Chapter 15 #4
‘I don’t want anyone to drive me home,’ Billie said. ‘I know you hate driving up there in the dark. I’ll stay with Ottilie until the play is finished. Then you can come and get me.’
‘You don’t really imagine we can just go back in now and watch the rest of it, knowing that you’re with Ottilie, feeling this way?’ Zoe said.
‘I don’t want to ruin your night.’
‘It’s too late for that,’ Alex said.
Zoe frowned at him. ‘That’s hardly helping.’
‘But it’s true. Why don’t we talk over what this is really about.’
‘It’s not about anything,’ Billie fired back. ‘I just thought the panto was stupid.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘You actually thought that was good?’ Billie flung her arm out in the direction of the village hall. ‘You just sat through that and thought there might be another reason for me leaving? Sometimes, Dad, you can be so delulu.’
‘Maybe, but I know you,’ Alex said. ‘I know when it’s that simple and when it’s not. Keeping whatever it is bottled up isn’t helping anyone.’
‘I’m not keeping anything bottled up!’
‘Both of you’ – Zoe held out her hands to get their attention – ‘we can’t do this here! Let’s all go and fetch Louisa and go home. We can talk there.’
‘There’s nothing to talk about!’ Billie shouted. ‘Stop interfering – you don’t even belong in this family, so stop pretending like you do!’
Zoe stepped back, Billie’s words like a punch to the gut, and in the time it took for her to collect her wits, Alex launched a defence – one she hadn’t asked for and didn’t want.
‘What the hell is wrong with you? How can you talk to Zoe like that after everything she’s done for you? She’s made her whole life about you and Louisa since she moved in with us – she’s every bit as much family as anyone!’
‘Alex,’ Zoe pleaded, ‘don’t. It doesn’t matter.’
‘No, it does! Billie, I get that you’ve been through a lot, but it doesn’t excuse your behaviour. Sometimes I just don’t understand what goes through your head.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t, would you? You don’t even try.’
It was Zoe’s turn to leap to a defence. ‘That’s not fair. Your dad does try. Everything he does is about what you need.’
‘Oh, right. So what he thought I needed was to live in a village in the middle of nowhere where everyone is about a hundred years old, where there’s nothing to do, nobody my age, where it’s always cold and raining, where the only people I can find to make friends with are a girl who acts about twelve and an old woman who spends her life serving her sexist husband?
Yeah, thanks, Dad. Don’t worry that you didn’t consult me before you moved me here – you didn’t need to because you totally nailed the brief! ’
‘What…?’ Alex stared at her. ‘Is that how you feel?’
‘Yes!’ Billie cried. ‘It’s how I feel!’
‘Why didn’t you say at the time?’
‘How could I? You were so excited about this place, and then you met Zoe and she moved in, and I thought I could get used to it, and I could grow to like it eventually, and you all kept saying how nice it would be for Louisa to grow up here. How could I tell you how I felt? I tried, Dad, I really tried to like it because I knew how much you liked it. But I don’t.
Every day I wake up and look out of the window and there’s just hills and fields, and everything is grey, and it makes me miserable. ’
Zoe watched Billie’s outpouring with sympathy.
Perhaps, at her age, she might have felt the same.
It was easy to forget that this place was Alex’s dream, and since moving here it had become Zoe’s too, but it wasn’t everyone’s.
It was easy to forget, in their day-to-day life of building businesses and careers and making a home, that all those things kept them occupied, gave them a reason to get up in the morning and to be thankful for the place that had given them so much, but when she really thought about it, what had Thimblebury given Billie?
Perhaps what she’d needed for a short time, but not what a woman of her age might want.
But then, her heart went out to Alex too, watching his expression in the low light of the street lamps, the face of a man who was witnessing the rude awakening from a dream he’d thought was everyone’s and not just his.
He’d been convinced he’d brought Billie to a life that would be good for her, and she’d been willing to play along to protect his feelings, and now they’d both got hurt.
There was a silence so heavy it felt as if it might pull down the hills that encircled the village, and it seemed to last for hours before Alex finally broke it.
‘Let’s get back to Hilltop.’
Neither Billie nor Zoe argued as he began to walk in the direction of Ottilie’s house, and they followed.
But Zoe noted that Alex said Hilltop, and not home, as if all it had meant to him had ceased to be, and now it was just a house.
She pushed the thought out, though it did nothing to improve her melancholy.
They’d collect Louisa and head back, and they’d talk things through and they’d work it all out.
At least that’s what she hoped. At this exact moment, only one thing seemed certain: Christmas was going to be more difficult than any of them could have imagined.