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it’s Sacha’s birthday at the weekend. He wanted to know what you were doing about it.’
    Meg buried her face in her hands. ‘What have I done?’
    I bent down, picked up her discarded jumper and trousers and placed them on the chair. ‘I’m busy today. I’ll see you later.’
    ‘It’s all Rob’s fault,’ she muttered. ‘If he’d stayed married to me, I might have got through.’
    At my wits’ end, I whirled round. ‘Meg, you drove him to it. He fell in love with Tania out of the exhaustion.’
    ‘I’m sick,’ she said flatly. ‘He should have tried harder. You shouldn’t give up on sick people.’
    ‘Have I ever given up on you?’ I asked.
    ‘You’ve wanted to. Be honest.’
    We stared at each other. Meg was the first to drop her gaze but only because she knew she was the victor. She knew she had made it impossible for me to walk out of the room.
    I drew up a chair, manipulated the banana on to the spoon and handed it to her. ‘Eat.’
    A smile hovered at the corner of her mouth, but her eyes darted towards the whisky bottle in the wastepaper basket, before she parted her lips.
    I used to dream of a big, generous, blowsy household where children rustled and muttered in the bedrooms – two, three, even four. And every night I would go round and count them. ‘This is Millie’, I would say, smoothing fair tangles away from her face. ‘This is Arthur’, removing the thumb from his mouth. And this … this one is Jamie, the terror.’
    But it had not happened that way. After Chloë there were no more babies. My body pulled and strained to obey my longings, but it could not do what I asked of it. They haunt me, my non-children. Those warm, sleeping, rosy bodies, the children-who-never-were. Sometimes, I listen out for them playing under the eaves of my ugly house.
    ‘I don’t mind,’ Will said to me once. ‘We have Chloë, that’s enough. We look after her. I look after you. You look after me, Fanny. Be content,please’
    ‘Don’t you mind at all?’ I asked.
    He touched my cheek. ‘I mind for you. I mind anything that hurts you.’
    Yet my household was full and we had been happy. First Chloë was born, and I was catapulted into the terror and mystery and exultation of a love that would never die. Then Meg came to live with us; Sacha too, after his sixteenth birthday. The au pairs came and went; the party workers slipped in and out; each leaving a ghostly imprint on the atmosphere, their rustles and murmurs dissolving into the general murmur of our lives.

3
    ‘Is anything wrong Francesca?’
    My father was the only person who ever called me by my full name, and very little of what I felt or did escaped his scrutiny which was sometimes critical, but always loving.
    ‘Not really.’ I looked up from our scratch lunch of mushroom soup and cheese in the dining room at Ember House. It was only five miles from our house and I wrestled him into the diary at least once a week.
    The clock ticked reassuringly on the walnut sideboard and the blurred reflection of the blue and white fruit bowl beside it had the depth and stillness of a painting.
    The electric light emphasized the lines on my father’s face. New lines? And his tweed jacket seemed looser than I remembered. He had always been bony: all his energy had gone into running his wine business – and into me, his only child. I don’t know what he thought about my situation, for there were some things about which he was guarded, but his pride in Battista Fine Wines was immense. It was a highly respected, idiosyncratic operation, catering to a growing number of wine lovers who were prepared to trust my father to select their wines, rather than the supermarket.
    I speared a gobbet of dolcelatte on my knife. ‘Once Chloë’s exams are over, things will settle down.’
    How did one admit to the feeling that a crossroads had been reached? How did a girl – no , a woman come to terms with the fact that her daughter was about to leave home? How