The Space Between

by Rachel Billington

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From the critically acclaimed author, a stylish and compelling novel about a woman making a new life for herself. Alice Lightfoot is far too young to be a widow and a grandmother. Perhaps she'd been too young to be a wife, although she was happy enough at the time. Now, nearly three years after her husband's death, the world suddenly seems to be changing. Her daughter expects Alice's life to revolve around her grandchild, Lily, and everyone else seems to think that Alice must be looking for a new husband - after all, she's such a WIFE. There doesn't seem to be space to decide what Alice wants for herself: does she want a man around, or would independence give her the full life she craves? Alice is a woman at a turning-point, coming out from the protection of a long marriage into the hurly-burly of the wider world. She has far-reaching choices to make and the seriously unexpected to face...

Release date: July 22, 2010

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 332

Sample

Alice Lightfoot hadn’t planned to be naked when the postman arrived. Although not a particularly self-conscious woman, she did draw the line at exposing her body to a relative stranger. It crossed her mind, as she saw him staring through the kitchen window and an open door to herself, lying on a sheepskin rug, that it would have been better if he had been a complete stranger.

How much of her could he see? She hastened to look away for fear of catching the information in his eye. A twinkle, perhaps, or worse, the cold glint of disapproval. It was tempting to jump up and run out of his eyeline. But that would mean exposing more of herself and, anyway, she couldn’t do anything in a hurry because the baby would have to be removed first.

Alice wasn’t alone. Curled up in the foetal position, as if about to return to the womb – the wrong womb, as it happened – was Alice’s granddaughter, Lily.

If the postman is here, thought Alice, it must be seven, which means they had slept together for hours. She’d got up to give Lily her bottle at four thirty, taken off her nappy to change her and decided on a brief cuddle, a moment of delicious skin-to-skin contact. It had been dark outside, a little lamp casting a mellow glow in the room. Her nakedness – she hated a nightdress in bed and there was no one else in the cottage – was perfectly natural. Richard would have said she should have pulled the curtains. I am not a freak.

She could call out to the postman, she thought, but then heard a gruff, embarrassed voice: ‘You can sign for it later.’

‘Thanks.’ He was gone. She heard his van go up the lane.

Relieved, Alice was just about to ease Lily sideways when she felt a warm wetness trickle rapidly down her stomach and between her legs.

‘Oh, Lily! How could you?’ The baby’s eyes were open and gleeful. She even gave a fat chortle. She was a plump baby, smooth head covered with soft down. According to her mother, she slept through every night and played or slept through every day. So far the night information had been false. Lily hadn’t settled until after midnight and had woken soon after four. Perhaps she was missing her mother.

‘You’re going to share a bath with Grandma, my wicked princess.’

Grandma, Alice thought, as she walked through to the bathroom, was a very odd word when applied to one as young as herself. Their generations were so close. Florence, now Florrie, had been born when she was just twenty-one and Lily when Florrie was nineteen.

Alice placed Lily on the changing-mat and stared at her own body in the mirror. For a redhead she tanned easily and was always surprised by how white her breasts and buttocks remained. She twisted round to get a different angle. She supposed she had been shocked by the poor postman’s unwillingly prying eyes because no man had seen her naked since Richard’s death.

She leant over to turn on the taps and felt her breasts swing. She was glad they were big enough to do that. She imagined hands coming up to hold them, perhaps squeezing the nipples a little. Immediately, she felt a slight and unexpected tingling between her legs. She put a hand there and felt the damp of Lily’s urine.

It seemed extraordinary that, after three years of hardly considering sex, she was now aroused – not much, certainly, but enough to make it clear that, in the right circumstances, she might become interested.

‘Come on, darling.’ She turned off the taps and lifted the baby into her arms. But as she stepped into the bath, she realised that her intention to splash about in innocent delight with her granddaughter had been tainted by her resurrected sexuality. The boundaries had blurred and become dangerous. What if Florrie came back, as she would at any moment from her honest job of stacking shelves in the local supermarket?

Hastily, Alice set Lily down and wrapped herself in a towel. Lily would have a conventional bath and they’d eat boiled eggs for breakfast and she’d behave like a proper grandmother. Alice sighed. A grandmother and a widow.

‘It was absolutely horrendous! Fellow workers vile! Boxes filled with jars. Worse than a nightmare!’ Florrie burst into the kitchen, her hair newly bleached and standing up in little knots over her head.

‘It was very brave of you,’ said Alice, and thought that if you went ahead with a plan to be a single mother, as Florrie had, your destiny was sure to include horrendous job experiences.

‘Luckily,’ continued Florrie, kissing Lily as she stuffed the toaster with bread, ‘tonight I’ve got a job picking mushrooms. Peace. Calm. Listen to the mushrooms grow et cetera.’

‘Good,’ lied Alice, wondering at what point she could introduce the subject of Lily’s bad night behaviour. ‘I’m exhausted,’ she said, as a lead-in.

‘I’m exhausted,’ yawned Florrie, at exactly the same time but louder than her mother. ‘I’ll get in a few hours’ kip and be right back on duty. Isn’t it lucky Lily’s such a dream baby?’ Smiling contentedly, she left the room.

Alice tried to recall Richard’s often repeated estimate of their daughter’s character. Had it been ‘the most selfish, self-centred, self-regarding person in England’? Or ‘in the world’? At the time she’d hotly defended Florrie, citing the difficulties of being virtually an only child in London – her brother chose to patronise some absurd all-male school in the north, her father worked from very early morning to very late evening, and her mother worked as much as she could. This had made Florrie precociously independent, Alice had argued, so that she knew her own mind and was capable of organising things to get her own way.

‘Selfish,’ Richard had repeated, inexorable, as always.

Alice had been forced to reel out a longer defence, about how strong Florrie was, how well prepared to thrive in a world where the weak went to the wall. One evening, she now remembered, she’d even upped the stakes to a boast. ‘You mark my words, she’ll become a captain of industry and give you a heart-attack.’

Richard did have a heart-attack. And since presumably it was decreed by fate, one could count it lucky that he had been taken ill in court just two months before Florrie, ever decisive, made the decision not to take her A levels, and about a year before she announced she was pregnant, father not relevant.

Not that I mind any of this in principle, thought Alice. She went over and lifted Lily out of the high chair. I just don’t want to be left holding the baby.

‘Mama, Mama,’ gurgled Lily, trying to pull strands of Alice’s hair.

‘No.’ The hair was firmly removed. ‘I am not your mama. I’m an independent spirit who’s on temporary duty in this little cottage on loan to your mama, while I enjoy the hard and satisfying grind of a working woman in my flat in London.’

‘Mama, Mama,’ laughed Lily.

‘Whatever are you going on about?’ Florrie stood at the door: a childish expression of attack was evidently the best form of defence.

‘I’m just trying to explain to your daughter the realities of family life.’ Alice noticed Florrie looked tired – young and pretty and tired. ‘You go and have a rest, darling. Lily and I will enjoy the garden.’

The garden was small, a patch of grass surrounded by flower-beds overflowing with the sort of flowers that take care of themselves. Theirs was a wild independence that Alice admired: clumps of white daisies, rosemary, lavender, tangled up with straggling old-fashioned roses and a few ancient wallflowers that survived from one year to the next. ‘Look.’ She bent down with Lily to point out a Red Admiral alighted on a spike of lavender.

Beyond the lawn the garden became even less kempt, the unmown grass overhung by three small, aged apple trees. Alice carefully placed Lily’s pram under one and put her into it. She sat on a deck-chair nearby and listened to the baby’s protesting cry die away. She wanted to make herself a cup of coffee but the peace, hardly interrupted by birdsong and the steady hum of insects, held her there. This was why she’d bought the cottage, she remembered.

‘Mum! It’s lunch-time and Lily hasn’t even got a clean bottle. You’ve just left them there on the side and now she’ll wake up and scream.’

Dazed, Alice looked up at her reproachful daughter. ‘I must have fallen asleep.’

Later, Alice and Florrie sat on a rug under one of the apple trees eating a salad Alice had made. Florrie’s bare legs stuck out into the sun. They were beautifully slim with the unmarked perfection of youthful skin. Lily lay nearby waving her hands at the shadows made by the leaves over her head.

‘This is a bit of an idyll,’ said Alice, and was surprised by her ironic tone. Surely it was an idyll. Three generations in summery contentment, the snakes subdued or gone away. She stood up and stepped over her daughter’s legs. ‘I’m going to open a bottle of wine.’

Florrie looked up lazily but said nothing.

Alice walked into the cottage and found some wine in the fridge. She’d made their supper at the same time as their lunch, a chicken pasta salad waiting in a pretty painted bowl, which only needed fresh tarragon added at the last minute. Quiet hours stretched ahead in which she could relish being a good grandmother.

‘I’d prefer a beer, if you’ve got one,’ called Florrie, from the garden.

‘No, I have not!’ How could she be so angry, even though she’d said it quietly through gritted teeth? She slammed the drawer from which she’d taken the corkscrew.

‘No beer, darling,’ said Alice, re-entering the garden. ‘You’ll have to make do with wine.’

Alice listened for her steps on the pavement, but there was no sound, no hard evidence of her existence. She could have been a ghost floating along these warm, busy streets, with no one knowing or caring about her presence. Yet she had left the country earlier than usual today because she had longed to be in London.

Her flat was on the second floor of a mansion block in Kensington. The building was constructed of scarlet bricks, whose colour was intensified by the sunset flooding its western angles. The block stood on three sides of a paved courtyard edged with urns bearing gloomy shrubs. When Richard had proposed to her, standing just about where she was now at the end of another late July day, she had rejected him on the grounds that her hair clashed with ‘all that hideous brick’. What had he said? ‘Then I’ll move.’ But, of course, he hadn’t. Richard had loved the flat. She loved their little cottage, bought in the last five years of their marriage.

Alice sighed, shifted her bag on her shoulder and looked up to the west-facing window of the flat. She’d always needed to trace it along, beyond two flats at its left, one with dreadful pink geraniums on its balcony, the other with a row of round balls of clipped privet, then hers – or rather his – the balcony flanked by the pyramidal bay trees he had bought. Despite her efforts, they refused to die.

The white curtains were drawn back but beams of sun struck the two long panes of glass directly, making them glossy black and reflective. For some reason, Alice continued to stare, picturing the heavy furniture inside, which easily dominated her own pale cushions and throws, introduced over the years.

Concentrated on her own imaginings, it took her a moment to appreciate that the sun had moved, allowing a section of glass to become semi-transparent. Someone was inside the room.

Her heart skipped. No one should be there. Florrie was at the cottage; she had Peter’s key. Could it be the porter? But the porter wouldn’t flutter. The glass doors to the balcony must be open a crack and a breeze was catching the intruder’s clothes. A woman in a dress with loose sleeves or wearing a light shawl who, she felt quite convinced, was staring out at her.

Hurriedly, Alice opened the gate to the courtyard and let herself into the hallway. The reception desk was unattended but by the time she reached it the porter, putting on his hat hastily, had appeared from some inner recess.

‘Quick, Joe, there’s a burglar in my flat!’ He didn’t move so she took his arm. ‘You don’t have to be frightened. It’s just a woman.’

Mumbling something about guns, he disappeared, then emerged armed with a canister of pepper spray. He followed her in an aura of servile unwillingness. He was always like this on Sunday. He had once informed Alice there were too many bags returning from weekends in the country requiring a strong arm. Well, she required a strong arm now.

They went up in the lift and hurried past one flat to her own front door. It was closed, tranquil, secure. Alice unlocked it and gingerly entered, then, rethought. ‘You go first!’

Joe became more enthusiastic. He held up his canister triumphantly.

Alice nodded impatiently. They proceeded across the hallway with its shiny parquet flooring. A corridor led to right and left, the living room straight ahead. She indicated the open door. His canister pointed, Joe trod silently on to the thick carpet. Only a streak of orange sunset came through the window but it was easy to see that the room was empty and undisturbed.

‘She was by the window.’ They went to it – closed, Alice noticed – and stepped on to the balcony. Nothing.

‘I’ll check the bedrooms.’ He went off quite cheerily now, obviously certain the burglar was the product of her imagination. He would like that, Alice thought. All men enjoyed the idea of a hysterical female.

She stood dreamily on the balcony, as if the fearful raising of her heartbeat over the last few minutes had dropped her into a calmer place than before. She supposed the movement had been a combination of shadow and the light curtain fluttering as if it were a woman’s dress. The window had never been open.

The streets were emptier than before. A couple came out of the launderette opposite, and a group of three or four were going into the pub a little further down the road. It had outside space, which would soon be crowded and noisy. Sometimes Alice sat on her balcony and people-watched.

In the road directly below, a Volvo estate drew up. Children and dogs spilled out, followed by the Hunter parents. The Hunters kept swearing they were going to buy a house but somehow still squashed into the flat beneath hers. She was about to turn away – watching the Hunters argue about who was going to carry what was no fun – when a woman wearing a dress came into her eyeline. She had evidently left the flats and now approached the Hunters’ debouch. As Alice began to be nervously interested, the woman spoke to Mrs Hunter, who stopped lecturing her son long enough to give her a beaming smile and even call something after her. Clearly a friend, thought Alice, and hardly bothered to watch as the woman strolled away down the street opposite.

‘All clear, Mrs Lightfoot. No intruders today.’

Alice stepped back into the room. Joe now looked disappointed, as if he had been thwarted of pepper-spraying fun. ‘Good. You’d better get back downstairs, then.’ He hovered, waiting, doubtless, for a fiver. ‘The Hunters are back with piles of baggage.’ She took a small revenge as she handed over the note.

Alice sat on one of the large leather sofas. The sun had gone from the room now but the day had been hot enough for her to enjoy the cool breeze blowing from the door to the balcony. She would never like the flat, but this had become a good moment, the being left on her own. She had learnt to enjoy it a little watchfully, though, for after a while, the good moment changed to loneliness.

This evening she felt happy. She enjoyed the knowledge that she could behave in any way she liked. She could take off her trousers and sit comfortably in her knickers and T-shirt without causing desirous expectations or disapproval. Richard had often complimented her on her thighs. They were long, slim and unpuckered by the pull of subcutaneous fat. Just genetic luck, presumably, although it wasn’t easy to check out her inheritance since her mother, an only child, had died when she was three and her father, still alive, had always refused to talk about her. But Alice knew she had the same auburn hair as her mother had had, so it seemed reasonable to assume she had her thighs too.

She stood up. The next procedure, when she was alone for an evening, was to think about food. Put a little shape into the hours. But instead she sat down again, crossed her legs and looked at her calves and ankles. They were not as satisfactory as her thighs. Not fat but definitely straight. Had her mother’s legs been straight? Her father’s were too sinewy in that particularly masculine way for her to draw any deductions.

Alice smiled at her absurdity. Why this sudden interest in her body? Yesterday it had been nakedness and the beginnings of sexual arousal; today an examination of her legs. Would she soon be experimenting with hair colour and going on faddish diets? Was it out of mourning and into self? Was her reluctance to take responsibility for darling Lily a sign that she wished to revert instead of going forward with the mature wisdom – Alice smiled again – of a middle-aged woman? Perhaps she would take this question to her Cruse counsellor, who was still there for crisis moments. Perhaps, on the other hand, she wouldn’t. Perhaps she wouldn’t feel like seeing him ever again, with his encouraging talk of one day at a time.

Alice stood up again and stretched. She suspected that these thoughts should be expressed to someone, probably Mitzi, who had made a stab at the role of sympathetic confidante since Richard’s death even though her own marriage had been falling apart.

Slowly and reluctantly, Alice went down the snugly carpeted corridor to her study, a neatly ordered room, once Richard’s, with fitted bookshelves, filing cabinets and a smart new computer. In this room she became the successful journalist and interviewer whose copy appeared weekly in the magazine section of a national newspaper.

The study door opened with a little whisper as the wood brushed along the carpet. Alice, concentrating on the computer, gasped as the sound reached her consciousness. Someone was inside the flat. Had the woman been hiding in a cupboard all the time she’d been studying Sir Brendan Costa’s history, life and work?

‘Hi, Mum.’

Alice turned round from the computer screen, which shone with a many-coloured diagram of Sir Brendan’s latest takeover. ‘How did you get in? I thought you gave me back your key!’ There was the edge of a squeal in her usually low voice. Relaxing, she watched Peter’s face, like her own in its foxy colouring but otherwise quite unlike, with its long, bony seriousness.

‘I lost it. But now I’ve found it. You are jumpy this evening.’

‘But you didn’t come here this afternoon?’

‘No. Jennie was with me.’ He smiled.

Alice thought it the proud smile of a young man who had made love and was both irritated by and glad for him. ‘Come to Mum for supper, have you?’ She walked towards him, her toes curling into the carpet.

‘It’s too late for that. I’ve come for a bath. My boiler’s broken.’

They hugged. ‘Make yourself at home, darling.’ The door to the second bathroom closed, and soon steam and music were trickling through the edges.

Alice wandered restlessly around the flat, trying to look objectively at what it offered. It was very large for one person, the wide living room with the tall windows on to the balcony and on either side one big room, one smaller and a bathroom. It had been quite big enough to house Richard, herself, Peter and Florence – as she had been. Exquisite little Florence with her dark mass of hair and pointed face. Alice’s face and Richard’s colouring.

She sat on the bed in what had been Florrie’s bedroom. It was piled with unironed clothes and an open ironing-board.

Then she got up and wandered to the other side of the flat, switching on lights as she went. The night outside was cooler and darker now; she could hear the noise from the pub drinkers quite clearly, friendly rather than disturbing. Alice liked people. The only room she didn’t use was the one where she and Richard had slept. The old-fashioned overhead light that Richard had refused to remove bounced off the heavy mahogany bed, dressing-table, chair and cupboards – all inherited from his mother. Here was the bed in which Peter and Florrie had been conceived. No, that wasn’t quite right. Florrie had happened on a holiday in Paxos. Hot nights with the baby Peter in a cot beside them.

The idea that Richard had also been conceived in this shiny mahogany frame had always rather depressed her. At least he hadn’t died in it. He’d died in court, with the words, ‘Your Honour is mistaken.’

Peter came into the room. He’d put on shorts and a T-shirt but his face was pink and his red hair, veering towards orange – which hers thankfully avoided – was wet and tufty.

‘There’s something I want to show you.’ Alice took him to the cupboard. She slid open the heavy doors. ‘I kept just the suits. I mean, a dark suit is a dark suit and you’re about the same height.’ She watched Peter put his hand forward as if to touch, then withdraw it. ‘Your father liked expensive suits,’ added Alice. ‘It’ll save you a mint.’ She thought she sounded as if she was trying to persuade him, whereas really she didn’t mind at all. She’d removed her own clothes to the bedroom next door where she slept. As Peter said nothing, she shut the cupboard again. ‘Anyway, there they are.’

‘Why don’t you sleep here?’ Peter was looking round the room as if this was the first time her abandonment of it had struck him.

‘Just didn’t feel like it.’

‘It’s a bit of a waste.’ He seemed to be estimating the room’s size, the windows in two walls.

‘That’s what I thought about the clothes.’

Peter hesitated. ‘Are you lonely?’

Alice looked startled. Peter never asked questions like that. They were hardly close enough, even if they were mother and son. It must be the sight of his father’s clothes. Or perhaps Jennie was turning him into a different person. They began to walk to the living room. ‘No, darling. Not really.’

‘I could come back here. Live with you.’ He’d blurted it out. His face went pinker.

‘Absolutely not,’ Alice exclaimed, louder than she meant too. Before she could feel guilty, she caught the relief on Peter’s face.

They entered the living room and Alice’s eyes went immediately to the white curtains blowing inwards quite vigorously now. Should she tell Peter about the woman at the window? The non-woman. Was it a sign of loneliness to create a woman lying in wait for her?

‘Such a strange thing happened to me this afternoon . . .’ She began the story but as she told it – quite amusingly, she thought, with descriptions of Joe’s pepper spray – she saw that Peter was hardly interested. He had reassured himself about her state of mind and now he wanted to return to his own life.

When she finished, he laughed. ‘It was probably your doppelgänger. What colour was her hair?’

Alice let him go then. As he collected his things, she went out to the balcony again. After a few minutes, he called out,’ I’m off!’ She went to say goodbye, but the door banged before she reached it so she returned to the balcony. He emerged quite soon and Alice was surprised to see that, as well as the bag he’d arrived with, he had something over this arm.

‘’Bye, Peter.’

He looked up, waved briefly, then hurried away, head down, as if guilty. It was almost a run and she clocked then that he was carrying a couple of Richard’s suits over his arm. She could see the hanger poking out of the black bag he’d put over them either as disguise or protection. How odd of him. How sensitive.

Alice walked slowly to the large empty bedroom and opened the cupboard. Yes, there was a space. Perhaps he had even taken three suits. Maybe she should reassure him that she, too, was moving beyond his father’s death.

Sir Brendan Costa looked questioningly at Alice, his hot blue eyes shooting attention and energy over the wide desk. She had thought him ugly and predictable up to this minute but suddenly she saw she had been quite wrong.

‘Do you always look so bored when you conduct an interview?’

She would have to give him an answer but it mustn’t contain the smallest element of flirtation. She had resolved that that should never be her way. ‘You’re mistaking concentration for boredom, I think.’

‘So I’m blinding you with figures, am I?’ He laid his rather pudgy fingers on the empty desk so that the one ring he wore was well displayed. It was on his wedding finger but, according to press clippings – that is, gossip columns – he was presently unmarried, having been divorced three times. She would ask him about it towards the end of the interview.

‘I would hate to misrepresent your point of view.’

‘Good. Good. Have you ever worked in business?’

Alice uncrossed and recrossed her legs. Despite her no-flirting rule, she almost invariably wore a skirt. It gave her one superiority over her subjects: they couldn’t wear a skirt. Or, at least, not in public. Today she was wearing a cream linen suit. Her best. She must answer Sir Brendan’s question. Pauses were a good way of keeping the subject on his toes but, if too prolonged, risked irritability.

‘Never. No.’ Should she be more forthcoming? He had just finished a twenty-minute monologue, explaining the reasons behind the takeover of a company that produced up-market kitchen fittings, which was interesting because his core business had always been in property. He couldn’t be truly curious, despite those blue, rather small eyes.

‘The English middle classes have always despised business, although very happy to live off the proceeds. What did your father do?’

‘He was a doctor. A GP. Quite humble.’ She didn’t mind telling him that.

‘Very respectable. And your husband?’ This was an unacceptable question. She should deny him, but she found herself saying, ‘He was a lawyer.’

The answer seemed to please him. He smiled and drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘Don’t you want to ask about my family? Interviewers are usually intrigued.’

‘Father Italian immigrant, mother Irish immigrant.’ She read from her pad. ‘Met in Liverpool 1920. Five children – two sons, three daughters. The eldest son killed in action, Second World War. Parents and two daughters killed in bombing raid.’ Alice stopped. What was she doing? Just because this man had made millions, married (and divorced) three times, and had a reputation for toughness verging on brutality, she must not assume he was inhuman.

Alice looked up with a sensitive, apologetic expression on her face, and was horrified to see Sir Brendan’s eyes full of tears.

He produced a large red spotted handkerchief. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I weep easily. It’s the Italian side of my inheritance. The Irish are tough as old boots.’ He blew his nose lustily. ‘As you who know everything know already, I was only a baby in the war. The deaths left a mark on my soul but not on my memory. I was brought up by my much older sister. A fiendish woman who made me what I am.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Alice, feebly.

A flash of irritation crossed Sir Brendan’s face, and he looked at his watch. ‘Free for an early lunch, are you?’

‘But . . .’ Alice, already unnerved, felt out of control. Could she write about his tears? He had forbidden a tape-recorder and she looked rather hopelessly at her pad, filled with shorthand detailing the reason for his takeover.

‘Yes. Tell Gudgeon I’ll catch up with him this afternoon.’ Alice realised he was ordering his secretary to cancel his lunch date. ‘Let’s go.’ He was standing beside her, a big man, twice the width of Richard who, although six foot, maintained the reedy form of the non-athlete, which was an understatement. He had been ‘bookish’ – she thought of the word affectionately. And many, many years older than her, even older than Sir Brendan. How odd to be thinking of him now. She never thought of him when she was working.

‘Thank you. How very kind.’ Formality, that was the thing. But he was hurrying her past two secretaries, towards the lift, down the marbled entrance hall. Clasping her notepad to her breast, she asked, ‘Are we still on the record?’

He stopped for a moment, eyed her with a mixture of reproach and humour. ‘Do journalists ever go off the record?’ Then he was bustling her into a chauffeur-driven car with its engine running. It was, Alice noticed, deliciously cooled. Since he seemed to feel no need for speech, she settled back and tried to remember her unasked questions.

‘That’s right.’ He looked at her approvingly, ‘There’s a time for everything. Conversation is best undertaken across a corner table with a bottle of Puligny Montrachet premier cru and a fillet of steamed sea bass.’

Alice smiled at what she assumed was self-parody and shivered. The car was almost too cool. She understood he was the sort of man who liked to compartmentalise and keep each compartment under his control. And now, she told herself, he had kidnapped her for an hour or two.

Mitzi and Alice lay on their backs, each on one of the big sofas set at right angles in Alice’s living room. Mitzi, who was tall and angular with black, straight-cut hair and a small rosebud mouth, painted vermilion, was dressed in tights and a l