back his head and laughed. I had not seen or heard him laugh for a long time.
Conscious that I was spying, I stepped back from the window.
As I was making coffee Chloe ambled into the kitchen. ‘What are you doing up so early, Mum?’ She sniffed. ‘Coffee. Great. Can I have some?’
‘Have you been out all night? Did you have anything to eat?’
Chloe shook her head and her long hair flew around her shoulders. ‘You always ask the same questions, Mum.’
‘Sure. We were up all night.’ Sacha, who had followed her in, fetched the cups from the cupboard. ‘No big deal.’ He smiled at me teasingly. ‘Can’t you remember?’
‘Dimly,’ I replied, with a touch of acid. ‘How was the club?’
Chloe and Sacha’s eyes met, and a private message was exchanged. ‘Brilliant.’ Chloe’s voice was a note higher than normal.
I hacked at the bread and slotted two slices into the toaster. ‘I hope you didn’t do anything… silly.’
Chloe’s eyes flashed me a warning.
‘Yup…’ Sacha unzipped his leather bomber jacket and arranged it over the back of the chair. ‘The club isn’t bad. The boys and I might just do a gig there to help out.’
Sacha tried so hard not to imply that they were desperate for any gig. He would never admit that, two years on from its formation, the group’s progress to fame and fortune had hardly lifted off the ground.
Chloe hunched over her coffee. There was faint flush on her cheek and a faint smile on her lips. She looked happy and untroubled.
The toast was stuck in the toaster so I pulled it out – spraying a waterfall of crumbs on to the floor – and put it in front of them. ‘Have some Tuscan honey.’
‘What’s wrong with English honey?’ She feathered her impossibly long eyelashes. ‘Or anything English, for that matter. It’s Italian pasta, Italian ham, Italian this, that and the other.’ Again she fluttered her eyelashes and Sacha watched, seemingly enraptured. ‘You must go this year, Mum, get it out of your system.’
I fetched the dustpan and swept up the crumbs. ‘As it happens, I’m planning to go with your grandfather.’
Chloe raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘So you say.’
While they ate and drank, I sat at the table and puzzled over the agenda for the Stanwinton homeless-persons committee. Afterwards, Sacha got to his feet and lifted his prized jacket off the chair. ‘Bedtime,’ he said, and disappeared.
‘What about you, darling?’
Chloe drained her coffee and hunkered down beside me. ‘You mustn’t interfere, Mum. Not any longer.’
I slipped my arm round her. There was a smudge of honey at the corner of her mouth, and I nipped it away with my finger. ‘He’s your first cousin, Chloe.’
Chloe’s happy look vanished. ‘He’s my first everything, Mum. He’s my blood and bone. He knows me. I know him.’
‘He’s your first cousin,’ I repeated.
Chloe straightened up. ‘Forget it, Mum,’ she said, in a flat voice that was new to me. Then she, too, was gone.
I looked up and out of the window where, like black and bruised plums, summer rainclouds were gathering.
Later that morning, Chloe and I sorted through bags of discarded clothing that had been dumped in our garage. ‘There’s so much, Mum. I don’t see why we have to do all this.’
I upended a bag, and a drift of grubby sweaters and trousers spread over the floor. Their smell – musty, used, depressing – made us recoil.
‘Ugh,’ Chloe said. ‘Throw them away.’
I surprised myself by saying heatedly, ‘I can’t. They might be useful. Someone might need them.’
Chloe inspected a second bag. ‘Actually,’ she pulled out a pink cardigan that looked suspiciously like cashmere, ‘there’s quite a nice one here.’
I gathered up an armful of clothes and plodded into the kitchen, where Brigitte was cleaning the sink. ‘Could you put these through the machine?’
She took a step back. ‘These are not nice.’
‘No,’ I agreed, ‘but they’ll be better when they’re washed and ironed.’
Brigitte loaded them sulkily into the machine and banged the door shut.
Chloe had followed me in and handed Brigitte the detergent. ‘It’s a funny old life,’ she said. ‘Do you think it’s OK if I keep this cardigan?’
I gave Meg a lift to the doctor on my way into town. She snapped the seat belt into place. ‘Sacha tells me that you’ve… been talking to Chloe about Sacha. I gather you don’t approve of him and Chloe being together so much…’
I eased the car out of the gateway and into the road. I should no longer have been surprised by the way information circulated in the house. ‘Does he discuss everything with you?’
‘Mostly. We’ve always talked. As you know.’
It was unfair, but the remark set my teeth on edge. ‘Chloe edits any confidences she grants me.’
‘Tell me,’ Meg searched in her bag, ‘is it my son you object to, or my genes?’
‘I love Sacha, and Chloe shares your genes.’
Meg flipped down the passenger sunshade and used the mirror to apply bright red lipstick, while I wrestled with a gyratory system which had been expressly designed to send drivers mad. ‘You know, Fanny,’ she said, ‘we were once better friends.’
I felt her stare burn into my cheek. ‘Meg,’ I said, rashly. ‘I’ve been thinking that it’s time to make a few changes.’
As ever, she was as sharp as a knife. ‘You want to chuck me out?’ Then she gave one of her laughs. ‘I would if it was me.’ She pushed her hair behind her ears; an uncharacteristically nervous gesture. ‘Does Will know what’s on your mind?’
‘I haven’t discussed it at length. But Chloe will be leaving home fairly soon, and I thought maybe… maybe it’s time for a smaller house.’
‘Will wouldn’t like that. He’d never chuck Sacha and me out.’ She shot me a wary look. ‘And you wouldn’t either, would you, Fanny?’
‘Won’t Sacha be leaving home too?’
Meg flung the lipstick into her bag. ‘Yes.’
Rather as my mother had departed from Ember House virtually empty-handed, Meg had arrived in Stanwinton with almost nothing, just a suitcase and a small bag of Sacha’s clothes for his weekend visits. ‘I couldn’t cope with choosing,’ she’d said.
Years later, when I talked to Rob at Sacha’s eighteenth birthday party, he told me he had begged Meg to take it all – furniture, clothes, china – but she’d resolutely refused, telling him she wanted space for her grief. Rob had been puzzled by this, but, in a curious way, I felt it made sense.
Meg raised her hands in front of her. ‘Look, only a little tremble. I’m improving. The other night was just a lapse. I am going to try for another job, you know.’
‘Sure.’ I drove into the surgery car park and dropped her by the entrance.
Meg gripped the door handle. ‘But I’m not quite sure enough to cope on my own.’
I leant over to close the door. ‘Meg,’ I called after her. ‘I didn’t mean it.’
After the committee meeting, I drove up to London. It was raining again. I peered through the windscreen. My father made a big thing of the Italian summer and, not for the first time, I realized why. Oh, to be there where it was so hot in the valley that if I sat under an olive tree, and looked up, the leaves would resemble flickering tongues of fire.
Will had left a note on the hall floor of our London flat where I would be sure to tread on it: ‘See you at the embassy. Don’t forget Pasquale. Plse don’t be late.’
