I’ve always had vivid dreams. When I was small, about six or seven, a lady in a white dress would come and sit on my bed while I went to sleep. She had strange blonde hair which kept fading into nothingness and that Cheshire cat smile left behind when she faded away, but I didn’t mind her sitting there, pulsing in and out of existence, any more than at first I’d minded seeing Ted wandering about in the dark wood. It was only later others told me the blonde lady ‘must have been a ghost’. But children do see things that aren’t really there: the young brain has a whole set of new experiences to make sense of and sometimes gets them wrong.

  I was an adopted child, and I knew the reason for the adoption. When I was four my father shot and killed my mother then turned the gun on me, but fortunately changed his mind and shot himself instead. Childhood amnesia only partially sets in at that age, and I remember the broad strokes of this traumatic event, if not the detail. I daresay such a trauma rivals waking up and finding your husband dead in bed beside you, but not by all that much. The ghost at the foot of my bed was in all probability my mother, but my adoptive parents – who were kindness itself, but not very bright – did what they could to steer me away from what they called ‘spookiness’. Odd, considering my adoptive mother made quite a name for herself as a fortune teller in the village fête world. To me, believing you can foretell the future using cards and tea leaves is weirder than anything. But I tried to oblige my new Mum and Dad, who were very good to me, and I got into the habit of keeping silence about any weird spookiness of my own.

  Then when I was about ten, playing on the foot of the war memorial in the grounds of our local church, I saw a young soldier wearing puttees sitting on the steps and someone old said, ‘Oh, that’ll be poor Joe Morland. He died in 1915. He was only twenty-two.’ I reckoned it was a kind of time slip: I was seeing Joe Morland at twenty-two as he was then, not him now coming back from the dead or anything like that. Such time slips continued to happen from time to time but if I saw people who didn’t look as if they were quite there, or were dressed in odd clothes, I learned to shut up about it.

  As I grew older I’d do rather less of this ‘seeing people’. I once watched someone’s cat die in the road after being run over, and the difference between the living animal and the dead was so great it certainly gave me the feeling that the spirit left the body and went somewhere else. But one sees what one expects to see (ask any conjurer), and events in the real world can be even more disturbing than any number of visions, dreams and phantasms.

  I looked in the trash can as soon as Robbie had left for work to make sure he hadn’t dumped the plastic bag before he left, but he hadn’t. He’d taken the mud to work for some kind of forensic report. But was I being paranoid in assuming so, or was Robbie being that in doing so? It was perfectly possible that I’d brought the lump of mud into the house on my trainers before I’d gone to bed, that I’d noticed it subconsciously and done nothing about it which was why the mud had featured in my dream. I might well be turning into a really feckless housewife. Nothing to do with Ted stepping over into our reality: how could he? True, the natural laws of the nano-world differ from ours in ways we do not understand, though thanks to the Hadron Collider and such, no doubt we soon will. But even acknowledging the reality of alternative universes, and living in the quantum-conscious age we do, no-one is yet suggesting material objects can pass from one dimension to another. Robbie has Scientific American and Nature delivered every week, and I find them as fascinating as in the Ted days I had found Vogue and Elle.

  My uneasiness got worse not better, and by mid-morning I found myself punching in Cynara’s number. I hadn’t spoken to her for months: she was the last person I wanted to talk to – the weeks after Ted had died were still too painful for too much remembering. But Cynara had been Robbie’s lover before he so suddenly deserted her and married me, and she would surely have something to say about what actually went on at Portal Inc’s developmental facility, and I thought I deserved to know.

  I shared a domestic life with Robbie – I shared an intensive and concentrated exchange of bodily fluids night after night, but I knew surprisingly little about his work. Cynara might be prepared, if only out of spite, to tell me something I didn’t know. Robbie was an American, not an Englishman, and people from outside one’s own culture are often hard to read – but maybe he was just too good to be true?

  And then I put down the phone. This was madness. I had so many reasons to be grateful to poor Robbie. Had he not come to my rescue when I was floundering about as a widow, wooed me, entranced me with his lovemaking, told me he adored me, married me, restarted the engine of my life so that after a few chokes and groans it ran smoothly? Hadn’t he paid off my mortgage, got the roof mended, settled the twins’ college fees? I was ungrateful, unreasonable, suspicious, hormonally disturbed and dysfunctional. Had I not lived with Robbie in peace, harmony and order for many months? He did not deserve this sudden distrust on my part. All he had done was pick up a piece of wet mud in tweezers and take it off to a lab to be examined. Surely he had his own reasons, which could be perfectly well explained if only I were in the mood for explanations. Again I picked up the phone, and then again put it down.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Philly, look before you leap!’ I heard Ted in my head, clear as a bell. It wasn’t really Ted talking, of course, but me talking to me using Ted’s voice, urging common sense. Though come to think of it I never say ‘for Christ’s sake’, it’s what Ted says. Only sometimes when driven to distraction I’ll let out a mild ‘for ‘God’s sake’; ‘Christ’ seems somehow extreme, male.

  I do hear voices in my head from time to time, but not the kind the mad have: mine are perfectly benign, they don’t tell me to kill anyone, anything like that; they just give me advice, usually quite sensible if not what I want to hear. I will feel my birth-mother, long dead, hold my hand as I pour myself another drink, and hear her say, ‘You’ve had quite enough, Philly!’, and sometimes I’ll take notice and sometimes not. But I at least I know it’s me talking to myself. I can’t deny that after Ted died, when I was really distressed and traumatised, there were a couple of weeks when I heard all too clearly what other people were thinking. Fortunately this fit of intense telepathy, if one might call it that, lasted only a couple of weeks and then everything snapped back to normal. I was glad: it is horrible being so aware of what others think of you.

  Not that one necessarily needs voices in the head to let one know. After Robbie started staying the night I have no doubt it was all: ‘I wonder if she’d been having an affair with him all along,’ and: ‘Those poor twins, and their father only just dead,’ and at the Judd Street wedding: ‘Talk about warmed-up funeral baked meats.’ Things like that. Gossip is what makes the world go round. But it’s not nice. Anyway, I, or at any rate the sensible part of me, told myself I was being stupidly impetuous and on instruction from whomsoever – my guardian angel? – put the phone down before Cynara could answer.

  I had been freaked when Robbie had invited Cynara to our wedding. She wouldn’t wish us well: she’d be jealous and angry. I certainly would be in her place. Robbie had gone with Cynara to the party; she’d been wearing his ring, but he’d left hand-in-hand with me, the merry widow. I’d been going through a for-God’s-sake-I-need-a-fuck phase, and didn’t care what others thought. I’d been conscious at the time of a fair amount of whisperings and nudgings, but the sense of cosmic inevitability, the across-a-crowded-room syndrome, had been overwhelming. Eyes met eyes, hand met hand, and that was it.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Philly,’ Robbie had said, once the first flush of primal urge had been assuaged. ‘Cynara’s just a bed buddy. You’re different. ’

  ‘But what about her engagement ring?’

  ‘Oh, that. It was given to her by her late husband.’

  ‘No way an engagement to you?’

  ‘Good God no. I’m totally free. I wouldn’t want to marry Cynara. She’s good fun but she’s mostly high as a kite.’

  Fun or not, I still didn’t want him inviting an ex-girlfriend to my wedding.

  ‘But everyone thinks she was having an affair with Ted,’ I tried to explain. ‘It isn’t true, but they’ll think I’m having my own back by marrying you.’

  ‘You mean you think that, honey; nobody else does. It’s your hormonal dysphoria speaking. What do you want other people to think? That you’re the one who’s jealous and angry?’

  Of course he was right and Cynara came to our wedding and behaved perfectly well, just as she had at Ted’s funeral. Then she had been suitably and calmly sad – as one would be when a friend and business partner has died, not when a lover has been snatched away by a cruel fate. I hadn’t, by the way, sent her an invitation. She just turned up.

  Cynara had come into Ted’s and my life some eighteen months before he died. The young widow of a very rich old man, she had been an occasional customer at the art gallery we ran in Cork Street. We sold fake artworks by reputable forgers. You might not think there was much of a market in these, and it was indeed beginning to dwindle when the economy picked up. We had been worryingly undercapitalised until Cynara came to the rescue. She had invested £200,000 and saved our bacon. She was younger than me, not even thirty – a lissom, leonine thing (she’d started out as a dancer) long-legged, slim-hipped, with a great mane of reddish gold hair. She was all the things I wasn’t – impeccably dressed, manicured and shod, charming, at ease with herself and the world. I could hardly be expected to like her, though her interest in fake artworks was genuine enough. Some of her husband’s artworks – Vermeers, Picassos, Monets, Van Dykes – had turned out to be forgeries, or looted masterpieces which had to be returned to their rightful owners. Ted had been able to help and advise. They could pool their knowledge, enthusiasms, and above all their business contacts.

  Ted was fascinated by Cynara, of course he was, while ruefully recognising that she was out of his league: ‘She’s top totty; she goes for Alpha males; I’m arty bog Irish, Beta plus, don’t worry about it, Philly.’ But of course I did, a bit. Cynara spent more and more time in the shop, sold her own stock out of her house in Holland Park, and was soon buying and selling along with Ted. And then when Ted died she bought out my ten per cent stake at a knock-down price and started buying work by young artists which sold well and with a much higher mark-up.

  On my part it was hardly a close or very genial acquaintance. Ted died on Christmas Eve. I’d met Cynara in the gallery on several occasions before that event. She turned up at his funeral in January. I saw her in March when I signed away the gallery, and then not again until September when I went to a private view in Cork Street – my friend Ali the Nigerian sculptress – and Cynara was there, cynosure of all eyes, her escort a handsome young neuroscientist from Harvard. Ali’s sculpture was all grey and stone and tasteful; Cynara was in primary colours: a sleeveless Prada silk dress in bright red and strong green, a pale blue bag, thick white-wool knee-highs, pink flats, and a superb diamond on her finger – on the arm of this tall blond American. He took one look at me and I at him and we bonded there and then. He came back to my house; the children were out; he stayed the night. We were married a month later. It was madness.

  Robbie did ask Cynara to the wedding. But being in a generous mood I’d attempted a kind of apology for having so crudely snatched her boyfriend.

  ‘Cynara, I do feel rather bad. One doesn’t usually behave, so, well, impetuously, at a private view.’

  ‘Oh darling, one simply does, sometimes,’ she said. ‘I totally adore you, you know that. And you’re so much Robbie’s type. I never was. And I was so very fond of dear Ted.’

  I puzzled about that rather, but one does not waste time pursuing subtleties at one’s own wedding reception. She gave Robbie a rather full and prolonged kiss on the mouth with her slightly pouty collagen lips, and then a little slap on the cheek which I suppose indicated forgiveness and the righting of wrongs. Otherwise she behaved unremarkably. She had even, if rather obviously, dressed down so as not to outshine me; that is to say she didn’t wear crimson-soled Louboutin platform pumps but a plain navy silk dress which might have cost £25 or £2,000, how could one tell, and perfectly ordinary flats like my own. Her legs could stand them, mine couldn’t really. The ceremony had been a very quiet affair at the Camden Register Office near King’s Cross. Robbie’s boss, and a clutch of his work colleagues came along, my two former research employees Carole and Luella, Ali the sculptress, and my grief therapist Bambi Bennett. That was all. Afterwards we all went and had an Indian meal.

  Bambi had been most disapproving. She thought that after one relationship ended you should learn to live on your own before you tried again. I thought this was nuts: a recipe for loneliness and boredom. Some people like to pretend sex isn’t crucial, but a kind of optional extra to one’s existence. Maybe it’s a therapist thing; they tend not to be sensuous people, but great advocates of sensible thinking. Bambi denied the reality of loneliness, saying one had rather to see it as ‘aloneness’, as if that were something to be desired. But at least she came to the wedding, if under protest.

  Our twins, Maude and Martha, did not come, nor did I pressure them to do so. It was too soon after their father’s death. My urgencies – sex and comfort: love, even – were not theirs. All they could see, along I fear with many others, was that the baked meats were barely cold, their widowed mother was remarrying and it was an insult to their father. I told myself that they had finished their college courses, got their degrees and left home: what happened in their old home scarcely mattered. They shared a flat in Camberwell. Both had, so they said, found jobs with the Arts Council. Their new lives had started.

  When they came to visit they might have a stepfather sitting at the end of a table where once their beloved father had sat, but he would be a stepfather who would help fund their first steps onto the housing ladder – which was rather more than their real father would have done. I would hereafter be no kind of emotional burden to them. Could they not be glad for themselves, if not for me? But no.

  Martha.... Marriage is for the procreation of children, Mum.

  Maude.... And best done in your twenties.

  Martha.... Our friends will refer to you as the cougar.

  Maude.... A cradle snatcher.

  Robbie was thirty-nine, four years younger than me. I had the twins when I was twenty-two. Children can be very difficult. When they’re born you think you will have them for twenty years or so and that’ll be it – but it’s not the case. They have you for ever. Maternal guilt and anxiety doesn’t abate with time, not does the child’s resentment against the parent: you didn’t make their life perfect and you can never be wholly forgiven. Just as one can’t forgive one’s own parents. My birth parents put themselves out of court, mind you, by my father shooting my mother; my adoptive parents did their best but brought me up to believe that truth and reality were dangerous things. At least the ghost of my birth mother had the grace to sit on my bed and croon to me; my adoptive mother went into the good night after the merest smile, the touch of a blessing: if my birth father said goodbye I did not catch it – he had blown the top of his head off; and my adoptive father went without saying anything – but then he had been drinking. And Ted – Ted just walked off into the dark wood without so much as a look behind, as if I had been no part of his life at all.

  The twins were polite to Robbie, but were no longer wholly trusting of me. They had always seemed to make common cause with Cynara, when she first turned up in the gallery.

  Maude.... She is so good with clothes, Mum, and she knows everyone who’s anyone.

  Martha.... She’s going to help us find jobs when we leave college.

  Maude.... She says never, ever, use soap and water on the face: it dries out the skin.

  Martha.... All the kinds of useful things she knows about and you don’t.

  And even after Ted died they’d go round to see her from time to time. They’d turn up at the gallery and she’d leave early if she could and take them round the corner to the Ritz for hamburgers. The twins would call me up to let me know and invite me to come along, but I always said I was busy. Perhaps that was stupid and narrow-minded of me. Was I the one at fault? Their new lives had started.

  I picked up the phone one more time and got through to her at the gallery straight away.

  ‘Hi, Cynara,’ I said, ‘This is Phyllis Whitman, remember Phyllis, Ted’s wife?’

  ‘Ah. Oh yes. Of course. Philly. How could one forget? White witch Philly.’ I felt an acute pang of jealousy, which ran like a shiver from my crotch to my scalp. Stupid, unsophisticated me. Second husbands have ex-girlfriends; first husbands have no doubt confided and joked with women other than their wives. I told myself Ted was well dead; what had happened when he was alive between Cynara and he was hardly of any consequence. Everything fades into the mists of time, anyway. But white witch Phyllis? Ted had sometimes described me to the children as ‘your mother the white witch’, but as a kind of intimate family joke.

  It’s what he’d call me when sometimes I seemed to know what was going on behind my back with the children – the way surely any mother does. But Ted liked to see it as magic. And it was true that once or twice a mug I disliked – too garish or too vulgar – had leaped off the shelf and plunged to its destruction, just when I was saying so. I’d have put it too near the edge, that was all. Or the garden tap once or twice ran red like blood, but it must have been rust; or a letter ready for the post disappeared and then appeared in another place, the silly things that happen in households from time to time. But now ‘white witch Phyllis’, and from the mouth of Cynara? How could Ted have blabbed so? Yes, they’d had an affair.