Nikki saw her mother’s hands tremble as she put down her knife and fork. It was back, this thing between them; this unsaid thing that Nikki had wanted to shriek out at her mother all her life. Why? How could you love my dad and have an affair with Fergus? How could you?

Fleur got up from the table to get more water from the fridge. ‘If you’ve finished, Nikki, I’m going to go and have a rest. What about you?’

‘I’ve finished. Can I borrow your Hundertwasser? I can’t get into my book.’

‘Of course you can. I’ve got some paper here, Nikki. Will you do what Blythe suggests and write down anything you can still remember?’

‘As if,’ Nikki said, ‘either of us is remotely likely to remember more than we did twenty-eight years ago.’

‘I suppose they just want to compare minor details.’

‘Or clutch straws. Have a good sleep, Mum.’

In her bedroom, Fleur found the amah had closed the shutters against the hot midday sun and, feeling claustrophobic, she opened them slightly to let the glare of the day slide into the room in a sliver of heat that slanted across the floor. She took her dress off, turned the ceiling fan on, and got under the thin cotton sheet.

It seemed such a long time since morning. The days had a strange lost quality, like a dream, but real too, like slow, somnolent, heavy steps back towards something she did not want to remember. Fleur felt a longing to return to her normal life; the life she had made. To be doing the thing she had set out to do when she started this journey.

The day she left her London house swam back; that uneasy sensation that she would return home a different person.

She closed her eyes, longing for sleep. She reached out across the bed with her hand to touch the empty space the other side.

‘Fergus…I miss you.’

Fergus, who had flown into her life and changed the balance of everything. He had been David’s best man at their wedding, but she hadn’t known him then. Not then. And she could not possibly have foreseen the future, not on the day she and David got married.

TWENTY-NINE

They married in David’s village church with the reception in his parents’ garden. There was a marquee on the lawn and the sun shone the entire day.

‘Well it would, wouldn’t it?’ someone remarked. ‘Lovely couple, picturesque village, quaint church, wonderful house and garden. Fun people. It wouldn’t dare rain.’

Laura flew back from Northern Ireland to help Kate, David’s mother, and his unmarried older sister, Cecile, to organise it all. Laura and Peter’s house in Hampshire was rented out, and in any case Fleur had always hated it.

David was the golden boy. He had inherited his mother’s good looks, while poor Cecile, who patently adored her brother, was shy and plain and had unfortunately inherited their father’s features. Life, as Laura remarked at the time, could be very cruel.