SAM BAKER

To My Best Friends

To my best friends Nancy, Clare, Catherine Jude Shelly And, above all, Jon

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Also by Sam Baker

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

That navy Prada suit, the one with the nipped-in waist you wished you’d never bought? Trust me, get the skirt taken up two inches and wear it with my red Marc Jacobs mary-janes. The ones with the blue trim. They always fitted you better than they did me, anyway. You’ll look a million dollars . . .

Slipping the lid back on the cartridge pen, Nicci dropped it on the duvet beside her and let her head fall back onto plumped pillows. She closed her eyes and felt the bedroom spin. It was a familiar sensation now, almost comforting, in a sick sort of way.

Three and a half lines of writing. Five sentences. Fifty-five words. How could fifty-five measly words be so exhausting? They weren’t even the important words. Those were still to come. These were just the preamble, the housekeeping. Nicci risked opening her eyes and the room sped up.

Damn it, she thought, and let her lids drop, feeling the spinning recede. This wasn’t her. Illness didn’t suit her. Nicci Morrison didn’t do sick, just as she didn’t do sitting around at weekends, chilling or downtime. And she didn’t do lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon. At least not since she was twenty-one and had met David. Then they’d done nothing much other than lying in bed all afternoon when she should have been writing a ten-thousand-word dissertation on the way clothes reflect women’s place in society in nineteenth-century literature. Well, not so much lying, but bed had figured prominently. Bed, the floor, the bath . . .

Nicci smiled at the memory. Half sad, half glad they’d had that then, and the rest.

Come on, she urged herself. Get a grip. One down, three more letters to go.

The trick was catching her morphine at the right stage: long enough after her injection for the pain to have eased, but not so soon the opiates dulled her capacity to think straight. Pulling herself up, Nicci rummaged around her for the pen while trying to find her train of thought. Light shimmered at the edge of her vision, brighter than she could stand.

Jo wouldn’t refuse, Nicci was sure of that. Especially not when she opened the parcel containing the red mary-janes, which David would deliver with the letter. How could she – how could any of them – when Jo knew only too well what Nicci had been through in the past year? Biopsies, mastectomy, chemo and radio. None of which, ultimately, had worked. Wasn’t wearing an old navy-blue suit the least a girl could do for her best friend?’

Looking at the sheet of thick cream paper resting on a magazine on her knee, Nicci smiled. She would have the last laugh. And her business partner would thank her for it. In the weeks to come, the last thing her friend would want to think about – the last thing any of Nicci’s friends would want to think about – was what to wear.

Now, that’s the outfit sorted. And don’t argue, Jo. Remember, on the wardrobe front, Nicci knows best!!!

Just think of it as one less problem to worry about. After all, you’re going to have enough on your plate with Capsule Wardrobe once I’ve gone.

But that’s not the point of this letter. No, what I’m really writing about are my twin babies, my darling girls, my Charlie and Harrie, your goddaughters. And you’ve been such a good godmother, Jo, the very best. Which is why I want you to be more . . .

Chapter One

There were few things in life Nicci Morrison had not been able to control. But being buried on a dank, drizzly day in February was one of them.

It was not yet two o’clock, and the dirty grey cloud hung low over the church, obscuring the spire, making the hour seem closer to dusk.

‘There you are!’ Jo Clarke called out as a tall thin woman, hair frizzing from the bun at the nape of her neck, picked her way along the muddy path. She was clad head to toe in black – hardly unexpected at a funeral – but her spike-heeled ankle boots would have looked more at home in a bar.

‘Let me guess,’ Jo laughed, eyeing the Jimmy Choo boots. ‘The person responsible for you buying those in the first place is to blame for you wearing them now?’

Mona Thomas raised her eyebrows and looked pointedly at the red mary-janes on Jo’s feet. ‘Takes one to know one,’ she said.

‘Typical Nicci, huh?’ Jo hugged Mona hard to distract herself from her tears. Nicci had known outfit-planning would be the last thing on anyone’s mind, and so, unable to break the habit of a lifetime, she had done it for them.

‘Hello, Si.’ Mona reached over Jo’s shoulder to pat his cheek. ‘Am I the last?’

Shaking his head, Si moved aside to make way for a group of unfamiliar faces waiting impatiently in the mizzle behind his wife and her friend.

‘Lizzie and Gerry are inside. Well, Lizzie is. Gerry dropped her off at the gate and went to park the car. You on your own?’

‘Yep. I thought I’d spare Dan. I know he was fond of Nicci – and he adores David – but, y’know . . . kids and funerals . . .’ Mona’s voice trailed away, and Jo and Si nodded. They knew. Adults and funerals, too.

‘You guys go on in,’ Si said. ‘I’ll wait for Gerry. The, erm, the . . . hearse will . . . you know . . . be here soon.’

Jo nodded gratefully and took Mona’s arm. Si knew she wouldn’t want to see her best friend arrive that way.

‘So have you told Si yet?’

‘Told him what?’ Jo whispered, leaning across the pew so she could be heard by Lizzie and Mona, but not the random mixture of family members, customers and distant friends who had gathered to pay their respects.

‘About the letter, of course,’ Mona hissed.

Jo’s eyes bulged. ‘Of course I bl—’ she stopped herself, remembering where she was. Jo wasn’t religious, but even so. ‘Of course I haven’t! What was I supposed to say? “Hey, Si, after the last three years, all the money we’ve spent, all the . . .”’ she swallowed, focusing on her hands until Lizzie’s freckled arm reached over and squeezed one of them, “. . . all the disappointment, guess what. It doesn’t matter now if we can’t have kids because we’ve been left shares in someone else’s?” You can imagine how that would go down.’

Actually, now she thought of it, Jo didn’t have the first clue how that news would go down with Si. It was months, longer, since they had even talked about it.

‘You don’t have to put it quite like that,’ Lizzie whispered gently. ‘After all, it’s not as if it’s that straightforward.’

‘It’s not remotely straightforward.’

Closing her eyes, Jo leant back in the pew. Centuries-old oak dug uncomfortably into her vertebrae and the organ music was giving her a headache. Whatever Nicci’s instructions for the funeral, and, Nicci being Nicci, there would have been plenty – the flowers for a start; the church was awash with blue and yellow, not a lily in sight – Jo was sure they hadn’t included a wheezing, clunking rendition of ‘Dido’s Lament’, or anyone else’s lament come to that.

‘I’ve told Gerry,’ Lizzie coloured as she rushed the words out. She couldn’t help herself; never had been able to. If there was a crease Lizzie had to iron it out. A silence – awkward or not – she had to fill it.

Jo’s eyes flicked open. ‘About our bequests?’ she asked, her voice tight. ‘Didn’t we agree to keep that between ourselves for now, just while we work out what to do? Whether we have to, you know, comply with Nicci’s wishes.’

‘Not yours and Mona’s, just mine.’ ‘Oh,’ snorted Mona. ‘That’s hardly the same, is it? At least Nicci left you something—’

‘Just out of interest,’ Jo interrupted, hearing Mona’s voice rise and seeing Lizzie’s lip quiver, ‘what did Gerry say, about your bequest, I mean?’

Lizzie’s mouth twisted. ‘What d’you think he said?’

‘Let me guess,’ Mona said. ‘I bet it had something to do with cheap labour.’

Lizzie’s laugh burst out over the hush of voices and the wheeze of the organ. She clapped a hand over her mouth, but not before earning a scowl from an elderly woman sitting on the other side of the aisle. ‘That’s about the sum of it. Gerry said . . .’ she put on his voice. It was posh Yorkshire. He used being northern when it suited him and hid it when it didn’t, ‘. . . “Don’t you usually have to pay someone to do that?”’

Jo and Mona exchanged glances. They loved Lizzie but, despite years of trying, they still didn’t get Gerry. If he hadn’t married one of their dearest friends their paths would never have crossed. Nicci had barely tolerated him, declaring him smug and materialistic, and nowhere near good enough. But once Lizzie announced a date and flashed a rock that – as Nicci muttered later – cost a fortune and still looked as if it belonged in an Argos sale, she backed off. If Gerry was what Lizzie wanted then, like him or not, he was what they wanted for her too.

As ‘Dido’s Lament’ segued clumsily into Albinoni’s ‘Adagio’ Mona mimed sticking her fingers in her ears. ‘Clearly there are some things even Nicci’s ghost can’t control. Now That’s What I Call Funerals.’

‘Still,’ said Lizzie, ‘what are the alternatives? Westlife? Celine Dion? Bette Midler?’

‘That, and the self-invited guests,’ said Jo. ‘Guess it’s what you get for being popular.’

‘Yeah,’ said Mona. ‘Can you imagine having loads of people you hardly know turn up for your wedding?’

‘I did,’ Lizzie said. ‘Remember? My mother insisted on inviting a bunch of aunties and cousins three times removed.’

‘Nicci did too,’ Jo said. ‘But weren’t they all distant relatives of David that he said he hadn’t seen since his christening?’

A sudden hush cut them short. The organ music had died and all around them people were getting to their feet as the pallbearers entered the church. Si slid in beside Jo, Gerry behind him.

‘Here we go, love,’ Si said, slipping his arm around Jo’s shoulder . . .

‘Ready or not,’ she agreed, reaching for Lizzie’s hand . . . ‘Not,’ Lizzie whispered, squeezing Mona’s hand in turn . . . ‘Never will be,’ Mona replied, squeezing it back.

‘Nicci had to be first at everything,’ said Jo, trying to raise her quavering voice so it was audible at the back. The flowers seemed to muffle it, each petal, leaf and stamen cushioning the sound. Who knew flowers buggered up your acoustics? Not even Nicci could predict that.

Think of this as a business presentation Jo coached herself. Imagine those red eyes and puffy faces belong to financial backers, not fellow mourners at your best friend’s funeral.

Her best friend’s funeral.

How had she got landed with this? She hadn’t known Nicci any longer than the others. Well, no longer than Lizzie. A day, maybe a week, certainly no more. Why did Jo always have to be the grown-up?

Gripping the lectern to steady herself, she took a deep breath. ‘You name it,’ Jo continued, ‘Nicci beat the rest of us to it. She was the first to meet The One – her lovely David.’ Jo ventured a smile at where Nicci’s widower sat in the front pew, two tiny blonde girls in mini-me coats held close on either side of him, confusion on their small faces. David’s parents sat either side of the three, creating a protective barrier around their son and granddaughters.

‘The first to marry, the first to have children . . .’ Jo swallowed. That last bit wasn’t strictly true. Mona had had her son long before the others even started thinking about kids, but they’d discussed it the night before and agreed that simply didn’t count. Mona had gone away, and when she came back there was Dan. It was different. They didn’t really know why, it just was.

‘. . . her adorable and much-loved Harriet and Charlotte. Harrie and Charlie to their besotted godmothers – Mona, Lizzie and, of course, me . . .’

Did David know about the bequest, Jo wondered. Of course, he knew about the letters; he’d delivered them. But was he aware of their contents; that he was handing over grenades? He had to, didn’t he? Nicci wouldn’t have done that without telling him . . . would she?

Seeing a hundred faces gazing up at her, Jo forced herself on.

‘She was the first of us to have it all. To juggle her new family, her beloved husband and our little business: her other baby, Capsule Wardrobe. And now . . .’ Jo tried to concentrate on the neat capitals printed on the index cards in front of her. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know the words off by heart – poor Si had listened to this speech a dozen times in the last couple of days – but her eyes filled with tears, and the neat letters doubled and tripled until she couldn’t even see her words, let alone recall them.

‘And now, our beautiful Nicci . . .’ she heard Lizzie prompt gently from the front row.

Jo blinked away her tears. ‘And now, our beautiful Nicci,’ she repeated, ‘our best friend, the love – I know he won’t mind me saying – of David’s life, is the first of us to die.’ Looking up, she pasted on a smile. ‘Taking this number-one thing to extremes a bit, I think.’

A ripple of laughter echoed around the small church and Jo risked catching David’s eye. Misery, exhaustion and disbelief at finding himself in this place, for this unthinkable, unimaginable, reason . . . all her own emotions were in his gaze but ripped raw. He squeezed his daughters tighter. Was it her imagination, or was he sending a signal?

Stop it, Jo told herself. Concentrate.

‘I met Nicci,’ she continued, ‘on my first day at university. She took me under her vintage-store-clad wing and I never looked back. Soon after, she found Lizzie and, for want of a better word, adopted her too. Then, by sheer fluke, Mona found us. And together we found David. The poor thing didn’t know what he was letting himself in for . . .’ Another ripple of laughter.

‘Nicci wheedled her way into David’s life, and his wardrobe!’ More laughter, louder now. ‘As she did for so many of us here.’

Jo let her gaze roam the front pews where Nicci’s influence bloomed. How had Nicci known they would all be so obedient? Or were they all just too exhausted, too heart-broken, to greet Nicci’s instructions telling them what to wear to their best friend’s funeral with anything other than gratitude?

Lizzie’s taupe cardigan was loosely belted over a beautiful floral Paul Smith tea dress that Jo knew for a fact had cost as much as half a month’s mortgage; the Burberry trench coat that had cost the other half lay over the back of the pew behind her. Mona wore a slick black Helmut Lang trouser suit, which just about made up for the four-inch heels Nicci had convinced her ‘cost per wear’ would be a bargain. At the last count, ‘cost per wear’ those boots still stood at six months’ Council Tax. David’s scuffed Church’s brogues, identical to the ones Nicci had bought him their very first Christmas together, already showed signs of missing Nicci’s care. And Jo’s own navy suit was nowhere near as frumpy as she remembered now the skirt was taken up, as per Nicci’s instructions.

As ever, Nicci had been right. It might be her funeral, but her friends still looked a million dollars. In a subdued, funeral-appropriate, style.

‘I know this isn’t the done thing,’ Jo said, deviating from her script, ‘but I’d like to do a straw poll.’

A bemused murmur rippled through the congregation. Lizzie glanced at Mona, who shook her head. This wasn’t planned.

‘How many here today are wearing outfits, or at least items of clothing, that Nicci picked out for us?’ Jo raised her own arm. She felt like an idiot. And from the way half the congregation stared at her, she knew she looked like one too.

Widening her eyes at them, she willed Lizzie and Mona to join her.

Mona raised her arm, then Lizzie. A second later, David joined them. Harrie and Charlie’s arms were raised by their granny and grandpa. Then, as if in a Mexican wave, arms rose around the church, rippling right to the back where, Jo realised now, Capsule Wardrobe’s most loyal clients stood, the pews too full to hold them.

Laughter burst from her. Jo couldn’t help it; didn’t even try to suppress it. The sound of the first genuine laugh she’d managed in the two weeks since Nicci’s death pealed up into the apse.

‘How much would Nicci love this?’ Jo said. ‘She made clothes her life, she believed that what we wore spoke volumes more than anything words could say; that a T-shirt, or a dress, or a pair of shoes, really was a statement. That woman contributed in some way to the outfits of what must be over a hundred people here.

‘My friends . . . all of whom, like me, loved and trusted Nicci, there can be no better affirmation of her life. Because if there’s one thing I know Nicci would have wanted it’s this: no frumps at her funeral.

‘Nicci, we love you, we miss you, and we don’t yet know what we will do – how we will even begin to cope – without you. But you are forever in our hearts . . .’ Jo paused, locking wet eyes with Lizzie and Mona, strengthened by their tearful smiles.

‘. . . And in our wardrobes.’

Chapter Two

‘Isn’t David going to wonder where we’ve got to?’ Lizzie asked, as she fumbled with the lock of the shed. In the fading light, she misjudged the distance and the key landed in the sludge at her feet. Bending, she noticed her high-heeled loafers were now crusted with mud. ‘Anyone got a tissue?’

Mona shrugged, and Jo shook her head.

‘Where is David, anyway?’ Jo said. ‘I haven’t seen him for at least half an hour.’

‘Hiding, probably,’ Mona said. ‘Who can blame him? House full of total strangers feeding their faces at his expense. Anyway,’ she added, ‘it’s not as if it matters. It’s Lizzie’s shed now.’

Lizzie didn’t look convinced. ‘I know that, but does David? Does David know any of it?’

‘Look,’ Jo said, turning back to the house. Every window in the Victorian terrace was ablaze and the kitchen was crammed with people. ‘It looks odd, doesn’t it? Wrong, somehow?’

The others followed her gaze.

‘It’s not that the house is full – ’ Lizzie said – ‘it was always full – it’s those people. Who are they? Does anyone know?’

‘Someone must,’ said Mona. ‘David probably.’

‘Come on,’ Jo said, ‘you must recognise some of them? The girls from Capsule Wardrobe, some suppliers, a few clients. David’s mum and dad, his brother and his wife . . .’

‘There was an awful lot of family at the church for someone who didn’t have any,’ Lizzie said.

Jo shrugged. ‘David’s, I suppose, like the wedding. And there are some old friends of Nicci’s from the drama group at uni.’

‘I can’t believe none of Nicci’s family bothered to show up,’ Lizzie persisted. ‘You’d think some would have wanted to pay their respects.’

‘You don’t know they didn’t,’ Jo said. ‘There were plenty of strange faces in that church. Not inconceivable one or two of them belonged to Nicci.’

‘You pair of romantics,’ said Mona. ‘Nicci didn’t have family, you know that. She was always saying so: “You’re my family. You, David and the girls. You’re the only family I need.”’

‘That doesn’t mean she didn’t have one. No one comes from nowhere,’ said Lizzie. ‘Much as they might want to.’

‘She fell out with her mum, we know that,’ Jo went on as if Lizzie hadn’t spoken. ‘I remember her talking about it one night – when we were pissed, of course. You must remember?’ Jo grinned. ‘Whisky night.’

‘Not sure I remember much from whisky night.’ Lizzie grimaced.

Jo never forgot anything. It amazed Lizzie, and annoyed her slightly. Jo and Nicci always could riff off events, jokes and incidents she barely remembered at all. Most of her time at university was a blur. A blur then, and a blur now.

‘Think that was the only time she mentioned it. And you know how she always spent every holiday at uni, working in Sainsbury’s, when the rest of us went home. Said someone had to look after our house. Like we were going to fall for that.’

‘We did, though, didn’t we?’ Lizzie said.

‘Her dad left when she was a baby, didn’t he?’ Mona said, tucking her hands under her arms in a bid to keep warm. The fine wool suit looked good but it wasn’t much use against the damp chill that hung in the air.

‘So Nicci said that night. You know how she was: all ears where our problems were concerned, but always playing her own cards close to her chest.’

Having wiped the muddy key on her hem, Lizzie pushed it into the lock, turned it but found the door wouldn’t open.

‘Come on,’ said Mona. ‘My toes are going to drop off if you don’t let us in soon.’

Lizzie looked puzzled. Turning the key back the other way, she felt it click and reached for the shed’s door handle. The shed had been unlocked all along.

‘Here we go,’ she said, pushing open the door, and stopped . . .

Lizzie could hear breathing. There was someone in there. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, the toes of a scuffed pair of shoes came into view. Church’s brogues.

‘D-David,’ she asked, ‘is that you?’ Her mind raced through their conversation. Had they said anything he shouldn’t have overheard?

‘Yes,’ said a familiar voice, and she felt her shoulders sag. ‘It’s me. Sorry. I didn’t mean to make you jump, I just had to . . . you know . . . get away for a bit. I couldn’t think where else to go. Every room in the house is . . . and Nicci always . . .’ David stopped, unable to go on. After a careful breath, he said, ‘She came down here when she wanted peace, you know. Said it was the only place she could think. Away from the house, with the sounds of the garden.’

‘And the A3 in the distance,’ Mona said wryly.

David flipped a switch and Nicci’s shed came into focus. It was larger than Lizzie expected. The light came from two small lamps. They were the kind of lights her gran might have had: dark wood sculpted base, lampshades of faded chintz. Lizzie wouldn’t have given them houseroom. Typically, here they looked somehow stylish. The one nearest David sat on an old sideboard, which doubled as a worktop, a kettle, glazed brown teapot and assorted mugs, plus a couple of boxes of herbal tea, piled haphazardly on its surface. In the far corner was an old-school Victorian sink. It appeared to be plumbed in.

One of the mugs Lizzie recognised: she’d bought them all ‘I NY’ mugs back from her honeymoon. The chair David sat in was from his and Nicci’s first flat. A battered old thing that had been more holes than leather when they’d bought it for a tenner in a junk shop. Nicci had restored it.

‘I always wondered what happened to that chair,’ Lizzie said. ‘And those cushions . . .’

‘What did she need a kettle for?’ Mona said. ‘I know it’s a big garden, but it’s not that big.’

‘Mona,’ Jo said crossly. ‘What?’

‘Think about it.’

An awkward silence fell. Lizzie and Jo were thinking the same thing: a couple of hundred feet is a long way when you’ve had chemo.

‘Like I said,’ David got to his feet, ‘Nicci used to spend time down here thinking. Until the last few weeks. Then the state of the garden made her feel too guilty. She hadn’t been well enough to put it to bed for winter, and she felt bad about that. Said it wore its neglect like unloved clothes.’

Yes, Lizzie thought, that sounded like Nicci.

David looked wrung out. Anyone who hadn’t known him with a purple Mohican would have thought the same hair-dresser had cut his short brown hair in the same style since he was a toddler. His brown eyes were bloodshot, his face puffy. His mouth, usually ready with a quiet smile, was set in a tense line, as if one wobble would bring his composure crashing down.

‘I’m sorry,’ Lizzie said. ‘We didn’t realise . . . I mean, if we’d known you were here we wouldn’t have intruded.’

‘OK,’ he said, brushing off his trousers, even though there was nothing on them. ‘I should get back anyway. After all, it’s my party . . .’

‘And I’ll cry if I want to,’ the women finished for him.

‘David,’ Lizzie said, ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘I know,’ he said, his voice almost inaudible. ‘But not as sorry as I am.’

‘He knows,’ Mona said, when David had shut the shed door firmly behind him. ‘About the letters. He knows.’

‘What makes you say that?’ Lizzie asked. ‘He’d say something, wouldn’t he? If he did.’

‘We know,’ Jo pointed out. ‘And we haven’t.’

‘Of course he knows,’ Mona said. ‘When has it ever been that awkward with David? He’s known us as long as he’s known Nicci. It’s never been awkward. If you’d asked me a couple of weeks ago I’d have said I was closer to him than my brothers, by a mile. Dan certainly is. I’ve seen a lot more of David in the last fifteen years than I have of them.’ She grinned. ‘Hell, when we lived in that dive in Hove he probably saw us naked almost as often as Nicci.’

A memory of David walking in on her in the bathroom came to Mona and her grin slipped as fast as it had arrived. His appraising glance, before embarrassment hit them both. Nicci’s forty-eight hours of coolness, David’s mumbled apology in Nicci’s presence, and the wariness with which she watched David and Mona for a few weeks after that. It was unnecessary. Even if Mona would have, David wouldn’t.

‘Damn it,’ she said. ‘He knows.’

‘The awkwardness could be coming from us,’ Lizzie said. ‘I know I’ve never felt uncomfortable around him before, but look at what we just did. We barged in on him in his own shed – a shed to which I now have the key – like we owned the place.’

‘Which you do,’ Mona said. ‘If those letters mean anything. Which is a whole other conversation.’

‘Look,’ Jo interrupted, ‘suppose Mona’s right?’ She’d been standing at the small window watching David’s back recede in the darkness. His drooping shoulders and scuffing walk radiated anguish. ‘And given that we just let ourselves into his shed – with his wife’s key – and he didn’t bat an eyelid, I think she is, then he’s waiting for us to make the first move.’

It took a while to sink in.

‘What did he say?’ Lizzie turned to Mona. ‘When he delivered your letter, I mean. How did he look?’

Mona shrugged. ‘Rough as hell. Like he hadn’t slept in days. Which he probably hadn’t. And he didn’t say anything much. Certainly wasn’t up for a cup of tea and a chat. He just handed me the envelope and said something like, “Nicci wanted me to give you this.” We hugged, just barely, now I think about it. He definitely wanted to get away as quickly as possible. Said he had the girls in the car.’

‘Which he did,’ Jo pointed out.

‘I found this,’ she said, pulling a crumpled piece of paper from her coat pocket. ‘After I’d read the letter – about a hundred times – I went up in the attic and dug out the copy of The Bell Jar Nicci gave me for my birthday.’

Mona and Lizzie groaned.

‘She was obsessed with that damn book for a while,’ Lizzie said.

‘Bloody depressing,’ Mona added. ‘I’m pretty sure I binned mine years ago, before I went to Australia.’

‘Anyway,’ Jo interrupted them, ‘this fell out. I must have been using it as a bookmark and forgot all about it.’

Smoothing the square of paper flat with her hand, Jo held it up. The picture was faded where the flare of the flash had turned pink. Blu-Tack stains still speckled its back.

‘I remember that night!’ Mona exclaimed. ‘It wasn’t long after I moved in with you.’

Jo glanced at her friend anxiously. She knew the fact that Mona had joined their little group a year after the others still smarted, but if Mona was thinking that it didn’t show.

The photograph was of the four of them, just before a party. Snarls and pouts and grins for a camera on self-timer and balanced on a bookshelf. All with that early nineties hair, which was still really late eighties. Except for Nicci, of course. She had a bleached crop, the kind that looked like she’d cut it herself, which she had.

‘Look at you!’ Lizzie laughed, and Jo was embarrassed to see she was hoisting her boobs for the camera. As if they weren’t big enough already in those days. She wore a towel and nothing else. Lizzie was all wild red hair, in an over-large man’s shirt and Levi’s 501s, a look she adopted in their first term at university, under Nicci’s tuition, and wore for years. As ever, her hair hid her face.

Mona was in the hippy phase that presaged her wander-lust. A long Indian skirt and a mirror-beaded waistcoat over a puffy shirt. On anyone else it would have looked like a sack, but she looked as lean as always. Only Mona would hide the slim-hipped, long-legged figure of a model under that outfit.

And Nicci? She was channelling Courtney Love.

Doc Martens, with her original sixties biker jacket, over a peach satin slip, her hair spiky. A bottle of vodka in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Jo was pouting, Mona was inscrutable and Lizzie was grinning, more or less. As for Nicci, she had a rock star snarl and that wildness in her eyes. The wildness that had only started to fade when she met David.

Lizzie’s sniff broke the silence. ‘Still no tissues, I suppose?’ she asked, glancing around the shed. Her gaze fell on the remains of a kitchen roll. She tore off a square and passed the roll to the others.

‘Nicci lived in that leather jacket,’ Lizzie said. ‘She was wearing it the very first time I met her.’

Chapter Three

The Sixties Vintage Biker Jacket

Sussex University. Brighton, 1992

Lizzie barely opened her mouth in the Hardy seminar. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what she thought; she’d read Jude the Obscure three times to be sure. But why would anyone care what Lizzie O’Hara thought? And anyway, she was too intimidated by the peroxide blonde in the charity-shop nightie and battered motorbike jacket who’d been holding court for the last ten minutes. Where did she get her self-confidence, Lizzie wondered. At least she wasn’t afraid to express her opinions, even if Lizzie wasn’t convinced they were entirely accurate.

When the blonde came up to Lizzie as she waited for a lift after the seminar, Lizzie couldn’t have been more amazed if Damon Albarn had asked her out. ‘I’m Nicci Gilbert,’ the girl said. ‘Don’t know about you, but I’m gasping for a coffee. Fancy one?’

Dumbfounded, Lizzie just nodded, and found herself walking beside – well, slightly behind – the coolest and fastest-walking person, she’d ever seen, let alone spoken to, in her entire eighteen years of small-town life.

They looked like chalk and cheese.

Despite her best efforts, Lizzie’s long reddish hair was frizz rather than curls. Her skin was white and freckly, what little of it could be seen beneath her floor-length black jersey skirt, which bagged at the knee where she’d crossed her legs in the tutorial. An over-sized man’s shirt was meant to disguise her pear-shaped – and much-loathed – size fourteen body. In Lizzie’s eyes, it did the job adequately.

Apparently not . . .

‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ said Nicci, sliding into a corner table in the Students’ Union café, laden with plastic cups of nasty, lukewarm machine coffee. Allegedly black, the liquid looked more like a murky brown. ‘But that skirt . . . it really doesn’t suit you. You should try men’s jeans with a big belt. Or leggings, they’d work. The shirt’s great, by the way. But a baggy top and a baggy bottom just make you look . . .’

At the expression on Lizzie’s face, the conclusion trailed away. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’ Nicci said. ‘What I meant to say was, you’ve got that amazing body, and I’d kill to have curves.’ She ran one ring-laden hand down her birdcage-like chest to reveal a Jenga of ribs under her slip. ‘No such luck. If I had boobs – even small ones like yours – and a bum, I’d make sure everyone knew about it.’

Lizzie was mortified. Where did she get off, this stranger slagging off her clothes and calling her fat? The way Lizzie was brought up, if you couldn’t say something polite, you didn’t say anything at all. One reason why she didn’t tell Nicci where to stick it, crap coffee and all. Plus, she didn’t have the nerve. Her instinctive reaction was to crawl under the table and stay there until Nicci had gone. Instead, she just nodded sheepishly and stared hard at the brown plastic cup in front of her.

So that’s what I am, she thought as she stomped back to halls half an hour later, a charity case. And a fat one, at that. Well, bugger off. I can find my own friends. And I can dress myself without your help too.

But somehow next day, without intending to, she found herself the centre of Brighton, in a second-hand shop in The Lanes, fingering a ripped up pair of 501s, washed and worn to soft.

The following week, after their seminar Nicci was waiting for Lizzie by the lift, a battered paperback copy of A Pair of Blue Eyes in her hand.

‘Cool jeans,’ she said, when she spotted Lizzie. ‘Vintage too.’ She nodded approvingly. ‘They’re perfect on you. You look sexy.’

Lizzie flushed, embarrassed. In spite of herself, she was pleased. Nicci grinned. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude last week,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry if I upset you. I can be clumsy like that. I need to learn to keep my trap shut.’

Smiling cautiously, Nicci slid her arm through Lizzie’s. ‘I just thought you’d look better in jeans – and you do. Come on,’ she added. ‘I’m meeting my friend Jo in the Union. I think you’ll like her. She lives in the room next door to me in halls. She’s the first friend I made here.’ She grinned again, taking Lizzie by surprise. ‘And you’re the second.’

It was supposedly the first day of the rest of Jo’s life. The day life really started to happen. But sitting on a yet-to-be-made-up mattress in a single room on the third floor of halls, Jo had never felt so out of her depth.

Her parents had left an hour earlier and she hadn’t moved since. So she sat surrounded by black bags, cardboard boxes and a new John Lewis suitcase bought especially for the occasion. Her worldly goods, such as they were. Sat and stared at the detritus of the room’s last occupant: Blu-Tack stains freckling the walls where once a montage of photographs had been, fading gig tickets still pinned to a corkboard, smiley-face stickers obscuring the window, which wasn’t big to start with. Proof, if proof was needed, that room 303’s previous inhabitant had been ‘popular’. All the signs so far suggested that Jo was going to be the opposite.

To judge by the blank stares, uninterested glances and irritated sighs as she’d lugged her bags into the lift, Jo was sure friends whose photographs might paper those walls would be in short supply.

Feeling like nothing so much as her eleven-year-old self, Jo allowed herself a few minutes to wallow. She knew absolutely no one here, and didn’t have a clue how to go about changing that. She’d probably be back home in Watford by the middle of term; friendless, grade-less and with a queue of people who couldn’t wait to tell her how much too big for her boots she’d been for wanting to do a degree in the first place.

Ten minutes and then she’d get it together.

Jo had just hurled herself face down on to the bed when there was a sharp rap at her door. Precisely the knock her mother used when she was making a show of respecting Jo’s privacy but intended to come in regardless.

Before Jo could shout, ‘Hang on a sec,’ let alone blow her nose and wipe tears from her eyes, the door had swung open and a small, pointed face with huge kohl-rimmed green eyes topped with spiky white-blond hair appeared around it.

‘Hi. Not interrupting anything, am I?’

Without waiting for an answer, she clambered over Jo’s bin bags and propped herself against the wardrobe, arms folded. One foot beat impatient time to the bass line of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ rising from the floor below. She wore a beaten-up leather jacket over a faded floral minidress and her skinny tanned legs disappeared into eighteen-hole Doc Martens that reached almost to her knees. The boots were ostentatiously battered.

Tugging her Hello Kitty T-shirt down over her too-big boobs, Jo wished her hair wasn’t mousy brown and held out of her eyes with a pink scrunchie. She had never felt so square in her life.

‘I’m Nicci Gilbert,’ the girl said. ‘We’re neighbours. I thought I’d brave the bar, but, I didn’t really fancy walking in on my own. To be totally honest,’ she said disarmingly, ‘you’re the only person I’ve met here, so I thought we could give each other some moral support.’

Chapter Four

‘That’s what these are meant to be,’ Jo said, pulling a letter out of her bag. The once-pristine vellum was now scuffed, the midnight-blue ink smudged by tears.

She might have expensive highlights and a three-figure haircut where once the mousy-brown split ends and pink scrunchie had been. She might even have a five-times-a-week runner’s body where once puppy fat had reigned, but right now Jo needed Nicci’s moral support more than ever.

‘Moral support?’ Mona snorted, pulling her own letter, minus its envelope, from her jacket pocket. ‘Only Nicci would do this and expect us to call it moral support.’

Ignoring Mona’s comments, Jo stretched out her hand. ‘Swap?’

‘Hey, what about me?’ Lizzie said, pouting. ‘Just because you two think my bequest is a joke.’

Leaning over to hug Lizzie, Jo handed her letter to Mona and reluctantly took Lizzie’s from her. It was true, though. She didn’t really want to read Lizzie’s letter. It was Mona’s she wanted to get her hands on. Mona had to be mistaken, she just knew it.

Mona dropped into the leather chair vacated by David, while Jo perched on the edge of the sideboard and Lizzie sat on a crate. For several long seconds, the women read in silence; the shed was so quiet they could hear voices coming from the kitchen at the far end of the garden.

‘Lizzie!’ Jo snorted, breaking their concentration. ‘I don’t want to be mean, but leaving her garden to you – a woman who famously reduced a cactus to an explosion of dust – what was Nicci thinking?’

‘I know.’ Lizzie’s laugh was mirthless. ‘How did she put it? “I can’t trust anyone else with it”? She might as well have said I’m the best of a bad lot!’

‘Cheers,’ Mona muttered without looking up. ‘What does that make me, then?’

‘That’s not true,’ Jo said, as if Mona hadn’t spoken. ‘Listen to this:

‘I need to make sure the things I love, the people I love, look after one another . . . So I’m leaving you my garden. The most nurturing of my friends. I know you’ll lavish on it the care that I tried to.’

Lizzie smiled. That much, at least, was true. She would try. But she couldn’t guarantee she would succeed, not if her own garden was anything to go by. The twenty-by-twenty square of concrete (inappropriately and not entirely honestly described by the property developer as a ‘private terrace ideal for outdoor entertaining’) was lined with the corpses of slaughtered plants. Not even last summer’s dead plants: most were relics from the summer before, when Lizzie had still believed her green fingers were in there somewhere, their potential just waiting to be discovered.

Returning her attention to Mona’s letter, Lizzie gasped. ‘Oh, Mo! This is excessive, even by Nicci’s standards.’

‘Told you,’ Mona shrugged. ‘Mind you,’ she waved Jo’s letter in the air, ‘talking of excessive . . .’

Jo rolled her eyes. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘But if I read this right,’ Lizzie continued, ‘Nicci’s left David to you because you’re “too self-sufficient”. Is that Nicci-speak for lonely?’

Avoiding her gaze, Mona shrugged.

‘Let me see,’ Jo held out her hand for the letter. ‘It can’t be that basic. That doesn’t sound like Nicci at all. There must be some mistake.’

‘There isn’t,’ Mona rounded on her. ‘I know what that letter says – how many times d’you think I’ve read it? How many times have you read yours?’

‘OK, OK.’ Jo held up her hands in defeat.

‘It is,’ Lizzie said. ‘Listen . . .’ And she began to read aloud.

‘The thing is, I worry about you. You’re so . . . self-sufficient. Dan’s growing up fast and I worry you’re both alone. I know Greg broke your heart and then Neil stomped on it, but it’s like you’ve given up. You’re not interested in anyone else, in finding anyone new. It’s over two years now. You have to stop mourning the loss of – don’t hate me, but I have to be honest, it’s not like you can kill me, after all! – the loss of something that never really was. You must move on. For your sake and Dan’s. And I want to help you.’

‘Help?’ Mona spat. ‘Interfere, more like.’

Jo threw her a look, but she didn’t disagree. How could she?

‘Well,’ Mona said. ‘Honestly, only Nicci could interfere from beyond the grave. And I don’t know why you’re sticking up for her. I mean, take a look at this.’

‘I have,’ Jo said. ‘Believe me, I have.’

‘Let me finish this first,’ Lizzie interrupted. ‘She says it. I can’t believe she actually says it: “So I’m asking you to take care of David . . . the love of my life. The man I’ve been with my whole adult life . . . until death us do part.”’ Lizzie looked up, her eyes wide and glittering.

‘Lizzie,’ Mona said, ‘did you think I’d made it up?’

‘No, no. It’s just . . . I . . .’ Lizzie started reading again. “I can’t believe I’m writing this, but I have to – death is about to part us. It will have parted us when you read this, and so I’m bequeathing my beloved David to you.”’

‘Give me that.’ Jo snatched the letter and the others watched her eyes speed down the page.

‘What the fuck?’ she murmured as she reached the end. ‘What. The. Fuck. Nicci, Nicci, Nicci, you can’t just go leaving people to other people. What were you thinking?’

‘Perhaps . . .’ Lizzie put in cautiously, ‘. . . perhaps she wasn’t? Perhaps . . . the drugs?’ Her voice faltered.

‘No!’ Jo said fiercely. ‘Don’t say that. Much as we don’t want this to be happening, Nicci wanted it. We have to . . . we have to try to find a way to cope with it.’

‘And you?’ Mona said, suppressing a shiver. The shed had not got any warmer in the half an hour they’d been sitting there. If anything the temperature had dropped. ‘What are you going to do to “cope with it”?’

‘No idea,’ Jo said, heaving herself off the sideboard and perching on the arm of the chair beside Mona so she could see her own letter over her friend’s shoulder. Not that she needed to. She knew the damn thing by heart. She’d read it so many times it was a wonder her eyes hadn’t worn away the words.

‘“You’ve been such a good godmother, which is why I need you to be more,”’ she read aloud.

‘More? What does that mean, “more”?’ Lizzie asked.

‘Read on.’ Jo nodded to Mona.

Mona did, the words sounding wrong through the remnants of her Aussie twang.

‘I’ve watched you over the years struggling to be a good stepmother to Si’s boys, trying and not managing to have children of your own. Harrie and Charlie are going to need a mummy. And I’d like her to be you. Not literally, of course! But their emotional care I leave in your hands. Under your watchful eye my two girls will find the confidence to grow into fearless, talented, wonderful young women. The women I know they can be. The woman you are. The woman I always strove to be.

‘But what’s she asking, precisely?’ Mona asked, when she’d finished reading. ‘Surely she’s not leaving you custody of Charlie and Harrie over David?’

‘No,’ Jo laughed. ‘No,’ she said again, with less certainty. ‘At least . . . I don’t think so.

‘I think what she’s saying, in her clumsy, bossy, Nicci way is, since, so far, I’ve been unable to have children of my own,’ Jo paused and swallowed hard, ‘I can have first dibs on hers. You know, Christmas, Easter . . . As if I don’t have enough other people’s children to keep me busy on public holidays with Sam and Tom.’ Her smiled dropped. ‘Not that I don’t love Si’s boys, because I do.’

‘We know that, Jo,’ Lizzie said gently. ‘Don’t we, Mo?’

Mona nodded.

‘She meant well,’ Jo said at last. ‘I’m sure of it. Nicci was a control freak but she was a good person. She meant well.’

Mona looked up. ‘Did she, Jo? Do you really think so?’

Silence filled the shed and cold crept under the door and through the tiny gaps in the window frame. It was as cold now inside as out.

‘I feel . . .’ Lizzie said, looking around, taking in her friends sitting side by side and feeling inexplicably left out, ‘. . . like I hardly knew her at all. There were hundreds of people at church I didn’t recognise, friends, maybe even family, I didn’t know existed. And this, two hundred yards from the kitchen where we spent so much time.’ She gestured at the shed. ‘I didn’t even know this was here, did you?’

‘I thought it was all dirty pots, plastic trays and bags of compost,’ Mona said, swiping her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Not another little world.’

‘It’s like she’s gone off,’ said Jo, getting up and brushing ineffectively at her skirt, ‘and taken the map.’ She sounded lost.

‘She left us the letters,’ Lizzie said.

‘They’re not a map,’ Mona said crossly, stamping her feet against the cold. ‘They’re hardly even a clue.’

Chapter Five

It has to be done, Jo told herself. Someone has to sort through Nicci’s clothes and that someone has to be us. David isn’t in a fit state to do it.

The high street was gridlocked: a snarl-up caused by the usual mix of road works, double parking, plus an icy drizzle so depressing it felt like it had been falling for eight weeks straight.

Checking her watch, Jo sighed. Six thirty. Too early and too late. When she left work she’d thought she had plenty of time to spare. That was before it took forty-five minutes to drive less than a mile.

She wasn’t due at Nicci’s house until seven – it would always be Nicci’s house to her – but the way the traffic dragged, one car crawling through the lights at a time, there was barely any point going home at all. Only she’d promised Si she’d put in an appearance because it was Wednesday, his night to have Sam and Tom. Si’s sons from his first marriage stayed every Wednesday night, every other weekend and exactly half of all school holidays. That was the deal.

Supper wasn’t an issue. Wednesday night was pizza night. The same order every week: chicken dippers, followed by medium, stuffed-crust pizzas with some unimaginably disgusting meat combo on top, and brownies and a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food to finish. Cardiac arrest delivered on the back of a motorbike. Jo had long since stopped trying to force vegetables down the boys, although Si had taught her all his little tricks for concealing them. Domino’s could set their clock by Sam and Tom’s order. It didn’t thrill their mother, but that was Si’s battle. Jo had learnt that over the years. All Jo knew was carbs oiled the wheels of domestic harmony. Plus pizza straight out of the box seriously reduced the washing-up.

At what point did it become better not to show at all than to sprint in, wave to the boys and sprint out again? If she dropped home now, she would be late to Nicci’s, and Jo had been the one who promised David they’d sit Charlie and Harrie, get them to bed, so he could have a night out without worrying.

It was hardly a night off if the sitters turned up half an hour late. Mind you, it was hardly a night off if you suspected one of the sitters had been left joint custody of your children.

Too late Jo noticed the news had finished and been replaced by one of those annoying comedy news programmes. Flicking through the channels, she found something classical she didn’t recognise on Radio Three and something dance-y she didn’t recognise on Radio One. She turned off the radio and groaned into the silence. When had she got so old?

But the silence was worse. It let her thoughts crowd back in.

Capsule Wardrobe was Nicci. That fact had smacked Jo in the face in the few short weeks since Nicci’s death. In every meeting, phone call and email, all Jo could see was Nicci’s absence. It showed in the eyes of the loyal customers; in the pity of the suppliers tiptoeing around her, in their concern.

Oh, the company couldn’t run without Jo, there was no question of that. Jo was the organiser, the administrator, the accountant. She was the person who kept the show on the road, day in, day out. But it was Nicci’s innate sense of style that made Capsule Wardrobe what it was. Jo didn’t begin to know how to keep it going without her. And yet she had to keep telling the others it was going to be all right. The internet business was thriving. The name was strong, their reputation excellent, these things would live on.

Kelly, Nicci’s right-hand woman, was trying – trying really hard – to fill Nicci’s shoes. Sitting up late into the night on her laptop, scouring the ready-to-wear shows look by look, noting the key pieces she thought would work for Capsule Wardrobe’s loyal core of customers. Items that nodded to the new season’s trends but would last far longer than that, making their three- or even four-figure price tag vaguely justifiable, cost per wear. Kelly was there each morning, hovering in Jo’s doorway like a puppy desperate to be stroked. Wanting praise for her list of looks, her trend notes, her buying suggestions. And every morning Jo praised her, and saw relief soften Kelly’s face. But the truth was, Jo wasn’t convinced.

She couldn’t put her finger on the problem. She certainly didn’t know how to solve it. But despite Kelly’s enthusiasm and hard work, she just didn’t have Nicci’s taste; Nicci’s ability to sling on a moth-eaten leopard-print coat, belt it tight, and look like Liz Taylor in her golden years, not Bet Lynch in her Rovers years.

Kelly just didn’t have it. Worse, Jo was pretty sure she couldn’t learn it.

When Nicci was there, Kelly could take her cues from her, but Nicci wasn’t there now, was she?

And then there were Si and the boys, and the attention they deserved, but that she knew they hadn’t been getting from her lately. Not since it became clear how ill Nicci was.

And then there were Charlie and Harrie.

Nicci had meant well, Jo was convinced of that. Until the cancer took hold, Nicci had watched helplessly her friend’s growing anguish as first one, then two, then three attempts at IVF failed. And now . . . what? Who knew? Not Jo, and not Si. They’d both steered well clear of the subject since Nicci’s cancer was declared terminal.

Jo adored her goddaughters, but seriously . . . ?

Behind her some jerk leant on his horn. Lifting her head, she saw the four-by-four in front had rolled forward a few feet, leaving a patch of rain-darkened tarmac. There were still four cars between her and the red lights. Big whoop. What difference did it make if she moved now or in five minutes?

In her rear-view mirror, the middle-aged guy in his BMW made a show of drumming his hands impatiently on the steering wheel. It was too dark to see clearly, but she just knew that his expression screamed ‘women drivers’.

Tosser, she thought as she eased her foot off the brake to allow her Golf to close the gap between it and the car in front.

Charlie and Harrie . . . Three weeks had passed and still Jo hadn’t said a word to Si, let alone David. She didn’t know where to start, with either of them.

Si was a good guy. A keeper, Nicci called him. The kind of guy who knew what to do on a long, empty Sunday. Hardworking, reliable and unfailingly kind. Still sexy at forty-five, twice-weekly swimming sessions ensuring his body was firm. Plus, he still had his own hair, and lots of it. She loved him, baggage and all.

He knew there was something going on. ‘What’s wrong?’ he’d asked, a couple of nights ago after they’d made exhausted love, when the lights were out and she hoped he’d fallen asleep. She let him think it was work; that she was worried about what would happen to Capsule Wardrobe. That was true, as far as it went. All their savings were in the company: big money, by their standards. And no pension. Capsule Wardrobe was her pension. But that wasn’t all. Far from it. The IVF had gone on a backburner when Nicci became sick, but now she was dead there was no excuse not to get back on the wagon. Or not. Three strikes, they’d promised themselves. Three strikes and then they’d stop. But neither of them had expected it to come to that. Not really.

And then there was the other madness. The Mona and David thing.

What the hell had Nicci been thinking?

In her darker moments, when Jo woke at three or four or five and couldn’t get back to sleep, she wondered whether Nicci had been thinking at all; whether the cancer and chemo . . . but no, that was too hideous to consider. And yet, even for Nicci – and Jo had a high tolerance for Nicci’s plots, seeing them as endearingly hare-brained rather than Machiavellian – this whole letter thing was extreme.

The traffic lights changed and the Golf rolled forward. Beyond the lights a comparatively empty road beckoned. One more car and she was on her way.

If she were honest, Jo was dreading this evening. Not just because she hadn’t seen David to talk to since the funeral, but also because the idea of sorting through Nicci’s clothes felt wrong. The mere thought of it made Jo feel like an intruder. It was so . . . final. If Nicci was letting them touch her clothes there was no escaping it. She was gone.

The first time she’d read Nicci’s letter Jo hadn’t noticed the P.S. tacked on the end. The enormity of the rest of the letter had overshadowed it. But then David called and asked her when she wanted to start dealing with Nicci’s clothes, and it dawned on her – not that if he knew about the clothes, he might know about everything else too – but that every item, and there were thousands, had to be sorted into one of three lots.

CHUCK: Far from being junk, these were the valuable but dispensable pieces – and there were plenty – that should be sold to raise money for the girls’ futures.

CHERISH: The pieces with sentimental value to be kept for the girls as a kind of wearable memory box.

CHARITY: Where the rest went. Nicci, being Nicci, had specified charities: Oxfam, the NSPCC, Macmillan Cancer Support, Refuge, Safe Shelter; those specialising in children and cancer, mainly. Although Jo had been surprised by the inclusion of Refuge, and had never even heard of the last.

Well, now that task was upon her and there was nothing for it but to gather her strength and face it.

Chapter Six

‘Not early, am I?’ Lizzie asked. The confusion on David’s face when he opened the front door made her wonder if she had the wrong time, or even the wrong day. Instinctively, she glanced at her watch: ten past seven. That was Lizzie, always early or late. Try as she might, she could never just be on time.

Usually she would have thrown her arms around him, hugged him hello. But since letter-gate it felt wrong. Instead, she stood on tiptoe to peck his cheek and stepped back when he took a second too long to respond.

‘No,’ David said, eventually. ‘You’re not.’

He looked, if anything, worse than the last time she had seen him. His usually pink skin was sallow, the bags under his eyes tinged with grey. ‘It’s just . . . I was expecting Jo first.’

‘She isn’t here yet?’

Before he could answer, a shriek came from the far end of the house, followed by a crash and a wail.

David glanced over his shoulder. ‘I better go and see . . . Come in.’

Before Lizzie had a chance to ask how he was coping, David had vanished into the kitchen. Not that she needed to ask. One look told her he wasn’t.

‘Why don’t I take over?’ she offered when she reached the kitchen, and the full chaos Harrie and Charlie had wrought on their bedtime milk and cookies became clear. Crumbs and puddles splattered the oak table. The solid wood worktops were thick with dirty dishes, open cereal packets and the debris of an earlier meal – or two. And the toddlers were hardly to blame for that.

Lizzie headed purposefully towards the sink. ‘I’ll start on this while I wait for Jo,’ she said. Anything was better than this awkward hovering.

David made to protest but Lizzie waved him away. ‘I thought you were going out,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you get off and let me sort this?’

David hesitated. ‘I was . . . am . . . it’s just . . .’

Still he loitered. Surely he wasn’t planning to stay home after all?

‘Off you go then,’ Lizzie said, channelling her mother in the days when her mother could still strike the fear of God into cold callers, and hoping he couldn’t hear the panic in her voice. This evening was going to be hard enough without David here. ‘The reinforcements have arrived.’

At least one-third of the reinforcements was lurking around the corner, sheltering from the rain.

‘Hurry up,’ Mona muttered, adjusting her inadequate umbrella so the drips stopped soaking her back and spattered her boots and jeans instead. It was only five minutes since she’d seen Lizzie park and go inside. But, thanks to the cold and the wet, it felt far longer.

Through the downpour she stared at the solid Victorian end terrace and felt a familiar sense of isolation. Nicci and David had bought the house as part of a probate deal eight years earlier, soon after Mona returned from Australia. ‘In need of modernisation,’ the estate agent had said. Understatement of the year. ‘Buy it while it’s still standing,’ Mona had muttered the first time the proud new owners showed their friends around. That was before the builders and plumbers and electricians had transformed it into the twenty-first-century family home of Nicci’s dreams.

Mona had spent endless Sundays and bank holidays there in the intervening years, but still she felt like an outsider. It was entirely her own fault, she knew. Nicci, Lizzie and Jo had been such a tight-knit group when she’d answered their ad for a fourth person to share their student house that she’d never felt totally part of it. She hadn’t helped herself, of course, by heading off to satisfy her wanderlust as soon as graduation forced everyone to decide how they were going to live their lives. It was in Australia, as far away from home as possible, she hoped to find the person she wanted to be.

Instead she found heartbreak. Although it hadn’t looked that way at first.

Temping by day, Mona learnt yoga by night, which was where she met Callie, the instructor. And through Callie, her brother, Greg. Tall, blond, oozing confidence. As unreconstructed as it was possible to be. One look and, for the first time, Mona fell in love and lust so hard she barely caught her breath. Pregnancy and marriage, in that order, took her by surprise, followed, almost as rapidly, by rumours of Greg’s ‘hook-ups’. At first, she refused to believe the man she loved would do that to her; at second, she turned a blind eye for the sake of their baby boy.

Until he left her.

He. Left. Her. For a blonde waitress called Justine. Just one of many things she omitted to tell Nicci and Jo and Lizzie. Instead, she returned to London, aged twenty-eight, and with nothing to show for her travels but a newfound passion for yoga and a wide-eyed five-year-old boy with a Star Wars rucksack, who looked nothing like her and everything like the man the memory of whom she was running away from.

Glancing irritably at her watch, Mona stamped her feet against the damp, spraying water on to her jeans. Seven twenty – what the hell were they doing in there? And, come to that, where was Jo?

The rain had slowed, but by now the bottom half of her jeans were soaked. Mona knew she should just go in, face David, get it over with. But she couldn’t make herself. Just as she hadn’t been able to make herself tell Nicci about Neil. Though there were many times she’d wanted to.

Neil Osborne. If she’d felt distanced from her friends before, it was Neil who sealed her alienation.

‘Because Sunday afternoons were family time, which, for Mona and Dan, meant long lazy roast lunches around Nicci’s big oak table. And for Mona Thomas’s lover meant roasts at home. With his wife, Tracy (although Mona did her best not to give the woman a name, just as she didn’t want to see her face). Tracy, she forced herself to think, and his three teenage daughters.

So it was always just Mona and Dan. Mona’s lover was never there to top up her glass or squeeze her knee under the table at some private joke; never there to kick a ball around David’s back garden or talk sport in the kitchen.

But then, to be fair, Neil had never been invited.

It wasn’t that Nicci and David excluded him, more that they didn’t know he existed. None of them did.

They knew he had existed. To begin with, they’d even managed sisterly empathy. ‘He wants to have his cake and eat you,’ Jo said, thrilled at her own witticism. Mona had just confessed she’d fallen for a married man, with all the usual qualifications: I didn’t know to begin with . . . She doesn’t understand him . . . He’s not happy . . . They’re only together for the sake of the children . . .

‘Mona,’ Nicci said, as Jo and Lizzie rolled their eyes.

And they all chorused their favourite line from their all-time favourite movie, ‘He’s never going to leave her.’

Mona’s mouth had twisted as it always did when she was a little bit hurt, a little bit guilty, but didn’t want to show it.

‘You’re right,’ she said, forcing a smile and channelling Carrie Fisher as she knew she was required to do. ‘You’re right. You’re right. I know you’re right.’

But that was three years ago. More. What they didn’t know was that he was still around. They thought Mona had dumped him because that was what she’d told them. It wasn’t a lie, exactly; more a lie of omission. She’d intended to end it, putting it off each time she saw him, but then, out of the blue, he dumped her, and to her surprise and horror she’d thought her heart was going to shatter all over again.

In the end, it was easier to let the others think she’d been the one to do the dumping. And when they’d been so pleased they cracked open a bottle of Nicci’s favourite pink Laurent Perrier to celebrate, Mona knew she’d been right. Better by far than telling the truth, which was that she’d do anything – anything at all – to have him back.

Despite the fact she’d been on the receiving end of a cheating husband herself, and knew precisely how it felt to be left.

So when Neil turned up at the fashionable organic restaurant where she was manager, claiming he couldn’t live without her – literally, that was what he’d said: ‘Mona, I can’t live without you’ – well, Mona just ‘forgot’ to mention it the next time she saw her friends. And the next time, and the next. And because there’d always been a part of herself she’d kept private, the deception hadn’t even felt that unnatural. And then it felt too late, like she’d missed her chance to tell them the truth. And now . . . well, now she had.

The sound of an engine igniting brought Mona to, just in time to step back into the shadow of a six-foot garden wall as David’s people carrier appeared, indicated and turned in the opposite direction. Nearly seven thirty. And still no Jo. Lizzie was going to be livid.

Chapter Seven

‘Where the hell have you been?’ Lizzie had barely opened the front door before she started in on Mona. ‘It’s nearly half-past!’

‘You want the honest answer?’ Shaking the rain from her umbrella, Mona leant it against the wall of the porch.

‘Would I like it?’

‘Doubt it,’ Mona said.

‘Then forget it.’ Turning her back on her friend, Lizzie marched back to the kitchen. Charlie and Harrie were charging around in increasingly small circles, but they were now washed and wearing pyjamas. The kitchen table still looked like a battle in a biscuit factory, but the washing-up was done and the wood worktops were, at least, visible.

‘I was hiding round the corner like the pathetic coward I am,’ Mona said, pointing to the drenched lower half of her jeans, ‘waiting for David to leave. I just didn’t bank on a monsoon.’

‘Shhhh.’ Lizzie’s gaze flicked towards two pairs of small but flapping ears. ‘You could have texted me; at least waited somewhere dry. I’d have let you know when the coast was clear.’

‘Where’s Jo?’ asked Mona, hanging her damp jacket over the back of one of the mismatched kitchen chairs.

‘Stuck in traffic, she said. And she had to nip home. Should be here any minute.’

‘Probably avoiding you know who too,’ Mona concluded, turning her attention to the tiny hands now clinging to her wet legs. ‘Hello, my lovelies.’ Sweeping Charlie and Harrie up, one under each arm, she spun them around until their squeals pierced Lizzie’s ears.

‘When did you get so big?’ Mona groaned, setting them down with a kiss each.

‘Again!’ Harrie insisted.

‘Don’t. You’ll make them si—’

‘Just one,’ said Mona, spinning on the spot.

‘Mo . . .’ Lizzie protested.

‘Shouldn’t you two monsters be in bed?’ Mona asked when she’d stopped.

‘Nooo!’ Harrie shrieked.

‘No bed!’ That was Charlie. ‘Auntie Lizzie say no bed.’

‘That doesn’t sound like Auntie Lizzie to me.’ Mona raised an eyebrow.

‘Did!’

‘It’s true.’ Lizzie waved an open bottle of Sauvignon Blanc at Mona.

‘Just a small one.’

Lizzie raised her eyebrows. ‘No small glasses in this house.’

‘As it comes then.’

‘We agreed, remember? It’s for them, after all. They should be there for the ceremonial opening of the wardrobe.’

‘Wardrobe!’ Harrie and Charlie shrieked, running around the kitchen again. ‘Wardrobe!’

‘Do you feel weird?’ Mona asked half an hour later when they had transferred to the large bedroom that took up the entire front half of the first floor, where Nicci had spent most of the last six months of her life, when she hadn’t been in hospital.

‘Not weird, exactly,’ Lizzie lowered her voice. ‘Just, you know, empty. Like a piece is missing.’

‘I do, really weird.’

‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you?’ Jo said, walking in with a bottle of pink Laurent Perrier and three fresh glasses. She set the glasses on the bedside table, slit the foil and began unfurling the wire.

‘Why me more than anyone else?’

Jo smiled grimly, although she didn’t feel much like laughing. If a year ago someone had told her they’d be standing here, the three of them . . . Three . . . She shook herself.

‘Pot-kettle,’ Mona said. ‘And anyway, isn’t it about time you mentioned your little bequest?’

‘Stop it, you two,’ Lizzie said. ‘Little ears.’

But the little ears were shut. Their owners fast asleep, curled up, their dark blond heads like inverted commas on the pillows of David’s bed. Thumbs firmly in place.

‘Anyway, I didn’t mean that,’ Mona replied, prowling the room, unable to settle. ‘I meant this whole scenario. Last time we were here . . .’

Nobody needed to say it. The last time was the night before Nicci was moved to the hospice. The night she said her real goodbyes.

Easing the cork from the champagne as silently as possible, Jo poured three glasses and handed one each to Mona and Lizzie. ‘I thought we should do this properly . . . for Nicci and for the girls,’ she said. ‘But I think we’ve already lost our audience. I’m sorry I missed them awake. How did they seem?’

‘OK. A bit hyper. But I guess that’s better than the alternative. Better than David, anyway.’ Lizzie stared pointedly at Mona, but her friend was making a show of rearranging the large cardboard boxes lined up along the bedroom wall. Each had a scribbled yellow Post-it note attached: the first ‘Chuck’, the second ‘Cherish’, the third ‘Charity’.

‘Do you want to do the honours?’ Lizzie pointed to the mirrored double doors that led to the walk-in wardrobe.

‘No, it’s OK,’ Jo said.

‘I’m not doing it,’ Mona put in, too hastily. ‘It’s all yours.’

Anyone would have thought they were opening a long-sealed family crypt, not the spot-lit inner sanctum that housed Nicci’s fashion collection, Lizzie thought.

She sighed, but she didn’t move. She didn’t want to do it. Didn’t see why she should. It wasn’t as if she was Number One Friend, anyway. That was Jo’s domain. But Lizzie had always been the tidier-upper, the smoother-over, the peace-maker. Where Nicci had been the leader, forging ahead with plans and ideas, Lizzie had always trailed at the back, shutting doors behind them, unable to come up with a good reason not to be the one to clean up after the others. She even helped mop up the trail of emotional devastation a much younger Nicci had left in her wake.

‘Looks like it’s down to me then,’ Jo said. Positioning herself by the double doors, her right hand on the handle, she lifted her glass stiffly. ‘To Nicci,’ she said, raising it higher and pulling the door open.

‘To Nicci,’ Lizzie and Mona echoed.

Ceiling-set spots had come on automatically as the doors opened, lighting the eight-by-twelve room lined with rails, one row of full height on the right, two of half height on the left. A wall of drawers faced them, and a double row of shoe shelves skirted the room from floor level. More shelves piled high with bags and hatboxes lined the top. There, any suggestion of order stopped. The room was stuffed.

‘I had no idea it was such a mess!’ Lizzie gasped. ‘I was expecting, you know, neat colour-coded piles. The law of the wardrobe, copyright Nicci Morrison.’

‘Are you telling me,’ said Mona slowly, ‘that when it came to her own clothes the queen of clean was the world’s biggest hoarder?’

Jo shrugged. ‘Looks that way.’

‘How the hell did she collect so many?’

‘It was her life’s work,’ Jo said, ‘her passion. You know that. Her job and her hobby. Some people collect books or works of art, Nicci collected clothes. This isn’t even the whole lot. David says there are about eight suitcases in the attic, maybe more. He reckons there’s nothing of value in them; Nicci was too worried about moths and damp for that. We should have a quick sort through just to be sure. But I reckon those can go straight to the charity shop.’

‘The question is,’ said Mona, putting her glass on Nicci’s dressing table and joining Lizzie in the doorway, ‘where the hell do we start?’

‘Knowing Nicci,’ Lizzie said, ‘there’s an arcane filing system. Nothing as straightforward as “what goes with what”.’

‘Alphabetical by designer?’ Mona suggested.

Jo scanned the wardrobe. The air was far cooler in here than in the bedroom. On the wall beside her, just inside the door, a thermostat was set at fifteen degrees Celsius. Typical.

‘Good guess,’ Jo said. ‘But I don’t think so. It’s too much of a mishmash. If all the McQueen, for instance, was in one place, the Prada in another, the rails would look more uniform.’

Mona frowned. ‘By style?’

‘I’ve got it!’ Lizzie announced loudly, glancing over her shoulder at the sleeping girls almost before the words were out of her mouth. ‘It’s autobiographical!’

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Jo. ‘That would be chaos.’

‘And your point is?’ Mona laughed. ‘Lizzie’s right. Look.’

In the left-hand corner, tucked at the back, was a pair of beaten-up Doc Martens, the fluro-pink that graffitied them now almost invisible. Above them hung a familiar cracked and faded leather jacket.

Jo blinked and stared hard at the thick-pile carpet, determined not to let the others see her cry. Tears rolled down the side of her cheeks, dampening her neck.

‘I guess we start at the beginning then,’ Lizzie said, taking charge. Pulling a small wooden stepladder from its place at the back of the closet, she lifted a yellowing hatbox from the uppermost shelf, set it on the floor and removed the lid.

‘Omigod,’ she said, wrinkling her nose as she stepped back from the box. A piece of something unquestionably dead was suspended between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Gross. Can you believe she kept this?’

‘What is it?’ Mona asked.

‘Dead bunny,’ Lizzie said. ‘It was dead as a doornail then, and it’s even deader now. And it smells rank.’

‘Bin!’ Mona wretched. ‘Where it should have gone long ago. Why haven’t we got an option for bin? I’ll go and get a black bag.’

‘You can’t,’ Jo said. Taking the rabbit fur shrug from Lizzie’s hand, she laid it carefully on the bed and stood in front of it, as if guarding it from Mona’s malign intent. ‘It’s cherish, definitely cherish. Is there a peach satin slip in that box, too?’

Peering through folds of aged tissue paper, Lizzie nodded.

As soon as she saw the slip she remembered exactly what Jo had known the second she saw the shrug. Almost reverentially Lizzie handed the delicate fabric to Jo, who folded it neatly and put it on top of the shrug.

Mona watched, her expression one of revulsion. ‘If you apply the principle to everything,’ she said, ‘that if-Nicci-kept-it-it’s-significant, then the chuck-stroke-sell pile and the charity shop pile are going to be non-existent.’

‘It won’t apply to everything,’ Jo said. ‘But if it’s twenty years old and has no obvious value – like, it’s not the first piece of McQueen she saved up for, or those original Vivier shoes she bought in a junk shop on The Lanes in our second year, or her Helmut Lang suits – then it has a different value. A sentimental value. Like this.’

‘Why that particularly?’ Mona asked.

‘You must remember?’ Jo said.

She could still see Nicci in the living room of their rundown student house, drumming her newly graffitied docs impatiently while they waited for Lizzie to decide what to wear. ‘It’s what she was wearing the night we . . . The night she met David.’

Chapter Eight

The Rabbit Fur Shrug

Sussex University, Brighton, 1994

The evening hadn’t got off to the best of starts.

‘Lizzie, c’mon!’ Nicci bellowed up the stairs. ‘We’re gonna be late.’

Silence.

Late wasn’t Nicci’s thing. She affected casual insouciance but she was scrupulously punctual. Lizzie was always late, a reaction to her mum, who would always rather arrive two hours early than be two minutes late. And this involved clothes. Clothes and Lizzie just didn’t go together.

‘Just wear the bloody 501s!’ Nicci yelled.

More silence.

‘I don’t know why you’re bothering.’ Mona stuck her wet head, her arm and a single shoulder around the bathroom door. ‘You know how she gets.’

Nicci did. They all did. Lizzie was at war with her wardrobe.

‘Why don’t you just go and style her?’ Jo suggested.

Jo sat in the doorway between the hall and living room, a plastic cup of cheap white wine between her knees. She was wearing jeans. Mona and Jo both were. All three of them did, usually. Only Nicci refused, claiming they made her look even more like a boy. They didn’t, but who were Jo, Lizzie and Mona to argue? Nicci understood clothes in a way no one else did. Jo liked them – sometimes – more than clothes liked her, but she didn’t know how to play them. How to make them do her bidding.

Nicci was wearing her beaten-up DMs, with torn fishnets and one of the many vintage underslips she’d bought from a local flea market, topped off with a rabbit fur shrug she’d brought home earlier that day. The row about how disrespectful Nicci’s dead jacket was to Mona’s vegetarian sensibilities had just finished, only to segue into this.

If I didn’t love Nicci so much I’d be eaten up with jealousy, Jo thought. But she did. Nicci was Nicci. Whatever ‘it’ was, she had it. She could pull it off, black bra showing beneath the slip and all. That was just how life was.

‘Finally!’

Jo looked up at the sound of Nicci’s voice. Lizzie was hurrying down the stairs in her usual uniform of 501s and outsized man’s shirt.

‘You look great,’ Nicci said.

But Lizzie obviously didn’t feel great. She looked defeated. In the battle of Lizzie vs. her wardrobe, Lizzie had lost. Again.

They were so late they decided to skip the pub altogether. They’d drunk a bottle of the cheapest white table wine Tesco had to offer before they left the house, and had another two bottles in their bags so they went straight to the house party. The thud of the bass met them before they could turn the corner into the right street, and pissed students were already spilling onto the pavement.

The girls were so far behind everyone else on the alcohol-and-illegal-substance front that they almost kept walking.

It was Lizzie who saw him first. Not that his old-school purple Mohican was easy to miss. But in the dark, with the fug of B&H and dope smoke clouding the ceiling, and the pulsing beat of The Prodigy destroying the bits of her concentration alcohol hadn’t already wasted, it was a miracle she noticed anything at all.

Lizzie found him in the kitchen, beside a keg of Dutch cooking lager, set up on the draining board.

If she was honest his look intimidated her, but between the fierce hair and torn leather jacket were kind brown eyes.

‘Want some?’

After glancing over her shoulder to make sure he really was talking to her, Lizzie nodded. ‘Four cups, please.’

‘The party that bad?

She grinned. ‘I’ve been to worse.’

He grinned back. ‘Me too.’

When Lizzie fought her way back to Nicci’s corner, plastic cups of something warm and flat balanced between her hands, she looked different, somehow. Glowy.

‘You look different. Have you been smoking?’ Nicci asked, extracting one of the cups from Lizzie’s hands.

‘No!’ Lizzie yelped. ‘You know I don’t.’

But Nicci was right. She felt different too.

‘What is it then?’ Jo said. ‘You met someone? Fast work, O’Hara. You’ve only been gone ten minutes.’

‘Maybe,’ Lizzie said, but even in the dark they could see her blush.

‘You left one behind.’ The voice behind them made Lizzie start. She jumped, knocking Nicci’s hand and sending warm lager sloshing across her peach satin slip. ‘Bollocks,’ everyone said in unison.

‘Shit,’ said the guy with the purple Mohican. ‘I didn’t mean to . . . I mean, I was just trying . . .’

‘Yeah,’ Nicci said.

‘I’m David,’ he added helplessly.

His face was in direct contrast to his hair. If his hair was all aggression and sharp edges, his face was round and friendly, his eyes soft and brown. He looked genuinely mortified. ‘Whose is this?’ He held up the final plastic cup and Jo claimed it.

‘I’m Lizzie,’ Lizzie said. ‘And these are my housemates, Jo, Mona and Nicci.’

In the time it took her to give their names Lizzie saw it happen. She’d seen it before. She was used to it. They all were. So used it, she didn’t even mind any more. Not usually. It wasn’t as if Nicci did it on purpose.

David smiled warmly at the others but his gaze returned to Nicci, who was staring back, her mouth slightly open. Lizzie started to say something, anything, to capture his attention, but it was pointless. She could have jumped up and down between Nicci and David and neither would have noticed. She knew the warning signs, but this wasn’t just a sign, it was hazard lights and sirens and all the makings of a ten-car pile-up.

‘You’re not at uni, are you?’ Mona asked. ‘I mean, I haven’t seen you around.’

‘I know Phil, the guy whose party it is,’ David said, dragging his attention away from Nicci.

‘Mad Phil?’ Lizzie said.

David nodded, his gaze never leaving Nicci. ‘I’m doing architecture at King’s. Just finished my placement. And just broke up with my girlfriend. Phil said there’d be some fit birds here so I should come down.’

‘They must have left already,’ Jo said. Boom boom!

Lizzie rolled her eyes and stuck her elbow in Jo’s ribs. Not funny, she mouthed.

‘What course do you do?’ David was saying, but it wasn’t a general question.

‘Eng lit. No idea why.’ Only Nicci answered.

‘What’s wrong with English?’ he asked.

‘Nothing. I’m just more interested in fashion.’

‘C’mon,’ Jo said, grabbing Lizzie’s elbow, ‘let’s go and steal someone else’s bottle.’

‘But I just got—’ Lizzie protested. She knew it was futile.

‘Lizzie,’ Jo hissed as Mona took Lizzie’s other elbow. ‘We. Are. Not. Wanted. Here.’

And imperceptibly, Lizzie drooped.

One of them met a bloke, then the bloke met Nicci and that was it. It wasn’t that Nicci was a babe. Mona had the model body, Jo had better boobs and Lizzie had the wild Pre-Raphaelite curls. But whatever it was Nicci did have, men wanted it. The path to their student house was littered with the broken egos of Brighton’s straight male population. And some of the gay ones too.

Chapter Nine

Seven fifty-five p.m. Mona glanced at her mobile, double-checked the clock on her DVD and sighed. Whichever clock she looked at it was still seven fifty-five.

She wasn’t sure which made her more tense: the fact Neil said he’d phone between seven and eight, and it was now precariously close to being clear that call was not going to come at all (oh, there’d be a good reason, there always was); or that in five minutes Jo would be knocking on David’s front door and doing what they’d all reluctantly agreed had to be done. Asking him the big questions. Had he had a letter too? If so, what did his say? Had he been in on this crazy plan all along? And if not, what was he going to do about it now he did know?

‘Daniel!’ Mona yelled. ‘Have you done your maths homework?’

Silence. If you could call the drone of computer-generated gunfire and the grinding gears of video-game tanks, silence.

‘Daniel!’

Silence, literal this time.

‘What?’

‘Homework? Have you done it?’

‘Yes, Mum. Ages ago.’

‘When, ages ago?’

Dan, all five foot ten and counting, filled the doorway. The flat was too small for them now. Too small for him, certainly. Barely fourteen and already four inches taller than Mona. Every inch his father’s son. Physically, at least.

‘After tea and before now. Maths and physics. Do you want to see it?’

It was a dare, not a question. He knew she wouldn’t; especially not physics. English or history she might have taken him up on. Funny how his homework was never English or history.

She shook her head and watched his back – spookily familiar and scarily alien – return to his boxroom.

Once Coronation Street was finished, Lizzie dabbled with a documentary about obese babies on Channel 4 and now she was trying to care about University Challenge.

When Jo first volunteered to talk to David, Lizzie had to admit she’d been relieved. But now . . . she felt . . . what did she feel? Guilty, she supposed, for copping out. But also a bit excluded. This affected her too. All right, so Nicci had left her a patch of land (albeit right outside David’s kitchen window). But still, it wasn’t the same. The others had been left people.

‘Picasso,’ Lizzie guessed. Just as the boy onscreen said, ‘Van Gogh.’

‘No, it’s Picasso.’

Lizzie high-fived the air. Still got it.

No matter how many times Lizzie looked at her mobile, balanced on the arm of the sofa, it refused to ring. Jo should be there by now. She’d promised to call as soon as she could, but that might not be for ages.

Idly, Lizzie flicked through the channels, ending back at University Challenge.

Gerry had gone straight to squash from a late meeting; he wouldn’t be back until gone ten, maybe eleven. Perhaps if she texted Jo now she could go with her, be her wing woman. Lizzie could be at David’s in ten minutes if she left now. Snatching up her mobile, she found Jo’s number and clumsily typed, Want some moral support? She pressed Send, before she could think better of it.

Eight ten p.m.

David wouldn’t mind Jo being ten minutes late. Since Jo hadn’t warned him she was coming, he wouldn’t even know. She hadn’t told him because that way she could still chicken out. And he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t convenient.

She’d come straight from Capsule Wardrobe’s offices, taking advantage of Parents’ Evening at Si’s school to get in some extra hours. She was knackered, and worried about last month’s profits. The new season had been in full swing for two months now, but business was still slow. Part of her wanted to put it down to the weather, but who was she kidding? They’d had a sub-zero spring before; it hadn’t affected sales then.

Smoothing down her sweater dress and tucking the hems of her skinny jeans into her ankle boots, Jo tried to gauge her reflection in the door’s glass panel. Her hair had been thrown into a ponytail hours ago, her roots were long overdue and, apart from red lipstick reapplied in the rear-view mirror two minutes earlier, her makeup hadn’t been retouched since breakfast. She knew she didn’t look great.

It was now or never, she decided. Do it, or go home and beat yourself up for the rest of the evening. As she raised her hand to ring David’s old-fashioned bell, Jo felt her mobile vibrate in her pocket. Damn. She was tempted to ignore it, but just in case it was Si she turned away from the front door and checked her screen.

Want some moral support?

Jo sighed. She didn’t know which was worse, Mona not attempting to disguise her relief when Jo volunteered, or Lizzie’s indecision. Come or don’t come, she had wanted to say, but make your bloody mind up. The fact was, Lizzie didn’t want to be there. She just didn’t want to not be there either.

It had to be a charity, the local MP canvassing or a neighbour looking for a lost cat/apologising for noisy teenagers/ wanting to borrow a parking permit. Nobody else knocked unannounced at quarter-past eight on a Monday night around here. If he ignored them, David decided, they’d probably go away. He couldn’t be bothered with being neigh-bourly tonight. It had been one of those days. Another one of those days. He just wanted to sit in the dark and wait for it to end.

The doorbell rang again. Its ancient chords hitting precisely the right note to pierce his low-level headache. Another ring like that and the girls would be awake.

‘Fuck off,’ David groaned aloud.

Could his day get any worse? The girls had taken for ever to go down tonight, demanding story after story and then complaining in unison that he didn’t do the voices the way Mummy did.

To which there was no answer. Parent fail.

David knew they weren’t saying it to hurt him. They weren’t even three years old, for God’s sake. And they were hurting too. They didn’t understand where Mummy had gone. Even though, as coached by the child psychologist his mother had insisted he consult (‘She’s an expert on child bereavement, you’re not’), he’d taken Harrie and Charlie to the funeral. And, to be honest, he didn’t understand why Mummy had gone away either.

The bell rang again. Whoever it was had no plans to go away. It was a miracle it hadn’t woken Charlie and Harrie already.

‘All right,’ he muttered as he dragged himself from the kitchen table. ‘You win. I’m coming.’

‘Look, just—’

David was in full flight as he flung open the front door. He stopped, as if looking for someone else behind Jo. ‘Jo . . . I . . . you didn’t . . . I wasn’t expecting you.’

He didn’t exactly look thrilled to see her.

From the far end of the hall she could hear the low buzz of voices competing for airspace. Someone in the kitchen. She strained to hear . . . someone in the living room, too.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jo said. ‘I haven’t seen you for a week or so. I dropped by on the off-chance. I should have called first, to check you didn’t have visitors.’

‘Visitors? I don’t . . . ?’

Pushing gently past him, Jo went to investigate. The door to the living room was open and a documentary was on the TV. In the kitchen a poet was saying something she clearly thought profound on Radio Four. An iPod played softly from the dining table.

The kitchen was a mess again. One of the spotlights over the sink had blown since her last visit. It looked like the washing-up hadn’t been done in days. And there were still bunches of dead flowers from relatives David claimed not even to know on the windowsill.

‘Oh God.’ She turned to him. She wanted to take him in her arms and hug him, but everything about his manner said no.

‘That bad?’ she said.

‘Worse.’

Shoulders sagging, David shoved his hands in his pockets. He looked about twelve. Boyishly handsome, utterly lost. There was a splosh of wine on the front of his work shirt. It didn’t look recent.

‘I can’t stand the silence,’ he said finally. ‘Before Nicci . . . when she was here, her constant racket used to drive me nuts, all the music and chat – you lot always here, and when you weren’t you were constantly on the phone. Never a moment’s peace, never just us. You have no idea how hard it was to get that woman on her own. But now . . .’ he shrugged, looking helpless. His eyes brimmed, the long lashes that Jo had always thought wasted on a man, glistened. ‘Now I can’t stand it, Jo.’

‘You should get an au pair.’ It sounded pointless even to her.

‘A what?’

She could see David thinking, How did we get from there to here?

‘I just mean it might help having another person around. With the girls, I mean, and . . .’ Jo couldn’t help glancing at the washing-up, a pile of clothes sprawling on the floor by the washing machine . . .

‘You mean the mess?’ He forced a grin. ‘I have a cleaner. I just gave her a few weeks off. I couldn’t, you know, cope with all her . . .’ he grimaced, ‘. . . sympathy. The nanny’s bad enough.’

Jo nodded, waited for him to continue.

‘I don’t think I could stand having someone around full time,’ David said eventually. ‘An au pair, I mean. Living here, with us. Not yet, anyway. It would be too much.’

‘Tea?’ Jo waved the kettle at him. ‘Or something stronger?’

David grimaced again. ‘Better be tea. I already tried something stronger. It just gave me a headache.’

The phone rang just as the kettle began to boil. Instinctively, Jo reached for it, as if it were her own. Sorry, she mouthed, seeing the expression that flashed across David’s face, and held it out to him.

He shook his head.

‘Hello?’ she said, and paused. ‘Hello? Hello?

No one there,’ she shrugged a few seconds later. ‘Must have been a wrong number.

‘That’s odd,’ David said. ‘Had a few of those lately. Wonder if it’s a call centre or there’s a problem at the exchange. Anyway,’ he added, watching her move around his kitchen as if it were her own, ‘I’m guessing you didn’t just drop in on the off-chance. What is this? Project check-up on David? Or something else?’

‘Does it matter?’ Jo said.

David said nothing. Instead he waited for her to turn to look at him. He’d been wondering when she’d come. And he’d known it would be her. Jo was the doer, the efficient one. Lizzie was too beaten down by that idiot she’d married to volunteer for a confrontation. And Mona – the bolter, his mother called her – she’d run to the other side of the world to get away from her family, and then run all the way back to get away from her cheating husband. And poor Dan, the evidence of that marriage, had packed his little rucksack and come with her.

No, when it happened, it was always going to be Jo.

‘You do know, don’t you?’ Jo said, after she’d dragged out the tea-making as long as possible.

Know what? David wanted to say. But he didn’t have the energy.

‘Of course I know.’

Even as he felt his anger rising, he tried to suppress it. This wasn’t Jo’s fault. There was no way she’d have come up with a stunt like this: four letters; life divided like a pie. No, there was only one person who could have come up with this.

Of course, Jo had been enabling Nicci for years. So had he. Every little thing Nicci wanted to do he’d tried to help her with, from the moment he’d fallen for the peroxide pixie.

‘What?’ Jo asked.

David shook his head. ‘Nothing.’ How did you explain your heart just twisted?

Nicci hadn’t been peroxide for a decade now, more, but the memory of that meeting was burnt in his brain. That was how he thought of her. Even now he felt bad about using Lizzie as an in. But from the moment Nicci had walked into the party, he’d known – like in some dodgy rom-com – she was his one, and he would do anything to get her.

‘David?’ Jo was standing in front of him. ‘Are you OK? I mean, I know you’re not . . .’

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Just thinking.’

‘So did she tell you about the letters?’ Jo ventured. ‘Consult you, I mean?’

‘You mean, did I choose Mona?’ Amongst the confusion and disgust, despite himself David could feel his fury take hold.

Jo stepped backwards. It was instinctive; she couldn’t help it. ‘I’ll take that as a no.’ Her voice was full of sympathy.

‘I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean . . .’ David’s anger was gone. Dragging out a chair, he slumped at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. ‘No, Jo, she didn’t tell me. She didn’t consult me. She left me two letters. The first was instructions for delivering your letters; the second, to be read after I had, told me what she’d done. That she’d planned my future for me. Because she didn’t trust me to do it myself. Like an idiot, I did what she asked, it didn’t occur to me not to.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Jo said. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t. Nicci adored you. She loved us all. She was just worried what would happen when she . . . when we found ourselves where we are now.’

‘Maybe,’ said David, hoping he could keep the bitterness from his voice. ‘Or maybe Nicci just wanted to make sure we did it her way.’

Perhaps he should have been the one who went to the bereavement counsellor. Were you allowed to be furious with your wife for dying on you? She’d wanted the house, she’d wanted children, she’d wanted the business, she’d wanted their life. Then she’d left it. Was he allowed to be angry about that? Because he was. So gut-wrenchingly furious that thinking about it brought tears flooding to the surface.

‘She left my garden to Lizzie, my children to you, and me – her husband – to Mona. What the fuck, Jo? I mean, seriously, what the fuck was she thinking?’

Pulling out the end of a bench, Jo sat next to him and slid her arm around his shoulders. And felt, rather than heard, him begin to sob. She didn’t know what to say. So she held him tight and let him slip down and weep against her.

The house was quiet now, but alive with sound the way old houses are: pipes creaking as they heated and cooled, floor-boards moaning with memories of past footsteps. Jo had circled the house, turning off the countless lights and electrical appliances, before returning to the kitchen to collect her bag.

‘Will you start coming back now?’ said David. ‘The three of you? And Si, and Gerry, and Dan? You still eat Sunday lunch, don’t you?’

‘Wild horses wouldn’t keep us away,’ Jo said. ‘Except maybe Mona.’

She smiled, to show she was joking, and he forced a laugh.

Now she’d gone, David punched 1471 for the fifth time in as many days, only to be greeted with the same message: number withheld. Despite what he’d said earlier, David didn’t think it was a call centre or a fault on the line, not really. In his darkest nights he’d started to fear Nicci had been keeping more from him than he’d realised. That she’d even – he could hardly bring himself to think it – been having an affair. No, he knew she wouldn’t do that. Not his Nicci.

In an attempt to calm his brain, David made himself sit and listen to the quiet. Many, many times he’d yearned for this silence. Well, now you’ve got it, he thought. This is it. Better start getting used to it.

Outside next-door’s tabby tortured the last drop of life from a small undeserving rodent, a car passed the end of the road, music so loud he could almost hear the words, teenagers shouted abuse as they made their way home from the town centre. He forced himself to listen to it all.

Floodlights came on suddenly, triggered by a small creature using his garden as a shortcut. Almost April, and still the soil was cold and bare, the grass straggly, beds bedraggled and neglected, the remnants of last autumn’s leaves rotting where they’d fallen. It had been this way for months.

When the lights turned themselves off again two minutes later, he was grateful. It had been like looking inside himself, and finding nothing there.

Chapter Ten

Sunday lunch didn’t happen. David knew it wouldn’t.

‘It’s Mona, isn’t it?’ he said when Jo called on Friday night and suggested they take a rain check. ‘She nixed it.’

‘No,’ Jo said. ‘It’s Lizzie. Something’s come up with her mother. She needs to go and see the staff at the care home.’

‘What about her sister?’ David asked, already knowing the answer.

‘What about her?’ Jo’s shrug was almost audible. Lizzie’s sister, Karen, lived in the States and was conspicuous by her absence at the best of times, particularly when there was a mother-related issue.

‘Look, David, I promise, it’s nothing sinister. Nobody’s avoiding you. Not even Mona. Lizzie does have to go to Croydon and she doesn’t know how long it will take. But next weekend, Easter Sunday, if you’re free, it’s a date. I’ll shop, Lizzie will cook. You get the booze in. And Mona can bring desserts that come out of a packet.’

He’d had to be satisfied with that. He understood; after all, they hadn’t even begun to resolve the ‘what to do about Nicci’s bequests’ problem.

Common sense said the whole thing was ridiculous. Everyone agreed on that. You can’t go leaving people to other people. Clothes, yes. Patches of garden, at a push. Even the shed, but not people.

Emotionally, though, it wasn’t that straightforward. Emotionally, morally, ethically . . . Put like that, the less he saw of Mona the better. And he tensed every time he thought he heard Lizzie unlocking the side gate. Only the idea of Jo mothering his girls, for now at least, didn’t bother him. After all, somebody had to.

The sound of Peppa Pig sloshing through the muddy puddles echoed from the sitting room. Harrie and Charlie were happy, sitting side by side on the floor in front of the TV, clutching their blankies. But it wasn’t yet 9 a.m. The whole day stretched ahead.

If not going to the park or on play dates, Nicci would have baked cakes, done potato prints, or made dresses for their dolls, applying the same focus to making and baking on Saturdays and Sundays as she did to her other baby, Capsule Wardrobe, during the week.

‘No one ever regretted time not spent cleaning the house,’ she’d been fond of saying (about pretty much anything she didn’t like doing), which was why they’d got a cleaner. ‘But if I don’t spend time with the girls, I’ll regret that.’

As it turned out, Nicci was right. Of course, they hadn’t known then just how little time with the girls she had left.

David once asked where Nicci had learned it all, the sewing and cooking and making, hoping she’d tell him about her childhood, but she just shrugged. ‘I taught myself,’ she’d said. Now he wished she’d taught him too.

Wandering back to the kitchen, David flicked the radio on, then off again. He’d promised himself he’d dispense with the white noise, but it was instinctive. Another weekend stretched before him. Another weekend of not doing the right voices, of eating shop-bought cookies. He had to do something.

‘You know you can always come to us,’ his mother had urged, from the very first weekend, and his father had clapped him on the shoulder in silent agreement.

He knew. He’d been to his parents five out of the last six weekends. The last time, Charlie had announced, as he lifted her from the car, ‘Not Granny’s again!’ in a voice that carried all the way to his mother standing beaming on the doorstep. She sounded so much like Nicci, he barely held it together.

There was always the swimming pool. Si might be there, with his boys. Although last time David had tried getting Charlie and Harrie changed and into the baby pool, he’d lost Harrie for a full minute and nearly had heart failure. And he’d been able to see what all the mums were thinking: typical weekend dad, can’t be left alone for five minutes. The ones who recognised him were worse. There were days he feared he might drown in other people’s pity.

Then it dawned on him: Whitstable. The beach hut had been one of Nicci’s favourite places, especially in the winter. (‘Fewer tourists, more personality,’ she’d said, neatly sidestepping the fact that owning a beach hut in Whitstable didn’t exactly make her a local.) They hadn’t been since the end of last summer. Once the chemo started, and the radio, Nicci wasn’t well enough to go back.

‘Let’s go to the beach!’ he announced, tiggering into the living room in his best children’s TV presenter manner.

Two small blond heads turned to watch him, two pairs of brown eyes gave him a look of withering contempt, usually reserved for idiots who thought they might eat green stuff.

Harrie cocked her head on one side, Charlie the other. ‘But, Daddy,’ they said, ‘it raining.’

* * *

Angry waves lashed the shingle just short of the row of weather-beaten huts. There was no horizon that David could see. The unforgiving grey of the North Sea merged with a steely, rain-laden sky. Only the occasional tuft of green showed where feisty blades fought their way through spits of land, only to wonder what the point was when they got there. The usually cheerful pastel pinks and blues of the beach huts failed to inject any joy into the landscape.

He tried to see what Nicci would have seen if she’d been here. Spirit! Nature! A challenge! Without her to show it to him, all David could see was a cold beach; nature in the grip of the meanest of mean reds.

He’d come here looking for comfort. But there was nothing comforting on this bleak stretch of shingle.

The beach was empty in both directions. Not so much as a dog scavenging for scraps. Even the oyster stalls weren’t open, not that David would be using them if they had been. The memory of trying to force-feed the girls oysters – working on Nicci’s theory that they should get them used to everything early – and the look of disgust on their faces as they spat five quid’s worth of seafood across the table gave David his first smile of the day. ‘Heathens!’ Nicci had declared.

The only tourists dumb enough to brave the Kent coastline in the coldest March for thirty-one years had taken refuge in Nicci’s favourite café, Tea & Times, nursing steaming mugs and the papers. This was where David and the girls had been, eating cheese on toast and drinking hot chocolate until half an hour ago. And where, it was painfully clear, they should have stayed.

His was the only beach hut open, and David was rapidly wishing he hadn’t bothered. The interior – which in his mind’s eye was a stylish combination of nautical blue and white – was, in reality, drab and faded, the rattan sofa coated with grit that had crept through the cracks in the clapboard. The Calor Gas heater was empty. And he hadn’t thought to bring a new bottle. The beach hut was as desolate inside as it was out.

‘Need a wee-wee,’ Charlie announced.

David counted backwards from ten. ‘Sweetie,’ he said, when he reached zero, ‘you just had a wee-wee in the café. Come and help me tidy Mummy’s hut.’

‘Need one now.’

‘Right,’ David said. ‘We’d better go outside then.’

‘Co-old,’ Harrie said, plonking herself heavily on the gritty sand at his feet, as David helped Charlie crouch. ‘Harrie need a wee.’

Any second now the grizzling would start. Who could blame them? The afternoon was cold and wet and, frankly, no fun at all. Given the chance, he would happily sit down next to them on the damp shingle and grizzle along with them.

‘Come on, girls,’ he said, trying to sound convincing. ‘Let’s go for a walk. It’ll be fun.’

They weren’t fooled. ‘Cold, Daddy!’ Their little faces looked pinched and blue.

David closed his eyes and prayed for help; for a hot-water bottle, thicker coats for the girls, a teleporter, brandy, anything to get him through this.

‘Excuse me, are you OK?’ A kind voice out of the blue.

The woman’s trench coat was so wet it had turned dark grey, her cheeks were red with cold and her hair stuck to her face in tendrils. Not exactly the angel of mercy he’d had in mind.

‘No . . . I mean, yes. Thanks. I’m just, erm, regrouping.’ He forced a smile.

There was a yelp from behind. They both turned to see a black and white mongrel sniffing Harrie’s Peppa Pig lunch box, the only pink thing Nicci allowed houseroom, except pink wine.

‘Stop it, Norman,’ the woman yelled, tugging at the dog’s collar. ‘I’m sorry,’ she added. ‘He’s such a piglet. He thinks there might be second lunch in there.’

David’s smile was weak. ‘Afraid he’s out of luck. Nothing in there but dolls, clothes and KitKat wrappers.’

‘You’re David, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘I thought I recognised you. Your girls have got so big.’

He racked his brains. The woman was vaguely familiar, but only in the way people you see in the street or on television are.

‘Jilly,’ she said. ‘Three huts down from yours. Usually see more of you guys in the winter. How’s Nicci? Seems like an age since you were here. Must have been what, September?’

‘August Bank Holiday,’ David said.

It was only seven months ago, but his mood could scarcely have been more different.

Back then, they’d known Nicci was ill. The cancer had been given a name and a stage. There was still hope. Not a lot, but it was there. The date for Nicci’s operation was just days away. So this was their last family weekend away before the unavoidable weeks of treatment and, they hoped, recovery. This time, next August, they’d be back, they told themselves, drinking ice-cold rosé, David barbecuing Cumberland sausages, Nicci unpacking tubs of salad and olives, tearing crusty French bread into a basket. Far too much food for the four of them.

The girls had been crouching on the sand, wearing pants and Hello Kitty T-shirts, their shorts and crocs long discarded, faces comical masks of concentration as they built sandcastles for their Baby Alives, which Nicci had let David’s mother buy them. She’d stalled at the accoutrements. Fortunately, Jo and Lizzie hadn’t. The sky had been a perfect August blue, broken by a smattering of cartoon clouds the twins could have drawn.

Despite the Choos, and the Chanel, and the designer jeans that replaced her vintage frocks and Doc Martens, Nicci was the same girl he’d fallen in love with the moment he saw her. The knackered denim cut-offs with a hole in the bum where, if he looked hard enough, he could see a flash of black lace knickers, were gone. And so was the faded Stone Roses T-shirt – the one he’d bought her the first birthday after they’d got together. Although, knowing Nicci, it was folded in a box or bin bag somewhere. She’d worn it to grey and with sleeves rolled up to reveal slim tanned upper arms. The peroxide had been replaced by a pricey, professional dye-job, and the skinny tanned legs ended in orange toenails and clashing pink Havaianas, not the battered Docs she’d lived in when they first met. But she was still his Nicci.

He could see now that her face that day had been brave. With hindsight, her exhaustion and fear were obvious, but at the time it had been easier not to see. Kinder too. To both of them.

Too often he’d complained that they didn’t spend any time alone. Never did anything together, just the four of them, as a family.

‘The house is always full of your friends!’ he’d snapped, more than once, when the twins had gone to bed, and Sunday was about to slip into Monday, when they’d both be back at work without a private word spoken. ‘Why can’t we be just us? If I’d known I was walking up the aisle with all four of you—’

She’d put her hand in front of his mouth and he’d let her shush him.

‘They’re not just my friends. They’re my family,’ she said, as she always did. ‘You know that.’

And she replaced her hand with her mouth.

He missed her face and her smile. Her scent, the texture of her hair, the taste of her skin. She’d been what let him be him: David, the thoughtful one. He missed her body, and he missed feeling her naked skin as he fell asleep, and their hands clutching as they sometimes did when they both awoke.

The woman was staring at him, looking anxious. The rain was heavier now, slicking dark curls to her forehead.

He remembered her now. Well, he didn’t. But Nicci was always striking up conversations. Standing up to the rims of her Hunters in the freezing surf, chatting with strangers, as if it was July. You never knew who you might meet, she said. Better to waste ten minutes talking to a dull person than miss a chance of meeting an interesting one. To her, three huts down was almost family.

Always open, always looking. His exact opposite.

Nicci collected: people, things, clothes . . .

‘Oh!’ The woman’s face was ashen. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve said the wrong thing, haven’t I? You two haven’t . . . you haven’t split?’ Mortification crossed her face. ‘I can’t believe it. You always seemed so, happy . . .’ Her voice trailed away.

David shook his head, finally glad of the rain blurring his vision and trickling down his face. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We haven’t split.’

Oblivious to the rain, the girls sat at his feet petting the dog, content for the first time that day. ‘I’m sorry,’ David said. ‘I told everyone I could think of. Everyone in Nicci’s address book . . . I don’t know how to say this . . . She had cancer. It . . . the end . . . was quick.’

Quick, but not painless.

The expression that crossed the woman’s face was agonisingly familiar. He’d seen it before, many times, over the last two months. In the months before too, when the end became inevitable. But that didn’t make it any easier, for either of them. As the woman hastily made her excuses and strode off down the beach, dog in tow, head down, into the rain, David decided he could hardly blame her.

Nicci’s Dead. It was a hell of a conversation stopper.

They packed up soon after. There was no point staying. He’d come here looking for Nicci, but he hadn’t found her.

She wasn’t here to be found.

Chapter Eleven

The only good thing about Croydon is leaving it, Lizzie thought, as she pulled her second-hand Renault out of The Cedars’ car park.

It wasn’t Croydon’s fault. She didn’t have anything against the place. In fact, it wasn’t Croydon she hated at all. It was Sanderstead, and The Cedars in particular.

The Cedars had been Lizzie’s mother’s home for two years now and Lizzie’s elder sister, Karen, had only managed to visit once. OK, so Lizzie lived an hour’s drive away, and Karen’s journey involved an eight-hour transatlantic flight, but even so, Lizzie thought, stomping her foot on the brake as a bus pulled out, would it kill her to visit her mother a couple of times a year?

‘I only get two weeks’ holiday,’ Karen reminded her when Lizzie called from the car park to give her an update. ‘And anyway, what would be the point of begging unpaid time off work? She wouldn’t recognise me anyway.’

Lizzie’d had to resist the urge to hurl her mobile onto the gravel. She couldn’t afford to replace it. ‘You think she recognises me?’ she said instead.

Before the home there had been the memory loss. The missing door keys, the lost handbags, the returning from school to twenty-five voicemail messages from her mother, all checking she hadn’t been killed in a car crash reported on the local news thirty miles away.

Doctors’ appointments, specialists’ appointments, MRI scans and CAT scans, had swiftly followed those calls. Lizzie handled it largely on her own. Gerry was in meetings. Entertaining important clients. Away on business/at a training course/being fast-tracked. Gerry was off being Gerry.

And then they had the care home row.

I wouldn’t be any help, babe. What do I know about care homes?

‘The same as me,’ Lizzie had said. Fuck all.

She didn’t add that bit. Just as she never gave her sister a piece of her mind. Just as she’d never properly quarrelled with her mother. The stand-up knock-down row she should have had at nineteen or twenty-one had somehow gone astray.

Instead she visited countless care homes, each more depressing than the last, and then found an estate agent to sell the family home to pay for her mother’s care. Each step of the way she religiously called Karen in Brooklyn so she’d know exactly what was going on. And each time Karen had been too busy with work, with her husband and children, to come and help.

Eventually, after Lizzie threatened to give every last stick of furniture to charity, Karen took unpaid leave from her job on Wall Street. The forty-eight hours she stayed at the Gatwick Hilton and systematically tried to ‘put right’ every decision Lizzie had made were topped off by their mother’s glazed lack of recognition. No, Lizzie was pretty sure Karen wouldn’t be coming back any time soon. And who could blame her? Lizzie only wished she had the same option.

In a way, she was glad. Sometimes doing everything yourself was simply easier . . . As she pulled onto the M23 and put her foot down, she felt her spirits lift. It was done.

The Stone Roses went on, the early album with all the good tracks. Not even her music really, but an old boyfriend at uni’s. Somehow she’d adopted his music taste as her own and had never really moved on.

Mum had been even worse today.

‘Isn’t it nice of Kathleen to come and see me,’ she’d said, before lapsing into one of many long and intricate conversations with herself. It was ironic. Mum had never been chatty. Now you couldn’t shut her up.

Janet, The Cedars’ manager, had shrugged apologetically. As if to say, What can you do? Lizzie had shrugged back. If Janet didn’t know, she certainly didn’t.

Kathleen was her mother’s cousin, dead for ten years. Lizzie had been Kathleen for months now. At first she’d thought Mum did it on purpose, to punish Lizzie for not being Karen. Now she knew it was the illness at work.

The next call to Karen was going to be grim. Lizzie needed to tell her The Cedars felt Mum needed specialist care. For which read expensive.

‘What’s wrong with the NHS?’ Karen would say. And Lizzie would reply, ‘They’ll pay for Mum when we can’t afford to any more.’

And Karen would say, ‘We can’t afford to now.’

So predictable. So pointless. So why bother? Because Karen was the eldest, that was why. It had always been that way, Lizzie’s entire life.

Turning the corner into the cul-de-sac, Lizzie saw instantly that their three-bedroom house was dark, the only unlit house in the loop of exclusive three-and four-bedroom New England-style properties. Everyone else was in, doing whatever Lizzie’s neighbours did in the evenings. Watching television, having dinner parties, drinking too much white wine.

Wherever Gerry’s silver Audi Quattro was, it wasn’t here.

She knew she should have felt cross, that she should have wanted Gerry waiting here to greet her. Instead she felt relieved. Pulling up in front of their glossy garage door, she grabbed her bag off the passenger seat and locked the car, watching lights blink as the alarm set itself. Wanting time alone – even on Sunday evening – wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She could indulge her secret passion for Countryfile, open a bottle of something cold and white, instead of drinking the Rioja that Gerry preferred.

She could drink white wine, hog the bathroom, use all the hot water. She could even make headway into the damn gardening books she’d taken out of the library.

Having drawn the curtains, she flipped on the television – in that order, always in that order – and peered in the fridge. So much for the wine choice: half a bottle of Pinot Grigio and two cans of Peroni.

One eye on the television, she settled onto the sofa and picked up Alan Titchmarsh’s The Gardener’s Year.

The phone inside began ringing precisely as David’s house alarm started peeping. Thirty seconds and counting to disable the beeping, before all hell broke loose. The phone would have to wait. There probably wouldn’t be anyone on the other end anyway.

By the time he’d keyed in the security code the phone had fallen silent and he felt his shoulders relax. Head down, he ran back to the car, hoisted first one child, then the other, and carried them into the house, depositing one on each sofa, before heading back to grab their bags and lock the car.

As he did, the phone started up again.

‘Da-addy . . .’

‘I’m here,’ he promised them. ‘Just let me get rid of this.’

‘Hello?’

‘I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday. I’m looking for David Morrison.’

The voice belonged to a woman. Not old, but certainly not young. She sounded anywhere from fifty something upwards. What she didn’t sound like was a cold caller.

‘That’s me,’ he said.

‘Ah, um, good. I mean . . . it’s good that I’ve found you,’ the woman said. ‘It’s taken weeks. And then I wasn’t sure I had the right number.’

‘Da-addy!’

Christ, David thought, cut to the chase. ‘Well, you’ve found me,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Well, um. You don’t know me. But you might know my name. It’s – well, it was – Lynda Webster.’

David racked his brains. He didn’t know anyone by that name.

‘Lynda Webster?’ the woman repeated, her voice a question now.

When it became clear the name meant nothing to him, she cleared her throat and when she spoke again the nerves had been replaced by sadness. ‘David, I’m Nicci’s mother.’

David put down the phone. He didn’t intend to. It was instinctive.

The telephone rang again almost immediately.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I did that.’

‘Nicci must have told you terrible things about me . . .’

‘She didn’t tell me anything,’ David said. ‘You weren’t a welcome topic of conversation. I didn’t even know you were still alive.’

Brutal, he thought. Before deciding he just didn’t care. There was a silence at the far end of the line, as if the woman was considering that. And then a sigh.

‘You did know she had a mother?’

‘Da-addy!’

‘Look, the girls—’ David stopped; suddenly aware he was talking for the first time to his children’s grandmother. ‘I can’t talk now. Give me a number where I can reach you and I’ll call you back when they’re in bed.’

A silence said the woman didn’t believe him.

‘I will, Lynda,’ he said. It sounded weird; over-familiar. ‘Look, Mrs Webster . . . apparently you know where to find me. It’s not like I have a choice.’

He heard her mutter something.

‘Give me your number,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll call back. It won’t be before seven, maybe later. Depends how long it takes to persuade them to go down.’

‘What are their names?’ the woman asked, tentatively.

David hesitated.

‘Charlie and Harrie,’ he said, before hanging up a second time.

Chapter Twelve

Bedtime was a nightmare, as if all the stress of the day at Whitstable had seeped into Harrie and Charlie’s pores, along with the salt, grit and tar. When the girls finally went down, after two stories and endless grizzling, David barely had time to pour himself a large brandy before the phone rang again. This time he knew there would be someone on the other end.

‘I said I’d call you,’ he said, without waiting for her to speak. ‘The girls are, tricky, at the moment. It took a while.’

‘Hardly surprising,’ Lynda Webster said. ‘They’ve not long lost their mother. I expect they’re confused.’

‘That’s one way of describing it.’ David took a slow sip of the Courvoisier and felt its warmth slide down his throat. ‘Sad, mainly.’

‘You’ve really never heard of me?’

‘I knew you existed. But no more than that. She didn’t tell me you were dead, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘It wasn’t,’ the woman said tightly. ‘That’s all?’

‘You fell out before university. That’s it.’

‘That’s the truth at least.’

‘I’d like to be able to tell you something different,’ David said. ‘But Nicci never talked about you. It was one of her conditions, right from the start. She didn’t know her dad, and you and she had a huge row in her teens and hadn’t spoken since. End of subject.’

‘End of subject?’

‘That’s what she said.’

‘You didn’t ask?’

‘Of course I asked!’ David struggled to hang on to his temper. Who did this woman think she was?

‘I didn’t mean to suggest—’

‘You did,’ he snapped, cutting her off. ‘Of course I asked about her family. I was married to her, for Christ’s sake.’

Was. Tears threatened to burst through.

Am, he thought. Am married to her.

Closing his eyes, David took a deep breath and then another. ‘I only asked a couple of times,’ he said, when his voice was steady again. ‘Near the start, before I learnt it was on Nicci’s Don’t Go There list.

‘Don’t go there . . . ?’ The woman’s shock was clear.

This wasn’t like him, David thought. Why was he jabbing away at her? Whatever this woman was to blame for, Nicci’s death wasn’t on that list. But she’d asked, and for some reason he felt obliged to tell the truth.

‘Listen,’ David said. It wasn’t quite an order. ‘Once, at uni, when I asked, she got up, walked out of my room and wouldn’t speak to me or even see me for a week. When she came back she told me it was on the condition that I never asked again. I thought I’d lost her. So I decided right there that it wasn’t worth the risk. I didn’t like to see her hurt, I loved – love – her.’

‘And when you had your babies, she didn’t . . . ?’ The woman took a deep breath. ‘You didn’t ever . . . ?’

‘I know what you want to hear,’ David said quietly. ‘But it would be a lie. Nicci never mentioned you. Not once. Not when we married. Not when we had Charlie and Harrie. Not even when she was . . .’

He couldn’t bring himself to complete that sentence.

‘I guessed as much. That’s why I called. When I read she’d died I thought . . . well, I’d wait to hear. I thought she might have left me something.’

David tensed, his fingers clenching the phone. It must have been somehow audible.

‘Oh, not like that,’ Nicci’s mother said. ‘I don’t mean money. Although I know she was well off. By my standards, anyway. I don’t want you to think that’s why I called. I thought perhaps a letter, or something.’

‘Something?’

‘A brooch . . . ?’

It was not quite a question, and they both recognised she already knew the answer. Her voice had risen on the word more in hope than expectation.

David shivered at a memory of Nicci and he on the shingle near the beginning, in mid-winter. She’d pushed her hand into her pocket and pulled out a silver brooch. A very ordinary brooch. So ordinary, it could have passed for tin.

‘What’s that?’ he’d asked.

She hadn’t answered. For a moment, he’d thought she was going to hurl it straight into the cold grey sea. Instead she’d put it back into her pocket, almost as if deciding throwing it wasn’t worth the effort. He wasn’t meant to notice when she’d dropped it into a bin on their way back to his rooms. Another lover, he’d thought. And he’d kept thinking that, until now.

When David didn’t say anything the woman sighed.

‘The reason I’m calling . . .’ she paused as if seeking the right words, ‘. . . I thought . . . I’d like to know my granddaughters.’

‘Your granddaughters?’

‘If you don’t mind. I mean, obviously I understand you’ll need time to think it over.’

In a way he’d been expecting this from the second the woman announced herself. But now she’d come out with it, he could hardly contain his anger. If he didn’t mind? Of course he bloody minded. And, more importantly, Nicci would mind.

Nicci would mind violently. If Nicci had wanted Charlie and Harrie to know their grandmother, she’d have introduced them long before now.

‘Oh, not right away,’ the woman said, sensing David’s mood. ‘I wouldn’t dream of asking that. I thought maybe you and I could meet, for a coffee or something, So you can see I don’t have two heads. Or whatever Nicci told you I had.’

‘You’re missing the point,’ David said curtly. ‘Nicci never told me anything at all.’

Once he’d put the phone down on her for the third time that evening, Nicci’s mother didn’t call back. Or maybe she did. David pulled the jack from its socket so he didn’t have to find out, refilled his glass and retired to the bedroom. Now he sat on his side of the bed, brandy long since drained.

Their room was lit only by the orange glow of the street-light through open curtains, and the nightlight’s glimmer from the children’s room next door. David didn’t need any extra light to see the photograph he was holding. He’d looked at it so many times since he’d put down the phone, the image was imprinted on his brain.

Seven weeks Nicci had been dead. Seven weeks, two days and twenty-one hours. And already he knew more about her than he had in the sixteen years they’d been together.

The square lay in the palm of his hand, corners bent upwards from over-handling. It was a Polaroid, the white frame daylight-faded to creamy yellow, the image itself washed opaque.

Snuffling came through the baby monitor as Charlie – or was it Harrie? – turned over in her sleep. Nicci had deemed the monitor redundant almost a year earlier, but since her death David had reinstated it. He found it comforting. The sound of his daughters’ slow breathing got him through most nights.

The photograph had been in her bedside cabinet all along.

He’d found it a couple of weeks back as he bagged up the last of her medicine to return to the hospital, unable to bear the sight of her cancer paraphernalia any longer. It had been at the bottom of the drawer, book-marking a page in one of the cancer memoirs that had become her favoured reading. Now they sat in a bag under the stairs waiting to go to Oxfam. Where the Polaroid would have gone too, if it hadn’t slipped from the paperbacks as he carried them downstairs. He only knew who it was now because of a scrawl in an unfamiliar hand across the back.

Lynda and Nicola.

It was a very seventies Polaroid, Nicci’s mum all Suzi Quatro hair and denim flares, standing beside a small girl – three years old, maybe four – squinting warily into the camera. Red gingham dress bunched up, revealing skinny legs, white socks and red T-bar shoes. The girl stood half on, half off a blue trike with a yellow seat and handlebars.

If only he’d known it was there before, he could have asked Nicci about it. Only Nicci wouldn’t have told him. But now he knew someone who would. If he’d let her.

The other person in the photo.

Chapter Thirteen

‘Marking homework?’

Lizzie jumped. She’d been so engrossed in her gardening books she didn’t hear Gerry’s key in the lock. She’d only just reached April and the things that should have been done by now already stretched to three pages of an exercise book.

‘A gardening book?’ He looked surprised.

With one sock-clad foot Lizzie kicked a half-eaten packet of chocolate HobNobs under the coffee table and out of Gerry’s line of sight. Only that morning he’d grabbed her bum as she struggled into size twelve jeans – jeans that now cut into her middle, forcing a roll of flesh over the waistband – and made some comment about her ‘filling her jeans’.

How had that happened? Only last autumn she’d been comfortable in her favourite size tens. Now she was on the verge of swapping the twelves for the fourteens she kept under her bed for just such emergencies. Some people, people who mostly didn’t need to lose weight in the first place – Nicci, for example – responded to life’s traumas by losing their appetite. The heartbreak diet.

Lizzie was the total opposite; her emotional history mapped out in junk food. Recently, this ran:

1) Mother with Alzheimer’s – one packet of chocolate HobNobs.

2) Row with sister, over Mother – whole tube of Pringles. 3) Best friend’s funeral – bottle of dry white and a bowl of peanuts with takeaway pizza chaser, repeat as necessary.

4) Fight with Gerry about giving up teaching to become a proper wife/mother; her timekeeping; what she/he was doing at the weekend* (*delete as applicable) – that happened so often it barely merited more than the bar of Sainsbury’s cooking chocolate she’d hidden from herself at the back of the freezer.

Hunger had nothing to do with it.

Closing the gardening book, Lizzie stretched her cheek up to receive his kiss. Gerry had the kind of whiskers that meant if he shaved at 8 a.m., he had a beard by lunchtime. It was early evening now. There were days she felt she could get a rash just by looking at him.

‘Pooh,’ she said. ‘You smell beery.’

Gerry winked. ‘I am beery,’ he said. ‘Nineteenth hole.’

‘Thought it was rugby today.’ She didn’t need to glance at her watch to know he’d spent far more hours in the clubhouse than he had on the course.

‘Golf. Told you this morning. Anyway, I knew you’d be out so I went for a late lunch with the guys after.’

And drove home? Lizzie wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead, she reached for her book, flicking to a boxout on compost.

What was the difference between peat, loam and ericaceous compost? Who cared and why would it matter? She couldn’t believe Nicci had. Nicci had to be more of a ‘shove it in and see what grew’ type of gardener. Didn’t she?

‘How was your mum?’

‘The same,’ she said. ‘Still thinks I’m Aunt Kathleen, though . . . Thanks for asking.’

Crouching down beside her chair, Gerry slipped both arms around her, fingers grazing her breast as they passed. His breath was yeasty on her ear. Lizzie forced herself not to tense.

‘I’m glad you’re not down,’ he said, as his left hand crept back up, cupping her breast.

Lizzie wasn’t in the mood, not really. Some people lost themselves in sex, used it as a release. Mona, for one. And Nicci too, when they were first at college.

Not Lizzie.

She’d always felt a bit out of it like that. A bit uptight – frigid, some git who played rugby had called her in sixth form – but that was just her. She had to feel close, loved and liked to want sex. And she had, with Gerry, in the early years, but now . . .

‘Come upstairs?’

Closing her eyes, Lizzie emptied her mind, forcing herself to go with it as Gerry began kissing her neck, his free hand deftly unbuttoning her shirt. After all, you didn’t get babies without sex and they hadn’t ‘done it’ in almost a month.

They used to have the ‘There’s never a right time to have babies’ row every second month. Back then, Lizzie was the one arguing to start a family. Gerry was too busy, he was in line for another promotion, he wanted to wait until next year when they’d be able to afford another, bigger, house . . . The only argument he never used back then was her job. Because he knew she’d throw that up in a second. It was a job – teaching at the local primary – and she enjoyed it, but it wasn’t her life’s work, not like her sister’s career. Something she’d be willing to ditch when they started a family. Lizzie was positively old-fashioned like that. It was another thing she and Karen didn’t agree on.

Then it changed. Gerry started talking about babies and she – Lizzie hardly dared say it – began to wonder if the time was right.

But she’d always wanted a family.

Lizzie could remember her elation the first time she’d mentioned babies over breakfast and he hadn’t flinched. That had been a couple of years ago.

The other night, he’d made some comment about the pre-prep school his boss sent his son to. So now he was willing to talk babies; but the local school at which she taught was no longer good enough.

Gerry groaned as his hand eased into her bra and stroked her nipple until it stiffened. His other hand slipped inside her jeans.

No babies without sex, Lizzie reminded herself. And she did want to start a family . . . didn’t she?

Chapter Fourteen

‘Where’s the roasting tin?’

‘Same place as usual, I imagine.’

‘Nu-huh.’ Lizzie shook her head. ‘I’ve looked there, and all the other likely places.’

The two women looked at each other and rolled their eyes.

Jo threw open the kitchen window. ‘David,’ she yelled. ‘What have you done with the roasting tin?’

‘What have I done with . . . ?’ he shouted over the shrieks of two small girls. Having hunted Easter eggs, provided by Jo and hidden by David after they’d gone to bed the night before, Charlie and Harrie were on a carbohydrate high, taking turns to be pushed on the tyre hanging from the old apple tree.

‘Higher, Daddy, higher!’

‘In a sec . . . Nothing. Haven’t touched the damn thing. Do I look like a man who’d know what to do with a roasting tin?’

‘More than Gerry does,’ Lizzie muttered, looking for a cupboard she hadn’t yet searched. ‘Who else would move it? The kitchen ghost?’

She caught Jo’s eye. Jo raised a quizzical eyebrow.

Jo looked tired, Lizzie thought, nothing like herself. The roots were visible in her usually flawlessly highlighted hair and her fringe kept falling into her eyes. She was dressed as if for a ramble: battered biker boots; knackered, not-for-going-out jeans; and what looked suspiciously like one of Si’s fleeces. A fleece? Nicci would have had something to say about that. Maybe that was the point. Nicci couldn’t see them. For the first time in years Jo was at liberty to wear whatever she wanted. They all were. But it was Easter Sunday and the first time they’d all been here, together, since Nicci’s funeral. Lizzie had assumed that meant they’d make an effort. But no.

She felt painfully overdressed. Glancing down at her floral dress and heels, she wondered if there was time to nip home and change.

‘You OK?’

Lizzie snapped back to see Jo looking concerned. ‘Yeah, fine, just spooked myself with the ghost comment,’ she lied. ‘But I didn’t mean it like that. Anyway, if it was Nicci – which it isn’t, obviously – at least she’d have put it back in the right place.’ Jo started to laugh, and after a moment Lizzie joined in.

It was shaping up to be a beautiful Easter weekend, exactly as Jo had hoped. Late April sunshine crept round from the front and in through south-facing windows to throw a strip of gold across the oak table Nicci and David had lovingly sanded and varnished. The Chinese slate floor beneath the table reflected a rainbow of bronzes and gilts. The kitchen was warm from the Aga, the scent of coffee lingered, and the Archers squabbled amongst themselves in the background. Everything was as it should be.

Almost.

When Nicci became too tired to cook Sunday roast for ten, back in the autumn, the others had taken over, with Nicci presiding over the proceedings, passing judgement on the consistency of their stuffing or the sweetness of the apple sauce. And they smiled and gritted their teeth and let her. It was better to go on pretending nothing had changed. All of them – friends, partners and children – had lunched there every Sunday without fail, unless Jo and Si had his kids for the weekend; then they’d appear in the late afternoon after dropping the boys back at their mother’s. Usually just in time for pudding and to help with the third or fourth bottle of wine.

Jo shook the image from her head. ‘Got it!’ she said, emerging from under the sink, roasting tin aloft. ‘Suspect kitchen ghost’s offspring put it there.’

‘Sorry I’m late,’ Mona said, shouldering her way through the back door and kicking it shut with her heel. ‘No reason,’ she added, pre-empting the question. ‘Just late.’

She had once been a year late for Lizzie’s thirtieth birthday party, since when anything less was considered minor.

‘Good to see you.’ Tossing the roasting tin on the side with a clatter, Jo threw her arms around Mona, coat, bags and all; ignoring the look of surprise that flickered across Mona’s face. ‘It’s been too long.’

It had only been a couple of weeks, but that was long by their standards. Lately they weren’t sure which of them was meant to be holding it together. Jo was trying, but it didn’t come naturally. She preferred to watch from the periphery: not so much outside looking in as standing on the edge, with both choices open to her. She wasn’t Nicci; didn’t have that magnetism, the sort that made others gravitate to her.

‘Where’s Dan?’ Lizzie asked. ‘I bought him a tub of Celebrations. He is coming, isn’t he?’

He’s there.’ Mona jerked her head towards the back garden, where her son was already kicking a football. ‘I got organic crumble, real custard, profiteroles and crème fraîche. And organic hot cross buns, just in case.’

‘In case of what,’ Jo laughed. ‘Famine? Apocalypse? Terrorist attack? We’ve got enough food here to feed the entire street.’

Mona’s inedible cooking was the stuff of myth. Since no one could remember ever tasting it, Jo suspected the myth was urban, created by Mona to avoid having to do any. Like Jo’s brother’s famously crap washing-up.

Dumping her coat on the back of a chair, to reveal an embroidered smock over narrow dark jeans and ankle boots, Mona began emptying the contents of her carrier bags into the fridge.

‘What needs doing? More coffee?’ The others shook their heads but Mona filled the kettle anyway. ‘Peel spuds then?’ she offered, and took up position at the sink overlooking the back garden.

For a few minutes the three women worked in companionable silence, Lizzie salting the pork for crackling and slicing apples for apple sauce, Jo chopping nuts for nut roast and Mona peeling a mountain of King Edwards. Bags of carrots, parsnips and broccoli were lined up beside her.

‘Is it me,’ Mona said suddenly, ‘or is this weird?’

‘Is what weird?’ Lizzie said. Her tone made it clear she wished Mona hadn’t put the thought into words.

‘This . . . the three of us preparing Sunday lunch in Nicci’s kitchen, as if nothing’s changed. David and Si and Dan in the garden, Gerry . . .’ Mona frowned. ‘Where’s Gerry?’

‘Rugby. Be here later.’ Lizzie didn’t look up from slicing apples, but Jo noticed her back tense in preparation for the Gerry-related onslaught. Nicci might be gone but clearly Lizzie didn’t think that was about to change.

Jo loved Lizzie. She just wished Lizzie had married someone different. Someone who deserved her.

Mona opened her mouth to say something – probably exactly what Jo was thinking. Jo shot her a warning glance. Back off, she mouthed.

‘It’s you,’ Lizzie said testily. Mona looked at Jo and raised her eyebrows so they vanished into her hair. It was her party trick. Jo stifled a giggle.

‘It’s me what?’

‘You said, is it me or is this weird? It’s you.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Reckon,’ Lizzie snapped. ‘We’re old friends having Sunday lunch together. What’s wrong with that?’

‘You know what Mona means,’ Jo said gently. Where was this coming from? Lizzie was normally resident peacemaker, the one smoothing the sheets and making the tea, not the one lobbing rocks. Maybe Nicci’s spirit was lurking around, hiding roasting tins and making trouble.

‘Come on, Lizzie, you have to admit, it is a bit weird,’ Jo said. ‘Especially the Mona-David thing.’ She glanced around, double-checking little ears – and big ears – were safely outside. ‘I mean, what are we supposed to do about the letters?’

‘Ignore them, that’s what I plan to do,’ Mona banged the potato peeler on the worktop. ‘It’s just another of Nicci’s mad schemes.’ She raised her eyes to heaven, and Jo could have sworn that if Mona had been Catholic she’d have crossed herself.

‘We don’t have to do it.’

‘I don’t know . . .’ Lizzie sounded thoughtful. ‘I feel like we do.’

‘Lizzie!’ Mona said. ‘All you’ve got is a bit of gardening! If Nicci has her way, I have to, well, you know . . . with David!’

‘Mo . . .’ said Jo, but Mona was in full swing.

‘C’mon, Lizzie. Admit it, you got away light.’

‘It might be just a bit of gardening to you,’ Lizzie said tightly, ‘but Nicci knew I can’t even grow a weed! And have you looked out there? It’s a wilderness. How can I get it looking right for David, for Harrie and Charlie?’

Jo and Mona followed Lizzie’s gaze.

It wasn’t strictly true. Although Jo had to admit she’d seen Nicci’s garden in better shape. Not that she could remember even noticing the garden since last September, when Nicci had sat her down in this kitchen, put a large glass of red wine in front of her and told Jo she had cancer.

Since then, the leaves shed in autumn had been swept aside, but not cleared, and were mouldering on the flower-beds. Occasional spring bulbs had fought their way through, but their leaves were straggly as if, with no one to appreciate their efforts, they’d given up trying. Even Nicci’s beloved vegetable patch beyond the apple tree was little more than mud and blown-over runner bean tepees.

Jo was horribly afraid Lizzie was right. The garden looked as desolate as they felt. Somebody had to do something.

‘And even if it wasn’t a wilderness,’ Lizzie’s tone, now verging on hysterical, took Jo by surprise. She looked as panic-stricken as she sounded, ‘I’m not Nicci. I’ll never be Nicci. I don’t know a bromeliad from a perennial.’

The others looked at her in astonishment.

‘What’s a bromeliad?’ Mona asked. ‘Just out of interest.’

‘I don’t know!’ Lizzie wailed. ‘That’s the point. I got a book from the library, and then I got three more. And now I wish I hadn’t. It might as well be Chemistry A level, for all the sense it makes. I mean, it has charts, diagrams, tables.’ Lizzie looked at Jo – the mathsy one – as if she could make it all clear.

Jo had made sure the bills got paid at uni. She divided them up, told you what you owed and you paid. If not for her, the rest of them would have been sitting in the cold, probably in darkness.

‘It can’t be that hard,’ Jo said. ‘Diagrams!’ Lizzie repeated. ‘And tables. You should see the list of things Alan Titchmarsh reckons need to be done by April. Even if I did nothing but garden full time between now and June I couldn’t catch up.’

Jo slid her arms around Lizzie and suppressed a laugh as Lizzie buried her head in Jo’s shoulder. Over Lizzie’s head she saw Mona stuff her hands over her mouth.

‘I mean,’ Lizzie’s words were muffled, ‘how did Nicci fit it all in?’ She let out a wail and Mona, unable to contain herself, dissolved into fits.

‘Come on, Lizzie,’ Jo said, gripping Lizzie’s shoulders and fixing her with an encouraging smile. ‘It’s just a garden. Do it if you want. Don’t if you don’t. But if you decide to do it don’t try to do it Nicci’s way. Otherwise you’re setting yourself up for failure. Do it your way. You know Nicci, she probably just did the bits she wanted to and ignored the rest. That’s how she did everything else. Get out there and scratch the surface and you’ll probably find it’s not as magazine-perfect as it used to look from a distance.’

They were sitting at the refectory table watching Lizzie tear off sheet after sheet of kitchen roll, blow her nose, and toss it aside. She was nursing a mug containing the lukewarm dregs of a pot of coffee. All three women jumped when the phone rang.

It rang three more times before Jo found the handset under a tea towel on the worktop. ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘David Morrison’s, erm . . .’ Jo looked at the others but they just shrugged. ‘Residence?’ she finished.

Mona sniggered and Lizzie waved a hand to shush her. ‘Hello? Hello?’

There was no answer, just a distant click at her third ‘hello’. But just like last time she had a distinct feeling someone was there.

‘Who was it?’ Mona asked.

‘No one. It sounded like there was someone there when I answered but the line went dead when they heard my voice.’

‘Probably a call centre in India,’ Lizzie said. ‘You know how the line goes quiet for a minute or two after you answer, like it’s waiting for a connection. Always freaks me out.’

‘Didn’t sound like that. More like there was someone there, then they hung up. It happened that evening I came round to see David about Charlie and Harrie, too.’

‘David’s got a mystery lover,’ Mona laughed.

‘In your dreams!’

‘I heard the phone.’ David was standing in the open back door. ‘Who was it?’

‘Oi, goalie!’ Dan shouted. David let the door swing shut on Mona’s son’s protests.

‘Nobody,’ Jo said. ‘I’d have called you.’

‘Didn’t they leave a message?’ he asked, crossing the kitchen and checking the little red light.

‘When I say nobody, I mean, literally, nobody,’ said Jo, trying to hide her irritation as he checked there was no one on the line anyway. ‘Like last time,’ she said when he replaced the receiver. ‘Remember? Probably just a call centre.’

‘Are you expecting a call, David?’ Mona asked pointedly.

‘No,’ he said, but he seemed on edge. ‘Just had a couple of strange calls lately, bloody irritating.’

‘God,’ Jo muttered when he’d rejoined the game, ‘what’s eating him? Perhaps you’re right, Mona. Maybe he’s being consoled by a nurse from the hospice.’

Lizzie sprayed her coffee. ‘Stop it, you two!’ she said. ‘David wouldn’t do something like that.’ She pushed the coffee away. ‘It must be wine o’clock by now, surely?’

‘It is by my watch,’ Mona said.

The cork was out of the bottle and three indecently large glasses filled with Pinot Grigio when the phone rang again. This time David was in the kitchen before Jo could pick up.

He listened and then dropped it back onto its charger. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean to be paranoid. It’s just I keep having these nuisance calls. They’re getting to me a bit.’

‘You can report them, you know,’ Lizzie said. ‘There’s a number you can call to get your number put on some list that means they can’t cold-call you. I’ll find out what it is, if you like?’

‘Nah, it’s fine, thanks,’ he said, taking a swig from Jo’s glass before heading back out into the garden. ‘I’ll do it.’

Only Jo noticed him pull the wire from the socket before he left.

‘Nom nom,’ Dan said, walking mud across the slate floor. ‘Smells brilliant. What is it?’

‘Roast pork, roast potatoes, veg, apple sauce, nut roast for Mum,’ Lizzie reeled off without taking her eyes off the gravy. There were lumps. There were always lumps. Carefully she chased one to the edge and squished it against the pan with the back of her spatula. Cornflour blossomed white in the golden liquid and dissolved.

Dan was right. The food smelled amazing. The rosemary and thyme that had been tossed in olive oil with the potatoes mingled with the scent of succulent pork, which was now crisping in the oven. Broccoli, green beans and peas were set to boil on the hob, their steam condensing on the windows overlooking the garden.

‘Talking of Mum, where is she? I thought she was in here.’

Jo looked up from the Observer in surprise. ‘Didn’t realise she wasn’t. Where’d she go, Lizzie?’

‘Loo, probably. Dunno, though. She’s been gone for a while.’

‘Typical.’ Dan rolled his eyes and grabbed a handful of crisps from a bowl on the side. ‘She’s always doing that.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Vanishing,’ Dan said. ‘On her mobile a-gain, I bet.’

‘Her mobile?’ Lizzie and Jo exchanged glances. ‘Yeah,’ Dan crunched through a mouthful of crisps and grabbed another handful. ‘She’s always on her mobile or looking at her mobile waiting for a text or a call. Reckon she thinks if she makes calls in the bathroom I can’t hear her. Like, duh . . .’

‘Hey, love, what’s up?’ Si leant over the back of Jo’s chair and wrapped his arms around her.

‘Lunch is up, nearly. Want a drink?’

‘Definitely,’ said Gerry, coming in behind him. ‘What have you got? Hey, Jo, if you don’t mind me saying, you look wrecked.’

‘Cheers, Gez.’ Jo stuck out her tongue. ‘You sure know how to make a girl feel good about herself.’

He was right, though. She did look wrecked. Looked wrecked, felt wrecked, was wrecked. But she’d been hoping to get away without anyone pointing it out. So far, the girls and David had been kind enough not to. Trust Gez.

‘What haven’t we got?’

‘I’m going to open Chablis, if anyone’s interested,’ David said, opening the fridge. ‘In Nicci’s honour.’

Chablis was another of Nicci’s favourites.

‘I don’t mind mixing my reds and whites if you don’t,’ Gerry said.

Over his shoulder Lizzie caught Jo rolling her eyes and muttering something under her breath. From where Lizzie sat, it looked like, Surprise me.

‘Gerry’s right, you know,’ Lizzie said, laying her free hand on Jo’s shoulder as they unloaded roast vegetables into a piping-hot serving bowl. ‘I didn’t want to say anything earlier, but you don’t look yourself. You’re not ill, are you?’

Jo picked imaginary bits off Si’s fleece, deciding how to respond.

Lizzie’s hand snaked down to the bowl and broke off a piece of roast potato, spiriting it into her mouth.

There were many things Jo wanted to say, not least of which was: pot/kettle, Lizzie O’Hara. You must have put on a stone since Christmas

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