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       Chapter 2: Fault Lines

      ‘By then other drivers had stopped and the police were there in minutes,’ I said, trying to describe the scene to Daisy Silver, one of Aunt Debo’s oldest friends. ‘An ambulance came soon after, and then it all got a bit confusing.’

      ‘I expect it did, after such a shock,’ Daisy said in her calm, warm voice, pouring me a mug of coffee and pushing it across the wide, battered pine table in the cosy basement kitchen of her Hampstead house.

      Her ample curves were enveloped in a familiar old rubbed purple velvet kaftan and she had loosened the thick plait of hair that usually circled her head like a silver crown so that it hung down her back to her waist … or where her waist would have been, had she had one.

      ‘Douglas is an awful man! I mean, he’s a doctor, yet instead of getting out to see if the people in the other car needed any help, he just kept on and on at me to say I was driving. Luckily no one was seriously injured, but the mother and two small children in the other car were really shaken up.’

      ‘He does seem to have entirely disregarded his Hippocratic oath,’ she agreed drily.

      ‘Yes and even when the police were questioning him, he insisted the driver of the other car was at fault and wanted me to back him up.’

      ‘Which I’m assuming you didn’t?’

      ‘No, of course not. I told them it was entirely his fault for overtaking on a bend and then, of course, he was even more furious with me. When they breathalysed him, he was way over the limit, so they charged him with drink-driving as well as dangerous driving and goodness knows what else … though, come to think of it, I didn’t tell them about him asking me to pretend to have been the driver.’

      ‘It sounds like he’ll be in enough trouble without that, so I wouldn’t worry about it.’

      ‘It would be just my word against his anyway, wouldn’t it?’

      She nodded. ‘What happened next?’

      ‘We had to go to the police station, but eventually they said I could go, so I got into a taxi and came here. I never gave a thought to how much the fare would cost until we arrived, but I’ll pay you back tomorrow.’ I clamped my hands around the mug of hot coffee.

      ‘That’s not important, and you know I’m always glad to see you, whatever the reason.’

      ‘I do, and it seemed natural to head here,’ I said gratefully, for as well as knowing Daisy from her frequent visits to stay with us in Halfhidden, I’d spent several weeks convalescing with her after the original accident when I was sixteen. She was a child psychiatrist by profession, but I hadn’t been her patient; it was just that Debo had thought a total change of scene would do me good.

      ‘Very sensible,’ she approved. ‘In fact, you behaved extremely well, given the shock you’d had.’

      ‘It could easily have been a fatal crash.’ I shivered. ‘All because he drank too much and drove like an idiot.’

      ‘Health professionals have all the human failings, just like anyone else,’ Daisy said. ‘But I’m horrified he should have asked you to change places in the car with him.’

      ‘I don’t suppose Kieran ever told him about the accident I was involved in – in fact, Douglas probably doesn’t even know I can’t drive.’

      ‘He should never have thought of asking you, whether he did or not. It’s wonderful that the family in the other car weren’t hurt.’

      She smiled at me and pushed over the open tin of coffee-iced biscuits. ‘Have some soothing sugar.’

      ‘Thank you,’ I said, taking one and crunching into the crisp coating.

      For a few moments we munched in amicable silence.

      Then Daisy said with her usual acuity, which I suppose was a vital component of her success as a psychiatrist, ‘Did something else happen, Izzy?’

      ‘Yes – or rather, two things happened just as we hit the other car. One of them was that I briefly went back to Heaven, like I did after the first accident … and then I was right out of my body, looking down.’

      ‘So you went through the bright tunnel again?’ she asked, interested.

      ‘There wasn’t any tunnel this time, I was just momentarily enveloped by light and colour and a strange kind of music … it was lovely. But right before that, just as we struck the other car …’

      I tailed off, trying to frame the words for what I had experienced, and Daisy didn’t push me. Any more than she had when I’d arrived by taxi half an hour before in a distressed condition, and she’d merely greeted me with her usual, ‘Oh, there you are, Izzy! Come in,’ as if I was the most welcome and expected visitor in the world.

      She’d always made me feel that way, especially when I was convalescing with her after that first dreadful accident. It was during that stay, after a trip to the V&A Museum, that I’d developed the consuming interest in textiles that eventually enabled me to help other women escape from grinding poverty. If you looked, there seemed to be a reason for everything that happened in life, good or bad … and that thought brought me back full circle to what I needed to say.

      I looked up at her familiar apple-cheeked, wise face with its clever dark eyes. ‘It was the weirdest thing, Daisy, just as if time was a curtain that ripped open to let me slip through – because suddenly, I was there in the Range Rover on the night of the accident when Harry … when I …’

      ‘That’s interesting,’ Daisy said, ‘because you had no recollection of even getting into the car, СКАЧАТЬ