I Should Be So Lucky Page 14

  ‘I’ve heard of him, vaguely. Dead, isn’t he?’ Greg was loading his tools into their box. He’d be gone in a few minutes and the day – with Rachel over in Notting Hill – would be all hers.

  ‘Yes, years ago. Mum wore scarlet and purple to his funeral because he’d told her – she said – that she looked terrible in black.’

  ‘Who looks terrible in black?’ Naomi strode in through the French doors at that moment, clutching her bag from the night before. ‘I know you,’ she said, not waiting for Viola to answer, jabbing a finger towards Greg. ‘That car out there – you brought our Vee home in it after her puncture.’ She turned to Viola and asked, ‘So is this going to be a new friend?’

  ‘Possibly,’ Greg answered warily.

  ‘You’re here very early. It’s only just gone nine.’ Naomi looked past the two of them, glancing round the room, expertly checking for evidence of some kind and then seeming distinctly disappointed.

  ‘If you’re looking for signs of …’ Viola was going to say ‘a night of passion’, but thought better of it.

  Greg looked at his watch. ‘Yes, it is early, isn’t it? How was your evening? And have you only just come home?’

  He was teasing Naomi. A dangerous game, Viola wanted to warn him. She could feel the words ‘walk of shame’ about to come up in the next sentence. She managed to suppress a wave of laughter and gave Greg a warning prod. Naomi didn’t do humour in the mornings, only suspicion.

  ‘I have just come home, thank you. I could hear voices so I thought I’d come and see who it was. But if you’re going to stay around, Mr New Friend, you’ll want to get something different to drive,’ Naomi told him. ‘Green’s very unlucky for cars. Anyone’ll tell you that, especially this one.’ She nodded towards Viola, then stalked grandly across the flat’s sitting room and through the door to her own part of the house.

  ‘You nearly accused her of having a naughty night, didn’t you?’ Viola said, trying not to smart from the reference to green cars, as soon as Naomi had gone.

  ‘I very nearly did,’ Greg agreed. ‘And as a reward for not saying it, you have to promise me something.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘You have to come out planting with me one night, just so you can see for yourself there’s no murder involved.’

  Viola felt a bit torn. Yes, she was madly curious about his nocturnal gardening and, yes, she’d admit there was a thrill about the idea of seeing him again, but – there was the Mickey factor. Although … digging a hole in the ground and stuffing in some hardy perennials was hardly a hot adulterous date.

  ‘But … why do you do it? It seems, well, weird, to say the least.’

  He shrugged. ‘Just something I got into, something I read about in one of the Sunday papers – guerrilla gardening. There’s so much that’s bloody wrong with the world, wars and bloody banker bonuses and stupid governments making the poor even poorer. I mean, you can go on any number of protest marches and sign petitions, but they don’t make everyday stuff less bleak. Who can’t be a tiny bit cheered up by seeing flowers in a wilderness? Real plants, not the tat I rent out for the day job to the make-believe con industry. Sorry, sounds so fucking worthy.’

  ‘Protests, then – is that how come you’ve got a police record?’

  ‘Yep, anti Iraq war. Not proud of the record, but the cop lammed me with a truncheon so I pushed him away, hard. Six of them were on me in a millisecond. All with truncheons. Anyway, did the crime, did the community service and now I’m into planting flowers where no one expects them. Got to be the safest form of subversion ever, hasn’t it?’ He grinned at her. ‘Go on, tell me I’m a wuss.’

  ‘You’re a total wuss,’ she said. ‘An activist with a trowel.’

  ‘So will you come out and plant something with me?’

  ‘Won’t your wife mind?’

  ‘I doubt it. My wife is my ex-wife and lives with her new husband and three-year-old son in Vancouver, and I’ve got no current plans to offer the vacancy to anyone else.’

  ‘OK, then. Yes, I’ll come out. So long as we don’t get arrested again.’

  ‘I’ll give you a call. And when we’re out in the dark and I smear your face with mud, just think of being a kid again with your Uncle Olly.’

  FIFTEEN

  BY WEDNESDAY, THE Bell Cottage hallway and kitchen were already painted, the sitting-room ceiling was done and there were three lads painting walls with fat rollers, covering the space in double-quick time.

  ‘Talk about fast,’ Viola said to Marco when they’d called in to check on the progress. ‘They’ve done almost all of downstairs already. Didn’t they only start on Friday?’

  ‘They’re scenery boys, that’s the trick. They’re used to squeezed time limits,’ he told her. ‘And there wasn’t a lot of preparation to be done so it’s kind of instant result, which cuts the costs. What do you think of the pink kitchen wall?’

  ‘Fabulous – I love it. I can’t wait to have all my own stuff back in the house. I keep feeling, and I know this is mad …’ She hesitated.

  ‘No, go on, what?’

  ‘It’s like getting another go at everything, starting grown-up life all over again. Another chance to get it right. No more screw-ups.’

  ‘Ha! You think? What about Friday night?’ Marco was laughing at her. She felt a bit hurt.

  ‘I wish I hadn’t told you now!’

  ‘I wish you’d told me on the night, Vee. You know I’m always here for you.’

  ‘I didn’t want Rachel to worry. What would you have done, woken her up and said I won’t be long, I’m just off to bail your mum out of jail?’

  ‘OK, when you put it like that …’

  ‘Exactly. And she definitely doesn’t need to know I spent hours in the cells – it’d be all over her Facebook page in minutes and her friends would look at me funny. It’s bad enough I had to involve Kate. It’s even more ammunition in her battle to keep me shacked up with Mum and out of harm’s way. Also, Mum hasn’t stopped raving about Monica’s flat since she spent the night there, though she did say there was too much beige in it. I’m hoping that she’ll come round to the idea that moving isn’t such a terrible thing after all.’

  ‘Hmm … good luck with that. How will you run it past her?’

  ‘I won’t. Not directly. It’ll have to be her idea, just hers, or she’ll think she’s being manipulated. If anything, a bit of opposition might help to persuade her. For that I’d need Kate and Miles. But, well … you’ve seen how they are. It won’t be easy. I just wish …’

  ‘Wish what? That we’d gone for Dead Salmon in the hallway?’ Marco asked.

  ‘No … that it could be something other than her having to be on her own again for a while to persuade her that she’d be happier and that life would be easier up in the retirement flats. To come round to that way of thinking – as she’s so determined at the moment to stay put – she’ll probably need to feel lonely, or something negative anyway. I don’t want that for her, I really don’t.’

  ‘I know, and it’ll be something she won’t admit to easily, either. Your ma can be stubborn to the max.’

  ‘She wouldn’t say she was stubborn, she’d just insist she wants to be on home ground, with her own things around her. I know how she feels.’ Viola sighed, happy just to be in the cottage again, even though its furniture hadn’t yet come out of storage.

  ‘You’ll be back in here soon – and hey, look, this was on the doormat when I got here.’ Marco handed her an envelope. ‘Looks like a card, hand-delivered anyway, no stamp.’

  Viola didn’t recognize the writing and slit the envelope open. There was a greetings card inside, a painting of a cute rural cottage. Inside, the sender had written the words ‘Welcome back’, but hadn’t signed it. She felt cold and shoved the card back in the envelope quickly.

  ‘Who’s it from?’ Marco asked. ‘One of the neighbours?’

  ‘No. Well, could be, I suppose. I don’t know. They haven’t signed it.’ She handed it
over to Marco and he took a look and frowned, then said, ‘Probably just forgot. Must be from someone round here who’s seen you coming and going lately. Nice of them, isn’t it?’

  ‘I hope so. You don’t think …’

  ‘If you’re thinking it might be one of those crazy bats who used to chase Rhys, then no, I don’t think. They’ve long moved on, haven’t they? Grown up at last, maybe.’

  Viola tried to feel reassured but didn’t, quite. Rhys’s fame had been pretty fleeting in the long-term scheme of things, so Marco was almost sure to be right. But all the same, this was a bit unnerving.

  ‘I’d rip it up and bin it, but if it is a neighbour that would be horribly rude, wouldn’t it?’ she said, taking the card and stuffing it into one of the kitchen-dresser drawers.

  ‘And even if it isn’t, it’s no one who can really hurt you now, is it? Look at it this way, if it is one of the crazy ones, at least it says something nice,’ Marco told her, giving her a gentle squeeze.

  ‘Yes – you’re right. Positive thinking – only way forward. Just … please don’t mention it to anyone in my family, will you?’

  ‘Not a chance. No worries on that.’

  The book group was going to take a summer break, but Charlotte had been the one to choose their next read and insisted on one more meeting before the holidays took over their lives, which meant they’d only had three weeks to read the whole of Middlemarch – Charlotte’s ambitious choice.

  They were meeting at Amanda’s and Amanda hauled Viola into the kitchen before letting her join the others. ‘The barman at the club phoned Leo this morning, so I’ve got good news and bad news about your stolen bag,’ she told her, as the two of them sliced up the cake while the others settled in the next room and made a start on the discussion.

  ‘So someone found it?’

  ‘Yes. It was found on a window ledge behind a blind. That’s the good news.’

  ‘How can there be bad news?’

  ‘Um … Leo brought it back here. It smelled funny and had a water mark-type of stain. I think someone’s peed in it.’

  ‘Wow – talk about expressing disappointment at the lack of profitable contents. That’s gross.’

  ‘I actually chucked the bag. Thought you might not … you know …’

  ‘Thanks,’ Viola said, feeling a bit flat. ‘Who would do such a horrible thing?’ She thought about the man who had followed her to their table. It might or might not have been him. Probably not. The point was, you couldn’t tell anything about anyone. She thought briefly of Greg, out there in the night transforming old patches of scruffy ground into little pieces of living colour, for the pleasure of strangers. Did he ever wonder if it was worth the trouble, when the world was full of random, careless nastiness?

  ‘No idea.’ Amanda shrugged. ‘I wish I hadn’t told you now. I thought there might be a funny side, but …’

  Viola smiled. ‘Oh, give it a month or two and there might be. For now though, it’s just a bit vile. Depressing. But hey, I can hear Charlotte giving them hell in there. Let’s go and rescue them with cake.’

  ‘So – OK, so I got it wrong.’ Charlotte wasn’t happy. ‘I should have realized most of you wouldn’t be able to read all the way through a huge – huge and important – book like Middlemarch in less than our usual month. It was just too big an ask. Wrong choice, mea culpa.’ After a second or two’s pause, Charlotte then added, ‘My fault.’ She obviously felt that if they couldn’t read the entirety of Middlemarch in the time allowed, then no way were the book group going to understand a bit of basic Latin. She wasn’t exactly sulking, but her lips had gone thin and she briskly waved away the piece of cake (coffee and walnut) that Amanda offered her. It was only a gesture, Viola could tell. Her eyes followed the plate quite longingly as it was passed to Jessica, next along on the sofa, who took a piece eagerly and downed half of the generous slice in one groaningly voluptuous bite.

  ‘Did you get through it, Char?’ Viola asked, feeling a new sympathy for her Med and Gib pupils and their never-ending work-avoidance excuses. ‘It’s massive – how on earth did you find the time?’

  ‘Well, obviously I’ve read it before. I assumed we all would have and that really we’d just need a skim through, a bit of a reminding catch-up. Didn’t absolutely everyone do it for A level?’

  ‘Not me,’ Jessica said, licking smudged icing from round her mouth. ‘But then I was all Maths, Physics and Chemistry. It’s why I enjoy book groups like this one that do the more classic stuff – you get to go over all the things you missed out on at school. We scientists had a limited education.’

  ‘Except you’re one of those who didn’t finish reading it, Jess,’ Charlotte pointed out.

  ‘OK – well, let me give you my take on what I did read of it, then.’ Jessica rose to the challenge. ‘For starters I couldn’t really find anyone to like, which is a bit of a put-off, in any kind of book. I hated prim old Dorothea. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why she married dry, dull old Casaubon in the first place unless it was for, oh, let me see – could it be the massive house, the land, the cottages, the money? But no, we’re not supposed to feel like that because she’s the nice worthy one in this book, isn’t she? All sacrifice and good works and yet too dim to realize that her old man’s great work wasn’t worth all those hours wrecking her eyesight to write up.’

  ‘Oh, I think she realized that, quite early on probably. Do you think they ever had sex?’ Amanda asked. ‘There didn’t seem to be any hint of love or intimacy at all in their relationship. He treated her like a useful servant, as if he’d married her because that was the only respectable way to keep a secretary on permanent duty on the premises, and she behaved, at least at first till the disappointment kicked in, with ridiculous deference.’

  ‘So much of the book was about disappointment. Sounds like home!’ Lisa said. They all looked at her in some surprise; Lisa was usually a quiet, shy sort, and her contributions to book discussions were usually barely above a whisper and accompanied with a nervous blush.

  ‘That’s it exactly, Lisa!’ Charlotte perked up. ‘That’s why a book like Middlemarch is still so relevant. Expectation versus disappointment. Who couldn’t relate to that? I mean, look at Viola.’

  They all did. Viola felt as if she’d been pinned up on a noticeboard for close inspection. Did Charlotte expect her to come up with an instant three-line homily on how to avoid being a hopeless failure when it came to relationships? Because she couldn’t, obviously, because, well … she was one.

  ‘She is the ultimate triumph of hope over experience,’ Charlotte went on, somehow making it sound like a wonderful thing.

  ‘I am?’

  ‘Well, yes! Aren’t you? I mean, look at your track record. But you’re still up and about and functioning and starting to go out again, which is positive, isn’t it?’ Charlotte gave them all a moment to ponder this, while she got up and went to help herself to a slice of cake. The collective failure to finish the huge novel seemed to have been forgiven: cake could now be taken.

  Hostess Amanda handed Charlotte a napkin and fork, and then went round the group topping up their glasses with wine.

  ‘It’s not that much of a track record,’ Viola protested. ‘I’ve only had two husbands. Loads of women have more than that.’

  ‘Ooh yes, and quite a lot of them have other people’s as well, don’t they, slotted in among their own!’ Jessica’s dirty laugh somehow managed to make adultery seem like a jolly hobby, up there with Zumba classes and making sock puppets.

  ‘Yes, they do. Bloody health risks,’ Viola said, then wished she hadn’t, as all eyes were suddenly wider with curiosity. ‘What? Well, it is, isn’t it? A health hazard. Sex with other people’s husbands. Unless you’re really careful? Look – are we done with the book? Because one thing I want to tell you is that at last I can be host for the next book club. Rachel and I are moving back home soon.’ She hadn’t meant to say this right now, but having seen the collective nosiness she
definitely didn’t want Charlotte (and it would be Charlotte) asking awkward questions about Viola’s experience of sexual health hazards. Charlotte would cosy her down, secretly add wine to her glass, do her we’ve-all-been-there thing but carefully not actually tell anything about herself, so that Viola would end up being the one lured into exposing all.

  Before she knew it, she’d be turning her one long-ago trip to the GU clinic into something for them all to laugh at. She thought of how she’d opted – for the first and last time – to use Rhys’s surname there, which meant the nurse had squeaked, ‘Ooh, you’re Rhys Llewellen’s wife! I saw a picture of your wedding in OK! I used to love him in that band, years ago. Can’t even remember their name now, ha ha, way it goes.’ An unlucky bit of recognition, considering there’d just been the one photo shoot, the lack of any more having so infuriated Rhys. And the whole waiting room had looked up from behind newspapers to give her a thorough staring-at. So much for patient confidentiality. And after all that – and a lot of un comfortable tests – she’d only got a touch of thrush, nothing too serious. But with Rhys, she’d realized just the wrong side of the wedding ceremony, you could never be too careful.

  ‘That’s great about you going home. Not before time, too. Much longer and you’d have been a permanent mummy’s girl. Now you can concentrate even harder on getting back your real life.’ Charlotte was approving, as if it had all been her idea.

  ‘She’s got a real life, Char,’ Amanda said quietly.

  ‘Yes, but … look, what I meant was …’

  ‘You meant a man.’ Lisa was nodding as if a huge burden of new wisdom was on her. ‘A man is a comfortable thing to have around the place.’

  ‘Ha! Not always!’ Viola laughed. That was progress. It was a laugh without bitterness, without resentful memory. ‘I might be in the market for a kitten, if anyone knows of any going, but I’m not looking for a man, thanks.’

  ‘No, sweetie. Best not to,’ Charlotte agreed, rather unexpectedly. ‘But now it’s the holidays, you must come out with me. I have a thing to go to and I know you’ll love it, so don’t even think of saying no. My friend Abigail, she’s singing at an event and she is just wonderful. Voice to die for. I mean, er … she sings like a dream. Anyway, it’s invites only and I’d love you to come with me as my Plus One. What do you think?’