dogs’ excited barking made her hurry to open the door and as they walked out into the dark she admired, as she often did, the beauty of the lights all around the square. Golden Square’s residents could be split into two groups: the people who owned whole houses, had two cars, and employed someone else to cut their grass, and those whose families had lived there for donkeys’ years and who couldn’t have afforded to buy one now even with the state of the market, but who were holding on for the next property boom. They cut their own grass, occasionally rented out bits of the houses to tenants, and looked enviously at their neighbours’ double glazing.
Nora was one of the latter type. Her parents had inherited the house and had moved in anxiously in the 1940s, fresh from a tiny flat above a gentlemen’s draper’s shop in Camden Street, terrified they’d never be able to heat or redecorate this comparatively enormous residence.
They’d been so proud of their new home, but always anxious about living somewhere so grand. As if they didn’t really belong.
Nobody’s windows were so clean or their garden so weedfree as the Flynns’. It was as if they felt keeping the place spotless made up for the fact that they had to repaint it all themselves. It was years before they could afford to have a roofer fix the tiles. When it rained heavily, Nora’s mother used to trail round the house nervously, waiting for the arrival of the next spot of damp. Unaccustomed to the whole notion of a garden, they’d kept the lawn shorn and attempted little else.
One of the biggest worries had been the behaviour of the various basement tenants over the years. Nora could remember her mother’s prayers that the next lot of new people would be quiet.
‘I’ll say a novena to St Jude,’ she’d say. Sometimes the novenas worked and sometimes they didn’t. Nora’s parents never wondered why, they just accepted it. God’s choice was not theirs to question.
If they could see her now, Nora thought sadly. They’d have told her to keep the dogs on the lead and her father would have been following at a crouch, plastic bag in hand, waiting for the inevitable poop.
Dogs were supposed to be kept on the lead in the square, but it was easy enough to work out which animals were there and whether it was safe to let her pair off. It was safe this evening. Nora unclipped the leads and let the dogs race off under the gentle lamplight. She sat down on her favourite bench, stretched out her legs and let the strains of the day slough off her. There were only a couple of other people about. Nora liked all the doggie people in the square. Having dogs did something to people. Made them softer, gentler.
Prudence Maguire didn’t have a dog; no surprise there. Rumour had it that her daughter had once had a hamster, but it had escaped, and Prudence had refused permission to have the couch ripped apart to find it. Nora imagined a ghostly hamster still rattling round inside the Maguire family couch, making little eldritch squeaks of distress that Prudence would totally ignore.
She glanced at her watch. Ten to seven. Megan would have landed. She’d be in the taxi soon, on her way. Nora closed her eyes and wished for the first time ever that her niece wasn’t coming. Nora had tried hard to be a steadying influence in her nieces’ lives. Her brother Fionn would have wanted his big sister to take care of his daughters when he died. But it hadn’t been easy. Marguerite, their mother, was the exact opposite of Nora: a woman who lived in a state of constant, almost child-like happiness, she was prone to both wild adventures and falling passionately in love.
She was the type who clearly needed a man around and, although she’d adored Fionn, he wasn’t long dead before she was anxiously looking for another strong male to take care of her.
She also had strange views on how to bring up her daughters.
When the carrots the children had planted hadn’t grown in Nora’s bit of garden, Marguerite stuck shop-bought ones into the earth instead and pretended to dig them up.
‘That’s appalling,’ Nora had said, unable to stop herself. ‘How can they learn about real life when you fake it for them like that?’
‘They’re only a few carrots,’ Marguerite had laughed. ‘Don’t be so serious, Nora.’
And now Marguerite was sunning herself in Ibiza with her latest hunk and didn’t appear to be treating Megan’s situation as worrying.
‘Darling, it’ll all blow over,’ Marguerite had reportedly said to Pippa when her elder daughter had phoned with the news.
Nora hadn’t spoken to Marguerite in years. It wasn’t possible to kill someone over the phone but Nora didn’t want to take any chances.
So Nora was left to pick up the pieces. But how could she? Megan still didn’t know that huge, clean carrots didn’t magically appear a couple of weeks after you planted seeds.
The cassette player in the taxi had been blasting out Moroccan music all the way from the airport and the driver, a very slender, dark-skinned man with long, artistic fingers that tapped the steering wheel in time to the beat, hadn’t spoken at all since Megan had got into the cab.
‘Very good,’ was all he’d said when she gave him the address.
‘This is it,’ she said, sitting forward in the seat at the taxi slowed down in Golden Square.
‘Very good,’ he said again, applying the brakes with a firm foot.
Megan shot forward in the back seat and banged her head on the headrest of the passenger seat. The taxi driver looked around in alarm.
‘It’s fine,’ Megan said quickly, holding a hand up in the international ‘all fine’ gesture.
He still looked alarmed.
‘Really fine,’ she said. ‘I’m OK, honestly.’
She handed him the money plus a generous tip. When you didn’t want to communicate, Megan had learned it was best to hand out big tips. It was like saying, ‘I’m not a rude bitch because I’m famous, really, but here’s a large tip, just to make sure you like me.’
‘Very good,’ the driver said.
It was clearly the only English he spoke. Poor man. He wasn’t at home here either, she thought, hauling her stuff out and shivering in the chilly night air.
Megan couldn’t actually remember the first time she and Pippa had come to stay with Nora. Their aunt and her narrow, quirky house in Golden Square had always been a part of their lives, it seemed. Yet she knew it wasn’t always so. It was only when Dad died that they’d begun to stay with their aunt for long periods of time. It was clear, though nobody had ever said as much, that Mum hadn’t coped well with her husband’s death, hence Nora had stepped in to take care of her little nieces.
Golden Square, with its endless cycle of interesting tenants downstairs, and various motley dogs, cats and even once, a parakeet, had filled the gap left by Megan’s father. Yet everyone appeared to forget that it was Nora’s brother who’d died. She had every right to be as devastated as Mum, yet she never said anything about her own grief. She’d simply moved into their lives, being there when she was needed, for summer holidays, for Christmases, her pain on hold while she did her duty.
Nora must have been watching out for Megan now because the front door opened and Nora appeared silhouetted in the hall light, trying
