I Should Be So Lucky Page 17

  ‘Hi, Mum! Is it OK if I just pick up some stuff and go over to Emmy’s?’ Rachel’s eyes were bright, expectant, hoping for a ‘yes’ answer.

  ‘Er … hmm, I don’t know. Let me think.’ Viola watched Rachel’s face fall. What kind of excuse could she come up with for ‘no’? The truth was she just wanted Rachel to stay close and safe beside her. But this wasn’t about Rachel; it wasn’t fair to involve her. She made a little more effort, just managing to overcome the feeling that, really, she was about to keel over.

  ‘Yes – OK, why not? Back later this evening though, OK? I need to move some more things back to the house before Marco’s lot bring the vanload from the storage lock-up, and you’ve got to sort out what to keep separate from the house-packing for when you go to Ireland.’

  ‘Ace! And thanks!’ Rachel bounded across and hugged her mother. Viola pushed the card behind her back and gave Rachel a hard, fond squeeze.

  ‘Ouch, Mum! You’re squishing me!’ Rachel laughed, breaking away.

  ‘Sorry – just affection.’ Viola tried to laugh along with her, but could feel her mouth twisting all wrong. ‘Off you go then, and say hello to Emmy’s mum for me.’

  ‘I will! Hey, we’re going home soon! Yay, can’t wait! And more yay for holidayyy!’

  So there it was, Viola thought as the door slammed shut. She couldn’t back out of the move now, even if she wanted to. And she definitely didn’t. She glanced at the treacherous kittens again, then took the card into her bedroom and stuffed it into the pocket at the back of her laptop bag. She just hoped there wouldn’t be any more joining it. But there probably would.

  ‘I still think you’re mad,’ Kate told Viola as the two of them unpacked a boxload of cutlery into newly scrubbed kitchen drawers at Bell Cottage. The whole of the downstairs area seemed to be a jungle of cardboard boxes. Viola couldn’t believe how fast Marco’s team of helpers had unloaded everything from the hire van, but now she could also hardly believe she’d ever get through the sorting process. Somewhere around Christmas would be her best guess. Rachel was still out with Emmy doing whatever important teenage things always mysteriously come up when a bout of hard physical graft is needed, but had promised to turn up later in the afternoon to unpack the boxes that were now waiting in her room. All she’d done so far was hang up the latest selection of knitwear she was trimming up for Gemma’s stall and leave a heap of clothes on the landing for the laundry fairies to deal with.

  ‘I know you do. And looking at this lot that needs doing, I’m half inclined to agree,’ Viola told Kate as she cut another drawer liner to the right size and smoothed it into place. ‘But this is my real, proper home, the only one I’ve ever actually put together myself, and I want to get on with living in it again. For over a year now it’s been like a limbo thing, waiting for something, escaping from something. If I don’t give this a go I’ll just be a … I don’t know, a blob, something passive and lifeless for ever. I also made a promise to myself to go out as much as I can, accept every invite. And I have been, just lately. No more hiding under a stone and letting life drift by. For one thing, it’s not a great role model of Strong Capable Woman for Rachel, is it?’

  Hmm, she thought but didn’t say: and look how well that’s turning out so far … A stolen bag, an arrest and a gatecrashed wedding with her knickers off. Top entertainment by anyone’s standards. But, the lurking Pollyanna in her brain encouraged her, surely it can only get better?

  ‘Yes, but here.’ Kate sliced open another box and started on the crockery. ‘Why does it have to be here? You could live anywhere. Somewhere new, for a fresh start. It would still be all yours, even more so. I mean, even apart from … Rhys … this is still a bit Marco too, isn’t it? Much as I’m fond of him, he’s past, surely. Yet his paint-colour suggestions are all over it, I can tell.’

  ‘Oh, leave it, Kate, please! Rachel and I just want to come back home and get back to some kind of normal. Can’t you just be the teeniest bit positive for us?’ She’d felt so excited about moving back home – in spite of the sick-making card in the post – till Kate had turned up, volunteering to help. The house was all new paint and a feeling of bright optimism. She didn’t need or want any kind of downer.

  ‘It can’t ever be completely normal, though, can it?’ Kate persisted as she loaded plates into the rack on the wall beside the sink. ‘Not really. Don’t you still see Rhys in it, everywhere you look? Don’t you half expect to see him on the stairs or coming in through the front door? Won’t you feel utterly, hugely, heartbroken that he doesn’t?’ Kate’s eyes were wet with emotion, as if she were trying to show Viola what she should be feeling.

  Viola stopped rifling through the box, a colander in one hand and her favourite conical sieve in the other.

  ‘No, Kate, I won’t. Look, I never told you this before, but the last thing he did before he took off with whoever was his next idiot victim was to hit me. Very hard. Even if he’d come back safely after that night, I wouldn’t have wanted him back. The whole thing with him was a stupid mistake, beginning to lousy end.’

  ‘He hit you?’ Kate’s eyes were wide and glittery, challenging. ‘Why? What had you said?’

  ‘What? Kate – how could you? How could you even ask that! Does it matter what I said? If I tell you, are you going to decide whether I asked for it or not? I mean, please!’ Her own sister. Shouldn’t the support on this one be pretty much unconditional?

  ‘No, no. Of course not. Sorry.’

  ‘Good – and you’d better bloody mean that or just … just piss off home to your nice safe golfy husband and all your sodding cushions.’

  Furious, Viola opened the garden doors and stepped out on to the terrace to breathe in some fresh, calming air. The house was just about perfect – she didn’t want Kate polluting the atmosphere with bad thoughts, so, if she couldn’t physically chuck her out through the front door, she’d stay outside for a while till her anger subsided. The garden was still an exuberant wreck of weed-choked perennials, deliriously overgrown shrubs escaping over the fence and grass long enough make a winter’s worth of hay for a pony, but it didn’t matter – there’d be time to sort it, some peaceful day soon. And the garden would do its best to recover, just as she was.

  She walked slowly along the side border, pulling out a few dandelion plants but leaving the pink campions because they looked so pretty. It felt good to wrench out the weeds like that and was safer than her first urge, which had, in the kitchen, been to grab the nearest heavy saucepan and batter her nagging, infuriating sister into silence, a swift but bloody death by kitchen utensil. The dandelions snapped off as she pulled; she wasn’t getting the long tap roots out and they’d grow back, tougher than ever before. The whole long, soft-tipped quivering root needed to be excised. Forks and trowels, she thought, where were they? Still where she’d left them in the little green-painted shed down by the bins?

  She went on down the path, treading the overgrown buttercup-strewn lawn out of the way, and pulled back the bolt on the shed door. It was stiff and rusty, and so were the hinges. No one had been inside since she and Rachel had left, and it was full of old spider-webbing and dead flies. A can of oil was on the shelf so she took it down and pulled off the cap, then drizzled a few drops over the bolt and the hinges. The garden tools were hanging where she’d left them. Which one was the dibber thing that Greg had told her to bring on their late-night gardening outing? She’d had to ask Naomi, find out that it was something for making holes. Maybe the long skinny pink-handled trowel would do just as well? She took it down from its hook and went slowly back up the garden, removing a few more dandelions on the way before feeling calm enough to go in and carry on sorting the kitchen. Small starts, she thought. Small steps. All would be well, whatever any stupid ill-wishers hoped. Breathe.

  ‘I’m sorry, Vee,’ Kate said, stirring tea bags round in two steaming mugs.

  ‘It’s OK. Just, you know … leave all that old past stuff, will you? I’m trying so hard to do the new-beginni
ngs thing. Maybe I am clinging to the house when maybe I shouldn’t, but it’s got to be easier this way than completely starting again somewhere new. Anyway, I couldn’t afford to, so it’s not as if there’s really a choice.’

  ‘I know. So, new beginnings, huh? Here’s to lucky bloody you.’ Kate raised her mug in a toast.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry, sorry! Ignore me. And I’ll make those new bedroom curtains for you if you want me to. Only …’

  ‘Thanks, Kate, and I’d love you to, but “only” what? Are you all backed up with other orders? Because it’s OK, I can hang up the old ones for now.’

  ‘No, it’s not that. I’ll have to find a new workroom. Rob and I are … well, it’s not so cosy, dull and safe as you think. Fact is … um … we’re splitting up. Selling the house as soon as we can and divvying up the cash.’ Kate reached into the fridge for the milk Viola had brought with her that morning.

  ‘But you two have been together for ever!’ Viola had a flashback to Kate’s bedroom and the solitary pillow, the snappiness with Rob over that last family lunch. So that was the score. ‘I thought once you got to that many years, you were, you know, cooked as a couple?’

  Kate laughed, but not in a particularly amused way. She pushed her over-long hair back away from her face, taking, Viola thought as she watched, a good five years off her age. ‘It doesn’t work quite like that, Vee. I don’t think you ever get to a safe zone. Just a sort of separate-islands type thing. You’re co-existing in the same cage but with hardly a word to say. Who wants that?’ Then she did laugh, properly. ‘Anyway, I thought I was the one who’d been fretting to be free but it turns out Rob’s been seeing the golf club’s lady captain. If he’d only done all this two years ago; how sodding different it might all have been. He tells me they’re moving into her place up by the seventeenth tee, and they’re very excited about it apparently. He couldn’t resist telling me, all bouncy and showing off like a small boy around Christmas. They’re planning to build a practice bunker in her garden so they can have hours of fun with their sand wedges.’

  Viola was confused for a moment, having immediately pictured the bunker as some underground haven from nuclear fallout and mishearing the last bit as sandwiches. A very claustrophobic picnic was in her head but the mists cleared eventually, luckily before she said something completely loopy.

  ‘Why two years ago? Would you have wanted him to go off with someone then?’

  ‘No, of course not. I was just a lot more together then. Now it’s all, you know, all what’s-the-point-ish.’

  ‘Menopause?’ Viola wondered, as the word came out, if there was a more tender way she could have put that.

  ‘Probably. It doesn’t help. I’m all over the sodding place,’ Kate said, turning away and shoving tea towels into a drawer.

  ‘Do the boys know?’ Viola asked. ‘What do they think? Don’t they want you two to try and work something out?’

  Kate shrugged. ‘They’re OK about it. We told them together, but it all seemed rather ridiculous. They just looked embarrassed and shuffly, the way boys do when you expect them to be emotional and they can’t manage it. They were a bit “yeah, like, well, whatever”. They’ve got their lives going on and it’s not as if they can’t still see us both. I haven’t told Mum yet. Dreading that – she’ll probably tell me to go back and try to make a go of it. Like she did back when … well, I mean like she just would.’

  ‘Back when? Have you and Rob split before?’

  ‘Er … no, not as such. Just a wobbler, ages ago. Nothing.’ Kate was flapping her hands as if they were wet dusters, waving Viola’s questioning away.

  ‘You should have told me at the time, Kate. I hate to think of you all unhappy and keeping it to yourself. And do you really think Mum would say that? I’m not so sure. Because it’s Rob leaving you, so …’

  ‘That won’t make a difference with her, will it? She’ll still be thinking it’s my fault, a bit like she did with you, with Marco going gay, as if you could have turned him if you’d put your mind to it. And after Dad died, there was never anyone else, was there? Loyalty even to just a memory. But then that’s the way it is, isn’t it, when it’s the absolute love of your life. And there’s no saying when those will turn up, out of the blue. Maybe early on if you’re lucky, maybe later. Maybe never. Either way, I’ve had my go at it. Much good it did me.’

  Kate’s eyes filled with tears. Viola put her mug down and went to hug her but Kate fended her off, dashing tears away with the back of her hand. One fell on the black granite worktop, flashing in the sun like a fallen diamond. ‘No, don’t,’ she said, opening another of the boxes. ‘Don’t be nice or the floodgates will open. Just tell me where you want these pans stashed.’

  NINETEEN

  ‘SO HE, LIKE, texts you all the time?’ As the two girls sidestepped a bunch of dawdling tourists wielding big, lethal backpacks and walked down the first part of Portobello Road, Emmy’s look of frank envy was massively gratifying. This Ned thing was just such a totally cool thing for Rachel, the best thing that had happened this whole year, possibly even ever, and it made her feel on an equal footing with her best friend for once. Emmy was usually the one who had boys flocking to her like urban foxes round café bins. Emmy’s boys were all a bit gothy, of course, always scarily skinny and grim-faced pale and wearing droopy black all the time, which was the part Rachel wasn’t jealous about, but at least Emmy and her Camden velvet and lace and bluey-purple hair got male attention from that clan wherever she went.

  ‘He does. Just tells me stuff like where he is and where he’s going. Don’t know why, sometimes. I mean, like if he’s texting me that he’s hangin’ with a mate in the Met, does that mean he wants me to go there too?’

  ‘Does he ask you to?’ Emmy asked, sounding slightly puzzled, as if nothing needed analysing and agonizing over. Perhaps it didn’t. How, Rachel wondered, did you learn to take everything at the simple just-as-it-seems level?

  ‘Not really. It’s just, like, information. Lots of contact. Maybe the Met is kind of impressive? I don’t know the place, don’t even know if it’s a pub or club or what. I can’t tell.’

  ‘Ask him? Google?’ Emmy’s face was all screwed up with confusion. It crossed Rachel’s mind that if her gran saw her she’d tell her not to pull that face or it would stay like that if the wind changed. She’d miss having Gran around, but only a bit, and anyway they weren’t going far away from her. Naomi was great but, maybe it was all the detective stories she read, she always seemed to be keeping an eye out for more information than you actually gave her. Unless that was Rachel’s own guilt showing … She had never really had secrets till now. She hadn’t had any practice at keeping them from people. Even here, miles from home, she felt watchful and nervous. At the Kensington Church Street end of Notting Hill there was the danger she’d run into Gemma. Anywhere past halfway down Portobello Road she risked bumping into her father or James.

  ‘I already Googled, Emmy – course I did. I got the Metropolitan Police and the Met Office with some weather. No help at all. If I ask, especially this long after, I’ll just be looking stupid. Like I should know. He’s loads older than us. Not that he knows that, cos he hasn’t actually asked how old I am. If he does,’ she suddenly felt panic about this, ‘can we be, say, sixteen? Otherwise he might just run.’

  ‘Hmm, yeah OK. Tricky, innit, life?’ Emmy laughed.

  Before Ned, Rachel had begun to think she might be invisible. Now she was getting some attention she was thinking more about looking like who she was. She knew she looked like just about every other tallish, thinnish blonde London girl of nearly fifteen, wearing the flowery cut-off shorts that were this summer’s version of last year’s denim ones, just as everyone else was. Same long messy hair, same little Topshop long Ts, same OK face, but she so wanted something that made her a one-off. Gemma had given her a gorgeous 1940s floral tea dress, but when she put it on she just felt like a little girl dressing up in a grandmother’s outfit.
Also it had smelled a bit funny. A lot of what Gemma sold had that same pong, which Gemma said was from being too long in musty wardrobes with worn-out mothballs. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t a smell you’d ever want to wear. She and Emmy now stopped to look in a window at fringed cowgirl-style skirts and thick leather belts studded with turquoise.

  ‘Is that me, do you think?’ she asked Emmy, who understood Rachel’s need to find her defining image.

  ‘Dunno. You’d look OK, but then as you’re not completely fuggerz, you’d look hot in anything. Do you like it? Wouldn’t you have to know about, like, Dolly Parton and country stuff?’

  ‘Suppose,’ Rachel agreed. ‘Can’t see me going for all that yee-hah country music. I only know a couple of Taylor Swift songs; don’t even know if she counts. I’d end up getting looked at by blokes who only listen to songs about dead dogs and Nashville. Dad likes all that, but then he loves rhinestones and cowboy boots.’

  ‘So where are we meeting these people? Is it far? These shoes are a bit of a killer.’ Emmy winced as her ultra-pointy-toed boot caught the edge of the pavement.

  ‘No – he said it’s not far down the road. Actually, look – that’s it, over there.’ Rachel pointed, reading the sign Gold, big letters running from top to bottom outside the pub. She felt nervous, her heart rate sky-rocketed and she fluffed up her hair quickly and licked her lips. It was too late to delve into her bag to find a mint and she hoped that if (and oh please …) Ned actually kissed her, she’d taste all right. She was definitely a slow starter compared with some of the others in their year; she’d only snogged two boys before, both of those at last new year’s party when it didn’t really count as anything but practice. This one mattered.

  ‘So, do we, like, go in?’ They crossed the road to the pub, but hung back. There were a few quite old tatty-looking men hanging around the doorway, smoking and laughing, clutching pints of beer and looking as if they’d been there a while, possibly years. As the girls lingered on the pavement, two of the men finished their drinks, took the glasses inside and yelled goodbye to the bar staff.