R.J. Lynch's Blog, page 5

The Second Time Around by Gloria Antypowich

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I know there are people in the UK who look down on the Romance genre. There are also people who look down on the horror, sci-fi, fantasy and religious/inspirational genres. I think this has to do with the snobbery that has been part of publishing in this country since the nineteenth century. Part of that snobbery says, “If it sells, then lots of people like it and, if a lot of people like it, it can’t be any good.” That would apply to all of the genres I just mentioned, because they are among the five largest money spinning genres – and Romance is right at the top. Romance pulls in more money than any other genre. And good writing is good writing, whatever the genre. So, instead of belittling it, let’s take a moment to think about what makes a good romance. And if we want to do that, Gloria Antypowich is a very good place to start. Because The Second Time Around is an object lesson in how to construct a romance. It’s also an illustration that not everything you hear about Romance genre tropes is correct.

Gloria wastes no time in introducing the two central characters (a man and a woman – there’s a market, too, for every other romantic combination you can think of and a number you probably can’t, but Gloria is mainstream. Or straight. Or whatever you want to call it). Not every romance features a pair whose hearts have been broken, but that probably describes the majority and it’s certainly what we have here – and Gloria wastes no time, either, in apprising us of what caused the breakage. Then she moves them into a position where they cannot fail to meet and, as we will have expected the moment we turned the first page, creates a situation in which they absolutely detest each other.

So far, so formulaic; where Antypowich scores so heavily is in the skill with which she pencils in the characters and the background (which is Western Canada, ranching, farming and the rodeo – not surprisingly, because that is also the author’s background. She knows the people and the place she’s writing about). I mentioned tropes; one very well-established romance trope is: Everyone else may be having it away but for the principal characters there can be no sex until they have it with each other. Antypowich sticks to that for her female lead, but the guy gets up to all sorts of stuff your Aunt Mabel would not have approved of. He does, though, in the end realise that the woman he’s been fighting against is the only one for him and we get our Happy Ever After. The trend in romance today is towards Happy For Now, but this author is more traditional than that. But none of that happens until a series of new obstacles has been placed in the way, each of which is obviously the final nail in this romance’s coffin and each of which is somehow overcome.

It’s Romance writing at its very best – and if you don’t like it because you never read it, you’re missing something. Remember how, when you were young, you didn’t eat something because you didn’t like it, and you didn’t like it because you’d never eaten it? You’re doing it again.

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The Darkness by Ragnar Jónasson Translated by Victoria Cribb

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It’s a broccoli book – and I hate broccoli

If, like me, you were raised in a book loving family, one of the things you were taught at an early age was that books, once started, should be finished. You should read to the end, even if you don’t want to. I’ve no idea why we were taught that as children – I don’t know about you, but when I was a child I was taught all sorts of stuff that I had to disabuse myself of before I could even dream about a happy life. One of those things was eating broccoli. I did it for years. Why? Because people told me I should. It was good for me. And I hated it. And then, one day, maybe ten years ago, maybe a little less, I was in mid chew and I thought, “Why am I doing this? I don’t care how good it is for me – I hate the stuff.” I haven’t eaten it since. I’ll never eat it again.

The Darkness is like that. It’s very well written and, although I don’t speak a word of Icelandic, I can tell that Victoria Cribb’s translation is first class. And I read 80% of the book before I thought, “Why am I struggling on like this? I’m bored to tears. I couldn’t care less about the characters or what happens to them. My time has been woefully imposed on.” And I stopped. I didn’t finish it. I never will.

I know from looking at the reviews that there are people who think The Darkness is a wonderful book. I’m very pleased for them. I’m also very pleased for people who like eating broccoli. But both sets of people are deluded.

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Killing the Girl by Elizabeth Hill

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I’m a long-time admirer of William Trevor. I like the way, as an outsider (a Protestant in Catholic Ireland, and someone who had moved often in his childhood), he observed the people around him and presented them accurately in his fiction. I like even more his ability to indicate that what we are seeing when we read his books is not all that’s there. Sometimes, there’s a curtain between what we see and what is just out of sight but every bit as real. Sometimes, instead of a curtain it’s the ground beneath us and we know that it could suddenly move and we’ll be staring into the abyss. Those are great gifts in a writer and you don’t come across them very often. They are present in Killing the Girl by Elizabeth Hill. Hill lets us know that there’s more to the story than she has shown us – and, just occasionally and just for a moment, she lets it emerge from the darkness and stand before us.

As a man, I didn’t feel entirely comfortable with the way men are dealt with in this book, and I don’t just mean that there are three deaths and all of them are male. What made me uncomfortable was the qualities the men shared: all three of them took so naturally to controlling the protagonist (Carol Cage, who tells her story in the first person) that it was clearly second nature, and one of them also beat her. I know it happens. I don’t like knowing it happens. I don’t like watching it. But it is very well done here.

Carol spends most of her life in the shade of others. She knows it’s possible to be happy, but it seems to be beyond her reach. She reaches a kind of settlement at the end, and she does it as the reader reaches a different kind of ending. I said that all of the deaths are male; the title of the book is Killing the Girl, but the girl who dies is the naïve twelve-year-old who lives inside Carol Cage’s head and it’s long past her time to leave us.

It’s a challenging read, but worth it, and easy enough because, about a quarter of the way in, I found it had become one of those fairly rare books that grab you and pull you inside to the point where you’re living inside them and you can’t stop reading even if you want to (which I did, at one point, because of the kind of men I was having to look at. And I didn’t like the picture on the cover one little bit). It’s a first novel and it isn’t perfect, but it’s close. I look forward to the next by this author.

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The Silent Kookaburra by Liza Perrat

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The Silent Kookaburra is not an easy read. Extremely well written, it demands to be read with the same concentration as went into writing it. And it repays the effort. What this book does is to trace the evolution of Australia from place of safety to one that knows that the safety was always an illusion. It presents the story first from the point of view of eleven-year-old Tanya; the tragedy is already there, implicit in the knowledge that the adult reader can see what the child cannot and the adult reader knows what is going to happen to the girl. At the end, Tanya is herself an adult who not only understands now what she did not understand as a child but also presents us with a shocking ending that we feared but hoped would not happen. Perrat does not shrink from showing us the worst of human nature, though she leavens the mix with humour, and leaves us always uncertain whether we are seeing simple vileness or the results of mental illness. It is, as I say, not an easy read – but a very worthwhile one.

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5 Stars for The Wedding Speech Handbook by Michael J McMahon

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However much or little experience you have, this book has something to teach you

I received a free copy of this book in return for an honest opinion. I’ll be frank: I didn’t expect to learn much. How wrong I was! Many years ago, when I began my sales career with IBM, I attended a course on public speaking given by a “resting” actor. Since then, in forty years of selling, I’ve spoken to large and small gatherings in many countries. I’ve been complimented from time to time on what people described as very professional performances. I thought I knew everything there was to know. Nevertheless, when this book was offered to me just before my daughter’s marriage, I decided it would be a good idea to see what Michael J McMahon had to say on this very specific branch of speaking. When I read it, I ripped up the speech I had planned to give and wrote another, following McMahon’s advice. The speech was received with laughter and applause. My takeaway: It doesn’t matter whether you have no experience of speaking in public or you’ve been doing it for years – there’s something here that you can learn from. If you’re going to speak in any capacity at a wedding, buy this book, read it thoroughly and do what the author tells you.

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4½ Stars for Rules for Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

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This is a very clever book on a number of levels. Peter Swanson has pulled off two very difficult tricks in one book:

He has made us care about a character who, if not actively dislikeable, has nothing to commend him. The protagonist makes a point of telling us that he finds it easy enough to make someone’s surface acquaintance but almost impossible to move beyond that to real friendship, and that is exactly the way the reader feels about him
He has written a new version of a very well-known book – probably one of Agatha Christie’s best-known and most written about – without our realising that that is what we are reading until quite late in the book. We know something is going on and Swanson nudges us in that direction with a cleverly inserted musing on the history and current popularity of the unreliable narrator – but it isn’t until the final two chapters (which closely parallel the final two chapters of the Christie book) that we completely understand what the author is up to.

This is not really a mystery in the Agatha Christie sense, because the unravelling does not come from a series of clues – instead, as is normal in mystery fiction today, the killer is simply introduced to us at the appropriate point. The reason I’ve taken half a star if you’re reading this on my blog and a full star if you’re reading it on Amazon from something that is otherwise five-star perfect is that there is no “Of course!” moment – you don’t think, as you do with the very best mysteries, “How did I miss that? It’s been staring at me almost from Page 1.”

Nevertheless, it’s an excellent book and I recommend it.

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Old Filth by Jane Gardam

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Old Filth by Jane Gardam
5 Stars. Stunning. Brilliant. A tour de force by a brilliant writer

Just occasionally, you read a book that has attained absolute perfection. It doesn’t happen often – once a year if you’re lucky (and I average more than 100 novels in a year). This is one such. The author leads us (and misleads us) through a whole life in which she forces us to care desperately about the man leading it and all around him, and presents us at the end with something utterly unexpected that, nevertheless, could not have been otherwise. Stunning. Magnificent.

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Towards the Vanishing Point by Jan Turk Petrie

[image error]Before reading this I read all three of the author’s Eldísvík novels and before that I read Too Many Heroes, so I guess you could call me a Jan Turk Petrie fan. What I like most is the way she creates real, believable characters and then carries them forward in a plot that makes sense and doesn’t get lost on the way. In Towards the Vanishing Point, she’s done it again. The author’s photograph suggests she isn’t old enough to remember the 1950s in England, but I do. It was a dishonest decade, ten years that we’re lucky to be rid of, and Petrie captures it as though she lived through the whole thing. I look forward to her sixth book.

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Life is Precarious

[image error]Life is precarious, and our hold on it uncertain. That’s always been true, but it seems that people have forgotten it. We have medication that keeps people alive with conditions that, only a few years ago, would have killed them. It’s easy to believe that threats to life have been overcome; those in their teens today may even believe that they’ll live for ever. They won’t.

Life in the eighteenth century was a lot less certain

A lot of research went into my James Blakiston series, some of it to do with the ages at which people died and what it was that carried them off. Illnesses that we now know as TB and flu were rife. Here is a passage from the first book in the series, A Just and Upright Man:

On the fourth of February in a winter that was taking no prisoners, Blakiston might have expected to find everyone clustered around the fire – and that is exactly where the aged Benjamin was, being fussed over by his wife who was twenty years younger than he was. His two sons, however, were hard at work in the biting cold. Blakiston watched them, struck by the single-minded intensity with which both young men worked. Then he returned to the farm house to take a dish of tea by the fire with the old man and discuss how they would manage the change from a three crop to a four crop rotation.

As he prepared to leave, Blakiston said, ‘You have two good sons.’

‘Aye, Master. They’re good lads, both of them.’

‘It is a pity that both cannot inherit the tenancy. The younger boy…Tom, is it?’

‘Aye, Master. Tom is the second born.’

‘From what I have seen he would make a better farmer than many who are already tenants. But it cannot be. This farm is not large enough to divide. We need bigger farms, not smaller.’

‘Well, Master, God’s will is God’s will.’

‘Do you say so? Tell me, Benjamin Laws, have you any other children beyond those two?’

‘A daughter, Master. Henrietta. We call her Hetty. She is a scullery maid at the Castle.’

‘And how comes it that a man of advanced years has sons so young?’

‘Twas the influenza, Master.’

‘ Ah. I am sorry.’

‘Aye, Master. I had a wife and five bairns before what you see me with today. And then the influenza came, in 1735 I think it was, and in three weeks all were gone but me.’

‘A sad story.’

‘It was the same for many.’

‘And that, too, was God’s will?’

Blakiston saw the startled expression in the old man’s eyes and realised he had better take this no further. ‘Well, Uncle, I shall keep you from sleep no longer.’

That was how life was, and the people knew it. Cholera and typhoid were other killers and it was not so many years before that that plague halved the population of England. And these killers did not respect rank – a king or a bishop had almost as much chance of dying as some farm labourer in a hovel.

Those 18th-century killers are still at work

That isn’t the case now, and it could be that the reason that Covid-19 is getting so much attention when tuberculosis (and, if it comes to that, measles) kills far more is that most of the people dying from TB are not white and not middle-class and have very little buying power and are therefore of little interest to our western media. If the virus serves no other purpose, perhaps it might be useful in bringing home to all of us a lesson that, once, did not need to be taught: that life is precarious and our hold on it tenuous.

Passing the time in self-isolation

If you are observing self-isolation, you may find that this is a very good time to spend with a good book. You’ll find the first in the James Blakiston series here and the second here. If historical fiction is not your bag, and you’d like to take a look at the way people live now, try this one or this one.

Where (and How) Does a Book Start?

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This is not “Where do you get your ideas?”

It can take a long time to write a book, but they all start somewhere – with an idea, an observation, something the writer wants to say. I’m not talking about the question every writer gets – Where do you get your ideas? I always answer that question by saying, ‘Honestly, I haven’t the faintest idea,’ and “honestly” doesn’t really belong in that sentence because I do know where I get them, but it’s just too complicated to go into. No, what I’m talking about is the moment we, the writers, start to move the idea out of our minds and onto the page.

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The Making of Billy McErlane was unusual for me, because my first draft of the first sentence and, in fact, the first chapter was still there the day the book was published. Usually, those first few pages are the scaffolding that supports the book as it unfolds and they have disappeared by the time the file is laid out for the printer. In the case of Billy Mac, the first sentence I wrote was:

All I’d said was, I wouldn’t mind seeing her in her knickers

and that sentence, along with the sentences that made up the rest of the first chapter, made it into the finished book. But, as I say, that’s unusual.

What made me think about this was a conversation I had today with one of my favourite writers, Ali Bacon, about places to stay in Gran Canaria. The reason that’s relevant is that I wrote the original first chapter of my latest book, Darkness Comes, on holiday in Gran Canaria. I’d gone out for a walk immediately after breakfast and I didn’t get back until lunchtime (although I did stop for coffee twice, and on one of those stops I also had apple pie and ice cream). As I walked, I started to have an idea for a book about a theme that has been in my mind for as long as I can remember. And when I got back, lunch had to wait because I had constructed the whole of the first two chapters in my head and I needed to get them on paper before I did anything else. Just in case I forgot them.

I compose my best stuff while I’m walking

The book originally had a different working title. It took a long time to finish, and when it did come out (as Darkness Comes), those first two chapters were gone. I didn’t need them any more. They were on the writer’s equivalent of the cutting room floor. But they still – I believe – have something to say, and so I’m appending them here. Anyone who has read Darkness Comes will recognise what’s going on here. And that theme I mentioned is set out quite clearly.

Read it. I hope you enjoy it. If it makes you want to read the book, you’ll find it here.

The Original Opening of Darkness Comes

Chapter 1

He sees her standing in front of Alno’s as though she knows this is his spot. Michelle sees her too. She stands close in the cockpit, not speaking the words but asking them anyway. Does he know her?
‘Her name’s Sarah. Haven’t seen her for years.’
Michelle absorbs this. ‘You expecting her?’
‘Hell, no.’
Michelle is looking up into his face. She wants more.
‘I loved her like I never thought I could love anyone.’
Michelle’s face now is like he’s hit her.
‘It’s over,’ he says. ‘Been over a long time. Well. How long have we been together? She was the one before you.’
The one before you. Michelle stares at him. Whatever’s in his mind, it hasn’t reached his face.

They’re making almost no way at all now. He turns the wheel slowly to the right and watches Sarah realise that this is it, this is the meeting she wanted, this boat is his boat. He sees Sarah’s eyes pass over him with barely a glance and come to rest on Michelle. The two women watch each other in that way women do.
‘She must have been a looker,’ Michelle says. ‘When she was young.’
He doesn’t respond. Michelle steps lightly up onto the bow, then onto the dock, tying off expertly to the bollard. He should be securing at the stern, but he stays where he is. She glances at him as she skips down the floating pontoon and finishes his job. He cuts the engine and the boat floats at ease.

Sarah hasn’t moved. Michelle steps back onto the boat and shouts down into the saloon. A girl’s head appears above deck. He watches Sarah take in the newcomer, sees her calculating. Ticking off the years on that calendar women carry around in their heads.
‘I’m going to put Tammy to bed,’ Michelle says.
He nods.
‘You want to eat in?’
He shakes his head. ‘See you in Alno’s.’
‘Okay. Would you rather be alone?’
‘Alone?’
‘With her.’
He smiles. ‘No, Michelle. I would not rather be alone. With her.’
‘For old time’s sake?’
‘Put Tammy to bed and come to Alno’s.’
‘Okay. If that’s what you want.’

He says no more. Michelle takes her daughter by the hand and leads her away. He watches her go, the way her arse moves in the tight shorts. She’s got a lovely arse, Michelle. That was one of the first things he noticed about her, way back at the start. When he was about to be between women once again, and he didn’t know who the hell she was, how she came to be sitting beside him on that sea wall in San Pedro de Alcántara. When she offered to fellate him and had the chance to take every peseta he had on him, and didn’t.
Funny, the things that attract him to a woman.

Chapter 2

Sarah steps forward to meet him as he steps off the boat. She offers her cheek and he kisses the air beside it.
‘Nice looking child,’ she says. ‘Yours?’
She follows him towards Alno’s. The outdoor tables on the wooden decking over the marina are warm in the evening sun. He sits at a table for four. Sarah takes the place opposite. Alno himself bustles up. ‘Senor Bailey, how are you this evening?’ He begins to remove the surplus place settings.
‘Leave one, Alno.’
‘Ah. The senorita is joining you?’
He nods. ‘When the bambina is asleep.’
‘Bueno. Something to drink?’
‘Rioja.’
Alno snaps his fingers, speaks in rapid Spanish. A waiter brings a bottle. With a flourish Alno draws the cork, pours a little for Bailey to sniff, smiles at Sarah. Bailey nods and Alno fills Sarah’s glass, tops up Bailey’s, leaves the bottle.

‘The senorita,’ Sarah says. ‘You’re not married, then?’
‘How did you find me, Sarah?’
‘How? Not why?’
‘How.’
‘Why is more important.’

‘This woman, Sarah,’ Parkinson says. ‘You hadn’t seen her for ten years?’
‘Something like that.’
The stone-faced woman in the front row settles back. This is what she wants to hear. Stories of men betraying women. She turns for a moment to look at the overweight, balding man beside her. She glowers.
‘Let me get this right,’ Parky goes on. ‘When she came back into your life…’
‘When she appeared at the marina. Completely unannounced and unwanted.’
‘…she was forty-three. You were fifty. And you were living with Michelle, a woman not much over thirty.’
A hiss goes round the ballroom. It’s a gender-related hiss. From most of the men, it’s a hiss of approval. From most of the women, it isn’t.
‘And her daughter, Tammy,’ says Parky. ‘Who was not your child. Have I got that right?’
‘Spot on. Look, can I have a drink?’
‘Is that wise? In your condition?’
‘I’m dying, Barry. I don’t think a Remy’s going to make much difference now. Do you?’
He nods at the justice of this, and a waiter steps briskly up to the table. On his tray is a brandy balloon half full of warm water, an empty shot glass and a bottle. He tips the warm water into the shot glass, pours a generous slug of cognac into the warm balloon and hands it to me. I thank him. He smiles and steps back towards the bar.
‘All of this was about ten years ago?’
‘Nearer fifteen, Michael. I’d be drawing my pension in two years if I still lived in England.’
‘And if you’d been paying tax.’
‘There is that. Nice brandy, by the way.’
‘You don’t see Sarah any more? Or Michelle?’
I let my head swing round to face him. How does he do that avuncular bit? His face is as brown close up as it is when you see him on the screen. Bugger gets more sun than I do, and I live here.
‘Little Tammy is a woman now. Older than that girl your dying body is crushing as we speak. Wherever she’s done her growing up, it hasn’t been with you?’
I say nothing. I let my baleful glance bathe him. He is bathed in bale. That usually has an effect on people. Makes them mind their manners. Doesn’t seem to be working tonight.
‘You do have children, though? Tammy wasn’t yours, but there are some little Baileys out there?’
‘There’s one. If there are more than that, I haven’t been told. ‘
‘And that one has very little reason to commend you to God’s care when she kneels to pray at night. Is that right?’
‘That’s a little hostile, Michael.’
‘Is it? Look, I came here at a moment’s notice. Dropped everything when I heard you were dying.’
‘Fucking myself to death, as it were.’
‘Don’t use the F word on my show. This isn’t Kilroy. I was busy. I was watching one of my old Freddie Truman videos, if you want to know. But you got into difficulty, the call came, I dropped everything and here I am. You can expect a hearing, Ted. A fair hearing. What you can’t necessarily expect is a friendly one. Okay? Understood, Ted?’
‘Understood, Michael.’

‘All right. Since that’s what you want to tell me, why are you here? And why are you vacuuming up that rioja? You never used to drink like that.’
‘I’m nervous, Teddie.’
He puts his hand on hers. Something is stirring and he knows what it is. It’s stirred many times before. ‘You always called me that when you wanted something.’
‘It still makes you smile.’
‘I’m smiling because Michelle does it, too.’
‘Michelle. That’s the senorita?’
He takes his hand away. ‘What is it you want, Sarah?’
She empties her glass. He refills it and she drinks deeply again. He signals to Alno to send a second bottle.
‘Mac’s left me,’ she says.
‘Mac?’
‘You know perfectly well who Mac is.’
He says nothing.
‘The man I married after you threw me out.’
‘After I…’ His mouth stays open but for a moment no words come. ‘Your memory fails you. You ended our relationship. Not me. Don’t bite your lip.’
‘You and that girl were arrested for lewd conduct.’
‘You’d already gone.’
‘Just. I might have come back. If you’d shown any sign of wanting me. If you’d got yourself off the bottle.’ Her voice has risen an octave. People are looking uneasily at them. She comes bolt upright. ‘That’s her. Isn’t it? That was her name. Michelle. That’s the little tart who got you arrested.’
‘Your husband’s left you.’
‘How could you stay with a scrubber like that?’
‘Why don’t we talk about why you’re here, Sarah?’
‘I’m going to lose the house.’
‘The same house? The one I bought you?’
She nods.
‘You mortgaged it?’
‘Mac said he wanted to start a business. He needed capital.’
‘And the business failed.’
‘There wasn’t a business. It was a way to get at my money.’
Bailey starts to laugh. ‘You married a con man?’
She looks nervously at the nearby tables. ‘I’d been with you, hadn’t I?’ she whispers. ‘You’re a crook, aren’t you?’
Bailey’s smile disappears. ‘I never deceived you. I gave you that house so you’d be safe. Didn’t I? Well, didn’t I? How much do you need?’
She reaches for the bottle. ‘Shit,’ he says. ‘It can’t be that bad? Can it? I only paid fifty thousand for the place. Cash.’
She won’t look at him. ‘That was 1985,’ she says. ‘Ten years ago. You’ve been out of the country most of that time. You’re out of touch. It’s gone up eight times since then.’
‘How much?’
‘I mortgaged it to the hilt for that bastard.’
‘I said how much?’
‘Three hundred and fifty.’ In a low voice.
‘Three…three hundred and fifty? Thousand? Pounds?’
She nods.
‘You’re crazy.’
‘That’s what love does, Teddie.’
‘A fucking imbecile.’
‘I’m sorry.’

Parkinson says, ‘So you helped her?’ The crabby woman’s face has softened. All of Parky’s guests have an inner goodness. This one’s not so bad if he handed over three hundred and fifty thousand for love. She wonders what three hundred and fifty thousand would look like, all gathered together in one place. Without thinking, she lets her hand steal out and slip into her startled mate’s.
‘I didn’t give her three hundred and fifty thousand quid,’ I say. The woman snatches her hand away, looks furiously at her husband.
‘But you helped her?’ Parky looks round at the guests, inviting them to approve of this reprobate with the heart of gold. It is clear that, by and large, they do. I decide to address them direct. My eyes fall on a German, early seventies, the generation that worked like heroes to rebuild a nation their fathers had destroyed.
‘She’d behaved like a stupid bitch,’ I say. The German nods sagely. For all his age he sits upright in the plush chair. His neck sags less than many in the room. His dark red jacket is spotless, his blue shirt well pressed. A man of presence. Integrity. He wouldn’t be upstairs, dying on top of some poor kid who’s only naked because she needed the money.
‘And she must have told a few lies,’ I go on. ‘You don’t get a mortgage just by having the equity. Not for that kind of money. She must have signed something to say they had the cash coming in to make the payments.’ Righteous indignation seeps into me with the brandy. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘She ended our relationship, she finished with me, and I gave her a fifty grand house. Which was a lot of money at the time. I didn’t owe her anything.’
Interestingly, the heads nodding in agreement belong largely to the women and not the men.
‘So what did you do?’

‘Will you help me?’
‘Is the mortgage with your bank?’
‘No. It’s a separate company.’
‘Good. Give me your bank details. A cheque, give me a blank cheque. Don’t sign it,’ he says when she gets her pen out. You have to smile. ‘I only want the sort code and the account number. And tell me how to find Mac.’
‘Teddie, I don’t know…’
‘Don’t treat me like an idiot, Sarah. You’ve got some way of getting hold of him. You must have.’
‘A mobile phone number. That’s all.’
‘It’s enough. Write it on the back of the cheque.’
She does so. ‘Why is it important for the mortgage not to be with the bank?’
‘Because then the bank would just take the cash and put it against the loan.’
‘But…that’s what we want. Isn’t it?’
‘I’m not paying your loan off, Sarah.’
‘But…I thought…you said…’
‘I’ll help you. I’ll set you up again in a new place. I’m not paying your loan off.’
She looks lost.
‘Everything you do has a price, Sarah. And you have to pay it. Your parents try to tell you that when you’re young, but you don’t listen. You don’t find out it’s true till it’s too late. You did what you did and now you’re looking at the bill. I’ll put two hundred grand into your account. That’ll buy you somewhere, right?’
‘A flat, maybe. Not a house. Not like the house I lost, Teddie.’ Her voice is mournful, sing-song.
‘Write that off to your own stupidity.’
She nods. ‘When will I get the money?’
‘As soon as I’ve made contact with Mac.’
Her face looks as though she’s just been told she has days to live. ‘What if he isn’t on that number any more?’
‘Sarah. If I don’t find Mac, you don’t get the money.’
Ashes. Crestfallen. She picks up the blank cheque, turns it over, draws thick lines through the phone number she has written. Then she writes another.
‘Will you hurt him?’
‘Terminally. And any cash he’s still got will be returned to you. Less two hundred thousand.’
‘I love him, Teddie.’
‘Well, sweetheart, make up your mind. Take this back, we’ll forget the whole thing. Including your two hundred thousand.’ He pushes the cheque across the table towards her. She looks at it. She fidgets with the hem of her top. He lets the cheque lie on the table. Then he picks it up, folds it, slips it into his shirt pocket.

Michelle arrives. Bailey stands up and kisses her on the lips. ‘Tammy okay?’
‘She’s fine. She had some pasta, a quick bath, now she’s reading in bed.’ She sits down, smiles at Sarah, ignores the tears trickling down her cheeks. ‘Do you have children?’ she asks brightly.
Sarah shakes her head. ‘No. No, I don’t have children.’

Later that night, Michelle lies in bed, her face flushed. ‘Were you generous to that woman tonight?’
‘I think so. Why?’
‘You’re always especially horny when you’ve been generous.’