What Women Want, Women of a Dangerous Age: 2-Book Collection. Fanny Blake

She seemed to be looking straight at Ellen as if she was trying to say something to her. Ellen strengthened her resolve. ‘You don’t know them.’

      ‘I feel as if I do. You’ve told me so much about them. Everything you’ve said makes me sure we’ll get on.’ He clicked the middle and thumb nails on his right hand, again and again.

      ‘But coming back to find your mother has moved a strange man into your home is a lot to take on board. They’ve been used to everything being the way it’s been for so long that they’re bound to resent you at first. Surely you see that.’

      ‘Of course. But they’ll get over it and be pleased to see you happy again. Think of that.’

      ‘Not to mention the discovery that their mother’s enjoying a sex life all of a sudden! I should think they’ll be horrified, poor things.’ Ellen laughed. ‘But, most importantly, I don’t want them to think they’ve lost me to someone else. They’ve lost one parent – that’s enough. If we’re going to be together for ever, I want it all to be right from the start.’

      But Oliver was not going to give in that easily. They carried on the discussion over the mushroom omelettes, the apple pie, the washing-up, the coffee. They took their mugs to the end of the garden where they sat in the near-dark on the bench, the summer smell of other people’s barbecues drifting round them as they tried to reach a resolution that suited them both. Lights from neighbouring windows cast a glow over the gardens while the sound of voices travelled across fences with the last gasps of barbecue smoke. Over the previous years, Ellen had always drawn comfort from the proximity of her neighbours but now she wished they would hurry inside so she and Oliver could have the night to themselves.

      They talked round and round in circles, until finally she invoked the one person she had hoped not to involve. ‘I have to do this for Simon. I have to make sure that Em and Matt understand that I’m not writing him out of their lives or them out of mine. I know he’d want me to be happy but he’d want them to be happy too, so I’ve got to do this in the way I think will make that happen.’

      They sat for a moment, neither speaking. Then Oliver took her hand and kissed it, pulling her towards him until she leaned against his chest, feeling the steady beat of his heart.

      ‘I think you’re the most wonderful selfless person I’ve ever met.’ He bent to kiss the top of her head.

      ‘I’m just their mother, that’s all. I—’

      ‘Sssh!’ He stopped her saying any more. ‘OK. I’ll do whatever you want.’ He ruffled her hair.

      ‘You will?’ His sudden agreement shocked her.

      ‘Yes.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I don’t want to, but I will.’

      ‘Thank you so, so much.’ She sat up to face him, taking both his hands in hers. ‘Where will you go?’ Now she was anxious at the idea of being separated from him again.

      ‘I’ve no idea.’

      ‘But you must have. What have you done with all the stuff you must have brought back from France?’ She pulled her pashmina tighter round her shoulders, aware of a chill in the night breeze.

      ‘I’ve stored it all at a friend’s place near Cardiff. Yes, I could go there.’

      ‘Near Cardiff! You never said.’

      ‘You never asked and it didn’t seem important.’

      ‘But you must have friends in London?’ This wasn’t what Ellen had imagined at all. She had imagined him nearby, in easy reach, so that he could call in regularly and gradually become more of a fixture in their lives without the children really noticing.

      ‘None. Not close enough to bum a bed from anyway – and I couldn’t afford a hotel, not for that length of time. No. I’ll have to see if Dan and Alice can have me for a few months. Do you think that’ll be long enough to sort this out?’

      Long enough? It sounded like a lifetime.

      ‘But how will we see you, if you’re living there? When will we see you?’

      ‘It’s only a couple of hours on the train. Ellen, this is what you wanted. Remember?’

      ‘But I hadn’t imagined you quite so far away. I’d thought of you sneaking out in the early morning before the children were up. That kind of thing,’ she said, her cheeks burning.

      ‘I’d rent somewhere nearer, but my funds are limited and without a job . . .’

      She thought of the clothes that he’d bought, guilty that he’d spent so much on her. ‘Haven’t you had any luck at all?’ She knew how he spent his days while she was at the gallery, trawling through the jobs-vacant sites online and riffling through the papers, ringing the bigger galleries. He was doing his best.

      ‘Nothing concrete. But I’m hoping it won’t be long. I’ve got a couple of possibilities lined up. Once I’ve got an income again, things will be different, I promise.’ He kissed her again, taking away her breath and her impulse to ask what the possibilities were.

      ‘I can’t bear to think of you so far away. There must be a better solution. Isn’t there any way of borrowing some money till you set yourself up?’

      ‘Who’s going to lend money to someone with no obvious means of repaying it and no guarantees? Unless . . .’

      She could barely see his face now the lights from the surrounding houses were going out one by one. She responded to the touch of his hand by moving closer to him. Sitting with his arm around her, their bodies tight against one another, Ellen felt she had never been more at one with another person. Even Simon. She shuddered.

      ‘Unless what?’

      ‘There’s only one solution that I can think of.’ She felt his body tense, his arm tighten round her. ‘But I can hardly bring myself to ask.’

      He didn’t need to say more. A silence fell between them as the night grew darker.

      *

      ‘You’ll never guess what she’s done now!’ Bea’s shriek of indignation almost burst Kate’s eardrum. She held the phone away from her ear.

      ‘What?’

      ‘She’s only agreed to pay rent on a studio flat for Oliver until he gets a job. “It should only be for a month or two.”’ This last was said in a shrill imitation of Ellen’s own justification to Bea only a couple of hours earlier. ‘He hasn’t got any money and otherwise he’d have to move out of London. Or so he says.’

      On her screen, Kate saw there were no patients waiting. Her morning so far had been routine, filled with the usual minor ailments and one or two ‘worried well’. She was glad of a break. Holding her phone between her shoulder and her ear, she began to straighten her room, hiding the carrier-bag of allotment vegetables given by a grateful patient, replacing the paper sheeting on the bed, pulling back the curtain surrounding it and putting away the toys that the last child had slung about in boredom while she was examining his mother. ‘Where?’ She held one of Sam’s long-ago discarded plastic Ninja Turtles, turning it over in her hand and remembering those days when he was a small boy and would play with nothing else.

      ‘I don’t know where. Somewhere near Ellen, I suppose. There wouldn’t be much point otherwise. I just can’t believe she’d be so rash.’

      ‘Why are you so against the idea? Mightn’t this be the best way to get what she wants?’ She sat behind her desk, picking up her pale-blue cardigan, which she’d knocked off the chair-back, and glanced at the photograph of the view from the Tuscan villa she and Paul had rented two years earlier. Looking at the rolling vineyards, distant orchards, terracotta-roofed farmhouses and yew trees standing sentinel around a distant monastery gave her the sense of relaxation she remembered from that time spent together. On her desk calendar, a caravan of camels and white-clad nomads crossed the shadowy red dunes of the Sahara. Between them they did the trick of distancing