I Should Be So Lucky Page 7

  Reluctantly, as time was getting on, Viola closed the French doors, locked them and faced the moment of going upstairs, almost afraid to go into the room that had witnessed the last awful scene between her and Rhys. This was the big test: would she find that, after all, the place was for ever tainted by the memory, to the point where she couldn’t see a way to move on and enjoy life here again?

  ‘You OK?’ Marco asked, sensing a change of mood as they prepared to go upstairs.

  ‘Yes – I’m fine, thanks. I had a dream about the crash last night and it’s made me think about who he was with. What happened to her? Why did she never ever turn up? You’d think she would, one way or another. Maybe she has. I’ll never know, will I?’

  Marco squeezed her hand. ‘No, you probably won’t, but it wouldn’t change anything if she did, would it? Don’t let a dream hold you back, Vee, don’t let him get in the way of the rest of your life.’

  ‘I know, I know. And I won’t. So …’ she rallied and smiled brightly, ‘let’s go and look. All of upstairs will need paint, just to colour away, you know – that last day. I can just about run to new carpets too, I think.’

  ‘I get it, I completely get it,’ Marco said, hugging her. ‘And you don’t have to live here at all, remember. Moving to somewhere else wouldn’t be that hard – all your stuff is in storage, everything tidied and ready to roll.’

  ‘No, I want to give it a go because if I don’t move back in and try living here again then I’d never know if it would have worked or not. You and me and Rachel had a great time here, and I love the area. I’d only be looking for something pretty much identical if I did move, and then paying pointless thousands that I can’t afford in stamp duty. It would be mad. And it would feel like a defeat.’

  She went into her bedroom and over to the window, facing the door, picturing the last scene with Rhys, trying to work out how she felt now.

  ‘You know it won’t last!’ she’d shouted as he’d hauled his crammed suitcase off the bed and headed for the stairs. ‘It’s just another in that long line of your sluts.’ From then it had almost felt like slow motion as he’d stopped, put the case down on the landing and walked back into the room. She’d held her breath, realizing too late what he would do. The slap was quick, vicious, and when she opened her stinging eyes after it, he was halfway down the stairs.

  ‘This one’s everything to me. Everything,’ had been the last words she’d heard him say, his voice trailing away as he bumped the case down to the hall.

  Well, none of that had been the room’s fault. The windows overlooked the bright and sunny back garden, and the walls were painted a subtle grey-blue. She looked around, seeing it as a house-buying stranger would, opened and shut the wardrobes, inspected the little en-suite bathroom with its vivid blue and green Moroccan tiles, and waited to feel something momentous. But it seemed the room had forgiven and forgotten, and she sensed it welcoming her home. Exciting. And a delight actually to feel that way – she’d been so blank for a long time now, it was as if she was coming out of fog.

  She turned to Marco and smiled at him. ‘Palest turquoise?’

  She could hear him letting go of a held breath. ‘Yes – and I know just the shade. A touch of Caribbean but light and subtle, better for the British climate. Perfect.’

  ‘Brilliant. And I’ll see if I can get Kate to make me some new curtains too. And Marco?’

  ‘Yes, darling?’

  ‘Cliché or not, I think I really will get a cat.’

  SEVEN

  ‘APPARENTLY,’ AMANDA TOLD Viola, ‘a party of some of our dear little charges had got a bit out of hand on Thursday night. A couple of the lads, including our very own sweet Benedict Peabody, were arrested after a lot of noise complaints, but there was nothing definite they could hang on them. No real damage, just a lot of broken glass, kicked-about cans in the street, too much racket and the neighbours in those big wedding-cake-type houses having their beauty sleep disturbed.’

  The college seemed strangely empty after the past weeks of individual last-minute pre-exam tutorials, which were spent in equal measure calming students’ nerves and trying to gee up the too laid-back into some sort of work ethic. Viola, rushing from Bell Cottage, found she had time to chat to Amanda, and they were in the college staffroom with tea and biscuits and some gossip mags that another tutor had left. These reminded Viola, yet again, of Rhys. A photo of himself in one of these magazines gave him a buzz for days. He’d been hugely sulky that none of them were keen to give more than half a page to coverage of his and Viola’s wedding. ‘What the fuck else does anyone think I’m doing it for?’ she’d caught him saying down the phone to his agent, and she’d almost bailed out on the whole event right then till he apologized, saying he was just piling on the pressure. ‘Make the idle bastard try a bit harder,’ he’d soothed her, kissing her neck in the way that always made her shiver.

  ‘Oh Lordy, Thursday! I can’t help feeling the party was very much my fault, you know,’ Viola said, dunking a gingernut into her tea and watching with no surprise at all as the wet half fell to the bottom of the cup. ‘It was me that day who suggested they all go round to Benedict’s to watch Wuthering Heights on DVD, for a bit of last-ditch revision. I had a feeling as soon as the words were out that this wasn’t going to turn out well. The boy was just a bit too enthusiastic. He was texting before the class was over, a look on his face like he was up to something. Letting his thousands of Facemates know, I expect. I bet the photos of the carnage are up there for all their future employers to wince at.’

  ‘He’s a teenage boy, they’re always up to something!’ Amanda laughed. ‘You can’t take the blame for what they do. He’d have thought up some other reason to get the crowds in if he hadn’t already, what with the Peabody seniors being away and him having a free house. And bless him, I overheard him this morning in the corridor, grumbling that he wasn’t doing anything, just “cotchin’ wid da bredrin” and then saying the housekeeper had sorted the broken windows. Imagine having a housekeeper; wouldn’t that be heaven? You’d never have to plead for half a day off to wait in for the plumber. Anyway, he looked pretty pleased with himself, all bouncy and bumptious and with those two dippy girls hanging off him. His cred rating, or whatever they call it, must be way up.’

  Viola sighed. ‘I know I’m not really to blame, not deep down,’ she said. ‘But it’s sort of typical. One day, one day, I’ll suggest something, or do something, and it’ll all work out fine. No complications, no hassles, nothing going ludicrously wrong.’ She felt like curling up on the staffroom sofa with her hands round her knees and her forehead resting on them, like a child who thinks that by making herself smaller and keeping her eyes shut, she’ll become both invisible and unreachable. Miles had called her just after she’d spoken to Greg, saying he wanted to meet her for a chat soon, just the two of them. ‘A matter of importance,’ he’d told her, trying to sound mysterious, as if, after what had been said at Kate’s on Sunday, she wouldn’t have the first clue what it was about. It certainly wasn’t to discuss his promotion prospects or his wife Serena’s fury about her third-year-in-a-row failure to get into the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. How old did she have to be before life stopped being a series of tellings-off?

  ‘Well, hey – here’s something that can’t go wrong.’ Amanda sounded comforting. ‘My cousin’s band is playing at a pub in Chelsea on Friday night, blues covers, that sort of thing – quite good, actually. I thought you might like to come along with Leo and me? I’ll drive – so you won’t have to worry about ending up in the trees with a flat tyre again. You can have a glass of wine, relax, forget all about these students and their idiocy. What do you think?’

  Viola pondered for a moment, feeling mildly suspicious, thinking of Charlotte’s plan to get her hooked up with a new man. But Amanda’s pretty, wide-eyed face was looking perfectly innocent: not at all sparkly and overkeen as if trying to pretend there wasn’t a hidden agenda. All in all, it did sound like a good idea;
a social life hadn’t exactly been a priority over the past months. She’d fended off quite a lot of invitations because they usually sounded like carefully chosen mercy missions, such as films with absolutely no love interest, as if she needed sensitive handling. It didn’t make for comfortable outings, having people look sideways at you any time long marriages or death were mentioned, or noticing someone being nudged hard when there was gossip about other charmless, cheating actors. Music, though – good noisy stuff in a darkened room and no one paying attention to what she was thinking. That could be just what was needed. And hey, if it turned out to be a set-up, she could always plead a headache and do a runner.

  ‘Yes, thanks – actually I’d love to,’ she decided. ‘Rachel’s going to be staying over with Marco and James that night, so that kind of works out really well.’

  A night out, good sounds, a couple of glasses of wine. She closed her eyes as the thought breezed past quickly: just like normal people.

  It was funny how you could live for years in one area and still have to look at a map to track down undiscovered corners, unexpectedly rural ones, barely twelve miles from the centre of London. Viola had been out and about in these magically wild bits of the district with Kate many times during the past year, Kate calling round on sunny weekends and dragging her out to stop her brooding in the flat, making her walk the poodle for hours with her across fields and woodland completely out of sight of any houses, and with no one around except other dog-walkers and the occasional jogger. It reminded Viola of being a small child again, when Naomi would persuade (and probably pay) the teenage Kate to take her out for hours on Sunday mornings or late summer afternoons, walking the family spaniel and letting Viola pick huge bunches of buttercups that would have lost most of their petals by the time they got them home. The two of them would sit by the river throwing the dog’s ball into the water for her to swim out and retrieve, while Kate, for lack of someone else to offload to, would chat on about whichever boy she was pursuing, who was usually one who was inconveniently pursuing some other girl. Even Rob, Viola remembered, had been engaged to someone else when Kate had met him, and had taken his time disentangling himself from the fiancée.

  Viola had found the post-Rhys walking as therapeutic as Kate had insisted it would be, being able to let fresh, clean air in to breeze away the gloom and having nothing to think about except where to put her feet so as not to slide over in a muddy puddle. Kate would talk away just as she had as a teenager, not requiring any response, chatting about her clients, such as the woman who had gone all nineties retro and was having festoon blinds everywhere, and about being asked to make bedroom curtains from a toile de Jouy pattern so pornographic she’d had to lock the workroom door against uninvited visitors. If Viola started to try and talk about Rhys’s accident, about those unknown details such as who had his new woman, this sudden absolute love of his life, been, Kate would deftly block this direction of conversation, gently steer Viola to safer ground, persuade her, just as Marco had, that going over questions that could never be answered was not the way to moving on with the rest of her life. And each time Viola returned to the flat and to Rachel and Naomi, she felt just that little bit better, until the next time she was awake at 4 a.m.

  Viola, knowing that with her luck a satnav would almost certainly lead her straight into the Thames, drove with her map book propped between her lap and the steering wheel, hoping it wouldn’t tumble down to get stuck under the brake pedal. She was now heading down an unfamiliar tree-lined lane, assuming, as the sign saying Fabian Nursery had pointed her this way, that it would appear as she reached the end. The sign by the main road had been so small, paint-faded and hard to spot that you could have been forgiven for thinking Gregory Fabian really loathed the idea of attracting customers. She’d actually stopped the car at the turning, reached out of the window and pushed a chunk of ivy away from the lettering, feeling like a mother smoothing a child’s overgrown fringe out of its eyes. Eventually, after bumping down a rutted, overhung track, she came to a pair of five-bar farm-style gates leading to a long, ancient brick wall beyond which she could just make out a low building with a much-mended roof, the green-stained top windows on an old, ornate glasshouse, and several polytunnels. Fronds of giant bamboo waved in the near distance. A collection of big, muddy rocks was piled up beside the path and a load of old tree trunks leaned against the wall. A fat grey pony looked up from grazing in an orchard of low fruit trees across the path from the gate and eyed her, as if he was speculating on the possibility of a pocketed carrot. For a place that was close to the Heathrow flight path, it could hardly have been a more bucolic scene.

  Gregory Fabian emerged from a doorway in the wall and came to open the gate for Viola. His dark blond curly hair looked as if it had been attacked by a thorn bush, he had a streak of mud across his face and a fraying rip over the knee of his jeans. She parked beside his Land Rover, which was crammed with potted daisy trees, some of them with their branches escaping and poking out of the open windows. A flatbed truck and a Transit van, each bearing the Fabian Nursery logo, were alongside, the truck laden with topiaried box trees, reminding her of old-fashioned poodle tails. A girl with Goth make-up was driving a forklift truck piled high with sections of ancient balustrading.

  ‘You don’t seem that keen for people to find you,’ she said as he led her towards the ramshackle building.

  ‘Sorry – the sign needs redoing. I keep meaning to get someone on to it, though I know it’ll be me who fixes it in the end. We don’t tend to get casual callers,’ he told her, as they passed an open door to an office containing a mud-stained computer and untidy heaps of paper. ‘But then this isn’t your average garden centre – you wouldn’t come here for your petunias.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go anywhere for petunias,’ Viola replied. ‘I don’t like them much.’

  ‘We have something in common then.’ He looked at her, nodding rather seriously. ‘That’s always a good start.’

  As before with the estate-agent comment on the phone, Viola wasn’t sure how to react. He seemed quite hard to fathom, not that she needed to try. After all, was she likely to see him again after today? Bizarrely, the thought that she wouldn’t see him again made her feel a bit odd inside. Maybe it was the rescue on the roundabout the other night – a very minor version of that thing where if someone saves your life, you are bound to them for ever. Ridiculous, she told herself. What he’d saved her was only a little bit of time and effort, though the fact that he’d restored some much-needed faith that people really could be just plain nice for no ulterior reason wasn’t to be discounted.

  ‘Come and see some of the stock,’ Gregory said, leading her past an open-sided shed crammed with gnarled old olive trees, followed by an area devoted to all kinds of ferns. Further on was a steamy polytunnel so densely packed with various palms that the two of them could hardly squeeze in. Display didn’t seem to be the Fabian forte. ‘We can get you pretty much anything you want. A hundred red maple trees, topiaried box, ivy by the ton, on or off the trellis.’

  She reached out to stroke some ivy fronds that were hanging from a doorway, then pulled her hand back, startled. ‘Ugh, it’s not real!’

  ‘No, well, quite a lot here isn’t.’ He faced her, smiling, amused by her confusion.

  ‘So if it’s not a garden centre, what is it? A cover for secret experiments with GM crops?’

  He laughed. ‘No, nothing so random. It’s all for hire, rather than buying.’

  ‘Renting? Who’d rent plants?’

  ‘Film companies, TV, advertising people, events, parties. I can rent you a marquee-load of big fat Kentia palms for your wedding, if you like, or a whole grove of olive trees for a holiday ad that’ll be made in an Acton shed because these days no advertising budgets will stretch to a location trip to Greece.’ They were now walking through the beautifully ornate Victorian greenhouse she’d glimpsed from the track, built along the ancient brick wall. It was stocked with more ferns, palms and banana trees.
Bird of paradise plants, hibiscus and bougainvillea took up the far end.

  ‘Are these real?’ She stroked a gorgeous strelitzia.

  ‘Yes, those are real. A bit of an indulgence, because I like them and among this world of fake old tat it’s good to have something genuine and exquisite. But the bougainvillea isn’t. You can order it by the metre.’

  ‘I’m getting the feeling I had when I went to Disneyland,’ she told him. ‘I was so confused by what was real and what was fake that I didn’t trust the ducks on the lake to be anything but remote-controlled.’

  ‘Tricks of this duplicitous trade, I’m afraid. It’s all about make-believe, isn’t it? A shabby old business in a way, when you think of it. All a con, but it pays the bills.’

  ‘Amazing. The things you don’t know … I’ll never look at a TV ad with woodland and plants in it again the same way. So how many of you work on this?’

  ‘Mostly just me and Mickey – we set it up years ago and we run it together – for the moment, anyway. Plus there’s Beth out there on the forklift, a fat bloke called Jez who lives entirely on crisps, and then several casuals who come in when there’s a big order on. Er … are you hungry? Is it too early for a bit of lunch?’

  ‘Lunch? Is there somewhere local?’ she asked.

  ‘Very local.’ He turned and grinned at her. ‘Right here.’

  Coming out from the far end of the greenhouse into the bright sunlight, she was for a moment dazzled by the glare but then saw just ahead, tucked away among pots of stunning flowering white lilacs (in June? Ah – right), a sumptuous purple and terracotta-coloured Moroccan tent, carpeted with a blue and scarlet kelim, elaborately decorated on the roof with gold appliquéd stars and hung with tassels and tiny tinkling bells. It was furnished with a low cushioned sofa draped with embroidered cloths sewn with little mirrors, and on an ancient-looking marble table (‘Don’t lean on that, it’s only fibreglass,’ Greg warned) was a bottle of chilled white wine and – beneath a couple of protective mesh covers – a selection of flatbreads and dips. Pots of scarlet standard roses bloomed at each end of the sofa.