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the phone rang.
    ‘ Darling! ’
    Rosie’s mother Angie – there was only twenty-two years between them, so sometimes she was Mum and sometimes she was Angie, depending on whether Rosie felt like the younger or the older person in the conversation – still, after two years, found it difficult sometimes to coordinate telephone calls from Australia.
    When Rosie called, early in the morning was usually best, but sometimes she caught her mum and her younger brother Pip at the thin end of a long afternoon’s barbecuing and beer-drinking in the sunshine, and the children would be yelling down the phone too. Rosie felt sorry for them – she’d only seen Shane, Kelly and Meridian once and they were constantly forced to make conversation with their auntie Rosie, who for all they knew might have a huge wart and grey hair – and it was tricky to chat. But now, with Gerard having his pudding, a large bowl of Frosties, it wasn’t a bad time at all.
    ‘Hi, Mum.’
    Four, Rosie had recently found herself thinking darkly. Four. That’s how many of her friends had met someone and got married during the period she and Gerard had been dating, before they’d even moved in together. And she’d ignored every single alarm bell. She’d been young and carefree when they met, it seemed now (though at the time she’d been desperate to meet someone). Looking at it today, from the wrong side of thirty, the idea that all that time and all that love might not be leading anywhere sometimes gave her vertigo.
    Rosie had heard her family all talk about the good life down in Oz, the swimming pools in the back gardens and the lovely weather and the fresh fish. Her mother, whose patience was constantly stretched by Pip’s three children, and whose unflattering opinions on Gerard (not Gerard himself, he was perfectly pleasant, but his seeming unwillingness to marry, provide for and impregnate her only daughter, preferably all by last Thursday) she rarely hesitated to share, was always trying to persuade her down under for a year or so, but Rosie loved London. Always had.
    She loved its bustling sense of being in the middle of things; its people, all nationalities, hugger-mugger on the crowded streets; theatre and exhibition openings (although she never went to any); great historic monuments (although she never visited them). She had absolutely no desire to give up her life and move halfway around the world to where, she was sure, cleaning old people’s bums was much the same and cleaning her nieces’ bums for free would be thrown in.
    ‘Darling, I have a proposition for you.’
    Angie sounded excited. Rosie groaned mentally.
    ‘I can’t work down under, remember? I don’t have the qualifications or the points or whatever it is,’ she’d said.
    ‘Ha, oh well, who cares about that,’ said her mother, as if there was no connection between her dad leaving and her failing half her A levels that year. ‘Anyway, it’s something else.’
    ‘And I don’t want to … be a nanny.’
    According to comprehensive emails from her mum, Shane was a thug, Kelly was a princess and Meridian was developing an eating disorder at the age of four. And since she’d moved in with Gerard and they’d got a mortgage, Rosie hadn’t been ableto save even the tiniest bit of her salary. She couldn’t afford the ticket in a million years.
    ‘I don’t think so. Mum, I’m thirty-one! I think it’s time I stood on my own two feet, don’t you?’
    ‘Well, it’s not that,’ Angie said. ‘This is something else. Something quite different. It’s not us, darling. It’s Lilian.’



Chapter Two
Fudge
The facts are that fudge (and its northern, crunchy variant, tablet) appears to be an addictive substance and should be handled with extreme care. Overconsumption will result in illness and premature death. * There are those who say that eating a tangerine or other citrus fruit when one first starts to become nauseous will freshen the digestive system and allow it