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By Root 1662 0

of that. I can almost remember the look in her eye as she'd stood at the kitchen window one day after lunch, watching Tim, huge, burly and kindly, with his father's shock of red hair, bowling at a tree stump in the back garden. She'd wanted him too, and she'd got him. And if I'm honest, I thought, gazing down at the pattern on my tapestry kneeler, I'd looked at her orderly family, her punctual meals in the uncluttered town house with its state-of-the-art appliances, its colour TV and microwave, her quiet, professional, teacher parents, and thought: and I'll have some of that. Of course, I didn't marry her brother – that would have been too neat, and apart from anything else she didn't have one – but my eyes, shall we say, were opened: to an urbane, civilized lifestyle. One that revolved around restaurants and concerts and political debate instead of wheat yields and set-aside and crop rotation. I was smitten.

When, some years later, I'd met Ant, tall, tousled, slightly myopic in his John Lennon glasses, an academic I'd found in a bookshop I was working in, I knew it was a blueprint I'd been working to. And so everything slotted into place. Caro got her heart's desire, and I got mine. In fact, Caro, even more so, because when Dad died, suddenly, unexpectedly, not in a tangle in his combine, as some farmers do, but just quietly in his sleep and, it transpired, intestate, Caro got the farm too. She almost hadn't, actually, because everything naturally went to Felicity, but Felicity wouldn't hear of it. No, no, the house and land should go to Tim. It was what Dad had always wanted, she insisted, what he'd said he wanted, what would have happened if he'd flipping well bothered to write it down. Felicity took sufficient from the estate to buy herself a small house in town, and left the bricks, the mortar – the acres – to Tim and Caro.

I wouldn't say Caro moved in with indecent haste, but it must have been a relief to leave the dismal white bungalow in the village and hustle her children into their bedrooms under the eaves, with the playroom downstairs, family kitchen and rambling back garden. The fact that the roof leaked like a sieve and the winter months were spent running from room to room with buckets whilst the damp galloped gaily up the walls was neither here nor there. She'd got her farm, her land, the whole bucolic bit.

As I'd got my bit, I thought, as I watched Jack come back from the altar, fresh from taking his first parish communion, cheeks flaming, eyes down, collar too tight, looking so impossibly like Tim at that age. I'd got my academic: my sensitive, clever Ant, who duly went on to become a don, making me, nearly bursting with pride, a don's wife, and all at the tender age of twenty-nine. Ant, not me. We had a house in college, in Balliol, one of those dear yellow stone terraced ones, looking out onto the grassy quad complete with gates and porter; we had like-minded friends on our doorstep – dons' wives with babies, with whom I pushed prams. Life was sweet.

But then Ant had gone one step further. He'd written a book. Not a dry, academic tome, but a rather accessible biography of Byron, about whom he was a bit of an expert and whom he regarded as a bit of a dude. Which was how he'd portrayed him. As a legend. A modern-day lyricist, a good-looking, aristocratic, floppy-haired, druggy poet with supermodel girlfriends, in an accessible way that had caught the public's eye, and, more importantly the eye of a daytime television programme, which promoted him. Almost overnight, he became something of a success, and Anthony Hamilton, obscure English professor from Oxford, became Anthony Hamilton, bestselling author. Which wasn't entirely in the script, as far as Caro was concerned.

Oh, it wasn't the fame she envied – I knew she got a vicarious thrill out of being his sister-in-law; broadcasted it loud and clear at the slightest opportunity – no, it was the money. Not a great deal, but enough for us to move out of the college house, which, whilst sweet, was tiny, to a large Victorian villa on four floors with high