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ball about, and those swings, semi-permanent and wholly symbolic, would only have served to strengthen the belief. How she hated to disappoint them all, hoped Joe wouldn’t decide to lay bare their postponement plan. Better if he hinted vaguely that they would be trying soon and then, when next quizzed, suggested it was taking a little longer than expected, just one of those things. His casual diminishment of it – even in this imaginary form – brought a lump to her throat.
    After the tour they had coffee in the kitchen. Their old pine table looked completely wrong amid the Frasers’ state-of-the-art modernity and there was talk of sanding it and smartening it up with a coat of paint.
    ‘What’s this?’ her mother asked, spotting the hotel brochure that had come in the post for Amber Fraser. Since the acetate was already torn, Christy had thought it harmless to open it and leaf through the photographs. ‘Treetop Suites, I’ve heard about this hotel. It’s not far from Granny’s place in Sussex. Isn’t it extortionately pricey?’
    Christy nodded. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not ours.’ She didn’t mention that she had read the letter that had come with the brochure:
Dear Mrs Fraser, following your recent stay, we are delighted to confirm your automatic membership of the Treetops Club …
It had made Christy think of the mile-high club; she imagined the Frasers in their luxury cabin under the canopy, lounging about in silk robes and cashmere slippers, feeding one another woodland-themed canapés before falling onto a bed strewn with apple blossom.
Oh, Amber, baby …
    She suppressed a giggle.
    ‘Shouldn’t you be forwarding any mail that’s not yours?’ her father said, ever the upstanding citizen.
    ‘Yes, I’ll send it on in the week with the rest.’
    ‘No point keeping it, anyway,’ Joe said, tossing the brochure aside with mock regret. ‘It’ll be a long time before we can even afford a drink at a place like that.’ He and Christy beamed at each other: incredible how quickly you could get used to being phenomenally in debt.
    At the door, about to leave, her mother delivered herofficial verdict: ‘It’s a wonderful house, Christy. I see why you decided to risk everything to get it.’
    And Christy accepted her congratulations in the who-dares-wins spirit in which the words were intended. After all, did anyone who dared win actually believe they might lose?
    Did anyone who risked everything expect to fail?
    Christy had met Joe at Cocktail Night in the union bar during their second year of university (the lowest-ranking of any to grace a Jermyn Richards CV). Delivering her White Russian to their table, he’d remarked on her sweet tooth and when she told him that he’d already discovered the most dangerous thing about her, he’d laughed and said, Good, because he didn’t know how to cope with dangerous women. Perhaps that was why their attraction had been less a fireworks display than a quiet mutual ignition; neither having fallen in love before, they were not in a position to tip the other off as to what was happening between them, and only when they’d resurfaced did they understand that they had plunged.
    Unlike other couples, they had developed no mythology around their early years together, nor around their respective childhoods. If hers had been unremarkable – the only child of a teacher and an assistant manager at a branch of Boots – then his might be described as a struggle. His father had worked for decades in recovery patrol for the AA, routinely absent on weekend and night shifts, while his mother raised four children and cleaned part-time for a chain of kitchen showrooms. The familyhome was – still was – a rented terrace on the east London–Essex border.
    (Once, at a Jermyn Richards drinks, Christy had heard Marcus and another senior partner discussing Joe in terms such as ‘salt of the earth’ and a ‘genuine Londoner’, as if he’d been raised by pearly kings and queens,