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aged-care facility. ‘We used to have a holiday home there, but it had to go after Dad’s stroke,’ she murmured, rubbing the scarred surface of the table, which was pocked with a thousand small dents and rubbed shiny by decades of use. ‘I’d keep it myself, but there’s no way it’ll fit in my apartment – if you don’t take it, I’ll ask the neighbours to help me cart it out to the street.’
    Maggie shuddered at the thought of such an attractive object being exposed to the elements – it would be ruined in days. ‘No, it’s beautiful,’ she said truthfully. ‘I love it. But are you really sure you want to let it go?’
    â€˜It’s just me and this one,’ the woman said, nodding down at the ugly tabby cat encircling her legs. ‘No chance of anyone else joining us now.’
    Maggie nodded politely to mask her discomfort. It was amazing the things people shared with her, in their grief. Even if auctions did generally revolve around the three Ds – death, divorce and disaster – she was constantly taken aback by the intimate tales of family rifts, infidelity and money troubles of her clients. And, sometimes, their crushing loneliness. People she’d only just met often bared their souls to her within minutes. ‘But if you love it,’ the woman continued, ‘I’m happy for you to have it. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.’
    And now the table sat, exactly as she’d pictured it, squarely within the heart of their home, an almost living presence in itself. And it was loved. It was the sort of table Maggie had dreamed about since she was a girl, big enough for ten or more friends to gather around for a feast, but cosy enough so that she and Tim could sit and companionably share a bottle of wine together at the end of a working day, while Pearl sat drawing beside them, her pencils and books fanned out in front of her. It was a real family table, and looking at it now – scrubbed and cleaned, with an old glass jar holding some branches of cherry blossom she and Tim had collected from the Columbia Road flower market on the weekend – it felt like home.
    In fact, Maggie thought, hit by a sudden realisation, it was a table drawn straight from memory, from the only other home she’d ever really known. Not her own family home, but the home of her best friend from childhood, Kate, where she’d virtually ended up living during her teenage years.
    Maggie had been fourteen when her mother had first found out about her father’s affairs. One brave friend in her parents’ circle mentioned seeing him out with a woman from the office of the book warehouse her father managed on the outskirts of Basingstoke. Maggie’s mother said the woman had begged her father to leave them, but he’d ended it. He was ashamed and contrite. But then other indiscretions came to light: her mum’s oldest friend, who had disappeared from their lives overnight, and one of the neighbours (Maggie had thought the woman gave her odd looks whenever she caught the school bus with her son). Prostitutes in London, which her mother found out about while combing through her father’s bank statements. He vowed to stop drinking and promised her mother he’d stop chasing women. But he didn’t.
    Maggie remembered the arguments, her mother and father circling each other in the living room, with its polite beige Axminster carpet and Waterford Crystal–lined shelves. But still her mother stayed in the marriage, and Maggie never really understood why.
    â€˜I shan’t be a divorcee, Margaret. I won’t let him have the satisfaction,’ she once said, her lips a cold thin line. ‘What would I have left? I gave up everything to be with your father, and look where it’s got me. He’ll have to support me as long as he lives. Do you know how many women my age end up destitute and alone? I won’t