‘No, no, of course not,’ Ross hastily appended. ‘Sorry. I’m not getting to grips with the toddler thing all that well, am I? I could come over to you, perhaps? No wine but a quiet evening talking?’
‘I’m not allowed guests in the hostel.’ I tried not to sound as though I was putting obstacles in the way of having any kind of relationship with Ross. Iwanteda relationship with Ross, I realised. Very, very much. ‘There are vulnerable people there.’
Tilly and I had been two of them. But now? I had a slight shiver down my spine when I realised that I was in the hostel under slightly false pretences. I wasn’t escaping a relationship with a coercively controlling man as I had told everyone; did I even deserve to be there? I was occupying a room that ought to be taken by someone genuinely in fear of their, and their children’s, lives. ‘I need to move out of the hostel,’ I said abruptly. ‘Are you still going to pay me that five thousand pounds?’
Ross held the door of the shed open for me in a gentlemanly way as we exited into the storm. ‘I suppose you did get Isobel out of Elm Cottage,’ he said slowly. ‘So, yes.’
‘Right. I can make plans.’ The wind caught at Isobel’s letter, which I still had in my hand, and tried to throw it into the air. I folded it and slid it into her metal box, which I’d tucked under my arm. I wanted to keep that note and reread it later and try to believe what she’d told me about my not being at fault. And also just in case anyone questioned where I’d got the bag of black diamonds from. I didn’t exactly look like an international jewel thief, but you never knew.
No, I thought, following Ross back along the mud-flecked path through the trees. You never knew. When I’d first met him I’d thought of him as a nervous wreck of a man with his chewed lips and nails. Now I knew him to be a kind and gentle creative, which probably explained a lot about the ‘nervous wreck’ part. Good looking, considerate and – when he turned around to give me a flick of that dark, slightly wicked smile – bloody sexy too. We stood as good a chance as any other couple, really.
25
We all ended up at the soft play place. My mum and David, Ross, Tilly and I all squeezed around a little table, and ate vastly overpriced chips, for which David paid. I think he was enjoying being the man of largesse and I wondered how Isobel could have thought that those black diamonds could ever level the field between us. At a few thousand pounds each, there was approximately thirty thousand pounds worth in that little bag, an amount of money not to be sneezed at but not sufficient to put me on a par with David’s family wealth, London townhouse and evident desire to spoil his daughter rotten. Besides, I wanted Tilly to have most of them. I could persuade myself to sell a few in the interests of having a roof over our heads, but no more than that. The field might be a little less of a precipitous slope, but nowhere near level.
‘She knew who I was,’ David said proudly, watching Mum and Tilly, who were negotiating the ball pit. ‘Did you see?’
I wanted to say that of course she did, I’d been telling her that she was going to see her daddy. She had yelled, ‘Daddy!’ to the guy behind the admission table, Ross and two random men before we’d got inside and she’d shouted it at David. But I wasn’t here to ruin his day, and hehadbought us all chips.
‘We said we’d take it slowly, remember?’
‘Yes, yes, you’re right, of course.’ David ate a hot chip and carried on staring at Tilly. ‘She’s a beautiful little girl,’ he said almost wistfully, then, turning to me, ‘Are you sure you’re fully recovered now? You know that I never ever meant to harm you and you’d trust me with Tilly?’
I thought about the decor of his lovely house. Neither David nor I had had much exposure to small children before we had Tilly, and I was fairly certain that quite a few of those expensively decorated rooms weren’t suitable for the force of nature that was our daughter. ‘If we take it slowly,’ I said again.
‘I might move to York.’ David surprised me then. ‘There’s no reason for me to stay in London and then I can… if you’ll let me. I want to be a part of Tilly’s life, Libby. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be, is there?’
‘But you’re anactor,’ I said, as though implying that life outside the capital wasn’t available to anyone who didn’t wear clogs, own a whippet and have forty past generations of their family who’d done something with looms. He shrugged.
‘I can work from here. I’m mainly doing voice-over stuff now anyway. And…’ His gaze travelled back to where Tilly was rather overexcitedly throwing Brass down a small slide. ‘I want to be there for her. For the normal stuff, choosing a school, watching her ballet recitals, parents’ evenings, all that.’
I knew it would be good for Tilly. Iknewit. I just couldn’t quite get my head around it yet.
A few moments later, I heard ‘Wee!’, saw the dreaded groin-clutch and flew into the ball pit to whip Tilly up and out and hustle her in the direction of the primary-coloured toddler toilets conveniently located just behind the ball pit. My mum came too.
‘Libby,’ she said softly, her tone being incongruous when paired with the yellow plastic bear that Tilly was currently sitting on and singing something fromFrozen. Weeing, in Tilly’s case, was not something to be hurried, particularly when you could be keeping your mother from her social life.
‘Yes?’ My reply was a bit stiff, a little wooden.
‘Nobody blames you, you know that.’ Mum’s voice creaked. It sounded as though she had too much emotion: that everything wanted to come out at once but she was afraid of my reaction. It gave me a jolt to realise that my own mother was afraid. She was mymother! Motherhood conferred a kind of superhumanity in which you might be inwardly terrified while giving the impression that you had never had so much as a goose pimple of fear in your life. God knows, I’d had to use that illusion often enough on Tilly.
‘I know, Mum.’ I concentrated on the plastic bear-shaped toilet. The cubicle smelled mostly of toddler impatience and damp trousers.
‘And I am so, so sorry that you had to go through what I did. You must have been so frightened.’
In the face of my own mother’s vulnerability, my facade of all-powerful maternity cracked and I gave a little sob. ‘I was,’ I whispered, realising suddenly how true it was. ‘I wasterrified.’
The toilet cubicle wasn’t very wide, so Mum barely had to stretch out her hand to stroke my hair. ‘I know,’ she said and I realised that I had only suffered a fraction of the awfulness that she had been through. ‘My baby,’ she whispered. ‘You will always bemybaby.’
‘Mum…’ I let go of Tilly’s shoulder, where I’d been holding her against any sudden desires to leap up to check the toilet or rip her clothes off, and suddenly I was in my mother’s arms. She smelled so familiar, the hug was the same hug I remembered from childhood injuries, teenage disappointments. The same hug she’d given me at the airport when she and Dad had taken off for their new venture in Australia and I had thought I hadn’t minded.
I sobbed into the hug like Tilly deprived of a treat. Even Tilly went quiet, as though impressed by the volume of tears, while Mum stroked my hair and murmured gently to me about her and Dad coming back to Britain now he was retiring, of wanting to spend time with their granddaughter. They’d still travel, I had no need to worry that they would be bored or were coming because they felt theyhadto, to keep an eye on me bringing up my daughter. But she’d missed me. She loved me.
And I was five again.
Eventually, a small voice said, ‘Mummy? I weed,’ almost tentatively and I snapped back from childhood so fast that I almost hit my head on the cub-shaped cistern.
‘Good girl,’ I replied, almost automatically.
