‘Come upstairs with me, Fanny’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘What a touching scene.’ Neither of us had heard Meg appear in the doorway.

Will released me and she glided up and gave him a hug. ‘Good meeting?’ he asked.

She looked calm and collected. ‘Winning the battle. I hope. No more scenes.’ She looked straight at me. ‘I am sorry about that, Fanny. I hope you have forgiven me?’

‘Short meeting,’ I said.

She raised a quizzical eyebrow at my lack of response and unwound a pink scarf from her neck. ‘It’s very simple and it can be said in two words. “Don’t drink.” Even the stupidest can get that message, and I’m not stupid.’

Will regarded her fondly. ‘No, you’re not.’

‘So what were you two talking about?’

I went to check on the fishcakes. ‘Second-car tax, what else? But I was rather hoping to discuss the revival of my career.’

She tucked her arm into Will’s. ‘I’m not up to speed,’ she said. ‘Tell me all about it.’

I found myself chopping the last tomato with unnecessary vigour.

In keeping with the summer so far, the week of the twenty-first dawned scratchy and unsettled. To prepare for the dinner, I had got myself to the hairdresser and spent three hours reading up the briefing notes supplied by Will’s office. Transport Tariffs. Aids. Agricultural initiatives. So far so predictable.

As Will handed me into the car, he surprised me by saying, ‘You look lovely.’

‘Thank you.’

In a full, black silk skirt and tiny matching jacket, my hair highlighted and swept back from my forehead, I sat between Antonio Pasquale-we greeted each other warmly – and the charming Italian ambassador. During the first two courses, I was occupied by Antonio and we discussed rubies. He had noted my ring. ‘Is there not a passage in the Bible that refers to a good woman being above the price of rubies?’ He smiled into my eyes. ‘Your husband should have bought you a bigger one.’ Conversationally, both of us did well and, as dessert was served and I turned to my right, I was sure he winked at me.

The Italian ambassador was formidably well educated and good-looking. ‘Is something amusing you, Mrs Savage?’

‘I think your finance minister just winked at me.’

‘Can I wink at you too?’

‘If you like.’

‘Your husband has been energetic lately. He is a notable politician.’ He leant towards me. His breath was scented with raspberries and vanilla. ‘We just need a little more time to think out his scheme. You know that we’ve stuck on one or two points.’

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Will fix his gaze on me. Don’t let me down.

Teamwork. The spoon in my hand was cool and hard and the raspberries tanged sweetly on my tongue. Once a team, always a team.

‘Why don’t you talk to him after dinner?’

‘Maybe the Prime Minister… We’re not sure how supportive the Prime Minister is…’

I smiled. ‘The Prime Minister is not a personal friend.’

‘But perhaps you will remind your husband to consider everyone’s interests.’

I put down my spoon. ‘You must talk to him yourself.’

The women retired for coffee, leaving the men in the dining room. ‘Terrible,’ hissed our hostess, in my ear, ‘but they like it that way.’

I accepted a cup of coffee. ‘Do you ever get tired of it all?’

She looked startled. ‘I don’t think so. It has its drawbacks but it’s an interesting life. Of course, when the children are young…’

We went over to join the rest of the wives, who were huddled in a gorgeous group of reds, blues and gold. They were a jolly group, keen to sample the delights of a capital city, and we settled down to discuss facials, shopping and theatre.

I reported the conversation about the Prime Minister to Will when we got back to the flat. ‘Point taken,’ he said, climbed into bed and reached for the red box.

Lines of fatigue stood out harshly under his eyes. ‘Will, would you ever consider doing something different?’

‘Not really. Though there are times… it used to seem so straightforward. Get elected and start improving the world… It isn’t that simple, is it? But I don’t see myself getting off the treadmill quite yet.’

I turned away and pulled the pillow under my head. The box hit the floor and Will put his arms around me. ‘Fanny…’

But the distance had opened up between us again, and I struggled with my feelings of indifference… and remoteness. Will had almost – but not quite – become a stranger, a troubling kind of stranger: someone I had once known inside out, but who had slipped into acquaintanceship.

‘Oh Fanny,’ he said at last. He pulled back my arms and caught me by my wrists. ‘I miss you…’

I made an effort and put my arms around his neck. It was a matter of faith, I think, and effort of will. I had to believe that the passionate feelings we once shared were not completely dead.

It worked.

Afterwards, he said. ‘Fanny, that was so nice.’

I smiled and touched his thigh. ‘It was.’

I lay awake, listening to the sounds of the city.

I would have given almost anything to be walking on a hot hillside where my father told me that the vines plunged deep through clay and sand. I wanted to squint through the sunlight at a horizon where Cupressus sempervirens pointed to the sky, and to see olive trees, fat tomatoes on skinny stakes, the bright green of basil.

I ached, too, for Chloë and wondered where she was. Did her feet hurt, or her back ache? Was she fed and were her clothes clean? Would she cope with… the experiences that lay before her?

From the branches of my beech tree at Ember House, I had spied on cars as they negotiated the bend in the road that skirted the garden. If I angled my (plastic, shocking pink) telescope correctly, I got a good view of the occupants. Often, when a car slowed, the women passengers flipped down the sunshade to check their lipstick in the mirror. Occasionally, the driver wound down the window and chucked out rubbish. This behaviour made me conclude that people were very peculiar.

It was on my eighteenth birthday that I took Raoul up to my eyrie; we clawed and cursed our way up in the dark. For once, Raoul had drunk too much wine, and I was wearing delicate, strappy sandals. The platform groaned under the weight of our bodies, and we embraced clumsily. My thin cotton dress split at the seam when Raoul tugged too hard and he pounced on the tongue of flesh which appeared. ‘So brown,’ he murmured, and wrenched off his shirt.

Inexperience and ignorance made me shrink and Raoul was unnecessarily rough. We had no saving grace of humour, only a grim determination to get the deed done.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Raoul murmured at last. He lifted a face sheened with sweat. ‘I love you.’

But I pushed him away.

That was unfair of me.

A tree-house is no place for seduction. It belongs to childhood… to a different place. Now, it was spoilt.

That night, I quit my tree-house in more ways than one.

I turned over in bed and considered the aspects of my life. The rubies and crimsons, the frail gold and amber of wine. My father. Will. Meg. Sacha.

Pushing my daughter towards Departure…

9

…as I had pushed her into life.

The first contraction took me by surprise when I was eating an early supper in Will’s flat. Alone.

I was thirty-nine weeks pregnant and, when I reflected on the rapidity of the changes in my life, it seemed to me that I had barely known Will for much longer.

The six o’clock news flashed up on the television screen and, in perfect synchronicity, Will rang to say that he would be in a meeting for most of the evening and not to keep supper for him. I felt soggy, pregnant and apprehensive, and it flashed across my mind that Will loved his work more than he loved me. Worse, he understood it better than he did me, and preferred to be doing it rather than having supper with his wife.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Dinner in dog.’

‘Miss me?’

I bit my lip. ‘No.’

‘I take that to be yes. Do both of you miss me?’

At my end, a smile forced its way to my lips. ‘No… Yes.’

Like an animal, I had gone underground. I had become blind and subterranean, blundering through the days. On one level I craved Will’s presence and attention but almost… almost he had become superfluous, for I was wrapped up in the female parcel, an enormous, bulky object with embarrassing aches and pains. The books had informed me about backache, varicose veins and a host of other ailments, and explained the body invasion with diagrams. None, however, owned up as to how thoroughly one’s mind was invaded. How the broad-bean-cum-ammonite sucked dry the rivers of wit, energy, calculation and inventiveness until there was nothing left except a vague, dreamy nothingness.

With Will frequently not around, and without the energy to visit friends, there was no one in whom I could confide my feelings, and I had fallen into the habit of talking aloud to myself. ‘I feel like softened butter, underdone jam, a melting snowman,’ I informed the grill pan as I cleaned it, a task that, these days, represented the level of my achievements.

So be it.

Shortly after Will, my father rang to check my progress. He sounded starded. ‘You’re alone? This is wrong. Someone should be there. What if something went wrong?’

‘Don’t panic, Dad. It’s fine.’

He sounded angry. ‘Is there anyone who could come over?’

‘Dad, it’s only six thirty and Will promised to be back later.’

‘Even so…’ In the background, his second phone shrilled. ‘Got to go,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep in touch.’

The first contraction made me shift in my seat in an effort to ease the ache. Fifteen minutes later, a second was intrusive enough to make me shove aside my plate of salad and heave myself to my feet.