I Should Be So Lucky (5 page)

‘No. But the rent is paid up to date so I suppose she can do what she likes. It’s great, as it happens, really works out well.’

Kate turned to look at her, bright blue eyes sparkly with suspicion. ‘Why were you giving her notice? What’s she done? Mad parties? Upset the neighbours? She hasn’t trashed the place, has she? It would be just your luck to end up with the tenant from hell. You should have let me or Miles check her over before you took her on.’

‘No, no, nothing like that.’ Viola squashed down her irritation at Kate’s assumption that she couldn’t get anything right. ‘Rachel and I, we’re … um …’ She hesitated. Once the words were out there would be no retracting them. She gave herself a moment to reflect whether moving back here was what she really wanted. From the car she could see the open and empty garage where Rhys had kept his adored green Porsche. As he’d backed it out in such a rush on that last fatal night, he’d smacked it hard into the magnolia tree before revving hard and racing off along the avenue. Would the scar in the bark always be there, or would it heal up? It would be a horrible downer if there was going to be a daily visible reminder of that night. Her dreams were bad enough without small tweaking clues forever in view. She climbed out of the car and hesitantly walked in through the gates, passing a pair of men struggling with
a
box felt-tip-marked ‘Kitchen’. Kate was just behind her. Viola stroked the old tree, feeling for damage. It seemed OK. Bark trauma all healed up. Lucky tree.

‘Come on, Vee, you and Rachel are
what
? Selling the place? Great idea, actually. Best thing you could do. Leave all that past behind and start again.’ Kate took hold of Viola’s arm and pulled her away from the tree, back towards the road.

‘No, Kate, I hadn’t even thought of that. I don’t want to sell it – Rachel and I are going to move back in. It’s time.’

‘Are you MAD?’ Kate shrieked at her. ‘You mean you want to come back
here
with all the bad memories?’

‘Only the very last bit was bad, Kate. And don’t forget I lived here long before I even met Rhys, so this place is far more about me and Rachel – and Marco too, of course – than about me and Rhys. I loved it here, this was the home
I
made. Rhys, well – you know what he was like. Sometimes I thought I’d see more of some anonymous lodger than I did of him. Moving out was only ever going to be temporary, I said that right from the start, just till those dippy women went away. I can’t stay in Mum’s old flat for ever – it’s been a great refuge from all the … well, the
stuff
, but you know, it’s not home, not
our
home.’

Kate was curling a strand of her hair through her fingers. She always did that, Viola remembered, when she was thinking hard and fast.

‘And what about Mum? You can’t just leave her on her own. She’s getting older – how will she cope?’

Viola looked at her, puzzled. ‘You want Rachel and me to stay there
for ever
with her? In that flat? But that was never the plan. Mum’s been cool with that all along. Why aren’t you?’

‘Well, someone’s got to be her carer. I know she’s in incredible nick right now, but she’ll be seventy-six next year. Miles and I thought that you could …’

‘You and Miles have been discussing me? Deciding where I should live?’

‘Not
deciding
, exactly. No – just, well, going over possibilities. Thinking about what’s best, all round.’

‘Who for?’

‘Well … Mum of course. Who else?’

Viola wanted to say ‘Me and Rachel?’ but decided against it in case it sounded horribly selfish. Kate was certainly capable of twisting it so that she would
feel
selfish – it was another much-older-sister trick. Viola’s needs, preferences and feelings clearly didn’t count here. Kate liked to be firmly in charge.

‘I’ve been thinking about Mum too,’ she said instead. ‘And I know the house is way too big and starting to need a lot of work. On her own, it’s soon going to be too much for her and she’ll need to be somewhere that’s easier to run. So, I had this thought in the middle of last night: you know her friend Monica who lives in that new sheltered housing place up on the hill, all those
swanky
apartments with the lovely gardens? Don’t you think Mum might like it there? I was going to suggest it to her. Carefully, of course.’ She laughed. ‘You know what she’s like – if you don’t somehow make it sound as if it’s actually
her
idea, she’ll dig her heels right in.’

Kate frowned. ‘And how is she going to fund that? Can you imagine the annual maintenance charges? Those places cost a fortune to live in.’

‘Oh, that’s a no-brainer, surely?’ Viola said. ‘She could sell the house.’

‘Oh, Vee – don’t be ridiculous! It’s been the family home for over thirty years! Absolutely
not
!’

FOUR

NOBODY HAS LOVE
letters any more, Naomi thought to herself rather sadly as she sat out on the sunny terrace with a Liberty flower-print folder in front of her on the old iron garden table. She could only feel sorry for the current generation with their disposable emails, swiftly deleted texts and nothing by which to recall some of their most romantic moments. What would they have left to touch, read and remember, many, many years after all the great loves of their lives? At best, there might be a few birthday cards kept for their loving messages, but other than that it would be printed-out emails, impersonal and businesslike, but nothing handwritten, no character, no clue to the deep-down bones of the person.

She opened the folder. Inside was a small heap of cream and pale blue envelopes, maybe twenty or so of them. She took the top one out and sniffed at it,
inhaling
the dusty scent of old dry paper and a hint of her own scent from many years ago: Elizabeth Arden’s White Linen, her perfume of choice that winter of 1976 when she’d been a thirty-nine-year-old hectic full-time mother of two and corporate-entertaining wife, with a feeling creeping up on her in the nights that not too far ahead was only a greying middle age and the falling-away of looks, promise and opportunities.

Sometimes, back then, having rushed to get Miles and Kate to bed, she then had to cook and serve up a full-scale dinner-party menu to clients of her husband, being smiling and charming to people she’d never met before. At times like that, she’d find herself thinking of long-past Friday nights at bar-room folk clubs, listening to heartfelt protest songs and really believing that the world would become a gentler, less greedy place. Instead she was permanently exhausted and felt her life sliding by with little purpose outside raising the children, while she just felt older by the day.

It wasn’t like that for wives these days, she knew. With everyone claiming that sixty was the new forty, women who
were
forty still looked, acted and probably felt like they were barely older than teenagers. Lucky old them, she thought now, approving their joyously extended youth. Her friends back then, even the few who, like her, had had those free-thinking bohemian years, had already taken to wearing skirts of sensible length and had taken up good works, fancy cooking and bridge. But
not
Naomi. Fifteen years into a marriage where her chief love rival was her husband’s ever-increasing capacity for whisky, Naomi had taken up passion.

Naomi opened the first blue envelope. The edge of it was holed and torn, like frayed fabric that had had too much wear, but the blue-black ink was unfaded. ‘Darling Mimi’ the letter began. Nobody else in her life had ever called her Mimi, only Oliver. When they’d met, they’d been out on a balcony for a firework display at a party, seeing in the new year with cold champagne. She was watching Miles and Kate running around with other guests’ children in the garden below, overexcited at midnight with sparklers. She’d left her gloves inside the house and Oliver, an artist friend of the host, had noticed her shivering, taken her hand in his and slid it into the pocket of his sheepskin jacket. ‘Poor little frozen hand,’ he’d said, squeezing it gently. ‘Just like Mimi’s in
La Bohème
.’

He’d never once called her Naomi. ‘That’s what your husband calls you,’ he told her weeks later when they were in bed together for the first time. ‘For me you’ll always be Mimi.’

When Viola got back to the house she realized she was still no wiser as to the reason Kate had been at Bell Cottage earlier. She’d never know now – Kate would, if asked, literally wave her away, flapping her elegant little fingers, and completely dismiss the visit, telling Viola
she
was making something of nothing. All the same, it had looked odd, as if she were snooping around. She’d been a great one for dropping in without calling when Viola and Rhys had lived there.

‘She’ll be demanding a bloody key next,’ Viola had grumbled to Rhys out in the kitchen when she’d come home, exhausted and laden with bags from taking Rachel school-uniform shopping on a sweltering Saturday, and found Kate sprawled on the sitting-room sofa with her shoes off and a big glass of wine in her hand. She’d been taken aback when Rhys had immediately stuck up for Kate, claiming that it was good to have some company, seeing as Viola was off out enjoying herself on one of his few free days. ‘Few?’ she’d queried, wondering how the twelve days’ filming out of the previous month counted as full-time work. Not the most tactful thing to say to an actor: he’d stormed out at that point, insisting on Kate – on the far side of that glass of wine – leaving her car at the cottage, and driving her home. She vividly remembered how, hugging Kate an apologetic, brief goodbye, she’d smelled sweet, delicate jasmine scent on her sister and had been quite happy to see the back of the pair of them so she could soak away the hot dust and sweat of the crowded high street in the bath.

Of course, there was always the chance that maybe Kate had just been passing – she could have been on her way back from the park at the far end of the avenue and
could
claim she’d been walking her poodle in there. Except, Viola thought, she was pretty damn sure she’d been dogless at the time. It was a hot, sunny day – once Kate had stopped the car she would have put Beano on his lead and let him straight out into the fresh air. Still half wondering about it, she went into her mother’s kitchen and sorted a pot of tea and some ginger cake, then took it out on a tray into the garden, where Naomi was looking through a floral folder of papers.

‘Tea for you, Mum. That’s a pretty folder,’ she commented. Naomi closed the file as Viola approached. ‘Just old letters, nothing important,’ she said. ‘Kate phoned just now and said she thinks a family Sunday lunch over at hers this weekend would be a lovely idea. She’s phoned Miles and he’s coming too.’

‘Ah, does she? Right … This Sunday?’ Viola put the tray on the table and Naomi moved the folder out of the range of any possible spillage, tucking it carefully between her thigh and the arm of the chair.

‘You and Rachel will be around, won’t you?’ Naomi asked. ‘Or had you made some other plans?’

‘No, no plans for Sunday.’ Well, not firm ones anyway. Not yet. A letter from Viola’s tenant had been waiting for her on the hall table as she’d walked in, explaining that an unmissable job in New York had suddenly come up, that she had to leave immediately and the keys would be with the agent. Sunday would have been good for starting to reorganize the house, thinking about
repainting
, making a list of any repairs and updating that were needed. If she was going to do that, though, it would mean saying no to the lunch and telling Naomi right this minute about moving back home, before she’d run the idea past Rachel, although obviously she’d have to tell both of them before Sunday, anyway. It was just that some things need a bit of leading up to.

‘Well … I’ll be here, at least. Rachel might want to go over and see Marco. She loves it over there in Notting Hill, but more on Saturdays than Sundays, when Portobello Market is busier. I’ll ask her, but I’m sure it’ll be all right.’

Viola wasn’t remotely surprised about the lunch. It was typical of bossy big sister Kate to rally the troops like this and she must have done it in a double-quick hurry the moment Viola had driven off, probably sitting in her car outside Bell Cottage, calling Miles and just about
ordering
him to turn up for an urgent family conflab. She would be banking on the certainty that, faced with opposition from herself and their brother, Viola would cave in and do as she was told like a good baby sister, promise to stay in the flat for the rest of Naomi’s lifetime and put her own house on the market first thing on Monday morning. But she wasn’t going to be bullied, she resolved. As soon as she’d spoken to Rachel about moving back home, she’d raise the subject of future care with Naomi. She was only grateful that Kate hadn’t rushed in first to tell their mother. Even she
must
have worked out that the subject needed delicacy.

Rachel, after a slow school afternoon, knelt on the floor of her aunt Gemma’s sitting room in her flat overlooking Kensington Church Street, surrounded by bin bags full of mostly well-worn old cardigans. On the glass coffee table in front of her were boxes of fancy buttons and beads, rolls of ribbon, sequinned and embroidered motifs and polythene bags full of brightly coloured feathers. The window was wide open, letting in dusty air and the sounds of traffic, and the feathers fluffed and fluttered in the breeze.

‘Marco and James had a look at the stall last week and suggested we try selling some for men as well, so I picked up a few real grandad gems at the Chiswick car-boot sale on Sunday,’ Gemma said, lighting a joss stick beside a statue of Buddha in the fireplace. ‘Trust those two to see the gap in the market, bless them. But it could go either way – they’ll either walk off the stall or they’ll be a dead loss.’ She put her hand into one of the bags and hauled out a tobacco-coloured cardigan with dark brown leather buttons and elbow patches.

‘Hey, look at this, Rachel. Cashmere. Real treasure!’

‘It’s hideous.’ Rachel giggled. ‘Who’d wear that?’

‘I don’t think it’s been worn at all yet, this one,’ Gemma said, inspecting it closely. ‘There’s no pilling or bobbling and it’s got definite crease marks as if it’s been kept folded in a drawer for best, and maybe a best didn’t
happen
. It’s a generation thing. I bet your gran has things hanging in her wardrobe that she’s only worn maybe once, on the grounds that they’re “too good”. You can’t help thinking about the back story with old clothes, can you?’ She leaned back against the couch, which was draped with tattered patchwork velvet. ‘Maybe he was an old childless widower, and the nephews and nieces came to clear out his clothes. He’d always been careful with money so, with the quality things, they didn’t want to just hurl them into a charity shop but decided to do a nice cheery car-boot sale and raise enough to sponsor a rescue greyhound or something.’