Uncoupled

by Lizzie Enfield

Genres: General Fiction; Family Life

Synopsis

'We are getting early reports of a train crash on the Brighton to London line...Emergency Services are on their way to the scene'. Holly knew that by staying with her he was putting himself at risk. But, as he held her in the darkness, she didn't want to let him go. Holly's a mother with children, a husband she loves and a time-consuming job up in London. She copes, and life is good. So when she is in a train accident on the London to Brighton line, Holly knows that it's just a small chapter in her life and nothing has changed. But Holly can't forget the younger man who comforted her in the chaos of the crash, and when she sees him again on her daily commute up to town, there's a flash of recognition between them. Is it embarrassment? Curiosity? Or is there something more? And what of Anne-Marie, another passenger who has survived. Just what is her story? What readers are saying about Uncoupled : 'It has real optimism about human nature and some really good plot twists. Thoughtful and fun ' 'It's warm and humorous but also a slightly dark and disturbing portrait of a marriage tested by circumstances beyond its control. Clever twists and a real page-turner which both makes you think and laugh in equal measure ' ' Witty and poignant at the same time. Beautifully delivered story. Great character portrayal and development '

Release date: February 2, 2012

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 386

Sample

BBC Radio 4

12 April

9 a.m.

The news is read by Charlotte Green.

We are getting very early reports of a train crash on the Brighton to London line. Part of the Southern train appears to have derailed inside the Balcombe tunnel between Haywards Heath and Gatwick Airport. Passengers on board say the vehicle was going into the tunnel, when there was a loud crash and it jolted to a halt.

Emergency services are on the way to the scene . . .

HOLLY KNEW THAT by staying with her he was putting himself at risk. But, as he held her in the darkness, she didn’t want him to let go.

He squeezed her hand, as if he knew what she was thinking, and said, ‘It’ll be OK.’

It was eerily quiet in the tunnel and Holly suspected he was as scared as she was. The initial cries of surprise, when the train had lurched from standstill and ricocheted off the walls on to its side, had quickly given way to a quieter sense of shock and then a unanimous flurry of activity.

‘We ought to get out,’ several voices had said at once.

‘We’ll need to break the windows,’ a chorus of others responded.

Then there was the sound of windows breaking and people scrambling up over the upturned floor of the carriage, desperate to escape.

No one actually said, ‘Do you think it was a bomb?’ or ‘There could be another.’

And, with a perverse sense of logic, Holly thought that as long as she didn’t say it either then it might make it untrue.

But that didn’t stop her from being terrified, especially when people began to struggle up from wherever they’d been thrown and edge themselves towards the broken carriage windows. Then she realised that she was trapped beneath the twisted metal of her seat and couldn’t move.

‘We need to get out,’ a soft voice said somewhere near her.

In the weak light, emanating from mobile phones and laptop screens, Holly could just about make out the outline of the young man who’d been sitting opposite her.

‘I can’t move,’ she told him, surprising herself by sounding remarkably calm and matter-of-fact. ‘I don’t think I’m hurt but I can’t get out from under the seat.’

He bent down to investigate and felt for her in the semi-darkness, brushing her torso with his hands without apology.

‘It’s twisted.’ He tried to move the seat but it was firmly lodged against the wall of the carriage and over Holly’s prone body.

Holly saw him turn and look towards the other passengers who were now climbing through the broken windows.

‘Please don’t leave me,’ she heard herself say, although she wished she hadn’t.

He ought to get out too, whoever he was. He might have a wife and family of his own who needed him more than she did. But he was already settling down beside her, reaching out for her hand and taking hold of it.

Holly felt strangely detached from what was going on, as if she was watching it happen to someone else. She urged herself to think of Mark and the children, to try to see their faces and hear their chatter. She was physically unable to do anything, but at least she could stay focused on the people she needed to get out for.

As if he too was thinking the same thing, he began asking questions.

‘Are you married?’

‘Yes.’ Holly felt the reassuring warmth of his hand in hers. ‘And I’ve got two children.’

‘Tell me about them,’ he said.

Holly wished he’d been more specific, asked her what her name was or how long she’d been married or what she did or how old she was. His question was too general.

‘Mark, my husband . . .’ She considered this, thinking it was important to describe him accurately now. ‘He’s kind and clever and funny and good looking. And he’s very compelling. If you met him, you would like him. Everybody does.’

Holly never prayed but she hoped hard now that Mark knew this was how she thought of him. He’d been a bit down recently, his energy diminished, and slightly less himself. She knew he was worried about work but hadn’t asked if anything else was bothering him.

‘And the children?’ he asked, squeezing her hand again. ‘Are they boys or girls?’

‘A girl and a boy,’ she said. ‘They are both gorgeous.’

Saying this helped her sense them more keenly.

Chloe seemed to be emerging from the moody phase of adolescence, beautiful, clever and enjoying Holly’s company again, while Jake still filled her with wonder every time she looked at him. Even though his beautiful fresh face was peppered with spots and his hair was beginning to smell of wet PE kit, he still seemed impossibly perfect.

Chloe had been in the shower when she’d left the house and Holly had shouted goodbye through the sound of running water, but her daughter hadn’t answered.

‘Bye, Jakey,’ Holly had said, trying to force something muttered out of him, when he left for school.

A group of his friends had called and when Holly opened the door and Jake had snuck past, his adolescent body language screamed: Don’t try to kiss or hug me in front of my friends!

‘I didn’t say goodbye properly to any of them this morning,’ she said, as if confessing this to a stranger would ease the burden of not having done so.

‘We’ll be out of here soon enough,’ he tried to reassure her, but she could hear the fear in his voice.

Holly thought of her late grandmother, Mary, whose mantra had been: ‘Never leave the house without saying goodbye properly, you never know when you might be hit by a bus.’

Mary had been Irish and her life was governed by superstitions. She was for ever crossing herself, calling upon various saints or shouting, ‘Get those shoes off the table, before something terrible occurs!’

The saying goodbye properly was founded on a terrible reality. Her husband Bob had been knocked down and killed by a 5A bus, as he went to buy a paper. It had happened on the same morning Mary had turned on him in an uncharacteristic fit of anger when he’d asked, innocently enough, ‘What’s it like out? Will I need a coat?’

‘How do I know if you need your coat or not? Are you not old enough to decide for yourself?’ she had shouted at him across the breakfast table. ‘I’ve enough children without you wanting to become one of them yourself.’

‘I’m sure he was fretting about it and not concentrating,’ Mary said later, referring to the moment when Bob stepped into the path of the oncoming double-decker. ‘Perhaps that’s why he wasn’t looking properly.’

Mary came to live with them, shortly after her husband’s death. So Holly spent the last years of her teenage life unable to leave the house without an elaborate ritual of goodbyes. It had made her anxious at the time, never leaving to go to school without being reminded she might meet an untimely end.

As an adult, she’d happily shut the door on her family and gone wherever she was going without saying any fond farewells first.

But now, as her grandmother’s face swam into the forefront of her mind, Holly wished she’d opened the door of the bathroom and said goodbye to Chloe through the steam of the shower, and that, instead of respecting Jake’s pre-pubescent angst, she’d ruffled his hair as he left for school.

To Mark her goodbye had been a slightly mocking, ‘Are you going to wear that hat to work?’

She’d said it in a tone that people who have been married for a long time reserve for each other. It wasn’t outright rude but it implied that she didn’t think it suited him. Twenty years ago Holly thought Mark utterly gorgeous, no matter what he put on or took off.

‘Mark bought a hat at the weekend,’ Holly told the man with her now.

‘Yes?’ He sounded unsure how to react to this.

‘The children liked it but I didn’t really.’

It was a grey pork-pie style with blue-spotted ribbon trim. A very pretty girl had been selling them in an outside stall in the North Laine. Holly thought Mark had stopped to look at the hats so that he could get a better look at the pretty girl and had been surprised when he had begun trying them on.

‘How much was it?’ she asked him as they continued their walk through the North Laine to the seafront.

‘It was only eight pounds,’ he said, and Holly presumed he’d thought this a price worth paying not to have the pretty girl think him a time-waster.

He had put the hat on when they’d got home.

‘I love it.’ Chloe had run her finger around the ribbon. ‘Is it vintage? Can I borrow it?’

‘You look like one of the Specials,’ Jake had said, and Mark had done a little ska dance in the sitting room.

‘When have you come across the Specials?’ Holly asked.

‘Chloe bought a vinyl album in the market.’

‘But we don’t have anything to play records on.’

‘I know,’ Chloe interjected. ‘I want to get a turntable for my birthday. They’re cool.’

‘We should go to a gig sometime, Hol,’ Mark had said, singing the first few lines of Too Much Too Young and taking her hands so she had to join him in the sitting-room dance.

Chloe had laughed but Jake had rolled his eyes in embarrassment and then done an impression of his parents’ generation’s dance routines.

‘This is how middle-aged people dance.’ He had stood up and, with his feet firmly rooted to the floor, twisted slightly at the waist and moved his arms a fraction. ‘And then, when they get drunk, they do this!’

Jake had raised one leg off the floor, continued the slight twisting of the waist and begun rotating the lifted foot around in the same direction.

It was a good impression and they’d all laughed.

‘It was worth eight pounds, just for that,’ Holly had said, when Mark took the hat off.

Later, when she was brushing her teeth and she’d looked at Mark, lying naked in the bath, his hair plastered against the sides of his face, she had wondered if he was becoming sensitive about his receding hair line and the tiny coin-shaped patch of baldness which was new to the top of his head.

She’d bent over the side of the bath and kissed him and he’d slipped his hand under her dressing gown and stroked her breast, saying, ‘I’ll be out in a minute.’

Holly tried to keep hold of that moment now, and the evening which preceded it, not think about what might happen next.

‘You should go,’ she said, suddenly resolute that she shouldn’t rob this stranger of his chance to get out of danger and near-stifling darkness.

‘Is there anybody in here?’ a voice rang out through the carriage.

‘Here!’ he called back. ‘There’s a woman over here. Her leg’s trapped under the luggage rack and she can’t get out.’

‘It’s OK now, love.’ The voice came closer. ‘We’ll try and get you moved as soon as possible. Are you hurt, sir?’

Torches flashed through the carriage and Holly saw clearly again the face of the man who’d been sitting opposite her before it all happened.

He was bending towards her, and kissing her on the forehead.

‘Good luck,’ he whispered.

‘Thank you.’ Holly heard her own voice say this quietly. As she let go of his hand he disappeared into a blur of fluorescent jackets.

PEOPLE ASKED HOLLY afterwards if her life had flashed before her and she said, ‘No, not exactly.’

She had suddenly recalled certain scenes from her life so vividly that they seemed almost real, like the last time the family had been on holiday in Cornwall. She wondered afterwards if she’d thought of this because they were going again to the same part of the country in a week’s time. By recalling the past in such detail, she was probably subconsciously trying to cling to the future.

‘Dad bought a wetsuit!’ Chloe and Jake looked flushed and healthy from the two hours they’d spent chasing waves. They were beside themselves with laughter at Mark’s new buy.

Holly had no idea why this was so funny but their laugher was infectious and she began giggling too, as she waited to find out what the joke was.

‘Where is Dad now?’ she asked them, as they queued to buy hot chocolate at the café next to the surf-hire shop. ‘Does he want a drink too?’

‘He’s waiting in the car.’ This was enough to start Chloe off again.

‘He won’t be joining us,’ Jake snorted. ‘He said we can have the drinks in the car. He wants to go straight back to the cottage.’

‘Yes,’ Chloe spluttered. ‘He wants to go straight back!’

It was early May and Holly had the tail end of a cold and had not wanted to go in the sea, with or without a wetsuit. So Mark had spent the last couple of hours body-boarding on the beach at Polzeath, while Holly had walked across the cliffs to Daymer Bay and back. She’d hoped they’d all have a drink or lunch in the café together and wondered why he was so anxious to get back.

Perhaps he was cold, she thought. The children were rosy with exertion but when she’d kissed them their cheeks were freezing.

‘Two hot chocolates, please, and a cup of tea,’ she said, when she reached the front of the queue. ‘And should I get something for Dad? Did he say?’

‘Why don’t you get him a hot chocolate and I’ll have two if he doesn’t want it?’ Jake suggested hopefully, and looked surprised when Holly said that was a good idea.

They walked the short distance across the sand to where Mark was waiting in the car. He was sitting on a towel, still wearing his wetsuit. He looked up and smiled when Holly knocked on the window with the lid of the cup.

‘Hot chocolate?’ she asked as he wound the window down.

‘Thank you, gorgeous.’ He took it from her and winked.

‘Chloe and Jake can’t tell me for laughing how you came to buy a wetsuit,’ she said, before walking round to the passenger seat and getting in. ‘I take it it’s the one you are modelling right now?’

‘Does my paunch look big in it?’ Mark asked, sitting up straighter and breathing in as she sat next to him.

Holly glanced down at his stomach. Wetsuits flattered only the very shapely. For all that they held bits of you in, they seemed to dislodge other bits and made you bulge in places where you hadn’t previously. Mark now had a strange tyre slightly higher than where his, only recently acquired, excess flesh usually protruded.

‘You’ve hardly got a paunch.’ She leaned over and ran her hand across the black material of the wetsuit. She hadn’t thought she had a thing for clammy Neoprene but felt slightly turned on by the feel of Mark’s belly beneath it. If the children had not been climbing into the back of the car, she would have been tempted to undo the zip and stick her hand beneath it.

‘I’ve got enough of a paunch that I may never be able to get out of this bloody thing.’ Mark glanced over his shoulder at Chloe and Jake. ‘You might have to cut me out of it when we get home, Holly.’

‘That’s why he bought it,’ Chloe said triumphantly, doing up her seatbelt. ‘It took him about half an hour to get it on, and when we’d finished he said he couldn’t face trying to get out of it on the beach . . .’

‘So he told the guys at the shop he wanted to buy it and wear it home!’ Jake finished off the story for her.

‘Really?’ Holly looked at Mark.

‘Really.’ He looked sideways at her and shrugged. ‘Thirty quid to save myself the embarrassment of being a fat bloke on a beach, trying to get out of a wetsuit. I need to lose some weight. I’ve had too many business lunches this year.’

‘You look good to me.’ Holly reached her hand over the gear stick and rubbed his stomach beneath the suit material again. It was true he had put on a bit of weight recently, but she thought it suited him. He was tall enough to carry off a bit of extra flesh around his midriff and, perversely, she found the flaw made him more attractive to her anyway. It was as if the slight imperfection of middle-aged spread and the few grey hairs that were appearing in his otherwise full head of dark hair gave him a kind of vulnerability which had previously been lacking.

Mark had always seemed too physically perfect to her. He was tall and dark and lean, but with a kindness to his face that softened his otherwise almost intimidating good looks. The stretches and scars of childbirth and the tell-tale signs of middle age had left a definite impression on Holly herself and, in moments of self-doubt, she felt inferior by comparison. So Mark’s tiny bit of extra belly and his obvious embarrassment about it made her feel less vulnerable herself and more protective towards him.

‘It was that trip to Finland that did it,’ he said, starting the engine of the car. ‘They fed us every five minutes.’

‘Only when they weren’t whipping you,’ Chloe sang from the back of the car.

‘Birching.’ Mark grinned over his shoulder at her. ‘There’s a difference, you know.’

‘It’s all part and parcel of selling whisky to the Finns,’ Holly said. ‘Or so I’m told.’

‘It’s true.’ Mark began reversing out of the parking space. ‘Most of the business on that trip was conducted in the sauna or the snow, with a little light birching in between. I still have the scars to show for it.’

‘Don’t I know it!’ Holly grinned.

Mark’s business partner, Chris, had corroborated his version of discussing whisky sales in the sauna, before being led naked into the snow and handed twigs for tapping away impurities.

‘I started tapping Mark and wondering how we would ever face each other in the office again,’ Chris had told her, ‘when Iivarim, who was six foot six and had the most enormous balls I’ve ever seen, said we weren’t doing it hard enough and took over!’

‘I’ve never been so scared in a professional capacity,’ Mark had told Holly, as she rubbed Sudocrem on to the welt marks. ‘But it was worth it. They’re going to start selling Red Ptarmigan in several Finnish hotel chains.’

‘Did they get a good deal?’ Holly asked as Mark winced when she came across a wound that looked slightly raw.

‘Yes. As you can see, they put me under pressure, Holly,’ he laughed back and then inhaled sharply as her hands moved down his back.

‘The wetsuit wasn’t the only humiliation I’ve been subjected to today,’ Mark said as he drove between the lines of cars parked on the beach. Their boots served as changing rooms for hard-core surfers, all of whom, Holly noted and hoped Mark hadn’t, seemed to be peeling off wetsuits with ease and revealing perfectly honed torsos.

‘You know that deli in St James’ Street at home?’ Mark looked ahead.

‘Yes?’ Holly caught sight of a man who had taken off his wetsuit and was wearing nothing underneath it. ‘Wow!’

‘What?’ Mark glanced in the surfer’s direction but he’d stepped around the side of a camper van.

‘Nothing.’ Holly smiled to herself. ‘You were saying about the deli in St James’ Street?’

‘Yes. There’s a very pretty girl who works in there. We had a conversation about Cornwall once and I told her we often went to Polzeath and went surfing.’ Mark paused as he checked the traffic before pulling on the road. ‘She looked suitably impressed when I said it.’

‘Do you mean you gave her the impression you were like someone out of Endless Summer?’ Holly eyed him quizzically.

‘Not quite, but maybe one of the penguins in Surf’s Up.’ Mark shrugged.

‘How does she come into your humiliating day?’ Holly asked.

‘We got one really good wave that took us right to the shore and as I was floundering around in the shallows, trying to get up and looking like a beached whale, I heard this voice say, “Aren’t you from Brighton?”’ Mark pulled out into the road. ‘I looked up to see this vision in a wetsuit, with a proper standing up surfboard tucked under her arm, looking at me as if to say, “I never believed you could really surf”.’

‘I’m sure she was looking at you as if to say, “Wow, he looks hot in that wetsuit!”’ Holly laughed.

‘Err Mum, pl-ease,’ Jake and Chloe had chorused from the back seat.

They’d have pleased some more if they hadn’t gone downstairs to make more hot chocolate and slump in front of the television the moment they got back to the holiday cottage.

It had a huge wet room just by the front door and Mark had gone in there to try to get out of his new wetsuit and take a shower.

‘Can you help me undo the bloody thing?’ he’d called to Holly, as the kids disappeared downstairs, and after she’d managed slowly to unroll the suit as far as his waist, she’d found middle-aged spread wasn’t the only bulge that was making it difficult to get off.

‘That’s not helping.’

She’d looked up at Mark and he’d looked at her and said, ‘You’re looking a bit salty after your walk, Holly. Why don’t you have a shower too?’

 

I watched the news, because I couldn’t think what else to do. I’d cried all afternoon, after I got the call. Then, when I was exhausted from the tears, I cleaned the kitchen; scrubbed it from top to bottom. I had to do something and cleaning has a certain reassuring rhythm and effect.

‘Call someone,’ Julia had said, when she left. ‘Do you want me to call someone? You shouldn’t be on your own.’

‘No,’ I snapped at her, partly because it wasn’t her place to call anyone. It wasn’t her who had lost her husband and I couldn’t bear her concern. It seemed to make it worse, Julia thinking she might help if she called someone else to come and be with me. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of saying, ‘I made sure she had someone with her, just in case.’ I wanted her to worry about me.

Besides, I couldn’t think who else to call. I don’t have that many friends here. Julia had to go and pick up her children from school and nursery; Toby and Gemma, her perfect offspring, one dark like her ex-husband and one blonde, like herself.

‘Blessed,’ my mother would have said, of her children, if she were still alive to see them. ‘She’s blessed with two beautiful children.’

My mother was only blessed with the one. ‘A gift from God,’ she used to tell me and anyone else who cared to listen. She was forty-four when I was born. Mum thought she couldn’t have children. She’d resigned herself to a life without them and then suddenly ‘a gift from God’.

Geoff and I hadn’t been blessed either but I didn’t want to think about that, not today. It was too much, on top of everything else. I’d lost my husband and with him my chance to have a child.

Julia, Toby and Gemma would be the perfect family, except that Andrew, her ex, left her not long after Gemma was born.

‘He said it wasn’t what he wanted,’ she told me once, when I was having coffee in her kitchen. She threw out her arm in a broad sweep as she said it, as if it was the kitchen and the dining room and the lounge beyond that Andrew hadn’t wanted, rather than Julia and the children and the domesticity.

‘Do you think you’ll ever get back together again?’ I asked her once, over another coffee. That seemed to be the extent of our friendship really, the odd coffee, but in the absence of any others, I valued that. I thought of her as my best friend, at this stage of my life, because really there weren’t any others.

I thought Andrew might regret it later, that one rash moment, triggered by something probably insignificant that made him decide to leave behind his life to date. I know my mother regretted not being at home with me when I was a teenager, even though she said she couldn’t help the way she felt at the time.

‘I should have been there for you then,’ she said to me, when I visited her in hospital the week before she died.

‘I was OK, Mum,’ I said, lying to protect her. There was no point her knowing then how much I had hated the new life her absence forced upon me. And it was behind me now. I had Geoff and I was looking forward, not back.

Now I found myself looking backward again, to my time with him, because I couldn’t bring myself to think forward, to the time without him.

So I put on BBC News 24 and watched their coverage of the crash, giving it my full time and attention, hoping maybe I’d catch a glimpse of Geoff, see him again in the moments while he was still mine. It seemed possible while I was watching. I almost believed that, if I caught sight of him on the television, then perhaps I’d be able to turn the clock back and make it all go away.

But I didn’t see Geoff. By the time I turned the television on, the emergency services had been there for several hours and the reporter was saying that they were still working to free people stuck in the wreckage.

Then they cut to footage, filmed earlier, showing ambulance workers carrying a woman on a stretcher away from the mouth of the tunnel. There was a close-up of her face and I thought I recognised her from the train.

I’ve definitely seen her before. She’s a striking-looking woman, with dark hair and dark eyes, not young but beautiful. I was sure as I watched her being carried on the stretcher that I’d sat opposite her a few weeks ago and she had smiled when I sat down, acknowledging my presence with an openness that a lot of commuters don’t have.

They didn’t say, on the news, what had happened to her or whether she was seriously injured or not, but when I saw her face she looked haunted, as if she’d seen something she wished she had never seen.

I recognised the look immediately, because it was the same look my mother wore when she’d realised exactly what we’d been a part of: a look that sets you apart from the rest of the world. The look of someone who has witnessed something they wish they’d never had to.

The woman on the news had been trapped in that tunnel God knows how long. Minutes? Hours? The reporter didn’t say. But however long it was, it must have been long enough for her to question whether she’d ever get out. I wondered then, as I looked at her moving off the screen into a waiting ambulance, if she’d seen Geoff.

Had he passed her in the carriage, and had she smiled at him when he noticed her while looking for a seat?

The TV camera cut back to the mouth of the tunnel, where the back end of the train was being slowly pulled back, and the reporter was saying it might take days to clear the wreckage from the line, but it would take everyone caught up in the accident much longer to get their lives back on track.

I felt as if he was talking directly to me, as if he knew that without Geoff I had no idea how I was going to carry on. There are only so many times you can keep on picking up the pieces and carrying on. I didn’t know if I could do it again, but I knew that in a few weeks’ time, when people stopped being sympathetic and understanding and asking how I was, that was what I was going to have to do.

And so was she, the women on the stretcher. She was going to have to carry on too.

BBC Radio 4

14 April

4 p.m.

The news is read by Corrie Corfield.

Another person has died in hospital following a train crash in Sussex earlier this week. Greg Simpson was travelling in one of the carriages of the commuter train, which came uncoupled and was hit by another train in the Balcombe tunnel near Haywards Heath. His death brings the total number killed to five. Several others involved in the crash are still being treated for their injuries, though none are thought to be life-threatening. The line between Haywards Heath and Gatwick Airport remains closed while accident investigators try to find out how the carriages from the Brighton train became detached . . .

‘YOUR MOTHER’S HERE.’ Mark didn’t usually curtain twitch when either of Holly’s parents was expected, but today he seemed eager for her mum to arrive. ‘She’s never going to get the car in that space.’

‘Don’t watch her.’ Holly could hear a car moving backwards and forwards, snail-like. ‘You’ll put her off. She hates parking at the best of times.’

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Mark said.

He’d been doing this more or less constantly for the past two days. Holly wished she’d been able to go straight back to work, but people kept saying it was too soon: Mark, the counsellor he’d arranged for her to see tomorrow, the paramedics who had checked her over after she was cut free from the train, and her mother when she’d spoken to her on the phone.

‘It feels odd, us both being at home with the children at school and nothing to do,’ Holly kept saying to Mark, who had taken time off to look after her.

‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ was his usual reply.

Holly was glad of her mother’s visit. Susan didn’t really do fussing, a fact Jake became aware of when he was about five years old and she had looked after him for the day.

‘If I fall over,’ he told Holly on her return from wherever it was she had been, ‘you stop whatever you are doing and say, “Oh, dear, darling, are you all right?” But Granny just carries on whatever she is doing and says, “Bad luck!”’

Holly suspected that if Susan mentioned the train crash at all it would be obliquely: ‘How are you, really?’ rather than just ‘How are you?’ or ‘Have you been eating properly?’

She wondered what her mother would make of the fact she was booked to see a counsellor tomorrow. Neither of her parents believed in going over things.

‘In my day,’ her father, Patrick, would say if the subject arose, ‘people just built the Burma railway and got on with it.’

Holly realised she was more like her parents than she had previously thought.

Even as Mark was phoning the counsellor to book an appointment, she was thinking that she didn’t need it.

‘I was lucky to get out alive and unhurt, when so ma