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lurid paperbacks and her banishment from his toast-warm study came straight back into her head. It was starting to get cool, she noticed, her toes were feeling chilled, and the shadows were dappling the pool’s surface as the sun slid behind the clematis-twined head of the statue of Bacchus down by the temple changing room.
    Margot continued, ‘And it’s not just the filming. The director or writer or someone is staying in Simon’s rooms for the duration, which I don’t at all mind. I’m happy to have someone on the premises during the nights,’ she giggled. ‘Russell would be hiring security guards otherwise. Even now he’s talking about getting Harrods to store his precious model soldiers.’
    Heather wasn’t really listening, but waiting to ask, as calmly as she could, her next question, so she could get past hearing Margot’s inescapable answer. She could feel her scalp tingling. ‘So who is he, this writer, director, whatever? Have we heard of him?’
    Margot reached forward and picked up the jug of Pimms, sloshing more, fairly accurately, across into Heather’s glass on the table. ‘Shouldn’t think so, he’s some Scottish laird or other, writes enormous blockbusters, horror numbers with death and derring-do. Ivan someone could it be?’
    â€˜Iain,’ Heather corrected, voicing the inevitable, ‘Iain Ross MacRae.’

Chapter Three
    It was a terrible thing, to wish a hasty death on poor old Uncle Edward just so that Heather could see her mother away as speedily as possible on to her homebound train. It was hardly the old man’s fault if she and Delia were bonded by little more than an accident of birth. ‘Do you know,’ she told Margot on the phone, just before leaving to collect her mother from Reading station, ‘I think that when God was dishing out the Things in Common between mothers and daughters, the two of us must have been gazing out of the window, having a serious lapse of concentration.’
    â€˜How sad,’ Margot sympathized. ‘I still miss mine. We were more like sisters, told each other everything.’ This reminded Heather of her own schoolfriends’ mothers, the ones who’d tried to recapture their own youth through their daughters, or hold on to being important in their escaping lives for as long as they could, insisting with teeth-gritted desperation in the face of sullen teenage self-centredness, ‘Of course, we’re best friends, you know.’
    â€˜I can’t imagine Kate telling me absolutely
everything
,’ Heather said, ‘and I hope she’ll realize, when the time comes – God if it hasn’t already – that some things I might prefer
not to
know!’ Who was it, she tried to recall, who’d said that when mothers and daughters are mistaken for sisters, it’s only the mothers who are pleased?
    â€˜But surely you talk to your mother, you know, when things are going wrong at home?’ Margot asked.
    â€˜Absolutely not. We talk about the weather and what’s for lunch and how the girls are doing at school and that’s about it. Information is power with my mother. If I tell her I’ve had a row with Tom, perhaps over how much vodka he can put away, then six months later when Tom and I are four fights further on about everything and anything, she’ll still be sending me cuttings from the
Telegraph
about AA meetings and counselling services in this area.’ With Margot she could laugh about it, but Delia had a terrier-like tendency to hold on fast to snippets of personal information and re-use them against her, like evidence in a police court. She then thought briefly about Kate and Suzy and their spats of mutual hostility, realizing that, if she went by Margot’s ideal standard, she certainly hadn’t managed to produce a pair of even compatible sisters.
    Heather had spent a resentful couple of days tidying the