There was an awkward pause. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ Ed asked after a moment.

It sounded all too much like an accusation to Perdita, who flushed. ‘I…my mother lives next door,’ she said, ridiculously flustered by the situation. ‘We saw the removal vans so guessed you’d just moved in. I just popped over to welcome you and give you this.’ She held up the bottle of wine awkwardly.

‘That’s very kind,’ said Ed as he wiped his hands on his jeans. ‘Sorry, I’m filthy,’ he explained and took the bottle Perdita was holding out to him. His brows shot up as he read the label. ‘This is more than just a bottle of wine! I hope you’re going to stay and share it with me?’

‘Oh, no, I mustn’t,’ Perdita stammered, stepping back, as gauche as a schoolgirl. ‘You must be tired if you’ve been moving all day.’

‘Please,’ said Ed, and unfairly he smiled. ‘I’ve had a long day and you don’t know how much I’ve been wishing that I could just sit down with a glass of wine! I can’t share it with the kids, and I don’t like to drink alone.’

‘Well…’ Now it would seem ungracious if she rushed off, Perdita decided. ‘I mustn’t stay long, though. I’ve left my mother on her own.’

‘Have a glass anyway. Everything’s chaos, but come into the kitchen and I’ll see if I can lay my hands on a corkscrew.’

Ed’s daughter looked from one to the other suspiciously. ‘Do you guys know each other, then?’

‘Your father is my boss,’ Perdita told her.

‘And this is my daughter, Cassie, as you’ve probably gathered,’ Ed put in.

Cassie tossed her blonde hair over her shoulder. ‘God, is he as grumpy at work as he is at home?’

‘You’d probably need to ask his PA,’ said Perdita, amused. ‘I haven’t had much to do with him yet.’

‘It’s no use asking his PAs. They always think he’s lovely, but we know better,’ said Cassie with a dark look at her father. ‘At home, he’s a tyrant! He’s so pig-headed and unreasonable!’

‘Really?’

‘I couldn’t bear to work for him,’ Cassie declared. ‘I’d be on strike the whole time!’

Ed seemed quite unfazed by all of this as he led the way into the big kitchen at the back of the house. ‘I’m so unreasonable that after a day moving house with three bone-idle teenagers, I decided that it was more important to sort out some beds so that we could all sleep tonight, rather than dropping everything to set up the computer so that Cassie could instant message her friends right away.’

‘Very tyrannical,’ murmured Perdita.

‘See?’ Cassie shook back her hair and changed tack without warning. ‘Can I have some wine?’

‘No,’ said Ed.

Cassie heaved a dramatic sigh. ‘I’m going to go and ring India and tell her how boring it is here!’ she announced and, when this threat had no visible effect on her father, she flounced out.

‘Sorry about that,’ said Ed, locating the corkscrew at last in one of the boxes piled on the kitchen counters. ‘Cassie is a bit of a drama queen, as you probably gathered.’

‘She’s very pretty.’

‘And knows it,’ he said wryly. ‘When Cassie is in a good mood, there’s no one more delightful-and no one more unpleasant when she’s in a temper! It can be exhausting just keeping up with her moods.’

‘My best friend has two teenage girls,’ said Perdita, who had spent many hours plying Millie with wine and listening to the latest crisis with either Roz or Emily, and occasionally both. ‘I gather they can be hard work. It always seems that boys are easier, but that’s probably because Millie doesn’t have one!’

Ed smiled ruefully. ‘Probably. Tom can be just as difficult in his own way, and so can Lauren. They’re upstairs, but I’ll spare you the introductions for now. It’s been a long day and for now I’d just like to sit down and relax for a few minutes!’

He pulled out a chair from the kitchen table. ‘Are you OK here? The sitting room is even more of a mess, I’m afraid.’

‘Here’s fine.’ Perdita watched as Ed poured the wine and then burrowed his nose in the glass reverently. Something about the intentness of his expression, something about his smile, something about the hand curving around the glass made her squirm inside and she wriggled involuntarily in her chair.

Ed lifted his head and smiled at her across the table. ‘This is a wonderful wine. Do you always give away bottles like this to your neighbours?’

‘No, it was just the first one I found in my father’s collection,’ she told him. ‘I don’t know anything about wine, to be honest. I’m sure Dad would be glad to know it had gone to someone who appreciates it, though.’

‘I remember you said your father had died.’ Ed took another appreciative sip and put his wine down. ‘Does your mother live on her own?’

‘For the moment.’ Perdita turned her own glass very carefully by the stem. ‘That’s one of the reasons I came round, actually. I wanted to give her new neighbours my contact numbers in case there was ever any problem. She hasn’t been well recently, and it’s taking her a long time to get over it. I try to come every day, but she’s alone at night and when I’m at work, and that does worry me sometimes. Some days she seems fine, but others she’s not so good.’

‘Couldn’t you get someone to come in and help her?’ said Ed. ‘When my own mother was ill, she had excellent carers. There was someone in the house with her twenty-four hours a day.’

‘I’ve tried suggesting that, but she won’t hear of it.’ Perdita sighed and stopped fiddling with her glass, taking a sip of wine instead. ‘Sometimes I think that the only thing keeping her going is her determination not to lose her privacy. That’s really important to people of her generation. I do understand. It must be awful to feel dependent, but it’s so frustrating too. Her life-and mine!-would be so much easier if she would let someone pop in and cook and clean at least. As it is-’

She broke off, embarrassed suddenly. Too often lately she had found herself going on and on about her mother’s situation, as if it consumed her. It wasn’t a healthy sign.

‘As it is,’ Ed finished for her in a practical voice, ‘you have to do everything. Isn’t there anyone else in the family who could help, or are you an only child?’

‘No, I’ve got two brothers, but one emigrated to New Zealand a couple of years ago, and the other lives in Devon and is married with three small children, so obviously he can’t be expected to help, especially when there’s me with no husband or family to take into account. It goes without saying that I have to be the one to give up my life.’

She broke off abruptly. ‘Sorry, I should have a paper bag to put over my head when I start going on like this!’ she apologised. ‘It’s just that I get so resentful sometimes, and then I feel guilty. The fact is that I don’t want to give up my job to look after my mother. I don’t know how I would manage financially, but perhaps that’s just an excuse? My mother spent enough years of her life looking after me, after all. Am I just being selfish in not selling my flat and moving in as a full-time carer?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Ed frowned as he considered her situation. He could quite see how frustrating she found it. ‘It does seem hard that all the responsibility falls on you. Couldn’t your brothers at least help persuade your mother that she needs some practical care?’

‘Mum doesn’t believe in worrying men about domestic details,’ she said wryly. ‘She’s always so thrilled to hear from them that, of course, she tells them everything is fine-and then tells me at length how good it was of them to have called her when they have such busy lives!’

Hearing the bitterness in her voice, she flushed. Ed was a sympathetic listener. Too sympathetic, perhaps. He didn’t gush, or exclaim, or tell her how awful it was for her. He just sat there and listened with a thoughtful expression that made her want to blurt out all the worry and grief and frustration and resentment bottled up inside.

But he had problems enough of his own and, anyway, he was her boss. Remember that, Perdita?

‘I’m sorry,’ she said wearily. ‘I shouldn’t be like this. I love my mother. I should be grateful that I’ve still got her, not moaning about what a worry she is.’

‘It’s normal to feel resentment,’ said Ed. ‘When you love someone, it’s hard to cope with the fact that they can’t be what you need them to be any more. I loved Sue very much,’ he told Perdita, ‘and I miss her still, but there were times when I was angry with her for getting ill, for dying, for leaving me to cope on my own, for leaving the kids without a mother…I had to try and be strong for her and for the kids, and yes, I resented the fact that there seemed to be no one to help me be strong.’

His mouth twisted. ‘I hated myself for how I felt,’ he said honestly. ‘And I felt guilty about it, the way you do. If I’d been able to stand back and analyse the situation dispassionately, I’d have been less hard on myself. I’d have been able to see that anger can sometimes be a mechanism for dealing with fear.’

‘Did your wife know how you felt?’

‘I think so. I tried so hard not to take it out on her, but she knew me very well. And, of course, she was afraid too. Things were better when we both just admitted it, and then we could help each other.

Perdita swallowed. ‘I feel terrible going on about my mother when you’ve been through so much worse,’ she confessed, but Ed shook his head.

‘It’s not a matter of “worse” or “better”. You can’t compare how it feels to lose someone you love. You can’t say it’s better to lose a partner through death rather than through divorce, or that it’s easier to lose someone in spirit than physically, that you don’t grieve as much for a mother as for a wife…However it happens,’ he said, ‘you have to deal with the pain of not having the person you love any more.’

‘Still…’ said Perdita, not entirely convinced. She thought Ed was probably just trying to make her feel better. ‘How did you manage?’ she asked tentatively after a moment.

‘After Sue died?’

‘Yes. It must have been so…’ Perdita struggled to find the right word to express how she imagined he’d felt, but ‘terrible’, ‘awful’, ‘sad’ just sounded like trite clichés. ‘So lonely,’ she said after a pause. ‘So desolate.’

Desolate was a good word, Ed thought. ‘Yes, it was a terrible time,’ he said slowly, remembering Sue’s hand, so painfully thin in his, the deafening, unbelievable silence when she’d stopped breathing at last. The expression in Tom’s eyes when he’d told him that his mother was dead. Holding Lauren and feeling how her small body was racked by sobs. The fury in Cassie’s face. She hadn’t really believed until then that her mother would actually leave her. The tearing grief that had clawed at him when he’d tried to imagine the utter emptiness of a future without Sue by his side.

Ed shook the painful memories aside. ‘For a while, you just have to go through the motions,’ he told Perdita. ‘Nothing seems to make any sense. But I couldn’t fall apart. I had to keep the kids going somehow, and it wasn’t easy.’

‘They were terribly young to lose their mother,’ said Perdita quietly.

‘Lauren was only eight.’

Eight. She was forty, and the thought of losing her own mother filled her with dread. Perdita felt very ashamed of the fuss she had been making about caring for her mother earlier.

‘There were practical problems to be dealt with too,’ Ed was saying. ‘My sister came for a while when Sue was dying, but she has her own life and she couldn’t stay for ever. I wanted to find a nice, comfortable housekeeper, but they’re not easy to come by and the kids wouldn’t accept anyone else living in the house for a while-a bit like your mother, in fact! So we moved to a place where there was a flat over the garage where an au pair could live. None of them were very successful, though. It was really just someone to be in the house when the kids got home from school, but once Lauren got to secondary school, they said they didn’t want anyone any more.

‘They’re used to getting themselves around London, but it’s one of the reasons I wanted to move to a smaller place, where I’m hoping they’ll make a network of friends who live nearby instead of the other side of London. And somewhere I can get home more easily, and have a less pressurised job. Although they’re all old enough to look after themselves in lots of ways, in others they need just as much attention now as when they were toddlers.’

He looked around the kitchen. ‘So here we are! I’m hoping I’ve done the right thing, but it’s always difficult to be certain. The girls are moaning about having to leave their friends in London and everything’s a mess…It’ll take us all a little time to settle down, I think.’

‘And the last thing you need is me burdening you with my problems,’ said Perdita guiltily. ‘It sounds as if you’ve got more than enough of your own.’