Chapter 20
Although we had seemed to drive forever on the way out, it only took a minute or so to reach the little lay-by, churned with my repeated parking into a layer cake of ruts and puddles.
Tilly had begun to struggle against her restraining straps. ‘Out! Out!’ she chanted, like a prisoner hearing the jingle of approaching keys.
‘Sit still, Tils,’ I said. ‘Ross, if you take the bird in, we can…’ I was keeping my eyes trained on the untidy hump of masonry through the bushes.
It might have been my imagination but the house seemed to be leaning even more now, resting a shoulder of wall against the fallen beams and bricks as though exhausted. There was no sign of anyone there.
‘Balls!’ Tilly yelled.
Ross looked at me questioningly from over the top of the agitated bird.
‘She means Isobel’s beads – the diamonds. She associates the house with being allowed to play with them,’ I explained, trying not to look at the thrusting beak or the way Ross’s jacket undulated in a sickening motion. ‘Please don’t let go, Ross.’
He gave me a steady look, his hair flopping over his forehead. ‘I don’t intend to ever let go, Libby,’ he said.
We sat in a moment of dual purpose and blinked at one another.
‘Thank you,’ I breathed. I had no idea how any of this was going to work, but there was a feeling about Ross, as though he was somehow both very, very strong and incredibly fragile.
Like those materials that you can put under immense pressure in one direction but will shatter if you hit them sideways.
The urge to hug him was beaten back by the ferocious struggles going on against his chest and the irritable cawing issuing from his sleeve. ‘But I…’
I had no idea how I was going to qualify that, or even what I intended to say.
I meant, perhaps, to point out that I had absolutely nothing going for me, and no idea why Ross would even like me.
Other than that I was the only person who might be able to get Isobel out of the cottage so he could carry on with his building work.
Ross shifted the bird package to his other arm. ‘When I look at you, I see someone incredibly strong,’ he said. ‘You just don’t know it. You’re bringing up your daughter on your own, and just that takes an amount of courage and determination that I can’t even comprehend.’
I had a brief moment of feeling unworthy. ‘There’s plenty of us single mums about out there, Ross,’ I said. ‘I’m not doing anything that they aren’t.’
Behind us, Tilly was writhing in her seat. I could half-see her out of the corner of my eye, but Ross was giving me such a look of heart-scorching intensity that I couldn’t give her my full attention.
‘You could have thrown yourself on my mercy. I mean, I’ve made it quite clear that I’m… well, I’m attracted to you. I’m solvent, reasonably, I have a place to live and I’m a good, marriageable proposition.’
I laughed now, despite everything. ‘You sound direct from Jane Austen.’
‘I just mean… you’re so determined. Strong minded.
I’m a sucker for a helpless woman, but you won’t let me see you that way and it’s…
nice.’ Then he wiggled his eyebrows. ‘You also are very attractive. I hate to say it because it makes me sound like that’s all I’m interested in but I should reassure you that with everything else I’ve got going on I’m not one to have my head turned over a pretty ankle. ’
I laughed again. ‘Thank you. I feel… actually, I’m not quite sure whether I’m flattered or horrified, but it’s always nice to hear that someone thinks you aren’t quite as much of a failure as you think you are. Now, get that bird to Isobel.’ I gave him a nudge and he opened the car door.
‘On my way. What excuse shall I give?’
‘No excuse. I wasn’t watching and I hit the bird. Hopefully she can do something for it?’ I shivered again at the way the bill kept poking from random openings around Ross’s bundled jacket and the whole parcel rotated and shifted with a horrible sinister life.
‘Let’s hope so.’ Ross began to climb out of the car, at which point Tilly showed off a previously unsuspected skill at undoing her own seat harness and clambered between the seats to follow him.
‘Tilly, no!’ But she had squeezed past Ross, who had both hands full with the struggling package of bird and wasn’t watching.
To be fair, he didn’t have the experience I had of a small child, and even I, as her mother, hadn’t realised that she had learned to undo her seat clasp.
Panicked, I tried to get out of the car without undoing my seat belt, was tightly restrained and had to sit back to get the catch to undo.
Ross was already under way, traipsing behind the fleeing toddler and clearly uncertain as to how he ought to stop her, as rugby tackling a small child to the ground would not be a good look in a man attempting, with endearing ineptitude, to woo her mother. Besides, he had his arms full of bird.
‘Tilly!’ I yelled again, but my daughter was a flying sprite, dancing between the bushes, ungainly in her big coat and yet somehow almost ethereal.
I put my head down and pounded after her, all thoughts of what I might meet at the house subsumed under the desire to keep the child out of trouble. ‘Tilly, come back here… now!’
‘Balls!’ came the cry, filtered through the undergrowth.
‘Beads,’ I corrected under my breath as I ran. She had a head start but my legs were longer and I caught up with her outside the front door to Elm Cottage and swept her up into my arms as she made a lunge to go inside, with Ross and the bird arriving just behind me in a puffing, cawing kerfuffle.
There was no sign of either my mother or Isobel and I was sweating with gratitude about that and also with the unaccustomed sprinting through the woods.
‘You mustn’t… run… away,’ I panted as Tilly tried to fling herself to the floor. ‘Anything could have happened!’
Tilly clearly wasn’t up for philosophical discussions about potential dangers because she began to wail at the top of her voice, whether because she’d been thwarted in her desires or because I was using a stern voice I wasn’t sure.
The end result was the same: a red-faced toddler crying loudly and intermittently yelling, ‘Balls!’ Even the jacket-wrapped bird had gone still under the weight of the noise.
‘Would you like me to hold her?’
The voice came at my elbow and made me spin around so quickly that I almost dropped Tilly, aided by the centrifugal force as she wriggled. My mother and Isobel had come around the outside of the house from the back, walking together like old friends.
‘No!’ I began to back away as though they were explosive devices and my daughter was a rare piece of china. ‘No. Stay away!’
I couldn’t look anywhere except at my mother’s face, rendered fragmentary by the edges of Tilly’s screaming.
I was peripherally aware of Ross holding out his bird bundle to Isobel but that was all unimportant now.
Could I see a trace of guilt in her eyes, a touch of horror or pain that her daughter was refusing to relinquish her hold on her own child?
‘All right.’ She stepped back, holding her hands up as though to indicate that she wasn’t armed. ‘All right, Libby. It’s fine, honestly, everything is all right. But I do need to talk to you.’
‘About what?’ The unreality was there again now, in the back of my head, along with a feeling of tension, as though my thoughts had become a wire strung across the back of my brain.
My head twisted wildly. ‘Is David here? Where is he?’ My words sounded half-swallowed, as though I didn’t want to let them out and definitely didn’t want the answer.
‘David is…’ She stopped. ‘We’ve been worried. About you, about Matilda.’
Isobel stood at the open door and scrabbled in the pocket of her jacket, drawing out a flopping piece of paper on which she wrote:
We should go inside.
‘Absolutely not,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what he’s said to you, Mum, or how he’s phrased it, but I am not under David’s thumb any more and I don’t have to have anything to do with either of you. Ross…’
I didn’t know what I was going to say to him and his name was almost a plea.
‘I think,’ Ross said very gently for someone whose entire front was covered in bird poo and feathers, ‘that Isobel is right. We ought to go inside.’
I stared at him. ‘No!’
‘I’m not going to let anything bad happen here,’ he said. ‘Apart from what’s already happened, obviously. But I think it might be time to face those demons, Libby. This is your mother.’
There was something in his voice, almost a longing, that told me he didn’t understand.
How could he understand, after all? Was he trying to force me to confront my mother because he’d never been able to confront his own?
, But while his mother had been, by his own admission, less than perfect, she hadn’t turned and betrayed him.
She hadn’t let him think she loved him and then switched sides. How could he understand?
‘No,’ I said again and began to back away from all of them, Tilly struggling desperately in my arms.
‘I had hoped to make my appearance under calmer circumstances.’ Another voice came, this time from behind the trees at the side of the house. ‘But I think I might have to now. Libby, this is important and you can’t run away from it any more.’
It was David. David bloody de Winter, standing here. Invading my life: the little life that I’d carved out for myself amid the treachery and the fear. Leaning louchely against a sapling as though it were I who was the invader in this domestic stand-off.
My brain shut down. I had fought so hard – so hard – for my freedom and for independence for Tilly and me.
I’d thought I could do it, that I could escape the de Winter clutches but I should have known better.
David had got to my mother and now his tentacles were reaching out to grab me again.
How could I ever have thought I could fight it?