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today.’ Inigo puts down the Turkish Delight, rather crestfallen. ‘I thought I could get bagels, but they were closed. The only escape from wet sandwiches was this girl with a soup wagon on the street opposite. It’s Thai chicken. Is that OK for you?’
    This unusual humility and concern for Laura is Inigo’s way of saying thank you for her time and energy spent soothing him this morning. Generally, he is too lost in artistic contemplation to buy lunch, and Laura does it, relishing half an hour out on her own.
    They arrange themselves at a small red table next to the window and sip their soup. The street below is shiny black from recent rain, the removals van has gone, and with it, all traces of the occupants of the upstairs studio.
    â€˜Did you see the fancy dressmakers before they left?’ Laura asks Inigo. He nods, not looking up from the spiralling arrangement he is creating from tulip petals and dusty pink and amber squares of Turkish Delight.
    â€˜I couldn’t believe it. They’re leaving to move to Somerset.’ From his tone of incredulity, Laura expected a destination a little more obscure, themoon perhaps, or Sao Paulo, but Somerset seems eminently sensible.
    â€˜What’s wrong with Somerset?’
    Inigo places a last block of Turkish Delight like a full stop at the end of his spiral; the yellow stamens and black centres of the tulips are as delicate as glass beside the soft dense blocks of muted colour of the sweets. Laura would like to wear the arrangement as a necklace. It is classic Inigo, and she feels a rush of frustrated affection for his childlike restlessness, his need to keep on making things. Even if she could pick it up and put it on, it would lose much by being removed from the red Formica table. Inigo stares at his creation for a long, silent moment, then, his artistic eye sated, he pops a bit of Turkish Delight in his mouth.
    â€˜It’s so far away,’ he explains, waving another piece in Laura’s direction. ‘You can’t run a business or find your creative voice among fields. The countryside has too much of its own agenda with all the cows and nature and stuff. It gets in the way.’
    Laura opens her mouth to disagree, but Inigo, his eyebrows drawn low and fiendish, pushes a powdered lump of stickiness onto her tongue.
    â€˜We all need the pulse of the pavement,’ he says.
    â€˜You are ridiculous,’ Laura laughs, but icing sugar hits the back of her throat, and she chokes instead.Her eyes water and she turns away. In the midst of her discomfort, a small voice in her head is saying: ‘How long can you go on putting up with him?’

Chapter 4
    â€˜Hello. Whoisit?’
    Dolly answers the phone. She has been sitting next to it all evening making arrangements with her friends, painting her toenails and occasionally glancing away from the television and towards the French vocabulary list teetering on the arm of her chair. The only reason she is in the room and using this phone is that her mobile has been confiscated at school. Laura was supposed to get it back, but she was too late to see Madame King the French teacher. Dolly has not yet decided to forgive her for this.
    â€˜Mum, it’s for you. It’s Hedley.’ These are Dolly’s first words to her mother since she came in. Laura smiles in recognition of the truce, and reluctantly Dolly allows her mouth to rise a millimetre at the corners. But a call from her mother’s brother in Norfolk holds no interest for Dolly; she flops her wrist back and lets the telephone fall on the cushion beside her, shifting her long legs slightly to allowLaura room to perch on the edge of the seat to speak, while she continues to rake her fingers through her hair and chew gum. Fred zaps the television with the remote control to kill the sound, earning a grateful look from his mother.
    â€˜Hi, Hedley, how are you? I’m sorry I haven’t rung you. I got your