Candles flickered and spilled red wax down the necks of wine bottles, their flames casting shadows of the women against the lime green walls. Margo told them how she’d started the commune ‘as a place of shelter, somewhere we can live without violence or fear or censure. Everyone is equal here. We all contribute, we pool our resources, our time and our skills …’ She had a slow, sonorous way of talking that was almost hypnotic. Somebody put some music on, a female voice rising and falling along with a flute and a guitar. Vivienne, sleepy now, leaned her head against her mother’s shoulder as she listened to Margo talk.
One by one, the women had told their stories that night, describing how they’d come to find each other, how Margo and Unity House had changed their lives. Viv must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew she was being carried up to bed, a blanket pulled over her, her ears full of the music and the rise and fall of the women’s voices.
They would stay at Unity House for almost a decade, and during that time the strong, clever, loving women who lived there would each, in their own way, help to shape the person Vivienne would become. But, just as that first night it was Margo who’d made the greatest impression upon eight-year-old Viv, it would also prove to be Margo who taught her the most valuable lesson of all – that people aren’t necessarily always who they seem.
When Viv wakes the next morning to the sound of Cleo showering down the hall, she lies in bed staring at the ceiling for a while, thinking about Ruby and the black hole of memories she’d fallen into the night before. The little white Essex cottage, their sudden escape to London, the decade spent at Unity House. She looks at her alarm clock and, remembering it’s Saturday and that Cleo has a football match she needs driving to, groans and pulls herself from the bed. She drank too much again last night. After Cleo had gone to bed she had thought about Monday’s anniversary and one glass of wine had turned into another and then another, as they so often do. Wrapping a dressing gown around herself, she stumbles downstairs to the kitchen where she finds the empty wine bottle and shoves it guiltily in the recycling box with the others.
As she makes herself coffee she gives herself a mental shake. Ruby’s death was so long ago; they had survived it, both she and Stella. Jack Delaney had been found guilty and sent to prison, and that was that. It was all in the past.
She’d been in her thirties when he’d finally been released, thanks to an extra eight years added to his sentence for an attack on a fellow prisoner so vicious it had left his victim in a coma, permanently blinded in one eye. On Jack’s release, Viv had avoided all news stories about him, even taking Cleo, ten by then, on holiday to France in case the papers decided to print his picture. She had only vague memories of what he looked like: dark hair, a thin, cruel mouth and heavy brow, but nothing substantial; his image had been banished to the part of her brain where her darkest terrors lived and the shadowy figure who stalked her nightmares was frightening enough without furnishing it with the details a photograph would provide. Her mother later heard he’d emigrated to Canada, and though that should have given Viv comfort, it hadn’t, not really: as long as he was alive she would fear him.
She carries her coffee across to the table and sits down. A pale morning sun casts its glow across the parquet flooring and the kitchen has a gratifyingly warm and cosy feel. This morning, she thinks with satisfaction, her house looks exactly like the tasteful, comfortable, middle-class home she’d spent the past fifteen years and an awful lot of money trying to create. In fact, every room of her pretty Georgian townhouse is a testament to the hours spent lovingly restoring each period detail, or trawling auctions and eBay for the perfect antique lampshade or table or chair. A million miles from the little white cottage, the large and chaotic commune – the sort of home where nothing bad ever happened and never would. A perfectly nice, perfectly safe place in which to raise her daughter.
She hears Cleo come clattering down the stairs seconds before she bursts into the room, stuffing her football kit into her bag. Her curls still wet from the shower, she takes one look at her mother and wails, ‘Oh Mum! You’re not even dressed! You’re supposed to be taking me to footie!’
Guiltily Viv jumps to her feet. ‘OK, OK! I’ll be ready in two minutes. Jeez, relax!’ She gulps her coffee and hurries from the room.
Five minutes later as they are leaving the house, Cleo impatiently rushing ahead, Viv spies their new neighbour, Neil, cutting his hedge. Not having the heart to ignore his eager smile, she gives him a wave, ‘Hello there!’ He’s a slightly chubby man who looks to be in his late forties with badly dyed brown hair and a rather grating laugh, but he’s harmless enough; a welcome antidote at least to the self-satisfied hipsters who’d descended on the area in droves in recent years.
Ignoring Cleo, who’s scowling and rolling her eyes, she says, ‘You’re up and at ’em early, Neil. How’s it all going with the renovations?’
‘Oh, slowly, slowly, you know how it is.’
‘You’ve done wonders with the place.’ She glances up at the sash windows he’s recently installed. It is, in fact, quite astonishing what he’s managed to do in such short a time. Before he’d moved in, the property had belonged to a sweet elderly Cypriot woman who, due to ill health, had allowed the house to fall to rack and ruin over the fifty years she’d lived there. By the time she’d died it had been almost derelict. Shortly after the funeral her daughter had put it on the market for a price Viv had thought extortionate, considering the work that needed doing to it, and it had languished on the market for over eighteen months before suddenly it had sold, to the entire street’s surprise, for the full asking price. A few months later, Neil had moved in.
He’s looking at her hopefully. ‘You and Cleo will have to come round for a cup of tea sometime. I can show you what I’ve done inside.’
‘We’d love to,’ she says, beginning to edge away. ‘That’d be great.’ She smiles apologetically, ‘I’m afraid we’ve got to run now, footie practice, but let’s definitely do that soon, thank you.’
She feels him watching her as they get into the car. Oh, God, does he fancy her? She doesn’t really get that vibe, though she’s not quite sure what vibe she does get, exactly. Perhaps he’s just a bit lonely: she never sees any friends dropping by, no one who looks like family for that matter either. She finds herself hoping very much that he doesn’t fancy her; there’s something about his high-pitched giggle, his eager-puppy eyes that creeps her out a little. Immediately she feels a twinge of self-reproof: You’re not exactly beating them off with a stick yourself, Viv. And then she thinks of Shaun and cringes.
There’s a short warm-up before the match starts so Viv decides to wait in the car. The icy rain that had begun to fall on the journey over there begins to pick up pace and she turns up the heater, savouring these last moments of warmth and dryness before she’s forced out into the freezing cold to watch her rosy-cheeked daughter run around the sodden sports field, happy as a pig in mud. Cleo certainly hadn’t inherited her love of sport from her.
She changes the CD she’d been listening to and idly thinks about what to cook for Samar and Ted later when they come over for lunch – something she’d organized to distract herself from the looming anniversary of Ruby’s death. Before long her thoughts turn to the café and the refurb she’s planning, and she feels a pleasurable tug of excitement.
She sometimes has to pinch herself when she considers how well her life has turned out. A beautiful daughter, her own house and business. For a terrifying time, it had seemed likely that she might not make it through her twenties alive – in fact, if it hadn’t been for Stella and Samar, she doubts she would have done.
In 1991, when she was fourteen, she had received completely out of the blue, a letter telling her that both her maternal grandparents had died and left all their money to her. An astonishing sum of £500,000, to be held in trust until her eighteenth birthday.