I Should Be So Lucky Read online

  ‘It never crossed my mind. And if they thought I was a bit loopy they’d probably not have believed me anyway.’

  Kate was quiet for a moment, then said, ‘You never did bother to change your name to his, did you? I always wondered about that.’

  ‘I wanted to keep my name the same as Rachel’s, that’s all.’ Viola wrapped her hands round her mug of tea, absorbing all the warmth she could. Three thirty in the morning wasn’t a time she’d have chosen to be talking about this. In fact, no time was.

  ‘Is it? Are you sure you didn’t always kind of half wonder if you and Rhys would really stay the distance? I … used to wonder about it.’

  Viola’s hands were trembling as she lifted the mug to sip the tea. Any more left-field questions and it would be all over the table. ‘Did you? Why?’

  Kate shrugged and got up, fetching milk from the fridge and adding more to her tea. ‘No real reason. I … you … well, you didn’t seem his type, somehow.’

  ‘He didn’t have a type,’ Viola said grimly. ‘Unless you count female. Any type in fact, really. He wasn’t fussy.’

  ‘He was, you know. Deep down. I always felt there was a side of him that longed for something, I don’t know, more …’

  ‘Oh, you knew that, did you?’ Viola snapped. ‘Thanks for that, Kate, but you couldn’t possibly know, not really. You hardly knew him.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, of course I did. You’d never have met him yourself if I hadn’t.’ Kate gnawed a thumbnail, worrying at it hard between her canine teeth.

  ‘Well, OK, but if you’re going to tell me he only married me to look a bit less bad-boy, as a career move, then please don’t. I think I’d already worked that out by the end of the honeymoon. And no, I didn’t wonder about the “distance”. Though I probably should have. Enough people warned me, and we did get married ridiculously soon after we’d met. And come on, even you didn’t try to persuade me not to, did you?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ Kate sounded bitter, full of regret, and Viola felt softer towards her.

  ‘Hey, you mustn’t even slightly blame yourself. I made my own stupid mistake there, all by myself.’

  ‘I only blame myself for introducing you to him in the first place. It seemed a good idea at the time.’ She smiled.

  ‘But honestly, Kate, if I did wonder if it would go the distance, which I didn’t – because even though it was all too rushed and stupid and completely mad, if I’d had any doubts I’m sure I wouldn’t have married him – I certainly wouldn’t for a minute have imagined that distance would be so short or so abrupt.’

  ‘No. Well. None of us did, did we?’

  FOURTEEN

  FOUR HOURS OF restless sleep were nowhere near enough, but Viola needed to join every weekend DIY enthusiast on a trek to Homebase to find a tin, tube or jar, whatever it came in, of putty before Naomi got home from Monica’s and started asking questions. She really didn’t want to explain the events of last night, not yet anyway. That day would come – Kate would make sure Naomi and Miles knew all about it as soon as she got a chance. Just, not yet, preferably only when she was settled back in Bell Cottage and out of range of being fussed over.

  Her text alert beeped as she was climbing out of bed: Greg. This early? In fact, at all? After last night she was very surprised he even thought of contacting her, ever, ever again. What was his excuse for being awake and texting before 8 a.m., given the hour he must have got to sleep? Ah – if he’d got to sleep. She imagined Mickey furiously refusing to let him in after double-locking all the doors, swearing robustly as she flung his possessions out of an upstairs window and forced him to sleep in the office or the Land Rover under a heap of old compost sacks and fake banana leaves.

  ‘On way with putty in about half hour,’ she read. ‘Request payment in coffee, also bacon sandwich.’

  She couldn’t help smiling. She was about to reply when it beeped again.

  ‘You do have bacon? Or are you a veggie?’

  ‘Not a veggie,’ she texted back. ‘Coffee on, also bacon.’

  Rachel’s room in James and Marco’s big, light apartment off Lansdowne Road was a blissful place to wake up. The flat was on two levels of one of the huge white houses in the road, and her little bedroom and shower room were downstairs at the front of the building, with a door leading out to the porch steps. Marco kept that door firmly locked and had made her promise that even when she hit the most delinquent and sneaky part of teenagehood, she would never creep out and up these steps in the night. He said he’d always rather know where she was, even if she was sliding out to devil-worship classes. Behind her personal territory, the sitting room and kitchen at the back opened on to a bright sunny terrace which James had planted with lush clumps of agapanthus, and where he waged war on fat aphids that sneaked up every evening and attacked his favourite white lupins in their black granite pots. A gate led through to the communal private garden shared by the houses around the square, and when she took James and Marco’s little spaniel Cyndi for a walk in there she always hoped to see somebody phenomenally famous playing with their small children. How cool would it be to drop into a school conversation over a copy of Heat magazine that (really nonchalant voice here), ‘Oh, yeah, him. Saw him on Sunday, pushing his baby on a swing, and y’know, he’s quite short in real life.’

  Rachel was awake early, watching the passing silhouetted shape of a woman with a big dog breaking up the stripes on the wall where the sun sneaked in through the quarter-open plantation blinds. She was supposed to keep them completely shut overnight: Marco said the thought of some creepy snooper being able to catch even the smallest glimpse of her while she slept was just too horrific, and the scene in Twilight where the vampire boy had crept in to watch Bella sleeping had given him the shivers. (She had argued that this was teen fiction and not aimed at people’s dads and their hang-ups, but all he’d said to that was she would get it, that and the not-sneaking-out thing, once she was a parent.) All the same, Rachel hated complete, disorientating darkness and needed a sliver of streetlight to give her a sense of life still going on outside overnight.

  One of Oliver Stonebridge’s paintings, like the ones at home and at Gran’s, a scene of stormy sea and exaggeratedly angular pier at Brighton, was on the wall opposite her bed. It made, for her, a link between home with her mum and this other home here with Marco and James. There were other links too – the chrome Anglepoise lamp by her bed was the same as at home (real home, not Gran’s), and her duvet covers were the same white waffly ones too.

  The flat was stirring into life. She could hear muffled sounds from the kitchen TV and the whirr of the Magimix, which meant James was up and about. He was always first in the kitchen, needing a caffeine fix the moment he was up, and he also liked making her breakfast treats – smoothies, waffles, the kind of thing you would never get on a rushed school morning. Marco and James always said she had to think of their place as home, just as she did with Viola, but sometimes it felt like being at a luxury villa or a boutique hotel – or, at least, what she’d read about them in magazines. They were taking her to Ireland in a couple of weeks, for a holiday in a horse-drawn gypsy caravan. She was looking forward to it, but couldn’t help wondering how the two men would cope without their fantastic multi-way shower and their espresso machine.

  Rachel, now wide awake and scenting coffee, had a quick shower and pulled on her denim shorts and a T-shirt. The sunlight through the blind slats told her the day was going to be a gorgeous one, and she wanted to be outside.

  ‘Hi, James!’ she greeted her father’s partner, who was now out on the terrace at the ironwork table with The Guardian and a dense-looking cup of coffee. ‘Shall I take Cyndi into the square?’ she asked. The little golden spaniel, guessing what she was saying, bounced to her feet from where she’d been lying under James’s chair.

  ‘Hello, darling, sleep well? And yes, please, do take Cyndi for a run around – if you don’t mind being on poo duty. They are very strict here and quite right
too. Bags are under the sink. I’ve whizzed up pancakes for breakfast – fancy that?’

  ‘Yum! Ten minutes? I’ll take Cyndi’s ball – she loves that.’

  The garden square was empty and so silent Rachel almost felt like tiptoeing around. The pink and yellow roses climbing the perimeter fences showed off their full-bloom glory only to her. No children were yet scrabbling about on the climbing frame or fighting over the swings. There was no litter, no discarded cans, no graffiti, no branches pulled from the trees like in the park and on the riverside at home after a hot summer night. Only the scent of an unseen somebody smoking nearby spoiled the perfect morning. Cyndi, excited at the space and freedom, bounded around on the grass, chasing the raggy old tennis ball Rachel threw for her, then finding a spot under a buddleia bush to deposit a neat pile of crap.

  If Rachel was for a moment tempted to leave it where it lay, one look at the hundreds of windows surrounding the garden told her that there’d be sure to be someone who noticed her negligence. She took the plastic bag from her pocket and approached the heap, wrinkling her nose.

  ‘Aww, so who’s a good little schoolgirl then?’ A taunting voice came from a bench just beyond the bushes. Rachel straightened up, her bag of dog shit dangling from her fingers. She held it away from her body, conscious that it was still repellently warm. Terrific – just what any girl would choose. To come across the boy she’s been fancying when she’s carrying a bag of dog doo.

  ‘You can’t just leave it.’ She went across to the bench and sat beside him. Ned was in an old white T-shirt with a black and white Debbie Harry on the front, not wearing the tobacco-coloured cardigan he’d bought from her. This disappointed her, which was ridiculous, as who would want to wear wintry cashmere when it was already so hot out? His hair was all over the place and he looked as if he’d just got out of bed, which he probably had. She wondered about his room, whether it was an untidy heap of clothes, trainers and electronics or if he was a neat-nerd. She’d guess the first one.

  ‘I could,’ Ned said, flinging his cigarette end under the roses. ‘But then, me, I wouldn’t have a dog. I might in the country, not here.’

  ‘She’s my dad’s dog.’ She instantly felt a bit disloyal to lovely Cyndi. She sounded as if she were disowning her for the sake of agreeing with this boy. She threw the tennis ball and Cyndi sprinted off after it, tongue lolling and glossy golden fur rippling. He’d called her schoolgirl again, she noted, wondering if that was because he’d already forgotten her name. And only yesterday he’d been sort of asking her out. She slid the bag of dog poo under the bench. She had to deal with it, yes, and take it with her to put in the garden’s dog bin, but she didn’t have to be clutching it in her hand while they had a conversation.

  ‘So, Schooly,’ he said. ‘You live on this square too. Which house?’

  ‘Over there.’ She pointed. ‘And you?’

  ‘Back that way.’ He nodded vaguely in the direction of the far side, where the houses were on an even bigger scale. ‘Usual thing, folks, sister, baby sister, people.’ He shrugged as if disconnecting himself from his entire family.

  ‘So can you get in here from your own garden or do you have to go round to the gate?’ It was a totally lame question but she didn’t really know what else to say to him. Why didn’t sparkling conversation come instantly to her head? But it was very early in the morning.

  ‘Huh? Not sure what you mean …’

  What was so hard to understand? For a moment she considered that he might be really a bit dense. Not good and potentially so disappointing. ‘I mean, my dad, he’s got the lower-level apartment with the garden, so …’

  ‘Oh it’s a flat?’ He looked rather confused, as if he’d heard of people who lived in apartments but had never actually met any. Perhaps he hadn’t. How exotic would he find Emmy, who lived in a council flat? ‘Right. No mine’s, like, you know, like a house. So yes, garden. Gate. All the usual.’

  ‘Nice.’ She took another look across the gardens, at where he’d indicated earlier. What was it Marco had said about that side with the massive, stupendously expensive houses? “Banker wankers” was the term he’d used, she was sure. Ned’s dad must be one. Or his mum. Probably both.

  ‘I don’t live here all the time,’ she said. ‘I live with my mum mostly.’

  ‘Hang around here long enough and you’ll get scouted for a model. Or has it happened already?’ He reached across and picked up a hank of her hair, twisting it up behind her neck in a knot. ‘You look OK. Nice legs. A camera would love you.’

  She laughed. He’d forgotten her name, sure, but he was definitely flirting. ‘No, it hasn’t happened! Why would it? And anyway, I don’t want to be a model. I want to be a … oh, I don’t know, a doctor or a vet or something.’

  ‘A vet? That is, like, so gay!’ He was laughing at her. But what was so funny?

  ‘So “gay”?’ she challenged. ‘You can’t say that. It’s wrong to use it like that. Like it’s insulting.’

  ‘No, it’s not! Course it’s not. What’s your problem? It’s just something you say. Not an insult.’

  ‘I don’t say it. Not ever. Not everyone does! It’s … it’s gayist?’ She couldn’t think of the right word. Typical.

  ‘Gayist? What, like homophobian or wha’ever? But I’m so not!’

  ‘Well, don’t say it then!’ Whistling to Cyndi, who trotted up beside her, she got up from the bench and stalked off, back towards James and Marco’s flat.

  ‘Rachel!’ he called after her. She refused to look back in spite of an involuntary inner tingle that he had, after all, remembered her name. Hell, what would she be like if he ever actually kissed her? Not that she wanted him to now. Not ever, not after what he’d so carelessly said. She heard thumping footsteps coming after her.

  ‘Rachel?’ He stood in front of her, forcing her to stop. He looked into her eyes, his face so close to hers she could see all the tiny individual flecks of colour in his grey eyes.

  ‘You forgot this.’ He handed over the little plastic bag of Cyndi’s shit as tenderly as if it had been a bag of rare birds’ eggs.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said solemnly, taking it from him, then flounced past him and continued her walk of protest, trying to keep her head up and some dignity. Not easy when you’re carrying a bag of excrement and trying, in spite of stubbornly insisting on making your point, so damn hard not to laugh.

  ‘It looks like I owe you again, Greg. You keep rescuing me and I can’t thank you enough, but you don’t have to, you know. I was going to fix the window myself, should have done it myself, being a capable twenty-first century woman,’ Viola said to Greg later as he finished reattaching the window pane.

  A sparkly look and the raised eyebrows told Viola that Greg wasn’t entirely convinced. Given her track record with him so far, it wasn’t really surprising.

  ‘But it was me who broke the window in the first place. It was me who screwed up our lunch thing the other day – Mickey can be such a bossy cow, but deep down it was my own fault. I knew that marquee had to go back but I wanted a bit of time with you. As for the window, you’ve paid me for it royally in bacon rolls and coffee.’

  ‘Yes, but it was my idea to break the window. It was me who was locked out, not you.’

  ‘Hey, what does it matter?’ He looked up at her from squidging in the last of the putty, treating her to the playful-Alsatian smile again. ‘It’s all sorted now.’

  ‘So did you get a lot of grief from Mickey last night?’ It was a question Viola had been dying to ask since he walked in, looking amazingly well rested and with the curled ends of his hair still shower-damp. So he hadn’t had to sleep in the Land Rover, then. He cleared the last smear of putty from the glass.

  ‘Mickey? No – I haven’t seen her.’ Viola had a vision of a cross half-woken woman, head firmly lodged under a pillow in protest at her husband staggering into the bedroom and disturbing her in the dawn hours. She pictured her sliding out of their house before seven to take a long r
un along the riverbank and across the common so she could come panting in later before Greg was even awake, all smugly exercised to make a point about how some people didn’t carouse about all night. Except he wouldn’t have been there … he was here, with someone else. Not that she counted as that kind of ‘someone else’. Absolutely not.

  He was sniffing at the greyish sludge of putty that was left on his thumb. ‘I love the scent of this stuff, don’t you? Linseed. Clean, luscious oil. Here, have a whiff.’ He offered up his thumb under her nose and she put her hand on his wrist, steadying it while she inhaled the smell, not quite trusting him not to smudge it all over her nose and think it hilarious.

  ‘Mmm – it’s giving me a déjà vu,’ Viola said. ‘It’s a real flashback to something from years ago. There was this family friend we used to call Uncle Oliver. He was a painter and Mum took me to see him in his studio sometimes. I must have been about six, I think. It was really messy there, the kind of seriously untidy that really impresses a small child. There were paint tubes and pots of oil everywhere, the floorboards were all spattered with paint and canvases were leaning against the wall. Mum kept telling me to be careful and not to touch and he said none of it mattered, I could do anything I wanted. He gave me a brush and a bit of board and squeezed dollops of oil paint out on to a palette for me. So I could paint while they drank wine and talked.’ Viola stopped for breath, thinking how much this must not be of any interest to Greg. Why would it be?

  ‘Sorry – I’m rambling.’ She turned away to collect up their coffee mugs and take them to the kitchen.

  ‘No, go on, what did he paint?’

  ‘Landscapes, sometimes seaside scenes as well. Turbulent stuff. He was called Oliver Stonebridge; quite well known in his day. There’s a really scary, stormy one that Mum keeps on the top landing. I always used to run fast past it when I was little, trying not to look.’