Also by Amanda Craig

Foreign Bodies

A Private Place

A Vicious Circle

In a Dark Wood

Love in Idleness

Hearts and Minds

Novella

The Other Side of You

Copyright

Published by Little, Brown

ISBN: 978-1-4087-0931-3

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2017 Amanda Craig

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Little, Brown

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To my mother

‘It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside … But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.’

– Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’,
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Like everything else which is not the result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.

– W. H. Auden

1

There is No Money

There is no money, and the Bredins can’t afford to divorce.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not a chance?’

‘No.’

It’s so long since they have spoken to each other, rather than exchanging curt texts on their mobile phones, that talking face to face seems strange.

‘God, this is pretty bad, isn’t it?’ Quentin says. He pours himself a third glass of wine and inspects it. ‘I never thought that divorce was something I wouldn’t be able to afford.’

‘In any case, things can’t go on like this,’ Lottie says. She does not drink. One of them, and it is always she, has to keep a clear head.

The ruin of a marriage is a trivial thing to the persons not involved. Since Quentin’s infidelities were discovered, there have been revolutions, earthquakes, hurricanes, acts of terrorism and a worldwide economic crisis, yet as far as the Bredins are concerned, none of these matter.

‘I simply don’t believe the bloody house won’t sell.’

‘It will, but not for what we need to buy a home each.’

‘What about renting?’

‘The only thing that will raise an income is if we rent this house, and move somewhere cheaper. A lot cheaper.’

In the kitchen it is perfectly quiet, though the nearby flyover murmurs lamentations. The trees are dull with dust, unrelieved by rain and swollen with summer sun. Upstairs their daughters are asleep and Lottie’s son Xan is locked in his bedroom wearing a onesie and watching a film downloaded via Pirate Bay. On the table is a meal, the first they have shared in many months, cooked by Quentin with ingredients bought by Lottie. Every domestic task is now supposed to be shared. Half of the long beech veneer table from Heal’s, the half at which Lottie and the children eat, has been meticulously wiped clean. The other half, at which Quentin sits, glitters with microscopic crumbs that catch the evening light like pulverised jewels.

‘You mean moving to the country,’ Quentin says.

‘Yes.’ Lottie looks into the white china bowl before them, where a few last strands of spaghetti swirl vertiginously in their red sauce, as if disappearing down a plughole.

A dozen recriminations rise, and are bitten back. No matter how much each feels violently wounded by the other, they must keep talking.

A gloom lies over the world. Only a short while ago it seemed as if they were all on an endless soaring ride up to heaven. Now, they are plummeting down so low that nobody is sure when the fall will stop. Banks have defaulted, businesses have gone bankrupt and millions have lost their belief in a better future. Everybody is anxious. Some continue to live as they always have done, or possibly even better, but more see their income shrivel and their hopes fade.

Waking with fortitude, living with compromise and sleeping with stress is normal for an architect in Britain. Even during the best of times, Lottie has spent weeks drawing up plans for projects over which clients have then backtracked, changed their minds and cancelled. Experience has taught her that nothing is ever built without compromise, and yet she had expected better of marriage. For just as we expect sweetness from the milk we first drink, so the child born to a happy union is wholly unprepared for disharmony. Lottie had failed to understand what she risked when marrying Quentin; but then waking with optimism, living with laxity and sleeping without self-reproach is normal for a journalist.

What a fool I was, she thinks. Yet he had never been violent, dirty or mean with money; there are plenty of men who are this, and more. In the beginning, Quentin had brought colour, humour and fun into her life, just as she had brought order, calm and seriousness into his. They shared many interests, and were both the children of teachers. Yet the differences between them have made it clear that no reconciliation is possible.

Work has defined Quentin, as a mould does jelly. Without it, he is prone to depression, irritability and loss of libido. He has been adept at sidestepping the bile and smuggery of the Left and the guile and thuggery of the Right; being clever and talented, versatile and ambitious, he has been courted for almost thirty years. Since losing his job, however, it’s as if he no longer exists. People he has known since university let their eyes slide past him. His bitterness about the collapse of his career is more than equal to Lottie’s over her marriage.

This particular day of crisis had come about through a typical oversight: Quentin had forgotten to renew the parking permit on the family car. He has always taken care of the taxing and servicing of vehicles as a contribution to the smooth running of family life, but having detached himself from it he had failed to take care of the paperwork. Consequently, he had received a parking fine which he neglected to pay, followed by interest which mounted rapidly into hundreds of pounds that he was too angry or impatient to deal with. At dawn this morning, two bullet-headed bailiffs from a debt-collection agency had tricked their way in, and demanded goods to the value of £1000 for the money owed. Lottie, white as wax in her nightdress, had been forced to give them a flat-screen TV; Quentin, his motorbike.

Lottie says, in a low voice, ‘I can’t believe that somebody could do something like that, in our own home.’

‘It’s not our home.’ Quentin, too, is shaken. ‘The bank owns part of it, remember?’

For the first time in their lives, they feel poor, and frightened. Their gaze has always been fixed slightly upwards; if they have been conscious of poverty it has been largely as a source of ugliness. Until this day, it had never occurred to them how swiftly the accumulated privilege of two professional careers could be lost. Each had jumped through the right academic hoops, worked hard, saved, paid taxes and been able to acquire that golden ticket to a better life, a house in London. Everybody in the world wants this, and even though the Bredins’ home is in what has been an unfashionable and run-down area, it is now, at almost £1 million, absurdly valuable.

Before the crunch became a downturn, before the downturn became a recession, it was taken for granted that their children would be privately educated, their health insured, their holidays exotic and their minds stimulated by all the intellectual entertainments the capital has to offer. Their five-bedroomed home at the wrong end of Randolph Avenue, the joint total of two incomes and some unacknowledged luck, has added many thousands of pounds to its putative value: if they have been smug, as members of the luckiest generation in British history, then so have many others.

The sensations of acquiring a home are not dissimilar from those elicited by romantic love, not least because the house they bought has been transformed from a shabby rooming house to a place where they were once almost entirely happy. Here they have thrown lively parties, taken deep baths, filled large fridges, and returned from holidays with relief. Stripped, replastered, rewired, repainted and reconfigured, the house has been the third party in a charmed union. When they borrowed an additional £100,000 to give it three new bathrooms, a splendid new kitchen extension, stair carpets, fitted bookshelves and cupboards, it seemed like an entirely rational thing to do. No longer: for both have lost their jobs.

‘We have to move.’

Despite her best intentions, Lottie’s eyes suddenly brim with hot tears. She looks away.

Quentin is filled with weary dislike. The whole disaster is as much her fault as his. For many months after Stella was born Lottie changed from an enthusiastic lover to one who was perpetually exhausted, unwell and rejecting; he had been grateful to be living in an age of computer pornography. In the end, however, he had been a starving man offered a steak sandwich. Most normal men would have cracked in such conditions, but he never meant to hurt his wife.

‘It was just sex. They meant nothing,’ he had said, aware of the banality of his words.

‘Am I nothing? Are your children nothing?’

Lottie’s fury and distress astounded him, for he had always seen her as supremely self-controlled. Yet she became a madwoman, screaming and sobbing, and had even confronted one of his mistresses at the annual summer party of the magazine he then edited – much to the entertainment of his colleagues. Mortified but unrepentant, Quentin fled to a new job in America, and the Bredins separated. For three years they had led separate lives, coming together for brief family Christmases and tense summers, pretending to the girls that it was all temporary. When he returned, jobless, he found that Lottie had neglected to have the locks changed, and promptly moved back in. It has been thoroughly unpleasant, but he refuses to budge.

‘I am not going to clear out or live in a hotel just because your pride has been wounded.’

‘It’s called adultery, Quentin. You promise not to do it when you marry someone, remember?’

She is no longer tearful, but her contempt for him is withering. Someone who automatically ascribes the worst possible motives for everything you do is an experience that even the joy of being with his children again can’t obliterate. Yet he has no option but to continue to squat here, sleeping on the sofa in his study and trying to drum up freelance commissions while Lottie pays the mortgage she had taken out in happier times. However, even this has gone wrong now that she, too, is unemployed.

Lottie, looking at him, sees her redundancy as her husband’s fault. Had she not been devastated by the collapse of her marriage she would probably have kept her job; as it is, she has lost everything. Her vocation has demanded years of training and testing: to design and build is what she’s wanted to do ever since she first laid her hands on a Lego set. (It had been intended for her cousin Justin, who was far more interested in the pink tutu given to his sister.) The loss of her career makes her feel as if she is falling into an abyss. There is no money for their daughters’ school fees, and she is racked by anxiety about her son. He has failed to make his offer from Cambridge, and instead of shrugging his shoulders at what is always a lottery, has withdrawn from the other universities in anger and despair. She’s desperately afraid that he has taken rejection so much to heart that he’ll now go off the tracks altogether. Trying to galvanise him to reapply, trying to keep the household budget under control, looking for new schools for the girls and making the effort of appearing cheerful has been achieved only with antidepressants.

‘There must be some economies that would help.’ Quentin’s voice has taken on a note of bewildered complaint. ‘Can’t you just sack the cleaner?’

Lottie gives a small, weary smile.

‘I did, months ago.’

‘Ah.’ Quentin gulps more wine. ‘That explains my shirts. What about the girls’ schools?’

‘We’ve been living off the refund of the school deposit.’

‘Surely any local primary would be thrilled to have them?’

Lottie winces. She has never been comfortable with this kind of assumption.

‘No. They are all oversubscribed.’

Why did I marry her? he asks himself.

It was his first wife’s money that, once he’d agreed to a hasty marriage and a hastier divorce, had provided the initial deposit on his flat in Camden during the halcyon of the 1980s. Since then, he’d ridden the property boom, trading onwards and upwards until, at forty, he owned a nice two-bedroomed flat in Islington. So what was it about Lottie that made him forget his instinct for self-preservation? It wasn’t beauty: though ten years younger than him, she looks older, these days. In addition, she irritates him more than anyone he has ever known – apart from his father – and the more miserable she looks, the more he dislikes her.

‘I just want this to be over.’

‘Exactly. That sofa-bed in my study seems to have both the rock and the hard place lodged in it.’

‘Perhaps it’s your conscience,’ Lottie says, in a rare flash of wit.

‘I am trying to be sensible—’ he begins, but it’s too late. The rage between them is flaring up, like phosphorus in water.

‘If you were sensible, we would not be in this predicament. We would, at least, have each other.’

‘One must be thankful for small mercies, I suppose.’

Lottie returns to the main subject with an effort.

‘This house has to be rented out, and we have to rent another that is cheaper.’

Quentin pours himself another glass.

‘We’ll both get other jobs.’

‘No, we won’t,’ Lottie says. ‘We may never get another job. The life we had before is gone. If we’re very, very lucky, the property market will rise enough for us to be able to sell this place and have enough for a flat each. But it will take at least a year, and in the meantime we can’t continue here.’

Quentin says, grudgingly, ‘This house would bring in, what, £4000 a month?’

‘Think half that, minus the agent’s fees and tax. We’d clear enough to cover the mortgage and rent somewhere else, but probably not quite enough to live off.’

‘Live off?’

‘Yes, Quentin. We have to live on something, even far, far away. We’re lucky to have even that option.’

‘What about France?’

It’s like talking to a child, she thinks. ‘No. The euro is too risky. There is, however, Devon.’

Appalled, he stares at her.

‘I am not going back!’

‘I don’t see why not. Your parents might like to see more of you.’

‘Lottie, you know as well as I that my work depends on my being here. Here in London, where everything happens.’

‘It is the only solution.’

Quentin feels sick. ‘You’ve no idea what the countryside is like to live in, especially Devon. If you stand still for a minute there, fungus grows between your toes. It rains all the time. They don’t like strangers.’

‘We wouldn’t be complete strangers because of your parents. The girls can go into a nice village primary, and Xan can find work.’

‘But neither of us will ever get another job there.’

‘There’s the Internet, and the train from Exeter. You could commute if necessary.’

‘Like you have any idea how other people live.’

Her cheeks flush, but she makes no response.

‘I might consider it for just one year.’ Quentin pauses. ‘But I demand a room of my own.’

Lottie says, ‘What about Xan? He can’t sleep with the girls, he’s a young man now.’

‘You’re talking four bedrooms, minimum, then.’

‘Actually, there is a possibility. A farmhouse, available now.’

Quentin looks at her with deep suspicion.

‘You’ve actually found a place?’

‘It’s near Trelorn, outside a village called Shipcott. I’ve got it on my laptop, see? Four bedrooms, big kitchen, beautiful views and best of all, amazingly cheap. Your mother says it’s lovely.’

‘If she says that, it’ll be a nightmare.’

He knows what Devon longhouses are like: all built to a pattern for dwarfs with thick skulls, and this looks no exception. It’s a long, L-shaped whitewashed cob building, no thatch but roofed with slate, bound to blow off in winter. The kind of thing that fools in the city think is picturesque, but which anyone with experience of country life knows is riddled with rot, rats, bats and beams. The photographs of the inside show lashings of pine and a lavender bathroom suite circa 1972.

‘What about the local primary school?’

She clicks on the Ofsted report. ‘It’s rated Outstanding. It has lots of outdoor space, good teacher-to-pupil ratio, and only about eleven children per year. In London you’d be paying through the nose for that.’

Yes, Quentin thinks, and it’d be worth it, too.

‘How much is the rent?’

‘Five hundred pounds,’ says Lottie.

‘A week?’

‘A month.’

Even Quentin is surprised by this. ‘There’s got to be something wrong with it.’

‘There isn’t any central heating; and we would have to sign up for the whole year. We can’t afford to be fussy. We just can’t,’ Lottie says. ‘Besides, it’s too late.’

‘Too late for what?’

‘I’ve found tenants for this place.’ Lottie almost laughs at his outraged expression. ‘Canadian lawyers are moving in next month. Unless you’d like to return their deposit?’

So it is fixed.

‘It’ll be fun, you’ll see,’ Lottie tells the children the next day; ‘it’ll be an adventure for us all to move to the country.’

Quentin says, ‘In the countryside nobody can hear you scream.’

2

Ten Green Bottles

Lottie is sitting outside a café in Highgate, trying to seem normal. Bad as it had been to lose her husband, getting him back is infinitely worse.

Each minute of each hour, she feels maddened by sharing the same air, let alone the same roof. When she first found out about his infidelities she had been so shocked she could barely breathe, but now their arguments, really always the same argument, go round and round like clothes in a tumble dryer. She accuses him of being shallow, promiscuous, irresponsible and a liar. He accuses her of being a sociopath, frigid and the most controlling person on earth.

‘All you want is to keep everyone on a leash.’

‘What you call a leash is fidelity.’

‘It’s not my fault I can’t be faithful to you.’

Few things are more painful than loathing and despising someone you have once loved and admired. She has been through each stage of misery, from looking for scraps of affirmation that he might still love her, to obscene sexual fantasies about what he must have done with his other women, to hating him so much she wanted to put ground glass in his food, to thinking that they might be able to work it out if he has therapy, to despising herself for having ever been with him in the first place, to thinking that if she had a revenge affair then he might come to his senses. What she wants most is just to stop feeling. She thinks about her marriage almost as much as she thinks about being poor, which is to say, every waking moment. Other than his professed love for their daughters, Quentin has no redeeming qualities – though he accuses her of poisoning the girls’ minds against him.

‘No, you do that all by yourself whenever you shout at me.’

‘Why would I do that? You’re the shouter, not me.’

This is one of his most odious techniques: implying that his awful behaviour is all in her mind. Another is to say,

‘You have a serious issue about trust.’

Lottie is astounded by how low someone she loved could sink, and how much he can still hurt her. She wants to crawl away into a hole and sleep for a hundred years, but because of the children she has had to summon every reserve of will to find a way forward, even though it means leaving London and almost everyone she has ever known, including her mother.

People who have not been through what she is going through just can’t imagine it. She has poured out her miseries to her cousin Justin, who had originally introduced her to Quentin, and to her school-friend Hemani, who through her own lawyer friend Polly Noble had put her in touch with a specialist in divorce. They have listened sympathetically, and suggested seeing a therapist, but she can’t even afford that. Her redundancy payment has dwindled to less than £2000, and the most important thing is to minimise the suffering of her children.

Yet Lottie is more English than the English (which is to say, half-German). When her boss sacked her in April he’d said,

‘You’re a tough cookie, Lottie, and I know you’ll survive.’

What he meant was that she could be relied on not to burst into tears or sue him for constructive dismissal. Lottie has the kind of shield-shaped face that always looks calm, but she has so many things to be angry about that she often finds herself humming Ten Green Bottles.

‘And if one green bottle,

Should accidentally fall …’

In one bottle is her heartbreak over her son. Lottie thinks of all the work she has turned down, the promotions she missed and clients she annoyed, simply to support Xan, her first-born, fatherless and until recently, only child. Gifted, gentle, handsome and hard-working, his conception had been the accident which turned out to be a blessing. Now, he hates her.

‘Just fuck off and leave me alone!’ he roars whenever she taps on his bedroom door. His hair is one big puffball of neglect; she’s terrified he is clinically depressed. His two best friends have both got into the universities of their choice: Hemani’s son Bron to UCL to read Medicine, and Dylan to read Philosophy at Oxford. Xan is reapplying nowhere.

‘I wouldn’t mind so much if Xan were lazy, but he’s so bright and he worked so hard,’ she told her mother, Marta. ‘I keep telling him that Oxbridge doesn’t matter, that all Russell Group universities are terrific, but he takes no notice. He’s always driven himself too hard and now he’s blaming my marriage, or going to a private school, or being mixed-race or just being too boring.’

‘I know, but that way, madness lies,’ her mother answered. ‘Have faith.’

‘Faith in what?’

‘In your son. You can’t rescue him; he must rescue himself.’

Marta, too, has put a lot of time and effort into Xan’s upbringing. Lottie had been just twenty-three when she discovered she was six months pregnant. She did not even know the name of her child’s father, except that he had been drunk, like herself, at a large party, and overwhelmingly attractive. It was like one of those encounters with a god in Greek myth: he’d appeared, and then he’d disappeared. What made it all the more humiliating was that she was the last person anyone would have expected to become a single mother. Marta had converted the top floor of her house into a small flat, shifted her own workload, and enabled Lottie to complete the crucial second part of her training as an architect. It had been Marta’s face, not Lottie’s, that Xan had looked for at the end of every school day.

‘If he could be off at university, Mutti, the rest would not be so bad.’

‘My darling, there’s something to be said for disappointment early in life.’

It’s all very well for Marta. Her mother has so much self-confidence that sometimes Lottie wonders whether she has colonised her own share of it, much as in some families one member seems to have a disproportionate amount of luck, leaving little left over for the rest. But Marta adores Xan with a fierce, steely love quite unlike Lottie’s own, where to love and to worry are inextricably intertwined in her mind: why else should the word ‘care’ hold its double meaning? Xan now accuses her of being a ‘helicopter mother’.

‘All I want to do is protect you.’

‘But you can’t. And in any case, you failed the moment you married Dud.’

In another two bottles are Stella and Rosie, the innocent casualties of their father’s selfishness. They are so young they are almost transparent, like tiny snails; she can see every emotion pulsing through them.

‘But why don’t you love each other any more? Why can’t you stop quarrelling?’ Stella asks.

‘We just can’t,’ Lottie told them. She longs to be able to say, ‘Because your daddy is a selfish, lying philandering bastard,’ but must not. She must suffer, like the heroine of a fairy tale, and not say a word. Oh, there are so many fictions – Quentin has almost written a three-volume novel justifying his own actions, and she is so weary of it – that the cause of their mutual loathing is as mysterious as love. Yet whatever they do or don’t believe, the emotional damage is likely to be far-reaching: as a consequence of all that has happened, her daughters must leave behind all the tender infant friendships made in London, and adjust to being at Shipcott Primary, where they know nobody.

‘I’ll never make another friend like Bella, never,’ Stella sobbed. ‘Why can’t I stay here?’

‘Because Daddy and I won’t be here to look after you, sweetie.’

‘Then why can’t I stay here without you?’

‘Another family is going to pay us to live in our house in London, while we move to a new home in Devon. It’s cheaper to live in the country, you see.’

‘Is that because nobody wants to live there?’

Rosie doesn’t ask pointed questions like these. She wakes, night after night after night, her bed and nightdress sopping with urine, and demands to sleep in Lottie’s bed. So at 3 a.m., Lottie has the choice: wake up enough to strip her child, and the bed, or allow her to sleep, restless and reeking, with her.

In the fourth bottle is Lottie’s grinding sorrow at having lost her job, and with it any hope of hanging on to a few remaining shreds of self-respect or a viable future. For all its frustrations and complications, architecture is not just a profession but a vocation; and she had loved it.

In the fifth bottle is being forty-two. The cruelty of biology is such that, if she were to find another man, he’d probably be in his seventies, because men never look for a partner who is their own age. It’s no consolation to see that Quentin, ten years older than herself, is still a handsome man, whereas the most that can be said for her is that, having put on too much weight during her pregnancies, she can once again fit into the clothes she wore as a student.

‘People keep asking if I have cancer,’ she remarks to her cousin Justin, when they meet.

‘Sweetie, it’s called the divorce diet.’

‘Just take my advice and don’t marry Sebastian. Anyone who marries is insane. Look at your sister, shackled to that toff.’

‘Lottie, we want to get married for the same reason you did. We’re in love, and we want to have the legal rights we’ve been denied for centuries.’

Justin and his future husband look so alike they remind her of Tweedledum and Tweedledee; they have a cottage in Stoke Newington, and radiate happiness.

‘Darling Justin, I’ve longed for you to find true love with someone worthy of you, only I don’t think it exists.’

‘I hate seeing you like this, Lottie. You will find happiness again.’

‘People make far too much of happiness. What we ought to be seeking is autonomy. That’s the essential thing.’

There is a whole row of green bottles boiling and swirling with venomous mist involving Quentin’s girlfriends which she mustn’t think about because they are, essentially, blameless. However sordid it is to have an affair with a married person, they are not the ones who made a promise of fidelity. No doubt he had broken their hearts, too, though how can one romantic disappointment measure up to the destruction of a family?

All things considered, Lottie would really prefer to see her mother in private, but Marta insists on a brisk constitutional walk across the Heath every morning with her white terrier.

‘Darling!’ she says, bestowing a kiss redolent of Revlon. Her glasses match Heidi’s bright pink collar, and her thick white hair is immaculately styled. ‘Breakfast?’

Lottie shakes her head. Marta orders a double macchiato for herself, a poached egg with toast, and a smoothie.

‘How are you?’ Lottie asks, to forestall further enquiries.

‘I am in mint condition. So, you are upside-downing?’

‘Downsizing. Yes,’ Lottie says. Her mother had rescued her once before, when she had Xan, but it’s out of the question she could do so again. An adult and three children, one now eighteen, could not fit into the two spare rooms of Marta’s tall, thin house, not that she’s offered.

‘Are you really not interested in breakfast? You are too thin.’

‘No.’

There are so many things about divorce that you are never told, Lottie thinks, ducking to avoid being seen by someone she’d been at school with. Those who have been lucky in love, like her mother, have a kind of virginal innocence about what a really bad marriage is like.

But then, Marta had been widowed young. Edward Evenlode had been thirty-four when he died of a brain aneurysm after a recital at the Wigmore Hall. He had come from a large, dull upper-class family which mostly confined itself to farming and soldiering. Lottie and Marta were perfectly happy to live without such relations, and even happier when Xan arrived.

Having a baby so young meant that she was largely cut off from the companionship of her peers, but it also meant that she was able to continue living under her mother’s roof. They all got on so well, and Marta’s respect for her privacy meant she was free to entertain any guests; the occasional flings with men who couldn’t handle her son’s jealousy persuaded her that she would remain single. Then she met Quentin.

Justin, who worked with him on the Rambler, warned her when it was too late.

‘He has what the Americans call a zipper problem. Don’t fall in love with him.’

Lottie trusted Quentin for the most idiotic reason: when they met for the second time on a dirty train, he had taken off his own coat, opened it, taken hers and folded it so that her coat was wrapped in his, unsullied. She noticed that he was good-looking, well-dressed and, unusually for a British man, did not smell bad; but she was also charmed by the twinkle in his eye, the liveliness of his mind and a warmth she mistook for kindness. Like herself, he was not entirely English, having a Jewish South African mother. He was not intimidated by her intelligence, drawing out a flushed and laughing self that she had forgotten. By chance, they met again, and in the course of a train journey from London to Leeds discussed everything from politics to films to an exhibition they had both enjoyed. He invited her to dinner the following week. She never intended to sleep with him so soon. Even now, with a vividness which makes her flush to the creases of her body, she can still remember how astonishing the sex had been. For the first time she understood why a man might be irresistible.

Quentin also had a son of his own, now grown-up, fathered in South Africa when he was only twenty-one. It was another bond between them, though he, typically, had been paid to marry, then divorce, his child’s mother by the mother’s family. Which should have warned me, Lottie reflects. Quentin seemed to appreciate Xan, teaching him to ride a bicycle and taking Xan’s opinions seriously. Her son, so watchful and suspicious of other men, worshipped him. Quentin had actually asked his permission to marry his mother before he asked Lottie, and Xan had given his solemn consent. It had been a master-stroke.

‘Are you sure, Xan, that you are OK if he becomes your stepfather?’

‘Mum, he’s cool even though he has a silly name. You really like him don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘I even like his name. It sounds romantic, not silly.’

Three months after, they were married.

She wondered why more people didn’t take this step. To be licensed by society to do all those wicked, secret, thrilling things and for it to be not just legal but expected felt wonderful. Once Quentin sold his flat, they had put down a deposit on the rundown house on the edge of Kilburn where they expected to live for ever. Both their careers took off to new levels, and she got to work on transforming their Victorian semi into a Modernist miracle of light and space. In retrospect, she thinks, they had been nauseatingly pleased with themselves, and each other.

‘You are so serious, so good,’ he told her. ‘You do a proper job.’

‘So do you.’

‘Oh, journalism is totally ephemeral.’

‘But one that’s vital to democracy. Architecture – well, if you make a mistake it’s there for generations, and people hate you for it.’

She met his parents, liked his mother immediately and his father less so – but that was fine, because Quentin detested him.

‘He’s a shit, and if he were ten years younger he’d have tried to seduce you,’ he said.

Lottie couldn’t help laughing at the idea; Hugh Bredin was old and some sort of minor poet. His wife, Naomi, was a potter.

‘They seem sweet,’ she said.

‘I have no interests in common with them, especially not my father,’ Quentin insisted.

What did interest Quentin, she came to realise, was money. His friends and ex-girlfriends were always wealthy, some quite staggeringly so; Lottie, however, had not gone to a private school, and money had always been tight. Yet the fluke of London property prices means that her mother’s house in Church Row, bought for a thousand pounds after the War, is worth, conservatively, £5 million. One of Lottie’s most bitter reflections of late is to wonder whether this was what he had found attractive about her all along: she will never forget the way Quentin’s eyes lit up when she first brought him there. He views the London property market as a kind of magical force in his life which has made him, alongside everyone else who bought a home there in the 1980s, rich beyond his wildest dreams. The £20,000 which his first wife’s family paid him to disappear had, by the time of his second marriage, grown into £300,000, and now into £500,000, all thanks to property. The thought that he might lose any portion of it when they get divorced gives her savage satisfaction.

Lottie says, ‘I hope you’ll visit us.’

‘At Christmas, I will definitely come, my darling.’

Marta says, gently, ‘I can’t help you, you know that?’

‘Yes,’ Lottie says. She has made her own bed and must lie in it, even if the bed in question will be a thin mattress on a wire base rather than the super-king-sized Vi-Spring that must remain behind for the tenants.

‘What a shame you did not marry that other man.’

Lottie groans to herself but answers, ‘He disappeared.’

‘Oh, not Xan’s papa, obviously – but, the architect you lived with – what was his name?’

‘Martin. Not my type, or I his.’

Martin had been another architect, plump with red hair, a bit like William Morris. They had shared a place in Spitalfields together, when the houses there had still been such slums that students could afford to rent them, and he was just one of a group of friends, though particularly loyal. She had tried to stay in touch, but Quentin had picked a fight with him because his idea of small talk was to discuss metal fatigue in motorway flyovers. Still, when Lottie thinks of all the men she might have married, she remembers something her old friend Hemani had said:

‘Why didn’t we realise when we were twenty-two that we could have married almost anyone?’

Hemani loathes Quentin, and says she should divorce him immediately: but her friend is an eye surgeon married to the nicest, most civilised kind of American. Lottie sighs, and watches the people at other tables: the young mothers, exhausted but still hopeful; the resting actors; the retired people whose pensions have not yet imploded; the joggers and dog-walkers. All around her are Londoners unaffected by what is being called ‘the current economic climate’. They still drive big cars, go on foreign holidays, wear designer clothes and send their children to private schools. They expect to be able to go to the theatre or restaurants or opera, to not clean their homes and to shop at artisan farmers’ markets – just as she had done until very recently. It’s hard not to hate them.

‘This cottage,’ Marta is saying. ‘It looks charming in the link you sent.’

‘Looks, but isn’t,’ Lottie answers. ‘There’s no central heating.’

‘My darling, all we had when you were born were storage heaters.’

‘Yes, and heaven knows what it’ll do to Xan’s asthma.’

Lottie’s mobile buzzes. It’s one of the children asking plaintively when she’ll be home. Xan is supposed to be babysitting, but he’s probably playing Call of Duty. I’d like to see a game about the real Call of Duty, Lottie thinks, in which you jump from log to log with a feverish child under one arm and a laptop under the other, a game in which the blood is real and there are no second chances.

‘You will be fine, my darling. Many people dream of escaping to the country, to live in peace and quiet.’

‘Ha! With my husband around I’ll be certain to have neither.’

When Marta takes her leave, Lottie runs all the way home. The hard grey pavements jar her knees. She hates the pollution, the parking fines, the noise, the drunken teenagers riding children’s bikes, the rubbish and dried vomit, the overpriced shops selling nothing useful: yet the thought of leaving London is terrifying. Apart from her years at university, this has been her home all her life.

The new house, by contrast, is ludicrously rural. Not only does it have just one bathroom, but there’s also a dank little room behind the stair at the back, half-buried in the hillside, with a kind of granite bath on one side. A big iron hook hangs over it from the ceiling.

‘What on earth is this for?’ Lottie wondered aloud.

‘It’s where the farm pig would have its throat cut, every year, and be salted,’ Quentin said.

‘Ugh.’

‘Useful as a wine cellar,’ said the agent, brightly. ‘Or a broom cupboard.’

How bad can it be to live in the country? Boring, but not as boring as being utterly broke in the city, Lottie thinks. Below the garden a big field sloped down, quite steeply, towards a small river, invisible in its wooded valley. On the other side, field, wood and hill rose until the flanks of Dartmoor bulged against a vast, cloud-flecked sky.

‘Beautiful isn’t it?’ the estate agent remarked.

The view is the reason why the house might be bearable, although the tenebrous kitchen has mean, metal-framed windows looking out to a small orchard burdened with large, wasp-flecked apples, a withered vegetable patch, and a rusting clothes airer.

‘What a pity there’s no window on the gable end, looking down the valley,’ Lottie remarked. The large pine dresser was not to her taste either.

‘Probably to keep the wind out,’ the agent told her.

It was all energy-saving light bulbs, wall-to-wall carpet, brown furniture and thin sagging curtains. It would need every scrap of furnishings she can scrounge out of her own home to make it bearable.

As usual she is organising everything. She’s cleaned their own house from top to bottom, arranged with the agent for the tenants to move in the day they leave; she’s booked the removal lorry, been in contact with the village school at Shipcott to enrol Stella and Rosie; put down the deposit and signed a rental agreement with their new landlady. It will probably be the longest year of her life, but she has to hope that the rise in the London property market will make it possible to sell for a higher price the following year, and escape.

As Lottie lopes along, her wedding ring falls off her finger, and rolls tinkling along the pavement before falling over onto its side. She’s tempted to leave it there, but stops herself. It’s gold, and she’ll probably end up selling it.