she’d been close to her parents, but with the divorce something had changed. Maybe it was embarrassment, shame, a deep sense that she’d let them down somehow, but she’d found herself making excuses not to visit them in Spain, and slowly, over the months, their contact had dwindled to a phone call a week – sometimes Millie would answer and speak to them and Sally wouldn’t even know about it until later. As for Zoe… well, Zoe was never going to come into the equation. She was something high up in the police now, and wouldn’t want anything to do with Sally – the spoiled, idiot doll, propped up in the corner with her vacant grin, always looking in the wrong direction and missing what was important in life.
Missing things like Melissa, happening right under her nose.
Big, tanned, leggy Melissa, with her fat frizz of blonde hair, her tennis player’s shoulders and loud Australian accent. She’d crept into their lives through those fatal gaps in Sally’s attention and, before anyone could draw breath, she was the next Mrs Julian Cassidy, starting a whole new chapter of Cassidys. According to Millie, the baby, Adelayde, had taken over the house at Sion Road with her playpens and bouncy chairs in every doorway. Melissa had dug up the lawn and replaced it with gravel-filled beds, huge desert plants and walkways for Adelayde. Sally didn’t mind, though. She had decided there was only one way to approach the divorce – amiably. To accept it and welcome it as a new start. She didn’t miss Sion Road. The house seemed, in her memory, to be murky and distant, always cloaked in cloud or orange electric light. And anyway, she told herself, Peppercorn Cottage was beautiful, with its views and clear, natural light that just fell out of the sky and landed flat on the house and garden.
Peppercorn was hers. The terms of the divorce were that Julian would pay Millie’s school fees until she was eighteen and buy the cottage for her and Sally to live in. The solicitor said Sally could have got more, but she didn’t like the thought of clawing for things. It just seemed wrong. Julian had set up a special kind of mortgage on Peppercorn. Called an offset, he explained, it meant she could borrow against the house should she need to. Sally didn’t understand the nuts and bolts of it, but she did grasp that Peppercorn was acting as a kind of a cushion for her. She and Millie had moved out of Sion Road one November weekend, carrying their suitcases and boxes of art equipment through drifts of fallen leaves and into Peppercorn. They’d turned the heating up high and bought boxes of pastries from the deli on George Street for the removals men. Sally hadn’t given a thought to the overdraft she kept dipping into. Not until the following year, when the warning letters from the bank began to fall on the doormat.
‘What on earth have you spent it all on? Just because the overdraft is there it doesn’t mean you’ve got to use it. They’ll take Peppercorn away from you if you’re not careful.’
That winter, Julian had met her in a coffee shop on George Street. It was sleeting outside and the floor in the cafe was soaking from all the people who’d come off the street and dropped snow on it. Julian and Sally had sat at the back of the shop so Melissa couldn’t walk by and catch sight of them.
‘I don’t know anyone who could go through that much money in a year. Honestly, Sally, what have you been doing?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said lamely, completely at a loss. ‘Truly I don’t.’
‘Well, I bet it hasn’t gone on maintaining the house. That thatch’ll need redoing before next winter. Buying things for people, I suppose. You’re like a child when it comes to giving presents.’
Sally put her fingers on her temples and concentrated on not crying. It was probably true. She didn’t like to turn up at someone’s house without something for them. Probably it came from when she was a little girl. From the time she’d do anything to make Zoe smile. Anything at all. She’d save up her pocket money and, instead of spending it on herself, she’d wait until she overheard Zoe talking about something she wanted in one of Bath’s shops, then sneak out and buy it. Zoe never seemed to know what to do with the gift. She’d stand with it in her hand and look at it awkwardly, as if she suspected it might explode in her face. As if she didn’t quite know what expression to arrange her features into. Sally wished she could talk to her sister now. She wished there wasn’t this awful cold distance between them.
‘I’ve never had to think about money,’ she told Julian now. ‘You always took care of it. It’s not a very good excuse, I know. And you’re right – the thatch has got a hole in it. Something about course fixings. There are squirrels and rats in it, looking for food. Someone’s told me it’s going to be ten thousand to fix.’
Julian sighed. ‘I can’t keep propping you up, Sally. I’m under a lot of pressure at work and things are very fraught at home with the baby not far away. Melissa’s finding it hard not to get tense about money. She wouldn’t be happy at all to hear I was helping you still.’ He screwed up his napkin and felt in his pocket for his wallet. It was a new leather affair with his initials embossed in gold. From it he flipped out a cheque book. ‘Two thousand pounds.’ He began scribbling. ‘After that my hands are tied. You’ll have to find other ways of supporting yourself.’
If a change in life could be marked with a point in time, the way a signpost marks a fork in the road, or an island divides a river, Sally looked back at her life and saw two markers: the first, when, during a childhood squabble with Zoe, Sally had fallen off a bed on her hand, an event their parents had treated with unexpected seriousness, behaving suddenly as if an unspeakable darkness had descended on the family, and, the second, that day with Julian – the day when she had, at last, grown up. Sitting hunched over her cup of hot chocolate, her feet wet and cold, her propped-up umbrella leaking a pitiful puddle on the floor, she saw the world in its plainest colours. Saw it was serious. It was real. The divorce was real and the overdraft was real. There really existed things like bankruptcy and repossessed houses and children living on sink estates. They didn’t happen Out There. They happened In Here. In her life.
The six months that had followed were some of the hardest of her life. She got herself a job, she traded in her car for a smaller Ford Ka, she learned how to work out interest rates and how to write letters to banks. She heated only the kitchen and Millie’s bedroom all winter, and never used the tumble-drier. There always seemed to be bird dirt on at least one of Millie’s school shirts when it came in from the line – that, or when it was really cold, frost making the clothes as stiff as boards. But she persevered. It was an uphill struggle and even now it was like running to keep still. She didn’t turn to her parents for help – they’d have been devastated to know the state she was in and, besides, it would get back to Zoe eventually. Zoe would never have got herself into a predicament like this. Zoe had always been the clever one. Amazing. She’d never have ended up accepting jobs from people like David Goldrab. She’d judo-kick him over the nearest hedge before she did that.
Still, it had to be done, she thought, as she got up the morning after Lorne had been found, and padded barefoot into the kitchen to make breakfast. There weren’t any choices in this new world of hers. She switched on the kettle, set a pan of milk on the hob, arranged cups and plates on the table. Steve was still asleep so she didn’t put the radio on. Anyway, it would all be about Lorne Wood and she didn’t know if she could face listening to any more of that. She put some croissants into the oven. The tarot cards were still sitting in an untidy pile on the table where she’d dumped them last night. Now she paused and studied the one of Millie. It wasn’t that the paint was fading, she saw. It was that something corrosive had blistered the surface, worming and chewing at Millie’s face. Feeling suddenly cold, she raised her eyes and looked out of the window at the fields that strained limitlessly to the bottom of the sky. The canal where Lorne had died was miles away. Miles and miles and miles.
She turned the card face down and went to switch on the kettle. Millie was safe. She was fifteen. She knew how to look after herself. And, anyway, sooner or later you had to learn to take a step back.
10
On the other side of town, in her living room, Zoe stood with a cup of coffee in her hand and studied the photos on her wall. Most of them came from the trip she’d taken eighteen years ago. Just her and the bike. She’d been everywhere. Mongolia, Australia, China, Egypt, South America. Getting the money together for the adventure had been one of the toughest things she’d ever done – it had just about ripped the skin from her back. Had taken her places, made her do things she never wanted to think about again. But the trip itself turned out to be the most important time in her life. It had taught her all she knew about self-sufficiency, survival, determination. It had sprung her from the trap she’d lived in since childhood.
Lorne Wood would never have the chance to learn any of those things, she thought now, as the sun powered into her kitchen through the bay windows. That was a whole chapter of Lorne’s life that would never be
