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checked, in French.
    'Yes.'
    'I never ask a lady her age.'
    I rolled my eyes, without letting him see. 'She must have been about thirty.'
    'Perhaps.'
    'But she didn't have me until she was thirty-eight, did she?'
    'If you say so.'
    I bit back a retort. 'And then she had Tom.'
    He looked at me.
    'Yes,' he said. 'Then she had Tom.'
    'Why did it take her so long to have babies? When you'd met years before?'
    My father tutted and stared straight ahead. He performed a couple of aggressive overtaking manoeuvres, his hand on the horn.
    'Hélène,' he said, chastising me. 'Some things are private. Some things are in the past. Some things are both.'
    I didn't dare ask again.
    'Sorry,' I said, meekly.
    He knew about Elizabeth Greene. He knew that Mother had been married before, that she had loved William Greene enough to wear his ring and have his child. That was obvious.
    I wondered what had happened in her first marriage, to send Mother away to France. I was itching to find out. Tom and I were doing our best but, so far, it was proving hard to track down the right Elizabeth Greene.

 
     
chapter five
Liz
    29 November
    Four weeks later, the grace period ended. As soon as I realised that my period was fifteen days late, I knew that I had, somewhere in my brain, known all along. It had taken me two weeks to face the possibility.
    At the same time, I didn't believe it. I didn't believe it for an instant. I felt that this was another of life's sick jokes, and that if I ignored it, something else would happen instead. Perhaps it would turn out to be the menopause. I kept the positive pregnancy test around the flat for a while, but it seemed like a curiosity, a random item that meant nothing very much. I had seen that blue line once before, when I was twenty-one. It felt disastrous then, whereas now I felt nothing. Back in my youth, it had barely occurred to me that I could have had a baby. A blue line meant an abortion, which happened as quickly and quietly as possible. I didn't even mention it to my father; it was my stepmother, Sue, who drove me to the hospital, waited for me, and took me home again. I never regretted it. I did, however, go on to marry the father, out of some strange feeling that the fact that we had conceived meant that we were made for each other. That stupid romantic notion was soon brutally dismissed.
    This time, the line, which glowed like neon, had many potential meanings. It could mean that my body had overcome the obstacles, and got itself pregnant when I threw myself at Steve, the week before I found out what was going on. I knew this was unlikely, but I looked it up on the internet, and found that there were a lot of people out there who had had a period but still been pregnant. There was a chance that this was his baby. It could mean that Rosa was still fertile, a notion that had barely occurred to me. It could mean another abortion. Or it might mean that, after the fuck-ups and disasters of the past two months, after all the rejection and the self-destruction, the pills and the alcohol and the mind-spinning weirdness, finally something positive was happening. I had no idea what to do.
    I changed my mind many times a day. I stopped drinking and stopped my pills, just in case. I had no idea what I was going to do.
    I was fairly sure, however, that I wouldn't marry the father this time.
    The idea that Rosa might have impregnated me made me sick to the core. I shuddered at the risks we had taken: when I rifled through my hazy, desperate, drunken memories of that night, I saw no condom. I didn't think it had even occurred to me, because she was a woman, and because I was so fixated on taking the worst possible course of action for me and for her.
    The night Steve left, I had thrown my contraceptive pills in the bin, and had quickly filled their place on the shelves with temazepam.
    I suddenly, chillingly, hoped that Rosa hadn't given me anything else. To risk AIDS twice in one month certainly felt like