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  The last time she had seen her mother, Helen James had been quite bright, but today her mood was querulous and snappy. She barely tasted the fish Perdita had bought to tempt her appetite before she pushed it away.

  ‘I’ll have it for lunch tomorrow.’

  It would be ruined the next day, even supposing her mother remembered to heat it up correctly. Perdita looked at her mother worriedly as she picked up the plate. ‘Aren’t you feeling well?’

  ‘I’m absolutely fine,’ Helen snapped. ‘For heaven’s sake, stop fussing!’

  ‘But you haven’t had a good meal for ages.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  Perdita drew a breath, then pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her mother. ‘Mum, don’t you think it’s time you thought about getting someone in to help? It doesn’t have to be a permanent arrangement, just someone to help with the cooking and cleaning until you feel better.’

  ‘I am better, and I’ve already got a perfectly adequate cleaner. You know that Mrs Clements comes in twice a week.’

  ‘I know you like Mrs Clements, Mum,’ Perdita acknowledged with a sigh. Mrs Clements was the bane of her life at the moment. As far as Perdita could see, she did nothing but drink coffee and complain about not feeling very well whenever she came round, and it was the surest sign of her mother’s decline that she wasn’t prepared to brook any criticism of her cleaner, who never seemed to do any cleaning at all.

  Perdita dug out a cloth and took out her feelings on the mess on top of the kitchen worktops. ‘Wasn’t she supposed to come today?’ she asked, wrinkling her nose with distaste as she rinsed out the cloth.

  ‘She did come.’

  ‘Where did she clean?’ It certainly hadn’t been the kitchen!

  ‘Where she usually does,’ Helen said sharply. ‘And you’re not to say anything else to her, Perdita,’ she warned in some agitation before her daughter could retort. ‘She was very upset after last time.’

  Perdita counted to ten, very slowly, before she could trust herself to reply. ‘I’m not suggesting that Mrs Clements doesn’t come any more, just that someone else could drop in about midday to make sure you have some lunch and-’

  She stopped as she saw the old familiar stubborn look settle on her mother’s face. ‘I don’t want strangers in the house, Perdita,’ she said. ‘I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself.’

  Then why was she here, cooking and washing and cleaning? Perdita wanted to stand up and shout at her mother, but she wrung out the cloth and attacked the worktops once more instead. Her mood of excited anticipation had been steadily trickling away since she’d arrived, leaving her with the usual mixture of frustration and guilty resentment. That champagne feeling had definitely gone flat.

  By the time Perdita had settled her mother in front of the television and finished clearing up, it was ten past eight and her mood had plummeted. She was tired after the unaccustomed physical activity this afternoon, and now she was tense and cross too. The last thing she wanted was an evening of small talk. She would knock on Ed’s door and explain that she really needed to go straight home. She didn’t suppose Ed would care particularly.

  Ed answered the door, took one look at her face and, before Perdita had a chance to make her apologies, he had stepped back to usher her inside. ‘You need a glass of wine,’ he said. ‘Come into the kitchen.’

  Perdita was suddenly too tired to argue. It had been a long day, with one thing and another, and in the face of Ed’s calm acceptance she knew with appalled certainty that if she started to explain her frustration and guilt she would start to cry, and she couldn’t let herself do that.

  He didn’t seem to expect her to say anything, so she followed him into the kitchen and sat down at the table while he poured her a glass of wine.

  ‘I’ll just get on with supper,’ he said, pushing the glass towards her. ‘You drink that.’

  Obediently, Perdita picked up the glass. A CD player had been set up since she had last been there, and there was restful classical music playing in the background. She sipped her wine and watched Ed move around the kitchen, intensely grateful that he wasn’t asking her to talk. A tea towel was flung over his shoulder and his movements were unhurried and competent and insensibly calming: washing lettuce, opening the fridge in search of Parmesan, chopping tomatoes, stirring his simmering sauce, setting a big pan of water to boil…

  The kitchen was warm and the sauce smelt wonderful, the music was soothing and the wine cool and crisp, just the way she liked it, but it was Ed’s quiet, steadying presence that made Perdita’s knotted muscles in her shoulders gradually relax as her tension dissipated.

  ‘Thank you-’ she broke the silence at last with a sigh ‘-I needed that.’

  ‘I know.’ Ed gave the bolognaise sauce a final stir, tapped the wooden spoon on the side of the pan and balanced it on the edge before turning to her with a smile. ‘Have some more wine.’

  Perdita let him top up her glass and then his own. ‘I’m afraid I’m not being a very good guest,’ she told him as he pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her.

  ‘You don’t need to be,’ said Ed. ‘You just need to be here.’

  In truth, he had been feeling a little guilty about the way he and Tom had made it impossible for her to refuse coming tonight. She hadn’t seemed that keen, but he had suddenly really wanted to see her at his kitchen table again. Ed couldn’t even explain why to himself, but he knew that he didn’t want to wait and make some formal arrangement for the future. He would just be nervous then, and it would have seemed more like a date, and obviously neither of them wanted that.

  No, it was just that the thought of sitting quietly with her, of talking and sharing a meal, had seemed inexplicably appealing all at once and, since Tom had provided the opening, Ed had taken his chance. He hadn’t been lying when he’d said that he looked forward to some adult company. There were times when he could feel very alone, even with three children in the house. Perdita’s presence the other evening had been somehow warming, revitalising, and he had wanted that again.

  But the moment he’d opened the door, he had seen the strain on her face and had guessed that Perdita had given enough of herself for one evening. Perhaps, though, he could do something for her, even if it were just to let her sit without talking for a while.

  ‘You’re very understanding,’ she said now, and Ed looked across the table at her. She was less glossy than usual. Her hair was tucked tiredly behind her ears and the chocolate-brown eyes were huge and dark, but, even weary and stressed, there was a vividness about her that illuminated the whole room.

  ‘I know what it’s like,’ he told her. ‘After Sue died, people were very kind, but sometimes what I really needed was just to sit quietly and not have to make an effort. The good friends were the ones who gave me a bit of time until I came round.

  ‘Those first few months were mad. It felt like I was running desperately on one spot, just trying to keep on top of work, making sure that I was there for the kids, trying to help them bear it and knowing that I couldn’t make it better…Everyone kept advising me to stop and think about myself, but I couldn’t just switch off like that. I’d just end up worrying about the girls and what was going to happen to them without a mother, how Tom would cope…I was the least of my worries.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound as if you had a chance to grieve yourself,’ Perdita said, suspecting that he was talking so that she didn’t have to. Ed was a kind man, she realised uneasily. After Nick, kindness was dangerously seductive, far harder to resist for a woman her age than any amount of bulging muscles.

  ‘I didn’t properly until nearly a year later,’ he was saying. ‘The kids and I had settled into a kind of routine, and I’d got very good at keeping everything bottled up. Looking back, I can see that I was completely rigid with tension and probably very difficult to live with, but I didn’t realise until one of my oldest friends turned up with his wife one Friday. They just announced that Katie would stay wi
th the kids and Mike was taking me walking in the Dales.’

  Ed’s mouth twisted in a wry smile at the memory. ‘I didn’t want to go, but Mike wouldn’t take no for an answer and, as it turned out, it was exactly what I needed. We walked for miles, not really talking at all. It was the first chance I’d had to think about Sue and how much I missed her…’

  He stopped, remembering how the grief he had kept tightly screwed down for so long had erupted without warning. ‘We stopped for a rest on a limestone pavement up there at one point. It was a beautiful day and the view was fantastic…and I suddenly started to cry.’

  Perdita’s throat was tight. It was hard for men like Ed to admit that they cried, but she respected him the more for it. Sometimes it took a lot more strength to acknowledge pain or weakness than it did to bluff and bluster and pretend that feelings weren’t important.

  ‘Mike didn’t tell me to pull myself together or pat my shoulder and say that it would be all right. He just sat there and wasn’t embarrassed and, when I’d finished, he handed me a cup of coffee and apologised he didn’t have anything stronger.’

  ‘He sounds like a good friend.’

  ‘The best,’ said Ed. ‘I was better after that.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said inadequately. ‘Does it still hurt as much?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, you get used to it, of course. Some times are worse than others.’

  Perdita nodded. She knew what that was like. It had taken her a very long time to get over Nick. She would think that she was doing OK. At first a few days would go by, then weeks and latterly a whole month or so, when she hardly thought about him, but then the old misery would swamp her without warning and for no obvious reason, plunging her back into wretchedness of long hours spent fighting tears, of nights when she would wake in the early hours and lie alone in the darkness, churning with loss. That was when she would miss Nick so much she felt as if she were drowning in it, until she managed to drag herself out of it once more. Even now, two years later, the memory of how he had let her down when she’d most needed him still had the power to make her wince at odd moments.

  ‘I miss Sue most when something’s happened with the kids,’ Ed said. ‘If I’m worried about one of them, or if there’s something to celebrate, it seems all wrong that she isn’t there. I miss just being married too,’ he went on slowly. ‘I miss having someone to make plans with, someone to talk to at the end of the day, someone to hold…God, listen to me!’ He broke off with a humorous roll of his eyes. ‘I’m not usually this maudlin.’

  ‘It must be lonely,’ Perdita said, conscious of a strange pang of envy, mixed with guilt and disgust at herself. How could you envy a woman who was dead?

  ‘Yes, it is sometimes,’ said Ed, but not in a self-pitying way. Reaching across the table, he topped up Perdita’s glass. ‘What about you? Have you never wanted to be married?’

  Perdita swirled the wine in her glass, studying it intently as if it held the answer. ‘Once,’ she admitted after a long pause. If Nick had ever asked her to marry him, of course she would have said yes. ‘It didn’t work out.’ She shrugged, managed a smile as she lifted her eyes to Ed. ‘It was probably for the best.’

  ‘In what way?’ he asked quietly, watching her face.

  ‘Maybe if I’d met the right guy in my twenties…’ Perdita was very conscious of his eyes on her, and she bent her eyes to her wine once more, swirling it mindlessly round and round. ‘Maybe then I would have settled down, done the whole marriage-and-kids thing…but I didn’t. I’ve had my share of relationships, and some of them were more fun than others, but there wasn’t anyone I could really imagine wanting to wake up with every single morning.’

  Except Nick, of course.

  ‘And now I’ve been on my own too long,’ she went on. ‘I’m used to having my own space. I like being able to go home and close the door and do whatever I want, whenever I want, without consulting anyone else. I don’t get lonely. I earn a good salary. I’ve got good friends, a nice flat, I can afford to travel…Why would I want to give up all that to get married?’

  ‘No reason, unless you think of marriage as sharing rather than giving up your freedom.’ Ed’s voice was carefully neutral.

  ‘Sharing means compromising,’ said Perdita. ‘I’m forty now. I’m set in my ways, and the chances are that anyone I meet is going to be too. Relationships are more complicated now. We’ve all got baggage-failed relationships, grief, disappointment, responsibilities-and that all has to be part of the compromise too. You have to really want someone to be prepared to compromise your whole life.’

  ‘And you never have?’

  Irritated by her own endless swirling, Perdita put her glass down with a click. ‘Yes,’ she said, her eyes sliding away from his. ‘But he didn’t want me enough to compromise, and a relationship takes two. You can’t do it all on your own.’

  ‘No,’ said Ed, wondering what sort of man a woman like Perdita would love. What sort of man wouldn’t love her enough to compromise even a little.

  ‘So I’ve given up on compromise,’ said Perdita, and she snapped on a bright smile. ‘When I meet a man, I don’t think about anything except having a good time, and when it’s not fun any more, it’s over.’

  Well, that told him, Ed thought wryly. ‘If you’re happy to be on your own, I suppose that’s the best attitude,’ he said after a tiny pause.

  ‘You obviously don’t like being on your own.’ For some reason, Perdita found herself wishing that she hadn’t been quite so adamant about the joys of single life. ‘Have you thought about getting married again?’

  It was Ed’s turn to play with his glass. ‘When Sue knew that she was dying, she made me promise that I would move on and make a new life, try to find someone else, but it’s easier said than done. For a long while I couldn’t imagine being with anyone but her, and then, as time went on, I did think about what it might be like to find someone else but, between the kids and work, there hasn’t been that much time to think about meeting the right woman,’ he said dryly. ‘Even supposing I knew who or what the right woman was! But Lauren is fourteen now, so she’s getting more independent, and it means that I don’t need to struggle to find an acceptable babysitter if I do want to go out in the evening. I’m hoping that moving here will make a difference to all of us.’

  ‘Has it yet?’

  ‘It’s a bit soon to tell. In spite of moaning constantly about missing their friends, Cassie and Lauren already seem to have made new ones. Tom’s finding it harder. He doesn’t have their social skills.’

  And you? Perdita wanted to ask. What kind of woman would be the right one for you?

  ‘Tom was fine with me this afternoon,’ she said instead, feeling that she was straying into very intimate territory. Perhaps it would be better to get back to more impersonal topics. ‘I felt sorry for him being landed with an old bag like me instead of having one of the other kids as a partner, but he certainly didn’t make it obvious.’

  ‘I should hope not,’ said Ed, evidently happy to follow her lead and steer the conversation back on to safer ground. ‘I don’t know what he thought at first-Tom’s not exactly chatty, as you’ve probably gathered-but I doubt very much that he considered you an “old bag”! He liked you.’

  ‘You didn’t ask Grace to put us together, then?’

  ‘Of course not. In spite of what my children think, I’m not that much of a control freak! I have to say that I was glad to see that he had been paired up with you, though. It meant he worked a lot harder than he would have done otherwise-swept along in your wake! I think he enjoyed it a lot more than he expected to, thanks to you.’

  Perdita made a face. ‘I don’t know that “enjoy” was the operative word!’

  ‘Oh, come on, Perdita, it wasn’t that bad, was it?’

  ‘It wasn’t quite as bad as I was expecting,’ was all she would acknowledge. ‘I just can’t see how the project is going to work, though.’

  ‘Didn’t Grace show you
the plans?’

  ‘Yes, but the project needs investment as well as a few people with forks,’ she pointed out. ‘It’s a huge area-the hard landscaping alone will cost a fortune.’

  Ed’s mouth quirked in amusement. ‘There speaks a practical businesswoman! But I agree. Substantial investment is going to be needed. Grace tells me that she’s hoping to get sponsorship for all the materials and wants to persuade skilled craftsmen to volunteer to teach the kids how to lay bricks, make hedges and fences and that kind of thing.’

  ‘It all sounds a bit vague to me,’ said Perdita crisply, wondering when Ed had had all these cosy little chats with Grace and what else they had been talking about. ‘Fund-raising takes a lot of time. Grace told me that she’s organising all this from her front room at the moment and trying to run her own consultancy. She won’t be able to keep that going indefinitely.’

  ‘No,’ Ed agreed, getting up to stir his sauce. ‘Which is why I’ve offered to sponsor the cost of getting someone to work part-time on the project, doing all the administration and chasing up potential sponsors. Grace thought that was a brilliant idea.’

  He lifted the lid of the big saucepan to check whether the water had come up to the boil, while Perdita turned her glass crossly between her fingers. Ed and Grace seemed to have a mutual admiration society going. Good for them.

  She scowled down into her wine, aware that she might not mind if Ed hadn’t more or less admitted that he was looking for a new wife-or if she hadn’t liked Grace so much. She was quite a bit younger than Ed, of course, but she was lovely and, as a widow, she would presumably have a lot in common with him. They were perfect for each other, in fact.

  And why was that thought so depressing?

  CHAPTER SIX

  S OMETHING in the silence suddenly made Perdita lift her head to see that Ed had turned from the cooker and was patently waiting for her to answer a question that she had been too wrapped up in her thoughts to hear.