“Before you know it I’ll be at Cambridge, fingers crossed. Tom will be off with his weirdos.”

“And I’ll be on my own and I won’t be able to function is what you mean.”

“Not exactly.”

“What then?”

“I worry that you’re missing out. You should have someone.”

“I don’t want to be married again.”

“How do you know? You may not want to in theory c but if you met someone.”

“Well who’s to say I won’t?”

“Not stuck in a windowless cubbyhole full of pill packets you won’t.”

“I like my job.”

“That’s not the point. Look, I think you should take a more proactive approach to this thing.”

“There is no ‘thing.’ Come on, Mutley’s too hot. So am I.”

She stood. But when Lizzie also stood, there it was, the direct gaze. Not letting her off. Helen had turned and started back down the Hill so fast she almost slipped on the stony track.

She had not wanted to think about it. She wouldn’t think about it. She was perfectly contented. She had met Terry when she was twenty-three, married him a year later, had the children, been happy. When Tom was six she had gone back to work, part-time. Life had been good.

When Terry had been diagnosed with malignant melanoma she was told he would have a couple of years, maybe more. He had had four months. Any sort of relationship with any other man had been—was—unthinkable. She realised as she reached the last few yards of the track that she was angry, angry and in some sort of panic.

“I think—” Elizabeth said, catching up with her.

“Well, I don’t. Leave it. It is not a conversation I am prepared to have.” She had spoken harshly but Elizabeth had simply gazed at her for a long moment without replying.

Two days later, a brochure came through the post.

“ My name is Laura Brooke. I run the Laura Brooke Agency for men and women wishing to meet a partner hand-picked for them. I do not believe people can be matched by computers. I act as a friend. I only take on clients with whom I feel I can succeed and I only introduce clients to one another after extensive interviews and my own personal and careful consideration. I give clients my time and expertise to find them c”

She had stuffed the brochure in the bin.

The following day in the hairdresser’s, she was startled to find herself wondering if people really did meet successfully through agencies or via the Internet, if the whole thing was possibly not the con she had always assumed it to be. Sad people went to dating agencies, sad or sinister people. She could understand why you might join something or other if you were, say, new to a town and had no way of making friends—a club, a sports group, a night class. But friendship was one thing, this was another. She had friends. What she didn’t have was enough time to spend with them.

She was forty-six. By the time she was fifty Tom and Elizabeth would have left home. She would have her job and also more time for her friends. She would have the St Michael’s Singers and she might rejoin the Lafferton Players. She would volunteer for something.

Terry was irreplaceable. His death had devastated her and she still felt like someone who had lost a limb. Nothing would ever change that. Nothing and no one.

“I’m not going,” she said now. “I can’t do this.”

“You are and you can, if I have to push you there.”

“Elizabeth c”

“Once, you said, just once when someone seemed really worth meeting. And he does. We agreed. Tom, didn’t we agree?”

Tom put his hands up. “Leave me out of this, OK?” he said, banging out of the room.

“He doesn’t like it,” Helen said.

“He doesn’t like anything that isn’t about his own peculiar world. Ignore him.”

“Why are you pushing me into something I don’t want?”

“You dowant it. You want to get out of here, you want to open yourself up to something new. You want a fresh start.”

“It’s only one date.”

“Exactly!”

A part of her knew that Elizabeth was right. Helen had thought about it a good deal, once she had allowed the idea house room. She was fearful of being too much alone when her children had left home, she was too young to be in a rut, she needed to open herself to something new. All the same, to her, meeting someone through an agency or a dating website, or by answering an advert, was an admission of failure. And she wasn’t sure she even wanted to succeed. Besides, there was a stigma, when someone of her age did this.

“Rubbish,” Lizzie had said.

Of course it was a stigma. If she did—by remote chance—meet someone through a dating agency, and that someone came to be important, she would never be able to tell anyone how they had got together. She would cut out her tongue rather than admit it.

“I don’t get it.” But that was Elizabeth and she was her daughter.

“I’ll send a text message and say I’m not well.”

“That is absolutely pathetic. For God’s sake, Ma, this is a drink in a pub—”

“A bar.”

“A drink. A chat. You can leave it there. Oh God, we’ve been through all this—if you get the feeling he’s a mass murderer, you send Tom a text and he’ll be there in five.”

“I won’t think he’s a mass murderer. He sounds c”

“Like a nice bloke.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“You must have wanted to go through with it earlier, you got ready hours ago.”

“Is this too dressed up?”

“No, it’s great. That wasn’t my point.”

There was a long silence.

“I do want to go. I want to. But I don’t want to. I just haven’t done anything like it before and it’s so many years since I even had an evening out with a man c”

Elizabeth got up, came round the table and gave her a hug, bending over her as if she were the mother, Helen the child.

“You look great and it’s going to be fine. And if it isn’t—so what? What have you lost? One evening.”

“ EastEnders.”

“Well, that’s crap at the moment so there you are.”

Elizabeth settled down to Eugénie Grandetagain. The room went quiet.

“Lizzie c”

“Mother— go away!”

She had retrieved the agency brochure from the waste-paper bin. But she felt uncertain about being interviewed by someone with the firm intention of matching her with a man on their books, particularly when she didn’t even know if she wanted to meet anyone at all.

Which was how she had come upon the website peoplemeetingpeople.com. Because she would admit to that. Yes. She would agree that she was a person wanting to meet people.

It was quite straightforward. You joined the site for a fee which was not too expensive, not too cheap. She had done that finally one evening when she was on her own. You went step by step. You didn’t have to commit yourself to too much too soon. She felt happy with that.

She put in her name—first name only—and age. The next stage was to narrow down the kind of “people” she wanted to meet. Age group. That was surprisingly easy. Between forty-five and sixty. Marital status. She ticked Widowed. Then Divorced. Not sure about divorced but so many people were now, and the reasons were less—what? Sinister? Worrying? She did not tick Single. Few really eligible men were still single after forty-five.

She entered her geographical area. Narrowed it down a bit.

Occupation. Professional. Media-related. Public services. Administrative. Business. Farming and countryside. Almost any of those. She could probably find something to chat about even to a farmer. She ticked each box.

She had expected there to be more stages, more questions, but she was asked if she would now like to see photographs and brief details of anyone matching her outline.

She went to make a coffee. Somehow, photographs of people, real people, took it one big step away from being a game, made it serious, committed her.