The happy mood lasted all through Christmas. Everyone noticed.

True to his word, Sean had picked her up from work on the 3rd of January and taken her to dinner at Joe Allen's, where they ate steak frites, drank a full-bodied red and talked for hours, knees bumping under the table, 'accidentally on purpose', as Mum would have said. She knew nothing about him, she realized, except for the very basic facts and provisional thumbs up Alastair had been able to provide when he'd stopped making fun of her, and Sean seemed keen to fill in the blanks for her. He was great, easy company he had a great delivery, everything he said was peppered with jokes and if the conversation was slightly more about him than about her, she really didn't mind. She laughed a lot, and felt far more comfortable than she might have imagined she would. He was one of four kids with an English father, a cardiologist at Birmingham City Hospital, and an Irish mother, a former children's nurse. Still married after forty years, and still in love, he said (looking at her significantly, she thought). He'd been raised in a middle-class suburb of Birmingham, the spoilt only brother of three sisters his father still called him the Sun God, apparently and studied Economics at St Andrews university. Two of his sisters were married, and he had two nephews, who he adored although most of the family was still in the Midlands, and he didn't get to see them as much as he would have liked. He made it sound rather like Birmingham was somewhere just inside the Arctic Circle. One sister Becky was doing a PhD on James Joyce at Goldsmiths College in London. At twenty-nine, he was six years older than Susannah was, more established in his career and his life in London. He was a bond trader, he told her. A good one. Things were good. He'd made enough money to buy his first house at twenty-three, though he still shared it with mates.

On the 7th, after daily phone calls and one delivery of a dozen American Beauty red roses that got both the long-married receptionists at her firm completely overexcited, he'd taken her to the theatre, to see Miss Saigon. And a week later, he took her to bed.

It seemed like time, although Amelia had laughed at her afterwards and said if she'd done it Susannah would have called her a slut. He swept her off her feet there was no other way to describe it, however hackneyed the expression. He'd taken her for drinks and for dinner at Claridge's, and then afterwards, he'd produced a room key and laid it on the table in front of her, saying that the room was hers for the night, and that he'd only share it with her at her invitation. That he'd never done anything remotely like this for anyone else, with anyone else. That he wanted to be with her, and that if she wanted to be with him, too, then he wanted the first time to be somewhere wonderful away from flatmates and alarm clocks and everyday things but that if she wasn't ready, he would wait until she was. That he'd wait a long time, because he had a feeling, already, that she might be someone worth waiting for.

It was a good speech. It had seemed almost impossibly romantic to Susannah. The gesture had both touched her, and excited her. It felt like something that should be happening to someone else to Amelia even. Not to her. So she'd nodded, shyly, and they'd walked hand in hand across the extraordinary marble-tiled lobby to the lifts, and then to a beautiful room on the third floor with a view across Mayfair.

She didn't know then how could she have done? that hotel sex was almost always way above average. There was something about the anonymity and the unfamiliar surroundings and the cool, clean sheets on the bed you'd never have to remake. And if Sean had known it at that point and had used it to his advantage, who could blame him? She was halfway to swooning and collapsing at the knees just from the romance of the offer, and the rest was just as unexpected and just as delightful. That was the word that sprang to mind the next morning as she lay in a fragrant frothy cloud of Floris bubbles in an enormous bathtub, blowing gently at them in her hands to watch them fall like snow all around her, and listened to a butler serving breakfast in the bedroom next door. She remembered Amelia's 'perfect' from all those years ago, and wondered how it might compare. This had been pretty good. Delightful, in fact.

Susannah believed herself to be absolutely in love with Sean. She felt like he ticked all the boxes for her. She believed in their shared values and their shared vision for the future. She wanted to make a life with him. She had been swept away that first night and she stayed swept on the tide of new feelings for weeks on end. She hadn't done anything wrong, anything to spoil it. It was fresh and new and simple.

Four months later they were engaged. Sean did that properly, too, of course. He drove down to Mum and Dad's one evening when she'd been at the Porchester Spa with Amelia, and thus was safely out of the way, and solemnly asked her father for his permission which was granted, Sean having made a very favourable impression on them both during several visits in the last few months. He'd even gone to church. There was a ring a sparkling oval emerald encircled by a row of small round diamonds, from Garrard and there was a bended knee. And an instant, tearful yes.

And eight months after they'd first met, on a mild and sunny August afternoon in 1994, they were married in Susannah's mum's beloved St Gabriel's church.

Planning the wedding had been more fun than she would have expected, although four months turned out not to be very long at all. Susannah bought a large lever arch file, and kept meticulous notes and records of everything. Sean's parents who she thought she liked a lot when she met them for the first time, a week after the two of them got engaged, when she and Sean took the train to Birmingham for the weekend offered to pay for half the cost of the wedding, after which Dad seemed relieved and more relaxed about everything. Susannah had wondered if his earlier tension was because he didn't think she and Sean knew each other well enough, and was relieved to discover his anxiety was of a more prosaic, practical nature. Mum was beside herself, and prone to sudden unexplained bouts of crying that came and went swiftly and could be provoked by anything from fabric samples to cake brochures. If she thought it was too quick to be getting married, she never said so. And Sean's mum had held her hand tightly on the drive from the train station to their home, and said that she and Sean's father had known, 'just known', only weeks after meeting, that they were right for each other, and that it was clear from everything Sean had told her on the phone about Susannah that he was sure, too. She still had an Irish lilt in her voice and it made everything sound lovely, most especially that.

Susannah had worn a dress from an expensive bridal shop in Bath, a long lean ivory sheath covered with Chantilly lace, with a wide apricot sash. Amelia and Kathryn had been her bridesmaid and matron of honour Kathryn was now married to Alastair since a whirlwind engagement and wedding after a May visit to Marrakech 'not too hideous' (as Amelia graciously put it) in apricot organza. She'd carried a bouquet of tightly packed peach and cream tea roses tied with a satin ribbon. Sean, his best man, Hugh, and the ushers (who included Alastair and Alex) wore traditional morning dress, with embroidered waistcoats to match the bride's dress made by Favourbrook, the exclusive tailor in Jermyn Street. Dad wore a navy suit. The men all wore an apricot tea rosebud in their buttonholes.

They chose 'Jerusalem' and 'Love Divine, All Loves Excelling' as the hymns. Sean wanted 'Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise', but Susannah's mum said the organist always had trouble with it.

They'd held a reception in a nearby small country house hotel, where Hugh's best man speech recalled the evening the two of them had first met, and how he instantly knew his friend was off the market the moment he saw him talking to Susannah. Sean nodded as his friend spoke, and grasped her hand. Susannah's dad had welled up and had stopped for a moment to recover his composure when he'd spoken about his dreams for his only daughter, of whom he was, he said, inordinately proud. A DJ played 'I'll Be There' by Mariah Carey as they danced for the first time as man and wife, and they cut a three-tier fruit cake decorated with sugar roses guess which colour? Alex got drunk on his own allotted alcohol supplemented with surreptitious gulps from other people's glasses and threw up not quite as surreptitiously in an urn flanking the front door of the hotel.

'Do you ever think he might be too perfect?' Amelia had asked, late in the evening, as the two of them sat outside on a teak bench, sharing a glass of champagne, the buzz of the party still going on inside.

'What do you mean?'

Amelia shrugged. 'I don't know. Nothing. Don't listen to me. Drunk cow.'

'You mean something, Meels. You always do.'

But she'd refused to elaborate. Gone off on a monologue about hats guests had worn. Susannah had let it go. Maybe she was just drunk.

When she'd hugged her, just before Susannah and Sean had left their reception, she'd looked at her intently. 'Be happy, Susannah.'

'I will,' she'd answered, completely confident that she would be.

They honeymooned in the Seychelles, where they made love every night and most mornings, in a room on stilts over water more turquoise than she'd ever seen, and learnt to scuba dive, which Sean loved and Susannah merely tolerated and was sometimes very frightened by because she loved Sean and wanted to be with him every minute. And came back two weeks later to a large pile of boxes from John Lewis full of Le Creuset cookware, Waterford crystal glasses and 400 thread count bed linen from their wedding list. Which they then moved into their new house, a three-bedroom terrace in Battersea they'd completed on just before the wedding, Sean having waited until he proposed to make the move he'd spoken of on their first date.

They'd gone back to work Susannah to her final year of articles and spent weekends painting and decorating the house in modern shades and fabrics, with silver framed pictures of themselves on almost every available surface downstairs, and throwing three course dinner parties for their friends, at which they got out their wedding albums and talked about their wonderful day, throwing each other misty-eyed smiles across the room.

That year they went to seven more weddings the hit movie of the year, Four Weddings and a Funeral, felt more like a fly-on-the-wall documentary than a romcom to her including Amelia's, when she married Jonathan at St Gabriel's in September.

She thought she'd got it right. Maybe it had always just been somebody else's blueprint for how her life should be.

1997.

But the end when it came came from him, and not her.

She had always believed she'd never have left him. But not necessarily because she still loved him, or because she'd made vows for life. She would have stayed.

Things changed. When he made his speech, Sean said it was she who'd changed, but she didn't think it was just her. It was everything.

It was as if they'd gone through the motions of this perfect, right thing. The courtship, the engagement, the wedding, the honeymoon, their first home together. They'd done it all right. And then everything stopped, the circus left town, and it was the two of them, just the two of them.

And it wasn't, she thought, because they'd married too quickly, and didn't know each other well enough to make the adjustments married life required. There was no toilet seat or nail biting issue. No gambling addiction. Nothing so obvious.

Just a slow, aching realization that there wasn't that much between them. Everything that had seemed so right on paper seemed suddenly insubstantial in real life. A shared vision for the future didn't mean much when you faced each other across the breakfast table on a Sunday morning and couldn't really think of what to say, preferring instead to read every article in The Sunday Times until it was time to meet friends for lunch at the pub and concentrate again on projecting the image of perfect, and perfectly happy, newly-weds that everyone else was also concentrating on.

The hotel sex from Claridge's became Saturday night with the lights off sex before the year was even over. Susannah wondered if she was bad at it, but Sean wouldn't talk about it, brushing her questions away.

Years later, when Susannah saw The Truman Show, she thought that her life then had been just like that.

She might have thought it was normal if she hadn't had the example of Amelia and Jonathan. They weren't like the others. They didn't care what anyone thought. They fought and bickered about extraordinarily trivial things through dinner and then you'd find them outside on the patio twenty minutes later, snogging the faces off each other like a pair of teenagers. Susannah envied them the ups and downs.

But her downs were coming. Sean left her thirty months later, four months after Susannah miscarried her first pregnancy, and six months shy of their third wedding anniversary.

Afterwards she realized that she wasn't as shocked as she thought she was.

He left her for a woman called Miriam. He was, at least, honest enough to confess to that straight away, and not to pretend he thought it was her fault. Or worse, that he needed to be alone the classic 'it's me, not you' speech that was never, ever true as far as Susannah could see. For Sean, there was someone else. He did seem genuinely distressed to have discovered that not only was he not in love with his wife or at least, not, as he put it, 'the way I'm supposed to be' but that he was, actually, in love with someone else, and he thought she was the one. It had all been too quick, after all, he said, the two of them, and that was his fault, he said he took full responsibility. He thought it had been time. But he'd been wrong, and he saw that now, and could he please have a divorce? She could stay in the house. Until it was sold, at least.

How could she be too angry when she realized he was saying exactly what she'd said to herself? That it had been time. It was almost, but not quite, a relief when he said it.

She mostly felt humiliated. Telling people was somehow more painful than hearing it herself had been. She and Sean had mostly done a terrific job playing their parts, she realized. Mum and Dad were as shocked as she'd ever seen them. That was the worst driving home to tell them.

Mum had opened the door, still in her apron. The smell of her roast lamb wafted as far as the hallway, and Susannah could see the dining-room table set with the Sunday lunch china and glasses. She hadn't said, when she invited herself over, that Sean wouldn't be with her. She hadn't wanted to get into it over the phone. Mum peered over Susannah's shoulder, back at the car, looking for Sean. Disappointment registered on her face when she saw that Susannah was alone. She didn't seem to notice the dark circles and rheumy eyes of her daughter's sleeplessness and crying jag.

Dad did. Dad always took in every detail of her face. 'Something's wrong.' His voice was calm and gentle.

She nodded, grateful for his perception.

She'd sat on the edge of her chair opposite the two of them on the sofa, and stared at her hands while she spoke. She heard her voice, speaking in short staccato sentences, tightly controlled. She heard a sob catch in her mum's throat, and when she looked up, her dad had taken her hand and was holding it tightly between his own. Mum had stood up then, and come over to her to hug her. Dad had stood behind the chair, awkwardly trying to enclose them both in his embrace. Afterwards Mum sat down heavily on the sofa again, pulling a handkerchief out of the sleeve of her pullover, and started talking, to herself as much as to either of them, while she sniffed and dabbed at her eyes. About Sean, and how she hadn't suspected a thing, and about how awful Susannah must feel, and then, finally, about how she was going to tell her friends up at St Gabriel's.

Eventually, she excused herself and went into the garden, leaving Susannah and her dad alone in the living room. She came over to sit beside him. He put his arm around her shoulders and she sank into his familiar embrace. He stroked her hair gently.

'She's not still smoking, surely?'

Dad smiled wryly. 'No. The cigarettes are gone, thank God. But she still goes out there, just like she always did. Calms her down.'

'I'm sorry, Dad. I'm so sorry.' Now that Mum had done her sobbing, Susannah's tears came again. She felt tremendously guilty about the wedding. And she felt like a failure.

Dad turned her round to face him, holding both her shoulders. 'Don't you dare say that, Susannah. You have absolutely nothing to be sorry for ...'

'But the wedding ... and everything. I've let you down.'

Dad's eyes filled with tears. The only other time she'd ever seen him cry was when Alex was born. She almost couldn't bear it, if Dad cried. 'You've let no one down. You've been let down. In the very worst way. My poor, darling girl. Don't you ever be sorry. I just need you to promise me that you won't let this change who you are. Because you're wonderful, my lovely girl. If he didn't see what he had, then he's a fool. But some day soon, I promise you, someone will. Someone who might deserve you.'

He'd pulled her close then, and held her for the longest time, and she tried to believe what he was telling her. Until Alex came home from football practice.

Amelia was the only person who didn't seem surprised.

Sean and Miriam had been married for ten years or so now. He hadn't rushed so headlong into his second marriage, it seemed. They had two kids a girl and a boy and they lived in Connecticut. Miriam was American, and resolutely determined, it seemed, to be civilized. This mainly entailed sending a Christmas card every year with a saccharine sweet photograph of the children both with Sean's blue eyes and strawberry-blond hair stuck on the front, wishing Susannah 'Happy Holidays and a Peaceful New Year'. Every year she gazed at her ex-husband's children and felt like Sean was laughing at her although, in reality, of course, he wasn't. He wasn't interested enough in her to laugh, or even know what there might be to laugh about.

Amelia always sniggered at the card, which helped enormously.

Present Day.

October.

Douglas had been in Chichester all weekend, overseeing his beloved boat into dry dock. Fin had gone unwillingly with him. Fin liked the sailing well enough, and he was pretty good at it, considering his slight weight and height, and even slighter attention span, but he wasn't interested in the hard work that went along with it. Rosie had gone with her mother to visit some cousins or other in Suffolk. Sylvie's explanation had been garbled and late, as ever. So Susannah and Daisy had spent Sunday together. In the morning, she'd read the paper from cover to cover while Daisy claimed to be doing homework in her room, with Green Day blasting. In the afternoon, at her suggestion, Susannah had taken her to Jigsaw and let her choose a whole new outfit for herself. She'd sat in one of the baroque velvet chairs, moaning that it was so dark she could barely see, while Daisy had paraded a series of options in front of her. She looked so grown-up, skinny as you like in the drainpipe jeans. Her long wavy hair suited the bohemian clothes that seemed to be in fashion this autumn and she looked, to Susannah, like a model. Daisy had fun with it, peeping seductively out from behind the curtain, then sashaying up and down the carpet in front of the changing rooms. Susannah felt a flash of something like maternal pride as she watched other women look at her with envy. Daisy looked good in everything. She settled on a pair of cords, a blouse with a small print and a long, thick sweater. She hugged herself with delight as Susannah paid the bill and tried not to look shocked, and then hugged Susannah outside on the street, squealing her delight.

Susannah had been carried away by something, and they'd marched arm in arm to L.K. Bennett to buy a pair of glossy brown ankle boots to go with the clothes.

'This is so much fun,' Daisy had noted, a child's happy face above the young woman's body, and Susannah had nodded her agreement.

Later, over a coffee and a piece of cake, she'd asked Daisy how Seth was, and been touched by Daisy's answers. She clearly believed herself to be in love with the boy. Her eyes shone, and the dimple she had always had in her left cheek deepened as she smiled at the thought of him. It was infectious, and it made Susannah feel 105 years old.

She tried to talk to Douglas about it that night, after he got home. He'd squabbled with Sylvie, dropping Fin off Susannah didn't know what about and he was crabby and cold. She ran him a hot bath, and poured him a whisky. Then she sat on the edge of the bath and scrubbed his back for him as the steam rose and he sipped his drink.

'You haven't done that for ages.'

'Is it nice?'

'It's very nice. Thanks.' He put a hand up to where hers was on his shoulder and covered it with his own.

She kissed the top of his head, gently. 'I had a great time with Daisy today.'

'You did?' He'd put his head back, and his eyes were closed.

'We went to Hampstead. Shopping. Had a coffee. Just girlie stuff.'

'That's nice.' He sounded non-committal. Disinterested, even.

But she was so pleased, she didn't want to let it go. 'I bought her some clothes, and she was so pleased, Doug. And she's gorgeous in them. You should see her. She's really beautiful.'

She did look like Sylvie. Susannah wondered whether that ever bothered Douglas. There was definitely some disconnect between him and his elder daughter. It may just be the usual adolescent stuff, but sometimes she wondered. And just occasionally she wished she knew Sylvie. She didn't want to be friends. But it might, sometimes, be good to be able to talk to her about the kids. Douglas didn't seem to want to talk much tonight.

'And we talked,' she persisted.

'Oh yes?'

'Yes. We did.'

'What about?'

'Life, the universe and everything. A bit, anyway. We talked about Seth.'

He bristled at the name.

'She really loves him, you know.'

'She's too young to know what she's talking about.'

'She isn't. I'm not saying anything ridiculous that they'll end up together, or anything like that. I just think she's very serious about him. He's her first love, Douglas.'

Douglas snorted derisively.

'Come on.' She tried to jolly him out of it. 'You're not so old you don't remember how strong those feelings are, do you?'

He sat forward now, and splashed his face with bath water. 'Hormones and rebellion.'

'It's more than that, Douglas.' Surely he didn't mean that.

'And I don't think it's helpful to have you believing every word she says about it.'

Just like that, she felt the tide turn. 'I didn't say that.'

'You're encouraging it, basically, aren't you, by even listening?'

She couldn't have disagreed more. She frowned, not sure what to say next.

'Are you trying to make me the bad guy, is that what you're doing?'

'Not at all. You're overreacting.'

'But you go shopping with her, and buy her God knows what, and she pours her heart out to you, and then the next time she wants to stay out or go to some party held God knows where by God knows who, she'll look to you ... and I'll be the monster if I say no. Which I will do, because I'm her father, and I know what's best for her.' Douglas stood up crossly, sending a tidal wave of bath water across the tiled floor. He grabbed a towel from the rail and stood rubbing himself vigorously. His penis bounced ridiculously.

She looked away, feeling anger rising in her now. These days, it came quickly. 'Where is this coming from? I'm just telling you about your daughter. I'm just telling you that we had a nice day, that she's happy, that I think she's in a good place. You should be pleased, you silly bugger. And instead, you're getting angry with me. What the hell for?'

'I don't like you being her friend. It undermines me, Susannah. Surely you can see that. We're not supposed to be their friends.'

'What am I supposed to be, then, Douglas?'