by Melanie Rose
“Jim’s the gardener, Mummy,” Nicole explained, more kindly than her sister. She took my hand again, rather as if I were the child and she the adult, and led me down toward the trees with the others following. “Do you want to see?”
“I do indeed,” I said, glad to be out from the stifling blandness of the house. It occurred to me, as I stood and sucked in the fresh air, that as I was stuck here in this life I might as well try and make a go of this weird thing I was committed to. And if I was going to play the game I might as well do it properly. “I want to remember everything so I can be a good mummy again.”
“You can’t,” said a little voice from behind us. “’Cause you’re not Mummy.”
I stopped walking and turned to Teddy.
“I’m sorry, Teddy,” I said, hunkering down in front of him. “This is hard for all of us. But I’d be very happy if you’d give me a chance to try.”
It seemed as if he were going to object further, but obviously thought better of it because he looked right into my eyes and then nodded abruptly.
“Right,” I said, straightening up. “To the compost heap!”
We squeezed through a gap in the conifer trees and, to my surprise, found a large area of unkempt garden on the other side. The grass here was long and brown. To one side of a crazy-paved pathway stood a huge pile of leaves, grass cuttings, and trimmed-off branches. On the other side was a small shed, presumably where Jim kept the mower and tools.
I tried the shed door, using my right hand to avoid pulling the damaged skin under the dressing on my left shoulder, but it was locked, so I shaded my eyes and peered through a side window. I had been right. The shed housed all the implements a gardener would need.
“Do you know where Jim keeps the key?” I asked the children.
They looked blankly back at me, then Teddy said conspiratorially, “I knowd where Jim put it.”
He disappeared behind the shed and returned holding a key. I quickly unlocked the door and stood hands on hips, surveying the contents of the shed with satisfaction. “Right,” I said, grabbing a spade with my good arm and handing it to Toby. “You’d better get digging, and then you can move the mud away from that area there with the dump truck. It’s very important to make a really big hole, because Daddy and I are going to get you a sandbox to put in it.”
Toby’s eyes shone as he banged the spade into a depression of loose earth. I saw Teddy watching with interest.
“Would you like to help, Teddy?” I said encouragingly, sitting myself down on an upturned wooden crate. “You’ve already been a big help by finding the key. Do you think you can help Toby by digging out the other side of the hole with a trowel?”
He nodded enthusiastically, his eyes glowing with the unaccustomed praise. I turned to look at the girls, who were watching the boys rather disapprovingly.
“What would you like to do if I told you a little bit of this secret garden was yours?” I asked them. “Would you like to help with the sandbox, or make your own flower beds? Or maybe we could buy one of those swing things with two seats, you know, like a boat swing.”
Sophie looked at her toes, then flicked her eyes up to meet mine. I could see she was struggling between the idea of being cool and confessing what she really wanted to do.
“Could we have a rabbit hutch, with real rabbits in it?” she said at last. “I know you don’t like animals, Mummy, but we’d look after them all by ourselves, wouldn’t we, Nicole?”
The younger girl nodded, her eyes gleaming. “Can I have a guinea pig, too?”
I laughed, surprised at how much I was suddenly enjoying the children’s company. Anything was better than staying in that oppressively immaculate house with their Captain Von Trapp of a father, I told myself.
“One thing at a time, I think. And we’ve got to ask Daddy, of course.” I glanced at my watch, realizing that I was not only getting tired, but hungry. None of us had eaten for several hours.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said, brushing aside the fatigue that was threatening to engulf me. “I’ll go and find Daddy and, if he agrees, we can go to a pet shop to look at hutches. After that we could get pizza for tea. How does that sound?”
The girls screeched with glee and Nicole actually jumped up and down with excitement. I looked back at the two boys: Toby was making brrrrming noises as he made his digger work, and Teddy concentrated silently on digging out the muddy hole, his ball still clutched in his free hand.
“Carry on with the good work here, boys,” I said. “The girls are going to show me where Daddy’s study is, then I’ll give you a shout when it’s time to go.”
Grant was astounded when I told him about the rabbits.
“It isn’t a good idea,” he said, advancing on me from around his wide mahogany desk. “Neither of us likes animals. They’re messy, smelly, and unhygienic. We discussed this a couple of years ago when Sophie wanted that hamster. You said you hated the things.”
“The children have had an awful shock,” I said carefully. “They thought they were going to lose me. I hoped having a couple of pets might give them something else to think about. And of course,” I added quickly, “they’d be down the garden, right out of sight of the house.”
Grant pursed his lips but then nodded. “Well, if you really think they’re old enough to look after them…”
“We are, Daddy, we promise,” Sophie and Nicole said, bouncing in from the hallway. “Please, Daddy, we’ll be really good.”
Grant glanced at the paperwork strewn across his desk, then down at his watch.
“I know you’ve only just come home, but what are we going to do about the children’s tea? It’s getting on for four o’clock.”
“Mummy said we could go out for a pizza, after we’ve looked at hutches,” Nicole said helpfully.
I almost laughed at the expression on Grant’s face as he digested this piece of information. In the short while I’d known him I’d already discovered he was rather stuck in his ways, but at least he seemed to be trying.
“Is that okay with you?” I prompted.
He nodded slowly.
“You don’t seem very sure.”
“It’s just that you don’t like animals and you detest pizza,” he replied in a bewildered voice. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather lie down while I make the children a sandwich or something?”
“I am tired,” I confessed. “But I’ve promised them now.”
“Will you be all right?”
It was my turn to be taken aback. “Aren’t you going to come with us?”
“I thought I’d done the school vacation chore by taking them to Chessington yesterday,” Grant commented.
“I don’t know where the shops are from here, or even where we keep the car keys,” I reminded him. “The children will be safer if you show me the way.”
“Okay, fetch the boys,” he said resignedly. “I’ll give you a guided tour of the area while we’re out so you can manage when I go back to work. I suppose I’d better show you where their schools are as well.”
The boys needed a bath when they eventually straggled back to the house, and I managed to get the worst of the mud off them while Grant tidied away his paperwork. Just after four-fifteen we were all back in the Galaxy, with the boys fighting over who was going to sit where, and the girls bickering over which CD we should play.
The commotion lasted until Grant turned to me and asked me to tell the children to shut up.
“Be quiet, children, please, or we won’t be going anywhere,” I said crisply, in the voice I used sometimes to quell difficult clients. They fell silent immediately, and Grant shot me a sideways glance that left me in no doubt that this wasn’t how Lauren usually handled the children.
Little Cranford turned out to be no more than a small village with a church, a pub, and a handful of shops. Grant drove past a boys’ preparatory school, explaining it was where the twins went to nursery class every day. We carried on through the village and out onto a larger road wi
th signposts to places I didn’t recognize.
“How far are we from London?” I asked.
“Around thirty-five miles,” Grant said. “The nearest big town is Cranbourne.”
“Oh,” I replied, disconcerted at being so far from anywhere I knew.
I sat in silence for the next few minutes, looking out of the window at the beautiful countryside flashing past the window. It occurred to me how unlucky I had been to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It worried me that not only had I been caught out in the thunderstorm that had raged all those miles away over the Epsom Downs, but that for this to have happened, Lauren had to have been struck at precisely the same time by a second lightning storm that had flashed simultaneously through this small hamlet. I shivered as I tried to block out thoughts of probability and fate and tried to turn my mind to more mundane matters.
“We don’t have to go all the way into Cranbourne to get a pizza, do we?”
Sophie and Nicole giggled behind me as Grant explained that there was a garden center and a pet shop in a complex not far away.
“And there’s an Italian pizza place a bit farther along the road,” he added, “which seems to be open all hours.” He glanced at his watch. “We’ll only just make the pet shop. I think it closes at five.”
We did indeed catch the pet shop just before it closed, but the proprietor didn’t seem in too much of a hurry to shut up shop once he sensed the opportunity for a big sale. The girls, skinny-looking in their baggy hipster jeans and sparkly pink T-shirts, cuddled each of the rabbits in turn, trying to decide which they liked the best, their long hair falling over the rabbits’ fluffy backs. Grant begrudgingly took the twins off to the garden center to buy a plastic sandbox and a couple of bags of silver sand. Meanwhile, I inspected the hutches and runs and decided on a good-sized hutch with a separate run.
“Why don’t we have the sort where the rabbits can get into the run themselves?” Sophie asked when she saw what I was looking at.
“Because then you won’t need to handle them every day and they won’t be so friendly,” I told her. “I had a rabbit as a child and I know it’s too tempting to throw food into the sort of hutch that leads into a run and not have to get the animals in and out every day. If you’re going to have these pets, you will have to see to them every single day. Even in the rain,” I added.
Sophie was cuddling a dwarf Dutch rabbit. I watched as she held her face against its soft black fur.
“You said you hated rabbits,” she said, looking at me accusingly over the rabbit’s back. “I didn’t know you’d had rabbits of your own.”
I felt myself blush. I had kept rabbits, but Lauren obviously hadn’t.
“Do you want that one?” I asked, changing the subject quickly.
“Yes please,” she said dreamily. “I love her so much.”
“What about you, Nicole?” I asked.
Nicole was holding a small multicolored guinea pig with a reddish-brown forelock sticking out just above its eyes.
“Can I have this, instead of a rabbit?” she asked.
“Of course you can,” I smiled. “Have you thought of a name?”
“Ginny,” she said, smiling to herself. “Like Ginny Weasley in Harry Potter. She’ll be my Ginny pig.”
I laughed at the joke. Nicole might be quiet, but she had a quirky sense of humor. I realized that there was a possibility I could grow to like these children. The thought was sobering. So far my first day with them had been a heady mixture of new discoveries about the family unit and how it ticked. I’d seen my part of it as a bit of an adventure, rather like I imagined a visiting auntie might feel. Although I believed their mother was dead and I had resigned myself to playing her part, at least for the time being, that was all it had been to me, a role, like I was an actress committed to performing a part in a new play. The Richardsons had meant no more to me than a dreamlike fantasy family, the result of a fluke of time and the elements.
Now, as I watched Sophie stroking her rabbit and Nicole snuggling the guinea pig under her chin, I felt a twinge of some unidentified emotion. After only a few hours in their company I felt a responsibility to them that I hadn’t expected to feel, certainly not so quickly anyway.
“Don’t forget we can’t take the animals with us today,” I cautioned. “It’s getting late and we have to find a good safe place for the hutch, fill it with sawdust and hay, and put the food and water in. Tomorrow, as soon as… er… I’m awake, we’ll get it all sorted out and come back for the animals.”
“I want to take mine now,” Sophie said, giving me a measured glance.
Shaking my head, I told her firmly no. We would fetch the animals tomorrow.
“You’ll change your mind tomorrow and you won’t let us have them!” she cried. “You said we couldn’t ever have pets. I knew it!”
I watched in dismay as she snatched up the rabbit and flounced off to the other end of the shop.
After a few seconds, I followed her and found her staring fixedly at some bird feeders, the rabbit nestled in her arms.
“Sophie?”
She didn’t answer at first, so I stooped down to her level and spoke gently but firmly.
“This rabbit is very lucky,” I told her. “She’s going to belong to a sensible girl who knows that she wouldn’t be happy sitting in a box all night. She wouldn’t, would she, Sophie?”
Sophie shrugged her shoulders and I plowed on. “We’re going to come back for her, I promise. But it is going to take time to prepare her new home properly.”
Sophie stuck out her bottom lip and dragged the toe of one of her pretty pink and white shoes across the floor, and for a moment I thought she was going to argue further.
But then she nodded and handed the creature back to the pet shop man, who was hovering nearby, waiting to carry the hutch out to the car.
Nicole meekly handed her guinea pig over, too, then came and slipped her hand into mine as we walked to the exit. It was a strange feeling having her small warm hand in mine, and I squeezed it reassuringly, though whether the reassurance was for her or for myself, I wasn’t sure.
We had just closed the rear door of the car on the large hutch, a run, a bag of sawdust, hay, and rabbit food, when Grant appeared with the twins. He was lugging a huge bag of silver sand on his shoulder.
I opened the door again quickly and he threw the heavy sack into the back, eyeing the pet equipment as he did so.
“Good grief, Lauren,” he said, straightening up and wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. “Have you bought the whole shop?”
“Actually, it’s not exactly bought yet,” I grinned. “I said you’d be in to pay for everything in a minute. He’s waiting to close up.”
Grant turned and went grumbling into the shop, while Toby jumped up and down with excitement. “Daddy says we can come back tomorrow and pick up the sandbox,” he cried. “It’s green and plastic and it’s really big. I’ll have to work very hard with my digger tomorrow to make the hole big enough!”
“That’s splendid, Toby,” I said, opening a back door so he and Teddy could squeeze themselves into their seats among the bags of hay. “This is going to be an exciting half-term break, isn’t it?”
Helping Teddy with his safety belt, I glanced into his troubled eyes and gave him a reassuring smile. “You’ll love having the sandbox, Teddy. It’s going to be yours, too.”
He was staring at the animal paraphernalia all around him, his hands squeezing rhythmically at the ball that seemed to go everywhere with him.
“Mummy’ll be cross wiv you,” he said quietly. “When she comes home and sees all this mess. She’ll make you take it all away again.”
chapter six
It felt strange waking as Jessica on Tuesday morning. As I fed Frankie and gulped down a cup of weak tea, I realized I missed the children.
We’d had a great time in the pizza parlor the previous evening, despite the gnawing ache across my injured back and shoulder. Even Grant seemed to have been
caught up in the children’s excitement as the girls told him about the pets they’d chosen, and Toby rattled on about how his digger was going to make roads and bridges in the sandbox. Only Teddy had sat quietly, slouching and staring into space with strings of melted cheese dangling between his chin and his plate, until Grant had wiped his mouth with his napkin and told him to sit up properly.
I felt bad about Teddy, I realized, as I walked around the block with Frankie and waited while she did her morning business. He knew I was an impostor, and I was pretending otherwise, making him feel he was in the wrong. But what was I supposed to do? If I told anyone the truth, they would have me committed; and if I told Teddy he was right, I risked him telling someone else, and then they’d think he was crazy, too.
By the time I’d been back to the flat to drop off Frankie and had walked to the office it was nearly eleven o’clock.
Clara was busy typing when I slid quietly into my chair and began opening Stephen’s mail.
“You’re okay,” she called across the room. “He’s already left for court. Heavy night last night, was it?”
I laughed. “You’d never believe me if I told you, Clara.”
As it happened, I’d claimed tiredness and gone up to bed shortly after tucking the children in. And I hadn’t needed to fake it. Bedtime for four children had turned out to be an exhausting military operation. The twins had needed help bathing and drying themselves and brushing their teeth, then Grant had told me Teddy still wet the bed at night and needed to be put into a nappy. The girls had wanted bedtime stories and Nicole had begged me to brush her hair for her. I was happy to do it all, but Lauren’s burns had really started to hurt under the dressings, and the challenges of the day had finally caught up with me.
When Grant had offered to come up and share my “early night” I’d told him firmly that I was truly exhausted, and he’d looked crestfallen. I reminded him rather shortly that he was still a stranger to me unless my memories returned, which it didn’t look like they were going to, and suggested I should sleep in another room. He’d shaken his head adamantly at the idea and promised he’d stay on his side of the big bed.