by Judy Astley
Back at Charlotte’s, the others would by now have been asking each other if Viola was seeing anybody yet. She’d bet the question had come up the moment the front door had shut behind her – she’d ask Amanda about it at work tomorrow. Amanda, bless her, would tentatively have suggested maybe it was a bit soon; Charlotte would have said no, it was high time to get back on the dating circuit, Viola wasn’t getting any younger. What none of them would have come out with (because you just didn’t, ever, not even if you were as gormlessly tactless as Charlotte) was that Rhys had been a selfish, cheating bastard and giving him even sixteen days’ grieving grace was possibly more than he deserved, let alone sixteen months. Soon, people would sidle round to the whyever did you marry him question. They probably had already in private, though not yet to her face – but any day now they would. Especially her sister Kate, who’d managed to look as if she predicted doom even on the wedding day, taking her aside from other guests before the ceremony to ask her about five times if she was sure. At the time she’d just giggled and told Kate she was being like the kind of fussy mother who keeps asking a small child if they need a wee. But maybe Kate had second-guessed disaster: Rhys had turned out to be a complete sod with a complete absence of the fidelity gene, but his sudden death had been a huge shock, even though she’d spent most of the funeral service wondering which of the many assembled women in the congregation had been the mistress he’d sped off to leave her for on that fatally icy February night.
Ahead of her were more red lights, but also a blue flashing one. So that was the hold-up: an accident. Traffic was down to one lane and police were directing alternate lines of cars past the scene. Viola felt her heart beating faster. Reminded of Rhys’s demolished Porsche, she really didn’t want to see cars crunched up like sweet wrappers, maybe someone still trapped and frantic; really didn’t want to imagine scenes of desperate rescue inside the parked ambulance that she could now see on the verge. One that wasn’t going anywhere was always a bad sign, wasn’t it? Because if there was hope, it would surely be speeding with full siren-blast to the nearest A & E.
Quickly, she turned up the nearest side road. The diversion she had in mind would be the long way round and would take her past Bell Cottage (now rented out), shared during those tempestuous months with Rhys, but needs must. She stopped at the roadside to call Rachel, tell her she would be home in fifteen minutes, and then sped on her way, pleased to be free of snarled-up traffic and wondering why so few others had opted for a detour. Who were those people who slowed down to look at crash sites? How could anyone want to do more than get past as fast as was safe and not have their minds scarred by the sight of someone else’s catastrophe?
Later, she wondered if her doomy thoughts had had some karmic influence on what happened next. As she slowed down for a big shrub-shrouded roundabout before rejoining the dual carriageway, something went clunk at the back of the Polo and Viola felt a sudden lack of give in the steering wheel. In a heart-pounding panic, trying to remember what the Stig always told the celebrity guest drivers on Top Gear about how to steer into skids, she tried to brake, but the car had developed its own sense of direction and lurched sideways, almost bouncing across the raised kerb and on to the roundabout before coming to a thudding halt in the middle of a large bush. For several moments she sat silent, trying to calm her thumping heart and feeling desperately thankful that all of her seemed to be in one functioning piece and that she hadn’t been punched in the face by an airbag. Can’t have been that bad then, she thought, still shaking as she pushed the door open as far as she could.
‘Oh, brilliant,’ she sighed, as her hand was immediately attacked by spikes and thorns. The bush was one of the nasty stabby kind. Every little twig on it seemed keen to dig into her to remind her that she was in vading its space. Considering this was only a suburban roundabout, she appeared to have landed in the middle of a small forest. And just when she needed them, there seemed to be no cars around. Not that they could have seen her. The black Polo was so engulfed in foliage it was as if the stuff had grown around it, like the forest of thorns round Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Viola just hoped she’d be off the traffic island in under a hundred years. Tentatively she stepped out, trying to push down as much of the undergrowth as she could.
‘Hey, are you all right? What happened there?’ A man appeared next to her, taking her hand and treading the branches out of her way and leading her to a clearing, further into the centre of the island. He was dressed all in black, a fair bit too old to be wearing a hoodie, and the fleeting idea that he was a good old-fashioned cat burglar, diverted between local break-ins by her careering Polo, came into her head. Where had he come from? He must have sprinted across the road.
‘I think so,’ she said, pulling leaves from her hair. ‘My car, though … I think there must have been a puncture or something, it went all …’
‘It’s OK. It looks rescuable. Are you with the AA?’
‘Yes, thank goodness. I’ll give them a call …’ She stepped back towards the car door.
‘No, wait, you’ll get covered in scratches. Mahonia are spiky bastards; it’ll rip your coat to shreds. Let me help; I’m guessing your bag is on the passenger seat?’
She hesitated. How safe was this? Not remotely safe, would be her guess. If she’d been right to come up with the burglary-career option, then he could be halfway down the street with her credit cards and cash before she’d got free of the last of the twigs. All the same, she waited where she was as he crunched easily over the branches to the far side of the car. In the weak shine from the Polo’s sidelights his teeth gleamed as he looked back and smiled at her: a wolfish sideways grin that didn’t quite reassure her – it brought to mind the way that people who say a toothy Alsatian dog ‘just wants to play’ make you immediately want to get behind the nearest high wall. In contrast to the bright teeth, his face looked streakily muddy and his hands were covered in earth. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom she could also make out that beyond him, further into the clearing, there was a small green Land Rover, against which was propped a spade. So that was where he’d sprung from so swiftly.
What, she asked herself, would anyone be doing in the middle of a woody traffic island late at night with a spade? Only one thing, one horribly gruesome thing came to mind, along with an image of a shallow grave and every lurid police drama she’d ever seen. Her mother, it occurred to her, would have been thrilled. As an avid reader of murder mysteries Naomi would have been right there, congratulating Viola’s rescuer on picking the perfect spot for a bit of late-night body-burying.
‘Oh dear Lord,’ she breathed, catching sight of a deep and recently dug hole. What the hell was this guy doing?
‘Here’s your bag.’ Her rescuer returned and handed it over. ‘I hope your phone didn’t drop out of it in all the lurching about. The battery’s given out on mine.’
‘Um … thanks.’ She fumbled around inside the bag, completely incapable of getting her trembling hands to find what she was looking for.
‘Look, you’re really shaken up, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Why don’t I just give you a ride to wherever you were going and you can sort it out in the morning from somewhere a bit warmer and easier than this? Your car’s not in anyone’s way, after all.’
‘Actually, maybe I should just ring for a cab. I mean …’ She indicated the spade and the mound of freshly dug earth. ‘You’re, er … busy. I’ll just go and leave you to whatever it is you’re doing.’
Oh God, whyever had she said that? She should have pretended not to notice anything at all. Now he’d have to kill her too. A desperately sad image came to mind of Rachel packing her possessions and trailing off to Notting Hill to live with Marco and James. Others followed swiftly: Naomi getting her magpie-feathered funeral hat out and weeping into a triple gin. Her sister and brother on their way to identify her corpse, agreeing that she’d always been the jinxed one and now look.
‘No, really, it’s no trouble at all – so long as you’
re not heading for Scotland or something!’ he insisted cheerily, flashing some more of the slightly crazed smile. ‘Just climb into the Land Rover and give me a minute to finish off here. All I ask is that you don’t tell anyone you saw me here tonight.’
‘Oh, absolutely!’ Viola almost shouted the words. ‘I absolutely promise I’ll never tell anyone, ever, not in my whole life. Trust me. Please.’
He looked puzzled. ‘Well, it’s not that big a deal, but thanks.’
‘It isn’t?’
He picked up the spade and grinned at her again. ‘No. Because I don’t know what you think I’m up to here, but I’m only planting a tree. A quince tree, to be precise.’
Oh. Planting a tree. A quince tree. Yes, of course he was.
TWO
‘EH, LASS, THAT’S just the sort of thing that would happen to you,’ Naomi chuckled at Viola the next morning after Rachel had left for school. ‘But that man who brought you home, he could have been anyone. You can’t be too careful, especially with your luck. What I told you when you were little still applies, you know: never get into a car with a stranger. You could have been strangled in a ditch with your pants gone.’
Viola said nothing, but counted silently to ten as she filled the kettle in her mother’s kitchen. The kettle was a heavy old thing and the plug felt a bit wobbly, as if it were about to fall to pieces, like so much of this rapidly crumbling house. Naomi might still be able to whizz around like someone twenty years younger than her age, but surely at some point soon she really would need to be living somewhere easier and safer than this great mouldering Edwardian pile, especially once Viola and Rachel moved back to their own home. And that would have to be soon, she’d decided overnight. Very soon. It wasn’t only Charlotte twitting her about ‘camping at the homestead’ that had done it, though that had made her think about how long she’d been avoiding getting back to real life. No – it was the backlit vision on the doorstep that had finally made up her mind for her.
Arriving home at close to midnight, Viola had slithered awkwardly down from the Land Rover’s passenger seat and the front door of the house had been immediately flung open, sending a shaft of brilliant light across the gravel, effectively floodlighting the car. There, framed by the doorway, was Naomi in her long, shocking-pink kimono, her arms outstretched like an angel about to take off and the bright green dragon pattern on the silk breathing furious orange fire. She had purple sheepskin slippers on her feet and was shouting in a high piercing voice that would wake the comatose, ‘Vee, Vee, is that you? Where the ’eck have you been?’ For the second time that evening she’d felt like a nagged teenager, mortified and seethingly rebellious in equal measure.
‘Oo-er – looks like you’ll be grounded for weeks for this!’ her rescuer had teased. Viola hadn’t seen the funny side. You don’t, she’d thought grimly, at thirty-five.
‘If she had her way, I would be. Probably for life,’ she’d groaned, glaring at Naomi, mentally just daring her to stride up to the car and demand of the tree-planter precisely what he thought he was doing, bringing her daughter home at this time. For a woman who’d spent her long-ago teenage years hanging out in the smoky all-night jazz clubs of Soho, Naomi worried an awful lot about after-dark danger.
‘Will you give me a call tomorrow, just so I know you got your car back OK?’ he’d said, grinning with either sympathy or suppressed hilarity – it was hard to tell in the dark. He leaned over and handed her a card through the open window.
‘I will, and thanks for the lift and everything. I must go, sorry …’
‘Yes, you must! I’m guessing you’ll be packed straight off to bed with a big telling-off!’
She’d heared him laugh as he swung the car round on the gravel and drove out through the gate, which she took plenty of time to close after him so as to gain a few moments to calm her fury at her mother, otherwise there would have been serious danger of her calling the tree man back to dig another deep hole, this time to plant a human. She’d then gone into the house, giving Naomi the most minimal explanation, feigned tiredness and raced into the flat, shutting the door firmly after her. Rachel, the only one who had any real claim to be worried, had been fast asleep.
‘Mum, burst tyres happen to everyone,’ Viola said now as she dealt with the boiling kettle.
‘But coming home with an unknown man doesn’t,’ Naomi lobbed back, determined to have the conversation she’d been denied the night before. She wasn’t being jocular, as she had been earlier. ‘Now he knows where you live, anything could happen.’
‘Oh God, Mum, I’m not twelve!’ Viola laughed off the implied threat but it was a brittle kind of sound, covering rising annoyance. ‘It wasn’t what you’d call a Big Risk.’
She felt mildly dishonest here – after all, she’d been the one who’d suspected her rescuer of secretly burying a corpse. She hadn’t mentioned the tree-planting aspect to Naomi. No such details were required, she’d decided, otherwise she’d never hear the end of it. ‘What does anyone want to go gardening at night for?’ would be the first question, and, to be honest, that was something any half-sane person might ask.
‘And risk or not, he was very kind, as people mostly are,’ Viola insisted. ‘Thanks to him, I got home fast and safely and the car is now at the garage having its tyre sorted. I can pick it up later this morning before I go into work. I’ve only got one afternoon session today. A Wuthering Heights intensive with four boarding-school chuck-outs, though this close to the exams it’s a bit late for them to …’
‘You didn’t tell him who you are, did you?’ Naomi interrupted, not looking at Viola. She expertly prised the lid off the old biscuit tin and scrabbled about among the contents to find a chocolate digestive.
Viola had known that question was coming, because it too often did after Rhys had died and she’d moved in here. Waiting for it made her feel tense, that and the effort of not snapping about being treated like some silly adolescent.
‘I’m not anyone, Mum,’ she replied wearily, it being far from the first time they’d had this discussion.
‘You know what I mean. You know what folk are like.’
‘It’s been over a year now. I think I’m a long time off the tabloid-interest radar, don’t you? I bet there’s hardly anyone out there who even remembers who Rhys was.’ She felt an unexpected ripple of pity for him, faithless bastard though he’d been. He’d so adored both his fame (which he was supremely confident would escalate any day soon from the level of soap star to superstar) and his infamy, but the waters of interest swiftly close over those out of the public eye, especially those permanently out of it.
Rhys had been a music-biz one-hit non-wonder with a mediocre boy band, but had had the kind of lucky looks that rescued him, as he hit his thirties, from the usual road to has-been obscurity by qualifying him for the serial-shagger role in a twice-weekly medical drama called Doctors and Nurses. He’d played a randy, rather cack-handed surgeon who couldn’t keep his own anatomy under control, let alone fix other people’s. Off set, he’d become less and less keen to leave the character behind at the studio and specialized in gambling, casual women, speeding fines and the odd drunken bar brawl: if the tabloid press were having a slack day scavenging for celebrity gossip, Rhys could usually be relied on to provide some kind of handy little nugget for page four. Worse, since he’d once told an interviewer that he liked women with curves, he’d acquired a small adoring posse of female admirers who gave up going to slimming clubs and took up the avid pursuit of Rhys instead.
The posse ran a Facebook fan page, sent birthday cards, would knock on the front door of Bell Cottage and claim they happened to be passing or a car had broken down. There were only about twelve of these admirers, but what they lacked in numbers they certainly made up for in brazen persistence. Was it one of them he’d run off to be with, Viola would wonder in the middle of the night. He’d always claimed he could barely tell any of them apart … but maybe that wasn’t entirely true. There’d definitely been some
one hugely special. Rhys was like a cat – once he’d settled into a good, comfortable home, it would take an earthquake to shift him, but, at the end, shifted he had been.
Viola had hated his tabloid coverage: ‘Where exactly is the show-biz glamour in a pub fight, and all on the front page of the Daily Grot?’ she would challenge on the days there were photographers hanging around the gate in the mornings and Rachel had to push her way past them on her way to school. Rhys would just shrug and come up with his ever-ready answer: ‘What does it matter? You and me and Rachel, we know it was no more than me standing on a bloke’s foot, saying “sorry, mate” and buying him a beer. They exaggerate for a living.’ But then he’d do his delighted-with-himself laugh. ‘And hey, who cares if they make it all up? It’s another sprinkle of glitter on the old image!’
Under threat of his role being killed off in Doctors and Nurses, Rhys had been actively putting a more positive shine on his bad-boy image when Viola had met him, and was having a phase of being keen to be seen doing good works instead of bad deeds. Her sister Kate had booked him to be the guest auctioneer at a charity fund-raiser event she’d helped organize and Viola had gone along as a guest. Kate, smiling animatedly, had been showing off her celebrity catch, and had introduced him rather excitedly to her sister. Kate had then been inexplicably miffed when Viola had accepted a lift home with her pet star in his bile-green Porsche. ‘You were only supposed to chat politely to him,’ she’d hissed down the phone the next day. ‘Not bloody get off with him!’
‘But I sort of thought that’s what you wanted!’ Viola had been puzzled. ‘You practically threw us together! And you and Miles are always saying you’d like to see me settled again, which is a weird term – makes me feel like a badly rooted tree.’ I can’t get it right, she’d thought, sighing at the fickleness of families. Kate was stolidly long-term married. She, on the other hand, had been long-term single since the divorce from Marco, and was beginning to wonder if anyone – anyone ever – would ask her out again. But Rhys did ask – and he didn’t have to do it twice. He was all charm and fun, seemed to adore her on sight and she, slightly needy and not believing her luck, fell like a stone for him.
