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minutes. Periodically, the rain would ease, and they would get a glimpse of the unlovely terminal in front of them, but then it would beat down again, turning the picture into a watercolor bleed.
    â€œSo, will Geoff be gone when I get back?” Sabine lifted her chin as she said this, so that it sounded more defiant than inquiring.
    Kate gazed at her.
    â€œProbably,” she said, slowly. “But you can still see him anytime you want.”
    â€œLike I could see Jim anytime I wanted.”
    â€œYou were a lot younger then, darling. And it got complicated because Jim got a new family.”
    â€œNo, it got complicated because I got one bloody stepfather after another.”
    Kate’s hand stretched out to her daughter’s arm. Why did no one tell you that childbirth was the easiest pain?
    â€œI’d better go,” muttered Sabine, opening the car door. “I wouldn’t want to miss my ferry.”
    â€œLet me walk you over to the terminal,” said Kate, tears stinging at her eyes.
    â€œDon’t bother,” said Sabine, and with the hollow slam of the door, Kate was alone.
    I t was a rough crossing, rough enough for the screaming children to whiz up and down the carpeted walkway on stolen dinner trays, while their parents slid comfortably backward and forward along plastic-covered benches, drinking from cans of Red Stripe and occasionally breaking into noisy explosions of laughter. Others queued, staggering, for overpriced chips at the cafeteria, ignoring the salads wilting under cling film, or played the slot machines that broadcast jangles and sirens alongside the stairs. Judging by the number of families, and the resolute postponing of hangovers, the Sunday afternoon crossing was popular among weekend trippers.
    Sabine sat in a window seat, her personal stereo closeting her from all the irritating people around her. They seemed to be grown from the same stock as the people she saw in motorway services, or supermarkets. People who didn’t care that much what they wore; whether their haircuts were so last year; whether the way they sat or spoke was likely to be embarrassing. This is what Ireland is going to be like, she told herself grimly, above the bass-heavy sound of her CD. Backward. Culture-free. An anticool zone.
    For the millionth time, she cursed her mother for this exile, this removal from her friends, her manor, her normal life. It was going to be a nightmare. She had nothing in common with these people, her grandparents were virtual strangers, she was leaving Dean Baxter to the evil clutches of Amanda Gallagher just at the point where she thought she was getting somewhere with him, and, worst of all, she wouldn’t even have her mobile phone or computer to keep in touch. (Even she had to admit that her computer was too large to transport, while her mother had told her that if she thought she was going to pay to have an “international call” facility on her already overspent mobile, then “she had another thing coming.” Why did they say that? If she had told her mother she should thing again, her mother would have started on about how she should have sent her to private school.)
    So she was not only to be exiled, but without even the comforts of phone or e-mail. But even as she sat staring grimly at the churning Irish Sea, Sabine allowed herself the smallest sense of relief that she wasn’t going to have to be party to the endless tensions of her mother and Geoff slowly and painfully unthreading their domestic web.
    She had known it was going to happen before even Geoff had. She had known from the afternoon she came down from her room and heard her mother whispering into the phone. “I know. I want to see you, too. But you know he’s impossible at the moment. And I don’t want to make things worse.”
    She had stood, frozen on the stairs, and then coughed loudly, so that her mother put the phone down suddenly and guiltily, and then