstorm effect on the
television got worse instead of better. He'd been fiddling
with the damn thing for half an hour and so far, all he'd
managed to locate was an Irish language television channel,
which was going to be bugger all use to them. Maybe they
had sub-titles for the films: that was going to be the best
they could do at this rate.

'We could always watch with the sound turned down and
make up our own dialogue,' he joked, turning round to "lope. But she was deeply asleep, squashed into a corner of
the uncomfortable old brown sofa with a cushion wedged


against her head. Matt watched her for a moment, smiling
at the way her fair hair was all fluffed up around her face,
lots of little curls running wild because she probably hadn't
run a comb through it since that morning. She hadn't
bothered with make up either and her long, thick eyelashes
rested palely against her flushed cheeks. She looked very
vulnerable in sleep, her rounded face defenceless against the
world, her gentle coral mouth moving as she dreamed. She
certainly didn't look like a thirty-seven-year-old mother-of
two. More like a naive, trusting twenty-something. Naive,
that was certainly Hope, Matt thought with a twinge of
guilt. Despite his fierce belief that this was a good move for
them all, he couldn't help feeling selfish for bringing her here.
Dear Hope loved her routine, the comfort of the familiar. A
creature of habit, she was nervous of the unknown and yet
he'd transplanted her from her own world into a strange
place where she knew nobody.

He knew she'd follow him to the ends of the earth and
that was why she was here: because she loved him utterly.

And he was here for purely selfish reasons. Sure, he'd
managed things so that he'd have a job to go back to in
Bath, and their mortgage there was taken care of by letting
the house out. So the family wouldn't lose out financially.
But the reason they were here was because of his dream, not
theirs. He wanted the peace to write and he'd brought them
all here because of that.

Hope would forfeit every dream in her life just to make
sure her beloved family were happy and content. And he'd
forfeit all their contentment so that he could be happy. Matt
thrust that thought out of his mind. Redlion was a beautiful
place. He loved it here, he felt connected to it on some deep,
emotional level. He'd had such wonderful holidays here as
a child. Hope would learn to love it too. He'd work his
backside off to make his book a success, then they'd have
real financial security for the rest of their lives. He could do
it: he was sure of it. Whenever he thought about the book,
he felt a fresh burst of excitement.


He'd started it in a rush of ideas, racing to get his thoughts
on paper, eager to tell the story of a man on the verge of a
breakdown who takes off around the world to escape his
misery but ends up in a parallel universe where he's living
fifty years in the past. In his fantasies, Matt imagined literary
magazines reviewing his novel with words like 'lyrical',
'exquisitely written' and 'a breathtaking new talent.'
It wasn't going to be easy, he knew, but life wasn't easy,
was it? He'd write a wonderful book with the drive and
determination he was well known for. He'd work deep into
the night every night if necessary but there was no way he
would fail. He dismissed the idea. After all, he smiled to
himself, his drive and brilliance had worked magic for Judds,
making them the hottest agency in the area. He could do
that again, for himself this time. When had he ever failed at
anything?

'You're the new people from old Gearoid's place,' said the
elderly man behind the counter at the convenience shop
when Hope went in to buy groceries for her newly painted
cupboards.
'Er yes,' said Hope, a bit startled. It was the day after
they'd moved into the cottage and this was her first time in
the village. How did he know who she was?
'Lovely house, say it's a bit wild on the inside. He wasn't
the full shilling, old Gearoid. Them hens had the run of the
place, inside and out.'
'Really,' Hope said politely as she dawdled in front of
the eggs. She wanted to buy free range but they were more
expensive and she'd better economize until she knew how
their finances were going to pan out. The hire car had gone
back and they were stuck with her Metro, which had been
fixed at great expense.
'Would you be thinking of getting hens yourself?' the old
man inquired sweetly.
'Well, I don't know . . .' Hope hesitated, disarmed by his
twinkling faded blue eyes in a warm old face. Finula had

suggested she got some, she just hadn't felt ready for livestock
just yet.

'They're very easy to look after. Just throw in a bit of
feed and sure, you've got your own eggs. You could even
sell the eggs and make a few bob. The tourists are mad for
eggs in the summer. And the winter,' he added hastily. 'I
know just the man you should see.'


The six baby chicks tweeted maniacally all the way back
into Redlion. Muffled thumps from the big cardboard box in
the back of the car made it sound as if they were clambering
hysterically over each other, falling off and landing painfully
on each other's fragile yellow feet. Slowing down, Hope
peered in the back. The chicks were clambering hysterically
all over each other and were making desperate, upset baby
noises at being separated from their mother. Oh God, what
had she done, Hope wailed out loud. Matt would kill her.
It had sounded like a brilliant idea for saving money when
Emmet, the man from the shop, had explained it.

All she'd need now was a feeding trough, some hen meal
and maybe to put a light bulb over the box to keep them
warm at night. The chemist was also the animal foodstuffs
provider, Emmet's brother, Paddy said happily as he waved
her off, her cheque in his hands. It seemed a lot of money
for six little birds but Paddy insisted they were pedigree.

The kind-looking woman in the chemist, who introduced
herself as Mary-Kate and who, like Emmet, seemed already
to know who Hope was, was sceptical: 'Pedigree, my backside.
That old rogue Emmet Slattery sold you his brother's
runts. Nobody else would buy them at this time of the year.
It's too cold to have them outside for months unless you put
central heating into the hen house. You'll have them killed
with pure temper long before you've got an egg to your
name. What are they?' she relented. 'Speckled or Rhode
Island Reds?'

'I have absolutely no idea,' Hope said. They both peered
into the cardboard box in the car.


Mary-Kate's hard face softened at the antics of the tiny
balls of yellow fluff.

'I love chicks but they're not always easy,' she sighed.

'I thought they were no trouble at all,' Hope said anxiously.
'Finula said they weren't. So did Paddy.'

'Finula Headley-Ryan has killed more pullets than the
chicken factory,' snorted Mary-Kate. 'Don't mind her. She
thinks farming is so easy a child could do it but she hasn't
a clue. She's a city girl born and bred and until she landed
here, the only time she'd ever seen a hen was in an illustration
over the frozen chickens in the supermarket. And as for that
pair of old bandits, Paddy and Emmet, I wouldn't listen to
a word they said. Come on in. I'll make you a cup of coffee
and tell you what to do with your hens.'

Smiling guiltily at the thought that the spectacularly
efficient Finula wasn't as brilliant at everything as she thought,
Hope opened a window in the car for the chicks and followed
Mary-Kate, not thinking that it was unusual to be asked
in for coffee when you were shopping. This was Redlion:
everything was different here. Talking to total strangers
seemed bizarrely normal.

Mary-Kate's office at the back of the chemist was a cosy
nook complete with a comfortably worn couch, portable
television and a sophisticated looking Italian coffee machine.
Three darling kittens played in the corner, taking turns to
mangle a knitted mouse. While Mary-Kate began the complicated
business of brewing coffee, Hope sat down and watched her hostess. She was tall, thin and on the wrong
side of forty. Soberly dressed in a grey dress with her brown
hair cut in a neat, shining bob, she was as far removed from
the flamboyant Finula as it was possible to be. She also had
an intense, clear gaze. 'What you see is what you get,' said
Mary-Kate's honest expression.

'Are you settling in?' she asked.

'Well, it's a bit difficult,' Hope said, wanting to be loyal to
Matt. 'The house is a bit of a mess and I have to admit that it
wasn't my idea to come here,' she amazed herself by revealing.


'I'm not surprised the house is a mess. Your husband's
uncle was a complete nut,' Mary-Kate remarked, handing
Hope a cup of coffee. 'He used to say he couldn't get married
because he was too eccentric for any woman to live with.
The truth was he lived like a pig. I had to throw him out
of the shop on many occasions because he'd put the other
customers off with the smell of him.'

Hope laughed. 'So far, everyone I've met has claimed he
was a misunderstood genius who deserves a statue erected
for him.'

'Genius doesn't mean you can't wash your clothes,' said
Mary-Kate, proffering biscuits. 'If they erect a statue to old
Gearoid, I hope it'll have a scratch 'n' sniff bit to get the
whole effect.'

They talked about the trials of doing up old, damp
cottages and how terrible the weather was, managing to
consume two more cups of coffee while doing it. Hope
found it an incredible relief to talk to someone who wasn't
discussing culture, with a capital C, organic food or making
your own compost heap. At home, she'd have never let her
reserve down in such a manner but Mary-Kate was very
easy to talk to.

'Do most people round here grow their own food and
kill their own animals?' Hope asked cautiously.

'Are you crazy?' asked Mary-Kate, stunned. 'There's a
Dunnes supermarket five miles away and there's Tescos in
Killarney. The butcher's shop is beside the pub. It's closed
now because it's being refitted but he'll be open again in
two weeks. I'd much prefer to buy my food in the shop than
grow it myself. Stay out of Emmet Slattery's if you don't
want to be fleeced. I have a shampoo in the chemist that
costs two pounds and I caught him selling the very same one
for three! He's a crook, rob his grandmother for a shilling.'

Hope grinned. 'I sort of thought everyone made their own
bread and jam and everything.'

'Only if you're stone mad, you do,' Mary-Kate said.
'Hope, this is the 21st century. What are supermarkets for?'


'Well, Finula said

'God preserve us from that woman! We're modern people
who just happen to live in a rural community, not a remote
tribe fresh from the pages of National Geographic. We've
got running water, you know. Not to mention the internet
and digital television. Yes, there are plenty of farmers around
but they specialize: beef or dairy herds. That's a hard enough
job without growing everything themselves into the bargain.
I'm a pharmacist, for God's sake. I'm not going to spend
half a day killing, plucking and cleaning out a chicken for
my dinner when I know I can wander into the butcher's and
buy a lovely chicken breast for myself for a few quid with
no bother.'

'My sentiments exactly,' Hope said, relieved. 'I was beginning
to think that buying food from the shop was a sort of
local no-no.'

The shop bell pinged.

Mary-Kate got to her feet. 'Farming is a tough business,'
she said soberly. 'Lots of the people round here grew up on
farms but it's hard to make a living out of it nowadays.
People had to give up the land and got jobs in industry or
tourism. Half the village work in the computer factory in
Killarney, the other half are involved in tourism up in the
hotel, the Manoir Rouge Leon. Without both of those, this
would be a ghost town. People don't have the time or the
patience for growing anything but a few vegetables and
geraniums. It's great if they can grow the odd bit of rhubarb
and a neighbour of mine goes to great lengths to grow strawberries
but that's the height of it. The only people who
are obsessed with being self-sufficient are the likes of the
Headley-Ryans who think they're better than the rest of us
because they play at farming. If they get a bad crop of
potatoes, they can go into town and buy them. A real, cash
strapped farmer can't afford to do that.' Mary-Kate sniffed
disapprovingly. 'You can hear that poor cow of theirs wailing
for miles around some mornings because they can't get
themselves out of the bed to milk her. That's what farming


is about - hard graft and dedication. Not poncing around
talking about it.'


Matt was pacing around the kitchen when Hope got home
while Toby and Millie were squabbling loudly in the living
room.

'You were gone hours? Matt said accusingly. 'I was
meant to be up at the centre at eleven.' (He insisted that he
if he was to work properly, he had to treat writing like any
other job. 'The plan is to go in every day and write for five
or six hours. It's a silent zone, nobody talks except in the
kitchen.')

'And what's that?' he pointed to the box of baby chicks.

'Hens,' said Hope.

'For eating?' he said incredulously, peering into the box
where the chicks were chirping at their usual high-speed
level.

'For eggs, stupid. Finula told me we should get hens. I
thought you'd approve.' She didn't want to say that she
thought she might have bitten off more than she could
chew.

'Oh well, if Finula said it, she's probably right,' Matt
shrugged.

'Tell me, what time do Finula and Ciaran milk their cow
in the morning?' Hope asked suddenly.

'You're not thinking of getting a cow, I hope?'

'No, no, just wondering, that's all.'

Matt kissed her goodbye. 'Sorry I was cross. I was worried
because you were gone so long. You're certainly settling
into this country living bit very well,' he added with a smile.

'Six chicks do not make me a lady farmer,' joked Hope.

The chicks provided great amusement for the children for
the first hour while Hope set up their home in the small hall
off the back door. Bedded down in a huge cardboard movers'
box with a bigger one outside and a filling of old newspapers
for insulation, the chicks chirped happily, basking under the
light of two old desk lamps to keep them warm. Soft hay


and newspapers made a cosy nest in one half of the box and
in the other, Hope placed their shiny feeding container filled
with grain and some water. A covering of chicken wire on
the top of the box kept prying little fingers out and when
Hope sternly pointed out that the baby chicks were not
playthings, Millie got into a huff and scrambled upstairs to
pull all her clothes out of the big wooden chest Hope had
brought from home. Tidying it up took half an hour and
then it was still only a quarter to four.
Hope stared out the window. The sky was already growing
heavier, a combination of swollen rain clouds and the
onset of evening. It looked gloomy and depressing. Just like
she felt. She looked into the small back garden. You could
barely see the outline of the wall that circled it. Hope had
always liked the idea of a walled garden: a sheltered spot
where you could laze in the summer in the midst of fruit
trees and fragrant flowers, pottering around with a small
trowel, digging up the odd weed, then relaxing back onto a
charming deck chair to read your book and sip your glass
of wine. Gearoid had obviously not felt the same. His walled
garden was the jungle variety, full of six-foot-high weeds
and brambles no sane person would want to walk past.
You'd need to be on mind-altering drugs to want to sit in
it and drink wine and the only way to clear it had to be by
mechanical digger. She wondered what time Matt would be
home at. Soon, she hoped.

Two days later, Matt came home early and took the children
for a walk while Hope took advantage of their absence to
have a lukewarm bath - the plumbing still needed tweaking.
Then, wearing her dressing gown and socks to keep warm,
she sat down at the computer to e-mail Sam. She longed to
begin by writing how depressed she was and how her picture
of bucolic life was vastly different from the reality. But she
couldn't. Sam had warned her against the move in the first
place. She couldn't tell Sam how absolutely correct she'd
been. Not yet.

Hi Sam. Greetings from Kerry. That sounded
suitably breezy, didn't it? How are you? We're all
fine. No, that sounded too false. She erased the word
'fine' and wrote tired but happy. The cottage needed
a good bit of work done but we stayed with this
wonderful family nearby while it was being tidied
up. Not that the Headley-Ryans were that wonderful
- Finula drove Hope mad - but saying that would
sound as if she was already in need of Prozac. Let
me describe our new home to you: Curlew Cottage
is about a mile outside this little village. You drive
down a winding track and come to the sweetest
cottage which is definitely covered with rambling
roses in the summer. It's like something from the
kids' storybooks. Inside, we've got genuine old
wooden beams and amazing latticed windows.

Which are hell to clean, Hope thought grimly,
remembering the hours she'd spent scrubbing at the
tiny panes.

There's this incredible old stove, they call it a
range, in the kitchen-cum-sitting room and it's very
cosy. We've even got a walled garden, although it
needs some work and this local woman we stayed
with suggests clearing it to grow vegetables. That
sounded good. No need to mention that when Matt
had remarked that Finula had suggested growing
vegetables, Hope had looked at him incredulously
and said that he could clean out the jungle if he was
that keen on home-grown parsnips.

The bathroom is amazing - now that the earwigs,
beetles and other assorted creepy crawlies were gone,
it was amazing - with this huge old claw-footed roll
top bath. The kids love it here. At least that was
true. Neither Toby nor Millie appeared to miss all
their pals from Your Little Treasures, but that was
probably only because everything was so new to
them. Give them time and Hope was sure they'd


start wanting company of their own age. She'd have
to investigate a local playgroup or somewhere so
they could play with other children. And so she
could kick-start her own life. She hadn't thought
she'd miss work so much. It wasn't about having a
pay packet at the end of the week: it was about
independence and the camaraderie of working with
other women. The more she thought about it, the
more Hope was determined to find some part-time
job locally.
If she was honest, she felt a faint tinge of
resentment towards Matt that it hadn't occurred to
him that she might be missing her job.
We haven't made many friends yet because we've
been so busy but Finula - the woman we stayed
with - assures us there's a vibrant social scene. Matt
is settled into the creative centre and he goes there
every day to write. So far, so good! Write back
soon,
love Hope.

The rain pelted down all Monday afternoon.
'Mummy, I'm bored!' wailed Millie, pulling at Hope's
trousers. 'Want to do something!'
Mummy's bored too, thought Hope. This was not the
charming rural idyll she'd imagined. Instead of a pretty cottage
where she could sit snuggled up with the children and
spend quality time with them, she was stuck in a remote
cottage with the television not working and none of the
creature comforts of home. There was only so much finger
painting you could do. The cottage was a lot cosier than it
had been when they'd first moved in because Hope had been
working hard to brighten it up with little homely touches,
but it still needed more work.
They were at least a mile from the village, nobody ever
came down the lane to visit them, which was unsurprising
since they didn't know anybody yet, and the nearest big town was miles away. Matt was gone off to work in the
centre. Lucky him, thought Hope grimly, as Toby and Millie
began screaming at each other over a pop-up book.
She stuck it out for another twenty minutes when, noticing
that the rain was easing off, inspiration struck.
'Let's go for a walk and visit some kittens,' she said.
'Yeah!' said Millie enthusiastically.
Matt had taken the car, so Hope kitted out the children in
their winter woollies and anoraks, complete with Wellington
boots, hats and gloves. When they looked suitably like arctic
explorers, she pulled on her own coat and boots and off
they set. It was still drizzling a bit but it was good to be out.
At first, Toby was happy to sit in the buggy. Then he decided
that he wanted to walk, which meant a complicated hand
holding arrangement as Hope had to hold both children's
hands as well as dragging the buggy along.
Then, Toby decided that he wanted to be carried. 'Please
Mummy,' he said tearfully.
'Me too!' wailed Millie as Hope struggled along with
Toby on one hip. 'I can't darling, you're too big,' Hope
panted.
'Want to be carried. Put Toby down. Carry me!!!'
Feeling like a Himalayan baggage carrier, Hope hefted her children in strict rotation for ten minutes each before
she became exhausted.
'You'll have to walk, Millie,' she said as she put a protesting
Toby in his buggy.
With both children wailing, she arrived in the village,
silently cursing the fact that they only had one car. The
Metro was hers too, although Matt had taken it over as if
it was his. It wasn't her fault he'd had to give up the company
car.
The village was prettier when you walked through it.
Whizzing past in the car, Hope hadn't noticed the small
window boxes outside the post office, how quaint the small,
pastel coloured houses actually were or how lovely the old
stone of the Widow Maguire's pub was. On first sight, in

the heavy rain, everything had appeared dull but in the soft
mist of a faint drizzle, she could see that it wasn't just Curlew
Cottage that had a fairy tale air about it.
The children stopped grizzling long enough for her to
look at the signs outside the pub door. 'Entertainment every
weekend, fiddlers welcome,' said one sign. Another was a
menu listing a range of gorgeous-sounding bar food with
plenty of the sort of things that Finula would approve of:
goat's cheese tart, spinach and ricotta ravioli, crab cakes,
Guinness pie. Hope's mouth watered just looking at it. There
wasn't a pig's trotter in sight. Maybe she and Matt could
come there some evening if they could arrange a babysitter.
Toby started to grumble again so they trudged on towards
the chemist shop. The children would love the kittens and
she could tell Mary-Kate that the chicks were settled in.
Taking the children into anywhere as exciting as a chemist's
was dangerous on the grounds that colourful little
bottles of nail varnish, small pots of creams and exciting
packets of plasters were enticing for little fingers. Toby was
remarkably adept at grabbing things from the safety of his
buggy and opening them before Hope had even realized he'd
taken them. With this in mind, she bypassed the front door.
Mary-Kate's little office door was shut, so Hope knocked.
Mary-Kate appeared instantly with not a gleaming brown
hair out of place.
'Are these special visitors for me?' she inquired, bending
down and greeting Toby and Millie as if they were grownups.
'How do you do,' she said gravely, shaking Millie's
hand.
It was exactly the right thing to do. Millie beamed at her
and Toby smiled shyly.
'What is your name, madam?' Mary-Kate asked, still
grave.
'Millie,' Millie said, dimpling up at her.
'And this gentleman?'
'Toby, my little brother. He's only three,' Millie said disdainfully.

'I thought they might like to see your kittens,' Hope said.
'I hoped you wouldn't mind.'

'What a grand idea. Would you like to come in and play
with three lovely little kittens?'

It was an offer they couldn't refuse.

Miraculously turning into model children, Toby and
Millie played happily with the three tabby kittens while
Mary-Kate and Hope had coffee.

'I only dropped in to say thanks for the advice the other
day,' Hope said apologetically.

'It's lovely to see you,' Mary-Kate said kindly. 'It must
get very lonely on your own if you're not used to it.'

'Not at all,' said Hope stoically. 'I love it.'

'Well, isn't that great then,' Mary-Kate replied.


CHAPTER SEVEN


Virginia spent the first two hours of the train journey from
Dublin to Killarney jammed into her seat with a large man
beside her, a large man who took up more than his share
of space and whose bulk meant she was squashed uncomfortably
against the window. The arthritis in her left hip was
growling at the position she was forced into and Virginia
thought longingly of the anti-inflammatory tablets she had
in the bathroom cabinet at home. It wasn't the express train
and the journey seemed to take forever. She'd finished reading
the newspaper and as she hadn't been able to concentrate
on novels since Bill's death, she had brought nothing else to
read. Wintry rain lashed the train windows which then
steamed up with the passengers' hot breath, obscuring the
view.

When the tea trolley arrived and the tea man asked her
what she wanted, her large neighbour rudely demanded a
cup of tea and a chocolate muffin before Virginia had a
chance to reply. Immune to passenger battles over the last
plastic ham and cheese sandwich, the tea trolley man said
nothing and handed over the chocolate muffin before asking
Virginia again what she'd like.

'Just a cup of tea, thank you,' she said tightly. It had been
a terrible day and she could have done without this fresh
nuisance. No, that was the wrong word, she thought, her
heart fierce with pain and anger. The horrible man beside
her wasn't a nuisance, he was worse: a pig with no manners
who deserved to be shouted at or shoved off the train for
being so rude. If Bill was there, he'd have done it. She felt


hot tears well up in her eyes. Bill would have looked after
her but Bill was gone, forever. He'd left her. Abandoned her
and she had to look after herself forever more. It wasn't fair.

Suddenly, she realized that the brown-haired middle-aged
woman sitting opposite had handed her a paper cup of tea,
complete with little sachets of sugar and milk.

'Oh, thank you,' muttered Virginia, aware that she'd forgotten
where she was in her misery. It happened all the time:
she became lost in her private grief and time seemed to stand
still, while life rushed on around her. She hated that. It made
her feel like an idiot, a feeble old woman.

The tea man handed the woman opposite a cup of coffee
and some change and Virginia realized that the woman had
paid for Virginia's tea as well as her own drink.

'Forgive me,' Virginia said quickly, 'I'm sorry, let me pay
you . . .'

'It's fine,' the woman said softly. She was quiet and refined
looking, maybe in her late forties, with dark hair and a kind,
make-up free face. 'It was only a few pence and after all,
you hardly have enough room in that seat to get your money
out of your pocket.' She gave the man beside Virginia a
hard, slightly ironic glance and he moved away from Virginia,
suddenly giving her lots more room. The woman kept
up with her intense gaze and the man moved some more.

In spite of her misery, Virginia smiled.

The woman smiled back and lowered her eyes to her
crossword.

A lot of passengers got off at Limerick, including the big
man.

Virginia sighed with relief, finally able to spread out and
put her packages on the seat beside her.

'Some people have no manners,' said the woman opposite.

'You're right about that,' Virginia replied. 'Thank you. I
should have asked him for more room,' she added, 'but there
are some days when you don't have the energy to demand
things. And this has really been one of those days.' She didn't


know why she was saying this. But it had been so awful in
the accountant's office, signing more documents. Sorting out
the tax implications of Bill's insurance policies was mystifying
and endless. Every time the accountant lowered his voice
and asked Virginia if she was 'coping . . .' she wanted to hit
him with her handbag and scream 'NO! I'm not bloody
coping. As if you care!'
'I'm Mary-Kate Donlan,' the woman said, holding out a
hand.
'Virginia Connell.' They shook hands formally as if they
were at a party instead of rattling along on the Killarney
train.
'How about another cup of tea?' Mary-Kate suggested.
'The trolley doesn't come round again but I can get us tea
and a biscuit from the buffet car.'
'Let me get it,' Virginia said, getting to her feet. 'Do you
want tea or coffee?'
Mary-Kate shuddered. 'I never drink tea because I love
coffee but that last cup was like drinking boiled socks. It'll
have to be tea, thanks.'
When Virginia had returned from the buffet car, they
drank their hot tea and chatted idly, Mary-Kate making
Virginia laugh as she recounted her search for a posh dress
for a wedding she was going to soon.
'Not that I'd go to Dublin for a dress, mind,' Mary-Kate
pointed out, 'but I was there anyway and I thought I'd
try it.'
Virginia grinned. Her new friend's sober and slightly old
fashioned navy cardigan and white silky blouse made it
obvious that she wasn't the sort of woman who took many
high-fashion shopping trips. Virginia herself had always
loved clothes, not that she'd bothered buying anything
recently. But she still had some beautiful pieces in her wardrobe.
Today she was wearing a burgundy high necked dress
in a soft knitted silk with a matching long flowing cardigan
made of knobbly burgundy chenille wool. An Irish designer
piece, Bill had bought it for her fifty-sixth birthday. He'd

admired her tall, slim figure in it and said he loved the way
the rich colour showed up her silvery blonde hair so well.

'You don't think it's too young for me?' she'd said,
scrunching up her patrician nose as she looked at herself in
the changing room mirror.

'You are young,' Bill had said, swatting her rear lovingly.

Mary-Kate was talking about her shopping experience.

'I went into this boutique and I ask you, the prices! Three
hundred pounds for this filmy scrap of a chiffon thing you'd
run up yourself on the sewing machine. And it wasn't exactly
practical either. You'd freeze your bosoms off in it, I can
tell you. Well,' she looked down at her narrow, flat chest,
'not that I have any to freeze off.'

Virginia went off into peals of laughter and Mary-Kate
joined her.

'You can tell I'm not the Vogue type,' Mary-Kate laughed.
'They kept trying to put me in these mother of the bride rig
outs, all pastel blues and pinks with matronly skirts and
discreet camisoles.'

''Are you the mother of the bride?' Virginia asked.

'Lord no. I've no children and was never married. I'm
just your average maiden aunt.' She looked at Virginia
mischievously. 'Can't you tell? I'd say I have it written all
over me.'

Virginia thought that if Mary-Kate had one thing written
all over her it was that she was both shrewd and funny. Her
grey eyes glittered with fun and if her dress, undyed bobbed
hair and general demeanour were those of a quiet, maiden
aunt, two minutes in her company would soon put paid to
that idea.

'So did you buy anything in the end?'

'No.' Her companion looked glum. 'I have to have something
new for this wedding because if I turn up in my usual
grey suit, the real mother of the bride will be raging with
me for not making an effort. I suppose I'll have to take my
life in my hands and venture into my local shop, Lucille's.
They don't stock anything normal in there. I'll either come



out in lycra tiger skin or see-through black with a skirt up
round the cheeks of my backside. She's a very persuasive
woman, Lucille. You know it looks terrible on you but she
somehow manages to convince you that it's you.'

'You're from Redlion!' Virginia exclaimed. 'Me too. I
pass Lucille's every day and I love her window. It's . ..'

'I know,' Mary-Kate interrupted. 'Fake fur leopard at the
moment. I have thought of buying the matching little Russian
hat but it might frighten people out of the chemist.'

'You run the chemist?' Virginia said. 'That's amazing. I
walk past your premises every day. I live out on the Blackglen
Road in Kilnagoshell House and I go into town every day.
I've only been in your shop a couple of times, though.'

'Have you lived in Kilnagoshell House long?' asked Mary
Kate, who knew perfectly well how long Virginia had lived
there but who didn't want to say so. It was obvious that
Virginia knew nobody in the town and therefore had made
a conscious decision not to do so. She'd probably hate to
feel that Mary-Kate had known who she was all along, even
though in a village like Redlion, it was impossible to remain
anonymous.

'Over seven months. I've been a bit reclusive, I'm afraid.
My husband died last year you see and I moved to Kerry
afterwards. I wasn't up to socializing.'

She could feel tears surging up and swallowed hard to
get rid of the lump in her throat.

'I'm so sorry,' Mary-Kate said with warmth. 'It's hard to
ease yourself back in the real world after something like
that.'

'Today, I had to see his accountant and it was awful,'
Virginia said bleakly. 'Every time he mentioned Bill, I felt
like crying. It was like having a long nail hammered into my
head again and again. Each time I think the pain's getting
better, someone else hammers away and it's just as bad as
it was in the beginning. I don't know why I'm telling you
all this,' she added apologetically. 'I don't even know you.'

'Sympathy of strangers can be the best kind,' Mary-Kate


remarked. 'Strangers have no agenda, no desire to meddle
and no way of telling what's true and what's not true.'
Virginia looked at her curiously. It seemed as if she knew
what she was talking about.
'Strangers never tell you to get a grip and get on with
your life,' Mary-Kate continued.
'Strangers don't tell you to buck up because Bill wouldn't
have wanted you to waste away,' Virginia added with some
rancour.
Mary-Kate grinned.
'It's amazing,' Virginia went on, 'people who were really
only acquaintances and who wouldn't have had a clue what
Bill was really like are the first ones to tell you what he
would and wouldn't want now that he's dead. On the day
before the funeral, Bill's second cousin phoned to tell me
which reading we should have at the ceremony, "because
Bill always liked if. What rubbish. They never saw each
other.' She'd been furious at the intrusion. 'People like that
couldn't have bought him so much as a jumper when he was
alive and now that he's dead, they can figure out exactly
what he'd be thinking. God,' she added, 'you're sure you're
not a psychiatrist? You're doing a great job of letting me
get it all out and you're only nodding your head and saying
"mmm" at the right moments.'
'Did I mention the forty pounds an hour charge?' Mary
Kate deadpanned.
Virginia told her new friend about her three sons, her
darling little grand-daughter and dear sweet Sally, who was
the kindest daughter-in-law you could meet.
Mary-Kate explained that she'd grown up in Redlion
where her father was the chemist but had longed to escape
the small town. She'd qualified as a pharmacist herself in
Dublin and worked there for fifteen years until her father
died. She'd taken over the family business ten years ago.
'There are times when I love Redlion; there's great truth
in the adage that the place of your birth has a certain hold
over you,' she said. 'But there are other days when I long

for the anonymity of Dublin. In Redlion, everyone knows
everyone else's business.'

'Did you never have the chance to marry?' Virginia asked,
then immediately felt sorry for it. 'I'm sorry, that just slipped
out. It was a very personal question and you've just been
talking about nosy neighbours.'

'No, it's fine. Sure, I've been asking you things. There was a man but it didn't work out.' Mary-Kate shrugged and
gently changed the subject. 'As you don't know many people
in the village, I'll have to introduce you around. You really
must meet Delphine,' she added.

Virginia noticed the sudden change of subject but didn't
comment.

'Delphine's my niece and she's wonderful. You'd love her.
She's a beautician at the Manoir Rouge Leon up the road
and she's a lovely girl. A bit eccentric, you see, which is why
she and I get on so well. Delphine can go into Lucille's
boutique and actually buy things there that suit her.'

They both giggled at this thought. Delphine must be very
unusual, Virginia reflected.

'We go out every couple of weeks, sometimes to the
cinema,' Mary-Kate said, 'sometimes for a meal. I'd love
you to come along and meet her.'

'I'd like that,' Virginia found herself agreeing.

The train shuddered to a stop in Killarney and both women
collected up their belongings. Virginia's hip ached and she
thought again of her anti-inflammatory tablets. It would
definitely be an early night tonight after a hot, soothing bath.

'Can I offer you a lift?' Mary-Kate asked.

'No thanks, I'm driving too.'

'Well, here's my phone number,' Mary-Kate said, handing
Virginia a piece of paper. 'Phone me when you feel like
company.'

As Virginia walked to her car, clutching her woolly cardigan
close around her to ward off the icy wind, she smiled to herself. It was nice to feel she had a new friend.


Hope listened to the steady thrum of the rain falling on the
corrugated roof of the outhouses and wondered if she could
ring Dr McKevitt's surgery, plead an emergency, and be sent
a crate of Prozac immediately. Or Valium. Or some other
mood-altering drug to make her feel happy.

They'd been in Redlion an entire month, it was now an
icy December, and she didn't think she'd ever been as miserable
in her life. Every morning, an increasingly grumpy Matt
headed off to the creative centre with his laptop and didn't
return until at least six. She had no idea how much he'd
written since they'd arrived because whenever she asked him
about it, Matt snapped her head off and muttered that 'creativity
can't be rushed.'

So now, she asked nothing and wondered if Mrs Shakespeare
had to put up with this sort of behaviour. But even
if Matt was bad tempered, he was at least adult company,
someone who could converse about things other than the
chicks' pooh and the latest episode of Tweenies.

Once Matt was gone, the day stretched ahead of her
blankly, with nothing to fill it except Toby and Millie's latest
craze, which was making endless Christmas decorations out
of bits of coloured paper. They now had enough glittery
garlands to cover four cottages. The only other diversion
was the inevitable rainy walk through the mud into Redlion.
She adored the children and, in theory at least, loved the
idea of being able to spend quality time with them but the
problem was, the quality dimmed when there was so much
quantity. Except for the weekends when Matt mucked in,
she was the only person looking after Toby and Millie and
no matter how much she loved them, being sole carer in an
isolated little cottage with no other grown up help meant
they spent every moment together. Hope simply never had
a moment to herself even to read a magazine or blow-dry
her hair properly.

Even having a bath in the evening when the children
were supposedly in bed was impossible as Millie was so
demanding she'd clamber out of bed and insist on getting


into the bath too. The simple fact was that the children were
bored, too and needed the company of other kids but there
didn't seem to be any young families nearby.

Hope thought longingly of Your Little Treasures and
regretted ever giving out stink about the sergeantmajorish
Marta. She'd have done anything to get the children into a
local playgroup but when she'd investigated, there wasn't a
place to be had for miles around and wouldn't be until late
January when Hunnybunnikins on the far side of the village
would have room. Roll on January. Then, of course, Hope
would face the question of exactly what she'd do while the
children were at playgroup. Redlion didn't even have a bank
and she didn't fancy trekking into Killarney to work, assuming
she'd even be eligible for a job here. She wasn't qualified
for anything else apart from bank work, so what else could
she do?

Another nine months and they'd be gone. Nine whole
months. She sighed.

Now it was Monday and another week loomed ahead of
her, empty except for her by-now daily trips into Redlion
for the shopping. If she hadn't had Sam to talk to by email
and Mary-Kate to talk to in person every day, she'd have
gone completely mad. Visiting Mary-Kate constituted her
entire social life as she never set eyes on anyone else. Finula
kept inviting them to her house for dinner but on the one
occasion they'd gone, Finula had been so patronizing to her
that Hope hadn't wanted to go again. Matt went on his own
after that which frequently left Hope alone in the evenings.

Mary-Kate had twice invited her out with her female
friends but Hope had refused both times, partly because
Matt hated her going out without him and partly because
she didn't want to feel like a burden on anyone. It was one
thing to go into the chemist every day for something, it was
another entirely to impose on a group of old friends going
out at night. Sweet Mary-Kate never pushed her, unlike Sam
who was getting increasingly pushy via-email.

'Your life is revolving around Matt's,' Sam wrote. Hope


could almost hear her sister's voice rising in anger as she
read her words. 'He has set himself up with a new life and
he expects you to kow tow and have the dinner on the table
when he gets home. Tell him it's not on!!!'

Sam was right, Hope decided firmly. She needed to do
something about her life. She needed to get out and meet
people and get a job. She even daydreamed about the old
days in the building society where there was a constant
stream of conversation. But first, she'd better clean out the
chickens' box.

The raising of the chicks was going remarkably well. She
found that she liked looking after them and decided that,
when they were old enough to live outside in the hen house,
she'd get more chicks. The thought of having her own eggs
made her feel smugly self-sufficient and she was determined
to get the back garden cleared so she could grow vegetables.
And maybe herbs, she decided. Basil and rosemary that
would scent the entire garden deliciously. Unlike the chicks'
box, which did not smell delicious.

Nobody had mentioned that chicken shit smelled, she
reflected as she stood at the hidey hole by the back door
and peered into the box. Finula's chicks lived in her roomy
scullery, Matt had informed her, so the Headley-Ryans never
had to put up with the pong. And smell it did.

'Oooh yucky!' declared Millie holding her nose ostentatiously.
'I
thought you liked chicken pooh,' Hope laughed.
'You're always talking about it.'

Millie giggled endearingly.

Both children liked the chicks' coop being cleaned out
because it was the only time they got to play with the chicks.
Well, the only time officially. Hope was forever finding
Millie standing on tiptoes and trying to squeeze one fat little
hand under the wire into the coop to catch a hysterical chick.
At the first sight of her, all the chicks ran like lemmings,
frantically trying to hide under each other. Hope didn't like
to think what Millie had done to them to cause this panic.


Hope took the wire cover off and put the first chick in a
smaller box, which she then gave to Toby to hold. She had
decided that it was more important that Toby get over his
fear of countryside creatures than to be hypersensitive about
germs. She went through loads of disinfectant hand wash as
it was. 'Don't kiss her and don't put your hands near your
face if you touch her,' she warned. Toby gazed at his squeaking
chick with awe.
'Where's mine?' wailed Millie.
Hope handed her another box.
'What chick is that?' Millie asked, already sticking her
hand into the box to grab her prey.
'Mopsy,' lied Hope. She was never totally sure which was
which as they all looked pretty alike at this point. The grand
naming ceremony had made for an enjoyable few days when
Toby and Millie came up with all sorts of mad suggestions.
Millie was keen on Beatrix Potter names and refused to
believe that Mopsy and Flopsy were traditionally names for
rabbits. Toby had come up with Bear (after his favourite teddy) and Thomas (after the Tank Engine). Hope named
the smallest chick Fifi and had been considering a sixth and
final name when Millie piped up that they could call the
fattest chick Auntie Finula.
'You can't do that,' Hope said, desperately trying to keep
a straight face.
'But I want to,' said Millie.
'Why do you want to call that chick Auntie Finula?' Hope
knew she shouldn't go down this road but she couldn't resist.
'I don't like Auntie Finula. I don't like that one,' Millie
said firmly, pointing her finger at the innocent chick in question,
an enormous cuckoo of a bird who looked as though
her skinny little legs shouldn't be capable of supporting her
fat body.
Hope bit her lip. 'We can't call it Auntie Finula, it might
upset the real Auntie Finula.'
Millie's impish dark eyes glinted. 'Don't care!'

Mary-Kate was having more success with persuading Virginia
to come out. They'd got into the habit of talking on
the phone quite a bit and had already had one night out at the
cinema where Delphine had come along too and enchanted
Virginia.

Now Mary-Kate had asked Virginia to go to the Widow
Maguire's pub the following night.

'Just yourself, myself and Delphine,' Mary-Kate had said
on the phone. 'A girls' night out before Christmas.'

Virginia didn't feel up to it and wondered how she could
politely wriggle out of the invitation without upsetting her
new friends.

They made an odd threesome, Virginia thought. The
outwardly prim Mary-Kate, herself grief-stricken and Delphine,
Mary-Kate's niece, with her wild Celtic beauty and
mad clothes. Delphine's idea of normal clothes were pinstripe
trouser suits with a low-cut T-shirt underneath when
she was in a business-like mood or a long, purple velvet
dress with huge costume jewellery when she was in party
mode.

In Dublin, in her previous life, Virginia wouldn't have
made friends with such a diverse group. Her friends had all
been women of her own age, women with husbands and
grown up families, and their conversations had always taken
well-established, conservative lines. They grumbled happily
about how their husbands were always late home for dinner
and talked about unsuitable sons-in-law. Now Virginia
couldn't bear to be around her old women friends: they
reminded her too much of what she'd had and lost so suddenly.
Her friends went red with guilt when they realized
they were groaning about tardy husbands. They were kind
and loved her, and did their best to change the subject, but
Virginia was a realist. She knew that's what long-married
people talked about: their partners and their families. It
wasn't their fault that this topic sent shrapnel into Virginia's
heart.

Her new friends were very different. Straight-talking


Mary-Kate was forty-four, conservative on the outside and
startlingly original on the inside. She may have looked sedate
with her old-fashioned glasses and slightly prim manner, but
she was wry and marvellously acute. Mary-Kate had some
sadness inside her, Virginia felt, which was how they'd probably
been drawn to each other. The man she'd loved and
lost was obviously the secret but Virginia would never have
dreamed of intruding by asking.
The exotic Delphine, another Redlion inhabitant, was a
mere twenty-nine, lived with Eugene, a delightful teddy bear
of a man, and worked in the beauty salon of the luxury
hotel five miles away. Manoir Rouge Leon was practically
six star it was so posh, Mary-Kate informed Virginia. And
it was managed by a hunk who set every woman's heart
aflame, Mary-Kate added, pointing out that for some strange
reason, this hunk had never made it to the chemist to ask
her out.
'Christy De Lacy's not your type,' Delphine laughed when
her aunt said this. 'You've always told me that it's what's
in a man's heart that matters - not his face.'
'If he's as gorgeous as everyone says he is, I could make
an exception in his case,' protested her aunt.
Livelier than a firework, Delphine was Mary-Kate's niece
and god-daughter. When Mary-Kate took Virginia to her
heart, so did Delphine. They'd brought Virginia to the
cinema already and now the three of them were due to go
to the Widow's for a night of entertainment, food and wine. Virginia felt about as outgoing as a turkey at Christmas.
'I think I'm getting a bit of a headache,' she lied on the
phone to Delphine, deciding that it was easier to lie to
Delphine than to her aunt.
'If you've a headache going into the Widow's, you'll be
ahead of the rest of us then,' Delphine laughed, 'because
we'll all have a headache at the end. It's the Nashville Springtime
Girls tonight and they're godawful.'
In spite of herself, Virginia laughed.
'I'm tired,' she tried.Forget it,' said Delphine in her lilting Kerry accent. 'You're coming and that's it.'

The Nashville Springtime Girls were setting up their equipment when the three of them took up position at the back of the Widow Maguire's, as far away from the speakers as possible. The Springtime Girls had obviously chosen their name in an ironic way, Virginia decided, seeing as how none of them appeared younger than her and looked like sexy grandmothers in their denim and cowboy boots.
'Coming in early has its advantages,' Mary-Kate said with relief, sitting back against the extra cushion she'd stolen off a nearby bench. 'My sciatica is killing me. But I've taken two of those muscle relaxants and soon I won't feel a thing.'
'You won't be able to feel a thing if you drink either,' Virginia scolded. 'They'll react with the whiskey and you'll be as high as a kite.'
'Don't nag,' said Mary-Kate equably. 'I lead a very dull life and I'm entitled to a bit of being high as a kite. Anyway, it's okay to have a drink with these ones, I promise. I'm a professional and I can tell.'
'If that's the case, can I have a supply of them for Christmas,' begged Delphine. 'I'll need some sort of drugs to help me get through the festive season.'
Virginia shuddered at the thought of Christmas. She wished it could be wiped off the calendar. Last Christmas she'd been in a miasma of tranquillizers; this year, she'd be going without.
'What are you and Eugene doing for the big day?' Virginia asked, trying to sound normal. Just because her idea of Christmas was hell on earth, that didn't mean it was the same for everyone else.
Delphine's pale Celtic skin paled even further and her misty dark-green eyes suddenly became liquid.
Mary-Kate patted Delphine's hand briskly.
'I'm sorry,' Virginia said anxiously, 'I didn't mean to say


the wrong thing.' She must have missed some subtle hint about Delphine and Eugene's relationship. Delphine always spoke of him so lovingly that it was hard to imagine them having a row or anything.
'It's not your fault, Virginia,' Delphine said, snuffling a bit.
'Don't tell me, it's your business,' Virginia said, distraught at having upset her new friend.
'No, I'd like to tell you. You'd understand,' Delphine said. 'It's Eugene and Christmas, you see. He was married before and he's divorced and . . .' She gulped miserably.
Mary-Kate handed her niece her drink and finished the story. 'My dear sister Pauline is one of those high-minded people who think that married people have no business going off and attempting to get divorces and she believes that Delphine is ruining her immortal soul by living with Eugene. She refuses to talk about him, absolutely refuses to have him in the house and has only recently started talking to Delphine again. Mind you, the level of conversation never rises above the "when are you going to come to your senses and dump that immoral man or are you going to shame us all forever?" sort of thing.'
'Christmas is going to be just awful,' wailed Delphine.
Both Virginia and Mary-Kate leaned over to give her a hug.
'Last year, I hadn't told her about him and he had his own place but this year we're living together . . .' Delphine pulled a paper napkin from the table and wiped her eyes with it, 'and she keeps going on about how I have to come home for Christmas and how it's God's day. and it's a sin what I'm doing and I'll never be able to get married now in the church. She'll kill me if I don't go home but I can't leave Eugene on his own on Christmas Day, I just can't.'
'And there's no way you can say anything to Pauline?' Virginia asked Mary-Kate, who looked at her with resigned eyes.
'You haven't met my sister,' Mary-Kate said glumly. 'She

wasn't just behind the door when the Lord was doling out compassion and understanding - she was in another room entirely getting more than her supply of prejudice and signing up for the gossip-mongers' guild.'
'You got her supply of compassion,' Virginia joked gently, trying to lift the atmosphere. 'Delphine's lucky she's got you.'
Delphine grinned stoically. 'I'd go mad without Mary- Kate,' she said. 'I think I'll hit the loos and repair myself,' she added. 'It'd be bad for business for all the people in the pub to see the local beautician looking like she applied her mascara with a paintbrush.'
She hurried across the room, russet curls dancing as she went, causing many a man to look up from his pint. Even an over-sized tangerine man's jumper and a flowing silk skirt couldn't hide her Rubenesque figure.
'Poor Delphine,' Virginia said. 'I'm sorry I put my foot in it.'
'It's not your fault,' sighed Mary-Kate. 'It's bloody Pauline's.'
Virginia was startled. She'd never heard Mary-Kate swear.
'I do not know under God how we are sisters because she is a million miles away from me. She hasn't an understanding bone in her body,' Mary-Kate raged. 'She has put that poor girl through hell and all so that she can prance first in the queue up to communion on Sundays.'
'But so many people get divorced now, surely she can see it's common,' Virginia said. 'People have to live their lives differently, even the Church sees that. One of my friends in Dublin was on the church baptism committee and they were taught to treat all new parents the same whether they were married or not. That type of blinkered thinking is a thing of the past, surely.'
Mary-Kate laughed sourly. 'The Vatican will be announcing the election of the first female cardinal before Pauline changes her mind about marriage being for life. She's entitled


to her views but she's not entitled to ram them down Delphine's throat.'
'What about Delphine's father? Does he think the same?'
They both spotted Delphine emerging from the ladies.
'My brother-in-law, Fonsie, gets on very well with Eugene but is too afraid of Pauline to say anything. His notion of independence is to secretly buy one of those gossipy Sunday newspapers as well as the one that Pauline considers suitable.'
Mary-Kate turned to her niece. 'Delphine, will you order us another round, we're parched. Tell us about your day,' she said cheerfully.
'Don't ask. I had to give a manicure to that bitch Miriam Concannon from the television show. She's staying in a huge suite in the hotel and in between flirting madly with Christy, who was flirting back, I can tell you, she bitched about everyone on the planet. Believe me, she may come across as sweet on that programme but she thinks she shits chocolate and pisses eau de cologne,' sniffed Delphine.
'Where do you hear these sayings?' demanded Mary-Kate. 'You've a mouth on you like a docker.'
'We get lots of interesting people into the salon,' said Delphine, unperturbed, 'and they've got these very colourful turns of phrase. That's a real Dublin saying, apparently. Listen to this one . . .'
'Delphine,' warned Mary-Kate. 'Virginia didn't come out tonight to listen to your depraved mind. How about you Virginia? How was your day?'
They ate, drank and listened to the Springtime Girls run through an entire Tammy Wynette/Patsy Cline catalogue about love, men and how they always let you down.
'I thought we came here to be cheered up?' Mary-Kate said after yet another sad song about a woman with a fatal tendency for the wrong sort of man. 'I'm going home to have more muscle relaxants if this doesn't get happier.'
Delphine, who couldn't hold her drink very well and was already deeply merry after four glasses of Guinness, burst into hysterical giggles.

'Can you send a bumper packet of those over to my mother? She really needs them,' she chuckled, before suddenly growing maudlin. 'I phoned home today and she would barely talk to me.'
'Ah sure, with Pauline, that's a blessing in disguise,' Mary- Kate tried to cheer her up. 'My sister would talk the hind legs off a donkey,' she added for Virginia's benefit. 'And you, my girl.' She patted Delphine's knee. 'You need more nights out with normal people so you can remember that not everyone is as narrow-minded as your mother. I think it's time we revived the Macrame Club?'
Delphine perked up. 'It's been out of commission since Aggie left Redlion but we could start up again.' She turned to Virginia, 'Aggie was one of the founder members,' she explained.
Virginia was mystified. 'Macrame? I wouldn't have put you two down for arts and crafts.'
Mary-Kate and Delphine exchanged looks. 'The major craft is learning how to make the perfect martini,' Mary-Kate said solemnly.
'Think Witches of Eastwick,' added Delphine.
'Only I get to be Cher and I want Jack Nicholson to myself,' interrupted her aunt. 'We've got to reconvene after Christmas. You will come, won't you, Virginia?'
'What should I bring?' Virginia asked, wondering if she could do crochet instead of macrame.
'Gin,' suggested Delphine. 'Vodka maybe. Handicrafts are the last thing that go on there. It's a letting your hair down sort of night.'
'And where did you come up with the name?'
Mary-Kate beamed. 'We didn't even have a name for it originally. It was just a group of us meeting up to relax and chat, you know. But when Finula Headley-Ryan moved to the village, she was desperate to get involved and none of us could stand her, so we told her it was a handicrafts night. I thought macrame sounded suitably off-putting. Finula wouldn't be interested in anything so pedestrian. And the

name stuck. It came in handy for keeping my sister, Pauline, off the scent too. Pauline would have seen it as an opportunity to hear all sorts of dirt and personal stories, and that wasn't the point of the club at all. Oh look, it's Hope,' Mary-Kate added as the Parkers came into the pub by the side door. 'Matt is the latest convert to the Kerry school of creative scribbling and Hope is his wife,' she explained to Virginia and Delphine. 'She's lovely. I think she could do with a bit of macrame too.'
Virginia watched the newcomers with interest. It was nice not to be the newest person in the village any more, so she watched the people who'd taken her place. Hope and Matt did not fit the normal artistic community bill. For a start, Hope was dressed in very normal black jeans, chambray shirt and navy windbreaker instead of the sort of flamboyant flowy stuff that the awful Finula Headley-Ryan always wore. Virginia had met Finula in the chemist on one occasion and had not felt as if she'd met a kindred spirit. Hope was also pretty in a subdued, old-fashioned way, although she was cast into the shade by her marvellously handsome husband.
'He's a fine thing, isn't he?' Delphine said of Matt, admiring the tall, dark man with the chiselled jaw and soulful eyes. 'He can fill a pair of jeans. Is he the latest eejit to fall under Mrs HR's spell?'
'Afraid so,' said Mary-Kate sorrowfully. 'I don't think poor Hope knows what's hit her. She's very lonely, God love her, and embarrassed to admit it.'
'So you know her well?' Virginia asked Mary-Kate in surprise.
Delphine laughed. 'Know her well? If Watergate had happened in Redlion, Mary-Kate would have been Deep Throat.'

'Isn't this nice?' Hope said, looking around happily. She liked the pub. It was so pretty with its dark beams, cosy corners and all the bric-a-brac dangling from hooks everywhere.

If you were tall you were in danger of being concussed by hanging lobster pots, storm lanterns and farmyard implements from another era. Matt was so tall he'd already narrowly missed being strangled by a bit of wayward fishing net.
'We could have gone to Finula's,' Matt pointed out. 'She was making boxty, which is some sort of traditional Irish dish.'
'Well, we can have traditional Irish food here,' said Hope, smiling in a forced manner. They'd had a mild argument earlier when Matt had tried to renege on his promise to take her for dinner in the pub by saying that Finula had just invited them to her place for dinner.
'That was nice of her but I hope you told her we'd arranged to go out,' Hope had said, gritting her teeth and thinking of the hassle she'd had getting a babysitter.
'Well, no . . .'
'Phone her then,' snapped Hope, sitting down heavily on their bed to do her minimal makeup.
'I will, I will. Keep your hair on.'
Matt was subdued when he came back from phoning Finula. 'I'm sorry about that, Hope,' he said. 'I should have told her no in the first place. Now, she's cross with me and you're cross with me .. .'
Immediately, Hope dropped her mascara wand and looked up from her hand mirror. 'I'm not cross, darling. I only wanted some time on our own, that's all.'
'You're right.' He dropped a kiss on the top of her head. 'I'm a selfish bastard. You need to see more of this village than Finula's house.'
Hope smiled privately. That was so exactly what she'd been thinking. He'd been so self-obsessed for the past few weeks that she'd forgotten how clever Matt was at getting inside her head when the mood took him.
'I'll get menus,' Matt said now.
They both ordered mussels and garlic bread, with red wine for Hope and Guinness for Matt.

'You should have some,' he said taking a deep draught of the inky black pint. 'You'd love it.'
'Give me a taste. Ugh, horrible,' she said, wishing she could spit it out.
They sat in companionable silence for a while, looking around and breathing in the atmosphere. People were settling themselves in for the night, buying lots of drink and looking as if they planned to be there till closing. It was an interesting mix of people. Two men with jumpers and wild beards were staring moodily into their pints in one corner, while a very glamorous blonde woman in a suit, whom Hope had noticed rushing in and out of the estate agent's, was beside them talking furiously to an abashed looking man who'd removed his suit jacket and had damp patches under his arms. Definitely a couple having a row, Hope decided. She could also see Mary-Kate with two other women, one young and exotic with flaming red hair, the other older and quietly elegant, with silver hair, sad eyes and a ladylike look about her. Hope would have liked to say hello but she didn't want to butt in.
'How did the writing go today?' she asked Matt tentatively instead. She hadn't asked him much about the novel, sensing that Matt didn't want to talk about it.
'OK,' said Matt guardedly.
'You're great at that sort of thing, you're so creative,' Hope said. 'Remember that terrible pension plan ad when the clients rejected eight different ideas and you still came up with a ninth.'
'Hell, yes,' laughed Matt. 'Those clients were a nightmare. But it's not quite the same. Ad campaigns and novels are very different things, or so I'm finding out.'
'Tell me,' said Hope. 'Tell me all about it.' She let the fingers of her right hand entwine with those of his left under the table. Matt gripped hers tightly in return.
'Let's not talk about work,' he said, tucking a wayward curl behind her ear. 'I know you didn't want to come here,' he added gently, 'but it's been good for us, hasn't it? This

place has a good effect on us, it makes us better. If we were at home, I'd probably only be getting back to Makings Lane now and you'd be worn out with working all day and having the dreaded quality time with the kids.'
She nodded ruefully. 'And I'd be angry with you for being so late home because the dinner would be burned to a crisp and I'd had nobody to have an adult conversation with all evening.'
'And then you'd go to bed because you were shattered and I'd stay up watching Sky Sports because I didn't want to get into bed and face the icy cold of your back turned towards me.' Matt grimaced at the memory.
'My icy back in my stay-away-from-me pyjamas, don't forget,' Hope laughed, thinking of the winceyette passion- killers she'd worn on purpose on those nights when Matt had annoyed her. That had been her idea of letting him know she was annoyed. Easier than saying anything outright, she'd hoped he would realize why she was angry without her having to tell him.
The food arrived and Matt dug in, eagerly scooping out delicious garlic-flavoured mussels with one hand, still holding onto Hope with his other hand. He dunked a bit of bread into the mussel juice and held it to her mouth. Hope bit off half, leaving the rest for him. 'It is good for us here,' he said with his mouth full, 'isn't it?'
Hope nodded. 'It's just a bit hard to fit in because I feel as if I don't have a role here. Sorry,' she said apologetically. 'But I feel a bit lonely. I'd love to have a part-time job or something. I love being with the children every day but I never get to see anyone, it's terribly lonely . . .'
She broke off. She felt guilty even saying it. She'd spent so long dreaming of the fantasy world where she'd be able to be with the children all the time, but it was hard to be so isolated from other people during the day. In Bath, she'd have had friends nearby; lunch with Betsey, a night out with Yvonne and Denise from work, Sam coming down on the train for a long weekend; here, she had nobody.

Matt sighed deeply. He didn't need this hassle, really he didn't. He'd hard a hard day working on the damn book and no matter what he did with it, his main character remained resolutely wooden. 'I'm sorry, Hope,' he said, trying to be accommodating. 'I'm not trying to be selfish. I go off every day to work and it's a big stress trying to get the novel off the ground. It's not easy you know.'
Hope glared at him. He was unbelievable. Selfish wasn't the word.
'It's not easy for you?' she hissed. 'How easy is it for me? I love the children to bits but it's tough to be buried at home with them all day without any friends.'
'I know . ..' he interrupted.
'No you don't,' she said. 'If you did, you'd make a bit of an effort. Why can't you work from home a couple of days a week and give me a chance to get part time work?'
'Doing what?' he demanded. 'What are you going to do? Work in a shop? Get a job in the pub?'
'I don't know,' Hope retorted. 'It's not what the job is that's important, it's the fact that I've got one. I've worked all my life and it was hard to give it up for you. And I did give it up for you,' she reminded him. 'I just want a bit of independence again. There's at least another month before the day nursery can take the children, I don't know if I can cope with another month buried away all day feeling lonely while you write the great novel.'
Thinking of how badly the great novel was going, Matt scowled at her.
'I feel very isolated right now,' Hope added. 'Our social life round here is limited apart from dinner at Finula's.' She grimaced. 'We need to meet more people and make friends. Me working would be part of that.'
'How am I supposed to work if I'm watching the kids?' Matt demanded.
Hope gave up. They ate their food and listened to the music in silence for the next hour. Hope brooded on her need to spend time with other adults, time when she was

someone other than a wife and mother. Matt didn't understand this. He seemed to think it was a betrayal of him and the children if Hope wanted anything else. He didn't realize that Hope's job had given her confidence. Neither had she, to be honest. Until it was gone. Without the job, she felt her confidence slipping away until she was afraid she'd become a reclusive creature who viewed meeting people with fear. She couldn't let that happen.
Matt stared gloomily at the Nashville Girls and brooded on the novel. Did all great writers have this problem, this not-able-to-write-a-word problem?
'Hello Hope. Nice to see you.'
They both looked up from their brooding to see Mary- Kate and her two companions: the elegant silver-haired lady and the voluptuous redhead.
'We're going home before our eardrums give in,' Mary- Kate said pleasantly. 'I thought I'd introduce you to Delphine and Virginia.'
Introductions were exchanged and Matt roused himself from his gloom to be charming.
'You must come out with us some night, Hope,' Delphine said. 'We're thinking of having a girls' night soon.'
Hope felt her eyes stinging as she nodded gratefully at the three women. 'I'd like that,' she said.
'And you said you never meet anyone,' remarked Matt when they'd gone, waving goodbye and promising to phone Hope.
'She seemed lovely,' said Virginia as she, Mary-Kate and Delphine said their goodbyes outside the pub. 'But nervy, I think. You're right, Mary-Kate, she looks lonely.'
Delphine grinned. 'We'll soon sort that out.'

CHAPTER EIGHT

Sam sat in the first marketing meeting of the new year and listened intently to the latest single from Hot Banana, a sexy all-girl band from Birmingham, Alabama. There were nine people around the long matt wood table, all with pages of densely typed marketing reports, A4 pads and biros in front of them and coffee in plastic cups - the office mugs were always being stolen, so disposable cups were the only option.
'Boy, don't do it to me, yet,' cooed the Hot Banana lead singer in a breathy voice to a background of pizzicato strings intercepted with a pulsating drum beat.
On the enormous flat screen TV mounted on the wall, Hot Banana danced with a troupe of black male dancers, five tiny tanned blondes writhing with the muscle-packed dancers, clinging to the dancers in a way that was just on the right side of decency. The lead singer, the girl with the longest blonde extensions and the shortest mini skirt, pouted with her inflatable pool lilo lips and breathed the last few words to the camera. She was nineteen, looked about seventeen and had jail bait written all over her.
'Good video,' said Sam, swinging her matt grey leather chair away from the screen and back to the table and her plastic cup of fizzing painkillers. She had a murderous pain in her belly, something between the pain of an agonizing period and another, unidentifiable ache. She picked up the cup and stirred the contents with her pen, watching the last bits of tablets dissolve. 'What's the story for Top Of The Pops? They're not bringing all those dancers with them, are they? The hotel bills would be horrendous.'

'No,' said Karen Storin, Sam's publicity director friend, who was masterminding the publicity and the arrangements for the tour. 'Their manager has them working with the choreographer who did last year's MTV awards and they've got an amazing routine together. They're very focussed girls, Sam. They want to crack Europe so badly, you wouldn't believe it.' She consulted her papers. 'The album is at number seven in the US album charts. If only we can get them some airplay on MTV, I think we've got a real chance of breaking them here.'
'Great,' said Sam, draining her painkillers with distaste. 'What are we going to do with them, then?'
For the next fifteen minutes, all nine people around the table discussed Hot Banana and the company's plans for launching their first album in the UK in April, just over three months' time. A round of media interviews was planned, Karen had managed to get them on the cover of Smash Hits, they were appearing on four TV shows and on a kids' Saturday morning programme 'in longer skirts,' added Karen, mindful of shocking parents with scantily-dressed singers appearing in front of their impressionable ten-year-olds. Promo T-shirts had been printed, along with expensive keyrings for when the first single would be sent out to radio stations.
There would also be a month of personal appearances and gigs in shopping centres around the country, along with five gigs supporting a boy band, El Mega, who were currently number two in the singles charts but belonged to another label. A Titus tour manager, along with publicity and marketing personnel were assigned to look after the Hot Banana girls.
'Just make sure you keep them away from the actual Megas,' Karen advised the tour manager. 'The word on the street is that two of the boys from the band are experimenting with heavy drugs.'
Everyone winced. There was nothing worse than seeing a band you'd worked your fingers to the bone for turn to


the bad parts of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. Bands like El Mega appealed to a very young female audience and their image had to be cleaner than clean. One hint of heroin addiction and the whole band would collapse like a house of cards.
'It drives me mad,' said Cheryl fiercely. One of the publicity assistants, Cheryl had become devoted to a Titus signing called the LLBoys, who were launched at the same time as El Mega and who'd failed where the Megas had succeeded. 'You wouldn't mind if they had any talent in the first place. They're just singing stuff someone else has written and trying to pretend to the fans that they wrote it themselves!'
Everyone laughed at this.
'Cheryl, if the only people with songs in the charts had actually written them themselves, there wouldn't be a Music Week Top Hundred, it would be Music Week's Top Three!' joked another of the publicity team.
Cheryl went pink.
'Right, let's move onto Enchanting,' said Sam, who had a budget meeting at five and who wanted to cover everything important in this meeting before she had to go.
Enchanting were another new act, one which had been signed by Sam's predecessor but who hadn't yet released an album. Two pretty London sisters who sang almost identical soprano, Steffi and Katya Ceci were just seventeen and their version of 'Jerusalem' would bring tears to anyone's eyes. Desperate to find their own Charlotte Church, the wunderkind Welsh girl with the angelic voice who'd sold millions of CDs, LGBK had signed the Cecis for a huge sum of money the previous year but, as Sam found out as soon as she took over, the two girls were totally unsuited to a life of fame.
Shy to the point of neurosis, both sisters were reduced to silence by interviewers and Karen had discovered that their mother - the original nightmare stage mother - gave them beta blockers before they went onstage to calm their nerves. Karen was also convinced that Steffi was anorexic and firmly believed neither girl would be able to cope with journalists

breathing down their necks and writing articles about them being too fat, too thin, too dull or too wild. Becoming a hit act meant your private life became fair game and Sam wasn't sure if her newest protegees could cope with it.
They'd spent six months on and off recording their album and now that it was to be released, the girls were practically having breakdowns at the thought of doing publicity, while their mother was apparently spending all their advance money in the Versace shop buying herself a selection of highly provocative dresses for a launch party that hadn't even been finalized yet.
'Mrs Ceci was on the phone this morning because she knew we were having a marketing meeting,' Karen said wearily.
'How did she know about it?' demanded Sam.
'I don't know. She's like the FBI, that woman - she knows everything. I can't cope with her,' Karen said with a shudder. 'She wanted to come in for the meeting.'
Sam raised her eyebrows. 'She did?' Nobody but staff ever went to marketing meetings. Artists and their managers sometimes came in to marketing presentations for campaigns but that was generally only the really big stars.
'She's been phoning me all week saying she wants to be involved because she doesn't want us "screwing up her little girls' big chance" - and that's a direct quote,' Karen said.
'Perhaps I should talk to her and explain how we do things,' Sam said grimly.
The people round the table grinned at the thought of Sam Smith taking the obnoxious Mrs Ceci down a peg or two. Mrs Ceci thought she was a match for anyone - wait 'till she met Sam.
They eventually had to leave the troublesome Cecis and moved onto a handsome Latin American singer who'd sold millions of records so far and showed no sign of letting up. 'Thank God for Manolo,' Sam said, looking at the sales figures for his last two albums. Reliable, clever, utterly committed and entirely professional, Manolo was no trouble at

all. And his ever-growing sales would make up for some of the chunk of money they'd spent buying up the so-far useless Cecis.
Sam looked at the album cover where Manolo smouldered inside a white shirt, his bronzed skin a startling contrast. For a moment, her mind rippled back to another man in a sexy white shirt, a man who had come to bed eyes and who could certainly give Manolo a run for his money charisma-wise.
'What a pro,' said Karen fondly after she'd reeled off the lengthy list of engagements Manolo had obligingly agreed to do. 'He's doing three entire days of press and TV interviews at the Dorchester and I know he won't complain once.'
'Great,' Sam said mechanically, trying to put the man next door out of her mind. She hadn't set eyes on him since the morning after the party, although the builders were working at full speed on his house, banging and hammering all day. Despite peering out her window occasionally, hidden behind the curtains of course, Sam hadn't noticed Him going in or out at all.
'Speaking of complaints,' interrupted one of the product managers, 'we've got a problem with Density.'
Sam felt her insides grind painfully. Maybe it was just stress: mention Density and something went pop. 'What is it this time?' she said.
Karen interrupted smoothly. 'We'll talk about it afterwards, Sam, if that's OK with you,' she said, shooting a fierce look at the product manager.
Sam nodded. More trouble ahead. Things had to be bad if Karen wanted to discuss it in private.
For another hour they ploughed through the list, discussing rock bands, a soul singer and a group of folk-singing grandmothers who'd been a huge hit on a talent show and who'd just been signed. Sam fidgeted in her seat, trying to get comfortable but unable to. Her belly ached and no matter which way she sat, it didn't help. Neither had the painkillers. She had more in her desk drawer, she remembered with

relief, although if she felt this bad when her period was due, how awful would she feel when she got it?
Finally, the meeting was over.
'Thanks everyone,' Sam said, trying to sound upbeat and positive but unable to. She felt so ill.
'Are you OK? You look a little tired,' Karen said as everyone hurried out of the room.
'Late night,' lied Sam, grinning.
'Lucky you,' laughed Karen. 'I was in bed at ten watching Ally McBeal.'
You and me both, Sam thought silently.
Back in her office, she peered into her make-up compact mirror and winced. She didn't look tired: she looked grey in the face, grey with a film of sweat sheening on her forehead. She quickly slapped on another layer of Clinique base and brushed on cheekbones. Mascara and a slash of rich lipstick made her look slightly more presentable. As a finale, she popped another couple of painkillers in water, doing her best not to read the instructions about how many you were medically allowed to consume in a twenty-four hour period.
Enchanting loomed large and scary at the budget meeting with Steve and two guys from finance. Their album had cost a fortune to record and the video had been nearly as expensive having over-run by two days because the director had had to coax the two reluctant stars into smiling occasionally. As a marketing director, Sam had often faced the hard facts about artists not recouping money for the record company, but in her new job, she faced these facts from an entirely different perspective. Now that she was the managing director of the label, the buck stopped at her desk. The label had spent an arm and a leg on Enchanting and they still hadn't made so much as three pence profit from them.
Steve wanted to know why the album's release date had been put back. 'We're giving out the wrong signal to the trade by doing that,' he growled, lighting another nuclear cigar.
Sam was feeling too ill to bullshit him. 'Yeah, I know,'


she said. 'But we should never have signed them in the first place. You know that, Steve.' She eyeballed him. 'My people and I are taking the flak for someone we didn't sign, so don't give me a hard time about putting the album back. If we work on the theory that selling 30,000 albums will be a miracle, at least we're being honest about it. I've been doing some figures and if we're lucky, we'll recoup half the costs. That would be doing brilliantly given the problems we're discovering with the girls.'
Steve stopped in the middle of lighting his cigar to stare at her, astonished by such candour.
'Don't sit on the fence about this one, Sam,' he joked. 'Tell us what you really think.'
Sam fixed him with her fierce blue gaze. 'Steve, we have one possibly anorexic and two definitely stressed-out kids on our hands. They've got the most pushy mother my team have ever encountered and when anybody they don't know enters the recording studio, they refuse to sing. They may have wonderful voices but they are not performers, it's that simple. Their mother wants this far more than they do. If she could sing, she'd have made millions by now because she apparently had the brass neck for anything. Her daughters don't. Breaking Enchanting as a successful act is going to be damn near impossible. If it works, fantastic, but at this point, our only option is releasing the album and letting it off on its own without sending the girls out with it. If you want an MD who lies through their teeth to you, then you better rehire. Capisce?'
The two other people in the room blinked. Steve let out a giant roar and started laughing so hard his belly rocked the table.
'You're something else, Smith, you know that? We lucked out the day we found you, that's for sure.'
Relieved that Steve hadn't blown a gasket, the two accounts guys laughed. Even Sam found the energy to raise a smile. They discussed the redundancies and Sam was grateful that Steve didn't question the people she'd chosen to lose.

He'd lose respect for her as a ball-breaking bitch if he discovered that she'd insisted that the pregnant woman kept her job, as had the young guy who'd just bought the big apartment. Sam had spent hours trying to find a solution to the problem and had finally come up with three members of staff who'd been actively looking for jobs elsewhere and who would be happy to take a lump sum, along with a glowing reference and a chance to move. Sam was now waiting for the last redundancy candidate to agree on their package.
It was nearly eight when she stepped out of the Titus building and into lashing rain. As if rain wasn't enough, it was freezing cold - the temperature had definitely dipped since Sam had left her flat that morning clad in her leather coat and no hat. Now she shivered like a whippet after the tropical heat of the office and wondered if she'd get a cab. The underground was miles quicker and the station was literally two minutes away but she couldn't face trekking miles down the escalators into the bowels of the earth to get one. She was too tired. She was always tired these days. Maybe it was just the January blues. Or maybe she'd make an appointment with the doctor.

Hope's e-mail was upbeat for the first time in ages.
Hi Sam, how are you? You sounded tired on the phone on Sunday night. I hope you're looking after yourself. You need to visit us and I'll fill you full of good country food. A blast of Kerry air would be good for you. Listen to me! I even sound like a local now after two months! Seriously, though, you should have come to us for Christmas. I know you promised Catrina and the gang that you'd go to the cottage in Brighton as usual but Redlion is lovely at Christmas. Apart from the rain!
Matt's working hard and Millie and Toby are starting at a new playgroup next week. I can't wait and neither can they. Millie is finally tired of playing

with the baby bens, who are all growing huge, by the way. I've ordered a book that tells you all about them because I can't keep asking other people when they're going to lay eggs or whatever. Apparently, you can tell when they've got an egg ready to lay by feeling their bums but I can't bring myself to do it! No mention of how Hope herself was doing, Sam thought
critically as she scanned through her sister's chatter about
their new friends and how she and Matt had started going
out to dinner once a week.
When are you going to take some holiday and come and
see us? We'd love you to visit us. Please say yes soon. I miss
you.
Sam felt a lump in her throat. She missed Hope too. They'd been so close as children but when Matt had come along, some sort of barrier had grown up between them, a barrier Sam didn't feel strong enough to break down. It was only natural, of course. Sam didn't waste time getting jealous or feeling lonely about it. Siblings had to drift apart a little bit when they had their own families. Well, when one of them had her own family. But instead of getting used to being without Hope, Sam had found herself missing her sister even more lately. It was the sense of family she missed, she reflected.
She'd managed so well for years with her own family of friends. People to spend Christmas with, people to go to dinner with. Now, that didn't seem enough. She wanted more, yet she felt too proud to admit it. It would be too humiliating for strong, go-it-alone Sam Smith to admit that she really needed people, which was why she hadn't gone to Ireland for Christmas. She did feel terribly guilty about it. Hope had certainly asked her often enough. But in Sam's current state of mind, three days celebrating was as much as she could handle.
She'd gone to Brighton to the cottage that Hugh and Catrina had owned for years and had managed two days of smiling with the gang until she could take it no more and

had used the excuse that she had to see an upcoming band who were playing on December 27th as an opportunity to escape. She'd hoped her dashing off sounded high-powered and not antisocial.
Better fly, Sam. Matt's just finished putting the kids to bed. Talk soon and I mean it about coming to stay here soon. We'll only be here for a year and I want you to visit, love Hope

Sam sat at the computer for a moment and tried to imagine Hope's life. What would it be like to live in a family unit, to have to constantly think of other people and worry about dinner or who was looking after the children? Would it be very strange? Having someone sleeping in your bed all the time, having two little people utterly dependent on you, demanding all your time and leaving you with nothing private? Not to be an individual any more but to be Mummy or somebody's partner. Weird.
She clicked onto the 'reply' button and composed her answer.

Hi Sis, I'm feeling great, she lied. I've been very busy with the new job and it's getting busier. We've got some great new acts coming up in the next few months and I'm going to be up to my eyeballs with them. I know you love Manolo so I'll send you his new album. He's doing loads of publicity for us so I'll be able to tell you what he's like in the delectable Latin flesh. I've got to fly to Brussels next week for an international meeting which will be interesting. I've never been to one of the international meetings as an MD. They're usually exhausting but at least I'm getting a suite in the hotel. There have to be some perks. Karen Storin is going too. I've told you about her, she's great.

The e-mail was entirely about work, Sam realized, rereading. Probably because it was easier to rattle on and on about international meetings and new acts instead of telling her sister that she felt low, miserable and lonely. Yes, that was it: lonely. Fifteen years of slogging her socks off for an office with a view and now that she'd got there, the view was increasingly desolate and her sense of job satisfaction was disappearing faster than the months to her fortieth birthday.
She tried again.
Going to a dinner party tonight at Catrina and Hugh's. I'm going with Jay, whom I haven't seen since Christmas, nearly a month ago, despite meaning to phone her every day, Sam reminded herself guiltily. I must rush out and buy some flowers or wine to take, so I better go now. I'll talk soon,
Love Sam.
She'd managed to avoid mentioning the suggested holiday in Kerry. In London, she could keep up the increasingly shaky facade of being in control of her life. With Hope's big grey eyes watching her anxiously, searching for answers, knowing, Sam knew the facade would disintegrate totally.

She left the carrier bag containing a bottle of champagne in the taxi and ran up to Jay's apartment block. She pressed the buzzer for Jay Raskin.
'Jay, it's Sam,' she said when Jay answered. 'I've got a cab waiting, will you be long?'
'Down in a minute,' said Jay in the soft Atlanta accent that hadn't changed despite twenty years in the UK.
Sam got back in the taxi and leaned tiredly against the seat. She half-wished she'd made more of an effort with her outfit instead of staying in her business-like black suit and mannish white shirt. With her hair tied back, it looked a bit butch. But she simply hadn't had the energy to put on anything else.

Catrina was infinitely stylish and always dressed as if a glossy magazine was just about to photograph her. She'd undoubtedly be wearing something divine from an unknown designer who, in a month's time, would be on the cover of Vogue. You'd think she was a designer herself instead of a recruitment consultant.
The only consolation was that, no matter how career- woman Sam's outfit was, Jay's would be equally unpartyish, albeit in a different way. Jay's style was a cross between the Merchant Ivory wardrobe department and Sixties hippie chick. Her favourite garments were trailing antique lace skirts worn with biker boots and little T-shirts with messages on them. It was a look a million miles away from Sam's career lady chic and Catrina's style queen image.
When the entire group of friends were out at dinner, Sam often noticed people looking at the disparate crowd and trying to figure out what they were doing together. Jay looked younger than the rest, Hugh looked older. Jay dressed like a student, Catrina dressed like a fashion editor and nobody would have worked out that they had all gone to the same university.
Jay's front door slammed and Sam looked up. She blinked in astonishment. Jay didn't look like Jay. Instead of the usual trailing outfit, Jay was unrecognizable in a slim little pistachio-coloured skirt that came to the knee and was finished off with sheer tights and high heels that looked like Jimmy Choos. She was without her famous astrakhan coat (Oxfam, 8) and sported a fitted winter white number that was definitely cashmere and could only have come from some expensive boutique. Jay normally avoided expensive boutiques like the plague.
Sam wished she could stop goggling.
'You look so different,' she gasped as Jay got into the taxi.
Jay blushed prettily and tucked a strand of poker-straight dark hair behind her ear. Another change. Jay's hair was normally curly and uncontrollable. 'You haven't met Greg,

have you?' she said, sitting down to reveal a man climbing in behind her.
'Hello,' said Sam politely, as if she wasn't utterly astonished. Jay had vowed never to lay a hand on a man after her last boyfriend, a futures analyst named Stefan, had run off with his sister's best friend. It had taken a year and many vodka-fuelled nights with Sam for Jay to wash him out of
her hair.
'Nice to meet you,' said Greg in a seductive Scottish burr.
Sam shook his big hand and tried to eye him up and down without looking as if she was eyeing him up and down. Not tall, he was lean with pale reddish hair and the blond eyelashes and striking blue eyes that often went with such colouring. His complexion was freckled and sported a healthy golden tan as if he'd just come back from somewhere very hot. With his big engaging grin and intelligent, laughing eyes, the whole effect was very attractive and Sam could see why Jay had that daft, besotted smile on her face. What she couldn't see was why Jay hadn't told her about this new amour.
He sat on the bucket seat of the taxi and grinned across at Jay, who was dimpling back at him. Sam couldn't have felt more like a gooseberry if she'd suddenly turned round, hairy and green.
'We met in Lanzarote,' Jay said to Sam, without taking her eyes off Greg.
'I didn't know you'd been to Lanzarote,' Sam said lightly. 'You must have gone right after we got back from Brighton.'
Jay patted her on the knee. 'You've been so busy with the new job and everything, we haven't talked since Christmas. I went on the spur of the moment - I needed a break. It was just a week in the sun.'
Greg, who appeared to know the area, directed the taxi driver to an off licence.
'We've got to get a gift for Catrina,' Jay explained.
'Won't be long,' Greg said, hopping out of the taxi athletically, his dark raincoat flapping around his legs.

'You're a dark horse,' Sam said as soon as he was gone. 'Why didn't you tell me?'
'I wanted to surprise you,' Jay smiled.
'I'm surprised. Now tell me everything?
Jay ticked it off on her fingers: 'He's thirty-four, runs a landscape garden business, has never been married, comes from Fife and I'm crazy about him. It's only been three weeks but this is for real, Sam. This is the Big One.'
Sam gave her a hug. 'I'm so glad.' She thought for a moment. 'Does Catrina know he's coming tonight?'
Jay nodded but looked out the window so she didn't have to meet Sam's eyes. They could both see Greg coming, swinging an off licence bag. 'She's met him. We all went to an exhibition in Duke Street.'
Sam had the curious sensation of feeling like the child in the playground whom nobody wanted on their rounders team. She'd known Jay, Catrina and Hugh for years. They were part of the gang, seven people who'd shared student life together. Now, with one quick move, she'd been sidelined by coupledom, intellectual enjoyable coupledom at that.
When was the last time she'd seen an exhibition or gone anywhere that didn't involve work?
Hugh met them at the door, looking every inch the successful barrister in a striped shirt that didn't really disguise his girth. He would never win any Mr Universe awards but he had the kindest eyes of anyone Sam had ever known.
'Come in,' he said, grabbing Sam in a bear hug. 'Where have you been hiding out, Madam MD? We've missed you.'
Inexplicably, Sam's eyes welled up and she was glad that her face was buried in Hugh's well-padded shoulder.
'I haven't been anywhere,' she said with a creditable imitation of a laugh. She wriggled out of his embrace and hurried into the hall so nobody would see her glistening eyes. 'Where's Catrina?' she added.
'Slaving over a hot stove,' joked Hugh.
Sam dried her eyes as she made her way down the corridor. It was a beautiful house, not unlike Sam's flat in terms

of decor as it was a vision of clutter-free loveliness with simple interior design. But while Sam's flat was decorated entirely in off-whites, Catrina had painted every room a different colour. The hall was a welcoming buttercup yellow with only yellow flowers ever allowed on the modern furniture the small study was olive green, the big bathroom was purple and Catrina and Hugh's bedroom was shades of misty ocean blue. Sam reached the kitchen (turquoise), a room that would have made any Michelin chef feel right at home with its big steel appliances, professional copper-bottomed saucepans and coolly tiled splashbacks.
'Burnt to a crisp from standing over the hob stirring sauces?' inquired Sam from the door.
Catrina turned around, looking a far cry from the frazzle- faced cook. Beautifully groomed in a slinky salmon pink Ghost dress, she looked unconcerned at the thought of cooking up dinner for ten. Sam knew for a fact that Catrina bought her dinner party materials in containers from a catering company and the only effort involved was heating them up and chopping up the coriander to sprinkle on top of the soup. The caterers sent that too.
'Darling Sam, hello.' Catrina presented one Elizabeth Arden-scented cheek for a kiss and then the other.
'You look tired,' she said bluntly.
Sam smiled ruefully. Catrina may have looked like the perfect hostess, but she'd never lost that straight-talking charm that had earned her the nickname No Holds Barred in college. Being utterly honest had made her one of the City's most successful recruitment people.
'Busy day at work,' Sam said blithely. 'Shall I put this in the fridge and can I help?'
'You don't need to do a thing,' Catrina assured her. 'But you could open a bottle of white wine from the fridge. I know you like white. Everyone else is here. I suppose the young lovers are still helping each other off with their coats?'
Her head in the fridge looking for the wine, Sam smiled. 'You said it. I got such a shock when he appeared this evening.'

'He's good for her,' Catrina said. 'You should have seen them in Lanzarote. I've never seen Jay so happy. She spent ages . . .'
Sam didn't hear the rest because she was so shocked. They'd all gone to Lanzarote and nobody had thought to mention it to her. Her best friends, people she'd seen over Christmas, dammit, had been planning this and never said a word. Sam stared at the big bowl of rocket salad sitting in the fridge and felt betrayed. And why had Jay lied and said that Hugh and Catrina had met Greg at an exhibition? Probably because she knew Sam would feel left out if she heard about the holiday.
'You're not upset, are you?' Catrina asked shrewdly. 'The holiday really was a last minute thing. We were all sitting round freezing in Brighton after you'd gone back to London and Hugh suggested we take a week in the sun. You know you hate sun holidays, Sam. Ever since that week in Crete when you said you'd go insane if you had to lie on the beach for one more minute!'
Sam nodded, doing her best to look as if it didn't matter in the slightest that she hadn't been asked on the holiday. Not that she'd have wanted to go or anything but, oh, to have been asked.
In the dining room (Sahara colours) Andy was the only other one of the college gang there apart from Jay and Sam. He was thinner than ever since his divorce the year before; Sam could feel his ribs through his baggy jumper when he gave her a hug.
'That's some diet you're on, Andy,' she said reprovingly, looking at the slight frame and the serious eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses that Andy had started wearing when he first became a teacher.
'Right back at you, Ms Smith,' he said. 'You've lost a few pounds yourself.'
'It's the Stress Diet,' Sam said bitterly.
Hugh introduced everyone. There were two other couples: Maya and Tom, who were Catrina's guests because she

worked with Maya, and Dennis and Emily, who were Hugh's invitees because he worked in the same chambers as Dennis.
Sam was polite but couldn't summon up too much enthusiasm for the evening. For a start, she was still smarting from being left out of the Lanzarote holiday plan. Secondly, she wasn't in the mood for a business party where Hugh and Catrina had invited colleagues for duty meals. She'd expected a gang-only night where they could all let their hair down. Now she had to be charming to the boring Dennis who wanted to talk all evening about the music industry and was 'it true that you just manufacture bands these days?'
Luckily, Andy, who was sitting on her other side, came to Sam's rescue before she could stab Dennis in the eye with her soup spoon.
'Is it true that barristers make behind the scenes bets on who'll win the case?' he asked innocently.
Dennis choked. 'Rubbish,' he spluttered. 'That's an offensive suggestion and I might add ...'
Andy grinned. 'Gotcha!' he said pleasantly. 'What you said to Sam was just as bad.'
Dennis got the point. 'Sorry,' he said weakly to Sam. 'Didn't mean to be offensive but you hear such stories . . .'
'Yeah, you do,' Sam said and turned to talk to Andy.
'Everything all right?' asked Catrina nervously, seeing her fabulous dinner party in danger of collapsing.
'Fine,' said Andy. 'Are you okay?' he asked Sam gently. 'You don't look in the best of form and normally, you relish the chance to put people like Dennis firmly in their place.'
'You mean I'm Queen Bitch and it's rare for me to pass up an opportunity to savage someone?' she said harshly.
'Hey, relax,' he said. 'It's me, your friend, remember? The one who held your hand on the Journey of Fear roller coaster.'
They both laughed.
'It was your bloody fault I went on it in the first place,' Sam pointed out, giving Andy a poke in the shoulder. 'I'm terrified of heights as a result.'

'Do you still avoid the glass lift in the office?' Andy asked slyly.
Sam shuddered. 'Now that was scary. No, that was my old office and I'm in a new job now.'
'Sorry, I forgot. It's hard to keep up, isn't it? You get so involved in your own problems.' Andy gazed down at his half-full soup bowl. Sam felt like a total bitch. Here she was getting all tantrumish over the fact that she hadn't gone to Lanzarote with the others, while Andy's problems were much more serious. His divorce had been acrimonious and still was, with vicious rows over access to his two children. The last time Sam had met him, he'd been living in a shabby bedsit - all he could afford on his teacher's salary after paying out maintenance - and his ex was insisting that she wouldn't let the kids visit him there. It was Catch-22 time.
'I can't manage to live anywhere better,' he'd told Sam then, looking for all the world like a broken man. At the age of thirty-nine, Andy looked fifty.
That had been six months ago, she realized guiltily. She hadn't been a very good friend to Andy, had she?
He could have done with someone to drag him out to the pub for a drink, someone to listen to his problems when he was in the depths of depression, someone to be a friendly voice on the other end of the phone. But she'd been too busy, right? At least Catrina and Hugh were kind and thoughtful and invited him to dinners and parties.
Sam took a deep gulp of mineral water - she wasn't really in the mood for wine, strangely enough, even though she knew it would be superb because Hugh was a bit of a wine buff.
She had to stop being selfish and try and enjoy herself for everyone else's sake.

The food was sublime and the music wasn't bad either. Sam didn't really go for the sort of middle of the road stuff that Catrina and Hugh adored but she wouldn't dream of saying so. For fun, she'd once given them a batch of garage



rock CDs for Christmas but had never heard any of it played.
Tonight, the music was very much in the background as the ten people around the dinner table laughed, joked and discussed life, the universe and everything. Well, eight of them joked and laughed: Jay and Greg, seated beside each other, stared deep into each other's eyes most of the time and laughed at the jokes a good two minutes after everyone else. Sam was sure they were playing footsie under the table judging by their giggles.
She did her best not to stare but somehow couldn't help it. There was something so utterly tender about the way Greg fed Jay some of his chocolate pudding because she'd chosen Catrina's fruit salad instead. Sam watched under her lashes and wondered bleakly if anyone would ever feed her with such love ever again.
'Gosh, this Stilton is good,' said Dennis, hoovering up the contents of his plate.
Sam looked at the elaborate cheese board and remembered when the gang's idea of a dinner party had been something with minced beef and rice and when the wine had come in litre sized screw top bottles because they were all broke and couldn't afford the expensive stuff with corks.
Everything had changed so much for all of them.
She did her best to remember what she'd hoped for in those far off college days. Had she assumed she'd be utterly happy with a superb career or had she ever dreamed of anything else? She couldn't remember.
It was no good, she couldn't enjoy herself. She felt out of synch with everyone. Catrina and Hugh were exchanging loving glances down the table all the time, Jay and Greg were in lover land and everyone else, bar herself, was well on their way to being drunk.
At eleven, Sam decided it was time to go home. She finished her coffee and wondered how rude it would be if she were the first to leave. She'd hoped that she and Jay could have gone home together because she really wanted

to discuss her bouts of exhaustion and illness with her friend, but she couldn't now. Getting Jay on her own would be impossible as she'd doubtless be glued to Greg in the taxi home too.
'We've got an announcement,' Catrina said suddenly, her eyes glittering with pride.
Hugh beamed up the table at her.
'You've been made partner!' gasped Sam delightedly. 'Oh Catrina, that's wonderful.'
Both Hugh and Catrina laughed.
'No Sam, you are such a workaholic!' said Hugh fondly. 'Catrina's pregnant. We're going to have a baby.'
Immediately, the table erupted with squeals of delight and congratulations. Everyone got up and hugged the happy couple.
'That's wonderful,' Sam said genuinely as she held Catrina tightly. 'I'm so happy for you.'
'Thank you,' Catrina said.
The more she looked at her, the more Sam was astonished she hadn't copped on earlier. Catrina was blooming, so it wasn't just a pregnancy myth. Her face glowed with joy and pride and her slim figure had the gentle swelling of the fourth month. Sam smiled wryly to herself. Trust her to come up with the career-orientated answer to Catrina's announcement that she had something to reveal. People with real lives would probably have worked out what the news was instantly. Only career spinsters thought exciting news meant a promotion.
After several bottles of champagne had been consumed to toast the baby, Sam finally said her goodbyes.
'I'm sorry to be such a party pooper but I've a half seven meeting in the morning,' she lied.
It didn't make her feel any better that nobody begged her to stay. She was now officially so boring that rooms lit up when she left rather than when she entered them.
At the front door, Catrina and Hugh kissed her goodbye.
'It's such wonderful news,' Sam said, standing on the

front step and holding Catrina's hands. Her eyes misted over with the emotion of it all. 'I'm so happy for you.'
Misreading the signs, Catrina gave her hands a squeeze. 'Don't worry, Sam, it'll happen to you,' she said comfortingly. 'It's not too late. We thought we'd left it a bit late but we were wrong.'
Sam's heart missed a beat. Then it hit her: traumatized and divorced Andy wasn't the only person they all felt sorry for. They felt sorry for her too. Everyone else was doubled up, secure in happy partnership and she was the cautionary tale, the woman who'd been too busy for a man and family, the lonely working woman with nothing but a lifetime of meals for one and cosy nights in with the remote control to look forward to.
For pride's sake, she laughed heartily. 'Me?' she gasped. 'Oh Catrina, you'll be a wonderful mum but that particular path's not for me. Bye,' she said with added cheeriness. She waved exuberantly as she walked to the taxi, keeping up the bubbly facade. 'I'll phone soon. We must go shopping for maternity clothes!' And she was gone, into the taxi and finally able to wipe the rictus of a smile from her face.
The taxi driver pulled up outside the wrong house on Sam's road and, as he was a bit deaf and it had taken several goes to explain where she wanted to go in the first place, Sam didn't bother to correct him.
'Great, thanks,' she said tiredly, handing him the fare through the side window.
She walked slowly up her road, too weary to even look into the lit-up houses of her neighbours. Hearing footsteps behind her, Sam felt momentarily nervous. She whisked round but the person running behind her wasn't a mugger: it was a girl with long dark hair, wearing a big fleecy coat and high heeled sandals that weren't much use for running in. She fled past Sam and as she did so Sam realized that the girl was the doe-eyed beauty she'd seen with the man next door, leaving his house after the party. And that she was crying.

Honestly, Sam thought, it was like having a soap opera next door. One minute, stunning girls in silver dresses left the house, the next, they ran back in sobbing their hearts out. The girl was banging on the front door by now and Sam watched with interest as it opened and he appeared. At least he had his shirt on now, Sam noticed tartly, as she passed by and opened her own gate.
'Maggie?' he said as the girl collapsed into his arms. 'My poor girl, what happened?'
Sam banged the gate loudly. The neighbourhood was really going down. No other residents lived their lives in public.
At the sound of the gate banging, he glanced up and saw Sam. His brows narrowed at the disapproving expression on her face.
Sam sniffed, stuck her nose in the air and ignored him as she got her keys out of her handbag. As if she cared what age his girlfriends were.
She opened the door quietly.
'Stop making noise,' roared Mad Malcolm from the top floor.
'Oh shut up,' roared Sam back.
If he dared come out while she was going up to her apartment, she'd kill him!
At home, she slopped some soluble painkillers in a glass with water. What a crap evening. She'd discovered that her best friends had gone on holiday without even mentioning it to her. She'd had to witness love's young dream in Catrina's house and more love's young dream next door. Well, love's young dream and Mr Ageing Playboy. It was enough to make you sick and it was so unfair. Men could be lotharios at any age, dating women zillions of years younger than them if they wanted, but women were supposed never to get any older than thirty. It was all downhill afterwards.
Sam thought grimly about the articles she'd read claiming that women's sexual peak was in their thirties and forties.


So bloody what if it was? There was no one who wanted to have sex with them then.
She knocked back her painkillers as if they were a shot of tequila, took a sleeping tablet for good measure and went to bed.

The next morning was Saturday. Sam was up early and had her morning coffee sitting on the window seat that faced the street. Half-leafing through the paper, she spotted people walking down the next door path. Him. And the girl, although this time she was wearing baggy jeans that were way too big for her and had been turned up at the bottom. His jeans. How cute, Sam thought sourly. How bloody cute. She'd bet a tenner the girl had wandered round all morning in one of his shirts and nothing else, long tanned legs appearing endless under the shirt tails. If he owned a proper shirt, that was. Wasters like that didn't. They owned expensive T-shirts they bought with money from their trust funds and they never had shirts because shirts meant jobs and idle rich layabouts thought that jobs, like taxes, were for the little people.
Sam was pretty sure he was a waster. All the signs were there: wild parties, no visible means of support, girls coming out his ears. She hated people like that.
After breakfast, she unearthed her running shoes, her sweat pants and a double-layered fleece that was perfect for running in when the weather was cold. She hadn't had any exercise for so long, she was sure her legs would seize up before they'd even warmed up. Doing a bit of mental arithmetic, Sam figured it was nearly three months since she'd had a run, although at least she hadn't put on any weight.
Outside, the January air was icily fresh. The streets were filling up with people meandering off to leisurely Saturday lunches or doing their shopping. Sam breathed deeply and ran, trying to remember the rhythm she ran best at. It wouldn't come. Running felt wrong and her body felt tired, clumsy. She persisted for a mile, refusing to turn back because she just couldn't wimp out. But finally the weariness

got the better of her. She began to weave her way back through the lush, expensive streets of Holland Park. And then she stopped suddenly. A wave of nausea hit her and she sank down onto the kerb, her legs so weak they weren't able to hold her up any more. Sam wasn't sure what was worse; the feeling of being so utterly feeble that she had to sit on the dirty kerb or the fact that she was no longer in control of her own body. Shaking, she put her head between her knees and tried to breathe deeply. Even that failed her. She could only draw in ragged, short breaths. Tears pooled in her eyes. What was happening to her? What was wrong? And how was she going to get home?
After a few minutes of feeling her legs and bum going numb with the cold of the kerb, she got shakily to her feet and leaned against a fat cherry tree for support. If only she'd brought her mobile phone she could phone someone for help. Only who could she ring? Sam thought bleakly. There was nobody she could think of. She'd let her friends drift away from her. She was truly alone.
Two women, in fresh new tracksuits, power walked past with the zeal of the January exerciser determined to shift the Christmas spare tyre. Leaning against her tree, Sam barely looked at them. But they noticed her. They walked briskly past and then stopped, before returning.
'Are you all right?' asked one tentatively.
Sam shook her head. 'I was jogging and I suddenly thought I was going to pass out.' She tried to laugh. 'I'll be fine in a moment, I just need to rest. I only live half a mile away.'
'You're as white as a sheet,' said the other woman. 'You don't look fit to walk another yard.'
'I'm fine, honestly,' protested Sam, still clinging onto the tree.
The women looked at each other. The first one produced a tiny mobile phone from a pocket. 'I'm phoning Michael to bring the car round,' she said firmly. 'We can't leave you here.'
Michael turned up in ten minutes in a gleaming new Range Rover and they all piled in. Sam was feeling too weak

to protest too much and she sat in the back wondering what exactly was happening to her.
They stopped outside her house.
'I can't thank you enough,' she said, tearfully. 'Please give me your names so I can repay you in some way.'
'Nonsense,' said Michael's wife. 'This is our good deed for the day. Take care of yourself, my dear. You really should see a doctor.'
In the flat, Sam lay down on her bed with her track shoes still on, not caring that she'd leave marks on the creamy bedclothes.
They'd been so kind to her. If she'd seen a strange woman leaning against a tree, she'd have walked by as fast as she possibly could and thought 'drug addict.' Today, she'd learned that there were nice people out there, people who weren't riddled with cynicism like herself.
She'd definitely phone the doctor. On Monday.

On Monday, Sam was in her office by eight. She worked steadily through the paperwork on her desk, only stopping to drink a cup of coffee and to make a doctor's appointment for that lunchtime. She felt fine, really, she convinced herself. She was probably pre-menstrual or just run down. A tonic was what she needed. And no gin.
At half ten, Karen Storin came into her office for a meeting.
As usual, Karen looked marvellous, vibrant in a cream trouser suit that looked incredible against her black skin.
'I love that suit,' Sam said. 'It's Joseph, isn't it? You look wonderful.'
Karen stared back at her. 'I wish I could say the same for you, Sam.'
Sam felt herself tense.
'I don't want to overstep the boundaries but Sam, you look terrible. You've lost so much weight and you look . . . well, worn out.'
'Do I?' There was no need for pretence with Karen.

'Yes,' she answered bluntly. 'Do you want to talk about it?'
Sam shook her head and gave a tight little smile. 'I think I'm run down and I'm going to see the doctor today, OK? Can we keep this between us, though?'
Karen looked hurt. 'I wouldn't dream of saying a word to anyone.'
'Lydia,' Sam said via the intercom. 'Can we have a pot of coffee in here, please?' Anything to change the subject.
When Karen had gone, Sam got Lydia to cancel her appointments for the rest of the day.
'I have to go out,' she said, ignoring her assistant's startled face. Sam Smith never cancelled appointments, Lydia knew. She was an automaton and would work until nine at night every day if she could. Something was up, Lydia decided.

Sam was rarely sick. She took vitamins, was addicted to the herbal immune booster Echinacea and was convinced she always did her best to look after herself. Which was why she'd never spent much time in the doctor's surgery. Today, she fidgeted in her seat, looked at her watch and glared at the surgery door crossly. She was a busy woman; she didn't have time to hang around while people had major conversations with the doctor. The woman who'd gone in before her had been in there ages. What was she doing? Having her tonsils out?
Finally, Sam gave up and rifled through the dog-eared magazines on the coffee table in front of her. As Time magazine was the only one not dedicated to telling her how to get a man, enchant a man or cook for a man, she picked it up and was engrossed in an article on internet piracy when her name was called.
The doctor was a brusque forty-something man with tired eyes. As briskly as if she was in a ten-minute meeting, Sam outlined her symptoms. The tiredness, the pains, the nausea.
'Heavy periods too?' he asked.
'Well, yeah . . .' she admitted.


'How long have you had these problems?' the doctor said, reading through her file.
'Six months,' Sam admitted, a bit ashamed. 'I've been busy .. .' she said, breaking her own management rule about never giving an explanation to someone who didn't need one.
'Should never be too busy to look after your health,' the doctor said, looking at her properly.
Sam stared at him stonily.
He asked a lot of questions, discussed her periods, how much menstrual blood she lost each time, and the exact position of the pain, talked about her diet and her bowel movements, and then said he'd better give her a pelvic exam.
Sam lay down on the examining table, feeling vulnerable and exposed with her naked lower half pale and ridiculous looking compared to her fully dressed upper half. With practised ease, the doctor appeared not even to look at her when he came behind the curtain. His hands were cold as he palpated her belly, fingers surprisingly nimble as they splayed over her pale skin. She winced in pain.
'Does that hurt?' he said unnecessarily.
'Mmm,' she said, biting her lip.
He prodded some more and she winced again.
After a few minutes more of this, he slipped on a rubber glove, spread jelly on it and slid it inside her. Sam felt as taut as elastic as his fingers probed painfully.
Ouch! God, what was he doing? Prospecting for gold? Looking for his car keys?
'Relax,' he said.
Relax! thought Sam grimly. You bloody well try and relax when a total stranger is sticking his enormous hand up inside you! She said nothing and tried to ignore the pain as he probed from the inside.
Finally, it was over.
Sam dressed quickly. Her clothes back on, Sam felt more like herself, more in control.

The doctor didn't waste any time.
'I'd say you've got fibroids and irritable bowel syndrome,' he said brusquely, writing as he spoke to her.
'What are fibroids?' Sam asked. She knew all about irritable bowel: every woman in the gym had it. No dinner party in London ended without some discussion on the latest cure and what herbal remedy worked best. Sam was bored rigid by those conversations.
'Fibroids are benign tumours of the uterus. They can make you anaemic, which is probably why you're so tired. They cause heavy, painful periods, abdominal and pelvic pain, fatigue and sometimes painful sex.'
Sam scowled. Not a problem she had.
'The other spasms you describe are most likely the bowel problem although you can get fibroids attached to the uterine wall and they twist, which is painful. You need an ultrasound to be sure. At your age . . .'
Sam winced but the doctor didn't notice.
'. . . there are several options, myomectomy, endometrial resection, endometrial ablation, but in my opinion, the only final way to deal with them is a hysterectomy. But that depends on whether you want to have children or not.'
Sam opened her mouth to say 'I don't,' and then shut it again. How many times had she said that? At parties and to people like Hope or Aunt Ruth? Aunt Ruth, when she'd been alive, had always nodded firmly and said 'good idea, Samantha, I don't see you as the children sort.' Hope always looked sad and told her sister that you never knew when you might change your mind. Hope had desperately wanted children. Sam knew she wanted to create the sort of loving, happy family atmosphere they'd been denied as children, which seemed a bit futile. You couldn't make up for the gaps in your own childhood by reinventing yourself as an earth mother complete with a huge adoring family. Then again, Sam reflected glumly, she was trying to make up for the gaps in her childhood by ensuring that she didn't have children, so there were no small beings to feel unloved and


abandoned with an unmaternal, stern adult saddled with looking after them.
The doctor was scribbling again. Sam would normally have tried to see what he was writing: she was an expert at reading upside down and sideways, the result of years of office politics where being able to read memos on other people's desks was a vital survival skill. But today, she didn't bother. She fiddled with her watch strap aimlessly.
'If you come back tomorrow you can pick up a letter for the specialist about the fibroids,' the doctor said, still writing. 'I'll get my receptionist to make an appointment for you or you can make it yourself if you've a tight schedule. When that's sorted out, it may be sensible to have tests done to check your bowels too. Just to be on the safe side.'
'About the hysterectomy thing . . .' began Sam. 'I mean, the other things you mentioned are options?' She didn't know why she was saying this. It was a bit pointless.
'Yes there are but I haven't gone into them because it might be easier to let the specialist do that. Some women are totally against a hysterectomy but you didn't seem unduly worried about the prospects of having one. At your age, women either have children or don't have them. If you'd had any fertility treatments they'd be on your file so I assumed you weren't interested.'
'Rather a lot to assume,' Sam snapped.
How could he get away with it? He should have been struck off, fired, hung, drawn and quartered. How dare he assume that just because she didn't have children yet, she didn't want any? And did she look that over the hill? Obviously.
'Are you this rude to all of your patients?' she asked drily.
'I didn't mean to be insensitive,' he said, startled. 'We can discuss all the other options, drugs to shrink the size of the fibroids . . .'
He didn't get any further.
Sam walked out of the surgery. She'd see the specialist and if he was rude to her, she'd hit him. Men.

There was no point going back to work, so she went home, stripped off her suit and changed into slobbing around clothes which consisted of an old grey-T shirt, black gym leggings and a lambswool cardigan. Taking her crammed briefcase, she sat at the dining room table to work. But her brain refused to focus on marketing reports and budgets. She kept thinking of the doctor's words. Fibroids. Hysterectomy. Tests. Just to be sure ... She wished she'd asked him more but she'd been too shocked and too angry. Still, she could look it up on the internet. Honestly, what was she turning into? Two months off her fortieth birthday and she was falling apart.
She made another cup of coffee and wandered over to the dining room window to look out. The garden belonging to their house was long and narrow, almost all patio except for a wild bit at the bottom. The couple with the ground floor flat had several lovely containers planted up and even in the bad weather, the shrubs flourished.
Sam opened the window to let some air in and looked into the garden next door. It had been a complete mess for years but since He'd moved in, He'd been clearing it and now the overgrown briars were gone and a plot of freshly turned earth stood in their place. Sam leaned forward nosily to see exactly what He'd been doing and then drew her breath in suddenly. He was there, carrying a huge paving slab from the side of the house. Making sure she was partially hidden behind the big brocade curtain, Sam watched him place the slab beside a carefully laid group of others. He was laying a patio, she realized in astonishment. Who'd have thought that Mr Trust Fund Playboy could do anything so practical. He was obviously warm despite the cold day and was stripped down to just jeans and a white T-shirt. Sam cradled her cup of coffee and watched him work. It was interesting how he did it. Each slab took ages to hammer into place and then there was a whole palaver with bits of string and some measuring implement to see if they were level. A couple of times, Sam noticed him glancing uptowards her window, but he couldn't see her, she was sure .. .
After a few minutes, he stopped, looked directly up at her window and yelled, 'Are you going to watch all day or are you going to help?'
Sam shrank back from the window as if she'd been scalded. Caught out. She hadn't thought he could see her. How embarrassing! Peering carefully from behind the curtain, she saw him put down the big hammer and lope towards the house. Boy, he could lope too, those muscles rippling through that white T-shirt and those legs striding in the jeans. Levis would pay him to advertise their product, she was sure of it, because he was a magnificent animal. That's all he was, of course, an animal. A party-mad animal who screwed around with girls miles younger than him. Sam sighed. Why was she even wasting her time looking at him? Just because he'd given her goose bumps when she'd seen him that first time at the party didn't mean anything.
When the doorbell rang a moment later, the blistering noise in the quiet of the apartment made her jump. Who would be looking for her at this time of day? She was never, ever at home during the week. It had to be someone ringing the wrong bell. Window cleaners or something.
'Yes,' she said into the intercom phone.
'Delivery of flowers,' said a voice.
Sam perked up. Flowers! Lovely. Karen Storin was so kind. She'd obviously been talking to Lydia and discovered that Sam wasn't going to be back at work that day.
Grabbing her front door keys with a smile on her face at the thought that someone cared, she hurried out of her apartment and down to the street door. She whisked it open and gasped. There, still in jeans and a smudged white T-shirt, with a small bouquet of wild narcissi in his hand, was Him. The Man From Next Door.
'I thought there was someone here with flowers,' Sam said, still in shock.

'There is.' He handed her the narcissi, and by instinct she buried her nose in them and breathed in the delicious smell.
She looked up cautiously, seeing the narrowed treacly eyes watching her like a bird of prey watched its victim. The bird of prey effect was heightened by the hooked nose. Very predatory. She didn't know why but he was very daunting or overwhelming or something. She felt herself prickle up with a fresh crop of goose bumps. What was it about this guy? Even her skin went into meltdown when he was near.
'What are you doing here?' she asked, doing her best to get her voice back to normal.
'Since you're obviously bored and you were watching me, I thought I'd ask you to help me with my patio,' he said, eyeing her old grey T-shirt and gym leggings lazily.
'I'm not bored,' she retorted. 'I'm studying reports.'
'Looking out of the window into my back garden?'
For a brief moment, Sam tried to think of a suitably cutting and derisory retort. Nothing came to mind. She leaned against the door and sighed.
'Yeah, you're right. My mind isn't on my work today,' she admitted. 'Murderous migraine,' she lied, 'although it's gone now, thankfully.'
His handsome face creased up into a big smile, which miraculously transformed him from predatory male to friendly neighbour, despite the dark stubble on his jaw. 'I figured you were sick because you're never at home in the daytime, so I thought why not invite you over.'
'How do you know I'm never home during the day?' she asked.
'I watch you striding off down the road every morning,' he said, still with that engaging grin.
'You watch me?' she said, eyebrows raised.
'There's something about this neighbourhood that makes you watch people,' he said without inflection.
Sam had to grin. 'How am I supposed to help with the patio?'
'You can supervise,' he said. 'You look like the sort of

woman who's good at supervising. And now that you're migraine-free, you can make the tea,' he added cheekily. 'Shall I wait here for you?'
Why am I doing this? Sam muttered repeatedly as she scurried round the flat looking for her track shoes and something warm to throw on over her cardigan. I must be mad. I don't know this guy. He could be a serial killer and he's going to lure me into his house to bury me under the patio! But she still went downstairs. Well, she reasoned, she was bored and at least he was company, even if he was a playboy waster. It wasn't as if they were going on a date. It was a neighbourly thing.
She was way too old for him for a start. He didn't even look at a girl unless her age was lower than her waist measurement. And probably about the same as her IQ, Sam thought bitchily.
'Ready?' he asked pleasantly as she came to the door.
'Ready,' said Sam with her most innocent smile.
He led the way round to the back of his house where the patio slabs were piled high. He'd laid about half of them and Sam had to admit that it all looked very professional. She was impressed.
'Aren't you going to introduce yourself,' she said, to hide being impressed. He held up two dirty hands ruefully. 'Forgive me if I don't shake but I'm covered with dirt and cement. I'm Morgan Benson.'
'Sam Smith,' she said briskly.
'I know,' he said.
Startled, she said: 'You do?'
'I like to know all my neighbours.' He grinned again and Sam noticed the tiny feathering of lines around his eyes, endearing crinkles that gave his face character. 'Particularly ones who disrupt my parties.'
Her face flared bright pink. 'If you've brought me here to insult me . . .'
Morgan handed her a strange oblong metal implement with what looked like three glass bubbles in it. 'This is a

spirit level and I need you to help me check if I've got the slabs straight, OK? I didn't bring you here to insult you. I brought you here to make friends.'
'I've enough friends, I don't need any more,' Sam said hotly.
'Ah don't be crabby,' he said, hunkering down to examine the last slab. 'Let me show you how this thing works. The trick is to have the patio draining in a particular direction so that rain doesn't gather on it. . .' he explained.
She couldn't be angry with him, Sam realized, because he just ignored it.
'Now when the air inside the spirit level is correctly aligned in each place, then the slab is flat. . .'
By the fourth slab, Sam was a dab hand at the spirit level and was keen to lay her own slab.
'Let me have a go,' she said.
'I'll just make sure the sand is level,' Morgan said from his kneeling position. He bent over the smoothed-down sand, making a minuscule adjustment.
'I can do that,' she protested. 'I've watched you do four.'
He sat back on his knees and wiped the sweat from his brow with one muscular forearm. 'Are you always this impatient?' he inquired.
'No,' lied Sam, kneeling beside him.
'Why don't you do this one totally on your own, then,' Morgan said, smiling at her. 'I'll take a break and watch.'
Sam's eyes gleamed with pleasure. A challenge. Just what she liked.
Morgan sat down on an upturned bucket, folded his arms, stretched out his long, cement-encrusted legs, and watched. It wasn't as easy as he made it look.
'Where did you learn to do this?' she asked. 'I wouldn't have you pegged as the handyman type.'
Morgan looked at her with his lips twitching.
'And what sort of guy did you have me pegged as? A party animal type of guy, perhaps?'
'You don't appear to go to work at normal office hours
and you're obviously well off enough to buy this house, so I didn't see you as the sort of person who'd know how to lay his own patio . . .' Sam knew she was getting deeper and deeper into this ludicrous explanation but there was no turning back. 'You know, I thought you'd get someone in.'
'Ah.' Understanding dawned. 'You meant that you thought I was too feckless to do anything like this myself when I could pay someone else to do it.'
He had an unerring knack of hitting the nail on the head. 'I'd pay someone to do it,' stammered Sam.
'But then you couldn't lay a patio, until now anyway,' he said. 'I can so it would be a waste of money to get someone else to do what I can do. Besides, I like working with my hands.'
I bet you do, Sam thought, imagining those long fingers trailing all over the succession of women he had in the house.
'What line of work are you in?' she asked.
'I'm retired,' he said flatly.
Bingo, Sam thought triumphantly. He was a trust fund guy, either that or an internet millionaire. Who else could retire at forty and who else would go round wearing only jeans and scruffy old T-shirts with holes in the seams? Mind you, if he was an internet millionaire she'd have a lot more respect for him than if he was just a waster.
'You look frozen. Would you like tea?' he asked.
She nodded.
He led the way into the kitchen, which didn't look too different from the last time she'd been there, that never-to-be-forgotten occasion.
Sam sat down on one end of a workmen's bench that was decorated with paint splatters.
'I love what you've done with this place,' she said deadpan, looking around at the cans of paint on the floor and the half-finished kitchen cabinets.
'It's the latest look,' Morgan replied, busily making tea. 'I had the place feng shui-ed and they told me that wallpaper and paint were messing up my happiness corner and that if

I didn't put doors on the cabinets, I'd experience inner peace. I need chaos, apparently. Milk and sugar?'
'Just milk. Seriously though, what are you going to do with this place?' Sam asked. The kitchen was pretty much a shell but it was so light and airy that she could see how wonderful it would look when it was finished.
'Maple everywhere in here,' Morgan said, putting two mugs and a pack of biscuits on the table and pulling up an elderly deckchair for himself. 'I once lived in a house where the whole place was awash with antique pine and I don't want a shred of it here.'
'Don't tell me: you had an Aga as well?' joked Sam.
'How did you know,' he groaned.
'I can just see you in a palatial pile with an Aga and a butler,' Sam added.
Morgan looked amused for a moment, then he shook his head. With a strange glint in his eyes he said, 'Yes to the Aga, no to the butler. What sort of house did you think I lived in?'
Sam shrugged. 'Somewhere big with family silver.'
'We had family silver, all right,' Morgan said, still with that strange glint in his eyes.
Sam smiled to herself. She knew it.
'Are you going to live here when you've got rid of all the antique pine?' she asked.
'I don't know,' he said.
'Don't tell me,' Sam remarked, 'you're going to sell it for ten times what you paid for it?'
'Do you disapprove?' He ripped the top off a packet of biscuits.
'No. There's nothing wrong with that. ..'
'You do disapprove, don't you? You're a very disapproving lady, Ms Smith,' Morgan said, handing her the packet of biscuits. 'Is it having a migraine or are you always like this? I'm only asking because I like an easy life and if we're going to be friends, you'll have to tell me when you're having one of your disapproving days.'
Sam dropped the biscuits as if they were poisoned.


'I'm sorry,' he said, sounding genuine. 'I didn't mean to upset you. I was trying to be funny.'
'I'm not in the mood for funny,' Sam said tightly. She felt like a little bomb packed full of emotional explosives and ready to go off any minute. It had been an awful day what with the doctor and everything, and now this man was being horrible instead of flirting gently with her and making her feel good.
'Please stay.' He held her hand tightly.
'No,' she said, wrenching it away. 'I have to go. I'm not well.'
'I know, I'm really sorry.' He sounded it too. The and my big mouth. I'm not used to company.'
Sam's eyeballs swivelled upwards with disbelief. And after the trail of women she saw wandering in and out.
'Migraine back again?'
'Er yes,' she said, glad to be let off the hook.
He grinned.

On Tuesday, Sam phoned in sick and then went to the doctor's surgery to pick up her letter of referral. The receptionist told her she had an appointment with a consultant in three weeks.
'That long?' asked Sam, aghast.
'That's quick,' replied the receptionist. 'You're going to see the top consultant in London, she's very busy. We only got that appointment because the doctor wants you seen quickly and because they'd had a cancellation.'
He wants you seen quickly. Ominous. Sam tried to put it all out of her mind.
She bought a couple of fat glossy magazines on the way home, and then decided to get some groceries. Proper food was what she needed. She'd do chicken breasts or something nourishing.
A wire basket hanging from her arm, she was in the vegetable department of the local supermarket when she heard a voice behind her.

'Hi there.'
It was Morgan, looking his usual disreputable self with at least two days' worth of stubble on his jaw, wearing an open-necked shirt (ridiculously cold in this weather, Sam told herself, trying not to gape at the sliver of chest visible at the open neck) and that beige suede jacket he never left the house without. She'd seen him wear it countless times. Not that she'd been looking or anything, but from her front window seat she couldn't miss him.
'Hi,' she said brusquely and turned back to squeezing avocados.
'I think that even heart massage won't bring them back to life,' Morgan remarked.
'Ha ha,' she said tonelessly. 'Ever thought of being a comedian?'
She waited for him to begin to answer then interrupted. 'Well, don't.'
'Is it a migraine or just a common or garden headache you've got today?' he asked unperturbed.
'Neither,' she snapped. Honestly, would he ever get the hint that she wanted to shop in peace?
She looked into his trolley. As she'd suspected, a huge TV dinner sat on the top. Roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and gravy. Yeuch.
Noticing her glance, Morgan picked the package up and looked at it with distaste. 'I know, this stuff is awful for you but the guy doing the plastering with me insists on eating this sort of junk for lunch.' He put it back in the basket to one side so she could see the rest of his shopping: far more vegetables than Sam had in her basket, fresh fish and a packet of dill. 'I prefer proper cooking myself.'
Sam coloured. Her own basket contained three TV dinners and she never bothered buying fresh fish. It made the apartment stink and why kill yourself cooking something smelly when you could get your weekly dose of seafood in a restaurant instead?
Since she couldn't shake him, she'd embarrass him.

Marching over to the feminine hygiene products, she positioned herself in front of the tampons and studied them carefully, as if she was planning to write a thesis on applicator versus non-applicator. To her chagrin, Morgan studied them too, head to one side before he picked up a pale blue pack and put it in his basket.
'What did you do that for?' she demanded.
'You never know when you might need them,' he said blandly.
He was insufferable!
Sam threw her usual brand into her basket and marched off to the cash register.
She banged the basket down on the conveyor belt and waited.
'Hi Morgan,' said the girl on the checkout. 'How are you doing?'
Naturally, he was standing behind her. Sam turned round to give him her hard stare but he ignored it.
'Fine Tanya,' he smiled back at the girl on the cash register, showing wolfish white teeth against that dark stubble. 'How about you?'
Sam watched in disbelief. Tanya actually batted her eyelashes. She was smiling fit to burst a gut and she'd missed scanning Sam's bag of avocados because she was too busy mooning at Morgan.
Sam barely knew the name of the supermarket, never mind the names of the staff. But why was she surprised? This was the Babe Magnet she was standing beside. His house was like a homing beacon for west London's young female population. He probably knew the name of every twenty-something in the whole metropolitan area, not to mention what her favourite sexual position was and what sort of tampons she liked best!
Tanya finished with Sam's groceries and Sam thrust her credit card into the girl's hand.
She signed the docket, whipped back her card, packed up her shopping and left without saying a word.

It was too close to the house to get a taxi, so Sam struggled along the road with her four carrier bags. They weren't heavy but she suddenly felt so tired, as if all her muscles had turned to jelly.
'Do you want a hand?' he asked. He must have sprinted from the shop.
'I can carry my bags myself,' Sam snapped, knowing she sounded like an ungrateful harpy but unable to stop herself.
Morgan gazed at her thoughtfully. 'You know, Sam, for a good looking woman, you're an awful bitch. I was only trying to help.'
'Yeah well, maybe I don't need help,' she snapped back. 'I'm a grown woman, not one of your child bride types who probably need help with their shoelaces and their maths homework, OK?'
To her utter aggravation, he leaned against the wall and began to laugh so loudly that a woman wheeling a pushchair nearby crossed the road in alarm.
Sam watched in taut fury as Morgan's face creased up in mirth, making him look even more attractive, the bastard. And there was no sign of him stopping. He kept laughing and even wiped his eyes, as if she'd just told him a spectacularly good joke and he couldn't control himself.
'Stop it,' she hissed after five minutes of belly laughing. 'You're making a fool of yourself!'
'You're really something, do you know that?' he said. 'Or as my granny used to say, "you're a caution".'
Sam picked up her bags and stomped off. It was amazing how rage could give you a fresh burst of energy. When she got to the pedestrian crossing, she allowed herself a glance back to see if Morgan was following her. But he wasn't. He'd disappeared. Feeling strangely let down that he hadn't come after her, Sam walked home, her burst of energy gone.
After she'd shoved the groceries away, she didn't feel like cooking, so she went into her bedroom and lay down on the bed to relax and read her magazines.
She woke up at half seven that evening, feeling groggy

and astonished that she'd fallen asleep in the first place. Rubbing her cheek to get rid of the creases from falling asleep on a magazine, she got up and automatically looked into Morgan's back garden. She'd been such a bitch to him and she didn't know why. Well, she amended, she did know why. She fancied him, was deeply attracted to him, whatever. And because it was clear that he wasn't interested in women of her vintage, she'd gone out of her way to be horrible to him. Queen Bitch strikes again, she thought miserably.
What was wrong with her and her life? She had a fantastic new job, she was one of the few women ever to reach the position of managing director of a record label, she was tipped for career stardom and yet she still felt empty and miserable inside. No, Sam corrected herself, not empty: she was full of despair, that was it. Despair. No matter which way she looked, she could see no bright future, only the draining loneliness of the rest of her life.

CHAPTER NINE

Darius both loved and hated opening his post. As an artists and repertoire scout, or A & R man as they were commonly known, he got sackloads of the stuff every week: demo tapes and CDs from hopeful bands and even more hopeful band managers, each one convinced that their demo would be The One. To the hopefuls, The One meant a million-pound signing and a career of number one albums and singles, not to mention wall to wall groupies and a life-style of drinking champagne in the back of limos. To Darius, The One meant the kudos of having discovered them, and hopefully promotion and an assistant to go through the demos and sort out the chaff from the wheat.
When he was interviewed by hip music magazines about his job at Titus Records - 'the best job in the world!' as the interviewer normally described it jealously - Darius rarely mentioned the down side of trawling through hundreds of terrible demos looking for something good. Scrupulous about his work, Darius refused to do what some overworked A &c R people did and listen only to the first song or two. He listened to the whole demo carefully, no matter how horrifically busy he was.
'These are people's dreams,' he'd explain, when asked about this, 'it's not fair to give them a cursory listen and then dismiss them.' This wasn't a media sound bite: Darius Good was serious. He knew just what it was like to long for musical stardom and the cover of Billboard. Until he'd got this job, he'd been the singer in a college band. The Effervescent Bunnies were long disbanded but Darius never

forgot what it was like to send a demo off to a record company. He remembered waiting two whole months for some sort of response and when it had come, it had been a blunt form letter which the whole band had gone into gloom over. Of course, they were a terrible band, he realized now. But that hadn't made the pain of being rejected any worse.
Consequently, he was always plugged into his Discman, listening to demos, and he went through a lot of headache tablets after enduring dire songs that sounded as if they'd been recorded in the sort of register that only bats and police dogs could hear.
On the last Thursday in January, he arrived at his desk with a mild hangover after a wild session with Density. The band had had an appearance on breakfast telly that morning and he hated to think what they had looked like after a three-nightclub crawl that had involved a shot-drinking game.
Those boys could sure party, Darius sighed, easing his lanky frame into his chair. His post was a smaller pile than usual but it was full of the same brown envelopes or yellow padded ones containing people's hopes and dreams.
Darius groaned and leaned his forehead on his desk. He couldn't cope with other people's bloody hopes and dreams today. He didn't want to be kind and scrupulous; he wanted to sweep the whole lot into the bin because chances were, there wasn't a single decent song, band or singer in the lot. He'd had it up to here with people who thought an adequate Oasis impersonation meant they were destined for stardom. Coffee. Coffee would help, he decided, and went off to find some.
Half an hour of gossip and two sugar-saturated lattes later, Darius felt marginally more human. Ripping open the first envelope, he stuck the minidisc it contained on the player, sat back in his chair and put his trendy trainered feet up on his desk.
Not another Whitney clone, he groaned silently, as the strains of the first song started and he recognized 'The Power

of Love'. He closed his eyes and listened, wishing he wasn't quite as diligent about his work. But as the singer started, something strange happened. The hairs on the back of Darius's neck stood up. The woman's voice was the most sensual, husky thing he'd ever heard in his life. Utterly untrained, of course, but the magic was there. She could hold a note as pure as a piece of Waterford Crystal and then let it drop down into a velvety huskiness that would make a bishop blush.
Darius loved it. When he'd listened to the four songs on the demo once, he listened all over again. And again, with the volume up so loud that Moll, the marketing woman next door, came in briefly to ask him to turn it down but stayed to listen, just as rapt as Darius.
'Who is that?' she asked.
'I don't know but she's got an incredible voice, hasn't she?' said Darius excitedly. However, there needed to be more than a voice. He read the accompanying letter from one Nicole Turner which was brief and actually offered no information apart from her address and mobile phone number. There was no picture, sadly, which would really have helped. If Ms Turner was young and a looker, with a voice like that, and if they could get the right songs for her, there'd be no stopping her. The combination of a wonderful voice and hits from the top songwriters could make it all happen. Unfortunately, that huskily experienced voice made it sound as if she'd been around a bit. The wrong age and the wrong looks would all work against her and in an industry dominated by youthful talent, Nicole Turner could fail before she'd started, no matter how beautifully she could sing. There was only one thing to do: Darius had to meet her. Casually, not too hyped up, of course. Just in case she was a velvet-voiced fifty-year-old who'd have her hopes unfairly raised by meeting the guy from a record company who were unlikely to sign her.
He popped his head round the door of the marketing woman's office.




'You wouldn't do us a favour, Moll, and not mention that demo to anyone, would you? I don't want to get people interested in case she's not what she's looking for.'

Nicole was attacking her cod and chips with gusto in the office canteen when her mobile rang. She fished it out of her bag, her mouth full of chips.
'Hebbo?'
'Er hello,' said Darius, mildly disconcerted at this muffled
reply.
Ib eabing my dinner,' mumbled Nicole. Thorree.'
She swallowed. 'Sorry,' she repeated.
'Nicole Turner?' asked Darius.
'Yeah,' she replied, spearing a few more chips.
'This is Darius Good from Titus Records.'
Nicole's jaw clanked open and she dropped her fork.
'Wow.'
In his office, Darius grinned. She sounded young, that was definite. 'I liked your demo and I'd like to meet up. Would that be possible?'
'Tell me when and where,' Nicole said simply.
'You pick,' he said.
Nicole was thrown. Astonished by his phone call, she couldn't think of a venue for the life of her. 'Er . . .' she stammered, racking her brains, 'er . . . the Red Parrot.'
'Seven tonight?' Darius pressed.
'Sure.' She gave him brief directions. 'I'll see you there.'
Nicole pushed the 'end' button on her mobile and groaned. What sort of a moron was she? Suggesting the Red Parrot and agreeing to meet him tonight? For a start, the Parrot was a total dive and not the place to meet a cool record company bloke who probably only ever went for cocktails in trendy members-only bars. He sounded far too posh for the Parrot. And secondly, she should have played it cool and made a date for a few days. Talk about being too eager. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
'What's wrong, Nic?' asked Sharon, sitting down with

her cottage cheese salad and eyeing Nicole's chips hungrily.
Nicole rolled her eyes but there was a slight uplift at the
corner of her mouth. 'You'll never guess who I'm meeting
tonight.'

Contrary to Nicole's expectations, Darius was perfectly happy in the Red Parrot. Used to visiting flea-ridden venues to check out upcoming bands, he didn't care that the red brocade banquettes were faintly sticky from years of having booze spilled on them or that the table in front of him still bore the empty glasses, torn crisp packets and half-full ashtray from the last people who'd sat there. He ordered a pint and waited, looking up eagerly at each new influx of people.
Strangely, he was sure he'd recognize Nicole. Lord knew why. One minute on the phone hardly gave him a clear concept of her physically and he hadn't asked what she looked like, but Darius somehow felt he'd know Nicole the moment she stepped into the bar. She'd look special, he knew it.
At ten past seven, Nicole, who'd been loitering outside with an anxious Sharon so they'd be fashionably late, strode into the Parrot and smiled at the landlord behind the bar. She didn't look around, fearful of appearing as nervous as she felt. Instead, she sashayed up to the bar and leaned against it, trying to look as nonchalant as she could.
From his seat, Darius watched the girl in the sharkskin jeans and fitted leather jacket. His eyes followed her eagerly as she joked with the barman, bought a drink for herself and her short, blonde friend, and then turned to cast a cool, speculative eye over the premises. He knew instantly that she was Nicole.
She was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Skin the colour of caramel with high cheekbones like Nefertiti and glittering, tigerish eyes. Not much more than twenty-one or two, he guessed, but she certainly looked streetwise. Wary, almost, in spite of that cool demeanour.

The hair was wrong, he thought instantly. There were quite a few beautiful dark girls with long straight hair on the circuit. They couldn't let his Nicole look like a clone. She was far too talented for that. He could just see her hair cropped short, clustering round that beautiful skull, feathering around her high cheekbones, hair soft enough to stroke ...
'Darius?' She stood in front of him, tall, slim and self- possessed.
Hoping he hadn't been looking at her like a lovesick calf, Darius stood up and nodded solemnly before shaking her hand.
'I'm Nicole, this is Sharon.'
'Sit down, please,' Darius said formally and cursed himself for sounding as if he was at one of his mother's garden parties. 'Do you want a drink?'
'We've got one,' Nicole said shortly.
It was weird, Darius thought. He was the one who should have been in charge and she should have been nervous, but it was the other way round. He tried not to stare into the liquid dark eyes which were boring into him and looked down at his half-finished pint instead. What was happening to him? She was gorgeous but he'd met gorgeous women before. Famous ones too.
'Have any trouble finding this place?' asked Sharon, to be sociable.
'Not really,' he replied.
Two minutes more of idle chit chat was enough for Nicole, who was not known for her patience. She had to know why this guy wanted to meet her and now that he was here, he was burbling on in his posh voice about the perils of getting a cab driver these days who knew where he was going.
'What did you want to talk to me about?' she asked brusquely.
'Well, I like your demo,' he said, still not looking at Nicole. 'Really like it. Your voice is fantastic .. .'

He felt her hand on his arm, touching him lightly. He could smell her perfume now, something seductive with cinnamon in it. He gulped.
'You really like my voice?' she breathed.
Feeling as if he was drugged, Darius looked up to see that Nicole's coolness had melted away and that she was staring at him in delight. 'You like my voice,' she repeated, as if she'd just been given the winning lottery ticket.
'Yeah,' he said, gazing at her animated face and the small, perfect mouth curved up into the most kissable smile. 'I wouldn't have come otherwise. When I heard it, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.'
Nicole shot a gleeful look at Sharon, who was too busy gazing at Darius to respond.
'So what happens now? Do you sign me up? Do I go into a studio and record an album? What do we do next?'
The warning signal went off in Darius's head too late. 'Er . .. well, it works a bit more slowly than that.'
Nicole whipped her hand away as if she'd been burned. 'What do you mean?' she asked anxiously. 'You liked my voice.' She looked at him suspiciously, waiting for him to say that liking her voice wasn't important and that he'd come here to let her down gently.
'I do,' Darius said earnestly. 'But I'm only one cog in the wheel. We need to get more people interested and we need to see how far you'll go.'
'Whaddya mean? How far she'll go.' This time Sharon was looking suspicious.
'I mean how serious you are about music as a career,' Darius explained quickly. 'It's not all fun and parties. It's very hard work and I mean seriously hard. I've been spending some time with Density and they work their asses off.'
'Never heard of them,' Nicole said, feeling hurt and wanting to hurt back.
'You will,' he assured her. 'The thing is, you don't suddenly become a star overnight. It can take up to two years

to get an album off the ground and get the marketing set
up.'
'Two years,' Sharon said, aghast.
Nicole said nothing, just stared at him.
'Please don't think I'm wasting your time, Nicole.' Even saying her name gave him a shiver. This girl had star quality and something else, but he daren't mess around with things by falling for her. She was too young for that, thought Darius with the wisdom of his twenty-seven years. And she was definitely vulnerable under that cool exterior. Although if she made it in the industry, she'd soon have an even cooler, harder exterior. 'I believe in you. I've simply got to convince other people at Titus to believe in you too. I'll phone you in a couple of days, OK?'
'Fine,' she smiled tightly and pulled Sharon's sleeve to signify they were going.
'Bye Darius,' cooed Sharon as Nicole dragged her out the door.
'Did you see him?' Sharon sighed lustfully as they trudged through the rain to the bus stop. 'Bloody gorgeous face and what a bod. What do they give to these posh blokes to make them grow up like that? It must be all that rugby playing in the snow at those posh schools. And his accent. And imagine having naturally blond hair ...' She poked Nicole in the ribs playfully. 'D'you fancy him?'
'No way. These posh guys look right through the likes of you and me. He's only being nice to us because he sees us as useful opportunities,' Nicole said scathingly.
'I don't know,' Sharon grinned. 'He was looking at you in a very interested way, like he wouldn't mind if he got the opportunity.'
'Yeah right.'
'Really he was,' Sharon protested.
'You've been reading those bodice ripper books again, haven't you, Shazz,' Nicole teased her. 'Where the handsome duke ignores the toffee-nosed ladyship they've got lined up for him and marries the housemaid with the big tits.'

They both laughed.
'I've certainly got the big tits,' joked Sharon, 'but it was you Darius was looking at.'
'Well, he can keep looking,' Nicole said as they reached the bus shelter.
'Ah Nic,' Sharon pointed out. 'He was nice.'
'You think everyone is nice,' Nicole said sharply.
'Yeah, and you're suspicious of everyone,' her friend retorted. 'The whole world isn't out to get you.'
'It's better to think that way when it comes to guys like him,' Nicole insisted. 'He's probably screwed half the female singers he knows and he's not going to have me as another notch on his bedpost.'
Sharon eyed her. 'If you ever hear that he screws singers' best friends, can you put in a word for me, then?'
Nicole grinned. 'OK, but we'll wait until he actually comes up with a meeting with someone in his office before I give him the combination to your chastity belt, milady.'

There was a chain of command at Titus and Zak, the Titus A &C R director, was the person to whom Darius reported directly. In theory, at least. In reality, Zak had done his brain cells too much damage in his distant drug-taking years to be capable of directing anything and only the fact that he was Steve Parris's best mate saved him from joining an exclusive dole queue which was full of washed-up record company execs who'd been too busy doing a line of coke in the loo to realize that the music industry was now a giant corporate business and vehemently anti-drugs. Steve and Zak went way back and if Zak wanted to sign up two tramps playing the harmonica outside Piccadilly tube station, Steve would hand him the company cheque book and let him add as many noughts as he liked. Which should have meant that Zak was exactly the right person to go to with the demo of Nicole Taylor's fabulous voice. Should have being the important words. Because Darius knew that Zak's music of choice was heavy, eardrum bursting rock. It was no accidentthat Zak had developed tinnitus, the constant ringing in the ears from years of over exposure to loud music. His idea of gentle, romantic music was Aerosmith so Nicole Taylor, with her rich, throaty voice, would not be his thing at all. He'd throw her demo in the bin and some other record company would end up signing her. Darius couldn't let that happen. He wanted Nicole for the LGBK label. And for himself, he admitted wistfully. There had to be a way around things. If he went over Zak's head, Zak would go mental. But what if somebody else heard Nicole's demo by mistake. .. somebody with power who didn't care who the hell Zak was and who'd stand up to Steve Parris? There was one person who fitted that description: Sam Smith. The new MD of the LGBK label, she was supposed to be a total bitch with steel caps in her toes for kicking people, or so they said. But Darius had met her at the Density gig and she'd seemed nice enough. Not a pushover or anything, but not the hard-edged uberbitch she was made out to be. Rumour had it that she didn't take any crap from Steve. She was the person he needed to see.
Lydia, Sam's assistant, was chirpy and said that Sam was free after lunch. 'What shall I say it's about?' inquired Lydia, who, with an eye to being made permanent, was making an effort to be businesslike. Sam got really pissed off when she doled out appointments without finding out why the person wanted to see her.
'Just business,' muttered Darius.
'Lydia, what do you mean by writing "just business"?' Sam asked crossly an hour later when she looked at her appointments book and saw Darius's name in it. She had been anxious and bad-tempered these last few days and she knew it. 'What sort of business exactly?'
'Don't fly into a huff,' said Lydia, a bit huffy herself. 'I did ask him but that's what he said.'
Sam's eyes went heavenwards. 'Fine, Lydia. He can't have long whatever he wants. I've got the Ceci girls and their mother in at two forty-five. And remember, if Mrs Ceci

comes in and demands champagne, do not get her any. This is an office, not the Met bar.'
'Wouldn't dream of it,' Lydia sniffed. 'Coffee's my limit. I'm not a bloody waitress.'

Darius was outside Sam's office at two-fifteen on the dot.
He'd been planning how to approach the situation and was still in two minds. He could go for honesty and tell Sam he was worried that if Zak got the demo, he'd bin it. Or, he could pretend he was there to discuss something entirely different, casually mention a new singer he was keen on, and then seem reluctant to let Sam listen to the demo. That would be sure to pique her interest. Yeah, that was probably the best bet.
But he hadn't reckoned on Sam. After one minute sitting in front of her desk, Darius found himself feeling uncomfortable. She was gazing at him with a clear, honest gaze and Darius felt that she wasn't the person to lie to. Even if he did lie, he reckoned that she'd chisel the truth out of him efficiently. Those candid tawny eyes may have been beautiful, but they were shrewd too. He knew that a woman didn't get to run a record label by being stupid.
'What do you want to talk about, Darius?' Sam asked pleasantly.
Darius's mind ran through his options and he gulped. 'Well . . . er, you see . . .' he stammered. He decided to go for the honest approach. Taking a big breath he started: 'I've found this girl with an amazing voice,' he said.

It was Friday evening and Nicole and Pammy were watching Bob The Builder. Or at least, Pammy was in her Barbie nightie watching it and Nicole was staring blindly at the screen and thinking about Titus Records. And Darius. It had been over a week since she'd met him and since then, she hadn't heard a thing. Not a phone call, nothing.
Even Sharon, the only other person who knew about Darius and the sort of woman who could remain upbeat in

the most depressing circumstances, was beginning to suspect that Nicole's musical career might be over before it had begun.
'Come out with me and Elaine tonight,' she'd begged earlier. 'It's Friday after all, you need to go mad and get pissed to cheer yourself up.'
'Can't.' Nicole was looking after Pammy that night as her mother had a hot date with a fireman who'd been phoning her for months asking for a date before she'd given in. 'Mum's out tonight.'
'Oh.' Sharon said nothing else. She'd often thought it was wrong the way Nicole had to take on so much of the responsibility of looking after her little sister but then, Sharon's own family was big - there had always been an older brother or sister to baby-sit so Mum and Dad could go out. But with Nicole's family, there were really only the three of them.
'Shall I come round? We could watch a video and have a take away?' suggested Sharon. An evening in with Nicole compared favourably to an evening out with Elaine, who got drunk very easily and had to be looked after thereafter. Sharon spent more time minding Elaine's handbag than she did minding her own.
'Nah, I'm going to bed early,' lied Nicole. There was no need to mention that she hadn't slept all week with misery and going to bed early tonight wasn't going to help. 'Phone me tomorrow and tell me all about it.'
The Bob the Builder video ended and Pammy looked hopefully at her big sister, huge blue eyes pleading to be allowed to stay up later than usual.
'No silly billy,' said Nicole, ruffling Pammy's soft hair gently. 'It's ballet tomorrow and you'll be too tired if you go to bed any later. It's half seven as it is.'
Nicole strictly enforced Pammy's bedtimes even at weekends. She remembered when she was a kid, when they'd lived with Gran, and Gran had always insisted that early bed was important for kids. Nicole used to grumble about


not being allowed to stay up late like other girls at school but Gran had been firm.
'Little girls need their sleep,' she used to say, packing Nicole off up the stairs after she'd had her hot milk and special bedtime biscuit.
When Sandra had got her own home and they'd moved out, Nicole had been allowed to stay up until God knows when. Sandra wasn't a rules person. It had been strange how Nicole had felt nostalgic for those nights when she'd been tucked up in her bed in Gran's house, looking at the gleam of the streetlights from beyond the flowery pale pink curtains and telling stories to send herself to sleep, knowing that she was safe with Gran firmly in charge.
Consequently, Pammy's bedtime routine was straight out of her grandmother's textbook: a hot milky drink and a biscuit as a treat followed by a story. Pammy was currently going through a princess phase and tonight she wanted to hear the story of the princess and the pea. Reluctantly, Nicole found the book and started to read. Not that she minded reading to Pammy: she'd have read War and Peace from cover to cover if her darling sister wanted it. But she couldn't help but feel that all the fairytale princess books were a bad influence on small girls. All that carry on about how the prince would appear on his white horse, save the swooning princess, and everything would work out - it was plain old dangerous, Nicole thought crossly. There were no princes and the only way an intelligent princess was going to get on in life was if she got a job and could afford to tell the prince where to stuff his proposal of marriage.
However, it was hard getting this message across to a five-year-old for whom Barbie in a sparkly wedding dress with a tiara on her head was the ultimate fantasy.
With Pammy settled down to sleep, Nicole made some coffee and plonked herself down in front of the fire to see what was on the box. She flicked through the channels rapidly, bored with everything until she came across a show on cable that featured a group of young women in what
looked like a school hall singing an old chart hit as if their lives depended upon it. Nicole knew that the singers weren't the original band and she watched for a moment, interested to see who they were because they looked so young and inexperienced. The story was made clear a few minutes later. The show was about the search for a pop band. Five talent scouts were auditioning eager young people for a four- member female pop band and, via subtitles because the show was in French, she realized she'd tuned into the segment where the scouts were in Paris and had pared down the competition until only twenty girls were left.
Fascinated, she turned the sound up and watched, engrossed. Her fascination soon turned to horror, though, as she watched the contenders being put through their paces. It was like watching a beauty contest where it wasn't enough to be ravishingly beautiful: the girls had to be talented too, and conform to whatever notion of a superband the judges had in their minds.
Nicole winced at the comments from the scouts, comments that thankfully, the girls auditioning couldn't hear: 'Her hair's terrible. With short blonde hair, maybe, but we've got enough girls with long dark hair to fill a swimming pool.'
Nicole wanted to switch over there and then but she was hooked.
Three of the girls were fantastic singers, gorgeous looking and could dance into the bargain. All three were interviewed and spoke of a lifetime of stage schools and working towards this moment. Being in a band was their lifelong dream. Nicole felt sick just watching them. How could she have thought she had a career in the music industry when compared to these girls, she was a novice?
They'd tap danced their way through their teens, acting, singing and dancing in an attempt to make it. She'd spent her teens having fun, only ever dancing round her handbag in nightclubs and doing her best to avoid any kind of job that could be termed a career. She'd sort of fallen into the

job at Copperplate Insurance and to be honest, it wouldn't bother her if she lost it tomorrow, apart from the difficulty that would create when it came to the Turner family finances. She hadn't been focussed on anything much, while these girls were determined to succeed in a way that bordered on the obsessive. She'd toyed with writing a few songs and she could play her acoustic guitar a bit, but she wasn't Eric Clapton by any means.
In the commercial break, Nicole miserably examined her hair for split ends. She was a fraud. That was why Darius from Titus hadn't phoned her. He'd seen right through her and realized she wasn't in it for the long haul. He'd been able to tell that being a singer wasn't her lifelong dream.
The show came back on and Nicole watched gloomily. She didn't even look like any of the would-be pop stars.
They all had funky hair styles. Blonde hair styles. She fiddled with her long jet black hair some more. She wanted to be a singer, honestly she did. Maybe she hadn't longed for it with all her heart when she was a kid but she'd grown up now and she'd changed her mind. She loved singing and she'd do anything to succeed. She could take dancing lessons, she could change her hair . . . That was it. She'd change her hair. That would show everyone how serious she was.
To give her some Dutch courage, she went to the cupboard where her mother kept the booze. Nobody in 12a Belton Gardens drank very much but there was always some bottle or other stashed behind the biscuits in case of emergency or guests. Nicole pulled out a bottle of whisky. She didn't like whisky much but that was all there was. She poured some out, mixed it with orange juice and took a sip. Ugh. Horrible but necessary.
Upstairs, Nicole drank some more whisky and rummaged through her mother's top drawer. Old lipsticks, tampons with the plastic unravelling and crumpled up scraps of paper mingled with empty deodorant bottles and odd earrings. She shoved that drawer closed and opened the next one. Hair removers and an ancient looking leg waxing kit lay abandoned





alongside what Nicole was looking for: a home dying kit. Sandra Turner had been mousy haired until she'd discovered bleach at the age of fourteen, although Nicole had often wondered exactly how her mother had drummed up the courage to dye her hair seeing as how Gran thought dye was the first step on the path to eternal damnation.
Her mum got her highlights done in the hairdressers these days but there had been many cash-strapped times in the past when she'd dyed it herself. Nicole examined the instructions on how to turn herself into a Nordic blonde. It sounded simple enough, she thought, not for a moment considering that her luxuriant black hair might be harder to dye than her mother's mousy curls.
Three quarters of an hour later, she peered in the bathroom mirror at the froth on her head and wondered if she was cooked. She gingerly rubbed a strand of long hair. Still not Nordic blonde. It was a bit orangey, actually. She'd leave it on for another ten minutes just to be sure. Busily imagining herself looking like an exotic Amazon with dark skin and striking blonde hair, Nicole didn't notice the time rushing by.
When she did glance at her watch again, seventeen minutes had passed.
Shit! She bent over the bath and let the shower attachment wash all the foamy bleach away. The box had recommended shampooing twice to get rid of any last traces of colour, so with her eyes still closed, Nicole groped around for the shampoo, washed twice and then rinsed. It was odd but her hair felt different, coarser and stringy somehow. She groped for the small tub of expensive conditioner. That would help. Except that it didn't. The more she rubbed, the more her hair felt like the consistency of old rope. Finally, Nicole chanced Opening her eyes a bit to see what her hair looked like and the sight made her drop to her knees like a stone. The lustrous black skeins had been replaced by hanks of straw-like hair that was the colour of gone off apricots. Nicole mopped up her dripping hair and looked at it in

horror. Not even apricots, more the colour of oranges. Or those neon vans that advertised plumbing services. Or Bobo the Clown's outfits. Nicole started to cry.
When her mother came home with her fireman friend for a coffee, Nicole was sitting glumly in the sitting room with her third huge whisky. Her hair, which she had been unable to comb due to its extreme dryness, was sticking out like an electrocuted bush and looked for all the world like orange hay.
'Your hair!' said Sandra, startled out of her usual apathy by the sight of her daughter's strange coiffure.
Nicole burst into tears again. 'I know, it's terrible,' she sobbed. 'I used your dye and it didn't work. I think I left it on too long.'
'Reminds me of work,' said the fireman with a grin. 'It's fiery...'
'Shut up,' howled Nicole and Sandra simultaneously.

On Saturday evening, after a day when Nicole hadn't so much as stepped outside the front door, Sandra's friend, Charlene, arrived with a metal make-up box full of hair dyes and her scissors. Thankfully, she didn't purse up her mouth like a prune and shake her head, which was what Gran had done. Gran was still muttering about the dangers of hair dye as Charlene checked the damage Nicole had done.
'It might have been OK if you'd gone to a salon but home dying with out-of-date stuff is a no no,' Charlene said. 'With your type of hair, dying is incredibly difficult anyway.'
'Mum's always dyed her hair,' Nicole said weepily.
'There's a big difference between Asian hair and your mother's hair,' Charlene said simply.
After a few minutes of examining Nicole's head, she looked grim.
'It's ruined,' she said sympathetically. 'I'll have to cut it off before I try and fix up the colour. You do know that if you'd had this done to you in a proper hairdresser's you'd be made up for life with the compensation.'

Nicole blinked miserably. It didn't make her feel any better to realize that she'd brought her misfortune on herself.
'Just cut,' she said between gritted teeth.
Charlene cut. Long wafts of orange straw fell to the floor as she wielded her scissors expertly.
'Charlene's the best,' Sandra promised, seeing the look on her daughter's face. 'You'll love it.'
'I don't even want to ever look at it again,' Nicole said. 'I'm buying a hat.'
'You won't need a hat,' Gran laughed. 'It's a wig you'll be needing.'



CHAPTER TEN


Despite having been unable to sleep with excitement the night before because they were finally going to the Hunnybunnikins nursery, on the Monday morning in January in question, Millie threw a tantrum and decided she didn't want to go.
She petulantly stomped her tiny, pink-socked feet and refused to allow Hope to pull her purple dungarees on. 'Don't wanna go!!' she roared at the top of her voice, flailing out her arms like an angry windmill.
Toby, who was used to such tantrums, stood in the corner of the bedroom sucking his thumb and watching with interest.
'Millie, behave!' roared Hope. She knew this wasn't the way to deal with toddler rages but she was tired herself and beyond calm reasoning. Ignoring Millie and showing her that her attention-seeking wouldn't be tolerated was what all the child care books prescribed but it was easier said than done. None of those people could have ever been in the supermarket with a red-faced, sweet-obsessed toddler from the way they advised walking away and ignoring the child in question. Hope had tried this once and as soon as her back was turned, Millie had run off down the baking aisle, rampaging through the glace cherries like a tornado and getting them stuck in her fringe before screaming blue murder when a kind shop assistant tried to help her.
'Not going to Bunny place!' Millie roared. She stomped a bit more and Hope gave up. It was only a playgroup after all, the playgroup she'd been dreaming of for the last month

as a method of giving her a teeny bit of freedom. So what if they missed the first, longed-for day?
She sat on Millie's bed and looked out the window at the wilderness of the walled garden. The brambles were less demented in the icy January weather having had their plans for world domination thwarted by the frost. She really had to do something with the garden. The chicks were going to have to go outside soon. She couldn't keep them in the scullery forever and they'd get lost in the wilderness as it was.
Something moved in the garden. Hope's eyes swivelled to the moving bit and narrowed. Something brown and small. Rabbits maybe, she wondered? Or a cute hedgehog baby snuffling adorably for food. It moved again. Fat and sleek with a long tail and cunning rodent eyes. A rat.
'Aggh!' shrieked Hope in horror. Rats in the garden! Plague, pestilence, horrible creepy things that would attack them all and converge on the house at night!
Alarmed by her shriek, Millie's lip wobbled.
'Sorry Mummy,' she said tearfully.
They had a group hug while Hope looked fearfully over the children's heads into the infested bit of the garden. Perhaps it was a one-off. Perhaps the rat was on its own and had mistakenly wandered into the Parker garden like Peter Rabbit but wouldn't stay.
The rat reappeared with a friend, both scuttling in the same direction, from the big rhododendron past a scrap of bare ground, over to a rusted old barrel. They were definitely scuttling with intent. A smaller one followed. For the next ten minutes, Hope watched the rat cabaret gloomily.
She'd thought that rats were nocturnal animals, scared of humans. It was just her luck that her rats were brazen and had no problem running around by day as if they were eagerly auditioning for a nature programme.
How had she missed them before? And what was she going to do to get rid of them?
She phoned Matt, to be told he was out for a walk.

Hope's eyes narrowed some more. It was only half nine in the morning. What the hell was Matt doing walking around when he was supposed to be working? If this was how he spent his time in the bloody centre, no wonder he was monosyllabic when asked about how the great novel was getting on.
'Mummy, are we going to the Bunny place?' asked Millie innocently. She'd put on her dungarees herself although the fasteners had defied her so she'd stuck the straps into the neck of her pansy-printed jersey.
'In a moment, poppet,' Hope replied, leafing through the local phone directory.
The pest-control man was very reassuring.
'Don't worry, the place is full of rats. It's just a matter of keeping them in check. We'll handle it. I'll be out at midday,' he said. 'How many of them have you seen?'
'Definitely three,' Hope replied, the phone jammed under her chin as she fixed Millie's dungarees properly, 'but there could be more. They all look the same to me and there could be loads of them but you only ever see three of them at a time.'
'Do you have children or domesticated animals?' he asked.
'Children and hens.'
Cue sharp intake of breath. 'Hens,' he intoned gravely. 'This could be more serious.'

The lady in charge of Hunnybunnikins was a softly-spoken German woman named Giselle who could have come straight from central casting as a fairy godmother. She had golden curls, kind eyes and a warm motherly expression that made Hope wish that she was going to spend time at Hunnybunnikins as well as the kids. When Hope had met her in December to get the feel of the playgroup, she'd been charming. She was just as nice now that Hope was an hour late, flustered and anxious about the invasion of the killer rats.


'I'm sorry we're late,' Hope began. 'I know when we spoke on the phone I said I'd have them here by half nine but. ..'
Giselle stopped her. 'That's perfectly fine,' she said in her faultless English. 'First days can be difficult. Let's get Millie and Toby settled in and then you must try some of our homemade cookies.'
When Hope finally drove off an hour later, she was comfortably full of ginger nut cookies and confident that Hunnybunnikins was going to be great for the children. They were going twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays for the moment with the possibility of more days should Hope get a part-time job.
'I don't know what work I could get,' Hope had told Giselle. 'I've always worked in a bank or building society and since the village doesn't have one, that's a problem.'
'The summer is better,' Giselle replied. 'The tourists bring lots of jobs but now, it's not so good. Still, you never know what will turn up. Don't worry about the rats. This is the country with lots of little beasts. Good thing we don't know what else is out there!'
Rats were bad enough, Hope thought darkly, not in the least cheered up by the notion that there could be other scuttling things in the undergrowth, eyeing up her hens and her ankles.

The pest-control man surveyed the area around the old rusted barrel and said 'mm' a lot, particularly when he saw the two old beech trees in the corner. He shuffled around in the beech nuts and looked glum.
'What do you think?' asked Hope, who was wearing her jeans tucked tightly into her Wellingtons to prevent rats leaping up her trouser legs. She was also carrying a big stick to beat them off. Naturally, there wasn't a rat to be seen.
'There are signs of a lot of rodent activity,' he said gravely. 'You've got all the major things rats need: a water supply in that small stream behind the garden, food in the form of

last year's beech nuts. They love beech nuts,' he added, 'and you've got chicken feed in the shed.'
'But they can't get to that,' Hope protested.
'No, but they can smell it and they love it. Rats are omnivores - they'll eat anything.'
'Even hens?' she squawked.
'No, not hens but they'll eat any food you put out it the hens and if they soil it, the hens can pick up infections which could then get passed into the eggs.'
'Oh dear.'
'Don't worry. I'll put down poison in our special tamper proof bait boxes which are only big enough for rats and that should control them for now, but unless you get this area cleared of all this junk, overgrown briars and beech trees, you're always going to have a problem. Particularly if you have your hens out.'
'That was the plan,' Hope sighed.
She wrote him a huge cheque before he started putting down poison boxes. Feeling doubly queasy at the thought of both the state of the bank balance as well as the rat invasion, Hope went inside, washed her hands as feverishly as if she'd been cuddling the rats, and phoned Mary-Kate.
'Have the children settled into the playgroup?' Mary-Kate asked.
'Yes, but that's the least of my worries,' Hope groaned. 'We've got rats and I've got to get the garden cleared before we can get completely rid of them, otherwise I'll never be able to let the hens out. Do you know anyone who could do a job like that? I can only afford to pay around fifty pence, that's the problem.'
She could feel Mary-Kate grinning at the other end of the phone.
'I don't think that'll be enough,' she laughed.
'I'll do anything to get this sorted out,' Hope said. 'I hate rats.'
'I know a man with a machine-hire business who has a baby JCB that would clear all the briars and junk in no time

but he'd want some kind of payment and believe me, Hope, you wouldn't be so quick to say you'd do anything to get this sorted out once you see him.'
For the first time all morning, Hope laughed. 'Unless he needs some payment in kind like his finances sorting out or money changed from dollars into euros, I'm no good to him.'
'Something will turn up,' consoled Mary-Kate. 'I better go. I've a list of prescriptions as long as your arm to fill out. The whole town is sick. Talk to you soon.'
When the phone rang fifteen minutes later, Hope didn't expect it to be Mary-Kate again.
'You won't believe it but I just had the most amazing idea,' she said. 'You know Erwin, your man with the machine-hire business I mentioned to you, well, his wife handles the office business and he was in just now with a prescription for shingles for her, God love her. She's in bits and she won't be working for at least a month. Erwin says he'll be lost without her. I've told him about you. How would you like to fill in for her?'
Hope just gaped at the phone. 'I. . . I. . .' she floundered. 'I've never done anything like that,' she said.
'You could keep the office ticking over until she gets better and he'd pay you and probably do your back garden for free into the bargain. It'd be a couple of mornings a week and it'd be a start wouldn't it?'
Erwin had sounded pleased, if monosyllabic, when he'd phoned to ask her about Mary-Kate Donlan's suggestion.
'It'll only be for the month,' he'd pointed out. 'Nothing long term, mind. The wife will be better soon.'
'That suits me fine,' Hope said. 'I'll come on Thursday.'
By half six, Hope felt as if she'd survived a maelstrom: the children starting playgroup, hiring the pest-control man and getting a new job. Matt had only been gone since nine that morning and it felt like a month. So much had happened and she couldn't wait to tell him.
The children were worn out after their time at Hunnybunnikins and Millie was already asleep on the couch,


clutching a book she insisted she'd only 'borrowed' from the playgroup library. Toby, who normally ate everything his mother put in front of him, was too tired to eat his dinner and his long eyelashes kept drooping onto his cheeks as he held his plastic fork tightly.
'Come on darlings, up to bed,' said Hope happily.
A succulent pork casserole was simmering on the range, scenting the air deliciously, and in honour of her new job she had a bottle of wine in the fridge. Just a quiet night in for her and Matt to celebrate new beginnings. He'd be so proud of her; Hope smiled as she ran the children's bath. He was always worried about money these days and her wages would pay for the playgroup. Yes, some people might think she was mad working purely to pay for playgroup, but Hope knew that she needed to get out a couple of days a week. And even though she wasn't going to have much left over from Erwin's wages, if he did the garden for free, that would be a huge advantage.
For once, she got away with reading the shortest of bedtime stories. Both children were sleeping soundly before she'd reached the final page. Kissing them softly on their foreheads, she slipped out of their room and into hers. She quickly swapped her usual uniform of jeans and sweat-shirt for an olive cobwebby knitted skirt and a matching tunic top. She let her hair fall around her shoulders and sprayed herself with scent.
A crunch of brakes told her Matt had arrived but instead of him getting a lift with Ciaran Headley-Ryan, it was Finula herself who dropped Matt off, clearly determined to invite herself in.
'Just popped in for a minute to say hello,' she said gaily, settling herself down on the most comfy chair as if she was there for the night.
As usual, she was dressed for a fancy dress party in flowing florals with a huge knobbly crimson cardigan over the whole rig out. It was jumble sale chic as opposed to bohemian chic.

Matt gave Hope a perfunctory peck on the cheek and threw himself tiredly onto the couch. In his faded jeans, with an old grey fleece hugging his muscular body and a day's dark stubble on his chiselled jaw, he looked more like an off-duty rock star than a would-be-writer.
'You'll have a drink, won't you, Finula?' he said, his voice low.
He was not in a good mood, Hope figured.
'Well just the one . . .' Finula said with a great show of reluctance. She batted her eyelids at Mart, unable to stop herself flirting with him. That was the effect her husband had on women, Hope realized grimly: drawn in by the movie star dark good looks, they were doubly hooked when they realized that there was a sharp and incisive mind behind the gorgeous facade.
'I'll have a glass of wine too, Hope,' Matt added.
Hope's eyes narrowed. She was obviously cast as maid servant for the night.
Her nicely chilled bottle of wine didn't last long, so Matt opened some red. The wine had certainly livened him up but he wasn't any happier, Hope thought, as she took the casserole off the range and covered it with tinfoil. He was more animated than he'd been earlier but still as tense as a tightly coiled spring, long fingers drumming the arm of the couch. As if he was brooding on some inner problem and was trying to be chatty for Finula's benefit. Not that Finula would have noticed. Drink in hand, she was leaning as close to Matt as she could get without actually sitting on his lap, telling a story about some artist she'd admired ten years ago, who was now famous and successful.
'People tell me I have a good eye for art, you know,' she said mistily before she took another big gulp of wine. 'One does one's best but it can be difficult. So many of us artistic people are forced to live in the cultural wasteland.'
Hope was pretty sure that she was one of the cultural wasteland people, while Finula and Matt were the misunderstood artists.

'We mustn't bore Hope talking about art. How about literature? You do read, don't you?' Finula asked her, like a patronizing aunt making the effort to talk to a not-very- bright niece. 'What have you read recently that moved you?'
'The DIY Guide to Getting Rid Of Rats,' responded Hope. 'It made me nauseous.'
Finula laughed throatily and Matt stared at Hope.
'Rats?' he inquired.
'I'll tell you later,' she said.
'What do you think of Matt's work?' Finula inquired, not interested in domestic details. 'I'm fascinated by his ideas.'
It was Hope's turn to stare at her husband. She hadn't seen one word of the famous novel but obviously Finula had. Rage bubbled up like the casserole that now sat on the worktop.
'Now Finula, don't get me into trouble here,' Matt said, uneasily. 'I haven't shown anybody what I'm working on.'
'I know, you wretch.' Finula smiled coquettishly and hit him a playful thump on the arm. 'But from the way you've spoken about it, Ciaran and I can't wait to read it. With your intellect, it'll be a wonderful novel, of that I have no doubt. I bet you're proud as punch of your husband?' she addressed Hope again.
'Very proud,' Hope said with gritted teeth.
Finula didn't go until the second bottle of wine had been drunk, waving off Matt's offers to phone a taxi by saying she had only to drive down a small country lane and she'd be home. 'They were only teeny glasses of wine,' she said gaily as she clattered out to the car in high heels deeply unsuitable for country living.
'Stupid bitch will probably drive straight into the hedge,' Hope fumed as she dumped the two wine bottles in the bin. Finula was a boring, pretentious cow. She might have thought she was talking in deep intellectual terms about art and culture but in reality, she was just wittering on and on about this exhibition she'd seen and that book she'd read in an attempt to show off. The combination of hunger, two

glasses of wine, and rage that Matt had ruined her cosy evening by bringing Finula home, fuelled Hope's temper. She slammed the dirty glasses into the sink.
Matt shut the door after waving Finula off and sat down again on the couch, long legs resting on the coffee table, staring moodily into the middle distance.
'Dinner is probably ruined,' Hope snarled. 'I mean, what a stupid bloody question: "what have you read recently that moved you?" Patronizing cow!' She ripped the tinfoil from the dish and stared into the dried remains of her lovely casserole. No matter how idiot-proof they were making jars of casserole mix these days, no concoction was up to two hours drying out in a cantankerous oven.
'Even better: "do you read, Hope?" Meaning, are you a stupid housewife schmuck or do you have a bit of a brain in there as well?' The casserole dish hit the kitchen table with a resounding bang.
'You'll wake the kids,' Matt warned.
It was like lighting a fuse. Hope's eyes blazed with rage. 'If they do wake up, it'll give them a chance to talk to their father for a change. They've had a long day, an interesting day, come to that. But you haven't bothered to ask about them, or about my day. Oh no.' She was warming to her theme and her voice went up an octave. 'When dear intellectual Finula is here, why bother asking stupid wifey how her day was? It's much more interesting to drag the neighbourhood gossip round and get her to patronize me and ruin our dinner!'
'She invited herself in!' hissed Matt.
Hope could see the warning signs. She could see the muscles in his jaw working rapidly, signs that the inner tension was uncurling and was about to erupt. But she couldn't stop. Her long-nurtured hatred of Finula started seeping out.
'And you tried to stop her, right! That stupid cow is obsessed with you and it's annoying the hell out of me . . .'
'It's great to think that something provokes a reaction from you, then,' Matt snarled. 'It's been like living with a

bloody robot for the past month. I've had more interesting conversations with my laptop than with you.'
'And whose fault is that?' screeched Hope, stung. 'You spend more time talking to your laptop than you do to me.'
'Oh gimme a break,' snapped Matt.
'You're never here to help out with the kids,' she yelled. 'You've dumped us all in this backwater and I'm supposed to run around like Martha Stewart and keep the house perfect for you. Little wifey! And when you get home, you snap my head off if I ask you how your day went!'
'Just stop it!'
They faced each other across the steaming, dried-up casserole. Hope had never seen Matt look so angry. His lips were clamped together as if he was trying to stop himself saying something he'd really regret. And then, the anger left her in a sudden rush, flowing out of her body like a bubbling stream. Hope could never maintain anger: she was too scared to. People who got angry were bad people and got dumped. What had she said? She'd hurt him, she'd wounded him and now he'd go. Oh no. A sudden surge of memory meant she recalled exactly how terrified she'd been when she'd thought he was having an affair, the fear of thinking he'd leave her. Swamped by this fear, Hope knew she had to apologize.
She reached out to touch him and say sorry but Matt was way beyond that now.
'I'm sorry for bringing you to this backwater,' he said cruelly. 'If you want to go, I won't stop you. You can always run home to Sam if you don't want to stick by me. All I wanted was support for this dream I've always had.' He looked at her bleakly. 'We'll talk about it tomorrow. I'm sure there's enough money in the account for plane tickets for you and the kids.'
Hope gasped and her hands flew to her mouth.
'Don't wait up,' Matt added coldly. He pulled his big leather jacket off the rack, flung it on and slammed the front door behind him.
What had happened? It had all got so out of control;

she'd started something she couldn't stop. Hope bit her lip but the tears had started flooding and nothing could stop them. Upstairs, a child wailed. Toby. He was a light sleeper and she'd never get him off to sleep again, not now, not with her in floods of tears. Matt hadn't been serious about her and the kids going home, had he? He couldn't have been. What had she done? She should have kept her mouth shut about Finula. She should have kept her mouth shut full stop.

Matt knew he shouldn't be driving, not after the wine, but he didn't care. He drove to the top of the lane, and only then guilt over drink driving hit him and he left the car and marched the last half a mile to the village. The Widows was crammed as usual, full of a combination of locals and tourists. People who stayed in the luxury hotel up the road sometimes dropped in for a taste of genuine Irish pub life and forgot to go home. The hotel was always having to send a minibus to the village to pick up lost residents who didn't realize that Irish alcohol measures were bigger than European or American ones and who'd lost the run of themselves after the Widow herself had poured them '.. , one more for the road'.
There was one unoccupied stool at the bar and Matt sank onto it.
'Double whiskey,' he said to the young girl behind the bar. 'Jameson. No ice.'
Hers were not the only eyes to widen appreciatively at the sight of the tall, dark man in the leather jacket who'd stormed into the pub. He looked angry with that fierce scowl, but that only heightened his handsomeness.
He was sort of dangerous looking with that stubble and the dark long-lashed eyes. A fine thing, definitely. She didn't recognize him but he didn't look like any of the rich people from the hotel. From under the bar, she retrieved her handbag, checked her lipstick in a hand mirror and applied another slash of hot, sexy pink.
Oblivious to the effect he was having, Matt drained his

drink in a few gulps. The Jameson hit his system like a lava explosion and he took a sharp intake of breath.
He looked up to wave to the barmaid but she was in front of him immediately, lips glistening a hopeful pink. 'Can I have another,' he said. 'Please.'
'Of course,' she breathed hopefully, not realizing that even when he was in a bad mood, Matt Parker was oblivious to flirtation.
He nursed this one briefly, holding the glass in his hand and swirling the amber liquid gently. What the hell had happened with Hope? He'd been in a bad mood, sure, but that was no reason for her to go ballistic and take it out on him. She just couldn't bear Finula and he didn't know why. Finula was harmless and her flirtation was like a balm to his soul these days. At least Finula seemed to believe he was a talented writer. Nobody else did. Lively folk music rippled all around him and the pub was rowdy, but Matt ignored it all and sipped his drink contemplatively. What he missed, he realized, was the constant excitement of life at Judd's. If you were working on a bitch of a campaign, there were others with you to commiserate and help and drain a couple of bottles of decent wine in the evening as you moaned about the client. And if you'd come up with a campaign that would win awards, there were people to tell you how marvellous you were. He missed both. Sitting on your own and writing down your thoughts was a fantastic idea in theory but a terribly lonely one in practice. He desperately missed the buzz of the office, the quick-fire wit in the creative department, the bawdy humour and the in-house jokes. And perhaps that wasn't all. He shivered involuntarily, as if someone had walked over his grave. Instinctively, he drained his glass, anything to block out the thoughts in his head, the thoughts he didn't want to face.
The girl behind the bar smiled coyly at him. She wasn't bad looking, Matt thought. Dark hair and freckles with those blue Celtic eyes. Very Irish looking. He could just see her in a Guinness commercial, laughing as she held onto a

pint of the black stuff. Mystical Irish music in the background. He grinned to himself. Once an adman, always an adman. He and Dan had spent many happy hours mentally casting total strangers in imaginary adverts.
'Tampon ad, definitely,' Dan would say in the pub as they watched a couple of lithe young girls in skin-tight jeans wiggling their tiny bums as they crossed the floor.
'Chocolate bar,' Matt would counter, when one of the girls looked their way, showing off the sort of plump, pillowy lips that would look best puckered up round some type of phallic chocolate bar. Matt never knew why more people didn't complain about those sexy ads.
'You win,' Dan would sigh. 'She's perfect. Or ... perhaps lipstick?'
They never did it with people they knew: it would be too cruel. Privately, Matt thought that the newest copywriter would be perfect as the weedy guy who didn't get the girl in a soft-drink campaign and the accounts secretary would look great trying to get stains out of her son's football shirt in a washing powder ad. And Hope? Hope would look totally out of place in a modern commercial.
She'd only work if cast in a historical setting: perhaps a shy lady-in-waiting for an advert for historical tourist sites? But historical commercials were few and far between. Hope. How would he ever tell her what was wrong? He couldn't because if he did, Hope would realize that he'd uprooted them all for nothing. The great novel was going nowhere. Matt was furious with himself and needed Hope's support, but all he'd got was a shrewish wife who didn't seem to understand that. Was Hope blind? Couldn't she see what was going on inside him?
He smiled at the barmaid, a bitter little smile, and asked for another double. He wanted to get terribly, terribly drunk.

It felt very cold but Hope wasn't sure if it was frosty or not. She'd become more used to anticipating the weather these days; if it was going to be frosty, the night sky was icily

clear and you could see every star in the sky. She'd never been aware of the weather or the sky so much before. In Bath, if it was cold, she'd merely turned the heating up a notch and she'd rarely peered out of the windows at night. But with the limited heating system in Curlew Cottage, she'd got into the habit of listening to forecasts and monitoring the weather herself. If it was frosty, she needed to put much more wood in the range so the house would remain warm all night.
Tonight, Hope thought the cold might not be due to the weather. It seemed to come from inside her very bones. She'd been cold for hours now, since Matt had stormed off into the night.
Once Toby had finally gone back to sleep, she'd tiptoed downstairs and sat beside the range, her toes resting on the ledge, trying to keep warm as she waited for Matt. But he didn't come back. Midnight came and went. The pubs closed at half eleven, she knew, so he'd be home soon. Only he wasn't.
At one, she turned off all the lights except the small lamp inside the front door and made her way up to bed. Her movements slow and almost painful, she undressed and climbed into the big bed. The cold embrace of the sheets was so icy it hurt. Her feet were freezing but she'd deliberately not put on her white fluffy bed socks. Matt hated them, even though without them her feet felt like two lumps of ice. She wanted to do something to please him, something to make up for earlier. If only he came home, she'd apologize and tell him it was all her fault. She'd been shrewish, horrible . . .
Her tears wet the pillow she clung to, trying to imagine it was Mart's warm body. She watched the luminous hands on the clock crawl round to two and then three before she fell into an uneasy sleep.
The peal of the alarm made her sit up in bed in shock. Half seven. The time Matt usually got up. She was shocked to realize that his side of the bed hadn't been slept in.
Normally, Hope managed another ten to fifteen minutes in bed before Toby and Millie launched themselves at her,

grumpy or delighted, depending on the mood. But this morning, she could hear them downstairs, already tucking into their breakfasts she deduced, from the noise of spoons clattering into bowls.
She pulled on her candlewick dressing gown, the one that made her look like the Michelin Man's fatter sister, and dragged herself downstairs, prepared for the disaster of her two children making their own breakfast.
Instead, Matt was there, whisking up some eggs while the kids sat sedately at the table with cups of milk. He looked terrible, as if, whatever he'd been up to all night, sleep hadn't been on the agenda. Hope's heart hardened as she looked at him.
He hadn't phoned or anything, she'd been sick with worry, thinking he'd driven the car into the ditch or was lying in a pool of blood somewhere. And now here he was, blithely unaware of what he'd put her through, making the children's breakfast as if he did it every morning.
Saying nothing, she marched over to the kettle and switched it on.
'Mummy, Daddy's making Fwench toast,' announced Millie happily.
Is he now, thought Hope grimly. 'He better tidy up after himself,' she hissed.
Matt gave her a long, hard look which Hope ignored.
She made a cup of instant coffee and marched silently back upstairs. Let Matt look after the children for a change; she was going to go back to bed and read.
But this plan, which had always seemed such a nice one because she never got the chance to do it, wasn't as enjoyable as she'd thought. Instead of being able to relax with her detective novel, she sat and simmered, listening to every word from the kitchen, all the while wondering where the hell her husband had spent the night. She wouldn't ask him: no way. It was up to him to tell her. If he didn't tell her, she'd never ask. Never.

The cold war continued all week. Every morning, Matt was gone before Hope had got the children dressed and ready. Every evening, Matt was coolly polite to her, inquiring about the children's behaviour as if the pair of them were distant acquaintances meeting on the street. He'd just grunted when Hope told him about her job. She cooked dinner mechanically and they ate in silence, with the television on in the background. In bed, they lay like statues, each one at the farthest possible edge, determined not to let so much as a big toe mistakenly reach across the expanse and touch the other person.
Finula had obligingly told Hope that she'd been delighted to give dear Matt a bed for the night after the row.
'Artistic types can be hell to live with,' she'd said, clearly thrilled to have insider information on the Parkers' family life.
Hope had agreed with that.
Men were so good at war, Hope realized sadly on Wednesday afternoon as she peeled carrots for dinner. They could sustain it for much longer than women.
She longed for the battle to be over but for once, and possibly for the first time in her life, Hope resisted the temptation to rush up to her husband and beg forgiveness so that life could go back to normal. He was wrong this time after all; she couldn't plead for forgiveness when the fault was Matt's. She'd done that all her married life and for the first time, she realized that it was a mistake. The pattern had to break. Or something had to break.
But although Matt was the one in the wrong, he carried on as if he was furious with her for something.
On Thursday, she drove Matt to the artists' centre in the now customary stony silence and then took the children to Hunnybunnikins. The eagerness with which they raced in to meet Giselle made Hope aware that the cold war was having an effect on them. How could it not? No matter how hard she tried to behave normally when the children were present, the atmosphere in the cottage was positively Siberian.


would have to stop tonight, she decided firmly. They'd have a frank discussion with no abject apologies on her part, and they'd sort it out. Feeling slightly more upbeat than she had all week, Hope drove on to her first morning's work.
Erwin Donald's machinery hire business was situated ten miles outside Redlion on the Killarney Road. The office was a cold looking concrete structure attached to the enormous, steel-doored garages where the machines were kept. Hay balers and harvesters cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and few farmers could afford them, which was why men like Erwin made money hiring out machinery.
But February was a quiet time on all fronts. The weather was generally too bad for even building work, which meant there wasn't much call for any of Donald Machinery's wares.
'We just need someone to keep the place ticking over until Moira gets well again,' said Erwin, a giant of a man in his fifties with a shock of red hair and an explosion of freckles on his face. 'It's really only answering the phones and that. Moira was going to get the files sorted out for the tax man before she got sick,' he added, as he switched on the light in the office.
Hope bit her tongue to stop herself gasping with the cold. The bare little room felt icier than outside. No wonder poor Moira had got sick. The only miracle was that she hadn't succumbed to double pneumonia before shingles. Shivering, Hope looked around at the forlorn white walls, the big steel filing cabinets and the old linoleum on the floor and hoped there was a heater behind one of the two elderly wooden desks.
'We can have the office phone switched through to the house, you see, so we didn't spend much time here,' Erwin said apologetically as if noticing the desolation of the office for the first time. 'There's a kettle and teabags and there's a toilet down the hall.' He dragged an old hot air heater out from under one of the two desks and switched it on. Hope half expected it to fuse the electricity system but after a few moments, it began to belch out warm, fusty air. When Erwin

had explained how to deal with phone callers, and they'd arranged a time for him to come to Curlew Cottage with the JCB, he left. Hope stared at her little empire and shivered some more. The pale blue woollen polo neck and plain black trousers that had seemed business-like earlier weren't adequate protection against this place so she left her coat on.
Two cups of tea later, the phone hadn't rung once and Hope was bored out of her mind. Was this what she'd put her two beloved children into a playgroup for? To sit in a freezing office for two mornings a week and look at a silent phone? There wasn't even a radio to amuse herself. She looked at her watch. An hour had crawled by. Two more interminable ones to go. She toyed with the idea of phoning Mary-Kate to ask if Erwin had really needed help or if Mary- Kate had bullied him into it but perhaps that was a bit paranoid. As she couldn't face another cup of tea, Hope prowled around to keep warm and began opening filing cabinets. Erwin hadn't asked her to do anything other than answer the phone but she had to do something to earn her wages or she'd go mad with boredom.
The first filing cabinet drawer went back ten years and seemed heat and tidy with files labelled tax, accounts, outstanding, etc. Hope opened the second drawer which, according to the label, contained papers from nine years ago. The note was accurate: the papers were nine years old. They weren't filed however. They were just jumbled on top of each other. In disbelief, Hope lifted some out, little slivers of paper drifting out from the haphazard pile and fluttering to the floor as she did so. She flicked through the papers and realized that everything from bills and receipts to catalogues and price lists was jumbled up in the pile.
She checked the third drawer. Still the paperwork of nine years ago and still messy. She began to see why Moira had developed an illness rather than cope with the tax forms. Hope smiled. She now had a task. Rolling up her sleeves, she sat down and began to sort through the paperwork.
By half twelve, she'd dealt with four phone calls and had


filed one drawer with ruthless efficiency. There was something very satisfying about sorting out such utter mess, she thought. If she was doing it every day, she knew she'd probably have a different view, but for now it had been enjoyable. Deep in the realms of technical details and uncomplicated pieces of paper, Hope had forgotten the war with Matt. Bits of paper didn't give you reproachful glances or make you feel guilty. They just lay there waiting to be assigned a proper place.
She left an explanatory note for Erwin with his phone messages adding that she'd done a bit of tidying up, then she switched off the heater and left, feeling strangely satisfied.
Mary-Kate's assistant, a shy young man with the most un-Irish name of Otis, was in the middle of serving a customer when Hope entered the chemist, so she sat on the chair beside the prescription counter and waited, feeling impatient and eager to tell someone about her morning.
'Mary-Kate said you're to go through to the back,' Otis said when she'd asked for Mary-Kate.
Surprised at this, Hope hurried through, expecting the aroma of her friend's favourite blend of coffee to be scenting the air. Instead, the coffee maker was off, the gas fire was off and Mary-Kate was just pulling her raincoat on.
'Sorry to barge in,' Hope said, immediately apologetic. 'I just wanted to tell you how I'd got on at Erwin's. I can see you're on your way out so I'll let you get ready.'
'What are you like?' said Mary-Kate fondly. 'It's you I'm going out with. We're going to the Widows for a sandwich to celebrate your new job.'
Hope felt absurdly pleased. It was so nice that somebody appreciated her. 'How did you know we'd be celebrating?' she asked.
Mary-Kate laughed. 'Stop with all the daft questions and tell me how you got on with Erwin.'

Buoyed up with new found energy, Hope took the children for a walk in the afternoon. When they got home again,

they were so tired after the walk and their morning in the playgroup, that they were both happy to sit down and play quietly without murdering each other. Hope decided to tackle the ironing.
After an hour of ironing fiddly toddler clothes, all of which were rock hard having been washed in the lime-rich local water, she felt both virtuous and tired, yet she still had one more job to do: cook dinner.
She flicked through her Queen of the Kitchen book for something simple. Everything she liked the look of involved ingredients she didn't have and the recipe for stir fried pork - which she did have - required ginger, which she didn't have. Blast. Slamming the book shut, Hope decided that working women didn't have time for cooking and she opened one of her favourite jars of instant dinner mix. It was nice to be a working woman again. When the pork was bubbling away and seeing Millie, the main mischief maker, fast asleep on the big armchair while Toby was colouring in, Hope rushed upstairs to check her e-mail. She'd got into the habit of checking it every day to see if Sam or anybody else had been in touch. When she'd left Bath, she'd promised to keep in touch with her friends and had had quite a few e-mails wishing her good luck, Happy Christmas, or asking her how she was getting on. Now Betsey had written and Hope clicked on the message eagerly: Betsey's correspondence was always a howl.

How are you doing in darkest Kerry, she wrote. God, it must be lovely having got out of the rat race. I'm up to my tonsils with a huge women-in-politics feature and haven't had a moment to write since Christmas. Dan's working on a beer campaign and he's driving me mad. You know what he and Matt get like when they're being creative. Total nightmare. Dan says he can't remember what it's like to have a family dinner at home because I'm either working late or he is.



And we've got the Bionic ad awards next Saturday night and I'm longing to hit London and Harvey Nicks to get something new. You know what the competition will be like and if I'm not dolled up to the eyebrows in Chloe or something, I'll be labelled an old hag forever. Remember last year when Erica turned up in that old pink velvet thing that looked like her granny knitted it? Dan will be mortified if I don't get glammed up but I don't have the time. Boo hoo.
How I envy you being able to slob around with the kids and not worry about award ceremonies, nannies, nurseries or having your eyeliner straight in the morning. What bliss. Have you met any other mums? I hope you're making friends. Are coffee mornings still a big thing for non-working women? I was thinking of doing a feature on them. They sound so seventies, don't they. Do tell us how you're getting on and if you two are planning a trip back to civilization anytime soon,
Ciao,
Betsey.

Hope glared at the message. Back to civilization? Where the hell did Betsey think they were - the Congo four hundred years ago? And as for 'have you met any other mums' and 'how I envy you able to slob around. . .'
What sort of twilight zone was Hope supposed to be in now that she'd left work? Had giving in her notice meant she'd traded in her brain and her dressy clothes as well, turning into a zombie housewife from hell with nothing on her mind but cleaning out the fridge? Betsey had never stayed at home with her kids for more than the statutory maternity leave and obviously reckoned that anyone who did was insane or stupid. Or both.
Hope switched off the computer and stomped downstairs furiously. She was so cross that when Matt arrived home,

she forgot the cold war and launched into an impassioned tirade about the email.
'Honestly, who does she think she is?' Hope finished as she slopped pork onto plates. 'It's as if we've been marooned a zillion miles away from civilization and are running round in grass skirts while the natives beat drums around us. And how patronizing to assume that anyone who stays at home with the children has a lobotomy.'
'It can't be that bad,' Matt said placatingly, pleased that Hope was talking to him again. She'd made the first move, therefore he could now afford to be magnanimous and talk back. He still could barely believe she'd kept up the silence all week. Once, Hope would have been begging for forgiveness within minutes of a row. She was changing, subtly, but still changing. 'I'll have a look at her email.'
He stomped downstairs a few minutes later. 'Stupid bitch,' he muttered.
'You see, I knew you'd think it was over the top,' Hope fumed.
But what had upset Matt wasn't the reference to coffee mornings or the implication that they were living in the middle of nowhere because they weren't in the UK any more. No. It was that casual reference to Dan's beer commercial and the excitement of the advertising awards. Matt longed to be in the thick of it all again with an intensity that shocked him. He craved the thrill of the awards, where everybody drank too much and pretended to be blase about the Best Creative Team gong, even though they were desperate to win. He yearned to be in the middle of a brainstorming session on whatever damned beer it was, with ideas rippling around his head like aftershocks from an earthquake and everybody ad-libbing and joking around the table, brilliant minds honing ideas until they were as sharp as Sabatier knives.
Hope put her arms around him, suddenly realizing that she'd broken the ice despite her vow not to. Oh well, it was better this way and she was proud of the fact that she'd


made her point by remaining angry with Matt for so long. 'I'm glad we're out of that particular rat race,' she lied. 'It's better here, isn't it?'
'Yes,' lied Matt in response, returning her hug. 'Much better.'

CHAPTER ELEVEN

On Monday morning, Nicole stalked into work with her short feathery hair a glinting copper colour. The hideous orange had been replaced by subtle shades of dark burnt umber mixed with gleaming metallic tones, all of which looked absolutely stunning against Nicole's cafe au lait skin. Even better was the cut which clung to her perfectly shaped head and showed off cheekbones to die for. She looked utterly different from the girl who'd left the office the previous Friday. Always beautiful, she was now stunning, thanks in part to hair that would make heads turn.
'Holy shit,' said the receptionist in astonishment as Nicole walked past in tight black trousers, high boots and a teensy faded denim jacket clinging to her slender body.
'What happened to your hair?'
'I fancied a change,' said Nicole. She and Sharon has agreed that this was the best response because Nicole was far too embarrassed to admit that a home dyeing accident had actually been to blame. Except where the hell was Sharon? They'd been supposed to meet in the cafe across the road so Nicole would have some moral support when she braved the slagging from her workmates.
'You the new mascot?' demanded a guy from new business as she got into the lift. 'Copperplate, copper hair, geddit?'
'It's fashion,' said Sharon, panting as she just made it into the lift in time. 'Don't men have fashion too?' she added, then, staring disgustedly at the man's balding head, added: 'you'd give your eye teeth to have some hair so you could dye it!'


'Bitch,' he snapped.
Nicole gave him the finger as she and Sharon fell, giggling, out at their floor.
'What happened to your hair?' gasped every second person in shock when they spotted Nicole.
'It's lovely,' breathed the girls who sat nearest to Sharon and Nicole.
'I wish I was brave enough to do something with my hair,' said a pretty Indian girl named Shirin who had long black hair just like Nicole's. 'My father would kill me if I dyed it.'
Nicole's face burst into a big, rueful smile. 'That's about the only advantage of not knowing your father!' she joked.
'Sinclair at nine o'clock!' hissed Sharon, spying Miss Sinclair advancing on the cheerful little group.
Faster than mice who'd noticed a creeping cat, the gang scattered and flung themselves into their allotted seats. They needn't have worried. Nicole was Miss Sinclair's real quarry. What had the stupid girl done with her hair?
'Your hair,' said Miss Sinclair in disgust.
'Yes,' smiled Nicole, the smile not reaching her eyes, 'hair. I have hair. I got it cut.'
Grim in the face of such cheekiness, Miss Sinclair growled deep in her throat. 'It wasn't the cut I was talking about,' she said icily.
'Don't you like the colour?' Nicole asked innocently, knowing that there was nothing Sinclair would have liked more than to have her fired for breaking some stupid workplace appearance code. 'Lots of people dye their hair,' she said, looking pointedly at Miss Sinclair's hair where an inch of dandruff-riddled mouse showed through the dark brown. 'It's not a problem for women of Indian heritage to dye their hair, is it?' she added wickedly and had the satisfaction of seeing the bitch step back nervously. She knew that Sinclair picked on her because she didn't like her, but ostentatiously playing the race card would serve the old cow right.

Miss Sinclair's nostrils flared. 'Don't be ridiculous. I was commenting on your hair, that's all. But the denim jacket is not allowed. You know the Copperplate rules: no denim.'
Silently, Nicole shrugged off the jacket, revealing a white T-shirt, the thin fabric of which did absolutely nothing to hide the high, braless breasts with erect nipples underneath.
Miss Sinclair's eyes really did pop then, which made Nicole grin. There was no rule about not wearing a bra, now was there?
When Sinclair had stormed off to the top of the room to make someone else's life hell, Nicole phoned Sharon up.
'That cow,' she hissed. 'The sooner I get out of here the better, because I am going to end up in jail for murdering her one of these days.'
'Cheer up,' said Sharon kindly, 'when you're a big singing star, you can bitch about her to everyone you see and she won't be able to do a thing.'
'Yeah right,' Nicole said gloomily. 'Hell will have frozen over before I'm a big singing star.'
'You shouldn't have said anything about Indian women,' Shirin chided her later when they met in the ladies' at one minute past one. 'My father says it's wrong to claim special treatment on account of our race.'
'Well, Shirin, your dad sounds like a real old pet but although I have fifty per cent Indian blood in me,' Nicole pointed out breezily, 'I'm West London through and through. I never even met my dad. The only culture in my house is my gran's cultured pearls.'
'I am sorry for you,' Shirin said.
'What's she sorry for?' asked Sharon, coming in to put on some lipstick.
'Nothing,' muttered Nicole. What was Shirin on about? Just because she didn't know her dad and anything about his culture, didn't mean anything. She got plenty of culture from her gran, anyhow: she could sing the 'Old Claddagh

Ring' and any number of Irish traditional songs thanks to Reenie's training. What else did she want?
It was a long, dull day. Nicole got bored by half three and began circling ads for other jobs in the evening paper. When Sinclair prowled around, she didn't even bother to hide the paper, half willing the supervisor to fly into a rage and fire her. Nicole was fed up to the teeth with Copperplate.
It was all Darius Good's fault, she thought crossly. If he hadn't come along and given her false hope about her singing career, she'd still be happily working away, joking with Shazz and the gang, playing tricks on Sinclair and not giving a damn about life except to hope Friday came around as fast as possible.
Now, she'd had a glimpse of another life, and she was hungry for it. She didn't want to be stuck in this office for the rest of her days.
At coffee break, she turned her mobile phone on - they were banned from having them on for personal calls during working hours - to check if there were any messages.
'You have no messages,' cooed the automated telephonist.
Nicole was so miserable that she didn't even bother turning the phone off again.
It was ten to five when the mobile began to bleat from the depths of her rucksack.
'Where is the damn thing?' hissed Nicole, poking around in the rucksack looking for it.
'Yes?' she snapped, pushing the 'yes' button.
'Hi Nicole, it's Darius Good from Titus.'
Nicole straightened up in her seat. Who cared if Sinclair saw her on a personal call.
'So, what's the story?' she said casually.
Darius couldn't hide the excitement in his voice: 'Can you come in tomorrow and meet the boss? I know you've had to wait a few weeks to hear from us but the boss, Sam Smith, has been really busy. She loves your voice, by the way.'
'She does?' Nicole beamed.

'What time tomorrow?'
'Ten?'
'Perfect. Give me the address, will you?'
When she'd written it down, she inquired: 'Will you be there?'
'You bet. You're mine,' Darius said. 'I mean,' he stammered, 'that I discovered you .. . that, I brought you in ... you know what I mean.'
'I do,' said Nicole huskily. 'I'm looking forward to it.'
She hung up and grinned at Sharon.
'Get your coat, Shazz, we've got to hit the shops.'
'It's not half five for ages,' Sharon protested.
'We'll sneak out,' giggled Nicole.
'I can't.'
'Ok, I will and give me a buzz on the moby when you get out and we'll meet. I've got to buy a very special outfit.'
Nicole unbuttoned the top three buttons on the deep scarlet clinging shirt dress she'd bought in Next the previous day. The black leather knee-high boots she'd had to buy to go with them had been way out of her price range but, she'd thought as the assistant in Russell &c Bromley scanned the price tag, what else were credit cards for?
Sharon had made the ultimate sacrifice and loaned her older sister's cherished Prada handbag, on the proviso that it was back in its place in the wardrobe by that night or Tina would kill her.
'You'll look a million dollars,' Sharon had sighed reverently when she saw Nicole wearing the whole outfit, including the handbag, which had been smuggled out of Tina's wardrobe in a high security operation.
Now Nicole sat in the chrome and smoked glass expanse that was the Titus reception area and tried not to look too awestruck as people, all trendily dressed, rushed to and fro, talking at the tops of their voices on mobiles or to each other. A particularly glamorous woman with a blunt platinum blonde bob, and distressed leather trousers that Nicole

knew were D &C G, sashayed past, clutching the latest electronic organizer in purple-tipped fingernails.
Nicole would have loved to have asked the receptionist who the woman was and what she did, but Darius appeared at that moment and Nicole didn't want to appear gauche.
'Hi,' she said calmly, as if she was quite used to sitting in record company lobbies waiting to find out if she was going to be offered a record contract or not.
'Hi,' he said back to her.
Nicole ran her eyes over Darius. He looked even better than he had the last time.
His fair hair was shorter and fashionably spiky and he was one of the few people she knew who suited casual shirts worn open over jeans. His welcoming face was warm and friendly and he looked like he was ready to find a sunny spot in Hyde Park and lie down on the grass with a bottle of wine and Nicole, with bees buzzing lazily around them as they stared deep into each other's eyes.
'I love your hair,' he said admiringly.
Her reverie interrupted, Nicole smiled, hoping that he never heard the true story of her haircut from hell.
She felt her cool facade wobble as Darius led her to the fifth floor where, he explained, Sam Smith, Sophie Lanson, Nadia Vieri and various other members of the team were waiting to meet her.
'Like a group of people?' Nicole said, wishing she could smoke.
'Yeah, well, everyone wants to meet you and afterwards we'll probably have a chat with Sam on her own. She's tough but she's cool, I promise. She loves your voice.'
'You said that before,' Nicole pointed out through chattering teeth. 'What does that mean precisely? What's going to happen next?'
'What it means is that if Sam agrees, we'll sign you for a deal where you go into a studio and work with songwriters and producers on songs and, if it's all good enough, we'll release singles and hopefully, an album.'

'I don't have many songs, that's the problem,' Nicole said. 'I've written a few but nothing incredible.' She might as well be honest. The night before, she'd gone through her entire catalogue of songs and realized that they were all terrible.
'We could look at your songs, but if they're not up to scratch, don't panic. Lots of artists don't write their own music,' Darius comforted her. 'That's fine. You've got the voice, that's what matters to us.' He didn't add that LGBK was so keen on Nicole because their last two young British female singers had failed dismally. They needed young blood and they needed a hit singer. If Nicole was what they were looking for and was successful, then they'd all be delirious but only time would tell.
'Why do you keep saying "artist"?'
He shrugged. 'That's what we call singers and musicians.'
'Oh, like piss-artists?' joked Nicole.
She stopped joking when she went into the big, modern board room which was ten times classier than any part of the Copperplate office block. Seated around a large table were more trendy people, looking at her intently. In one corner sat the platinum blonde she'd noticed in reception. Nicole gulped and then took a deep breath. This was her chance; she'd show them.

'She's fantastic,' Sam said to Karen Storin afterwards when Darius was showing Nicole where the ladies' loos were. 'She's a bright kid and she knows what she wants.'
'And she's utterly stunning looking,' sighed Karen. 'She could be a model. If the music works and if she's got what it takes, then we could go a long way with Nicole.'
'I hope so,' Sam said fervently, 'because we've spent a fortune on Density and I have a feeling that they're not going to go a long way. We need a sure-fire, no hassle hit act to make up for those boys.'
'Did they like me?' Nicole asked Darius anxiously as he escorted her to Sam Smith's office. She'd given up any


pretence of being ultra cool with him. It was clear that he wanted her to succeed just as much as she did.
Darius beamed down at her. 'They loved you. I told you they would.'
'So we're going to work in the studio and record some songs and see, right?'
'Just a couple,' Darius said, 'and then Sam will see if she can offer you a deal.'
'I don't know if I can stand the waiting,' Nicole said impatiently.
'Look, if you can sing even half as well as you did on your demo, then you're a dead cert, I promise.'
Sam's office was a lot like her, Nicole thought: immaculate, businesslike and without any frills. There were no photos of kids clustered around her desk, no carefully tended pot plants hanging from filing cabinets, no watercolours on the walls: just a seating area with a table, a huge, clear desk and platinum singles on the walls. Sam was definitely a tough cookie, Nicole decided. Small, slim and elegant in what was obviously a dead expensive grey suit, Sam was very attractive looking but she gave off vibes that said she didn't take any bullshit. Nicole liked that, even if it was a bit daunting.
But Sam had been really nice to her all along, which was a good sign.
'What did you think of all that?' Sam asked her when the three of them were sitting down at the table.
'It made me a bit nervous to be honest, all that talk about voice coaches and choreography and stuff like that.'
'I'm delighted you were nervous,' Sam replied, to Nicole's astonishment. 'This is a serious business and we're going to be asking you to give up your job to work with singing coaches and producers to record songs, get an act together, work with a choreographer, all of which comes with a guarantee of exactly nothing.'
Nicole blinked.
'You'll get the advance for signing the contract, assuming

we do sign you, but if it doesn't work, after that, it's goodbye. This is a tough business and I don't want you to go into it with your eyes closed, Nicole.'
'I'm not stupid,' Nicole said hotly.
'I didn't say that,' Sam was calm. 'I can tell you're anything but stupid. But you'd be surprised at how many people think they're going to be a huge star and when it doesn't work out - and there's a high failure rate in the music industry for your type of act - they're heartbroken and astonished. This isn't telling you that you're going to fail,' Sam was speaking very intently now, 'this is just to make sure you're aware of the possibility of failure.'
Nicole looked a bit shocked.
'Cheer up,' Sam said. 'I have every faith in you, and in the LGBK label. We've a great team here and if we can't make it work, Nicole, then nobody can. Nobody can break an act, like LGBK, I promise you. Right, first things first, you need a manager. Darius, what's the story about management for Nicole?'
When Darius and Nicole went down to the lobby in the lift half an hour later, Nicole felt as if she'd been in the presence of a tornado.
'She's impressive,' Darius said, 'but I hope she didn't scare you?' He looked anxiously at Nicole, hating the idea that she might be upset.
But Nicole's feline little face was alive with exultation. 'No,' she said, 'it was wonderful. I'm even more determined than ever to make this work!'

Sam could feel the familiar nagging pain growing in intensity, gnawing at her insides, spilling out from the centre of her belly into a dull, ceaseless ache in her lower back and her entire pelvic area. If there was a time and a place for everything, this wasn't it. The Density album launch was being held in the hottest rock venue in town and the place was jam packed, although it was hard to tell if it was packed with the right sort of people. There were at least

three hundred milling around, drinking free drinks and eating free canapes, but if they weren't the top media people, the correct rock show hosts and basically the right people, it was a waste of time.
Sam had to make a speech, a short one, luckily, before Steve's. Which was why it was not the time to feel utterly crippled with oncoming period pain. Another wave hit her and she was suddenly terrified the damn thing would start and she'd ruin her skin-tight beige trousers. Almost stumbling in her haste to get to the loos, she cannoned off Mrs Roberta Ceci, mother of Enchanting, and absolutely the last person Sam wanted to see right now.
'Sam,' said Roberta, holding up a talon. 'I need to talk to you ...'
'Sorry, can't right now,' gasped Sam and fled, leaving Roberta Ceci looking angry, which wasn't unusual.
In the loos, Sam stayed in the cubicle for a long time, glad she'd learned to carry tampons with her all the time nowadays. She was certainly living the boy scout motto: be prepared. She dry swallowed a painkiller and sat down on the toilet lid, hoping the pain and the faintness would go away. These bloody fibroid things were killing her. Ever since she'd seen the GP, she'd begun to trace backwards and remember all the other times when crippling period pains had made her life a misery.
There had been many occasions, she realized, thinking of the back ache and the dull gnawing in her pelvis that she'd tried not to notice at the time. Or had been too busy to notice. Her appointment was in nearly three weeks' time and, not for the first time, she began to wonder if she shouldn't have insisted on being seen by a consultant sooner. She knew there was a crisis in the National Health Service, but she was going privately and had enough health insurance to skip the queue, surely. Then again, it was probably nothing and she was worrying needlessly. She'd look "he a neurotic woman if she rang up and frantically tried to change her appointment now. Her GP's secretary had

insisted that this was the earliest one they could make for her.
After ten minutes, she felt marginally better and emerged from the loo. The sight of her ghostly white face in the mirror made her realize she needed to slap on a bit of blusher to disguise how she felt. Unfortunately, Sam was not the sort of woman who carried lots of make-up in her sleek handbags, so she had to make do with putting a few dots of pink lipstick on her cheekbones and rubbing it in. The repair job didn't really work but it was dark in the club, so hopefully nobody would notice.
Outside, the time for speeches had clearly arrived and Sam could see Steve standing at the backstage door, looking around furiously. Sam rushed over to him.
'Sorry, I was giving an interview to the Mirror,' she lied.
Placated, Steve pushed open the door and they went onto the stage,. Density were waiting in the wings, ready to perform as soon as Steve had told the world they were the hottest band on the planet. It took all of Sam's professionalism to smile, shake hands with the band's troublesome manager, and tell the band how incredible they were. The problem was that she had a bad fueling about Density, a feeling which magnified every time she met them. For a band who'd never sold a record, they were too smug by half. And if they failed, they'd probably bring her down with them.
Her speech lasted two minutes, Steve's lasted five, and then the band were cranking up their guitars and roaring at the crowd.
'I love those boys,' yelled Steve to Sam over the noise.
'Me too,' she said cheerily as they left the backstage area.
Mrs Ceci appeared like a bad penny and collared Sam, her face purple under a heavy layer of Max Factor.
'Don't think you can just walk out on me like that!' she squealed. 'I need to talk to you and I won't be pushed aside...'
Sam had had enough. She moved slowly forward until her face was only inches away from Roberta Ceci's. 'This is

an album launch and I'm working,' she breathed. 'I do not know what you're even doing here because I did not see your name on the guest list, but if you wish to speak to me, you can phone my assistant at the office and, she emphasized this, 'If you have anything valid to say, then I'll see you. Do you understand?'
Roberta Ceci's eyes widened. She understood all right.
'And by the way, you can stop phoning my staff and giving them hell,' Sam added. 'If you have something you want to say, say it to me because I won't take any crap from you.'

After another half an hour, Sam slipped out and hailed a taxi. Nobody would notice she had left, she hoped. As the taxi drove her home, she phoned Karen Storin on her mobile. Karen answered with the noise in the background making Sam realize that Density were still playing.
'Karen,' Sam shouted, 'I've had to step out for a moment, I got an urgent call on my mobile. If Steve's looking for me, tell them I'll be back in an hour.'
In an hour, Steve would be too far into the champagne to notice she hadn't returned while Density's manager would be too far into the Colombian marching powder to notice anything at all.
London's lights flashed past and Sam forgot about the hassle with Mrs Ceci. What she couldn't forget was the pain she was in and the anxious, upset feeling that wouldn't go away. What was wrong with her, was it really only fibroids? Should she have insisted on getting an immediate appointment with the specialist instead of settling for one in nearly a month's time?
At home, her feeling of anxiety got worse, so Sam booted up her computer and decided to research what was wrong with her. She loved surfing the internet and was an expert at zipping in and out of interesting sites. Medical sites were not ones she'd ever visited before, so it took a few goes before she found one on women's health.

It wasn't long before she was engrossed in illnesses she'd never heard of. And then she found it, a list of symptoms that mirrored hers exactly. The pains, the nausea, the period problems, the list described her perfectly. Only it wasn't a description of the symptoms of fibroids. The disease in question was ovarian cancer. The more Sam read, the more she realized that when a woman had symptoms like hers, the disease was at an advanced stage and was a killer. Symptomless until it was too late, she read, with an ever growing sense of horror.
Shocked, she clicked on a self-help group and the first thing she saw was a poem from a woman whose sister had died of the disease, a poem calling for more women to be aware of the silent killer.

We had two months before you died, Juana, Two months to fill with memories, Two months to remember a lifetime. It wasn't enough. We all miss you so much;
We miss you more because it shouldn't have to be this way.

The accompanying biography explained that Juana had been expected to live for at least six months from diagnosis, but had survived for only two. She left three teenage children and a husband behind her, along with a sister who vowed to stop other women dying needlessly and who'd set up a group to increase awareness of ovarian cancer.
Sam wrenched the internet connector from the wall and punched the off button on her computer. Numb, she stared at the darkened screen for a long time. Now she knew what was happening to her, now she finally knew why she'd been ill and losing weight. She was dying. Time was running out for her. She didn't have three weeks to wait and see some specialist; she needed help now. But then, what was the point if she was dying anyway?

It was strange: her hands didn't shake and she didn't cry. Instead, she rocked herself back and forth in her favourite chair and thought about how she'd taken every day for granted.
Waking up was never a miracle for her, she'd never thanked anyone for her existence, she took it as her right and went on living, fully expecting that no matter what happened, she'd wake up the next day. And the next, and the next.
Except not any more. Time really was precious and hers was running out. It was such an enormous idea to get her head around. Like trying to imagine infinity, her brain couldn't imagine a time when she would cease to be.
What would it be like? Was there anything out there? Was there nothing? And who would mourn her, if she were truly honest?
An image of Hope came into her head, Hope with Millie and Toby, laughing. That's when the tears began to fall.
Sam didn't bother going to bed that night. Instead, she sat in her silent living room and drank glass after glass of white wine. Why bother with abstinence when you were dying? In the early hours of the morning, her face swollen with crying, Sam finally made up her mind. There was only one thing for it. She knew what she had to do.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Matt had the car that afternoon meaning that Hope was stuck at home. It was too wet to think of walking into the village, so she decided to work on the chair she was attempting to revamp. It was a plain wooden kitchen chair but the fretwork at the back was pretty and Hope imagined it could be lovely if only it wasn't covered with layer upon layer of thick cow-dung brown paint. She'd taken a week to strip off the old paint, and had painted it with lemon yellow wood varnish. Now, she planned to stencil wild flowers all over it with the help of the Irish wild flower book she'd got from the library. Millie was very keen to help, so both she and Toby were wearing their old creche painting smocks over their clothes in what Hope knew was a vain attempt to keep them paint-free. Hope was wearing an old shirt of Matt's over her T-shirt and jeans for the same reason.
'Mummy, give me a go,' Millie said imperiously, holding out one fat little hand for the tiny paintbrush.
Millie painted pictures like a novice decorator painted a huge wall: with sloppy, enormous strokes and little attention to detail. Hope smiled because she knew they'd all be covered in paint soon.
'Now you can do one bit here,' she said firmly, giving Millie a tiny brush with a tiny smidgen of paint on it, 'and Toby can do this bit.'
Millie's tongue poked out of her mouth as she concentrated.
They were all so engrossed in the chair that none of them


heard the car and the sound of someone knocking on the door gave them all a huge shock.
Hope leaped to her feet and vowed to get a doorbell. She was used to doorbells, but the sound of knocking reminded her of films where the police knocked before they raided the place.
She opened the door and gasped, for there, shivering in her shearling coat and with her eyes huge in a thin, haunted face, stood Sam.
Hope was momentarily speechless but when her sister uncharacteristically burst into tears, Hope threw her arms around her and pulled Sam out of the doorway and into the house. At first, she couldn't get any sense out of what Sam was saying but she figured out that something awful had happened.
'I've made such a mess of everything,' Sam sobbed, her voice shaky. She felt so thin, Hope realized with horror. She used to be slim but now she was like a walking skeleton. 'I've got nothing, n . . . nobody,' stammered Sam. 'Who's going to give a damn when I'm gone? Nobody, that's who. I've turned so bitter and it's all eaten me up on the inside. That's why I'm sick. I'm even beginning to repel people who like me. Like him, I mean, he was only being nice and I haven't liked anyone so much for ages and I was horrible . . .' She broke off with howls of misery, like Millie when she scraped her knee and couldn't begin to tell her mother how awful it was.
'Is it the guy you told me about in Bath?' Hope asked. 'Have you split up, love?'
Sam's big eyes were stricken. 'There was no guy,' she whispered. 'No guy for a long time. Who'd come near me? And I've even frightened off my friends. Jay and Catrina . ..'
'Hush, hush,' crooned Hope as she held her sister tightly, trying to stop the shuddering.
Poor darling Sam.
'And now I'm sick I'm dying and nobody but you cares.'

Hope finally understood the phrase about your blood turning to ice. She felt every litre flood icily through her veins.
'You're sick. What? Tell me. Now.'
It took endless moments for Sam's shuddering to stop. Hope held her tightly and prayed like she'd never prayed before. Aunt Ruth hadn't been much of a one for religion but Hope made sure the children said their prayers every night. Dear God, please, please let it not be true.
Finally, Sam was able to speak.
'I read about it on the internet. It's ovarian cancer.'
'But a doctor hasn't told you, you haven't had tests or anything?'
'I can read, Hope! I've got all the symptoms. I've got an appointment with a specialist in three weeks but I know it without seeing her, don't you see?'
'But surely they wouldn't make you wait this long to see someone if it was serious . . .' began Hope, but stopped when Sam began to sob hysterically in a way Hope had never seen her cry ever before.
Hope sat her sister on the couch and instructed a wide- eyed Millie to sit beside her aunt while she got Sam some tea. Millie loved Sam but she was scared of this wild-eyed, sad person and she stood behind an armchair, twisting her pinafore in her hands and peering out nervously. Toby, however, climbed up on the couch and began to show Sam his new favourite toy, a big dumper truck with a yellow hydraulic trailer that actually went up and down.
'Up and down,' said Toby gravely, demonstrating this. 'Up and down.'
'That's very good,' Sam said, doing her best to sound normal because she could see how her behaviour had upset Millie. 'Do you let Millie play with it?'
'No,' said Millie indignantly from her position behind the chair.
'What new toys have you got, then?' Sam had herself under control now.

Millie came out of hiding and began to pile toys on the couch beside Sam. 'See, loads.'
Hope brought the cups of tea from the kitchen and laid them carefully on the low table away from small hands.
'Now Millie and Toby, Auntie Sam wants to have her tea. I'll put a video on for you, OK?' she said in a bright voice.
Sam smiled at her sister weakly. For the first time, she could see how mummydom meant having to subdue your real feelings and pretend nothing was wrong.
When the children were engrossed in the Teletubbies, Hope sat beside her sister. 'Tell me everything, from the very beginning,' she commanded.
'The consultant I'm to see has no appointments for over three weeks. She's supposed to be the best there is but I'm afraid to wait any longer. I thought if I was here, it would be easier.'
'Sam, why didn't you insist on seeing another consultant? You've got the health insurance, they could have managed it.'
'I know,' Sam said, 'I didn't think. I panicked at the thought of waiting three weeks. And what are they going to tell me, anyway? That it's spread all over me and that I can put myself through agonizing chemo just for a few more weeks. I've read all about it...'
'Sam, please, don't say that,' said Hope, distraught. 'Cancer is one of the most curable diseases now. Modern medicine is incredible and there's always hope.'
'Not with this when you have symptoms like mine,' sobbed Sam. 'By the time you notice, it's too late. You should have seen this site on the internet.'
Hope silently raged against scare-mongering sites where other people's terrible experiences made you fear the worst. 'Listen, there was something on the internet recently that said you could get cancer from using deodorant. How about that for rubbish?'
'I know but this is different.'

Afterwards, Hope put Sam to sleep in her and Matt's bedroom.
'I can't take your room,' Sam said wearily.
'I'll make a bed up for you later but for now you're exhausted and you need to sleep,' pointed out Hope. Sam hadn't slept for well over twenty-four hours, and on her emergency flight from London to Kerry via Dublin, she'd obviously been too distraught even to doze.
'I won't be able to sleep,' Sam said frantically. 'Will you sit with me?'
'Of course.'
With the children now playing in their bedroom under pain of death not to make a noise, Hope sat on the edge of the bed and stroked Sam's cold hand. Her sister's blonde hair fanned out on the dark blue pillow case and she looked frighteningly pale against the dark background.
'I'm scared, Hope, that's why I had to come to see you. You're the only one I've got,' Sam whispered. 'I don't want to be alone to face this.'
'You won't, I promise you. Now hush, Sam, get some sleep,' said Hope, as softly as she spoke when she soothed Toby after a bad dream.
She kept stroking Sam's hand and within minutes, her worn-out sister was asleep. When Sam's breathing was even and measured, Hope slipped out of the room and wondered what she should do.
The tables were certainly turned. After years of being the one whom Sam had looked after, Hope was suddenly the strong one. The one who had to take charge.
Like a swimmer gingerly testing the water temperature with one toe, Hope wondered what it would be like to be the coper. Then she realized that she had no choice: she had to do everything for Sam and, if she was dying, Hope would fight to the bitter end with her. Thinking of Sam's dying made her chest throb with a nameless ache, but she knew she didn't have time to get emotional. It was time for action. Medical action. Sam would never stand the strain of the

three weeks until her appointment with the consultant and, if she was truly ill, it could be disastrous for her to wait that long. Hope was furious with the nonchalant doctor who hadn't rushed her sister into hospital immediately. What an incompetent moron.
Hope Parker, the one who had traditionally let other people take care of problems, swung into action.
She found Sam's diary and found the consultant's appointment marked in for nearly three weeks' time, with a telephone number.
It was nearly five, just in time to catch someone in the consultant's office. Hope phoned and got through to the consultant's receptionist, explaining the story very simply.
'I can't discuss this with you, Mrs Parker,' the receptionist said politely.
Hope grimaced. 'I'm not asking you to discuss it with me,' she said. 'Just find an earlier cancellation as soon as possible, please. She is having a breakdown. Or else recommend someone else for me. This is an emergency.'
The woman promised to phone back the next day. There was nothing else Hope could do. She hung up and thought she better start dinner.
'Who does the hire car belong to?' asked Matt, arriving home shortly after six. He threw his car keys down on the coffee table and strode into the kitchen, looking for the mystery guest.
'It's Sam's,' Hope said, shivering at the thought that Sam had actually driven from the airport in her state. It was a miracle she hadn't crashed.
'Sam,' he said, stunned. 'What's she doing here?'
'Daddy, Daddy,' squealed Millie, running down the wooden stairs and making a noise like a herd of elephants.
'Quiet,' hissed Hope. 'Sam's asleep upstairs in our bed, I don't want her to wake up yet.'
'She's in bed?' Matt repeated. 'Hope, what is going on?'
Hope pulled him towards the back door and told him, whispering in case Sam was awake upstairs and could hear.

'Jesus,' Matt said, visibly shaken at the news. 'That's terrible, Hope.' He put his arms around her and kissed the top of her head gently. 'Are you all right?'
In his embrace, feeling as if someone else was in charge at last, Hope let herself go and began to cry.
'It's all right, love, I'm here with you. You'll still have me and the kids if the worst comes to the worst,' he soothed.
'I know,' sobbed Hope into his denim shirt, 'but why can't I have Sam too?'
Rather than wake Sam, who slept the sleep of the truly exhausted, Hope made up the sofa bed in the spare room and she and Matt spent an uneasy night there.
In the morning, she was awake at dawn and lay on the uncomfortable sofa bed staring out at the lightening sky through the curtainless windows.
When the phone rang at five past nine, Hope leaped at it.
'Yes?'
It was the consultant's receptionist with an appointment for three days' time.
'Thank you, thank you,' said Hope gratefully. 'I'll see you then. I'll bring her.'
She woke her sister after eleven with a tray filled with coffee, fresh orange juice, one of her own hens' eggs boiled, local brown bread, and homemade butter and gooseberry jam from the Saturday morning farm market in the soccer club hall.
Hope had never tasted better food than the food she bought on Saturdays: just-dug-up vegetables with earth still clinging to them, nutty brown bread, butter that just begged to be spread fatly over everything, and jams and chutneys that she always meant to store but which were consumed greedily, so that she inevitably had to buy another consignment the next week.
'I can't believe I've slept so long,' Sam said in amazement, sitting up in bed with Hope's pink fluffy dressing gown wrapped around her shoulders.

Hope put the tray on the bed. 'You were exhausted,' she said.
She sat on the bed and drank a cup of coffee, watching Sam eat in the same way she anxiously watched Millie toying with cut up bits of chicken.
'Eat up,' she said, 'you need some proper food inside you.'
'Yes Mummy,' joked Sam.
Hope smiled. 'I know you're on the mend when you start teasing me.'
'That's because you're so pathetically easy to tease,' Sam laughed fondly, almost upsetting the tray in the process, 'Remember that time in school when some kid got nits in their hair and we had to bring a note home to Aunt Ruth telling her to watch out for them ...'
'Oh yes,' Sam interrupted, 'and I told you that you'd got them and that the only way to get rid of them was to cover your head in Aunt Ruth's Yardley talcum powder and hang your head out of our bedroom window for an hour!'
'That was mean,' said Hope, laughing at the memory. 'I hung there for ages and Aunt Ruth went mad because I'd used all her powder up.'
'You were so innocent, then,' Sam said, spreading jam on her bread.
'And what am I now, then?' demanded her sister. 'What's the opposite of innocent?'
'You're still innocent,' Sam smiled, 'and kind. Thank you for looking after me.'
'I haven't finished yet,' Hope replied. 'I've made you a new appointment with your consultant for three days' time. She can fit you in and I'm coming with you.'
Sam could say nothing but she reached out and held her sister's hand, her eyes flooding with tears.
'Eat up,' said Hope briskly. 'When you finish that, we're going for a long, revitalizing walk.'
'We are?'
'We are,' Hope said firmly. 'You need some fresh air.'

'What about the children? Where are they, anyway?'
'Matt took them to the creche this morning so you and I have the place to ourselves. Eat up, lazy bones.'
It was a glorious February day, with pale sunshine burnishing the bare branches of the trees. Hope and Sam walked up the Janeway, enjoying the faint heat of the sun.
'I'm sorry, I should have stayed at home and not given you all this hassle. I should have changed the appointment myself,' Sam said, walking along with her hands firmly in the pockets of the light anorak she'd borrowed from Hope.
'Don't be ridiculous. You did the right thing. Where else could you have gone?'
Sam nodded miserably. 'Yeah, you're right. Where else could I have gone? Nowhere, that's where.'
Hope could have cursed herself for speaking. In the middle of Sam's tearful story the night before, she'd mentioned Morgan and it was obvious that Sam had feelings for him, but that nothing had happened. It was also obvious that there hadn't been a man in Sam's life for a long time. Hope felt ashamed that she'd believed Sam's vague stories about men friends. She should have known that her sister was lonely after all but just putting on a very successful facade to hide it.
They reached the main road and as they walked in the sun, Sam marvelled at the friendly drivers who raised a few fingers from the steering wheel in greeting at the sisters as they drove past.
'Funny, I'm totally used to that now,' Hope said. 'I thought it was strange at first, and not everyone waves, but most people do.'
Sam grinned. 'I can't imagine anyone doing that in London. If someone waves fingers at you, they're telling you to eff off.'
They walked in silence for a while, then Sam spoke suddenly: 'Mum and Dad were much younger than we are now when they died. She was twenty-nine. I can still remember her perfume although I've never known exactly what it was.

I was in a perfume department in Paris one day and I spent ages sniffing everything but I never found one just like it. Do you remember it?'
Hope shook her head. 'No, I don't. I don't really remember them either,' she said. It was the first time she'd ever admitted it to anyone. She'd been three when their parents had been killed. Sam and Hope, three and six respectively and being cared for at home by babysitter Marina, knew nothing until the following day. Even now, Sam hated the name Marina. To her, it symbolized when everything had changed.
'You never told me before that you didn't remember them,' Sam said now.
Hope shrugged. 'When we were little and you asked me if I remembered Mum's perfume and the special song she sang to get us to sleep, I said yes, because I thought it was the right thing to say. I thought you'd be angry with me for forgetting.'
'I'm sorry,' Sam said, feeling the increasingly familiar flood of tears swell up in her eyes. She burst into tears at everything now. The slightest provocation and she was off. She hated that.
'I wanted us to remember everything because Aunt Ruth didn't want to talk about them at all. She used to interrupt and change the subject when I said anything about Mummy.'
'I don't think she meant it in a bad way,' Hope pointed out. 'She just wasn't used to either kids or death and she probably thought it was better for us if we forgot them, that we'd get over it all quicker if we never spoke of them or talked about them, which was totally wrong, of course.'
The sisters were silent, remembering the tall, quiet, old- fashioned house in Windsor where childhood giggles felt out of place in case they upset the bridge ladies in the parlour and where the mention of Camille or Sandy Parker made Aunt Ruth inhale swiftly and say, 'now girls, no looking back.'
'She wasn't bad at taking care of us,' Hope said.

'She wasn't. It must have been a nightmare for her. Two kids dumped on her while she was grieving for her kid brother.'
It had been years before Aunt Ruth had explained that she'd felt she had to take them on because both sets of grandparents were too old to take care of two small children. Both of their parents were the children of older parents themselves. That had to have been a bond between Camille and Sandy, Sam always thought. And because of their tragic death, their children ended up being brought up by someone much older too.
'Would things in our lives have been different if Mum and Dad hadn't died, do you think?' Sam asked.
Hope shrugged. 'We'd probably both still be bonkers,' she said lightly.
A shiny new red car stopped beside them.
'Halloo,' yelled Delphine, rolling down her window. 'Hiya Hope and you must be Sam,' she said enthusiastically. 'So nice to meet you. God,' she added, 'anybody would know you're sisters, you're the cutting image of each other.'
Sam and Hope looked at each other and laughed.
'Nobody's ever said that to us before,' Sam said, leaning across to shake Delphine's hand.
'It's my Celtic ancestry,' Delphine beamed. 'I'm part psychic and I just know things. Either that, or it's my new crystal necklace.' She waggled a couple of crystals that hung on a chain round her neck. 'They've got a whole new line of druidic jewellery up in the Mother Earth craft shop and this must be giving me vibes that told me you were sisters. Are you coming to the Macrame Club tonight?' she asked.
'Well, I was going to but with Sam here . . .' Hope broke off.
'Get away out of that,' said Delphine dismissively, 'Sam has to come too.'
'I don't want to intrude,' Sam said, horrified at the idea of crashing a party which had obviously been arranged ages ago.

Delphine raised her eyes to heaven. 'What are the pair of you like? Of course you're invited. The Macrame Club is for like-minded sisters, druidic jewellery not a requirement, and you both have to come. This is our first meeting for ages. It'll be a blast. Anyway, Mary-Kate has been stocking up on vodka and making her fabulous martinis, so if you don't come, myself and the others will have to drink it all and nobody in the whole town will be able to get a prescription tomorrow if herself has a raging hangover! Byee!'
And she drove off at high speed.
The sisters looked at each other and laughed.
'Isn't she amazing?' Sam said. 'What a place.'
'That's Redlion for you,' Hope said proudly. 'It doesn't so much embrace you, as swallow you whole and refuse to spit you out again.'

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Tonight was the first meeting of the Macrame Club. Virginia had bought a slab of locally made cheese and a bottle of white wine as her contribution to the evening's party, even though Mary-Kate kept insisting that she bring nothing.
'Bring yourself,' said her friend, 'that's all you need. Delphine and I are providing the goodies. Don't drive, whatever you do, and have some soluble painkillers ready for the morning.'
'Are you intimating that we'll have hangovers, oh health professional?' inquired Virginia.
'Not a bit,' said Mary-Kate briskly. 'I simply like to be prepared.'
Virginia glanced at her watch and decided that she needed to leave in half an hour so she'd be there in time, but beforehand, she decided to inspect the spare bedrooms at the front of the house. Jamie, Laurence and Laurence's new girlfriend, Barbara, were coming to stay in a couple of days' time and she wanted to be sure the bedrooms were in good shape. Virginia had wondered if Laurence and Barbara would prefer to share a bedroom but decided that she'd make up three rooms just in case and they could sort themselves out whatever way they wanted, with minimum embarrassment on all sides. The wallpaper was mildly tinged with damp in one outer corner but the second bedroom, a feminine boudoir pink, was perfect and would be lovely for Barbara. The blue and yellow room at the front of the house boasted a bright pink sink in one corner and another patch of damp but Virginia decided that Jamie would put up with it.

Old houses, Virginia sighed, were like middle-aged ladies like herself: every time she thought she'd banished some symptom of age, another sprang up just to remind her of the frailty of woman. Her arthritic hip had been twinge-free for a week, despite the freezing weather, but the painful shoulder spasm she hadn't experienced for years had reappeared, just when Virginia needed to be energetic. With the children coming to stay, it was important that she looked vital and capable, instead of feeble and in need of being looked after. Not that they were children, Virginia corrected herself. They were adults. Twenty-seven and twenty-five respectively. But somewhere in the depths of her mind, Laurence and Jamie would always be children. They had their own lives to lead, grown up lives where they worked all the hours God sent. Laurence was building up the dental practice he'd set up with two friends in Swords, while Jamie was a science teacher in a boys' school. She was so proud of them, proud of all her three boys. Virginia just hoped she'd managed that parental cliche: to give them roots and wings. It had been hard to leave Jamie and Laurence in Dublin when she moved and she'd felt selfish for it. Dominic, in married bliss in London, had Sally and little Alison, while Laurence had been so caught up with the practice, he'd seemed utterly contented. But Jamie had always spent lots of time with his parents, even though he had left home at the age of twenty- two, and actually lived nearby in a house with three college pals. He'd been constantly dropping in for dinner or to borrow something or to get Virginia to bung his clothes in the washing machine as the one in the shared house had broken down yet again. Dear Jamie, her baby. But in her grief over Bill, Virginia hadn't been able to cope with looking after even herself, never mind Jamie.
Both Jamie and Laurence had seen Kilnagoshell House when she was first considering buying it, and when they'd realized there was no point convincing her not to up sticks and move to the country. But they hadn't been to stay since and she was strangely nervous about their visit.

Barbara and Laurence had been going out for four months and Virginia hadn't met her yet. Before Bill's death, Virginia knew Barbara would have been a guest in their house so often, that she'd be almost like family by now. That was Bill all over. Welcoming and generous, he'd wanted his sons to bring their girlfriends home right from the very beginning. Virginia sat on the dusty bed in the paisley bedroom and remembered Laurence's first girlfriend, a wild, hippie-ish girl who'd gone in for torn jeans, unwashed long hair ('After a month, it cleans itself,' she'd insisted) and automatic confrontation with anyone over the age of twenty. Even the besotted Laurence had blanched when she'd tried to start a row with Bill over having a lawnmower that used diesel instead of unleaded. Bill, smiling, had refused to be riled.
'She's not what I'd have picked for Laurence myself,' he'd whispered to Virginia in the kitchen later, 'but if she's his choice, we'll support him.'
'Does that mean we all have to get our belly buttons pierced?' said Virginia, smothering a laugh at the thought of her conservative husband trying to fit in with his son's new girlfriend.
Bill winced. 'It does look painful,' he admitted. 'But young people need to do different things. Remember how my father thought drainpipes and Elvis Presley were signs of the devil?'
'You know what I love about you?' Virginia asked, putting her arms around him. 'You're such a fair minded person.'
She was kissing him when Laurence, with his girlfriend in tow, had arrived in the kitchen.
Laurence, used to his parents' constant displays of affection, ignored the kiss and opened the fridge. His girlfriend stared at them in astonishment.
Virginia pulled away from Bill's lips and grinned at her. 'Strange though it may seem to you, my dear, people over the age of forty are allowed to have sex lives,' she said crisply. 'Why should you young people have all the fun?' Even if Bill hadn't minded the rude attack about the lawn

mower, she had. Nobody was allowed to hurt darling Bill.
The girl blushed. She hadn't lasted long after that.
Laurence had gone through many girlfriends since then but had rarely been as besotted as he sounded about Barbara.
'She's kind and wonderful and . .. just lovely,' Laurence had said in a dreamy voice on the phone.
'She's a bit annoying in a helpless sort of way,' Jamie had pointed out in a separate phone call. 'But she's bossy at the same time. It's all very passive aggressive,' he added.
Virginia grinned. Jamie's dalliance with psychotherapy courses in university had meant he'd analysed them all to bits.
'You mean you don't like her?' Virginia asked.
'No,' he said with uncharacteristic firmness.
Virginia sighed and wished she had Bill with her to help referee the weekend. Thinking about Bill had the usual effect and she reached for her ever-present tissue and dabbed her eyes with it. Think of something else, she commanded herself. Now, what was she going to do about that damp patch?
Putting in a damp course would cost a fortune and she didn't have a fortune. Replastering. Would that work? Bill had known the answers to questions like that. Oh Virginia, stop it!'
She went down to the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea she didn't want. Why was tea considered such a panacea? In times of emergency, people always insisted on making you tea, as if a few leaves swirling in boiling water could cure anything. Virginia had been brought up on the habit and, even now, she still went automatically to the kettle when a crisis loomed. Her insides were probably pickled with tannin as it was. Stupid tea. She emptied the cup down the sink and decided that she wouldn't drive to Mary-Kate's house that night. Virginia, currently unaccustomed to social gatherings, had planned to only stay for a short while and stick to mineral water, despite Delphine's constant reminiscing about the perfect martini and the remembered hangover from the last club. But why be a party pooper? She

decided. If anybody could do with a few perfect martinis, it was her.

Mary-Kate opened her front door and welcomed Virginia in.
'I wasn't sure you'd turn up, you know,' she said as Virginia handed her the cheese and wine and the bunch of daffodils she'd picked from the swathe that flourished to the left of the mossy lawn at Kilnagoshell.
'I nearly didn't,' Virginia smiled, looking around Mary- Kate's house with fascination. She'd never been there before.
'You know the routine,' Mary-Kate said firmly, steering her into a room papered entirely in rich crimson. 'If you feel miserable tonight, just let it all out. No bottling stuff up at the Macrame Club.'
That was the wonderful thing about her new friend, Virginia thought: you didn't have to pretend with Mary-Kate.
'This room is incredible,' she breathed as she admired a room that looked as if it belonged in a Hollywood version of 1930s Shanghai. Two huge sofas covered with oriental brocade and fat, tapestried cushions sat opposite each other, with a big dark wooden low table between them covered in knick knacks, wooden animals and a chessboard made from carved jade. The walls were hung with oriental paintings, elegant silk curtains the colour of old roses draped the windows, while old tiffany lamps and richly coloured fringed shades kept the lighting to a dusky, amber glow. A bronze Buddha sat and gazed down at them from the mantelpiece where candles burned brightly scenting the air with a mixture of spice and cinnamon. All the room needed was Mary- Kate in a kimono and the scene would have been perfect.
'It's beautiful,' Virginia said again genuinely.
'It's probably a bit kitschy but I love it,' Mary-Kate said. 'In my mother's time, this room was the parlour, formal and never used. She had a small horse-hair chair you'd slide off if you sat on it, not that anyone ever sat on it, except for at weddings and funerals.' She stroked the black and white cat who'd prowled into the room and was now peering around

to see what he'd play with first. 'I wanted something different and as I never really got to travel, this room is my escape where I listen to music'
'Isn't it fabulous,' sighed Delphine, arriving in from the kitchen carrying a tray set with proper martini glasses, a cocktail shaker and all sorts of cocktail accoutrements. 'I want a room just like this in my house. Drink, Virginia?'
'Why not.'
Delphine sat on a big velvet cushion on the floor and stroked the cat, while Mary-Kate put on some music and Virginia sipped her martini.
'God, this is good,' she said as the liquid slipped down her throat like quicksilver.
'I told you she was great at martinis,' Delphine said. 'She's wasted as a pharmacist. The Plaza Hotel in New York would pay her a fortune but she insists on staying in Redlion mixing up cough mixture for the masses.'
Mary-Kate tweaked a strand of Delphine's hair. 'Did you get the crackers sorted out, madam?' she asked.
'Forgot. I'll get them now.'
'Let me do something,' Virginia said, getting up from her comfy seat. 'I feel terrible coming here and letting you do all the work.'
'Come and help, then,' Mary-Kate said, leading the way to a small, tidy kitchen. 'Mind you, there's no work for the Macrame Club. Whoever's hosting provides some drink and that's it. If you tidy up for the club, you get drummed out. The whole point is that it's a trouble-free night.'
She gave Virginia some unopened crackers to put on a plate. 'There's cheese in the fridge and get a few knives, little plates and the napkins under the cutlery drawer,' she said. It was very relaxed entertaining, Virginia decided. Refreshingly relaxed. Mary-Kate wasn't rushing around cutting up crudites for dips. Instead, she was giving her guests something to soak up the martini. Conversation, not catering, was the point of the night.
'Who's coming?' Virginia asked. 'You better tell me about


everyone so I don't put my foot in it and say something awful.'
'Hope, for a start. You met her in the Widow's that night with her husband. She's bringing her sister, Sam, who's over from London.'
Virginia nodded, taking it all in. She remembered the pretty Hope Parker, with her big, anxious eyes and that good looking, confident husband.
'And Giselle. She's German and she runs the creche, Hunnybunnikins, near the hotel. She's been living here for years and was one of the original Macrame Club six. We always had six from the beginning.'
Virginia nibbled a bit of cheese. 'Sounds very covenish. How did it start?'
'It was Sheila's idea, at first. She and I had been at school together but we hadn't really kept in touch. I was in Dublin and she was here. Then her husband left her and ran off with the doctor. They were both lovely men, who'd have known?'
Virginia's eyes widened.
'Sheila and I met up round then because I was just back from working in Dublin and we wanted to have a night out away from all the gossips who wanted to know about Sheila's husband and why I'd come back to Redlion with my tail between my legs and no husband.'
Virginia said nothing. Personally, she was quite interested in the mystery of why Mary-Kate wasn't married.
'Giselle was so lovely to Sheila then. She never asked her a thing and took the children for a couple of weekends while Sheila tried to persuade himself to come back - he wouldn't by the way. Anyway, there were six of us who didn't feel we fitted in and after a great night in Sheila's, we decided to meet once a month and just bitch about everyone and everything. It's great therapy.'
'And you did study macrame in the beginning?'
Mary-Kate giggled. 'That was subterfuge. Both my sister Pauline and Finula Headley-Ryan were madly keen to come

along, mostly so they could hear all the gory details about Sheila's husband, so to put them off, I said we were having macrame lessons. Finula thinks she's above such banal gatherings and Pauline had always hated anything except knitting so there was no excuse for either of them to come. I used to buy macrame pot holders occasionally so we could pretend we were actually making things but I've stopped bothering. You can't get them anywhere any more. Honestly, I've looked all over, although I think Pauline has figured out that we don't do much arts and crafts on these nights because she came into the chemist one morning after and I was dying of a hangover.' She sighed. 'Poor Pauline. She's her own worst enemy. You could say the same of Finula, mind you.'
'Sheila's not coming tonight, then?'
'No. She lives in the South of France with an electronics millionaire now. But when she comes back on holidays, we have a club night for old times' sake. She said it kept her sane all those years ago.' Mary-Kate smiled ruefully. 'It kept me sane too.'
They carried the goodies into the Shanghai room.
'There'll be us three, and Hope, her sister Sam, Giselle, and Mai Hondu, she's Japanese and her husband works in the computer factory.'
'There hasn't been a proper quorum for ages, since Sheila went,' Delphine said.
The doorbell rang and Delphine went to answer it.
'Giselle and Mai, welcome,' she said happily. 'Drink?'

Hope and Sam were late. Suspecting that her mother and her aunt were going out somewhere exciting without her, Millie had refused to get into her pyjamas and had played up until Hope had finally given up and asked Matt to put her to bed. At which point, Millie had suddenly started behaving sweetly, blinking her long eyelashes at her daddy and doing everything she was told. 'She's a little terror,' Matt had whispered to Hope fondly as Millie rummaged in the toy box for the longest story book she could find.

'Yes, and she's got her Daddy wrapped around her little finger,' Hope whispered back.
Now they walked up Mary-Kate's path, Sam clutching a bottle of wine. Hope, who'd normally have felt mildly nervous about meeting all these women who knew each other, wasn't even slightly nervous now. She had Sam with her and it was her job to take care of her beloved sister. For a change, Sam was the one who felt nervous. Her world was out of synch and everything had shifted, making her more unsettled than she'd ever been in her life. But as soon as she walked in the door and breathed in the relaxed atmosphere that came when everyone was one martini down and laughing at the cat playing with a toy mouse on the floor, Sam relaxed. She hadn't expected to. Unused to all-female gatherings, she was half-afraid they'd get all Stepford Wives at a coffee morning and start discussing the merits of washing powder.
But this wasn't that sort of night. Coffee mornings didn't usually involve strong vodka martinis, complete with olives, or hysterical conversations about their ideal men. The only men that women at coffee mornings were supposed to talk about were their husbands, while at this party, Giselle was delightedly giving a description of her first love, who was apparently very handsome but not a great intellectual genius.
'Claus is so different,' Giselle said, referring to her beloved husband. 'I prefer clever men to beautiful ones but that boy, he was so good looking, I didn't mind how stupid he was,' she sighed, once Sam and Hope had been given drinks and seats. 'He was a male bimbo, I suppose.'
'A himbo,' supplied Delphine.
'There's nothing wrong with that,' Mary-Kate said. 'I wouldn't mind a himbo myself. With one of those ten-packs.'
'Six packs,' chorused Sam and Delphine automatically and everyone laughed.
'I was kidding,' Mary-Kate insisted. 'Do you really think I don't know the difference between a six-pack and a ten- pack? Have you lot never heard of irony?'

The ice was broken and they all dug into the cheese and crackers, chatting wildly about anything and everything. Sam, who was not given to confidences, found herself sitting beside Mary-Kate and talking about herself and her distraught flight to see Hope.
'It sounds so stupid to be sure I'm seriously ill without any actual medical evidence,' she said finally, the hand holding her martini shaking with nerves.
'I don't think you're stupid to get upset,' Mary-Kate said in her warm, soothing voice, 'but don't plan the funeral until you know for sure.'
Sam smiled weakly. Hope had said that Mary-Kate had a very direct way of making you see sense.
'What I mean,' Mary-Kate continued firmly, 'is that you know nothing for definite. Doctors do sometimes make horrific mistakes, I know that, but from what you've told me, I'm not so sure he has. If he thought you were seriously ill, he wouldn't have let you off into the ether with an appointment a month down the road. At least you're going to see a consultant in a couple of days. When you've got it all sorted out, you'll feel better. So don't panic yet.' She grinned at Sam. 'I'm an ould wan and a pharmacist, so I know what I'm talking about.'
'I do hope I'm just overwrought, I really do,' said Sam earnestly. 'But I'm not the sort of person to get all worked up like this, really I'm not.'
'Well then, your body is trying to tell you something,' Mary-Kate pointed out. 'It's up to you to work out what it is and deal with it. You're used to looking at worst case scenarios, so that's what you did, mistakenly I hope.'
Sam realized that Mary-Kate had put her arm around her and was hugging her gently as she spoke, holding Sam's thin body against her own wiry one. Mary-Kate couldn't have been that much older than Sam but there was something comfortingly motherly about the embrace.
'I've never been much of a one for listening to my body,' Sam said wryly. 'I've spent years making it listen to me: get

out of bed; you don't have flu; so what if you're sick, keep going. That sort of thing.'
'You might have to change, you might have no option. Imagine if you were seriously ill, you'd have to change your life. So why not change it now? You are going through a crisis, Sam. You must see that.'
Sam nodded. 'Racing over here to see Hope is definitely a sign of something. I've never done anything like that before. My colleagues would be astonished to see the Queen Bitch being vulnerable about anything.'
Mary-Kate tipped her head to one side and scrutinized Sam. 'Are you Queen Bitch in the office?'
Shrugging her shoulders, Sam said: 'Not all the time but I feel that I'm becoming it. And I don't want to be but. . .'
'Then change,' said the other woman bluntly.
'It's not that easy to change.'
'Why not? Hope sees another side to you, a warm, kind side, the sister she loves.'
'Yes, but we're all different with our families,' Sam protested.
'And you're trying to be something you're not because you think that's the way to remain strong and in control,' Mary-Kate said.
'Ouch,' laughed Sam. 'You're good at this but it hurts. I don't know if I can cope with much more analysis.'
'Yes you can. You're a strong woman and you need strong friends and strong words to help you.' Mary-Kate was silent for a minute, as if she was considering whether to mention something or not. 'In the old days at the Macrame Club we used to have a game, our own truth or dare, without the dare bit. When we had problems, we talked about them, said truthfully what we really wanted in life and - this is the hard bit ' she added, 'asked our friends to give their opinion.'
'We've never done that since I've been coming,' interrupted Delphine, tuning into their conversation.
'Done what?' asked Hope, looking over at Sam to check she was all right.

'Macrame Club Truth Drug,' said Mary-Kate.
Giselle laughed. 'My last baby was born as a result of one of those nights. Too much of Mary-Kate's truth drug and you forget to use your contraceptive cap!'
'What's the truth drug?' asked Sam.
Mai smiled. 'You're drinking it.'
'Oh let's do it,' begged Delphine. 'It'll be fun. I love girlie confessional nights.'
'It's not easy,' Giselle said. 'People may say things you don't like to hear. But the good point is that you can talk about anything and know that it's safe. Nobody refers to it again and not a word of it goes beyond this room.'
'Let's do it,' Delphine said again.
Mary-Kate, Mai and Giselle looked at each other and shared a smile.
'We need a vote,' Mai said. 'We can only do it if everyone agrees. All in favour put your hands up.'
'Only if you're gentle with me,' begged Sam.
'Deal,' said Mary-Kate.
Six hands were raised.
'Right, Delphine, you go first,' said Mary-Kate, 'but just let me make up some more martini first.'
'You have to pick one area of your life that you want to change and be truthful about it,' Giselle explained. 'Then, we can offer advice, if we think we can help.'
'Do I have to go first?' Delphine said.
'Yes,' said the others.
'Right, confession time,' she said, taking a deep breath.
'Hold out your glass first,' Mary-Kate said, returning with another jug of martini.
'This reminds me of this game we play in the beauty salon,' Delphine said, when her glass was full and she had three fat olives on a stick into the bargain. 'You have to pick three words to describe yourself. It's much more fun when other people have to do it to you. Last week, the new girl, Anna, did me and said I was sweet, sexy but couldn't stand up for myself.'

Everyone winced.
'That was a bit cruel,' Sam said.
'Yes, I think she believed we had to be deeply honest when for the rest of us, it's a bit of fun,' Delphine admitted. 'You know, you say nice things about each other. The manageress is always worried about her figure, so I said she was voluptuous. The odd thing is, Anna was right. I've been thinking about it all week and she was right. I don't stand up for myself.'
'Neither do I,' Hope said, not wanting Delphine to feel exposed.
'It's terrible, isn't it?' Delphine said, twirling her olives. 'I want to stand up for myself but it's easier not to.'
'Is that what you'd like to change, then?' asked Giselle.
Delphine's chin stuck out firmly. 'Yes.'
'How can you do it?' persisted Giselle.
For once, Delphine was speechless.
'This is the bit where we interrupt,' Mary-Kate pointed out. 'Marry Eugene.'
Startled, Delphine looked up at her. 'You know why we haven't got married . . .' she said.
'I do know why and it's because you won't stand up to Pauline,' retorted her aunt.
'Fill us all in on this story,' Sam interrupted, sliding forward on the seat.
Delphine took a big slug of martini. 'My fiance is divorced and my mother won't even meet him, never mind go to our wedding. We've been putting it off until Mum gives in and accepts him, but she still won't. My dad has met him, secretly, mind you, because she'd kill him if she knew. She thinks getting married to a divorced man will destroy my immortal soul. She wants a big church do and that's out of the question because he's divorced.'
'Poor you,' said Mai, patting Delphine's shoulder.
'That's what I would describe as a textbook example of not standing up for yourself,' Sam said. 'It's simple: you've got to arrange the wedding, invite your mother and, if she

doesn't turn up, that's her loss. You've made your decision and how she reacts to it is out of your hands.'
Delphine looked at her. Sam was so self-possessed and confident. Hope had told them all about her fabulously bright sister and her incredible job. Even too thin and tired with dark circles under her eyes, she emanated forcefulness and drive.
'It's easy for someone like you,' Delphine fretted.
Sam laughed ruefully. 'Delphine, I make mistakes all the time but one of the few I don't make is not standing up for myself. Standing up for myself is practically my area of expertise. When I'm at work and a tough decision needs to be made, I think of it in simple terms to make sense of it. So, in your case, imagine say, you want to dye your hair pink, right?'
They all grinned.
'She's had it pink already,' Mary-Kate said.
'Punk is dead,' announced Delphine. 'I was only sixteen and it was not a good look for me. Continue, Sam.'
'OK, you want pink hair but you're afraid to do it in case your mother won't like it. What do you do? Dye it and let her deal with how she feels about it? Or don't dye it and spend ages feeling bitter and angry because you're letting her feelings prevent you from doing what you want?'
'You do have a great knack of reducing problems down to their most simple form,' said Mary-Kate admiringly.
'It's easier when it's someone else's problem,' Sam said with a wry smile.
'Let's see if I've got this,' Delphine said. 'I get married anyway, no matter what Mum says.'
'Well, Pauline isn't talking to you now,' Mary-Kate pointed out prosaically. 'What's the difference if she's not talking to you afterwards? Maybe she needs a kick up the backside to make her see that the world doesn't revolve around her.'
'Hear hear,' said Giselle.
Delphine's eyes blazed with righteous fervour. 'You're

right. I'm going to do it. Go and buy hats girls, you're all invited to a wedding next month.'
'A toast,' said Mary-Kate delightedly. 'To Delphine, Eugene and the fabulous Truth Drug!'
More crackers and cheese had to be produced to soak up the drink.
'Sam,' said Mary-Kate meaningfully, 'do you want to go next?'
Sam winced. 'I'm not good at this kind of thing,' she confessed. 'Taking advice is like taking cough medicine: I try and avoid it.'
Hope leaned over and gave her a hug. 'Go on,' she said, 'we're with friends.'
It took five minutes for Sam to relate the story of her last few months, and this time she admitted that she had probably totally overreacted to the whole thing and now felt embarrassed at dropping everything to race to Redlion to see Hope.
'There's nothing wrong with that,' Delphine said. 'You wanted to be with your sister, that's perfectly normal.'
'I know, but I don't usually do things like that,' Sam said.
'Ah ha,' pounced Mai, 'then something is different. You are different. You might not be ill but you are suffering from a crisis. This is a sign to tell you that you must change things, rearrange the pieces.'
'What do I change?' Sam said helplessly. 'I have a job, a mortgage, responsibilities. What can I change? C'mon girls, this is the real world here, not Yoga-Land.'
'Ask yourself are you happy with what you do every day?' Giselle advised. 'Work is so fundamental to happiness and if you're not happy doing the same thing any more, you must change your job.'
'Make time for the people in your life: you feel left out of your friends' lives and yet you can't hope to have a life of your own if you work so hard and push yourself to the limit,' Virginia added.

'Take care of your body,' Hope said fiercely. 'I pray that you're going to be fine and when you are, I'll personally kill you if I hear you're burning the candle at both ends. You don't eat properly, you never rest, you don't relax. Why are you surprised when your body rebels.'
'Stop pushing people away,' said Delphine eagerly, keen to help the woman who'd made matters so clear to her. 'You've got all these barriers up. You liked that hunky guy next door but when he tried to make friends with you, you froze him out. That's crazy, Sam. You're beautiful, I'd kill to look like you, so why not get some benefit from it. I didn't know how happy I could be until I met Eugene. This guy might be your Eugene.'
'I never wanted a Eugene, you see,' Sam pointed out. 'I didn't not want him either, if you see what I mean, but it just happened that way. In the past few years I've been interviewed a couple of times and the journalists always want to know how I made the choice between career and family. But I didn't, and they don't understand that. Who plans their life?'
Nobody said anything but they all looked on sympathetically.
'I didn't have a great master plan where I said no to some things and yes to others,' she continued fiercely. 'It just happened that way. I'm fed up having to justify my life.' She looked as if she might cry.
Mary-Kate leaned forward earnestly. 'Nobody is asking you to justify your life, Sam. Your life is as valid as anyone else's here, whether they've got a scatter of children or not, or husbands or not or toyboys or whatever. But when you're so defensive about your own life, that's saying that you feel uncomfortable with it for some reason. Not us, you. There are lots of people round here who think I'm a dotty old bat because I had this great job, a fine premises, money and yet I never got married. But that was my choice and I wouldn't change it.'
Virginia shot a glance at her.

'Not that I'm saying I never had a man in my life,' Mary- Kate put in, with a wicked glint. It broke the tension and the women laughed.
'I think Sam may have had enough advice,' Virginia said softly, looking at Sam's shell-shocked face.
Sam shook her head. 'No, it's great,' she said. 'It's years since anybody told me what I should do in such blunt terms. I'm the person who normally lays down the law. The only problem is, where do I start?'
'Wait till you see the doctor and then decide what to do with the burden you're bearing. You're an intelligent woman, you'll know which seems right,' said Giselle.
'I can't change my job, though. Whatever about all the rest,' Sam added. 'I've only been doing this for a few months and I've got to make my mark . . .' Her voice trailed off. For the first time since she'd found out about ovarian cancer on the internet, she began to think she'd been overreacting.
Had she merely panicked - the cool, calm Sam Smith flipping and panicking for the first time in her life? And if she had flipped rather than intuitively known something was wrong, what did that mean? Sam knew the answer, even though she'd have killed for it not to be true: that she really couldn't cope with her life any more for some reason. Perfectly content and emotionally secure people didn't have mini-breakdowns where they thought they were dying.
'I suppose it's my turn next,' Mary-Kate said, seeing that Sam was very tense about the whole discussion. 'We can't have Sam on the rack all night. What do I want?' she mused out loud.
'Other than a himbo with a six-pack?' inquired Delphine naughtily.
'Very funny. Actually, that would be nice,' her aunt joked. 'One with massage skills so he could do things for my bad back.'
'Would he be restricted to your back?' asked Mai with a glint.

'I won't say anything if you don't stop teasing me,' Mary- Kate said, picking up the cat and settling him on her lap. 'What I want. . .' she stopped. 'What I want is to stop looking back all the time,' she said wistfully. 'There, that's it. I don't want advice and I've decided that I'm too old to be psychoanalysing myself. Every time my sister, Pauline, turns up here, she does it for me for free. She tells me where I've gone wrong in my life, asks me why I couldn't be sensible and get married like her and, this is the best bit, adds what a joy marriage has been for her. No offence to your father, Delphine,' Mary-Kate added, 'but I would never have put your parents' marriage up there on the great love stories of all time list.'
Delphine nodded grimly in agreement.
The evening began to wind down as Mai had to leave. Her husband was scheduled to pick her up at eleven and it was five to.
'Sorry, ladies,' she said, 'but I have to be up at six and if I wait any longer, I will not be able to move out of my bed in the morning. I'll have to tell you my truth at the next meeting.' She left after much hugging and the rest of the guests began searching for handbags and coats with a view to going too. Mary-Kate phoned taxis.
'You never said what you wanted, Hope,' Mary-Kate said when she came back into the room.
Hope blushed. 'Nothing really,' she said.
'Go on,' urged Sam, 'you must have something you want to change, something you need to get out of your system. It's amazing really to have everyone give you advice like this. I feel better already!'
And she did, thought Hope, looking at her sister's pale face which seemed to have miraculously had all the worry lines taken from it.
Hope dithered, not because she had nothing to say but because she had so much to say that if she started, she might lot stop. She sat down again. Oh well, she might as well say something but what?

'I'd like to stop being afraid,' she said, and startled herself. 'I don't know where that came from!' she gasped, 'I've never thought that out loud before now.'
'Keep going,' Sam said warmly.
Hope did her best: 'Afraid of lots of things,' she said. 'I worry about the children all the time. When they were babies, I had this compulsive thing about checking them every few hours at night in case they stopped breathing.'
'That's perfectly normal,' Giselle pointed out.
'And before we came here from Bath, I was afraid that Matt was having an affair,' Hope revealed, feeling ashamed even to be saying it. 'He wasn't, but I was so sure he was seeing someone else, so sure that I wasn't good enough for him, that I'd convinced myself he was.'
Sam patted her sister's shoulder. 'That makes two of us who can convince ourselves of things without having actual facts.'
'You at least have been feeling ill,' Hope argued. 'I based my notion on absolutely no evidence apart from my own insecurity. You see, it's fear. I'm always afraid of the thing that's over the horizon.'
'It sounds as if you're afraid of people you love being taken from you,' Mary-Kate said wisely.
Hope nodded. 'That's part of it, too. You know that our parents died when Sam and I were young and I suppose I've never got over that feeling that people I love are going to leave.'
'We understand that,' Delphine said. 'It must have been incredibly traumatic'
'Yes but because of that, I...' Hope paused. It was hard to find the words to describe it. Hope knew that she yielded to Matt's will purely because she was sure that if she didn't, he would be angry and leave. 'As a direct result of that, Matt and I hardly ever argue,' she said. 'I know that sounds crazy but we don't or we didn't. I thought that if we fought, he'd leave. That makes me sound like some dimwit with room temperature IQ but that's what's always going on in

my head. As if I'll do something wrong and he'll go. So I avoid fighting with him. I sulk a bit, mind you.'
They all grinned.
Hope said. 'We never fought until we came to Redlion, to be honest. If I got angry, I hid it.'
'People who hide their anger have a big furnace of rage boiling away inside them,' Virginia pointed out. 'It has to go somewhere when you don't vent it on anyone else, so it eats you up. It's supposed to be much healthier to lose your temper occasionally instead of bottling it up forever.'
'I do get angry now,' Hope said. 'I do say what I want. But it's not a dramatic change, mind you. It's such a big step for me that it's happening very slowly. Matt wouldn't be able to cope if I turned from a yes-woman to a harridan in one fell swoop.'
'Slow but sure, like an ass eating thistles,' quoted Delphine.
'What does that mean?' laughed Sam.
'That it's happening slowly but that eventually, the donkey will eat all the thistles,' Delphine said. 'It's my dad's favourite saying.'
'But you do argue now?' Virginia asked. 'So you are already changing what needs to be changed. It's not easy changing the habits of a lifetime but you have to think that you are important and special, you need to think that Matt is lucky to have you and that maybe one day he'll be scared of you leaving him.'
'I doubt it,' laughed Hope. 'Why would Matt ever be worried that I'd leave him?'
Virginia shrugged. 'I'm not saying it's going to happen that you'll leave, just that you should start to see yourself as a valuable person.'
Hope smiled, pleased at this thought. 'This is a great idea, but it's exhausting.'
'Yes it is,' said Virginia. 'I'm sorry, girls.' She held her hands up in surrender. 'I'm exhausted, I don't know if I have the energy to bare my soul.'

'There's no need,' Mary-Kate said swiftly.
'You mean we only have to bare if we need to bare?' Virginia asked shrewdly.
'That's it.'
The doorbell rang, signalling the arrival of the taxis.
'Good,' said Giselle, getting stiffly to her feet. 'I'm also too tired to bare anything. Till the next time, yes?'
'Yes,' they all said, tipsy but happy.
'I feel healed, calm, wonderful,' announced Sam as she said goodbye to Mary-Kate at the door. 'And it's not just the martinis.'
'I know it's not,' Mary-Kate said. 'It's a first sight of what you're looking for, Sam. Most people think they have no option but to settle for what life has shown them. A few lucky ones know that they can change their lives and go searching for something better.'
Sam smiled beatifically. 'Tonight was great. Can I come again?'
'You can come any time,' replied Mary-Kate warmly.

After the Macrame Club, Teddy the taxi drove Virginia home at precisely fifteen miles an hour. Virginia sat beside him and wished he'd go a bit faster because she was so tired that she felt she might fall asleep and she didn't particularly want to drop off on his shoulder.
'The roads are terrible,' he muttered, eyes on the rainswept road ahead of him. It was the fourth time he'd said it.
Virginia, incurably polite, had replied the first time that yes, the roads were terrible. Now, she realized that no response was necessary. She felt mildly drunk thanks to Mary-Kate's martinis but she'd eaten enough cheese and crackers to soak it up. At least she hoped she'd eaten enough. She was too old for raging hangovers and she simply had to tackle the guests' bedrooms in the morning. They were coming on Friday, which was only two days away, and the dust wouldn't disappear magically. But it had been a lovely

evening, very intense when everyone had been talking about their hopes and dreams, but somehow very healing.
'Would you look at the size of that pothole,' demanded Teddy.
Virginia looked wearily out into the bleak, lashing night and saw, suddenly, not the pothole, but a small white dog huddled beside the verge. A terrier with white fur plastered to a shaking body, it cowered as the taxi's lights shone on it. Even from inside the car, Virginia could see the animal's heartbroken little face and knew that this wasn't the sort of dog that should be out on such a night.
'Stop the car,' she commanded in such a firm voice that Teddy put the brakes on immediately. He'd barely stopped before she'd jumped out into the lashing rain to run back to the shivering animal, which shrank down at she approached.
'Hello,' cooed Virginia crouching down. 'Hello you poor little pet.' She held out a hand but the dog still cowered. Virginia wasn't a country girl for nothing. And she loved dogs. This poor thing needed to be rescued and she was the one to do it. 'Come here, boy,' she crooned, reaching further until she could touch the soaking wet fur.
The little dog shivered but when Virginia's hand started petting the wet white head, it looked up anxiously and whimpered. 'It's OK,' repeated Virginia, oblivious to the lashing rain. She edged closer to the dog and reached for its neck, seeking a collar. There was none. Still petting, Virginia got close enough to pick the bedraggled creature up, wincing as she realized how thin the animal was under its covering of thick fur. She could feel delicate ribs and the poor dog's heart beating fiercely with fear. But it didn't growl or show its teeth. It lay frozen with terror in her arms.
'You poor little thing,' she said softly.
Teddy had reversed the taxi until he was beside Virginia, who, still carrying the dog and seemingly oblivious to how wet and dirty it was, motioned to him to roll down his window.
'I'm bringing the poor dog home. We can't leave it here,' she said.

Teddy gulped. He didn't want a small, scruffy wet dog in his immaculate taxi and if any other passenger had tried to rescue a roadside stray in the middle of a downpour, Teddy would have told them where they could get off. But he got the impression that Mrs Connell could be formidable when she wanted to, for all that she was so quiet and ladylike.
'Well . . . yes,' he said, looking at his clean seats.
'I'll wrap her in my coat and you won't got a bit of dirt or rain in the car,' Virginia said imperiously.
There was nothing you could say to that. Teddy meekly opened the passenger door and Mrs Connell got in, the dog bundled up in her expensive coat like a baby.
At the house, she grabbed the first banknote that she could find in her handbag and gave it to Teddy. It was twice the fare and Teddy stared at it for a moment as if contemplating whether he had change or not. 'Consider it a tip in case there's any dirt on the seat,' Virginia said graciously. Then she was gone, with the dog still bundled up in her coat. Teddy watched Mrs Connell walk gracefully up to her front door, coatless in the lashing rain. Women, he thought. What hope had a mere man of understanding them.
Once they were inside, Virginia unwrapped the little dog and quickly found a big towel to dry it off properly. The kitchen was always warm at night, so they went in there and Virginia rubbed the dog gently, talking nonsense to it all the time until the worst of the nervous shivering was over. It was a West Highland terrier, a sweet little white dog that should have been sitting in front of a warm fire instead of dumped by the side of the road on a wet night.
'I'm so sorry to have called you a boy when you're a little girl,' Virginia said, looking fondly down into the still anxious eyes. 'What's your name, pet?' The dog blinked up at her, as if disbelieving that somebody was being nice to it.
Virginia got some milk from the fridge and put a bowlful on the floor. The dog looked at the bowl mournfully and then back up at Virginia.
'Go on,' she urged.

With another mournful look, the little dog began to delicately lap up the milk with her little pink tongue. Even in her hunger, she lapped gently and without slopping a drop of milk.
'You're starved, you poor thing,' Virginia said. She found a left-over bit of chicken and gave the dog that too.
Finally fed, the dog seemed to relax a bit and slowly wandered round the kitchen, sniffing here and there. She stopped at the back door and looked up at Virginia anxiously.
'Somebody trained you well, darling,' Virginia smiled and let the dog out, standing in the doorway all the while in case she wandered off.
'I wonder who you belong to,' Virginia said when the dog came back, not quite as nervous now, and sat at her feet. 'We'll phone the police and the dog pounds in the morning to see if anyone's reported you missing but until then, we both need our rest.'
Virginia made up a bed beside the radiator in the kitchen, left a bowl of water beside it and then went to the kitchen door. She looked back at the little dog who was now looking at her with an expression of abandonment on its small white face. Virginia's heart melted. The poor little thing had obviously been abandoned often enough.
'Would you like to sleep upstairs with me?' she asked.
Was it her imagination or did the doggy face smile? Virginia picked up the make-shift bed made out of an old blanket and carried it upstairs, the dog stepping neatly behind her. 'I can't keep calling you dog,' Virginia said as she patted the blankets into shape in a neat nest beside her bedroom radiator. 'What name will we give you?'
The dog tilted her head to one side as if considering the matter.
Virginia cast her mind back to the dogs she'd known. Her mother had a lovely little terrier called Dinky, a family pet as distinct from the sheep dogs that slept outside. Dinky had been sweet-natured and docile, like this little dog.

'How does Dinky sound to you, as a stop gap?' Virginia asked. 'Bed Dinky.'
Dinky licked Virginia's hand and trotted off to her bed, curling up in it snugly.
'Dinky it is,' smiled Virginia.
She got ready for bed, chatting all the time to Dinky who lay watchful in her bed, big eyes following Virginia's every move. It was nice to have someone to talk to again, even someone who couldn't talk back. Virginia climbed into bed and turned out the light. In the dark, she thought of the evening and the marvellous Truth Drug session. What a clever idea and Mary-Kate, in her inimitable way, had known that Virginia wasn't ready to talk about what she wanted from life just yet.
Peace, Virginia thought suddenly. That's what she wanted. The peace of feeling at ease and not having that tearing in her heart when Bill came into her head. And she thought she might slowly be getting peace. She could chat to Bill when she went about her everyday chores, telling him about her day, sharing the stories she'd read in the morning paper. She could think about him without bursting into tears and she could now remember the good times without feeling her heart clouding over because the good times were over. Being able to remember and be thankful for the good times was a huge step for her and she thanked God for it. That's what she could have said tonight. Still, there were more nights to talk about it. Virginia snuggled down on her pillow and slept better than she had in a long time.
In the morning, she was awakened by Dinky standing on her hind legs and tentatively sniffing the bedclothes.
Virginia patted the covers invitingly, and without hesitation Dinky jumped up and snuggled down beside her.
'Aren't you a little pet?' Virginia crooned.
Dinky licked her hand lovingly.
After breakfast, Virginia forced herself to phone the police station and told them she'd found a little white dog.
'No mention of it here, Mrs Connell,' said Sergeant


O'Hara. 'But we'll keep your name and number in the book in case someone does come along looking for her.'
Next, she rang the animal rescue agency and the local animal protection organization.
Neither had any notice of a lost white terrier.
'I can't believe that someone hasn't missed her,' Virginia said. 'She's such a dear little thing.'
'You did say she was very nervous of you at first, wasn't she?' said the animal rescue woman. 'That doesn't sound like a dog that was well treated to me. She was probably dumped.'
'But how could anyone just dump her on the side of the road?' Virginia asked. 'It's cruel.'
'That's nothing to what some people do to dogs,' the woman said sadly. 'If nobody comes forward, do you want to keep her?'
'I'd like nothing more,' Virginia said genuinely. 'I already love her. I know it sounds awful, but I hope nobody comes forward because she's a beautiful little dog.'
'She was lucky you found her,' the woman said, 'or she could have been run over. Lots of lorries use that road and at night, sure they'd have her run over before they'd see her.'
Virginia reached down to pet Dinky who was sitting loyally at her feet. 'It was lucky for both of us,' she said fondly.

The morning after the Macrame Club, Sam was up earlier than anyone else and was making Rice Krispie buns with Toby and Millie when Hope wandered downstairs.
'You're up early,' she said, feeling decidedly woolly- headed after their late night.
'Yes and I feel wonderful. I hope you don't mind, but I've booked myself on the evening flight so I can be home tonight.'
Hope stared at her sister. 'I thought I was going with you.'
'No you're not. You're too busy here. I'm going to go

home and go to the consultant myself. I'm not a baby, Hope.'
'But I wanted to .. .'
'I know.' Sam made the fatal mistake of leaving Millie alone with a big bowl of chocolate in order to hug her sister. 'I can manage on my own, you've calmed me down and made me feel normal again.'
They hugged until a squeal and a crash made it obvious that Millie had taken the catering into her own hands.
'It fell,' Millie said, wide-eyed when they both looked at her and at the broken bowl and the chocolatey mess covering the floor.
When both Sam and Hope started to laugh, Millie giggled happily. She'd never thought anyone would find that funny.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Far from the chalk-stripe suited consultant Sam had imagined, Professor Olivieri was a tiny grey-haired woman of few words who was even smaller than Sam but who had warm, shrewd eyes in a pale face.
She read the letter from Sam's doctor silently, while Sam sat in the high-tech consulting room and shivered with a mixture of nerves and embarrassment. Now that she was here she felt hideously ashamed at the thought of being considered a deranged hypochondriac. Ever since she'd stopped panicking, she'd regained her appetite and the night before had managed to consume an enormous pizza with half a bottle of wine as she watched Sense and Sensibility on video.
'I'm really sorry about all this hassle,' Sam said. 'I was nervous and I didn't think I could wait so long . . .'
Professor Olivieri merely smiled. 'Do not worry,' she said. 'Now I am going to examine you for cysts in the abdomen, glands and in the neck of the uterus. Then we will give you a scan to be sure.'
Sam nodded weakly. 'Fire away,' she said in a whisper. She had talked herself into believing she was going to be fine, but what if she was wrong after all?

In Redlion, Hope sat in the kitchen and stared at the Little Mermaid clock that hung on the wall over the kitchen table. Five past three. Sam's appointment was for three. How long could it take? Hope began to work it out: perhaps five minutes waiting to see the consultant. Then fifteen to talk

about what was wrong, five or ten for an examination. Then, what if the consultant had to send Sam off somewhere to get a scan? Would that mean a separate appointment somewhere else?
Curlew Cottage was quiet except for the gentle ticking of the Little Mermaid and the distant lowing of a cow in the field nearby. Matt had kindly taken the children out for the afternoon and contrarily, now that they were gone, Hope wished they were there. Millie and Toby would have kept her mind off worrying about Sam.
As she sat and waited in anguish, Hope raged with herself for not flying to London with Sam. It would have been so simple: Matt could have taken care of the children and she wouldn't have been sitting in Kerry now, hoping for a phone call to tell her everything was fine. She'd have been holding Sam's hand, being with her, helping.
Damn Sam for being so stubbornly independent. But even as she thought it, Hope knew that being independent was what Sam had needed at this time. She could be strong on her own; if Hope had been with her, she might have crumbled.
Damn, cursed Hope. There was nothing for it: she might as well do the ironing.
She'd ironed ten shirts with savage speed when the phone rang and she left the iron perilously on the board, racing to the phone.
'Hello.'
'It's me,' said Sam.
Hope took a deep breath, praying she'd know what to say.
'I'm fine!' gasped Sam. 'Absolutely fine. The scan shows fibroids but nothing else and they can whip them out no bother.'
'Oh Sam,' sobbed Hope, 'I was so afraid, so very afraid.'
'Me too,' sang Sam delightedly, comforting her sister, 'but it's wonderful now. I'm free, free and well and healthy. She wants to book me in for something called TCRE, trans

cervical resection and it's easy. I could be in and out of the clinic in one day.'
She threw her head backwards as if she was greedy to breathe in life now that she had it guaranteed, 'I'm so thrilled, what'll I do now?'
'Have a party?' suggested Hope, who longed to be there at that moment to hug her sister.
'Great idea,' said Sam.
Hope felt a pang of loneliness but quashed it.
'Tell me who you're going to ask?' she said.

Catrina was all on for a last-minute dinner party on Friday night.
'I never go anywhere any more,' she wailed. 'I suddenly feel huge, you know.'
Jay and Greg were going somewhere else later, but agreed to drop in.
'No sloping off to the bedroom for a bonk,' warned Sam over the phone.
'What's the party for?' asked Jay suspiciously.
'For me being happy and alive,' said Sam, wiping away tears. 'I had a bit of a bad moment last week when I thought I was ill, but I'm fine.'
'What do you mean you thought you were ill?' demanded Jay.
'I'll tell you later. Now what shall I cook: take away That, take away Indian or take away Italian?'
'Why don't you go the whole hog and ask Delia Smith along? It'd be easier.'

Sam danced into the office on Friday, astonishing everyone who'd been told she was ill all week by Lydia.
'You sounded at death's door with that flu last Friday,' Lydia remarked, looking at her boss who was radiant if slightly too-thin in a cream fine wool trouser suit. 'You're sure you haven't been at a health farm?'
Sam grinned at her. 'If you want to leave, why don't you

try the more conventional route of handing in your notice, rather than making me fire you,' she teased.
She left the office early in the afternoon, stopping off in a taxi to pick up several huge bouquets of flowers. The wine and food were being delivered later at great expense. As Sam had said gaily to Hope on the phone the previous night: 'Why earn all this money if I don't do anything with it?'
'Exactly,' said Hope, thrilled that Sam was in good form but still feeling a bit left out at not being there to share the celebrations.
At home, Sam gave the apartment a cursory tidy up - it didn't need much work due to her obsessive cleanliness and arranged her flowers everywhere, a bowl of coral pink roses on the dining room table, blood red amaryllis surrounded by striking foliage in the cool white living room, and beautifully-scented stargazer lilies in the hall.
She was just putting a couple of rose buds in a crystal glass on the dining room windowsill when she glanced out into the next door garden and saw Morgan hauling a bay tree in a huge stone container along the patio. It clearly required more than one person to drag it along but that was so Morgan: one man taking on the world.
Sam smiled at the sight of him, then ducked back when he stood upright, rubbed his aching lower back and looked directly up at her window. He'd seen her.
Suddenly, she flushed with shame as she remembered the last time she'd met him and she'd been such a bitch. He'd been nice to her, not just nice, friendly and a bit flirty, and she'd behaved like a crocodile who'd just been to the dentist for root canal work. As the deep-seated shame spread through her body, she realized she had to make amends.
She was going to change her life after all, she decided firmly. Apologizing to Morgan would be first on the list. Racing out of the apartment before she could change her mind, she reached his front door and rang the bell forcefully. Several minutes elapsed before the door was wrenched open.
Morgan was clad in his trademark jeans and there were

bits of leaf and dirt clinging to his jumper and to his rumpled tawny hair.
'Yes?' He looked at her warily, as if waiting for her to land a punch or something. Even when he was mad, he couldn't get the sex appeal out of those treacly eyes. Although they were narrowed and suspicious as they surveyed her arrogantly over his proud, hooked nose.
'I've come to apologize,' she said, launching into it before she could have second thoughts. 'I was so horrible to you and I apologize. I was being a bitch but if it's any excuse, I was going through a bit of a personal crisis. Not,' she amended, looking down at her shoes because she couldn't meet that wary expression any more, 'that having a crisis is any real excuse. I'm really sorry, Morgan. I understand if you'd never want to see me again but I'd like us to be friends. I'm having a dinner party tonight and I wonder if you'd like to come?'
She looked up, hopeful that her grovelling had worked.
It was worth it to see his face light up in a glorious smile.
'Can I bring ten bimbo girlfriends?' he asked evilly.
Sam bit her lip. 'If you want, you can bring one,' she said.
'Only kidding. I'll just bring myself,' Morgan said, looking very pleased.
'It's strictly cas ...' began Sam and stopped herself. She'd been about to say 'strictly casual,' but then, what other clothes did Morgan Benson possess?
'Jeans are fine, then?' he asked, the corners of his mouth lifting.
'Fine,' Sam said gravely. 'Just not those ones.'
They both looked down at the frayed hems at the ends of his long legs.
'I'll go then,' Sam added. 'Cooking and so on, you know.'
'I know. Dinner parties can be hell,' he deadpanned. 'All that stirring risotto and hoping the butler's not getting stuck into the dessert wine.'

Back at the apartment, Sam realized that the food and drink people would be rolling up any minute, so she had to dress. But instead of going for her usual casual uniform of a cotton shirt and tailored trousers, she dressed in a soy-sauce brown silk wrap dress, with a flattering V-neck and a skirt that showed off her slender legs. She'd bought it for a party and then never wore it, as it was too girly. And what was wrong with being girly anyway, she thought gaily, slipping on crazy stack heeled sandals that looked as if they'd been custom made for Carmen Miranda. There had to be a place for frivolity in her life, hadn't there?
By eight, all the gang were there: Jay and Greg still heartbreakingly in love; Catrina and Hugh proudly expectant and eager to discuss every scan and baby detail; Andy with a shy fellow teacher, named Vanessa, who looked as if she was getting him over his divorce.
Morgan astonished Sam by turning up looking devastating in a crisp charcoal shirt unbuttoned at the neck and grey trousers, all of which screamed expensive and classy. His lips brushed Sam's cheek as he handed over a bottle of wine. 'How lovely of you to invite me, Ms Smith,' he said formally. 'What a pleasure it is to have such nice neighbours. Will there be loud music later?'
Sam giggled and sat him next to Jay and Vanessa, before rushing into the kitchen to dish up the first course.
'He's gorgeous,' murmured Catrina to Sam when they were tucking into That chicken. 'Where have you been hiding him?'
'He's just a friend,' Sam protested, handing round the salad.
'With friends like that, who needs husbands?' replied Catrina with a salacious wink.
The evening raced by. Sam had never had such a successful dinner party and it was due in part to how relaxed she was, and, she was astonished to realize, to how happy she felt to have Morgan there. The rest of the gang clearly liked him too, with Hugh and Morgan hitting it off particularly

well. They were talking intensely about people they both knew and Sam was desperate to overhear because she was still in the dark about Morgan in so many ways, like what he did for a living, for a start. He and Hugh seemed to know lots of the same people and Morgan had apparently worked in New York years before, where he knew Hugh's older brother, Christopher.
'What were you and Morgan talking about?' Sam asked Hugh idly when he was helping her make a second batch of coffee.
'Oh just work and that. He's a decent chap, Morgan. Seems glad to be out of the rat race, though.' At that moment, Morgan arrived to help so Sam had to stop probing.
It was nearly twelve when Catrina announced that it was time she and Hugh went home. 'I don't know what's going to happen when the baby comes and you lose your designated non-drinking driver,' she remarked as a tipsy Hugh kissed Sam goodbye.
'We're going to get the baby a driving licence,' declared Hugh. 'What else are we having children for if it's not to look after their dear old parents?'
Jay and Greg said they were too tired to bother going on to the party now and got a taxi with Andy and Vanessa, who were going in the same direction.
'I'll help you clear up,' said Morgan when everyone had been waved off.
Together, they stacked the dishwasher in companionable silence, with Macy Gray playing softly on the CD player. It was like being an old married couple, Sam thought sentimentally.
'You're very laid back tonight, Ms Smith,' Morgan said, filling the sink with hot water to rinse the glasses.
Her tongue loosened with a couple of glasses of wine, Sam let her defences down and told him about her frantic week.
'No wonder you were so upset,' Morgan said, drying his

hands on a towel and, to her astonishment, pulling her into his arms. 'I'm so glad you're not ill. You must have been terrified.'
Sam was speechless in his embrace, loving the feeling of his arms wrapped protectively round her and the sensation of being safe against him. He felt even better than she thought he'd feel: solid and warm, his chest hard against her face. It was nice to be held by someone who wasn't Hope or Hugh or Andy, someone who wasn't hugging her in a sisterly or brotherly way.
Then, just as suddenly, Morgan moved away, leaving Sam reeling with excitement as she stood there limply.
'Sorry,' he said abruptly, 'I didn't mean to invade your space. Sometimes I forget the proprieties.'
'No, that's fine,' muttered Sam, feeling let down.
Too late she remembered the first time they'd met when she'd accused him of invading her personal space, just before she kicked him on the shin.
'I should go,' Morgan said. He wasn't looking at her, but at the last few glasses he'd gone back to rinsing.
'Of course,' she replied politely, staring at his solid charcoal-shirted back. 'Thanks for coming and for staying behind to wash up.'
'No trouble.'
He didn't kiss her on the cheek when he left but merely said thanks again. Sam stood at the door for a moment, waiting for him to turn back and smile, but he didn't. She shut the door, conscious of a sense of anti-climax. There had been a definite air of anticipation in the air until Morgan had pulled away from her. She wondered why, then stopped herself. If he was interested, he'd make a move, she decided firmly. If he wasn't, he wasn't. What was the point torturing herself over it. She'd made her peace with him and that was the main thing. The new, improved and deliriously happy to be alive Sam Smith was not going to get her knickers in a twist over what might have been. She was going to be happy, contented and change her life for the better. She was

going to take up yoga, eat organic food, be kind to everyone and try to live her life filled with inner spiritual light. She would not worry about the hunk of manhood who brooded Byronically in the house next door, absolutely not.


CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Virginia couldn't for the life of her see why Jamie thought Barbara bossy. She seemed very quiet, almost docile.
Tiny, in direct contrast to the three tall Connells, she had long strawberry blonde hair that trailed down her back in romantic ripples. A heart-shaped little face, demure rosebud mouth and big blue eyes all added up to the very picture of sweetness. It was easy to see how Laurence was crazy about her.
Beside Virginia's strapping sons, Barbara looked like a nymph between two linebackers.
'Would you like some tea? You must be exhausted after the drive,' Virginia said once the introductions had been made.
'If it wouldn't be too much bother,' said Barbara.
Virginia spotted Jamie raising his eyes to heaven.
'Not at all,' she said, shooting Jamie a glare.
Dinky trotted confidently after Virginia as she led the way into the kitchen. When nobody had come forward to claim the little dog, Virginia had bought her a lovely tartan collar and a dog licence. If anyone wanted to take Dinky away from her now, they were in for a fight.
'How are you Ma?' asked Jamie, immediately sinking onto the old armchair beside the big dresser and hanging his long denimed legs over the arm. He looked so like Bill, thought Virginia fondly, except that Bill had been a heavier build, while Jamie was tall and lanky, with chestnut hair falling into mischievous blue eyes. Even at twenty-five, he still looked boyish. Laurence, on the other hand, looked

tired, she thought anxiously. From a distance, he and Jamie were like twins, but up close Laurence's blue eyes boasted new lines and his hair didn't really suit him in that new, going-to-see-the-bank-manager cut.
Virginia vowed to get Laurence on his own and ask him if the practice was going well. She wouldn't embarrass him by asking in front of Barbara.
Installed in the kitchen on a chair, Barbara seemed to perch like a bird and gazed around her with those big blue eyes.
Dinky, who had so far greeted even the postman with a happy bark, approached and sniffled round the hem of Barbara's long black skirt with the politeness of a duchess genteelly greeting a friend . . .
'Oh a dog, how nice,' said Barbara, drawing her skirt in closer to her as if Dinky had been a fierce wolfdog with fangs bared.
'Do you not like dogs?' asked Virginia, perfectly prepared to banish Dinky to her bed if necessary. Not everyone loved animals the way the Connell family did.
'I love dogs,' cooed Barbara, still holding her skirt in.
As if to say that the new guest was lying, Dinky shot Virginia a wry glance.
'Yes, she loves dogs,' interrupted Laurence anxiously as if scared that anyone might think his beloved girlfriend was anything less than a saint.
'Dinky, come here,' said Virginia. Perhaps Barbara was merely nervy, she deserved the benefit of the doubt.
Dinky, ever the lady, came and sat quietly at her mistress's feet. She stayed there while Barbara explained at great length why she loved the country. Virginia felt herself tuning out eventually and wondered why Barbara had drawn a very dark lip liner around her mouth that bore no relation to her actual lip line. Fashion, she assumed.
After twenty minutes of Barbara's version of country life, Virginia realized that her son's girlfriend's notion of the country was restricted to watching TV soaps about rural

communities and occasionally going to the races, where she'd nearly won the best dressed lady competition twice.
'You looked a million dollars at Leopardstown,' Laurence said, reaching across the table to pat her tiny little hand with his big one.
'I've got the photos somewhere, they were taken by a professional photographer, you know,' Barbara added smugly.
She was probably just trying to impress, Virginia thought charitably, as they all heard about the hat with the hand- painted flowers that the judges had so admired. Of course the woman who'd won owned a boutique so had unrivalled access to lots of clothes, which wasn't fair, as Barbara said.
'In that case, she definitely cheated,' Jamie said, straight- faced. 'Boutique-owners shouldn't be allowed to compete. You should have asked for a steward's inquiry.'
'Why don't you all have a walk or a bath or whatever and I'll start dinner,' Virginia suggested, shooting him a warning glance. It had been so long since she'd had to cook for more than one that she needed the kitchen to herself and wanted to scotch any notions Barbara might have about helping. Those beautifully painted nails couldn't have ever had much to do with peeling vegetables.
Everyone shot off, leaving Virginia and Dinky alone.
'What do you think of her?' Virginia asked Dinky, who laid her pink nose on her paws and looked gravely upwards. Not very much, was the answer.
Jamie asked the same question an hour and a half later in the dining room as Virginia got him to help her lay the table.
She hadn't had a chance to answer before Barbara's voice could be heard from the sitting room where she and Laurence had just arrived.
'Should that dog be allowed in the house?' said Barbara in much more carrying tones than the babydoll ones she'd used so far.
Virginia stiffened.

'Told you,' said naughty Jamie, appearing beside his mother. 'She may look and act like butter wouldn't melt but she's a direct descendant of Attila the Hun's nasty older sister.'
'You might have told me,' scolded his mother.
'I did. You didn't believe me,' Jamie snorted.
'She's a lovely little dog,' they heard Laurence say placatingly.
'Mmm. This entire house needs an overhaul,' continued Barbara in tones of disgust. 'I don't know how your mother can live here. I mean, the damp in our bedroom. It can't be good for my asthma. There's a huge damp spot on the wall
Virginia heard no more. Jamie propelled her back into the kitchen before she self-combusted.
'How dare she?' growled Virginia, 'how dare she?'
Jamie, irrepressible as ever, laughed. 'Why don't you send Dinky on a suicide mission to kill her?' he asked.
'I wouldn't let Dinky near her. She'd poison the poor dog.'
At dinner, Barbara was back to being Ms Butter "Wouldn't Melt, even calling Dinky over to her to offer a bit of bread. But Dinky wasn't stupid. She stayed watchfully at Virginia's feet offering support to her mistress, who was no longer in the mood to put up with false politeness. When Barbara gushingly said she adored Kilnagoshell House and loved the faded curtains that Virginia hadn't got round to replacing, Virginia had to bite her tongue.
'Ouch!' was all she said, but that was because Jamie had kicked her under the table.
She glared at his innocent face but, for Laurence's sake, said nothing to Barbara. If he loved Barbara, it wasn't her place to upset things. And with luck, he'd soon realize that a woman who could be sweet in public and shrewish in Private was not a good bet.
The next day, Barbara got up early and used up all the hot water having an enormous bath. Seeing as how Virginia

had mentioned that the plumbing was sensitive and that she'd been meaning for ages to get someone to sort out the hot water situation, she was understandably cross to have to endure a freezing cold shower.
'Sorry,' Barbara said in her baby doll voice. 'As this place was a B & B before, I thought the plumbing would be wonderful.'
Virginia glared at her. Nobody looking at the faded, elegantly run down Kilnagoshell with its elderly bathrooms, could have imagined that it had decent plumbing. In fact, Virginia was always waiting for the hot water tank to come crashing down from the attic whenever she switched the heater on.
After breakfast, Barbara suggested accompanying Virginia on her daily walk with Dinky.
'What a lovely idea,' Laurence said, giving his mother an affectionate hug.
'Yes, lovely,' said naughty Jamie. 'The whole family together, lovely.'
Barbara was not cut out for walking. First, she had the wrong sort of shoes for muddy country lanes, then she wailed like a fishwife when she caught her trailing, pure white Macintosh on a bramble and a thread pulled out.
Finally, she said she'd love to see cute little animals like rabbits and wherever were they?
Shaking in their warrens frightened out of their skulls by your screaming, I dare say, Virginia muttered to herself.
Back home, she took Dinky and rushed out of the house saying she had errands to run, anything to get away before Barbara suggested another en masse trip.
Mary-Kate was quite happy to leave Otis in charge for ten minutes while she and Virginia went into her cosy office to share a coffee and some of the pastries Virginia had brought.
'I hate to think I'm turning into one of those awful women who loathe their daughters-in-law and their sons' girlfriends,' Virginia groaned. 'Mothers-in-law cause so much
strife. Apparently, they even have classes in Italy where mothers-in-law can go to learn how to get their claws out of their sons and let the marriages run normally. Or is it India? Somewhere beginning with an I, anyhow.'
'But not Ireland,' Mary-Kate said mischievously. 'Only joking,' she added, seeing Virginia's stricken look. 'You get on brilliantly with your other son's wife, don't you?'
'Sally, you mean?' Virginia snuffled a bit until she found her handkerchief. 'Yes I do but that's different.'
'Exactly, that's different because she's nice and kind and you love her. This Barbara sounds like a total bitch and you don't like her. But you'll just have to put up with her, I'm afraid.'
Virginia looked distraught at this. 'All I want is for the boys to be happy, I want them to be married to wonderful, kind women I adore, then I know they'll be content.'
'Yes, and I want world peace and to win the lottery but neither wish is going to come true, so I'll have to live without them,' Mary-Kate pointed out pragmatically. 'You never know, Laurence could get tired of her and dump her. Men are always dumping women. He must have had loads of girlfriends in the past.'
'When he was younger, yes,' Virginia said gloomily. 'This is different. This is serious. Barbara's the sort of girl who won't rest until she's got the diamond solitaire on her finger and has the church booked.'
Mary-Kate looked thoughtful. 'That serious, huh. I wonder if Delphine could persuade any of her drop-dead gorgeous friends to lure Laurence away from Barbara for one night of passion. That'd put a stop to her wedding fantasy gallop.'
Virginia laughed. 'Only you would think of that. You're far too Machiavellian to be running a chemist's. You should be CEO of some giant corporation.'
'You could be horrible to her and tell Laurence you hate her.'
Even though Virginia knew her friend was only joking,

she still shook her head. 'No, I refuse to pander to the wicked mother-in-law legend. I'm sick of hearing about bitter women who treat their daughters-in-law like bonded servants and their sons like spoiled pashas. I won't join the twisted sisterhood.'
'Practice a fixed smile, then,' Mary-Kate advised.
They finished their coffee and had said goodbye when Virginia thought of something else about Barbara that she hated.
'And you won't believe it,' she added grimly. 'Barbara doesn't like Dinky.'
Mary-Kate held a hand dramatically to her chest. 'That does it. I'll get the rifle out now. This woman must be stopped!'
'You're a big idiot, do you know that?' Virginia chuckled.
Her good humour was short-lived.
That night, Laurence took them all out to dinner in the Pigeon Club, a local five-star restaurant.
'The practice must be doing well, Laurie,' said Jamie, wincing as he looked at the prices. 'I should have become a dentist. I couldn't afford this place on a teacher's salary.'
'We wanted to come somewhere special,' Laurence said, smiling over at Barbara, who dimpled up at him, 'because we've got good news. Barbara and I are getting married.'
Virginia didn't know who was the more astonished: herself or Jamie. From somewhere, she summoned up the ability to smile, say congratulations and to kiss Laurence. Then, with supreme effort, she gave her first ever air kiss, to Barbara, because she couldn't bear to touch her.
Barbara didn't notice, she was too busy beaming with sheer delight.
As Virginia looked at her daughter-in-law-to-be, she realized that Barbara's big pale blue eyes were as cold as the winter sky before snow.

'Any news of the wedding of the year?' inquired Sally, a week later, when Virginia had just about got over the shock.

Virginia laughed heartily into the phone. At least she had one daughter-in-law she got on with.
'No, you brat. Don't remind me. You won't be so chirpy when you've had her for the weekend.'
Barbara and Laurence were due to visit Dominic and Sally in London soon.
'She'll insist on going to Harrods where Laurence will be made to buy her something expensive, and you won't be able to understand a word she says because she's got the weirdest, put-on accent I've ever heard in my life.'
'So Jamie says. He hates her.'
Virginia shook her head miserably. 'I'm not a huge fan, either. Oh, let's talk about something else. I've been spending far too long thinking about bloody Barbara. When I can't sleep, I find myself grinding my teeth and thinking of all the things I'd like to say to her. Anyway, Sally,' Virginia said proudly, 'I've made a phone call I've been meaning to make for ages. I've booked lessons with a pro in the local golf club and I start in a week.'
'Fantastic!' said Sally.
Virginia suspected Sally would have said 'fantastic' if she'd mentioned taking up the trapeze. Any sign that Virginia was coming out of her gloom was a positive sign, no matter what she decided to do.
'I'll probably be terrible at it and I'm a bit old to start,' Virginia said.
'Nonsense,' said Sally staunchly.
Her mother-in-law grinned. 'You're a terrible liar, do you know that?'
They both laughed.
'The pro asked had I played any other sport and I said camoige when I was a teenager and he said that was perfect. Mind you, I pointed out that it was forty years since I had a camoige stick in my hand and he said that was still perfect, I wouldn't have any bad habits to unlearn.'
'Camoige's that game that's a bit like hurling, is it?' enquired Sally, a born and bred Londoner who had never

heard of such mad Irish games as hurling until she'd fallen for Dominic.
'Much more violent,' smiled Virginia. 'I'll probably be banned from the local course for belting the Lady Captain with my nine iron.'
'You've certainly got all the lingo,' Sally pointed out.
'Living with a besotted golfer all those years, you'd have to be deaf not to,' Virginia said. Living with Bill, she meant. Lucky she had a tissue up her sleeve to wipe the tears away.

The golf professional in St Cecilia's Golf Club was a gruff and grizzled man in his forties who was short on small talk and who had obviously got out of bed the wrong side.
'Why is the club called St Cecilia's?' Virginia asked politely as the pair of them walked from the clubhouse to the tiny driving range where she was to receive her first lesson.
'Don't be asking me,' snapped Fintan O'Riordain. 'I'm here to teach you how to play golf, not to give you a history lesson.'
Count to ten, Virginia told herself.
'My husband played and these are his clubs,' Virginia said, stroking one of them.
'Probably too big for you, Mrs Connell. Women need shorter clubs than men do.'
Virginia eyed him coolly. He was shorter than she was and no doubt used men's clubs, but she held back.
'Now watch me,' Fintan said and hit a few drives to impress her. Bill would have hit them further, Virginia thought proudly. He'd always said he was a long hitter.
'Your turn,' Fintan said.
After ten minutes when he showed her how to grip the golf club and managed to sigh heavily every few seconds at how stupid she was proving, Virginia had had enough of Fintan.
'Two knuckles, woman!' Fintan roared, wrenching the five iron from her grip and demonstrating.

'Tell me,' she said conversationally, 'do you get much repeat business, Fintan? Because you're the most bad- tempered pig I've ever had the misfortune to meet and if this is how you plan on teaching me to play golf, I'd rather chew off my own leg.'
'Nobody's ever complained before,' said Fintan, looking hurt.
'I'm complaining,' said Virginia, smiling. 'Now if all it took to learn was just to look and immediately know how it was done, we'd all be Tiger Woods, wouldn't we? Even you, Fintan and you wouldn't have to be teaching golf to stupid women.'
He blinked nervously.
'I'm not up on fancy ways of Dublin women,' grumbled Fintan.
'Fintan, I may have lived in Dublin for thirty years, but I was born and bred just outside Tralee and no Tralee woman would take that sort of abuse from a man she was paying for a lesson.'
'Well if you'd said that,' he said indignantly, 'I'd have been treating you like a local.'
'So locals get preferential treatment,' said Virginia, feeling the laughter creeping into her voice.
'Could be. But the price is the same,' he said firmly.
When the lesson was over, they walked back up to the club house, a grand old building with ivy growing over the door and a terrace on the first floor where people could sit outside on warm days and watch weary golfers playing the eighteenth.
'Do you want to come into the bar and be introduced to them all?' Fintan asked, obviously on his best behaviour now.
No, Virginia wanted to say. I don't want to meet anyone
and have to explain that I'm a widow, that my husband is
lead a year and a half and that I ran away because I couldn't
race being in our old haunts without him. 'That would be
nice, Fintan,' she said mildly.

St Cecilia's Golf Club was olde worlde on the outside and even olde worlde-ier on the inside. Virginia washed her hands in a pretty ladies' room decorated with rather dark mock Victorian paper and reapplied some lipstick in a gilt- edged mirror with decoupage cherubs on the surround. She combed her hair and tied it back again with the plum- coloured velvet ribbon. That would do. Her fine hazel eyes with the arched brows looked cool and collected and the cream polo shirt and darker cream trousers were suitable, she was sure. Just one drink, then she'd be free to retreat back to her lair and be alone again.
Fintan was at the bar when she climbed the steps to the club lounge, a darkly panelled room with an excess of burgundy swagged curtains.
'What'll you have?' Fintan asked.
'A mineral water, please,' Virginia answered, looking around. Apart from the young barmaid and a couple of men in one corner sipping whiskey and not talking to each other, the place was empty.
'The course was closed this morning,' Fintan said, seeing her looking. 'Maintenance.'
'Oh', said Virginia, realizing that she wasn't going to be introduced to many people if there was no one there. Good.
She sipped her mineral water and relaxed in her chair. Fintan wasn't the chatty type and that suited her fine. She had no need to talk to him if it wasn't necessary.
She was finishing her drink and was about to make another appointment with Fintan for a lesson when someone else entered the bar. A tall rangy man with collar-length greying hair, a healthy tan he hadn't got in Kerry in March, and the upright bearing of someone who'd once been in the military, he nodded at Fintan and smiled politely at Virginia, intelligent eyes flickering over her briefly. He was handsome, Virginia noticed, not gone to seed as so many men in their sixties did.
There was no beer-induced stomach here or whiskey

reddened cheeks. Just a lean man with a lined face, a Roman nose and warm, intelligent eyes.
'Kevin!' said Fintan, sounding as relieved as a man overboard who'd just spotted the lifebuoy. 'Come and meet Virginia.'
Kevin held out one hand but before he got to say hello, Fintan went on with his introduction.
'Sure, you'll have loads in common,' Fintan said. 'Virginia's learning golf and she's a widow from round here. Kevin's a widower. Isn't that a coincidence?'
Clearly delighted with himself for having got Virginia off his hands, Fintan grabbed his half-finished pint and made his way over to the two whiskey-drinkers in the corner.
Virginia's clear hazel eyes met Kevin Burton's warm grey ones, and instantly they both laughed.
She took his hand, still laughing: 'Virginia Connell, widow of this parish and would-be-golfer,' she smiled.
His hand was warm and the clasp strong. 'Kevin Burton at your service,' he said, also smiling. 'Widower and also would-be-golfer. I've been learning golf for a long time. The first thirty years are definitely the worst.'
Virginia giggled, a sound she hadn't heard emerge from herself for a long time. 'Fintan will tell you that the first lesson is definitely the worst. I don't think I impressed him very much.'
'Fintan is never impressed very much,' Kevin said. 'He has to be nice all summer to the visitors so during the rest of the year, he lets his normal cantankerousness loose to make up for his efforts. You can't expect him to be polite all the time.'
They both laughed again, and Virginia was struck by how relaxed she felt. Later on, she wondered what would have happened if Fintan hadn't introduced them with his usual lack of manners. Would they have laughed so companionably if not at his gauche behaviour? Would they have ever
realized that they had so much in common? Probably not.
Virginia imagined that she and Kevin would have said

hello occasionally across the bar and perhaps encountered each other on the driving range but that was all. Fintan's spectacular introduction had done them both a favour.
In the end, Virginia had another drink. 'A real one,' Kevin had said softly.
He was very softly spoken, as if he knew that people listened to what he said so there was absolutely no need to raise his voice.
'How did you find your first lesson?'
Virginia grimaced. 'I was pretty terrible,' she admitted. 'My husband, Bill, was an avid golfer and he was always on at me to play. I never bothered and now I know why! I'm awful at it.'
Kevin smiled encouragingly at her. 'We're all terrible when we start. It took me years to get down to a decent handicap.'
The conversation flowed easily.
He knew the people who'd owned Kilnagoshell House before her. He and his wife, Ursula, had been to dinner there a few times.
'Lovely place but I think running the B & B was a bit much for them when they got older.'
'Did your wife play golf?' Virginia asked.
'Yes, she was marvellous,' he said ruefully. 'We played together a lot.'
They laughed and talked for over an hour. Virginia had another glass of Chardonnay and felt herself grow enjoyably tipsy. Kevin and Ursula had been to the Far East too and they discovered that Virginia and Bill had stayed in the same hotel in Singapore, only on different years. Both couples had gone to St Andrews to play golf, although Virginia grinned and admitted that she'd spent the entire glorious weekend relaxing while Bill had joyously played the old course.
'Do you know what's lovely about talking to you?' Virginia blurted out suddenly. 'Talking about my husband and knowing that you understand. You haven't tried to change the subject as if I must be mad to mention him at all. You

haven't muttered something about how we've all got to move on and frantically thought of something else to talk about. That's such a relief. My sons are nervous of mentioning their father in case it upsets me. Only my daughter-in-law understands and speaks about him naturally.'
She would never have said that at home in Dublin. There, she was buttoned up and kept her public face on show: Virginia Connell, ladylike, gracious and reserved. Here, it was as if she was allowed to speak her mind.
Kevin's face was sad for a moment as he considered what she'd said. 'People think it's for the best, you know,' he said. 'They don't mean to be insensitive but they think that you'll heal better if you don't talk about the person who's died. When you and I know that you desperately want to. Nobody wants to hear me talk about how Ursula and I always planned to go on a cruise when we were both retired. They think it's morbid and that I'll never forget if I keep talking about her.'
'I loved the idea of a cruise,' Virginia said quietly. 'That's what's so awful, you know. Thinking of all the things you'd planned to do but never did. I had cruise brochures in the kitchen and I used to look at them and think of how nice it would be when we could go, when Bill was retired. Nothing madly expensive, mind you. Just relaxing and fun, seeing the Mediterranean or the Adriatic' She was misty-eyed at the memory. 'Then Bill died and that was it: plan over. You can't go for a cruise on your own.'
Kevin's hand came down over hers, comforting and kind, nothing more.
'But you can learn golf,' he said. 'I'll take you out and show you the ropes. Kerry isn't the Mediterranean, I know, but we can improvise. Two old friends helping each other out.'
'We're not old friends,' Virginia pointed out.
Kevin smiled, a lovely warm smile that lit up his face. After that conversation, I think we're damn good friends,' he said.

Sally had left a message on the answer phone when Virginia got home.
'Just phoning to see how the golf lesson went,' said her daughter-in-law's cheery voice on the tape. 'I'm in all day so phone back if you get a minute. Dominic is working late so I'd love to hear from you.'
Virginia stared at the phone as if it was remonstrating with her for abandoning her family. Dominic and Laurence and Jamie, her sons, Bill's sons. What had she been doing: talking and flirting, yes flirting, with a man when the man in her life was her beloved Bill and he was dead. She crumpled up the events listing she'd taken from the club, with its notices about a ladies' fourball for charity and details about the course's opening hours.
How could she have talked so openly and happily to a strange man? Bill was dead and there was no more happiness to be had in the world. To laugh and forget about him for even a moment was betrayal. To laugh with someone else for well over an hour, well, that was the most heinous betrayal.
Virginia sat on the bottom step of Kilnagoshell House's grand curving staircase, the sort of Victorian staircase that Bill had always liked the look of and had maintained they'd own one day. She buried her face in her hands and wept. For Bill and for herself.

The note arrived the next afternoon.
'Phone me if you want to play a nice relaxed nine holes of golf,' Kevin had written in a strong, decisive hand. He'd left his number and finished with the words 'no pressure. Phone if you feel like it.'
She did want to phone. And she didn't. After a frantic, dream-filled night where Bill had remained tantalizingly out of reach although she could see him in the distance, Virginia had woken feeling as if she'd ploughed the front garden. The guilt of having fun with Kevin weighed on her heart like a millstone. To recompense, she'd got up early and gone to eight o'clock Mass, hoping that the familiar words in the

mouth of twinkly-eyed Father McTeague would penetrate her soul and make the world seem normal. But Mass had remained as horribly uncomforting as it had been since Bill had died. She murmured the familiar words mechanically, reams of prayers tripping off her tongue with ease, but none of it made any sense. It hadn't been able to comfort her then and it didn't help now, either.
Still desperate for absolution, she'd come home and attacked the shed at the back of the garden, making a huge heap of rubbish from old paint containers to bits of wood with nails stuck on. By lunch time, she was worn out but still miserable. There was nothing she could face but an evening at home on her own. However, she'd promised to go out with Delphine and Mary-Kate, for what Mary- Kate described as 'a feast of chicken wings and chips in the Widows and a few drinks before Teddy Taxi drives us home.'
There was no moping when Mary-Kate was around, so Virginia found herself having a glass of wine and the Widows famous fish pie, because she hated chicken wings.
'Fair play to you for learning golf,' Delphine said, attacking her chips with gusto.
'And you met Kevin Burton? He always strikes me as a nice man,' Mary-Kate said casually.
'Yes, he is,' replied Virginia, just as casually. She looked up and caught Mary-Kate smiling at her. Virginia flushed. 'What?'
'Nothing,' said Mary-Kate innocently.

Matt stared at the blank screen of his laptop. It flickered in the soft lights that were dotted all around the big attic room, the cursor winking at him cheekily. The room was silent, as ever. Talking wasn't permitted in the writing room. Only two of the seven desks were occupied this morning, one by an elderly lady writer who'd confided to Matt in the kitchen that she was filling out her tax return and needed somewhere Quiet to do it; the other by Ciaran Headley-Ryan who was

typing away briskly. He worked there every morning from nine to one and his fingers never stopped. He didn't appear ever to be struck by either writer's block or a crisis of confidence.
Matt gazed out the big window at the desolate, windswept landscape. It was a horrific morning, with gale-force winds buffeting the pine trees around the centre and lashing the rhododendrons beside the gate. You needed to be able to write something in the first place to have writer's block, Matt thought desperately. He'd been ploughing away for months now and it was all total rubbish.
The beautiful, lyrical book he'd dreamed of writing for so long, a novel that would have the world's literati queuing up to shake his hand, refused to take shape. Something had taken shape all right: a third rate TV movie of a novel that wouldn't interest anyone. His depressed hero was more like an escapee from a bad science fiction book than the main character in something Salman Rushdie would want to review. An avid reader, Matt knew the difference between rubbish and a decent book and, no matter how much it pained him to say it, his was definitely rubbish. He hadn't had the courage to tell Hope how awful it was to stare at the screen with so much intensity and still come up with only a few terrible sentences that looked even worse when he read them a day later.
He'd spent half an hour scrolling through the previous week's work and had felt his heart sink into his sturdy boots with each passing minute. Tip tap went Ciaran, his fingers flying. Matt had never read any of Ciaran's historical escapades although Finula had pressed three on him. He didn't want his own creativity to be tainted by reading anyone else's stuff. Well, that was the reason initially. Until he'd realized he couldn't write for toffee. Now, he couldn't bear to look at Ciaran's novels on the grounds that it would physically hurt to see someone else making a living out of doing what he couldn't.
Painful though it was, Matt had realized that he wasn't

a writer: writing ad campaigns and writing a novel weren't the same thing. They were a million miles apart; like being able to play the piano and assuming that meant you could also play the violin. Similar, definitely, but still different enough to ensure that doing one did not necessarily mean you could do the other.
That hurt, hurt terribly. But even worse was the knowledge that his mistaken belief that he could write meant he'd uprooted the entire family to Kerry. He'd given up his job, their home and their life, for nothing.
'Coffee,' mouthed Ciaran, appearing suddenly beside him.
Matt nodded gratefully. Anything to get away from that malevolently winking laptop cursor.
Together they went downstairs, past the two big art studios where the sound of muffled laughter signalled that the morning art class was coming to an end. To make the centre profitable, the committee rented it out for two and three-day art courses and week-long writing courses during the year. Today's group had abandoned the idea of drawing outdoors and Matt had seen them dragging in branches of trees and mucky great lumps of rock for a still life session when he'd arrived. Luckily, he wouldn't have to exchange idle chit chat with the visiting painters.
The visitors always had their mid-morning coffee in what was called the library, a small room decorated with unsold paintings and books written by the centre's past and present writers. Ciaran had an entire shelf to himself. Matt miserably decided that the only way his work was going to ever be exhibited in the library was if he took up art. Making potato prints was probably his level, he thought bitterly.
'How's it going?' Ciaran said kindly. He would never betray for a second that he could recognize the signs of someone who was struggling. Ciaran had seen people come to write in the centre and discover that they had some glorious hidden talent buried inside them: their fingers flew over the keyboards with joy as they wrote, finally letting the

creativity ring out like a triumphant piece of music. And he'd seen the people who'd spent years promising themselves that they'd write one day, people who'd saved up for a week at the famous Redlion Artistic Centre, only to discover when they sat in the big attic room, that it wasn't as easy as it looked, that the words didn't fly out but had to be dragged forth, kicking and screaming. Words that didn't work on any page and never would.
Matt didn't look like the former: he had the stunned, depressed look of the latter, the face of a man who'd made a big mistake and didn't know how to face up to it.
'OK,' said Matt guardedly, 'it's OK. I'm still thinking about the plot really.'
'Of course,' said Ciaran soberly. 'That's very important.' He went back to spooning coffee into his cup and reflected that he was never able to work on the plot without writing anything. Poor Matt. Ciaran felt sorry for the younger man, and sorry for his sweet, quiet wife. He just hoped that Matt realized writing wasn't for him before it affected their whole family. He'd seen Hope dragging those two little kids listlessly into the village a few times, all of them looking as bored and misplaced as a refugee family. Now she was working a few times a week so money was obviously a problem. It would be fairer if Matt upped sticks and went home. Fairer for Hope and much better for him too. Torturing oneself over not being able to write wasn't good for the soul, Ciaran knew, from having seen too many people like Matt.
'Finula asked me to invite you to ours next week, we're having a bit of a party,' he said casually.
'We'd love to go,' Matt said. Anything to break the monotony. Maybe he could get totally plastered and forget, for a few brief moments, that he was a failure.

A week later, Matt negotiated a bend in the road at what Hope considered to be a deadly speed.
There was no point saying 'slow down.' Such a remark

would only make him drive faster and rely on his brakes even more. She wouldn't mind so much but the Metro was not built for hurtling over bumpy country roads.
Her knuckles white from clenching the side of the seat, Hope stared tight-lipped into the back of the car where Toby was asleep in his car seat. Millie was learning from ear to ear. No speed was too fast for her. Like her father, she preferred the white-knuckle style of driving and had been known to squeal 'faster, Daddy', on occasion.
They were driving back from a shopping expedition in Killarney where new shoes had been purchased for both children. Millie was thrilled with her sky blue suede MaryJanes. Hope was less thrilled on the grounds that Curlew Cottage and sky blue suede were not compatible. Exactly how did you get mud out of suede? Matt was what passed for happy these days because he'd bought a new thriller and a couple of expensive computer magazines, Toby was happy because, well, Toby was always happy. Hope was depressed and grumpy because she hadn't bought anything - apart from some groceries. Sadly, two-for-the-price-of-one for toilet cleaner could only thrill a woman so much. She'd planned to buy something cheap and stunning to wear to Finula's party that night but strangely enough, the shops were all out of garments that fitted the 'cheap and stunning' bill.
Hope tried to take her mind off Mart's Formula One driving and flitted over everything partyish in her wardrobe, mentally discarding at least half of it.
There was a direct correlation between clothes and dislike, she decided. The more you disliked someone, the better dressed you wanted to be when you met them. On that basis, Hope knew her only sensible option would be to phone up Milan and ask Donatella Versace to send over a dress. If only there was some way out of going to the damn party, but there wasn't. Baby-sitting problems couldn't be blamed because Finula had insisted that the children be brought and put to bed in one of her spare rooms.

'They probably won't even wake up when it's time to bring them home,' Matt had said happily when he told Hope about this plan.
And if they did, Hope vowed, he could sit up with them. He'd been so bad tempered for the past month, so hellish to live with, that she'd had to do everything with the kids. Well, she hadn't wanted to go to this bloody party, he had, so he could deal with two crying, confused children who wouldn't appreciate being woken at midnight to go home.
The entire Parker family were dressed in their best when they parked outside the Headley-Ryans' at eight o' clock that night. Millie and Toby were in their best pyjamas, Millie wearing the new shoes which she refused to take off. Matt was looking particularly handsome in a Paul Smith suit he'd rarely worn before, complete with a grey shirt worn open without a tie. The effect was both casual and effortlessly classy. Hope felt she never managed to combine casual and classy, so she'd gone hell for leather towards classy and was shoehorned into a scoop-necked little black dress from Next that had clung a bit too tightly around the waist when she'd bought it and which hadn't got any looser with age. Pearl earrings, her hair up and sheer barely black tights with classic suede court shoes finished the look.
You couldn't go far wrong with a little black dress, screamed all the best fashion magazines. As she was also wearing the uncomfortable, constricting all-in-one underwear that was supposed to suck all your fat in, Hope prayed that the magazines were right. She felt like a piece of chicken breast in the supermarket: squashed up into an odd shape with her boobs bolstered across the front. It would be worth it, though, if she looked better than Finula.
'There are a lot of cars here,' Matt remarked.
Big, expensive cars, he added mentally. Their Metro looked lost among the BMWs and sporty Audis. Matt thought of the low slung sports car he'd driven until the move. A company car, it had gone back while he was on

sabbatical and he hadn't thought he'd miss it until he was forced to drive Hope's elderly Metro. The Metro couldn't compare to the elegant lines of his old car, the powerful engine and the throaty roar it made when he put his foot to the floor. They couldn't afford a second car at the moment. Hope didn't seem to mind but Matt did. He was fed up being broke.
Ciaran greeted them at the door and led them off to the spare room to settle the children.
'Will I get Finula to drop in and say hello?' he asked before he bore Matt off to the party.
Hope smiled and shook her head. She'd recently decided that Ciaran was a nice man, after all. It was Finula she couldn't stand.
Naturally, Millie had no plans to go to sleep without having milk, water and several trips to the bathroom.
It was nearly nine, therefore, and the party was in full swing when Hope finally left the children asleep. She felt tired instead of partyish.
'Darling, lovely to see you, are the kiddies asleep?' said a voice.
Finula's vowel sounds were even more strangulated than usual. No surprise, there, Hope thought. Finula was on impress-mode, which meant she'd be littering her conversation with French, mentioning distant artist acquaintances as if they were close friends, and carrying on as if she had champagne for supper every evening. It was very wearing. After ten minutes, Hope wanted to go and lie down. There was a great film on the telly that night, she remembered crossly.
Clearly, Finula was bored with Hope too. 'Now, you must meet my sister, Priscilla Headley-Clarke,' Finula said, as a woman approached.
Priscilla was a thinner, more conventionally dressed version of Finula, with the same fascination for red talons, too much jewellery and a faux posh accent.
'Priscilla Headley-Clarke,' Priscilla said, holding out

her hand, as if Hope was deaf and hadn't heard the double- barrelled moniker moments before.
'Hope Parker,' Hope said, suppressing both a giggle and the desire to call herself Hope Smith-Parker.
She could just imagine Priscilla hearing that her elder sister was adopting a double-barrelled surname by linking hers with her new husband's.
'If she's having one, so am I!' Priscilla would scream, determined to be Headley-Clarke if Finula could be Headley-Ryan. Hope wondered if Priscilla had made her husband go double-barrelled, as Finula had with Ciaran.
And what happened if double-barrelled daughters got married, she wondered idly. Treble-barrelled last names or quadruples?
Released from having to listen to Finula drone on about how all the pictures in the house were painted by personal friends of theirs, Hope found Priscilla easier to talk to.
A Galway-based interior designer, Priscilla wasn't averse to mentioning the famous people she'd worked for but at least she didn't try and score intellectual points every few minutes, unlike her sister. And she actually listened to what Hope said, also unlike her sister.
'It must be difficult to up sticks and move,' Priscilla commented when they began talking about the Parkers' move to Kerry.
'I miss friends,' Hope said, 'although I've made some good ones here.'
'Finula, of course,' Priscilla said reverently.
Hope didn't correct her. 'We've only been here a few months and some of the time, I feel as if we've been here forever. This place does grow on you.'
'Don't you get bored?' Priscilla asked. 'I find the country a bit dull. I like city living, I must admit.'
Hope realized that she hadn't been bored lately. She worked two days a week for Erwin, although that would be coming to an end soon, as his wife was on the mend. However, she wouldn't be out of work for long. Delphine had

told her that the accounts office in the hotel urgently needed some part-time help.
On the social side, Hope regularly met Mary-Kate or Delphine for coffee, she and Matt went to dinner with someone at least once a week, and now that she'd started walking with Delphine at lunchtimes twice a week as part of a getthin-for-summer plan, she was busy. Plus there was the Macrame Club which was fun because they all let their hair down and talked about anything and everything. The only minus was the fact that Mary-Kate had a very heavy hand with the vodka. Every time they met, Hope promised herself she wouldn't have any martinis but then she fell by the wayside and ended up with a killer headache the next day. The only sad thing was that Sam was in London but they phoned each other every second day now, not caring about the phone bills but wanting to keep in touch. Hope knew Sam was taking one day at a time and trying to change her life, but she was still worried about her sister.
'It must be dull compared to Bath. Isn't that where you lived before?' inquired Priscilla.
'Actually no, I love it here,' Hope said, surprising herself. 'There's a great sense of, I don't know . . . community here. I like that, it's like having a very big extended family where you know everyone.'
Priscilla snorted. 'Finula's been here for ten years and she says she still feels like a stranger.'
Hope suppressed a smile, thinking of how Finula descended upon the village shops like Lady Bountiful condescending to the natives, talking loudly as if she were in Outer Mongolia and nobody could understand her or her desire for organic lentils. It was even worse if she bumped into anyone who was in Redlion to work at the artistic centre. Hope had witnessed Finula buttonholing some poor poet in the butcher's, telling him how she loved the rural simplicity and the simplistic wildness of both the people and the landscape. The butcher's wife, a highly educated, marvellously funny woman, had been apoplectic with rage behind the counter

and had been in danger of slicing off the butcher's assistant's fingers with her boning knife as she overheard the conversation.
'Well,' Hope said, trying to be kind, 'not everyone fits in.'
'Oh Finula's fitted in,' Priscilla insisted. 'She just says the locals are very unfriendly.'
Eventually Hope escaped from Priscilla and got to talk to Mai, her fellow Macrame Club member. Neither Mai nor her husband, Chan, were artistic but had been invited on the grounds that Chan was something big in the computer factory. Finula liked the idea of mixing art and industry at her gatherings.
It was one before they left. 'Did you have a good time?' asked Matt, caressing her thigh through her silky sheers.
'Great,' said Hope. And it had been fun once she'd managed to escape the double barrelled sisters. 'How about you?'
'Yeah, I miss going out.'
'We get out here,' Hope said, stung.
'You know what I mean, that's just us. I mean going out to parties with Dan and Betsey. Talking to different people, networking, I suppose.'
They were both silent. Matt, realizing that he missed the social aspect of his old job, Hope upset at the idea that her conversation wasn't good enough.
They drove home slowly, trying to avoid potholes and miraculously, the children didn't wake when they were transferred from the car to their beds. Hope was taking off her murderously painful all-in-one underwear when Matt rushed into the bedroom, eyes glittering excitedly.
'There's a message on the answer phone from Dan. You won't believe it. Adam Judd's had a heart attack. He's all right,' Matt added, 'he's not in any danger, but he'd going to be off work for six weeks. He asked Dan to find out if I would come back and fill in for him until he's better.'
Hope stared at him blankly.
'It's an emergency,' he added, unable to stifle his joy. He

was going back. He was still a player. Judds needed him, the company needed him. So what if he wasn't going to write the great novel. He was still the only man for the job of taking care of Judds.
He took Hope in his arms, holding her half-naked body close to his clothed one, letting her feel just how turned on he was. And somehow, Hope knew that it wasn't the sight of her that had made him want her: it was the thrill of the job. Hearing that he was needed had flicked a switch inside him, the switch that turned him on. Hope let him nuzzle her neck and caress her until they fell down on their bed and made love. But afterwards, when Matt fell asleep, half on her side of the bed, Hope lay there with her eyes open. Why was it that Matt was enough for her, but she wasn't quite enough for him? He needed something more from life and all she needed was his love.
The following day, Matt rushed around making phone calls, sending e-mails, booking his plane ticket. It was like old times, Hope realized. Buoyed up by the knowledge that he was needed, Matt was on a high and his enthusiasm was infectious. The children, not knowing that he was going to be away for six whole weeks, danced around him happily. Hope did her best to be cheery but she felt desolate that he was going and twice as desolate at how happy he was to be going.
They drove to the airport that afternoon, with Millie finally cross because the penny had dropped that her beloved daddy was going away. In the back of the car, she roared all the way to Killarney. It reminded Hope of her arrival in Kerry.
'Don't come in,' said Matt as they parked. Hope's pale, upset face was making him feel guilty enough. It would be worse for her to have to say goodbye in a teeming airport and then drag two screaming children back into the car. Far easier on them all to kiss goodbye now in the car.
He held her hand tightly, hoping she'd understand.
All Hope understood was that Matt was so eager to be

away from her that he was denying her the chance to say goodbye properly.
When he bent to kiss her, she gave him the lightest peck. 'Bye,' she said in a small voice.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Hi Hope,
Sorry I couldn't talk yesterday. I was just running to a meeting and literally didn't have a second. This is a quickie early morning e-mail because I've lots of meetings in the office first thing and we've got a sales conference on afterwards and the whole building is decamping to Hertfordshire for three days. How are you getting on without Matt? I bet Millie's playing up as usual. She really is Daddy's girl.
I know today's the first day of your new job, so best of luck. You'll be fabulous, natch. That hotel sounds pretty amazing. Maybe next time I come, we'll book ourselves in for a night and spend a day in Delphine's salon getting beautified. I could do with it! My skin has gone to pot over the last few weeks - I am convinced it was the anaesthetic from getting my fibroids done. So much for 'you'll be out of the hospital within twenty-four hours and suffer no ill effects'! Only kidding. Dry skin isn't much of a price to pay and I'm feeling great. I've started doing this yoga video at home but I think I need to sign up to a class to do it properly. And I'm eating properly, drinking loads of water and actually cooking dinner every night. You'd be proud of me.
I won't have time to phone today probably, but I'll try and give you a ring tomorrow,
Love Sam.

Hope smiled at the thought of her hopelessly undomesticated sister cooking every night. She clicked on reply.
Hi Sis, it's all right. I understand you're madly busy. I keep getting your answering machine in the evening. This is just a quick note because I've got to leave the house in five minutes to get to the hotel for my first day and from the sounds downstairs, Millie is killing Toby. I am a bit nervous about the job to be honest because the only interview I did was simply over the phone with the accounts office boss, Una Hutchinson, and she said they needed someone for a couple of days a week to cope with a backlog of filing.
Hope smiled to herself at the thought of her new job. She'd got it after the most unusual interview of her life. On the day of her interview at the hotel, Una had phoned first thing to say her husband was ill, consequently she was confined to home and could they do the interview over the phone?
'I'd love that,' Hope had laughed, thinking of when she'd gone for job interviews in her twenties and had suffered horrific nerve pangs as she sat, all dolled up in a neat little suit, waiting to be asked lots of difficult questions she was sure she'd never be able to answer. By comparison, talking with the companionable Una Hutchinson over the phone had been a doddle.
She quickly reread the e-mail and then continued. The other job I've had since I got here was so laid-back that it felt like giving a neighbour a helping hand with the filing, and in contrast, this job is in a five-star hotel where they probably have a complex accounts system and I'm a bit nervous about that. But I'm going to do my best. If I can cope with the wiring in the house going haywire since Matt left, and with Millie acting up (you're dead right, she's been a minx since he left), then I can cope with a new job. Do you know, it's three

weeks since he left? I almost can't believe it myself. I've been so busy that I don't miss him during the day, but it can be lonely here at night. Still, the girls are great at dragging me out of the house. This wasn't totally true. Hope missed Matt like crazy but didn't want to tell Sam or she'd doubtless phone him up and launch a tirade about neglecting her sister.
Glad to hear that your skin is the only casualty of the operation. I'll ask Delphine for her recommendations. She probably knows some hideously expensive bottle of cream (the ninety quid for an ounce variety) that'll do the trick. Better still, you could visit Redlion and she'd administer it herself. All the girls at the Macrame Club are always asking about you and you know I'd love you to visit. By the way, Giselle is going to London in November and wants to know if you can meet up.
Matt's fine although he's harder to get hold of on the phone than you'. Judd's is madly busy and he's doing Adam's work as well as some of his own. Hope didn't mention that Matt was the worst e-mail correspondent ever, believing that it was a mistake to get private e-mails at the office in case other people read them. Consequently, he made do with phoning Hope and the children, which wasn't satisfactory because he did it when he got in from work at nine, forgetting the children were in bed by half seven. Even more annoying, he hadn't phoned the night before or this morning to wish her luck in her new part time job at the Manoir Rouge Leon. Delphine, Mary-Kate, Virginia and Giselle had all remembered, but not Matt. Hope's pledge not to bitch about her husband was taking a rattling. She longed to let it all out and tell Sam how neglected she was feeling but she couldn't: couples owed it to each other to keep their differences private, Hope felt. And Sam would certainly try and fight Hope's battle, which was another no-no. She kept writing.
Bet you're going to some lovely hotel for your conference,

so have a good time. Talk soon and take care of yourself! It's only two weeks since your op, don't forget. You're not superwoman. OK, you are, but don't push yourself,
Love
Hope.
Toby's voice sounded plaintive as he roared up the stairs: 'Mummy, Millie hit me with Thomas the Tank Engine.'
Hope hit send and rushed downstairs.

An hour later, Hope's jaw dropped a bit as she drove up the manicured driveway to Manoir Rouge Leon. She'd seen the brochure photos that Delphine had given her, she'd heard Mary-Kate saying the hotel was an oasis of utter luxury, and she'd even heard about the prices - the price of a suite for two weeks would buy you half a house in Redlion, apparently. But nothing had prepared her for the sight of the soaring castle that lay nestled in a splendid valley of beech trees and mighty oaks a mere six miles from the village. The hotel was enormous, with a huge tower on either side of a vast wooden door, plenty of gargoyles and crenellated bits in between, and a castle wall that stretched around the rambling, spreading building as if it was guarding a precious jewel.
'Wow,' she said, not daring to park the Metro in the visitors' car park alongside all the Mercedes and Bentleys. Since she'd banged it off the rusty gate on the lane, the car looked more disreputable than ever. She followed the signs for the staff car park and then dithered about taking the back entrance. Delphine had advised her to go in the front door 'or you'll get lost. The back of the castle is like a rabbit warren and we'd find you a month later locked in some back office,' she'd said.
But now Hope felt unsure about sauntering in as if she was a guest. She was only coming in to help because the accounts office were short staffed. Still, there was no choice. The front it was. A liveried doorman opened the big door to her and smiled 'Hello Madame.'


Hope smiled back, thrilled that her smart black suit made her look posh enough to pass as a Bentley-driving guest. She must make an effort with her hair and make up more often. For a moment, she stood and admired the lobby, a vast richly panelled room with tapestries on the walls, enormous arrangements of flowers on two marble tables, and a suit of armour lurking malevolently by the grand double staircase.
'Beautiful, isn't it?' said a soft, male voice.
'Lovely,' said Hope untruthfully. Suits of armour reminded her of horror movies for some reason.
'Can I help you?' The voice belonged to a man in a suit, a man with a mop of curly dark hair that refused to be subdued and that reminded Hope for all the world of a Tibetan terrier's coat. It was the only wild thing about him. From the tips of his perfectly white, double cuffs to his gleaming leather shoes, he had the style of someone from Blackwells Best Dressed Men list. He oozed gypsyish charm and Givenchy for Men from every pore and as Hope looked up into his shining black eyes and the saturnine face, she could do nothing but smile dumbly.
'I'm ... er ... looking for the accounts office,' she managed after what seemed like an age. 'I'm supposed to be working there.'
'You must be Mrs Parker,' he said.
'How did you know?' Hope said astonished.
'It's my job to know everything that goes on around here,' he said in that soft, caressing voice. 'I'm Christy De Lacy, the general manager.'
Before she was even aware of it, he'd taken her hand in his. 'Welcome and thank you.'
Hope wasn't sure what she was being thanked for but it was very nice to have this delectable specimen of manhood holding her hand and thanking her, so she wasn't about to break the moment.
'Which direction is the accounts office?' she asked.
He finally let go of her hand and Hope wondered if it would smell of his aftershave now.

'I'll show you,' he said gravely, 'and perhaps give you the grand tour as well.'
'Actually,' Hope pointed out, 'I'm supposed to be there at half nine and it's nearly that now.'
Christy shrugged in a Gallic manner. 'I'm the boss,' he said with pride.
Flustered, Hope began to protest. 'But I don't want to take up your time . . .'
His voice, already low, dropped an octave. 'I'm never too busy to escort a beautiful lady,' he purred.
Hope's stomach did a little flip that wouldn't have earned her any points in an Olympic gymnastic display but which was still pretty good for a 37-year-old woman's stomach with limited experience of somersaults.
He guided her over to the lift and the tour started.
'This panelling was taken from a house in Malta,' he explained gravely and as the lift began its stately ascent, he told her about the work that had gone into refurbishing this section of the castle. He was very knowledgeable about it all but Hope decided that it was hard to say the correct things about wood panelling and the expense of maintaining antique furniture when all she wanted to do was hear Christy call her a 'beautiful lady' again. And there was something very sexy about being in the lift with such a man. Hadn't there been fabulously hedonistic goings on in a lift in some movie? Didn't modern hotels have cameras in the lifts? Would they be spotted if Christy flung her against the railing and kissed her?
'The first floor refurbishment is the best, I think,' Christy intoned as the door opened.
She did her best to ask intelligent questions and soon discovered why the castle wasn't called a castle and why Christy knew so much about it.
'I was here for all the refurbishment,' he said. 'It took two years and it was like watching a gracious old movie star turn back into a youthful goddess.'
Hope sighed. 'It's beautiful, but why is it called a manor hotel? Why not a castle?'

'You ask all the right questions.' Christy smiled benignly on his pupil who glowed as much as if she'd just been given a gold star on her copybook. 'It looks like a medieval castle in places but the oldest parts are only nineteenth century. A wealthy landowner built it for his young wife as a love token, because she said she'd always wanted to live in a castle, only she died before it was finished and in his grief, he insisted that nobody ever call it a castle again. It's more of a folly really than a castle.'
'How romantic' Hope ran a hand over a silken tapestry on one wall.
As they waited for the lift again, Hope found herself gazing up at Christy with the shining eyes of the love struck. Stop it! What are you doing, she asked herself? It was like being a fifteen-year-old on a first ever date, desperate for compliments, smiling gauchely up at the object of her desire and waiting for him to say that her hair/jeans etc were nice.
On the top floor, he whisked her along to one of the unoccupied suites, which contained the biggest bed she'd ever seen.
'Wow,' she said, resisting the temptation to sit on it and bounce up and down.
'Sit, it's a waterbed,' he said, sitting down and bouncing. 'Fun, huh?' His eyebrows were distinctly devilish when raised in that provocative way.
Hope perched as far away from him as possible. This was crazy. There was something dangerous about this man.
As if reading her mind, Christy got to his feet.
'Forgive me,' he said earnestly, 'I get so carried away with my beautiful hotel that I forget it can be boring for other people. You see, I want the people who work for me to appreciate the beauty of the Manoir. It makes them proud to work here, that's why I gave you the tour. I hope it hasn't bored you. Now let's bring you to the accounts office and you can see the rest of the hotel later.'
Hope felt stupid for even imagining another motive for the tour. Of course, he was the manager and he wanted to

impress upon new staff that this was a special place. As if someone as suave and sophisticated as Christy De Lacy would seriously be interested in her.
They went down the back stairs, Hope burning with embarrassment at how silly she must have looked as she simpered up at him like a schoolgirl. Obviously, a man so handsome must be used to women throwing themselves at him but she hadn't so much thrown herself as launched herself from a great height. How humiliating.
She could barely speak for embarrassment.
He delivered her at a plain door. 'I'll tell Mrs Hutchinson you're here,' he said, opening the door.
After a moment, he came out and told her that Mrs Hutchinson, head of the accounts office, was waiting for her.
'We shall meet again soon, I hope,' he said, giving her a formal handshake.
'Thank you, Mr De Lacy,' Hope said, trying to pull off the double whammy of being polite and apologetic all in one.
'It's Christy, not Mr De Lacy,' he smiled.
Hope watched him as he strode off down the corridor.
Had she imagined it or had that last searching look as they said goodbye been a look that couldn't possibly be construed as platonic? No. She must have imagined it.
Mrs Hutchinson turned out to be a jolly local woman of fifty who was just as friendly as she'd been during Hope's phone interview and immediately insisted that Hope call her Una. 'This office isn't the place for formality, as I've always said,' she smiled, introducing Hope to the other accounts person, an impish young woman called Janet.
'The way Mr De Lacy called you Mrs Hutchinson, I thought it was,' Hope said.
'What did you think of him?' inquired Una with great innocence.
'He's very nice, I found,' Hope said lightly.
She missed the glance between the two others.
'Such a pity he'll never have a girlfriend,' said Janet mournfully. 'Such a tragedy .. .'


'What tragedy?' asked Hope, jumping straight into the
trap.
'Gotcha!' giggled Una. 'He's irresistible, Mr De Lacy, isn't he? Everyone falls for him.'
'I haven't fallen for him,' protested Hope hotly. 'I'm a married woman with children, I'll have you know . . .'
Una patted her on the arm. 'You're going to fit right in,' she said. 'Until they let us have a television in the staff room, lusting after Christy De Lacy is the only entertainment we get around here! And no, he's not married, before you ask.'
They giggled again. 'Bet you were putty in his hands,' sighed Janet.
'Don't be ridiculous,' Hope said firmly in her best Mummy tone. 'Now, I expect you've work you want me to do,' she added, trying to banish the image of herself puttylike in Christy De Lacy's firm hands; kneading her flesh, getting the knots out of her tense shoulders and then splaying further down ...

Mary-Kate and Delphine turned up at Curlew Cottage that night with several bottles of wine and a pot of Mary-Kate's legendary mushroom soup, 'so you don't have to worry about cooking,' she told Hope.
In the three weeks since Matt had gone, the three women often had dinner together and Hope had learned that Mary- Kate was the most incredible cook.
Delphine was greeted with delight by Toby and Millie, who considered her to be a bigger version of themselves with the added bonus that she was allowed to work the video recorder.
For a few moments, nobody could hear themselves think with the children trying to drown each other out in asking Delphine to play their game.
'Mine, mine!' yelled Millie, who could roar for Ireland.
'We'll play your game and Toby's,' Delphine announced diplomatically. 'But I have to talk to your mummy first. How did you get on?' she asked.

'Wonderful. Una's lovely.'
'Oh, she's an utter pet,' Delphine cried. 'She practically runs that place and she doesn't have a bossy bone in her body. It's only since her husband's been sick that she's had to take all those days off and there are so many bits of paper flying in and out of that office, that the place can't cope. And isn't Janet gas?'
'Great. Oh, and I met the manager,' Hope said idly. 'Christy De Lacy.' She couldn't help it: she liked saying his name, liked the way it rolled off her tongue.
From her position on the couch between Millie and Toby, Delphine shot a look at Hope. 'And you liked him?' she inquired.
Hope glowed. 'He was an angel, he gave me a tour of the hotel. Sorry, Manoir.'
'How come I've never set eyes on this man?' Mary-Kate demanded. 'I must be the only woman in a ten-mile radius who doesn't swoon at the mention of his name. Why does he never come into the chemist looking for spot cream or anything? I think I should write a letter of complaint to someone. What does the Minister for Justice do again? Would he be able to handle it?'
Hope laughed. 'You should book yourself in for a tour of the Manoir,' she said. 'Then you'd get to meet him.'
'Ah,' Mary-Kate said wisely, 'maybe he only gives those tours to gorgeous thirty-something women wearing fitted little suits.'
'There'll be no wine for you, madam,' Hope joked, 'if you keep up that line of thought. He's just a nice man, that's all. Nobody's swooning.'
Just talking about the hotel with him was hardly the first sign of a grande affaire, now was it, she thought to herself.
Delphine picked up Millie's story book with a sense of unease in her heart.
She didn't like to tell Hope that she'd seen Mr De Lacy being very not nice, being downright nasty in fact, when the Latin curl of his lip had turned into a sneer and his much

admired eyes were as hard as nails. Most women seemed to love him; they fell hook, line and sinker for that suave business even though Delphine felt it was all an act. Even poor Una Hutchinson, God love her, who was besotted with her big lummox of a husband, had a soft spot for Christy.
A soft spot that wasn't the Bog of Allen, as Delphine's father might have said wryly.
Still, it wasn't up to her to warn Hope off him. Hope was married to the utterly gorgeous Matt, a man who'd knock spots off the smarmy Christy any day of the week. Why would Hope even look twice at Christy when she was married to Matt? It'd be like living in a cream bun factory and sneaking out to buy diet biscuits from the corner shop. No, there was no need to worry.
The children went to bed reluctantly although the fact that Delphine was going to tell them a bedtime story cheered them up.
'You're sure you don't mind?' Hope asked her, not wanting to take advantage.
'I love doing it,' Delphine said. 'I love kids and this pair are little dotes.'
Hope went downstairs to Mary-Kate.
'She's so good with children, she'll be a wonderful mother,' she said. 'Do you think she and Eugene will have kids?'
'I'm sure they'd love to but I think she's waiting for her mother to welcome Eugene into the bosom of the family first. Poor Delphine,' Mary-Kate sighed. 'I'm afraid she'll be waiting a long time. I don't know why she just doesn't get married and let my idiot of a sister like it or lump it.'
'People can be very cruel without knowing it, can't they?' Hope said. 'What right has anyone to tell Delphine how to live her life?'
Mary-Kate said nothing but just stared into the middle distance. She looked sad and fragile, Hope thought suddenly.
'Are you feeling all right?' she asked.
Her friend seemed to visibly shake herself back to reality. 'Old memories,' she said finally.

Hope felt as if she'd stumbled clumsily across someone else's pain and did her best to backtrack. 'Shall we have some of your wonderful soup?' she said brightly.
The older woman didn't appear to have heard her. Hope had never seen Mary-Kate look maudlin or sad. It was scary. Mary-Kate was the one who buoyed them all up and made them laugh. She was the one who helped the Macrame Club women laugh at life and see the funny side. To witness her looking so forlorn was a shock.
'I think they're asleep,' whispered Delphine, tiptoeing downstairs. 'They were tired. I only managed one story.'
'They're always tired on the days when they're at the creche,' Hope replied. 'I don't know what Giselle does with them there but it's fantastic'
'She probably has a special baby gym and she ties them to the walker for an hour every day and leaves them at it,' suggested Delphine mischievously.
'Now there's a thought,' Hope said. 'I'll have to invest in one of those myself.'
Even Mary-Kate laughed at that notion.
They were soon feasting on the delicious soup mopped up with chunks of soda bread, all washed down with wine. The talk turned to the sort of week they'd all had and Hope managed to talk about her morning in the accounts office without mentioning Christy again. Delphine made them scream with laughter with her story of an elderly film star who was staying in the hotel with his wife and who'd wanted his chest hair waxed that afternoon.
'Stronger sex indeed,' she laughed. 'I've given women Brazilian waxes that would bring tears to your eyes and they clench their teeth with pain and say nothing. But your man ... he roared so much that I couldn't bear it from wanting to laugh and I had to get Antoinette to take over. And you wouldn't mind but when it was over, he came out all macho and asked me if I wanted to have a drink with him later! The nerve of him. His wife is a sweetheart, I did her nails earlier, and there he was asking me out!'

'Such excitement,' teased Mary-Kate. 'I hope you said yes.'
'I told him it was unethical to go out with clients,' Delphine grinned. 'I managed not to mention that I'd rather pull my own teeth out with a pliers first. Yeuch. He was creepy. Let's talk about something else.'
'I'm afraid I've had a very dull day compared to the pair of you,' Mary-Kate said. 'But I did meet the Merry Widow Maguire and I got to hear all about her new venture.'
'I didn't know there actually was a widow,' said Hope in surprise. 'I thought the pub was just called that because it sounded good. I've never seen her.'
'That's because she spends most of the winter in her villa in Portugal,' Mary-Kate explained. 'She's the quintessential merry widow, Belle Maguire is. And why not. It's a mystery to me why she didn't die of sheer suffering before her husband popped his clogs because he was the most miserable man ever walked on the earth. But he was rich.' She grinned. 'Virtue does have its rewards. When he died, Belle renamed the pub - it was plain old Maguire's until then - got herself a villa and doesn't come back to Ireland until March. Rumour has it that she's got a boyfriend half her age out there but she never brings him back here, more's the pity. I'd love to clap eyes on a toyboy.'
'She sounds fascinating and dead glamorous,' Hope said.
'She's glamorous in a perma-tan-and-gold-handbag sort of way,' Mary-Kate explained, 'but the only people she bothers to fascinate are men. She's not a woman's woman. I'd keep Matt clamped to your side when she sees him because he'll be just her type.'
'She'll have to fight off Finula then,' Hope said with a hint of bitterness. 'She's round here every second day asking how he is and what he's been up to. As if I'd know. I'm only his wife.'
'Ah now,' Delphine said comfortingly, 'you know he'll be missing you like mad. Men are hopeless at phoning.'

'He's probably guilty at having left you here on your own with the children,' added Mary-Kate.
He has a funny way of showing it, then, Hope thought to herself. He hadn't phoned since Tuesday evening. Two whole days ago. Hope wouldn't have lasted eight hours away from her family without phoning anxiously but it seemed that Matt didn't feel the same way. He'd walked out that door nearly three weeks ago and had forgotten about them. She'd been feeling lonely since he'd gone but it was apparent that he wasn't suffering at all. No doubt Betsey was squiring him all over town, triumphantly dragging him to parties and launches as a sought-after man on his own. The fact that he had a wife at home in her rural paradise wouldn't matter to the man-hungry predators who prowled the party scene. Without her and the kids to cramp his style, Matt would have a whale of a time, she thought glumly.
Both Delphine and Mary-Kate gave her an extra-tender hug when they went, as if they were physically telling her what they didn't want to say with words: that they knew she was lonely and that they were there for her.
Hope remembered her friends in Bath and wondered frankly if any of them would have been as good to her as her new friends here in Redlion. She tidied up, locked the doors, checked the windows and then went up to her lonely bed. But strangely, she didn't mind being on her own tonight. She curled the duvet snugly around herself. She could lie there and indulge in a fantasy where Christy De Lacy's shining black eyes loomed large. Matt had gone off to Bath, so she was entitled to have a little dream about Christy, wasn't she? It was harmless after all. Like Baileys and ice as a comforting night cap when you were on a diet. Slightly naughty but so, so nice.
On Sunday night, Hope found herself rifling through her wardrobe trying to work out what to wear. It had been years since she'd done that. She'd worn a uniform at Wither- spoon's and since she'd been living in Redlion, her daily outfit was almost as predictable as the office skirt and blouse:


jeans or one of her pairs of navy chinos and either a sweat-shirt or fleecy top. For a total high fashion look, she sometimes added eyeliner and lipstick, but not all the time. She didn't want to frighten the hens with full makeup.
None of the above were suitable for a morning in the Manoir, of course and the bed was soon piled high with blouses, skirts and trousers she hadn't been able to get into for years.
The pile reminded her of being a teenager riddled with anxiety about what to wear. Sam, two and a half years older, had never seemed to be bothered about clothes. With her, it had been a simple matter of opening the colour coordinated wardrobe and instantly pulling out something suitable. Sam hadn't worried about what boys would think of her bum in those trousers or whether she had fat arms or not. Sam's attitude had been: 'Let the boys worry - why should I?'
At the time, Hope had longed for the effortless chic of her older sister. What was she thinking about - she still longed for Sam's effortless, uncaring chic.
Matt, who'd made up for his lack of phone calls with a long one on Friday, rang at ten past eight.
'Hello,' whispered Hope, half in and half out of a clingy polo neck and praying the children wouldn't wake up because of the phone ringing.
'Why are you talking like that?' asked Matt.
'So I won't wake Toby and Millie,' she said, pulling off the polo neck.
Matt groaned. 'I wanted to talk to them,' he said miserably.
His wife shook her head in disbelief at the male sense of timing. 'What time is it, Matt?' she inquired sarcastically. 'Do you not realize they're always in bed by now.'
'No they're not,' he replied. 'They stay up later sometimes.'
'Sometimes,' she agreed, 'but not often. You should have rung earlier. We were here.' While you were having fun in Bath and forgetting all about us, was the subtext.

'I thought you might be out,' Matt said.
Hope didn't bother to tell him that it had been raining buckets all day.
'What are you doing?' he asked.
'Tidying up the linen cupboard,' Hope said with a twinge of guilt as she looked at the debris of her Christy-attracting clothes hunt.
'Oh.' Pause. 'What did you do all day?'
Hope fingered a russet silken blouse speculatively. Now that could be nice with a black skirt. Left loose it would hide her waist. 'Er . . . nothing,' she said. 'Millie has a mild cold so we stayed in. And you?'
'Went for lunch at the Meadows' with Dan and Betsey. The au pair was looking after the children.'
'The au pair?' demanded Hope. 'Betsey and Dan have an au pair? Since when?'
'Since a week ago.'
'She always said she didn't believe in farming her children out to other people,' Hope raged. 'So I suppose this au pair is seventeen and looks like a Britney Spears clone?'
Matt laughed. 'Are you mad? You know what Betsey's like. She's far too jealous to have anyone like that in the house. This au pair is a twenty-three-year-old devout Christian girl from Strasbourg and she is a million miles away from Britney. She's very prim and shy and calls Betsey "Madame".'
Hope harrumphed. 'Betsey would love that. She'll have her in a maid's outfit next, curtseying and bowing and asking if Madame would like tea in the drawing room. What was the Meadows' like? Was it lunch or a party?'
'A party,' Matt said unwisely. 'It was their tenth anniversary and they wanted to renew their vows.'
Sitting on the bed in their cold little country cottage where nobody had called all day and where the main amusement had been watching The Sound of Music on the television in the afternoon with a box of chocolates on her lap, Hope simmered.



It didn't matter that she and Matt barely knew the Meadows and that, if Matt hadn't been staying with Dan and Betsey, he'd hardly have been invited. The fact of the matter was that he'd been enjoying himself without her and now he'd rung too late to speak to the children.
'Well, we were here listening to the rain drumming off the shed roof while you were out at the Meadows' having fun, and drinking cocktails,' Hope said, knowing she was nagging but, in her jealousy, not able to stop herself.
'It was dull as ditchwater,' Matt lied. 'You wouldn't have enjoyed it.'
'That's easy to say seeing as I wasn't asked!'
'Don't give me that,' snapped Matt. 'You're not a child, Hope. You're perfectly capable of going out and doing something for yourself. Stop the martyr act.'
She glared at the phone. Martyr! He'd dared to call her a martyr. While she was here looking after his children in a place he'd chosen, and he was off swanning around at vow-renewing parties. The cheek of it.
And then Hope did something she'd never done before. She hung up without saying another word. He was annoying her too much. Let him suffer. It wasn't as if he could come home in half an hour and be cross with her for hanging up. He wasn't going to be back for weeks. She took the phone off the hook so he couldn't ring back and then smiled at her reflection in the mirror. Bizarrely enough, she felt good.
She picked up a slinky black body that Sam had bought her once for Christmas and that she'd never had either the nerve or the correct bra to wear. Hope tried it on now without a bra and admired the effect of the gathered silky fabric coming down to a deep V below the point where most bras crossed the chest. She tried on her grey skirt suit with it and did a bit of model-type twisting in front of the mirror. It was all way too sexy for a morning doing the accounts in an office where the other two members of staff dressed in sedate business outfits.

Well, this was a business suit, Hope convinced herself. It all depended on what sort of business you intended doing.

In the chintzy spare room in Dan and Betsey's house, Matt sat with his mobile in his hand and felt miserable. Great. Hope had hung up on him. She'd never done that before.
He hadn't meant to needle her but she'd driven him to it. He just hated the way she expected him to make everything all right in life, as if it was his duty to direct all their lives like some great ruler. Do this, Hope, do that, Hope. Don't take responsibility for anything.
He lay back on the flowery duvet gloomily. That wasn't totally true, he admitted. He'd wanted to be the great ruler. He'd liked being the one who told Hope what they'd do next, what video they'd watch, what sort of car they'd buy for her, where they'd go on holiday.
If he was utterly honest, he'd liked the fact that Hope waived her right to make the big decisions and let him do it. He liked being in charge, so he could hardly fault Hope for not wishing to be in charge when she was left on her own. Even when she got those jobs in Redlion, she'd rushed to tell him, wanting him to approve of them. Hope wasn't an independent type, not like her ball-breaking sister.
Only it hadn't been Sam who'd slammed the phone down on him and who had now left it off the hook in a gesture of defiance. It was Hope.
'Matt,' said a soft voice at the door. 'I am making coffee. Would you like some?'
He hadn't been entirely accurate in his description of the au pair, either. Chantal was prim, Christian and certainly not a hot babe. But he'd intentionally made her sound a bit plain. She was actually very pretty in a quiet way and she had undoubtedly got a massive crush on him, which was sweet. She wasn't that unlike Hope, really. All huge eyes, eager to please and absolutely no hassle. Correction: like Hope used to be. But she wasn't Hope. And Matt was

definitely a one-woman man. No matter how many women batted long eyelashes at him, he wasn't interested.
'I'd love a coffee, Chantal,' he said warmly. 'I'll be right down.'

It was a miracle that Hope got out of the house the next morning without getting cereal, juice or some other bit of breakfast on her suit. With her deadly accurate radar sensing that Mummy was Up To Something and in a rush, Millie was wildly uncooperative at breakfast and managed to fire an entire bowl of Coco Pops across the floor with remarkable strength.
Hope, keyed up and as nervous as a thoroughbred filly before a big race, shouted at her, with the result that Toby was sucking his thumb and Millie was sobbing as they finally piled into the car.
'I want Daddy!' wailed Millie, her cherubic little face bright pink with misery.
'Daddy will be home soon,' soothed Hope, doing up Millie's car seat straps expertly as Millie drummed on the seat with her heels.
'Now, now!' screamed Millie, bouncing Barbie off her mother's skull.
'Ouch. That hurt. Behave, Millie,' said Hope crossly.
Cue more roars.
By the time they got to Hunnybunnikins, Hope had a headache from the combination of Millie's roars and the Singalonga Nursery Rhymes tape that both children normally loved.
'My poor Millie. Have you had a bad morning?' crooned Giselle as she welcomed them into the playgroup and immediately spotted Millie's red eyes and trembling lower lip.
Millie shot into Giselle's arms, giving a heavily reproachful look at her mother, before leaning angelically against Giselle's shoulder looking for all the world like a misunderstood flower fairy with her dark curls tumbling around her face.

'Missing their father, I suppose,' Giselle said gently to Hope.
Hope nodded tight lipped. Then,' she said grimly.
'I know,' Giselle said, taking both children by the hands. 'Can't live with them, can't kill them.'

'Don't you look nice,' said Una, admiring Hope's outfit as she brewed them all a cup of coffee.
'Oh, this old thing,' said Hope, settling into her seat. 'Now what's first?'
'Horrible job, I'm afraid,' Una said. 'We've got a problem with the fishmonger's invoices. The filing here's gone to pot because I've had to take so much time off and there's war over fish that's apparently been delivered but was never signed for, so we haven't paid - we only pay if there's a signature from here - and they're going to stop delivering. Poor Christy is going demented about it, so we've got to get it sorted out this week. Only thing is,' she added, pointing to a big folder on the floor beside Hope's desk, 'there's a lot to go through.'
'No problem,' said Hope joyfully, imagining having lots of exciting meetings with Christy where he'd tell her what a pleasure it was working with someone so efficient.
'Nobody could have handled it the way you did,' he'd murmur as they stood with the haddock receipts between them.
Unfortunately, her morning didn't go as planned. Although the door from reception to the accounts office opened many times with the two receptionists looking for Una, there was no sign of Christy. Every time someone came in Hope looked up eagerly, fixing a smile on her face so she'd look welcoming as well as efficient. But it was always one of the two elegant French receptionists, Claude or Sophie, who both ignored Janet and Hope and spoke only to Una.
As the morning passed with nothing more exciting than elevenses and proper shortbread biscuits from the hotel kitchens to enliven things, Hope began to agree with Una:

sorting out the fish dockets was a horrible job. She'd been meticulously entering all the payments and the numbers of the dockets relating to them into the computer all morning and she was still only ten per cent of the way there.
And to add to her sense of anti-climax at not setting eyes on the delectable manager, she'd discovered that the lovely silky body got very hot and un-sexily sweaty in the centrally- heated office, which Una kept at boiling point.
'My hands get so cold that I can't work,' Una had said apologetically. 'Bad circulation, so I like it very hot.'
'That's OK,' said Hope kindly, from behind a film of sweat. She hoped she had deodorant with her. Otherwise she couldn't dare raise her arms or she'd asphyxiate someone.
There wasn't much chit chat in the office. Not that Una and Janet weren't friendly, but they had the radio on all morning listening to talk shows and the conversation ranged from the odd comment on the various radio guests, to discussions on whose go it was to make coffee. And of course, during the commercial breaks, they talked about food. Hope had never worked in an office with women where they didn't talk about food. At Witherspoon's, they'd discussed diets. Yvonne had tried them all, from ones where you only ate carrots, to ones where you could eat anything you wanted as long as you only ate half of it. Hope had tried that one diligently but it hadn't worked. How did you define half a scoop of ice cream?
Here, they talked about gourmet food. Una was trying to tempt her husband's appetite because he was laid up with a broken hip and wasn't eating. She kept bringing home little morsels of delicious food from the hotel in the hope of getting him to eat properly.
'He loves duck a l'orange,' she said, 'but Luigi says it's unlikely to be on the menu again for a couple of days.'
'That thing they do with the angel hair pasta and the Pernod sauce,' drooled Janet. 'I could eat that till it came out of my ears.'
Hope, who had that morning started the must-lose

a-stone-for-Christy-De-Lacy diet, was nearly weak with hunger listening to them. She took another low-calorie mint from her handbag and crunched in desperation.
Claude marched in from reception, cross after an altercation with a guest who was demanding to see Christy.
'I have to see Mr De Lacy,' Claude said angrily, waving his arms in temper.
'Well, he's not here,' Una said tartly. 'You know this is his day off. Frederick's on instead.'
Both Claude and Hope's faces fell. Hope sighed. They could have bloody told her and she would have saved this outfit for another day.
By ten to one, Hope was squinting from keying numbers into the computer.
'You've been wonderful,' Una said gratefully. 'The last person we had here helping out didn't fit in at all but you do. I don't suppose you could do more than two mornings a week? It would be such a great help until my husband's better. In fact, it would be such a great help permanently. We really could do with another pair of hands, couldn't we, Janet?'
Hope was absurdly pleased. It was nice to be needed and appreciated.
'Shouldn't you check with Mr De Lacy first?' she asked. Giselle had already offered her another day for the children at Hunnybunnikins.
'No need, he thinks you're great,' Una said, thereby making Hope's stomach do one of its flips.
He thought she was great. In what way, exactly? Great in a good-for-the-accounts-office type of great, or great in a wildly-attracted-to sort of great?
'Do you want to come to lunch with us?' Una asked. 'One of the perks of the job is amazing food.'
'I better not,' Hope said, thinking of the long-term effects of angel hair pasta in Pernod sauce on her waistline. 'I have to do the shopping before I pick my children up from playgroup.'

'You must bring in photos on Thursday,' insisted Una. 'They sound like such little sweethearts.'
Hope's face softened and she felt utterly guilty about being cross with poor Millie that morning. 'They are,' she
said.
She hurried out the back door to the staff car park, writing a shopping list in her head, totally oblivious to the world around her.
'Hello Hope,' said a familiar purring voice.
She whirled around to find Christy grinning wolfishly at her from the driver's seat of a silver sports car. His hair was wet and slicked back and he was wearing a cream sweater instead of his manager's suit. He looked even more attractive in casual clothes than he had in formal ones. His hair made him look vulnerable slicked back like that. It was like seeing him naked, she thought, then bit her lip at the very idea. He must live at the hotel, it came to her suddenly, and he'd just hopped out of the shower.
'Oh er, hello,' she said lamely. Trust her to meet him now, when she was flushed and un-lipsticked, and not earlier when she'd been looking her best waiting for him.
'Not staying for lunch?' he asked.
'No,' she said, hoping she wasn't blushing.
'Aren't you hungry?'
'Well, yes but I don't have time . . .' she began.
'Nonsense. You should always take time to eat. I'm going to have lunch myself in the Pigeon Club. Want to join me?'
The Pigeon Club was an elegant restaurant ten miles away and completely in the other direction to Redlion. Hope had never been there although she'd heard enough about it from Finula, who raved about the food and the decor and the fact that only the very best people - meaning herself - went there. Up till now, Hope had never had any desire to go there. But suddenly it sounded utterly alluring. And she was, after all, hungry.
'I've got to pick up the kids this afternoon,' Hope said anxiously. 'I said I'd be there by half three.'

'Loads of time. Why don't you bring your car and follow me. When you're ready to go, you can drive off to get your children,' Christy said, as if it was simple.
'OK.' She felt her face flush for definite this time. Lunch with Christy De Lacy. What was she doing?
He rolled up his window and Hope scurried off to her car. Christy wasted no time roaring down the drive, tyres scattering gravel like confetti. Hope did her best to roar after him, wondering how she was going to drive and apply a bit of make-up if he kept taking corners at this speed.
She'd managed to drench herself in White Linen, powder down the shiny bits of her nose and slick on some coral lipstick when Christy's silver bullet of a car took a sharp right and belted up a tree-lined drive. He was already out of the car when Hope pulled up beside him, got out and stared at the Pigeon Club. A long, secretive looking house with a thatched roof and small windows peering out, it looked as if it was made for assignations.
Inside, a man shook Christy's hand enthusiastically, introduced himself to Hope as Liam, the owner, and then found them a table in a window recess where they were practically hidden from the rest of the room. Hope was pleased at this on the grounds that nobody could see her having an illicit lunch while her husband was away. But when she realized that she and Christy could strip down to their underwear and begin to have sex on the linen tablecloth and nobody would see that either, she began to be nervous. This wasn't her scene.
Christy excused himself when he'd settled Hope in her seat. 'I've got to talk to Liam for a moment,' he said.
While he was gone, Hope panicked.
She loved Matt, she'd never had an affair in her life. She'd tried to be sophisticated with Christy and it had backfired. He couldn't just be bringing her to lunch for the good of his health. He had to be looking for something, something Hope couldn't give him. He probably thought she'd take him back to her cottage and bonk him senseless; that she


was a bored housewife looking for cheap sex! Oh God, no.
But it's only lunch, said the little voice in her head, the voice that yearned for excitement. Matt's away having fun in Bath and not bothering to phone you, and all you're doing is going out with a handsome man, a colleague, in fact. Nothing wrong with that. Anyway, Matt and Christy would like each other and they could have dinner parties and invite Christy.
But then, Hope reminded herself honestly, there wasn't a chance in hell of having Christy and Matt in the same room. She was kidding herself with this dream of intellectual dinner parties. She felt herself quiver with excitement just being near Christy and it was a bit unlikely that Matt wouldn't notice this. A person with no perception whatsoever would notice it.
'Sorry about that.' Christy slid into his seat. 'I wanted to have a chat with Liam about something. That's why I was coming here today. I hope you didn't mind me asking you along.' His dark eyes were innocent. 'I thought it would be nice to have the company. I hate eating alone and Liam never has more than a moment to sit and talk to his guest.'
Hope felt some of the tension and guilt leave her - he made it sound so reasonable . . .
They examined the menu, and, after a bit of chat with Liam about his recommendations, ordered. Christy also ordered a bottle of red wine.
'I can't, I'm driving,' Hope said.
'Just a teeny glass,' Christy wheedled. 'It'll do you good after all your hard work this morning. Now, tell me what the situation is with the fishmonger crisis?'
Hope relaxed a bit more. He just wanted to talk about work. What was the harm in that? This was a business lunch, actually, now that she thought about it. She could tell Matt that she'd had a business lunch, if he asked. Not that he'd ask, but if he did, she'd be able to tell him it had all been above board. Utterly respectable. What could you get up to in a public place, for goodness sake?

She talked about the trail of fish receipts and Christy listened, filling her glass with wine occasionally. The starters were a long time coming and with nothing but bread rolls to fill her up, Hope began to get drunk. In Christy's skilled hands, the bottle was soon empty, most of it having gone into Hope's glass. Nerves always made her drink more.
He really was the sweetest man, she thought tipsily. He didn't want to talk about himself at all, he just wanted to hear about her.
'Your husband's writing a novel, I believe,' Christy said as they began their starters. A second bottle of wine appeared magically on the table. 'Tell me all about it. I'd love to meet him. I think I've got fantasies about writing a novel - don't we all, I suppose!'
Wine had removed ninety-nine per cent of the tension in Hope and this guileless statement removed the rest. Dear sweet Christy, he was interested in her family - he'd love to meet Matt. How nice. He was a friend, nothing more. A handsome, utterly sexy friend and it was so nice to be able to go out to lunch with him in a platonic way. That's what she needed: lots of sexy platonic friends with kind eyes.
Staring over at Christy with glazed eyes, admiring the way the chunky jumper clung to his broad shoulders, she thought he was very sexy indeed. Sam would like him too. If anyone asked, she could say she was finding a nice man for Sam.
They talked about life in Kerry and Hope was thrilled that she was clearly being so entertaining about adjusting to a totally new life. It was amazing that the stories of the rat invasion and her attempts to rear six chicks could sound amusing, but they did. Christy laughed uproariously and didn't interrupt at all.
At half three, the sound of a vacuum cleaner could be heard starting up in the distance. Hope, who was leaning on her hand and smiling at Christy as she mistily told him how she'd spent ages looking for something nice to wear that day in case she'd bumped into him, sat up at the sound.

Through a drunken haze, she looked at her watch and
gasped.
'The children! I've got to pick them up!' she said.
'Not yet, surely,' said Christy, looking a bit put out.
'Yes! I'm late!' wailed Hope getting clumsily to her feet. She knocked over her wine glass, mercifully empty, in her attempts to get out of the seat.
'You can't drive, darling,' Christy said. 'You're plastered. I'll drive you.'
'You're drunk too. I can't let you drive my children,' Hope said.
'I haven't had as much as you,' he replied truthfully, having poured much more wine into Hope's glass than into his.
'No,' insisted Hope. She was drunk, she was ashamed to admit, but she wouldn't let anyone else in that state drive her precious children. 'You can drive me to Hunnybunnikins and I'll phone Teddy Taxi to take us home.'
She passed a mirror in the hall on their way out and was shocked to see that she no longer looked as lovely as she felt she had an hour ago, when she'd admired herself in a happy drunken haze in the ladies' room mirror. Her face was flushed, her eyeliner was all gone and she'd rubbed her lipstick off with her wineglass.
Christy's car felt very low as she swung herself inelegantly into it. The interior was also very small and when Christy's hand settled on the gear stick, it was only inches away from her knee.
'Settled?' he asked.
'Yes,' she said, feeling trollopy and like a bad mother.
She began to feel slightly queasy as they raced along. Christy certainly didn't slow down in deference to the wine he'd drunk. Hope stared guiltily out the window and worried about being late for the children and about Christy driving after drinking. She was worrying so much, she didn't notice that between gear changes, Christy rested his hand on her knee. It was only when they reached Hunnybunnikins that

she realized why her knee felt warmer than the rest of her.
Christy stopped the car on the other side of a big tree
that shielded the playgroup from the road. It also shielded
the car from anyone inside the building. The next house was
a few hundred yards away. Nobody was looking.
'Bye darling,' said Christy softly. He moved like a big cat
until his arms were around Hope and his dark, saturnine
face was inches away from hers. He closed the distance
between them and then his lips touched hers in a deep, open
kiss. Hope felt her body melt automatically against his hard
chest and she arched herself instinctively upwards, as if waiting
for his hands to slip into the valley between her breasts
and discover that she wasn't wearing a bra. Every nerve in
her body tingled, waiting for his next move. Her nipples
quivered with excitement, hard as bullets. Then, before she
had a chance to say anything, he pulled away and brushed
her lips with his thumb tenderly.
'I've wanted to do that from the moment I met you,' he
said, staring at her with his deep, unfathomable eyes.
Hope breathed heavily.
'I'll see you soon,' he said and put both hands back on
the steering wheel.
'T . .. thanks for lunch,' she stammered and clambered
out of the car, catching her tights on the door and snagging
them.
Christy drove off with a crunching of tyres and Hope was
left standing beside the playgroup, feeling juddery from too
much drink and too much excitement. How was she ever
going to explain this to Giselle?
Giselle took one look at her, said nothing, and then led
Hope into the adults' quarters where she made her a cup of
coffee so strong a duck could trot across it.
'I had a couple of glasses of wine after work and I got a
lift here and I knew I couldn't drive the children home
Hope rattled on.
'And you got a lift?' Giselle inquired, her kind face concerned.

'From someone at work,' said Hope with a hiccup. 'Mary
Kate's always telling me to loosen up. I suppose this must
be what she means! Can I use your phone to call Teddy
Taxi?' she added.
At home and still tipsy, Hope skipped around the cottage,
happily playing with the children and feeling wildly energetic.
'You
smell funny,' Millie said, confused by this unusually
giggly version of her mother who hadn't changed into her
normal old clothes.
Hope picked her up and they danced around the room
together. Toby wanted to join in, so Hope put on some
music and the three of them twirled and danced for a while.
Both children had been making things with glitter and gold
stars in the playgroup, so as they danced, flecks of glitter
fell.
'I'm shiny like a star!' sang Millie, twirling on her toes
like a ballerina with glittery fragments dancing around her
in shafts of pale sunlight.
'Lovely stars,' sang Hope happily as she twirled too.
But by half five, both Hope's hangover and a terminal
dose of guilt began to kick in. What had she been doing
having lunch with Christy? She must have been out of her
mind. And that kiss outside the playgroup . . . Just thinking
about it made her quiver somewhere deep in her solar plexus,
but it had been wrong, absolutely wrong. It must never
happen again. What if somebody had seen them and told
Matt? Hope paled at the very thought. No, it must never
happen again.

She woke up in the middle of the night in a panic, having
just had a fevered dream where Matt had walked in on her
and Christy making love in the hotel Jacuzzi. Dreams were
so weird: she didn't know if the hotel had a Jacuzzi. Hope's
pulse raced with shock as she remembered the look of
devastation on Matt's dear face when he'd realized that his
naked wife was straddling a total stranger, clinging to him

like a sex-starved limpet. Devastation was the only word
for it.

The guilt overwhelmed Hope. Why had nobody ever told
her that cheating on your husband would be so awful? All
those films and books had made it plain that the only risk
was getting caught, nothing about the agony of guilt over
hurting someone you loved. And this wasn't even proper
cheating; it had only been a stolen kiss. She tried to convince
herself that it wasn't so bad. It wasn't full-blown sex in the
Jacuzzi. It wasn't sexual at all, really.

Oh hell. Hope felt like crying. It was no use trying to
convince herself that her afternoon with Christy had been
innocent: it hadn't. If his sports car had been any more
like a double bed, she'd have been stripped down to her
underwear in seconds, so great had been the electricity
between the two of them. Flattery and excitement meant
she'd almost shoved her boobs in his face and if he'd touched
her any more, she'd have swooned in her eagerness to be
made love to.

Tearfully, she got out of bed, wrapped herself in Matt's
old dressing gown for comfort, and went downstairs. Sleep
would be impossible now: she might as well turn on the TV
and watch some mindless middle of the night television.

With a reviving cup of tea in her hand, Hope switched
on the television and started to watch a repeat of an '80s
American soap. She was just remembering a time when she'd
worn jackets and jumpers with huge shoulder pads like the
women on the show, when she realized that the heavily
shoulder-padded actress screaming at her downcast husband
was upset because he'd admitted to having an affair.

'Why did you have to betray me?' screamed the woman,
doing her best to look devastated without ruining her inch
thick eye makeup.

Hope couldn't change the channel fast enough as another
wave of shame surged in her soul. Would she ever forgive
herself for almost cheating on Matt? Would she have to live
with this guilt forever? She knew that magazine agony aunts


urged people having affairs not to tell purely to purge themselves
of guilt. Doing so only salved the guilty person's conscience
and did nothing to help the relationship. But Hope
longed to be able to admit all to Matt and be absolved. If
only she could turn the clock back and do things differently.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN


Virginia and Dinky were gardening when the phone rang.
Virginia pulled off her gardening gloves as she ran into the
house, Dinky running ahead helpfully.

It was Laurence and he sounded upset.

'I don't know how to tell you this, Mum,' he said, 'but
Barbara's not happy with the wedding plans.'

'What do you mean "not happy"?' asked Virginia.

Laurence sighed. 'She says she's always wanted a beach
wedding, you know, with everyone barefoot on the sand
and the waves in the background.'

Virginia counted to ten. It was a mistake to bitch to your
son about your future daughter-in-law, she knew.

'Why didn't she say this in the beginning?' Virginia said
mildly. 'You booked the church and the hotel last month.
Perhaps it would have been easier to say what she wanted
before everything was organized.'

The wedding was due to take place in four months and
the reception was to be in one of Dublin's poshest hotels.
So far, the only trauma had been the fact that the pretty
church that Barbara had set her heart on had been booked
already for another wedding. However, since Barbara and
Laurence - or, should that be Laurence, Virginia thought were
paying for the wedding, Virginia had no intention of
putting her oar in. 'I'm sure you'll lose your deposit from
the hotel for cancelling,' she added gently, knowing damn
well who'd be out of pocket due to Barbara's newest fantasy.

'I know,' Laurence groaned. 'She says she didn't want to
make a fuss.'






There was no point in saying that changing her mind four
months before the actual wedding would create far more
fuss than being upfront about what she wanted in the first
place.

'What do Barbara's parents say?'

'They just want her to be happy. And so do I. Mum, I
know you were looking forward to it so much. Would you
hate it if we went to the Caribbean instead?'

'Of course not, Laurence, love. It's your wedding, not
mine. But lots of people probably won't be able to travel
that far. It's a big expense,' she added delicately. 'Have you
checked out dates and places yet?'

'I'm going to,' he promised. 'I've just been so busy at
work, I haven't had a chance to make any phone calls
yet.'

Virginia couldn't resist it: 'Why can't Barbara check it
out?'

'She hates doing things like that,' Laurence said. 'She's
very shy, you know, Mum. She's not organized, like you.'

Virginia privately thought that Barbara's problem was
nothing to do with shyness. Over-indulged was more like it.
Her poor parents would probably agree to a wedding on
Mars if it pleased her. And now she had Laurence singing
off the same hymn sheet. Pleasing Barbara was the name of
the game.

'Well Laurence, when you've checked it out, phone me
back. There's no point making a drama out of it.'

Jamie was much less reserved when he rang.

'That bloody bitch Barbara is doing my head in, Mum.
She treats Laurence like dirt. Have you heard the latest about
the wedding? Stupid cow wants to get married on a beach.
If she's not careful, when she gets to the beach, I'll shove
her into the water and hold her head down and she can glug
"I do" with a mouthful of seawater.'

'Jamie,' chided his mother.

'Well, she deserves it. She's messing Laurence about big
time. The poor guy's distraught. They're going to lose a


fortune on the hotel deposit, not to mention the holiday
deposit now that Madam wants to honeymoon in the Caribbean
instead of Thailand.'

'We can't get involved, Jamie,' Virginia said. 'I refuse to
be an interfering mother-in-law.'

'Mum, if Dad was alive, he wouldn't stand for it,' Jamie
said angrily. 'He'd back Laurence up and show him he
deserved better than that stupid Barbara.'

'He wouldn't interfere,' Virginia said weakly.

'He would if he thought Laurence was going to get hurt,'
Jamie said.

Virginia had been standing by the phone in the sitting
room, now she sat down heavily on the corner of the couch.

'Mum, you're not the only person messed up by Dad's
death,' Jamie went on. 'Laurence took it hardest. He was so
close to Dad. You know how sensitive he is. Just because
he doesn't talk about it, doesn't mean he isn't miserable. He
hasn't been the same since and Barbara is the first person
he's fallen in love with. He's totally messed up and she's
taking advantage of it. He needs us, he needs us to tell him
to call the whole thing off. They're rushing into it. Oh,
there's my mobile. I better go, Mum. I'll call soon.'

And he was gone. Jamie always was the high-speed one
of her sons, rushing everywhere, living life at ninety miles
an hour. And Laurence was the quiet, sensitive one; the one
who bottled up his feelings and never told anybody how he
really felt.

Dinky, knowing her mistress was upset, positioned herself
beside Virginia's feet and raised her big eyes anxiously.
For once, Virginia didn't even notice. She was too shattered.
All she could think was that she'd been so busy taking care
of herself when Bill died that she hadn't taken care of her
sons.

As usual, talking it over with the pragmatic Mary-Kate
helped.

'I don't know what to make of Barbara,' Virginia moaned
as they drank coffee in Mary-Kate's cosy back office. 'She


said she wanted a romantic proposal where Laurence produced
the ring, and then, when he did, she wanted a different
one because she didn't like the one he'd chosen.'
'Why not pick it together in the first place?' Mary-Kate
asked. 'That's what most couples do nowadays.'
'Not Barbara. It's like the ten labours of Hercules,' Virginia
said. 'Barbara likes making people exert themselves on
her behalf. She needs to have Laurence running around after
her all the time.'
'How many labours has Laurence clocked up so far?'
Virginia shrugged gloomily. 'Not enough, I daresay. Barbara
probably has a list. I'm just terrified she's one of those
awful women who never want to be responsible for anything,
the sort who can't be satisfied but who never make
an effort to satisfy themselves,' Virginia said.
Mary-Kate looked as if she knew exactly what her friend
was talking about.
'You know,' Virginia continued, 'the sort of woman who
never makes a decision about anything, who plays the victim
card like as if it was the Ace of Hearts in poker, and then,
when it all goes wrong, spends her life telling anyone who'll
listen that it's all his fault.'
'Ah, I know what you mean.' Mary-Kate's face was grim.
'I knew a woman like that once. She should have had "poor
me" tattooed on her forehead. She got married to this lovely
man because he stood for all the things she wanted in life:
money, stability, a big future. Marrying him was a career
move for her, a career of being the lady of the manor. Then,
when the marriage didn't work out according to her plan,
she refused to acknowledge it. There was no way she was
giving up her position in life, God help her. She wanted to
hold onto all the material trappings and she spent years
telling anyone who'd listen that it was his fault, that he was
a terrible husband and she didn't know why she stuck with him. She'd never admit that they shouldn't have got married
in the first place.'
Mary-Kate's eyes were filled with unshed tears.

It was obvious to Virginia that there was more to this
story than met the eye. 'They were friends of yours?'

'I knew him at college, before he married her,' Mary-Kate
said. 'The whole class went to the wedding and I think every
single one of his friends knew he was making a big mistake.
They were far too different to ever be happy together.'

Suddenly it all made sense. Mary-Kate was talking about
the man in her life, the man she still mourned over. 'You
loved him?' Virginia asked quietly.

Mary-Kate nodded. 'We lost touch and met up a few
years after he got married and we fell in love. Timing is
everything, right? If we'd fallen in love before he'd met
her, who knows what would have happened. Anyway, we
were together for six years. We were crazy about each
other.'

'What happened?' Virginia's voice was gentle.

'She found out about us, had a breakdown and begged
him not to leave.'

'And he didn't?'

'No.' Mary-Kate blinked back the tears, as if she'd shed
quite enough for her lover already. 'I came down here to
take over the chemist and they had another child.' She gave
a little half-shrug. 'That's my sordid story. I don't look like
the other woman type, do I?'

Virginia smiled softly. 'Well, the absence of fire engine
red lipstick and black silk stockings did throw me. You're
pretty good at keeping secrets, Mary-Kate.'

'When you live in a small village, some things need to be
kept secret. Nobody knows about him although I think
Giselle may have guessed - she's very intuitive. But I
wouldn't want anyone else to know. It's better that they
think I'm the spinsterish pharmacist rather than the harlot
who was in love with a married man. I haven't shocked you,
have I?' She was suddenly anxious. 'I felt as if I could tell
you but I'd hate to lose your friendship . . .'

Virginia fixed her with a glare. 'If you think I'm the sort
of uptight moral hypocrite who'd condemn you, then you


don't know me very well. Aren't you talking to Redlion's
second merry widow, who's scandalizing the ladies in the
church by having a wild fling with poor innocent Kevin
Burton?'
They both laughed. The gossipmongers of the village were
already on full alert at the news that Virginia often had
lunch at the golf clubhouse with Kevin.
'I'm afraid you have upset some of the local ladies who
thought they might have a chance with dashing Kev,' Mary
Kate admitted. 'Miss Murphy who does the church flowers
is particularly upset and thinks you're a brazen hussy. Her
hopes of walking down the aisle for the first time at the age
of sixty were scuttled when you appeared in your Dublin
finery. But,' Mary-Kate smiled, 'rivalry over Kevin is having
a good effect on my business. I'm doing a roaring trade in
discreet silvery blonde hair dye since you moved in. There
are plenty of women who've realized that if the elegant Mrs
Connell can look like a film star, then there's no reason for
them to have dull grey hair. They'll be coming to you for
make-up tips soon.'
'You're priceless,' Virginia said grinning.
'You think I'm joking, don't you? I'm not,' her friend
retorted.
'I'm not after Kevin, not in that way,' Virginia said. 'It's
just nice to have someone to play golf with.'
'Tell that to Miss Murphy.'

Virginia fiddled with the card Kevin had sent her for so long that she creased one corner irretrievably. She'd never
been a fidgeter. Neither had Bill. They'd both been calm
people.
Virginia remembered when the children had been small
and the little boy next door, Freddie, had stuffed four peas
up his nose.
'Oh Christ, what'll we do?' roared his mother, who'd
been having a companionable cup of coffee with Virginia
while the children laid waste to the back garden.

Virginia had calmly dropped her boys off at her friend
two doors down, had taken Freddie and his mother to the
doctor's, and had them all back home in an hour, no fuss,
no hysterics. Apart from a slight tantrum from Freddie when
he set eyes on the instrument of torture the doctor produced
to remove the peas.

Thereafter, Freddie's mother considered Virginia to be
the greatest solver of disasters in the area. When her washing
machine flooded, she rang Virginia. When Freddie's younger
sister nearly electrocuted herself with the toaster and fused
the entire house, she rang Virginia.

'I hope her husband doesn't leave,' Bill had teased. 'She'll
be on the phone to you like a shot.'

But Virginia's legendary calmness had deserted her when
she'd received Kevin's card asking her to the recital. As formal
as an invitation to a royal garden party, Kevin's invitation
was old-fashioned and absolutely unthreatening.

Would you be my guest on Thursday evening for a recital in Kilmonbeckin? If you can go, I'll pick you up at seven.

So why then was Virginia terrified at the idea of meeting
him in the evening? Because, she thought, evening meant a
date. That would really give the church flowers ladies something
to gossip about.


Virginia deliberately wore a new dress the night of the recital.
It would have been wrong to wear something she'd worn
for Bill - the evening would have been doomed from the
start. Virginia knew that if she'd sat fingering the material
of her favourite rose-coloured woollen dress and thinking
of the last time she'd worn it, a dinner with dear Antonia
and Michael in Howth when she and Bill had to get a taxi
home after Michael had insisted they all try some of his
special Armagnac, then she'd have descended into tears of
guilt and depression. Not the ideal way to spend an evening.
It would also have been unfair to Kevin. He'd asked her out
for the night, not her and the ghost of her husband.

So she'd taken a trip into Killarney and bought a simple


pale amber dress in a soft knit fabric. She'd tried on a lovely
black one, beautifully cut and very chic, but in the harsh light
of the shop, Virginia realized she looked like a caricature of
a widow in her weeds, so she went for the amber instead.
Anyway, she thought, Bill had always hated her in black.

'I know you love shiny things,' he'd joke whenever she
put on any of her black clothes, 'but you don't have to look
like a magpie into the bargain.'

The combination of her silvery blonde hair and a black
outfit had made her resemble a magpie, but she'd never let
him away with saying it without a bit of retaliatory teasing.

'Talking of shiny things,' she'd say sweetly, 'I hope you're
saving up for my Christmas pressie. Weirs have some lovely
diamond chokers and they're only a couple of hundred thousand
each.' Even if they could have afforded a diamond
choker, Virginia wouldn't have wanted one. She was totally
happy with the simple pearl necklace Bill had bought her
for their silver wedding.

'Damn,' Bill would joke. 'I'd ordered that diamond thing
for the other woman. I suppose you want one too, do you?
Honestly, there's no pleasing some women. I'll have to ring
up the Swiss bank again.'

Virginia would then throw a cushion or something at
him. 'Just as well you're joking, my boyo,' she'd say. Then
she'd wonder was it worth changing her clothes. 'Is black
awful on me? Should I wear something else?'

'Nothing you wear would ever look awful,' Bill would
reply. 'You're a stunner, Mrs Connell, do you know that?'

'You look charming,' Kevin said formally when he picked
up her in his car at seven.

Virginia's smile was a little strained. 'Thank you,' she
said. This was so strange. There was none of the relaxed
camaraderie they'd shared on the golf course. It was easy
to chat while you were doing something sporting in broad
daylight with other people around, and not so easy at all
when there was just two of you in a car in the evening going
on a date.


A date. The very thought of it made Virginia's heart
break. She shouldn't need to be dating, she should be tucked
up at home with Bill, doing the crossword.

They drove along in deafening silence. After a few minutes
of keeping his eyes firmly on the road, Kevin cleared his
throat. 'Er, you're very good to come along tonight,' he said
stiffly. 'It's nice to have a guest at these things.'

'Yes, it is,' said Virginia, just as stiffly. She looked out of
the window into the inky night.

What are we like? she asked herself ruefully. Two ventriloquist's
dummies sitting in the car, unable to speak.
Neither Bill nor Ursula could have wanted that.

So Virginia decided to chat as normal, the way they did
on the golf course.

'I've been practising my putting like mad,' she said
brightly. 'My son, Jamie, sent me this carpet putter and it's
great. Once you shoot the ball at it, it whizzes it back across
the carpet to you. Dinky loves it. She thinks it's for her and
keeps chasing the golf ball.'

Kevin smiled. 'Those things are addictive,' he said. 'Ursula
bought me one once and I spent hours playing with it. It's
probably stuck in the attic now. I bet Bill had one too?'

Virginia tried to remember. 'Not that I can recall, but he
probably did although I don't know what became of it, if
so. He had everything. If they made golf oven gloves, we'd
have had them too.'

'You mean you don't have golf oven gloves?' Kevin said,
doing his best to sound surprised. 'Mine are my most prized
possession.'

And they were off, chatting and laughing, friends again
instead of dummies.

Ursula had been a brilliant putter, Kevin said fondly.
She'd won so many matches with marvellous puts.

'She sounds like she was a marvellous golfer,' Virginia
said.

'Oh she was, she was.'

The big modern hall was buzzing with people when they


got there, all clutching the glass of sickly mulled wine that
the organizers thought would bring people out in droves on
a cool April evening.
Virginia handed Kevin a glass. One mulled wine would
be good for him. He needed to relax.
'Kevin,' called a voice from the throngs of Sunday best
people waiting to be told to take their seats.
'Glenys, Richard, how nice to see you,' Kevin said, greeting
a couple effusively.
Glenys, a matronly sixty-something resplendent in fur and
a frosted hairdo, hugged Kevin before turning to cast a
mauve-eyeshadowed stare over Virginia.
'Hello,' Virginia said warmly, 'I'm Virginia Connell, I'm
a friend of Kevin's.'
'Glenys and Richard Smart,' Glenys said coolly. 'We're
very old friends of Kevin's. And Ursula's,' she added with a
determined lift to her chin.
Oh dear, thought Virginia, her smile never faltering. So
that's the way the cookie crumbles. Loyal to the memory of
our dear, dead friend, we don't want any mucky widow
from Dublin getting her hands on the grieving widower.
'How nice to meet you both,' Virginia said. Bill had often
teased her that she was an expert at being outwardly polite
to people she didn't like.
Richard nodded hello.
Glenys turned away and took one of Kevin's hands in
hers. 'Dear Kevin, how are you?'
It was a nightmarish evening. Glenys managed the seating
plan so that Virginia and Kevin were separated, with Virginia
sitting at the outside of their row beside a monosyllabic
Richard. Hemmed in by Richard and Glenys, Kevin couldn't
exactly reach over and speak to Virginia, which was probably
Glenys's plan all along. At the interval, Glenys sighed
loudly and said that the tragedy was that poor Ursula wasn't
here to listen to the concert.
'She so loved recitals,' Glenys said wistfully, squeezing Kevin's hand. 'Do you remember that lovely night we all

had in Dublin at the Concert Hall, when we stayed in the
Westbury and had supper after the show?'

Kevin did remember, and soon the three old friends were
laughing over the grand time they'd all had.

Virginia felt her fixed smile waver. How terribly, terribly
rude.

She hoped that if her friends ever got to meet Kevin, they
wouldn't stoop so low as to spend the entire time remembering
Bill and all the lovely times they'd had when he was
alive.

Rude and insensitive didn't even come close. Glenys was
doing it on purpose too, because she clearly disapproved of
Virginia. But why? What was she protecting Kevin from?
Did she imagine that Virginia was some sort of evil hussy
who'd left a trail of abandoned men behind her? Or was
Virginia cast as the black widow, who mated, then killed?
Whatever it was, Richard and Glenys Smart clearly believed
there was some nasty intent in her friendship with Kevin.

After the recital, the four of them walked to the small
pub nearby. Virginia let Glenys march alongside Kevin, one
arm protectively through his, leaving Virginia and Richard
to walk behind. Glenys kept up the train of babble about
Ursula throughout.

During a five minute walk, they got through Ursula's love
of classical music, her ability to recognize any piece from
the first four bars and how she'd always wanted to learn to
play the violin.

'Don't you think she'd have been wonderful at the violin?'
Glenys said mistily to Kevin. 'She was so talented, wasn't
she?'

Virginia, who'd previously felt that Ursula Burton was
the sort of woman she'd have liked a lot, began to dislike
her no end. How could any sane woman have been friends,
no, 'best friends' with the likes of the nauseating Glenys?

In the pub, Virginia took matters into her own hands by
choosing a banquette with room for two and inviting Kevin
to sit beside her. Glenys and Richard were forced to sit on


two single chairs opposite from where Glenys glowered like
Grumpy with migraine. For badness sake, Virginia put a
hand on Kevin's arm. He started nervily and got to his feet.
'Drinks?' he said, obviously anxious to be away from his
date. 'I'll get them.'
When he returned, he sat beside Virginia but kept as far
away from her as was possible given the constraints of sharing
a seat, and let Glenys carry on with the Ursula tribute
concert. When Kevin did speak to Virginia, he was as formal
as an archbishop, as if he didn't want to give his old friends
the wrong idea.
Virginia's bullshit tolerance level bottomed out quite
quickly. She finished her white wine quietly and then asked
Kevin if he'd mind driving her home.
'You must come to dinner soon,' Glenys gushed to Kevin
as they left.
Virginia knew that she most definitely wasn't included in
the invitation.
The drive home was silent with the car radio the only
distraction.
Virginia didn't see the point of talking to Kevin. If he was
ashamed of his friendship with her, then she didn't want to
see him again: it was that simple. Miss Murphy of the church
flower arranging group could get her hopes up again.
At Kilnagoshell, she said a polite thank you for the recital
and began to get out of the car.
'It was a pleasure,' Kevin said, sounding like his old self
for the first time all evening. 'I'll phone you about golf?' It
was a question rather than a statement.
Virginia gave him the benefit of her cool, clear gaze.
'Why?' she said.
He lowered his eyes first. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I know
that was awful for you. Glenys and Ursula were such friends
and Glenys can't cope with the idea of anyone replacing
her.'
'You should have told Glenys that I have no intention of
replacing Ursula,' Virginia said crisply. 'I went out with you

tonight as a friend, nothing more. Friends do not sit idly by
and let other friends be insulted.' She got out, slammed the
car door shut and walked to the house, leaving Kevin with
no option but to drive off.


'How was your evening?' asked Mary-Kate the next day,
when they met by chance outside the post office. Virginia
had discovered that it was impossible to go into Redlion
without meeting someone you knew. In her current bad
mood, she was grateful that it was Mary-Kate she'd bumped
into and not Lucille from the fashion shop who spent many
futile hours trying to get Virginia into the boutique to buy
a little something.

Virginia filled her friend in on the grisly details.

'I don't know the Smarts but she sounds like a nightmare.
Probably has fantasies about comforting the grieving widower
herself,' Mary-Kate said prosaically. 'Having a handsome,
unattached man around can do wonders for a
marriage and Mrs Smart may have thought how nice it
would be to have a spare man for her parties. You've ruined
all that, you hussy.'

Virginia shrugged. 'I know, I'm just a heartbreaker, wilfully
being nice to lonely men. There should be a law against it.'

'Don't give up, Virginia. Just because she's jealous of you,
doesn't mean you can't see Kevin.'

Virginia looked down at the letters she intended to post.
'That's the thing, Mary-Kate,' she admitted, 'he did behave
differently to me in her presence. I think he's already crippled
with guilt for seeing me at all.'

'Guilt? But why? His wife's dead, she's been dead several
years, he's not hurting her memory by seeing you.'

Virginia shrugged. 'Dead but most definitely not forgotten.
It's obvious he feels disloyal for meeting me for the odd
game of golf.'

Mary-Kate looked at her sadly.

'I think about Bill all the time, you know,' Virginia said


softly. 'I loved him so much that there'll never be anybody
for me but him, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy the
company of a man like Kevin. The very idea of having someone
to go out for a meal with makes life sort of normal
again. When Bill died, I didn't think there could ever be any
normality in my life. But simple things, like buying a new
dress or making new friends, help. They make me feel like
I'm still alive, that I'm not just marking time until I die and
join Bill.' Her beautiful, fine-boned face was earnest as she
spoke and Mary-Kate thought that Kevin Burton was a fool
if he walked away from lovely, gentle Virginia Connell
because he and his so-called friends wouldn't let go of his
dead wife.

'Do you understand what I'm saying, Mary-Kate? I can't give up on life, that would be wrong. I might as well take
a razorblade into the bath and be done with it, if I do that.
I've got to try to actually live for the rest of my life, rather
than just exist. What's wrong with that?'

'Nothing. You're absolutely right. You shouldn't stop living
just because there are people out there who feel threatened
by a woman who doesn't throw herself on her husband's funeral pyre.' Mary-Kate was firm. 'Give Kevin
a second chance, won't you?'

'Well, I might as well. I've been here a year now and he's
the only handsome single man I've noticed, unless I try and
wrench Richard Smart out of Glenys's tight little hands.'

They both grinned at the thought.

'Go on,' teased Mary-Kate, 'I dare you.'

Virginia shuddered. 'Even double daring wouldn't work.
She's welcome to him. In fact, they deserve each other.'


CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


'Mummy, phone!' said Millie indignantly the next morning,
climbing onto her mother's bed and bouncing. 'Wake up,
Mummy, it's Daddy on the phone.'

Mummy, head throbbing from a terrible night's sleep,
dragged herself into a sitting position. Why hadn't they ever
got a phone connection in the bedroom?

She stumbled downstairs and picked up the receiver, her
voice croaky and tired.

'Hi darling, you sound as if you've just woken up,' said
Matt cheerily.

Hope thanked God that video phones were an innovation
yet to hit the Parker family. She was sure that Matt would
be able to tell she'd been up to no good purely by looking
at her guilty face.

'N... no,' she stammered. 'Just tired. I had a bad
night.'

'You poor thing,' Matt answered. 'I'm afraid I've got
something to talk to you about.'

Hope's eyes widened. How could he have heard? Who'd
have phoned him? Nobody in the village had a clue where
he was staying and it had only been the day before and
surely nobody would be so cruel as to break up a marriage
over a piece of vicious gossip . . .

'Things are so busy here, I'll be back as planned in about
ten days but I'll have to go back to Bath for a couple of
weeks, maybe longer,' Matt said. 'The office is so busy right
now and Adam isn't back to full strength. The heart attack
has had a huge effect on him, he's changed, I must say. And


since that new restaurant campaign's been nominated for
the industry awards, Judds are the hottest agency around
and everybody wants us working for them. The phones are
hopping and Adam is loath to turn any work down, particularly
since some of the people ringing are companies whose
business we've been touting for for years.'
Hope sank onto an armchair with relief. He didn't know
anything about her or Christy after all. Relief made her
forgiving.
'It's all right, Matt,' she said warmly, 'there's nothing you
can do. I understand.'
'That's great, love,' he replied. 'I was afraid you'd go
ballistic. I know it's been tough for you coping with the kids
on your own. I promise that when I get back, we'll ask
Finula to babysit and we'll take ourselves off for a romantic
weekend away somewhere, okay?'
The thought of a romantic weekend where she'd have to
steel herself not to tell Matt what had happened made
Hope's blood run cold.
Every part of her longed to blurt it all out. She'd kissed
Christy De Lacy but honestly, it had been a mistake and
she'd never meant to ...
'What do you think, Hope? Would that be a good idea?'
'Lovely,' she said automatically. 'A weekend away would
be lovely, but let's take the kids.' With Millie and Toby
along, there'd be no time for either introspection or long
talks about marriage.
Matt began discussing venues for the weekend away but
Hope wasn't listening: she was crucifying herself. Except
Matt got the wrong idea about her silence.
'Don't go all quiet on me,' he begged. 'I'm sorry I'm not
going to be home this weekend. I know you think the kids
will have forgotten me and you'll have got yourself a toyboy
with the boredom of it all.' He laughed at the absurdity of
the idea.
Hope joined in nervously. 'Funny, very funny,' she said.

She hadn't meant to dress up the next time she went to work at the hotel. She really hadn't. The night before, she'd chosen a boringly plain white cotton shirt to go with her tailored
black trousers, an outfit that would probably make her a
dead ringer for a waitress and which would kill any lust stone dead. She'd even practised what she'd say should she
bump into Christy.

She'd spent forty-eight hours practising this; endlessly
going over the whole prospective conversation in her head.

I'm married, Christy. I love my husband. It was a mistake
and I'd had too much to drink. I apologize for giving you
the wrong impression. I am a happily married woman.

She tried several variations on this theme, her skin burning
with shame at the thought of having to actually say it
to Christy. He'd probably be shocked to think that she
hadn't meant it when she'd let him kiss her. Perhaps he'd
thought she was some sort of wild, whorish woman who
had affairs left, right and centre and trifled with men's affections.
Oh no, please don't let him have thought that. In all
her years married to Matt, she'd never even looked at
another man, apart from the odd long-range crush on the
likes of Mel Gibson, which was so far into the realms of
fantasy, it didn't matter, did it?

What she really hoped was that Christy never came near
her again, and that she could forget the whole sordid thing
had ever happened. A sort of see-no-evil type of scenario
where Christy was deaf, blind and dumb to the entire event.

In the end, it was Millie who made Hope change out of
her waitress garb by getting strawberry jam all over both
herself and her mother.

'Millie, careful!' said Hope, as Millie stuck a spoon deep
into the jam pot, more for naughtiness than through any
desire for jam.

But it was too late. Millie, and therefore, everyone around
her, was instantly covered in jam. Small jammy fingerprints
on Hope's sleeve rendered the severe white blouse unwearable.
She rushed upstairs to change Millie's jamsplodged



sweat-shirt, before rushing into her room to find something
for herself. The only other white blouse was squashed at the
back of the wardrobe and she dragged it on at high speed,
forgetting why she rarely wore it. Silky and outwardly
demure, the blouse was a slave to static electricity and unless
a tumble dryer freshening sheet was rubbed vigorously over
it, the fabric stuck to the skin like a wet t-shirt.
Hope remembered this as she removed her coat in the
accounts office, to find the blouse stuck to her body as firmly
as if she'd rolled in superglue before getting dressed. 'Oooh static,' said Una sympathetically, staring at Hope,
who was doing her best to pull the blouse away from her
skin. 'I have a silky skirt just like that. If I don't put enough
fabric conditioner in the wash, it sticks to me like mud. And
with my legs, it's not a pretty sight.'
'This looks awful, doesn't it?' wailed Hope, looking down
at her chest where the outline of her lacy white bra was as clear as daylight. 'I just need one of those tumble dryer sheets
and it'll get rid of the static'
'I'll ring laundry and ask them to send one up,' said Una
cheerfully.
Janet was off that day, so it was just the two of them,
working along to the sound of the radio, with occasional
interruptions from reception.
Each time the door opened, Hope jumped guiltily, hoping
it wasn't Christy because she was far too embarrassed to see
him, particularly since she looked like a wet T-shirt contestant.
But
the morning passed without any sign of the handsome
hotel manager. He must be away, Hope reassured herself.
There was no sign of anyone from laundry with the promised
tumble dryer sheet either, but Hope began to stop worrying
about her cling-on blouse. With luck, she thought, she'd be
out the door long before Christy appeared and she wouldn't
have to face him at all. She'd forget her impassioned apology,
too, and hope that they next time they met, they could both
be utterly professional and pretend it hadn't happened.

Like actors and actresses having lust-driven flings when
they were on location making films. DCOL was the name
of the game there, Hope had read: Doesn't Count On Location.
All involved pretended afterwards that the affair hadn't
happened, going chastely back to their partners as if they
hadn't sinned at all. The hotel world must be the same, she
decided.
At five to one, Hope turned off her computer and grabbed
her coat.
'I know it's a teeny bit early,' she said, 'but I've got to
rush.' Christy had always appeared after one in the afternoon.
If only she could leave early, she'd miss him.
'No problem,' Una said. 'Could you just drop this out to
reception on your way?' She held out a document.
Hope took it and peered out at reception. The coast was
clear: no sign of Christy. Thrilled, she handed Una's document
to the receptionist and literally ran out the front door,
her coat over her arm because she didn't have time to put
it on. She rounded the topiary hedge and peered round a
mossy statue of an Irish wolfhound to see if she could spot
Christy in the car park. There was no sign of him. Walking
as quickly as she could in her high heeled boots, she hurried
to the staff car park but she'd only reached the gravelled
entrance when Christy appeared in front of her.
Dressed in his beautifully tailored suit with his dark hair
falling over those glinting, dangerous eyes, he looked incredible
and disturbing. Much more disturbing even than when
he had been naked and turned on in Hope's dreams, ravaging
her furiously, telling her how much he wanted her in that
deep, velvety voice.
'Hello,' he said warmly now, eyeing up her outfit. 'You're
always rushing off somewhere, Mrs Parker.'
Hope was incapable of speech. Despite working out her
spiel many times, she couldn't manage to deliver it now
that Christy was standing beside her, making her heart beat
double time.
'I have to pick up the children,' she said, then cursed



because Christy would know she was lying. She hadn't
picked them up until nearly four the other day.

'Pity,' he said lightly. 'We could have had lunch. I do like
your shirt,' he added, one dark hand stroking the lapels of
the traitorous blouse. 'You wear the most interesting
clothes.' He was grinning at her, one hand still caressing the
fabric of her blouse. He was so close that Hope could feel
the heat of his breath on her face.

'This is a very disturbing outfit,' he said huskily. 'I can't
imagine that I'd get any work done at all if I had to look at
you all morning.'

'You don't have to look at me,' Hope said stupidly.

Christy smiled slowly. 'But I'd like to.' Those eyes roved
all over her, taking in the swell of her breasts, the full curve
of her hips and the soft coral mouth trembling in anticipation.
His head came closer to hers, closer, until his full mouth
hovered just over hers, the glimmer of a smile curving up
the edges.

Hope didn't want to but she couldn't help it. Her 'I'm
happily married' spiel fell apart in her mind and she let
herself be swept along on the intoxicating sensation of being
inches away from the sexiest man she'd ever met. When
Christy's mouth plunged down on hers, she kissed him back.
His hands joined together in the small of her back, pulling
her close to him, moulding her to him. It was different from
the kiss in the car. Then, they'd been constrained by space.
Here, in a discreet corner half hidden by a tall hedge, there
were no constraints. Christy held Hope's quivering body
against his, letting her feel the lean hardness of his body
jammed up against her. She responded fiercely, winding her
arms around his neck, running her hands through the soft
curls of his hair, pulling him closer to her as if she were a
deep sea diver dying for lack of air and he was a spare scuba
tank.

The kiss seemed endless, Hope was lost in Christy's
deliciously probing mouth. Every inch of her body yearned
for him, every inch leaned towards him like a flower reaching


for the sun. Her hands rippled through his hair, sliding down
to his shoulders, delighting in being able to touch him. His
hands left the relative safety of her lower back and slid down
to cradle her buttocks. Hope couldn't stop herself moaning as his fingers pulled her closer to him, leaving the most
exquisite tingling sensation in her lower body. She wanted
him, here and now. She wanted him to push her up against
the wall and rip her clothes off, begging her to let him make
love to her, crying out for her to say yes. Yes, yes . . .

'Yes,' moaned Hope dizzily as Christy's lips burned down
past her neck into the buttoned up cleavage of her glued-on
shirt.

'Yes?' he said hoarsely. 'You mean that?'

'Yes, I know it's wrong but I can't help it,' Hope wailed.

'It's not wrong.' Christy's expert fingers were rapidly
undoing the buttons of her blouse and then his hands were
inside, touching the fabric of her bra, one hand pulling it
away to touch the sensitive skin of her breast itself. Hope
moaned with lust as his fingers circled her nipple, tweaking
and stroking until she was a volcano of excitement. She
couldn't remember being so turned on in her life. Every part
of her strained towards him, liquid with desire . . .

The shrill ringing tone of Christy's mobile phone made
them both jump.

'Jesus!' gasped Christy, whipping a hand out from Hope's
blouse and searching inside his jacket for his phone.

'Christy De Lacy,' he said smoothly, recovering his savoir
faire while Hope stood there, both her mouth and her blouse
gaping.

'Mr Wilson, of course we haven't forgotten you,' Christy
was saying, switching into work mode at the drop of a hat.
It was as if he hadn't practically been having sex with Hope
a moment before.

The exquisite sensation of being wanted by Christy vanished,
to be replaced by the hard, cold truth that when duty
called, he had been quite capable of shoving her aside. And,
like an animal on heat, she'd blindly forgotten her duty to


her husband. What had they been doing? What had she been
doing? Horrified, she buttoned up her blouse, picked up her
coat from the ground where she'd dumped it in high passion,
and ran to her car. So much for 'I love my husband very
much', she told herself fiercely as she threw her belongings
into the car.
You're nothing but a lying, cheating tramp, she cried,
hurtling the car down the drive lest Christy race after her
for a repeat performance. But there was no sign of him. No,
she thought bitterly, he was back in character, playing the
master of the Manoir universe to perfection, having no doubt
forgotten his passionate snog with the stupid, wanton part
timer from the accounts office. The stupid married woman,
with a cuckold for a husband. Now Christy would look
down on Matt, smugly thinking I had your wife, mate and
it was all her fault.
At that moment, Hope hated herself more than she ever
had in her whole life. What had she done? At home, she
stripped off her clothes and put on her oldest jeans and an
elderly, deeply unflattering grey sweat-shirt. She wanted to
tell someone what had happened, to seek some sort of solace
in the sisterhood of having someone say it was nothing,
nothing had happened and, therefore, she had nothing to be
guilty about.
But she couldn't reach Sam either in the office or on her
mobile. In desperation, she tried Mary-Kate but the chemist
phone was engaged. And Delphine knew Christy, which
would make it harder to tell her. She sat at the computer
and tried to compose a note to Sam but when she started
explaining what had happened, the shame hit her again.
Looking at those blank, cold little words describing what
she'd done, he kissed me and I let him, I kissed him back, Hope knew she couldn't bear to tell Sam how low she'd
sunk. Sam would be ashamed of her and with reason.
Miserably, Hope put on her WelingtOn boots and went
outside to do the job she most hated: cleaning out the hen
shed.


The hens didn't spend much time in their shed during
the day, except when it was being cleaned out. Then, they
abandoned their usual activity of pecking the ground for
hours on end and arrived en masse to sit on their perches
and look outraged at all the activity, clucking non-stop in
disgust.
'Stop complaining,' growled Hope crossly, as she started
shovelling out the floor which was a mass of straw and hen
droppings. The smell was awful, but even worse were the
maggots crawling from the eggs which flies laid in the midst
of the droppings. Seeing those wriggling white bodies always
made Hope feel nauseous. Well, she deserved to feel nauseous
today. It was her punishment, her penance. Gritting
her teeth, she shovelled fiercely.
When she finally got through to Sam late that evening,
Hope decided against saying anything. Not that Sam was a
prude or anything, but Hope knew that infidelity was not
like any other sin in life. It was such a taboo topic, not the
type of thing people discussed. People who condoned all
sorts of mad behaviour could be shocked by the thought of
cheating on a partner.
For all that Sam and Matt didn't get on, she might be
utterly stunned to find out that Hope had even toyed with
the idea of cheating on him. Worse still, she'd be so disappointed
in her sister, so Hope said nothing and they
chatted idly for ten minutes.
On Friday, Mary-Kate phoned to say she had the flu, so
did Virginia, Delphine was getting it and that the Macrame
Club on Saturday was therefore cancelled. Hope felt like
crying. The weekend stretched dismally in front of her, with
no adult company and no chance to blurt out her awful
story.
'You sound a bit fluey yourself,' Mary-Kate said suspiciously.
'I'm
fine,' lied Hope.
After she hung up, she stared miserably out the window
where the children were happily making mud pies and were

up to their eyes in dirt. They were utterly happy. She felt
like hell but she had nobody else to blame but herself. There
was only one option: she had to give up her job. She couldn't
bear the embarrassment of ever seeing Christy again. But
how would she ever face Matt?

CHAPTER NINETEEN


'Where'll we go for dinner?' asked Morgan as he and Sam
wandered out of the cinema into the cool night air of Leicester
Square.

'Dinner?' she demanded. 'You've just eaten a mega bucket
of popcorn. How can you be hungry? You must have a tape
worm in there.' She pointed at his lean belly in mock horror.

'That's my secret,' he smiled. 'Us blokes have to suffer to
be beautiful, you know. Leg waxing, tapeworms, the whole
business...'

Sam laughed. 'I'd like to see your face if anyone waxed
any bit of you. Like,' she grinned evilly, 'the bikini line.'

Morgan winced. 'OK, you win. Women have it really
tough, blah, blah, blah. But it's not easy being a hunter
gatherer.'

Beside him, Sam raised her eyes theatrically to heaven.

'Besides, we decided we'd go out for a movie and dinner,'
Morgan added. 'We've only done half of it. I'm keen on
doing the dinner part too. I'm a growing boy and I need my
food.'

'Only if we split the bill,' Sam interjected because this
wasn't a date precisely and she wanted to get the facts
straight at the start. Morgan had phoned up the day before
and said he fancied seeing the new Tom Hanks movie and
asking if she wanted to come along too. Definitely not a
romantic evening, Sam had decided, from his tone of voice.
A casual tone of voice. Just a friend asking another friend
for a night out. Which meant that the bill-splitting thing had
to be sorted out.


'Whatever,' Morgan said. 'Anyway, I owe you for dinner
at your place.'
They walked in companionable silence, Sam struggling to
keep up with Morgan's long-legged lope. Normally, people
had to hurry to catch up with her.
They wandered round Soho looking for somewhere to
eat and ended up outside a suitably dimly lit Italian restaurant
which promised lots of dishes 'like Mama used to
make'.
'They've never tasted my mother's cooking, then,'
Morgan joked as they went in. 'She's a highly talented
woman but the kitchen is not her forte. My father has to
do all the cooking because she can't boil water.'
Sam was surprised. 'You never usually talk about
yourself.'
'Hello,' breathed a very un-Italian looking blonde waitress
who smiled admiringly up at Morgan. 'Table for two?
No problem at all.'
She found them a table then handed Morgan the menus,
almost reverently. Sam watched, half-amused, half-angry.
The only positive sign was that Morgan didn't appear to
notice the waitress's wide-eyed admiration.
'I don't talk much about myself because there's not much
to talk about,' Morgan shrugged when they were alone
again. 'I'm very dull.'
'Our waitress doesn't think so,' Sam said impishly. 'Nor
does Tanya in the shop near us, or any one of the trails of
women I see smiling goofily at you all the time.'
'Jealous, Ms Smith?' Morgan had a piercing gaze when he wanted to use it: his face became more hawkish than
usual, narrowed eyes staring at her curiously over that long
nose.
For one crazy moment, Sam almost thought he wanted
her to be jealous. That he wanted her to say 'yes, I'm jealous
as sin of any woman who looks crossways at you.' But he
couldn't, she was sure of it. Morgan, for all that she loved
his company, wasn't interested in her, not in that way. She

was most firmly a platonic friend, someone he liked but
would never fancy, someone he could talk to when he was
having a break from the Tanyas and Mirandas that waved
to him when he stepped out his front door. Granted, he
didn't pay them any attention. In fact, he was rarely more
than friendly to them, really, even though they looked at
him with undisguised lust as if they'd love to rip his suede
jacket off his lanky frame and trail long nails over his
muscles.

But best of all, there had been no sign lately of the youthful,
doe-like Maggie, the girl who'd rushed into Morgan's
arms that evening. Sam dared not ask about her but hoped
that her absence meant she was out of Morgan's life for
good.

She took a long, cool sip of water.

'It's hot in here,' she said, fanning herself with her hand.

Morgan grinned at her, eyes crinkling up in amusement.

'Stop grinning and start talking,' she said. 'You're far too
secretive you know. You could be on the run from Interpol
for all I know, or on the FBI's most wanted list.'

He nodded. 'There's a reward out for my arrest, obviously.
Not much but enough to, say,' he considered it, 'redecorate
your apartment and buy a nice car, I imagine.'

'A stand up comedian, I should have guessed,' Sam
laughed. 'No, really, tell me about yourself.'

He rubbed his eyes with one hand, and then looked a bit
blearily at her.

'Did it ever occur to you that when people don't talk
about things, it's because they don't want to talk about
them?'

'Yes,' Sam replied equably, 'but I still ask. I'm direct, you
know.'

He laughed. 'There are chief inspectors in Scotland Yard
who are less direct than you are. Right, get your notebook
out, Inspector, what do you want to know?'

Sam felt herself go hot again. What she wanted to ask
was about his relationship history, how many women he'd








gone out with, if he had ever lived with anyone or been
married. But she couldn't ask that sort of thing because then,
he might realize she was interested in him. God forbid. How
humiliating that would be. As if Mr Serial-Dater-of-TwentySomething-Nubile-Blondes
would be interested in a thirty-nine-and-eleven-months-year-old
tough cookie. He hated
tough cookies.
Sam did what she always did: when in a difficult situation,
discuss work.
'You aren't an internet millionaire, I checked,' she said.
'So what do you do?' And how come you have the money
to buy the house next door? was the unspoken question.
'You mean, how did I manage to buy the house next door
to you?' Morgan said solemnly.
She bit her lip and burst out laughing. 'I confess, that was
my real question.'
The waitress arrived with their meals.
'Can I get you anything else?' the waitress asked, gazing
at Morgan.
He favoured her with a warm, engaging smile that made
Sam go weak, as well as want to slap the waitress for impertinence.
'No thanks, everything's fine,' he said.
'Honestly, I've never seen anything like it,' Sam said
crossly, digging her fork into her pasta. 'That woman was
all over you like a cheap suit. They throw themselves at you.
It's shameless.' She twisted her fork viciously.
'She was simply doing her job,' Morgan said in astonishment.
'She has to ask if everything's all right. What are you
on about?'
Sam stared at him. Did he honestly not have a clue? Did
he think that other men spent their lives with women giving
them the sort of longing looks that chocoholics gave Snickers
bars?
'Oh nothing,' she said. 'Go on, you were going to tell me
about your job.'
'I was a venture capitalist,' Morgan said, mopping up
sauce with his bread roll. 'I was a partner in a firm in the


city and we found development money for companies starting
out. It was high-risk but it's an addictive life.'
'Why did you give it up?' she asked unthinkingly. 'It
sounds as if you loved it.'
She glanced up and caught sight of Morgan's face, which
was mask-like.
Instinctively, she reached across the table and touched his
hand, her slim fingers closing round his strong masculine
ones. 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to pry, Morgan. Forget I said
that.'
The mask relaxed a little. 'It's all right. I've got to learn
to be less uptight about it.' He smiled suddenly. 'That's what
Charlie keeps telling me. Charlie's my stepson and he's very
into psychology.'
'I didn't even know you had a stepson,' Sam said.
'You see, my man of mystery thing worked. Actually, I've
three step children, two girls and Charlie. They live with my
ex-wife but we're still very close. I've known them all since
they were little.'
'Oh,' said Sam, sorry she'd been so intrusive. 'I really
didn't mean to pry . . .'
'You're a woman, that's your job,' Morgan said through
a mouthful of pasta.
'Well, you know all about me,' Sam began defensively.
'I'm teasing you,' he said softly. 'It's not so bad now I've
started. I understand what you're like because that's what I
was like: a workaholic. I lived for my job and at the end of
the day, it broke up my marriage. We split up and now
we're divorced, which is what spurred me to get out of the
rat race. Too late for me and Val, mind you. That's it, that's
my story.'
'I'm sorry,' Sam said.
He shrugged and pushed his plate away. 'It was my fault,'
he said brusquely. 'The house was my project, something to
take my mind off life until I worked out what I wanted to
do next. When Val and I were married, I never changed a
light bulb or hammered a nail. We got someone in to do it

even though I could have done it, no problem. I was too
busy.' His mouth twisted into that half-smile again. 'Too busy being a master of the universe to see that my family
life was disintegrating.'
Sam was so sorry she'd started this. She hadn't meant
to upset him or to make him remember things he'd rather
forget.
'Will you go back into the City?' Sam asked to change
the subject.
He shook his head. 'I don't want that sort of life any
more. Index-linked pension funds aren't much compensation
when you've got nothing else. The past year has given me
time to see what I do want in life and I needed time to get
over it all. That's why I'm not rushing into getting involved
with anyone.' He stared deeply into her clear blue eyes. 'I
wasn't rushing into getting involved,' he amended.
It was an electric moment, pregnant with meaning. Sam
bit her lip nervously, wanting him to say more, to say he
liked her, because he had to say it, she couldn't.
'Finished? Was everything all right?' The waitress
swooped and cleared away their plates, gathering up side
plates and the butter dish briskly, bestowing another beaming
smile on Morgan. 'Do you want dessert?'
'No,' snapped Sam.
'Yes,' said Morgan. 'I've a sweet tooth,' he explained to
Sam.
'I bet you do,' breathed the waitress with a naughty wink.
Sam glared at her but it was no good: the electric moment
had vanished.
Morgan must have felt it too. He sat back in his chair,
breaking the sense of intimacy that came from two people
leaning closer to each other across a tiny bistro table.
'It's been sort of fun being a bum, never wearing a shirt
with French cuffs, not having to leave the house at six in
the morning for a meeting in Frankfurt.'
'And I thought you didn't have a decent shirt to your
name,' Sam said lightly.

'What's wrong with this?' he demanded, looking down
at the faded blue casual shirt he wore with his usual jeans
with worn seams.

'Lovely,' she said kindly, intensely aware of the effect
of Morgan sitting so close to her, his long, jean-clad legs
occasionally touching hers under the table in a way that was
both comfortingly familiar and utterly exciting.

They chatted idly over coffee and ice cream, and then got
a taxi home. All the time, Sam was conscious of Morgan
sitting closely by her, long jean-clad legs taking up lots of
room as they talked and laughed. That was the great thing
about him: he made her laugh all the time.

Outside their respective houses, Morgan handed the taxi
driver money before Sam had even got her purse out. 'We're
supposed to be splitting everything,' she said.

'Relax, will you?' he replied. 'I'm not going to demand
payback of a carnal kind just because I've shelled out eight
quid on a cab.'

Pity, thought Sam.

'How about having a cup of coffee at my place as a thank
you, then?' she inquired, trying to make it sound casual.

'Sure.' He opened her gate. 'After you, Ms Smith.'

As they climbed the stairs, Sam felt her heart beating a
tattoo in her chest. This was it: the chance to see if Morgan
really did like her.

He prowled round the living room, running his fingers
over her driftwood sculpture, hunching down to examine
the silver Indian elephant, admiring the pictures on the walls.

'I forgot to say it to you the night of the dinner party but
you really have a lovely place.'

'Thanks,' she said from the kitchen where she was looking
around frantically for some fresh coffee. She couldn't be out
of it, could she? Damn, double damn. She was. That was the fatal flaw in being a working woman with too little time
to buy groceries: the cupboards were often bare.

'Will instant do?'

'Sure,' he said. 'Do you mind if I put a CD on?' he asked,


adding wickedly, 'I promise not to turn it so loud that it
annoys the neighbours and forces them to march in and pull
the plug from the socket.'
'Very funny, Benson,' Sam replied. 'You turn that dial up
over five and I'll kill you. The guy who lives above me bangs
on the ceiling if he can hear the slightest noise from down
here.'
'I'm sure you're a noisy neighbour,' Morgan joked, 'all
those wild girls' nights in with two-litre bottles of vodka
and Gloria Gaynor on the CD player.'
'Don't even joke about it,' she begged with a shiver. 'Mad
Malcolm upstairs has a dog that barks at all hours of the
day and night, he's addicted to playing his music so loud
that the people in the basement can hear it, and then, he
hangs over the balcony at odd intervals telling us all to stop
making noise.'
'Sorry, bad joke,' Morgan said. 'Can't you do anything
about him?'
'Every resident in the house has reported him to everyone
we can think of but nothing's happened. I'm waiting for him
to go completely mad and get carried off to a mental hospital
somewhere. Either that or I'll have to sell.'
'Let's forget about him,' Morgan said, as the strains of
Nina Simone drifted gently out of the speakers.
'My favourite,' said Sam in delight. 'How ever did you
know?'
Morgan settled himself comfortably on her big couch and
grinned at her. 'You look like the sort of woman who likes
good music'
She was carrying the mugs of coffee over when the phone
rang.
'Shit,' Sam said, dumping them down on the table.
'Who'd be phoning at. . .' she looked at her watch, 'a quarter
to eleven.' She blanched. 'Something bad must have happened,'
she said. 'Nobody phones me this late. Except Hope.'
She rushed to the phone and grabbed it from the cradle.
'Hello?'

'Sam,' said Hope. 'It's me. I needed to talk to you.'

'Sure, Hope, can I call you back?' said Sam, not aware
of how her sister had psyched herself up to make this call.

There was a silence on the other end of the phone.

Morgan got up and waved at Sam. 'I'll go,' he mouthed.

Sam shook her head.

'It's OK,' said Hope on the other end, apologetically,
'you've obviously got someone there. I'll call some other
time.'

She was clearly distressed about something.

'No, hold on, Hope,' said Sam as Morgan collected his
jacket, waved goodbye and left, shutting the door quietly
behind him.

'They've just gone,' Sam said, 'so tell me, what's wrong
Hope?'

'Nothing,' Hope burst out. 'Nothing. I'll talk to you
tomorrow. Bye.'

And she hung up. Sam sat looking at the coffee cups on
the table and put down the phone with a sigh. She ought to
give classes on how to end an evening on a high note.


CHAPTER TWENTY

Nicole checked her make up for the nth time that morning.
'The mirror will crack if you look in it any more,' said
her mother with her trademark giggle.
'Don't be daft,' said Gran. 'At least she looks in the mirror
when she puts it on. You just close your eyes and plaster on
the lipstick.'
Nicole's fingers tightened their grip on the cup of coffee.
They'd been bickering ever since they'd left the house and
got into the taxi.
First, Gran had muttered that a taxi was a waste of money
when there was a perfectly good bus service and if it was
good enough for her, it was good enough for the rest of
them.
Sandra had countered this by saying that it was about
time the Turner family lived with a bit of style and added
that, talking of style, she had her eye on a very nice handbag
she'd seen in a magazine that only cost 200 pounds pounds in
Harrods. With Nicole being very rich soon thanks to all that
record company money, they'd be doing all their shopping
in Harrods, wouldn't they?
'Harrods!' shrieked Gran, loud enough to give their laid
back Rastafarian taxi driver a shock. 'Far from Harrods you
were reared, my girl. When I was a girl, we didn't have
Harrods, I can tell you. Style, rubbish. When I was your age, madam, I wouldn't have dreamed of buying the sort of
handbag that would keep the whole family in clothes for
years.'
War had raged back and forth while Nicole stared out

the window and wondered why she hadn't told the people
at Titus that she was an orphan and would not be bringing
anyone with her to meet the would-be managers.
Darius had insisted that she bring her family for moral
support. 'It's highly unusual for a record company to be
setting up this sort of interview in the first place,' he said.
'Most people have got a manager by the time we're going
to sign them but Sam Smith really wants to make sure you've
got the best representation. She's dead on, Sam is.'
'Yeah, she's nice,' Nicole said for want of something
better to say. She'd been terrified of Sam that time they'd
met. Calm, in control and silent for most of the meeting,
Sam Smith had appeared to be icily cool. Not the sort of
person who'd be putting herself out for a new singer by
lining up a group of prospective managers for her. But Darius
was very impressed by the whole thing and pointed out that
by coming up with a list of people for Nicole to meet and
choose between, Sam was actually making things slightly
harder for herself.
'By getting you to meet the top management companies,
she's putting you in touch with people who'll screw a better
deal out of us,' he pointed out.
Nicole didn't know if she could trust Darius or not. She
wasn't sure if she could trust any of them but this was her
big chance and she had to plunge right in. The meeting with
the first company was in the Titus boardroom at half ten
and each meeting was to last half an hour, finishing up by
lunchtime, when Sam and Darius would take the Turners
out for something to eat.
Nicole prayed that her mother and grandmother would
have stopped sparring by then. So far, they hadn't been much
use in the moral support department. With half an hour to
spare, they'd gone for a coffee in the chic little cafe across
the road from the Titus office and, once Reenie Turner had
complained loudly about the price of a cup of tea and why wasn't there proper sugar apart from those silly little paper
tubes of sugar, the battle had recommenced.

They were now bickering over hair colour, a favourite
topic for both of them. As Goldie Hawn's biggest fan, Sandra
was a lifelong believer in the 'blondes have more fun' dictum
while her mother's Catholic upbringing had entrenched in
her the notion that it was wrong to meddle with what God
gave you.
'Look, you even have Nicole at it now,' grumbled Reenie
Turner, whose greying dark hair had never seen a drop of
hairdresser's colour.
'It suits her,' retorted Sandra. 'Better than going round
with more grey streaks than an old English sheepdog.'
'Well, why don't you just insult me and be done with it,' snapped back Reenie.
With nerves eating away at her insides at the thought of
the meetings to come, Nicole had had enough. Standing up
abruptly, she shoved her metal chair across the floor with a
resounding screech.
'I brought you both here to help me, to support me,' she
lashed out at the pair of them. 'I thought that it might be
nice for once to have support but all you both want to do
is carry on your stupid arguments. If that's all you want to
do, go home! I've enough to worry about without worrying
about you two.'
Her grandmother and mother looked up at her shamefaced.
'Lord,
you're right, Nicole love,' said her Gran apologetically.
'We're both sorry, love, really we are. We're just
nervous for you.'
'And I'm not nervous?' demanded Nicole.
'You seem so cool about it all,' added Sandra helpfully.
Nicole sat down again and let her arms fall limply to her
sides. She wanted to tell them the truth, that she wasn't cool
about it at all, that she was scared stiff. But she couldn't.
They relied on her too much. They needed to know she was
ready for whatever life threw at the Turner clan.
'Don't be daft,' she said brusquely. 'There's nothing to
be nervous about. This is all very straightforward. We'll

meet five different managers and choose one. Simple. It'll be
easier to concentrate if I'm not keeping you pair from killing
each other, that's all.'

Her mother and grandmother stared at her with pride.
Their Nicole: strong, clever and beautiful. Nothing fazed
her and she was well able for those record company types.
Wherever had they got her from?

Sandra was highly impressed with the smoked glass and
chrome decor of the Titus headquarters. Her mother was
less impressed with the length of the mini skirt on the receptionist's
long legs. But neither of them said anything. They
were doing their best for Nicole. They were going to be
decorum personified if it killed them.

However, Reenie couldn't help commenting on Darius
when he left them alone in the board room in order to tell
Sam that the Turners had arrived.

'He's a well brought up, boy, that one,' she said. 'Very
grand and such nice manners. I thought all these record
company people were mad into drugs and all that. Pity about
the clothes, though.'

Despite her nerves, Nicole grinned. Personally, she thought
Darius's distressed denim jacket, simple white T-shirt and
black canvas trousers looked great on his long, lean body
and she liked the way his fair hair was spiky with wax and
stood up at mad angles to his skull. It was funky and yet
somehow made his pale neck look vulnerable and young.

He liked her hair too.

'It suits you short,' he'd said admiringly, in the brief
moment when they were alone while Sandra and Reenie
were looking out the boardroom window admiring the view
of London below.

Somehow, at that moment, Nicole began to trust him.
There was something you could trust in that kind, open face.
Something that said Darius Good was kind to animals, gave
up his seat on the underground to old ladies and would
never tell a girl he'd phone her if he didn't mean it.

She smiled up at him and the tough feline little face


blossomed into the warm, beautiful, gentle one that Darius
had known was there all along. 'Thanks,' she breathed.
'I mean it,' he said anxiously.
'I know,' she said softly.
As he sprinted along the corridor to Sam Smith's office,
Darius felt ten feet tall.
Sam had five minutes before her next meeting.
'I'd love to say hello,' she told Darius. 'They must be
nervous. Have you offered them coffee?'
'Er no but I will,' Darius said.
There was definitely something different about Sam Smith
these days. He couldn't quite put his finger on it but she
was changed. Softer, kinder, somehow. Or maybe he was
imagining it. But Izzy, the A & R secretary, had said so too.
Although she'd been slightly less charitable. 'Ms Smith must
be getting it,' she'd said sagely over lunch one day. 'She's
dumped the career bitch clothes and has gone all floaty and
New Age on us. Did you see her with her hair in a pony tail
with a flower on it the other day? Definitely a man. Those
hard-as-nails types always lose the run of themselves when
they've got more than a cat to go home to.'
Darius felt that Izzy was being a bit cruel but he had
to admit that Sam had changed. She was chatty, warmer
definitely, not the tough, no-nonsense woman he'd met
initially. Still, he didn't care. Her new-found sweetness
meant his darling Nicole was being wonderfully looked after
and that was all that mattered. If a man was responsible for
this change in the boss, he was happy for her. After all, he'd
found Nicole, although she didn't exactly know it yet.
Sam strode along the corridor with her off-white John
Rocha dress flowing elegantly behind her. She loved wearing
it, adored the way it hung beautifully without clinging. Like
a mini whirlwind, she swept into the boardroom.
Nicole got to her feet instantly, a slim, beautiful figure in
black with a halo of bronze curls on her exquisitely shaped
head.
'Hi Sam,' she said.

Sam found herself giving the girl a hug, not the sort of
thing she'd have done before. Before The Illness, as she called
it herself, in capital letters, had changed her life.

'Hello Nicole, lovely to see you.'

'This is my gran, Reenie Turner,' Nicole said, 'and my
mum, Sandra.'

'Nice to meet you,' said Reenie formally, taking Sam's
hand and giving it a strong shake. 'We're here to support
Nicole in whatever way we can,' she announced firmly.
Nicole had asked for support and she'd get it.

'It's so exciting,' trilled Sandra as she took Sam's hand
in her own dainty one. 'You've got a lovely picture window
here. How do you get any work done with the view?'

'You don't notice it after a while, I'm afraid,' Sam said
regretfully.

She sized up the Turner women. At least the grandmother
seemed like a sensible woman, not like Nicole's sweetly dizzy
mother, who seemed to think that a cream leather jacket,
floaty girlie skirt and pink high heeled sandals were becoming
on a drizzly spring day. It was a look that could work
well in the fashion pages of Sunday supplements when worn
by a twenty-year-old model but it managed to look a bit too
garden-partyish in the cold light of the normal world on a
normal woman.

'I won't be sitting in on the meetings with you,' Sam
explained, 'but I know Darius will if you'd like that and that
he's told Nicole about the various people you'll be seeing.'

Nicole glanced shyly at Darius.

'You don't have to make any decisions today and don't
let any of these people bully you. Their job would be to
represent Nicole in her career and she has to feel comfortable
with them. That's very important, Nicole,' Sam added. 'Your
manager will work very closely with you, so you've got to get
on with him or her and that's often an instinctive decision.
Everyone coming here today is a professional and is damn
good. So it's really up to you and how you feel about them
all as individuals.'


Nicole and Reenie were watching her intently as she
spoke. Sandra was admiring Sam's Gucci mules.
'Afterwards, if you have the time, I'd like to take you to
lunch.'
Sandra lit up. 'Will there be champagne?' she asked.

'What did you think?' Darius asked at ten to one, when
Nicole's head was spinning.
The highlight of the morning had undoubtedly been when
her grandmother had sent a photo of one manager's top
clients spinning across the shiny table with the words: 'if
you think you're going to get my Nicole into an outfit like
this . . . this . . . prostitute's costume, then you've got another
think coming!'
'I don't think Gran liked the middle guy,' she remarked
with a grin.
'Yeah.' Darius grimaced at the memory. 'Although hot
pants aren't that unusual in this business.'
'I quite like hotpants,' Nicole laughed. 'It's just that
Gran's never seen me in mine.'
Darius's eyes lit up. 'Do you think I might get to see you
in them?'
She gave him an impish look. 'You never know your
luck.'
'They're Gucci, those mules,' whispered Sandra to her
daughter as they followed Sam and Reenie to the lift on their
way to lunch. 'I've seen them in New Woman magazine on
the fashion pages. I wouldn't like to tell you what they cost.'
Nicole linked arms with her mother. 'When we get this
deal sorted out, Mum,' she whispered, 'I'll buy you a pair.'
'Promise!' breathed Sandra.
'I promise.' Nicole was pretty sure it was a promise she
could keep. After meeting the various managers that morning,
she'd been astonished at how much money they'd all
insisted she could get from Titus. It had been more money
than Nicole had ever dreamed of, and they'd all promised
that this was only the start.

'If you really make it, you could become a very rich young
lady,' the manager she'd disliked most had said.

Nicole hated being called a young lady. He was definitely
out of the running. Those beady little eyes and eyebrows
that met in the middle. Horrible. So was that tall bossy
woman with the short haircut and the leather jeans. Her
voice was so penetrating and she reminded Nicole of Sister
Jerome who'd taught her geography for the three months
she'd been at St Anne's before she was expelled. Nicole
half-expected the bossy woman to demand to see her homework
on the industries of the Ruhr valley. Definitely out
too. The other two were OK, nice enough, but Nicole didn't
have an opinion on them either way.

The best was a youngish guy who'd made her laugh and
who hadn't attempted to talk himself up by telling her he
could get her the best deal on the planet - unlike the other
four. Casual in jeans and a wrecked looking leather coat, he'd
told her about his other clients, an impressive list, Nicole
noticed, explained what he did and added that he wasn't the
sort of manager who believed in being a sycophant.

'A boot-licker,' Nicole whispered to her mother, who'd
looked puzzled.

'I'm here because I think you're good and I think you'll
go places. It's my job to help you go places. It's not my job
to suck up to you and make you think you're Madonna.
That's a mistake all round. If that's what you want, then
I'm not your man.'

Nicole looked at his name on her sheet of paper: Bob
Fellowes of DMF Management. A solid, straightforward
name for a solid, straightforward guy.

'He's good,' Reenie said afterwards. 'I liked him best. At
least he didn't have any pornographic photos of other people
he looks after. I'm not having you dressed up like a fallen
woman for anybody, Nicole.'


At lunch, Darius behaved like the well-brought-up young
man he was and talked politely to Nicole's grandmother


who was warning him off outlandish outfits for Nicole's
future engagements. Sandra Turner, wildly happy to be having
lunch in a posh restaurant with running hot and cold
waiters, was busy watching the other guests and trying to
work out where they'd bought their clothes and how much
they'd cost.
Sam finally had a chance to talk to Nicole.
'How have you been?' she asked kindly.
With this new, friendlier Sam Smith smiling at her warmly
and seeming really to want to know how she was coping,
Nicole was honest. 'Freaked out,' she said. 'I never dreamed
anything like this would happen. It's scary.' She looked
down at her hands. 'I know that sounds stupid to someone
like you, but this is scary to me.'
'It's not a bit stupid,' Sam insisted earnestly. 'There's
nothing worse than being scared. Something happened to
me recently that scared the hell out of me and made me
change how I looked at everything. That's a hard thing to
go through. I know how you're feeling.'
Nicole wanted to ask what had happened but she didn't feel she could.
'The secret is,' Sam continued, 'to be yourself and to trust
yourself. This is a wonderfully exciting time for you but of
course it's scary, and that's why you need a good manager
to make sense of it all. Hopefully, you'll have Darius and
myself to help too. He's a good guy, Darius.'
Nicole nodded shyly.
Sam ploughed on. 'Some people change when they make
an album and think it's important to behave in a certain
way. They lose sight of who they really are - and they generally
drive everyone else mad at the same time,' she laughed.
'You mean like asking for Jack Daniels in their dressing
rooms and M & Ms with all the red ones picked out?' Nicole
joked.
'Yeah, that sort of thing,' Sam admitted. 'But it's more
than that. They begin to believe the hype and lose it. You're
a lovely girl and you've got a fantastic voice. I want you to

be successful but I want you to understand that this is a
tough business and that you should hold onto your friends
and onto who you are. Trying to turn yourself into something
you're not is a big mistake.'

For a moment, the distant look on Sam's face made Nicole
think Sam was really talking about herself. But she couldn't
be.

They had a great lunch. Sandra was in flying form and
Reenie, who firmly approved of Darius, thoroughly enjoyed
herself. To keep things light, they talked about holidays and
Sandra professed a lifelong desire to go to Cannes.

'The South of France is so glamorous,' she said wistfully,
picturing herself on the Croisette wearing head-to-toe Dior,
possibly with a poodle or some such dog under her arm.
Women in magazines often had small dogs with them
although Sandra wasn't sure if dogs were let into restaurants
and shops unless they were Labradors.

'You can't beat Eastbourne,' Reenie said. 'Although my
best holiday ever was in Guernsey. We stayed in a little
guesthouse outside St Peter Port and the weather was magic'

'I saw a holiday programme about the Maldives and it
looked wonderful,' Nicole sighed dreamily. 'Bounty bar beaches and incredible blue sea and nothing to do all day
long.'

Darius's eyes met hers. 'I've always wanted to go there
too,' he said eagerly.

Sam told them she'd had a lovely few days in Ireland with
her sister.

'She lives in the most amazing place,' Sam recalled. 'It's
so pretty and looks like a postcard with the most incredible
landscape all around, all brooding melodramatic hills and
valleys, and in the middle, this lovely village with these cute
little houses, brightly coloured shops and the liveliest pub
culture in the world. But it's a very healing place, if you
know what I mean. It's friendly and there's a great sense of
community, which is missing from everywhere else, isn't it?'

Reenie nodded sagely. 'Nobody knows their neighbours


any more. You could be dead in your house and the only
way anyone would know would be when the milk bottles
piled up outside.'

Sam thought of the lovely kind people of Redlion who'd
taken Hope into their hearts and who looked after her as if
they were one big family. She thought too about the long
walks she and Hope had enjoyed, letting the fresh country
air fill her spirit, and she remembered the marvellous Macrame
Club when she'd laughed so much, her ribs had ached,
and where she'd begun to think about changing her life.

'It's peaceful too, although when you actually get to know
the people there's more going on in Redlion than there is in
central London, I swear! It's a hotbed of action.'

Reenie stiffened in her seat. 'Redlion, you say?'

Nicole looked at her grandmother curiously.

'Do you know someone from there, Gran?' she asked.
'Gran's originally from Ireland, from Kerry,' she explained
to Sam. 'She left at sixteen and she's never gone back. I said
that if I get a contract, we'll all go and see where she came
from. I'd love to go.'

'Did you come from Redlion?' Sam said excitedly.

Reenie's pale eyes went opaque behind her thick glasses.

'No, from Killarney,' she said quickly.

At that moment the desserts arrived, so the subject was
dropped. Sam wondered why Reenie Turner had reacted so
strangely to the very mention of Redlion. The subject had
certainly sparked something in her and she'd seemed interested
in the whole notion of Ireland until then. But perhaps
she hadn't good memories of her homeland. If Sam was
accurate about Reenie's age, she would have left Ireland
some fifty years ago.

Things were different then. Lots of people left and never
returned for a variety of reasons. And Sam knew that some
emigrants couldn't bear to return to their home country
because of the bad memories of their life there, while some
preferred to remember the auld sod in misty sepia rather
than see it for what it actually was.


After lunch, Sam had to rush back to the office. She
hugged Nicole goodbye and found herself on the receiving
end of a double kiss from Sandra, who'd watched people
doing it all lunchtime in the restaurant.

'Phone me any time if you want to talk it over,' Darius
said to Nicole as he left with Sam.

'I will,' she said, gazing after him. 'I will.'

'What do you think?' Sam asked as she and Darius went
up in the lift.

'She's incredible,' Darius said with a misty look on his
face.

Sam grinned. Wasn't true love wonderful?

Karen Storin, who dropped in to see her at six on her
way to an album launch, didn't think the whole thing was
quite as wonderful. She loved Nicole's golden voice and was
as keen as everybody else to sign her. But she saw problems
in the future because Sam had been working so actively with
Darius to get a hot manager for Nicole.

'Of course, the upshot could be that with a new manager,
Nicole gets a better deal somewhere else and walks off leaving
us with egg on our faces,' Karen warned.

Sam steepled her fingers and gazed up at Karen with a
seraphic look on her face. 'If that happens, we'll have to live
with it,' she said calmly. 'Worse things could happen.'

'Not much worse if Steve Parris gets to hear of it,' Karen
pointed out.

The seraphic look vanished and Sam felt the familiar ache
in her intestines, the ache she'd done her best to eradicate.
The fibroids might be gone but the nervous tension was still
there. Shit, Karen was right. If Steve Parris discovered that
Sam's new-found sense of generosity meant the company
had lost a prospective hit act, he'd have her belongings in a
bin bag and have her escorted out of the building by security
in ten minutes flat.

Oh God, had she made a huge fatal error? Would she be
out on her ear if he found out? Was the Pope a Catholic?

When Karen had gone, Sam sat in her office and reflected


on how impossible it was to live her new, caring life and
still do her job properly. How could her stress levels decrease
and her spirit grow if she had to be the corporate raider
every day of her life? It just wasn't possible. No matter how
many cups of camomile tea she drank, she still had to make
tough decisions that affected other people's lives, people who
would no doubt wish all sorts of bad luck on her.

She left the office at seven and, as she walked to the
underground, took out her mobile to phone Hope but there
was no answer. In the days since Hope's strange late night
phone call, Sam had done everything to find out what was
wrong, but Hope now insisted that she was merely depressed
over Matt being away.

'I'm fine,' she'd snapped the last time Sam had brought
it up. 'Honestly, Sam, haven't you ever had a bad evening
and wanted to moan to somebody?' Hope had demanded,
too ashamed to say what was really wrong.

'Fine,' said Sam. 'Pardon me for being interested.'

But she was still worried about her sister.

She made it home by half seven to find a handwritten
note stuck in the door for her: Want to join me for an organic
pizza?

It was from Morgan. Since the night they'd gone to the
movies together, he'd taken her out five times: once to the
library for a talk on holistic lifestyles, three times for dinner
and once to a juice bar where Sam had felt like spitting out
the wheatgrass concoction that was supposed to do wonders
for the system.

'The only wonder is that they don't give you a free roll
of loo paper when you get one of these, because it goes
straight through you,' Morgan had said, grimacing at the
taste.

'You're just bringing me to these places to tease me,' she
accused him, 'so you can laugh at my attempts to be healthy.'

'Not at all,' he said, desperately trying to be serious. 'Just
because you've gone all holistic doesn't mean I can't help. I
love New Age therapies. Imagine it, we could be like those


Hollywood stars and fall out over our guru! When stars split
up, they don't just fight over the house and the alimony,
they fight about their guru too.'
'I don't have a guru,' she said, slapping him.
'You have me,' he said. 'I'm doing my best. My mantra
is "enjoy life". Or is it my mission statement?'
'It's definitely your mission statement all right,' Sam remarked.
'I never met a man who tried to enjoy himself more.'
Tonight, she grinned at the thought of an organic pizza
date. Up to now, her plans for the evening had involved
doing her yoga practice and hand washing a basket full of
delicate bits and pieces. Going out with Morgan was a distinct
improvement on both of those options.
So, Morgan didn't look at her the way he probably looked
at the twenty-something lovelies he fancied. But he was
good company and they got on well. They were friends. Sam
needed friends right now.
She phoned him. 'Organic pizza, Mr Benson. Is that the
best you can do?'
She knew he was smiling now. 'The supermarket has run
out of those yummy tofu burgers so I thought we'd have
pizza instead. My place in half an hour?'
'We're not going out?'
'I can't face another health food restaurant,' Morgan
admitted. 'But the topping is goat's cheese and wild
mushrooms . . .'
'Sounds wonderful,' she sighed. 'I had a big lunch,
though.'
'You've got to put a few pounds on,' he reproved. 'Don't
want you falling down the cracks in the pavement. If you
get any thinner, next thing we know, someone will have
signed you up as a catwalk model and have you marching
down the ramp in two square inches of lycra.'
'Dream on,' she retorted. 'I'll see you in half an hour.'
She was smiling as she raced around the apartment. There
was no need to change out of her work clothes: her lovely
John Rocha dress would be perfect.

She was still smiling when she skipped downstairs twenty
five minutes later.

Seeing Morgan was always such a relief after a day at the
office.

What was most enjoyable about their relationship was
that Morgan was so easy to get on with. Not that they
had a relationship as such, she corrected herself. But the
difference between him and most of the other men she knew
was that Morgan was fun to be with. Undemanding. Laid
back in the best possible way. She never felt she had to watch
what she said with him or exhaust herself trying to look
good when she wasn't in the mood to dress up. Morgan
seemed as happy to be with her when she was wearing her
scabby old jogging pants as he did when she was all glammed
up in work clothes. He just accepted her exactly as she was.
She'd never had that sort of friendship with any man before.
Karl, who'd been her last big love affair, had required careful
handling of the ego-boosting type. Karl liked being told how
clever he was and how the company would be lost without
him. He took great pride in that.

With Morgan, there was none of that 'how was your day,
dear?' stuff before she could launch into what her day had
been like. Perhaps it was different when you were actually
going out with the person, she considered. Maybe Morgan
wanted his girlfriends to mollycoddle him, to boost his ego
and to tell him he was wonderful. Sam's favourite trick was
to tell him he was making a hash out of the renovations.
Being friends was definitely much better.

He answered the door in his usual uniform of paint and
dust-splattered jeans and sweat-shirt. His dark hair was
dusted with white like an eighteenth century French aristocrat's
and so was his face. Sam peered at the grimy Cape
Cod sweat-shirt he was wearing.

'You've been wearing that for three days on the trot,' she
remarked as he let her in. 'I thought you'd plumbed in the
washing machine.'

'I did but we're ripping up the ensuite bathroom and it's


an awful mess, so I thought I'd keep wearing this until we
were finished.'

'You're an environmental health hazard,' Sam pointed
out. 'The council will be round any minute to fumigate you
and I cannot have dinner with you if you insist on wearing
that.'

Morgan leaned wearily against the front door. 'Don't
nag,' he begged. 'I'm worn out.'

She regarded him sternly. 'Go up and take a shower.
That's an order. And by the time you come down, I'll have
dinner ready. Right?'

'Yes sir!' he barked, saluting.

'And throw down that disgusting sweat-shirt, when you
get it off,' she added as he started to climb the stairs. 'I'll
put on a wash for you.'

'You're sure you weren't in the army in a previous life?'
Morgan muttered, pulling the sweat-shirt over his head.

Sam waited at the bottom of the stairs for the sweat-shirt.
Morgan threw it down and then ripped off his t-shirt,
revealing lean muscles that rippled as he pulled it up and
over his head. Sam felt as if she should look away. This was
so intimate and private. And disturbing. Morgan's half
naked body sent a little excited shiver down her spine. He
looked so damn good, from the powerful shoulders to the
narrow hips. And he was so utterly unselfconscious as he
stripped off, completely at home with his body. She wondered
how many bench presses he'd needed to do to develop
a physique like that and then realized that Morgan wasn't
the sort of guy to sculpt himself in the gym. Laying patio
slabs and breaking down dividing walls with a sledge hammer
would be his preferred ways to keep in shape.

He threw down the T-shirt and carried on upstairs. Sam
picked up the clothes, still warm from his body. They smelled
of a male, musky scent, and of paint thinners, she realized.
Eau de white spirit. He was out of sight when the jeans fell
to the ground floor. He'd stripped them off when she
couldn't see him. Damn.


His dirty clothes were boil washing when Morgan came
down, clad in a pair of fresh jeans and a clean sweat-shirt
almost identical to the last one.
'Dressing for dinner?' she inquired with a grin.
'You wouldn't recognize me if I was in a suit,' Morgan
pointed out, pulling up a chair.
'Oh yeah, and you've got a wardrobe full of suits,' Sam
teased.
Morgan gave her a wry look. 'You'd be surprised if you
saw me in a suit,' he said.
'I'd die of shock,' she remarked tartly. 'Now are you
going to open a bottle of wine or do you expect me to bring
my own?'
They talked so much over dinner that the last bit of Sam's
pizza was cold by the time she got round to eating it. She
loved spending time with Morgan, she thought happily, as
he boiled the kettle for coffee. The only fly in the ointment
was the fact that he still treated her like a good, but platonic
friend, when Sam longed for more. Even tonight, when he'd
been so charming, there was still something missing. Was
he afraid to take that big step and ask her out? Or was he
simply not interested? Sam didn't know if she could face the
humiliation of asking. Far better to let their relationship
continue the way it was. Good friends made the best lovers,
didn't they? It was just a matter of waiting.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


Farranfore airport was manic when Hope and the children
went to pick Matt up. He was going to be home for three
weeks, three weeks which Hope simply didn't know how
she'd face. If consummated affairs didn't ruin some marriages,
how could an unconsummated one ruin hers? She
wished the three weeks were up and that Matt was safely
back in Bath, but he'd be home for good soon and how
would she deal with life then?

When Matt appeared from amid the throngs of tourists
weighed down with bulging suitcases, Millie and Toby
launched themselves at him, shrieking 'Daddy, Daddy!'

He scooped a child up in each arm and somehow managed
to shove the trolley along in front of him with his lean,
jean-clad hips until he was beside Hope.

Still holding the children, he leaned forward and kissed
his wife, who burned with guilt and wondered if he'd be
able to tell that the last person she'd kissed on the lips hadn't
been him.

'I've missed you,' Matt sighed. 'So much.'

'Us too,' said Hope brightly. Being ultra-bright was her
only hope.

'Let's get Daddy into the car and you can tell him all the
things you've been doing while he was away,' she said, still
brightly.

The children needed no more encouragement and were
soon trying to out shout each other with stories of glittery
pictures successfully glued and how Millie had made a pie
out of mud and even got mud on her knickers in the process.


'Mud on your knickers,' said Matt. 'That's amazing, how
ever did you manage it?'
The children prattled excitedly and Matt listened happily
as he drove, chattering back to them and occasionally patting
Hope fondly on the thigh, giving her a quick smile. She
managed to smile back. Things might be all right after all,
she thought. If she kept her mouth shut and her upper lip
suitably stiff, they might get through this.
In Redlion, Matt suggested having lunch in the Widow's
as a treat.
'You deserve a break from cooking,' he said to Hope.
The Widows was busy for a Friday with plenty of tourists
taking advantage of the balmy early May weather by touring
the county. They found a table and agreed on sausage and
chips for the kids, with fish pie (the Friday special) for themselves. As
Matt stood at the bar ordering, Hope watched him
miserably, asking herself why she'd even been tempted by
Christy. Okay, so Christy was good looking and that winsome
puppy dog look could be charming, but there was no
question that Matt was the more handsome. There was
simply no comparison between Christy's saturnine face and
Matt's lean, strong-featured one, no comparison between hot,
sultry eyes and passionate, loving, caring ones. Matt was like
a noble, proud lion to Christy's edgy, self-serving bobcat. Both
beautiful creatures but with no similarities otherwise.
'Look who's here,' said Matt, smiling as he led Delphine
over to say hello.
'Hi there,' said Delphine gaily, hugging Hope and dropping
kisses on the foreheads of the delighted children.
'Eugene has a day off, so I took one too. We're being lazy
and not bothering to cook lunch. Can we sit with you?'
Eugene ambled over, a cuddly bear of a man with a
rumpled face to go with his rumpled clothes. No matter how
carefully Delphine ironed his shirts, after one minute on
Eugene's back, they looked as if they'd been dragged straight
from the laundry basket by a herd of buffaloes.

'Pull up chairs,' said Matt.
They were soon all squashed into a table made for four,
chatting about how lovely the weather had become and how
the village was jam packed with visitors. Even Mrs Egan's
de luxe B & B hadn't a room to spare, which was a miracle,
they all agreed, given how unfriendly she was.
The hotel was full too, Delphine said, and she'd had to
call in all sorts of favours to get her day off.
'They work you too hard,' said Eugene, a man not given
to making idle statements. 'She hasn't had an extra day off
since Christmas, you know,' he told Matt and Hope. 'That
manager tries to run the place with a rod of iron.'

Hope started nervously at the mention of Christy.
Delphine grinned ruefully. 'It's not that bad,' she said.
'Mr I-Love-Myself De Lacy isn't a total despot. He might
be a bit of a tyrant but I'm not going to be working there
forever. I want to set up my own beauty salon.'
'Do you?' said Hope, keen to change the subject.
'Yes but you don't want to be burned out working for
the Manoir,' Eugene insisted. 'I don't like that man,' he
added. 'He's a shark and he uses people.'
Delphine laughed and patted Eugene's arm affectionately.
'Isn't it funny, Hope,' she said, 'how none of the men
I know like Christy and practically all the women love him.
Una up in the accounts office thinks the sun shines out of
his rear end and Mary-Kate's raging that she's never met
him.'
'Have you met him, Hope?' inquired Matt.
'Yes,' she said faintly.
'And?'
'And he's always been very nice to Hope,' said Delphine
wickedly. 'I think he fancies her.'
Hope sat frozen while Matt and Delphine went off into
peals of laughter.
'What a chancer,' said Matt, smiling at his wife. 'Should
I challenge him to a duel?'
Eugene didn't laugh. 'That's what I don't like about that

man,' he said in serious tones. 'He's unscrupulous, chatting
up married women like a wolf looking for . . .'
'Hush,' said Delphine, putting a finger to her lips and
gesturing to the children. 'Little pitchers have big ears.'
'What's a little pitcher?' asked Millie, bored with being
ignored.
Delphine began to amuse the children, using their crayons
to draw pictures on the paper placemats, and Eugene finished
making his point, this time in a whisper.
'I don't trust any man who has so little respect for other
people, that's all.'
Hope was grateful when their food arrived. She did not
want to answer questions about how well she knew Christy
De Lacy or hear anyone talking about his fatal fascination
for married women. She merely wished someone had told
her all this before she went to work for him.
Lunch arrived and as they tucked in, Matt made them all
laugh telling them about the clients for his beer campaign,
who couldn't agree on which beautiful girls should feature
in the ad. 'They were only background actors after all, but
arguing over which ones they wanted took longer than the
decision about which campaign to go with.'
'You can't talk,' said Hope, 'you and Dan spend hours
picking models for campaigns. You had more model cards
than the fashion editor at Vogue when you were casting the
insurance company advert. They have this game where they
figure out who'll be suitable for which product,' she told
Delphine and Eugene. 'It can get very rude at times. They
decided that the sales assistant in the local chip shop, who
had the glossiest lips and,' she whispered, 'a definite boob
job, was perfect for marital aids.'
Delphine giggled.

'What are marital aids, Mummy?' inquired Millie, who
had ears like a bat.
'Band aids for married people,' said Matt blandly, knowing
that at the first sign of a word she shouldn't say, Millie
would be roaring it at the top of her voice for days.

Delphine giggled some more. 'What should I advertise,
then, Matt?' she asked.

He shook his head. 'We never do it on people we know,'
he said.

'Oh go on,' urged Delphine.

'Shampoo,' suggested Eugene, running a hand through
his girlfriend's rippling auburn hair.

'No, let Matt decide,' she said. 'He's the expert.'

'Shampoo would be great,' Matt said hurriedly.

'What's a boob job?' Millie asked loudly.

'Let's change the subject, please,' Hope said.

They ordered coffee and Matt and Eugene talked about
football, while Delphine filled Hope in on the latest saga
with her mother. She and Eugene were still plucking up the
courage to announce their wedding plans.

'She rang me at work yesterday to tell me that my second
cousin in Tipperary was getting married and that she'd heard
that I'd been sent an invitation for two. Naturally, she was
ringing to beg me not to bring Eugene.'

'That's terrible,' sympathized Hope with feeling. 'I just
don't understand your mum. I know she's religious but that's
no reason to be so unchristian.'

'When you love someone, you can cope with these things,
can't you?' Matt said, holding Hope's hand in his firmly.
'Love will find a way.'

Feeling more like a charlatan than ever, Hope squeezed
Matt's hand in return and tried to stop herself breaking into
tears. She was a bad, bad person. She hated herself and she
certainly didn't deserve him.

The Widow herself, Belle Maguire, arrived at their table
in a cloud of Chanel No 5, gold bangles jangling on her
tanned, skinny arms. Determinedly blonde and expertly
made-up, she welcomed them all, smiling particularly at
Matt, whom she hadn't met before. 'I hope you've all bought
tickets to my charity night,' she said. 'It's for the guide dogs
for the blind people and we run it every year. The more the
merrier, I always say. We've got bands lined up and a buffet.'


'We're going,' Delphine told her. 'What about you,
Hope?'
'Er yes,' said Hope.
'Good. I could do with another ticket seller.'
'I'm afraid I'll be away,' said Matt, on being told when
it was.
The Widow's black-lashed eyes swept over him. 'Pity,'
she said. 'But there'll be other times.'
It was after three when they all finally left, with Toby
declaring that he felt sick because Millie had put so much
pepper on his chips.
'Didn't,' she said truculently.
'Did!' said Toby, giving her a fierce glare that shut Millie
up for once.
'Now kids, stop fighting,' said Hope mildly, but she was
secretly pleased to see Toby standing up to his older sister.
He was definitely getting more self-confident.
'Eugene's a sound bloke,' Matt said, fastening Millie into
her car seat. 'Although he was coming over all Victorian
about that De Lacy chap. Probably scared he'll start hitting
on Delphine.' Matt smiled.
At Curlew Cottage, Matt was impressed with how big
the hens were, how many eggs they were now laying (three
to four eggs most days from the six hens) and how hard
Hope must have worked to have cleared out the big briars
at the front of the cottage.
'It's nothing,' said Hope of the enormous task that had
taken her three whole, back-breaking days. More penance.
Her hands, arms and legs were scraped with endless thorns
and her shoulders ached from wielding the saw and the
spade, but the bonus was that she'd finally got a nice clear
space to plant flowers. There were some lovely bedding
plants outside the supermarket that would look lovely there.
While Matt unpacked with Millie and Toby clinging to
him, Hope went about her daily chores, tidying up the kitchen
and pouring some home-made marinade over chicken
breasts for dinner that night. Even more penance. She'd spent

ages searching for the correct ingredients to make up the
marinade from her Queen of the Kitchen book. Every time
she bought fresh basil, it went limp and hopeless within
days, so now she'd bought some fresh herbs in pots and
was attempting to grow them in the shelter of the walled
garden.

When Matt reappeared, he leaned over her shoulder and
made impressed noises at the marinating chicken. 'You have
been working hard,' he said, planting a kiss on the top of
her head. 'Now, I know you want us to have time as a family
but,' Matt looped his hands around her waist, 'I think we
need time as a couple too. I asked Finula if the kids could
stay with her for the weekend. You and I are driving to
Kinsale tomorrow morning. It's going to be just you and
me, with a big double bed and a town with some of the
best gourmet restaurants in the country, so everyone says,
anyhow.'

Hope gulped. There was no point saying anything. What
could she say? Her thoughtful husband had organized a
fantastic romantic weekend away for them and it was only
her deceitfulness that rendered it agonizing. She thought of
saying that Millie wasn't actually that keen on Auntie Finula
but knew that as both children loved Ciaran, that excuse
wouldn't really work.


Kinsale was even prettier than the guide book Finula had
inevitably produced, with narrow winding streets, scores of
restaurants tucked away in every corner, and a pretty harbour
where all manner of yachts and crafts sat moored side
by side while the owners sank pints of Guinness in the harbour
bars. Under normal circumstances, Hope would have
adored it.

Matt held her hand as they wandered the streets before
choosing a pretty pub with a bright pink facade for their
lunch. They sat in the snug, warmed by a blazing fire despite
the heat outside, and Matt insisted that Hope have a glass
of Guinness.


'It's medicinal, apparently,' he said, laughing as she
screwed up her face at the first taste. 'You look so pale that
you need a tonic'
Afterwards, they took a brisk walk along the road out of
town, before ending up on a sliver of beach where Hope
happily collected shells for the children, ending up with a
cache of the palest pink scallop shells and dolls' house sized
mother-of-pearl cowries. Millie loved shells and would be
raging to think that she hadn't had the chance to pick these
ones, Hope thought fondly.
That night they ate fresh crab and dug out the flesh of a
delicious lobster in a dimly-lit restaurant with lilting Irish
music in the background and plenty of laughing and talking
from the patrons in the foreground. People who came to
Kinsale liked to enjoy themselves it seemed, soaking up the
atmosphere and the fabulous food and drink.
'I love it here,' Matt sighed, sitting back in his chair,
replete. 'There is a laid-back atmosphere in this country, for
sure. I tried to explain what it was like to Betsey but I
couldn't. She has this idea that if you're more than three
hours away from London, you're on the far side of the
moon.'
'Betsey wouldn't let herself enjoy Ireland. She secretly
wants to live in Manhattan,' Hope pointed out. 'She thinks
that if only she could off-load Dan and the kids, she'd be
Carrie from Sex And The City and spend her life drinking
cocktails, wearing vintage dresses and being chatted up by
handsome men with houses in the Hamptons and trust
funds.'
'She doesn't want that,' said Matt with a grin.
'She does.'
'You're very anti-Betsey these days,' Matt remarked.
'Back home in Bath, you seemed like best friends.'
Hope fiddled with her wine glass. 'We were, we are,' she
said. 'But Betsey hasn't been exactly killing herself to keep
in touch with me and when she does, she spends the entire
time going on about what I'm missing in Bath. It's very

annoying. And she thinks my having hens is hilarious,' she
added crossly, 'as if they're living in the house with us,
perching on the fridge and laying eggs on the couch. Honestly,
she hasn't a clue about country life, for all the articles
she says she's written about it.'

Matt roared with laughter. 'You're so funny when you're
angry,' he said. 'You used to be in awe of Betsey, she bossed
you round like nobody's business. You've changed, you
know.'

Hope looked warily at him. She certainly had. In Bath,
she wouldn't have looked twice at the likes of Christy De
Lacy, never mind have two passionate encounters with him.
'I suppose I have,' she admitted.

'And remember when you complained that you didn't
want to leave Bath and how you said you'd never fit in
here?'

'I was wrong,' Hope replied. 'I love it.' She gazed at him
frankly. 'It seems as if you're the one who hasn't fitted in.'

It was Matt's turn to look discomfited. Hope was getting
very blunt in her old age. 'I have fitted in,' he said. 'My
working in Bath is just a temporary thing. I haven't given
up on the novel,' he added, crossing his fingers under the
table and hoping that the novel hadn't given up on him.

His arm hung over her shoulder as they walked through
the bustling town to their hotel. In their room, Hope
undressed slowly, the guilt lying like lead in her heart. The
previous night, Toby had had a bad dream just before Matt
and Hope had gone to bed. By the time she'd calmed him
and given him some soothing hot milk, Matt was asleep,
sprawled in the middle of the bed, giving Hope a night's
grace.

Tonight, she had no excuse. She unpinned her hair, letting
it fall in soft curls to her neck, and took off her amethyst
cardigan and matching camisole. As she unzipped the long
black skirt that flared out over her hips, Matt put his arms
around her and nuzzled into her neck.

'I've missed you,' he said, holding her close against him.


He was stripped to the waist and his strong torso was warm
and familiar. He smelled of the aftershave he'd been wearing
for years and his skin was warm to the touch. They'd made
love so many times before that they fitted together expertly,
like much-loved old clothes that hung comfortingly even
after many washes.

Tonight, Matt caressed her the way he always had, the
way she loved, his recent absence adding extra passion. His
hands unhooked her bra and held her heavy breasts, stroking
and caressing, while his lips roamed over her soft neck and
shoulders. Hope, who longed for him and couldn't bear his
touch with equal measure, leaned her head back and felt the
prickle of tears behind her eyelids.

How could she bear this when she felt so guilty?

They ended up on the bed, Matt finishing undressing
her before undressing himself. Naked, he climbed on top of
her, kissing passionately and touching hungrily, his voice
hoarse as he told her how much he missed her and how
many nights he'd lain in Betsey's spare room thinking of this
moment.

'I love you, Hope,' he murmured, as his wife tried to
caress him back with even a quarter of his passion, all the
while trying to obliterate the nagging little voice in her head
which told her she was a liar and a cheat.

She tried, oh how she tried. But it was so difficult to feel
Matt's fingers on every part of her body, excitingly exploring
those exact places which turned her on most, when she felt
so bad about betraying him and when the image of Christy's
glittering, dangerous face mocked her. Every endearment
from Matt's lips made her want to cry out that she didn't
deserve it or him.

'Hope, my love,' Matt said hoarsely when he finally slid
into her, urgently, fiercely, desperate in his need of her. And
in spite of her guilt, Hope's body answered his. Those many
long nights when she'd yearned for him meant that when
Matt cried out in orgasm, Hope reached a glittering climax
too, holding him as tightly as she could, crying his name


and then just crying, as great juddering sobs racked her body
with the emotion of it all.
'Oh my love, are you all right?' gasped Matt, his mouth
in her hair.
'I'm fine, I'm fine,' she cried. 'I missed you, that's all.'
And then she sobbed harder because it wasn't exactly the
truth.
They lay spooned together, with Hope's eyes tightly shut
as if she could stop any more tears from falling. Normally,
they cuddled and chatted after making love.
'What's wrong, Hope?' asked Matt, idly running his
fingers up and down her arm.
Hope held her breath. 'Nothing,' she answered after a
moment. 'I just feel a little emotional, that's all. I've missed
you, I'm missing the children. And I'm a bit premenstrual.'
With luck, Matt wouldn't think it odd that she was premenstrual
two and a half weeks before her actual period.
Infidelity was such hard work and required so many lies.
'Oh,' he cuddled her more closely. 'I've been thinking,
Hope, now that Toby's nearly three, do you want another
baby? I know you always said you'd like three children. You
said yourself that you're so happy in Redlion, wouldn't this
be the perfect time?'
Beside him, Hope bit her lip.
It was vital that she said the right thing, vital that she
didn't give Matt the impression that she didn't want his
baby, when she loved everything about him. In truth, she
didn't know if she did want another child. She adored her
children and loved being a mother but Millie and Toby took
up so much of her energy, could she cope with a new baby?
It had taken a year after Toby's birth for her to come to terms with having two children to care for instead of one.
Yet the last thing she wanted to do was give Matt the impression
that the idea of another child with him was one she
couldn't bear.
'I haven't thought about it for a long time,' she said carefully.
'Our pair are such a handful, it's hard to imagine

coping with another one. Toby sleeps so badly as it is ...'
She broke off.

'Has he been sleeping very badly while I've been away?'
asked Matt.

'Not great,' said Hope, which was another lie. Toby had
been a light sleeper since he was a baby, waking up at the
slightest noise. But he had improved since they'd been in
Redlion. The heavy country air made them all sleep more
soundly.

'So you're not broody? I thought you were,' said Matt.

Hope wriggled round to face him and laid her face against
his chest. 'Let's enjoy the pair we've got for the moment
before we start planning any more, okay?' she said lightly.

Matt kissed the top of her head. 'Yeah, you're right.'


By the time Matt left for what Hope prayed was his final
stint in Bath, she had almost convinced herself that nothing
had happened between her and Christy. Life had slipped
back to normal with surprising ease. Matt went off to the
creative centre to write most days, although he got back
earlier than he used to and wanted to spend more time
playing with the children.

'When you're away from them, you realize that you're
missing them growing up,' Matt told Finula one day when
she dropped in unannounced for coffee and was put out to
discover that Matt had a picnic planned with the children
and wasn't cancelling it for anyone.

'I'm afraid you're stuck having coffee with me,' Hope
said a touch vindictively to Finula, as Matt and the children
set off down the lane with a bag of sandwiches made up by
Hope and jam jars to collect tadpoles in the stream.

'Super,' said Finula, in a voice that made it plain the
situation was anything but super.

While Matt had been away, Hope had managed to avoid
seeing too much of Finula. She'd been forced to go to dinner
with the Headley-Ryans once when Finula wouldn't take no
for an answer and had spent the evening bored out of her


skull. Luckily, without the lure of Matt, Finula wasn't too
interested in spending time with Hope, so she'd been spared
any other invitations.
This meant she'd almost forgotten how irritating she
found the other woman. With her little finger crooked in
what she fancied was a posh way, Finula drank her coffee
and gobbled up half a plate of chocolate biscuits with astonishing
speed for someone who claimed to have a wheat
allergy. Typically, she couldn't resist showing off.
'We were in the Pigeon Club for dinner the other night,'
she announced. 'It was wonderful, the food is superb. I had
the most wonderful lamb.'
Hope, who knew just how good the food was in the
Pigeon Club, nodded.
'Really.'
'The owner is a personal friend of ours. I'm sure you'd
like it, Hope. I know Matt would,' Finula preened, as if she
had the inside track on what Matt Parker did and didn't
like.
It nearly killed Hope not to say that she'd met Liam, the
owner, that she'd had the most fabulous lunch there with
a genuine friend of Liam's and that Liam had given them
the best table in the house. In fact, it was nearly a bed, never
mind a table. She gritted her teeth and poured more coffee,
resisting the impulse to pour it all over Finula's swollen
head.
'Finula drives me mad,' snarled Hope later, when Matt
returned with two mucky children, one with a big scrape on
her knee, and no tadpoles.
'She's all right,' Matt placated her. 'She's just insecure at
heart.'
'Insecure?' raged Hope. 'That woman is as insecure as
Chairman Mao. She cannot stop boasting. Do you know
she told me three times that she and Ciaran are getting a
brand new Cherokee next January, and I lost count of the
number of times she mentioned "our holidays in Antigua". I hope they get stopped by Antiguan customs for suspected

dope smuggling and get locked up in jail for the entire three
weeks!'
Matt further annoyed Hope by laughing. 'Hope, you're
hilarious. Of course Finula's insecure. Why else would she
keep telling you things like that - because she's jealous of
you and the only way she can deal with that is to keep
reminding both of you about her holidays and her jeep and
her famous friends. She's sweet, I like her.'
Hope wondered how she and Matt could possibly be
compatible when they had such wildly different views on
people.
'Anyway,' she demanded, as an argument clincher, 'why
would Finula be jealous of me? What do I have that she
wants?'
Matt grinned wickedly. The, darling.'

Although Hope worked in the Manoir for six mornings
when Matt was home, she never once bumped into Christy.
It was as if he sensed she was off his radar and he knew he
had to leave her alone. Hope, who found her enjoyment of
working with Una and Janet tinged with anxiety that Christy
would walk in at any moment, was relieved that there was
no sign of him.
By the sixth day, she had managed to almost convince
herself that their passionate kisses had been like an episode
of Dallas - and that she'd merely been dreaming.
'I'm going to be away for a week soon,' Una confided as
they had their elevenses. 'I don't suppose you'd be able to
come in for the whole week and help Janet out?'
'I'll have to check it out with the creche but it shouldn't
be a problem,' Hope said confidently. The whole Christy
thing was over after all. She had nothing to worry about.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO


Nicole sat on her bed and looked at her picture in the evening
newspaper. It had been one thing to see the promotional
photos in the comfort of a Titus office, dark and moody
shots where her cheekbones stood out so that she looked like
some sort of Indian princess, but seeing them in a genuine
newspaper in the 'up and coming' slot was another thing
entirely.

She was described as the latest LGBK signing, 'the hottest
new singer in years,' according to Sam Smith, who was also
quoted as saying there'd been a lot of competition to sign
the golden-voiced Nicole. 'We're thrilled that she's signed
with us because we discovered her and she's going to be a
huge star,' Sam said.

Nicole's mum had been delirious when she saw the photo
and had bought six copies of the paper, going round to all
her friends in Belton Terrace to show them how well Nicole
was doing. As always, when her mum went overboard,
Nicole had compensated by going underboard, as it were.

'It's nothing, Mum,' she'd said when Sandra arrived home
with her collection of papers. 'Only a picture in the paper.
It doesn't mean anything.'

'It means you're famous,' Sandra said reverently.

'No it doesn't,' Nicole replied. 'Now, are you ready for
your dinner or not? I've done egg and chips.'

Sharon had phoned half-way through dinner. 'Everyone
at Copperplate has seen you in the paper!' she squealed
delightedly. 'Even old iron knickers Sinclair! The whole place
was talking about you in the canteen.'


Nicole briefly felt a moment of nostalgia for her old job.
But it was only brief. It was only just over a month since
she'd left the building for the final time and already it seemed
a million years ago. Since then, she'd been working on her
album - even thinking those words gave her goosebumps and
doing things like photoshoots, which sounded glamorous
but were actually so boring that she couldn't imagine
how models ever stuck it. Hours upon hours of posing
woodenly, prefaced only by hours of getting plastered in
make up. All a zillion miles away from sitting beside Sharon
down the back of the motor department trying to think of
ways to wind up Ms Sinclair or longing for her lunchbreak
or for the weekend. These days, life seemed to be one long,
weird weekend.
'Wow, Nic, you're famous.' Even Sharon sounded
impressed.
Hearing her say it made Nicole sad. She and Shaz had
been best pals for ages, ever since they'd joined Copperplate at the same time, as nervous eighteen-year-olds. Shaz knew
what sort of person she really was. She should have known
that Nicole was still going to be Nicole, no matter how many
times her bloody picture was in the paper.
'What are you up to tonight?' Nicole asked to change the
subject.
Sharon groaned. 'Going on a double date with Michelle,
her fella and his best friend.'
"I thought you'd been saying no to that for ages,' Nicole
protested, seeing the possibility of going out with Sharon
disappearing. 'You think Michelle's fella is a plonker.'
'Yeah, well, it's something to do, isn't it?' Sharon said.
'How about you? Something dead cool, I suppose?'
Nicole looked at the kitchen table with the remains of
her mother and Pammy's dinners congealing on their plates.
Both had finished and left all the dishes and cutlery just lying
there, the way they normally did. Sandra was not the sort of person who couldn't relax until the kitchen was tidy. She
could quite happily leave the dishes to pile up for days,

which meant that Nicole was the family's main washer-upper.
She knew from past experience that fried egg set solid on
plates and needed a lot of effort to remove it. She wouldn't
have minded clearing up if she'd thought she could go out
with Sharon afterwards and celebrate having her picture in
the paper. But it was obvious that Sharon had found a new
best friend in her cousin Michelle and that she, Nicole, was
assumed to have an exciting new social life for herself with
her record company pals. She was off the radar to her old
friends.
'Nothing,' she replied to Sharon. 'I'm not doing anything.
It's been a mad week, I might go to bed early.'
When Sharon had hung up, Nicole threw the remains of
her cooling dinner in the bin and began to wash up. The
egg on all three plates was stuck solid, as she'd guessed. She
scrubbed energetically and wondered if this was how other
would-be singers spent their Friday nights. She had been
invited to a party by Peta, one of the Titus publicity people,
but she'd said no.
It was an album launch and Peta had said that it would
be great for Nicole's profile if she went but Nicole couldn't
really tell her that she was nervous of the idea of big, glam
parties. Sharon would have loved the launch, Nicole
reflected, since it was for one of her favourite bands. But it
probably wouldn't be okay to bring a friend. Nicole knew
that big stars often had an entourage of friends with them,
but they were big stars and she was just a hopeful star that
nobody had even heard of yet. Imagine how embarrassing
it would be if she turned up with Sharon and nobody let
them in?
When everything was tidy in the kitchen, Nicole went to
her room and indulged in a few minutes looking at her photo in the paper. Incredibly, she looked beautiful. Like a
stranger, almost. Anyone looking at that wide-eyed girl in
the photo with the jewelled ethnic collar around her slender
neck, would have thought that she'd be out partying every
night. Not stuck at home.

Nicole threw the paper on the floor. She didn't have to
be stuck at home, though, did she?
When she couldn't get through to Peta on the phone,
Nicole phoned Bob Fellowes's assistant, Isya, because she
didn't want to phone Bob himself with something so unimportant.
When
she'd appointed him as her manager and they'd
signed the deal with Titus and the LGBK label, he'd insisted
that she phone him about anything. But Nicole was still shy
around him and Isya was always utterly sweet to her and
much more approachable. She couldn't talk to Bob about a
party.
Isya listened to the problem gravely. 'Of course you don't
need an invitation,' Isya said in her soft voice. 'Leave it to
me. I'll get the stylist over to you and the limo will pick you
up at nine. Lorelei, another DMF client, is going and you
could go with her. You need to meet her anyway because
you'll be doing the Teen Stars roadshow together.'
Nicole put down the phone in shock. Lorelei was a big star, she'd had two top ten singles. The limo, and a stylist
to do Nicole up for the party, were coming. Nicole breathed
out shakily. She was on the celebrity express train and there
was no getting off.

The stylist dressed Nicole up in a minuscule leather skirt
and a chiffon top that wouldn't have fitted Pammy's Barbie.
Lorelei was wearing something even more daring. Needless
to say, guys were drooling over them all evening. Not ordinary
guys of the variety that Nicole knew how to deal with,
but semi-famous ones, like the lead singer with Coral Fish,
a dead-eyed giant named Zol who wore nothing but leather
and had roving hands. He'd smoked a joint right beside her
and asked her if she fancied coming back to his hotel room
later. Nicole had laughed nervously at that.
Her habitual cool deserted her and she downed cocktail
after cocktail to cope with it all. She hadn't said yes to Zol
but he seemed to think she'd agreed to go back to his hotel

room later anyway because he kept patting her bum in a
proprietorial manner and fiddling with her hair.

'I'll look after you,' Lorelei had said when they'd met for
the first time in the limo going to the party, but she'd more
or less abandoned Nicole, which was why Nicole lunged
delightedly at Darius when he arrived with the Density
guys.

'Thank God you're here,' she'd hiccuped. 'It's mad here,
they're all mad.'

'Nicole,' Darius said, as he held her hot swaying body in
his arms. 'Are you all right? You seem a bit woozy.'

'Zombies,' she said, raising her half-empty cocktail glass
to him. 'I've had loads. Four at least. It's scary here. Nobody
seems normal.'

'That's because you've been with the abnormal people,'
he said, putting down her glass and taking her to sit down
in a quiet corner away from the dance floor and the bar.
Nicole flopped into the big squashy sofa with the insouciance
of the very drunk.

'I didn't think you were coming tonight,' Darius said
gently, taking in the skimpy chiffon top that barely hid her
small breasts and the leather skirt that revealed at least five
inches of leg above the knee. Nicole's granny would have a
fit if she saw her granddaughter in that outfit.

'I wasn't. I had to wash up the egg and chips plates and I
was bored and lonely.' Her slender fingers curled themselves
round Darius's collar and she gazed up at him hungrily,
her shining black eyes liquid with desire. 'You're so nice,
Dariush,' she slurred sweetly.

Darius gulped. He was crazy about Nicole but he had no
intention of taking advantage of her when she was drunk
out of her mind. He hated seeing her like this. She shouldn't
have been there at all. Nicole was talented and just starting
out. She didn't need to learn any lessons from dope-heads
like the Coral Fish people or from cast iron little madams
like Lorelei. Both would be on the way out in two years, he
was sure of it, their limited talent squandered and their


chances blown because of the way they messed people
around. Even Density, whom he thought were hugely talented,
were stretching his patience with their demands. But
Nicole could be a huge star for a long time and it would
ruin her to get caught up in the jaded lifestyle of the likes
of Coral Fish.
He gently unhooked her hands. 'I really like you too,
Nicole,' he said softly. 'But not here, not tonight.'
Suddenly, they were interrupted. 'Well hello,' purred a
purposefully low voice. Lorelei, five foot six, seven stone
and with a diamond-hard, truculent little face, appeared with
a waiter in tow and three more cocktails on a tray. 'Who
have we here? Don't keep all the beautiful ones for yourself,
Nicole.'
Lorelei eased herself onto the sofa beside Darius like
toothpaste oozing from a tube.
'Hello.' Her long manicured talons were a direct contrast
to Nicole's short, clear-coated ones and she laid one hand
on Darius's long, lean thigh. 'I'm Lorelei.'
Lorelei expected this intro, delivered in her trademark
(and carefully worked upon) drawl, to work wonders. Some
men had drooled when she'd delivered it, agog at the sight
of her silicone breasts shoved up under her chin in a
Wonderbra.
Unfortunately, it didn't have the desired effect this time.

'We've met,' Darius said shortly. 'At an awards ceremony
last year.'
He turned back to Nicole and Lorelei, enraged to be
ignored, stomped off in high dudgeon.
That was when, had Nicole but known it, it all went
pearshaped. Lorelei was planning her revenge.
Nicole talked to Darius for ages, even when Zol from
Coral Fish sent a message over that he was leaving and did
she want to leave with him? Eventually, Nicole left Darius
to go to the ladies. She was smiling as she swayed along on
her new high-heeled sandals, then, before she knew what
was happening, a blond giant picked her up in a bear hug

and dragged her outside to where Lorelei was waiting with
the limo.

'I have to get back to Darius,' slurred Nicole from the
depths of the leather seat.

'Not tonight, dearie,' snapped Lorelei.

Lorelei made the limo driver take them all to another
club and although Nicole spent ages tearfully trying to find
Darius's mobile number in her phone's address book, she
was too drunk to do it properly.

Depressed that he'd think she'd dumped him, she sank
three tequila slammers to make up for it. And it was only
thanks to the blond giant kindly putting her back into the
limo at four in the morning that she got home at all.


The following morning, when nobody answered the phone
which had been ringing loudly for at least twenty minutes,
Nicole dragged herself and her hangover out of bed, made
it shakily down the stairs to the hall and picked up the
receiver.

'Hello,' she croaked.

'How was the party?' Sharon asked sharply.

'What party?' Nicole's head was pounding.

'The one you were at last night? The one you went to
after you'd told me you were doing nothing?'

Nicole sat on the bottom step and leaned against the wall
with its yellow wood chip paper. She felt awful. Her stomach
felt as if it was the epicentre of a force ten gale. If she could
keep still for a few moments, maybe the nausea would pass.

'It was just a spur of the moment thing,' Nicole said
weakly. 'I'd been asked to this party but didn't want to go
really.'

'Well, you looked as if you were enjoying it in the Globe today,' Sharon snapped. 'Have you seen it yet? I'll read it
to you: New kid on the block, Nicole - latest megabuck
signing at LGBK - bit the Coral Fish launch party in trendy
club Shiva last night with wild child Lorelei, who says they're
best friends and will be touring together on the Teen Stars


roadshow. Sultry Nicole, whose first single is released in
May, says she's a huge Coral Fish fan and loves their music. I love their music too,' Sharon said, her voice wobbly. 'You
know that. I've got their last two albums. But you never
even mentioned you were going to their party. Just because
you didn't want there to be any chance of your boring ordinary
old friend coming along, you decided not to say anything.
Fine.' There was no disguising the hurt in Sharon's
voice. 'Be like that if you want.'
'Sharon,' protested Nicole feebly, 'I wasn't going to go
to the party. When you phoned, I thought maybe you and
I could do something but you were going out with
Michelle

'Yeah, sure. Like you'd really prefer to go out with me
and have a few slammers down the pub when you could be
in some nightclub knocking back champagne with bloody
Lorelei. Stupid bitch, she is. You always said you hated her.'

Now was not the time to explain that, having actually met Lorelei and found her to be a stuck-up little prima
donna, Nicole hated her even more than she had when Lorelei
was just another beautiful, distant face on MTV.

'Sharon, it wasn't like that.' Nicole didn't know which
was worse: having a murderous hangover or having Sharon
furious with her.

'I suppose the next time I see you, it'll be fifty years later
on a documentary about your fabulous life and I'll be just
one of a throng of boring old pals you haven't bothered to
get in touch with!' Sharon hung up.

Utterly miserable, Nicole made it to the kitchen to get a
pint glass of water, which she puked up ten minutes after
drinking.

Darius phoned next. He didn't sound pleased, either.

'You got home all right, then?' he said, his clipped upper
class tones sounding icy. 'I was worried when you disappeared
and never came back. I searched for ages but the
cloakroom girl said you'd gone.'

The vague memories of the night before hit her. Lorelei


had had her kidnapped and Nicole swore Lorelei had done
it as revenge because she'd liked the look of Darius but he
hadn't given her a second glance. And now Darius was
furious with her, which wasn't fair.

She did her best to explain what had happened but she
felt so nauseous, she could barely speak.

'It was nothing to do with Zol,' she said finally. 'Lorelei
had me kidnapped.'

Darius clearly didn't believe her.

'I wouldn't advise you to go off with Zol,' Darius said
coldly. 'He's dangerous. He does every sort of drug under
the sun. I thought I was going to take you home?'

'You were,' Nicole said sadly.

'I'll see you in a few weeks,' Darius said then, as if he
was consulting his diary about a dentist's appointment. 'I'll
be talking to Bob about the album, naturally, but that's all.'

'But aren't you coming with me on the Teen Stars roadshow?'
Nicole asked. 'I thought you were going to be with
me . . .'

It was a seven city tour and it was seen as an ideal way
to let a novice performer learn the ropes, to polish their act
before they had to hit the big time and to garner new, young
fans. Some acts never made it any further than the Teen
Stars roadshow, because they simply didn't have what it
took. Nicole was absolutely terrified she'd be among the
inevitable casualties. Because she was his discovery, Darius
had planned to go along for the ride. But he'd changed his
mind.

'You've already met Lorelei,' he said coolly. 'You'll be
fine.'

Nicole felt as if she'd lost her only ally in the world.


Nicole knew her songs backwards, and she irritatedly told
her mother so when Sandra flustered round her as Nicole
packed for the tour, worrying about whether Nicole would
be able to perform in front of all those people and what if
she forgot the words . . .


'I hope you know them forwards as well,' cackled Reenie
from her overseer's position at the end of Nicole's bed.

Nicole, miserable because she hadn't spoken to Darius for
a week and nervous at the idea of performing live, snapped:
'That's a stupid thing to say!'

Instead of barking back, the way she did when she and
Sandra rowed, Reenie Turner looked deeply hurt and said
nothing. From the way her shoulders drooped as she left the
cramped bedroom, Nicole knew her grandmother was upset.

Even Sandra gazed at her daughter with reproachful eyes
but said nothing as she too left.

Nicole crammed her suitcase shut furiously.

What were they like? They spent their lives squabbling
and now, the one time Nicole had said something smart,
they were both behaving like outraged doves with ruffled
feathers, cooing in shock and confusion. It had been a stupid
thing to say.

Nicole stared fiercely at herself in the mirror, not really
noticing the tiny little denim jacket she was wearing with
the black cargo pants, an outfit that had thrilled her when
she first got it. People said such stupid bloody things to her.
Couldn't they see she was stressed?

But there had been no reason for her to be horrible back,
she knew. She never was. In fact, she couldn't remember a
time when she'd been so sharp with her poor gran. A wave
of deep shame swept over Nicole.

Just then, the doorbell rang.

'Your car's here,' roared her mother from downstairs.

Nicole dragged the suitcase downstairs and said hello to
the driver.

She popped her head round the sitting room door.

'Well, bye,' she said brightly. There was no sign of her
grandmother.

'Where's Gran?' she asked her mother.

'Gone home. Have a good time.'

Sandra didn't even get up from her chair to say goodbye,
which was most unusual. Sandra had been so excited about


the Teen Stars roadshow that Nicole had half-expected a
fanfare of neighbours and a bottle of sparkling wine. The
grumpy, nervous Nicole would have felt irritated by such a
display. But the ashamed Nicole felt her eyes go misty at the
lack of the neighbours, the sparkling wine and the proud
family farewell.

Only Pammy gave her big sister a huge hug. 'Say hello
to Lorelei,' Pammy said in her breathy voice. 'I love her.'

You wouldn't if you knew her, Nicole thought grimly.
She held her little sister tightly and said she would say hi to
Lorelei. 'Go in to Mum, Pammy,' she ordered, and she shut
the front door behind her. Nobody waved from behind the
curtains of 12a Belton Terrace.

Nicole climbed into the car and sat, red-eyed and silent,
all the way to the airport. This pop star business wasn't all
it was cracked up to be.


At Heathrow, the Teen Stars roadshow acts were congregated
in one of the business class lounges and Nicole's
first thought was that the entire group resembled a slightly
older than usual school tour. The various record company
and management staff were like the teachers, anxious at the
thought of taking care of the singers, all of whom were
carrying on as if they'd been let out of convents for the day
and were determined to create as much havoc as possible.
Nicole could see four members of the supposedly sweet
and innocent Carli Girls sitting in a corner smoking, knocking
back glasses of red wine, and telling ribald jokes to a
photographer, while Gregory, a fresh-faced young ex-soap
star who was adored by teenage girls and their mums alike
and who'd fronted a 'be nice to your parents' campaign,
was smoking and screaming down the phone at someone,
with every second word a profanity. Tina, a child prodigy
who sang Nolan Sisters covers, was busily painting on
Cleopatra-style eyeliner in a compact mirror and sneaking
surreptitious gulps of the Carli Girls' wine while her mother
wasn't looking.


Only Euston, a five-piece boy band with the squeakiest
image in the world, were behaving. They were playing travel
Monopoly. There was no sign of horrible Lorelei.
Maybe she'd cancelled, Nicole hoped. She didn't want to
ever set eyes on Lorelei again.
Nicole was welcomed by both the LGBK and Teen Stars
staff who were there to make sure that the paths of their
young stars ran smoothly and without too many scandalous
inches in the gossip columns. They'd have their hands full.
'We were worried about you,' said Andrea, the publicity
woman from LGBK who was going to be travelling with
Nicole. Andrea looked about twenty but as she was publicity
manager, she had to be older, Nicole reckoned. Hopefully,
she'd be fun and they could have a nice time. Nicole longed
to be able to confide in someone and say she was as nervous
as hell about the whole roadshow thing. But now was not
the time.
'Traffic was terrible,' she said brightly, determined to be
as professional as possible. 'So, what's the plan?'
'We need some photos for the Teen Stars magazine,' said
Phyllis, the most senior Teen Stars tour person, who looked
around three times Andrea's age and was obviously well
used to ordering wild young bands around. 'Could we have
the group together?' Phyllis called in an authoritative voice
that brooked no argument.
In a flash, the Carli Girls stabbed out their fags and
whipped out expensive compacts to re-do their make up.
Phyllis swiftly removed the offending glasses and everyone
tried to look like young, happy, squeaky clean pop stars.
Gregory swore viciously one last time, hung up his phone
and smiled the lovely, sweet smile that women of all ages
adored.
'Hi babe,' he said, wriggling in beside Nicole and brushing
back a swathe of naturally blond fringe. 'Haven't met you
before. This tour could be fun.'
Nicole glowered at him. She wasn't dumb enough to fall
for such a two-faced jerk.

'Hello,' said a familiar, hated voice. 'Stealing my boys
again, Nicci. Very bad of you. I can see I'm going to have
to watch you.'
It was Lorelei, dripping vitriol in skin-tight pink lace; an
outfit that was extremely out of place in Heathrow at two
in the afternoon. She looked as if she was ready to start
dancing round the pole in a strip club.
Lorelei couldn't be only nineteen, Nicole decided. She
was obviously one of the undead and had been walking the
earth for centuries looking for people to torture. It would
take a long time for anyone to become as twisted as Lorelei
and nineteen years just wasn't long enough.
'Are we ready?' said the photographer.
Lorelei, scene stealing as ever, decided that she wanted
to be in the middle of the group, so she clambered all over
everyone else and plonked herself in the middle, managing
to stab Nicole in the arm with one deadly fingernail.
'Ouch,' said Nicole.
'Sorry diddums,' said Lorelei. 'Me didn't mean to hurt
you, diddums,' she added in babyspeak and hugged Nicole.
'We're bestest friends, you and me.'
And so it was that the first picture of Nicole's groundbreaking
first tour was of her clutched in Lorelei's deadly
grasp, with Lorelei looking angelic and Nicole looking grim
as she realized that there were three more weeks of this to
go.
Lorelei had messed things up for Nicole with Darius and
Nicole was determined to pay her back if it was the last
thing she did. Darius hadn't phoned since that morning after
the Coral Fish launch and when she'd rung him in the hope
that they could make things up, he'd been cool and businesslike,
as if she was just another LGBK act instead of someone
special.
Nicole had hung up and allowed herself to cry a few
bitter tears. It astonished her how miserable she felt without
his friendship.

The tour, despite everyone from Teen Stars saying the opposite,
was surprisingly hard work. There were sixteen venues
and two performances in each, often on the same day. Once
the second gig was over, everybody was too tired to do
anything except shuffle off to bed. Or at least, that was the
plan. But Lorelei, Gregory and the Carli Girls generally
found a burst of energy from somewhere and were determined
to party. Nicole soon found that asking for a room
on a different floor of the hotel and making sure that nobody
but Andrea and Phyllis knew the number was the only
answer. She discovered this after the first two nights in Manchester
when Lorelei and Gregory set off a fire extinguisher
outside her room door and then scarpered, leaving her
peering confusedly into the hotel corridor just as security
rounded the corner.
It had taken a lot of effort to explain that she'd just woken
up and had nothing to do with the prank.
However, trying to avoid the vindictive Lorelei had one
magical effect: Nicole's performing nerves disappeared.
At rehearsals, she was too busy waiting for Lorelei's next
practical joke to be nervous and by the time the actual performances
came round, she'd realized that she simply loved
being onstage and could perform in her sleep.
As the Edinburgh Clarion music reporter wrote: The Teen
Stars roadshow may be manufactured pop, but you've got
to applaud the organizers for bringing us the charismatic
Nicole. With the voice of a husky angel and the looks of an
Indian goddess, she's surely the star of this show. And from
the screams she gets every time she's on stage, the fans think
so too.
This glowing review did not endear her to Lorelei, who
broke two nails with rage when she read it and proceeded
to spill nail varnish all over Nicole's prized D&G flower
print jacket by way of revenge.
Nicole, fed up with being dignified and professional, put
Lorelei's vast collection of make-up in the backstage microwave
until it all melted into a Technicolor puddle. She then

put it carefully back into the big steel make-up artist's box
that Lorelei made other people haul around for her. This
was Lorelei's pride and joy as she refused to use the makeup
that everyone else did and insisted that the tour makeup
artists use her own, expensive stuff.
Lorelei's un-amplified yells when she discovered what had
happened were as loud as her miked-up performance.
'You bitch!' She stood at the door of Nicole's dressing
room, looking for all the world like an enraged female velociraptor
from Jurassic Park.
Nicole, who was talking to Phyllis at the time, gazed back
at her innocently. 'What are you talking about, Lor?' she
inquired sweetly.
'Yes, get a move on, Lorelei,' said Phyllis firmly, wanting
to knock any arguments on the head. 'It's half an hour to
the performance and you haven't let them start on your face
yet.'
'My make-up is a mess, all drippy!' squealed Lorelei.
'You probably left it too close to the radiator,' Nicole
said sympathetically. 'These rooms are very warm, for a
change.'

The days raced by. Nicole found it strange being on her own.
Not that she was alone or even lonely what with rehearsals,
performances, flights and interviews. But it was simply that
Nicole was so used to taking care of Pammy and Sandra
that it was odd not to have to think about anyone else. At
first, she felt adrift without other people to look after. But
eventually she began to get used to it and to enjoy it.
On her time off, Nicole didn't want to rush into the shops
like the other girls and go crazy buying clothes. Instead, she
went for long walks around the cities they were staying in
and saw the sights. The freedom was incredible. She wasn't
responsible for anyone else; she didn't have to worry whether
Pammy had taken her swimming things to school or if there
was proper food in the house for dinner.
Nicole had felt like the person in charge for most of her

life. When other girls she knew had moved out of home and
into flats with their pals, Nicole had known that she could
never do that. She could never leave her little sister and their
mother alone. She wouldn't have been able to cope with the
very idea of it. But now, living a carefree life for the first
time, Nicole began to wonder what it would be like to have
her own place, what it would be like to be without the
responsibility of her family? It was a dizzying thought.
She talked to Pammy every day on the phone and missed
her desperately.
Pammy was going to be a fairy in the school play and
Nicole's heart swelled with pride when she heard the news.
'I've got wings,' announced Pammy importantly during
one of their daily phone calls. 'Silver wings. Kylie's wings
are blue and not pretty like mine.'
'Can I come and see you?' Nicole asked.
'You have to. Miss Vishnu knows that you're singing on
the telly and then you're coming.'
Nicole smiled at her little sister's innocent explanation.
Sandra had supplied the silver wings. 'I got them in the
market,' she told Nicole. 'I think Pammy's teacher wanted
me to make them but honestly, can you see me sewing! This
nice Italian lady down the market does stuff like that if you
can't sew and they're beautiful. That poor little Kylie kid
had to wear blue net ones. I said to Miss Vishnu, "my Pammy
is the prettiest child and she's going to look like a pretty
angel. No blue ones for her."'
Nicole was mildly astonished that her mother had even
been talking to Miss Vishnu. Previously, Sandra had kept
away from the school as much as she could, probably
because she'd had so many unwilling conversations with
teachers about Nicole's madcap ways, well, not conversations
as such. The teacher in question would try to talk
to Sandra, who'd sidle off and say she was in a rush, but
they could catch up at the parent/teacher meetings. Except
Sandra never went to the parent/teacher meetings. And here
she was looking after Pammy and organizing her fairy wings.

It all went to prove that life could go on without her.
Nicole couldn't help but feel strangely left out. Even her
grandmother was different.

Reenie still hadn't thawed although Nicole had said sorry
several times.

Their conversations were stilted, no matter how many
times Nicole apologized.

'I don't want you turning into some stuck up little
upstart,' Reenie said on one of the few occasions when she'd
deigned to come to the phone.

'I'm not, Gran,' protested Nicole.

'Hmm,' was all Reenie would say, before passing the
phone over to her daughter.


After ten days of touring, Darius phoned'.

'I hear you're doing brilliantly,' he said.

Nicole, in her bathrobe and just about to dress for the
evening gig, blushed with pleasure.

'I've missed you,' she said abruptly, then blushed even
more at how that sounded. 'I mean ... it would have been
nice to have you here . . .' she added quickly, hoping to
counteract what she'd said. God, he'd think she was some
sort of idiot.

Darius interrupted her. 'I missed you too,' he said softly.

Nicole had been standing beside the phone. Now she sat
down on the bed with a resounding thud. 'Oh.'

'Andrea says you've been fantastic. You're a real trouper,
she says, and you've got one amazing review. In fact, we're
sending up a group of people from some of the international
Titus companies tomorrow evening. They're really keen to
see you, they've heard you're going to be a big star. There's
quite a buzz going round here about you.'

Nicole didn't care. They could be sending up the Emmy
awards committee for all she cared. She sat on the bed,
smiling with love. Darius had phoned. That was all that
mattered.

'Are you coming?' she asked.


'Of course,' he replied. 'I'm sorry,' he added gruffly. 'You
know, about the other week.'

'I didn't go off with Zol,' Nicole interrupted. 'Honestly.
Lorelei was furious that you'd turned your back on her and
she got this guy to drag me out to the limo with her. I didn't
want to go, I wanted to stay with you. But when I tried to ring
you, I couldn't. Too many Zombies,' she admitted guiltily.

'It's not your fault,' Darius said. 'You fell in with a bad
crowd.'

'I don't want to be with people like that,' she said. 'I'm
not like that. Lorelei drives me mad. She's a ... cow.' She'd
been about to say that Lorelei was a bitch, but somehow
she didn't want to swear in front of Darius. 'Zol's worse.
He kept touching my bum all night.' Nicole couldn't hide
her outrage at this.

Darius was gratifyingly angry. 'Asshole,' he said furiously.
'I should never have let you out of my sight.'

Nicole, who'd have punched any previous boyfriend for
implying that she required looking after, grew misty-eyed at
this sign of protectiveness.

'I like the idea of you not letting me out of your sight,'
she said.

As if she knew it was an important day for Nicole, Lorelei
chose the following day to play up even more than usual.
She delayed the bus leaving the hotel that morning by over
an hour, claiming that she'd lost the lucky charm bracelet
her father had given her.

Because they were so delayed, there was no time to check
in at the hotel before the afternoon gig. Nicole, who was
due to meet the Titus executives at the venue afterwards and
had planned to doll herself up in the hotel before rehearsals,
was furious. She was sharing a dressing room with two of
the Carli girls and it would be impossible to smother herself
in body lotion for Darius's benefit with them watching.

'You look upset, Nicci,' Lorelei said sweetly, when Nicole
came offstage after having uncharacteristically botched her
rehearsal.


Nicole shot her a vicious look but said nothing.
In the dressing room, the two Carli Girls were discussing
Lorelei.
'I thought she was fun at first, but she's a nightmare,'
said one.
'Jesus, yes. She's such a drama queen, she's doing my
head in,' said the other.
'Tell me about it,' said Nicole.
With half an hour to go, they all changed into their stage
clothes. The Carli Girls were going through a silver phase:
they all dressed in sequinned silvery catsuits. Nicole's outfit
for the day was a mixture of bronze and denim, a tight, sexy
sleeveless top with a deep cleavage and customized Dolce & Gabbana jeans with bronze embroidery.
'See you later,' chorused the Carli Girls, as they left. They
were on stage next, with Nicole coming on after them.
Gregory was after her, then Lorelei, finally Euston ending
the show. The running order was very important and the
biggest act usually finished last. Lorelei was fighting viciously
to be the last act but had failed so far.
Nicole knew she had fifteen minutes before she had to be
onstage, which gave her a few minutes in the tiny dressing
room bathroom.
Wearing just her jeans and a slinky see-through bra, she
took her body lotion and perfume into the bathroom, shut
the door and clicked the little bolt home.
She stripped off the bra and began to rub the musky
lotion into her skin. Just in case Darius held her close, she wanted to smell and feel beautiful.
A sudden noise outside made her jump.
'Hello? Andrea? Who is it?'
There was no answer but Nicole stiffened as she heard
somebody approaching the bathroom door. Suddenly there
was a click as if someone was turning a key from the other
side. Nicole unbolted the door and tried to open it but it
didn't move.
'Who's there?' she demanded.

Nobody spoke but Nicole heard a smothered giggle she'd
recognize anywhere: Lorelei.

'Let me out, Lorelei,' she roared furiously. But nobody
answered.

Nicole used her entire weight to pull at the door but it
wouldn't open. Lorelei had obviously found the key and
now she was locked in with just fifteen minutes to show
time. Nobody would notice her until the five minute call and
then it would take a few minutes to find her and let her out,
by which time she'd look deeply unprofessional to all the
visiting record company execs. Nicole burned with fury at
the very thought. When she got her hands on Lorelei, she'd
kill her.

Five minutes went, then ten. Stuck in the bathroom in
her bra and jeans, Nicole simmered and then panicked. She
kept banging on the bathroom door, shouting and yelling
all the time, but nobody appeared to have heard her.

'Help, help,' she screamed, scared of going hoarse from
shouting but even more scared of missing her slot onstage.
She'd worked so hard and now it was all going down the
tubes thanks to that horrible, nasty cow.

You're not going to win, Lorelei, vowed Nicole. She
looked around the bathroom for something heavy. The only
possibility was a grimy old weighing scales that looked as
if it had been around since Victorian times. It'd do. Picking
it up, Nicole banged it against the door, splintering a big
hole in it. Grimly, Nicole began banging the scales against
the door handle, hoping to break it. She'd just landed a
third, crushing blow when she heard her name being called.

'Nicole? Are you in there?'

'Yes,' shrieked Nicole joyously, dropping the scales to the
floor. 'I'm locked in. Find the key.'

There was silence for a moment, then a voice said: 'I can't
find it. Stand back, I'm going to break the door down.'

She darted to one side and waited until a mighty noise
boomed, the door groaned and flew open and Darius stood
at the other side, with his boot in the air.


'Darius,' breathed Nicole. She'd never been so pleased to
see anyone in her life, for a variety of reasons. 'Lorelei locked
me in, I'm sure of it.'

'That little cow,' he growled, his kind, easy-going face
angry in a way Nicole would never have believed possible.
'You should never have been put on the same tour with her.
It was like putting you in a pool with sharks and not giving you a cage to protect you. She's jealous of you.'

'Is she?' Nicole stood in front of him, not caring how she
was dressed. 'How did you know I was here?'

'I didn't,' Darius said, looking down at her longingly. 'I
just knew you'd never be late and that something had
happened to you.'

And because Nicole knew he was too polite to do anything
to a woman dressed only in jeans and a bra, she stood
on tiptoe and kissed him. In an instant, his arms were around
her and they clung together fiercely, kissing, only breaking
away when Darius came to his senses.

'You've got to get onstage,' he gasped, running a hand
through his fair spiky hair, making it stick up more than
ever.

'Afterwards,' said Nicole.

'Afterwards,' he promised.


'Where were you? We were so worried,' said an angelic
Lorelei as Nicole raced backstage for her performance.
Nicole didn't have time to say anything but after the show,
she got her chance for revenge.

'Can you do a five minute interview?' begged Phyllis as
they all trooped off stage after the finale. 'I know you've got
record company people to go out with but you were so
brilliant up there tonight that this girl from Superb magazine
wants to do an interview with you.'

'No problem,' said Nicole, a wicked plan forming . . .

The interview took place in a small office backstage and
when the inevitable question about co-star bitching appeared,
Nicole was ready for it.


'I know what you're talking about,' she said, stifling a
sniff. 'I know that Lorelei said terrible things about me. It's
awful, this whole music industry is so cruel,' Nicole added
mournfully. 'She's such a sweet girl at heart and I really like
her but when your single fails, it's like you're a non person
and that really has an effect on some people.'

The Superb reporter perked up at this fresh information.
'We didn't think her single bombed that badly,' the reporter
said. 'It's been hard getting actual figures from the record
companies,' she continued in a probing manner. 'Everyone
denies it but I'm convinced they try and massage the figures
to make it look better for some artists.'

Nicole bit her lip as if she'd made a huge mistake. 'Oh
God, I shouldn't have said anything. Lorelei would be devastated
if anyone knew . . . She's so proud. We were friends
before this, you know, but. . .' meaningful pause, 'her
second album dropped like a stone from the chart. She's so
upset. I know she wouldn't have meant to bitch about me,
we're friends, honestly.'

Nicole tried to look innocent. The reporter smiled, knowing
now that Lorelei was hauling her ass round every small
venue in the country because it was the only way her next
single had a hope in hell. Suddenly her story had an angle.
Lorelei had got on many people's nerves over her two-year
career. It was payback time.


'How did the interview go?' Darius asked later, when they'd
got a minute alone after the triumphant dinner with the
European Titus people. They all adored Nicole and thought
she had a fabulous career ahead of her, promising European
appearances left, right and centre.

Nicole grinned. 'Wait till I tell you,' she said wickedly.

It was nearly two in the morning when Darius escorted
her to her room. Nicole was exhausted after a long day, her
voice was hoarse from talking and performing and her feet
were tired, yet she still felt as if she could dance all night if
only Darius asked.


He stopped outside her door and took her small hand in
his big one. He was so gentle, Nicole thought. The kindest,
politest man she'd ever met. What did he want with a tough
little cookie like her?
'Well . . . goodnight,' stammered Darius, the boy who'd
won debating contests at his public school and who'd never
been at a loss for words before. He was speechless now.
Nicole did that to him. Just one scorching look from those
tigerish eyes and he was struck dumb.
'Yes . . . goodnight,' said Nicole, looking at her hand in
his grasp. She couldn't talk. What was the matter with her?
She wanted Darius to kiss her, she wanted more than kisses,
but she'd made the first move once, she couldn't do it again.
Not with someone like Darius. He was so upright and
respectable, his voice made her think of the Queen's garden
parties and regattas on the telly. His parents would probably
drop dead with shock if he turned up at home with this
half-Indian, half-Cockney brat. . .
'What are we like?' Darius suddenly took action. 'Where's
your key?'
Dumbly, Nicole handed it over. He opened the door
and dragged her inside. Then, he pulled her into his arms
and kissed her until she thought she'd faint with lack of
oxygen.
'Sorry,' he said, as she gasped for air.
'Sorry?' laughed Nicole. 'What for?' And she pulled his
head down to hers again. 'You'll be sorry if you stop.'
Much later, they sat on the sofa, Nicole curled up on
his lap, his big body cradling hers protectively. 'I've got
something to tell you,' she said, not able to look him in the
eye.
'You can tell me anything,' said Darius, his voice suffused
with love.
'I'm . . . that is . . .' Nicole said haltingly. How was she
ever going to do this?
'Tell me.' When Darius looked at her with that honest,
blue gaze, she knew she could tell him anything.

'I'm a virgin. I've never . . . done it before.' She bit her
lip anxiously. 'Everyone thinks I have. I mean, you can't say
you're a virgin nowadays, can you?'
'Why not?' Darius said softly, tracing the outline of her
lips with one finger. 'You're beautiful, Nicole. I'm crazy
about you. I love you.'
'Me too,' she said quickly, 'that's why I wanted to tell
you. It has to be special, you see or . . .' she paused. 'Or it
can screw up your life.' She wanted to say more and Darius
knew it.
'Tell me?' he asked.
'It wasn't my mum, you see,' Nicole said. 'It was Gran.
Ever since I was a kid, she was always going on about mum
getting pregnant when she was a teenager and how it ruined
everything. I felt guilty, I was responsible.' Nicole's eyes
glistened.
'You weren't, you were the innocent one,' protested
Darius.
'Mum was innocent too,' Nicole said. 'You've met her.
She's just the kindest person and she can't say no to anyone.
She shouldn't be allowed out on her own, Gran always says.
I love Gran, honest I do, but I love Mum more. I never
wanted anyone to label my mum as some reckless mother
with kids by different fathers. I hate that.' Nicole was vehement.
'That's why I tried so hard to keep things together at
home.'
'Your mum is lovely,' said Darius truthfully. He knew
exactly what Nicole meant about her mother, who was as
naive and trusting as the day is long.
'Mum expects the best out of life and people,' Nicole said
simply. 'There isn't a bad bone in her body. She's just a bit
innocent, if that makes sense. She's always done her best for
us but she was the sort of person who needed someone
strong to lean on. I tried to be that person, and all the time,
Gran was telling me that sex was bad and look what it had
done to Mum.'
'Sex isn't bad.' Darius stroked Nicole's cheek softly. 'That's

your gran's religious upbringing. You've got to understand
that.'
'I know that,' Nicole smiled as if talking to a child. 'But
I still wanted to wait for the right person.'
Darius couldn't speak.
'That's you, silly,' she said. 'You're the right person. But
not here.'
She knew where she'd like to make love to him: in her
own home, where she felt happy and independent, her own
flat. 'I'd love to have my own place,' she said suddenly, 'but
I can't,' she added.
'Why not?' asked Darius reasonably.
She stared at him. 'I can't leave Mum and Pammy, you
know that.'
Darius was serious: 'You'll have to leave sometime,
Nicole.'



CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Hi Sam,
How are you feeling? I hope you're not working
too hard. It's a glorious day in Redlion with summer
peeking round the corner. Toby and Millie are at my
feet playing cards. Matt sent them this pack of animal
cards from Bath and they spend hours playing snap. I
was never so grateful to anyone in my life as I am to
those cardmakers although Millie can get a bit stroppy
when she loses. She's really Daddy's girl, I have to say.
In the two weeks since Matt went back to Bath she's
been so naughty and when I give out to her, she cries
at the top of her voice and says she wants her Daddy!
But she's happy today because a new babysitter is
coming tonight and Millie can't wait to get rid of
me! I imagine she's hoping to get up to all sorts of
tricks with a babysitter who doesn't know the rules.
I'm going out to this big charity do which was set
up by the woman who owns the local pub, which is
the hotbed of all sorts of excitement. Apparently it's
amazing, everybody in the area comes. Tonight,
we're raising money for guide dogs for the blind.
Matt says that knowing the people who frequent the
pub, it'll be guide dogs for the blind drunk. I have
been roped in to sell raffle tickets. It should be fun.
As you know, I haven't been out much since Matt
went back to Bath because both kids have had colds.
Will tell you how it went tomorrow,
Love Hope.

Geraldine, a nineteen-year-old Arts student whose parents '] ran the organic butchers, wasn't in the least bothered by
missing the charity night to babysit.

'It'll all be old wrinklies tonight,' she told Hope dismissively.
'No talent whatsoever, just the usual clutch of ould
fellas trying to drag me up to dance because they buy meat
from my dad's shop, I'd hate it. It'll be like every charity
night they've ever had in the town. Boring as hell.'

'Will all the ould fellows try and drag me up to dance?'
inquired Hope, grinning.

Geraldine shook her head. 'No, they don't know you
well enough. In my case, you see, they all look mistily
into their pints and tell me they remember when I was a
baby and all the times they changed my nappy. That's their
grounds for hauling me round the dance floor. But they
can't do that with you. You're still a visitor and you're
safe. Besides,' she smiled in an awestruck way, 'they know
you've got a gorgeous husband, so what would be the
point.'

'My babysitter tells me the place will be full of old men
desperate to drag young women up to dance,' Hope whispered
to Delphine as they left their coats at the cloakroom.

'She's got that right,' Delphine whispered back. 'But
there's bound to be a few nice ones too. I promise I'll rescue
you if I see you being molested by anyone unsuitable.'

Hope had never been in the village hall before. On the
outside, it was a barren looking breeze block building with
zero charm that no amount of climbing ivy could hide. On
the inside, however, Belle Maguire's group of charity ladies
had transformed it with yellow crepe paper, plenty of trailing
plants and a long table covered with a delicious looking
buffet.

All the tables were covered in yellow table cloths and
decorated with yellow roses, while the lights were all dim
bulbs flattering to all ages and nicely atmospheric. It was
obvious that a huge amount of effort had gone into everything.

By half seven, people started to arrive, the usual combination
of people who were dressed to kill, along with people
who'd come straight from work and hadn't had a chance to
change out of suits and ties. Hope and Delphine were asked
to roam the tables once people had piled their plates from
the buffet. Hope, who hadn't had anything to eat since lunch,
began to look longingly at the buffet with its beautifully laid
out cold meats and the dressed salmon. By eight the place
was full and the party raged on, with a few people not
bothering with the buffet at all but getting stuck into the
first hour of free drink.

'Do you think having a free bar for an hour is a good
idea?' Hope asked Belle, when the queue to the bar was at
least six deep with no sign of abating.

Belle smiled enigmatically. 'Wait till the auction,' she said.
'They're much more generous when they're plastered. When
it's all balanced out, we'll have made a fortune.'

She was right. By ten, Hope had sold most of her tickets
and the floor was heaving with happy partygoers dancing to
a band playing disco music. Hope had been whirled around
the floor several times and not with any of Geraldine's so
called ould fellas either. Eugene had brought along some
friends, who been only too delighted to whisk off the pretty
Mrs Parker who looked so sweetly sexy in a long flowered
chiffon dress.

In fact, the gathering was pretty glamorous all round.
Lots of gorgeous teenage girls drifted around affecting to
look bored at being at a do with their parents, but secretly
trying to attract the attention of one of the local rock stars,
who'd turned up with his wife, an ex-Vogue model who was
watching the teenage lovelies with a wary eye. The Oscar
winning actress who'd bought the crumbling Shanrock
Castle was there with a party of guests from LA, one of
whom was trying to Riverdance with the barmaid from the
Widow's. Delphine's friends, a crowd of glamorous, French
manicured young things who looked as if they'd spent all
day in a beauty salon, were being ogled by the LA guests and


Eugene's friends. Meanwhile, two of the handsome Danish
artists who'd been renting a house near the artists' centre
since March had arrived on a Harley and were having a
great time being indoctrinated into Irish cuisine by boutique
owner Lucille, who felt they ought to try crubeens before
they went back to Denmark.

'What are crubeens?' inquired the younger guy innocently,
taking a big bite.

'Pigs' feet,' Lucille announced pleasantly. 'The back ones
to be precise because there's more meat on them. Anyone
want some more?'

'How are you doing?' asked Belle, catching up with
Hope in the ladies as she tried to tone down her flushed
face.

'Brilliantly,' Hope said with delight. 'We're making a
fortune.'

'Good. It's the auction next and I've a problem because
one of my ladies has let me down.'

'Can I help?' Hope asked.

Belle smiled at her. 'I was hoping you'd say that.'

Which was how Hope found herself standing nervously
onstage beside seven other locals, all of whom had good
humouredly offered themselves up for the auction. Danny, a
landscape gardener, was offering a day's work in someone's
garden. Shona, a talented decorator, promised a consultation
to help revamp someone's house, while Delphine was offering
a home facial.

Hope wasn't sure what she was supposed to offer.

'Hen rearing skills,' suggested Mary-Kate wickedly from
the safety of the dance floor.

'Why aren't you up here?' demanded Hope.

'You're prettier,' said Mary-Kate.

'No, it's because she refused,' Belle said. With her golden
blonde hair piled on top of her head and wearing a very
low cut pink suit out of which her magnificent bosom rose
majestically, she looked like the madam of a successful
brothel.


'What am I up here for?' Hope inquired.
'I keep hearing what a wonderful organizer you are - Una
Hutchinson never stops singing your praises. You can offer
two hours of sorting out people's business affairs.'
'I don't really do that sort of thing . . .' protested Hope.
'Nonsense,' said Belle. 'Don't sell yourself short. You're
a very capable woman, remember that.'
The bidding was slow to start but by the time Shona's
interior decoration services were up for grabs, the money
was flowing.
'300, can you imagine that,' said Shona delightedly as
the bidding stopped.
'Oh God,' whispered Hope in embarrassment to Delphine.
'Nobody's going to bid for me. I'll die. Why did I let
myself in for this?'
Belle, the perfect mistress of ceremonies, invited Hope to
stand beside her, outlined her skills, and asked for the bids
to start.
Hope smiled glazedly out at the audience, thinking that
if only Matt were here, he'd bid for her, purely to save her
from utter public humiliation.
'One hundred pounds,' cried Eugene loyally.
Hope smiled at him.
'One fifty,' offered Mary-Kate.
'One seventy-five,' said Paddy Slattery who'd sold her the
hens. Hope sighed. If Paddy won the bidding, he'd probably
have her cleaning out his henhouse for him.
'Two hundred,' said Erwin, whose machinery hire company
she'd worked for. Hope smiled at him. She'd already
sorted Erwin out.
'Two fifty,' said a man in a wheelchair. Standing beside
him, giving her a thumbs up signal, was Una Hutchinson.
'Two seventy-five,' said the butcher's wife encouragingly.
'Three hundred,' said the rock star huskily, earning himself
a fierce glare off his wife.
'Three hundred,' repeated Belle, gazing round at the
audience.

There were no more bids and the only sounds in the hall
were the noise of the CD player on low and the sound of
glasses rattling down at the bar.

'Any more bids?' roared Belle.

'Three twenty-five,' said the butcher's assistant, no doubt
primed by his boss.

'Three twenty-five it is,' said Belle, judging it to be the
end of the bidding, 'going, going . . .'

'Four hundred pounds,' said a familiar voice.

There was a delighted roar from one of the charity ladies
who was now semi-comatose from brandy. 'Fantasthic!' she
slurred. 'Pray ish not my husband who's bidding.'

'Who bid?' whispered Shona, fascinated, peering down
the back of the hall where the lights were dim and all the
faces merged into one another.

Hope didn't need to see who'd bid for her. She knew.
She'd recognize that honeyed voice anywhere. Christy De
Lacy.

Her face burned.

'Four hundred pounds, any more bids?' said Belle, who
knew a good thing when she saw it and who had no difficulty
recognizing Christy's saturnine face from amid the
throngs of guests. 'Going, going, gone. Sold to Mr De Lacy
for four hundred pounds. Lucky you,' she added in an undertone
to Hope. 'I wouldn't mind being sold to that boy for
four hundred pounds. I'd let him have me for four pounds,
never mind,' she added with a lascivious cackle. Hope
wondered if she should write a cheque for four hundred
pounds herself for the charity, seeing as how she had no
intention of spending a moment in Christy's company ever
again.

When the auction was over, Belle announced that the bar
would be closing in ten minutes. There was a mad rush to
the back of the hall. Some people began to gather up coats
and bags to leave. At Belle's request, the bidders came up
to claim their prizes and make arrangements to meet up.
The hall lights were switched on to full and Hope watched


as Christy, devastating in one of his signature Hugo Boss
suits, strolled up to the stage.
'That was very good of you to bid so much,' Belle said,
eyeing him up.
'It's for charity,' he purred.
'I wouldn't have had you down as the charitable type,'
Hope said sharply.
Belle glanced at her but said nothing.
'When are you going to come up to the hotel and sort
me out?' Christy said softly so that only Hope could hear.
'I've missed our little sessions.'
Hope said nothing. She was terrified that someone would
hear. Delphine and Eugene were only feet away and Mary
Kate was chatting to Shona close by.
'Can I give you a lift home, Hope?' asked Christy loudly.
'It's on my way and I have to get back to the hotel by half
eleven.'
'No,' said Hope abruptly. 'Eugene and Delphine are driving
me home. My babysitter, Geraldine, lives near them and
they're going to drive her home afterwards.'
'I can do that,' Christy said smoothly.
Hope shot Delphine a beseeching look but Delphine was
busy getting her coat and didn't notice.
'Eugene, I'll drop Hope off,' Christy said to Eugene. 'It'll
save you the drive.'
'I don't know ... if you're sure . . .' said Eugene hesitantly,
his dislike of Christy warring with his desire not to
have to drive down the pot-holed lane to Curlew Cottage.
'Absolutely,' Christy said.
Unless she wanted a full-scale disagreement, there really
was no option but for Hope to pull on her jacket, wave
goodbye to everyone and go with Christy. She could have
refused him point blank but that would only make Delphine
and Eugene wonder why, and then Hope would have to
explain that she was a stupid, flirtatious woman who'd made
a fool of herself with Christy. Damn him! Couldn't he see
she wasn't interested?

Christy, however, didn't appear to see anything.

'Mind your step,' he murmured, taking her arm as they
walked out the path to the car park.

Hope pulled her arm away as if she'd been scalded. 'I'm
fine,' she snapped.

He shot her a reproachful gaze with those puppy dog
eyes. 'Tired?' he asked. 'Never mind. I'll get you sitting down
in a minute and you can slip off your heels.' His gaze
flickered over her, as if her high heels weren't the only things
he envisaged her removing.

At his silver sports car, Christy flicked the alarm and then
opened the passenger door with a flourish.

'Madame,' he purred, helping her in.

A blast of deja vu hit Hope as Christy slammed the door
and she shuddered at the memory of the last time she sat in
the low-slung car. She primly smoothed down her skirt and
folded her arms across her chest protectively. If her body
language didn't give him the message, then she'd have to tell
him straight up: she loved Matt and she didn't want to fool
around. It had all been a big mistake.

'Comfy?' said Christy, sliding into his seat. The overpowering
scent of Givenchy for Men flooded the car. He
must use buckets of the stuff.

'Fine,' Hope replied. She must try to be civil after all. 'I'm
tired, Christy. I've an early start in the morning.'

'Yes, Una's away from tomorrow. I know you'll manage,
though. You're very capable, Mrs Parker.' He shot her a
meaningful glance.

Ignore it, Hope told herself.

They sat in silence as Christy drove rapidly through Redlion,
with scant regard for the thirty mile an hour speed limit
in the village. As the car bumped down the lane to Curlew
Cottage, Hope felt relief surge through her. She was home,
Christy had said nothing and hadn't moved so much as a
finger in her direction. He stopped the car quietly outside
the cottage.

'Thanks,' said Hope abruptly, getting out.


To her surprise, he got out too. 'I'm driving Geraldine
home, surely?' he said, noticing her surprise.
'Er . . . yes, but I'll probably ask her to spend the night,'
Hope stammered, having no intention of sending poor
Geraldine off in the car with him.
'I'll come in.' He smiled that wicked smile.
Hope fiddled with her key, nerves making her clumsy.
Surely he wouldn't try anything in the cottage, not with
Geraldine sitting on the couch watching them?
But when Hope entered the house quietly, there was no
sign of the babysitter perched on the couch with the television
guide on her lap. Hope's face fell. She had told
Geraldine that if she was tired, to leave a note and to go to
bed in the spare room. But it was only half eleven, far too
early for that, wasn't it?
'She must have gone to bed,' Christy said, silently closing
the front door.
'Yes,' said Hope nervously. She took off her jacket and
looked around for a note from Geraldine, her mind racing.
Her chaperone was gone and she had to get rid of Christy
quickly before he got any ideas. 'Well, Christy, thank you
so much for dropping me home,' she whispered, trying to
sound like a dinner party hostess getting rid of guests who'd
overstayed their welcome and not like a woman alone with
a man whom she had a history of kissing.
'My pleasure,' Christy purred. He gently laid his keys on
the coffee table, shed his suit jacket like a snake shedding
its skin, and was beside Hope in one smooth move.
'Hope,' he breathed, arms wrapping themselves around
her. His glossy head bent and his mouth captured hers, stopping
Hope from saying 'No!' as his tongue invaded her mouth.
'No,' she hissed seconds later, managing to move her
mouth from under his. The pressure of his arms increased
with one strong hand moulding her body closer to his, and
the other crumpling the material of her chiffon dress, drawing
it upwards so that he could stroke the softness of her
bare legs.

Hope gasped with shock. The sense of unreality about
the whole moment meant it was like watching a sexy movie
rather than being in one: Christy's hand burrowed up under
Hope's skirt and Hope felt as if she was watching in the
distance as she tried valiantly to push him away. He was
surprisingly strong and obviously deaf, because with his head
buried in her neck, he didn't hear her saying 'Stop it,
Christy,' in a fierce whisper. All she needed was for Geraldine
to hear the commotion and arrive downstairs. It would be
so embarrassing.

'Stop it,' she hissed again and had the satisfaction of
seeing Christy straighten up and face her, eyes heavy with
lust and with a smidgen of irritation.

'Oh Hope, stop resisting, you know you want me,'
Christy murmured. 'You weren't saying no when we were
up at the hotel. I've been thinking about you ever since, you
are so sexy. Christ, I thought I'd go mad if I couldn't have
you.'

She caught his groping hand with one of hers and pushed
it away. There wasn't anything vaguely sexual about it for
Hope. Any shred of passion she might have had for Christy
had vanished once she'd realized that kissing him was betraying Matt. And now that he was pulling up her skirt
and groping her against her will! How dare he? The sheer
nerve of it.

'Did you hear me?' she hissed even more loudly. 'Stop it.
I don't want this and I'll scream in one minute if you don't
stop!'

She pushed him away and they stood facing each other,
hair tousled, lips red and panting, clothes dishevelled from
the encounter.

'That wasn't what you were saying last time,' Christy
said in a loud, angry voice. 'You were hot enough for me
then! You wouldn't have said no in the back of my car,
that's for certain. Why have you come over all coy now?
Back at the hotel, until my phone rang, you were all for it.
Admit it, you were.'


'I think you should get out of my house, now,' said a
low, angry voice, 'if you don't want me to call the police.'

Christy and Hope looked up in shock. Standing above
them on the staircase, a face like thunder, was Matt. In an
instant, Hope felt her legs go weak.

'Jesus!' said Christy, blanching at the sight of a tall, strong
rival who had the law on his side and very possibly a baseball
bat hidden somewhere. He grabbed his jacket and his keys
and was out the front door faster than an Olympic runner
out of the stocks. The door rattled as Christy started up his
sports car and raced down the drive with a crunch of gravel.

There was silence in Curlew Cottage. Not a nice, peaceful
silence either. Hope closed her eyes momentarily and wished
she could turn back the clock, just a few minutes would be
enough. What had Matt seen? What had he overheard? No
matter that she'd been trying to get rid of Christy, the
evidence was damning if you didn't know the facts.

'I'm so glad you were here,' she babbled, wishing she
could get a bit of strength back in her legs. Her heart was
racing after the encounter with Christy, and the shock of
seeing Matt was making it race even more. 'He was all over
me and he wouldn't take no for an answer,' she said anxiously.
'I told him to go but he wouldn't. You heard me
telling him to go, didn't you?'

She stared up at Matt who was still motionless on the
staircase. She'd never seen him look so angry in her life. His
jaw was clamped in rage and his mouth was a thin line of
hate. He looked perfectly capable of beating the hell out of
Christy De Lacy. Which was the sort of thing that happened,
she knew, when men found other men having sex with their
wives. Other men having sex with their wives. Shit. Hope
had to sit down. This was happening for real. This wasn't
a TV soap episode. It was her life. She had to make things
better immediately.

'Matt,' she said weakly, 'it wasn't what it looked like.
He was coming on to me and he wouldn't stop, you saw
that, didn't you? I wasn't interested.'


Matt's face might have been red with the heat of fury
but his voice was at freezing point. 'I saw a lot of things
and I heard a lot of things,' he said slowly, looking at her
as if he was seeing her clearly for the first time in their
marriage. 'What a pity I came back early as a surprise for
you and the children. I'm sorry for interrupting your torrid
little session.'
'It wasn't like that,' Hope replied, her voice rising with
fear. Matt had never looked at her like that before, so coldly
and so full of hurt. He wasn't even behaving the way he
normally did in arguments. Then, he snapped and got angry.
Now, even though his face was volcanic, his voice was low
and pained. He looked devastated, she realized.
'It wasn't like that,' she repeated.
'Don't insult my intelligence,' he said. 'I heard you long
before you saw me. I heard it all.'
Hope leaned against the couch feebly. Even her hands
were shaking now.
Matt walked slowly down the stairs and Hope hurried
over to him, wanting to wrap her arms around him, to tell
him she loved him. He'd put his arms around her and it
would all be okay. She got to within a foot of him and he
recoiled. 'Don't touch me,' he whispered.
Hope flinched. She took a step back, not knowing what
to do. She stared at her husband's stricken face.
She would have preferred it if he'd screamed at her,
shouted that she was a whore for so much as looking at
another man. But that pained, betrayed look on his face: she
couldn't deal with that.
'Please Matt,' she begged hoarsely, 'please let me explain.'
'I don't want to hear your feeble explanations,' he shot
back.
'You have to,' she insisted. 'Please, you never listen to
me, you never want to hear what I have to say . . .'
'Oh, so that's it,' he said, eyes blazing. 'It's all my fault,
is it?'
'No, but you don't listen to me,' Hope cried, 'you've

always been like that. I just want to tell you what happened
here. Please listen. It was nothing. He fancied me and didn't
understand I was married, that I love you so much. I do,
you know that.'

'That's what I can't forgive,' he said and his face was
blank. 'I thought you loved me. I was never close to my
family and you, you had only Sam and nobody else. We
were supposed to be everything to each other, you were my
whole family and I thought I was yours. And you've just
destroyed that.'

'I haven't!' she cried. 'I haven't. It was nothing.'

His dark eyes regarded her with something close to loathing.
'That's even worse,' he replied. 'You've destroyed us
for nothing. I thought that's what men were supposed to
do.' For one brief moment, he looked as if he might cry.
Hope had only seen him cry twice before, when the children
were born. She couldn't imagine any other circumstance
when Matt would cry. But as he gazed at her, she could see
his face harden.

He turned away from her and climbed the stairs.

Hope burst into tears and sat on the couch, hugging her
knees to her chest and letting the tears run down her cheeks.
What had she done? It was all her fault, she couldn't even
blame bloody Christy because all he'd done was flirt with
her. It had been up to her to tell him she wasn't interested
but she hadn't.

A noise from their bedroom made her look up. She recognized
the sound of the bottom drawer opening: it was old
and stiff, creaking madly when pulled open. There was nothing
in there but the remainder of Matt's working shirts, the
ones he wore in Bath but hadn't needed in Redlion. Hope's
eyes widened in horror. He'd only open that drawer if he
was packing.

She ran upstairs and tried to open their door but it
wouldn't budge. It was locked.

'Matt,' she whispered, standing in anguish outside the
door. 'Please let me in, please.'


He said nothing and the sound of drawers opening continued.
'Please,'
whispered Hope, 'please.'

After a few minutes he unlocked the door and emerged,
pale faced now and with the family's big suitcase in one
hand. He was wearing his black suede jacket and carried his
laptop case in the other hand.

Hope stepped backwards, ashen. 'Where are you going?'
she whispered, barely able to get the words out.

'It doesn't matter,' Matt said bitterly, 'as long as it's away
from you.'

'You can't do this,' she wailed. 'You've left me already,
you dumped me here and forgot about me. You can't do it
again.'

'I'm not abandoning you,' he snapped. 'I'm leaving you
and lover boy together. But don't let him think he's getting
his hands on my children, because he's not.'

'Matt! Stop and think, please,' she begged. 'We can work
it out. We've got the children to think about. I was lonely,
I felt depressed without you and when he flirted with me, I
flirted back, that's all. I mean, you'd gone off and left me
and you practically never phoned,' she said, knowing this
was no excuse and that she shouldn't even be saying it.

'I left you to work, not to have it off with every woman
who flirted with me.'

'I wasn't like that,' Hope insisted in vain. 'Please listen
to me.'

'No, I won't listen to your pathetic excuse,' Matt said.
'When I think of you whining to me about Finula and how
she fancied me, and you know I wouldn't so much as look at another woman. And then it's you who runs off with
someone.'

'I didn't run off with anyone,' screeched Hope. 'Why
don't you listen to me for once?'

'Listen to yourself,' Matt said coldly. 'You sound pathetic.
You wanted everything, well you can't have it. You can't
have me and lover boy.'


He left the case and the laptop at the top of the stairs
and went into the children's bedroom. Hope didn't follow
him but she could hear him stoop to kiss Millie and then
Toby, hear him whispering 'bye my little pets. I'll see you
soon.' She could the rattle in his voice as it broke when he
finished, saying 'I love you so much, don't forget that.'
She stopped trying to stem the flow of tears at that point.
They ran unchecked down her face. What had she done?
Matt ignored her when he came out of the children's
room. He hefted the big case down the stairs and Hope
could only watch helplessly.
She tried to stop him at the front door. 'I flirted with
him,' she sobbed, saying more than she intended to in her
guilt and grief. 'Nothing more. He got the wrong idea and
tried to take it further. I didn't want to, you know that,
Matt. I love you, I love you.'
His dark, hurt eyes raked over her face. 'Do you?' he said.
'Please don't go,' she begged. 'Think of the children,' she
added, as a last resort.
'You can reach me on my mobile if the children need me,'
he said bluntly. 'Otherwise, don't bother phoning. I don't
want to talk to you. When I'm settled, I'll give you a phone
number and address. I don't live here any more.'
Then he opened the front door, moved his belongings
outside. 'There's a taxi coming. I'll wait outside.' And he
slammed the door.
He stood outside until the taxi turned up.
The taxi driver obviously said nothing when Matt put
the suitcase into the car, because Hope, who was leaning
against the door listening and sobbing, could hear absolutely
no conversation. She heard the taxi drive up the lane, bouncing
over the potholes. Then she sank to the floor inside the
front door and cried until she had no more tears left inside
her.

Delphine was astonished to see the curtains still drawn when
she parked outside Curlew Cottage the following morning

at ten. She and Hope were bringing the children into Killarney
for the morning and because it was unusual to see no
signs of life, Delphine wondered if perhaps one of the children were ill.
The words 'is everything all right?' froze on her lips when
Hope answered the door.
Delphine gulped. Clearly everything was not all right.
Hope looked dreadful. No, dreadful didn't accurately describe
it. She looked as if she'd just crawled from a car wreck
where she was the only survivor. Her eyes were puffy and
red-rimmed, her face was white and sunken and she was
shaking like a sapling in a force ten gale.
'Oh Delphine,' she croaked. 'Delphine. Matt's gone, he's
left me. He found Christy here and he jumped to the wrong
conclusion.' Then Hope just leaned helplessly against her
friend and shook as if she was crying, only there were no
tears coming out.
Despite the jaw-dropping revelations that made her want
to ask 'what?\ Delphine hadn't grown up with her aunt as
a role model for nothing. Mary-Kate was the epitome of
cool in these situations and after years of watching her at
work, Delphine sprang into expert, caring action, no questions
asked.
She shut the door and helped Hope to the couch. Cartoons
were blaring out of the television and Millie and Toby
sat transfixed in front of it, with several packets of sweets
scattered around them. Delphine knew that Hope was very
keen on stopping the children from viewing sweets as the
ultimate treat and gave them yoghurts and dried fruit instead
as often as she could.
'I thought if they had some sweets they wouldn't notice
anything was wrong,' Hope said wringing her hands. 'I don't
want them to know what's going on.'
'It's all right, there's nothing wrong with sweets now and
then. Sure where would us grown ups be without chocolate?'
Delphine smiled but Hope didn't smile back. She genuinely
looked too shattered to smile.

'When did this happen?' Delphine asked, taking one of
Hope's quivering hands in her own and holding it tightly.
'Last night,' whispered Hope. 'Matt was here when Christy
dropped me home. He'd got a taxi and sent Geraldine home
in it and then ... it was awful. He's gone and he's not
coming back, ever.'
'And you haven't slept, right?'
Hope raised haunted eyes to her. 'Would you be able to?'
Delphine marched into the kitchen and made Hope a mug
of strong coffee which she laced with a slug of brandy. She
handed it to Hope and prayed that Hope would be able to
hold the mug without spilling it.
'This has alcohol in it,' Hope said after a sip. 'I won't be
able to drive or anything.'
'You can't drive in your state as it is,' Delphine said firmly.
'Drink it. Then you're going to go up and have a shower,
fix your hair and your make-up and then we'll talk if you
want to. But first you've got to look presentable for the
children's sake. They can't see you like this and they're your
first priority.'
'Yes, of course,' Hope's eyes filled with tears. 'I should
be ashamed of myself. I'm not fit to be their mother . . .'
'Now, now, hush,' Delphine said gently, hugging her.
'You're a great mum. You've had a shock, Hope. Of course
you got upset, you're not a machine.'
Hope drank down the coffee like a child taking nasty
medicine, then she went obediently upstairs. Somehow, by
blanking out everything, she managed to shower, dry her
hair and slick on lipstick to make herself look more human.
Her hands shook when she pulled out the bright pink shirt
that Millie loved and which Matt had told her suited her
better than any other colour. No, she wouldn't think about
Matt. She touched her mother's pill box, leaving her fingers
on the painted surface as if she might feel some inspiration
or strength travelling via her fingers into her heart. But she
felt nothing, except guilt and shame. Her mother would be
ashamed of her, Hope was sure of it.

'Hello Millie and Toby,' Delphine said brightly to the
children. 'How are you?'

Toby was too enthralled watching the TV to answer but
Millie looked at her solemnly. 'We're fine but Mummy has
a pain in her head. She told me. That's why she's crying.'

'Poor Mummy,' Delphine agreed. 'Mummies sometimes
get terrible pains in their heads and they need lots of love
and kisses to get over it. Will you help?'

Millie nodded.

'Did you have your breakfast?' Delphine inquired.

Millie nodded again. Then whispered: 'I spilled all mine
and she never noticed.'

'We might have some more later,' Delphine said decisively.
Millie went back to watching the TV.

It was fifteen minutes before Hope came downstairs
again, still looking pale but miles better than she had earlier. Millie and Toby threw themselves at her.

'Mummy, we had toast and chocolate spread and Toby
got chocolate spread on his T-shirt,' giggled Millie.

'Did not,' said Toby hotly.

As they squabbled and cuddled up to their mother, she
looked over their heads at Delphine and mouthed the word
'thanks'.

When the children stopped vying for their mother's attention,
Delphine made more coffee - this time without the
brandy - and sat with Hope at the kitchen table.

Hope told her everything, leaving nothing out, no matter
how embarrassed she felt at the revelations.

'Confession is good for the soul, or so I hear,' Hope said
miserably when she'd finished.

'That's what my mother's always telling me,' Delphine
agreed. 'But she means it in a "confess and never make a
mistake again" sort of way. I don't think humans are made
like that. We keep making mistakes.'

'Not like mine, you don't.' Hope looked dismal.

'Don't be so hard on yourself,' Delphine advised. 'You
didn't do this on your own. Christy's an expert at that sort


of thing. Other people have hobbies: his is charming women.
I've seen him flirting with female guests just for the hell of
it. He can't help himself and because you were married, you
were even more of a challenge.'
Hope looked unconvinced. 'I should have known better,'
she said, staring into the depths of her coffee mug.
'Oh Hope, you were an innocent going like a lamb to the
slaughter. Christy's trading point is excitement,' Delphine
pointed out. 'He finds people who lack excitement in their
lives and he provides it, in great big doses. Being whisked
off to an exotic lunch with a handsome, attentive man is
like something from a film and it doesn't happen to most of
us in real life, which is why his victims are always so thrilled
and convinced that they're the real thing.'
Hope shuddered at Delphine's choice of words. She had
been a victim and she had thought, however briefly, that it
was the real thing for Christy. He was so believable when
he told her how he felt about her. And of course, she'd been
nothing but a diversion for him. She had just ruined her
marriage for nothing. That was the absolutely awful thing.
'Maybe he was a flirt or a playboy and I should have
known better,' she said slowly, 'but that doesn't take away
from the fact that I was interested in him. That's what makes
me most ashamed. What sort of person can I be if I have a
lovely husband and I'm capable of even thinking of cheating
on him? You wouldn't do that to Eugene, how could I do
it to poor Matt?' She was too worn out to cry but now she
laid her head on her arms and sobbed dry, painful sobs.
'You didn't cheat on Matt,' Delphine protested. 'You got
carried away and you kissed Christy. Big deal, that's all.'
'Matt doesn't agree with you,' Hope said.
'Matt doesn't know the entire story. You should have
told him.'
'He wouldn't listen,' Hope said quietly.

That evening, Hope found the courage to phone Matt's
mobile. Delphine had been urging her to do it all day but

she was scared to: scared in case Matt told her their marriage
was over. Not phoning was her version of the ostrich
defence. The longer she kept her head buried in the sand,
the longer she didn't have to face the truth.

The kids were drinking their bedtime milk and squabbling
over which story they wanted read for bedtime when she
picked up the phone and dialled. The answering service was
on and, hearing Matt's steady, familiar voice telling her to
leave a message, she chickened out and hung up, swallowing
to deal with the huge lump in her throat. When the kids
were finally in bed, she steeled herself and rang again, leaving
a message this time.

Hello Matt, it's Hope. We've got to talk. Please phone
me, please. I love you. I'm so very, very sorry. You know I
wouldn't hurt you for the world, please believe me. I love
you.

There really wasn't anything else she could say until he
responded. Then, she phoned Betsey and Dan in Bath.

'Hello stranger,' said Dan chirpily when he answered.
'Long time no hear. How are you? Looking for Betsey, no
doubt. . .'

'Er . . . no,' Hope said hesitantly. Matt couldn't be there.
Dan would have instantly mentioned it if he had been. Unless
Matt didn't want her to know where he was. 'Is Matt there?'
she asked, knowing that if he wasn't there, she'd just told
another person her tale of woe.

There was a moment's silence. 'No, Hope, he's not. He
was going home to you for the weekend, it was a surprise
. . . don't tell me he didn't get there?'

At the other end of the phone, Hope sighed. 'He got here,
Dan. We had a row and he left again and now I can't get
him on his mobile.'

'What are you like!' joked Dan. 'I never had you pair
down for the tempestuous lovers. Betsey goes into a rage at
least twice a week and flounces out of the house. She only
comes back when she's done serious damage to the Visa
card. Matt'll be back with a hangover, I guarantee it!'


If only it were that simple. 'I hope so,' she said.

She tried Matt's mobile again and left another message,
telling him she was worried and to please phone. 'The kids
miss you,' she added, knowing it was emotional blackmail
but not able to help herself. She'd say she was dying if
only it would make him phone her, because once they were
actually speaking, she'd be able to convince him that she
loved him, truly.


CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR



There was a certain type of nosy neighbour whom Virginia
hated. The sort who adored other people's traumas because
it gave them a cast iron excuse to arrive at the front door
with a thrown-together pile of scones and a fake 'how are you?' refrain so they could peer around your house and see if you'd let the place go in the midst of your misery. Luckily,
these neighbours were rare but Virginia remembered one
particular example who'd arrived at her house the day after
Bill had died, bearing a cake and dying to be asked in so
she could see if Virginia was bearing up or if she'd been
sitting in front of the television like a tranquillized zombie.
Laurence had admitted Emily Dawson, blithely thinking she
was a kind woman who truly wanted to sympathize, like
the other people who'd been arriving at the house all day
to hug Virginia and cry and say how sorry they were to hear
about Bill. It was Jamie, who was much more observant and
more worldly than his older brother and who knew Emily
was on a mission to snoop, who whisked her out again
before she could start compiling her list for the neighbourhood
watch.
'Poor Virginia . . . well, she just sits there, doesn't she? I
saw the doctor's car outside the house earlier and she must
be on something . . . not a scrap of make-up on her, poor
dear, and her always so well turned out normally . . . those
boys are very good to her . . . wasn't the younger one a terror
at school?' would be the report, delivered with saccharine
sympathy.
Virginia knew the routine, having spent years trying to

avoid Emily in case she got an update on whatever poor
local person had just split up with their husband or lost their
job or had a death in the family. 'I could have told you he'd
up and leave her . . . he had a roving eye, that one . .. God
love her and all them children . . . the house looks like the
local dump, not that I'm saying anything, mind you . . .'
Therefore, when Mary-Kate phoned and insisted that
Virginia join her, Delphine and Hope on a girlie lunch in
Killarney to cheer Hope up, Virginia refused.
'I'm sure she'd hate me to turn up at her house tomorrow,'
Virginia had said, scandalized. 'The poor girl must be going
through enough torment without thinking that the entire
village knows her husband has left her.'
'The entire village won't know,' Mary-Kate said firmly.
'You'll know and you're not going to announce the news
from the pulpit on Sunday. Hope needs a few people to
bring her out and make her feel a bit normal. And she loves
you, Virginia. She'd be delighted to see you. Let's face it,
people are going to find out soon enough, so it might be
easier on her if she has a few friends who know Mart's gone
and can stop the worst of the gossip.'
'Why don't you ask her if she minds me knowing?' fretted
Virginia. 'Say you haven't told me but that if she doesn't
mind, you will and then I'll go with you.'
'Fine,' said Mary-Kate. 'You're a stickler for details.'
Virginia grimaced. 'I've had plenty of experience with
nosy people who want to witness your misery. I'd hate to
be one.'

Virginia couldn't get Hope Parker out of her mind all
afternoon. She was a lovely, rather sweet woman, Virginia
felt, who was one of life's givers and who'd be lost without
that handsome husband of hers. Then again, Virginia
thought sadly, she'd felt utterly lost without Bill and she'd
still had to deal with the world. She'd had to face up to life
no matter how devastated she felt. Hope would have to do
the same.

Mary-Kate phoned that night. 'Get your party dress on,
missus, you're coming to lunch with us tomorrow. The only
problem with asking Hope would she like you to come was
the fact that she got upset and thought you wouldn't want
to meet her if you knew that she'd been carrying on with
that bould lad up at the hotel. She thinks you're a very
moral, decent person and was afraid you'd be disgusted with
her.'

'God love her,' said Virginia, touched and saddened at
the same time. 'I am glad you asked me along, Mary-Kate.
I think we'll have to explain to poor Hope that the world
isn't black and white and that her true friends know that.'

'Grey,' said Mary-Kate sagely. 'The world is grey, and
talking of grey, I think I'll wear my grey dress tomorrow so
I better go and iron it.'

'Mary-Kate!' reproved her friend. 'I am determined that
one of these days I'll get you out of your greys and your
muddy browns. Bright colours would look beautiful on you.'

'Mutton dressed as lamb more like,' laughed Mary-Kate.
'I don't have your style Mrs Connell to carry off clothes like
a model.'

'Madam, are you insinuating that I'm mutton dressed as
lamb?' demanded Virginia with mock indignation.

'Why would I do that and you an expert with a golf club?
I'd be afraid you'd hit me with one of your irons.'

'As if I'd hit you,' Virginia said. 'No, poison would be
best, something from your chemist, then the police would
think it was suicide and I'd be off the hook.'

'You're reading too many of those detective novels,'
Mary-Kate replied. 'I'll pick you up tomorrow at twelve.'


Millie was acting up, which cheered her mother up no end.
For the past four days since Matt had left, both children
had been subdued and clingy, reacting to Hope's palpable
misery. No matter how hard she tried to be bright and
breezy, the children sensed that something was wrong.
Which was why Hope was so thrilled that on the morning


of the girls' lunch in Killarney, Millie threw a major, class
A tantrum.

She flew into a rage at breakfast when she heard her
mother on the phone discussing going to Killarney. Toby
and Millie were going to Hunnybunnikins and Millie decided
that this wasn't fair. Killarney with Auntie Delphine meant
treats, sweets and possibly ice creams with chocolate things
stuck in them.

'Won't go! Won't go!' she shrieked at Hope. Her Barbie
beaker of milk went flying along with Toby's cereal.

'Millie,' said Hope in a warning voice.

'Won't! Want to go to 'Larney!' shrieked Millie again,
giving her cereal bowl a forceful shove that made it rattle
to the edge of the table and whisk over it, adding to the
cereal and milk disaster on the kitchen floor.

Thank God for slate floors, Hope thought calmly. She'd
put lovely rugs all over the downstairs of the house to cover
up the beautiful but cold slate floor. The only place without
a rug was the kitchen, scene of many meal time disasters. It
would only take a minute or so to clear away and Hope
could deal with that. She could deal with simple, everyday
matters without any problem, she'd realized over the past
few days. If the range went out, she calmly lit it again. If
Toby walked mud into the ochre and burnt sienna rug in
the sitting room, she cleaned it up. The beauty of these things
was that they could be fixed. Unlike her and Matt. So she
was dealing with the whole situation by not thinking about
it and by acting on super-calm auto pilot, serenely being a
capable mother and trying not to give in to too many
moments of despair. If she did that, she'd be a wreck.

'Toby,' she said now, 'you're a good boy and I'll give you
more breakfast in a moment.'

She kissed the top of his head and began to clear away
the mess.

Millie sat crossly on her seat and scowled at everyone.
She wanted to be noticed. She wanted to be begged to be good, she wanted attention. Instead, she was getting none.


Speculatively, she bounced her spoon across the table and
onto the floor.
Hope said nothing but picked Millie up and carried her
into the living room where she sat her on the couch. 'Toby
and I are having breakfast and if you don't want any, you
can sit here,' Hope said firmly. Then she turned her back
on her astonished daughter and went back to Toby.
After a full minute of sitting there crossly, Millie started
peering into the kitchen. Hope was talking to Toby, telling
him what sort of fun day he'd have in the creche and
how Giselle had said there was going to be finger painting
and all sorts of other excitement. He'd have to go on his
own, of course, because Millie wouldn't be going. Giselle
didn't allow naughty girls in. Shocked, Millie glared at them
both. After another minute, she wriggled off the couch and
stomped into the kitchen. Her big dark eyes were sad and
her full lower lip wobbled the way it did when she was upset
or on the verge of a tantrum. Now, it was wobbling in an
upset way.
'Can I go to the Bunny place, Mummy?' she said tearfully.
Hope pretended to consider this. 'I thought you didn't
want to go,' she said, 'and you know that Giselle doesn't
like naughty girls in the creche. She'd be very cross if you
spilled your milk.'
Millie's lower lip wobbled some more. Hope reached out
and hugged her. 'All right, darling,' she said, kissing the top
of Millie's head, 'you can go with Toby. And we don't want
any more tantrums at breakfast, OK?'
Millie was instantly delighted, her cherubic face creased
up into a big smile. 'No Mummy,' she said innocently.
With the children safely installed in Hunnybunnikins until
half three, Hope went home, climbed into bed and started
to cry. Rocking back and forth with the duvet around her,
she sobbed and sobbed, letting all the tears she'd had to
stifle come out. She cried for herself, for her marriage, for
the children and, finally, for darling Matt.
Hope could barely manage to think about his anguished

face without feeling like the most evil woman on the planet.
He'd looked so devastated.
She could see his face and remember those words as if
they were engraved on her heart; engraved without an anaesthetic: We were supposed to be everything to each other,
you were my whole family and I thought I was yours. And
you've just destroyed that.
She remembered in the early stages of their relationship,
when she had fallen deeply in love with Matt and become
hopelessly dependent on him, how she'd cried one night and
told him that she'd always been scared of people she loved
leaving her.
'I won't leave,' Matt had said gently, fixing back a strand
of her hair that had come loose from its scrunchie. 'Don't
be afraid, Hope. We're like the musketeers, always together.
I love you.'
It was the first time he'd said it: in a quaint little pub in
Oxford where they'd gone for Easter weekend. All around,
people were chatting and laughing, tapping their feet to the
background folk music, asking loudly for pints and demanding
crisps and toasted sandwiches. Hope didn't notice the
noise because she was so in love.
'I love you too,' she whispered joyfully, not having had
the courage to say it until he did.
'My little musketeer,' Matt had said warmly.
He'd bought her an antique edition of the Dumas classic
as a first wedding anniversary present.
'The Three Musketeers' she'd exclaimed, thrilled and at
the same time ashamed because her present to him was a
boring briefcase.
'The first wedding anniversary is the paper one,' Matt
had said proudly. 'What better paper than a book like this?
I love it, it's one of my favourites.'
Now, sitting on their bed, Hope drew her knees into her
chest and rocked some more, trying to comfort herself in
her wild grief. She knew exactly where the book was now, sitting, still wrapped up carefully in tissue paper, in a box

of belongings they'd never opened since leaving Bath. Curlew
Cottage was smaller than the house in Makings Lane and
there were several boxes in the corner of the tiny spare room,
stacked neatly on top of each other and waiting until the
Parkers went back home. What was their home now? Hope
wondered dismally. Would she get the Dumas book in the
divorce or would Matt demand it back as an expensive love
token he'd bought as an investment?
If only he'd get in touch, she could tell him how much
she loved him and what a mistake it had all been. But after
four days, she'd heard nothing. He could be dead in a ditch
somewhere and it would be all her fault.
Eventually, the shaking stopped and she clambered out
of bed and tried to repair the damage to her devastated face.
Her skin was red, blotchy and she had an outbreak of spots
considering whether to appear on her chin. In spite of her
misery, Hope grinned weakly at her frazzled reflection in
the bathroom mirror. In films, women with marriage breakdowns
got thin, developed marvellous cheekbones and
looked beautiful in a deeply haunted manner. In real life it
seemed as if acne and a spare tyre from comfort eating
toasted cheese sandwiches and Quality Street were the only
things you developed.
On the off chance that Matt might have sent her an email,
she switched on the computer. There was nothing from him
but Sam had written.

Hope, my darling,
I am so, so sorry for you. How awful. When you
told me last night, I have to admit I was stunned.
That bastard Matt! I will kill him. How dare he
leave you without giving you a chance to explain.
Anybody who knows you, knows you would never
dream of having an affair. Hell, we all flirt with
people, even precious Matt flirts, I'm sure. So you
are not to blame yourself for anything. You were
simply being a normal woman and if Matt hasn't the

loyalty or the sense to trust you, then he doesn't
deserve you.
You leave it to me and I'll track him down and
give him a piece of my mind. If he hadn't left you
on your own with the kids, then you wouldn't have
been prey to bloody predators like that De Lacy
man. He's just as bad. How dare he try and assault
you like that. Have you thought of phoning the
police and pressing charges . . .
Hope winced. Dear Sam was standing up for her
as usual but raging against Matt, or even Christy for
that matter, was a waste of time.
I will fly over at the weekend. Don't panic. You
can manage without Matt Parker and when he
comes to his senses and tries to crawl back, he'll
have me to contend with. You may be able to
forgive him but I won't. Will phone later,
All my love, chin up,
Sam.

Hope didn't have the energy to answer the missive. It had
been difficult enough telling Sam what had happened, although
Sam had been loyalty personified. On the phone,
she'd been so virulently angry with her brother-in-law that
if she'd been able to get her hands on him at that moment,
she'd have ended up in jail for murder.
'I'll kill him for doing this to you!' she'd raged furiously,
leaving Hope feeling guilty. Even if Matt hadn't listened to
her side of the story, she did have something to be ashamed
of and there was no escaping that brutal fact.
Delphine, Mary-Kate and Virginia arrived just before
noon, bearing gifts.
Delphine had brought a sample of the new, hideously expensive
face mask they were using up at the hotel. 'It promises
to rejuvenate tired skin,' she said, reading the label, 'although
the advert for it on the television shows a fourteen-year-old
girl without a line on her face, so I don't know if we can

trust them. Fourteen-year-old girls don't need rejuvenation.'
'Do you not have a cream that does skin resurfacing?'
demanded Hope, trying to be light hearted. 'It's my only
hope. I've come out in spots. Probably from all the chocolates
I've been munching.'
'Chocolate has nothing to do with your skin,' Delphine
remarked in her professional voice. 'Spots like those are
probably hormonal.'
'A good bottle of wine will help cure them,' Mary-Kate
said, adding her gift to the pile: six bottles of home made
wine. 'Frederich from the craft shop makes the most beautiful
elderberry and gooseberry wine. It's not Chateauneuf de whatever, mind you, but it's very cheering to have a glass
at night.'
'That's why you're so merry all the time?' Delphine teased
her aunt. 'A glass of home made brew and one of your
muscle relaxants . . .'
'I only use those for my back,' protested Mary-Kate.
'Yes,' agreed Virginia. 'She smokes hash if she wants to
relax.'
'Jesus! Do you want to get me arrested?' exclaimed Mary
Kate. 'I told you I only tried it that one time twenty-five
years ago at a party and it did nothing for me. I was a kid,
I didn't know what they were giving me . . .'
The other three broke off into howls of laughter.
'You should see your face, Mary-Kate,' Virginia said,
putting one of her famous tea cakes on the table as her
offering.
'You're a crowd of bitches,' Mary-Kate sighed. 'I don't
know why I'm friends with any of you.'
Hope hugged her. 'You know we only tease you because
we love you?' she said, feeling happy for the first time in
days.
'Ah sure, I know, a stor,' said Mary-Kate, breaking into
Irish as she always did when she was touched. 'Now come
on. I've booked us a table at the best restaurant in town and
I've told them to have the champagne cooling for us.'

'Champagne? What are we celebrating?' asked Hope in
astonishment.
'Sisterhood,' said Mary-Kate firmly. 'Or maybe it was
varicose veins. I forget. Never mind, let's go.'
After the champagne they moved on to wine and Mary
Kate pointed out that they'd have to leave the car and get
a taxi home when they were finished.
'I hate getting Teddy Taxi,' Delphine said as she put her
knife and fork together after some incredible scallops. 'He
goes so slowly. He should be driving a hearse.'
'If he hadn't been going slowly, I'd never have seen Dinky
looking bedraggled on the side of the road that night,' Virginia
pointed out.
'She's a little pet,' Hope said fondly. 'Toby and Millie
love playing with her. Maybe I should get a dog. Something
to sleep on the bed at night. . .' she trailed off miserably.
'Now, let's not get maudlin,' Mary-Kate insisted. 'Everything's
going to work out fine.'
'I don't know that it is,' Hope said. 'Matt hasn't been in
touch since he left, I haven't worked for the last week and
I am not going back up to the hotel anyway,' she added
with a shudder at the thought of meeting Christy De Lacy
again. 'The only thing going into the bank account is the
rent for the house in Bath - which is going straight out again
for the mortgage. Without my earnings and the money Matt
got for his contract work for Judds, we're broke.'
Delphine put a hand on Hope's. 'We'll help out,' she said.
Hope smiled at her. 'That's so kind of you, Delphine, but
I can't ask that of you.'
'You need to get more work,' Mary-Kate insisted. 'Next
week, we'll start looking. Have you told Sam?'
Hope nodded. 'She's coming for the weekend.'
'She'll cheer you up.'
'I don't know,' Hope said gloomily. 'I feel incapable of
being cheered up, not to mention incapable of working ever
again. I feel so useless.'
'Nonsense, work is what you need.'

'Talking of Teddy Taxi and hearse drivers,' Virginia said,
adroitly changing the subject, 'I was driving along the Killarney
road the other day and this big black car overtook me
at about eighty and guess what? It was a hearse.'
'Without a coffin, I presume?' Hope was wide-eyed at the
thought of a high-speed funeral.
'Absolutely. But he was belting along, he must have been
doing ninety.'
'Can you blame him?' Delphine asked. 'Imagine always
having to drive at ten miles an hour, sure it must be torture.'
'So says the next would-be driver for the Jordan team,'
teased her aunt. 'Since you got the new car, you're like a
maniac'
'Would you care for dessert?' inquired the waiter.
'No,' said Delphine, with a mischievous twitch of her
mouth, 'but we'd like to have the thrill of looking at the
dessert menu.'
Naturally, looking wasn't enough and the sight of something
described as a Chocolate Orgasm made them all order
it.
'What's in it?' Mary-Kate wondered.
'If you have to ask, you'll never find out,' Virginia said
sliding her fork into the mound of dark chocolate.
It was nearly three when they left to pile, giggling, into
Teddy Taxi's waiting vehicle.
'Afternoon ladies,' he said nervously. This lot of mad
women scared him a little. When they were leaving those
strange arts and crafts nights they had, they were always roaring
with laughter and acting wild. He was only waiting for
the night one of them would make some manner of improper
suggestion. A man didn't feel safe with such women.
Virginia, who'd been given the honour of sitting in the front, was about to close her door when a pair of long legs
in cream trousers ironed to a knife-edge appeared beside it.
'Virginia, how lovely to see you.'
Kevin Burton squatted down until he was at the same
level as Virginia. He was tanned from the golf course and

his grey, intelligent eyes were warm in the lean, dark face.
In the back seat, the other three began to giggle like
naughty schoolgirls on a day trip who'd just caught sight of
their first builder's bum.
Vowing to slap them later, Virginia graciously inclined
her silvery head at Kevin and said hello. She hadn't seen him
since the disastrous recital. She'd deliberately stayed away
from golf club functions she thought he'd be attending and
had played golf only with her lady friends.
'How are you?' he asked.
'Fine,' she said. 'We really must go, Kevin. Delphine is
late for an appointment.'
Delphine, who, after a glass and a half of champagne and
three glasses of wine was only fit for an appointment with
the couch and the TV zapper, began to giggle uncontrollably.
'May I phone you?' asked Kevin, formal as ever.
Virginia felt one of the women in the back kick the back
of the passenger seat in an unmistakable 'go for it, woman!'
gesture.
'Yes, of course,' she said to Kevin.
'Thank you,' he said politely, then, 'goodbye ladies,'
before shutting Virginia's door for her.
'Lovely man,' said Mary-Kate innocently, before Virginia
shot her a warning glance that said 'not in front of Teddy.'
When the others had been dropped off, Hope and Teddy
the Taxi drove by Hunnybunnikins to pick up Millie and
Toby, who'd had a wonderful day of finger painting. Hope
didn't know what sort of protective garments the children
wore for this but they must have been like space suits: there
wasn't a spot of paint anywhere on their clothes.
'We were very careful,' Giselle said as she waved them
goodbye.
'I wish you'd teach me how to be so careful,' Hope
laughed. 'When we paint at home, the only things that escape
being covered in paint are the hensI'
When she got home, the green light on the answering
machine was flickering, a sign that someone had left a

message. Barely daring to hope it might be Matt, Hope
pressed the button and listened.

'It's me,' said Matt.

Hope felt her heart lift with joy.

'I know you've been looking for me. I was talking to Dan
and he told me you'd rung. I didn't want to stay with him
and Betsey so I've been staying in a hotel in Bath.

'I just don't know if I can talk to you at all, Hope,' he
continued bleakly. 'I can't cope with what's happened and
I need time to sort it out in my head. Give the children my
love, will you? We'll have to talk about access, obviously,
and my mobile is on now so if there's anything wrong with
either of them you can reach me. But don't phone to ask
me to come home because I won't.' He hung up.

Hope's sliver of joy crashed into a thousand pieces.
Access? What did he mean? Surely, the only people who
needed access to their children were people in the middle of
murderous divorces. Was that what Matt wanted?

That was when she began to get angry. Typical Matt,
he'd made a unilateral decision without giving her a chance
to make her point or put her side of the story. How often had
he done that in their marriage? Scores of times, thousands of
times. Matt made the decisions and she followed blindly.
Well, not any more. If he wanted a divorce, he could have
one. Only she'd file first. That'd show him.


At Kilnagoshell House, Virginia stripped off her crimson silk
shirt dress, threw on a pair of rust cords and a sweater and
brought Dinky out for a second walk in order to clear her
head after an unheard of three glasses of wine.

'Disgraceful to be drinking in the daytime, Dinky,' she
said.

Dinky danced around her mistress's feet happily, grateful
to the wine for this second walk. Most days they only had
one long walk: two was a canine thrill.

Virginia walked briskly along the avenue down to the
road, pausing only when Dinky scampered far into the


woods. She knew the little white dog would know how
to follow her but Virginia loved her new friend too much
to want her to rush out onto the busy Blackglen road and
possibly fall under the wheels of a juggernaut. Virginia paled
at the thought that her beloved dog could easily have been
killed that wet night she'd been abandoned on the side of
the road.
'She's such a little pet,' Virginia had told Jamie on the
phone the other day. 'I don't know what I did without her,
although I feel a bit ridiculous to be so crazy about a dog.
You're only supposed to love people that way.'
'Don't be silly,' Jamie said warmly. 'It's good for you to
have Dinky,' he said. 'We all need someone in our lives,
whether it's man or beast. Anyway,' he added wickedly,
'you're not the only member of the family to love a dog.
Laurence does.'
'Jamie,' remonstrated his mother, scandalized. 'That's a
terrible way to speak about Barbara. You're not too old for
me to give you a slap on the ear,' she said.
Jamie, secure in the knowledge that his mother had never ever hit any of the children, merely laughed.
'Will you slap Laurie too, then? That'd bring him to his
senses.'
She was so engrossed in thinking about her future
daughter-in-law that she didn't notice Kevin's car approach
until he was almost beside her.
He got out of the car and petted Dinky, who responded
joyfully to his touch, even going so far as to lie down and
roll over so he could stroke her belly.
'Good girl, Dinky,' crooned Kevin.
Oh well, Virginia reflected, a man who loved dogs
couldn't be all bad.
'I came to apologize,' Kevin said, still petting Dinky.
'For what?' asked Virginia. She was determined not to
let him away with this.
'For taking you out with the Smarts and letting Glenys
away with being so rude to you the whole time.'

'Rude wasn't the word,' Virginia said shortly, remembering
the hurt of that evening. 'What upset me, however,
was that you wouldn't stand up for me. It's hard for old
friends to see a widow or widower with someone else, so I
understand her behaviour somewhat, although,' Virginia's
voice was cold, 'I certainly don't condone it. But you let her
treat me like that. That was unforgivable. I was your guest
and it's not as if we're even dating each other, so to let her
assume we were was appallingly thoughtless, not to mention
presumptuous.'
Kevin got up stiffly. 'I know and I'm so sorry,' he said,
taking one of her hands in his.
Virginia gently slid it away. She didn't want to be impolite
but she didn't feel that Kevin had earned the right to hold
her hand in that lover-like way.
'Please forgive me,' he said earnestly. 'There was no
excuse except for the fact that I wish we were dating and
that, somehow, made me guilty in front of Glenys's disapproval.'
Virginia's
upright bearing became marginally more
upright and seeing her face tauten, Kevin swept on.
'I would dearly like to go on a date with you, Virginia,'
he said, 'both because I like you so much and also, to apologize.
How does dinner in my house sound to you? That way,
we're not meeting in public to let the gossips get started and
it'll be very relaxed. I don't mean to insult you by asking
you to my home,' he added anxiously, 'there's no catch, but
I am quite a good cook.'
For the first time, Virginia smiled and it lit up her lovely
face. 'If there was any catch, Kevin, you would find yourself
in the deepest hot water imaginable,' she laughed.
'Then it's a date? Friday night, perhaps?'
'I shall have to consult my diary,' Virginia said. In her
day, no woman leaped at the offer of a date without consulting
her diary. They hadn't needed The Rules to tell them
that.
'I'll phone you tomorrow to check,' he said eagerly. 'Till

then.' When he took her hand to squeeze it, Virginia didn't
pull away.
'You're a disloyal little wretch to quiver so delightedly
when he petted you,' Virginia told Dinky on the walk home.
But then, it wasn't fair to Dinky to say that. She was obviously
a good judge of character in that she adored Mary
Kate, tolerated Teddy Taxi, and hated Barbara. 'What do
you think of Kevin?' Virginia asked her.
Dinky, sensing that some reaction was required, wagged
her tail.
'Dinner it is, then,' her mistress said.

As Hope stood in the arrivals hall in the airport waiting for
Sam, she couldn't help but think of the last time she'd been
there, waiting for Matt, full of guilt and angst. She'd been so
terrified that he'd be able to see that she'd been up to something,
as if her guilt was written in big letters across her face.
She thought of the interviews she'd read with marriage
counsellors who, when asked if guilty spouses should admit
their affairs to their partners, always said no. That last day
at the airport, she'd longed to tell Matt everything so that
he could hug her, forgive her and tell her he understood that
it had been nothing.
If only she'd done that. Then she wouldn't be standing
here today waiting for her sister, who was coming to offer
tea and sympathy.
'Hope!'
Sam, looking radiantly healthy, threw her arms around
her sister and they clung together, Sam in the role of comforter
as Hope buried her head in her sister's shoulder and
allowed herself the luxury of tears.
'How are you doing?' Sam asked as they stood there,
oblivious to the crowds milling around them.
'OK,' snuffled Hope. She opened her eyes to see two small
boys looking curiously up at them. 'Come on, let's go.'
On the drive back to Redlion, Hope told her sister the
story, the entire story in all its grisly details.

'I feel so ashamed,' she said miserably as they negotiated
the bend in the road just before the village bridge. 'I wanted
to tell you all of this before but I thought you'd be disgusted
with me.'
'Don't be silly,' said Sam, hurt at the notion that there
was anything Hope couldn't tell her. 'You're my family,
you're the closest person to me in the world, how could you
even dream that I'd be disgusted by you?'
'Because I'm disgusted with myself,' Hope said, tearful at
Sam's kindness. Kindness was her undoing. At any kind
word, even if it was only the butcher smiling hello at her in
a warm manner, she longed to burst into fresh tears. 'I know
that Matt was wrong not to let me explain - he never lets
me explain - but I was in the wrong too. It really is my fault,
no matter how I try and pretend it isn't. You, Mary-Kate, everyone tells me he's at fault and should come back to give
our marriage a go, but if it was me, if Matt had even thought
about betraying me with anyone else, I don't know if I could
ever forgive him.'
She'd thought about it so much and it was true: if Matt
had become really intimate with another woman, Hope
knew she wouldn't have been able to bear it.
'You don't mean that,' Sam said briskly.
'But I do,' insisted Hope. 'I thought I could forgive Matt
anything because I need him so much, but I couldn't forgive
him that. I can understand why he's gone,' she added, her voice bitter.
Sam was nonplussed. 'You've never felt like that in the
past, you were perfectly happy to allow Matt to be in
control.'
'You're right,' Hope replied. 'But the most fundamental
part of our marriage was that we needed each other. I can
see that now. He needed me just as much as I needed him.
You know what his parents are like; they treated him like
a second-class citizen. What he loved about me above all
was that he was everything to me and that's why our marriage
worked. To his family, he was a nuisance; to me, he

was my life. Now, I've just ruined all that. He's very uncompromising,
he can't go back if he thinks I don't adore
him. Just like I couldn't go on if I didn't think he loved me
absolutely.'
She parked outside Curlew Cottage and they sat in silence.
'The way he always had to be in charge, that was his way
of loving me. I didn't see it then. But I do now and it's too
late. He can't go back.'
As weekends went, it wasn't a fun-filled one. Sam felt as
if she was walking on eggshells because she was so scared
of upsetting Hope. She quashed her instinctive desire to talk
bluntly about alimony, access and arrangements for separated
couples, and did her best to provide support rather than
advice. Every time Millie or Toby prattled innocently about
Daddy, Sam shot an anxious look at her sister, terrified she'd
see utter despair on Hope's face. Yet somehow, Hope was
coping.
She hadn't fallen apart as Sam had thought she would.
She hadn't run to the doctor begging for Prozac and she
wasn't sinking into the gin every night. Instead, she was
trying to cope in a calm, strong way.
'I owe it to the children,' she said simply.
On Sunday afternoon they had lunch in Killarney before
Sam's flight. While Millie and Toby coloured in the cartoon
character paper mats that the restaurant had kindly provided
for all small guests, Sam took the bull by the horns.
'What's next?' she said.
'I don't know,' Hope shrugged. 'Matt was the one who
left, I don't want to close the door, you know that: I love
him. But I can't make him come home.'
'Would you like me to talk to him . . .' began Sam.
'No.' Hope was vehement. 'If he comes back, it's got to
be because he wants to and not because he's been pushed
into it.'
Sam grinned. 'When has anyone ever pushed Matt
Parker into doing one single thing he didn't want to?' she
asked.

Hope's eyes brimmed and Sam cursed her thoughtlessness.
'Sorry.'
'I'm
not a child, you know, Sam. I have to face the truth.
He's left me and it might be for good.'
'It's your worst nightmare, isn't it?' Sam asked. 'Being
left, being abandoned.'
Hope looked wry. 'Yes. What does it say about me when
I manage to engineer the very thing I've spent my entire life
worrying about? I've always been scared Matt would leave
me, like Mum and Dad left us. And what do I do? Have a
fling and ruin everything.'
'You didn't ruin everything,' Sam insisted. 'And it wasn't
really a fling.'
Hope didn't reply.
Before she went through to the departure lounge, Sam
hugged her sister warmly. Hope, who couldn't throw her
arms around Sam because Millie and Toby were holding her
hands, steeled herself not to blub.
'You could come to London, you know,' Sam said. 'We
could get a nice house between us and you wouldn't be alone
any more.'
'Thank you, but no,' Hope said fondly. 'That's lovely of
you, darling, but this is my home now.'
Hope and the children waved energetically until Sam was
out of sight.
'When is Daddy coming home?' demanded Millie, looking
around as if Matt might appear from nowhere.
'Soon, Millie, soon,' said her mother brightly.

The day of Virginia's dinner date with Kevin, she thought
about Bill a lot. Sometimes, it was hard to imagine that it
was over two years since his death. He was still with her in
so many ways, his presence a palpable part of her life. And in other ways, it was as if he'd been gone longer because so
much had changed. Or perhaps it was she who had changed.
Her path through the mire of bereavement had been a winding

one, when she'd taken one step forward, she'd found
herself taking two back. It had been slow and painful. But
life had gone on and she'd learned to live with it, because
there was no option. For about six months after Bill's death,
she'd eaten porridge for breakfast instead of her usual
muesli. Making a bowlful with a dash of honey, the way
Bill had every morning of his life, had somehow made him
seem closer. Like wearing his shirts.
She remembered how when Bill's six month anniversary
had come up, Laurence, thinking it was the right thing to
do, had gently suggested a clear-out of his father's clothes.
But Virginia wouldn't hear of it.
'If you throw his clothes out, you might as well throw
me out too,' she'd said fiercely.
She'd brought all of them to Kilnagoshell and hung
them in one of the spare rooms. But the lingering scent
of Bill had somehow left everything. When Virginia leaned
against his favourite old tweedy jacket, a thing she'd spent
years trying to get him to throw out, there was no evocative
scent of him. Only the smell of an old wardrobe and
clothes that no longer hung on a strong, much loved male
body.
She'd cried the afternoon she'd packed them all away in
suit carriers. But it had been the right decision. Bill would
have wanted her to move on, she was sure of it. Even if it
hurt her to do it, she had to. Otherwise she might as well
have been buried with him that day. She made herself walk
past the porridge oats in the supermarket, determined not
to be a slave to memories.
Bill's old golf club jumper still sat in her bottom drawer,
though. She took it out regularly and held it close to her
face, tears misting in her eyes at the memories it evoked.
Bill, laughing as he packed his clubs in the car on a Saturday
morning, kissing the top of Virginia's head and promising
he wouldn't spend too long at the nineteenth hole, as
golf club bars the world over were affectionately known.
'You better not,' she'd tease with a glint in her eyes,

'otherwise your dinner won't be in the oven when you come
home, it'll be in the dog.'
After she'd dressed that evening to go to Kevin's, she sat
on the bed and wrapped her arms around the jumper, as if
she were cuddling a teddy bear. Dinky, sensing her mistress's
melancholy, sat in her beanbag at the foot of the bed and
gazed up soulfully, her little face between her front paws.
'You think I'm mad, don't you?' Virginia addressed
Dinky. Then, she kissed the jumper and put it back in the
drawer carefully. 'I won't be long, pet,' she told the dog.
Kevin lived in an old farmhouse that stood back from the
road on the other side of Redlion. Virginia, who had a keen
eye for gardens, would have imagined the best greenery for
such an old house would have been rambling roses climbing
over the door, large pots spilling over with tumbling flowers
beside it and herbaceous borders dominated by fragrant
night-scented stock and nicotiana. Instead, there were four
beds of gladioli which looked as if they'd been planted with
the aid of a slide rule and a T-square. Strangely formal, it
all looked out of place.
'Admiring the flowers?' said Kevin from the front door.
'Er, yes,' lied Virginia, for gladioli were the only flowers
she didn't like.
'Ursula was a wonderful gardener. She planted those beds
herself and I try and keep them the way she'd have wanted,'
Kevin said wistfully.
Inside, the farmhouse was just as formal, with a patterned
Axminster over what Virginia assumed was a wooden floor.
The walls were a lively dark red Laura Ashley which clashed
violently with the carpet and the pale pink couch. Heavy
oil paintings with gold frames hung on the walls, while
occasional tables jostled for space with sideboards and plant
stands. Every available surface was covered with silver
photograph frames. It was all a bit overwhelming, like a
Hollywood version of a cluttered Victorian house.
But one item dominated the room: hanging over the
mantelpiece was an oil of a woman in a blue dress. She was

in her late forties and was smiling faintly in a Mona Lisa
way, short dark hair cut tightly round her face, dark eyes
glittering. It had to be Ursula.
'I had it painted for her fiftieth,' Kevin said in a proud
voice.
'Goodness, she doesn't look fifty,' said Virginia.
He was pleased. 'She never looked her age. She was one
of life's youthful women. Even at the end, she looked much
younger than she really was. Everyone remarked upon it.'
Kevin's voice was tinged with sadness and he seemed lost in
reverie as he gazed up at the portrait.
'Do you need a hand in the kitchen?' Virginia said
brightly.
He appeared to shake himself and said: 'No, goodness,
it's all under control. I hope you like lamb.'
'Love it,' said Virginia.
She'd have liked to have gone into the kitchen to chat
amiably while Kevin cooked, but he obviously preferred the
more formal style of entertaining and, once he'd given her
the glass of water she asked for, insisted she stay in the
sitting room where a wistful piece by Chopin was playing
softly.
Virginia knew it was bad manners to snoop, but couldn't
resist peering at some of the myriad photos around the room.
They were mainly of Ursula and Kevin with some single
ones of Ursula. The portrait painter had flattered her, Virginia
found herself thinking, as she stared at one close-up
of Ursula at a wedding. Her dark eyes were much more slitty
than the painter had portrayed and her heavy jaw was more
defined. Virginia looked carefully and wondered if she and
the dead woman would have been friends. It might be hard
to be friends with such a paragon, particularly one who was
so close to nightmares like Glenys Smart. And Virginia felt
slightly uncomfortable in this house, for it was clearly
Ursula's home. Her mark was everywhere, from the regimented
flowers outside the door to the rather hectic decor
which was at least ten years old and, therefore, dated from

when Ursula was alive. Even if Kevin had changed the wallpaper
and the carpets, it would still be very much Ursula's
domain, because of all the photos of her. It was, Virginia
thought, finishing her glass of water, a shrine.

Kevin had been right: he was a good cook. The lamb was
tender as poached cod and they both ate hungrily, enjoying
the tiny roast potatoes and the green beans dotted with
butter. They chatted about friends and acquaintances, laughing
over golfing stories and telling each other tales of their
previous lives. Virginia found herself being careful about
mentioning Bill too often as a reaction to how often Kevin
mentioned Ursula. Her name came up in every second sentence
and Virginia gave herself a mental check to see if she
was guilty of this too. But she didn't think so. They both
drank little and by coffee, the bottle of wine still had at least
one glass remaining.

'More wine?' Kevin asked, proffering the bottle.

'No thanks, I've had enough and I'm driving,' Virginia
said.

He put the cork in the bottle. 'For another day,' he said
wryly, 'it's all too easy to sink into grief and drink too much.
I'm sure many lonely widowers turn to the bottle to get over
it all. When I sit here with my memories and Chopin, I know
it would finish me off totally if I drank to numb the pain.'

Virginia glanced at him curiously. 'I know it's a cliche,'
she said, 'but do you not find that time does help to heal?'

Kevin looked shocked. 'No, not at all. How could it?
How could I forget Ursula?' His face was etched with pain
as he spoke.

'I didn't say forget her,' Virginia said softly, 'I meant learn
to deal with her loss. It's been two years since Bill died and
you never forget, of course not. Bill was all of my life for
so long, I could as easily forget to breathe as forget him but,'
she paused, searching for the right words because she didn't
want to offend Kevin, 'life goes on.' She laughed, 'another
cliche, I'm afraid. You have to move on, though. Ursula
sounds like such a lovely, vital woman: she wouldn't have


wanted you to . . .' she was about to say bury yourself alive
for nearly five years, but she stopped in time. 'She wouldn't
have wanted you to stop living.'
'You're so right.' Kevin's face lightened magically. 'She
was a lovely, vital woman. I'm glad I've been able to give
you a picture of what she was like.'
He put one hand on Virginia's warmly. 'You'd have loved
her, you know. The two of you would have been friends.'
'I agree,' Virginia said, 'and I'm sure you and Bill would
have got on like a house on fire and spent hours on the golf
course. But Kevin,' she continued earnestly, 'they're both
gone. We have to move on. I moved out of our old house,
probably more in grief to be honest, but it gave me the
chance to start again without bursting into tears every time
I looked at the bathroom sink and imagined Bill standing
there shaving, or seeing the grass go wild in the garden and
thinking of how he'd never have let it become so out of
control. Change can help, it's not betraying the person who's
gone.' She paused, wondering if she should delicately say it.
Yes, she should. 'You could always, for example,' she said
gently, 'redecorate to change things a little. That's just one
idea to move on.'
He smiled at this. 'But I did redecorate. The paper was
getting worn.'
Virginia smiled too. At least the hopeless coordination
was his, probably Ursula had had a more matching colour
scheme.
'You wouldn't believe the trouble I had getting the same
wallpaper. That pattern had been discontinued. It took me
two months to track down enough to do the whole room.'
He looked so proud at this industriousness that Virginia
could say nothing. Well, there was nothing to say, was there?
Perhaps it was true that widows managed life better than
widowers, who were so lost without their wives that they
could barely face the world. How terribly sad. Sadder even
was Kevin who wanted to recreate life with Ursula, right
down to the same wallpaper she'd chosen. Virginia bet that

every grocery in the house was the same as Ursula had
bought, from the milk right up to the brand of kitchen
cleanser. And she undoubtedly had taught Kevin to cook
the most marvellous lamb, always served with tiny roasted
potatoes and green beans with a precise amount of butter.
Virginia shivered: it was like being watched over by a ghost.
After a few minutes, she took a surreptitious look at her
watch: a quarter to ten, late enough to leave without being
rude.

'That was a lovely meal,' she said kindly.

'I'm glad you liked it. We'll have to do it again,' he said,
smiling at her fondly. 'Maybe we should scandalize the
whole town by going out for a meal the next time.'

Virginia nodded. 'They can hardly be scandalized by two
old friends going out for dinner, now can they?' she said,
deliberately misunderstanding.

She got to her feet and didn't ask if she could help Kevin
tidy up. He'd probably refuse and besides, she had had
enough of Ursula for the evening.

'Thank you, Kevin.'

She didn't wait for him to get her jacket, but went to the
hall and took it off the peg, slipping it on quickly.

'Let me,' said Kevin, trying to help her.

'I'm very busy next week,' she said. 'I've several games
of golf lined up. So perhaps the week after, we might play
in a fourball.' Four people playing together meant less time
for her and Kevin to be alone.

'Well, yes, of course if you're busy . . .' Kevin said.

She pecked him on the cheek and had the front door open
in a flash.

'Byee,' she said gaily, rushing past the lurid pink gladioli
to her car.

Safe in the car, she could wave at him until she was out
the gate and able to relax. So much for a bit of sedate dating.
The merry widow indeed.

Kevin had done his best to woo her, but it would never
be a proper relationship. He liked Virginia with his mind


but his heart was entirely reserved for Ursula. Which was a
pity.
'I hope you're having some luck in heaven with a nice
widow angel, Bill darling,' Virginia said as she drove home,
'because down here, I'm not having any romantic luck at
all. Still,' she smiled, 'I've got the girls, so don't worry about
me.'
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE



I

On the morning of her fortieth birthday, Sam woke at
dawn and sang the first few bars of 'Happy Birthday' to
herself.

'This is a sure sign of insanity,' she told her reflection in
the bathroom mirror, 'talking to yourself like this. You are
now forty and mad. Congratulations.'

She stood under the shower and thought that maybe she
should get a cat. The company would be nice, she liked
animals, and it would give her an excuse for talking out
loud when she was alone in the apartment. But then, perhaps
people would start seeing her as 'a woman with a cat', which
was shorthand for 'woman with a cat and no man'. Before
forty, it was possible to have a cat and still be considered a
fun, single woman who liked animals. After forty, she'd have
to start styling her hair into a tight, spinsterish knot like
Aunt Ruth's, take up bridge and become testy with shop
assistants. She'd be so high up on the shelf, someone would
need a step ladder to take her down.

As she made her face up, she thought of the statistics
about single women. In the next thirty years, forty, or was
it thirty per cent of women would live on their own. There
was absolutely nothing wrong with living on your own, Sam
knew. She liked it, or at least she had quite liked it. What
was hurting now was the fact that all the other successful
singles she knew were now coupling up like ticket holders
for Noah's Ark. It was as if, after years of claiming they
were happy on their own, they were now saying actually,
we were lying all along. We want love and another pair of


slippers in front of the fire. Sam felt more than a bit betrayed. Or did she feel lonely? She was afraid to be brutally honest
with herself and ask which it was.

She checked the post but there was nothing except for an
electricity bill. Sam refused to feel miserable because there
was no birthday card from Morgan.

The radio blared out 'Walking On Sunshine' as she
dressed in a rose coloured silk cashmere sweater with a
rounded neck and a long, lean cream linen skirt suit. It was
the sort of thing she would never have worn to the office
before, it was more a summer wedding outfit, but she wanted
to look feminine and pretty today, of all days. She had her
fresh fruit for breakfast, took a bio yoghurt out of the fridge
for eating later in the office, and rushed out of the house to
the hairdressers.

'Can I have a manicure while I'm getting my blowdry?'
she asked the receptionist.

'Of course Ms Smith,' said the receptionist in surprise.
Ms Smith never had anything done but a speedy blowdry in
the mornings.

'Going anywhere special tonight?' asked the manicurist
as she settled down to work.

The stylist blowdrying Sam's hair raised her eyebrows in
alarm. Sam Smith was not your average chatty client. She
often read business reports while her hair was being dried
or else she flicked through the newspaper, never glossy magazines.
To
be honest, the stylist was a teeny bit intimidated by
Sam who seemed to be the epitome of the successful, wealthy
career woman: a woman with no time for small talk. But to
her astonishment, Sam replied.

'No, more's the pity,' she said. 'I wish I was going somewhere.
I'm just going home after work and if there's a good
film on telly, that'll be the extent of the excitement.'

'I know what you mean, you're just too tired after work
aren't you,' the manicurist sighed. 'I'm like that too. I have
all these great plans and when I get home, I just collapse in


front of the box. Now, do you want clear polish, French
manicure or a colour?'
Sam considered this. 'Let's go for dusky pink, I never
wear colours but, what the heck, it's my birthday.' As soon
as she'd said it, she was sorry.
'Oh, happy birthday,' chorused the manicurist and the
stylist.
Both women knew better than to ask her age.
'And you're not doing anything tonight?' the manicurist
said sympathetically. 'I bet you've plans for the weekend,
though, haven't you?'
Sam smiled weakly. 'Yes, of course.'
Hope was on the phone as soon as Sam left the salon and
turned her mobile on.
'I missed you at home,' Hope said. 'You must have left
early. Happy birthday, Sam love. Oh, I wish I was there
with you. It's not right to have your fortieth birthday on
your own.'
Sam's eyes filled up.
'I wish you were here too,' she said, fishing a tissue out
of her coat pocket. 'Or better still, that I was there with
you. Still,' she tried to sound bright, 'I'm going to have a
lovely lunch with Jay.' Normally, she and Jay had dinner on their birthdays but this time, Jay appeared to have
forgotten it was a special one, and anyway, she was permanently
glued to Greg, so her dinnertimes were all tied up
with him.
'Nothing tonight?' Hope sounded upset at the thought.
'I'm too tired to go out in the evenings,' Sam lied. 'I'm
trying to get my energy back by catching up on sleep. Any
word from Matt?' she asked.
'He's phoned every night this week to talk to the children,'
Hope replied, 'although he can barely bear to speak to me
when I answer the phone. He was in a hotel in Bath but
he's moved into a rented apartment, which makes it sound
as if he intends to stay. Millie keeps asking when he's coming
home again. It breaks my heart.'

Sam winced at the thought of Millie's earnest little face
as she asked after her daddy. Poor Hope. It was selfish to
be feeling depressed about being forty when Hope was
coping with single parenthood.
When they'd said goodbye, Sam walked along, enjoying
the sun and the sensation of her silky hair flopping freshly
washed on her shoulders. A girl with long dark blonde
hair walked out of a shop onto the footpath ahead of Sam,
carrying packages and bags. Her hair was fresh and bouncy
too, but she looked no more than twenty-something in
pedal pusher denims that tapered down to slim brown
ankles. The girl's undulating walk took her past two suited
guys talking animatedly beside a BMW. Both heads turned
to watch her and then their eyes flicked over Sam with interest.
Sam grinned. There was still something enjoyable about
turning men's heads, even if you half despised them for
turning.
In the office, a huge bouquet of flowers from Hope
awaited her. Only her sister seemed to know that the stern
and permanently in control Ms Smith adored the most
romantic flowers going: Hope's birthday bouquet to her was
a riot of pink Vendella roses, some full blooms, some exquisite
little buds with tightly curled petals, all nestled in rich
dark greenery that set off the luscious pink to perfection.
Thrilled with her first, and so far only birthday gift, Sam
hid the flowers behind a filing cabinet, not wanting anyone
to see and ask her what she'd got them for. But the office
network hadn't missed the delivery of pink roses to Ms Sam
Smith.
Speculation on what they were for and who they were
from was rife on the fifth floor all morning.
'A lover, it must be,' said the fifth floor receptionist.
'A married lover,' remarked the publicity assistant, who
knew about such things.
'She probably sent them to herself,' said Izzy from A & R spitefully.
At eleven, Catrina phoned.

'Happy birthday Sam,' she said cheerfully. 'Had any nice
pressies yet?'
'A few,' Sam said, not wanting to sound like Billy No
Mates.
'Did you get ours yet?' inquired Catrina.
'No, sorry.'
'Oh, Hugh posted it several days ago. I'm sure it'll be
there tomorrow. Or when you get home,' Catrina said. 'It's
not very thrilling, I'm afraid. What are you up to tonight?
Out for a mad party with your trendy record company pals,
I suppose?'
Sam wondered if Catrina was taking any particular mind
altering drugs to help with her pregnancy. Sam had never
been part of the trendy record company scene. Her friends
were the gang. Or, at least, they had been.
'Well, there's so much on at the moment,' Sam said
lightly. 'There's a party in the Sanderson tonight but I'm
getting sick of drinking Cosmopolitans.' There, that sounded
suitably hip and thrilling.
'Lucky you,' groaned Catrina. 'I haven't had a drink
in so long, if I so much as smelled a cocktail, I'd pass
out.'
There followed a lengthy discussion of Catrina's pregnancy.
At nearly eight months pregnant, she was going
through an exhausted phase where by the time she'd got
into work in the morning, all she wanted to do was go back
home to bed. Typically, being Catrina, she was determined
to work practically up until her due date . . .
'You need to rest, Catrina,' Sam insisted. 'Stop trying to
do everything and be superwoman. It's important for the
baby. Why don't you and Hugh take a long weekend away
somewhere nice? Forget about work for a bit.'
'You're right,' Catrina said, sounding like herself for the
first time in the conversation. 'Everybody else is telling me
I'm great for being so active and that I shouldn't stop doing
all the normal things I do.'
'That's only if you feel like doing all the normal things,'

Sam pointed out. 'You're only weeks away from giving birth,
so be gentle with yourself.'
They said goodbye, with Catrina promising to phone Sam
the following week.
Almost immediately, the phone rang again. It was Jay
crying off lunch.
'I feel so terrible,' she said, 'doing this to you on your
birthday but something's come up.'
Jay didn't say what that something was. In Sam's experience,
people with genuine excuses gave them. When the
excuse was something having come up, it was a fake.
The something was probably Greg at a loose end and
begging Jay to get out of lunch with her dull, career-obsessed
girlfriend. Sam hated women who let transitory men come
between them and their friends. Men were just for Christmas;
women friends were for ever. Hope's Macrame Club
girlfriends would never dump her for a guy, Sam thought
darkly.
'That's OK, Jay,' she coolly. 'I understand. Give me a
ring next time you have a gap in your diary.'
'Oh Sam,' pleaded Jay. 'Don't be cross, please. You'll
understand, I promise.'
Sam ground her pen so firmly into the yellow post-it pad
on her desk that she made a deep dent in it. People were
promising her a lot of things lately. She wanted to say that
Jay had promised they'd have a lovely birthday lunch but
she didn't.
'Just call me, Jay. I'm busy over the weekend.' That was
a lie for a start. 'Maybe we could meet up next week.'
Sam could remember a time when she and Jay met up
every second day.
'Bye Sam.' Jay sounded terribly subdued. 'And happy
birthday.'
'Yeah, thanks.'
Sam threw the defaced post-it pad in the bin. What a
great day this was turning out to be.
There she was on her fortieth birthday and none of her

close friends seemed to have remembered. Those that had,
all had better things to do than spend the day with her.
At half twelve, Sam marched out of the building and went
to Harvey Nichols, where she decided to investigate if retail
therapy really did work. She started the investigation in the
perfume department where she bought herself a giant bottle
of Chanel No 5 and matching body lotion. If nobody else
was going to buy her a birthday present, she might as well
buy her own. Next stop was the lingerie section where she
splashed out on two sets of exquisite La Perla underwear.
Then she marched into the designer rooms and in twenty
minutes flat bought a Richard Tyler black suit with a jacket
so fitted it looked as if it had been sewn onto her, two
delicious Fendi sweaters, and finally a wildly sexy iridescent
Gucci dress that looked as if it was designed to fall off her
body with one practised tug. The sort of tug that Morgan
Benson was a specialist in, she thought gloomily as she signed
the credit card slip. Why was she even buying this stuff?
Who'd get to see the lilac uplift bra and where could she
ever go where anyone would want to tug her dress off ?
There were plenty of music award ceremonies where
babes in Gucci dresses looked right at home but she was
one of the music industry types who normally arrived in
wall-to-wall Prada suits. Everyone would choke on their
straight-up Stolis if she turned up in a sexy dress. Sex was
for artists. Suits wore suits.
Still, she'd be the best dressed bachelorette for miles
around. She'd bought so much black that she'd better get a
black cat so then the hairs wouldn't show up quite so much.
Her concession to lunch was a takeaway bagel with cottage
cheese and slivers of avocado for protein.
It was just after two when she got into the lift at the
office, big, expensive Harvey Nichols bags dangling. Retail
therapy worked but only momentarily, she concluded. She'd
felt good when she was trying everything on but now that
she'd bought it all, she just felt as bad as ever. And with a
diminished bank balance.

The lift doors were about to close when Steve Parris
eared at the gap and slammed the button. The doors,
knowing what was good for them, opened obediently, and
let him in.
Today, he was doing his laid-back look: white t-shirt,
jeans, leather jacket. All designer, Sam knew. Steve was too
paranoid about being five foot six and skinny to wear anything
that didn't have a label hanging off it. The Titus staff
often speculated that if Steve had been born taller, he'd have
been much nicer on account of not having a chip on his
shoulder about his height. Privately, Sam thought Steve was
extremely well balanced seeing as how he had chips on both
shoulders.
'Hiya Sam. Been shopping?' Steve said, small dark eyes
whizzing over her. Sam knew that Steve could read a profit
and loss account in three seconds. It was always disconcerting
when he did the same with a person.
'Yes,' she said in her calm office voice, resisting the
impulse to say no, she just liked carrying department store
bags around with her.
'Anything nice?'
Sam blinked. This was very un-Steve-like behaviour. He
never talked about anything but work.
'Er .. . a few things.'
'Anything drop-dead gorgeous?' he inquired chirpily.
Sam looked at him curiously. Mischief overcame politeness.
'Yes, a dress that's so hot, it comes with a Government
health warning,' she breathed, then instantly regretted it.
God help her, the only fun she got these days was trying
to shock the boss.
But he didn't look shocked. 'Great.' Steve's eyes, cold
chips of ice which normally only ever lit up when the number
one album and single were both Titus acts, gleamed with
pleasure. 'Listen Sam, you know we've got the Lemon
Awards coming up.' Of course Sam knew. Everybody in the
industry with two brains cells did. These high-profile awards
were a status symbol for both the artists and their record

companies and Titus had several bands up for big awards
this time round. Sam's biggest current problem was trying
to limit the number of staff members getting the highly
expensive and much-sought-after tickets.

'Well, I've got some of the Americans coming over for it big
players,' Steve waggled his eyebrows knowingly. 'You're
going, obviously.'

'Obviously,' she said.

'Well, I'd like it if you could sit at my table.'

Sam looked at him warily. She had her own table organized
for the LBGK label.

'And I'm having a very exclusive party afterwards in
Shiva. I'd like you to come with me.' He touched her shoulder
meaningfully. 'It would mean a lot to me.'

It had been a long time since Sam had been speechless.
Was he hitting on her? Was Steve Megalomaniac Parris, the
man with an Excel spreadsheet instead of a heart, actually
chatting her up? No, he couldn't be.

'Of course I'll come, Steve,' Sam said carefully. 'I can
hardly miss the Lemons, can I?'

Steve's eyes lit up.

'Thanks, Sam. It's important. And,' he smirked, 'wear
the government health warning dress, won't you? It sounds
incredible.'

The lift pinged at Sam's floor and she walked out in a daze.

Shit, shit, shit. He had been hitting on her. Why else
would he want her to wear a drop-dead gorgeous dress? If
only she hadn't been such a smart ass, she'd have been able
to subtly steer him clear of being flirtatious. But she'd walked
right into it.

Hoist by her own sarcastic petard.

She walked to her office, her mind racing. Apart from the
obvious, that she didn't have the remotest interest in Steve,
there was another reason for not getting romantically
involved with him: the fact that inter-company dating was
the worst career move since Marie Antoinette mentioned the
possibility of letting the peasants eat cake.


At best, it would be deeply embarrassing if Steve actually
thought anything was going to come from this date. At
worst, he'd go ballistic when she slapped him down. And
even worse, how bad could this look for her career in general?
Would the all-powerful American people see Steve smiling
at her and assume that here was a woman who'd made
it up the career ladder by lying back and thinking of the
Empire? Sam cringed at the thought of it all.
Somehow, between now and the Lemon Awards (ten days
away), Sam had to think of a way out of this disaster.
She managed to work through the rest of the afternoon,
juggling meetings, phone calls and important e-mails without
betraying for a moment that she was both miserable and
frantic. She left the office at seven and got a taxi home,
which was her penultimate birthday treat. The final one
would be opening and drinking an entire bottle of wine
before having a bath and smothering the body nobody ever
saw in Chanel No 5 body lotion. The solace of the lonely
career woman on her birthday.
She got home and saw that her answering machine light
was lit up with four messages. But Sam only heard the first
one, a terse-sounding Catrina: 'Sam, I know it's short notice,
but Jay has just turned up and she's a bit upset. I don't
suppose you could drop over?'
Even if Catrina's words were unemotional, Sam was convinced
something serious must have happened. Some disaster
to do with Greg, Sam thought, forgetting that she'd been
furious with Jay earlier in the day. Poor Jay. She and Greg
must have split up, which was awful, because Jay was clearly
smitten.
Sam grabbed her handbag and rushed out. It was impossible
to find a taxi at this hour of the evening in such a
residential street. Then she spotted Morgan all dressed up
and getting into his battered jeep. It was a filthy vehicle and
he never washed it but at that moment, it looked as beautiful
to Sam as a Porsche Carrera.
'Morgan,' she yelled. 'Could I ask you a huge favour?

Could you give me a lift? It's only ten minutes away by car
and I'll never get a taxi at this hour?'

'Hop in.'

'It's my friend Jay,' explained Sam when she'd given him
directions. 'Something's happened and she needs me. I'm
really sorry to ask you but it must be serious or Catrina
would never have rung.'

'No problem,' Morgan said. 'I hope it's nothing bad, she's
a nice girl.'

'I hope so too.' Sam bit her lip with anxiety. 'Poor Jay
has gone through hell with men, I hope Greg hasn't dumped
her.'

'They looked totally in love when I met them at your
dinner party; it's probably just a row.' He gave her hand a
comforting squeeze.

The jeep rattled through London's streets with Morgan
whizzing down back roads and sneaky short cuts until they
finally pulled up outside Hugh and Catrina's house nine
minutes later.

Sam leaped out almost before Morgan had put the handbrake
on.

'I owe you,' she said as, long dark blonde hair flying, she
rushed up the path.

Catrina opened the door looking calm and unflustered.

'What's wrong, where is she?' demanded Sam. 'Is it Greg?
He didn't finish with her, did he?'

'You talk to her,' Catrina said. 'She's in the living room.'

Sam rushed into the room.

'Surprise!' chorused the group of people standing under
the big Happy 40th Birthday Sam banner. There was Hugh,
Jay, Adam and Greg, along with Sally and Danny, whom
she hadn't seen in ages; all the gang smiling and raising their
glasses at her.

Reeling with shock, Sam stepped back and collided with
Morgan, who was standing behind her with an enormous
grin on his face.

'I hope I didn't scare you,' Catrina said, rushing forward


to embrace Sam. 'We couldn't think of any other way to get
you here without making you suspicious and Jay came up
with this idea. She just knew what conclusion you'd jump
to.'
'Happy birthday,' squealed Jay, flinging her arms around
both Catrina and Sam.
'As if I'd miss seeing you on your birthday,' she laughed.
'I had to cancel lunch today because the party was only
half-organized. I thought we'd never get it all sorted. We've
been getting ready for two weeks now and you've no idea
the trouble we had setting it up without you guessing,' she
added delightedly.
Sam thought of how cross she'd been with poor Jay earlier
and how angry she'd felt because she'd assumed all her old
friends had abandoned her. Emotion overcame her and she
burst into tears.

'Don't cry,' said Hugh, adding his birthday kiss.
'Oh!' Sam sobbed.
'It's Sam's party and she can cry if she wants to,' paraphrased
Greg, handing her a glass of champagne and planting
a chaste kiss on her forehead. 'I'm just devastated that
you'd believe I was a total bastard and had dumped my
darling Jay!'
Everyone queued up to hug and kiss her.
'You're all so good to me,' Sam sobbed, looking at the
balloons, the banner and the coffee table covered with
gorgeously wrapped presents.
'You're our friend,' Hugh said affectionately. 'What did
you expect, you big silly? You're not forty every day.'
After her second glass of champagne, Sam's tears had
dried up and she was sitting on the big squashy armchair
opening presents. Catrina sat on one the arm of the chair
and Jay sat on the other one. Hugh was circulating with
more drink, people were chatting and laughing, and Greg
was helping Morgan to hand round plates of delicious
nibbles.
'I love tapas,' sighed Jay as she accepted more goodies


from Greg. 'Morgan told us you were on a health food kick
but he said you'd still eat normal food.'
'Morgan was in on it all along?' Sam said, amazed.
'From the start. He and Catrina organized everything,'
Jay said simply. 'I didn't do that much until today when
Catrina had to work and I had to stay here and wait for the
caterers, but Morgan chose the food in the first place and
when Catrina and I worked out how to get you here, Morgan
said he'd be ready with the jeep. I think he feels guilty that
he was driving you, knowing there was nothing wrong and
that you were upset. But he was the one who said that the
ruse would certainly work because you were such a loyal
person that if one of us needed you, you'd come immediately,
no questions asked.'
'Ooh.' Sam felt the tears welling up again. Morgan
thought she was a good loyal person, how lovely. And
she wasn't, really. She'd been awful to Jay on the phone.
She wasn't worthy of anyone thinking she was good and
loyal...
'You can't cry for your whole birthday party,' Morgan
said soothingly, appearing in front of her with a bottle.
'I can!' wailed Sam, feeling guilty.
'Open your presents, darling,' he said as gently as if he
was talking to a child.
Sam sniffled, "kay.'
She laughed at the furry hot water bottle cover in lurid
leopardskin and sighed with pleasure over Catrina and
Hugh's gift: a beautiful watercolour painting of an orchid.
Jay's present was an exquisite sculpture of an elephant,
carved out of some exotic dark wood, while Greg gave her
a wonderfully planted window box.
'It's full of treasures that will come up over the next few
weeks,' he promised.
There was a gift wrapped bottle of her favourite Rioja,
perfume, book tokens and pretty silver filigree earrings.
'Thank you all so much,' cried Sam, touched beyond
words. She stared at her friends and they smiled back at her.

'I wasn't sure what to get you,' Morgan said. 'I did think
of a few things but I mean, what would you do with a
twenty-six-year-old Californian surfer . . .'
Everyone laughed.
'She'd think of something,' Hugh roared. 'Our Sammie
is very inventive.'
'But,' Morgan continued, 'I thought of the one thing
you'd love. I wasn't sure if it would be a good present,
because they say you should never give things like this.'
Sam goggled at him. What on earth was he talking about
and why was he so unaccountably nervous?
'If you don't want them, the lady will take them back,
and don't worry about when you're away, because I'll look
after them then.' He handed her a big cardboard box. Sam
sat it on her knees and looked inside. There, wriggling and
mewing furiously were two kittens, one marmalade and one
tabby. Both looked insanely cross to be stuck in a box when
they could be out testing their baby claws on the furniture.
'Oh,' she breathed, picking them up and cuddling them
against her, 'they're beautiful. I adore them. It's a wonderful
present.' And suddenly she laughed uproariously. 'Talk
about ironic,' she added. 'I've become a lady with two cats!'
Her laughter was infectious but nobody was totally sure
what she was talking about.
'Do you really want them?' Morgan's face was more anxious
than she'd ever seen it before. 'I know animals aren't
meant to be given as gifts,' he said, 'and if you change your
mind, I'll understand. I thought that two would be company
for each other when you're not at home and any time you're
away on business, I'll look after them, I give you my word.
I mean ...'
'Stop,' she said, handing him the wriggling ball of marmalade
fur. 'My aunt had cats and I know how to look after
them. What's more, I love the idea of having cats.' She held
the tabby up and kissed its pink nose. 'I've been thinking
about getting one and these two are so beautiful. Aren't you,
babies?'

The tabby nuzzled against her shoulder and began to purr
loudly.

'Jay tells me you helped organize the party?' Sam said.

Morgan's kitten's claws were stuck in his white shirt as
she tried to mountaineer up his chest. It took him a while
to unhook her.

'Girls love getting their claws into you,' Sam teased gently.

Morgan smiled. 'I have a card for you too,' he said, fishing
in his inside pocket.

He handed it to her and took the tabby kitten so she
could open the envelope.

It was a simple card: a romantic oil painting with a frilly
dressed heroine sitting on a swing. Inside, there was Morgan's
scrawl: Happy Birthday Friend, to an exciting new year, I
hope. Love Morgan.

Jolted by how touched she felt at both his present and
his tender card, Sam had to joke.

'Is this recyclable?' she demanded.

'Of course,' Morgan said. 'No trees were harmed to make
it.'

Sam felt the corners of her mouth twitch upwards.

'Except four baby shrubs were battered to death to make
the envelope. Only kidding,' he laughed. 'I like you all New Agey. It suits you.'

'Better than being a career bitch?' she said, her eyes hard
for a second.

'Calm down,' he said gently. 'Conversation is not a contact
sport.'

She grinned. He could always do that to her: defuse the
situation until it was useless to get all hot and bothered.

'I liked you before you were New Agey, remember?
Ouch.' The marmalade kitten had scratched his hand. 'Did
your mummy tell you to do that? Thank Christ I didn't get
tiger cubs instead.'

The kittens were adored by all and were soon flaked out
in their box, sleeping off a bowl of milk and more exercise
than they'd ever had in their short lives.


She enjoyed the party more than she'd enjoyed one for
years. The reason was simple: everywhere she went, Morgan
seemed to end up there too. It was as if they were a couple
and no matter how far apart they were, some hidden magnetic
force drew them back together again to exchange a
joke or a few words.
'Are the kittens all right?' Morgan asked her as they met
in the dining room.
'Peaceful and dreaming happily,' she replied, touching his
arm softly. 'We'll have to think up names tomorrow.'


The tabby kitten had a sweet, trusting face, while the marmalade
one was autocratic, with a disdainful sweep to her tail.
'She's very orange,' Morgan said the next day, examining
her on the floor in Sam's apartment. 'We could call her
Orange.' The kitten swiped him with a paw.
'She's far too classy for Orange,' Sam said. 'Anyway, she's
apricoty not orange.'
'Apricot?' said Morgan. 'You could call her Apricot. I
can just see you hanging your head out the window at night
yelling "Apricot! Your dinner's poured out!" at the top of
your voice.'
Sam grinned, busily making tea.
'Or maybe Marmalade?' he suggested.
'Too long,' Sam said. 'And it's not something you can
shorten.'
'How about Spike,' said Morgan. 'She's definitely spiky.'
Sam didn't look convinced. 'It's a boy's name.'
'It suits her,' protested Morgan. He peered deep into the
kitten's clear amber eyes. 'Spike. You like that name, don't
you pet?'
Spike made her very distinctive husky mewing noise.
'She does!' crowed Morgan. 'Spike. Now you've got to
name the other one.'
'She's a Tabitha,' Sam said fondly, abandoning the tea
making to cradle the sweet tabby kitten.
'Tabitha and Spike. What could be simpler.' Morgan

looked delighted with himself. 'Are you cooking tonight or
shall I? What do you fancy eating?'

Sam looked at him speculatively. She knew what she fancied
and it wasn't eating. But Morgan didn't appear to feel
the same. He liked her, she knew that for sure. Why else
would he go to so much bother for her birthday? But when
was he ever going to make a move?


CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

It took Sam ages to leave for her first yoga class a few days
later. It was her own fault for leaving the leggings on the
end of her bed where Spike could turn them into fringe
bottomed, eyelet-holed trousers after an hour's solid ripping.
Spike was fatally drawn to clothes. She liked nothing better
than to shred tights or tear great big holes in t-shirts.
All the towels in the apartment now sported big long
loops where Spike had been scratching playfully and then
pulled. Sometimes she got stuck and squealed piteously until
Sam arrived to free her. Sam suspected that if she wasn't
freed, she merely bit her way out, which accounted for the
tiny holes near some of the biggest loops.
Tabitha was her sister's devoted slave and looked up to
her. Sam hoped the marmalade terror wasn't going to teach
Tabitha any naughty tricks.
'I can't wear these,' Sam said, holding up the leggings
that had been in pristine condition a mere hour previously.
'Spike, you are a holy terror. I'll have to find something else
now.'
Spike sat on the floor and continued grooming herself,
utterly unconcerned. Tabitha, meanwhile, peered meekly
from under the computer desk.
'Why didn't you come and tell me what your naughty big
sister was up to?' Sam asked Tabitha, picking her up and
cuddling her. Tabitha begged forgiveness by rubbing her tiny
face against Sam's cheek.
'Oh you are a little pet, aren't you?' Sam said.
It amazed her how easily she'd got used to having the

kittens around and how much a part of her life they now
were after only a few days. They leaped onto the bed in the
mornings, demanding love and breakfast. Sam hadn't been
letting them out of the apartment because they were still too
young. Until they'd had all their injections from the vet,
they had to use their litter tray and content themselves with
looking at the outdoors.
When she came home from work, they were thrilled,
weaving excitedly around her ankles and purring loudly.
Tabitha's favourite position was on the windowsill watching
the world go by and gazing with huge, astonished eyes at
the two robins who spent their lives in the birch tree outside
the window. Spike's favourite position was wherever
she could do most damage. No curtain was safe from her
destructive, naughty paws and she was quite capable of leaping
onto the coffee table and dipping one exploratory paw
into whatever Sam was eating to see if she liked it.
'Stop it,' Sam would yell, making Tabitha whisk off under
the sofa in terror, while Spike would blithely lick her paw
clean as if she hadn't a care in the world and as if she had
every right to be sitting on the table.
'I'm going to be late thanks to you, Spike,' Sam said,
rifling through her drawers for something to wear.
The phone broke her concentration. It was Hope.
'I can't stop to talk,' Sam said apologetically, hating to
not have time to talk to her sister who was, after all, going
through so much. 'I'm late for my yoga class and bloody
Spike has ruined my leggings.'
She was thrilled when Hope giggled. 'I'm sorry,' Hope
said, sounding a lot more cheerful than she had for ages,
'but there's a certain sick humour in that. I have Millie laying
waste to my wardrobe and you have Spike doing the same.'
'They should get a flat together,' Sam remarked. 'Can I
call you back later?'
'Sure.'
'How was the yoga?' Hope asked that evening when Sam
rang back.



'Marvellous,' replied Sam from her prone position on the
couch. She felt absolutely wonderful, calm and serene as if
she'd had a glass of wine but without the accompanying
lack of sobriety. 'I feel as if I've just been in a flotation tank
for an hour, it's incredible. And you have to try it, Hope. It
would be so good for you.'

'Are you implying that I need relaxing?' asked Hope
wryly.

'Well, you could probably do with a few months in a
flotation tank,' Sam pointed out. 'And this is cheaper. I did
get a book but you have to have lessons I think. There's no
way I'd have figured out the breathing without it.'

'Oh, you mean like giving-birth-type of breathing?' Hope
asked.

'Haven't a clue. But I did have to get into some weird
positions today that made me look as if I was giving birth,
so maybe that's the link. How are you, anyway?'

She could almost hear Hope grimacing. 'Okay, I suppose,'
Hope said slowly. 'I still haven't made any huge, life changing
decisions yet, which is just as well because everyone is
telling me not to do anything but to "sit tight". I wish I
knew what that meant.'

'It's what people say when they don't know what to say,'
Sam said wisely. 'Nobody wants to offer any sort of opinion
because it's only been a bit over two weeks and hopefully,
it will all work out.'

'Two weeks and five days,' Hope interrupted.

'Whatever. Everyone's scared to give you proper advice
because if they tell you it's good riddance and you and Matt
subsequently make it up, they'll feel embarrassed forever.
Likewise if they tell you to throw yourself on his mercy and
you don't, then they'll feel like an even bigger idiot for having
read the situation wrongly.'

'And what's your advice?'

Sam paused. In the period since Mart's departure, she'd
wondered exactly what her sister should do. Her notion of
Hope's reaction to Mart's leaving had been wrong. Sam


imagined Hope would sob helplessly and do anything to get
him back. But she'd been wrong. Instead, Hope had squared
her shoulders and got on with life. During the weekend Sam
had spent in Redlion, she'd been astonished to see her sister
cope so well. But was it merely because she thought the
separation was a short-term thing? If Matt filed for a divorce,
how would she cope then?

'I don't have any advice, Hope,' she said candidly. 'I'm
hardly an expert on relationships. Look, what do you want?'

'You know what I want. I want Matt to come back home
but he won't even talk to me on the phone. He just says he
wants to speak to the children and that he doesn't want to
talk to me.'

It did not sound good, Sam decided. 'He's got to come
to terms with it, I suppose,' she said.

'I know,' Hope said dismally. 'He won't let me explain
anything. The only explanation he got was my frantic one
the night he left, which was hardly coherent. I'd love the
chance to say that I was wrong but that I adore him, that
it was a mistake born out of stupidity and nothing else. If
I'd been thinking, I'd never even have looked at Christy. But
then,' Hope sounded bitter, 'thinking rationally has never
been my strong point.'

'Shall I speak to Matt?' Sam asked tentatively.

'No.' Hope was firm. 'I want him to come back because
he wants to, not because other people have made him do
it. Maybe that's what "sitting tight" is. People do say the
stupidest things.'

Sam attempted to cheer her up: 'Give it a month and I
know exactly what people will be saying to you, and it'll
have nothing to do with sitting tight. They'll be inviting you
to dinner parties where they've got a spare man lined up for
you. There'll be men crawling out of the woodwork for you,
divorced husbands, men who've never had girlfriends, men
who live with their mothers and don't buy their own
underpants, you wait and see.'


'I hope not. I've had enough of men to last me for the
rest of my life,' Hope said vehemently.
'They will, I promise,' her sister said. 'You never know,'
she added, 'you might even find some absolute hunk.'
'I tried that,' Hope said drily, 'and look where it got me.
Anyway, enough misery. How about you?'
'Not bad,' sighed Sam. 'I'm trying to find out why the
hell the men I like refuse to make a move on me and men I
wouldn't fancy if they were the last human beings on earth
think I'm God's gift.' This last was inspired by Steve who
had smiled goofily at her twice in the past two days. Morgan,
on the other hand, appeared determined to keep their
relationship strictly platonic.
'It's an anti-magnetic thing,' Hope offered.
'Aunty who?'
'Anti-magnetic. Some women have such magnetism they
make men drop like flies at their feet. Some don't. You and
I have obviously turned into the don't variety.'
'A cheerful thought,' Sam said.
'Well, we can turn mad and eccentric and never have to
worry about anybody stealing all the duvet in the middle of
the night again,' Hope said.
'I never have had to worry about that,' Sam pointed out.
'So, what have you been up to?'
On the other end of the phone, Hope thought about telling
the truth. But she couldn't.
'Oh, you know, looking after small children, cleaning
up hen shit and Mary-Kate's found me a job attempting to
organize the Redlion Tourist Office which, apparently, hasn't
been the same since the co-ordinator left last year to visit
an ashram and never came back.'
'Busy, huh?' said Sam.
'Yes,' sighed Hope.
When she'd hung up, Hope went upstairs to check on the
children, then came down and made herself a cup of camomile
tea. Mary-Kate, who was a firm believer in medicine's

advances in anti-depressants, had wanted Hope to see Dr
McKevitt for a check-up. But Hope, knowing that she wasn't
allowed anything on account of her pregnancy, said she'd
stick to the odd glass of wine (which was a lie as she couldn't
even have that) and camomile tea to help her sleep.

The tea made, she investigated the television guide to see
what she could watch. This was her evening routine now;
or at least, it had become her routine since the day she was
tidying the bathroom and came upon a packet of tampons
she hadn't used for at least two months. Only the anxiety
of the past few weeks meant she had missed the unavoidable
signs of pregnancy: feeling nauseous and a strange metallic
taste in her mouth. She'd had exactly the same symptoms
with Toby and Millie.

It was no little source of ironic amusement to her that
she must have become pregnant on that fateful night in
Kinsale when Matt had thought she'd wanted another baby;
a night when she'd been consumed by guilt over her flirtation
with Christy.

In the midst of all the shock, Hope knew one thing for
certain: she wanted this new baby, and she didn't care how
hard it would be to bring him or her up without a father.

She still felt devastated at the idea that her marriage was
over. The thought of never laughing with Matt again, of not
feeling his arms protectively around her, those thoughts were
agony. But there was no point in dwelling on her misery.
She had a duty to protect her children. Through her hubris,
she'd already ruined their parents' marriage, now she had
to stop feeling sorry for herself and take care of them properly.
All three of them.


'I need to see the children, Hope. I'm coming to Ireland for
the weekend and I'm going to stay in Killarney.'

Matt's voice was so cold and distant that Hope had to
bite her lip to stop her voice shaking.

'That's fine,' she said bravely. She'd been dressing Millie
for bed when he'd phoned and had prepared to hand the


phone straight over to her daughter when Matt had said he
wanted to speak to Hope.

'Yes?' she'd said eagerly, ever hopeful that he wanted a
reunion, that everything was going to be fine.

'I'll phone you when I've booked a hotel and you can
drop the children off on Saturday morning. I'm sure you
won't mind them staying with me that night. It'll give you
a chance to have some fun.' The bitter way he said the word
'fun' made it apparent that her husband thought she was
still having fun with Christy De Lacy.

'You can have the kids on Saturday night,' Hope said.
'We should discuss what we're going to tell them.'

Matt had no bitter remark about that. 'I suppose we
should,' he said heavily.

'I know they're small, but they know something's wrong
and I haven't known what to say,' Hope confessed.

'How about "I've got a new daddy for you"?' rasped Matt.

Hope bit her lip again. This sort of stress could not be
good for the baby. 'That type of remark doesn't help,' she
said far more calmly than she was feeling. 'Should I get my
lawyer to make the arrangements for you to see the children?'
she asked. Two could play that game.

Matt sounded shocked. 'You have a lawyer?'

'If you can't be civil to me, it looks as if I'll need one,'
she snapped. 'Phone me when you've booked the hotel.' She
slammed the phone down and burst into tears.

'I didn't talk to Daddy,' said Millie tearfully. 'Did Daddy
make you cry?'

'No,' wailed Hope. 'Daddy is the best daddy in the world
and he would never hurt Mummy.'

Instantly, Toby began to cry too, until the entire family
were sobbing, huddled together at the bottom of the stairs.

'I want Daddy!' cried Millie.

'I want a wee wee,' cried Toby.

'I want to turn the clock back,' Hope sobbed.

Thereafter, Matt was ultra civil on the phone, as if he
was speaking to a new client for the first time.


'How are you?' he'd say formally.

'Very well,' Hope would reply, feeling like a Jane Austen
character on her best behaviour at an assembly.

In this way, they organized the trip for Saturday. Matt
was going to stay in the Hotel Europe on the other side
of Killarney, a welcoming family hotel with a huge indoor
swimming pool and a riding stables with beautiful golden
ponies to amuse the children.

'Will you pack stuff for every eventuality?' he asked
Hope, for one minute sounding like the old Matt, the one
who could never tell the difference between the children's
old dungarees for messing around in and good trousers that
shouldn't be let out in the mud.

'Of course,' Hope said humbly. It wasn't his fault they
were in this position. Maybe, a teeny bit his fault. But in
the main, they were at a Mexican stand off because of her
behaviour.

On Saturday, the children were ecstatic with excitement.
Millie squealed a refrain of 'Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!'
as Hope drove them and their baggage out to the Europe
Hotel, feeling more and more tense with every mile.

This could be her big chance to make everything right.
Perhaps Matt felt the same way. Perhaps he was waiting for
her to apologize and he'd come home and it would all go
back to being the same as before.

As she drove, Hope mentally practised what she'd say.
'I'm so sorry, Matt. Nothing happened. It was all my fault,
I should have never let him drive me home and I can completely
understand why you didn't believe me . . .'

But that was the one sticking point: she understood why
Matt had stormed off, but she was still upset that their love
wasn't strong enough for him to have given her the benefit
of the doubt. The old pattern had repeated itself again when
he hadn't waited for her explanation.

Hope turned into the long drive to the hotel and felt
her heart bleed. She couldn't abase herself before Matt, because
he'd been to blame too. He should have known that


she wouldn't betray him. If she crawled on her hands and
knees again, it would be like the old days. Him, in charge;
her, the devoted, prostrate servant. And Hope knew she'd
gone too far to go back to that. If they got back together,
it had to be because they both wanted it and had both
said sorry for what had gone before. The rules had to
change.
Matt was waiting outside the hotel for them. She saw
him standing with one long canvas-jeaned leg resting on the
rails beside the ponies' paddock at the front of the hotel.
He wore a white T-shirt that made his dark hair look even
darker than usual and Hope's heart swooped at the sight of
him.
'Daddy!' squealed the children in unison and Hope did
her best to smile. She stopped the Metro, got out and smiled
hello shyly.
Matt didn't move forward to kiss her or even touch her.
Instead, he pulled open the car door and leaned in to hug
the children in a flurry of squeals and cries and delighted
giggles. Hope had to stand away from this touching tableau.
When the children and their baggage had been removed, she
waited briefly, longing for Matt to make the first move. All
she needed was one 'would you like to come in and have a
coffee?' and it would be fine. She could throw her arms
around him and say yes!
'What time are you coming back tomorrow?'
It took a moment before Hope could drag herself back
from dreams of joyous reconciliation to the harsh reality of
. life.
'Five?' she whispered.
'See you then,' Matt said politely. Then, he hoisted Toby
onto his shoulders, picked up all the luggage in one strong
arm, and taking Millie's eager little hand with the other, he
walked off to the hotel.
Sadly, Hope got back into the Metro and drove home,
with only one stop in order to find a tissue to wipe the tears
from her streaming eyes. Until today, she'd had hope. Now

she had none. How could she tell Matt about the baby now?
He'd think she was trying to trap him. That was if he didn't
assume it was Christy's.


CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN


Nicole dumped her suitcase in the hall and wandered into
the sitting room. She half-expected it to look like a bombsite
because she'd been away for so long. Normally, unless she tidied up all the old papers and magazines, nobody else did.
But the room was pristine, with no mugs left on the coffee
table and no copies of Hello or OK! scattered across the
couch. Weird. In the kitchen, it was the same story. The
counters were spotless, there wasn't so much as a teaspoon
lying in the sink and the scent of lemon cleanser was in the
air.

Gran, decided Nicole. Gran had been round scrubbing and
cleaning, probably as the result of an argument with Sandra
about tidiness. Normally the 'honestly, Sandra, you're as
untidy as a teenager!' comment produced a row and it was
up to Nicole to restore order to the chaos. But Gran must
have done it this time.

She dragged her case upstairs but didn't bother unpacking.
She hated unpacking and despite being a tidy soul
in most areas of her life, this wasn't one of them. The house
was unusually quiet, it was strange, in fact. Nicole went into
Pammy's pink room and sat on the bed, idly picking up a
cuddly toy and stroking it. Even this room was tidy, with
Pammy's collection of Disney characters lined up on a dust
free shelf.

Nicole's favourite was Tigger. She had an elderly Tigger
of her own and had taken it with her on the tour, where it
sat on her hotel bed and comforted her many nights. The
night she and Darius had ended up cuddling for hours,


talking and kissing, Tigger had stared disapprovingly at them
from the dressing table.

'Tigger is shocked,' Darius had said the following morning,
turning the cuddly toy away from them before they
kissed goodbye.

'He shouldn't be shocked,' Nicole replied softly, 'nothing
happened.'

But she wanted something to happen, all right. It was a
matter of timing. She wanted the timing to be right. And
the place.

She'd thought of nothing else since that night with Darius.
During the final few days of the tour, she'd imagined finally
having her own flat. Not one with Darius, no matter how
much she liked him. No. A place of her own, a place he
could visit but which would still belong to her, where she
could keep the kitchen spotless and never see so much as a
cup out of place anywhere.

The idea was so seductive that Nicole was constantly
waking up after delicious daydreams where she'd been
merrily shopping for duvet covers and lampshades, whizzing
along with Pammy and her mum, picking out bits and
pieces, laughing over silly shower curtains decorated with
goldfishes. And then her eyes would open and reality
would reassert itself, making her realize that she couldn't
possibly leave them. For the first time in her life she had
the financial security to have her own place to live, but her
sense of responsibility meant she couldn't take advantage of
it.

The sound of a key turning in the front door made Nicole
race downstairs happily. She couldn't wait to see her mum
and darling Pammy.

'Nicole!' roared Pammy, a small blonde princess in pink
jeans and a tiny denim jacket.

'Oh love, I've missed you,' Nicole said, trying to bite back
the tears as she held the small body to hers.

When she'd hugged her little sister, she turned her attention
to Sandra.




'It's lovely to have you back,' Sandra said. 'We've missed

you.'

'How've you been?' asked Nicole, immediately putting
the kettle on for a pot of tea.

'We've been fine,' Sandra said, opening her shopping and
extracting some chicken breasts, a couple of onions and a
tin of tomatoes. 'Haven't we, Pammy?'

The little girl nodded proudly. 'We've had cooking every
day, Mummy, haven't we? Not just egg and chips, Nicole.
Mum said you'd say that was all we had.'

Both Sandra and Nicole grinned at this.

'I've learned how to do this lovely recipe with lamb and
yoghurt,' Sandra said. 'It's very easy and Pammy loves it.'

Pammy nodded at this. 'Better than Barbie spaghetti,' she
said, which was high praise indeed.

'And we had the boiled bacon that your Gran loves the
other night. I did it all myself. Pammy wasn't so wild about
that, though, were you pet?'

Pammy shook her head.

Nicole had to sit down on a kitchen chair. This was all too
bizarre. Her mother cooking? Sandra never cooked. When
Nicole had been small, they lived on eggs, chips, pizzas and
anything else frozen that could be easily reheated. Now her
mother was turning into Nigella Lawson.

'The place is looking good, Gran must have been spring
cleaning,' she added.

'I was spring cleaning!' said her mother indignantly.
'Honestly, Nicole, you'd think I didn't know which end of
the vacuum cleaner was up.'

Nicole bit back the comment that for years her mother
hadn't taken much interest in being Mrs House Proud.

'So tell us everything,' Sandra said when all the shopping
had been put away and chocolate biscuits had been produced
to go with the tea. Pammy began colouring in at the kitchen
table and Sandra started chopping onions for dinner. 'You
look great. I saw the latest article on you in the evening
Paper. They called you "very talented". I got six copies.'


Nicole grinned. 'If the single flops, everyone will soon be
saying I was talentless and they knew from the start that I'd
fail.'

'That's newspapers for you,' Sandra said, browning the
onion in what looked suspiciously like a new skillet. 'Paper
won't refuse ink, as I always say. We're all proud of you,
whatever they print.'

'I've been thinking, Mum,' Nicole began. She paused, got
up and got another biscuit from the pack on the counter.

'You've given up smoking, haven't you?' demanded her
mother suddenly. 'You never eat biscuits.'

Nicole blushed. 'I'm doing my best,' she said. 'Dar. . .'
she corrected herself, 'the company told me it was bad for
my voice.'

'Oh, did they?' teased her mother. 'Or was it that lovely
Darius . . . ? Come on, tell me.'

Nicole couldn't stop the silly, sentimental grin that
crossed her face every time she thought of Darius.

'Are you going out with him?' asked Sandra, abandoning
the onions to start work on some mushrooms.

'Well .. . yes . .. well, that's part of what I wanted to
talk about,' Nicole said anxiously. She got up to stand at
the cooker and give the onions a stir. She didn't want Pammy
to hear what she had to say next.

'I'm thinking of. . .'

'.. . moving out,' finished her mother. 'Don't look so
shocked, love. I knew it'd happen. It makes more sense for
you to have your own place, now that you'll be working in
town all the time. You've got a career now, you need your
own space.'

Nicole stared at her mother, astonished and hurt. 'But
what will you do without me?' she blurted out.

Sandra's blue eyes crinkled up when she smiled warmly
at her daughter. 'Carry on, Nicole. You were going to have
to go sometime, weren't you? I knew I'd have to let you go.
You're my daughter, not my prisoner.'

'But how will you cope?'


This time, her mother really did look surprised. 'Cope?
Well, we won't have you running round after us, taking care
of everything, Nicole, but we'll manage. I'm not useless, you
know. How did I cope when you were a baby? I just had
to, didn't I?'
'Yes, but Gran said she had to take over,' interrupted
Nicole.
'Your gran is just like you, Nicole: she needs to be needed.
She was the one who insisted I stay with her. I wanted my
own place but you know your Gran, bossy boots from hell
that she is,' Sandra added fondly.
Nicole wished she still smoked because she desperately
needed a cigarette to help her cope.
'You were such a funny little girl when you were small,'
Sandra went on. 'Always wanting everything to be perfect,
just like your gran. The two of you were like peas in a
pod, but even your gran isn't as much of a perfectionist as
you, Nicole. She's never been able to get the taps in the
bathroom cleaned up the way you do. I did worry about
you, you know,' Sandra confided. 'I talked to the doctor
about getting you help because you were so obsessed with
things being right. But she put my mind at rest. Said that
was your way of coping with life. She said you obviously
missed having a dad, although it would kill you to let on to
me, and you wanted everything ship shape on the surface.
Said I should let you get on with it, that it was what you
needed.'
'But. . .' Nicole didn't know where to start. This wasn't
how she remembered things at all. 'But Gran said I had to
look after you . .. and I felt responsible for everything . ..'
'I know.' Sandra's soft eyes hardened briefly. 'You were
never responsible, my love. You and Pammy are the most
precious gifts I've ever been given, you do know that, don't
you? I don't regret a single moment of my life because I've
got my two wonderful daughters. Your gran has her regrets
and that's her business, that's why she's so anti sex before
marriage. Not for moral reasons but because she never

wanted you to be stuck with a child and no way of earning
your living, like her and me.'

Too late, Sandra stopped stirring and stared horrorstruck
at her daughter. 'Oh Lord, Nicole, forget I said that.'

'Like her.' repeated Nicole parrot-fashion.

'Please, Nicole, don't say a word. Your gran would kill
me. She never wanted you to know, she was sure you'd be
ashamed of her. Just forget I said it.'

'I can't,' Nicole gasped. 'I'm not ashamed of Gran, how
could I be? But tell me the truth.'

'The truth about what?' demanded Reenie Turner,
appearing at the door with her keys in her hand.


The entire story took two more pots of tea and Nicole
decided she'd have to pick another day to give up smoking.
Once her grandmother started telling the story, the words
flooded out, as if she'd longed to tell Nicole the truth despite
everything. Reenie Turner had indeed been sixteen, going
on seventeen, when she'd left Ireland for London. Except
the bit of information Nicole had never been given included
the fact that Reenie had fled her home after getting pregnant
by a local lad, who had no intention in hell of marrying
her. She'd lived in a small farm near Redlion, which Nicole
remembered was the town where Sam Smith's sister lived.
Not that it surprised her: this entire tale was so unbelievable
that one more startling coincidence wasn't noticeable.

'It wasn't like now,' Reenie recounted. 'Being pregnant
in those days was a mortal sin and a shame like nothing you
can imagine, Nicole. My family didn't know. Sure, I barely
knew myself. There was no sex education or the like, we'd
all grown up on a farm so we knew what was what, but as
for people having babies, that was like another, mysterious
world. If I'd been a heifer, I'd have had a better idea of what
was going on than I did as a young woman.'

The three Turner women, sitting around the table, smiled.
Even telling a sad story, Reenie couldn't resist a bit of a
joke.


'My sister, Heather, God rest her, was going to London
to train as a nurse. She was three years older than me and
I told her one night. I knew I had to get away or the family
would have been destroyed with the shame of it all.'
Nicole's heart ached at the thought of a lonely young girl
having to leave her family and her home all because she
lived in an era where unmarried pregnancy was the ultimate
taboo.
'It was either leave or get sent to the nuns,' Reenie said
mistily. 'They had homes then for fallen women or magdalens
as they called the likes of me. Those places were
nothing but workhouses for pregnant women and I say a
prayer to Our Lord every day that I missed that. Your aunt
Heather took me with her to London and took care of me.'
Sandra reached over and squeezed her mother's hand softly.
'When your mother was born, Heather and I got a place
of our own and she told everyone I was widowed, that my
husband had died in an accident on a building site. There
were so many Irish builders, nobody thought much about
it, or if they did, they said nothing. And when I met your
grandfather, Charlie Turner, and he was your grandfather,'
she added fiercely, 'because he loved Sandra like his own,
we were a proper family.'
Nicole had only vague memories of a sweet, white-haired
grandfather, who'd died when she was a small child.
'Why did you never tell me, Gran?' she asked now. 'As
if I'd disapprove of you!'
'I didn't want to be washing our dirty linen in public,'
Reenie said firmly. 'I did want to tell you, so many times,
but it was never the right moment.'
'Nicole's got her own bits of news, Mum,' said Sandra,
grinning. 'She's in love with that Darius Good. And she's
going to move out and get her own place.'
'Not with Darius, I hope?' demanded Reenie fiercely.
'No,' said Nicole, stung. 'I thought you liked him,
anyway.'
Her grandmother smiled. 'I do,' she insisted, 'I think he's

a real gent and he'll be good for you. I just don't want you
rushing into anything. You've got your career to think about
now, Nicole. You don't want to be tied down to any man.
Your mother and I want to see you making it before you
start thinking about settling down. I've been watching that Top of the Pops programme and there's nobody on it near
as good a singer as you,' she said loyally.

Nicole laughed. 'Ah Gran, you're biased.' She kissed both
her grandmother and her mother. 'I'm just going upstairs to
use the phone,' she said. 'I want to phone Darius.'

'Are you going to be telling him about me?' asked her
grandmother suspiciously.

'No, why would I? I just want to tell him that I am going
to get a flat after all,' Nicole replied. 'I didn't want to do it
for sure until I felt it was the right decision, and now I'm
sure it is.'

'You have to move on,' Sandra said matter-of-factly. 'Will
you be having your dinner here? I'm making a casserole.'

'You bet,' said Nicole. 'Since I'll be racketing around soon
in my own place, I might as well get as much home cooking
as I can here.'

'Home cooking!' said Reenie, raising her eyes to heaven.
'I better check if I have my stomach pills. You know I can't
eat onions ...'

'Mum, you are a right pain, you know that,' interrupted
Sandra.

Grinning, Nicole danced upstairs to phone Darius. Everything
in the Turner household was back to comforting
normality.


CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Sam tried on her drop-dead gorgeous shimmery dress.
Against her olive skin and with her poker straight dark
blonde hair hanging like a sleek fall of silk, the dress looked
stunning. Tiny spaghetti straps, iridescent fabric that clung
voluptuously to her figure and a low cut back that scooped
down dangerously, made it the sort of thing Hollywood
divas wore to the Oscars.
Hanging on the wardrobe door was her other possible
outfit for the Lemons: a black Prada suit that looked
wickedly expensive and very classy. Chic but not overtly
sexy, especially when she wore it with the white agnes b
T-shirt which instantly transformed the suit into cool but
casual.
The dress, on the other hand, screamed blatant sexuality
and might not be the wisest thing to wear to an awards
ceremony where you were going with your boss: a boss
who'd made it plain he fancied you.
But Sam was fed up with looking coolly casual and she
was sure she'd figured out how to deal with Steve. She could
handle him, she knew it, and besides, she wanted Morgan
to see her looking all glammed up for once.
She might not be in his target age group, but she cleaned
up pretty nicely, she felt, and before she went to the awards,
she was going to drop in on Morgan to say hi.
'Hi,' she practised it in front of the mirror as she kohled
her big hazel eyes.
'I just dropped in for a moment to return your video,'
she tried. Sounded a bit lame, she knew.

Oh what the hell. Why couldn't she just march in there
and say, hello, just wanted to drop in and see you before I
went out. What do you think of the dress?

She knew what she wanted him to think. She wanted
those narrowed caramel eyes to lengthen with appreciation
as he took in her glowing shoulders covered with a dusting
of sparkling bronzer, then she wanted them to slide down
to the exciting hollow of her cleavage, just about covered by
the dress. She wanted him to be consumed with sheer lust.

That's what she wanted. And when he saw her in this
dress, it would happen.

Triumphantly, Sam looked at her dazzling reflection in
the mirror. She was crazy about Morgan; she was sure he
was crazy about her, although he'd never made a move. He
was waiting for her to say something first, Sam had convinced
herself. He knew she was a strong woman and didn't
like men presuming anything. He respected her. Now the
time had come for Sam to let him know that love and respect
could work very well together.

The limo was coming to pick her up at six, the kittens
were fed and had had their daily ration of adoration, and
Sam was ready by five, a time when she knew Morgan's
workmen began winding down for the day. Hopefully, she'd
be able to slip in without meeting anyone but Morgan
because in this dress, the builders would give her quite a
ribbing.

Just in case, she wrapped herself in a big plum velvet
evening coat before she went next door. The front door was
open, as usual, and Sam could hear the inevitable hammering
noises.

The builders would be gone soon, they'd been renovating
the house for months and it must have cost a fortune.
Morgan hadn't talked about selling it for ages. In her dreams,
Sam sometimes had a delicious fantasy where she and Morgan
lived there together. She imagined telling guests how
she'd helped with the patio, imagined Morgan smiling, putting
his arms round her and telling everyone how he'd fallen


in love with her independent streak when she'd insisted on
laying part of it herself after watching him for only half an
hour.
'Hello?' she called lightly, peering into the big airy drawing
room. No sign of him. The builders were in the kitchen
having the last cigarette of the working day.
'Hiya Sam,' they said, eyeing up the big coat and the
dainty ankles in pink strappy evening sandals appearing
underneath.
'Hi guys,' she replied. 'Any sign of the boss man?'
'In the conservatory,' said one.
Sam walked quickly through to the conservatory, which
had been almost totally rebuilt. It looked great now and she
could picture it beautifully decorated. Cane furniture maybe,
she liked cane furniture. It signified holidays in the sun and
would look lovely with plenty of plants and perhaps paintings
like her watercolour orchid one.
Deep in these happy thoughts, she said 'Hello,' in a
breezy, I've-just-dropped-in-for-a-moment voice. Her next
words died on her lips. There, with Morgan's arms wrapped
around her as if she was precious china, was the young girl
with the big doe eyes. The same girl that Sam had first seen
leaving Morgan's house after the party, having stayed the
night. The girl who'd come out another morning clad in his
jeans, her pert little twenty-something body cuddled up in
one of his sweatshirts, looking for all the world as if she'd
just been cuddling Morgan himself.
Sam had fondly hoped that this nymphet was a fling of
the past. Recently, there had been no sign of women drifting
in and out of Morgan's house with their lips glossed up
ready to have the lipstick kissed off by him.
Sam had been so very sure that this was no coincidence
and that, once Morgan had fallen for her, he'd dropped the
bimbos. But from the way Little Miss Muffet was clinging
to Morgan like a limpet, nestled against his old white Tshirt
as if she belonged there, it was obvious their affair was very
much in the present.

Sam felt like someone had struck her in the chest. The
breath seemed to leave her body and she stepped backwards
in shock. All of this took just a few seconds: from recognition
to realization, only a moment had passed. Morgan stared
at her dumbly, but without waiting for him to offer lame
explanations, Sam whirled around at high speed and ran out
of the conservatory.

'Love the dress,' roared one of the builders as she ran
past him in the hall, velvet coat flying out open behind her.

Once inside her own apartment, she sat down on her
window seat, still wearing the coat, too stunned to think of
taking it off. Morgan didn't love her at all, she'd been stupid
to think he did. He hadn't cared; she'd been fooling herself
or had he been fooling her? Who knew. All she knew was
that she'd run to see him with childlike enthusiasm and had
made an enormous fool of herself. It had all been in her
mind. How pathetic she must have seemed.

She didn't know how long she sat there, immobile and
stunned. One half of her wanted Morgan to storm into the
apartment and apologize, to tell her it was all a huge mistake
and she'd got the wrong idea. That he loved her.

But the other half of her raged at her own stupidity at
ever believing in a man. There was nothing for it but to
cut Morgan Benson completely out of her life, because she
couldn't stand the strain any more. He was gone, in the past,
like some band whose next option she'd refused to exercise.
People often wondered how it felt to work in an industry
where tough decisions had to be made but Sam always
explained simply that it was business. There was nothing
personal in it, but no record company could carry passengers.
Everybody knew that. You walked away and tried to
remember that.

Now all she had to do was adopt a similar attitude in
her own life. Morgan was like a band she'd invested so much
time and money in, and now he'd failed her. Time to dice
and slice. He was gone, history, finito. If she said it often
enough, maybe she'd believe it.


In the limo on the way to Earl's Court, Sam didn't bother
checking her make up. What was the point, she thought,
staring blindly out the darkened windows at the streets
whizzing by.
Thousands of fans, gathered outside the main entrance,
screamed delightedly when Sam's car pulled up, thinking she
was someone famous. When she got out, fiercely glamorous
in her shimmering designer gown, they screamed some more.
'Probably think you're Jennifer Lopez,' smirked the limo
driver.
'Give or take ten years, six inches of leg, and ten million
bucks,' said Sam sourly.
She marched past the screaming kids and the frantically
snapping paparazzi, knowing that the photographers were
wasting film taking her picture just in case she was someone
they should have recognized.
'Oo are you, luv?' yelled one guy with a telephoto lens
like an elephant's trunk.
'Nobody,' hissed Sam menacingly.
The photographers got the hint.
Inside was organized chaos as thousands of dressed up
to the nines people surged around, trying to figure out where
the hell they were supposed to meet up with their friends
and jealously checking to see if their table was in a less
advantageous position than their rivals. Table positioning
was almost a professional sport at these bashes, with lots of
internal company anger when one group were right at the
stage and another of their fellow execs were in the Siberia
of the back of the room. Karen Storin joked that she could
tell whose career was on the up and whose was going down
purely by where they ended up sitting at award ceremonies.
Sam had laughed at the time and said that the two of
them were going to have great fun at the Lemons betting on
career prospects. Now, Sam didn't think she'd ever have
fun again. She couldn't imagine even smiling again, and the
thought of putting on a brave face nearly killed her. But she
had to for her career's sake. And let's face it, she reflected

~~
bitterly as she looked over the wasteland of her life, her
damn career was the only thing she had left.
'Love the dress,' Steve Parris said enthusiastically as Sam
arrived at the Titus table - right at the front, naturally,
because Steve wouldn't have stood for anything else. Everybody
was there; twelve people crammed into a round table
built for ten. The next table held international Titus head
honchos, and Karen Storin, who, resplendent in a red leather
trouser suit, was holding court. She waved across at Sam.
'You look fantastic!' she called.
Sam did her best to smile back. The one person she'd
wanted to admire the dress hadn't.
Sam sat down three places away from Steve,, who was
already well stuck into neat vodkas. He should have been
sitting with the international people but he'd obviously made
a conscious decision to get drunk instead.
'You should wear clothes like this more often,' he said
loudly, eyes darting over her outfit.
'Yeah,' said Sam, not really caring either way.
The meal was the type of thing where bowls were placed
in the centre of each table and people could help themselves,
which was a mistake as everybody was affecting to be far
too cool to eat. Sam couldn't really be bothered with leaning
in to take spoonfuls of Caesar salad or slivers of chicken
breast, so she nibbled her bread roll and didn't argue when
Steve leaned perilously across the table to fill up her wine
glass.
'Thanks,' she muttered, her mind elsewhere; in the conservatory
of Morgan Benson's home to be exact.
'My pleasure,' Steve said, admiring her with hot eyes.
It was a relief when the show started and the small talk
could stop. Sam was fed up with listening to everyone at the
table bitching about other record companies.
First to perform was an artist who'd been signed to the
record company Sam had worked with until she'd joined
Titus. Tula-Faye, a crossover country and western artist who
had sold millions of records and got scores of record company

people's backs up in the process because she was such
a demanding diva, swayed onstage in a few strategically
placed bits of chiffon.
'I thank the Lord for the chance to be here with you good
people tonight,' she drawled.
Sam raised her eyes to heaven. She admired people with
genuine religious sentiment but she knew damn well that
the only God Tula-Faye worshipped was the one who looked
after her dollars - all of which were tied up in investment
funds that no hopeful future husband could ever hope to
infiltrate unless he had one hell of a lawyer. Anyway, surely
God preferred his chosen ones to wear more clothes? One
good breeze and Tula-Faye's outfit would fall to the floor.
Tula-Faye was followed by the winner of the Best Female
Act category, and then, after another litany of awards, a hip
young boy band came on, gyrating around six limber female
dancers as they lip-synched their new song. The fans who
were let in to create some atmosphere screamed themselves
hoarse.
A Titus act won Best Album, and Steve went demented,
yelling loudly in triumph. Not that it was a surprise to him,
Sam knew. The record companies all knew exactly which
band was going to win which award in advance. Otherwise,
they'd never be able to coax their performers into turning
up in the first place. Sam couldn't imagine the hell of getting
a top act to an awards ceremony where they had to endure
the humiliation of not winning the award they'd been nominated
for.
Titus's fiercest rival record company won the next two
awards and from the corner of her eye, Sam watched Steve
sink another straight vodka. Trouble ahead, she thought
idly.
Next came the nominations for Best Newcomer. Everyone
at the Titus table perked up. Density were up for this award.
Unlike the other awards, the winner of this was a fiercely
guarded secret because it was decided by the television company
which broadcast the awards.

Sam watched Steve Parris sit up stiffly in his seat and
shove away his empty vodka glass. He had a lot riding on
this. Massive sums of money had been spent on the band
and their first album had sold a disappointingly low number
of units. The critics had loved it, which augured well for the
future, implying that a band as talented as Density needed
a couple of albums to hit the mega time with the fickle
public. But if they failed to win such an important award
as Best Newcomer, it would look very bad. And looking
bad in the music industry was to be avoided at all costs.

Personally, she couldn't give a damn. Her life was in
tatters. What did it matter if Density won? Morgan would
still be bedding that brunette child bride type. If only he'd
had the balls to tell her the truth; that they were friends,
nothing more. Why put her through all that pain of thinking he liked her when she was clearly wrong. He was gutless,
that was why. A gutless, dishonourable coward and she
hoped she'd never see him again in her life.

The Earl's Court crowd, deeply blase and not inclined to
clap anyone except perhaps U2, gave a smattering of desultory
applause as a handsome male soap star who played a womanizer in the show arrived with a female pop show
presenter to present the award.

After the requisite giggling and flirting, which was even
more hilarious because everyone knew the pair disliked each
other, they read out the nominees. The Titus table practically
moved a foot forward thanks to all the people on it shifting
in their seats and leaning hopefully towards the stage, urging
Density to win.

'. . . and the winners are . . .'

The Titus staff held their breath.

'. . . El Pirador!'

A roar went up at a rival record company table at the
news that their band, made up of second-generation Italian
girls with fantastic voices and the looks of four Miss World
contestants, had won. The Titus people sighed heavily.

Steve's eyes went blank and he signalled a passing waiter,


on hand to cope with both the vagaries of the pop world
and depressed record company bosses who needed solace.
'Four bottles of Krug,' Steve demanded. 'No, make it
five.'
Sam sat back in her seat with a sigh and engaged in some
surface commiserations over the band. Thankfully, Density's
manager wasn't around or it would have been a complete
nightmare. She knew he'd blame her for the band's failure
to win and there was no point telling him that if his charges
were more media-friendly they'd have a better chance of
success. The fact that the band had called one interviewer
'an ugly cretinous cow' hadn't helped their standing with
the press for a start.
The champagne arrived and Steve stood to toast Density,
loudly proclaiming that they were stars and didn't need any fucking awards anyway, and then proceeding to down most
of the first bottle himself.
By the time the Lifetime Achievement award was
announced - going to a band of rockers so walnut-like and
wrinkly that they looked like they'd just been plugged into
the mains to revive them after being dug up - Steve was
at that stage of depressed drunkenness which is the most
dangerous. His hard little black eyes were like two holes in
the snow and his mouth was a flat line of anger. As mechanically
as if someone in the mother ship was beaming down
instructions to a micro chip in his head, he shuffled out of
his seat and plonked down beside Sam, clutching her arm
with one hand, holding his second precious bottle of Krug
with the other. It was only a quarter full.
'D'ya know what I hate about this fucking award ceremony
shit?' he hissed.
Sam swallowed. Steve sober she could just about manage.
Steve plastered out of his mind was another thing entirely.
'I hate the fact that they could tell us who was going to
win but they don't. Make us look like fucking idiots tonight.'
He scowled in the direction of El Pirador's record company's
table where a celebration party was raging, and where three

waitresses were working at full speed to keep the drink
flowing.

'Well, we do have a bit of a clue about the Best Newcomer
when they ask us to make certain bands available,' Sam
pointed out. The fact that Density were touring the Far East
meant they'd had to say they couldn't be at the awards after
their nomination had been announced. If they'd been around
and had been bluntly told not to come, even a lettuce leaf
would have figured out that they weren't going to win anything.
As it was, they'd been told nothing, which was a sure
sign, in Sam's eyes.

Steve's face screwed up. 'That's not f. . .' He broke off
as the New York VP, a handsome German guy named
Helmut who didn't drink, pulled up a chair beside both of
them and patted Steve on the back.

'Never mind about Density,' Helmut said, his flawless
English faintly accented with New York after ten years in
Manhattan.

Steve put down his glass and took a sip of someone else's
water in an attempt to impress Helmut. There was a lot of
untouched water on the table.

'You win some, you lose some,' Helmut continued. 'We
need to talk about the future of the band, I don't know if
they're going to get a deal from us. I can't see them working
in the US.'

Ouch, Sam thought. If the American office weren't interested
in signing Density, that was a slap in the face for Steve.
The muscles in his jaw worked a bit.

'Helmut, you must tell me about your new signings. I've
heard some great things about them and I want to get my
hands on them. Anything to harden that bottom line,' Sam
said brightly.

After half an hour schmoozing Helmut, trying to distract
him from Steve's constant drinking, Sam was wrecked. The
party was winding down and everyone was leaving, phoning
limos on their mobile phones and arranging to go to the
all-important after-show parties.


'Are you coming to the party at Shiva?' Sam asked Helmut
hopefully. It would be nice to have someone sober and senior
along to keep Steve in line.
He shook his head ruefully. 'I have to catch the morning
flight to LA but some of my other colleagues from New
York are going.'
Damn, thought Sam, still smiling. That meant there was
no way she could escape from Steve. She didn't know why
she was bothering anyway. He was too plastered to appreciate
her kindness in looking after him and wouldn't know
how to say thank you.
Steve's limo was a triple stretch which looked as if it
should come complete with a pimp and a couple of hookers
in hotpants, and Sam had no idea how it was ever going to
go round corners.
'Cool, huh?' smirked Steve, settling himself into the
leather back-seat.
Four more execs, including the new Spanish MD, an
Antonio Banderas lookalike called Jorge, and Karen Storin
all piled into the limo.
Despite her misery, Sam was able to appreciate Jorge's
sleek beauty and she smiled her first genuine smile of the
evening as he wriggled his lean hips into the space between
her and Karen.
Only it wasn't Sam he was interested in: instantly, he
turned away from her and began chatting up Karen. Feeling
about a hundred and utterly unlovable, Sam stared down at
her strappy sandals where her shimmery pink toenails
winked up at her. She remembered how happy she'd been
the night before when she painted them, thinking all the
time of the effect she'd have on Morgan when she nonchalantly
visited him. Stupid cow.
Shiva was packed with Titus staff and their top artists.
Sam hated being squashed in clubs and wasn't tall enough
to appreciate standing all night while looking up at other
people, clutching a glass and her handbag. Everybody
seemed content to stand, but not Steve who clearly realized

that if he didn't sit down soon, he'd fall down. Lurching
into people left, right and centre, he dragged his group to
the reserved area at the back of the club where endless
squashy leather armchairs were grouped around a low table
laid with olives and yet more champagne. When Sam sat
down, she sank uncomfortably into her seat like a small
child in an adult's chair. Her heart also sank when Steve
dragged his armchair close to hers so they could talk.

'I really like you,' he slurred. 'I know you don't think I
do but I do. You don't really know me but if you did, you'd
like me too. You do, a little bit, don't you?' he said.

'Yeah,' said Sam absently. She wasn't interested and knew
that Steve was so drunk he wouldn't remember a word of
this in the morning.

'But you do like me a weeny, weeny bit?' he insisted
drunkenly.

He was so close that she could smell the acid boozy reek
of his breath.

'Yes,' Sam said, the same way she'd say yes to Millie or Toby.

'You see, people think I'm gay,' Steve revealed.

Sam breathed a sigh of relief. If he was gay, it meant
two things: one, that he clearly didn't fancy her and two,
that he was hopefully hiding a much kinder personality
because he'd assumed he needed to be tough to succeed in
the macho music world. If Steve were gay, perhaps they
could actually become friends, united in the job of presenting
a tough front.

She put a kind hand on his knee in what she hoped was
a supportive gesture.

'I'm not, you know,' hiccuped Steve. 'I wish I was, it'd
be bloody easier. I wouldn't have to deal with bitches like
my ex-wife. But I hate gays.'

Sam removed her hand, her hopes dashed.

'And the bitch got the dogs,' he said miserably.

Sam hadn't thought Steve was a dog person. Perhaps there
was hope for him.


'Just as well, I hated that bloody schnauzer. She got the
Cure albums as well, bitch! She said I was no good in bed,
which is a damn lie. I hate her. Not all women are like that,
are they?'
Every fresh confidence made Sam gulp. Drunken confidences
were deadly things. Steve was interested in her but
her opportunity of telling him she didn't feel the same way
diminished as he got drunker. Even worse, Steve was confiding
in her like she was his dearest friend. He would, therefore,
be gutted when she told him she wasn't interested.
Then again, in the morning he might have forgotten he'd
told her all this stuff. . .
Blearily, he smiled up at her from the depths of his
squashy chair.
Sam smiled weakly back at him.
In the distance, she could see Jorge's sleek otter head
bent over Karen Storin's. They were laughing at something,
Karen's full lipsticked mouth roaring with delight. Having
fun, Sam realized. What was that?

Karen was on the phone first thing on Saturday morning,
sounding anxious and with her voice resonating with that
up-all-night hoarseness.
'Sam, please tell me that nobody noticed me going off
with Jorge last night, please tell me. Steve would disapprove
so much.'
Sam laughed mirthlessly. 'Karen, if you had danced the
Dance of the Seven Veils with Jorge lying on the floor underneath
you with his shirt off and his mouth open, Steve
wouldn't have noticed. He was off his head drunk. If I hadn't
half-carried him to his limo, he'd still be passed out at Shiva.'
'Thank you for that, I was so worried,' Karen said. 'It
was great last night but this morning, I began to worry . . .'
'Stop worrying. You're entitled to have a life, you know.
Anyway, tell me about gorgeous Jorge. Why is he wasting
his life in this business - he should be starring in the new
Steven Spielberg movie.'

Karen giggled. 'I know. He is gorgeous, isn't he?'

'Totally, you cow. I'm very jealous.'

'Oh get outta here,' Karen said, sounding pleased. 'Anyway,
what was Parris bending your ear about all night? I
thought he was going to fall down your cleavage he was so
close.'

Sam shuddered. 'I suppose everybody noticed that?' she

said drily.

'No. Well, yeah. But everyone knows you're not interested
in him, Sam. He's just a total asshole.'

Thinking of the total asshole's declaration of lust the night
before, Sam sighed. She really hoped he'd forgotten it all in
the miasma of alcohol, otherwise her life was going to be a
lot more complicated from now on.


Three o'clock in the morning is not a good time to go to
bed, Sam reflected at lunchtime as she collected her purse
to go grocery shopping. Despite having only had a couple
of glasses of wine, she hadn't slept well and had woken up
feeling groggy and tired.

Her eyes were dull and lined and her face was pale but she
didn't bother with make-up. Who was going to be looking at
her? Throwing a zip-up jacket on over her T-shirt and sweat
pants, she left the apartment.

On the street she came face to face with Morgan. If it
was any consolation, he looked just as hollow-eyed as she
did, his unshaven face grey under his normal tan.
'Sam,' he said softly, 'I need to talk to you.'
'About what?' she hissed. 'About your harem? I am such
a fool, I really thought you were over the pre-schoolers but
I must have been wrong.'

'Sam,' he insisted, 'it wasn't what you thought. . .'
The rage that had been percolating in her system since
the previous evening, exploded like a volcano. 'Not what I
thought?' she hissed, sounding like somebody possessed in
a horror movie. 'How do you know what I thought? You
don't know the first thing about me. I know all about you,


though. You can't keep your hands off women, can you?
You're just disgusting.'
He moved closer, his narrowed eyes pleading with her.
'Sam, don't be upset. You've got it all wrong, I promise. I
can explain
She glared at him furiously, wanting to scream at him so
that everyone within a fifty mile radius could hear, but also
wanting to retain some shred of her dignity. 'I don't want
to hear your pathetic explanation,' she said, raising her chin
regally. 'Why don't you just leave me alone.'
'Please, don't be like that,' Morgan begged.
'I'll be whatever I wish. You're nothing to me, I don't
even want to talk to you ever again.'
'So you're not going to give me a chance to explain
because you've already got it all worked out in your mind,
is that right?' Morgan asked, his eyes strange, his voice cold.
For a millisecond, Sam hesitated. Then rushed on. She knew what it had been all right and he wasn't going to make
a fool out of her a second time.
'I asked you to leave me alone,' she said fiercely, wanting
him to go before she broke down. She'd never be able to
keep up this dignified act if he didn't leave soon and she
didn't want to break down in front of him. That would be
too humiliating.
'Pardon me,' Morgan said flatly, again sounding very
strange. 'You're saying our friendship means nothing to you?
You don't trust me?'
'You don't have to explain to me. Never explain, never
apologize,'' Sam quoted bitterly. 'That's probably your
mantra.'
'No,' he said in a voice that would freeze Hell. 'But I
don't explain when I'm not trusted.' With that, he walked
off. Sam would have loved to have walked after him but she
couldn't, could she?

The following Monday morning, Lydia was at her desk
drinking a Starbucks latte, nibbling a muffin and chatting

on the phone to her best friend when Sam marched into the
LGBK office, hideously late after the tube had decided to
stop for half an hour in the tunnel. Clad in her sharpest black
trouser suit, wearing boots with heels like dagger points and
with her hair tied back severely, she looked like she'd looked
six months before, Lydia thought idly: the tough career
bitch.

'Is this lunchtime or is my watch wrong?' snapped Sam,
glaring pointedly at Lydia's muffin. 'And the office is not
the place for personal calls,' she added, stalking into her
office and slamming the door so hard that the framed platinum
discs hanging on the walls rattled.

Oh shit, sighed Lydia gloomily, the bitch is back. It wasn't
just the clothes. The whole persona had returned.

She had to admit, though, that Sam in a black mood
made for staggering efficiency. By one, they'd got through
masses of correspondence, huge numbers of phone calls and
Sam had had three meetings. She'd also had seven cups of
strong, black coffee and had sent a junior out for cigarettes.

'I didn't know you smoked,' Lydia blurted out before
she realized that the career bitch boss didn't like personal
comments, unlike the recent touchy-feely version.

Sam, deeply ashamed of herself for giving in to the desire
to smoke, ripped the cellophane off the cigarettes with
unnecessary force. 'Nobody knows anyone really,' she said
enigmatically. 'Can you get me an ashtray.' It wasn't a
request.

Lydia rushed off to get one from somewhere, deciding
that she wasn't going to be the one to point out to Sam that
the entire Titus building was, officially, a no-smoking zone.
Of course, Steve Parris smoked anywhere he liked, but he
was the Big Boss. Mind you, the office gossip of the morning
was the fact that Stevie had been draped all over Ms Smith
at the Lemon Awards the previous Friday, so perhaps that
was the reason for her bad temper. Having anything even
vaguely sexual to do with Steve would certainly put Lydia
in a bad mood.




The first cigarette made Sam nauseous but the second was
better and by the third, she felt like a smoker again. She
certainly wasn't hungry but unfortunately she had a lunch
to go to. Even worse, it was with Density's manager, the
hated Glenn Howard. The only good point was that the
LGBK marketing director, Sophie, and Nadia, the product
manager in charge of Density, were going too, so Sam
wouldn't be forced to make conversation all on her own.

'I'll be back by half two at the latest,' Sam told Lydia,
who was astonished because lunches with managers
invariably lasted two hours and it was already five past one.

In the car taking the three LGBK staff to the restaurant,
conversation was limited. Sophie, as befitting a marketing
manager, was permanently on her mobile phone, so the other
two were silent.

'Sorry,' apologized Sophie as the car pulled up outside
Half A Cow, the latest hip and trendy restaurant which
specialized in giant steaks, tripe, steak-and-kidney pie and
sausage and mash.

'A man's restaurant,' Sam muttered as they entered.

'You can say that again,' sighed Sophie, who was vegetarian.
Glenn
was already at the table, had ordered a bottle of
red (without asking us if we want red or white, Sam growled
to herself) and was full of bonhomie.

'Great to see you, Sam,' he roared, jumping to his feet
and giving her a bear hug. 'How's the record industry doing?
Have my boys made you another million today?' he added
loudly.

Loudly enough for everyone nearby to look around and
realize they were in the presence of a top manager, Sam
knew.

'Sophie babe, how are you?' Glenn said to Sophie, this
time without the hug. Hugs were for MDs in Glenn's book.

Ever professional, Sophie was ultra-polite in return, not
betraying for a moment the fact that this man bawled her
out on the phone on a regular basis.


'Hi,' Glenn said brusquely to Nadia, who was not even
on the scale as far as he was concerned.
That irritated the hell out of Sam. People like Nadia had
the hardest jobs in the industry and worked their bums off
for the likes of Density. Nadia was responsible for the band's
endless posters and sales presenters, she set up radio campaigns,
worked hard on every nitty-gritty detail of the band's
marketing, making sure that every i was dotted and every t
crossed. It was a huge job that encompassed a huge area of
responsibility. On those rare occasions when Density gave
interviews, it was hard-working Nadia who got landed with
co-ordinating the actual logistics of it all, sorting out venues
for the band and supplying their increasingly bizarre
demands, not to mention making arrangements for foreign
press to turn up.
Sam still remembered the days she'd worked with TulaFaye
in her previous job. She'd been a marketing director
and had borne the brunt of Tula-Faye's rudeness on many
occasions despite the fact that it was Sam and her team
who'd worked endless hours breaking Tula-Faye in the UK
market. Sweetness and light when she'd met Sam's boss, the
singer had been a cast-iron bitch to everybody lower down
on the scale. Sometimes, the job could be so thankless. Sam
was determined to change that.
'Still working twenty-four seven?' Glenn asked Sam.
'Yes,' she said grimly. She signalled to a waiter. 'A glass
of white wine, please,' she said pointedly.
They studied the menus and Glenn chattered on and on
about how well the band were doing on their tour and how they couldn't wait to get back to London to work on the
new album. 'They're keen to work with Bruce Kaminska,'
said Glenn.
Sam looked up from her menu and gave him a searing
look. Kaminska was one of the world's top record producers.
He was also one of the most expensive. His involvement in
any album could mean the difference between a top twenty
album and a number one album. However it added millions

to the cost and, because he invariably wrote songs for the
bands too, he demanded a cut of the profits. He was certainly
a hit-maker but deciding to use him was an enormous
decision to make. Sam didn't know if she wanted to blow
such a huge chunk of her budget on a band who'd failed to
make any waves so far.
Not to mention the fact that they were well on their way
to becoming the Tula-Faye of Titus: hated.
'We'll have to think about that one,' she said shortly.
'Hey,' Glenn said in a menacing tone, 'Steve Parris
wouldn't want you to just think about it.'
Sam put down her glass and stared coldly at Glenn, thinking
that his band hadn't a hope in hell with such a manager.
Perhaps it was time to tell him that the tables had turned.
She was sure that Steve was no longer in love with his precious
new find. The Americans were definitely not in love
with them, and the press, though writing that Density were
very talented, were fed up with rock star tantrums.
'Glenn, I'm a busy woman. I'm here to eat lunch. If you
want to put me off my lunch, then I'll leave. Your choice.'
Glenn gulped and made his choice. 'Hey, what the heck!'
he said in a false jovial voice. 'Let's eat.'

Back in the office, Sam worked on till half eight, ignoring
her headache from the two glasses of wine at lunch and the
dull ache in her stomach from eating beef. She finished the
entire packet of cigarettes and vowed that she wouldn't buy
any more. Lydia went at seven and Sam was conscious of a
twinge of guilt because she'd been very sharp with the poor
girl all day. It wasn't Lydia's fault that Sam's life was a
disaster. It wasn't fair to make her suffer. Sighing, Sam put
out her last cigarette and promised herself she'd be nicer to
Lydia the next day. It was still light when she left the office,
carrying her briefcase so she could look over some papers
at home.
As she walked through Covent Garden, Sam watched the
crowds of people enjoying the lovely evening and having an

out of doors drink. Happy groups clustered round outdoor
pub tables, drinking Pimms and beers, laughing and chatting,
making plans to go for dinner and flirting. Light music
drifted out from inside the pubs as she passed, along with
laughter and the hum of voices. Girls in skinny little tops
and low-slung jeans revealed slender limbs tanned by the
last few weeks of blistering sun. Sam remembered sitting on
her tiny back balcony in her bikini top a couple of weekends
ago, letting the sun warm her body, turning her olive skin
an even caramel colour. At the time, she'd indulged in a
fantasy of being on holiday with Morgan, letting him rub
sun lotion into her skin, imagining his breath quickening as
his fingers stroked the cream over her body. Stupid cow.
Fourteen-year-old girls were allowed to indulge in fantasy
land, not forty-year-old women. Next thing she knew, she'd
be buying frothy romantic novels and dreaming of dashing
dukes on white horses rescuing damsels from danger. There
were no dashing dukes in real life. Only lying, cheating scum.

Ignoring the voice in her head that said 'No', Sam ducked
into a shop and bought another packet of cigarettes.

At home, she couldn't be bothered with cooking. Instead,
she sat on her balcony with a glass of wine, her packet of'
cigarettes and the Financial Times and watched the daylight
fade into twilight. Spike and Tabitha, finally allowed out,
weaved around, investigating her glass, the wine bottle and
the ashtray, screwing up their eyes in disgust at the unaccustomed
smoke. Tabitha refused to sit on Sam's lap because
of it.

'Suit yourself,' Sam said.

Her glance occasionally flicked into Morgan's silent
garden but she did her best not to think about what he
was doing. There was no light streaming from the kitchen
window. When she went round for dinner, they usually sat
in the kitchen for hours, eating off the iron table Morgan
had finally bought when she'd nagged him about having nothing to eat dinner off. If the light in the kitchen wasn't
on, Morgan wasn't home. Sam fiercely rubbed her eyes to


get rid of the stinging sensation. She didn't care what he did
or who he did it with.

The Friday after the Lemon Awards dawned gloriously
sunny and as Sam walked briskly towards Holland Park
tube station, she could hear the birds chattering madly to
each other from the tree-lined road. It was a shame to be
working on such a day, she thought, then reprimanded herself
for being negative.
At half six in the morning, the morning rush on the Underground
hadn't yet begun so Sam's carriage was only half
full. On a seat beside her lay a women's magazine that someone
had forgotten. Having nothing to read except a sheaf
of papers in her briefcase, Sam began to leaf through it in
a desultory manner. She flicked speedily through the fashion
spread, which featured lots of flirty summer stuff that would
look stupid on her and bypassed an interview with a self
obsessed actress who was claiming that she didn't need to
diet to maintain her size six body. 'I eat like a horse, honestly,
and I love chips. Yeah right, laughed Sam.
She stopped flicking pages when she came to an eight-page
relationship special.
Normally, Sam viewed women's magazine articles on
relationships with the same disdain with which she viewed
women who thought that having a man was the be all and
end all of their existence. But today, the headlines caught
her eye.
'Too Proud To Say Sorry', 'Is Your Career Damaging
Your Life?', 'Seven Relationship Secrets Every Woman
Should Know'.
Sam settled down to read, expecting to scoff at it all.
Career damaging your life - as if! But she found that she
couldn't scoff. The piece about careers could have been written
with her in mind: it described women who'd taken on
men at the executive coal face but who hadn't understood
that having a life outside work was as important as the life
in work.

Men have always understood the need to have other interests, explained the psychologist consulted by the journalist
who'd written the piece. They have sports and hobbies, and,
luckily for them, usually a female partner to do the chores
so they have time for sports and hobbies.

But women, who can do four things at once, don't. They
give their jobs their all and that's ultimately a problem. Very
few careers are worth everything in the world.

A man who'd got on the train at Notting Hill Gate and
plonked himself beside Sam, leaned nearer as if reading the
magazine and Sam abruptly pulled it closer to her chest.
She'd hate anyone to realize that she was reading about
herself: a sad and lonely career woman.

Even worse, the photo illustrating the career woman
article could have been based on Sam that very day. Both
were slim, grave-looking blondes in sleek dark suits with a
simple white T-shirt underneath. Mr Armani's expensive uniform
for women executives, Sam thought, feeling strangely
jumpy.

She shouldn't be reading this junk. But she kept reading,
holding onto the magazine when she changed trains at
Holborn.

'Too Proud To Say Sorry' was painfully close to the bone
and she had to stop reading when she got to a bit about how
pride and a desire to have the blame for everything laid at
somebody's door meant that couples forgot basic communicating
skills. Surely the most important thing is communicating
so that the relationship starts working again. Does it
really matter who apologizes first? Is that so important?

No, realized Sam mournfully. She'd never given Morgan
a chance to explain why he'd been holding a cute young
brunette so tightly, but perhaps if she had, he'd have had a
proper explanation. Even if he hadn't had an explanation, what business was it of hers? Instead, her pride and temper
had made her lash out without giving him a chance. She'd
tried to apply the principles that worked so well in the office: as a boss, Sam hated staff who couldn't own up to their own


mistakes. That was ducking responsibility, in her opinion. If
she made an error, she was the first to admit it. Then, they
could move forward. But Morgan wasn't her employee, he
didn't have to come up with a craven apology instantly so
that she could deign to forgive him.

The lightness of step she'd had earlier had gone, now Sam
trudged slowly to the office, picking up a caffe latte on the
way. The office was empty apart from the security guard in
reception.

'Morning Miss Smith,' he said to Sam.

'Morning,' she replied. 'It's quiet this morning.'

'Nobody's keen to be in by seven,' he said, 'except for
yourself and Mr Parris.'

Sam might have guessed. Steve didn't get where he was
today by wandering into the office with the first edition of
the evening paper.

She might drop up to his office and talk to him about
Density. The figures on their album were not good and she
wanted to discuss the marketing spend. Their manager had
been phoning her daily, insisting on a souped-up marketing
campaign which would eat into her budget. Sam was loath
to spend the money because she had a bad gut feeling about
the band, especially after their losing out on the important
Best Newcomer award. However, they were Steve's proteges
so it would be wise to discuss it with him and gauge whether
he was going off them too or whether they were still his
golden boys.

The only problem was that they hadn't been alone
together since the Lemon Awards a week ago. She'd seen
him at the directors' meeting on Tuesday but there had been
twelve other people in the room. Hopefully, he'd forgotten
all about his drunken confessions.
Sam dropped her briefcase and her coffee off in her office
and, carrying some of the latest sales figures on Density, got the lift up to Steve's office on the seventh floor.

Her shoes made no noise on the thick piled steel grey
carpet. She entered the ante-office where Steve's assistant


usually sat. Opposite was a smaller desk where the assistant's
assistant sat. They weren't in yet, poor dears. Steve worked
them so hard, they needed all the time off they could get.
In fact, she was surprised that Steve hadn't made them come
in when he was going to be in early. He liked having his
acolytes present at all times.

The door to Steve's inner sanctum was ajar.

'Steve, are you there?' she said, knocking loudly on the
door.

There was no answer so she peered in. Steve's office was
a huge corner one, complete with a comfy seating area with
giant sofas and a modern leather armchair, which was higher
than the other furniture and was where Steve sat when he
was playing hardball. Victims there for an earbashing had
to sit on the squashy sofas which swallowed up all but the
longest-legged people. Steve sat above them on his chair,
looking down like a grand inquisitor.

The other side of the room held Steve's desk, a vast steel
construction made specially for him by a rising young furniture
designer. It looked more like an autopsy table than a
desk. Beyond that, was Steve's personal bathroom with its
own shower. Sam had never seen it but it was the subject
of some back-biting among Titus executives who wanted
their own shower rooms, too.

There was some noise coming from the shower room and
Sam instantly turned to leave.

'Sam!'

She looked around to see Steve coming out of the shower
room naked from the waist up, his hair damp from the
shower, a towel in one hand. It was impossible to look at
his skinny torso without contrasting it with Morgan's strong,
powerful one. Sam wondered briefly how Steve had the confidence
to stand there in his trousers and socks with no shirt
on. But then, he clearly thought he was a hunk.

'Sorry for barging in,' she said, backing steadily towards
the door. 'If you have a moment later, I wanted to talk to
you about Density.'


'No, don't go,' urged Steve, advancing towards her. 'Sit
down, I've got some coffee on.' And he went out the door
to the anteroom where the coffee machine was.
There was no way she could leave now, so she sat on one
of the squashy couches and picked up the copy of Music
Week carelessly thrown on it. She'd already read the magazine
from cover to cover but she wanted to give Steve time
to put some clothes on.
He came back in with coffee, mugs, sugar and milk, put
them on the table, then proceeded to sit down in his high
chair and pour. He hadn't bothered to go back into the
shower room and dress properly.
Sam was disgusted. There were very few men in the world
she wanted to have to stare at half-naked over coffee. Actually,
there was only one and she'd already ruined her chances
with him.
'Milk?' he said cheerfully.
Sam shook her head and snatched the coffee from him,
eager to be out of there as soon as possible. 'The figures
aren't good, Steve,' she said shortly. 'The album just isn't
selling and the word is out, I'm afraid. You know what the
scent of failure does in this business. For example, they were
scheduled to have, a big interview with one of the top music
mags next month and the magazine has cancelled.' In Sam's
eyes, that was ominous but Steve shrugged, not looking too
worried, so Sam continued.
'The video shoot for the next single ran two days over
because the band had hangovers every morning and refused
to work until the afternoon.' That had particularly annoyed
Sam. Just before they were heading off on their tour, the
band had been booked to make the video but had decided
it was more important to party every night to say goodbye
to all their pals. The extra days of shooting had cost Titus
thousands of pounds.
'And I've had Glenn Howard on the phone every day
this week looking for a bigger marketing spend. He wants
more money spent than was agreed in the contract. He's also

being particularly vicious to Sophie, the marketing director.'

Steve still didn't look perturbed. He was smiling, Sam
realized, smiling goofily and those dark little currant eyes
were happy. And excited. A faint frisson of unease flickered
over her.

'Don't you worry about Density,' he said smoothly. 'Let
me worry about them.'

'That's nice of you, Steve,' she said facetiously, 'but
they're eating into my bottom line.'

'Show me the figures,' Steve said, suddenly jumping off
his seat and plonking down beside her. Sam's sense of unease
went on to red alert. She handed him the spreadsheets and
then moved away from him.

'There's no need to be shy,' Steve said, dropping the
papers unread to the table. 'I've wanted to talk to you all
week but I didn't know how to. This is perfect. Fate,' he
smiled.

Not so much fate as an impending sense of doom, shuddered
Sam.

'I won't beat around the bush but you know I like you
and,' Steve's eyes grew as warm as Sam had ever seen them,
'I'm sure I'm not mistaken in thinking that you feel the same
way.' With that, he lunged at her, pressing his scrawny naked
torso against her, one sneaky hand snaking up to grab her
neck and pull her face close to his. She could smell the acid
reek of his breath and feel droplets of water from his wet hair
dripping onto her face. Sam was shocked at the sensation of
creepy Steve Parris's bare flesh anywhere near her body but
she wasn't so shocked that she couldn't wriggle out before
his slimy mouth got anywhere near hers. She wrenched herself
away from him, got to her feet and stared at him in
fury, breathing heavily with the shock.

'What do you think you're doing?'

Steve wasn't the boss of a multi-billion pound company
for nothing. He made all the connections instantly, worked
out that Sam was genuinely sickened, and sat up, red in the
face.


'Sorry,' he muttered.
'Sorry?' demanded Sam, as she realized with disgust that
he was covering his groin with his hands. She didn't even
want to speculate why. 'What the hell did you think you
were doing? How dare you force yourself on me?' He must
still be pissed from the night before. Why else would he
make such an error of judgement?
Steve's colour began to fade. 'I thought we'd got on so
well the other night.. .' he started.
'The other night, you were pissed out of your mind and
I had to manhandle you to your limo,' she hissed. 'If that's
your idea of getting on well, then you're way off beam,
Steve.'
'Look, it was a misunderstanding,' he said, recovering his
poise in super quick time. 'We all make mistakes. I wasn't
forcing myself on you, really.'
Sam looked at him coldly.
'You weren't?' she asked. 'What were you doing, then?'
'Making a big mistake, honestly, Sam, please accept my
apologies for that. I completely misread the situation.'
He certainly looked contrite although whether it was
because of what he'd done or fear of her slapping him with
a sexual harassment suit, Sam couldn't tell. She could feel
her own pulse slowing down and she began to think logically
about what had happened. Her initial reaction had been
instinctive. Now she needed to be politic.
The worst had happened and she needed to smooth it all
out. There was no manual on how to pleasantly rebuff your
boss without causing maximum grief. There should be, Sam
reflected bitterly.
'Please forgive me, Sam and let's forget this happened,'
Steve said, the big boss again, being magnanimous even half
dressed. He got up and held out a hand.
Sam had to admit, he had balls.
'How can we forget this?' she said evenly. 'Are you trying
to tell me that this little incident won't affect our working
relationship?'

'Hey, Sam,' Steve got up as he talked, went into his bathroom
and came out pulling on a shirt, 'haven't you ever
acted stupidly with a colleague after a gig when you've all
been drinking, or at one of the conferences? C'mon, nobody's
that much of a professional. Let's just pretend this happened
late one night when we all should have known better and
forget about it. Peace?'

Sam stared woodenly at him. If she did nothing, would
it go away or would Steve make her suffer for humiliating
him? Maybe, just maybe, they could manage to forget it all.

'I'll forget it if you promise me that you never mention
this to anybody,' she said.

Steve winced. 'You think I'm going to be talking about
this?' he asked incredulously.

'I mean it,' she insisted. 'No drunken gossip about the
time you tried it on with me, OK? And this had better not
affect our relationship here or my career, do you understand
that?' Her voice was hard as nails.

'Sure,' he said.

'I'll make you suffer, Steve, if it does,' she warned.

'Get with the programme, Smith,' he snapped. 'This is
the big boys' club you're in now.'

She glared at him.

'OK, OK, sorry I said that,' he said holding his hands up
in apology. 'But we're grown ups, Sam, and we've got a
company to run. There's no time for games here.'

'I sincerely hope not,' she said finally.

She turned to leave, but not before she saw his face hardening
with humiliation and anger. As she walked to the lift,
Sam sighed heavily and wondered if she'd just made a terrible
mistake.

An hour later, Hugh phoned.

'Catrina had a baby girl this morning at six o'clock!' he
announced joyfully.

'Oh Hugh,' said Sam, 'I'm so happy for you both. Is
Catrina OK? Was it a difficult labour?'

'You'll have to ask Catrina about that for an accurate




assessment,' he laughed, 'but I brought her to the hospital
at midnight, she had the baby at six and she never said
anything about us not making love ever again! The baby's
beautiful, six pounds four ounces and the image of her
mother.'
Sam felt her eyes flood with tears at the thought of a
fragile miniature Catrina. 'I'm so pleased,' she said again.
'When can I come and see her?'
'We're leaving it to just family tonight, so how about
tomorrow?'
'Perfect, I'll see you there.'
Sam ordered flowers for Catrina and made a mental note
to buy her some of her favourite Chanel No 19 perfume.
Sam knew that the baby would get lots of presents but she
felt that Catrina had done the hard work.
Sam left early that afternoon, exhausted from her early
start and worn out with the upset of the day. It was still
glorious outside and at half four, the sun was still bright
and warm. Sam walked through the streets, enjoying the
feeling of sun on her face and thinking about the events of
the day.
She wasn't upset by Steve's overture. Shocked and disgusted,
yes, but not upset. Because Sam didn't feel scared or
threatened by Steve Parris. If she had, then his assault would
have been truly terrifying.
But she wasn't terrified: just angry and worried about the
consequences. It would be so much easier if she could just
tell someone and charge him with sexual harassment. But
then, women at the top slid to the bottom faster than a
player landing on a ladder in snakes and ladders if they
made the mistake of filing harassment charges. Only the very
brave went that route. Sam's career couldn't survive that
sort of bravery.
She thought too about Hugh, Catrina and their new baby.
All her friends had their lives in order, all except her.
She went into a delicatessen she liked and bought some
goat's cheese, olives drenched in garlicky oil, ciabatta bread

and slivers of smoked chicken as a treat. Then she hopped
in a cab for home. In the apartment, she made a salad of
the chicken and put some of the goat's cheese on ciabatta
under the grill for a starter, then opened a bottle of wine.
As she waited for the goat's cheese to toast, she flicked
through the last pages of her magazine.

The back few pages were dedicated to women who'd
changed their lives, according to the strap line, and this
month the person featured was a woman Sam recognized.

She'd been a high-profile London banker who'd given it
all up to buy a rundown property in the Dordogne. And she
was happier than ever, she said, pictured beside a wooden
beamed barn with a field of misty lavender in the background
and a smiling, barefoot toddler on her hip.

It looked heavenly, Sam thought wistfully. How much
longer would she be able to stand it at Titus?


CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Hope knew she'd made an irreversible decision the day she
put Millie's name down to start in September at the Redlion
National School. Putting Millie's name down meant she was
officially staying in Kerry. There was No Going Back. The
reasoning behind the move was simple: she loved Redlion
and, if she had to be anywhere without Matt, it might as
well be where she felt loved and happy with close friends
around her, instead of in Bath where she'd remember their
past life together every time she opened a cupboard in the
house in Makings Lane. It was as easy for jet-setting Sam
to visit Kerry as it was for her to visit Bath, so there really
was no reason to go back.
She hadn't mentioned the school to Matt. What would
have been the point? There was no point getting maudlin,
Hope told herself, as she drove into Killarney with the kids
in the back of the car, to buy new clothes for the kids - and a
pair of stretchy trousers for herself to cope with her suddenly
exploding pregnant belly.
She'd told nobody about her pregnancy yet, not even Sam,
which was hard. Initially, Hope had wanted to be well past
the first three months of staring nauseated into the toilet
bowl every morning before she actually said anything to
anyone. However, at over four months, she was still sick
every morning and she still hadn't told anybody. Telling
people would mahe it real, that she was now a separated
mother of two with a baby on the way. She could give
lectures on how not to live your life, she reflected in her
lighter moments. The only (slim) consolation was that at

least she knew the baby was Matt's. Imagine the sheer heartbreak
of not knowing who the father was.

Dr McKevitt had referred her on to Mr Murray, a charming,
debonair gynaecologist in the local hospital and Hope
had wondered did he have a terrible time with besotted
female patients falling in love with him because he was so
kind to them when they were vulnerable. He'd been very
kind to her too but there was no danger of her falling for
him. She'd had enough of that kind of thing.

His pale grey eyes had swept over the bit of the form
she'd filled out with the words 'separated' on it, although
there was still no formal separation, and he'd said nothing,
which was a relief. If he'd looked at her with a smidgen of
pity, Hope was prepared to give him a steely glance and tell
him it was none of his business. But Mr Murray had merely
told her she was very healthy and explained about the team
of lovely midwives in the hospital.

Hope had felt as if she was coping until the day of her
ultrasound scan. Sitting in the waiting room, she couldn't
help but remember the other times she'd had scans. For
Millie's first scan, Matt had sat holding her hand tightly as
if something dreadful was going to happen.

'I want to be with you through all of this,' he'd said
earnestly, gripping her hand so firmly that Hope had felt as
if the circulation was going to be cut off.

And he had been with her through it all. Millie had taken
hours to emerge, so long, in fact, that the epidural had worn
off and giving birth to her was like giving birth to an indignant
baby elephant who objected to being dragged out of a
nice warm womb.

Toby's birth had been a foretaste of him as a child: no
trouble at all. The epidural was still in effect when Matt
brought in a snipe of champagne to toast his son and heir
and when Hope had taken one tiny, forbidden sip, with baby
Toby lying in her arms, she'd felt plastered.

Now she thought about this little baby, the one Matt
didn't know about. This baby wouldn't feel left out and


forgotten, she was determined about that. This baby would
be loved and adored.
But what about its father, said the little voice in Hope's
head. Doesn't he have the right to know about his child?
Doesn't he have the right to love this baby as much as you?
No, said the other voice stubbornly. He doesn't. He gave
up that right when he walked out without giving you a
chance to explain.
Hope knew she'd have to tell him some time, but she
wanted to postpone it for as long as possible. She simply
couldn't face the fighting and the recriminations when she
did.
Still thinking about Matt, Hope parked the car in the big
car park in Killarney and checked her shopping list: pregnancy
trousers, new dungarees for Toby and more new shoes
for Millie. She was just leaving the car park, with Toby in
his pushchair and Millie stomping along in the red Wellington
boots she refused to take off despite the heat of the day,
when a loud, faux posh voice assailed her: 'Hope, helloo.' It could only be Finula. Fixing a rigid smile on her face,
Hope turned to see Finula rushing across the road from the
beautician's, flamboyant purple layers of clothes flying.
From the way she was holding her hands ahead of her like
a person feeling their way round a house in the dark, it was
clear that a manicure had been on the cards. Sure enough,
Finula's talons were blood red and beautifully painted, and
the scent of nail varnish would have knocked a horse out.
'How have you been?' said Finula, with heavy emphasis
on the word 'been'. 'Ciaran and I have been so worried
about you.'
At any sign of pity, Hope felt a deep guttural growl emanate
from withim her. She knew she was due for lots of local
Pity. It was clear that the locals had worked out that Matt hadn't been around for a long time. Hope was sure they
reckoned that his earlier absences had been trial separations and that now, he was gone for good. Miss Murphy who did the church flowers had thrown her arms round Hope

the day before and said she was 'so sorry you poor dear,
and I'm saying a novena that Mr Parker comes back to
you.'

It had been kindly meant, but Hope wasn't in the mood
for pity. Still, she could cope with sweet Miss Murphy better
than with Finula Headley-Ryan, who had no doubt been
running a book on how long Matt and Hope's marriage
would last from the first moment they arrived in the village.

'I'm wonderful,' gushed Hope, giving Finula a dazzling
smile.

'You're so brave,' Finula said, shaking her head sorrowfully.
'I don't know what went on and I don't want to,' she
said.

I bet, Hope thought to herself.

'But,' Finula went on, 'if I get my hands on Matt, I'll kill
him for leaving you here all on your own. He should be shot
with a shovel for thinking it's right to go off and leave you.
All couples fight, it's not breaking up that's the trick.'

Hope's mouth was a perfect oval. This was not what
she'd expected from Matt's most loyal fan club.

'Come on,' said Finula cosily, 'have you time for a quick
cup of coffee? You'll have to take my purse out of-my handbag
to pay for it, though. I dare not smudge my nails.'

Hope was still reeling from the unexpectedness of it all
when the four of them were seated with cappuccinos for the
adults and ice creams covered in sprinkles for the children.
Millie proceeded to slobber her ice cream all over the place.
Hope ignored her.

'Don't tell me anything,' Finula insisted, 'but are you
doing all right? Ciaran and I aren't the filthy rich or anything,
but we're comfortable and if you need anything . . . I've been
meaning to drop by for a week and ask if you wanted me
to take the little ones some night but to be honest, I wasn't sure if you'd welcome me or run me.'

Hope had to grin. 'I would have thought you'd be on
Matt's side in this one,' she said wryly.

'I adore Matt,' Finula said throatily, sounding more like


her old self, 'but he's artistic and artists are often not in
touch with the real world. And us girls have to stick together
in times of need. I mean it about the money.'

Hope was touched. 'I'm fine,' she assured Finula. 'We're
not on the breadline yet. Matt's boss in Bath is still off work,
so he's still running the agency. I've been working three days
a week at the tourist office and to be honest, I could work
there full time because of the state of the place.'

'Tell me about it,' said Finula dramatically. 'I have been
onto them for years to get them to have something on their
website about the artistic centre. I might as well be talking
to the wall for all the good it does me. They don't even have
the centre on their maps!'

'There are a lot of improvements that could be made,'
Hope agreed diplomatically, not wanting to be disloyal to
the tourist officer, a nervy man named Ronan, who would
visibly perspire when he spotted a phalanx of tourists bearing
down on the tiny office. Since Hope had arrived to give
him a hand part-time, Ronan had been giving her more and
more responsibilities to the point that Hope could no longer
get her work done in just three half-days.

'It was his novel, wasn't it?' Finula asked suddenly. 'The
reason Matt left. I knew it, Ciaran told me that he could
see Matt having problems every day and knew the novel
was going very badly. Men are sensitive and when their
work doesn't go well, it kills them. Their masculinity is
threatened.'

Not half as much as when their wives play around, Hope
thought grimly, but she was surprised at the revelation.
'Ciaran thought Matt's novel wasn't going well?' she asked.

Finula nodded. 'He said Matt spent hours typing and then
he'd delete it all. Ciaran had another friend it happened to:
it destroyed him not being able to write when he was so
sure he had a book in him.'

Hope was silent. She hadn't known. Suddenly more of
Matt's behaviour made sense. She'd had no idea that Matt's
novel wasn't working out. He hated talking about it and


she, blindly, had assumed it was because he was caught up
in the creative process. When, in fact, he'd been stumbling
around in pain and she hadn't noticed his anguish. To think
she'd blamed him for not noticing her loneliness and
depression, when all along she hadn't noticed his either.
'It was that, wasn't it?' asked Finula, eyes shiny with
inquisitiveness.

Hope had to grin. That was much more like the Finula
she knew: sensitive as a bull in the Waterford Crystal factory.

'I can't say, Finula,' she replied. 'Thanks for the coffee and
the offer of help, which I'll refuse gratefully. I may take
you up on the babysitting someday, though.'

The other woman beamed. 'Never say I don't do my bit
for the community.'

That evening, Matt phoned at his specified time of six.
He phoned every night to speak to the children and nowadays,
Hope merely said hello and passed him on to Millie.

Tonight, however, he asked Hope to stay on the line.

'I'd like the children to come and stay with me,' he said.
'I haven't seen them for so long.'

'They can't travel on their own,' Hope said sharply. 'I'm
not sticking them on a plane with a "please look after this child" sign around each of their necks.'

'I'll come and get them. I want them for a week. I'm sure
your lawyer would think that's acceptable,' Matt retorted
irritably.

'I don't have a lawyer,' Hope said quietly.

'Well, let's hope you don't need one.'


She'd been on the verge of telling Mary-Kate, Delphine and
Virginia so many times. Her three friends were so kind to
her, dropping by endlessly, babysitting in turns so the others
could take Hope out, arriving on lonely Friday nights with
videos, food and homemade wine from the craft shop, which
Hope had to pretend to drink and then empty her glass into
the nearest plant pot in case they worked out she wasn't
drinking alcohol and came to the inevitable conclusions. Her


weeping fig plant would never be the same after having glass
upon glass of wine thrown into it.
The only good news was that Delphine and Eugene had
set a date for the wedding. They were getting married in
two weeks' time.
'We had a long engagement, so we thought we'd have a
shot-gun wedding,' joked Delphine.
Pauline would have to like it or lump it, as Mary-Kate
said gleefully.
To save funds, Delphine and Virginia were making the
dress, Mary-Kate's help having been dispensed with in the
matter of fashion.
'I'd be getting married in a grey serge pinafore with a
good pair of sensible black shoes on my feet if you had a
hand with the dress,' said Delphine one evening as the four
of them sat in Hope's kitchen and pored over bride's
magazines.
'No, no,' laughed Virginia, 'dark grey wool,' she corrected
Delphine, 'and those lace up boots.'
'Dark grey wool just happens to suit me,' retorted Mary
Kate, pretending to be hurt as the other three went off into
peals of laughter. 'I suppose I'm wedding co-ordinator, then?
Seeing as how I have no sense of style but am ruthlessly
efficient.'
'Don't you know I love you, you big eejit,' said Delphine
fondly, throwing her arms around her aunt.
'Stop messing,' said Mary-Kate, pleased. 'Now, let's get
on with this list. Will we assume your mother is coming,
Delphine?'
'Yes,' said Delphine firmly. 'I am going to deliver the
invitation myself and if she decides she won't come, then
that's her choice.'
'Sam will be so proud of you,' Hope said with a grin.
'How is she?' asked Virginia.
'Not bad. She's off to America for a conference soon and
well. .. she's a bit miserable really. Remember Morgan, that
lovely man she liked?'

'Yes,' breathed Delphine.
'She saw him with someone else, another woman, I mean.'
'The rat!' spat Delphine.
'Some young woman, too, which hasn't exactly cheered
Sam up,' Hope sighed. 'Since she hit forty, she's feeling very
vulnerable. I think her confidence has taken a bit of a dive.'
'Make her come here for the wedding,' begged Delphine.
'We'll soon cheer her up.'
'She says she's coming for a visit soon and she'd be thrilled
to be invited. But won't that put your numbers up too
much?' Hope said.
Mary-Kate looked up from her list and smiled. 'The more
the merrier.'
They chatted about satin versus raw silk, weighed up the
options for where the wedding reception could be held and
ended up discussing Hope's job in the tourist office and how
much more sensible it would be if she was working there
full time instead of part time.
'I don't know why you don't apply for Ronan's job as
tourist officer,' Mary-Kate said as she made the wedding list
in her neat hand-writing. 'You'd be perfect for it, Hope.'
'But how can I apply for his job when he's got it?' asked
Hope, confused.
'Oh no, here goes Deep Throat again,' giggled Delphine,
deep in the realms of medieval satin-trimmed ball gowns
with shove-'em-up corset detail.
Mary-Kate sighed. 'Just because I know what goes on
around here, there's no need to be sarcastic. I was just saying
that I believe Ronan's house is going to be up for sale soon.
I met Lara, the estate agent, the other day and she told me.'
They all stared at her.
'And he's not looking for anything else round here which
implies that he's moving out of the area.'
'Mary-Kate and the estate agent are in cahoots,' Delphine
revealed.
'We are not,' said Mary-Kate equably. 'I just like to know
what's going on. Anyway, Hope, you'd be perfect for that

job. You have a newcomer's eye for the place and you can
see what needs to be done, along with having a real love for
Redlion.'

Hope was touched. 'You're right, you know. I do love it
here. But could I be a good tourist officer?'

'You'd be better than Ronan,' said Delphine without
thinking. 'Ooh,' she said as they all stared at her, 'I didn't
mean it that way.'

Hope considered this. 'I actually enjoy working there and
it drives me mad when I see how little Ronan does. It's only
because Redlion is such a pretty village and is on the main
road that it does so well at all. But if we worked hard at it,
we could have hordes more visitors coming and not just
ones who come in coachloads and leave later that afternoon,
but people who rent houses in the area and stay in the small
B & Bs. Finula's right, you know, she said that the artistic
centre is an important focal point for the area. Imagine if
we marketed the town in a cultural way and looked at the
important artists, poets and writers who've worked here.'

'Like Matt's uncle Gearoid?' deadpanned Mary-Kate, 'the
scratch and sniff artist himself.'

Hope laughed. 'That's not quite what I had in mind. I
still haven't seen any of his poetry. I daresay he probably
limited himself to writing haiku on Spam, which is a big
thing on the internet, I hear.'

'That's a brilliant idea, Hope,' Virginia said enthusiastically.
'Not the Spam, but the artistic links to drum up tourism.
There's an artist from around here who's exhibited all
over the world. Kevin Burton's got one of his pictures. And
it's not the one of Ursula, either,' she added wryly.

They'd all heard the sad story of the room redecorated
in exactly the same way as Ursula Burton had decorated it,
with her portrait staring down from the wall as if warning
all interlopers off.

'At least Sam is fighting a live woman for her man,' Virginia
said sorrowfully to Hope. 'I'm competing with a dead
one.'


'How is Kevin?' asked Mary-Kate delicately.

'He keeps phoning me, asking me out to play golf,' Virginia
said. 'I don't mind playing golf with him but then he
thinks we should go out to dinner and I can't cope with that
broken record of "Ursula said this, Ursula did that." Do I
go on like that about Bill?'

'No,' they all said at the same time.

'Thank God for that.' Virginia was relieved. 'It's like competing
with a saint. No matter what I do, I'll never measure
up to Ursula and frankly, I don't want to. Sorry, I'm sounding
bitter. I don't mean to.'

'You're not bitter,' Delphine said. 'Stupid Kevin needs his
head examined.'

'Lots of people round here need their heads examined,'
Virginia remarked. 'We should apply for a grant for a resident
psychiatrist.'

'Can I have the first session?' begged Hope.
'You're doing fine, aren't you?' said Delphine with an
anxious look in Hope's direction.

'Fine, yes, fine,' said Hope faintly. She couldn't tell them
that she was going to have a baby in a few months and that
she had no idea how she was going to cope as a single mother
with three small children. She spent hours at night working
out her finances and worrying about how much money she
and Matt would get if they sold the house in Bath. How
would the divorce courts view their circumstances? Would
she get to stay in Curlew Cottage? Hope's list of worries
was endless.





CHAPTER THIRTY


'You're going to love Vegas,' Karen Storin sighed. 'It's a
crazy place but there's such a buzz about it and after British
weather, it'll be bliss to feel some real heat.'

Both she and Sam looked out the office window where a
rainbow straddled the sky. There had been a lot of showers
recently, which Karen clearly felt was outrageous behaviour
from Mother Nature seeing as it was August.

'You get used to this sort of weather,' Sam said.

'I don't think I ever will,' Karen replied with a shudder.
'I know Chicago has the most awful winters on this planet,
but at least it's hot and dry in the summer. The only negative
is that Vegas is going to be very hot. I don't know if I'd
have picked it myself as a conference venue. Sure, they have
big hotels, which is what we need, but August can be very
hot in Nevada. It'll be like an oven.'

'As long as the hotel has top-notch air-conditioning, we'll be all right,' Sam pointed out. Unlike Karen, she'd been at
world wide company conferences before. In her experience,
when four hundred of a record company's top executives
gathered every couple of years for an intensive, five-day conference,
nobody ever got to leave the hotel. The meetings
started at eight in the morning, lasted till dinner, and with
artists performing until the wee small hours showcasing their
new albums, the chances of some free time alone to explore
were non-existent. The participants could have been on Mars
for all they got to see of the place they were visiting. At the
last conference she'd been to in Zurich three years previously,
all Sam had seen of the famous city was the hotel,


the view from her bedroom window, and the view from the
front seat of the people carrier which brought her back to
the airport after four exhausting days. She'd bought some
Swiss chocolate in the airport as if to prove to herself that
she'd actually been there.

'I'm kind of looking forward to it,' Karen said.

'I'm not,' Sam said grimly. 'It's survival of the fittest at
these things. I know there's a bit of that at ordinary UK
conferences, with everyone determined to prove that they
can work hard and party hard too, but at the big world
wide gigs, it's worse. The meetings and presentations are so
tiring, but nobody dares leave early at night to catch up on
sleep in case it looks as if they're not up to the job. You'll
be wrecked when you get home.'

'Yeah, but I guess we'll get a bit of personal time,' Karen
said confidently. 'I'm going to take my training stuff with
me so I can work out in the gym too but I won't go near
the slot machines. They're lethal. The first time I was in
Vegas was with my room mate from college and she blew
a fortune.'

'I'm not much of a slot machine person,' Sam said, 'and
it's years since I played Blackjack.' Just in case they did get
any free time, she decided it wouldn't hurt to pack her
swimsuit and a few casual outfits.

The rain showers had thankfully finished that evening
as Sam walked up her road. In the past month, since the
argument with Morgan, she'd taken to walking home a different
way so she didn't have to pass his gate. This way, she
rounded the corner, past the big cherry tree whose roots were
slowly and steadily ripping up the footpath, then reached her
gate, all in about one minute.

Even if Morgan had spotted her, he'd never be able to
rush out and accost her in time. And if he rang her doorbell,
which he hadn't, she'd have ignored it.

Contradictorily, she did want him to rush out and accost
her, mainly because she longed for the chance to apologize
for all the things she'd said to him, and because she wanted


to hear his excuse. She'd replayed that scene so many times
in her mind, mostly in the heat of the night when she lay
awake listening to the sound of traffic in the distance. In
those replays, she'd been regal and hurt, making Morgan
almost beg her to forgive him.

And she would forgive him.

Well, that was immaterial now. She unlocked the apartment
door and, when the kittens didn't arrive to greet her,
she shrugged off her light jacket and played her phone messages.
There was only one. Billy No Mates strikes again.

Catrina had rung ten minutes previously. 'It's eight fifteen,
Sam, I hope you're out and about and not still at bloody
work. Even masters of the universe take breaks. I'm phoning
to see if you and Morgan can come out to dinner with us
next Saturday. I thought it would be nice if the gang could
have a special dinner together to celebrate little Amber's
birth. My mother's going to babysit her - she's the only
person I trust. In fact, Amber behaves better for my mother
than she does for me! Give me a buzz, byeee.'

Saturday week, Sam knew she'd be flying to Vegas for
five days of pure exhaustion. She was almost glad not to
have to face dinner with her oldest friends. She'd visited
Catrina and baby Amber three times since the baby was
born but, luckily, there had been so many other visitors that
she and Catrina had never been alone. If they had been,
Catrina would have asked meaningfully about Morgan and
Sam couldn't bear having to tell her that it - whatever it had been - was over.

She'd phone Catrina from the office the next day and
make her excuses. But Catrina wasn't giving up. At ten, when
Sam was about to watch a documentary about stalkers, the
phone went again.

'Got you at last,' said Catrina. 'You weren't at work until
this time, were you?'

'No,' lied Sam, feeling guilty for lying, 'I was at an album
launch and I only just got in. I didn't want to phone you so
late at night.'


They chatted briefly, with Catrina making Sam laugh
about how little Amber had changed her life.

'I am exhausted because she sleeps in bursts of two hours
but I adore her,' sighed Catrina. 'Hugh is determined to be
a new man and changes as many nappies as possible, but
he's also exhausted because he wakes up when she cries and
then can't go back to sleep. Now tell me, what about dinner
next Saturday?'

'Can't, sorry. I've got to go to an international conference
in the US.'

'Where?'

'Vegas.'

'How exciting,' sighed Catrina.

'Not really,' Sam pointed out. 'It'll be all work, I'm afraid.
The only way to have fun at these things is to stay a few
days after the conference and have a bit of a holiday.'

'Are you doing that?'

'No, I've too much to do here.'

'And who's looking after the kittens?'

Sam hesitated, thinking of how Morgan had publicly
offered to take care of them on the night of her birthday.

'Er, Jay's taking them for me,' she said.

'Right.' Catrina paused and then asked artlessly, too artlessly, Sam should have realized: 'How's Morgan?'

It was Sam's turn to pause. What was the point of lying?
'I don't know,' she said candidly. 'We had a bit of a falling
out and I haven't seen him since.'

'I know,' confessed Catrina. 'Hugh and I brought Amber
out the other day and we met him on the King's Road. When
I asked him how you were, he told me he hadn't seen you
for weeks. You didn't need to be a nuclear physicist to work
out you'd had an argument of some sort.'

Sam nibbled her index finger. 'He didn't say anything
else?' she asked.

'No, just held Amber and said she was adorable, as if we
didn't know. Oh yes, he had his step-daughter with him.
She's very beautiful and knows it, mind you. And she's a


bit flirty. I think Hugh was impressed in spite of himself,
and you know he's not into twenty-five-year-olds. Well,' she
laughed, 'I hope he's not into twenty-five-year-olds! With
me still the size of a whale, you couldn't blame him for
looking at skinny little brunettes with no stretch marks. I
keep waiting to get miraculously thin with all the breast
feeding but it hasn't happened yet.'
'But,' said Sam confused, 'that couldn't be his stepdaughter.
She's only fourteen or fifteen. I've never met her
but she's only a teenager. Fifteen at the most.'
'This was definitely his step-daughter,' Catrina insisted.
'Maggie her name was. Quite the daddy's girl. The way she
hooked her arm around his and proudly told us he was
buying her a present to cheer her up, it reminded me of my
sister when she was ten and wanted to marry our dad. That
sort of carry on is all right when you're ten but it's a bit
much for a twenty-something. Talk about a handful. She's
been at college in London so I'm surprised you never met
her.'
Sam bit her lip as the last bit of the jigsaw puzzle fell into
place. 'Actually, I think I have met her, except I didn't know
who she Was.'
It took ages to write the letter. After four drafts, Sam
finally thought she'd got it right. But when she re-read it,
all the complicated explanations about how she'd thought
the girl in his arms was a girlfriend and then Catrina had
made it clear she wasn't, simply sounded stupid and trite.
She ripped the fourth draft up and started again with a short
note that would, hopefully, make Morgan understand that
she'd wanted to see him again long before she realized that
she'd wrongly accused him.

Morgan,
I'm sorry about everything. I was wrong and I'm
so sorry. Please forgive me for all the horrible things
I said. I miss you and our friendship. Please call me.
Sam.

The next morning, she planned to deliver the letter on
her way to work but as she was leaving she saw a taxi
cruising down the road with its light on, so she raced out
the gate and hailed it, thinking she'd drop the letter off that
night.


The For Sale sign was enormous, a double-sided one in
elegant Roman script telling all and sundry that Jefferson,
Power and Dowden were the agents for the house sale. Sam
stopped in her tracks when she saw it as she emerged from
the taxi that evening.

'I can't wait to see what he gets for it,' said the voice of
one of the neighbours, an elderly lady who was giving her
two Yorkshire Terriers their evening walk. Both she and
Sam contemplated Morgan's house. 'The builders have been
there for months, so it must be lovely inside,' the elderly
lady continued. 'I do hope somebody nice buys it. The road
has gone quite downhill since that rock star chappy bought
number 77. My friend at number 76 said they have sex in
the garden at those all-night parties. Disgraceful, I call it.
She saw them at it with her binoculars.'

Sam didn't have the heart to smile at this innocent remark.
When she'd said goodnight to the lady and the panting terriers,
Sam walked up to Morgan's door and slipped her
envelope in the letter box. She wasn't to know that the house
was vacant and that the estate agent scooped the mail up
the next day, shoving it all into a drawer in the hall table
so as not to make the place look messy for the first viewing
on Saturday. He meant to take it all out and leave it for
Morgan, but he forgot. Sam's fifth draft lay unnoticed
between a flier about window cleaners and a bank statement.



CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Nicole stared out of the car window and watched a little
old lady with a shopping trolley walk briskly past while the
car sat wedged in a traffic jam which had seen them inch
forward about three yards in the past ten minutes.
'This is ridiculous,' she said. 'I don't know why we didn't
get the underground.' It didn't seem very sensible to her to
spend an hour in early morning traffic getting to the studio
when they could have been there in twenty minutes on the
tube.
Ollie, LGBK's new press officer, looked at her reprovingly.
'Artists don't get trains,' she said. 'You don't see Celine
Dion on the train, do you?'
'You would if she was in a rush,' Nicole grumbled
impatiently.
They were on their way to a magazine shoot for Teen
Babe, the cover, as Ollie kept saying reverently. The cover
was the Holy Grail for interviews and as far as the industry
was concerned, getting the cover of Teen Babe was on a par
with getting an audience with the Pope. The only downside,
as far as Nicole could see, was that she had to spend the
entire day in a studio with the Teen Babe people answering
inane questions about her favourite colour, was she utterly
thrilled about having a single out in two weeks, who she
fancied most in the whole world and had she ever snogged
anyone famous? Or at least these were the main questions
the previous Teen Babe cover-star had answered and Nicole
was not looking forward to an entire day of this sort of
stuff. If she was really honest, she was nervous about the

whole thing. Giving a ten-minute interview over the phone
was one thing, but spending the whole day with a team
of photographers, make-up artists and stylists was another
entirely. But Nicole had discovered that since her single,
'Honey (Don't You Know) I Need You?' had been getting
so much airplay on the radio, her career had moved up a
notch. The single would be out in two weeks and everyone
at Titus was crossing fingers, legs and anything else they
could find in the hopes that it got into the top five. Top ten
would be doing fine but to really make an impact, the single
needed to hit the top five.
The record company had certainly pulled out all the stops.
Nicole's smoky tones were heard blaring out of radios everywhere,
which was great. But she'd had to spend the past
week being whizzed around the country doing appearances
and interviews, for radio, print and television, which wasn't
great. Although she'd never admit it to anyone, Nicole was
feeling shy for the first time in her life.
She'd enjoyed the touring because she was with a gang.
It had been a bit like being down the back at Copperplate,
only with Lorelei to tease instead of Miss Sinclair. Now,
Nicole was on her own. She was simply Nicole, a star,
expected to have opinions on everything and a fantastic life
where she wouldn't dream of being home at night to watch
her soaps and eat beans on toast.
The car pulled up outside the photographic studio and
they all clambered out. As they did, Nicole's mobile rang.
'Hello,' she said softly, recognizing Darius's number.
'How are you?' he asked.
'We just got here,' Nicole said. 'We've been in traffic for
ages. I should have walked.'
Darius laughed. 'Hugely successful, gorgeous sexy stars
don't walk.'
Nicole sighed with pleasure.
'Good news on two fronts. One, I was talking to a girl
from that estate agent's and they have another flat in the
complex you like. It's got a smaller balcony but it's two


bedroomed, which will be perfect if you ask Sharon to share
with you.'
'Great,' Nicole said happily. 'When can we see it?'
'Tonight at six. I'll pick you up from the studio. And the
second bit of good news is that Sam Smith is back from the
US this weekend and her assistant has pencilled you in for
lunch on Tuesday.'
'Thanks for organizing that,' said Nicole. 'I've something
important to ask her.'
She blew a kiss down the phone to Darius and went into
the studio, determined to be professional. And she was, right
down to the moment when the journalist asked her what
her favourite colour was.
Unable to help herself, Nicole convulsed helplessly, as the
journalist, who couldn't have been much older than she was,
looked on in amusement.
'I'm sorry,' the journalist smiled. 'That was last week's
interview, the Bimbo Questionnaire. You suit the questions
to the subject. If you get someone with a room-temperature
IQ, what are you going to ask them? Explain Einstein's
Theory of Relativity?'
Nicole laughed heartily. 'I'd like to pass on the favourite
colour question but I don't think I want the Einstein one
either.'
'You can never tell until you meet someone,' the journalist
said. 'I think you might like the intelligent questions better.
So, what do you think of this whole music star thing?'
Thinking of the enormous changes in her life and the
stresses of her new job, Nicole grinned. 'It has its moments,'
she said.

After the heat of Vegas, London felt deliciously cool. Sam
breathed in the air as she emerged from the Heathrow
Express at Paddington and thought that it was nice to be
home, although she was sorry she hadn't got even a hint of
a tan.
Originally, she'd planned to go straight home, have a

long shower and unpack before going over to Jay's flat and
picking up the kittens. But in the taxi from Paddington, she
began to think about how lonely the apartment would be
without Spike and Tabitha and she changed her mind. She'd
get the cab to wait while she dropped off her luggage and
then go immediately to Jay's.
'Sure, that'll be fine,' Jay said when Sam phoned her to
check if that was all right. 'We're having a lazy Friday
evening in. Greg's about to go and get a Chinese takeaway.
Do you want to join us?'
'No,' said Sam, not wanting to impose. 'I've eaten.'
'I'll just be a moment,' Sam told the cab driver, as he
pulled up outside her house.
She hauled her suitcase from the cab and rushed up
the path. Pausing only to swap her light suit jacket for the
worn denim one that hung on the cast iron coat stand inside
the door, she rushed back down the stairs to the waiting
cab.

Jay's apartment had been redecorated, which made Sam
realize just how long it had been since she'd been there. The
big living room had been a sunflower yellow for ages but
now the walls were covered in a warm apricot shade that
matched the tapestry throw flung across Jay's threadbare
old couch.
'I like the new look,' Sam said enthusiastically.
'Sam, it's been like that for ages,' Jay laughed. 'I'm almost
bored with it already.'
'Oh,' Sam said stiffly, sitting on the couch. Tabitha
appeared from under the coffee table and climbed onto her
lap joyously, purring deeply.
'Tabby, baby, how have you been?' Sam crooned
delightedly. 'Where's Spike?'
'Probably sulking,' Jay said with a smile. 'She missed you
terribly, although she'd hate you to find out.'
'Was she off her food?' Sam said anxiously, feeling like
a bad pet owner.

'Off her food, yes. Off our food, no. Do you know that
she puts her paw in anything she fancies and if it's on your
plate, tough.'
Sam had to stifle a grin. 'Sorry, Jay. I didn't think she'd
do it with anyone but me. She loves human food and thinks
that cat food isn't suitable for creatures like herself.'
The door opened and Greg arrived with both a brown
paper bag and an overpowering scent of Chinese food.
Sam felt her taste buds spring into action because she
hadn't actually eaten.
'Hi Sam.' Greg gave her a peck on the cheek and then
turned to Jay, whom he kissed gently on the mouth as if he
hadn't seen her for months. They were still in that stage of
love that meant being apart for five minutes made them
weak with desire. Sam remembered being like that about a
zillion years ago.
'Did you get chicken balls?' asked Jay, when she and Greg
finally unlocked lips.
'Yes, love. As if I'd forget anything you asked me for.'
They kissed again, slowly and languorously. Sam busied herself
tickling Tabitha's chin. In any other circumstances, she'd
say 'go rent a room' but she was in their home, after all, so
she should be the one to go in order to let them eat their
Chinese in post-coital bliss. There was no way they'd last
until after eating to make love.
'I should go,' she said, getting up.
'No, don't,' said Greg halfheartedly.
'Stay and eat with us,' pleaded Jay, one arm still round
Greg's neck, her fingers stroking gently, while his hand
trailed up and down her back. Last Tango in Shepherd's
Bush, Sam smiled to herself.
'I've got loads to do,' she said, and she wasn't lying. She
had to unpack, put the washing on, dust the apartment
because it was bound to be musty after a week, oh, loads
of things had to be done.
'Well if you're sure . . .' Jay's voice trailed off.
'Very sure,' Sam said firmly and brightly.

The taxi driver wasn't keen on having two cats in his cab,
even if they were in their cat boxes.
Jet-lagged and miserable, Sam fixed him with a venomous
glare. 'I told the guy I booked the cab with that I was transporting
two cats in their boxes,' she hissed, 'so if you've a
problem with that, take it up with him.'
'Keep your hair on,' said the driver in alarm.
At Sam's house, he didn't get out of his seat and let her
move the boxes and the big bag with their beds and toys in
it out without any help. When everything was piled on the
pavement, Sam paid him.
'What about a tip?' he said, outraged, because she'd paid
the exact fare.
'Never leave the house without an umbrella,' said Sam
evilly. 'That's the only tip you're getting from me.'
He was still mouthing furiously when he drove off. Sam
moved her cargo into the front garden and then brought the
two cat boxes up first. If somebody stole anything, they'd
only get the bag of toys and their sleeping cushions, not
her beloved kittens. Once the cat boxes were safely in the
apartment, she ran down for the other bag and, for the first
time, allowed herself to look at Morgan's house. The For
Sale sign was still there, only now another board was glued
on top of that: Sold.
Sam was so lost in thought when she climbed the stairs
to her apartment, that she never even noticed Mad Malcolm's
CD player blaring out 'The Girl From Ipanema' at top
volume. Noisy neighbours were the least of her problems.
When the kittens were fed and played with, Sam realized
she had to buy some groceries. She'd given them the last tin
of cat food and they were not keen on long-life milk, which
was all she had left in the fridge. Shrugging on her faded
denim jacket, she walked briskly down the road to the local
shop, passing her favourite local restaurant as she did so.
The Greenwich Emporium served organic food with the
emphasis on healthy eating, 'apart from the enormous
carafes of wine,' as Morgan always joked when they ate

there. The owners, George and Felicity, were constantly urging
people not to bother having a mere glass of house wine
when they'd be sure to have more and therefore a carafe
would be better value. This wasn't the hard-sell: it was
common sense. Nobody in the Greenwich Emporium ever
had just one glass of wine.
All of which undid the goodness of eating organic food,
Morgan would say politely to Felicity, who would blush
frantically, touch her hair in a self-conscious way and have
to rush away to see to another customer.
'You only like coming here because Felicity fancies you,'
Sam had said once, only half-teasing.
'If you'd learn how to cook, we wouldn't have to come
here at all,' he'd said in an indignant voice. 'This is only
paying me back for the four meals,' he emphasized the word four, 'I've homecooked for you.'
'Home burned, you mean.'
'That's well done in restaurant parlance,' Morgan said
gravely.
'Vegetables aren't supposed to be well done.'
'Whatever.'
Sam looked sadly in at the candle-lit interior of the Greenwich
and thought of the many happy evenings they'd spent
there. It all came back to Morgan. She'd never get over him,
she was sure of it.
On the way back from the grocery shop, she had to pass
the restaurant again. George was at the door, welcoming in
a group of diners.
'Sam,' he roared as he spotted her weighed down with
grocery bags. 'How are you?'
She had no chance to rush across the road and yell that
she was late for something, so she had to stop, let George
hug her and demand to know why he hadn't seen her or
Morgan for ages.
'Felicity thinks you've gone off her chicken and aubergine
special, but I said that was rubbish, you loved it and you
were just busy.'

'Very busy,' Sam agreed and changed the subject. 'How
about you? Is the restaurant busy?'

George grimaced. 'Yes and no,' he said. 'Jammed on
Fridays and Saturdays and only ticking over for the rest of
the time. Sorry, shouldn't be bothering you with this.'

'I'm sorry to hear that,' Sam said genuinely. 'I hope you're
not considering closing down. It would be a huge loss to the
area.'

George shrugged. 'I hope it won't come to that, but things
are tight. If it wasn't for Felicity's organic jams and chutneys,
we'd be out of business. She sells a tonne of that stuff in her
friend's deli in Richmond.'

They said goodbye and Sam walked the rest of the way
home, pondering George's business worries. Tabitha was
delighted to see her and so was Spike, who'd regally decided
to forgive her mistress for going away for a week on the
grounds that she'd been grocery shopping and there might be
cat treats hidden among the boring packets. Tabitha weaved
around Sam's ankles, while Spike poked her perfectly shaped
little head into the bags looking for something she'd like.

'I got cat treats, so you can stop looking,' Sam said, scooping
Spike up and cuddling her.

After showering, Sam padded into the kitchen in her bare
feet and contemplated the fridge. The chicken breasts she'd
bought for her dinner looked palely unappetising and she
suddenly longed for one of Felicity's delicious meals: succulent
organic roasted chicken served with parsnip and carrot
puree flavoured with nutmeg, tiny potatoes crusted with sea
salt and aubergine cooked beautifully to Felicity's special
recipe, so soft that it melted deliciously in the mouth. Sam
was almost drooling thinking of it. Her own attempts at
cooking the chicken would be workmanlike at best. And
then it hit her: why didn't George and Felicity start up a
gourmet takeaway for the days the restaurant wasn't busy?
Individual portions of their beautiful meals for the affluent
people in the surrounding area, many of whom liked the idea
of organic food but didn't have the time or the inclination to



cook it. Sam knew plenty of people who'd be delighted to
come home and do nothing more domestic than stick one
of the Greenwich Emporium's dinners in the oven.
She vowed to mention it to them. They might not be
interested, but it couldn't hurt, could it? It might give them
a new focus in business . . . And then it struck her: What if
she completely changed her focus by advising people like
George and Felicity? What if she left Titus and set up a
company where she advised businesses in trouble? Solving
problems was her forte. Faced with a seemingly insurmountable
problem, Sam knew there was nobody better at looking
at it from every angle until she came up with a solution. She
adored problem solving, and, with her business acumen,
what better job could she do? All she had to do was decide
if she had the courage to go it alone and set up her own
business. Sam smiled to herself. She'd been going it alone
for most of her life. It would come naturally to her.



CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Matt hated his apartment. 'Fully furnished modern one-bed
available for a short let' the advert had said. And it was
fully furnished - by someone who clearly thought the
original series of Star Trek was the last word in style. The
bedroom was purple complete with a lava lamp, the livingroom-cum-diningroom had one wall wallpapered in a design
even Austin Powers couldn't have lived with, and there
was simply no way you could get comfortable on the big
square leather furniture. None of the canary yellow cupboards
in the kitchen had handles on them and it had
taken five minutes for Matt to figure out how to open any
of them.
The letting agent thought the apartment was the last word
in modern design, said it was owned by a dot.com genius
and pointed out that the neo-sixties and seventies look was
really hot.
But then, he was about twenty-four, Matt thought sourly,
and didn't remember lava lamps from the first time round.
'I'll take it,' Matt had said miserably, as it was the last
short let available and he'd hated all the others.
The only plus was the dot.com genius's enormous computer
desk in the dining room, which was where Matt spent
most of his time in the evenings, writing. He wasn't working
on the great novel, though. He was having fun.
It had started out as the sort of witty e-mail he'd send to
Hope if only they were still on speaking terms, a sort of
comfort e-mail where he'd tell her about his day. Of course,
Matt was painfully aware that if he'd been sending this type


of daily message to her in the first place, he might have
realized she was falling for that greasy bastard up at the
hotel and put a stop to it before the said bastard ruined his
marriage. But he put that out of his mind. Thinking about
Hope upset him too much.
He thought about her all the time these days, feeling guilty
and sad at the thought of what had happened between them.
He knew that Hope would blame herself but Matt knew
that his behaviour had certainly driven her to it. If only he'd
been able to share the mental torture he'd gone through in
Redlion, the depression he'd sunk into when he'd realized he'd made such a huge mistake and was a failure. If he could
have shared that with her, then perhaps he wouldn't have
been so eager to run away back to Bath. And it had been
running away. Faced with a sense of black depression and
sheer failure, Matt had run like a small child running from
danger.
It had taken him weeks to get over it. His black moods
meant he knew he couldn't stay with Dan or Betsey; the
only solution was to live on his own and sort himself out.
Being a failure was Matt's greatest nightmare, but, as he'd
discovered, once you face your greatest nightmare, you can
tame it. It had been tough, but he'd done it. The proud,
slightly arrogant Matt Parker had gone and in his place was
a wiser man, the arrogance replaced by a rueful knowledge
of what he was really capable of. He was a husband, a father
and an advertising man, not a Booker prize winner. And he
was good at being an adman. Adam's heart attack had been
more severe than any of them had realized and he'd been
ordered to recuperate for several months, which gave Matt
the chance to do something he was good at.
Working on his amusing e-mail diary at night had helped
too. It was his way of relaxing: being witty as he told Hope
or an imaginary someone about how the beer commercial
people had gone to lunch with Dan ('we'll be back in an
hour, we've got lots of meetings on,' they'd said gravely)
and come back four hours later utterly plastered and

demanding to go to a strip club, or how the computer technician
had said in shocked tones that he'd never seen anything
so filthy as the pornographic pictures the graphics
department had been sent via e-mail, and had then spent ages
trying to print them off on the department colour printer.

Hope would have laughed at that, Matt thought. But he
wasn't telling her, she wouldn't care. So he told his imaginary
someone, his diary.

Diaries were for teenage girls, he knew, but it was cathartic
to spill the beans about the day, so he got into the habit
of doing this every evening. Until one evening he'd gone a
bit mad and made some stuff up. The sedate receptionist at
Judds hadn't enticed a motorbike courier into the ladies,
desperate for a bonk because it was her thirtieth birthday
and she hadn't had sex in a year, but it made a funny story
and before long, Matt was giving his imagination full rein
with the stories of life in Bath Ad Attack, his fictional advertising
company. In Bath Ad Attack, it was a miracle that
anyone got any work done at all, what with all the intercompany
affairs and the fact that the CEO was trying to
take as much time off work as possible to deal with his
gender reassignment counselling.

At Bath Ad Attack, entire campaigns were lost on dodgy
computer systems because people had been making love
across desks and pressed important buttons on keyboards
at the moment of orgasm; hard-working people were fired
with great regularity for silly mistakes, while others (usually
ones with great boobs) were promoted despite botching up
even the photocopying; and the whole office rocked with
bitchery, indiscretion and genuine mayhem. If only proper
novels were as much fun to write, Matt thought one evening,
as he reread the words he'd written in an adrenaline-fuelled
two hours and found himself laughing like a drain at them.
His much-vaunted literary novel was buried in a folder
named TOXIC just in case he forgot what was in it and had
to look at all those tortured words. Re-reading that novel
had never elicited much emotion, apart from the usual grim


ace as he realized that writing miserably about misery in
long, convoluted sentences did not a novel make.
He was never going to be published, never mind be up
for the Booker or the Pulitzer or anything else. It was time
to face facts. But he might win more awards as the hottest adman on the planet and if ever there was a market for
scandalous, libellous farcical novels about life in an ad
agency, he was the man for the job.
Matt switched off the laptop and switched on Sky Sport.
Mind you, the chances of his becoming the hottest adman
ever were going to be hindered when Adam Judd came back
to work and took over the helm again. And where would
Matt be then?
The following morning, Matt ran up the steps to the front
door of Judds, feeling fit, healthy and ready to take on the
world. He had two important meetings that morning and
lunch in one of the city's top restaurants with a prospective
client who'd keep the entire company in Mercedes sports
cars for the rest of their lives if only the client signed on the
dotted line.
'Morning Matt,' breathed Celeste, one of the work
experience students they'd taken on, arriving at the door at
the same time as him.
'She fancies you rotten,' Dan had teased Matt the day
before. 'Every time she opens her mouth it's "Matt says this"
or "Matt says that" like she was talking about the Almighty.'
'Get out of it,' Matt had retorted, giving his old friend a
slap on the arm with a copy of Campaign. 'You're just
jealous because I won the squash last night.'
'The truth hurts,' Dan continued. 'Mr Advertising Guru,
tell me how you make all the women wet their knickers? Is
it your dark good looks or the size of your bonus?'
Matt had grinned to himself. Dan could never resist smiling
at a pretty girl and didn't understand that Matt had no
interest in girls like Celeste or even Betsey's sweet au pair.
Dan obviously felt that Matt deserved a fling to cheer
him up but Mart's heart wasn't in it. He and Dan had blazed

a pub and nightclub trail in Bristol the previous month but
no matter how many lean-thighed babes had danced in front
of him in the nightclub, shaking their booty in cowgirl
fringed skirts, he'd only been able to think of Hope. At the
London awards ceremony, the only thing he'd undressed
was a bottle of mineral water which sat in front of him at
the table and which he'd painstakingly de-labelled while all
around him flirted and drank uproariously. Matt didn't need
anyone to tell him he was turning into a bore.

'Morning Celeste,' Matt said, trying to sound professional.
He didn't want to be rude or anything but he
wanted her to get the message that she was a junior colleague
and that was it.

He pushed the button for the lift, with Celeste eagerly
beside him, having rushed to keep up with his long-legged
stride. She was keen to explain to the handsome Mr Parker
exactly what she'd been doing.

'I've been working with Ricky on the health club adverts
and we're going to be finished today,' she said, batting her
long eyelashes for all she was worth. He really was so dishy
and somehow tortured with that lean dark jaw with a five
o'clock shadow even though it was still first thing in the
morning. There was something hideously hot about men
who needed to shave twice a day.

'Great. Show it to Dan, will you?' Matt said absently as
he pushed the third floor button, 'I've got a lot on this
morning.'

Celeste's shoulders slumped. Honestly, what was the
point? She'd worn her best leather jeans and had got in really
early in the hopes of bumping into Matt Parker, who was
always first in, and where had it got her? Nowhere.

He was obsessed with work, like all bloody men.

Jasmine Judd arrived just as Matt was leaving his second
meeting. He was loosening his tie and popping the top button
of his grey shirt when he saw her.

'Hello Matt,' she said, tearfully, looking for all the world
like Jessica Rabbit in skin tight leather with zips everywhere.


'Jasmine, what a surprise,' Matt said, mentally saying
'shit'. Every time Jasmine arrived, she was there on a mission
from Adam to see how things were going. Even though
Adam had promised his cardiologist that he wouldn't set
foot inside Judds or phone in for two months, he'd been
cheating slightly by getting updates from Jasmine. Now she
stood on the threshold of her husband's old office, currently
taken over by Matt, and looked as if she was about to flood
the entire building with tears.
'Oh Matt,' she sobbed, heaving herself into his arms.
Over her shoulder, Matt could see Dan giving him an
enthusiastic thumbs up sign as if to say 'Result!' Matt
scowled back. Five foot ten of blonde, beautiful boss's wife
in tears was not his idea of a result.
'Sit down, Jasmine, you poor thing,' Matt said, thinking
that Hope was always so much better at comforting people
than he was. She was so good when there was any sort of
emotional crisis: she'd have known exactly how to comfort
Jasmine, he thought sadly. She was so kind and affectionate
to everyone, hugging the kids all the time and telling them
that she loved them. A longing for Hope and the children
swept over him.
'Matt, I can't stop Adam. He wants to come back to
work!' Jasmine's anguished tones broke into his reverie and
she leaned against him tearfully.
Matt knew it had to happen. From the first day he'd taken
over from Adam and had realized that he enjoyed being the
big boss, Matt had told himself that Adam was ill, not dead.
He'd be back and then the fun would stop and Matt would
be demoted back to being an employee. A trusted, valuable
employee, yes. But still an employee. One of the people who
said 'how high?' when Adam said 'jump'.
'Would you like a cup of tea?' Matt heard himself asking
in a perfectly normal voice. He waved at his assistant and
made a drinking motion, then turned his attention back to
Jasmine, who was sobbing and heaving all at the same time,
her zips rattling and her leather outfit creaking. She smelt

of some heavy perfume he didn't recognize and didn't like.
Hope was more of a floral perfume person. Roses and lilies
and stuff like that. Nice, girlie stuff.
'What has the doctor said?' he asked Jasmine, half-hoping
that the doctor would have acted like one in a Victorian
melodrama and said something along the lines of 'if Adam
ever picks up a biro again, the strain will kill him!'
'He says it's about time Adam went back to work,' Jasmine
sobbed, 'but I know it's too early. He could die and
where would I be then?' Cue another bout of heaving sobs
on his shoulder.
Matt hoped she wasn't ruining his charcoal Italian suit.
'Well, the doctor probably knows best,' Matt said, thinking
to himself that the doctor should be struck off. 'Is Adam
eager to get back to work?' Stupid question. Adam believed
holidays were for people who'd been either fired or made
redundant.
'Yes, and I don't understand why because I thought he'd
been so happy at home with me,' she wailed.
The door opened tentatively and his assistant arrived with
a tray of coffee and biscuits, which Matt knew were a waste
of time. As if Jasmine was going to eat biscuits. You didn't
fit into that sort of leather outfit by losing the run of yourself
with the chocolate digestives.
It took ten minutes, two cups of coffee and a certain
amount of patting Jasmine's knee for her to be satisfactorily
cheered up. Matt knew it was in his interests to tell Jasmine
that Adam should buy a yacht and sail off into the sunset
with her, only stopping at sun-drenched islands with relaxed
tax laws to stash away his regular income from Judd's, which
would become wildly successful with Matt Parker at the
helm. But he couldn't say that. Instead, he told Jasmine the
truth: that her husband was the sort of man who'd die if he
wasn't allowed to come in and run his empire and that
after another month of enforced recuperation time, she'd be
begging Adam to go back to work because he'd be driving
her mad.

'He lives and breathes this place,' Matt pointed out.
Jasmine stifled a sob. 'Yes, but so did you and you gave
it up. And now you have a lovely life in Ireland writing and
you're not going to get a heart attack, are you? Hope's very
lucky. She's got everything! She's got a lovely place to live
and no stress and no work and everything! Not like me. I'm
under so much pressure with all of this.'
Jasmine sobbed again and Matt, fearing for the state of
his suit which was now sodden, sighed and put his arms
around her again. The only person in the agency who knew
about his separation was Dan, and Matt was grateful for
small mercies. If Jasmine knew that Matt was separated,
she'd doubtless be setting him up on blind dates with her
bimboish friends.
'Adam would never move anywhere nice to be with me,'
Jasmine said shakily. 'He won't even take me to the Bahamas
for our wedding anniversary.'
'He probably can't imagine needing a holiday because
he's been away from the office for so long, but he will,' Matt
said gently. 'Give him a month back here and he'll be thrilled
at the sight of a holiday brochure, I promise you. And don't
think Adam doesn't love you, you know he does. Remember,'
he added ruefully, 'other people's marriages aren't
always what they seem.'
'What do you mean?' she asked, dabbing at her eyes with
a tissue.
'Well, Hope and I have had a falling out,' he said slowly.
'We're not talking and I haven't seen her for a while.'
'But you love each other, this is terrible,' wailed Jasmine.
'You've got to make it up, now! As soon as Adam is back,
fly to see Hope and tell her you love her. Take flowers,'
Jasmine added. 'And perfume. Women love perfume.'
It was like getting marriage guidance counselling from
Barbie, Matt thought.
When Jasmine had finally been borne off by Sadie from
the art department to a cheering-up girlie lunch, Matt sat at
his, correction Adam's, desk and looked around miserably.

It was all over: his delusion of power. Adam Judd would
come back and after his brush with death, would undoubtedly
be tougher and narkier than ever.
Adam had never made it any secret as to who was the
boss at Judd's, the company he'd built up by sweating blood
and guts, as he liked to tell anyone who'd listen. He would
probably see Matt as a threat now; the man who'd taken
over when he was sick and the man who could take over at
any time. It wouldn't matter that Matt wasn't the sort of
man to start a mutiny. Adam would want him out because
every day he looked at Matt, he'd be reminded of his heart
attack and his very mortality. Getting rid of Matt would
become his mission.
What was worse was that Matt had given him the ammunition
to do it. Matt's sabbatical had another few months
to run, time enough for Adam to find another adman who'd
undermine Matt and make it impossible for him to come
back. And it wasn't as if he even had anything thrilling to
go back to. One hopeless novel and a wife who didn't want
him. Yahbleedin'hoo.
'Fancy a drink?' said Dan at six, when most of Judds had
sloped off quietly to the bar next door which was having a
tequila promotion. The office was silent except for the faint
sound of the cleaning lady's vacuum. 'Betsey is on a girls'
night out in London with her mates from the magazine and
as she's due to arrive home at half one, pissed and screaming
that all men are bastards, I reckon I'm due a night out in
lieu.'
Matt, miserable though he was, had to laugh. 'You mean
she's on a night out which will include the radical lesbian
feminist columnist who writes those incisive interviews on
the contents of celebrities' fridges?'
'Yeah, that's the one. Ms I'm-a-serious-journalist-but-justlet-me-nle-this-copy-about-The-Spice-Girls-and-Fll-tell-you
my-views-on-Marxism-and-the-male.
After an hour in her
company, even the mildest mannered woman starts to think
about Bobbiting her husband. You wouldn't mind, but
Betsey's hardly the oppressed little woman. I do more ironing
than she does, she controls the cheque book and if one of
us had to give up work to mind the kids, it'd definitely be
me.'
'My heart bleeds for you. Tell me, how many radical
lesbian feminists does it take to change a light bulb?' asked
Matt.
'Man, the old jokes sure are the best,' laughed Dan. 'Ten,
one to change the light bulb and the other nine to hold a
workshop about the oppressed role of the socket. You need
to download some new jokes, my lad. Let's go and get
plastered.'
On their third pint, Matt told Dan about his novel: both
of them.
'The literary one was crap, that's the only word for it,'
Matt said dolefully.
He was mildly offended that Dan didn't bother to console
him and say 'no, mate, I'm sure it's great,' or anything like
that.
'I tried that once,' Dan confessed, 'the big novel. Mine
was crap too.'
'Oh,' said Matt, slightly mollified. 'It's not that easy, is
it? But, you know, the second one is easier to write and it's
more fun.'
'What second one?' Dan asked, waving at the barman
for another pint and simultaneously eyeing up a spectacular
female customer who was wearing a T-shirt that must have
been originally made for a ten-year-old. On a grown woman,
it stretched in all sorts of interesting places.
'I've been messing around at night and I've written about
twenty thousand words of a . . .' Matt struggled to find the
right word, 'sort of farce of a novel. It's about advertising.'
'That'd account for the farcical bit, then,' Dan said. 'It's
not an autobiographical farce, is it?'
'The hero is stunningly handsome in a dark way and
women are always throwing themselves at him, if that's what
you mean,' Matt joked.

'So it's fantasy, right?'

'Ha ha. No, seriously, it's a bit of fun.'

The beer arrived.

'Are you going to send it to an agent?' Dan asked, fishing
in his pocket for change to pay the barman.

'Forget it,' Matt said.

'Why ever not? It could be the answer to all your prayers.
You could make us all sick by getting paid a megabuck
advance to sit at home all day and take the mickey out of
the world of advertising.'

'Out of people like you, you mean?'

'Yeah, like me. Go on, what have you got to lose?'


CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Dinky heard the doorbell first and began barking.
'You're a great early warning system,' Virginia smiled at
her little dog. She slowly got to her feet, wiped the earth off
the knees of her old gardening trousers and walked up past
the gnarled old crab apple trees, stripping off her gardening
gloves as she did so. Weeding was very therapeutic. Virginia
loved working in the pale evening sunlight, clearing the
flower beds slowly and methodically. Her baby sedum plants
were almost smothered by some perfidious bindweed and a
crop of particularly virulent nettles. Too much golf was bad
for the garden, she decided. She'd been playing at least three
times a week recently, once with Kevin and the other times
with three very nice local lady golfers who were delighted to
have someone else to make up a fourball. Of course, she was
still very much a beginner but she no longer hit the ball sideways
and her putting had improved beyond all recognition.
And her three new golf partners were so encouraging. They
were so full of stories about how hopeless they'd been in the
beginning and how one of them had once hit a ball backwards
straight into her husband's foot, that Virginia's confidence
was growing. If only she could improve her bunker shots.
Thinking of this, she opened the front door and found
an elderly couple complete with two suitcases standing on
the step. The woman was leaning heavily on a walking stick
and her frail face was pale with tiredness.
'Thank goodness you're open,' the man said delightedly.
'When we couldn't reach you on the phone, we were afraid
you'd gone out of business.'

Virginia stared at both of them and at the man's hand
which was holding a three-year-old copy of the bed and
breakfast guide which listed Kilnagoshell as a charming, olde
worlde retreat where guests could escape the rat race and
enjoy Margaret Delahunty's famous cooked breakfasts and
her husband Jasper's wonderful dinners.
'I'm terribly sorry,' Virginia said, meaning it, 'but this is
a private home now. It's not a B & B any more.'
Both faces fell and the woman looked as if she might
faint.
'Oh no,' said the man. 'We should have phoned, I'm
sorry. Monica, are you all right?' he added in alarm as
Monica wobbled a bit.
'Come in,' Virginia said firmly. 'Leave the cases there.
Nobody's going to steal them. Maybe a cup of tea will help
you and I'll phone the nearest B & B - that's Mrs Egan's
down the road - and see if they have any vacancies.'
'Thank you so much,' said Monica gratefully as her husband
helped her in.
Virginia led them into the drawing room, which was high
ceilinged and faded in a shabby genteel way, almost exactly
the same as it had been before except that Virginia's furniture
now stood on the old flowered carpet which must have been
there since the thirties. The curtains were beautifully made
eggshell blue damask, with velvet fringing that was nearly
all worn away with age.
'It's just the same,' cried Monica, looking around her.
'A bit different, probably,' Virginia said. 'I haven't
changed much since I've been here, though. I'm Virginia
Connell, by the way.'
'Edmund and Monica Harris,' said the man. 'Thank you
so much for this. Monica hasn't been well recently and I
couldn't imagine making her drive off again without a rest.'
Introductions over, Virginia got up to make tea.
She was back in ten minutes with tea and a plate of the
cookies she'd made for a charity cake sale in town.
To her relief, Monica was looking healthier, although she

was now embarrassed to have made such a nuisance of herself
and to have interrupted Virginia's day.
'That's perfectly all right,' Virginia said kindly, handing
her visitors their tea. 'The only thing you interrupted was a
bit of weeding and I can do that anytime.'
'Monica loved weeding,' Edmund said fondly, putting
sugar in his wife's tea. 'She's a talented gardener but since
her hips went, she can't bend.'
'I did get one of those long-handled weeder things but
I'm so slow at it, that it annoys me,' Monica added. 'The
gardens here are beautiful, but they must be so much work.'
'So you have been here before?' Virginia asked.
'We came here for our honeymoon and I've never forgotten
it.'
It was Virginia's turn to look surprised. 'Did you get
married recently?'
'Oh no, fifty years ago. All we could manage was a week
away and we came here, it was wonderful.'
'But that's incredible,' Virginia said in amazement. 'I had
no idea Kilnagoshell was a B & B that long ago. When I
bought it, I was led to believe that it was turned into one
only twenty years ago or thereabouts.'
'You see, the O'Neills, the family who owned it since the
twenties, went through a bad time financially and the only
way out was to take in guests. It wasn't like a B & B, really,'
Edmund said. 'More like staying with friends in a house in
the country and paying your way. There were no locks on
the doors or anything and we'd all sit in here before dinner
and have a little drink with Major O'Neill.'
'And dinner was whatever had been shot or caught that
day. It was like a dinner party, you didn't have a choice
but the food was delicious,' added Monica wistfully. 'We've
stayed in the top hotels round the world, and there was none
of them could beat Kilnagoshell.'
'It's the atmosphere,' Edmund added. 'You can't buy atmosphere,
no matter how much money you put into a place.'
For a moment, Virginia thought of Mrs Egan's de luxe

:
B & B with its dead plain facade, chipped front gate and
the few withered looking geraniums that sat in plastic pots
outside the gate.
Whenever Virginia allowed herself to peer in as she
passed, she could see net curtains hanging stiffly as though
starched and she had once noticed a cat-frightener device in
the front garden to deter any unwary felines from doing
their business in Mrs Egan's sliver of mossy lawn. The only
atmosphere Virginia could imagine in such a house was an
atmosphere of uncomfortableness.
On an impulse, she turned to Monica and Edmund: 'I'm
not precisely equipped for it, but would you like to stay here
tonight? On a no-pay basis because I have no insurance for
paying guests and anyway,' she smiled warmly, 'no B & B
inspector has been past these doors for years.'
It was worth it to see their faces light up. 'That would
be wonderful,' said Monica, tears in her eyes.
'I've some news for you,' Virginia said the following
evening when she phoned Jamie to say hello.
'Ditto,' he said joyfully. 'You first, Mum.'
'No,' insisted Virginia in alarm. 'I'm a mother and I
worry. You first or I'll spend the next ten minutes thinking that your news is bad and that you're going to travel round
the world as a male strippergram or something.'
'Mum!' Jamie was scandalized.
'They say the money's very good,' teased his mother. 'Go
on, spill the beans.'
'Laurie will probably be phoning you later to tell you
that it's off with him and Sergeant Major Barbara.'
'Off?' Virginia was astonished.
'Off. The engagement is off and I can't say I'm not
pleased. In fact, I've just rung Dominic and Sally to tell them
the good news too, but you've got to pretend that you know
nothing. Promise? I only know 'cos I dropped into Laurie
earlier to return a video and he told me.'
'Oh, the poor boy.' Virginia was devastated at the thought
of her beloved Laurence being upset.



'Poor boy my backside! He's had a lucky escape.'
The fact that Virginia agreed with Jamie didn't stop her
remonstrating with him: 'He's upset,' she said. 'Having
someone break off an engagement with you is a huge thing,
it's going to be very traumatic,' she said.
'Mum, you've got the wrong end of the stick,' Jamie said. 'She didn't break it off; he did.'
This time, Virginia did gasp.
'He probably wants to tell you himself, Mum, but I
couldn't resist,' Jamie said. 'It's totally possible that Barbara
will phone you in floods of tears asking you to intervene.
She's such a little madam.'
'I'd hate to see her try and get me on her side,' Virginia
said, her mouth in a grim line. 'That's the best thing Laurence
has done in years.'
'Mum,' said Jamie.
'Yes?'
'Please tell him that, won't you?'
'Not in so many words, Jamie. We have to be gentle with
him. No matter who broke the engagement, it's a big shock.'
'And what's your big news?'
'I'm going to turn Kilnagoshell House back into a B & B.'
'Great, Mum,' said Jamie. 'You'll be a wonderful landlady.
Look, I must fly. I'm going out with the lads tonight.
Talk soon, byee.'
Virginia couldn't stop herself smiling as she hung up.
Jamie was hilarious. Nothing fazed him. She could have said
she was starting a brothel and his reaction would have been
the same. To hear him blithely say it was a great idea made
Virginia laugh to think that she'd spent a near-sleepless night
thinking of the very possibility. Dinky and she had sat up
until half one, considering every angle of the plan, until
Virginia had got annoyed with herself and marched off to
bed, informing Dinky that her mistress was an idiot who
couldn't run a game of Scrabble, never mind a bed and
breakfast. But when she'd woken that morning and still felt
full of vigour and enthusiasm, she'd changed her mind.

Kilnagoshell was made to be lived in, made to be full of
people. Turning it back into a B & B was a wonderful idea
and she was determined to go through with it.

She longed to phone Mary-Kate to discuss it but didn't
want the phone engaged in case Laurence tried to phone.
She refused to phone him first and act like the overprotective
mama. Let him tell her in his own good time.

He phoned after nine.

'Hi Laurence,' she said warmly.

'Jamie's told you, hasn't he?' said Laurence instantly.

'Can I have no secrets from you?' asked Virginia guiltily.

'You sounded so sympathetic,' Laurence explained, 'I just
knew.'

'Do you want to talk about it?'

'Not really. Just that she was driving me mad. She wasn't
marrying me, Mum, she was marrying the dentist. She fancied
herself as the dentist's wife, that was it.'

Virginia knew it was time to say nothing.

'How are you, Mum? Still playing golf with the handsome
widower?'

'Snap,' said Virginia. 'We are not an item any more, if
we ever were, for that matter.'

'What happened?'

'He was still in love with his wife,' she said simply.
'Oh Mum, I'm sorry. He sounded great. He was good
for you.'

'Not good enough,' Virginia attempted to joke.

'Don't worry, some gorgeous bloke will come along who is good enough for you.'
'I think I've finished dipping my feet in the dating pool,'
she said.

'Don't be defeatist,' said Laurence. 'I'm not giving up and
neither should you.'

Virginia's heart missed a beat. 'Would you mind me
finding a gorgeous bloke?' she asked gently. 'Would that
be all right? You wouldn't feel I was betraying your
dad?'


Laurence laughed heartily. 'If any of us gave you the
lightest bit of hassle over seeing another man, Dad would
me straight down from heaven and beat us black and
blue!'
Virginia relaxed. 'He would, wouldn't he? He was a
special man, your father,' she added wistfully. 'I'll never find
anyone like him again. He was a one-off.'
'Cheer up, Mum. There's no harm in looking.'
Once Laurence was off the phone, she rang Mary-Kate,
who was so pleased at the idea of turning Kilnagoshell back
into a B & B that you'd have thought she'd come up with
it herself.
'I knew you'd do it!' she crowed delightedly. 'It's perfect,
it's just what you need and it's just what Redlion needs: a
classy, atmospheric country house hotel.'
'I didn't say hotel,' said Virginia in alarm.
'Country house hotel,' insisted Mary-Kate. 'That's different.
Beautiful, elegant and atmospheric - and you don't need
a Jacuzzi either. Tell me,' she said thoughtfully, 'when were
you thinking of opening?'
'I hadn't got that far . . .' Virginia said. 'Why?'
'Because we still can't find the right venue for Delphine's
wedding and we could have it in Kilnagoshell. Think of it,
Virginia, we could get all hands on deck to do your place
up and the money for the wedding would help pay for
renovations. Isn't it a wonderful idea?'
'God Mary-Kate,' Virginia shook her head ruefully.
'You're not a woman: you're a force of nature.'

From the way Lydia shuffled into Sam's office on the Monday
morning after the conference, Sam knew something was
wrong. Normally, Lydia was bright and breezy, ready to
chat to Sam as she brought in the mail and the coffee, filling
Sam in on her love life even though Sam had never asked
for an update on Jake/Phil/whoever. But today, there was no
spring in Lydia's step. Perhaps she wasn't well, Sam reflected,
flicking expertly through her post. She drank some coffee,

made some notes for letters to be replied to, then called
Lydia into the office.
'Yes,' Lydia said.
She was white in the face, Sam realized.
'Everything OK?' Sam asked.
Lydia nodded her head tautly. 'Yes,' she said.
She was lying, Sam was sure of it. But Sam had other
things on her mind, like Steve Parris and how he'd behave
to her now they were back in London, in Steve's domain.
In Vegas, they'd never been alone thanks to the chaperonage
of other conference delegates and the company bigwigs that
Steve loved hanging out with.
The morning passed with painful slowness. Lydia's misery
wrapped itself round the office like a fog. Finally, Sam had
had enough. She could barely concentrate.
'I'm going to the Italian for a bit to eat. Will you come
with me?' she asked.
The startled expression on Lydia's face made her resemble
a duck who'd been asked to go on an all-expenses paid trip
to a l'orange.
'All right,' she stammered.
In the tiny Italian cafe, Sam ordered a pesto dish she
didn't really want. She wasn't hungry but she liked Lydia and
if there was any chance of getting her once-super-efficient
assistant back on the rails, a private little lunch was it. If
she was gentle, perhaps Lydia would spill the beans and
things could go back to normal. But she didn't need to prod.
Lydia started the ball rolling herself.
'I feel so guilty,' Lydia said, hanging her head over her
half-nibbled breadstick.
'Why?' asked Sam conversationally.
'Because I've asked personnel to move me to another
department and now I wish I hadn't.'
Sam gaped at her in shock. 'You asked to be moved? But
why?'
Lydia hung her head. 'Because you've been so hard to
work with lately and I can't cope. I've been having a rough

time at home; my dad's sick, and I don't need hassle at work
too. You used to be so lovely to work for, you were nice,'
she added accusingly.
Sam still said nothing; she couldn't. Shock had made her
speechless.
'Lately, you've turned into a bitch,' Lydia said, determined
to get it all out now she'd started. Be honest in life,
her favourite self-help book had said. So she was going to
be honest.
'Everyone said you were tough and a bit of a bitch but I
never found you like that,' Lydia went on. 'You had to work
hard but I knew that was because women have to work
harder to be recognized. I understood that and I admired
you.'
The waiter laid their lunch in front of them but neither
woman noticed.
'But lately I can't do anything right. For the last month,
you've just snapped at me like I'm some sort of skivvy.
There's no need for it. And now you're being nice to me
and I feel so awful. . .'
Two large tears plopped onto Lydia's untouched
carbonara.
Guilt and shame fought for supremacy in Sam's heart and
shame won.
There she was accusing her boss of harassment, when
she'd been guilty of harassment herself. So, she hadn't tried
to flirt with poor Lydia, but she may as well have. Her bad
temper had had the effect of making her impossible to work
with. How could she have been so awful?
She reached over and patted Lydia's hand. 'I am so, so
sorry, Lydia,' she said earnestly. 'I had no idea you felt this
way and I feel so ashamed of myself. I.. .' she stopped, 'I
want to excuse myself by saying that things have been pretty
awful in my life recently but that's no excuse.' She stared
down at her plate. 'You're a great assistant, you make me
laugh and you never seem to be in a bad mood about anything,
and I repaid you by taking my misery out on you.'

I

She'd never felt more ashamed in her life. 'I can't say how
sorry I am and I'll talk to personnel and explain that your
leaving was absolutely my fault.'

Lydia shook her head. 'But why didn't you tell me you
were going through a bad time?' she demanded, red-eyed.
'I'm on your side, we're a team. I could have helped.'

'I know. I'm sorry,' Sam said. 'I did what I always do
when I'm down: pull up the drawbridge like an embattled
fortress and settle in for a long siege. I never want anyone
to help me, I won't let them.'

'That's stupid,' said Lydia forcefully. 'We all need friends,
nobody can do it all on their own.' She squeezed her boss's
hand.
'I really am sorry, Lydia, and I mean it about talking to
personnel. It's my fault you're leaving and I owe it to you
to make sure personnel know too.'

Lydia dug her fork into her carbonara. 'Ah, forget about
it. I'll tell them I was having a bad day and don't want to
move after all.'

Sam looked down at her lunch but knew she couldn't
touch it now. 'No, Lydia, don't, please. I don't know if I] can do this job any more. I'm tired of having to be tough,
I'm tired of working all hours and having no life.' There,
she'd finally said it. 'It's turning me into someone I don't
like.' She laughed mirthlessly. 'It's turning me into someone
that nobody likes.'

'Now that's plain daft, if you don't mind me saying it,'
Lydia said firmly. 'I like you - lots of people at Titus like
you. You're straight as a die, you don't expect people to
suck up to you and you're fair.'

'That's very kind of you, Lydia, especially since I've been
the bitch from hell for the last month, but I mean it. I think
I've got to move on. Please don't say that to anyone in the
office.'

'Of course I wouldn't,' Lydia said indignantly. 'But I think
you're mad. You've got such a great career.'

'A great career and no friends because I'm turning into a


fortress,' Sam said ruefully. 'Ms Smith locked in her office
on the fifth floor. There's got to be more to life than a big
salary and a pension plan, Lydia. By the time I'm ready to
collect the pension, all the life will have been squeezed out
of me and I won't have the energy to spend it. I really think
I need to get out of the rat race.'
'Downshifting, they call it. Less money for less work and
more life. Can't see the attraction myself,' Lydia commented.
'Yes, but you're twenty-three, Lydia. I'm forty. I've been
working like an indentured slave most of my life and I have
nothing to show for it except my own office stationery and
a personal assistant who wants to be moved because I'm
such a cow to work with.'
'Sorry,' Lydia said.
'You're not the one who has to be sorry,' Sam said firmly.
'That's my fault and I'll apologize again. Thank you for
having the guts to tell me.'
Lydia laughed. 'It wasn't easy,' she admitted. 'You're no
pushover.'
'Tell me about it,' Sam groaned. 'Anyway, enough of this.
Tell me about your poor dad. What's wrong with him?'
They got back to the office at half two, Lydia cheered up
by both the talk and two glasses of wine. Sam was cheerful
on the surface but underneath, she felt numb. She was repelling
people left, right and centre.
She left work early and phoned Hope, who was making
fairy cakes with the children helping with the icing.
'Don't eat it all, Millie,' Hope could be heard saying.
'You'll be sick.'
'Won't,' said Millie defiantly.
'Pink icing is more enticing than cabbage, there's no doubt
about it,' Hope groaned.
The sisters chatted idly for a few moments.
'Can I ask you a question, Hope?' Sam said.
'Sure.'
'How do you define yourself?'
'That's not a question, that's an essay,' laughed her sister.

'Yourself: define and discuss. I can see Miss Marsh giving
us an essay like that in English.'
Sam chuckled. 'Miss Marsh wasn't an English teacher,
she was a frustrated psychiatrist. The hidden meanings she
got out of Hamlet ... No wonder I refused to do an arts
degree, I couldn't have coped with all the analysis. That
wasn't what I meant, Hope, about defining yourself.'
'What did you mean?'
'Well. . .' Sam hesitated, trying to find the right words.
'I've always defined myself by my job. When I was in marketing,
that was me: Marketing Executive.'
Hope interrupted. 'That was what you did, not what you
were. Millie, stop, put that spoon down. You'll be sick.'
'Actually, no. That's what I was. It was the same thing
for me, you see. What I did was what I was.'
'You're turning into Miss Marsh,' said Hope jokily, sensing
the conversation was getting deep and intense.
'Exactly. Miss Marsh was a teacher, it was her whole life
and didn't you always feel that she had no other life outside
the classroom? That being a teacher was everything for her?'
'Sort of,' Hope replied. 'What are you getting at, Sam?'
'You're a mother and a wife .. .'
'Er . . . there's a bit of doubt about the latter description,'
Hope said lightly.
'OK, so you're a mother, and a friend, you're doing sterling
work in the tourist office, and you meet people and
go to the Macrame Club for fun, and renovate old kitchen
chairs and rear hens who produce real eggs, and you make
fairy cakes,' Sam paused. 'You've lots of different sides to
you. Whereas me, I'm a businesswoman and I'm nothing
else. I've spent my life defining myself by my job and it's
not enough. When I retire, there'll be nothing left. Like a
balloon with no air inside.'
'You're hardly going to retire just yet?'
'No, but I can't keep doing this the rest of my life, I'll
burn out. And what then? Burnt out exec in chichi flat with
two cats, lots of office clothes and an ulcer.'

'Cheer up, it's not that bad, is it?'

Sam sighed and said nothing.

'It's Morgan, isn't it?' Hope asked. 'I thought you were
getting over him. You've got over guys before.'

'This is different,' Sam said sadly. 'I never saw a future
with any of the other men. Even Karl. We had fun but I
never looked further forward than the next few dates or the
next weekend away. Planning a month ahead seemed like a
big deal. I mean, who knew what you were going to be
doing in a month. Morgan was different.' Even saying his
name hurt. 'I never thought I wanted that togetherness thing
but after meeting Morgan, I know I do. And I screwed it all
up. Go on, tell me it's my fault,' she said gloomily.

Hope sighed. 'As if I'm going to give you romantic advice.
Me, the woman on her own with two small children, six
hens and a family of rats at the back of the yard and . . .'
She stopped, wondering if this was the moment to mention
that she was pregnant.

'You still have rats?' asked Sam.

'Either that, or aliens keep landing down by the beech
tree frightening the hens every night. Those bloody rodents
actually seem to like rat poison. I've a good mind to get a
gun and shoot them.'

'When you're finished with it, will you lend it to me so I
can shoot myself in the foot properly.'

'Sam!' chided Hope.

'Well, I spend my life shooting myself in the foot.'

'Stop being so negative. It's not like you, Sam.'

'I'm having a "not like me" sort of day,' Sam pointed
out. 'I think I'm going to leave my job.'

'Good,' said Hope.

'Good? I thought you'd be shocked!'

'Why would I be shocked? If you didn't work all the
hours, maybe I'd see more of you. That bloody job is killing
you.'

'Oh,' said Sam, utterly taken aback. She'd imagined
that Hope was so proud of her sister's fabulous job, like a


satisfied mother who loved seeing her offspring in such a
position of power. She could hardly say this, though, because
she now realized that the only person who was deeply proud
of her job was herself. As if reading her thoughts, Hope
spoke again.
'I'd be proud of you no matter what you did, Sam. You
don't have to prove anything to me. I know you're clever
and talented and oh, loads of other things. You've proved
it, now you can stop proving it and try another sort of life.'
Sam had to fumble blindly for a tissue.
'I do want another sort of life,' she gulped. 'But I couldn't
tell anyone.'
'I know,' Hope said comfortingly. 'It's like spending ages
driving on a winding road and finally managing to overtake
the car that's been crawling along at thirty miles an hour
and then almost immediately, you realize you have to stop
for petrol or something and you don't want to. It's like you'll
have to give up all the ground you gained and you can't
bear to do it. But who's watching, who cares? Nobody but
you.'
'You're very wise, you know that?'
Hope laughed heartily. 'Thank you. I spent years thinking
I was an idiot and couldn't do anything without asking
advice or getting the go-ahead from someone else, but you
know, over the past few months, I've begun to realize that
I'm not an idiot. Just lacking in self-belief. Delphine jokes
that the two of us should set ourselves up as a telephone
agony aunt service: problemsRus.'
'I'd owe you a fortune, then,' said Sam with a grin.
'Don't write the cheque just yet. I don't think it's very
professional to go into a counselling business advising other
people when your own life is totally messed up,' Hope said
ruefully.
'Why can't you and Matt sort it out? You know you're
both crazy about each other, just tell him and stop playing
Ms Ice Queen on the phone with him.'
'I'm not playing Ice Queen,' Hope pointed out. the is or

Jack Frost, anyway. I tried to tell him the truth in the beginning
and he wouldn't listen to me.'

'That was his pride speaking. He was hurt,' protested
Sam. 'Sorry,' she added. 'Talk about the pot calling the kettle
black.'

'We're a right pair, aren't we?' Hope agreed. 'Anyway,
he's coming over here in a fortnight to take the children
back to Bath for a week. I hate the thought of them being
away from me for so long. He's bringing them back on a
Saturday morning, which is the day of Delphine's wedding,
by the way, and you're invited. Millie's being a flower girl.
I'm worried she may hit the other flower girl over the head
with her posy.'

'Delphine's sweet to invite me,' Sam said, touched.
'Should I come?'

'Of course, I'd love to see you. It would be nice...'
Hope's voice trailed off. It was now or never. 'Sam, you're
going to kill me but I've something to tell you.'

'What?'

'I'm pregnant.'

There was a long silence.

'It's Mart's baby, Sam,' said Hope in exasperation. 'Honestly,
I told you nothing happened between Christy and me.'

'Sorry, love. That's wonderful but does Matt know?'

'No.'

'Hope, you've got to tell him. He's a right to know, no
matter what's been happening.'

'I'll tell him,' Hope said. 'In my own time.'


Nicole looked around the Titus Records reception area and
marvelled at the change; not in the reception, but in her.
The first time she'd come here, only months ago, she'd been
nervous and shy, feeling out of place amongst all the movers
and shakers. Now, she was one of them. She was Nicole, an artist in her own right with a single just about to be
released and plenty of excellent reviews for her work on
tour.


'Hi Nicole,' said Lydia, Sam's assistant, who appeared to
take Nicole upstairs to join Sam before lunch.

'Hi Lydia,' Nicole replied.

As they walked off, Nicole noticed the receptionist look
at her enviously. It wasn't Lydia she was looking at, it was
Nicole. Clad in designer clothes, with her coppery hair styled
beautifully, Nicole was indeed someone to stare after enviously.
The feline face with the high cheekbones now graced
billboards around the city.

'You're really famous now,' Sharon had said to her the
other night as they trekked around looking at apartments.
They'd both been astonished to see a huge poster of Nicole
in the underground station.

'Does this mean you won't share a flat with me, then?'
Nicole had demanded.

Sharon gaped at her and then burst into tears.

'I thought you were a bit fed up at home,' Nicole said.

'I am,' Sharon sobbed. 'It's just that I never thought
we'd actually do it, now that you're a big star and everything.'
Nicole
hugged her. 'I'm not a big star yet, for the record,'
she said, 'and ever since we joined Copperplate, we've talked
about getting a place of our own. This is finally it.'

'What about Darius?' asked Sharon anxiously.

'He might stay over sometimes,' Nicole said with a mischievous
smile. 'When we feel like letting him, that is.'

In the lift at Titus, Nicole wondered if she'd bump into
Darius. He wasn't going to lunch with them: it was just Sam
and Nicole because Nicole wanted to ask Sam's advice.

'Sam will be with you in two minutes,' Lydia said, leaving
Nicole alone in Sam's office. Sam swept in a few minutes
later, looking coolly elegant.

'Hi Nicole,' she said, kissing her new star's cheek. 'Are
you ready to go?'

They walked to a small local restaurant and Nicole was
delighted to see Sam order fish and chips.

'Make that two,' she smiled at the waiter, who swooned


at the sight of her. 'It's nice to eat normal food,' she confided
to Sam. 'At lunch interviews in posh restaurants, everyone's
always trying to order these weird things I've never heard
of.'
'That's menu one-upmanship,' Sam smiled. 'It's a form
of social climbing whereby the more bizarre your order, like
asking if the fish comes from one particular bit of the sea
or which grove the olive oil in the dressing came from, the more cool and trendy you are proven to be.'
'And ordering fish and chips makes the two of us dead
common,' laughed Nicole, instantly getting it.
'We're so cool, we don't have to try,' agreed Sam. 'I know
this amazingly rich and successful singer who orders prawn
cocktail, steak and chips and a bloody Mary wherever she
is. She likes it and she doesn't care what anybody else thinks.'
They enjoyed the meal and Nicole got to the point.
'Remember when you met my gran, Reenie, and we talked
about the place in Ireland where your sister lives?'
Sam nodded.
'Well, it seems that Gran left there and never went back,
for lots of reasons,' Nicole added discreetly. 'I think it would
be lovely for her to go there and I wanted to arrange it as
a surprise, for her and Mum. I can't go what with the single
and all, but I'd love them to go. All-expenses paid, my treat.
Could you help me arrange it?'

Hope tried to look astonished when Ronan told her he was
resigning from his job as Redlion's tourism officer.
'That's a terrible shame,' she said, thinking that she could
finally post the CV that Eugene had expertly printed up for
her. As long as the tourism chiefs didn't mind her taking a
teeny bit of time off to have her baby, she was flying. The
way Eugene made it sound in the CV, they'd be lucky to
have her.
'I'm going to recommend you for the job,' Ronan said,
his big sorrowful face more sorrowful than usual.
'Thanks, Ronan, that's lovely of you.'

'Not really,' he said gloomily, 'you'd be perfect for the
job. I'm only telling the truth.'

Delphine was mentally tied up with the menus for the
wedding but still managed to rouse herself from the salad
buffet versus hot food debate to be delighted for Hope.

'You could do that job with your eyes shut,' she said.
'You'll have the tourism industry doubled in no time at all.'

'Well, yeah . ..' muttered Hope, thinking that there was
only the small matter of the baby to consider and then, yes,
she'd be perfect for the job. In her application letter, she'd
pointed out that she would like to work part time rather
than full time. Who knew if the powers that be would go
along with that.

'How are the children?' asked Delphine. 'Does Millie still
want to be a flower girl?'

'Just try and stop her,' Hope said. 'She's been practising
like mad with a paper tiara and her nurse's uniform. She's
making Toby be the bride, so she gets to trail along behind
him, picking up his train, which is my velvet dressing gown,
by the way. The only thing is, I keep having panic attacks
that Matt's plane will be delayed on Saturday and they won't
get back in time.'

She knew that Delphine and Eugene were actually getting
married on the Friday because it was the only day the registrar
could fit them in for the civil ceremony. The wedding
party was, therefore, not dependent on the usual split-second
timing. An ex-priest friend was providing a blessing on Saturday
in Virginia's rose garden. 'The holy bit,' Eugene had
said ruefully.

'Stop fretting,' Delphine said cheerily now. 'We're not
Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. It's Eugene and me who are
getting married. The official bit is the day before so this is
a laid-back wedding.'

'Have you told Virginia that?' inquired Hope.

Virginia was busy supervising a team of decorators who
were tweaking Kilnagoshell at lightning speed into a vision
of country house loveliness in readiness for both the wedding


and the inspection by tourist guide people who were keen
to get her in their booklet for the January edition. The two
upstairs bathrooms had been totally renovated to make them
suitable for paying guests and Virginia was having ensuite
shower rooms installed in three of the bedrooms. Downstairs,
her kitchens had to be revamped to suit health regulations,
while the cloakroom was also in need of an overhaul.
Delphine laughed. 'Poor PJ who did up Curlew Cottage
for you is in shock, I can tell you. He's not used to working
for a perfectionist like Virginia. I met him last night and he
looked weak. He said "It's not that Mrs Connell ever loses
her temper, it's just that calm way she looks at you that
makes you sweat.'"
'Someone should make PJ sweat,' Hope commented. 'My
plumbing still isn't fixed.'
'Get Virginia to oversee it,' Delphine suggested. 'That
way, he'll have it fixed in no time.'

'Ooh, it's lovely.' There were tears in Sandra Turner's eyes
when she looked around the modern apartment that Nicole
had just bought. With one big window looking out over
Tower Bridge, the entire living room was bright and airy, a
fact emphasized by the lack of furniture.
'It'll be nicer when the furniture's delivered,' Nicole said
anxiously, desperately wanting her mother and gran to like it.
Reenie Turner said nothing. She walked around tightlipped,
looking out onto the small balcony, peering into the
compact kitchen with its gleaming stainless steel oven, and
scrutinizing the en-suite bathroom off the master bedroom.
Pammy was the only member of the Turner family behaving
as normal and she was playing with the intercom, pretending
she was phoning up her friends from school.
'No Pammy,' said Nicole automatically. 'You can't play
with that.'
Pammy clutched Barbie in one hand and took her big
sister's hand in the other.
'Now when you stay, you can sleep in here with me,'

Nicole said, leading Pammy into the master bedroom, which
had a wall of built-in wardrobes.

'Where's our bed?' asked Pammy.

'I haven't bought one yet,' Nicole admitted.

'Will it be as big as Mummy's?'

Nicole grinned. 'Bigger,' she whispered.

Back in the living room, Reenie had perched herself on
one of the few bits of furniture in the apartment, a rather
battered old couch. The apartment had been let for the two
years since it had been built and the previous owners had
left a few items behind, all things that looked as if two years
of renting had been detrimental to their health.

'You'll have to paint the whole place,' Reenie said, looking
around at the grubby mushroom coloured walls.

'I know,' Nicole said. 'But do you like it, Gran? You've
got to imagine it when it's all done up and it is a good
investment, too,' she rushed on, anxious that her grandmother
say something positive. 'What do you think?'

Reenie looked at her grand-daughter in amazement. 'It's
wonderful, pet. I'm as proud as punch of you. I don't have
to tell you that, now, do I?'

Nicole's smile split her face in two. 'I thought you didn't
like it,' she said.

'It needs work, mind you, and I'm going to have to ask
George next door for advice on who to get because you don't
want to get stuck with cowboys who don't know one end
of a paintbrush from another but of course I like it.' Reenie
marched into the kitchen and examined the oven. 'I don't
like the look of this thing at all, though,' she announced.
'Could you not get them to take it with them and you can
get a nice one like the one I have?'

Nicole and Sandra burst out laughing.

'What are you like, Mum?' demanded Sandra. 'I've never
seen such a gorgeous flat and there are you, telling her what's
wrong with it.'

'I'm family,' Reenie said indignantly. 'I'm allowed to be
honest. Mind you, if anyone else dared to criticize our



Nicole, that would be a different story. They'd feel the sharp
end of my tongue and no mistake.' She sniffed.
Nicole felt sorry for anyone who dared to criticize her
in Reenie's presence. She could vouch for the sharpness of
Reenie's tongue, all right. 'You're great, Gran,' she said,
throwing her arms around the older woman. 'What would
I do without you?'
'Get ripped off by bad decorators probably,' Reenie said
firmly.
They discussed colour schemes and it was an hour later
before they left the apartment to go back to Reenie's where
they were having dinner.
Reenie and Sandra went into the kitchen to cook and
Nicole took Pammy out to the park for a go on the adventure
playground. After half an hour pushing Pammy, 'higher,
Nicole, higher!' on the swings, they walked tiredly back to
their grandmother's house.
Nicole let them both in quietly. Pammy immediately
rushed up to the spare bedroom where her grandmother
kept a supply of toys and books for when she stayed over.
Nicole hung her coat in the under-stairs cupboard beside
the kitchen and couldn't help overhearing the conversation
between her mother and grandmother. --
'Don't cry, Sandra,' Reenie was saying. 'You know it's
the right thing to do.'
'I know,' sobbed Sandra. 'I've tried so hard. I told her I
wanted her to go, but I don't want her to think I've pushed
her out. I'll miss her so much . . .'
Eyes glittering suspiciously, Nicole opened the door.
'Mum,' she wailed, before throwing herself into Sandra's
arms.
Clinging together, they sobbed until down-to-earth
Reenie broke it all up with a comforting pat for each of
them and three mugs of hot sweet tea so strong that it was
the colour of toffee.
'A good cry is what you both needed, now cheer up. This
is a day for celebrating.'

'I know,' said Sandra, wiping her eyes with her fingers.
'I'm sorry Nicole, I didn't mean for you to hear me.'

Nicole ripped some kitchen towel off the roll and handed
some to her mother. With the rest, she scrubbed at her eyes.
'You didn't push me, Mum,' she said, when she was recovered
enough to speak. 'I won't go . . .'

'You will,' said Reenie and Sandra in unison.

'Your mother isn't an idiot who can't cope on her own,'
Reenie added, 'it's my fault for making it look like that. I
couldn't help it,' she admitted with regret. 'I wanted to protect
her from life and I've ended up over-protecting her. And
so have you.'

Nicole squeezed Sandra's hand.

'Between the pair of us, Nicole, we've carried on as if
Sandra can't manage on her own. That's just because we
wanted to be indispensable. But we're not and she's not.'

Reenie looked intently at her grand-daughter. 'You need
to spread your wings, love,' she said, 'and so does your
mother. Nobody's saying we won't miss you, but you've got
your own life now and you've got to live it.'

'You've still got your keys,' Sandra said, her voice wobbling,
'I expect you back at least once a week for your tea,
right?'

They were all still tearful and snuffly when Pammy came
downstairs, trailing a giant furry panda bear that was nearly
bigger than she was.

'You poor little mite,' said Nicole, hoisting her sister onto
her lap. 'You must be hungry. Are you?'

Pammy nodded. 'So is Panda,' she announced. 'I said
we'd have milk.'

The air of tension was totally gone and the family laughed
and joked over dinner, with Reenie back on form teasing
Nicole about Darius.

'I'll lend you my white gloves when you go to visit his
mum and dad,' she joked.

Nicole winced. 'That's something I wanted to talk to you
about, Mum,' she said. 'Not about Darius's dad, but about


mine. It's the newspapers, you see. You know I've been doing
interviews and everything, but if the single works, there'll
be more publicity than ever, or so everyone at Titus keeps
telling me. What I'm worried about is the papers bringing
up my dad,' she said. 'I've side-stepped it up to now but you
know the papers: they want to know all about you . . .' she
looked anxiously at her mother.

It was something Nicole had thought a lot about lately.
Ever since Shirin in Copperplate had remarked that Nicole
was losing out on one part of herself, Nicole had been thinking
about her father. Sandra had never made a secret out of
the circumstances of Nicole's birth. She'd been seventeen,
naive, and had a huge crush on the handsome Nikhil, a
stunning looking Indian boy from school. In turn, he'd been
crazy about the lovely blonde girl with the sweet face and
the irresistible giggle. It had never been a great love affair
and when Sandra became pregnant, she hadn't told him.
Nicole had never quite understood that but she'd assumed
that a lifetime hearing about Reenie's run-in with a feckless
man who didn't want anything to do with his child had
something to do with it. But Sandra said no, it wasn't that.
Nikhil's family wanted a traditional marriage for him.
Sandra didn't want to ruin that over what was, she knew,
a teenage flirtation that had gone too far. So she'd said
nothing, and gave his baby a name that sounded not a million
miles away from his.

'I never wanted him to know because he'd have tried to
do the right thing,' Sandra said now. 'He didn't deserve that.
He had his life mapped out for him.'

'He made you pregnant,' Nicole shot back, angry at her
father. He should have known, he should have somehow
worked it all out. 'He should have been made responsible.'

'Nicole, it's water under the bridge,' Sandra insisted.

'Not if the papers want to know where my dad is,' Nicole
sighed. 'Look,' she added, 'I'll talk to Darius about it. He'll
know what to do.'

Reenie cackled. 'It must be love . . .'



Nicole blushed. 'If you're not nice to me, I won't give
you your sixtieth birthday present.'

'Don't remind me,' Reenie groaned. 'I can't believe I'm
about to be sixty. Anyway, it's not for two weeks,' she added
suspiciously.

'You need to know about this present in advance,' Nicole
said mischievously. She dug deep in her handbag and found
a travel folder, which she handed to her grandmother.

Reenie opened it, unfolded the first page, which was the
itinerary, and gasped.

'It's a trip to Ireland. Three flights to Dublin, then on to
Kerry, then seven nights at the Manoir Rouge Leon in ...'
Her voice failed her.

'In Redlion,' supplied Nicole, watching her grandmother
anxiously. 'I thought it would be nice for you to
go back. I know your family are long gone, but wouldn't
it be nice to go back and get all the bad things out of your
system?'

For what seemed like an age, Reenie said nothing, she
merely held the itinerary in her hand, staring at the words
as though in a daze.

'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you,' Nicole said
quickly, terrified that her plan had backfired hideously and
that, in her haste to do something lovely for her grandmother,
she'd done the one thing guaranteed to devastate
her. 'Let me take it back,' she said, trying to grab the folder
out of Reenie's hands.

But her grandmother held on tightly. 'Oh Nicole,' she
said weakly, 'did you see into my heart or something? Your
great great grandmother could see things, you know. She
had the Sight, although she had to keep it quiet because
the parish priest would have had something to say about
that. Do you have it too because I've thought about this for
years.'

'No, I've no special sight: I'm blind as a bat, Gran,' joked
Nicole, shaking with relief. 'I just thought that if it was me,
I'd want to go back, to lay the ghosts to rest.'Both Nicole and Sandra watched Reenie carefully.
'These tickets are for me, your mum and Pammy,' Reenie
said, reading carefully. 'What about you, Nicole?'

'I can't go,' Nicole explained. 'My single's being released
in the next two weeks and I'll be like a blue-tailed fly rushing
round promoting it.' She'd blanched when she'd first set
eyes on the promotion schedule. It involved a ten-day tour
and there were so many flights on it that Nicole was determined
to sign up for air miles. The promotion tour was in
preparation for the release of 'Honey, (Don't You Know)
I Need You?' a rhythm and blues ballad which Nicole
adored. Time would tell if the rest of the country adored it
too.

'But you should come too,' her mother said. 'We can't
do it without you.'

'I'll come next time,' Nicole promised. 'I can't this time.
But you'll be okay without me. Sam Smith from Titus is
going there for a wedding and she's going to be travelling
with you. She helped me organize it all, actually.'

'Would you really like to go back, Mum?' asked Sandra.

At that moment, Reenie's face was miraculously softened
by memories, with the lines of a tough life miraculously
erased. 'I'd love to go home,' she said.


Sam didn't need anybody to tell her that the numbers for
Density's album were bad. As she sat at her desk one gloriously
sunny morning, still plucking up the courage to resign,
she knew the band were in trouble without even looking at
her computer. When she dropped into record stores to keep
an eye on the LGBK label displays, she saw piles of Density albums on the carousels, with the band's angst-ridden faces
staring gloomily at her from the cover. Their current single
had been dropped from all but the most rock-driven radio
station playlists and the video, shot at great expense, was
probably mouldering away in some dark cupboard in the
MTV headquarters, never to be seen again except in a 'where
are they now?' slot. The initial shipment of albums were


steadily returning to the Titus warehouse while the album
itself sat like a millstone in the number eighty-seven position
in the album chart.
Eighty-seven was a fine position for an album that had
stormed into the charts, spent ages in the top twenty, and
then slid slowly and triumphantly out, after months of success
and lots of hit singles. Density's album had been in
the chart for eight weeks and had never risen higher than
seventy-one. Their two singles had made as much impact as
two flea bites on an elephant.
With a practised eye, Sam ran through the sales analysis
on her computer. Even though the Titus sales team had told
their customers that the band were hotter than hell, they'd
still had to offer sale or return on the album. If unsold, the
shops could send the copies back and now the thousands of
unsold albums were returning like homing pigeons.
It wasn't as if the band had performed reasonably and
could, therefore, hope for better luck next time. The album
simply hadn't sold at all. Despite Titus pulling out all the
stops marketing and publicity wise, Density were still dead
as dodos. The combination of costs looked horrifying when
compared to the dismal bottom line. Sam looked at the
figures which detailed the cost of signing the band, recording
their album, making the video and finally, the costs of the
huge marketing campaign. There wasn't a hope in hell of
making back any of that money.
'If only they weren't such stupid, arrogant fools, they
could have a hope,' Karen Storin had raged to Sam the
previous week when the band refused to appear on a TV
chat show because they weren't the top act on the show.
'They told me no way they were going to play warm-up for
some country and western singer from Abilene. That woman
has sold ten million records! They've barely sold ten records.'
'They've got a big star complex without actually being
big stars,' remarked Sam bleakly.
'You said it. Most of the press hate them. I practically
hate them myself,' Karen admitted, 'although you're the only

person I'd say that to. They're so rude to everyone and that
manager of theirs is a giant pain in the rear end.'

'He may change his tune soon,' Sam pointed out. 'At this
rate, we won't be able to risk making a second album with
his precious boys. Let's see how sweet he'll become when
he realizes there's a good chance the band could be dropped.'

'That bad?'

Sam nodded. 'That bad.'

Now Sam scrolled through the figures on her computer
and knew that a big decision was going to have to be made
soon. LGBK couldn't afford Density but if she dropped
them, it would look as if she'd made a huge mistake that
had cost the company millions. She'd been running the company
for nearly nine months. Nobody, least of all the bosses
on Madison Avenue, would remember that it was actually
her predecessor and Steve Parris who'd signed the deal with
Density. She wondered whether it was worth discussing it
all with her champion, Julian Ruben, the European president
who'd hired her in the first place.

'You look like you could do with a cup of coffee,'
remarked Lydia, arriving into the office with a pile of opened
mail.

'Do you have any coffee flavoured with Valium?' asked
Sam.

Lydia grinned. 'No, just ordinary. If you're feeling down,
a gang of us are going out to dinner tonight if you fancy
coming along. It's me and a few others from the fifth floor.'

'Thanks,' said Sam, deeply touched. 'But tonight's off,
I'm afraid.'

'Some other time, huh?' said Lydia.

'Yes,' Sam said slowly, hating herself because she was
lying. She had nothing on that night, except for a date with
her television remote control. But managing directors didn't
go out for dinner with the staff. Why not? thought Sam
savagely. Because it might erode their precious status if they
were seen to be enjoying themselves with lesser mortals.

And all of a sudden, Sam was sick of it. She was sick of


being the boss, sick of running a company where she sat at
the top in an ivory tower, so far removed from everyone
else that she had no colleagues any more, just people who
worked for her, and probably hated her. In the time she'd
spent at Titus, only Karen Storin had become a friend.
Despite her so-called new life where she planned to concentrate
on enjoying life and making new friends, nothing much
had actually changed.
Karen was still her only true work friend. Sam was never
going to change her life if she stayed in this job. She had to
get out and now.
She phoned Lydia. 'Lydia, can you get me Julian Ruben's
office on the phone? I'd like a meeting with him if possible.
And by the way, if that offer of dinner is still on, I think I'll
change my other plans and come along, if that's all right?'
'Cool,' said Lydia, pleased.

Hope was miserably packing a suitcase for Millie and Toby's
trip to Bath when Sam phoned late that night.
'I hope I didn't wake you,' Sam said, sounding giggly
after a couple of glasses of wine at dinner.
'No,' said Hope, 'the baby is having one of his or her
footballing nights. I don't remember being kicked so much
with the others. How are you?'
'Fantastic,' announced Sam. 'I've done it.'
'Done what?'
'Resigned. I did it today. I spoke to Julian Ruben and
told him I couldn't do it any more.'
'Wow,' was all Hope could say.
'He was lovely, actually, begged me to reconsider, which
was flattering, but I told him it wasn't the company's fault
but that I needed a change.'
'Sam, we've big plans for you, you've got to believe that,'
Julian had actually said. 'I want you to reconsider this, for
all our sakes. I know you're having a rough time with Parris,
but that won't last, believe me,' Julian had added ominously.
'I just said that it didn't matter what the plans were,' Sam

recalled. 'I need a change, Hope. I need to downshift. And
I've got just the idea. I'm going to run a management consultancy
firm. Just a small operation. I got the idea from
these people I know who've got a fabulous restaurant but
are finding it tough to break even. I had an idea about how
to change that, and I just thought, hey, I'd be good at that,
telling people where their company is going wrong. I think
there's a big market for it.'
'Problem solving,' said Hope, 'that's what you're brilliant
at.'
'Yes, problem solving.' Sam sounded so happy and
excited. 'I know there's a risk in any business venture but
hey, I'm used to risk. It's like this big burden has been lifted,'
she said joyously. 'You know, Hope, I don't think I knew
how much I wanted to change my life until I actually did
it.'
'What about money?' asked Hope, ever practical.
'It's not as if I haven't got savings and investments. I may
sell the Holland Park apartment and buy something smaller if I need to realize some cash. But I don't care, Hope,' she
said. 'That's the point. It's not about money or being able
to eat out seven nights a week with an expense account,
putting money into Terence Conran's coffers. I just wasn't
happy.'
'What about Morgan?' asked Hope suddenly. 'I thought
he was part of your long-term plan for happiness?'
Sam felt her bubble burst. Hope had hit the nail on the
head. Without Morgan, she didn't know if she could be truly
happy, but then, she'd just have to get over him. She'd heard
nothing from him since that awful day after the Lemon
Awards when they'd fought so horribly. He'd made his
decision and there was nothing she could do to change that.
'Morgan's in the past,' Sam said.
'Are you OK with that?'
'No, but I have no choice in the matter. He's made the
decision, not me. And look who's talking. You could have
made the first move with Matt and you haven't.'

'That's different,' Hope retorted.
'Why?'
'It just is.'
'You mean that you still haven't told him about the baby?
Why, Hope? He's going to find out eventually. Are you going
to hide behind the sofa when he comes to pick up the children
on Saturday so he doesn't see the bump?'
'No,' said Hope. 'I'm not going to see him at all. I'm
asking Delphine to deliver them to the airport. I don't want
to have to face Matt, not yet.'
'Because you're visibly pregnant and you don't know how
to tell him or because you genuinely don't want him back?'
Sam asked gently.
'I know you're going to become this mega problem
solver,' Hope said a touch irritably, 'but don't start on me.
Oh all right, of course I want him back but I don't feel very
forgiving or apologetic right now,' she said.
She was pregnant and hormonal, dammit, she needed
someone looking after her, never mind worrying herself
about Matt thinking the wrong thing about her and Christy.
'Sorry, Hope, I didn't mean to hassle you,' Sam said.
'I'm just hormonal,' Hope said.
'You weren't with Millie and Toby.'
'Yes I was, I just didn't let it all out,' said Hope. 'But this
is the new, improved me, the one who lets everyone know
when she's grumpy!'
'Do you want me to talk to Matt...' began Sam.
Hope's yell startled her.
'No! Don't you dare. This is my life and I'll sort it out.'
'I was only trying to help,' Sam said, helplessly.
'Phone Morgan then. That'll help.'
'I can't.'
'Yes you can,' Hope said firmly. 'Stop worrying about
me and go and sort out your own life, right?'

Virginia was very pleased with herself when she came out
of the soft furnishing shop in Killarney. Those buttery yellow



tie backs would look perfect on the dining room curtains
and would finish the entire room off beautifully. It had been
a frantic few weeks but Kilnagoshell was finally getting there
and would look beautiful for Delphine's wedding reception.
The six spare bedrooms had been restored to their former
glory, thanks to PJ's careful decoration and also to Shona's
skill as an interior designer. She'd been fantastic at sourcing
beautiful fabrics and wallpaper at good prices, which was
vital as Virginia couldn't afford to plough all her money
into the redecorating. All that remained to be done was a
bit of work in the garden and although Virginia had been
promising herself that she'd tackle it, Mary-Kate had pointed
out that she'd done enough.
'The rose garden looks wonderful and the lawn is in
perfect condition. What else would anyone want?' she
demanded.
She was such a dear friend, Virginia thought fondly, as
she walked leisurely along, enjoying the sunshine and the
hustle and bustle of the main street. If she'd been paying
attention instead of just strolling along happily, she might
have seen Glenys and Richard Smart storming up the street,
arguing volubly.
As it was, she almost collided with them outside the book
shop.
'I'm sorry, oh, hello Glenys and Richard,' Virginia said.
'Well, well,' said Glenys, her eyes glittering with malice.
'If it isn't Kevin's little friend.'
As she towered over Glenys, Virginia thought this was
amusing.
'Charmed as ever to see you,' she said, managing to stop
the corners of her mouth lifting.
'I'll just drop into the book shop . . .' began Richard.
'Don't be long,' snapped Glenys.
'Seen Kevin lately?' inquired Glenys, eyes travelling over
Virginia's tall, slim figure, elegant in an ivory linen suit that
wouldn't have looked out of place on the Out Of Africa film set.

Glenys, on the other hand, was sweating in a serviceable
red blazer, the buttons of which were under severe strain.

'Kevin and I played a lovely round of golf at the club last
week, actually,' Virginia said. She was almost enjoying this.
It was clear that Glenys wanted to rage at her about Kevin
and, because she no longer viewed Kevin as anything other
than a friend, Virginia was no longer sensitive about him.
Let Glenys rage all she wanted to.

'How can you stand there and smile at me like that?'
demanded Glenys.
' Virginia's kept smiling. She'd bet herself that it would
take at least one minute before Glenys went in for the kill:
instead, it had taken only thirty seconds.

She said nothing and waited.

'Poor Ursula is just a few years dead and you've no shame,
Mrs Connell, dallying with her poor widower husband, a
man who's still in shock after her death. Call yourself a
grieving widow? Hah, that's a laugh.' She would have spat
if she could.

Virginia might have let her ramble on in vitriolic style
except Glenys added another comment: 'And you can't have
loved your husband if you're so ready to hop into bed with
another man and your poor husband not yet cold in his
grave.'

Mentioning Bill was her big mistake. Virginia's eyes
flashed fire. She drew herself up and glared stonily at the
other woman.

'Have you ever heard of the phrase: don't condemn a
man until you've walked a mile in his shoes?' she asked, her
voice cultured and low. 'You haven't been widowed, Glenys.
Lucky you. You don't know what you're talking about. You
treat Richard with contempt.' Glenys went to interrupt, but
Virginia held up a hand to stop her.

'You've had your say, now it's my turn. I loved my husband
very much and I appreciated him when he was alive,
unlike you,' she said scathingly. 'Now he is gone and my
carrying on with my life doesn't mean I didn't love him.


Bad-mouthing and bitter people like you make it hard for
anyone who's lost a loved one to move on, because you
prefer us in grief. You don't want bereaved people to have
happiness because it'll show up the lack of happiness in your
own sad, twisted lives. Kevin Burton is my friend, that's all.
And may God pity you if anything ever happens to your
Richard, because you won't know what's hit you.'
Leaving Glenys furiously mouthing, Virginia swept along
the street regally and into the cafe where Mary-Kate was
waiting for her.
'You'll never guess who I bumped into,' Virginia said,
sitting down calmly and putting her purchases on the empty
chair beside her. 'Glenys Smart and poor Richard.'
'Did she try and kill you with a knock out punch on the
main street?' joked Mary-Kate, waving at the waitress for
another pot of tea.
'She did her best,' Virginia said, 'all things considered.
She wasn't physical but she was very nasty.'
Mary-Kate's eyes widened. 'I was only joking. Are you
all right? Was she awful? What did she say?'
'Calm down,' said Virginia. 'She told me I was a hussy
for daring to look at Kevin Burton and that I couldn't have
loved Bill at all.'
Mary-Kate's gasp of shock was so loud that people at
neighbouring tables looked around in surprise. Virginia must
have been devastated, she had to be in shock, Mary-Kate
thought furiously.
'It's fine, I promise. I gave her a lesson in widowhood
and she's gone off with her tail between her legs. I admit,
I've been dying to tell that woman a few home truths and
it was very satisfying to actually do it.'
'You're amazing,' said Mary-Kate admiringly. 'I'd be in
bits if someone attacked me on the street, but you're as cool
as a cucumber. You're a strong woman, Virginia.'
'I was always strong,' Virginia said in surprise. 'Losing
Bill took that strength away from me but over the past year,
thanks to people like you and my new life, I've got it back

again.' Virginia's lovely face was calm and happy. 'I don't
know what I'd have done without you, Mary-Kate. You've
been my saviour.'

'Nonsense, you've saved yourself.' Mary-Kate laughed
suddenly. 'Can I set you on Pauline, please? She's received
Delphine's wedding invitation and she rang me up and left
a message on my machine to say there wasn't a hope in hell
of her going.'

'Ouch,' said Virginia. 'I can only assume she phoned when
she knew you'd be out so she wouldn't have to suffer your
wrath.'

'You betcha,' Mary-Kate said grimly. 'If she doesn't turn
up, Delphine will be devastated. I know she keeps going on
about how it's her mother's choice and how it won't affect
the joy of the day if she doesn't come, but of course it will.
Delphine is so vulnerable. Her father's delighted to come,
though. He loves Eugene, although he wouldn't dare tell
Pauline.'

Fresh tea arrived and they drank it, both deep in thought.
Virginia began formulating a plan. 'Pauline is very religious,
you say.'

'First in the queue at Mass every Sunday.'

'How about if we ask all the devout people along, like
Miss Murphy who does the flowers, and so on? If they
come, she'll be shamed into coming. Oh,' Virginia had a
brainstorm. 'And let's ask Father McTeague. He's a sweetie
and I know for a fact that he deplores the fact that poor
Delphine can't get married in church.'

'You're evil, do you know that?'

They both laughed.

'Pauline won't know what's hit her. Wait till everyone in
the village is telling her they'll see her on Saturday, she'll be
shamed into turning up.'


Nicole, Darius, Sam, Reenie, Sandra and Pammy stood in a
little group in Heathrow's Terminal One, with much hugging
and kissing going on.


Pammy had taken a huge shine to Darius and was now
half-crying because she wanted to stay with him and Nicole
'You'll have a lovely time in Ireland with your mummy '
Darius told her, his gangly frame crouched down beside Pammy as he tried to cheer her up.
'And we're going to have adventures,' added Sam enigmatically.
Thanks to Millie, she had enough experience of
little girls to know that the promise of excitement to come
helped cheer them up.
Pammy sucked her lollipop thoughtfully. 'What sort of
adventures?' she asked finally, looking up at Sam with her
innocent gaze.
'You're definitely related to Nicole,' Sam laughed, 'your
big sister asks all the right questions too.'
'I wish you weren't leaving Titus,' Nicole said wistfully
to Sam.
'I know.' Sam shrugged. 'I had to do it, but whoever
takes over will look after you, Nicole. You've got a brilliant
manager in Bob Fellowes and you've got the voice - and the
professionalism.'
Nicole smiled. 'You forgot to mention Darius,' she said,
sliding her arm through his.
'That would be stating the obvious.,' Sam replied. 'I know
he's going to look after you. And I expect that single to go to
number one, Mr Good,' she commanded goodhumouredly.
'It will, don't you worry,' he said confidently, squeezing
Nicole's small hand.
'Do look after her, won't you?' Reenie said to him. 'She
should be coming with us.'
'I'll be fine, Gran,' Nicole assured her. 'I just want you
to enjoy yourself.'
'I will,' Reenie said, her voice breaking.
'We better go through,' Sam announced, not wanting
everyone to get upset. 'Quick goodbyes and we're off.'
Leading the way, she took her group through security
until they could no longer see Darius and Nicole, hand in
hand, waving goodbye.

'I hope they'll be all right,' Nicole said tearfully.

Darius pulled her to him and gave her such a passionate
kiss that a group of male golfers going home to Ireland after
a week in Portugal gave them a round of applause.

Nicole giggled.

'Sam Smith is looking after them,' Darius said, as they
walked away from their guffawing audience. 'They could
put Sam in charge of the space programme and she'd have
it running like clockwork in half an hour. Don't worry about
a thing, love.'

Nicole beamed up at him. 'I'm not,' she said.

On the journey back to the flat, they were both almost
too excited to speak. The sense of delicious anticipation
made them both grin inanely and hold hands tightly. Darius
had originally suggested they went out to lunch after leaving
the family at the airport, but Nicole had taken a deep breath
and suggested lunch at her place.

'A special lunch,' she'd said, gazing at him with those
miraculous tiger eyes until Darius had felt his heart leap
with love.

Once she'd made the decision, she'd had a wonderful
time planning everything. Darius was a That food junkie,
so Nicole had found a That takeaway and ordered everything
for half twelve. She'd run round the flat first thing
that morning, tidying and polishing, arranging the bright
yellow gerberas she loved everywhere and making the bed
up with the virginal white bedclothes she'd bought but
never used. She shivered excitedly as she thought of curling
up in them with Darius's body moulded to hers. She'd deliberately
left alcohol off her shopping list. There was no
way that Nicole wanted this momentous occasion dulled by
booze: she wanted to remember every incredible moment
of it.

Thanks to frenzied traffic, it was nearly half twelve when
they reached the front door, still holding hands tightly.
Nicole was conscious of a certain sense of unease. Darius
no longer looked deliriously happy; he looked nervous.


'Come on,' she said enthusiastically as she led him
into the hall, 'you haven't seen my new bathroom stuff. I
got a toilet seat cover that's clear and has coloured fishes
embedded in the plastic!'
Nicole dragged Darius into the small, modern bathroom
where she had let her sense of colour go wild. The walls
were raspberry pink, the tiles were tiny aquamarine mosaics,
the fluffy towels were the colour of sunflowers, and above
the hand basin a giant Dali-esque mirror was surrounded
by movie-star light bulbs for making up Nicole's face.
'I always wanted one of these mirrors,' she admitted,
looking at their reflections. She, so small, dark and exquisite;
Darius, tall and lanky, his fair hair and faintly tanned skin
a total contrast to Nicole's cafe au lait perfection. She leaned
back against him, letting him support her and watched as
the anxiety left his face. Darius put his arms around her,
letting his hands rest on her slender waist.
'Are you sure?' he asked tenderly.
She nodded at his reflection in reply.
Darius gently swung her round so that she was facing
him and, as tenderly as if he was leaving a butterfly kiss on
a baby's cheek, kissed her on her upturned little face. At
first, his mouth was soft and then, as Nicole wound her arms
around his neck, moulding her taut body to his, their kiss
deepened into fierce passion. Their bodies leaned hungrily
against each other as their hands ran greedily over arms and
waists and hips. Darius inexpertly opened the buttons on
Nicole's fitted denim shirt and then buried his head in the
softness of her breasts. Nicole leaned her head back as his
mouth burned a trail along the fine lace of the sexy little
pink bra she'd bought specially.
She moaned with excitement as he kissed and nuzzled
endlessly. She'd never felt anything like this before. Those
few unpleasant late-night fumbles she'd had with other boys,
encounters she'd felt uncomfortable about, had never been
like this, this gloriously exquisite sensation that was sending
ripples of pleasure straight down into her toes.

'That's wonderful,' she sighed, 'but you can't do all the
work, love.'

She pulled at Darius's shirt, hearing buttons ping onto
her tiled floor and wriggled until she was stroking and kissing
his lean chest instead, making him moan with desire. The
last thing Nicole wanted was to be made love to; she wanted
to be making love, making Darius gasp with pleasure the
same way he made her gasp with pleasure when his lips
fastened on her nipples. She wanted to tear both their clothes
off and . . .

Ding dong!

In their shock at the intrusion of the door bell, Nicole
and Darius both jumped and he banged his shin on the edge
of the bathtub.

'Ouch!'

Nicole dissolved into giggles and she hugged him. 'I bet
that's lunch. I ordered That food for a treat!'

Still giggling, with Darius laughing as he hobbled along
behind her, she went to the front door and hastily buttoned
her shirt up.

'Don't make me laugh,' she warned him.

'Hello?' She opened the door to find a young, bored
looking guy with a big paper bag in his hand.

'That To Die For?' the guy said, looking at Nicole's shirt
which was all buttoned up wrong. Both Nicole and Darius
noticed it too.

'Yes,' said Nicole sedately while behind her, Darius had
to stuff his hand into his mouth to stop himself corpsing.

'Er money?' said the guy at the door, still holding firmly
onto the paper bag.

'Oh, yes, money. Darius, have you got money?'

Finally, they managed to pay the guy and Nicole shut the
door, at which point they both burst into hysterical laughter.

'I thought I'd die when he started looking at my shirt,'
squealed Nicole.

'Oh I don't know,' said Darius, taking the bag of take
out from her and putting it firmly on the floor, 'I could


understand him wanting to look at you, specially when
you're wearing this.' He unbuttoned the shirt for the second
time and took it off. Nicole stood still, enjoying the sheer
sensuous pleasure, and let him continue. 'I love this bra,' he
added, regretfully, 'but I think it has to come off too.'
Then his lips were on her breasts again, this time unhindered
by her bra. Nicole clung to him, feeling the heady
excitement growing. They never made it to the bedroom and
her white sheets. Instead, they fell, entwined, onto Nicole's
brand new couch, where they ripped off the remainder of
their clothes. It seemed like hours of touching and caressing,
fingers stroking and playing, but it was really only minutes
because both Nicole and Darius were frantic for each other.
When Darius gently pulled her matching pink lacy panties
off, Nicole wound her legs round him like a little acrobat
and pulled him closer to her, desperate to feel him inside
her.
'Nicole,' he groaned, 'let's take our time.'
And he did. Nicole may have read about love making
and how a man could give his partner exquisite pleasure,
but reading about it and having it happen were two very
different things. Just when she thought she could take no
more without exploding, Darius's body melted into hers.
There was no pain, only the exquisite sensation of pleasure
flooding through her body as Nicole's orgasm screamed
through her body like an express train. They were clinging
together fiercely and she couldn't stop yelling in passion until
her orgasm died and she felt Darius finally let himself go.
She'd never felt more love or tenderness in her life as she
held his spasming body in her arms, clasping him to her
until they both sank back onto the cushions, weak from
love, their skin wet with sweat, their breathing ragged.
The That food lay cooling in its bag but neither of them
was hungry. Sated by love, they lay on the couch, limbs
tangled, dozing lazily. Darius couldn't stop touching Nicole;
his fingers stroked her hair gently and tenderly caressed her
smooth shoulders.

'I'm glad I waited for you,' she said, playing with his
watch strap.

'Me too,' he said, kissing her collar bone.

Nicole smiled serenely as she lay there. This was what it
was all about; what those endless articles about love and
sex had meant. Perfect, wonderful love making. She was
passionately grateful that she'd waited for someone like
Darius. For the first time, Nicole was glad of having been
ingrained with her grandmother's beliefs.

'Did you think I was a prude because I was a virgin?' she
asked Darius suddenly.

'Nobody who knows you would ever call you a prude,'
he said. 'I admire you, Nicole. You're the sort of person
who knows what she wants and doesn't want to settle for
anything else.'

Nicole smiled a cat-like little smile. 'That's it exactly,' she
said.

Eventually, thirst made them get up and head for the
fridge and suddenly, the now cold lunch smelt tempting.

'Could we heat it up, do you think?' Nicole said, standing
stark naked in the kitchen and looking curiously into the
take away bag.

'Cold would be nice,' Darius said.

So they sat on the sitting room floor with their lunch
spread out in front of them and drank vast gulps of icy
lemonade.

'Have a piece of lemongrass chicken,' Darius said, leaning
over and placing a dripping yellow sliver of food onto
Nicole's thigh. Nicole laughed delightedly as he knelt and
gobbled it up from her thigh, licking her skin languorously
to get rid of all traces.

'Would you like some of my stir fried mushrooms?'
Nicole asked, leaving a trail on his chest. 'Lie back there,
how else can I lick it off?'

Suddenly they were licking bits of food off each other
and the exhaustion had mysteriously vanished.

'How about we wash up and go to bed?' Nicole suggested.Darius grinned. 'The way we're going, we're going to
christen every room in the flat, so the bathroom is next.'

In the bathroom, Nicole lovingly sponged the lemon
chicken from Darius and then said, 'It's no good. We need
a shower.'

'Ooh!' she cried in astonishment as Darius swept her
easily up in his arms and carried her into the bedroom.

'I'll lick you clean,' he promised, holding her over the bed
as though he was going to drop her. 'I thought we might
try a traditional venue this time.'

'I bought those sheets specially,' Nicole said, looking at
the still-virginal whiteness.

'We can't waste the sheets,' he laughed, then rolled them
both onto the bed in one giggly heap, legs and arms tangled.
'Mmm,' he added, licking his way up Nicole's thigh, 'this is
definitely That to die for. Yum yum ... or Tom Yum for
spicy lemon grass soup.'

'Bad pun alert,' groaned Nicole. 'If I didn't love you, I'd
have to throw you out for making remarks like that.'

Darius stopped licking. 'Do you mean that?' he asked
anxiously.

'Do I love you?' Nicole repeated. She stroked his cheek.
'Yes. Do you love me?'

'Oh God, Nicole, so much!' he said, burying his face in
her shoulder and hugging her tightly.

'Good,' she said and exhaled slowly. They lay there
together, wrapped in each other's arms. This was perfect,
Nicole thought. Just perfect. She had everything she ever
wanted.


By the time the weary party of travellers clambered into a
people-carrier at Kerry's airport at six that evening, they
were all exhausted. Reenie and Sandra weren't talking to
each other after a tiff about the suitability of the pink chiffon
dress Sandra had worn for travelling, and Pammy had lost
the Barbie she liked best out of the four she'd brought in
her hand luggage.


While Sandra and Reenie sulked with each other, Sam
was left looking after Pammy, and began to appreciate why
Nicole was so mature. If she had to referee fights between
the other volatile pair all the time, and take care of her little
sister during the ensuing sulking session, no wonder she was
the oldest twenty-three-year-old Sam had ever met.
'Is Barbie sad because she's lost?' said Pammy, lower lip
quivering, as she sat on Sam's lap. She really was the most
beautiful little girl, Sam thought, with those crystal clear
blue eyes and shimmering blonde hair. The record company
executive in Sam idly wondered if she'd have a voice like
her sister's in fifteen years' time. If so, she'd give any star
out there a run for their money.
'Barbies have a special Barbie island they go to,' Sam
explained gravely. 'It has all the ponies they like, and the
Barbie hair salon and a place for Barbie to go swimming.
Sometimes Barbies need a holiday, but don't worry, we'll
get a new replacement Barbie for you.'
'Oh,' said Pammy, fascinated. 'Is there a story about the
Barbie place?'
'Well, there might be,' Sam said. 'Would you like a story?'
Pammy nodded.
Even the driver of the people-carrier listened as Sam wove
a story about Barbieland for Pammy. Sandra and Reenie
stopped sulking and smiled, slowly forgetting their row as
they drove through the gloriously verdant countryside,
still lit by the golden evening sun. Finally, they came to
Redlion.
'I didn't think it was going to be so pretty,' said Sandra
as the people-carrier drove down a gently curving street
where pastel-painted houses and shops shone red gold in the
dusk. Reenie and Sandra stared at the window boxes and
hanging baskets overflowing with riotous summer flowers;
they looked at the people sitting at the wooden trestle tables
outside the Widow Maguire's pub, laughing and joking as
Christy Moore's mellifluous voice drifted out from inside
the bar.

'I wouldn't have recognized the place,' Reenie said finally.
'It was poor, a little old town in the middle of nowhere
when I left and now it's . . . it's lovely and prosperous.' Her
eyes were wet as her gaze roamed over the elegance of the
carefully restored premises on the main street. The Victorian
courthouse that had been half falling down in her day was
now a restaurant with stars outside it; the battered post
office had been done up and was now a refined looking
estate agent's with no less than two posh sports cars parked
outside it and a well-dressed woman in a suit closing up,
talking on her mobile phone as she locked the door.
The old cottages by the bridge were unrecognizable.
When Reenie had been young, the row had been rundown
and disreputable, a place where slates regularly fell off the
roofs when you walked past, a place where the worst drunk
in the village lived in state, screaming and roaring until the
wee small hours. Now, the cottages were charming little
homes, with window boxes, carefully painted doors and
windows, and fine cars parked outside.
'That's Mary-Kate's place,' said Sam, pointing out the
well-appointed chemist shop with its stylish Lancome display
in the window. 'You're going to love her, girls. She's great
fun. And we'll have to have a night in the Widow's, if we
can get a seat with all the tourists here. Apparently, since
Belle Maguire got this delectable young Californian barman,
the place is totally jammed at night. Half of the tour bus
guides are women and they keep dragging their busloads
here for dinner, just so they can ogle Elliot.'
'Put Sandra down for a night of ogling,' remarked Reenie.
Sam gulped at the thought of hostilities resuming but
Sandra just giggled and stuck her tongue out at her mother.
'I don't ogle young men,' she said happily, 'only ones my
own age.'
'Well, put me down for a session ogling Elliot, then,'
Reenie shot back, going off into peals of laughter. 'There's
life in the old dear yet.'
Sam raised her eyes to heaven. She'd never understand

the pair of them. Maybe that was how mothers and daughters
got on. Who knew?

They drove to the hotel and Reenie went off into fresh
sighs of astonishment about how such a place would never
have been able to make a living in her day. The hotel was
nice, Sam thought approvingly, as a liveried doorman helped
them in with their luggage. She just hoped she got to make
the acquaintance of one Mr Christy De Lacy. He would not
enjoy the encounter, she thought grimly.

'Is Mr De Lacy around tonight?' she inquired idly as they
checked in.

The receptionist squirmed. 'Er . . . no, not tonight,' she
said, clearly uncomfortable. 'He is indisposed.'

Sam did her best to look nonchalant but vowed to get
to the bottom of it. There was a story there, to be sure.
Hopefully, one which involved pain and ignominy for
Christy.

She dumped her bags in her room, went to see that the
others were fine, then left to drop in on Hope. On the phone
the day before, she had thoughtlessly suggested dinner at
the hotel but Hope had pointed out that she'd die of hunger
rather than eat there.

'Sorry,' Sam had winced. 'The Widows then?'

'I'll round up the troops,' Hope said, feeling brighter than
she had all week. She missed Toby and Millie so much that
it physically hurt.

The sisters were late getting to the Widow's. They'd both
cried when they met, Sam at the sight of her beloved sister's
gently rounded belly. 'Oh Hope, love, you have to tell Matt.
He loves you, this will all blow over. You've got to sort it
out for the sake of the baby.'

'You can't glue a marriage together with a baby,' said
Hope, wiping away the tears. 'Band-Aid babies don't work.
It's not fair on the baby or the parents.'

'I give up,' said Sam. 'C'mon. The poor driver thinks he'll
never get home for his dinner.'

'Send him home now,' Hope said. 'I'll drive. That'll give me an excuse for the rest of them as to why I won't have a
drink.'
'As if they don't know you're pregnant,' Sam said wryly.
'They don't,' insisted Hope. 'I'm very careful what I
wear.'
Sam gave up. 'And you say I'm stubborn?'
'Sam, you made it!' squealed Delphine at the top of her
voice when Hope and Sam finally made it to the pub.
Virginia, Mary-Kate, Delphine, Giselle and Mai had
annexed a big table near the bar - 'and near Elliot,' Hope
whispered.
'Is this your hen night?' demanded Sam when everyone
had been hugged and kissed.
'Yes,' sighed Delphine. 'I can't wait till Saturday.'
'Only a day and a half to wait,' said Mai, brandishing a
bottle of champagne sent over by Belle.
'Can Elliot pour it?' said Mary-Kate, batting nonexistent
eyelashes.
'Trollop,' squealed Delphine, with several cocktails under
her belt. 'It's my hen night. I get to behave like a mad woman
with any attractive available men.'
'You're both out of luck, I'm afraid,' Virginia pointed
out. 'Since Sam came in, Elliot hasn't been able to take his
eyes off her. His eyes are out on stalks looking at her.'
'Stop taking the mickey,' said Sam, embarrassed.
'This is no joke,' Virginia insisted. 'He's just given Emmet
Slattery a pint of Guinness with no head on it, all from
gazing over here at you, Sam. That's serious infatuation.
Emmet will murder him. He's very particular about his pint.'
It was a fabulous evening. Delphine got hilariously tipsy,
eventually ending up on a bar stool with her cardigan falling
provocatively off one freckled shoulder, telling a group of
exhausted Italian hill walkers who'd been hiking the Ring
of Kerry that she was deeply in love with Eugene who was
'de bestest man in de whole whorld. You don't need to go
to any campsite,' she slurred. 'Youz can schtay in my house
tonight. Eugene won't mind. He ish lovely.'

Sam rescued her, smiling at Elliot, who beamed back at
her. Lord, thought Sam, he was only about twenty-five and
a thing of beauty, a bronzed Californian love god. Maybe
she wasn't such a crabby old spinster after all.
It was after twelve when Hope dropped her back up at
the hotel and Sam felt exhausted, even though she'd drunk
very little. 'I'll bring my visitors to see you tomorrow,' she
promised Hope.
'We can have lunch in the garden,' Hope said. 'It's lovely
now. The hens have their own bit so you won't be stepping
carefully to avoid the chicken shit.'
Sam laughed. 'I never thought I'd hear you being so blase
about chicken shit.'
'I'm a country woman now,' Hope grinned. 'Mind you,
I've failed utterly to grow basil. My lettuce is lovely and the
cabbage is rampant, but when it comes to herbs, I'm useless.'
Sam kissed her on the cheek. 'Never, ever let me hear you
say you're useless again. You're survived on your own. Not
just survived,' she corrected herself, 'but flourished. We're
survivors, us Smith girls.'
'You said it,' Hope said.
She drove down the Manoir drive, deep in thought. She
hadn't been there for months. After the disastrous encounter
with Christy, she'd never come back. As she negotiated the
bends and crunched over the gravel, she thought of how
foolish she'd been to risk a wonderful marriage for something
so insubstantial with Christy. Yes, she'd been bored
and Matt had been so vague, so distant, that she'd felt neglected.
But that had been no reason to throw so much away.
She simply hadn't thought it through, Hope knew. It was
like Millie jumping in a puddle: fun for a moment, Millie
never thought about the consequences. Which was fine for
a child of nearly five, but not so intelligent for a woman
who was about to turn thirty-eight.
Hope gritted her teeth to stop herself crying. She couldn't
cry, she didn't have that luxury. She had to be strong.

Matt had never realized just how tough it was looking after
two small children until he had Millie and Toby on their
own in his rented apartment in Bath for an entire week. It
was one thing to look after them for a few hours, safe in
the knowledge that Hope would be back from the shops or
wherever soon, ready to take over expertly. It was quite
another to take care of, feed and entertain them all by
yourself for days at a time, with nobody else to take the
strain. For the first time, Matt began to have a new respect
for his wife. No wonder Hope had wanted some time to
herself when they'd moved to Redlion. After being a working
mother for years, suddenly becoming a stay-at-home one in
a rural area where she didn't know anyone, and, he admitted
guiltily, where her husband was caught up with his own
problems, must have been very difficult and frustrating.
Small children were enchanting but damn hard work.
Even more irritating was Millie's habit of criticizing everything
he did with her unblinking dark gaze. Used to thinking
of Millie as 'his' little girl, Matt was disconcerted by her
habit of telling him 'Mummy doesn't do it that way' ten
times a day.
So far, he'd discovered that he didn't put on socks the
way Mummy did, he didn't pour milk into cereal the way
Mummy did, and he definitely didn't know how to wash
hair without getting water in the eyes the way Mummy did.
After four days of this, he was nearly incandescent with
joy when Betsey invited the kids over to her place for the
afternoon to play with Ruby and Opal.
'Give you a chance to tidy things up in the office,' Betsey
said.
'Give me a chance to lie down and sleep,' said an exhausted
Matt.
That morning, the children were even more energetic than
ever. Millie decided she felt sick. She rushed into the bathroom
every five minutes to hang her head over the toilet
bowl and pretended to retch, which had Matt hysterical with
nerves in case she really was sick. The morning paper andthe post all sat unread on the kitchen table while Millie ran
back and forth to the bathroom.
When no vomit was forthcoming, Matt was thrilled, but
Millie wasn't, so she opened a tub of pickle from the fridge
and got most of that all over herself. Then she spilled the
rest into the toilet bowl and was looking into it happily
when her father appeared at the bathroom door with a
world-weary expression on his face.
'Sick,' she announced cheerfully, pointing at the mess.
'I'm a big girl now like Mummy.'
Matt's face was a picture as he realized what she was
saying.

Sam knew that Hope would kill her. 'Don't interfere,' she'd
warned on several occasions. But sometimes, Sam reflected,
you had to go with your gut instinct. Hope loved Matt and
needed him. At the same time, Sam was sure, in spite of her
reservations about him, that her bull-headed brother-in-law
adored his wife, but between the pair of them, they were
behaving like two immovable objects, both unyielding.
Well, Sam decided the morning before the wedding, the
time had come for action.
First, she phoned Dan at Judd's in Bath. He was delighted
to give her Matt's phone number.
'I've told him not to be a fool and to make it up with her
because I can tell he's not happy without Hope,' Dan said,
'but then, when has anybody been able to tell Matt anything?'
'There's
a first time for everything,' Sam said firmly.
Matt's phone nearly rang out before he picked it up,
sounding out of breath.
'Yes,' he gasped.
'I thought you weren't in,' Sam said.
'I was dressing Toby and Millie got at the shoe polish,'
Matt said. 'Her blue suede shoes are now blue and black,
and the kitchen floor is not much better.'
'She is a handful,' agreed Sam. 'I'm sure you know why

I'm phoning you, Matt,' she added, getting straight to the
point as usual. 'This has gone on too long and there's something
you should know . . .'
'Hope's pregnant,' interrupted Matt.
For once, Sam was speechless. 'How do you know? She
hasn't told anybody.'
'Millie's new game is pretending to get morning sickness,'
Matt explained.
'Oh. So what are you going to do about it?' demanded
Sam.
'Don't get on your high horse with me,' began Matt hotly.
'I don't have to listen to your bossing me around . . .' He
stopped abruptly. 'Sorry. You and I are like a broken record,
aren't we? Fighting is all we're good for.'
'Yeah, you're right, sorry,' Sam said. What was she fighting
with him for, anyway? The whole point of the conversation
was to sort things out for Hope.
'I love her, you know.'
Matt's simple declaration touched Sam's heart.
'I know,' she said. 'I do too, that's probably why you and
I fight so much. We have trouble sharing her.' She paused.
'Nothing happened with Christy. He flirted with her and she
was flattered, that was all. If she wasn't so naive and trusting,
she'd have told him to get lost.'
'I know that,' admitted Matt.
'And you're to blame too,' Sam went on. 'You pretty
much abandoned her in Kerry. She's made a life for herself
there but it was no thanks to you.'
'I know that too,' he said ruefully. 'I got so tied up in my
own problems that I neglected her. I thought she'd always
be waiting there for me, I took her for granted. That's no
excuse, I know, but I was going through a difficult time in
my life.'
'And now?'
'I'm going back,' Matt said simply. 'I need her, more than
she knows, to be honest.'
Sam felt tears prickling her eyes.

'What about your job, though? Hope loves Kerry, she'd
hate to leave, so how can you combine it all?'
That was when Matt told her his plan.

'Why did you pick a dress with thirty silk-covered buttons?'
joked Hope on the Saturday of Delphine's wedding, as her
fingers fumbled to fasten the tiny silk loops over the tiny
buttons.
'I wanted Eugene to suffer tonight when he unbuttons
me,' replied Delphine, her long red curls falling down her
back onto the buttons, adding to the difficulty. 'He has to
suffer to win me, you see, like the brave Celtic knights suffering
to get their hands on the lovely maidens, or whatever. I
can never remember the exact details of those old stories.'
'He'll fall asleep before he's half-way down your back,'
remarked Mary-Kate, arriving into the pink bedroom in
Kilnagoshell, scene of the pre-wedding party. 'Virginia is
bringing up some nibbles for us all to keep us going because
it's going to be hours before we're eating.'
'I can't eat or I'll burst out of the dress,' Delphine said.
'I want to be slim and virginal looking when Eddie says "I
bless the marriage of Delphine Eustacia Lavinia Margaret
Ryan and Eugene O'Neill...'"
'Delphine Eustacia Lavinia Margaret?' said Hope, awestruck.
'My
sister read a lot of romantic novels when she was
expecting Delphine,' revealed Mary-Kate. 'Delphine has no
idea that if it wasn't for me putting my foot down, Pauline
would have called her Marilyn Scarlett.'
Hope giggled so much she had to stop buttoning.
'Delphine is bad enough,' Delphine pointed out. 'Even
the registrar sniggered yesterday. You want to try being a
ten-year-old in a class of boys and girls with a name like
that. I wouldn't like to tell you the horrible rhymes they
came up with. Delphine rhymes with lots of things. When
Eugene and I have children, they're all going to be called
Mary and Tom, nice simple names.'


'I don't know,' Hope said dreamily, 'I like Rosalie these
days. And Rory. I like R names.'
Delphine and Virginia looked meaningfully at each other.
'For the baby?' asked Delphine.
Hope stared at them and realized they knew.
'Honestly, nothing's secret round here!' she said.
'Pouring all that wine into your weeping fig plant is not
keeping a secret,' said Delphine.
'Not having even one glass of champagne on Delphine's
hen night was an even bigger giveaway,' Mary-Kate added.
'And although I know you like chocolate, I didn't think you
liked it enough to make your midriff swell quite so much.'
Hope made a noise that was half sob, half laugh with
relief.
'How long have you known?'
'For ages,' said Delphine. 'Don't cry. I spent half an hour
making up your eyes, you'll ruin them.'
'Does Matt know?' inquired Mary-Kate gently.
'You're as bad as Sam,' said Hope exasperated. 'She never
stops going on about it.'
'You have to tell him. He's flying over with the children
later. Will you tell him at the airport?' asked Delphine.
'Sam is going to the airport to pick them up,' Hope said,
avoiding their eyes.
'Fine,' said Mary-Kate. 'Delphine, you know how much
you hate people who interfere,' she warned. 'We can't
interfere.'
'I hate people who interfere in my life,' grumbled
Delphine. 'This is different.'
'Baby sandwiches,' announced Virginia, appearing at the
door with Dinky at her heels and a plate of tiny cucumber
sandwiches in one hand.
'Is this a conspiracy?' demanded Hope. 'Baby sandwiches?'
Virginia
bit her lip. 'I meant that I cut the crusts off,' she
said. 'I take it the news is now out in the open?'
'There's going to be an advert in the local paper,' Hope

said wryly. 'Yes, I'm pregnant. No, Matt doesn't know. No,
I don't want to tell him but Yes I will. Eventually.'
'Fine,' said Virginia. 'Tea anyone?'

'You hold her,' said Sally, thrusting a wriggling Alison into
Jamie's arms. 'You're her godfather after all.'
'I thought that meant I gave her money on her birthday,
I didn't know I had to actually do anything,' Jamie grumbled,
clutching inexpertly onto his niece who immediately stopped
sobbing and smiled, happy now that she was causing the
maximum difficulty. She pulled her uncle's hair joyously,
causing him to yelp.
Everyone else ignored him, too busy watching the carousel
for their luggage.
'Is that your case, Dom?' asked Laurence, as a battered
old leather case appeared in front of them.
'Er no,' said Dominic. 'Er, yes, yes, grab it!'
After ten minutes, the entire Connell family had collected
their belongings and had hired a taxi to take them to
Redlion.
'Kilnagoshell House,' said Sally, who had realized that
once the three Connell brothers got together, they reverted
to childhood and were incapable of looking after themselves.
No wonder poor Virginia was so capable. 'I don't have
precise directions but. . .'
'No bother,' said the taxi driver, waving a laid-back hand.
'I have a vague idea of where it is.'
'Well, if that's all right with you,' said Sally, used to taxi
drivers who wanted a postcode before they even started the
engine.

Sam saw Millie before she saw her brother-in-law. Millie
was running, pigtails flying, eagerly looking for her mother,
eyes scanning the waiting crowds at the airport.
'Millie, hello,' yelled Sam.
Millie ran at her like a little hurricane and threw herself
into Sam's arms. 'Where's Mummy?' she gasped.


'Mummy's waiting for you,' Sam whispered into Millie's
dark hair. 'She's helping Auntie Delphine get married.'
'I'm going to be a bridesmaid,' crowed Millie. 'I've got
my outfit. Daddy's got it in my case.'
'Hello Sam.'
It was Daddy.
Hoisting Millie up into her arms, Sam greeted Matt. Normally,
they gave each other cool smiles, the smiles of people
who were wary of each other. But today, Matt beamed at
her and kissed her warmly on the cheek.
'Hiya Sam, lovely to see you.'
'You look pretty smooth, Mr Parker,' Sam grinned at
him. 'New suit?'
Matt grinned wickedly. 'It's a special day, I have to look
my best.'
'Auntie Ham,' said Toby from low down.
Matt hoisted him up so he could be kissed.
Sam lifted her nephew high in the air. 'We better rush or
we'll be late. Do you want to drive, Toby?'
'No me, me, me drive!' yelled Millie.

'Sam's taking a long time to come from the airport,' said
Hope, staring at her watch.
'Don't panic,' said Virginia. 'The blessing ceremony
doesn't start until two, it's only a quarter to now.'
'I know, but Millie will never forgive me if she doesn't
get to be a flower girl,' said Millie's mother ruefully. She
looked out the drawing-room window for her Metro, which
Sam was driving from the airport.
'Looks like more guests have turned up,' she said, as a
taxi disgorged a group of people, complete with suitcases.
Three tall, chestnut-haired young men, a dark-haired woman
and a small child with bright red curls stood on the drive
looking around. 'I didn't think any of them were staying
here, though,' she added.
Virginia crossed the room to look out. 'Oh gosh!' she
shrieked. 'It's my family. I can't believe it. They never told


me they were coming.' And she shot out the front door to
welcome Sally, Dominic, Jamie, Laurence and little Alison.
'You never told me you were coming!' she yelled.
'It was a surprise to celebrate your new career as the
landlady of a five-star B & B,' said Sally.
'The inspectors haven't been in yet,' said Virginia,
delightedly hugging her family.
'But you'll get the top rating, we know it,' Dominic told
his mother confidently.
'What's going on here?' asked Laurence, looking around
at the people in finery who were milling round excitedly.
'It's a wedding, my friend Delphine's getting married,'
Virginia said. 'It will be lovely to have you here. Oh,
Eugene's here with Eddie. It's time for the blessing. I do so
wish Sam was here. Millie's meant to be a flower girl and
she'll kill us all if she doesn't get to be one.'
'This little poppet could be a flower girl,' Mary-Kate
said emerging from the house with a tray of glasses full of
champagne.
Alison beamed adorably up at all the adults and momentarily
stopped pulling her Uncle Jamie's hair.
'We don't want to gate-crash,' Sally said, 'I didn't know
the wedding was on today. I thought that was yesterday.'
'Only the civil ceremony,' yelled Delphine, sticking her
head out of an upstairs window. 'The more the merrier, I
say. So nice to meet you. I'm the bride,' she added unnecessarily,
as she was the only one with a wreath of white flowers
on her head.

Pauline Ryan checked her reflection in the passenger seat
mirror once again. Her lipstick was on fine and there was
none on her teeth, but she was conscious of a sense that
something wasn't quite right. Looking down at her pale blue
lap, Pauline suddenly recognized the culprit: her second-best
suit, the blue one she'd bought for a distant relative's wedding
five years ago. Despite her best efforts to subdue her
guilty feelings, a big wave of guilt kept bobbing up in her

mind, like a buoy floating in the harbour. She should have
bought a new outfit after all, she thought crossly.
This blue thing had been perfectly suitable until last week,
which was when people began to stop her in the street and
say how thrilled they were to get an invite to Delphine's
wedding, and wasn't Eugene a lovely man and what a great
idea to have the reception in Kilnagoshell House. Pauline,
who had been planning to grace the wedding with her presence
after all, was taken aback. In her eyes, this tawdry hole
in the corner affair was one which would undoubtedly be
shunned by everyone. Her second best outfit would be more than good enough. And now everyone from Miss Murphy
to Belle Maguire was gaily telling her she must be proud of
Delphine and how they were all in a dither over what to
wear because you could never rely on the weather not to
turn nasty.
Suddenly, the second best suit wasn't good enough, but
when this really hit Pauline, on Friday, it was too late to do
anything about it.
She couldn't shame herself by nipping slyly into Lucille's
for an outfit. The whole town would find out and she'd be
humiliated if they realized that the mother of the bride hadn't
bothered to get herself a new suit.
'It's a fine house, isn't it?' said her husband, Fonsie,
nervously as he drove up the winding, tree-lined drive to
Kilnagoshell. He hated all this fighting. If only he was able
to stand up to Pauline. He'd have loved to have told her to
stop her nonsense and that he was going to his beloved
daughter's wedding, church or no church. But Fonsie was a
mild man who stood in awe of his wife.
'It's nice enough,' said Pauline grudgingly, looking at the
gracious facade where a rambling rose blossomed sweetly
over the portico.
Fonsie parked the car and got out, suddenly eager to see
Delphine and hug her. He loved her to bits and thought
Eugene was a fine fellow. Of course, Pauline didn't know
he'd met Eugene. She'd flip her lid if she did. Fonsie slammed

the car door. He was fed up with his wife, and that was the
truth.
'I'm going in to Delphine,' he announced.
If the car had spoken to her, Pauline couldn't have been
more surprised. Fonsie always did what she wanted and
right now, she wanted to mingle and see who'd turned up.
But he was gone, striding into the big house as if he was
the squire himself.
Pauline walked around the side of the house to the rose
garden and was astonished. There, enjoying one of the most
beautiful days of the whole year, was half of Redlion, laughing
and chattering and having a whale of a time.
And there, she realized with shock, was Father McTeague,
laughing his head off with his flock. Pauline's chest inflated
like an angry bullfrog, then deflated just as suddenly. What
could she say? He was a man of God, he knew the rules,
surely he wouldn't be there if he thought Delphine would
suffer eternal damnation for marrying a divorced man?
'Pauline,' he roared, spotting her. 'Come on over here.
We thought the mother of the bride would be too busy to
spend time with us mere guests.'
Half-smiling weakly, Pauline allowed herself to be led
into the group, who all congratulated her on the whole event.
'I can't wait to see her dress,' Miss Murphy sighed romantically.
'Mrs Connell tells me she looks like a fairy princess,
isn't that so? You must be so pleased?'
All eyes were on Pauline and for one uncomfortable
moment, she wondered did they know that she'd opposed
this Godless wedding. No, they couldn't possibly. Giving an
airy wave she'd copied from watching Queen Elizabeth on
television, Pauline sighed. 'Lovely isn't the word,' she said.
'We're delighted, of course.'
Father McTeague let his breath out and smiled. 'I knew
you would be thrilled,' he said, his eyes twinkling. 'Now, I
don't think you've met our visitors from London: Sandra,
Reenie and Pammy Turner.'

'You look beautiful, Delphine,' said Fonsie, staring at the
vision of loveliness that was his only child. Her dress flowed
out into a full skirt from a tight bodice. Pale cream with
hints of gold thread embroidered in the bodice and bottom
of the skirt, it was a glorious dress and Delphine, her hair
flowing in luxuriant curls around her shoulders, looked
indeed like a fairy princess.
'I'm so sorry about your mother but she's here. I'm sorry
I didn't stand up to her,' he said, looking down miserably.
'Nonsense, Dad,' said Delphine kissing him softly on the
cheek. 'You're here now and that's all that matters. Will you
give me away?'

'Mummy!' yelled Millie, running into the hall in Kilnagoshell
House with her flower girl dress on but only half-buttoned.
Auntie Sam couldn't do them properly in the back of the
car because it was so bumpy.
'Darling Millie!' Hope swept her daughter up joyously.
'I was scared you wouldn't make it. Auntie Delphine is just
ready now.'
She spun Millie around and did up her buttons. Then,
she picked up the coronet of creamy roses that she'd had
waiting for Millie, fixed it on with hair clips, and handed
Millie her posy of flowers. 'Ready?'
Millie nodded excitedly.
Hope peered into the hall mirror to see if she looked
terrible in her amethyst jacket and trousers. The trousers
were too tight and Hope had had to leave the top button
undone. She just hoped they didn't fall to the ground at
some vital moment, leaving everyone staring at her big
knickers and pop socks, a dazzlingly elegant combination.
'Where's Toby?' she asked Millie.
'He's with Daddy.'
'Daddy! What's Daddy doing here?' Hope gasped.
'Coming to the wedding. I was invited, wasn't I?' said
Matt. He stood at the door, a tall dark figure with the sun
behind him. He'd had his hair cropped too short and he

looked tired, but even that couldn't disguise his fierce glamour.
And he was all dressed up, in his best suit and the tie
Hope had searched Bath for on the occasion of his fortieth
birthday. He looked so dear to her that all she wanted to
do was rush into his arms and never let go.
'Matt!' squealed Delphine delightedly, coming down the
stairs with her father by her side and Mary-Kate bringing
up the rear. 'Right. Are we all ready?'
There was no time to say anything. Millie was stationed
behind Auntie Delphine and Mary-Kate and Matt and
Hope had to rush outside to take their places in the rose
garden.
The traditional musicians who played in the Widows
struck up the wedding march, which sounded odd on fiddle,
accordion and bodhran, but no sound had ever sounded
sweeter to Delphine or to Hope.
Delphine stared at her dear Eugene, standing proudly
there in his rumpled suit, waiting for her.
Hope stood beside Matt, feeling his hand clutching hers
in a vice-like grip. Beside them stood Sam and Toby, who
was tired and was leaning against Auntie Ham's knees.
Matt leaned over to Hope. 'I love you,' he whispered.
Hope squeezed his hand even more tightly. All the worry,
all the anger seemed to have melted away as she held his
hand. 'Please,' was all she could say for fear of floods of
tears bursting out.
Virginia stood with her family, little Alison asleep in her
arms.
'How do you do that?' asked Jamie in astonishment.
'She's a little terror with everyone else.'
'She knows she's with her granny.' Virginia smiled down
at the little girl and stroked her russet curls.

There wasn't a dry eye in the house when Eugene finally
leaned down and kissed his bride firmly on the mouth. Even
Pauline could be seen to poke around in her handbag for a
tissue.

'Have one of mine,' said Mary-Kate, handing one of a
travel pack to her sister.
'Glad you came, Pauline?'
Pauline sniffed yes.
'And there'll be no more arguments, right?'
Pauline nodded again.
'Great. Now come into the house with me: as mother of
the bride you get to help supervise the catering. We don't
want to ruin your reputation, do we?'
'It's a pity Nicole wasn't here,' Reenie said, patting her
eyes with a tissue. 'She'd have loved it.'
'She would have,' Sandra agreed, fanning herself with
her handbag. 'You are having a nice time, Mum, aren't
you?'
'Nice time?' said Reenie. 'That doesn't even describe it.
I'm having a grand time. By the way, I had a chat with that
nice priest and I told him that my family are long gone but
I'd love to trace any other relatives. He's going to give me
a hand on Monday. You never know what we might find.'
'Nicole would love that,' Sandra said. 'But what she'd
really love is to find her dad.'
Reenie patted her daughter's hand. 'There's a time for
everything, Sandra, it'll all work out, don't worry. And you
did a great job rearing her on your own, anyway, father or
no father.'
'Really?' Sandra looked astonished.
'Really.'
While Delphine and Eugene were hugging and kissing
everyone, Matt pulled Hope away onto the lawn at the front
of the house. Sam, watching and hoping, took Millie and
Toby by the hands and suggested finding Dinky for a game.
'Why did you come back today?' Hope asked, still holding
Mart's hand tightly.
'Because I've been so stupid,' Matt said. 'I missed you so
much, you wouldn't believe it.'
She thought of the sleepless nights and the painful weeks
when she thought she'd never be happy again. 'Yes I would.

I've missed you too. I thought you'd never come back to
me. And I couldn't beg, you understand that.'
'I couldn't understand that for a long time,' he admitted
slowly. 'I thought of the old Hope who'd never even start an argument and who'd be first to apologize even when it
wasn't her fault rather than have a fight lurking in the air.
To be honest, I thought you did love him, I was sure that
was why you didn't phone me every hour, begging me to
come back.'
'Oh Matt,' she turned to face him. 'Nothing happened
with Christy. I flirted with him, that was all, and I was too
stupid to let him know it was just flirting. I didn't love him,
I didn't care one iota about him.'
'You're an innocent,' Matt said, stroking her face gently.
He sat her down on the lichen-covered stone seat. 'I knew
it all along, really, but I was hurt, my pride was hurt. I
couldn't understand how you'd do that to me and I couldn't
understand why you didn't beg me to come back.'
'I've changed,' she interrupted. 'If I'd begged you to come
back, I would have hated myself for begging and you would
have hated me for what you thought went on. You had to
forgive me because you'd worked it out for yourself,' she
said earnestly.
'When I began to think about it, I did understand a bit,'
Matt replied. 'I was pretty shitty to you. I'd left you to
cope with everything when we moved here and then I was
surprised when having to cope changed you.'
'For the better, I hope,' she said. 'I relied on you too
much, now I've learned to rely on myself. Which reminds
me, you never even told me the book wasn't working. If you
had, I'd have understood why you were so . ..'
'Hard to live with?' Matt supplied, wincing. 'I didn't want
to tell anyone that. After all these years of thinking I could
do anything, it was a humbling experience to find that I
couldn't. I'm sorry. It turned me into a total bastard. It
wasn't fair on you. I neglected you and the kids.' His eyes
were pained. 'What was killing me was that I was a failure

and that you'd soon see I was a failure. I couldn't bear that.
I brought you all this way to a strange place, left you alone
to deal with it all and I failed at my part of the bargain.'
'You're anything but a failure, Matt,' Hope said, eyes
shining. 'You're the man I love, you're not perfect but you're
no failure. I'm not perfect myself, you know,' she laughed.
'I know. But I still neglected you and I promise I won't
do it again. Especially not now.' He put one hand gently on
Hope's swelling belly.
'It's your baby,' she blurted out.
'I know,' he said. 'I know you wouldn't have gone off
with another man, I should have given you the benefit of
the doubt. Seeing you with him made me freak out and made
me feel more like a failure than ever. I wanted to roar off
in a rage and get away from everything. I was running away
from life not working out here as much as running away
from you.' He hung his head. 'If I'd acted sensibly, none of
this would have happened.'
'But. . .' Hope was puzzled. 'How did you know I was
pregnant?'
'My first inkling was due to Millie thinking that morning
sickness is a sign of being a grown up,' he said wryly.
He told her all about the pickle jar contents in the toilet
bowl. 'And,' Matt added, 'don't go mad, but Sam phoned
me yesterday to tell me to cop on and the pregnancy was
discussed.'
Hope rolled her eyes. 'I've spent months telling her not
to get involved,' she said. 'I'm amazed.'
'Sam loves you.'
'That's not why I'm amazed. I'm stunned that the pair of
you could bury your differences for long enough to talk on
the phone.'
'We managed it. She's great with the kids, isn't she? They
went mad when they saw her at the airport. It's no joke
looking after them. I don't know how you do it,' he said. 'I
think we'll have to get a nanny so that when we're off travelling,
the kids can be looked after.'

Hope just looked at him. 'What do you mean get a nanny? We're broke. We can barely afford a babysitter. Have you
got your job back at Judd's?'
'It's a long story,' he said. 'Adam is back and to be honest
I'd find it hard to go back to working for him after so long
running the show. So I won't be going back. The only option,
under normal circumstances, would be to set up my own
agency.'
Hope looked anxious, missing the reference to under normal
circumstances. That would cost a fortune. How would
they cope? 'What do you want to do?'
Matt could barely contain himself. 'My great novel was
a bit of a disaster but when I was in Bath, missing you, I
started writing this comic novel for fun. It's not literary or
anything, but I enjoyed doing it.'
Hope was still staring at him, not sure where this was all
going.
'Dan persuaded me to send it off to an agent. I thought
he was mad,' Matt commented, 'but I did it, expecting to
hear nothing back, to be honest. The day that Millie played
morning sickness, I dropped the kids off at Betsey's and went
back to the flat to open the post and there it was. A letter
from my agent.' He grinned. 'I love saying those words: "my
agent". Anyway, a letter from my agent begging me to phone
because I had forgotten to put my phone number on the
original letter. I phoned up and you won't believe it, he
loved the book and he was so excited that he'd already asked
a publisher to have a look at it.'
Matt took both Hope's hands in his and looked at her
gravely. 'They've offered me a quarter of a million pounds
for three books,' he said. 'I've done it, Hope. I'm a writer.
It's worked!'
'Oh Matt,' wailed Hope. 'That's so wonderful, I'm so
proud of you.' She threw her arms round him and kissed
him madly.
'We've got two productions on the go,' whooped Matt,
patting her belly.


'Just one thing,' Hope said, suddenly anxious. This was
a vital point, but they had to discuss it. 'I'd like to stay in
Redlion. It's very important to me. Do you think we can
manage that?'
'Leave this oasis of creativity?' said Matt. 'Not likely.'

The first moment Nicole realized that her life had changed
inexorably, was when she stepped out of the apartment
building on Wednesday afternoon to see a crowd of at least
fifteen photographers hoisting their cameras in the air and
start clicking madly. Her mobile held to her ear as she spoke
to her mother, Nicole looked blindly around to see who the
photographers were so keen to photograph. But there was
nobody behind her, no superstar in dark glasses attempting
to be anonymous. This frantic activity was for her, Nicole
Turner.
'Nicole, how does it feel to be tipped to reach number one
with your first single?' yelled a female reporter, balancing a
tape recorder in one hand and an enormous handbag in the
other. 'Will you be phoning Lorelei to tell her or are you
still feuding?'
Several more tape recorders were shoved under Nicole's
nose.
Nicole blinked in shock and was relieved to feel Isya from
Bob Fellowes's office grab her by the arm and haul her off
for a quiet word.
'Nicole will be back in a moment,' announced Talia,
the tall, commanding publicity woman from LGBK who'd
virtually been Nicole's shadow for the previous two
weeks of non-stop interviews and performances. 'We've been
trying to reach you all morning to tell you,' she said to
Nicole.
'We've left so many messages on your mobile,' pointed
out Isya.
'I didn't turn it on until just now,' Nicole said, who'd
spent her longed-for morning off in bed sleeping off a hectic
two weeks of travelling. It had been her first time off inweeks. 'I got such a shock when I came out and saw all of
these people .. .'
'We only just got here and we didn't think there'd be any
press activity here,' Talia admitted. 'I don't know how they
got your home address. We have a photocall set up for
tomorrow morning's breakfast television show, I thought
that would generate the most interest.'
'But why are they here anyway?' asked Nicole, still in
shock. 'The single was only just released on Monday. It's
not even in the chart, how can they be talking about the
number one slot already.'
Talia allowed herself to smile with pride that all her hard
work had paid off. 'The sales have been incredible,' she said.
'We've got the mid-weeks and "Honey, (Don't You Know)
I Need You?" has had 50,000 over the counter sales in just
two days. That's fantastic. If the single keeps selling this
way, you'll definitely be number one and with one of the
biggest sales figures ever.'
Nicole could barely take it in.
'Now,' said Talia, glancing at the waiting press, 'I want
you to smile, pose and tell them how thrilled you are.'
'Don't mention Lorelei,' begged Isya. 'She is with the
same management company as you.'
'And she's a right bitch,' Nicole said quietly.
'It's time to be magnanimous in triumph,' advised Talia.
'Lorelei's single was released on Monday too and according
to the mid-weeks, the only place it sold well was round the
corner from where her mother lives.'
Nicole allowed herself to grin. Served bloody Lorelei
right.
She posed for the photographers and Talia said they had
time to answer four or five questions. Nicole smiled and told
everyone how thrilled she was when asked. Suddenly the
question from hell arrived.
'You're half Indian but you never discuss your heritage.
Do you think you're copping out of half your heritage by
making yourself white?' demanded one journalist.

Talia and Isya both gulped but Nicole was ready for him.
'I've never met my dad,' she said simply, 'that's why I
don't know anything about Indian culture, but I'd love to
change that. I'm willing to learn, I'm proud of what I am a
little bit of everything.' She smiled that hundred watt smile
at them all.
'Interview over,' snapped Talia, whisking Nicole away to
the waiting limo.
'You handled that well,' she said admiringly.
Nicole shrugged. 'It was going to come up some time, so
let's see what they make of that. I talked it over with Darius,
my mum and my gran. We've nothing to be ashamed of and
who knows, maybe I'll find my dad after all. I'd like that.'
Talia stared at her. There was no doubt about it, Nicole
Turner was very different from the usual girl-with-a-fabulous-voice.
Refreshingly different.
'Right,' she said. 'Next,' she consulted her list, 'we've got
two press interviews, four radio drive-time interviews, and
you've got to get all dolled up like a dog's dinner for the
movie premiere tonight. The stylist has a load of great dresses
for you to try on, so let's get moving, OK?'
'Yeah,' said Nicole, suddenly not able to stop grinning.
Her single was selling brilliantly. How wonderful was that?
Even if she didn't get to the unbelievable number one slot, she'd never forget the thrill of this day.

Backstage at Top Of The Pops, Nicole looked around her
simple dressing room.
'Are you sure there's nothing you want?' asked a beautiful
girl whose job it was to make sure that artists had everything
their demanding little hearts desired.
Nicole, thinking of the horror stories of singers who
insisted on making everyone's life a nightmare with their
demands, smiled warmly at the girl.
'The only thing would be some lemon tea and honey for
my throat, if that wouldn't be too much trouble,' she said
politely.

The beautiful girl sighed with pleasure. If only they were
all this easy. When that cow Lorelei had been in, she'd
insisted on taking over four dressing rooms for her entourage,
wanted six bottles of Krug in each room and had
demanded that a top restaurant send over an organic fish
dinner at great expense, which she had then only used to
stub her cigarettes out in. Nobody had been too upset that
Lorelei's single had flopped so spectacularly.
Darius, lounging at the door unnoticed by either of them,
looked at Nicole proudly. She was incredible. The stunning
looks, the voice of a seductive angel, and she was so sweet
to people. Underneath that tough veneer she tried to keep
up, she was as soft as butter. And she was going to be a
huge star, he was sure of it.
Nicole understood that she wouldn't make it to the top
by playing the prima donna. She knew, unlike lots of other
people he'd worked with, that carving a career out as a
successful star meant hard work, utter commitment and professionalism.
So many of the people he met on the scene
seemed to think that the only way to the top was to behave
appallingly, assuming that rudeness, impossible demands
and an ever-growing entourage made them more star-like.
In Darius's experience, the bigger the entourage, the bigger
the ego.
'Isn't she lovely?' said the Top of The Pops girl, coming
out of the dressing room.
'She is,' Darius agreed, making Nicole look up in delight.
'You're here!' she said, springing lightly to her feet. She
pulled him into the room, shut the door and locked it. 'I've
missed you.'
He'd been in Sweden with a new band who were working
on their album with the top Swedish producers, so he and
Nicole hadn't seen each other all week.
They clung together, moulding their bodies into one.
Darius's mouth fastened onto Nicole's eagerly.
'I've missed you so much,' he said hoarsely, holding her
tightly to him as if he was afraid to let her out of his arms.

'Oh me too,' Nicole said, resting her head against his
chest. It felt so nice there. She'd had such an incredible week,
what with the single breaking all records for a debut, but in
the midst of all the interviews and performances and signing
sessions, Nicole had longed for a quiet evening with Darius
where they could cuddle up on her new couch and talk and
end up in her big bed to make love.
'Bob Fellowes is waiting outside and Sam's coming later,'
Darius said. 'She's so proud of you. So am I,' he added
gently. 'You're going to be a big star, darling.'
'Just promise me one thing,' Nicole said.
'Anything.'
'You'll be there for me?'
'I promise.'

It was amazing how much junk one person could accumulate
in just a few months, Sam thought as she hoisted the cardboard
archive box upstairs to her apartment. She'd cleared
her desk at Titus that afternoon and she was sure she'd
rupture something from the weight of the junk she'd had to
bring home.
'All that minimalist, clean desk policy has to have a down
side,' laughed Lydia when she saw Sam going through the
overflowing drawers in her desk.
'Yeah, it does,' Sam groaned. 'You shove junk in the desk
instead of leaving it on top.'
'See you tomorrow,' Lydia said as she left. 'And don't forget to dress up.'
Lydia was organizing a leaving party for her the next
evening. Sam couldn't remember the last time she'd had a
leaving party.
In the apartment, she checked her e-mail and was
delighted to get a chatty one from Hope.

Hi Sam,
Hope you're well. We're all wonderful here. Matt
is in fabulous form and he's going to be in London

next week to sign contracts with the publishers. I
hope you can meet up. Virginia and Mary-Kate are
driving to Dublin with him. They've decided to fly
to Germany and travel round B & Bs to see what
standards Virginia should be aiming for. Mary-Kate
says she can't wait. She hasn't had a holiday in
years. Virginia keeps saying it's because Mary-Kate
won't leave Redlion in case the whole place falls
apart without her!
We're minding Dinky while Virginia is away,
which has Millie in utter delight. She's mad to get a
dog and I'm not sure if that's a good idea until the
baby's born. Dogs can get jealous of babies, they
say. Mind you, Matt's keen on a dog too. He says
we should get a male dog to balance out the sexes
thing. My latest scan shows that the baby's a girl
(we like Rosalie as a name, what do you think?) and
he says that there'll be two males as opposed to
three females unless we get a male dog to balance
things'. Honestly, what is he like?
We're going out to dinner with Eugene and
Delphine tonight. They're back from honeymoon
and Delphine is mad to show off her tan. My other
bit of good news comes courtesy of Delphine, who
says that slimy Christy has left the hotel for good.
He carried on like he owned the hotel but even
managers are expendable. On the phone, Delphine
said it was something to do with a nasty scene with
a guest's girlfriend round about the time you were
over. There was some talk of a law suit and the
owners fired him. I'm not surprised. I'll have to drag
her into the restaurant loo tonight to get the full
story from her.
How are Reenie, Sandra and Pammy? Everyone
here loved them and says they have to come back
again. And we'd all love to meet Nicole. Isn't it
wonderful the way her single is still number one?

never off the radio here, so her only problem if she
came here is that she'd he mobbed walking down
the street.
Do phone soon, I haven't spoken to you in ages,
Love Hope.

Sam smiled as she turned the computer off. It was wonderful
that everything had worked out for dear Hope. Sam couldn't
help wishing that things had worked out for her too. Still,
she scooped up Tabitha from the floor and kissed her, she
had the cats and her new company. She'd keep herself busy,
that was the trick. When the cats were fed, she decided to
drop across the road to see Felicity and George in the Greenwich
Emporium. They'd loved her ideas for making their
business profitable and were her first clients in Spike Solutions.
She'd spent ages trying to think up a name for the
new company and it was only when Spike had climbed onto
the table and lain down on the paperwork that Sam had
given in.
She picked up her notes, put them in her briefcase, and
left the apartment. It was a warm evening and as Sam opened
the front gate, she looked automatically at Morgan's house.
The sign was down now. It was sold. She wondered where
he was.
George and Felicity were run off their feet as it was Thursday
evening. After fifteen minutes discussing her plan, they
said they'd have to run because they were nearly fully
booked.
'Stay and eat,' insisted George.
'No,' said Sam. 'I won't be very cost effective if I keep
eating into your profits.'
'Sit,' commanded George. 'A carafe of red?'
Sam forked up rocket salad and read her notes, stopping
only to put down the fork and take another sip of wine. The
restaurant was buzzing, mainly couples gazing deep into
each other's eyes. Felicity and George waved at her whenever
they passed, which somehow made her feel even more alone.


Her notes began to blur as she thought back over the past
few weeks. So much had happened in her professional life.
She'd undergone a total revolution work-wise, yet her private
life was as unchanged as ever. She didn't know how
she'd have coped without Spike and Tabitha to go home to.
Their feline adoration made life bearable and when she felt
down, she gathered Tabitha up in her arms and stroked the
tabby cat until Spike appeared, outraged at being unloved.
'Oh my goodness,' gasped Felicity, rushing past with wine
and a bottle opener.
Sam looked up to see Felicity blushing as pink as the
bottle of rose she was carrying. Sam knew only one person
who had that effect on Felicity.
Morgan stood behind her. Large as life and instantly
making people look up in the crowded restaurant.
In shock, Sam spilled her wine. It dripped ruby red all
over the tablecloth, looking like a bullet wound in a bad
movie. She could only stare at it, feeling her pulse rocketing
up to marathon-running level in an instant.
'I'll get a cloth,' said Felicity and whisked off.
Sam looked up at Morgan. He was tanned and healthy
looking, as if he'd just stepped off a plane from somewhere
hot. He was wearing his wrecked old jeans and a soft grey
shirt that revealed some of the strong chest that Sam sometimes
dreamed about. His hair was shorter, though still a
million miles away from a short back and sides. But his face
was the same: the hawk nose giving him the look of some
medieval conquistador, the narrowed treacly eyes surveying
her. If he'd turned up on a crusader horse with a broadsword
in one hand, Sam wouldn't have been at all surprised.
'May I sit down?'
She waved at him to do so. She wasn't being rude: it was
just that she couldn't find words. Finally, her voice came
back to her.
'How have you been?' she said, knowing she sounded
incredibly distant but not able to help herself. She was too
stunned by his appearance to say anything intelligent.

'I've been miserable,' he announced. 'Miserable as hell
and it's all your fault.' A couple of people looked round.
Sam was still mute.
'That's why I'm here: to take it out on you, Ms Smith.'
He got to his feet, and then sank to his knees. Everyone was
now looking. People didn't get on their knees in front of
other people much these days, certainly not in restaurants.
Sam stared at him, shocked.
'It's all her fault, you see,' Morgan announced even more
loudly, for the benefit of the audience, who had now all
stopped pretending to eat and were watching happily.
'You're prickly, you boss me around, you think my taste
in clothes is execrable.'
Sam flushed with each remark.
'But despite all that, and despite the fact that you seem
to think I'm the least discriminating lover since Casanova,
I'm crazy about you.'
Sam wasn't sure she could have heard him right.
'Did you get that?' Morgan asked the couple next door
who were listening so shamelessly that they'd moved their
chairs to get a better view.
'Oh yes,' said the woman, admiringly. 'She bosses you
around but you like it?'
'Not like it so much,' said Morgan in considering tones,
'but I love her, so you see I can cope with it.'
'Aaah,' went up the cry around the restaurant.
'Not too much bossing around,' insisted the male half of
the couple.
'Not too much,' agreed Morgan. 'Just a little bit because
then, we can fight. I can show her that I am in charge,
naturally, being a man, and then,' he gazed at Sam with a
look so hot it could have scorched all the linen in the restaurant,
'we can make up. Which is the best bit,' he breathed.
Sam was glad he could breathe: she couldn't.
'Making up is the best bit, isn't it?' he said, moving closer
to her. 'I'm getting too old for this,' he said as his knees
creaked. 'My joints aren't up to it.'


'Cod liver oil is great for that,' volunteered a woman at
the table on the other side.
'Do you want to make up?' said Morgan. He was so
close, she could smell the sweet mintiness of his breath and
it reminded her of the first time they met.
'I'm sorry I got the wrong idea about Maggie,' she gasped.
'Maggie is wonderful but she thinks it's acceptable to
have a crush on her stepfather - it's very embarrassing, not
to mention inappropriate in this day and age seeing as I'm
her stepdad,' Morgan said. 'She does it to play Val and
me off against each other, and you walked in at the wrong
time.'
'I'm so sorry,' Sam said again.
'Stop saying sorry,' Morgan commanded. 'I'm not used
to hearing you say it.'
She laughed and slapped him playfully on the arm.
'Oh, hit me again, I like it,' he growled.
Then he leaned forward and kissed her so hard that Sam
could feel every inch of her body quivering with lust.
Only the sound of applause made them draw apart.
'Show's over,' said Morgan, getting creakily to his feet.
He pulled Sam up from her seat. 'We're going home to make
up.'
'George, Felicity, I owe you for dinner...' began Sam
helplessly.
'It's fine,' said George, looking like a cat who'd got the
cream.
'But I want to . . .'
'Shoo,' beamed Felicity.
'Don't come back until you're married,' yelled an elderly
man near the restaurant door.
Morgan shoved the door open and they were on the street,
the sounds of everyone clapping and whooping behind them.
'What did you do that for?' gasped Sam, feeling her heartbeat
get back to normal.
Morgan took her hand in his and Sam's heartbeat raced
again.







'To shock you into realizing how I feel about you. If I'd met you on the street, you would have gone all formal and
behaved like the perfectly in control MD.'
'I wouldn't,' she protested.
'You would,' he insisted. He took a deep breath. 'It's
taken me a long time to tell you but I've been attracted to
you ever since I met you. You came into my life like this
raging fury, a small blonde dynamo who wrenched my stereo
plug out and gave me a bruise the size of a melon on my
shin.' He pulled up his jeans to show her the spot.
'Big baby,' she retorted, 'I was only wearing espadrilles.
It hurt me much more than it hurt you.'
'Possibly.'
This time, his arm went round her shoulders and it felt
only natural for Sam to slip her free arm around his waist
as they walked.
'You are totally different from any other woman I've ever
met,' Morgan continued.
'Is that good or bad?' she asked.
'Good,' he replied.
They crossed the road and ended up standing outside
Sam's apartment building, right beside Morgan's old house.
'I couldn't believe you'd sold it,' she said, gazing up at
the beautifully restored house.
'I haven't. The sale fell through. I've decided to live here.
If I can find the right person to live in with me.'
Sam felt a quiver of excitement run down her spine.
'And I found your apology,' he added. 'It had been shoved
in a drawer. I think I'll have it framed. And enlarged.'
Sam laughed.
'You know, for a woman who's supposed to be cool and
make calm decisions, you're very hot-headed, Ms Smith,' he
continued. 'You jumped to all sorts of conclusions when you
came in that night of Maggie's party. You thought I was
some ageing lothario when all I was doing was giving up
my home to my stepdaughter for the night. And you thought
that Maggie was my girlfriend.'

'You never told me the truth,' objected Sam. 'If you'd
given me all the facts, it would have been different.'

'At first, I'd just got divorced and had spent months giving
people the facts,' Morgan said with a shrug. 'I wanted to be
Mr Anonymous and steer a wide berth away from women.
Until this fiery next-door neighbour came into my life and
refused to let go, totally screwing up my plan to have a
female-free existence.'

Sam felt the wild grin going out of control on her face.
She was beaming, she just knew it.

'But Maggie - how could you get that wrong, Sam? When
you saw me with Maggie, I couldn't believe you'd really
think we were going out. She's just a kid.'

'I know,' mumbled Sam, 'but I was beginning to think
you'd never make a move and I was depressed about being
forty and . . .' her voice tailed off. She realized that she'd
never normally make an admission like that to anyone but,
with Morgan, it felt right.

Morgan led her up the path to his house. 'I daresay that
I'm the only person in the entire world who knows that
behind that sleek exterior is a total pussycat with a soft
centre.'

'I'm not a pussycat,' Sam said.

Morgan smiled as he opened the door. 'OK, a wild cat,
then. Soft and fluffy looking but with deadly claws.'

'You ever call me fluffy again, and you'll be sorry,' she
warned, deadpan.

Morgan raised both hands in resignation. 'What can I
call you? Darling, perhaps?'

He stood in front of her and Sam gazed up at him
expectantly.

'No,' said Morgan firmly. 'Something's wrong.'

'What?' Sam said, puzzled.

Morgan led her through into the dining room which was
free of furniture except for a stereo in one corner. Sam burst
into laughter as soon as she saw it.

'Now,' said Morgan happily, 'this is where it all began.'He lowered his head to hers and finally kissed her, deeply.
It was every bit as wonderful as Sam had dreamed it would
be and she held onto him tightly, loving the sensation of
being able to run her fingers through his tousled hair. Her
eyes closed, she gave herself up to the feeling of Morgan's
body close to hers and the sensation of his beautiful mouth
kissing her fiercely as though she might vanish at any
moment.
'I'm sorry,' he sighed when he pulled his mouth away
from hers, 'sorry it's taken us this long. We were both stupid.
I should have been honest with you at first and not kept you
in the dark about everything. I was so angry you couldn't
trust me and I wanted to forget you but I couldn't, I've got
you under my skin . . .'
'Shush,' Sam put a finger over his mouth. 'Let's not look
back, let's look forward,' she said, and this time she kissed
him, covering his face with kisses until he groaned and pulled
her so tightly against him that she was standing on her
tiptoes.
'Promise me one thing?' he murmured into the cloud of
her hair.
'Yes.'
'Don't kick me.'