People assumed you couldn’t have much of a life without children, but they were wrong. Irene and William had wanted kids. It hadn’t worked out for them, but Irene had had a perfectly good life anyway. A husband who loved her, a job as a dental receptionist that she’d enjoyed more than she’d ever expected to, volunteering at the Red Cross. Trips to the theater, holidays in Italy. What was wrong with that? She could do with a bit more of it, if she were honest. And she wasn’t done yet, despite what people thought; she wasn’t in death’s waiting room. She’d the Villa Cimbrone she wanted to visit, in Ravello, and Positano, where they’d filmed The Talented Mr. Ripley. Oh, and Pompeii!
Irene had read in a newspaper article that the happiest people on earth were unmarried childless women. She could see why—there was a lot to be said for that sort of freedom, for not being answerable to anyone, for living exactly how you pleased. Only, once you’d fallen in love you could never be truly free, could you? It was too late by then.
After William died, Irene fell into one of her moods. Depression, they called it now, though when she was younger, it was just moods. Angela called it the Black Dog. Irene had been visited, infrequently, by the dog ever since she was a young woman. Sometimes she took to her bed, sometimes she plodded through. The moods took her suddenly, sometimes triggered by an obvious sadness （her third miscarriage, her last）， though sometimes they descended without warning, on the brightest of days. She kept her head above water and she never went under because William didn’t let her. William always saved her. And then when William was gone, miraculously, Angela stepped in.
* * *
The year William died, 2012, Christmas crept up on Irene. Somehow she’d managed to miss the gradual appearance on shop shelves of decorations and festive food, she’d turned a deaf ear to the annoying music, and then suddenly, it was freezing cold, and it was December and people were carrying trees along the lane.
Irene received invitations—one from her friend Jen, who’d moved to Edinburgh with her husband, and another from a cousin she barely knew who lived in Birmingham of all places—but she declined them with barely a thought. She couldn’t face the Christmas traveling, she said, which was quite true, although the real reason she felt she ought to stay at home was that if she didn’t spend Christmas alone this year, then next year would be the first one without William, or the one after that. All the Christmases for the rest of her life were going to be without William. She thought it best to just get the first one over with.
Angela, who was sensitive about this sort of thing, said that at least Irene should pop round on Christmas Eve. “Daniel and I will be having a takeaway curry from the Delhi Grill,” she said. “Delicious lamb chops. Won’t you join us?”
Irene said that sounded very nice indeed. On the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, she went out to get her hair set and her nails painted, and to buy some small gifts: a hardback copy of The Hare with the Amber Eyes for Angela and a voucher for art supplies for Daniel.
On returning home, she’d barely had time to put down her things when she heard the most peculiar sound, a kind of moaning, a lowing almost. That strange, animal sound was interrupted, sharply, by another: something shattering, glass or china. Shouting came next. “I cannot deal with you! It’s four o’clock in the afternoon and look at you! Just look at you. Jesus!” Daniel’s voice was high and strangled, the voice of someone at the end of their tether; Angela’s was the voice of someone way past that. “Get out!” she was screaming. “Just get out, you . . . you bastard. God, how I wish . . .”
“What? What do you wish? Go on! Say it! What do you wish?”
“I wish you’d never been born!”
Irene heard the sound of someone crashing down the stairs, the front door slamming so hard the whole terrace seemed to shake. From the window she watched Daniel storm past, his skin livid, his hands balled into fists at his sides. Angela came reeling out into the street a few moments later; she was falling-down drunk. Literally— Irene had to go outside to help her up. She managed—after a fashion, after a great deal of consoling and cajoling and gentle and then not-so-gentle persuasion—to get Angela inside and up the stairs to bed.
Angela talked all the while, mumbling to herself, scarcely audible at times. Irene heard this, though: “Everyone told me to get rid of it, you know that? I didn’t listen. I didn’t listen. Oh, I wish I’d had your good fortune, Irene.”