Past Secrets
Cathy Kelly

Copyright

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

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

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Cathy Kelly 2006

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

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

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

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780007268658

Ebook Edition © February 2012 ISBN: 9780007389353

Version: 2017-10-28

Praise

Praise for Cathy Kelly:

‘A tear-pricking writer, capable of making you care about her characters.’

Daily Mail

‘Totally believable.’

Rosamunde Pilcher

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

Sunday Independent

‘Warm and delightful.’

New Woman

‘An absorbing, heart-warming tale.’

Company

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

Choice

‘Kelly dramatises her story with plenty of sparky humour.’

The Times

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

Irish Independent

For Laura, Naomi and Emer

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

Excerpt from The House on Willow Street

Prologue

Chapter One

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

If a road could look welcoming, then Summer Street had both arms out and the kettle boiling.

Christie Devlin had lived halfway up the street for exactly thirty years in a small but exquisite red-bricked house that gleamed like a jewel in a necklace of pretty coloured stones.

Summer Street itself was curved and ran for half a mile from the crossroads where the café sat opposite a house which had once been a strawberry-ice-cream shade and was now a faded dusky pink.

From the moment Christie had seen the graceful curve of the street, where maple trees arched like kindly aunties over the pavement, she’d known: this was the place she and James could raise their family.

Those thirty years had gone in a flash, Christie thought on this beautiful late-April morning as she went about her chores, tidying, dusting, sweeping and wiping.

Today the sun streamed in through the windows, the house seemed filled with quiet contentment and Christie didn’t have to go to work. She loved her job as an art teacher at St Ursula’s secondary school, but she’d cut back her hours recently and was relishing the extra free time.

Her dogs, Tilly and Rocket, miniature dachshunds who had clearly been imperial majesties in a previous life, were sleeping off their morning walk on the cool of the kitchen tiles. The radio was playing quietly in the background and the old steel percolator was making the rattling death throes that signalled the coffee was nearly ready. All should have been right with Christie’s world.

And it was – except for a niggling feeling of disquiet. It had been simmering in her subconscious since she’d awoken at six to the joyous chorus of birdsong outside her bedroom window.

‘Happy Anniversary,’ James had murmured sleepily when the alarm went off at a quarter past and he rolled over in the bed to cuddle her, to find Tilly squashed between them. The dogs were supposed to sleep on their corduroy bean-bags on the floor, but Tilly adored the comfortable little hollow in the duvet between her master and mistress. James lifted the outraged dog and settled her at his other side, then moved closer to Christie. ‘Thirty years today since we moved in. And I still haven’t finished flooring the attic.’

Christie, wide awake and grappling with the intense feeling that something, somewhere, was wrong, had to laugh. Everything was so normal. She must be imagining the gloom.

‘I expect the floor to be finished this weekend,’ she said in the voice that could still the most unruly class in St Ursula’s. Not that she had ever had much trouble with unruly students. Christie’s love of art was magical and intense, and transferred itself to most of her pupils.

‘Please, no, Mrs Devlin,’ begged James, in mock-schoolboy tones. ‘I don’t have the energy. Besides, the dog keeps eating my homework.’

Panting, Tilly clambered back defiantly and tried to make her cosy nest in between them again.

‘The dog would definitely eat the homework in this house,’ James added.

Christie took hold of Tilly’s warm velvety body and cuddled her, crooning softly.

‘I think you love those dogs more than you love the rest of us,’ he teased.

‘Of course I do,’ she teased back. Christie had seen him talking adoringly to Tilly and Rocket when he didn’t think anyone noticed. James was tall, manly and had a heart as soft as butter.

‘Children grow up and don’t want cuddles, but dogs are puppies for ever,’ she added, tickling Tilly gently in her furry armpits. ‘And let’s face it, you don’t run around my feet yelping with delight when I get home from work, do you?’

‘I never knew that’s what you wanted.’ He made a few exploratory barking noises. ‘If I do, will you whisper sweet nothings to me?’ Christie looked at her husband. His hair was no longer a blond thatch. It was sandy grey and thinning, and he had as many fine lines around his face as she had, but James could still make Christie smile on the inside.

‘I might,’ she said.

From the bedroom floor, Rocket whimpered, wanting to be included in the fun.

James got out of bed and scooped her on to the duvet beside her mistress, whereupon Rocket began to smother Christie in kisses.

‘I hope I get to come back as one of your dogs in my next life,’ he remarked, heading to the bathroom for his shower.

Christie shivered. ‘Don’t even speak like that,’ she said, but she was talking to a closed door.

Thirty years in this house. How had the time passed so quickly?

‘I love it,’ she’d told James that first day, as she stood, pregnant with their second child, Shane, outside number 34, a house they could only afford because it required what the estate agent hilariously described as ‘a wee bit of renovating’.

‘You’re sure you don’t prefer the mock-Tudor heap seven streets over?’ asked James, holding tightly to little Ethan’s hand. At the grand old age of three and a quarter, Ethan’s current favourite hobbies included trampolining on his bed and wriggling out of his parents’ grasp to fling himself in danger’s path.

Christie had arched a dark eyebrow at her husband.

The heap’s front garden had been tarmacked while the back garden contained two fierce dogs who hadn’t responded when Christie instinctively reached out her hand. There was a sinister brick-sized hole in one of the upstairs windows and when James had casually asked the estate agent why there was no gun turret complete with AK47 peeking out, Christie had had to smother her laughter.

‘Call me old-fashioned,’ she told James, ‘but I somehow prefer Summer Street and this house.’

Despite the obvious dilapidation, the very bricks of number 34 seemed to glow with warmth, and the stained-glass oriel window over the graceful arched porch was in its original condition.

From where they stood, the Devlin family could see the Summer Street Café with its aqua-and-white-striped awning and paintwork. On the pavement outside stood white bistro chairs and three small tables covered with flowered sea-blue tablecloths that looked as if they’d been transported from a Sorrento balcony.

On the same side of the street as the café there were terraced houses; then a couple of slender detached houses squeezed in; eight small railway cottages, their classic fascia boards traced with delicate carvings; then a series of redbricks including theirs; five 1930s bungalows and, finally, a handful of one-storey-over-basements. The other side of Summer Street was lined with more terraced houses and cottages, along with a tiny park: two neatly kept acres with a colonnaded bandstand, an old railway pavilion and a minuscule fountain much loved by the pigeons who couldn’t bear to poop anywhere else.

The maple trees that lined the street were flanked by colourful border plants, while even the doors to the dizzying variety of houses were painted strong bright shades: cerulean blues, poinsettia scarlets, honeyed ambers.

Christie would always remember how James had responded when she’d said she loved the house. He’d put the hand that wasn’t holding on to Ethan around hers and squeezed.

‘Then we’ve got to have it,’ he’d said.

They hadn’t even looked inside.

When Christie told astonished people afterwards that they’d decided to buy 34 Summer Street without crossing the threshold, she’d explained that you knew when you were in the right place. Homes were about more than actual walls.

‘You can’t go far wrong with a well-built redbrick,’ James’s brother said sagely, put out by all this talk of feelings.

And indeed, the house was beautifully proportioned even though it was sadly down at heel, like a genteel lady who’d fallen on hard times but still polished the doorstep every morning even when she could barely afford milk for her tea.

But James and Christie knew it was more than decent proportions or the welcoming width of the copper-coloured front door that had made up their mind. Christie had simply known it was the home for them and James had learned to trust his wife’s instincts.

When she, James and Ethan moved in a month later, they were the proud owners of a ramshackle four-bedroom pile with one bathroom, nothing resembling a usable kitchen and a butterfly sanctuary for a garden.

In those days, there was no three-storey apartment block at the bottom of the street and no unneighbourly huffing about parking since most families were lucky to own just one car. But it was also before the park was given the primary-coloured playground equipment where small children roared with both delight and temper, depending on how the arguments were going over whose go it was on the slide.

Christie used to take Ethan and Shane to the park to play. Now, she walked Rocket and Tilly along the neatly trimmed pathways. Her two beautiful granddaughters, Sasha and Fifi, had been wheeled into the park in their buggies, and Sasha, now two and a half, loved hurling herself at the fountain as if she was about to leap in. Just like her dad, Christie thought fondly.

Ethan had always had so much energy. He’d thrown himself into life at full tilt from his very first breath. And he’d adored Summer Street.

‘We’d better get the mower out,’ James had observed that first day as Ethan ran into the garden, whooping with excitement, his blond head almost disappearing in the long, wild grass. The van they had rented to move their belongings was parked on the drive and a few friends were due round to help shift all the heavy stuff. But for the moment, the small family were alone. ‘It’s like a jungle out there.’

‘It’s like a jungle in here too,’ Christie had said wryly, looking up at the corner of the kitchen where a particularly murky black bit of wall stood out amid the peeling cat-sick-yellow plaster. ‘Please tell me there wasn’t that much mould on the walls when we viewed. We should have got the infectious diseases people to survey the house instead of an architect.’

‘You think we’ll be eaten in our beds by a noxious house fungus?’

Christie smiled affectionately at her husband, who’d given their son both his blond hair and sunny disposition. The pride of finally owning their own house shone in James’s eyes, noxious fungus notwithstanding.

‘Probably. Now, are you going to rescue Ethan, or am I to shift my five-months-pregnant bulk out after him?’ Tall and normally slender, she’d carried Ethan easily with a neat little basketball of a bump that was unnoticeable from behind. This time round, her slender figure was a distant memory and she felt like a giant stretch-marked pudding, equally enormous whichever angle she was viewed from.

Her sister Ana reckoned it was second baby syndrome, where all the muscles gave up the ghost. But Christie knew that her inexplicable cravings for huge bowls of deep-fried banana with ice cream hadn’t helped.

‘I’ll go and rescue him, o Massive One,’ James said, laying a hand on her swollen belly. ‘I don’t want you so tired out that you don’t have the energy to christen the house with me tonight.’ He grinned suggestively.

A laugh exploded out of Christie. The exhaustion of pregnancy meant she was asleep by nine most nights and not even a vat of aphrodisiacs could rouse her. But then she relented, seeing the look of hope on her husband’s face.

‘Back massage first,’ she bargained. Why her back should be an erogenous zone, Christie didn’t know. But feeling James’s supple hands kneading away her aches always got her in the mood for love.

‘Deal.’

The upside of living in such a wreck of a house was that Christie didn’t have to worry about Ethan crayoning on the walls, though he was an intrepid mountaineer so she spent much of her time rescuing him from various pieces of the second-hand furniture which was all they could afford. The downside of the house was that it seemed to take for ever before the damp was banished and they could eat a meal without a bit of ceiling falling on to their plates.

Now, a lifetime later, Ethan was thirty-three, Shane was almost thirty and Christie was a grandmother twice over.

The long dark hair she’d worn in a loose ponytail all those years ago was now cut to jaw length and waved, its cool silvery white highlighting the warmth of her olive skin and dark, winged eyebrows.

She still wore a delicate flick of eyeliner, which gave her eyes a magical tilt at each olive green corner, but had swapped the block of cake eyeliner she’d grown up with for a modern miracle liner pen. She liked embracing new things, believing that living too much in the past made a person look their age.

The kitchen wasn’t showing its age, either. Currently on its third incarnation, it had been decorated in brightly coloured chic, then antique pine and was now showcasing modern maple. Many woman-hours of hard work had turned the garden into a honeytrap for lazy bees, which moved from one variety of lavender to another in the height of summer.

Now, in the last days of April, the old French rose that Christie had been nurturing to sweep over the pergola had produced its first decent crop of antique white flowers with a musky, amber scent. Her garden was so sheltered that her roses bloomed at least a month before they should and she could smell their fragrance from the open window as she stood rinsing the breakfast dishes at the sink.

Scrubbing at some stubborn crumbs of toast glued to a white plate, Christie tried to rationalise the niggling anxiety in her head.

Anniversaries brought up old memories, that was all it was, surely.

Christie had been so lucky these past thirty years. Blessed, almost. There had only been that one time in her married life when it had all nearly gone wrong, and, like catching a falling glass before it hit the floor, Christie had averted the disaster. There was a tiny crack left behind from that time, but nobody except Christie could see it. That couldn’t trouble her now, could it?

No, she decided firmly, as she slotted the clean plate into the drying rack. That was all in the past.

She knew she was blessed. James was as good a husband as he’d been when she married him. Better, in fact. They’d grown closer as they’d grown older, not apart, like so many others did. Christie knew plenty of people her own age who’d stayed married and had nothing to show for it except spite and old wedding photos. They bitched and bickered and made everyone around them uncomfortable. Why bother? Christie wondered.

Wouldn’t it be better to be happy on your own instead of coupled off in sheer misery? She liked to think that if she and James fell out, God forbid, they could end it with dignity and move on.

‘I bet you wouldn’t,’ her sister Ana had pointed out mischievously once, at the end of one long night on the small terrace in the garden when the wineglasses were empty and the conversation had turned to what-ifs.

‘There wouldn’t be a bit of dignity involved. I bet you’d stab James with your secateurs one night, bury him under the rhubarb and act delighted when it turned out to be a good crop!’

‘Ah, Ana,’ said James, feigning hurt. ‘Christie would never do that.’ He paused for effect, looking round the garden his wife adored. ‘The lilac tree needs fertilising, not the rhubarb. That’s where she’d bury me.’

‘You’re both wrong,’ said Christie amiably, reaching out to clasp her brother-in-law Rick’s hand. ‘I’m going to bury James right here, under the flagstones, then Rick and I are going to run off into the sunset together.’

‘As long as I get this house,’ Ana said, getting to her feet, ‘the pair of you can do what you want.’

It was a beautiful house, Christie knew. One of the loveliest on Summer Street. Christie’s artistic talent had made it just as beautiful inside as outside.

‘If Mum and Dad could see this place,’ Ana said wistfully as the sisters hugged goodbye in the hall where Christie had black-and-white photos of the family hung alongside six watercolour paintings of irises of the kind that she used to sell to make money during the early days of paying the Summer Street house mortgage.

‘Dad would hate it,’ laughed Christie easily. ‘Too arty farty, he’d say.’

‘Ah, he wouldn’t,’ protested Ana, who at fifty-four was the younger by six years. ‘He’d love it, for all that it’s nothing like the house in Kilshandra.’

Kilshandra was where they’d grown up, a small town on the east coast that was never a destination, always a place cars drove past en route to somewhere else.

‘No, it’s not like Kilshandra,’ Christie murmured and the fact that it was nothing like her old home was one of the best things about it.

Thinking of the past made the anxiety tweak again. She didn’t want to think about the past, Christie thought with irritation. Get out of my head. She’d spoken out loud, she realised, as the dogs looked up at her in alarm.

The dishes done, she poured a cup of coffee to take into the garden while she went through her list for the day. She had groceries to buy, bills to pay, some letters to post, a whole page of the by-the-phone notepad filled with calls to return…and then she felt the strange yet familiar ripple of unease move through her. Like a thundercloud shimmering in a blue sky, threatening a noisy downpour. This time it wasn’t a mild flicker of anxiety: it was a full-scale alert.

Christie dropped her china cup on the flagstones. Both Rocket and Tilly yelped in distress, whisking around their mistress’s feet, their matching brown eyes anxious. We didn’t do it, we didn’t do it.

Automatically, Christie shepherded them away from the broken china.

‘You’ll cut your paws,’ she said gently, and shooed them safely into the kitchen. Dustpan in hand, she went outside again and began to sweep up.

Her whole life, Christie had been able to see things that other people couldn’t. It was a strange, dreamy gift: never available on demand and never there for Christie to sort out her own problems. But when she least expected it, the truth came to her, a little tremor of knowing that told her what was in another person’s heart.

As a child, she’d thought everyone could do it. But there was no one in her deeply religious home whom she could ask. Something warned her that people might not like it. Her father prayed to centuries-dead saints when things went wrong, ignoring them when all was well, but he disapproved of the local girls having their fortunes told and hated the Gypsies’ gift of sight with a vengeance. Her mother never ventured any opinion without first consulting her husband. Opinions that Father didn’t approve of meant his black rage engulfed the house. So Christie had learned to be a quiet, watchful child. Her six elder brothers and her baby sister made enough noise for nobody to notice her, anyhow. And as she grew older and realised that her gift wasn’t run of the mill, she was glad she’d kept it quiet.

How could she tell people she’d known the McGoverns’ barn was going to burn down, or that Mr McGovern himself had set fire to it for the insurance money?

The first time she even hinted at her gift was when she was nineteen and her best friend, Sarah, had thought Ted, handsome with smiling eyes and a blankly chiselled face like Steve McQueen, was the man for her.

‘He loves me, he wants to marry me,’ said Sarah with the passion of being nineteen and in love.

‘I just have this feeling that he’s not being entirely honest with you. There’s something a bit two-faced about him,’ Christie had said. It was a flash of knowing that Ted didn’t love Sarah and that there was someone else Ted made promises to.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Sarah angrily.

Christie noted the anger: there was a lot of truth in the cliché about shooting the messenger.

It transpired that Ted had indeed been seeing another girl, one whose family had money, not like Sarah or Christie, who came from a world of hand-me-down clothes and making do.

‘How did you know?’ asked Sarah when her heart was broken.

‘It sort of came to me,’ Christie said, which was the only way she could explain it.

The closer the person was to her, the fuzzier it became. For herself, she could never see anything. Which was probably as it should be. Except that today, for the first time ever, she’d had a horrible feeling that the premonition of gloom was for herself.

In the pretty kitchen with its bunches of herbs hanging from the ceiling, a place where Christie always felt perfectly happy, panic now filled her. Her family. Something awful must be about to happen to them and she had to stop it. Yet, the feeling had never been like this before. She’d never, ever seen any harm coming to her sons or James.

There was the day thirteen-year-old Shane had broken his collarbone falling from a tree, and Christie had been on a school trip to a gallery, explaining the gift of Jack B. Yeats to twenty schoolgirls.

When the frantic St Ursula’s secretary had finally reached Christie, she’d cursed her own inability to see what mattered. How could she not have seen her own son in pain? What use was her gift if it only worked for other people?

This morning, within ten minutes, Christie had phoned her two sons to say a cheery hello, she was thinking about them and her horoscope had said she was going to have an unfortunate day, and she thought it might extend to them, so not to walk under any ladders.

Finally, Christie phoned James, whom she’d only said goodbye to two hours before as he headed off to the train station for a meeting in Cork.

‘Is everything all right, Christie?’ he asked carefully.

‘Fine,’ she said, not wanting to transmit the intensity of her fear to him. ‘I felt a bit spooked, that’s all. It’s thundery here.’ Which wasn’t true. The sky was as blue and clear as the single oval sapphire in her antique engagement ring. ‘I love you, James,’ she added, which was entirely true. And then the signal on his mobile phone went, the connection was severed and Christie was left with her feeling of terror still beating a tattoo in her chest.

She left a message on her husband’s mobile phone: ‘I’m fine. Off shopping now, phone me later and tell me if you’re able to get the earlier train. I love you. Bye.’

James worked for a government environmental agency and had worked his way up the ranks so he now held a senior position. He travelled round the country a lot, and Christie worried that the endless trips were getting too much for him. But James, still fired up wanting to be busy and to make sure that everything was done properly, loved it.

By ten, Christie was on her way along Summer Street with her shopping bags in her hand, trying to put the fear out of her mind. On the three days a week when she worked at St Ursula’s, she turned left when she walked out of her garden gate. Today, she’d turned right in the direction of the Summer Street Café.

It was a pleasant time of day, with not much traffic. The stressed morning drivers were at their offices and Summer Street belonged to the locals again. Many of Christie’s original neighbours were gone, but there were some who’d lived on the street nearly as long as the Devlin family.

Like the Maguires, Dennis and Una, possessors of a series of clapped-out cars and gloriously oblivious to the outrage of their current next-door neighbour who clearly felt that a car with that many dents in its paintwork should not be parked beside her gleaming BMW. The Maguires had one daughter, Maggie: a good kid, Christie recalled. Tall, shy, always polite, hiding her prettiness behind a heavy veil of carroty red curls as if she needed a retreat from the world. She’d never been in Christie’s art classes but, like many of the girls on Summer Street, she’d had a crush on Shane. Lots of girls had. It was that combination of tousled blond hair and a slightly cheeky smile. He was a few months older than Maggie – extraordinary that they could both be thirty now – and indifferent to her pubescent longing.

‘Just say hello to her,’ Christie said, exasperated that Shane couldn’t see that even a few words from her idol would make a difference to this shy girl.

‘Ah, Mum, she’ll only think I like her. Get real, would you?’

‘What does that mean?’ demanded his mother. ‘Get real? I am being real. I’m saying show a bit of kindness, Shane. It doesn’t cost you anything, does it?’ Her voice had risen up the scale.

‘OK,’ he muttered, realising his mother was off on her high horse about how goodness and kindness filled your soul with happiness. It was a sweet idea and all, but it didn’t work with girls, did it? ‘I’ll say hi, right?’

‘And be nice.’

‘Should I propose as well?’

Maggie lived in Galway now and Christie hadn’t seen her for ages.

But the adult Maggie had lived up to the early promise Christie had seen in her. She was truly stunning-looking, her hair darkened to glossy auburn, her face a perfect oval with silvery cobalt-blue eyes, wide expressive lips and the translucent skin of the pure redhead. Yet she didn’t appear to be aware of her beauty. Rather the opposite, in fact. Christie sensed that Maggie Maguire was still hiding her real self.

‘She’s doing so well,’ Una Maguire said every time Christie asked. All those years ago, Una had been red-haired, too, but now the red was a faded strawberry with fine threads of grey. She was still beautiful, though, with the fine-boned face her daughter had inherited. ‘Maggie’s going out with this fabulous man. He’s a lecturer in the college and she’s in the library research department now. They’re made for each other. Living together for three years and they have a beautiful apartment off Eyre Square. No sign of them getting married, but young people don’t bother with that these days.’

‘No, they don’t,’ agreed Christie easily, who understood quite plainly that Una longed with all her heart for her only child to be settled down with a husband and children.

They’d gone on their separate ways, Christie sure that Una had no notion of what she’d really seen in Una’s heart.

Along with learning about her odd gift, Christie had learned that mostly people didn’t want you to know their deepest, darkest secrets. So she kept her insights to herself unless she was asked.

Ten yards ahead of her, Amber Reid shot out of her gate at number 18, long tawny-gold hair bouncing in the telltale manner of the newly washed. Amber was seventeen, in her final year at St Ursula’s and undoubtedly one of the stars of Christie’s class.

Amber could capture anyone or anything with her pencil, although her particular gift was for buttery oil landscapes, wild moody places with strange houses that looked like no houses on earth. Even in a large class, Amber stood out because she was so sparky and alive.

An unfashionable pocket Venus shape, with softly curved limbs and a small, plumply rounded face, her only truly beautiful feature was that pair of magnetic pewter eyes, with the ring of deepest amber around the pupils. She’d never have been picked as one of the school’s beauties, the languorous leggy girls with chiselled cheekbones. Yet Amber’s vivaciousness and the intelligence of those eyes gave her an attractiveness that few of the teenage beauty queens could match. And the artist in Christie could see the girl’s sex appeal, an intangible charm that a photographer might not capture but an artist would.

Christie knew that unless St Ursula’s had been evacuated for some strange reason that morning, Amber should be in school. And yet here she was, trip-trapping along in achingly high heels and a colourful flippy skirt that flowed out over her hips – unlike the institutional grey school uniform skirt that jutted out in an unflattering A-line. Amber was holding a mobile phone to her ear and Christie could just overhear.

‘I’m just leaving now. Has anyone noticed I’m not there? MacVitie’s not got her knickers in a twist over the absence of her best student?’

Mrs MacVitie was the maths teacher and Christie doubted that Amber, who was typically left-brained and hopeless at maths, was her best student. Favourite, perhaps, because it was hard to resist Amber, who always paid attention in class and was a polite, diligent student. But not best.

She must be speaking to Ella O’Brien, to whom she was joined at the hip, and Ella obviously told her that no, the St Ursula’s bloodhounds had not been alerted.

‘Sweet. If anyone asks, you think I was sick yesterday and it must have got worse. I phoned in earlier and told the school secretary I was sick but, just in case, you back me up and say I’m puking like mad. It’s true,’ Amber laughed. ‘I’m sick of school, right?’

Christie wondered if Faye, Amber’s mother, knew what her daughter was up to.

Faye Reid was a widow, a quiet, businesslike figure who’d never missed a school meeting and was utterly involved in her daughter’s life. Even though they lived on the same street, Christie didn’t see much of Faye. She kept herself to herself, head down, rushing everywhere, clad in conservative navy suits and low-heeled shoes, with a briefcase by her side. There was such a contrast between the butterfly beauty of Amber who had the best of everything and caught people’s eyes, and her mother, who always appeared to be rushing to or from work, trying hard to keep the mortgage paid and food on the table. A person didn’t need Christie’s gift of intuition to see that Faye’s life had been one of sacrifices.

‘She’s one of the most gifted students I’ve ever taught,’ Christie had told Faye two years before, shortly after Amber arrived in her class. ‘Any art college in the world would love to have her.’

And Faye’s face had lit up. Christie had never seen a smile transform a person so much. Faye was defiantly plain beside her daughter, overweight to Amber’s curved sexiness and with her brown hair pulled severely back into a knot that only someone with the bones of a supermodel could get away with. Faye Reid didn’t have the supermodel bones. But when she smiled that rare smile, she suddenly had all the charm of her daughter and Christie caught herself wondering why a woman like Faye, who could only be forty, lived such a quiet life. No man had ever been seen kissing Faye a wistful goodbye on the doorstep. Her clothes, the discreet earrings and low shoes that screamed comfort – they were like armour. It was as if Faye had deliberately turned her back on youthful sexiness and hidden behind a façade of plain clothes.

Christie wondered if she could see more…but suddenly, it was as if Faye Reid had abruptly closed herself off and Christie could see nothing but the woman in front of her.

‘Thanks, Mrs Devlin,’ Faye said. ‘That’s what I think too, but I love her so much, I thought I was totally biased. Every parent thinks their kid is Mozart or Picasso, don’t they?’

‘Not all,’ replied Christie grimly, thinking of some of the parents she’d met over the years with no belief in their kids whatsoever.

Her comment apparently touched a chord with Faye and the smile vanished to be replaced by her more usual, sombre expression. ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ she said, nodding. ‘There are always a few who don’t appreciate their kids. Nothing that twenty years of psychotherapy wouldn’t cure.’

Up ahead, Amber said a cheery ‘byee’ into her phone. Christie knew that the correct teacher response at this point would be to catch up with her and ask what she was doing out of school. But suddenly Amber broke into a run, high heels notwithstanding, and was gone down the street before Christie could move.

Christie shrugged. Amber was a good student, hardly a serial absentee. She and Ella had never been part of the school’s wilder cliques and had both managed to move from adolescence to young womanhood without any noticeable bursts of rebellious behaviour.

There might be a perfectly good reason for her absence today. And Christie herself knew that you could learn plenty of things outside school as well as in.

When she’d been young, she hadn’t done everything by the book either.

Yet again, Christie thought about the past and the places she’d lived. The house in Kilshandra with bitterness and misery engrained into the wallpaper so that she’d barely been able to wait till she was old enough to leave. The bedsit on Dunville Avenue where she’d met so many friends and learned that she didn’t have to hide her gift. And Summer Street, where all the best things in her life had happened.

She could remember what the young Christie had looked like when she’d moved to Summer Street – long dark hair drawn back in a loose ponytail, always in jeans and T-shirts – and she could remember how lucky she’d been, with a kind husband, enough money so they weren’t in debt, with one beautiful, healthy child and another on the way. Yes, the years on Summer Street were the ones she liked to remember.

But there were other times she’d like to forget.

The strange feeling came through her again and despite the warmth of the morning, Christie shivered.

CHAPTER TWO

Amber Reid was concentrating so fiercely on getting to the bus stop in time that she hadn’t noticed Mrs Devlin walking along Summer Street behind her. This was despite her intention to watch out for anyone who might sneak to her mother about her appearance out of uniform on a school day.

‘We’re going on a field trip,’ Amber had planned to say blithely should the need arise, though the final-year students at St Ursula’s didn’t have time for field trips this close to the all-important state exams. And even if they did, what sort of field trip would require her best high heels – Oxfam spindly sandals revitalised with bronze paint – a sliver of a silk camisole and a flippy skirt, all topped off with the curious and fabulous silver tiger’s-eye pendant she’d recently found buried in her mother’s bottom drawer? The pendant was a mystery. She’d never seen her mum wear it. Faye dressed in boring suits and was resolutely against making the best of herself, no matter what Amber said. The pendant was so not ‘her’. Amber was still wondering where her mother had come by such a thing. She didn’t like to ask, because Mum would be hurt that she had been snooping. But it was odd of her to keep it hidden because they shared everything.

Well, not everything. Amber felt a splinter of guilt pierce her happy little cocoon. Today was a secret she couldn’t share with her mother. It wasn’t the first time she had concealed something. Mum was so square, so protective, that on the rare occasion that Amber had done anything outside her mother’s rigid code of what was acceptable, she’d had to fib a little. But the current secret was certainly the biggest.

Ella had phoned just as Amber slammed the front door behind her.

‘Ring me later and tell me how you got on, won’t you?’ Ella begged.

‘Promise.’

‘Wish I was bunking off,’ Ella grumbled. ‘I’ve history in ten minutes and I haven’t finished my bloody essay on the Civil War.’

‘Sorry, I did mine and I could have lent it to you so you could use some of my ideas,’ Amber apologised. She loved history and the words flowed effortlessly from her pen to the page. Although how she’d written her essay last night was largely a mystery, as she’d been consumed with excitement thinking about today.

When she’d said goodbye to Ella, she broke into a run so as to race past the Summer Street Café in case of neighbours lurking within.

A minute later, she was at the bus stop on Jasmine Row, just in time to catch the 10.05 bus into the city, and Karl.

Karl. She whispered his name to herself as she gazed dreamily out of the windows on the top deck. Karl and Amber. Amber and Karl.

It sounded just right, like they were destined to be together.

Destiny had never been a concept Amber had held much faith in up to now. Just a few weeks away from her eighteenth birthday, and a month from the hated exams, she felt that she was in charge of her own life.

So she’d only been half paying attention when Ella read their horoscopes that fateful Friday at lunch. Horoscopes were fun but hardly to be relied on. Mum always insisted that Amber was responsible for herself and that life should not be lived on the word of what some astrologer had dreamed up for that day.

Mum was firm that Amber should never follow the crowd or do anything just because of someone else’s opinion or because ‘everyone else is doing it’. It was a lesson Amber had followed very well up to now.

‘Crap for Aries, as usual,’ muttered Ella, reading hers quickly. ‘“Rethink your options but don’t let your enthusiasm wane.” What does that mean? Why doesn’t it ever give us hints on what’s coming up in the maths paper? Now that would really be seeing the future.’

They were eating lunch on the gym roof – strictly forbidden but the current cool spot for sixth years – plotting their weekend and how to fit exam study in around at least one trip to the shopping centre to flip through rails of clothes they couldn’t afford. All study and no play made you go mad, Ella insisted.

‘Yours is better. “Single Taureans are going to find love and passion. Expect sparks to fly this weekend.”’

‘Sparks at the football club disco?’ Amber roared with laughter at the very ridiculousness of this idea. It was the same big gang of people she’d known all her life and you couldn’t get excited about a bunch of guys you’d watched grow up. Where was the mystique or the romance of that?

‘Patrick?’

‘Too nice. He’d want to walk along with his hand in your jeans pocket and yours in his and discuss the engagement party. Gross.’

‘Greg’s cute.’

‘He called me Chubby Face once. No way.’ Growing three inches taller in the past year meant Amber had gone from being childishly plump to womanly and voluptuous. The addition of honeyed streaks in her rich brown hair meant that all the boys who’d previously talked to her like a clever younger sister suddenly sat up and took notice.

This new power over guys was heady and Amber was still testing it, gently. But she wanted to go somewhere more exciting than the football club disco to do so. Somewhere, beyond the confines of Summer Street, the football club disco and St Ursula’s was Life with a capital L: pulsing, exciting, waiting for her.

‘You’re getting so choosy,’ said Ella. ‘You fancied Greg last year.’

‘That was last year.’

‘Should I get more highlights?’ asked Ella, pulling forward a bit of the long, streaky blonde hair that was almost mandatory in sixth year and examining it critically. ‘Your highlights look great but mine have gone all dull and yellowy.’

‘Use the special shampoo for blondes,’ said Amber.

‘It costs a fortune. I bet your mum buys it for you. Mine wouldn’t.’ Ella was indignant. Because there were only the two of them, Amber’s mum bought her everything she wanted, while Ella’s, with three older sons as well, could hardly do the same thing.

‘I’ll give you some of my shampoo,’ offered Amber. She knew how lucky she was and always shared any goodies with Ella. That’s what best friends were for. ‘Now, tomorrow night.’ The pewter eyes gleamed. ‘Not the football club disco, please.’

‘Well…’ Ella began. ‘We could try something different.’

‘…Something bad…’ Amber shivered deliciously. ‘Let’s try to get into a grown-up club. Come on, in a few months, we’ll have left school and we’ll be the only people in our class to have never done anything interesting, Ella. Everyone else has gone to clubs they’re not supposed to be able to get into, except us because we’re the sensible ones. I’m fed up being sensible.’

Sensible was nice when you were thirteen and adored by all the teachers, but less so when you were nearly eighteen. The girls who never had their homework done and never got top marks in exams seemed to be having all the fun now, which seemed like an unequal division of spoils.

‘Me too,’ Ella breathed. ‘And I’ve just thought how we can do it.’

Amber’s eyes glittered. ‘How?’

This feeling of dissatisfaction had in fact been incubating for weeks. Fed up with studying for exams and stifled by the pressure-cooker atmosphere at school, they felt the need to do something wild and rebellious for the first time ever, but their options were limited.

Most of their pocket money went on clothes or their mobile phone top-up cards, so they had little cash left over for wild behaviour.

Smoking was considered cool by some of the older girls, who insisted that it kept them thin, but cigarettes were too expensive to be more than a rare treat. Alcohol was easily available, like hash and ecstasy, but Amber’s mother had a nose like an airport sniffer dog and could smell badness anywhere, so coming home drunk or stoned was hardly an option. Faye would have had a fit and grounded her for a month, not to mention being hurt by her daughter’s behaviour, which would, in turn, make Amber feel bad for failing her beloved mother.

And that was the crux of the matter: their family unit was just two. Two people who adored each other, two people who’d gone through it all together, who protected each other from the world. But sometimes, that could be a burden too.

At least Ella had three brothers who could share living up to their parents’ expectations: Amber had the weight of her mother’s hopes and dreams resting squarely on her shoulders alone. And unlike Ella’s parents, who seemed to understand that their kids eventually tested their wings and flew the nest, Faye Reid still seemed to think that she and Amber would be together for ever.

‘What’s the plan?’ Amber asked now. ‘Where are we going? Nowhere round here, surely? There’s nothing but boring pubs.’

‘Exactly. So forget about round here.’ Ella grinned excitedly. ‘Marco’s going into town to a club tomorrow night, and if we went with him, we could get in without being carded.’

Marco was Ella’s middle brother and they both realised he was their best bet for an illegal excursion. Her eldest brother wouldn’t dream of taking two schoolgirls into a city nightclub, while her youngest brother was too square to go at all. But twenty-three-year-old Marco, who had his own late-night show on a small radio station and went to all the coolest places, just might be persuaded to take them with him.

‘Where?’ asked Amber.

‘Highway Seven.’

‘That’s twenty-ones and over.’ It was hopeless. Doormen were up to speed on the best fake IDs. Amber and Ella didn’t even have fake IDs. All the best clubs were over twenty-ones only. They’d be busted before they got in the door.

‘Yeah, but there’s a gig on there tomorrow night, some new band Marco’s going to check out for his show,’ Ella explained. ‘He’ll be on the guest list and he’ll be going in the back door of the club, so the bouncer will let him in no hassle, and if we’re with him…’

‘…We’ll waltz right in,’ laughed Amber gleefully. ‘You are one clever chick, Ella O’Brien. But how do we get Marco to take us in the first place?’

‘Bribery and corruption.’ Ella had thought it all out. ‘We’ll twist his arm this evening after school.’

Marco looked a lot like Ella: dark eyes, pale skin and the same dark hair as she’d had before she discovered peroxide. Easy-going to a fault, he wasn’t keen on taking his little sister and her friend out with him.

‘In your dreams,’ he said.

‘Mum would go mental if she knew you’d had that huge party in the house when the rest of us were in Kerry at Christmas,’ Ella said, all wide-eyed innocence. ‘The one where the neighbours called the police. You’d be chopped liver if she ever found out. You know what she’s like about not upsetting the neighbours…’

‘How did you hear about that?’ demanded Marco and then slapped his forehead and groaned. ‘You didn’t know, did you? You were just guessing.’

‘Oh, Marco, we knew about the party,’ Amber said, exasperated. ‘We were only guessing about the police, but we found some guy’s coat under Ella’s bed, along with a lot of empty Heineken cans and a condom.’

Marco blanched.

‘It’s not as if Ella put the beer cans there. We never drink beer. We prefer wine or vodka,’ she added, hoping to sound worldly-wise.

‘Can’t you go out with your own friends?’ Marco begged, not even commenting on the wine or vodka remark. It seemed like only last week his sister and her friend had been sobbing their hearts out over guinea pig funerals in the back garden and winning badges for Guides.

‘Think of it as community service for deeds previously unpunished,’ Amber pointed out. ‘We won’t be any trouble. Once we’re in the club, you can forget about us. We can look after ourselves.’

‘OK, you’re nearly eighteen and you know everything, right?’ he said sarcastically.

‘I’ve a yellow belt in karate,’ Amber said, assuming what she hoped was a karate stance, though it was years since she’d set foot on a dojo. Her mother’s insistence on self-defence lessons had been fun when she’d been ten, less so when she hit puberty.

Marco sighed. ‘Close combat is not the answer to all situations in life. The most dangerous guys in the club probably won’t ask you to arm wrestle, Amber. Understand?’ He looked at both girls as sternly as he could. ‘I don’t want to have to come home at two in the morning and tell Mum and Dad that I’ve lost you two. Or worse, tell your mother, Amber. She’d rip me limb from limb.’

Amber’s mother had always made Marco a bit nervous. There was something steely in Mrs Reid’s gaze, as if she was warning him that she had his measure.

‘We’re not kids,’ growled Amber. ‘We’re coming. It’s no skin off your nose. You only have to get us in.’

‘Well, you’ll have to watch your drinks,’ sighed Marco, knowing when he was beaten. ‘There are guys out there who’ll slip a date rape drug in your glass and, well…you don’t have any experience. You don’t know the half of it.’

‘You’re a wonderful brother.’ Ella gave him a hug.

‘This is a one-off deal,’ Marco insisted. ‘OK? And you’ve got to behave yourselves.’

‘Of course,’ said Amber, who had absolutely no intention of behaving herself. She could do that in the football club.

The truly difficult part of the plan was lying to her mother about where she and Ella were going that night. They decided that, because of Faye’s ultra-vigilance, they’d stay at Ella’s that night after their alleged trip to the disco. Having gone through it all before, Ella’s parents were definitely more relaxed about their daughter’s behaviour.

‘Mum will check we’re home, but if I put pillows in the beds, she’ll think we’re there,’ Ella said.

Amber thought of how her mum never slept until Amber was back after an evening out. How many nights had they sat up on Amber’s bed on her return, Mum listening as Amber recounted her triumphs and disasters?

Then, she brushed the feeling of guilt away. It was only because Mum was so protective that she had to lie. She wasn’t a kid any more. She didn’t want to hurt Mum’s feelings but she had to move on and Mum must be made to understand that.

Getting into Highway Seven worked precisely as Ella had predicted, although Amber only felt her breathing come right when they were deep inside the club, far from the stern eye of the doorman. In spite of her outward nonchalance, she was nervous. She and Ella might have sunbathed on the forbidden gym roof and smoked a few illicit cigarettes, but they were strictly homework-on-time girls in other respects. This was breaking into new territory, both exciting and scary at the same time.

Dark, moody and almost vibrating with bass-deep music, the club was crowded with bodies, perfume and a sweet smell that Amber knew was marijuana because even the football club wasn’t trouble-free.

‘Er…what do you want to do now?’ asked Marco, wondering how he’d got lumbered with this situation. Thankfully, the two girls looked old enough to fit in, but hey, they were still his little sister and her friend. He had a bad vibe about the whole thing.

‘We’re fine,’ Amber said airily.

‘Yeah, you go off with your mates. We’re cool,’ Ella added, matching her friend’s unconcerned look.

Marco shrugged, but he looked relieved. ‘If you’re sure…’

‘We’re sure.’ Both girls nodded.

Amber scanned her surroundings idly, her body moving gently to the music. Ella adopted the same laid-back hauteur.

Marco was no match for them. He was fooled.

‘Text me if you need me,’ he said, then turned and was swallowed up by the crowd.

On their own, Amber and Ella clutched each other and shrieked, all pretence at being cool gone. Nobody heard them over the pumping beat. ‘We’re here,’ they screeched and did their own little war dance.

‘Loos,’ gasped Amber, taking Ella by the hand.

In the toilets, they re-adopted adult cool while Amber applied a line of smoky kohl around the rims of her eyes like she’d seen in a magazine. The effect was startling: her beautiful eyes seemed larger and more hypnotic than ever.

‘You really do look twenty-one,’ sighed Ella, pausing in the act of applying another coat of sticky lip gloss.

A woman rinsing her hands at the next basin glanced at them.

‘Thanks!’ said Amber. ‘I’m actually thirty-two but my plastic surgeon is a miracle worker.’

The woman left in a hurry and they creased over laughing again, high on their own daring.

They had enough money to order one drink each, which they’d have to make last all night, and they stood at the bar, nursing their vodkas, trying to look as if they’d been here a million times before and were bored with it all.

Behind her calm façade, Amber was enthralled, watching everyone, envying them the way they all seemed to fit in.

In a corner cordoned off by velvet rope sat a dozen people drinking champagne. All beautiful, having the time of their lives, utterly at home. One slender brunette in faded, sequin-decorated jeans was holding court, talking and laughing, while everyone else watched her with evident fascination. In that one second, Amber longed to be just like her: part of the scene instead of watching enviously from the sidelines.

Then, one of the guys saw her watching them, a guy with dark cropped hair and stubble that was probably five o’clock shadow at ten in the morning. His gaze was so intense Amber looked away in embarrassment. Shit, how gauche to be caught staring hungrily like a schoolgirl.

She did her best to stare anywhere else, but she really wanted to look back at the guy and drink him in. She’d never felt that connection before, that instant buzz from another human being, the feeling that she knew him.

But who was she kidding? He was probably only staring at her because it was obvious she and Ella were out of place. She’d thought they looked old enough but perhaps they didn’t and the guy was wondering what a kid was doing there.

‘Nobody’s bothering to chat us up,’ moaned Ella beside her.

‘It’s early yet,’ said Amber with more enthusiasm than she felt. Perhaps Marco had been right and they should have gone out with their own friends, but the football club would seem so tame after this. After him.

‘Are you lost?’ said a low voice.

Amber swivelled round. The dark, crop-haired man stood beside her, staring at her with intense blue eyes. Every nerve in her body quivered into alertness, though she tried to stay calm.

‘Lost? No.’ She shrugged, hopelessly trying to adopt the laid-back aura of the brunette in the VIP section.

‘You weren’t looking for someone?’ he asked. His voice was soft and deep, a man’s voice, not a boy’s.

Amber shook her head.

‘I thought you were looking for me,’ he added, ‘and you’ve found me.’

Amber just stared at him, concentrating on breathing.

Chat-up lines for her usually consisted of the guy asking what class she was in at school. This approach was wildly different. Amber felt her spine lengthen, some new instinct making her stand up straighter, yet slightly closer to him.

‘I wasn’t looking for you,’ she said, nonchalant. How was she doing this? She’d never spoken this way before, like a heroine from a film. ‘I was watching people. I’m an artist: I like watching people.’

‘You draw them, then?’

Amazingly, he didn’t spot that she was making this up as she went along. Buoyed up, Amber lowered her eyelids and gave him a sultry gaze she’d rehearsed in her bedroom in front of the faded line of her childhood teddy bears.

‘If I like the shape of them and the look of them, I might draw them,’ she replied coolly.

‘And me? Do you like the look of me?’ he asked.

It was noisy, so he’d moved till he was very close to her and, despite the gloom of the club, she could see that his face was moulded like a beautiful Renaissance statue: a straight, proud nose, flaring cheekbones, a finely planed forehead and a mouth so sensitive it would take a sculptor months to get right. Tightly cropped brown hair and a filament-thin cotton shirt flattened against his lean body took him into the modern era, but otherwise, he was like the historical princes of art that Amber had grown up admiring.

‘I like the look of you very much,’ she breathed, not bothering to be cool any more.

And he smiled at her, revealing an endearing dimple on one side of his mouth and perfect white teeth. Amber forgot about everything else in the world except this fabulous man. She wanted to touch him, kiss him, feel him wrap his arms around her and press his body against hers for ever. This, she thought, was love at first sight.

Karl was in a band, he told her. She introduced him to Ella and he led them over to the VIP area.

Ella squeezed Amber’s hand in delight as they were ushered past the velvet rope, but Amber was too engrossed in Karl to sense Ella’s message of ‘Wow! Look where we are now!’

Some of Karl’s as yet unsigned band were among the group. The rest, the ones who’d undoubtedly got everyone into the VIP area in the first place, were a band with an album that had just been released, the ones Marco had come to hear.

‘The Kebabs, of course I’ve heard of you! My brother came to hear you play. Tell me, you do, like tours and stuff?’ asked Ella, fascinated, as she was handed a glass of champagne.

As Ella listened to stories of life on the road, Amber barely heard a word. She was conscious only of Karl sitting beside her, with an arm loosely around the back of her seat, his leg casually close to hers.

She didn’t want to hear about anyone else, only Karl.

‘What do you do in your band?’

‘I am the band,’ Karl shrugged as if it was obvious. ‘I write the songs, I sing, I play lead guitar. The band is me.’

‘You’re an artist too.’ She smiled and took his hand, tracing the lines on it with sensitive fingers. ‘I could paint you.’

‘I could write a song about you,’ Karl said, touching her face with his other hand.

Their faces were inches apart now, Karl was drinking in every inch of her, his eyes travelling from her tawny hair, past the softness of her jaw down to the firm, high curve of her breasts highlighted in the tight little T-shirt she’d borrowed from Ella.

‘You’re so sexy,’ he whispered. His eyes roamed lower, past her waist to the rounded curve of her hips and along her jean-clad legs. For once, Amber didn’t bother trying to lift one thigh up so her leg looked thinner. There was no mistaking the fact that Karl liked her the way she was, and that was headier than any alcohol she could have drunk.

‘Get a room!’ shouted someone to them, and everyone creased up laughing.

Amber and Karl didn’t hear the jest or the insistent throbbing of the club music: they were locked into their own beat, aqua eyes in a lean face staring fiercely into grey-and-amber eyes in a gently rounded one, the red stain on each of Amber’s cheeks owing nothing to her make-up.

They moved at the same time, Karl’s arms winding around Amber’s waist, her hands spreading out to feel the heat of his torso through the thin shirt. Before her fingers had a chance to revel in the fine muscles of his back, his mouth met hers and they were kissing. It was unlike any kiss Amber had experienced: Karl’s tongue snaked into her mouth with practised ease, banishing the memory of every St Bernard slobber of a French kiss she’d ever had before. They melted against each other, his hands cupping her face, her hands raking through his hair. The heat of their bodies burned through their clothes. And long afterwards, when Amber was again capable of thinking, she realised that this was what love was all about.

As the morning bus lurched along into the city, Amber sat on the top deck in her finery and thought of how much had changed in the past two weeks. She had been a kid then, but now she was an adult.

An adult with an adult relationship. Or at least, she’d be properly having an adult relationship soon. Today, she was meeting Karl to take him home where they’d have the place to themselves all day. There was no privacy in the poky flat he shared with five other musicians. In her bedroom on Summer Street, there would be as much privacy as they needed. Briefly, Amber thought of how she’d explain it all to her mother if she arrived home early from work. She could imagine Faye’s horrified face, and how hurt she’d be to have been lied to. But Amber flicked the thought away. She’d worry about that later. Everyone had secrets, didn’t they?

CHAPTER THREE

Twice a week for the past six months, Faye Reid had taken an early lunch and walked a mile to the swimming pool complex near her office. The brisk walk past the mirror-windowed buildings of the docklands was soothing. Striding along the pavement, away from the incessant phones and the beehive drone of the busy recruitment company where she worked, she listened to music, watched seagulls swoop and dive towards the river, and relaxed.

Today, she had Billie Holiday on her portable CD player. Billie’s golden voice told of men who’d left and Faye thought how wonderful it was that, no matter how many times she heard Billie, it always sounded as if the guy had just that second gone, the screen door still banging behind him.

Music talked to Faye. Sound was the most evocative sense for her and the first few bars of a song on the radio could take her right back to where she’d been when she’d first heard it. She herself had a softly husky singing voice that few people had ever heard and could repeat a melody after only hearing it once. When she’d been Amber’s age, she’d always been singing but she rarely did now.

For music could be a curse too. There were still some songs she couldn’t listen to, songs that would break her heart because of the memories they brought to life.

Billie Holiday songs thankfully, for all their pain, didn’t fit into that category.

‘It’s lovely and everything, but it’s kind of depressing, Mum,’ Amber had pointed out the previous weekend about her mother’s love of exquisitely melancholy jazz.

‘Some of it is,’ Faye agreed, trying to see things from her daughter’s point of view. It was an unseasonably warm Saturday for the end of April and they’d spent the afternoon in the garden, Amber keen to start a dusting of golden tan on her face.

With the iron discipline Faye brought to every area of her life, the housework in the Reid household was always up to date. But when it came to gardening, she didn’t know weed from plant. Occasionally, she wished she was more like Christie Devlin who’d created an exquisite all-white garden at the front of her house. Faye had never seen Christie’s back garden, had never seen the inside of the Devlins’ house, actually, because they barely knew each other in spite of living mere doors apart for ten years, but she’d have bet that it was just as beautiful, with frothy roses and trailing blooms that flourished under Christie’s magic hands.

On this particular Saturday, Faye wore a tired pale-pink polo shirt over cheap loose-fit jeans that did nothing for her shape, and was trying to uproot any weeds she could identify. It all looked weedy to her. Surely that big thing that looked strangely like a marijuana plant couldn’t be a flower? Although since she’d thrown those packets of wildflower seeds every which way last year, it was hard to tell. That would be a fine advert for sensible single parenthood, wouldn’t it: a hash plant in Faye Reid’s garden.

She grinned. If there was any illegal vegetation in her garden, nobody would cast aspersions on the arch-conservative Mrs Reid, the very model of a career-minded widow with an equally model teenage daughter. Faye had worked very hard to reach that place in the local psyche. She’d learned that a single woman bringing up a child needed to be beyond reproach. Nobody would ever have cause to accuse her of trying to steal their husband or of letting her daughter run wild.

‘I like songs like “Respect”,’ Amber went on. She was lying on her tummy on a rug on the lawn, her feet in the air and a school book propped up in front of her. ‘Not sad ones where everyone’s depressed, like no guy will ever look at them again ’cos they messed it up the first time.’

Faye paused in her weeding.

‘You’ve got to remember, Amber, that the old jazz and rhythm-and-blues songs are from another age, when life was different and women didn’t have the same opportunities we have today,’ she said, wiping her hands on her jeans so she could clip a few strands of light-brown hair back. Faye didn’t bother with her hair much: shoulder length, wavy and undyed for many years, it got washed, tied back firmly and treated to conditioner when she had the time, which wasn’t often.

‘They didn’t have contraception, any hope of equal pay or equal rights in lots of things. So it might sound depressing to you now,’ she explained, ‘but they were brave. I think they were feminists in their own time because they sang when it wasn’t considered a decent job for women. They didn’t have what we have now. Girl power hadn’t been invented then.’

‘Yeah, I know that, but why do all the women hang around waiting for the lover man to turn up?’ Amber wanted to know, abandoning her book with a speed that showed she hadn’t been that engrossed in revising maths equations. ‘The women do all the waiting in these songs and in the old movies. If a guy doesn’t respect you, he’s going to walk all over you. They’re waiting for him to make it right. It’s so passive. You don’t need girl power to see that.’

‘You and Ella have got to stop reading the therapist’s sections in women’s magazines,’ Faye groaned, but she was smiling. ‘I thought you were going to study art, not psychotherapy.’

‘Ha ha. All I’m saying is that some people want to be rescued and that’s, like, not going to happen.’ Amber’s small face was determined, her chin lifted to signify that life would have to take her on her terms, and not the other way round. Faye felt the familiar clammy grip of a mother’s anxiety on her heart. Amber was full of energy and hope, for all her careful studying of women’s magazines’ problem pages.

What if one day, despite all Faye’s efforts at protecting her daughter, someone or something destroyed that energy and hope?

‘My little suffragette.’

Amber looked pleased. ‘I like to think so,’ she said, ‘only I’m the modern version. No chaining yourself to the railings involved. I’m glad it’s different now.’

Faye said nothing. It was hard to tell a seventeen-year-old with her whole life ahead of her that heartache and loss crossed every century, women’s rights notwithstanding. She sat back on her heels, tired from gardening. If only she could wave a wand and conjure up a lovely garden: then she’d take care of it. But creating it was another matter.

Her house was one of the smallest on Summer Street, the first of the eight railway cottages lined up in a terrace like an illustration in a Victorian picturebook. The painted front doors – theirs was teal blue – carved fascia boards and perfectly square windows were like something a child would draw.

Most of the cottages had been extended at the back. Faye’s extension had made the kitchen bigger, creating a T-shaped upstairs attic bedroom for Amber, and taking the already tiny garden down to shoebox size. It had a small block of mossy lawn, flower beds on either side and a rackety garden shed at the bottom.

‘I can’t imagine Gran waiting for a man to fix what was wrong,’ Amber added, ‘and she grew up when it was different. I mean, she takes the car to get it fixed, not Stan. She’s a real role model. I tell all the girls in school about her and they think she’s amazing. They think you’re amazing too, Mum, because you don’t take crap from anyone.’

‘No,’ said Faye, ignoring the use of the word crap and wondering if that would be her only epitaph. Here lies Faye Reid, who never took crap from anyone. It wasn’t what she’d hoped she’d be remembered for when she was younger, but it certainly fitted now. When she’d been Amber’s age, she’d wanted to be thought of as exciting and glamorous, a mysterious woman loved by many men. Teenage dreams were funny in retrospect, weren’t they? She’d bet that Amber would never imagine that her mother could think like that. Before Amber had been born, Faye had been a very different person altogether, not the cautious, dowdy mother she’d become.

‘Nor does Gran,’ Amber went on. ‘And not everyone her age is like that. Ella’s grandmother makes them all run round after her like headless chickens since she had her heart operation. Ella’s terrified her grandmother is going to end up living with them. She says they’ll all have to be on drugs to cope. I’m glad Gran’s not like that.’

Faye’s widowed mother, Josie, had got married again a few years previously to a widower who understood that his new wife had got too used to the independence of almost twenty years of being on her own to ever be under a man’s thumb again. A retired teacher with boundless patience, Stan was a calm breeze to Josie’s cyclone of activity. Josie ran her local meals on wheels, while Stan was the Martha to her Mary.

‘Your gran was on her own for a long time so she had to learn to take care of herself,’ Faye said absently.

‘Like you.’

‘Yes, like me.’

‘I was thinking.’ Amber swung her legs back and forth. ‘About Dad being dead and Granddad being dead, and now Gran is married to Stan and, well…When you go to heaven, how do they work it out if you’ve had more than one husband? I mean, if Stan dies and then Gran dies, who does she live with in heaven – Granddad or Stan? It’s a problem, isn’t it? They never talked about that in religion classes. Just that we’d all be happy but how?’

‘Your gran’s probably not planning on shuffling off to meet her maker just yet,’ Faye said, startled.

‘I know, I can’t stand the thought of her not being here.’ Amber shuddered. She was very close to her grandmother. ‘But how does it work? Like if you met someone and Dad’s up there waiting for you. He’s still only in his late twenties, and then you come and you’re this old lady, but you’ve got another husband who’s waiting too, because women live longer than men, so he’s there first. Do you see what I mean? Reincarnation sounds better,’ she added, ‘because then you’re not all going to be in heaven at the same time. It makes more sense.’

Faye had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, the same feeling she always had when Amber talked about her father. The long-dead and beloved dad who was reduced to a photo in a frame, a misty figure who never did anything wrong, never shouted or discussed tidying up her bedroom. Never said no to a mobile phone or the purchase of a miniskirt of belt-like proportions. The dead could do no wrong.

‘I hope Dad’s waiting for you in heaven, though. That’s nice. I like to think of that.’ Amber smiled. ‘For your sake, really. So you can be together again, like in Titanic. Although the woman in that was really old at the end, and then when she joined them all on the ship, she was young and back being Kate Winslet. Which was a bit convenient, wasn’t it? Does that mean you get to be at your best in heaven, like twenty-one, even if you’re very ancient and falling apart when you die? I think it’s a bit too convenient.’

Faye breathed an inward sigh of relief at this rapid turn in the conversation. It meant she didn’t need to discuss the concept of Amber’s father waiting patiently for her in heaven. Not that he’d have waited. Patience had never been one of his virtues.

It was because saying he was there already would be a lie and now that Amber was older, it was getting harder and harder to lie. Adults lied to children all the time, little white ones for their own good. But time had turned Faye’s white lie into a giant black one and now she couldn’t stomach repeating it any more.

‘I think the whole problem with heaven is that nobody really knows anything about it,’ she said, copping out. ‘You’re supposed to believe even though you don’t know.’

Amber grimaced.

‘That’s what the whole faith thing is about,’ Faye added, feeling she was on shaky ground here. ‘Believing when you don’t know for sure.’ Like you’ve always believed me, she thought guiltily. ‘You could ask Stan. He studied theology.’

‘The thing is, you have one person who’s right for you, your soul mate, the one who’s waiting for you,’ Amber said. ‘But if they die, how can you meet another soul mate? There’s only going to be one person who makes you feel complete, who you can’t wait to see and talk to, right? Isn’t there? People say that, anyway,’ Amber added hurriedly. She bent her head to her book again.

A few more minutes passed by and Faye tugged listlessly at a couple of weedy plants, obsessing over her daughter’s vision of her dad happily waiting in heaven for Faye to turn up. Amber never needed to know, did she?

‘Ella said something totally crazy the other day, Mum.’ Amber broke the silence.

‘She said that maybe you have to pretend not to be independent and that’s what men like. That’s crap, isn’t it? Why should you pretend? I told her, Ella, you have to be you.’ Amber was earnest, sounding like a much-married matron explaining the ways of the world to a teenage bride.

‘That doesn’t sound like Ella.’ Faye knew her daughter’s best friend as if she were her own daughter. Like Amber, Ella was clever, sweet, responsible and had never caused a moment’s trouble in her life. ‘What’s come over her?’

‘Giovanni’s new girlfriend, that’s who,’ Amber went on. ‘Dannii. With two i’s and little hearts over each of them. The hearts are very important. She’s messing up Ella’s head and saying that the reason Ella and me don’t have boyfriends is because we’re too clever and too independent and guys don’t like that.’ Amber snorted dismissively.

Giovanni was Ella’s youngest brother and Faye had heard about this new girlfriend enough times for alarm bells to tinkle gently. Giovanni was in his second year in college, handsome like all Ella’s half-Italian family, and Faye knew Amber had a mild crush on him, despite the fact that she said he was boring. The appearance of an actual steady girlfriend was certainly a catalyst for Amber to realise this. Faye wouldn’t have minded if her daughter’s first serious boyfriend was someone like Giovanni: someone she knew all about and approved of.

‘Dannii’s OK-looking, I suppose,’ Amber conceded, grudgingly, ‘but she’s a pain and she’s round Ella’s house all the time talking this crap. She’s doing business studies, Mum, right, and when she’s with Giovanni, she behaves like she’s had her brain sucked out. You don’t get into business studies in college if you’re a moron, so I don’t know who she’s kidding. Well,’ she added gloomily, ‘Giovanni appears to be falling for it. Big dope. Dannii told Ella that Giovanni’s a really hot guy. You can’t say that to your boyfriend’s little sister! Your brother is so sexy. Yeuch. That’s disgusting. I can’t stand her. She hasn’t a clue about anything.’

Faye said nothing for a while. She gazed at her work so far. She’d definitely pulled up some genuine flowers along with the weeds. How was it that carefully planted flowers could be ripped up easily, while unwanted weeds needed incredible force to shift them?

‘If you act stupid with a guy, he’s only going out with you because of how you look,’ Faye said eventually.

‘Exactly what I said,’ Amber pointed out. ‘Oh, I suppose Ella was only thinking out loud. She couldn’t act dumb, anyway. She’s going to come top of our year in the exams.’

Talk of the exams made Amber stare wearily down at her maths book again. ‘That’s not love. Love is different. If any guy’s only interested in what a girl’s like on the outside, then he’s not what you want, is he?’

It was half question, half statement.

‘That’s what I think,’ Faye said decisively. This was safe ground: she’d been telling Amber to appreciate her worth all her life. ‘If he doesn’t love you for who you are, then he’s not the right person for you. Have you and Ella met any hot guys?’ she asked lightly. She’d love to ask if Amber thought she might fancy Giovanni.

‘No,’ said Amber hastily. If her mother hadn’t been so busy being thankful at the change of subject, she might have noticed just how hastily Amber had spoken. But Faye didn’t notice. She was pulling at weeds and she didn’t see the hint of red on her daughter’s cheeks.

‘Summer Street is not exactly awash with hot men my age.’ Amber fanned herself with her book as if the sun was responsible for the heat suffusing her complexion. ‘Ella’s road is just as bad. The whole neighbourhood’s full of nerds and middle-aged men with beer bellies who suck them in when we walk past.’

Savage but accurate, Faye thought with a smothered laugh. Amber and Ella’s teenage beauty made them a stunning pair, Amber all tawny hair and those spectacular eyes contrasting with Ella’s flashing dark Italian looks. Though they’d never have believed it, they were gorgeous – a scary prospect when you were the mother of one of them. But Amber was so sensible. Faye had taught her well. How not to make mistakes, how not to be led by other people. Except, Faye thought, she’d never explained to her daughter how her mother knew these lessons were so important.

‘The people from number 42 have sold up,’ Faye said breezily. ‘Who knows, a handsome father-son combo might have bought it.’

‘Doubt it. But hey, if you’re right, you could go out with the dad. Wouldn’t that be great?’ Amber was delighted. ‘You could come home and tell me all about it. And I’d laugh and warn you not to let him get past first base on the first date!’

Faye grabbed a nettle by mistake and gasped with pain.

‘Ouch. That was stupid,’ she muttered lamely.

‘It’s a serious subject, Mum,’ Amber said gravely. Just to show how serious, she sat up cross-legged and gazed at her mother, her face solemn. ‘I know how much you’ve given up for me but I’m an adult now and you can have your life back. I’ll be going to college. You need to do your own thing.’

The little speech sounded like one Amber had been working on for ages and Faye almost grabbed the nettle again for the comfort of physical pain against this shocking emotional stabbing sensation. She was meant to be urging Amber gently into the world, not the other way round.

Seventeen-year-olds were supposed to be too involved with their own problems to notice their mothers’. If Amber was urging her to get a social life, she must be a total basket case. Well, Faye’s own mother thought so, too.

‘Come on, Faye, don’t bury yourself. You’re not dead yet,’ Josie had said many years before, and it had triggered the one big row between them since before Amber was born.

‘Leave me alone to live my life my way! You don’t know what I want,’ Faye had said furiously.

She’d never forgotten what her mother had said. Josie hadn’t understood at all. This life with Amber wasn’t being buried: it was living peacefully and contentedly without the interference of any man.

‘I’m just saying think about it,’ Amber went on. ‘I’ll be gone and I’ll worry about you, Mum. I won’t be here so much and you’ll need to keep busy. And I don’t mean doing overtime,’ she added sternly. ‘I mean having fun. Getting out. Going on dates. Grace would love to set you up on a blind date at one of her dinners, you know she would. Sure, you’d probably meet a few men you’d hate, but you never know, you might find romance.’

Lecture over, she went back to her maths book, leaving Faye feeling that their roles had been reversed. She’d been the one receiving the lecture on life from her daughter.

Amber’s remarks had been running through Faye’s head since Saturday afternoon.

Climbing the steps to the swimming pool complex, Faye wondered, was this all normal teenager stuff: get a life, Mum, because I’m going to and I don’t want to worry about you. Or was there something else?

Faye went into the women’s changing room, switched off her music and changed into her plain black swimsuit quickly. She did everything quickly and efficiently.

‘Economical and precise,’ Grace said, which was high praise indeed because Grace, Faye’s boss in Little Island Recruitment, turned efficiency into an art form.

‘Economical and precise or obsessional?’ Faye wondered from time to time when she was interviewing in her office and saw candidates staring at her pristine desk with everything exactly at right angles to everything else. A cluttered desk meant a cluttered mind and Faye had never had time for a cluttered mind.

But didn’t it signify an obsessional mind if you arranged all your paperclips to lie lengthwise in their compartment in the desk organiser?

She stowed her navy skirt suit in a locker and pulled on a swimhat. She never looked at herself in the mirror like some women in the changing room, anxiously making sure they didn’t look awful in clinging Lycra or admiring a physique honed by laps.

At the age of forty, and carrying probably two stone more than she should, Faye was no fan of mirrors. They lied. You could be scarred to bits on the inside and look beautiful outside.

She walked out of the changing room, shivered under the cool shower for a moment, then slipped into the pool’s medium-fast lane where she pushed off into the water.

The Olympic swimming selectors were unlikely to be calling on her any time soon, but over the last six months she’d worked her way up to swimming sixteen lengths each time and she knew she was getting faster, no matter how unprofessional her forward crawl. She felt more toned too but that wasn’t the primary reason for the exercise.

What she loved about swimming was the solitude of the pool. Even if the lanes were full and every noise was amplified by the water, when her head was down and her body was slicing through the pool, she felt utter peace.

This was her time, time for Faye alone.

Six months previously, when she’d paid for the swimming complex membership, she’d realised it was the first time in seventeen years she’d indulged herself in something that didn’t directly benefit Amber. Even the CD player she used was an old one that Amber had discarded when she’d saved up her pocket money for an iPod.

The money she’d spent on the membership fee could usefully have gone somewhere else. Amber would need a whole new expensive kit for art college, and there would surely be trips to galleries abroad. There never seemed to be enough money for all the things Faye thought Amber should have.

But the pool had called to her.

‘I wish I was into swimming,’ Grace had begun to say on the days that Faye took an early lunch.

Grace and her husband Neil ran the recruitment company together. Grace regularly said they couldn’t have done it without Faye, and Neil, who actually worked very little, was smugly convinced its success was all down to him.

‘Swimming sounds so easy, swim, swim and the weight falls off,’ Grace had said.

Faye grinned, knowing that Grace liked the idea of exercise and the results that exercise provided but wasn’t that keen on actually doing it.

‘Is it better than running, do you think?’ Grace went on. ‘I’d quite like to run but I’ve weak ankles. Swimming could be the answer.’

‘You’d get bored in a week,’ Faye told her. Grace was a chataholic and got anxious if she hadn’t had at least four friends phone her a day in between her hectic schedule of business calls. ‘There’s nothing sociable about swimming. You put your head into the water and plough on. You can’t hear anyone and you can only see what’s ahead of you.’

It was like praying, she often thought, although she didn’t say that to Grace, who’d have thought she was abusing recreational pharmaceuticals. But it seemed like that to Faye – here it was only you and God as you moved porpoise-like through the water, nobody else.

‘Really? No Baywatch male lifeguards?’

‘I haven’t noticed any,’ Faye said drily.

‘Well, who needs a Baywatch lifeguard anyway?’ Grace said.

Which was, Faye knew, her way of moving on to another line of conversation. Because Grace, although happily married, had many fantasies about a muscle-bound hunk who’d adore her. It was strange when Faye, who’d been on her own for most of the past seventeen years, went out of her way not to notice men at all. She was with Billie Holiday on the whole men issue: they were too much trouble. And she’d learned that the hard way.

Lunchtimes could be busy in Little Island Recruitment because that was when staff from other offices got the opportunity to slope off, march into Little Island, relate the sad tale of their current employment and discuss the possibility of moving elsewhere where their talents would finally be appreciated. But today when Faye arrived back from her swim, damp-haired, pleasurably tired out and dressed in her old reliable M & S navy suit, reception was empty except for Jane behind the reception desk.

‘Hi, Faye,’ said Jane cheerily and held up a sheaf of pink call slips. ‘I’ve got messages for you.’

The office was very high-tech and designed to impress. Nobody could fail to be dazzled by the glass lift, the stiletto-crunching black marble floors, or the enormous modern-art canvas that dominated the reception. Faye thought the picture looked like what two amorous whales might paint if they’d been covered in midnight-blue emulsion and left to thump around for a while on a massive canvas. But having an artistic daughter, she understood that this was probably not the effect the artist had anticipated.

‘People are scared of modern art,’ Grace said gleefully when the painting had first been hung.

‘It can be intimidating,’ Faye pointed out bluntly. ‘But this one’s a bit dull, to be honest.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ sighed Grace. ‘But it says we’ve arrived. We’ve come a long way from that awful dive of an office we started out in, remember.’

Faye remembered. Ten years ago, Faye had been broke after a series of dead-end jobs, and was desperately trying to get her foot on an employment ladder that didn’t involve late-night bar work. She’d been so grateful to Grace for taking a chance on her in the fledgling recruitment business she had made sure Grace never regretted it. Nobody in Little Island worked harder than Faye. The two had forged a professional friendship that grew stronger every year.

‘The ex-barmaid and the ex-banking queen, who’d have thought we’d make it?’ Faye used to say, smiling. She didn’t let many people past her barriers, but Grace was one of the few. What if Grace was a social butterfly, was married to the obnoxious Neil, and could air-kiss with the best of them? Despite all that, she was a real person. True, kind, honest. Faye trusted her, which made Grace part of a very small and exclusive club.

‘You should say “ex-beverage administrator”,’ Grace chided. ‘Besides, you should have been running that bar. If you’d had the childcare and the opportunity, you would have been.’

Grace knew Faye’s history and how she’d worked in dead-end jobs so she could take care of Amber herself. She knew most of Faye’s secrets, but not all.

Faye took her messages, walked past what was now dubbed ‘Flipper Does Dallas’, went up to her office and got ready for the afternoon meeting.

At three in the afternoon, on Mondays and Wednesdays, there was a staff meeting in Little Island Recruitment. Grace said it kept everyone in touch with what the whole company was doing.

They’d been holding it for nine years and it was a marvellous idea because it made every single member of staff feel both personally involved in the company and valued by it.

‘We’re only as good as our last job,’ Grace would remind the staff at the meeting, where there was always a buzz of conversation, until the apple and cinnamon muffins came in. ‘This is the think tank where we come up with ideas to improve what we do.’

The staff all believed the idea for the meeting had been Grace’s. After all, she’d been a banking hotshot for years before starting up the agency, and could write a book on how to get ahead in life.

It could be called Who Moved My Emery Board? joked Kevin who was in charge of accounts. Grace’s nails were things of beauty: ten glossy beige talons that clacked in a military tattoo on the conference-room desk when she was irritated.

Clack, clack, clack.

In fact, Faye had suggested the staff meeting shortly after she joined.

Grace felt that some benign presence had been on her side the day Faye walked into her life. Grace may have been the one with the financial acumen and the qualifications as long as her fake-tanned arms, but Faye was the one who’d made the agency work.

On this afternoon, nineteen members of staff sat around the conference table and worked their way through the agenda.

Today’s meeting focused on the few sticky accounts where the jobs and the jobseekers didn’t match. There were always a few. Little Island had an ever-growing client roster, with just three companies who created the problems, people for whom no applicant was good enough and who went through staff faster than Imelda Marcos went through shoe cream. Chief among the difficult clients, known as VIPs, in-house code for Very Ignorant People, was William Brooks.

It was wiser to transfer a call from him by saying, ‘It’s Mr Brooks, one of our VIP clients,’ and risk being overheard, than to say, ‘It’s that horrible bastard from Brooks FX Stockbroking on the phone and I’m not talking to him, so you’d better.’

William Brooks, the aforementioned company’s managing director, was yet again looking for a personal assistant. This was his third search in six months, the previous two assistants having decided to leave his employment abruptly.

Little Island also supplied temps, and only that morning, Faye had been on the phone to Mr Brooks’s current temp who said she was giving it a month more, ‘Because the money’s so good, Faye, but after that, I’m out of here. He’s a pig. No, strike that. Unfair to pigs.’

‘We have no PAs on our books that will do for him.’ Philippa, who was responsible for Mr Brooks, scanned through the file wearily. ‘Out of last week’s interviews, we found two wonderful candidates and he doesn’t like either of them. I don’t know what he wants.’

‘I do. He’s after a Charlize Theron doppelgänger who can type, operate Excel and doesn’t mind picking up his dry-cleaning or listening to his dirty jokes,’ said Faye.

‘If such a person existed, she wouldn’t want to work for a fat, balding executive who goes through secretaries faster than I get through Silk Cut Ultra,’ Philippa said with feeling. She hated William Brooks. The only person who seemed to be able to handle him was Faye, who somehow made William rein in the worst parts of his personality and who stared him down into submission. Philippa wished she could glare at men in the steely way Faye did. Mind you, the steely gaze seemed to scare guys off too, because in the years Philippa had known Faye, she’d never had a man around. She couldn’t imagine Faye with a guy, anyway. There was something about Faye, something about the look on her face when the computer repairman came in and flirted with everyone in the office, which suggested Faye was one of those women who had no interest in men.

‘It’s a prestigious account,’ Faye pointed out gently. ‘We’ve made a lot of money out of Brooks FX and having them as clients looks great on our prospectus. William is the fly in the ointment but it would be sensible to work with him.’

Recruitment was a delicate balance. Finding the right person for the right job didn’t sound too hard in principle, but, as Faye had discovered during her ten years in the industry, it could be impossible in practice. The right person in the right job might suddenly realise that her boss (sweet on recruitment day) was a control freak who insisted on just two loo breaks a day, didn’t allow hot drinks at the desk in case coffee spilled on the keyboard and thought that paying a salary meant he owned her, body and soul.

‘The right PA for William Brooks exists,’ Faye said. ‘And we’ll find her.’

‘Only if someone comes up with a PA robot,’ muttered Philippa. ‘They won’t complain if they get their bums pinched.’

‘He’s pinched somebody’s bum?’ This was news to Faye. Difficult clients were one thing, sexual harassment was another.

‘Well…’ Philippa squirmed. She wasn’t supposed to say. The second assistant they’d placed with William had phoned her up in tears.

Faye looked grim. ‘Tell me. Chapter and verse.’

Philippa told her and gained some satisfaction from the steely look on Faye’s face.

‘You’ll talk to him?’ Grace asked warily, also seeing the look.

‘I’ll talk to him,’ Faye agreed.

The women around the table grinned at each other. Mr Brooks was about to be taken down a peg or two. If only they could witness it, but they wouldn’t. Because Faye was so famously discreet.

After the meeting, Faye poured herself another coffee and shut the door to her sanctum.

She loved her job. Recruitment suited her perfectly because it was about placing the right person in the right job and to a woman who liked the towels in her airing cupboard folded just so and in the correct place, it was very satisfying indeed. People were not towels, but life might have been easier if they were.

Over the years, she’d discovered that the main skill was interviewing potential employees and working out whether a certain job and company would suit them. With no training whatsoever, Faye turned out to be a natural at it.

‘It’s like you can work out precisely what sort of person they are from just twenty questions,’ Grace said admiringly.

‘Yes, but you’ve got to know which twenty questions to ask,’ Faye said. She was justifiably proud of her ability, if a little amused. It was odd being successful in business by seeing through people’s façades to the character within, when the biggest problems in her private life had come from being unable to do just that.

‘It’s easy to suss people out when you’re not involved with them,’ she added. ‘You might never have met them before but it’s possible to gauge fairly soon whether someone is hard-working, easy-going, anxious, a team player, whatever.’

In the early days, they only recruited secretarial staff and the competition was vicious, but the combination of Faye’s talent and Grace’s business savvy meant the company took off. Then, there would have been no question of dropping difficult clients: they needed everyone they could get. But not any more, as William Brooks was about to find out. Recruitment was a small business where everybody knew everybody. Faye phoned a couple of her old colleagues, now with other agencies, and asked what the word was on William Brooks. Fifteen minutes later, she hung up the phone a lot wiser.

After a moment or two of deep thought, she dialled the number for Brooks FX. She was put straight through to Mr Brooks, probably because he thought she bore news of a suitable PA with the required Miss World physique.

‘Well,’ he snapped. ‘Found anyone?’

‘I’m not sure Little Island is the right recruitment agency for you,’ Faye began blandly.

‘What?’ He was instantly wrong-footed, she knew. Few agencies could afford to turn down business.

‘As you know, we work with Davidson’s and Marshal McGregor.’ She named the two biggest stockbroking firms in the country, both of which could buy and sell Brooks FX with the contents of their petty cash boxes. ‘And we have excellent relationships with both those companies, but you do appear to have peculiar requirements, Mr Brooks.’

‘I’m exacting, that’s all,’ he snapped. ‘You’ve been sending me morons. Call yourselves a recruitment agency…’

‘You’re more than exacting,’ Faye interrupted, feeling cold rage course through her. She’d planned to do this the official way, but it was clear that Brooks needed the unorthodox approach. ‘Let’s put it this way, Mr Brooks, if we were offering sports massages, I believe you’d be the client insulting our therapists by asking for a massage with a “happy ending”.’

‘What?’ exploded out of him again, and Faye grinned to herself. ‘Happy ending’ was code for a massage with sexual services included, the sort only available in red-light districts.

‘How dare you…?’

Probably nobody had ever talked to William Brooks this way. She knew his sort: a bully. And, importantly, she now knew some even less pleasant things about him.

‘We have our reputation to consider too, Mr Brooks,’ Faye went on, the vein of ice evident in her tone. ‘And we’ve been hearing stories from the staff we’ve placed with you, stories that neither of us would like to hear repeated. You see, we place temps in the equality agency too, and with some of the city’s top legal firms, and we can’t have any hint of scandal associated with our company.’

‘What are you implying?’ he roared.

‘We’ve placed a lot of staff with Wilson Brothers too,’ Faye went on. ‘They’re one of our best customers and actually handle our legal affairs, so if there was any, shall we say, unpleasantness, we’d naturally go to them.’

This time, there was an audible indrawn breath at the other end of the phone.

Wilson Brothers was a law firm where the senior partner just happened to be William Brooks’s father-in-law. The unspoken message was that Mr Wilson would be fascinated to learn of his son-in-law’s fondness for touching up his assistants.

‘How about we pretend we didn’t have this conversation, Mr Brooks,’ Faye went on, ‘and we’ll resume our search for a PA for you. However, if and when we do find one, I shall be in constant communication with her and I assure you, I expect any Little Island person to be treated with the utmost respect and dignity. I’m sure you agree that bullying and sexual harassment cases can be so messy and time-consuming?’

‘Oh, yes,’ blustered William Brooks but the fight had gone out of him. ‘I’ll talk to you again, Mrs Reid,’ he muttered and hung up.

Result, thought Faye, leaning back in her chair, relieved. She knew that what she’d done was unethical and that Grace would have had a coronary had she overheard, but sometimes the unorthodox approach was required and this time, thankfully, it had worked. She’d never had a problem thinking outside the box when it came to business. And being tough was second nature to her now.

Some people thought it was being hard-nosed, but it wasn’t: it was self-preservation.

She’d tried to instil that and a sense of personal power in Amber.

‘You are responsible for you,’ Faye used to repeat mantralike. ‘It’s not clever to be led by other people or to do what you don’t want to do, just to fit in. You have the power to do and be anything you want and to make your own choices. Believing in yourself and in your own power is one of the most important things in life.’

‘Ella’s mum says to behave like a little lady, not to hang around with rough boys in the park and that if a stranger tries to get you into a car, to scream,’ Amber reported when she was younger and her friends thought Faye’s ‘be your own boss’ mantra was cool. ‘But Ella thinks your rules are better. I told her you were a feminist because you never let anyone walk all over you. It’s because Dad’s dead, I said. You had to be tougher because we were on our own.’

Faye spent an hour on paperwork, then returned her emails, by which time her eyes were weary from staring at the screen. She fetched another coffee, shut her office door firmly, kicked off her shoes and lay down on the couch for a few minutes. She was tired today. The reason still worried her. Amber had woken her up at three the night before, talking loudly to herself in her sleep, saying, ‘No, I will not!’ firmly.

Faye had stood at her daughter’s door in case this middle-of-the-night conversation became a nightmare, but it didn’t. Amber muttered ‘no’ a few more times before turning over and falling back into a silent sleep.

Amber had been prone to nightmares when she was a small child and Faye, who couldn’t bear to think of her darling lonely and frightened in her bed, would carry the pink-pyjama-clad little girl into her own room.

Having your baby sleep with you when you were a lonely, affection-starved single mother was probably against every bit of advice in the book, Faye knew. But she needed the comfort of her little daughter every bit as much as Amber needed her. The sweetness of that small body, energetic little limbs still padded with baby fat, gave Faye strength. No matter how tough life could be, she’d go on for Amber. Her daughter deserved the best and Faye would provide it, no matter what.

‘Mama,’ Amber would mutter in her lisping, babyish voice, and fall into a deeper sleep, taking up half the bed by lying sprawled sideways.

‘Mama, how did I get here?’ she’d say in wonder the next morning, delighted to wake up in her mother’s bed. And Faye would cuddle her tightly and they’d giggle and tickle each other, and the nightmare would never be mentioned.

Now, Amber didn’t have nightmares, just the odd restless night when she had a lot on her mind, like exams or last year’s school play where she was in charge of painting the scenery and used to sit up in bed murmuring about more Prussian blue paint for the sky.

She was probably suffering from the most awful exam stress, Faye decided, as she sipped her coffee. There were only weeks to go, after all.

If there was anything else worrying her daughter, she’d know, wouldn’t she?

Except that recently, she was beginning to think it was easier to understand total strangers searching for the perfect job than work out what was going on in her daughter’s mind.

CHAPTER FOUR

One hundred and fifty miles away, Maggie Maguire didn’t know what impulse made her go home that afternoon instead of trekking off to the gym. Karma? Fate? Destiny twirling a lazy finger in the human world?

Unexpectedly getting off work early meant she could have had a rare meander around Galway’s shops before taking her normal Wednesday evening Pilates class. But some unknown force made Maggie walk past Extreme Fitness, bypass the lure of the bohemian boutiques, and go home to the apartment she shared with Grey. A modest third-floor flat, it was her pride and joy, especially since she’d gone ahead and painted the tiny cloakroom’s wall tiles a mesmerising Indian Ocean blue.

‘You can’t paint tiles,’ Grey had said, lounging against the door of the cloakroom, barefoot and jean-clad, as Maggie sat on the floor and read the instructions on the tin. Grey had the sort of shape that lent itself to lounging: long, long legs, a lean torso and an elegance that made women stare, admiring the swept-back leonine hair, strong, patrician face and intelligent eyes that were the same colour as his name.

‘You can. It says it right here.’ Maggie peered at the instructions, her nose scrunched up. Her auburn hair was held up with a big clip, but bits still straggled wispily round her freckled face. Maggie could have used cement as a hair product and red wisps would still have escaped to curl around her face.

Grey said he loved her hair: it was unruly, wild, beautiful and unpredictable. Like her.

After five years together, Maggie believed him, even though his last three girlfriends before her had been Park Avenue-type blondes with sleek hair, sleek clothes, push-up bras and shoe collections organised by Polaroid. Maggie’s shoe collection was organised by age: old cowboy boots at the back of the wardrobe, new ones at the front. Her clothes were rock chick rather than chic, faded Levi’s being her must-have garment. Being boyishly slim, she didn’t have enough boob to fit into a push-up bra. And nobody looking at her pale freckled face with the silvery cobalt-blue eyes that showed exactly what she was thinking could have imagined Maggie having even a grain of Park Avenue Princess hauteur.

Alas, she’d have loved to be such a creature: icily cool without a hair out of place, and could never see that her wild russet beauty and eyes that belonged to an ancient Celtic warrior queen were far rarer and more precious than high-maintenance blonde glamour.

‘And this is the last bit of beige in the whole place. It’s got to go,’ she’d added, opening the tin of paint and breathing in, as if the salty tang of the sea would drift out, scenting the air with memories of a foreign beach.

They’d bought the apartment two years ago and the previous owners had been keen on beige, beige and more beige. It was like living in a can of mushroom soup, said Maggie, who’d grown up in a quirky house on Summer Street where her bedroom had been sky blue with stars on the midnight-blue ceiling. Dad had been going through his planetarium phase and the stars had been in their correct places too. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor would not be the wrong way round when Dennis Maguire was in charge.

The cloakroom in the Galway apartment was the last room Maggie had painstakingly redecorated. Now it was all cheery blues and whites, like a small beachside restaurant from their last holiday, a glorious, special-offer week in the Seychelles. Holidays had been off the agenda for the past few months as they were broke but Maggie had an almost physical longing for the feeling of sweltering sun toasting her skin while her toes wriggled in sand.

We need a break, she thought as she stepped out of the lift on to their floor. Sun, sand and no conversations with irritated students when they’d discovered that the very book they needed for that night’s rush-job essay on Greco-Roman funerary practices wasn’t in its place.

Grey was a politics lecturer and Maggie was one of six librarians in the vast, modern Coolidge College library, a job she loved because it allowed her mind to wander over many varied subjects from medicine to literature. The downside was that pre-exams the stress levels of the students went up and people who’d spent six months working on the formula for the perfect Long Island Iced Tea to fuel a party suddenly required actual research materials for their courses. And Maggie was the one they got mad at when the research material in question was booked out by someone else.

‘But, like, I need it today,’ a radiantly pretty brunette girl had said only that morning, slim fingers raking through her hair, which irritatingly made her look even better. What hair product did she use? Maggie wondered briefly but didn’t ask.

Instead, she said, ‘I’m really sorry but I can’t help you. We’ve only two copies and they’re both booked out every day for the next week. You’ve got to make arrangements in advance with some textbooks.’

‘Well, thank you very much,’ snapped the girl sarcastically. ‘You’ve been a great help, I must say.’ And she marched off in high dudgeon.

‘You can’t win ’em all,’ commiserated her colleague Shona. ‘Still, she’s not like the back of a bus, so she can always sleep with her prof if the going gets tough.’

‘Shona! That’s so sexist. I thought you were reading The Female Eunuch?’

‘I did and it’s marvellous, but I’m on to the new Jackie Collins now. I know Germaine Greer wouldn’t approve, but I’d have slept with my prof if it’d have improved my degree,’ countered Shona wistfully. ‘He was sex on legs, so it wouldn’t have been a hardship.’ Shona’s degree had been in European Literature. ‘When he talked about the Heart of Darkness that was in all of us, I swear, I felt a shiver run right down my spine into my knickers.’

Shona was, in fact, happily married but she was an irrepressible flirt and batted her eyelashes at every passing cute guy, despite many weary conversations with the head librarian about appropriate behaviour in the workplace. ‘Just because I’ve eaten doesn’t mean I can’t look at the menu,’ was her motto.

Fortunately her husband Paul, whom she adored and would never cheat on, was merely amused by all this.

‘Professors don’t have sex with students, except in the fevered imaginations of people like you,’ Maggie retorted. ‘Besides, she’s in third-year history. Have you seen Prof Wolfowitz? Brilliant, yes. Beddable, no. He is totally bald except for that one eyebrow. Every time I see him, I want to pluck a few of the middle hairs out and give him two eyebrows instead of one.’

‘Maggie, Maggie,’ sighed Shona. ‘The eyebrow is immaterial. Sleeping your way to success has precisely nothing to do with how good-looking the powerful person is. You may wear scuffed cowboy boots and a tough attitude, but you’re Haven’t-a-Clue Barbie at heart. You don’t have a calculating bone in your body – apart from the one hot Dr Grey Stanley puts there, of course.’ Shona laughed like a drain at her own joke.

Maggie groaned. She was used to Shona by now. They’d become fast friends from the moment they’d met on Maggie’s first day in the library, where she discovered that her new friend’s second degree subject was indubitably Teasing: Honours Module. Now Maggie leaned over and swatted Shona on the arm with her ruler. ‘Brat.’

‘Haven’t-a-Clue Barbie.’

‘Slapper.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ Shona said, pretending to preen. She was impossible to shock. ‘Shona O’Slapper, I like that. Now, can you swap shifts with me? I know you’re on till six tonight, but I’ll do it and you can go early if you’ll do tomorrow afternoon for me? You could spend another hour honing your body in Extreme Fatness,’ she wheedled. Shona had accompanied Maggie to the gym once and hated it, hence the new name.

‘Are you and Paul going out?’ inquired Maggie.

‘I’m providing a shoulder to cry on,’ Shona informed her. ‘Ross has broken up with Johann.’ Ross was a hairdresser who lived in the apartment below Shona and Paul, providing the perfect opportunity for Shona’s fag-haggery and giving Paul a chance to watch football on the television while she and Ross sat in the apartment below, rewatching old Will & Grace episodes and bitching happily.

‘He’s inconsolable, even though he whined all the time they were going out about how insensitive Johann was and how he didn’t like Nureyev.’ Nureyev was Ross’s beloved pet, a lop-eared rabbit, who was spoiled beyond belief and had his own Vuitton bunny carrier as well as a purple velvet collar with his name spelled out in diamanté. He lived in luxury in Ross’s Philippe Starck-style kitchen and was house-trained to use a cat litter box. ‘Nobody’s ever truly gorgeous until they dump you, right? We’re partying to get him over it.’

‘On a Wednesday?’

‘Woe’s day, sweetie, as the ancient Danes would say. It’s apt.’

‘Who’s looking after Nureyev?’

‘We’re going to leave the Discovery channel on for him. He loves all those shows about meerkats.’

Maggie was still laughing at the idea of the rabbit sulkily glued to the television when she got to her own front door and pulled out her keys.

The mortice lock was undone. Grey must have got home early, she thought with a smile. That was good, they could have a blissfully long evening together. Good call, Maguire, she thought as she let herself in. Sometimes a girl’s gotta know when to miss stretching on a mat so she can stretch on a bed. And for all of his intellectual cool, Grey knew some pelvic contortions the Pilates teacher had never taught. It was funny though, Grey was supposed to be at a meeting – perhaps it had been cancelled?

‘Shouldn’t be too late, honey,’ Grey had said on the phone earlier. ‘You’ve got your class tonight so I’ll pick up Thai food on the way home.’ Grey believed in sharing cooking duties, although he preferred takeout to actual slaving and stirring with wooden spoons.

Inside the apartment, Maggie heard muted noises coming from the apartment’s lone bedroom. Grey must be watching the TV, she thought, and, shedding her possessions as she went, handbag on to the floor, jacket on the couch, she crossed the small living room, went down the hall and pushed their bedroom door open.

The door was still swinging open when Maggie stopped on the threshold, frozen.

Grey was on the bed, naked and lying underneath a woman, also naked.

The woman’s hair hung like a silken curtain, erotically half covering a lingerie-model body with a hand-span waist and high, perfect C-cup breasts.

Three mouths opened in surprise. Maggie twisted her head sideways to try to get the scene to make sense. It was like a clever illustration in a psychoanalyst’s office, a bizarre, mind-bending scene designed to make you question everything you knew: what’s wrong with this picture?

Well, Doctor, that’s our bed with our duvet tangled up on the floor, and my side table pretty much the way I left it this morning with a book open on it. And there’s the photo of me and Grey outside the cathedral in Barcelona, but in the bed, there’s this strange blonde girl with an unbelievable body arched over my boyfriend who has – well, had – an erection. And there really is no other explanation for this apart from the obvious.

‘Maggie, I’m so sorry, I never meant you to see, I wouldn’t hurt you for anything,’ Grey said urgently, wriggling out from under the blonde girl so fast that she squealed.

Maggie didn’t answer him. She couldn’t. She just stared in disbelief.

Politicians were supposed to be excellent at wriggling out of embarrassing situations. Perhaps Grey taught that, too, along with analysis of world power structures and globalisation.

Bile rose in Maggie’s throat and she turned without a word and ran to the tiny cloakroom she’d decorated with such pride. Student. That girl had to be one of Grey’s students. Someone who’d possibly stood in the college library and looked calculatingly at Maggie sitting at the research desk, pleased to realise that her rival was older. Perhaps wondering what Grey saw in thirty-year-old Maggie with her tangle of wild hair when he could have a twenty-one-year-old with a silken mane like a hair commercial, and a va-va-voom figure with the peach-bloom skin of youth.

Students were always getting crushes on Grey. The two of them joked about it, because it seemed so funny, despite Shona’s stories. Grey was miles away from the image of a fusty academic with woolly hair, badly fitting jackets and mismatched socks. When they had first met, five years previously, when she was finding her feet in the city, Maggie herself had found it hard to believe he held a doctorate in political science. At a start-of-term college party, he’d stood out among the soberly dressed professorial types. He wore jeans, and, around his neck, a couple of narrow leather coils from which hung a piece of obsidian that glittered like his cloudy grey eyes. Maggie had heard of Dr Grey Stanley, a brilliant thinker who’d resisted attempts by various political leaders to advise their parties and who was the author of several widely read articles on the state of the country. Nobody had mentioned how jaw-droppingly handsome he was.

‘Hey, Red,’ he’d said, tangling long fingers in the tendrils of her auburn hair. ‘Can I get you a glass of the vinegar that passes for wine round here?’

Maggie, tomboy extraordinaire whose shoulder-length hair was one of her few concessions to femininity, would normally have given the death glare to any strange guy who dared to touch her. But this man, all heat and masculinity so close to her, made it hard to breathe, never mind shoot murderous glares. She exhaled, suddenly glad she’d worn the black camisole that hung low on her small breasts, the fabric starkly dark against her milky white skin. Her skin was true redhead type, so white it was almost blue, she sometimes joked.

Grey stared at her as if milky white with a smattering of tiny freckles was his favourite colour combination. The party in a draughty hall on the Coolidge College campus was full of fascinating, clever people with IQs that went off the scale, and he’d chosen her. Even now, no matter how many times Shona told her she was beautiful and that Grey Stanley was lucky to have her, Maggie shook her head in denial. It was the other way round, she knew.

‘Maggie…’

As she slammed the cloakroom door shut and slid the lock, she heard Grey’s anxious voice outside. He rarely called her Red any more. Red was the girl he’d fallen in love with, the feisty redhead who was fiercely independent, who needed nobody in her life, thank you very much. She was so different from the Park Avenue Princesses, she must have struck him as a challenge he couldn’t resist. But five years of coupledom had surgically removed her independence and now, she realised, she had become like a tiger in a zoo: lazily captive and unable to survive in the wild.

She leaned over the toilet bowl and the cloudy remains of her lunchtime chicken wrap came up. Again and again, she retched until there was nothing left in her except loss and fear.

She was the old Maggie again, the one who hadn’t yet learned to hide her anxiety under an armour of feistiness. Stupid Maggie who’d never imagined that Grey would cheat on her. Just like Stupid Maggie from years ago. It was a shock to feel like that again. She was so sure she’d left it all behind her. The memory of those years in St Ursula’s, when her life had been one long torment of bullying, came to her. She’d had four years of hell at the hands of the bullies and it had marked her for ever. Now she was right back there – reeling from the shock, sick with fear.

When she could retch no more, she sank on to the floor. From this unusual vantage point, the bathroom had turned out well, she realised. The colours were so pretty and it was so carefully done. Even Grey had said so.

‘You’re wasted in the college library,’ he’d laughed the day she finished it. ‘You should have your own decorating business. The Paint Queen: specialising in no-hope projects. Your dad could consult.’ Grey had seen and admired the planetarium ceiling in her old bedroom in the house on Summer Street.

‘Lovely,’ he’d said and joked that her parents were sweetly eccentric despite their outwardly conservative appearance.

Grey’s parents were both lawyers, now divorced. He’d grown up with money, antiques and housekeepers. She couldn’t imagine his French-cuff-wearing father ever doing something as hands-on as painting stars on the ceiling for his son. Or his mother, she of the perfect blonde bob, professionally blow-dried twice a week, breathlessly explaining about winning &euro;75 in the lottery and planning what she’d do with the money, the way Maggie’s mum had.

‘My parents are not eccentric,’ Maggie had told Grey defensively. ‘They’re just enthusiastic, interested in things…’

‘I know, honey.’ Grey had been contrite. ‘I love your mum and dad. They’re great.’

But it occurred to her that Grey had been right. Her parents weren’t worldly or astute. They were endlessly naïve, innocents abroad, and they’d brought her up to be just like them. Blindly trusting.

She put her head on her knees and tried not to think about anything. Numb the brain. Concentrate on a candle burning. Wasn’t that the trick?

There was noise outside in the hall, muffled speech, the front door slamming. Grey’s voice, low and anxious, saying: ‘Maggie, come out, please. We should talk, honey.’

She didn’t reply. He didn’t try to open the door but she was glad it was locked. She had absolutely no idea of what she’d say to him if she saw him. There was silence for a while.

After half an hour, he returned, sounding harder this time, more lecturer than contrite boyfriend. ‘I’m going out to get us some Thai takeout. You can’t sit in there all night.’

‘I can!’ shrieked Maggie, roused to yell at him with an unaccustomed surge of temper. How dare he tell her what she could and couldn’t do.

‘You can stay in there all night,’ Grey said patiently, in the voice he used to explain difficult concepts to stupid people at parties, ‘if that’s what you want to do, but you ought to come out and eat something. I won’t be long.’ The front door slammed again.

Gone to phone his nubile student, perhaps? To say that Maggie would get over it and then it would be business as usual.

We’ll have to use your place instead of mine.

Grey mightn’t like it so much if he had to bonk his lover in some grotty student digs, though. He liked the smooth crispness of clean sheets, a power shower and wooden floors where you could comfortably walk barefoot without wondering how many other zillions of people had walked barefoot on it before, shedding flakes of dry skin. He’d been brought up in luxury. Before she’d met Grey, Maggie had known nothing of the world of Egyptian cotton sheets with a 400-thread count. To her, sheets came in only two varieties: fitted and flat.

Maggie stuck her ear up against the door and listened. Nothing. She unlocked the door, came out and looked around the apartment, thinking that it no longer looked like the home of her dreams, only an identikit apartment trying hard to be elegant and different, but still looking exactly like its neighbours.

Everything she had achieved had been done on a budget, from the bargain basement African-inspired coffee table to the Moroccan silk cushion covers she’d bought on a street stall and which were now woolly with loose threads. Despite the kudos of being an ultra-clever doctor of studies whose lectures were always packed, Grey wasn’t paid well.

The library paid less. But Maggie was used to not having money. She’d grown up that way. Making do, managing: they were the words she’d lived with as a child. There had been great happiness in her home, for all the lack of hard cash and the shiny new things some of the other girls had. Money wasn’t important to her. Love, security, safety, happiness were. She’d tried so hard to make their home beautiful, the heart of their love. What a waste of time that had been.

Sinking down on the low couch, still numb, she wondered what she should do next. Storm off? Or wait for Grey so she could rage at him that since he’d cheated, he should be the one to go.

Maggie’s Guide to Life didn’t cover this one.

He’d tell her not to be stupid. She could almost hear him saying it, in measured tones that made any argument he laid out sound entirely plausible.

Honestly, Maggie, listen to yourself. There’s absolutely no point in being hasty. Think about this, don’t give in to some primitive emotional response. It was just sex.

Just sex. One of Grey’s endlessly philosophising colleagues had probably written a paper on the subject: how just sex was occasionally justifiable. If the partner in question was away; if the potential bonkee was particularly gorgeous; if nobody would ever know.

Even with her eyes open, Maggie could still see Grey and the blonde on her bed, imagine it all: the blonde’s moans of pleasure as she rose to orgasm; Grey saying: ‘Oh baby, oh baby, that’s so good.’ The words he murmured to Maggie, her words. But they’d never be truly hers again.

Although there was nothing left inside her stomach, Maggie felt she might be sick again. No, she wouldn’t wait for him to explain it to her. Grabbing her handbag from where she’d dropped it so happily what felt like a lifetime ago, she ran out of the apartment. If she was somewhere else, a place where every single ornament didn’t remind her of Grey, she might be able to work out what she’d do next. A bus was coming down the road, the bus to Salthill where she could walk on the beach. Without hesitation she ran to the stop and got on.

CHAPTER FIVE

On Summer Street, the sun had shifted in the afternoon sky. Christie Devlin’s back garden was bathed in a golden glow that lit up the velvety roses and turned the cream-coloured trellises a glittering white. It was the sort of afternoon Christie loved.

James had phoned to say he’d caught an earlier train and should be home by seven instead of nine. The postman had arrived with a late-afternoon bounty of the gadget catalogues Christie loved to devour at night, picking out useful things she’d buy if she could afford them. The dogs, too tired of the heat to clamour for another walk, were content to lie in the shade of the kitchen door, dreaming happily, two sets of paws twitching.

Sitting on her tiny terrace with a cup of iced tea, Christie was supposed to be marking art history essays for tomorrow morning, but she couldn’t concentrate.

The heat, the glory of her garden, James coming home early, none of it mattered. Nothing except the fear that sat hard and stone-like in the pit of her stomach, telling her there was something very wrong.

In her kitchen seven houses away, Una Maguire was standing on a chair looking for a spare tin of baking powder in the larder cupboard beside the fridge. She’d decided to bake a Victoria sponge for the church fair and there had been only a scraping of powder in the old tin.

‘Dennis, have you been at my cupboards again?’ she yelled good-humouredly at her husband. It was a joke. As their daughter, Maggie, was well aware, Dennis Maguire barely knew how to open the cupboards in the kitchen and his only domestic duty was washing and drying. He never put away the dishes he’d dried. Una did that.

For years, it had been Maggie’s job in the production line of washing and drying, but she was long gone with her own life, and the duty fell to Una again.

‘Never touched them,’ Dennis yelled back from the living room where he was putting the final touches to the model of a Spitfire that had taken two weeks to complete. The construction was entirely accurate: Dennis had checked in his Jane’s Aircraft Guide.

‘Don’t believe you,’ teased back Una, over-reaching past a pack of semolina because she was sure she’d seen the red metallic glint of the baking powder tin. With a swiftness that surprised her, the chair tilted, she lost her footing and fell to the floor, her left leg crumpling underneath her.

The pain was as shocking as it was instantaneous. Cruelly sharp, like a blade neatly inserted.

‘Dennis,’ whimpered Una, knowing that she’d done something serious. ‘Dennis, come quickly.’

In the comfort of her bedroom at number 18 Summer Street, Amber Reid lay in her boyfriend’s arms and heard the sound of the ambulance droning up the street to the Maguires’ house. Amber had no interest in looking out the window to see what had happened. The world didn’t exist outside the tangled sheets of her bed, still warm from their lovemaking.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asked Karl.

She couldn’t help herself, even though every magazine she’d ever read said that this sort of question was a Bad Idea. She didn’t think she was a needy person, but there was something about this intimate moment after lovemaking, that made her want to know. She’d been a physical part of Karl. She wanted to be inside his head too, inside for ever, always a part of him.

‘Nothing. Except how beautiful you are.’

Karl shifted, laying his leg over hers, trapping her.

As fresh heat swelled in her belly, Amber realised that there was nothing more erotic than the feeling of naked skin against naked skin. Just lying there after the most incredible lovemaking was almost beyond description.

She ran questing fingers along his powerful chest, feeling the curve of his muscles, the sensitive nubs of his nipples, so different from hers.

She’d seen men’s bodies before, but never fully naked except on a canvas or on a plinth carved from finest Carrara marble. And marble felt different from the warm, living beauty of a man’s body beside hers, inside hers. Desire rushed through her veins again. Why had nobody told her lovemaking could be like this? All those talks about pregnancy, AIDS and being emotionally ready, nobody had said how utterly addictive it all was.

‘We should get up,’ Karl said. ‘It’s after six. Your mother will be home soon.’

Half six, Amber had said. Her mother ran her life on a strict schedule. Half six home, change out of her office suit by 6.35, dinner on the table – pre-prepared from the night before, obviously – by seven.

Amber used to love the comfort of their evening routine. It made home seem like a refuge. No matter how much life changed in the outside world, her mother put dinner on the table at seven. But lately, Amber found herself telling Ella that when she moved out of home, she’d never have a schedule as rigid as her mother’s as long as she lived. Life was about being a free spirit, not a slave to the clock or the powers of good kitchen cleaning products, or having to hear the oft-repeated phrase ‘a good education and you can go anywhere, Amber’.

Right now, education suddenly seemed so boring. Her mother’s view of life was stifling and there was no escape from it. And Mum would hate Karl, who was a free spirit, would hate his intrusion into their tightly run lives. It wouldn’t be the two of them any more. It would be a different twosome, Amber decided firmly: her and Karl.

She slithered over until she was astride Karl, her long tawny mane a tangle over his lightly tanned shoulders. ‘We don’t have to get up,’ she said, smiling. ‘We’ve ages yet.’

There was so much they could do in that precious twenty minutes.

‘And if my mother arrives home early, you can always hop out the back window and climb down the flat roof of the kitchen.’

Her mother was still paying off the credit union loan for the kitchen extension, a fact that often brought a worried look to her face.

Money: that was another subject Amber never wanted to worry about again, along with timetables and exams. Karl was going to be a famous musician and they’d have loads of money. Enough to pay off her mother’s debts, enough to buy anything Amber wanted.

Just once, she’d love the thrill of shopping and never looking at the price tag. Wouldn’t it be glorious to spend without worrying or feeling guilty over it?

‘The neighbours will call the cops if they see a strange bloke hop out of your bedroom on to the kitchen roof and down the lane.’ Karl put both hands around her waist and splayed his fingers.

Amber was proud of her tiny waist. She’d inherited her mother’s hourglass figure, although, thank God, she hadn’t inherited her total lack of interest in looking good. Her mother wouldn’t have been seen dead in the clothes Amber wore: slivers of vintage fabric that barely covered her breasts, low-rise jeans that revealed more than a hint of bare skin. Mum just never bothered making herself look good or showing off her waist.

Amber arched her back as Karl’s fingers moved up to cradle her ribcage. She didn’t want him to go. They had plenty of time.

‘Everyone’s at work or cooking kids’ dinners,’ she said, feeling sympathy for anyone engaged in such boring duties. ‘Nobody will see you.’

There was only one person on the street who might possibly know she had phoned in sick to school and might wonder at her having a strange guy in the house, and that was Mrs Devlin.

Amber approved of Christie Devlin, even if she was old and, therefore, should be totally wrinkly, boring and incapable of remembering what it was like to feel alive. For all Christie’s silver hair, she had a way of looking at Amber that said she knew what was going on in the girl’s head. Scary. Amber wondered if Christie would know by looking at her that Amber had just had the most incredible sex of her life.

Losing-her-virginity sex. She’d nearly done it eighteen months ago, with cute but dopey Liam, who was a friend of Ella’s youngest brother. She’d called a halt to the proceedings just in time. Liam’s hand was burrowing into her jeans and she’d realised that she was about to have sex with a guy just to see what it was like rather than because she would die then and there if she didn’t.

A woman had the right to say no at any point, her mother had said in one of her talks about sex.

‘Whaddya mean, you don’t want to after all?’ demanded Liam, who clearly didn’t agree with Amber’s mother on the whole issue of coitus interruptus.

‘I mean no,’ said Amber. ‘No means no. Got it?’

And although Liam hadn’t spoken to her since – not a big worry – she was glad she’d said no when she did. Imagine having to live your whole life knowing you’d lost your virginity to an ordinary guy like Liam when you could have the memory of a man like Karl Evans?

This was sex with a man of the world, a twenty-five-year-old man with a future. He was her future. She was going to travel the world with him and discover life, with a big L. She’d be eighteen in less than three weeks. She could do what she wanted then. Nobody could stop her.

‘So you’ll come with us?’ he asked, returning to the subject they’d discussed earlier, before they’d fallen into bed. ‘If we’re going to work with a producer in New York, we’ll be gone at least six months. I’d hate to be away from you. I couldn’t bear that.’

‘I’d hate to be away from you too,’ Amber answered, stroking his skin with exploring fingers.

This was love. Pure contentment flowed through her veins. Karl was so crazy about her that he wanted her to travel with his band to America to record their album.

He needed her, he said. He’d been writing songs like a man possessed since they’d met. ‘You’re my muse,’ he’d said.

And Amber, who’d been told all her life how talented and special she was, believed him. She and Karl: they were the twosome now.

As the ambulance carted Una Maguire and her frantic husband Dennis off to hospital, Amber gazed at her lover with shining, besotted eyes and imagined all the wonderful times they’d have. Her mother would flip when she discovered Amber wasn’t going to art college after all, but Amber was an adult now, wasn’t she? She could do what she liked. That, surely, was the point of all those years of ‘you have the power to do what you want’ conversations. Amber would do what she wanted and although she hated hurting her mum, Faye would have to live with it.

Faye left work early so she could dash into the mini-market near home and pick up a few last-minute bits. They were out of basmati rice and she’d defrosted a home-cooked vegetarian korma the night before.

Ordinary rice wouldn’t work, it had to be basmati.

Near the checkout, she dallied briefly by the ranks of magazines and papers. She loved the interior decoration magazines but they were all so expensive, so she didn’t splash out very often. But she felt weary this evening, and the house felt lonely when Amber was upstairs at her desk bent over old exam papers. Faye could do with a treat. Finally choosing a magazine with a supplement on bedrooms, she looked down and her eye was caught by the lead story in the local free newspaper.

Developer’s Deal With Council: 25 Apartments in Summer St Park

She picked it up and moved to the checkout.

‘They must have got it wrong. They can’t be talking about the park here, opposite my house?’ she said to the cashier.

‘That’s the one,’ the woman said, scanning the groceries. ‘Shame to rip up that lovely little park. I don’t know how they get away with that type of thing. There won’t be a bit of green left around here if the developers get their way.’

‘But it’s tiny,’ Faye protested. ‘And surely nobody’s allowed to buy an actual park?’

A queue appeared behind her and Faye was in too much of a rush to stop to read the story, so she stuffed the paper into the top of her grocery bag and left. In her car, she read it all quickly with mounting horror.

The pavilion in the park was falling down and the council had decided to sell it, and the half-acre of land that accompanied it, to a developer in return for the developer building another park and a community centre on a sliver of waste ground a mile away.

‘We’re not tearing up the park,’ insisted a council spokesperson. ‘The park is staying. The pavilion was never part of the park. People just thought it was. We’ve every right to sell it because we can’t afford to renovate it and it’s dangerous, besides. Summer Street will still have its park.’

Except that it will be half the size and have a dirty big apartment block cutting out the sun, Faye thought furiously.

She drove home angrily. Amber would be just as annoyed to hear about this, she loved that little park. Honestly, why did things have to change all the time?

The evening walkers were out in force when Maggie left the beach at Salthill and got the bus back into the city. The bus was only half full and she sat a few seats behind a group of schoolgirls still in uniform.

Half listening to their chatter, she stared listlessly out the window. She’d come to no conclusions because she couldn’t think about Grey. Her mind refused to cooperate, racing off on ideas of its own. She had to work late the next evening instead of Shona. Were they out of coffee? Should she and Grey go to see the new Pixar film? Anything was better than thinking about what had just happened.

From the depths of her handbag, her mobile phone rang. On auto-pilot, Maggie retrieved it, saw that her father was calling and clicked answer.

‘Dad,’ she said, managing to sound bright. Her entire world hadn’t just crashed and burned, no. All was well. Faking happiness – wasn’t that what communicating with your parents was all about?

‘What’s up, Dad?’

‘Hello, love, it’s your mum.’

Maggie’s hand flew to her chest.

‘She’s in hospital, she’s broken her leg.’

A breath Maggie didn’t know she’d been holding was released. ‘I thought you were going to tell me something terrible,’ she whispered, cupping her forehead in one hand with relief.

‘It is terrible,’ he went on. ‘Your mother insisted they did a bone density scan in the middle of it all, and it seems she’s got osteoporosis. The doctor says he doesn’t know why she hasn’t broken bones before.’ Her father had to stop talking for a moment and gulped. ‘I don’t know what to do, Maggie. You know how your mum copes with everything and all, but she’s taking this badly. She keeps saying she’s fine but she’s been crying. Your mother crying.’

He sounded shocked. Una Maguire could see the silver lining in every cloud and had taught her daughter that a smile was easier to achieve than a frown. Mum never cried, except at films where a child was hurt or the dog died.

‘Maggie, I know it’s not fair but could you come home for a couple of days…?’

Maggie could imagine her father standing obediently outside the hospital entrance, not using his mobile phone inside as per the instructions on the hospital walls, even though nobody else obeyed them.

Dad, with his wide-open eyes, his few strands of hair and his endearing inability to deal with daily life to the extent that Maggie felt he ought to wear permanent L-plates. Dad, who’d never seen her mum cry over anything.

‘I’ll be home tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about a thing.’

It was, after all, the solution to everything.

You’re running away, said a voice in her head: a voice that sounded remarkably like Shona when she was in Dr Phil mode. Shona loved Dr Phil and felt that America’s favourite television doctor’s principles could be applied to every life situation.

Are you doing the right thing? Ask yourself that. Would you advise a friend in a similar situation to do what you’re doing? Will running away solve your problem? Dr Phil asked all the right questions and so did Shona.

No, no and no. Maggie knew the answers. But Dr Phil hadn’t the benefit of Maggie Maguire’s Guide to Life.

Don’t stuff your bra to make your A-cups look like B-cups. Boys won’t get close enough to notice but nasty girls from school will. Nobody wants to be No-Tit Maguire for a whole month, as Maggie knew from experience.

Guys who say things like ‘I’ve never met anyone like you’ are not lying, exactly, but probably don’t mean it the way you think they do.

Maggie had a new piece of advice to add to the Guide:

When in doubt, put your running shoes on. Nothing will improve but at least you don’t have to stare your defeat in the face on a daily basis. And if you can’t see it, surely it can’t be there?

In a trendy little internet café close to the apartment, she ordered a latte and a session on the web. Flicking through flights to Dublin, she found one that left the following afternoon, giving her time to pack as well as to negotiate with the library for emergency leave. When she’d booked it, she knew there was only one more big task left: to go home and say goodbye to Grey.

Goodbye Grey, I’m going and we’re selling up so you’ll have to take your jail bait somewhere else from now on.

No, too bitter.

Bye, Grey, I’m going home to Dublin for a while to think. You cheating son of a bitch.

Again, too bitter.

Maybe she ought to stick at Goodbye, Grey.

When she got back to the apartment, Grey and the remains of a Thai meal were both in the living-room area. Maggie didn’t feel even mildly hungry.

The words ‘You lying, cheating bastard’ ran round in her head like a washing machine on final spin.

‘Hello,’ she said. See, not bitter.

‘Honey.’ Grey leapt off the couch and went to touch her, but the frozen look in Maggie’s eyes stopped him. They stood several feet apart, staring at each other, misery on both their faces.

‘I am so sorry,’ Grey said, and he sounded it.

He honestly was sorry. But sorry that he’d had sex with a stunning blonde student or sorry he’d been caught? Bastard.

‘I love you. You might not believe that, but I do.’

‘Then why did you do it?’ Maggie asked. She hadn’t meant to ask anything, had meant to tell him bluntly she was going home for a while. But the question had shot out of her mouth before she could stop it.

Grey’s gaze didn’t falter, she had to give him that. ‘I don’t know,’ he said dismally. ‘She was there, I could have her…it sounds dumb, but I still love you, Maggie. You’re different, special.’

The spinning washing machine still kept rattling out ‘lying, cheating bastard’ as Maggie struggled to make sense of Grey’s words. Her heart was broken and this was his sticking plaster?

‘She was there? Is that your only excuse, Grey? She was bloody well there? If I’m so special, why would you even want to make love with someone else whether she was there or not? If I’m so special, then you wouldn’t want to look crossways at another woman, never mind screw one in our bed. IN OUR BED!’

He looked taken aback at this. Maggie was not a shouter.

‘It wasn’t making love, it was sex. It’s not what you and I have. That’s…’

‘Don’t tell me,’ she snapped, ‘special.’ Infidelity must have a previously undetected side effect of robbing people of their linguistic skills. Even Grey. She had never known Grey to run out of words before.

‘I’m not explaining it correctly,’ he began.

‘Oh yes, you are, and it still doesn’t make sense. You’re the one who says he’s logical, I’m supposed to be the klutzy one who forgets her bank card numbers and can’t program her mobile phone.’ Maggie knew her voice was rising but she couldn’t help it. If Grey was tongue-tied, her word power was on 110 per cent. ‘So how can you come up with such an illogical explanation? If I’m so different and special, you shouldn’t want sex or love with anyone other than me. Simple. QED. That’s what I thought I was getting when we moved in together: fidelity, monogamy, no threesomes. Did I miss the briefing where you said we’d sleep with other people? Or were you just lying through your teeth when you said that I was the sort of woman you wanted, not a pneumatic blonde like all your previous girlfriends?’

‘I wasn’t lying and I do believe in fidelity, really,’ Grey said helplessly. He sat on the edge of the armchair, running a hand through his hair. He had such long, sensitive fingers, like a pianist, fingers that could elicit a ready response from Maggie. He still looked handsome and desirable, with sexily rumpled hair as if he’d been so lost in his books he had forgotten to comb it. Maggie, who spent all her time surrounded by books, had always found this combination of brains and beauty utterly captivating. She could totally understand Ms Peachy Skin wanting to sleep with him. Grey was gorgeous, clever, and powerful within his sphere, all wrapped up in one package.

Just not faithful.

‘I love you, Grey, I don’t look at other men,’ she said. ‘I don’t think about anyone else but you, I almost don’t see anyone else but you. If there was anyone else there, if Brad Pitt and George Clooney and Wesley Snipes and anyone else you can think of were there for the taking, you know what?’ She paused. ‘I’d still say no.’

‘I know, I’m sorry, so sorry.’ The long piano-player’s fingers ran through his hair again and for a flicker of an instant, Maggie thought of his hands running through the girl’s hair in the throes of passion, twisting it and pulling gently like he did with Maggie.

‘I love your hair,’ he’d mutter when they were naked together. Maggie almost never cut it now. Grey loved its length lying tangled on the pillow as he hung over her, cradling her face before he kissed her. He thought she was feminine and sexy, things Maggie had never felt in her life until he’d come along and made her feel them. Now he’d taken all that away.

When her mother or Shona or other people said she was beautiful, she didn’t believe them. They loved her, they were being kind to her. But when Grey said it, she had believed him. He made her beautiful because she glowed from being with him.

That he had so much power over her made her feel helpless now. Going back to the sort of woman he’d had before her made it a double betrayal – a blonde with curves that Maggie would never have. She felt so hurt that she wanted to hurt him too.

‘You’re lying. You’re not sorry, only sorry I got home early and ruined it all. You screwed her. In. Our. Bed,’ she said slowly. ‘That’s not love and respect.’ She paused. ‘Were there others?’

A strange look touched his face briefly, a look of sheer guilt, and it was gone so quickly that only someone who loved his face and knew it in every mood would have noticed. But Maggie was that person. She noticed.

‘No,’ he said. She didn’t believe him.

The armchair seemed to rise up to greet her. Collapsing into it, she hugged her knees to her chest, a gesture that said ‘keep out’.

There had been others, of that she was sure and she wasn’t strong enough to hear about them. Her mother was ill, crying and not coping. Her father was asking for her help. Maggie’s world was topsy-turvy.

‘Just tell me, what’s so hard about fidelity?’ she whispered, afraid she knew the answer.

It had to be her fault. This confirmed what she’d known all along. She’d always felt lucky to have Grey, astonished that he was with her.

Someone like Grey could manage faithfulness with other people, with one of those icy blondes, but not with her. For one of those women, the right sort of wife for a man with a political future in front of him, he’d have got married. But Maggie obviously wasn’t the right sort of wife for him. She was an experiment between the Carolyn Bessette Kennedy types, the trophy women. She wasn’t worth giving up other women for. That was what this was all about.

The demons of anxiety and the self-doubt she’d grown up with rushed back howling into her mind and it was as if they’d never been away.

‘I’m sorry, Maggie, I swear this will never happen again, never.’ He looked up at her but Maggie was away in her head, remembering the years when she’d lived with a permanent clench of anxiety in her gut.

Sunday nights were the worst, when the weekend was careening to an end and Monday loomed, Monday with Sandra Brody and her taunting crew who’d made it their mission in life to destroy Maggie Maguire. Maggie had never done anything to them but that didn’t appear to matter. Maggie was the chosen scapegoat. Daily verbal torture and cruel tricks were her punishment. The self-loathing – because it had to be her fault, hadn’t it? – felt just like it did now.

‘I’m sorry, Maggie,’ Grey repeated. ‘I don’t know why I did it. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.’

‘Really?’ she asked with a bitter laugh. Why was he bothering to pretend? She’d prefer it if he told her the truth: that he loved her but just not enough. She wasn’t quite good enough.

‘You’re different, Maggie,’ Grey began and sat at her feet, pulling both her hands from around her knees, trying to make her hold him. ‘I love you, I never meant to hurt you. I am so, so sorry. Can’t you forgive me?’

She whisked her hands away, but he laid his dark head on her chair, pleading, imploring. It would be so easy to reach out and touch him, make it all go away and start again. Go on holiday, sell the apartment, move somewhere else, anything to paper over the crack. Maggie felt her fingers reach out, an inch away from brushing the softness of his hair.

Marriage – that would be the ultimate Band-Aid. A sign that they were together despite it all. Her mum would love it if she got married. Poor Mum, always hoping for the fairytale ending for her daughter. But Grey had never discussed marriage with her. Perhaps she wasn’t worth that, either.

Maggie’s hand stilled on its way to his hair. She could forgive Grey, she could forgive him almost anything. But then it would happen again. Other women, who’d work at the university and pity her, understanding that a prince like Grey wouldn’t be satisfied with just one woman. That was the price a woman like Maggie had to pay to be with a man like Grey. Why hadn’t she realised that there was a trade-off, a price?

She pulled her hand away. She couldn’t pay that price.

Suddenly, her running shoes seemed very inviting. Even home, the confines of Summer Street where her life had never been storybook perfect, was better than this.

It was familiar, somewhere she could lick her wounds. Shona and Dr Phil were probably wrong about running away. Now, staying was the hard option and running was easy.

Christie had cooked a beautiful goulash by the time she heard James’s key in the lock.

Goulash in honour of her dear Hungarian friend, Lenkya, who’d once said, ‘You can kill a man or cure him in the kitchen.’ This had been nearly forty years before, when Christie’s culinary expertise extended to making porridge or boiling eggs.

‘Cooking is the heart of the home and is the place where the woman is queen,’ Lenkya pointed out in the husky Hungarian accent that would have made the phone book sound fascinating, should she ever want to recite it.

Lenkya had lived below Christie in a house on Dunville Avenue that contained a veritable warren of bedsits.

‘If you can kill in the kitchen, I’ll end up in the dock for murder,’ Christie had said merrily.

She was dark-haired then and when she and Lenkya walked the half-mile to Ranelagh to buy groceries, people often mistook the two women with their flashing dark eyes, hand-span waists and lustrous curls for sisters.

‘You should learn to cook,’ said Lenkya, who could rustle up the tenderest stew from a handful of root vegetables, a scattering of herbs and a scraggy piece of meat. ‘How have you never learned before this? In my country, women learn to look after themselves. I can grow vegetables, raise chickens, kill chickens, pouf –’ She twisted both hands round an imaginary chicken’s neck. ‘Like that. If you are hungry, you soon learn.’

‘My mother cooked for all of us, my father, my brothers and sister,’ Christie told her. It was harder to explain the family dynamics which meant cooking was the only power her mother had ever had. Under Christie’s father’s thumb all the time, it was only when Maura was in front of her stove that she was in charge. If it was possible to kill or cure a man in the kitchen, Christie wondered how her mother had resisted the impulse to kill her overbearing husband.

James hadn’t known Lenkya well, but he’d been benefiting from her cooking expertise ever since. Food was all about love, Christie knew now. Feeding your family, giving them chicken soup when they were sick, and apple cake to take away the bitterness in their mouth when they were lovelorn: that was how you could cure them. Love and healing flew out of her kitchen into her home. Her life was nothing like her poor mother’s and she had no need of killing.

‘Hello, Christie.’ James put his arms round her and held her tightly. He smelled of the train, of dusty streets and other people’s cigarette smoke. He looked, as he so often did these days, tired and in need of a long, long sleep.

‘Hard day?’ Christie took his briefcase and jacket, resisting the impulse to push him up to their room, tuck him into bed and make him stay there until the exhausted look had gone from his face.

‘Ah no, fine,’ he said, removing his shoes and pulling on the old leather slippers he kept on the second step of the stairs. ‘The trip takes it out of me, I don’t know why. I’m sitting on the train half the day, not driving, so I should be in fine fettle.’

‘Travelling is exhausting,’ Christie insisted. ‘There’s a difference between sitting in your own armchair at home and sitting on a train at the mercy of leaves on the track, worrying about missing your meeting.’

‘I’m hardly Donald Trump,’ he joked.

‘He has a limo, I’d say, so he’s not at the mercy of the leaves.’ Christie handed her husband a glass of iced tea. ‘And someone else to drag his briefcase around after him. How did the meeting about the emissions go?’

‘We’re getting there. But one of the people was sick today, so there’s a chance we’ll have to go through it all again.’

‘For heaven’s sake,’ exclaimed Christie. ‘Surely if they’re sick, they have to catch up with the rest of you, not the other way round.’

‘You know how it works, love,’ said James. ‘For some people, the more meetings there are, the better. Then nothing actually gets done, but lots of minutes are typed up and the department’s accounts’ people are kept busy printing out expenses cheques for tea and coffee. Global warming won’t kill the planet: bureaucracy will.’

He followed her into the kitchen and sat down on a low stool to pet the dogs, who’d been clamouring for love since he arrived.

He normally knelt on the floor to pet them, she knew. His hip must be bothering him again. Not that James would ever say so. Christie knew many women with husbands whose flu symptoms were always at least on a par with Ebola, if the patient was to be believed. She was the lone dissenting voice with a husband who never magnified his illness to the power of ten, which worried her because James could be having a heart attack in front of her and he’d probably say he had ‘a bit of an ache’ and that a moment sitting down would cure it. How could you look after a man like that?

‘Now, what was that all about this morning?’ he asked when Tilly’s inner ears had been rubbed to her satisfaction and Rocket had snuffled wetly all over his shoes to establish that no other dogs had been admired that day.

‘What was all what about this morning?’ said Christie, feigning innocence.

‘You know, the phone call when I’d only just left the house.’

‘I was having an anxious day, that’s all,’ she relented. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you but I had this awful feeling that something bad was going to happen to us.’

James pulled her over on to his knee and the dogs whimpered in outrage. This was their time for cuddling, not Christie’s. Tilly stormed off to her bed to sulk.

‘You can’t take my weight on your hip…’ Christie began. She knew it was stiff, she could see from the way he’d been walking that morning.

‘Oh, shut up about my bloody hip, woman,’ James said and held her tight. ‘I love you, you daft creature, d’you know that? I love that you still worry about me.’

‘Yes and I love you too, you daft man,’ she replied. ‘Even if your hip is aching and you won’t mention it.’

‘It’s only a twinge.’

‘I don’t believe you. You’d be in agony, and you’d still say it was only a twinge. You’re not impressing anybody with your stoicism,’ she said crossly.

‘It’s not agony.’

‘If your arthritis is playing up, it’s not good to have me on your lap,’ she said.

James laid his head against her cheek. ‘The day I can’t manage to have you on my lap,’ he said, ‘get them to shoot me.’

‘They couldn’t shoot you,’ Christie murmured, hugging him. ‘You’re an endangered species.’

‘Like the dodo?’

‘The poor dodo’s been and gone, sorry. You’re more of a white tiger: rare and special.’

‘You say the nicest things,’ he replied, his lips close to her cheek.

‘Impossible man,’ sighed Christie, kissing him on the forehead and getting up. ‘I made goulash.’

‘Lenkya’s recipe? Great, I love that.’ James sat down at the table expectantly. ‘Whatever happened to her? She hasn’t been in touch for years, not since Ana was involved with that artist fellow and they were all here for the big exhibition in Dawson Street. Remember that? How many years ago is it?’

Christie opened her mouth but no sound came out. Fortunately the phone blistered into the silence and she leaped to answer it.

It was Jane from the Summer Street Café, with news that poor Una Maguire had been carted off in an ambulance after a fall.

‘I knew you’d want to know,’ said Jane, ‘and that Dennis might not get round to telling people.’ Which was a kind way of saying dear Dennis would be too flustered to brush his teeth and might need some hand-holding. Christie was good at that: calm in a crisis.

‘I’ll pop a note through their door telling him I’ll drop in on Friday and to phone me if he needs anything before then,’ Christie said and Jane hung up, knowing it was all taken care of now that Christie Devlin knew.

‘Looks like your feeling of gloom was right after all,’ James said as they sat down to their goulash. He’d opened a bottle of lusty red wine to go with the stew, even though it was only midweek, and they stuck pretty much to the wine only at weekends rule.

‘Yes,’ said Christie, thinking of the Maguires and how Dennis would cope with being the carer instead of the cared for. ‘That must have been it, after all.’

But she wasn’t telling the truth. Whatever dark cloud had moved over her head was still there, looming, promising bad things to come.

And James had mentioned ‘that artist fellow’ of Ana’s, Carey Wolensky, who’d turned out to be one of the most famous painters of his generation. When James had carelessly referred to him, Christie had felt a shiver run right through her. She didn’t believe in coincidence. Everything happened for a reason. There were tiny signs of the future everywhere and only the watchful spotted them. First her anxiousness, now this mention of a man she wanted to forget. Christie was scared to think of what it might all mean: her past coming back to haunt her. Why now?

CHAPTER SIX

The next afternoon, Maggie’s suitcases arrived together on the carousel. They looked shabby among some of the classier travellers’ bags from the Galway to Dublin shuttle.

She hauled them off the belt with some difficulty, having murmured, ‘No thanks, I’m fine,’ to the man who’d leaped to offer to help the tall redhead in the trailing pale suede coat.

Her eyes were raw with crying and she kept her head down as she spoke, embarrassed by how she must look. The man probably felt sorry for her; thought she was one of those care in the community patients who rattled because of all the Xanax bottles in their pockets.

Maggie didn’t need anyone feeling sorry for her today. She felt sorry enough for herself.

The first piece of luggage was the heaviest, a wardrobe-on-wheels affair that was fit to burst, only a bright purple strap preventing its internal organs splurging out over the concourse. An orange ‘heavy item’ sticker hung from the handle. The second was a hard candy-pink case that was a dead weight even when empty.

Grey used to joke that it had been cursed by so many baggage people, it had probably developed magical powers itself.

‘If our plane ever goes down, the pink case will be the only survivor, you wait and see,’ he’d laugh.

Fresh misery assailed her at this thought of Grey and the fabulous holidays they had saved up for and shared before they’d bought the flat.

They’d never go away together again. Not when she’d be watching like a jailer every time he tipped a beautiful waitress or glanced at a woman on the beach. Only a fool would trust him again. Maggie was not going to be that fool. Last night she’d packed and said they’d talk later, trying to delay the inevitable argument in case she gave in.

‘Would you like me to sleep on the couch?’ Grey had asked, and she wanted to whisper: no, lie next to me and hold me. Tell me it’ll be all right, it was a mistake, that you’ll make it better.

‘Yes, sleep on the couch,’ she said, finding the strength from somewhere to say it.

We’ll try again, I know you love me, her heart bleated.

But her head had to do the talking. Leaving this way was easier, because if she stopped and thought about actually losing him, about not sharing her life with him, Maggie was afraid she’d relent. And her head told her that staying would destroy her, in the end.

Gulping back a fresh batch of tears, she grabbed Cursed Candy Pink and shoved it on to the luggage trolley behind Wardrobe, ignoring the interested gaze of the man who’d tried to help her. She wished he’d stop looking at her. Honestly, what was wrong with people? Couldn’t a person cry in public?

On top of the trolley, she dumped her handbag, a banana-shaped black leather thing that held everything, and cleverly deposited the most vital bits right at the bottom, thus deterring both purse-snatchers and Maggie from locating her money in shops.

She wheeled her trolley hopefully past the special mirrored section, holding her breath.

On those girls-only holidays to Greece, in the pre-Grey days, the others had always trooped through customs happily clinking contraband bottles of ouzo and Metaxa brandy, while she (the only one who’d actually read the customs bit of paper about only importing 200 fags and giving notice if they’d been loitering near goats) was the one to have to unpack her case in public.

Today, fortunately, the customs people behind their two-way mirrors resisted the impulse to go through Maggie’s blameless luggage.

Then she was out into arrivals, into the spotlight, where hundreds of eager people scrutinised and rejected her as they searched for whichever special person they’d come to meet so they could wave their welcome home placards, wobble their helium balloons and scream ‘hello!!!’

It brought home to Maggie that she had no special person any more. The person for whom she used to be special had cheated on her. God, it hurt.

Trying to look cool, as though she didn’t care, she was thankful when her mobile rang and she could busy herself answering it.

‘We’re home from the hospital,’ said her father happily. ‘Where are you, love? Are you nearly here yet? Will I boil the kettle? Your mother can’t wait to see you.’

Maggie felt the usual dual burst of affection and irritation reserved for conversations with her parents. The plane had only just landed, for heaven’s sake. She’d already given Dad the details and told him to add another fifteen minutes for normal plane delays. Unless Clark Kent was bursting out of his Y-fronts in a telephone box nearby in order to whisk her off home at supersonic speed, she wouldn’t reach Summer Street for another three quarters of an hour at least.

‘Not quite, Dad,’ she said, keeping her tone cheery. It was only because he cared. ‘I’ve just come through arrivals.’

‘Oh, right then. You’ll be here in…’

‘Less than an hour,’ she said. ‘See you then. Bye!’

She stuck the phone back in her jeans pocket and tried to ignore the feeling that the walls were closing in. She was back home. Back with nothing to show for five years away in Galway and the Maguire family clock – always at ‘Where were you? Why didn’t you phone? We were worried!’ – was ticking once again.

Maggie manhandled all her worldly goods towards the door and the taxis. It was too late for the if-onlys but she went through them all the same – if only Grey hadn’t screwed someone else, if only she hadn’t witnessed it, if only he’d realised how much he loved her and pledged undying faithfulness instead of saying he couldn’t help himself. If only she wasn’t so stupid to fall for someone like him in the first place.

That’s what it all came back to: her stupidity. An intelligent woman would have known that Grey, who could have had any woman, would one day stray. An intelligent woman would have got out before this happened. An intelligent woman would have made it calmly clear long beforehand that straying wasn’t an option and that if he did, their relationship was over. For such a woman, Grey would have agreed.

But not for Maggie. For all that he’d said she was special, that he didn’t want a pert blonde, he’d lied to her.

Now all she had to do was work out what to tell her parents. With luck, she’d have some peace on the ride home to adjust and get her story straight. They didn’t need her in tears right now, with her mother in such distress.

‘…So you see, what the politicians don’t realise is that if you have a system with toll roads, it’s the people like myself who are paying for it…’

‘Right, I see.’

The taxi driver’s monologue was only stemmed by having to negotiate the tricky box junction just before St Kevin’s Road. Since picking her up at the airport, he’d been talking at high speed about the price of property, chewing gum on car seats and now toll roads. Maggie hadn’t felt able to interrupt. It would have been rude and in the grand scheme of things, there was no excuse to be rude, was there? Her mother’s training had kicked in as usual.

Maggie was the one who got stuck with bores at parties, charity muggers in the street, and sweet bewildered people who wandered into the library for warmth and who ought to have been thrown out. She was too kind and too polite to say no or ignore people.

‘That’s what I said to that woman politician. I said: that’s my opinion, Missus, and if you don’t like it, don’t get in my cab,’ the taxi driver went on. ‘Was I right to say it?’ As with all the other questions he’d posed on the forty-minute trip, he didn’t pause for a reply. ‘I was right, you see. Nobody stands up to these people. Nobody.’

The taxi turned the corner, driving slowly past the Summer Street Café where people sat outside at the small tables, looking as if they hadn’t a care in the world. Mum and Dad loved the café, loved the buzz of meeting people there. Mum would listen to all the gossip and pass it eagerly on to Maggie, forgetting that she’d lived away for five years and didn’t know all the people they met.

Maggie, who didn’t know all of the people in her Galway apartment block and clearly didn’t know her boyfriend at all, had learned that the wild-eyed Mrs Johnson was off the sauce after failing the breathalyser test one night and losing her licence, that Amber Reid, the teenage girl who lived alone with her mother – lovely woman with a big job but never too busy to bake cakes for the Vincent de Paul fundraisers – was going to art college and would be a big star one day. Christie Devlin said she was a marvellous artist, and Christie would know, wouldn’t she? Look at those lovely paintings Christie had done for Una’s sixtieth. Maggie knew that the carrot cake muffins in the café were now sugar-free; oh, and she knew that Jane and Henry in the café had hired this lovely Chinese waitress.

‘Xu her name is, although we call her Sue, because it’s almost the same. Came all the way from China by herself, brave little thing, and not knowing anybody here. She’d put us to shame,’ Mum had said. ‘Learning English and working at the same time, and not knowing a sinner here. It must be terrible hard to leave your country and start again.’

Maggie loved the way her mother was so interested in people. Maggie used to be like that too, she realised, before she met Grey and became so wrapped up in him that she had no space or time left for anyone else. Yet how could she be totally involved with him and still not see the obvious? Love wasn’t just blind, it was lobotomised.

In the back seat of the taxi, her thoughts miles away, Maggie realised they’d passed the third of Summer Street’s maple trees and suddenly they were slowing down outside her house.

‘Number forty-eight you said?’ the driver asked.

‘Yes, thanks,’ she replied.

She scrabbled in her bag to pay him.

‘Cheer up, gorgeous,’ he said, beaming up at her from the window, ‘it might never happen.’

True to form, Maggie managed a smile.

‘See ya,’ she said. There was no way she was going to tell him it had already happened.

She turned and stared at number 48. Home. It was one of the 1930s houses, white with dark beams painted on the front gable and diamond-paned windows. Part of the house was covered by the bronzed leaves of a Virginia creeper that had science fiction film capabilities to regrow no matter how often it was pruned back to the roots.

Maggie felt the years shrink away. Home made her feel not entirely like a child again but as if still under the influence of all the old childhood problems.

Her father met her at the gate, dressed up in his going-into-the-hospital outfit of navy blazer and tie, but still comfortingly familiar. When he put his arms around her, Maggie snuggled against him like the child she once was, even though he was shorter than her and as skinny as ever.

‘It’s so lovely to have you home,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming. I know it’s a lot to ask, but thank you.’

‘How could I not come?’ admonished Maggie, pulling away briskly. If she let her reserve drop, she’d sob her heart out. Better to be brusque and not give them a chance to ask after Grey. She’d tell them later, when she – and they – felt stronger.

‘How’s Mum?’

‘Much better today.’ Her father’s face brightened. ‘She got an awful shock, you know. It was all so quick. One minute we were here, the next, she’d passed out with the pain. I thought she was dead, Maggie,’ he added, and he looked so forlorn that Maggie had to take a deep breath to steady herself.

‘Where is she?’

‘Where do you think?’

The kitchen at the back of the house was certainly the heart of the Maguire home. A cosy room which had been decorated at a time when there was no such concept in interior design as using too much pine, it was the room Maggie felt she’d grown up in.

Sitting in an armchair at the table (pine) with her plastered leg up on a kitchen chair (pine), watching the portable television that was perched on the Little House on the Prairie dresser (distressed pine), was Maggie’s mother, Una.

As tall a woman as her daughter, she was just as slender but with faded red hair instead of Maggie’s fiery curls. Their faces were very similar: perfect ovals with other-worldly cobalt-blue eyes and wide mouths that were always on the verge of a smile. But whereas Maggie’s smile was tremulous, anxious, Una’s was the all-encompassing beam of a woman who embraced life. Now Una sat listlessly in the chair, as if breaking her leg had taken the strength out of all her bones. Beside her was the crossword, nearly finished.

‘I’ve left the hard ones for your father,’ Una said, which was the standard and affectionate lie in the Maguire household.

Dennis was no good at crosswords. A champion at the Rubik’s Cube, and deeply sorry when that had gone out of fashion, he was marvellous with gadgets, figures and magazine quizzes where you had to work out which tetrahedron was the odd one out.

But words defied him.

‘What’ll I say?’ he used to beg Maggie when he had to write the only birthday card his wife didn’t write for him.

‘To Una, happy birthday, I love you so much, Dennis,’ was Maggie’s usual suggestion.

It was what she’d have liked written on a card to her. Grey, for all his eloquence, hadn’t been much good at cards either, although Maggie had kept every single one he’d given her.

Mum hugged Maggie tightly, then somehow managed a final squeeze and whispered in her ear: ‘We’re so glad you’re here, Bean.’

Bean or Beanpole was her nickname, so given because she’d been long and skinny as a child.

‘Like a beanpole!’ her cousin Elisabeth used to say joyfully.

Elisabeth, also tall but with Victoria’s Secret model curves instead of Maggie’s racehorse slenderness, was never called anything but Elisabeth.

While Dennis bustled off with Maggie’s suitcases, Una told her daughter that the osteoporosis was advanced.

‘They can’t believe I haven’t broken anything before,’ she said finally. ‘It’s a bit of a miracle, and at my stage, I could end up breaking bones with just a knock against a bookcase.’

Maggie was shocked. ‘Oh, Mum,’ she said. ‘That’s terrible. Dad said it was osteoporosis but he never said it was that bad.’

They heard Dennis coming back.

‘I don’t want him to know everything,’ her mother went on. ‘It’d only worry him and what’s the point of that?’

‘He ought to know, Mum.’

‘Ah, why? It won’t be good for his heart if he’s watching me every moment worrying about me. I’ll be fine.’

Maggie’s father came back into the kitchen.

‘What’ll we have for dinner?’ said Una breezily. ‘I can’t wait for a decent meal. Your poor dad is doing his best but he can only do soup and rolls. How about a roast? I fancy beef.’

‘Roast beef? Is there beef in the fridge?’ Maggie asked.

Her mother looked blank. ‘I don’t know, love. I can’t get near the fridge. But look. Or you could go to the shops. The car’s there.’

At that instant, Maggie began to feel panicky. Everything was more serious than she’d thought.

Her father wasn’t exactly one of life’s copers. He’d never been able to cook, and viewed both the iron and washing machine as arcane specimens, beyond his ability. Her mother had done everything in the Maguire household.

And yet here she was, expecting Maggie, who had just arrived, to know what was in the fridge, not to mention to feel confident hopping into a car she had never driven before and going to the supermarket. Maggie had passed her driving test when she was a teenager but she’d never owned a car and could barely remember the difference between all the pedals.

Had breaking her leg broken something else in her mother too?

‘Mum,’ Maggie said, feeling horrendously guilty at not being able to do this simple thing in a family crisis, ‘I can’t drive. You know I can’t.’

She looked into the fridge. There were several big chill-cabinet cartons of soup, half a pack of butter and eggs. Nothing else. ‘We shop from day to day,’ her father added helpfully. ‘I’ll stay with your mother.’

Maggie shut the fridge. She was in charge. She wondered how this had happened. She was not qualified for this. Her mother was the one who was in charge.

‘You’ll be able to go, won’t you?’ Una’s voice quavered slightly.

With frightening clarity, Maggie saw that their roles had swapped. One cracked femur and she was the parent.

She had no option.

‘I’ll do a shop right now,’ she said firmly. ‘The mini supermarket will have everything we need. I’ll walk.’

Speedi Shop on Jasmine Row had been open from dawn to dusk since Maggie had been in infant school. More expensive than the proper supermarket a mile away, it was always busy but there were never any long queues at the checkouts, mainly because Gretchen, the owner, didn’t encourage chitchat. She was, however, an interrogator of Lubyanka standards and Maggie had always felt that Gretchen was terrifying. She didn’t smile much and when she did, her forehead and face remained static, as if filled with Botox, although it was hard to imagine Gretchen spending the money on such a thing. Beauty, a bit like politeness, was a waste of time in Gretchen’s book.

She was there behind the counter when Maggie arrived at the checkout, her basket spilling over with the makings of a roast dinner, shop-bought apple pie and ice cream for pudding.

‘Maggie Maguire, a sight for sore eyes. Long time no see. I thought you were living in married bliss in Galway.’

Maggie translated this bit of faux politeness in her head: fancy seeing you here, and is it true you’re not married at all but still shacking up with some fellow who clearly won’t marry you?

‘Home for a few days,’ said Maggie, aiming for the happily unconcerned approach. Had Gretchen X-ray vision? Could she see that Maggie’s man had cheated on her? It wouldn’t surprise her if the answer was yes. ‘And I’m not married, actually, I’ve a long-term partner.’

Translation: I am a fulfilled woman who has made interesting life choices and wouldn’t be bothered getting married when I could live the free life of a modern feminist unshackled by silly old wedding vows.

‘Right.’ Gretchen nodded appraisingly and began to scan Maggie’s groceries. ‘You remember my Lorraine, don’t you? You were in the same year in school. Lorraine’s living in Nice, married to this gorgeous French pilot, Jacques, with three kids and a live-in nanny. You should see their house: Jacuzzi, pool, bidet in every en suite, the lot.’ I don’t buy your story, said her eyes. Long-term partner, my backside. Now Lorraine, she’s a success story. She has it all: fabulous husband, children, everything money can buy. She’s not home with her tail between her legs at the age of thirty with no ring and no kids either.

‘How wonderful for her,’ Maggie said, adding a large bar of chocolate to the basket to comfort herself. ‘Lorraine always knew what she wanted, didn’t she?’ She snatched back her shopping and shoved it into a bag. Lorraine was a hard-nosed little madam and she was always keen on self-improvement without doing any actual work. Like stealing other people’s homework or hanging round with the class bullies.

‘Bye, Gretchen, have to rush.’

On her way home with the grocery bags weighing her down, Maggie passed the time by trying to remember who lived in the various houses on Summer Street. Many of them were still owned by the people who’d lived there when she was a child, like the Ryans, who bred Burmese cats and never minded the neighbourhood children coming in to coo over the latest batch of apricot-coloured kittens. Or sweet Mrs Sirhan, who’d looked eighty when Maggie had been small, and now must be unbelievably old, but still went for her constitutional every day, up the street into the café for a cup of Earl Grey with lemon.

There was a sign on the park gate: ‘Save Our Park’, written in shaky capitals on a bit of cardboard, and Maggie idly wondered what the park had to be saved from. But the sign-writer hadn’t thought to add that bit of information. Rampaging aliens, perhaps? Or people who didn’t scoop the dog poop?

The old railway pavilion was her favourite part of the park: she’d played in it many times during her childhood and it was easy to imagine it as a train station, with ladies in long dresses sobbing into their reticules as handsome men left them behind, sad stories behind every parting. There hadn’t been a train that way for many years.

The train tracks were long gone, too. Maybe that was the lesson she needed to learn: nobody cared about the past. Her misery over Grey would mean nothing in a hundred years.

It was ten before Maggie managed to escape to bed and to her private misery. She’d left her mobile phone unanswered all day and when she finally checked there were seven where are you? texts from Shona, along with two missed calls and one I am so sorry, please answer your phone text from Grey.

Yeah, right, Maggie thought furiously, erasing it. One lousy text and a couple of phone calls. What an effort that must have been. Feeling angry with Grey was easier than giving in to feeling hopeless and alone. If she let go of the anger, she’d collapse under the weight of the loneliness.

She unwrapped the giant bar of milk chocolate she’d bought and dialled the only person in the world, apart from Shona, who might possibly understand: her cousin Elisabeth. Despite coming up with the nickname Bean, Elisabeth was one of Maggie’s favourite people.

Elisabeth was tall, athletic, had been captain of the netball team and was wildly popular at her school, a fact that had often made Maggie wish they’d gone to the same one. She might have protected Maggie. She was now a booker in one of Seattle’s top model agencies and incredibly, despite all these comparative riches, she was a nice person.

It was eight hours earlier in Seattle and Elisabeth was on her lunch break, sitting at her desk with her mouth full of nuts because she was still doing the low-carb thing.

‘How are you doing?’ asked Elisabeth in muffled tones.

‘Oh, you know, fine. You heard about Mum’s accident?’

‘Yes, Dad told me.’ Her father and Maggie’s were brothers. ‘You don’t sound OK,’ she added suspiciously.

Elisabeth picked up tones of voice like nobody else. Certainly nobody else in the Maguire family, who all had the intuition of celery. ‘What’s up?’

‘I told you.’

‘I mean what else?’

‘You can hear something else in my voice?’

‘I spend all my life on the phone to young models in foreign countries asking them how they are, did anybody hit on them and are they eating enough/drinking too much/taking coke/ screwing the wrong people/screwing anybody. So yes, I can hear it in your voice,’ insisted Elisabeth.

‘I caught Grey in bed with another woman.’

Silence.

‘Fuck.’

‘I didn’t know you were allowed to say that outside Ireland any more,’ Maggie remarked, in an attempt at levity. ‘Everyone on your side of the Atlantic nearly passes out when they hear it, when here, it’s a cross between an adjective and an adverb, the sort of word we can’t do without.’

‘Desperate situations need desperate words,’ said Elisabeth, then said ‘fuck’ again followed by, ‘Fucking bastard.’

‘My sentiments exactly.’

‘Is he still alive?’

‘He has all his teeth, yes,’ Maggie said.

‘And they’re not on a chain around his neck?’

Maggie laughed and it was a proper laugh for the first time all day. Elisabeth was one of those people with the knack of making the unbearable slightly more bearable. With her listening, Maggie didn’t feel like the only person on the planet to have been hurt like this before.

‘No, they’re still in his mouth. I did think about hitting him but he was attached to this blonde fourteen-year-old at the time…’

‘A fourteen-year-old!’ shrieked Elisabeth.

‘Metaphorically speaking,’ Maggie interrupted. ‘She’s probably twenty or twenty-one, actually. Gorgeous, from the angle I was looking from. Which was really a bummer. I mean, if she was ugly and wrinkly, I might manage to cope, but being cheated on with a possible centrefold doesn’t do much for your self-confidence.’

‘Oh, Maggie,’ said Elisabeth and there was love and pity in her voice. She’d long since given up trying to boost Maggie’s self-esteem, although having a beautiful cousin with a skewed vision of her gorgeousness was perfect training for working with stunning size six models who thought they were too fat and faced rejection every day. ‘I wish I was there to give you a hug. What did you do?’

‘Dad phoned about Mum, so I left to come here. Ran away, in other words, which is what I’m good at.’

‘You haven’t told them.’

‘No. Couldn’t face it.’

Maggie heard muffled noises at Elisabeth’s end.

‘Sorry, I’ve got to go. Call me tomorrow?’

‘Sure.’

Maggie looked at her suitcases waiting patiently to be unpacked. It was hard to feel enthusiastic about moving back into her childhood bedroom. All she needed now was one of those big doll’s heads that you put eye make-up on, her old Silver Brumby books, and she’d be eleven again.

She’d read so much as a child, losing herself in the world of books because the outside world was so cruel. And yet she hadn’t learned as much as she’d thought she had: books taught you that it would work out right in the end. They never envisaged the possibility that the prince would betray you. They never pointed out that if you gave a man such ferocious power over your heart, he could destroy you in an instant.

She finished her bar of chocolate slowly.

If everything had been different, she’d have been at home now in her own flat with Grey.

Without closing her eyes, she could imagine herself there: sitting on their bed, talking about their day, all the little things that seemed mundane at the time and became painfully intimate and important when you could no longer share them. Like waking up in the night and feeling Grey’s body, warm and strong beside her in the bed. Like leaning past him at the bathroom sink to get to the toothpaste.

Like hanging his T-shirts on the radiators to dry. These things made up their life together. Now it was all gone. She felt betrayed, broken and utterly hollow inside.

She was back in her childhood bed with nothing to show for it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mrs Devlin’s art classes were different from any other lesson in the school, agreed all the girls in the sixth year. For a start, Mrs Devlin herself was not exactly your average teacher, although she was older than many of the others. Even her clothes bypassed normal teacher gear, whether she wore one of her long honey suede skirts and boots with a low-slung belt around her hips, or dressed down in Gap jeans and a man’s shirt tied in a knot around the waist. Compared to Mrs Hipson, headmistress and lover of greige twinsets and pearlised lipstick, Mrs Devlin was at the cutting edge of bohemian chic.

Most of all, the girls agreed, it was her attitude that made her different. The other teachers seemed united in their plan to improve the students whether they wanted to be improved or not. But Mrs Devlin, without ever exactly saying so, seemed to believe that people improved themselves at their own rate.

So on May the 1st, with just weeks to go to the state exams and with the whole teaching body in a state of panic, Mrs Devlin’s assignment to her sixth-year class was to ‘forget about the exams for a moment and paint your vision of Maia, the ancient pagan goddess who gave her name to May and who was a goddess of both spring and fertility’.

‘As today’s the first of May, it’s the perfect day for it.’

She stopped short of pointing out that the exam results probably wouldn’t matter in a millennium. Not the way to win friends and influence people in a school. ‘You’ve all been working so hard with your history of art,’ Christie added as she perched on the corner of the desk at the top of the class. She rarely sat down at the desk during art practicals, preferring to walk around and talk to her students: a murmured bit of praise here, a smile there. ‘I thought it might be nice to spend one hour of the day enjoying yourselves, reminding yourselves that art is about creativity and forgetting about studying.’

The class, who’d come from double English where they were re-butchering The Catcher in the Rye for exam revision, nodded wearily.

The most art they got to do these days involved colouring in their exam revision timetables with highlighter pens – generally a lot more fun than the revision itself.

‘Maia is the oldest and most beautiful of the seven stars called the Seven Sisters, or the Pleiades,’ Christie continued. ‘The Pleiades are part of the constellation of Taurus, which is ruled over by Venus, for those of you interested in astrology. Maia is around five times larger than our sun.’

It was such a sunny morning that flecks of dust could be seen floating on shafts of light filtering in from the second-floor windows. St Ursula’s was an old building, with decrepit sash windows and huge sills perfect for sitting on between classes and blowing forbidden cigarette smoke out into the netball court below.

‘In art, spring is represented, as you know, by the sense of sensuality and passion,’ Christie went on. ‘Can anyone remember any artists who painted spring in such a way?’

‘Botticelli,’ said Amber Reid.

Christie nodded and wondered again what Amber had been getting up to on Wednesday. The way she’d been dressed and the joy in her step made Christie damn sure that Amber had been on her way to some illicit activity.

‘Yes, Amber, Botticelli is a good example. Remember, girls, artists didn’t have television to give them ideas, or films. They looked at their world for inspiration and got it from nature. Keep that in mind during the exam, they were influenced by their times. By war, poverty, nature, religion. As we discussed in art history last week, religion is important as an influence on artists. Remember the puritanical Dutch schools with their hidden messages.

‘Today’s the pagan festival of Beltane, which is why May is called Bealtaine in Irish, and it’s a celebration of spring, warmer days, blossoming nature and blossoming of people too. Of course, the Church wasn’t too keen on pagan festivals, but they’re part of our history too, so it’s interesting to know about them. You paint, I’m here if you need me.’

The class were silent as they considered painting a fertility goddess. At St Ursula’s in general, sexuality was given a wide berth by the teaching staff. Even in sex education classes, the concept of passion was diluted, with scientific words like ‘zygote’ giving students the impression that it was a miracle the human race had gone on for so long considering how boring procreation sounded.

‘Is it true that Titian only painted women he’d gone to bed with?’ asked Amber suddenly, her eyes glittering.

Christie had a sudden flash of knowledge: a picture of Amber and a dark, moodily dangerous young man came into her mind, entwined on a childhood bed doing grown-up things. Christie knew exactly what Amber had been up to the day before. She blazed with burgeoning sexuality. To embody Maia, Amber just needed to paint a self-portrait.

Christie felt a rush of pity for poor old Faye who probably hadn’t a clue that her teenage daughter had just taken one of the giant steps into womanhood. Having sons was definitely easier than daughters, she thought gladly. Sons were rarely left holding the baby.

‘So I believe,’ said Christie carefully. ‘Paint, Amber,’ she whispered, ‘don’t talk.’

‘I swear Mrs Devlin’d bring in nude life models if she was let,’ groaned Niamh to Amber. Niamh was struggling with art in general and was sorry she hadn’t done home economics instead. How was she going to embody a fertility goddess? Couldn’t they please do a still life instead – a couple of bananas or a nice simple apple?

‘I wish she did bring in nude models,’ said Amber, glaring at Niamh. ‘It’s impossible to learn to draw people properly with their clothes on.’ At least in art college, she’d be able to study line drawing properly with nude models…

But she wasn’t going, was she? She was going to New York with Karl, before the exams, and she had to tell her mother all this, and soon.

‘It’s not as if you haven’t seen a man with no clothes on, Niamh,’ added the girl on the other side of Amber with a wicked grin. ‘You’ve been going out with Jonnie for a year now, don’t tell me he’s kept his boxers on all this time.’

It was Niamh’s turn to grin. ‘He’s worth drawing, all right. And he’s got a bigger you-know-what than all those Michelangelo statues!’

The back of the class dissolved into filthy giggles, but were sure Christie, who was walking sedately around the art room, couldn’t have heard the remark.

Silvery-white hair was a fabulous disguise, Christie thought as she managed not to smile. Schoolgirls appeared to think that white-haired equalled deaf, which meant she overheard all manner of things she mightn’t have heard otherwise. These girls probably would have been stunned to think that their esteemed art teacher had made the same jokes once, a lifetime ago, when she was as young and when men’s heads turned to look at her.

Young people always imagined that sex and passion had been invented by them. Christie fingered the gold and jasper scarab necklace that James had once bought for her in a market in Cairo, and smiled.

When you were over the age of sixty, if you hinted at a moment of wildness in your youth, people smiled benignly and imagined you meant a reckless time when you’d sat in a public bar and drank a pint of Guinness when such a thing was frowned upon. But she’d known plenty of passion. Still did. Being a stalwart of the local church didn’t mean she was dead from the neck down, no matter what the youngsters thought.

That holiday in Cairo had been before the children were born, when she and James had been able to take advantage of a cheap week-long trip. They’d sighed with pleasure over the treasures of the Egyptian Museum by day, and lay in each other’s arms in their shabby hotel by night with the overhead fan not quite doing its job.

Despite that, they’d made love every night, caught up in the sensuality of Cairo with its iconic sights, and the heady perfume of the spice markets.

The heat was an incredible aphrodisiac, James said, on the last night of their holiday, as he lay back against the pillows, sated, and watched his wife standing naked in the moonlight in front of the hotel-room mirror.

‘Just as well we don’t live here all the time, then,’ Christie teased, admiring the necklace that lay between her full, high breasts. ‘I love this,’ she said, holding it tenderly. ‘Thank you.’

‘You do understand that I’ll want to rip your clothes off every time you wear it?’ he asked.

‘Even in the supermarket?’

‘We’d probably have to wait till we got to the car park,’ he amended. ‘Wouldn’t want to bruise the avocados.’

‘How about we introduce a one-hour rule? Once you notice the necklace, we have one hour to get to bed.’

James grinned lazily. ‘Sounds good to me.’

No, she thought now, watching her class concentrating on their drawing boards: young people thought that old age was at best fifteen to twenty years older than they were, and reckoned your life was over once you hit forty. They’d learn one day.

Christie had no teaching in the period before lunch, so she headed for the staff room to mark the art history revision test the fifth years had handed in earlier. St Ursula’s staff room was in the original, 1940s part of the school, surrounded by small classrooms with creaky wooden doors, crumbling parquet floors and thick walls that you couldn’t hammer a nail into. The staff room itself was the biggest room in this section of the building and, in the fifteen years she’d worked in the school, Christie had decided it had a routine about it, an ebb and flow rather like a sea.

There was the calm of half past eight in the morning, when Christie sat at the long veneered table with its decoration of mug rings and drank green tea while she mentally prepared for the rest of the day.

By 8.45, the staff room would have filled up, the teachers all business, fuelling up on murderous coffee from the large catering tin.

By late afternoon, the tide had swept steadily out and no amount of coffee could raise the energy of the staff as the clock ticked on towards four and freedom.

Once, when an Italian teacher – Gianni, a man who looked as if he’d love to whip you off to bed and teach you how to roll your ‘R’s properly – had arrived to teach languages, there had been talk of buying a proper coffee-making machine.

‘This ees muck, this coffee,’ Gianni would say when he caught the rest of the teachers listlessly spooning brown dust into their mugs. ‘If we had a proper machine, then you would have coffee worth dreenking.’

A coffee machine collection had been started, not to mention a few diets, but then Gianni had decided that he missed the Italian climate too much, and had gone home to Florence.

Christie, who’d been immune to Gianni’s Paco Rabanne-scented charms and wasn’t as heartbroken as the rest of them by his abrupt departure, suggested they buy a small television with the coffee machine fund.

‘Not to watch junky soap operas on,’ insisted Mr Sweetman, who taught English.

‘What’s wrong with soap operas?’ demanded Mademoiselle Lennox, French.

‘You’re both so busy, you probably won’t get to watch much but the lunchtime news,’ Christie remarked gently and there was much muttering in agreement.

The news, yes, that’s what they’d watch. Keeping in touch with current affairs was vital, Mr Sweetman agreed.

The television was now a much valued part of the room, with the channel screening Who Wants to Be a Millionaire repeats being the favourite. Mr Sweetman was currently top of the league having got to the quarter of a million question four times, with Mrs Jones, physics and applied maths, in second place.

Today, the TV was off, though, and only Christie and Liz, who taught home economics and biology, were there. Christie pulled the uninviting pile of essays towards her.

She’d only had two classes that morning, but she felt tired because she’d slept so badly, waking three times in the clammy grip of a cold sweat after nightmares, one particularly horrible one involving a sea of giant black spiders which burned people they touched. She often had vivid dreams – the downside of her gift of intuition. But giant spiders? Very strange.

Eventually, she had stopped trying to sleep and did her best to lie quietly, eyes closed, amusing herself by imagining how useful the inside of her head might be to a roomful of psychiatrists.

Some people left their bodies to medical science – she might leave her brain because there was definitely something weird going on in there.

‘Are you all right, love?’ James had murmured drowsily at half five when Christie had given up on the psychiatrists, slipped out of bed and pulled on her jeans and a T-shirt.

‘Fine, I’m fine. You go back to sleep, pet,’ she’d replied, gently pulling the pale-blue sheet over his shoulders.

James’s nightmares had to do with losing his job or not having money to buy food for his family. Christie had long ago decided that he could do without hearing about her horror movie versions. Now her eyes felt gritty with tiredness and the nagging sensation of doom was still there.

‘Christie, how are you?’ A voice interrupted her thoughts.

Liz, the other teacher, plonked herself and her ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps’ mug down beside Christie and the untouched pile of essays.

‘Busy?’ she said, obviously hoping the answer would be no.

Liz was in her early thirties, attractive with dark curly hair, and had been a big hit with the pupils since she’d arrived at the school the previous September. She’d replaced eccentric Mrs Cuniffe who’d been at St Ursula’s for over twenty years and refused to be in the same room as a microwave because of a story she’d heard about a man cooking his liver by accident. Eventually, this had made her position as home economics teacher untenable and Liz had arrived to take her place.

‘I’m not really busy,’ fibbed Christie. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine,’ Liz began and stopped herself. ‘Awful. Sorry.’ Her eyes brimmed. ‘I only wanted to say hello, not burst into tears.’

Christie reached into the tapestry bag that served as her briefcase, rifled a bit and came up with a pack of tissues.

It transpired that Liz was in love with a man who loved her back but felt it was all moving too fast, and perhaps they should see other people.

‘He said he needs time,’ wept Liz helplessly. ‘We’ve been going out for a year. He’s never mentioned this before, why does he need time? I don’t know what to do, Christie. I love him. My sister says I should send him packing but she’s never liked him. She thinks I’d be better off without him. He says we’re still going to my brother’s wedding as a couple, so it can’t really be over, can it? What should I do?’

The hardest questions were often simplest, Christie thought. Stay and hope, or walk away to start again?

‘I can’t tell you what you should do, Liz,’ she said gently. ‘Only you know that.’

‘But I don’t.’

‘Close your eyes and tell me what does it feel like in there?’ Christie gestured at the place on Liz’s chest where her heart resided.

Liz obediently closed her eyes and instantly her face lost some of its tension. Her shoulders slackened.

‘I think it’s over. He’s being nice by saying he’ll go to my brother’s wedding with me and he thought it was all fun between us until I mentioned that I wanted a baby.’ She snapped her eyelids open and stared at Christie in misery.

‘Then it’s over,’ Christie said gently. She hadn’t seen the future for Liz, she’d merely let Liz reach out and think the unthinkable herself.

‘You’re right. I was kidding myself, wasn’t I? I think I always knew he wasn’t in it for the long term,’ Liz said sadly. ‘I kidded myself because I wanted it so much. Looking back, I can see it all now and I should have done everything differently.’

‘Looking backwards is a terrible thing,’ Christie added, smiling. ‘With the benefit of hindsight, there are lots of things we should have done and didn’t, and vice versa. But we learn from them and do better next time.’

‘You’re being kind,’ Liz whispered, getting up. ‘I bet you’ve never been as stupid as me. You think before you act, Christie. I blunder along and convince myself that everything’s fine when it’s not. I only wish I could stop myself doing that. I wouldn’t be in bits now if I did.’ She bent to give Christie a small hug. ‘You’re very good for listening to me. I know why everyone says you’re wise. You really are.’

The room was filling up again as lunchtime arrived. Liz took her cup and her folder and left Christie sitting at the table, frozen in thought.

For all the noise going on, all the chat about the third form’s behaviour that morning and the traffic being a nightmare, Christie might as well have been sitting in a room all on her own. She heard nothing, except Liz’s words. You think before you act, Christie.

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