And she was. It was a relief, Gavin not being there. There were moments, usually late at night, in bed, when she ached for him or for someone. Their super-kingsize felt too big for just her. Martha had had a nightmare recently and got in with her for comfort. Nicole had let her stay all night. With Martha breathing rhythmically beside her, Nicole had dropped off and slept well for the first time in months.

She thought about the baby a lot. She'd have been big by now, nearly seven or eight months, feeling Braxton Hicks probably, and those awful pains in her lower belly that the midwife said were due to ligaments stretching. She'd be getting up in the night, finding it hard to get comfortable, knocking back Gaviscon like it was water. The baby would weigh five pounds or more, have eyelashes and fingernails. Her bag would be packed and in the hall, and the voluminous blue nightshirt with the pink heart on it that she felt was charmed because she had worn it for the twins' and Martha's births, and the tape she had made of her favourite songs to labour to. Maybe not that tape: it was full of songs that belonged to her and Gavin, the soundtrack of their courtship. 'Lilac Wine' had been playing in the wine bar that very first night. 'My First, My Last, My Everything', Barry White the first time they had danced, at a friend's party. 'Fall at Your Feet', 'Crowded House': they'd been sitting in the car somewhere in Norfolk, and they'd heard that John McCarthy had been released by his kidnappers, and his girlfriend had been interviewed on the radio, and it was such a moment, somehow, a 'you and me together in this big crazy happy world' moment, and that song had come on right after the news. Whitney Houston, 'I will Always Love You': the first dance at their wedding. Not that tape.

It hurt so much not to be eight months pregnant, so much more than Gavin had ever hurt her. Of course, in a strange way, that perspective helped. Most of the time she wished more than anything that she hadn't done it. She was stronger than she'd thought. She'd been strong enough to shut Gavin out of her heart, her bed and her house. She'd been strong enough to end her marriage, to do the practical things that were necessary to make that happen, to tell the children. She'd been strong enough to put herself in the job market. She'd have been strong enough to bring up a baby without Gavin. She just hadn't believed it at the time. It was never going to go away, she knew. It wasn't so much guilt she could see that eventually she would forgive herself it was sorrow, loss and regret. There would always be a gap, in her home, in her life, in her heart, for the baby that wasn't there. That was her scar.

She'd said that to Harriet, who had held her hand. Cue more tears. But Harriet preferred to laugh. 'Well, that may be so. Good to know, then, that Gavin's not the scar. He's more like the nasty rash that the nice pink ointment cleared up.'

'You are so irreverent. He was my husband for nearly ten years, you know.'

'Oh, I know. And he was a s.h.i.t for about nine and a half of them. Don't I just love the sound of that past tense?'

Harriet's good-riddance-to-bad-rubbish att.i.tude was good for her, she knew. She was never once flippant or dismissive about the abortion, just about Gavin. She'd been an extraordinary friend, and Nicole would love her for it for ever.

At home, she had to be nice about him: the children loved him. She didn't want to be Bitter Mummy, like so many of the school-gate crowd. That was just another kind of stranglehold, another gate on a happy future. She'd given them the Kramer vs Kramer version, the 'Mummy and Daddy aren't going to live together any more but we will always love all of you, and you will see Daddy lots and lots' version, the unexpurgated one could wait until they were older. He'd wanted to be there, but she had said no. She hadn't trusted herself not to explode at his display of familial loyalty and devotion. She told them, one Sunday afternoon, over Harriet's cure-all hot chocolate and cakes in the kitchen.

'Like Stephanie's mum and dad?' Martha had been apparently unperturbed, with her b.u.t.terfly mind and her goldfish memory, and slid off her chair to go in search of her Hamma beads, to make Daddy a heart for his new house. He hadn't been home for weeks, and Nicole realised that Martha had acclimatised already. She supposed that one day a stroppy teenage Martha would castigate her anew, but she had learnt from Polly and Susan that hormonal loathing was normal, not confined to single parents. Susan had told her a story, months ago, about Alex, greasy, angry and monosyllabic at fifteen. He'd been asked to choose a poem to recite in a drama showcase at school. He'd learnt by heart and delivered Philip Larkin's 'This Be the Verse', which began 'They f.u.c.k you up, your mum and dad...' and had earned him untold street cred with his cla.s.smates, an A+ for expression from his drama teacher, and a week of detentions from the headmaster. This was the lot of a teenager's parent: Nicole could hardly wait.

The boys had been thoughtful, more questioning. At least, George had. He wanted to know whether either of his parents would remarry, which had surprised Nicole. 'One day, perhaps, sweetheart, but if we do, either of us, it won't be for a long time, and then it would only be to someone you had had a long time to get to know, who loved you and whom you loved back.'

'Not "love" like we love you or Dad?'

'Of course not. You only have one mum and dad. But there are lots of kinds of love, aren't there? You love Harriet, and Tim, don't you? And Uncle Ian and Auntie Kate?'

'Yes.' He hadn't seemed sure. 'But I wouldn't want to live with them.'

'Darling, don't worry. You're going to live with me, only me, for years and years. Promise.' He had come to her for a cuddle.

William had always been more self-contained. Like her, Nicole realised. He had fiddled with his Beyblade, and not said much. 'Are you okay, my love?' she had asked, putting her hand over his.

'I will be,' he had replied, suddenly seeming so adult, judging his own recovery from the news. That made her sad.

Gavin always talked euphemistically about the divorce, like people talked about embarra.s.sing medical conditions. Maybe he still didn't believe her. She didn't much care whether he did or not: he would see. She couldn't tell whether it was his wallet or his heart that was throbbing in antic.i.p.ated pain.

He need not worry: she was not vengeful not nearly vengeful enough for Harriet, who thought he should pay dearly for his crimes. She wanted to keep the house, because it was the children's home. She wanted to be able to keep them at school and in a life they were used to. That was all. His money was unpalatable to her now, as though he'd been paying her for her complicity all these years. She looked now at her engagement ring, with its quail's egg diamond, and her eternity ring, with its broad band of stones and all her other jewellery, and doubted his motives in buying it. Like it was a quarter-carat per illicit s.h.a.g. Maybe she would sell it all.

He'd found a flat to rent, Gavin said, 'while they waited for everything to be sorted out'. It was near Canary Wharf, in a serviced building with a swimming-pool, close to lots of restaurants and a cinema. It had three bedrooms, so that Martha could have a room of her own. It was a nice place to take them, and she was glad. They were what mattered to her now. She thought of the time she had wasted over the past years, when she'd been too busy thinking about herself and Gavin to lie on the floor and play, bake cakes and just waste time.

She'd found a new momentum, a new rhythm. She was willing herself forward, out of this b.l.o.o.d.y awful year into the next. Normally she didn't like New Year's Eve: it was too close to Christmas, loaded with too many aspirations and intentions. This year she could hardly wait for it: a red dress, a real Chris de Burgh special, was hanging in the wardrobe. A gorgeous chiffon size-twelve dress. She would wear her hair down. Gavin liked it up. He had never liked her in red either, so it had jumped off the rail at her when she'd gone shopping with Harriet last week.

'You look fantastic in red. No wonder he said he didn't like it. You'd have been rescued from him years ago if you'd worn red to all those stuffy dos he made you go to.'

She was wearing it to the first party she had been to without Gavin in more than a decade. How sad was that? Lipstick, keys, money, Gavin. What a geisha she had been. No more. It was her friend Polly's wedding party. A friend who had never known Gavin, a friend she had made on her own. Harriet would be there, and Tim, and Susan and Roger and lots of people she had never met. And she was going to drink and dance and talk to people she didn't know, and introduce herself as single, and it was going to be great.

7.35 P.M.

Susan loved her Christmas tree. Nothing upset her more than designer trees. One of her clients, a woman who had more frilly-knicker blinds and silly little dishes of potpourri in her house than anyone else Susan had met, had a pink tinsel tree on which hung only pink and silver b.a.l.l.s. Susan thought it was hideous, and completely unChristma.s.sy. Her own, which she was sitting in front of now, rubbing her shop-weary feet, was a proper Christmas tree. Seven feet of Norwegian greenery, festooned in a thousand different colours with ornaments collected over the years, from holidays and gift shops and, her favourites, from nursery and school, carefully brought home at the end of term: the toilet-roll-and-crepe-paper angel that looked more than a little like Eddie Izzard, the doily stars that had lost all their glitter, the little pictures of Alex and Ed with tea-towels on their heads, set in frames of pasta shapes spray-painted gold. Every year when she got out the boxes she sat in a reverie. She couldn't remember which years, which plays, which son, but she knew that they were part of the quilt of her family life, and she adored them all.

It would be strange this year without Alice. She glanced at the picture of her on the mantelpiece. She had taken it last Christmas, just before the film she didn't remember which one began on BBC1. The boys, flanking her as she sat stately in the armchair, were still wearing their paper hats, and Ed had that fluorescent string down one arm. Alice was smiling that faintly bewildered, staged smile that people of her generation always wore in pictures. She looked so well, compared to the Alice of the spring and summer, so with it, although it must already have been happening. We didn't know, she thought, remembering the day. We didn't know it was the last Christmas she would be here. The last time she would help me peel the sprouts and the parsnips while the boys went to the pub. The last time the whole family would be hushed to listen to the Queen's Christmas broadcast. The last time that the living room would smell of the lily-of-the-valley soap and old-fashioned drawer-liners Alice liked to receive.

Roger had said they should do Christmas differently this year. He thought it might make her absence less acute. But Susan knew it wouldn't make any difference if they opened their presents before breakfast instead of after, or ate their dinner at supper-time instead of in the early afternoon. Alice still wouldn't be there. Maybe next year. Maybe they'd even go to Australia, take up Margaret on her invitation, but this year she wanted to do it like they had always done it it would be okay to remember and miss her. She wanted the comfort of familiarity: so much had changed this year. When that picture had been taken Alice was alive and her mum. Now she was dead, and she wasn't her mother. It didn't get much more different than that. When Alice had posed with Ed and Alex, Margaret was someone they didn't think about much, a distant, difficult sister Susan had little to do with, living with her husband in Australia. None of that was true any more, either.

Margaret came in with two mugs of tea. 'Here you go.'

'Fantastic. Thanks, Mags. Just what I need.' She took the mug gratefully. 'Now, what's the time? About half seven. I've got a few minutes. Are you sure you won't stay?'

'Sure, thanks for asking, though. I don't think it's my cup of tea.'

'Don't knock it till you've tried it. I didn't think it was mine. Actually, it's a lot of fun. I look forward to it every month now we have a laugh.'

'I've already fixed to meet up with that cousin of Lindy's remember the one I was telling you about?'

'Oh, yes, I'd forgotten.'

'Can't really see the point, we don't know each other from Adam, but that's the Antipodean way, isn't it? It's like you're twelve thousand miles from home so you have to find the nearest Australian and bond. Explains Earls Court, at least.' She smiled.

'If you can't face going out, you could always cancel and hide out with Roger. He'll be home soon.'

Margaret wrinkled her nose. 'That'd be right. Roger's dream date supper in the kitchen with me.'

'Don't be too hard on him! He's getting his head round you. Slowly.'

'And your mate Polly isn't too gone on me either, is she?'

'They'll all get used to you. The new improved you. You've got to admit, Maggie, you've never gone out of your way to make a great impression on either of them, have you?'

'No. That's true.' She thought for a moment. 'G.o.d, when I think about Mum's funeral I cringe. I was such a b.i.t.c.h, Suze.'

'You were.' She had been. No point softening the blow. They'd promised each other they'd only be honest from now on. Too many wasted years.

They fell quiet, looking at the tree, and the fire.

'You love Christmas, don't you?'

'Best time of the year.'

'Just like Mum. Do you remember, we all used to have new outfits from the tallyman? Took her most of the year to pay for them and then she started all over again.'

'I remember.'

'You used to decorate together, the two of you.'

'Did we?' Susan remembered the crepe paper they had twisted and fringed with scissors and hung criss-cross in the front room, and the balloons. They didn't have a tree, in those days. There had been a big one in the town centre, that was all, that they had stared at in wonder and excitement. Once or twice Alice had taken them up to London, on the train, when they had the money for it, to see the lights in Oxford Street and Regent Street. She was sure they'd been more impressive then, all different colours, and huge. These days it seemed to be all about whichever five-minute wonder of a pop group switched them on; the lights looked like an afterthought, white and spa.r.s.e. Then again, maybe it was a child's memory at work. She remembered other Christmases when they hadn't gone to see the lights, when Alice had left them with their dad last thing on Christmas Eve and gone down to the market to buy the boxes of tangerines they were selling off cheap.

'Do you remember our stockings?' Dad's socks, pinned to each of the wing-backed chairs in the front room.

'Yes! And they always had a tangerine and a handful of walnuts and hazelnuts stuffed into the toes.'

'That's right. I did that too, for the boys, when they were little.'

'You didn't?' Margaret was laughing at her now.

'I did. Not that they ever stood much of a chance against the chocolate and sweeties. Always went back into the fruit bowl on Boxing Day, as I recall.'

It was there now, on the coffee table. A bowl of tangerines and nuts, and the pewter nutcrackers they had had as children. Ineffectual in their little hands, but very pretty, with a squirrel at the top.

Margaret was looking at it. 'It made me feel left out. You two loved Christmas so much, and you both got so excited and carried away, and I always felt a bit silly. Believing in Father Christmas, and trying to pretend the presents weren't the same things we had seen in the toy-shop window and on the market for months beforehand.'

'Oh, Maggie.'

'I just let you two get on with it, really. Stayed out of the way.'

'I never noticed.'

'You never did. You were always in a world of your own. Busy being just like Mum.'

Susan gave a sad laugh. 'Ironic, isn't it?'

'Isn't it just? I think that was one of the things I loved about going to Australia, saying goodbye to those Christmases.'

'How did you celebrate it there, you and Greg?'

'Not much. Went to the beach, usually, treated it like any other day off. He was never any good at presents and that sort of thing. I usually bought myself something on his credit card. He wasn't mean, just wasn't really into it, which suited me, pretty much.'

'What about since Greg?'

Margaret grinned. 'Much better. I mean, I don't think I could ever feel the way you and Mum did about it, but I go to Lindy's she always has this huge drunken barbecue, really typical Aussie stuff. There were about thirty of us last year. We cook, and drink, and eat, and dance. And she's got these mad Greek relatives, and they all smash plates and stuff.'

It didn't sound very Christma.s.sy, but it did sound fun. Susan tried to picture a laughing, lightweight Margaret in the thick of it all. Maybe she could see it. She had a lot of unlearning to do about her sister. 'I'm sorry,' she said.

'About what?'

'Sorry we made you feel funny about Christmas.'

'You didn't do it on purpose. That's just how you were.'

They were quiet for a minute or two.

'It helps me, you know. Knowing that you weren't Mum's.'

Susan didn't know how to take that.

'I don't mean that how it sounds. It's hard to explain. I mean, you and Mum were more alike than she and me were, I know that nothing to do with biology. But now that I know how she came to be looking after you, it makes me think that maybe she tried harder with you than she did with me because she thought she had making up to do, you know?'

Susan had thought it herself so many times, since the day they had found the letter.

'It was an amazing thing that she did, wasn't it?' Maggie said.

'It was. I feel slightly in awe of her when I think of the selflessness it took for her to do that.'

'Makes you think, doesn't it? I don't know if I could do that for someone else.'

'Even your own sister?'

'Especially my own sister.'

Susan hit her playfully, with a cushion. Then they were quiet again, thinking about Alice. These were hard things to think about, and hard things to say.

'I bet it made her sad.'

'What?'

'That we didn't get along.'

'She never once said so. Did she to you?'

'No.' Margaret shook her head. 'Not that I ever gave her the chance. I b.u.g.g.e.red off, didn't I, as soon as I had the chance?'

'I wonder if she felt guilty?' Then Susan answered her own question: 'Of course she did. All mothers feel guilty.'

'So she never talked to you about it? I sort of thought she would have done. You two have always been so close.'

'Not close enough for that I guess. She missed you, I know. And she sometimes said she didn't understand how things had gone wrong between you and her. She loved you you know that, don't you?'

'Yes.'

'She made a promise, to Dorothy, I suppose, and my G.o.d she kept it.'

'I've been sitting over there in Australia all these years, eaten up with jealousy. I feel like I've wasted so much of my life, Suze.'

Susan thought she might cry again. This new Margaret, with all her nerve endings on the outside, was a revelation to her. It was as if a dam had burst inside her. She wasn't sure she had the energy to cope with her, but she knew she wanted to try. She wished she was religious, because then it would be possible to believe that Alice could watch her two estranged daughters moving forward without her, more together than they had ever been. That was a nice thought, the childhood idea of Alice in white robes and halo, watching them with Dorothy from a fluffy cloud. Then again, that made it sound like she was doing it just for Alice, and that wasn't true. She was doing it for herself. She wanted to keep part of her old family, however much she understood that she, Roger, Ed and Alex were a new one, and Margaret was all that was left. She wanted to love her, and be close to her, and she was just beginning to see that that was possible. She put her arms round her sister, her cousin-sister, and held her.

December.

Reading Group.

Girl with a Pearl Earring.

TRACY CHEVALIER 1999.

'As historical fiction, Girl with a Pearl Earring convinces, but as a study of human nature, honed by hindsight, it dazzles. Chevalier brings an impressive combination of pa.s.sion, outrage and perception to a novel which is beautiful and brutal.' Irish Times.