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Harry’s settled well at nursery. We had a lovely time on Saturday afternoon making harvest baskets out of shoeboxes. They’re both mad about dinosaurs and I had to make the boxes look like a stegosaurus or something, can you imagine? It took me ages! Then would you believe it, on the way to the Harvest Festival Ollie dropped his and all the fruit fell out. But I salvaged some, and Harry offered him an apple from his basket, it was so sweet.’
    ‘What about Charles?’
    ‘I hardly saw him. He went over to the Great House as soon as I arrived and didn’t come back until late. Then today he was up at the lake until lunch time. I took the boys there after church, but of course he couldn’t say much in front of them.’ She bit her lip. ‘He’s asked me to go back next weekend, it’s Roger’s birthday on Saturday and there’s a party at night. They’ve got a babysitter but he wants another pair of eyes at the party, in case Mona–’
    ‘Don’t make a rod for your own back,’ Tom said, setting a plate in front of her.
    ‘I hardly do a thing for them, it’s the Musgroves who help out most of the time. I wish Walter and Lisa would do more, but until Mona’s last birthday they didn’t seem to realise there was a problem–’
    ‘Your father never seems to realise anything ,’ Jenny put in. ‘He certainly doesn’t seem to realise that Charles and Mona only got married because she was pregnant and Charles felt he had to do the decent thing. But Walter prances about pretending the Musgroves are embarrassingly grateful to be part of the Elliot dynasty and refusing to accept that it’s a marriage made in hell.’
    ‘I just feel sorry for the children,’ Anna said quietly. Then, with forced cheerfulness, ‘Mmmm, this looks delicious.’ She picked up her fork and ploughed her way through a meal that may as well have been sawdust.

Chapter Five
    After a heavy session at the hotel gym, Rick sat in his room nursing a whisky and reliving that brush with the past in Uppercross.
    If it was her … No, there was no mistake, it was her all right. And the betrayal had been even greater than he’d thought. From the look of it, she hadn’t finished her precious degree – probably hadn’t gone to university at all. She’d fallen in love with someone else, had a couple of kids and was now festering in Sleepy Hollow. God knows, she could have had all that – and an awful lot more – with him , out in Australia. But she’d preferred to listen to her pompous old fart of a father and her evil godmother. If he let himself, he could remember – as if it were yesterday – the moment when she’d told him she would do what her mother had always planned for her, a degree in Russian at Oxford ...
    Except she obviously hadn’t. Instead here she was, a dowdy mother of two, living close enough to her beloved Kellynch to make a daily bloody pilgrimage if she wanted.
    Women. You couldn’t trust them as far as you could throw them.
    He phoned Shelley, but there was no answer. Maybe she was away on an assignment and had left her mobile behind; she was always forgetting something.
    He phoned Sophie.
    ‘Hi,’ she said brightly. ‘How did Charing Cross Road go?’
    ‘Fine. Just wanted to check it’s still OK for me to come on Friday.’
    ‘Of course. Although I should warn you – one of our neighbours, Roger Musgrove, is having a party on Saturday and Ed let slip that you were here for the weekend, so we’re all invited. I couldn’t really refuse, Roger’s been very kind.’
    ‘Who else is going?’
    ‘Oh, it’ll be mainly family. Barbara, his wife, we’ll have to hope she’s not doing the catering.’ She giggled, but didn’t share the joke. ‘His two daughters, Louisa and Henrietta, they run the stables at the far end of the village. His son, Charles, and his dreadful wife. A few other neighbours, I think, and us.’
    ‘Do you know someone in Uppercross with two little boys?’ He paused, calculating their ages.