Chapter 25
We all ended up at the soft play place. My mum and David, Ross, Tilly and I all squeezed around a little table, and ate vastly overpriced chips, for which David paid.
I think he was enjoying being the man of largesse and I wondered how Isobel could have thought that those black diamonds could ever level the field between us.
At a few thousand pounds each, there was approximately thirty thousand pounds worth in that little bag, an amount of money not to be sneezed at but not sufficient to put me on a par with David’s family wealth, London townhouse and evident desire to spoil his daughter rotten.
Besides, I wanted Tilly to have most of them.
I could persuade myself to sell a few in the interests of having a roof over our heads, but no more than that.
The field might be a little less of a precipitous slope, but nowhere near level.
‘She knew who I was,’ David said proudly, watching Mum and Tilly, who were negotiating the ball pit. ‘Did you see?’
I wanted to say that of course she did, I’d been telling her that she was going to see her daddy.
She had yelled, ‘Daddy!’ to the guy behind the admission table, Ross and two random men before we’d got inside and she’d shouted it at David.
But I wasn’t here to ruin his day, and he had bought us all chips.
‘We said we’d take it slowly, remember?’
‘Yes, yes, you’re right, of course.’ David ate a hot chip and carried on staring at Tilly. ‘She’s a beautiful little girl,’ he said almost wistfully, then, turning to me, ‘Are you sure you’re fully recovered now? You know that I never ever meant to harm you and you’d trust me with Tilly?’
I thought about the decor of his lovely house.
Neither David nor I had had much exposure to small children before we had Tilly, and I was fairly certain that quite a few of those expensively decorated rooms weren’t suitable for the force of nature that was our daughter. ‘If we take it slowly,’ I said again.
‘I might move to York.’ David surprised me then. ‘There’s no reason for me to stay in London and then I can… if you’ll let me. I want to be a part of Tilly’s life, Libby. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be, is there?’
‘But you’re an actor,’ I said, as though implying that life outside the capital wasn’t available to anyone who didn’t wear clogs, own a whippet and have forty past generations of their family who’d done something with looms. He shrugged.
‘I can work from here. I’m mainly doing voice-over stuff now anyway.
And…’ His gaze travelled back to where Tilly was rather overexcitedly throwing Brass down a small slide.
‘I want to be there for her. For the normal stuff, choosing a school, watching her ballet recitals, parents’ evenings, all that. ’
I knew it would be good for Tilly. I knew it. I just couldn’t quite get my head around it yet.
A few moments later, I heard ‘Wee!’, saw the dreaded groin-clutch and flew into the ball pit to whip Tilly up and out and hustle her in the direction of the primary-coloured toddler toilets conveniently located just behind the ball pit. My mum came too.
‘Libby,’ she said softly, her tone being incongruous when paired with the yellow plastic bear that Tilly was currently sitting on and singing something from Frozen. Weeing, in Tilly’s case, was not something to be hurried, particularly when you could be keeping your mother from her social life.
‘Yes?’ My reply was a bit stiff, a little wooden.
‘Nobody blames you, you know that.’ Mum’s voice creaked.
It sounded as though she had too much emotion: that everything wanted to come out at once but she was afraid of my reaction.
It gave me a jolt to realise that my own mother was afraid.
She was my mother! Motherhood conferred a kind of superhumanity in which you might be inwardly terrified while giving the impression that you had never had so much as a goose pimple of fear in your life.
God knows, I’d had to use that illusion often enough on Tilly.
‘I know, Mum.’ I concentrated on the plastic bear-shaped toilet. The cubicle smelled mostly of toddler impatience and damp trousers.
‘And I am so, so sorry that you had to go through what I did. You must have been so frightened.’
In the face of my own mother’s vulnerability, my facade of all-powerful maternity cracked and I gave a little sob. ‘I was,’ I whispered, realising suddenly how true it was. ‘I was terrified.’
The toilet cubicle wasn’t very wide, so Mum barely had to stretch out her hand to stroke my hair. ‘I know,’ she said and I realised that I had only suffered a fraction of the awfulness that she had been through. ‘My baby,’ she whispered. ‘You will always be my baby.’
‘Mum…’ I let go of Tilly’s shoulder, where I’d been holding her against any sudden desires to leap up to check the toilet or rip her clothes off, and suddenly I was in my mother’s arms. She smelled so familiar, the hug was the same hug I remembered from childhood injuries, teenage disappointments.
The same hug she’d given me at the airport when she and Dad had taken off for their new venture in Australia and I had thought I hadn’t minded.
I sobbed into the hug like Tilly deprived of a treat.
Even Tilly went quiet, as though impressed by the volume of tears, while Mum stroked my hair and murmured gently to me about her and Dad coming back to Britain now he was retiring, of wanting to spend time with their granddaughter.
They’d still travel, I had no need to worry that they would be bored or were coming because they felt they had to, to keep an eye on me bringing up my daughter. But she’d missed me. She loved me.
And I was five again.
Eventually, a small voice said, ‘Mummy? I weed,’ almost tentatively and I snapped back from childhood so fast that I almost hit my head on the cub-shaped cistern.
‘Good girl,’ I replied, almost automatically.
Mum let me go and we both pulled an enormous amount of paper from the dispenser – shaped, rather oddly, like a tree – and wiped our faces.
‘David and Ross will be wondering what we’ve been doing in here,’ Mum said, and now her voice sounded lighter, with the top note of laughter I remembered so well.
‘It’s a toilet, Mum.’ I helped Tilly off and sorted her out. ‘I think they can work it out.’
‘And you’re all right? Really?’ Without thinking Mum helped button Tilly’s trousers. We were face to face with Tilly’s wriggling little body between us and I could see the strain and tears still staining Mum’s face.
I smiled and it felt as though my face had echoed the words of Tilly’s chanted song and let it go. ‘I will be,’ I said. ‘I really will be.’
But after Mum and David had left, Mum to go sightseeing around town and David to…
I actually didn’t know what he was up to, and Ross and I were sitting facing one another across a small plastic table while Tilly ate a bowl of ice cream and occasionally shouted ‘Balls!’ at a disconcerting volume, I slumped.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ Ross said cheerily. ‘Tilly gets both parents, I get you – within the acceptable boundaries laid down and not meaning to imply anything by the word get…’
‘You don’t have to worry, Ross.’ I helped Tilly with her spoon. ‘I know what you mean.’
‘I’m an architect. I tend towards being upfront with full details. Avoid that in my business and you’re likely to find a staircase halfway up the wrong wall and a room with no doors.’
I smiled. ‘You’re an idiot.’
‘Oh, probably. But it does seem that things are falling into place. Incidentally, I need a PA to deal with the business while I’m on this TV gig, are you interested?’
I tried to give him a hard stare but it was difficult because I was also fending off Brass who seemed to want to beat me over the head. ‘No. That would be a recipe for disaster.’
A sigh. ‘You’re probably right. But you’re going to have to find a job, aren’t you? And sell some of the diamonds to get somewhere to live?’
‘I don’t want to sell them all though. Isobel left them for Tilly, so I shouldn’t.
’ There was that horrible guilt back again, the guilt that had descended on me as soon as my pregnancy had been confirmed and had lapped up against my shores to a greater or lesser extent ever since.
Knowing how I’d behaved after Tilly’s birth was a tsunami of guilt, and not wanting to sell the crow diamonds while knowing that I might have to was eroding an entire coastal district.
‘But Isobel told you to use them so you didn’t have to roll over and take whatever your ex suggests,’ he said, reasonably.
‘But she said they were for me and Tilly,’ I pointed out again.
‘I checked the bag, there are twelve black diamonds there. Even if I save six for Tils and sell the other six, that’s going to net me, what, eighteen, twenty grand?
A nice little sum, but hardly life changing – it will all go on housing us until I can work full time.
And I’ve still got to find a job that fits in with nursery and then school hours.
Mum and Dad are thinking of moving back to Britain but they’ll have their own lives and I don’t want to depend on them for childcare. ’
‘I’m sure Tilly will understand if you have to sell them all.’ He was so rational that it made my teeth hurt.
‘I think Isobel meant her to actually have some of the diamonds, at least. I mean, yes, I could sell them all but it’s still not going to realise loads.
Maybe forty thousand pounds? Bill-paying money, a new car…
and then nothing for Tilly to keep; nothing for her to use for her future, and Isobel was all about the future.
I’m pretty sure she didn’t intend me to flog the lot and blow the money on boring, everyday stuff. ’
‘You could…’ Ross tilted his head, hopefully.
‘No, I couldn’t,’ I said firmly. ‘Working with you and… well, us having whatever we might have, it wouldn’t work. We’d be too much together, and Tilly and David aren’t the only ones who need to take things slowly.’
Now Ross looked back at the tabletop and rubbed at the skin around a nail.
He didn’t quite go as far as picking at it, but it looked like a close-run thing.
‘How slowly are you envisaging? Only, I’m thirty-nine and I can feel the world of male pattern baldness and erectile disfunction creeping on apace. ’
I let Tilly’s spoon drop and touched his hand.
It felt very intimate as a gesture, even given that we were sitting around a primary-coloured table in a room full of screaming toddlers and I was being assaulted by a felt dragon.
‘Ross, I’m never going to risk having another baby,’ I said, trying for softly, but Tilly instantly yelled ‘Baby!’ at such volume that several mothers turned around and gave me ‘good luck with the pregnancy’ smiles.
‘If you want someone to start a family with…’
Ross looked over at Tilly, who was hanging dangerously from her seat. ‘I never had much thought about children,’ he said, also as softly as was concomitant with several small children seemingly being murdered. ‘I think you and Tilly are more than enough.’
Relief waves joined the puddles of guilt. ‘After what happened, I don’t dare,’ I said, apologetically.
‘No, I can see that.’ His hand curved upward to take mine. ‘And I don’t want to risk losing you, not now.’
I held his hand while awkwardly righting Tilly in her seat, fending off Brass and trying to keep my elbows out of the remaining ice cream, and wondered how on earth we were ever going to get this to work.