her mobile. I was immediately connected to her voicemail but that didn’t tell me much. As I’d found to my cost over the previous year, there were several dead zones on Sandling Island where mobile phones lost their signal. Charlie might have switched off her phone or left it in a drawer in her room or she might have been on her paper round already. I made a mental note to call her a few minutes later.
I stood in the living room, briefly at a loss. I had about eight things to do and there seemed no compelling reason to choose one to do first.
It was my birthday, my fortieth birthday. I remembered the unopened mail and decided that, before anything else, I would have a cup of coffee and look at the cards and intriguing little parcels that lay on the kitchen table. I put the kettle on, ground some coffee beans, pulled out the white porcelain cup and saucer that Rory had given me this time last year. I remembered opening it as he watched me, sitting at this very table. One year ago, as I turned thirty-nine, I was still married, and we had been starting our new adventure together. Looking back with the merciless clarity of hindsight, I could see the ominous signs. Perhaps if I had recognized them at the time, I could have saved us. I could recall the day clearly. Rory had given me the lovely cup, and a shirt that was several sizes too big, and later in the day we had gone for a long walk round the island in the rain.
Now I was forty and single, with the wreck of my marriage smoking behind me. But because of Christian, I felt younger than I had for a long time, more attractive, energetic and hopeful. Falling in love does that.
The kettle boiled and I poured the water over the coffee grounds, then opened the first card, from my old school-friend Cora. I hadn’t seen her for years but we remembered each other’s birthday, clinging to our friendship by our fingernails.
There were about a dozen cards, and three presents: a pair of earrings, a book of cartoons about getting older, and a CD by a sultry young female singer I’d never heard of. I nearly didn’t bother with the large brown envelope at the bottom of the pile, addressed in neat capital letters, because I assumed it contained a brochure. As I ran my finger under the gummed flap, I saw a glossy sheet inside, and I drew it out carefully. It was an A4 photograph of Jackson and Charlie, with ‘Happy Fortieth Birthday’ written in Charlie’s flamboyant scrawl along the white border at the top and their signatures underneath.
I smiled at the faces smiling at me: there was Jackson, rather solemn and self-conscious, his neat dark hair with its widow’s peak, his tentative smile, his dark brown eyes gazing directly into the camera. Charlie stood beside him, her copper hair in a glorious tangle, her wide red mouth flashing a smile that dimpled one cheek, her blue-green eyes in her pale freckled face.
‘Jackson!’ I called up the stairs. ‘This is lovely!’
‘What?’ came his voice.
‘The photo. It arrived in the post.’
‘That was Charlie’s idea. She said it was more exciting to get things by post.’
‘It’s really good,’ I said, looking at the image once more, the two pairs of bright eyes. ‘Who took it?’
He put his head round the kitchen door. ‘What?’
‘Who took it for you?’
‘Oh, I dunno. Some friend of Charlie’s when you weren’t here on the weekend.’
‘On Sunday?’
‘Yeah. I can’t remember her name, though.’
‘Thanks. I’ll always treasure it.’
He wandered off once more, as if he hadn’t heard.
Later I would frame it but for the time being I pinned it to the fridge door with a magnet. But what to do now? What to do first among all the things that needed doing? I mentally tossed an imaginary eight-sided coin. First, I put the bag with the snorkel, the flippers, our bathing suits and towels into the back of the car, to get it out of the way. I put the dollars I’d ordered from the bank last week into my