But this morning, sitting upstairs on the double-decker bus, she gloomily watched the rain sliding down the windows, unable to concentrate on the manuscript she was trying to finish, which was yet another new theory on how the Egyptian pyramids had been built. It would interest Fergus Donleavy, she thought, because the author claimed to have definitive proof that the pyramids had been built on the instructions of aliens.

  Her emotions were in turmoil and she was feeling very tired. Housework was exhausting her, and she'd stuck an ad for a daily help in the local newsagents" wirtdow. So far she'd had no response.

  God, it was only Monday, a whole week's work to get through, and all she wanted was to go home, curl up and sleep. She'd woken with a dull ache in her abdomen, which was new, and she was afraid that it was going to turn into one of the ghastly sharp pains again. She was putting on weight now, which she was not happy about - although John liked her enlarged breasts - and the bump was just starting to show. And she was going through a phase of craving dark, bitter chocolate. She took a bar out of her handbag now, broke off a square and slipped it into her mouth, sucking it, resisting the temptation to bite, to make it last longer.

  They were having a big supper party at home on Saturday and she wished she could cancel it - although it had been her idea in the first place. She was determined for life to go on as normal and not be a wimp to her pregnancy - surely all women went though this pain and tiredness? -and, besides, they hadn't yet had a house-warming party.

  She pulled her battered Filofax out of her handbag and looked through the checklist. John had bought her an electronic organiser for her birthday last year; she had almost got the hang of it but still preferred the familiarity of her old leather-bound friend. They'd invited fifty people, a dozen of whom couldn't come, which left them to cater for either thirty-six or thirty-eight plus themselves - they were still waiting to hear from Harvey Addison and his wife. Susan had told John she thought it rude of the obstetrician to leave it so late, and John had promised to call him this morning.

  She went through her checklist. The waitresses were confirmed: the owner of the That restaurant was organising them and the food - lemon grass chicken and That vegetable curry. The drink, red and white wine plus Australian fizz, was being delivered on Friday morning from Bottoms Up, on sale or return, and they were lending the glasses.

  They'd debated about whether to have a disco and dancing. Susan was for it but John was against: half the people coming were to do with his business and he had said he wanted it to be a networking evening. To compensate she had bought several hundred poppers, streamers, blowers, silly hats, as well as boxes of crackers.

  The tough thing was going to be everyone at the party congratulating her on being pregnant and asking when the baby was due.

  She flicked a few pages of her Filofax and glanced down the Christmas card list. She'd already mailed off the ones to the US, with a specially large one for Casey, as the last postal dates had come and gone, and she should complete the English ones this week. Turning to her Christmas presents page, she made a mental note that she should do the tradesmen's tips next week.

  Then she looked at the list of presents for John. Three books that he wanted. A wild waistcoat to go under his tuxedo. A Victorian bronze horse statuette she'd bought in the antique shop near the That restaurant, and a golf gizmo she'd ordered from the Innovations catalogue, which hadn't yet arrived - a kit for making a lost ball give off a bleep. John would be upset if there wasn't at least one gizmo in his stocking.

  She would send a huge bouquet of flowers to Casey, and as for her parents - well, that would depend on whether or not they came over. If they didn't she'd buy them a treat, maybe a weekend at Caesar's at Vegas.

  And then, as if reminding her that there was someone else who should not be left off the Christmas-present list, she felt a light stroking inside her. This had only started happening a few days ago and it was an incredible sensation.

  She put her arms protectively around her abdomen. "Hi, Bump," she whispered. She had started calling the baby Bump because she did not want to think about a real name. John had told her that if they gave it a name - Alice or Tom or Nicholas or whatever - they might start getting too attached. "This is your first Christmas, Bump. How do you feel about it? Have you written out your list for Santa yet?"

  Mr. Sarotzini had not been in touch with her since that morning he had come into her room at the clinic after the operation. She had told John that she didn't mind, that it made things easier, but deep down she did. She was hurt because it made everything seem even more clinical and businesslike than it need be.

  What was going to happen to Bump?

  What kind of life was Bump going to have with Mr. Sarotzini? What kind of parent would an elderly man make? And what about Mrs. Sarotzini? She'd had cancer, which was why she couldn't have children, according to Mr. Sarotzini. Was she sick now? Or a glamorous international jet-setting clothes-horse, who didn't have time to have babies, found it easier for other people to have them for her? Like those women who insisted on having Caesareans so their vaginas didn't get stretched? Sure Mr. Sarotzini could afford anything - but was that going to be enough? Was Bump going to be stuck in a nursery in some remote Swiss mansion, to be wheeled out and shown to his parents once a day - a trophy child? As if echoing her concerns, Bump stroked her again.

  The bus was slowing for a stop. It seemed fuller than usual today -people going into town for their Christmas shopping, she guessed. A heavily pregnant woman began walking down from the front of the bus. Susan caught her eye, giving her a me-too smile, with which the woman failed to connect.

  Suddenly, before she realised it, Susan's eyes were watering with the terrible homesickness she'd felt earlier when John had rung.

  However much her mother and father had failed in their acting careers, they had still been good parents to herself and Casey - in as much as any child could judge these things. They had always been there for her when she'd needed them, home had always been a welcoming place, and they'd never grown bitter over either the failure of their careers, or the tragedy of Casey. Susan knew they would love to become grandparents, and she remembered how disappointed they had been when she had told them, soon after getting married, that she and John did not intend to have a family.

  Now she was pregnant and she wanted to share something of this with them. She wanted to see the delight it would bring to their faces, wanted to experience the sensation of being with them and sharing this, this -this what?

  Joy?

  Or, as John had said, would it be cruel to do this to them? To raise their hopes and then have to tell them the baby was gone, dead, stillborn? Was John right that it was best to keep it quiet, as far as they were concerned?

  She couldn't do that. What if they found out from someone that she was pregnant? Or had been pregnant and hadn't told them? That would be much worse, surely.

  Why, she wondered, had she made that remark to John about her mother staying on in England to look after the baby? It had just come out so naturally, as if she really believed that was going to happen.

  She shook her head. I really am in a bad state, she thought.

  Shortly before eleven that morning, Susan was typing a rejection letter to a promising writer from the slush pile. The book, on case studies of people driven by their genes to commit crime, had had good readers" reports and she had liked the young writer's style. But the board had felt the book, clearly a modified PhD thesis, too scientific for a broad readership.

  She was trying to find a way to let the writer down gently by encouraging him to find a way to rewrite the book more commercially, when her phone intercom rang. It was her secretary, telling her she had a Mr. Sarotzini on the line.

  Susan's brain went into tilt. Weird, she thought, that he had been on her mind only an hour or so earlier this morning. "I'll be with him in a moment," she said, and released the button, feeling, suddenly, like a bag of jelly.

  Absurdly, she ran her fingers through her hair, tidying it, tossed some away from her forehead, then looked behind her to make sure her door was shut. Then she pressed the button again. "Put him through, Hermione."

  A moment later she heard his unmistakable voice, pleasant, courteous, a little more formal than before, a little stiffer.

  "Good morning, Susan," he said. "I thought I should enquire how you were. And, of course, the baby."

  "We're both fine, thank you," Susan said, almost blurting the words, feeling breathless. "How are you?"

  "Oh, yes, I am well, thank you."

  There was a silence in which Susan flailed around for something to say. There were a million questions she had been wanting to ask him when they next spoke, but all of them eluded her. Finally she came up with: "And your wife, how is she?"

  Mr. Sarotzini seemed to hesitate, then replied, "Yes, thank you, she is well also." There was another silence. He said, "You must forgive me for not having been in touch sooner. I am aware of promises I made to you about concerts and the opera and art galleries, but I have been detained by business activities. I wondered, perhaps, if tomorrow or Wednesday you were free for lunch, and to come and see a remarkable collection of impressionist paintings. I recall from our discussions that you care for the Impressionist school very much."

  Tomorrow was her secretary's birthday and she and Kate Fox had promised to take her out to lunch. "Wednesday would be good," she said.

  "Perfect, it would suit me better also. I will collect you at twelve forty-five."

  Chapter Thirty-five

  During the regular Wednesday morning editorial meeting Susan was tense and finding it hard to concentrate. She had arrived late in the office, having changed her mind several times about what she was going to wear for her lunch with Mr. Sarotzini, and her hair, with which she normally had no problems, had not come out well after she had shampooed it.

  To make matters worse, John had been in a strange mood last night, almost as if he was jealous that he had not been invited today. He had pranced around the bedroom, mimicking Mr. Sarotzini, making crude jokes about the man's virility and, even though she had not been in the mood, had virtually forced her to make love, as if to establish his superiority - or his territory.

  When reception buzzed her to tell her that Mr. Sarotzini was waiting, she put on her navy coat and went downstairs as nervously as if she were going for a job interview. She normally felt confident in her most formal suit, a black two-piece, with a high-collared white blouse, the neck pinned with a silver brooch, but now she felt stiff and awkward.

  Mr. Sarotzini stood in the reception area, in a long camel coat with a velvet collar, looking out of place among.the racks of new titles. The only other occupant was a ponytailed illustrator, who was awaiting his lunch date. The banker greeted Susan with a polite smile and a stiff, almost absurdly formal handshake.

  "How very good to see you, Susan," he said, and indicated the door. "My car is outside."

  It was strange to see him again, this tall, debonair man with his fine clothes and his worldly air, and to know that his child - their child - was inside her. She kept trying to look at his face, to try to learn more about it, to lock it into her memory. Her thoughts kept oscillating: one moment this man was the father of her child, the next he was a stranger and she could not connect the baby growing inside her with him.

  As they sat in the back of the Mercedes making small-talk about the weather, Britain's problems with the EC and the worsening state of London's traffic, Susan was trying to imagine how the baby might look -which of her features, and which of Mr. Sarotzini's, Bump would inherit. Mr. Sarotzini had an assertive nose - it wasn't overly large but it would look better on a boy than a girl, she thought. But those grey eyes were gorgeous, anyone would be happy to have them.

  She continued to study him over lunch, still trying to put an age on him and finding it impossible. He smiled and he looked fifty. He turned his head to the right and he looked seventy. He angled his head down to concentrate on a quail's egg and he looked eighty. He turned his head to the left and he was sixty, tops. She searched for the usual telltales of age, but he had no turkey-neck, few liver spots on his hands and just the tiniest one on his face. When he smiled, his eyes were bright and creased with crows" feet but otherwise not excessively lined. There was energy in his movement, in the animated way in which he spoke, once they had moved on to the topics of art and music, and yet all the time it was there, this aura of old age he wore like a shadow that he could not quite shake off.

  In spite of her earlier nervousness, Susan began to relax a little, finding him as good company and as charming as when she had previously dined here with him and John. He regaled her with anecdotes, privileged insider little-tattle about great singers, including Pavarotti and Maria Callas, about great conductors like von Karajan and Previn and Simon Rattle, about the great composers. There seemed to be nothing of the world of classical music that he did not know, and few of the world's greatest names in this field that he had not met.

  Susan listened with interest, but absorbed only part of what he told her, because all the time she was going over the questions she wanted to ask him. She had no appetite, and hardly touched the soup she had ordered; neither did she eat more than a couple of mouthfuls of her liver and bacon.

  Somehow their conversation had moved to paintings. Mr. Sarotzini told Susan stories of great art treasures plundered by the Nazis, and sold illegally to private collectors around the world, and he regaled her with case histories of fakes: some of the most famous people in the world had been duped into paying millions for faked old masters or Impressionists, and concealed the fact to this day.

  It was only when coffee was served that Susan, anxious now about time, managed to bring up the subject of the baby's future. Would his wife look after the baby or a nanny? It was the first of many questions she wanted to ask, and the banker answered it with a glib but evasive, "This is under discussion."

  She got the same response to her questions about where the baby would live, where it would go to school, whether it would be christened or brought up in any religion at all. Everything was, in Mr. Sarotzini's words, "Under discussion."

  It rapidly became clear to Susan that the period beyond the birth of the child was shuttered off, and although she tried not to show it, his attitude angered and disturbed her. It seemed strange that Mr. Sarotzini and his wife should so badly want a child, yet be so undecided about the kind of life they proposed for it. Besides, this wasn't just his baby, it was theirs. She was the mother, however much Mr. Sarotzini might have paid, so she had a right to be interested, to be informed, to be consulted even, on their baby's future.

  Mr. Sarotzini rose. "Time is short, is it not, Susan? You have a meeting?"

  "Yes, three-thirty."

  "You must not worry about the baby. It will have the very best care in the world."

  "Babies need more than care," she said, as they walked out of the club's entrance. "They need love."

  "Of course," Mr. Sarotzini said, as the chauffeur opened the rear door of the Mercedes. "Love. Yes, this baby will have so much love, I can assure you of that, Susan."

  Something chilled her about the way he said this. And as she sank back into the leather upholstery of the car and the door closed with a thud against the bright December sunshine, it felt as if they had entered a smoked-glass vault. She looked at his face, which had hardened, and felt even more chilled.

  Yes, this baby will have so much love, I can assure you of that, Susan. Yes, he probably could assure her - he had enough money to fix it, to fix anything. And she thought back to that Sunday in September when she'd read about Zak Danziger's death and had wondered then whether there might have been any connection: She had dismissed the thought, but looking at that steely hard face now, it had returned, and it was disturbing her. He seemed to switch so effortlessly from being utterly charming to being icily hard. How ruthless was Mr. Sarotzini?

  "So now, Susan, we are going to visit a dear friend of mine, Esmond Rostoff. You have heard of him, perhaps?"

  She kicked the name around for a few moments but it rang no bells. "No, I don't think so."

  "He was a great polo player, legendary. He has played with them all, and at one time Esmond owned the world's finest team. Maybe you have not followed polo?"

  "No."

  "Today he owns a huge string of race-horses, but he keeps a low profile." He smiled. "But we are not going to look at horses. Esmond is a collector of Impressionist paintings. He is an intensely private man and only permits his close friends to see his collection. It was necessary for me to convince him that you are very special to me."

  Susan wondered what he had told the man. "Thank you," she said, dubiously, her curiosity to see the paintings lost in the anxiety raging in her head.

  The Mercedes pulled up outside an imposing white Georgian house just off Belgrave Square. As they walked up the steps to the front door, Mr. Sarotzini informed Susan that Esmond Rostoff was a descendant of the last Russian tsar, and that he owned one of the finest - perhaps the finest -collections of early Impressionist paintings in the world, finer than any public gallery. He hinted that some of these had been removed secretly from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg in the final days before the revolution and smuggled out of Russia.

  When Susan asked him whether the rest of the collection had been built legitimately, or from purchases of Nazi loot, he laughed the question aside. "Esmond Rostoff is a very proper man, Susan. He is an aristocrat of fine breeding. Such a man has no need to resort to illicit - or distasteful -methods."

  However, Mr. Sarotzini's expression and the feeling she got on arrival at the house, told her otherwise. The front door was opened by a security guard who looked like a Middle Eastern thug; they were received in a red-carpeted hall, by a butler, who led them through double doors into a large, ornately decorated drawing room.

  Susan had never seen a room decorated like this outside a National Trust property. Magnificent old masters hung from the walls: hunting scenes, portraits, still lifes of game and fruit. The floor was arranged with exquisite antique furniture - armchairs, reading chairs, two settles in front of the fireplace, a chaise longue, a love seat, all upholstered in fine muted grey coloutings that toned with the carpet and the swagged drapes. There were beautiful cabinets and display cases, and no rope cordoning anything off, Susan thought. This room was lived in!