What to do when someone dies… Self help? DIY law? Five years ago, Dad borrowed that book from the library, the day after mum died, giving birth to Ben, a brother for Katherine, Elizabeth and Frances. The announcement wasn’t true. They hadn’t longed for a baby brother. On that summer’s day, Kate was ten and a half, Libby and Frances five. They wanted mum. Dying in childbed’s melodramatic, consigned to history. It’s not supposed to happen. Shell-shocked, Tom Blake couldn’t cope with birth and death. For years, he barely noticed his daughters, lived for his job, thought of Kate as a child still. When it suited him, Kate was affordable child care… Eldest girl, why not? Friend? Not possible. She was a child.

Gran had just retired. She’d done kids, grief, work. Time for the best years of her life… Trekking in the Pyrenees? Trans Siberian railway? Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu and maybe Antarctica? No chance. Gran moved in, back to Pampers and parents’ evenings. On the last day of term, Tom offered Kate a lift to school. Single sex, faith school, academic high fliers only. Kate didn’t choose her faith. Babies were christened. That was it, for life. Believing impossible things was compulsory. The dog days are dangerous, littered with battles and disasters. Dad worked all hours, caught up in the kidnap and murder of their local MP. Daniel Levy was young, outspoken, unpopular in dangerous places. Kate was beginning to fathom the world of religious hatred, international politics. Dad’s late nights and long absences couldn’t all be the Levy crisis. What was going on?

Gran spotted the appeal for volunteers. A rescue dig, in dockland, downwind from the soap factory? It’s not Pompeii… In September, the site would be cleared, the hall demolished Filthy, backbreaking work, muddy trenches, moody director Annabel. After the dig, she’d be out of a job. On the first day, Kate worked with David. Love at first sight? Forbidden, for so many reasons. As for her dad’s relationship with Annabel… Who set this up? Dad? Annabel? In the trenches, conditions became vile. Annabel was depressed, desperate to save the hall and her own career. In hard times, can anyone afford the past? Exhausted, filthy, battered by wind and rain, volunteers come and go. Mocking Becky’s a vicar’s daughter, allowed to think what she likes. They talk about Dan Levy. What’s worth dying for? Faith? Or something else? In Becky’s trench, the inscription was barely a fragment… Tu solus alt… Thou only art the Most High… The Mithraeum’s a major discovery, temple of Mithras, dying and rising God, celebrated on December 25th.

And at home? When someone dies, family treasures are handed down, secrets and skeletons revealed. Why wait for a death? The silver amulet would have been her mother’s. Star of David? Kate looked at her grandmother. ‘All they had left’, said Gran. As David says, on their first date, who knows where we all came from?

Christie was a convent girl. The nuns had never known a child like her, so bad, so dangerous. Sister Francis Xavier recognised her at once. Christie was nothing like the good little girls who kept the rules. For instance, her birthday was on Old May Day, better known as Beltane. When her beautiful mother died, Christie went on strike, refused to work. Why care about anything? Why believe in a ruthless God? Only two people mattered now, her dad and her brother Jamie. Two weeks before the eleven-plus, Christie’s teachers despaired. Bottom of the class, barely able to spell, she was bound to fail. Francis Xavier appealed to reason… A good move, only just in time.

The key to Christie begins with her childhood, playing with Meg, Lennie and Kay - three real friends are enough for most people. Her classmates planned ordinary lives and struggles. Red-haired, green-eyed, reckless, Christie refused to believe anything, became a physicist, went to CERN, to understand the foundations of the earth… Turning thirty, she came home, to an angry world and no job. In Oxford, her brother’s girlfriend offered stellar advice.

‘ Never miss an opportunity to have sex or appear on TV.’

‘ Who said that?’

Flora shrugged.

‘ I did, just now. Does it matter? It’s good advice. If one career’s over, you need to launch another, asap. If I were you, I’d write a book.’

‘ And appear on TV and have sex with every frog I meet?’

Flora considered this.

‘ Maybe not the frogs, but yes, in your position, I’d try anything once. What have you got to lose?’

Inspired by the woman who used to be Francis Xavier, Christie looked up old friends, discovered all the usual havoc. Meg, the holy one, had lost her faith, fatal for a nun. Lennie, once a teenage mother, had managed to lose two husbands. Wasted by anorexia, Kay had very nearly lost herself. Inexplicably, Christie healed them, or rather, they thought she had. What was going on? Flame-haired icon, author of the greatest how-to book since the Bible, global bestseller, daytime and everytime star, Christie had no idea and didn’t believe in miracles.

Then she disappeared. PA Meg updates the website daily.

The perfect place for an escaped celebrity would be gardening. A garden makeover, somewhere remote, magical, impossible.

What happens when a grown man goes missing? Leaves for work as usual, then leaves the planet? No trace of the car, no accident? Nothing much… No red top headlines, no TV appeals, no neighbourhood searches… The police aren’t completely heartless. If the Missing Person’s a Vulnerable Adult, sick or disabled, they’ll be out in force… And if not? Then it’s just a Domestic. For better or worse, men can walk out.

On their son’s ninth birthday, Jane battles with anger, then fear. Neil had promised, faithfully, no staying late, this was Tom’s day. No play rehearsal, no parents’ evening. Head of Department, Neil made language classes sexy and his students Oxbridge stars.

Jane had a good-enough job, part time, not the career she’d hoped for. Few women manage that, even now… Instead, she and Neil had their children, Tom and Claire, both bright, both healthy. Parents sold their souls for a place at the local school. Five miles out of town, the village was indecently perfect. Neil’s disappearance the most dramatic news in years.

At first, especially at Christmas, people rallied round. In the New Year, suspicion arrived on the wind, grew like knotweed. Jane was pregnant. With Neil’s child? Cruel rumours begin, and then the calls, wordless at first… The man wanted to meet, to explain…

Meeting Hugh, Jane knew the truth at once. When Hugh tried to kill himself, the last minute call to Jane saved his life. Suicide, because Hugh knew how Neil had betrayed him, betrayed Jane, abused so many others too. Already, Hugh and Jane had so much in common. Nine year old Tom saw the beginnings of love. Impossible? Not necessarily… Amor vincit omnia?

The year men walked on the moon, Maddy was sent to France. In 1969, France wasn’t just another country, more like another planet. That summer, she met the two men who would change her life… For protecting a Jewish classmate, Pierre was sent to hell. One evening, over supper, Suzanne Duchamp said something quite ordinary and vicious about the Germans. Pierre said: ‘Suzanne, the war’s over, a long time ago. Unless we forgive, there’ll be another.’

On his sunburnt arm, the camp number was still ink-blue. His brother died in Auschwitz, three days before the Russians arrived. Pierre would spend the rest of his life creating beauty - woodcarver, craftsman, peacemaker.

And the other man? Pierre’s nephew Leon would inherit a Champagne fortune. Champagne was bubbles in a bottle. Losing his mother to cancer, Leon wanted to be a doctor.

Suzanne and Pierre’s only daughter was a mathematician, brilliant, ruthless, destined for success. The day she introduced Maddy to Leon, Edith knew exactly what she was doing. ‘My cousin’, she’d said, lazily. It amused her to watch as Maddy and Leon fell in love. ‘If you want Leon’, she said, ‘Why not? He’s wanted to take all your clothes off since the moment he saw you.’

Saying goodbye, Pierre slipped something into her hand, a carving, a dove etched with his Auschwitz number. Three times, Leon wrote long, heartbroken letters, three times, Maddy didn’t reply. Pierre and Leon… Maddy would never forget.

 

Author’s note

Traditionally, writers of fiction insist that all their characters are imaginary, having no connection with any real person. This is rarely if ever true and as P.D.James has observed, the traditional disclaimer offers little protection in law. Walking on the Moon was inspired by my own experiences and the man I call ‘Pierre Duchamp’ is drawn completely from life. To change him in any way would be unthinkable. ‘Pierre Duchamp’ chose to forgive the unspeakable crimes committed against him. Asked to name the one person who has inspired me most of all, my answer will never change.

One bright warm day in April, Beatrix found two mud nests in the vicarage porch. New build, no planning permission, messy and ferociously protected… Until the birds have flown, Beatrix, her family and visitors must use the back door. Jeremy’s a celebrity vicar, media star, maybe-Bishop too. Nobody comes to church, but they all want a piece of him. Vicarage daughters, Cassie and Jane want their porch back, perfect hide for observing everything, swallows, stars, scandals… Beatrix is also the mother of Adam. The day she should have married his father, she fled from the register office, pelted down Castle Hill, scattering guests, bikes and tourists. David Rosenbaum chased her through the streets of Cambridge, but the wedding was off. What would be the point? His family didn’t want a shiksa daughter in law. Only Nuptial Mass would satisfy her side.

The film crew and David move in. And Leah with their lookalike sons, smaller versions of Adam. David arrives to collect the keys to his rented cottage, expecting a vicar’s wife. Instead - Beata Beatrix… The sun shines, no rain falls, the reservoirs run dry. Kitty Bland’s raised thousands to give war-battered Africans a holiday. Experts in drought, the Amalians think standpipes are the last word in luxury, teach squabbling villagers survival skills. Beatrix tries to see herself as a Bishop’s wife. How can Jeremy do this to her? Will she elope with David? Will it ever rain again? Enter Maria…

Ruthlessly honest, Rosamund Ridley’s widow is not mourning her unfaithful and unloving husband, killed when his car skids on icy roads. David and his pregnant girlfriend die together. After his messy death and tidy burial, Clare does as she’s told, making a new life for herself…

‘A confident first novel… Rosamund Ridley has written a realistic romance. The widow’s struggle to keep the truth about their marriage uppermost, resisting social pressure to grieve for something false is the most successful aspect of this novel.’     Gillian Greenwood,  The Times

‘As detailed and convincing as an autobiography. The Widow Bird has a zest that makes one want to read on.’     British Book News

Rosamund Ridley has an exceptional gift for drawing on the detailed minutiae of everyday existence to present a convincing and thought provoking portrait of a woman at the crossroads of her life. Critics who misread Ridley’s tongue-in-cheek theology raised the spectre of Graham Greene. Like almost every other writer identified as ‘Catholic’, Greene was a convert. Ridley’s converso background is far more intriguing. One perceptive reader recognised territory closer to Frederic Raphael. Howard Jacobson would be even nearer the mark.

Christopher Marlowe’s youthful dreams of fame and success haven’t quite worked out - unlike those of his notorious, albeit short-lived, namesake. He’s a good journalist and had created a niche for himself in Eastern Europe - but the Iron Curtain’s been torn apart and his partner, the beautiful and brilliant academic Dr Annabel Grey, is forging ahead with her own more prestigious career, while her maverick right-wing views have made her beloved of the media.

Marlowe was wildly in love with Bel once, but the passion between them died before their first child, Luke, was six months old. He’s now a teenager - but habit has somehow kept his parents together and the result is a second child, Caro, that Bel never wanted. A fortnight after giving birth, Bel is back at her desk. Soon after that, Marlowe seems to be slipping from dual-career prosperity to a life on Family Credit with alarming ease…

‘Rosamund Ridley portrays the agonisingly unpredictable impediments, and equally unforeseen joys, of life with children with nicely precise observation… This is an interesting and important novel because it draws attention so effectively to the problems that arise when family life is piggy in the middle of two demanding careers’      Christina Hardyment,  Country Living

Moving, compassionate and hard-hitting, Changing Places is an unusual story of role reversal and contemporary values.