Annie and Tom's marriage is in mid-life crisis.

They seem to have everything - a lovely home, rewarding jobs and three healthy grown-up children - but, beneath the surface, all is not well. Beneath the surface lies a secret guilt which ensures that whilst they live under the same roof, they sleep in separate beds.

Then, as recession strikes, Tom comes home one evening and drops a bombshell that threatens to destroy everything they have left. Will he and Annie be able to leave the past behind and weather this storm together? Or will it push them further apart?

Annie is about to discover that out of disaster springs the faint rays of hope. As her family rallies together, for the first time in years, her home is filled with people, conversation, tears - and laughter. And, little by little, Annie and Tom start to open up to one another about the terrible, painful truth they have lived with all these years.

Soon a new, unexpected future starts to take shape as Annie and Tom are offered a second chance at happiness. But will they take it?

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Elizabeth Buchan talks about her new novel, Separate Beds

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Zosia said to Annie, ‘I’m glad you got home before I left.’

Annie dumped a whole lot of Christmas shopping on the table and ran her fingers through her hair. Bad-hair day. Very bad-hair day. ‘So am I. Are you in a hurry? Would you like a glass of wine?’

There were just the two of them in the kitchen and the house was quiet and dark. Zosia always turned the lights off as she worked through the rooms. When Annie commented on this thrift, she had replied, ‘We must not waste,’ for the deprivations of Zosia’s upbringing were lodged deep in her.

Annie retrieved a half-drunk bottle of excellent claret left over from the previous evening and gave her a glass.

Zosia took a mouthful and leaned back in the chair. ‘Very nice, Annie.’

‘Here, look . . .’ Annie burrowed in a bag and shook out an expensive man’s sweater. ‘That’s for Tom. Unimaginative, I know, but I haven’t a clue what he wants these days. And here . . .’ She produced a leather notebook. ‘That’s for Emily. I’ve still got to get Jake and Jocasta’s. But look at these . . .’ She waved a box of Christmas lights, plugged them in and, razzle-dazzle, hoop-la, a river of brilliance looped over the table.

‘Beautiful, Annie.’ Zosia closed her eyes. ‘You always make everything so.’

Warm, sparkling clean, filled with things that made life easy and convenient . . . the house that had everything.

Not really, thought Annie, and the old feelings tore at her chest. This place will never be beautiful while we are as we are.

Remember . . .

The front door opened and closed. ‘Mia . . .’ She uttered the name she had called so many times since her daughter had left. Her voice quivered with pain and anticipation. ‘Mia, is that you?’

‘It’s only me.’ It was Tom and he refused to meet Annie’s eye.

Mia had been gone for a couple of weeks and a silence had fallen over the family. Tom had promised to go up to Manchester to try to make contact at the university to which Mia had almost certainly returned as she had every intention of finishing her degree. But, by the look of him, he hadn’t done any such thing. ‘Sorry,’ he confessed. ‘Something came up at work.’

He was lying. What Tom should have said was: I didn’t want to go and look for Mia because I feel so awful/ ashamed/angry . . . you could take your pick as to the explanation. Actually, if Annie knew anything about her husband all of them applied. 

‘So, work came before your daughter.’ Annie plucked at a lock of her hair and the anguish turned to aggression. ‘As always, Tom.’

‘Don’t start.’ He shrugged.

At that moment, Annie hated him more than she had ever hated anyone. It was a new emotion and its intensity was akin to love. She also hated herself because this would never have happened if she and Tom had been cleverer and clearer about their marriage. ‘If you won’t go, I’ll go.’

‘She won’t see you, Annie.’ 

‘How do you know?’

He looked at her oddly. ‘You accuse me of not knowing my children. But I do know Mia. She won’t see you . . .’

Tom had been right. That had been then and Mia still had not come home, or phoned. She had written just once.

She had been gone for almost five years.

Come home. Please . . .

Annie draped the lights artistically over her handbag and smiled at Zosia. ‘I’m not telling you what I’ve got for you.’

Zosia pointed to the diamond ring on Annie’s finger. ‘Do you want me to clean it before I go?’

Her mother’s ring (and her grandmother’s before that): hugely valuable but, more than that, part of Annie and irreplaceable. Zosia enjoyed handling it and she loved to
please Annie, who slid it off her finger. ‘Go on, then.’

Zosia buffed away and Annie watched her affectionately. ‘Did I ever tell you Emily stole it? She must have been six or seven. There was such a fuss and everyone was pulling out drawers and upending the rubbish. I was so angry when she owned up. Poor little girl was shaking. But Tom talked to her. Tom was – is – always so good with her, and Emily confessed between sobs she thought I was going to give the ring to Mia.’

Zosia slid it back across the table. ‘But it’s true you can only give it to one of them.’

Annie said, ‘We couldn’t help laughing at Emily, which was unfair on her and made her cross. At the time it was funny.’ She stopped herself and Zosia laid a hand on hers. After a moment, Annie asked, ‘So, have you booked the ticket?’

‘Yes. I will be gone for Christmas and New Year, as you said I could.’

‘Good.’

Zosia raised her eyes to Annie. ‘You are very kind to pay for the ticket. I am grateful.’

The two women smiled at each other. They went way back – to the day Zosia had turned up on the doorstep in answer to Annie’s advert for a cleaner and someone to
help with the school runs – and were friends. It was a friendship springing out of a mutual empathy and a willingness to listen. ‘Careful,’ Tom had warned. ‘You’re
Zosia’s employer.’

‘It’s nothing,’ said Annie, as the phone rang. ‘I want you to know how much I owe you. We owe you. For one thing . . .’ Annie sounded a touch wry ‘. . . I love talking to you.’ She picked up the phone. ‘Tom?’ She listened. ‘Oh, OK. Fine. See you.’ She replaced the receiver.

She poured more wine for Zosia. ‘That was Tom. Not coming home till late. Last-minute dinner with someone from the Foreign Office.’ After a minute, she added, ‘It’s been ages since Tom and I had supper together.’ A moment of further reflection ‘It happens in the run-up to Christmas. That’s the World Service for you . . . all the media, I imagine.’

‘Of course,’ said Zosia

They exchanged a look.

Annie knew what Zosia would have liked to say: ‘Tom spends more time than he should on his work and has done for years.’ And it was true that, since Mia had stormed out, things had been bad, really bad. But not bad enough for them to fold entirely.

At seven o’clock, Zosia leaped to her feet and declared she must go. Annie knew she liked to be home in time to phone her mother in Warsaw. At the door, Annie kissed her cheek fondly and said, ‘See you next week.’

The door clicked shut and the house was still. If only, Annie thought. If only . . . if only . . . So many things. If Tom hadn’t taken Mia’s room, I could sit in there for a bit
and think about her. But Tom now occupied the room – usurper by default.

She wandered back into the kitchen, drank the rest of her wine and observed the Christmas lights still draped in a starry Milky Way over her handbag. After a while, she reached for the pile of post Zosia had placed on the table and slit open the top envelope.

A plain card stamped with the House of Commons insignia was from Sadie who had written ‘love from Us’ and underlined ‘love’. A further note on the left-hand side
of the card revealed penitence: ‘Sorry about this.’ And ‘PS Yup, Christmas is designed to torture women. PPS Give Tom a kiss from me.’

‘Wretch,’ murmured Annie. How often did she and Sadie speak? Practically every day. Had they sworn not to send each other Christmas cards? Yes. But the (sweetly duplicitous) joke was that Annie had already posted hers to Sadie. ‘Sorry about this,’ she had written on the left-hand side of the card – and inserted a handwritten piece of paper: ‘Dearest Sadie. You make me laugh so much. Try not to kill Andrew over the holiday.’

Each knew exactly what the other was driving at. It had been obvious from the moment they’d met a decade since when Sadie had turned up with Andrew on an MP’s factfi nding hospital visit to St Brigid’s. Having negotiated the arid patch between her second and third marriages, during which she had fl ed to England from the US, Sadie brimmed with thankfulness and relief. Annie was more or less coasting through her marriage and worried that her responses to life had become muted. Yet, they recognized each other as cut from the same cloth. True, if she and Tom had still been talking, really talking, really in tune with each other, and Sadie had been as settled as she was now, the quality and energy of their friendship might have been less intense. For a start, there would have been less necessity for the deep trawl of each other’s thoughts and minds. 

Annie worked through the rest of the cards, placing to one side those that could be pinned to a ribbon and hung in the sitting room and, on a separate pile, those that
required a response.

‘Give Tom a kiss from me.’

Annie frowned. She recollected a fleeting and careful meeting of their mouths on Tom’s last birthday. Well meant. Dutiful even, but nothing more. ( ‘I am drunk on you,’ he had once said, after kissing her.) But since then?

She opened the final card, which was large and expensive looking, and the angel from Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin of the Rocks winged into the kitchen. Characteristically shadowed in the artist’s unmistakable manner, typically mysterious, heavy-lidded, yearning, he was both messenger and guardian, carrying secrets he would never tell.

Something about him – a sadness, a darkness, loss – spoke to Annie as she sat on in the empty house in which there was no Tom, no Jake or Emily. No Mia.