MADELEINE REISS
Someone to Watch Over Me

To my dearest three – David, Felix and Jack And in love and memory of my father, Barry Unsworth 1930–2012

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

Chapter Forty-two

Chapter Forty-three

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

Chapter Forty-seven

Chapter Forty-eight

Chapter Forty-nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-one

Chapter Fifty-two

Chapter Fifty-three

Chapter Fifty-four

Chapter Fifty-five

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Q&A with Madeleine Reiss

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

He held her hand tightly. It was dark and it was hard to see the path. She had told him to watch where he put his feet and not to get too near the black channel of water. He knew for a fact there were bad things hidden right down deep at the bottom of it. There were supermarket trolleys and stolen cars and rotting cows, which had toppled out of their fields into the canal and not been able to get out. There were snakes that swam all twisty through the coldness. He thought that there were people in there too. He thought of bodies floating upright, anchored to the slimy bottom by curling fronds of weed. He had once seen an eyeball coming out of a drowned person’s head on a TV programme. He had watched through the crack in the door and afterwards he had wished he hadn’t. Once you saw things they stayed with you forever. Even though they were walking so fast it made him breathless and even though her nails were digging into his hand, he was glad to get out of the house. He just wished he knew where they were going.

‘Will we be able to stop soon?’ he asked.

‘Just a bit further. We can’t stop yet.’

Her face gleamed all white and her mouth was stretched out thin. He knew they would never be able to go fast enough or far enough, however hard they tried. He wished they could change themselves into giant birds and fly as far as Africa. Big, yellow birds that could see in the dark and camouflage themselves against the sand in the daytime. In his brain he sang the song that made him feel better and tried with all his might to escape into clear open spaces and a sea without edges.

Chapter One

Carrie stood on the pavement outside the shop. It looked even better than she had imagined it would. The window, trimmed with lace stencils and silver stars, framed a display of what she hoped were the most irresistible Christmas gifts ever. There were creamy cashmere dressing gowns, strings of crystal beads, amber earrings with ancient insects trapped in their glowing depths, vintage cake stands laden with glittering brooches, elegant party shoes with buckles and curved heels, old silk scarves traced with faded Eiffel Towers and caped matadors. Tomorrow, Trove would open its doors to the paying public, and all the months of work would have been worthwhile.

Back inside the shop she checked that everything was perfect; the pan of mulled wine was ready to be heated up on the tiny stove in the back room, the cinnamon-scented candles were lined up along the counter alongside the piles of brown bags, each stamped with the name of the shop and fastened with red ribbon. She took one last look round, then set the alarm and clicked off the lights. Her bike was locked up at the back of the shop, the saddle already sheened with frost. Tucking her coat around her legs and sitting gingerly on the hastily wiped seat, she set off down the road hoping that her flickering front light would last until she got home. She had bought the bike from a shop just round the corner from where she lived and she had realised, even as she was buying it, that it wasn’t the most practical of purchases. She should have looked more closely at the state of the tyres and at the chain clotted with rust rather than been seduced by its green and silver stripes and large wicker basket laced through with plastic daisies.

As she cycled down the largely empty streets, she looked into windows warmed with lights and decorations and clouded with cooking steam and the moisture from people talking and laughing in small rooms. Carrie felt the familiar sadness settle around her heart. She could distract herself for some of the time, but it always came back to this. This dogged pain that refused to let her go, but carried her mercilessly out to that wide-open sea and sky.

It had been Carrie’s decision to go to the coast that day; Damian would have preferred to have stayed at home to read the papers and fix the fence that had blown loose sometime over the winter. She loved expeditions, particularly those that involved chill bags and flasks, and she got up early to fix a feast of cheese and tomato baguettes and crisps and some sinful sundae-type desserts in their own plastic glasses. Charlie, who had just turned five, hadn’t yet mastered the sandwich. Cheese was fine, and bread, by itself, was more than acceptable, but put the two elements together and he acted as if she was offering him something impossible to contemplate, a culinary monstrosity that made his small shoulders shudder. For Charlie she packed a hunk of bread, some Babybel cheeses and a cake with pink icing.

It was the sort of summer day that is called perfect because it is so very rare. They rolled down the windows as they drove, and the car seemed to be full of sun and the smell of warm plastic from the water bottles on the back seat. The Norfolk coast was only a couple of hours away from Cambridge, an easy drive on a chilly day, but likely to be slower today with the roads full of people making for the sea. Charlie had developed a taste for Ella Fitzgerald and sang along under his breath to the CD he insisted on having at full volume.

‘“I love to go out fishing, in a river or a creek, but I don’t enjoy it half as much as dancing cheek to cheek …” What’s a creek?’

‘A stream, as in, “I’m up shit creek without a paddle”,’ said Damian, who was better than Carrie at providing succinct explanations of the meaning of words.

‘Umm … Dad said a rude word!’ said Charlie with delight.

Carrie could see her son in the wing mirror. She loved looking at him. At his neat head, his serious dark brown eyes, the way his eyebrows rose and rounded every time he talked. Sometimes she went into his room and watched him sleeping, even climbed the first rung of the ladder of his bunk bed so that she could get close enough to smell that combination of salt and sweetness that was unique to him. She wasn’t a particularly patient mother. She wasn’t fond of activities involving flour or tubs of poster paint and there were times when his chatter drove her to a kind of bored distraction, but most of the time he dazzled her. Her love felt overwhelming, liquid, like blood through veins or a sea, filled beaker-like to the very brim.

They arrived at the beach at about lunchtime and dragged food and rugs and buckets along the sand until they found a place that was far enough away from other people to satisfy Damian, who had a ‘no radios, no dogs and no other people’s children’ rule which tended to narrow their options. Since having Charlie, Carrie also had a rule which she kept to herself that involved not setting up camp anywhere near young, firm girls who looked as if they might strip off at any moment and indulge in a vigorous game of volleyball. They settled at last for a hollow in the dunes, some distance away from a woman and a boy about the same age as Charlie, who were lying on their backs on striped beach towels. Carrie anchored the water bottle in the shade of the grass, which fringed the dip in the dune like eyelashes, and unpacked the swimming costumes. Then they took off their sand-laden shoes and walked to the sea. A day at the beach always began for them with this small act of homage.

The tide was coming in slowly and the sun glittered in patches where the water had gathered. The ridges of moist sand were so firm beneath their bare, car-softened feet that it was almost painful to walk. Charlie squatted down to examine the intricate piles of wormed sand and to hook up fragments of mussel shell with pruned fingers. His yellow shorts were too large round his waist, despite Carrie having sewn up an inch on either side, and when he ran he gathered them up with one hand to prevent them falling down. The perfectly blue sky stretched away, until it imperceptibly merged with the sea at a point so distant that it was impossible to see where sea ended and sky began. It felt as if you were walking in a thin membrane stretched to infinity. Although the day was warm, after a couple of weeks of overcast weather, the warmth hadn’t yet found its way into the sea.

‘Can I go swimming?’ asked Charlie, oblivious to the temperature. He threw himself forward in the shallows, kicking vigorously, churning up the sand, trying to tempt them in by pulling at their ankles. He was beginning to learn to swim, but still needed his inflatable wings. Carrie and Damian kept walking and Charlie splashed alongside them. It seemed as if the water would never get deeper and that the three of them would move forward forever. Hunger finally made them turn back to the beach. That, and the fact that Charlie’s lips were turning blue. Damian lifted his son up and wrapped him in his shirt.

When they turned round and headed back for their spot in the dunes, they saw a flamingo standing in the water between them and the beach. Carrie thought at first it was a blow-up toy, too impossibly bright to be real. Its exotic shape and colour out of place in the pale, bleached landscape. But then it bent its neck and dipped its head repeatedly in the water.

‘It must have escaped from a bird sanctuary,’ said Damian.

The bird shook itself, as if, like them, it had expected a warmer ocean, took a clumsy run forward and then lifted off with a curious sideways movement, head and neck stretched out, its legs trailing behind like an afterthought. They watched it fly away until it was just a speck.

‘Will it come back, Mum?’

Charlie asked her the question because he knew the beginning of a story when he saw one, and indeed, Carrie was already thinking about a possible bedtime tale which could feature a confused flamingo called Fabian and perhaps Florette, a lost flamingo wife.

‘Why is it pink?’

Damian knew it was something to do with its diet, but was unable to say what it could find on a Norfolk beach that would be pink enough to maintain its plumage.

‘Will it go grey after a while?’ asked Charlie anxiously.

‘I’m not sure, pal,’ said Damian. ‘Perhaps he will find his way home where his brothers and sisters and a bucket of fresh shrimps will be waiting for him.’

After he had been persuaded into a fleece, they had lunch. Charlie ate his bread and an apple and said he wanted to save his cake for later. He sat for a while, watching the boy whose encampment was nearest theirs. He was squatting on his heels and digging energetically. Carrie could tell that Charlie wanted to play with him by the way that he kept sliding his small feet through the sand.

‘Why don’t you go and make friends?’

‘I think he’s older than me,’ said Charlie. She knew how much he hated to be at a disadvantage.

‘He looks pretty much the same age to me.’

Charlie got to his feet and wandered in a self-consciously casual way over to where the boy was scooping up sand. For a while Charlie pretended to be looking for shells, but then he gave up dissembling and stood over the other boy, watching his endeavours with a critical eye.

After what he clearly considered to be the correct amount of time, Charlie finally spoke.

‘My name’s Charlie. I’m five. How old are you?’

The boy looked up at him and answered. Carrie didn’t catch what he said, but it must have been encouraging because Charlie got down on his hands and knees and started burrowing too. They each began to excavate from a different point and dug along towards each other. Whenever their hands made contact under the cool sand and another tunnel was formed, they exclaimed in surprise. Carrie watched them for a while, but then the effects of lunch and the sun began to catch up with her and she lay back on the picnic rug. She could hear Damian turning the pages of the newspaper, the occasional voice shouting, and once, what sounded like a helicopter, but the sounds were muffled. Black shapes swarmed behind her eyelids and she dozed. She woke when Damian tickled her bare feet.

‘Sorry to disturb you, sleepy head,’ he said, ‘but I need to go to the toilet. I’ll have to go back to the car park.’

Carrie shook herself awake and sat up to look at Charlie, who was still playing with his new friend. She got her magazine out of her bag, rolled over onto her stomach and tried to read but the words swam in front of her eyes and she laid her head down on the paper and slid back into sleep. Charlie’s voice woke her the second time. She rolled over onto her side and squinted up at him, but the sun was too bright to see his face.

‘Can I go down to the sea again?’

‘Only if you go with your father.’

‘Dad’s still not come back.’

‘Well you’ll just have to wait until he does. Where’s that other little boy gone?’

‘He had to go for a walk with his mum.’

‘Is he nice?’

‘Yes.’ Charlie made his case by ticking off his new friend’s attributes on his fingers.

‘One, he is five. Two, he has yellow hair. Three, he isn’t mad on bats. Four, he likes Scooby Doo. Please can I go down to the sea?’

‘Just wait a bit, I can’t leave the bags. Wait till Dad gets back.’

Carrie sat up, and Charlie sat down next to her, looking up every now and again to see if Damian was coming. Finally he spotted him in the distance making his way back down the beach.

‘Can I go and meet him … please … and then we can swim …?’

‘Only if you give me a kiss first,’ said Carrie, lying back down. He knelt next to her and planted his lips on her cheek, stroked one sandy hand across her face.

‘I love you every single day,’ said Charlie.

‘And I love you every single day too,’ said Carrie, and shut her eyes.

Afterwards, she wasn’t able to say how long she had been asleep. She thought it could only have been a matter of minutes.

‘Where’s Charlie?’ asked Damian, appearing suddenly above her.

Carrie, like every parent, was always only a moment away from panic. All it took was for her to lose sight of him when he lagged behind in a crowd, or when he was hidden by a slide in a park, and she felt a dip in her stomach. She felt that familiar lurch now.

‘I thought he was with you.’

‘No, I left him here when I went to the toilet. I’ve just been for a run.’

Carrie stood up and scanned the beach. There were a number of figures in the distance that could have been him. It wasn’t easy to see that far away. She couldn’t immediately spot anyone in the distinctive yellow shorts he was wearing.

‘You stay here in case he comes back. I’ll go and look for him.’

Carrie started running towards the sea.

Chapter Two

Molly watched Max as he lay on the floor, lining up his plastic animals in strict formation. He was using the geometric design on the border of the carpet to ensure that all hooves and paws toed the line. The ark stood waiting with its gangplank down and its tiny bearded Noah standing to attention on the deck. Max’s tendency to place things in lines was sometimes disconcerting – miniature soldiers faced certain death as if about to start a race; crayons lay in an orderly rainbow all the way along the hall. Cards trimmed the mantelpiece in royal flushes. He even rearranged the food on his plate in sequence, with the least desirable items bringing up the rear. Since this was a recent habit, Molly wondered if this behaviour was a sign of inward disturbance. Possibly she should be worried by his seemingly compulsive need to order the world. Maybe she was simply reading too much into it and he was disclosing a propensity that had always been there, waiting for the right set of animals or the new box of crayons. He had probably been born with the straight-line gene, and would grow up into an adult who was fond of graphs and trousers ironed sideways and pint glasses placed neatly in the centre of beer mats. She thought that what she was really looking for in his behaviour, were confirmations of her own sadness.

Although the Christmas tree bent slightly to the left, Molly thought it looked pretty, with its multi-coloured lights flicking out some sort of puzzling rhythm. They had gone and got the tree together and brought it back in the car with its tip sticking out through the window. She had resisted the temptation to take charge of its decoration, despite the fact that Max had adorned all the lower branches with the heaviest baubles so that they bent at the ends and almost touched the floor.

She started to put away the canvas she had been working on earlier in the day, a small watercolour of the view out of the window. It was the first thing she had painted for a long time and it felt good to be getting back into doing even a little of what she loved. She looked out of the window, across a wide, black field over which birds gathered and then dispersed. It was beginning to get dark although it was still only three o’clock. She felt oppressed and anxious, as if this small house was cast adrift on floodwaters, without a compass or proper provisions. Molly was keen on the acquisition and preservation of provisions. As a child the stories she had loved the most always involved families in extremis eking out bitter winters with a small box of onions and turnips and fashioning pathetic, yet admirable playthings out of twigs and balls of wool. She liked fictional characters who bottled and salted their way through their lives and nobly stacked their larders with the labours of their presumably very rough, red hands or who, when left on desert islands, conjured up ingenious accommodation and cunning ways of collecting rain water. She had always celebrated each season by preserving it. Jam from the warm strawberries she had heaped into smeared punnets. Blackberries brought home in jugs and Tupperware boxes and then stashed away in freezer bags. Each sloe carefully pierced and pickled with gin and put in the dark to marinate.

‘When’s tea?’ asked Max, rolling onto his back, a rhino in each hand meeting horn to horn.

‘Not for ages yet,’ she said. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘Can I have just one chocolate bell from the tree?’ he said. ‘That should tide me over.’ She recognised with pain that this was one of Rupert’s expressions. She thought of him years ago, packing the boot of the car to go away somewhere with more food and drink than they could possibly need. ‘That should tide us over,’ he had said and smiled, and she remembered feeling the safety in the words.

Max untied a chocolate from the tree, careful to avoid touching the wire from the flashing lights. He had a morbid fascination with electrocution, and the slightest darkening of the skies would provoke dire warnings on the danger of standing under trees and wearing leather-soled shoes. It had been Rupert who had planted the horror in Max’s mind by telling him some outlandish tale of putting his finger into a socket and being thrown through a window and biting all the way through his tongue until he almost choked on his own blood.

He always was a convincing teller of tall tales. Molly thought about the evening they had first met. He had seemed more vivid and distinct than anyone else in the room. Her eyes had been drawn to him straight away and she had found it hard to stop looking. Rupert had reminded her of a fox, or some other shiny-furred creature. She had always thought of herself, with her pale blue eyes and hair of an indeterminate brown, to be the very reverse of striking. She had often despaired at the soft, almost child-like contours of her face, wanting instead to have high cheekbones and dark, dramatic lashes, the sort of looks that made men catch their breath, and so she’d been astonished when he came straight over to her, as if he had been waiting for her to arrive, although they had never met before.

‘You can sit by me,’ he had said, steering her over to the table and the chair next to his. He had talked to her throughout the meal, his eyes never leaving hers, his hands solicitous with butter and wine. When her napkin slid off her lap and fell under the table, he insisted on ducking down and retrieving it. She felt, with shock and excitement, his hand brush her ankle and pause delicately, halfway up her leg.

They were married six months later. She had set her heart on a dress that she had seen in a shop window. The material was the palest pink and encrusted with crystal beads. It had a tight bosom-enhancing bodice and fitted sexily across the hips and made Molly feel like a decadent princess. Molly thought that being a bride was your one chance to be voluptuous and get away with it. Rupert’s mother, whom she had only met once and whose eyes, on that occasion had shifted over her swiftly as though assessing a metre of fabric, had insisted both on paying for the dress and coming with Molly to choose it. She dismissed the frock Molly had selected with a small sound of distaste and chose instead a severely simple sheath. Although its pale lines were exquisitely cut and it was four times the price of the dress she had wanted, Molly never felt like herself in it – but rather as if she was playing the part of the person that should have been standing by Rupert in the little church that was filled with the scent of lilac.

They honeymooned in Umbria in a villa that looked out over terraced olive groves and a night sky full of fireflies. They spent their days exploring the nearby towns where Rupert took hundreds of pictures of her by fountains or leaning against yellow walls threaded with caper flowers and quick lizards. Sometimes when he stopped her halfway up some steps and made her turn towards his lens or when he laid down his fork to frame her head exactly beneath an arch she felt as if the sequence of pictures were what made the story for him.

‘Smile!’ he said, and she had no trouble obeying, since everything was enchanting to her. She found it endearing that he wanted to record her happiness so minutely. In their muslin-draped four-poster bed Rupert gave her slender body the same earnest attention.

‘You are so beautiful,’ he said as his fingers moved over her and into her as if his touch could read her secrets. He discovered the tiny, silvered scar on her breast caused by the removal of a cyst, the dent just above her ankle where she had been bitten by a dog as a child and the raised mole at the top of her inner thigh.

‘It’s a kind of inventory,’ he said when she protested that she felt scrutinised. ‘So I’ll know you again if I was blind.’

He held her open with his fingers and stroked her with his tongue and she was glad and surprised that he wanted her so much. When they got back he carried her carefully over the doorstep of their new home. After advice from his mother, Molly had set about painting it cream, with the occasional wall in heritage grey or papered with large, muted flowers. The first year he took her to all the places he had been to as a child. There was a wood that smelt of wild garlic that was threaded through by a fast, brown river, and a garden with blue and pink hydrangeas the size of a child’s head and a low wall against which they had nestled like lost lambs.

The phone rang and Molly came out of her reverie with a start.

‘Hello?’ There was silence at the other end of the line. ‘Hello?’ she said again, but no one answered and she replaced the receiver. She told herself it was a foreign call centre and that a young man with a made-up British name had been prevented from selling insurance by tangled lines or that a hand in a bag had unknowingly activated a cell phone, but she knew it was him. He often phoned in the early evening, as if the fading light was his prompt to check on where she was.

‘Are you alright, Mum?’ asked Max. He sat down next to her on the sofa and put his arms around her neck. She could see her face reflected in the darkened window, as pale and as insubstantial as the ghosts that populated this area of the Fens. One such phantom Fenland farmer was said to regularly return to haunt his land. So precious was the rich black soil, that he ate great chunks of it. His invisible munching left clods disturbed where no tractor had been.

‘I’m fine, darling,’ she said to Max, and pulled him onto her lap. She stroked his head, feeling the shape of it under her hands. After a while he wriggled away from her and lay back on the floor and so she got up and drew the curtains against the dark fields.

Chapter Three

Carrie woke early on the day the shop was due to open. She switched on the light in the still-darkened room, threw off the quilt that covered her bed and put on the Chinese silk dressing gown that hung on the hook on the bedroom door. In a pre-Christmas bid to lose a few pounds to accommodate the feasting to come, Carrie had decided to start each day with a bowl of porridge made with skimmed milk and a few raisins. She was half hearted in her attempts to lose weight and at thirty-seven, felt she was approaching the time when she would in any case have to choose between her bottom and her face. She had a theory that after forty, the skinnier the arse, the more prune-like the face, unless you overdid the surgery and then you just looked weird. Carrie was tall and long legged and had a face that was at its most beautiful when animated. Her brown eyes were spaced a little too far apart, but her mouth was soft and full and her black hair fell straight and smooth across a wide brow. When she talked she often rubbed her hand across her forehead, as if trying to shape her thoughts before they escaped from her.

Carrie sat on the sofa to eat her porridge and contemplated the day ahead. She found that for the first time in three years, she felt something that resembled anticipation – although it was such a long time since she had felt it that she barely recognised it at first, mistaking the small flutterings as her stomach rebelling against the dollops of oats she was sending its way. She had filled Trove with things that were beautiful and had real value, not in monetary terms necessarily, but objects that had been made with care. It was the perfect place to get a present for someone else or to buy yourself a treat when you were feeling down. Carrie hoped that it would become somewhere that people wanted to linger and touch things. She had worked hard to get the balance right between providing a good range of new, quirky objects and old reclaimed things that had a patina and a story. She had also spent weeks travelling around looking at the work of craftspeople and artists. She had found a woman in Northumberland who created the lightest, silkiest scarves out of wool that had been dyed the pinks and burnt oranges seen so often in north-eastern skies. She had also bought several watercolours from a Manchester artist who had barely managed a civil word to her but whose paintings had immense charm. They featured small figures bent absorbed over tasks or walking in old-fashioned formation through dappled woods. Carrie enjoyed the hunt for treasure, particularly if she found it in unexpected places.

She had thought in the first white, dazed months after it had happened, that she would have to move from Cambridge. The town was too small; there was no way to escape the memories. But after a while she welcomed what she had been left. She also understood that she couldn’t move. She needed to stay where she could be found. There was, in any case, something in the gloominess of Cambridge, in the oppression of grey sky and buildings that soothed her. It was a town made for mourning. She was familiar with the open land and the dark earth of the surrounding countryside, where the beauties were subtle ones. They had explored it together as a family; Charlie, head bobbing over Damian’s shoulder and later, running on ahead to blaze the trail through flat fields of corn or along chalky dykes. Now when she saw Charlie’s first wobbling cycle ride across the common, or caught a memory of his face just on the edge of laughter at the top of a swing, she was comforted. She didn’t want to go to a place that he hadn’t marked, just as she couldn’t throw away the tubs of play dough still pitted by his fingers.

After rifling through her wardrobe and leaving piles of discarded clothes on her bed, Carrie eventually decided to wear her favourite pair of just tight enough jeans, black boots with buckles on the ankle and wedge heels and a green vintage jacket with large buttons and a velvet collar. She pinned a diamanté bow-shaped brooch onto her lapel and wrapped three strings of dark green glass beads around her neck. As she left the house, protected from the early morning cold in a huge scarf and beret, she saw a small blonde figure, dressed in a flimsy frock and minuscule cardigan, coming out of the door of the house opposite. This was at least the sixth different woman she had seen emerging from the premises. It was a constant source of wonder to Carrie how her neighbour managed to keep up with his demanding schedule. The blonde figure scuttled off into the half-light, and Carrie got on her bike and headed for town. The build-up of traffic had not yet begun along Mill Road. In another hour or so there would be a line of car windscreens framing pale, Monday faces. A woman with neatly curled hair was unlocking the doors of the Co-op. In the newly refurbished church someone was shifting a font on castors across the laminated floor.

Trove was situated about fifteen minutes’ walk from the centre of Cambridge and was tucked down a side street in a largely residential area of expensive Victorian terraces. It was in the middle of a small row of shops; a delicatessen whose clientele accepted the overpriced olives and mozzarella in exchange for the rakish charm of the owner who wrapped up their loaves of bread in tissue paper with exaggerated reverence, a greengrocer who had a tendency to use organic as his excuse for limp leaves and shrivelled carrots, a betting shop and small Chinese supermarket. Although the street was a little out of the way, it was on the main route into town and the shops benefited from the footfall of local customers.

Jen was there when she arrived, and had already turned on the feather-fringed lamps that were placed strategically around the shop. She had also sprinkled orange and clove oil on the radiators so that the place smelled delicious. She was engrossed in the task of dressing the old wire dummy that stood next to the racks of vintage clothes Carrie had sourced from charity shops, fairs, eBay and her own extensive hoarded wardrobe. With her head buried under the folds of silk, she struggled to pull the narrow-hipped dress down over the wire frame.

‘I didn’t know you were going to get here so early,’ said Carrie, taking off her scarf and gloves.

‘Gnnf … too excited to sleep,’ Jen replied, the words muffled. She emerged from the fabric with her hair mussed and her eyes bright.

Carrie had met Jen at college on the very first day of term. She had been a young eighteen-year-old then with no experience of being away from home, let alone living in London, which seemed terrifyingly large and noisy to her and full of people who talked too fast or who looked at her strangely. She had seldom been to the capital and wasn’t really prepared for the homesickness that engulfed her in the first months. Her mother had despatched her briskly at Coventry station with the words, ‘Remember, the best way to avoid loons on the tube is to sit with a bit of string trailing out of the corner of your mouth. Works every time.’

Although economical in her farewell, Carrie’s mother, Pam, was devastated by her daughter’s departure and remained on the platform, hidden from sight behind the newspaper stand in WH Smith to watch the train pulling out of the station. Not usually given to public displays of emotion, she found to her surprise that tears were running down her face and gathering inside the collar of her pink cashmere coat. To cheer herself up she went to John Lewis and bought three skirts, four pairs of shoes and a hat for which she had no wedding.

Jen was older than Carrie and had spent the previous two years travelling and working. She had seemed very sophisticated to the other girl who had attended one school, dated one boy and had been drunk only once, after drinking half a bottle of peach schnapps taken from the back of her parents’ kitchen cupboard. Unlike Carrie, condemned to live in smelly university accommodation, Jen had also been the proud possessor of a flat in Clapham, bought for her by her father just before he had absconded to France with a young lawyer who worked at his firm. After knocking down a few walls of their chateau and indulging in the purchase of some enamel jugs, the young lawyer (who it turned out was somewhat susceptible to rashes) decided that Jen’s father wasn’t, after all, quite what she had expected and she returned to home to Surrey and set up a sanctuary for maimed hedgehogs.

Jen had looked after Carrie during that first year at university, advising her on how to acquire and then ditch various hapless young men who were drawn to Carrie’s legs, lustrous hair and air of vulnerability. Jen herself had to beat men off with a stick. Dark and curvaceous, she treated the smitten youths who had the misfortune to succumb to her charms with ill-concealed contempt. In her third year, much to her mortification, she fell hard for a high-profile, married politician, who treated her with just enough disinterest to keep her frantic. She finally gathered enough strength to call a halt to proceedings when, on her twenty-third birthday, she found herself having sex with him in a restaurant lavatory again. The thought came to her that perhaps she ought to want something more meaningful from a relationship than being rammed against a sanitary towel disposal unit.

Although Jen had a very warm heart and had a real aversion to hurting small creatures, when roused, she was scary. The twinkle in her politician’s previously sparkly blue eyes dimmed somewhat when he discovered that a rumour (planted into the ear of his demoralised secretary) had been circulating, describing details only his wife (and the five other young women with whom he had enjoyed white tiles and the smell of bleach) could possibly have known. Information such as the fact he had a penis that curved sideways and that he had a tendency to shout out random French words at his moment of climax was used by his political enemies to such good effect that he was never again able to stand up in public without some wise ass muttering ‘Brioches massive!’ or ‘Le fanny de ma tante!’ sotto voce.

After her politician, Jen steered well clear of any serious or lasting entanglements, preferring to remain firmly in control. Every now and again she would meet a bloke on a Friday or a Saturday night with good teeth or an affable smile and invite him back to her dusty flat, with its battered sofas and heavy velvet curtains. In the morning however, she would always wake alone, ready for a solitary walk on the common followed by two butter-laden croissants and a bowl of milky coffee. Throughout college and beyond, Jen looked out for Carrie. She scrutinised prospective boyfriends (‘Looks to me as if he might wear women’s shoes on the sly’), doled out travel tips (‘Never stand behind a donkey’), and advised on the best job interview techniques (‘Look them in the eye and imagine them on the toilet’). In return, Carrie vainly tried to get her to have a decent haircut and dress in a way that showed off her ample breasts and tiny waist. Despite her best efforts Jen persisted in wearing droopy garments of the sort found on women who like to dress up as Anglo Saxons in their spare time and she stubbornly resisted any attempts at restyling her mop of curls. Over the years the two women stayed in touch, despite the fact they were often on other sides of the world and then other sides of the country.

Carrie smiled at the thought of what the two of them had been through. She was glad and grateful that Jen was still in her life. She looked at her watch. It was time to open the shop door for the very first time.

‘Come on, girl,’ she said. ‘Let’s open the doors to the hordes!’

Chapter Four

Molly often woke with a sense of urgency; this morning it took her several minutes to realise that it was Saturday and there couldn’t be anything that needed her immediate attention. Although she and Max had been living in the house for over a year she still wasn’t used to its noises. The house was full of scratchings and creakings, as if the very bricks and wood it was made of were shifting uneasily. It was a house with a restless soul she’d decided, although the more prosaic side of her knew quite well that many of the late-night rustlings were due to rats. A couple of days after blocking a large hole in the edge of the kitchen floorboards with wood filler, the house had smelt unmistakably of rotting rat, a sweetish odour like overripe apples mingled with something more meaty and rancid. She thought that she had probably trapped a rat family beneath her floorboards. The smell didn’t subside for almost two weeks, by which time she had almost become accustomed to it.

She stretched out underneath the pile of blankets she had heaped over herself. Some of the house noises were also due to a decrepit old boiler, which seemed to have a mind of its own. At the moment the temperamental creature was sulking and produced only enough heat to warm the very bottoms of the radiators. She hoped Max would sleep for a while longer. She knew that once he was up, she would have to marshal them both through another day. It was that exact time between night and morning when everything was holding its breath. When the new day seemed to hover in the distance, as if waiting for a sign.

Molly couldn’t remember now exactly when she had stopped feeling happy. She sometimes wished that there was a way of recognising the end of things, so that you could properly acknowledge their passing. She always left rented holiday houses with a sense of ceremony. Thank you, she would say as she took a last look round. Thank you house, for giving us a good two weeks. I hope that I might see you again one day. She knew it was foolish and she would never say the words out loud, but it helped her to leave if she was able to mark both the happiness and its ending. She knew that being a mother set in motion a series of endings. Every child who was lucky enough to have a lap to sit in must surely also have a last time they indulged in this intimacy, but it was only when you looked back that you noticed that the last time had been and gone.

It seemed to her now that the first years of her marriage were part of another lifetime. It wasn’t that Rupert changed suddenly, it was more as if the bits of his personality that she had previously only noticed out of the corner of her eye came into sharper focus. Living together had been wonderful at first. She loved her grown-up home with its matching china and scatter cushions. She loved her job as a teacher at a local primary school, but most of all she loved being Rupert’s wife. Molly had felt like the most blessed of people, hardly deserving of the good fortune that had been heaped upon her. Rupert seemed to make it his mission to anticipate her needs and make her happy. There would be gifts hidden around the house, loving notes pinned up on the fridge. He would administer back rubs and hot water bottles at the first sign of period pain. He would remember passing comments she had made about books and films, and bring them home for her. He put batteries in her bicycle lights, paper in her printer and credit on her phone, and made sure her bottle of Chanel No. 19 never ran dry. He even once hunted down an unusual oval blue button that had dropped off the cuff of a favourite dress, finding a replacement on an obscure website. She laughed at the thought of him searching the whole of the internet for a button, but he looked at her as if he was surprised by her levity.

‘You know I would do anything for you,’ Rupert said, stroking her hair in that way he had; tugging slightly at the ends as if he was testing its strength.

They celebrated the first anniversary of their marriage by going back to their honeymoon hotel. Molly would have liked to have tried somewhere new but didn’t want to raise churlish objections when Rupert had gone to the trouble of putting a copy of the menu from their very first meal, with flight details added, into the side pocket of her handbag. She found it at work when she was looking for her pen, and just for a moment, as she pulled it out and saw what it was, she felt breathless. She thought of him waiting for his opportunity. Waiting for her to go upstairs or out into the garden and then opening the bag, maybe looking through her things to see which would be the best place to leave it and then zipping the pocket up again quickly so that she would discover it later and think of him. If Molly was irked by the way it had all been decided without any consultation, she didn’t show it, nor did she reveal her embarrassment when he caused a scene in the marbled hotel lobby on discovering that they had been put into a different room from the one they had stayed in before. Although the honeyed skin of the young receptionist flushed under the onslaught of Rupert’s bad temper, she remained composed.

‘I’m sorry Sir, we cannot ask our other guests to move,’ she said, biting down with small white teeth on her bottom lip.

‘I expressly asked for room number 8. I definitely put it in the email. Go and check. Go and check now.’

She checked and double checked and then a perfectly groomed young man tilted his head gravely at them and expressed the deepest of regret in impeccable English, but no amount of bluster from Rupert made the slightest bit of difference.

‘I’m so sorry, Sir; we only have the one room free. Would you like me to arrange for your bags to be taken up?’

As Rupert snatched the key from the receptionist, Molly saw the little purse of her lips and the quick glance she gave Molly before lowering her head, and she knew that the other woman felt sorry for her. You don’t understand, she felt like saying, you don’t know what he is really like, how he loves me. She was angry, and then regretful, that this place that had been so full of wonderful memories had been soured by this second visit.

Rupert remained cold and irritated throughout their evening meal, barely speaking despite her attempts at gaiety. She ate slivers of duck that were pinker than she liked, and he moved his sea bream around his plate and drank quickly, ordering another bottle of wine before he had finished the first. Because he wouldn’t talk to her, Molly spent the time looking at the other diners and wondering about their stories. At the table opposite there was an older man with a breathtakingly beautiful young woman who twisted her great fall of hair around her hand as he showed her how to eat langoustine. Next to them there was a woman with her head wrapped in a silk scarf patterned with butterflies. She was with a young man who was unmistakably her son. They had the same awkward thinness and sharp, pink-tipped elbows resting on the table. It looked to Molly as if the woman had been crying. ‘What makes me sad,’ Molly heard her say, ‘is the fact that I will never see them.’ Her son looked as if he wished he were anywhere else but sitting in this dining room with its sconces and tablecloths and extra cutlery.

‘They’ll probably be ugly sods,’ he said, shielding his face with one hand.

‘Nonsense,’ said the older woman, ‘they’ll be beautiful,’ and she smiled at a point behind his head as if she could see them in her mind’s eye, lined up, lovely and gleaming for her inspection.

Back in their room Rupert stroked himself, then held her wrists tightly and came quickly into her as if he didn’t care if she was there or not. She waited until she could hear from his breathing that he had fallen asleep and got up, as quietly as possible. She put on the same white cotton dressing gown that she remembered wearing on their honeymoon and pushed open the wide doors that led out onto the balcony. At some point in the evening it had rained and the air was fresh and smelt of quenched dust. Two hot air balloons moved through the sky slowly like oil in water.

The next morning his moodiness of the day before was forgotten and Rupert was back to his loving, attentive self. He ordered breakfast for them both and insisted that she sat in bed while he fed her small spoonfuls of yogurt. Afterwards he pulled her off the bed and pushed her against the wall and she wrapped her legs around his waist while he thrust hard into her until she cried out so loudly he had to put his hand over her mouth to stop the people in the next room from hearing. Fiercely private, he hated the thought that anyone else might know what they were doing. She stood in the shower whilst he knelt in front of her and washed slowly between her legs, his hands slippery with soap that smelt of honey, the warm water soothing against her back where the skin had been grazed by the uneven plaster on the wall. They went to Gubbio and took a swaying funicular up the mountain to the Abbey of Saint Ubaldo. She pretended that she was more scared than she really was of the sloping hillside beneath their caged feet so that he would hold her close and put his hand into her shirt to distract her, his clever fingers slipping through the cotton and plucking at her nipple. Above the Abbey, the evening landscape spread out, perfectly composed, just for them, and she wondered how she could ever think that she was anything other than completely happy.

Molly heard Max’s feet padding across the landing floor and a quick glance at the clock showed that she had been lying in a stupor for some time. She felt a fizzing in her arms and hands that she recognised as a reaction to shock or fear; the unexpected lurch against her shoulder by a stranger on the edge of a train station platform, the sudden sound of beating wings rising up from a still hedgerow. The door creaked open and Max’s head poked cautiously around the frame.

‘Are you awake yet?’ he said hopefully, his teeth chattering, his arms clutching his chest. In reply, Molly pulled back the blankets and he ran and jumped into the warm patch by her side.

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