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Gina’s experience. She’d never met anyone like her in her life.
     
    ‘Aren’t you devastated?’ she said finally.
     
    Izzy looked thoughtful. ‘I suppose so, but wailing and weeping isn’t going to do me much good, is it? Besides, Kat says it would only give me wrinkles.’
     
    ‘Mmm.’ Gina, who had spent the majority of the past few days weeping and wailing, experienced a twinge of guilt. At this rate, she supposed she was lucky not to look a hundred and fifty years old. ‘Your daughter also told me that you were about to be thrown out of your flat. What will you do when that happens?’
     
    ‘Well,’ said Izzy in a confidential whisper, as a nurse strode briskly past, ‘since I’m between men, as they say, I thought I might as well seduce my landlord. See if I can’t persuade him to change his mercenary old mind . . .’
     
     
    ‘Are you joking?’ asked Katerina, two days later. She didn’t know whether to laugh and the expression on her mother’s face was making her feel decidedly uneasy.
     
    ‘Of course not,’ Izzy replied with enthusiasm. ‘Would I joke about something as serious as our imminent vagrancy? It’s perfect, darling. The answer to a desperate mother’s prayer.’
     
    ‘But she’s an old witch!’
     
    ‘She is not.’ Seeing the mutinous glitter in Katerina’s eyes, Izzy knew she had to be firm. ‘She’s just going through a rough time at the moment. I thought it was amazingly kind of her to make the offer - and it isn’t as if we have much of an alternative, anyway,’ she reminded her daughter briskly. ‘I was going to ask Rachel and Jake if we could stay with them for a while, but they really don’t have the room, whereas Gina’s rattling around on her own in that big house of hers and she needs some company at the moment . . .’
     
    ‘What about money?’ Katerina demanded. The idea of having to keep that woman company was positively chilling; she’d rather share a hot bath with Freddie Kruger.
     
    ‘Rent free for the first month,’ Izzy replied with an air of triumph. ‘And then the same as we’ve been paying Markham. Now isn’t that a great deal?’ she exclaimed. ‘Be honest, where would you prefer to live, Clapham or Kensington? Or was a plastic bench on Tottenham Court Road tube station what you’d really set your heart on?’
     
    Since there wasn’t really any satisfactory answer to that, Kat said nothing.
     
    ‘There you are then,’ concluded Izzy, glad that it was sorted.
     
    ‘I still don’t like her.’
     
    ‘We’re renting a couple of rooms in her house, we don’t have to marry her.’ She flashed a flawless smile at the dentist as he zipped past in his wheelchair with his smashed-and-plastered leg stuck out at right angles before him. ‘And since we don’t have any choice, we may as well make the most of it. Sweetheart, who knows? It might even be fun!’
     

Chapter 6
     
    Gina didn’t know what she’d got herself into. She was suffering from a severe attack of doubt which erupted from time to time into near panic. Never one to act upon impulse, she couldn’t understand why she should have done so now, when her entire life was in the process of being turned on its head anyway and the last thing she needed was more trauma. And although she had tried to shift the blame on to Andrew, she was uncomfortably aware that from now on she wasn’t going to be able to do that. As from last week, she had become unwillingly responsible for her own life and already she was making a diabolical mess of it.
     
    Visiting Isabel Van Asch in the hospital had succeeded in taking her mind off Andrew for an hour, which was miraculous in itself. She had gone in order to salve her vaguely pricking conscience, and had come away impressed. She’d never met anyone like Isabel - Izzy - before and the novelty of the woman had been a revelation. Imagining what it must be like to live so carelessly, to be so unworried , had occupied her thoughts for