Sita was standing now, too. The others sat, motionless.

"Bed, Jay. It's late."

"Fuck late!" he screamed. "Fuck all of you. I hate you. I hate you!"

And he turned and ran out, slamming the heavy door as angrily as his puny arms would let him.

14.

Jonathan didn't realize how far things had gone until he found himself saying yes to another beer in Tamsin's flat at three o'clock in the afternoon. Even through the haze of lunchtime drinking, there could be no favorable explanation for them going back there after the wine bar. There hadn't even been a truly favorable explanation for the wine bar itself.

"To say thank you for last weekend," he'd said over the phone. "That's okay," she'd said, "you don't need to thank me. I enjoyed it." But they'd arranged to meet anyway. And Jonathan had lied to Sita for the second time. That for him was a habit.

Truth and lies swam around in his head like slightly pissed wasps. He swatted arbitrarily. Lie to Sita, swat. Toy with Tamsin, let it go.

He felt justified. He had tried hard to rekindle the brief foreplay he and Sita had enjoyed on the night of the party, but his wife had made it clear she was no longer interested, not since his ridiculous decision to go and get the post from the chapel in the pouring rain at eleven o'clock at night, not since the argument about the lime wash and his eyes, and certainly not since the traumatic house meeting, which had changed everything.

He didn't want to think about the almost freakish vacancy in Emmy's eyes throughout the whole gruesome deliberation. Actually, he didn't want to think about any of it. Even then, at that silent, awful table, the idea of Tamsin had popped into his head. He was almost getting used to it, the way she came to him at the most vulnerable times, like a silent shrug at their joint failure to make the most of the Bodinnick dream.

But if he had to pinpoint the exact moment he'd decided to take the Tamsin thing to the edge, he would say it was Sita telling him about Niall and Emmy's snatched moment of abandoned passion on May Day. She'd told him in their bathroom after the meeting, when he was standing in boxer shorts and socks rubbing cream into his chapped hands, and she was sorting the family wash into colors and whites. They had been pretending life was normal, that there was no significance in their decision to have the place valued, that it wasn't really all over but the shouting.

The way she'd said it made it sound as if it were entirely his fault that those days were so far behind them. And his first reaction hadn't been his usual acceptance of inadequacy, it had been anger: "Well, lucky old them."

"Quite."

"And what about Kat? Is it fair on her?"

But Sita had flicked one of Lila's sleep suits angrily into the air and said something along the lines of "You've got to take your chances when you can, haven't you?"

And so here he was now, taking his chance, already floundering. Not out of his depth, exactly, because being in Tamsin's flat was more like swimming to the shallow end of a pool and standing up to find that the water doesn't even cover your trunks. He was suffering from realizing he was overgrown, that he was too old for all this.

Nothing he could see in her twenty-something home had any reference to his life. In other friends' houses, there were familiar signposts, like a CD collection that echoed your own, or the same out-of-production Habitat mugs, or letters from school about hair lice or sports day.

Here, their fifteen-year age gap was visible even in the packets of food on her open shelving: flavored rice in sachets, tacos, a bottle of Malibu. A knee-length coat with a furry collar and cuffs lay over a perspex chair, and an ice-cream tub full of bottles of nail polish sat on the bare floorboards by a bright blue sofa with metal legs.

Because he didn't know where to look, he settled his eyes on a smooth oval boulder propping open a door leading into a room with cerise walls.

"I like your doorstop," he said pathetically. Oh God, please spare me from this humiliation.

"I got it from the beach."

"Is that legal?"

"Do I care?"

Until then he'd focused only on their similarities, of which, he was suddenly painfully aware, there was just one.

And yet for the past two hours Tamsin had laughed at his feeble jokes, flirted with him and flattered him. He couldn't remember the last time he had felt funny or sexy or worth listening to. And although it almost pained him to see her in this light, he at last understood the clear message she was giving out. To use the ugly shorthand employed by Niall, she was telling him in no uncertain terms that she was "up for it."

Her offer had been clear. "I don't want to make you late back," he'd said as they'd lingered over the last centimeters of wine in the bar. "Oh, I thought I'd take a long lunch," she'd replied. "Do you want to see my flat?" She'd been quite assured. Yes, her intelligent pale blue eyes had said. This is a sexual advance. Don't be shy. I'm not.

He had felt himself harden, but there was another dialogue going on in his head about quick fixes not being as satisfying as they used to be, about getting to the point in his life where he wanted to see beyond them, even if there was just an open vista or an empty space. But worse than all of that, the thought had occurred to him that it could all go terribly wrong. He was out of practice, big time.

He hadn't seen her offer coming, he honestly hadn't. Or at least not quite so fast. He knew many marriages were peppered with discreet infidelities but he had never understood, until now, how they happened. You just stopped caring too much about the consequences.

He still found women other than Sita attractive. He was even prepared to believe that some women felt the same way about him, but he could never work out how on earth anyone took such feelings a stage farther. Or why, actually. He'd never considered his own loyalty because he'd never thought he'd have to. And now he was being offered the perfect chance to test it.

Even his car full of family disorder hadn't seemed to distract her. What was going on in her head, allowing a man almost old enough to be her father, let alone anyone else's, to take her back to her flat in the middle of the day? He knew what was going on in his own head. It was an exercise in seeing what it might be like to be someone else, which was the only enduring fantasy of his life to date.

His heart had thumped all the way with guilt and fear. Desire reared its head every now and again but it was a third-party thing, and only because any sex, extramarital or otherwise, seemed such a long time ago.

In the wine bar, Tamsin had made him believe anything was possible, but that had been back in the safety of licensed premises. He'd believed in there, with the outdated red glass oil lamps and blackboard menus, that he could have a secret life, a soulmate, someone to talk to about love and lime when no one else cared.

What he felt now they were on their own in her big empty flat with the perspex and the Pop Tarts was that anything, particularly escape, was impossible. He also felt that both her image and his were irreversibly tarnished. There was something tacky about it all. He wanted to go. His career as an adulterer was over before it had started.

"This is it," she'd said breezily as she'd opened her front door, which gave straight from the street onto a flight of white painted stairs. Free newspapers, taxi flyers and three crushed cans of lager were piled on the floor. He'd imagined her sitting on the bottom step, waiting with her clubbing friends for a cab, drinking. Then he'd noticed his own brown brogues following her up the steps like a lost sheep. Or a lamb being led to slaughter, maybe. This is it, then. This is it. Immediately, he'd known it wasn't enough.

He'd taken the beer from her because he needed something to do with his hands, but she was already suggesting other options.

"Would you like to see the bedroom?"

"I'm fine here," he said.

"I know you are. I'm only offering to show you a few original beams."

"Oh, of course."

"I've got photos, if you prefer."

He sat down quickly on the sofa between the two bay windows. She came to sit next to him, making sure her thigh touched his.

"It's the same size as this. I wanted something old with good proportions."

"Is there a joke coming?" he asked.

"I don't know what you mean," she said coyly, passing him a blue envelope of mail-order processed snaps.

He tried to look as if he knew the routine, pulling out a cushion, thumping it and leaning back. "Just being facetious. Yes, it looks great. Did you reveal it yourself?"

"Yes. I'm very good at revealing things."

He wasn't sure if she was being serious or not. He put his hands behind his head, thinking it made him look less like someone who was about to start hyperventilating.

"Well, what shall we do now?" she asked, twisting her body toward him.

Clearly, women took control of such situations these days. Actually, he acknowledged, as he clutched his stubby green bottle of Stella, they always had, as far as he was concerned. He had never made a sexual overture in his life. The number of women he had slept with equated exactly to the number of women who had made the first move.

He raised his eyebrows and put his hands palm up, but as he was trying to think of something suitably nebulous to say, she spoke again.

"I know. How about you kiss me?"

The effect on him was magical. He wanted to go home and make it all better with Sita, to cancel the appointment with the double-barreled chartered surveyor who was coming to value Bodinnick on the day ringed in red on the kitchen calendar, and to start all over again.

"I'd love to," he heard himself say.

"I know you would." She had even closed her eyes.

"But I won't, if that's okay."

Tamsin pulled back no more than a couple of inches. Her face managed a smile. "Yes, of course it's okay." Rejection hadn't ruffled her composure. Made her blush, maybe, just a touch.

"It's not that I don't..."

"Don't you? I really thought you did."

"No, I mean, I do, but..."

"Jonathan, it's okay. No one's died."

"No." He stared at the floorboards, wondering what he was mourning for.

"Hey, come on. I got it wrong, that's all. I thought you wanted me for something other than professional advice, and I didn't mind that. But I don't mind this, either. It's really no big deal. I do it lots."

"Do you?"

"Yes," she nodded. "I do."

"I should go," he said.

"Or we could talk about it while you finish your beer?"

"I'm no good at talking, Tamsin. Ask my wife."

"Better not," she said, getting up. "She might get the wrong idea."

By sending all five letters, Cathal had made sure there was no chance of Emmy getting the wrong idea.

"Someone's trying to tell you something, I think," the chirpy postman said as he handed her the identical envelopes with their Irish stamps. He had a smirk across his gnomic face as if he had just cracked the joke of the century. "Or is it one of those chain-mail things?"

He cocked his head and waited for the answer that he could take to Mrs. Partridge at the farm. Eileen Partridge liked to keep abreast of what was going on, and he liked the coffee and the sugar and currant Cornish "heavy cake" she gave him in return.

"Thank you," Emmy said quickly, shutting the back door in his startled face.

The first sight of the green harp was hardly a shock. In a peculiar way, it was almost a relief, since she'd been expecting it daily. But when she put it at the bottom of the pile to look at what else he had given her, she saw the second one and something hit her at the back of her throat. The third, fourth and fifth hit her somewhere much worse.

She leaned against the delicately fern-etched glass of the back door and stared into the dingy passageway known as the boot room, which still smelled of Toby's dogs, into wellies and weedkiller, into ancient tins of axle grease and oil dispensers with long thin spouts, and old seedling trays.

For a split second she thought she might collapse in a heap on the floor and lie there until someone carted her off, but the thought that the someone might be Maya was just enough to make her stay standing. She breathed in through her nose, a long controlled intake. Then she blew slowly out of her barely open mouth. She tried to swallow but couldn't. Her left hand went to her neck and she squeezed the glands below her ears, trying to collect her thoughts. Her right hand hung limply by her side, clutching the letters.

A door slammed upstairs and she heard raised voices. Somewhere in her head, she registered them as Niall and Kat's but the fact that they were having a row did not resonate. It was a detail that belonged to another life.

She opened the first letter while she was still leaning against the door. It was a photocopy of the one she had already received. She tore open the second, which was the same. And the third. Instead of being relieved that Cathal hadn't elaborated on his initial request, she felt chilled to the bone. Stalked, or hunted, or blackmailed. Had he gone mad?

She ripped straight through the fourth and fifth ones, once, twice, three times. She saw snatches of his photocopied words, and scared herself witless at the now familiar loops of his writing. The moment had something of the repetitive nightmare about it, as though she knew she was falling into it but couldn't help herself. A shadow passed across the glass behind her and she leaped away from it, as if any minute now the handle would go down, the door would be pushed open and he'd be inside.

The shouting upstairs still didn't sink in. Nor did the clattering of children in the kitchen just on the other side of the wall, the noise of cereal bowls and taps running, the sound of Sita calling good-bye twice.

Fury began to boil inside her head. Without thinking what she was doing or how she would explain it, she pulled from her trouser pocket a lighter which had lit her a cigarette every waking hour since the original letter had arrived, and set fire to the paper in her hand. As it caught and threatened to reach her fingers, she dragged out a coal bucket from between the boots and dropped the burning page in. One by one, the rest followed.

Standing over her pyre, she watched the long flames lick the Irish stamps, the typewritten address, Cathal's brutal demands. Her eyes burned with a warning. You leave me and Maya alone. Just leave us alone. She felt witchlike and powerful while the fire burned, but when it died her potency died too, and when the paper was just a pile of black ash she was left feeling like a wet rag.

The flames were dead by the time Niall and Kat walked past ten minutes later. A thin curtain of smoke hung in the air, but Niall's Camel cigarette rendered it invisible.

"I can't leave him here on his own," he argued. "He's coming to see me, not anyone else. The Irish house stuff is just a pretext. I've told you, he's got another agenda, I know him."

He was doing his best to keep up with Kat as she tore through the house, but she was in a fast and furious mood. She had her London clothes on again: a tight large-cuffed tailored white shirt and black cut-off trousers. Her black leather sandals had heels on them like the bottom of a bumper car and her lilac lipstick made her look like a mini version of Cruella Deville.

"But the deal was never me always coming here. You said you would come up to London sometimes, too."

"What are you talking about? What deal?"

Her car needed a new exhaust, the timer for the heating in her flat was refusing to work, and there was a party she didn't want to go to on her own. He had to come to London. "You know exactly what deal I mean, so don't be boring."

She kicked the bucket of paper ash to one side and opened the door, forcing herself and her hugely expensive bag through the space and out into the courtyard. Three bicycles were heaped in her way, the pink one from the store included.

"You were the one who wanted the recreational relationship," he reminded her.

"That was because you weren't offering anything else."

"I was. I offered this, full-time."

"Only because you knew I wouldn't damn well accept." She stepped round the bikes, brushing against the oil tank and getting the arm of her white shirt soaked with the warm rain that had just fallen.

"Not true. The offer is still open."

"I don't think so. Anyway, it doesn't sound as if any of you will be here much longer."

Niall had refused to talk about the house meeting. It was all too raw.