I resisted turning round, forcing myself to tune into the registrar who was working up to the words I’d dreaded, the bit about in sickness and in health. I couldn’t concentrate on what we were promising each other, only that Nico would be saying these words for a second time. Had he for one moment imagined the burden of that vow, the reality he might be forced to face? Had Nico really expected Caitlin, with the toned biceps and sleek hair, to cash in the bit about ‘in sickness’, to watch her slip away, a little more, week by week? When he thought about having kids, did he ever imagine sitting at a table set for two, talking brightly to a teenage daughter, trying to ignore the third place where Caitlin used to sit, shocking and bold in its emptiness?

His voice caught on those words. I put my hand on his arm to reassure him I was expecting to bulldoze through the next fifty years without so much as a fallen arch. The way he grabbed my hand made me realise his first marriage would shape his second.

Thank God I’d lived long enough not to expect the fairy tale.

2

LARA

A little frisson of disapproval dominoed around the congregation – a unanimous Farinelli family frown – as Maggie walked in, barefoot, clutching a single sunflower. If not exactly dancing, she was close to prancing as she made her way down the aisle on the arm of her son, Sam, as though the very beat of ‘Chapel of Love’ was seeping up into her feet, bringing joy to her limbs.

As Sam did a little shimmy past in his junior-sized top hat and tails, I hoped no one else heard my husband, Massimo, say, ‘It’s like the circus coming to town.’ I couldn’t resist a glance at my mother-in-law, Anna, standing there ramrod straight, her pillbox hat perched like a predatory eagle on her head. Her face was a perfect picture of disdain, as though she was having to concentrate on not shouting, ‘Will someone switch this racket off?’

With a quiver of hat netting, Anna leaned forward and caught my eye. She was far too polished to pull a face that might be intercepted by anyone else – but I knew the dawn of new daughter-in-law comparisons was gearing up in the starting blocks. I might even have a chance of emerging victorious this time after so many years of ‘Caitlin got her figure back very well after Francesca was born. But then, you did have a caesarean, I don’t suppose that helped.’ Followed by some suggestions on how a scarf could ‘help disguise that tummy’ and the odd cutting from the Daily Mail entitled ‘Drop a dress size in ten days!’ left on my kitchen table. I’d also been found lacking in gardening, cooking and what Anna called ‘household administration’ so I hoped Maggie wouldn’t possess a huge array of secret skills to put me to shame.

Maggie didn’t give the impression that she cared what people thought of her very much. With the little rose tattoo on her ankle, her bright blue toenails and her corkscrew hair cascading down her back, she looked more like someone celebrating a pagan ritual at a New Moon party than a bride trying to integrate herself into a new family where the obstacles were already piled up against her. She was going to need a whole lot of self-belief to resist Anna’s decrees for ‘Farinelli family behaviour’.

If I knew Anna, she would have tried every which way to stop Nico marrying Maggie. ‘Two years is far too soon, you’re still grieving.’ ‘It’s not fair on Francesca. She doesn’t need a new mother; she needs a father to focus on her.’ ‘Do you really want to take on some other man’s bastard child?’ And she would probably have used those very words. Anything that didn’t fit with Anna’s world view would be singled out and shot.

But she obviously hadn’t managed to put Nico off Maggie. His face was ablaze with emotion, as though he couldn’t quite believe this carefree creature had come along to liven up the precise hallways of the Farinelli households. It was astonishing that Maggie was only thirty-five, the same age as me. She wore adulthood so lightly, as though it were a state to be dipped into when absolutely necessary, an interruption to having fun and letting tomorrow take care of itself. With my neat bob, pearly pink nails and the knee-length dresses Massimo loved, I could have passed for ten years her senior.

So despite Anna muttering about the marriage being ‘doomed’, I didn’t feel sorry for Maggie. I felt envious. Envious of that burning intensity of new love. Of their optimism. Of their hopes for the future.

I imagined Nico laughing at her singing to the radio, dropping a kiss onto her head as she sat at the table, tucking her scarf into her coat before she headed off to work. I felt a pang of nostalgia for the days when Massimo would slip into my office and sweep all the carefully documented papers off the desk, the minutiae of the accounts I’d been auditing receding, blocked out by the ferociousness of his kisses. The ‘working’ dinners where we’d be so absorbed in each other we’d only tear ourselves away when the waiters started sweeping up. I ached for the connection that opened the door to belonging, to feeling part of a family again.

I wished I’d let Dad come to this wedding. Massimo only had his best interests at heart: he didn’t want Dad to become confused by all the new faces, but Dad still loved music and this 1960s song was right up his street. Any recognition from him made my day. And I’d have loved to have seen him in his suit again, smart and smiling, like he used to be.

Like we all used to be.

I turned my attention back to Nico and Maggie as they began their vows, catching sight of Francesca’s rigid face as I did so. Despite Anna’s doom-mongering, I thought Nico marrying again was a good thing for Francesca. Given that my mother died when I was a toddler and now my dear old dad was fading like an ancient Polaroid photo, I’d have been delighted to have had a warm, jolly stepmother to help me along. Maybe if I’d had someone to talk to, rather than protect, I’d have had a different life all together.

But before I could disappear any further down that path of then and now, my seven-year-old son, Sandro, spotted a spider scuttling under the chair in front of him. Since our cat, Misty, had gone missing a few days earlier, Sandro was even more sensitive and clingy than usual, his pale face carrying the air of someone who’d read the instructions for aircraft evacuation and was just biding his time until the emergency presented itself. The exact opposite to the little I’d seen of Maggie’s son, Sam, who looked as though suppressing a mischievous chuckle was a daily challenge. Sandro started to fidget. He nudged me and pointed. I leant down and whispered that it was only a little spider, that it wouldn’t hurt him, when it suddenly encountered Beryl’s shoe and ran straight back towards him. He screamed, clambering up onto his chair.

Anna was turning round, frowning, no doubt clocking up more ammunition for one of her ‘Lara does her best but she really has no control over that child’ speeches. Massimo leaned around me, trying to get hold of him but Sandro started running along the empty chairs. I chased along the row after him, grabbing his hand and leading him out of the room, glad of an excuse to leave all that Farinelli expectation and accusation trapped behind me. Though I could still feel the opprobrium snaking under the ornate door I’d tried to close quietly behind me. I held Sandro to me, waiting for his tears to abate.

I forced out a calm tone of, ‘It’s all right, it wasn’t very big.’

‘I’m not really crying about the spider, Mummy. I want Misty back.’

‘We all do, darling. She’ll turn up soon, don’t worry.’

I hoped a seven-year-old wouldn’t be able to detect the doubt in my voice.

3

Maggie

Nico and I managed one blissful night away in a fifteenth-century coaching inn as a ‘honeymoon’. We’d decided to take a longer holiday on our own when the kids were used to their new family life, which, judging by Francesca’s behaviour a fortnight in, might be at the turn of the next century.

Nico gradually introducing me to Francesca over the previous year hadn’t worked. We’d tried to edge towards a family atmosphere, with curry nights in and cinema nights out. I could count on one hand the times when she hadn’t made some barbed comment about how Caitlin had been better/thinner/fitter/funnier than me. I could have been the world expert in wing-walking and no doubt Caitlin would have been able to do it on a pogo stick. In the end, Nico had gone for the ‘like it or lump it’ strategy, though we’d agreed that Sam and I wouldn’t move in until the week before we got married, as a way of drawing a definitive line in the sand, when, for better, for worse, we’d have to find a way to get along together.

‘Do you mind moving into the house where Caitlin lived?’ he asked when he proposed, months before we’d set a date.

I’d waved away his concerns, thinking it seemed churlish to have any reservations about moving from the mouse house of a flat I lived in with my mum and Sam to Nico’s Victorian terrace house, with its two bathrooms and four bedrooms. I did try to work out how to say, ‘I don’t want to sleep in the bed you shared with her, let alone the one she died in,’ without sounding like an insensitive cow, but I couldn’t.