FELICITY EVERETT grew up in Manchester, lived, worked and raised her family of four in London. In 2014 she returned from a four year spell in Melbourne, Australia, to live in Gloucestershire. After an early career in children’s publishing and freelance writing, she published her debut adult novel The Story of Us in 2011. Her second novel, The People at Number 9, was published in 2017.

Also by Felicity Everett

The Story of Us

The People at Number 9

The Move

Felicity Everett

ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019

Copyright © Felicity Everett 2019

Felicity Everett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

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

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

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

Ebook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008288396

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 Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008353759

For my family

(sorry about the sex scenes)

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

1

It was a miracle. I had navigated the town’s one-way system without taking a single wrong turn. And this had to be the right road out because I’d just passed Tesco Express, which I remembered Nick telling me was the last chance to pick up a pint of milk before you hit bandit country. As the houses petered out and the last streetlight of the town dwindled to a pinprick in my rear-view mirror, darkness fell like a cosh across the windscreen. I flicked the headlights onto full beam and turned the radio on. The syrupy late-night jazz made me feel like a character in a film. I imagined the panning shot, following my little car along the contours of the valley – the heroine, driving with trepidation into her new life. Nick had wanted to come up and fetch me, but I’d told him no. I didn’t want to be mollycoddled. Not any more.

A dilapidated signpost reared up from nowhere and, unsure whether I had read it right, I made the split-second decision to take the turn-off anyway, pitching the Renault downhill into a tunnel of green. Branches closed over my head and the hedgerows rattled the sides of the car, their abundant spring leaf-growth a sickly green in the halogen. I followed the lane through all its labyrinthine twists and turns and was starting to wonder whether I might after all have gone wrong, when I came to the derelict barn that marked the start of the hamlet. The cottage was around the next bend. With a surge of relief, I pressed the accelerator, saw – too late – a brief flash of orange in the headlights, braked hard, felt a dull thud; drove on.

‘I think I hit a fox.’

I stood on the doorstep, trembling. This was not the homecoming I had planned.

Nick pulled a sympathetic face. ‘I didn’t even see it.’ I could feel my voice starting to break. ‘I thought it was a branch, but it can’t have been because look…’ I raised my palm to show him a rusty smear of blood across it.

‘It wouldn’t have felt anything,’ he said briskly, ‘I wouldn’t worry. Come here…’

He drew me over the threshold into a welcoming hug, but I held myself a little aloof, torn between the gut-melting desire his presence still, in spite of everything, evoked and a reluctance to sully his pristine clothing with my bloody hand.

‘What if I only injured it?’ I fretted. ‘It might not even be dead…’

‘Come on, Kaz…’ Nick said, with slight impatience, ‘this is the countryside. Foxes are ten a penny here. The farmers hate ’em. You’ll be a local hero.’

He tilted my chin upwards with his knuckle and pressed his mouth on mine and I forgot about the fox and let my lips cling to his as if it were the kiss of life, which, in a way it was. When at last he signalled, with a volley of little kisses and a cancelling stroke of his finger across my cheek, that it was time to stop, I sighed, and turned to the room for the first time.

‘Wow!’

I had only seen the cottage once for half an hour after the vendor had moved out, leaving the ghostly silhouettes of her mock-Regency furniture on walls that needed a lick of paint. They had had the lick of paint and more. Oak floorboards gleamed in the lamplight. Fat church candles flickered on the deep sills of the curtain-less windows. Familiar items of furniture mingled with new ones I didn’t recognize. The place looked like a photo-shoot for Ideal Home.

‘You’ve been busy,’ I said.

‘I wanted it to be nice for you. You don’t mind that I chose things without you, do you…?’

He stooped slightly and looked into my eyes.

I shook my head with an amused grimace. Why should I mind about that? For the past four months, I had barely been able to choose what clothes to wear, what meal to eat, what TV channel to watch. I don’t think I was going to have a hissy-fit about whether he’d gone for Buttermilk or Dimity on the skirting boards.

‘That’s lovely,’ I said, nodding towards a scuffed leather armchair.

‘Local antique shop,’ Nick said smugly. ‘It’s the real deal, not one of those naff reproduction ones. Would have cost twice as much in Shoreditch.’ I had to suppress a smile at my alpha male husband’s unexpected knack for home-making. He had even had the rug cleaned. Or perhaps it just looked better in front of the rustic wood-burning stove than it ever had beside our ugly Victorian fireplace at home. I needed to stop calling Trenchard Street home. This was home now.

I struggled to subdue a wave of nostalgia for our old life. We never got the house right, in nineteen years. It had been a mish-mash of stuff – my parents’ teak dining table surrounded by Nick’s Swedish wishbone chairs. Nick’s carefully chosen abstract artworks jostling my folksy wall hangings. We didn’t see eye to eye about décor but somehow between his minimalism and my clutter we created a home. I’d preferred it when we’d just got together and the place was full of toys and IKEA tat, but as the boys grew up and Nick started to entertain his clients, good taste began to prevail. My quirky Mexican candelabra disappeared, to be replaced by a tasteful stainless steel job, and the Klippan sofa ended up in a skip. Yet the more our home became Nick’s home, the less at home he seemed. Funny that. I sometimes wonder if I was too much of a pushover. Perhaps he’d have respected me more if I’d put up a fight – stuck to my messy ways. Because things had got pretty messy anyway.

I glanced again around the open-plan cottage – glow of firelight over lime-washed walls, stacked logs and plumped cushions; a background scent of something grown up and aromatic.

‘What do you think?’ Nick asked.

‘I love it!’

He made to kiss me again, but I waved my bloody hand at him, more cheerfully this time, and he took me by the waist and steered me towards the kitchen. Here too, he had judged things perfectly. Belfast sink, maple work surface, slate grey Aga, concealed spotlights. And running along the back wall, a triptych of dormer windows, sleek dark mirrors, behind which lurked who knew what. I watched the reflection of my hand-washing in their black panes, foaming suds carrying away a wisp of pink under the state-of-the-art mixer tap. Nick handed me a threadbare tea towel – the one from way back, featuring ham-fisted portraits of Ethan and all his Year One classmates. I dried my hands, taking care not to sully the corner featuring the giant-headed alien that was our son, then rearranged the cloth with satirical precision over the hanging rail of the Aga.

‘I’m surprised you let this stay,’ I said, indicating the old-fashioned four-door oven.

‘It’s a little piece of history,’ said Nick. ‘I’m not a complete philistine.’

‘I could have sworn it was brown.’

‘I had it re-enamelled.’

‘You did not!’

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘No, I do.’ I clutched his forearms eagerly and felt him tense up.

‘The colour’s gorgeous. It’s just… you re-enamelling an Aga.’

‘Not literally me.’

‘Even so…’

‘The estate agent was really helpful. Recommended local people. The grey was her idea…’

I bet it was, I thought. I bet she had you on speed-dial. I’d met her once myself – Marnie – sugar-coating on a will of steel. Boob job. I had to stop thinking like this.

Nick handed me a glass of champagne and we clinked rims.

‘To us,’ he said.

He held my gaze, his eyes full of remorse. I wanted to tell him it was OK; that I had forgiven him. I welled up and he turned away, perhaps in shame, perhaps in exasperation. I watched him bend down to put the bottle back in the fridge, his shirt riding up to reveal the ragged birthmark on his lower back. I could have traced the shape of it with my eyes shut.

‘We’ll never live it down, you know,’ I said, straining after the playful tone of our earlier banter. He stood up again.

‘What?’

‘Us. Here with… that. I jerked my head towards the Aga. Wait till Dave and Jude see it.’

‘They’ll be jealous as fuck,’ he said. ‘They’d kill for a place like this. London’s over.’

‘Hmmm,’ I said.

‘They would,’ he insisted. ‘They’re miserable. Jude hates her job. Dave only stays for Arsenal. If they hadn’t remortgaged they’d move out in a heartbeat. They’re in denial.’

I smiled doubtfully, wondering if it wasn’t Nick who was in denial. Moving to the country had never been part of his game plan. He used to come out in a rash if he had to stay in a gîte for a week when the boys were young, so the idea that he’d suddenly become a convert was a bit of stretch. Still, a fresh start had been called for and this one was as good as any.

‘Why shouldn’t we live somewhere nice?’ he continued, bullishly. ‘Not that Jude and Dave will admit it’s nice. They can’t afford to. Not even to themselves.’

‘Nick!’ I laughed, incredulously. ‘They haven’t even got here yet.’

‘They don’t need to. I could see it in their eyes when I showed them the brochure. You poor bastards, they were thinking. Forget about having a life. It’ll be tribute bands down the Corn Exchange for you from now on. Good luck with multiculturalism. Good luck with buying a gram of coke.’

‘You don’t do coke.’

‘I know, because I don’t need to blot out the misery of my desperate urban existence. That’s what I mean. Denial.’ He seemed to notice, at last, that he’d been ranting, and had the grace to look a little sheepish.

‘Anyway,’ he brightened, ‘Shall we do the tour?’

I followed him up the open tread staircase, gratified to see that he’d given my blue slipware bowl pride of place on the landing window ledge. I touched it for luck on my way past.

‘Study,’ he said, standing to one side so that I could put my head round the door. ‘Had to double up some of the books.’

I nodded and backed out again.

‘Bathroom,’ he announced unnecessarily.

‘Nice mirror,’ I said in surprise. ‘Where’d you get that?’

It was an ornate antique French job – not Nick’s style at all. It hung opposite the claw-footed cast-iron bath, making the otherwise poky room look bigger and grander than it had any right to.

‘It was here when we looked round,’ he said, frowning, ‘don’t you remember?’

‘Oh yeah,’ I said quickly, ‘So it was. It just looks much better now you’ve done all this…’ I waved vaguely at the freshly painted walls.

‘She charged me over the odds for it really,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Not my scene, but I remembered you liked it…’

‘It’s gorgeous,’ I said, resting my cheek on his shoulder, ‘thank you.’

Nick inclined his head towards mine, and the tarnished mirror made Siamese twins of our reflection. He planted an absent-minded kiss in my hair, and I counted the seconds until he broke away again.

The first time he’d kissed me, I’d needed to come up for air. I suppose it wasn’t completely unexpected – he’d been giving me the eye ever since our bit of banter at the bar earlier in the evening. And every time he’d looked across at me, I’d had to look away quickly and pretend I hadn’t been ogling him back. I’d been telling myself the classy-looking blonde on his table might just be his date, not a permanent fixture, but I knew in my heart I was kidding myself. He had ‘married’ stamped through him like Brighton rock. It had got to that time in the evening when they put the lights down and cranked up Whitney, so rather than be a wallflower, I’d scrounged a ciggie off someone at my table and ducked outside. I’d been scrabbling in my bag for some matches, when his lighter flared by my cheek.

‘Oh, right, thanks,’ I said.

He lit his own cigarette and, crossing one arm over his midriff, propped the opposite elbow aloft and smoked it as if smoking were its own art form.

‘So…’ he said, after a while.

I glanced sideways at him, cursing my lack of small talk.

‘… Lunch next week.’

It wasn’t even a question.

I raised a quizzical eyebrow, hoping to convey much. That I was not the pushover he thought I was; that I was not into married men; that I might, in fact be busy next week.

I had only just put the cigarette to my lips when he leaned across and took it off me, tossing it, along with his own into the parched grass around one of the pegs securing the marquee. For a second, as his lips met mine, it occurred to me that the whole lot could go up. I didn’t care.

‘Shower’s a bit rubbish,’ Nick said now, stepping away from me just that bit sooner than I’d hoped. ‘Like being pissed on by a gnat.’ He demonstrated what looked to me an average flow. ‘I think we should get a bigger head.’

I imagined us in the steamy cubicle, water thundering down, hair plastered to our cheeks, bodies entwined…

‘OK,’ I said.

‘And last but not least, the master bedroom,’ he said, opening the door with a flourish.

I cast a greedy eye over the bed, which seemed to stretch like a small continent between the threshold of the room and the wide sash window on the gable wall.

‘Great view to wake up to,’ Nick said.

‘I remember.’

I did have a vague recollection of a wooded hill rising gently from behind the house, but I wasn’t sure whether I had seen it in the pages of the brochure or in real life. It had been a big selling point, the hill.

‘His ‘n’ hers hanging, like you wanted.’

He opened the doors of the built-in cupboards, in which every conceivable category of possession had its niche, from sportswear to handbags, jewellery to hats, the advantage of this approach being that the rest of the room retained its pared-down, monastic charm; the disadvantage, that the opening of the doors forced us back against the side of the bed, making it difficult to remain upright. In another life, we might have reached for one-another’s hands before falling back, like felled trees, onto the pristine duvet.

‘I know it’s small…’ Nick said.

‘No, I like that about it.’

‘… But it’s got everything we need.’

‘The blind’s nice.’

‘And if we just get in the habit of putting stuff away…’

I thought of our bedroom in Trenchard Street. The Lloyd loom chair, buried beneath piles of clothing, the dressing table, so cluttered with beauty products that I could barely reach for my hairbrush without causing a tsunami.

‘Definitely.’

‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ I said, as he made his way back down the landing.

‘Am I?’

‘Ethan’s room?’ I said, with a perplexed smile, my foot poised on the bottom step of the attic stairs.

For an instant he looked confused.

‘Oh, yeah. Go and have a look if you want.’

‘Aren’t you coming…?’

He shrugged and followed me up.

The door stuck a little as I pushed it open, breaking the seal of the fresh paint. I switched on the light and a bare forty-watt bulb illuminated a spartan space, empty except for two single beds and a cluster of unopened packing cases.

‘Singles?’ I turned to Nick with a bemused look.

‘I thought that’d be more practical,’ Nick said, evasively, ‘in case…’ He gave me a defensive glance.

‘In case Gabe wants to stay,’ I supplied. A pained look crossed Nick’s face.

I should not have sounded so grudging. Gabe was Nick’s son. The fact that he was pushing thirty and had just bought a flat of his own, courtesy of a whopping loan from his father should not, I supposed, preclude him from feeling welcome in our house. Surely Ethan should take priority though? It must surely still be his room, not ‘the boys’ room’ or ‘the spare room’. It would be hard enough persuading our disaffected young son back to this sleepy hamlet after his gap year, without making him feel like a guest. I don’t know what I had expected. Blue and white striped walls? A miniature basketball net? Ethan was nineteen now. A man. All the same, the emptiness, the sterility of the room could not have contrasted more starkly with the care Nick had lavished on the rest of the house.

I thought of Ethan’s old room in London. It had been a health hazard, the way teenage boys’ rooms often are – you went in holding your breath and hoped you could retrieve the five mouldering coffee mugs from under the bed before you had to gasp for air. It had accumulated grunge the way a bat cave accumulates guano, his interests over the years evidenced in layers, like relics in an archaeological dig, from Harry Potter to Stormzy, ammonites to condoms. But beneath the rank whiff of adolescence and the deliberate affronts to political correctness, I had always been able to detect the little boy he had been – not just in his football trophies or the dog-eared Pokemon cards at the back of a drawer, but in the clean, underlying tang of goodness.

‘Oh well,’ I said, coming out of my reverie, ‘if he gets himself a girlfriend, I suppose we can always push the beds together…’

I turned around to find Nick gone. How long had I been standing there? Two minutes? Ten? Had he left because I’d offended him or had he merely got bored of waiting? I felt a flutter of anxiety in my stomach. How graceless I’d been; how boorish to pick holes because the furniture wasn’t just so in every room. He’d gone to so much effort everywhere else; made such a beautiful job of it.

‘Nick?’ I called anxiously, hurrying down to the first-floor landing.

‘Better get a move on if you want some of this fizz,’ he called back, his tone friendly and relaxed.

‘Coming!’

I clattered down the last flight of stairs, relieved, chastened, grateful.

2

I rose up from sleep like a deep-sea diver. For a few seconds I had no idea where I was, and then I heard footsteps and the clink of crockery on the landing and I remembered. I kept my eyes closed until Nick had entered the room and set the tray down on the bedside table, I don’t know why. When I opened them, his face was an inch from mine, moving in for a kiss. I feinted to spare him my morning breath, and his lips landed on my cheek instead. His breath smelled faintly of garlic from last night’s meal and of his occasional tobacco habit and of Nick, which was the part that always slayed me. Perhaps mistaking my fastidiousness for lack of interest, however, he had already crossed to the window and raised the blind.

‘There you go,’ he said, turning to me proudly, ‘what do you reckon?’

I squinted into the sunshine, waiting for the dazzle of blue and green to resolve itself into a view. The hill was actually two hills, a greater and a lesser one, rising up from the land like the uneven breasts of a sleeping giantess. Bright green foliage covered the lower slopes, but the peaks protruded, nude and straw-coloured as if the effort of rising so high had sapped them of fecundity. Above, a single pillowy cloud hung in the turquoise sky as if on wires.

‘It’ll do,’ I said, turning to pick up my teacup.

‘Fuck off!’ Nick gave me an incredulous grin and I smiled back mischievously. For the first time since my arrival I felt connected to him. This was how it used to be – easy banter, insults even. The ruder we were to one another, the better things were between us. He had courted me in obscenities, but for months now he’d been treating me like his maiden aunt and for months I’d been feeling like her.

I threw off the duvet and went to stand beside him, slipping my hand warily around his waist. He slung his arm over my shoulder in comradely fashion and we contemplated the scene together.

‘It’s lovely,’ I said, ‘I love it. Well. Done. You.’ I punctuated each word with a kiss, lingering on the last one as a pretext to inhale his scent.

‘Yeah, well,’ he said smugly, ‘it was a no brainer really.’

I hooked my thumb over the waistband of his pyjama bottoms, and pretended not to notice him tense up. He turned and nuzzled my shoulder and, taking this as permission, I threaded my fingertips after my thumb. It felt like vertigo now, my desire – I could barely breathe. With a more or less convincing growl of lust, Nick made a lazy grab for my breast and I gasped with surprise and then, as his touch became more sensual, with gratitude. Pride left me now, and need took over. I manoeuvred myself in front of him, spread my palms wide across the windowsill and tilted my buttocks up and back interrogatively, as if posing for the world’s least imaginative pornographer.

‘All right then,’ he muttered, his voice thick, at last, with lust.

I didn’t look round, but waited for the first frisson of pleasure as his hands shucked my nightdress up over my hips, then the unbearable hiatus as he readied himself, the anticipation seeming to stretch out until the precise moment when fear that he would do this thing was perfectly balanced against dread that he might not. And then he was in me and I could no longer look at the view, because he had one hand on the crown of my head, pushing it down, and the other on my waist, for purchase, and all the disorientation and humiliation of the past was briefly, joyfully obliterated in the disorientation and humiliation of the present. My forehead juddered against the glass and he withdrew, flopping down on the bed with a faint harrumph of satisfaction. I stayed standing – limbs a-tremble, skin aflame, everything above the waist alive and energized, everything below numb and remote, yet still retaining the memory of pleasure, as an amputated limb retains the memory of an itch.

I leaned my forearms on the windowsill and took in, once again, the view beyond. It had a calming, almost soporific effect – the blueness of the blue, the greenness of the green, the emptiness of the landscape. Except it wasn’t quite empty, I noticed now.

‘Hey. There’s someone on our hill!’

Nick peered after my accusing finger.

‘It’s not our hill,’ he said, laughing. ‘It’s a local beauty spot. People go up there all the time. I shouldn’t think he copped much of an eyeful, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

I squirmed. I don’t know what I’d thought – certainly not that we owned it, but perhaps that we might have privileged access. A foolish idea, come to think of it, so I tried to make a joke of it, tapping on the window and calling out in my best cut-glass accent, ‘I say, you there! Get orf our land!’

By coincidence, the hiker chose that moment to start heading down. Nick was delighted.

‘There you go. Breeding will out. You’re a natural. Rounding up the peasants, keeping down the foxes. I told you you’d take to country living.’

Foxes. Oh God. I felt again the slither of tyre on gravel, the dull thud, the dread and minutes later, as my hand skimmed the moulded plastic of the bumper, the certainty of what I had done. I thought of the poor beast’s stiffening carcass decaying somewhere under a hedge. I glanced down at my fingers, half expecting to see blood on them.

A two-tone chime sounded downstairs, startling me. I stared at Nick and for a moment he stared back, equally flummoxed. Then his face cleared.

‘It’s the door. You’ll have to go.’ He nodded apologetically towards his still semi-erect penis.

‘Oh God!’ I grabbed my dressing gown, wiping my soiled fingers on a screwed-up tissue in the pocket as I hurried downstairs, desperately hoping it wasn’t a neighbour or anyone on whom I needed to make a good impression.

I needn’t have worried. A courier was peering impatiently through the mullioned windows of the front door. I opened it with an apologetic smile and he thrust a large square box into my arms and handed me an electronic pad to sign, almost taking my eye out with the stylus in his haste to get away. The package was light but bulky and addressed to Nick. I tried not to speculate. Let him have a life. Let him take delivery of a parcel without it being pawed and scrutinized by his mistrustful wife. But then I noticed the company logo.

I raced back up to the bedroom, and did a silly little jig.

‘I know what this i-is! It’s my thermocouple, isn’t it?’

‘Bloody hell!’ Nick muttered bitterly. ‘Three weeks they’ve had to deliver this and they pick the day after you arrive.’

‘I’d have thought that was when you’d want it to come…’

‘Well no, I was planning on having things ready for you, to surprise you.’

‘The kiln, you mean?’

‘Better than that. Come on, I might as well show you now.’

‘Show me what? What are you up to?’

He picked up the package in one hand and yanked me up off the bed with the other.

‘Where are we going?’

He galloped me down the stairs, only letting go of my hand when we reached the kitchen, so he could unlock the back door. He was still wearing pyjama bottoms and his feet were bare but he strode up the garden, past the pond and the vegetable patch – a man on a mission.

‘Nick!’ I hurried after him, half anxious, half excited. ‘What’s the big—’

But he had disappeared, squeezing through a gap in the yew hedge I hadn’t even known was there. With some trepidation I followed him and found myself in a hidden dell, surrounded on all sides by shrubbery. In one corner loomed what at first glance looked like a tree house: a timber structure with a shallow-pitched roof, all clean lines and Scandinavian simplicity. Three floor-to-ceiling windows gave onto a narrow veranda, which was raised on stilts to clear the steeply sloping ground in front, while the back nestled into a bower of mature shrubs. Timber steps led up from the scrubby lawn to a glass-panelled side door. It was utilitarian without being cold, rustic without being hokey. I knew Nick hadn’t built it himself – he could barely put up a shelf – and I doubted he had even had much of a hand in designing it, but he had gone out of his way to think about what I would like and found someone to make it, and that, well… that was a kind of miracle.

Speechless, grinning, I shook my head as I followed him up the steps and through the door, which slid open with a satisfying rumble. It was hot inside. Dust motes swirled in the light. There was a smell of timber and fresh paint and the sound of a bluebottle flinging itself stupidly against the glass.

‘So yeah, this is it,’ said Nick, with quiet pride. ‘Your studio.’

I stood beside him surveying the view down the garden and beyond to the valley, and slipped my hand into his.

‘You didn’t need to do this.’

‘I wanted to.’

‘Trying to get rid of me so you can have the house to yourself?’

There was a pause. The temperature in the room seemed to drop a degree or two. I’d meant it as a joke, but it was too soon; too near the knuckle.

‘That’s right,’ he said, stretching his lips into a grimace.

‘I’m kidding. I know why you did it and I’m touched, honestly I am. Nick, I absolutely love it.’

‘It’s the other view,’ he said briskly. ‘The one you don’t get from the bedroom. Or from the house at all, come to that. It faces south-east, so it gets the sun nearly all day.’

I glanced around the room and nodded my approval. He seemed to have thought of everything – my wheel and kiln were there of course; also a wedging table, a glazing area, a sink, metal shelves for work in progress. Only…

He saw the brief frown cloud my features.

‘What?’

‘No, nothing.’

‘What have I got wrong?’ he asked wearily. ‘I thought I’d got it all covered. If you knew what I spent to get the floor reinforced for that beast over there…’

He nodded towards my kiln, cold and inert without its thermocouple, but soon to be the beating heart of the enterprise.

‘I love it. Honestly, there isn’t a single thing I’d change.’

‘Oh, but there is.’

‘It’s trivial,’ I shook my head, ‘I’m sure there’s a solution.’

‘A solution to what?’ he smiled through his exasperation.

I could have kicked myself. I had done it again. He had spent a fortune, but more importantly, he had invested his time, taken advice, thought through my methods – thought of me. And I had rubbished it with a moment’s tactlessness.

‘It’s just…’ I pulled a rueful face, ‘… Well… it’s lovely that it’s a sun trap and I love all the light. Only, with the clay – it can dry out so easily. I could have done with a damp room or at least a bit of shade, or cool somehow. I’m sure we can think of something though…’

He walked over to the kiln and stood with his back to me, drumming his fingers on its surface. One two three four, one two three four. I hovered nearby, mortified.

‘I’m sorry, Nick.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘No, I’ve been… I’m such a…’

‘I just wanted to get it right. To make it right.’ His voice was tight.

‘You have… you are. Please, Nick, stop beating yourself up. It’s time to stop now.’

I went over and laid my cheek against his bare back. He didn’t move. His skin was cool and clammy. I wrapped my arms around him and held on, trying to warm him up.

3

‘Funky, or elegant? What do you reckon?’

I held up an Ikat print tunic in one hand and a grey linen dress in the other. Jude reclined further on the bed, the better to appraise both outfits from a suitable distance.

‘I’d go with that,’ she said, leaning forward and swatting the dress, ‘the other one looks a bit “eccentric potter”.’

‘Oh, cheers, Jude…’

‘No it’s nice, and everything, it’s just… I’m not being funny, Kaz, you’ve got to be careful living in a place like this.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Well, we had a little nose round the town on our way here – it’s very cute, but…’

I jutted my chin, defensively.

‘… Also, let’s face it, a bit Middle Earth.’

‘It isn’t actually,’ I said hotly. ‘That’s just the touristy bit. There’s quite a decent commercial gallery that you wouldn’t have seen because it’s tucked away. And there’s a craft beer place and an art trail twice a…’

‘Don’t take it so personally,’ interrupted Jude, laughing, ‘it’s just where you live. It doesn’t define you.’

I looked at Jude in her Agnès b. shirt and her expensive haircut and felt a faint twinge of… what? Not dislike, surely? One could not dislike one’s best friend, who has stuck by one through thick and thin, particularly thin. Irritation, then. Yes, Jude could be irritating. Dave too. They had made fun of the Aga, as I knew they would. Dave had started humming the theme tune to The Archers and talking about milk quotas in a funny accent. But then the four of us had gone on to enjoy an evening of drunken camaraderie. Dave had brought coke ‘for old time’s sake’ and everyone had done a line except me. I was tactfully discouraged. There was a lot of repartee about what Dave insisted on calling ‘the Auld Neighbourhood’, even though he’s not Irish and it was in Hackney. Mutual friends were shot down in flames for their hypocrisies and pretensions. I found myself wondering what kind of jokes Dave and Jude made about us behind our backs, although to be fair, we had not really been joke material of late. Not unless you had a very sick sense of humour, anyway. It was a fun evening all the same and for a couple of hours, in the glow of the fire and the embrace of the wine, and to the strains of a mellow soundtrack provided by Nick’s music app that told you if you liked that, you might also like this, I started to see how I might become a person again, a friend, a wife even.

But that had been last night and this was tonight and the grey linen dress looked try-hard with the wedge heels that Jude had suggested, yet frumpy when dressed down with Converse, so I had abandoned it in favour of a drapey sweater and jeans. It had been a warm day and the sky was still blue, but a bank of pinky-grey clouds was scudding up the valley on a brisk evening breeze. The fairy lights that Nick had rigged in the trees around my new studio were swinging alarmingly, and smoke was swirling from the barbecue like a malevolent genie released from its lamp.

Jude and I stood on the grass, arms hugging our bodies and sipping our wine, while further down the garden Nick was greeting some early arrivals, his tone jovial and not a little strained.

‘This reminds me of my sixth birthday party,’ I muttered in Jude’s ear. ‘My mum invited the whole class and I hid in my bedroom and refused to come down.’

‘Let’s not talk to them,’ Jude said. ‘Let’s just get wasted and dance on the patio.’

I gave her an anxious glance.

‘Relax,’ Jude patted me on the shoulder, ‘I’m kidding.’

Already, Nick was shepherding an elderly couple up the garden path towards us: the man, white-haired and slightly stooped, in a houndstooth jacket and slacks; the woman ruddy-faced and beady in a polyester two-piece.

‘Darling,’ Nick said (he never called me darling), ‘these are our next-door-but-one neighbours, Jean and Gordon from Prospect Cottage. Jean, Gordon; meet my wife Karen and our very good friend Jude.’

I shook Jean’s papery hand, then Gordon’s surprisingly soft one.

‘Jew, was it?’ bellowed Gordon, his face contorted with what I hoped was curiosity, but feared might be something worse.

‘Jude,’ said Jude, with a beaming smile, ‘short for Judith.’

‘Ah…’ said Gordon, with a hint of relief.

‘But I am Jewish, as it happens,’ said Jude, ‘on my mother’s side anyway, which is how it works. All that wandering in the desert. I suppose they couldn’t be sure who the father was, so they made it matrilineal.’

‘I see,’ said Gordon, with a faint look of distaste.

‘Anyway,’ Jude said breezily, ‘I’m about to get a top-up. Can I bring you something to drink…?’

‘A light ale for me and Jean’ll have a tomato juice,’ Gordon said.

Perhaps Jean would like a Mai Tai, I felt like saying; perhaps she’s in the mood for a Sex on the Beach. I caught Jude’s eye as she headed off towards the makeshift patio bar.

‘Grab me another beer will you, Jude?’ Nick called after her. ‘On second thoughts, you won’t have enough hands, I’ll come with you.’

‘Nick…’ I protested, but they had gone and I was marooned, clutching my glass, as tongue-tied and awkward as if the new guests were some glamour couple from Islington, not our septuagenarian neighbours from two doors up.

I turned back to them with my best hostess’s smile. ‘Have you… lived here long?’

Jean turned deferentially to Gordon.

‘How long is it, dear?’

Gordon raised his eyes heavenwards.

‘Nineteen sixty-seven we moved in,’ he muttered as if this were a topic of conversation he was tired of rehashing.

‘Nineteen sixty-seven, that’s right,’ Jean nodded fondly, ‘because we got a television and that lady won the song contest in her bare feet.’

Gordon muttered to himself and drifted off to weigh up the vegetable patch.

‘Goodness, that’s a long time!’ I said, with a forced smile.

Fifty years in this one spot. Fifty years married to Gordon. I felt a gloom descending and I wasn’t sure if it was on Jean’s behalf or my own. Would I find myself reminiscing at some future date on my own half century spent in this obscure little corner? The hedges growing higher every season, the trees growing taller, the wonky signpost finally falling off so that not even Jude would be able to find me?

‘We moved in with Gordon’s mother, after his father passed away.’

‘Right,’ I said.

‘And by the time she passed on I was in the family way, so it made sense to stay in the house.’

‘How lovely!’ I said, thinking the opposite. ‘It must be so nice to have that sense of continuity. Do your children still live nearby?’

‘Oh no, dear, Peter’s in Dubai and…’ she lowered her voice, ‘… Gordon doesn’t see eye to eye with our daughter, so we don’t see her any more…’ her tone was wistful ‘… or the grandchildren.’

‘Oh, what a shame,’ I said with a sympathetic pout, ‘it’s such a lovely spot for little ones too.’

Who was I kidding? Prospect Cottage was every estate agent’s nightmare – a blight on an otherwise desirable hamlet in which the average property prices had doubled in a decade. Its mellow stone frontage had been pebble-dashed over and the portion of its front garden not turned into hard-standing for the couple’s Honda Civic, was dominated by a vast Leylandii, whose one benefit was that it obscured a fuller view of the ugly uPVC porch which Jean and Gordon had filled with gloomy, Triffid-like houseplants. Neglect, the consequence of its owners’ advancing years, had been the property’s only saving grace, allowing its hedges to grow tall and shaggy, ivy to rampage up to its sagging eaves and moss to spawn on wall and outbuilding alike, softening its ugly profile into an irregular dark green carbuncle.

‘… They know who their granny is though,’ Jean continued now, the chirpy optimism in her tone more heartbreaking by far than despair, ‘I never forget their birthdays. Send ’em a postal order every year, on the dot.’

A postal order, I mused, was that still a thing?

‘That’s nice,’ I said doubtfully.

Jean gave me a wistful smile but as we both glanced across to where Gordon was still glowering at the kale, it died on her lips, and I looked away embarrassed. Over her shoulder I could see a young couple making their way down the lane, he carrying a bottle of champagne, she a Kilner jar trimmed with gingham. Behind them trailed two little girls in flouncy dresses and Alice bands, each clutching a small bunch of garden flowers. I squeezed Jean’s arm by way of ‘excuse me’ and her eyes met mine in mute appeal, as if there was more she had wanted to say to me.

‘Douglas Gaines,’ said the newcomer, pumping my hand warmly and handing me the bottle. ‘And this is my wife Imogen.’

She was a woman for whom the term pretty might have been coined: snub-nosed, blue-eyed, smooth-haired, with a mouth neither too big nor too small. She wore a fitted cotton dress and an angora cardigan over her freckled shoulders.

‘Courgette chutney,’ she said, thrusting the Kilner jar at me. ‘Last year’s, I’m afraid, but it keeps for ever.’

I juggled the champagne, the Kilner jar and my half-empty glass before finding a precarious equilibrium.

‘Thank you so much.’

Douglas ushered the two girls forward.

‘And these two monkeys are Honour and Grace. Say “hello”, girls.’

‘Hello,’ they chimed, thrusting their bunches of wilting flowers at me.

‘Oh! Sweet.’

I made an awkward grab for one of the posies and the jar of chutney slipped from under my arm and smashed on the path.

The faint babble of conversation stopped and there was a brief silence, before someone – it must have been Dave – filled it with ironic applause.

Slowly, I took in the tableau of horror – the green gloop on the path, studded with shards of inch-thick glass; the spatter of chutney up the legs, and yes, on the dresses of Honour and Grace; the expressions of polite dismay on the faces of their parents.

‘God! Oh God. I am so sorry. I’m such a…’

Grace (or was it Honour?) started to cry while her braver sister cast a silent malevolent spell on me. Whatever she was summoning – pustules, incontinence, lameness, it couldn’t have been worse than the agony of standing there for what felt like decades, apologizing on a loop, while the Gaineses’ smiles grew ever more strained.

‘You’ve met the wife, then?’ Nick appeared from nowhere, clapping a matey hand on each of their shoulders, and looking from Douglas to Imogen and back again with an expression of such pop-eyed satirical enthusiasm that they had no choice but to laugh. Even I managed to crack a smile – my roguish husband, whose insults were taken for compliments, whose sins masqueraded as misdemeanours – always on hand with a ready quip.

‘She made it herself,’ I murmured, woefully, in Nick’s ear. He bent down to appraise the spilled chutney before sticking his finger in an uncontaminated bit and licking it ostentatiously.

He grimaced.

‘Lucky escape if you ask me!’

There was a moment of silence while the assembled guests digested the audacity of his remark, then Imogen turned on him an expression of scandalized delight and batted his sleeve and Douglas emitted a complicit snort. Jude handed me a dustpan and brush and ushered the little girls towards the kitchen. I heard her promising them Coke, crisps and stain removal, in that order. Day officially saved.

More people came. A friendly couple called Ray and Min who ran the B&B and overhauled vintage motorbikes in their spare time, followed by a plump Scottish woman, Cath, mannish of dress, unfussy of demeanour. She explained which house she lived in and I must have looked surprised. It was the picture-perfect cottage with roses round the door, which I had imagined might belong to some apple-cheeked matron and Nick had insisted was more likely a lucrative holiday let. Cath was a garden designer, she told me, and whilst her own garden reflected her old-fashioned preference for lupin and hollyhock, she had paid for it by designing minimalist gardens for city types who didn’t give a shit about plants but cared very much that she’d won two silver gilts at Chelsea. I smiled at that.

Things were getting almost buzzy now. The local farmer dropped in, accepted a glass of wine, offered us a discount on his organic beef and asked us to like his Facebook page before heading off to move the yearlings to their summer pasture. Then came an interesting pair, young and arty-looking with foreign accents and I got quite excited until Min took me to one side and explained, in embarrassed tones, that they were guests at the B&B, who hadn’t quite grasped the protocol, and thought it was open house. I didn’t mind. They bulked out the numbers and brought down the average age of the guests by a good couple of years. I even had a slightly stilted discussion with the woman about the merits of the Swedish education system, only to be told later by Jude that they were Dutch.

As twilight fell, a couple of rackety youths looked in, who seemed to know everyone, but only hung around long enough to eat a burger apiece and down a couple of beers, before heading up the lane towards the local pub. Nick muttered ‘freeloaders’ under his breath, but I didn’t mind – I liked their swagger and their air of entitlement and the way they came and went, like the weather. I could almost fool myself they were mates of Ethan’s – that we were a family again.

It was only when the four of us were clearing up at the end, trekking back and forth from garden to kitchen with glasses dangling between our fingertips, making cheery remarks as we passed each other on the path, that it occurred to me that Jean and Gordon must have left without saying goodbye.

4

I slept in the next morning. I could hear the murmur of voices downstairs, the chinking of cups and smell bacon cooking. For a while I pretended to myself that I was still asleep. I couldn’t face it. The laughter, the chitchat, the morning-after discussions, during which my progress would be monitored, my rehabilitation assessed and scored. But Jude and Dave were leaving today, and I knew that if I let them go without saying goodbye, I’d only regret it. I struggled into my dressing gown, ran my fingers through my hair, glanced into the mirror to reassure myself I still had a reflection, and then made my way along the landing, slowing as their voices came within earshot. I could tell from their hushed, confidential tones that they were talking about me. I stopped, one hand on the banister, and listened.

‘… I just think you have to be so careful,’ Jude’s voice – low and serious, ‘… It might be therapeutic, but it might be too soon…’

‘Yes, I haven’t forgotten, thank you,’ Nick interrupted tersely, ‘and of course I’m not going to push her. I’m not an idiot. Only the psych said, career aside, it could be a good outlet… a safe space…’

‘Don’t you think this should be her safe space? Here, with you? In your house?’

I clattered noisily down the rest of the stairs.

‘So yeah, no… I suppose the neighbours aren’t exactly what you’d call cosmopolitan,’ said Nick, and I marvelled at his ability to turn on a sixpence, ‘but their hearts seem to be in the right place and it’s not like we need any more friends as such… oh hi, darling. Come have a coffee.’

‘So yeah, Kaz, we were just saying. Not a bad gaff you’ve got here,’ Dave pitched in, with uncharacteristic tact.

‘The neighbours seem friendly,’ added Jude. She shuffled her chair along to make room for me.

‘Well, we hardly know them yet,’ I reminded her, holding out a mug so that Nick could pour the last of the coffee into it.

‘The B&B woman seemed nice. Normal anyway,’ said Jude.

‘You’d have to at least pretend, wouldn’t you,’ put in Dave, ‘running a B&B.’

‘I quite took to Cath,’ I said.

‘The er… big woman?’ said Jude.

‘The lesbian,’ Dave said, in a satirical whisper.

‘Is that how we identify women,’ asked Nick drolly, ‘by their size or their sexuality?’

‘Works for me,’ said Dave.

‘Anyway, yeah, Cath was nice,’ I said.

‘Better keep an eye on the missus, Nick,’ Dave said.

‘She’s promised me some fuchsia cuttings,’ I said to Jude, ignoring him.

‘Eh-up!’ Dave slapped the table.

‘Shut up, Dave,’ said Jude wearily.

‘Shall I fry you an egg, love?’

Nick leaned across the table and touched my hand. I watched his fingers caress mine and felt the warmth of his touch, but the two phenomena seemed unrelated. I smiled at him and shook my head.

‘What about the Fotherington-Farquars?’ Jude nudged me, her eyes round with suppressed merriment.

‘They’re called Gaines,’ I said with an admonishing smile. ‘They were all right, I thought. Especially considering I dropped her chutney.’

‘Chutney though!’ Jude rolled her eyes.

‘What’s wrong with chutney?’ I said, laughing.

‘She’ll be joining you up to the WI next,’ said Jude with a sulky smile.

‘She will not.’

‘My God, their kids are precocious,’ Jude said, changing tack. ‘You should have heard them when I was trying to get the stains out of their dresses.’ She put on a high drawly voice. ‘“I don’t think it will come out completely because Mummy’s chutney has turmeric in it and turmeric is used as a dye in India.”’

‘Yep, you’re right,’ I muttered, ‘spawn of the devil. Remind me to sneak round after dark and kill their ponies.’

I didn’t know why I was being mean to Jude. Because she was going home, I suppose; because she was leaving me here.

‘Don’t be like that,’ she said. ‘I’m not saying they’re not nice people. I just can’t see you hanging out, that’s all.’

‘Yeah well, I didn’t hang out with our neighbours in Trenchard Street, did I? I hung out with you.’

The truth of this statement – its emotional heft – silenced us both for a moment.

‘Come home!’ Jude said, pouting. ‘We miss you.’

Nick winced and Dave threw Jude an exasperated glance.

‘Not home, obviously,’ Jude backtracked, ‘this is home. And a very homely home at that. Much nicer than… well every bit as nice as… Anyway, you know what I’m trying to say… Oh Christ, when you’re in a hole, eh…?’ She looked in slight desperation from Nick to Dave and back again, then leaned forward and patted the back of my hand. ‘Take no notice of me, babe. I’m just being selfish. I want what’s best for you. You know that… as long as I still get to see you once in a while and you promise not go off with old Vita Sack-of-potatoes up the road, I’ll let you keep your little bit of paradise. How about that?’

I rolled my eyes, not trusting myself to speak.

‘Well, it is,’ Jude insisted, waving toward the window as if I had challenged her, ‘it’s paradise. Look at that view. A person could never get tired of…’

‘Jude, I’m not a child!’ I snapped. ‘We’re not here for the view as you very well know. I wish to God you’d all just…’ I put the back of my hand to my mouth and focused hard on the tufts of meadow grass waving their own strange semaphore message through the kitchen window.

It was awkward after that. Too much politeness about the order in which showers should be taken, too much willingness to strip beds and take taxis to the station, rather than put us to any trouble. An onlooker might have mistaken us for casual acquaintances, rather than friends of twenty years’ standing. I felt the old feeling returning, the fish tank feeling, as though I were behind glass, moving more slowly than everyone else through the wrong element. I watched Jude check the train times on her phone and had to fight the impulse to snatch it off her. Don’t leave me here! I wanted to say. Take me back to London with you. Only take me in a time machine back to before the silences and the evasions and the sudden lavish treats. Back to a houseful of noisy adolescents pissing off the neighbours and a busy social calendar, back to a pair of perky tits and a husband who occasionally wanted to fondle them. Back to the sound of sirens and the smell of chicken shops; back to rubbish in bus shelters and busted sofas on street corners; back to reality.

I heard the rattle of Jude’s suitcase wheels on the landing and felt, for a moment, overwhelmed with despair.

By the time we were loading our guests’ luggage into Nick’s new Range Rover, the mood had lifted a bit.

‘Nice light environmental footprint you’ve gone for here, mate,’ Dave said sarcastically.

‘He’s just jealous,’ said Jude, as if we didn’t know.

Nick smirked and switched on the ignition. Then, half joking, half in earnest, he turned the sound system on full blast, slid down the front windows and roared up the lane with Nirvana riffling the hedgerows like a cyclone. He had taken three blind corners at breakneck speed, to the anxious hilarity of his passengers, when, rounding the fourth, a Transit van loomed out of nowhere. Brakes squealed and we were flung forward in slow motion, collapsing like puppets against the leather seats.

‘Shit!’ Nick killed the music and we sat in shock for a moment, watching the bonnet of the Transit vibrate. I thought we must have hit it, but leaning out of the open passenger window, I saw that it was juddering, not due to any impact, but because it was held together mainly by rust and gaffer tape.

Not that the van’s shaven-headed driver seemed much mollified by the lack of physical damage. Seeing him glare down at us through his wrap-around reflective sunglasses, I shifted uneasily in my seat.

Nick raised a hand, acknowledging fault, and then, with his trademark insouciance, gestured towards a passing place a few yards behind the Transit, into which the other driver might easily reverse so that the two vehicles could pass each other. The youth continued to stare at us, his neck pulsing beneath a terrifying-looking Celtic cross tattoo. He gripped the steering wheel and worked his jaw.

‘Dude’s off his head,’ muttered Dave.

‘I think you’d better just back up,’ I said.

‘Oh, come o-o-on!’ said Nick, slapping the steering wheel in frustration. ‘He’s only got to reverse three yards and I can get past him. What’s he even doing round here anyway? Goon like that.’

‘Big problem in the countryside apparently,’ Dave said, ‘nothing else for them to do.’

‘I’ll give him something to do…’ muttered Nick ominously. All the same he looped one arm around the back of my head rest, rammed the car into reverse and with his gaze fixed on the rear window, accelerated recklessly around corners and up and down undulations in the road, until we were almost back at the cottage. Then he tucked in beside a drystone wall and waited.

All was quiet except for the sound of birdsong and a branch tapping out a rhythm on the roof and for a moment it seemed the van might have been a figment of our imaginations. But just as Nick was losing patience and seemed ready to pull out again, it came jerking and squeaking around the bend and the exaggerated slowness of its approach made me nervous. I squinted into the Transit’s windscreen, but the sun glanced off it, turning it into a vast silver rink, the only sign of life inside the slow back and forth of a talisman dangling beneath the rear-view mirror.

‘Uh-oh,’ Nick murmured, and his voice sounded suddenly small. There was a pause. A light breeze stirred the nettle patch. I could hear my heartbeat in my temples. Then a cacophonous roar, a squeal of tyres, a skitter of pebbles. I shut my eyes and braced for the impact… and braced… and braced… and then, warily, opened them again.

‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ hissed Nick as the van accelerated away in a cloud of filthy exhaust fumes, leaving the Range Rover unscathed.

‘What a cock!’ said Dave.

Jude and I laughed with relief.

Nick put the Range Rover in first gear, his hand trembling slightly on the gear stick, and accelerated away at even greater speed than first time round.

‘They don’t tell you about twats like that in Country Life, do they?’ Dave called, over the sound of rushing air and roaring engine.

‘Yeah, well, he’s not a local,’ Nick said, defensively. ‘Probably just some blow-in, staying off the main roads so he doesn’t get pulled over.

But it was too late. Our country idyll was exposed for the sham it was. There was no time, now, to prove to Dave and Jude that you could actually get a decent coffee in the town, or to take them accidentally-on-purpose past the stylish gallery, where I hoped I might eventually sell my work. It was too late, anyway, after the run-in with Crazy Van Man and last night’s collection of oddball neighbours to convince myself, let alone my sophisticated urban friends, that this was any place to live. You only had to look at the two station platforms, the up line and the down, to see that anyone with any taste or savoir-faire was heading back up to the smoke, whilst the down was populated by what Ethan would scathingly term ‘randoms’.

The train was pulling in. Jude enveloped me in a perfumed hug.

‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘it was a blast. Great place, kiddo. Just, you know… give it time.’

She gently peeled my knuckles off the collar of her denim jacket and picked up her case. Nick and Dave did some manly back-slapping and then our visitors were on the train, moving down the carriage, mingling with the other passengers so that they could no longer be distinguished one from another, only from those left behind.

5

‘The clay will find you out,’ my ceramics tutor used to tell me and it was true. In my beautiful new studio, the clay found me wanting. It wasn’t its consistency: Nick had taken my plea to heart and found me an old fridge, which, unplugged, made the perfect storage facility. It wasn’t any of the practicalities: I had ironed out all the little teething troubles that had arisen from his misapprehensions about my practice. The awkward configuration of tool store, worktable and wheel had been corrected and I had rescued an old piece of formica from a skip which made an ideal glazing surface. The kiln was up and running.

It was, if anything, too perfect. I didn’t feel equal to it. I’d got used to working in the utilitarian strip-lit basement of Trenchard Street, where anyone over five feet seven had to stoop. Needless to say, at six feet one, Nick had not visited often. It had always been ‘the basement’ never ‘the studio’. The wheel, worktable, kiln and shelving had been squeezed in alongside extraneous junk. By the end, despite Nick’s repeated promises to help me sort it, a proliferation of finished pots were jostling for space with garden chairs, bags of jumble and Ethan’s outgrown toys. It had suited me – the informality of it, the sense that my work was provisional – only one step-up from Play-Doh. Underground, unseen, I had somehow felt freer to explore unseemly things, primeval things. That’s how teddy bears and gingerbread men came to wield axes on my pots; how rag dolls went topless in badly applied lipstick; how hearts and bootees, tampons and butterflies, condoms and cupcakes became ubiquitous tropes. Almost by accident, I had developed a style. Not that I’d known it, until, thanks to Jude, I was offered a show in a posh West End gallery, written up in their catalogue as a feminist ceramicist. They mean lady potter, I’d said, and we’d laughed.

Here, though, was a fresh start. If I couldn’t rediscover my muse up here among the treetops, with the clouds scudding and the birds singing, and the zinc gleaming and the kiln humming, where could I? This place was light and open, an eyrie, from which, eagle-like, I should be able to soar.

I tried to sneak up on it, to let habit take over – feel the weight of the wet clay between my palms, the sense of possibility. I got the treadle going, centred the clay, mind in neutral. I dunked my hands in water, braced my elbows on my knees, pushed down with my thumb, not too hard, just hard enough, to let the pot flare, rise, grow. It was a living thing, the clay on the wheel; close in too fast, squeeze too hard, show it anything but tenderness and it would fly away. I came near a few times; felt it live, held my breath… lost it. I made a couple of pots that morning. Serviceable vessels, both of them; many a potter would have finished them, glazed them, fired them. Not me – I didn’t want these lame, damaged specimens that would sit on a shelf unable to sing.

Into the bin went the latest abortion, and I stood at the window, staring out at the garden, wondering if my best work was behind me, or if I had just believed the hype.

Stir crazy, I headed back to the cottage, knuckles rimed with clay. I would make us a coffee, I thought – talk things over with my husband, take him into my confidence. Befriend him. Take your time, he would tell me. There’s no pressure. You’ve been through a lot.

Slipping through the gap in the hedge, I caught sight of him through the living-room window. He was pacing back and forth with the phone clamped to his ear. Something about his demeanour – the tight lips, the furtive expression – gave me pause. He was probably just buying time, I told myself; negotiating an extension on that Fitzrovia job. He certainly seemed to be negotiating. Surely it was work, not…

Panic rose in my chest. I found myself clenching and unclenching my palms; trying to drive back the feelings of doubt, of worthlessness. I turned around on impulse and went down the garden path. Closing the gate behind me, I began heading up the lane towards the woods but soon changed my mind. I did not want to brood alone in the shade, I wanted to strike out into sunshine, put myself in the way of human contact; reassure myself that life was good and people generally well-meaning. I wanted to make a friend. Turning back, I strode briskly past the Gaineses’ house, and slunk undetected beside the overgrown hedge of Prospect Cottage, telling myself I would look in on Jean another day when I was feeling more robust. For now I needed harmless chatter, tittle tattle, laughter.

My pace slowed again as I drew level with Min and Ray’s B&B, with its cheerful hand-painted sign. People who ran B&Bs must be sociable types, mustn’t they? And Min seemed like she might be friendship material. I had seen her the previous week, getting out of her car with a yoga mat under her arm. We had waved at each other. But today the gravel driveway in front of Min and Ray’s had two strange cars on it and the sign said ‘NO VACANCIES’. The whirr of a strimmer could be heard in the back garden. Now did not seem like the time.

That left Cath, whose house, whilst much less forbidding than the Gaineses’, was set back above the lane, its front door accessible only via steep stone steps, the very effort of climbing which would undermine any claim I might make to have been ‘just passing’. A shame because Cath seemed perhaps the likeliest candidate for friendship among the locals I had so far met.

I walked on past the ruined barn to the edge of the hamlet, where I turned right at the fork in the road, picked my way over the cattle grid and headed up the hill.

It was steeper than it looked, and I had to stop halfway and hold on to my thighs. Down at the bottom, a car door slammed and a dog-walker shouted, ‘Bailey! Come to heel!’

I turned, curious. Perhaps Nick and I should get a dog, I thought, though the beasts I used to see in the park in London frightened me to death, with their barrel bodies and their bared teeth. This dog seemed a different proposition – a setter or something. I could just see its tail, waving like a pennant, between the cattle trough and a clump of nettles.

I moved off again, pushing hard into the balls of my feet as the sandy path climbed higher and then petered out. Now my sandals slithered on flattened grass, making my climb even more difficult. I glanced up. The summit was still a good distance away. The house would be visible now, if I looked, but I had already decided that the sight of it should be my reward for reaching the top. A breathless scramble past a couple of scrubby bushes and I was there. My chest heaved and my lungs burned but I felt exhilarated; even more so when I turned round to take in the view.

I gazed first into the far distance, where beyond the town, the estuary glinted through a cleft in the hills like a shucked snakeskin. The sky was overcast, except where three broad beams of sunlight burst over the valley, turning it an improbable emerald green. Hedgerows divided the fields into geometric shapes I couldn’t name and tangles of woodland camouflaged the lichen-coloured farms and houses, the only signs of modernity an occasional solar panel or the swish of a car along the road into town. It was as lovely as a picture on a calendar and just as unreal. Slowly, I allowed my gaze to track back down the lee of the valley, past the manor house, the stand of trees, the sagging roof of the barn and at last to what I must call, for want of a better word, home. I was standing now where the hiker whom I’d suspected of spying on us had stood and I was relieved to see that from this distance you couldn’t really make out in any detail what was going on in the house – only whether lights were on or off (they were off), whether smoke curled from the chimney (it didn’t), whether there was anyone moving about in the rearward facing rooms. There was.

Nick was in the bedroom; the vague flicker of movement somehow still identifiable as my husband. And then a second flicker which I couldn’t account for, unless… no, surely not? I shaded my eyes with my hand and squinted. It must be a trick of the light. But no, two silhouettes stood side by side, their heads seeming to touch, like figures in stained glass. Blood rushed in my ears. I felt sick. Not this. Not again. I slumped down on the grass. Could it be her? Surely not. He had promised me that was done with. He had promised. Someone else, then? Another one. Some floozy from the local pub; a neighbour, maybe? Perhaps he was addicted. Perhaps I was. Yes, that was it. I was making this happen. It was my fault.

I heard a faint keening, like the rise and fall of a car alarm several streets away, and it took me a moment to understand that I was making the noise myself. Climbing unsteadily to my feet, I focused again on the blankness of the bedroom window, of my bedroom window. There was no one there now. They were gone, or perhaps just out of sight. The glass looked as dark and impenetrable as a lake, from which something ugly might or might not briefly have surfaced.

I felt wetness on my knuckle and recoiled in surprise as the woman’s red setter bounded joyfully around my knees.

‘Get down, Bailey!’ the young woman called, panting up to me and grabbing the dog’s collar.

‘It’s all right, he won’t hurt you, he’s soft as anything,’ she gasped. ‘Just not very well trained. He’s my sister’s dog.’

They said people looked like their dogs, but this woman looked like her sister’s dog, which seemed an odd coincidence. She was tall and rangy, with thick auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was wearing the inevitable Barbour jacket, but she wasn’t a country type, I could tell. No one round here wore make-up to walk a dog.

‘Oh no, yeah, I’m not scared, it’s OK,’ I said, willing myself to keep looking at the woman and not to glance back at the house.

‘Oh good,’ said the woman doubtfully.

‘It’s steeper than it looks, that’s all,’ I said, putting a hand to my chest.

‘Tell me about it,’ said the woman. She waffled on about preferring the gym to the great outdoors and how poorly trained the dog was and whether or not in the countryside you could get away with not scooping the poop. I was in the fish tank again, watching her mouth moving, but hearing only whale song. The woman cocked her head curiously, but having no idea what she had just said, I muttered something vague and turned away. The next time I looked, she was heading back down the hill, holding the dog on a short leash. I glanced at the house and felt something like grief rising in my chest.

I waited, in a state of agitation, until she had got far enough ahead that there could be no risk of my catching up with her, and then I began my own descent, galumphing down the hill sideways, knees trembling, breathing ragged, my eyes aching with pent-up tears. I jumped the last foot from the bank onto the lane, and turned my ankle as I landed. It was as much as I could do to limp my way across the cattle grid without crying. I was hobbling homeward as fast as I was able, when the dog woman’s Fiesta came by. Shrinking into the hedgerow to let it pass, I caught my T-shirt on a bramble and had to wrench myself free. Droplets of blood bloomed on my arm and trickled down, blending with the clay dust to turn my wrist pink. I rubbed it to a lurid smear, then hurried on, trying to adopt a jogger’s pace so as not to look like what I was – a deranged harpy running home to catch my husband in an act of infidelity.

‘Oops-a-daisy!’

A firm hand gripped me by the shoulder and I stopped short, panting and staring wildly into a face so huge and ruddy and friendly, with its abundance of chins and laughter lines that, if it weren’t for a whiff of Lily of the Valley and an absence of facial hair, I might have taken Cath for Santa Claus.

‘Oh God! Sorry, I’m so sorry.’

She had a recycling box perched on one ample hip, most of its contents now slewed into the gutter.

‘Not to worry,’ said Cath. ‘Do me good to get down there. You were going some, though, what’s the hurry? And did you know you’re bleeding?’ She swivelled my forearm to show me. ‘Why don’t you come in and we’ll put a…’

‘I can’t!’ I said, a little wildly. ‘It’s very kind of you…’ I tried to moderate my tone, and attempt a normal person’s smile, ‘… and I really would love to come and have a chat another time, but I’ve got… I’m… expecting a delivery!’

‘Oh, OK,’ said Cath with a doubtful smile. She bent down effortfully to pluck an empty whiskey bottle out of the gutter. ‘Be sure your sins will find you out,’ she said, waving it aloft, but I was already speeding away.

It was the last push now, past the B&B, past Jean and Gordon’s, up the killer slope, muscles like water, heart hammering, and at last I could see the cottage. I stopped dead. The Range Rover had gone from its parking place. I felt sick. Bile actually came into my mouth. This was it, then. The worst. I looked across the fields to the main road. They could only have left minutes ago. Christ, he must have nerves of steel. How long had I been out? I’d lost track. If only Cath hadn’t wittered on so… They’d be nearing the town by now. It was only ten minutes the way Nick drove. I could see them in my mind’s eye – staring straight ahead, smelling of perfume and sex. A discreet goodbye at the station, a screeching U-turn and Nick would be on his way back, a packet of fags or a newspaper tossed onto the passenger seat for an alibi. I’d have to be quick…

I ran up the garden path, high on adrenaline. The door was unlocked. I scanned the living room wildly. The TV was tuned to Sky News and muted. An empty coffee cup sat on the arm of the sofa. I sniffed the air like a wild animal but the pleasantly smoky scent of the wood burner was all I could discern. I took the stairs two at a time. The bedclothes were tumbled. Yanking back the duvet, I scanned the bottom sheet for stains, but that proved nothing. They probably did it standing up. They were probably doing it when I saw them from the top of the hill. My stomach clenched at the thought. I hurried to the bathroom and flipped open the pedal bin, but found only my own panty-liner, cringing around its smear of discharge. I felt a pang of self-disgust. No wonder Nick went elsewhere. I let the lid clang shut and returned to the landing, glancing this way and that, at a loss what to do next. I stood like a sentinel at the front window, clutching my elbows to stop myself from trembling. I could see the road in the distance, stitched in and out of the undulating landscape. I squinted hard but the passing cars were too far away to identify their colours, still less their makes. Any one of them could be Nick’s. Soon enough I would hear his wheels crunch on the gravel, the expensive clunk of the driver’s door. I could not afford to be like this when that happened. I would go back to the studio, I decided; play dumb. Yes, that was it. I’d keep the upper hand. Stay in control.

I went downstairs, through the kitchen, out through the unlocked door. I could do this. Past the pond and the vegetable patch. I could do it. Through the gap in the yew hedge, across the grass, up the steps.

I closed the door behind me, inhaled the warm, wood-scented air. I pressed my palms on the cool zinc of the work surface and took a few deep breaths.

An angry buzzing noise made me jump. I cast around in a panic, failing at first to recognize the vibration of my mobile phone, which I had switched to silent and slid into the pan of the old kitchen scales I used to weigh out my clay. I snatched it up, just as the buzzing stopped. Nick. Nine missed calls.

6

‘So next time,’ Nick slapped me between the shoulder blades in comradely fashion, ‘she’s going to tell me before she heads off into the wide blue yonder, aren’t you, my little vagabond?’

I laughed awkwardly and scuffed a stone along the footpath.

‘I should’ve thought one could go for a stroll in broad daylight without prompting a house-to-house search,’ said Cath drily.

‘Yeah fair play, I probably overreacted,’ Nick admitted. ‘But we’re new round here, and she’s got form…’

I cast Nick a hurt sideways glance.

The Fleece was in sight now, and I was feeling apprehensive. Nick and I were not really pub quiz types, but Ray and Min had invited us and the other team members were the Gaineses and Cath, so to turn it down would have seemed rude. Here was a chance, anyway, to prove that I was more than the hopeless klutz who had dropped Imogen’s chutney and knocked Cath for six. Here was a chance to get to know our neighbours better and get a feel for the wider community. So I had accepted Min’s invitation, had touted Nick’s encyclopaedic knowledge of world capitals and premiership football; had delved into my purse on the spot for our share of the entry fee, even though Min assured me we could pay on the night. And now it was the night, and if I could have turned and run, I would have.

It was, as Nick had promised, ‘a lovely boozer’, the sort of place you came across on holiday and never shut up about when you got home – leadlights and roses round the door and locals playing dominoes in the snug. It had been a sticky day. A pearl grey sky was stretched tight as a drum skin over the valley. Around the trestle tables out front sat hikers who had popped in for a pint at four and never left. Inside, the air was warm as beer, and there was a friendly atmosphere. Being a fundraiser for a nearby hospice, the quiz night had attracted, besides the regulars whose special pewter tankards hung above the bar, a cross section of village society. There was a table of scruffy-looking eccentrics with loud, entitled voices – ‘Old money’, Nick told me under his breath – and a gaggle of blokes by the bar in windowpane checks and designer jeans, whom I could see for myself were ‘new money’. There was a gang of rugger-buggers competitively downing pints and on the other side of the inglenook, a table of book-club cougars with highlighted hair and expensive casual wear. The vicar was there, and the local poet in his sailor’s gansey. There was a horsey contingent and a hippy contingent and a gaggle of underage youth from the town, conspicuous by their desire to fly under the radar. Yet even these shifty sixteen-year-olds looked more at home than I felt.

‘I’ve a book of local walks I can lend you,’ Douglas Gaines said to me as we ducked under a beam and made our way toward a table ‘reserved’ for us with a scribble on a folded napkin. ‘There are plenty of them and most of them are way-marked, so it’s really quite hard to get lost.’

‘Oh, I wasn’t lost,’ I started saying, ‘I just went up the hill behind our—’ Nick gave me a look. ‘But yeah, that would be lovely.’

‘So, what’s everyone drinking?’ My husband reached for his wallet. With one ear on Douglas’s friendly prattle, I watched him stroll to the bar and catch the barmaid’s eye ahead of his turn – classic Nick. He’d done the same to me the day we’d met – cut me up in the queue for the bar. Not that he remembered it that way. In his retelling, he’d swept me off my feet. Banter, cocktails; never looked back. Does it count as queue jumping, if the person in front of you is invisible? Because I don’t think he even saw me at first. I was next in line and then suddenly, I wasn’t. It was only when I muttered ‘be my guest’ under my breath, that he turned round, fixed his unfeasibly blue eyes on me and said with his mile-wide, fair cop grin, ‘And what’ll you have…?’

I watched him tip the barmaid now, and barge his way back to our table with a tray of drinks, somehow contriving to have the people on whose toes he trod apologise to him.

There was a whine of feedback, and an amplified phut as the landlord tapped the top of his mic.

‘Am I on?’ he said, and everyone clutched their ears.

‘Evening, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, once the volume had been adjusted, ‘welcome to The Fleece charity pub quiz. And you are. Welcome to it. Boom, boom. No, seriously, I hope you’ve got your wits about you and your phones switched off – yes, I’m talking to you, Dave Sullivan. Is he in, Dave? Where are you, you cheating bastard…?’

‘Just kidding, folks. It was all a misunderstanding, wasn’t it, Dave? Half a day in the stocks and he saw the error of his ways. A-n-yway, ladies and gents, for those of you who do want to play by the rules they’re very few and very simple. Just like our regulars…’

The landlord continued his banter while his wife, a glamorous redhead, distributed the quiz sheets.

‘Who’s going to be captain?’ said Ray.

‘Do we need a captain?’ Imogen asked.

‘Just someone to write down the answers and adjudicate if there’s a difference of opinion,’ Douglas suggested.

‘God help them!’ Min muttered with a wry smile.

‘Well, I know literally nothing about anything so…’ I started to say.

‘Here,’ Cath reached for the clipboard, and I wasn’t sure whether she was exasperated at our team’s indecisiveness or my self-deprecation, ‘I’ll be captain.’

‘OK,’ boomed the landlord, at last. ‘A nice easy round to get you started: visual arts.’

Nick caught my eye and gave me a little nod of tacit encouragement. I felt a twinge of anxiety.

‘Which artist painted The House of Doctor Gachet at Auvers?’

A collective groan went up.

‘What’s the matter?’ shrugged the landlord, all injured innocence. ‘Come on, folks, this is kindergarten stuff. I’ll repeat the question. Which painter…’

‘Auvers…’ said Nick, tapping the table urgently with his fingertips. That’s ringing bells. Come on, Kaz, we know this…’

He glanced at me and I shrugged stupidly. Auvers, Auvers. It didn’t mean anything… and then all of a sudden, it did.

Sunlight slanting through stained-glass windows onto sandstone pillars, the patter of Ethan’s five-year-old feet as he ran towards the votive candles, hand outstretched, Nick’s intervention; tears, a scuffle. My outrage. ‘He’s only little.’ His furious hissed response, comparing English children unfavourably with the mythical French ones who will sit through a five-course dinner without a peep. We made up afterwards. He bought Ethan an ice cream and me a pretty postcard – a painting of the exterior of the church, drooping like a circus tent against an inky sky, a nun making her way into the foreground down a cobbled path, her eyes downcast. It could only have been by one artist.

‘Van Gogh!’ I all but shouted.

‘Oh.’ Imogen Gaines bit her lip in amusement. ‘I was just about to say Cézanne.’

We smiled at each other politely, neither of us wanting to contradict the other, each of us equally sure she was right.

‘Could do worse than listen to Immie, people,’ Douglas Gaines murmured, ‘she does have a first in art history…’

‘Oh well, in that case…’ I backtracked. ‘Only I thought… isn’t Cézanne more Provence?’

‘I’m putting Van Gogh,’ Cath said, and that was that.

‘Question two,’ said the landlord and the buzz of conversation died down again. ‘By what name was the actor Archibald Leach better known?’

‘Oh, that’s an easy one,’ said Ray.

Cath raised her eyebrows enquiringly, pen poised.

‘Tell ’er, Min.’ Ray gave his wife an affectionate nudge.

‘I don’t know,’ Min said.

‘You do,’ he insisted, ‘Archie Leach. Bristol-born. One of your mum’s favourites.’

‘You see, this is what he does,’ she said to the rest of us.

‘What?’ Ray affected innocence.

‘You make a big production out of it. You know very well I haven’t a clue. You’re just spinning it out to make yourself look good.’

‘How does asking you for the answer make me look good?’ he protested, but he’d been rumbled, and his wry smile told us he knew it.

It was nice to watch them play out this charade, the back-and-forth, the faux exasperation, obviously masking a deep affection. They were an unlikely couple, he a grizzled biker of sixty or so, she at least ten years his junior, genteel and pretty in skinny jeans and pumps. She was the last person you would expect to ride pillion, yet I had seen the two of them myself, more than once, roaring round the lanes on their Ducati, locked together in leather like a pair of mating cockroaches.

‘I could do my impression…?’

‘Please don’t,’ said Min, wincing, but Ray was already in character, setting his jaw and knitting his brows, his accent pitched halfway between Hampstead and Hollywood.

‘Juday! Juday! Juday!’ he said and even I knew it was supposed to be Cary Grant. The whole pub erupted.

‘All right over there, giving the game away,’ said the landlord sternly, ‘I’ll be docking you points if you’re not careful. Question three. What was the name of the exhibition mounted by Charles Saatchi at the Royal Academy in 1997, which launched the careers of the so-called YBAs?’

‘Sensation,’ said Nick, quick as a flash.

‘So it was,’ Douglas Gaines nodded. ‘That was the one with the cut-in-half shark and the fried egg how’s your father, wasn’t it? Miracle they got away with that garbage, looking back…’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Nick, ‘I thought the shark was pretty cool. The Inability of the Living to Contemplate Death…’

‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living,’ Imogen corrected him. I watched Nick bridle and then look at her with fresh eyes.

‘Whatever,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘Iconic artwork anyway.’

‘So everyone says,’ Imogen replied, tilting her head archly. ‘But hardly an original one. I think Holbein said it better in The Ambassadors.’

Nick made a ‘get you’ face; it was both grudging and admiring, a look that signalled a re-evaluation. He had given me that look once…

‘… I’ll have a margarita, if you insist,’ I’d said and then spoiled the effect by blushing. It was hard not to be seduced by Nick’s easy charm and studied dishevelment, tie already yanked to half-mast. He hadn’t turned a hair, to give him his due. Just took the hit – which was generous as only the beer and wine were on the tab – it being my boss’s third wedding. The order took ages, especially the margarita, as the barman was really only used to pulling pints. By the time he’d poured it with great ceremony and added the straw, Nick was holding out a twenty a little impatiently between his middle fingers. He paused for a second while I took the first sip, more, I think, to satisfy himself that he had successfully charmed me than because he really cared if I liked it. If I hadn’t been a bit squiffy from the lunchtime reception, I probably wouldn’t have had the nerve, but I made a bit of a meal of it, tilting my head from side to side, narrowing my eyes, swallowing…

‘Not bad,’ I said, ‘a bit light on the triple sec…’

‘Ah,’ he said, still bantering, still eager to make good his escape, ‘isn’t it always the way?’

‘Not in Tijuana,’ I said.

That was when he’d given me the look; the look he was giving Sloaney Imogen now. ‘Hello…’ it seemed to say, ‘you may be of interest after all…’

‘Didn’t it all start decomposing,’ Cath said breezily, ‘the shark? You’d be mightily pissed off, wouldn’t you, if you’d paid squillions for an original Damien Hirst and you ended up with a nasty wee bit of muck in a tank.’

‘He had to remake it, actually,’ Imogen said. ‘There was a bit of hoo-hah about whether he could call it the same thing, despite it being, essentially, a whole new artwork, but he claimed that being a conceptual artist, the idea of the work was more important to him than the physical expression of it, so…’ she shrugged prettily and there was an awed silence. I remembered then that it was Cézanne and not Van Gogh who had painted The House of Doctor Gachet at Auvers.

‘Only right they beat us, really,’ Douglas Gaines declared as we ambled homeward at closing time. ‘What with that chap’s mother being a patient in the hospice; lovely for him to be able to take her the cheque. It brings a lump to my throat just thinking about it.’

‘We gave them a run for their money though,’ Nick said. ‘Narrow margin.’

I could feel my cheeks colouring in the darkness. Nick had never been a good loser, especially when pipped to the post by a bunch of posh boys. And it had been the rugger-buggers who’d won the day, confounding expectations with their in-depth knowledge of meteorology, roman numerals and the lyrics of the Spice Girls.

‘Well, if anyone’s to blame, it’s me,’ I said. ‘We might have won if I’d listened to Imogen.’

‘Nonsense,’ Min called over her shoulder, ‘you did brilliantly.’

‘Hardly matters now,’ muttered Nick.

‘Of course it doesn’t,’ agreed Douglas Gaines. ‘The main thing is we raised the money and had a good time. At least I did. Haha.’

‘Oh yes, it was fun,’ Imogen agreed. ‘I love it when the village comes together. It doesn’t happen often enough. We should do that Auction of Promises we were talking about, Douglas. Get the marquee up while the weather holds.’

As the road curved away from the village and the footpath narrowed, we transformed ourselves from a tipsy rabble into a more or less orderly procession, with those who had had the foresight to bring torches lighting the way for the rest. The air was thick with a coming storm, so that even the occasional gust of fume-laden air from a passing car brought welcome relief.

‘So tell me,’ said Cath, weaving a little, ‘what did you reckon to the Village of the Damned?’

‘Yeah, not bad,’ I said, hedging my bets, ‘I mean, they’re not exactly soul mates, but they seem a decent bunch, on the whole.’

Cath snorted.

‘What?’ I said, but she shook her head mysteriously.

‘My lips are sealed,’ she said.

‘Do you not go up the pub much then?’

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘It’s all right on a night like tonight, but it can be a bit cliquey the rest of the time, if you get me…’

I thought I probably did.

‘So what do you do for entertainment?’ I asked, boldly.

‘Oh, I’m not much of a party animal any more,’ Cath replied and a wistfulness seemed to come over her. ‘I’m happy enough with my seed catalogues and a box set these days…’

I was about to probe further, when she stopped and sniffed the air.

Up ahead, the others had congregated at the point where the road broke out of the woods and started to curve along the valley’s edge.

‘They’re waiting for us.’ I hooked my arm through Cath’s and urged her into a comical jog, which became less comical and more sheepish as we got nearer and saw that the others had not, in fact, stopped to wait for us, but to gaze in consternation across the valley.

‘Shit!’ mouthed Cath.

‘Is that a fire?’ I said, dumbly as if any other phenomenon could be responsible for the sparks shooting up into the darkness above the treeline and the sky glowing dirty pink.

Only now did the douf douf of house music and the stutter of a strobe light impinge. This was not pyromania, then, but recreation.

‘It isn’t the first time,’ Ray said grimly. ‘And they’ll be going till three if it’s the same mob.’

‘What is it, some kind of rave?’ I asked. I could imagine Ethan’s withering sarcasm, ‘Some kind of rave, Mother?’

‘Just kids,’ Cath patted my arm, ‘summer solstice. Nothing to fret over.’

‘All the same,’ said Douglas Gaines, ‘you wonder what their parents are thinking.’

‘Good job we’ve no guests this weekend,’ muttered Min.

‘It’s not the noise that worries me,’ grumbled Douglas Gaines, ‘it’s the destruction of habitat. They moan about the Hunt, this lot, but they don’t think twice about the havoc they’re wreaking with their fires and their rubbish and their bloody racket.’

As if to underline his point, a stuttering bile green laser lit up the sky, prompting a burst of joyous ululation from the revellers. With much tutting and head-shaking, we moved off again, clambering over a nearby stile and down the muddy path that came out near the old barn, lately a repository for several abandoned and burned-out vehicles. The air of camaraderie that had united us after the pub quiz was replaced now by one of disapproval and righteous indignation, to which I found myself instinctively resistant. For all the selfishness of the revellers, there was an energy to their hedonism that I found beguiling. It seemed life-enhancing and visceral, a sybaritic two-fingered salute to everything about the English countryside that was staid and safe and depressing – the tea shops and the kagouls and the olde-worlde typefaces; the Miss Marple prettiness of it all.

We kept up a desultory chat for a while, but the closer we got to the hamlet, the more the music reverberated within the hollow of the landscape, so that, parting company, we had to time our farewells to fall on the off-beat or go unheard. Only Cath, waving a cheery goodbye and staggering slightly as she hauled herself up the steps to her house, seemed assured of a good night’s rest.

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