LITMIR.BIZ

      I heard them before I saw them: a rising and falling hubbub of voices outside the kitchen door, their words blurring into each other so that I could barely make sense of them. I kept my head down, piping cream into meringues in perfect circles, feeling heat spilling over me. Now that the guests were arriving I wanted them gone again. A painful shyness was spreading in my chest, making me gasp for breath. My fingers shook as I placed the strawberries one by one on top of each meringue, taking far longer than I needed, spinning out the task. Above the general hum I heard Harvey’s coolly authoritative tones, inviting the guests to go out into the garden and exchanging niceties. Now and again, I thought I could hear Laura chiming in, palely echoing his words. Shadows moved across the work-surface as people passed outside, but I kept my back to the window. I collected the meringues on to their silver platter, then went to wash my hands. In my agitation I turned the tap on too hard and water sprayed out on to my dress, staining darkly against the red linen. I dabbed it ineffectually with a tea towel, feeling my heart beat faster, hearing the voices grow louder outside.

      ‘And where is Violet?’ I heard someone say, my name cutting through the babble of words. ‘How is she?’ I didn’t recognise the woman’s voice, but her tone was deferential, sympathetic, as if she were referring to an invalid. I couldn’t catch Laura’s reply, but the woman made a noise of ostentatious understanding in response. ‘Of course, it’s very hard on her,’ I heard her say. ‘On all of you.’

      I snatched up a tray of quiches at random and made for the back door, gripping the tray tightly to cancel out my shaking. When I saw the lawn I stopped in my tracks and blinked, half dazzled; dozens of people, many of them women with bright, jewel-coloured hats and shoes that danced and sparkled jauntily in the sun. I had not meant to make an entrance, but as I appeared, conversations seemed to fade, heads turn sharply my way for an instant before whipping back into place. I came forward across the lawn, placed the tray carefully down on to the nearest table, then straightened up, searching for a face I recognised. Many of them stirred up vague memories: ex-colleagues from Harvey’s law firm, their eyes alert and watchful. I couldn’t remember a single one of their names.

      I saw Laura and made my way towards her, forcing my lips into a smile. Next to her, a large matronly woman loomed, her hair teased up into tight little brown curls that clustered around her bovine face. I knew instinctively that it was her voice I had heard in the kitchen, but I had no idea who she was.

      ‘Violet, I was just going to bring out some more of the food – but you remember Miranda,’ Laura said, almost beseechingly, as if willing me to say yes. I looked closer, and with a shock I connected the name and the face: Miranda Foster, Jonathan’s godmother and an old family friend. All at once I could see her on our wedding day, bearing down on me and telling me how lucky I was and how Jonathan was like a son to her, before enfolding him lasciviously in a hug like no mother I had ever seen. The past eighteen months had not been kind to her; her face looked strained and stiff, as if it had been dipped in wax.

      ‘Of course,’ I said, holding out my hand, but Miranda made an impatient gesture and cast aside the sandwich she had been holding, pulling me against her voluptuous bosom into a forced embrace. I froze in shock, the sticky, cloying scent of her perfume flooding my nostrils.

      ‘My poor child,’ she whispered into my ear. ‘What you must have been through!’ As swiftly as she had drawn me towards her, she pushed me back, holding me by the shoulders to examine me. ‘You look older,’ she said, a little critically. ‘I suppose it’s to be expected.’

      Yes, I almost said, the passage of time tends to have that effect – but I knew that was not what she meant. What she was trying to imply, not very subtly, was that grief had ravaged me, stolen the youthful bloom that she might once have envied and rendered me wholly unremarkable. She may well have been right, but I fiercely resented her assumption that she was entitled to say it. She was no one to me; had meant less than nothing to Jonathan, who had once told me that he wished the old harridan would stop undressing him with her eyes every time they met. For an instant I felt my colour rise and the words threatened to burst out of me.

      ‘I suppose it is, yes – for all of us,’ I contented myself with. ‘I would hardly have recognised you.’

      Miranda’s brow wrinkled in suspicion and dismay, but before she could speak Harvey materialised at my side. He was wearing a crisp linen suit in pale grey, his silver hair drawn back from his forehead, and a necktie I had not seen before: an unusually flamboyant affair, apple-green silk shot through with metallic thread. When she saw him, Miranda’s face softened into what I suspected she thought was coquettishness, and which indeed might have been in a woman half her age.

      ‘Lovely to see you, so glad you could make it,’ Harvey said smoothly. ‘Violet, why don’t you go and see if anyone would like a top-up? There’s more champagne inside.’

      Gratefully, I broke away. Harvey had an instinct for seeing when people needed to be rescued and an admirably selfsacrificing nature when it came to substituting himself into the firing line; it was something I had forgotten about him in these months of near-isolation. As I retreated, I stole a look back at him. He appeared relaxed, urbane and smiling. It was impossible to tell whether it was just an act.

      I spent the next hour passing through the crowd, offering drinks and canapés, stopping here and there for a brief five minutes of small talk. Most of the guests had eyes that flooded with a mixture of pity and curiosity as they spoke to me, but at least, unlike Miranda, they had the good sense to keep their tongues in check and stuck to chatting about the weather. As time passed I felt myself begin to unwind, the tension relaxing from my muscles. A couple of Harvey’s colleagues flirted gallantly and unthreateningly with me, making me roll my eyes and blush. I wondered whether I might be having fun. Standing there on the lawn in my red dress, tossing my hair over my shoulders and laughing, I caught a glimpse of the future opening up. It was not the future I had planned and not the kind of fun I had been accustomed to, but there was little prospect of that any more. Glancing into the crowd of guests, I tried to imagine Jonathan among them, moving with his old confident ease from group to group, and found that I could not. For so long I had carried him around with me like a dead weight, projecting him so vividly into every situation I found myself in that it sometimes seemed I had summoned his ghost. The thought felt disloyal, but if I had lost the knack, I was not sure that I wanted it back. I was tired of missing him, tired of living my life around someone who no longer existed. Any respite from it, no matter how temporary, made me giddily thankful.

      I was helping Laura to collect some empty glasses when I saw Harvey stride across the lawn towards us. He put his arm lightly around Laura’s waist, bending in towards her so that his mouth almost brushed her ear. ‘What is that man doing here?’ I heard him murmur, jerking his head to indicate who he meant. To anyone who knew him less, his voice would have sounded unruffled, but I caught a steely undertone to it, the merest hint of a threat.

      Laura followed his gaze, narrowing her eyes in the sunlight, and I did the same. Underneath the low-spreading apple tree at the edge of the lawn, a little apart from the crowd, a man stood, smoking a cigarette and looking out across the grass, his face half turned away.

      ‘It’s Max Croft, isn’t it?’ Laura said. When Harvey did not reply, she turned her face up to his appealingly, searching for a clue as to what

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