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Annie had been happy, and she caught her breath at the precariousness of it, and the waste that life could turn out to be.
    Only half joking, she had once remarked to Sadie, ‘If only I had known about having children.’
    ‘You’re not serious?’
    Annie tugged at a curl. ‘ No .’
    All the same, they agreed that Annie producing three children in three years was not the most cunning game-plan ever devised. ‘It kinda wrings a girl out. Neither body nor soul remains honeymoon fresh,’ Sadie remarked, in the Scarlett O’Hara drawl that had so fascinated the teenage Mia and Emily.
    At the time they were having dinner in the House of Commons where she and Sadie sometimes holed up. The dining room was agreeably warm, full and noisy. A television screen in the corner revealed an almost full debating chamber with the Members stacked on the benches. Tom was working and Andrew, having crammed in a first course, had returned to the chamber for a big vote on the use of CCTV cameras.
    Sadie was right. Three toddlers under five was plain bad strategy (and two of the many consequences were an enlarged waistline and fatigued skin tone). ‘Emily wasn’t planned,’ said Annie. ‘The twins were quite enough. But …’ Sadie raised her eyebrows and Annie said, ‘But Tom and I got carried away by – I quote from the catalogue – “the never-to-be-repeated bottle of Château Lynch-Bages, Pauillac, 1996”.’ She smiled at Sadie. ‘Our look-out, and I could never wish any of the children away.’
    ‘Even if they try to kill you with exhaustion and boredom?’
    ‘Especially if,’ said Annie. ‘But it’s lucky I’m not Napoleon.’ She was keeping half an eye on the celebrity count in the tea-room. ‘I would have lost the battles of Borodino and Austerlitz in one fell swoop.’
    ‘Come again?’ said Sadie, unversed in European history.
    ‘Deficient in forward planning. Look, isn’t that the Chancellor?’
    The division bell rang for the vote and the television screen in the corner went temporarily blank.
    Sadie said severely, ‘Pay attention to me, Annie, and don’t rubber-neck.’ She put down her cup, placed her elbows on the table and leaned forward. ‘So, what do we want?’
    … ‘Crazy, crazy woman,’ said Tom, on their honeymoon. They had had hardly a penny between them, he loved fresh air and she loved walking. So, he had bought them both a pair of hiking boots and carried her away to the mountains above Salzburg. Of course, she couldn’t (and didn’t) resist twirling round and round in a green alpine meadow and singing, ‘The hills are alive …’
    When she came to a stop, he was looking at her with his heart in his eyes. ‘You’re embarrassing. Do you know that?’
    She had laughed. ‘Very embarrassing?’
    ‘Off the scale.’
    Down the years she remembered the iced-water quality of the air rushing down into her heaving lungs, the sharp peaks and blue sky and that look in his eyes. Tom had taken hold of her. ‘I love you beyond speech,’ he had said, ‘but I have to tell you that you’re no good as Julie Andrews.’
    There was then nothing more that Annie could have wished for.
    Later on, as they had descended through the trees, and dusk was gathering, she heard the owl’s call. It had stopped her in her tracks: she was willing a repetition of the strangely beautiful, unsettling sound. She pictured the bird’s flurry of down and feathers, its iron hunter body and powerful, unblinking eyes.
    Tom had stood beside her, his warmth and closeness asvital to her as her own heartbeat. ‘I’ll never forget it,’ she had told him. ‘I’ll always listen out for the owl …’
    Annie swallowed, but the lump in her throat refused to budge. She reached for the water glass. Grieving for remembered happiness did not do any good. Tom and she were different, oh, so different, now. Life lesson, Annie: however often its frames were played and replayed in her mind, the past was not retrievable. It was only