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don’t feel very well.’
    ‘Ursy? His forehead’s a bit hot.’
    Wearily, Ursula climbed out of bed, felt a trickle of her husband’s semen on her thigh, sighed, and walked into the children’s bathroom. She rifled about in the cupboard for the thermometer.
    ‘37.5. Just on the high edge of normal,’ she said, taking it from under the child’s arm after a minute. ‘Would you like a drink?’
    ‘Yes, please. An orange juice,’ George said.
    ‘I’ll get it,’ she told her husband. Barry slumped back to bed.
    ‘I think actually I would like an apple juice,’ George announced.
    ‘OK,’ Ursula replied.
    ‘And a biscuit.’
    ‘Don’t push your luck,’ she told him.
    When she returned from the kitchen he was fast asleep again. She stood in the doorframe looking at him for a couple of moments, thinking how utterly innocent he was in repose with his arms stretched up above his head on the pillow and the slight gleam of sweat accentuating each of his perfect little features like a della Robbia angel.
    When he was awake, demanding attention, wanting to help with the cooking and generally getting in her way, it was easy to forget how young he was. His language was advanced and he parroted phrases they both used with astonishing accuracy. On occasion she would look at him when he was telling her something he had done that day and see a miniature Barry, and she was entirely capable of being cross with him when he reneged on his part of a negotiation whose terms were far too adult for him to understand. In sleep, he looked just as vulnerable as he had done when he was a baby. He was just three years old, her last child, and as she watched him sleeping, she loved him so much it frightened her.

Chapter 8

    The smell of his in-laws’ house was the same as it had been on the first occasion he had slept there. Geraldine made her own pot-pourri. A Chinese bowl of shrivelled petals stood on the walnut chest of drawers on the landing just outside the guest room. The sweet-stale perfume of old roses permeated every timber of the Cotswold vicarage. He had known whenever Penny had been to see her parents for the afternoon because he could smell it in her hair. It was as much of a giveaway as the scent of another man’s aftershave on an adulterous wife’s skin. Not that Penny had ever made any attempt to disguise her frequent visits home.
    If he had been asked to choose one word to describe the family he had married into it would have been ‘polite’. If he had been allowed a list, then the top five would have included middle-class, Christian, honest and kind, all of which would have sounded like put-downs when he was younger, but which were qualities he had come to value. He had never been one of them, and never would be, but they had welcomed him, and their sense of doing the right thing was practised as well as preached.
    Roy lay in bed, watching the colour of the plaster walls turn from grey to pale blue to bright white, as the rays of early morning sun seeping through the floral curtains intensified.
    The first time he had slept in the guest room the paint and matching soft furnishings had been new and he suspected that the refurbishment had been partly in his honour. Penny was their only daughter and it had been hard for them to give her away, but their genuine good manners made them want him to feel completely at home. Turning Penny’s old bedroom into a guest room where they could spend their first Christmas as husband and wife was the sort of project Geraldine took on with gusto. He could imagine her talking to Penny about it.
    ‘We do want Roy to feel comfortable. You’re not just our little girl any more darling. Anyway, if we’re buying a double bed for the room, we might as well do the whole thing...’
    And Penny protesting, knowing that he probably wouldn’t even notice, but secretly rather enjoying the idea of choosing new fabrics and colours, of having her new status given the full stamp of parental