Cover

Dedication

For David

Epigraph

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds;

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken…

FROM SONNET 116, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

FIRST DATES

1

By the time Esther reached the turn at the railway bridge into her road, she was quite alone. One of the fast trains shot past, a bomb-burst in the silence, and she jumped like a ninny. The road was narrow and long, hugging the curve of the railway line. Her rented little terraced house was a still a good walk away, down at the far end, part of a run-down row made affordable both by its distance from the convenience of the high street and by its proximity to the concrete flat-blocks, where washing fluttered like bunting in the boxy balconies and neon graffiti lit up the walls.

Esther walked quickly, looking straight ahead, clasping her handbag tightly under her arm, fighting sinking spirits both at how insecure a forty-eight-year-old woman could still feel mid-evening on a city street, and how desperately far she remained from the newly single future she had dared to envisage for herself, leaving Lucas and moving – via a miserable couple of months with her parents – to London two years before. The July night air was muggy. Her feet felt spongy in her high heels, and her mane of hair, long since collapsed out of the shape she had painstakingly created with her tongs, was gluey on the back of her neck. She wanted to take her jacket off, but feared the kerfuffle of stopping in the lamplit dark, looking like the middle-aged woman on her own she was, vulnerable and faffing, easy prey for anyone seeking a target for their own disappointments.

The jacket had been wrong anyway, tight like most of her wardrobe these days, as well as overly formal and trying too hard for a first date in what turned out to be a riotously crowded, riverside, East Sheen pub. She had identified Chris Mews at once, reassuringly similar to his profile credentials, tall and shaven-headed, and looking the opposite way as he waited on the fringe of the mêlée of smokers and drinkers gathered round the pub entrance. Noting his smart-casual style of dress and relaxed demeanour, Esther had felt her jitters ease slightly; crisp, dark-blue jeans, loafers, and a tan T-shirt, loose enough to curtain the gentle swell of stomach underneath, he looked like one of those men appealingly and enviably easy in their own skin. His height meant he carried his extra weight well, Esther had decided, double-checking her jacket was buttoned up across her own tummy bulges, before bracing herself for the camera-click of first impressions as his head turned.