Summer Holiday
Penny Smith

To Rob, Hilary, the man from the Danish biscuit commercial and the wife of my dentist.

Contents

Chapter One

When Miranda Frayn was little, she’d wanted to be a…

Chapter Two

On Saturday, having told nobody about her new career as…

Chapter Three

It felt very politically incorrect to get into a Jaguar…

Chapter Four

While he was at his minor public school, Nigel had…

Chapter Five

The theatre was rammed with people drinking bottles of beer…

Chapter Six

The newspapers were full of the freak heatwave that the…

Chapter Seven

It was the weekend, and Miranda decided it was time…

Chapter Eight

The text said eight o’clock for dinner, Somewhere small –…

Chapter Nine

There were days when Miranda felt that nowhere could be…

Chapter Ten

It was as though Walt Disney had decided to turn…

Chapter Eleven

Driving to his house in the country, Alex had one…

Chapter Twelve

The Mediterranean Sea is almost completely enclosed by land and…

Chapter Thirteen

The days unfurled in glorious azure and yellow, with Becky…

Chapter Fourteen

The yacht La Maritana was twinkling like the Orion constellation…

Chapter Fifteen

‘And then, as if my week ’adn’t been bad enough,…

Chapter Sixteen

The atmosphere on board La Maritana was at mercury-bursting-out-of-the-thermometer point.

Chapter Seventeen

For many of those holidaying on the Costa del Sol,…

Chapter Eighteen

Some pieces of music are unhelpful when you’re in a…

Chapter Nineteen

Swimming-pool attire differs depending on what country you’re in. Katie…

Chapter Twenty

Normally on a drizzly Sunday evening, Lucy would have been…

Chapter Twenty-One

There are a number of sights guaranteed to strike fear…

Chapter Twenty-Two

Heat in another country is subtly different. The temperature can…

Chapter Twenty-Three

There are days you can pinpoint as being pivotal days…

Chapter Twenty-Four

At the age of eight and three-quarters – when every…

Chapter Twenty-Five

‘They’ve got your age wrong, Mum,’ said Lucy, as she…

Read On…

About the Author

Other Books by Penny Smith

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

When Miranda Frayn was little, she’d wanted to be a vet, an astronaut or someone who got lots of free stickers and felt-tip pens.

At around twelve years old, she decided that being a vet was not a good job, since it seemed that all they did was put down hamsters, massage Minty, her Jack Russell, up her bottom, and get scratched by cats. Astronauts did not spend their days bouncing round the moon and far-flung planets, but instead did tedious experiments with seeds and rubbishy-looking rocks. She no longer wanted free stickers and felt-tip pens, but instead yearned to be famous and get married to Luke Skywalker or Han Solo.

With that in mind, she put her name forward for every school play and, by dint of hard work and the non-stop badgering of the drama teacher, managed, the year before she left, to achieve the giddy heights of Maria in The Sound of Music. The boy who wrote the review in the school magazine described her as radiant, moving – a star in the making. Miranda had discovered early that if you wanted something badly enough, you had to be prepared to kiss really unattractive people – sometimes more than once. If she had not virtually sucked his head off at the back of the cinema, he would have written a very different critique. He would have said that as a nun she was unconvincing, and as a singer she’d made his ears bleed. He would have said that she should take up any other career but acting.

But, once caught, the performing bug is difficult to shake off, and there are any number of people willing to take your money for everything from head shots to acting lessons.

Luckily for the viewing public, fledgling starlet Miranda Frayn fell in love and decided that what she really, really wanted to do was get married and have babies. In her dreams, she imagined combining a career in film with bringing up children, but MGM failed to come knocking at the house in Oxfordshire, and instead she trod the boards in amateur plays, where the costumes were creaky, the sets were wobbly, and there was always a sweaty man playing fourth lead who wanted to have an affair with her.

It was all so dispiriting that, eventually, Miranda settled on acting the part of the devoted wife and became a passionate advocate of scarf knitting. She would have liked to create something a little more advanced but, frankly, with two small children and a man who wore Savile Row suits and cashmere from Brora, that was never going to happen.

Nigel Blake, her husband, was everything she had wanted: smart, funny, handsome and rich. She hadn’t realised she wanted rich but, increasingly, it was the only thing he still was. When she divorced him after two decades, having discovered his long standing shag-fest, as she called it, with his secretary, she would have described him as fat, boorish and rich. Or Knobhead, for short. But he was the father of her two children, so she reserved such comments for evenings when she was out with friends and for phone calls with the man himself.

Meanwhile, she was living in London, back on the dating scene and hating it. It was like constantly seeing bad films. She had started off excited about the prospect and then, over two years, a sort of malaise had crept over the whole thing and she had stopped worrying about matching underwear – or even matching outerwear. And as for her friends’ view of what constituted handsome …

Here she was, for example, on yet another night out with an allegedly suitable man. Passers-by glancing into the little restaurant would have seen a couple who had probably been married for an eternity – they weren’t speaking.

Miranda was bored again. She imagined her date as an icon on her computer that she was deleting.

And while she was at it, she might delete some of her friends’ numbers. How on earth they could think that this pompous tit was her cup of tea … And her steak was tough. Still, at least it was giving her teeth a workout.

‘Sorry?’ She raised her eyebrows at her dining partner.

‘I asked if you wanted more wine.’

‘No,’ she responded baldly. ‘Thank you,’ she added. No point in adding rudeness to the patronising she had already been. Mind you, he deserved it. Right-wing. Fascist. Fat. Twat. She smiled as she thought it.

‘What?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘Nothing. I was just thinking silly words. Rhyming words. How much better they are than when they’re on their ownsome.’

‘As in?’ he queried, trying to get on to her wavelength, although he had almost given up. He was not a man who struggled to get women. He was rich and lived at a very expensive address in Mayfair.

Miranda knew, as she opened her mouth, that it was going to be a hopeless conversation. The man had no imagination, the verbal dexterity of a Clanger and she honestly couldn’t be bothered to try to explain what she found amusing about rhyming words. And of course she couldn’t articulate the words she’d come up with to describe him, so she had to make up two more. ‘Numpty and flumpty,’ she said, off the top of her head.

‘Which means?’

‘Nothing. It’s the rhyme that amuses me.’ Oh, God. Now she was going to have to explain. Or feign partial death and get out of this place.

‘What – so Humpty Dumpty’s funny?’ He wrinkled his nose.

As if I’d done a trouser cough, she thought, and smirked.

‘Is it?’ he asked, mistaking – again – her expression.

‘I think you either find words funny or you don’t. Have you finished? Shall we get the bill?’ He looked at his very expensive watch, clearly hoping she’d clocked its exclusivity. ‘I know it’s a bit early,’ she added, ‘but I’ve suddenly remembered I have a five o’clock start tomorrow, and perhaps tonight wasn’t the best for organising a long dinner.’

‘A five o’clock start? What for?’ he asked.

‘Erm. Flight. Early flight. Late booking. I needed to get away. Going to …’ her eyes fell on the tablecloth ‘… the Czech Republic,’ she said brightly. Like I care whether or not you believe me. She tried to look innocent and apologetic at the same time.

To give him his due, he asked promptly for the bill, then insisted on paying. That was the one good thing about the blind dates: they hadn’t cost her anything. But they were all bankers or company directors, so she felt guilt free. In fact, with the bankers, she was practically doing the country a service.

She was barely home and through the door before she was entirely disrobed and in front of the television. What a waste of an evening. What a waste of a lot of evenings.

Miranda realised she was accidentally watching the news and it was all too depressing. She clicked it off and wandered up to the bathroom to wash her face and moisturise. After she’d cleaned her teeth, she looked at herself in the mirror. Put her hands to either side of her face and pulled them back to see how she’d look with a face lift. Would she have the guts to let someone literally take off her face, trim the edges and hem it again to smooth out the wrinkles? At least her eyesight was starting to go a bit. It was a relief not to be able to see the crow’s feet quite so clearly.

She sighed and padded through to the bedroom. Odd, she still couldn’t get used to sleeping alone. For almost a quarter of a century, another body had slumbered beside hers, getting larger, taking up more space, and snoring louder as the years passed. It was such a luxury to do a starfish impression and not touch flesh.

Tomorrow is the day I take control, she thought. Life has got to perk up, big-time. She lay between the cotton sheets trying to decide what control needed to be taken.

Her friends would have described Miranda Blake first and foremost as a laugh. Pressed to expand, they would have said she was attractive, with a penchant for extremely high heels. Her parents would have described their daughter as wayward but tamed by a decent man, whom she had divorced for no good reason (after all, everyone has a little dalliance on the side). Miranda herself would have said she was all right, considering the alternatives. Everything was heading south and hairs were starting to sprout in strange places, but it could have been a lot worse. She had friends with prolapses, fallen arches, bad backs or bunions.

Early in their relationship, Nigel would have described her as a cracking bit of totty. The two had met at a party in Fulham where neither knew the host. Miranda was dressed for success in a little blue dress and very high black heels, which she found surprisingly easy to walk in. Nigel was wearing what she later came to describe as his out-of-hours uniform – a Pink’s shirt and corduroy trousers with Gucci loafers. His thick brown hair fell in messy abandon to his shirt collar and his amber eyes looked admiringly into her sparkling blue ones as they shared the bottle of Château Latour he had brought, having mistakenly thought it was a dinner party.

He had looked around for a corkscrew and she had handed him one wordlessly – she’d been on the lookout for a semi-decent bottle since she’d arrived ten minutes earlier with a girlfriend. He had walked her home afterwards and they had kissed fervently on the doorstep of her minuscule studio flat. Within a year, they had married in a picturesque church in the Cotswolds and Miranda got pregnant on honeymoon. Lucy’s birth was followed two years later by the arrival of Jack.

It wasn’t until the children were on the verge of leaving home that Miranda realised she categorically loathed her husband. The sound of his key in the front door of the smart stuccoed building in fashionable Kensington filled her with a horrible ennui. It didn’t help that he now resembled an overstuffed pork sausage. Maybe he had actually absorbed a whole other person. Watching him tie his shoelaces was a lesson in physics: how did he bend in the middle when the middle was so much bigger than either end?

When she’d brought up the subject of divorce he had been stunned. ‘On what grounds?’ he had demanded.

‘My unreasonable behaviour? Your unreasonable behaviour? Bird molestation? Giraffe bothering? I don’t really mind, but I do want a divorce,’ she had said, in a reasonable tone.

‘Are you having an affair?’ His eyebrows had come together.

‘No. And I assume you aren’t?’ she asked, her eyes on his paunch. When a paunch got that big, did it become a super-paunch?

He went pink around the ears, and it dawned on her, with a shock, that he was. And as the conversation (now a shouting conversation) continued, she discovered that it was of long standing and with his secretary. She remembered yelling at some stage that he was a cliché. It was strange that even though she wanted a divorce, wanted never to see Nigel step out of his trousers ever again, it was still awful.

It was the division of the spoils that did it. There were days when she had cried over the toaster for her lost dreams. The things they had bought together when she had imagined herself in love. But now she could see that that had been youthful folly, a combination of lust and laziness. Marrying Nigel had relieved her of the need to get a proper job.

Lucy blamed Miranda for breaking up a happy family. Jack had been upset but understanding.

After the decree absolute, Miranda had bought herself a house in Notting Hill and put the rest of the money in the bank. It wasn’t a huge amount, but she had reckoned that, if she was careful, she could have a lovely break before she found employment.

The time had come. But what job?

I need a change of direction, Miranda thought, putting her toes out from under the duvet and wiggling them. Tomorrow I’ll do something to facilitate finding a job. At least it’ll be a change from thinking about sodding dates.

Eventually, as her mind wandered off to variations on a theme of sheep, she drifted into sleep.

The next morning she arose full of purpose. She had a shower, washed her hair and put on a conditioning treatment, then vigorously applied a body scrub, which smelt slightly off. Wrapped in a fluffy new towel – she had thrown out all those that might have touched Nigel – she plucked her eyebrows and moisturised, using industrial quantities of cream. She applied blow-drying serum to her mid-length red-gold hair, then hung upside down to do the roots, leaving the rest to curl naturally.

‘Right,’ she said, as she strode to the wardrobe. She took out a thin pink shirt and a pair of jeans cut off to the knee. Looking critically in the mirror, she was in two minds about whether she was mutton dressed as lamb since she could see her bra through the shirt. But without a husband or children to declare either way, she decided to go with it.

She breakfasted on two pieces of toast, one with marmalade and the other with Nutella, which looked a little funny – she’d probably bought it when Jack was about eight, and a lot of buttery crumbs had gone under the bridge since then.

With a cup of tea in hand, she opened her computer, checked her emails and hovered over the Google search space. What should she put? Maybe, she thought, I should get into the habit of having a job before actually applying for one. It was a bit scary, the idea of an interview. And she was a bit long in the tooth to be asking for work experience.

In the absence of anything springing to mind, she typed ‘Constructive Things to Do’ and clicked on the first result. A list of twenty-five possibilities popped up, including updating your MP3 player and throwing out clothes. Very therapeutic, but not what she was after.

Another suggested learning how to spin a pencil round your thumb. Not now. Although it would be a good trick – and certainly an advance on dating.

An hour later, Miranda had got herself on to a website advertising eco-produce. She went and made herself another cup of tea, and opened the kitchen cupboard to see if there was anything that might help it go down. There wasn’t. That was the flip-side of living on your own – there was never a biscuit when you wanted one.

Back at the computer, she chose a different heading for Google: ‘Constructive Things to Do In Your 40s’.

One word stuck out: ‘Volunteering’.

‘By Jove, I think she’s got it,’ she said, double-clicking on a link. By lunchtime Miranda Blake, divorcee, forty-three, had volunteered for canal clearing in the Cotswolds.

She printed off the list of suggested items to take with her, ticked off those she had, and ringed those she hadn’t. What on earth was a ‘wicking shirt’ when it was at home? She Googled it. Oh, right, she thought. What we used to call Aertex when we were at school and forced to play hockey in inclement weather.

Her mobile phone rang. ‘Hi, Lydia.’

‘Miranda,’ said Lydia, the wife of one of Nigel’s friends. ‘Wondered how the date with James went last night.’

‘Erm. Fine. But I don’t think he’s right for me,’ answered Miranda, suddenly remembering she had told James she would be on an early flight.

‘Oh?’

‘You know. Not really the same sense of humour. And things,’ she ended lamely.

‘Handsome, though,’ stated Lydia, in her clipped way.

‘Yes. Oh, yes. Definitely,’ said Miranda, shaking her head vigorously even though Lydia couldn’t see.

‘And he’s loaded.’

‘Yes.’ She had noticed his very expensive watch and the new Aston Martin.

‘So, are you going on a second date?’

‘Well … no,’ said Miranda.

‘But you’d be perfect together,’ pronounced Lydia.

In what way? wondered Miranda. Perfect together as in chicken and Lego? ‘Mm,’ she said, debating where to go from here. ‘Thing is, I don’t think it would work. He’s sort of similar to Nigel.’

‘To Nigel?’ Lydia almost shrieked.

‘Banker. Square?’ she essayed.

‘Square?’ repeated Lydia.

There was a silence while Miranda tried to form a sentence that wouldn’t antagonise her friend. Or was she a friend? Would a proper friend have set her up with such a – such a muppet? ‘I think what I’m looking for, Lydia, is a change,’ she finally tried. ‘Someone who isn’t in the banking world, maybe. Someone to be silly with. Carefree with. A diversion.’

Lydia of the carefully styled coiffure was not having that. ‘What you need is someone who is going to look after you. And that means a man with a solid career. Money in the bank. James ticks all the boxes – and he doesn’t have any children to get in the way. As I told you, he’s newly out of a long relationship with a concert pianist. Which means he can be arty. And so on and so forth.’

Really! How could she have a friend who would say ‘and so on and so forth’? She typed into the computer: ‘How to End a Friendship with Someone Dull’.

‘Are you typing?’ asked Lydia.

‘No,’ responded Miranda, swiftly, smiling to herself at the options listed. She would read them all later.

‘I think he’s worth a second stab.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ lied Miranda. ‘Leave it with me and I’ll have a little think.’ Anything to end this conversation. ‘Now,’ she added, ‘I have to sort myself out. I’m going on an expedition and I reckon I need some wicking shirts and a pair of gaiters. I’ll speak to you later.’

‘Shall I tell James to call you?’

‘No. I’ll call him myself. ’Bye.’ Why had she said that? Damn. She pursed her lips, then sent a text: James. Thanks for dinner. All the best, Miranda. No self-important alpha male could possibly take that as anything but a brush-off. Particularly not when he found out from Lydia that she was definitely in town and not in the Czech Republic.

She grabbed her list and her bag and left the house with a spring in her step. It was a beautiful day and she decided to walk to Kensington instead of driving. After all, she was going to have to get used to being in the fresh air, and it wasn’t always going to be this sunny.

CHAPTER TWO

On Saturday, having told nobody about her new career as an ecobod, Miranda woke up to the alarm and wondered whether she should cancel. She’d bet loads of people did, what with one bronchitis or another. She lay in bed for a minute, luxuriating in the beauty of being alone under her king-size duvet. No man-smells here, she thought. If Nigel had been there, he would have farted, scratched his scrotum and demanded breakfast in bed. And possibly nudged her with his early-morning broom handle, emerging from below his distended stomach. Urgh. Just the thought of it got her out of bed.

She meandered over to the curtains and threw them back. Damn. Raining. Typical. Maybe she wouldn’t bother to wash her hair, after all. She checked the time. An hour to get ready. She pottered into the bathroom and turned on the shower, catching sight of herself in the big mirror over the bathroom sink as she reached for her toothbrush.

Whoa. What was that? She peered closer. Bollocks. A spot at my age, she thought. That is just so unfair. And then she smiled at her reflection. She was sounding remarkably like her daughter going through puberty. The difference was that Miranda would leave the spot to do its own thing and not fiddle with it, unlike Lucy who would dig and squeeze until it virtually needed stitches and a few weeks to heal. It was amazing that Lucy’s face had survived without a scar.

Miranda stepped into the shower – and couldn’t get out again because of a severe bout of water-induced inertia. She was in the zone, just wanting to stand there for ever letting the water cascade down her back and creep round the front. What would snap her out of it? She had to make a move. Any move. A move that would break the spell. No. It wasn’t going to happen. She’d be found on Wednesday by the cleaner. Blown up from water absorption and with five days’ hair growth on her legs. Would there be maggots? Are there always maggots? ‘Yuk,’ she said, and reached for the shaver.

There was something wonderful about stepping out from a long shower into a warm mist, and it was even better not being able to see herself in the fogged-up mirror. She moisturised every available inch of skin, covered the spot with concealer, then hovered over the perfume. Was there any point? She sprayed some on the back of her neck.

She could just not turn up. Simply call in sick. How wonderfully naughty. Who would care? But she used to push the children into doing things they didn’t want to and they usually came back saying it was the best day they’d ever had. She girded her loins and walked with purpose to the plastic carrier bag from which she had not yet unpacked the requisite items on the list.

My goodness, she thought, when she was dressed. I look like the sort of woman who’s never heard of Brazilian waxing or eyebrow-plucking. In short … a mad feminist. All men are bastards. I’ll take them down with my sharp wit and disused tweezers.

She fluffed up the duvet, threw on the coverlet and the six cushions, then decided she had just enough time for a quick coffee.

Ten minutes later she was wondering why, with all her experience of life, she hadn’t put a dash of cold water into it. The burnt roof of her mouth hurt. On the bright side, there would be that strangely enjoyable peeling away of the skin tomorrow.

The green Jaguar purred into life and she put the postcode into the sat-nav as she waited for the garage door to lift. She drove west towards Shepherd’s Bush and the A40, searching for something to listen to on the radio, finally settling for XFM because it made her feel connected to Jack. Her adorable Jack. Nigel hadn’t been able to make him conform and he was now wandering the world with a clutch of A levels and a backpack. She did worry about his future and, in a secret, locked-away bit of her brain, actually wished he had gone into banking and done the hiking stuff later.

Lucy, mind you. Chip off the old block. Miranda tried out her singing voice along to some god-awful rackety piece of music.

The weather was getting worse. The rain was sluicing down as though a pipe had been uncorked. There was little traffic on the roads and she made it to the rendezvous within an hour, parking between a muddy old Fiat and a yellow VW Beetle. After she’d struggled into her brand-new, state-of-the-art Gore-Tex anorak, with zips under the armpits for letting off steam, she emerged from the car with a modicum of decorum and tiptoed to the boot in her trainers to get her wellingtons. Four people were watching her from under umbrellas. Their clothing looked like it had been stolen from a tip. They were filthy.

‘Hi,’ said Miranda, brightly, stuffing her new gloves into her jacket pocket.

The assembled group smiled and nodded, drinking tea from a flask and chatting about the work in hand. A man in a high-visibility jacket, with teeth that might have been thrown into his mouth by a blind parsnip-tosser, introduced himself as Will. ‘We’re basically going to be getting rid of the undergrowth and stuff on the towpaths so that the dredger can get through to clean out the canal,’ he said. ‘At the moment, as you can see …’ he looked around and amended that ‘… as you can’t see through this atrocious weather but I assure you is the case, the canal is all silted up and full of algae bloom and duckweed. The dredger can’t do its work until we’ve done ours.’ He waved a hand in the direction of the sky. ‘Now, apparently the good folk at the Met Office are predicting that this rain is going to blow through pretty quickly. Since we’re all here, with the exception of Alex, we may as well get cracking. At least nobody’s cried off with the “flu”.’ He made quote marks in the air as though that was a usual excuse for someone not turning up. Miranda shook her head in disgust.

He walked towards the Land Rover and bent over, his large trousers gathering in an elephant’s bottom of grey as he rummaged. ‘I’ve got a collection of implements in here. Come and take your pick. Not literally.’ He laughed – it was obviously a line he’d used before. Miranda smiled. Might as well show willing.

The others had obviously done this work before, since they showed no hesitation in lunging for the tools, leaving her with nothing but a pair of enormous leather gloves and the job of picking up litter. ‘It’s like being at home with children,’ she commented to the woman in front of her. Her name was Teresa: she had hair like a newly shorn sheep and a wart near her nose.

‘What? Walking along wearing protective gloves?’ Teresa asked, with a confused expression.

‘No, having to pick stuff up. All their toys and things. Socks. Although usually I didn’t wear big leather gloves to do it. Do you have children?’

‘Cats,’ responded Teresa, briefly.

‘Lovely. Hairy ones?’

‘Yes. Well, one short-haired and two long-haired.’

‘Rescue cats or pedigree?’ Like she really cared.

‘Rescue.’

‘Lovely.’ Bloody hell! She had to stop saying ‘Lovely’ – she was beginning to sound like a game-show host.

They stopped speaking as they reached the rest of the group.

‘Here’s where we left off last week.’ Teresa nodded to a newly cut section on a bush.

Will was hunched over, talking to one of the men, but turned and said something to Teresa, who moved forwards, leaving Miranda standing alone. She sniffed the air appreciatively. The rain had stopped, leaving a damp, green smell. It reminded her of finding a little patch of camomile in the corner of the garden and lying on it to see how comfortable it was. When Nigel had found it, he had covered it with weed-killer.

‘So, Miranda,’ said Will, ‘you’ve picked the short straw, and are doing the tidying up. It’s one of the most important jobs, but also one of the most unloved as it plays havoc with your lower back.’ He rubbed his own and grimaced, his lips slightly parted to reveal one of his yellowy parsnip teeth. ‘I’d recommend that you stand up and stretch it out frequently or you’ll wake up tomorrow unable to walk. And try not to get too close to the cutters – they can get a bit carried away, if you know what I mean.’

Miranda nodded, although she wasn’t sure she did know what he meant. She added a smile, then turned quickly as loud running was heard through the gloom, followed by the sudden appearance of a superbly scruffy man with dreadlocks, wearing a jumper with so many holes that it resembled a string vest.

‘Alex!’ exclaimed Will, warmly, clasping his outstretched hand and clapping him on the shoulder. ‘We were wondering where you’d got to. Thought you must have been struck down with summer flu or some other lurgy.’

‘Camper van sprang a leak in the middle of the night. I’ve been doing emergency repairs. Couldn’t leave until I’d made sure it was watertight. Don’t want to get back and find all my Armani pumps wrecked, do I?’

‘Ha-ha. No. You betcha you don’t,’ Will said jovially. He pointed a big square finger. ‘I saved you a machete.’

‘Can I have a machete?’ asked Miranda, moving closer.

‘Ha-ha!’ He laughed again. ‘No, I don’t think so. Not on your first day.’ He strode back to the Land Rover, his boots sliding on the muddy path.

‘Alex,’ said Alex, holding out his hand to Miranda.

‘Miranda,’ said Miranda, shaking it and looking into the greenest eyes she had ever seen. They were leaf green. Ireland green. Ridiculously green.

‘First time, then.’ He smiled down at her.

Miranda was tall, but he was taller still – and what her friends at school would have called ‘well tasty’. Although she wasn’t sure about the dreadlocks. Didn’t you have to be seriously grubby to get them? Not wash for months? She sniffed cautiously. He didn’t smell. ‘Lovely fresh air, isn’t it?’ she exclaimed, to cover herself, and then answered his question: ‘And, yes, it is my first time. I wanted to get out of the city and do something constructive.’

‘Which city?’

‘London.’

‘Which part?’

‘Notting Hill,’ she said semi-apologetically. Ever since the film Notting Hill, she’d felt something akin to embarrassment about living in a place that was synonymous with a romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts.

‘Nice,’ he said, as he accepted the machete from Will. ‘Shall we?’

‘“Lead on, Macduff,”’ she said, even though they were already where she needed to be to start picking up rubbish.

‘“Out damned spot,”’ he threw back, as he advanced into the undergrowth, the crotch of his baggy trousers catching on foliage and shooting raindrops in arcs.

Was he flirting, Miranda wondered. How lovely. That bloody word again. ‘Lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely,’ she said, under her breath, to use them all up. ‘Lovely, luvverly. Luvverly bunch of coconuts. Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely? And the new word of the day is …’ she paused, putting a big lump of greenery into the bag ‘… gorgeous. Scrumptious. Handsome. Steady on, Miranda.’ What was happening to her?

She gave herself a stern talking-to. ‘I am a forty-three-year-old woman with two children, one of whom is probably about the same age as he is. It’s disgusting. Nigel’s eyes would literally come out of his head on stalks if he knew what I was thinking. No, not literally – particularly with all that lardy, piggy flesh holding them in.’

Her mind rambled on aimlessly as she bent to her task. She didn’t notice the time slipping by because she had wandered into a rich seam in the creases of her brain and hopped incrementally to a reverie about Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Then she stood up. ‘Ow,’ she squeaked. A searing pain had shot up her back and exploded tiny pinpoints of light through her retinas.

Will ambled back to check she was all right.

‘Yes. And, yes, I know you told me to stand up and stretch, but I got into a rhythm and completely forgot,’ she panted, rubbing the base of her spine.

‘Stand with your feet apart and drop your body forwards from your hips,’ he ordered. ‘Go all floppy. Take the strain off your lumbar region.’

She hung forward and felt her anorak slip up past her nose, so that she was breathing into the zip and smelling something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Was it man-made-fibre scent? She suddenly realised what it was: the smell of hard work, alias sweat, and she had obviously forgotten to put on any deodorant. How very, very … in a weird way, almost pleasant. If acrid.

She stood up to get away from it.

‘Feeling better?’ asked Will.

‘Yup,’ she announced – although, actually, she felt a bit sick from standing up so fast. ‘Onwards and upwards,’ she said, with determination.

She reapplied herself to the task in hand, stretching every few minutes and admiring the clean and tidy state of the path. Well, tidy but muddy and a damn sight better than the view in front, with its branches and undergrowth melding together. She could just see Alex’s dreadlocks whipping to and fro as he sliced the heads off unsuspecting plants.

It felt like days since she’d had her coffee.

She waved Will over.

‘Problem?’ he asked.

‘Er, I hope not. I was suddenly overcome by a wave of hunger but I haven’t brought a packed lunch with me. Which I seem to recall was on the list. A bothersome omission. Is there anywhere I could get something when we stop?’

‘Yes – most of the regulars bring their own because they don’t want what’s on offer from the nearest shop. I’ll warn you now, it ain’t exciting. There might be a pie but it’ll be more pastry than filling. And if the filling’s meat, it might be a part of the animal you aren’t familiar with.’

‘A dollop of testicle, a dash of oink and an earlobe, eh? Beggars can’t be choosers, as they say. That’s what I’m going to have to do when we break. Which is when?’

Will checked his watch. ‘Half an hour. Can you last that long?’

On cue, Miranda’s stomach howled, like a small woodland creature in pain.

He laughed, and jerked his head upwards, revealing hairy nostrils. ‘I’ll take that as a no. If you could possibly hang on for a quarter of an hour, that would be better for us. We’re dealing with a knotty branch and it would be nice if we could get that sorted before we have lunch.’

‘I’ll keep my stomach on a short leash, and tell it to pull its horns in, if that’s not too much of a mixed metaphor,’ she promised. She bent forward and pushed a great wodge of vegetation and sticks into her bag, suddenly noticing a stripy snail stuck to one of the leaves. She picked it off and it retreated quickly into its shell. She held it until it came out again, then gently touched one of its antennae. It retracted. She poked the other.

‘Aw. Leave him alone,’ said Alex, who had arrived at her side without her noticing, absorbed as she had been in the snail’s defence mechanism.

She smiled and put the snail on the side of the path where they watched it unfurl from its shell and make off. ‘Racing home to his wife and daughters,’ she said. ‘Or her husband and sons. Having said that, they’re hermaphrodites, aren’t they?’

‘Yes, they are. And the way they mate isn’t what you’d want to be doing if you were out on a date. They twist themselves round each other and cover themselves in frothy slime. Then they both set off to bury their eggs in a mulchy bit of ground. They cover them with mucus, soil and excrement, and about a month later, bingo, loads of tiny snails are ready to munch their way through your prized garden plants. Some snails live to fifteen and they’re excellent fodder for birds, toads and snakes.’

‘Snakes?’ she queried.

‘And that’s all you’ve taken from that superbly informative lecture?’ he said sadly, shaking his head.

‘Of course not,’ she told him, ‘but I don’t know why, I thought snakes went for fast food. Mice. Rats. Humans, if they were hungry.’

‘And the last time you read about a human in Britain being eaten by a snake?’

‘Yeah, okay, Mr Biology. Although we’ve all heard about the bloke going to the loo and finding a huge great python.’

He smirked.

She blushed.

‘Does a snail really vomit to move, as someone once told me?’ she asked quickly.

‘Well, it’s a gastropod, which literally means “stomach foot”. And I suppose it does essentially secrete mucus, which it slides on. So, yes. Vomit. Slide. Vomit. Slide.’

‘Existing on a liquid lunch. And dinner,’ said Miranda, beginning to walk back along the towpath. She could feel her stomach on the verge of making another announcement. ‘Quite nice, though, to bury your eggs in the garden and let them hatch on their own, rather than spending nine months incubating them and several years saving them from themselves,’ she threw back, over her shoulder.

‘How many have you got?’ he asked.

‘Two. But they’ve gone now. So I’m foot-loose and fancy-free.’

‘No father of the children?’ he enquired, kicking a stone into the grass.

‘He’s gone too.’ She flashed him a smile. Really, she thought, this is going to have to stop.

CHAPTER THREE

It felt very politically incorrect to get into a Jaguar and drive to the shop for her lunch, particularly with the collection of vehicles surrounding it. Alex’s camper van was, as she had expected, a faded orange with a scratchy cream top. How awful, she thought, to have to live in something so small when you were so tall. And where did he shower? Or maybe he didn’t. She had read somewhere that after a while you didn’t smell, that your body was self-regulating. Or maybe that was your hair. Whichever it was, she didn’t believe it for a minute. Otherwise tramps would smell fragrant. Maybe you simply stopped smelling any worse.

She returned with a pie, a packet of crisps and a bottle of sparkling water. ‘Woo-hoo. She went and bought the pie from the local shop,’ Will exclaimed, as she joined them on the groundsheet where they were chatting.

There was a lull in the conversation and they watched with interest as she bit into it. She swallowed and they waited expectantly. ‘Well,’ she said eventually, ‘if I had to describe it, I’d say it was worm, with a hint of parsley. Or loam. Beautifully minced. Anyone else want a bite?’ She held it out.

‘No, you’re all right. Don’t mind if I don’t,’ said Brian, a grizzled veteran of the volunteering sector, who had been getting rid of overhanging branches on the path.

‘Is it supposed to be a meat pasty, or something else?’ asked Alex, peeling a hard-boiled egg.

‘Well, the woman in the shop said she thought it was cheese and onion. But since it appears to be brown and sludgy, I can only assume it’s meat. Are you vegetarian?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m all about sustainability. Eating food that’s in season. Having organic and ethically treated animals. Eating fish that are plentiful and not caught in bloody great drift nets that denude the sea.’ He looked around at the others. ‘Yes, I know, I’m on the well-ridden hobby-horse again. I’ll just dismount over here and take the spurs off.’

Miranda felt now as though she should be apologising for devouring a pie made of indeterminate animal, which had probably been treated very badly and didn’t even taste nice. But bugger it. It had filled the hole in her stomach and it was dead anyway.

Will gestured to the blue sky. ‘I love this country. Pissing down with rain this morning and now it’s like the Caribbean.’

‘Which is like the Caribbean, really,’ said Miranda. ‘Pissing down one minute and baking hot the next? Or, at least, it is at some times of the year …’ She tailed off.

‘A favourite holiday destination?’ asked Teresa, her mutton hair seeming to express rank disapproval.

‘We have friends in Antigua. Very good friends.’

‘Naturally,’ said Teresa.

She really doesn’t like me, thought Miranda. And then, because she could have gone either way, she decided to antagonise her. ‘Um. I also have friends in Switzerland, who I visit on a regular basis. Oh, and friends who have an ocean-going yacht – I join them when I can.’ She noticed Alex shooting a glance at her and stopped. Then added, ‘When I’m not camping in, er, Lancashire.’

Alex flashed her a massive smile. Clearly he didn’t believe her for a minute.

Lunch packed away, they walked back to the towpath. She was gratified to see him manoeuvre a spot beside her.

‘Lancashire, eh?’

‘Yes,’ she said firmly. ‘A huge favourite.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Chilterns,’ she threw back.

‘My goodness! I can only assume they must have got up on their tiptoes and shuffled north, then.’

She chuckled. ‘Never was much good at geography. Where are the Chilterns then?’

‘Not far from here – the area near Henley to the south-east. You’d be in the Yorkshire Dales if you wanted hilly near Lancashire. Beautiful part of the country. And you don’t have to camp to enjoy it.’

‘Is that where you’re from?’ she enquired.

‘No,’ he responded. There was a beat before he continued, ‘I’m from loads of places. We moved around a lot when I was growing up and I’ve continued the trend.’

‘Where do your parents live now?’ she asked.

‘They’re divorced. My mum lives on the Isle of Wight. My dad …’ he hesitated ‘… my dad … Last time I spoke to him he was in Spain somewhere. And it was raining.’ His voice held a note of finality, as though that was all he would be saying on the subject. ‘Are you from London?’

‘Yup. Grew up in Camden Town, before it got quite as skanky as it is now. It’s all about ripped tights, piercings and …’ she’d been about to say ‘dreadlocks’ ‘… it’s a bit druggy. You see people coming towards you smacking their gums and looking wild and …’

‘You realise it’s your father checking up on you,’ he finished promptly.

‘Exactly.’ She laughed. ‘Then we moved to Primrose Hill and I spent all my time kissing boys in the park.’ Now, why had she said that? Freud would have had a field day. It was absolutely, without a shadow of doubt, because she had been looking at his lips as he spoke. She went through the routine in her head: I am a forty-three-year-old mother of two. Leave this poor child alone and stop being predatory. Yuk. What was it they called women like her, these days? ‘Cougar,’ she exclaimed aloud.

‘Where?’ asked Alex, pretending to look about in consternation. ‘That would be a very unusual sighting.’

She bit her bottom lip. ‘I was trying to remember something,’ she said. And left it there, since there was nothing else she could say that wouldn’t land her in it.

She realised with a jolt that it had been ages since she’d had such a nice time. Flirting was very therapeutic, even if it did feel wrong with a boy who was barely out of short trousers.

She donned her gloves again and got stuck into the path clearing, finding it satisfying in a way that she had never found cleaning the house. Maybe it was because everyone was working together. If cleaning the house had been a team event instead of a lonely chore, which was only noticed when it hadn’t been done … In fact, after careful consideration – she stretched, hands on her waist, leaning backwards and admiring the blue of the sky – she would have to say that the best time she had had recently was the evening of celebratory divorce drinks with Hannah. They had laughed so much she had almost thrown up a kidney. She had also cried quite a lot. But somehow she had still had a good time. That was a bloody sad indictment of the last few years of her life. She bent down and picked up a load of prickly brambles, which had been thoughtfully cut into manageable pieces. She had taken off her jacket as the day had warmed up, but she was beginning to feel like a cheese wrapped in plastic. The wicking shirt, which was supposed to allow her skin to breathe, was sticking to her back. If her skin was breathing, she imagined it would have its mouth wide open, gasping for air. A drop of sweat fell off her nose.

Right. That was it. She took off her shirt, revealing a decidedly skimpy vest top and a wretchedly ugly sports bra. It couldn’t be helped. It was either that or suffocation. She did an impression of a cormorant drying its wings, then carried on picking up rubbish with renewed vigour.

An hour later, Will called another break and handed out bottles of water. Miranda drank hers thankfully.

‘Hot work, eh?’ Alex tried unsuccessfully not to look down her top.

‘Any hotter and I’ll be down to my pants,’ she said unthinkingly. And blushed. She could feel the heat staining her chest. Even her ears felt hot.

‘Come on, sun,’ he said quietly.

Which didn’t make her feel any cooler.

Driving home, with scratches up her arms and smelling like a navvy, as her mother would have said, she had to confess to feeling satisfied and rather virtuous. She couldn’t wait to tell her friends about it. Her real friends – those who weren’t tainted with a whiff of Nigel, so not Lydia or Estelle or anybody who had set her up with shit dates.

When she unlocked the front door, she wanted to embrace her house. There was nothing quite like a shower after an honest day’s work. It seemed so long ago that she had been standing in this cubicle, trying to activate herself. Naked and still damp, she weighed herself. How depressing, she thought. All that exercise and I’m still fat.

Miranda was not fat. In previous centuries she would have been described variously as ‘voluptuous’, ‘Rubenesque’ or ‘hourglass’. But it was hard to find clothes that fitted – they all appeared to have been designed for flat-bottomed and -chested girls. Or boys, even.

The one decent piece of advice she’d had from her mother was to buy proper bras. Rigby & Peller made excellent, comfortable upholstery for her top half, and after a fitting (‘Madam has a fuller left breast’), she liked to nip into Harrods for tea and to use the luxury washrooms.

She checked her breasts for lumps and idly wondered if she could ever have worked in a strip joint, showing her wares, as it were. In her teens she’d been addicted to a magazine that was almost entirely about girls and women prostituting themselves because of their circumstances. If it wasn’t actual prostitution, it was staying with a hideous husband, or drug-smuggling. It had been a sort of forerunner of Heat magazine, which was still about women marrying for money but now they were famous.

It was seven o’clock on a Saturday night. This was when she missed having someone to hang out with. Even Nigel. It seemed sad opening a bottle of wine with no one to share it. And she missed cooking for two. Or four, when the family had been together. ‘Oh, listen to yourself,’ she said aloud, remembering how she’d complained about being a skivvy, sometimes cooking separate meals for the children because she’d allowed them to become faddy eaters.

She opened the fridge door and ate a piece of celery while debating the options. Omelette. That was about it. She closed the door, grabbed a stash of flyers from beside the phone and ordered a takeaway sushi before flumping down on to the sofa and switching on the television, which felt wrong, considering the bright evening, but she hadn’t got the energy to walk to the shops, let alone gather food there.

The enormous beige linen sofa gathered her in, and a faint breeze from the window stirred the curtains. She half watched The Vicar of Dibley – it was an episode she’d seen a number of times, with Geraldine, Dawn French’s character, becoming a radio star. There was something strangely attractive about the owner of the manor, David Horton. Or was it his house? Or the fact that he was so capable?

The doorbell rang, and a man in a crash helmet handed her the sushi. She couldn’t have worked as a food deliverer, she thought. Couldn’t have coped with the semi-permanent helmet hair. And, luckily, I don’t have to. Yet. Standing in the kitchen, she ate the rice and fish with her fingers, rinsed them under the tap and wiped them on the tea towel, which she then threw into the laundry basket with a Note to Self that she should put it in the wash the next day.

She sniffed her fingers and went back into the bathroom to wash her hands with soap, sniffed again, then slathered on almond hand cream. The mirror reflected a face with a hint of suntan. Miranda leant forward to peer closer at her crow’s feet and the lines on her forehead. She was definitely going to get them done. Botox. That was the answer. All her friends looked so much younger than she did after their bi-annual visits to the doctor in Harley Street. Apart from Lydia, who was old school and didn’t even moisturise, let alone Botox. Hands like a pumice stone and the toes of a tree climber.

She got out a mirror that magnified by thirty and stuck it on the wall tile. When she had wanted to be a vet, she had asked for a microscope for her birthday and, for about six months, had studiously examined everything under it, from ants to scabs. But it was never as good as the science programmes where you could see the chomping hairy mandibles of a beetle or the inside of a wobbly pink human intestine. She loved her magnifying mirror, though. You could see only a little bit of your face at a time, which was fascinatingly hideous. Her eyebrows looked like spindly thorn thickets, with outlying stragglers. She plucked them and checked her chin to make sure nothing was growing there. Age, her grandmother had once told her, may give you wisdom but it also gives you excess hair and fallen arches. Age is not for wimps. God, it would be so easy to get depressed about everything drooping and growing hair.

Meanwhile, there was a nose to be attacked. Its pores were the size of bubbles in a yeasty bread mix and needed to be dealt with. That took a few minutes, and while it was relaxing after its pummelling, she peered up her nose. Bodies. So complicated. Hair inside nostrils to sift out particles in the air. Skin, with its pores opening or closing. She imagined her entire body as a vast collection of pulsating sea anemones, expelling and swallowing minute motes.

She dabbed toner everywhere, then mixed up a face pack with organic powder she had been given as a birthday present. It smelt of damp nappies, but was exceptionally good at calming down punished skin.

Back on the sofa, under a thick layer of night cream, she flicked through the channels. Telly was so boring on Saturday night. She shifted to Sky and rolled down the things she’d recorded, settling on a drama series about Sherlock Holmes, which had been getting good reviews. The cushions were comfy, the temperature was perfect and Dr Watson had a very good bedside manner. He had barely got his feet under the valance before she was fast asleep. She woke up as the credits were rolling and decanted to bed without cleaning her teeth.

The next day, Miranda woke up with a spring in her step and took a moment to remember why. Oh, yes. Towpath clearing. She quickly checked the time, having forgotten to set her alarm. It took her a moment to work out that the digital clock actually was showing five thirty-seven a.m. – the earliest she had woken up naturally since she’d last had jetlag.

She bounced into the bathroom and smiled at herself in the mirror. Natural light made you look so much better. She brushed her teeth with fennel toothpaste – bought because it was the sort of thing Nigel sneered at – then mint, because it felt fresher, and virtually skipped into the shower. ‘Oh, what a beautiful day,’ she trilled, as she shaved her legs.

She had two pieces of toast and a boiled egg, which she had undercooked so seriously that it looked like a jellyfish in a shell. She squiggled it around with a spoon to make it less offensive, then wolfed it down. She was ravenous so she followed it with a bowl of cereal and leapt into the car.

She arrived at the towpath with a tub of salad, a vegetable wrap, an apple, a banana, a smoothie and a bag of organic carrots.

‘Don’t tell me, you’re more hung-over than a quadruple bypass patient on an operating table,’ Alex commented, as she reeled off the list to him while they waited for the others to arrive.

‘Actually, no,’ she said primly. ‘I had an early night after dining on sushi.’

‘You were knackered?’ he sympathised.

‘Yes, I was.’ She smiled. ‘I know it sounds pathetic, but I really was a bit wiped out. A combination of fresh air and a little exercise.’

‘It’s what happens if you’re not used to it.’

‘And you?’

‘Well, I suppose I’m used to it.’

‘I meant what did you get up to last night?’

He hesitated. ‘I had to have a meeting with my father.’

‘Have a meeting with him? You mean you went to see your dad?’

‘No. It was a meeting – it’s complicated. But I didn’t get back till … erm, back until late, so I didn’t have a huge amount of sleep.’

‘And how was that?’ she asked idly, to keep the conversation going.

‘Fine,’ he said. And bent down to do up a shoelace that didn’t need tying. ‘So, no aches and pains, then? No massage required anywhere?’

‘You offering?’ she asked, addressing his ear.

He stood up. ‘I think I possibly am,’ he said, his green eyes alight.

He’s only saying that because he feels safe, she thought. Because I’m so much older. Because I’m no threat. Treating me like he would his mother. But she couldn’t prevent a tingle of excitement. ‘Shoulders could do with a rub, then, if you really don’t mind.’ She turned to present them.

His hands were strong and she winced a little as he worked on her.

‘Hey, can we all have one of those?’ asked Teresa, emerging from her scruffy Fiat with a cooler bag that contained her lunch.

Alex merely grinned and carried on massaging Miranda. ‘How’s that?’ he asked.

‘Me love you long time, meester,’ she responded, in a higher voice than she’d meant to use, actually feeling rather hot and bothered and trying hard not to be turned on.

Will’s Land Rover pulled up, drowning Alex’s response, but it appeared to signal the end of his ministrations and they got to work soon after.

It was a beautiful day and Miranda stood up frequently to stretch and look about her. On the canal, a shimmering drake was bothering a drab duck in an area of dark, still water. She knew she should be appalled by the huge expanse of green duckweed and algae bloom, but it was the most brilliant colour. It made the bank on the other side look positively dull.

She had stuck her hair into a large clasp at the back of her head, but red-gold curls had escaped and had glued themselves to her face by the time the call for lunch went up. ‘Phew,’ she said, as they walked back to the meeting area. ‘It’s awfully hot and sticky.’

‘Maybe you should wash it,’ said Alex, as he went past.

She snorted.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said apologetically. ‘Something a friend of mine used to say every time I said it was hot and sticky. Reflex action. Really. Sorry.’ He did look a little pink around the ears.

‘It’s fine. Honestly. Don’t worry about it. I’ve heard worse. Much worse. And I definitely could do with a freshen-up.’ She grinned. And now she was embarrassed. ‘A freshen-up.’ That was so bloody Surrey.

It was peculiar how, even at her age, she reverted to being a teenager, given half a chance and a following wind.

After lunch, they worked with fewer breaks to clear the last stretch of towpath they were dealing with that weekend. Miranda wondered whether she would do the volunteering thing again. It had been a nice idea, but apart from Alex, she didn’t like the others much. They were all a bit holier-than-thou, with bad skin and terrible hair. She smiled at that. Hers had gone mad with the combination of heat and sweat. She took off her glove and wiped her brow with the back of her hand. Her nails were filthy, even though she hadn’t done anything without gloves on. Yuk. That must be from the inside of the gloves. Someone else’s body detritus.

By five o’clock, it was all done. The team gathered gratefully in the shade of a tree – now shorn of its lower branches – and drank bottles of water. Will thanked them all for their hard work and said that anyone who wanted to see the job through to the end was welcome to come again. Everyone except Miranda intimated that they’d be doing just that.

She couldn’t decide. On the one hand, it would be a waste of the wicking shirt and the trousers if she didn’t. On the other, she might just go and get a job.

She got into the Jaguar and was sitting with her eyes closed, anticipating the drive home, when she was startled by a knock on the window. ‘Alex. You gave me a fright,’ she said, her heart beating unnecessarily fast.

‘Sorry.’ He smiled. ‘Again.’ He leant his forearm on the car roof. ‘I’m sorry for my very poor attempt at humour earlier. Can I take you for a drink to make up for it?’ He hastened on before she had a chance to speak. ‘There’s a really pretty little pub about a mile away. It’s on your way home. They do coffee. Or … erm … other things, if you don’t want a drink of an alcoholic nature?’ he ended, raising his eyebrows hopefully.

‘How could I possibly say no?’ she answered. ‘A nice glass of something sounds just the job. Only the one, mind you, since I do have to drive home.’

Alex began to explain where the pub was, but saw that she had lost him beyond turning left on to the main road. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you follow me?’

‘Much easier,’ she agreed.

It was a relief to get the air-conditioning going in the car. She tuned in to Radio 2 and jigged along to ‘Honky Tonk Woman’, singing the few words she knew and humming the rest. She was going to a pub with a dreadlocked eco-warrior. Not that he was a warrior, but it was a very sexy word redolent of a bygone age when men were men and women wandered about in long skirts applying harts-horn and experimenting with plaits.

‘Whoa, lady,’ she said aloud, running her hand along the nape of her neck and lifting her hair to get a bit of ventilation.

The verges were verdant with flowers, trees and bushes, all bursting into life. It was like a scene from a 1950s film with euphemisms for sex. Peonies exploding. Pods popping. Stamens thrusting. Miranda felt an excitement she hadn’t experienced since the very first blind date after her divorce, when she’d thought that she was going to be properly pillaged. How misplaced that had been.

The photograph of Marc – that was his name – had shown a stocky man with close-cut hair in the Russell Crowe mould, standing by a stallion with muscular nostrils and a look in its eye. She had spent about three hours getting ready – even bought new clothes and underwear to emphasise the new leaf she was turning over.

And then she had met him. She would literally have preferred to have had dinner with his horse.

His wallet had been bursting with platinum credit cards and fifty-pound notes – he had made sure she noticed them when he took out a picture of his new Labrador. But he had been an unreconstructed bore who could barely wait for her to finish a sentence before he was leaping in with long, tedious stories, all of which he started, ‘I must tell you about this funny thing that happened to me …’

Under her breath, she replied, ‘No, you don’t have to tell me and it won’t be funny.’

Her mobile phone startled her by ringing very loudly where it nestled in her crotch. She put the hands-free earphones in and answered.

‘Hi, Mum.’

‘Oh, hello, Lucy. Listen, I’m driving so I might lose you if I go into an iffy patch. How are you?’

‘Fine. How are you?’

‘Feeling pretty good, actually. Everything okay, or were you after something?’ She might as well cut to the chase, since Lucy generally only phoned to lecture her about splitting up the family or how she should invest her cash.

‘Hmm. I saw Dad yesterday and he said you still had some of his books, which you said you were going to give him back. I thought I’d save you a trip by picking them up from you this week.’

Miranda bristled. She consciously kept her voice light. ‘I wonder which ones they are. He did take the couple he’d read, and the yard of books he bought at Sotheby’s to put on his office bookshelves,’ she said sweetly. ‘Sorry. You’re going to have to tell him to give me a ring and let me know what he’s talking about.’ He wouldn’t because he was a coward and that was why he had drafted in Lucy to ask her.

‘Leatherbound books, he said,’ Lucy countered, obviously having been briefed by Nigel.

‘Yes. The ones he bought by the yard, as I said. No doubt he’s finished reading them all and is desperate for the sequels,’ she said bitchily. Nigel read the Financial Times, the Telegraph and some magazine called Square Mile, which she’d once read in the bath in the absence of anything racier.

‘He says you know which books he’s talking about. Apparently you claimed they were yours, but Gran says they were definitely hers and she gave them to Dad.’

‘Well, I’ve no idea what you, he and she are talking about,’ she said waspishly.

‘Do you think you could check when you get home, though?’ asked Lucy, relentlessly.

‘Not tonight. I’m on my way to a …’ She paused, unwilling to get into a conversation about where she was going and with whom ‘… friend’s house. For dinner. I’ll be late.’

‘Oh.’ Lucy sounded put out. ‘Well, I’ll tell Dad you’ll do it in the morning, then.’

‘No, you won’t,’ countered Miranda. ‘You’ll tell him to give me a ring and explain what I’m looking for.’

‘I’ve already told you what you’re looking for. Don’t be mean, Mum. Which friend are you having dinner with?’

‘Eh?’

‘Which friend are you having dinner with?’

‘Lydia,’ she said foolishly, no other name coming to hand quick enough. Damn. Trust her to pick the wife of one of Nigel’s best friends.

‘On a Sunday?’

‘Well, it was supposed to be lunch, but I was busy. So I’m dropping round now.’

‘It won’t be a late one, though, knowing Lydia and Justin. He’s like me, up at five every morning. I must ring him – I heard a rumour about Standard and Poors.’

Miranda’s eyes widened. Drat and double drat. That would be the cat put firmly amid the pigeons.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear you very well, Lucy. If you can hear me, lots of love. Speak to you soon. ’Bye.’ She clicked the off button and glanced down to switch the phone off altogether. Ridiculous. Lying to your daughter about going to a pub with a young man.

‘Young man.’ She couldn’t help putting on an accent. Like that actor in the sketch show. Who was he? She couldn’t remember his name. Someone dressed as an old woman, ogling the man who came round to fix the boiler. Fix the boiler – oh, that’s a good euphemism, she thought.

Feeling a little discombobulated, she concentrated on the camper van ahead.

They pulled off at a crossroads and within ten minutes were in the car park of a pretty pub with a bright display of hanging baskets at the front and a little beer garden at the back. ‘Why don’t you grab a spot outside and I’ll get you a drink?’ Alex said, holding her door open as she got out of the car.

‘All right. Could I have a half of whatever the local beer is, please?’

‘Crisps?’

‘Salt and vinegar, please.’

‘An excellent choice, madam. They’ll complement the ale beautifully.’ He flashed her a big smile and walked into the saloon bar.

Miranda sat on one of the benches under a stripy umbrella. There was a slight breeze and her hair danced. She closed her eyes to enjoy the moment. It was delicious. There was a soft murmur of bees and the susurrant sound of plants drifting in the gentle wind. She could hear a couple chatting at another table, but not loudly enough to disturb the rustic peace.

Bit annoying about Nigel and the books, though. If she hadn’t had children with him, she could quite happily never speak to him again. She hoped there wouldn’t be any marriages just yet. The ex-wife of the father of the bride. Or the father of the groom – although it was unlikely that Jack would be tying the knot any time soon. And Lucy? Miranda loved her daughter, but she could be trying, and her boyfriends had almost always been annoying. Although, to be fair, not annoying to Nigel.

She opened her eyes and turned to the young couple she’d heard talking. They were holding hands over the wooden table with empty glasses in front of them. She thought wistfully of her lost youth. Had she ever looked like that? She supposed she must have done when she first met Nigel. Or had she? Her head had been full of other things, like not having to work unless she wanted to. And Nigel had been the human equivalent of the wardrobe full of fur coats in the Narnia books, a window on to a different world. A world of adults making adult decisions, like where to buy a house. Organising a mortgage. Choosing stuff that wasn’t crockery and cutlery, saying things like, ‘Oh, yes, a king-size bed is much more suitable,’ and knowing that they were married, so it was a proper marital bed. Then, of course, the ultimate grown-up thing – even though you could get pregnant from the age of about twelve: having a baby. It had been odd telling Dad. Absolute proof that she was having sex. That a man was actually … she searched for the word that Nigel had used … ‘banging’? Or was it ‘slamming’ her?

‘What’s making you smile?’ asked Alex, ending her reverie with his arrival.

‘Nothing. Rambling through memories. Can’t even remember now. Pff!’ She clicked her fingers. ‘A moment that’s gone in a flash of – What beer have I got?’

‘That is one interesting flash,’ he dropped a packet of crisps in front of her, ‘and it’s called Brakspear. A fine drop of ale, if I do say so myself.’

She downed half of it in one. ‘Excuse me. A bit thirsty.’

‘Can I interest you in a thinly sliced potato drenched in a delicious marinade of sea salt with a hint of balsamic?’

‘Don’t mind if I do.’ She reached into the bag and took a few.

‘England on a balmy evening like this is heaven, don’t you think?’ He necked a pint of very pale apricot liquid.

‘Gorgeous. Why would anyone be anywhere else?’

‘All we need now is the thwack of leather on willow.’

‘That’s the sort of dodgy thing they get up to in the shires,’ she said.

‘Not a cricket fan, I take it?’ he asked.

‘You are?’

‘Love it. A game of strategy. The only thing my father taught me,’ he said, and stopped.

‘He must have taught you more than that.’ Miranda tucked a stray curl behind her ear.

‘Not much,’ he said curtly. ‘What will you be doing next week?’

Miranda raised her blue eyes to his leaf-green ones. ‘Something rather akin to what your father taught you … not much. I’ve got a few friends I’ll be meeting up with, and a play at the Barbican that another friend has press-ganged me into seeing. It sounds like one of those experimental pieces where I’ll spend the entire evening wondering whether I’ve missed the point, and concentrating desperately to see if I can grasp something to talk about intelligently afterwards. And no doubt coming up with the stock word … “interesting”. Apart from that, same old, same old.’

‘You should get more involved with the eco side of things then,’ he said, taking another long sup of his drink.

‘Maybe. Is that lime and lemonade?’ she queried.

‘Lime and soda with a dash of Angostura bitters. Tastes almost alcoholic, but allows me to retain my driving licence. You have children, I think you said?’

‘Two. One in banking, the other on a rather extended gap year.’

‘As in?’

‘As in over a year now, and not much to show for it,’ she said, with a sigh.

‘Except that he can probably hold his own with anyone, has a better view of the world than those who don’t travel more than ten miles from their own door, and speaks a few languages?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m very proud of him. My ex-husband thinks he’s wasting his life.’

‘I’ve got a friend whose parents thought exactly the same. He now runs one of the biggest student travel agents in the world. Hugely successful. Rolling in dosh. Gives loads of it to charity.’

‘And now has ecstatic parents?’

‘And now has ecstatic parents,’ he echoed.

‘Not that Jack’s doing much at the moment. If his emails are anything to go by, he’s learning how to surf in Indonesia.’

‘A necessary survival skill. Imagine how useful that could be if there was a sudden deluge and your house was washed away.’

‘I’d be in the house, surely.’

‘And he’d be coaxing you out of the window on to his surfboard as you were heading for the weir.’ He nodded sagely.

She laughed. ‘Is that how you ended up doing this canal-clearing thing?’ She gestured airily.

‘No. I did it to – erm – annoy someone,’ he said.

‘Your father?’

‘Yes. He thinks it’s all about capitalism. We don’t always see eye to eye.’ He grinned. ‘It’s a long story. And you have to get home, you said.’

‘Did I? I meant I can’t drink much because I have to drive home. I can certainly make time for what sounds like an interesting story. There’s nothing I like better than hearing about other people’s complicated home lives.’

‘Since you have one of your own?’

‘Well, it doesn’t sound as exciting as yours. But I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’

‘Depending on where we start with the life history, it’ll take a lot longer than one drink,’ he said, his eyes crinkling attractively.

She put her head on one side, considering. ‘Fine,’ she said, after a few seconds. ‘And what would you suggest in that case?’

‘Have dinner with me,’ he pronounced, his even white teeth showing between what she had thought were eminently kissable lips since the moment she’d met him.

CHAPTER FOUR

While he was at his minor public school, Nigel had been called before the headmaster to explain how he had come to be in possession of a packet of cigarettes and a hip-flask full of whisky. During the complicated explanation he had given, in which he had blamed dark forces and a boy who was swotty, spotty, blond and a bed-wetter, he had discovered an aptitude for lying. It was standing him in good stead now, but what he needed were the books his mother had given him and which he had mixed up with two yards of leatherbound dictionaries bought in a drunken moment from Sotheby’s.

When Miranda turned on her mobile phone on Monday, there were several texts and voicemail messages, at least half of which related to the books. ‘Pesky blighter,’ she said aloud, making an avocado, cottage cheese and tomato sandwich for breakfast – she’d had no dinner the night before. There was also a message from Alex, suggesting dinner on Wednesday at Zuma, a very smart restaurant in Knightsbridge. That struck her as odd because he didn’t look the type who would know its name, even less frequent it.

Was he expecting her to pay? Or go halves? Well, if that was the price of hanging out with younger men, she supposed she’d have to bite the bullet.

The trouble was that she had recently put what was left of her cash into a copper-bottomed scheme that Lucy had organised. It had been paying such rich dividends that she had taken out a mortgage on the house and piled in more. She envisaged it growing year by year into a kind of enormous, bouncy pension that she could lie around on in her old age – but it left her very short for day-to-day expenses. That was one major disadvantage in not having Nigel to sort out the finances. And the reason she needed a job.

She composed a text, saying she would love to have dinner with him, then hesitated over whether to put an ‘x’ at the end of the message. She put it on, took it off and put it on. Then took it off just before she pressed send. A date. With a man who was only a bit older than her daughter. Or thereabouts, since she didn’t know for certain how old he was. If he was thirty, he was thirteen years younger, therefore two-thirds her age. Or was that three-quarters? Her maths had always been a bit foggy, particularly round fractions.

She finished her breakfast, and put the items in the dishwasher. Oh dear. Is that one of those non-eco things I shouldn’t be doing, like brushing my teeth without using water? Or was it okay as long as the dishwasher was full? But that meant there would be bits of dried food mouldering away in it, smelling like a teenager’s bedroom.

After a quick shower (saves on water), Miranda threw on an orange and cream Diane von Furstenburg dress and carefully put on her makeup. She had a hair appointment at eleven thirty, which would leave her with just enough time to get to the Lanesborough, near Hyde Park Corner, which did a very fine pot of loose-leaf tea. There she would do battle with her mother. It was a ritual she felt sure neither enjoyed much, but it had become so entrenched in their lives that it would be difficult for them to back out now.

Her mother. Where to start? She had got to that age where every action was accompanied by an equal and inapposite reaction. Bending resulted in a little exhalation, a ‘pah’ of effort. Sitting down occasionally concluded with a full-blown ‘aaaah’. Was it legitimate, she wondered, to say that she loved her mother but didn’t like her very much? That seemed churlish when Miranda knew how much effort it took to raise a child.

A few hours later, in the unforgiving daylight of the glass-domed room, her hair newly highlighted and blow-dried (such a treat after two days of it being sweaty and itchy), she watched as her mother ever so slightly touched her tongue to the cup while sipping the Lady Grey. It was just one of the habits that irritated her. Mothers. Couldn’t live with them, couldn’t shoot them. Although there were those who did, obviously. Her parents had loved Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em – if Miranda ran the BBC (or was it ITV?), she would commission a show called Some Children Do ’Ave ’Em. It would feature a mother who was constantly at you about everything and a father who forgot your name but remembered the hamster’s.

She had a forlorn hope that she would never look like her mother, but was very aware that at some stage she probably would. In which case, she was heading for a mouth like a sucked lemon and long earlobes.

Nigel had cloyingly called her mother a stunner, and it was true that photographs from her youth showed some similarity to Diana Dors. But for half a century she had been married to a philandering workaholic and the stress had left her features crabby and disappointed.

‘What are you going to do with that boy of yours?’ her mother asked, reaching for the pot of clotted cream.

‘Jack is perfectly all right, Mum. He phoned me the other day from Indonesia. He’s on his way to Borneo and I think he said he was volunteering to help at an orang-utan centre. It sounds like he’s having a great time and getting work experience,’ she lied.

Her mother spread a large dollop of strawberry jam on her creamed scone and then consumed half of it. At least I’ll have inherited excellent teeth and digestion, thought Miranda.

‘He needs a sense of direction,’ said her mother. ‘If you hadn’t got divorced, he might have stayed on the straight and narrow. Been working in the City now and saving for a house.’

Miranda listened to the well-trodden rant and continued to sip her tea. Thank goodness for Jack. Weird how Lucy had become so like her father. She had been such a sweet child. Rather like a stuffed squid when she was going through the terrible twos, with dimpled arms and legs that didn’t seem to bend in the middle, but she had turned into a pretty little girl.

‘Did I ever have a comfort blanket, Mum?’ she suddenly asked.

Her mother looked disgruntled at being interrupted just as she was getting into her stride about feckless youth, but finally said, ‘No, not a blanket. There was that stuffed polecat you had from Uncle Ben. You used to suck its ears and scream like a banshee if we didn’t have it with us. Why?’

‘I was remembering how Jack used to take a funny little bear everywhere until he was about eleven. And Lucy had that pink satin blanket from a doll’s cot. I found it the other day when I unpacked a box of odds and sods that’d been in the cupboard under the stairs. She must have lobbed it in there years ago – terrible reek of mothballs. I think I’ve finally found her sentimental streak.’

‘She’s a wonderful girl, Lucy …’

Before her mother could begin a new strand involving her beloved granddaughter, Miranda cut her off by enquiring sweetly if she wanted a top-up because she was definitely having more Darjeeling, and waved over a waiter.

‘Did you have a good weekend?’ asked her mother, searching for a neutral topic.

‘Er, yes, actually. I did some volunteer work at a canal in Oxfordshire,’ she said, clasping her hands together and giving her mother a challenging look.

‘Did you?’ her mother asked, horrified.

‘Uh-huh. It was really good fun. Thought I needed to get out more – do something constructive. It’s a precursor to getting a job. Yes. After all these years. And before you ask, no, I don’t think it will be in the acting world – I’m far too long in the tooth. I don’t know what kind of job, except it won’t be lap-dancing, circus work or anything else that will embarrass the children. Although I quite fancy burlesque … Mum, you should see your face! Anyway, I went to Oxfordshire and met some very nice people.’ Not a total lie. One of them was very nice.

‘Really?’ her mother asked in disbelief.

‘Yes, Mum. They were. Perhaps not the sort of people you’d meet at the Rotary Club, but good sorts.’ What on earth was she saying? She’d be using expressions like ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk’ next.

She pressed on, ‘I enjoyed it so much I’m going to go again.’ So there.

‘Well, it’s very singular of you, Miranda,’ her mother said. ‘If you’re going to do charity work, why not do proper charity work? Doesn’t Lydia do something with disadvantaged children?’

‘Yes. I think she knits them into socks for the army. But I wanted to do something energetic.’

‘You never used to say that at school.’

‘That was rather a long time ago. And I was utterly hopeless at hockey and netball. It’s very dispiriting to be the last person to be picked for the team and it puts you off doing anything energetic. If you remember, I was only good at shot-put, and nobody wants to be good at shot-put unless they’re lesbian.’

‘Miranda!’ Her mother’s eyes darted to the next table.

‘Oh, all right, not lesbian, then,’ said Miranda, wanting to voice the L-word again. ‘Fat.’ What was it about being with her mother that always made her sound like she was seven? ‘The point is, I’m going to go and volunteer again – and I met a rather scrumptious man, who I’m going to have dinner with on Wednesday.’ There. It was out.

‘From canal clearing?’

‘Mum, you’ve done that face where you look like Lamb Chop eating a pretend carrot.’ She laughed. ‘I think he might be mixed race. He’s got dreadlocks. Down to here.’ She gestured to her waist. ‘And now you’re doing what Butter and Marg did when they wanted feeding,’ she said, talking about the goldfish she had won at a fair. They had lived in a bowl that eventually went a livid green and killed its occupants.

‘Does Nigel know?’ she eventually asked.

‘Mum, I’m not married to him any more. I’m a free agent, just like he is. He doesn’t have to tell me about his latest floozy, and I don’t have to tell him what I’m doing.’

‘Have you told Lucy? Or Jack?’

‘Nope. They’ve left home. It’s nothing to do with them.’ Yet. ‘And it’s a dinner date, not a wedding.’

‘But mixed race.’ Her mother shook her head.

‘Mmm.’ Miranda reached for the teapot. ‘He might not be, though. I have no idea. Doesn’t matter either way, though, does it? I think he lives in a camper van. Or that seems to be what he lives in. I don’t know very much about him. I will by Thursday, if you want me to keep you posted?’

Her mother tightened her lips, realising she was being baited and refusing to capitulate.

Miranda left the Lanesborough feeling rather as she had on leaving school, a combination of exhilaration and trepidation. Her dad wouldn’t approve of Alex either. He approved of Nigel and men like Nigel. He read the Daily Telegraph and believed there was too much immigration and that too much of what he paid in tax went to social-security scroungers. On the other hand, they had a cleaner from the Philippines and he kept quite a lot of his money in offshore accounts. ‘If it wasn’t for the stupidly generous state handouts encouraging people to sit at home watching television and producing more children, there would be people available to do the jobs,’ he would declare, to anyone who would listen. ‘As it is, we allow thousands of people to come here and most of them are instantly able to access stuff that we pay for. Why should they be able to go to our hospitals for treatment when they’ve contributed nothing, and send their children to our schools when they don’t even speak English?’

Who was it who said you were only an adult when your parents were no longer around?

Maybe she was having a mid-life crisis. How do you know whether it’s a mid-life crisis or something you’d have done anyway? A friend’s husband had done a classic: he’d run off with a twenty-year-old Norwegian student, spent all his money on renting a smart flat and buying a Porsche, and started wearing low-slung jeans and tight-fitting shirts that looked ridiculous with his mini pot-belly. He’d come crawling back two years later, wanting to be part of the family again.

But Miranda had always had a nice car. And she tried to be on trend if not trendy – maybe she’d have a look for a funky top in one of the high-street shops for Wednesday. Aha, and that’s how the mid-life crisis starts. She smiled. ‘You can drop me here on the corner.’ She handed the cabbie a twenty-pound note. ‘Keep the change.’ It was odd, she thought, how you tipped cabbies and hairdressers, waiters and waitresses, but not gas fitters, car mechanics, salespeople, hospital porters. All of them did you a service, but only some got a little extra cash. And, actually, the waiters and hairdressers she tipped were often bloody annoying.

She would have liked to be the sort of person who had the balls only to tip those who deserved it – the sort of person who took the service charge off the bill or demanded to see the manager. She had done it once and got so hot and sweaty that in the end she had meekly paid up.

Her mobile rang as she was searching for her house keys. Wedging the phone between shoulder and ear, she carried on rifling through her enormous handbag.

‘Hi, Miranda. Wondered if you fancied going to a play tonight? I’ve been let down at the last minute so I’ve got a spare ticket.’

‘What play?’

‘I think it’s called Spurt of the Moment or something like that. Written by some young person. You know me, I book them up so far in advance. Check on the Internet. It’s at the Royal Court. Should be good.’

Amanda Drake was one of Miranda’s closest friends. They had met at antenatal classes when having their first children and done instant bonding, having constantly answered to each other’s names. Amanda’s house was Miranda’s second home, the place where she felt most comfortable. It was full of squashy sofas, huge televisions, palatial bathrooms and a light, airy kitchen where much gossiping was done over bottles of wine. It had been there that Miranda had done her sobbing before, during and after the divorce.

‘I’m desperately trying to get into my house, and can’t find my keys in this stupidly large bag. I’ll call you in a moment,’ Miranda mumbled, unaware that her chin had hit the mute button. She put her bag on the doorstep and took out its contents one by one. It was only when the objects were strewn around her that she remembered she had put the keys in the tiny front zipped compartment while she was in the taxi, so that she could reach them easily.

She piled everything back in and semi-shuffled into her house, turning the alarm off with concentration. She had set it off again the week before, and if there was one more accident, she would lose her police response. No one had told her that, had they, when she’d spent a fortune putting it in?

Miranda was on her way to the bin in the kitchen to throw away drooping roses from a vase on the dining-room table when Amanda rang back.

‘Oh, sorry. I was going to phone you. Got sidetracked by a bunch of past-their-sell-by-date flowers. Is there anything sadder than a wilting rose?’

‘Erm. A child with its leg blown off by a landmine?’

‘Oh, make me sound callous, why don’t you? I meant is there a flower sadder than a wilting rose?’

‘A depressed daffodil? A weeping willow? A lethargic lily? A suicidal scarlet pimpernel?’

‘Oh, enough of the aliteration!’ laughed Miranda. ‘And is there truly a scarlet pimpernel? I thought it was an eighteenth-century spy.’

‘That too.’

‘Let me look at my diary. I’m flicking through the pages as we speak. I’m almost sure I haven’t got anything on … fnaw, fnaw …’

‘Naked at four thirty of a Monday afternoon, eh? Who have you got round there, you saucy minx?’ asked Amanda, in a raunchy voice.

‘Ha. No one. But remind me to tell you of a rather naughty prospect which may be coming up. Literally. On Wednesday. Now. Diary. Here it is.’

‘No. You can’t do that. Tell me about the naughty prospect first.’

‘Shan’t. I’ll check my diary, and if I’m seeing you tonight, I’ll give you all the gory details later. And here we are. Nope. Totally free for – oh, look – the rest of my life. That is shabby. Really. Nothing in the diary apart from tea with Mother, and some dreary dinner party at Sally Thurston’s next week.’

‘Why do you say yes?’

‘Habit. She means well. She’s kind.’

‘Kind of boring, you mean,’ said Amanda.

‘You’re right. How do I get out of it, though, when I’m not doing anything else?’

‘Start doing things.’

‘Okay. You can give me this lecture later. What time tonight?’

‘It starts at seven thirty or seven forty-five. How about we meet at six thirty in the restauranty bit of the bar downstairs?’

‘Fine. Are we having dinner or just a vat of wine?’

‘Maybe a light nibble. And you can tell me exactly what kind of light nibbling you’ve been up to.’

CHAPTER FIVE

The theatre was rammed with people drinking bottles of beer and eating olives. ‘That’s how you can tell we’re in Kensington and Chelsea,’ said Amanda. ‘If we were in Streatham we’d be drinking full-fat Coke with a hot dog.’

‘And in Camden, we’d be having a line of coke and an energy bar,’ said Miranda. ‘It’s all healthy crack chic there now.’

‘It’s not like when we were young, is it?’ Amanda put on an old-crone voice. ‘When Camden was all fields and we had to walk three miles to school.’

‘And you’d get seventeen gobstoppers for a penny and drink dandelion and burdock floats from a passing milkmaid,’ finished Miranda.

‘Oh, yes, I remember it well. Actually, I do remember when Notting Hill was a dodgy area. Now it’s full of bankers and sleek women with fantastic teeth and shiny hair … because they’re worth it.’ Amanda did the L’Oréal advert voice.

‘That’s why I moved there. I fit right in.’

‘Well, you are a yummy mummy, so I actually think that, despite your protestations, you do fit in.’

‘And you’re a yummy mummy, too, so don’t come the raw prawn with me, matey. How are the offspring?’ asked Miranda, scoffing a pickled garlic clove and a piece of cheese.

‘I’ve got serious empty-nest syndrome. It’s okay when I’m at work, but when Peter’s not around, I rattle about in that big house looking for something to do. No feeding of the five thousand. No unloading the dishwasher every night. No sewing on name tags or helping with homework. I miss them, don’t you?’

‘Well, I miss Jack a lot because I haven’t seen him for so bloody long, but Lucy’s still around. A mouthpiece for Nigel half the time, but that’s fine.’

‘Anyway. Enough of that,’ said Amanda, draining her gin and tonic noisily. ‘I’m going to get another of these and then you’re going to fill me in about your date.’

Miranda always used to tell her children to stop wishing their life away when they said they wanted it to hurry up and be their birthday, but she had secretly wished away the days until Wednesday, and finally it had arrived. And even more secretly, as she stretched and wriggled in the cotton sheets and thought about getting up, she was wishing it was this evening. It was ridiculous – she had umpteen things to do, like finding a proper job (Amanda had suggested someone she could call about PR work), going to the bank to see exactly what amount of money she had to spend, and sorting out a man to fix the leak in the shower room.

It was strange how she had started to get calls on her mobile about advice on debt. How did they know? She cleansed her face and smothered on hydrating cream while phoning a plumber recommended by Lydia – she assumed Lucy had not phoned her the other night since there’d been no angry call.

Then she did what she had told her children never to do: she went shopping, knowing that there might not be enough money in the bank to cover it. But, she reasoned, the money would be there in about nine months when the scheme she had invested in came to fruition. And it was looking like 10 to 15 per cent interest at the moment, possibly even higher, according to Lucy. By two o’clock, she was practically dead on her feet, and some unkind mirrors with nasty overhead lighting had made her dread the evening ahead. She could only pray he had early-onset cataracts.

She wondered if Alex was running round his camper van right now, trying things on, polishing his natty dreads – if that was what you did with them – buffing up his feet.

Bugger this for a game of soldiers, she thought, as her breasts almost burst the seams on a red shirt, and went for a sit-down and a bowl of soup at a communal deli – she was definitely the fattest person there. A text pinged through. Lucy: still on the trail of the bloody books. She would have liked to tell Nigel to do his own dirty work, but that would involve a tetchy conversation with him. Not that it would start tetchy …

It was strange to reconcile the toady countenance he now had with the handsome young man he had been when she married him. On really bad days he looked like a bilberry, all swollen and purply. He would be easy to draw in a life class, just a series of massive circles. His attractiveness in every way had disappeared in direct proportion to his wealth. Peculiar how some women out there were prepared to allow such an abundance of flesh to land on them in the bedroom in return for a few baubles. At least she had had an excuse: youth, silliness and lack of ambition. Other men had been available, but she felt she had been unduly influenced by the approbation of her father. Yes, she’d blame it on him.

The leaves on the lime and plane trees lining the roads were barely moving in the sultry weather. Miranda felt hot and leaden as she walked back to the house empty-handed, debating what to eat so that she didn’t look too bloated later. At least it was the sort of day when she didn’t want to eat chocolate – it melted so quickly it reminded her of poo.

Earlier that day, a little orange Volkswagen camper van made its way towards Cirencester, Alex was feeling clammy. His father had insisted he go to see him that morning on a matter of some importance, and Alex assumed it was about his mother, who was periodically threatening to end it all.

He drove up to the gates and got out to tap in the day’s code on the pad. It was his favourite time of year for the garden in front of the house. It was vast, but sectioned off into smaller areas, including a walled garden where hollyhocks and ornamental thistles poked above lamb’s ears and lady’s mantle. By summer, it would be a riot of colour, but now everything was quietly budding.

Belinda, the housekeeper, let him in and he made his way to his father’s study where the wood-panelled walls gave the ticking of the eighteenth-century clock a pleasant bok sound. A tall, slim man with close-cropped silver hair and tanned skin was standing by the window pouring two glasses of sparkling water. One already rested on a filigree coaster on the walnut side table.

‘Hi, Dad,’ said Alex, sinking into the red leather chair and accepting a glass. ‘What’s up?’

‘I’ve bought a small island off the coast of Spain,’ his father said, ‘to build a luxury hotel, a spa and a golf course – yes, I do know how you feel about golf courses, before you give me a lecture – and I happen to know that a number of people are going to be very unhappy about that. No, not the golf course,’ he added, as Alex opened his mouth to speak, ‘about me owning the island. Right now, it’s used as a very handy stopping-off point for drug-runners getting their stuff from Africa to Europe. I intend to stop that, obviously. I’ve been told they could make things nasty for us because we’re talking about a lot of money. I myself am hiring a couple of personal bodyguards, possibly for the next couple of years, and putting in a little more security here at the house.’

‘And you think I could be at risk too?’ Alex asked bluntly.

‘In a nutshell, yes. Let’s face it, you’re hardly difficult to track down in that orange van of yours. And not difficult to, say, kidnap. As my only son, you would be the perfect way for them to get at me and persuade me to allow them to continue. I don’t want that to happen. In fact, I won’t allow it to happen.’

‘I can see that you might not like it, Dad, but why not let them carry on with it, and get the police involved?’

David Miller took a sip of his water. ‘I have it on good authority that the police may be taking backhanders. As for letting them get on with it, you know I can’t. Can you imagine the headlines if an island I own is used for drug-running?’

Alex grinned. ‘Yes. Right. But won’t they find somewhere else if you make it uncomfortable for them?’

‘No. I think they’d try to make it uncomfortable for us by maybe shooting anybody who saw what they were doing. An innocent builder, for example.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘I need you to take a lot more care than you do now.’

‘All right, I will,’ Alex said.

‘What will you do?’

‘Take more care,’ Alex said jauntily, raising his eyebrows.

‘As in?’

‘Why don’t you just tell me what you want me to do, Dad, like you always do?’

‘I’d like you to employ a bodyguard.’ The clock ticked, and the leather chair creaked as he leant forward. ‘I know you’d hate it. I know it’s not your …’ he paused ‘… style. But it’s not for ever. I’ve never asked you to change your way of life, have I?’ Alex acknowledged that. ‘Even though I do think it’s about time you started thinking about laying down foundations for the future.’

Alex nodded. ‘Yes, I know you do, Dad. And actually,’ he said, ‘I was going to wait and tell you this in a few months’ time, but I may as well tell you now. Today I signed on the dotted line for my range of organic freeze-dried soups to go into Waitrose. For a not insubstantial amount of money.’

David let out a crack of laughter. ‘Bloody well done, Alex. Congratulations. I know how much that means to you.’ He got up from his chair and came round the desk to give his son a handshake and a clap on the back. ‘Do you want a celebratory drink?’

‘No, thanks. A little early for me. But now you come to mention it, I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea.’

David picked up the phone. ‘Belinda, a cup of tea for Alex, please, and a glass of champagne for me. Thanks.’ The sun was shining between the slats in the blinds and he walked over to alter the angle. ‘To get back to the security issue, what do you want to do? Obviously, since it’s entirely my, er, fault, if you like, that the situation has arisen, I’m willing to put it through the company.’ He raised a hand to Alex’s instant objection. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have used the word “willing”. It should go through the company, since otherwise I could be facing all sorts of problems if you were to get kidnapped. Including raising the ten quid needed to free you.’

Alex smiled wryly. ‘I don’t know, Dad. It just seems a little over the top. You’ve done deals before where dodgy people have been involved.’

‘That’s the point. I’m not doing a deal with these “dodgy people”, as you describe them. I want them off the island.’

‘I still don’t understand why they won’t go and find another island. Yours can’t be the only one, surely.’

‘It’s the most useful. Not many others are virtually uninhabited. Point is, I’ve taken advice, and the advice is, we need professional protection.’

‘Is it worth the deal?’ Alex wrinkled his nose.

‘It most assuredly is. And before you ask, I’m doing as much as I can to make it ecologically aware. Solar panels on the roof, et cetera. However, it’s going to be a five- or six-star hotel, and I refuse to have the sort of ecological bathrooms where you throw earth into the lavatory and occasionally lob in a hundredweight of worms. So don’t even ask it of me.’

‘How long would we have to have these bodyguards?’ Alex asked, emphasising the final word.

‘Until the hotel is finished and at least in its first working year.’

‘Which would be about how long?’

‘Three years, to be on the safe side.’

‘Three years?’ Alex was aghast. ‘Three years of having someone—’

‘Or two,’ interjected David.

‘Of having someone,’ Alex reiterated, ‘following me around everywhere. For God’s sake, Dad. Talk about overkill.’

‘Alex, you are my heir. And they know that. Please don’t make me have to have you followed.’

Belinda knocked and came in with a pot of tea and a crystal glass of champagne. ‘It’s ethically sourced organic Assam tea,’ she said to Alex, who was now pacing the room. ‘Shall I pour?’

‘No, thanks, let it mash. How are the kids?’

‘Great,’ said Belinda, her bosom almost visibly swelling with pride. ‘One’s taking GCSEs, the other’s trying to decide whether to go in the army or do plumbing. I’d prefer him not to go into the army, what with Afghanistan and everything, but he’s got friends who love it.’

‘Yes, I can see that plumbing would be the marginally less dangerous option. Although I tell you what, there are some people whose pipes I would not like to riddle,’ he said, with a grimace.

‘Anything else I can get you?’ asked the housekeeper, addressing David.

‘A new van for my son, if you could. It’s making the front of the house look scruffy.’

Belinda looked affectionately at Alex and left the room.

‘I think she’s got the hots for you, Dad,’ Alex said, pouring the tea through the strainer into the bone china cup.

‘Hardly surprising,’ was David’s riposte. He was well used to his son’s ribbing. Belinda looked like a friendly dumpling. ‘Anyway. What’s it to be?’ he asked.

‘Let’s compromise. I’ll allow you to employ one minder. But can I have a right of veto? I don’t want one who looks like a bloody great big gorilla with balloons under his arms. And if he’s got to be around me all the time, I’d like him to have a reasonable personality.’

‘Or her,’ added David.

‘Or her,’ said Alex, perking up. ‘You know, that would actually be quite cool. Halle Berry in Die Another Day. Angelina Jolie in that shit film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Nice. Hey, I’m coming round to this idea.’

‘I think the likelihood of that is going to be about zero. But if you’d prefer a woman, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll send them round to the van, shall I?’

‘Ha-ha. The house will be finished in a week or so. Send them there or the flat in London. Is there going to be a code? Three short knocks, followed by a long one, a finger of banana slid through the letterbox and a cough?’

‘I can see this is going to be an endless source of amusement. I’ll let you have a list and you can make your own arrangements.’

Alex drove back to his house in the pretty village of Shillingford and had a quick chat with the decorators before going to London and getting ready for his dinner date. He chose a pair of Alexander McQueen trousers and a Paul Smith shirt. He slipped on a pair of tan boots he’d had made for him, and tied his dreadlocks back. He had shaved that morning and was sporting a rakish five o’clock shadow. With a cursory glance in the mirror, he left with a confident air.

There was a distinct lack of confidence going on with Miranda. She was having a crisis. Every item of clothing she tried on looked atrocious. She had decided that her body looked like an old potato. Her hair was a mess. She could only see wrinkles and could have sworn her skin was starting to ruche in places.

She was almost tempted to phone Alex and tell him she’d got flu. Or the plague. Boils. Frogs. Anything. She looked at her watch. How could it be that she was running out of time? She’d been getting ready since three.

The mobile rang. Lucy again. She pressed reject call. A text pinged. Alex, saying he was on his way and was really looking forward to dinner. He’d also given her the postcode in case she didn’t know where it was. As if. His text spurred her on. She decided to follow the tenets she had lived by since she was a teenager. One: if in doubt, get them out. Two: high heels good, higher heels better.

The woman who hailed the taxi on the main road in Notting Hill looked flushed but beautiful. She had tied her hair back loosely with a clip, and was wearing slim black trousers, towering stilettos, a stunning blue shimmering shirt unbuttoned dangerously low, and diamond drop earrings – a twentieth anniversary gift from Nigel when he was feeling guilty about the affair with his secretary.

Fashionably late, she arrived at Zuma and was directed to a table where Alex was perusing the wine list. He stood up and kissed her on one cheek, setting off a chain reaction through her sensory zones and making the hairs on the back of her neck tingle. It had been an age since anything this exciting had happened to her follicles.

She smiled flirtily. ‘Sorry I’m late. Have you been waiting long?’

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘The temptation to say “all of my life” is quite strong.’

‘But luckily you resisted it because it was far too corny,’ she responded.

‘Exactly. I arrived about ten minutes ago, to make sure our table was okay.’

‘What would you have done if it wasn’t?’ she asked, opening the menu without looking at it.

‘Asked to be shown another, of course.’

‘Naturally,’ she said, ‘since you’re obviously a frequent customer.’

His bright green eyes crinkled attractively. ‘I can see I’m going to have to disabuse you of the notion that I live in a swamp, make my own clothes out of spinach and grow fungus under my fingernails.’

‘A fungi to be with,’ she quipped.

‘Well, I do hope so. Before we get into the story of my life and you tell me how you came to be so gorgeous, shall we order some wine?’

‘Thank you. Yes. White okay?’ He had called her gorgeous! She felt like a teenager.

Alex addressed himself to the wine list, giving Miranda time to study him more fully. The sage green shirt with small cream stars had a couple of buttons undone and highlighted his smooth brown skin. He was wearing stone-coloured trousers, and she could see a booted foot coming out from under the table.

As if he could feel her scrutiny, he glanced up and caught her eye. ‘All satisfactory, madam?’ he asked.

She blushed to the roots of her hair.

He smiled. ‘Hey, don’t think I haven’t been doing the same. You look beautiful. That blue shirt makes your eyes look the colour of cornflowers.’

Miranda was feeling too hot to make any intelligible response. He turned to the more innocuous subject of wine. ‘How do you feel about a sauvignon? Or a pinot grigio? Or chardonnay?’

‘Chardonnay, but not too oaky. If you fancy that?’ She was all of a dither, and her voice had gone up a notch. Calm yourself, she said slowly, in her head. You’re forty-three years old, for heaven’s sake.

He waved at the waiter and ordered a bottle of chenin blanc before opening the menu.

‘How do you square all this with your eco-credentials?’ queried Miranda, gesturing to the selection.

‘I do what I can where I can. And I ask before I decide. You don’t have to wear a hair shirt to want to do the decent thing by the planet. I do think we should eat a lot less meat, but I also accept that we wouldn’t have the meadows we do if there weren’t sheep roaming the hillsides chomping up the grass and leaving handy droppings for the plants. Has that helped you make any decisions on what you want to eat?’

‘A small pile of seaweed and an organic carrot?’ she suggested.

He grinned at her. ‘Honestly. I’m an eco-fan, not an eco-bore – I hope. And please, please, order what you want. My father is an out-and-out protein scoffer. He would eat a whole cow every day, hoofs cut off, arse wiped and on the plate – except that his doctor would have a go at him. My mother thinks food is only safe to eat if it’s covered with plastic. As I said, I do my best, but I accept that the world changes slowly.’

Miranda was quiet as she ran through the menu. She wasn’t going to risk it.

‘You ready?’

‘Yes, I think I am.’

His mouth twitched as she ordered a selection of vegetable dishes. He ordered some dishes that she hadn’t seen, explaining afterwards that he was a friend of the chef and had phoned ahead.

The restaurant was packed, with a hubbub coming from the bar area to the right of the entrance. Their table was one of the more discreet ones, but it still felt buzzy.

‘Where do your parents live, then?’ Miranda asked, after the waiter had left. He raised his eyebrows. ‘You said your dad eats cows and your mum eats plastic. Earlier,’ she explained.

‘Oh, yes, I did. Dad lives in Gloucestershire. Mum currently lives in Hampshire. The Isle of Wight. Just getting divorced for the second time and presumably working on a third husband.’

‘Not very good at being on her own, then?’

‘No. Although she does prefer the company of adults. She wasn’t around that much when I was growing up.’

‘Where was she?’

‘Charity stuff, I suppose,’ Alex said smoothly, not revealing that he had had a nanny for most of his childhood. ‘And then she divorced my father when I was ten and married a man who was an idiot. Luckily, I get on well with Dad most of the time, and he got custody of me.’

‘Only child?’ empathised Miranda.

He nodded. ‘You too?’

‘I spent my childhood wishing I was creative enough to have an imaginary friend.’

He laughed. ‘I spent my childhood roaming round the est–countryside,’ he stumbled slightly, ‘un-damming streams, saving chicks that had fallen out of the nest, foraging for mushrooms.’

‘How idyllic. And did you always have hair like that?’ she asked.

‘It was an act of rebellion when I was about twenty-five. It’s quite fun creating dreadlocks. You have to put special wax in your hair and eventually it does it itself. I’m considering chopping them off.’

‘That would be a shame if you have to put so much effort into it. It must be like a big, comfy pillow when you sleep on it. And if you cut it off, you might end up on litter-picking duties instead of being given the big, butch equipment.’

He looked confused for a second, then his brow cleared. ‘Oh, right. Samson and the hair. I get it. I do think it gives me an air of latent strength that would be sadly lacking if I had a short back and sides.’

‘You could have a long back and sides,’ she suggested.

‘Which would be what it is now.’

‘No,’ she corrected. ‘You’d have long back and sides and a short top. Which is an unusual look, but one you could possibly pull off.’

‘Hmm. Like a mad monk.’

‘And with the dreadlocks, do you have to avoid getting water on them?’

‘Only if you want to have scurf up to your ears and get a great itch going on. You wash your hair as often as most people. But unlike your lustrous locks, I merely let them dry naturally. And occasionally shape them into dogs, squirrels or swans.’

‘Nice,’ she said. ‘Like balloon animals. You could wake up of a morning and decide to go on safari.’

‘Is that how you’d like to wake up, an animal on your head?’

‘I could say I’m just “lion” here! I do look like a lion’s sat on my head sometimes. I have to get the water buffalo in to lick me into shape. It’s a jungle out there in Notting Hill.’

He laughed. ‘So, you’re divorced with two children and you live in Notting Hill?’

‘Correct.’

‘You do good deeds at weekends?’

‘Erm … correct?’ she essayed, with a slightly guilty expression.

‘You did a good deed last weekend?’

‘Correct.’

‘And your favourite colour is green?’

‘No, I don’t really have a favourite colour. Do people really have favourite colours?’

‘I have absolutely no idea. Particularly not when you’ve got to our age. I was sort of being ironic. I was saying you loved green as in ecologically.’

‘Oh,’ she said briefly. She had been startled by ‘our age’. Strictly speaking, they were the same generation, she supposed. And they were technically on a date, she supposed. So she should stop worrying about the age difference … she supposed.

‘What do you get up to, then, when you’re not tidying canals?’

‘I have endless lunches and go shopping. I have manicures, pedicures, massages and hair-dos. I do charity work with children and animals and, in my spare time, I dabble with world peace and global warming and make small soft moccasins for millipedes,’ she said gaily.

‘Phew,’ he said, taking a sip of the wine that had been poured. ‘I’m surprised you managed to find a hole in your busy schedule to have dinner with me.’

‘There’s a half-finished pile of slippers at home,’ she pronounced.

‘Is it a rush order?’

‘It’s imperative they’re finished by the weekend. There’s a hoe-down.’

‘Is that generally what you say when people ask you what you do?’

Miranda thought back through the evenings with the Nigel-clones. ‘If I do, they usually say’ – she put on a Queen Mother accent – ‘“No, but, really, what do you do?’’’

‘All right,’ he said, ‘but, really, what do you do?’ he asked her, in an even higher voice.

‘Oh, you have disappointed me. I was hoping you were going to come up with something more interesting than that,’ she said, with a properly disappointed expression.

‘I’m genuinely interested in what Ms Miranda Blake gets up to,’ he said. ‘Like, what did you do today?’

‘Weeell,’ she said slowly, trying to decide whether to lie or not. ‘Actually I did go shopping, but couldn’t find what I was looking for. I organised a plumber because I’ve got a leak – that’s L-E-A-K, not L-E-E-K. Cleaned a bit at home. A rather boring day, all in all. You?’

‘Essentially spent the day talking to my dad and dealing with a few bits and pieces here and there.’ He was always a little cagey, having been targeted by gold-diggers for most of his life.

‘What a dull pair we are.’ She sighed, picking up some fried seaweed with her chopsticks. She wished it was the meat sizzling at the next table, which smelt heavenly.

‘Yes. It’s amazing we find anything to talk about, isn’t it?’ His smile belied the statement.

‘In reality, I do what many women in my position do when they suddenly find that, after years of being everyone’s skivvy, they’re beholden to no one. They run around trying to find something to do. Hence the canal. And I’m trying to sort out a job, or it’ll be out to the scullery after dinner for a spot of washing-up.’

‘Hopefully it won’t come to that,’ said Alex. ‘I’m sure I could sell some of your caterpillar carpet slippers. This area’s ripe for them.’

‘Moccasins for millipedes. They wouldn’t fit caterpillars,’ she corrected.

As successive dishes came, the conversation flitted from one topic to another until eventually Alex asked for the bill.

Miranda reached for her purse and took out her credit card.

‘Thanks, but I’ll do this,’ said Alex, handing his card to the waiter, without even checking the amount.

‘Tsk tsk. You should never do that,’ said Miranda. ‘They might have put somebody else’s food or drink on our bill. Or whatever.’

The waiter handed the console back to Alex for his PIN. ‘Well, that seems very reasonable,’ he said, looking at the amount.

Miranda had not managed to extract the information required to know whether it was all bravado on his side, and whether he would now have to live on scrumped vegetables for a month, but she accepted the comment at face value.

‘Would you like to have a drink at the bar?’ he asked.

She looked doubtfully at the packed area full of skinny women, with over-inflated beaks instead of mouths, and predatory men in sharp suits. ‘No, I don’t think so. But there must be somewhere else we can have a quiet drink,’ she said.

‘Hmm. A friend of mine has lent me his flat just around the corner. We could go there – if that doesn’t sound too whatever-the-word-is – forward for a first date?’

She flicked him a saucy look. ‘Oh, go on, then. And it’s certainly a better idea than the shark-infested pool over there.’

Her high shoes tapped as she walked alongside him. Morse code for ‘Ooo-er’.

Ten minutes later, he was letting her into an imposing building with a porter on the door, who nodded as they went past.

‘My God,’ she said, as they went into the first-floor flat. ‘Who is this friend? Can I have him as a friend too? This is incredible. What beautiful artwork.’

The flat was on one level with blond-wood floorboards, white walls and big sofas in thick beige cotton. A giant painting of two swimmers hung over one, while a turquoise and green statue loomed over the other.

‘He likes to support up-and-coming young artists,’ said Alex, standing behind her as she admired the painting. ‘What can I get you to drink?’

‘Vodka tonic, please, if you have it.’

‘Coming right up,’ he said, and went through to the kitchen. ‘Ice and lemon or olives?’

‘He keeps a very well-appointed kitchen. Olives, please.’

She could hear cupboards being opened, and continued to admire the art on show.

‘There you go,’ Alex said, handing her a heavy tumbler.

She sat down on one of the enormous sofas and kicked off her shoes, then tucked her feet underneath her. ‘Lovely,’ she exclaimed, taking a bigger gulp than she’d meant to, and coughing. ‘Sorry,’ she spluttered, eyes watering.

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