Night Music by Jojo Moyes

Laurent.
    He had reacted, as she had suspected he would, with delight, then horror when she told him what she was considering. ‘But why?’ he demanded. ‘You have me and Mary to help. Kitty would love a brother or sister – she has begged us for one so many times.’
    ‘We agreed, Laurent,’ she said. ‘We agreed no more children. I couldn’t cope with two.’
    ‘You don’t have to cope with one,’ he had retorted, ‘and I have never minded. But you can’t deprive me – deprive us – of this child because it doesn’t fit in with your schedule.’ His face told her she must concede. He asked for so little.
    She never confessed her dark thoughts as she passed each pregnancy milestone, as birth became an impending date in her diary. And he had been right: when Thierry arrived, his arms out thrust in protest against his delivery, perhaps against his unwanted nascence, she had loved him with the same instinctive passion as she loved Kitty. And felt a deep relief when, three months later, she had been able to return to work.
    Isabel pulled her scarf round her neck, and strode down the path to the woods, the moisture-laden cow parsley and long grass catching at her boots. It was the first time she had been on her own for weeks. She had seen the children off to school two hours earlier, Thierry ducking away from her kiss, shuffling off with his uniform stiff on his shoulders, Kitty setting out with her customary determination.
    She had looked forward to being alone again – God knew she had longed for some time to herself. But she missed them. Without the noise and bustle of the children, the house had seemed too sad, too overwhelming, and within an hour she had realised that if she didn’t do something, she would sink into melancholy. She could not face unpacking the remaining boxes, did not feel robust enough to start the Sisyphean exercise which would be cleaning the place, so she had gone for a walk. After all, there was nothing a walk couldn’t put right, Mary had told her often enough.
    She had decided to cut through the woods to the village shop. The simple act of buying milk and something for supper would give her a focus. She would make a stew or roast a chicken for the children to come home to.
    Somehow, it was less upsetting to think about Laurent when she was outside. A year on, she found that there were times now when she could think of him in relation to the things she had loved, rather than what she had lost. The sadness never went away, she had been told, but it would became easier to cope with.
    She thrust her hands into her pockets, breathing in the tang of new growth, observing the shoots of bulbs beneath the trees or hinting at where a flowerbed might once have been. Perhaps I’ll make him a garden, she thought. But she knew it was unlikely: digging, forking and cutting with shears would be too hard on her hands. Gardening had long been on the unofficial list of things violinists couldn’t do.
    She had reached the edge of the woods, and walked their length, the lake to her left, trying to remember where she had noticed a gap. She found it and ducked through. On the other side the ground was even less contained than it was around the house. Briefly, she turned back: its dark-red expanse and haphazard windows stared back at her without warmth or welcome. Not yet hers. Not yet a home.
    You mustn’t think like that, she scolded herself. It will be our home if we make it so. They now had hot water, albeit at an exorbitant price, and a vague metallic-scented warmth in some rooms. The plumber had told her the radiators needed bleeding, but he had been so patronising that she hadn’t asked him what that meant. As there was a huge crack in the bath, they had to wash in a tin tub, a state of affairs Kitty protested about bitterly every morning.
    She stopped to examine some oversized fungi fanning from a rotten tree-trunk then peered up at the overcast sky, visible in filigree patterns through the