Your Roots Are Showing (2 page)

Calling their names, she broke into a run down the crooked passageway. As she rounded a corner, she managed to trip over her own feet, catching her arm on the highly textured white wall as she fell. Funny how grazes hurt more than deep wounds, she thought, glancing at her raw elbow. Then she was up and running again, down the steep stairs, across the bare boards in the dining room, and out into the garden. Perhaps she’d left the gate open; perhaps even now the twins were capering merrily across some field, unhindered by an ounce of common sense between them to keep them out of bramble patches, away from angry bulls, and safe from poisonous mushrooms or pedophiles walking their dogs.

But the gate was closed.

Could they have climbed it? It was too high for Ellie, that was certain, but perhaps Alex could have boosted her up?

Oh God, how could she have lost the children within hours of bringing them to their new, single-parented home? She might have known she couldn’t do this on her own, not after days of panic and insomnia. She wasn’t competent, not right now. She could barely look after herself, let alone the children. She’d better call the police!

Then she remembered the shed. “Never come in here alone,” she’d told them earlier when they poked their heads in to look at its sad jumble of discarded garden implements. Encouragement enough!

And, of course, that was exactly where they were — closeted in the lovely, mysterious, giant Wendy-house with the door firmly closed to keep out meddling mothers. She heard them chatting away as she paused beside the door, trying to slow down her breathing and get a grip on her overblown emotions.

“Alex, this box is a table,” Ellie was chanting insistently.

“We got to keep dah monsters out,” was Alex’s equally insistent reply.

Lizzie threw open the door with a resounding smash.

“Dah monster!” Alex cried, and both children began to screech in only half feigned terror.

The cortisol was obviously sloshing about in bucket loads in Lizzie’s veins. Her anxiety immediately morphed into fury.

But she’d learned a trick that had saved her sanity and the children’s hides in just this sort of situation many times before. Count to forty-seven before you open your mouth. She did so, as slowly as she possibly could, and by the time she reached twenty, she was no longer itching to smack bottoms. By twenty-five, the children had stopped screeching and were studying her with a mixture of apprehension and curiosity. By thirty-five, she’d noticed Ellie’s box table, complete with newspaper tablecloth, a leaf plate, some gravel for food, and a solitary diner in the form of Panda the panda. By forty, she’d taken in the stout stick in Alex’s grubby hand, dangling at his side now but no doubt ready for action should a bona fide monster suddenly burst onto the scene. By forty-seven, she was able to speak, not yell at a volume that would have assaulted the ears of their only neighbor, as yet unknown to them.

“Children,” she said evenly, “I told you not to come in here, didn’t I?”

They nodded. In the past few days, Lizzie had seen this watchful look on their faces many times, most recently when they’d squeezed all the toothpaste into the tooth mug. Mummy was no longer the tolerant woman she’d once been, laughing off minor incidents like raw eggs smashed all over the tiles and sudden haircuts with the kitchen scissors. No, Mummy had become a wild force, like the weather, given to crashing around like a sudden electrical storm on a summer’s day.

“Do you know why I told you not to come in here?”

They looked at her in silence for a while. “Iss dirty,” Ellie finally said.

“Iss dangeriss,” Alex answered at almost the same instant.

“Right,” Lizzie said and pursed her lips. Both children were still studying her intently. By their expressions, she could tell they were braced for anything — shouting, arm-waving, door-slamming, foot-stamping, even Mummy in tears. Since James had left them, she’d been going off pop at the smallest provocation, despite renewing her vow every night to remain patient, calm, and rational with the children.

She took another cleansing breath.

“This shed is not only dirty but also dark and nasty. It’s full of broken glass. You could cut yourselves.” She gestured at the litter of glass beneath a smashed window.

“Yes, Mummy,” came the chorus.

“It’s full of old paint cans and bottles of turpentine and who knows what else.” Really, she had a good mind to complain to the landlord about all the odds and ends the previous tenants had abandoned. It was no stretch of the imagination at all to picture the twins settling down with paper cups and an assortment of bottles — engine oil, antifreeze, rose pesticide — for an impromptu garden-chemical-tasting session.

“Yes, Mummy.”

She decided not to mention the pitchfork and garden shears. Best not to draw Alex’s attention to such bounty.

“So you must never come here alone.”

“We won’t, Mummy.”

“Never, ever. Promise?”

“Pwomise, Mummy.”

“Right. It’ll be dark soon. Let’s go and clean up now.” Obediently, the children trailed her back to the house.

Using paper plates, she rustled up a meal of bread (no butter), miniature cheeses in red wax, tiny pots of fromage frais, wrapped cereal bars, and juice in foil pouches with straws. The children, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the living room, fell upon this uninspiring fare with shrieks of joy. In their eyes, anything in bright packaging was superior by far to home cooking, be it ever so gourmet. Which it seldom was — but still.

With her mouth full of purple fromage frais, Ellie announced, “Daddy will fix the shed an’ make it nice an’ not nasty.”

Alex, who was working on rolling his red wax into a malleable ball, looked up with bright eyes. “Yesh, Daddy woll fix it!”

Lizzie massaged her eyebrows with all ten fingers. “Daddy will not fix it,” she said at last, her voice rising. “Daddy will not be staying in this house with us. Daddy is living with Gran and Granddad at the moment. You’ll be seeing him a lot, but not here, not in this house.” How many times would she have to tell them before it sank in?

“Daddy will fix it,” Ellie screamed suddenly and threw her plate across the room.

A hush filled the house as the three-year-old contemplated her crime. The cheese seemed to roll forever, while the fromage frais pot went head over heels, spattering purple blobs on the beige carpet.

Then Lizzie found herself doing it again. Crying in front of the children. Sort of crying, at any rate — no noise came from her throat, but the tears were slipping freely down her cheeks, as if she had some kind of incontinence of the ducts. Wordlessly, she got up and began retrieving the paper plate and bits of food. Wordlessly, she dumped everything down in front of Ellie again and retreated to the kitchen.

She was standing at the sink, dabbing at her face with a tissue, and looking out over nettles toward the great open space of the field beyond the garden when she heard them pattering hesitantly over the linoleum.

“Mummy?”

“Mmm?”

“Iss okay, Mummy. Everything woll be all right if you have a nice little nap. You jus’ tired, Mummy,” Alex said earnestly.

For good measure, Ellie added, “You look ’stremely pretty today, Mummy.”

And it was all her fault, all of this.

Of course, she could clean up the shed for them. Throw out all the dangerous chemicals. Sweep away the broken glass. Hang the sharp tools up high so that Alex couldn’t get his hands on them. Get a chain and padlock.

But that wouldn’t solve a thing, not a solitary thing.

Still, she needed to stop crying, for the children’s sake. Taking a deep breath, she told herself that this whole thing was just a jaunt anyway, just temporary, just a stopgap adventure, just a detour she and James would look back on in a few weeks’ time and howl with laughter about.

The irrational, miserable side of her brain wasn’t convinced. Never mind. As soon as she managed to get the children to sleep, she’d take out the large slab of milk chocolate she’d hidden in one of the high cupboards, and then she’d be able to make it through the night.

Chapter Two

G
osh, it looks different with your things in it,” said Ingrid Hatter, drinking a brew made with a one-cup tea bag in a Tesco mug and shamelessly assessing her surroundings. “The other people had so much stuff, the place was bulging. The rooms look much bigger like this.”

After a week as tenant of the cottage, Lizzie was wondering if she’d allowed loneliness to get the better of good judgment when she’d invited her neighbor in. For a well-heeled middle-aged woman with an expensive accent, Ingrid had a surprisingly inquisitive gleam in her eye.

Lizzie followed that gleaming eye around the room. There wasn’t a picture on the wall as yet, but Lizzie had bought an oak bookshelf from a secondhand shop in town and a comfortable wheat- colored sofa from Ikea — the cheapest furnishings she could find. It seemed you couldn’t function without some squishy piece of furniture to flop down on at the end of the day.

The memory of the trip to Ikea, on her second day in the house, made Lizzie shudder. Traipsing around the enormous warehouse with the twins in tow had been exhausting enough, but then she’d found she couldn’t stuff the boxes of sofa parts into her vehicle. Close to tears, she’d had to wheel the teetering trolley back inside and line up all over again to arrange for delivery.

The sofa had arrived only yesterday and she’d spent a good part of the night putting it together, alternately sobbing and cursing because James could have done the job in fifteen minutes — but then if James had been there in the first place they wouldn’t have had to assemble a sofa at all.

When the thing was finally set up, the sight of it in her living room made her feel suddenly hospitable. So when she’d spotted Ingrid over the garden fence, out walking her tiny dog, she’d rashly invited her in. And now here Lizzie was, without a scrap of makeup on her face, in a crumpled T-shirt she’d worn for three straight days, her unwashed hair scraped back in a ponytail, her voice hoarse from lack of use — entertaining!

If Lizzie was a wreck, at least the living room didn’t look too bad. In addition to the sensible sofa, she’d splurged on some ruinously expensive but rather gorgeous scatter cushions in heavy scarlet, gold, and peacock blue. Now, every time she looked at the cushions, she felt a jab of remorse. She was in no position to be impulse spending, especially not on frills and furbelows like cushions.

At the windows fluttered beaded Indian muslin drapes, the palest shade of old gold — found in the bargain bin of an Indian shop in Tunbridge Wells. She didn’t feel at all guilty about those, at any rate. The four framed photographs she’d packed carefully at the bottom of her suitcase were the only other ornamentation in the room. They stood on the bookshelf commanding attention.

Ingrid stood up, went over to the shelf, and took a good long look at those four portraits. One was of Lizzie and her old friend Tessa Martin at a beach in Greece when they were about twenty, looking tousled and tanned and happy. Two were studio shots of the twins at various stages of babyhood. Ingrid Hatter lifted up the largest photograph, a family portrait, and turned it into the light from the window. “This is your husband?” she asked in wonder. “Very photogenic, isn’t he?”

Lizzie winced. James was good-looking enough on paper, but photography couldn’t hope to convey his full magnetism. He was far more impressive in the flesh, when he could do that quirky thing with his eyebrows and flash his dimple at you.

In real life James was the sort of person who lit up a room when he walked in. Rooms had definitely been darker for Lizzie since he left.

Despite the dimple and unwitting charm, James wasn’t a lady’s man at heart. For years, his overriding passion had been rugby; he’d been some sort of star player at university.

He wasn’t even a flirt, not on purpose. But he had a way of locking eyes with people, even in casual conversation, that was very gratifying. This unconscious mannerism left women — and even men — believing they’d made a huge impression on a man whose good opinion was worth having.

Even after she married him, Lizzie was aware that when they entered a restaurant or pub together, all the single women (and many of the attached ones) nudged their friends and hissed, “Oy, look what just walked in!” — as if Lizzie and her wedding ring were invisible.

Every single one of these women would be incredulous to hear that Lizzie had actually driven a man like this away.

“Yes, that’s James,” Lizzie said. “He, um, he’s not actually here with us. We’re, sort of, having a bit of a trial separation right now. Taking a bit of a break from — from the whole marriage thing.”

Lizzie’s palms were sweating and her face felt tight, as if horribly sunburned. How embarrassing if she should burst into tears! Apart from the real estate agent, she hadn’t yet told anyone outside Laingtree village that she and James had split up — not her best friend, not her sister, not even her mother. At first she’d put off telling in the hope that there’d be no need, that James would turn up one evening with his suitcase and perhaps a bunch of tulips. As the crisis deepened, she found that she just couldn’t face telling anyone; apart from anything else, the details of the whole thing were so — so
toe-curling
. And then there was the awful feeling that if she put the sorry situation into words, it would become set in stone; irreversible, a fact of life.

Of course, everybody in the village knew about the separation without having to be told by Lizzie. Her mother-in- law had seen to that.

According to Lady Evelyn Buckley, Lizzie had never adapted to village life. Hankering after the bright lights of London, she’d willfully scuppered her own marriage, depriving her children of their father so that she could reclaim her fast-paced sex-in-the-city lifestyle.

Lizzie was a little flattered, really. Lady Evelyn clearly had no idea how many Saturday nights Lizzie had whiled away, in her single days, eating cereal on her sofa in front of the TV.

But even if she’d ever had the racy lifestyle Lady Evelyn attributed to her, she couldn’t see how she was supposed to be reclaiming it with three-year-old twins in tow.