Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Part Four: March 2009
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Cornwall, 1963
If you close your eyes, perhaps you can still see them. As they were that sundrenched afternoon, the day everything changed.
Outside the house, in the shadows by the terrace, when they thought no one was looking. Mary is in the kitchen making chicken salad and singing along to Music While You Work on the Home Service. There’s no one else around. It’s the quiet before lunch, too hot to do anything.
‘Come on,’ she says. She is laughing. ‘Just one cigarette, and then you can go back up.’ She chatters her little white teeth together, her pink lips wet. ‘I won’t bite, promise.’
He looks anxiously around him. ‘All right.’
She has her back to him as she picks her way confidently through the black brambles and grey- green reeds, down the old path that leads to the sea. Her glossy hair is caught under the old green and yellow towel she has wrapped round her neck. He follows, nervously.
He’s terrified of these encounters – terrified because he knows they’re wrong, but still he wants them, more than he’s wanted anything in his life. He wants to feel her honey-soft skin, to let his hand move up her thigh, to nuzzle her neck, to hear her cool, cruel laugh. He has known a couple of women: eager, rough-haired girls at college, all inky fingers and beery breath, but this is different. He is a boy compared to her.
Oh, he knows it’s wrong, what they’re doing. He knows his head has been turned, by the heat, the long, light evenings, the intoxicating almost frightening sense of liberation here at Summercove, but he just doesn’t care. He feels truly free at last.
The world is becoming a different place, there’s something happening this summer. A change is coming, they can all feel it. And that feeling is especially concentrated here, in the sweet, lavender-soaked air of Summercove, where the crickets sing long into the night and where the Kapoors let their guests, it would seem, do what on earth they want . . . Being there is like being on the inside of one of those glass domes you have as a child, visible to the outside world, filled with glitter, waiting to be shaken up. The Kapoors know it too. They are all moths, drawn to the flickering candlelight.
‘Hurry up, darling,’ she says, almost at the bottom of the steps now in the bright light, the white dots on her blue polka-dot swimming costume dancing before his eyes. He clings to the
