10.

"A month," Jonathan told Tamsin the next day, suddenly realizing he was staring at the almost invisible downy hair that ran in a line from her earlobe down her jaw line. The May Day beast had had its effect on them all.

He knew he was a very changed man from the one who had left London, if only because he was becoming so easily distracted. In the city, he had been programmed to focus on specific things, yet in Cornwall his viewfinder was all over the place. There was suddenly a lot to see, although, to be fair, he wasn't the only one looking. And none of them had their zoom lenses pointing at the same thing.

With Sita it was children, work, house. With him it was children, chapel, Tamsin. Or was it Tamsin, chapel, children? He couldn't remember the last time either of them had put each other in the frame.

What was he doing in Tamsin's lilac VW Beetle anyway? He didn't know whether he felt like her driving instructor, her date or her father. Somewhere not so deep down, he blamed Emmy and Niall, but only because that made him feel less guilty than blaming Sita. He certainly didn't blame himself. Everyone else did that for him.

The medieval building they were heading for this stunningly clear morning was only an excuse. Open to the public every fourth weekend, Point Manor had a chapel of the same proportions as Bodinnick's, with the addition of two wall paintings which were apparently in a remarkable condition. It would be interesting to see them, but he could easily have gone on his own.

"Would you like me to take you?" Tamsin had asked him over the phone on Friday.

"I'd love you to," he'd said.

"Great, bring your children," she'd replied. But they'd both known he wouldn't.

"So you've got another two to go?" she asked, still five miles away and crunching the gears at every change.

"Two what?" He'd forgotten what they'd been talking about.

"Months."

"Oh, yes, well, that's the plan."

"Is it unsettling, not knowing?"

"Not knowing what?"

"Come on, keep up. Whether this is it or not."

Not when you've spent the last forty years not knowing, he thought, slamming his right foot automatically onto the floor as they found themselves staring up the back of an old bus. It had Surfers Against Sewage sprayed in big black letters across its boot and a thick curtain across the back window. It was the same bus they had all followed up the lane to Bodinnick on the last leg of their first journey.

"Well, who knows what they really want?" he said.

"I do. I want a job that I love that pays me loads of money which I can then spend traveling."

"What, like these guys?"

She pulled out on a blind bend. "God no. I've got no desire to be a gypsy."

"No?" If he hadn't been so preoccupied with her driving skills, he would have felt disappointed at that admission. "Anyway, I thought you liked the job you've got."

"I do. It just doesn't pay enough."

The engine was straining. Change down, for God's sake, he wanted to shout.

"Cornwall's full of mad people like this," she said, gesticulating rudely at the bus. "Britain is like a Christmas stocking. All the nuts end up at the toe."

"Thank you."

"Oh, not you. You're-" Don't say sensible, he willed-"Sensible," she said.

"Oh, you as well. Everyone thinks that."

"Are they right?"

"Not necessarily."

"Is it for me to find out?"

Her challenge made him lose his nerve and he changed tack. "Well, your job must pay you quite well to buy a brand-new car like this," he said, his foot flat down on an imaginary accelerator.

"Someone bought it for me, actually."

"Oh. Lucky you."

"It was a guilt thing," she said dismissively.

He knew she expected him to ask who the someone was, and what they had done to feel guilty about, but her slight arrogance had deflated him.

"Money's not everything," he said instead.

She finally found third gear. "You're going to tell me it can't buy you love next, aren't you?"

It was the first time their conversation had turned away from the professional, but he couldn't help wishing it wasn't happening while they were abreast of a thirty-year-old coach on a hairpin bend. He glanced up at the driver and was surprised to see it was a girl with what looked like a big stripy sock on her head.

"I don't know. I've never had enough of it to put it to the test," he said.

Tamsin looked as though she didn't believe him, and why should she? After all, he was a liar. As far as Sita knew, he was going on his own to a quarry to pick up some lime putty.

"They shouldn't be allowed to drive round in that heap. It's not roadworthy," she said angrily, beginning to scrabble in her glove compartment for a tape.

"What do you want? Let me get it. You just get on with overtaking."

"You choose."

He didn't recognize any of the names of any of the bands she had written on the cassette boxes, so he picked one at random and put it in, pretending he hadn't looked.

"Well done, good choice. Thanks," she said.

And because both the bus and a ten-mile stretch of road were now behind them, he smiled. She had both needed and thanked him in the space of a minute and he was grateful for that-even if he was very clearly in the passenger seat again.

"Let's have some music," Emmy said to Sita, rolling her sleeves up and taking a deep breath of the clove-scented steam rising from the ham. She needed to fill the time, having already spun out her trip to the butcher's to a full hour, not that the person she really wanted to notice had noticed. Niall had been too busy sleeping off the effects of making love to two women in twenty-four hours to notice anything.

Kat really had come back from London last night just as she had threatened, and for the first time in nearly three weeks Emmy hadn't seen Niall all day. She knew what he was doing up there. He was kicking over the last few traces of his infidelity, undoing the spell. The problem was that she was still well and truly under it. She could still smell him in her bed, a mix of shower gel and smoke and mystic beast.

"Turn it up as loud as you like," she said to Sita, who was more than happy to oblige. She'd heard the movements upstairs too. "We can't have him emerging from his love nest into complete silence, can we?"

Sita shuffled around inside a cardboard box of organic vegetables which had just been delivered. "You okay?"

"Fine. Why?"

"Just that I thought it might be hard for you, with Kat coming back."

Emmy put her finger on the recipe. "Hold on. Add the sugar, lower the heat and simmer briskly. Sorry, what did you say?"

"Can't remember."

There was another noise from upstairs, an indistinct banging. It couldn't be the children. They were outside. Emmy turned the music up even more.

"What have we got this week?" she asked, peering into the box and speaking in a voice that sounded to her a few octaves too high. "Please not more kale."

"Carrots, potatoes, a rutabaga, a huge bunch of parsley."

"Hmm. Do you think we could get away with rutabaga and carrot with the ham?"

"No, the children are sick of it. We should try and do something festive. The food has got to be in the party mood, even if you're not."

"Oh, but I am."

"Yeah, and I'm a banana."

"See if you can find anything in there that uses swede and spuds, then," Emmy said, spinning the book across the table. The sound of Kat laughing seeped through the floorboards.

"What time did she get back? Were you still up?" Sita asked.

"No idea," Emmy said, remembering that the digital display on the clock radio next to her bed had said 12:12. She had heard everything. The motorbike, the front door, the low voices, the stairs. She even thought she had heard the clothes falling to the floor. "Right, this has now got to simmer briskly for an hour and fifty minutes."

Emmy peeled off her long-sleeved T-shirt to work in her vest. Sita noticed that someone had written "Goodnight" in ballpoint on the top of her shoulder. It wasn't Maya's hand. "That's not a brisk simmer, that's a gentle boil."

"What's the difference?"

"The same as the difference between you being in a party mood and me being a banana."

Jay saved them from the pointless discussion by walking in and asking if he and Scott could have a beer.

"No," Sita said.

"Why not? We're supposed to be celebrating, aren't we?"

"Not all day. You can have one tonight."

He made a face at his small friend, who looked relieved. "But Scott won't be here tonight."

"He can be if he likes."

"Cool. Can he stay the night?"

"I should think so. There's no school tomorrow. And if it's okay with his parents."

"It will be," Scott said a little sadly.

"Can I have this?" Jay asked, picking up a cast-iron saucepan lid.

"No," said Emmy. "I need it."

"This, then?" He picked up a knife block.

"No! What for?"

Jay tapped the side of his nose.

"Where are the girls?" Sita asked.

"Practicing their play. What about these? If we promise not to drink them?" He lifted a four-pack of beer by the plastic rings.

"No, Jay," said Sita. "Do you think I'm stupid? What do you want them for, anyway?"

He smiled secretly, Scott shrugged, and they both slipped into the room-sized larder, where they found a giant tin of coffee, a crate of shrink-wrapped baked beans and an economy-size box of washing powder, provisions bought weeks ago by Sita with the idealistic notion that bulk buying would make them all better people. In fact, all they had done so far was block the path to the fridge, stub a few toes and lurk like muttered reminders of their spectacular incompetence at sticking to the rules.

"These'll do," Jay whispered to Scott. "Give me a hand to get them up later?"

"Are we allowed a beer?" Emmy asked Sita when the boys had gone again.

"No, we're allowed champagne. We might as well make the most of being manless."

"When have I been anything but?"

"Don't give me that," Sita replied. "Jay may think I'm stupid but you're certainly not allowed to."

"It's quite a sorry tale, actually," Tamsin was saying to Jonathan who was trying not to concentrate too hard on his breathing.

It was a shame his difficulties seemed to have chosen this moment to return with a vengeance. A couple of times since they had got out of the car, he had felt his heart lose its rhythm. So far Tamsin hadn't noticed his panic-ridden gulping because he'd managed to cover it up with coughs.

"The building of the house was aborted in 1521 when Charles Pencarrow's wife and infant son both died of a fever. He couldn't bear being here anymore, because it represented everything he had lost. Basically, he went a bit mad."

Jonathan didn't want to think about wives or sons. "It's a shame someone else didn't come along and finish it," he said, drawing air slowly though his nose.

"No one would go near it. Everyone believed it was cursed."