'Did he say much about it?' Annie wanted to know.
'Erm . . . no,' Connor told her, 'he looked so angry that no one really wanted to quiz him. He even chewed Owen up about something and you've got to admit, that's not usually his style.'
'Oh great.' Annie sat down heavily on the deckchair beside them.
'Hi, Mum!' Owen shouted over, obviously not too upset.
'Annie?' Dinah ventured, 'I shouldn't have . . . I mean . . . it wasn't really . . .'
'Any of your business?' Annie snapped. 'No, it bloody wasn't. You're lucky we're very closely related or I would never, ever speak to you again.'
'Sorry,' Dinah offered.
'Well . . . you were freaked out,' Annie managed, 'it was Ed's fault and let's face it, it
was
Ed's fault. And then he finds out about everything I've been doing without telling him . . . and well . . .' she shrugged her shoulders, 'here we are. It'll blow over,' she said, trying to convince herself as much as the others.
'Why's he so uptight about you running your own business?' Connor had to ask. 'Anyone can see you're going to be fantastic! I couldn't believe it when you went back to The Store, I thought you were going great guns on your own last year. This is what you should be doing,' he assured her.
Despite her deep disappointment that Ed was not here and just didn't see it that way, Annie mustered up her warmest smile for Connor. 'Thanks,' she told him, 'you're my best friend and I love you, even when you're sober.'
'Oh God! Don't talk about sober, in fact' – he flicked a look at his watch – 'It's nearly lunchtime, not too early to open a cold white, I don't think.'
'I will if you will,' Annie answered.
'Leave me out of it,' Dinah told him, 'I'm staying off the booze till we get home.'
'Too right,' Annie agreed, 'there's no knowing what you'll come out with next . . . and bring Lana out, will you?' Annie shouted after Connor, 'she needs to put her phone down. I'm starting to panic about the bill.'
'Have you tried to phone Ed?' Dinah asked. 'Would it help if I phoned him?'
'Yes and I don't think so, but nice of you to offer.'
'Is it you he's really angry with . . . or is it me?' Dinah asked next.
'Oh don't worry, I'm sure it's me . . . but . . . I can't give this all up for him.'
'Could you delay it?' Dinah wondered.
Annie thought of the one hundred boxed pairs of shoes waiting for her in London and the four-figure cheque she'd just written out for Mr B. 'No,' she said, 'not really. He's got to trust me. He's got to let me go ahead and cock it all up really badly if I have to.'
'He doesn't want to lose the house,' Dinah reminded her gently. 'That's his family home.'
'Yeah!' Annie broke in, 'which he wouldn't have been able to keep anyway if it wasn't for me. He and his sister would have sold it last year. I'm the one who owns one third of that house, if I want to borrow against my share, that's up to me!'
'Maybe that's not how he sees it.'
'No,' Annie had to admit, 'but I don't want to lose the house either! He can't really think I would, can he? I'm only borrowing a bit and I know this will work.'
Annie sat back with a sigh and stared out across the fields. 'The problem is, babes,' she said, in a lower voice, 'I don't remember having a situation like this with Roddy.'
'Of course you did!' Dinah insisted, determined that Annie shouldn't bathe her husband in a saintly glow. 'You used to have the most monumental rows.'
'Rows, yes. Any number of rows, terrible rows,' Annie agreed, 'but I don't remember him ever saying I couldn't do something I really wanted to do. He believed everyone should do the things they wanted to do. He always used to say, "
compromise and die!
" He did!'
'Well . . .' Dinah looked at her sister dubiously, 'that's easy to say. Not exactly so easy to do. What if Bryan wanted to live in the countryside and I wanted to stay in London?'
'It is easy,' Annie insisted. 'You have to let the other person have a go. You can't just clip their wings. You'd have to move to the country with him for a few years on the promise that then, if you still couldn't stand it, you'd both move back. The compromise would be to move to the suburbs and then you'd both be miserable. See? Compromise and die!
'If Ed keeps saying no,' Annie added, 'I'm just going to resent him, and then I'd have to leave him.'
'Annie!' Dinah sounded shocked now. 'You are not going to leave Ed over this. Ed is a great guy and he's the right person for you.'
'How can you say that when he doesn't want me to do the one thing I want to do most?' Annie asked her with exasperation.
Dinah just gave her a raised eyebrow look, which Annie took to mean: Ed knows better than you.
'Oh shut up!' Annie said and stormed back into the villa.
In the sitting room, the sofa bed had been neatly made and folded away. The jumble of clothes which had been exploding from Ed's open suitcase when she'd gone out this morning had now gone and only her own open suitcase with her clothes neatly stacked inside was left on the floor.
Annie sat down on the armchair opposite the sofa and stared at it glumly. She cast her eyes about the room looking for anything that Ed might have left behind for her. A note? A scribble of explanation?
Her eyes fell on the villa's telephone – a heavy, old-fashioned cream-coloured one with a dial – resting solidly and silently on the side table beside her chair.
Next to it was a slim pad of paper and a navy and gold ballpoint pen.
Annie bent over to take a closer look at the pad of paper and there, although the page was blank, she could see the imprint of a name and a number which had been left when someone had written on the sheet above.
She snatched the pad up and looked at it closely. Apart from a capital G and some fours, she couldn't read it. But she'd read Owen enough mystery stories to know that what she needed was a pencil.
She searched the room as quickly as she could and finally found a stub of pencil in one of her suitcase pockets, tucked in there for emergency airport lounge games of hangman. With care, she gently shaded over the markings until clearly legible was the name 'Giovanna' in Ed's scribbly handwriting followed by a telephone number.
Giovanna? Giovanna?
Annie was absolutely certain that Giovanna was the name of Ed's Italian ex-girlfriend.
She leaned back in the sofa and stared at the piece of paper. Ed had gone in a taxi with his luggage, an elderly aunt and the telephone number of his ex-girlfriend in his pocket. Whatever problems she and Ed were having, they were definitely not going to be helped by the reappearance of a Giovanna in his life, that much Annie did know.
She scrunched up the paper and threw it hard against the wall. Punching Ed's number into her mobile again, she told his voicemail: 'You really better phone me, Ed. Before someone else makes our problems even worse.'
Lana in a gloom:
Black knitted tunic (mother's wardrobe)
Black leggings (Asda)
Black baseball boots (Converse)
Black mood (homemade)
Total est. cost: £45
'
We should never have gone!
'
As the taxi from the train station pulled up outside their home at close to 9 p.m. on Monday evening, Annie craned her head out of the window to get a better look. The house was ominously dark. Only the porch light was on, and she knew that was on a timer.
There had still not been one word from Ed. She'd tried his mobile regularly, leaving various messages ranging from sulky, contrite and pleading, to just plain angry.
But not a single call had been returned. Finally, just before they took off from Ancona airport, she'd texted: 'U r a jrk,' which she regretted almost as soon as she'd pressed send.
She'd tried to make the last day and a half of the holiday as enjoyable as she could for everyone, especially the three children. There had been dinner out, late night swimming, more sunshine and even an excursion to some very decrepit Roman ruins for Owen's sake.
But on Sunday night, when Owen had nestled up against Annie and asked her if Ed had left because he'd fallen in the well with Billie, Annie could just about have cried.
'No,' she'd told her son emphatically, squeezing her arm tightly around him, 'Don't think that. You didn't do exactly the right thing, but we all make mistakes, babes,' she'd reassured him. 'It turned out all right and no one's even thinking about it any more. No, Ed's had a fight with me. But when we get home, I'll sort it out with him and everything will be OK again.'
'But Ed shouted at me before he went,' Owen confided. 'It wasn't very nice. He told me not to be so rough with Billie in the pool, but we were just play fighting and she was laughing.'
'Don't worry, please,' Annie had soothed him. 'I'm sure we'll sort everything out.'
But in her heart she was furious that Ed had upset not just her, but her son as well. And Lana too, Annie was sure, although Lana was too guarded to say anything yet.
At Stansted, Annie had waved goodbye to an exhausted Billie, pimply Dinah, plus Connor and his plastered nose because they were taking a cab home together. All Annie's extra shopping luggage meant that she and her children needed a taxi to themselves.
'Chin up,' Connor had instructed, 'I'm sure you and that nice man will work it out. You have to,' he'd added, 'we'd all miss his cooking too much.'
But when Annie and her children hauled their luggage in through the front door, it was obvious that no one else was home.
'Where's he gone?' Owen asked, not needing to name Ed because they were all thinking exactly the same thing.
'Oh, he must be out doing something, I'm sure he'll be back soon to see us,' Annie told them, but she had really expected him to be there to meet them.
'Maybe he'll make us supper,' Owen said hopefully.
'Where are the cats, though? They were supposed to be dropped off this morning. He must have taken the cats.' Lana pointed out, because Hoover and Dyson, the big, black, fluffy furballs, usually stalked out into the corridor purring whenever anyone came in through the front door.
'He's taken the cats!' Lana repeated, now sounding upset.
'I don't believe this,' Annie said, more to herself than to the children.
She turned and shut the front door behind them then, dumping all her things down in the hall, hurried upstairs to the bedroom she shared with Ed. Surely there would be something up there? Some note, or explanation, or clue . . . or
something
?
'Take your things to your rooms,' she told the children, over her shoulder, 'I'll try and find out what's going on.'
It was very tidy in the main bedroom. It was almost exactly as Annie remembered leaving it. But then, looking carefully around, she saw the very significant difference.
Ed's second, larger suitcase was missing from its place on top of the wardrobe. With a heavy heart, she opened the wardrobe doors and saw that not all, but a large portion, of his clothes were gone.
'No,' she heard herself say under her breath.
Scanning the room desperately for any further clue, Annie's eye fell on her bedside table.
There it was, the dreaded note. Folded neatly in half.