Chapter One.

West London in June. Choking heat, choking tourists, and traffic going nowhere. Who on earth would choose to live in this crazy place apart from the mad, the bad and the super-rich?

Screech! The taxi rounded the corner as if on one wheel and skidded to a halt outside the yellow front door. Harriet, who had been peering through its grimy windows willing the driver to get from Shepherds Bush to Hammersmith in four minutes, waited for an eternity for the man to unlock the door. Come on, come on! Click. Stressed and mad applied to her, she thought as she leapt out onto the pavement. A mistake, the skirt of her suit was much too narrow. She ignored the ripping sound.

‘Just wait here will you? I won’t be long.’

Keys, keys, why did she always put the wrong one in? There! At last, she turned it in the lock and rushed inside her neglected little house. Automatically she stooped and picked up the junk mail, and threw it on the hail table, the answering machine flickered next to it. No time to worry about it. She leapt over the piles of ironing on the stairs and crashed into Laura’s room.

From the landing window she could see the taxi down in the road, meter ticking, costing a fortune, purring in boiling heat. The driver was reading the Sun, his elbow sticking out of the window. Where? Where was the script in all this chaos?

Laura, of course, had howled hysterical pleas for help down a crackling line from Paddington, but hadn’t bothered to tell her even what colour paper it was printed on. Was it pale yellow or pale blue, or white with the BBC logo splashed conveniently along the top? Laura hadn’t even been sure where she had left it. By the mirror, she thought. Great. And which bloody mirror? There were books everywhere, in piles, or shoved in corners, clothes falling out of of the wardrobe, the bed half made, bank statements and the previous week’s Sunday papers sliding off the crumpled quilt. On the carpet, old Tatlers, warred for space with apple cores, empty tights packets and crumpled balls of paper. A packet of condoms peeked cheekily out of the dressing table drawer. That was Laura, ever the optimist. Where had she left the script?

The taxi driver hooted. Then she heard him yelling through the letter box. ‘You’re pushing your luck luv, we’ll get stuck on the West Way.’ Wretched man. Wretched bloody script. Why was she even doing this? Laura could have got a later train, got another script from the production office? Even Tom had managed to remember his script, even when she’d had to do everything else for him. Tool of the trade. But then, Tom had learnt his lines days before, whereas Laura busked through every script like everything else she did. Eyes and teeth. Typical.

Harriet caught sight of herself in the dusty mirror, the long pale red hair plastered over her shiny face, crumpled silk blouse, what a sight! Her hair was too long, it was driving her mad, she kept saying she wanted it cut off, but never had time to ring the hairdresser’s still less to turn up. She had what people called an expressive, interesting face, beautiful when she smiled, which wasn’t often, some days. No make-up left, and was that a spot coming? Fantastic. ‘Beep beep’ came from the street below. ‘Shut up!’

She found it at last, wedged under a fruit bowl which contained a rotting grapefruit and a dead wasp. Pale green this time. Laura’s demented scrawl all over it. Auctioneer, just the title, and the writers’ names, were enough for Harriet to know exactly what it would be like. Another Sunday-night drama serial, with spectacular scenery, designer clothes, wooden direction, this time set in a west-country auction house, but it could easily have been in a marina, or a country club. All the story lines, and the characters were interchangeable.

And, as usual, Laura, (‘L-ow — as in wow, darling, not Law as in bore. Italian way, never heard of Petrarch’s Muse?’) would play the plump efficient secretary, with lines such as, ‘Really! Your coffee’s right in front of you Gerard!’ Going on past form, her character would either turn out to be the other woman, or part of the office furniture, depending on how nice Laura was to the director and the writers before the second series. With empires to be built within the BBC drama department there usually was a second series — sadly for the general public. Though not for Laura’s precarious finances, Harriet had to admit.

She just couldn’t look at the room anymore, the smell of perfume and Laura was unmistakable. Harriet fled down the stairs, tripping over the ironing, and sending clothes spilling down onto the hall carpet. Was the rest of the house much better? Harriet thought, but didn’t stop to pick them up. She only ever cleaned the house at night, in the five minutes between the evening news and crashing into oblivion, and the only reason the place was tidy, was because she was ruthless at throwing things out. Never enough time. ‘Damn!’ A piece of chewing gum had stuck onto Harriet’s shoe, and then attached itself to a large birthday card. She flapped down the through the hall and out into her front garden, slamming the door behind her.

Heat shimmered in the street, distorting the shapes of the terraced houses in the taxi’s window screen. As she came out, the driver looked pointedly at his watch, ‘Sorry, got what I wanted. Paddington station as fast as possible please.’

‘When’s the train, love?’

‘Four thirty.’

‘On a Friday afternoon? Leave it out.’

He drew away in that extra slow way, Harriet thought all drivers must learn with the ‘Knowledge’, just for occasions when captive passengers were foaming at the mouth. Harriet was made of sterner stuff. She sat back, she wouldn’t foam. If Laura’s train had gone, it was Laura’s problem, it was bloody nice of her to do this at the end of the week.

‘Husband been dead long has he?’

Harriet was thinking of Laura. No wonder after a while all her men fled in the end, she frightened them off. Men were all little boys, they hated other people’s left-overs in bed, only their own. If Laura ever had any publicity as the nineties’ cool assertive woman, she would personally sell pictures of her room to the News of the World!

‘Sorry? Wasn’t listening.’

‘Been a widow long then?’

Widow. How did he know? Fool, she’d said so on their cosy ton-up just now, down the Goldhawk Road, when he’d asked what her ‘hubby’ thought of England’s lousy score. Why hadn’t she just said he thought it was lousy too? She hadn’t been very clever.

‘Er five years.’ She could see a harassed woman with three obviously sunburnt children crossing the road.

‘You’ll have to marry again. Nothing like it, married life. Second time around’s better. I’ve got two stepdaughters as well. Life’s more comfortable the second time you call.’

Oh no, he’s not going to sing all the way there! Two step-daughters, ghastly prospect.

She unstuck the birthday card from her shoe. Laura’s. Looked like Jeremy’s writing, a good sign when agents knew you were still alive. ‘Darling Laura, many more, love J.’ Laura had been in a foul mood all last week, saying now that she was 40, she was in the dead zone, and would probably never work again. Tom had been a Gemini too. He would have been only 34 this month. Harriet found herself sighing. She thought of him so often at this time of year. The odd thing no-one ever seemed to understand, was that she didn’t feel any less married, just because he wasn’t around. Until death us do part, was rubbish. Though now she found it hard to picture him except in certain surroundings, like the pub round the corner.

She had once read about a mother whose children had been abducted to Pakistan by their father, who had trained herself not to go out shopping after school, or look at children in the street. She too had developed this selective vision, skimming round articles about bereavement and heart attacks. It made life more manageable. Features on single-parent families she could handle. That was not a category that seemed to apply to Billy and her. That was for unmarried mothers, divorced women, both of whom had had a measure of choice.

The man was still singing, and he kept turning round smiling at her. She wished he would keep his eye on the road. He had that look. Most men went a bit silly when they found out she was a widow. Good gracious a young widow, how was she managing the bills and what was she doing for sex? As if being a widow in your thirties put you somehow into a different category, in which your money worries were more acute, and your lack of sex more erotic. And what did other single women do? Muddled along and did without, that’s what! Laura told her she was being paranoid, and to get out more, join something. But it was such an effort going out alone, and even worse having to be with someone else.

Tom, like most actors, had been a gossip, who had loved the latest news who had got which part, and better still who hadn’t! He had told wonderfully funny stories too, when unemployment had not made him hell to live with.

Harriet sometimes wrote him long gossipy letters late at night, curled up in their bed, about Billy’s life at boarding school, who his friends were, his fencing, his singing. How the business was doing, small triumphs like a new client, small hurts, staff problems, the latest details of their friends, his parents, her father. Gradually the number of people she had met since his death had grown, but she told him all about the new ones anyway, though all the time she was aware, that the these people saw her differently. She was no longer the carefree, seize-the-day, student Harriet she had once been, which was why perhaps she saw less of their old friends. But then she wasn’t exactly twenty anymore, 35 was a horribly round number.

The letters often ran for pages. In the winter, a little girl again, she would screw them up and push them on the fire, hoping, just like the children’s advertisement for a nanny in Mary Poppins, they would float up the chimney, and reach his cloud, where he would be sitting happily knocking back the booze, and planning which Monday morning would be best to slosh rain down on the car she’d just washed. The swine! Absurd, childish, yet this vision soothed her in a way no amount of kind words ever could.

From the depths of her handbag, came the intrusive whine of her mobile phone. ‘Mrs Gosse, it’s George Russell speaking. Your office told me to ring on this number for my lesson.’

Harriet snapped back into the present. She’d said she’d do the lesson instead of Mireille because she had had to go to the dentist! How could she have forgotten? The taxi, which had been crawling along Shepherd’s Bush, suddenly tore into third gear at the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout.

Flung forward almost to her knees, Harriet ruffled through her briefcase for Mr Russell’s coursework. If + pluperfect

— conditional. Laminated plastics. What was the French for laminated plastics? Her mind went a blank.

‘Monsieur Russell?’ She took a deep breath and in French, oozed Gallic charm concentrate down the line to Pinner. ‘I had intended to ring you this afternoon. Mireille has had to go to the dentist, so we shall certainly have to arrange another lesson at a time convenient to you. But I thought, not to waste this opportunity, perhaps we could do the exercise on page one.

Harriet knew that when Rome burned, she was a damned sight better than Laura at playing the cool nineties businesswoman. Keep the man sweet, Harriet, she thought, we’re talking school fees here.

‘Par exemple, si vous aviez terminé votre travail, vous auriez pu aller au theatre. Mais oui. Alors numero deux.’

The driver eyes met Harriet’s in his mirror. Harriet could see him thinking ‘Très sexy, French on the mobile, one of those dirty 0898 numbers are you?’ The traffic came to a dignified stop on the Westway. ‘Never make it now love’, he said. Harriet ignored him. On the other end of the line, the client’s accent was like sandpaper, how could Mireille bear to teach him? ‘Oui très bien, ou peut-être, Monsieur, si vous etiez sorti, vous auriez rencontre Marcel.’

She worked through her lesson notes, wondering if he would get a twenty-minute lesson, on the other hand if he did, then Laura’s train would definitely have left.

The taxi lurched off the West Way, and temporarily the line went dead as it went under the flyover. Mr George Russell deputy sales manager of Rushton Plastics (UK) plc sitting in Pinner, was feeling waggish. ‘Oü est vous Madame, Piccadilly Circus?’ He loved his phone lessons on a Friday, didn’t feel a fool at all, more an international high-flyer, not just a cog in the sales force, third in line to any trips to la belle France. ‘Je voudrai....

But whatever it was he did voudrai, was cut off forever, when, finding its form at last, the taxi tore down the slope into Paddington station, shooting up in the air as it ran over the newly installed sleeping policemen. Harriet shoved the phone back into her handbag. She’d have to get him back later, somehow.

‘What was all that about then?’ The driver winked salaciously.

‘Laminated plastics. Thank you, here you are!

By the time he’d put the money away, and thought of a witty reply, Harriet had disappeared.

The station was a sea of hot striped shirts, and fraying tempers. Like hungry penguins at the Zoo waiting for their fish, middle-aged men stood expectant, looking up at the announcement board, poised to dive the second their train flapped up. Nearby, as if to mock such hopes, the Western Region Brass Band played Chattanooga Choo Choo, whilst the voice on the tannoy announced yet another delay for the Bristol service. The announcer’s apology on behalf of British Rail sounded triumphant, as if, Harriet thought, she only had to get to Perivale, when her shift was over, thank you very much.

Harriet stopped running. What a waste of time and money. Obviously Laura had already left.

‘Harriet! Darling! Over here!’

Laura’s husky contralto boomed across the concourse with the practice gained from more years demonstrating kitchen products at Debenhams, than she cared to admit. ‘Over here! The train’s late, thank God!’

Flap, flap, flap went the announcement board. Burntout executives swooped past Harriet. Every penguin for himself.

Harriet could see Laura waving, and she waved the script pretending to slit her throat. From this distance, Laura looked quite petite, funny how the camera made people gain ten pounds, and she always looked plump on television, however much she starved. Bones were the thing, Tom had always said. Harriet began to worm her way through the crowd.

‘Laura, I can’t think of a printable adjective for your script. The cab cost a fortune. Don’t ever do this again.’ Harriet flopped down in the plastic seat next to her. She felt like kicking Laura’s mock-Gucci luggage all over the concourse. ‘Don’t look so cool and boody collected.’

‘I’m not cool and collected. I’ve been shitting myself for the last half-hour.’ Laura was rifling through the script. ‘Thanks Harriet —,

‘You cannot imagine the traffic, and I had to give a lesson, to this plastics man in the cab. We were cut off mid-excercise. God knows what he thought. If I’ve lost that business, you’re dead.’

‘I’m so sorry Harriet. I just don’t know why I left it behind. There’s this one scene that’s not sticking.’

‘But your lines never stick.’

‘It’s just not as easy for me darling. Not like Tom, he used to learn them on the loo!’

‘I know. We would all be hopping outside banging on the door!’

They laughed.

Harriet piled all her hair on her head hoping it would cool her down. It didn’t.

‘And now I’ve got to fight my way back to the office and placate Mrs Mac, which won’t be easy, she was really pissed off when I rushed out. As for your room, I nearly threw up.’

‘Awful isn’t it?’

‘A black hole.’

‘Darling I already feel a heel, a rotten lodger, a rotten actress who can’t learn her lines. I promise I’ll come back laden with black bin liners and be hugely tidy.’

Laura lit a cigarette, always a sign of apology, and blew what was probably the finest smoked ring Paddington station had seen for months.

‘you’d better, Marchaflt. I forgive you, just why are actors so hard to live with?’

‘That’s easy, we never, ever grow up. Good God, look at that. Where do people get the energy from, in this heat?’

In front of them, a few yards away to one side of the weighing machine, a couple were embracing with real passions completely oblivious to their surroundings. At first, Harriet thought it was a young girl, she was so slim, and wore torn jeans and a cheap white T-shirt, but as she turned, Harriet could see she was older, in her thirties perhaps, something about her arms and her neck. But the man was much younger, tall and powerfully built, muscles bulging out of his white shirt, his navy blazer was neatly folded over the briefcase at his feet. It was an odd combination.

‘Don’t think they’ve got it quite right do you, H.? I think you need a bus stop and a line of disapproving old ladies really, for the full effect.’

‘Stop looking, Laura, they might turn round.’

‘Darling, they’re hard at it. We’re talking toyboy time. Now should I feel envious, or pity her for having to be so physical in this heat?’ Laura put her head on one side to copy the angle of the woman’s head. ‘He is rather scrummy, though that thick neck makes one suspect that he might be two cogs short of a Moulimix.’

‘Wherever do you get these expressions?’ Harriet laughed, watching the couple for a moment. They never stopped for a second, not even for the announcement of the departure of the 5.10 for Swindon.

‘Where’s his other hand gone? Naughty. Personally, I think he looks a bit too energetic. Couldn’t cope with all that rampant testosterone. But that’s what you could do with H. Good meaningless sex, and lots of it. Trust your auntie Laura.’

‘No comment.’

‘O.K., O.K.’

‘Laura, that boy does seem familiar, and the woman does too. Who do you suppose they are? Do we know them?’

‘Luvvies you mean? No I don’t think so, unless they’re rehearsing for a remake of The Graduate, no she’s too young, and he looks too thick. I’m just wondering if he’ll ever let her up for air. No, no, give the girl a break! Phew! Now that’s not fair, how come she’s still kept her lipstick on? Awful shade though.’

‘The 4.30 train to Gloucester is now standing at Platform S. We apologise for the delay, this was due to signal failure.’

‘Hoo-bloody-ray.’ Laura stood up, and stamped out her cigarette.

‘I’ll take this case.’ Harriet picked it up, and started to walk towards the trains.

‘Wait for me. Thanks again darling, for bringing the script, you’re an angel. Think of me working on it tonight. You know, I’ve got to kiss David Forsyth on Thursday, you know, the hunk in the chocolate ad. What a drag’. She lied! They stopped at the barrier. Laura looked at Harriet, ‘Look after yourself H., and take some time off when Billy comes home. You need cherishing! I’ll babysit.’

‘Liar, you’ll be living at the beautician.’

‘I hate you Harriet Goody-two-shoes Gosse, you know me so well. How depressing.’

‘Hope the shoot goes well. Ring me.’

‘I’m so nervous it’s ridiculous. No I’m not. Big breasts. In! Out! Give my love to darling Billy. Oh and enjoy his Speech Day, I forgot about that. Take lots of pictures.’

Laura waved and rushed along the platform. A dark head in exuberant pink amid the sea of bobbing shirts. A crowd of young schoolchildren went through after her, noisy, chattering, their teachers looking hot and desperate. Harriet turned and headed for the Underground, she looked around for the couple, but they had disappeared, as if they had been just a ghostly taunt. Fumbling for her rail pass, she was unexpectedly blinded by tears. Why they were there, she was much too exhausted to determine.

It was after seven when Harriet finally stepped off the tube. So weary, her briefcase, seemed to weigh like bricks. What a pay-off the devil had had from her good deed for the-day! She had got back to office to meet three last-minute crises, teachers throwing tantrums, and endless niggles, clients ringing up to grouch, suppliers ringing up to whinge. Let me out! Walking out of the station Harriet saw the rush-hour traffic still grinding its way into Chiswick, and suddenly wished she had leapt onto the train with Laura. A nice west-country location, only a few lines to learn, the luxury of it. Actors did not know they were born.

From the tube, the green of the Ravenscourt Park always burst in upon the eye after Hammersmith station, and tonight in the heat, there were still people lying on the grass grabbing the urban sun. Walking through the streets towards her house, there were all the familiar sights of a West London summer, people smoking on their doorsteps, windows open, all along the streets, and front doors too, in spite of the security risk.

Sounds of music, West Indian, jazz, classical. Cooking smells, delicious and pungent. All hit her as she passed by the small packed-together houses. More inner-city than Chiswick, less iffy than Shepherds Bush. Her own little patch of the London jungle, Brackenbury Village, as it now seemed to be called by every upwardly mobile resident under fifty, had its own familiar feel. Claustrophobic or cosy, moving up, clinging on, or giving up, its own particular street-life was never dull. A large Rolls Royce sneaked past, the chauffeur was obviously trying to cut out of one traffic hold-up only to crash into another. In the back, a middle-aged man, was reading a newspaper and smoking a cigar, but his windows were firmly closed, safe from such a mixed area.

‘Coo-ee! Harriet! Araminta, stay on the pavement, a car could come round any minute. Florian, whatever it is you’re doing, stop it!’

Two joggers came panting out of the off-licence clutching bottles of chilled Frascati, and Georgiana Gaskell, Harriet’s next-door neighbour and uncrowned Queen of Brackenbury Village, was standing on the pavement, as Harriet trudged round the corner. She was wearing beige shorts, which showed off her rather knobbly knees, and was carrying a bottle of Evian water and a bag of frozen mange tout. There was no escape.

‘Hello Georgiana.’ By the time Harriet had reached the last syllable of her name, she had succeeded in injecting some semblance of friendly enthusiasm. But Georgiana was not fooled. ‘You look so hot Harriet, thoroughly miserable. Poor dear. It must be such hell teaching French on the phone all day.’

‘I don’t. My staff do it now mostly.’ Harriet tried hard not to grit her teeth.

‘Now listen, Florian, walk in front properly, and stop picking your nose! How much a term? Harriet, Robert and I were wondering if you’d donate some food, and those sweet little kitchen chairs of yours to the street party. It’s going to be next Saturday, before everyone goes away.’

‘But that will mean Billy will miss it.’

‘Well yes, but it can’t be helped I’m afraid.’

‘Oh. I’ll have to leave it to you to contact everyone. Including the Browns and the Patels’, said Harriet pointedly, knowing Georgiana was nothing if not politically incorrect.

‘Er, yes. Must. Poor Harriet. Such a tired girl. At least you never have to worry about decorators. Mine broke the floral lavatory bowl this morning. Robert is going to go absolutely spare!’ Harriet thought Georgiana’s martyred tones were a joke, as if everyone in the entire road didn’t know that she had lived with the same decorators in great harmony for years.

Harriet had often wondered why Georgiana had not decamped long ago, to Wiltshire or the New Forest. Then one day, she had suddenly realised that she and Georgiana actually moved into two different places. While she and Tom had moved to Hammersmith, in the early eighties, scruffy, cheap, unloved and inner city, where rasta music filled the skies, and the odd mattress decorated the doorsteps, Georgiana and many others who had moved in later, had come not to Hammersmith, but to bijou Brackenbury Village, an area of chic, terraced cottages and small, stucco houses, where no window was without its full quota of Viennese blinds, and calico swags, tastefully sandwiched between Hammersmith Broadway and the Goldhawk Road with dear, wonderful Queen Charlotte’s Hospital.

Shops appeared, the owners also certain that they were in Brackenbury Village, wine bars too, and trendy, little restaurants with celebrated chefs doing their thing. The delicatessens, and the corner shops then started selling avocados, radicchio and the Spectator. By the time the peak of the property boom was reached in 1988, simple pretty cottages built for artisans and humble clerks ninety years before, had been pushed into the £175,000 bracket. The clerks were replaced by architects, lawyers and advertising executives on huge joint mortgages. And Harriet found she had succeeded in moving districts without leaving home.

Even now, though the nineties’ recession had bitten deep into any middle-class sense of order and fair play, and made the locals nostalgic about the once ubiquitous skips, Georgiana and her friends still lived in Brackenbury Village, come hell or repossession. Though now they had to cope with the arrival of noisy tenants brought in by the hated local Housing Association, who were now buying up property for a song; and pretend not to hear the loud music which rent hot summer evenings, which was certainly not Bach or Vivaldi, not even the Nigel Kennedy version. Yet the Brackenbury Village Society continued to thrive with its social calendar. There was even talk of starting up a branch of the W.I.

Harriet always felt a rush of pleasure when she saw her own little house down the street in all its brave shabbiness. Wisteria looped over the white-painted brickwork, Home, a haven for Billy, Laura and her. Even if she could not boast a German kitchen, a supine male meal ticket or a loft conversion, there was always the satisfaction of knowing that she passed with the Village Mafia because her unswagged curtains were, at least, lined! She had once caught Georgiana mouthing the words ‘unlined curtains’ to a fellow member of the National Childbirth Trust, when describing the new Irish family at 45. An absurd vision had struck that day of ripping out the lining in her own front curtains, and dancing with them naked in the street.

They parted at Harriet’s gate. Georgiana looked charitably at the cracked paving stones in her tiny front garden, ‘When does Billy come home from school? We really must have him over to play.’

‘Two weeks’ time. I can’t wait.’ Harriet felt it better not to commit Billy. Florian and Araminta were his bêtes noires.

‘Mark and I have decided we can’t bear to part with Florian till he’s thirteen. He can try for Eton then. Boarding’s such a wrench at eight isn’t it? You’re so brave!’ Georgiana patted Harriet’s arm, and then shepherded her brood up her own carefully tiled path. ‘As for the fees, I don’t know how people manage at all. Not that you’d get him into a good day school now I’m afraid, you’ve left it far too late. Bye!’

‘Thank you Georgiana’, Harriet thought as she let herself in for the second time that day. ‘Just remember she doesn’t mean to be an insensitive, snobbish intractable old cow, she was just bred that way, to marry a bore who is probably juggling his debts on his gold cards as I speak!’ Her tortoiseshell kitten came purring round her ankles. Thank God for the sanity of cats.

No Billy, no Laura. Just bills and a note from ‘The Willows’ announcing changes in visiting hours. They’d be banning visitors altogether next, on the basis that so few of their elderly residents ever got any, it would be better not to arouse jealousy.

She put the radio on in the kitchen, the CD player on in the living room, the clock radio in her bedroom, but drew the line at the musical box in Billy’s bedroom. The radio in the bathroom was always kept on Radio 4, and she filled the bath with lavender water and bubbles then lay back, still aware of the real silence behind the false companionship.

Yet this should be, what psychologists call, the flashpoint of the day. Children demanding baths, supper and attention from tired mothers, husbands coming through the door demanding meals and attention from tired wives. Juggling, washing machine on, fishfingers and whisky at the ready. Yet here she was at 35, on a Friday night, soaking up the bubbles and thinking about painting her toe nails instead of cleaning the loo. Her life had other flashpoints.

Through the open bathroom door, she could see family photographs nailed up all over the landing wall. Her rogues gallery. Her mother, frail and pretty in a mini skirt, .Tom and her on their wedding day, they looked so young! Not to mention penniless. Penniless actor meets penniless Edinburgh graduate language teacher at Edinburgh fringe. Hot kisses on Carlton Hill almost leading to hypothermia, followed by nuptials in an even more frozen church in W6. Never would she forget the surprise when her father offered to buy them the house. Unbelievable. The even greater surprise came, when the cheque hadn’t bounced. Dressed like George Melly on a good day, and a tramp on a bad, she’d never thought he had any money at all.

Jester Dunne, artist impossible, whose oils had flowed in and out of fashion like a slick, always said money came along when you needed it, and painting like an avenging angel, in the AuerbaCh style, it usually did. He had dragged her along through France and Italy, leaving her to grub about with the local kids in whichever village took his fancy. She had grown up a trilingual gypsy full of disjointed learning, the object of fitful fatherly affection. They had belonged together. A pair of vagabonds. Yet while she had poured on him a little girl’s devotion, she had always known somehow, that he didn’t need it. That he reserved his real passion for the colourful women on his canvas and his couch, rather than for the flesh and blood creation of his loins.

Later wooed by American matrons, Jester had descended on Martha’s Vineyard each summer lecturing, and doing none too complimentary portraits with irascible charm. The stroke had screwed up his hands and his perception of depth, and to his fury, had made him stop painting. Though he had once announced during Sunday lunch at the Willies as he called it, that the place was far too full of scraggy tits to make him get his paints out — or his pants down come to that. Luckily only Harriet had been able to make out what he was saying, and the residents had continued to be enchanted.

The phone rang.

‘Mum, it’s Billy.’

‘Darling, how are you? Are you O.K? I’m really looking forward to Speech Day.’ Harriet had learnt the hard way not to overdo it.

She really wanted to say that without you, I feel I have a leg missing, that you can’t possibly know what it is to be without your child. What the guilt is like to live with. But she didn’t. He was getting a marvellous education, and lots of male company, and he would never be a latchkey only child as she had been, heating up cold pasta on the stove, doing her homework alone in the cold house at the kitchen table, waiting, waiting all the time, often late into the night, for her father to come back from his studio.

‘I’m singing the Sanctus in the service, though you probably won’t be able to see me.

‘How exciting. Will they record it?’

‘Shouldn’t think so. Too mouldy.’

‘Oh what a shame. Listen Billy, are you eating? Are you drinking that extra milk I’m paying for through the nose?’

‘Yes Mum, do stop fussing. By the way, Matron’s just got hitched to Rogers, and Crouch has gone ballistic. It’s been going on for months in her flat, but he’s only just got wind of it.’

‘Matron, but she’s in her thirties?’

‘Yes, really ancient, but still pretty tasty.’

‘Watch it! But he is a bit young for her.’

‘Not according to her! Must go. Bye, Mum.’

‘Yes, bye darling.’ The line was already dead.

Of course! The couple at the station, they would have been getting the train back to School. Nom de nom de nom. A new twist, a RICH toy boy. Clever, not-so-old Matron! Harriet went downstairs to open the wine. What was she going to wear? It would have to be the pink dress she’d bought last year, with her one and only Philip Somerville hat. Now rather past its sell-by date, but still classy. She smiled as she remembered how Tom had brought it home with a flourish with his first cheque from Sampson House, then got as drunk as a tick. They were really going to be in the money, he had told her with a sozzled smile, before crashing out asleep on the sitting room floor. Two musketeers.

Later getting into bed, she thought how angry he would have been about Billy going to boarding school. Yet how could she have built up the business unless he had gone? Or had there been an alternative that she had simply not had the wit to see? Widowed parenting was an eternally one-sided conversation.

Without thinking, she picked up a small smooth block of wood off the bedside table.

‘Mum, I kept planing it to get it straight, and every time I got one side straight, the other got wonky. Now, that’s

all that’s left. The other boys have made magazine racks, but I couldn’t do it.’

Eight-year-Old Billy, still the new boy in his overlarge uniform and crumpled little face, had stood there in the Woodwork Department on Parents’ Day fighting back the tears, and holding the small piece of wood out towards her. Aware she was breaking a hundred unwritten codes, she had knelt down and folded him in her arms.

She had told him how, at one school in Brighton, she bad been told in Domestic Science to make a nightie. Not likely, since she didn’t even know how to thread the sewing machine. At the end-of-term fashion show, there were girls mincing up on stage, who had made whole wardrobes of coats and dresses; while her own effort had been banished, a ragged tube of turquoise nylon, with two holes where the sleeves should have been, and a zip hanging precariously down one side. When Jester had seen it afterwards, he had opened champagne, and he and his friends had made her dance in it on the kitchen table, toasting all Domestic Science teachers to perdition. How she and Billy had howled with laughter among the perfect lampstands and tie holders. There is always something rather comforting about inherited incompetence.

Read Chapter Two

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