Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      One

      Two

      Three

      Four

      Five

      Six

      Seven

      Eight

      Nine

      Ten

      Eleven

      Twelve

      Thirteen

      Fourteen

      Fifteen

      Sixteen

Seventeen

       Eighteen

       Nineteen

       Twenty

       One

      It was the end of October. As London receded and the motorway bisected open country they saw the flamboyant colours of the trees. Autumn in the city was a decorous affair of fading plane trees and horse chestnuts, just one more seasonal window display, but here the leaves made fires against the brown fields and silvery sky.

      ‘Look at it,’ Nina said. ‘There’s no elegant restraint out here, is there? That’s real countryside. Where I belong now. How does the poem go?’

      She knew it perfectly well, but she shifted cautiously through the layers of her memory that contained it. Memory could still play tricks on her, bringing her up against some scene or a view or simply some remembered words that would make her cry. She had cried more than enough for now.

      ‘“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,”’ Patrick supplied for her.

      ‘Yes, that’s it.’

      The poem brought to mind completion, or rather the conclusion of some important cycle, and the slow but inev-itable stilling of the blood and consequent decay that must come after it.

      Nina turned her head and stared out of the rear window as if she hoped to catch a last glimpse of London. There was nothing to be seen except the road, and the traffic, and the unreticent scenery. She had left London, and had not yet arrived anywhere else. It was as if the expansive world she had unthinkingly occupied had shrunk until it was contained within Patrick’s car. ‘It’s how I feel, rather.’

      ‘You are not particularly mellow.’

      She laughed, then. ‘Nor fruitful.’

      ‘You have your work, that’s fruit. And you are only thirty-five.’

      And so even though she was a widow there was still time for her to meet and marry another man, and to mother a brood of children if she should wish to do so. Not much time, but enough. In his kindly way Patrick did not want her to lose sight of this, although he was too tactful to say it aloud. She was grateful for his consideration, but with another part of herself Nina also wished that her loving friends would stop being so careful now. She thought that she needed someone to shout at her:

      Your husband is dead but YOU are ALIVE and you must bloody GET ON with it.

      It