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you.”
    “That’s OK. But … maybe in the cause of further cementing Anglo-American relations, you could agree to meet me. Just for half an hour.”
    “Maybe I could. In the cause of Anglo-American relations.” She smiled back at him. “Well … all right. I’ll meet you here at ten past five. Anyway—better go now. Bye.”
    And she was gone, with a quick sweet smile, half running, her brown curls flying in the spring breeze.
    And so it began: their romance. Which now—most wonderfully, it seemed—might not be over …
    • • •
    Patrick Connell was tired and fed up; he’d stopped for a break on the motorway, and was drinking some filthy coffee—why couldn’t someone provide some decent stuff for lorry drivers? They’d make a fortune.
    Life on the road wasn’t a lot of fun these days, and you didn’tmake the money either, because you were allowed to work only forty-eight hours a week, and that included rest periods and traffic jams, and the traffic just got worse and worse …
    And so did the sleep problem.
    It was turning into a daytime nightmare. It started earlier and earlier in the day, a dreadful, heavy sleepiness that he knew made him a danger. Even when he slept well and set out early, it could catch him halfway through the morning; he would feel his head beginning its inexorable slide into confusion, force himself to concentrate, turn up the radio, eat sweets: nothing really licked it.
    He’d actually gone to the doctor the week before—without telling Maeve, of course; she was such a worrier—to see if he could give him anything for it. The doctor had been sympathetic, but couldn’t. “If I give you pep pills, Mr. Connell, you’ll only get a kickback later, won’t be able to sleep that night, and that won’t help you, will it? Sounds like you need to change your job, do something quite different. Have you thought about that?”
    With which unhelpful advice Patrick had found himself dismissed; he had continued to take his Pro Plus and drink Red Bull and eat sweets and struggle on somehow.
    Everyone thought lorry drivers could do whatever speed they liked; everyone was wrong. The lorry itself saw to that: a governor in the fuel pump that allowed exactly the amount of fuel through to do the legal fifty-six mph and no more. Some of the foreign drivers removed the fuse, or adjusted the pump, but Patrick wouldn’t have dreamed of doing that. Not worth it. You got caught, you lost your licence. And anyway, then there was the tachograph fixed in your cab that told it all: how many hours you’d done, how long you’d stopped, whether you’d speeded at all. So you literally got stuck in some god-awful place, unable to leave because your hours were up. And they could be up simply because of being stuck in traffic, not because you’d made any progress.
    What he longed for more than anything right this minute was ashower and a shave and a change of clothes. Life on the road didn’t do a lot for your personal hygiene. On the English roads, anyway; it was better in Europe. Like the food. And the coffee …

CHAPTER 4
    “What a perfect summer it’s been,” said Jonathan, smiling at Laura, raising his glass of Sauvignon to her; and, “Yes,” she said, “indeed it has. And it’s even nice here now. For our return.”
    “I thought maybe in future we could spend Easter in France, as well as the summer,” he said.
    “Well … well, that would be lovely, except—”
    “Except what?”
    “Well … the thing is, Jonathan, the children are growing up so fast, they’ve got lives of their own now, and they want to be with their friends.”
    “They can be with their friends the rest of the year,” he said, sounding mildly irritable.
    “I know, but …” Her voice trailed off. How to explain that a remote, albeit beautiful farmhouse for weeks at a time wasn’t going to be quite enough for children approaching adolescence? She’d hoped Jonathan would realise that for himself, but he didn’t