Plus Ross was coming too, wasn’t he?
WhatdidI think about Ross? I tried to examine my feelings, which wasn’t easy when nudging a Skoda around a ring road. I thought I felt slightly amused by him, with his somewhat whimsical observations and his appearance of being so highly strung that you could have played a tune on him. I liked the way he looked – or was that the potential for him to look good? He was tall and dark and probably would be handsome if he stopped biting his nails and the anxiety-fuelled eczema got some treatment. He’d been kind to me and Tilly, which was a huge plus. But technically he was my boss – or he would be when he eventually paid me, anyway – and my romantic track record was on a par with that of any driver who did one lap around the Nürburgring only to crash and burn.
I was a disaster. A single mother with a paranoid controlling ex who just hadn’t found her yet, hiding out in a hostel room. I had nothing,nothingto offer anyone, so it really didn’t matter whether I loathed Ross or found him as attractive as a slowly melting Magnum on a hot summer’s day. I had enough to worry about already.
Then I saw David. Or rather, I ‘saw’ him. He couldn’t possibly have been there, standing by the roadside in that village as I drove through, where blind covered windows turned their unseeing eyes towards the woods. It was a man who bore a resemblance to David, that was all, dark and slim and leaning casually against the post of a road sign which warned about deer. I was steering carefully through, trying not to offend the grass-verge gods by clipping any corners and ruffling the golf-course finish which made the entire village look as though it were on a plate in someone’s living room. So when I glanced up at a silhouette which screamed at me and made my hands sweat on the wheel, my heart balloon over my lungs and my stomach threaten the upholstery with a hastily eaten breakfast, I was past it before I could talk myself down.
It wasn’t David. He didn’t know where I was, he had no way of knowing. I was safe. Tilly was safe. Someone, probably innocently waiting for a bus or a tourist taking in the view, had looked enough like him to send panic scrubbing through my bloodstream and my vision greying out the images of those first lone trees outlining the forest.
‘Stop it. Juststop it,’ I told myself, breathing in and out as deeply as I could. ‘He’s not here. He doesn’t care any more – it’s over, you’re out.’
The urge to turn the car around, drive back to nursery, grab Tilly and run was so strong that I almost gave in. Only the thought of that five thousand pounds, a home, a future, stopped me. If I ran we’d have to start again somewhere else. And we might not be so lucky next time – the hostels may all be full, I may have to share with people a lot less friendly than Tia and the girls, and with drug habits a lot less benign than Don and Tony’s perpetual weed smoking. I couldn’t do that to Tilly. We couldn’t keep running. I had to breathe deeply, know that we’d escaped and David de Winter had no influence over us any more.
We were safe.
Ross was parked in the little pull-in, two wheels up on the splattered verge, sitting in his car and eating chocolate. When he saw me draw up he dropped the chocolate, searched for it for a few moments, then shrugged and got out.
‘Hello. You look… clean. I like the boots.’
I’d put on one of the remnants of my old work wardrobe, slightly surprised that, given that I’d last worn it before my pregnancy had started to show, it still fitted. Tailored trousers and a neat top, which at least gave me a professional silhouette, even if the contents of that silhouette were now a little more wobbly. I’d got proper footwear on though. Big, clompy walking boots, borrowed from one of the Ukrainian girls and slightly too small but a lot more practical for stomping through woods than my plastic wellies. They looked a bit ridiculous with my outfit, but I was prepared to take the jibes in the interests of not having damp socks and mud to the knee. Besides, the wellies wouldn’t have looked any better.
‘I wanted to show Isobel that we mean business,’ I lied. I’d actually wanted to showhimthat I could look businesslike and wasn’t always floundering around covered in cereal stains with a dragon in my pocket and a toddler on my hip.
‘And up to now you’ve been telling her it doesn’t matter if she doesn’t leave?’ It was a bright, sharp question, accompanied by a glance from under a fall of hair that looked newly washed.
‘Er. No, of course not.’ I closed my car door more emphatically than I had meant to, and some gobbets of mud fell from the underneath. I hoped nothing essential had gone with them.
‘That was a joke,’ Ross said, without looking at my face. ‘I don’t know why I bother with jokes; nobody ever seems to get them.’ His voice was quite neutral but there was an odd kind of sadness in the words, as though an empty loneliness whistled in the gaps between.
‘If it hadn’t been a joke, I’d be driving away now,’ I said, and now he looked at me properly.
‘You’re a bit pale. Are you all right?’
The innocence of the question caused a resurgence of the fear I’d felt earlier, but I couldn’t tell Ross. If I said I’d started to see my ex lurking on every street corner he’d question my mental state and I couldn’t have that. ‘I’m fine.’
Ross tipped his head and pushed a hand through his hair. There were new patches of eczema across his fingers, I could see. ‘You’d tell me though? If you weren’t?’
Something shuddered deep inside me. A conflict of feelings where part of me wanted to break down and tell him what I’d imagined and how it had sent me into a loop of dread and the sensation that someone was watching everything I was doing. The other part of me remembered that the last time I had made myself vulnerable to a man, having his baby, needing his care and support, he’d betrayed me by becoming his own evil twin. This part won out.
I smiled, stretching my lips into a grin I didn’t feel. ‘I’m all right. Why else would I be here? If I were ill I’d be snuggled up in bed right now.’ I hoped he wouldn’t realise that ‘snuggling up in bed’ to get over an illness wasnota possibility when you had a toddler. Standing over a bucket while kidding yourself that it was educational to let said toddler watchAlphablocksall day on the laptop was more like it.
‘But you need the money.’
‘I’m fine, Ross. Honestly…’
‘So it’s a bit like I’m paying for your company. You are only here because I’ve promised to pay you, otherwise you’d be… I dunno, running on the beach with your daughter and a beautiful dog, flying kites and eating ice cream with the wind in your hair and everyone smiling.’
He’d got his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched around his ears. This morning’s jacket was a little cleaner than Sunday’s, a black waterproof that made him look as though he were on a site visit, which I supposed he technically was.
‘No I wouldn’t. That’s not my life, that’s an advert for toothpaste. And stop making it sound as though I’m only here for the money, as though I’m renting myself to you. Idohave a life to be getting on with, but it’s not kites and beaches and ice cream and an impossibly perfect dog; it’s a tiny room in a hostel, and worry and Tilly not having a second pair of wellies and the blokes downstairs playing a Slipknot album into the small hours.’
The words all came out in a bit of a rush. Ross leaned his back against his car, hands still in pockets, and started looking at the ground, while overhead the crows and rooks rattled and gusted, still unsettled.
A flash of movement caught my eye and I glanced up. Through the denuded undergrowth, over at the doorway to Elm Cottage, I could see Isobel standing. Her overdressed outline made her look like the ghost of a previous owner, comfortably and bulkily Victorian with her crinoline of skirts flaring from under her jacket. She must have seen me looking because she raised one hand in a greeting, then looked upwards towards where her birds were wheeling through the sky and I heard her give a single high-pitched call, not a whistle, not a cry but a throaty imitation of the crows themselves. It was the first real sound I’d heard her make.
‘That’s Isobel,’ I said, breaking the uncomfortable silence that Ross and I had fallen into. ‘She looks like she’s talking to the birds.’
He looked up too now and we watched as the black drift of birds came in slowly, one by one, flapping and cawing, to land around Isobel. Some went to the ground, others perched on her shoulders and her arms, one sat on her head so she looked as though she was wearing a very bad hat. I shivered at the thought of her being touched by all those feathers – that horrible, dry silkiness against her skin and those bare, clawed feet. It made my mouth suddenly very wet and I wondered if I was going to be sick.
