by Camilla Way
Viv hadn’t moved. ‘Where are we going?’
The reply had been astonishing. ‘To see your grandparents,’ Stella had said.
The journey had been a long one, taken first by train then coach to a faraway rain-drenched city and followed by another journey by bus to a small village. She could tell by the look in her mother’s eye that it wasn’t the time for questions, so she’d sat quietly next to her, holding her hand, trying not to worry. She’d never met her grandparents before and she wondered what they might be like. Her mother had only ever told her that they lived far away, and that she hadn’t seen them for a long time, and something had made Viv know not to push for more.
When they’d arrived, the house had been very large and beautiful, surrounded by rolling countryside. Vivienne, told to wait at the gate, had watched as her mother traipsed up the long drive, approached the door and knocked. A grey-haired man had answered, and Viv never knew what was spoken between them, only that minutes later the door had slammed shut, Stella had returned to where she waited and said in a voice as heavy as stones, ‘Get up, Vivienne. There’s nothing for us here.’
They’d made the return journey mostly in silence, her mother lost in thought and unreachable. It was late when they got back to their cottage and for some time they had stood staring at the front door, the moonlight revealing what was painted there in vicious foot-high letters: LIARS.
4
It was a few weeks after that when Vivienne’s life in Essex came to an abrupt end. Viv had returned home from school one day to find Stella packing their one and only suitcase. ‘We’re moving to London,’ she’d said as Viv watched her, wide-eyed. ‘Take that uniform off and throw it in the bin.’ Then she’d tossed her Ruby’s little green rucksack. ‘Put whatever you can fit in there, the rest we’ll leave. Let that pig of a landlord deal with it.’
They left there and then, taking a bus to the nearest station to catch a train to a new life. She had sat across from her mother, her bag of belongings on her lap, and tried to make sense of it all. Were they leaving because of Jack’s family? Or because they had no money left to pay the rent? She had sneaked a glance at her mum, and thought she understood: Ruby’s death was too sad, too terrible, to do anything else but run from.
For the first few months of their new London life they’d moved from place to place, to the spare beds or sofas belonging to ‘friends of friends’, or the sister of someone Stella used to work with. Sometimes Viv thought about the toys and bedroom she’d left behind, she thought of her friends and the people she knew in their village, but then she remembered the cold dragging misery of Ruby’s funeral, the cross bearing her and Noah’s names, the mound of earth covered in irises, her sister’s favourite flower, and she knew she never wanted to go back there again.
Stella never said how she found the commune in Nunhead and Vivienne didn’t ask, it was just another surprising turn in this constantly twisting new life of theirs. It was 1985, Nunhead a grubby pocket of south-east London tucked between New Cross and Peckham. The occasional small and dusty pub filled with small and dusty old men; clusters of council estates, Afro-Caribbean barber shops that stayed open half the night, lights and music and laughter spilling out across the pavement, narrow streets of dirty-bricked terraces, punctuated here and there by a greasy spoon, a bookies, a launderette. It was as far away from their rural Essex lives as Mexico or the moon.
Unity House had been on the border of New Cross, along a wide street lined with tall Victorian houses with steep steps to the door, from where you could look down at the barred windows of the cool dark basement area far below. Viv and her mother had arrived there one rainy Tuesday afternoon. They’d stood staring up at its yellow front door, they and their bags growing steadily damper in the drizzle.
Suddenly the door had opened and a young, pretty woman with a mass of black curls tied back with a red bandana and huge silver hoops in her ears had said, ‘Hello! You must be the new recruits. I’m Jo. Looks like you could do with a cuppa.’ And Viv had looked into Jo’s smiling face and something tightly bound inside her had unloosened 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.
5
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 takes one look at her mother and wails, ‘Oh Mum! You’re not even dressed! You’re supposed to be taking me to footie!’
Guiltily Viv jumps to her feet. ‘OK, OK! I’ll be ready in two minutes. Jeez, 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.