She ignored me and muttered something at Clive, who was protesting something and staggering towards her with his hands out. But she turned and stomped away. This is why I couldn’t do marriage, I thought. Too much reading between the lines. But I was disappointed, too, because as Clive asked those bizarre questions I had wondered if I should ask him about the diary. It was possible he had planted it in my room. I made a mental note to ask him the next day.

That night, I was up again with Coco, rocking her back to sleep, when I heard Derry and Clive talking in their room.

‘I saw the way you looked at her,’ Derry said. Then: ‘Did you want to?’

Was she talking about me?

   34   

YOU WANT THIS

Then

Aurelia wakes with a gasp, the bedclothes swamping around her. She is panting, filmed with sweat, her heart jackhammering in her throat. She rises from the bed, the dimensions of the room all akimbo, and heads for Gaia’s bedroom. She collapses on the shape of the bed and reaches her hand for where Gaia’s face should be. The relief that hits her when she feels the familiar warm smoothness of her daughter’s cheek and nose is overwhelming: she is still half inside the dream, can see each of the faces of the reindeer with unbelievable vividness. The glassy black eyes, the markings around their snouts, brown felt dangling in tatters from their antlers …

She squeezes her eyes shut and tries to breathe away the panic that mounts up again as she recalls seeing Gaia in the water, and that searing helplessness when she discovered Gaia was gone. The emptiness of her arms. An infinite emptiness.

But it was not real, and Gaia is here.

She sits up and covers her face with her hands, then sobs quietly for a moment. Gaia does not stir. Aurelia doesn’t want to go back to bed. The thought of falling into nightmares again does not appeal. She’ll drink, that’s what. She’ll go downstairs and have a nightcap, or four, so that she doesn’t dream.