It rang again.

You can ring a million times, she told it. I'm still not going.

It rang again.

Love of God! Stomach-first, she vaulted from the couch, like a high-jumper clearing the bar, stomped noisily into the hall and pressed the buzzer. Ten seconds later someone knocked on her door and she wrenched it open. "What? "

Standing there was a man with dark eyes and longish hair, a touch of wildness to him. Selling mops, she assumed. But, to her horror, she saw that he had some sort of musical instrument in a case under his oxter. A door-to-door busker? When did that lark start? God Almighty, do they torment us even in our own homes?

She said, "I'll give you money if you promise not to sing."

He looked confused. "I em Oleksander. Oleksander Shevchenko."

"Who? Oh! The person who was here before me." Not a roving entertainer! Her face lit up with relief.

"And you?" he said. "You are new tenant? You live now in little room?"

"Yes, yes. You're here for your letters? I suppose you'd better come in."

". . . And no one in your family had any idea about Charlie's secret love-child?" Jemima was incredulous.

"Not a clue," Conall said, with some smugness, glad to be able to contribute such a juicy item of gossip to Jemima. "Only Katie. Only because I knew, and it was pure chance that I found out." Conall had come by the information when he'd been "rationalizing" a company and a young woman had thrown herself on his mercy and begged to keep her job because she had a child to support and wasn't receiving a penny from the dad-who'd transpired to be Charlie Richmond, younger brother of Katie.

"But why would your brother neglect to tell your parents?" Jemima was struggling to understand. "Surely they would be delighted to discover they had a grandchild?"

"Because Katie's mother is a-" Conall paused and looked at Katie.

"What?" Katie asked.

Choosing his words with evident care, Conall said, "She's a . . . an unfulfilled woman who, ah, undermines all her children."

Katie dropped her eyes and smiled to herself. "You never said."

Conall's eyes lit with indignation. "As if, Katie. I made a lot of mistakes with you, way too many, but I wasn't a total idiot."

"I must say," Jemima said happily. "That really is a choice morsel of gossip. Well worth waiting a lifetime for." She shifted herself beneath the weight of Grudge's head. "Not there, my darling hound. Too painful."

"Oh?" Katie asked, just as Jemima had intended she would.

"I had cancer four years ago." With an airy wave, Jemima dismissed it as being barely worse than a stubbed toe. "The wretched thing has returned."

Katie and Conall exchanged a look.

"How do you know?" Katie asked cautiously. "Have you had tests?"

"No need. I can feel them. Tumors. One on my liver. Quite large. I can no longer button my skirt. Most vexing." She smiled. "When one's skirt no longer fits, it's time to go."

". . . Ah . . . we can get you a new skirt," Conall said, trying to hide his mortification beneath a veneer of jolliness. "A whole new wardrobe."

"Most kind. But that wouldn't banish the cluster of bumps under my left arm. Or those behind my knees."

That wiped the fake smile off Conall's face good and proper. He gazed anxiously at Katie. Was Jemima serious? Katie returned Conall's beseeching look and gave a small shake of her head: she hadn't a clue what was going on.

"I see I have embarrassed you," Jemima said. "For that I apologize. And I see that you doubt me, but I assure you I am deadly in earnest."

In response to their stunned silence, she repeated, "Deadly in earnest."

"I see . . ." Conall sounded stumped. "So how can we help you?"

"You can't."

"No such word as can't." Conall began rummaging for his phone. "I'll find a doctor."

"He really is quite the Mr. Fix-it." Jemima smiled at Katie, who wasn't finding this at all amusing. "He'll be ringing that long-suffering Eilish, I'll wager. Find a new door, Eilish! Find a cancer specialist, Eilish! Poor woman. Conall, put that confounded contraption away. I'm beyond the help of a doctor."

She reached out to touch Conall's BlackBerry and, as she did, her body twisted, lifting her skirt and revealing alien-like clusters of lumps and bumps, like mini mountain ranges, behind each knee.

Jesus Christ, Katie thought. Jemima certainly wasn't exaggerating.

She stared at Conall and the look on his face said that he had gone beyond shock. "Right! That's it!" Conall knew when he was in over his head. "I'm ringing an ambulance!"

"Absolutely not," Jemima said, in ringing tones. "Absolutely not! I forbid you."

To his great surprise, Conall found he was afraid to defy her.

"It's far too late," Jemima said.

"No." Conall was having a series of speedy visions, of Jemima being wheeled into surgery, of Jemima having infusions of magic drugs, of a hundred different ways the doctors could fix her. Agitatedly, he flipped his BlackBerry from hand to hand.

"Far too late, dear heart," Jemima repeated.

"We can't just do nothing." He thought he would burst with f rustration.

"Yes, we can," Jemima said. "A good lesson for you to learn, Conall. Sometimes nothing is the very best thing one can do."

"But why didn't you do anything before now?" Katie exclaimed.

Why hadn't Fionn insisted she got help? And why hadn't Fionn told her that Jemima was sick?

Jemima looked ashamed. "Would you think me a coward if I admitted a reluctance to endure chemo again? It was deeply unpleasant. I'm eighty-eight, and it's been a good life, except, of course, for the dearth of gossip."

"But what about the pain? Aren't you in pain?" Conall asked.

"Oh, pain," Jemima said dismissively. "Everyone is so frightened of pain. But how else is one to know one is alive? Conall, please put away your phone and hold my hand again, I was so enjoying that."

Reluctantly, Conall settled down again on the floor and Jemima extended her hands to be held.

"Why are you telling us this if you won't let us help you?" Conall asked.

"Don't be frightened, Conall. To all things there is a season."

"That's not answering my question."

Jemima laughed.

"And neither is that."

"Is there someone, people, you'd like us to ring?" Katie chose her words carefully. Jemima was clearly very sick, far sicker than they'd known when she'd done her little swoon downstairs in Matt and Maeve's, and she wasn't showing signs of getting up off the divan any time soon: how appropriate was it that herself and Conall were the ones by her side? Jemima knew Katie fairly well, but Conall was practically a total stranger. "To be here with you?"

"You're the two I want."

Why? "Well-" and Katie had to force herself to be brave-"at the very least Fionn should be here." That meant Katie would have to try to find him, and she didn't want to because she might bump up against all kinds of painful stuff.

"I sought opportunities over these past few days to tell him, but we were always interrupted."

"You mean . . .?" Jesus Christ. Fionn didn't know. "Conall, quick, give me your phone, mine's upstairs."

With fumbling hands, Conall passed it over and Katie left a quick, terse message for Fionn. "You need to come home right now. It's urgent."

"I wanted to kill myself too," Maeve said suddenly.

Matt looked aghast. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Matt stared up at her, his shoulders bowed, his eyes dead. "Christ, what a shambles," he said, with terrible weariness. "You wanted to kill yourself. I actually tried to. I suppose the real miracle is how we managed to keep going for so long."

"It's been . . ." Maeve had to stop. "I can't think of the right word. A nightmare wouldn't describe it, it wouldn't come close."

"Nightmares end."

"And this just went on and on. Sometimes, when I was a kid, I used to think about my life and wonder what was going to happen, because they always said that bad stuff would happen to everyone at some stage. And I thought about things, you know? Trying to prepare myself. But I never thought about this. I never thought I could be raped. And I never thought I'd feel so . . . so . . . I had no idea that anyone could feel this bad for so long."

"Sweetheart . . ."

"And I'm sorry, Matt. It was very hard for you, I know that. You just got caught up in someone else's stuff. You didn't bargain on any of this when you married me."

"I loved you."

"It was too much for us, though. We're only human. Both of us suicidal, that's not a good sign."

He gave a weak smile.

"How do you feel now?" Maeve asked. "Still not able to go on?"

"Not the way we were."

"Me either. Come on, you can help me pack your stuff."

In the bedroom, Matt slowly gathered his shoes from all the places they'd landed and lined them up on the floor.

"It's probably better if the clothes go in first," he said.

"Grand." She opened one of Matt's drawers, gathered an armload of clothes and dumped them in the case. And the memories hit her. It was the smell, she realized. A cloud of it had risen from the impact of the clothes. She could smell their honeymoon-sea salt and sandalwood and moist fecund air-as if they were there right now. Wasn't it unbelievable that the residue had survived so strongly for three long years? Dried rose petals were still strewn in the bottom of the case and she picked out a couple.

"Remember these?"

"Oh, I do." Matt's eyes sparked briefly at the memory. "It was every night after dinner, wasn't it?" They'd come back to their room and find that some mysterious person had used handfuls of rose petals to draw a big red heart on their duvet.

"And in the beginning we thought it was so romantic."

"Ah no, I always thought it was cheesy."

"No, you didn't, Matt, you loved it!"

"Wellll, I guess I thought it was nice that someone would go to the trouble."

"But then we started getting ungrateful, d'you remember? And we'd be saying that the hearts were getting smaller and more crooked."

"And the petals would get into the bed-"

"-and we used to be finding them in all kinds of places," she said.

"All kinds of places," he repeated.

"And do you remember the bath the butler bloke ran us?"

"No . . . Oh yes! That's right. More bloody petals!"

"And we were covered with them and we couldn't get them off us-"

"-and they'd gone black from the water so we looked like we had Kaposi's sarcoma."

And even that hadn't put them off drying each other with elaborate care and having sex for about the hundredth time. It was amazing, really, Maeve thought, just how much sex they'd had during those two weeks. Almost as if they'd known it was all going to come to a sudden stop and that they'd better make hay while they could.

"We were so happy then," Maeve said. "Like, we were, we really were, weren't we? I'm not making it up?"

"I felt like the luckiest man on the planet. I'm not joking. You were everything I ever wanted . . . No, it's more like you were everything I hadn't even known I'd wanted and I was so scared that I'd never get you."

"And look at how it ended up. Three years later you try to kill yourself."

The shock of it hit her afresh and a storm of crying overtook her.

"Maeve, please, it was only because I thought you'd be better off without me. I thought I was no use to you."

"Yeah? Well, you were."

She snatched hold of him and held tightly on to his body, pressing herself against the solidity, the realness, the warmth, the life in it, feeling his heartbeat and her own.