One night I called Alice to tell her that we’d lost another baby.

I had terrible nausea with that pregnancy. I gagged every time I cleaned my teeth. I had to run out of a cinema because the smell of the woman’s perfume sitting next to me (Opium) combined with her popcorn made me retch. I’d thought for sure it must be a sign that this one was going to be the lucky one. Ha-ha. It meant nothing.

When I rang Alice, she answered the phone laughing. Gina was in the background, yelling out something about pineapple. They were inventing cocktails for some school function. Of course Alice stopped laughing when I told her the news and put on her sad voice, but she couldn’t quite stamp out the leftover laughter. I felt like the boring sister with yet another boring miscarriage, ruining the good times for everybody with her slightly disgusting gynecological bad news. Alice must have signaled to Gina, because her laughter stopped like a switch had been turned off.

I told her not to worry, that we could talk later, and hung up fast. Then I threw the phone across the room and it smashed a beautiful vase that I’d bought in Italy when I was twenty, and I lay on the couch and screamed into a cushion. I still grieve for the vase.

Alice didn’t call me the next day. And the day after that was when Madison ran through the French doors. So we were distracted and busy at the hospital worrying about her. My miscarriage got forgotten in between cocktails with Gina and Madison. Alice never even mentioned it. I wondered if she forgot.

I think that’s when the coldness started between us.

Yes, I know. Petty and childish, but there you have it.

Chapter 17

Frannie’s Letter to Phil I’m tucked up in bed again, Phil. It’s been a long day.

Who should be sitting next to me again in the dining room at dinner tonight? You guessed it. Mr. Mustache.

The man seems to have taken a shine to me. I don’t know why because we have absolutely nothing in common and we appear to disagree on everything.

He was talking about his mustache tonight. He said that he’d always wanted a mustache but that his wife had never let him grow one because it would be “too ticklish when she kissed him.” (Too much information, as the young people say!) He said that after she died, he’d “cultivated this beautiful specimen.”

He asked what I thought of his mustache and I said I thought it was most unattractive.

He roared with laughter.

Then he asked how I’d managed to escape the “shackles of marriage.” (Do you mind!)

You will be astonished to hear that I told him about you. Not the whole story. I just said that I was pretty much an old maid when I finally met “Mr. Right.” I said that we were engaged to be married, but unfortunately the wedding never took place. It wasn’t meant to be.

Mr. Mustache was uncharacteristically quiet. Then he said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Frannie,” and touched my hand, and for a moment I couldn’t speak.

He had an unexpectedly gentle touch.

Of course, only a few minutes after that, he was regaling the whole table with the most tasteless “dirty joke” you have ever heard.

“Nick!”

Alice sat bolt upright, her heart racing, her breath shallow. She felt about the bed with her hand for Nick, to wake him up and tell him about the nightmare, although the details were already slipping away and starting to seem silly. Something to do with a . . . tree?

A huge tree. Branches black against a stormy sky.

“Nick?”

Normally he woke up immediately when she had a nightmare, his voice gruff with sleep, automatically soothing her, “It’s okay, it’s just a dream, just a bad dream.” Part of her mind would always think, He’s going to make such a great dad.

She patted at the sheets. He must have gone to get a glass of water. Or had he not come to bed yet?

Nick is not here, Alice. He lives somewhere else. He flew back from Portugal this morning and you weren’t there to meet him. Maybe “Gina” picked him up at the airport. Oh, and you kissed that school principal today. Remember? Remember? Can you just please REMEMBER your life, you fool!

She snapped on the bedside lamp, threw back the sheets, and got out of bed. There was no way she was going back to sleep now.

Right.

She ran her palms down her nightie. It was a sleeveless, shimmery oyster-colored silk. It must have cost a fortune. It was just so stupid that she didn’t remember buying it. She’d had enough. She wanted to remember everything, right now.

She went into the bathroom and found the bottle of perfume she’d used at the hospital. She sprayed it in big lavish swoops and sniffed deeply. She was going to run and jump straight into that vortex of memory.

The perfume assaulted her nostrils, making her feel a bit sick. She waited for the images of the last ten years to fill her mind, but all she could see were the smiling strange faces from tonight’s party, and Dominick’s liquid brown eyes, and her mother smiling coyly at Roger, and the disappointed lines around Elisabeth’s mouth.

All these recent memories were too fresh and confusing. That was the problem. There was no space for all the old memories.

She sat down on the cold bathroom tiles and hugged her knees in close. All those people tonight, trooping happily into her house, helping themselves to glasses of champagne and tiny canapés from white-aproned caterers (who had turned up at five p.m., taking over the kitchen, blandly efficient), standing around her backyard in little groups, high heels sinking into the grass. “Alice!” they said so familiarly, kissing her on both cheeks. (There was a lot of kissing of both cheeks in 2008.) “How are you?” Hairstyles were smoother and flatter than in 1998. It made everyone’s heads seem comically smaller.

People talked about petrol prices (how could there be anything to say on such a boring topic?), property prices, development applications, and some political scandal. They talked about their children—“Emily,” “Harry,” “Isabel”—as if Alice knew them intimately. There were hilarious jokes about some school excursion she’d apparently attended where things had gone hilariously wrong. There were serious, lowered voices about some teacher everybody hated. They talked to her about jazz ballet lessons, saxophone lessons, swimming lessons, the school band, the school fête, the tuckshop, the extension class for “gifted and talented” kids. None of it made any sense. The conversations were so detailed—so many names and dates and times and acronyms—the PE-something class, the WE-something teacher. On two occasions different women hissed the unfamiliar word “Botox” in Alice’s ear as another woman walked by. Alice couldn’t be sure if it was a contemptuous insult or an envious compliment.