Chapter 28
EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER
‘Tils! Where are you?’
‘In my bedroom, silly Mummy!’ Tilly popped her head out of the doorway. ‘Is it time yet?’
I checked the clock. ‘Not quite. Daddy said ten o’clock.’
Tilly stared at the enormous clock face that I’d bought to make teaching her to tell the time a little bit easier. ‘It’s ten o’clock now.’
‘No, it’s half past nine. Get your socks.’
David was coming to take Tilly for her first weekend down in London, where he would, no doubt, be showing her off to all his actor friends and indulging her wildly.
‘Are you going somewhere? When I’m not here?’ Tilly sat on the carpet in her bedroom doorway, ignoring my instructions about her socks. ‘I want you to stay here.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I said, with a small shiver of silent, private delight.
‘Ross and I are looking over the plans for the new building.’ And that wasn’t all we’d be doing, if past weekends were anything to go by, but Tilly was at least a decade too young to know about what else we’d be getting up to.
‘What building?’ She’d lost interest now in her mother’s weekend plans. Daddy was coming and she was clearly more focused on that.
‘The new hostel. The Isobel Isherwood building.’ I still hadn’t quite got used to saying that. Being a Public Benefactor was so totally new to me that I struggled to get my head around having the money to be able to be a benefactor. But I was determined that those diamonds would do some good.
‘Oh.’ Tilly scuffled on her bottom back into her room, hopefully to get her socks, and I sat down at the kitchen table and looked around me.
Tilly and I had moved into the container house as a temporary measure, and we were still here.
I wasn’t sure now that I wanted to live anywhere else.
The woods were peaceful, even when the dawn chorus started at four thirty; Tilly loved stroking the horses who lived in the field at the back and, now that Ross had made the driveway up to the house a little bit more permanent, it was easy to get in and out.
Ross and I had jointly bought the new Elm House in all its eco and carbon neutral glory and we used it as his calling card when he was touting for work.
Having featured on a national TV show had done his business a huge amount of good – even though Ross hadn’t won The Great British Build, coming a close runner-up, he was already turning away work – and his ego and self-confidence were also much improved.
I still looked out for Isobel. When evening drew in and the local crows and rooks crowded in to the treetops, I sometimes went to stand outside and look up, wondering if any of them were Rook and whether Isobel might be somewhere nearby, watching.
There had been no word from her and nobody had seen her, although she had allowed herself to be found once, by the people who’d had to prove the diamonds to be really my property.
She’d asked for her whereabouts not to be revealed though, and I’d not pushed the point.
She didn’t want to be found, and she wanted me to have the diamonds, that was all I needed to know.
But now the undergrowth was greening rapidly on the branches, wild garlic flowers scented the woodland and competed with the bluebells, and together the flowers drifted white and blue in clouds between the trees.
I looked up and saw Ross treading his way over brambles and nettles through the huge bifold doors that opened one half of our little house out to the nature beyond.
I opened the doors for him to step up into the house, brushing tree pollen from his hair, and hugged him. ‘Hello, you.’
He hugged me back, a tight embrace that smelled of crushed greenery. ‘Hey. Is Tilly ready for the off? Oh, bugger, that wall looks as though it needs some work, when did it get like that?’
‘Stop looking at the walls. Your intended is right here in front of you and planning a weekend of utter debauchery, and you’re thinking about walls?’
‘Sorry.’ He kissed me now and we were only interrupted when Tilly burst in, skidding on her continuing unsocked feet.
‘Ross!’ She ran over and grabbed his leg. ‘Sock.’ She held up one bare foot.
‘All right. Sit down.’
Ross helped my daughter on with her socks and then we all sat around the kitchen table playing a rather inept game of I Spy until David came to collect her. Whereupon our weekend really got started.