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don’t know – he was like a dark-haired lion, great in the doorway of your white house, grapevines over his head, Raki in his hand. He was a sort of Dionysus.’
     
    ‘Godlike.’
     
    ‘Yes, if you like. Godlike.’
     
    And the two women sat there in the rain, under the umbrella, remembering that all this was dead, gone, no longer.
     
    ‘I’ve missed you, Poll,’ Rose said.
     
    ‘Me too you.’ Polly leaned forward and stubbed her cigarette out on the picnic table.
     
    ‘You really must stay as long as you like,’ Rose said. ‘Stay for ever!’
     
    ‘Well, until we get on our feet again . . .’
     
    ‘Of course.’
     
    ‘Oh, by the way,’ Polly said. ‘The baby was crying when I went past the car.’
     
    ‘Why didn’t you say?’ Rose said, scrambling to her feet and running down the slope to get Flossie.
     
    ‘I did. Just now,’ Polly said to Rose’s back as she slowly got up and made her way down behind her.
     

Five
     
    It took Rose a while to settle Flossie back into the car seat; she had managed to wake up all the others with her wailing. Anna had been trying to calm her sister, which somehow made Rose feel worse, as if she had committed a double dereliction of duty. Polly just got in the car and sat and waited for Rose to finish, barely acknowledging Yannis and Nico, who were wriggling with discomfort in the back.
     
    Rose eventually climbed into the driver’s seat. It was nearly seven o’clock and she wanted to get home to the stew she had cooking in the Aga, to feed the travellers then settle them into their new digs. She was a little angry at Polly for not having told her earlier about Flossie, but she made allowances for tiredness and for grief. By the time they were back on the motorway, she was able to speak again.
     
    ‘What are your plans then, so far?’ she asked Polly, but there was no answer. She glanced over and saw that Polly had curled around her seatbelt and fallen asleep. She looked so calm and so innocent like that – at least ten years younger than she actually was. Rose turned her attention back to the road and quickly had to brake. The car in front was stationary and it looked like there was a long queue up ahead.
     
    As she sat in the traffic jam, Rose felt a growing sense of responsibility for her visitors. Her own and Polly’s histories were so bound up together, it was hard to know where one of them began and the other ended. It was Rose who had introduced Christos to Polly, back in the Notting Hill flat days, and it was because of Polly and Christos that Rose had got together with Gareth.
     
    Polly had been very successful in the early nineties. She had ridden high in the indie charts with her raw yet poetic music, and had been the pin-up for a certain type of kohl-eyed boy. When she came up to London to do her teacher training, Rose had rented a room in Polly’s velvet-lined Notting Hill flat. Those had been heady days. Polly was Rose’s ticket to the glamorous and exciting London that she, a maths graduate and trainee primary school teacher, shouldn’t really by rights have had access to. She remembered only too well the feeling of facing a raucous class of seven year olds with the dregs of cocaine in her system – and, on one very memorable occasion, her nostrils – from the night before. She was well known as Polly’s sidekick, and her photo often appeared in magazines, in the background or in the back of some taxi, behind the main story that was Polly.
     
    And then it all went wrong. Polly’s fourth album, a pared-back piano-based series of the darkest songs she had ever written, was universally loathed. ‘Music to cut your wrists to,’ was one critical opinion, ‘and not in a good way’. Polly, who lacked the thick skin to deal with such blows, sank low, and the recreational use of cocaine and heroin that they had both enjoyed soon became, for her, a daily necessity. Sepulchral at the best of times, Polly started to look like a