‘All is well,’ I said.

‘Nothing is hurt – nothing is lost.

One brief moment and all will be as it was before.

How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!’

The sobbing from the back was growing louder. Heads were turning to see who was crying. It was all wrong, this hysterical, broken-hearted wailing coming from the back. It was the ultimate funeral faux-pas – for the outsider to show more emotion than the family. It was Skyla who was in tears. I almost smiled. Skyla was so young, so untouched, she probably still had healthy grandparents. Skyla’s first hamster was probably still in robust health.

Then it was over.

I was exhausted by it all, I could not face the thought of watching Mary’s coffin being lowered into the ground. I just wanted to go home. I wanted to take off these miserable black clothes and order a takeaway and huddle in our nest. I wanted wine, I wanted life, I wanted to be with my boys.

But Skyla was coming down the aisle, going against the tide of people leaving the church, still sobbing uncontrollably as if Mary had been her next of kin.

Too bloody much, quite frankly, I can clearly remember thinking as Skyla went to Christian and he took her in his arms and she stayed there.

And the moment seemed to freeze.

As if she was his, and he was hers, as if she wanted to stay in his arms forever.

I felt Marlon take my hand as I stared at them and they broke away from each other, too quickly, not meeting my eye. But I knew everything and I did not have to look at his phone, I did not have to trawl through the deleted messages and his call history and the reckless texts, all those sweet Wi-Fi nothings that are so hopelessly, endlessly romantic to the sender and the recipient, and so pitilessly, murderously cruel to the one who suddenly learns that she is living in a shattered home. There was no need for any forensic examination of my husband’s iPhone. I did not have to go shopping for pain because it was delivered to my door.

The pain came and found me.

41

Tara

My mother gently tapped on Maple’s hind hoof with the nailing hammer, as delicate as a dental hygienist cleaning under a particularly tricky bridge. Her shiny crimson nails glinted in the fading sunlight of the stable, expertly closing the gap that had worked loose between shoe and foot.

‘In the cold weather,’ Uncle Jack said, ‘me hands seize up a bit.’

‘It’s not a problem,’ my mother said.

‘It’s the arthritis,’ Jack continued. ‘All right in summer, they are.’

‘Jack. Stop. I’m happy to do it.’

My mother was a horsewoman too.

This fact was often forgotten in our family. My mum had been a pony club regular before she had started school, but her history of riding and showing had been overshadowed by my father’s romantic nostalgia for rosy-cheeked stable lads riding an Irish draught mare bareback as they went off to court the beauty at the next village. But although my mother’s love of horses grew in a very English middle-class suburbia, rather than mucking out in Irish racing stables, it was no less real. I watched her run the palm of her hand over Maple’s hoof. The shoe now looked like an extension of Maple’s foot.