The Turning Point: A gripping love story, keep the tissues close...

‘What do you do? That you travel from London to Lynn?’

‘I write,’ said Frankie. ‘And you?’

‘I teach Alexander Technique.’

‘Is that when you’re meant to walk with a penny between your bum-cheeks and a pile of books on your head?’

How Ruth had laughed. ‘No – but that’s how our grandmas were taught to walk, nice and ladylike,’ she’d said. Somehow, she’d detected that Frankie suffered headaches. ‘Come to me for a few sessions,’ she said. ‘Mate’s rates.’

Scott. What just happened? And what could happen next? Suddenly it struck Frankie that she wanted Ruth to know.

I met a man. Like no other.

Ruth phoned her immediately.

‘There are only clichés to describe it. What he’s like. I’m a bloody writer and I can’t do better than Love at first sight.’

‘But actually, you can’t do better than Love at first sight,’ Ruth laughed down the phone. ‘What could beat that? I have to see you!’

Frankie gazed out of the window again. The landscape was now passing by fast in a blur. When did the train pick up speed? When did the points change? When did they get so far from London, so close to King’s Lynn? Reality felt suddenly distorted. However present and alert, alive and sentient she’d felt in London, actually she was hurtling back to the real Frankie – Norfolk and children, the house that leaked and page after page of bare paper devoid of all trace of Alice.

‘Don’t let him leave before you’ve seen him again,’ Ruth said. ‘You can’t let him go just because of clichés and complications.’

‘Canada is a pretty big complication,’ Frankie said.

‘Rubbish,’ said Ruth so passionately that it struck Frankie she ought to believe her.

‘I have to go – the train is pulling in to Lynn.’

‘I’ll be phoning you later,’ said Ruth.

Her mother had cleaned the fridge though Frankie had cleaned it the day before she left. Her mother had also reorganized its contents. It was a typical gesture that could be interpreted one way or the other and responded to graciously or defensively. Her mother had gone by the time Frankie arrived home yet she didn’t know whether to be relieved or affronted.

Mum. Mother. Mother dear. Having a sparse relationship with your mother was as complex as having an overinvolved one. Would Annabel some day feel as distant from Frankie as Frankie felt from Margaret?

She left the kitchen and went to the children’s rooms. The beds were made and it was a stark sight. The children never made their beds until, bizarrely, they were just about to get into them each evening. She cast an eye over the bathroom. Sam had obviously had a wee and forgotten to flush. Margaret was obviously making a point by leaving it for all to see – though she’d picked up towels, wiped the basin and hung a damp flannel over the tap. Frankie thought of Peta’s boys and she wondered why her mother never passed comment on their bedroom walls festooned with semi-naked women, their floors obliterated with piles of dirty clothes. Neither Peta nor Frankie could work that one out at all.

She checked her phone. Nothing. She made a call.

‘I’m home and it’s very quiet.’

‘I’m in the studio,’ said Scott. ‘Listen.’

‘How was Grandma?’ Frankie asked Annabel who’d run across the playground into her arms chanting Mummy Mummy Mummy – something she’d never do usually, though admittedly Frankie was usually late and her daughter was cross. This afternoon, she was bang on time. ‘Was everything OK when I was gone?’

Annabel settled herself into the front seat, fastened her seat belt and leant forward to open the glove compartment. Mummy Mummy Mummy. Chocolates and crisps to choose from.

‘She was all right,’ Annabel said. ‘She wouldn’t let us watch The Simpsons. She wouldn’t even let Sam watch The Simpsons and he’d done all his homework and everything.’

‘You can watch double Simpsons this evening.’

‘Her cooking is disgusting.’

‘I don’t like the word disgusting. Did she let you have ketchup?’

‘Yes – but she blobbed it on because she said too much was bad for us. Stop checking your phone. You have to be hands-free to drive.’

That evening, during triple TheSimpsons, Frankie’s phone beamed through a text from Scott. He’d attached a photograph of the control room at the studio – his left arm just visible; a bank of switches and knobs and empty paper cups.

THE Abbey Road.

It wasn’t how she’d imagined it.

Been thinking of you, Frankie. Scott x

She looked around the room. Could she really envisage him here? Was there room on the sofa? Yes, if they all squashed up a little. Did he like The Simpsons? Would he like everything she liked and would it matter if there were some things he didn’t? She alighted on her CDs and LPs. Would he approve of her taste? Was Duran Duran a deal breaker? She glanced at Annabel and Sam. What on earth would her children make of a man in their home, a man in their mother’s life?

If you ever get a boyfriend I will spill his dinner down him and make his life hell.

Annabel had come out with this, apropos of nothing, a few months ago. But the three of them had laughed because the sentiment was so random and the concept so far-fetched anyway.

‘Mum – no double-screening, that’s what you say to Sam.’ Annabel tried to take Frankie’s phone. ‘It’s “Grift of the Magi” – we love this episode!’

‘I missed you,’ Frankie said to her children, nudging them, trying to kiss them.

Sam grunted and Annabel said shh!

I miss you she texted to Scott.

Frankie looked up and away from the burning brightness of the empty paper in front of her, gazed out of the window to the sunlight dancing on dewy grass, the light from the unseen sea bathing the garden with clarity. But she wasn’t focused on the garden. She was back in the hotel foyer with Kate Moss on the magazine and Scott saying care to join me? Over and over again she replayed the sensation of turning and seeing him and hearing his voice and thinking me? me? really?

She started to write, displaced words and short justifications, a technique she used to shape character and build a backstory.

Polite/thoughtful (hates olives/didn’t say)

Strong/principled (raised daughter single-handed)

Talented/modest (shining career/doesn’t court limelight)

Secure (happy to say he’d been thinking about me)

Handsome (but not the point)

Foreigner.

‘A man who lives on a bloody mountain in sodding Canada.’

She took another page and quickly sketched Alice, enveloping her with chains. Alice in Chains she scrawled, leaving the table and going over to scan her CDs for the band of the same name. She played ‘Check My Brain’ very loudly, her forehead pressed against the wall.