The best of times.

by Penny Vincenzi.

For Emily and Claudia, with much love.

For saving the plot, the book, and their mother's sanity.

PROLOGUE

A Time Near to Now A Time Near to NowIt happened just before four p.m. after a brief thundery shower. The Friday traffic had packed the M4 in both directions, heavy enough to hold cars in the fast lane just within the speed limit, light enough to keep all three lanes moving. Viewed on the CCTV cameras, everything looked orderly and under control.At one minute to four, a lorry travelling eastwards swerved suddenly, and then accelerated towards the central median, cutting through it with lethal force, and then turned in on itself, its trailer twisting and half rearing before falling onto its side, slithering along the road into the oncoming traffic and finally coming to a halt just short of the hard shoulder. It burst open, not only the doors, but the roof and sides, discharging its burden of freezers, fridges, washing machines, dryers, some tossed into the air with the force, some skidding and sliding along the motorway, a great tide of deadly flotsam, hitting cars and coaches in its path.A minibus driving westwards in the fast lane became impacted in the undercarriage of the lorry; a Golf GTI immediately behind it swung sideways and rammed into one of the lorry's wheels. A vast, unyielding dam of vehicles braking, swerving, skidding was formed, growing by the moment.On the eastbound side of the carriageway, the cars immediately behind the lorry smashed into it and one another; one hit the central median with such force it became embedded in it, and the dozen or so after that, with an advantage of two or three seconds' warning, skidded into one another relentlessly but comparatively harmlessly, like bumper cars in a fairground.The freezers and refrigerators continued on their journey with enormous force; one car hitting them head-on made a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, and was struck by an oncoming motorbike; another shot sideways and hit the central median.Up and down on the road, then, stillness formed, and a strange semi-silence overtook the road, engines stopped, horns hushed, but replaced by other, hideous sounds, of human screaming and canine barking, and through it all the absolutely incongruous noise of music from car radios.And then a hundred mobiles, in hands that were able to hold them, called the police, the ambulance service, called home. And even as they did so, the chaos spread out its great tentacles, reaching far, far down the road in both directions so that hundreds were unable to escape from it.Within the space of thirty or forty seconds, chance, that absolutely irresistible force, had taken its capricious hold on the time and the place. It had disrupted the present, distorted the future, replaced order with chaos, confidence with fear, and control with impotence. Lives were ended for some, changed forever for others; and a most powerful game of consequences was set in train.

CHAPTER 1

Laura Gilliatt often said-while reaching for the nearest bit of wood-that her life was simply too good to be true. And indeed, the casual observer-and quite a beady-eyed one-would have been hard-pressed not to agree with her. She was married to a husband she adored, Jonathan Gilliatt, the distinguished gynaecologist and obstetrician, and had three extremely attractive and charming children, with a career of her own as an interior designer, just demanding enough to save her from any possible boredom, but not so much that she could not set it aside when required, by any domestic crisis, large or small, such as the necessity to attend an important dinner with her husband or the nativity play of one of her children.

The family owned two beautiful houses, one on the Thames at Chiswick, a second in the Dordogne; they also had a time-share in a ski chalet in Meribel. Jonathan earned a great deal of money from his private practice at St. Anne's, an extremely expensive hospital just off Harley Street, but he was also a highly respected NHS consultant, heading up the obstetric unit at St. Andrews, Bayswater. He was passionately opposed to the modern trend for elective caesareans, both in his private practice and the NHS; in his opinion they were a direct result of the compensation culture. Babies were meant to be pushed gently into the world by their mothers, he said, not yanked abruptly out. He was, inevitably, on the receiving end of a great deal of criticism for this in the more vocally feminist branches of the media.

The beady-eyed observer would also have noted that he was deeply in love with his wife, while enjoying the adoration of his patients; and that his son, Charlie, and his daughters, Daisy and Lily-his two little flowers, as he called them-all thought he was absolutely wonderful.

In his wife he had an absolute treasure, as he often told not only her but the world in general; for as well as being beautiful, Laura was sunny natured and sweet tempered, and indeed, this same observer, studying her quite intently as she went through her days, would have been hard-pressed to catch her in any worse humour than mild irritation or even in raising her voice. If this did happen, it was usually prompted by some bad behaviour on the part of her children, such as Charlie, who was eleven, sneaking into the loo with his Nintendo when he had had his hour's ration for the day, or Lily and Daisy, who were nine and seven, persuading the au pair that their mother had agreed that they could watch High School Musical High School Musical for the umpteenth time until well after they were supposed to be in bed. for the umpteenth time until well after they were supposed to be in bed.

The Gilliatts had been married for thirteen years. "Lucky, lucky years," Jonathan said, presenting Laura with a Tiffany eternity ring on the morning of their anniversary. "I know it's not a special anniversary, darling, but you deserve it, and it comes with all my love."

Laura was so overcome with emotion that she burst into tears and then smiled through them as she looked at the lovely thing on her finger; and after that, having consulted the clock on their bedroom fireplace, she decided she should express her gratitude to Jonathan, not only for the ring but for the thirteen happy years, in a rather practical way, with the result that she got seriously behind in her school run schedule and all three children were clearly going to be late for school.

Laura had been nineteen and still a virgin when she had met Jonathan: "Probably the last in London," she said. This was not due to any particular moral rectitude, but because until him, she had honestly never fancied anyone enough to want to go to bed with him. She fancied Jonathan quite enough and found the whole experience "absolutely lovely," she told him. They were married a year later.

"I do hope I'm going to cope with being Mrs. Gilliatt, quite an important career," she said just a little anxiously a few days before the wedding; and, "Of course you will," he told her. "You fit the job description perfectly. And you'll grow into it beautifully."

As indeed she had, taking her duties very seriously; she loved cooking and entertaining, and had discovered a certain flair for interior design. When they had been married a year, and their own lovely house was finished to both their satisfaction, she asked Jonathan if he would mind if she took a course and perhaps dabbled in it professionally.

"Of course not, darling, lovely idea. As long as I don't come second to any difficult clients."

Laura promised him he wouldn't; and he never had. And neither, as the babies arrived, in neat two-year intervals, did they; for many years, until Daisy was at school, she simply devoted herself to them, and was perfectly happy. She did have to work quite hard at reassuring Jonathan that he still came absolutely first in her life, and was slightly surprised at his impatience and near-jealousy created by the demands of the children. Clearly her mother had been right, she reflected-all men were children at heart. For the first few years, therefore, she employed a full-time nanny; for the demands of Jonathan's professional life on her time were considerable, and he liked her to be totally available to him.

But when Daisy went to school, she began quite tentatively to work. She had a particular flair for colour, for using the unexpected, and she was beginning to earn a small reputation. But it all remained little more than a pleasingly rewarding hobby, very much what she did in her spare time: which was not actually in very large supply.

But that was how Jonathan liked it; and therefore she liked it too.

Spring that year had been especially lovely; it arrived early and stayed late, perfect green-and-gold days, so that as early as April, Laura was setting the outside table for lunch every Saturday and Sunday, and as May wore on, she and Jonathan would eat dinner outside as well, and watch the soft dusk settle over the garden, listening to the sounds of the river in the background, the hooting of tugs, the partying pleasure boats, the raw cries of the gulls.

"How lucky we are," she said maybe a hundred times, smiling at Jonathan across the table, and he would raise his glass to her and reach for her hand and tell her he loved her.

But now it was midsummer and the rain had arrived: day after relentless day it fell from dark grey skies. Barbecues and summer parties were being cancelled, floaty summer dresses put away, the shops holding what they called end-of-season sales, and a stampede began for flights to Majorca and Ibiza for long weekends in the sun.

For the Gilliatts there was no such stampede; Laura was packing, as she did every year, for their annual pilgrimage to the lovely golden-stone farmhouse in the Dordogne, where the sun would shine down unstintingly on them, heating the water in the pool, ripening the grapes on the veranda vine, and warming the stones on the terrace so that the lizards might siesta in the afternoons along with their landlords.

"And thank goodness for it," she said. "Poor Serena is so dreading the holidays, keeping the boys amused all those weeks, well, months really ..."

Jonathan said just slightly shortly that he had thought the Edwardses were off to some ten-star hotel in Nice, not to mention the week they would spend with the Gilliatts on the way down; Laura said, well, that was true, but it still added up to just over three weeks, and that left six or even seven in London.

Jonathan said that most of his NHS patients would not regard that as too much of a hardship, given the three and a half weeks of luxury sunshine; he was less fond of Mark and Serena Edwards than Laura was. Mark was a public relations consultant for a big city firm, oversmooth and charming, but Serena was Laura's best friend and, in Jonathan's view, made Laura the repository of just too many confidences and secrets.

Jonathan was not able, of course, to spend nine weeks in the Dordogne; he took as much of his annual leave as he could and, for the rest of the time, flew out each Friday afternoon to Toulouse and back each Monday.

And so, as she read reports of what appeared to be almost continuous rain in England, and indeed listened to friends in England complaining about it and telling her how lucky she was not to be there, Laura savoured the long golden days even more than usual, and even more than usual counted her own multiple blessings.

Linda Di-Marcello was aware that she also was fairly fortunate, which meant that, given her line of work, she was doing very well indeed. Linda ran a theatrical agency, and as she often said, her role was a complex one. She was, in almost equal parts, nanny, therapist, and hustler; it was both exhausting and stressful, and she threatened repeatedly to give it up and do something quite different. "Something really undemanding, like brain surgery," she would say with a smile. But she knew she never would; she loved it all too much.

The agency's name was actually Di-Marcello and Carr; Francis Carr was her nonsleeping partner, as he put it, a gay banker who adored her, had faith in her, and had put up the money for the agency, in return for "absolutely no involvement and forty per cent of the profits."

So far it had worked very well.

She was thirty-six, an acknowledged beauty, with dark red hair, dark brown eyes, and a deep, Marlene Dietrichstyle voice, and she had been to drama school herself before deciding she really couldn't hack the long, long slog into nonstardom and that she rather liked the idea of agenting. She had had the agency for five years; before that she had worked for several of the established organisations before setting out on her own. And she had proved to have a talent for it; she could look at an apparently plain, shy girl and see her shining on the screen; at a charmless, ungracious lout and know he could play Noel Coward.

She didn't have many big stars on her books-yet. She had Thea Campbell, who had just won a BAFTA for her Jo in the new BBC version of Little Women Little Women, and Dougal Marriott, who had just been cast as the grown-up Billy in the sequel to Billy Elliot Billy Elliot, and three or four more who were almost as successful, but she had a big battery of middle-rankers, mostly picked out by her from the drama schools, almost all of whom were carving out good careers for themselves. But her younger clients particularly found it hard to face reality; they were inevitably disappointed with the slow progress, and while most of them did part-time jobs in bars and restaurants or worked as runners for the TV companies, a handful were emotionally needy, impatient, and at worst disparaging of the work Linda could get them.

"You know," she said irritably to Francis Carr, "I long to tell these kids that thousands and thousands of young people can do what they can do and do it superbly well; they need an awful lot of luck and star quality to stand out. And most of them don't have those things. They're an ungrateful bunch on the whole, you know; nothing's ever good enough for them."

Francis said that the same could be said of his clients, who never felt their money was invested quite well enough or that he gave any of them quite enough of his attention. "It's human nature, Linda, fact of working life."

"I suppose so. I'm obviously making a big fuss about nothing. And when somebody does take off and I know I've been a key part of that, it's a great feeling."

"Well, exactly. Has anyone taken off recently?"

"Not exactly. It's all been a bit run-of-the-mill this summer. If you can call it summer indeed ... Probably that's what's getting to me."

"I don't think so," he said with a grin. "You're always complaining about it."

"Am I? God, how depressing for you. Sorry, Francis. I'll try to be a bit more positive in future."

Linda lived in a mansion apartment just off Baker Street: large and luxurious, expensively furnished-in a mix of antique and contemporary-and absolutely immaculate. Her office-a sleek, modern suite near Charlotte Street-was equally so. Linda was a perfectionist in every aspect of her life. She was, by any standards, a hugely successful woman. And yet she quite often felt she was actually a failure.

She was lonely, and however much she told herself that she was lucky, that she had a far better life now, happily single rather than unhappily married, she didn't really believe it. No amount of looking at the rows of designer clothes she was able to buy, at her collections of art deco figures and lamps, at her growing gallery of modern paintings properly made up for it. She would have given all of it-well, most of it, anyway-not to be alone, not to be lonely.

She did have did have a social life-by most people's standards a glamorous one. But it wasn't quite the sort she wanted. Of course, a social life-by most people's standards a glamorous one. But it wasn't quite the sort she wanted. Of course, Sex and the City Sex and the City had made singledom fashionable, which helped. Nobody had to sit at home staring at the cat anymore; you could lift the phone, call girlfriends or man friends, propose any kind of outing. You could do what you liked, when you liked it. During the week it was fine: she often worked late, and there were theatres and film screenings to go to; and she made sure her weekends were fully booked weeks or even months ahead. She did a lot of quick trips-flips, as she called them-to Paris, Milan, Rome, usually with one of her single girlfriends to visit galleries and shop; she was a Friend of Covent Garden, of Sadler's Wells and the RSC. It would certainly take a fairly remarkable man to deliver so indulgent a lifestyle. had made singledom fashionable, which helped. Nobody had to sit at home staring at the cat anymore; you could lift the phone, call girlfriends or man friends, propose any kind of outing. You could do what you liked, when you liked it. During the week it was fine: she often worked late, and there were theatres and film screenings to go to; and she made sure her weekends were fully booked weeks or even months ahead. She did a lot of quick trips-flips, as she called them-to Paris, Milan, Rome, usually with one of her single girlfriends to visit galleries and shop; she was a Friend of Covent Garden, of Sadler's Wells and the RSC. It would certainly take a fairly remarkable man to deliver so indulgent a lifestyle.

But ... it wasn't actually what she wanted; it was cool and demanding, and somehow self-conscious, when she yearned for warmth and ease. She wondered if perhaps she should have given Mr. Di-Marcello another chance instead of throwing him out of the house at the first discovery of his first affair.

But she knew, deep down, that she shouldn't; it would would have been only the first one; he was about as monogamous as a tomcat. But the divorce had hurt horribly, and had been followed by a second bad relationship, with another charmer who had been seeing another girl almost before he had moved into Linda's apartment. She had an eye for a rotter, Linda often thought gloomily. have been only the first one; he was about as monogamous as a tomcat. But the divorce had hurt horribly, and had been followed by a second bad relationship, with another charmer who had been seeing another girl almost before he had moved into Linda's apartment. She had an eye for a rotter, Linda often thought gloomily.

She didn't exactly want domesticity, she didn't want children, and she certainly didn't want to take on a man with a ready-made family, as so many of her friends seemed to be doing; but she did want someone to share things with, pleasures and anxieties, jokes and conversations-and, of course, her bed.

Nor did she meet that many men she fancied; the world she moved in contained an exceptionally large number of gay men, and still more addicts of one kind or another: "The London branch of the AA is incredibly A-list," as a young actress had astutely remarked (and indeed the meetings were regarded as an excellent opportunity for networking).

"I want a solicitor," she wailed to her friends. "I want a bank manager; I want an accountant." And they would tell her that she wanted no such thing, and of course they were right in one way and quite wrong in another, for what were accountants and bank managers and solicitors but synonyms for reliable and sensible and loyal?

The fact was, she no longer felt free; she felt lonely, no longer self-sufficient, but insecure. What was the matter with her? Was it such a big thing to ask? Not just to fall but to be in love. Wholeheartedly, wondrously thunderously, orgasmically in love. It did seem to be. She really couldn't see how it was ever going to happen again.

"Only five weeks to the wedding. I absolutely can't believe it."

Barney Fraser looked at his fiancee, in all her absurd prettiness and sweetness, and sighed.

"I think I can," he said.

"Barney! That doesn't sound very ... positive. Aren't you looking forward to it?"

"Yes," he said quickly, "yes, of course I am."

"It's the speech, isn't it? But you'll be fine; I know you will. It's all going to be wonderful. If it stops raining, that is. Pity it's not September; that's usually more reliable, much better than the summer, actually. Wouldn't you say?"

"What? I mean, no. I mean-"

"Barney, you're not listening to me. Are you?"

"Sorry, Amanda. I was ... well, I was thinking about something else. I'm very sorry."

Actually he wasn't. He was thinking about the wedding; he thought about it more and more. Well, not the wedding. More the marriage.

"What?"

"Oh-just work. Sorry. More wine?"

"Yes, please."

He grinned at her and refilled her glass; there was nothing he could really say about his misgivings over the wedding. It was too late and it wouldn't help. It wasn't his wedding, for God's sake, that he had misgivings about; it was Toby's, and Toby was old enough to look after himself.

And Amanda was so thrilled at being maid of honour, and the bride was one of her very best friends. And when she and Barney got married the following spring, Tamara would be her her maid of honour. And Toby would be Barney's best man. maid of honour. And Toby would be Barney's best man.

Toby wasn't just one of Barney's best friends; he was absolutely his best friend, had been ever since prep school, when they had lain in their small beds the first night, side by side, smiling gallantly, refusing to admit either of them felt remotely homesick. And the friendship had never faltered, intensified, Barney always thought, by the fact that they were both only children, and were soon spending time with each other over the holidays as well as the term. They had stayed cheerfully together right through prep school and Harrow; then after the separation of universities, Toby at Durham, Barney at Bristol, the delight of discovering that they were both applying for jobs in the city and managed to end up not at the same investment bank-that would have been too much of a cliche-but at closely neighbouring establishments either side of Bishopsgate.

Toby was just the best: clever, funny, cool, and just plain old-fashioned nice. Barney didn't like to think of their friendship in terms of love-these days if you said you were terribly fond of another bloke, people presumed you were gay. But he did did love him, and admired him and enjoyed his company more than that of anyone else in the world-except Amanda, obviously. Not that you could compare how you felt for your best friend and your fiancee: it was totally different. What was great was that despite their both being engaged and setting up home and all that sort of thing, they were still able to see an enormous amount of each other. love him, and admired him and enjoyed his company more than that of anyone else in the world-except Amanda, obviously. Not that you could compare how you felt for your best friend and your fiancee: it was totally different. What was great was that despite their both being engaged and setting up home and all that sort of thing, they were still able to see an enormous amount of each other.

And the two girls were great friends; both worked in the city as well. It was very neat: Amanda in human resources at Toby's bank, Tamara on the French desk at Barney's. There was no reason they should all not remain friends for the rest of their lives.

Barney didn't just think that Tamara wasn't good enough for Toby-no, he knew knew. OK, she was gorgeous and sexy and clever, and their flat in Limehouse was absolutely sensational, more to Barney's taste, if he was honest, than the house he and Amanda had bought in Clapham. It was a bit ... well, a bit too fussy, full of clever ideas that Amanda had found in the house magazines and copied, without considering whether it all worked together properly. But still, she was great and he loved her, of course, and not having much of a visual sense himself, he just accepted it all. There were more important things in life than decor.

Amanda was solid gold, through and through; Tamara, he felt, was composed of some rather questionable nickel under her lovely skin. She was selfish, she was spoilt-first by her doting parents, and now, of course, by Toby-extremely possessive, dismissive of Toby's feelings, given to putting him down, albeit with her rather sparky humour, when it suited her. Toby really loved Tamara; he told Barney so repeatedly, almost too repeatedly, Barney thought sometimes. He had been an angel over the buildup to the wedding, agreeing to everything she wanted, even their honeymoon in the Maldives when Barney knew that sort of place bored him. But, "It's her wedding," he would say easily, apparently unaware of the irony of it: that it was his too.

And with the stag do-a long weekend in New York-only a fortnight away, it was really much too late to do or say anything about it at all.

Barney just remained uneasy about it, and couldn't discuss it with anyone. Not even Amanda. Actually, least of all with Amanda. That was a bit worrying too.

CHAPTER 2

Well, she'd done it now; there could be no turning back. Mary took a deep breath, turned away from the letter box, and walked home through the pouring rain, hoping and praying that she had done the right thing. In four or five days, the letter would arrive in New York, at Russell Mackenzie's undoubtedly grand apartment, bearing the news that yes, she thought it would be lovely if he came to England and they met once again, after all these long, long years.

More than sixty years since they'd said good-bye, she and Russell; she'd stood in his arms at Liverpool Street station, surrounded by dozens of other couples, the girls all crying, the soldiers in their khaki uniforms holding them close. It was almost unbearable, and when finally she had to let him go, it was as if some part of her had been wrenched off, and she'd stood watching him walking down the platform, climbing into the train, waving to her one last time, and she'd gone home and run up to her room and cried all night and wanted to die. Literally. She had loved him so much, and he had loved her too. She knew he had; it wasn't just that he'd told her so-he'd asked her to marry him, for goodness' sake. But it had been too frightening, too unimaginable to go away, all those miles away from everyone she knew and loved. And anyway, she was spoken for, engaged, even if she didn't have a ring on her finger: engaged to Donald, sweet, gentle Donald, who was coming home to her to make her his wife.

She had been wonderfully surprised when Russell continued to write to her; he had done so almost as soon as he arrived back in the States.

"I want us still to be friends, Mary," he had said. "I can't face life totally without you, even if I can't be with you."

She had agreed to that, of course: what harm in letters? Nobody could object to that, think it was wrong. And the letters had flown back and forth across the Atlantic ever since.

He had sent pictures: first of himself and his very grand-looking parents and their very grand-looking house, and later, as time passed and wounds healed and lives inevitably progressed, of his bride, Nancy; and she had written of her marriage to Donald and sent pictures of the two of them on their wedding day, and of the little house they had bought in Croydon. And later still, they exchanged news and photographs of their babies, her two and Russell's three, and sent Christmas and birthday cards to each other. Donald had never known; she had seen no reason to tell him. He wouldn't have believed that Russell had been only a friend, and he would have been quite right not to believe it either.

The letters arrived about once a month, usually after Donald had gone to work. If one did happen to arrive on a Saturday, and he saw it, she would say it was from her American pen-friend. Which was true, she told herself. He was. In a way.

Russell's stories of splendid houses and Cadillacs and swimming pools were clearly true; his parents were rich, with an apartment in New York and a house somewhere called Southampton, full of big houses, and people played polo there and sailed on the ocean in their yachts. He and Nancy spent every weekend at the Southampton house.

It had been a happy marriage, as far as Mary could make out; as hers to Donald had been. But Nancy had died when she was only fifty-two, of cancer, and Russell had married again, to a woman called Margaret. Mary had been absurdly comforted when Russell told her it was only so the family had a mother figure.

Donald had died on his seventy-fifth birthday, had had a heart attack while the house was full of his beloved family. He had been a wonderful husband; he had never made much money, had worked away perfectly happily at his job in an insurance company, and had no ambitions to change it.

As long as he could come home every night to Mary and the children, he said, and knew he could pay all the bills, he was content.

She had kept all Russell's letters, and photographs, safely hidden in her underwear drawer, tucked into an empty packet of sanitary towels; Donald would no more look in there than fly to the moon. And every so often, she would get them out and relive it all, the wonderful, passionate romance that had led to a lifetime of secret happiness.

And then last year, Russell had written to tell her that Margaret had died. "She was a very loving wife and mother and I hope I made her happy," he wrote. "And now we are both alone, and I wonder how you would feel if at last we were reunited? I've been thinking of making a trip to England and we could meet."

He had been over occasionally on business-she knew that-but of course they had never met.

Mary's initial reaction had been panic; what would he actually think, confronted by the extremely ordinary old lady she had become? He was so clearly used to sophistication, to a great deal of money, to fine birds in very fine feathers; she was indeed his "Little London Sparrow," the name he had given to her all those years ago. And all right, she lived in a very nice house on the outskirts of Bristol, where she and Donald had moved when he had retired, to be near their beloved daughter, Christine, and her family, and she had a few nice clothes, and she had kept her figure; she was still slim, so if she did get dressed up she looked all right. But her very best outfits came from Debenhams, the everyday ones from Marks & Spencer; her hair was grey, of course, and a rather dull grey at that, not the dazzling white she had hoped to inherit from her mother; and she had very little to talk about: her most exciting outings were to the cinema, or playing whist or canasta with her friends. And Russell spent a lot of his life at things called "benefits," which seemed to cover all sorts of exciting events: theatrical, musical, even sporting. Whatever would they talk about?

But he had rejected her argument that they might spoil everything if they met again now-"What's to spoil? Only memories and no one can hurt them"-and gradually persuaded her that a rendezvous would be at worst very interesting and fun, and friendship "at best wonderful."

"I want to see you again, my very dear Little Sparrow. Fate has kept us apart; let's see if we can't cheat her while there is still time."