'Well, that's very understandable; it's been an emotional time for her. Give her my love, won't you, tell her I'll be thinking of her tomorrow and that just as soon as she wants to, she's to come for tea.' Ruby had then gone on to discuss more practical matters. 'Presumably, when she feels ready, she'll be returning to university. Has she missed much already?'

'Just the first week. I'm sure she'll be able to catch up.'

'Of course she will; she's a bright girl with everything ahead of her.'

That was what was so great about his mother: nothing fazed her. She was a full-on optimist.

He was just considering having another go at the car magazine when the door opened and Suzie came in. One of the nurses he'd seen earlier was with her. He leapt to his feet, nearly knocking the table over. Surely it couldn't have been done already?

The next thing he knew, Suzie was in his arms, sobbing. 'I'm sorry, Dad, but I couldn't do it. I just couldn't get rid of it. I'm so sorry.'

Catching Will's eye, the nurse quietly shut the door and left them alone. 'It's okay, Suzie,' he said, his voice cracking. 'If this is what you want, it'll all be fine. Don't you worry about a thing.'

Chapter Twenty-Seven.

Some things never change. Dominic had only been back in Maple Drive a matter of hours, but within no time at all he'd made himself the centre of attention. Harriet's drink with Miles had been postponed because Freda was in the mood for playing happy families and had insisted on both her sons sitting round the dinner table that evening. 'Sorry about this,' Miles had apologised on the phone, 'I'll make it up as soon as he's gone. He won't be here for long; he never is.'

But strangely Dominic was in no hurry to return to the rarefied atmosphere of his Cambridge college. Five days after his surprise arrival, he was still around, casting the shadow of his ferocious presence on their lives.

Harriet's parents had taken her to task over the sharpness of her greeting to Dominic. 'There was no need to be so rude,' her mother had said. 'Especially as he'd gone to the trouble to call in and apologise to us about missing the funeral.' They might have succeeded in making her feel churlish had it not been for the fact that she knew Dominic better than they did. He revelled in making people eat their words. One minute he'd make people hate him, the next he'd be so contrite that he'd be instantly forgiven, somehow instilling a sense of guilt in those who had been so quick to misjudge him. 'I'm a cruel man,' he once declared, 'but who will save me from myself?'

Plenty had tried. Or rather, he had allowed plenty to think they could do it. It was another of his games: send out the bait - his twisted, cruel-mannered charm - then reel in the poor, hapless fool.

Harriet had observed this since childhood, hating it when she had been reeled in. Humiliating people was what he did best. Harriet had often told him what she thought of him, and on one occasion she said to his face that he was a narcissistic b.a.s.t.a.r.d who didn't care who he hurt. All he'd done was laugh at her and say that if you were old enough to play the game, you were old enough to pay the emotional cost of getting hurt. 'People aren't as fragile as you think,' he'd told her, 'and anyway, as Byron put it so succinctly, "The heart will live on brokenly."'

It turned out that even children weren't immune to his charm; Carrie and Joel were fascinated by him. With his tall, lean frame, his Prince of Denmark attire - black polo-neck sweater and black leather trousers - and his formidably short dark hair (as a student he'd worn it long and tied it back with a black silk ribbon; now it was short like his temper) and his propensity to swear at random, he was irresistibly charismatic. The children had met him several times before, but they'd been too young and had no memory of him - something that probably pierced Dominic's ego more than they would ever know. But once Carrie realised he was Miles's brother and had been a friend of her mother's, she wanted to know everything they had ever done together. Any of the stories Harriet and her parents had told the children were now forgotten, redundant in the face of this golden-tongued storyteller in their midst. Harriet couldn't blame them, after all; when was the last time they'd been exposed to someone who exuded so much glamour and excitement? Many years ago Dora had said that Dominic had the smile of an angel, but the mind of a devil. It was one of the most apt descriptions Harriet had heard.

'Did Mummy really get caught for shoplifting?' Carrie was now asking Dominic, her face more radiant than Harriet had ever seen it. Joel was listening too, his eyes rapt with wonder.

'You bet to b.u.g.g.e.ry she did! We all did; Harriet, my brother Miles, and me.'

It was Sat.u.r.day morning, and they were in the kitchen.

Shortly after Mum and Dad had gone to the supermarket, leaving Harriet to supervise Carrie's homework, an autumn montage of leaves and twigs, Dominic had called round. 'I'm bored to death,' he'd said. 'Let me in and talk to me. If you don't I shall have to shoot myself. Here, these are for you.' He thrust an extravagantly large box of champagne truffles at her. 'I thought you deserved something expensive and frivolous. And these are for the children.' From his coat pocket he produced a box of Maltesers. His thoughtfulness brought to mind equally unexpected gestures of kindness he'd made in the past - the large bouquet of flowers he'd arranged to be sent to her mother when he'd heard about her being diagnosed with ME; the amusing card he'd posted to Dad on his retirement; the housewarming gift of a luxury food hamper that had turned up for Harriet when she'd moved into her flat in Oxford. She smiled her thanks and took his coat.

Now, as Harriet listened to Dominic answering Carrie's question, giving a riveting account of Edna Gannet catching the four of them as they'd tried to sneak out with their pockets bursting with Cadbury's creme eggs and threatening to box their ears, she wondered why he was here in Kings Melford. Why had he come home when it was normally the last place on the planet he wanted to be? He'd said his rooms in college were being decorated before the start of term and the smell of paint was making him ill, but Harriet's suspicious mind doubted this. True, he didn't look that well - his handsome face was thinner and sharper and he looked older than when she'd last seen him, scarcely a year ago - but she was more inclined to think that his protracted visit was to do with something completely different.

'I hear you and Miles are practically inseparable these days,' he'd said after he'd caught up on local gossip at Freda's enforced family get-together.

'We've been out for drinks and the occasional meal, if it's any of your business,' she'd said. 'But I suppose in your world that would signify a deep and meaningful relationship.'

'By that sharp little riposte, I a.s.sume you're referring to my renowned promiscuity. Is it serious, then?'

. 'Is what serious?'

'You and Miles. I always thought you two should get it together. You're perfectly suited.'

'Why? So that you could take pleasure in tearing us apart like you used to pull the legs off spiders?'

He had sighed. 'I'm getting bored with the diva b.i.t.c.h thing. Whatever's happened to you? You never used to be quite so touchy.'

'Losing the person who meant the most to me has changed me more than you'll ever know,' she'd said.

'Ah ... Felicity,' he had said stiffly, sounding like the desiccated academic he was destined to be. 'I miss her too.'

She gritted her teeth. How glib he could be.

Tuning back in to what Dominic was now saying, Harriet did a double-take. To her astonishment, he was helping Joel to pull on his socks and telling Carrie to forget about her homework so they could all go for a walk.

'Keep away from the bank,' she yelled at the children as they scampered on ahead in their Wellington boots, squealing and laughing and throwing sticks for Toby. Honestly, what had got into them? They were as high as kites. They never normally made so much noise. Perhaps it was all those Maltesers they'd scoffed.

The morning was bright and fresh, the sky clear as if washed clean by the heavy rain overnight. The air was damp and earthy, the towpath slippery with leaves that had been shaken from the trees. The sight of Dominic's sartorial elegance wrecked by a pair of her father's old gardening boots brought a smirk to her face.

'What's so sodding funny?' he demanded.

'Nothing.' She rearranged her face. 'When are you going back to Cambridge to pore over all those dusty old books?'

'When I'm ready.'

'What about the start of term and freshers' week? Won't you miss the first pick of budding undergraduates to corrupt?'

'I dare say they can manage a few days without me.'

'But I thought the world revolved around you, Dominic.'

'It does. Which is why I can decide my own comings and goings. A bit like masturbation, you could say.'

Again she smiled to herself. The same old Dominic; buried in amongst all the faults and flaws was his sharp wit and diverting turn of thought. 'What brought you home?' she asked. 'I'd have thought you'd have preferred a few days somewhere more cerebrally challenging than Maple Drive.'

He shrugged. 'I accepted a long time ago that an occasional foray into my home town of Sodom and Gomorrah would be the cross I'd have to bear. Tell me about this job you've been offered.'

Quite used to the speed at which he could change the subject, she complied. 'It's with a software house in Crantsford. I'll be head of a team of four and my main responsibility will be to provide the means to interface between AVLS systems and road haulage systems.'

'My G.o.d! Could you have picked anything more boring?'

'Oh, shut up!'

They walked on in silence, pa.s.sing Will's house. Harriet wondered if his young girlfriend had had her abortion yet. Wondered too what its consequences would be on their relationship. If indeed they really had one in the first place. She thought of Felicity and her secret relationship. What would her sister have done if she'd got pregnant by her lover? Pa.s.sed the baby off as Jeff's? It occurred to Harriet, stealing a quick glance at Dominic, that maybe, because they'd been such close friends, he was the one person in whom Felicity might have confided. She had come to the conclusion that her sister hadn't told Harriet because she was too close and too fond of Jeff. Whereas Dominic had never really liked Jeff and therefore wouldn't have judged Felicity. It was all supposition, but Harriet was tempted to ask Dominic if he knew anything. Before that, though, she had something else she wanted to sort out with him.

'I still think you were a complete s.h.i.t to miss Felicity's funeral,' she said.

He slowed his step, but didn't speak.

'Why didn't you come?' she pressed. It rankled that he hadn't bothered. That he could have been so cavalier.

After another pause, he said, 'She wouldn't have wanted it.'

'You mean you didn't want it. Funerals, after all, must be so wearisomely pedestrian for a distinguished don such as you; strictly for the ma.s.ses, the plebs. All that cheap dry sherry and polite chit-chat to get through. If only it could be more civilised - Mozart's Requiem played, some dreary piece of poetry recited. Women wailing. Men flaying themselves.'

He suddenly turned on her, his face so savage that she took a step back - looking into his eyes was like staring down the loaded barrel of a gun. 'Don't be so b.l.o.o.d.y patronising!' he roared. 'Is it too much for you to understand that I wanted to remember my oldest and closest friend the way she was? That I didn't want to watch her mutilated corpse being shoved into a hole in the ground? Is that really too difficult for you to grasp?'

'Liar! You're too selfish and vain to grieve for anyone but yourself. It's always about you, isn't it? You, you, you! And for the record, she was cremated and her ashes buried. She was not shoved into a hole!'

'You picky little cow! But at least I have a heart. More than you have. You're nothing but an a.n.a.lytical machine. You're like Miles: incapable of feeling anything from the heart.'

'And what would you know about my feelings? It's not just Felicity I've lost. It's everything. My home, my job, even my boyfriend.'

'Well, bully for you. But just remember this; there are no exclusive rights to grief.'

He turned and stalked off the way they'd just come. Her eyes brimmed with hot, stinging tears, and she rushed on to find the children. b.a.s.t.a.r.d! Why had she allowed him to get to her? And how the h.e.l.l had he managed to grab the moral high ground?

By twisting her words, that's how.

October Love may be a fool's paradise, but it is the only paradise we know on this troubled planet.

Robert Blatchford Taken from My Eighty Years

Chapter Twenty-Eight.

It was the middle of October, and what had so far been a gentle and relatively mild autumn now consisted of strong wintry winds coming in from the north, which shook the curling leaves from the trees, sending them rattling along the streets. A fence panel had blown over in the night, and under normal circ.u.mstances Bob would have been straight out to the garden to fix it. But as he stood at the kitchen window looking at the damage, it couldn't have interested him less: he had other things on his mind this morning. He had an appointment to keep. A rendezvous, you could say. He had been secretly counting the days and now that it was here he was doing his best to act normally. It was always possible, of course, that something had happened to change her plans, but he wouldn't let himself dwell on that worry. Or maybe she simply said things she didn't mean. No. Jennifer wasn't that kind of woman. She'd said she would be coming back to Kings Melford and he had no reason to doubt her. Moreover, she'd said she wanted to photograph this stretch of the ca.n.a.l when autumn had really settled in.

That day when he'd accepted her offer of a cup of tea and climbed down into the snug warmth of the saloon had been a turning point for Bob. A powerful moment when he'd started to think about something other than the emptiness of his life.

'Grief's a terrible thing,' she'd said matter-of-factly when not long afterwards he'd told her about Felicity - the words had come out before he could stop himself. 'I lost my husband two years ago,' she said, 'and for months after his death I could hardly bring myself to get up in the morning. Some days I didn't bother. I just stayed there howling under the duvet.'

'What changed?'

'You mean, how did I pull myself together? It sounds vaguely absurd, but I simply ran out of tears. I had none left. Unlike a lot of people who bottle them up, I let it all go in one long, horrid outburst. My children were probably on the verge of having me sectioned; they thought I'd lost it completely. And it's not something I'd recommend for everyone. There were a few moments when I thought I'd lost it too. It was a very scary time. Have you cried much?'

'Er ... a bit.'

'In private, I'll bet.'

'Mostly at night,' he'd confessed, avoiding her gaze by bending down to Toby and scratching the top of the dog's head. 'I go and sit inside the Wendy house I made for my daughters when they were little,' he further admitted. 'It's the only place I can be alone.'

When he'd raised his glance, she'd said, 'Oh, that's so sad.'

'It's pathetic,' he shot back, his voice too loud and harsh.

'No, you mustn't ever think that. You do whatever it takes. I've discovered the hard way that you never get over grief; you learn to live with it. It's like having an arm chopped off and learning to manage without it. Excruciatingly painful but not impossible.'

After pouring him a second mug of tea and pa.s.sing him a tin of custard creams, she said, 'How's your wife coping?'

'Better than me. She has her friend Dora to talk to. It seems to make all the difference for her.'

'Of course it does. Don't you have any friends you can talk to?'

'I have work colleagues but ... but since I've retired, well, you know how it is, the link isn't there any more.'

She surveyed him over the rim of her mug. 'If I'd died first, my husband would have been in the same situation as you. He spent all his life working and didn't bother to make any real friends. It's a terrible mistake.'

Moving the subject on, he'd asked her what she was doing, cruising the inland waterways on her own. 'I'm satisfying a long-held ambition. Actually, it was something my husband and I had planned to do together, but when he died and I'd come out from under the duvet, I thought, what the heck, I'm going to do it anyway. I sold the house we'd lived in for more than twenty years and moved to an isolated bungalow where my only neighbour is a grumpy old farmer who is much too busy to bother me with pitying looks. And then I bought this boat and took off. So here I am living the dream. I've been away from home for four months and I'm having the time of my life.' She pointed to an expensive-looking camera on a shelf. 'I'm trying my hand at being a photographer. I want to put a book of pictures together. Maybe even have a go at getting it published.'

'Where are you heading next?' he'd asked, scarcely able to keep the envy out of his voice. Take me with you, he wanted to say. Take me along for the ride.

'I'm staying here for a few days, but I'm on my way up to Yorkshire. I have some friends just north of Hebden Bridge whom I haven't seen in a long while. They swear the run of locks up that way will finish me off, but I can't wait to prove them wrong.'

'Will you be pa.s.sing this way again?'

Once more she'd looked at him shrewdly over the top of her cup. 'Yes. Why do you ask?'

'I'd be interested to hear how you get on with all those locks.'

Changing the subject, she said, 'I'm going to moor the boat this side of a pub called The Navigation. Do you know it?'

'You could say it's my local.'

'Is the food any good?'

'It's ages since I've eaten there, but I hear it's reasonably wholesome. Their chip b.u.t.ties are well known round here.'

'Sounds heavenly.'

As he'd known it would have, the next day when he was out walking Toby, the Jennifer Rose had moved on. Approaching the mooring points in the stretch that led to The Navigation, he saw that its owner was on the roof of the boat, sweeping the leaves that had fallen from the nearby trees. She'd told him yesterday that she'd named the boat after herself; it was what her husband had planned to do. When she saw him, she straightened up and leaned against the broom. 'h.e.l.lo,' she said, and without referring to her watch, added, 'it must be about time for a cuppa. Why don't you go down below and put the kettle on?'

In all, she stayed moored in the same spot for four days. He visited her every morning and late afternoon. He came to believe that she was part of his healing process. Or was that too fanciful? He never once thought about touching or kissing her - he'd never make that mistake again - he just wanted to be with her, to sit and talk. She understood his pain because she'd experienced something similar.

At night, after she'd moved on for Yorkshire, he would lie in bed picturing Jennifer coc.o.o.ned in her cosy bedroom at the prow of the boat. She'd given him a full tour of the Jennifer Rose and he was as fascinated by the clever design of the craft as he was with her courage to change her life so dramatically. What would Eileen say if he announced that he'd like to blow their savings on a second-hand boat and leave Maple Drive?

Now that Harriet was working, it was his job to take the children to school, and after he'd done that he poked his head round the bedroom door. Eileen was having a lie-in; she hadn't slept well that night. 'I'm just off out with Toby,' he said softly. 'See you later.' Getting no reply, he a.s.sumed she was sleeping and crept quietly downstairs.

If he had been a younger and fitter man he would have sprinted to the towpath, but as it was, he lumbered along at his usual pace trying to keep the eager antic.i.p.ation from showing on his face.

The wild wind that had blown overnight had settled, leaving twigs and bits of broken branches scattered on the ground but, annoyingly, the damp chill of autumn was aggravating his knee and he was forced to slow his pace yet more. He'd have to keep quiet about it; he didn't want Eileen worrying. Or Harriet thinking that it was another nail in the coffin. Now that she had a job, he knew she was keen to find a place of her own and move out with the children. Was it so very wrong of him to want that too? Eileen would shush him if he ever dared to say that he was tired of having the children around, but he longed for the day when he didn't have to worry about tripping over some toy or other left on the floor, or he could use the bathroom knowing there would be plenty of hot water. He resented his home not being his own. And he refused to feel guilty about it. He was being honest, which was more than Eileen was. She kept saying she was feeling better but he knew she wasn't. Her afternoon naps were getting longer and sometimes she was reluctant to leave the house. If Eileen wasn't careful, she'd turn into another Freda. He shuddered at the thought that he too might turn into a carbon copy of Harvey McKendrick: trapped and never saying a word, bitterly resigned to living a life of pretence.

He sighed, realising how angry he'd made himself. It wouldn't do. He thought again about Harriet and the houses she had started to view. The solicitor had already made arrangements for part of the children's trust fund to be made available and added to Harriet's money from the sale of her flat so that should the right property become available she could go ahead and buy it. As a cash buyer, she was in an enviable position, so the solicitor had said.