Cuckoo (10 page)
‘These are Polly’s kids.’ She called them over. ‘Nico and Yannis, come and meet Liam and Effie and their dad, Simon.’
‘Come and pull the trees!’ Anna said to Simon’s children. Only Nico lingered as the others pelted back across the muddy field.
‘Who’s the dog?’ he asked, standing with his arms folded to show that he knew he was too old for the little kid stuff.
‘Trooper,’ Simon said. ‘Here, throw this for him,’ and he handed him a beslobbered ball. Nico took it and charged off with the dog.
‘Great lad,’ Simon said.
‘They’re a bit wild,’ Rose whispered.
‘So she turned up, then?’
‘Last night.’
‘When do I get the honour? I’m terrifically excited,’ Simon said. He had been a great fan of Polly’s back in her heyday, and ever since Rose mentioned she was coming, he had been on tenterhooks waiting for her arrival. He dressed up his anticipation with manly irony, but Rose could see through it.
‘She’s pretty blasted, I’m afraid. It’ll be a day or two before she emerges. I was quite shocked when I saw her.’
‘She’s lucky to have a friend like you, keeping the fans away,’ Simon grinned.
The children had run on ahead and were playing a game of catch that seemed to involve the dog in a central role.
‘We go back a long way, me and Polly – since we were seven. See this? Blood sisters.’ Rose showed him the scar on her index finger.
‘I did that, too, when I was about six,’ Simon said. ‘Can’t even remember the kid’s name now.’
‘We did ours when we were sixteen. After my parents moved away,’ Rose said. ‘Poll made up this elaborate ritual. We had to put on long dresses and be very solemn. And she wrote this special music for it.’
‘How did it go?’
‘Don’t ask me that.’
‘Very gothic, teenage and intense.’
‘I know. But back then it seemed so important. We’d been together so much and, with her mother being so ill, her dad off the scene, and my lot disappearing, it really was just us on our own. It seemed like we needed something to underline all that.’
Simon took Rose’s finger and bent to look at the scar. ‘Quite impressive. Must’ve been a deep cut.’
‘Yeah, it bled for ages. Her scar is much smaller.’ She glanced over at the children. ‘Yannis, no!’ she yelled as she saw him push Anna over into a ditch.
She ran across to help her, but when she got there, she saw that Anna was laughing like a drain.
‘Get up, Anna! Look, you’re all muddy.’
‘So?’ Anna said. She skipped off to catch Yannis and get her own back.
‘Little madam,’ joked Simon, who had crossed the field behind Rose. ‘So she’s in a bad way then, Polly?’
‘Yes. It’s almost as if the grief has stilled her. She needs a lot of looking after. I’m sure we’ll get the old Polly back eventually. I’m working on it.’
‘I’ve no doubt you are,’ Simon said, touching her arm.
‘And those poor boys,’ Rose said, looking over at Yannis and Nico. ‘They must be waiting for their mother to return, too. She can’t really see them at the moment – she’s too wound up in losing Christos. Life never touches Polly lightly.’
‘I know the type. Trooper – come here!’ Simon turned to call the dog, who was getting over-excited and making Yannis scream. Rose was almost dazzled by the shine of the sun caught in Simon’s whiteblond hair. She would introduce him to Polly really soon. He was a good listener. He would cheer her up.
They got to school and Rose kissed her soggy, muddy daughter goodbye. Then, when all the children had gone inside, she took the boys to see Janet Jones, the Headmistress.
The boys sat outside Janet’s office with a pile of books. Rose could see them through the glass door and was pleased to note that, instead of beating each other up, they seemed to have got themselves lost in Dorling Kindersley.
As she had anticipated, her record with the school – parent governor, magazine editor, running the maths club and even doing the odd day’s sneaky unpaid supply teaching when someone was ill – meant that Janet was fine with letting the boys stay as visitors for the remaining two weeks, while the formal application for a place went through with the council.
‘I’ve got a couple of spaces in Reception and Year Four. How’s their English?’
‘Perfect. Polly – their mother – had only very basic Greek, so the family language was English.’ Rose resisted the temptation to add that the boys’ idiom tended toward the Anglo-Saxon.
‘Well, it’ll be good for the school. We’re pretty mono-cultural here and their experience of growing up in Greece will help broaden the other children’s outlook,’ Janet said. Rose hoped that the broadening effect wouldn’t be too wide, given the boys’ behaviour that morning, but she kept her mouth shut about that, too.
‘Of course, I’d like to meet their mother as soon as is possible,’ Janet said, handing Rose the forms. ‘How’s she doing?’
‘I’ll bring her down this afternoon,’ Rose said. ‘She’s OK, considering.’
Rose and Janet looked at the boys through the office window. Their faces were hidden in the straggled bushes of their hair as they bent their heads low into their books.
‘Poor little fellows,’ Janet said. ‘We’ll make them very welcome here.’
Rose was pleased. That was the boys sorted, then.
Nine
She dawdled on her way back home. Polly wouldn’t be up yet, Gareth was working, and Flossie was fast asleep strapped to her front, so there was no hurry. The sky was an extravagant blue with small puffs of white clouds.
She loved this walk home from the school. Knowing that Anna – and now the boys – were safe and happy in the classroom, that Flossie slept securely scooped into her sling, and that the finished house was over there in front of her – it all gave her a great feeling of completeness.
She remembered the trudge through litter and dog shit that she used to take home from playgroup with Anna in Hackney. She shuddered as she remembered the underpass she used to run through each time – her heart in her mouth, the buggy crashing and splashing through the pissy puddles. Once, earlier, when she was seven months pregnant with Anna, she had been coming home from work late on a dark winter’s evening when a kid with a knife and a desiccated face jumped out in front of her. Rose thought she knew him – hadn’t he been in Year Six a couple of years ago? But if he recognised her as his ex-teacher, he didn’t show it. He demanded her purse, and she just gave it to him. There was no point arguing and getting herself stabbed for a tenner and an easily replaced Visa card. But her heart was pounding, and Anna was leaping around inside her, suffering electric shots of adrenaline.
The mugging changed forever the way Rose viewed the streets around her home. That moment was probably the one that sowed the seed of escape and now, here she was, standing at the foot of a ridiculously rounded green hill that grew out of the field at the bottom of her large, burgeoning garden.
She found the bench with the view; the one that she considered to be hers, even though it was actually dedicated to a seventeen-year-old girl called Martha who had died of cancer in 1985. She sat and took in the village and the far-reaching hills that rose behind the valley. There was still a little mist rising where the river wound its way through the houses and down towards the hidden city of Bath, fifteen or so miles away.
Looking back, part of her felt sorry for that kid with the dry features. Unlike her, he would probably never escape those streets. More importantly, he would never get away from whatever it was that made him feel that he had the right to take other people’s things from them. But mostly she had to admit that she just thought he was a little bastard and hoped that he was locked up now. How could he have drawn a knife on her? She was pregnant, for God’s sake! And the money he had stolen she had earned working her arse off trying to save shits like him. She still shivered a little with the anger.
Then she breathed and felt her shoulders settle back to their country level. She could sit here on this bench, a woman on her own, with her bag, and she didn’t once have to look back over her shoulder. She had brought her family to a place of refuge.
And they were going to stay. They still felt the dirt of the city on their shoulders, but this was where they were going to dig in their roots. She knew that she and Gareth would grow old here, keeping the family home for their daughters, even after they left to start their own lives. Having not had this for herself, Rose felt strongly about it. Later, there would be grandchildren, who would long for their holidays with Rose and Gareth in the big house in the countryside. Rose had an image of herself, grey-haired, at the head of the table, serving
Boeuf en Daube
like a Boden-clad Mrs Ramsay.
Boeuf en Daube
like a Boden-clad Mrs Ramsay.
She thought that once the dust had settled from the renovation work, they might dig a swimming pool in the back garden, though she wasn’t going to mention it to Gareth just yet. And Andy could come over again from France and help, even perhaps move into the Annexe for good in the end.
In the end. If Polly ever left, of course.
Rose got up, brushed herself down and set off towards the house. She wanted to check on the Annexe, to see if Polly was up.
She stood very still at the bottom of the steps to the flat, and heard nothing. She pushed open the door to the cobwebbed ground-floor storeroom that sat right underneath the bed-sitting room, tiptoed in and stood in the middle of the room, listening with her ear angled up to the floorboards above. Nothing. Not a sound. Polly must still be asleep.
Rose wandered down the flight of stone steps towards The Lodge and let herself in. That was another joy of living here – you didn’t have to lock anything. In Hackney, Rose had felt as if they lived under a constant, low-level siege, with bars on the basement windows, double locks and a couple of bolts each on the front and back doors, and a motion-sensor burglar alarm. They had to be careful not to leave anything valuable lying in view of the street. They had even put the stereo in a cupboard so it couldn’t be seen by passers-by.
Despite all of these precautions, they had been burgled twice – the first, shockingly, when Rose and Anna had been taking an afternoon nap upstairs. That time the intruders stood on a dustbin and lifted a first-floor sash window that Rose had left slightly ajar, the way you do when you’re in a house on a hot day. The other lot put a brick through the glazed back door and turned the locks and bolts by reaching through.
Both burglaries had been opportunistic and both times the intruders took cash from Rose’s purse. The first lot also took an SLR camera that Gareth had left in full view on the table in the front room. The second time they stole a few more things, including a laptop Rose had on loan from the school. That had been a complete pain in the arse. The police said these sorts of robberies were very common in the area – most likely the thieves were junkies looking for stuff they could shift to raise a bit of quick cash. Rose and Gareth were insured, anyway.
But it was the invasion that was the upsetting thing. The idea of some sweating, shaking, dirty stranger roving through her stuff made Rose feel ill. Worse, during the second burglary, which took place while they were up in Scotland trying to make some kind of peace with Rose’s mum in the hospice, one of the burglars took a shit right in the middle of their kitchen floor. The police said this, too, was pretty common – due to adrenaline, apparently. But Rose thought it was more that this semi-animal intruder was marking out their territory as his own, scenting it, leaving his mark. It was as if he were saying that all this couldn’t ever be just theirs again. If the mugging had been the seed for them leaving the city, this had been the final straw.
After they moved, it took a while to get used to leaving the doors unlocked. It was easier for Gareth, growing up as he had done in the sort of remoteness that only a country the size of the USA could offer. Pam and John’s house hadn’t even had any locks to do up. It was harder for Rose. While she was OK about it during the day, at first she couldn’t sleep unless she had the Annexe doors locked and chained. She was making progress, though. Now they had moved down to the main house, she felt comfortable with only the Yale locks on at night. But that may have been because she was up with Flossie so regularly that she was able to keep a weather eye out for intruders.
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