‘Yes.’ I bent to slot her into her car seat and tightened the straps. As I got into the car and gave Ross a last wave, I heard him let out a whoop and, in the mirror, the image of him jumping up and punching the air made me grin again.
17
That night I lay beside Tilly, thinking. Unfortunately, as I’d let her sleep in the car so that I could think back over what Ross had said and the secret little glow I’d got from his rather diffident admission of falling for me, she’d refused to go to bed until after ten. I was, therefore, exhausted and rather frazzled by the time she fell asleep, which made my thoughts fractured and piecemeal.
Ross would like to try to have some kind of relationship with me. I, in turn, liked him enough to want to reciprocate. But was it wise? I was, after all, technically still on the run and if it turned out that Davidhadfound me, what would that mean? I couldn’t somehow see the quiet and stress-ridden Ross standing up to my confident ex, particularly if David did the whole ‘they are coming home with me’ act and gathered Tilly and me up. Could I go to the police? Report his bizarre behaviour, the previous control and coercive behaviour and my belief about the current stalking? Or would David bring out the actor schtick and talk his way out of it all as ‘just a misunderstanding’? There was, after all, no proof of anything. Apart from the texts David had sent since I’d left, everything had been unspoken. It had been the air of menace, the little vignettes that I remembered – David holding Tilly in the night and whispering about taking her away, the tablets to make me sleep. The always knowing where I was or wanting to know who I’d spoken to. On their own just little symbols of caring, but taken all together a terrifying picture of a man obsessed.
How could I put Ross, with his bitten nails and anxiety eczema, in the way of all that?
I did spare a quick memory for the way Ross had been when I’d seen him in full professional mode talking to his workforce. Smiling, jokey, encouraging rather than bullying, he was someone who got his own way through gentle persuasion rather than shouting and ordering about. Ross was… sweet. He hadn’t tried to ingratiate himself by making friends with my daughter either, which was a tactic men had occasionally tried. Ross treated Tilly as though she were my chaperone, to be acknowledged politely and included in conversation, but not as though she were a part of me which had to be separately wooed.
I sat up in the bed and hugged my knees. Beside me, Tilly breathed softly with her head half on the bed because Brass occupied most of the pillow, his stitched expression of near-terminal stupidity fixing me with a felt-eyed stare of accusation. What did Ido?
We could run again, of course. Pack what we needed and head somewhere else, somewhere it would take David longer to find us. Some isolated community somewhere, perhaps, in the rural depths? I looked around our tiny room, where the shadows thrown in by the street lights highlighted how little there really would be to pack. Most of what we had was donated and could be left with the room, for the next occupant. I could gather what money we had, put Tilly in the buggy and buy a train ticket to as far away as we could get. Scotland, maybe?
Tilly sighed and turned over, one hand unconsciously reaching out for Brass’s floppy scales, and I wondered if Ishouldrun again. Tilly had friends and a good nursery. She had a routine she understood, even if her mother did disrupt it occasionally by letting her fall asleep in the car and leaving her to doze uninterrupted while her feckless parent sat in a car park daydreaming about future possibilities that could never happen. Even if Davidwereto be hanging around in York, Tilly was in no danger. Perhaps David would settle for seeing her and would then head back down south to leave us alone and unmolested?
Then the memories of those dark days flooded back. David monitoring me at all times. The questioning, when I was already so tired with trying to care for a tiny baby that I barely knew my own name. The atmosphere in the house, as though potential threat tiptoed behind me, sometimes throwing the hood of blind panic over my head. Being followed, having to continually worry that if I went out without her someone was going to snatch Tilly and that I would arrive home to find the house empty and David and my baby gone.
David was capable of that. He was capable of taking my child, using the fact that he was her father and could provide her with the perfect upbringing to take me to court for residency. Oh, he’d beunderstanding, he’d offer to let me see her ‘whenever you want, darling,’ and then he’d buy a little place somewhere in the country, inaccessible except by boat and, probably, flying unicorn…
I recognised my own hyperbole and snorted an ironic laugh, which made Tilly twitch in her cartoon-laden dreams. No. I wasn’t going to run, not again. I’d stay here in the limited protection of the hostel and wait for him to get bored. After all, he couldn’t really be out there; it was imagination and a tiny bit of guilt making me see him on street corners. There were plenty of men who looked enough like David de Winter to stop my heart whenever I looked around in a crowd, but the real David wouldn’t care enough now to be still following me. He would have shrugged off our relationship, and the only person he would be interested in would be his daughter. She was still young enough to be influenced by him and his family money, young enough for her affection to be bought with riding lessons, daily ice cream and a bedroom with circus wallpaper. He’d let me starve alone, but he might just try to take his daughter.
A sudden impulse made me hug the sleeping Tilly. No. No, I was her mother. While I lived and breathed, she would be with me. Her father might look like security and safety, but really, underneath it all, he was…
The darkness broke through and I cried, clasping Tilly to me while she wriggled and muttered a protest in her sleep. Tomorrow I’d plead with Isobel. If she left Elm Cottage then Ross owed me the five thousand pounds that I could use to get Tilly and me away from here and somewhere David would never find us. Ross was… Ross was…
I drifted off to sleep with the tears of confusion stiffening my cheeks and before I could make any kind of sense of what Ross might be.
18
‘No.’ Tilly gripped onto the sides of her car seat. ‘No. Scary house.’
I sighed. Reasoning with her was all very well and sometimes worked, but expecting a two-year-old to get to grips with my mixed emotions of guilt, fear, desperate need to escape and obligation was a step too far.
‘We have to go and see Isobel.’ I reached in again and tried to pull what felt like an octopus away from its mooring. ‘She might let you play with her diamonds again, if you’re sensible.’
‘No.’ Tilly stuck her lip out, mutinously. ‘Scary house.’
I sighed again. I didn’t suppose my perpetual fleeing from the place had really given her the best impressions of Elm Cottage, and, to be fair, it was quite a scary place, especially with the half-collapsed nature of the roof and some of the walls.
‘I’m sorry, Tils,’ I said, pulling her free from her seat, which I could swear made a noise like a drain being unblocked. ‘We really do have to do this and I don’t have time to be rational about it.’
Actually today the place didn’t look quite so dreadful. The sun was shining in a brief imitation of the lost summer and it highlighted the colours in the mixed swirl of leaves at our feet. High above, the sky was empty and blue, stretched with streaks of pale cloud, like the most delicate of lacework. No birds circled, the only avian life that was evident was cheeping at us from the surrounding bushes in a covert kind of way. I wondered where the big black birds that haunted this wood were, and hoped that they weren’t all keeping Isobel company.
‘Come on, Tilly.’ I tried to sound jaunty and upbeat, but Tilly wasn’t having any of it and stood sullenly beside the car, kicking one of her wellingtons off again.
‘No.’ The thumb went into her mouth and she stood, rebellious as a teenager. Beyond my car I saw the cycling man pedal furiously into view, head down as though racing, and I wondered why anyone would want to cycle through these woods. The possibility of some large animal leaping out and knocking you sideways must be high, surely, and the birds… I shuddered as the cyclist passed by, unmolested by mammalian life forms.
‘Come on, Tils. Isobel might have some biscuits and juice,’ I cajoled, hating myself for using food as a bribe. Was I setting my daughter up for a lifetime of disordered eating? Should I admit that she reallydidn’twant to go into the house and let her have the freedom of choice? I hovered uncertainly, wishing yet again that motherhood had come with a manual.
Then the thought of the five thousand pounds loomed large again, the knowledge that money would buy us freedom. I could change my phone and David would never again be able to ruffle me with impromptu messages; we could move away from the hostel to somewhere more remote and unreachable. We’d besafe.
I picked Tilly up, ignoring the kicking legs and the wailing, and carried her like a bag of bad-tempered shopping down the muddy track through the undergrowth to the front door. As I twisted my head to avoid her cracking me on the nose as she threw herself about in my arms, I noticed that the cycling man had stopped his furious racing further along the road and seemed to be on his phone. I wondered if he was calling social services to report a bad mother forcing, as he would no doubt see it, her child to do something it clearly didn’t want to. And Tilly was ‘clearly not wanting to’ at some volume now, thrashing about in my arms like a suitcase in a washing machine. I held her close, remembering those days of pregnancy, when my entire abdomen had undulated and writhed with her movements. Remembering how David and I had lain entranced, watching lumps appear and vanish as though swimmers did breast stroke under my skin, fascinated and anticipatory with the desire to meet our daughter.
‘We did not… know the half of it,’ I muttered to myself, as the eagerly awaited baby, now converted into a cross between a violent boulder and a heavyweight boxer, writhed in my arms and kicked at my middle. The cries of ‘Scary house! Scary house!’ trailed through the undergrowth, trumpeting our arrival as unsubtly as if we’d arrived with a fanfare and banners flying.
So I wasn’t altogether surprised to find Isobel standing at the door to her room, hands on hips and her ever-present tweedy jacket seeming to have been hastily put on.
