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house to a standard not usually achievable during the growing season, even with Mrs Gibson’s twice-weekly help, at the same time asking herself, also resentfully, why she bothered when there were beans to be picked and delphiniums to be staked and a garden in the next village to be redesigned. But she knew really. From forty-one years of experience, she knew how wearing it was to be on the constant wrong end of criticism. It was far more restful to eliminate the things that
could
be criticized. Back in her teens this had been organized by dodges like waiting till she had left the house and found a phone box with a mirror before applying her preferred full amount of make-up, ghost-white lipstick and sooty black Dusty Springfield eyeliner. Huge batwing false eyelashes could be whipped off as close back to home as the garden gate, with her mother having no clue that her daughter had spent the evening looking very much as if she’d been haunting the churchyard. ‘Very high standards your mother has. It’s being your only parent. Wants you to reflect on her with credit,’ Uncle Harold had explained to her, with an extra helping of knee-squeezing, on one of the gold-doily Sundays when an appalling history exam result had produced a two-day maternal sulk, unmollified by otherwise excellent grades.
    â€˜Come to the station with me Suzy, I’m sure Gran would love to see you,’ Heather pleaded cravenly, finding Suzy sprawled untidily on one of the sitting-room sofas reading
Swallows and Amazons
, and making notes in an old exercise book.
    â€˜Do I have to? I mean she’ll see me when she gets here,’ Suzy protested, reasonably.
    â€˜Yes but she likes to be
met.
It shows you’re really looking forward to seeing her,’ Heather cajoled, shoving Suzy’s long bony feet off the freshly-laundered apricot silk cushions.
    â€˜But I’m not,’ she heard Suzy murmur.
    â€˜Suzy!’
    â€˜Oh, OK, OK. I didn’t mean it. It’s just that she
picks
. Though maybe I could come if – would you buy me something? Please?’ Suzy, the possibility of a reward making her suddenly compliant, leapt off the sofa, ran her fingers through her hair as her gesture towards making it look tidy, and tucked her Manchester United T-shirt into her shorts. ‘It’s only a small something, but I do
need
it.’ Suzy produced a warmly persuasive smile. ‘Just an oil lamp, for camping over on the island with Tamsin. They don’t cost much.’
    She made it sound very much already decided, Heather thought, wondering if this was something Suzy had made her agree to in one of the absent-minded moments between an early evening vodka and tonic and the cooking of dinner. She plumped up the sofa cushions and took a last look round the unnaturally tidy room, trying to see it with the sharp eyes of her mother. Books on the shelves were all neatly spine-out and lined up, and videos were filed away in the cupboard instead of lying abandoned across the floor. The curtains, lavishly patterned with enormous foxgloves, were prettily scooped into their silky rope tie-backs and fluffed out at matching angles, and surely
no-one
, not even Delia, could find fault with the glorious view from the French windows, down across the sloping lawn past the swimming pool and box-hedge-bordered herb garden, to the river with the willows and fields and hills beyond the opposite bank. The carpet still showed tracks from Mrs Gibson’s loyally fervent vacuuming, and the air smelled deliciously of the rich cream-and-yellow roses picked that morning from the pergola that sheltered the cars. She hoped, suddenly, that her mother wouldn’t ask what the names were, realizing that some kind of serendipitous accident had led her secateurs straight to both ‘Wedding Day’ and ‘Schoolgirl’. She stifled a chuckle that would have had Suzy thinking she’d gone crazy, and turned her attention