Dog Handling Part 1

Dog Handling.

Clare Naylor.

Chapter One.

Francesca Honeycomb, International.

Beauty, Philanthropist, and Academic.

19722060.

Francesca Honeycomb [oh, come on, if you think that in my fantasy life I'd be n.o.ble enough to keep the name my parents gave me you've got me all wrong] lived a life without compromise. There were times she was so wasted on fabulous substances that the morning after a night of unparalleled hedonism she'd hitch a ride home on the milkfloat only to discover she'd lost her house in a game of blackjack with a Russian card shark. Fortunately, Francesca was the kind of girl that the card shark would fall madly in love with and serenade with "Down the River Mother Volga" at four in the morning. He would give her back her house and a bitten fountain pen that had belonged to Karl Marx and leave her to concentrate on her study of neocla.s.sical armoires. But study alone couldn't hold Francesca's attention for long-she was diverted along the path of academic brilliance by the appearance of a lethal rock star and a glittering aristocrat, neither of whom she had an iota of respect for but both of whom knew how to twinkle her toes in every sense. In fact, it was not until her forties and an exhausting decade of being pursued by the most eligible and delicious men in the world that the girl who boasted the unique accolade of appearing as a guest star on Eastenders and as a panelist on Newsnight finally met the man she was to settle down with-marketing guru turned yogi Tim Evans-a man in the Terence Stamp mold [Francesca figured Terence himself may be a little past it as she approached her forties and he his seventies]. She is survived by two children with piercing blue eyes, a daughter who has just been awarded the Turner Prize and a son who lives in Falmouth with his boyfriend and their eight cats. A distraught friend said last night, "Frannie was the greatest. She spent every last penny in the bank account of life." Mourners are asked to send as many flowers as the hea.r.s.e will hold but none of those awful supermarket carnations.

It was another day in the accounts department and Liv Elliot was thinking ahead. Thinking ahead to the day she died, to be precise. Newspapers across the land would be splattered with coverage of her life well lived. Her obituary would read like the blurb on a fantastic novel and everyone would agree that she hadn't wasted a moment.

"Like h.e.l.l," moaned Liv, and quickly flipped the computer screen from her fantasy obituary to the work she was meant to be doing. But instead of a spreadsheet detailing company profits she was confronted by the x.x.x-rated pictures of Naked Brad she'd been glancing at earlier. She didn't always spend her mornings ogling electronic images of movie stars in the buff, but she was getting married in a few weeks and the strain was wreaking havoc with her brain and hormones. In short, she wanted to have mad s.e.x with every man who walked past her desk or banged into her trolley in the supermarket. It was all getting a bit ugly.

"Liv, we need the monthly accounts before lunchtime. We've got a meeting with the board at Selfridges and I want ammunition!" Fay shouted as she bristled past Liv's desk. And what Fay wanted Fay got. Fay was Liv's superwoman, superenergetic, super-b.l.o.o.d.y-human boss who lived on Nutri-Grain snacks alone while she reared a fourteen-year-old child whose first play in Greek had just opened the Royal Court. Luckily, she'd flown past back into her office before Brad's lack of skivvies had time to register on her double-first-from-Cambridge brain.

"Sure!" Liv yelled out, and maniacally began drumming figures into her keyboard. She hated numbers. Which wasn't very useful for an accountant. If Liv had to tell a total stranger what she was all about, it wouldn't be algebra or equations or anything even remotely resembling the senior financial executive she was. She'd have a way with a musical instrument that would take her to Albert Hall for a solo performance in a taffeta dress or, even closer to her heart, she'd be the milliner out on the studio floor nestling organza into a trilby. Somehow, though, she'd become an accountant. Albeit a good one. In fact, her life could be described, to the casual onlooker, as a bit of a success story.

Liv pretty much has it all: a flat-small but great location-location-location in the heart of London's fashionable Notting Hill-a job that, even if a bit dull, is definitely better than a kick in the teeth with a cheap stiletto. And to top it all off she's got a man. To whom she's engaged to be married. So Liv's hardly a candidate for a charity sale. With half of what she's got most people would be counting their blessings and planning their next winter sun holiday. But not Liv. Not that she's ungrateful or anything, just that she's starting to panic a bit. Wondering whether she's doing the right thing, et cetera. Worrying that this is it, the end of the road, and she'll never know what it is to sleep with someone who has a record in the Top Ten or discover whether bald men really make the best lovers. This really is where the train of romance and l.u.s.t stops and Liv gets off.

The trouble is, this bit is a source of embarra.s.sment and she's never admitted it to anyone, but she's never had a one-night stand, which kind of tweaks the nipples of bra-burning feminists really. What did they get saggy b.o.o.bs for if not so that girls like Liv could know the joys of regretting that last gla.s.s of wine and wondering why they hadn't noticed he was wearing a wedding ring last night?

When Liv started working at Goldsmiths, the most dusty and prestigious milliner in London, she planned to learn how to magnificently trim a boater at night cla.s.ses; then one evening she would stay late, ostensibly to work on the annual financial report. The next morning everyone would come into work unsuspectingly clutching cappuccinos and croissants as usual and discover the most magnificent hat that anyone had ever seen outside of an Audrey Hepburn movie. The Hat would be resting insouciantly on a dummy, and croissants and Nutri-Grain bars would remain uneaten as everyone merely marvelled, wondering who, but who, had given birth to The Hat. For Liv's Hat would be the Platonic Ideal of hats. A prototype of wonderfulness that would have Philip Treacy, creator of the most beautiful headwear in history, meeting seedy figures in overcoats in subterranean bars negotiating just how much it would cost him to have The Marvel's legs broken. Or maybe her arms. No, on second thoughts, both. . . .

"It'll run late, too. Could you book us both a cab home for nine?" Fay did a few quad stretches as she whirred past Liv's desk again. She was off for her lunchtime run around Hyde Park. All of it. When she heard the doors of the lift close safely, Liv flipped back to Naked Brad and thought of her upcoming wedding. Her l.u.s.t obsession had coincided, to the day, with her engagement. Since then she hadn't been able to stop looking at other men. And not in a "lucky me I'm marrying the only man in the world for me" type way. No, she was wondering what it would be like to . . . if she were being honest with herself . . . s.h.a.g them senseless. Not very blushing bride, is it? Much more l.u.s.ty, perspiring, panting in some locked stationery cupboard / seedy motel room / quickie in the back of his Audi woman-you-wouldn't-want-to-marry-in-your-darkest-nightmares type thing. But that said, she and Tim had been together for five years and she'd never once been unfaithful. It was just that simply wanting to on her wedding day would be an act of treachery and not the act of a newly married woman. A newly married woman who would never again until her dying day as long as ye both shall live know what it was like to so much as kiss someone else. So, you see, apart from that small, niggling doubt, she was blissfully happy to be getting married.

"It's not that I'm s.e.x-mad or anything, just that I'm curious." Liv spilled Sweet'n Low all over her skirt as she and Alex settled down for a lunchtime catch-up in Patisserie Valerie.

"Had one, you've had them all," said Alex Burton, Liv's closest friend and a ferociously smart woman trapped in the body of a supermodel. "I promise that the second you so much as kiss another man it'll be like deja vu. One tongue's the same as another and the more p.e.n.i.ses you see the more repellent and frankly ridiculous they start to look."

"But at least you can use the plural-in my life it's just a p.e.n.i.s. Only the one. I just want to know what it's like out there."

This was a conversation that Alex and Liv had been having every day since May, when Tim had taken Liv to Blakes Hotel and proposed. In bed on a gorgeous Sunday morning, with a beautiful tombstone of a ring. The only problem was that to Liv it might as well have been a tombstone. A huge gaping grave, a creaking coffin with her inside it all bridaled up. Bridle. That's what horses wear, isn't it? Man's faithful servants. "I mean having to take his name. I'm not ready to be someone's chattel. I'm not ready to be Liv Evans. s.h.i.t, I'm not Welsh."

"You don't have to take his name. Keep your own. But you're twenty-seven; isn't it about time?" Alex sipped the froth of her cappuccino and glared in a schoolmarmish fashion at Liv.

"Time?" Liv's eyes rolled wildly in panic. A huge gong signalling Doomsday. Time to give up all your dreams and ambitions, girls. Time to admit that you're just another one of the little ants that scamper round the earth eating, getting married, procreating, and then snuffing it. No matter what you think, you're just the same as the woman who serves you in Woolworth's. You're no different from the superconfident housewives stocking up with salmon en croute in Putney Sainsbury's on Friday evening. You have the same dreams and desires as the next clone. Time? How dare Alex (who was about to collide headlong with thirty) threaten her with Time? Since when had her best friend decided that it was time to put the clock forward to GMT, Get Married Time?

Liv fiddled with her spoon and tried to resist the urge to run to Thomas Cooke across the road and book the sixty-four-pound one-way ticket to Malaga. Weren't those holiday reps for all their sunburned drunkenness at least flying in the face of convention by not exactly longing to run down the aisle at the drop of a hint from their mother? Liv simply wasn't ready. She hadn't lived the life she fantasised about. She'd never had a studio flat of her own with knickers hanging from the antique chandelier that she'd bought with her own money. For heaven's sake, she'd never even kissed a man whose name she didn't know. "Will you marry me?" is the sumptuous curtain call of a romantic encounter that has taken in shifting sand dunes and desert storms; s.e.x and sunsets on beaches in the South Pacific; ecstatic kisses atop some mountain that only you two and a few Aztecs have ever climbed. This hallowed question is meant to be the full stop at the end of a life less ordinary. Not the beginning of a life pretty much the same as before save for a few more sticks of furniture and the addition of an infant in the box room.

"Let's go and look at some frocks," said Alex as she bolted down her Florentine. "I've seen the most amazing McQueen gown in this shop round the corner." In case you were wondering how Alex manages to bolt down Florentines and still be slim enough to utter the words Alexander McQueen you have to understand a thing or two about Alex. Mostly, that she's not like me or you. For one, she's the kind of girl you see in South Kensington patisseries and Gucci and wonder how. How come she doesn't have inky cuffs and a bullying boss? How come she can buy trouser suits in three colours and one for evening? How come life is so unfair and I have to shop in French Connection? The short answer is that if you knew how, you might be prepared to settle for French Connection.

She makes a very decent living having very rich boyfriends and immaculate hair. Her Gucci is always paid for by someone called Richard who has the same surname as a large American bank. Dinner is usually courtesy of a shipping tyc.o.o.n, and the penthouse in Holland Park was a good-bye present from a seventies rock star who wanted his past to remain a secret when he got married to a French heiress with a Catholic mother. See, it's easy when you know how.

Alex discovered how by accident really. Her natural habitat as a book reviewer led her to late-night conversations with many a literary lion who would thrill at her knowledge of allegory but much prefer the journey around her Amazonian body. Alex would fall in love and give them five-star reviews and then they'd suddenly remember that they had a lioness and cubs in some den in Primrose Hill. Adieu, literary lion. Soured and fed up with men who evidently preferred her bra size to her IQ, Alex tumbled along with the old maxim if you can't beat 'em beat 'em up and sometimes whip 'em, too, as long as you never have to see your own credit card statements. Which she'd been doing lucratively for the past three years to some of the most powerful and rich men in the world. Though she claimed not to do much s.e.x anymore.

"You just don't have to. It cheapens the product." And she would never kiss before the third date unless he was under forty and pa.s.sably s.e.xy. What's more, all her spending money came in useful for her brothers. Alex's parents had died a few years ago, leaving her solely responsible for her two younger brothers, Luke and James. She'd kept them in trainers, driving lessons, private schools, and university since that day. They didn't come cheap and they didn't get any cheaper. Luke had just been accepted to Yale University in the States and James was about to start his second year at Exeter. All bank-breaking stuff, so she gratefully accepted all the help she could get from her suitors.

Liv and Alex met via one of the literary lions five years ago. Liv was his accountant and teaching him to collect as many receipts as possible from lunch dates so they could all be written off as business expenses. Alex was his current mistress, whose shoes and salads were being written off as a business expense. The girls met in his hallway one day when his wife was in the Mull of Kintyre. They were instantly bonded in hilarity over his misconception that shiny trousers made him look taller than his five-foot-two in Cuban heels.

"It's the happiest day of your life. You can't wear black." Alex, for all her career choice, was much more an old-fashioned romantic than Liv in many ways. Just a frustrated, hard-bitten, cynical one. She hovered outside the wedding shop changing room as Liv emerged looking like a trussed-up governess who had just escaped a grim Victorian novel-austere, hara.s.sed, and deep in mourning.

"It's slimming. And I can't wear cream or I'll look like a bedspread." Liv sc.r.a.ped back her hair into a governess's bun.

"Definitely virginal, but you look more like a candidate for female circ.u.mcision than a wench longing for a rampant deflowering." Alex walked over to the rails and plucked out a few shimmery, ethereal nightmares for Liv.

"Ees such a shame your friend is not getting married. She would make ravenous bride, eh?" Delilah, the irritatingly pretty French a.s.sistant who was begging to have her face slapped, stepped forward and t.i.ttered.

"Sorry?" bristled Liv.

"She would wear these dresses well, non?" Delilah a.s.sessed Alex's perfect proportions, which were only enhanced by combat pants, and longed for her to try on the Dolce number she couldn't bear to sell to any old person. "Per'aps you keep it simple, eh?" Delilah's face pinched with horror as Alex handed Liv the diaphanous numbers. Thankfully Liv was spared the guillotine stare when a gleaming beauty strode in through the door and Delilah hurled herself to the other side of the room.

"Ciao." Beauty kissed Delilah on the cheeks and tossed her handbag onto a nearby sofa. "Is it ready?"

"Ees 'ere." Delilah hurried into a back room and emerged with a wedding dress so perfect that Liv thought perhaps she'd forget weddings altogether in the face of such unfair compet.i.tion and plan her funeral instead.

"Alex, I just can't do this. Look at me. I'm not a bride. Unless Frankenstein's up for it."

Alex stared long and hard at Liv as she stood before the mirror in a delicate dress that showed off everything she had and hid what was better left unsaid. "Yes, you can. You look gorgeous." And Liv really did. "But this isn't about dresses, is it?" Alex shoved her hands seriously into the pockets of her combats and a.s.sessed the damage. "It's Tim. Do you really not love him?"

"Love him? Yes," Liv granted. "In love? Not exactly. You can't be, can you, after all this time? Which is why I really shouldn't be doing it, should I?"

"Let me explain something to you, Livvy. It's Darwinian, you see." Alex gave her the look that the lions hankered after. Authoritative and s.e.xy. "Love as we think of it is a chemical imbalance. Humans were designed to have babies. A couple meet and have mad s.e.x for three years. No rhyme or reason; often they hate one another. Then if no babies are made they stop fancying each other. It means they're not compatible mates. If, however, you actually get on with that person but still have no babies you're consumed with doubt during the s.e.x drought. It's a common problem in the postpermissive era of the pill."

"Which means what exactly?" Liv pulled the thread off a delicately embroidered rose until the whole flower vanished.

"n.o.body has s.e.x after the first three years. And at least you like Tim, which, trust me, is a huge blessing." Alex took the thread from Liv's hand and hid it in her pocket before Delilah could accuse them of shoplifting an embroidered rose.

"But s.e.x? Pa.s.sion?" Liv looked forlorn. "I want to have lunch with a man I hardly know and not wear any knickers."

"It's overrated and chilly. You'll have a fantastic life with a man you love. Tim is that man. Someone you can trust not to s.h.a.g the chief bridesmaid. He'll still love you after childbirth. It may not be pa.s.sion, but G.o.d, it's the most romantic thing ever. You've no idea how much I envy you that."

Liv looked back in the mirror. Give or take the odd flower on her bodice, maybe she could be the fancy dress version of a bride at least. The bodice looked pa.s.sable with her pale skin. A bit of lipstick, and all would be well on the big day. And Tim? Well, he was completely great, really; she'd never thought otherwise or she wouldn't have been with him for all this time. She just had to learn to appreciate him a bit more. Remember how much she loved his fluffy boyish looks and how cute he was when he fell asleep on the sofa during Friends. And try to imagine how devastated she'd be if he was. .h.i.t by a bus tomorrow. Anyway, who wanted a man who bought you dagger-heel shoes and asked you to wear them in the bedroom? How awful would it be to have a husband whom women at c.o.c.ktail parties flirted with as they elbowed you out of the way to try to wrest his mobile number from him? And just what was it with these aftershave-commercial-type men who kissed your neck pa.s.sionately in front of the mirror as you cleaned your teeth? At least Liv knew Tim loved her for herself. He wouldn't be stupid enough to stand for her tantrums. To buy her jewels "just because." He knew his own mind and they laughed together. Curled up deliciously in bed. Knew their respective chopping and stirring roles in the carbonara recipe by heart. That, as a poet must have said, was love. She'd make a beautiful bride, she thought as she eased the zip down on her corset, with maybe a whisper of a diet before the big day.

"You see, darling, I've sampled the soup. Licked the cones. I have lived life. And now I will give myself: my extended, travelled, fulfilled self, to my husband." Beauty was twirling around the shop like a remake for the twenty-first century of a Doris Day movie.

"C'est parfait. Parfait." Delilah was practically panting with the ecstasy of it all. "Roger ees lucky man, non?"

"It's been a thrilling affair and it will be a thrilling marriage." Beauty was the kind of girl who took her luck and flawless looks for granted. Presented with one smidgen of her charms on a silver platter by the tooth fairy, Liv would have evaporated in a puff of I-am-not-worthies. Beauty just frowned at an imaginary dark root on her head. "I love love love him. I swear the second he puts that ring on my finger I'll just growl with pleasure."

"And you just know that Roger will be precisely three-foot-six of mangy, bearded, impotent, but oh, so wealthy arms dealer," Alex whispered into Liv's ear as she looked at Beauty with her golden ponytail and Bulgari engagement ring. Liv giggled; Alex was right. So what if Beauty had sampled the soup and licked the cones? She wasn't likely to be truly in love with the old dog she was marrying. Just bluff. Pa.s.sionate marriages with wonderful, kind men who were also handsome were just a myth devised by advertising agencies to sell more chocolate.

Liv pushed all thoughts of breathtaking one-night stands and having Eric Clapton write songs about how wonderful she was looking tonight to one side and concentrated on how she was going to make Tim the happiest husband in the world. And there was always Tantric s.e.x Counselling and stuff if they ever got really desperate. For heaven's sake, she hadn't even resorted to buying exotic undies yet. Much less had one of those conversations that magazines always advised: talk through your fantasies and if you're comfortable with them feel free to chuck an old scarf over the lampshade and act them out. The only hitch was that Liv's fantasies usually involved other men: Naked Brad, the in-house photographer at work, various newsreaders.

"Oh, my G.o.d. Look away; look away." Alex closed the curtain on Liv and began to whistle loudly.

"What? Why?" asked a m.u.f.fled Liv, thinking that maybe the arms dealer was just too hideous a sight to behold. Perhaps he'd been maimed by one of his own weapons. Perhaps they'd had to st.i.tch his face on inside out after a mishap with a Kalashnikov. "You know I'm much better at stomaching the gory scenes in ER than you. I can take it." Liv groped her way round the curtain and stuck her head out. "f.u.c.k me." She whistled slowly. Before them stood a clearly smitten Beauty but not a beast in sight, only the most divine leather-clad Frenchman that money could never buy. His hair was cropped, black, and ruffled and his criminally blue eyes creased with joy as he watched Beauty emerge in her very small smalls.

"Darling, you're not allowed to see me in the dress. Now go away or I won't marry you at all." Beauty shooed him away like a gnat; he tossed his head back and laughed.

"Me, please. Me, please. Next in line if she doesn't want you." Alex panted quietly. "There is a G.o.d, isn't there?"

"Yeah, and he's wearing a seventies biker outfit and smells of petrol." Liv's bodice was too tight now. She hacked the zip down a few notches and continued staring. "Why is life so unfair?" she moaned. Alex suddenly swivelled round and pulled the curtain over her.

"Okay, hang on a minute. Let's just say that even if that fiancee of his was. .h.i.t by a bus, or even just an old green BMW in the street outside, you are getting married. He'd be mine. You can't have your cake and eat it."

Liv didn't care. She just wanted another look. She ripped the curtain from Alex and stuck her head out. The girls panted and gawped until the trinity of beautiful people in the corner turned and stared at them in horror. Did such unfortunate people really exist? they wondered as Alex wiped her sweating palms down her thighs, her tongue lolling bovinely next to Liv, whose b.o.o.bs spilled out of her bodice onto the Fulham Road. The beautiful ones quickly looked away, terrified that such dreadfulness was contagious and having no intention of being afflicted.

"Cherie, my bike 'e is throbbing in the street outside. I wait there for you. Comme toujours." Roger pulled on his helmet and creaked through the door.

"But you just know he's impotent, don't you?" Liv ventured hopefully. "I mean all that throbbing between his thighs. It can't be good for it. Can it?"

Chapter Two.

Where Was I When.

Everyone Was Sampling the Soup.

and Licking the Cones?

Liv rang her parents six times before she finally gave up and decided to cut her losses and walk the two miles from the train station to their house. It would give her time to think and work out just what she was going to say to them. To ask them whether they really thought she was doing the right thing in getting married. Shouldn't it be undying pa.s.sion or not at all? Liv had convinced herself that her mother would know what was best for her. But her faith in her mother's ability to help her out suffered a minor setback ten minutes later when she was accosted by last year's rotting Christmas tree and three empty boxes of Waitrose's own brand wine in the driveway of their house. Ordinarily Liv would have cleared them discreetly away into the wheelie bin, but she was dying for the loo.

Seeing the curtains still drawn despite the bright autumn sunlight outside, she pelted round the back of the house in the hope that someone had left a door open for the cats to get in. Liv's mother and stepfather had no concept of security-Lenny, her stepfather, had worked with reforming criminals for many years and had it on good authority from several burglars that the more signs of life in a house the less likely you were to be broken into. Hence all the neighbours with bolted garages and crooklocked cars were forever having their homes stripped of video cameras and computers. Meanwhile Lenny and Elizabeth, with their open doors and garage spewing lawn mowers and trampolines and unlocked cars with tantalising stereos, had never been relieved of so much as a garden hose. They just knocked on wood occasionally and wondered who'd want their LP collection anyway, much to their smart neighbours' crooklocked dismay.

But today the door was firmly locked.

"Lemme in, quick." Liv hammered on the French windows and crossed her legs. Still no sign of life. The cats were scattered on a.s.sorted surfaces, Oedipus on the kitchen windowsill, Tom on the mouldering patio table, and Blair, the youngest, on the mat. Blair had been named in the heady preelection frenzy of April 1997 when Labour seemed like a good idea and before Tony had become Tory. Lenny had subsequently wanted to change her name to Karl, but Elizabeth deemed it cruel to confuse her, so he'd only call her Karl under his breath while breaking open a can of Sheba.

"I'm dying for a pee. Quick," Liv pleaded, and looked around the garden for an opportune hedge or bike shed. Then she crossed her legs again; the neighbours were notoriously nosy and it'd be all over the local paper the next week. Lenny and Elizabeth were already a rather unusual addition to the quiet Berkshire street. On a good day they were deemed a breath of fresh air-the Tom and Barbara Goode in a neighbourhood of Margot and Jerrys. But when the good life wasn't going their way the Margot and Jerrys would huff and puff at the lowering tone of the neighbourhood. After January storms, fence panels lay scattered across the garden for months harbouring entire universes of wood lice; the front wall that Lenny had started in 1983 had never quite seen the light of day, and those who actually ventured into the house left with tales of dislodged bathroom tiles and splotches of paint samples all the way through the house, "And on top of perfectly nice wallpaper, too." But Elizabeth and Lenny would barely have noticed. They had eyes only for one another and their minds were filled like recycling bins with the economic implications of organic farming and adult literacy issues. To them a splotch of paint sample was as good as decorating the house in Primrose Glory.

"Oh, it's divine. Isn't it Lenny? I could look at it all day," Elizabeth would marvel for a while at the patch of yellow on top of twenty-year-old lilac and then read a book, glancing up every so often to envisage Primrose Glory wherever she looked.

"Good G.o.d, we thought Oedipus was having another stroke. Come in Livvy." Lenny opened the French doors in his Betty Ford Clinic T-shirt. A rangy, bearded man who could have pa.s.sed for the messiah on any day other than a hungover Sat.u.r.day, he scratched away his hangover and kissed Liv as she hurtled past him to the downstairs bathroom. After much sighing and a minor civil war with the flush on the loo, she emerged smiling and relaxed.

"I'll put on the kettle. Your mum's in bed. Go say h.e.l.lo." Lenny went to boil the kettle but remembered he'd had to use the cable as a makeshift door handle last week, so he boiled a saucepan of water instead.

"Black, loads of sugar please." Liv left her stepfather humming to himself and wandered upstairs to say good morning to her mother. Lenny and Elizabeth had been married for twenty years now, but still, sometimes Liv had a pang of just wanting her mother to herself, of which Lenny was acutely aware. He was an achingly sensitive man who had endured all manner of tantrums and resentment from his stepdaughter until she was in her early twenties and she suddenly stopped struggling and saw his messianic qualities and twinkly blue eyes instead of an imposter who wanted to take her mother away from her and hurt her as her father had done. Liv's father had left when she was only five; she'd only ever had a cursory holidays-on-Scottish-islands-type relationship with him. Liv had looked after her mother and protected her for so long that it was finally a relief when she relinquished that mantle to Lenny and began to have a life of her own. Liv thought that part of the reason she'd become an accountant was just as an extension of her protective, coping role in life. It was ordered and financially secure, neither of which had been features in her childhood.

Her mother was at the top of the ramshackle house, behind a door with an old part from a kettle for a handle.

"Mum." Liv tramped in and sat on the end of the bed. Her mother's sleepy blond head rose confused from beneath the sheets.

"Darling. I thought you were coming tomorrow. Now what's this big thing you want to talk to me about?" She kissed Liv on the forehead and settled back into the pillows. "If you're thinking about inviting Aunt Flora, you know I hate, but hate, her." Liv had come down to her mother's for precisely this reason. Elizabeth was wonderfully childlike and had absolutely no idea of how to behave in the real world. She had no regard for convention for convention's sake, and if she thought the wedding was a bad idea then she'd say so with no anxiety that it might provoke frowns of disapproval from elderly relations. To Elizabeth a wedding wasn't a big deal, just a lot of fun. She wanted to be surrounded by lovely people, Liv's friends, and Tim, who she thought was the most handsome man since Gregory Peck, and if it had been up to her would just have sent everyone off into the garden to eat barbecued sausages from paper plates as they sat on tree stumps chatting. Liv would wear some old ballet tutu they had lying around in the loft, and the nuptials could have been taken care of by a friend of hers who was a tarot reader. It was all the same to Elizabeth; the children loved each other and wanted to make a commitment-no matter if it was in St. Paul's Cathedral or her dilapidated paG.o.da. Liv, however, felt entirely differently.

"She's Dad's sister. We have to have her," said Liv as Lenny came in with a tray of coffee and some Bombay mix.

"Thought you might be hungry after the journey," he said as he laid the tray on the floor, the only available s.p.a.ce in the dark and chaotic bedroom.

"Thanks, Lenny," said Livvy as she shovelled down a handful of Bombay mix gratefully. "Besides, she's my G.o.dmother, isn't she?"

"Dog mother more like. She never even called when you had whooping cough when you were four, Livvy. But it's your day, petal. If you want her there, then I promise not to pull her chair away when she sits down." Elizabeth giggled and hugged her mug of coffee. Liv sighed.

The wedding would also be stressful because Liv's parents hardly ever saw each other. The last time had been the funeral of a mutual friend and had resulted in the hurling of insults and ham sandwiches at the wake. Even if Liv managed to keep tempers sweet, she still had to cope alone with the decisions on peach or cream napkins and lox or melon and prosciutto for the starter. Her mother had no concept of the etiquette of these matters, and her father, being sn.o.b extraordinaire, would forever moan if Liv got it wrong. Perhaps coming home hadn't been such a great idea after all. Instead of her mother's insouciance rubbing off on Liv, she'd just sunk further into the mires of misery as she realised that the weight of the world was resting squarely on her shoulders.

"Can we give you a hand making the invitations or anything, love?" asked Lenny as he settled down on the bed. Liv thought of the look of horror on her father's face as he opened an invitation to his only daughter's wedding that had been crayoned with a lettraset and had Prit-stuck glitter wedding bells on. Perhaps not.

"I think maybe I'll just go to a printer's actually, Lenny. Probably cheaper in the long run."

"In which case, we'll make the cake, won't we?" Elizabeth turned to her husband proudly, obviously having forgotten the fact that her fairy cakes had been rejected from Liv's school fete three years running. In the end, she had to send tinned peaches to the nonperishable stall instead.

"Mum. Lenny." Liv took a huge breath in. "Do you think that perhaps I'm too young to get married?" There. She'd said it. Her lungs visibly deflated.

Her mother and stepfather took in the question for a long moment, then in unison said, "Oh, of course not, darling."

Then her mother added, "I was your age when I had you." Something Liv was only too aware of.

"Exactly," Liv volunteered cautiously.

"Well, you're beautiful, darling. And so far as I know not pregnant yet?"

"No. Not pregnant. But, well, you and Dad . . ." G.o.d, it was like getting through to someone snorkelling in the Solomon Islands on a mobile phone. "I just wonder if I shouldn't ought to live a bit more first. Maybe, you know . . . just a bit." Liv had thrown caution to the wind, she'd lain her life and destiny in her mother's lap more firmly than the time she had whooping cough.

"Well, darling, if you think so. Perhaps then you're right. What did you have in mind?" her mother asked as she collected spilled bits of dried spicy pea off the duvet cover.