And so, she called him. Right now, she reasoned, she needed him as much as he might need her. They both loved Amelia, and if they were going to be strong for her, they'd need to get strength from each other.

They met two days later, after work, in a pub near Susannah's office on Adam Street Jonathan worked as a reasonably successful stockbroker near Fleet Street. She was there first, and she was halfway down the first glass of white wine from the bottle she'd ordered before he arrived. She stood up to greet him, and he folded her into a long, close hug that made her feel strangely emotional. She missed Jonathan and Amelia. She missed her friend. It wasn't that Amelia had asked her to take sides (there were no sides, anyway there'd been no war). It was just that life galloped on apace. She saw Amelia. She saw the kids. She didn't see him.

His hair was longer. He pulled at the curls on his neck self-consciously. 'Trying it longer,' he offered, by way of explanation. 'Apparently it makes me look younger. Grows like weeds, too. This is just a missed trim or two.'

It did make him look younger, although he'd never really looked his age. He had a full face, and it was still barely lined. Susannah supposed it was Jess who liked it longer. According to Elizabeth, Jess was 'disgustingly much younger' than her dad, although Amelia had said she thought Jess was in her early thirties. Teenagers were judgmental little beings, when it came to their parents. Susannah couldn't imagine him with someone else. It jarred, just a little, that he didn't mention Jess if it was Jess who liked his hair longer. As if the secret was hanging in the air between them. A silly secret that wasn't one really. It was as if he felt guilty, though God knows he needn't.

She busied herself pouring him a glass of wine from her bottle, and he took off his jacket, and then sat down opposite her.

'Cheers.' She raised her glass, and clinked it against his.

'Here's to Amelia.' He put the glass down without drinking.

She saw now that his hand was shaking a little. 'She's going to be okay, Jonathan.'

'How do you know?' He ran his fingers through his hair.

'I don't know. They're not in the business of giving guarantees. But she has amazing odds. They caught it early, they're treating it aggressively. She told you all this, right? Ninety per cent survival at five years. She says she told you when you spoke.'

He nodded. 'She told me. Did she tell you what I said?'

'Of course.'

'So, you've been sent to talk sense into me, have you?'

'I haven't been "sent" anywhere.'

'Liar. I haven't seen you in months and months.' His tone was reproachful.

'I'm sorry. I know.'

'You don't have to be sorry. I miss you, Susannah, that's all.'

He looked sad. 'I miss everything, actually. Still.'

'I know you do.'

They sat for a moment without speaking.

'So, how's it going with Jess, then?'

He snorted. 'You know about that, too, do you?'

'No secrets. You know the drill.'

'Does that mean Amelia tells you everything?'

She nodded.

'What does she think about it?'

Amelia hadn't exactly said. Susannah shrugged. 'What does she expect? That you'll stay single for ever?'

He smiled. It wasn't the answer he might have hoped for. It wasn't, strictly, an answer to his question, but he knew Susannah of old, and he knew that was the best he'd get. 'It's fine.'

She arched an eyebrow. 'World's most damned affirmative word.'

'It's fine. What can I tell you, Suze? It's nothing really. I'm not in love.'

'Are you "not in love" in a 10cc way?'

He laughed. 'No, I'm not in love in a "don't really give you much thought when we're not together" way. She's a nice girl. I'm flattered, I suppose, in a sad middle-aged divorcee kind of a way. That's about it. Sex, and someone to be with on Sunday nights.'

Susannah felt a sudden rush of sympathy for Jess, although they'd never met. She first knew about her because Victoria had spilt the beans, and Victoria only knew about her because she'd confronted her dad a few weeks ago with a lipstick she'd found in the bathroom. 'Not your shade, I don't think, Dad!' She'd been very pleased with her humour.

He shook his head. 'I'm sorry that makes me sound like a complete shit. She's a nice girl.'

'You said that already. You're making her sound like a Blue Peter presenter.'

'She is. Nice, not a presenter. But I'm a million miles away from being ready for something serious. I've told her. She knows. I wouldn't lead her on or anything. She says she's happy with a fling.'

Susannah raised an eyebrow again, and Jonathan raised a hand. 'I know, I know. I shouldn't believe her entirely.'

'No.' Susannah didn't know every woman in the world personally, but a straw poll of the several hundred she did know would reveal that no matter what percentage of women claimed that to be the case, only a tiny fraction actually meant it ...

Hadn't she told Douglas she was happy not to get married, when he gave her the patented 'I've tried it, you've tried it, it doesn't work for either of us, clearly can't we just stay as we are' speech, all those years ago? She might even have meant it, at the very beginning. But not for long, of course.

'And I don't. I'll be careful, I promise. I won't let it go on too long if I think she's too into it. But I'm lonely, Susannah. You can understand that, surely? I went from a house full of noisy kids, and a wife I slept with every night, to an empty flat. It wasn't my decision, if you recall.'

'I know. You don't have to get defensive with me, Jon. I was there, remember?'

He rubbed the back of his neck. 'Anyway ... that stuff doesn't seem to matter much now.'

'No.' She looked down at her hands on the stem of the glass.

'So, how is she doing?'

'Exactly as we'd expect. She's being practical, strong, determined.'

'And you believe her?'

'Well, you know her better than me, I suppose ...'

'Not sure that's true.'

'Well, pretty damn well, at least. I think it's real. I haven't seen any chinks yet. And, believe me, I'm watching.'

'I just want to do something.'

'And you can. You can stop with the drama. She won't accept it from either of us. And God help her mum, if she starts. She wants no fuss. She just wants help, when the time comes, with the practical stuff. The kids, the house. All of that.'

'Of course. Anything.'

'Anything but not moving back in. You've got to drop all that, Jon. That isn't going to happen.'

'I know. I shouldn't have said it. I was just ... shocked.'

Susannah put a hand on his shoulder. 'I know. She's a stranger to breaking things gently. I've heard her reaction to a new haircut I've had often enough to know that. She pulls no punches.'

'Why do we both love her so much? She's actually pretty dreadful.' He laughed ruefully.

'You still do, huh?'

'More than I even knew, I think, until she called and told me this.'

His eyes filled with tears, and she took his hand, saying nothing, because at that moment there was nothing to say.

Douglas had asked her to marry him once. Not in the beginning. In the beginning he'd said he didn't want to get married again. To be fair, he'd been consistent. To be accurate, he'd waited until she was in love with him before he said it. It was one of the things she always wondered whether he'd done deliberately like the way he always apologized when she was exhausted. He said he had three children, and he didn't want to have any more. Not even with her. That if she wanted to be with him, she'd need to be okay with that. Then he'd left her alone, to decide, and after two miserable weeks without him, she'd reasoned she could live with anything, as long as she had him. She'd gone to him. He'd held her and kissed her and said it again, and she'd stayed.

The proposal had come about three years after that, if you could really call it a proposal. They'd had a fight about the kids, about his inability to commit to her a big, angry, fight that seemed, at the time, insurmountably vast. She'd stormed out, and stayed at Amelia's for a few nights, and he'd come to her there.

'We can get married, if that's what you really want.' Those had been his exact words. No ring, no bended knee, no flowers and certainly no violins.

But she'd gone home with him anyway.

1988.

Rob had never asked her to marry him, of course. They'd been far too young. It would have been mad to even have contemplated it. But that didn't mean she hadn't. She was a young girl, and young girls did that. She'd spent hours daydreaming about it. Doodling Mrs Rossi, Mr and Mrs R Rossi, Susannah Rossi on her notes when she was supposed to be revising.

Rob passed his driving test three weeks after his seventeenth birthday. He and Frank had been practising three-point turns and parallel parking between white lines in the car park at Tesco's out of hours every evening. He read from The Highway Code interminably, while they sat on the sofa in her house or his house, his free arm around her shoulder and her head on his chest. Sometimes she tested him, calling out road signs and having him draw them in the air with a finger, and sometimes mostly she just tried to distract him, planting tiny kisses across his neck and up to his earlobes until he groaned and put the book down to kiss her back.

Frank insured his son to drive his car, and let him borrow it after he came home from work, and at the weekends. With the car, and the freedom of the road, came a new freedom for the two of them. Finally, at last, they could be on their own. At Rob's house, Frank and Lois asked that they stayed downstairs, but largely left them alone. Still, though, they were almost always there, in the next room. Their voices carried. At Susannah's it was even harder. If it wasn't Mum coming in all the time on some pretext or another, it was Alastair or Alex. In the car, it was just the two of them.

Her mum and dad thought she was 'too obsessed' with Rob. They'd had rows about it the first real rows of Susannah's adolescence, of her whole life actually. At least, she rowed with Mum, in Dad's vaguely embarrassed presence. Mum was convinced that Rob was, if not exactly a bad influence, then the first teetering domino in an inevitable tumble towards all the things she feared most as a mother drink and drugs and failed exams and sex before marriage and pregnancy and STDs. Her sexist double standard infuriated Susannah she had never ranted at Alastair this way and her mistrust hurt her more than she wanted to admit. It was unfamiliar and uncomfortable to her to suddenly feel that her mum didn't get her at all. That the gap between them was so much wider than it had ever been and than she had ever imagined it could be. She felt defensive, and she felt compelled to be secretive, and she didn't like how either of those things made her feel. And she judged her mum, holding her more responsible for this new, unpleasant atmosphere at home. Judged her as harshly as she felt she was being judged herself. For the first time in her life, she saw her mum as a silly woman.

One Friday night, Mum tried to stop her from going out to meet Rob. It was summer it didn't get dark until late. Kids from their year at school just too young for the pub, way too old for the playground all congregated on the common. Susannah had wanted to skip dinner, but Mum had put her foot down, and so she said she'd meet Rob after she'd eaten. Mum started nagging her about eating too fast. She was spoiling for a row at least, that was how it felt to Susannah. Alastair shot her a sympathetic look, and Alex put his head down nervously, shovelling his food in, but Susannah took the bait.

'Why are you having a go at me?'

'I'm not. I just think it isn't too much to ask for you to sit with your family and eat nicely. It took me an hour to make this dinner, and I don't want it wolfed down in five minutes, that's all.'

Susannah hated it when Mum tried to make her feel guilty. 'That's not all, though, is it, Mum?'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean you don't want me to be out with Rob.'

'Who said anything about Rob?' Mum looked around the table at the others, her arms open in incredulity. 'Did I say anything about Rob?'

'Rosemary.' Dad spoke quietly, but his note of warning was incendiary to his wife.

'Don't you "Rosemary" me, Clive. The girl is obsessed. You know I'm right.' This was a phrase she used often.

After this the row followed its usual script for a while. Rowing by numbers. These days, it usually ended with someone flouncing out. This evening it was Rosemary, who took a Silk Cut from the pack she kept in the biscuit barrel into the garden. Since she only ever smoked, as she always said, when stressed or upset, the action of removing the cigarette from its open hiding place was a statement as much as anything else. Designed to maximize Susannah's guilt.

But she only really felt guilty about her dad. She knew he tried to be a buffer. She knew it was he who would have to go out into the garden and listen to the rest of whatever Mum had to say.

Sometimes she could hear them talking about her, when they thought she was asleep in bed. Her dad was usually defending her. He was good at calming her mum down. Once, she'd heard him, exasperated, asking Rosemary whether she'd completely forgotten what the two of them were like when they were young. Her mum had been quiet for just a moment, then she'd heard her laugh, and it sounded nice. 'Don't you know that's why I worry so much ... ?'

Now he was finishing his meal.

'Sorry.' She looked down at her plate.

Her father put down his fork and laid his hand over hers, squeezing her fingers.

'But she isn't right, Dad. Not about this. She isn't.'

He gave a wry smile that silently agreed with her. 'She'll calm down. I'll talk to her. You go, love. The boys will do the dishes.'

Alex groaned. 'For a change.'

Dad shot her brother a withering glance. 'You go and have fun.'

She and Rob talked. A lot. More than they did anything else, though her parents, and certainly Amelia, might not have believed it. Rob would park somewhere, the radio on quietly, and they would climb into the back seat, curl up into each other and talk softly, for hours and hours. Susannah didn't think she had ever known another human being as well as she knew Rob. That she ever could or would. Or might want to.

They talked about their childhoods, and their parents, their beliefs, their fears. About where they'd been and where they wanted to go. He talked a lot about joining the air force. He made her understand why he wanted it so much. He'd been offered a scholarship at Biggin Hill after his 'O' levels, and the RAF were paying his way through 'A' levels. He wasn't going to university he would go, the September after their final college exams, to Cranwell, in Leicestershire, to do his officer cadet course. Eighteen weeks of pretty intensive training, by the sound of it. And then he'd be in the Air Force. For six years at least, but he said he couldn't imagine doing anything else. He wanted to fly. He wanted to belong to something. He wanted his life to be organized and planned and, to some extent, controlled by other people.

She understood him, she thought, but she didn't really understand it. It was nothing she wanted, and nothing she'd ever really thought about, not before him. She couldn't imagine herself in that life. Everything she'd been working towards was taking her in another, opposite direction. And she didn't like to look forward. Everything was going to change. What had so recently been exciting was now fraught with fear and tinged with sadness. She didn't want to be apart from him. In fact, she couldn't imagine it.

Rob always saw it differently. He said, without irony or even sadness, but with a matter-of-factness that was disarming and hard to answer, that she could do much better than him. He held her face in his hands, and stared into her eyes, and said that she was only his for a while anyway, and that it wasn't his going to Cranwell that would split them up. 'You're destined for greater things, Susannah Hammond. I see it in you. You're so clever, so bright. So beautiful. So special. I'm not any of those things. Except when I'm flying, maybe. Down here, I'm ordinary. I'm going to be just a memory for you. A sweet one, I hope. Happy. But just a part of your past. I might be good enough for now, but I'm not good enough for you for ever. Not for you.'

It made her cross and it made her sad, when he said things like that. She knew she was clever. But those other things, the other things he saw in her she felt those things, but she only felt them when she was with him.

He wouldn't talk about the future beyond their exams. And when he couldn't rationalize her out of talking about it, he kissed her to make her be quiet. And that usually worked.

There was something really old-fashioned about Rob, and it was part of what she loved about him. They never had sex in the back of Frank's car, even though with the car came the first real chance they had to do it, and even though both of them wanted to so much sometimes that it was almost physically painful, and even though they got wonderfully, tantalizingly close so often. Mostly it was Rob. There were many occasions when Susannah was too drunk and dazed, with what she didn't realize at the time was a very adult lust for him, to have stopped him.

'It should be in a bed, if it happens. A big, white, clean bed. Not in a hurry, not with us being afraid someone is coming in to catch us, or that a policeman is about to tap on the window. Not with my trousers around my ankles and your sweater around your neck. Just us, just the two of us. I've got too much respect for you, Susie. Frankly, too much for my dad, too. This is his car, and he trusts me.

'And if you think I'm scared, you're right. Of course I am. If you think I don't want to, you're crazy. There is nothing absolutely nothing I can think of that I want to do more. If you think '

She kissed his mouth while he spoke, until he stopped. 'Do you want to keep telling me what you think I think, or do you want me to tell you? I think ... you're the best man I know. I think I love you. Actually, I know I do ... and I don't mind waiting. Because it's going to happen, Rob. I know that one day it's going to happen. And it's going to be worth the wait ...'