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room, where there are boxes filled with toys, drawers stacked with puzzles and games; on the mantelpiece the painted wooden letters that spell out BENJAMIN … from his godfather James. Dear James. Juliet reaches out and traces her finger around the curves of the ‘B’, and shivers. There but for the grace of God. She blocks the feeling, refusing to allow the thoughts to spread. They’re too painful; too close to home. She should have asked Heather, his widow, to spend Christmas with them. She’s one of Juliet’s closest, oldest friends, but Juliet was too cowardly and now she’s feeling ashamed of herself. She supposes there’s a fear of contagion from Heather’s grief, and also a sense of guilt that Alex survived, that they still have this supposedly perfect little family while she has nothing, not even a child. Some clumsy person had apparently told Heather that not having children would make it easier for her to move on, to meet somebody else. People can be really stupid. But perhaps most of all Juliet feels that she and Alex are not grateful enough. She doesn’t want Heather to see the cracks. Juliet is the lucky one. She got Alex back. To be anything less than perfectly happy – and grateful – would somehow be an insult to James’s memory and Heather’s loss. It’s complicated, guilt. It can make you behave in peculiar ways.
    Juliet pushes the feelings – and the guilt – aside and distracts herself by straightening the special set of tin soldiers which line up in front of the slate hearth. They’re too fragile to be played with – a special gift from Alex’s mother as ‘she’d saved them all this time in the hope of a grandson.’ They have sharp, rusted edges and more than likely lead paint, so even these lifeless little facsimiles of soldiers come with a health warning.
    She stands up and finds herself looking at the picture over the mantelpiece. It’s a pre-Raphaelite-style painting of a small boy in an old-fashioned white linen smock, blond curls tumbling around his shoulders, blue eyes shining above pillowy, cherubic cheeks, a chubby fist reaching out for something beyond the picture. It was a very un-Juliet choice, but it is fabulously kitsch, and it did look a lot like Ben had done at the same age. It slightly redeems itself by having a decent gilded frame which looks original. It is the sort of romanticized, iconic image of a perfect child that can never really exist in real life. Rose-tinted cheeks of that hue could only appear if the child was febrile, Juliet knows. She imagines that the boy in the painting would have had an old-fashioned, proper nanny in his idealized and sanitized life. A sensible, no-nonsense sort of woman in a dark blue dress under a starched white apron; the uniform of the nation’s child protectors; nothing like a uniform, eh? One of those Mary Poppins-type coats with a velvet collar, and a hat for when she wheeled her charge into the park and competed with all the other nannies as to who had the smartest perambulator, the springiest coachwork, the shiniest spokes; the most spotless starched pinafores on their charges. Just the sort of nanny that Alex would have hired if they were into nannies.
    There is really no point Alex interfering in Ben’s upbringing, because he can never be relied on to help, and because she’s always had to do everything, it seems perfectly reasonable that it has to be done her way. Alex has missed so many of Ben’s big milestones – birth, learning to walk, first birthday, first day at school, pretty much everything that has mattered so far – it’s only natural that she’d resent his interference when he came out. Being married to a soldier was like being a single mum a lot of the time.
    But the best thing about Alex being out is the fact that they live here. The house is one of the larger houses in the road because it’s been extended upwards and outwards. They have a loft conversion to accommodate a large master bedroom with