Just For The Summer

It was Heather's silver wedding anniversary. But this important milestone did not mark her marriage to Tom, her often-absent airline pilot husband and father of their two teenage children. It was for her first marriage - a wildly romantic, secret affair, when she and Iain - twelve years older than her and the heir to a Scottish baronetcy - had eloped immediately after her final school speech day. She was just sixteen at the time. The marriage had not lasted twenty-five weeks, let alone years, and it was, as her mother firmly announced, As If It Never Happened. But secrets have a habit of coming out, and when a film crew arrived in the attractive Thamesside village where Heather and Tom lived, Heather was horrified to find her ex-husband amongst them.

As Heather and Iain met again, many secrets jostled to be revealed, including Tom's own highly secret life. Heather, her daughter Kate - the same age as Heather was when she embarked upon her disastrous elopement - and her mother Delia all had to reveal things which they never thought would need to be revealed, and their peaceful Oxfordshire village community buzzed with speculation and scandal.

The residents of the Close were much concerned with crime - preventing it, that is. With all those out-of-work teenagers on the nearby council estate hanging around, stealing, joy-riding and goodness knows what else, it was just as well that Paul Mathieson was setting up a Neighbourhood Watch scheme.

Not that the inhabitants of the Close did not have their own little activities, of course, but these were hardly the same thing. If Jenny and Alan's daughter was caught travelling on the underground without a ticket, and their son was doing a little experimenting with certain substances, and Laura didn't see the need to declare her earnings from hiring out her house to a film crew, and Jenny drove home only just over the legal limit - well, these were quite different matters, not to be compared with what went on in the Estate. And then there was Jenny's discovery, when she advertised flute lessons, that she could work up quite a nice little earner in a rather unexpected way...

As the leafy London street resounded to the efforts of its citizens to keep crime at bay, Jenny realised that it was her marriage, rather than her property, that needed watching.