a fraction for the first time since they’d left Essex and she’d thought, Thank you, oh thank you, thank you.
Unity House had been the start of it all, the start of their new life, of Stella’s transformation, though they hadn’t known that then. Jo had led them to an enormous kitchen with lime green walls and a long table covered in books and mugs and gardening gloves, a tomato plant someone was in the middle of repotting. Off the kitchen was a brick outhouse, and spying a wooden hutch, Vivienne had let go of her mother’s hand and dropped to her knees to find the biggest rabbit she’d ever seen.
When she returned she’d stared up wide-eyed at the posters pinned to the kitchen walls. One, bizarrely, was of a fish riding a bicycle, another was about something called Greenham Peace Camp. After a while she’d tuned into her mum and Jo’s conversation and was shocked to hear Stella haltingly tell her about Ruby. Viv had held her breath; her mother never talked about these things, not ever, not even to her. But Jo had leaned forward and put her hand on Stella’s arm, her eyes shining with compassion. ‘You’ve come to the right place,’ she said. ‘We’re all survivors here, one way or another.’
When they’d finished their tea, Jo had shown them around their new home, which they soon saw was much bigger than it had appeared from the street: four floors of large, light and airy rooms, linked by narrow passageways and three steep flights of stairs. In the living room one wall was entirely covered by a mural of a naked woman, a white dove in each hand. Everywhere she looked were piles of books, an abundance of pot plants, large, dramatic abstract oil paintings in vivid primary colours, a broken guitar here, somebody’s bike there. Indian throws were pinned across the large bay windows, turning the room’s light a pale mauve, orange, green. Viv can still recall the house’s singular woody, musty smell, feel the fresh air blowing through the always-open garden door.
One by one they were introduced to the others. There was Sandra and Christine, who, strangely, had a son together, a round-faced two-year-old named Rafferty Wolf who called one of them Mummy and the other Mama; they lived on the first floor. Soren, a slender, bright-eyed woman in her sixties, wore her grey hair in a long plait to her waist and was clearly responsible for the artwork displayed throughout the house; her attic space was lined with dozens of canvases, a smell of turps in the air.
On the second floor lived Hayley. A student in her twenties, she had purple spiky hair, a nose ring and a wide smile that showed large and gappy teeth. Her room was thick with cigarette smoke and through its fug Viv saw that her walls were covered in posters and flyers with slogans like ‘Maggie Out!’ and ‘Ban the Bomb!’ and ‘Fuck Capitalism!’ Across the hall was Jo’s room. In the basement lived Kay, who had a man’s haircut, shy brown eyes, wore a man’s suit, and barely spoke. ‘You’ll meet Margo later,’ Jo had promised as she showed them to the room that would be theirs.
That evening a dinner was thrown in their honour. The long table now cleared of gardening things, the nine of them crowded around it, everyone – apart from Viv, her mother and Kay – talking at once while Jo ladled something called goulash onto their plates. Vivienne sat close to her mother, overwhelmed by the hubbub of voices, the good-natured jostling for space, and she’d watched wide-eyed as Sandra, mid conversation, lifted her top to reveal her bare breast for Rafferty Wolf to feed hungrily from.
And then Margo had entered the room. Though in her fifties, her black skin was still luminous, her long dreadlocks only lightly peppered with grey. She was, Viv thought, absolutely beautiful. Her movements slow and languorous, she wore a long billowy blue dress with mustard embroidery at the bodice. She took her seat at the head of the table and while Jo poured her a drink, she had turned her large dark eyes to Viv and her mother. ‘Welcome, Vivienne and Stella, I’m so pleased to have you here,’ she’d said.
Candles flickered and spilled red wax down the necks of wine bottles, their flames casting shadows of the women against the lime green walls. Margo told them how she’d started the commune ‘as a place of shelter, somewhere we can live without violence or fear or censure. Everyone is equal here. We all contribute, we pool our resources, our time and our skills …’ She had a slow, sonorous way of talking that was almost hypnotic. Somebody put some music on, a female voice rising and falling along with a flute and a guitar. Vivienne, sleepy now, leaned her head against her mother’s shoulder as she listened to Margo talk.
One by one, the women had told their stories that night, describing how they’d come to find each other, how Margo and Unity House had changed their lives. Viv must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew she was being carried up to bed, a blanket pulled over her, her ears full of the music and the rise and fall of the women’s voices.
They would stay at Unity House for almost a decade, and during that time the strong, clever, loving women who lived there would each, in their own way, help to shape the person Vivienne would become. But, just as that first night it was Margo who’d made the greatest impression upon eight-year-old Viv, it would also prove to be Margo who taught her the most valuable lesson of all – that people aren’t necessarily always who they seem.
When Viv wakes the next morning to the sound of Cleo showering down the hall, she lies in bed staring at the ceiling for a while, thinking about Ruby and the black hole of memories she’d fallen into the night before. The little white Essex cottage, their sudden escape to London, the decade spent at Unity House. She looks at her alarm clock and, remembering it’s Saturday and that Cleo has a football match she needs driving to, groans and pulls herself from the bed. She drank too much again last night. After Cleo had gone to bed she had thought about Monday’s anniversary and one glass of wine had turned into another and then another, as they so often do. Wrapping a dressing gown around herself, she stumbles downstairs to the kitchen where she finds the empty wine bottle and shoves it guiltily in the recycling box with the others.
As she makes herself coffee she gives herself a mental shake. Ruby’s death was so long ago; they had survived it, both she and Stella. Jack Delaney had been found guilty and sent to prison, and that was that. It was all in the past.
She’d been in her thirties when he’d finally been released, thanks to an extra eight years added to his sentence for an attack on a fellow prisoner so vicious it had left his victim in a coma, permanently blinded in one eye. On Jack’s release, Viv had avoided all news stories about him, even taking Cleo, ten by then, on holiday to France in case the papers decided to print his picture. She had only vague memories of what he looked like: dark hair, a thin, cruel mouth and heavy brow, but nothing substantial; his image had been banished to the part of her brain where her darkest terrors lived and the shadowy figure who stalked her nightmares was frightening enough without furnishing it with the details a photograph would provide. Her mother later heard he’d emigrated to Canada, and though that should have given Viv comfort, it hadn’t, not really: as long as he was alive she would fear him.
She carries her coffee across to the table and sits down. A pale morning sun casts its glow across the parquet flooring and the kitchen has a gratifyingly warm and cosy feel. This morning, she thinks with satisfaction, her house looks exactly like the tasteful, comfortable, middle-class home she’d spent the past fifteen years and an awful lot of money trying to create. In fact, every room of her pretty Georgian townhouse is a testament to the hours spent lovingly restoring each period detail, or trawling auctions and eBay for the perfect antique lampshade or table or chair. A million miles from the little white cottage, the large and chaotic commune – the sort of home where nothing bad ever happened and never would. A perfectly nice, perfectly safe place in which to raise her daughter.
She hears Cleo come clattering down the stairs seconds before she bursts into the room, stuffing her football kit into her bag. Her curls still wet from the shower, she
