‘Good girl. Let’s take it outside. I think there are some biscuits somewhere. Oh, no, I gave them to the birds because they were stale. Never mind. I’ll just check on Ferdinand first.’
‘Another hen?’ asked Vee, but Yolanda shook her head.
‘Tree frog,’ she said succinctly, as if this explained everything.
Sure enough, nestling in a plastic sandwich box on a shelf of the dresser, Vee saw a tiny green frog, blinking up at Yolanda.
28
Vee was starting to feel as if she’d slipped into a different world, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. Would a white rabbit appear next? She waited for her aunt to explain this extra member of her family, hoping the idea of keeping a frog in your kitchen might make more sense then.
‘I adopted Ferdinand last year,’ Yolanda said. ‘He looked very sick, so I caught a few tiny flies for him, and he recovered very nicely. It’s perfect in the warm weather because there are plenty of insects for him to find but during the summer I have to swat any stray flies and pop them in a box in the freezer so he has a supply to keep him going through the winter.’
Vee tried to think of a suitable response to this information, but nothing came to mind. Yolanda was already making her way into the garden, so she followed her outside. They settled themselves on rickety garden chairs by a table mosaicked in a myriad of small chips of coloured tiles. The pattern was of a sunburst and the whole effect was stunning.
‘I did this myself,’ said Yolanda proudly, gesturing to the tabletop. ‘Simone admired it so much that I had to do one for her and since then her guests have often ordered them from me. It’s a nice earner. Every little helps to keep the wolf from the door, you know.’
‘Erm… yes, it must do,’ said Vee. She’d been wondering how her aunt managed for money, and this must only be a small part of how she paid for this idyllic lifestyle.
‘I cycle round the villages whenever there’s a house clearance or similar and I buy up old tiles,’ said Yolanda. ‘The people here save them for me too, and bits of pottery and so on. Ferdinand likes to come with me in my bike basket. He travels in his sandwich box. I’ve customised the lid so he can breathe, obviously. It’d be cruel otherwise.’
In Vee’s opinion there was nothing obvious about travelling around France with a frog in a box, but she was starting to realise that her aunt was a person full of surprises. She supposed Yolanda had always had her quirky side, but to be fair, when Vee was growing up, anyone over thirty had seemed a law unto themselves, quite out of her orbit. She was reflecting on this when Yolanda said, ‘So what’s the real reason you wanted to see me? Not just for old time’s sake, I’m assuming.’
Vee took a sip of her coffee, which was hot, strong and very good indeed. It gave her the confidence to make a start. ‘There are two reasons. The first is that I’ve been trying to remember more details about the weeks leading up to when our family left Willowbrook,’ she said.
‘Why?’
The bald question stalled Vee, and she took a moment to form her thoughts into order. ‘Because… there’s a blank in my mind around that time and I’ve always had a feeling that I’ve forgotten something significant. Something very bad, that had to do with that final school camping trip,’ she added, watching her aunt’s face closely.
Yolanda didn’t answer for a while. She stared into the distance, as if she was attempting to conjure up the past from the trees that surrounded her garden. Then she stirred herself.
‘You’re thinking of Patrick Summerfield, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Beryl’s boy.’
Just the sound of his name was enough to make Vee flinch. She put down her coffee cup. ‘Yes,’ she whispered, hands now clenched in her lap. She could feel her nails biting into the soft palms. ‘Tell me what happened, if you know. All of it. Please,’ she added as an afterthought when Yolanda’s expression grew even grimmer.
‘You really don’t remember?’
Vee shook her head. ‘I know you fetched me back from the campsite and I was in bed for a few days. I was pretty sick, wasn’t I?’
‘You were very poorly. We were seriously worried about you. A fever is always scary, and you were rambling – burbling about being sorry and wishing you were dead. We called the doctor, but he couldn’t find anything wrong with you, apart from a dose of summer flu. He said you were probably run-down and you just needed to rest. Of course, it didn’t help that everybody thought you were just plain drunk.’
‘You mean I wasn’t drunk?’
‘Oh, you were, most definitely. I suspected that Patrick had stolen some brandy out of his mum’s cocktail cabinet. Beryl has never been short of a bottle or two of her favourite tipple.’
Vee rubbed her eyes. A sudden flashback had transported her to the times when she and Rhonda had met up with a few others in the churchyard and passed around various dregs in bottles filched from their parents’ stocks. She’d never had anything of her own to contribute because Tallulah wasn’t keen on having strong drink in the house. Some of them had smuggled in their booze offerings to the campsite, she now remembered. Vodka had been popular because if you ate enough mints, the teachers couldn’t smell it very easily, but Vee hadn’t liked the taste of that, so Patrick had made a point of sharing his brandy with her. She’d thought he was being kind for once.
‘Do you have any idea what I was sorry about?’ Vee said, going back to the part of Yolanda’s tale that seemed most significant but already dreading the answer.
Yolanda sighed. ‘I think you’ve worked it out by now, surely? Patrick was a troubled soul by that time. He was a fairly happy little boy, as I recall, but when he reached his teens, something happened to him. I suspected he’d fallen in with a bad crowd and drugs were involved but when I tried to warn Beryl, she completely flew off the handle and said her lad would never meddle with anything illegal. Anyway, whatever the reason, he became withdrawn and started to act very oddly. You must remember that Patrick had a massive crush on you all that summer?’
Long-buried memories stirred in Vee’s mind. She shivered. ‘I… yes, I think I knew that.’
‘Knew it? Of course you did. Everyone who had anything to do with either of you was aware of it. Patrick used to follow you everywhere. You were kind to him to begin with, but he was always a bit of a joke to you and after a while you lost patience with him mooning around. He still wouldn’t leave you alone, even when you grew stroppy with him, and boy, you knew how to be stroppy in those days. Is that why you were sorry? Then you all went off on that camping trip. It was just after the incident in the churchyard. You can’t have forgotten that?’
‘No. I remember the fire, of course I do.’
‘They never did get to the bottom of who started the blaze that destroyed the shed, but Patrick was involved somehow, I’m certain of it.’ Yolanda folded her arms and stared at the table. She was miles away.
