Acclaim for Margaret Leroy’s The River House

“In some ways The River House reads like a suspense novel written by Richard Yates. Leroy handles marriage and domestic life with the same graceful, precise, rueful style as the late novelist did, though with a warmer, more hopeful intelligence… Leroy elucidates Ginnie’s moral conundrum beautifully. Although there is never much doubt as to what Ginnie will do, it’s how she does it that provides considerable suspense.” — Washington Post

“Leroy delineates Ginnie’s diffidence in a deliberately hypnotic, masterly fashion. Her quiet, self-assured narrative voice delivers tremendous psychological depth and emotional resonance.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Leroy’s sensuously ethereal, subtly electric drama discerningly probes the affective fragility of a woman struggling to preserve all she holds dear, without losing herself in the process.”

—Booklist

“Margaret Leroy, who also wrote the excellent Postcards from Berlin, makes you care about her characters, who feel so real that you know they must be out there leading the lives she talks about… Settle down in a deep armchair or hammock with The River House, and make sure you’re comfortable—you won’t want to get up for a while.” —BookLoons

“This gripping suspense novel by British author Margaret Leroy is more about the complex relationships between people than it is about crime. Leroy expertly draws a picture of a woman and a family in crisis and the moral questions one sometimes has to face.”

— Toronto Sun

Acclaim for Margaret Leroy’s The Perfect Mother A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

“It’s a premise familiar from some of Hitchcock’s best movies: seemingly upright people, through no fault of their own, see their lives unravel before their eyes. Margaret Leroy’s [The Perfect Mother] taps the compelling emotions inherent in that storyline.” —Seattle Times

“Written with a wonderfully convincing authority… I was eager to find out what happened next. I dreaded the worst and I hoped for the best—and I won’t tell you which happens.”

—New York Times

“The novel reads like a thriller and is brilliant at portraying the slow, steady disintegration of a seemingly ordinary life when secrets are unearthed and dark suspicions spread.”

—Baltimore Sun

Acclaim for Margaret Leroy’s The Drowning Girl

“Margaret Leroy’s eerily lovely novel [The Drowning Girl] is one of those rare books you’ll sit with till your bones ache.” —Oprah Magazine

“This is a really special book. Sylvie’s vulnerability is so powerfully drawn, so flesh-and-blood real, that you want to reach into the pages and protect her yourself.”

—Louise Candlish

“Every once in a blue moon, a masterful writer dives into Gothic waters and emerges with a novel that—like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, or, more recently, Patrick McGrath’s Asylum—simultaneously celebrates and transcends the genre. Welcome Margaret Leroy to the clan. Haunted and haunting, [The Drowning Girl] is a wonderfully original, deliciously suspenseful mystery.” —Publishers Weekly

“This book is perfect for anyone wanting an intriguing story which is also well-written and moving.”

—Adele Geras

“This book was compelling from the first chapter. Margaret Leroy’s twists are carefully orchestrated so Grace had my sympathy and understanding. It is a book I will never forget. Read it—it is such a refreshing change from the usual frothy stories.”

—Candis

The

River
House

MARGARET LEROY

www.mirabooks.co.uk

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply grateful to my wonderful editor, Maddie West, for her intelligence and empathy; to the brilliant team at MIRA, especially Catherine Burke and Oliver Rhodes; to Judy Clain, my editor at Little, Brown and Company, New York; and to my marvellous agents, Kathleen Anderson and Laura Longrigg. Brian Hook very generously enlightened me about the workings of the Metropolitan Police—any errors are, of course, mine alone. My thanks also to Lucy Floyd and Vicki Tippet for contributing contacts and insights; and as always to Mick, Becky and Izzie for their love and understanding.

In researching this story, I found these books especially valuable: “Men Who Batter Women”, by Adam Edward Jukes; “A Celtic Miscellany: Translations from the Celtic Literatures,” by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson; and Peter Ackroyd’s “London: A Biography”.

CHAPTER 1

He’s building a wall from Lego. There’s no sound but the click as he slots the bricks together, and his rapid, fluttery breathing. His face is white as wax. I know he’s very afraid.

‘You’re building something,’ I say.

He doesn’t respond.

He’s seven, small for his age, like a little pot-bound plant. Blond hair and skin so pale you’d think the sun could hurt him, and wrists as thin as twigs. A freckled nose that would wrinkle if he smiled: but I’ve yet to see a smile.

I kneel on the floor, to one side of him, so as not to be intrusive. His fear infects me: the palms of my hands are clammy.

‘Kyle, I’m wondering what kind of room you’re building. I don’t think it’s a playroom, like this one.’

‘It’s the bedroom,’ he says. Impatient, as though this should be obvious.

‘Yes. You’re building the bedroom.’

His building is complete now—four walls, no door.

It’s a warm September afternoon, syrupy sunlight falling over everything. My consulting room seems welcoming in the lavish light, vivid with the primary colours of toys and paints and Play-Doh, and the animal puppets that children will use to speak for them, that will sometimes free them to say astonishing things. The walls are covered with drawings that children have given me, though there’s nothing of my own life here—no traces of my family, of Greg or my daughters, no Christmas or holiday photos: for the children who come here, I want to be theirs alone for the time that they’re with me. The mellow light falls across Kyle’s face, but it doesn’t brighten his pallor.

He digs around in the Lego box, looking for something. I don’t reach out to help him: I don’t want to distract him from his inner world. His movements are narrow, restricted; he will never reach out or make an expansive gesture. Even when he’s drawing he confines himself to a corner of the page. Once I said, Could you do me a picture to fill up all this space? He drew the tiniest figures in the margin, his fingers scarcely moving.

He finds the people in the box. A boy, and an adult that could be a man or a woman: just the same as last time.

‘The people are going into your building. I’m wondering what they’re doing there.’

He’s grasping the figures so tightly you can see his bones white through his skin.

I feel a slight chill as a shadow passes across us. Instinctively, I turn—thinking I might see someone behind me, peering in at the window. But of course there’s nothing there—just a wind that stirs the leaves of the elms that grow at the edge of the car park.

There’s a checklist in my mind. Violence, or sex abuse, or something he has seen—because I have learnt from years of working with these troubled children that it’s not just about what is done to you, that what is seen also hurts you. I know so little. His foster parents say he’s very withdrawn. His mother could have helped me—but she’s on a psychiatric ward, profoundly depressed, not well enough to be talked to. The school were certainly worried. ‘He seems so scared,’ said the teacher who referred him to the clinic.

‘Of anything in particular?’ I said. ‘Swimming lessons, storytime, male teachers?’

She had riotous, nut-brown hair and her eyes were puzzled. I liked her. She frowned and fiddled with her hair. ‘Not really. Just afraid.’

‘Perhaps a bad thing happened in the bedroom,’ I say now, very gently. ‘Perhaps the boy is unhappy because a bad thing happened.’

Noises from outside scratch at the stillness: the slam of a door in the car park, the harsh cries of rooks in the elms. He clicks the figures into place. The sounds are clear in the quiet, like the breaking of tiny bones.

‘You can talk about anything here,’ I tell him. ‘Even bad things, Kyle. No one will tell you off, whatever you say. Sometimes children think that what happened was their fault, but no one will think that here…’

He doesn’t respond. Nothing I say makes sense to him. Yet I know this must be significant, this room with the child and the adult, over and over. And no way out, no door.

Perhaps this is the detail that matters. I sit there, thinking of doors. Of going through into new, expectant spaces: of that image I love from Alice in Wonderland, the narrow door at the end of the hall that leads to the rose garden. Maybe he needs to experience here in the safety of my playroom the opening of that door. I feel a surge of hope. Briefly, I thrill to my imagery of liberation, of walking out of prison.

‘Perhaps the boy feels trapped.’ I keep my voice very casual. ‘Like there’s no way out for him. But there is a way. He doesn’t know it yet, but there is a way out of the room for him. He could build a door and open it. All that he has to do is to open the door.’

He turns so his back is towards me, just a slight movement, but definite. He rips a few bricks from his building and dumps them back in the box, like he’s throwing rubbish away. His face is blank. He stands by the sandpit and digs in the sand with his fingers and lets the grains fall through his hands. When I speak to him now, he doesn’t seem to hear.

After Kyle has gone, I stand there for a moment, looking into the empty space outside my window, needing a moment of quiet to try and make sense of the session. I watch as Peter, my boss, the consultant in charge of the clinic, struggles to back his substantial BMW into rather too small a space. The roots of the elms have pushed to the surface and spread across the car park: the tarmac is cracked and uneven.

The things that have to be done tonight pass briefly through my mind. Something for dinner. The graduates’ art exhibition at Molly’s old school. Soy milk for Greg, and buckwheat flour for his bread. Has Amber finished her Graphics coursework? Fix up a drink with Eva… A little wind shivers the tops of the elms: a single bright leaf falls. I can still feel Kyle’s fear: he’s left something of it behind him, as people may leave the smell of their cigarettes or scent.

I sit at my desk and flick through his file, looking for anything that might help, a way of understanding him. A sense of futility moves through me. I wonder when this happened—when my certainty that I could help these children started to seep away.

I have half an hour before my next appointment. I take the file from my desk and go out into the corridor.

CHAPTER 2

Light from the high windows slants across the floor, and I can hear Brigid typing energetically in the secretaries’ office. Clem’s door is open: she doesn’t have anyone with her. I go in, clutching the file.

‘Clem, d’you have a moment? I need some help,’ I tell her.

Her smile lights up her face.

Clem goes for a thrift-shop look. Today she looks delectable in a long russet skirt and a little leopardskin gilet. She has unruly, dirty-blonde hair: she pushes it out of her eyes. On her desk, there’s a litter of files and psychology journals and last week’s copy of Bliss, in which she gave some quotes for an article called My Best Friend Has Bulimia. We both get these calls from time to time, from journalists wanting a psychological opinion: we’re on some database somewhere. She gets the anorexia ones, and I get the ones about female sexuality, because of a study I once did with teenage girls, to the lasting chagrin of my daughters. In a welcoming little gesture, Clem sweeps it all aside.

‘It’s Kyle McConville,’ I tell her.

She nods. We’re always consulting one another. Last week she came to me about an anorexic girl she’s seeing, who has an obsession with purity and will only eat white food—cauliflower, egg white, an occasional piece of white fish.

‘We’ll have a coffee,’ she says. ‘I think you need a coffee.’

Clem refuses to drink the flavoured water that comes out of the drinks machine in the corridor: she has a percolator in her room. She gets up and hunts for a clean cup.

‘When does Molly go?’

‘On Sunday.’

‘It’s a big thing, Ginnie. It gets to people,’ she says. ‘When Brigid’s daughter went off to college, Brigid wept for hours. Will you?’

‘I don’t expect to.’

‘Neither did Brigid,’ she says. She pours me a coffee and rifles through some papers on a side table. ‘Bother,’ she said. ‘I thought I had some choc chip cookies left. I must have eaten them when I wasn’t concentrating.’

She gives me the coffee and, just for a moment, rests her light hands on my arms. It’s always so good to see her poised and happy. Her divorce last year was savage: there were weeks when she never smiled.Gordon, her husband, was very possessive and prone to jealous outbursts. She finally found the courage to leave, and was briefly involved with an osteopath who lived in Wesley Street. Gordon sent her photos of herself with the eyes cut out. About this time last year, on just such a mellow autumn day, I took her to pick up some furniture from the home they’d shared, an antique inlaid cabinet that had belonged to her mother. Gordon was there, tense, white-lipped.

She looked at the cabinet. She was shaking. Something was going on between them, something I couldn’t work out.

‘I don’t want it now,’ she said.

‘You asked for it, so you’ll damn well take it,’ he said.

As we loaded it into the back of my car I saw that he’d carved ‘Clem fucks in Wesley Street’ all down the side of the cabinet.

She sits behind her desk again, resting her chin on her hands. There are pigeons on her window sill, pressed against the glass: you can see their tiny pink eyes. The room is full of their throaty murmurings.

‘Are you OK, Ginnie? You look kind of shattered,’ she says.

‘It’s death by shopping. I’ve got this massive list of stuff that Molly seems to need.’

‘You need to treat yourself,’ says Clem. ‘A bit of self-indulgence.’

I sip my coffee. Clem likes to eat organic food,but the coffee she makes is satisfyingly toxic. I feel a surge of energy as it slides into my veins.

‘I did,’ I say. ‘I really tried.’

I tell her about the boots I bought, in a reckless moment out buying bedding with Molly. How they caught my eye in a shop window—ankle boots the colour of claret with spindly improbable heels. How Molly urged me on: Go for it, Mum. You look fab in them: and for a moment I believed her: I felt a shiver of possibility, a sense of something shifting. And then the moment of doubt when I handed over my credit card, wondering why I was doing this.

‘You haven’t worn them yet,’ says Clem sternly.

‘No. Well, I probably never will.’

She shakes her head at me.

‘Ginnie, you’re hopeless,’ she says, with affection. ‘So tell me. Kyle McConville.’

‘There’s something I’m missing,’ I tell her.

She waits, her fingers steepled in front of her face, like someone praying. She has bitten nails, and lots of silver rings engraved with runes, which she buys at Camden Market.

I take a breath.

‘He makes me feel afraid. Like there’s some threat there, something that’s happened or might happen. It sounds silly now, but I found myself kind of looking over my shoulder. I don’t know when I’ve had such a powerful feeling of dread—not even with kids we know have been abused. But there’s nothing in his case-notes.’

She nods. I know she’ll take my feeling seriously. We have a mantra, Clem and I: How someone makes you feel is information. We understand this differently. I’m more prosaic perhaps: I think we’re all more sensitive than we realise and respond unconsciously to one another’s signals; while Clem’s quite mystical about it, believing we’re all connected in ways we don’t understand.

‘He builds a bedroom from Lego,’ I tell her. ‘Over and over. I feel that he went through some trauma there. But maybe that’s too simplistic.’

‘So much is simple,’ she says.

‘I said that he wasn’t trapped, he could escape from the room. He just closed up completely when I said that. But it felt so right to me—you know, to walk out of your prison.’

Her eyes are on me. She has brown, full eyes, always a little dilated, that give her a childlike look. Now they widen a little.

‘Ginnie,’ she says tentatively. ‘Perhaps there was some other reason that it seemed to make so much sense.’ Her voice fades.

I sip my coffee.

‘I just can’t tell if it’s something to pursue. Given how he reacted.’

She leans towards me across the desk.

‘Ginnie, you need the story,’ she says. ‘You’re dancing in the dark here. You need a bit more background. Who else has been involved?’

‘There’s a note to say the police were called to the house.’

‘Well, there you are, then.’

‘But no one was charged. And no one told Social Services, so Kyle can’t have been thought to have been in any danger.’

‘So what?’ she says. ‘Maybe someone messed up. Go and talk to them, Ginnie.’ There are lights in her eyes: this amuses her. ‘Isn’t it what we’re all meant to be doing nowadays? I mean, it’s all about interfacing, isn’t it? Collaboration and interfacing and stuff. You need to go off and collaborate.’

She pulls the notes towards her, flicks open the cardboard cover. Her fingers with the runic rings move deftly through the file. I wait to see what she says. You can hear the murmuring of the pigeons, as though the air is breathing.

She pauses, her hand on the page. A shadow crosses her face.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That’s not what you’d choose exactly.’

‘What do you mean?’

She looks up at me, a little frown stitched to her forehead. ‘I’ve met this guy—the detective you need to talk to. He’s at Fairfield Street, he runs the Community Safety Unit. DI Hampden. I know him.’

‘You don’t sound convinced.’

‘Maybe it’s nothing,’ she says. ‘I mean, I could have got the wrong impression. He spoke at this conference I went to. Very energetic.’

‘You mean difficult.’

‘I didn’t say that, Ginnie. A bit combative, perhaps—but there were some pretty crass questions from the floor. What the hell. I’ll give you his number.’

She writes it down for me.

I feel tired suddenly. I know just how it will be, this encounter with Clem’s rather combative detective. A meeting like all the others, hurried and inconclusive, both of us distracted and rushing on to the next thing, in a room that smells of warm vinyl: trying to find a way forward for yet another troubled, damaged child.

‘I guess I could try him,’ I say.

The reluctance is there in my voice. She looks up sharply.

‘Ginnie, you are OK, aren’t you? I mean, should I be worried?’

‘I’m fine, Clem, really. Just shattered, like you said.’

She frowns at me with mock-severity.

‘This isn’t burnout, is it, Ginnie?’

‘Nothing so glamorous.’

I can’t quite tell her how I really feel. How I’ve lost the shiny hopefulness I used to have. How as you get older it changes. You learn how deep the scars go: you worry that healing is only temporary, if it happens at all. You know there’s so much that cannot be mended.

I take the number and walk back to my office. The bars of sunlight falling from the windows seem almost opaque, like solid things: as though if you put out your hand you might touch something warm and real.

CHAPTER 3

My house is half hidden behind tall hedges. It’s a house that belongs in the country—you’d never guess you were on the edge of London: a cottage, with a little sunken garden; and at night its crooked old walls and beams and banisters seem to stretch and creak as if they’re living things that are shifting and turning over and settling down to sleep. Sometimes I think how we’d all have loved this house if we’d moved here earlier, when the girls were little and we lived in a forgettable thirties semi. How it would have preoccupied me in my domestic days, when I thrilled to fabric catalogues and those little pots of paint you can try out on your walls. How the girls would have relished its secrets and hiding places: and how Amber especially would have loved that the river was down the end of the road, the Thames that runs on through London, with its willows and islands and waterbirds. Like in the poem she made me read each night when she was three:

Grey goose and gander

Clap your hands together

And carry the good king’s daughter

Over the one-strand river.

don’t know what it was about the poem. It made her think perhaps of the walks we sometimes took on weekend afternoons, when Greg was busy in his study preparing his lectures: driving down to the river, and parking on a patch of gravel where nobody seemed to come, and walking along the river path where in summer the balsam and meadowsweet grow higher than your head. Amber especially loved those walks, poking around with Molly in the tangle of bushes beside the path, and coming upon some tiny astonishing creature, a sepia moth with lacy wings, a beetle like a jewel, black and emerald. Or maybe it was just the sound of the words—maybe gander sounded to her a little like Amber—for when children are greedy for poetry, it’s often for the sound as much as the sense. There was a picture that went with the poem—the rush-fringed mudflats beside the glinting river: the princess a teenage girl in a cloak and a coronet with a look of perplexity: the soaring goose, wide-winged. I’d read it endlessly, till it had no meaning: but it always evoked a particular mood—lonely, a little melancholic, with bulrushes whispering and the smell of the river, the mingled scent of salt and rotting vegetation. This house would have been perfect for us in those days. But things don’t always happen at the right time in our lives, and I think my daughters now scarcely notice the house they live in, as they move towards independence and their centre of gravity starts to shift away.

Molly has begun packing, ready for Sunday and the start of her first term at Oxford: the hall is cluttered with boxes. I check my voicemail for messages. Amber must be already home: she leaves a trail behind her—her shoes kicked off, her grubby pink school bag with books spilling out, her blazer, still inside out, flung down on the floor. I remember she had the afternoon off for an orthodontic appointment.

I call to her. She appears at the top of the stairs. The light from the landing window shines on her and glints in her long red hair. She is drinking something electric blue from a bottle.

‘You shouldn’t drink that stuff,’ I say routinely. ‘It leaches the calcium out of your bones. Girls of twenty are getting osteoporosis….’

With a stagy gesture, she hides the bottle behind her.

‘You weren’t meant to see it,’ she says.

‘Nice day?’

‘OK,’ she says.

She pushes back the soft heap of her hair, tossing her head a little. Stray flyaway bits turn gold.

‘Have you finished your Graphics coursework? ‘

She shrugs. ‘I’m waiting to get in the mood.’

There’s a brief blare of music as she opens her door and goes back into her bedroom.

Molly, making the most of her last week of leisure, is sprawled on the sofa in the living room, her little pot of Vaseline lipsalve beside her. She’s already dressed and made up for the art exhibition; she’s put on lots of pink eyeshadow and she’s wearing one of her many pairs of embroidered jeans. She glitters against the dark colours of my living room, the kelims and patchwork cushions. My daughters dazzle me, with their long limbs, bright hair, and that sudden startling shapeliness that seems to happen between one day and the next. Molly once told me she could remember the precise day—she was just thirteen, she said—when she first looked at herself in the mirror with interest.

She fixes me now with her eyes that are dark and glossy as liquorice.

‘Hi, Mum. I don’t suppose there’s any food?’

I suppress a sigh. Molly is quite capable of complaining that there’s never anything to eat while standing in front of a fridge containing a shepherd’s pie, a cheesecake and six yogurts.

‘I’ll be cooking in a minute.’

‘OK.’ She turns to me then, her fingers tangled in the kelim on the sofa. Her lips are slick from the Vaseline. ‘Dad is coming, isn’t he? ‘

‘Yes,’ I say, a bit too emphatically. ‘Of course.’

I remember her as a little girl, one time when I had a case conference and couldn’t make it to her Harvest Festival: What’s the point of me learning all the words to these songs if you aren’t there to hear me?

‘Dad wouldn’t miss it,’ I tell her.

‘I want him to see it.’

‘Of course you do,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry. He’ll be there.’

I go to the kitchen to ring him, so that she won’t be able to hear.

My kitchen soothes me, with its warm red walls and its silence. It’s a jumble of things that don’t quite fit together, that almost seem to belong in different houses. There’s a clutter of mismatched flowered china on the dresser, and a mirror shaped like a crescent moon, and an apothecary cabinet that I loved the look of, though its many little drawers are really very impractical. I keep all sorts of oddments in the drawers, things that aren’t much use but that I can’t bear to get rid of—the wrist tags the girls were given in hospital just after they were born, and a piece of pink indeterminate knitting Molly did in infant school, and the tiny photos you get in the pack of assorted prints from the school photographer that are too small to frame but that I’d never throw away. On the wall by the sink, there’s a copy of my sister Ursula’s painting of the Little Mermaid, from one of the fairy-tale books she’s illustrated, the mermaid diving down through the blue translucent water, with around her the dark drenched treasure and the seaweed like curling hair. When Molly was a toddler, the picture used to trouble her, and she’d stare at it with widening liquorice eyes: ‘But won’t she drown, Mum, under all that water?’ On the window sill there are some leggy geraniums, and apples from the Anglican convent down the road. Passers-by were invited to help themselves to the apples: and I had some vague hope that, given their ecclesiastical origins, they might be specially nourishing. I see in the rich afternoon light that it all needs cleaning, that I haven’t wiped my window sills for weeks.

He’s slow to answer. I worry that he’s in the middle of a tutorial.

‘Greg, it’s me. It was just to check you hadn’t forgotten tonight.’

‘What about tonight?’

‘It’s Molly’s exhibition. The art show at the school.’

There’s a brief silence. Something tenses in my chest.

‘Hell,’ he says then.

‘I did tell you.’ I hear the irritation edge into my voice: I try to control it. ‘It matters, Greg.’ It depresses me how familiar this is: me always wanting more from him than he is willing to give. ‘She worked so hard,’ I tell him. ‘And she spent all yesterday stapling it up.’

‘Look, I’ll be there, OK? There’s no need to go on about it. Though it’s quite a pain, to be honest. I was hoping to get in a bit more work on my book.’

I sit there a moment longer. I should be making the dinner, but I just wait for a while and let the quiet knit up the ravelled bits of me and ease away the disturbance of the day. I see that a tiny fern is growing out of the wall behind the sink: this shouldn’t happen. An apple shoot once sprouted from a pip that had fallen behind my fridge. Sometimes I feel that if I relaxed my vigilance for too long, my house would rapidly revert to the wild.

I decide I will make a vegetable gratin, a concession to Amber’s incipient vegetarianism. I cut up leeks and cauliflower. I’m just at the delicate stage, adding the milk to the roux, when the phone rings.

A woman’s voice, bright and vivid. ‘Am I speaking to Ginnie Holmes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ginnie. Great. I’m so glad I managed to get hold of you.’ She’s too polite: she wants something. Behind her, there are ringing phones, a busy clattery office. ‘I’m Suzie Draper,’ she says, as though she’s someone I should know.

‘Hi, Suzie.’ I brace myself.

She’s ringing from Cosmopolitan, she says, and she’d be hugely grateful for my comments.

‘I read that study you did on teenage sexuality—the one that was in The Psychologist,’ she says. ‘I thought you made some great points.’

‘Right,’ I say.

‘I’d love to have your perceptions for something I’m writing,’ she says. ‘You know, as a psychologist. It’s a piece on one-night stands. Would you have a few moments, perhaps, Ginnie?’

‘Yes. Sure,’ I tell her.

There’s a smell of burning. I reach across to pull the pan off the heat.

‘It’s about a trend we’ve noticed, Ginnie. That more and more women are choosing one-night stands. You know, choosing just to have sex? A bit less concerned about commitment and so on.’

I’m distracted because the sauce is ruined and I don’t think that there’s enough milk to make any more.

‘The thing is,’ I say without thinking, ‘you don’t always know it’s a one-night stand till afterwards.’

There’s a little pause. This isn’t what she wants.

‘Ginnie, would you like me to ring you back?’ she says then, rather anxiously. ‘So you can have a bit of a think about it?’

‘No. It’s fine. Really.’

‘OK. If you’re sure.’ She clears her throat. ‘So, Ginnie, d’you agree that lots of women today can enjoy sex without strings? What I mean is—sex without love, I suppose. Without romance. Like men have always done?’

I take a deep breath and try to think up some intelligent insight. But I don’t really have to say much: she puts the words in my mouth and I only have to agree.

‘That’s a good thing, surely—women taking initiatives, being clear in what they want? Rather than always fitting in with men?’

‘Absolutely,’ I say.

‘I mean, to be honest, I’ve been there, Ginnie: I’m sure we’ve all been there—you know, letting men set the agenda. But what we have now is women saying, I really want that guy, and I’m going to have him.’

I agree that this is a good thing.

The door opens and Amber comes in. She’s overheard some of the conversation and makes a vomiting face. I gesture at her to go.

‘Is it OK if I quote you on that, Ginnie? This idea that more and more women enjoy sex for itself and kind of keep it separate? I can quote you?’

I tell her, yes, she can quote me.

She thanks me profusely and seems to be happy enough.

I put down the phone with a flicker of guilt about the women who’ll read the things I’ve said—thought up at the end of a tiring workday while the dinner was burning. They surely deserve better.

I open the window to let out the burnt smell. A blackbird is singing in the pear tree in my garden. I stand there for a moment, listening to the blackbird’s lavish song, leaning on the window sill, thinking about the last time I had a one-night stand. Quite a long time ago now. It was just before I met Greg: an attractive paediatrician I met at a conference on attention deficit disorder seduced me by pretending to read my palm. I loved his touch as he made to trace out my life line, as if he’d discovered a new erogenous zone: that was the best bit really. The sex was pleasant enough—but the next morning, when we made love again before the plenary session, it took him for ever to come, and afterwards he complained he was getting a cold and sent me out to buy Lemsip. When we said goodbye, I asked for his phone number—not really wanting to see him again, just feeling it was only polite to ask—and he said, It’s in the phone book. I remember driving home down the motorway, tired and rather hungover: and noticing in the mirror in the motorway service station that there were mascara smudges under my eyes and I looked like I was crying.

I wonder if that was really why I married Greg—to get away from all those complications, the unfamiliar beds, mismatched desires, awkwardness about phone numbers. It was such a relief for everything to be settled. And choosing Greg was surely a good decision. I tell myself we have a solid marriage: that it really doesn’t matter that we haven’t made love for years.

I hunt in the fridge for milk. There’s just an inch left in the bottle. I top it up from the tap and start again with the sauce.

CHAPTER 4

Greg is there already, parked outside the school. He gets out of his car. From a distance he seems the perfect academic—tall, thin, cerebral-looking, with little wire-rimmed glasses. He never seems to age, though his hair, which was reddish, is whitening.

‘Are you OK? ’ I ask him.

‘Not exactly,’ he says. He has a crooked, rueful smile. ‘It was the Standards and Provisions committee this morning.’

The exhibition is in the art suite, up at the top of the building. We go into the first room. The place is crowded already, and crammed with sculptures and paintings, the whole room fizzing with colour. I’m dazzled by this marvellous multiplicity of things—harsh cityscapes, bold abstracts, masks, pottery, flowers. Beside us a boy with a baseball cap and a laconic expression is standing in front of a painting, his arm wrapped round his girlfriend. ‘Is this the one with me in?’ he says: his face is pink and proud. I feel an instant, surprising surge of tenderness: like when I used to weep embarrassingly at infant school carol concerts. There are certain startling emotions—rage at whatever threatens your child, or this surging tenderness, or fear—that you only really feel when you have children. I talk about this sometimes with Max Sutton, my lawyer friend from university, when we meet up over a glass or two of Glenfiddich and compare lifestyles—mine, domestic, anxious, enmeshed: his, bold and coolly promiscuous. He’s travelled widely, been to Haiti, Colombia—nothing seems to throw him.

‘To be honest, Ginnie, I never feel fear,’ he says.

‘You don’t know what fear is till you have children,’ I tell him. ‘It’s your children who teach you fear.’

We’re offered Chardonnay, and cheese straws made in Food Technology that crumble when you bite them. Mr Bates, Molly’s art teacher, comes to congratulate her; he has a single earring and looks perpetually alarmed. Cameras whir and flash as embarrassed students are photographed.

Eva is there, in red crushed velvet from Monsoon.

‘Molly! Your pictures are wonderful. Are you going to be like Ursula, do you think? You’ve certainly got the gene. Ginnie, I love Molly’s stuff! ‘

We hug. I’m wrapped in her capacious arms and her musky cedarwood scent. We’ve been close since the time we first bonded, in a moment of delicious hysteria at antenatal class, when I was pregnant with Amber, and Eva was having Lauren and Josh, her twins. It was during the evening when you could bring your partner, and some of the men, seeking perhaps to assert a masculine presence in this too-female environment, were pronouncing on the benefits of eating the placenta: they claimed it was full of nutrients. I saw that Eva was shaking with barely suppressed laughter and I caught her eye and we had to leave the room.

I tell her about the Cosmopolitan journalist.

She grins. ‘I used to love Cosmo,’ she says. ‘Now I buy those lifestyle magazines—you know, forty-nine things to do with problem windows.’

‘But, Eva, you haven’t got problem windows.’

‘I’m working on it,’ she says.

‘Mum,’ says Molly, ‘you’ve got to see my stuff.’

Her display is in the second room: she pulls Amber and me towards it. I look round for Greg, but he’s met a woman from his department, an earnest woman with wild grey hair who lectures in Nordic philology: she has a daughter here. They’re having an urgent discussion about spreadsheets.

‘I’ll be right with you,’ he tells me, but he shows no sign of following us.

‘Mum, come on,’ says Molly. ‘I want you to see my canvas.’ She has a look she sometimes had as a child, when she would tug at me, especially after Amber had arrived and she couldn’t get enough of me: intent, with deep little lines between her eyes.

We go into the second room. Her display is in the corner, facing us as we enter—her sketchbooks and pottery heaped on the table, and behind them the canvas, nailed up on the wall. I stare at the painting. It’s huge, taller than me, so the figures are more than life-size. I don’t know how she controlled the proportions, how she made it so real. It’s based on a photo from my childhood—me and Ursula and our mother and father, in the garden at Bridlington Road. I don’t know who took it, perhaps a visiting aunt. It’s a rare photo of all of us together, and we look just like a perfectly normal family. It was one of a heap of old photos that Molly found in the kitchen cabinet: she was hunting around for something to paint for her final A-level piece. ‘It has to be about Change,’ she said. ‘I ask you. I think it’s a freaky topic. Change is totally random. I mean, it could be anything.’ She was pleased when she found the photos of me and Ursula: she loved our candy-striped summer frocks, our feet in shiny bar shoes. The two of us would stand to attention with neat cheerful smiles, every time anyone pointed a Kodak in our direction. ‘Look, you’ve got parallel feet,’ said Molly. ‘Amber, look, it’s so cute. In every picture their feet are kind of arranged.’

The photograph was black and white, but the painting is in the strong acrylic colours Molly loves; our skin in the picture has purple and tangerine in it. The photograph may have made her smile, but the picture she’s painted has an intensity to it. She has quite a harsh style, like an etching, the lines and structure of people’s faces exaggerated, so that they look older than they are: and she’s seen so much that was only subtly there in the photograph, that was just a hint, a subtext. My mother, her forehead creased in spite of her smile. My father, a looming presence, his shadow falling across us: my father, who was a pillar of the community, a school governor, a churchwarden, a grower of fine lupins: and I think how shockingly glad I was when he died. Ursula and me, eight and six, with our parallel feet in their shiny shoes: not wanting to step out of line. I see myself then, my conscientious smile, my six-year-old hope that if I was good, stayed good, everything would be all right. I wonder if Molly has brought to this painting some knowledge she has of my family. Yet I’ve told them so little, really, even though in my work I always maintain that families shouldn’t have secrets. Maybe Molly’s gleaned something from the absolute rule I have that there’s no hitting in our family: or from the things I’ve said about marriage, the advice I so often feel a compulsion to give. The very worst thing in a man is possessiveness. Don’t ever imagine that you can change a man. Promise me—if he’s cruel or hits you, that’s it, it’s over, you go straight out of that door. Promise me. Yeah, yeah, they’ll say, glancing at one another, with a look of complicity, of ‘There she goes again’, indulging me: We know, Mum, you’ve told us.

Molly turns to me, unsure suddenly. She’s never had Amber’s certainty.

‘Is it OK? D’you like it, Mum?’

I realise I’ve just been standing here, staring.

‘Molly. I love it. It’s wonderful.’ Instinctively, I put my arm around her, then realise she will hate me doing this in public. But she tolerates it for a second or two before she slides away.

‘Mr Bates asked if my grandparents were coming,’ she says. ‘He kind of blushed when I said that Grandad was dead. It was, like, really embarrassing. Mum, make sure Dad sees it.’ She moves off with Amber towards a gang of her friends.

I go to find Greg.

‘You have to come and see Molly’s work,’ I tell him.

He says goodbye to the earnest philologist. I take him to see the canvas.

He has an appraising look, one eyebrow raised, the look he has when he’s reading a student’s essay.

‘Goodness,’ he says. ‘It’s quite in your face, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t you like it, though? ‘

But I see that he doesn’t, that he wouldn’t.

‘It’s rather raw,’ he says.

‘Yes. But isn’t that good? All that emotion? I love it.’

‘Her plant drawings are great,’ he says. ‘But it takes a bit of maturity to draw people. Maybe she should stick to plants for now.’

‘For God’s sake don’t say that to her,’ I tell him.

I feel a flicker of anger: why can’t he just be generous?

I go to find the girls, to say it’s time to leave. Amber has moved away from her friends, from Jamila and Katrine, and is talking to someone Molly knows, a boy about three years older: she’s standing close with her head on one side and flicking back her hair. She mutters to me that she’ll make her own way home.

‘What about your Graphics?’

‘Mum, for God’s sake.’

It’s dark in the street now. There’s an edge to the air, a smell of autumn, a hint of frost and bonfires. We stand by Greg’s car in a pool of apricot lamplight.

‘Did you like it, Dad?’ says Molly.

I’m worried what he’ll say.

‘Sure, it was great,’ he tells her.

I remember her when she was little, thrusting some drawing she’d done at me: But d’you really really like it, Mum? Say it as though you mean it.

Now, she doesn’t say anything.

‘Mum, I’m coming with you,’ she tells me.

We go to our separate cars. I notice how scruffy my Ford Escort looks beside all the other cars, and that moss is growing in the rubber round the passenger window. When I turn the ignition, there’s a grinding sound from under the car and it’s hard to get into gear.

I glance at Molly. The lamplight leaches all the colour from her face, so you can’t see most of her make-up; her face looks rounder, more open, as though she is a child again. A bit of glittery eyeshadow has smudged under her eye.

‘He didn’t look at it, Mum,’ she says.

‘He did, sweetheart.’

She chews at a strand of her hair.

‘Not properly,’ she says. ‘He didn’t look through my sketchbooks or anything. I was watching. Well, why would he want to look at it anyway? It’s a load of crap.’

‘That’s nonsense, Molly.’

‘No, it’s true,’ she says. ‘I don’t know why I got such a good mark. It must have been a mistake.’

There’s a tug at my heart.

‘Don’t say that.’ I want to stop the car and reach out and hold her, but I know she’d hate it. ‘Sweetheart, you’ve got to have faith in yourself: everyone loves what you’ve done.’

But the shine has gone from the day for her, and I know she isn’t listening.

I wake in the night with a start, from some indeterminate dream, feeling the thickness of the dark against me. Greg is snoring quietly beside me: I can sense the sleep-warmth coming off his body. I press the button that illuminates the face of my alarm clock. 4.15. Shit. This happens over and over, this sudden waking at three or four, and the thoughts are always the same. Thoughts of dying, of endings, when death seems so real to me I almost believe that if I turned I would see him there behind me. Looking perhaps like the picture of Death in one of the girls’ old storybooks: Death who played dice with a soldier in The Storyteller, with green bulbous eyes and a sack and a look of cool composure. He lays it out before me, clinical, utterly rational. You’re forty-six, you’re over halfway through; even with luck, great blessings and longevity, you’re more than halfway through; and you’ve certainly had the best bit. He fixes me with his cool green stare, knowing and expectant.

I slip out of bed carefully, so as not to wake Greg, though nothing seems to stir him. I go downstairs. I haven’t drawn the curtains in my kitchen: outside, the yawn of a black night. I make myself some toast and flick through the heap of yesterday’s post on the table, a catalogue full of cardigans with little satin trimmings, an offer of a new credit card: seeking to ground myself in these safe and trivial things.

CHAPTER 5

It’s eight in the morning, and Amber isn’t yet up.

I go to her room.

‘Amber, you ought to be dressed.’

I pull back the curtains. She groans and hides under the duvet.

‘My braces hurt,’ she says. ‘I can’t go in.’

‘Amber, for God’s sake, you can’t stay home because your braces have been adjusted.’

‘Sofia always has a day off after her orthodontic appointments,’ she says, though without much hope, from under the bedclothes.

‘I don’t care what Sofia does,’ I tell her. I suspect a hangover. She went to the pub last night with the boy that she met at the art show, and he probably bought her one too many Malibus. ‘I’ll bring you a Nurofen, but you are going in.’

Then I find I have no clean work clothes. All my trousers have paint and Play-Doh on them, and the only thing that’s respectable is a short black skirt I hardly ever wear. It’s velvet, shapely, too smart for work really. I’m keeping it for best, I suppose. I do that with clothes, I probably do it with everything. It’s a pattern of mine—deferring gratification, saving things up for some brilliant future time. This is always thought to be a positive trait. There’s an experiment where you sit a three-year-old at a table with a single marshmallow, and you ask them not to eat the sweet while you go out of the room. You promise that if they don’t eat it, when you come back they can have two. The children who can wait do better at school and even later in life: there’s something fundamental about being able to postpone the small, immediate pleasure, in hope of achieving a greater one further down the line. But perhaps you can carry this too far. Perhaps there’s a time in life when you have to stop deferring. Sometimes I think that at forty-six I’m still waiting patiently for my two marshmallows.

I put on the skirt, but my usual flat boots look silly with it. My eyes fall on the wine-coloured boots I bought in a rash moment with Molly. I slip into them. High heels feel odd to me—it’s only rarely that I wear them: in spite of their sophistication they make me feel somehow childlike, as though I’m just trying on grown-up things. Like when Ursula and I would borrow our mother’s shoes and put a jazz record on the ancient wind-up gramophone she’d inherited from our grandmother and stomp around the living room. Conjuring up a life of unguessable glamour, of glasses of Martini with little umbrellas in them, and dancing under a pink-striped awning and the sound of the band.

I glance at myself in the mirror. I’m taller, thinner, more vivid. I look like somebody different.

Amber is dressed now, but she says her mouth is too painful to eat, and really she can only manage a can of Dr Pepper for breakfast: so she won’t be able to concentrate, so what’s the point of school. I don’t respond.

I’m late: I hate being late. I have a case conference at the hospital and I’ll only get there in time if there’s hardly any traffic. I go out to the road, into a sodden world of thick brown water-laden light. The traffic is always slower in the rain. I start up the car. In my unfamiliar shoes, the pedals seem to be at the wrong angle: and then I realise the problem isn’t the shoes. The grinding sound from under the car is louder than yesterday. I don’t know enough about cars to guess what’s wrong with the engine: perhaps the rain has got in.

Where the side road joins the main road, I pull out in front of a bus and press on the accelerator, and there’s no response from the car—no power, nothing. The car creeps forward, the bus driver hoots aggressively. Panicked, I pull in to the side of the road and switch on my hazard flashers and crawl to the nearest garage, where a stooped and rather smug man who smells of engine oil informs me sombrely that my gearbox has gone.

I know my hair will be frizzing in the rain. My new red boots have mud on. I ask tentatively what kind of money we’re talking about.

‘I could do a reconditioned one for about five hundred quid,’ he says. ‘New, we’d be talking seven.’ He casts a pitying eye over my car, taking in the rust marks and the moss round the passenger window. ‘But, to be honest, love, there’s no point putting a new one into this, now, is there?’

Briefly, I feel ashamed, as though my mossy car is a moral failing.

It will take two days, he tells me. I manage to get a taxi, but I am still late for my meeting. I arrive with mud on my legs, self-conscious in my new boots.

At lunchtime, looking through my To Do list, I see where I have written the number of Fairfield Street police station, and Will Hampden’s name.

I ring.

A woman’s voice, brisk and sibilant. ‘Sorry, he’s in a meeting. Can I take a message?’

I leave my number and say it’s about a patient—nothing current, I just need some information.

At the corner shop I buy baguettes for Clem and for me. It’s still raining. We eat in Clem’s office.

‘The boots are fab,’ she says. ‘You ought to wear things like that more often.’

Clem’s in a rather mournful mood. She’s just had a date with a rather hunky medical insurance broker who explained between the sorbet and the espresso that he really enjoys her company but she has to know commitment isn’t his thing.

After lunch there is a team meeting. Peter lectures us on the vexed subject of the waiting list, and how cutting patient waiting times really has to be our priority. Brigid talks with passion about the coffee fund. Rain traces out its spider patterns on the windows: pigeons, plumped-up, pink-eyed, huddle on the sills. Bad temper has its claws in me.

The phone rings as I go back to my office and I hope it will be Will Hampden, but it’s the man from the garage, saying he needs to revise his estimate upwards.

I try the police station again. It’s the same woman.

‘Like I said, he’ll ring you back. You must understand, he has to prioritise, he’s very busy,’ she says.

There’s an edge to her voice, but I know she’s probably responding to some crossness in my own.

There are days that you can’t make right or mend. I make more calls but no one is in. I have a desultory session with Kerry James, a ten-year-old girl who’s been referred with suspected depression: she draws immaculate little pictures of cats, and nothing I say gets near her. In the end I just leave, rather early. The rain has stopped. I’ll walk for part of the journey and pick up the bus when I’m tired. Perhaps the walk will calm me.

I need my street plan, I have to go down roads where I’ve never been. These streets are dreary, with bleak terraced houses with grimy curtains and gardens full of old motorbikes. I turn into Acton Street, where there’s an ugly purple-painted pub with advertisements for Sports Night and a wide-screen television. I pass a grim tower block, where the playground has a high wire fence, like an exercise yard in a prison. But over all this there’s a wide washed sky, and a light that makes distant things seem near, so you feel you could see for ever. Birds fly over, grey geese like in Amber’s poem, clapping their wings together: six of them, in a black ragged V, against the shining sky. I watch them till they’re out of sight and their creaking cries have faded in the distance. I feel the day’s irritations start to seep away.

As I study my map on a street corner, I see that my route will take me near to Fairfield Street. And something perhaps can be retrieved from the general mess of my day.

CHAPTER 6

The desk sergeant is young and angular, with gelled hair.

‘Is it possible to speak to Detective Inspector Hampden?’

‘It should be. Who shall I say it is?’

I tell him. ‘I did try ringing earlier. I just wanted some information about a case.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he says. He speaks into his phone. ‘He isn’t answering,’ he says, ‘but I know he’s somewhere around.’

Suddenly I wonder why I’m here.

‘Don’t worry,’ I tell him. ‘Not if he’s busy. I can ring him. I just dropped in on the off chance. You know, as I was passing.’

‘You might as well see him now you’re here,’ he says. ‘I’m sure I can get hold of him. Why don’t you sit down for a moment, Mrs Holmes?’

In the waiting area there are metal seats fixed to the wall. The only other person waiting is an elderly woman: a faint smell of urine hangs about her and she has three bulging Aldi bags and many large safety pins fixed to the front of her coat. A voice crackles over an intercom: it sounds like traffic information. The woman shuffles sideways towards me, catching her capacious skirts in the space at the back of the seats.

She reaches out and puts her hand on my arm. ‘You’re pretty, aren’t you?’ she says. Her voice is surprisingly cultured. There’s a fierce scent of spirits on her breath.

‘Mrs Holmes,’ says the desk sergeant. I get up, go to him. ‘Let me take you through,’ he says. ‘I’m sure he won’t be long.’

He takes me down a corridor; through the open doors on either side, you can hear phones shrilling and cut-off scraps of conversation. He shows me into an empty office, which smells of tuna and of illicit cigarette smoke.

‘I thought you might prefer to wait in here,’ he says. ‘Maureen does go on a bit.’

‘Thanks,’ I say.

He closes the door behind him.

It’s a cluttered, disorderly office: on the desk a computer, a litter of papers, a heap of blue ring-binders: and the more personal stuff, framed photos, a mug with pens and highlighters in. My eye is drawn to the photographs. A little blond boy, rather serious: a woman with a fall of straight dark hair. I think idly of something I once read in a novel by Milan Kundera, which I thought to be rather wise: that women aren’t essentially drawn to the most beautiful men—that the men we desire are the ones who have slept with beautiful women. There’s a half-drunk cup of coffee on the desktop and discarded sandwich wrappings in the bin.

The phone on the desk rings, and I have a brief instinctive urge to answer it. The voice over the intercom makes a new announcement, giving the number of a car that’s been abandoned, and inside it the body of an unidentified male. Above the sounds of phones and footsteps from the corridor, I can hear shouting, a man’s voice harsh with anger: I can only make out certain phrases—For fuck’s sake, repeated several times—and then a softer voice, a woman, seeking to placate. The anger in the first voice makes my pulse race. I sit there for what feels like an age in the smells of smoke and tuna, hearing the distant shouting.

The shouting stops, there are rapid footsteps along the corridor. The door bangs as it is pushed back. He comes into the room, then stops quite suddenly when he sees me.

‘What are you doing here?’ he says, as though I’m someone he knows, and I shouldn’t be there.

He’s a little taller than me, with cropped greying hair and a lived-in face. Forty-something. I see in a theoretical kind of way that he is quite attractive: that other women may like the way he looks.

‘I’m sorry.’ I feel an acute, disproportionate embarrassment about everything—hearing the quarrel, that I’m here at all.

He’s staring at me still, as though he finds me perplexing.

‘I’m Ginnie Holmes from the Westcotes Clinic,’ I tell him.

‘Hi, Ginnie,’ he says. He reaches out, as though he’s remembering how he ought to behave. I half get up, unsure what to do. He shakes my hand, and I notice the warmth of his skin.

‘The desk sergeant showed me through,’ I say.

‘He could have told me,’ he says.

I decide that Clem was right: that he is a difficult man.

He’s restless, the energy of his anger still hanging around him. He sits at the desk and takes out his cufflinks and pushes up his sleeves.

‘So, Ginnie, how can I help you?’ His gaze is hard, puzzled.

‘I’ve been trying to ring you,’ I tell him. ‘I couldn’t get through.’

‘That happens, I’m afraid,’ he says. ‘It’s been crazy here. Tell me what I can do for you.’

I tell him I’m a psychologist, that I’m working with a child that I don’t understand.

He’s leaning forward across the desk, his hands loosely clasped in front of him. His hands are close to mine. I notice the pale skin, the dark hairs on the backs of his fingers, the lilac web of veins inside his wrists.

I tell him about Kyle, how I feel he’s been through some trauma but I don’t know what it was. Will Hampden has his eyes on me, dark eyes, with red flecks in. As I talk I’m very conscious of his intent, puzzled gaze. I decide he doesn’t like me. I think how I must seem to him, prissy, bland, ineffectual; my skin reddened from walking here, my hair all messy from the morning’s rain.

‘I don’t remember the name,’ he says, ‘but that doesn’t mean a thing. I’ll have a look on Crim Int. Let’s see what we can find out for you.’

He searches on his computer and gives me the dates the police were called to the house. He says he’ll have a word with the officer involved.

‘Where can I find you, Ginnie?’

I give him my cell phone number.

‘I’ll see what I can do for you,’ he says.

I know this means that our conversation is over. I get up, pull my jacket round my shoulders. I have an odd, incomplete feeling, but there’s no reason to stay.

‘OK, then. Thanks.’

‘My pleasure,’ he says. He sits there for a moment, looking me over. There’s something unequal about this, the way he doesn’t stand although I’m standing, as though he’s breaking some unspoken rule.

‘I like the shoes,’ he says.

‘Thanks.’ I make a little dismissive gesture, unnerved by this, not knowing what to say. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure they’re really me,’ I tell him. Then wonder why I said that.

His eyes hold mine.

‘What is really you, Ginnie?’ he says.

My stomach tightens. I don’t say anything.

There’s a little silence while he just sits there looking at me. I can hear my breathing.

‘Well,’ he says then. He pushes back his chair: he’s brisk again, full of purpose. ‘I’ll show you out, Ginnie. Where did you leave your car?’

‘I didn’t,’ I tell him. ‘It’s in the garage. They told me the gearbox had packed up. It’s been one of those days.’

‘For me too,’ he says. He smiles at me, a sudden vivid smile.

He takes me out through the back of the station, down a long white corridor lit by harsh tubular lighting that shines into all the corners. The walls are scuffed in places, as though they have been kicked. We hear the shriek of a siren as a police car pulls away from the car park at the back of the building. I hunt around for something to say—some light appropriate comment—but my mind is blank, as though all thoughts have been erased.

‘I’d give you a lift,’ he tells me, ‘but there’s someone I’ve got to see. Some crap meeting that got set up and nobody bothered to tell me. I’d like to have given you a lift.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ I tell him.

We come to the door that opens onto the car park.The doorway is quite narrow and he’s standing close to me: he smells of rain and smoky rooms, and some faint spicy cologne.

He looks at me in a serious way, unsmiling now.

‘Sorry about the shouting,’ he says. ‘Someone messed up. Sorry. You shouldn’t have heard that.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I say blandly.

‘I wouldn’t like you to think I’m always shouting at people,’ he says.

I put my hand on his arm. It’s happened without thought, an instinctive gesture of reassurance. But his sleeve is rolled up and I touch his skin. It’s inappropriate, far too intimate, and I know he likes it. He turns to me: his face is close to mine. It would be the easiest thing in the world to reach out and trail my finger down the side of his face. It enters my mind that this is how it will be. The thought astonishes me.

The voice comes on the intercom again: the registration number, the body they need to identify, repeated over and over. This is how it happens, with the news of a death, with someone’s story ending.

I turn and walk across the car park between the lines of police cars, quickly, without looking back. I feel how his gaze follows me. In my new red shoes, the ground feels insubstantial under my feet, as though it could slide away from me.

That night I have a dream about Will Hampden. It’s a sexual dream—which is not in itself unusual, I have such dreams quite often. But usually they’re rather vague—as though my unconscious mind demurely follows the conventions of between-the-wars Hollywood movies. In these dreams, some indeterminate man, a stranger whose face I don’t see, might hold me or kiss me, or stand behind me and run his hand through my hair. Or the sexual feeling might be allied to some entirely neutral image: I might simply be swimming in a sunlit sea. And these images will be transient, rapidly merging with some other blurry narrative.

This dream is different. A dream of penetration, first his fingers, then his cock, gentle, slow, insistent. And it’s quite precise and vivid. I’m on top of him in the dream, I’m gazing down at him, seeing his face quite clearly, my eyes on his as he moves so deeply inside me: and it seems to go on for a very long time, though the end still comes too soon.

CHAPTER 7

We park near the restaurant in a wide mellow street. The girls extricate themselves from the back of the car: they have bags of clothes wedged round their feet, and boxes on their knees.

Honeyed autumn sunlight falls on Molly as she steps out onto the pavement. She’s wearing her flimsiest top, her most flamboyantly embroidered jeans. Her face is creased with worry.

‘What if someone nicks the car while we’re having lunch?’ she says. ‘All my stuff’s in there.’

She chews absently at a tendril of hair that’s slipped out of her hairband.

‘For God’s sake, Molly, no one will steal it,’ says Greg.

‘We’ll sit in the window,’ I tell her. ‘Then you can keep an eye on it.’

Greg raises his eyebrows.

Molly’s nervousness is like a glittery sheen on her. She moves on to her next worry.

‘Are you sure other people will have their parents with them?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I tell her. ‘Everyone will have their parents.’

‘They won’t,’ she says. ‘I bet they’ll all come with their mates in a van. They won’t have their parents. And, Mum.’ Her frown deepening as another fear comes rushing in. ‘What if they all know each other already? What if half of them come from the same school and they’ve known each other for years?’

‘Molly, stop freaking,’ says Amber severely.

The restaurant is crowded, but we manage to get a table by the window. Molly takes out her lipsalve. When her chicken pie comes, she just dips a chip in the sauce and sucks at the end of the chip. I terribly want her to eat, as though I have some unexamined idea that we’re feeding her up for weeks, as though this final family meal will magically sustain her.

She feels my gaze on her.

‘Sorry, Mum, I’d normally like it. I just can’t eat today.’

She’s hunched in on herself, as though she’s shrunk a little. I wonder how well I have prepared her for this moment of moving on, the ultimate test of my mothering. Maybe I should have pushed her more towards independence—right from when she was tiny and I used to go on feeding her, when I should perhaps have urged her to take the spoon. She was always rather too willing then to let me look after her. Whereas Amber would grab the spoon from the moment she could clasp it, mashed pears and custard flying exuberantly everywhere. Amber would grab whatever she wanted however much mess it made.

Another family comes to a table near us, two parents and a serious young man in a stylish denim shirt. He has a chiselled face and fine dark hairs on his arms. Amber glances at him, then away. She has an intent look.

She catches Molly’s eye.

‘Mmm,’ she says, thoughtfully. ‘I hope he’s going to your college.’

‘For Chrissake, shut up,’ hisses Molly.

Amber’s lips curve in a small secret smile.

We have crème brulée for pudding. Amber wolfs hers, then takes herself off to the cloakroom; and comes back by a devious route, brushing past the boy’s table, catching his eye and smiling slightly, keeping her lips pressed together to hide her braces. I love it that it comes so easily to her, this intuitive choreography that I’ve always found so perplexing.

I murmur to Greg, ‘Perhaps she’ll work a bit harder now. Maybe she’ll see the benefits.’

He shrugs. He gives me a puzzled look. Perhaps he didn’t see.

‘We need to get back to the car,’ he says. ‘We’re out of time on the meter.’

He pays the bill.

‘OK?’ I say to Molly.

She nods. She puts on more lipsalve.

We park at Molly’s college and she goes to the porter’s lodge and is given her key. Two o’clock chimes across the city: we hear the hollow sounds of many clocks and bells. We’re directed round the back; there’s a patch of gravel to park on, a tangled herbaceous border, a decrepit potting shed. The plants in the border are drying out and dying back with autumn—shaggy heads of chrysanthemums, and tatty Michaelmas daisies, their colours fading as though they’ve been left too long in water. The thin white stalks of some of the flowers have a calcified look, like tiny bones. Rich sunlight lies over everything. Around us, other families are unpacking their cars.

We go through the open fire door, along a brown corridor with many photographs of academic women, who all have solemn expressions and mildly unkempt hair. White rose petals have blown in through the open door onto the carpet. Someone has drawn genitals in black felt tip on the figure on the door of the men’s cloakroom.

Molly unlocks her door. The room has that immediate bleakness of all uninhabited student rooms; it’s under-furnished and nothing matches, the purple curtains ugly against the mustard walls. The ceiling is high. Our voices echo.

A brief panic flickers over her face, now it’s really happening.

‘I like the view,’ she says determinedly.

We go to the window. The gardens are spread out before us: a velvet lawn, an ancient beech tree, its massive limbs propped up with wooden struts, a round flowerbed with a sundial in the middle. It all has a subtle dishevelled loveliness, nothing too neat or ordered, no gravel path without its casual edging of lavender or sprawl of yellow daisies. Some autumn cyclamen, frail as moth wings, are flowering in the bare earth under the beech tree.

‘God, Molly,’ says Amber. ‘I wish I was a geek.’

We bring the boxes in, while Molly starts to unpack. I tip out cosmetics into a drawer, and the vitamins I bought for her. Her bath oil isn’t properly fastened and spills as I unpack it. I bite back the urge to tell her off. I go to the bathroom to wash the oil from my hands. The basins are swarming with green gauzy flies, and word-processed posters urge the ecological advantages of showers: ‘If you’re gagging for a bath, share one with a friend.’

The window is open, looking out over the gardens. I linger there for a moment, resting my arms. Nostalgia floods me. I’m eighteen again, walking a sepia corridor much like this one. Memories pass through me, a kaleidoscope of images. Men I went out with, tutors who scared me. The choir I used to sing in with Max, performing very old music in some chill college chapel: and afterwards there’d be a party where everyone got drunk because the medical students had doctored the punch with ethanol. I think of a tight black velvet dress I wore for one of those concerts, and, at the party afterwards, a stranger who came up behind me and ran his hands quite slowly down my sides, his palms curved into me, his fingers just missing my breasts. And I remember how I felt then that life was a quest or journey, a movement onwards towards some ultimate attainment: that at some point you’d get there, there’d be a kind of clarity. And here I am, years later: yet the present remains tentative, far too full of traffic jams and compromise: and the thing I thought I was moving towards continues to elude me.

I take the final suitcase to Molly’s room. There are urgent lists in my head, things I need to tell her: This is how your heater works, and if you leave your radio there on the window sill somebody could steal it, and promise you’ll take your vitamins. Amber is pinning Molly’s postcard collection to the pinboard.

Molly unpacks an alarm clock. It’s frivolously pink and was a present from a friend: she’s never used it.

‘I want to know you can set that thing,’ I tell her.

‘For God’s sake, Mum, I’ll manage.’

I insist. She tries, but it’s complicated.

‘I’ll be OK,’ she says. ‘I can set the alarm on my phone.’

‘But then you have to leave it on all night—and what if somebody rings and wakes you?’ My voice is shrill: all my anxiety about her focused onto this clock.

She puts her hand on my arm.

‘Mum, it’s OK. Really.’

She comes to the car park with us. It’s colder now.The wind stirs the leaves of the beech tree: the leaves are drying though they haven’t fallen yet, and there’s a rattle to the sound, a harshness that makes you think of winter. Behind us a girl with a sleek black bob is weeping as her parents’ car drives off. We stand there for a moment. Molly seems so small, suddenly. I put my arms all round her.

‘I’ll be fine, Mum,’ she says.

I realise I am utterly unprepared for this moment. I hold her for a moment and then she pulls away.

Amber wraps herself round her sister.

‘Go, girl,’ she says.

Greg gives Molly a rare hug. She holds him a little stiffly.

We get into the car and Molly turns and walks away. As we crunch out over the gravel, past the borders where the flower stalks are pale and fine as bones, I turn to watch her. She’s on the steps to the fire door, talking excitedly to the girl with the shiny bob, who a moment ago was crying and wanting her mother, and who is laughing now and flicking back her hair.

CHAPTER 8

We drive slowly out of the city, through heavy traffic. The car feels lighter without all Molly’s stuff in it.

‘I wonder how she’ll get on,’ I say to Greg.

‘Don’t worry, she’ll be fine,’ he says. ‘Molly always copes. Look, I don’t suppose you could dig me out a Milk of Magnesia, could you? I shouldn’t have had that crème brulée.’

There’s a packet he keeps in the glove compartment. I tip out a pill and hand it to him. The jasmine scent of Molly’s bath oil is still all over my hands. We have to wait for a long time at the roundabout on the ring road. I feel as if there’s something lurking just round the corner of my mind: some grief, skulking there, waiting to grab me.

Amber is hunting in her bag for her iPod.

‘It’s weird,’ she says. ‘You feel you haven’t said goodbye properly—that there’s something you should have said which you forgot to say.’

‘I feel the same,’ I tell her.

She takes out the iPod and chooses a song.

‘I’ll miss her,’ she says, her voice a little husky.

‘I know you will, sweetheart. We all will.’

She isn’t listening any more; she has her earphones in.

‘Greg, I’m worried Molly won’t wake in time in the mornings,’ I say. ‘I thought I’d send her our alarm clock—you know, just to tide her over till she can get to the shops.’

‘Ginnie, for God’s sake.’

‘She needs something.’

‘Well, so do I. I mean, what will wake me up?’ He turns slightly towards me; I smell the chalk on his breath.

‘You could use the alarm on your watch.’

‘OK, OK,’ he says wearily.

We drive through the Chilterns, through the swoop and dip of the downs. The sky is blue as ash. I can just hear the faint tinny sound of the music on Amber’s iPod.

‘I wonder what it will be like without her,’ I say.

‘Well, not so very different, I imagine.’

‘We could do more things together, I suppose.’

‘Such as?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps we could go out a bit.’ My voice small, tentative. ‘You know, when Amber stays with her friends. Perhaps we could go away together or something.’

‘It’s a possibility,’ he says. ‘Though to be honest I’d welcome a bit more time to get this book together. Fenella’s very patient, but she’s starting to make noises.’

I think of Fenella, his literary agent: her Sloaney clothes—the pearls, the velvet Alice bands—her immaculate vowels and limitless self-assurance. I try to push away the irritation I feel.

‘But—I mean—things will be different now, won’t they? It’s a big change.’

‘Ginnie, we only left Molly half an hour ago.’

‘But we have to make it a positive thing. You know, a chance to do things differently…’

He’s quiet as though he’s thinking. I feel a flicker of hopefulness—that maybe he will agree.

‘There was one thing I thought of,’ he says. ‘I thought I might move into Molly’s bedroom. Just while she’s away. I’m sure we’d both sleep better. Would that be OK with you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I say. ‘If you want to.’ This jolts me. I swallow hard. ‘I’d have to clear out her room first—it’s a total tip in there.’ Trying to be light about it. ‘But I was thinking more of maybe doing things together…’

‘Let’s not go rushing into anything,’ he says.

A dark mood washes through me.

The cars all have their headlights on now: bright beams from the oncoming traffic weave across us. We drive through a stand of birches, their slender trunks and branches pale and naked in the lights. I realise I had hoped for something in this moment—though the hope was never fully conscious, and certainly never expressed. That there’d be a kind of freedom or renewal. That we’d enter a new landscape, with glimmerings of what life might be like when Amber too goes, when it’s just the two of us, and that it would be a place that I could live in. That there’d be a new intimacy—dinner sometimes in restaurants on the waterfront, trips to the theatre, winter weekends in Prague. A rediscovery of one another.

Yet in this moment I know the limits of what we have, what we are. I see that what is missing is not just something postponed or which can be recovered. Not something put aside for a while or safely stowed away—like a book you never quite finished but hoped one day to return to. Is this my fault? I wonder. Have I tried hard enough, done enough to mend it?

We went to a Marriage Guidance counsellor once. It was my idea, of course, but Greg agreed to come—unwillingly, but at least he agreed. I was so grateful to him. I remember this, as we drive along the motorway and the countryside darkens around us. I tell myself—at least I did what I could, at least I tried.

The counsellor had a room with walls the colour of mint toothpaste, and on the table an African violet that looked as though it was made from plastic, the leaves too clean and symmetrical to be real. She smelt of anti-bacterial soap and she wore a polyester blouse with a floppy bow at the collar.

We talked for three sessions before we reached what we’d come for. She never seemed quite comfortable with us: perhaps my being a psychologist made her nervous. We talked about our children, the families we grew up in, and what we did when we disagreed—which seemed to be her speciality. The thing we had really come to say hung there in the room with us.

Eventually I told her that sex was our problem. She flushed a little when I said this, her neck blotching with purple above the polyester bow. Her embarrassment seemed a serious flaw in a marriage counsellor. She said, rather primly, that she thought the physical relationship between any two people would be fine if the communication was right. And I thought, No, that’s not true: sex is about sex, it’s not about communication.

I remembered how it had happened. How after the children I was always so tired; and we went on having sex, though I didn’t really want to, because it seemed mean to say No: but an orgasm seemed to take more energy than I had. There’s a moment of decision, of reaching out for pleasure, you have to focus, to fantasise—well, it’s like that for me anyway—and it never seemed quite worth the effort. So I used to say, Leave it, really, I don’t mind. And sex had come to seem pointless, even inappropriate—as though it wasn’t what our relationship was for. I’d tell myself this didn’t matter, that I could live without it. Yet always with an awareness of something obscurely wrong, of an absence—some primary colour missing from my life, as though I were a picture painted without red. I couldn’t begin to explain this to her.

She tried a different tack. She said how sex—just the physical thing—often isn’t enough for women: we women need to feel we’re making love. She said this with emphasis, as though it were a unique insight. I told her this was a distinction I’d never understood. My response seemed to perplex her. But romance was so important, she said, all those little gestures that make a woman feel special.

I tried again.

‘But I mean—after having kids—sex does go sometimes, doesn’t it? Don’t you find that with other couples? What happens to them? Does it ever come back?’ My voice was shrill, urgent. I really wanted to know this.

She said it was us she wanted to talk about now—not other couples.

She had some suggestions, some stratagems. I was to ring Greg at work and to make an appointment for sex. When she saw how we both responded to this, imagining me interrupting a semiotics tutorial with a lascivious proposition, she moved on down her list. I needed to pamper myself, she said—she was very keen on pampering, which seemed to involve the purchase of scented candles and expensive bath products. I muse on this now, as we drive on through the darkening landscape—because it’s quite a common belief, and yet so very strange. As though sex can be found at a department store cosmetics counter, among the flash balms and exfoliants, and purchased from one of those pushy women with clinical white coats and far too much mascara. Whereas desire is to be found in other places entirely. At a party where a stranger comes up behind you and runs his hands down your sides. Or in an afternoon office, where a man who smells of smoky rooms holds your eyes for a little too long and pushes up his shirtsleeves. Yes, especially that: just thinking of it.

And then Greg said, ‘Ginnie’s ever so tired, aren’t you, darling? Bringing up the girls—she has her hands full. You know, life’s very busy.’

And the counsellor said yes, that it would probably all change when our daughters were older. I felt a kind of despair then, as they both insisted that our problem was not such an issue really and perfectly predictable. I knew such bleakness, in the room with the African violet and the toothpaste walls. Feeling that this was beyond repair, that we’d reached the end of the line.

After that she retreated to safer ground—to our relationship history and the story of how we’d met. She sat back in her chair now, she seemed to be more at ease. I understood what she was seeking to do—to unearth or recover whatever had originally drawn us together. I might well have done the same in her place. Though I didn’t see how this could help us. You can’t go back there.

I told her how we’d met at a dinner party—just giving the outline of the evening. It was a Burns Night dinner, held by some friends of Max’s, who’d wangled me an invite: and we were all told to bring a song or a poem: and I fell in love with Greg when he was reading aloud.

It was done with panache—a long refectory table, a proper damask tablecloth, the whole place shimmering with candles. The men wore dinner jackets, the women were in long dresses. I remember one woman who had a dress of some slippery cloth that was tight across her breasts, and a heap of blonde hair pinned high up on her head. There was whisky that tasted wonderfully of woodsmoke.

But even after the whisky, most of us were a little embarrassed reading the poems we’d brought. Mostly we chose comic poems, keeping the emotional temperature down, so as not to seem pretentious. Max read something by Craig Raine. I read a poem by Wendy Cope, which was short and a little poignant. The blonde woman didn’t read anything, though toward the end of the evening she pulled out her hair clip and let down all her hair, shaking her head a little as it fell, so it rippled and gleamed in the candle-light. Max watched intently. Someone took out a guitar and sang a Tom Lehrer song.

I didn’t really notice Greg till he started to read. He was rather too thin for my taste, and anyway seated up at the other end of the table. But he had a beguiling speaking voice—a subtle, cultured baritone. He read something obscure and Celtic, a strange tale of enchantment, of four companions who were walking in their lands when a mist fell: and when it lifted the land was bright but everything they knew had disappeared, all their flocks and herds and houses and the people who were with them; there was no animal, no smoke, no fire, no man, no dwelling, so only the four of them remained alone. The narrative was disjointed, dreamlike, as though the storyteller had stitched together many different strands. There were curses and metamorphoses and one thing becoming another, and magical objects and animals—a shining white boar, a golden bowl. Greg read with complete confidence, expecting to be listened to. It was a bold thing to do, to read something so rich and elusive. We heard him in attentive silence. Afterwards, before we clapped, there was a little collective sigh of pleasure.

At the end of the evening, as people started to drift away, I went to him and asked about the story. I was warm with the wine, fluid, more forthcoming than usual. It was from the Mabinogion, a collection of medieval Welsh stories, he said. He lent me his copy, wrote his phone number in it, insisted that I had to give it back when I’d finished. I noticed that his cufflinks were little silver fish. He seemed quirky, cerebral, charming: but with a kind of reserve that made me feel at ease. Max gave me a quick knowing smile as he slid out of the room, his arm round the blonde woman, his fingers tracing the curve of her hip through the flimsy fabric of her frock, as though they were lovers already.

Yet I misread Greg, of course. The whole attraction was based on errors of interpretation. I saw his detachment as a kind of peacefulness, a safety I knew I needed. And he, I think, misunderstood me too—welcomed my shyness, my hesitancy, believing I would be happy to be a rather traditional wife, grounding him, keeping everything calm and stable: while life for him, the real thing, happened elsewhere. There’s such readiness, at some points in your life, to move on to the next stage—the old world over, the new one not yet begun. You grasp at anything you feel might take you forward. There, it’s all signed and sealed, the choices made, the path plotted out. And you find yourself in the middle way: your marriage empty, your children leaving, the mist falling over the land.

CHAPTER 9

I sit in the soft late afternoon sun that falls across my office, sipping a final coffee. I like to stay here sometimes before I head for home, letting the day and all its tensions fall from me.

The file of the last child I saw is on the desk in front of me. Gemma Westerley—a little waif in frilled socks, with hair the colour of straw and a naked, timid smile. She has special needs, though for years her teachers didn’t realise; she was quiet in class and her exercise books were orderly with hearts drawn in the margins, and nobody saw how little she understood. Now her teacher is worried she might have been abused. Her confusion is still here in the room, like a trace of smoke or perfume. I make some notes, then put the file away.

I plan my evening. There’s fish in my bag for tea. I went to the market at lunchtime and braved the fish stall with its glazed dead eyes: this made me feel like a good mother. Amber is going out later, to the Blue Hawaii for a birthday party, where they will drink cocktails named after sex acts and laced with too much v dka, and I want to make sure that at least she’s eaten properly. And when Amber has gone I shall start to tidy Molly’s room.

At the thought of Molly, I feel a little surge of anxiety. I wonder whether she woke on time this morning, and whether she has made friends with the girl with the black shiny hair. I wonder when she will ring me.

I look through some post that wasn’t urgent—courses I could go on, and a catalogue from a firm I’ve used before. They make hand puppets and therapeutic games. The catalogue is glossy, full of colours. I flick through. There’s a crocodile with a zipper mouth, to use with children who’ve been abused, to help them tell the things they’re keeping secret. There’s a wolf that’s half as big as a child. ‘A large scary wolf who can also be afraid. Is he then so scary?’ I think how Amber would have adored him when she was little and had a scheme to keep a wolf as a pet. And there’s a grey velvet caterpillar, with poppers you can undo to hatch a yellow butterfly. I shall take the catalogue home and see if there’s anything useful. Perhaps I should order the crocodile for Gemma. But I’m tempted too by the chrysalis that turns into a butterfly. I’m not sure which child I would use it with: but I love its velvet wings.

My mobile rings. I scrabble in my handbag, thinking it’s Molly.

It’s a number I don’t recognise.

‘Now, am I speaking to Ginnie?’

My pulse has skittered off before I consciously recognise his voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Ginnie,’ he says. ‘It’s Will.’ I notice how he doesn’t give his surname. ‘Look, I’ve got some info on your little patient. Quite interesting.’

‘Thanks so much,’ I tell him.

There’s a little pause, as though he’s drawing breath or working out how to put something. The sun through the window is warm on the skin of my arms.

‘Would you like to meet up to talk about it?’ he says.

‘That would be really helpful,’ I tell him.

‘I wondered about after work today,’ he says. ‘About six. I could do that if it suits you.’

I tell him, yes, it would suit me. We talk for a moment or two with enthusiasm about how useful this will be—to talk about it properly. Our voices are level, reasonable: we are two professionals planning a case discussion. I have a crazy fear that even over the phone he can hear the thud of my heart.

‘There’s a pub,’ he says. ‘In Acton Street. D’you know it?’

I explain, perhaps with rather too much emphasis, that it will be the easiest place in the world for me to find.

‘I’ll see you there,’ he says.

I put down the phone but his voice is still inside me. Desire ambushes me, taking away my breath.

I ring Amber. It’s her voicemail.

‘Sweetheart, look, I’m going to be late, I have to go to a meeting. There’s some lamb stew from yesterday in the fridge. It just needs heating through. Make sure you heat it for ten minutes, and be really careful to switch the ring off afterwards.’ But I know she’ll ignore my message, and go to the Co-op for crisps and a pack of Cherry Bakewells.

In the cloakroom I study myself in the mirror for a moment. I think of the dream I had of him. I hold my hands under the tap then pull wet fingers through my hair. At least I have a lipstick. My skin is still flushed from talking to him.

I take my coat from my office, and the bag with the fish in—though I’ll probably have to throw it out, it needs to be cooked today—and the catalogue with all its therapeutic toys. I decide I shall order the butterfly.

CHAPTER 10

It’s the pub that I passed when I walked home from work, a lumbering building with purple paintwork and advertisements for Sports Night. I get there too early and sit in my car round the corner, nervous, suddenly wondering why I’m here.

At exactly six I go in. At first I can’t see him. I try to remember his face, but it eludes me, though I saw it so precisely in my dream. I worry, like a girl on a first date, that he’s here and I haven’t recognised him.

He’s in the corner, by the fruit machine. I see him before he sees me. In that brief moment before he knows I’m there, he seems quite different from when we met before, his shoulders bowed, head lowered—as though something weighs on him and presses him down. As though there’s a shadow on him. This surprises me.

He looks up.

‘Ginnie.’

He’s vivid, eager, again. I forget the shadow.

He stands and kisses me lightly, his mouth just brushing my skin. I breathe in his smell of smoke and cinnamon.

‘I’ll get you a drink,’ he says.

‘I’d love a whisky.’ I wish that my voice didn’t sound so girlish and high.

The pub looks as though it hasn’t been decorated for years. The chairs have grubby corduroy seats, and there are curtains with heavy swags, and eighties ragrolled walls. You can smell hot chip oil. The place is filling up with workers from local offices, relaxing before their journey home—raucous men with florid ties, and women in crisp trouser suits and wearing lots of lip gloss. A teenage boy with an undernourished look and blue shadows round his mouth and eyes comes up to the fruit machine and starts to play.

I take off my coat, rather carefully: my body feels clumsy and ungainly. I watch all the glittering colours that chase across the fruit machine. I have a strong sense that I’m forgetting something important. Pictures of home move through my mind, a catalogue of possible disasters: Amber losing her keys and waiting on the doorstep in the cold, or starting a fire because she heats up the casserole after all and then gets sidetracked by an urgent text message. I take out my phone, I’m about to ring her again. But Will is coming back with my drink. I watch his easy grace as he weaves through the crowd towards me. Instead of ringing Amber, I turn off my phone.

He sits.

‘So you’re OK?’ he asks. Just to fill in the silence. His eyes linger on my face for a moment, then flick away. I realise he too is nervous.

‘I’m fine.’

He smiles at me rather earnestly, as though this is encouraging information.

‘I hope this pub’s all right,’ he says. ‘I thought it would be easier to talk here.’

‘Of course, it’s great,’ I tell him.

I think of the dream I had about him, his warm slide into me, the shocking openness of it. Now, sitting here in this banal place with this man who’s still a stranger, I’m embarrassed by the memory of my dream.

He sips his beer.

‘Let me tell you,’ he says. ‘About young Kyle.’

‘Yes. Please.’

‘You were absolutely right,’ he says. ‘In what you suspected. The father’s very violent.’

I nod.

‘The mother called us a few times. I had a word with Naomi Yates, who’s her liaison officer. Nasty stuff: he used to choke her, she said. It started when she was pregnant. As so often.’ A kind of weariness seeps into his voice.

‘Did he ever hurt Kyle directly? ‘

‘Not so far as we know. That happens, doesn’t it?There are men who’ll beat up their wives and not lay a hand on the kids.’

‘Yes,’ I say.

He takes a sip of his beer. I watch his hands, his long pale fingers curving round the glass.

‘She’d leave and then go back to him. You know the story—these women who keep on leaving and then can’t stay away. All it takes is some tears and a bunch of cut-price roses. It’s one of the great mysteries, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘Why women don’t just give up on these psycho husbands.’ When he frowns, there are hard lines etched in his face. ‘There’s fear, of course, but it isn’t always fear. I don’t want to buy into that whole hooked-on-violence thing, but you’ve got to wonder.’

‘Perhaps it’s remorse they get hooked on,’ I say.

This interests him. Lights from the fruit machine with all their kaleidoscopic colours glitter in his eyes.

‘You could be onto something,’ he says. ‘I imagine it’s very seductive. He sobs and says he’s sorry and it’ll never happen again… We believe what we want to believe, I guess. About the people we love.’ His gaze is on me, that intent look. ‘I mean, we all do that, don’t we?’

‘Yes,’ I say.

This hint of intimacy stirs something in me, a little shimmer of sex.

‘You know about this stuff, then, Ginnie,’ he says,after a moment. ‘Well, of course you would. You work with the kids who get caught up in it all.’

I have a sudden sharp impulse to uncover myself, to reveal something.

‘It’s not just that,’ I tell him. ‘It’s in the family.’

His eyes widen. He’s very still suddenly.

‘Now, you mean?’ He leans towards me, his voice is careful, slow. ‘Or are we talking about the past here?’

‘Not now. Now is OK. In the past. My childhood.’

‘Your childhood,’ he says gently.

He makes a little gesture, reaching his hand towards me as though to touch me. His hand just over mine. My breathing quickens—I don’t know if he hears this.

There’s a resonant clatter of coins from the fruit machine beside us. The noise intrudes and pushes us apart. Will leans back in his chair again. The teenage boy scoops up his winnings and stuffs his pockets with coins.

Will looks at me uncertainly, but the mood has changed, we can’t get back there.

‘Tell me more about Kyle,’ I say.

‘The last time was the worst,’ says Will. ‘Naomi reckons this is what triggered the mother’s breakdown. She said she was going to leave, that this time she really meant it, and he threatened her with a pickaxe. Actually, threatened doesn’t quite capture it. I think this could be the thing you need to know.’

‘Kyle built a room with Lego,’ I say, ‘but he wouldn’t open the door.’

Will nods.

‘How Naomi told it—Kyle and his mother were in the bedroom, and she pushed the wardrobe over and barricaded them in. She’d got her phone, thank God, she managed to call us. We got there just as the father was breaking down the door. Afterwards he said he wanted to make her love him. Weird kind of loving.’ He twists his mouth, as though he has a bitter taste.

I shake my head.

‘I got it totally wrong,’ I tell him.

‘I’m sure you didn’t,’ he says.

‘No, really. He’s so terrified. And I thought the thing he was so scared of—I thought it was there in the room with him. That he’d been abused or something. He’s always so afraid.’

‘It’s a pebble chucked in a pond,’ he says. ‘That kind of violence. It reaches out, it hurts a lot of people.’

‘Yes,’ I say.

A little silence falls.

He leans towards me again. His hands are close to mine on the table.

‘Tell me about yourself, Ginnie,’ he says lightly. ‘You have a family of your own? ‘

I tell him about taking Molly to university. I feel uncertain though: it makes you seem so old, to have a child at college. I wonder if he’s working out my age.

‘It made me think how when I was just eighteen, I was so sure that one day I’d have everything sorted,’ I tell him. ‘That I’d know where I was going.’

‘I know just what you mean,’ he says. ‘And then you wake up and you find you’re forty and all that’s happened is that life just got more complicated…’

Forty, I think. Shit. Forty.

‘My other one—Amber,’ I tell him. ‘She’s sixteen. I worry about her. She drinks a lot and stays out late—I mean, she’s quite pretty.’

‘Well, she would be,’ he says.

His eyes are on me. I realise I am flirting, running my hand through my hair, pushing it back from my forehead, as though it were the sleek glossy hair you can do that with. For a moment I feel I have that kind of hair.

‘And you? ’ I ask.

‘We’ve got a son. He’s eight.’

He doesn’t tell me his son’s name, or anything else about him. I’m suddenly uneasy, as though everything is fragile. I don’t know where this feeling comes from.

‘So you’ve still got all that teenage stuff to look forward to,’ I say lightly.

He nods. There’s still a wariness about him.

‘And your wife?’ I ask tentatively, thinking of the photograph in his office, the woman with the long dark fall of hair. ‘What does she do?’

‘Megan’s a photographer,’ he says.

‘That sounds so glamorous,’ I say.

‘She’s good,’ he says, with a thread of pride in his voice. ‘She doesn’t work much now though. She’s not happy with that really. But I guess we all compromise.’

I would like to hear more: I have a feverish, disproportionate curiosity about her. But Will is distracted, staring over my shoulder across the room.

‘Great,’ he says, very quietly, meaning the opposite.

I turn and follow his gaze. The man who walks towards us is shorter than Will, but authoritative, in a sharply cut linen jacket the colour of wheat. They greet each other with that slightly forced bonhomie men will sometimes use, when they know each other well but aren’t at ease together. Will introduces us: the man’s name is Roger Prior and he works in the murder squad.

‘I’m helping Ginnie with a case,’ Will tells him.

‘Great to meet you, Ginnie,’ says Roger. I’d guess he comes from a different background from Will, probably rather affluent, his voice deliberately roughened to fit in.

He leans in towards me: I can smell his aftershave, a bland, rather sweet smell, with vanilla in it. His skin against mine is cool, like some smooth fabric: his handshake seems to last a little too long. I see myself through his eyes, sitting here drinking whisky when I should be home with my family, too old to be holding a stranger’s gaze and running my hand through my hair, my voice too eager, my shoes too bright and high.

‘Will’s helping out, then?’ says Roger. ‘Will’s always pleased to help.’

‘Ginnie’s a psychologist at the Westcotes Clinic,’ says Will.

‘A psychologist?’ says Roger, his cool grey gaze on me. ‘So you can see straight into me, Ginnie?’

My laugh sounds forced and shrill. Roger has an affable look but his eyes are veiled.

‘Well, I mustn’t distract you both,’ he says. ‘I mean, from your case discussion. Good to meet you, Ginnie. Don’t let Will take advantage.’

He goes to join someone the other side of the bar: but it’s as if he’s still with us—his scepticism and cool amusement and his vanilla smell. It’s hard to talk, to recover the ease we had, as though Roger’s pragmatism has undone something. I realise I had impossible hopes of this encounter—deluded, impossible fantasies. I know it’s time to leave.

I pick up my bag.

‘Well, thanks for the drink and the info. I guess I have to go.’

I’d like him to grasp my wrist and say, Don’t go yet, Ginnie.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We both should.’

As we get up the noise in the place breaks over me, all the talk and music and laughter. I can’t believe how unaware of it I’ve been. Roger is at the bar, chatting to a very toned blonde woman, who smiles and nods subserviently at everything he says.

I follow Will to the door. I think how I’ll never see him again, and a sense of loss tugs at me.

Outside it’s getting dark and the street lamps are lit, casting pools of tawny light. There are smells of petrol and rotting fruit, and a dangerous, sulphurous smell where kids have been letting off fireworks. A chill wind stirs the litter on the pavements.

‘God, what a dreary night,’ he says. ‘You’re the only bright thing in the street.’

This charms me.

I point out where I’ve parked my car, thinking we’ll say goodbye now and he’ll leave me. But he walks beside me.

I stop by the car.

‘That was a real help,’ I tell him. I’m very polite and reserved. ‘Thanks for taking the trouble.’

I’m fumbling in my bag for my keys, keeping my head down. I’m embarrassed at what he might read in my face, something too open and hungry.

‘A pleasure,’ he says.

I expect him to say goodbye but he just stands there. It’s quiet on the pavement, just for the moment no traffic, no one passing. I feel the quiet in me everywhere. I am stilled, waiting.

‘Would you like to meet again?’ he says. ‘Perhaps for lunch or something.’

‘Yes. Yes, I’d like that. I’d like that very much,’ I say. I manage not to say Please.

‘We’ll do that, then,’ he says. ‘If you’d like to.’ But he doesn’t move.

I can feel his eyes on me, but there’s such a space between us: unbridgeable space.

‘Ginnie,’ he says.

My name in his mouth. The tenderness in his voice undoes me. I look up, meet his eyes: everything loose, fluid in me.

Slowly he moves his hand across the space between us, reaches his hand out to me, runs one finger slowly down the side of my face, tracing me out, watching me. I feel the astonishing warmth of his hand right through me: hear my quick in-breath.

He shakes his head, with that look he has, as though I puzzle him.

‘I dream about you,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say. I think of my own dream.

‘I want to make love to you. You know that, don’t you?’

I nod. I can’t speak.

We stand there for a moment. He cups the side of my face in his hand. I press my mouth into his palm: there is an extraordinary pleasure in the feel of his skin against my mouth. I would like to feel his whole body against me. He says my name again.

But people are coming towards us along the pavement—people from the bar, with their harsh raised voices and laughter. He takes a step away from me, lowers his hand. I can understand that he doesn’t want to be seen here with me: but I still feel a quick ache of rejection when he takes away his hand. I hate these people. I would like to stay here for ever on this pavement, his gaze on me, feeling his warmth on my skin. He shrugs a little.

‘We’ll speak,’ he says, and turns and walks away.

CHAPTER 11

Thursday is my day off. I decide I shall clean out Molly’s room so Greg can sleep there. Greg is working at home today, in his study under the eaves. Before I start on the bedroom I take him a mug of coffee. He’s intent on his work; he doesn’t hear me come in. In the angled light from his desk lamp, the bones and lines of his face are etched in shadow; he looks older, more severe. The room feels cloistered, apart; up here you’re scarcely conscious of the bustle of the street. You can see across the trees in people’s gardens and down to the river, on this dull wet day a sullen dark surge.

He’s checking through the editing of his latest book, an anthology of medieval Irish prose and poetry, aimed at a general readership. I glance at the page over his shoulder. There’s a little poem called ‘The Coming of Winter’: it tells how the bracken is red and the wind high and cold, the wild goose crying, cold seizing the wings of the birds.

‘I like that,’ I say.

‘It’s Irish,’ he says. ‘Probably ninth century.’

‘It makes me feel cold just to read it,’ I say.

He smiles a little. This pleases him.

‘We’re calling the book Our Celtic Heritage,’ he says. ‘Fenella reckons that anything Celtic sells.’

‘It’s a good title,’ I tell him.

‘D’you think so? I’m really not sure,’ he says. ‘I thought I’d have a word with Mother about it.’

Greg’s mother is a highly energetic woman, who likes to wear elegant layers of grey linen, and volunteers with the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, work to which she seems admirably well suited. I don’t doubt she’d have an opinion.

I put the coffee mug down on the desk beside him.

‘Not there,’ he says.

I put it on the floor.

Molly’s room has purple walls and fairy lights and a feather boa draped across the mantelpiece. She used to say smugly, No one would think it’s a lad’s room, would they, Mum? But today her room smells troublingly of vinegar and everything is covered with a velvet bloom of dust. I fling the curtains wide. This hasn’t been done for months: she lived a subterranean life, never let the day in. There are cobwebs where I’ve pushed back the curtains; I swipe at them with a duster and they break up, but the rags of web have an unnerving stickiness, lacy grey fragments clinging to my fingers. I feel a vague surge of guilt. There are certain feminine skills I’ve never really mastered—ironing, making your home gleam, straightening your hair. When the girls were small and I picked them up from school, there were women I used to notice at the gate who had clearly mastered these things, who knew what it means to be female: who were different from me, sleek and ironed and certain. I bet those women never find such cobwebs in their homes.

Molly is a hoarder. Her desk is littered with things she has no use for but can’t quite throw away—earrings speckled with tarnish, dog-eared essays, karma bracelets. I come on a handmade birthday card from Else, her German penfriend: it’s decorated with spangly stickers, and inside Else has written, in carefully looped handwriting, ‘To your 18 birthday. I wish you health, good luck and a lot of effect in your life!’

I penetrate under the bed, where I find a collapsed heap of celebrity magazines and an apple core and an open bag of crisps—the source of the vinegar smell. I heap up all the glittery chaos from her desk into boxes, and dust and polish everywhere. The room comes into focus, as though its lines and edges are clearer, sharper, than before.

And as I do these things there’s part of me that’s somewhere else entirely—as though I’m living another life in parallel to this one. A life in which I’m with Will on the pavement in the dark of the evening: and this time no one disturbs us, and he pulls me towards him and holds me to him, the whole warm length of his body pressing into mine. The sensation overwhelms me, and for a moment I sit on the bed and just let myself feel it: and the smell of his skin and the touch of his hands are almost as real as if these things are happening. As though it’s this room and my life here that is imagined. But mixed in with the longing, I feel a kind of fear. Yet what is it I’m so afraid of? That something will happen between us, that I could imperil everything? Or do I fear that nothing at all will happen, that nothing will be imperilled, that my life will just carry on, quite calmly, like before?

I hoover under the bed, and the noise brings Greg downstairs.

‘How long is this going to take?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘It’ll just be a moment or two.’

Next to the fireplace there are bookshelves that stretch to the ceiling. It’s a kind of archaeology, these layers of the past—A-level and GCSE textbooks, and, from further back, the books the girls liked as children. There have always been loud protests if I threatened to give them away. The Storyteller is here, and Death who played dice with a soldier, with his bulbous eyes and his sack, the drawing that haunts me; and Amber’s book of nursery rhymes. I turn to ‘Grey goose and gander’, that I had to read each evening, feeling a mix of tenderness and tiredness, remembering the countless repetitions of early mothering, the things that always had to be done the same. Eva can get quite poignant about this sometimes, in the Cafe Matisse after one too many Bloody Marys, leaning towards me across the table, her splendid cleavage gleaming, the candle-flames reflecting in her eyes. ‘What happened, Ginnie?’ she’ll say. ‘D’you ever think—what happened to those children? The little children you bathed and read all those stories to? Don’t you sometimes want to be back there? You know—when you could make them perfectly happy by buying a chocolate muffin. And you’re so scared for them—you fear for them, that it’s all so fragile, that something awful could happen, that they’ll stick their fingers in an electric socket or something. But the thing is, you lose them anyway. You don’t think about that, you think it’ll go on for ever.’ She’ll look down into her wine glass and slowly shake her head. ‘Sometimes I wonder—where have those little children gone?’ I always tell her that I don’t share her nostalgia—that I like the teenage years; but now as I pile these books into boxes, ready to go to the second-hand bookshop in Sunbury, it seizes me for a moment, that sense of something lost and irreplaceable.

Right at the top of the bookcase there’s a shelf of Ursula’s books. Leaves and tendrils from her drawings decorate the spines. Ursula draws such wonderful plants—extravagant, Italianate—that she sometimes gets letters from fans—Ursula, I would so love to see your garden. But the plot at her Southampton home is a few square yards of decking and a cactus: the enchanted gardens she draws are all from her imagination.I run my finger along the spines, feeling a flicker of envy; it must be good to have achieved something as solid as this whole shelf of books. The one that made all the difference for her is there—the volume of Hans Anderson fairy tales she illustrated.

She wasn’t always successful. She’d been struggling for years, largely living off Paul, her husband, wondering if it was worth it, or whether she should perhaps go back to primary teaching, when she did this book. I remember when she showed it to me—hesitant, self-deprecating—she used to be hesitant then. I could see at once it was special. There was something about these stories that suited her wayward imagination—these white-fleshed girls with their voluptuous deprivations: the mermaid trying to walk on her beautiful legs that cut her, the curve of Gerda’s white throat and the scratch of the robber girl’s knife. Everything was animate, full of sex or threat, every petal, every tree-root; tendrils of ivy clutched like greedy caressing fingers, the flowers had lascivious smiles.

Nothing much happened to start with—she sold the usual few thousand copies; and then it was chosen by children’s BBC, to illustrate a series of fairy tales read by celebrities—and suddenly everyone was buying it. Not just children either, for her books inhabited that sought-after terrain—books for children that adults also enjoy. One drawing was even reproduced in Vogue, in a piece on the New Romantics—the picture of the Little Mermaid that I have in my kitchen, that Molly found so troubling as a little girl. I remember when Ursula visited, just after the arrival of her first fat royalty cheque. She looked different. Still hardly any make-up, and her hair severely tied back, but with a new coat of the softest buttery suede. Though it wasn’t just the money. There was a new certainty about her: she knew what she was for.

My phone rings. It’s Molly.

‘Sweetheart, how are you?’

‘Well…my pimp beat me and then I got raped and I’ve started shooting up.’ She can’t quite suppress a giggle. ‘Fine otherwise.’

‘Tell me what’s happening.’

The Freshers’ Fair was great, she says, she’s joined at least thirty societies. Even the Blonde Society—you don’t have to be blonde, they just go round all the cocktail bars. And can she have a long denim skirt and some shots glasses for Christmas? And thanks for the alarm clock, but she didn’t really need it, she’s using the clock on her mobile.

‘Molly, are you eating OK? Can you manage all right with the cooker?’

‘I don’t cook much really,’ she says. ‘If I miss a meal I have Pringles.’

I question whether Pringles are a satisfactory meal.

Molly sighs extravagantly over the phone.

‘Mum, d’you ever listen to yourself? You been on one of those parenting courses or something? Look,I’m fine, OK? I’ve just joined thirty societies and I’m fine.’

‘Have you got everything you need? D’you want me to send you anything? I could send you some echinacea.’

‘OK, Mum, if you want to…’

‘Are you making plenty of friends? ‘

‘They’re really nice in my corridor. We’re going out for corridor curry tomorrow.’

‘Any men you like the look of? ’ I say tentatively.

‘Just don’t go there, Mum, OK? Anyway, half the guys in my college are gay—that’s why they have such nice trainers. Look, my phone needs recharging,’ she says. ‘I’ve really got to go.’

I finish the room. I box up the books and dust everywhere. I strip the bed and heap up the linen to take to the kitchen to wash.

It’s raining more heavily now: there’s a thick brown light in my kitchen. I make a coffee and sit at my kitchen table. Suddenly, after talking to Molly, I feel ashamed; the things I’ve been thinking astound me. All the desire has left me. I can’t believe I considered getting involved with this man, this stranger: took it seriously, half imagining it would actually happen. My family and their needs are all that seem real to me now: Amber, struggling with school work, needing stability: Molly just starting out, eager but brittle, tense with the newness of everything, joining thirty societies: Greg and the Celtic anthology that he works on with such diligence, for which he has such hopes. How could I have imagined I would put this life at risk?

I make plans. I shall put more energy into my home, my family. I shall get a private tutor to help with Amber’s Maths and one of those French courses she can do on the computer. I shall hold a dinner party; if Greg won’t take me out to dinner, then I shall ask people here: Clem and Max, perhaps—they might get on well together. I shall redecorate my kitchen, which looks so gloomy in this dull brown light. These colours I’ve loved—deep russet red, and the sort of green that has a lot of blue in it—are all too dark, too dreary. I shall paint this room a brisk cheerful colour, cream, or the yellow of marigolds. I shall have a lot of effect in my life.

I sip my coffee, hearing the rain on the gravel, like many people walking outside my window.

My phone rings and I jump. I take it out of my pocket, expecting Molly again.

‘Ginnie, it’s Will.’

My body changes when I hear his voice, something opening out in me.

‘Oh. I mean, I wasn’t expecting you.’

‘It was good to see you,’ he says.

‘Yes, it was good,’ I say.

There are moments when we choose. Maybe this is the moment: here in the silence, waiting, hearing his breathing the other end of the line.

‘Will.’ I hear how my voice is hushed now. ‘Look, I’m at home at the moment, so.’

I leave the rest of the sentence unsaid. In that moment we become conspirators.

‘OK,’ he says evenly. ‘We won’t talk long. I only wanted to ask if you’d like to have lunch some time? There’s a bar in Sheffield Street—it’s a little further from where I work, we shouldn’t be interrupted.’

He says we could meet at twelve-thirty. He tells me how to get there. We both know I have said yes already.

CHAPTER 12

The bar is empty. It has cream walls and big mirrors on the walls with elaborate gilt frames, like in an old-fashioned ballroom. As I walk in I am surrounded by reflections of reflections. There are hanging baskets full of ivies that curl and reach out like hands. The back wall is all glass, wide French windows that look out into the garden, letting in lots of light: but today the light is dull, thick, like in an old photograph. Soon it will rain again.

A barmaid is wiping glasses at a sink behind the bar: she’s young, with sharp, pretty features, her hair tied up with string. There are baguettes in a glass case. I order a whisky and go to sit by the windows on a flimsy bentwood chair. There are only one or two other people drinking here. Outside there’s a wet grey sky and eddies of starlings, and the lawn is covered in drifts of fallen leaves, soaked through and shiny as mahogany, everything fading, sifting down, except in the flowerbed where a random rose still clings to a blood-red stem. A saxophone is playing a song on the edge of memory, something I know but can’t name.

I sip my drink and read my newspaper, the same paragraph over and over, none of it making sense. My other world doesn’t exist—my children, my home, my husband: there’s just here, now, the sepia garden, the saxophone, in my mouth the taste of whisky.

Half twelve passes and Will doesn’t come. Perhaps he will never come. I was crazy, deluded, to think that he meant what he said. Undoubtedly, he has been prudent and thought better of it. What did I expect? I’m not the kind of woman men take risks for. I would like to be someone different, to be confident, at ease: a woman skilled in the way she moves her body, the way she touches a man. I would like to be balanced on one of the slender barstools, poised, rather louche, a woman who expects to be looked at: or leaning on my elbow at the bar, wearing a short black dress and vanilla-pale stockings and dazzlingly high heels, the sort of heels that make your pelvis tip and your body arch a little: a woman perhaps who has a vibrator discreet as a silvery lipstick hidden in her handbag.

The barmaid changes the CD. A lazy beat, a pensive muted trumpet. Maybe like me she only likes slow music.

I can see how it will happen, the whole thing spooling out in front of me, filmic, vivid, as though I am watching myself. How I sit here, drinking whisky, studying my paper, not looking up too often, and still he doesn’t come: and then at last I shrug and gather up my things and walk away—not very embarrassed, because I’m too old for that, but a little: watched by the barmaid with string in her hair, who has seen this before, who immediately comprehends the whole scenario. Feeling a surge of shame—the shame of having so longed for something that I have no right to, no claim on.

The music stops and you can hear the squawk and clatter of starlings in the garden. The barmaid wipes some glasses, holding them up to the light to check for smears.

I look up and into the mirror on the wall in front of me: Will is there, his reflection as he walks down the street towards me. A sudden easy happiness warms me. Of course he would do what he said. I watch him in the mirror: intrigued to see him when he can’t see me. He’s serious, unsmiling: like someone heading for a work meeting, preoccupied, someone on whom things weigh heavily. Not someone coming to meet a woman. I watch him till he walks out of the mirror.

The door opens behind me and I turn. We smile, he kisses my cheek.

I eat him up eagerly with my eyes, his worn face, knowing hands.

‘So. Was your morning OK?’ I ask him.

He shrugs. He brings the dregs of work with him—the things that still have to be done, or that have been done, but badly. While I have given no thought to such things, coming here with reckless abandon,leaving my whole other world behind. I want to peel all this preoccupation from him, to say, Don’t think about all that. Just be here with me, for a while, for this moment.

He doesn’t take off his coat: I notice this. He sits in one of the bentwood chairs; he’s too big for this feminine furniture. I sense his uncertainty. He’s looking at me, trying to read me. It would be easy to keep it all ordinary and safe: to buy him a drink, to talk about our work. The easiest thing in the world.

‘Are you hungry?’ he says.

‘Not especially.’

‘Me neither,’ he says.

I don’t know what to say now. I don’t know how to get from here to where we want to be.

I look at his face, his mouth, his dark eyes with the red flecks in, his jaw shadowed with stubble. I would like to move my hand on his face, to trace out the lines of him, to pull him towards me and press my mouth into his. I feel no guilt, just this wanting—clear, explicit, exact.

‘Perhaps we could go off somewhere?’ I say.

‘Where would you like to go? ’ he says.

‘We could go down to the river.’ My voice hushed, questioning. ‘There’s a car park I know. It’s quiet there. Perhaps we could walk by the river.’

‘I’d like that,’ he says.

I leave my whisky undrunk.

We drive there through the dull day. We talk about the traffic and the weather.

At the park by the river I stop the car. It’s raining again. It seems a bleak, forsaken place in the rain: there are puddles on the gravel, holding the grey of the sky, and a starling pecks at a litter bin. When I turn off the engine, all you can hear is the water on the roof, like drumming fingers. A single dark leaf with a rim of white light is pressed against the windscreen. I turn to him as he undoes his seat belt: I hope he will kiss me properly, but he just gets out of the car. I put on my mac but I leave my umbrella—some calculation that there’s something deeply unsexy about an umbrella. It’s as though I’m drugged or in a dream.

‘I’m sorry about the rain,’ I say. Then think how silly this sounds.

There’s one other car in the car park: a man sitting there, smoking, his newspaper propped against the steering-wheel. He stares at us, a cool unguarded stare. This makes me uneasy. I think how obvious we must be—a preoccupied man, a middle-aged woman in suede boots that are clearly all wrong for the weather, and both of us oblivious to the rain.

We walk to the left along the path by the river. Even on this dull day, the water has a faint shine, reflecting the opalescence of the sky. The river is running high and dimpled by the rain and full of movement, all its contrary surges and eddies and ripples. We can see Eel Pie Island to our right across the water, one of the biggest islands in the Thames. At either end there’s a nature reserve, huge gold willows reaching down to the water, but there are houses too, and from this bank we can see the back gardens of some of them, ending abruptly in a steep drop to the river. On the flagstones at the end of one garden sits a terracotta boy, one leg dangled over the edge, his head turned as if he’s looking down the river; he’s so precisely the colour of sunburnt flesh that you think for a moment he’s real. But there are no houses or gardens here on the bank where we walk—on one side of us the river, to the other side a tangle of bushes and trees.

Ahead there’s a noise and chaos of geese and swans on the path: an old man in a tattered coat is scattering bread from a bag, undeterred by the rain. With the birds all clustering round he’s a figure from an engraving, from one of Ursula’s fairy tales, at once grotesque and beneficent, the sort of man who might give you three gifts or three wishes. Scattering crusts, paying us no attention, around him the flurry of wings.

The river path curves. We’re out of sight of the car park and the old man. The trees hang low over the path here. A pigeon startles through the tree canopy above us, with a sound like something torn. Will takes my hand and pulls me after him, in under the trees. Bramble bushes catch at my legs. We go in a long way, so we’re hidden from the path. There’s a place where the bushes open out a bit, though the branches are low over our heads, catching at our hair. The rain doesn’t penetrate here, but it’s wet underfoot, a thick shiny mulch of dead bracken and earth and leaves.

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