their loved ones.’
‘Dry up?’ TJ looked confused.
‘I am not going through the change.’ Well, maybe she was. ‘I was upset because I felt no one loved me.’
‘What dries up?’
‘Their vagina.’
‘Bunnies, not now. If you sing “Happy Birthday” again, I’ll blow out the candles.’
‘That’s bad luck!’ Dilly seemed spooked. ‘Doing it twice.’
‘No, it isn’t!’
‘Isn’t it? Oh, grand, so!’
After dinner and the cake, the kids peeled away until only Johnny and Jessie were left at the table.
‘I really am sorry,’ Johnny repeated. ‘I’ll never let anything like that happen again.’
‘I’m sorry too. I was being a diva. I shouldn’t have wanted to go to the spensie hotel in the first place. Who do I think I am? But look. Can I apologize for something else? At your parents’ anniversary shit-show, I knew we needed some alone time. Then the Hagen Klein thing blew up. I was firefighting and, yeah, eye off the ball. I’m sorry.’
‘I accept your apology.’ His smile was fake-grave.
‘You still want me to change the business to the website.’
‘Well, to think about it …’
‘It would be so much work. And chaos. We’d have to buy storage facilities, take on packers and couriers, new staff … It would cost tons of money. Which we haven’t got.’
‘That’s what banks are for.’
Jessie was afraid of banks. Banks had made her shut down eight of her stores during the crash. Banks wouldn’t loan money without taking a good old rummage in the Caseys’ personal finances. Banks had the power to withdraw their generous overdraft at a moment’s notice. ‘They’d want a guarantee and the only thing we really have is the house. If everything goes tits up, we’d have no business … and no house.’
‘It won’t go tits up.’
But it might. ‘There are lots of websites, Johnny. What would make ours different?’
‘The PiG name, the goodwill.’
He didn’t get it. Nobody seemed to get it, except her. ‘Goodwill counts for nothing on a website. It all comes down to pricing, and we wouldn’t have the purchasing power that bigger companies have.’
‘We can’t stay as we are, though.’
But why not? They worked hard but they had a nice life. What was wrong with staying exactly as they were?
SEVEN WEEKS AGO
* * *
LATE AUGUST
Tuscany
SIXTY-FIVE
‘Oh, my God.’ Nell darted towards a low sideboard, its teal blue colour polished to a dull sheen. ‘The workmanship!’ She ran her fingertips along the shallow carving on the drawers. ‘The detail.’ She admired the pattern-work of scrolls, so faded they were barely visible. ‘That’s definitely not Italian Ikea.’
‘I think Nell likes the villa,’ Ed said, carrying a suitcase up the stairs.
‘Nell loves the villa,’ Nell exclaimed.
After the shock-to-the-system early-morning flight, the car-hire hell and the difficulty of satnavving narky Liam through the snarl of Florentine traffic, Nell’s day had dramatically improved as soon as they emerged into the Tuscan countryside. Every five seconds there was something new and beautiful to exclaim about: the sun-baked slopes, the sandstone fortifications perched on a steep hill, the green-and-beige drills of grapes. ‘Like, this is totally amazing!’
In the back seat of the car, Saoirse and her new best friend Robyn were being world-weary and unimpressed.
‘She’s cute,’ Robyn dead-panned.
‘How come you’ve never been to Italy before?’ Saoirse asked Nell.
‘Never got the chance.’
As they turned off the road towards the villa, Nell was newly astonished at the size of the estate.
‘Seven acres,’ Saoirse said. ‘Those are olive trees, grape vines there. That’s the vegetable garden.’
‘Totally wow.’ This from Robyn.
Abruptly Saoirse shut up.
Surrounded by cypress trees, which looked like moss-covered stalagmites, the villa appeared: a solid, handsome house, with sloping roofs of terracotta tiles and distempered walls of pale yellow. Shutters painted ivy-green bracketed each deep-set window and the heavy front door stood invitingly open. ‘It’s perfect.’ Nell could barely breathe. ‘Like an eighteenth-century painting.’
‘Don’t think they had satellite dishes in the eighteenth century,’ Liam muttered.
Up the stone steps, Nell passed from blazing sunshine into a cool, dim, tiled hallway and from there into a huge sitting room. Light poured in through six statement windows.
Everything was perfect. On one wall, a fitted wooden bookcase, painted a gorgeous dusty sage, reached the ceiling. The other three walls were distempered in a warm, almond, rustic finish. Two giant L-shaped linen sofas shared space with sturdy little armchairs in a colour Nell decided to call celery. At seemingly random points through the room there were low tables, made from gently distressed oak or finished with a tile mosaic. Proportions, balance, colour: this was a room so right that it thrilled her.
‘Nell!’