Something in Common

by Roisin Meaney

Genres: Friendship; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

A life-affirming, poignant story of two women with nothing in common except their friendship - from Number One bestselling author Roisin Meaney.
Perfect for readers of Cathy Kelly and Sheila O'Flanagan.

The friendship starts with a letter . . . from aspiring writer Sarah to blunt but witty journalist Helen, complaining about Helen's most recent book review. And there begins a correspondence that blossoms into a friendship which spans over two decades.

As the years pass, the women exchange details of loves lost and found, of family joys and upheavals. Sarah's letters filled with thoughts on her outwardly perfect marriage and her aching desire for children, and Helen's on the struggle of raising her young daughter alone.

But little do they realise that their story began long before Sarah penned that first letter - on one unforgettable afternoon when Sarah changed the course of Helen's life forever.

This is the story of Helen and Sarah, and the friendship that was part of their destiny.

Release date: May 1, 2013

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 456

Sample

If it hadn’t been for the scarf she’d have kept going. She’d noticed the maroon Beetle, of course, as soon as she’d turned onto the bridge – impossible to miss it, so carelessly positioned, front wheels skewed, bonnet poking right out, as if it had been flung there in a temper rather than deliberately parked – but with her mind still picking its way through the interview, the image of the car did little more than skitter across the edges of her vision, gone the minute she’d pedalled past it.

What had they thought of her, the three people who’d just spent forty-five minutes picking their way through her background? She had no idea. There’d been no frowns, no indication of dissatisfaction at anything she’d said, but she’d seen no sign that they’d approved of her either, as they’d scribbled God knows what into their identical navy hard-backed notebooks.

At least she was female, and everyone knew that women made better cooks. But maybe they’d been hoping for someone a bit older than twenty-four, someone with a bit more experience: all she’d done since her Leaving Cert was work, with varying degrees of responsibility, in the kitchen of her uncle’s small country hotel.

Not that she hadn’t been grateful to Uncle John for taking her in – with her mediocre Leaving Cert there hadn’t been a lot of choice. Jobs were scarce, and a lot of businesses preferred to employ a man, who wouldn’t leave the minute he got married, or became a parent. Small wonder so many of her friends had emigrated the minute they’d left school, or found husbands as soon as they could.

But emigration hadn’t appealed to Sarah, and no man had offered to marry her, so she’d made the most of her time in the hotel. She’d watched others and learnt from them, and she’d devoured cookery books in her spare time. She understood food, she respected it – and she felt she was ready for bigger things. She liked the idea of being head cook, even if it was only in a smallish County Kildare nursing home, forty-odd miles from Dublin. It was a perfectly respectable job, and she’d be doing pretty well to get it.

Christine didn’t agree.

‘Why you want to work in St Sebastian’s is beyond me,’ she’d said, drawing her kohl pen in a slow black arc beneath her left eye.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ They’d grown up three miles from the nursing home; it was down the road from their old primary school.

‘Nothing as such – well, I presume it’s decent enough, as nursing homes go – but, honestly, who are you going to meet there under seventy-five? What hope have you got of finding anyone if you’re stuck in some kitchen surrounded by old-age pensioners?’

‘I’m not looking for a job just to find a husband,’ Sarah had protested. ‘I can meet men socially.’

But her sister’s words had struck a nerve. Impossible, unbearable scenario, never to walk down the aisle on someone’s arm, never to become a wife and a mother – and it was a fact that a lot of women met their future husbands in the workplace. What hope did Sarah have of finding anyone in a nursing home?

It had been so easy for Christine, paired up with Brian since their early teens, engaged to him now at twenty-three, getting married the year after next. All set to give up her part-time job in the library whenever the first baby was on the way. Ready to be supported by her husband as she cooked his dinners and ironed his shirts for the rest of her life.

And look at Sarah, a year older and currently unattached, and still living at home. Still sleeping in the single bed she’d had since childhood, her Beatles and Dickie Rock and Joe Dolan posters covering the flowery wallpaper her mother had chosen. And two of Sarah’s friends were already mothers themselves: Goretti Tobin had two little boys and Avril Delaney had had a baby girl just after Christmas. Where was the man Sarah was destined – must be destined – to marry?

But she had to work, and she loved working with food, which was why she’d answered the St Sebastian’s ad. If she got the job she’d take it, whatever about Christine’s reservations, and hope for the best.

She wondered if the green trouser suit had made any difference in the end, or if she should have gone with her pink dress, like she’d wanted to. Her mother, not surprisingly, had favoured the suit.

‘The colour is better on you,’ she’d said, drawing her darning needle through the heel of one of her husband’s many dark grey socks. ‘And you look much more professional in it.’

‘I’m interviewing for a cook’s job,’ Sarah had pointed out. ‘I won’t need to look professional when I’m chopping onions or peeling spuds.’

But she knew, of course, that the real objection to the dress was that it was too short. Sarah didn’t think it was that short, not compared to some of the ones she saw on Top of the Pops every week. Minis were in, everyone was wearing them – and her legs weren’t bad, if she said so herself.

Mind you, that woman on the interview panel, the one from the nursing home’s board of management – Bernice? Beatrice? – with her blue rinse and lavender cardigan buttoned all the way up, would probably have found fault with anything above the knee, and of course it was a lot easier to cycle in trousers.

She’d be glad when she got home though, already caught in a small shower and by the look of it, a lot more on—

And there was the scarf, spread like a puddle on the wooden surface of the bridge, nearly under Sarah’s wheels before she spotted it. She swerved and pulled on the brakes, and doubled back for a closer look.

It weighed nothing, a wisp of a thing – 100% wild silk, the label said – in gorgeous swirly blues and turquoises and lilacs. She held it by the ends and opened it out, and found a rectangle about the size of a bath towel. She brought it to her nose and smelt sweetish perfume, and cigarettes.

Where had it come from? It couldn’t have been here long – no tyre marks on it that she could see, no sign that anything had disturbed it since its arrival. Perfectly dry, although the bridge itself was damp from the short shower Sarah had cycled through not ten minutes before – and surely such a feathery thing would have been blown away on the tiniest breeze, whisked up and carried off?

She imagined it billowing upwards, skirting the treetops, wrapping itself eventually around a church steeple, to the bemusement of the parishioners below. Or maybe swooping gently into the river and floating away to sea, like the Owl and Pussycat, catching the attention maybe of a passing fisherman, who might scoop it up and take it home to his wife.

She glanced behind her and saw again the carelessly parked car – and only then did she notice a figure standing on its far side, between the car and the waist-high metal railing that spanned the bridge on either side, thirty yards or so from where Sarah stood.

She squinted to get a better view of the person she was looking at. As far as she could see, whoever it was wore a dark coat, brown or black. Big hair, also dark, above it – or maybe a hat, one of those furry ones that Russian secret agents wore in James Bond films.

She got off her bike and wheeled it over to lean it against the railing. As she covered the short distance back towards the car, rubbing her hands to get some warmth into them, the narrow heels of the only presentable shoes she owned made a loud clacking sound on the wooden surface that reminded her, for some reason, of a teacher she’d had in second or third class – Sister Mary Assumpta, or was it Attracta?

Brought a ruler down hard three times on Sarah’s palm once when she hadn’t known the Irish for something. Gave her such a fright she’d wet her pants. Sister Mary Whatever-her-name-was, everyone terrified of her, slap you soon as look at you. Dead now, died not long after Sarah had moved on to secondary school, keeled over with a brain haemorrhage, or a massive stroke or something. Poor creature, you couldn’t hold a grudge when you heard something like that.

As she drew nearer to the other figure, she saw that it wasn’t a hat: it was hair with the glossy red-brown richness of a just-hatched conker. It was masses of glorious Shirley Temple curls that Sarah would have traded her boring straw-coloured bob for in an instant. They tumbled down the back of the woman’s black sheepskin coat, shielding her face completely as Sarah approached.

She must have heard the ridiculous clippity-clop of Sarah’s shoes, but she didn’t look around. Her palms were braced against the metal railing – no gloves, she must be cold – the too-long sleeves of her coat, miles too big for her, almost covering her hands, the furry cuff of the left one dangerously close to the tip of the half-smoked cigarette that was clamped between her first and second fingers. The smoke from it drifted straight upwards, no breeze to push it sideways.

Sarah stopped about six feet away. No movement from the other woman, apart from a tiny, rapidly vanishing puff of steam around her face each time her warm breath met the January air. Would she appreciate an interruption? But if it was her scarf, and surely it was, she’d be glad to have it returned to her, wouldn’t she?

‘Excuse me.’

No response. No reaction, no sign at all that she’d heard.

‘Excuse me.’ A little louder.

Still nothing. Didn’t she want her scarf back? Sarah held it out. ‘I found this lying on the bridge up ahead, and I wondered if it was yours.’

The woman continued to ignore her. This was getting ridiculous. Maybe she was deaf.

Sarah stepped closer. ‘Excuse me, I just wanted to—’

‘Go away.’

Softly said, the words practically inaudible, the head still turned away. Ash dropped off the end of her cigarette and tumbled towards the water.

‘Pardon? I didn’t quite catch—’

‘Leave me alone.’

Sarah was thrown. Maybe she’d missed the mention of the scarf. ‘Oh, well … but I found this—’

‘Just go away, would you?’ Louder, sharper, the voice quite deep for a woman. ‘Leave me alone.’

‘But your scarf—’

‘Keep it.’

Keep it? She was giving her beautiful, and probably very expensive, scarf to a stranger, just like that? Why on earth would anyone just hand over—

The thought stopped short in Sarah’s head, snagged on a new and disturbing one. Clearly, the woman was in a distressed state. She was standing on a bridge, and she wasn’t interested in having her scarf returned to her. Why wouldn’t she want it back, unless she was planning never to wear it again?

A green car drove onto the bridge from the opposite direction. The driver, an elderly man, glanced at the two of them as he passed. Too late, as he reached the far end of the bridge, for Sarah to be wondering if she should have flagged him down.

No, of course she shouldn’t have: that would have been overreacting. The woman was upset about something, that was all. She needed a shoulder to cry on, some words of comfort.

‘Look,’ Sarah said, ‘is everything OK? I mean, you seem a little … I don’t know. I mean, are you all right? Can I help at all?’

A long, slow sigh came from the other woman. She flicked what was left of the cigarette into the river and turned finally to look at Sarah. A few years older, somewhere into her thirties. Not beautiful as much as striking. Eyes so very dark brown they might have been black, deeply shadowed beneath, nose large and slightly hooked, bottom lip full and wide. Skin the soft colour of coffee with cream in it, cheekbones high and sharply defined.

But there was a curious blankness in the expression, an emptiness in the dark eyes that caused a fresh flick of uneasiness in Sarah.

‘Would you just go away?’ the woman said, emphasising each word. ‘Would you leave me alone and go away, and just keep the fucking scarf, or dump it, I really don’t care.’

The swear word, uttered so quietly and with so little feeling, was shocking in its unexpectedness. Sarah’s anxiety increased as the woman turned back to face the river. The two of them stood there as the seconds ticked on, Sarah’s mind tumbling about, searching for the right course of action. She couldn’t possibly leave her – but what on earth was she to do?

A little brown bird swooped towards the water before lifting off again. The sun, well hidden all day behind the clouds, slid past a particularly dense one, washing the afternoon in a slightly darker shade of grey and causing Sarah to pull the front edges of her jacket more tightly closed. Not long till twilight, and a further drop in temperature. She thought longingly of a hot bath, of her mother’s rich, beefy stew.

A sudden burst of birdsong came from a copse a few feet from the bank. It sounded unnervingly out of place in the still, cold January afternoon.

Sarah’s stomach rumbled, almost three hours since she’d chopped a hardboiled egg into slices and added it to a handful of raw mushrooms. Much less than she normally ate for lunch, but all she’d been able to face with the interview looming.

She had to say something: they couldn’t go on standing here in silence all afternoon. She might be blowing this whole thing out of all proportion, it might still be a case of some sad person simply wanting to be alone for a while. But what if it wasn’t?

She had to speak, even if she made an utter fool of herself. Better say it and be wrong than be left wondering. As she opened her mouth, the woman looked around again, and this time the dark eyes were narrowed, the lips pressed together, a frown lodged between her eyebrows.

‘Sorry,’ Sarah said quickly, ‘I know you want me to go, but I can’t. Not until I know you’re not going to …’ she faltered, searching for the right words ‘… I’m just afraid you might be thinking of …’

She came to a stop again, the words refusing to come out – but surely it must be obvious what she meant. She waited for the woman to protest, to tell Sarah she was being stupid, to laugh at her, even – but there was no protestation, no sign that what was lying unspoken between them surprised her in the least. No indication at all that Sarah had come to the wrong conclusion.

God, she wasn’t wrong, she knew that now. Her palms prickled with nervousness. Why did she have to be the one to come on this situation? Why hadn’t she cycled on and ignored the damn scarf? No, she didn’t mean that; she wanted to help, but she hadn’t a clue what to do, not a clue.

‘It’s none of your business,’ the woman snapped. ‘You know nothing about me, you’ve no right to butt in. Just leave me alone, for Christ’s sake.’

‘I can’t,’ Sarah insisted, ‘not when I know what you want to do. I can’t leave you – how can I? How could anyone walk away from this? I’d never be able to live with myself if – I mean, I just can’t leave you on your own to—’

Again she stuttered to a standstill, praying for another car to appear. Anyone would do – she’d run out and flag them down, make them stop and help – but no car came. She was alone with a suicidal woman: it was down to her.

‘Please don’t,’ she went on, putting a hand on the sleeve of the too-big coat, feeling the heat of incipient tears behind her eyes. ‘You can’t do this – things can’t be that bad. There must be—’

‘How the fuck would you know how bad they are?’ the woman demanded angrily, snatching her arm away. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, to tell me what I can and can’t do? Go away, leave me alone – this has nothing to do with you.’

‘I can’t go away,’ Sarah repeated, eyes burning, voice trembling. ‘Look,’ she said urgently, blinking hard to keep the tears at bay, ‘I have to try to help you, whether you want it or not. I can’t just walk away from you – even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. You must understand that.’ Tears spilled out then and rolled down her face, and without thinking she pressed the scarf to her eyes, smelling again the perfume, the tobacco.

‘Jesus!’ The woman slammed both her hands hard onto the top of the railing, making Sarah’s heart jump, making her jerk the scarf away from her face. ‘What the hell are you crying for? You know nothing about me. If you had any fucking idea what I’m going through—’

‘Tell me,’ Sarah cried, rummaging in her jacket pockets for a tissue, remembering that they were in her bag, which was sitting in the bike’s basket. ‘Tell me what’s wrong – maybe it’ll help.’

Wasn’t that what everyone said, that you had to talk about your problems? Never mind that Sarah wouldn’t have an idea what to say in response: maybe the act of talking would be enough.

But the woman shook her head violently. ‘Jesus Christ!’ she cried. ‘You really think you can make all this go away? You think I’ll tell you what’s wrong and you’ll, what, wave your little magic wand and make it all better?’ Her eyes were flashing, and bright with tears too now. ‘Would you ever just go and leave me to it? Just walk on, pretend you never saw me. Would you just do that? If you want to make anything better, that’s what you can do.’ She pressed her mouth shut and swung her head away to look out at the river again.

‘I can’t,’ Sarah wept, ‘I can’t do that. I’m sorry, I can’t walk away. Please don’t ask me to.’ She searched for the right words, anything that might help. ‘There must be someone,’ she said urgently, dabbing again at her wet face with the scarf, ‘you must have some family – think what this would do to them, think how much it would hurt them.’

She had to keep talking, had to keep trying to stop this. ‘You don’t want to cause more hurt, do you? Because that’s all this will do. You’ll escape whatever you’re running away from, but you’ll be leaving more heartache behind you, and where’s the good in that?’

She was dimly aware, as she talked, that maybe her words were all wrong. Maybe there was no family – maybe they’d all been wiped out in a terrible car crash, or a house fire. Maybe that was why the woman was here now, planning to end it all. Sarah watched her hands, still planted on the railing. She waited in dread for any sudden movement.

But the woman remained motionless. Sarah glanced up to her face, but the little she could see of it gave nothing away. Was she listening, or had she shifted her awareness somewhere else? No matter: the longer she didn’t haul herself upwards onto the railings, the better.

‘I just think,’ Sarah went on, afraid to let the silence grow, ‘that maybe if you got some help or, I don’t know, if you had someone to talk to – oh, not me, I don’t mean me. Like you said, we don’t know each other at all, and of course you’re right, I have no idea what’s brought you to this state, but I really truly feel that this isn’t the answer. Maybe if you spoke to a doctor or …’ not a psychiatrist, she’d better not say that, it mightn’t go down well ‘… or a counsellor, someone professional, they might be able to help you.’

She stopped, drained, finally out of inspiration. A small breeze was cold on her damp cheeks. Her eyes still stung: more tears weren’t far away, wouldn’t need much encouragement to fall. She’d always been quick to cry, regularly bawled her eyes out at the cinema.

There was silence for a few seconds. Another car drove onto the bridge then, but Sarah didn’t turn towards it, made no move to intercept it. She remained standing where she was, her eyes still fixed on the woman’s face, every sense alert to the possibility of any sudden movement – though what she could do in that eventuality was beyond her. Grab on, and maybe get pulled over the railing herself? She imagined the two of them spinning through the air like a pair of circus acrobats, whirling and flailing as they plunged towards the water. The thought was horrifying: she shook her head to dislodge it.

Finally, the other woman moved. She lifted an arm and brought the sleeve of her sheepskin coat once across her eyes, and Sarah realised she was wiping away silent tears of her own. Then, without looking in Sarah’s direction she turned away abruptly, drawing keys from her coat pocket. Sarah watched as she walked around the Beetle and opened the driver’s door.

‘Are you OK to drive?’ she asked. ‘I can stay a bit longer if you want.’

The woman ignored her. She got into the car and switched on the ignition as she banged the door closed. Sarah stood and watched as the Beetle pulled away too fast, causing the tyres to screech loudly for an instant. She waited until it turned off the bridge and disappeared.

They hadn’t exchanged names. They would probably never lay eyes on one other again. For all Sarah knew, the woman was going to drive to the next bridge and throw herself off it, uninterrupted by a babbling, tearful cyclist. Sarah might read about it in tomorrow’s paper: Volkswagen Beetle found abandoned by river, fears for driver’s safety.

Had she made a difference? Had anything she’d said struck a chord? She’d never know – but if she read nothing over the next few days, if there was no report of a missing woman on the radio, she’d tell herself that maybe she’d been of some help. She’d let herself believe that she’d saved a life, and hope she was right.

She leant against the railing, trailing the scarf over it and pressing her hands against its cold metal, just as the woman had done. She drew in the dank scent that came up from the river beneath her. Imagine wanting to throw yourself into that freezing water, imagine how desperate you’d have to be, how low you must have fallen to want that.

She pressed her icy palms against her cheeks and eyed the scarf, lying limply there. Should she tie it onto the railings in case the woman came back for it? But that seemed unlikely: the scarf was probably the last thing on her mind right now. Sarah might as well keep it, although she couldn’t imagine ever wanting to wear it, pretty as it was. Maybe she’d wash it and add it to her next charity shop round-up.

She retraced her steps to where she’d left the bike, her legs unexpectedly shaky. She pushed the scarf into her handbag, beside the envelope of references she’d brought along to the interview. So unimportant it seemed now, whether or not she was offered the cook’s job. She remembered her nervousness as she’d cycled to the nursing home just a couple of hours earlier, not knowing that the real challenge would come on the way home.

As she cycled off, none too steadily, the rain returned in earnest, stabbing into her back, her shoulders, her head. She hardly noticed it.

All the way back to Dublin she shivered violently, despite the heavy coat and the relative warmth of the car. Driving through the outskirts of the city, wipers slicing away the rain, she noticed that she was almost out of petrol. Dusk was falling, headlights were being switched on in other cars, streetlights were winking into life. Lights appearing all around her, the whole world lighting up, and nothing but darkness inside her, nothing but a black gaping hole where her heart, or her soul, or her entire being, used to be.

She tried not to think, she tried to keep her head empty. She pulled into a petrol station and rubbed her numb hands together for several minutes before getting out. She pumped fuel into the tank she’d deliberately ignored all week, certain that whoever filled it again wouldn’t be her.

A line from a song floated unbidden into in her head, something about learning the truth at seventeen, as she stood by the car, watching the money gauge as it climbed to five pounds. Janis Ian’s dreary, angst-ridden song had come on the radio as she’d fed Alice her breakfast that morning, and now it returned, spinning on its imaginary turntable in her head, spewing out its woebegone lyrics.

It wasn’t about learning the truth, it was about recognising the lies. Helen had known it all at seventeen: she’d been wild and hungry and impatient to turn the next page of her life and meet head-on whatever and whoever was waiting there. It had taken her almost another seventeen years to understand that happiness never lasted, that good didn’t triumph, that love only laid you bare for the pain that was waiting.

You must have family, the woman on the bridge had said, butting in where she wasn’t wanted. Forcing Helen to remember Alice, who smelt of wet grass and pepper, who couldn’t sleep without her thumb tucked into her cheek, who screamed if the landing light was turned off, whose chubby little wrists poked from the horrible pastel-coloured cardigans that Helen’s mother insisted on knitting.

Alice, the reason Helen hadn’t been with Cormac at the end, hadn’t held his hand as he’d slipped away. Alice, whom Helen wanted to hate for that but couldn’t, because Alice was part of Cormac. She was all he’d left behind.

But the timing, the cruel timing of the rash that had prompted Alice’s babysitter Anna to phone Helen, the rash that had forced Helen to leave her dying husband’s bedside and attend to Alice, who, it turned out, didn’t have meningitis after all, just an outbreak of psoriasis – and by the time Helen had got back to Cormac, it had been too late.

She felt the rumble of the petrol through the nozzle she held, heard its gush into the tank, smelt its acrid tang. She would have done it. She would have climbed onto the railing. She would have jumped out of this putrid life without a backward glance, without a second’s hesitation, once she’d keyed herself up enough. She would have done it, if it hadn’t been for the interfering woman on the bridge, the crying stranger, with hair the colour of crispbread, in a hideous green trouser suit.

She pulled the nozzle from the tank and hooked it into its cradle. She screwed the petrol cap back on – and then she slammed both of her palms hard on the roof of the car, causing a man at the next pump to look across, startled. She ignored him, feeling the sting of the blow, doing nothing to lessen the sharp heat of it.

Enough lies: of course she wouldn’t have done it, because she was a fucking coward. The other woman had had nothing to do with it: all she’d given Helen was an excuse to walk away.

She leant against the car and wrapped the sheepskin coat more tightly around her. She closed her eyes and saw herself standing by the railing, looking down at the rushing water. She remembered taking a deep breath and preparing herself to do it – and her body had refused to move, refused to obey her mind’s command.

She’d lit a cigarette and drawn furiously on it, still determined to carry out what she’d come to do. She’d cursed her stubborn, traitorous limbs, willing them to move, but the more she’d thought about it, and pictured herself doing it, the more terrifying the prospect had become.

And out of nowhere she’d heard the soft whirr of bicycle wheels going past. She hadn’t looked around, had kept stock still and waited for whoever it was to disappear again, but then she’d heard the wheeze of brakes being pulled, and a few seconds later the clack of approaching footsteps. Female footsteps.

The best of it was, the killer was, the woman probably thought she’d saved Helen’s life. She’d probably congratulated herself all the way home because she’d rescued someone who was about to jump off a bridge. She’d never know the truth, never know that Helen had already been saved – or damned – by lack of courage.

And her beautiful scarf was gone. Serve her right, too proud to take it back from the woman she’d told to keep it. The ridiculously expensive scarf Cormac had bought her for their first anniversary was gone to a stranger. One more layer to press onto the slab of her grief.

In the small shop beside the petrol station she bought two atrociously priced bananas and a bag of jelly babies. She ate the bananas driving through the wet streets to her parents’ house. She slicked on more lipstick as she sat in the parked car outside their wrought-iron gates, listening to the engine ticking itself to sleep.

She wouldn’t try it again, she knew that. She’d gone to the edge and pulled herself back, and now there was no edge any more. She couldn’t do it: the will required for such an act wasn’t in her. The knowledge brought no relief, made her no happier; on the contrary, she now had the added torment of the realisation that there was no escape.

She wondered suddenly if Alice could possibly have been the reason for her failure today. Maybe, despite her conflicted feelings about her daughter, there was some unacknowledged umbilical connection to Alice that had prevented Helen from climbing onto the railing and letting go. It sure as hell hadn’t been the thought of never seeing her parents again.

She pulled the key from the ignition – forget it, it was over now – and got out, wrapping Cormac’s coat tighter around her as she hurried through the petering-off rain up the driveway.

‘What kept you?’ her mother said, opening the door. ‘You said you’d be back by five. We had to put Alice to bed.’

‘I ran out of petrol,’ Helen replied, walking around her into the hall, continuing past the giant walnut hallstand, past the marble-topped side table, home to an elegant white telephone and the key to her father’s Rolls-Royce, which sat as always on top of his leather driving gloves.

‘Really,’ her mother said, a hand to the string of small, perfect pearls around her neck, ‘I have to say that coat looks ridiculous on you.’

Helen began