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for security: for someone else to take the strain. Maisie is a darling but as she grows older she’s beginning to push the boundaries, to challenge authority and argue about even the smallest things. She used to be so easy, so sweet and such a wonderful companion. Of course, she’s angelic with Jemima which is irritating in one way but gratifying in another. At least it shows that Maisie does know how to behave.
    Even now, she’s swinging along on Jemima’s hand, chattering and laughing whilst Jemima strolls at the child’s pace, listening to her, Otto on his lead in her other hand. Onlookers might think that she was Maisie’s mother, so comfortable do they look together. This thought might bring a bitter taste, send a tiny shaft of jealousy to the heart, yet it is such a relief to watch somebody else taking charge that Miranda simply feels grateful.
    Maisie glances back and beams at her and Miranda’s heart twists with a painful mix of love and anxiety.
    â€˜Come on, Mummy,’ Maisie cries. ‘We’re going to take Otto for a walk along the ley.’
    They climb into Jemima’s car and drive away towards Torcross, and Miranda begins to gird herself up for the trip back to Torquay and the night shift at the hospital.

CHAPTER FOUR
    CLAUDE SITS ON a bench on the Embankment in the sunshine watching the busy holiday scene. At little octagonal wooden kiosks, painted like beach huts, river trips are advertised; plastic pails containing bait for sale stand in a row outside the station café; people disembark from the Castle ferry, climbing the steep stone steps to the Embankment. Out on a mooring a young couple is making ready to go to sea in a small yacht. Loaded with provisions, they clamber from their little dinghy on to the deck and disappear below to stow things away.
    The excitement and anticipation of regatta buzzes all around Claude: the flare and explosion of fireworks high above the town, the air-shattering roar of the Red Arrows slicing up the river; races and competitions; rowing and sailing; the raucous shriek and thump of the fairground. There is nothing quite like regatta.
    A thin fair man sits down at the other end of the bench and as Claude glances at him he is shocked by the expression of misery on the man’s face. It is an expression of loss, of loneliness, and Claude guesses that this man has lost someone very dear to him and he knows exactly how that feels. It is a few years now since Jilly died but the pain still strikes fresh; nothing ever quite fills the emptiness.
    Even as he glances at the thin fair man Claude sees his face change, as if he is willing down his grief so as to smile at a boy standing nearby at the edge of the Embankment where children lie peering over the edge into the water, their fishing lines hanging down weighted with bait, waiting for crabs to bite. The boy – Claude guesses that he is about twelve – smiles back, clearly enjoying the contest, looking as if he might like to join in whilst conscious that he’s rather too old for such games. Parents are at hand lest the younger ones become too excited and in danger of falling in or getting their fingers nipped. Seagulls sometimes make opportunistic forays on the exposed bait lying beside the young fishermen, and a very small boy screams with terror as a herring-gull swoops in and snatches at the piece of out-of-date bacon. As the great bird carries its trophy away it is immediately mobbed by a group of gulls who drive it down towards the dazzling water where they fight and quarrel noisily as they snatch for the prize.
    Claude watches sympathetically as the little fellow sobs, shocked by the noise of the shrieks from vicious yellow beaks and the violence of the beating of powerful white wings; his father, almost as scared as his child by the sudden attack, puts an arm around him.
    â€˜I didn’t think they’d dare to come in so close,’ he says, bewildered, to