The Reading Group Part 7

'I bet you she doesn't.' He kissed her ear. 'Still, your mum's got you, hasn't she? I think there's the distinct possibility of another wedding around here before too long, don't you?' Susan's cheeks had pinked, and she stared harder at the roasting tin she was scrubbing, smiling to herself.

Half an hour later, when they had finished and taken in a fresh pot of tea, Alice's eyes were puffy from crying, but both her parents were quiet, resigned. Susan always wondered what they had said, how they had felt about her sister's announcement, but it was something they kept to themselves. Alice only said, 'She's always wanted adventure, that one. I'm happy it's found her.'

Margaret hadn't changed her mind. Three months later she was gone. That same month Roger asked Susan's father for permission to marry her, and when it was granted, joyously, he had proposed and been accepted. Six months after that they were married, on a bl.u.s.tery spring day. Alice got to make her plans, and Susan's dad got his proud walk down the aisle. Margaret had sent a telegram, but was too busy on the farm, with the harvest, she said, to make the long journey home for the wedding.

Clare and Elliot There were no lights on when Elliot got home. Clare's car wasn't there. And the front door was double-locked. He didn't realise until he got upstairs that she had gone. Not out, but away. She'd left him. Strange, really, that there should be so few things downstairs that she needed. As if she was living in a B & B. The living room, the kitchen, the hallway were all exactly the same. The words of a Philip Larkin poem he had once read swam round his head as he wandered, vaguely dazed, from room to room: 'Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, shaped to the comfort of the last to go'. Only it hadn't been shaped to Clare's comfort. She had left barely a dent in the fabric of the home they had shared. Her bathroom shelf had been emptied of the utilitarian toiletries she used, her toothbrush was gone from the mug suspended next to the wash-basin, her side of the wardrobe was empty. He a.s.sumed the drawers were, too, but he didn't check. She had left the box of tissues on her side of the bed. The next month's reading-group book choice was gone, but the picture of the two of them, taken in the glare of the Mediterranean sun, was still there. It was stupid, he thought, how quiet the house felt, because she had never made any noise when she was in it. But, as though her things had somehow contributed to the ambient noise, it was quieter, hollowish, without them.

Elliot didn't know what to feel. If you could experience desolation, loneliness and fear at the same time as relief and a kind of excitement, then that was what he felt, but he knew that didn't make any sense. Mind you, what did any more? He felt guilty, too, that it had had to be Clare who made this dramatic gesture, Clare who had underscored the hopelessness of their situation and had been the first to do something about it. And angry, as well, that her action had made him the coward, the ostrich.

He knew where she was, of course. Her mum and dad lived five minutes away in the home where Clare had grown up; they hadn't changed her bedroom since she left.

Elliot picked up the phone, then put it down again. He wanted to hear it from her, watch her face while she said it, not have information about himself and his life filtered through her parents.

Clare's father let him in, holding the door wide open. His face was contorted with paradox: he had so much to say to Elliot and knew that there was nothing to say.

Clare was sitting with her mother on the sofa. She was holding a tumbler of whisky, Dutch courage. Mary got up, squeezed Clare's hand, and came towards Elliot. She smiled at him sadly. 'Are you okay?'

'I'm okay, Mary.'

She enclosed him in a hug, and then she was gone, the door was closed and he was alone with Clare. She was the first to speak, and she launched in, as though the conversation had already been started and she was picking it up in the middle. And, of course, it had been going on in their heads for months. But it was still surreal to hear the words.

'I'm just fed up with being so b.l.o.o.d.y sad all the time, and everything about home... and you,' Elliot winced, 'makes it worse. I can't do it any more, not right now.'

There was possibility, in those last words, hope. Elliot didn't know whether he wanted it to flicker on in his head or not, but at that moment, it made it possible for him to leave. It wasn't for ever.

'I know. Me too,' he said. 'I'll be at home, if you need me. Any time.'

Clare smiled, grateful to him for making it easy. 'I know.'

He didn't speak to Mary, or to Clare's father, although he knew he could have done. They didn't know what he was doing, they didn't blame him. They wanted to help, he knew. They just couldn't.

What now?

Harriet and Nicole They called it synchronised shopping, and they did it most Mondays after the school-run. They met in the supermarket coffee-shop for a weekend debrief, then took their trolleys to opposite ends, Nicole to bread and pastries, Harriet to fruit and veg. They met in the middle, criticised the contents of each other's trolley ('That's not cheese, it's yellow plastic'; 'Put those back!'; 'How can you feed your children on those?') and again in the queue. Some mornings the coffee-shop bit took hours, and the shopping had to be done trolley-dash style, in fifteen minutes. This was one such morning. It had taken two coffees so far for Harriet to relate every dreadful detail of the wedding.

'It was just awful. Awful. I was such a prat.'

'Oh, come on, it doesn't sound like you were that bad. I'm sure I've seen you a lot worse what about that quiz night at school last year?'

'Nic, I fell on someone. Fell. A more than averagely dishy man, as it happens.'

'You didn't fall, you leant. Besides, you could have thrown up on his shoes. Now that would have been shaming.'

'Yup. It would have been even more humiliating. Just.'

'I'm sure that no one took any notice. Half of them were probably just as drunk as you. I always get sozzled at weddings it's all that waiting around for the b.l.o.o.d.y photographs to be taken with the champagne on tap.'

'And that's almost the worst part of all. No one did take any notice. At all. Except this Nick bloke, I s'pose. And I think he just found me faintly ridiculous.'

'Well, sod him for a start. You'll probably never see him again. And as for anyone else, what on earth were you expecting? A starring role in the speeches? To get up and do the first dance with Charles?'

'No, no, no! Don't you make fun of me as well. I'm in no fit state to retaliate.'

'I'm not, Harry, honestly.' Nicole smiled. 'Look, you've done it now, he's off the shelf, you've got your "closure". You were never going to have the time of your life, were you? That's not why exes get invited to weddings. You were there for Charles to prove that he's oh-so-mature and well adjusted, and such a great guy that even his ex-girlfriends want to be in his life, and for this Imogen person to prove that she's secure and you're no threat, and to make sure you get that message. Which, I a.s.sume, you got loud and clear. All you can do now is just let go of it. Don't think about it any more.'

'Easier said than done. I wish we hadn't gone, I really do.'

'You do not! I know you better than that. You had to see how it had turned out. It just wasn't quite how you'd hoped. Although the wedding invitation would have been a big clue for most of us...' And she was smiling wryly again.

Harriet smiled back. 'Okay. But I don't know how to explain it. I wanted... I wanted some indication, however tiny, from him, that what we had wasn't nothing. That he remembered it. Cherished it, even. Like I do.'

'Sweetheart, I'm sure he does. But that wasn't the time or the place, was it? Really come on. Why does it still matter so much? After all this time?'

And the question hung in Harriet's mind all the way round Waitrose. Good point. Why did it still matter so b.l.o.o.d.y much?

As she pushed the trolley absently down the drinks aisle, Nicole was relieved to be with Harriet. She missed her when things were off track between them. Things had been a bit difficult since she had told Harriet about her... Plan sounded too calculating: it was a dream, really, a lovely daydream. Nicole was convinced that she and Gavin should have another baby, with his eyes and her hair, and tiny fingers and toes. Harriet thought she was an idiot, and had told her so. That was the trouble with having a best friend: honesty sometimes made it hard. She wanted to be told she was right. Harriet had said, 'You don't want me to lie to you, do you? If I really think this is a mistake, I have to tell you so. You see that, don't you?' Nicole didn't want to see it, and didn't want to hear it. Didn't want her bubble burst. So it was good to have the wedding and this ex to talk about. Harriet had been wallowing and self-absorbed mitigated only by how funny she was when she told the sorry stories. At the end she had been too wrapped up in it to ask, 'What's going on with you, then?' as she would normally. Maybe, Nicole thought, she doesn't want to talk about it either. But not talking about it wasn't going to change her mind any more than talking about it had done.

Besides, Gavin was being great. Best behaviour, Harriet called it. And it followed the pattern: Gavin had been caught out so Gavin felt bad (and Nicole still believed that he genuinely regretted it, that his behaviour was more addict than adulterer) and had behaved ever since like a model husband. Part of Nicole despised herself for having the strength to recognise and acknowledge that the pattern existed but being so weak that she still fell for it. But she wasn't falling for it, she was jumping into it. Each time, and there had been several in their marriage, she thought about not having him back, played out in her head how the conversation would go. She'd pack a bag of his things and leave it on the doorstep. She'd show up at his office and tell everyone what he had been up to. She'd change the locks, slam the phone down, see a lawyer and present him with papers. But she didn't really believe she would ever do any of those things. Nicole pa.s.sionately, desperately wanted her marriage and her family to work. She loved Gavin in a way she knew she could never love anyone else. Unlike Harriet, apparently, she felt certain that no other love, past or future, could ever measure up to the highs in hers for Gavin. That was why Venice was so perfect. It represented, in its few square miles, the very highest point. Going there together now should bring back all those honeymoon feelings, which would be reinforced by what had come since: three children, a home, a life together. Even Nicole's forgiveness should make it stronger. She remembered one night best of all. They had been drinking red wine from huge gla.s.ses, and listening to k. d. lang with only the light of a fire. They were lying together making love had been for earlier, and would be for later, long into the night and through to the morning. This was better, closer. This meant more. For now they were lying like spoons against cus.h.i.+ons, listening to the deep, longing voice on the stereo, silent except for the visceral sounds their bodies made. Nicole had felt complete happiness and oneness with him, and she had always reasoned, and believed, that she could not have felt that unless he, too, was feeling it. He was she knew he was. And if you had felt that with someone, even only once, could it ever go away? Wasn't it too strong? Stories like this one were the medicine Nicole took to cure herself. She played the tapes in her mind until the other pictures went away.

That was why she didn't want to listen to Harriet, who would dilute everything. There was a woman they both knew who had had a daughter in school. She was a single parent, and the girl was the product of a liaison, still ongoing, with a married man who clearly had no intention of leaving his wife and family. Harriet and Nicole had learnt this at a drunken pot-luck supper a couple of terms ago. She was a quiet woman, always rus.h.i.+ng to work and not dawdling to gossip in the car park, and the story spilt from her like a boil being lanced, full of love and hate, fear and defiance. Afterwards Harriet had declared her insane and taken a position of logic ('She's wasting her life, waiting for a train that's never coming into the station we're none of us getting more attractive, just nearer the pavement') and righteous indignation ('There are just so many victims in a set-up like that, and she's not one of them! I'm surprised at you, of all people, being on her side!'). But Nicole felt she understood. Love did that, to people it shouldn't and to people you wouldn't think it could. Gavin's conquests just f.u.c.ked him, like he just f.u.c.ked them. This was different. This was sad. She had made overtures of friends.h.i.+p to the woman, but she had snapped shut appalled by her own indiscretion and moved her child to a different school at the end of term.

At the weekend, Gavin had taken the kids, early, to the soft-play centre in town (a major concession, since he hated the sock smell, sticky floor and gla.s.s-shattering decibels). Before they left he had brought her toast and tea on a tray, with the newspaper. When the door had closed behind them, laughing and shouting together, Nicole had reached into her bedside drawer and pulled out The Rough Guide to Venice. Inside, marking the chapter on restaurants (where those that she and Gavin had visited on honeymoon were circled, then ticked in red after they had been booked) was a thin notebook with a list of what she was packing. In the margin, next to 'beaded top and matching wrap', was a doodle of dates and numbers. Her cycle. Gavin could not have planned it better if he had tried. Even Nicole couldn't quite bring herself to believe it was a sign that she should get pregnant. But it wouldn't hurt...

Cressida 'Cressida Bradford.'

The nurse had a dead kind face, really motherly. It was a relief to be called in physically, because she had drunk six gla.s.ses of lukewarm water and was desperate for a pee, and otherwise because it was unnerving to be alone in that waiting area. Everyone else, it seemed, had someone with them, from the shy-looking couple with s.h.i.+ny gold wedding rings, to the loud, cross-looking woman with the huge belly whose rather small husband was on a constant march up and down the corridor with two other children.

Perhaps being by yourself was okay. Mum had nagged to come along with her but Cressida was aware that this would label her a 'silly pregnant girl'. She was going for 'independent free-thinking woman'. He didn't even know she was here, didn't know anything yet, and Polly just worried.

'Right, Cressida great name, by the way.'

'Thanks.'

'Right, up here you pop. Top up, bottoms down here, tuck this tissue inside your knickers to keep the goo off them. That's it. Radiographer will be right with you. First time?' Cressida nodded and the nurse squeezed her shoulder gently. 'Don't worry nothing to it.' And off she breezed.

Worried? Huh? Cressida wondered how many people lay on this couch and felt as she did. Probably more than you think, she reprimanded herself. You're not the only idiot in the world. She knew, thought she knew no, really knew that she couldn't 'kill it': the thought of lying there while someone sc.r.a.ped out a real human life was untenable, however she might defend it for others. Beyond that, who knew? Keep it? Keep it how? Live at home with mum and Jack, give up college? Live with the father, playing at happy families, be a wife, a mother? At twenty? Live alone, struggling?

Or give it away? Suddenly Cressida saw herself in every film she'd ever seen on the subject, a tortured middle-aged woman Julie Walters or Alison Steadman and snapped her mind back into the present. One thing at a time. Just see how this goes.

Cressida didn't know what to expect when the radiographer came, and the cold jelly was smeared across her still flat stomach ('You might want to take that navel ring out at some point, Cressida. You may find it uncomfortable as the pregnancy progresses.' It seemed surreal to look down at the dip of her tummy, hammock-like with her jutting hip-bones at either end, and imagine it pus.h.i.+ng out and round curious and horrible and exciting all at once) and the thing that looked like what they scan food with at the supermarket was pressed on to her full bladder. When the whoos.h.i.+ng grey swirl of her blood gave way to the kidney bean of her baby, its heart blinking at her, tears came instantly into her eyes. What she saw, she knew at once, was life. What she felt was amazed, fascinated. It was mad that this thing this person should be inside her. What she said was: 'h.e.l.lo, baby.' And what she wanted was someone's hand to hold, someone to see it with her. Cressida wanted her mum.

Polly Polly pummelled the cus.h.i.+ons until dust exhaled through the fabric. She straightened the magazines and books, lined up all the remote controls including the one that had been down the side of the sofa for weeks on top of the television, and Flashed away the smelly rings left by milk bottles on the shelf in the fridge. That was how agitated she was.

Perhaps she should have argued more when Cressida had said she didn't want her at the hospital. Or just turned up in the waiting room surely Cressida wouldn't have sent her away? Well, not the old Cressida. The new, pregnant Cressida was an unpredictable force sometimes like a tiny child, wanting to curl up beside Polly and be held, and at others so spiky and hard that Polly couldn't get near her. She was so determined to cope, yet so clearly unable to. It made Polly unutterably sad. Cressida shouldn't be doing this, not yet. Life should be about which band to see, and which boy to go with. Those decisions, those dilemmas, not life and death ones. Polly wanted to be in charge of Cressida's life now more than ever before. She wanted to be responsible for making the decisions. Earlier in the week they had had the most spectacular row. Polly had tried to be decisive, stern even: she didn't want Cressida to go for the scan, she wanted to call Joe's mum round and discuss it together. She wanted Cressida, she told her, to have an abortion and put it all behind her. Get on with the foundation course, get her degree, kiss lots of toads and find a handsome prince. Be free.

'But, Mum, how can you, of all people, tell me that? How can you? You weren't much older than I am when you had me. Do you hate your life so much? Was it so awful?'

'I was young, yes, but I was married. I had a husband, a home, support.' She realised as she said it that it wasn't true. Her mum's you've-made-your-bed-now-lie-in-it att.i.tude had been hard to take, and Dan had been next to useless. It hadn't been much of a home, and she knew now that it hadn't been much of a marriage. She disliked herself for falling back on cliches and rhetoric, for reinventing her own history. But she knew that it was worth it, if only she could make up Cressida's mind the right way.

And then the wheels had turned in Cressida's mind and her angry voice had become calmer, scarier. 'Do you mean you wish you hadn't had me? That you'd got rid of me?'

'Cressida, that's not fair. You're here, you're my daughter, and I love you.'

'I didn't ask you that, Mum. I know all that and I won't let you hide behind it. I asked you to tell me the truth about then, about how your life turned out because you didn't get rid of me.'

Polly didn't answer.

'Come on, Mum.' Cressida's voice was getting louder. She had smelt her mother's fear, and this baby was no longer what they were talking about. 'Do you wish you'd had an abortion? Tell me, Mum?'

Polly's eyes were full of tears. She couldn't tell the lie that she desperately wanted to tell.

'No. Not for a second. Not for anything. You are, you were you and Daniel, you always will be, the very best thing that ever happened to me. Regretting that would make the whole of my life a sham.'

And the 'but' that said, 'I want more for you than I had myself,' that said, 'I want to protect you from some of what I had to go through' that 'but' was left unsaid.

They'd fought about Joe, too. Polly wanted to talk to him. She was angry that Joe had gone back to Warwick, and that he wasn't going through any of this with Cressida. She wanted to know how he felt.

On that point, more than on any other, Cressida was emphatic and, from her face, impervious to persuasion. Polly daren't go behind her back. 'He is not to know. You've no right to tell him, Mum. None at all.'

Nothing had worked. Polly had tried to say that he should face up to his responsibilities, that he shouldn't get away with this scot-free. When that hadn't got through, she had appealed, 'Doesn't he have a right to know? Is it really up to you to make a decision about a child that belongs to both of you?'

That had been a mistake, which had caused Cressida's anger to flare again. 'Oh, I see. Five minutes ago you couldn't even bring yourself to call it a child, you were so desperate for me get rid of it. Now it's a child. It's Joe's child, if you please, now that it suits you. Christ, Mum, it's got nothing to do with Joe, okay?' She had said that before. 'It's my problem, and I'll deal with it, okay?' (No, not okay, Polly thought. Not remotely okay.) And then: 'If you tell him, I'll leave. I'll just go, and you won't know where, and you won't find me.'

That threat had chilled Polly. Jack had said she'd never follow it through: 'Where would she go, for G.o.d's sake? It's adolescent angst, Poll. A bit of melodrama. That's all.' Jack thought she shouldn't tell Joe, or his mum. 'It's not your news, love.'

Polly looked at him, and for the first time he seemed like the man he really was, a man who hadn't had a child. Who couldn't understand. She cried at Susan's kitchen table when she told her what he had said. 'It is my news. She's my little girl. I'm being shut out and Jack thinks that's fine.'

'He doesn't think it's fine, Poll, he's just looking out for you.'

'But he doesn't understand, Suze. He can't.'

So they were all going through this half-experience on parallel lines that almost never crossed. Polly was exhausted by the effort of trying to be the parent Cressida needed her to be. She was building a wall against Jack punis.h.i.+ng him, she supposed, for not being Cressida's father or anyone else's. She was trying to cus.h.i.+on Daniel from everything. Susan was doing her best, but she had her own hands full with Alice and Margaret.

And now she was straightening cus.h.i.+ons on an already tidy sofa, waiting for Cressida to come home from the hospital. She should have been there: this was a crunch point it had to be. The jury was out, and waiting for the verdict was unbearable.

Harriet He was definitely playing footsie with her. The first time she had thought it was just an accident. Now she was sure it wasn't. And she wasn't going to stop him. Giddy wasn't in it. Harriet was a different woman. It wouldn't even be true to say that she was like she used to be she wasn't sure that she had ever been like this.

In her first year at college there had been a girl, Lucy, wildly beautiful with long thick dark hair and jade green contact lenses, who used to hold court atop the college bar late at night in an antique-brocade gentleman's dressing-gown. Harriet was being like her. Wanton and free, amoral, desirable, risque, and... it was delicious. Frumpy, stuffy old Harriet had stayed at home, and this new creature had caught the ten seventeen to Waterloo to engage in frankly lascivious behaviour in a smart hotel bra.s.serie. The mere presence of beds a few metres above her head was filling the air with possibilities. (Although, of course, she couldn't possibly sleep with him in daylight G.o.d, no. Blackout blinds, a sliver of moon and preferably a power cut were essential for that progression.) But she was thinking about it. A lot.

It had started a couple of weeks after the wedding. Harriet had steadfastly refused to think about the entire b.l.o.o.d.y day: the warm, loving yet amusing speeches, the tables of identikit glamorous guests, the flipping croquembouche cake, the tasteful string quartet, which gave way to the nostalgic and groovy Dexy's Midnight Runners-type disco, the bride's perfect Armani going-away suit, the Aston Martin leaving for the sodding safari honeymoon... the silently disapproving Tim and the spinning hotel room. Oh, and the hangover. Too much. Too b.l.o.o.d.y much. For the first week the humiliation had been her first thought on waking and her last before falling asleep. By the second week she had resolved to forget about it. So she wasn't best pleased when the phone rang and she'd heard Nick's voice.

'Hats?' Yuck that name again. 'It's me. Nick.' And when Harriet didn't reply: 'From the wedding? I mean, I know you were p.i.s.sed, but please don't break my heart by saying you don't remember.'

'I was not p.i.s.sed. I was tired. I had been up all night with one of my kids, dreadfully poorly, if you must know.'

'Sorry, Hats. Haven't got any myself. Shouldn't have presumed. Yes, of course. Tired. Is the little darling... better now?' Harriet could imagine the twinkle in his eye, and hear the amus.e.m.e.nt in his voice. Nick knew exactly what state she had been in that day and why.

He was ringing, apparently, to see if she was going to some reunion set up by their university. She wasn't. She'd known nothing about it. She never discovered if a reunion was really planned.

By then she was too flattered by his call to care. Nick Mallory had tracked her down.

And then Nick Mallory had pursued her. By phone. He learnt her habits when she was on the school-run, when she worked out (well, she'd told him she went to the gym: if he chose to imagine her working up a sweat on the tread-mill in a skimpy leotard rather than reading the Sun over a full-fat caffe latte in the lounge at the gym then why should she disabuse him of an idea that clearly gave him pleasure?), and he called her from work, once or twice a week at first, then almost daily.

He showed no interest in Tim, because Harriet didn't let him. She sidelined him, so that to Nick he would appear little more than a flatmate. Which didn't excuse Nick's caddish behaviour, Harriet thought. But, still, she was being a cow. She knew she was. She most especially knew because she hadn't told Nicole what she was up to. Couldn't face it, really. Nicole felt like her conscience, perched on one shoulder. Odd that it wasn't Tim on her shoulder, reminding her of her obligations, her vows, her family. She had done well in shutting him out of her head. And, anyway, she wasn't doing anything wrong, was she? It was just lunch with an old friend.

Wrong. She actually fancied him rotten. Mainly, she'd admitted, at least to herself, because he was making it perfectly plain that he fancied her rotten. Cor! What an aphrodisiac that was.

'So, Harriet...' even the way he said her name, now that he was using it, was s.e.xy '... what have you got to say for yourself? I've bought you this scandalously expensive lunch, which, incidentally, you've hardly touched...' oh, joy, the loss of appet.i.te. That never happened. '... and been extravagantly complimentary to you while you've pushed it around the plate and insulted me in return.'

That was true. She had teased him mercilessly about the old days, the conquests and even the jug ears. She had loved doing it. And he had loved her doing it, except, possibly, the bit about the ears. Achilles ears, she thought.

'You can afford it,' she said now. 'Weren't you just telling me about that huge bonus you've pulled off and this bachelor s.h.a.g-pad you've bought, and the cars, and the villa at Le Saint-Geran you're booking? I know all about you City wide-boys.'

'Aren't you forgetting that you're married to one?'

It was the first time he had mentioned Tim all through lunch. Harriet had a brief vision of Judas, but she looked at her watch it had already struck twelve.

'Hardly. Tim's an a.n.a.lyst, not a broker.'

'Ah, yes, the serious bit. Those boys earn a fair old whack. I've asked around,' golly, he was curious about her, 'and your old man is a seriously rated bloke.' Was he? Harriet had had no idea. 'He's got some pretty serious irons in the fire, I hear.' (Stop saying serious. Point taken, okay.) She shrugged. Nick leant in, eyes focused a few inches south of her chin. 'Not very s.e.xy, though, is it? It doesn't get the old blood pumping in quite the same way, does it?'

Harriet was reasonably sure they were no longer discussing the relative merits of brokers' and a.n.a.lysts' careers.

He smelt nice. A few brown hairs curled at the edge of his crisp white professionally laundered s.h.i.+rt, which was open at the neck. The skin beneath was brown genuine winter sun. 'What you overgrown boys get up to in your oversized playpens with your electronic gadgets and your ma.s.sive... egos does very little for my blood pressure either way, actually.'

Nick laughed. And then, with his head c.o.c.ked as though she were a sculpture he was appraising, he said, 'I'd forgotten how much fun you were.'

Harriet had forgotten too, but she enjoyed being reminded.

Nick raised a hand for the bill. While he signed the credit card slip, Harriet glanced down at her watch. Three o'clock. She'd promised the sitter she'd be back by four, and now she was going to be late. The homely, rotund Mrs Cartwright had a.s.sured her that time was of no relevance to her. 'Never you mind, my dear. As long as I'm back to give Mr Cartwright his tea by seven, it's fine. I can sort the little ones out if you get held up, what with those rotten trains and all.' Mrs Cartwright would probably have felt differently about the whole business had she known that, instead of a cosy girls' lunch with a spot of shopping in John Lewis, Harriet had been planning a liaison with an old... well, if not a flame then certainly a match. Mrs Cartwright took a dim view of such things, especially when they happened on Coronation Street. Which was why Harriet had promised four o'clock. Going home to Mrs Cartwright was the married woman's equivalent of a St Trinian's girl having to slip in after curfew past Matron. She wanted to do it with an if not completely clear then just slightly smudged conscience.

Outside, on the pavement, she looked about her for a black cab. There was none. She turned to check in the opposite direction and he was close way too close. He put his hand behind her neck, under her hair, brought her face to his. Harriet hadn't kissed a man apart from Tim for years hadn't kissed him properly for months and this was a full-on, end-of-the-school disco when the Spandau Ballet 12 of True is playing and your dad's outside in the car park snog. Isn't it funny how we're all so much better at kissing if that's all we're going to do? she thought. Once second and third bases, and even home runs, are on the cards, you start racing through the first. Which, she was now remembering, was a mistake. Yummy. She was responding to his kiss in an appropriately Barbara Cartland manner. Heart? Pounding. Knees? Weak. Pulse? Racing. Plus all the other bits of her that Barbara had left out. All in perfect working order.

He broke off. 'Mmm. I wish I'd done that years ago.' And kissed her again, pressing her to him with his other hand at the small of her back. He tasted of tobacco and garlic. And he tasted, despite the three-course lunch, very hungry.

April.

Reading Group.

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors.

RODDY DOYLE 1996.