"... hated them, you did."

"What? Did I?" He recovered himself.

Mary was smiling.

"Did I really have that many freckles?" he asked.

"No, I drew them on afterward. Of course you had that many freckles, you eejit."

"Definitely ten?"

"A darn sight more than ten. You were pickled. They were even on your earlobes!"

"No, not ten freckles, you mad old woman. Was I definitely ten years old there?"

"About that."

"No, not 'about that.' I need to be sure."

"Does it matter so much?"

"Well, it does if I'm to do the right thing by Billy."

"Let's see, is there a date?" She turned it over. "Yes, look, you were definitely ten."

"Sure?" He was studying its every detail. "I'll take it then."

"As long as Billy promises to keep it safe. I've not got another."

Cathal shook his head. His mother was barely visible under the pile of albums, but she meant it. It was the only print of that photograph she had. If you didn't count the four smaller versions.

"You know, Cathal, some children grow up not even knowing their daddy. And there's Billy, asking you for a photo. All's not lost, ye know."

It might not all be found yet, he thought, giving her hand a squeeze. It was hopeless. His visit had made him feel worse. He had allowed his confusion to spill into ordinary life. Actually, it was worse than that. He had experimented with the idea that it was ordinary life. Involving his mother gave the wild chance a legitimacy.

"Will ye stay for a bite to eat?"

"Another bite?"

"A proper bite."

"Oh, go on, then."

The two photographs were hidden under a sheet of paper-the 8" 5" portrait of him in his school uniform, and the 6" 4" of Maya in T-shirt and wellies. More than thirty years separated them, but to him they were identical.

The opening sentence of his letter to Emmy was eluding him. Their union had been so brief that he'd all but forgotten it. He was about to attempt an intimate dialogue with a virtual stranger.

Eleven and a half years ago, he had been commuting between London and Dublin, setting up the firm's Kensington office and reluctantly staying with Niall at his shared house with a bath in the kitchen and an oven in the garden. One day Niall hadn't bothered to turn up-he'd obviously come across a better bed for the night-so Cathal, locked out and hungry, had phoned the only other person in London he knew.

Emmy had seemed keen enough to see him-even gone out of her way to do so. They'd met at a strange pancake place in Holburn which was vegetarian or Mexican or probably just cheap. It'd had a lot of green paint everywhere. And plants. A straggly little spider thing in particular, yellowing, hanging from a windowsill.

She'd been with a load of mainly female workmates, celebrating someone's birthday or sending someone off round the world or something. There had been cards and flowers and stupid little presents like chocolate willies, and as a man he had felt surplus to requirements. Eventually, she had tossed him the keys to her flat and said he could go back if he wanted to. And he had wanted to.

Sex had been the last thing on his mind when he heard the front door open and shut two hours later.

"You don't have to sleep on that thing if you don't want to," she'd said, looking at his feet hanging over the arm of the sofa. "My bed is big enough."

Emmy had worn a cloak of such unhappiness back then that he had hesitated. It had been a struggle to desire her. Not impossible, clearly, but he'd spent most of the night trying to avoid touching the starved hollows between her shoulder and neck and the wafer thinness of the skin round her ribs. He wasn't sure how much contact she could take without snapping. And even at the time, he'd known she'd slept with him because it was the nearest she could get to Niall.

Her fridge the next morning had been completely empty apart from someone's contact-lens fluid and a bottle of white wine, he could remember that. That and the condom.

Being married, he wasn't in the custom of carrying them around, and he was sure he could recall her reaching over him in bed and opening a drawer. She'd tossed it on the bed-"You'd better use one of these"-and he'd struggled to hang on to his erection while he put it on, with her lying there motionless next to him. Not watching or touching or helping, but waiting. Resignedly. Like, hurry up, then, let's get this over with. And what had she been wearing? Some impossible leotard that only she knew the way into and out of.

The condom thing worried him. His sexual promiscuity had been in the days when men supplied, or more usually didn't supply, the condoms, and he'd been a little shocked, even put off, by her taking control there. As if she did it all the time. His memory wouldn't play that kind of trick, surely. Then again, they weren't fail-safe.

Now, though, when that bloody little electronic rabbit shot out of its stall again and ran rings round the dogtrack of his mind, it got him wondering whether the condom girl had in fact been Emmy, or perhaps one of his other indiscretions that year. God knows, there had been a few. And he didn't know whether or not he wanted to be right about being wrong.

The table was covered with discarded scribbling. Searching through his old work diaries, he had already identified his trips between Dublin and London but he had always remembered the Emmy thing as happening on his first trip back, which was why, when Niall had told him about Maya's birth, he had secretly thought, Bloody hell, she doesn't hang around, does she? But it had never occurred to him that it might have happened on the second. Or even the third. Both dates fitted his research.

A heap of crumpled rejects buried the newspaper. Maybe a phone call, then, to Niall, to find out Maya's birthday. Cathal picked up his mobile. If he rang while his mother was here, he could use her as a smokescreen. He stared at the numbers for a moment, urging himself to press one.

"Bloody Mary, mother of J!"

The phone sprang into life in his hand.

"Hello? Oh, did I say today? No, not busy, just, er, no, no. Give me half an hour. I'll be there. Forgive me."

Saved. He put the phone back in his pocket, let his head fall into his hands for a brief moment, then pushed his chair back and stood up. There was a convincing argument to let sleeping dogs lie. Or at least take the day off.

Maya treasured her "I'm me" moments. Sometimes she went through a phase of them happening every day, and then they would stop and she wouldn't get one for months. It was nothing to do with mood or place. It was all and everything to do with her own secret self, and that was the only way she could explain it.

The first time she'd tried to verbalize the experience was nearly five years ago, in a Peckham park on her sixth birthday. Puddles of spilt orange fizz had formed in the dips of the waterproof tablecloth, crisp crumbs and half-eaten sausage rolls stuck to the abandoned crumpled paper plates. Her friends had gone home, the late May sunshine had turned to a milky haze and her loathed Little Mermaid swimming costume had finally broken its Lycra promise.

"I'm me," she'd suddenly told Emmy as she decorated their grubby toes with tiny padded stickers.

"Yep, you are."

"No one else is me, are they? Just me. Only me."

"'Fraid so," Emmy replied. As a child, she'd often frightened herself with the recurrent and profound realization that no one else can share the world with you. It loomed, like a storm cloud approaching, or the swell of nausea. You knew it was going to get worse before it got better.

"Think of that," Maya carried on. "Just me. No one else knows what it's like to be me. Not even you."

"Just shake it away," Emmy said. "It'll go in a minute."

"Why?" Maya asked. "I like it."

Emmy hadn't been organized enough to remember to take anything as sensible as a camera, of course, but as a result of the "I'm me" moment, she could still see the day as clearly as any carefully captioned snapshot. It was the point at which she realized her daughter possessed the inherent security she herself lacked. It might also have been the first time she saw Maya as a crutch, a stronger, better version of herself, but that was now so ingrained a view that she couldn't recall ever seeing it otherwise.

Sometimes Sita and Niall warned her about her tendency to lean on Maya. "She's only a child," they'd say. "You don't need to be quite so truthful with her." But she knew Maya better than they did, and she knew, too, that her daughter didn't get the whole truth. She only got the half of it.

Maya was having an "I'm me" moment that very minute, kneeling in the music room at Bodinnick, laying out on newspaper the materials to construct a medieval dwelling as part of Jonathan's brilliant idea for their first rainy Saturday. So far, she had a bucket of mud, some clay, and a pile of carefully selected willow twigs for timber supports. She knew what she was going to build. A single-cell wattle-and-daub cottage, like the one in the book Jonathan had got from the library.

As she concentrated on the engrossing task of sorting twigs into uprights and roof beams, it happened. A feeling of suspended animation washed over her. Stuff receded. There was only her. This is me, Maya Hart, ten years old, watching myself getting ready to build a model house. She sang a few tuneless notes just to hear her own voice in her head. She looked at her hands still moving around on the newspaper. I am ten but I am ageless. I am me, but there is someone else in me, too, someone I know but don't know. I am a spirit in a body. My brain isn't big enough for my thoughts.

She tried, as she always did, to see around the corner of the moment, but so far she had never got there in time. One day she felt sure she would. She looked up and then pop! Back to normal.

"Jonathan?" she asked.

"Mm?"

"Do you ever get 'I'm me' moments?"

"I get 'I wish I wasn't me' moments," he said, trying for the third time to fit the printer cable into the back of the PC.

"You don't, do you?" Maya was shocked. It had never occurred to her that anyone might prefer to be someone else.

9.

"Make the most of your joie de vivre," Julian had told Emmy at Toby's funeral. Well, if ever there was a time to celebrate new beginnings, this was it. As luck would have it, it was the first of May.

"I need a maypole," she announced to the other three at breakfast, once the children had left for school, "or something. We should go to Padstow."

"Why?" asked Sita.

"Because it's May Day and that's where everyone in Cornwall goes on May Day."

"How do you know?"

"Well, for a start, I listen to the local radio and not Classic bloody FM," Emmy teased lightly, "but Toby took us once and I've never forgotten it. There was a monster horse chasing nubile wenches up and down the streets and people dancing and singing all over the place. We had to step over a drunk in the street."

"Sounds delightful," said Jonathan grumpily.

The sun was bouncing off the kitchen's freshly painted saffron-yellow walls, there were primroses on the table, wisteria dripping off the front of the house and unexpected geraniums breaking out all over the flowerbeds. Spring had sprung with such convincing life at Bodinnick that Emmy felt she could even forget Kat was coming back tomorrow. Almost, anyway.

"Feeling pagan, are you?" Niall asked, noticing with a little shiver of lust that she had let the hair under her arms grow.

"Yes," she muttered so Sita and Jonathan couldn't hear, "I am, actually, and if I were you I'd make the most of it."

Sometimes, she congratulated herself from the back of Niall's bike as they rushed up the A30, she had the best ideas. She put her arms round his waist, pressed her face into his shoulder and silently kissed his leather jacket. He wouldn't feel it so it wouldn't do any harm.

They were streaking up the outside of a mile-long tailback, passing camper vans with foreign numberplates, shiny Land-Rovers advertising London garages, surfy VW Beetles and anonymous station wagons packed to the gunnels with children and luggage, all of them bound for Padstow. Somewhere in the middle of it all were Sita, Jonathan and Lila in their ubiquitous SUV, but that was their lookout, Emmy decided, almost gagging on the rush of air that filled her open mouth as Niall put his foot down and took the lot.

The north-coast fishing village they were heading for really was the only place to go if you were in Cornwall on May Day. Even though tourists all over the world could pull details of this wild ancient custom off the Internet, it didn't stop thousands of them from believing, once they got there, that they were being offered a rare private glimpse of a primitive tribe at play, being let into a secret which had lost its roots in the mists of time-a clever trick which had as much vociferous local opposition as global support.

Plans to meet Sita and Jonathan in the car park proved to be a joke. There were too many car parks, too many people and too long a queue, so Emmy sent them a text message and they headed off.

Down in the primevally decorated town, it was impossible not to feel a little bit primeval oneself. Emmy walked the crowded narrow streets next to Niall like a ripe bud ready to burst into life. Even the stem of bluebells pinned to her red sleeveless vest made her feel like a bucolic maiden ready for the plucking.

Their shoulders were brushing again, as they had at the wedding, before Kat, and she could feel the swing of her breasts against the cotton of her top, imagining he could somehow feel them too.

The whole place looked like an Arcadian dream. Doorways and windows had been transformed overnight to arcane portals. Sycamore trees in the surrounding woodlands had been stripped of their best branches and young green leaves now fluttered competitively in the sea breeze with the brilliant nylon flags that zigzagged overhead.

Everywhere Emmy looked in the jubilant throng milling around the harbor, she saw a representation of youth. Plump rosy virgins (highly unlikely, she knew, but she was in the mood to suspend reality) flirted with their muscled admirers, who stood libidinously against the low granite walls. She couldn't help looking at the ways the boys advanced on their prizes, putting one arm against a shop front, a foot on a curb, pulling a ring from a lager can and spraying the opposition, standing just that little bit closer to each other. At the same time, the girls were easy prey, with open arms and happy faces.

"Everyone looks so hot-blooded," she said, lifting her voice above the clamor and the sporadic bursts of song.

"You don't look so cold yourself," Niall told her, his hand pushing her bottom through the horde. Keep it there, keep it there, she thought.

They shuffled along, following the stream of people round and round the cobbled streets, not knowing or caring where they were going, but trusting it would be somewhere good. Soon, they found themselves outside a formidable building which had clearly never tolerated any nonsense. Before they could draw breath, the swing doors of the Institute opened with a single thump on the drum. The crowd stilled. You could almost have heard a pin drop. Three more deafening beats, then out the monster came.

The town's entire population let out a roar as the May beast lashed and swirled its way into the crowd, the band weaving around it, teasing it with its pagan rhythm. Emmy and Niall's fingers crept toward each other and locked tight.

They called it a hobby horse, or 'obby 'oss if you were in the know, but the animal was nothing like the nursery toy the tourists expected. It didn't matter how meek the man underneath the wood and canvas frame was, it was a wild black whirling dervish of a stallion with its fierce hungry face that emerged to the baying of the mob.

"It's Nat Harvey's first time this year," Emmy heard someone say behind her.

"Bloody 'ell. Tamar better watch out th'n," another voice replied.

As the thump of the band approached, Emmy felt the rhythm hit her deep inside, melting her, making her tingle and want to run and dance. Fear and desire fell upon her and she had a crystal-clear sense of the world offering itself to her. Something opened up in her shut-down soul.

"Kiss me," she sang, swinging round to face Niall. "I need you to kiss me."

In that instant, they became different people, or maybe the same people operating in a different reality. He grabbed her by her bare shoulders, stopping dead in the middle of the pavement, sending people scattering and hopping out of their way. He pushed his lips-they were cold with the beer he had just swigged-against hers, and their mouths opened and joined. The rest of the world closed down for a moment, and when it started up again, the creature's mask-a stallion's head with snapping teeth and red eyes-was so close it could have taken a bite out of them. The revelers around it whooped and sang and clapped and cheered.

"Unite and unite and let us all unite For summer is acome unto day And whither we are going we will all unite In the merry morning of May"

The song rose high and clear, and as the music reached an almost deafening climax, a rounded woman in her fifties, dressed in the day's traditional white shirt and white jeans, grabbed Emmy's hand and pulled her toward the 'oss.

"Like this," the woman told her, and took her into the dance. Her movements were large, practiced and confident.

Niall watched. He wanted Emmy for himself but the older woman's magnetism drew him in, and soon it was her he couldn't take his eyes off.

The horse noticed her, too. It flung its tail into the air and then brought it down in a controlled display of strength, sweeping the floor and the tips of the woman's shoes. It ran into the crowd, sent the girls squealing and Emmy flying back to Niall, then retreated to pay more attention to its prize. It reared and came, circled and swooped and then backed off before doing the whole dance again. The woman's hips rose and fell at each approach, her arms outstretched to embrace the challenge.

Suddenly, the hoop was up and over her head and she was under the skirt. Emmy imagined herself under there, her world turning black, the drums and the accordions becoming a muffled pulse. She imagined being the only woman in the world who could smell the horse's hot torso, the mix of tar and sweat and horsehair, the damp cloth of a T-shirt.

When the 'oss finally released the woman with a vertical toss of the heavy hoop, his sooty finger daubed her reddened cheek and she waltzed out laughing, branded with what some referred to as "the mark of life."