Chapter 26
A few days later I was standing in the wood watching what was left of Elm Cottage being torn down.
Lots of men in hard hats and high-viz jackets moved purposefully through the rubble while Ross stood around looking at plans and pointing dramatically.
A camera team filmed every move, although I couldn’t quite understand why, as surely demolition was demolition and hardly what every viewer was going to tune in for.
But apparently the crew were going to film every stage of the build and somehow it would all be cut and interwoven to make unmissable TV.
I watched a huge truck with a massive grab arm on the front clawing its way into the paper-thin walls and sighed.
People watched other people making cakes on TV, didn’t they?
They watched people getting married, people going on holiday; they watched police and ambulance forces at work, what was so different about watching an architect and a building team?
And at least they got time-lapse; we had to live through every stage of something that took an hour and a half of TV to show.
The judging would be done live after the respective houses were finally finished, to a nine-month deadline.
Ross was still pointing, waving part of the team over to raze a small part of standing wall, then bending to pick up a brick and look at it critically.
I wandered back to my car. I’d only popped over to see how things were going while Tilly was at nursery and because I was at a bit of a loose end.
David was going to pick her up from nursery today and take her to a Children’s Day at the York Archaeological Trust for the afternoon, and I couldn’t settle.
David had, I had to admit, been very good about listening to my varied instructions before gently taking my shoulders and turning me around in the nursery car park.
‘It will be fine, Libby,’ he’d said. ‘I’ve got to learn sometime and if that’s by living through a monumental tantrum, then so be it.
’ He’d grinned and I’d remembered why I’d fallen for him originally.
‘I’m sure, in the event of anything going wrong, I will be surrounded by sympathetic women desperate to help out the poor man. ’
I’d given him a sharp look. ‘You had better not be using our daughter to try to pick up women.’
Another grin. ‘Nope. I’m off the pick-up market for the foreseeable. I want to concentrate on my daughter for now. I’m not saying “never”, but…’ He’d flashed me his best ‘audition’ grin. ‘Not for a bit. I’ve got a lot of adjusting to do. Now, go.’
So I’d gone. I kept my phone on in my pocket and my fingers never far from it, just in case it vibrated a panicked message about a lack of toilet facilities or Tilly having a seizure or choking or…
‘Hi. Sorry, I had to do something noteworthy for the cameras.’ Ross arrived beside me, panting slightly.
‘We’ve pretended to find something wrong with the foundations just to give them something to film, so they’ve had to stop so we can pretend to put it right.
’ His mouth twisted but he didn’t go so far as to chew his lip, he just pulled a rueful face instead.
‘I never knew that filming a TV programme could be so utterly slow. I could have had the new house up by now if they didn’t keep interfering. How are Tilly and David getting on?’
‘We both dropped her off and she seems happy about him picking her up on his own.’ I found I was having to beat off the urge to chew my own fingernails. ‘It feels odd.’
‘Of course it does. It’s been you on your own for everything for so long, delegation isn’t going to come easily.’
‘Mum flew back this morning,’ I said, trying not to sound as though this made me as sad as it did. ‘They want to move home, but it’s going to take time.’
‘There’s video calls though. Once you sort out the time difference you can chat to her whenever you want.’
‘Yes.’ A cold wind scuttled through the bare trees and sticky wet leaves made an attempt to rustle. ‘I took the crow diamonds in for valuing today.’
Ross gave me a shrewd look. ‘I assume from your lack of skipping about and general joyous carefree behaviour that the news wasn’t good.’
I tried not to look down the barrel of an unspooling future.
‘It’s all relative, isn’t it? Apparently black diamonds aren’t worth a huge amount right now, but the assessor said that prices go up and down a lot.
There’s about forty thousand pounds worth in the bag, and I know that’s not to be sniffed at.
I know it.’ I sniffed. ‘And I’m keeping half for Tilly.
She likes playing with them, and it’s something to be able to give her to help her pay for university or a car or something, when she’s old enough. ’
‘Well.’ Ross tried to sound upbeat. ‘Twenty thousand pounds is an improvement on what you’ve got now, isn’t it? Would David…?’
‘I am not asking David for money.’
‘No. No, I see that wouldn’t be good. Sorry.’
‘I feel guilty enough already,’ I said quietly. ‘If it hadn’t been for me, he’d have had two years to get to know his daughter.’ I shoved both my hands into my pockets and pushed down to distract me from those feelings and try to stop them rising and overwhelming me again.
‘Look.’ Ross stepped over to close the gap between us. He smelled of engine oil for some reason. ‘You were ill and nobody told you.’
‘I know.’ I let him put his arms around me. ‘It’s just… so much stuff.’
There was a brief quiet, interrupted only by the sound of demolition and some robust swearing from the house site. ‘I have the feeling,’ Ross said into my hair, ‘that this relationship is going to be a bit on the not-straightforward side.’
I struggled back so I could see his face. ‘It doesn’t have to be a relationship,’ I said, keeping the disappointment out of my voice with some effort. ‘I’m not holding you to anything.’
‘You are holding me to you,’ he almost whispered.
‘My other relationships have gone the other way, you know. I’ve tried to save people and then they’ve dusted themselves down and headed off into their new futures.
I haven’t needed to save you and yet, here you are.
’ Now he looked away from the horizon and into my eyes.
‘All that therapy, and what I really needed was this life lesson. And you were there at the beginning, trying to help me.’
‘But I come with baggage. Well, Tilly, who absolutely isn’t baggage but she’s mine.’
‘You also come with an ex-partner and a bag of black diamonds. That’s not baggage, that’s a thriller plot.’
Now I laughed. ‘True. We can at least try, can’t we?’
‘Why not?’
We stood together and watched Elm Cottage come down.
I tried not to think about how hard it was going to be to get a job to work around Tilly’s nursery and then school hours; where we were going to find somewhere affordable to live; how I was going to integrate David’s desire to help raise his daughter and the general overwhelming confusion of having not been able to trust my brain and whether I would ever learn not to doubt what I felt in future.
The gang of men in big work boots and gauntlets stomping all over the wreckage of what had been Isobel’s home began to feel like an allegory.
Then I left Ross and the big sweary men to it and headed back to the hostel. Which also managed to make me feel guilty just by existing. I shouldn’t be here. I hadn’t run from a stalking control freak, I’d run because I was ill, from a perfectly decent man, and thus didn’t deserve this little room.
I sat on the bed in the relative quiet. Tia and her family were a few wall-thumps and the Ukrainian girls were at college. Downstairs, even Slipknot had been struck dumb, so I jumped when there was a tap on the door.
‘Can I borrow some teabags?’ It was Tia’s eldest daughter. ‘Mum’s completely out and her money doesn’t come in until tomorrow.’
‘’Course you can. Hang on.’ I didn’t have any teabags either when I checked the cupboard. This sent more guilt flooding through me; a few teabags was the least I could do for Tia when she’d been such a good friend and support, and I felt a fraud all over again.
I thought about offering to go down to the little corner shop and then saw Isobel’s tin box where I’d left it tucked away in the corner with a sense of relief. ‘I think there might be some in here.’ I levered the lid off.
A box of teabags, a packet of biscuits. All that was left of Isobel and her bird-haunted life in that rotting old house.
I took a dozen or so of the loose bags and handed them over, then sat down on the bed again with the tin on my lap, thinking.
Where had she gone? Had the wood swallowed her up, her and her flock of corvids, akking, kakking and chinking their cries into the treetops?
Surely we would have seen her – and winter would be even harder for her now without Elm Cottage to hide out in.
But she’d been so adamant that we shouldn’t try to find her, we owed it to her to leave her alone now.
Although maybe she’d started on the path of cognitive decline; her assertion that that bag of black diamonds would help me level the playing field with David might just be a symptom of that.
She must have known that they weren’t worth enough to do more than help me out for a short while.
They weren’t even enough to prevent me from getting benefits, should I choose to do so.
Just a nice little parting gift, something for Tilly to keep, although I doubted she’d remember much of these first two years of her life.
I could only hope she wouldn’t remember anyway, while I worked on how to phrase the fact that I’d taken her on the road and lived with her in a car until we’d rocked up here.
Why did life have to be so complicated? Why couldn’t I just have had Tilly, separated from David in the classy ‘conscious uncoupling’ way that we’d planned, and found a neat little flat somewhere out in Zone 4 so we could jointly parent our daughter?
I could have gone back to my old job in the box office.
A mental image of how life could have been played its montage of neat dresses on crowded Tube trains, weekends of splash parks and tea parties, quiet Sundays when Tils was at her father’s, and I tried to avoid letting myself dwell on it, or how the losing of it all was my fault.
It wasn’t my fault and I just had to persuade myself to realise that.
A mental health crisis was nobody’s fault and this was my life now.
I stared out of the window at the wintering grey sky and thought about Ross.
If none of it had happened, I wouldn’t have met him, and the feeling that we could have never found one another chilled me almost as much as that view of alps of cloud and a windswept car park.
Memories of his diffident ridiculousness made me smile suddenly and my mood lifted. Ross and me. We could do this.
The tin box bounced on my knee and I decided that Tia was right, a cup of tea was what was needed right now.
Tea and maybe, while Tilly wasn’t here to ask me ‘What you eat, Mummy?’ causing me to gulp down entire biscuits in one go to avoid her tantrum when she wasn’t allowed to have the remainder of the packet, perhaps a few of the chocolate Hobnobs as well.
David was bringing Tilly back at teatime and I might as well get used to the feeling of not having her presence tugging on my mind like a sea anchor.
I needed to get used to it, however strange and alien that feeling might be, because if David really did relocate to York and share care of Tilly as he wanted to, then I’d be able to get a job, a proper one, not being paid by Ross in any capacity.
I dug into the tin, lifting out the box of teabags and the biscuits, then stopped. Stared. And called Ross.