I Should Be So Lucky (7 page)

‘Yes, well, you say that now. But you’re still young – just – so think on,’ Naomi told her, leaving Viola thoroughly warned that romance was absolutely a three-strikes-and-you’re-out game, and she was about to run out of chances. And also years. ‘Just’? That was new.

In the interests of golf-ball avoidance Kate and Rob had compromised on the possibility of a sunny outdoor lunch in the garden and had slid back their heavy patio doors as far as they’d go, ‘to let the outside in’, as Rob put it. The sweet scent of pinks wafted in but was quickly defeated by the clammy aroma of Kate’s famous roast pork and steamy vegetables. Kate liked a fully dressed table and it was draped with double cloths, heavy damask napkins, and (as Marco whispered to Viola) enough cutlery, glasses and plates to furnish an embassy banquet. With that, the swagged and tied-back floral curtains (made by Kate, along with every cushion cover, bedspread and padded headboard in the house) and all the wall space crammed with Kate and Rob’s family photos, Viola felt smothered and claustrophobic and wished they were outside in the fresh air having a
casual
barbecue. It would make breathing easier when the inevitable telling-off happened. And she knew it would – she’d already caught Miles and Kate exchanging looks. Building up to the strike, getting the timing right, she’d guess. Miles was looking flushed and twitchy. He kept touching the side of his head as if to check his hair was still there. Not much of it was, these days, but as if to compensate there was quite a lot more stomach.

‘I see you’ve put Aidan’s degree certificate up along with yours and Rob’s,’ Naomi commented, pointing to a newly framed addition to the wall: a photo of Kate and Rob’s elder son, an embarrassed-looking young man in a mortar board, clutching said certificate in its just-presented rolled-up form. Close by were Kate’s and Rob’s own graduation photographs. In hers, Kate had a blonde bubble perm, and the now-balding Rob sported a wispy gingery mullet in his.

‘You look so goody-goody in this, Kate,’ Viola remarked. ‘But I remember being so impressed that you had a really punky kilt thing on under the academic gown, all safety pins and rips. Everyone else was all tidy in knee-length skirts and white blouses. I thought you were the coolest sister.’

‘A long, long time ago,’ Kate said, looking dreamy, as if she’d been a different person. She might well have been, Viola thought, considering Kate’s journey from all-out punk to such formal tableware preferences. ‘And
on
that wall,’ Kate went on, handing round the potatoes, ‘I’ve just enough space for Henry’s, then we’re done, all finished.’ Viola saw her shoot a glance at Rob and was surprised to see a look of near-hatred on her face. Rob, benign and jovial, was oblivious, and carried on telling Miles about his chances of becoming golf-club captain.

‘Never was one to hide her light, that one,’ Naomi murmured to Rachel. ‘Give me paintings on a wall any day. A craggy landscape with some proper stormy weather in it, like my Oliver Stonebridge ones in the hall. Or they could put up a great big Rothko print or two. Family photos belong in albums, for private viewing, not up and out for showing off.’

Viola, still a bit shocked by the look that should have felled Rob, also thought the ‘we’re done’ statement sounded strange, as if Kate’s family life would be somehow ‘cooked’ by then, and would need no more nurturing. Of all their clan, she wouldn’t have had Kate down as being anything less than forever family-minded, one hundred per cent domestic goddess (in spite, as Miles pointed out as they ate, of being foolhardy enough to opt for pork when there wasn’t an R in the month) and a potential nightmare for any future daughters-in-law. Irons, to Kate’s household men, were things that lived in golf bags and had little knitted Aran hats. She used to tell Viola off for never ironing bedlinen, having once caught her doing a perfunctory
fluff-and-fold
and piling everything straight into the airing cupboard.

It wasn’t till the pudding (a chocolate tart, with strawberries, raspberries and clotted cream) was served that the real subject of the gathering at last surfaced for discussion. Viola had been wondering whether Miles or Kate would raise it first. They’d been waiting for their moment. She guessed Naomi felt the same and smiled at her across the table. Naomi winked back.

Miles always made Viola feel like a pupil who has disappointed a concerned teacher. So far, he’d contributed little to the lunch conversation other than to tell them that his wife Serena was away on a weekend watercolour course and was sorry to miss them all.

‘I bet,’ Kate whispered to Viola. ‘Last time it was a bridge cruise. Never home, lucky cow.’

‘Now, Viola. I hear you’re moving out of Mum’s flat,’ Miles began, the moment everyone had picked up their spoons, adding with a slow, sad smile, ‘and leaving her on her own.’

‘Yea, ’tis true – we’re going home!’ Rachel said.

Miles, formal in a cream linen suit that somehow didn’t dare crease, and striped tie, turned to her. ‘You needn’t sound so delighted.’ Rachel flinched.

‘Why not?’ Marco defended her. ‘She’ll get her own room back and all her stuff out of storage, she can have friends round. What’s
not
to like?’

‘Well, it does rather leave a problem, don’t you think?’
Miles
leaned forward towards him across the table. The tie threatened to dangle in his pudding. Viola watched it, fascinated, hoping it would. That would challenge her so-older brother’s air of supreme authority.

Marco put his head on one side and made an exaggerated thinking face. ‘Um … does it?’

‘When you pull that face you look like a budgie,’ Kate snapped at him. He winced. ‘This is serious,’ she declared.

‘Pudding wine, anyone?’ Rob waved a bottle of Vin Santo.

‘Not now, Rob.’ Kate now turned on him. ‘We’re talking.’ She paused, then smiled at Viola.

‘Now, Viola, darling,’ she began. ‘Have you really thought this through? Miles and I are thinking your memories of Bell Cottage can’t be happy ones.’

‘I’ve already told you, Kate. My memories of living there are more happy than not. We’re going back. Mum’s fine with it.’ She thought fleetingly of Rhys. He’d lived there with her and Rachel for less than a year, and hadn’t added much more to the place than his toothbrush and a
Top Gear
boxed set. ‘He’s not a settler,’ his own mother had warned. ‘Don’t think he won’t wander.’ Oh, he’d wandered all right. Why had the fact he’d promised her he’d changed made her believe he actually
had
? What an idiot she’d been.

‘You can’t be OK with this, Mum?’ Kate turned her attention to Naomi. ‘Who’s going to look after you?’

‘I’ll look after myself,’ Naomi insisted. ‘I always have. I didn’t need babysitting before Vee and Rachel moved in and I don’t now. Nothing’s changed in the time they’ve been with me. While I can still drive, walk and find my way to the bathroom in good time I’ll be all right.’

‘I think Viola’s being very selfish,’ Miles said. ‘She’s had your hospitality for all this time and now you’re getting frailer she’s bailing out.’ He paused. ‘The best thing all round would be for Viola to stay put. Maybe spread out from the flat a bit …’

‘Or,’ Marco suggested, ‘you could sell your house, Naomi. Get something easier to manage, blow the rest on gin and toy boys. I know, you could live in seaside hotels, have room service and put bets on the gee-gees in the afternoons.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Miles snapped at him. ‘She can’t sell the house!’

‘Why not?’ Viola said. ‘What’s to stop her?’

‘It’s the
family home
. The base.
Our
base,’ Kate began, exchanging a glance with Miles across the table.

‘That’s right.’ He backed her up. ‘For over thirty years. You don’t just
walk away
.’

‘But you haven’t lived there since you were eighteen, either of you.’ Viola was puzzled. ‘And, Miles,
you
were about sixteen when we moved in – so hardly there at all, really. If it’s anyone’s childhood home, it’s surely mine. And
I
don’t mind if Mum wants to go somewhere else,
somewhere
a bit easier to cope with. It’s not about bricks and stuff, surely?’

‘No, Viola, stop this. They’re right. I can’t sell it,’ Naomi said. ‘And I won’t. But will you all
please
stop talking about me as if I’m not here? I’m not a
parcel
, not a
thing
to be passed around and dealt with. Viola must go back to her own home, just as she’d always meant to, and I’ll carry on as I did before she came. I haven’t suddenly lost my marbles or the use of my limbs over the past year and I don’t want to talk about this. Next thing, you’ll have me in a home.’

Kate and Miles laughed. ‘Absolutely not!’ Miles assured her. ‘There’s no question of a home, but we do feel …’

‘No, that’s enough!’ Naomi stopped him. She started getting to her feet, staggering slightly as the voluminous tablecloth tangled itself round her leg. ‘Marco – please will you take us home now?’

Before they left, Viola went upstairs to the bathroom. Rachel was inside it so she went into Kate and Rob’s room to use their en-suite loo. The bedroom was looking showroom neat – no clothes and shoes lying around, no books open on the bedside table. Even Beano the poodle was tidily curled up and dozing in his basket. The double bed, though – Viola saw that it had only one pillow, centrally placed. A pink floral night-dress was poking out from beneath it. You could only conclude that Kate and Rob now occupied separate
rooms
. Kate’s usual collection of framed photos seemed to have gone from all the surfaces too, apart from a few on a table beside the bed. Viola picked up the nearest, surprised that it showed her own wedding, not Rob and Kate’s. It was a casual, happy shot of herself and Kate, both laughing, either side of Rhys, who had an arm round each of them. He was looking at Viola, grinning hugely, as if delighted (at least for that day) to have won her. She felt tears pricking at her eyes and put the photo down again quickly. He’d been a rat, for sure, but for a very brief blissful while, until he’d started to break out of the marriage cage, he’d been
her
rat.

SIX

VIOLA HADN’T HAD
the Rhys dream for a while, but the night of the lunch at Kate’s it turned up in the early hours, leaving her wide awake too soon to get up but too late to get back to proper sleep. At first after the crash it had descended on her almost every broken, miserable night, but gradually it had slipped away, coming back only a couple of times in the past few months. Lately, she had almost dared to hope the dream had stopped for good, but obviously no such luck. She should never, she thought to herself as she turned the pillow to the cool side, have looked at that photo in Kate’s bedroom.

The dream was pretty much identical each time. Viola was in the green Porsche with Rhys, screaming for him to stop as the car hurtled like a broken fairground ride towards a vast tree, one that seemed to be coming towards them, lurching out of the woods and over the
edge
of the roadside, deliberately aiming to smash into the speeding car. She could make out the intricate, twisted patterns of its bark; smell mushroomy old wood and feel the chill against her face from cold damp leaves, almost as if she were rolling on the woodland earth. Then instead of the expected impact she would be walking away from the crumpled, smoking car to join a waiting crowd of women, recognizing the faces of every one she’d ever known, from tiny girls at her first school, university mates, her barely remembered grandmother, her sister and mother, her daughter, her friends. And somewhere among this collection would be Rhys, completely unhurt, gloating and triumphant and smiling all around at these women, saying, ‘See? It was nothing.’ And they were all delighted and celebratory apart from furious, terrified Viola – the spoilsport, the bad fairy.

In the first confused waking moments, Viola would still feel she was right there on the edge of the group, searching for the one face she didn’t know, the one who wasn’t there, who he’d been with when he died. And she was a hundred per cent sure he
had
been with someone – in real life, not in the dream. Whoever he was leaving her for, this suddenly discovered absolute unchallengeable love of his life, had been in that car. The police had thought so too. The crash had been on a remote road and the call to the emergency services had been from a distraught woman who wouldn’t give her name. If she’d been injured, she hadn’t hung about
waiting
for the ambulance. But it was no longer as if Viola really wanted to know about her – it wouldn’t change anything to be confronted with some random woman who had run away from her dead (or far, far worse, dying) lover. What kind of woman did that? A very young one? A terrified one? Someone astoundingly concussed? But it was no use speculating: whoever it was had faded back into whatever life she’d had pre-Rhys, just as Viola was trying to now. If only the dream would – please – leave her alone. She’d fight it off and try her absolute best to will it never to visit her again once she’d moved back home, she resolved as she got out of bed before it was light and went to make a cup of tea.

He’d probably have forgotten all about her by now, Viola thought later as she clicked on Gregory Fabian’s number in her phone. She felt ridiculously nervous about calling him, ashamed that she’d left it so long. Good manners should have sent her visiting the Fabian Nursery well before this, to thank him properly for taking care of her and driving her home. She’d have gone on Sunday if it hadn’t been for the three-line whip of Kate’s lunch, though of course that would surely be any garden centre’s busiest day. Then, just before his phone could ring, she quickly switched hers off again, deciding that as she was still, post-shower, wrapped only in a not-quite-big-enough towel, she needed to be
dressed
in order to talk to him. Mad, she told herself as she rubbed her damp hair dry, he CANNOT see you. You DO NOT need to be fully clothed and with hair done and make-up on, just to fix up some simple visiting arrangement. But then, just as she’d dropped the towel and was about to put on her knickers, the phone rang.