Squabbles could be patched up, jacket elbows, grazed knees, but not abandonment, not betrayal, not four decades of silence. Astrid opened her mouth, but her throat was still too tight to release any words.

The mourning was, in fact, trickier than it sounded. It wasn’t just a question of stagey weeping at the back of a church. The acting required significant research, sometimes several phone calls with the client for background information, and then a dramatic performance sustained over many hours. Astrid had never thought before how funerals are prim

She shrugged. Astrid saw then that she’d been badly hurt, badly treated and had, like a winter shrew, responded with shrinkage. Somehow, she’d let herself get so small that she’d ended up in an isolated gatehouse on the edge of a Scottish estate, writing an old man’s life.

It’ll be all over the papers again, they’ll want to know what became of me, and then they’ll come up here demanding answers, and that’s just . . . well . . . we can’t possibly allow that, can we? The intrusion. People coming up here. Not now – my God – not after what we’ve done.’ ‘What we’ve done?’ ‘Yes! Good Lord, Eileen, I should think that was o

the wind had picked up, coming in off the sea, rushing over the ridge of the Downs, clear and hard, carrying salt and complicated scents of wildflowers with seagulls cresting in, and over, clouds travelling fast, faster, onwards, past; and the power builds and hums, the muscles strain for release and at last familiar feet run up inside, and there i

‘Your heart,’ she said, ‘will have been compensating for years without you even knowing there was something wrong. But then at some point it will have started to send out signals.’ Dizzy spells, tiredness, shortness of breath; a sense of things misfiring, spinning; palpitations, insomnia. The notion that her heart had been signalling to her made he

But a good editor can make a film. You’re basically sitting in a room for sixteen hours a day with the director, and together you figure out what shots work best – you know, whether one scene is flowing, or a character’s dominating, or underplayed, or which look or cut best conveys a certain feeling or mood. It can be incredibly subtle. I could sho

None of these objects had any monetary value, they were a random collection, life frass.

Astrid felt, oddly, as if she’d known Nina for years. Perhaps this had something to do with Nina’s response to the windmill; she’d been almost shaken in its presence, and Astrid had recognised this, because it had been her own reaction when she took the keys over forty years ago, and let herself into the tower for the first time. Standing on the th