The pain of losing Ash has returned with greater force, like a storm coming back across the sea, increasing in strength as it comes. In the day she can weather it but at night she is beaten to the ground. She can hardly crawl upstairs to bed at night. If it wasn’t for Poppy and Sorrel or Melly and Grace, she’d have given up by now. Eric never refers to his son. She knows he is thinking about him when he stands at the window, his face drawn and fists in his pockets, gazing at the donkey field with the fence that extends right down to the ground.

The time to discuss the affair has passed; she doubts whether he cares one way or the other. The connection between them has thinned to the point that if it snapped, neither of them would notice; perhaps it’s broken already.

Grace

Martin’s letters are addressed to all three of them, Grace reads them out loud at supper.

“. . . crowded classroom, listening as if their lives depended on it. I go to the park to write in the evenings; the little monkeys in the trees try to steal my sandwiches, they remind me of Charley.”

“It’s not fair,” bursts out Charley. “How come he gets to have a holiday and we don’t?”

“It’s not a holiday,” Grace reminds her. “He’s teaching, earning us money.”

“He sees these animals. He has picnics in the park.”

Grace looks at Charley’s resentful face. They could be there now, looking up at those monkeys, the sun hot on their faces and all the scents of Africa around them, if things had been different, if Martin had behaved differently.

“Well, we could have picnics in the park.”

“Just us?” asks Blake.

“If you want,” she replies, pleased.

“Nah.”

The flat is untidy. They tidy it together and she tries not to do it again when they’ve gone to sleep. The co-op has promoted her to part-time manager but she’s at home for meals and she writes alongside them when they do their homework.

“What happened to Ash?”

She is sitting by Charley, who is reading in bed. She smooths her hair off her forehead, the only time she’s allowed to do that now.

“He drowned, you know that. It was a terrible, terrible accident.”

“I know that’s what everyone says happened, but no one knows if it’s true.”

“It may not have happened precisely like that.” She turns off Charley’s bedside light.

“Izzy’s been saying it could have been her dad.”

“What?”

“She said not to tell anyone but she remembered he’d got angry with Ash the night before. Then he left early the next day, which was the day Ash was found. He could’ve, you know, done something.” She draws a noisy breath.

“Charley, who has Izzy been saying this to?”

“Me and Blake.”

After she kisses Charley good night, she stands at the balcony staring out at the sunset. The sky is very clear. April already. Soon it will be another long, hot London summer. Martin wrote about swimming in the Kariba Dam as well, and elephants on safari. She didn’t tell Charley that.