FELICITY EVERETT grew up in Manchester and attended Sussex University. After an early career in children’s publishing and freelance writing, which produced more than twenty-five works of children’s fiction and non-fiction, Felicity’s debut novel The Story of Us was published in 2011. She has just returned from four years in Australia and lives in Gloucestershire.

But now I am no longer I,

nor is my house any longer my house.

FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Acknowledgements

Why I wrote The People at Number 9

Reading group questions:

Copyright

1

Sara’s gaze drifted toward the window. It was dark outside now, and she could see her own reflection superimposed like a hologram on the house across the road. Their curtains were half-closed but the cold blue flicker of the TV could just be seen. She imagined Gavin lounging in the Eames chair with a glass of red, Lou lolling barefoot on the sofa. They might be watching an art-house movie together – or perhaps just slumming it with Saturday night telly. It was all too easy to conjure – the flea-bitten hearth-rug, the aroma of Pinot Noir mingled with woodsmoke. Even after everything that had happened, the scene still had its allure.

From their vantage point, Carol’s place would be a goldfish bowl – blinds open, lights blazing, a room full of people and more arriving. Sara hoped they had noticed. She hoped their exclusion would hurt, but she doubted it. Her focus shifted, once again, to her own face, a ghostly smudge in the sheen of the windowpane.

***

Eighteen months earlier

The first time Sara saw their car, she thought it had been dumped, it looked so incongruous among all the people carriers and Volkswagens. Its rear wheel was perched on the kerb, while its front ones were skewed at an alarming angle. It was a red and grey vintage Humber with a missing hubcap, a slew of rubbish in the passenger footwell and a baby seat in the back. Over the next few days, however, she spotted the car a number of times; not always so erratically parked, but usually within a stone’s throw of her house.

She was standing outside Carol’s, debriefing after the school run, when she noticed her friend’s concentration drift.

“Check out our new neighbour,” Carol murmured, nodding toward the other side of the street.

Sara glanced casually across. Got up in a boiler suit and headscarf, like Rosie the Riveter, the woman was struggling to steer a wheelbarrow of debris down the front path.

“She’s seen us,” murmured Carol. “Smile. Wave.”

Sara did so, regretting the aura she knew they must project, of complacency and cliquiness. The woman acknowledged them with an anxious smile.

Her house was the semi-detached twin of Sara’s. Bay windows, stuccoed porches, steep gables mirrored one another brick for brick and tile for tile, but while Sara’s house exuded bourgeois respectability, number 9 was a mess – peeling paint, rotten window-frames, sagging gutters. Still, they were doing it up now, and as noisy and dirty as the process continued to be, it was to be welcomed. As were the neighbours themselves. On an impulse, Sara left Carol to mind the boys and crossed the road.

“Looks like hard work!” she said, opening the gate. Her neighbour trundled the barrow out onto the street, up a makeshift gangplank and tipped its contents into the skip. She reversed back down and lowered the wheelbarrow to the pavement, before holding both hands out in front of her as if about to play an imaginary piano. It took Sara a moment to realise that she was demonstrating a tremor brought on by the exertion of pushing the barrow.

“Goodness,” said Sara.

“I know!” said her neighbour, then, after wiping her palm clean on her overalls, she held it out.

“I’m Lou.”

“Sara.”

Saah-ra. The syllables seemed to ooze like syrup, speaking of bedtime stories and ballet lessons. Not for the first time, she wished she were called something else.

“And can I just say, I feel terrible,” she added.

“Why?”

“Well, you’ve been here, what, a week…?”

“Two.”

“… And we haven’t been round to say hello. I kept meaning to, but you always seemed so busy.”

She was sounding like a curtain-twitcher now.

“Oh God, it’s me who should apologise. We’ve had our heads up our arses. The building work was meant to be finished before we moved in but,” she shrugged apologetically, “you know how it is.”

“Oh, totally,” Sara said.

“And then, just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse, the art-handlers fucked up and we had to store a million quid’s worth of Gav’s artwork, with half the house hanging off!”

“Gosh,” was all Sara could think of to say.

“Anyway,” Lou made to pick up the barrow again, “we’ll sort something soon…”

“Pop in later if you want,” Sara blurted. “It’s just me and the kids.”

Lou arrived on a waft of expensive, grassy perfume. Her hair was damp and she had changed into an embroidered shirt and jeans. There was something equine about her, Sara thought – a wariness that invited soothing. She had only brought one of the children – an angelic-looking child with shoulder-length, white-blond hair.

“Sara, this is Dash.”

“Hi, Dash,” Sara said, and was treated to a sunny, yet slightly unnerving, smile.

“Patrick! Caleb!” She then called over her shoulder. The trill and clatter of the Xbox continued unabated. Sara turned apologetically to Lou, “Perhaps she should just go through. They’re pretty tame.”

“He,” Lou corrected her.

“Oh!” Sara recoiled in embarrassment, “I thought… the hair.”

“It’s Dashiell,” said Lou, “as in Hammett.”

“Of course. Gosh. I don’t know how I… obviously you’re a boy, Dash. Sorry. It was only because of the…”

“… Hair. Yes, it does confuse some people.”

Lou’s neutrality on the issue, her complete lack of embarrassment or rancour only made Sara feel worse. Her own two children had by now appeared, Patrick, the younger one, skidded to a stop in his socked feet, ahead of Caleb, who followed with the world-weary lope of the pre-adolescent.

“So this is Dashiell,” Sara said, the colour still high in her cheeks. “He lives next door. Dashiell, these are my boys, Caleb and Patrick.”

Sara led Lou to the kitchen. It was the best room. The only room really, that she felt truly reflected her taste. Neil had wanted to economise on the re-fit, but egged on by Carol, Sara had gone all-out, sourcing artisanal tiles to set off the cherry-red Aga and agonising over subtly different shades of sustainable hardwood flooring. She had been vindicated, too. Eighteen months on, the stainless-steel work surface had acquired the odd dent and the cupboard fronts were scuffed, but the room still had a warmth and integrity to it. Even today, with the sink full of dirty dishes and the boys’ lunch boxes spewing rubbish across the table, it looked lived-in rather than squalid. So accustomed had she become to fending off compliments, in fact, that it came as something of a surprise when Lou offered none. Instead her visitor cast an appraising eye around the room before meeting Sara’s, with an inscrutable smile.

“Well,” Sara said, “what can I get you?”

She had been about to list a variety of herbal teas, when Lou shrugged and declared herself equally happy with red or white. They were soon installed at the kitchen table, a bottle of Shiraz nestling among the empty pasta bowls. While Lou knocked back wine like Ribena and enthused about the vibrancy of the neighbourhood, Sara studied her guest’s appearance. She was not quite beautiful. Everything was just a fraction off; the eyes too wide-set, the nose a tad flared. Yet she had managed to make a virtue of these defects – a flick of eyeliner, a discreet silver hoop through one nostril – so that mere beauty no longer seemed the point. Her hair, now almost dry, had resolved itself into a short mop of corkscrew curls, which she thrust around her head as she talked, as if the weight of it irked her.

When their kids hadn’t turned up at Cranmer Road, Sara had assumed they must have sent them to a private school, but Lou told her this wasn’t the case.

“We thought we’d wait for the new school year, rather than pick up the fag end,” she explained. “Where they were before was so tiny, and the curriculum was so different. I say curriculum…” She laughed and shook her head.

“Where was that?” Sara asked.

“Oh, didn’t you know? We were living in Spain. A little village in the mountains, not far from Loja.”

“Sounds idyllic,” said Sara.

“It was,” agreed Lou, with a wistful sigh. “I pine for it, but Dash is starting Year Six in September, so we had a decision to make.”

Sara wondered if they had made the right one. She knew plenty of local parents who, faced with the scramble for places at the mediocre state secondaries in their borough, would have considered a mountain shack staffed by a goat-herd to be a better bet.

“I’d love to live abroad,” she said, “but Neil’s job isn’t very portable…”

“Oh there’s always a reason not to do things.” Lou tugged a tendril of hair in front of her eyes and examined it, before letting it spring back into place. “What you have to do is look for the reasons to do it.”

“That is so true. I’m just a bit of a ditherer, I suppose. It’s such a big leap, isn’t it? And I’d be worried about not fitting in.”

“Mmmm…” said Lou ominously.

“Was that hard, then?”

“Yes and no. They’re very straightforward, the Spanish. If they don’t like you, they tell you to your face and their kids throw stones at your kids.”

Sara clutched her cheeks in mute dismay.

“It’s harsh, I know,” Lou went on, “but it’s kind of preferable to that awful thing the English do of keeping a poker face and making you guess what you’ve done wrong. Anyway, the flipside is, if you can turn it around, you’ve got friends for life.”

“And how do you turn it around?”

“Oh you work hard and you make yourself useful… and you tell your kids to throw stones back.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. Stopped overnight,” Lou replied, straight-faced. “And, thank God, because that first winter was hard. You can’t be self-sufficient in a community like that. It’s all tit for tat. You harvest my olives, I’ll fix your generator, sort of thing.”

“How fantastic,” said Sara.

“It is. There really is no better system when it’s working well. Everyone rallies round; there’s a sense of community. You share your surplus produce so there’s no waste.”

“Like a commune.” Sara stared wistfully out of the window at the serried garden fences of their own little enclave, dividing neighbour from neighbour as far as the eye could see. When she looked back, she was astonished to see Lou pressing her middle finger to the bridge of her nose, apparently holding back tears.

“Lou?” she said.

“Sorry.” Lou took a deep, shuddery breath. “I don’t know where that came from.”

Sara maintained a tactful silence, embarrassed, yet also thrilled that Lou seemed about to confide in her.

“We had four-and-a-half blissful years in Riofrio. We made some very, very good friends. People I’d trust with my life.”

“I’m sensing a but…?”

Lou took a gulp of wine and composed herself.

“It was a misunderstanding really. There isn’t a court in Spain that would have ruled in their favour…”

“A court?”

“Oh, it’s nothing terrible, honestly. As I say, a misunderstanding. If we’d had any money, we could have proved it…”

Sara frowned and sat forward in her seat, warming to her role as confidante.

Their neighbours, Dolores and Miguel Fernandez, had a smallholding further down the hill, Lou told her, a few sheep and an orchard. Miguel helped Gavin do the wiring for his studio and she and Gav pitched in at harvest time. So far, so neighbourly, but then the Fernandez decided to farm trout. A bit greedy really, according to Lou, because they were doing just fine as they were. But there were grants available and it looked good on paper.

“Typical Spain – to hell with the integrity of the landscape, bugger the ecosystem – if it ekes out a few more euros, go for it. The irony was,” she hugged herself and looked at the ceiling, blinking back tears, “Gavin helped them build the tanks. Worked flat out, even though he was meant to be getting his exhibition together for the Venice Biennale.”

It had only been up and running a week when they realised it was a disaster, she recalled. The constant whirring of the pumps gave Lou migraines, they didn’t know what to do with all the free trout (God knows they weren’t going to eat it, not the way those pellets smelled). The tanks were an eyesore. But they kept quiet because the Fernandez were their friends and they could see the bigger picture.

“And then one weekend,” she spread her hands wide, like a child, “all the fish died and they said it was Gavin’s fault.”

Sara shook her head.

“I know. Crazy,” said Lou, “but they claimed it was the residue from his studio.”

“Residue?”

“Gypsum, from the plaster of Paris. Of course you don’t know his work, do you?”

Sara shrugged apologetically.

“Well he’s been using it for years. Anyway, he’d hosed down his studio floor, and they claimed it ran down the mountain and contaminated their tanks.”

“Oh dear.”

“Never mind that the farm next door’s using God knows what on their rape. Never mind that Miguel’s an alcoholic and he could have just put the wrong chemicals in. We’re the newcomers, so it’s our fault, right?”

Her hand flexed convulsively on the oilcloth and a single tear brimmed over and tumbled down her cheek. Sara’s throat tightened in sympathy. She reached out to cover Lou’s hand with her own, but somehow suffered a failure of nerve and went instead for the tissue box.

“Thanks,” said Lou, honking noisily into the paper handkerchief. She met Sara’s eye with a brave smile.

“Well,” said Sara briskly, after a brief silence, “I for one am grateful to them.”

Lou looked puzzled.

“To the Fernandezes, or whatever they’re called. If it wasn’t for them and their stupid trout, you wouldn’t be here now, would you? We wouldn’t have you as neighbours.”

“Oh!” Lou gave her a tremulous smile.

The doorbell rang and Sara glanced at the clock.

“Shit!” she said. “Guitar.”

And with that, the spell was broken. Lou was a neighbour she hardly knew, the kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it and Caleb hadn’t practised Cavatina all week. She flew down the hall and let the guitar teacher in, noticing, even as she burbled apologetically to him about the chaos, the flicker of interest he betrayed as he passed Lou in the hall. It was the kind of glance Sara herself never elicited – not sexual exactly, though there was that in it – more a look of recognition. You are of my kind, the look said, or of the kind to which I aspire. And whilst appearing oblivious, Lou nevertheless managed both to acknowledge his need and to remain aloof from it. Sara felt a pang of envy.

Standing on the doorstep, Lou and Sara both started speaking at once.

“I can’t tell you how…”

“I’m really glad you…”

They laughed and Sara deferred to Lou, who shrugged as if suddenly lost for words.

“Thank you,” she said, finally, and they both laughed with relief. Lou had got as far as the garden gate, when she turned back, as if a rash new idea had occurred to her.

“We’re having a few people over on Saturday, a little get-together to christen the house. Why don’t you come?”

2

By the time they had settled the boys and let themselves out of the front door, the street lamps were turning from nascent pink to sodium orange. The Victorian semis loomed tall and narrow in the navy dusk, like nuns having a conflab. The dead hand of gentrification had not yet touched all of them. For every topiaried bay tree, there was a satellite dish, for every tasteful leaded light, a PVC porch. Gav and Lou’s place had yet to declare itself. The skip at the front provided some intriguing clues – an ugly fifties fire surround, a naked shop mannequin – but it was too soon to say for sure what kind of people these were.

“Bloody hell!” hissed Neil, as they stood on Gav and Lou’s doorstep, waiting in vain for someone to hear the bell. “What did you want to bring the Moët for?”

Sara shrugged.

“It’s all we had left.”

She had made a point of opening the last bottle of Sainsbury’s Soave, earlier in the evening, partly to settle her nerves, but mainly to make sure the Moët was all they had left. She knew, if she were honest, that Neil had tucked it at the back of the fridge on the off-chance he might soon have something to celebrate. He was plotting a boardroom coup in the housing association where he worked and he was pretty sure, he had told her over dinner the other night, his grey eyes animated, his jaw churning salad like a cement mixer, that he now had enough people onside to oust the finance director. This would remove the final obstacle between him and the CEO’s job he had long coveted. Sara had looked at him and seen little trace of the humble, idealistic undergraduate with whom she had fallen in love.

If she had told him, back then, that he would be buying Moët to toast his ascendancy to a boardroom, any boardroom, he would have called her a fantasist. Yet here he was, looking every inch the smart casual capitalist in his Paul Smith shirt and Camper shoes. He still had a plausible shtick on why his running Haven Housing would be the tenant-friendly outcome, but it seemed to her that the tenant-friendly outcome was inseparable these days from the Neil-friendly outcome. He had started at Haven wearing jeans and button-down shirts. Gradually, the jeans had gone and a tie had crept in (“tenants like a tie”, he’d said). A brief spell of chinos and sleeveless pullovers had given way to the era of the suit. Suits went down better with “stakeholders”, whoever they were. Scratch the suave surface, though, and you’d find the idealist beneath, still fighting the good fight, still standing up for the underdog. He wasn’t a cynic, her Neil.

She pushed the door, tentatively, and it opened.

“I think we’re just meant to go in,” she said.

It was still unclear whether the event was a soirée or a rave. All day she had kept her ear cocked and her eyes open, but there hadn’t been much to go on. The household had seemed to slumber until well after two, which, for a young family on a summer’s weekend, struck Sara as a significant feat. Then, when most people were beginning to wind down, they suddenly sprang into action. From her vantage point at the kitchen window, she could see Gavin hacking branches off the lime trees at the bottom of the garden with what must have been a blunt saw, because his torso was running with sweat. The temperature had to be in the mid-twenties, and, as it had seemed the whole of that summer, the humidity was high. Their fence was too tall and their shrubs too unkempt to afford anything but the odd glimpse of the kids, but she could hear their excited shrieks and yelps. Music blasted through the open windows – something kitschy and seventies, Supertramp maybe – but, occasionally, Lou would kill the volume and Sara would hear her call out, her tone plaintive, yet with a stridency that somehow managed to penetrate the rasp of the saw.

“Ga-a-av?”

When he had stopped and turned towards her, face glowing, chest heaving, she would ask him some trivial question or other, more to prove her entitlement to do so, it seemed to Sara, than because she really needed to know the answer.

By six o’clock, he was still perched in a cleft of the third and final tree, sawing at a stubborn shred of bark tethering the last substantial branch to its trunk. If it were Neil up the tree, and the two of them were having a “get-together” that night, however impromptu, she knew she’d have been going spare.

She had dithered about a babysitter, and in the end done nothing, because she didn’t really know what the deal was. She’d decided she’d just keep an eye out and when enough guests had arrived, they’d wander round. There was the problem of what to wear, but seeing the way their hosts had gone about things, she reckoned it had to be pretty relaxed. By eight, she was showered, and semi-got-up in her For All Mankind jeans, a silk camisole and strappy sandals, which she’d changed for Birkenstocks, as soon as she saw the look on Neil’s face. She could, she knew, have stared at his Coldplay T-shirt until it burst into flames and he still wouldn’t have got the hint, so in the end she’d just told him as nicely as she could to change it.

The hall was deserted. Tea lights on every step of the uncarpeted stairs threw juddering shadows up the wall.

“Place could go up like a tinderbox,” muttered Neil. The throb of seriously amplified music came from deep within the house. Closer at hand, the hum of party chatter made Sara’s stomach clench with anxiety. She poked her head around the door of the living room; a bearded man in a rumpled linen suit was sitting on a Scandinavian-style leather sofa rolling a joint on an album cover as if it were 1979. What she could see of the room was an odd combination of mess and emptiness. The walls were hung haphazardly with artworks. One alcove was crammed from floor to ceiling with books. In the other, a hydra-headed chrome floorlamp loomed behind a beaten-up Eames chair. Fairy lights were strung through the antlers of a stuffed stag’s head above the fireplace. There was a smell of curry and pot and a faint mustiness, which suggested that the age-old damp problem that had long beset the house had not necessarily been cured. In another corner of the room, she now picked out, amid the gloom, a man in a pork-pie hat and a woman in Rockabilly get-up. They were clutching cans of Red Stripe. She smiled at them tentatively and ducked back out again. She shrugged at Neil.

“Kitchen?”

They blinked as they entered the strip-lit room. It was as busy and vibrant as the living room had been underpopulated and dull. The decibel level alone was intimidating, and for a moment, confronted by what seemed to be an impenetrable wall of bonhomie, Sara’s instinct was to run. These people were not locals – they looked as though they had been flown in from an avant-garde New York gallery. Here were septuagenarians in skinny jeans and twenty-somethings in tweed. Here were Baader Meinhof intellectuals, kohl-eyed It girls, preening dandies and scrofulous punks. Sara felt instinctively for her husband’s hand and steered a course through the mêlée, until she reached safe harbour beside the kitchen table. Neil went to put the Moët down, but Sara gave him a warning look.

There had been no attempt to prettify the kitchen, or create atmosphere. It was just a watering hole and looked, as far as Sara could remember, exactly as it had when the house had gone up for auction. Perhaps Lou and Gavin had spent all their money converting the basement, or perhaps, seventies retro being back in fashion, they considered its brown floral tiles and yellow melamine cupboards a stylistic coup.

“Ooh, champagne! Crack it open then.”

“Carol, hi!” Sara was a little surprised, herself, at the grudging tone of her own greeting. Carol was wearing one of her Boden wrap dresses, accessorised with earrings, tights and nail varnish in the precise jade green of every third zigzag. Her short ginger hair had been freshly coiffed. She looked like a home-economics teacher who had wandered into a seedy jazz club and – unworthy impulse – Sara did not want to be seen with her. Not that Carol wasn’t a great girl, she was. She was stalwart and practical, clever and kind. She was as good for a heart-to-heart as she was for a cup of couscous. There had been confessions over the years and there had been tears. Carol ran a mean book group and threw a decent dinner party and if the guest lists for both tended to overlap, and the conversations repeat themselves, her hospitality was never less than generous. She was, however, no Bohemian.

Even now, as Sara reluctantly filled Carol’s glass with champagne, Carol was assessing the fixtures and fittings.

“Do you think this kitchen’s retro, or just old?”

“I don’t really know,” said Sara. She was trying to eavesdrop on a nearby conversation about rap music and misogyny, but with Carol prattling in one ear and Neil and Simon talking football in the other, it was impossible.

“I thought it’d be state of the art,” Carol went on. “Fancy having the builders in all this time and the kitchen still looking like this.”

“They’ve been making a studio, Carol.”

“Oh yes, I forgot he’s an artist.” Carol widened her eyes satirically and then returned her gaze to the sea of much-pierced humanity surrounding her.

“Do you know any of these people?” she asked. Sara shook her head. The thing was, though, that she wanted to know them, and if Carol stuck to her like glue, that wasn’t going to happen. The crowd was starting to thin a bit now, as guests topped up their drinks and wandered out to the garden. Carol leaned in to make some fresh observation.

“Hold that thought,” Sara said, laying an apologetic hand on her friend’s arm, “I’m busting for the loo.”

Walking down the steps to the garden, she could at last make sense of the intensive tree pruning that had gone on earlier. A gazebo had been erected at the far end, which had been filled with cushions and kilims. Paper lanterns winked with promise from within. You had to take your hat off to Lou and Gavin; they knew how to create a sense of occasion. She supposed it was some sort of chill-out zone and wondered what might take place there as the evening wore on. There would be more pot, certainly, but would there be other drugs? She wondered what she would do if someone offered her cocaine – turn it down, she supposed. There were the kids, for one thing and besides, she’d only do it wrong and look an idiot.

There was still no sign of the hosts, but clusters of people were milling about on the grass, drinking, smoking, weaving their heads, serpent-like, to trip-hop. Most of them seemed to know each other. This must be how it felt to be a ghost, Sara thought, as she floated from one huddle of people to the next, hovering on the periphery, smiling hopefully, yet never quite plucking up the courage to introduce herself. A few guests made eye contact, one or two smiled back and shuffled aside to accommodate her, but their conversations were too bright and smooth and fluent to allow her an entrée – it was like trying to wade into a fast-flowing stream. It was a relief, then, to bump into an acquaintance from a few streets away, who, it turned out, had done an art foundation course with Lou, but who now wanted to talk school catchment areas. After twenty minutes nodding and smiling, shifting her weight from foot to foot, and twirling the stem of her glass, Sara had had enough. She made her excuses and was threading her way back through the throng towards the house, when she met the host coming down the steps.

“Top up?” he said, tilting a bottle of wine towards her glass.

“Thanks,” she said. “You’re Gavin, aren’t you?”

“Guilty as charged.”

He filled her glass and started to move off again.

“We’re neighbours, by the way,” she added, quickly.

“Ahhh,” he said, turning back and re-engaging with genuine interest, “you must be Sara.”

3

Gavin apologised for taking so long to be neighbourly and explained that he had been like a dog, circling round and round in his basket, except in his case, his basket was his studio and it had had to be “not so much hewn from the living rock, as dug out of the London clay.’’ He nodded in the direction of the basement, which was still cordoned off with blue tarpaulins. At close quarters, Sara was relieved to discover he was only moderately handsome. One eyelid drooped fractionally, making him look faintly disreputable, and an otherwise fine profile was marred by a slight overbite. He spoke with a Lancastrian burr, which made everything he said sound vaguely sardonic, and prompted a certain archness in Sara’s response. She didn’t believe, she told him now, that the basement-conversion was a studio at all, but one of those underground gymnasia, beloved of Chelsea oligarchs. He said he’d happily prove her wrong, but not tonight, because he didn’t want just anyone – jerking his head towards his increasingly unruly party guests – traipsing through. At this whisper of a compliment, Sara felt a flutter of excitement in her belly.

“So what is it you do, Sara?” he asked after a pause.

“I’m a copywriter,” she said.

“Great! Advertising. Must be fun.”

“Oh it’s not Saatchi’s or anything,” she said quickly, “it’s really boring. Just in-house stuff for companies mainly. And consumer-y bits…”

He nodded, and turned his head, scanning the garden for someone more interesting to talk to, she assumed.

“… But I write,” she added quickly, “just for myself, you know.”

“Cool,” he said, turning back to her. “What sort of thing?”

“Short stories, the odd poem. I’ve started a novel, but it’s run out of steam.”

“You should talk to Lou.”

“Oh?” said Sara warily.

“Yeah,” he replied, nodding, “she’ll give you a few pointers – depending on the kind of thing it is, of course.”

“Lou’s a writer?”

“A writer-director.”

“What, films?”

“Yeah. She’s working on a short at the moment. Terrific concept.”

“She never said…”

“Oh, she wouldn’t. She’s very humble, my wife. One of those quiet types that just beavers away in the background and then comes up with this gob-smackingly amazing thing. Know what I mean?”

“Mmm,” said Sara miserably. She had only just got comfortable with the idea of Lou the style maven, earth mother and muse; now, it seemed, she had to contend with Lou the creative genius.

“Well…” Gavin looked around for more glasses to fill. It suddenly seemed imperative that she detain him.

“What do you make of Spanish cinema?” she blurted. He looked taken aback.

“I’m no connoisseur,” he said, “Almodóvar can be fun, but he’s so inconsistent.”

“I know what you mean,” Sara agreed, hoping she wouldn’t have to elaborate. “And doesn’t it get on your nerves how sloppy they are with the subtitles?” she rolled her eyes despairingly. “Some of the French films I’ve seen….”

“You speak French?” He looked impressed.

“I get by,” she replied, then shrugged.

“Ce qui expliquerait le mystère subtil de votre allure,” said Gavin, with a very passable accent and a twinkle in his eye.

“Er… yeah, okay, I did it for A level.” She pulled a rueful face. “I’m a bit rusty.”

There was a pause, then they both burst out laughing.

“Great!” he said, shaking his head. “I love it.”

“Good joke?” Neil appeared at Sara’s elbow.

“Oh hello,” she said, trying not to feel annoyed with him. “Gavin, this is my husband, Neil.”

They shook hands.

“It’s ten thirty,” Neil said to her, meaningfully.

“’Scuse me,” Gavin said, touching Neil’s shoulder, “if it’s that time, I should probably be helping my missus with the food. Great talking to you, Sara.”

He walked away, still shaking his head and smiling.

“Don’t you think it’s time we left?” Neil said.

“Why?”

“Well, the boys are on their own, for one thing.”

“Go and check on them, if you’re worried.”

“Are you having that good a time?” He seemed surprised.

“Yes, because I’m not stuck in the kitchen with Carol and Simon.”

“They’ve gone now,” he told her. “They said no one talked to them.”

She felt a twinge of guilt.

“I’ll go and check on the boys,” she said.“You, you know… put yourself about a bit. These are our new neighbours.”

He glanced doubtfully at the clusters of people – the beautiful, waif-like women, the men with statement sideburns and recherché spectacles.

“All right,” he said with an unconvincing air of bravado. He raised his glass to her and she felt a pang of love for him. It reminded her of the day she had left Patrick in Reception for the first time – the brave smile he had given her, that she knew would become a major lip-wobble as soon as she walked away. Neil might be CEO-in-waiting of Haven Housing Association, but they both knew that wasn’t going to cut any ice here.

The boys were fine. Patrick was snoring lightly, sweat glistening on his top lip. Sleep had stripped back the years, restoring the cherubic quality to features, which, by day, he worked hard to make pugnacious. She turned down his duvet and smoothed his hair to one side with her palm.

Caleb was in bed reading Harry Potter, his eyelids drooping.

“Good party?” he said.

“Not bad.”

“It’s very loud.”

It was. They were having a Hispanic interlude. Sara could feel the salsa rhythm pulsing through the brickwork. They had a bit of a nerve really, subjecting people to this when they had only just moved in; a lot of families nearby had young kids. She suddenly wondered whether that was why she and Neil had been invited – so they wouldn’t complain about the noise.

“I’ll ask them to keep it down,” she said. She went to kiss him, but he pulled the duvet up over his face to prevent her. She smiled sadly and stood up.

“’Night, Mum,” he called, as she went downstairs.

“’Night,” she called back, in a stage whisper.

Their front door was shut now. She leaned on the doorbell, but she knew she didn’t stand a chance of being heard above the racket. Then she noticed that the gate to the side passage stood open. She hurried through it and into the garden, just in time for the music to come to an abrupt stop. For a moment she thought she had timed her return to coincide with the end of the party, but something in the atmosphere told her that was wrong. The guests had formed a circle around the edge of the grass. As she squeezed her way through to the front, she saw Lou and Gavin standing close together in the middle, Lou’s face inclined submissively against Gavin’s shoulder. At first she thought they must have had a row, but then she noticed a guitarist sitting on a stool in front of the gazebo. There was a hush of anticipation. Rat tat tat; three times the musician slapped his soundboard and the loudness of the cracks belied the absence of an amplifier. Then he summoned a high-pitched, tuneful wail from his upper chest and started to thrum and sing the opening bars of a tango. Sara felt a shudder of embarrassment as Lou and Gavin flung their arms out at shoulder level, intertwined their wrists and began to dance. As the virtuosity of the guitarist and the commitment of the dancers became apparent, however, she found herself spellbound. Lou and Gavin circled the improvised dance floor, their ankles weaving intricately in and out of one another’s path, Lou’s slinky red dress flowing around Gav’s thighs, as they embraced and parted, attracted and repelled one another. The crowd clapped along, not in a spirit of solidarity but of daring; an egging on of something dangerous and illicit. Despite lacking the polish and timing of professional dancers, Gavin and Lou had something even more compelling – a quality that utterly faced down any ambivalence or awkwardness in the watching crowd – they really meant it. As they glanced off each other, brought their cheeks together and their thighs together, closed their eyes and jutted their chins, the sexual chemistry between them was flagrant. It was like watching a cataclysm; a slow-motion car crash with pulverised metal and shattered bone and rending flesh, and knowing that one shouldn’t be watching, but being unable to tear one’s gaze away. Sara could feel it undermining her, as she stood there, cutting away the ground beneath her feet.

The dance finished, one of Lou’s legs high on Gavin’s hip, the other trailing, her posture limp in surrender, and the audience erupted, clapping and whistling their appreciation. Laughing now, Lou hitched her other leg around Gavin’s waist and he spun her round, a gleeful child where moments ago had been a femme fatale. Sara clapped too and smiled, but she felt upset.

She went in search of a drink and found Neil, reclining on a beanbag inside the gazebo; he hauled himself guiltily to his feet when he saw her coming.

“That was awesome, wasn’t it?” He was grinning, in a slack-jawed foolish way. She realised he was stoned.

“Yes. Very impressive,” she said.

“Did you see that guy? Fucking amazing. His fingers were just a blur.”

“You must have been the only one watching the guitarist.”

“I might ask him if he could give Caleb a couple of lessons.”

“He won’t want to teach Caleb. He probably doesn’t even speak English.’

“Well I’m gonna see if he’s got a CD we can buy anyway. He’s gotta have a CD. Talent like that.”

“Don’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“It’s embarrassing.”

He looked a bit hurt, so she slipped her hand into his. His palm felt clammy.

The music had started up again.

“Dance with me,” said Neil. He pulled her in towards him and nuzzled her neck.

“I thought you wanted to get back,” she said.

“Just one dance.”

It wasn’t a good track; neither fast enough to pick up a beat and move, nor quite slow enough for a neck-encircling smooch. They revolved self-consciously on the spot, his hands holding her hips limply, hers clasping first his shoulders, then his elbows, in an effort to encourage him into some kind of rhythm. Fortunately, most people had gone back to refill their glasses, so their only companions on the lawn were a pixie-ish woman who danced with a strange wrist-flicking action, and a little girl wearing fairy wings over her pyjamas.

The track came to an end and Sara kissed Neil lightly on the lips and lifted his hands off her hips.

“Right then,” he said, looking around in a daze, “shall we say our goodbyes?”

“I’ll catch you up,” she said.

Sara stayed at the party for another hour or so, but she felt like a spectator. Lots of people smiled at her goofily, but no one offered her any drugs. She danced on the periphery of some other guests, who politely broadened out their circle to include her; one man even wiggled his shoulders at her in an “I will if you will” invitation to freak out to Steely Dan, but despite having consumed a whole bottle of wine over the course of the evening, she found she couldn’t commit to it, and drifted off to the kitchen. Here she stood by the table, absent-mindedly feeding herself parcels of home-made roti, dipped in lime pickle, until it dawned on her that Lou and Gavin had retired for the night, and she might as well go home.

4

Sara stood at the bedroom window watching the neighbourhood wake. She saw the man from the pebble-dashed semi walk his scary dog as far as the house with the plantation blinds and allow it to cock its leg on their potted bay tree before heading back home. She saw Marlene from number twelve, ease her ample behind into her Ford Ka and head, suitably coiffed and hatted, for Kingdom Hall. She saw a bleary-eyed man bump a double buggy down the steps of the new conversion and set off towards the park. She saw Carol’s front door open…

“Where’s she off to,” she murmured. A faint groan came from under the duvet.

Sara watched her friend cross the road carrying an envelope.

“Oh, my God, she’s not… She is! She’s sending them a thank-you note.”

Neil hauled himself up to a semi-recumbent position.

“Can you believe that?” She turned towards him with an incredulous grin.

“Christ yeah, good manners.” He shuddered.

“Oh come on,” Sara protested, “they didn’t even enjoy themselves, you said.”

With the pillows piled up behind him, wearing an expression of lofty tolerance, Neil’s profile might have been carved into Mount Rushmore.

“Maybe it’s something else.”

“What else could it be?” Sara eyed him sharply.

“A birthday card?” Neil shrugged and picked up his phone.

“Don’t be daft, they’ve only just met.”

All the same, she didn’t like the idea of Carol stealing a march on her. She was the one on the fast-track. Everything Carol knew about Lou and Gavin, she knew because Sara had told her. Their children’s ages and genders; the family’s recent migration from Spain; the medium in which Gavin worked; these nuggets she had doled out, with more than a frisson of satisfaction, keeping the confidences – the trout and the tears – to herself. The idea that the two women might have established their own rapport was ridiculous. They had nothing in common.

“What happened, anyway, after I left?” Neil didn’t lift his eyes from the phone, nor did his lightness of tone betray much curiosity, and yet he was eager to know, she could tell.

“Not much,” she said, returning to bed and yanking the duvet towards her. “Gavin and Lou disappeared. I talked to a couple of people, had a dance. Came home.”

“Disappeared where?” Neil said.

“To bed, one imagines,” said Sara, sounding a little prudish, even to her own ears.

“What,” Neil said, “bed bed?”

“You saw them,” she said, “that dance looked like foreplay to me.”

“Really?” Neil looked appalled and delighted, like a randy schoolboy.

“Bit much, don’t you think, at their own party?” she muttered.

Neil shrugged.

“Maybe they couldn’t help themselves.”

They lay there for a while in silence. The cacophony of kids’ TV from downstairs competed with the buzz of a hedge trimmer outside. Neil returned to his phone, but the theme of sex hung in the air between them. Sunday morning was their regular slot and she guessed from the intense way Neil was scrolling through the football results, that he had an erection. She felt aroused herself, but it was all mixed up now with Gavin and Lou and their stupid tango. She felt hungover and annoyed and horny. She sighed huffily and flopped a hand down on top of the duvet. With every appearance of absent-mindedness, Neil clasped her wrist and started to stroke it gently, whilst still apparently absorbed in the match report. It was the lightest and most casual of caresses, but he couldn’t fool her – he wasn’t taking in a word he was reading. She closed her eyes and tried to enjoy it, but she kept thinking of the party: the strange atmosphere; the music; the extraordinary behaviour of the hosts. Neil was nuzzling her neck now, burrowing his hand beneath the bedclothes, working his way dutifully, from base to base. A tweak of the nipple, a quick knead of the breast, then onwards and downwards. She threw her head back and tried to surrender herself to pleasure, but she couldn’t get in the zone. She moaned and wriggled, took his hand and, after demonstrating how and where she would like to be touched, closed her eyes, only to find her thoughts invaded once again by Gavin and Lou, this time, naked, Gav’s head at Lou’s crotch, her face contorted with ecstasy. Appalled, she banished the image, stilling instantly the butterfly quiver of her nascent orgasm. By now, Neil’s cock was pulsing against her thigh. To self-censor, she reasoned, would be to disappoint them both. No sooner had she given herself permission to go there than she was there, on the other side of the party wall, in their bedroom watching them fuck, like dogs, on the floor, Gav thrusting harder and harder, Lou’s hands beating the floorboards, head jerking back, sweat flying everywhere, groaning, screaming, coming, coming, coming.

“Oh God! Oh God!”

She opened her eyes and the room and the day fell back into their right order, but still there was a muscular twitch against her leg and a misty look in the eye of her husband. She touched his shoulder and, with the air of a family dog given a one-off dispensation to flop on the sofa, he clambered on board, and could only have been a few thrusts shy of his own orgasm, when the bedroom door burst open. Sara turned her head in annoyance, ready to remonstrate with whichever son had forgotten to knock before entering, but found herself, instead, eyeball to eyeball with a strange nappy-clad toddler, whose shock of blond curls and penetrating blue-eyed stare made her gasp in recognition.

***

“Well, that was interesting…” Sara called, breezing back into the house some fifteen minutes later and poking the front door closed with her foot. There was no response, so she followed the appetising scent of cooked breakfast into the kitchen and stood in the doorway, arms folded.

“They hadn’t missed her!” she said.

Neil continued frying eggs.

“No idea she was even here. Pretty shocking really. Poor little thing’s not even three. Hey, you’ll never guess what her name is.”

Neil didn’t try.

“Zuley, short for Zuleika,” she told his impervious back. “I can’t decide whether I like it or not.”

“You can get back to me,” he said.

“I wonder where they got it from…”

“The Bumper Book of Pretentious Names?”

“She must have tagged along with Dash and Arlo. Voted with her feet. It’s not exactly child-friendly round there. You should see the place – weirdos crashed out on every sofa, overflowing ashtrays, empty bottles… God knows what she could have put in her mouth!” Try as she might, she couldn’t quite banish a grudging admiration from her tone.

“Anyway,” she said, her mouth pursed against a smug grin, “upshot is… we’re invited round for dinner later.”

“Can you set the table, please?”

Coitus interruptus seemed to have rendered Neil selectively deaf.

Sara shuffled aside the Sunday paper, clattered plates and cutlery onto the table and called the boys. They hurtled into the room – a tangle of limbs and testosterone, jostling each other for the best chair, the fullest plate, the tallest glass. Dash won on all counts, even snatching the tomato sauce out the hands of his younger brother and splurging a wasteful lake of it onto his own plate, before Arlo had a chance to object.

“Er, we take turns in this house…” Sara said firmly, and was met with Dash’s signature smile – sunny and impervious – more chilling, by far, than defiance. He was a handsome specimen, no doubt about it, and possessed of an easy, insincere charm, but she wondered that she could ever have mistaken him for a girl. Neither his physique nor his behaviour struck her, now, as anything other than self-evidently Alpha-male. Arlo, on the other hand, had the unhappy aura of the whelp about him. Slight of build and weak of chin, he had his mother’s rabbity eyes, without her intelligence, his father’s thin-lipped mouth, without his redeeming humour. He was the kind of kid, who, even as you intervened to stop sand being kicked in his face, somehow inspired the unworthy impulse to kick a little more. She was touched therefore, and not a little humbled that, long after the older boys had left the room, Patrick sat loyally beside this “friend”, whose friendship he had not particularly sought, prattling cheerfully, while Arlo chased the last elusive baked bean around his plate.

“So that’ll be quite nice, don’t you think?” Sara said to Neil when they were alone again and she was stacking the dirty plates in the dishwasher, “dinner tonight. Just the four of us?”

“We were only round there last night,” said Neil.

“Yeah, us and fifty other people.”

“I just don’t get what the hurry is.”

“There isn’t any hurry, but nor is there any reason to say no. Unless we want to say no.”

“And in fact you’ve already said yes.”

“Well, not yes as such. I said I’d ask you.”

“Thanks very much. So now if we don’t go, they’ll think I’m a miserable bastard.”

Sara raised a meaningful eyebrow.

With a sigh, Neil returned to his task of scraping the leathery remnants of fried egg from the base of the pan.

“Neil, they’re nice, interesting people and they want to be our friends. I’m trying, I really am, but I’m struggling to see anything negative in that.”

Neil shrugged resignedly. He was a simple soul really – affable, straightforward, curious. He had constructed a credible carapace of manliness, which, on the whole, he wore pretty lightly. When he picked up a work call at home (which he seldom did), it was impossible to tell whether he was talking to his PA or to the Chairman. This, really, rather than the recent improvement in tenant satisfaction ratings, or the number of newbuilds completed under his jurisdiction, was the reason he was a shoo-in for the big job. The downside of his instinctive and wholly laudable egalitarianism, however, was, in Sara’s view, his reluctance to recognise that some people just were exceptional.

“Eleven o’clock, absolute latest, okay?” he muttered to Sara, as they stood on Lou and Gavin’s doorstep for the second time in twenty-four hours.

“Hell-o-o-o!” Neil said, as Lou opened the door and you would have thought there was nowhere he would rather be. He handed his hostess a bottle of wine and kissed her on both cheeks – a little camply, Sara thought.

“I brought dessert,” Sara told Lou, when it was her turn, “I thought, you know, with all the clearing up you’d had to do… it’s nothing fancy, just some baked figs and mascarpone.”

“Oh thanks.” Her hostess looked surprised and faintly amused. In truth, she didn’t appear to have done much clearing up. The house looked only marginally less derelict than it had when Sara had delivered Zuley back that morning. Empty bottles were stacked in crates beside the front door and a row of black bin-bags bulged beside them. A wet towel and a jumble of Lego lay at the foot of the stairs. The kitchen was chilly and smelled of stale cigarette smoke. No cooking smells, no piles of herbs or open recipe book hinted at treats to come. If it weren’t for the fact that Lou had obviously taken a certain amount of care with her appearance, Sara might almost have thought they had come on the wrong night, but Lou looked gorgeous – like a sexy sea lion, hair slicked back with product, eyes kohl-rimmed, in a tie-necked chiffon blouse and jeans, which could not have contrasted more sharply with the eye-popping maxi dress she had worn the night before. She had the enviable knack, Sara had noticed, of making every outfit she wore utterly her own.

Lou ushered them in and Sara and Neil sat down a little gingerly, on grubby chairs at a kitchen table still littered with half-eaten pizza crusts and spattered with juice.

“Shall I open this?” Lou asked, waving their wine bottle at them. “Or are you in the mood for more fizz?”

She flung open the door of the fridge and pulled out a half-full bottle of Krug.

“A party with booze left over,” Neil said. “Must be getting old.”

“Or more catholic in our tastes,” said Lou with an enigmatic smile. She filled three glasses and handed them round.

Watching her hostess pad around the kitchen, to the strains of John Coltrane, the grimy lino sucking at her bare feet, Sara found herself at once repelled by the squalor and intrigued by Lou’s indifference to it. She wondered what it might be like to live like this – to dress how you pleased and eat when you felt like it, and invite people round on a whim. There was, after all, a certain charm in the larky informality of it all, in stark contrast to Carol’s well-choreographed “pot luck” suppers. Lou cheerfully admitted to being “rubbish” at entertaining. She had once, she said over her shoulder, arms elbow-deep in washing-up water, served undercooked pork to Javier Bardem and given him worms. Once again, Sara found herself at a loss for words.

By the time Gavin bounded into the room, at 8.05, wearing jeans and a creased linen shirt the colour of bluebells, dusk had darkened the windows and Lou had brought about a transformation. She had cleared the table and put a jug of anemones and a squat amber candle on it. Around this centrepiece, she had placed terracotta dishes of olives, anchovies and artichokes, as well as a breadboard with a crusty loaf. All it took was for Gavin to draw the blinds and pour more wine and suddenly the atmosphere was one of gaiety and promise – the room felt like a barge or a gypsy caravan – some ad hoc combination, at any rate, of home and vehicle, in which the four of them were setting out on a journey. Now the informality of their reception felt less like negligence and more like a huge compliment. Gavin caught his wife around the waist and kissed her neck, glugged back most of a glass of wine, changed the music on the stereo and began to cook.

As the candles burned down and the alcohol undid the kinks in the conversation, Sara stopped worrying about her choice of outfit and Neil’s unappealing habit of sucking the olive juice off his fingers, and started to enjoy herself. The tone of the evening became relaxed and confessional. She heard herself admit, with a careless giggle that she’d been intimidated when Gav and Lou had first moved in.

“By us?” Lou looked askance. “Why on earth…?”

“Oh, you know – the car you drive, the way you dress…” Sara said, “… the stag’s head above your fireplace!”

“That’s Beryl,” replied Lou, dismissively, “no one could be intimidated by Beryl. She’s cross-eyed and she’s got mange on one antler. As for the Humber, I can’t even remember how we ended up with that…”

“Damien was getting rid of it,” Gav reminded her, “and we were feeling flush...”

“That’s right!” said Lou, “because you’d just won the Tennent’s Sculpture Prize. So you see, pretty random really. Anyway, Madam,” she said, leaning forward in her seat and fixed Sara with a gimlet eye, “it cuts both ways, let me tell you. That day you first spoke to me, remember?” Sara did. “I was a nervous wreck!” Lou glanced at Neil and Gavin, as if for affirmation. “There she was, all colour-co-ordinated and spiffy from the school run, and me looking like shit in my filthy work clothes and, what’s her name? Carol, watching me like a hawk from across the road. I felt like I was auditioning for something. And then you invited me round for a drink and I was, like, yesss!”

Sara didn’t know what to do with this information. She blushed with pleasure and pushed a crumb around the table with her forefinger.

“Well,” said Gav huffily, “if no one’s going to tell me how fucking marvellous I am, I suppose I’d better serve the dinner.”

They laughed. He had a knack for putting people at their ease, Sara had noticed. She’d imagined an artist to be the tortured, introverted type but Gav was neither. You couldn’t call him charming, quite, because there was no magic about it, no artifice. He was just easy in his skin and made you easier in yours. He pottered about the kitchen, humming under his breath, pausing occasionally to toss some remark over his shoulder, and then served up a fragrant lamb tagine as casually as if it were beans on toast. When at last he sat down, he didn’t hold forth about himself or his opinions, but quizzed Neil about his work, with every appearance of genuine curiosity.

“I just think it’s great how you guys give back,” Gav said, shaking his head with admiration.

“Oh, I’m no Mother Teresa…” Neil protested, through a mouthful of food. “It’s important work, don’t get me wrong, and I believe in it one hundred per cent, but they pay me pretty well. And if you heard the grief I get from some of the anarchists on the tenants’ associations, you’d think I was bloody Rachman…”

“Rachman?” Lou skewered a piece of lamb on her fork and looked up, inquiringly.

“He was a notorious private landlord in the fifties,” Neil explained, “became a byword for slum housing and corruption. I did my PhD on how he influenced the law on multiple occupancy. It was fascinating actually.”

“Neil, you can’t say your own PhD was fascinating,” Sara murmured.

“I meant doing it was fascinating.”

“So you’re Doctor Neil,” Gav said. “Very impressive. I can’t imagine having the staying power for something like that.”

“It was a bit of a slog,” Neil conceded. “Then again, I don’t suppose you leaped fully-formed from your mother’s womb wielding a paintbrush…?”

“Too true mate, and if my mother had had anything to do with it, I’d have leapt out with a brickie’s hod instead.”

He put on a broad Lancashire accent, “‘Learn a trade, our Gavin, if you want to put food on’t table.’”

“But you do put food on the table, as an artist,” said Sara. “Surely your parents must be proud of that?”

“What do you reckon, Lou?” He turned to his wife with a rueful smile. “Are they proud?”

“We wouldn’t know, would we?” said Lou coldly.

“Lou gets very indignant on my behalf. The truth is they don’t really get it. If I was a doctor or a lawyer, I’m sure they’d be pleased, but my mum’s idea of art’s a herd of horses galloping through surf, so…”

“She knows you’ve done well,” Lou muttered, “wouldn’t kill her to say so.”

“Doesn’t bother me,” Gav said, shrugging. “I always played second fiddle to our Paula, anyway.”

“Is that your sister?” asked Sara. “What does she do?”

“She’s just a primary-school teacher,” Lou interjected, “but to hear Gav’s mum, you’d think she walked on water.” She mimicked her mother-in-law with unsparing sarcasm: “‘Our Paula’s doing an assembly on multiculturalism, Gavin. Our Paula’s taking the kids to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.’ No mention of the fact that Gav’s got a piece in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Never occurs to her that she might actually stop playing online bingo for two minutes and go and have a look herself.”

“Lulu,” Gavin put a hand on her arm, “it’s no big deal.”

Lou’s eyes were glittering.

“That does seem a bit unfair,” said Sara, doubtfully.

“Not really.” Gavin shrugged. “I mean, artists aren’t very useful, are we? People don’t actually need art.”

“God Gavin,” Lou fumed, “I hate it when you put yourself down. You’re an important contemporary artist, represented by a top gallery.”

“I know,” Gavin laughed, “and I never stop wondering when they’re going to rumble me.”

“What do you mean?” Neil asked.

“Well honestly, what is it I do? Just muck about really, like those kids our Paula teaches. I just haul my guts up in three dimensions; I play around with bits of old rubbish until they start to look like the things I fear or loathe or love and then I put them out there and amazingly, people seem to get it.”

“Some people,” said Lou.

“Well,” said Neil, draining his wineglass and placing it decisively back down on the table. “Sara’s too shy to ask, so I will. When are we going to get a look at your studio?”

“Neil!” Sara turned to him indignantly.

“Haven’t you seen it yet?” Gavin seemed surprised. “Oh no, you haven’t, have you? That was Stephan and Yuki. Come on then!”

He slapped his thighs and stood up. So much for their banter last evening, Sara thought – the Chelsea oligarchs long forgotten. Nevertheless, she couldn’t quell a fluttering in her stomach as she rose, unsteadily, to follow him. She only wished she were feeling her bright, articulate best, instead of fuzzy with drink. As she wove her way towards the spiral staircase which led to the studio, she tried to recall some of the aperçus she had read when she’d googled his latest show, but the only phrase that sprang to mind was “spastic formalism”, and she couldn’t see that tripping off her tongue. Lou dried her hands on a tea towel and moved to join them, but Gav turned to her with a look of pained regret.

“Do you think maybe one of us should stay up here in case Zuley wakes up?”

“Oh…okay,” Lou gave him a tight little smile and turned away. Sara struggled to shake off the feeling that she had somehow usurped her friend, but that was silly – Lou must be up and down these stairs all the time, she would hardly wait on an invitation from her own husband.

Her qualms were quickly overtaken by astonishment and fascination when they emerged, not into the picturesque, messy studio of her imagination but into a stark, brightly lit space more reminiscent of a morgue. She could see at a glance that a lot of money had been spent here. There were the specialist tungsten light fittings, the open drains running down each side of the concrete floor, the coiled, wall-mounted hose and gleaming stainless-steel sinks. There were rolls of mesh, and rows of white-stained buckets, and in the centre of the room a large zinc workbench, on which lay the only evidence of what you might call, if you were feeling generous, creative endeavour. Sara edged forward to get a closer look. She could see what appeared to be a rudimentary human form made out of wire mesh, which protruded here and there through a slapdash layer of fibrous plaster. It reminded her, both in its diminutive size – about two-thirds that of an actual human, and its tortured attitude – of the writhing, petrified bodies she had seen in the ruins of Pompeii.

“Gosh!” she said.

“I suppose this is a work in progress?” said Neil hopefully.

Gavin smirked.

“And if I told you it’s the finished article?”

“I’d say I don’t know much about art, but I know when someone’s taking the piss,” said Neil affably. Sara darted him an anxious glance, but Gavin was laughing.

“You’d be right,” he said. “Come and have a look at this.”

He led them through a swing door, into a space three times the size of the first room. Neil emitted a low whistle.

“What I can’t get over,” he said afterwards, as they sat up in bed, discussing their new friends with the enthusiasm of two anthropologists who have stumbled on a lost tribe, “is the scale of it. I mean, I knew it had to be big – all the earthworks; the noise – but I didn’t realise it would be that big. The plumbing alone must have cost…” He closed one eye, but bricks and mortar was his specialist subject and it didn’t take him long, “… four or five K and they must need a mother of a transformer for those lights. I’m glad I’m not paying the bills.”

“I know,” said Sara, “but what gets me is the contrast. That really practical work-space and then you see the end-product and it’s so moving, so human.”

“Right,” said Neil doubtfully.

“Didn’t you like it?”

“No, I did. It’s just… I didn’t get why… he’s obviously a consummate craftsman … and yet on some of them the finishing looked quite rough and ready.”

“Oh I think that’s deliberate,” said Sara, “because others were really meticulous, really anal. And I think the ones covered with the mirror mosaic-y things were meant to be sort of fractured and damaged in a way. Don’t you think?”

Neil shrugged.

“Beats me,” he said, “but you’ve got to take your hat off to him. The nerve. The confidence. To take on a mortgage like they must have, knowing you’ve got four dependants…”

“Lou works,” Sara objected.

“Yeah, in film,” he said. “And then to blow a ton of money kitting out the studio like it’s a private hospital, and all for…” he shrugged “… something so particular, so rarefied. I mean, how does he know people are going to get it?”

“Oh people get it,” said Sara, “I’ve looked him up online. He’s in the top fifty most collectable living artists.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Neil said, “I admired it. I’m just not sure I understood it.”

“Oh I did…” Sara said. She took a deep breath “… I definitely think he’s obsessed with mortality. And then I think there’s quite a lot about the sacred and the profane. I mean the writhing, emaciated ones – I think must be referencing Auschwitz or something, and then you’ve got the ones with the wings – they’re angels, obviously – but maybe fallen angels because there’s a sordidness about them, a sense of shame. My favourite – the one that really spoke to me – was that one with all the tiny toys stuck to it and whitewashed over, did you see that? It looked kind of diseased until you got up close and saw what they really were. That, to me, was about childhood, about how we’re all formed and scarred by our early experiences. I think he’s actually very courageous.”

“Ok-a-ay,” said Neil.

5

It was the start of the autumn term and Sara had promised to show Gavin the ropes. The school run was his thing, apparently. Over the course of the summer, they had forged a firm rapport, yet finding him on her doorstep bright and early this crisp September morning, she found herself unaccountably tongue-tied.

“Hi,” she said. “It’s not raining, is it?” Gavin frowned, held out his hand and scanned the cloudless sky.

“I think we’re okay.”

Sara ushered Patrick and Caleb out of the door, fussing unnecessarily over their lunchboxes and book bags to cover her awkwardness, then fell into step with Zuley’s buggy.

The day might have been warm, but the street was done with summer. The privet hedges were laced with dust and the trees held onto their leaves with an air of reluctance. The long grass in front of the council flats had snagged various items of litter. Here and there a car roof box, as yet un-dismantled, recalled the heady days of August in Carcassonne or Cornwall, but for the commuters hurrying by, earphones in, heads down, the holidays were ancient history.

Only Gavin, in his canvas shorts and flip-flops still seemed to inhabit the earlier season. Sara stole occasional glances at him as he strode along. She liked the way he gave the buggy an extra hard shove every few steps to make Zuley laugh, the way he gave his sons the latitude to surge fearlessly ahead, but pulled them up short with a word when they got out of hand. He might not spend that much time around his children, she thought, but he was a good parent when he did; a better one, probably, than Lou. To the casual observer he could be any old self-employed Dad – a web designer or a journalist. She hugged to herself the knowledge of his exceptionalness.

“So you didn’t get away in the end?” he said. “That’s a pity.”

“No,” Sara sighed, “Neil wanted me and the kids to go without him, but I wasn’t up for a busman’s holiday. We just stayed here and I took them swimming and did the museums and stuff. Lost our deposit on the cottage, but…” she said, shrugging, “... not the end of the world.”

She had been less phlegmatic when Neil had told her, with days to go, that he couldn’t make it to Dorset after all. A mix-up over the holiday rota at work – not his fault, but if he wanted to send the right message, improve his chances of getting the big job, he’d have to lead from the front.

“Sounds like you had a lovely time,” she said, wistfully.

“Yeah. Great to catch up with old mates,” Gav agreed.

They turned the corner, passing the bus shelter where shiny Year Sevens waited for the 108 in over-sized uniforms, like lambs to the slaughter.

“Where was it you went again?”

She knew perfectly well. Tom and Rhiannon’s place in the Lake District. She’d had the full account – the walk up Helvellyn, the skinny-dipping, the toasted marshmallows. She had managed to disguise her envy; had smiled, nodded, agreed with Lou that they should definitely all get up there some time, the six of them and that Tom and Rhiannon sounded lovely.

“The Lakes,” Gav said with a shrug. “Weather was terrible.”

She could have kissed him.

“Neil still odds-on for promotion?” he asked, as they waited at the pedestrian crossing for the man to turn green.

“Looks like it,” she admitted, embarrassed. What, after all, could promotion mean to a man like Gavin? A man for whom success was measured in the raising of hairs on the back of a neck, the falling of scales from the eyes?

They shepherded the children across the road and quickly past the newsagent’s, ignoring their clamour for sweets.

“Smart guy, your husband,” Gav said.

Sara gave him a curious sideways glance.

“No, really, I admire him,” Gavin insisted, “he’s got integrity. Doggedness. Do I mean dogged?”

Sara shrugged.

“He commits to things – his work, his family, the community. I admire that…”

“So, are you a quitter?” Sara blurted.

“Because we left Spain, you mean?” Gavin frowned, after a pause.

Sara looked away, her cheeks hot. She always did this; overstepped the mark, said the wrong thing. A harassed-looking woman came out of her thirties semi, still tucking her shirt into her smart skirt. She waited, with barely disguised irritation, for their procession to pass so that she could reach her car and Sara gave her a meek smile of thanks.

“I didn’t mean that,” Sara said now, turning back to Gav. “Of course you’re not a quitter. Your commitment’s obvious. To Lou; to your work – my God, nobody could doubt your commitment to your work.”

“So you think I’m obsessed?”

“No! Good grief, but even if you were, it goes with the territory, doesn’t it? Artists are supposed to be driven. I mean, can you imagine,” she added, with a manic little laugh, “Picasso getting up in the morning and going, ‘Right, Françoise, shall I reinvent modern art today, or do you need a hand with the kids?’”

“I suppose…” he said, doubtfully, swivelling the buggy up the ramp and through the school gate.

“No, you’re fine. It’s us mere mortals who have to worry about work-life balance.”

“But you’re a writer,” Gavin shouted, above the din of the playground, and Sara winced, hoping no one heard.

“A copy-writer,” she corrected him, “day job comes first. Don’t know when I last got to do any of my own stuff. For all you think Neil’s such a family man, with this promotion in the offing, he’s around less and less. And when he is around, his head’s not around, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh, I get accused of that a lot.”

“Do you?” said Sara curiously. “I’d have thought with you both being creatives—hey, boys, don’t forget your bookbags…” but it was too late, her sons had disappeared into the mêlée.

“Not by Lou,” Gavin replied. “She’s got a sixth sense about that stuff. She gives me plenty of headspace. And I do her. No, it’s other people.”

“Oh,” said Sara, a little deflated. She couldn’t imagine who else would have dibs on Gavin’s headspace. Then again, there was still a lot about Gavin that mystified her. She could have gone on talking to him all day, but this was where they parted, he to deliver Zuley to her childminder, she to catch the 9.47 to Cannon Street.

“Well,” she said, briskly, “for what it’s worth, Neil really likes you too.”

Gavin gave her a grateful glance, and she saw that for all his biennales and his groupies and his five-star reviews, he was just as needy of reassurance and friendship as anyone else. The temptation to put out a hand and touch his skin was almost overwhelming.

“I see you’ve got her kids again,” Carol said, one teatime. She’d come over to see if Neil and Sara were interested in tickets for the new play at the Royal Court.

“I have, yes,” said Sara tartly, and then, in response to Carol’s meaningfully arched eyebrow, “it works really well. I have hers when she’s working. She hangs on to mine if I’m late back.”

“Which you almost never are…”

“I’m actually under the cosh quite a bit since I upped my hours,” said Sara, irritated by Carol’s sly dig. “She’s saved my bacon a few times.”

Carol twisted her mouth into an approximation of a smile and for a second Sara felt like Judas. Hadn’t Carol also saved her bacon over the years? The time Caleb was rushed to A&E with suspected meningitis? The day the guinea pig disappeared?

“Anyway, if you do want to come,” her friend was saying now, as she handed the leaflet to Sara, “can you let me know ASAP?”

Sara took this as a veiled reference to the last time they had gone to the theatre, when Sara’s prevarication had meant the only available tickets had been for the surtitled performance for the hard of hearing. Sara smiled, closed the front door after Carol, and put the leaflet straight in the recycling.

She was sorry they were drifting apart, but sometimes you just outgrew people. Friends like Lou and Gavin didn’t come along every day, and she felt such warmth towards them, such gratitude that they had come into her life and made it three-dimensional and vivid. She felt she had been sleepwalking until now, lulled by the conformity, the complacency of everyone around her. How could she go to Carol’s book group and discuss the latest Costa prize fodder now that Lou had introduced her to the magic realists of Latin America whose profound ideas wrapped up in hilarious flights of fantasy were like fairy tales for grown-ups? There was no doubt about it, Sara was learning a lot. It wasn’t a one-way street, though. Sometimes she surprised herself with her own perceptiveness. She had recently aired her pet theory that Georgia O’Keefe’s famously Freudian flower paintings were perhaps just flowers and not, as the art fraternity would have it, symbolic vaginas, only for Lou to confirm that this was, in fact, what the artist herself had always claimed.

The most rewarding aspect of their friendship, though, wasn’t the head stuff, but the heart stuff. After a surprisingly short time, Sara had found herself confessing things to Lou that she had never said to anyone else, not even Neil. Lou had set the tone that first afternoon, when she had cried about the trout farm, but since then, whether surrounded by childish clamour at teatime or listening to Dory Previn beside the dying embers of a late-night fire, they had shared some of the most intimate aspects of their lives. Sara didn’t even mean to say half of it – it just came tumbling out, her unhappy teenage promiscuity; her botched episiotomy and its impact on her and Neil’s sex life; her disappointing career and suspicion that Neil was secretly happy about it because he wanted a traditional wife. Lou was such a good listener. She had a way of asking just the right question, or upping the ante with a heartfelt confession of her own. She managed to make Sara feel both entirely normal in her anxieties and utterly exceptional in her talents. “But you’re so gorgeous, I can’t believe you had to shag a bunch of spotty oiks to prove it,” she would say, or “Creativity just oozes from you, Sara; the way you live, the way you raise your kids – I don’t think you realise how inspiring that is to someone like me.”

It was true that Lou had her shortcomings, but this only made her more interesting. Sara had heard her lose it with the children on a number of occasions. She blatantly favoured Dash over Arlo in a way that made Sara wince for the younger boy. Then there was the rather complex matter of Lou’s relationship with Gavin. There was a neediness in the way Lou related to her husband that didn’t seem quite healthy to Sara. Surely one shouldn’t be competing with one’s own children for the attention of their father? Yet Sara saw this happen often. Once, she had been in the kitchen chatting amiably with Gavin while she waited for Lou to get ready. The two women were going to see a film together, though if Lou didn’t get a move on they’d miss the beginning. Gav had been dandling little Zuley on his lap and marching toy farm animals across the table, interspersing adult conversation with a variety of silly moos and grunts that were making the three of them giggle. They were so absorbed that it was a moment or two before they noticed Lou had joined them. Wreathed in perfume and got up like an art-school vamp, she began clattering cupboard doors noisily in what looked, to Sara, like a flagrant bid for attention. And did Zuley, at nearly three years old, really need a bottle of milk thrust into her mouth, mid ‘‘Baaaa,” just so that Lou could pirouette girlishly in front of Gavin and solicit his opinion on her outfit?

Yet Sara wasn’t quite sure she was being objective. The air around Gav and Lou fairly crackled with sexual static and it made Sara envious. If the roles were reversed, would she care what Neil thought of the way she looked? If he were absorbed in a game with the boys – well, first of all she’d pinch herself to make sure she wasn’t seeing things, and then she’d leave while the going was good. No pirouetting, no eyelid-batting. All that was in the past. They’d been married fifteen years, for goodness’ sake. Surely, a certain amount of complacency was natural, desirable even?

Then again… ever since she’d witnessed it, she’d been unable to get that tango out of her mind. It had made her wonder whether all her life she had been doing sex wrong or, worse, with the wrong person. She watched, now, as Lou leaned in to kiss Gavin languidly on the lips. Zuley, eyes rolling with pleasure as she slugged back the milk, reached up a plump fist to grasp her mother’s forearm, but Lou prised the child’s fingers away and gave them a cheerful shake of admonishment.

“Mummy’s got to run,” she said, glancing at the sunburst clock on the kitchen wall. “You’re making Mummy late.”

They arrived five minutes into the film, just as the opening credits were starting. It was a gritty, low-budget number, which had got four stars in the Guardian. Sara took a little while to acclimatise, but half an hour in, she was starting to enjoy it; Lou, on the other hand, seemed to be growing restless. She kept shaking her head and laughing under her breath at things Sara didn’t think were meant to be funny. Finally, after what seemed to Sara a rather moving scene, Lou groaned loudly and rested her head on Sara’s shoulder.

“Do you want to leave?” Sara whispered anxiously. She couldn’t have been more mortified by Lou’s reaction if she had made the film herself. Lou nodded and, muttering apologies, they climbed over the laps of their fellow audience members before escaping to the bar.

“I had a feeling it’d be like that,” said Lou (Like what? wondered Sara). “I nearly said something when you suggested it, but I thought, give the guy a break.”

“Do you know the director?”

“He was in the year above me at St Martins. Very talented. Always wanted his name up in lights and now he’s got it. Just a shame he had to compromise the integrity of the film.”

“Compromise how?”

“Oh everything. The aesthetic, the soundtrack, the casting,” said Lou. “That grainy, cine-film thing? I mean, sorry, but yawn.”

“Mmmm,” said Sara.

“And the lead actor? Totally unbelievable in the role. Straight out of RADA, but, you know, he’s up and coming. Getting him’s a coup, so…”

“Right,” Sara nodded, thoughtfully. “Who would you have cast?”

“Oh an unknown,” said Lou. “I’d never compromise the integrity of the film for a ‘name’ actor. It’s just not worth it.”

Sara took a sip of her drink and tried to appear nonchalant. “So, I’ve been dying to ask: what’s your new thing about?”

“What’s it about?” Lou frowned humorously, and Sara blushed. “Well, it hasn’t got a plot as such. It’s not that kind of film. But I suppose, if I had to sum it up… it’s a sort of urban fairy tale.”

Sara nodded. “And it’s a short?”

“Yes. But a short film has to work that much harder to earn its keep. No indulgences. No flights of fancy. Every frame counts. And because shorts aren’t really made for a mainstream audience, there’s a… I won’t say higher... a different expectation on them to deliver.”

Sara nodded again.

“So, forgive my ignorance, but who actually watches them?”

“Well, there are all these amazing festivals now…”

“Sundance?”

“Sundance is a bit old hat, but there are lots of other really interesting ones all over the world: San Sebastian, Austin, Prague. You just hope to premiere your film at one of them and get good notices…”

“So that’s who they’re for, the critics?”

“Well, no,” Lou said, “they’re for everyone.”

“But they don’t go on general release?”

“Well, you’re not really looking for bums on seats…”

“What are you looking for?”

“Well an audience…”

“But not a big audience.”

“A discerning audience.”

“Ah…”

“And enough money to make your next film. Making the things is a doddle compared to financing them. I sometimes wish I’d studied accountancy…”

“Lou…”

“Yes?”

“I was wondering…”

“What?”

“Oh, no, you’re busy…”

“Come on, out with it. Gav said you’d got some writing on the go. You want me to have a look?”

Sara smiled hopefully. “I would love to know what you think.”

“It’d be an absolute privilege.”

“You might hate it. If you hate it, you’ve got to promise you’ll say so…”

“How could I hate it? I would tell you, though, of course I would. Not to would be a betrayal of our friendship, but I can’t imagine someone as clever and sensitive, and off-beat as you, could possibly write anything bad.”

Sara glowed with pleasure. Was she off-beat? She certainly hoped so.

***

It turned into another late night. They were pretty well-oiled when they tumbled out of the taxi and Lou eagerly accepted Sara’s invitation of a nightcap. Neil must have only just gone to bed, because the wood burner required only a little stoking to send flames licking up the chimney again. Sara put Nick Drake on the stereo, broke out the Calvados and the conversation turned, once again, to matters of the heart. Sara found herself reminiscing, dewy-eyed, about Philip Baines-Cass, the boy who’d played opposite her in a fourth form production of Hobson’s Choice.

“He wasn’t really good-looking,” she remembered fondly, “but he had this incredible charisma. He was the kind of person you couldn’t not look at. He was clever but cool and you didn’t really get that combination at my school. I’m kind of surprised he didn’t go into acting actually – he seemed like he was made for it.”

“Probably a computer programmer in Slough,” Lou chuckled. “Go on…”

“Well, so he was this… amazingly gifted actor and I was this stilted little am-dram wannabe, and there was this one scene where we had to kiss, and I would be literally shaking as it got nearer. On the one hand, I was dreading it, because every time we did it in rehearsal, everyone whistled and slow-handclapped and stuff; but on the other hand…”

“…You couldn’t wait.”

“Exactly. So, anyway, it comes to the big night and the play’s going really, really well. You can sense the audience is on our side. Even the rubbish people aren’t fluffing their lines and our big scene’s coming up and I’m just crapping myself. But then it’s like someone flicks a switch and I think, ‘Fuck it’. I just go for it. You could have heard a pin drop. It was amazing.”

Lou grinned. “How long did you go out with him for?”

“Oh, we didn’t go out,” Sara replied, “he had a girlfriend.”

“But you got a shag at least?”

Sara shook her head.

“He wanted to. At the after-show party, but I was a virgin.”

“I thought you said…”

“That was afterwards. I overcompensated,” Sara laughed, but she found herself welling up. “He was really mean. Called me a frigid little prick-tease and got off with Beverly Wearing right in front of me.”

“What a cock!”

“I know. But the funny thing is, even though he was a total cock, I’ve always wondered what it would have been like. It’s kind of haunted me, because I never really enjoyed it with any of the others. I think I was just trying to show him that I wasn’t… what he said.”

“Well, at least you did – show him, that is.”

“I don’t think he even noticed, to be honest. I was never girlfriend material for someone like him. I only came on his radar because of the play, and the one chance I had with him, I blew. I still think about that kiss…”

It was true, she did still think about it; more and more lately. The trouble was that the harder she tried to recall the facial features of Philip Baines-Cass, the more they tended to meld into Gavin’s.

There was a pause while Lou tipped herself out of the armchair, drained the last of the Calvados into their glasses, and shuffled backwards on the hearthrug until her back met the sofa.

“Funny, isn’t it?” she said, taking a thoughtful sip. “How different it all could have been, I mean same for me. God, I shudder to think of it! I was almost with that computer programmer from Slough.”

“You!”

“I know! Imagine. He wasn’t actually a computer programmer, obviously; nothing quite that bad.” They chuckled. “His name was Andy. He was a very sweet guy, and he’s loaded now. My Mum never misses a chance to slip that into the conversation: ‘I saw Andy Hiddleston at the weekend, Louise. Did I mention he’s a property developer?’” She rolled her eyes. “She’s never quite forgiven me for breaking off the engagement.”

“You got engaged?”

Lou nodded, delighted with the incongruity of it all.

“Until I went for my interview at St Martins and realised the world had other plans for me.”

“Poor Andy!” Sara sniggered.

“I know,” agreed Lou, “he didn’t take it very well,” she shook her head and grinned fondly, “then again; I’d only have made him miserable. Can you imagine? Me in a double-fronted, Bath-stone villa with a monkey-puzzle tree and a waxed jacket…”

“… Two-point-four children…”

“… A Range Rover…”

“… And a lobotomy!”

Sara started giggling and found she couldn’t stop. She forced the back of her hand to her mouth in an effort to control it.

“Come along, Camilla, we’ll be late for pony club!” said Lou in a plummy accent.

“Now then, Nicholas, don’t cry,” joined in Sara. “All big boys hef to go to boarding school.” Lou beat the hearthrug in merriment. Tears ran down Sara’s face.

“Introducing… the new… Chairwoman of the… Townswomen’s Guild,” Sara tried to say, but it came out as a series of gulps and squeaks.“Mrs Andy Hiddle…” she gasped, then keeled over on the rug, insensible with mirth.

6

It was hard to concentrate the next day, partly because of the hangover, but mainly because, somewhere along the line, Sara had lost even the small shred of enthusiasm she’d once had for her job. She found herself reading and re-reading the same phrase – “I don’t really have a preferred supermarket and tend to use whichever is most convenient” – until the words merged into one another and ceased to hold any objective meaning. For a stopgap job, NPR Marketing had taken up an awful lot of her time. Other creative types who had joined when she did had long since moved on. Anders the miserable Swede now wrote voice-overs for Masterchef; Tracy Jackson was a lobbyist for the Green Party. But NPR had granted Sara two generous periods of maternity leave and, although her game plan had been to return after Patrick’s birth for no longer than her contract dictated, five years had somehow elapsed and she was still sitting at the same desk, in what was essentially a cupboard, opposite the talented but cynical Adrian Sutcliffe.

A part of Sara had known for a long time that her and Adrian’s relationship was unhealthy. They were co-dependants, facilitating each other’s inertia through corrosive humour. As long as they channelled their creative energies into satirising the futile nature of their work, the slavish ambition of their less talented colleagues and the passive-aggressive behaviour of their workaholic boss, Fran Ryan, they could kid themselves that they were, respectively, a novelist and a journalist manqué.

“Eyes front,” said Adrian now, “Rosa Klebb at three o’clock.”

Sara snapped out of her reverie and battered her computer keyboard with a flurry of random keystrokes.

“On my way to Gino’s,” said Fran, “can I get you anything?”

“Ooh lovely,” said Sara, “tuna melt for me, hold the mayo.”

“Why do you let her do that?” said Adrian, after Fran had gone.

“Er… because it’s lunchtime and I need something to eat,” said Sara, with the interrogative upward lilt she had picked up from her children.

“You know what she’s up to, don’t you?”

“She’s getting my lunch?”

“Yeah, so you don’t leave the building.”

Before Sara could make a suitably acerbic retort, Fran had popped her head back into the office.

“By the way, can I tell Hardeep that you’ll ping the survey across by close of play today?”

“Yep. On it,” Sara said, picking up her biro as she spoke, ready to throw it at Adrian as soon as the door had closed.

Lately, Sara’s boredom was making her rebellious. Neil’s promotion was practically in the bag, and he had hinted on numerous occasions recently that she might at last like to “free herself up” from the rigours of work, which she took to mean free him up from the necessity to dash round Waitrose after a hard day at the office. She had resented the suggestion at first, but since Lou had been so encouraging of her writing, she was beginning to harbour serious ambitions in that direction. When Fran returned with her sandwich at one thirty, she didn’t bother to minimise her computer screen; instead, she doubled the font size.

As the front door banged shut behind Nora’s father, the draught wafted an empty plastic bag up in the air. Nora watched it as it rose and seemed to inflate itself with his very absence, before floating back down and lodging between the banister rails. She started to sing quietly,

“Bye baby bunting, daddy’s gone a-hunting, she sang, over and over, until the words became, not words, but sobs.

“One tuna melt,” said Fran, barely able to tear her eyes from the screen. Sara scrabbled in her purse and handed Fran a fiver, which she took, without shifting her gaze.

“It’s okay, I don’t need any change,” said Sara, pointedly.

“No, right,” said Fran, remembering herself. “Er… well, bon appétit,” she added, giving Sara a terse little smile before she left the room.

“The worm turns!” said Adrian, with grudging respect. Sara nodded in haughty acknowledgement and took a greedy bite of her sandwich. A large gobbet of mayonnaise dripped onto her jumper.

On the train home, she spotted Carol’s Simon getting on further down the carriage. Normally she’d have lowered her eyes to her Kindle, certain in the knowledge that everything they had to say to one another could be covered on the short walk between the station and their road, but she had hatched a plan and was bursting to tell someone, so she called out his name.

“Oh, hello, Sara.” He started to thread his way through the carriage towards her. She could tell from the look of portentousness on his face that he had some news of his own to impart. “I expect you’ve heard…” Sara prepared herself for the death of a pet, or a recurrence of Carol’s sister’s ME.

“What?”

“Cranmer Road got a stinking OFSTED report. One step away from special measures.”

“Shit!” Sara remembered her words to Gavin, as he’d urged a reluctant Arlo over the threshold on the first day of term: “Don’t worry, it’s a really lovely school. You won’t regret it.”

“Carol must be doing her nut.”

“Oh, I think she’s secretly quite pleased,” said Simon, “she’s been looking for an excuse to go private for ages.”

Sara stretched her lips into a smile.

“It was the numeracy that did it, apparently,” Simon added, “that and inadequate special needs provision.”

“Inadequate special needs? That’s a travesty,” spluttered Sara. “They bend over backwards at that school…”

Simon raised a didactic finger. “Ah but special needs includes GAT, you see.”

“GAT,” repeated Sara dumbly.

“Gifted and Talented,” said Simon, patiently.

Of course. The middle classes were in revolt because they thought the Head was squandering resources on the thickies instead of hot-housing their little geniuses.

“Ridiculous,” she said.

“Well, I’m not so sure…” Simon demurred. Then, sensing an ideological rift opening up, asked quickly, “How’s work?”

“Oh, you know, alright.”

Suddenly, Simon was the last person with whom she wanted to share her burgeoning literary ambitions. She could just imagine the smirk on his face as he relayed the news to Carol that she’d given up work to write a novel.

She expected better of Neil though.

“I’m not saying, don’t do it,” he said defensively over dinner, “I’m just querying the timing, is all.”

Sara tried not to wince at the Americanism. They seemed to be creeping into his vocabulary lately. She wasn’t sure if he had picked them up from watching back-to-back episodes of Breaking Bad, or from reading American business manuals, but, either way, they didn’t enhance his credibility as a literary adviser. He seemed to think she should do a course. As if creative writing was something that could be taught, like car maintenance or Spanish. And yet, the most irritating part of this suburban inclination of his to kowtow to “teachers”, was the fact that it piqued her own insecurity. She didn’t want some second-rate novelist picking over her work. She much preferred Lou’s bold exhortations to “just go with it”, to “trust the muse” and “tap into whatever’s down there.”

Now she found herself becoming tearful with frustration. She planted her fork in what remained of her quiche and tried not to let her voice quaver.

“I don’t think you realise what it’s like for me,” she said. “I’d like to see you spend eight hours a day writing consumer questionnaires.”

Neil looked up in dismay and Sara realised, with a mixture of satisfaction and shame, that the tears had clinched it for her, as they always did with Neil.

“No,” he said, apparently overcome with contrition, “you’re better than that. I totally agree. Go for it then. You’ll have six whole hours a day while they’re at school.”

Sara was about to point out that creativity wasn’t necessarily something you could turn on and off like a tap, but thought better of it.

“It certainly won’t hurt to be around more,” she said, “especially with the school on the slide.”

“What do you mean?” said Neil.

“They’ve had the thumbs-down from the inspectors,” said Sara, rolling her eyes, “so expect a mass exodus. Carol’s already looked at St Aidan’s, apparently.”

“We don’t have to copy Carol.”

“It’s not Carol I’m worried about,” said Sara, “it’s her influence on the others.”

“Carol is a bad influence on the other parents,” Neil affected a pedagogic tone.

“I wish you’d take this seriously. Carol wraps Celia round her little finger.”

“And I should care because…?”

“Celia’s Rhys’s mum, and Rhys is Caleb’s best friend.”

“I think you’re making a meal of it. Boys aren’t like girls. It’s easy come, easy go.”

But the damage was done. Sara could only look at Cranmer Road with a jaundiced eye now. As she and Lou sat in the school hall, the following week, waiting for the Harvest Festival to begin, her eyes roved critically around the display boards. BE KIND TO OTHER’S read one poster, its misplaced apostrophe less worrying than the conspicuous indifference of the Year Ones to its message. When the piano struck up the opening song, and the children joined in with their warbling falsettos, Lou dabbed a sentimental tear from her eye, but Sara felt like crying for a different reason. The “orchestra” consisted of three recorders and a tambourine; the harvest gifts, displayed on a tatty piece of blue sugar paper, were mostly dented cans of Heinz soups and dubious-looking biscuits from Lidl. This spoke eloquently to Sara of the disengagement of the middle-class parents. The only item of fresh produce was the pineapple she had donated herself. Most distressing of all was the palpable unease among the staff. Gone, were the wide smiles and big encouraging eyes. Gone was the sense of camaraderie and fun. To a man and woman, they wore the weary, defeated expressions of an army in retreat.

As they stood together afterwards, drinking instant coffee from polystyrene cups, Sara was astonished by Lou’s effusiveness.

“I can’t tell you how relieved I am,” she said.

“Oh?” Sara dragged her gaze from the clusters of muttering, Boden-clad parents dotted around the room and forced herself to focus on Lou’s beaming face.

“I can see the kids just blossoming here,” she said, “there’s such a buzz. It makes me absolutely certain we’ve done the right thing moving back.”

“I’m glad,” said Sara. She felt vindicated, now, in her decision not to worry Lou and Gavin with the news of the bad OFSTED. She couldn’t imagine what kind of regime the kids had been subjected to in Spain – some draconian hangover from Franco’s time, perhaps – but if they thought Cranmer Road was a happy seedbed for their young, then who was Sara to disagree? Unfortunately, a dissenter was already heaving into view.

Celia Harris was a sweet woman without political nous or cynicism. She and Sara had bonded at the nursery gate and Caleb and Rhys had been close friends ever since. Celia was a Cranmer Road stalwart. She had overseen fundraisers and socials and accompanied every school trip that either of her bright, speccy children had ever been on. The news of the OFSTED report would, Sara knew, have hit Celia like a hammer blow. She loved the school, but she loved her children more. Like a football player who would lay down his life for his club until moved to a rival team, Celia’s allegiance, though fierce, was also fickle. And seeing her now, brow knitted, flat, conker-coloured boots squeaking over the parquet, Sara could tell that she was already on the transfer list.

“Sara, hi,” she said, grasping Sara by the elbow and leading her out of Lou’s earshot. All the time they were talking, Sara could see Lou over Celia’s shoulder, sipping her coffee and trying to conceal her curiosity.

“I was thinking,” Lou said, later, her hands at ten and two on the vast steering wheel of the Humber as she drove them all home, “Gavin should go in and do some art with the kids sometime. He’d get a real kick out of it.”

“Yeah,” said Sara, “definitely.”

It had been three weeks since Sara left work and four since she had entrusted her novella to Lou for some critical feedback. Her first day of freedom was spent billowing duvets and scouring mildew off the shower curtain. When Neil had asked her, on his return from work, how the book was going, she reminded him sharply that she was writing a novel, not a board paper. The next day, after rearranging her desk a number of times, experimenting with the height of her chair and opening and closing the window, she sat down purposefully in front of the computer to re-read Safekeeping.

She had finished the closing paragraph with a sigh of satisfaction. It wasn’t half bad, for a first draft. In fact, its competence was, in a way, its main problem. She knew that what she had written was only the skeleton of a larger, more ambitious work that she must flesh out and bring to life, but it was hard to see, from her very partial standpoint, where she should insert new material, and what, if anything, could go. She had heard the phrase “kill your darlings”, but there was barely a line in it that she wasn’t a little in love with, so that would mean dumping the lot. She really did need Lou’s feedback now, and, despite her reluctance to hassle her friend, whom she knew to be struggling with creative decisions of her own, she decided to take the bull by the horns.

She knocked and rang next door to no avail. However, the Humber was parked outside, and when she peered through the letterbox, she caught a distinct whiff of toast, so, finding the door unlocked, she decided to take her chance.

“Hi? Only me…” She pushed open the kitchen door. The room was empty. Four crumby plates stood on the table, one of which had a mashed cigarette stub on its rim. There was a heady perfume hanging in the air and an unfamiliar suede jacket slung over the back of one of the chairs. They had company. She was about to leave with even greater stealth than she had come, when she heard footsteps tripping lightly up the basement stairs.

“White, one sugar; black without…” Lou was muttering, like a mantra, under her breath. “Oh my God, Sara! You frightened the life out of me.”

“Sorry, you did say if there was no answer I should... Listen, you’re busy. I’ll leave you to it.”

“That’s okay, we were just having a coffee break. Why don’t you join us?”

There was a difference in Lou that Sara couldn’t put her finger on. Her appearance was as carelessly stylish as ever – hi-tops, threadbare jeans, a hip-length kimono over a skimpy vest – but it was less her appearance than her demeanour that had changed. She had a slightly self-conscious air, as though acting a part in one of her own films. Watching her, Sara could almost read the stage directions: Lou loads the coffee percolator and stands on tiptoe to reach the cups from the shelf. She is a sexy young woman in the prime of life.

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