"Simon Cowell."

Terry thought for a moment.

"Lower."

"The mayor."

"The mayor's got another do on. If you'd sorted this out quicker, we could have asked her first."

"I've got an American singer-songwriter from the eighties staying with me at the moment. Would he be any good?"

She hadn't planned to mention him, but Terry Jackson's unfair attack on her organizational skills had stung. And in any case, she couldn't quite believe that he'd chosen to stay: Tucker and Jackson had been with her for three nights already and showed no desire to leave.

"Depends who he is," said Terry.

"Tucker Crowe."

"Tucker who?"

"Tucker Crowe."

"No. No good whatsoever. Nobody's heard of him."

"Well, which American singer-songwriter from the eighties would have done the trick?"

He was beginning to annoy her now. Where had this sudden need for celebrity come from? It was always the way, with councillors. At the beginning of a project, it was all about the needs of the town; by the end it was all about the Gooleness Echo Gooleness Echo.

"I thought you were going to say Billy Joel or someone. Is he a singer-songwriter? He'd have got us out of a hole. Anyway, thanks but no thanks, Tucker Crowe."

He made air quotes around the name and he chuckled, apparently at the depths of Tucker's obscurity.

"I've an idea," said Terry.

"Go on."

"Three words."

"Right."

"Have a guess."

"Three words?"

"Three words."

"John Logie Baird. Harriet Beecher Stowe."

"No. Neither of them. Oh. And I should probably say that one of the words is 'and.' "

" 'And'? Like Simon and Garfunkel?"

"Yes. But not them. I think you should give up."

"I give up."

"Gav and Barnesy."

Annie burst out laughing. Terry Jackson looked hurt.

"I'm sorry," said Annie. "I wasn't being . . . That wasn't the direction I was looking in."

"What do you think? They're local legends, and a lot of people around here recognize them . . ."

"I like it," said Annie, decisively.

"Really?"

"Really."

Terry Jackson smiled.

"Bit of a brainwave, really. Even if I do say so myself."

"There'd probably be no national press interest," said Annie.

"That's all right. That was always going to be a long shot."

Annie had once heard someone say that in the future everyone would be famous to fifteen people. In Gooleness, where Tucker Crowe slept in her bedroom, and Gav and Barnesy were invited to open exhibitions, the future had arrived.

On Wednesday, the day of the launch party, Tucker and Jackson were still with her; their departure was postponed one day at a time. Annie didn't want to press them on their plans, because she couldn't bear the thought of them leaving; every morning she was fearful that they would come into the kitchen for breakfast with their bags packed, but instead they announced plans to fish, or walk, or take a bus along the coast. She had no idea whether Jackson was supposed to be at school but again she didn't want to ask, in case Tucker suddenly slapped his forehead and dragged his son off to the station.

She couldn't have explained to anybody what she was hoping for-or at least, she wouldn't have wanted to, because the explanation would have sounded pathetic, even to her. She was hoping, she supposed, that they would stay forever, in any formation that they chose. If Tucker didn't want to share a bed with her, well, fine, although she firmly intended to sleep with someone at some stage, and if he didn't like it, he could shove it. (These scenarios had been imagined quite fully, hence the confrontational tone; she had scripted this particular conversation on Sunday night, when she was trying to get to sleep, and she had found herself getting irritated by Tucker's predicted indifference.) She would, of course, have to replace Cat, at least for most of the year-she fully anticipated trips back to the U.S. during the longer holidays, although Jackson would be attending school in Gooleness, maybe at Rose Hill, which had an excellent reputation and an impressive website, which she happened to have stumbled across the previous evening. How hard would that be for Jackson? He hadn't talked about his mother that much, which gave her hope-his primary relationship was clearly with Tucker, and she was pretty sure that, if Tucker was unambiguous about what he wanted, his boy would fall into line. She would offer to e-mail Cat weekly or daily or whatever she wanted, and she could attach pictures, and they could talk on the phone, and she could download the thing that allowed you to see someone in Australia on the computer, and Cat could stay whenever she wanted . . . If everyone was determined to make it work, then it would. After all, what was the alternative? That they just went home and resumed their lives, as if nothing had happened?

The trouble was that nothing had happened, of course. If Tucker and Jackson were able to hear the inside of her head, they'd have backed slowly out of the house, with Tucker brandishing whatever weapon he could lay his hands on in order to protect his son. Did her mother entertain similar fantasies when Christmas was coming to an end, and she knew that she was going to be left with and by herself for another eleven and three-quarter months? Probably. Everything had come too soon, that was the problem. Annie would have been happy enough looking forward to Tucker's e-mails, with the remote and tantalizing possibility of an actual meeting to be dreamed about only slowly, over months and then years. Because of the various medical misfortunes, she'd ended up scoffing the whole lot within weeks, and now she was left with an empty chocolate box and a vague feeling of nausea.

She had to concede, reluctantly, that there was another interpretation of recent events: the problem wasn't the empty box, but the metaphor. The short visit of a middle-aged man and his young son shouldn't be a gourmet pastry; it should be a store-bought egg-salad sandwich, a distracted bowl of cereal, an apple snatched from a fruit bowl when you didn't have time to eat. She had somehow constructed a life so empty that she was in the middle of the defining narrative incident of the last ten years, and what did it consist of, really? If Tucker and Jackson did after all decide that their lives should be lived elsewhere-and so far, anyway, they had given very little indication to the contrary-she had to make sure that, if they did ever come back, their stay would be an irritation, something she could have done without, something she wouldn't even remember a couple of weeks after they'd gone. That was how it was supposed to be with houseguests, wasn't it?

When she came downstairs she was wearing a skirt and some makeup, and Tucker looked at her.

"Oh, shoot," he said.

It wasn't what she might have hoped for, but at least it was a reaction. He'd noticed, anyway.

"What?"

"I'm going to have to go like this. I guess I might have a clean T-shirt, but I think it might have the name of a lap-dancing club on it. It's not like I'm a customer, or anything. It was a thoughtful present from somebody. What about you, Jack? Got anything clean left?"

"I put a couple of things in the wash," said Annie. "There's a new Something-Man T-shirt on your bed."

A lot of women had to say a version of that sentence every single day of the week, probably, without feeling particularly emotional about it. Or rather, the emotion they were most likely to feel was a very deep self-pity, rather than an ache of love and loss and longing. That seemed like an ambition, of sorts: to get to a stage where she wanted to hang herself because putting a T-shirt on a child's bed seemed indicative of the slow and painful death of the spirit. At the moment, she wanted to hang herself because it seemed like the first tiny glimmers of a rebirth.

"Spider. Is Spider-Man okay for your party?"

"I'm the only one who has to go dressed up," she said. "You're the exotic special guests."

"Only because we'll be wearing T-shirts," said Tucker.

"And you come from the U.S. When we first started thinking about a Gooleness in 1964 exhibition, we really weren't banking on American visitors."

"The exchange rate was bad back then," said Tucker. "You watch, there'll be hordes of us."

Annie laughed with inappropriate volume and vigor, and at preposterous length, and Tucker stared at her.

"You nervous?"

"No."

"Oh. Okay."

"I was just thinking about you leaving. I don't want you to. And that made me laugh too loudly at your joke. For some reason. Maybe just in case it was the last joke you made in this house."

She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything. And then, after the regret had flared and burned out, she didn't care. He should know, she thought. She wanted him to know. She felt something for somebody, and she'd told him.

"Okay. Who said we're leaving, anyway? We like it here, don't we, Jacko?"

"Yeah. A bit. But I wouldn't want to live here or anything."

"I could live here," said Tucker. "I could live here in a heartbeat."

"Really?" said Annie.

"Sure. I like the sea. I like the . . . the lack of pretension."

"Oh, it's not pretentious."

"What does that word even mean mean?" said Jackson.

"It means, the town doesn't pretend to be something it isn't."

"And some towns do that? What do they pretend to be?"

"Paris. Giraffes. Whatever."

"I'd like to go somewhere that pretends to be somewhere else. That sounds fun."

He was right: it sounded fun. Who wanted to be in a place that prided itself on its lack of ambition, its pig-headed delight in its own plainness?

"Anyway," said Jackson. "I have to see Mom, and my friends, and . . ."

And even then Annie hoped for some clinching argument from Tucker, as if she were watching a courtroom drama, and Jackson was the slow-witted and obstructive juror. But he just put his arm on his son's shoulder and told him not to worry, and Annie gave another inappropriate laugh, just to show that nothing was serious and everything was funny and it didn't matter that Christmas was nearly over. She was nervous now.

Tucker was worried for Annie when they walked into the cold and ominously empty museum, but then he remembered that she was the host, and she had to be there first. And they didn't have to wait very long before people started turning up; late wasn't a fashion option in Gooleness, apparently. Before long, the room was full of town councillors and Friends of the Museum and proud owners of shark pieces, all of whom seemed to have taken the view that the later you turned up, the narrower the choice of sandwiches and potato chips.

Once upon a time, Tucker hated going to parties because he couldn't introduce himself without people making some kind of a fuss when he told them his name. It turned out to be the same at this party, except the people who made the fuss were people who'd apparently never heard of him.

"Tucker Crowe?" said Terry Jackson, the councillor who owned half the exhibition. "The Tucker Crowe?" Tucker Crowe?"

Terry Jackson was probably in his sixties, and he had a weird gray hairdo, and Tucker was surprised that his name had any currency in weird-gray-hairdo circles. But then Terry gave Annie a big wink, and Annie rolled her eyes and looked embarrassed, and Tucker understood that something else was going on.

"Annie wanted you to be the special guest tonight. But then I pointed out that nobody knew who the bloody hell you were. What was your big hit, then? Just kidding." He patted Tucker on the back mirthfully. "But you really are from America?"

"I really am."

"Well, then," said Terry, consolingly. "We don't get many American visitors to Gooleness. You might be the first one ever. That's special enough for us. It doesn't matter about the rest of it."

"He really is famous," said Annie. "I mean, if you know who he is."

"Well, we're all famous in our own living rooms, aren't we? What are you drinking there, Tucker? I'm going to get myself another one."

"Just a water, thanks."

"I don't think so," said Terry. "I'm not getting Gooleness's only American visitor a glass of bloody water. Red or white?"

"I'm actually . . . I'm in recovery," said Tucker.

"All the more reason to have a drink, then. Always helps me, when I'm under the weather."

"He's not under the weather," said Annie. "He's a recovering alcoholic."

"Oh, you'd just be normal here. When in Rome and all that."

"I'm fine, thanks."

"Oh, well. Suit yourself. Here they are, the real stars of the evening."

They had been joined by two men in their forties, obviously uncomfortable in jackets and ties.

"Let me introduce you to two Gooleness legends. Gav, Barnesy, this is Tucker Crowe, from America. And this is Jackson."

"Hello," said Jackson, and they shook his hand with exaggerated formality.