Surely this wasn’t normal?

But then so much about Bean wasn’t normal. To call in a psychologist now, well, it felt a bit like trying to outrun a tidal wave of odd, thought Marianna. She lifted Bean’s hand off the book and smiled as she laid it on the floor. It’d been her own favorite book as a child and she wondered which story Bean liked the most. Ulysses? Pandora? Hercules?

Leaning down to kiss Bean Marianna noticed the chandelier and its old corded electrical wire. In her mind she saw a spark leap in a brilliant arc onto the bedding, smoldering at first then bursting into flames as they slept.

She stepped back, closed her eyes, and placed the invisible wall round Bean.

There, safe.

She turned off the light and lay in bed, her body feeling sticky and flabby. The closer she got to her mother the heavier her body felt, as though her mother had her own atmosphere and gravity. Tomorrow Spot would arrive, and it would begin. And end.

She tried to get comfortable, but the night was close and the covers collapsed and stuck to her. She kicked them off. But what really stood between her and sleep wasn’t the stinking heat, the snoring child, the clinging bedclothes.

It was a banana.

Why did they always goad her? And why, at the age of forty-seven, did she still care?

She turned over, trying to find a cool place on the now damp bedding.

Banana. And she heard again their laughter. And saw their mocking looks.

Let it go, she begged herself. She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the banana and the clocks tsk, tsk, tsking in her head.

Julia Martin sat at the vanity and took off her single string of pearls. Simple, elegant, a gift from her father for her eighteenth birthday.

“A lady is always understated, Julia,” he’d said. “A lady never shows off. She always puts others at ease. Remember that.”

And she had. As soon as he’d said it she knew the truth of it. And all the stumbling and bumbling she’d done, all the uncertainties and solitude of her teen years, had fallen away. Ahead of her stretched a clear path. Narrow, yes, but clear. The relief she felt was absolute. She had a purpose, a direction. She knew who she was and what she had to do. Put others at ease.

As she undressed she went over the events of the day, making a list of all the people she might have hurt, all the people who might dislike her because of her words, her inflection, her manner.

And she thought of the nice French man and their conversation in the garden. He’d seen her smoking. What must he think of her? And then she’d flirted with the young waiter and accepted a drink. Drinking, smoking, flirting.

God, he must think she was shallow and weak.

She’d do better tomorrow.

She coiled the strand of pearls, like a young snake, onto its soft blue velvet bed then took off her earrings, wishing she could also remove her ears. But she knew it was too late.

The Eleanor rose. Why did they do it? After all these years, when she was trying to be nice, why bring up the rose again?

Let it go, she begged herself, it doesn’t matter. It was a joke. That’s all.

But the words had already coiled themselves inside her and wouldn’t leave.

Next door, in the Lake Room, Sandra stood on their balcony surrounded by the wild stars and wondered how they could get the best table for breakfast. She was tired of being served last, always having to insist and even then getting the smallest portions, she was sure of it.

And that Armand, worst bridge player she’d ever seen. Why’d she been paired with him? The staff fawned over him and his wife, probably because they were French. It wasn’t fair. They were staying in that broom closet at the back of the Manoir, the cheapest room. A shopkeeper almost certainly and his cleaning woman wife. Didn’t seem right to have to share the Manoir with them. Still, she’d been courteous. They couldn’t ask for more.

Sandra was hungry. And angry. And tired. And tomorrow Spot would arrive and it would get even worse.

From inside their splendid room, Thomas looked at his wife’s rigid back.

He’d married a beautiful woman and still, from a distance and from the back, she was lovely.

But somehow, recently, her head seemed to have expanded and the rest shrunk, so that he had the impression he was now attached to a flotation device, deflated. Orange and soft and squishy and no longer doing its job.

Swiftly, while Sandra’s back was turned, he took off the old cufflinks his father had given him on his eighteenth birthday.

“My own father gave me these, and now it’s time to pass them to you,” his father had said. Thomas had taken the cufflinks, and the weary velvet pouch they came in, and shoved them into his pocket in a cavalier move he’d hoped would wound his father. And he could tell it had.