Lily looked at me, then back towards Mrs Traynor. I felt time slow around us. She swallowed, then lifted her chin a little. 'That I'm your granddaughter.'

A brief silence.

'My ... what?'

'I'm Will Traynor's daughter.'

Her words echoed into the little room. Mrs Traynor's gaze slid towards mine, as if to check that this was in fact some insane joke.

'But ... you can't be.'

Lily recoiled.

'Mrs Traynor, I know this must have come as something of a shock ' I began.

She didn't hear me. She was staring fiercely at Lily. 'How could my son have had a daughter I didn't know about?'

'Because my mum didn't tell anyone.' Lily's voice emerged as a whisper.

'All this time? How can you have been a secret for all this time?' Mrs Traynor turned towards me.

'You knew about this?'

I swallowed. 'It was why I wrote to you. Lily came to find me. She wanted to know about her family.

Mrs Traynor, we didn't want to cause you any more pain. It's just that Lily wanted to know her grandparents and it didn't go particularly well with Mr Traynor and ...''But Will would have said something.' She shook her head. 'I know he would. He was my son.'

'I'll take a blood test if you really don't believe me,' said Lily, her arms folding across her chest. 'But I'm not after anything of yours. I don't need to come and stay with you or anything. I have my own money, if that's what you think.'

'I'm not sure what I ' Mrs Traynor began.

'You don't have to look horrified. I'm not, like, some contagious disease you've just inherited. Just, you know, a granddaughter. Jesus.'

Mrs Traynor sank slowly into a chair. After a moment, a trembling hand went to her head.

'Are you all right, Mrs Traynor?'

'I don't think I ...' Mrs Traynor closed her eyes. She seemed to have retreated somewhere far inside herself.

'Lily, I think we should go. Mrs Traynor, I'm going to write down my number. We'll come back when this news has had a chance to sink in.'

'Says who? I'm not coming back here. She thinks I'm a liar. Jesus. This family.'

Lily stared at us both in disbelief, then pushed her way out of the little room, knocking over a small walnut occasional table as she went. I stooped, picking it up, and carefully replaced the little silver boxes that had been laid out neatly on its surface.

Mrs Traynor was gaunt with shock.

'I'm sorry, Mrs Traynor,' I said. 'I really did try to speak to you before we came.'

I heard the car door slam.

Mrs Traynor took a breath. 'I don't read things if I don't know where they've come from. I had letters.

Vile letters. Telling me that I ... I don't answer anything much now ... It's never anything I want to hear.'

She looked bewildered and old and fragile.

'I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.' I picked up my bag and fled.

'Don't say anything,' said Lily, as I got into the car. 'Just don't. Okay?'

'Why did you do that?' I sat in the driver's seat, keys in my hand. 'Why would you sabotage it all?'

'I could see how she felt about me from the moment she looked at me.'

'She's a mother, plainly still grieving her son. We had just given her an enormous shock. And you went off at her like a rocket. Could you not have been quiet and let her digest it all? Why do you have to push everyone away?'

'Oh, what the h.e.l.l would you know about me?'

'You seem determined to wreck your relationship with every person who might get close to you.'

'Oh, G.o.d, is this about the stupid tights again? What do you know about anything? You spend your whole life alone in a c.r.a.ppy flat where n.o.body visits. Your parents plainly think you're a loser. You don't have the guts to walk out of even the world's most pathetic job.'

'You have no idea how hard it is to get any job, these days, so don't you tell me '

'You're a loser. Worse than that you're a loser who thinks you can tell other people what to do. And who gives you the right? You sat there at my dad's bedside and you watched him die and you did nothing about it. Nothing! So I hardly think you're any great judge of how to behave.'

The silence in the car was as hard and brittle as gla.s.s. I stared at the wheel. I waited until I was sure I could breathe normally.Then I started the car and we drove the 120 miles home in silence.

CHAPTER F IFTEEN.

I barely saw Lily for the next few days, and that suited me fine. When I came home from work a trail of crumbs or empty mugs confirmed that she had been there. A couple of times I walked in and the air felt oddly disturbed, as if something had taken place I couldn't quite identify. But nothing was missing and nothing obviously altered, and I put it down to the weirdness of sharing a flat with someone you weren't getting on with. For the first time I allowed myself to admit that I missed being on my own.

I called my sister, and she had the good grace not to say, 'I told you so.' Well, maybe just once.

'That is the worst thing about being a parent,' she said, as if I were one too. 'You're meant to be this serene, all-knowing, gracious person who can handle every situation. And sometimes when Thom is rude, or I'm tired, I just want to slam the door at him or stick my tongue out and tell him he's an a.r.s.e.'

Which was pretty much how I felt.

Work had reached a misery point where I had to make myself sing show tunes in my car even to make myself drive to the airport.

And then there was Sam.

Who I didn't think about.

I didn't think about him in the morning, when I caught sight of my naked body in the bathroom mirror. I didn't remember the way his fingers had traced my skin and made my vivid red scars not so much invisible as part of a shared history or how, for one brief evening, I had felt reckless and alive again. I didn't think about him when I watched the couples, heads bowed together as they examined their boarding pa.s.ses, off to share romantic adventures or just hot monkey s.e.x in destinations far from there. I didn't think about him on the way to and from work, whenever an ambulance went screaming past. Which seemed to happen an inordinate number of times. And I definitely didn't think about him in the evening when I sat home alone on my sofa, gazing at a television show whose plot I couldn't have told you, and looking, I suspected, like the loneliest flammable p.o.r.no pixie on the planet.

Nathan rang and left a message, asking me to call. I wasn't sure I could bear to hear the latest episode of his exciting new life in New York, and put it on my mental to-do list of things that would never actually get done. Tanya texted me to say the Houghton-Millers had come home three days early, something to do with Francis's work. Richard rang, telling me I was on the late shift from Monday to Friday. And please don't be late, Louisa. I'd like to remind you again that you are on your final warning.

I did the only thing I could think of: I went home, driving to Stortfold with the music turned up loud so that I didn't have to be alone with my thoughts. I felt grateful for my parents. I felt an almost umbilical pull towards home, the comfort offered by a traditional family and Sunday lunch on the table.

'Lunch?' said Dad, his arms crossed across his stomach, his jaw set in indignation. 'Oh, no. We don't do Sunday lunch any more. Lunch is a sign of patriarchal oppression.'

Granddad nodded mournfully from the corner.'No, no, we can't have lunch. We do sandwiches on a Sunday now. Or soup. Soup is apparently agreeable to feminism.'

Treena, studying at the dining-table, rolled her eyes. 'Mum is doing a women's poetry cla.s.s on Sunday mornings at the adult education centre. She's hardly turned into Andrea Dworkin.'

'See, Lou? Now I'm expected to know all about feminism and this Andrew Dorkin fella has stolen my b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday lunch.'

'You're being dramatic, Dad.'

'How is this dramatic? Sundays is family time. We should have family Sunday lunch.'

'Mum's entire life has been family time. Why can't you just let her have some time to herself?'

Dad pointed his folded-up newspaper at Treena. 'You did this. Your mammy and I were perfectly happy before you started telling her she wasn't.'

Granddad nodded in agreement.

'It's all gone pear-shaped around here. I can't watch the television without her muttering, "s.e.xist," at the yoghurt ads. This is s.e.xist. That's s.e.xist. When I brought home Ade Palmer's copy of the Sun just for a bit of a read of the sports pages she chucked it in the fire because of Page Three. I never know where she is from one day to the next.'

'One two-hour cla.s.s,' said Treena, mildly, not looking up from her books. 'On a Sunday.'

'I'm not being funny, Dad,' I said, 'but those things on the end of your arms?'

'What?' Dad looked down. 'What?'

'Your hands,' I said. 'They're not painted on.'

He frowned at me.

'So I'm guessing you could make the lunch. Give Mum a surprise when she gets back from her poetry cla.s.s?'

Dad's eyes widened. 'Me make the Sunday lunch? Me? We've been married nearly thirty years, Louisa.

I don't do the b.l.o.o.d.y lunch. I do the earning, and your mother does the lunch. That's the deal! That's what I signed up for! What's the world coming to if I'm there with a pinny on, peeling spuds, on a Sunday?

How is that fair?'

'It's called modern life, Dad.'

'Modern life. You're no help,' Dad said, and harrumphed. 'I'll bet you Mr b.l.o.o.d.y Traynor gets his Sunday lunch. That girl of his wouldn't be a feminist.'

'Ah. Then you need a castle, Dad. Castles trump feminism every time.'

Treena and I started to laugh.

'You know what? There's a reason why the two of you haven't got boyfriends.'

'Ooh. Red card!' We both held up our right hands. He shoved his paper up in the air and stomped off to the garden.

Treena grinned at me. 'I was going to suggest we cook lunch but ... now?'

'I don't know. I wouldn't want to perpetuate patriarchal oppression. Pub?'

'Excellent. I'll text Mum.'

My mother, it emerged, had, at the age of fifty-six, begun to come out of her sh.e.l.l, first as tentatively as a hermit crab but now, apparently, with increasing enthusiasm. For years she hadn't left the house unaccompanied, had been satisfied with the little domain that was our three-and-a-half-bedroomed house.But spending weeks in London after I'd had my accident had forced her out of her normal routine and sparked some long-dormant curiosity about life beyond Stortfold. She had started flicking through some of the feminist texts Treena had been given at the GenderQuake awareness group at college, and these two alchemic happenings had caused my mother to undergo something of an awakening. She had ripped her way through The Second s.e.x and Fear of Flying, followed up with The Female Eunuch, and after reading The Women' s Room had been so shocked at what she saw as the parallels to her own life that she had refused to cook for three days, until she had discovered Granddad was h.o.a.rding four-packs of stale doughnuts.

'I keep thinking about what your man Will said,' she remarked, as we sat around the table in the pub garden, watching Thom periodically b.u.t.t heads with the other children on the sagging bouncy castle. 'You only get the one life isn't that what he told you?' She was wearing her usual blue short-sleeved shirt, but she had tied her hair back in a way I hadn't seen before and looked oddly youthful. 'So I just want to make the most of things. Learn a little. Take the rubber gloves off once in a while.'

'Dad's quite p.i.s.sed off,' I said.

'Language.'

'It's a sandwich,' said my sister. 'He's not trekking forty days through the Gobi desert for food.'

'And it's a ten-week course. He'll live,' said my mother, firmly, then sat back and surveyed the two of us. 'Well, now, isn't this nice? I'm not sure the three of us have been out together since ... well, since you were teenagers and we would go shopping in town of a Sat.u.r.day.'

'And Treena would complain that all the shops were boring.'

'Yeah, but that's because Lou liked charity shops that smelt of people's armpits.'

'It's nice to see you in some of your favourite things again.' Mum nodded at me admiringly. I had put on a bright yellow T-shirt in the hope that it would make me look happier than I felt.

They asked about Lily, and I said she was back with her mother, and had been a bit of a handful, and they exchanged looks, like that was pretty much what they had expected me to say. I didn't tell them about Mrs Traynor.

'That whole Lily thing was a very odd situation. I can't think much of that mother just handing her daughter over to you.'

'Mum means that nicely, by the way,' said Treena.

'But that job of yours, Lou, love. I don't like the thought of you prancing around behind a bar in your next-to-nothings. It sounds like that place ... What is it?'

'Hooters,' said Treena.

'It's not like Hooters. It's an airport. My hooters are fully suited and hooted.'

'n.o.body toots those hooters,' said Treena.

'But you're wearing a s.e.xist costume to serve drinks. If that's what you want to do, you could do that at ... I don't know, Disneyland Paris. If you were Minnie, or Winnie the Pooh, you wouldn't even have to show your legs.'

'You'll be thirty soon,' said my sister. 'Minnie, Winnie or Nell Gwynnie. The choice is yours.'

'Well,' I said, as the waitress brought our chicken and chips, 'I've been thinking, and, yes, you're right.