She sighed. Then she coughed and he heard her blowing her nose. He imagined her tossing the crumpled tissue into the bin beside her, imagined her small feet inside the big pair of woolly socks she wore when she was feeling fragile, and he felt a combination of rage and affection that was so contradictory his heart began to race.

‘I’m OK,’ Saoirse said quietly, although he hadn’t asked. There was a long pause. Then she asked: ‘Do you want me to leave you, Will?’

‘I can’t think about it now.’

‘If you won’t ask me to stay, then I’m going to go.’

Silence.

‘That was your chance to ask me to stay,’ Saoirse said. ‘I actually handed it to you on a plate.’

Silence.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘you could have us both. Me and Alice. We’re not mutually exclusive. You could write about her and still have me in real life.’

It wouldn’t work.

Alice took up too much of Will. She needed so much of him that there wasn’t enough left for Saoirse. He couldn’t tell her this, so he said nothing.

‘You’re an arsehole,’ Saoirse said.

‘You always knew that.’

‘Yeah.’ Silence. ‘I’ll see you then.’

‘OK,’ said Will. ‘Saoirse?’

‘Yes?’

He breathed in and out. He tried to capture the words he needed to say to her as they darted around him like flashes of light. But he couldn’t.

‘Nothing,’ he said. He ended the call.

30

Angharad had tried to help Marnie after Denise’s death. Her helping had taken the form of the provision of food and a superficial cleaning of the cottage. There was a fine line between what John perceived as helpfulness and what he believed to be interference so there was a limit to what she could do. She hadn’t known what to say to Marnie. Nobody had. Marnie had been adrift until Alice came along.

Alice had staged a gentle intervention in a way that did not humiliate or criticise. It began one afternoon when Marnie and Alice were sitting on the grass outside Alice’s caravan, in the shade of the parasol. Marnie had brought her mother’s locket to show Alice, and Alice had opened it and looked at the pictures inside. She’d been absolutely entranced.

‘That’s me as a baby,’ Marnie said, pointing to the picture on the right. She liked the picture. The baby had its eyes tightly closed and its mouth was hidden behind a dummy. There was a spot on its forehead which Denise had told Marnie was due to a speck of dust on the camera lens.

‘I was only a few hours old. And that’s me when I was two.’

‘And your mummy gave this to you?’

Marnie had nodded proudly.

‘Wow!’ said Alice.