"You'd be amazed how many times I've heard that."

David Lastingham must have heard them shouting because he ran downstairs yelling at Jackson, "What are you doing to her?" which Jackson thought was rich, and Josie, helpfully, said, "He accused you of interfering with Marlee."

"Interfering?" Jackson sneered at her. "Is that what the middle classes call it?" but by this time David Lastingham had reached the bottom of the stairs and aimed a sloppy but enraged right hook that Jackson didn't see coming but that he certainly felt when it landed. In fact he could have sworn he actually heard his cheekbone crack. Jackson thought, That's it, now I kill him, but Marlee suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs and said, "Daddy?"

Josie spat at him, "Get out of our fucking house, Jackson, and, oh and by the way, did I tell you – we're moving to New Zealand . I was going to sit you down and do the tea-and-sympathy thing, break it to you gently, but you don't deserve that. David's been offered a job at Wellington, and he's accepted it and we're going with him. So there, Jackson, how do you like that?"

Jackson parked the Alfa in one of the lockups he rented at the top of the lane, experiencing his usual momentary guilt about the noise his exhaust made. He was thinking about Sylvia, giving up her life to be shut up in that place. She knew more than she was telling – he was sure of that. But right now he didn't want to think about Sylvia. He wanted to think about a hot bath and a cold beer. He was furious that he'd let David Lastingham land a punch. He was thinking that the day couldn't get much worse, even though he knew from experience that the day can always get worse, and to prove that thesis a dark figure slipped out from the shadows behind the garage and hit him over the head with something that felt horribly like the butt of a gun.

Yeah, but really, you should have seen the other guy," Jackson joked weakly but Josie didn't laugh. She smelled of fruit and sunshine and he remembered that another berry-picking expedition had been planned for today. Her brown forearms were scratched as if she'd been wrestling with cats. "Gooseberry bushes," she said when he pointed them out.

"Sorry," Jackson said. "They found my donor card. It had you down as my next of kin. It was only a mild concussion, they shouldn't have bothered."

"You were lying there most of the night, Jackson. You were lucky it was so warm. Imagine if it had been winter." She said this accusingly rather than compassionately, as if it were his own fault that he'd been mugged. Actually, he really would like to see the other guy because he was pretty sure he'd done some damage back Jackson had been lucky, his reactions had been fast and he had moved intuitively when he saw the figure coming at him, enough to deflect the blow so that it only gave him a concussion rather than smashing his skull like an egg. And he'd got one back in, nothing as considered as a good right hook or a roundhouse kick, or any of the more refined tactics and moves he'd been taught at one time or another. Instead it had been the automatic brute response of the hard man out on a drunken Saturday night, and he had nutted the guy full in the face. He could still hear the nose squelching as his forehead connected with the soft tissue. It hadn't done his concus-sion much good, of course, and he must have passed out at that point because the next thing he remembered was the milkman try -ing to rouse him sometime before dawn.

Josie drove him home. "They want someone to stay with me for twenty-four hours," he said apologetically to Josie, "in case I lapse back into unconsciousness."

"Well, you'll just have to find someone else," she said as she pulled up at the top of the lane, not even driving down it. He re-alized he was still waiting for sympathy that wasn't going to come. He climbed awkwardly out of the Volvo's passenger seat. All the bones in his skull seemed to have been rearranged like tectonic plates slipping and sliding against one another. Every movement reverberated around his skull. He felt seriously damaged.

Josie rolled down the window so she could speak to him. For a second he thought she was going to lean out and give him a wifely kiss farewell or offer to stay and look after him, but instead she said, "Perhaps it's time you got another next of kin, Jackson."

When he got home Jackson propped Blue Mouse on the mantel-piece. He'd known that sooner or later he would start to capitalize the damn thing. He put Victor's urn (he'd forgotten to return it to Amelia and Julia amid all the hysteria) between Blue Mouse and the only ornament that adorned the mantelpiece – a cheap pot-tery wishing well that had wishing you well from Scarborough written on the side of it. After the split the marital property had been divided up in a way that Josie considered fair – Jackson took his "crap" (Josie's term for his country CDs and the little souvenir wishing well) and Josie took everything else. Perhaps Blue Mouse would watch over him, seeing as there was no one else who would. Jackson swallowed two of the Co-codamol that the hospital had given him (although what he wanted was morphine) and lay down on the sofa and listened to Emmylou singing "From Boulder to Birmingham," but there was too much pain going on tor even Emmylou to heal.

Caroline glanced at her stepchildren in the backseat of the Discovery and thanked God they didn't go to her school. They attended some small private place in the middle of nowhere where they did a lot of outdoor games and spoke French all day Wednesday. In principle, of course, there was nothing wrong with that and it would have been interesting to have applied it to the curriculum of some of the inner-city schools she used to teach in. Only two years but it seemed like a lifetime ago. Yet another lifetime. How many times could you shed your skin? Hannah and James were making faces at her in the rearview mirror, so they were either unbelievably stupid and didn't think she could see or they just didn't care. Either way they were inbred. Rowena, Jonathan's mother, talked all the time about "breeding" because she had a stable of hunters (big, frightening brutes), but sometimes she seemed to be applying the concept to her own family, and Caroline wanted to point out to her that natural selection led to a vigorous species whereas "breeding" resulted in congenital defects, in pale, blond children who spoke French on Wednesdays and whose blank Mid-wich Cuckoo faces suggested latent idiocy. In Caroline's professional opinion.

After the wedding, Rowena moved into the "dowager house," a small house on the estate, which she always referred to as "my little cottage" even though it had four bedrooms and two sitting rooms. She made a point of "not interfering," which meant that she interfered all the time but behind Caroline's back. She put on a good front though. At the wedding she had smiled benignly throughout like someone mainlining Valium and she had paid for the whole thing, the marquee, the string quartet, the silver-service lackeys, the cold salmon and roast venison, the vast vases of white lilies from which someone had unfortunately forgotten to remove the stamens so that the guests were continually showered with pollen. And no one mentioned that it was a registry-office wedding, or that it was a second marriage, even though the offspring of the first marriage were notable by their presence, running around like rats that had been transformed into children – dressed in white satin outfits that wouldn't have looked out of place in the doomed court of Louis XVI.

They had arrived on a plane from Buenos Aires a few days be-fore the wedding and then never went back because "Jemima" – the first wife – had decided that they should have an English education and Jonathan concurred. And it really hadn't bothered Caroline because (and, yes, she understood the irony) she was great with children, which was why she was so good at her job. And the two didn't necessarily go hand in hand – she knew plenty of teachers who saw children as an annoying by-product of the profession rather than its raison d'etre. She just hadn't expected Hannah and James to be such little bastards.