Lessons in Heartbreak
Cathy Kelly

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Cathy Kelly 2008

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

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.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © February 2012 ISBN: 9780007389339

Version: 2017-10-28

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Praise

Praise for Cathy Kelly:

‘A must for Kelly’s many fans; a warm, moving read.’

Daily Mail

‘Totally believable.’

Rosamunde Pilcher

‘An upbeat and diverting tale skillfully told…Kelly knows what her readers want and consistently delivers.’

Sunday Independent

‘An absorbing, heart-warming tale.’

Company

‘Her skill at dealing with the complexities of modern life, marriage and families is put to good effect as she reases out the secrets of her characters.’

Choice

‘Kelly deamatises her story with plenty of sparkly humour.’

The Times

‘Kelly has an admirable capacity to make the readers identify, in turn, with each of her female characters…’

Irish Independent

To Murray, Dylan and John, with love

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

PROLOGUE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

Excerpt from The House on Willow Street

Prologue

Chapter One

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About the Author

By the same author:

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

In her head, she knew what she was doing was wrong. She lay, open-eyed in the dawn, feeling the length of his naked body next to hers, warm despite the chill of the room. She’d never slept naked before, and now wondered how there was any other way.

Of course, you needed another body beside yours; a body like his, hard with physical exercise, taut and lean, not an ounce of flab on him, and fiercely strong.

Yet he was so gentle with her. His hands with their tender pianist’s fingers had drawn whorls on her pale skin the night before, his eyes shining in the soft light of the dim bulb.

With his hands on her skin, her body became like nothing she’d ever known before: a treasured thing made for being wrapped up with his and adored.

‘You’re so beautiful. I wish this moment could go on for ever,’ he’d said in the low voice she loved. There wasn’t anything about him she didn’t love, really.

He was perfect.

And not hers.

Their time was stolen: a few hours here and there, holding hands under the table at dinner, clinging together in the vast hotel bed like shipwreck survivors on a raft. For those hours, he was hers, but she was only borrowing him.

The awfulness of separating rose up again inside her. It was a physical ache in the pit of her stomach.

He’d wake soon. He had to be gone by seven to get his train.

If she had been the one who had to leave the hotel room first, she knew she simply couldn’t have done it. But he would. Duty drove him.

It was dark in the room and only the gleam of the alarm clock hands showed that it was morning. She nudged her way out of the bed and opened a sliver of heavy curtain to let some grey dawn light in. It was raining outside; the sort of sleety cold rain that sank cruelly into the bones.

There were early-morning noises coming from the street below. Doors banging, horns sounding, traffic rumbling. Ordinary life going on all around them, like worker ants slaving away in the colony, nobody aware of anybody else’s life. Nobody aware of hers.

He moved in the bed and she hurried back into it, desperate to glean the last precious hour of their time together. If she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend it was night again and they still had some time.

But he was waking up, rubbing sleep from his eyes, rubbing his hands over his jaw with its darkening stubble.

Soon, he’d be leaving.

She was crying when he moved hard against her, his body heavy and warm.

‘Don’t be sad,’ he said, lowering his head and kissing the saltiness of her tears.

‘I’m not,’ she said, crying more. ‘I mean, I don’t mean to. I’ll miss you, I can’t bear it.’

‘You have to, we both have to.’

She’d never known that love could be so joyous and so agonising at the same time. Every caress took them closer to his leaving. Each time he touched her, she couldn’t block out the thought: Is this the last time he’ll ever do that? Will I ever see him again?

She could barely stop the tears. But she did, because she had to.

In the end, she lay silently in the bed watching him get ready. Just before he left, he sat beside her, pulled her close and kissed her as if she was oxygen he was breathing in.

Her hands clung to him, one curved tightly around his neck, the other cradling his skull. They kissed with their eyes closed so they’d never forget.

‘I have to go. I love you.’

She couldn’t speak in case she cried again.

‘Goodbye.’

He didn’t look back as he left and she wondered if that was the difference between men and women. Men looked forward, warriors focusing on the future. Women’s eyes darted everywhere. Searching, wondering, praying to some god to keep the people they loved safe.

She lay back in the bed still warm with the imprint of his body, and wondered if she would ever see him again.

ONE

The New Mexico sun was riding high in the sky when the Zest catalogue shoot finally broke up for lunch. Izzie Silver stood up and stretched to her full five feet nine inches, glorying in the drowsy heat that had already burnished the freckles on her arms despite her careful application of Factor 50.

Truly Celtic people – with milk-bottle skin, dots of caramel freckles and bluish veins on their wrists – only ever went one colour in the sun: lobster red. And lobster red was never going to be a fashionable colour, except for early-stage melanomas.

It was her second day on the shoot and Izzie could feel her New-Yorker-by-adoption blood slowing down to match the sinuous pace of desert life. Manhattan and Perfect-NY Model Agency, who’d sent her here to make sure nothing went wrong on a million-dollar catalogue shoot involving three of their models, seemed a long way away.

If she was in New York, she’d be sitting at her desk with the rest of the bookers: phone headset on, skinny latte untouched on her desk, and a stack of messages piled up waiting for her. The office was in a sleek block off Houston, heavy on glass bricks and Perspex chandeliers and light on privacy.

At lunch, she’d be rushing down to the little beauty salon on Seventh where she got her eyebrows waxed or taking a quick detour uptown into Anthropologie on West Broadway to see if they had any more of those adorable little soap dishes shaped like seashells. Not that she needed more junk in her bathroom, mind you; it was like a beauty spa in there as it was.

In between scheduling other people’s lives, she’d be mentally scrolling through her own, thinking of her Pilates class that night and whether she had the energy for it. And thinking of him. Joe.

Weird, wasn’t it, how a person could be a stranger to you and then, in an instant, become your whole life? How did that happen, anyway?

And why him? When he was the most inconvenient, wrong person for her to love. Just when she thought she’d cracked this whole life thing, along came Joe and showed her that nothing ever worked out the way you wanted it to. You have no control – random rules.

Izzie hated random, loathed it, despised it. She liked being in charge.

At least being here gave her the space to think, even if she was missing her eyebrow appointment, her Pilates and – most importantly – dinner with Joe. Because Joe took up so much space in her head and in her heart that she couldn’t think clearly when he was around.

Here at Chaco Ranch, with the vast hazy spread of dusty land around her and the big sky that seemed to fill more than the horizon, clear thinking felt almost mandatory.

Izzie felt as much at home as if she was sitting on the back porch of her grandmother’s house in Tamarin where sea orchids dotted the grass and the scent of the ocean filled the air.

Chaco Ranch, just thirty minutes away from the buzz of Santa Fe, was a sprawling, white-painted ranch house, sitting like an exquisite piece of turquoise in the middle of sweeping red ochre.

And though it was geographically a long way from Tamarin, the small Irish coastal town where Izzie had grown up, the two places shared that same rare quality that mañana was far too urgent a word and that perhaps the day after tomorrow was time enough for what had to be done.

While the ranch was landlocked with huge cacti and mesquite trees guarding the house and mountains rising up behind them, Tamarin sat perilously on rocks, the houses clinging to steep hills as if the roar of the Atlantic would send them tumbling down.

In both places, Izzie decided, the landscape made people aware of just how puny they were in the grand scheme of things.

The consequent tranquillity of the ranch had calmed everyone down at least as much as two hours of Bikram yoga would.

Bookers rarely went on shoots: their work was confined to the office, living on the phone, relying on email as they juggled their models’ lives effortlessly. But Zest were important clients and Izzie’s bosses had decided it was worth flying her in, just in case anything went wrong on this first shoot for a whole new Zest line.

‘I love this place,’ Izzie had said to the blonde ranch owner the morning before when the crew had arrived with enough clothes, make-up, hair spray and photographic equipment to make a small movie, and enough adrenaline to power a large town.

Mexican-inspired arches in the walls, tiled courtyards hung with Moroccan lights, and dreamy wall-hangings made locally gave the place depth. Local artists’ handiwork hung cheek by jowl with pieces by international artists, and there were two walls dedicated to haunting photographs of Anasazi ruins.

The ranch owner had waved slender brown arms that rattled with silver and turquoise bangles and explained that Chaco Canyon, where her treasured photos had been taken, was home to a flea that still carried bubonic plague.

‘Could we get some?’ deadpanned Izzie. ‘Not for me, you understand, but I’ve got some people I’d like the flea to bite.’

‘I thought you fashion people had no sense of humour,’ the blonde woman grinned back.

‘Only me, sorry,’ Izzie said. ‘It’s a hindrance in fashion, to be honest. Some of these people cry at night over hemline lengths and if you are not a True Fashion Believer, then they try to kill you with their Manolo spike heels or else batter you to death with their copy of Vogue: New Collections edition. Personally, I think a sense of humour helps.’

‘And you’re not a True Fashion Believer?’ asked the woman, staring at the tall redhead curiously.

‘Hey, look at me,’ laughed Izzie, smoothing her palms over her firm, curvy body. ‘True Fashion Believers think food is for wimps, so I certainly don’t qualify. I’ve never done the South Beach or the Atkins, and I just cannot give up carbohydrates. These are crucial in True Fashion.’

In an alternate universe, Izzie Silver could have been a model. Everyone told her so when she was a kid growing up in Tamarin. She had the look. Huge eyes, coloured a sort of dusty heliotrope blue with glossy thick lashes like starfishes around them, and a big generous mouth that made her cheekbones rise into gleaming apples when she smiled. Her caramel mane of thick hair made her look like a Valkyrie standing on her own longboat, curls flying and fierce majesty in her face. And she was tall, with long, graceful legs perfect for ballet, until she grew so much that she towered over all the other little ballerinas.

There was only one issue: her size. When she was twelve, she stood five feet six in her socks and weighed one hundred and ten pounds.

Now, aged thirty-nine, she wore a US size ten. In an industry where skinniness was a prize beyond rubies, Izzie Silver stood out for many reasons.

With her perfect hourglass figure, like a sized-up Venus, she was proof that big was beautiful. She loved food, turned heads everywhere she went and made the hollow-eyed fashion junkies look like fragile twigs in danger of cracking inside and out.

She liked her size and never dieted.

In fashion, this was the equivalent of saying that polyester was your favourite fabric.

Joe Hansen had been mildly surprised when she told him she worked in the fashion industry the first day they met. They’d been seated across the table from each other at a charity lunch – an event Izzie had only gone to by the strangest, totally random circumstances, which proved her point that random ruled.

She hadn’t thought he’d noticed her, until suddenly, she’d seen that flicker in his eyes: a glint to add to the mirror-mosaic glints already there.

Hello, you, she’d thought wistfully.

It had been so long since she’d found a man attractive that she almost wasn’t sure what that strange quiver in her belly was. But if it was attraction, she tried to suppress it. She had no time for men any more. They messed things up, messed people’s heads up and caused nothing but trouble. Work – nice solid work where you toiled away and achieved something real that nobody could take away from you – and having good friends, that was what life was about.

But if she’d discounted him, he clearly hadn’t discounted her. From his position across the table Izzie could feel Joe taking her in admiringly, astonished to see that she was so earthy and real. She’d eaten her bread roll with relish, even briefly licked a swirl of butter off her finger. Carbs and fats: criminal. The city was full of fashion people and common wisdom held that they were skinny, high-maintenance beings, always following some complicated diet. Izzie didn’t try to be different. She’d just never tried to be the same.

‘God made you tall so men could look up to you,’ Gran used to say. Her grandmother had stepped into her mother’s place when Mum died of cancer when Izzie was just thirteen. Izzie wasn’t sure how her grandmother had managed to steer her around the tricky path of being a big girl in a world of women who wanted to be thin, but she’d done it.

Izzie liked how she looked. And so, it seemed, had the man across from her.

He was surrounded by skinny charity queens, spindly legs set elegantly on equally spindly-legged gilt chairs, and he was staring at her. No, staring wasn’t the right word: gazing at her hungrily, that summed it up.

Lots of men looked at Izzie like that. She was used to it; not in a cavalier, couldn’t-care-less way, but certainly she barely glanced at the men who stared at her. She honestly didn’t need their stares to make her feel whole. But when Joe Hansen looked at her like that, he flipped her world upside down.

The most shocking thing was that when his eyes were on her, she could feel the old Izzie – uncompromising, strong, happy in her own skin – slip away to be replaced by a woman who wanted this compelling stranger to think her beautiful.

‘You know, honey, from what I hear, that whole fashion world sounds kinda like hard work,’ sighed the ranch owner to Izzie now, hauling her mind away from the Plaza and the first time she’d met Joe.

‘I tried that South Beach once and it takes a lot of time making those egg-white and spinach muffins ‘n’ all.’

‘Too much hard work,’ agreed Izzie, who worked in an office where the refrigerator was constantly full of similar snacks. Quinoa was the big kick at the moment. Izzie had tried it and it tasted like wet kitchen towels soaked overnight in cat pee – well, she imagined that was what cat pee tasted like. Give her a plate of Da Silvano’s pasta with an extra helping of melting parmesan shavings any day.

‘Pasta’s my big thing,’ she said.

‘Spaghetti with clams,’ said the other woman.

‘Risotto. With wild mushrooms and cheese,’ Izzie moaned. She could almost taste it.

‘Pancakes with maple syrup and butter.’

‘Stop,’ laughed Izzie, ‘I’m going to start drooling.’

‘Bet those little girls never let themselves eat pancakes,’ the woman said, gesturing to where two models sat chain-smoking. Even smoking, they looked beautiful, Izzie thought. She was constantly humbled by the beauty of the women she worked with, even if she knew that sometimes the beauty was only a surface thing. But what a surface thing.

‘No,’ she said now. ‘They don’t eat much, to be honest.’

‘Sad, that,’ said the woman.

Izzie nodded.

The ranch owner departed, leaving the crew to it and Izzie wandered away from the terrace where the last shots had been taken and walked down the tiled steps to the verandah at the back where Tonya, at eighteen the youngest of the Perfect-NY models, had gone once she’d whipped off the cheerful Zest pinafore dress she’d been wearing and had changed into her normal clothes.

A brunette with knife-edge cheekbones, Tonya sat on a cabana chair, giraffe legs sprawled in Gap skinny jeans, and took a first drag on a newly lit cigarette as if her life depended on it. From any angle, she was pure photographic magic.

And yet despite the almond-shaped eyes and bee-stung lips destined to make millions of women yearn to look like her, Izzie decided that there was something tragic about Tonya.

The girl was beautiful, slender as a lily stem and one hundred per cent messed up. But Izzie knew that most people wouldn’t be able to see it. All they’d see was the effortless beauty, blissfully unaware that the person behind it was a scared teenager from a tiny Nebraska town who’d won the looks lottery but whose inner self hadn’t caught up.

As part of the Perfect-NY team, Izzie Silver’s job was seeing the scared kid behind the carefully applied make-up. Her stock-in-trade was a line of nineteen-year-olds with Ralph Lauren futures, trailer-trash backgrounds and lots of disastrous choices in between.

Officially, Izzie’s job was to manage her models’ careers and find them jobs. Unofficially, she looked after them like a big sister. She’d worked in the modelling world for ten years and not a week went by when she didn’t meet someone who made her feel that modelling ought to include free therapy.

‘Why do people believe that beauty is everything?’ she and Carla, her best friend and fellow booker, wondered at least once a week. It was a rhetorical question in a world where a very specific type of physical beauty was prized.

‘’Cos they don’t see what we do,’ Carla inevitably replied. ‘Models doing drugs to keep skinny, doing drugs to keep their skin clear and doing drugs to cope.’

Like a lot of bookers, Carla had been a model herself. Half Hispanic, half African-American, she was tall, coffee-skinned and preferred life on the other side of the camera where the rejection wasn’t as brutal.

‘When the tenth person of the week talks about you as though you’re not there and says your legs are too fat, your ass is too big, or your whole look is totally last season, then you start to believe them,’ Carla had told Izzie once.

She rarely talked about her own modelling days now. Instead, she and Izzie – who’d bonded after starting at the agency at the same time and finding they were the same age – talked about setting up their own company, where they’d do things differently.

Nobody was going to tell the models of the Silverwebb Agency – the name had leaped out at them: Izzie Silver, Carla Webb – they were too fat. Because the sort of models they were going to represent were plus-sized: beautiful and big. Women with curves, with bodies that screamed ‘goddess’ and with skin that was genuinely velvety instead of being air-brushed velvety because the model was underweight and acned from a bad lifestyle.

For two women who shared the no-bullshit gene and who both struggled with the part of their jobs that dictated that models had to be slender as reeds, it had seemed such an obvious choice.

Five months ago – pre-Joe – they’d been sharing lunch on the fire escape of Perfect-NY’s West Side brownstone, talking about a model from another agency who’d ended up in rehab because of her heroin addiction.

She weighed ninety pounds, was six feet tall and was still in demand for work at the time.

‘It’s a freaking tragedy, isn’t it?’ Carla sighed as she munched on her lunch. ‘How destructive is that? Telling these kids they’re just not right even when they’re stop-traffic beautiful. Where is it going to end? Who gets to decide what’s beautiful any more, if the really beautiful girls aren’t beautiful enough?’

Izzie shook her head. She didn’t know the answer. In the ten years she’d been working in the industry, she’d seen the perfect model shape change from all-American athletic and strong, although slim, to tall, stick-like and disturbingly skinny. It scared everyone in Perfect-NY and the other reputable agencies.

‘It’s going to reach a point where kids will need surgery before they get on any agency’s books because the look of the season is too weird for actual human beings,’ she said. ‘What does that say about the fashion industry, Carla?’

‘Don’t ask me.’

‘And we’re the fashion industry,’ Izzie added glumly. If they weren’t part of the solution, then they were part of the problem. Surely they could change things from the inside?

‘You know,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘if I had my own agency, I really don’t think I’d work with ordinary models. If they’re not screwed up when they start, they’ll be screwed up by the time they’re finished.’ She took a bite of her chicken wrap. ‘The designers want them younger and younger. Our client list will be nothing but twelve-year-olds soon.’

‘Which means that we, as women of nearly forty –’ Carla made the sign of the cross with her fingers to ward off this apocalyptic birthday ‘– are geriatric.’

‘Geriatric and requiring clothes in double-digit sizes in my case,’ Izzie reminded her.

‘Hey, you’re a Wo-man, not a boy child,’ said Carla.

‘Point taken and thank you, but still, I am an anomaly. And the thing is, women like you and me, we’re the ones with the money to buy the damn clothes in the first place.’

‘You said it.’

‘Teenagers can’t shell out eight hundred dollars for a fashion-forward dress that’s probably dry-clean-only and will be out of date in six months.’

‘Six? Make that four,’ said Carla. ‘Between cruise lines and the mid-season looks, there are four collections every year. By the time you get it out of the tissue paper, it’s out of fashion.’

‘True,’ agreed Izzie. ‘Great for making money for design houses, though. But that’s not what really annoys me. It is the bloody chasm between the target market and the models.’

‘Grown-up clothes on little girls?’ Carla said knowingly.

‘Exactly,’ agreed Izzie.

As a single career woman living in her own apartment in New York, she had to look after herself, doing everything from unblocking her own sink to sorting out her taxes and then being able to play hardball with the huge conglomerates for whom her models were just pawns.

Yet when the conglomerates showed off clothes aimed at career women like Izzie, they chose to do it with fragile child-women.

The message from the sleek, exquisite clothes was: I’m your equal, Mister, and don’t you forget it.

The message coming from a model with a glistening pink pout and knees fatter than her thighs, was: Take care of me, Daddy.

‘It’s a screwed-up world,’ she said. ‘I love our girls, but they’re so young. They need mothers, not bookers.’

She paused. Lots of people said bookers were part-mother/ part-manager. For some reason, this bothered her lately. She’d never minded what she was called before, but now she felt uncomfortable being described as an eighteen-year-old’s mother. She wasn’t a mother, and it came as a shock that she was old enough to be considered mother to another grown-up. Why did it bother her now? Was it the age thing? Or something else?

‘Yeah.’ Carla abandoned her lunch and started on her coffee. ‘Wouldn’t it be great to work with women who’ve had a chance to grow up before they’re shoved down the catwalk?’

‘God, yes,’ Izzie said fervently. ‘And who aren’t made to starve themselves so the garment hangs off their shoulder blades.’

‘You’re talking about plus-sized models…’ said Carla slowly, looking at her friend.

Izzie stopped mid-bite. It was exactly what she was always thinking. How much nicer it would be to work with women who were allowed to look like women and weren’t whipped into a certain-shaped box. The skinny-no-boobs-no-belly-and-no-bum box.

Carla wrapped both hands around her coffee cup thoughtfully. The familiar noises of their fire-escape perch – the hum of the traffic and the building’s giant aircon machine on the roof that groaned and wheezed like a rocket about to take off – faded into nothingness.

‘We could –’

‘– start our own agency –’

‘– for plus-sized models –’

They caught each other’s hands and screamed like children.

‘Do you think we could do it?’ asked Izzie earnestly.

‘There’s definitely a market for plus-sized models now,’ Carla said. ‘You remember years ago, nobody ever wanted bigger girls, but now, how often are we asked do we have any plus-sized girls? All the time. The days of plus girls being used just for catalogues and knitting patterns are over. And with lots of the big-money design houses making larger lines, they want more realistic models. No, there’s a market, all right. It’s niche, but it’s growing.’

‘Niche: yes, that sums it up,’ Izzie agreed. ‘I like niche. It’s special, elite, different.’

She was fed up working for Perfect-NY and having daily corporate battles with the three partners who’d long ago gone over to the dark, money-making side. The agency’s Dark Side Corporates didn’t care about people, be it employees or models. Any day now, time spent in the women’s room would involve a clocking-in timecard and a machine that doled out a requisite number of toilet-paper sheets.

Besides, she’d given ten years to the company and she felt at a crossroads in her life. Forty loomed. Life had run on and – it hit Izzie suddenly what was wrong with her, why she’d been feeling odd lately – she felt left behind.

She had all the things she’d wanted: independence, her own apartment, wonderful friends, marvellous holidays, a jam-packed social life. And yet there was a sense of something missing, a flaw like a crack in the wall that didn’t ruin the effect, but was still there, if you thought about it. She refused to believe the missing bit could be love. Love was nothing but trouble. Having a crack in her life because she didn’t have someone to love was just such a goddamn cliché, and Izzie refused to be a cliché.

Work was the answer – her own business. That would be the love affair of her life and remove any lingering, late-night doubts about her life’s path.

‘I’m sure we could raise the money,’ Carla said. ‘We haven’t got any dependants to look out for. There has to be some bonus in being single women, right?’

They both grinned. Izzie often said that New York must surely have the world’s highest proportion of single career women on the planet.

‘And it’s not as if we don’t know enough Wall Street venture capitalists to ask for help,’ Carla added.

This time, Izzie laughed out loud. Their industry attracted many rich men who had all the boy toys – private jets, holiday islands – and felt that a model on their arm would be the perfect accessory.

‘As if they’d meet us,’ she laughed. ‘You know there’s a Wall Street girlfriend age limit, and we’re ten years beyond it, sister. No,’ she corrected herself, ‘not ten, more like fifteen. Those masters of the universe men with their Maseratis and helicopter lessons prefer girlfriends under the age of twenty-five. They are blind when women of our vintage are around.’

‘Stop dissing us, Miz Silver,’ Carla retorted. ‘When we have our own agency, we can do what I’m always telling them here and have an older model department. And you could be our star signing,’ she added sharply. ‘The masters of the universe only keep away from you because they’re scared of you. You’re too good at that “tough Irish chick” thing. Men are like guard dogs, Izzie. They growl when they’re scared. Don’t scare them and they’ll roll over and beg.’

‘Stop already,’ Izzie said, lowering her head back to her wrap. ‘It doesn’t matter whether I scare them or not: they prefer nineteen-year-old Ukrainian models every time. If a man wants a kid and not a woman, then he’s not my sort of man.’

She didn’t bother to reply to the remark about her working as a model. It was sweet of Carla, but she was too old for a start, and she’d spent too long with models to want to enter their world. Izzie wanted to be in control of her own destiny and not leave it in the hands of a bunch of people in a room who wanted a specific person to model a specific outfit and could crush a woman’s spirit by saying, ‘We definitely don’t want you.’

‘Could we make our own agency work?’ she’d asked Carla on the fire escape. ‘I mean, what’s the percentage of new businesses that crash and burn in the first year? Fifty per cent?’

‘More like seventy-five.’

‘Oh, that’s a much more reassuring statistic.’

‘Well, might as well be real,’ Carla said.

‘At least we’d be doing something we really believed in,’ Izzie added.

For the first month after the conversation, they’d done nothing but talk about the idea. Then they’d begun to lay the groundwork: talking to banks, talking to a small-business consultancy, and drawing up a business plan. So far, nobody was prepared to loan them the money, but as Carla said, all it took was one person to believe in them.

Then, two months ago, Izzie Silver had found love.

Love in the form of Joe Hansen. Love had obliterated everything else from her mind. And while Carla still talked about their own agency, Izzie’s heart was no longer in it, purely because there was no room in her heart for anything but Joe.

Love had grabbed her unexpectedly and nobody had been more shocked than Izzie.

‘If it all works out, we won’t be the backbone of Perfect-NY any more,’ Carla had said happily just before Izzie had set off for New Mexico. ‘Imagine, we’ll be the bosses…and the bookers, assistants, accountants and probably the women who’ll be mopping out the women’s room at night too, but, hey, we won’t care.’

‘No,’ agreed Izzie, thinking that she didn’t give a damn about anything because she was so miserable at having to fly to New Mexico and be away from Joe. Once, she’d have loved this chance to leave the office for a shoot in a far-flung location. Now, thanks to Joe, she hated the very idea.

‘Catalogue shoots are tough,’ Carla added. ‘Pity you weren’t sent to babysit an editorial shoot instead. ‘Cos it’s going to be hard work, honey.’

She was right, Izzie thought, standing in the New Mexico heat, watching the Perfect-NY model work.

Catalogue shoots were hard work. Hours of shooting clothes with no time to labour over things the way they could on magazine shoots. On magazine shoots, Izzie knew it could easily take a day to shoot six outfits – here, they might manage that in one morning. The models had to be ultra professional. The girl with the cheekbones, still-eyed and silent, was just that.

During the morning, Izzie had watched Tonya in an astonishing seven different outfits, transforming her silent watchful face into an all-American-girl-next-door smile each time. It was only when the cameras were finished, and Tonya’s face lapsed back into adolescent normality, that Izzie thought again and again how incredibly young she was.

Now it was lunchtime. The photographer and his two senior assistants were drinking coffee and gulping down the food brought in from outside; the other two assistants were hauling light reflectors and shifting huge lights.

No lunch for them.

The make-up and hair people were sitting outside, letting the sun dust their pedicured toes and gossiping happily about people they knew.

‘She insists she hasn’t had any cosmetic procedures done. Like, hello!! That’s so a lie. If the skin round her eyes get pulled up any further at the corners, she’ll be able to see sideways. And talk about botox schmotox. She never smiled much before, but now she’s like a wax dummy.’

‘Dummy? She wishes. Dummies were warm once – isn’t that how they melt the wax?’

‘You’re a scream!’

The woman from Zest’s enormous marketing department was loudly phoning her office.

‘It’s fabulous: we’re on target. We’ve the rest of the day here because the light’s so good that Ivan says we can shoot until at least six. Then tomorrow we’re going up to the pueblo…’

Izzie’s cell phone buzzed discreetly and she fumbled in her giant tote until she found it. She loved big bags that could hold her organiser, make-up, spare flat shoes, gum, emergency Hershey bars, water bottle, and flacon of her favourite perfume, Acqua di Parma. The minus was triumphantly holding up a panty liner by mistake when you were actually looking for a bit of note paper. How did they always manage to escape their packaging and stick themselves to inappropriate things? They never stuck to knickers as comprehensively as they did to things in her handbag.

‘How’s it goin’?’ asked Carla on a line so clear that she might be in the next room instead of thousands of miles away in their Manhattan office.

‘It’s all going fine,’ Izzie reassured her. ‘Nobody’s screamed at anybody yet, nobody’s threatened to walk off in a temper, and the shots are good.’

‘You practising magic to keep it all running smooth, girl?’ asked Carla.

‘Got my cauldron in my bag,’ replied Izzie, ‘and I’m ready with the eye of newt and the blood of a virgin.’

Carla laughed at the other end of the phone. ‘Not much virgin blood around if Ivan Meisner is the photographer.’

Ivan’s reputation preceded him. As a photographer he might be a genius who had W and Vogue squabbling over him, but the genius fairy hadn’t extended her wand as far as his personality.

Nobody watching him idly caressing his extra-long lens as he watched young models could be in any doubt that he considered himself a bit of a maestro in the sack as well as behind the Hasselblad.

‘He’s definitely got his eye on Tonya,’ Izzie said, ‘but don’t worry. I’m going to put a stop to his gallop.’

‘Can somebody tape that?’ Carla asked. ‘I’d like to see him when you’ve finished with him. Hard Copy would love film of Ivan having his lights punched out.’

Izzie laughed. Carla was one of the few people who knew that, at fourteen, Izzie Silver had had a reputation for being a tomboy with a punishing right hook. It wasn’t the sort of thing she’d want widely known – violence was only in fashion when it came to faking hard-edged shoots in graffiti-painted alleyways – but it still gave her an edge.

‘Don’t mess with the big Irish chick,’ was how some people put it. Izzie was more than able to stand up to anyone. Ruefully, she could see how that might put some men off. Before Joe, it had been six months since her last date. Not that she cared any more: you had to move on, right?

‘Carla, you’re just dying to see me hit someone, aren’t you?’ laughed Izzie now.

‘I know you can because of all those kickboxing classes,’ Carla retorted. ‘Sure, you’re the queen of glaring people into silence with the evil eye and telling them you don’t take any crap, but I’d still prefer to see you flatten someone one day. For fun. Pleeese…? I hate the way Ivan hits on young models.’

‘He won’t this time,’ Izzie said firmly. ‘He might try, but he won’t get anywhere. Since the company have actually spent hard cash to fly me here to make sure it all runs smoothly, I’m going to do my best. Any news at your end?’

‘No, it’s pretty quiet. Rosanna’s off sick so we’re a woman down. Lola spotted a gorgeous Mexican girl on the subway last night. She got a photo of her and gave the girl her card, but she thinks the kid’s scared she’s from immigration or something, so she may not call. Stunning, Lola says. Tall, with the most incredible skin and fabulous legs.’

‘Oh, I hope she phones,’ Izzie said. As bookers, they were always on the lookout for the next big thing in modelling. Despite the proliferation of television shows where gorgeous girls turned up hoping to be models, there were still scores of undiscovered beauties, and there was nothing worse than finding one and having her not believe the ‘I work for a model agency’ schtick.

‘Me too. Lola keeps glaring at her phone. It’s going to catch fire soon.’

‘No more news?’

‘Nah. Quiet. What’s the Zest marketing guy like? I heard he’s a looker.’

Izzie grinned. Carla had said she was never dating ever again just the previous week.

‘He couldn’t come. They sent a woman instead.’

‘You can catch up on your beauty sleep, then,’ laughed Carla, before hanging up.

When shooting was over for the day, the entire crew repaired to their hotel’s restaurant-cum-bar for some rest and relaxation. There was a sense of a good day’s work having been done, but it wasn’t quite party time. That would be tomorrow night when the catalogue shots were all finished, when nobody had to be up at the crack of dawn and hangovers didn’t matter.

Besides, the Zest marketing woman was there watching everything alongside Izzie, and there was too much money in catalogue shoots to screw it all up mid-shoot.

Izzie knew what happened on shoots when party night had happened too early. Someone phoned her up at the office and screamed that her models had gone on the razz, and that the following day had been a blur with the make-up people working extra hard to hide the ravages of sleep deprivation, while general hungover irritation meant it was a miracle any shots were taken at all.

‘Menus,’ said the Zest woman cheerily, handing them out like a prefect at school trying to quash any naughtiness in advance. ‘There’s a salad bar too, if anyone wants anything lighter.’

A line of skinny people who did their best to never eat heavy if possible, stared grimly back at her. No mojitos tonight, then.

Food was finally ordered, along with a modest amount of wine and, thanks to the hair guy, who hated bossy women, cocktails.

‘Just one each,’ chirped the Zest woman, who had the company credit card to pay for all this, after all.

As Izzie had predicted, Ivan wasn’t long slithering up the cushioned wooden seat to where Tonya sat nursing something alcoholic from the cocktail menu.

Izzie sat down on a stool opposite Ivan and Tonya, simultaneously patting Tonya comfortingly on the knee, and giving Ivan the sort of hard stare she’d perfected after years of dealing with men just like him.

‘How’s Sandrine?’ she said chattily. Sandrine was his wife and a model who’d miraculously staved off her sell-by date by being labelled a super. Normal models were considered elderly once they hit twenty-five; supers could get another ten years out of the industry if they were clever.

Ivan didn’t appear to get the hint. He took another long pull of his margarita, gazing at Tonya over the top of his salt-encrusted glass.

‘She’s in Paris doing editorial for Marie Claire,’ he said finally.

Tonya, bless her, looked impressed. Izzie wished she could explain to the younger girl that she wouldn’t absorb Sandrine’s brilliance by osmosis. Sleeping with a supermodel’s photographer husband didn’t make you a supermodel. It just made you look stupid, feel used and get a bad reputation.

Izzie had another try at the subtle approach. She was working for Tonya’s agency, after all. No point in irritating the photographer so much that he took awful shots of the girl, thus screwing up both her career and her part of the catalogue shoot. Izzie knew that wasn’t what her boss had in mind when she said ‘make sure nothing goes wrong’.

‘Ivan’s married to Sandrine,’ Izzie informed Tonya gently, as if Tonya didn’t already know this. ‘She’s so beautiful and so successful, but she travels a lot. It must be so hard to be apart when you’re married,’ Izzie added thoughtfully. ‘You must miss Sandrine so much. I bet you’re dying for the moment you can phone her. How far ahead is Paris? Ten hours, eleven?’

Izzie was not a natural liar. Catholic school had done its work a long time ago, but for her job, she’d perfected the art of subtle manipulation. A tweak here, an insinuation there, was all it took.

She could see the rush to Ivan’s brain: would the smooth fire of the local tequila make it there first or would her suggestion about phoning his wife overtake it?

A moment passed and Ivan reached into his jacket for his cell phone.

Izzie allowed herself a small, internal smile.

Too much cocaine and general stupidity had eroded Ivan’s logistic skills but still he had a certain bovine intelligence. He was aware that Izzie knew the bookers in his wife’s agency and that, if he misbehaved, the news would reach Sandrine. He began to dial.

His wife was the sort of model Tonya might be one day, given plenty of kindness and therapy and people to stop predatory males hitting on her.

Quite why Sandrine had married Ivan in the first place was beyond Izzie. Models knew that photographers were drawn to models like flies to jam. And that DCOL (doesn’t count on location) was such a given in their industry that it should have been part of the model-wedding-vow thing. I promise to love, honour, obey and look the other way if he/ she has a fling doing a shoot in Morocco. However, it didn’t work quite that way with the supers; when you could have any man on the planet, you didn’t stand for being cheated on.

When Tonya got up to go to the women’s room, Izzie quickly slipped into the young model’s seat, to make sure that Ivan couldn’t get close to her when she came back.

Eventually, the rest of the group joined them, the food arrived and the danger of Ivan getting Tonya on her own for a quiet tête-à-tête passed.

The group shared a low-key meal and Ivan wandered off with his assistant early on. Probably to score coke, Izzie guessed – and not the liquid type that refreshed, either. After all, he didn’t need to look good in the morning.

Once he was gone, she left Tonya in the gentle hands of the other models and the make-up and hair people, and went to bed.

Her room was large, decorated in the soft ochre that seemed to be part and parcel of New Mexico, and looked out over a pretty pool that was surrounded by ceramic candle-holders, all lit, twinkling like so many stars. Opening the double doors on to the small terrace, she stepped outside for a moment and breathed in the balmy night air.

There were two wooden loungers on her terrace, along with a little blue and yellow tile-topped table with a lit citronella candle to ward off the giant flying things that seemed to hum in the air. A heady scent of vanilla rose from below, as well as a more distant smell of garlic cooking. It was all very romantic and begging for a special someone to share it with. Even the bath in the huge ensuite was big enough for two. Sad for one, though.

Izzie sighed and went back into the room. She stripped off her simple belted shirtdress and sank on to the bed, trying not to worry how many other people had sunk on to the heavy Dupion coverlet – hotels were freaky. So many other people using exactly the same space, over and over again, leaving their auras and their sweat there – and laid down. Her head felt heavy from the heat and she was tired. Tired and emotional.

She looked at her phone again. No messages. What was it Oscar Wilde said: that it was better to be talked about than not to be talked about?

Cell phones were the same. No matter how often people moaned about them, it was nicer to be phoned than not to be phoned.

She ran one unvarnished fingernail over the rounded plastic of the screen, willing some message to appear there. But there was nothing: the blankness mocked her.

He hasn’t called. What’s he doing?

What was the point of being wise, clever, savvy – all the things she’d worked hard at being – when she was risking it all for a married man?

Izzie closed her eyes and let the now-familiar anxiety flood over her. She loved Joe. Loved him. But it was all so complicated. She longed for the time when it would be simpler.

Of course, it was complicated simply because of the sort of person Joe was. He might be a tough member of the Wall Street elite, a hedge-fund man who’d gone out on his own with a friend to set up a closed fund and was slowly, relentlessly pushing towards the billionaire Big Boys’ Club. But he was a family man underneath it all, and that was where the complications appeared.

Raised in the Bronx, married at twenty-one, a dad at twenty-two, his professional life may have been fabulous but his home life had gone sour long ago. What he did have, however, were three sons whom he adored, and while he was living a separate life from his wife, they were trying to shield their two younger sons from the break-up.

When Izzie thought about it, about the tangled mess she’d walked into when she’d fallen for Joe, she felt nauseated. She knew that people of her age or Joe’s carried baggage with them but his baggage made their relationship so difficult.

No wonder she felt nauseated.

Funnily enough, someone being sick had set it all off. That someone was Emily De Santos, one of the Perfect-NY partners.

She’d bought a ticket for a twenty-thousand-dollar-a-plate lunch at the Plaza in aid of a child-protection charity which focused on kids from disadvantaged areas.

‘Do you think those rich people would have heart attacks if they actually saw a child from a disadvantaged area?’ wondered Carla when word came down from on high that Emily – a social climber so keen she carried her own oxygen – was too ill to take her place at the lunch and wanted a warm body to stand in for her.

‘Carla, don’t be mean,’ said Izzie, who was the only one without any actual appointments that lunchtime and was therefore about to race home to swap her jeans and chocolate Juicy Couture zippered sweat top for an outfit fit for the Plaza’s ballroom. ‘They’re raising money. Isn’t that what matters? Besides, they don’t have to do a thing for other people. They could just sit at home and buy something else with their twenty thousand bucks.’

‘Sucker,’ said Carla.

‘Cynic,’ said Izzie, sticking her tongue out.

She was between blow-dries, so her hair needed a quick revamp and Marcello, one of her favourite hairstylists, said he could fit her in if she rushed down to the salon.

‘I’m channelling Audrey Hepburn,’ he announced, as Izzie arrived, having changed at home and tried to put on her make-up in the cab downtown to the hair salon.

‘You better be channelling her bloody quickly,’ Izzie snapped, throwing herself into the seat and staring gloomily at her hair.

‘You’re right,’ Marcello agreed, holding up a bit of Izzie’s hair with his tail comb, as if he dared not touch it with his actual hand. Marcello was from Brooklyn, had been miserable in high school when he wasn’t allowed to be prom queen, and made up for it by being a drama queen for the rest of his life. ‘Forget Audrey. I’m seeing…a woman leaning into a dumpster searching for something to eat and she hasn’t washed her hair in a month…’

‘Yes, yes, you are so funny, you should have your own show, Marcello. I have to leave here in twenty minutes to go to the Plaza – can you not channel Izzie Silver looking a bit nice? Why do I have to look like someone else?’

‘The rules of style, sugar,’ Marcello sighed, like someone explaining for the tenth time that the earth wasn’t flat. ‘Nobody wants to look like themselves. Too, too boring. Why be yourself when you can be somebody more interesting?’

‘That’s what’s wrong with fashion,’ said Izzie. ‘None of us are good enough as we are. We have to be smelling of someone else, wearing someone else and looking like somebody else.’

‘Are you detoxing?’ Marcello murmured. ‘Have a double espresso, please,’ he begged. ‘You’re much easier to style when you’ve caffeine in your system. Fashion is fantasy.’ Marcello began spraying gunk on her hair with the intensity of a gardener wiping out a colony of lethal greenfly.

‘There goes another bit of the ozone layer,’ Izzie chirped.

‘Who cares about the ozone layer?’ he grumbled as he sprayed. ‘Did you see Britney in the Enquirer?’

They gossiped while Izzie dutifully took her espresso medicine and Marcello worked his magic.

‘You like?’ he said finally, holding up a mirror so she could see the back.

He’d turned her caramel ripples into a swathe of soft curls that framed her face and softened it. Audrey hadn’t been right, Marcello had decided early on. She was a light-brunette Marilyn.

‘I love it! I’m grotto fabulous,’ Izzie joked. ‘Like ghetto fabulous, but the Catholic version.’

‘And you think I should have my own show?’ Marcello grinned. ‘You’re the comedienne.’

The world at the Plaza that lunchtime was so not Izzie’s milieu that her New Yorker cool was rattled. She stared. Used to the fashion world where wearing American Apparel dressed up with something by McQueen was considered clever, it was odd to see so much high-end designer bling in one spot.

This was a combination of stealth wealth – clothes, jewellery and accessories so expensive and elite that there was no brand visible apart from the reek of dollars – and good old-fashioned nouveau riche, where no part of the anatomy was allowed out unless it was emblazoned with someone else’s name: Tommy Hilfiger’s, Vuitton’s, Fendi’s.

Women toted rocks worth more than a year’s rent on Izzie’s apartment, and it was hard not to be dazzled by the mega carats on show. Still, Izzie’s face betrayed none of this.

The tallest, biggest girl in the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Tamarin had to learn to look cool, calm and collected. Izzie never raised her chin haughtily into the air – she didn’t need to. She wore self-assurance like a full-length cloak, draping it round herself to show that she was happy, centred and able for the world on any terms.

Her hair, thanks to Marcello, was fabulous. Her grape silk wrap dress – from a new designer nobody had heard of who understood draping curvy figures – might have cost the merest fraction of the clothes worn by the other guests, but she looked stunning in it. Self-belief, as her darling Granny Lily always said, was more valuable than any diamond.

Izzie didn’t have any diamonds, on purpose. No man had ever bought one for her and, somehow, diamonds had come to represent coupledom in her head. Men bought diamonds in glorious solitaire settings as engagement rings for girlfriends, or a half-circle band of diamonds for the birth of babies. Strong single women bought strong jewellery for themselves.

So Izzie wore her Venetian-inspired bangles and dangling earrings with pride, because she’d written the cheque herself. She mightn’t have paid for her twenty-thousand-dollar ticket, but she was as good as anybody here.

The ballroom was beautifully formal and all cream: cream table cloths, cream bows on the chairs, cream roses rising from the centrepieces with a froth of baby’s breath softening the look. It was very pretty and reeked of money.

At her table, there were six women, including herself, and two men. One was young, handsome and accompanying a beautiful, very slim woman with a youthful face, telltale middle-aged décolleté, and an emerald necklace of such staggering beauty and obvious value that it was probably only out of the bank vault for the day.

The other man at the table was in a different league altogether. Forty-something, steely grey eyes that surveyed the room like a hawk, tightly clipped dark hair and a slightly weather-beaten face that wouldn’t have looked out of place under a cowboy hat, he had a definite presence. He didn’t need the exquisite perfection of his Brioni suit to give away the fact that he was a mogul of some sort or other.

Izzie knew the signs. If there was a checklist for the typical alpha male with a commanding presence, the Brioni suit guy ticked all the boxes.

Elegance, utter self-confidence, a fleeting hint of ruthlessness: he had it all.

There was also the fact that one of the other female guests, whom Izzie recognised from the gossip pages, was flirting with him like the last Ark was leaving town and she needed a man for it. Professional hunters of rich men only picked on the really rich and powerful.

The woman with the emeralds kept talking to him about super-yachts. Izzie idly wondered what a super-yacht was; from the odd snippet of conversation that reached her, this floating palace which needed sixty full-time staff sounded more like a liner than a yacht.

She did think of asking, just for the fun of dropping a spanner in the social works, but decided against it.

As the meal progressed, Izzie couldn’t help keeping an eye on the guy, pegging him as a mega-rich wheeler-dealer who’d spent years in the dirty business of making money and now, finally, was shaking the prize-fighter’s dust from his hands and looking for some worthy charity to climb a much steeper ladder: the New York class ladder.

She didn’t want him to see her looking. That would be so embarrassing.

But she couldn’t stop.

Hello, you.

She didn’t say it, but she thought it. This man was surely out of her league on so many levels. Rich guys went for young beauties: end of story. A normal New York career woman wouldn’t stand a chance.

But still…he was looking at her, making her stomach flip.

‘…so I phoned him, I said I wouldn’t, but you know, men never take the initiative…’ went on the woman to Izzie’s left. Linda was blonde and botoxed to look forty rather than her actual fifty years. Having started by saying she loved Izzie’s dress and adored her jewellery, she was now mournfully recounting her own Manhattan dating tales as she toyed with her entrée, pushing the radicchio and feta salad around her plate in the prescribed manner.

Izzie managed to swivel her head away from the hard-edged mogul man and concentrated on her neighbour’s story, as well as her own tuna steak.

‘You’re going on a date with this guy, then?’ she asked Linda.

‘Sort of. Is it a date if he says he’ll meet up at a party you’re both going to anyway?’

Izzie winced. It seemed that wealthy divorcées were just like ordinary women after all. She decided to give the sort of advice she’d give a friend. ‘Not a date, really. More a promise of a date unless something better comes up,’ she said. No point in fudging. ‘He’s hedging his bets, Linda.’

Linda sighed. ‘That’s what I think. I want to say no, but I like him…’

‘If he likes you, that’s fine,’ Izzie said firmly. ‘But don’t put your heart on the line so he can toy with you. Linda, men can sniff out dating despair the way an airport sniffer dog can home in on ten kilos of Red Leb. If you tell yourself you don’t need this guy, then you’ve got a better chance. And if he doesn’t really mean it, then you haven’t compromised yourself by wearing your heart on your sleeve. Trust me.’

‘Yeah, been there, done that, got the T-shirt,’ sighed Linda. ‘I used to give advice like that too, when I was your age. But I’m not any more: your age or giving that advice. Let me tell you, honey, when you get older, you get desperate. You don’t care if they know it. Shit, they know it anyway. This town’s full of women like me, and the guys all know the story. I don’t want to be alone. Why hide that?’

Izzie’s soft heart contracted. She grabbed Linda’s bony arm and squeezed it. She hadn’t expected this sort of honesty in such a place. Here, where it was all for show, it was strange and yet refreshing to find Linda and her straightforwardness.

‘Oh, listen to me, I sound all whiny,’ Linda said, finally putting her fork and knife down on her pushed-around-yet-uneaten meal.

‘That’s not whining – that’s being truthful,’ Izzie smiled. ‘I have this conversation with my girlfriends all the time. It’s a toss-up between being on our own for ever and getting used to it, or boarding the first plane to Alaska where there are single men dying to meet you.’

‘Why can’t the Alaska guys come to the Upper East Side?’ Linda wanted to know.

‘Because then, I guess, they’d become New York men and suddenly they’d have supermodels throwing themselves at their feet and they wouldn’t want us normal women any more.’

‘Oh, save me from models,’ sighed Linda.

Izzie laughed this time. ‘I work with models,’ she explained. ‘I’m a booker with Perfect-NY.’

Linda looked at her with respect. ‘Look at me whining about being lonely, when you’ve got to compete with that. There isn’t enough Lexopro in the world to make me work with models.’

‘Really, they’re just kids who happen to look that way,’ Izzie pointed out. ‘Lots of models are just as messed up as the rest of us. Looking amazing doesn’t fix any of the stuff on the inside.’

‘I could deal with a lot of shit inside, if I looked like that on the outside,’ Linda said fervently. ‘Still, I guess they’ll get old too one day.’

‘You’re not old,’ Izzie insisted.

Linda looked at her. ‘In this town, Izzie, once you’re sliding down towards fifty, you might as well get a Zimmer frame. Screw surgery and botox: men want real youth and taut little asses and ovaries that still pump out an egg. They might not want a kid, but they want a woman who could have one if they changed their mind. They want youth, end of story.’

She sounded so harsh, so bitter, that Izzie could say nothing in response. For once, her appetite deserted her.

All conversation stopped while the fashion show and auction part of the lunch began. Waiters silently cleared away the dishes, African-inspired techno music pumped out of the speakers, and the show began.

Izzie watched as the models – many of whom were from Perfect-NY, supplied free of charge for the event – stalked up and down the runway. Normally, she watched her girls intensely, scanning their moves and faces to see who looked content, who looked bored and whose pupils betrayed too many sips of the pre-show champagne. But today, Izzie was still shaken as she thought about her conversation with Linda and what she’d left unsaid: that she was scared of being alone too.

It had been a long time since she’d admitted that to anyone, or even to herself.

Marriage had seemed inevitable when she was growing up in Tamarin: you met someone and got married, simple as that. It would all fall into place gently, without you having to do anything.

Except that she’d left Tamarin for London and then New York, a place where the same boy-meets-girl-and-get-married rules didn’t seem to apply. Now, while all of her old school friends had at least one marriage under their belts, she hadn’t even come close to being engaged.

Finding the right person seemed a bit like a space shuttle coming back to earth – there was a remarkably small window of opportunity, much smaller than anyone realised, and if you missed it, you had to hope you’d find another window before it was too late.

When the single guys were gone, you had to wait for the next round – the ones who’d been married, got divorced, and were ready to go again. Except that they went for younger women, maybe ten years younger. And the women the same age as the guys were the ones who lost out.

Izzie thought about her forthcoming fortieth birthday in November.

A passionate Scorpio, as her astrologically-mad friend, Tish, liked to remind her. Izzie and Tish had lived together on the second floor of a three-storey walk-up in the West Village when Izzie had first come to New York.

They were the same age, in the same industry – Tish was a photographer’s assistant – and both were immigrants. Ten years on, Tish’s lilting Welsh accent was as pronounced as ever. She was also married and the mother of a six-month-old baby boy.

Tish would be forty soon too, but Izzie was facing it from a different vantage point to her friend.

Everyone had moved their chairs to get a better view of the fashion show, so when it was time for the auction, Brioni Suit Guy was sitting much nearer to her. Izzie hadn’t noticed until her auction programme fell and he got up smoothly, picked it up and held it out towards her.

‘Thank you,’ she said, startled, reaching for it.

‘Unpainted nails, how refreshing,’ he remarked.

Izzie never polished her nails with anything but clear gloss. In a sea of exquisite manicures, her almost-nude hands stood out.

‘I’m not a curly girl,’ she said absently. She felt too jolted by Linda’s conversation to resume the same level of interest in the guy. He’d hardly be interested in her, anyway: what with her shrivelling ovaries and skin that no amount of Dermalogica facials could refresh.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘I’m not a curly girl.’

‘I wasn’t talking about your hair.’ His fingers didn’t reach to touch the caramel curls that were streaked with honey tones at ferocious cost in Salon Circe every six weeks. But he looked at her as if he was thinking of it.

Linda had slipped off to the bathroom, so her seat was free and Brioni Suit took it, pulling it so close to Izzie that she felt her breath catch. She was a tall woman and instinctively knew if people were taller than her. He was.

‘I’m Joe Hansen,’ he said, holding out his hand.

‘Izzie Silver,’ she replied automatically, catching his and feeling something inside her jolt at the touch of that firm, masculine hand.

Nearly forty, but she could still feel the surge of attraction, couldn’t she?

And the way he was looking at her, watching, made her think that he wasn’t looking for a twenty-five-year-old. He was looking at her.

Smiling, a nice, real smile. Making her think of him with that shirt ripped off, and her close to him, kissing him, being cradled in those big arms, his mouth closed over the brown nub of her nipple. Phew.

Even now, Izzie could recall every precise detail of the moment. ‘So, what’s the “curly girl” thing?’ he asked.

Wiping the nipple-sucking vision from her mind, Izzie grinned at him now, not her sassy New Yorker-by-adoption grin but the born-and-bred-country-girl grin her family would have recognised. ‘My best friend from school used to call that sort of thing “curly”. Don’t know why. She had an odd way with words. Curly means the sort of person who loves pink ribbons and hairclips, makes her eyes look like Bambi’s and believes in eating before a dinner date so men won’t think she’s a great horse of a creature with a huge appetite.’

‘I’d warrant a guess you never did anything like that in your life,’ he said, assessing her with his eyes. ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with a huge appetite.’

A quicksilver flip in her stomach made Izzie think he wasn’t referring to appetites at mealtimes.

‘I like my food,’ she said flatly.

He’d get no games from her. She knew how they were played after years of dating in Manhattan. Games were games. This was for real, wasn’t it?

‘Favourite meal, then? Your last meal on earth?’

He was leaning back in Linda’s chair by now, totally oblivious to everyone round them. The charity auction had begun. Some hideous piece of sculpture was being sold and the other alpha males in the room were practically beating their chests like gorillas trying to buy it.

But Joe wasn’t interested. His total focus was on her. In turn, she couldn’t take her eyes off his face, off the steely grey eyes that were making her feel like the most important person in the room. That couldn’t be a trick, could it? Could a person fake absolute fascination?

Izzie sensed rather than saw the women at their table noticing the courtship going on between her and Joe, and she knew that it was time to put a stop to it all, and go back to the real world. Somebody would notice. She half-recognised his name and was sure that Mr Hansen was big fry, while she was just a shrimp in the pond. But somehow, she couldn’t put a stop to this just yet. It had been so long since she’d flirted with a man or felt even a quarter of the attraction she felt right now. Just a few minutes more, that couldn’t hurt, right?

‘Cough medicine and painkillers, probably,’ she joked. She joked when she was nervous.

‘Not your last meal in Cedars-Sinai,’ he said, eyes glinting now and a smile turning up his mouth ever so slightly. He smiled with his eyes, Izzie realised. So few people did that.

‘Trout caught from the stream beside my home in Ireland, with salad – rocket from the garden my grandmother set. She says it’s a great cure for grumpiness, puts a bit of pep back into you, and gooseberry tart with cream.’

‘Real food,’ Joe said, and his eyes were smiling more, sending out even more warmth that hit her square in the heart. ‘I was afraid you might say something about rare Iranian caviar or champagne out of a small vineyard that they only stock in five-star hotels in Paris.’

‘Then you don’t know me very well,’ Izzie countered. There weren’t many things that surprised Mr Hansen very much, she felt sure. Shrewd wasn’t the word. Izzie had a feeling she’d managed a feat few people ever had, and all because she’d been herself. Normally, being herself got her nowhere with men. How lovely to meet one who liked the unvarnished, raw Izzie Silver. The on-the-verge-of-forty Izzie.

‘I’d like to,’ he said. ‘Know you well, I mean.’

‘Sold at seventy thousand dollars!’ yelled the auctioneer triumphantly. Izzie glanced up. The red-faced oil billionaire at the table next to theirs was now the proud owner of what looked to Izzie like a squashed car gearbox painted with acid yellow dribbles. Art, schmart.

‘I’m boring you,’ Joe said softly.

‘No.’ Izzie flushed. She never flushed. Flushing was man-hunting girlie behaviour, ranking alongside her pet hates like hair-flicking and the tentative licking of lip thing that men always seemed to fall for, brain surgeons and cab drivers alike. Men could be so dumb.

‘You’re not boring me at all,’ she said quickly. He was unsettling her, though. Not that she could say that. Hello, I haven’t been on a date in six months and have given up on men, so you’re not boring me, but you’re freaking the hell out of me because I like you. No, definitely not something she could say.

He was talking again: he’d think she was a total nutter, the way she kept tuning in and out.

‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘I’d hate to be boring.’

As if, Izzie thought with a little sigh.

The voice of the MC boomed out of the sound system: ‘The next item in today’s auction is a portrait painted by art legend, Pasha Nilanhi. Who’ll start the bidding at twenty thousand dollars?’

Everyone made the correct noises of appreciation. Izzie had no idea who this Pasha person was, but everyone else must from the approving murmurs. Or else, they were pretending in case they looked like art philistines.

‘Do you collect art?’ he asked her as she craned her neck to see the picture that was now being carried round between the tables.

‘Only if it’s in the pages of magazines,’ she said with a mischievous smile. ‘To let you in on a secret, I didn’t pay for my ticket today,’ she added. ‘I’m not one of the art-collecting ladies who lunch.’

She waited for him to retreat. She was too old and not rich, either.

‘I’ve a secret too,’ he murmured, moving closer so that she instinctively bent her head to hear him. ‘I figured that out for myself. That’s why I’m talking to you.’

Izzie felt another swoop deep in her belly. ‘You’re saying I stand out like a sore thumb?’ she teased.

‘In a good way,’ he grinned. ‘The big giveaway was seeing you actually eat the entrée.’

Izzie couldn’t help herself: she let out a great roar of laughter.

‘Greed was the giveaway,’ she laughed. ‘How awful.’

‘Not greed,’ he insisted. ‘Hey, I ate mine too.’

‘You’re a guy,’ Izzie said, as if explaining experimental physics to a four-year-old. ‘Guys can eat and it looks macho. In our screwed-up universe, women can’t eat.’

‘Except for you,’ he urged.

‘Except for me,’ she agreed, feeling suddenly heifer-like.

‘Good. Because I was going to ask you out to lunch and there wouldn’t be any point if you wouldn’t eat. Or if lunch isn’t acceptable, we could have dinner?’

Izzie wanted to shriek ‘yes!’ at the top of her voice. This man, all elegance in a Brioni suit that cost more than a month’s rent on her apartment, had captured her as surely as if he’d caged her. He might dress like a civilised man, but he was a hunter all the same, a predator, the alpha male.

And playing with alpha males was madness. They knew what they wanted and went after it ruthlessly. Izzie didn’t want to be hurt.

To steady herself, she reached for the stem of her wineglass and twirled it. The table no longer looked pretty. It was sad now: the menus tossed aside, place names scrunched up, dirtied napkins left carelessly alongside coffee cups and untouched petits fours.

The whole shebang was nearly over and she had to go back to work afterwards, back to her normal life where millionaires didn’t flirt with her.

She lived in a tiny apartment with a dripping shower head, mould in the cupboard under the sink in the kitchen and still owed $1,200 on her credit card, for God’s sake, after splurging on those Louboutin platforms and the Stella McCartney trousers. Had he mistaken her for someone else from his blue-chip world? She imagined people she knew hearing about her flirting with Joe Hansen and winced. She’d never wanted to be a rich man’s arm candy: arm candy was twenty-something and ninety pounds, most of it breast enhancement, veneers and ego.

‘Everything is possible,’ she said cheerily, the way she spoke to woebegone models on the phone when they hadn’t been booked for something they were sure they’d got. ‘Not probable, though.’

‘Why not?’

Izzie thought about her words. ‘Because although I don’t know you from Adam, Mr Hansen, I have a pretty good idea that you live in a different world to me and it’s not my world.’

‘What’s your world?’ he asked.

‘I’m a booker for a model agency,’ she told him and explained a little about her job.

‘Why is that different from my world?’ he asked.

Izzie threw up her hands. ‘OK, I’ve got three questions for you and if you answer yes to any of them, then we agree that you come from a different world. Deal?’

‘Deal,’ he agreed, his eyes amused.

‘Have you flown commercial in the past year?’ She smiled and so did he.

‘No,’ he admitted.

Izzie held up one finger. People needed more than the average production-line worker’s salary to fly on private aviation.

‘Were there three or more noughts on the cheque you gave for today’s charity?’

This time he laughed. ‘You’re clever.’

‘Is that a yes?’

‘That’s a yes.’

She held up two fingers. ‘Two yeses,’ she said. From the way one of the table-hopping organisers had gushed over him earlier, Izzie had surmised that Joe had dropped a cheque for at least $100,000 on the charity.

‘Finally, do you own another home on the East Coast, say in the Hamptons or Westchester or fill-in-the-blanks Ralph-Lauren-style destination?’

He closed his eyes and ran a hand over a jaw that already had stubble shading it. Sexy, Izzie thought. Men who were smooth in every sense worried her: this guy was very real, very male. She liked that.

‘You got me,’ he said. ‘None of that explains why we can’t be friends.’

Izzie favoured him with her narrowed eyes look that said, without actual words: And the cheque’s in the post, right?

‘I’m not very good at this,’ he added ruefully.

‘You’re probably marvellous at it,’ she said. ‘I’m the one who’s out of practice.’

‘I find that hard to believe.’

‘Well, believe it, Mr Hansen,’ she said. ‘I’ve just had a depressing conversation about age with the woman whose seat you’re sitting in. New York older women age in proportion to dog years. Once we hit forty, we freewheel downhill to becoming senior citizens, wearing elasticated waists and going on cruises so we can put on another twelve pounds at the buffet. To sum up: I am all out of sexy chat with new men.’

She was sort of sorry by the time the words had left her mouth but still, she didn’t want to be toyed with. Joe was probably only amusing himself with her until a more likely prospect came along.

‘You don’t look forty,’ he said. ‘And, I’m really not good at this. I’m out of practice too. I was married for a long time and my wife and I have, well – separated.’ He said it all slowly, like he was just getting used to the phrase.

‘Sorry to hear that.’

‘Thanks but it’s been a long time coming.’ He shrugged. ‘We were married young. We’ve been trying to make it work for a long time but hey, it hasn’t.’

‘You’re on the lookout for a second wife, then?’ Izzie asked cheekily. ‘Because your neighbour’ – she meant the woman with the bank-vault jewellery – ‘seemed to be auditioning for the role.’

‘Muffy?’ he said. ‘She’s sweet but not really my type.’

Sweet? Muffy? She was as sweet as a rattlesnake, Izzie thought, but let it pass. She liked the fact that he wasn’t the sort of guy to make a snide remark about Muffy.

‘Listen,’ he went on, ‘I don’t do this normally. It’s been –’ he winced, ‘over twenty years since I did.’

He put one hand on her bare arm and Izzie had to hide her sharp intake of breath.

What was happening to her?

‘I take risks in business, calculated ones. I try to systematically beat the markets through math. Sometimes I bet on longshots, but not often. I’m known for being straight and saying what I think. I’ve never sat beside a strange woman at a charity luncheon and felt like this, or acted like this. For all I know, you might have a hotline number to page six of the New York Post to say Joe Hansen has lost it, but for once, I don’t care because I’ve got to say what I feel.’

There was silence. His fingers were still wrapped around her arm, warm skin on warm skin.

‘This is crazy,’ Izzie said, shaken.

Their eyes locked and he only looked away to curse lightly under his breath and take a tiny, vibrating cell phone from his breast pocket. He scanned it quickly, then put it back.

‘I’ve got to go,’ Joe said urgently. ‘Can I drop you someplace?’

‘I’ve got to go back to work too,’ she said. Work seemed like a million miles away. ‘But my office is off Houston, it may not be on your way…’ she added lamely.

‘I’ve got time,’ he said.

Suddenly, they were leaving, walking out without saying goodbye to anyone. The auction was still going on. Joe made a call on his cell phone and by the time they reached the street there was a discreet black car waiting for them. It was sleek and luxuriously anonymous, like something NASA might consider sending to Mars. Izzie climbed in.

‘I’ve lived in apartments smaller than the inside of this car,’ she joked, settling back into a seat of pale cream leather.

‘I know the owner. We could sort out a deal,’ he joked back.

She sat as far away from him as she could in the back seat, trying to appear as if she spent a lot of time being ferried round the city in luxury.

‘You know about me and I still don’t know anything about you, Ms Silver. What do you do?’ he asked.

Izzie gave him her spiel. Women were normally interested in the fashion world and made sympathetic noises about working with beautiful beings. Men were either bored or their faces lit up and they wanted to know – some subtly, some not so subtly – if her agency had any of the Victoria’s Secrets girls on their books.

Joe did none of these things.

He asked her about the agency and about the problems faced by a business where the main commodity was human beings. As the car cruised along, insulating Izzie and Joe from the rainy streets via darkened windows, she became passionate about the flaws in the industry.

Before she knew it, she’d forgotten everything except the need to explain to this man that she hated seeing so many girls messed up by fashion’s predilection for using the skinniest-limbed waifs they could find.

‘Officially, fashion people say it’s not our fault that the big look is “rexy” – a combination of sexy and anorexia,’ she explained when he looked baffled, ‘but of course the whole fashion industry is a factor. C’mon, if you’re a fourteen-year-old and you see an air-brushed girl in every TV commercial or magazine spread, eventually, you’ll think that’s what you’re supposed to look like, even if it’s physically impossible for you. So hello anorexia or bulimia.’

‘I’m glad I’ve got sons,’ he remarked.

‘Sons? How old are they?’ Izzie recovered at lightning speed. Of course, he’d have children. He’d spoken about a long marriage: children would be part of that.

‘Twenty-three, twelve and fourteen,’ he said, his face softening. ‘Tom, he’s the eldest. He’s in France working on his French, and possibly on the girls. Matt’s next, bit of a gap, I know, and he’s into music in a big way. Practises guitar all the time, won’t touch his math homework. Ironic, given that’s how I’ve made my money. Josh is more into his books. His school had an extra language class this term, Japanese, and he took it.’ Joe couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice. ‘Tom says his little bro is mad. Kids, huh?’

‘And they live with…?’ Izzie probed.

‘Us. We’re still in the same house while we’re sorting it all out,’ he said. ‘The separation has been a long time coming, but we’ve only recently formalised it. We’ve a big house,’ he added. ‘We want to get things right for the boys and this was the best way. No Dad moving out, not yet.’

‘Ah,’ Izzie said. Time for her to back off. No matter what instant attraction she’d had for this guy, she didn’t want to get caught up in a messy separation and divorce, or even be his rebound person. Any man getting out of a marriage after that long would be rebounding like a basketball at a Knicks’ game.

‘That’s my building,’ she told the driver as the Perfect-NY offices came into view.

The car pulled up. Joe put one hand on the door handle to let her out his side, the kerb side.

‘Would you have lunch with me one day?’ he asked.

‘You’re still married,’ Izzie pointed out. ‘In my book, that affects the whole dating process. It gets kinda messy – I’ve seen it. I don’t want to experience it.’

‘Just lunch,’ he said, and his steely grey eyes seemed to melt as they stared at hers. Izzie felt it again: that lurch of excitement inside her. She could honestly say she’d never felt anything like that before in her whole life, but what was the point? Their relationship could only be a friendship, it had no future. Otherwise, she’d be doing something really dumb.

‘Don’t move,’ Joe told the driver. ‘I’ll let Ms Silver out.’

‘Whatever you want, Mr Hansen.’

Whatever you want, Mr Hansen, thought Izzie helplessly, feeling that wave of attraction spanning out from her solar plexus again.

Just one little lunch. What was the harm in that?

TWO

The edges of the black-and-white photograph were ragged and slightly faded, yet life shone out of it as fiercely as if it had been taken moments before, instead of some seventy years previously.

Four women and five men stood around a huge stone fireplace, all clad in the evening dress of the 1930s: the women with marcelled hair, languid limbs and dresses that pooled like silk around their ankles; the men stern-faced in black tie, with luxuriant moustaches, and an air of command lingering around them. One man, the oldest of the group, held a fat cigar to his lips, another raised his crystal tumbler to the photographer, one foot resting lazily on the fireplace’s club fender, the perfect picture of a gentleman at ease.

On either side of the group stood two antique tables decorated with flowers and silver-framed photographs. On the parquet in front of them, a tiger rug lay carelessly.

The whole scene spoke of money, class and privilege.

Jodi could almost hear a scratchy gramophone playing Ivor Novello or the Kit Kat Band in the background, the music weaving a potent spell.

Lady Irene’s Birthday. Rathnaree, September 1936, was written in faded ink on the back.

Jodi wondered which of the four women was Lady Irene. One of the two blondes, or perhaps the woman with a jewelled diadem woven into her cloudy dark hair like an Indian nautch dancer?

The photo had been tucked away in a copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel, caught in the library’s elderly glued-on cover from decades ago. Jodi Beckett had nearly missed it. She’d gone to the Tamarin library one morning when her computer crashed for the third time and she’d been so angry that she just had to get out of the small cottage that still wasn’t her home, even though she and Dan had lived in Tamarin for two months now. Relentless rain meant that even walking was no escape, and then Jodi had thought of the library right at the end of their street.

She’d spent many hours in the college library when she’d been studying at home in Brisbane, but in the past few years she’d rarely ventured into one. She passed the Tamarin Public Library every day on her way to buy groceries and she’d never stepped inside. That morning, she ran down Delaney Street, head bent against rain that stung like needles, and entered a haven.

The place was empty except for an elderly man engrossed in the day’s newspapers, and a twenty-something librarian with a clever face, dyed jet-black hair, a nose ring and violet lipstick that matched her fluffy angora hand-knit sweater. Silence reigned, settling over Jodi as calmly as if a meditation CD was playing in her head.

An hour flew past as she wandered between the shelves, picking up book after book, smiling at ones she’d read and loved, making mental notes of ones she hadn’t.

And then the photograph had fallen from The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Jodi had felt that surge of fascination she remembered from a long-ago summer when she’d joined an archaeological dig in Turkey as a student.

Archaeology hadn’t been for her: she loved history but wasn’t enamoured of the physical digging-in-the-dirt part of it. Yet this photo gave her the same buzz, the sense of finding something nobody had seen for decades, the sense of a mystery waiting to be unravelled.

The librarian had been delighted to be asked for information and had told her that Rathnaree was the big house of the locality.

‘They were known as the Lochraven family, Lord Lochraven of Tamarin. Sounds good, huh? They were Tamarin’s gentry,’ she’d said. ‘It’s still a beautiful house, although it’s a bit ruined now. Nobody’s lived there for years. Well, since I can remember,’ she added.

‘Are there any books about the house or the family?’ Jodi asked.

The librarian shook her head. ‘No, not one, which is odd. The Lochravens were in that house for two hundred years at least, maybe longer, so there must be lots of interesting stuff there.’

Jodi felt the surge of mystery again. ‘I know the photo’s probably officially the library’s,’ she said, ‘but could I take it and get a copy made? I’m a writer,’ she added, which was technically true. She was a writer, but was unpublished since her thesis on nineteenth-century American poets, and had made her living for the past seven years in publishing, working as a copy editor. ‘I’d love to do some research on Rathnaree. See the house, hear about the people…write a book about it.’

There, she’d said it. Dan was always urging her to write one, but Jodi didn’t know if she had the spark required for fiction and, until now, she’d never had an idea for non-fiction.

‘A book on Rathnaree! Wicked!’ the librarian replied. ‘There’s a guidebook on the town with information about it, but that’s all. Don’t move! I’ll find it for you. You’ll love the house. It’s beautiful. I mean, imagine living in a mansion like that.’

A copy of the photo now lay on the passenger seat of Jodi’s car along with a small local guide to the area which carried another photo of Rathnaree House as it had looked in the fifties. She rounded the last corner of the avenue to the house, mentally muttering about how hopeless the car’s suspension was, and how bumpy the avenue. Avenue was really far too grand a word for it, she decided, for even though it was lined with stately beech trees and was at least a mile long, it was nothing more than a country track with a high ridge in the middle where grass grew.

And then, when she’d cleared the last corner and driven past an overgrown coral pink azalea, she saw the house. And her foot slid automatically to the brake, hauling the little car to a stop on a scree of gravel.

‘Holy moly,’ Jodi said out loud and stared.

The grainy black-and-white picture in the Tamarin guidebook hadn’t done justice to the house. In its nest of trees, once-perfect hedging and trailing roses, stood what the guidebook had described as ‘a perfect example of Victorian Palladianism’. In reality, this meant a gracefully designed grey building with the graceful arches and stone pillars of Palladian architecture and vast symmetrical windows looking out over a pillowy green lawn dotted with daisies and dandelions.

The huge house stretched endlessly back and widened into stables, servants’ quarters, a Victorian conservatory to the right, and the lichened walls of a kitchen garden that led off to the left. Giant stone plinths topped with weed-filled jardinières signalled the start of a box-tree-edged herb garden designed in a knot layout, now rampant with woody rosemary and lavender that sent their hazy smells drifting into the air.

There were no ladies in elaborate flowered hats and long dresses standing about beside stern moustachioed men, nor any sign of long sweeping cars with gleaming bonnets. But this Rathnaree, although older and clearly much less tended than the version from either of the photographs, still retained the unmistakable grandeur of the Big House.

Fleets of servants would have been needed to run it and thousands of acres of land would have been needed to pay for it all.

It was another world, a time when Tamarin was the little town where the powerful Lochraven family sent their servants to do their bidding. Now Tamarin was a thriving place while Rathnaree was empty, the Lochravens long gone, apart from the house’s owner, a distant cousin who never set foot in the place, the librarian had explained.

‘Rathnaree is the Anglicised version of the name. It’s really Rath na ri – fort of the king, in the Irish language,’ she’d continued. ‘Can’t remember half of what I learned in school, but we all had that drummed into us. I had a history teacher once who was very interested in the Lochravens, said her mother had been at hunt balls at Rathnaree House in the thirties; it was very formal, with a butler and women wearing long dresses and gloves. Imagine! I like those sort of dresses but I wouldn’t be into the gloves. Do you want me to draw you a map of how to get there?’

‘No,’ Jodi said. ‘I know roughly where it is. I’ve been living here for two months now.’

‘You have? Where? Tell us.’ The girl had leaned companionably on the counter.

‘My husband and I moved from Dublin,’ Jodi explained, as she had so often since she and Dan had arrived in Tamarin.

No chance of not knowing your neighbours here.

It was all very different from the apartment in Clontarf where they’d lived for two years where they only knew their neighbours from the sounds they heard through the thin partition walls. On one side, there were the Screamers During Sex. On the other side, were the CSI addicts, who had digital television and spent entire evenings with the television on full volume so no bit of an autopsy went unheard. Neither Dan nor Jodi would have recognised either set of neighbours in the lift unless one of them shouted ‘oh yes, YES!!’

Their new home in Tamarin was a crooked-walled cottage on Delaney Street with a tiny whitewashed courtyard of a garden. Within a week of their arrival, they’d been to dinner with the neighbours on both sides, had been offered a marmalade kitten by the people across the street, and were on first-name terms with the postman. In their old home, they’d never even seen the postman.

‘Dan, my husband, works in St Killian’s National School,’ Jodi explained. ‘He’s the new vice-principal –’

‘Oh, Mr Beckett! My little sister’s in sixth class. Now I know you!’ The librarian was thrilled. ‘You’re Australian, aren’t you?’

Jodi grinned. ‘Great bush telegraph round here.’

‘Works better than the broadband,’ the girl grinned back.

‘Tell me about it. I work in publishing and I’m going crazy trying to connect up. The engineer told me it was to do with being at the end of the line on our street, which doesn’t make sense.’

‘He says that to everyone, don’t mind him.’

A group of school children and their teacher on a mission to find out about Early Bronze Age settlement remains had arrived at that moment, and the librarian, smiling apologetically at Jodi, had turned to deal with their request. Jodi had made a few gestures to signify her thanks, and left.

She’d gone home with her precious photograph and that evening, when Dan arrived home, she’d told him about her idea.

‘You want to write a book about these people,’ he said, sitting down at their tiny kitchen table so he could study the photograph carefully. ‘Sounds good to me. Amn’t I always telling you that you should write a book?’

‘Yes, but I never had anything I wanted to write about,’ Jodi said, perching on his lap.

Dan put his arms around her and held her.

‘I’m sorry about today,’ she said. She’d phoned him at work when her computer had crashed for the third time, shouting that she was sick of this bloody town and it was all very well for him: he had a job to go to and people to see, but what about her?

‘It’s OK. I know it’s hard for you,’ Dan said, his lips buried in her hair. ‘I love you, you know, you daft cow.’

‘Love you too,’ she’d replied, allowing herself to feel comforted by him. Since the miscarriage, she’d felt so wound up, like a coiled wire spring, that she’d been unable to let Dan console her. Moving here for his new job was supposed to help, but it hadn’t. Here, in this watercolour-pretty town, she felt alien and out of place. Even their old home with the noisy-during-sex neighbours was better than this. She’d done the pregnancy test there: sitting on the toilet seat in their tiny blue ensuite with Dan hovering over her eagerly.

She’d been pregnant there. In Tamarin, she wasn’t, had never been. Might never be again.

And now this old photo had sparked a little of the old Jodi, had made her feel ever so slightly like she could be herself again.

She leaned against Dan and closed her eyes. She’d have to do some online searching. And sort out the laptop. No way could she begin proper research with a dodgy computer.

Two days later, she was standing in front of beautiful Rathnaree House with the scent of lavender in her head.

Jodi wandered around the deserted gardens, peering in the great windows, but she could see so little: the windows were filthy and shuttered from the inside. The gloom from within meant she couldn’t make out anything.

Prevented from entering the courtyard behind the house by a giant rusting gate, she stood with her hands on it, rattling it furiously.

She wanted to get inside, wanted to see Rathnaree and learn its stories.

Her list of people to see was growing. Ever since she’d told Dan about the photo, ideas had been bubbling out of her head. First, she needed to speak to someone who knew everything about the local area and would be able to put her in touch with the right people. Yvonne, who lived next door to them with her husband and two children, instantly came up with a long list of people who’d be able to help.

‘Lily Shanahan, she’s the one you should talk to. Nearly ninety but doesn’t look a day over seventy. There’s no case of her mind going, either, let me tell you. She’s as sharp as a tack but in a lovely way,’ Yvonne added quickly. ‘Her family worked for the Lochravens and so did she when she was younger, although I don’t think she was ever as keen on them as her mother. She was the housekeeper for years and that woman idolised Lady Irene. But Lily, she wasn’t a fan of Lady Irene’s to-the-manor-born carry on. Still, she’ll have some stories of Rathnaree for you, I’m sure. There isn’t much around here that she hasn’t witnessed.’

Jodi wrote it all down quickly.

‘Do you think I should call her family first, to see if she’ll talk to me?’ Jodi asked, thinking that such an old lady might get a shock if a strange Australian woman approached her.

‘Lord no. There’s no need for formality with Lily. I’ll give you her phone number,’ Yvonne replied. ‘She lives on her own out on the Sea Road. She has a home help these days to do little jobs around the house, but she’s very independent.’

‘She has family, though?’ Jodi still thought she might approach Lily via someone else. A ninety-year-old was bound to be frail and anxious.

‘Her family are all lovely. There’s her nephew, Edward Kennedy, and his wife, Anneliese. I work with Anneliese in the Lifeboat Shop on Mondays. You say her name like it’s Anna-Lisa but it’s spelled an unusual way. It’s Austrian I think. They’re a gorgeous couple, Anneliese is a fabulous gardener. Green fingers, she has. Lily had a daughter, Alice, but she died, I’m afraid. Cancer. But Lily’s granddaughter, Izzie, she lives in New York and she works with supermodels. Not that you’d think it,’ Yvonne said, smiling. ‘Izzie’s very normal, despite the supermodels and everything. Lily more or less raised her, to be honest, and Lily is very down to earth.’

‘Do you have her granddaughter’s email address or phone number in New York?’ Jodi asked. ‘I could approach her first?’

‘Nonsense.’ Yvonne was brisk. ‘Go directly to Lily. You’ll love her – everyone does.’

‘She worked for the Lochravens, you said?’

‘When she was young, she did. But she went off to London to train as a nurse during the Second World War, and I don’t think she ever worked in Rathnaree again. It was all changed, anyway,’ Yvonne added. ‘Nothing was the same after that, my mother used to say.’

Jodi made a mental note to study more about WW2. There was so much she didn’t know and she didn’t want to interview the old lady without being sure of her facts.

She’d phone Lily Shanahan as soon as she got home, Jodi decided, giving the big rusted old gate one final shove. It remained unmoved and she could only look into one corner of the courtyard from where she stood.

She only hoped that Lily had a good memory. If she was almost ninety now, she’d have been seventeen or eighteen in 1936, the date on the photograph, and that was an awfully long time ago. Then again, Yvonne had said that age hadn’t diminished any of Lily’s faculties. Jodi hoped that was the case. There was something about Rathnaree that made her want to know more about it and the people who’d lived and breathed inside its walls.

THREE

Anneliese Kennedy sat down in the big armchair that faced the sea and picked up one of her old flower catalogues. There were always a pile of dog-eared catalogues on the white cane table beside the chair, ready to flick through when she hadn’t the energy for the newspaper.

Normally, her fingers had only to graze the pages for a feeling of contentment to flood through her. Pages of seeds illustrated with full-bodied blossoms made her think of hours spent in her garden, hands buried in the soil, nurturing and thinking about nothing more than nature.

Today, the magic wasn’t there. They were just a bunch of well-thumbed catalogues, and the hand that lay on them was veined with alligator skin and ragged cuticles.

‘You’ve such pretty hands, you should look after them,’ her mother had sighed some thirty-seven years before when Anneliese was a young bride and prone to plunging her hands into dishwater without the time or the inclination to think about wearing rubber gloves.

Anneliese was a high-speed sort of person. Not reckless, never. Quick, practical and deft. Gloves and hand creams were for her mother’s generation, not for a twenty-year-old with vast energy and a life to be lived.

‘Artist’s hands and green fingers,’ Edward said proudly as they stood in the front of the church the day their daughter, Beth, got married and Anneliese had spent hours tying barely unfurled blush pink roses into tiny posies for the pews.

Anneliese preferred growing roses in the comfort of the Tamarin Garden Centre to making them into bouquets, but she’d have tied the roses together with her teeth in joy at seeing Beth walk up the aisle.

Four years ago now, it had been the best day of her life, seeing Beth finally settled. Beth was like a rose herself: one of the rare antique tea roses that Anneliese and Neil, who owned the garden centre, liked to grow in the shelter of the giant greenhouse.

Madame Alfred Carrière, very beautiful to look at with a glorious scent, but also prickly, high maintenance and needing hours of tender care. The day Beth married Marcus – gentle, strong of heart and crazy about her – Anneliese knew someone else was going to be providing that tender care, or at least, sharing it with her.

If Beth was a rose, Edward was a tree, a rare oak, standing tall and strong against the sea wind. And Anneliese? When she’d met Edward, she was like a poplar: tall, slim and vibrant from the top of her fair head to the tips of her ever-moving toes.

But she didn’t know what she was any more. Time and life had changed her.

Once, when she’d started working in horticulture, she’d thought that the art of growing things was the answer to all questions. The earth taught you to be calm, to wait, that the cycles changed but it would all come round again: spring would follow a harsh winter, eventually. Nothing, not problems nor solutions, could be rushed – any more than you could rush the questing head of a snowdrop. The snowdrop would emerge sleepily into the air when it was good and ready.

That became Anneliese’s motto. Things happened when they were good and ready.

And now, it seemed, she was wrong. Totally wrong.

She got up, went into the kitchen and put on the kettle. It was a reflex action. When she had nothing to do, she flicked that switch and busied herself with the ritual of tea-making. Most of the time, she barely drank more than half the tea.

Edward wasn’t a tea person: he preferred coffee. There was still a jar of his favourite and wildly expensive Blue Mountain from Fortnum & Mason in the cupboard.

Anneliese hated coffee but liked the smell of it. There would be no one to make coffee now, no rich aroma lifting into the air to tell her that Edward was in the kitchen, idly listening to the radio as he brewed up.

There would be no other person to move a tea towel, reposition a cushion, unfold a newspaper. After three decades of living with another person, would she now get used to this aloneness? Perhaps aloneness was the true human state, and not the Platonic vision of two together. She hoped so.

She flicked off the kettle switch, grabbed her keys and went to the back door. Swapping her flat shoes for boots, she put on the old padded jacket that hung with a selection of others on a peg in the tiny back hallway. The back door faced the beach and when Anneliese pulled it open, the fresh hit of sea breeze caught her breath.

The scent of sand and the tang of the sea filled her lungs and she gasped for a moment before recovering.

Her cottage was half a mile from the beach, half a mile where tenacious scrub grass and hardy sea orchids clung to the land before giving way to a crest of small stones that gleamed like precious jewels when the sea drenched them. Now, the tide was out and a swathe of fawn-coloured sand stretched out ahead of her in a big horseshoe. This was Milsean Bay, a small cove that sat beside the much larger Tamarin Bay, the two separated by the jagged cliff that ran down to the edge of the water.

The Milsean side of the cliff was the more exposed part of the headland, where sand and sea rusted cars and pummelled paint off houses, leaving cottages like Anneliese’s the same colour as the driftwood that swept up on to the beach.

On the other side of the cliff sat Tamarin itself, protected from the bite of the wind and the sea by a tiara of cliffs.

The valley that ran through Tamarin down into the bay, where a chunk of glacier had carved a path millions of years ago, was occupied by both the River Bawn and the fat road in and out of town. In a sunny haven in the curve of the valley was the garden centre where Anneliese had worked until last year.

Years ago, Anneliese had thought she’d like to live safely nestled within the crook of Tamarin Bay, where the wind still rattled the windows but there were neighbours close by on the nights when the power went. In the shelter of the cliffs and the hills, what was almost a micro-climate existed and in the garden centre Anneliese grew plants and flowers she wouldn’t dream of planting on the Milsean side.

Her aunt-in-law, Lily, had a fig tree in her garden, for heaven’s sake: hugely rotund and not so good in the fig department nowadays, like an old gentleman who couldn’t be bothered with productivity now that he’d reached his three score and ten, but it was still a fig tree, still a creature of warmer climes.

Now though, Anneliese was glad she and Edward had moved out here to the cottage twenty years before. The sense of isolation suited her. The wind couldn’t scream with any more pain and anger than she did, and here at least if she wanted to sit on her weather-beaten porch and drink wine while Tosca shrieked in the background, nobody would call her mad or phone her relatives wondering if they ‘could have a quiet word’.

The beach was scattered with shells and trails of slick seaweed. High on the shoreline were the hoof marks made by the morning riders who galloped along the beach from the stables three miles inland. Edward had taken photographs of them one summer: black-and-white shots of the fury of the gallop, nostrils flared and manes rippling as horses and riders thundered along, sand and surf flying.

One of the photos still hung in the cottage where she could see it every time she walked in the front door. It was a beautiful shot.

‘You could take up photography,’ Anneliese had told him. Edward was very artistic, although there wasn’t much call for artistry in the insurance business.

‘I’m only an amateur, love,’ Edward said back, although she knew he was pleased. He hadn’t been raised to compliments. Edward’s mother thought praise was a word you only used in church, praising the Lord. Anneliese had always tried to make up for the lack of praise in Edward’s youth.

‘It’s pretty good for an amateur.’

‘You’re blind, do you know that?’ Edward said, smiling. ‘You only see my good points.’

‘Selective blindness,’ Anneliese smiled back at him. ‘I see the bits I like and I like most of it.’

Walking along the beach now, Anneliese knew she’d have to take the picture off the wall when she got home. It would hurt too much to see it.

The wind bit into her face, stinging her eyes. Anneliese stared down at the sand, determined to find something to shift her mind off the sharp pain in her heart. A few yards ahead of her lay a piece of driftwood, tangled up in a skein of chemical blue net from the fishing boats.

Bending slowly, she picked it up. It was a foot long, twisted like a coil of rope. Some of the driftwood was beautiful, sculpted by the sea, still a thing of beauty despite the battering.

And then there were pieces of driftwood that were just that: wood flung on the beach after thrashing around in the surf, desolate and hollowed out, ugly and unwanted. Like this one. Like me, Anneliese knew.

She wasn’t a plant at all – she was driftwood. Ugly to most people, beautiful only to the very few.

Summoning all the pent-up energy in her body, she hurled the driftwood back into the ocean and screamed at it.

‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.’

There was nobody to hear her scream. Her voice was caught on the wind and whipped away into the air where the seagulls paid no attention.

Edward hadn’t seemed to pay attention that morning when she’d got up at eight and said she was going to Sunday Mass at nine, then might call in on Lily. He’d murmured something that sounded like assent, and rolled over in the bed, bunching the snow white of the duvet around his lanky frame. Anneliese didn’t mind. She was a lark and he was an owl. Opposites and all that.

Ten minutes later, she was showered, dressed and sipping a cup of green tea before she hurried out the door. She’d grown to like green tea, for all that she’d loathed it for ages after the acupuncturist had said it was good for you. Why was it that things that were good for you took a long time to get used to and things that were bad were instantly addictive?

The early service in St Canice’s in the square in Tamarin was pure and perfect. The cold spring sun sent rays of light shining through the stained-glass windows, leaving dust motes hanging in the air, an effect that was for all the world like celestial rays blessing the faithful in biblical paintings. There was no music at the early service.

The choir sang at eleven Mass, with Mr Fitzpatrick strangling hymns on a rheumatic organ, with the congregation wincing and Father Sean smiling bravely, willing people not to laugh openly.

Dear Father Sean. He had a great sense of humour which he had to subdue because not everyone wanted a priest who cracked jokes. Anneliese felt sorry for him, having to toe some invisible line.

Eleven was the family Mass too, where toddlers knelt on pews and twinkled bored eyes at the people behind them. Adorable but distracting.

At nine on a Sunday morning, the church was only a quarter full and it suited Anneliese perfectly. She loved the peace of it all. Time to think but not so much time that her mind skittered off into dark areas. No, she didn’t like that. Luckily, it never happened at Mass. Something to do with the ritual of standing and kneeling, murmuring responses to prayers that were engrained in her soul because she’d been murmuring them for so many years.

Anneliese’s religion was a meditative, safe place for her to rest rather than an intense, doctrinaire version.

Then the migraine came helter skelter into her head without warning; not the full blast that required lying down, but certainly a blistering ache that made her eyes narrow with pain.

There was no point waiting: she had to go home and lie down. She could phone Lily and apologise later. Her aunt, well aunt-in-law strictly speaking, because she was actually Edward’s aunt, wouldn’t mind. Lily had many glorious qualities – she was funny, warm, had a marvellous sense of humour – but one of her absolute virtues was the fact that she never sulked or took offence at anything.

‘Take care of yourself, Anneliese, and drop round when you’re better,’ was all she’d say.

Anneliese knew so many people who cherished perceived injuries and looked for them in everything. It was comforting that Lily wasn’t such a person.

Anneliese drove home slowly, feeling the car judder with the wind, and hurried into the house, thinking only of the blessed relief of getting into her bed, only half registering that the car parked outside belonged to her friend, Nell. Edward would have to talk to her. Nell wouldn’t mind: she and Edward were great pals and Nell knew that when a migraine hit, Anneliese could only think of lying down.

And then she stepped into the kitchen to see Edward and Nell sitting together at the table, his dark head bent towards her fair one and their hands clasped.

There was no soft music or gentle lights, no state of undress. But the intimacy of their togetherness cut into Anneliese like a knife sliding into the underbelly of a chicken fillet.

‘Anneliese!’ gasped Nell, seeing her.

They moved apart sharply, quickly. In another universe, Anneliese might have joked about what the speedy movement might do to Edward’s sciatica or Nell’s dodgy neck. But she knew, with absolute certainty, that there was nothing innocent about their closeness. The migraine pummelled louder in her head, fighting with the sense of nausea that rose instantaneously.

‘We were just…’ began Nell awkwardly, and then stopped as if she had no idea what to say next.

Nell was never short of words. In contrast to Anneliese, who preferred silence often, Nell had a word for everyone and a comment for anything.

Like the rain: ‘It’d be a great little country if only we could get someone to put an umbrella over it.’

People loved that.

Or thoughts on money: ‘Spend it now: there are no pockets in a shroud.’

Now, Nell had nothing to say.

‘Anneliese, you don’t want to get the wrong idea,’ began Edward, his face a mask of anxiety as he moved towards Anneliese and tried to take her hands in his. His hair was wet from the shower. It was only twenty-five minutes since she’d left the house. He must have leapt out of bed as soon as she’d gone.

‘Explain the wrong idea to me, so I can understand the difference between it and the right one,’ Anneliese said, gently detaching her hands. Her head still felt cloudy but the powerful instinctive message in her brain told her not to let her husband touch her.

‘Lord, Anneliese, please don’t think we’d ever do anything to hurt you,’ began Nell.

She looked anxiously at Edward, pleading with him to sort it out.

You could tell what people thought by their eyes more easily than by anything else, Anneliese knew.

Over the years, she and Edward had exchanged many telling looks. And she and Nell had exchanged them too – they’d been friends for nearly twenty years, a lifetime.

Only she’d never been aware of these two important people in her life looking at each other in this way. Until now.

Anneliese felt as if she was watching the last reel of a movie where all the plot loopholes are tied up.

Nell and Edward were the ones sharing the telling looks now because they were the couple in this scene: not Anneliese and Edward, but Nell and Edward.

‘Please, Anneliese, sit down.’

Edward was still beside her, his expression anxious and his hands out in supplication.

‘I wish we didn’t have to do this but I suppose we have to. Now or never, right?’ he said, looking defeated but determined, determined to have this awful conversation.

And that was when Anneliese knew absolutely that Edward was leaving her for Nell.

Edward hated confrontation of any kind. He’d been useless on those occasions when Beth was in floods of tears, distraught over something or other.

His facing a conversation that could easily end in shouting told her all she needed to know.

‘You’re going, aren’t you? You’re going with Nell.’

Edward nodded mutely and held his hands out imploringly, as if to say, What else can I do?

Anneliese sat down then and placed her hands on the table. ‘I came home early because I’ve got a migraine,’ she said to no one in particular.

‘Shall I fetch your pills?’ Edward said.

She nodded.

He rushed from the room, eager to be gone.

‘Tea might help,’ Nell added and turned to open cupboards, finding cups and teabags easily. She’d spent so many hours here, sharing tea and life with Anneliese, that she knew where everything was as well as Edward and Anneliese did.

‘Tea wouldn’t help, actually,’ Anneliese said harshly. ‘Nothing is going to help.’

Defeated, Nell sat down at the far end of the table opposite Anneliese.

Her hair was different, Anneliese realised. Normally, Nell’s dark blonde curly hair was windswept even when there wasn’t wind. She rarely wore much in the way of make-up and for a woman of her age – Anneliese’s exact age, actually, fifty-six – she had remarkably clear, unlined skin with just a few freckles and the inevitable little creases that spun out from her laughing blue eyes. Today, her hair was brushed carefully into shape and she wore lipstick and mascara. She looked done, ready for some event.

And that event was running off with Anneliese’s husband.

‘Why, Nell, why?’

‘Oh Anneliese, don’t sit there and look so surprised,’ snapped Nell, who’d never snapped at Anneliese before in her life. ‘You must have known. Edward said you didn’t, but I knew you did. Women know. You’re turned a blind eye, that’s all. Which says a lot about your relationship, that you didn’t care enough –’

‘I didn’t know,’ interrupted Anneliese, shocked at this new version of Nell whom, mere moments ago, was saying she’d never meant to hurt Anneliese. ‘If I’d known, do you think I’d have gone on wanting to be your friend, going for lunch with you, asking you here for dinner?’ She stopped because she felt too numb to think up other examples of how she hadn’t known.

‘How long has it been going on?’ she whispered.

Anneliese knew she should summon up rage and fury, but all she felt at this moment was a terrible weakness in her legs, and the sense that she’d been totally wrong about the people in her life.

If either Edward or Nell had betrayed her individually, the other would have been there to remind her that they still loved her. But they’d both betrayed her. Together.

‘Don’t let on you didn’t know. You must have known,’ Nell hissed.

Again, Anneliese felt herself recoil at the bitterness in her friend’s voice.

‘Don’t lie to me, Anneliese. You might lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to me. If you two were crazily in love with each other, would Edward have come to me? Answer me that, then? No, he wouldn’t. He came to me because you didn’t need him, you cut him off. You had so much and you didn’t care, didn’t realise it. Well, I did and I’m not going to apologise to you for it.’

Anneliese felt the weight of Nell’s rage at her: at Anneliese for having the wonderful Edward all to herself and not realising what a treasure she had, a treasure that she’d stupidly lost.

She thought of all the Saturday nights she’d invited Nell over to the cottage for dinner, making it sound as if they were three friends sharing a meal instead of a happily married couple reaching out the hand of friendship to a widow who might be sitting on her own at home otherwise. Eric, Nell’s husband, had died ten years previously, and since then Anneliese had tried so hard to include Nell in their lives. Anneliese had meant it as pure friendship, but perhaps Nell had seen it as something else: as pity? Or as Anneliese showing off, as if to say, I have a husband and you don’t. Come and eat with us and feel jealous, why don’t you? What else had Nell misconstrued?

‘I thought you knew me well enough, Nell, to know that if I’d realised you and Edward were –’

Saying it was hard.

‘– having an affair, I’d have said something. I might have a lot of flaws, but I know that I’m honest. Remember how many talks we had about the value of friendship where honesty mattered? How we hated fake friends, people who said the right things at the right time and meant none of it?’

The anger that hadn’t been there suddenly blazed to life in Anneliese’s heart. They’d lied to her. They’d both said they valued truth, and now it transpired that truth had been missing for such a long time. Worse, Nell was trying to put the blame on to Anneliese.

‘I didn’t have a clue what was happening,’ she went on in a harsh voice. ‘It might make you feel better to think I did and that I was giving you tacit approval to steal my husband, but I didn’t.’

‘I’m sorry, Anneliese.’ Edward stood in the doorway, the small plastic container of Anneliese’s migraine medicine in his hand and a look of desolation on his face. ‘I knew you didn’t know. I wanted to think you did because it would be easier, but I knew you didn’t.’

‘How long has it been going on, this thing between you two?’ Anneliese asked, purposely not looking at Nell any more.

‘Not that long,’ said Edward.

‘Since the fundraiser for the lifeboat,’ Nell interrupted, obviously not keen on the damage limitation of breaking it all to Anneliese gently.

Well over a year, Anneliese thought to herself.

‘I presume you were waiting for a nice time to break it to me, then. My birthday? Christmas?’

‘It had to come out sometime,’ Nell said coolly. ‘Might as well be now.’

Both women looked at Edward, who shrugged helplessly.

Anneliese felt another surge of anger, white hot this time.

The words were in Anneliese’s mouth before she had time to think about them: ‘You should pack, Edward. Nell, I’d like you to wait outside, please. I don’t want you in my house any more. You could always go home and wait for Edward to come. He’ll need space for his things.’

Somehow, Anneliese got up and went into the living room, where she broke with the habit of a lifetime and poured herself a strong brandy from the stupid globe drinks trolley that Edward loved and she’d always hated. He could have that, for a start.

She heard muffled talking from the kitchen, then the sound of the kitchen door closing and the revving of Nell’s car. That was some relief.

She couldn’t bear Nell being in the cottage now. Her very presence was poisonous: the worst sort of poison, the sort you hadn’t known was dangerous.

After the first drink, Anneliese had a second. Ludicrous to be drinking now, but she needed something to numb her. She sat on the window ledge looking out at the bay and tried not to listen to the sounds of Edward’s packing.

When Beth had been a teenager, Anneliese became very good at listening. It was different from listening to a small child messing round in the kitchen: hearing the fridge opening, the milk bottle top being laboriously pulled off, the glug of milk and the intake of breath when some spilled. That was a sort of innocuous listening.

But mothers of teenagers had to listen in a different way; what CD was being played was an excellent gauge.

Oasis and Counting Crows were good signs. Anything slow and dreamy might mean Beth was in a relaxed mood. But Suzanne Vega was fatal. A signal that Beth was in turmoil.

She’d have to tell Beth about this, of course. Anneliese closed her eyes at the thought of that conversation.

The back door banged and she jumped at the noise. Edward had gone. She rushed to the side window to see him put one suitcase and a gym bag into his car. He could have taken very little, just his clothes, she decided. Did that mean he wanted to stay after all, or was he so desperate to be with Nell that he didn’t care about his belongings? Who knew?

Evening was casting its greying spell over the beach and despite the old padded jacket, Anneliese shivered. The beach was bleak when the promise of sun had gone: like a wild kingdom that showed a softer side during the day but, when evening arrived, it was time for humans to clear off so the place could revert to its feral, untamed state.

The tide was coming in, slowly, inexorably. Anneliese stood at the edge of the water and watched as the waves lapped in and swept out, surging further and further up the darkening sand every time. It was relentless. In and out, on and on. Like life, coming at her endlessly, when she wished it would stop.

She watched as if hypnotised, until the water seeped into her shoes and then she moved back, startled.

If anyone could see her now, they’d think she was crazy, and perhaps she was: a lonely woman standing half-crazed at the shoreline, stuck in every sense of the word. Then she turned and walked home, leaving the dark of evening behind her.

The cottage was scarily silent and she went around turning on all the lights, anything to create a sense of warmth. In the sitting room, she picked up her knitting bag and looked forlornly at the tumbled skeins of coloured wools that perched on top.

She couldn’t bear the thought of the television or even the radio. But she might knit. Knitting somehow soothed her mind. It was a newish hobby. Newish in that she’d knitted things years ago: slippers, baby clothes, blankets for Beth’s dolls. But she’d never been much of an expert. She’d come back to it a year ago, after she stopped working in the garden centre and knew she needed something to occupy herself.

She’d toyed with the idea of learning another language or learning the computer, and then Marcus, her son-in-law, had helped by giving her an old laptop. Even though he apologised endlessly for its age and decrepitude, it still worked and Anneliese was thrilled with it.

‘It’s obsolete,’ he’d said apologetically.

‘It’s wonderful,’ Anneliese smiled.

‘It’s ten years old. That’s practically a dinosaur in computer terms,’ he’d gone on.

‘Like myself,’ Anneliese added, patting him on the arm.

She loved it, and surfing the Net – how she loved to say those words! – had taken her down a strange path one day to a craft site where she found all types of knitting that had nothing in common with the lumpen slippers and baby cardigans she used to make.

This knitting involved making felted handbags, crafting lace-like shawls, making wall hangings.

She loved it and instantly ordered a handbag kit. Then, in a might-as-well-be-hung-for-a-sheep-as-for-a-lamb moment, she’d also gone to the Crazee Knitters forum and signed herself up as a fledgling knitter. On the site, women from all over the world shared their knitting experiences.

It had taken her ages to write her first message: there was something scarily final about sending your thoughts out there where everyone could read them, but Anneliese felt safe in the anonymity of the internet.

Anneliese from Ireland could be anyone.

In her cottage with every light lit, Anneliese logged on, clicked on to her last message and felt a stab of utter astonishment at what she’d written only a few days before. It was so normal, so ordinary.

I’m halfway through knitting the pink-and-grey bag. It’s so pretty and I can’t wait to actually finish it because I want to see what it looks like when it’s felted. Last night, I sat up until midnight with the TV on and kept knitting. I sort of watched two medical dramas I’ve never seen before at the same time and a programme about a man-made island in Dubai and I kept knitting. I wish I was faster and I’m not sure how to knit the flower – does anyone have hints for it?

Anneliese thought of that night. Edward had laughed at her manic knitting and had gone to bed, leaving her and her circular needle in front of the television. At the time, she’d felt guilty leaving him to go to bed on his own. It was as bad as having separate bedrooms.

Just showed what she knew.

She’d been worried about sending him to bed alone, when he was probably grateful to escape her.

The pain of today was still too fresh to be anything but numb, but for a brief moment, Anneliese felt a sharp stab of agony. Edward was gone and he’d left with Nell. And all along, she hadn’t had a clue what was going on under her nose. She used to feel so intuitive, so connected with the universe. Clearly she wasn’t. That connectedness was another big misconception.

What else had she been wrong about in her life?

Suddenly, Anneliese felt that she couldn’t cope with all this on her own. She needed something to dull it. She found the corkscrew and a bottle of very expensive red wine that Edward had been saving. Blast that for a game of soldiers, she thought, pouring herself a big glass.

Then, glass in hand, she sat down in front of her laptop and felt grateful for the existence of those other people around the world, who might be sitting as she was now, alone.

The wine bit as it went down. It tasted too acidy, but perhaps that was just her. She’d had a strange metallic taste in her mouth all day: was that what grief tasted like? She drank it all the same and wondered did anyone on Crazee Knitters have any hints for what to do when your husband of thirty-seven years left you? In the five months since she’d been posting on the site, she’d only ever talked about her knitting – the pink-and-grey flower bag that had taken her three months because it was very complicated. Other people did talk about their lives, but Anneliese wasn’t the sort of person to open herself up to others. Now, when she had this unexpected longing to share her pain, it was too big to talk about.

She scrolled down through the posts. MariLee had posted a picture of the most amazing lacy shawl with a rainbow motif and Anneliese wondered absently if she’d ever be able to make anything that complicated. The flower bag was only difficult because there were so many bits to it. There were no really hard stitches, just lots of fiddly little bits to knit, felt and sew painstakingly together.

Lily had loved the finished product.

‘Isn’t it a dotey little thing,’ she’d said when Anneliese arrived to show it off in all its glory.

‘I loved knitting when I was younger although I can’t knit any more,’ she’d added ruefully, holding up fingers gnarled with arthritis. ‘It calms the soul.’

‘I can’t knit, really,’ Anneliese replied. ‘I keep toying with the idea of getting a pattern for a sweater or something, but I’m not sure I could do anything so complicated.’

‘Anneliese, you can do anything you set your mind to,’ Lily smiled.

‘Am I too old to learn?’

Lily laughed outright at that. ‘You’re never too old to learn, darling,’ she said. ‘I’m still learning, and look at me – nearly ninety. You’re only a child, Anneliese. What’s it they say nowadays? Izzie said it to me once…’ Lily stopped to think. ‘Yes, I’ve got it: ninety is the new eighty! So fifty-six is like being a teenager, if you make yourself think that way.’

Anneliese sighed. She’d have to tell Lily about Edward too.

Not that Lily would be like poor, dear Beth and need careful handling once she heard the news. Lily was quite unshockable, for all that she looked like a delicate little old lady in the flesh. While Lily had once been tall, age had withered her until she had the look of a bird about her: still with those fiercely intelligent cornflower-blue eyes that missed nothing, but as fragile as a bird nonetheless. Yet there was nothing fragile about her mind or her opinions.

So it wasn’t the thought of shocking Lily that made Anneliese not want to tell her – it was the pity she’d seen on Lily’s face. Anneliese hated being pitied most of all.

She finished her drink and began to write. Perhaps her fellow knitters had the wisdom she needed.

Sorry to bother you all with this but I’ve got no one to talk to and I’ve got to talk. You see, my husband left me today. I won’t bore you with the minute details but basically I came home to find him and my best friend talking and I knew. They were having an affair. He left with her. I don’t know what to do or think. I haven’t told anybody yet – we have a daughter but she’s very emotional. You could say she doesn’t do reality very well.

The hardest thing is the sense that I didn’t know him at all – or her, for that matter. It’s like a death. I think I’m going through grief. I feel like people must feel when they discover someone they loved is secretly a rapist or a murderer. I’m so astonished that I didn’t know and then, I wonder if everything was a lie? It must be. And I never noticed.

How could that be? How many other things did he lie about? Loving me? That I was the only woman he wanted to make love to? Wanting to be with me? Right now, it all could be a lie because he managed to keep one huge lie, so how can I be sure that all the other things aren’t lies too?

I can see a photo of us on the wall from here and I’m looking at it trying to catch a glimpse of this different person who must have been there all along, except that I didn’t notice him. This picture of us – me and him and our daughter, when she was about ten – is a holiday shot when we were on a picnic and it looks different now. We had that old station wagon and that really ugly tartan rug is spread beside it, and I’m smiling and so is he, and Beth’s dancing – she was so into ballet then – once, I’d have sworn tears of blood that I knew what was in his head at that moment: that he was happy with us. And now – well, I don’t know.

So what he’s done now has made me question every single thing in our whole shared lives. My memories are gone because they might be fake and they might not.

It’s like being shown a picture of a vase in silhouette and then someone points out that it could also represent two faces in profile, and once you’ve seen the new picture, it’s impossible to look at it and just see the vase.

And how do I tell my daughter? She’s thirty-six, married – and that sounds like she should be here taking care of me right now, but the thing is, it’s still the other way round. No matter what happened to me, Beth would need to be taken care of. So, does anyone have any advice for me? I’m desperate.

Anneliese was about to click ‘send’ when she changed her mind. With a single keystroke, she erased the whole message.

She could hear her mother’s voice in her head, a voice made angry by Anneliese’s shutting the door of her bedroom and refusing to come out: ‘Anneliese, you can’t solve everything by shutting us all out, you know.’

Shutting the door might not have worked but it made her feel better. Always had. It could again too. Instincts weren’t called instincts for nothing.

She locked the doors and checked the windows were shut. That had always been Edward’s job: the man’s job, organising the house before bed. Anneliese dampened down the hurt and the pain of thinking of him. They were just doors: she could lock them herself.

She went round the cottage methodically, switching off lights, then climbed the stairs to their bedroom. Her bedroom, now.

The beams in the upstairs of the cottage were stripped wood, bleached pale like all the floorboards. Their bedroom was pale blue with white furniture, two demin rag-rugs on the floor and white curtains that were heavily lined to keep the cold out. Anneliese took one look at the big high bedstead with its white quilted coverlet and backed out of the room. She couldn’t sleep there tonight. It would be like lying in a bed of lies.

Beth’s bedroom was still Beth’s, even though she’d left home years before. Beth liked the comfort of her childhood things still being there: her Barbies and their various cars and wardrobes still arranged on the wooden shelves, her Enid Blyton books lined up neatly.

The spare bedroom in the cottage was barely a box room. Painted purest white, there was room only for a bed, a bleached wood chest of drawers with seashells laid on top as decoration, and a tiny one-drawer nightstand with an old brass lamp on it. In the twenty years she’d lived in the cottage, Anneliese had never slept in this room. Which made it perfect.

She unearthed a small container of sleeping tablets from the bathroom cabinet, took one and washed it down with tapwater. In Beth’s room, she found an old nightdress of her daughter’s and pulled it on. She didn’t want anything from her own room to contaminate her. She climbed into the spare-room bed, turned out the light and closed her eyes until the chemically-induced sleep claimed her.

The Lifeboat Shop in Tamarin was very successful. Perhaps it was due to the loud proximity of the sea itself, but everyone – locals and visitors alike – dutifully went in to search for bargains, knowing that for every second-hand blouse they bought, money went to the upkeep of the local lifeboats. Even with the sea in the bay shining serenely up at people on a summer’s day, the power of the water was felt: beautiful, and yet all-powerful.

Monday was one of Anneliese’s days for working in the shop. She worked there Mondays and Wednesdays and had done so ever since she’d given up full-time work in the garden centre. When she woke early the day after Edward left her, she knew she had to go in.

Not turning up would make everyone think she was sick, and then someone might see Edward and ask him how she was, and he might tell the truth and –

Anneliese couldn’t bear that. She didn’t want everyone knowing what had happened, not until she’d dealt with it in her own head. She wasn’t sure when she was going to be able to do that – the sleeping tablet had made all thinking impossible as she’d crashed out twenty minutes after taking it, and to stave off the sense of solitude in the cottage the following morning, she’d turned on the radio loud, preferring plenty of news stories to being alone with her thoughts.

Her thoughts were dangerous, she decided: she didn’t want to be on her own with them.

Anneliese preferred the mornings in the shop.

The churchgoers were sure to arrive after Mass, and the women who’d dropped children at school popped in for a quick rummage. People who took early lunches sometimes crammed their sandwiches into a few minutes so they could rifle through the rails of clothes, or scan the shelves lined with books.

It was a nice, chatty place to work, with no real pressure, except when something of value came in and all the staff panicked slightly about getting the correct price sorted out for it, in case the original owner returned and felt their donation wasn’t being prized enough.

Today, there were five refuse sacks of stuff to be gone through, so Anneliese sat in the back of the shop where the storeroom, kitchenette and toilet were situated, and went through it all carefully. There were piles of clothes, mainly women’s, soft toys still covered with dust, and children’s clothes alongside ornaments, some paperback books, and bits of costume jewellery. About half of the stuff was in good condition and Anneliese began the painstaking job of sorting the wheat from the chaff.

It was incredible what some people thought was acceptable to donate to charity, she thought, holding up a man’s shirt with a threadbare collar, several missing buttons and a suspicious yellow stain on the sleeve. Curry? Flower pollen? She threw it into the ‘dump’ box.

Yvonne, another volunteer, was manning the front counter and kept up a steady stream of chat with the customers. Anneliese liked working with Yvonne because no response was ever required. Yvonne talked and didn’t appear to care if anyone replied or not. This normally suited Anneliese because she liked working in peace with just the faint hum of the radio in the background. Today, it suited her because she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to have a conversation if her life depended on it.

Anneliese knew she looked wretched and said she hadn’t slept to cover up the fact, even though the chemical cosh had knocked her out for eight hours. But she looked much worse than any lack of sleep could account for. She’d been shocked at the sight of herself in the mirror that morning. Grief had aged her overnight and it was as if her very bones had thrown themselves against her skin in protest at all the pain. She felt as if the last, vaguely youthful bloom of her skin had gone, leaving nothing but sharp angles, hollows and the big indigo-blue eyes her daughter, Beth, had inherited, like shining pools in an oval face. The thick white hair – once a stunning white blonde, now just silky white – that she kept neatly tied back no longer looked feminine. Instead, it made her look far older than her years: older and pantomime witchy.

Anneliese could barely recognise the woman who’d been told by an admirer, many years ago, that she looked like a prima ballerina with her long, graceful neck and doe eyes. She’d been one of Tamarin’s beauties about a million years ago, she thought sadly, or so Edward had told her.

Who’d have thought it now?

She should have bothered with make-up, after all, she decided. Some base, a little concealer to hide the dark circles, mascara to lift her eyes and some creamy blush to bring warmth to the apples of her cheeks: Anneliese had always been very proficient with make-up.

It was the one thing she and her mother had agreed on.

If Anneliese was going to throw herself away on a job in gardening, then she should still look after her skin and never go out without lipstick, her mother had said.

Her mother had also always been firm on women not drinking hard spirits. Anneliese had kept to that dictum too and was regretting her brandies and glasses of wine the day before. Her head ached dully from the unaccustomed drinking.

‘Dogs will do their business on the beach, I said,’ Yvonne was saying to a customer. ‘Signs, that’s what we need; signs on the beach about doggy doo.’

Anneliese was one of the people who disagreed with this point of view, preferring the dog-crap option to lots of ugly signs telling people off for not clearing up. Signs would ruin the craggy, bare beauty of the beach.

But she kept quiet and allowed herself to wonder what Yvonne would make of her news.

Edward has left me. He’s living with Nell Mitchell. Yes, that Nell – my best friend. There you go. Shows you don’t really ever know people, do you?

It still sounded wrong.

She tried it again, saying it more slowly in her mind, to see if she could make sense of it.

We’ve been through hard times, Edward and I, and perhaps it was too hard for him and Nell is so easygoing and, after all, they know each other so well –

‘Anneliese, what did you say?’ Yvonne looked at her expectantly from the front of the shop. The customer was gone and it was only the two of them in the shop.

‘Nothing, Yvonne. Just talking to myself.’

‘Oh sure, I do the same myself, Anneliese.’ Yvonne sighed and went back to scanning the local paper. ‘Nobody pays me the slightest heed. Mam, the kids say, you talk nineteen to the dozen and when we try to answer, you keep rattling on, so we let you at it. Kids!’

‘Kids, yeah,’ Anneliese nodded, when what she was really thinking was ‘husbands’ and ‘best friends’.

‘But we love them, don’t we?’ Yvonne went on, still talking about children and not in the least aware that she and Anneliese weren’t on the same wavelength at all.

It struck Anneliese at that moment that it was really quite easy to deceive people once they didn’t expect to be deceived. How easy had she been to deceive? Shamefully easy, probably.

She stopped sorting out clothes to ponder this. What lies had Edward and Nell told her? Had they gone home to the cottage on days when Anneliese was in the shop, and lain on her bed, having sex?

Suddenly, she had to rush into the tiny toilet to throw up. Bile, yesterday’s wine and nothing else came up.

‘Anneliese, you all right?’ said Yvonne.

‘Fine,’ she lied. ‘Heartburn. Smoked fish pie last night.’

Where did that excuse come from, she wondered, unbending and looking at her red-eyed face in the tiny room’s mirror. Was lying just a matter of practice?

The shop was mercifully busy all morning. Yvonne rushed about, chatting and working the till, while Anneliese gave the appearance of industriousness by tidying shelves and rails after the customers.

Her gaze often strayed out on to the streets of Tamarin, searching for the familiar figure of her husband loping along. Edward worked in an engineering company in town and sometimes dropped in on her when she was in the Lifeboat Shop.

But not, she decided, today.

Still, she stared out of the window, wondering if he and Nell would pass by.

The town was designed like half of a many-pointed star, with streets all heading down towards the harbour where they converged on Harbour Square, a wide piazza with squat Mediterranean-style palm trees, an open-air café called Dorota’s, and the horseshoe-shaped harbour beyond, like two arms reaching into the sea – or like the curve of a crab’s front claws, depending on which way you liked to look at it.

The Lifeboat Shop was on Fillibert Street, halfway between Harbour Square below, and the tiny Church Square above, where St Canice’s stood in its mellow-stone glory.

Her shift in the shop ended at two, when Corinne Brady arrived to take over, trailing scarves, dangly bead necklaces and an overpowering scent of a musky oil purchased many moons ago in the town’s health-food shop. Anneliese knew this because Corinne was always telling her that modern perfumes were bad for you and that eau d’elderly musk was where it was at.

‘Natural smells are best, Anneliese,’ Corinne would say gaily, waving a tiny bottle sticky with age. ‘Modern perfumes cause cancer, you know.’

Normally, Anneliese tolerated Corinne’s eccentricities and her bizarre medical theories, but she couldn’t cope today. She was all out of the milk of human kindness and she wasn’t sure if any of the local shops stocked it.

‘Hello, Yvonne, look at this! A new consignment of black cohosh. Now, Yvonne, I know you don’t want to talk about the whole menopause thing…’

In the background, Anneliese winced. Poor Yvonne. There was no chance of a discreet talk about female problems when Corinne was involved. Corinne didn’t do volume control. She roared, even when attempting to whisper.

‘This is fabulous,’ Corinne was saying.

‘Shout a bit louder,’ Yvonne said crossly, ‘I don’t think the whole town heard you.’

‘Tish, tish,’ said Corinne, unconcerned. ‘We’re all women here and we’re proud of our bodies. It’s the cycle of life, Yvonne. The great life force that moves inside us because Mother Nature put it there.’

Normally, Anneliese would have been grinning by now. Nobody could deny that Corinne was marvellously entertaining when she went into her whole Mother Nature routine. Mother Nature was responsible for all manner of things, including Corinne’s addiction to milk chocolate and Dr Burke from Grey’s Anatomy. Mother Nature would, undoubtedly, be responsible for Edward running off with Nell, if Corinne had a chance to think about it. The great life force would be in flux or something. Anneliese shuddered at the thought of having this raw pain slapped up on Corinne’s mental chopping board for examination. She wondered if she could leave without being seen. Too late –

‘Hello, Anneliese…ohmydear, you look soo tired. Poor you. I have just the thing in my bag –’ began Corinne, reaching into the enormous patchwork leather handbag she hauled around with her. The bag smelled plain bad after too many little bottles of oil and potions had spilled in it. ‘It might look a little odd, dear, but it’s a fungus and you keep adding water to it and drink the juice and –’

‘Corinne, thank you,’ said Anneliese quickly, thinking she might have to throw up again at even the thought of drinking fungus juice. ‘I’m afraid I can’t stop, not now. Bye.’

She almost ran out of the shop, holding her jacket and bag in her hand. She couldn’t deal with Corinne. Not now.

For all Corinne’s bulk, she was very fast and fear of Corinne running after her made Anneliese rush down Fillibert Street looking blindly for somewhere to escape. The bookshop. The Fly Leaf was a small, quirky establishment with a big crime section and darkish windows so it was hard for anybody from outside to see in. Perfect. Nobody would talk to her there.

It was a Bookshop Rule: smile and nod only.

She rushed into the silence of The Fly Leaf, and made blindly for the shelves at the back. The classics section. She fingered the spines of the books, asking herself how long was it since she’d read Jane Austen?

Eventually, she felt calmer. Corinne hadn’t followed her. Now that she was out of the Lifeboat Shop, she could stop pretending and be herself again. Except she wasn’t sure who herself was. It was a strange, disconcerting feeling. Anneliese felt fogged up, not real somehow. Like she’d been teleported into this body and this life and none of it was even vaguely familiar.

Oh no, please, no.

She moved on from the classics and found herself in Self-Help. Her breathing was getting faster again. No. Breathe deeply. In, count to four, and out. After a while, she refocused on the shelves. Self-help. She’d looked in this department many times before and knew that there were no Meditations for People Who Were Pissed Off with the Whole Planet.

A definite gap in the market, she thought grimly. And no 100 Ways To Kill Your Husband and Former Best Friend, either.

But there were plenty of books on depression, which could either be cured by therapy, positive visualisations or eating exactly the right combination of supplements, depending on which book you read.

Anneliese had read lots of them, wanting to be fixed. She scanned the shelves, thinking that she probably had all of these volumes at home, apart from the newer ones. None of them had worked. Depression wasn’t something you could sever from yourself merely by reading a book.

It was so much darker and deeper. She stared angrily at the books, furious with their authors for daring to pretend that they knew what it was like.

Bloody psychiatrists and mental health gurus wrote books on depression, not real people who’d actually been in that cavern underground: a place where you couldn’t imagine ordinary, happy life; a place where functioning was almost out of the question.

Anneliese, come on out of your room and talk to me, please. Her mother’s voice in her memory again. Dear Mother. She’d tried so hard, Anneliese knew, but she’d been stuck with a daughter with a cloud of darkness inside her and their family – ordinary, kind, simple really – hadn’t known what to do with someone like her.

‘If only you’d tell me what’s wrong,’ Mother would beg.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong,’ Anneliese would reply. Because she didn’t. Nobody had hit her or hurt her. But she felt everything so deeply, more deeply than Astrid, her older sister, who was nearest in age to her. There were days when there was simply a cloud in her head, a cloud of fear and anxiety and darkness. She didn’t know why – it was just there.

It was over forty years since she’d had that realisation. She’d been fifteen when she discovered that everyone else didn’t feel the same, that she was different.

And then, in The Fly Leaf bookshop in Tamarin, Anneliese Kennedy had that familiar, jarring sensation of darkness in her head, and something else, the onset of sheer panic. Behind her eyes came a thrumming sensation, like drums beating far away. A slow, constant noise that wasn’t real – she knew that – but felt more real to her than anything else at that exact moment. She hadn’t heard it in so long, normally only heard it in nightmares now, but she knew what it was: fear and panic.

She’d once read that certain types of situation made the lizard brain dominate. The lizard brain was the core survival part of human beings, lower down the totem pole than the limbic system and the cerebral cortex.

The lizard kicked into place when people reached a deep primal fear. There had been so many other hugely long medical words in the article that Anneliese had slightly tuned out, but she’d remembered that bit: that the lizard brain was basic survival and came out when the person was mortally threatened.

Like now. When a panic attack swept over her with raging force. No sooner had she thought the words, than the breathlessness hit and she began to wheeze, feeling her chest tightening. She couldn’t breathe, her heart was racing.

Anneliese moved so quickly that she bumped into a man bending over looking at the sports books.

‘Sorry,’ she half gasped, whisking past him. She had to get out and home. She needed to be in a safe place so she could make this fear and darkness go away.

It was years since she’d had a panic attack, years. She’d forgotten how horrific they were, how she always felt as if she was going to die.

Her hands were shaking so much, it was hard to get her keys from her bag, almost impossible to keep the key for the car at the right angle to slip it into the lock. But she did. Safe, she was a bit safe.

She sat in the driver’s seat, shaking, trying to calm her breath.

Breathe in, count to four, breathe out.

When she’d felt recovered enough, she started the engine, keeping the volume turned up loud on talk radio, willing the discussion to block out her own head. She didn’t want to think.

The house was silent when she got there – not the silence of a home where another person might be back soon, but the deadening silence of a place where only one person lived. Anneliese made herself a mug of herbal tea, the Tranquility tea that Edward used to gently tease her about. About to put the pack back in the cupboard, she took another teabag and stuck that in the mug too. She needed a double dose of tranquillity.

Then, she took the mug and an old fleecy blanket outside to sit on the deck.

With her feet curled up under her, mug in her hand and the blanket wrapped around her, Anneliese stared out at the crashing waves and let herself breathe slowly.

Breathe. In and out. Slowly and deeply. Concentrate on each breath, let your lungs fill and exhale slowly through your nose. In and out. That was all you had to do every day – breathe.

Shit, shit, it wasn’t working. Despite the deep breathing, she could feel her heartbeat fluttering along at speed, and the darkness was still in the back of her head, coming closer now.

Fuck you, Edward, for doing this to me, Anneliese thought bitterly.

She huddled into the fleecy blanket for warmth.

She was not going back on the tablets, not again.

Edward had been so good and understanding about her depression, even if he’d never entirely got it.

‘I feel a bit sad too sometimes, you know,’ he’d said early on in their marriage. ‘It’s not the same as you, love, but I understand, or at least, I’m trying to.’

Anneliese, who’d chosen her words carefully when she talked about being depressed so that she didn’t scare him or make him think he was married to a complete nutcase who needed access to a straitjacket at all times, had to stop herself from laughing out loud.

He couldn’t know or understand that depression was a part of her: she could go about her daily life like anybody else but while some people had freckles or lovely olive skin as part of their genetic make-up, she had depression. A part of her: sometimes there, sometimes not. She could go months, years, without feeling that overwhelming darkness, but when she did, it was far more than feeling a bit sad. And yet she loved him, loved him for trying.

‘I love you, you darling man,’ she said to him fiercely. He’d laughed too and hugged her, and Anneliese had ended up sitting on his lap, their arms wrapped round each other, and she’d felt really loved.

This kind, complex man didn’t really understand what she went through, but he was doing his best. That was love: trying to understand your mate, even if the understanding was outside your scope.

She remembered talking to Nell about it too. That hurt: thinking of bloody Nell knowing about Anneliese’s inner pain and then still walking off with her husband. Anneliese shuddered under her fleecy blanket.

She was beginning to hate Nell.

‘How can you be feeling like that, you know, down, and still go out and be normal?’ Nell had asked once, when Beth was a little girl and Anneliese had brought her to a classmate’s birthday party and gone home to cry for two straight hours, which was where Nell had found her when she dropped round.

‘You put your game face on,’ Anneliese said simply, her face raw with tears. ‘You can’t sit in a corner and stare into nothingness when you’ve a child. You just can’t.’

Not that she hadn’t felt like it many times, but mother love was a potent force. Anneliese might have had many days where she’d have liked to stay in bed, drag the duvet around her like armour and sit out the bleakness. But she couldn’t do that to her daughter.

When Beth grew older and it became clear that she’d inherited her mother’s depression just as she’d inherited her indigo eyes, protecting Beth had become Anneliese’s life. Beth, who needed huge love and attention, came highest on the totem pole.

Next, came Anneliese herself, sometimes staying on top of it all, sometimes falling into the pit so that she’d reluctantly have to go to the doctor and take some of those damned antidepressants, and she hated them. It was like admitting to failure and if she read one more article that said depression was like diabetes and if you had diabetes, you wouldn’t mind taking insulin to fix it, then she’d kill someone.

Edward, dear kind Edward, had come a very definite third in his wife’s list of priorities.

Women’s first love and concern would always be their children, if they had them, Anneliese had realised, while men’s would be their women. The two equations weren’t even on the same page.

Had that driven Edward away – always being third in their marriage? How could he not have known that he wasn’t third through choice but because of the rules of simple survival?

Anneliese sighed and stared out at the view that sold the house to her and Edward all those years ago. In the sharp light, Milsean Bay was like a mirror set in a valley that changed from white sand to the peaty green of the fields.

Beyond lay the Atlantic Ocean where seagulls swooped and flecks of white foam whisked up dramatically. Be careful, roared the water. It was a lesson that locals never forgot. Tourists took boats out to explore the sheltered bay, and kidded themselves that the waters were safe, only to have to be rescued when their boats were swept out into the fierce tempest of the Atlantic.

Basking sharks could sometimes be seen from the cliffs above the point, where a dolmen stood in grandeur. Anneliese could remember the day she and Edward had taken Beth to see the dolmen when she was small, wanting to instil a sense of pride in her.

‘This is our history, Beth,’ Edward had explained.

And now he’d rewritten their family history. Anneliese didn’t know if she could ever forgive him for that. There was no justification, none.

Of course, it didn’t matter to Edward if she forgave him or not. He wasn’t in her life any more.

FOUR

Izzie’s Manhattan apartment was cold and looked bare after the warmth of the New Mexico hotel. Even her beloved New York was coolly impersonal today, she decided: the cab driver who’d picked her up at the airport hadn’t been classically eccentric, just dull, and it was raining too, the type of flash flood that could drown a person in an instant.

Wet and tired, Izzie slammed her front door shut and set her luggage down, trying to put a finger on the sense of discontent she felt. There was something about the friendliness of the pueblo, a small-town kindliness that Izzie missed from home. She was a small-town girl, after all, she thought, feeling a rush of homesickness for Tamarin. She thought about home a lot these days. Was it because she felt so alone when Joe left late at night and her thoughts turned to her family, the other people who cared for her?

Or was it because she felt a growing anxiety over what was happening: a relationship that was so hard to explain that she hadn’t tried to explain it to anyone, not Carla, not her dad, not Gran.

She stripped off her dripping jacket and only then allowed herself to look at the answering machine. The message display showed a big fat zero. Zero messages.

Horrible bloody machine. She glared at it, as if it was the machine’s fault that Joe hadn’t rung.

Turning on the lamps to give her home some type of inner glow, Izzie stomped into the bathroom, stripped off her clothes and got into the shower to wash away the dust of the mesa. She was becoming obsessed with cleaning herself. Was Obsessive Compulsive Disorder a product of tangled love affairs? She’d never had so many showers in her life, always showering and scrubbing and oiling in the hope that, once she was in the shower, the phone would ring. It always used to. But not now. Joe hadn’t phoned in five days.

Five days.

‘I’ll talk to you,’ he’d murmured the morning she flew to New Mexico.

‘You do that,’ she’d murmured back, wishing she could cancel, wishing something would happen so she’d be close to him, because there was a cold, isolating feeling from not being in the same city as him. What was that about?

But he hadn’t phoned.

Not even on the last night when they all let their hair down, when the noise of partying would have made any normal absent lover slightly jealous – which was why Izzie had hoped he’d phone then, just so she’d have the chance to move away from the hubbub and casually say that Ivan was playing the limbo-dancing game, and make it all sound fabulous. So fabulous that he’d be jealous of her being there without him…Except he hadn’t played the game. He hadn’t phoned.

Izzie clambered out of the shower, still irritated.

No, a shower wasn’t the right thing. A bath, that would be perfect.

She started to fill the tub, poured in at least half of her precious Jo Malone rose bath oil, opened a bottle of white wine and made herself a spritzer for the bath, and finally sank into the fragrant bubbles.

She sipped her spritzer, laid back with her eyes closed and tried to relax. But the blissful obliviousness baths used to bring her, a sinking-into-the-heat-thing that made her forget everything else, evaded her. As ever, since she’d met Joe, he was the only thing in her mind.

For that first lunch, they’d met in a small, quirky Italian restaurant in the Village, the sort of place Izzie hadn’t imagined Joe would like. She’d guessed he’d prefer more uptown joints where the staff recognised every billionaire in the city. It was another thing to like about him, this difference.

Over antipasti, they chatted and the more he talked, the more Izzie felt herself falling for him.

He’d got a business degree, then joined J.P. Morgan’s graduate-trainee programme.

‘That’s when the bug hit me,’ he said, scooping up a sliver of ciabatta bread drenched with basil-infused olive oil. ‘Trading is all about instant gratification, and I loved it.’

‘Isn’t it stressful?’ she asked, thinking of losing millions and how she’d have to be anaesthetised if she did a job like that.

‘I never felt stress,’ he said. ‘I loved it. I’d trade, lose some, win some, whatever, I’d go home and go to sleep. People burned out all the time – the hours, the work-hard, play-hard mentality, it got to a lot of them, but not me.’

At twenty-nine, he’d been running his own trading fund, a hedge fund.

‘That’s what it means,’ said Izzie delighted. ‘I never knew.’

The higher up the chain he went, the more risk but also bigger percentages to be earned, until finally he ended up as head of trading for a huge bank. ‘Basically, you’re trying to systematically beat all the markets through math,’ he explained. ‘You name it, we traded it. We were a closed fund.’

Izzie, mouth full of roasted peppers, looked at him quizzically.

‘Means we only reinvested profits and no new investors could get in.’

‘Oh.’ She nodded. This was like a masterclass in Wall Street. How many years had she known all those money guys and never had a clue what they were talking about?

Finally, he and a friend named Leo Guard had started their own closed hedge fund, HG.

‘Eventually, we were doing so well, we changed the fee structure from two and twenty to five and forty.’

‘I add up using my fingers,’ Izzie explained. ‘I have no idea what that means.’

He grinned and handed her some more bread.

‘That’s the typical fee structure: two and twenty means you get two per cent for management and twenty per cent of profits from performance.’

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘And you were trading in millions?’

He nodded. ‘Imagine having six hundred under management.’

Izzie hated to look thick. ‘Six hundred million dollars?’ she said, just to check.

He nodded.

‘You’re rich, then,’ she said, hating herself for eating all that antipasti as she already felt full and the main courses would be coming soon.

Joe laughed.

‘You’re the real deal, Izzie Silver,’ he said. ‘I like that.’

‘Honest,’ she said, pushing her plate away. ‘Not everyone likes it.’

‘I do. Yes, you could say I am rich.’

‘You don’t own a super-yacht, though?’ she asked, with a twinkle in her eye.

He laughed again. ‘No. Do you want one, or do you simply want to date a guy with one?’

Izzie smiled at his innocence. ‘You haven’t a clue, do you?’ she said coolly. ‘I am so far away from the type of woman who wants a man with a super-yacht that I am on a different continent.’ She rearranged things on the table, pushing the salt and pepper around. ‘The pepper is me.’ She stuck it at the edge of the table. ‘And the salt –’ she moved it to the other side completely, ‘– is the sort of woman who wants to know a guy’s bank balance before she meets him for a drink. See? Big gap, big difference. Enormous.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Just don’t do it again,’ she joked. ‘I have never in my entire life gone out with a guy because of the size of his bank balance. Ever. I did briefly – one date – go out with a guy from next door in my old apartment because he knew how to work the heating, and he’d fixed it for me one day when the super wasn’t around and I went out on a date with him, but that was it. A one-off.’

‘You came out with me because I gave you a ride back to the office, then?’ he teased.

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Keep going with this life story of yours. Tell me some personal stuff.’

He was forty-five, his wife was a couple of years younger and they’d married young, kids, really. Izzie was sorry she’d asked for personal stuff.

‘Then, Tom came along quite quickly,’ he said proudly. ‘It all changes then, you know. Do you have children?’

Yes, in my handbag, Izzie wanted to say. ‘No, ‘fraid not. So I don’t know how it changes everything.’

‘Take my word for it, it does. It changes the couple dynamic, you get so caught up in the kids. But, hey, I didn’t come here to talk about my boys,’ he said.

‘OK, what did you come here for?’ she asked. She wasn’t sure why she was here. He was too complicated, there was too much going on in his life. She needed a rebound guy like she needed a hole in the head.

Besides, he wasn’t even at the rebound stage: he was still in the nursing-the-broken-relationship stage. A man on the hunt for a rebound relationship didn’t necessarily want to talk about his wife and kids.

Pity, she thought sadly. He was lovely, sexy, made her stomach whoop in a way she could never quite remember it doing before.

It just proved what she knew and what Linda had confirmed to her: all the good ones were taken. But he was a charming guy and she could enjoy lunch and mark it down to experience.

‘You still don’t know what I came here for?’ he asked.

Izzie shot him a wry look.

‘I might want to know more about the modelling industry so I can invest in it,’ he continued.

‘You might just want to be introduced to long-legged models?’ she countered. ‘I’m normally quite good at working out if a man is interested in me only as a means to get to the models. Although you –’ she surveyed him ‘– aren’t the normal type. You’re too nice.’

He pretended to gasp. ‘Nice? That’s not a word people usually use about me. I’ve been called a shark, you know.’

‘You’re nice,’ Izzie said, smiling back at him. It was true. For all that he was an alpha male, with all the in-built arrogance and intelligence, he had a solid, warm core to him, a devastatingly attractive bit that said he might be a rich guy but he’d been brought up to take care of people, to protect his family and his woman. Izzie felt a pang that she would never get to be said woman. There would be something wonderful about being with a man who’d take care of her.

‘You might pretend to be a shark but you’re a pussycat,’ she went on, teasing a little. ‘Besides, I know you don’t need me to get you introduced to the supermodels. You’re rich enough to buy all the introductions you need. Money is like an access-all-areas card, isn’t it?’

‘My but you’re cynical for one so young,’ he grinned.

‘I’m not young, I’m nearly forty,’ she said. If she’d thought he was interested in her, she’d have said she was thirty-nine. ‘It’s creeping up on me every day. I’m going to be over the hill soon.’

A few days ago, it might have been a joke. But since the Plaza and Linda, Izzie no longer felt complacent at the thought of her approaching birthday.

‘You’ll never be over the hill,’ he said in a low voice that made her think, ridiculously, about being in bed with him and having him slowly peeling off her clothes.

‘Are you flirting with me, Mr Hansen?’ Izzie squawked to cover her discomfit. ‘I thought this was a friendly lunch.’

‘Cards on table,’ he said, ‘I am flirting with you.’

‘Well, stop,’ she ordered. ‘You’ve just told me about your wife and fabulous kids. I don’t know what sort of women you’re used to meeting, but I’m not in the market for part-time love. I’ve got through thirty-nine years without dating a man who’s still tangled up with his wife and I’m not planning on starting now.’

‘Do you think I’d be here if my marriage was still viable?’ he asked in a low growl. ‘Give me some credit, Izzie. Yes, I have a wife and kids, but we’re separated and we’re only living together for the sake of those kids. Didn’t you listen to me? I told you Elizabeth and I married young. We haven’t been a couple for years, nobody’s fault, it just was inevitable. We finally agreed a few months ago that it wasn’t working on any level and we needed to formalise things.’

‘Oh,’ said Izzie, waiting. Was he serious? Or was he really still in that awful post-break-up stage where he was trying to convince himself it was over and that a rebound would sort him out?

‘I love her, I’ll always love her,’ he said, ‘but it’s like loving your sister. We’ve had twenty-four years together and counting; it’s a lifetime, but the marriage part is long over. We try to appear together for the younger boys. Tom would be able to cope with it if we split up, but Matt and Josh, no. The New York house is so big, it’s not a problem. Lots of people do it: if you have enough space, you can all exist happily together. I have my life, she has hers. Elizabeth’s parents divorced and she didn’t want our boys to come from a broken home. That’s why we stayed with each other, I guess, but it’s too hard. I can’t do that any more.’

‘What if one of you fell in love and wanted to be with another person?’ Izzie asked, trying to understand this strange arrangement. She felt like she was standing on a cliff and was about to fall. She didn’t want to fall without knowing he was going to be holding his arms out.

‘That’s never happened. Before,’ he added the last word deliberately slowly. ‘If it happened, then everything would have to change.’

‘Do people know about this?’

‘Most of our circle know. We’re not broadcasting it, but it works for us. Matt and Josh are still so young. They think they know it all now they’re twelve and fourteen, but they’re still kids. Now they can see their parents living amicably in the same house, they’ve got stability. That’s our number one priority.’

‘I see,’ she said, thinking with a sudden flash of sadness of her life when she was between twelve and fourteen.

‘Do you?’

She nodded and somehow he instantly picked up on the fact that she’d become suddenly melancholy.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘I was thirteen when my mother died,’ she explained. ‘Cancer. It was sudden too, so there was no time. Six weeks after we found out, she was dead.’ She shivered at the memory. It had taken her years to be able to say the word cancer: it had held such terrifying connotations, like an unlucky charm, as if just saying it brought danger and pain. ‘My father and my grandmother tried to protect me from that, but they couldn’t.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It must have been tough.’

She nodded. Tougher than anyone could imagine. In a way, she’d dealt with it by not dealing with it: locking herself up tight inside so nothing could hurt her, not crying, not talking much to anyone, even darling Gran, who was so devastated herself and was trying to hide it for Izzie’s sake.

Dad, Uncle Edward and Anneliese had all been there for her, ready to talk, laugh, cry, whatever she needed. Only her cousin Beth – quirky, irritable, easily upset – had been her usual self. Beth had actually helped the most in the first year. She’d made Izzie cry one day by screaming at her and that simple act of one person in her life not tiptoeing around her, brought Izzie back.

‘Is your father alive?’ Joe asked gently.

Izzie smiled. ‘Yeah, he’s great, Dad. A bit dizzy sometimes; runs out of sugar and cream endlessly and has to rush over to my aunt Anneliese’s house or to my gran’s. Between them, they take care of him – not that they let him know or anything. He’d hate that. But they do. They tell me how he’s getting on.’

‘Coffee, dessert? More wine?’ asked the waiter.

When he was gone, having cleared their plates and taken coffee orders, Joe leaned forward again.

‘Tell me more about you,’ he urged.

But Izzie felt she’d revealed enough about herself. She rarely talked about her mother, certainly not to someone she’d just met.

‘Hey, that’s enough of me,’ she said, trying to sound perkier. ‘You’re more interesting, Mr Mogul. So, tell me – are you interested in buying a model agency?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘I didn’t think you were but –’

‘But you needed to know where you stood?’

‘Convent education – it gets you every time,’ she sighed.

‘Would Sister Mary Whatever approve of me?’ he asked. She could feel his foot nudging hers under the table.

‘I think you’re probably the sort of guy they had in mind when they told us to bring a phone book out with us on dates,’ Izzie quipped.

When he looked puzzled, she filled him in: ‘If you had to sit on some boy’s lap, you placed the phone book down first, then sat. An inch of paper barrier.’

‘More like five inches if you lived in Manhattan.’

‘Don’t boast.’ She was smiling now.

‘So you might see me again, Ms Silver, now you know I’m kosher?’

‘I might,’ she said.

‘Listen, I have an art collection in my office building –’

‘You didn’t bid on that Pasha picture at the charity lunch,’ she interrupted.

‘I might have, except I was distracted,’ he growled. ‘I have to go to an artist’s studio to look at some paintings tomorrow afternoon. Would you like to come?’

Izzie took the plunge. Looking at art – where was the harm in that? ‘Sure. What time?’

‘Say eleven o’clock?’

‘You said “afternoon”,’ she said, confused.

‘He lives in Tennessee, in the Smoky Mountains. We’ll have to fly.’

Izzie had never been on a private jet before. First, she and Joe were picked up by helicopter and flown to Teterboro airport where a Gulfstream sat waiting on the tarmac. Inside, apart from the crew, there were just the two of them.

‘It’s fabulous,’ Izzie said in awe as she stepped into the cabin. On the inside, it looked smaller than she’d imagined but the luxury was something she couldn’t have dreamed up. Entirely decorated in calm cream shades, there were only eight or nine vast cream leather seats.

The light oak cabinets were topped with marble instead of airplane plastic. It was luxury cubed. Even the blankets laid on the seats felt too soft to be ordinary wool.

‘Cashmere?’ she asked the stewardess standing to attention with a smile fixed to her face.

The stewardess nodded. ‘The seats are a blend of wool and leather, for added comfort.’

‘There’s nothing you can’t do on this plane,’ Joe said, sitting down and reaching out for the glass of cold beer the stewardess had ready for him, without him even asking for it. ‘Watch DVDs, phone outer space – you name it. They’ve even got a defibrillator on board. Have you had to use it, Karen?’ he asked the woman.

‘Mr Hansen, you know I can’t tell you that,’ she said, grinning.

They flew into Gatlinburg but Izzie could only glance at the pretty streets of the historic town before they were driven out of town for twenty minutes to a property set on its own in the foothills of the Great Smokies.

‘I can see why a painter would want to work from here,’ Izzie said, taking in the sweep of powerful mountains ranged all around her as they walked to the door of the ranch-style house. The greenery reminded her a little of home, but there were no mountains in Ireland like these, no giant peaks that dominated the landscape.

The artist, a man named AJ, made them drinks and ambled round his studio, talking in a laid-back Tennessean drawl. Izzie had worried that the artist might wonder who she was and she imagined an awkward conversation ensuing, but no such thing happened. It was as if, once she was with Joe, she was instantly a member of whatever club they were in at the time. She found that she liked that.

Joe wanted to buy a lot of paintings.

AJ hugged him in a loose-limbed way. Izzie wondered how much it had all cost, but decided against asking. She wasn’t sure if she could take it.

On the flight home, over Cajun blackened fish, a Gatlinburg favourite recipe that the galley staff had prepared in honour of their destination, Izzie idly mentioned her initial anxiety that AJ would wonder who she was.

‘Who cares what other people think or wonder?’ he said, genuinely astonished at such a concept.

‘No reason,’ Izzie said cautiously. ‘It’s just –’

She stopped. She was scared of so many things around Joe: how intensely she liked him, how powerfully attractive she found him. But there were all those complications to consider. Izzie felt she was on a slippery slope now – she didn’t want to fall in.

Also, she was afraid that, just by being with him, she’d appear like the sort of person she disliked: the all-purpose rich man’s girlfriend. Not that she was his girlfriend or anything yet. He hadn’t so much as touched her, and she wasn’t sure if this was on purpose or not.

I have a career and my own life, she wanted to yell. I like him for who he is, not for how much money he’s got.

He dropped her home in the limo. Neither of them moved. Izzie felt so conflicted: on one hand, she wanted to invite him in and see what happened next. On the other, she wanted to go slowly because this felt so special, so different.

If only he’d do something, say something, then she’d know how to respond.

But he seemed to be playing some gentlemanly game, waiting for her to do something.

‘Have you talked to your wife about meeting me?’ she asked. Why did you say that? she groaned inwardly. How to kill a romantic atmosphere in ten seconds flat.

‘We don’t talk about the people in our life,’ he said brusquely. ‘It’d weird me out.’

‘Because you’d be jealous?’ Izzie asked tentatively.

‘Because we’re trying to keep a reasonable family unit together for the sake of the boys and that might add extra pressure,’ he replied.

And then, he leaned over and kissed her softly on the lips, not a Mr Predator kiss but a gentle, till tomorrow sort of goodbye. Izzie closed her eyes and waited for more, waited to sink into the kiss. But there was no more.

‘I’ll call you tomorrow and thanks for coming with me.’

‘Thanks for asking me,’ she said coolly. She was still trying to work out why he hadn’t kissed her properly. ‘I’ve never been to Tennessee before. Does a two-hour flying visit count as being somewhere?’

He looked at her thoughtfully.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Cheerio,’ she said, getting out as the driver opened the door. Cheerio? What’s wrong with you, Izzie? First the weird question about his wife and then ‘cheerio’.

He phoned the next day.

‘Would you like to go on another date?’ he asked.

Date? It had been a date, after all. Izzie hugged herself with delight.

‘Yes,’ she said and squashed the feeling that she’d just fallen down the slippery slope.

From the comfort of her bathtub, sipping her spritzer, Izzie thought about those first days when she felt like the luckiest person on the planet.

Joe was in her head all the time, edging more mundane matters out of the way, like a problem with a model sinking into depression because she’d been dropped from a beauty campaign or a big screw-up which saw five models miss a plane to Milan because they’d been out late partying.

It was a fabulous secret that she hugged to herself. Izzie found herself behaving as if her life was a movie and Joe would be watching her every move.

She wore her best clothes every day, so she’d look fabulous on the off chance that he’d phone. The spike-heeled boots she moaned about were hauled out of her wardrobe to go with the swishy 1940s-inspired skirt that hugged her rear end and made construction workers’ mouths drop open.

They had lunch and dinner twice a week, holding hands under the table, and kissing in the car on the way back to her office or to her apartment. They talked and talked, sitting until their coffees went cold.

But she’d never brought him to her home, had never done more than kiss him in the back of the car. Something held her back.

That something was her feeling that Joe and his life was more complicated than he’d told her. Why else were they having this low-key relationship, she asked herself? It only made sense if Joe wasn’t being entirely truthful about everything and she couldn’t believe that. He was so straight, so direct. She didn’t want to nag him like a dog with a bone. She said nothing and just hoped.

They’d had a month of courtship – only such an old-fashioned word could describe it: walking in the park at lunchtime and sharing deli lunch from Dean & DeLuca’s.

And then, on a sunny Thursday, they’d visited another artist in a giant loft apartment in TriBeCa and Izzie had wandered round looking at huge canvases while Joe, the artist and the artist’s manager discussed business. Izzie felt a thrill that was nothing to do with admiring the artist’s work: the fact that Joe had brought her here showed that she wasn’t a dirty little secret in his life. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have brought her along, would he?

Silvio Cruz’s giant abstract paintings had prompted some critics to compare him to the great Pollock. Even Izzie, who knew zip about art, could see the power and beauty of his canvases, and she loved listening to Joe talk about them.

Joe hadn’t grown up with art on the walls, he’d told her: food on the table in his Bronx home was as good as it got. So she loved hearing him talk passionately about a world he’d come into late thanks to his sheer brilliance.

Finally, she, Joe and Duarte, the manager, took the creaking industrial elevator down to street level.

‘The Marshall benefit for AIDS is on tomorrow night,’ Duarte said to Joe. ‘You and Elizabeth going?’

Izzie froze.

‘Yeah, probably,’ murmured Joe.

‘I hear Danny Henderson’s donating a De Kooning. I mean, Jeez, that’s serious dough. Danny’s been here too, but he just doesn’t get Silvio’s vision,’ Duarte went on, oblivious to the sudden temperature shift in the elevator.

Elizabeth was probably going with him? What happened to the separate lives thing?

On the street, Izzie looked around for Joe’s inevitable big black limo and then realised she couldn’t possibly sit in it with him. She wasn’t sure what was worse: the feeling that Joe had wanted to shut Duarte up and not talk about the party, or Duarte’s assumption that she, Izzie, wouldn’t be going.

If Joe Hansen was officially unattached, then why would anyone assume he’d take his wife to a benefit? And why would he say ‘yeah, probably’ when asked?

There was only one answer and it made Izzie feel sick.

Without saying a word, she turned and walked briskly away from the two men and the limo which had slid noiselessly into place.

‘Izzie!’ yelled Joe, but she kept walking.

He caught up with her, hurt her arm as he grabbed her roughly and turned her to face him.

‘Don’t go,’ he begged.

‘Why not?’ she demanded. ‘You’ve been lying to me. It’s not over with your wife. You lied to me.’

‘It’s over with me and Elizabeth,’ he insisted.

‘Fuck you and your lies!’ Izzie threw back at him.

‘They’re not lies.’ He let go of her and his hands dropped limply to his sides. ‘It’s deader than any dodo, Izzie, it’s just hard to end it all. Elizabeth’s different to me, she finds it difficult to let go. I’ve told her she can have the house here, the place in the Hamptons, whatever she wants. It was over long before you, that wasn’t a lie. But she’s trying to get her head round the fact that I want to leave.’

‘So you’re leaving now? First, you were all staying together for the kids,’ Izzie said, trying not to cry.

‘We did try but it didn’t work. Elizabeth kept getting upset about it, she wants all or nothing, and now it’s a matter of her accepting it and us telling the boys. I promise, Izzie. Don’t go, please.’

Izzie stared at him. She was a good judge of character, damnit, and he wasn’t a liar, for all he pretended to be a shark in business.

‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth straight up?’ she demanded.

‘You wouldn’t have gone out to lunch with me,’ he said, with a small smile that recalled the Joe she knew and loved.

Loved. She loved him, Lord help her, she loved him. Without meaning to, she’d got tangled up in this mess and now she couldn’t just walk out. Still, she needed time to think.

‘I’ve got to go back to work, Joe,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you later.’

‘Let me drop you,’ he said.

‘No, I’ll get a taxi.’

As if sent by an angel, a taxi with a lit sign appeared in front of her and Izzie stuck out her arm. She waved at Joe as she sat in the back and the driver sped off.

‘What’s up with you?’ snapped Carla at work that afternoon. ‘You don’t listen, you don’t talk, you stare into space like a moony high schooler. What gives?’

Izzie hesitated. She and Carla had sat up nights talking men, dissing men and generally deciding that no man at all was better than changing who you were in order to capture one.

‘Surrendered wife, my butt! Why pretend to be Pollyanna to get him, so you can go back to being Mama Alien once he’s married you? Who needs a man that much?’

They knew each other. But something had stopped Izzie from telling Carla about Joe. Perhaps it was a sixth sense or else it was her feeling that this was all too good to be true.

She’d had a feeling that explaining Joe’s complicated family set-up would trigger Carla’s internal Men Are Assholes alarm and there would be no stopping her. Carla wouldn’t understand the nuances of it all.

Well, she would now, Izzie thought bitterly. Now it wasn’t so complicated at all – just another guy trying to mess around on the side, only Izzie Silver, who’d never done the married man thing, was the person he was messing around with.

And how could she explain all that to Carla, along with how she felt about him, despite today? That thinking of Joe made her burn with heat. That his voice made her want to melt. That she was falling for him like the sort of soppy woman she’d never been in her life before. That she was furious with him for lying to her, but somehow her traitorous mind kept thinking What if she stayed with him anyway…?

No, she couldn’t tell Carla until she knew what she was going to do next.

‘Was I staring into space?’ Izzie said. ‘I was only thinking about Laetitia. We’ll need to keep an eye on her because her acne has flared up again and it really upsets her. I told her about the facialist who did wonders with Fifi’s skin, but she says she’s thinking of getting a prescription for something…’

Models using anti-acne drugs to combat skin problems were guaranteed to occupy Carla’s mind. Carla felt that skinny girls who lived on cigarettes and diet drinks didn’t need more medication.

‘She doesn’t need drugs!’ Carla went off on one, yelling and being angry.

Izzie was able to tune out of her job and into Joe.

Carla’s instinctive reaction – if she were told – would be the correct one. There was no future in this relationship. Izzie had to end it, tonight.

The sad thing was, she believed Joe. She believed his feelings for her, but it was all too complicated, too tangled, and he wasn’t ready to walk away from his past yet.

If Izzie stayed, she’d be the evil woman who’d ruined his marriage. The evil woman story played better than the marriage-falling-apart one.

‘Izzie, you’re tuning out again. What’s up?’ demanded Carla.

‘Just tired,’ Izzie said, flustered.

It wasn’t enough that Joe was messing up her heart, he was messing up her job too. She had to get out because, somewhere deep inside, Izzie knew that Joe had the power to hurt her like no man had ever hurt her before.

She was grateful now that their relationship had never become physical. Ironically, she’d thought that tonight might be the night that it did. Still, she was grateful for small mercies. It was as if some psychic force had kept her from making love with him because, once that happened, there would be no going back. Now she had to get out, fast, while she still could.

Before the fight in TriBeCa, they’d discussed going to dinner somewhere fancy at half nine. Izzie couldn’t wait that long. She needed to do this soon, after work, or else she’d explode. She had to get Joe out of her life and try to forget him. Although quite how she was going to do that, she had no idea.

She left a message on Joe’s cell phone for him to meet her at seven in a small bar at Pier Nine. Anonymous and quiet, it would be the perfect setting for telling Joe she never wanted to see him again.

At seven that night, the bar contained a mixed crowd, with studenty types, men and women in work clothes and people for whom fashion wasn’t a mission statement. The walls were jammed with non-ironic movie posters like Love Story and Flashdance, and there wasn’t a cocktail shaker in sight.

Carla would love this place, Izzie thought briefly, then realised she couldn’t tell Carla about it because there would be nothing to tell after tonight.

There was no future in this for her except heartbreak. God, she earned her living telling young beautiful girls that there was no future in it for them with the moguls they met at parties. They were just fodder for the rich; disposable people in a world of disposable income.

Look who’s talking now. Stupid, stoopid.

She sat there with her drink for fifteen minutes, hating herself, and finally moved on to anger because Joe was late. How dare he?

After everything he’d put her through, how dare he be late now?

Furiously, Izzie moved off the banquette, pulling her handbag after her.

‘You leaving? I’m sorry I’m late.’ His body, solid in a charcoal grey coat dusted with tiny diamonds of rain, blocked her way. He looked penitent, tired. He wasn’t playing a game with her, she knew instantly. But their whole relationship was based on mistruths and she hated that.

‘Joe.’ She slumped back into the seat, suddenly exhausted. ‘I wanted to see you to say I can’t do this any more. It’s not right, it’s not me. I was never comfortable with the idea that you still lived with your wife, split up or not, and today made it plain that I was right about that. I don’t want to be the other woman. I never auditioned for that.’

He’d moved in to sit beside her.

‘I know, I’m sorry,’ he said, sounding resigned. ‘Go, Izzie, you’re right. I’ve nothing to offer you.’

He had something to offer her, she thought, a moment of yearning in her heart. He had. But he was still married to someone else, still involved with someone else because of their children. Why couldn’t this be easy?

Joe was off the banquette and on his feet in one fluid gesture. He moved with such elegance, he was comfortable in his own skin.

When she’d woken up that morning with their dinner ahead of her, Izzie had decided that she wanted to feel that skin naked against hers. She wasn’t a silk underwear sort of woman. She did simple black, white or nude briefs and bras. No frills or lace. Until some invisible magnet had drawn her into Bloomingdales and the lingerie department where she’d gone crazy, doing more damage to her credit card bill. She could feel the results of that craziness, soft and very different under her clothes.

Going to bed with him now, the first and last time, was a strange idea. Yet maybe not. If she could have him, feel him touching her just one time, then perhaps she could leave. Like immunotherapy: one touch and she’d be for ever immune to him. Her heart would send out little antibodies so she wouldn’t want him again.

An anti-Joe shot.

Izzie closed her eyes.

‘Do you want to go?’ he asked. Softer, definitely.

‘Do you want me to?’

‘No.’ Low with wanting her.

‘Really?’

‘Really. I wanted to be honest with you, but when I met you, I knew you wouldn’t see me again if I told you how it really was. It’s over with me and Elizabeth, I promise. But I didn’t think you’d believe me, not at first.’

She kept her eyes closed and thought about his wife, Elizabeth, and the sons, the duplex in Vail, the listing in Fortune, the assistant’s assistant, all the things that were making this impossible. Then she opened her eyes and looked at him, that face she felt as if she’d known in another lifetime because how could you commit someone’s face to memory in such a short time? Reincarnation made sense suddenly. She and Joe had known each other in another life, for sure.

Perhaps he was meant to come into her life sooner, but he was here now. He was the one, she knew it.

‘I don’t want to go.’

He didn’t sit beside her: he bent and took her head in his hands, fingers cradling her skull with passion and gentleness, and crushed her mouth to his. She was just as ferocious, hands digging into his shoulders, dragging him down to her. This was what they hadn’t done, this type of kissing. They’d been so careful, dancing around it, both knowing that if they touched, properly, then there would be no going back.

Izzie moaned, knowing she was lost.

They pulled apart, two sets of bruised lips, two pairs of eyes black with desire.

‘Let’s go,’ Izzie said.

There was a car waiting outside the bar for him: a discreet Town car that smoothly drove up as soon as Joe raised his finger. It was always a different driver, Izzie realised, as he helped her into the leather backseat. Someone like Joe would absolutely have a regular driver, but that driver would know his wife, run errands for her, take the kids to school.

He couldn’t risk that driver seeing her again after the Plaza lunch. She was a guilty secret, to be hidden until it was all sorted out with his wife, the wife who didn’t want it to be over. Izzie, who’d never been hidden in her life and who’d often longed to be small for a day just for the experience, forced herself to brush the thought away. She was a secret. So what? It wouldn’t be for long, just long enough for Joe to end what was already over.

In her apartment, she didn’t think twice about saying, ‘I bet you didn’t know they made apartments in this size, huh?’

‘I didn’t come for the real estate,’ he said.

‘What did you come here for?’ she said.

‘For this.’ With one effortless move, his arms were around her waist, crushing her tightly against him. Izzie felt the surge of being plugged into some heavenly mains supply and with her back against the wall, she hungrily pulled his head down to hers and kissed him. His face was hard but his lips were soft, melting into hers, consuming her. Izzie flowed into the kiss, then suddenly pulled back.

She wanted to be in charge, in control for a moment, to show him that she would not be messed around with. She shoved him until he was against the facing wall, and she was on her toes, reaching and kissing.

‘Me first,’ he murmured, wrenching his mouth away. Her hands were behind her back, pinioned at the wrist with one of his big hands, the other cradling her head as he kissed her. He half carried her against his body until she was at the other wall again.

‘Rough stuff?’ she gasped, struggling to free her hands.

‘No,’ he said, stopping to stroke her cheek tenderly. ‘Never. I don’t want to hurt you, but I want you under me. Does that make me a Neanderthal in these sexually enlightened times?’

Izzie laughed. She took his hand and led him into the tiny living room. ‘I’m the sort of girl who goes on top.’

He hauled her close again. ‘Maybe the second time,’ he growled.

‘I’m not like other women,’ Izzie said. Still in his embrace, she managed to unwind her scarf and unbutton her coat. He ripped his coat off.

‘Never thought you were.’

‘So don’t tell me what to do or what not to do,’ she added.

‘Not even in bed?’

He was pulling his knotted tie loose and the sight of this normally buttoned-up businessman turning primeval made her weak at the knees.

‘Maybe in bed,’ Izzie teased, slipping her fingers down to untie the ribbons of her blouse. A complicated thing made of navy polka dot silk and laced up the front, it was the sort of garment that begged to be torn off. Joe’s eyes darkly followed her fingers as they loosened the navy ribbons.

‘I hope it’s not expensive,’ he said heavily, grabbing her again and pulling at the ribbons urgently, ripping the fragile fabric. Her full mouth caught his again, hot breath and hot tongues melding. He tasted like more. She wanted him like she’d never wanted anyone before.

Izzie felt every nerve ending on fire with desire. Her nipples were hard buds of lust and underneath her sedate pencil skirt she could feel her skin burning in its silken lingerie, wild to be set free and naked.

‘I can afford a new one,’ said Izzie, which wasn’t true, but now wasn’t the time to split dollars.

‘Good.’

He’d pulled the blouse apart, and his hands and mouth were roaming the soft skin of her breasts, kissing, licking and then sucking. Then his hands slid under the pencil skirt and his fingers cupped her pubic bone, making her feel the moisture pooling inside her.

Izzie groaned with pleasure. If this was her vaccination, then she wanted it to go on for a very long time.

She hadn’t shut the drapes and afterwards the lights of the city provided a gentle illumination for their crumpled bed. Joe lay propped up on her pillows, the sheets reaching up the muscled tan of his waist. Izzie lay on her side, head on her elbow, not quite looking at him but gazing away. It was an odd moment: at once both intimate and oddly formal.

Izzie, who’d had no difficulty sitting astride this man’s hips and letting him watch her face as she screamed with ecstasy, felt the awkwardness of afterwards. Suddenly she wondered how pure physical lust and attraction could make people do what they’d just done. There were so many things they didn’t know about each other. She didn’t know how he liked his coffee in the morning, the name of his first pet, did he love his mother?

None of that had mattered before. Now, the gap of that knowledge made what had gone before seem seamy, dirty. What was the protocol?

Thanks a million, honey: the money’s on the mantelpiece? It might be different for billionaires. The mink coat will be hiked over, sweetie, goodbye –

She shivered involuntarily. She’d never, ever wanted to be that sort of woman. And now, she was, wasn’t she?

‘I don’t suppose you have a cigarette?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t think you smoked,’ she said, surprised. Whatever she’d expected, it hadn’t been this.

‘I don’t. I quit ten years ago. But sometimes…’

‘Like when you’re in bed with women other than your wife?’ Izzie said, cut at the insinuation. ‘How many packs do you go through a month?’

‘None,’ he said, evenly. ‘Don’t be like that, Izzie.’

‘Like what?’

‘That.’

‘I can’t help it.’ She couldn’t. Now she’d crossed over to the other side, the side of loving him. Now he could hurt her and she felt naked, raw. She wanted to hurt first.

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