She fell on her knees beside Alice.

'I'll kill myself if you leave me.'

Alice put her hands over her face.

'Think what we've shared,' Clodagh said. Think what we do together. No one else can do that for you, no one. Only me. We'll go to France. We'll have a house in the sun, we'll all go naked in the sun. We'll have a garden with lavender and thyme and a terrace over a valley. We'll never have to be apart, nights and days together, days and nights. The children will be bilingual, brown as nuts and bilingual. We'll make love when we want to, quite free, in sunlight and moonlight, and you'll come so alive you'll wonder you ever called it life before-'

Alice's hands were shaking. From behind them she said, 'Be fair.'

'Fair?'

Alice put her hands in her lap and held them tightly.

'I expect you think I am deeply bourgeois but I can't come to paradise dishonestly-'

'Dishonest? What the hell's dishonest about us? It's being so bloody honest that's half-killing you!'

'Glodagh,' Alice said. 'Clodagh. I can't think while you're here.'

'I'm terrified of your thinking-'

'What would you do,' Alice said, 'if you had three children?' She looked at Clodagh squarely. 'And a husband.'

'It's excuses,' Clodagh said at once. 'All excuses-'

'Call it whatever names you like. Nothing changes what is, what I have in my path that you don't have in yours.'

Clodagh grew excited again.

'I see, I see. You're going to be the sacrificial lamb, nobly giving up the best happiness you'll ever be offered-'

'I didn't say anything about giving up anything. I have thought about sacrifice and I'll think some more. You could think about it too. You could think about a good deal, and stop shouting at me.'

'Alice,' Clodagh said, 'I'm scared as hell.'

Alice put out a hand and took Clodagh's.

'I remember the day you told me your lover in New York was a woman. We were down in the river meadow and the children had made a boat out of a log and you were wearing your wizard's cloak. I shan't ever forget that conversation. I shan't ever forget that I suddenly could see the powers and freedoms that might be mine. "We all have a choice," you told me. "You, me, everyone." Well, you had chosen, and then I did. Nobody made us, we chose. And now here we are with the results of our choice and we have to choose again-'

'I can't believe what I'm hearing!'

'Yes you can. You know it's true. "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen," you said to me.'

Clodagh snatched her hand away.

'But you won't stay in the kitchen with me!'

'I didn't say that. I haven't decided anything. But we must be apart for a bit. I don't want it but I can't think at all while there are emotional demands all over me, yours, the children's, anyone's. It isn't just the now, you see, it's the future too. Things never stand still, do they.' She looked at Clodagh. 'You ought to think about your own future too. For your own sake.'

Clodagh stood up. She was wearing a peculiar patchwork skirt with long handkerchief points to the hem, which brushed against Alice's bare arm. Alice looked with love at the triangle of red and yellow cotton lying against her skin.

'Just a week,' Alice said.

'I'll go to London.'

'Yes.'

'Who knows' - defiantly - 'who I may meet?'

Alice said nothing. Clodagh moved away to lean on the apple tree trunk.

'Wouldn't you care?'

'Of course-'

'Would it make you angry?'

'No.'

'Sad?'

'Very.'

'Alice - Alice, why don't you resent anyone for anything, damn and blast you?'

'I do.'

'You don't-'

'I do. I just can't resent anyone for something I've done-'

'Go to hell!' Clodagh shouted. She swirled from the tree in her gypsy rags. 'Priggish, conventional, bloody bourgeois! I'm going, I'm going and you'll never know where!'

And then she ran from the orchard and across the lawn by the sandpit and Alice heard her car start up and roar furiously round the house and down the drive. Then Balloon came, dancing through the long grass, to remind Alice that, crisis or no crisis, a cat would like his supper.

When the Unwins heard that Clodagh was going to London, they both tried desperately to stop her.

'But you wanted me to go. In fact you ordered me-'

'Not to London.'

'Why not to London, for God's sake?'

They could not answer her. They could not utter what they had newly learned about London. Clodagh watched them struggle for a while and then she said, 'You mean that you think I'm going to London to cruise.'

Even she was sorry. She looked at the utter misery on their faces, their self-confident, prosperous, genial faces, and was sorry.

'I'm not,' she said, and her voice was softer. 'I'm not interested. It's one of the things you don't understand. But I must get away from here, I must be somewhere anonymous. I might,' she said, trying to make small amends, 'I might see about a job.'

Margot drove her to Salisbury station and they listened to the car radio on the way, to an adaptation of an Arnold Bennett novel, and there was a scene between an overbearing mother and a defiant daughter longing for independence, and neither Margot nor Clodagh could turn it off for fear of tacitly admitting that it had any particular significance to either of them. It was market day in Salisbury and it was trying to rain, warm, thin, summer rain that made the roads feel greasy. The spire of the cathedral rose imperturbably into the grey clouds and tourists carrying National Trust carrier bags spilled off the narrow pavements in search of lavatories and Marks and Spencer and Mompesson House. Margot gazed at their apparent ordinariness with passionate envy and Clodagh with energetic scorn. At the station, Clodagh bought a single ticket.

'Oh darling, not a return?'

'No,' Clodagh said. 'Not because I'm not coming back. But because in my present mood I just wouldn't like the feeling.'

They were ten minutes early for the train.

'Don't wait-'

'I want to.'

'Ma,' Clodagh said, 'please don't wait.'

'I can't bear to see you so unhappy,' Margot said, her own face ravaged by wretchedness.

'It's pretty hateful-'

'Oh, Clodagh-'

'No,' Clodagh said. 'Don't start. If it makes it easier, just pretend I'm in love with a man.'

A flash of anger braced Margot.

'I will certainly not stay, to be spoken to like that.'

Clodagh watched her go, upright in a summer dress of cream linen, watched her stop to speak to an elderly porter who had helped with Unwin school trunks for fifteen years, watched her smile goodbye to him and go out past the folded iron gates to the station yard, back to her car, back to Pitcombe, where Alice was.

When she got to London, she took a taxi to Highgate, to the flat of the woman writer who had been her first real lover. The writer had a new lover, another writer, and they made Clodagh extremely welcome and were most sympathetic about her pain and her fears. It was comforting to be in their flat, to be in a room where the atmosphere was full of acceptance and understanding. She talked far too much and they were very patient.

During supper, one of them said, very gently, that she didn't think promiscuity would be the answer, and Clodagh said probably not and that was almost the worst part of it, not being able to affect Alice just now.

'I feel,' she said, 'that I'm the one that's given her the confidence to behave like this. So can you see why I feel so frantic?'

They could. They made her camomile tea and put her to bed in a little, comfortable back bedroom with a copy of Sinister Wisdom that one of them had brought back recently from America. Then they told her to try and sleep, and went out, and Clodagh could hear them moving about, clearing up, talking companionably to one another, and she looked at the room with its blue and white cotton curtains and its brass lamp and the rough white Greek rug on the floor, and she was so consumed with longing and envy that she turned her face into her pillow and cried and cried as if her heart would break.

In her kitchen, Juliet Dunne pretended to make watercress soup. She chopped shallots and made stock from a cube and hummed a bit but it wasn't any use. She'd only started because she'd met this very tired bunch of watercress lurking in the fridge behind the walnut oil and the Mister Men yoghurts, and she'd thought she'd just do something with it as a distraction from thinking of Martin and Alice sitting eight feet apart on her terrace supposedly having a talk. She had always happily regarded the roles of wife and mother as the absolute pits, but they were knocked into a cocked hat by the role of mediating friend. It was awful. Offer the participants a drink and they both say no, thank you, just Perrier, ask them where they'd like to sit and they say anywhere, it doesn't matter; say, trying to make a joke, look, I'll come and break it up in ten minutes and they look mortally offended. So you shove them out on to the terrace and say do look at my Whisky Mac rose, don't you think it's almost as disgusting as the drink, and they ignore you and sit down, sighing, a long way from one another as if they suspected a contagion. So you hop about a bit, being inane, and then you say oh my God something in the oven, and rush into the kitchen for another bloody cry and then you think, must do something, can't just sit here and wait, so you find some practically fossilized watercress and think, aha, I'll make soup. But all you really want to do is go on bawling, in between tiptoeing to the window and looking out at their unhappy, separate backs. I hate being fond of people, Juliet thought, stirring her dissolving stock cube with a knife handle, I simply hate it. I'd much rather loathe them, like I loathe Clodagh. At least you know where you are, with loathing.

After twenty minutes or so, Alice came and stood in the kitchen doorway.

'Martin's gone for a walk. It's so kind of you to have him.'

Juliet had her back to Alice, stirring her soup.

'You know I'm not kind.'

'And it was kind to have us both here-'

'Shut up,' Juliet said. 'Stop mouthing crappy platitudes at me.' She turned round. 'Did you get anywhere?'

'No.' Alice paused and then she said, 'He wants me to apologize, I think. He wants it to be all my fault.'

Juliet said nothing. She took the soup off the cooker and peered at it.

'Henry'll never eat this. Looks like pond slime.'

Alice said, 'I'll go home now. But thank you.'

Juliet banged her saucepan down.

'What the hell do you expect from him? What has he done, poor brute, except be the boring old Englishman he's always been - the one you married?'

'It isn't as simple as that-'

'Simple? You bet your life it isn't simple.' She came across the kitchen, holding the wooden soup spoon. 'Allie. Allie, how could you?'

Alice looked at her.

'How could you treat Martin like this? How could you be so absolutely normal all these years and then suddenly

- God, Allie, have you fallen off your trolley?'

'In order to even begin to understand,' Alice said, 'you have to want to.'

'And what about you trying to understand Martin?'

'I do.'

'You do?'

'Understanding unfortunately doesn't mean I can wave a wand and put everything right, but it does mean that I'm trying to take everyone into account.'

Juliet marched back to the cooker.

'Too good of you.'

Alice left. As she went out of the Dunnes' house, she could see Juliet's little boys on a climbing frame across the lawn. She got into her car. On the floor there were bits of Lego, and a cassette tape of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and a bangle of Clodagh's, purple and gold, that Natasha had borrowed to take to school and awe Sophie with. There were also rather a lot of sweet papers.

'I want you to be more slutty,' Clodagh had said to her. 'My beautiful, sexy, slutty Alice. I want you to let your elastic go. Life to the senses, death to sense.'

Alice started the car, and drove slowly down the drive to the lane. The heavy August green of the countryside weighted the land right down. Some days, when it was still, you felt the fields could not breathe. Gross weeds lined the lanes, tangling on the verges. Alice thought she felt like it looked, exhausted, weighed down, ripe for harvest. She put her hand up for her pigtail, and held it as she drove, one hand on it, the other on the steering wheel.