Instead she’d laughed, ‘Oh do me a favour,’ and he’d grinned back at her, the air altering between them, both of them knowing now what the score was. She’d poured herself another drink, enjoying the back and forth of flirtation, telling herself it would only go so far: she would finish her wine then go upstairs to bed, alone. But, of course, it didn’t happen quite like that.
And when she’d woken up the next morning in his bed she’d been full of self-loathing and regret. Sleeping with Stella’s guests was about as stupid as it got, and her mother would be furious if she found out. She’d slipped from the bed, silently scooping up her clothes and escaping to Stella’s room – where she was supposed to have slept that night. Knowing that her mum was due back later that afternoon, she’d fled for home as soon as she could, before Shaun even had time to surface.
She’d managed to avoid him for a while after that and life had gone on, though she’d shuddered whenever she thought of him. She’d only just begun to forgive herself, to hope she’d got away with it when, unexpectedly, he’d called her.
She’d answered her mobile as she was rushing to fetch Cleo from a party.
‘All right, Viv. How’s tricks?’
‘How did you get my number?’ she asked, before remembering with a sinking heart that it was pinned to the corkboard in her mother’s kitchen, the ‘in case of emergencies’ contact for when Stella was out.
‘Well, that’s not very friendly, is it?’
‘Sorry. I …’
‘Wanted to know if you fancied a drink.’
‘Um, I’m not sure that’s a good idea,’ she’d replied slowly.
‘Oh, right, like that is it?’ His voice was instantly hard, the fragile ego she’d sensed lurking there revealed in a heartbeat.
‘No, of course not,’ she’d said hastily. ‘I’m just not … I’m sorry, but I don’t want to get into anything, we probably shouldn’t have …’
He’d given a belligerent laugh. ‘Think you’re too good for me, is that it? Should have been grateful, saggy old bitch.’ His sudden aggression had stunned her. He’d cut her off, leaving her to stare down at her phone, her heart pumping with shock and anger.
That had been two weeks ago. She’d not seen him since, had managed to avoid coming to her mother’s house until today. But as she and Cleo finally get to the door, Shaun appears at the top of the stairs. He stops, looking her up and down insultingly, and she feels a flash of cold dislike.
‘Going so soon?’ he says, sauntering down towards her.
She puts her hand on Cleo’s shoulder and steers her towards the door. ‘Yep, gotta run. Bye.’ She and Cleo go out into the night, and she closes the door firmly behind her, a shiver of disgust prickling her skin.
Their house is a twenty-minute walk from Stella’s, on the other side of the Rye, and Vivienne pushes Shaun from her thoughts as she links her arm through her daughter’s. ‘How was school today, love?’ she asks.
For a while they chat about a history project Cleo’s been working on and how she thinks her team will do in an upcoming football match, and Viv smiles down at her, her happy, popular child, always tumbling from one enthusiasm to the next. She’d been twenty-six when she’d become pregnant, a result of a brief and unhappy fling with one of the suppliers for her café, a handsome but feckless Irishman named Mike who was a few years younger than herself. He’d run a mile at the news of her pregnancy and had kept only sporadic contact with his daughter since. It had always been the two of them after that, and as a result they’d always been close – as close as Viv was to her own mother, in fact.
As they draw nearer to their street Vivienne shivers in the cold November night and murmurs, ‘Thank God it’s Friday. I can’t wait to get home. We’ll have spaghetti for tea, shall we?’
They pass beneath a street lamp just as Cleo looks up at her and smiles, and there is, again, something in the angle of her face, in the expression in her eyes, that takes Viv’s breath away. Her daughter looks in that split-second so exactly like Ruby that her sister is brought back to life with sudden, shocking force.
It’s a new thing, Cleo’s random expressions triggering this heart-jolting reaction in her. Out of the blue a memory will turn up, glinting and sharp, to stop Viv in her tracks. Tonight she’s transported back to the little house in Essex where she and Ruby spent their childhood, a white, ramshackle cottage on the edge of a stretch of fields. In this memory Ruby is sixteen and heavily pregnant, dressed in a blue cotton dress and standing by the window that’s crisscrossed with iron latticing, the light falling on her red-gold hair, her hand resting on her swollen belly.
Viv, aged eight, had gone to her sister and pressed her cheek upon her tummy, gazing up at her as she listened intently. And then it happened: as Ruby smiled down at her with the exact same expression that she’ll see mirrored in her own daughter’s face thirty-two years later, Vivienne felt something move beneath her cheek and squealed in excitement. ‘Did you feel that?’ she asked. ‘I felt him! I felt the baby kick!’
And Ruby grinned and said, ‘Yes, I felt it too. Not long to go, Vivi. Two weeks and you’ll be an auntie.’ An auntie at eight years old! How important and grown-up and wonderful that felt. She would love this baby with all her heart; she did already.
But she never got to meet her sister’s child, never had a chance to call him by the name Ruby had so carefully chosen. Noah. Her nephew would have been called Noah. Because almost two weeks later, a few days before her due date, Ruby would be dead, and Noah with her.
Now, walking along the dark street with her own child, a passing motorbike rouses her from her thoughts. Seeing that they’ve nearly reached their gate she swallows back the shards of pain that have risen to her throat. ‘Come on,’ she says to Cleo, opening the door. ‘Go and get changed and I’ll make dinner, then we’ll watch something on Netflix, shall we?’
Alone in the kitchen, she puts the radio on and pours herself a glass of wine. She hates it when this mood descends upon her. It’s the anniversary of Ruby’s death on Monday and it always upsets her, no matter how prepared for it she is. Noah would have turned thirty-two this year, and as she has done every single year since it happened, she imagines the person he might have become – from toddler, to schoolboy, to teenager and young man – a sadness gathering inside her that’s hard to shake off. ‘Come on, Viv, get a grip,’ she tells herself and, tuning the radio to a music station, she turns the volume up, then starts to put together the ingredients for spaghetti bolognese.
There’s so much of that day that she doesn’t remember. She knows that she was the only other person in the house when Ruby was killed. That it was she who found her sister’s body, hugely pregnant, splayed out across her bedroom floor. She knows that it was her evidence that helped put Ruby’s murderer away. But though Viv knows what she said she saw, she cannot link those words to any clear, concrete images, as though the details are locked inside a box she has no access to. She’s been told that this is common; the mind’s way of protecting her from the trauma of that day, but still those buried memories won’t let her be, tapping and scratching at the box’s lid, as though willing her to relent and let them back out.
Even the time before the murder is hazy, her life in that little white cottage only returning to her in flashes. They were very poor, she remembers that. Viv and Ruby, eight years between them, each had different fathers; men who were bad and made their mother sad and who they learned never to ask about because they were gone and that was all. The house was down a narrow lane with four other cottages. She sees the patio tiles outside it, dandelions poking through the cracks, an old, abandoned swing set on the patchy lawn, the fields stretching out beyond.