‘Really.’ Guy struggled to keep a straight face. ‘Well, this is all very interesting, but I’m afraid you’re on completely the wrong track. Janey’s a friend, nothing more. She’s a very nice girl, but that’s as far as it goes. She just isn’t my type. When I said I didn’t know what was going to happen next,’ he explained, ‘I was referring to Maxine. If this new affair of hers turns out to be more than a nine-day wonder, it’s going to mean trouble for me. Before long, she’ll be wanting to move in with Bruno Parry-Brent and I’ll have to start looking for a new nanny.’

‘Of course you will,’ said Mimi blithely. ‘And who would be absolutely perfect for the job?

Janey.’

‘You’re shameless.’ This time he was unable to hide his smile. ‘Do you know that? Quite apart from the fact that she has a shop to run, I’ve already told you, Janey isn’t my type.’

Mimi, not believing him for a second, pulled the mohair cardigan more tightly around her vast bosom as a sudden gust of wind whistled down her cleavage.

‘You’re only a man,’ she said, her tone comforting. ‘What would you know? You thought Serena was your type.’

‘I have to get back,’ said Maxine regretfully, stirring the surface of the water with her big toe and transferring an artful dollop of foam on to Bruno’s shoulder. ‘We can’t spend the rest of our lives lying in the bath. Besides, I’m starting to prune.’

He reached for her hand and kissed her wrinkled fingertips, one by one. ‘I don’t want you to go. Why don’t you give in your notice and come and live here with me?’

‘What, leave my job?’

‘I left Nina,’ Bruno reminded her. ‘And my job. I’m not going to enjoy sitting around waiting for you to dash over here whenever you can manage to get a couple of hours off.’

She grinned. ‘You’ve done it to enough women yourself, haven’t you? Now you can find out how it feels to be the one on the receiving end.’

‘I want us to be together,’ he said crossly. ‘All the time.’

He was sounding more and more like a fretful mistress. Leaning forward, Maxine gave him a kiss. ‘So do I, but then we’d both be unemployed. Besides, Guy’s been good to me — in his own way — and I can’t leave him in the lurch. Why don’t we just see how things go for a while before doing anything drastic?’

‘Well thanks,’ murmured Bruno, who felt he had already acted pretty drastically. But Maxine, in a hurry to get back to Trezale House, was climbing out of the bath and reaching for the larger of the two towels.

‘Don’t glare at me like that,’ she said cheerfully. ‘You know what I mean. Look, I’ll have a word with Guy and see if we can’t come to some kind of arrangement. If he’s at home, maybe he’ll let me spend my nights here. And the kids are at school during the day ...’

‘Such concern all of a sudden, for Guy Cassidy,’ Bruno complained, watching as she eased herself into her jeans and bent to pick up her crumpled white shirt. ‘He’s hardly likely to go out of his way to make things easier for us. He doesn’t even like me.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Maxine winked. ‘I have ways of getting round Guy. Don’t you trust me?’

‘No.’ He wasn’t used to feeling jealous and he didn’t much like it. ‘That’s why I want you to come and live here.’

‘I don’t trust you, either,’ countered Maxine sweetly, doing up the last couple of buttons and knotting the shirt tails around her waist. ‘So forget it. Because I’m not moving anywhere until you manage to persuade me that I can.’

Guy was leafing through a mound of contact sheets and eating a Marmite sandwich when Maxine rolled into the sitting room at seven.

‘You look as if you’ve just crawled out of bed,’ he observed, taking in her tousled hair, bright eyes and distinctly rumpled white shirt.

‘It’s what you do when you’re in love.’ She gave him an unrepentant smile.

Josh and Ella were sprawled in front of the fire, their blond heads bent over a game of Monopoly. Glancing up, Josh said hopefully, ‘If you’ve been asleep all afternoon, I expect you’d like to play Monopoly now. I’ve nearly finished beating Ella.’

Guy pushed the contact sheets to one side. ‘How was Janey?’

‘Happy.’ Maxine rolled her eyes. ‘What can I say? He fed her some terrible line and she fell for it. ‘I just went along with the whole thing and pretended to be pleased for her.’ Collapsing on to the floor next to Ella, who was biting her lip at the prospect of having to mortgage the Old Kent Road, she added, ‘But it was definitely the right thing to do. At the moment, she won’t hear a word against him.’

‘Hmm,’ said Guy. ‘So I gathered. Your mother phoned earlier, wanting to speak to you.’

Maxine pulled a face. If Thea had somehow heard about Bruno leaving Nina from outside sources, it was entirely possible that she was in for a lecture. Her mother was sensitive about such matters. ‘Oh.’ She looked wary. ‘Did she say what about?’

‘In Technicolor detail.’ Guy glanced across at the children to make sure they weren’t listening. ‘And it isn’t good news. She went round to Janey’s place this afternoon and told Alan exactly what she thought of him. It didn’t go down well at all,’ he explained. ‘She and Janey had a screaming row and Janey ended up booting her out of the flat.’

‘Hell.’ Maxine heaved a gusty sigh. ‘Poor Mum. I suppose I should have warned her. Now we’ve got a family feud on our hands. Was she upset?’

‘Upset, no. Angry, yes.’ He half smiled, recalling the colourful language Thea Vaughan had employed during the course of their forty-minute conversation. ‘But with herself as much as anything. She realizes now that she made a mistake.’

‘Daddy, can you lend me two thousand pounds?’ asked Ella in desperation. ‘To stop me going bankrupt.’

‘She also warned me that I had all this to come,’ Guy went on, shaking his head wearily.

‘Apparently, raising daughters is the pits. One calamity after another.’

‘That means no,’ declared Josh, merciless in victory. ‘Good, you’re bankrupt. You’ve lost and I’ve won. Come on, Maxine, you’re next. I’m the racing car and you can be the old boot.’

‘Good old Mum,’ said Maxine. ‘She always was about as subtle as Bernard Manning.’

‘She certainly has character.’ Guy grinned. ‘She sounded fun though. I’d like to meet her.’

‘Now there’s a thought! Janey and I were only saying this morning that what you need is a woman in your life.’ Maxine’s dark eyes glittered with mischief. ‘Maybe I should introduce you to my mother.’

Chapter 45

Janey was in the shop putting the finishing touches to a congratulations-on-your-retirement bouquet when Guy came in.

‘They’re nice.’ He nodded at the autumnal flowers.

‘For Miss Stirrup, with love from Class 2C.’ Having trimmed and curled the bronze and gold ribbons holding the bouquet together, Janey reached for the staple gun and clipped the accompanying card to the cellophane wrapper. ‘She’s a complete dragon; she was my English teacher, always sticking the whole class in detention when the weather was good and all we wanted to do was go tearing off down to the beach. I was tempted to write out "Have a Happy Retirement" a hundred times,’ she added with a grin. ‘And spell "retirement" wrongly, just to annoy her.’

She was looking well and happy, Guy realized. The habitual working uniform of jeans and tee-shirt had been replaced by a pastel pink wool dress which flattered both her figure and colouring. She was wearing make-up too, not a great deal but enough to make a difference. The overall effect was one of renewed confidence and cheerfulness. So far, he decided, everything appeared to be going well.

But he still couldn’t bring himself to raise the subject of the long-lost husband’s miraculous return. Instead, sticking to safer ground, he placed a large Manila envelope on the counter.

‘I’m just on my way up to London. I thought I’d drop this in before I left. Go on, open it.

It’s for you.’

‘Really?’ Janey gave him a playful look. ‘What is it, more wages?’

Guy smiled. ‘Afraid not.’

‘Oh!’ As the photograph slid out of the envelope, she caught her breath. ‘Oh, my God ...

this is amazing. I can’t believe it’s really me.’

As soon as he had developed Friday night’s films, taken purely in order to test out the latest Olympus, Guy had known he had something special. The particular miracle of photography, he always felt, was the fact that although technical expertise played a part, it was never everything.

The best camera in the world, coupled with perfect lighting and the most compliant subjects, could produce adequate but ultimately disappointing results, whereas occasionally — and for no apparent reason — an off-the-cuff, unplanned snap of a shutter succeeded in capturing a mood, an expression, a moment in time to perfection.

He had felt at once, even as he pegged up the still-dripping print in the darkroom, that this was one such success. It didn’t happen often but it had happened last Friday, and the result was almost magical. Unaware of the camera, Janey had hoisted Ella into her arms in order to give her a clear view of Josh on the dodgems. Their faces, close together, were alight with shared laughter. Ella’s small fingers, curled around Janey’s neck, conveyed love and trust. The only slightly out-of-focus background managed to capture both the excitement and noise of the fairground. Ella’s childish elation and Janey’s pride and delight in Josh’s prowess at the wheel of his dodgem car were reflected with such astonishing clarity, it almost brought a lump to the throat. Unposed, unrehearsed and using only natural available light, it was the kind of one-in-a-million shot all photographers seek to achieve. Guy, having achieved it, had known at once where its future lay.

‘I don’t know much about this kind of thing,’ said Janey, who was still studying the print intently. She hesitated, then glanced up at him. ‘But it is good, isn’t it? I mean seriously good.’

‘I think so.’

‘It has ... impact.’ The fact that she was featured in the picture was irrelevant. Shaking her head, she struggled to express herself more clearly. ‘You can ... feel it. I don’t think anyone could look at this photograph and not respond. And how strange, we look like—’

‘Like what?’ Guy prompted half-teasingly, but she shook her head once more and didn’t reply. Against the darker background, which had created a kind of halo effect, both Ella’s hair and her own appeared white-blond and the camera angle had managed to capture a similarity in their bone structure; but the fact that they looked like mother and daughter was sheer chance, a mere trick of the lens and far too embarrassing to voice aloud.

Instead, she said simply, ‘I love it. Thank you.’

‘And now I have a favour to ask.’ Guy, who knew exactly what had been going through her mind, was amused by her reluctance to comment on the apparent resemblance between Ella and herself. ‘I was approached by a children’s charity a couple of weeks ago. They’re mounting a national appeal and they’ve asked for my help.’

‘Raising money?’ He had given her the photograph. Janey, happy to return the favour, was eager to help. ‘What can I do, keep a collecting tin here on the counter? I did a stint once, rattling a tin on a street corner for the RSPCA.’ With a grin, she added, ‘I did brilliantly, too. It wasn’t until three hours later I realized most of my shirt buttons were undone. All those men stuffing pound coins into my tin had been getting an eyeful of my boobs and there I was saying thank you and thinking what lovely caring people they were.’

‘All these months I’ve known you,’ Guy drawled. ‘And I never figured you for a topless model.’

‘It was almost worse than topless.’ Janey cringed at the memory. ‘I was wearing a really awful old bra held together with a safety pin. Talk about mortifying.’

‘Well you can rattle a tin if you want to, but that wasn’t what I had in mind.’ Leaning against the counter, Guy tapped the photograph with a forefinger. ‘You see, they asked me to come up with the advertising poster for the campaign. With your permission I’d like to use this.’

She stared at him. ‘You’re joking.’

‘Why would I joke? It’s perfect. As you said yourself, you can’t look at this picture and not feel something. With any luck,’ he added with a wink, ‘the public will look at it and feel compelled to donate pots of money.’

At that moment the door to the shop opened behind him. Guy could almost have guessed without turning around that the waft of Paco Rabanne aftershave and accompanying footsteps belonged to Alan Sinclair. Janey had gone two shades pinker and her hand reached automatically to her hair.