‘Alice, your mummy is here.’ It was Auntie Elizabeth. The play leaders were known collectively as ‘the aunties’. Elizabeth was plump and pleasant. The vicar’s wife. Connie thought she was itching to get inside Connie’s house and inside her head. Maybe she thought her faith gave her permission to be curious and to poke around in other people’s lives. Connie could understand the compulsion: she’d spent her working life being nosy too. But she knew that the woman looked out for Alice and she was grateful for that. The child shot to her feet and ran over to her mother. The kids must have been playing outside in the sun, because her freckles seemed brighter and there was a patch of mud on the knee of her jeans. For a moment Connie wondered if she’d been pushed, imagined bullying, the resentments and cruelties of the mothers played out by the children. She couldn’t think that way, though. It would lead to paranoia and madness.

She took Alice’s hand and led her to the table where the paintings, the handprints and pasta collages had been laid out to dry. The other mothers had gathered around Elizabeth and, while Alice found her own creations, their conversation filtered into Connie’s consciousness.

‘No Veronica today?’

Veronica wasn’t an auntie, but chair of the playgroup committee. She stalked through Connie’s dreams. A slender predator with a Marks and Spencer cardigan and bright-red lips. Often she was in the hall when the mums turned up, soliciting unpaid fees, cakes for the next bring-and-buy.

‘No.’ Elizabeth’s voice was calm and easy. Connie was never sure exactly what the vicar’s wife made of Veronica. ‘I need to talk to her too. I’ll call into her house on my way home. This lovely weather, she might have decided on a day in the garden. I think Christopher’s working away at the moment.’

Connie automatically took the paintings Alice had handed to her. ‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘We’ll put them up in the kitchen when we get home, shall we?’ Her voice was distracted; she was listening for more news of Veronica, and for once was happy to linger in the hall. But now the conversation had moved on to the allocation of school places, to some social function in the pub. Veronica was forgotten and Connie walked away, still holding Alice by the hand, without speaking to anyone.

Connie had rented the cottage by the river when she’d left the city, just desperate to get away, not really caring where she went. It belonged to friends of Frank’s parents. They couldn’t be arsed to do holiday lets any more, Frank had explained. And they didn’t use it themselves; they were both still working. They’d bought it as an investment, a way of saving for their retirement, before the bottom dropped out of the housing market. Frank had even offered Connie a place in his house when things blew up. For Alice’s sake, he’d said hurriedly, in case Connie got the wrong idea. He’d moved on after the divorce, had a new woman in his life. But they were welcome to his spare room until the reporters got pissed off with camping outside her gate. She’d been so desperate at that point that she’d almost accepted. Perhaps Frank had realized he might end up with a couple of unwanted lodgers, because the offer of the cottage in the Tyne valley came soon afterwards. Connie imagined him on the phone to all his mates. Help me out here. You must know of somewhere she can stay. Yeah, she might have brought it all on herself, but no reason Alice should suffer. I’ll have to let them crash here if I can’t come up with something else. He did still use words like ‘crash’. He was artistic director of a theatre in Newcastle and his new woman was a young designer.