I thought about offering to go down to the little corner shop and then saw Isobel’s tin box where I’d left it tucked away in the corner with a sense of relief. ‘I think there might be some in here.’ I levered the lid off.
A box of teabags, a packet of biscuits. All that was left of Isobel and her bird-haunted life in that rotting old house. I took a dozen or so of the loose bags and handed them over, then sat down on the bed again with the tin on my lap, thinking. Where had she gone? Had the wood swallowed her up, her and her flock of corvids, akking, kakking and chinking their cries into the treetops? Surely we would have seen her – and winter would be even harder for her now without Elm Cottage to hide out in. But she’d been so adamant that we shouldn’t try to find her, we owed it to her to leave her alone now. Although maybe she’d started on the path of cognitive decline; her assertion that that bag of black diamonds would help me level the playing field with David might just be a symptom of that. She must have known that they weren’t worth enough to do more than help me out for a short while. They weren’t even enough to prevent me from getting benefits, should I choose to do so. Just a nice little parting gift, something for Tilly to keep, although I doubted she’d remember much of these first two years of her life. I could onlyhopeshe wouldn’t remember anyway, while I worked on how to phrase the fact that I’d taken her on the road and lived with her in a car until we’d rocked up here.
Why did life have to be socomplicated? Why couldn’t I just have had Tilly, separated from David in the classy ‘conscious uncoupling’ way that we’d planned, and found a neat little flat somewhere out in Zone 4 so we could jointly parent our daughter? I could have gone back to my old job in the box office. A mental image of how life could have been played its montage of neat dresses on crowded Tube trains, weekends of splash parks and tea parties, quiet Sundays when Tils was at her father’s, and I tried to avoid letting myself dwell on it, or how the losing of it all was my fault.
Itwasn’tmy fault and I just had to persuade myself to realise that. A mental health crisis was nobody’s fault and this was my life now. I stared out of the window at the wintering grey sky and thought about Ross. If none of it had happened, I wouldn’t have met him, and the feeling that we could have never found one another chilled me almost as much as that view of alps of cloud and a windswept car park. Memories of his diffident ridiculousness made me smile suddenly and my mood lifted. Ross and me. We could do this.
The tin box bounced on my knee and I decided that Tia was right, a cup of tea was what was needed right now. Tea and maybe, while Tilly wasn’t here to ask me ‘What you eat, Mummy?’ causing me to gulp down entire biscuits in one go to avoid her tantrum when she wasn’t allowed to have the remainder of the packet, perhaps a few of the chocolate Hobnobs as well. David was bringing Tilly back at teatime and I might as well get used to the feeling of not having her presence tugging on my mind like a sea anchor. Ineededto get used to it, however strange and alien that feeling might be, because if David reallydidrelocate to York and share care of Tilly as he wanted to, then I’d be able to get a job, a proper one, not being paid by Ross in any capacity.
I dug into the tin, lifting out the box of teabags and the biscuits, then stopped. Stared. And called Ross.
27
We met in the car park, him not being allowed into the hostel and me not being able to stay sitting down.
‘I hope you weren’t in the middle of some vital action,’ I said, jittering from foot to foot under the solitary tree, which dripped unfelt moisture down my neck.
‘We’re demolishing a building not performing open heart surgery,’ he said, watching me with his head on one side. ‘What’s the matter? You sounded… odd. And you said it was an emergency, but all your limbs appear to be attached.’
‘I don’t know. I think… I mean, I’m not sure,’ I rambled, clutching the rattling tin box to my chest. I hadn’t even put a coat on because I was so wound up, and the cold wind was finding all the nooks and crannies in my clothing. ‘I think… I think… that I should have listened more closely to Isobel.’
‘Come and sit in my car before hypothermia sets in.’ He opened the passenger door. ‘And explain. Please explain, because if I’m meant to be filling in the gaps myself then I have to admit to doing an inadequate job. And why have you got Isobel’s tin? There’s a café just down the road, you didn’t need to bring your own tea and biscuits.’
In answer I lifted the lid of the tin and shook it lightly, as though calling a cat in for its tea. ‘Look. I wondered why it rattled, when there’s only a packet of teabags, a box of sugar lumps and a few odd biscuits in there. We didn’t lookunderthe teabags.’ I lifted the packet.
He looked. Then he stared. Then he reached into the tin and pulled out one of the glittering objects. ‘Good Lord. Are these…?’
I nodded, still fidgeting around. I just couldn’t keep still. ‘Diamonds. Yes. I think so anyway, I mean, what else could they be?’
‘Glass?’ Ross held up the stone to the light. It was quite large and prismed the feeble rays of the winter sun around inside the car.
‘Isobel’s father was a mining engineer,’ I said, trying to keep my voice level. ‘Why would she have glass beads?’ I didn’t mention Isobel’s confession about her father buying her silence. That wasn’t Ross’s business.
‘Not a very ethical business.’ Ross was staring into the heart of the stone. ‘Slavery, people dying, all that.’
‘I don’t think he was a very nice man.’ I paraphrased my feelings about Isobel’s father. ‘But I’m fairly sure he’ll be dead now.’
‘So these are… Should we find her? Maybe she didn’t know…’
‘Ross.’ I grabbed his wrist and he lowered the diamond. ‘She knew.’ I reached into my pocket and pulled out Isobel’s letter to me. ‘Look.’ I pointed to the relevant paragraph.
I am leaving my diamonds behind. Well, not quite all, I have my favourite that I shall keep to remind me of those times which were – contrary to your imaginings – not all bad. The rest I leave for you and the child.
‘“The rest I leave for you and the child”,’ I breathed. ‘I thought she was just talking about the crow diamonds. I didn’t know she had any others, because we only saw the black ones.’ I took another diamond from the battered old tin. ‘There’s a fortune in here.’
Ross turned his head slowly. ‘That’s what she meant by using them to level the field between you and David,’ he said, and his voice sounded a bit thick, as though his tongue got in the way of the words. His finger went to his mouth and I watched him bite at a corner of nail.
‘Yes.’ I was a bit puzzled by his reaction. ‘If I sell these then I can buy a house somewhere and he won’t be able to hold living conditions over me.’ Those middle-of-the-night worryings that David would be able to offer Tilly everything I couldn’t came back to me. My fears that, in a few years, Tilly might choose to go and live with her father for the riding lessons and the carefree weekends on beaches in Devon, rather than with her careworn mother who had to work odd hours and where holidays were a caravan at Bridlington.
‘So.’ Ross kept his head averted. I waited for the rest of the sentence, but it never came.
‘Ross?’ I touched his cheek. It felt daring; our touches were still restricted to the odd hug, a hand touch. We hadn’t even kissed again since that random moment in the disintegrating house.
When he turned to me, his eyes were huge and clouded. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, sounding slightly more normal. ‘I know how this bit goes.’
I suddenly saw. ‘No, you don’t.’
A sideways twitch of his head made his hair cover part of his face. ‘Your life is on the up now. You can sell the diamonds and then the world is your oyster. I’ve seen it a lot, bad life and then recovery.’
