relax!’ She gulps her coffee and hurries from the room.
Five minutes later as they are leaving the house, Cleo impatiently rushing ahead, Viv spies their new neighbour, Neil, cutting his hedge. Not having the heart to ignore his eager smile, she gives him a wave, ‘Hello there!’ He’s a slightly chubby man who looks to be in his late forties with badly dyed brown hair and a rather grating laugh, but he’s harmless enough; a welcome antidote at least to the self-satisfied hipsters who’d descended on the area in droves in recent years.
Ignoring Cleo, who’s scowling and rolling her eyes, she says, ‘You’re up and at ’em early, Neil. How’s it all going with the renovations?’
‘Oh, slowly, slowly, you know how it is.’
‘You’ve done wonders with the place.’ She glances up at the sash windows he’s recently installed. It is, in fact, quite astonishing what he’s managed to do in such short a time. Before he’d moved in, the property had belonged to a sweet elderly Cypriot woman who, due to ill health, had allowed the house to fall to rack and ruin over the fifty years she’d lived there. By the time she’d died it had been almost derelict. Shortly after the funeral her daughter had put it on the market for a price Viv had thought extortionate, considering the work that needed doing to it, and it had languished on the market for over eighteen months before suddenly it had sold, to the entire street’s surprise, for the full asking price. A few months later, Neil had moved in.
He’s looking at her hopefully. ‘You and Cleo will have to come round for a cup of tea sometime. I can show you what I’ve done inside.’
‘We’d love to,’ she says, beginning to edge away. ‘That’d be great.’ She smiles apologetically, ‘I’m afraid we’ve got to run now, footie practice, but let’s definitely do that soon, thank you.’
She feels him watching her as they get into the car. Oh, God, does he fancy her? She doesn’t really get that vibe, though she’s not quite sure what vibe she does get, exactly. Perhaps he’s just a bit lonely: she never sees any friends dropping by, no one who looks like family for that matter either. She finds herself hoping very much that he doesn’t fancy her; there’s something about his high-pitched giggle, his eager-puppy eyes that creeps her out a little. Immediately she feels a twinge of self-reproof: You’re not exactly beating them off with a stick yourself, Viv. And then she thinks of Shaun and cringes.
There’s a short warm-up before the match starts so Viv decides to wait in the car. The icy rain that had begun to fall on the journey over there begins to pick up pace and she turns up the heater, savouring these last moments of warmth and dryness before she’s forced out into the freezing cold to watch her rosy-cheeked daughter run around the sodden sports field, happy as a pig in mud. Cleo certainly hadn’t inherited her love of sport from her.
She changes the CD she’d been listening to and idly thinks about what to cook for Samar and Ted later when they come over for lunch – something she’d organized to distract herself from the looming anniversary of Ruby’s death. Before long her thoughts turn to the café and the refurb she’s planning, and she feels a pleasurable tug of excitement.
She sometimes has to pinch herself when she considers how well her life has turned out. A beautiful daughter, her own house and business. For a terrifying time, it had seemed likely that she might not make it through her twenties alive – in fact, if it hadn’t been for Stella and Samar, she doubts she would have done.
In 1991, when she was fourteen, she had received completely out of the blue, a letter telling her that both her maternal grandparents had died and left all their money to her. An astonishing sum of £500,000, to be held in trust until her eighteenth birthday. Half a million pounds! She had called for her mother, remembering the journey they’d made to her grandparents’ beautiful home, senseless with grief and shock, in the aftermath of Ruby’s murder. How her mother had told her, ‘There’s nothing for us here.’
Stella had read the letter in silence. ‘Well,’ she said neutrally, when she’d finished. ‘Looks like you’re going to be rich.’
‘But why didn’t they leave it to you?’ Viv had asked incredulously. ‘They didn’t even know me!’
Stella dropped the letter to the table and said, ‘I don’t want their bloody money.’
In the silence that followed they heard Margo walking to and fro in her bedroom above and Vivienne saw her mother’s whole bearing tense at the sound. ‘What happened between you and your parents?’ she asked her tentatively. ‘Why did they treat you so badly?’ It was a question she’d tried to ask her mother many times over the years, but had never received a satisfactory answer.
But to her surprise Stella said, ‘I didn’t do what they wanted – university, a career, a good marriage. I was so young when I fell pregnant with Ruby. I let them down. They couldn’t forgive me.’
‘And they punished you forever after?’ Viv said hotly. ‘Well, they were bloody bastards, then! I don’t want their money either!’
‘Take it.’
‘No way. Or if I do, we’ll share it.’
And though it had taken her a long time, eventually Stella had been persuaded, and at eighteen, Viv had found herself in the astonishing and very dangerous position of having more money than she knew what to do with. Now, as she waits for Cleo’s football match to start, she pushes the memory away. What had followed had been one of the darkest times of her life and wasn’t something she liked to dwell on.
After the muddy, wet and interminable football match, Viv and Cleo return home, Viv to make a start on lunch, Cleo to get straight on the phone to invite her friend Layla over. ‘To help me with my English essay,’ she explains, somewhat unconvincingly.
Viv’s peeling potatoes when Layla arrives. She pops her head around the door on her way up to Cleo’s room and Vivienne waves hello. ‘How’s it going, sweetheart? Nice to see you.’ Layla and Cleo have been friends since nursery school. She’s a slight girl, with neat tight cornrows, lavender-framed glasses and a terrifyingly high IQ. Layla holds strong views on everything from fracking to the Gaza Strip and isn’t afraid to air them. Though her parents – a jolly, extrovert couple from Mozambique – run a dry-cleaner’s and her older sister Blessing is training to be a beautician, Layla intends to be a human rights lawyer when she grows up, and Viv has absolutely no doubt whatsoever that this will happen one day.
‘Samar and Ted are coming over soon,’ she tells her. ‘Do you want to join us for lunch?’
Layla narrows her eyes. ‘Will it be vegan-friendly, Vivienne?’
‘Erm, no. No, I’m afraid it probably won’t.’
Layla looks at her severely through her glasses. ‘In that case, no thank you. I’ve been reading about the effects of meat consumption on the environment and frankly want no part of it.’
Viv smiles, and notices that Layla is carrying a small duffle bag. ‘What’ve you got in there?’
But before she can reply, Cleo appears and pulls her friend by the arm. ‘Come on, let’s go to my room.’
A moment later Viv hears Cleo’s door close and the stereo being switched on, and she relaxes, relieved that Cleo seems to have bounced back after the disappointing visit to her father’s a few weeks before. Mike had recently had a new baby with his girlfriend Sonia, and Cleo’s last visit had been her first introduction
