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Or at least back in the party fold.’

      ‘Blimey,’ Charles French spluttered. ‘That might be a tall order.’

      ‘It might be,’ Eddie agreed. ‘I made a lot of enemies in Westminster.’

      ‘And Fleet Street,’ Charles reminded him.

      ‘One enemy in particular, as we all know,’ Eddie said darkly. ‘But I’m also foolish enough to believe that I still have a number of friends, in both those worlds. Voters aren’t looking for perfection. They’re looking for someone who can learn from their mistakes. I’ve learned from mine.’

      Have you? thought Charles French. But he kept it to himself.

      ‘Besides, returning to politics is what I want,’ said Eddie. ‘And one should always go after what one wants in life.’

      ‘What about you, Lady Wellesley?’ Sarah turned to Annabel, infuriated by Eddie’s self-centredness. ‘Do you want to go back to Westminster life? After everything that’s happened?’

      To Annabel’s own surprise, her answer was unequivocal. ‘Yes. I do.’

      Sarah was amazed.

      ‘Why?’ she couldn’t help asking. ‘After people were so poisonous to you.’

      ‘I think it’s because people were so poisonous,’ Annabel said truthfully. ‘David Carlyle and his cronies destroyed our lives. Not just Eddie’s life, but mine too. He robbed us of something that was ours. I want it back. We both do.’

      Eddie saw the glint of fire in his wife’s eyes and felt a powerful rush of desire. All of a sudden he wished his guests would bugger off and leave them alone.

      ‘So why the move out here?’ Sarah asked.

      ‘We needed a change,’ said Annabel, her earlier coolness back. ‘If Eddie does go back into politics, we’ll need somewhere private to retreat to. Somewhere that’s just for us. Besides, I wouldn’t want to live in London full time. And in any case, it may not happen. It’s still early days.’

      ‘There you are, you see,’ Eddie smiled at Sarah French. ‘You heard it from the horse’s mouth. That little pleb Carlyle may have won the battle. But the war isn’t over yet. Not by a long chalk.’

      That night, in bed, Eddie pressed himself against his wife, slipping his hand up underneath her starched cotton nightdress.

      ‘Can’t you take this off?’ he whispered in her ear.

      Annabel didn’t quite know why, but suddenly she felt like crying.

      ‘No, Eddie. I can’t.’

      ‘Are you angry?’

      ‘No,’ she lied. ‘I’m tired.’

      ‘I’m sorry, Annabel.’

      The words hung in the air above the bed like a cloud of ash, the last, lingering remnant of the catastrophe that had befallen their marriage. A volcano had erupted two years ago, wiping out Eddie’s career and the life he and Annabel had built together. The cloud was all that was left of that life.

      We’ll build a new life, thought Eddie. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again.

      ‘I love you.’ His hand caressed her breast through the fabric of her nightgown.

      Annabel closed her eyes and bit down on her lower lip. Part of her wanted him, wanted to turn round and kiss him and make love and make everything all right. But that would require forgiveness and she hadn’t got there yet. Not completely anyway. Annabel had married Eddie when she was very young, barely out of her teens. She’d built her entire life around him. But in one, disastrous year she’d seen that whole life wiped out. It was like planting a forest, watching it grow, and then waking up one morning to find that the chainsaws had been in and it was all gone. People accused her of being a snob, and perhaps she was. It didn’t occur to anybody that she was defensive and standoffish for a reason. That she’d begun wearing armour because she needed it. Because Eddie had dragged her into a war zone and left her to fend for herself.

      ‘Things have to change, Eddie,’ she said, removing his hand from her breast and clasping it in hers.

      ‘I know, and they will. You heard Charles tonight. It’s going to be a slow road back to politics, whatever happens with this book. And in the meantime we can focus on our new life here. This house, the Swell Valley. It’s a new chapter for all of us.’

      I hope so, thought Annabel. I really hope so. But if this was day one of their new life: deranged neighbours wandering into the kitchen, Eddie inviting agents for supper, Milo getting rusticated again and reporters slavering outside the door like a pack of wolves, she had her doubts. They hadn’t even bumped into David Carlyle yet, but that was bound to happen. On a clear day you could see Hinton golf course from Riverside Hall’s attic windows.

      ‘Goodnight, Eddie.’ She let go of his hand and rolled over.

      Eddie kissed the back of her head tenderly.

      ‘Goodnight, my darling. It’s good to be home.’

       CHAPTER THREE

      Laura Baxter watched the raindrops shudder their way down the grimy train window as the 5.02 p.m. from Victoria hurtled through the Sussex countryside. For once she didn’t feel tired. Ever since she’d gone back to work, she’d been operating in a permanent fog of exhaustion, what with Luca still waking in the night and the long commute, not to mention the poisonous politics of the TV world. But today, none of that mattered.

      She’d had an idea for a show. A bloody brilliant idea, if she did say so herself. She could hardly wait to talk to Gabe about it.

      Ironically, it was the argument with Bill Clempson and his merry band of ramblers that had inspired her, although the idea itself had come to her in the midst of a disastrous meeting at Television Centre this morning. Sisters, a dark comedy drama that Laura had been working on with an old friend from the Beeb, and which looked certain to be green-lit a few weeks ago, had suddenly been binned by the powers-that-be at ITV drama.

      ‘But you loved the pilot,’ Laura protested. ‘Jim Rose said it was the most original thing he’d seen since Sherlock.’

      ‘It’s a great show,’ the commissioning editor agreed. ‘It’s just not quite the tone we’re looking for at the moment. You mustn’t take these things so personally.’

      The problem was, Laura strongly suspected it was personal. John Bingham, Laura’s long-term lover before she met and married Gabe, was out to get her. John had been head of Drama at the BBC when Laura first met him – charismatic, powerful, charming and married; unhappily so, according to him. Laura was young, impressionable and madly in love. It wasn’t until she got pregnant and John callously cut her off, crawling back to his wife and torching Laura’s career for good measure, that the scales had fallen from her eyes.

      It all felt like a lifetime ago now. After she lost John’s baby, Laura had moved back to Fittlescombe and met Gabe; the rest was history. She hadn’t given John Bingham a moment’s thought in years. Until family finances had forced her to go back to work and she’d discovered that, in the interim, Bingham had risen to become one of the most powerful men in the whole of British television. Now at ITV, where he’d sent the drama ratings through the roof and was considered little short of a god, John Bingham could make or break the careers of writers and producers with a nod or shake of his balding head.

      He’d actually got in touch with Laura when she first went back to work, inviting her to a swanky, intimate lunch at the Oxo Tower ‘for old times’ sake’. Laura had been shocked by how old he looked – how old he was. The fit, rugged fifty-year-old she remembered was now over sixty, with a pronounced paunch and saggy,