Your Roots Are Showing

by Elise Chidley

Genres: Marriage & Divorce; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

A gorgeous debut romantic comedy about marriage, mistakes, and moving forward. Lizzie Buckley has a life many women dream of - a gorgeous husband, a beautiful home and darling (when they're not fighting) three-year-old twins. But ever since the birth of her children, she's had a fantasy about locking herself in her bedroom for twenty-four hours with a good book and a box of chocolates. Unfortunately, her husband James doesn't understand her feelings. And when Lizzie unburdens herself in a flaming email to her sister Janie, then hits send at the wrong moment and accidentally shoots it off to James instead, her fairytale life gets a big dose of reality. With the word "divorce" ringing in her ears, Lizzie finds herself moving out and embarking on a totally different life -- working hard to reinvent herself as a runner, a gardener, and a writer of children's books. But despite transforming her body, her neglected career, and her libido (courtesy of the local landscape gardener), Lizzie can't get over her soon-to-be ex. As Lizzie discovers, sometimes the fairytale ending is just the beginning of the real story.

Release date: October 29, 2008

Publisher: 5 Spot

Print pages: 366

Sample

Chapter One

The kitchen cabinets at Back Lane Cottage were at a height the average man would find a bit of a stretch. The average woman, standing on tiptoe, might just be able to reach the underside of the cupboard doors if she had very long fingernails. Lizzie Buckley’s fingernails, bitten to the quick for the first time since she was twelve, were nowhere near long enough.

All in all, the cottage was the most inconveniently laid out place Lizzie had ever seen. What prankster of an architect would put the only bathroom downstairs? And under what circumstances had it ever seemed like a good idea to put the stairwell in the dining room?

Then there was the hallway. With its odd shape and plethora of doorways, James would call it a criminal waste of space. There wasn’t much you could do with the room except hang a chandelier — and maybe let the children loose on their tricycles.

The contrast with the home she’d left in Gloucestershire couldn’t have been greater. Mill House, so ancient that it was probably listed in the Domesday book, had been renovated to within an inch of its life. To look at its weathered limestone exterior, you’d never guess that every possible convenience — cappuccino-maker, crushed-ice dispenser, twenty-jet power-shower — had been tucked away amid the lovingly preserved period features. Back Lane Cottage was old too, but not old enough to be interesting. Just old enough to be awkward.

The trouble was, by the time Lizzie had noticed all these flaws, she’d already made up her mind. Back Lane Cottage was the house for her.

The garden won her over before she even stepped out of her real estate agent’s car. Not that it was a beautiful garden. Far from it. It was little more than a field — rough, lumpy, nettle-infested, and riddled with rabbit holes. Compared to the Sissinghurst-inspired garden at Mill House, it was laughable. But it was huge and hemmed in by big trees. Best of all, it was very well fenced. Just the sort of place for her three-year-old twins — once she’d cleaned it up, of course.

The other great thing about the house was its bedrooms. There was a tiny one, perfect for an office, and a big stately one complete with its own fireplace — a bit grand for a newly single mother, but never mind. The third bedroom made the house completely irresistible — it was long and bright, lit by two large windows with deep sills that would be perfect for sunflower seedlings, piggy banks, and the collections of bird’s eggs, pebbles, pinecones, shells — you name it — that sprang up around the twins wherever they went. These untidy and sometimes smelly collections had always been an eyesore among the gleaming antiques at Mill House. But here, they’d fit right in with the ramshackle nature of the place.

As Lizzie stood in the doorway of this room, picturing a set of twin beds beneath the windows, she felt a little warm glow of excitement building somewhere in her chest area. She put her hand to the place in surprise. It was days since she’d felt anything but a cold lump of misery there.

She could work with a house like this. She could turn it into a home.

But if Lizzie was sold on the house, her real estate agent wasn’t — which seemed odd to Lizzie. Then again, her experience of real estate agents was limited. She hadn’t needed one since her student days when she and her friend Tessa had been in hot pursuit of any sort of two-bedroom flat they could actually afford. Of course, when she married James he’d already been in possession of Mill House, and they’d moved in at once without ever considering that perhaps they didn’t have to live in it.

Even given that she was a novice in the world of real estate, Lizzie could have sworn that she understood the basic motivation of the profession — to unload houses on clients as quickly as possible. So she was surprised by this woman’s determination to drag her away to see another house, one with a “very well-maintained garden, loads of updates, and a bit more of a conventional layout.”

“Is the rent the same?” Lizzie asked, opening the tiny fridge a second time and peering into it. Back Lane Cottage was already more expensive than what she’d imagined she (or James, more precisely) would have to shell out.

“Actually, it’s a bit more,” the agent admitted, “but then it is furnished, and you said you wanted furniture.”

Looking out of the kitchen window across rolling fields, Lizzie sketched a careless gesture. “Furniture’s not a big issue,” she said, not quite accurately. “We can always sleep on blow-up mattresses just at first.” She wasn’t doing much sleeping at the moment, so beds, or lack of them, made very little difference to her personally. The twins, of course, ought to have something between themselves and the carpet.

“But this place is so isolated. Fantastic for a big family, yes, but for someone in your situation? Wouldn’t you want to be closer to town? And do you really think you’d manage with no dishwasher?” The agent watched Lizzie warily as she spoke, perhaps wondering if she was going to burst into tears, as she had several times the day before.

“But look at the view from the kitchen sink,” Lizzie riposted, determined to remain dry-eyed and rational.

The agent cleared her throat and shuffled through some papers. “Just a little look at the next property?” she pleaded. “I’m not really comfortable with the idea of you and the kiddies all alone in this place. To be honest, I only showed it to you as a bit of a yardstick this morning. We have a mantra at our office, ‘Show the worst first.’ Not to scare anyone into anything, you know, just to give the client a realistic idea of what’s out there.”

Then Lizzie understood. She was supposed to have fled from this place with a quaking heart, only to snap up the next house in pure gratitude for its dishwasher and upstairs bathroom.

Well, it wasn’t going to happen. After yesterday’s dreary tour of one miserable little semi after another — all that was available in the price range she’d originally suggested — Lizzie was tired of looking at houses. Besides, she couldn’t keep making the exhausting round-trip from Gloucestershire, couldn’t keep asking her friend Maria to babysit the children. More importantly, she couldn’t expect James to stump up a bit more so that she could have loads of updates in her Kentish bolt-hole.

“I don’t want to see any more houses,” she said, surprised by the firmness of her own voice. “I’ve made up my mind. This is the one I want.”

And if the rent on this place stretched the joint bank account a bit further than was comfortable, too bad. Maybe James would come to his senses all the faster.

It was all so simple in the end. A week later, they were in.

Lizzie didn’t take a stick of furniture out of Mill House. She wouldn’t have had the nerve. The furniture was as integral to that house as her nose was to her own face. She’d chosen none of it herself; many of the pieces had originally come from the manor house, so it was possible they didn’t even belong to James, but to his parents. Besides, she hadn’t wanted to suggest anything as irrevocable as a division of the marital spoils. On moving day she simply walked out of the house with her luggage and turned the key, leaving it fully furnished and ready to receive them all back again at a moment’s notice, if necessary.

The truth was, at the back of her mind she was still hoping — quite fervently, although with absolutely nothing solid to go on — that James would suddenly see how ridiculous this whole situation was, how massively he’d overreacted, how impossible it was that the two of them could live apart.

That was partly why she’d left. If he could no longer glance casually out of the library window at the manor and physically see the building that housed his family, maybe he’d finally see the light and realize what he’d done — the enormity and downright misery of it all. It wasn’t that she wanted him to come crawling back to her — a sheepish shuffle would probably do the trick — but if he didn’t make some kind of move toward reconciliation sometime soon, she didn’t know how she was going to keep getting out of bed every morning.

So she left Mill House tidy but not at all vacant, secretly telling herself that she’d be home again before the roses were in bloom. When she pulled up at Back Lane Cottage later that same afternoon and dragged four suitcases, three inflatable mattresses, a folding table, an old computer, sundry bits of hand luggage, and two bags of groceries over the threshold, she realized she was treating this whole “move” a bit like a camping trip.

When she finally released the children from their car seats, they spilled out into the desolate garden and chilly house with shrieks of glee, excited to the point of hysteria by the novelty of the unfurnished rooms, which they were seeing for the first time. They weren’t demanding tenants; even the dark and dusty garden shed delighted them.

Lizzie herself was shaken by the emptiness.

The newly painted “magnolia” walls seemed to echo. In every room, a bare lightbulb swung dejectedly from the ceiling. In amazement, Lizzie noted that there were no towel racks in the bathroom, no bathroom shelves or cabinets of any kind, not even a humble and homely toilet paper holder. How come she hadn’t noticed how denuded the place was the day she’d looked it over?

Standing in the chilly, echoing bathroom, Lizzie suddenly felt helpless and deeply afraid. How on earth would she cope with this stripped-down life? She must have been mad to think she could make a home of this place, temporary or otherwise. It had all the comforts of an abandoned barn. Okay, so she’d often poked fun at the splendidly tasteful Mill House interiors, mostly because they’d made her feel a bit inferior, but at least she’d always been comfortable. In fact, she’d been more than comfortable. She’d been living in the lap of luxury, traveling first class — and now she was in the cattle truck.

Shaking the excess water off her hands, Lizzie’s heart suddenly missed a beat as she realized that she hadn’t heard a squeak out of the twins for a good twenty minutes or more. Silence was never golden when preschoolers were involved.

She stuck her head out of the door. “Alex! Ellie! Where are you?”

Nothing.

“Alex! Ellie! Come quick, I have a surprise for you!” That usually worked in short order, and luckily she had some emergency Smarties in her handbag.

Still nothing.

With an exaggerated sigh, she began a quick tour of the downstairs rooms, absentmindedly popping Smarties into her mouth as she went. Nothing.

Irritation was tipping over into alarm as she went out into the bleak, unkempt garden and did a hurried reconnoiter of the few bushes and trees. All she found was Alex’s toy fire engine abandoned in the rough grass. She stuck her head round the corner of the house and surveyed the nettle-infested side garden. Not surprisingly, the twins weren’t there either. Alex would be bringing the house down by now if he’d wandered among the nettles. For a big bruiser of a boy, his pain tolerance was pitifully low.

Now her heart was definitely beating too fast. Giving up all pretence of calm, she sprinted into the house and up the stairs. Without a stick of furniture, there was nowhere for them to hide; not even a built-in closet. But as she flung open bedroom doors one by one, she was greeted only by the smell of new paint and a silence that seemed to hum.

Calling their names, she broke into a run down the crooked passageway. As she rounded a corner, she managed to trip over her own feet, catching her arm on the highly textured white wall as she fell. Funny how grazes hurt more than deep wounds, she thought, glancing at her raw elbow. Then she was up and running again, down the steep stairs, across the bare boards in the dining room, and out into the garden. Perhaps she’d left the gate open; perhaps even now the twins were capering merrily across some field, unhindered by an ounce of common sense between them to keep them out of bramble patches, away from angry bulls, and safe from poisonous mushrooms or pedophiles walking their dogs.

But the gate was closed.

Could they have climbed it? It was too high for Ellie, that was certain, but perhaps Alex could have boosted her up?

Oh God, how could she have lost the children within hours of bringing them to their new, single-parented home? She might have known she couldn’t do this on her own, not after days of panic and insomnia. She wasn’t competent, not right now. She could barely look after herself, let alone the children. She’d better call the police!

Then she remembered the shed. “Never come in here alone,” she’d told them earlier when they poked their heads in to look at its sad jumble of discarded garden implements. Encouragement enough!

And, of course, that was exactly where they were — closeted in the lovely, mysterious, giant Wendy-house with the door firmly closed to keep out meddling mothers. She heard them chatting away as she paused beside the door, trying to slow down her breathing and get a grip on her overblown emotions.

“Alex, this box is a table,” Ellie was chanting insistently.

“We got to keep dah monsters out,” was Alex’s equally insistent reply.

Lizzie threw open the door with a resounding smash.

“Dah monster!” Alex cried, and both children began to screech in only half feigned terror.

The cortisol was obviously sloshing about in bucket loads in Lizzie’s veins. Her anxiety immediately morphed into fury.

But she’d learned a trick that had saved her sanity and the children’s hides in just this sort of situation many times before. Count to forty-seven before you open your mouth. She did so, as slowly as she possibly could, and by the time she reached twenty, she was no longer itching to smack bottoms. By twenty-five, the children had stopped screeching and were studying her with a mixture of apprehension and curiosity. By thirty-five, she’d noticed Ellie’s box table, complete with newspaper tablecloth, a leaf plate, some gravel for food, and a solitary diner in the form of Panda the panda. By forty, she’d taken in the stout stick in Alex’s grubby hand, dangling at his side now but no doubt ready for action should a bona fide monster suddenly burst onto the scene. By forty-seven, she was able to speak, not yell at a volume that would have assaulted the ears of their only neighbor, as yet unknown to them.

“Children,” she said evenly, “I told you not to come in here, didn’t I?”

They nodded. In the past few days, Lizzie had seen this watchful look on their faces many times, most recently when they’d squeezed all the toothpaste into the tooth mug. Mummy was no longer the tolerant woman she’d once been, laughing off minor incidents like raw eggs smashed all over the tiles and sudden haircuts with the kitchen scissors. No, Mummy had become a wild force, like the weather, given to crashing around like a sudden electrical storm on a summer’s day.

“Do you know why I told you not to come in here?”

They looked at her in silence for a while. “Iss dirty,” Ellie finally said.

“Iss dangeriss,” Alex answered at almost the same instant.

“Right,” Lizzie said and pursed her lips. Both children were still studying her intently. By their expressions, she could tell they were braced for anything — shouting, arm-waving, door-slamming, foot-stamping, even Mummy in tears. Since James had left them, she’d been going off pop at the smallest provocation, despite renewing her vow every night to remain patient, calm, and rational with the children.

She took another cleansing breath.

“This shed is not only dirty but also dark and nasty. It’s full of broken glass. You could cut yourselves.” She gestured at the litter of glass beneath a smashed window.

“Yes, Mummy,” came the chorus.

“It’s full of old paint cans and bottles of turpentine and who knows what else.” Really, she had a good mind to complain to the landlord about all the odds and ends the previous tenants had abandoned. It was no stretch of the imagination at all to picture the twins settling down with paper cups and an assortment of bottles — engine oil, antifreeze, rose pesticide — for an impromptu garden-chemical-tasting session.

“Yes, Mummy.”

She decided not to mention the pitchfork and garden shears. Best not to draw Alex’s attention to such bounty.

“So you must never come here alone.”

“We won’t, Mummy.”

“Never, ever. Promise?”

“Pwomise, Mummy.”

“Right. It’ll be dark soon. Let’s go and clean up now.” Obediently, the children trailed her back to the house.

Using paper plates, she rustled up a meal of bread (no butter), miniature cheeses in red wax, tiny pots of fromage frais, wrapped cereal bars, and juice in foil pouches with straws. The children, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the living room, fell upon this uninspiring fare with shrieks of joy. In their eyes, anything in bright packaging was superior by far to home cooking, be it ever so gourmet. Which it seldom was — but still.

With her mouth full of purple fromage frais, Ellie announced, “Daddy will fix the shed an’ make it nice an’ not nasty.”

Alex, who was working on rolling his red wax into a malleable ball, looked up with bright eyes. “Yesh, Daddy woll fix it!”

Lizzie massaged her eyebrows with all ten fingers. “Daddy will not fix it,” she said at last, her voice rising. “Daddy will not be staying in this house with us. Daddy is living with Gran and Granddad at the moment. You’ll be seeing him a lot, but not here, not in this house.” How many times would she have to tell them before it sank in?

“Daddy will fix it,” Ellie screamed suddenly and threw her plate across the room.

A hush filled the house as the three-year-old contemplated her crime. The cheese seemed to roll forever, while the fromage frais pot went head over heels, spattering purple blobs on the beige carpet.

Then Lizzie found herself doing it again. Crying in front of the children. Sort of crying, at any rate — no noise came from her throat, but the tears were slipping freely down her cheeks, as if she had some kind of incontinence of the ducts. Wordlessly, she got up and began retrieving the paper plate and bits of food. Wordlessly, she dumped everything down in front of Ellie again and retreated to the kitchen.

She was standing at the sink, dabbing at her face with a tissue, and looking out over nettles toward the great open space of the field beyond the garden when she heard them pattering hesitantly over the linoleum.

“Mummy?”

“Mmm?”

“Iss okay, Mummy. Everything woll be all right if you have a nice little nap. You jus’ tired, Mummy,” Alex said earnestly.

For good measure, Ellie added, “You look ’stremely pretty today, Mummy.”

And it was all her fault, all of this.

Of course, she could clean up the shed for them. Throw out all the dangerous chemicals. Sweep away the broken glass. Hang the sharp tools up high so that Alex couldn’t get his hands on them. Get a chain and padlock.

But that wouldn’t solve a thing, not a solitary thing.

Still, she needed to stop crying, for the children’s sake. Taking a deep breath, she told herself that this whole thing was just a jaunt anyway, just temporary, just a stopgap adventure, just a detour she and James would look back on in a few weeks’ time and howl with laughter about.

The irrational, miserable side of her brain wasn’t convinced. Never mind. As soon as she managed to get the children to sleep, she’d take out the large slab of milk chocolate she’d hidden in one of the high cupboards, and then she’d be able to make it through the night.

Chapter Two

Gosh, it looks different with your things in it,” said Ingrid Hatter, drinking a brew made with a one-cup tea bag in a Tesco mug and shamelessly assessing her surroundings. “The other people had so much stuff, the place was bulging. The rooms look much bigger like this.”

After a week as tenant of the cottage, Lizzie was wondering if she’d allowed loneliness to get the better of good judgment when she’d invited her neighbor in. For a well-heeled middle-aged woman with an expensive accent, Ingrid had a surprisingly inquisitive gleam in her eye.

Lizzie followed that gleaming eye around the room. There wasn’t a picture on the wall as yet, but Lizzie had bought an oak bookshelf from a secondhand shop in town and a comfortable wheat- colored sofa from Ikea — the cheapest furnishings she could find. It seemed you couldn’t function without some squishy piece of furniture to flop down on at the end of the day.

The memory of the trip to Ikea, on her second day in the house, made Lizzie shudder. Traipsing around the enormous warehouse with the twins in tow had been exhausting enough, but then she’d found she couldn’t stuff the boxes of sofa parts into her vehicle. Close to tears, she’d had to wheel the teetering trolley back inside and line up all over again to arrange for delivery.

The sofa had arrived only yesterday and she’d spent a good part of the night putting it together, alternately sobbing and cursing because James could have done the job in fifteen minutes — but then if James had been there in the first place they wouldn’t have had to assemble a sofa at all.

When the thing was finally set up, the sight of it in her living room made her feel suddenly hospitable. So when she’d spotted Ingrid over the garden fence, out walking her tiny dog, she’d rashly invited her in. And now here Lizzie was, without a scrap of makeup on her face, in a crumpled T-shirt she’d worn for three straight days, her unwashed hair scraped back in a ponytail, her voice hoarse from lack of use — entertaining!

If Lizzie was a wreck, at least the living room didn’t look too bad. In addition to the sensible sofa, she’d splurged on some ruinously expensive but rather gorgeous scatter cushions in heavy scarlet, gold, and peacock blue. Now, every time she looked at the cushions, she felt a jab of remorse. She was in no position to be impulse spending, especially not on frills and furbelows like cushions.

At the windows fluttered beaded Indian muslin drapes, the palest shade of old gold — found in the bargain bin of an Indian shop in Tunbridge Wells. She didn’t feel at all guilty about those, at any rate. The four framed photographs she’d packed carefully at the bottom of her suitcase were the only other ornamentation in the room. They stood on the bookshelf commanding attention.

Ingrid stood up, went over to the shelf, and took a good long look at those four portraits. One was of Lizzie and her old friend Tessa Martin at a beach in Greece when they were about twenty, looking tousled and tanned and happy. Two were studio shots of the twins at various stages of babyhood. Ingrid Hatter lifted up the largest photograph, a family portrait, and turned it into the light from the window. “This is your husband?” she asked in wonder. “Very photogenic, isn’t he?”

Lizzie winced. James was good-looking enough on paper, but photography couldn’t hope to convey his full magnetism. He was far more impressive in the flesh, when he could do that quirky thing with his eyebrows and flash his dimple at you.

In real life James was the sort of person who lit up a room when he walked in. Rooms had definitely been darker for Lizzie since he left.

Despite the dimple and unwitting charm, James wasn’t a lady’s man at heart. For years, his overriding passion had been rugby; he’d been some sort of star player at university.

He wasn’t even a flirt, not on purpose. But he had a way of locking eyes with people, even in casual conversation, that was very gratifying. This unconscious mannerism left women — and even men — believing they’d made a huge impression on a man whose good opinion was worth having.

Even after she married him, Lizzie was aware that when they entered a restaurant or pub together, all the single women (and many of the attached ones) nudged their friends and hissed, “Oy, look what just walked in!” — as if Lizzie and her wedding ring were invisible.

Every single one of these women would be incredulous to hear that Lizzie had actually driven a man like this away.

“Yes, that’s James,” Lizzie said. “He, um, he’s not actually here with us. We’re, sort of, having a bit of a trial separation right now. Taking a bit of a break from — from the whole marriage thing.”

Lizzie’s palms were sweating and her face felt tight, as if horribly sunburned. How embarrassing if she should burst into tears! Apart from the real estate agent, she hadn’t yet told anyone outside Laingtree village that she and James had split up — not her best friend, not her sister, not even her mother. At first she’d put off telling in the hope that there’d be no need, that James would turn up one evening with his suitcase and perhaps a bunch of tulips. As the crisis deepened, she found that she just couldn’t face telling anyone; apart from anything else, the details of the whole thing were so — so toe-curling. And then there was the awful feeling that if she put the sorry situation into words, it would become set in stone; irreversible, a fact of life.

Of course, everybody in the village knew about the separation without having to be told by Lizzie. Her mother-in- law had seen to that.

According to Lady Evelyn Buckley, Lizzie had never adapted to village life. Hankering after the bright lights of London, she’d willfully scuppered her own marriage, depriving her children of their father so that she could reclaim her fast-paced sex-in-the-city lifestyle.

Lizzie was a little flattered, really. Lady Evelyn clearly had no idea how many Saturday nights Lizzie had whiled away, in her single days, eating cereal on her sofa in front of the TV.

But even if she’d ever had the racy lifestyle Lady Evelyn attributed to her, she couldn’t see how she was supposed to be reclaiming it with three-year-old twins in tow.

Lizzie knew about her mother-in-law’s version of events because her closest friend in Laingtree, Maria Dennison, had filled her in on it. Naturally, Maria hadn’t heard the gossip firsthand. But Maria’s boyfriend, Laurence, had heard various editions of the rumor in the pub. As a friend of James, Laurence was given all the dirt on treacherous Lizzie.

And, of course, there was also the conversation Lizzie had overheard in The Wisteria Rooms when she’d popped in to buy some sticky buns for the children. She and the shopkeeper had stared at each other, frozen with embarrassment, as Lady Evelyn’s distinctive, carrying voice boomed out from the table tucked around the corner from the till.

“Yes, he’s back at the manor for the moment,” Lady Evelyn was saying. “No, we’re not that surprised . . . Roots will out, I always say, and we knew all along she was lower middle class . . . It’s the children one feels sorry for . . . Oh no, the Christmas party business was pretty much par for the course . . . Often felt I should just drop a word about her clothes . . . Poor chaps around here, never knew where to look . . . One used to call that sort of girl a tart . . . Yes, something very loose about her, you only have to watch her eat . . .”

Lizzie and the shopkeeper both glanced at Lizzie’s ample bust, which even in a baggy sweatshirt managed to look a bit indecent. Blinking quickly, Lizzie had taken her change and bolted, leaving the sticky buns behind in her haste.

With an effort of will, Lizzie forced her mind away from The Wisteria Rooms. Much better to concentrate on her new neighbor.

She loved the picture Ingrid was scrutinizing so frankly. It was the only decent shot of all of them together, and she was darned if she was going to put it facedown in a drawer, let alone tear it up, as she believed was de rigueur in this sort of situation.

It wasn’t the usual sort of family portrait. It had been taken by a photographer who worked only in black and white, with an old- fashioned manual camera. The woman had come to Mill House in Laingtree late in the afternoon one midsummer’s day, more than half a year ago now. “Let’s see what the light’s like outside,” she’d suggested.

The light had been like honey, or well-steeped tea held up to sunshine. The photographer asked them to group themselves as they might after a picnic. James lounged on his elbow, elegant and obliging. The children, bandy-legged toddlers then, immediately began to jump and climb all over him. Lizzie sat behind James with her legs folded to one side, looking busty and slightly awkward because of the effort of holding her back straight and sucking her stomach in.

About thirty photos had been snapped machine-gun style, but Lizzie and James had chosen this one, which caught him smiling up at her through his floppy fringe in a moment that looked like the sharing of a secret joke, while the children used his long body as a hobbyhorse and climbing frame, their baby faces full of wicked delight at having Daddy at their mercy.

James was the center of that picture. Every eye was on him, every family member touched him, every twinkle and sparkle was aimed at him. James. How on earth was she living and breathing here in this strange house without him? The ache of missing him was constant, underlying all the rest: the anger, the confusion, the out-and-out fear.

“When I was your age, people had more respect for marria