Bollocks! Grace, dreaming her past, heard the words as clearly as if Nell Gordon was in the room. Nell Gordon, that smug cultural regurgitator, that second-guesser of other people’s lives, who flattered herself that she understood it all because she knew the ‘truth’, when every sane person knew that there was no such thing, just a flock of perceptions, as similar and different, as ever present and elusive, as the birds in the sky.

Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. There she was again. And you’re telling me I distort the picture. That little scene of domestic bliss was one big lie, wasn’t it?

Grace was tired but she still could not sleep. She was not averse to the idea that there was such a thing as telepathy and, if there was, maybe Nell Gordon was tossing and turning in her bed.

What kind of day were you having when you decided to deconstruct my life, eh? Bad, I wouldn’t mind betting. A dearth of interesting material and you with a deadline and probably little Tristram’s birthday party to organise and at least three launches to attend. Do you have a file marked Subjects For That Desperate Day, that day that comes in every journalist’s life when there’s inches and inches of empty columns to fill and nothing to fill it with? And I sympathise with you, I really do. You’re not some tabloid hack. You’re a serious writer on the arts pages of an important broadsheet; you can’t just make up some natty little piece about the vicar and the golf-club secretary. But Nell, why me? I who, after the furore and the applause, after my own personal chariot ride between triumph and disaster, withdrew into what my father used to call a becoming silence? Why pick on me?

But all right, it had been a game that first summer they spent together on the Cape. She and Jefferson had wanted to act out what might have been if, that other, long-ago summer, he had chosen Grace. They had wanted to let their love, poor sinner that it was, out of the shadows and hold it up to the light. They had wanted to have people walk by and say, ‘There go Grace and Jefferson,’ as if such a couple really had a right to be. So they had pretended to their neighbours. So they had lied. They had played house, watering the plants on the porch of the little cottage at the edge of town, just steps from the beach and the roar of the ocean. They had given Pluto his morning bowl of warm milk and wheat as if that was how they had always looked after their dog. So what? They never lied to themselves or each other; all they had done was dip their toes in a dream.

That time – four weeks in a borrowed house on the Cape – was the longest they had together in their six years.

A year earlier Jefferson had left his Manhattan law firm to take up a post teaching law at Redfield College, New Hampshire. Cherry had been going through an especially bad patch and he thought that moving back to small-town New England might help her. And for a while the drinking stopped. Jefferson drove her to AA meetings in another town, near enough to reach in half an hour, far enough away from the tittle-tattle tongues of neighbours. But come February she was a regular instead at that town’s only karaoke bar. The call came one evening from a man named Dwight, who asked for her to be collected as she was hogging the mike again, and there had been complaints.

He phoned Grace in London. ‘What am I doing?’ he groaned. ‘What am I doing with my life?’ This was her moment; the moment when he was weak and she could make him come to her and stay. ‘Grace, Grace, are you there? Can you hear me? I was saying …’

‘I’m still here. And Jefferson, my darling, you’re being good. You are staying because your wife is sick and would get sicker still if you weren’t there. You’re staying because if you left, your children would not just lose you, they would most probably lose her too. Now just don’t ask me my opinion too often because it’s possible that I shall not always be this good myself.’

‘I don’t know that either of you are exactly good,’ Angelica had said. ‘I mean, you are committing adultery.’

Grace, who had been sitting at her kitchen table resting her forehead in her hands, looked up at her with tired eyes. ‘I know, Angelica, I do know that. But how good do you want me to be?’

‘No, how good do you want to be?’

‘Don’t ask silly questions. Like most people, I want to be good but I also want my own way.’

So when a friend of hers, an American photographer called Dylan Lennox, had suggested a house swap, Grace had called Jefferson up to say she had the chance to spend the summer not more than two hours’ drive away. She had been working all year so she had money to fall back on and there were at least two famous writers, both known as reclusive, living on the Cape whose portraits were always sought after. ‘I think by now they’re bored with being out of the limelight and dying to have someone hunt them out.’

The plan had been for Grace to spend the summer in the house on the Cape and for Jefferson to visit when he could: the odd weekend and the annual week he ‘walked the trail with a couple of the guys’. Then came their stroke of luck: Cherry had announced her intention of taking the girls to visit her parents in Florida. She was tired of the rain, she said, and the way people kept sneaking looks at her when they thought she couldn’t see. Jefferson was happy. The girls would be fine with their grandparents to help care for them. They were excited about going away, especially as they had been promised a trip to Disneyland. Jefferson made up some story about extending his walking tour while he had the chance, saying, because he thought it would please Cherry who watched Oprah a lot, that he felt some quiet time communing with nature might help him find his spirit. Cherry always said he did not have one, and if he did, it was buried so deep it might as well not be there. To Grace, Jefferson said that was unfair; his spirit just ran and hid when Cherry was around.

Cherry certainly did not suggest that he come with them. Without him she was her parents’ princess once more, free from any adult responsibilities. ‘You’re always watching me, as if you’re just waiting for me to do something wrong. I sometimes think that’s what makes bad things happen; you watching and expecting the worst.’ Then she went off on her holiday.

That’s how Grace and Jefferson got their time together in the cottage on the Cape.