"That's okay-"

"I shouldn't-I don't-"

"Shhh."

"Do you think they noticed?" she whispered, as her body slowly slipped back into focus.

"Dunno," said Anthony. "So how long are you going to be gone?" he asked, retying his tie.

"Fortnight at the most." She b.u.t.toned up her blouse. "The nanny's mother's ill."

"b.i.t.c.h," he muttered, straightening his tie.

"You can joke," tutted Vanessa, tucking her blouse into her skirt. "It's not your life it impinges on."

"I wasn't joking," said Anthony, smoothing down his hair. "And yes it is."

Some believe that in every office, someone somewhere is in a stationery cupboard with someone else, sharing an illicit moment of not looking for stationery together. In fact, only a month earlier, Josh had been known to frequent a certain stationery cupboard with a certain person where together they had forgotten all about stationery. And now that certain person was approaching. As Sally reached his desk and perched on the edge of it, he tried to work up enough momentum to smile.

"What's wrong, lover boy? Someone died in your family?" she murmured.

He upped the effort and tried to laugh. "I'm just a bit down at the moment," he replied.

"Oh dear," she soothed. "Perhaps I can try and get you"-she leaned forward-"up again."

He stared at her, trying to remember her good points. "Nah, you're alright, thanks."

"I know I'm alright," she shot. "I'm fine. It's not me I'm worried about."

"Don't worry about me."

"Fine." Sally shrugged.

"I'm just a bit down."

"We've established that."

"Sorry."

"I don't really care for your sympathy, Josh."

"Sorry."

"Not half as sorry as I am for you."

Josh nodded. "Yep. That makes sense. I'm a complete mess."

"Yeah well, I'm a tidy girl-"

"I know-"

"No room for mess-"

"I know-"

"So seeing as you're an immature, messy sc.r.a.p of humanity who can't bin something he doesn't need anymore, and I'm the adult in this 's.h.a.gationship,' it looks like I'll be the one who's binning you."

Josh tried to smile again.

"Consider yourself binned, Josh."

"Thank you. You're a truly good person."

"Don't patronize me, you sod."

"Sorry."

"I'd bought a basque as well," she muttered.

"Sorry."

She got off his desk. "It's alright," she said. "Just because you won't be seeing it, doesn't mean no one else will."

"I have every faith-"

"Don't patronize me."

"Sorry."

And with that, Sally walked away, head high, ignoring the rib ache from her basque.

Josh stared at his phone, wondering how long the journey from London to Niblet-upon-Avon was.

Jo arrived at the station. Two whole minutes earlier, she'd stopped crying. Then she spotted her father standing alone on the platform and started all over again. They shared an awkward embrace and headed off to the hospital in silence. The hospital was tiny. It was where Jo had been born, and as they approached it, Bill started recounting his feelings on walking there twenty-three years earlier. He touched on the previous miscarriages Hilda had suffered, the doctors' gloomy prognoses, and their joy when Jo was born. The nearer they got, the more Jo felt she was still carrying her rucksack.

"She's just down here," said her father, as they approached a ward to the right. Jo kept her eyes ahead and followed him as he veered toward the end bed.

They found Hilda wide-awake. Smaller than Jo remembered and with slightly more squashy hair, but apart from that, surprisingly similar to before. She even managed a glint of recognition and half a smile on seeing her daughter.

She was already making clear sounds and just beginning to move the left side of her body. The nurse explained that if the physiotherapy and speech therapy went to plan, she should be almost good as new within six months.

When Jo and Bill returned home later that evening, they were too tired to eat. Bill sat in the lounge, flicking through the channels, and Jo shut the lounge door and sat in silence in the hall by the phone. She looked down at her mother's spidery writing on the notepad. Jo's phone numbers, it said. There was her mobile number and the Fitzgeralds' number. Best times to ring: Weekdays-between 9pm and 11pm and weekends-not in the morning! Jo rested her head in her hand.

"Cuppa?" Her dad appeared in the hall.

"Mm, lovely," she said, and picked up the phone. She left a message on Shaun's voicemail. She tried Sheila and did the same. She told them she was home and would love to see them. She didn't phone Pippa.

Vanessa was still in the office midevening when her phone rang. It was d.i.c.k.

"So how did it go?" he asked.

"How did what go?" asked Vanessa warily, hiding a Silly Nibble chocolate bar in her top drawer.

"The pitch. Did you get it?"

"Oh yes!" said Vanessa. "We got it."

d.i.c.k nodded slowly. He should have guessed.

"Well done, Mzzz Superwoman," he said. "Even with your home life crashing around your ears, you still don't miss a single rung up that ladder."

"Did you actually phone for a reason, d.i.c.k?"

"Just wanted to say well done."

"That was 'well done,' was it?"

"Yes. Would you like me to say it again?"

"No I certainly wouldn't. Anything else?"

"Just to say that after such hard work, you really deserve a fortnight off with the children."

"Just remember the deal. If Jo's gone for more than two weeks, it's your turn."

"Fine," said d.i.c.k generously. "I could definitely do with a break."

"Is that all you called about?" she asked.

"Nope. Thought you might like to know that the children are going to bed now and send their clever mummy all their love."

"Thank you," said Vanessa. "Tell them Mummy's looking forward to using up two weeks of her precious holiday looking after them while Daddy sits in an empty shop scratching his b.a.l.l.s."

"Oh, I have to go, darling," rushed d.i.c.k, "one of them needs the toilet."

"I hope it's Tallulah," replied Vanessa, "because the others have been managing on their own for a while now." And she slammed down the phone.

d.i.c.k held the phone away from his ear, then very slowly put it down. Then he started rocking backward and forward, head in hands.

Chapter 19.

Jo was so busy in her first week at home that she didn't have too much time to brood on why Shaun hadn't returned the phone message she'd left him on her first day back. Looking after her mother was far harder than looking after any children because Jo was so emotionally drained. Hilda needed twenty-four-hour care and could only move fractionally. It was like looking after a baby, while coping with the grief of losing a parent.

However, her mind wasn't so one-tracked that she didn't notice something was up with Shaun. She started replaying recent conversations with him and realized they'd hardly spoken more than twice a week in the past month, and even then their conversations had been short and full of unspoken resentments. She kept thinking back to when he'd come to visit her in Highgate. On the surface, things had gone well between them-if anything, they'd been happier than they had been for a long time. And then she thought of how things had felt under the surface. And then she pushed all thoughts of Josh to the back of her mind. Until nighttime, when in the safety of her bed, in the safety of the dark, she scrunched her eyes shut, faced the bedroom wall she'd faced all the way through childhood, and let her mind free-fall from a great height, whizzing past heaven and landing in h.e.l.l, just thinking of him.

When she had a spare moment from worrying about her mother, musing over Shaun, and dreaming of Josh, she thought about Sheila. Sheila had also not phoned her back since her return. It dawned on Jo that she hadn't actually spoken to Sheila since the call when Sheila had asked about Pippa, when Jo had had to leave midconversation. It only occurred to her now, in the cold light of day, how insensitive that was. And that was weeks ago-or was it months? Sheila hadn't returned one of her voice messages since then.

When Shaun finally phoned, a week and a half after she'd got home, she hardly recognized his voice.

"Oh h.e.l.lo," she said warily. "How are you?"

"Fine thanks," said Shaun. "You?"

"Mm. Fine."

She was just about to ask him whether he'd got her message, when he asked how her mother was. She did a little hop, skip, and jump over concern and landed on anger.

"Fine."

"Oh good."

"She's back home."

"I'm pleased to hear it."

"Thank you."

They arranged to see each other that Friday night-in two days' time, nearly a whole two weeks after she'd come home. Neither seemed particularly excited about it.

Things were going just as badly at the Fitzgerald home. Vanessa stood motionless in the middle of her kitchen, silence percolating through every pore, her naked eyes fixed on the clock-11:15 a.m. Were the clock batteries running low? She considered going back to bed until Tallulah needed to be picked up. Ironically, taking this time off to be at home had felt, at first, like supremely beneficial timing-she hadn't had to face Anthony after their scramble in the Silly Nibble cupboard. But as the time had pa.s.sed, she realized it was the worst thing she could have done. All it meant was that she hadn't been able to tell him immediately that she'd made a terrible mistake. She'd had to nurse her guilt for a whole fortnight, her only company being all the loved ones she'd betrayed. It bordered on torture.

She had thought about phoning Anthony at the office, but that would have implied that their dalliance-dalliance? Did it even count as that?-held some significance for her. And also someone at home might find out. Oh G.o.d, had it come to this? Added to the stress of that, the isolation of being at home was doing her head in. Every morning, she had her daily update phone call with Tricia and Max, but their efficient brusqueness against the background office noises cut like a knife. Every time they were about to say good-bye she had to stop herself asking them to stop and chat. Was she like this on the phone when she spoke to d.i.c.k, in his empty shop? Did she make him feel this excluded, this irrelevant? And then the phone call would be over and Tricia and Max would hang up abruptly, leaving her to a day of relentless, mind-numbing silence.

She felt like her soul was slowly shrinking. And in only a few days, she had become a different person. She hardly recognized herself. She'd become dangerously introspective and started talking to herself. Her beautiful home had transformed into a prison, and she felt swamped by a need to get out of it. Unfortunately, the more swamped she felt, the less she was able to extricate herself from it. But when she did manage it, she seemed to have turned into a madwoman. She'd start striking up inane conversations with shop staff, she'd try and make eye contact with pa.s.sersby, she'd even chatted to the Big Issue seller she usually ignored, until his eyes glazed over. Her all-time low was one morning when she'd managed to rationalize to herself the possibility of inviting in the dustmen for coffee. She wasn't one for poetry but after nearly two weeks at home as a full-time mother, she felt like she was a flower rooted in the shade, wilting silently against a cold brick wall. The thought that she might never again find a nanny like Jo, who would stay with them for long enough to give the children stability, and that the only possible solution might be that she give up her day job, had started to haunt her in the dead of night.

It wasn't as if she was idle. Keeping house-to the standard she'd grown used to with Jo living there-was a thankless, invisible, and twenty-four-hour-long job. It made her office job look like sheer bliss. At least with an office job, everyone at the office might treat you as a form of undercla.s.s, but the outside world treated you with some respect. At home not even your own children respected you. In those seemingly endless hours between afternoon and evening when the children needed her attention most and when she had least reserves of energy or emotion, she'd think of Jo and want to weep.

As she stood in the silent kitchen, thinking such thoughts again and again, the phone made her jump. Was it Max? Anthony, maybe? She braced herself and picked up the phone. "h.e.l.lo, Vanessa Fitzgerald," she announced.

"I should hope so," said d.i.c.k cheerfully. "Otherwise, I'll have to start paying you."

"Ha-ha."

"How's it all going?"

"The kids are at school, and I'm just about to make a coffee to give me enough energy to kill myself."

"Oh. Don't do that, darling."

"Give me one good reason."