“Mummy, do you have to go out now?” The girl dribbled grimy tears. “You promised last night that you’d help, then you went to that meeting. Daddy wouldn’t let me wait up for you.”

Pamela Marshall looked at her watch. She would already be five minutes late for Jerry. She would not usually have worried about that, but today she had to talk to him before they met the others.

“I am sorry, darling. Perhaps Daddy can help. He’ll be home soon. Or Edward. It’s his chess night, isn’t it? He’ll be in at five.”

“None of them can do French as well as you.”

Sian hated French and worried about it. Pamela looked at her watch again, and then at the immaculate kitchen, cluttered already with school bag, dirty sandwich box, gym kit, and then at her unbelievably untidy, bedraggled daughter. She stifled her irritation.

“I can’t stop now, darling. You know it’s my Gillibry weekend, but I’ll be back on Sunday afternoon. Forget about French tonight. Do your other homework, and I promise that I’ll help you on Sunday night.”

Sian smiled and Pamela’s irritation disappeared. Her daughter might be untidy and not very academic, but she was no disgrace to her. She was at least pretty.

“I must go now,” she said, “or the others will have to wait for me. There’s plenty in the freezer. If Daddy does happen to be late, just help yourselves. Or perhaps it would be nice if you and Edward could have a meal ready for him when he gets in.”

She kissed her pretty daughter on the forehead, tied her expensive, hand-knitted Guernsey casually around her neck, and hurried away before her son or her husband could distract her further.

With relief Jasmine Carson locked the front door of her flat behind her. Despite its comfort and convenience she hated it. For thirty years she had taught biology at a private girls’ school and her rooms there had been her home. They had been high ceilinged, impressively proportioned. When she retired it had seemed sensible to buy somewhere appropriate to her needs, and she had chosen a ground-floor flat in a new well-appointed block on the sea front. She had always been congratulated on her common sense and while she had been tempted to move somewhere older, to a cottage perhaps with a garden, she had resisted in favour of central heating and a built-in kitchen. Now she was too proud, too afraid perhaps of making a worse mistake, to move again, and knew that the flat would be her home until she died. She supposed that she would get used to it. Already she could bear what had seemed the unbearable heat of the communal areas, and she presumed that the other residents, most of them elderly, would come to realize that she had no interest in the lives of their children who lived in Milton Keynes or Johannesburg, would stop showing her photographs of apparently identical grandchildren.

She drove inland from Gillicombe, the seaside town which she had made her home. The road followed the bank of the estuary and as the tide ebbed, the island became an island no longer, different from its surroundings not in substance but in kind, a lump of sandstone surrounded by muddy sand. That is my real home, she thought. She felt as tensely excited as a young girl off to a dance, hoping that her lover would be there, expectant of adventure, new experience. Then: