‘Can I borrow some paper? And a pen, maybe?’ she whispered.

  Hope rolled her eyes, but tore a couple of sheets out of the back of her A4 pad and took a biro out of her pencil case. She passed them across without making eye contact with the woman.

  Carl pressed on with a brief overview of the various modules of the course, and at eight thirty he proposed that they stop for a comfort break, pointing out where the coffee machines were in the building.

  ‘Back in fifteen please, people,’ he called over the sound of chairs being scraped on the lino.

  Hope cringed.

  ‘Did he just call us “people”?’ asked her neighbour, and for the first time Hope turned to look at her.

  She was older than Hope. She wasn’t that great at ages, but she would place the woman closer to fifty than forty, although she had great skin and her hair was a rich auburn with no greys and looked entirely natural. She was wearing clothing that Hope would describe as either eccentric or hippy depending on her mood, with lots of unusual chunky jewellery in bright colours.

  ‘I fear he did,’ she said, giving the woman a mock grimace.

  ‘God,’ said the woman. ‘What an idiot. I hope he knows his stuff or I’m out of here. The last thing I need is to be patronised by some bloke who has chosen to teach adult education courses for a living.’

  Having said out loud what Hope would only ever have thought, the woman now had Hope’s full attention.

  ‘I thought the same,’ replied Hope. ‘I’m Hope, by the way.’

  She lifted her baseball cap a little so she could make eye contact with the woman. She generally wore a cap. It stopped people staring. She braced herself for the woman’s response to her. It always happened when she first met people, and sometimes for many meetings beyond then, and she didn’t consider herself to be arrogant to expect it. It was just something that had to be got out of the way.

  ‘I’m Angie,’ said the woman. And then, ‘Oh my God, you’re so beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever met such a gorgeous-looking person.’

  For once it was Hope who was wrong-footed. Her looks prompted a number of responses but ones quite as direct as this were rare.

  She lowered her eyes modestly. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘I bet it’s a pain in the arse, being so bloody jaw-dropping,’ Angie said. ‘It must get in the way a lot, like being really rich. I suppose it makes it hard to work out who likes you for you and who just wants to be near you for other reasons.’

  Hope just stared at her, open-mouthed. This woman’s perception was startling.

  ‘Precisely!’ she said. ‘That’s spot on, actually. Do you know, no one has ever articulated it quite like that before?’

  ‘And you won’t be able to say it because if you did, you’d come across as all “Poor me. No one understands how I suffer for being so stunning.”’ Angie pulled a ‘woe is me’ face that made Hope smile. ‘I have the same problem,’ Angie continued, sucking her cheeks in and pouting so that she looked more like a goldfish than a supermodel.

  They both laughed.

  ‘Do you want to get some coffee from that vending machine he mentioned?’ Hope asked, but Angie shook her head.

  ‘I don’t do caffeine,’ she said.

  ‘What? Not at night or not ever?’ Hope asked, aghast.

  ‘Not ever,’ replied Angie. ‘I aim for as pure a diet as I can get, so no chemicals or stimulants, artificial or otherwise.’

  ‘Blimey,’ said Hope. ‘That’s impressive. No alcohol either, then?’

  Angie shook her head. ‘Nope. I had a baby twelve years ago and I just decided that I needed to make some changes. Nothing like that has passed my lips since.’

  ‘I won’t tell you about my daily coffee consumption then.’ Hope laughed. ‘It would make your eyes water. So, I assume you’re here because you’re setting up a business?’

  Angie pulled at one of the silver hoops in her earlobe and flicked at it with her nail. ‘Actually, I’m expanding the one I already have,’ she said proudly. ‘So, I thought it might be better if I learned a bit of stuff first. It’s a treatment centre for holistic health. It’s been going for years and business is good, so I’m looking at opening at a second site. Trouble is, I’ve been basically making it up as I went along until now. I feel like I need to get a better handle on how things should be done. You know what it’s like when you don’t know what you don’t know?’

  Hope nodded. She understood that completely.

  ‘And so here I am. How about you?’

  Hope hadn’t really told anyone about her business idea. She had bounced the concept off her boyfriend, Daniel, but only in a vague way so as not to give him the chance to knock it down before she’d really worked at it. Now she felt suddenly shy at having to say it out loud. But what was the point of being here if she couldn’t even tell anyone what she was planning?

  ‘I’m going to start a business importing Italian swimwear,’ she said.

  Angie nodded. She looked impressed, at least. ‘I don’t really follow fashion, as must be obvious,’ she said, gesturing to her clothing. ‘But from what I can tell, we don’t seem to have that much stylish swimwear here. The last costume I bought came from Marks and Sparks.’

  Hope shuddered.

  ‘Well, that’s what I thought.’ Angie laughed. ‘But I wasn’t sure where else to go. And I’m assuming that you know a fair bit about the market,’ she continued. ‘You’re a model, right?’

  Again, Hope was surprised, but this was so refreshing. This woman had just assumed that she was a model and stated it as if it were any other job. Most people got sucked into the glamour of it, asking her endless questions about where she’d worked and who she knew. Angie seemed to see her beauty as a commodity that she would obviously be exploiting – it was as simple as that.

  ‘Well, I was,’ Hope said. ‘Work started to slow down a bit and I decided I needed to diversify before it dried up completely. Your thirties are a bit of a dead zone for modelling and I’m nearly there. So, I thought about importing. I have the connections and I know what will look good on women and how to show it to its best advantage. And it’s definitely a gap in the market. But I know nothing about business. I don’t even have any GCSEs.’

  ‘Well, why would you when you look like you do?’ asked Angie. ‘I assume you didn’t need any qualifications to get work.’

  Hope shrugged. ‘Well, no. But it’s not like I’m stupid or anything,’ she added, suddenly wanting to explain herself.

  ‘That much is obvious from what you’ve just said. I’d call it pretty astute actually,’ Angie said.

  Hope could feel her cheeks blush in spite of herself. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  It felt great to have someone acknowledge her idea as at least having potential, and she already had the impression that Angie wasn’t in the habit of saying what she thought people wanted to hear.

  The other students were starting to shuffle back into the classroom, brown plastic cups in hands, and take their seats. Hope turned back to face the front, signalling that the time for chatting was over, but, she thought, maybe it wouldn’t be too terrible to sit next to Angie for the next thirty weeks.

  30

  By week three of the course, Hope had concluded that Carl, the tutor, was irritating in the extreme but that he did actually know his stuff. Having decided that it wasn’t very satisfactory making notes on her laptop, she had invested in a lever arch file together with a set of coloured dividers, and the sections were filling up nicely. The pleasure that she felt at seeing the neat pages of notes was something new for her. This must have been what it felt like to be a swot at school.

  She was still getting on well with Angie, too, although she had yet to turn up for class with her own equipment. Hope didn’t mind; she had bought enough supplies for both of them and doled them out at the start of each session, having worked out that if she gave paper and pens to Angie to look after then they wouldn’t make it back for the next class.

  She had learned more about Angie in the fifteen-minute comfort breaks that Carl gave them mid-session. It appeared that she was a single mum to a twelve-year-old who, from the stories that Angie recounted, was wise beyond her years. There was no man on the scene, as far as Hope could tell. She had asked her about the child’s father, in a roundabout way to start with, and then more directly. Angie had sighed and looked a little wistful at the thought of him.

  ‘I think Romany’s dad was probably the love of my life,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t realise it at the time. If I had, I would probably have made a bigger effort to hold on to him.’

  ‘Did he not want to be involved with his daughter?’ Hope asked.

  ‘I think it was more that he didn’t really know what to do,’ Angie replied. ‘Even though we weren’t kids, the idea of commitment was all very new for both of us and we didn’t really think things through very well. Plus, Jax lived down south so I barely saw him as it was. And then when Romany was born it took us both by surprise. Not the fact of her. I mean, we knew I was pregnant. It was more the consequences. I should have worked out what I was expecting from him and told him straight away, but I didn’t and so he just kind of wandered off. It was more of an accidental thing really.’

  It seemed bizarre to Hope, but then she had never done anything by accident. ‘Do you ever hear from him?’ she asked.

  ‘Not any more,’ said Angie. ‘We did to start with, but then we moved house and I didn’t let him know. So now he wouldn’t know how to get hold of us even if he wanted to.’

  She fell silent for a moment. Hope thought that not giving someone important your new address wasn’t something that you did by accident, but it wasn’t for her to comment.

  ‘It’s no bad thing, I suppose,’ Angie added. ‘We’re doing just fine on our own.’

  Was it ever in the best interests of a child to have no contact with a parent if that parent had done no wrong? Hope wasn’t sure, but then she didn’t have any children herself. She couldn’t quite let it drop, though.

  ‘And what about Romany?’ she asked. ‘What does she think?’

  Angie shrugged. ‘It’s not been an issue so far. When she was little and first worked out that other kids had two parents she asked where he was, and I told her that he lived a long way away. Now it rarely comes up. I suppose with Facebook and things it wouldn’t be that hard for her to track him down when she’s older, but at the moment she seems happy enough as we are. She’s got enough on looking after one parent as it is!’

  Angie grinned, but something told Hope that Angie would be making a pretty good job of parenting on her own.

  ‘And how about you?’ Angie asked her.

  ‘No kids. A boyfriend but it’s pretty new. Seems to be going all right so far.’

  Angie raised an eyebrow, but Hope wasn’t up for sharing much more. She had met Daniel at a reception that she had been invited to in York for a breast cancer charity that she was involved with. She had noticed him, buzzing about the place looking purposeful and possibly a little stressed, and she had concluded that he must be something to do with the organisation of the event, rather than a guest.

  It turned out that his restaurant had provided the canapés, which were actually a cut above the cardboard offerings she was usually served. Their paths had crossed when he caught her shoulder with the edge of a tray of goat’s cheese tarts and sent them sliding down the front of her flame orange Carolina Herrera dress. The dress was borrowed and insured, but the look on his face had been priceless.

  ‘Oh my God! I’m so sorry. Here, let me . . .’ But he was at a loss to know what to do. He could hardly start fishing the tarts out of her cleavage.

  She’d enjoyed watching him panic for a moment or two and then she began to laugh. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘These things happen, and I was just thinking that I might head off home anyway.’

  ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Well, you must give me your contact details so that I can pay for the cleaning of the dress.’

  Hope looked down at the grease-stained silk. A blob of goat’s cheese was sliding majestically down her hips.

  ‘I think the dress is beyond saving,’ she replied wryly.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, and for a moment she’d thought he might actually cry. ‘This is the first one of these events that we’ve been asked to do, and I really need it to go well.’

  ‘The food was delicious,’ Hope had said, putting a finger down her dress to retrieve a tiny square of sun-dried red pepper and popping it into her mouth provocatively.

  For a moment, he seemed to forget about the crisis as he watched her, but then the full enormity of the disaster he had created returned to him. He ran his hands through his hair. He was quite good-looking, Hope thought.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said again. People had started to notice what had befallen her and were beginning to point.

  ‘Look, I’ll go to the ladies’ and clear up the worst of it. You go and retrieve my coat from the cloakroom, and I’ll meet you in reception.’ She opened her purse and fished out the cloakroom token. ‘My name is Hope Maxwell, in case they wonder why you’re retrieving my stuff. You can tell them that I sent you. They know who I am.’

  He hadn’t questioned this but scampered off in the direction of the door. Hope thrust her shoulders back and used her best catwalk strut to carry her to the ladies’. The whole incident struck her as funny, really, and it would get her out of having to chat to any more dignitaries, which was almost a blessing.

  The next day, the most enormous bouquet of flowers had turned up at her agent’s offices. Carrie rang her in great excitement.

  ‘Who is Daniel the Clumsy? Whoever he is, he appears to be very sorry!’

  There was a phone number on the card and so Hope had rung him, more to reassure him once again that no harm had been done, and from that there had been dinner and now a relationship of sorts. But she kept all this to herself. Angie was lovely, but Hope wasn’t the kind of person who overshared.

  Angie, however, was. She kept Hope entertained with endless stories about the things that her daughter did and said. Usually that kind of detail annoyed Hope – was there anything more boring than listening to other people talking about their children? – but Angie managed to make her tales self-effacing and highly amusing. It got so that Hope almost felt as if she knew Romany, even though she had never met the girl. And Hope was nearly tempted to go and try one of Angie’s outlandish treatments, having heard so much about them over the weeks. Nearly . . . but not quite.

  31

  2016

  Maggie could hardly believe it. It was thirty years since she, Angie and Leon had started at university. Well, thirty years and about six months to be precise, but with everything that had been happening she had missed the actual anniversary. Where had the time gone? It was such a cliché, but it really did feel like it had just been yesterday when she turned up in York, full of hope and ambition. The world had been her oyster back then, and she had believed that she could do whatever she set her mind to.

  And until that point, it had been true. Whatever Maggie Summers had decided should happen, happened. It was as if she had a hotline to whoever was in control of the universe. Maggie Summers wants to go to university to read law. Tick. Maggie Summers wants to be a solicitor with a prestigious firm of solicitors. Tick. Maggie Summers wants to be made a partner. Tick. The list had gone on and on. Until everything changed.

  Thirty years!

  Well, this was definitely something that needed celebrating. She grabbed her mobile and created a WhatsApp group. She called it ‘Thirty Year Reunion!’ and chose a picture of the lake that dominated the York university campus from Google for the image. Then she typed her message.

  Hi both. I’ve just realised that it’s thirty years since we first met in York. Sounds like an excuse for a get-together to me! What do you think? Up for it?

  Would they be up for it, she wondered? Her finger hovered over the send button. Angie certainly would, Maggie felt sure, although they might have to stay in York for their night out. Romany was fifteen now and certainly old enough to be left for an evening whilst her mother went out of town, but Angie had always been hugely protective of her in a way that she had never been about anything else in her life. If the reunion happened, it might be best to suggest that they stick to York rather than head over to Leon’s neck of the woods.

  Maggie was slightly less sure of how Leon would react. He’d had a rocky time recently and might not feel like celebrating. She had first wondered if something was awry in his world when there had been no Christmas card from his family the Christmas before. Becky was generally very organised, her cards arriving promptly in the second week of December. Maggie’s own cards always went out in the first week and so she doubted she could have been accidentally overlooked. Of course, she might have been cut from the list on purpose, although Becky had put up with her for all these years so it would have been odd if she had suddenly changed her mind. Curious, Maggie had rung Angie to see if she had received a card.

  ‘Hang on!’ Angie had said. ‘Just putting you on speaker while I check.’

  It clearly wasn’t a big job to look through her Christmas greetings, as she was back on the line moments later. Either she had received very few or, more likely, she hadn’t bothered to open the ones she got. Maggie visualised her own card – carefully chosen and with an individual and thoughtful message handwritten inside – sitting amongst a pile of circulars and bills, unopened and unloved.