Nicole sat beside her for a few minutes, saying nothing, with one hand on her friend's shoulder. When she felt Harriet settle slightly, she said, in the tone she normally reserved for her children, gentle, comforting, 'Tell me what's wrong, Harriet. Please.'

'Everything.' Harriet sighed melodramatically. 'Every b.l.o.o.d.y thing.' Then she raised her head. 'I don't think I love him, Nicole. I can't remember if I ever did. I'm not in love with him. I don't want to make love with him, or be with him, or share things with him. And I thought I could make it all go away, and pretend it wasn't true, but I can't any more. I honestly can't.'

'Has something happened?'

'Yes, no. Well, nothing that counts. I'm not having an affair with anyone, although there was someone. But it wasn't about him. It's about me. And Tim.'

Nicole didn't understand, but she didn't want to interrupt the feelings pouring out of Harriet.

'I feel like, it's like you reach a certain age, and you choose the person you're going to marry and you marry them and get membership to this club, and it's a really nice club, and you like all the other members, and you get to have a nice house and clothes and holidays and stuff, and great friends, and you have these babies and these are like wow the best thing that ever ever happened to you, and you can't believe how much you love them, but at the end of the day, when they're in bed, and your friends have gone home and you're sitting in your beautiful house it stops being about all that other stuff and it's about that person you've chosen and only about them, and they have to be the right person, because otherwise all of the other stuff doesn't matter. And he's not, Nic. He's not that person. He's lovely and he's kind and he's good. But he's not that person.'

'What person do you want him to be?' Nicole asked.

'That is so easy to answer. I want him to be the person I love more than anything else that I love so much I would rather die than be without. That still gives me b.u.t.terflies. Like Gavin.'

'You wouldn't want to be married to Gavin.'

'Of course not. But I want to feel about someone like you feel about him. And I don't, not about Tim. I thought I might have met someone else, only he wasn't either it wasn't him so much as an idea of him, you know, and I just made myself look like an idiot.'

'You're losing me, sweetie,' Nicole said. She was a bit afraid of this Harriet. She was crying through the talk now, so that it was coming in waves from far inside herself. Nicole didn't have a clue who this someone else was supposed to be Harriet must have been keeping secrets from her. She tried to ignore the sting this wasn't about her. What had brought things to a head? Harriet had been moaning about Tim for months, but Nicole hadn't taken it seriously until now. Tim was a great guy, and he loved Harriet so much, loved the kids. Nicole knew better than most that heart ruled head but, on paper, at least, Tim was perfect.

She didn't mean perfect for everyone, she meant perfect for Harriet. Nicole could see the whole picture she'd been watching them together for years and years. Tim 'matched' Harriet, like she hoped Gavin and she 'matched' in the eyes of the rest of the world (if not, she had to admit, in Harriet's). Harriet was ditzy and chaotic, Tim was calm and sensible; Harriet was funny and flippant, Tim lent her sincerity and, sometimes, levity. There were differences but also vast areas of common ground in the really important stuff in warmth, caring, wanting the same things for their children. They even went together physically, Tim long and lean, Harriet smaller and rounder, but the perfect size to fit under his arm and be held.

Nicole remembered Tim telling her about their first meeting: a bit drunk, his eyes had filled with pleasure at the memory. He had said, 'I thought love at first sight was b.o.l.l.o.c.ks, and maybe it wasn't love, but it certainly wasn't l.u.s.t, because she looked a fright all tear-stained and messed-up but I just knew, like a lightbulb had gone on over my head, like in a cartoon, you know that she was the other half of me. I was born to love her it's why I'm here, you know. It's the answer to the big question. Now they're the answer, Harriet and Josh.'

Nicole had thought, that yes, she did know, that this was how it was with her and Gavin, but she had felt... if not jealous, exactly, then aware that Tim's feelings were finer, n.o.bler, if that didn't sound pompous, than Gavin's. She thought Harriet was the luckiest woman she knew. Tim's eyes would follow her round a room, not checking up or possessively but proudly. She had never seen him flirt with anyone else she didn't think he was capable of it, or even of registering other women. He was gone, he'd been gone from the first night he saw her.

Now Harriet poured out the story of the a.s.signations, the lunches and the eventual disastrous weekend with Nick. It wasn't punctuated with her usual humour, or self-deprecating irony, but with shame, regret; humiliation and more tears. 'I'm so sorry I didn't tell you before. I knew you'd try to stop me I knew you'd be on Tim's side.'

Nicole pulled Harriet's face up and looked into her eyes. 'I wouldn't do that I'm always going to be on your side. You're my best friend and you've never sided against me. That's what it means.'

'Even though you've been where I was putting Tim? I think that's what made me feel worst, what stopped me telling you.'

Nicole imagined Tim's face, and his pain. 'I would have tried to stop you, yes, not because I'm on some crusade for fidelity but because it sounds like it was always going to hurt you and Tim in the end. This Nick may not be a pantomime villain, but he clearly didn't have much regard for you or your marriage, did he?'

Harriet smiled ruefully. 'Oh, I think he's probably just as screwed up as the rest of us behind that good-time facade.'

'Probably,' Nicole agreed. 'I'm not bothered about him right now, though. I want to say something to you about Tim and it's not that he's a perfect husband, and that you'd be mad to leave him. That isn't for me to say only two people truly know what goes on within a marriage.'

Harriet looked at her friend and recognised the barb.

'I just want to tell you that I have been your friend, both of you, for seven years, and I think you're wrong about him and you. You certainly loved him when I met you, and you loved him when Josh was born, and Chloe, properly I mean, like you're talking about. You can't fake that, and I've seen it. And he sure as h.e.l.l has loved you every minute of those seven years I know it.'

Harriet was listening, and wiping her nose. Nicole knew she was on the edge of the safe zone of friendship, but she cared so very much for both of them that she took off her safety-harness and jumped into the void. Once she'd started, the diagnosis poured itself out. She didn't look at Harriet, but she knew she was listening intently.

'I think you've been telling yourself all these years that Charles was the one true love of your life because it never properly ended before you met Tim and that you married some second-choice subst.i.tute, and that therefore you can't have truly loved him. And you hate yourself for "settling", and you feel guilty because you've made yourself believe you're using him. Now you're trying to talk yourself into leaving him because you think that's the best solution.'

Harriet still wasn't speaking.

'And I think the thing about Charles it's rubbish. You were so young, and it was a first love, but it wasn't real it never got tested like real life tests you and you fell at the first hurdle. And this Nick guy, same thing. Playing games. But don't throw away what's real. I believe in you and Tim I truly truly do.'

Harriet knew that Nicole was right about some things, about Charles and about Nick. 'Why am I feeling like this, then, if things should be so great?'

To this Nicole didn't have a ready answer. 'I don't know. Call it a seven-year itch.' Harriet tossed her head impatiently. 'No, I don't mean that flippantly. I mean that familiarity breeds contempt and you're afraid there's something better out there that you might be missing. I think that's what Gavin feels, too, sometimes.' Anger misted Harriet's eyes.

'Well, maybe that's different.' Nicole steered the conversation skilfully away from the trouble spot. 'I think the wedding in the spring, and being in our mid-thirties, and stuff maybe it's watershed time. Something like that. Maybe you guys need some time away from the kids, and the day-to-dayness, you know?'

Or away from each other, Harriet thought. Nicole may have read the situation, and her mind, like a pro, but when it came to solutions, she really wasn't much help.

June.

Reading Group.

My Antonia.

WILLA CATHER 1918.

My Antonia immortalises the beautiful, wild-eyed immigrant girl who has haunted Jim Burden all his life. For Jim, Antonia Shimerdas symbolises the extraordinary contradictions of the American West: its harshness and untamed beauty, its blazing summers and bitter winters, its endless possibilities and vast unconquerable horizons.

'Ready to go?'

Susan grabbed her bag from the hall table and slammed the door behind her. 'My G.o.d, am I ready!' She practically skipped down the path ahead of her friend.

'Okay. So I'm guessing you loved the book?'

'The book? Hardly! Read it, didn't really get it, didn't really mind, although of course I won't admit that this evening, especially to Harriet, and I don't expect you to drop me in it. One man's meat and all that. I'm just in the mood for some fun. I want to sit on Nicole's perfect white sofa, drink a gla.s.s of perfect white wine and forget about the whole b.l.o.o.d.y lot of them.'

'Who's them? Not St Roger, surely?'

'No, not Roger. He's lovely. Obviously. My customers, for one, with their hideous taste and unreasonable demands.'

'Good day at work, then?'

'Not a good day. Not at all. One of those absolute b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, actually. Mary's been in a mood for what feels like weeks now. I think she's stressed about Clare, but that's hardly my fault, is it?'

'I must confess that I've read this before.' Good-natured boos all round. Harriet put her hand up to quieten them. 'But not since university, and everyone knows that children addle your brain so I read it again for this meeting. Slowly and everything. In case I had changed, and it wasn't that good any more. But it was. Actually, it makes me a bit nervous, because I think if you choose a book you've read before because you love it and you want everyone else to love it like you do, that's a bit risky. I loved this when I studied it. And I wanted us to be brave and read something that wasn't new, not something we chose because it was on the bestseller lists, or in the front window of Ottakar's, or because everyone else was reading it. This is a cla.s.sic, and I think we're ready.'

'Jane Austen, yes although never ask me to read one of hers for this group. Charles d.i.c.kens, yes but frankly the BBC does it better than he did, if you ask me. D. H. Lawrence, ahem, yes. This one, not so much. The guy in the bookshop even had to remind me how to p.r.o.nounce it. How embarra.s.sing is that? And, then order it for me. How can it be a cla.s.sic if the rest of us have never heard of it?'

'Don't tempt me to answer that question.' Harriet winked. 'Just take my word for it, it is. It's an American cla.s.sic. Which is what I was really into at college. Walt Whitman, Flannery O'Connor, Stephen Crane. All of that.'

'Now you really are losing us.'

'Yeah. I think I'm in the wrong reading group.'

'No, I think Harriet's in the wrong reading group. We're all pretty much on a level. She's the intellectual one.'

'Then we could read h.e.l.lo!, and Jane Green, and Wendy Holden.'

'Flannery who?'

'Hang on.' Nicole was remembering something now, and she sat forward excitedly. 'Didn't you want to call Chloe Flannery? Is that why?'

'Yeah!' Harriet was animated. The others made faces. 'Thank G.o.d for Tim.'

'Absolutely. That's cruelty. Flannery. Honestly? Can you imagine calling her at soft-play? Flannery! Flannery!' They were all laughing now.

'Okay, okay. And yes, I'm almost certainly in the wrong reading group, but I'm prepared to tolerate you, for altruistic reasons, of course.' They knew Harriet was laughing at herself, and the fact that she did that more heartily than she laughed at them redeemed her. 'But did you like it?' She looked round the room, hands out at them, palms open. G.o.d, she could be bossy. Nicole was almost expecting her to ask for a show of hands, then keep back anyone who said no after cla.s.s.

Polly answered first. 'I did. I didn't love it. But I did. I really like the nature in it.'

'Absolutely. That incredible sense of seasons, vivid colours, the hardships.'

'Come on, though, Harriet. You're the one who's always going on about pa.s.sion and drama and caring. Did you honestly get that from this, or is this the kind of thing that you read on another level?'

'Oh, you get it in spades. It's all here unrequited love, suicide, seduction, desertion, lost youth, pioneer spirit, disappointment. It all goes on.'

Clare now: 'I see all that, but the writing style's a bit funny. All that stuff happens, but it's not like it's the main action somehow. These major things, she writes about them like they are incidental.'

'Against the backdrop they are, sort of. I think she didn't want to write some melodramatic women's novel. That's one of the points. It's the hugeness of everything.'

'But it's the melodramatic women's novel you profess to like best, Harry.'

Harriet was exasperated now. She didn't think they had liked it at all, and she was tempted to think that must be because they hadn't got it. Hadn't understood it. Why did they keep bringing it back to her?

Clare came to Harriet's rescue. 'I loved her stoicism, Antonia's I mean. All those terrible things happened to her I mean, her life was an absolute drag most of the time. Her father killed himself, the man she loved got her pregnant and deserted her, but she never lost her positivity, she never gave up. And she gets a happy ending, doesn't she? I don't know if it's a proper happy ending. I'm not sure it is for Jim, the narrator, but it is for her, for Antonia. She gets a husband who loves her and gives up one life for her to go and work the land, and doesn't mind that she had an illegitimate child, and she gets all those children, and they're obviously her whole life when she talks about the oldest one leaving home, when she's grown-up and has a child of her own, the way she still couldn't bear for her to go.'

Harriet looked at her. They all knew that she had left Elliot and was living with her mum, but they couldn't say anything until she told them herself. Harriet didn't think she would be in any hurry to do that. She's very pretty, and she's lovely, and her life is a tragedy. She wants what I have, she thought suddenly. She thinks I have a perfect life a husband who loves me, and my children, who are healthy and safe. She thinks my life is untouched by unhappiness. And if I told her what my unhappinesses were, she would think I was mad. And ungrateful and wretched. It would be like complaining to a starving person that you couldn't choose between Indian and Chinese. She felt a shiver of something like shame. If Clare knew what she had done, almost done, with Nick... Maybe she should be talking to Clare, not Nicole. Then she might get some perspective and be able to pull herself together.

Clare saw that Harriet was looking at her. She didn't know what she was thinking, but she saw pity cross her face. She wanted to talk about it. She wanted Harriet to ask her what it felt like, to be unable to have a baby. To lose a baby you were carrying, and be so afraid, each time, that it would happen again, so that eventually you were just waiting for it to happen and joy and excitement didn't come into it. So that you could almost describe that feeling when you had the cramp, or saw the blood in the toilet, as relief, because the waiting for it was awful. And she wanted her to ask how it felt to have your marriage collapse around you because you couldn't have a baby and you had stopped knowing how to help each other accept it. She wanted to talk to Harriet about it all, but the others were there. That surprised her, somehow: she had never felt before like she wanted to talk about it, even to her mother. She couldn't stand looking at the sadness etched on Mary's face as she listened. But she could talk to Harriet. She would tell her, one day, she was sure, when she knew her a little better, when there was a chance. She smiled at her as the others chatted beside them.

Elliot Mary had told him where Clare was. Elliot hadn't explained why he wanted to talk to her, and Mary hadn't asked. He hadn't been to his parents-in-law's house since that first night, in April, when Clare had moved out, and he had seen Mary briefly only once, when she had called round to see him on a Sat.u.r.day morning, and they had had an awkward cup of tea together. Without Clare in his house, her mother's presence had seemed odd and sad, and they had both been relieved when she had stood up to leave. Reg had dropped her off, Mary said, at one of the girls' houses, she wasn't sure which. She thought they usually finished by ten thirty or so, and that Reg would pick her up. She didn't question why Elliot would want to go and collect her, any more than she would ever question his intentions towards Clare: they had been on the same side for so long, the three of them. She called Reg downstairs to give Elliot directions to Harriet's house. They offered him a drink, to pa.s.s the time until then, they said, but Elliot thanked them and declined. If he sat with them, in the chintzy living room of a dozen Christmas mornings and a thousand Sunday lunches, he would have to tell them about the baby and about Cressida, and, whether from cowardice, a sense of what was right or both, he couldn't do that now. They would hate him for it, he was sure; years of affection would be swept away by a tide of protective love for Clare. And he would miss them, but he understood.

He had spent the afternoon by the river, alone, watching the world through these new eyes he had lately, the ones which saw so much more because suddenly the old world was bustling with possibilities. Only the spectre of Clare's face still hung over him, and that was why he had made up his mind to tell her tonight: the reality couldn't be any worse than what he had imagined, and he wanted to be free of both.

He had a brandy in a pub, the one where he and Cressida had had that first drink all those months ago. It was comforting to be there among the happy summer crowd. It felt so normal to say, even only to himself, 'Yeah, I got together with my girlfriend in this pub. She's pregnant, you know, yeah, first baby. Cheers, yeah, we're chuffed about it.' Like other people. You must feel like this if you'd just come out of prison, or if you'd had a cancer that had gone into remission. He was coming out, too, out of a bad marriage. Because that's what it had become, whatever it had once been. A marriage where two people are unhappy is a bad marriage, however much you wished you could change it back into what it once was, or even into something different. You couldn't, it was, and he was out of it. And it felt good. He was blinking in the sunlight after years underground. More than almost anything, he wanted Clare to feel the same. Maybe today would be two steps back, but he knew, or at least he believed, that there were steps forward for her to take... faltering ones that he couldn't help her with.

Later, outside Harriet's house, he watched the women leave. They were loud and giggling, flushed with pleasure and wine. Clare was the last out, walking down the path flanked by Susan and another woman. Her cheeks were pink; she looked pretty when she smiled. Young and pretty. She stopped short and the smile faded when she saw him through the car window. She moved forward self-consciously, almost hissed at him, 'What are you doing here, Elliot?'

'I went round to yours. I wanted to see you your dad told me where to find you. He said it was okay if I came instead of him.'

She was obviously embarra.s.sed. A little louder, evidently for the benefit of the others, she said, 'But I've just offered Polly a lift home she and I go a different way from the others.'

Polly started to protest, and Susan stepped forward. 'I'll drop you, Polly. No problem.'

Polly accepted gratefully, kissed Clare's cheek, and was gone towards Susan's car. Elliot watched her.

It was quiet in the car Elliot's hand twitched to turn on the radio.

Clare wasn't speaking. She sat as far into the left pa.s.senger door as she could get, seeming to insinuate herself into its very fabric. And looked straight ahead. What was he doing here? What the h.e.l.l was he trying to do?

Elliot was terrified by her silent reproach. He knew he could not have the conversation he was determined to have in moving traffic, but he couldn't go back to her parents' house, and he didn't want to take her to what was now only his home. A pub wasn't right either. He pulled over into a quiet lay-by and turned off the engine. They were only a couple of minutes' walk from Mary and Reg's home.

'What are you doing?' An exasperated sigh. 'Elliot, I'm tired, it's late, I really don't want to sit here.'

'Just listen, will you? I want to talk to you.'

His tone made her listen. She honestly had no idea what direction Elliot would take. She wondered, for just a moment, what she would say if he asked her to come back, begged her to come home. She wouldn't go. This was the first time she had realised it. She didn't feel as if she was looking at the man she loved, although she had a.s.sumed, from the dull ache in her stomach every day, that she still did. Curious, because, for so long, he had been. She fixed her eyes on his mouth, and watched his lips while he spoke.

Now Elliot looked at her, and just talked. It came out like the rehea.r.s.ed speech it was, rushed a little for fear of interruption, a little clipped for fear of breaking down. 'I know how much this is going to hurt you. I'm sorrier than you will ever know that things have turned out this way for us. We should have split up long before anything like this happened. It would have been best for both of us. We don't have the answers to each other's problems any more, Clare. We haven't for a long time. I've made a mess of it, and I'm so, so sorry.'

Clare looked right at him while he talked, not blinking, or reacting. He hadn't told her anything yet.

'I've met someone else.' A kick in the solar plexus.

'We've been seeing each other for a few months.' A knee in the groin.

'She's pregnant. With my baby.' A clean pistol shot to the temple. Everything sounded further away after that. Elliot was rambling, from miles away. Trying to say things that would make that one thing better.

'We didn't plan this, Cressida and me.' She had a name, and Clare knew who she was. She hadn't met her, but she knew.

'It just happened.'

Still she didn't speak, and now Elliot could feel himself begin to squirm under her scrutiny.

'I think... I'm in love with her. I think she loves me...'

At last Clare spoke, because she wanted to drown those words. Inside she was screaming, but her words came out calmly and angrily. 'Thank you, Elliot. Thank you very much. Not just for f.u.c.king someone else for months under my nose. Or for telling me about it in a sodding car. Or for getting her pregnant by accident, for Christ's sake. But for sharing with me the fact that you love each other. Thanks for that. You're a real star.'

Elliot was almost relieved at her rage. Rage was so much easier.

She wanted to slap him, hard, across the mouth that had said those things. So she did. She slapped him as hard as she could. Years of anger and hurt went into the blow, and it made his head spin. She had never raised so much as a finger in anger before. He was glad she had done it.

She got out and slammed the door. Elliot wound the window down. 'Clare, wait. Let me take you home. We need to talk about this.'

'That's exactly what we don't need to do. This has nothing to do with me. Not any more. Just leave me alone.'

And she walked off towards Mary's house.