She comes to a standstill outside the village’s only pub, the Rebel of the Reeds. How could she forget about money? She needs quite a lot of it, quickly, before she can do anything.
She pulls her phone out of the pocket of her joggers and rings her mother.
“Hello, darling. How are you? Hold on. Just hang on a minute, Sally.” As always, it sounds as if Julia is in a television studio, surrounded by at least fifteen demagogues, all bellowing their contradictory opinions at her. As usual, too, she sounds perfectly happy to be there—as if she’d gladly have lapped up many more hours ofuninterrupted hectoring if only her phone hadn’t rung. Sally hears, in quick succession, “Keir Starmer,” “morally incoherent,” “foregone conclusion.”
Not for the first time, it strikes her as verging on implausible that her mother chooses to live on a noisy main road in a noisy, crowded city, in one enormous room at the top of a very tall building with no outside space apart from a tiny balcony. As if determined to stretch Sally’s credulity still further, Julia voluntarily fills her home with the sound of noisy, crowded podcasts from the moment she wakes up each morning until she falls asleep at night.
Sally grew up in that same city—London. There’s no reason to avoid naming it in her mind, she thinks, as if her rejection might cause others to gang up on it, and from as far back as she can remember, she has loved and yearned for its opposite: the clean, grass-scented air you get only in the countryside; short, fat, bumpy buildings instead of tall ones made of brick. Throughout Sally’s childhood, her parents took her and Vicky nearly every summer to stay with family friends near Glyndyfrdwy in North Wales, in a long, white-painted stone cottage that nestled in a little dip between a hill, some dense woods, and a farm.
The house, Hafan Ddiogel, had a beautiful, rocky garden that wrapped all the way around it, full of interesting flowers, succulents, vegetables, and herbs. There were about ten different levels, each operating as a separate area. Maintaining and tending to it all must have required significant acrobatic talent since each individual area of the garden was as far from being flat as was the whole ensemble. It was impossible to sit or lie down without risking tumbling off some precarious ledge or other if you made one wrongmove, though you could stand anywhere (with one of your legs slightly bent, for optimal balance) and see the most spectacular views right across the valley.
Whenever Sally thinks about Dog Heaven, where her beloved Furbert now lives, that Welsh-valley view with its soaring gold and green planes is what she pictures. Her love for Hafan Ddiogel and, by extension, Wales was directly responsible for the additions to the Lambert family of first Furbert and then Champ. How could Sally consider any breed of dog except a Welsh terrier? She couldn’t. She didn’t.Rhiannon—Ree’s unabbreviated name—was Welsh too.
At one time Sally would have said that she’d love to live in the Welsh countryside if she could, but Mark’s job is in Cambridge, and Swaffham Tilney, half an hour’s drive from his company’s head office in good traffic, was out of all the commutable villages the one that most reminded Sally of the perfect rural atmosphere she’d fallen in love with as a child, though the two landscapes were very different in some ways. But if anything, she found Swaffham Tilney to be even more idyllic and wouldn’t dream of leaving—or, rather, she wouldn’t have, if Champ had not been falsely accused of biting that horrible little teenage bitch of a liar, Tess Gavey.
There’s a sense of deeply embedded calm and quiet running beneath everything in Swaffham Tilney. Mark likes to quip that it makes Reach, the next most peaceful village in Cambridgeshire, feel like Midtown Manhattan—somewhere he’s never been. Sally, who also hasn’t, agrees with him whenever he says it. Their home village is surely one of the world’s most unspoiled pockets of stillness and silence, in a way that feels almost sacred, like a special blessing bestowed upon no other place.
All silences, of course, are challenged when you add Sally’s mother to the mix, either in physical form or telephonically. Sally holds her iPhone away from her ear as Julia yells, “Alexa! Please turn off my podcast. Alexa! Turn. Off. The Podcast!” but the background clamor of urgently expostulating pundits shows no sign of letting up. Unlike the Alexas belonging to everyone else Sally knows (the Lamberts do not have one), Julia’s seems to ignore her instructions most of the time, and so Sally gets to hear someone berating someone else for being on the wrong side of history—something she’s heard both Mark and her mum say on different occasions about very different things.
Is it just something everyone says these days? What about right now, the present moment? Surely that matters more than history. By Sally’s reckoning, the worst thing of all is to be on the wrong side of right here, right now (as Tess Gavey is), so why, all of a sudden, is it everyone’s favorite hobby to imagine lots of strangers agreeing with them in hundreds or thousands of years’ time, after they’re long dead?Pathetic.As pathetic as pretending to be popular by saying, “I’ve got a massive gang of really cool imaginary friends.”
“Alexa! Turn off Politics in the Mix!” Julia shrieks.
Eventually the noise stops, and Sally allows herself to bask for a fraction of a second in the silence of her village, mercifully restored. Then she says, “I can’t talk now, Mum, so please don’t ask me lots of questions. There’s an emergency. I need you to do exactly what I say.”
“Sally, what’s wrong? Are Rhiannon and Toby all right?”
“Ree, Tobes, and Champ are fine,” Sally can’t resist saying, though Julia didn’t ask about Champ, and Sally has given up hopingthat one day her mother will come to love her furry and non-furry grandchildren equally. “We’re all fine. But I need money, urgently, so listen—”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Can’t go into it at the moment. Here’s what I need you to do immediately: Ring Pascale and tell her to get my thirty-seven grand out of whatever fund of yours it’s in and transfer it to your normal account. Then transfer me ten grand from there, or from anywhere that’s instantly accessible—but not to my and Mark’s joint account. This is very important, Mum. The ten grand needs to go to my just-me account, the one you pay birthday and Christmas present money into. Got it?”
“Sally, you’re not leaving Mark, are you?” Julia sounds horrified.
“No. Definitely not.” Sally doesn’t want to involve their joint bank account because she’s giving Mark no say in what’s about to happen, so why should he partly fund it? That wouldn’t be right. “So, just to check you’re clear,” she says, “notthe same account you pay Ree’s and Tobes’s school fees into. Right?”
“I’m not mentally incompetent.” Julia huffs. “There’s no need to speak to me as if I’m five years old. I’ve been paying money into both your accounts regularly for many years. I know the difference between them. But—”
“Okay, so transfer me ten grand, like,right now—because the Pascale money will take at least a week to liberate, I’m guessing.” Whereas Sally knows from experience that money from her mother’s normal accounts lands almost instantaneously. “Then get my thirty-seven grand out from your investment whatnots with Pascale, pay yourself back the ten grand you’ve already given me,and then transfer me the remaining twenty-seven—also to my personal account, not mine and Mark’s joint. Okay? Are those instructions clear? Can you do all that?”
“I can, but I’m extremely worried now, Sally, and I’d like to know—”
“Well, you can’t.” Sally cuts her off. “You can know very soon but not now. Will you please just do it?” Inside her head, Sally is screaming:Don’t you know what emergency means? You have no right to say anything but “Yes of course.” That thirty-seven grand is my fucking money, not yours. All of it, and I earned every penny. This is life or death for me, potentially, and it will cost you nothing, absolutely nothing. Not even ten pence.
“All right,” says Julia. She doesn’t sound happy about it.
“Thank you. Thanks, Mum. You’re the best.”
Sally marches around the rectangular perimeter of the village green, phone clutched in her hand, refreshing her online banking app every five seconds while simultaneously trying to calculate the odds of encountering a member of the Gavey family. Highly unlikely: They only ever drive through the village, never walk, and never at this time of day. Also, this part of the village, the main part, contains Shoe Cottage, the Lamberts’ former home and also the house Lesley Gavey will never forgive for letting her down. She once told Sally, “I can’t look at the place. Have to turn away if I drive past it.” She actually said that about Sally’s beloved former home.Despicable woman.
And then, as if by magic, there is suddenly £10,049.50 in Sally’s just-her bank account where only a few seconds ago there had been £49.50.Good old Mum.Now Sally can go to Avril Mattingley’shouse, make her proposal, and pray that Avril says yes—because Avril, Sally decided while waiting for the money to come through, is going to be her helper.
Unless Corinne Sullivan would be a better bet? Would this situation fit her peculiar definition of philanthropy?
No. Philanthropy is always financial, isn’t it? And Sally doesn’t need money anymore. She’s got enough to fund the first part of her and Champ’s escape. Besides, Corinne is too complicated and too notorious, though admittedly only within Swaffham Tilney. People have thoughts about Corinne, and voice them often, whereas there is something nicely under the radar about Avril. According to one of Sally’s two favorite self-help podcasts (in which all speakers have lilting, blissed-out voices), intuition is wisdom we don’t know we possess. If that’s true, it means Avril is the one. Hers is the house—once the village’s bakery, and still called the Old Bakery—to which Sally’s intuition is pulling her. It feels meant to be.
Sally continues to believe in the rightness of her choice until she knocks on the front door and Avril opens it with tears pouring down her face.
