The Reading Group Part 2

'Charlotte Charles. One of last year's graduate intake. I saw her at the Christmas do. Gavin's standard issue tall, legs up to there, hair made for tossing, t.i.ts, teeth and talk.'

Nicole had walked into the box just on time, deep breath at the door, big smile straight into Gavin, who was standing leaning against the wall and over Charlotte Charles. Who, for her part, smiled impertinently up at him, b.r.e.a.s.t.s heaving ever so slightly, lips parted and wet. A pose that probably said to most, 'Good colleagues, friendly, sharing a joke'. To Nicole it had said, without doubt, 'Gavin's latest screw.' They were all much the same: fresh, somehow, reeking of eau d'ambition, success and savvy, which got him every time. Same as she'd had.

'b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Are you sure?'

'Yup. Never knowingly overestimated, my husband. I can tell from the first moment. And then I just think back and, yes, the late evenings, the overnighters. If there was any doubt, there's the vast number of roses I'm staring at right now.'

'Wanna leave? Spare room's made up.' It was a joke between them, made often over the last two or three years. They both knew the answer: she didn't want to leave. She wanted it to be different. d.a.m.n it all, she still loved him so much. Harriet had almost given up preaching; settled for listening, loving, and biting back as much as she could swallow.

'No, but I'll settle for a bottle of wine and girlie gossip. Let the f.u.c.ker cook his own dinner and sort out the kids, shall I? That's a penance in itself.'

'Too right! See you at eight? I'll send Tim to the pub or the driving range, or something.'

'Thanks.'

'Nic? I love ya.'

Then the tears. Kindness did that. She tried to sound angry tried even harder to feel it because she was so fed up with hearing herself sound like such a pathetic doormat. But alone, in the quiet before the au pair brought the children home, she wasn't angry.

Harriet Harriet put down the phone. She had been standing in her own front hall, gazing at one of the photo-montage boards she had hung up the stairs ('All the better to play happy families with, my dear.') It featured their two families hers and Nicole's on holiday the summer after their first babies had been born: Josh and the twins, William and George. They'd gone to Cornwall, rented a big, whitewashed cottage near the sea, been incredibly lucky with the weather (it had been a lovely summer, perfect for nursing newborns, six a.m. feeds with the windows open, bare arms and legs in the carrycot). They all looked sleepily happy and proud, surrounded by the endless paraphernalia of affluent first-time parents.

It had been a great week, full of red wine, communally cooked pasta and catnaps. And we thought we all knew each other so well, thought Harriet. She remembered looking around at Tim, Nicole and Gavin one evening and thinking that they would be doing this, in different places, with more children hopefully but the four of them good friends, for years and years to come.

Theirs had been an instant, close friends.h.i.+p of the kind made only in wartime and late pregnancy, Tim had joked. From the instant Nicole had flopped down gratefully beside her that winter on the enormous beanbag at the first antenatal cla.s.s, smiling ruefully, Harriet had liked her. They were a motley crew, mostly with only their due dates in common, who had turned up to hear dubious words of wisdom that the dippy-hippie teacher Erica had to offer. She had sat in the lotus position ('Just because she's the only woman in the room who can,' Nicole whispered) and pontificated about the virtues of dried fruit and isotonic drinks as aids to labour ('Gin 'n' tonic, please,' Harriet whispered) before telling them, with just an undertone of smug cow, that she had delivered all five of her children underwater at home, with the first four in attendance to help with the fifth. At that Harriet and Nicole had been united in eye-rolling horror.

The husbands, Tim and Gavin among them, had been sent to another room to discuss their own fears about the imminent arrivals. There, Tim had been asked to articulate Gavin's greatest fear, and vice versa. Tim's was 'swapping my Z3 for a Volvo estate' and Gavin's 'Disneyland', which anointed them both with the mark of Cain, as far as Erica was concerned, but formed the beginning of a beautiful friends.h.i.+p between the pair.

The antenatal cla.s.s had become the pub, become dinner, become daily phone calls between Nicole and Harriet, and long winter afternoons drinking hot chocolate (Harriet) and ginger tea (Nicole).

'I just don't think we have a future if you're going to sit there drinking that stuff and ignoring those double chocolate-chip m.u.f.fins. This baby is two-thirds walnut layer cake already, and I've still got a month to go.'

'Well, tough. I'm determined not to put on another pound, even for you. These twins can jolly well live off my hips for the last few weeks. I sat in the bath last night and just cried it's never going to go back.' The 'it' in question was Nicole's stomach, which had grown vast, alarmingly protuberant, and taut. From the back, though, you couldn't even tell she was pregnant, and she looked beautiful in those fabulous French maternity clothes, which were actually designed to emphasise the b.u.mp. Harriet, on the other hand, might have been gestating in several parts of her body, and was truly fat from earlobes to ankles. Since the first trimester she had been reliant on M&S jumpers in size twenty-two, sobbing melodramatically and eating Toblerone whenever she read one of those helpful articles that suggested she 'borrow s.h.i.+rts from your husband's wardrobe he won't mind and accessorise them with a colourful scarf'. She'd outgrown Tim's stuff almost before she'd proudly shown him the blue line in the square window. Not that Tim had minded: he had been a sit-com husband, insisting from the first moment that she carry nothing heavier than a cup of tea and tackle no domestic task more taxing than flicking through catalogues of exquisite, outrageously expensive baby clothes. The fatter she got, the sweeter he was, the prouder, the more excited.

As much as Harriet envied Nicole her glamorous pregnancy shape, she didn't envy her Gavin, who was less indulgent. Although he, too, could hardly disguise his excitement, especially once they had established that the twins were boys, he was appreciably less entranced than Tim by his wife's changing shape. He was slightly impatient, even, about the process and its effect on Nicole. He snapped at her, once, in a restaurant, the third time she had to nip to the loo. Harriet and Tim had exchanged a marital eyebrow, and she had been reminded, yet again, of how lucky she was.

Harriet and Nicole's areas of common ground were bigger than the babies they were about to have. They had grown up as only daughters of middle-cla.s.s, conventional families, where the parents stayed married and celebrated silver wedding anniversaries with cruises in the Med. Both had been to university and had careers they loved Harriet in advertising and Nicole in book-publis.h.i.+ng which they were to put on hold to have the children, a decision that both excited and terrified them. And they saw in each other the friend they had hoped to find for the busy first years at home with the babies.

It was Harriet whom Nicole telephoned when her waters broke late in the evening six weeks before her due date: Gavin was away overnight, and although he took the first flight home that he could get the following morning, he missed it all. At the hospital the doctor had lost one twin's heartbeat and performed an emergency Caesarean. Gavin's loss was their friends.h.i.+p's gain. Nicole had been terrified; but the panic had been brief. One minute the two women had been sitting, b.u.mp to b.u.mp, in the ward, waiting for the consultant to p.r.o.nounce, joking about Lucozade. At the next quiet but fast activity had kicked in. Harriet had found herself sitting beside an empty bed with Nicole's engagement ring in one hand and her contact lenses in the other. She stared hard into the diamond, blinking back tears of fear, for Nicole and herself, until a nurse had stuck her head round the curtain and p.r.o.nounced that the boys had been born, mother and babies doing well. So Harriet had got to practise on William and George.

Six weeks later, Nicole was one of baby Joshua's first visitors, arriving in Harriet's bedroom with a twin under each arm, a bottle of champagne in one hand. They had laid the three tiny boys side by side on the big bed, Josh in the middle, and become sentimental and squiffy on one gla.s.s each: p.r.o.nouncing that in seventy-five years' time, when they were all little old men, they really would be able to say that they had known each other all of their lives.

G.o.d. Gavin was such a s.h.i.+t.

Harriet still remembered the shock of her first unpleasant discovery about Gavin. Joshua had been a few months old before she had finally lost enough weight to accept a lunch invitation to one of her old haunts from a friend at the agency where she had worked. Lisa Clements was an incorrigible gossip, but nice with it, and Harriet had figured that of all the people she might have seen, Lisa would be the most efficient: she always knew everything that had happened to everyone mostly before they did, since her best friend was PA to the human-resources director. Happily unmarried and drowning out her biological clock's ticking with the sound of her own laughter, it had been a Caesar salad and gla.s.s of Chenin Blanc before Lisa asked Harriet about 'that lovely husband of yours and that perfect little baby how old is he now, anyway?' The 'he' was a brave guess; clearly the names of said husband and son were too much of a struggle. Afraid of appearing hopelessly pedestrian and suburban, Harriet had told her a couple of brief and, hopefully, amusing stories she had worked on during the train ride up to town, making mention of her good friends Nicole and Gavin. She was delighted to be able to slip in, 'You might know Gavin, actually, Lisa. He's a creative director at Clarke, Thomas and Keeble.'

'Oh, my G.o.d. Know him? An awful lot of us "know" him, if you catch my meaning.'

Harriet, out of the loop for a few months, made a face that indicated she hadn't caught a thing.

'Serial s.h.a.gger, darling! Sleeps with anything that stands still long enough. Famous for it. You know Anna Johnson, used to be with them, blonde hair, never wears a bra... they had a thing. My friend Pam, at the media-buying agency... a gazillion graduate trainees, so they say. Oh, nameless, faceless many. I've always felt rather insulted that he hasn't made a move on me...'

Lisa had evidently been set to continue until she glanced at Harriet's face, became horribly frightened that there were going to be hormonal tears, and went quiet. 'Sorry, sweetie. Look, maybe he's changed. Fatherhood, and all that, does things to a bloke, don't they say?'

They skipped coffee. Lisa seemed pathetically keen to get back to some budget presentation, and Harriet's mouth was far too dry to talk.

Of course, after that everything had been different. She had gone home, unable to ring Nicole for what would have been their customary debrief, told Tim, then lain awake in bed, wide-eyed and furious.

Tim had been less shocked. 'What a p.r.i.c.k! I've never liked the way he eyes women up when we're out, gets chatting at the bar, but I didn't think he'd be stupid enough to do anything about it.' He squeezed her shoulder, then reached round to stroke the top of Joshua's head as his son lay cradled in Harriet's arms. 'Who would risk all this?' And then, 'Do you think Nic knows? Are you going to tell her?'

On this Harriet was clear: 'Absolutely not. If she does know, and I don't think she can, what with the twins and things, but if she does and she hasn't told me, it's because she doesn't want to talk about it. And if she doesn't know, I can't be the one to tell her. If and when she needs us, we'll be here for her.' She leant her head against his chest. 'Won't we?'

'Always.'

Always. Us. We. When was that? Just six years ago. Or six long years ago. She wasn't sure. She squeezed her eyes shut and imagined him as he had been then. Tall, strong, handsome, calm, kind. With a ready laugh that started in his eyes. An optimist, a gentleman, a thinker, but not a worrier. The perfect husband. An unbelievable father, who did night feeds as soon as Joshua, then Chloe had been weaned, winding them patiently as he swayed to Van Morrison downstairs in the sitting room. Who dropped to his knees, still in his suit, as soon as the front door closed behind him each evening to scoop both children into his arms and listened patiently to every tale of woe and triumph. Who brought her freesias every year on the anniversary of their first supper together. And most nights still held her face in his hands while he told her he couldn't believe his luck, that he loved her dearly.

And what kind of husband was he now? Exactly the same, given the chance. Which he hadn't been lately. I'm the bolter, Harriet thought. I'm the one who's changed. I don't love him any more. I made a mistake. I'm the b.i.t.c.h. But a b.i.t.c.h with a heap of housework to do. Harriet's inner Mrs Mop sat down hard on her inner demons, and got out the bleach. Something of a familiar pattern, three days: don't think about it, it might go away. Or maybe, she thought, I'll get an ulcer or spontaneously combust. But not this afternoon.

Surveying the chaos, she had to acknowledge that firing Tracey-the-cleaning-lady-from-h.e.l.l had probably been a bit rash. Tracey might have had a penchant for This Morning and pus.h.i.+ng dust under heavy pieces of furniture, but she had been better than nothing. The contents of the playroom had, as usual, flowed, like lava, throughout the house, and the naked Barbie dolls, stray pieces of jigsaw and forbidden b.a.l.l.s of brown Play-Doh were an a.s.sault course on every carpet. Unfinished homework (Josh's) and rejected clothing (Chloe's) lay on the stairs. Bits of stray tinsel left over from the week before gave everything else a party atmosphere, including the cat, who had clearly been rolling in it. Harriet picked up her almost cold coffee and dropped into the nearest armchair, neatly removing a piece of Lego as she did so. She started with the most appealing job: sorting the morning's post. She wasn't interested in the bills, but there might be the odd catalogue among them.

At first she a.s.sumed that the white envelope with un familiar handwriting was a stray Christmas card from obscure relatives. When she felt the unmistakable thick card of an invitation she still wasn't excited: interesting people didn't have parties in January they were either in Barbados, hibernation or rehab. It would be some terminally dull do organised by one of Tim's clients not worth paying a sitter five pounds an hour. Suddenly Joshua was there, a freckly hurricane, followed swiftly by Chloe, two years his junior but intellectually his superior. At this stage in their childhood, when they were almost perpetually locked in a half-nelson, that didn't s.h.i.+ne through.

'Mum!' It was dragged out to last ten seconds. 'Mum!' Repeated in case she tried to deny the charge. 'I'm trying to watch Bug's Life and Chloe keeps turning it off.'

'He's hidden the Fat Controller, Mum, and I wanna watch Sleeping Beauty.'

'But that's soooo drippy. And you've seen it about a million times.' Then Joshua began, in an alarming falsetto, 'I know you, I danced with you once upon a dream,' pirouetting around the chair with Chloe's pigtail held high in his hand.

'Aaagh.' Chloe screamed.

'You two,' Harriet began, in her best menacing-Mummy voice, then looked down at the invitation in her hand. Quietly. 'Joshua, please put Sleeping Beauty on in the playroom for your sister. Then you may watch Bug's Life in Mummy and Daddy's bed as long as you take your shoes off. I'll bring you some juice and sweeties in just a minute. Off you go, sweethearts.' Which, of course, they did, somewhat flummoxed at their good fortune.

Very grand, thick cream card, luxuriously copperplate printing in which a couple she was sure she'd never heard of formally requested the pleasure of her and Tim's company At the marriage of their daughter Imogen Amelia to Mr Charles Andrew Roebuck at 4 p.m.

on Sat.u.r.day 8 March 2002 at St Mary's Parish Church, Dinton, Salisbury, Wilts.h.i.+re, and afterwards at Chatterton House, Teffont Evias And would they please RSVP to said strangers, in Debrett's approved etiquette fas.h.i.+on, purchase a practical yet stylish gift from the happy couple's list at the Conran Shop, lose that last stone they were still blaming on their four-year-old child, buy an expensive new outfit with matching hat and bag, follow the neat little map enclosed, arrive on time, sing hymns in tune or very quietly, not get drunk on the Laurent Perrier, and smile benevolently at the person they still thought of as the great love of their life as he promised to love another for ever.

Would she h.e.l.l! Harriet's heart had fallen on to the rug in front of her. He couldn't be in love with someone else. He didn't really love this Imogen Amelia (what an absurd name) and he sure as f.u.c.k couldn't be marrying her. Yes, all right, Harriet had moved on, she'd found someone else, she was married. But didn't Charles know that was a mistake? He wasn't supposed to go and do it too.

She hadn't seen Charles since she was pregnant with Chloe. That lunch had been a mistake. She had gone for a look that said 'glowing with health, earth-mother, look what you're missing, boy'. But she had caught sight of herself in a shop window as she made her way to the restaurant and realised that the look she had achieved was more 'auditioning for Moby d.i.c.k; shoe-in for the part'. He'd just met Imogen, but that hadn't worried Harriet much there'd been a few girls since her, but none had lasted long. Charles claimed he was enjoying his freedom (after so many years with her) but Harriet had understood that this was code for 'no one compares to you'. She'd heard from a mutual friend that Imogen was bossing him into moving away from his old friends, but she knew Charles wouldn't stand for that self-determination was everything to a man like him: you couldn't pin him down. If he'd been going to settle down with anyone it would have been her. This Imogen creature didn't stand a chance. Then she'd lost touch with the mutual friend and been left to speculate, but mostly to comfort herself with the thought that Charles would always regret her, like Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. This was not right. Not right at all.

She ran upstairs to her en suite bathroom, kicked off her shoes, pulled her sweater over her head and jumped on to the scales. s.h.i.+t. Right. Eight weeks. Two pounds a week. (Four pounds if she made that cabbage stuff Nicole sometimes ate for a few days.) Should s.h.i.+ft a stone easily. In time to shop. For something with a lot of cleavage in red. With extremely high heels. Harriet tucked the invitation under the pile of tummy-gripping knickers in her top drawer, fingers still shaking, and went downstairs to make herself a cup of the ginger tea she kept in stock for Nicole.

Polly Polly had come straight from work to collect Susan. It was one of their regular nights at Caffe Uno just the two of them. Four gla.s.ses of house red, two bowls of carbonara, a salad to share, and the world to set to rights.

They were school-gate friends, she and Susan. They'd met fifteen years ago on the day when Cressida and Ed had started primary school. Susan was an old hand: Alex was in the year above. She'd been a lot slimmer then, but otherwise she was much the same. She'd been born thirty-five that was what she said. She was one of those women who was attractive not because of what she wore or how groomed she was but because she gave off a kind of healthy happiness. Her wet-sand-coloured hair worn in a bob, despite Polly's best efforts was thick and glossy, her cheeks always pink, and her eyes sparkling. She looked happy because she was, apart from the normal worries and pressures of a working mum with two sons that occasionally a.s.sailed her. She never got stressed, she was organised to a fault, and she was absurdly happy with her husband.

She had told Polly, once, that she hadn't found herself until she'd found him, which might have sounded a bit pathetic if it hadn't been Susan saying it. They'd met at some tennis house party or something, when Susan was ridiculously young. She'd known, she said, that he was 'the one' that mythical creature about whom the happily married go on ad nauseam if you let them from the second round, after tea. Susan would never say, 'from the moment I laid eyes on him' far too dramatic! No, Roger had had to go through the first round and the strawberries-and-cream test before he pa.s.sed muster. He'd taken her round the corner, behind the beech hedge, and kissed her 'properly' while someone else called, 'Game, set and match', on the other side. And so it was for them. They'd been together ever since.

Polly, who'd been more into kissing improperly, but who had nevertheless also married young (and, predictably, less successfully), was never entirely sure why they were friends or why Susan had approached her in the first place. Polly had been a mess back then. She'd let her wildly curly hair grow straight out from her head (a la Crystal Tips and Alistair) and worn those Katharine Hamnett slogan T-s.h.i.+rts. She'd have been a Greenham Common woman if she hadn't felt so pa.s.sionately about Cressida. Susan probably thought Greenham Common was a garden centre. But friends they had become, bonded by first-day nerves shared over a quick cup of tea that had lasted until lunchtime pick-up, and friends they had stayed, all these years, although the kids had gone to different schools at eleven. The bond was strong enough by then, forged by fish fingers, discos, Casualty dashes, homework traumas, and all the good stuff you could squeeze in between if you talked fast enough. When Dan left Susan had been brilliant: she'd taken Cressida and Daniel home night after night, given them their tea with her boys, while Polly and Dan had sorted things out. That first summer after he had gone she and Roger had invited her and the children to join them on their gite holiday in the Dordogne. It was golden, the whole fortnight. The kids went caramel in the sun, building dens, swimming in the pool, and recoiling in horror from the unpasteurised, cow-warm milk the farm delivered each morning. She had read and swum, cooked in the big cool kitchen, and had begun to heal there. Roger and Susan were still so in love, but it didn't make her jealous: it made her believe. They would go off for walks, the two of them, leaving her to supervise the chaos, and come back hours later, sunburnt and smiling conspiratorially. Once, while she and Susan were preparing dinner, Susan raised her arms to reach something and gra.s.s fell out of her top. She had blushed. 'Been kissing "properly", have we?' Polly had teased her.

She loved her. And she knew that Susan loved her back. Soulmates, perhaps not. Touchstones, definitely. Best friends.

For the offices of Smith, March and May Polly's appearance was smart and together, but her ancient Fiesta was the real her: newspapers, work doc.u.ments, sweet-wrappers, half-eaten bits of fruit, with the perfect ironic touch a tiny aromatic fake fir tree on the rear-view mirror, which was at least four years old and smelt faintly of cigarette smoke.

Now Susan cleared a s.p.a.ce gingerly in the footwell with her shoe, swept the crumbs from the pa.s.senger seat on to the floor and sat down.

On the other side Polly jumped in, pulled on her seatbelt, started the car and turned off Radio 4. 'Guess what Santa brought me this year?'

'Diamonds, pearls a dishwasher?'

'Close. Jack asked me to marry him. And it's a ruby, actually. We were was.h.i.+ng up after Christmas lunch so I was wearing a pink cracker hat, proving, at least, that love is blind.'

'My G.o.d! Congratulations! I do mean congratulations, do I? You said yes?'

'I haven't said anything yet. When Dan asked me I said yes so fast he'd barely got the question out. Once bitten, and all that.'

'But you're going to say yes? Eventually?'

'I don't know Suze.' Polly looked at her friend. 'I love Jack. He's kind and funny, great with the kids, and he can cook and all that perfect husband on paper but he's also a slob, and indecisive, and too laid-back for his own d.a.m.n good. And I've been on my own for a long time now. I'm not sure I want someone around all the time.'

'You need a Woody and Mia arrangement Jack should get a house across the road and visit on alternate nights.'

Polly roared. 'That'd be great until he ran off with Cress! No but seriously, why wreck things? I'm not some ditzy twenty-year-old desperate for a husband.'

'No,' Susan said, slowly. 'That's what you were when you said yes to Dan. This is different, surely.'

'In some ways, yes. But marriage hasn't changed, has it? Right now I've got my independence, my own money, my own overdraft. I can drink Cointreau from a mug and watch Cary Grant movies all night in bed if I want to.'

'Well, just so long as you've got good reasons for turning him down.'

They had got out of the car now, just outside the restaurant, and Polly laughed as she pulled open the door, felt the basil-fragrant warm air hit her face. 'You know what I mean.'

'I think you're just frightened. Scared of changing the status quo. You've become a control freak, that's all, after all that time being in charge. What do Cress and Daniel think about it?'

'I haven't told them. I think Daniel would like having him around. Not so sure about Cressida, though. To be honest, she hasn't been around much since she started this foundation course, which, by the way, she's loving. It's great to see her with so much enthusiasm. I think she's really found her thing, you know?'

'That's great. Sounds like Alex. I think Roger's unbelievably thrilled that he's so into medicine. But we're doing it again talking about them and not about you. Cardinal sin of parenting.'

'Oh, but they're so much more interesting than we are... they've got it all to do.'

'Says Miss I've-just-had-a-proposal-and-wouldn't-I-make-a-lovely-spring-bride. How's that as a cure for empty-nest syndrome? And here's me, stuck in a rut with Roger after all these years.'

'Humph.'

They both laughed. Polly knew that Roger and Susan had a rock-solid marriage of the kind she envied, not because it had lasted so long plenty of couples stayed together out of fear, habit, need and celebrated their milestone anniversaries with pinched smiles and hollow speeches but because Roger and Susan it was this huge sense that they were always working together for the same things. Which wasn't dull, or staid, as she might once have thought: it was good, and real, and rare. And about as far removed from her first experience of marriage as it was possible to go.

She had married Dan on impulse: he had been drop-dead gorgeous in that totally arrogant way some young men have. Like Billy Bigelow in Carousel. A puffed-up peac.o.c.k, her mother had called him. He was always broke, but Polly had been too drunk on the charm, the Babycham and the fantastic s.e.x to notice that she was buying all the drinks. They had met at college in the late seventies, done the three Ds together: demos, drugs and disco, had a fabulous time. Polly was away from her rather b.u.t.toned-up parents and their safe village, in London, the first in the family to get to university, and Dan had encapsulated everything she'd thought she wanted to be. He was lovely then, still was, as long as you didn't want too much from him too much time, too much money, too much commitment. In 1982 when they got married she'd been pregnant with Cressida. 'Stupid girl,' her mother had said. 'You're going to miss it all now.' At the time, of course, she'd thought her mother was the stupid one. What would she miss that mattered? Ha, ha. In an embarra.s.singly short time, she had found herself with two children, no husband, and a great new perspective on what she had missed. Dan was still around. After their divorce in 1986, he had married again, a drippy girl, Polly thought. Tina still hung on his every word, between keeping two jobs going to pay their mortgage. Thankfully there had been no more children.

Although Polly thought Dan was a lovely dad. It had driven her crazy in the early years when she was slaving to keep them that Dan would show up on Sat.u.r.days to do the fun bit: he'd take them to the pictures or for burgers or to fool around on Brighton pier, then bring them home knackered and sick from candyfloss to boring old Mum. But she had come to see that it was her, not him, who reaped the rewards of all that effort, and although they loved their dad while respectfully having no time for Tina it was to her that they came with their triumphs and problems, their dilemmas and funny ways. They were her kids, and she was fierce about them. Dan had had to take second place and, to his credit, he accepted that role gracefully.

So, marriage was on the cards again after nearly fifteen years on her own which was three times as long as she'd been married in the first place. Not that Jack was Dan, although they had some of the same characteristics: Polly had learnt to recognise her weaknesses, even if she still gave in to them.

Susan smiled at her benevolently as if I were her daughter, Polly thought. She's enjoying this: she thinks I'm going to say yes because she's an eternal optimist. She believes in love and marriage and happy-ever-after and all of those things I know don't really exist. Christ, she's the matrimonial equivalent of an evangelical friend gone mad. Any minute now she's going to say how happy I'd be if I opened my heart and let Jack in.

'Okay, okay, so it's a definite maybe. Can we leave it at that? Right now the only question that I'm giving an "I will" to is "Do you want wine?".'

'This is a good thing, honey. Honestly it is.'

Polly made a sick noise, pulled a face, and Susan admitted defeat (for the time being). 'Yes, yes, of course. Wine.'

A gla.s.s and a salad later, they were talking about the reading group.

'It was a bit weird at first, sure, but I really enjoyed myself.'

'I can't remember the last time I was in a room where I didn't know everyone inside out. Well, that's not true, of course. There's work stuff and things I go to with Jack and for the kids. But then you don't really talk to people, do you? It's usually all hairdresser-level chat, small-talk. It isn't terribly British to start talking about serious stuff.'

'Didn't feel too touchy-feely, though, did it, because it was all about the book, sort of? Like that makes it safe to talk about bigger things, puts it in a comfortable context.'

'Maybe. I did worry, though, about whether we weren't being clever enough. A girl at work goes to one that sounds terribly intellectual. All plot and themes and irony and device, she goes on about. Sounded a bit over my head.'

'I reckon we might get more ambitious as we go along. We're bound to be sussing each other out to start with.'

'I suppose. Anyway, the real meat is more interesting. Do you really think someone like... oh, I don't know, D. H. Lawrence sat down with a list of his themes and his "devices" or d'you think he sat down and wrote a b.l.o.o.d.y good story straight from the heart? Although, I'd have thought Lady Chatterley's Lover came straight from somewhere a bit further south.'

'If that's the level of insightful comment we can expect from you, Polly Bradford, I don't think this thing will ever get off the ground.'

'I liked the women, though. Interesting bunch. What do you know about Clare? She was pretty quiet, I thought.'

'Her mum, Mary, works with me. You've met her at ours, I'm sure. It was Mary's idea I asked her if she'd like to come, but it's not her kind of thing. She thought Clare would enjoy it, though. She's worried about her. Really worried.'

'Why?'

'Can't have a baby, apparently. They've been trying for years. It seems that getting pregnant isn't the problem, more staying pregnant. Almost like her body is allergic to being that way. Or to her husband.'

'G.o.d, how awful. I can't imagine that. Got pregnant with my two practically as soon as I lay down.'

'I know. She had that kind of sad look about her, don't you think? I've never met her husband I think he works at the college, something in administration. Mary says he's really nice. They're starting to feel the cracks, though, apparently.'

'No wonder. Christ, didn't Clare say she was a midwife? Having to work with pregnant women and new mothers every day it's like a sick joke. I'm surprised she sticks it. Can't they do anything?'

Susan's phone rang. She'd only started using a mobile in the last year or so it was useful for work. Normally she didn't keep it on in the evening, but today she'd forgotten to switch it off. Mouthing 'sorry' to Polly, she answered: 'h.e.l.lo, darling? Everything okay?'

'Fine, love, or at least I hope so. Is your mother with you?'

'No. I left her at Mabel's this afternoon and told her you'd pick her up after early-evening surgery. I thought you'd both have been back by now. I was sure I reminded you this morning.'

'You did, and that's exactly what I thought, but when I got to Mabel's she said Alice had left she was going to walk over to the surgery, wanted some fresh air or something. I thought maybe you'd had a change of heart and taken her along with you.'

'No. Where are you now?' Something like panic rose in Susan's stomach.