I knew what I had to do. I didn’t want to do it on so many levels, but I couldn’t sit here and watch this bird die. ‘Pick it up, please.’ I turned to Ross.
‘Me?’
‘I’ve got a bird phobia and Tilly is strapped in.’
‘What are you going to do?’ He spoke slowly, as though he suspected that I was going to wring the poor thing’s neck.
‘Take it to Isobel.’ Now I turned my face to the front. Reflected in the windscreen I could see Tilly watching the scene with interest. I didn’t want now to have to be the time I had the whole ‘death, like falling asleep only forever, never see them again’ discussion with her. In fact, I was hoping to hold that one off for several more years. ‘She takes in injured birds, and this one might already be one of hers. I can’t leave it to die and have her never know what happened to it.’
‘But your mother was there.’ He still spoke slowly, and the words were careful now, measured out in tiny portions, trying not to upset me.
I remembered Isobel telling me that she wished she’d faced up to her past. Knew I was too much of a coward to face up to mine. ‘I can stay in the car and you can take the bird in,’ I said. ‘I can lock the doors. Besides, she’s probably gone now, unless she and Isobel are bonding over animals or something.’
I felt again that brief tug – the urge to see my mother, to talk to her. To ask her how she’d navigated motherhood, whether it was always this difficult, when I could expect life to get easier. Those questions that came to the forefront at night when I lay awake with my daughter asleep beside me. Had she felt this all-consuming love when I was born? This dreadful horror that every day something might go wrong and I might lose Tilly.
I wanted my mum. But I wanted her not to be a person in thrall to David de Winter. I wanted her to be the person she had been when I was small: reassuringly down to earth, pragmatic and yet keen to sit and read with me or teach me how to craft.
‘All right.’ Ross got out of the car, pulling off his jacket as he went. ‘But if it kills and eats me, it’s your fault.’
‘It won’t,’ I said, then eyeing the ragged line of feathers trailing in the mud, I added, ‘probably.’
He advanced on the bird with his coat held out at arm’s length in front of him, as though he were stalking the invisible man. The bird panicked, flapped its good wing a few times against the mud-strewn road surface while seemingly trying to get up onto its legs and run away. Ross scooped it up, wrapping it firmly and tucking it close against him while trying to avoid the stabbing beak. The bird ‘kak-kakked’ and swung its head about, reminding me of Tilly trying to escape my embrace. The whole thing made me feel sick again.
‘Got it,’ Ross said unnecessarily as he clambered back into the car. I tried not to look, but the bird’s head was snaking out from the collar of the jacket, feathers dishevelled and the beak looking more incongruous than ever.
I kept my eyes averted as I turned the car carefully in the road, but the bird was making its presence felt, struggling hard against Ross’s chest, where he was clasping it. ‘Don’t let it go,’ I said, overwhelmed by the dreadful fear of it flapping loose around the inside of the car. ‘Please, Ross.’
‘Oddly enough I have little to no urge to be in a car with a loose crow flying around,’ he said, slightly tersely. ‘If only because the resultant accident is going to be hell to describe to the insurance company.’
I actually laughed at that. Ridiculously, because I was sitting next to a beast that was making bile rise into my throat every time I looked at it, and I was heading back towards a scenario that caused my heart to flap and flutter nearly as much as the damn crow was. But I couldn’t leave the bird to die. It was my fault that it was damaged, I hadn’t been paying attention to my driving, so I owed it at least a chance at life, and if that chance came in the shape of Isobel and meant that I might find out why my mother was hanging around the derelict house in the woods, then… well. What else could I do?
20
Although we had seemed to drive forever on the way out, it only took a minute or so to reach the little lay-by, churned with my repeated parking into a layer cake of ruts and puddles.
Tilly had begun to struggle against her restraining straps. ‘Out! Out!’ she chanted, like a prisoner hearing the jingle of approaching keys.
‘Sit still, Tils,’ I said. ‘Ross, if you take the bird in, we can…’ I was keeping my eyes trained on the untidy hump of masonry through the bushes. It might have been my imagination but the house seemed to be leaning even more now, resting a shoulder of wall against the fallen beams and bricks as though exhausted. There was no sign of anyone there.
‘Balls!’ Tilly yelled.
Ross looked at me questioningly from over the top of the agitated bird.
‘She means Isobel’s beads – the diamonds. She associates the house with being allowed to play with them,’ I explained, trying not to look at the thrusting beak or the way Ross’s jacket undulated in a sickening motion. ‘Please don’t let go, Ross.’
He gave me a steady look, his hair flopping over his forehead. ‘I don’t intend to ever let go, Libby,’ he said.
We sat in a moment of dual purpose and blinked at one another. ‘Thank you,’ I breathed. I had no idea how any of this was going to work, but there was a feeling about Ross, as though he was somehow both very, very strong and incredibly fragile. Like those materials that you can put under immense pressure in one direction but will shatter if you hit them sideways. The urge to hug him was beaten back by the ferocious struggles going on against his chest and the irritable cawing issuing from his sleeve. ‘But I…’
I had no idea how I was going to qualify that, or even what I intended to say. I meant, perhaps, to point out that I had absolutely nothing going for me, and no idea why Ross would even like me. Other than that I was the only person who might be able to get Isobel out of the cottage so he could carry on with his building work.
Ross shifted the bird package to his other arm. ‘When I look at you, I see someone incredibly strong,’ he said. ‘You just don’t know it. You’re bringing up your daughter on your own, and just that takes an amount of courage and determination that I can’t even comprehend.’
I had a brief moment of feeling unworthy. ‘There’s plenty of us single mums about out there, Ross,’ I said. ‘I’m not doing anything that they aren’t.’
Behind us, Tilly was writhing in her seat. I could half-see her out of the corner of my eye, but Ross was giving me such a look of heart-scorching intensity that I couldn’t give her my full attention.
‘You could have thrown yourself on my mercy. I mean, I’ve made it quite clear that I’m… well, I’m attracted to you. I’m solvent, reasonably, I have a place to live and I’m a good, marriageable proposition.’
