Before She Was Mine (30 page)

But it was Christian’s number that flashed up on my screen.

Hv u spkn
2
Nky?
was the message.

Speak to her yourself, fuckwit, I felt like replying. Or leave her alone. Instead I texted:
Nothng
2
say. Unless u wnt her back!!!

I knew what would happen next. Within thirty seconds my phone was buzzing like a wasp in a bottle.

‘What?’ I snapped.

‘Please don’t be angry,’ said Christian, tinnily. ‘You’re the only person I feel I can still count on.’

‘What do you expect me to do? It’s finished, you’ve told her that, so why do you keep texting and calling and pissing about?’

I could imagine him combing unhappily through his fringe with his fingers, or plucking at his flannel trousers. At last he said, ‘I suppose, what it is, it’s just I can’t stand
the thought of her hating me. She
hates
me, Freya.’

‘Is it any wonder? You’ve publicly humiliated her, told her she isn’t good enough for your exalted family—’

‘That’s twisting my words.’

‘Are you
denying
you dumped her?’

‘No, no, it’s . . . Oh, hell.’

Then I had this flash of insight, and I knew exactly what it was that was getting to him. ‘Oh, I understand. You can’t bear to be cast as the villain, can you?’

‘I’m not a villain. I simply did what my family believed was right for both of us. What
I
believe is right. Christ, you can’t blame me for that. And it doesn’t
mean – you know, I thought, after the dust had settled, we could maybe stay friends.’

‘
You and Nicky?
’

‘Well. You and me, maybe. I thought you at least liked me.’

Those massed ranks of Steuers, Joan and Derek and the aunts and uncles, the neighbours, the members of Rotary and the Inner Wheel: I could picture them standing shoulder to shoulder like a
firing squad. Awful to be the focus of such fury. Especially for a man like Christian who lived off his charm. There was no worse punishment.

‘It’s horrible, Frey,’ he whispered.

That was it. Finally I saw him for what he was: a petulant, indulged mummy’s boy who’d never suffered a real day’s hardship in his gilded life. Imagine being married to a
jellyfish like that, I’d tell Nicky later. He’d be bailing out at the first serious illness or bereavement or baby or financial blip, anything he rated a bit testing. She deserved so
much better. We all did.

‘Oh, why don’t you bloody well grow up!’ I cried, and flung the phone across the room. It may not have been the most eloquent of sign-offs, but it did the job.

In the silence that followed – a silence where Christian was almost certainly goggling at his handset in disbelief – I heard someone calling my name. I pushed the bin bags against
the wall and opened my bedroom door. Liv was standing outside.

‘Come downstairs. Someone wants to see you,’ she said.

They were drinking elderflower cordial in the living room, Melody perched on the arm of the sofa and Michael on the tall chair by the window. Geraint stood and swayed nervously
on the hearth rug.

‘Doesn’t Liv look fantastic!’ said Melody, before I could get a word in.

I glanced across, and yes, she was looking nice. The wig suited her, and she’d pencilled in some eyebrows and put on a slick of pale lip gloss. Nor had the compliment gone unappreciated;
there were sudden roses in her cheeks, and she was smiling.

‘You’re not doing so bad yourself,’ I said, which was also true. Melody had on a grey jumper with a white collar and cuffs, and a long black velvet skirt. The effect was
intense, rather than outright funereal. She’d also had her hair feathered, giving her face a softer shape, and her lips were painted a kind of brooding filmstar red. ‘I thought you
weren’t coming back till next week.’

‘She’s got a job interview,’ said Michael.

I blinked at him. ‘Oh my God. Where?’

‘It’s not exactly an interview,’ said Melody. ‘I’m seeing a guy who runs a gallery in Chester.’

‘What, an art gallery?’

‘Yeah. He wants someone to coordinate events, schmooze clients, sweet talk his artists. PA-type thing. Secretary, kind of. I’m not too clear on the detail.’

What do you know about art?
I thought. Once upon a time I’d have blurted this straight out, but now I just said, ‘Oh, wow. How did you get the gig?’

She giggled, and for a second it was like having the old Melody back.

‘Guess,’ said Michael.

‘Through my
mother
,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Abby’s got friendly with this local artist, a bloke called Sean, and she introduced us. He seemed to take a fancy
to me—’

‘As they do,’ said Michael.

‘—and I ended up doing some modelling for him. He’s really good. I’ve brought one of his sketches to show you. So anyway, when you’re stuck posing in a studio, you
get talking, and I told him I needed to do something different with my life. ’Course, he wanted me to move out there permanently, said I could be his muse. And he was nice, dead nice, only
he’s about ninety.’

‘He’s seventy-two, Mel.’

‘Yeah. So it wasn’t really on. Even if I was back on the scene, which I’m not. But one of the galleries he ships to was thinking about getting an assistant, and when Sean found
out I lived nearby he gave this bloke a ring and set up a meeting. So I’m going to pop up there and have a chat, and if we hate each other on sight there’s no harm done. But Sean said
I’d breeze it. He said I had the right face.’

‘You’d be perfect in a gallery,’ said Liv.

Yeah, I thought, she would. I could see it now. She’d sit in the window, all smoulderingly Bohemian, and passers-by would find themselves slowing their pace, stopping, climbing the front
steps without even realising what they were doing. Once inside they’d be hooked. Sean was right. The job was hers.

‘It’ll be a change,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I’ve something to show you. That’s the reason we came round.’ She stood up and now I could see, shoved in
between the sofa arm and the wall, a large flat folder like the one I’d used at school to cart my GCSE art projects around. Melody grasped the edge and tugged, and out it slid leaving a dark
furrow in the carpet. She prised the covers open a fraction and reached inside.

What she extracted and held out to Liv was a simple ink sketch of a mother and child. Although the drawing gave the impression of having been done quickly, with bold, energetic strokes, and
though the thickness of the lines was uneven as if they’d been done with something like a quill pen, I could tell at once this was good. We were looking from above at a woman with long hair
holding a newborn on her lap. You couldn’t see her face, but her baby was exposed and naked, its eyes black pools, one arm flung out and the tiny fingers splayed. Somehow the artist had
captured perfectly the protective curve of the mother’s shoulder, her wonder, and her youth.

‘It’s you,’ I said. ‘Us.’

‘That’s right, hun.’

‘Oh,’ said Liv, her flush returning.

‘He took it from a photo of Abby’s.’

‘Has she many?’ I asked. ‘Only I’d like to see them.’

‘Just a couple of pages in an album. Come to Ireland with me, next visit. Meet Sean.’

‘Assuming he hasn’t passed on from extreme old age,’ said Michael.

Liv made to hand the picture back but Melody stopped her. ‘It’s for you, to keep. Not the original, Sean has that. This is a copy. I’ve got one too.’

I said, ‘Can I have it for my room?’ My heritage, I was thinking. My past, my history, amazing.

‘It’s Liv’s, really. But I brought something else for you, Frey.’ Melody sat back down on the sofa arm and felt around inside her canvas satchel, underneath the angora
shrug. I hoped my present wasn’t going to be whisky-flavoured fudge or one of those pebbles with feet and eyes stuck on. But it turned out to be a ring box made of scuffed burgundy leather.
She dropped it into my outstretched palm.

When I flipped the lid open, I let out a low whistle. The ring she’d given me was gold with a chunky square-cut red stone flanked on each side by a row of minute pearls. You could tell it
was old, the surface dulled and pinkish, and the mountings grimy, but it was still a lovely piece. I couldn’t believe she was giving it to me.

‘That’s a garnet in the middle,’ she explained, ‘and the metal’s rose gold. It was Abby’s mum’s, and Abby had it on her wedding day, and it was supposed
to come to me when I got married. But I’m not going to, so I thought you should have it. A family heirloom. No point waiting till I’m dead. Aren’t you going to try it
on?’

My hands were quivering slightly as I slipped the ring over my finger, into the space that had been so lately stained with Oggy’s canal-path tat.

‘How does it fit?’ asked Liv.

‘It’s a little loose,’ I said. My voice was hoarse suddenly.

‘We can take it to a jewellers and get it adjusted. That’s so kind of Melody, isn’t it? How generous of her. You must write and say thank you to Abby, too. Let me have a closer
look.’

I let her lift my hand so she could examine the stone under the light. It winked and flared as I moved, as if somewhere inside whole crystalline worlds were shifting against each other, hot
coals and dark blood and sunsets and deadly nightshade berries. The depths of the stone seemed unfathomable. And it felt as though all the hopes and fears of the women who’d worn this ring
had been absorbed into it, and flashed out at me:
you, it ends with you.

‘Frey?’ said Michael.

I blinked and cleared my throat. ‘Fine. Sorry. My throat’s quite dry, actually, I need a drink. No, not the elderflower. I’m just going to get a glass of water.’

I pulled off the ring and gave it to Liv, then fled.

The kitchen was an unbelievable mess. The floor was covered in chunks of dried mud that I guessed had dropped off Geraint’s giant boots, and the sink was smeared with
black and green slime. One washing-up bowl, half full of pond water, sat by the back door and there was another on the work surface, empty except for a measuring cylinder and an eight-inch fish
net. Liv’s blender had been hauled out and plugged in, then filled with what looked like spinach soup but I guessed wasn’t. The base-unit door below was marked with black
fingerprints.

I stepped round the filth and got myself a clean tumbler out of the cupboard; let the cold tap run, swilling away some of the slime down the plughole, filled my glass and swallowed it down in a
single gulp.

Michael appeared in the doorway. ‘I’ll have one of those.’

Without a word I re-filled the glass and handed it to him. As he drank his head tipped back, his Adam’s apple bobbing. I wondered if he’d have to cut his hair short to work in a hot
country.

‘Bit skanky, this.’ He put the glass down next to the blender and nodded at the chaos around him.

‘Geraint’s doing something with sphagnum moss spores. Spreading them about.’

‘I’ll say he is. What did you think of Melody’s ring?’

‘It was – I don’t know. Don’t tell her, but – I mean, it is classy, way too classy for me, and it was a kind thought. I was blown away, to be honest.’

‘But what?’

‘Oh, ignore me. I’m not myself this evening. It’s been a bloody weird day.’

‘And then we turned up unannounced.’

‘Get off, it’s always good to see you.’ I let my gaze follow a string of blanket weed that stretched across the tea-towel drawer and down the front of the pan cupboard.
‘I think it’s that I don’t feel I’m worthy, you know? A ring like that, a precious family heirloom. I haven’t done enough to earn it, and I’m not mature enough
to be trusted to look after it. Never mind who I’m expected to pass it on to.’

‘Ah, come on, Frey. You’re not even twenty-four yet. Christ, get to my age and then you can start talking like a failure.’

‘I’m not fishing for compliments. I’m just saying how I feel.’

After a moment he came over and stood next to me. ‘There’s no catch. Melody gave you the ring because you’re her daughter, her only daughter, and she loves you. It’s
yours by virtue of that. There’s nothing to be earned. If you’re worried about losing the ring, have it tightened. If you never have kids, leave it in your will to Nicky, or to a
hospice, or drive down to Lands End and cast it adrift in a bottle.’ He nudged me in the ribs till I smiled.

I said, ‘What would I do without you?’

‘You’d survive.’

‘Would I?’

In the container by the door the water shivered and a piece of weed revolved under the bulk of a climbing snail. ‘Hey, Kim’s got herself a new man, so that’s one weight off my
back.’

‘Is that how you see me, then, as a weight?’

He made a mock lunge at me as if his patience had finally snapped.

At the same time there came a scuffle from the dining room, a scraping of a heavy object against wood followed by a muffled crash and a series of soft thuds, one after the other. A single apple
rolled into the kitchen. Geraint had knocked the fruit bowl off the window sill again.

Michael said, ‘You’ve got Oggy, Nicky, both your mums. You’d be so busy juggling crises you wouldn’t even notice if I wasn’t around.’

I shook my head. ‘But you’re—’

Geraint was standing on the threshold with a piece of bowl in each hand, his beard drooping.

‘Have we any of that superglue left?’ he said.

Although I had one earphone in, I still heard the quiet tap on my bedroom door. I switched my iPod off and checked the clock: 2.15 a.m. Evidently someone else couldn’t
sleep either.

‘Liv, is that you?’ I called. She pushed the door open with her hip because she had a mug in each hand.

‘I saw your light,’ she said. Her kimono was loose, but she’d tied a blue scarf round her head in lieu of the wig.

‘Suits you better than British Birds.’ I took the cup and set it down on my bedside table.

She settled on the duvet next to me.

‘These nights are a bugger, aren’t they? When your mind goes racing. Geraint’s snoring for England, which isn’t exactly helping. He sounds like an elephant
seal.’

Looks like one, too
, I thought. ‘Aren’t you feeling so good?’