but she’d had problems with the turbot and, out of nerves, proceeded to get disastrously drunk. At two a.m. Jennie had crawled into the double bed in Angie’s spare room to sleep it off, unaware that Virginia, equally plastered, was already installed. The next morning, Virginia had leaped out of bed bellowing: ‘Bloody hell – I’ve just left my husband, and the first person I sleep with is a woman!’
Jennie wasn’t necessarily in a violent hurry to meet her again.
‘Yes, your sister,’ she mused, as if giving it ample thought. ‘Who’s delightful, of course. Only I wonder if she isn’t a bit high-brow for us?’
‘Oh God, yes, she’s frightfully clever,’ Angie agreed. ‘Got a first from Oxford.’
‘Fuck me, that’s no good,’ muttered Peggy, stubbing out her cigarette.
‘So,’ Jennie went on, ‘we could have Saintly Sue, but then again, d’you think that’s a good idea, bearing in mind …’ She jerked her head eloquently in my direction. It was as if I wasn’t alive any more. Didn’t exist. ‘I mean, if we do ask Luke, which I actually think is quite a good idea of Peggy’s, although not necessarily the others –’
‘Why not necessarily the others?’ demanded Peggy.
Jennie sighed. Turned to me. ‘What do you think, Poppy?’
‘About what?’
‘About inviting Luke Chambers?’
‘Who’s Luke Chambers?’
Three pairs of eyes turned incredulously on me. There was a long and meaningful pause. At length, Jennie put down her pencil. She clenched her teeth and blew out hard through her nose, making a faint whistling sound.
‘OK,’ she said quietly and in very measured tones. ‘OK. We are here tonight ostensibly to talk about the book club. To talk about who we want to join and which books we want to read. But one of our members, one of our very dear friends, is in trouble, and I, for one, cannot go another day, cannot go another minute, without finding out why. What’s happened, Poppy? What the flipping heck is going on?’
‘What d’you mean?’ I felt myself go cold.
‘Two weeks ago you were coping. Sad, but coping. Resigned to Phil’s death, to being a widow. Then suddenly – and knowing you as I do, knowing your movements as well as I do, I would be so bold as to pin it down to two weeks ago last Friday – something happened.’
I felt my mouth go a bit dry. All eyes in the room were upon me. Possibly even those of Angie’s children in their silver photo frames on the side: those beautiful poised teenagers, back at school now, whom Frankie derided as toffs but of whom I think was secretly in awe. Not so poised these days perhaps, with their father gone. Felicity, off the rails a bit according to her mother, nothing too terrible, smoking, drinking, but only fifteen. Clarissa, not working for her exams. Their eyes too, it seemed, in frames all over the room, on ponies, on ski slopes, gazed and waited.
‘I … had a visitor.’ I also had no saliva. I couldn’t believe I was doing this.
‘When?’
‘You’re right. On that Friday. At lunchtime. You were cooking a lunch for the Hobson-Burnetts.’
Miles away, in Buckingham. I knew, because my first instinct had been to go next door, to find her. Find my friend. My second instinct had been to hide, which was the one I stuck to.
‘A woman called Emma Harding came to see me.’
My friends waited, wine glasses in hand. And although they sensed what was coming was not good, there was an air of expectancy in the room. Of relief, perhaps.
‘Apparently she’d been having an affair with Phil. For four years. Since Clemmie was born.’
You could feel the air thicken, hold and set. Nobody moved. Nobody blinked. They waited. I remembered Emma’s pale anxious face as I’d offered her a drink. A cup of tea, perhaps? Her polite refusal as she sat down, putting her bag at her feet. Swallowing; pressing her hands together to compose herself.
I turned to my friends, their drinks still motionless in mid-air, and, in Peggy’s case, her cigarette about to drop an inch of ash.
‘She helped Phil set up his private-equity firm four years ago, the banking off-shoot. When he left Lehman’s and set up on his own, remember?’ I certainly remembered because it was just after Clemmie was born. I’d be sitting up in bed in the middle of the night breastfeeding and he’d stagger in, exhausted. Working day and night to get it off the ground. ‘They worked very closely. She was in charge of new