I wiped a protesting Chloë’s hands. ‘She’s exploring,’ said her grandfather fondly. ‘Bold and brave. When she’s old enough, I must get the tree-house repaired.’

Will was surrounded by the debris of fried bacon and toast when Chloë and I returned. ‘Thanks for letting me know where you were,’ he said. ‘It didn’t take much to guess.’ Then he added nastily, ‘I knew you’d run off to your father.’

I dropped the car keys on to the kitchen table. ‘What are you getting at?’

‘Just that.’ He put his hands on the table and levered himself to his feet. ‘We might as well acknowledge it, Fanny. This is not going to work. I’ve made a big mistake. Let’s call it a day, pick up our lives and start again. I’ll make sure that you’re all right and we’ll share Chloë as best we can.’

The strange intimacy of the night had vanished, replaced by a brisk, decisive, politician’s blueprint for sensible arrangements and legal niceties. ‘OK?’ His eyebrows remained in a straight line. ‘That’s what you want?’

I felt faintness spread through my stomach and turn my knees as soft as butter. ‘I have to change Chloë,’ I said.

I bore her upstairs to her room and laid her on the changing mat, which was patterned with fat yellow teddy bears and, for some reason, bells. She was tired by her outing, and from the excitement of seeing her grandfather, and was scratchy and grizzly.

I cleaned and wiped and patted. When I had finished, I put her into her cot and turned on the musical mobile. The wretched tune tinkled and the ducks embarked on a stately, circular dance.

‘Gotcha,’ they seemed to say.

Chloë’s eyes drooped. I knelt down beside the cot. What was the truth? The truth was that now Chloë was here and well and safe, the luxury of choice had vanished. That was the deal with children. I knew. I knew about the chill of a child’s lonely incompleteness. I knew inside out their bewilderment and the nag of unanswered questions. A person has to choose. But that was mind candy. There was no choice. ‘I won’t leave your father,’ I told Chloë. ‘I can’t do that to you.’

Neither, I realized, could I do that to myself, for I loved Will. I hated what he’d done, but I loved him. I loved his passionate devotion to the idea of a better world; I loved the possibilities that beckoned in our future. I was not willing to give them up without a fight.

Chloë whimpered, and I stuck my finger through the bars and stroked her cheek. ‘Weeping Eros is the builder of cities,’ wrote a poet. I would weep and build my city too.

And rule it, and grow powerful.

I went downstairs to Will, who was waiting in the kitchen. As I entered, he turned slowly and I saw how beaten and tired he looked.

‘Fanny?’

‘I’ve decided to give up working with my father,’ I said. ‘We agreed it would be better.’

I crossed to the dresser and picked up the diary, which shed its snowfall of invitations and reminders.

‘OK.’ I opened it up. ‘Let’s go through this. We have a busy month.’

Will sat down opposite me and dropped his head into his hands. ‘Thank God,’ he said.

A few days later, when I was lying in the bath and he was brushing his hair in the mirror, he asked, ‘Do you really forgive me? Will you forget?’

I squeezed a sponge of water over my shoulders. ‘I’ll do my best.’

He abandoned the beauty parade, hunkered down beside the bath and kidnapped the sponge. ‘I promise I will never, ever do it again.’ His arm rested on the side of the bath. It was brushed with golden hairs that lay flat and silky over his skin. Underneath it the muscles were hard and different from my softer, yielding body. I reached out and arrested the hand that was trickling water over my shoulders. Will stared down at me and I returned his scrutiny more boldly than in the past.

I would do my best. I would clamp my mouth shut, stitch up my wounds, fight back and demand Will’s sexual… loyalty. In return, I would place myself by his side: smiling, entertaining, supporting.

Yet in future I would be watchful.

I would reserve the right to inner immigration. When faced with the intractable, or the intolerable, people fled inside themselves. They studied, they dreamed, they learnt. My situation was hardly intolerable – I was neither oppressed nor abused – but my spirit had been dented. Nothing so terrible there either. Every girl… and every woman, the woman into which I would grow, required an insurance. That was mine.

‘You will try?’ Will bent over and kissed me. ‘Will you try to forget?’

From its position on the shelf above the basin where I had propped it, a postcard from Benedetta of the church and a flower-filled piazza in Fiertino flashed in the corner of my eye. The red varnish on my toenails emerging from the water matched the scarlet of the geraniums in the photograph. An optimistic red. After a second, I kissed him back. ‘Yes.’

As I say, to be good is not necessarily to tell the truth.

14

The years of children, politics and of a marriage slipped by.

There was no more talk of a house in Brunton Street. Instead we bought a mansion flat in a utilitarian-looking block in Westminster and it did us fine.

We settled in and Will came and went: to his chosen arena of deals and alliances, ambitions and ideals. There was less talk of ideas and ideals and more descriptions of personalities and who had done or said what, but his career flourished.

And I? I patrolled and marshalled a different world, but joined him as often as possible. Once a week, I sat down and did the paperwork for my father. Meg lived with us and Sacha came at weekends. Once or twice a man appeared on the scene, but he did not last. At odd intervals, she got herself a job, but they did not last either. And, in the later years, her drinking was not so bad. Months would go by without incident.

More often than not, the rooms in the house were full, there was the rustle and mutter of a family sounding under its eaves. Our marriage grew and deepened, went through troughs, blossomed, withered a little, blossomed again but it was never stagnant.


*

Before I had had time to catch my breath, Chloë had been gone for a week.

‘How do you feel?’ Elaine had rung up to commiserate.

‘Like an arm or a leg has been chopped off but, and this sounds odd, I feel my energy returning…’

‘Got you,’ she said. ‘Feeding and watering a household takes it out of a girl.’ She drew in a sobbing breath. ‘This household at any rate.’

‘Have you been to the doctor as you promised?’

‘Prozac,’ she said. ‘The caring wife’s best friend.’

‘Hey. I’m your best friend.’

‘Fanny,’ Elaine said sadly, ‘you don’t match up to the chemicals.’

Chloë’s presence was in the house, in every room. If I loaded clothes into the washing machine, there was her favourite pink blouse. Her hipster jeans sat on the clean-laundry pile and I ironed them into shape. I picked up her sponge from the bathroom floor. Her copy of a Harry Potter book – ‘Comfort reading, Mum’ – had become wedged between her bed and the wall. I rescued it and placed it beside my own bed. The insurance loss-adjuster recorded her absence in toothbrushes and socks, in the silence when there had been words, in the hairs snagged in a hairbrush.

For the present, that would have to do. It was all I could manage in the way of coming to terms, and I closed the door on her room (‘Izt bad,’ said Maleeka, unnecessarily) until later.

‘Mum,’ she said, when she rang from Sydney, ‘you never told me how exciting it would be.’

As I put down the phone, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Expensively cut hair, waistline – well, no comment on the waistline – the correct lipstick for my colouring, long legs. Nothing new, nothing remarkable and yet I felt I looked like a woman in transition. Losing Chloë meant I looked back, and I’m sure Will did too. But Chloë would only be looking forward.

Meg and I were left to our routines. During the day, if I was at home, we kept our distance by mutual consent. After so long a time, we understood the limits for each other. But in the evenings – the dangerous time, the witching time – Meg often sought me out. She was my evening shadow, the reminder of the ties that earthed me.

At these times, because it was required of me – or because I required it of myself – I did my best and cooked light, nourishing suppers. Risottos, grilled salmon, chicken breasts in soy sauce. By now, these recipes had become second nature and I tossed them off easily and without much effort, and made a point of sharing them with her.

It was a sort of bargain struck between us – and we stuck to it fiercely: Meg because she knew she should have left our house long ago, I because… I had grown tough and strong inside. I had wept over Will and Meg and built my city.

On the day Chloë phoned, Meg and I shared a fish pie in the kitchen. ‘Congratulate me,’ she said. ‘I haven’t touched a drop since your anniversary.’

I murmured congratulations and Meg regarded me over her plate. ‘I wish I could explain, Fanny. You’re owed many explanations. You, of all people. I know what you’ve done for me. But I feel better and stronger… and I know that things must change.’ She concentrated on spearing a piece of fish on her fork. ‘It’s like this. If this delicious pie was brandy I’d be the happiest woman alive. The terrible truth is, alcohol is so much more reliable than a husband or a son. Or love.’

I found myself laughing. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

After we had finished, we moved into the sitting room and I opened the french windows. A moth flew in and attempted suttee on the lamp. I got up to rescue it and coaxed it out into the night.