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beforehand.
    â€˜Why can Mikey and Imogen be at home,’ Thomas wrote, entirely forgetting his own choice and resolve, ‘and not me?’
    At the bottom of the sheet, he had drawn a picture of himself and the blue rabbit and underneath he had written ‘We are sad’. Liza took the letter to June Hampole, who read it with the serious attention she gave anything to do with children.
    â€˜He can’t bear to blame himself for having got his expectations wrong so he has to blame you. But it will pass. I promise. Reality will block out his expectations and he will accept that. Poor Liza,’ said June Hampole, putting an arm round her shoulders. ‘The little fiends are so brilliant at putting the boot in.’
    Privately, Liza thought she might put her own boot in. Just a small boot. She would produce Thomas’s letter at lunch on Sunday, and show it to her father-in-law, in front of Marina de Breton. It was not so much that she wanted to make Sir Andrew unhappy, as to elicit from either him or Archie – and preferably Archie – an admission that Archie’s bond to his family came before that to his father.
    In the car, going to school, she practised saying, ‘Archie wouldn’t have agreed to Thomas’s going away if the suggestion hadn’t been yours.’
    She thought she could say this very smilingly, in front of a stranger. She felt suddenly happy and certain, driving between the hawthorn hedges with half-bare trees marching across the fields beyond them, against a translucent sky streaked dove-grey and pale-blue. Perhaps she could begin to move things as she wanted, perhaps her power – which she would never abuse, she was certain of that – was just beginning to spread fledgling wings. Perhaps the time was quietly coming when she would not be the dependent one, the cherished childlike one, and would move from the outer circle of their life, where she presently wheeled gently with the children, into the steering, driving heart of it.
    She drove into the old stableyard of Bradley Hall, and parked her car beside the wire-wheeled Alvis that Dan Hampole drove to Winchester station en route for London and his arcane pleasures. A double file of small boys in football boots was jiggling up and down outside a doorway, and, in front of them, Blaise O’Hanlon, his untidy Irish glamour accentuated by a frayed tweed jacket of dashing cut and an immense, dirty yellow muffler, was talking and tossing a soccer ball from hand to hand. As Liza pulled up, he sent a boy to open her car door for her.
    â€˜â€œL’absence est à l’amour,”’ said Blaise to her as she passed him, ‘“ce qu’est au feu le vent; il éteint le petit, il allume le grand.” Please identify the quotation.’
    But she went by him, laughing. There was no need to obey.

Chapter Three
    Archie, on duty on Saturday night, and called out to violent stomach pains just before midnight, and to a stroke which had smitten someone’s houseguest just before dawn, slept until ten o’clock on Sunday morning. It then seemed fair to Liza to send Mikey up with a mug of tea and Imogen behind him with as much Sunday newsprint as she could manage. Archie pulled them into bed with him, but Imogen said she must take off her shoes, and struggled out again.
    â€˜Just thocks,’ she said reprovingly to Mikey, climbing back in. Her hair, which grew in the same soft curls as her mother’s, had been tied high on the back of her head with a ribbon woven with edelweiss. She wore a Shetland jersey under a triangular pinafore of green corduroy and she smelled of baby soap and Marmite. Archie put his face into the duckling nape of her neck and breathed in deeply.
    â€˜Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah,’ said Imogen, holding a newspaper upside down and pretending to read it. ‘Nah-nah-nah.’
    â€˜What’s Mummy doing?’ Archie said between slow kisses.
    â€˜You