I Should Be So Lucky (3 page)

‘Actually, maybe I should just ring for a cab. I mean …’ She indicated the spade and the mound of freshly dug earth. ‘You’re, er … busy. I’ll just go and leave you to whatever it is you’re doing.’

Oh God, whyever had she said that? She should have
pretended
not to notice anything at all. Now he’d have to kill her too. A desperately sad image came to mind of Rachel packing her possessions and trailing off to Notting Hill to live with Marco and James. Others followed swiftly: Naomi getting her magpie-feathered funeral hat out and weeping into a triple gin. Her sister and brother on their way to identify her corpse, agreeing that she’d always been the jinxed one and now look.

‘No, really, it’s no trouble at all – so long as you’re not heading for Scotland or something!’ he insisted cheerily, flashing some more of the slightly crazed smile. ‘Just climb into the Land Rover and give me a minute to finish off here. All I ask is that you don’t tell anyone you saw me here tonight.’

‘Oh, absolutely!’ Viola almost shouted the words. ‘I absolutely promise I’ll never tell anyone, ever, not in my whole life. Trust me. Please.’

He looked puzzled. ‘Well, it’s not that big a deal, but thanks.’

‘It
isn’t
?’

He picked up the spade and grinned at her again. ‘No. Because I don’t know what you think I’m up to here, but I’m only planting a tree. A quince tree, to be precise.’

Oh. Planting a tree. A quince tree. Yes, of course he was.

TWO

‘EH, LASS, THAT’S
just the sort of thing that
would
happen to you,’ Naomi chuckled at Viola the next morning after Rachel had left for school. ‘But that man who brought you home, he could have been anyone. You can’t be too careful, especially with your luck. What I told you when you were little still applies, you know:
never
get into a car with a stranger. You could have been strangled in a ditch with your pants gone.’

Viola said nothing, but counted silently to ten as she filled the kettle in her mother’s kitchen. The kettle was a heavy old thing and the plug felt a bit wobbly, as if it were about to fall to pieces, like so much of this rapidly crumbling house. Naomi might still be able to whizz around like someone twenty years younger than her age, but surely at some point soon she really would need to be living somewhere easier and safer than this great mouldering Edwardian pile, especially once Viola and
Rachel
moved back to their own home. And that would have to be soon, she’d decided overnight. Very soon. It wasn’t only Charlotte twitting her about ‘camping at the homestead’ that had done it, though that had made her think about how long she’d been avoiding getting back to real life. No – it was the backlit vision on the doorstep that had finally made up her mind for her.

Arriving home at close to midnight, Viola had slithered awkwardly down from the Land Rover’s passenger seat and the front door of the house had been immediately flung open, sending a shaft of brilliant light across the gravel, effectively floodlighting the car. There, framed by the doorway, was Naomi in her long, shocking-pink kimono, her arms outstretched like an angel about to take off and the bright green dragon pattern on the silk breathing furious orange fire. She had purple sheepskin slippers on her feet and was shouting in a high piercing voice that would wake the comatose, ‘Vee, Vee, is that you? Where the ’eck have you
been
?’ For the second time that evening she’d felt like a nagged teenager, mortified and seethingly rebellious in equal measure.

‘Oo-er – looks like you’ll be grounded for weeks for this!’ her rescuer had teased. Viola hadn’t seen the funny side. You don’t, she’d thought grimly, at thirty-five.

‘If she had her way, I would be. Probably for life,’ she’d groaned, glaring at Naomi, mentally j
ust daring
her
to stride up to the car and demand of the tree-planter precisely what he thought he was doing, bringing her daughter home
at this time
. For a woman who’d spent her long-ago teenage years hanging out in the smoky all-night jazz clubs of Soho, Naomi worried an awful lot about after-dark danger.

‘Will you give me a call tomorrow, just so I know you got your car back OK?’ he’d said, grinning with either sympathy or suppressed hilarity – it was hard to tell in the dark. He leaned over and handed her a card through the open window.

‘I will, and thanks for the lift and everything. I must go, sorry …’

‘Yes, you must! I’m guessing you’ll be packed straight off to bed with a big telling-off!’

She’d heared him laugh as he swung the car round on the gravel and drove out through the gate, which she took plenty of time to close after him so as to gain a few moments to calm her fury at her mother, otherwise there would have been serious danger of her calling the tree man back to dig another deep hole, this time to plant a human. She’d then gone into the house, giving Naomi the most minimal explanation, feigned tiredness and raced into the flat, shutting the door firmly after her. Rachel, the only one who had any real claim to be worried, had been fast asleep.

‘Mum, burst tyres happen to everyone,’ Viola said now as she dealt with the boiling kettle.

‘But coming home with an unknown man doesn’t,’ Naomi lobbed back, determined to have the conversation she’d been denied the night before. She wasn’t being jocular, as she had been earlier. ‘Now he knows where you live, anything could happen.’

‘Oh God, Mum, I’m not
twelve
!’ Viola laughed off the implied threat but it was a brittle kind of sound, covering rising annoyance. ‘It wasn’t what you’d call a Big Risk.’

She felt mildly dishonest here – after all, she’d been the one who’d suspected her rescuer of secretly burying a corpse. She hadn’t mentioned the tree-planting aspect to Naomi. No such details were required, she’d decided, otherwise she’d never hear the end of it. ‘What does anyone want to go gardening at night for?’ would be the first question, and, to be honest, that was something any half-sane person might ask.

‘And risk or not, he was very kind, as people mostly are,’ Viola insisted. ‘Thanks to him, I got home fast and safely and the car is now at the garage having its tyre sorted. I can pick it up later this morning before I go into work. I’ve only got one afternoon session today. A
Wuthering Heights
intensive with four boarding-school chuck-outs, though this close to the exams it’s a bit late for them to …’

‘You didn’t tell him
who you are
, did you?’ Naomi interrupted, not looking at Viola. She expertly prised the lid off the old biscuit tin and scrabbled about among the contents to find a chocolate digestive.

Viola had known that question was coming, because it too often did after Rhys had died and she’d moved in here. Waiting for it made her feel tense, that and the effort of not snapping about being treated like some silly adolescent.

‘I’m not anyone, Mum,’ she replied wearily, it being far from the first time they’d had this discussion.

‘You know what I mean. You know what folk are like.’

‘It’s been over a year now. I think I’m a long time off the tabloid-interest radar, don’t you? I bet there’s hardly anyone out there who even remembers who Rhys was.’ She felt an unexpected ripple of pity for him, faithless bastard though he’d been. He’d so adored both his fame (which he was supremely confident would escalate any day soon from the level of soap star to superstar) and his infamy, but the waters of interest swiftly close over those out of the public eye, especially those permanently out of it.

Rhys had been a music-biz one-hit non-wonder with a mediocre boy band, but had had the kind of lucky looks that rescued him, as he hit his thirties, from the usual road to has-been obscurity by qualifying him for the serial-shagger role in a twice-weekly medical drama called
Doctors and Nurses
. He’d played a randy, rather cack-handed surgeon who couldn’t keep his own anatomy under control, let alone fix other people’s. Off set, he’d become less and less keen to leave the character behind at the studio and specialized in
gambling
, casual women, speeding fines and the odd drunken bar brawl: if the tabloid press were having a slack day scavenging for celebrity gossip, Rhys could usually be relied on to provide some kind of handy little nugget for page four. Worse, since he’d once told an interviewer that he liked women with curves, he’d acquired a small adoring posse of female admirers who gave up going to slimming clubs and took up the avid pursuit of Rhys instead.

The posse ran a Facebook fan page, sent birthday cards, would knock on the front door of Bell Cottage and claim they happened to be passing or a car had broken down. There were only about twelve of these admirers, but what they lacked in numbers they certainly made up for in brazen persistence. Was it one of them he’d run off to be with, Viola would wonder in the middle of the night. He’d always claimed he could barely tell any of them apart … but maybe that wasn’t entirely true. There’d definitely been someone hugely special. Rhys was like a cat – once he’d settled into a good, comfortable home, it would take an earthquake to shift him, but, at the end, shifted he had been.

Viola had hated his tabloid coverage: ‘Where exactly is the show-biz glamour in a pub fight, and all on the front page of the
Daily Grot
?’ she would challenge on the days there were photographers hanging around the gate in the mornings and Rachel had to push her way past them on her way to school. Rhys would just shrug
and
come up with his ever-ready answer: ‘What does it matter? You and me and Rachel, we know it was no more than me standing on a bloke’s foot, saying “sorry, mate” and buying him a beer. They exaggerate for a living.’ But then he’d do his delighted-with-himself laugh. ‘And hey, who cares if they make it all up? It’s another sprinkle of glitter on the old image!’

Under threat of his role being killed off in
Doctors and Nurses
, Rhys had been actively putting a more positive shine on his bad-boy image when Viola had met him, and was having a phase of being keen to be seen doing good works instead of bad deeds. Her sister Kate had booked him to be the guest auctioneer at a charity fund-raiser event she’d helped organize and Viola had gone along as a guest. Kate, smiling animatedly, had been showing off her celebrity catch, and had introduced him rather excitedly to her sister. Kate had then been inexplicably miffed when Viola had accepted a lift home with her pet star in his bile-green Porsche. ‘You were only supposed to
chat politely
to him,’ she’d hissed down the phone the next day. ‘Not bloody get off with him!’

‘But I sort of thought that’s what you wanted!’ Viola had been puzzled. ‘You practically threw us together! And you and Miles are always saying you’d like to see me settled again, which is a weird term – makes me feel like a badly rooted tree.’ I can’t get it right, she’d thought, sighing at the fickleness of families. Kate was
stolidly
long-term married. She, on the other hand, had been long-term single since the divorce from Marco, and was beginning to wonder if anyone – anyone
ever
– would ask her out again. But Rhys
did
ask – and he didn’t have to do it twice. He was all charm and fun, seemed to adore her on sight and she, slightly needy and not believing her luck, fell like a stone for him.

‘Because it’s just … just bloody
typical
of you,’ Kate had fumed the day after the charity gala. ‘You just march in and take what you want like a spoiled … Oh, never mind. It’ll all come to nothing anyway.’ Except it hadn’t. Not then, anyway.

But it wasn’t press intrusion that had driven Viola and Rachel to leave their home and take refuge in Naomi’s flat after Rhys’s death. The photographers hanging around on the pavement lost interest immediately after the funeral. That same little coterie of Rhys’s few but lunatic-level fans, however, had turned up to watch the funeral party leave the house and then seemed to hang on and around for ages after (‘What are they here for? In case he comes back as, like, a
ghost
?’ Rachel had asked), appearing regularly to decorate the magnolia tree by the gate with fronds of fabric that quickly became damply filthy in the suburban winter rain. They made a shrine, pinning photos of him to the fence, tied flowers to the gate and, when Viola slid out and removed their tributes after a couple of days’ grace, they turned nasty, posting spiteful, hurtful, anonymous notes through the letter
box
telling Viola his death was all her fault: if he was out driving too fast in the icy early hours, he must have been desperate to get away from home, and from her. The ‘B’ of Bell Cottage had been changed to an ‘H’.

Neither she nor Rachel could cope with this kind of persecution, so she’d packed up and stored their possessions, put her much-loved home up for rent and moved into Naomi’s flat. But last night … the Land Rover had taken her past the house. No lights were on; there was no sign of life from the tenant and her lovely little house looked lonely and abandoned. She fancied that maybe it missed her and Rachel – they’d had the place a long time, since way before Rhys, from back when she and Marco were first together. Also, although the car flashed past quickly and the only illumination was the pale orangey light from the street lamp, there didn’t seem to be any tacky Rhys memorabilia anywhere obviously in sight, not so much as a faded rose crumbling to desiccation on the fence. Either his admirers had gone off to get themselves a life (at last), or they were honing their shrine-making skills at the home of some other luckless dead celebrity. The tenant’s lease would be up soon. It was, Viola felt in her bones, time to go home. It was just going to be a matter of finding the right moment to tell Naomi.

The working hours were good and pretty flexible and the pupils were a lively and ever-surprising bunch,
even
if the pay wasn’t great. Viola told herself this every time she drove in through the ornate iron gates of the tall Georgian house that was the Medworth and Gibson Tutorial College (
never
to be called a crammer, according to Sandra Partridge, the principal, so of course it always was). Thanks to the tenant’s rent, she could just about afford for this work to be part-time, which had mattered a lot over these last long months since Rhys’s death, when she’d felt dismal and low and overwhelmed by so much time-consuming admin that had needed to be sorted. At Med and Gib, as it was known, she worked haphazard hours teaching English Lit to a client base made up of the rich and spoilt, but mostly rather sweet and needy, teenage dispossessed, trying to stuff their heads with enough exam-technique information to make up for the fact they’d been expelled from school, dozed away time on drugs and drink or generally spent months skiving.