Charlotte listened quietly and with mounting dismay. “Fifteen?” she said. “She had an affair with Pascal then?”

“She lied to him about her age.” Lindsay sighed. “Now do you understand? It isn’t just that she loves Pascal now. It isn’t just that she’s been living with him this past year. It’s deeper than that, Charlotte. It goes back such a long way.”

“I don’t want to hear any more.”

Charlotte rose, her kind face clouded with unhappiness. She gave a helpless gesture.

“I hate this, Lindsay. Poor Cassandra, and Mina. Gini. Love affairs. Lies. All this anger and misery. Us having dinner last night, and all the time Cassandra was up there, lying in some field. It’s so terrible. So ugly. And it makes me so afraid.”

She began picking up mugs and plates from the table, as if to restore order to the room would be to restore order to the world.

“I’m going to take the boys out,” she said abruptly. “I can’t expect them to play upstairs all day. I’ll take them around to a friend in the village. Then I’m going to see Susan Landis. She shouldn’t be alone.”

“Charlotte…” Lindsay began on a warning note.

“I know. I know.” Charlotte was again close to tears. “But you have a child, Lindsay. You must understand. And I have to do something. I can’t bear it here, Lindsay. It doesn’t feel like home.”

Chapter 8

FOR AN HOUR AFTER Charlotte left, Lindsay tried to occupy herself. Max and Rowland remained closeted in Max’s study. She could just hear the sound of their voices, the sound of telephones. She felt excluded and useless. Gini had not come back.

She could not settle. She tidied the kitchen, went outside and walked around. She went as far as the gate to the fields, hoping she might see Gini returning, and intercept her, try to talk some sense into her, but there was no sign of her anywhere, and it was bitterly cold.

She returned to the house, picked up Rowland’s file, and tried to concentrate on the rest of the press cuttings, but their subject seemed frivolous and remote: not for the first time in her life, Lindsay thought how much she loathed the fashion world. Not her actual work, not her actual job, but its milieu, its atmosphere, its bitchery and waywardness, its reckless obsession with the new. A young girl was dead, she thought, and closed the file impatiently; beside that fact, what did any of this matter? A truly trivial pursuit, she thought, unsmiling, and one on which she had spent seventeen years. The idea unnerved her: it was one thing to pursue this work when it provided a home and income for Tom, but in another year, two years, Tom would be going to university, leaving home. What will I do then, Lindsay thought, will I go on, measuring out my life with the collections every year?

She could feel fear, and a sense of hopelessness, just inches away. Such feelings were better not indulged, she knew, and they were selfish, inappropriate now. How death changes things, she thought. She had just seen Charlotte fighting a sudden awareness of the fragility of life, of the bulwarks of family and marriage; now she felt that too. Activity, she told herself—that was the cure. She could be useful, at least, even if excluded. She would make Max and Rowland some sandwiches, walk the dogs. Keep the home fires burning, she said to herself wryly, and walked through to the hall.