She’d said it just felt like a cop-out to her, but she’d been finishing with him then; it hadn’t mattered what she’d said or what he’d believed. She’d been too distraught to care.

She had been beginning to feel better, to rebuild her life. She was looking for a new job, was thinking she might perhaps move into party planning, as it was called… well, it would be better than party wrecking… She knew she’d be good at it, and it looked like fun. (She’d told William about that, actually, and he’d said that it sounded great. God, he was so nice to talk to; he really, really listened and thought about what you’d said…)

Well, she’d advance down the recovery road again, no doubt. If life had taught her anything, it had taught her that. And the fact that she still missed William, really missed him… well, she should regard all that as some kind of a penance for the wrong she had done, not only to Laura and her children, but to William himself.

William had been equally upset by their meeting. It had been great in a way… they’d almost become friends once more. But it had made him miss her horribly all over again; he felt like a reformed alcoholic who had had the fatal, dangerous last sip, and he was back in the misery of his addiction.

It was true, of course, what she said: she was not the person he’d thought; in fact-to be brutal about it-she fell extremely short of the person he had thought, and it would be very hard ever to quite trust her again.

But then, she had been honest with him in the end, brutally honest; she had not spared herself; she had not taken the liar’s way out and continued to deceive him. And that had been brave. She was brave: immensely so. It was a quality in her that William liked and admired. She wasn’t just tough-she was cheerfully so; she didn’t whinge about things-she just got on with them. And he missed her… horribly. And so he thought, Why not see her again? Without any illusions? The attraction had still been there; what she did for him hadn’t changed. Why couldn’t he live with the bad, enjoy the good, the sexy, the totally unsuitable, which was-he knew-so much part of the pleasure of her?

He swung from decision to decision, backwards and forwards, as he went about the farm and fed the cows-now in their winter quarters-and mended fences and hedges and drilled for winter wheat and delivered calves and checked on the drives and the birds with the gamekeeper, and changed his mind almost hourly.

What he needed, William thought as he lay most unusually sleepless in his extremely uncomfortable bed, was some kind of a sign that would make up his mind for him. Only… what was Abi practically bumping into him, quite equally fancy-free, and clearly pleased to see him, but a sign? Was he really likely to get another one? Almost certainly not.

CHAPTER 43

The one sadness hanging over Mary’s wedding day was that Christine refused even to consider sharing her mother’s happiness.

“I’m sorry Mum,” she said when Mary asked her. “I can’t. It feels wrong, disloyal to Dad. And please don’t ask me again, because I can’t change my mind. I’m not being difficult; I just feel very… uneasy about it.”

Gerry was coming, and her son, Douglas, had arrived from Canada with his wife, Maureen, and their two children. Timothy would take her down the aisle, and that would make up-almost-for Christine’s absence; they had always had a very special close relationship, she and Timothy. He had always adored her, asking her to all his birthday parties-except the teenage ones, of course-demanded she was outside the school gates after his first day, invited her to all the interminable football matches he played in and the school plays, and, after he had left home, visited her at least once a fortnight demanding the cottage pie she made, he said, so much better than anyone else.

So there they would all be, and Russell’s children had taken her to their hearts, especially his son, Morton; and the girls, Coral and Pearl, were very sweet and kind.

She would be surrounded tomorrow with friends, some old, some new; it would be a wonderful day. But still… it hurt that Christine would not come, and more, that Christine knew it hurt, and even so was not persuaded.

They had been to New York, and she had had the most wonderful time; she had met a lot of Russell’s friends and attended so many welcome dinners and cocktail parties she became exhausted and had to go to bed for two days; but she had also been shown the sights, had gone up the Empire State and looked down in awe on the dazzling fairyland that was the city far below, drunk cocktails in the Rainbow Room, done the Circle Line tour, shopped in Saks and Bloomingdale’s, and taken a horse-and-carriage ride in Central Park.

But she had gone home at her insistence to her own dear house in Bristol until the wedding; she contemplated its sale with deep misery, but then Russell had had the idea of giving it to Timothy. “It’s so tough these days for kids, trying to get a foot on the property ladder, and when they can’t get a mortgage for love nor money. Try him out; see what he says.”

Timothy had said only one word when she told him, and that four-lettered; he had then gone bright red and said, “Sorry, Gran, sorry, sorry, but that is just so… so cool; you are just absolutely the best.”

Christine had been a bit funny about that too, said it wasn’t good for young people to have things made too easy for them, but Gerry said if anyone had made things a bit easier for him when he’d been young, he might have progressed a bit farther than he had.

Douglas and Maureen and their daughters were staying in the house with her; and Douglas would drive her over to Tadwick Church next day. Russell had moved into Tadwick House, and his three children were staying there; they had said they would go to hotels, but Mary had begged them to use the house. “I hate to think of it not lived in; it will be wonderful to have you there. And besides, it will be nice for Mrs. Salter to have something to do other than wait hand and foot on Russell. So bad for him anyway.”

“But, Mary, dear, he’s ruined already,” Pearl said, and Coral agreed.

“You have to blame Grandma Mackenzie; she thought he was the nearest thing to an angel on this earth.”

“Heaven help us all,” Mary said, “if we get up there and find it inhabited by people like your father!” And then added hastily that actually of course it would be very nice. You couldn’t be too careful with stepchildren: even if they were sixty…

It was a perfect December morning: bright and golden, with frost spangling the hedges and meadows and a sky that was brilliantly clear and blue.

The guests started to arrive at eleven thirty. Russell was deeply touched by how many people, some of them quite elderly, as he remarked to the girls-while clearly and blissfully unaware that this description could be equally applied to him-had accepted and made the really quite long journey to Somerset, England, as they all called it. Mary’s friends-also quite large in number; there was no doubt they were good, healthy stock, their generation-followed them in, and the organist began to play the lovely echoing, rounded sound soaring through the little church. Russell felt a dangerous lump in his throat, and gripped Morton’s hand suddenly.

Alex felt rather proud to be arriving with not one but two extremely pretty women; he had confessed to Emma that he and Linda had become “just friends, nothing more, seen each other for a meal once or twice.” Given that he flushed to the roots of his hair as he said it, and failed to meet Emma’s eyes, she guessed that the relationship might be just slightly more meaningful than that, but she nodded politely and said how nice that must be.