Pulling back, Cressida looked at her hands. She was going to try to explain.

He wanted to let them both off the hook. 'Not now. You can't know how you're going to feel, can you, when everything's up in the air? And I'm not a free man. The last thing I want to do is pressure you when you've got everything else to cope with.'

She put her hand on his cheek. He didn't like it: it felt maternal, sympathetic. 'Listen, Elliot. I do love you. And I promise you...' she took his hand and put it on her stomach, '... this baby is yours. It always will be. Okay?'

He got off his chair, laid his cheek next to his hand where she had placed it. Next to the baby. He'd ended up on his knees after all.

Susan 'Mrs...?'

'Yes?'

'It's Giles Higson. I'm the manager at The Cedars. We have met.'

'Yes. h.e.l.lo.' Tall and a little stooped, with damp palms and a limp handshake. 'Is anything wrong?' She was held still by a white-hot ring of fear.

'Not now. Everything's fine. I just thought we should give you a ring because we had a bit of a problem with Alice this morning.'

She didn't like the way he called her mother 'Alice', as if she were a child. 'What happened?' She leant back against the desk, facing the window, and watched the trees. Mary had looked up, when the phone rang, and when she had heard her ask if anything was wrong, but she left her work on the wide table and went quietly out of the room now, with the two coffee mugs they had finished a few minutes before. She held a curtain hook in one hand and worked it between her fingers nervously.

'One of our care workers found her in the car park. She'd packed her bag, said she was going home. She got quite agitated when we tried to bring her back inside.'

'Oh, G.o.d.'

'There was a taxi driver. He'd just dropped off a visitor, and she was trying to persuade him to take her to an address he didn't know. He said it wasn't anywhere local. Obviously he became suspicious, and alerted one of our staff.'

He talked like an animated brochure, the one that promised you a home from home. Christ, no wonder Mum had tried to run away.

'She's fine now. She had a nice sleep, after lunch, and now she's in the lounge with the other residents.'

Watching children's television, no doubt. That patronising tone again. Why are you telling me? she wanted to ask. What's the point of me knowing?

He answered her silent question. 'We'll have to report it to the GP, when he comes, and if it happens again, we may have to look at her security arrangements for her own protection, of course.'

Lock her up. Her mind was offering a steady simultaneous translation. 'Isn't the front door secure?'

Now his tone became even more didactic. 'It is, but your mother can appear to be very lucid at times.' I know: those are the moments where I am afraid that I have condemned her. 'She must have waited until someone came to the door who wasn't familiar with her... problems.'

'I'll come over.'

'Well, if you would like to.'

She could hear his subtext: that there was no point, really, that Alice wouldn't know if she was there or not.

'We serve supper at five p.m.' High tea, not supper, at tables covered with plastic cloths, to old people who dribble and suck food through their teeth. Not something you would choose to interrupt. Far better that it happens behind closed doors.

'I'll be there as soon as I can.' She hung up, but stayed where she was, still watching the trees.

What home did Alice think she was escaping to? Not Maple Cottage, her most recent home, certainly. Perhaps the house where she and Margaret had grown up. Or further back, the house Alice herself had grown up in. Susan had never been there, but it was still alive home in Alice's head.

With a deep sigh, Susan gathered up her handbag and shoved her mobile phone into it. 'Mary?' She appeared at the door. 'I've got to go and see Mum. Can you hold the fort?'

'Course I can. Everything okay?'

'I don't know till I get there. Mum tried to run away, apparently.' Her voice, which had been strong, broke and wobbled. She pushed the fingers of one hand into her eyes. 'They found her outside.'

'Thank goodness.'

Mary didn't fuss. She knew Susan well enough to know that she didn't want that, a sympathetic hug or a clucking, maternal 'there, there'.

She went over to the curtains she had been cutting and picked up the scissors. 'I'll be fine here. I'll lock up behind myself, shall I?'

'Thanks, Mary. See you.'

She drove slowly to The Cedars. It was getting harder every day to will herself to go in. She was less certain, each time, of what or who she would find. And she had pretty much given up hope of finding her mother.

Nicole Nicole looked at Gavin. Ten out of ten for effort. If only six out of ten for appearance. Mind you, even dressed like he was, he was a good-looking b.u.g.g.e.r. She wondered if everyone else saw what she did.

At this minute he was at the far end of the games field, with its freshly painted, not entirely straight lines, wearing a lace tutu over his suit trousers and a six-year-old's school beret, waiting to do his stuff in the fathers' race at Sports Day, the first he had been to. Until now Nicole had flown the flag for the kids at these events on her own she would watch through the camcorder lens, stopping to wipe away tears of laughter or pride, recording it all for Gavin to see later. She'd been running in the mothers' race since the twins were at nursery school, even when Martha was still a baby and her pelvic floor wasn't entirely up to it. But at breakfast that morning, Gavin had announced that he'd cancelled a lunch, moved a meeting, and would be coming to Sports Day.

The boys had been so delighted they had spat Rice Krispies across the table in exultant cheers, and Martha had rushed upstairs to get dressed in her 'bestest bestest shorts' to mark the occasion. It wasn't fair, was it, that fathers had to do so little to earn adulation that mothers could only dream of? But Nicole didn't mind not today. Instead of sensible trousers and flat shoes, and the prospect of her sore b.r.e.a.s.t.s being made more so by the exertion, she was wearing a floaty summer dress with underwear that was not suitable for running and pretty kitten heels. She was feeling wonderful. If this was atonement, and she had thought a great deal about that since the reading group had read that McEwan novel, then long might it last.

Last week he'd run the BBQ at the Summer Fayre, had donned an ap.r.o.n and spent several happy hours flipping burgers and drinking beer with the other mums and dads from Martha's nursery cla.s.s. He used his breaks to take Martha on the pony that was lumbering from one end of the playing-field to the other at a pound a go, or to watch the boys toss the welly over their shoulders.

Harriet and Tim saw her from where they were chatting to one of the teachers, waved and came over.

'Hiya!'

Nicole kissed Tim warmly. She hadn't seen him since Harriet had poured out her heart.

'Well, this is a turn-up for the books.' Tim was looking at Gavin.

'I know.' Nicole laughed. 'I don't know what's got into him!'

'Aren't you in this race?' Harriet asked Tim. 'You'd better hurry up it looks like they're about to start.' She sounded irritated.

'Okay, hold these, will you?' Tim pa.s.sed her his jacket and shoes, stuffed with his socks. Harriet looked at them with distaste and put them on the ground.

'Good luck, Tim,' Nicole shouted, since Harriet clearly wasn't going to.

Josh's voice rang out clearly from the throng of his cla.s.smates: 'Go, Dad, go.' Tim saluted, Rocky-style, in his son's direction, and trotted over to join Gavin.

Harriet turned to Nicole. 'You look lovely. Is that a new dress?'

'Yes.' Nicole dropped her voice. 'I've bought a twelve so that nothing shows.'

Just as quietly, Harriet replied, 'Okay, it's official, I hate you. How many weeks are you?'

'Eight on Friday.'

'Cow! I was in, oh, at least a sixteen by then. He hasn't guessed?'

'Not a thing. I can't wait to tell him. He's going to be so thrilled. Look at him he's like a different bloke.'

Not so much, Harriet thought, watching Gavin give his all to secure victory in the race.

'How are you?' Nicole asked.

'Bobbing along.' Harriet nodded determinedly. 'I'm okay.'

'Are you looking forward to your holiday? At all?'

Harriet smiled with closed lips. 'Portugal. Tim's parents' villa again. Not really. The kids'll love it, though.'

'You might, too, you know, if you give it a chance.'

'I know. I'll try. Watch me smile.' And she made one of her comedy faces. Nicole laughed.

'You should have come with us.'

'Oh, yes. Now that is a good idea. Love's young dream. I wouldn't get a moment's peace once Tim found out you two were having another baby.'

'Might not be a bad idea, you know.'

'You just want someone to suffer through bladder incontinence and toddler group with you.'

'Yes.' Nicole was giggling again.

'Besides,' Harriet went on, 'I don't think I can bear to see Gavin in a thong, not this year.' Gavin had a penchant for ridiculously small swimming trunks, which he hoicked up into the crack of his b.u.m when he was lying on a sunlounger to maximise tanning. At the thought Nicole and Harriet broke into fresh peals of laughter.

'What are you two laughing at?' Tim and Gavin were back, still breathing heavily from their race.

'Yeah, you look like a couple of naughty schoolgirls. What did I miss?' Gavin asked.

'Nothing... yet,' Harriet blurted, and the two women were lost in new gales of laughter. The men shrugged. They were used to it. Harriet and Nicole had been like this practic ally from the day they met.

'Fresh air's gone to their heads' Gavin opined.

'That or the caffeine in all the lattes,' Tim agreed.

Susan Susan watched Alice watch Ground Force. She was smiling beatifically. The Alice who had been here last month the one who had remembered when Susan and Margaret were little had gone away again, and left in her place the shrunken woman with skin like tissue paper gazing through the television screen into goodness knew what.

Through the safety-gla.s.s panels of the fire door Susan could see Roger talking to Sandy, his colleague from the practice, and the regular doctor at the home. Roger was nodding. Susan could tell that their voices were low, confidential. She wondered what Sandy was saying.

They'd been here for almost an hour. Susan had rearranged the photographs on her mother's chest-of-drawers, checked through her clothes in the wardrobe. She and Roger had taken her for a walk. It was a warm day, and the golf course behind the home was busy with middle-aged men in their Argyle T-shirts and big golf bags. Alice thought that was where Dad was. The three of them had sat on a bench with a bra.s.s plaque commemorating the life of Doris Johnson, who'd lived somewhere else but died here three years ago, a month shy of her hundredth birthday, and who had, apparently, loved this view. Alice was like a child, looking about her with a mixture of bewilderment and excitement. They had had to take an arm each when they guided her back inside. She didn't reach Roger's shoulder, and he had to stoop. She seemed actually to be shrinking, somehow.

Back in her room, she had wet herself, soaking the incontience pad on her armchair, so they had come down to the lounge. Susan had left the window as wide open as the safety-catches allowed to get rid of the smell.

Before they left she took her mother in to supper, sat her between two other ladies, who smiled and nodded, and left them all in a silence punctuated only by the sound of soup being sucked off spoons. Afterwards she always felt as if she'd been through a battle, even when Alice was more lucid. That was worse, actually those days tortured Susan with the fear that maybe Alice knew where she was, and what was happening to her. Roger told her it wasn't so. But how could he know?

Still, Ed was home. He'd been to see Alice himself a couple of times. He was a good boy, and he had loved Alice. ('Had loved': she already thought of her in the past tense.) She was surprised, and grateful, that he had been able to brave it more than once. She had asked him, last night, what he made of it.

'That's easy, Mum. I just pretend I'm in a sit-com.'

Maybe that wasn't such a bad idea.

In the car, Susan asked Roger what Sandy had been saying. Was there news?

'No, sweetheart, no news. I just asked him how he thought she was getting on.'

'And?'

Roger slowed the car so he could face her briefly. 'He thinks she's going downhill.' Susan had known that already. 'Shutting down, gradually.'

'Is it the home doing that?' Always the guilt.

'No.' Roger was firm. 'It's the illness. Her body is catching up with her brain, that's the best way I can explain it to you.'

'But it might not happen if she was at home with us?' The true answer to Susan's question was that of course it was quicker at the home, accelerated by the lack of love and attention. Roger had seen it happen before. But he was determined that Susan shouldn't carry this enormous burden, real or imagined. There was no way she could cope with Alice at home. 'There's no way of knowing.' He settled on that. 'But think about what your mum would have wanted. She wouldn't want to drag on in that way, helpless, dependent, for years and years, would she?'

'No.' Susan's answer was little and quiet. She knew Roger was right. Alice would want to die.

They had a lovely meal that night, the three of them. Roger took them to the Indian at the top of the high street, and Ed told them all about this new girl he'd met. He had a picture of them, taken in one of those booths at stations: they were laughing, squashed together on that tiny revolving stool. In one they were kissing. She looked a bit like Julia Roberts, without the curls and with slightly fewer teeth, and Ed was smitten, although he shrugged off his father's accusation.

He was gorgeous, her tall, handsome son. Susan felt, as she often did when looking at him, swamped with love and pride. She remembered when she would swoop down on him while he played and scoop him up to squeeze him, get her nose into his neck and smell him. Now he was far too big for scooping, and smelt more of aftershave, and sometimes of Silk Cut, than of little boy. Everything else might change, but that incredibly physical love remained exactly the same.

That night she couldn't sleep. She lay curled on one side, watching the gentle rise and fall of Roger's shoulder as he slept next to her. She wondered if Alice, too, was lying awake, wanting to die.

July.

Reading Group.

The Memory Box.

MARGARET FORSTER 1999.

A mother leaves her baby daughter a mysterious sealed box before she dies. Years later, when Catherine opens her mother's box the 'Memory Box' she finds it full of strange, unexplained objects, carefully wrapped and numbered, like clues to a puzzle. Catherine never knew her mother, but her idealised image, as the 'perfect', beautiful and talented woman that the rest of her family remembers, has cast a long shadow over her life. As she tries to solve the mystery of the box of secrets, she is pulled into the past and her mother's story, which reveals a woman far more complex, surprising and dangerous than the family legend has allowed. And in turn Catherine, fiercely independent and self-absorbed, discovers unexpected truths about herself.

'He's a bit of a dish, Suze.'