'You should probably get an X-ray too, just to check your head's okay.'

Suzanna watched as Alejandro moved over to Jessie and examined her face, turning it gently towards the light. 'You want me to get some butterfly stitches from work? It would help this heal quicker. Or maybe some painkillers.'

'I tell you what you could do, Ale. Tell me how I can get the swelling down. I need to have Emma home ASAP and I don't want to scare the living daylights out of her. I've done ice packs and arnica cream, but if there's anything else . . .'

Alejandro was still looking closely at her head. 'Nothing that's going to make any real difference,' he said.

There was a silence. Suzanna took her tea and stared into it, unsure what to say. Jessie, in her pain and composure, in her apparently well-rehearsed reaction to it, seemed like a stranger.

'You want me to talk to him?'

Suzanna glanced up. Alejandro's expression was hard; his voice had been tight with restraint.

Jessie shook her head. 'I have told him,' she said eventually. 'That he's gone too far, I mean.'

Outside, the children were squabbling. Their voices were raised against each other at the other end of the street.

'I know what you're both thinking but I won't let this carry on. For Emma's sake, as much as anything. I've told him, the next time he lays a finger on me he's out.'

Alejandro looked down into his mug.

'I mean it,' said Jessie. 'I don't expect you to believe me, but I do. It's just that I want to see what happens with this anger-management course before I actually pack up and go.'

'Jessie, please go now. Please. I'll help. We'll all help.'

'You don't understand, Suze. This isn't some stranger, this is the man I've loved since I was . . . since I was practically a kid myself. And I know the real him and this is not it. I can't throw away ten years just because of a rough few months. He's Emma's dad, for God's sake. And, believe it or not, when he's not . . . like this, we have a good time together. We've been happy for years.'

'You're making excuses for him.'

'Yup, I probably am. And I can see how it looks to you. But I just wish you'd known him before this started. I wish you could have seen us together.'

Suzanna glanced at Alejandro. She had thought, given his evident affection for Jessie, that he might get angry, intervene on her behalf despite her instructions, but he was just sitting there, holding his mug, listening. It made her feel almost frustrated.

'I'm not frightened of him, you know. I mean, yes, it's a bit frightening when he loses it, but it's not like I'm walking around the house terrified of setting him off.' Jess looked from Suzanna to Alejandro. 'I'm not an idiot. This is his last chance. But what am I saying otherwise? That no one deserves a chance to change?'

'It's not that-'

'Look, you know what started this off, don't you?' Jessie lifted a mug with her injured hand, then transferred it to the good one and took a sip. 'Father Lenny. He had a go at him about losing his temper. He ended up feeling like everyone was judging him. He thought I'd been telling tales and that the town had turned against him. You know what it's like round here. It's a horrible feeling having everyone look down on you I know, because a lot of people wouldn't talk to me when I was a cleaner. Like it somehow made me different.'

She put her mug down. 'You've got to let me handle this myself. Don't make things worse. If I decide he really has changed, that he's turned into someone I don't feel safe with, I'll pack my bags and go.' She tried to smile. 'I'll move into the shop, Suzanna. Then you'll never be rid of me.'

Come now, Suzanna wanted to say, but there was something determined in Jessie's expression that halted her.

'Here's my number.' Alejandro was scribbling on a piece of paper. 'You change your mind about your hand, want me to get you some butterfly stitches, anything,' Suzanna thought he might have lingered meaningfully on 'anything', 'you call me. Okay?'

'I'll be back at work the day after tomorrow.'

'Whenever you're ready. It's not important.' Suzanna stood up and made to hug Jessie, conscious as she did so that she might be pressing on injuries they hadn't been told about. She stood back, and tried to impart some kind of urgency to the look that passed between them. 'You can call me too. Any time.'

'I'm fine. Really. Now, get lost the pair of you. Go and open that shop or I won't have a job to go back to.' She was shepherding them out of the door.

Suzanna would have protested, but she was also aware that Jason might be on his way, that Jess might have her own reasons for wanting an empty house.

'See you soon.' Jessie's voice, cheerful through the net curtains, followed them down the road.

They had walked in silence as far as the Swan hotel on the high street, each alone with their thoughts, their footfalls metronomic on pavement that was already radiating waves of heat, although it was not yet midday.

Suzanna stopped at the corner of the road that led towards the centre of town. 'I don't feel like opening the shop today,' she said. He shoved his hands into his pockets.

'Where shall we go?' he said.

Neither felt like eating, the heat and the tenor of their morning having conspired against appetite so, after strolling distractedly past the town's few lunching options, they went towards the market. Neither seemed to know where they were going: they simply shared a desire not to be alone, not to resume their normal routine. At least, that was what Suzanna told herself.

They walked companionably around the stalls in the square, drinking from bottles of water, until he confessed, apologetically, that he was bored with the market. 'I have walked here on almost every one of my days off,' he said. He had seen almost nothing, he added, since he got to England. He hadn't planned it like that, had thought he would travel to some cities and explore on his days off, but rail travel had proven prohibitively expensive, and in most of his free time he was too tired to make any major effort. He had been to Cambridge once, and there had been an outing for all the midwives to London, organised by the hospital management, when they had visited Madame Tussaud's, the Tower of London and the London Eye in quick succession, taking in almost nothing. The different nationalities had been barely able to comprehend each other's accents the women either giggling in exclusively female groupings, or gazing at him shyly, the fact that he was the only man preventing them engaging him in conversation. 'I was so glad to find your shop,' he said, his hands deep in his pockets. 'It is the only place . . . it was just different from everything else.'

'So what do you want to see?' she had said, blushing faintly at how suggestive that phrase might sound.

'Show me where you come from,' he said. 'Show me this famous estate. The one that causes you so much trouble.' He had said it teasingly, and she had smiled despite herself.

'It's hardly an estancia,' she said. 'It's about four hundred and fifty acres. Probably not very big by Argentinian standards.' It was, however, big enough to provide a decent afternoon walk. 'I'll take you to the river,' she said. 'If you like fishing, you'd like our river.'

It was as if they had made an unspoken decision to step out from the shadow of the morning, not to let Jessie's situation, the revulsion and helplessness they had both felt, haunt the hours. Or perhaps, Suzanna thought, as they walked along the bridleway up to the woods, she frequently stepping up on to the side of the maize field to avoid the heavily rutted track, it was just that it was impossible to feel bleak for long on a day when the sky was so gloriously blue, when the birds competed in song, their chests bursting with effort, when The afternoon itself was infected with the joyousness of truancy, of hiding when everyone else was working.

Twice he had taken her hand to help her across the path.

The second time, she had had to make a conscious effort to let his go.

They had seated themselves at the top of the forty-acre field and were looking down across the valley. It was one of the few points from which the estate was visible almost in its entirety, its undulating hills and dark patches of forest patchworking their way to the horizon. She pointed to a distant house, set about by outbuildings. 'That's Philmore House. It's let at the moment, but my mother and father lived there when they were first married.' She stood up, and motioned towards some woods, about five miles west of the house. 'That mustard-coloured house you can just see it, right? That's my parents' house now. My brother Ben he's younger than me and my grandmother live there too.'

They were a third of the way across the field, where it dropped away sharply below them, rolling down to the valley and the river, unseen behind woodland, when she said, 'Me and my brother used to come up here when we were little. We'd roll down it. We'd stand here, pretending we didn't know what was coming, and then the other would push us both down and we'd race each other rolling all the way to the bottom. You'd end up with grass in your mouth, your hair . . .' She held up her hands, her elbows in, demonstrating the position, lost in a distant memory. 'Dad turned this field over to the sheep one year. We didn't think about it. Ben got up at the bottom looking like a currant bun.' She realised she had brought in her family, and didn't want to continue. Sometimes, it seemed, there was no escaping them.

He stood next to her, shielding his eyes as he scanned the horizon. 'It's beautiful.'

'I don't really see it any more. I guess when you grow up with something you don't.'

Below them, a sparrowhawk hovered in the air, its eye trained on some unseen prey. Alejandro followed it as it swooped towards the earth.

'Even on days like this, I think I still prefer the city.'

He turned towards her. 'Then why do you let it make you so sad?'

He was looking at her as if her feelings were strange enough to be a curiosity. 'I'm not sad. And I don't let it bother me that much. I just don't agree with the system, is all.'

She sat down, pulled up a piece of long grass and placed its stalk meditatively between her back teeth. 'It doesn't rule my life or anything. It's not like I'm sitting in a dark room somewhere sticking pins in a voodoo doll of my brother.'

She heard him chuckle, as he sat down beside her and folded his legs beneath him. She heard the quiet rustle of grass as he adjusted himself, watched, surreptitiously, as his legs stretched out beside hers.

'The estate was never yours, right? It belongs to your father?'

'And his father. And his father before him.'

'So it was never yours, and it will never be yours. So?'

'So what?'

'Exactly. So what?'

She raised her eyes to the heavens. 'I think you're being a bit naive.'

'For telling you not to let your family's land eat up your happiness?'

'It's not that straightforward.'

'Why?'

She kicked out at an insect that had landed on her foot. 'Oh, everyone's such an expert, aren't they? Everyone knows how I feel how I should feel. Everyone thinks I should just accept things the way they are and stop railing against them. Well, Alejandro, it's not as simple as that. It's not as simple as making yourself not want something. It's about families and relationships and history and injustice and-' She broke off, stole a glance at him. 'It's never just about land, okay? If it was just about land it would have been sorted out long ago.'

'Then what is it about?'

'I don't know. Everything.'

She thought suddenly of the greater troubles he had probably seen, of Jessie's situation, and her voice sounded childish, petulant, even to herself. 'Look, can we just leave this?'

He pulled his knees up, glanced sideways at her over his shoulder. 'Don't get mad, Suzanna Peacock.'

'I'm not mad,' she said crossly.

'Okay . . . I think maybe you have to make a decision. I think . . . it is very easy to let yourself be swallowed by your family, by its history.'

'Now you sound like my husband.' She had not meant to mention Neil, felt his presence unwelcome in the air between them.

Alejandro pushed back his hair. 'Then he and I are in agreement. Neither of us wants to see you unhappy.'

She did look at him then, studied his profile, and then, as he turned towards her, let herself ask silent questions of those brown eyes, the knowing mouth. There was the faintest hint of puzzlement in his face, as if he was trying to work something out.

You are just another crush, she said to herself, then flinched in case she had said it out loud. 'I'm not unhappy,' she whispered. It seemed important to persuade him of this.

'Okay,' he said.

'I don't want you to think I am.'

He nodded.

The way he looked at her, as if he understood, as if he knew her history, her guilt, her unhappiness. As if he shared them, as if he bore them too.

He must be a crush, she thought, dropping her head abruptly to her knees to hide her sudden rapid blinking. I'm getting fanciful, imposing feelings on him that I don't even know he has.

She sat, her forehead resting on her knees until she felt his touch, electric on her shoulder. 'Suzanna,' he said.

She glanced up at him. Against the sun, she could see only a blurred, unnaturally slimmed silhouette. 'Suzanna.'

She took his proffered hand, made as if to stand, her eyes still adjusting to the fierce afternoon sunlight, accepting somehow, in this strange, dreamy afternoon, that she would follow this man anyway, that she would let herself be sucked into his slipstream. He did not stand, but pulled her slightly towards him, and she watched as he lay back on the grass. As her breath caught in her chest, he fixed his eyes on hers, something mischievous in them, in the invitation they carried. Then, with a childish whoop, he pushed himself off on a trajectory, had begun rolling down the hillside, his legs bumping against each other as he built up speed.

For several seconds, she stared in disbelief at the figure flying away from her, and then, the tension of the past moments liberated in some kind of whooshing release, she threw herself down after him, letting the sky and the earth dissolve into a blur, letting her senses be consumed by the rushing grass, the smell of the earth, the gentle bump of her bones as they met the ground. And she was laughing, lost in the ridiculousness of it, spitting out bits of grass and daisies and God knew what else, laughing, her hands stretched above her head, letting herself fly down a hillside, a child again, knowing she would be caught at the bottom.

He stood over her, as she lay giggling and panting in the grass, her head still spinning from the descent. He swayed above her, one hand reaching forward as if to help her up, standing still until she could gradually make out his beaming face, the livid grass stains all over his trousers. 'Happy now, Suzanna Peacock?'

She could think of no sensible response. And so, giddily, she lay back, laughing, her eyes closed against the painfully blue sky.

They had reached the centre of town shortly before seven. It was possible they might have made it sooner, but their pace, by mutual consent, had been measured, perhaps to allow them more time for conversation. It came easily now, as if the fact of their infantile physical release had freed something between them. She knew a little more about him: about his housebound mother, the maid, the political situation in Argentina. He knew about her family history: her childhood, her siblings, her anger at having to leave the city. Some time later, she would remember that in several hours of conversation they had not mentioned Neil, and would feel not quite guilty enough about the omission.

They were crossing the square when Suzanna noted the three young men leaving the delicatessen, chatting, their bags slung easily over their shoulders. They glanced at Alejandro's trousers, gesticulated between themselves and said something possibly rude in Italian, then saluted.

Alejandro and Suzanna lifted their hands in return.

'He's taken them back,' she breathed.

'Who?'

'It would take too long to explain but it's good news. Jessie will be so pleased.' She found she could not stop smiling, a broad, uninhibited smile. It was as if the pleasure of the day had been intensified by the uniquely miserable way in which it had begun.

'I'd better go,' he said, glancing at his watch. 'I'm on a late shift.'

'I guess I should head down to the shop,' she said, trying not to look as crestfallen as she felt. 'See whether any deliveries have been left outside.' She didn't want to leave, but it was made easier in the knowledge that whatever barrier had been breached today would still be breached tomorrow.

She looked down, then back at him. 'Thank you,' she said, hoping he would understand all that that meant. 'Thanks, Ale.' He stood there for a minute, then smoothed a stray hair from her forehead. He still smelt of grass, his skin drenched in sun.

'You look like your mother,' he said.

She frowned slightly. 'I don't think I know what that means,' she said carefully.

His eyes hadn't left hers. 'I think you do.'

He wasn't at home when she got there. A message on the answerphone said he wouldn't be in till much later: playing squash with work buddies, he said, he had told her that morning, but he was pretty sure she hadn't remembered. He added, jokingly, that she should try not to miss him too much.

She didn't eat any supper. For some reason she still had no appetite. Instead she tried and failed to find something that would interest her on television, then moved restlessly around the little house, staring out of the window at the fields she had walked earlier that day until the skies grew dark.

Finally Suzanna was in her tiny bedroom. She sat in front of her mirror, which only just fitted under the low part of the sloping roof. She stared at her reflection for some time and then, almost unconsciously, she pulled up her hair, and pinned it at the crown of her head. She outlined her eyes with kohl, painted the lids in the closest approximation she could find to that characteristic icy blue.

Her skin, pale as her mother's, was untouched by the sun. Her hair, free of chemical dyes and disguises, a deep, almost unnatural black. She stared into her own eyes, lifted the corners of her mouth in an approximation of that smile.

Then she sat, motionless, as Athene stared back at her. 'I'm sorry,' she said to the reflection. 'I'm so, so sorry.'

Eighteen.