‘I meant literallyhere. In this wood.’ He sounded amused. ‘With the cottage falling down and there are trees doing things that I’m not sure nature ever really intended them to do. And I want you to come and reassure me that it’s all right and the whole place isn’t something out of some horror movie full of zombies and possessed earth or something. You’re a very reassuring person to have around, Libby.’
Reassuring? Me?But he knew about the psychosis, about how I hadn’t even known my own mind, how could he possibly think I was reassuring? I didn’t even trustmyselfnow.
‘I’ve got Tilly,’ I said, with my voice coming out a little bit weak. ‘I can’t bring her if it’s dangerous.’
‘No. No, I can see that. Actually, I don’t know what I’m doing even askingyouto turn out. There are trees coming down left, right and centre out here and it’s… well, it might not be safe.’
‘Butyou’rethere,’ I pointed out.
‘I’m an architect. Whoever heard of an architect being killed in a dreadful storm-related incident? We’ve got whatever the opposite of main character syndrome is – we’re practically invincible.’
There was a bit of a pause, into which the wind inserted itself. ‘I’ll come,’ I said finally, when the thought of letting Ross fret alone into the storm made me feel sad. He’d stayed with me when I’d heard the worst about myself, surely the least I could do was to help him search for Isobel. ‘I just need to deal with Tilly.’
‘Could you… would you let your mum have her? Or her dad? Just for the time it would take us to check out the woods in case Isobel is hiding somewhere?’ Ross took a deep breath. ‘I mean, I’d call in the building team to help, but you know Isobel doesn’t like men and she’d just hide even more if I tried that. So I really think it has to be us. She’s far more likely to crawl out of the wreckage to talk to you, even if she’s hiding from me.’
It hit me again like a bullet. My mum and David were no longer the enemy. They never had been the enemy, that had all been me. But could I leave Tilly with them, two people she didn’t really know?
The reasonwhyshe didn’t know them was a guilty weight in the back of my head.
‘I’ll ask Tia, next door,’ I said. I wasn’t up to Mum’s delight at being asked to babysit at five thirty in the morning, or David’s slight condemnation of my life as being so random that I might need him. It wasn’t fair to Tilly to leave her with anyone she didn’t know, and that curling edge of doubt that still lingered even though the cold terror had gone told me that I wasn’t quite there yet. ‘Give me half an hour.’
I was already struggling out of the bed, phone held under my chin. I could hear the bangs and thumps against the wall to the next door flat that told me that Tia had already started her day, probably amid some teenage sulks and Kiara’s demands for breakfast.
Guilt still hung over me like a huge dark cloud as I drove away, leaving Tilly dipping Brass in the bowl of cornflakes that I’d let her take next door. Part of me said that I shouldn’t have done it, shouldn’t have left my daughter with Tia and her kids when there was a perfectly serviceable grandmother and a – well, maybe not quite so serviceable but certainly willing – father hovering about. Both of them were staying in York, both were keen to see Tilly and me again. Or, more precisely, my mother was keen. For David I came as a kind of fixture and fitting: if he wanted Tilly he got me in a ‘buy one child, get one grumpy and irritable mother free’ way. But I wasn’t ready yet to let her go to either of them without me. I didn’t know that I wouldeverbe ready for that, although I recognised how ridiculous that was. A tiny part of my brain held on to the feeling of impending doom, nursing it like a nugget of resentment.
The car twitched sideways sharply as though it had seen something scary on the other side of the road but it was just the force of the wind pulling at it. The wind was almost solid out here, the strength of it bending all plant life into complicated pretzels and shaking and shifting everything else. A few loose pieces of paper randomly rose and fell in front of me like hyperactive ghosts, soaked leaves lost the adherence of water and plastered themselves to every surface. Once out of town and away from the mitigating presence of high buildings, the wind tore along the roads and fields unstoppered. I turned the radio up so as not to have to listen to it, but the news was full of trees down and roads blocked, which didn’t help.
There were fallen trees edging the road I had to take to the woods. Some had come down so close that I had to squeeze the car through scraping branch tips and in one place a huge trunk had come right over the road and was propped up by the surrounding hedges. I held my breath and drove underneath with the car twitching like a nervous horse as it caught the body of water flowing sideways across the road – a stream had gone over its banks and was busily filling every available hollow.
At least Tilly was safe, I thought, seeing her empty car seat behind me. The thought that I might now have to share her with David was one that I was keeping well pushed down. There were practicalities we hadn’t even raised yet – he lived and worked where acting jobs were easier to come by and I couldn’t envisage Tilly travelling all that way, not even for a weekend. Not yet.Not yet. She’s only two, for God’s sake. She doesn’t even know her father. But he has every right to see her…Plus the money and background to make it happen.
I wrenched the steering wheel and clipped the verge, throwing gobbets of mud and soaked grass away from the headlights and into the dark. Life had been so simple! I’d been making it work! Why did all this have to happen now? David appearing and giving me all the grief and doubt that I’d managed to escape was not the therapeutic ‘finding my family’ experience that he’d clearly thought it ought to be, so, why now?
The woods were dark and dripping, the trees weeping into the leaf layers beneath my wheels. I pulled the car over in the usual lay-by; presumably Ross had parked back in the woods at the site office because there was no sign of him or his car here.
I got out onto the squelchy grass at the roadside. ‘Ross?’ I bellowed into the storm and he materialised out of the darkness, rumpled and worried but somehow wearing a dependability that made me smile. ‘What is it? Why am I here at this godforsaken hour? I’ve left Tilly annoying Tia so I can’t take long.’
‘Not with your mum?’ He tucked his hands into his pockets and I suspected he’d been chewing at his nails until I arrived.
‘No.’ I looked down at the soggy ground. ‘Not yet,’ I muttered.
There was a small silence into which the wind howled. ‘Oh, right. I suppose she doesn’t know them yet.’
‘Exactly.’ Another pause. ‘And Isobel definitely isn’t around here?’ I carried on, trying to deflect him from questions that I didn’t really have the answers to yet.
‘I don’t know, it’s hard to tell. Come and look at the house. You’ll see.’ Ross stretched out an arm, pulling his hand out of his pocket. The hand wavered around as though it wanted to take hold of mine but wasn’t sure where it was or what the reception would be.
His diffidence was suddenly appealing. I had become so used to Tilly grabbing at any part of my anatomy that she could reach that I had forgotten how it felt to be ‘beyond touch’; that feeling that I belonged to myself and had the final say on whether I was touched or not. I stretched out my own hand and took his. ‘Let’s go.’
Ross curled his fingers among mine and I felt suddenly stronger. It wasn’t just his presence, it was the implicit future he was promising. All right, we might not be able to have anything together but we could at leasttry. If we never tried, we certainly wouldn’t have anything, so, with my heart shoutingwhat the hellinto the wind, we advanced through the undergrowth on Elm Cottage.
Ross had been right, it did look as though it were dissolving. The previously fallen section was still there propping up part of the roof but another part of the outer wall had sunk inwards and was being kept up only by the angle of the other walls. The whole building looked like a drunk horse.
‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘And you’re sure Isobel isn’t in there?’ She’d be safe, I was sure, as nothing had actuallyfallen. Unless she’d had a heart attack, there was nothing that could have caused her any damage.
‘I looked in through the window and I couldn’t see her. She should be fine, shouldn’t she? It’s just a bit wet.’ His whole tone told me that he was secretly scared and trying not to show it.
As Ross finished speaking another gust made the trees around us flail wildly as though denying that it was ‘just a bit wet’ and emphasising the sheer destructive power of wind and water when combined. I felt the tightening of his hand around mine and thought,He’s not sure whether he believes that.After David’s permanent 100 per cent certainty about everything, Ross’s indecision was rather pleasant.
