Rosie shook her head vigorously.

She patted Rosie's gently heaving form gingerly. 'Okay. I'm going to go, Rosie. I'm going to go, but I won't be far away. If you want to talk to me, come and find me. Okay?' She stood up, feeling bizarrely embarrassed by Rosie's tears and her own inadequacy, and took two steps towards the door.

'Susannah?' Rosie had half sat up, and was holding her arms out towards her.

'Oh, love ...' Susannah could have cried herself, but she went back to the bed and sat down, almost falling backwards as Rosie launched herself at her. She put her arms around the child and smoothed her hair, thinking of Amelia, crying in the hospital chair, and of Daisy a few weeks earlier, sitting at the kitchen table red-eyed, and suddenly felt very tired.

Rosie's story spilt out of her slowly and, at first, made little sense. Susannah had to concentrate hard she was drained herself by the day she'd spent with Amelia. She listened, asked questions, and began to piece together what was going on. And as she understood, she began to get very, very angry. Rosie was being bullied at school. Not physically. No one was hitting her. (Susannah couldn't help but think that would be easier to deal with.) Evidently there was a small but toxic group of girls who were targeting her every day, singling her out in the big class. She was fat, they said. Roly-poly Rosie. Fat and ugly and stupid. Rosie hadn't been invited to a birthday party all term, she said. And only one last year. And all the girls in the class had been invited to that, so it didn't count. Her distress and confusion as to what she had done to deserve this was heartbreaking to Susannah, who hadn't heard a word about this up until now.

'Have you told your mum?'

Rosie nodded, and sobbed and sniffed.

'What did she say?'

'She ... she said ... she said I had to fight ... my own battles. She said what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.'

Jesus. What a stupid woman Sylvie was.

'Has she telephoned your teacher? Or been in to see her?'

'She said it ... would ... only make things ... worse ...'

Susannah bit back her anger, and held Rosie in her arms, smoothing her hair and whispering that it was okay. Eventually, Rosie lay back, calmer, and Susannah pulled her duvet up around her, drying her cheek with the back of her hand.

'Let me tell you a few things, Rosie. Firstly, you are not fat, or ugly or stupid. You're none of those things, do you hear me? Anyone who says so is an idiot. You're a sweet, pretty, perfectly normal, smart kid. Secondly, I am afraid that I don't agree with your mum. I don't think your dad will either. Some things, I know, you have to sort out on your own if this was a fight with a friend, or if we were only talking about one girl, or something like that. But this is bullying, Rosie. This is nasty, mean girls in a gang deliberately trying to make someone else feel rubbish, because that's the only way they can feel good about themselves. It's bullying, and it needs to be stopped. And we're going to help you. Okay?'

Rosie nodded.

'We're going to put a stop to it.'

She'd stopped crying now. She looked sleepy.

'I'm sorry, sweetheart. I'm sorry we didn't know. You could have told us, you know? You could have told me.'

When she'd settled Rosie down, Susannah went to find Doug in his study.

'Didn't hear you come in. How was it?'

She sat down heavily on the footstool, and laid her head on his lap.

He stroked her hair. 'That good, huh?'

'Did you know Rosie was being bullied?'

'No. Bullied? Who told you that?'

'She did. Just now. She's downstairs, crying in her room. You didn't notice anything this evening?' She couldn't help the trickle of resentment in her voice.

'No! She seemed fine. We had a pizza. They ate theirs in front of some show they apparently "had to" see. She went to bed fine. What's going on?'

Susannah retold the story she'd extracted from Rosie, including Sylvie's solution. 'I'm sorry, Doug, but that woman really is the most unspeakable, insufferable, ridiculous idiot.'

Doug laughed. 'She speaks well of you, though.'

Susannah slapped his thigh. 'Don't laugh this is serious.'

'What do you think we should do, then?'

'Well, it's obvious we've got to speak to her teacher. On Monday.'

'I'm away on Monday. Remember?'

She'd forgotten.

On Monday morning, Susannah walked to school early with the kids. Daisy hung back on the corner, waiting for her mates. Fin disappeared to join a game of football on the playing field, slinging his backpack on to the muddy ground. His shirt was already untucked, and one shoelace was undone. Susannah walked with Rosie to her classroom. The teacher was sitting at her desk with the door closed, reading something. 'Wait here, Rosie,' Susannah said, and knocked, opening the door as she did so.

The teacher was obviously irritated to be disturbed. She stood up and pulled primly at her twinset, before fixing Susannah with a rictus smile. She was pretty in a haughty sort of way, and young. Not a mother, Susannah guessed. And not all that sympathetic, by the look of her.

She took a deep breath. 'You're Rosie's teacher, I believe.'

'Miss Norton, yes.' She extended a hand. 'And you are ... ?'

Susannah hadn't been to parents' evening, of course. Sylvie and Douglas always went together to those things.

And she was?

Who was she?

She was Rosie's father's live-in girlfriend.

And right now, she was all Rosie had.

She hesitated for only a moment. 'I'm Rosie's stepmother, Susannah Hammond.' She saw Miss Norton's glance take in her ringless left hand. She drew herself up erect. 'And there's a problem in your classroom ...'

Sylvie rang that night, just as Susannah was about to climb into a hot bath. Work had been stressful everyone wanting something from her. And the house had been its usual Monday mess when she got home she'd spent an hour just moving things from where they were (floor, sofa, kitchen) to where they should be (kids' rooms, cupboards, fridge) and feeding the voracious washing machine another load of towels and sheets. Then she'd found herself too tired to cook anything for dinner, so she'd eaten a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and a slightly overripe banana in front of Have I Got News for You and then come upstairs to fill the tub.

'Doug's not here, I'm afraid. He's away at a conference.'

'I wanted to talk to you.'

That never happened. Susannah felt herself tense up.

Sylvie carried on. 'You went into school today and spoke with Rosie's teacher.'

'Miss Norton. Yes.'

'She called me this afternoon and told me what had gone on. Did Douglas know you were planning to do that?'

'Yes. Of course. He would have gone himself, but he had to leave early this morning the conference is at Gleneagles. In Scotland. And nothing "went on", as you put it. There was a situation which needed to be addressed and I brought it to her attention.'

'You had no right.'

'Pardon me?' Susannah was shocked. And she was tired. Premenstrual, too, she realized. Sylvie had picked the wrong night.

'She's not your child, you know.'

'I'm well aware of that, Sylvie. Just as you were well aware, I gather, of what was going on at school.'

'Of course I was.' Sylvie was all righteous indignation.

'But you hadn't done anything about it?' Susannah had little patience for her.

'I had given Rosie the tools to deal with it herself, which is how I thought it needed to be sorted out.'

Susannah detested that kind of language. 'The tools'. She couldn't keep the sarcasm out of her voice. 'Well, the tools weren't doing the job, Sylvie. I found her sobbing in her bed on Friday night. You weren't here. Something needed to be done.'

'Not that. Not by you. I won't have it.'

Susannah almost laughed. She pictured Sylvie fulminating the yoga retreat hadn't done a lot for her chi. 'Sylvie, I'm not going to have this conversation. I'm tired, and I'm going to take a bath now. You should be thanking me, not having a go at me, but since there is no chance of that happening, you'll excuse me.' And then she hung up.

It felt great. She caught a glimpse of her naked self, hair piled on top of her head, in the bathroom mirror, and gave herself a reflective high five. 'Let's hope she never finds Daisy's little pink pills and traces them back to me,' she offered out loud to herself, giggling just a bit as she sank gratefully into the bubbles.

Rob Rob had been thirty-seven years old when he met Helena. Thirty-seven years old, and Susannah was still, up until that point, his longest relationship to date. And probably the most mature, too.

There'd been women, of course, although not as many as most of his friends had had. The longest gap that had come after Susannah. It was two years after her letter arrived before he'd even been with another girl. That letter, and everything else that was happening to him, had precipitated a period in his life when he was as off the rails as it was possible to be when you were an officer in the RAF. Always conscientious on duty, he'd drunk too much, and smoked too much when he was off duty things he'd never really done before. Everyone else did. You had to, over there. Fear and boredom were a dangerous combination. If he was escaping from more than everyone else, he never talked about it. He told his mum he and Susannah were over, for good this time, on the phone, and said he didn't want to talk about it. She never pushed. No one else asked. He tore up the pictures he had of her one strip of passport-booth pictures of the two of them taken at Waterloo station, laughing and kissing, and several of Susannah alone that had been taped above his bunk and threw them away, fighting the temptation to keep just one. Everything else that connected the two of them was either in his head or in a small cardboard box in the loft at his parents' house, and he did his best not to think about either store of memories at all, although sometimes, late at night, when he was really tired, it was hard to keep her face out of his mind.

He was relieved of his virginity on his twenty-first birthday, by the sister of a mate of his from the regiment, after a drunken night in a bar and a garbled confession that she'd always fancied him like mad, but he remembered very little about it except that, the next morning, she smelt smoky and wasn't as pretty as he had thought the night before.

Then, over the next seventeen years, there had been a dozen different postings, several different ranks and a few girls. He was a good-looking guy, who knew how to be charming without being in the least oily, and women liked him. Some were in the regiment he lived, wherever he was stationed, in the Officers' Mess, and there were always younger female officers up for a bit of fun, although you had to be careful. Some were sisters, friends of friends he met them on skiing holidays, or at parties, in pubs. Set-ups, sometimes. Random, mostly.

He never fell in love. In lust, maybe. And he was fond of some. The relationships sometimes lasted a few months, and they were mostly a lot of fun. He'd gone out with one corporal for almost a year, although she was in the Falklands for six months, and he was in Scotland, so it hadn't really counted. He wasn't sure anyone had really fallen in love with him either. He didn't give much thought to whether he was unlovable.

Most of his mates married, in time. The rules had been changed so officers could marry other ranks, and some did. Pilots often married what were jokingly called 'trophy wives' good-looking, glamorous civvies. He was one of the older guys in the mess, although divorced men often moved back. He was a best man twice, and an usher several times. But he never got close himself. He never looked at a woman and thought that he wanted to go through life with her by his side. There were periods when he didn't want to be tied down, and periods where he saw his mates going through messy relationships, and couldn't see the point especially when young men in his regiment came to him asking for leave to go home to sort out bad marriages. And there was no one who moved him that way.

Until Helena. She was different. He was different, too. Timing was everything, didn't they say? He was beginning to be tired of his life. There were things he began to want that he hadn't craved before. He wanted a home away from the mess. A house. He wanted children. He saw his mates with their kids hoisted on their shoulders, and began, at last, to feel like something was missing.

And then there she was. In the right place at the right time. They met in Germany. The first time he saw her, she wasn't in uniform he thought she must be one of the civilian teachers on the base she was wearing tight white jeans and a T-shirt. Her blonde hair had been longer then, and it had been tied in a high ponytail that swung as she walked and it was a great walk past him one sunny afternoon. He'd felt a jolt of lust it had been a while and an appreciation of her leggy prettiness, but thought nothing more of it. The second time, she'd been in uniform, and it was the walk that he recognized, even though the high-heeled sandals had given way to standard-issue black boots, and the ponytail was subdued into a bun. It had taken a few more smiles to engage her, and a week or two to persuade her into conversation, but something about her had made him persevere.

Helena, for all the blonde slightness, turned out to be as tough as old boots, and absolutely not interested in being a notch on the bedpost of a senior officer, even one with rather amazing dark brown eyes.

Raised by a strong, capable single mother in a small flat above a bakery in Cardiff, she'd joined the RAF because it was a way out. A route to a life different from the one she'd had. She had a stronger sense of who she was than anyone Rob had ever met before, and sometimes the age gap between them felt like it should be the other way around.

Her mum, Helen, had been only fifteen when she'd fallen pregnant with Helena. She'd married her boyfriend three years older than her, but not as bright the same month she turned sixteen (pushed into it by her parents), and three months before Helena was born. She added the 'a' to her own name when she went to register the birth a couple of weeks later. She wanted something extra for her daughter.

Helena's father had stayed until she was four. She hadn't seen him much since then he'd paid token visits for the first couple of years, though he'd never paid child support and she barely remembered him.

Helen was a good looking woman who'd never had much fun before she became a mother. There'd been a number of 'uncles' in Helena's childhood, some of whom she'd hated, and some of whom she'd regarded with fondness. But they never lasted long, her mother's relationships. The two of them were the unit, and Helen hadn't ever let anyone get very close again.

She could be terrifyingly formidable, Helena's mum, but she loved Helena fiercely, and she'd raised her to be independent and self-sufficient.

It was that which had most attracted Rob to her when they began to get to know each other over their months in Germany. He liked her honesty and her straightforwardness. She seemed simple, uncomplicated. Most girls didn't. She was fun, too. She laughed easily and often, and about silly things. He began to feel lighter and freer when he was with her and, at the same time, more grounded than he had done in ages. She was sexy, too, in a way that wasn't obvious, but which, once you were tuned into it, was enthralling. She did the seducing, in the end, their first time.

By the time he recognized somewhat surprised at himself that he had fallen in love with her, she was way ahead of him.

He hadn't already decided to marry her when he saw Susannah at Alex's wedding in the summer. But somehow, seeing her again made him think about it. Susannah was lost to him just as lost as she'd been all those long years he didn't see anything in her face, or in her eyes, that told him otherwise, and living without her was by now an old habit. It didn't stab him with pain, but seeing her was like feeling an old injury that ached in the rain sore, but bearable. But it reminded him of how he could feel. Of what he'd wanted to have with her, all those years ago, and of what it might be possible to have with Helena now.

And still, he never proposed to her. It had been a mutual decision. A 'we should probably think about getting married' conversation they had in bed one night in late summer, after they'd been seeing each other for about a year and a half, rather than a bended-knee, ring-box affair. He wasn't afraid any more. Or maybe it was just that he was more afraid of the alternative. Since his father had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease, life had been scary. Coming out of the RAF and into a world he had not experienced his entire adult life was disorientating. Helena represented stability and continuity to him, and those two things suddenly became what mattered most.

They'd married in Cyprus, on a hotel terrace at sundown with two witnesses from the hotel staff in attendance. Rob hadn't wanted to tell his parents they were busy with their own issues so Helena agreed not to tell Helen, although she knew she'd get it in the neck for it.

If someone had asked Rob how often he thought about Susannah, he would answer, if he were being honest, that in the beginning, after her letter, it had been every painful, waking moment. Then at night, before he fell asleep. Still painful, but gradually less often. In the years between the two women he had loved in his life, she sprang to life in his imagination at odd and sometimes inappropriate times when he made love to a girl, or saw a film they'd seen together. Always when he went home. When he ate cannolis. And then, after Helena, less and less. Except at the moment when he took his marriage vows, and put the slender gold band on her ring finger. At that moment and it terrified him so much he shook as he did it, and everyone saw, though no one understood he remembered sliding his fingers into Susannah's the last time he'd been with her, when he'd told her he'd never love anyone else the way he loved her.

He went home alone to tell his parents. He'd sat at the table and told them he'd married a girl he'd been seeing, and that he was sorry he hadn't told them. And Lois had swallowed back tears that were both happy and sad, and hugged him, and Frank's eyes had filled with tears that Rob's mum said came more and more easily, and slapped his back too hard. And then Lois had told him Susannah had been to see them, and for some reason it made him feel instantly queasy.

December Christmas. God, she'd loved it when she was a kid. What kid didn't? These days, though, it always made Susannah think of that Dickens line the one about it being the best and the worst of times. She and Douglas as a couple they'd certainly had good ones and bad ones. Good ones alone, bad ones with his kids. And, in the last couple of years, the novel twist of bad ones alone, when the children were with their mother.

It hadn't started that way. They'd been on their own the first year, and very much in their honeymoon period Doug had spent Christmas Eve with Daisy, Rosie and Fin at Sylvie's house, at her request, and Susannah had spent the same day at her own childhood home, not even minding that he was with his ex-wife, believing that the next day would obliterate it all. She still loved going to midnight mass at St Gabriel's, with the life-size nativity scene she remembered once being bigger than she was. Christmas Day had been gloriously unconventional they'd stayed in bed, dozing and romping, until noon, then cooked shrimp with chillis and drunk champagne, some from glasses, and some off each other's bare skin. She'd made herself the gift buying fire-engine-red underwear for the first and last time in her life, and accessorizing the lacy bra and thong with an elf's hat, complete with jingle bells, and a giant red bow.

The second year they'd had the children, of course. And that year she'd spent Christmas Eve fully dressed, stuffing her first 12 lb turkey, and wrapping rashers of bacon around chipolatas. The next day, a sullen Daisy said, during lunch, that nothing tasted like it did at her mother's. She then added that it didn't matter, since Sylvie had promised to cook a 'proper' dinner for them tomorrow, negating all Susannah's effort, and causing her to bite her lip, followed by the top off all the chocolate liqueurs and to drain them during the Miss Marple Christmas special. The third year they'd gone home to Susannah's parents, and Douglas had gone to the pub with Alastair, Alex and Dad for the traditional Christmas morning pint. Doug had wanted to go home straight after lunch. He had never felt entirely comfortable at her parents' home, she knew. They had never said a word, to her or to him, about the age difference between the two of them, but it clearly bothered him enormously, and came home to roost during family occasions. At least, she thought that was what it was. In year four Daisy stayed in bed until lunch was on the table, eating in her pyjamas, and Rosie and Fin complained throughout lunch, that it was really, really boring to have Christmas in England in the third year, Sylvie had been going out with an airline pilot, and he'd flown them all to the Bahamas for Christmas. Five they'd spent with Amelia and Jonathan and their kids, which had sent Douglas into a rare, maudlin guilty mood that lasted for days as though he somehow blamed her for the fact that he'd had to watch Elizabeth, Victoria and Samuel open presents and load batteries into toys while his own kids were miles away. But in year six the guilt was forgotten, and it was Susannah who spent three hours on her knees building a Lego Taj Mahal with Fin. And so on ...

She'd actually come to rather dread the whole holiday now, in stark contrast to the feverish anticipation and groundswell of good feeling with which she had always greeted it in her previous lives. Divorce had a way, she reasoned, of ruining all the good days Christmas and birthdays and summer holidays. Once you were divorced, all those occasions were fraught the biggest mines in the minefield that is the life of a family torn apart by parents who don't love each other any more. It didn't seem to make a real difference whether or not she made a Herculean effort to go all Nigella, or approached the day with all the preparation and excitement a Hassidic Jew might display. She never managed to make a magical day happen for any of them.

This year number 9: was it really that many? it was Sylvie's turn to have the children for Christmas. Susannah and Douglas would be alone at home. She thought about booking them into a country house hotel, but then decided to stay at home. An elegant, adult Christmas with long walks, log fires and lacy lingerie would have felt strange. They were not in a good place, and it had nothing to do with geography. She wanted them to be on their own, not surrounded by people, let alone strangers. Susannah was determined to try and make their couple of days together work. Too many days didn't, lately.

She and Amelia had been talking about it a couple of weeks ago, during Amelia's chemo session. Amelia was letting Jonathan stay overnight on Christmas Eve. Susannah raised an eyebrow.

The two of them were shopping for wigs, in a shop Amelia had found on the internet. It was run by a dead ringer for Kenneth Williams (except that he was completely bald, the irony of which made them giggly from the start) with an obsequious and oily manner Amelia described later as very 'suits you, sir'.

Amelia had declared her intention to buy several wigs, determined not to try and make her hair look real. 'If I have to wear one, I'm going to have fun doing it.' She looked like a human condom in the wig cap Kenneth whose real name was an only slightly less comic Jeremy fitted for her first. 'What was that you were saying about me having a great-shaped head for baldness, Suze?'

Jeremy brought out a seemingly endless supply of wigs in every shade and style imaginable, and endeared himself to them by apparently not minding how many they tried on. So they were Charlie's Angels, twin Purdeys, The Supremes ... Jeremy told them they both looked good in everything. This, Amelia assured Susannah, as he went out back and Susannah tried a Mary Quant, was not true.

In between fits of laughter, they talked about Jon-athan.

'Don't give me that face. It makes sense. It all happens in the first hour you know that those three can rip a thousand square feet of wrapping paper off in about six and a half minutes. Then, once they get halfway through their Cadbury's stocking, before breakfast, it's all about the crowd control and the noise level. Mum's coming, too. She's doing a Delia goose-fat roast potatoes, and all that. I couldn't face cooking that much right now. Don't even know if I'll feel like eating it. So I figure it's not the day to play the martyr, and I said yes to both of them.'

'Just the day to play happy families, huh?!'

'Oh, why not? We were once. We can do it for a day. Especially if we get Mum enough Harvey's Bristol Cream in.'

'I agree.' Susannah nodded. 'I think it sounds nice.'

'What about you? Can't remember is it your turn to have les enfants terribles?'

'Nope.' She shook her head. 'They're with their mother.'

'The divinely insane Sylvie? Lucky devils. So you're just the two of you. Wanna bring Douglas round to ours? The more the merrier ...'