Sunshine Over Wildflower Cottage (41 page)

Geraldine was lying
. She knew what they were and Viv needed to hear them. She wanted Geraldine to prove Antonia wrong and give her the ammunition to blast away the doubts that sat in her heart like gangrene.

‘I
need
to hear them, Geraldine.’

Geraldine sighed. ‘
She
said that she needed to be with a man who loved her.
He
said he was sorry it wasn’t him.’

The impact of her words showed clear on Viv’s face. She could see that, however much Viv had said otherwise, she hadn’t been prepared to hear the truth at all. Geraldine tried to pat the words into a digestible shape and ended up distorting them further. ‘He didn’t mean it. I know he didn’t. She was nearer the end than he knew . . .’

Viv nodded as if she accepted that he had made a mistake; although she didn’t. A mistake was forgetting to put the bins out, or setting an alarm clock for the wrong time; not telling the woman you’d married – for better or worse no less – that it would be too much trouble to help her die in peace.

‘Heath never forgave himself,’ said Geraldine. ‘He’s a good man, Viv.’

‘I know that,’ was all Viv said.

Pilot nudged under Viv’s arm for affection and she took his big shaggy face in her hands. His great sad eyes looked up at her as if he understood that she had to go. And she kissed him on the nose and she knew she had said goodbye to him for all of them.

‘Okay, well,’ Viv jumped enthusiastically to her feet, ‘if Heath’s gone for wine, I think I should bring a cake home with me. A huge chocolate one.’

‘You are all right, aren’t you, Viv?’ asked Geraldine as Viv opened the kitchen door to go out. She wished she could have rewound the last five minutes and said that she didn’t know anything. One reveal had pulled another with it, like a constant stream of magician’s tissues.

‘Of course,’ said Viv.

As soon as Viv entered the folly, she started scrambling together everything she had into her suitcases, half-blinded with tears.

Geraldine realised she had gone an hour later when Heath came back and asked why the folly was empty.

Chapter 93

Viv booked herself in at a Travelodge for two nights. She didn’t want to go back to Stel immediately. She didn’t want to talk or think or feel. She texted her mother to say that she’d be home on Saturday morning and then switched off her phone. She had both the numbers of Wildflower Cottage and Heath’s mobile in her phone, but they didn’t have hers. They had a false address for her on file so they couldn’t contact her. They owed her a week’s wages but she could stand that. She wouldn’t ever go back for it; she couldn’t ever go back.

*

She arrived at Stel’s at ten on Saturday morning, but sat in the car looking at the house for a minute or two, before getting out. From the outside, everything was the same as she’d left it last time, but it didn’t feel like her home any more. She’d never looked at it differently when she came back for holidays from University, but she knew this time that she had moved on. Her heart had found a new place to settle but she’d had to wrench it away and now she was adrift. She didn’t know where she belonged any more.

Stel opened the door and stood there with her arms held wide ready to close around her daughter and squeeze her. Her mum felt distinctly thinner than Viv remembered. Then Ian came out and he gave Viv a kiss and said that it was nice to meet her. He smelled of Paco Rabanne and it suited him. But it was ladled on and masked all the other layers of scents that would have given him dimension.

Stel led her upstairs to the attic, twittering like a nervous bird that Ian was storing stuff in her room and staying for a bit, just until he got his place renovated and that’s why she’d had to postpone the decorators. Viv wasn’t daft, she knew her mother was scared to tell her that she’d moved him in. Once again, she’d hardly let the grass grow under her feet but maybe this time it was the right decision for her. It didn’t matter anyway because Viv wasn’t coming back here to stay. It was time she made her own life. And it was time for her mum to lift her wings and fly.

Viv tipped out her suitcases and loaded the washing machine with every item of clothing from them – clean and dirty. She needed everything to smell of Persil and Comfort and not misty morning flowers and hay-scented air. Basil sat on her bed like a fat ginger cushion as she carefully removed her mini-lab and set it up on the table by the window. She found a bottle of the oil-copy of Geraldine’s perfume and realised that she had never given it to her. She’d send it to her in the post without a covering note. Viv picked up Basil and cuddled him and smelled her mother’s scent on him. And salt, as if she had been crying into Basil’s fur recently.

Viv went downstairs to make a sandwich. She hadn’t had anything for forty-eight hours but she could have eaten all day and never filled her hungry heart.

Stel insisted on making her a toastie. She was fussing too much, as if she were a battery-operated doll and someone had tweaked up her speed. Viv ate it quickly, less so because her stomach was empty and more because she felt in the way of her mother’s new set-up. Ian was sitting opposite her at the table with the paper held in his hands but Viv noticed that he wasn’t reading it because his eyes weren’t moving across the words and his finger was tapping beats of impatience on the edge. He was killing time until she left them alone, that much was obvious.

‘I think I’m going to have a drive to Meadowhall,’ Viv said.

*

Stel felt Ian’s outward breath fill the room when Viv left the house.

‘You can’t have her staying here,’ said Ian, flapping the paper as if that gave special emphasis to his words.

‘She’s my daughter,’ said Stel with quiet defiance.

‘Well, she’s not mine,’ said Ian. ‘Get shut, unless you want
your daughter
to be the first to see what her mother gets up to behind her back.’

Chapter 94

Just as Viv reached her car, she heard someone calling her name and she turned to see Al jogging towards her, bear arms extended ready to envelop her.

‘I shouldn’t do this because I’ve just done a five-mile run but I’m not missing out on a cuddle,’ he said, nearly breaking her ribs. ‘When the bloody hell did you get back, lass?’

‘This morning,’ said Viv, smiling. But then Al was one of those blokes who had always made her smile.

‘Are you here for good now?’

‘No, I’m just parking for a bit until I can work out where I’m going next.’

‘I’m off as well, did you hear?’ said Al, thumbing behind him at the For Sale notice. ‘June the seventh I leave, so I’ve started packing up.’

‘I had heard, and I hope you’re very happy in your new home, Al. You deserve to have a fancy house. My mum will miss you though.’

Al stroked his stubble and it made a scratchy rasping sound against his hand.

‘Me and your mum had a bit of a falling out,’ said Al.

‘You and Mum?’ Viv wondered if she’d heard that right. They’d never fallen out. ‘What about?’

Al checked over his shoulder to make sure there was no one spying out of Stel’s front window.

‘That new fellow of hers more or less told me to back off. He said that your mum had complained to him that I’d pestered her for years and she didn’t know how to stop me.’

Viv screwed up her face in disbelief. ‘Al, Mum would never have said that. You don’t pester her at all. She’s really fond of you and she likes living next door to you as well. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard her say that she always felt a lot safer knowing you were only a knock away through the wall.’

Al put his hands on his hips and shook his head.

‘He said your mum couldn’t stand the sight of me . . .’

‘That’s absolute rubbish, Al.’

‘I tell you, I was so embarrassed, Viv. I felt sick . . . I felt hurt. I’ve never overstepped the mark with your mum. I was so upset when I’d heard she’d said that. I went over and over in my head conversations I’d had with her in the past . . .’

Viv knew her mother, and Stel wouldn’t have pulled Al down like that. She wouldn’t have been disloyal on that scale, even if she had thought it. But she also suspected that Al might have believed it because deep down a part of him was still a little skinny kid with no self-worth in a constant state of amazement that a lovely woman like Stel would bother to give him the time of day.

So why had Ian lied, then? That was the burning question, because it
was
a lie. Viv would have put her life savings on it.

‘I don’t like him, Viv. I didn’t from the off. You keep your eye out for your mum,’ said Al, reaching over and giving her shoulder a squeeze. ‘And you can tell her from me that talking or not talking, if she needs me, I’m still just a knock away through the wall.’

Viv walked around Meadowhall, tried on some clothes, looked at some books but she didn’t want to be there. She bought herself a coffee and sat in the Oasis food court and felt as if she were moving at a different pace to the rest of the universe. She felt dry, faded as if she were made of dust and the slightest single breeze would send her scattering into the air as a trillion motes. She might have cried had she had any tears left inside her.

*

Stel walked into her attic bedroom with an armful of fresh sheets to make up the narrow single bed for Viv. She sat next to the ginger curl of Basil and stroked his fur. He was always up here these days, and hardly ever came into the lounge any more. She wondered if that was because he could sense what a sadistic bastard Ian Robson was.

Stel had agreed to take Viv to one side and tell her that she had to find somewhere else to stay. But though she’d nodded submissively at Ian’s instructions, inside she had reared up at last. As if she would deny her daughter a place in the house she grew up in! Enough was enough. Stel would take her daughter to one side all right, but instead she would let her know what Ian Robson was doing to her. Knowing Viv, she’d drive straight to the police station and hopefully they’d do what they had to before he plastered those pictures all over the public domain. It was a risk she had to take because she couldn’t handle any of it any more.

Stel took her time putting on the covers, glad to be out of his sight and temporarily free from being checked up on. He’d found her diary with all her passcodes in it and used them to access the search history on her PC, her emails and online bank statements. As well as her mileage, she knew he recorded how long she spent in the supermarket and scrutinised what she bought from the till receipts. She wasn’t even allowed to lock the bathroom door any more. She felt compressed under the weight of his surveillance; but then he wanted her to feel controlled and demeaned, she knew. She hadn’t mentioned her future Sundays with the Old Spice Girls because she didn’t want to inflame him, but she could have guessed he considered those were at an end.

Stel plopped Basil back on the bed when she’d finished making it and sat at Viv’s desk where she had parked her box of bottles and test tubes and felt herself lifted up by a crest of euphoria that she was going to be out of this mantrap of misery soon. Today.

One of the phials caught her eye: Dancing Sunshine. She’d feel like sunshine was dancing inside her as soon as she and Viv walked out of the front door together. Whatever misery Ian planned to unleash when he realised she’d broken free from him would be better than staying in this hell. Stel’s eyes moved across the rack of perfumes. Viv thought of some lovely names for her mixtures: Storm-on-the-Moors, Misty Morning, Wildflower Cottage . . . There was a larger bottle with ‘Geraldine’ on the label. Stel unscrewed the lid of the bottle and inhaled.
Oh that’s lovely,
she said to herself. She tipped it upside down to put a dab on her finger but Basil jumped up on her lap and she dropped it, down her shirt and over his back before it fell to the floor and started glugging all over the beige carpet.

Stel bounced to her feet. ‘You silly lad, Basil,’ she said, picking up the nearly-empty bottle and setting it back on the desk. ‘I’d better get a cloth before you start licking yourself.’ He was already bending his head back and trying to dry himself off. Stel ran down to the bathroom for a cloth before he made himself sick.

Chapter 95

Viv set off back to Pogley Top but she didn’t go straight to her mum’s house as it felt more Ian’s than Stel’s territory now. His stuff had invaded the house like a rampaging weed. She didn’t fancy enduring the atmosphere there any longer than she had to and thought she’d pass another hour or so in a place she had always liked to go to. But tomorrow, without fuss or ceremony, she would suggest they went out for Sunday lunch – alone – mum and daughter for a catch-up. She wanted to check that everything was all right, especially after what Al had said.

There was a little-known clearing by the Stripe, so-called because it was a pathetic ‘stripe’ of river that dribbled through the wood. ‘It’s hardly worth its bother to flow,’ her Nana Blackbird used to say. ‘It’s even too bloody lazy to dry up.’ There was a commemorative bench there with a brass plaque on the back.
Edith Crabtree. She Loved this Place.
Viv and her Nana used to come here with a bag of homemade egg and salad cream sandwiches and a net from the corner shop and Viv would sit on the bank and try and catch one of the sticklebacks that journeyed down it; approximately one every six years. Halley’s comet was spotted more than fish in Pogley Stripe.

Viv sat on the bench and opened a bottle of cold pop. And tried not to think about Wildflower Cottage and everyone there, because that’s where her thoughts veered whenever they had any freedom to travel.

Chapter 96

Ian was trying to watch the highlights of the match, but the sound of Stel’s feet tip-tapping up and down the attic stairs was doing his head in. He gave the ceiling a nasty glare, switched his attention back to the screen, then heard her at it again.

He launched himself from the sofa and took the stairs two at a time.

‘What the frigging hell . . .’

He walked into a fug of too familiar scent.
Her scent.
As it swirled around in his head, graves in his memory started to yawn open and the contents sprang alive.
The bitch nearly killed him. She came out early from prison, slipped through his fingers.