Chapter 1

I'd known Keith and Jenny Ainsley forever: well, maybe not exactly that long, but certainly a lot of years. We had all started off together at the local primary school, when Jenny was still Jennifer Brent, and then we'd progressed right through our educations until it was time to head off to university. By this time Jenny and Keith had been an item for several years and had places on undergraduate courses at Bristol University, where Jenny read Sociology and Keith History, while I, Neil Hotchkiss, was going to the University of Kent to do my degree in Architecture.

Keith and I had both been interested in History and although Jenny was very bright in her own right, I suspect that she only took the subject at school because Keith, her first boyfriend since 14, did. We were fortunate to live in the suburbs of a major city and once we were old enough we often took a bus into the centre and spent hours visiting museums and sites of historical interest. These visits were more than just academic curiosity, however, we generally had a good laugh and honed our social skills at the same time and often Jenny would rope in one of her female friends to keep me company. As I got older I had fleeting relationships with some of these girls, but never formed the same kind of deep relationship as my two best friends had.

Having said that, however, it was during those heady days of adolescence that our future paths started to develop, as Keith leant more towards social history and I became increasingly interested in old buildings.

I'm maybe giving the impression here that we were all a bunch of nerds and swots, whereas, in fact, we were kids who did all the things that other kids did and still enjoyed most of the contemporary cultural interests of our time. During our mid- and later-teens we were allowed greater freedoms by our parents and we became more adventurous. I'm sure that Keith's and Jenny's respective parents knew and accepted that they were sexually active, and I was no virgin, although I had no regular partner. We often went camping during our summer breaks from school, with either a girl I was going out with at the time, or sometimes with other school friends; and although we never shared, sexually, a degree of public nudity was usually a regular occurrence during these trips.

At this point I should perhaps say something about my relationship with Jenny. I have older sisters whose friends were around when I was growing up, so when I started school my female classmates weren't alien creatures, they were just other children. I can't even remember how Jenny and Keith and I became friends: it was just a collection of circumstances that just happened over time. It helped, I suppose, that we three and our mothers who took us and collected us each day, all lived in fairly close proximity to each other, albeit in different streets, and we made the return journeys each day on foot; giving the adults time to chat as we walked. And so although we were friendly towards our other classmates, the three of us had that special affinity with each other.

Anyway, getting back to me and Jenny. For a long time, Jenny was just a girl that I saw almost everyday and liked a lot; same as I did Keith. We didn't see much of each other outside of school when we were younger, although we went to each other's birthday parties and sometimes our mothers got together for coffee and gossip at weekends. I must have known that Jenny was quite pretty, but it was never something that Keith and I ever commented on.

I guess that of the three of us, I was the most naïve and least worldly, so as Keith and I reached puberty and he started to talk about Jenny as being someone who was maybe more than just a friend, I didn't really understand what he meant; and when he eventually asked her out on a date during our early teens, I was never jealous that I was now excluded from their activities; in other ways nothing really altered. Again the changes seemed so natural that it was just absorbed into our everyday lives.

Of course, when the time came for Keith and Jenny's relationship to become sexual, he and I talked about it before and afterwards. We both had a theoretical understanding about sex by that time, but after the deed was done, so to speak, I was only left to imagine what my own first experience would be like; and as I said before, by the time that we began to go camping together during the summer months of our mid-teens, I was also no longer just imagining. Jenny and I often exchanged hugs and chaste kisses when greeting or saying goodbye to each other, but I don't think that I ever seriously thought of her as anything other than a close friend: she was easy on the eye and sexy, but otherwise forbidden fruit as far as I was concerned.

By the time that we all finished our A-levels and were about to leave that phase of our education, we all knew that our lives were about to change fundamentally, and that significant changes in our relationship were also inevitable. The summer prior to us leaving for our respective universities was largely spent with us all working to try and earn some cash to help ease the financial burden of the next three years, with the prospect of inevitable student loans to come. I found work in a pub, but Jenny and Keith had jobs working regular office hours, so unless they came to see me during my split shifts, we didn't see so much of each other during those months. Our original plan was to all holiday together for at least a couple of weeks before the university term started in the autumn, but for one reason or another, that never happened.

All too soon it was time to start the next chapter of our lives, so after an evening of reminiscing and alcoholic over-indulgence with a few other school friends, we said our goodbyes. A few days later, Jenny's father packed hers and Keith's belongs into a hired van and they set off for Bristol, while my things were loaded into my older sister's car for the trip to Canterbury, Kent.

The three of us stayed in touch during the university years and spent time together when we were all home during the vacations, or I sometimes stayed with Jenny and Keith in their off-campus accommodation, as they both had jobs to make ends meet and so didn't always travel back to their parents' homes; although we always tried to get a little vacation time, either in the UK or the beach resorts of southern Europe. I think that they had talked about marriage for some time, but sensibly were waiting until they both had a chance to get jobs and save some money after finishing their degrees. I also knew that if I wanted to be a practicing architect I would need to do some more, post-graduate, studying.

So now we jump ahead a few more years: Keith and Jenny were by now both teachers; Keith in a Secondary School and Jenny in a Further Education college. I was qualified and was fortunate to have gained employment with a quite well-known architectural practice in London. I still saw my two best friends, but only a handful of times a year, if I was lucky. Jenny had had a daughter, Miranda, a name which had somehow become abbreviated to 'Manda'. Jenny of course had to temporarily interrupt her teaching career, but both she and Keith appeared to have embraced parenthood wholeheartedly. I had tried to visit them at least monthly during the pregnancy and afterwards, and although none of us were really religious, I was designated the baby's godfather. My story begins just after Manda's second birthday.

I got a phone call from Jenny on Friday evening:

"—Hi, Neil! Fancy popping round in the morning, we haven't seen you for a few weeks."

"—Sure, Jen—any particular time?"

"—No—but if you get here early I'll make you one of those nice bacon sandwiches you like, with crusty bread. Ooh, you couldn't stop on the way and pick up a loaf, could you."