Life as I Know It (11 page)

I saw the light go out of Teddy’s eyes and guessed what he was thinking. He hung his head as if knowing he was also broken, imperfect, and therefore not worth anything in his father’s view, either. My heart went out to him and I held out my hand. “Why don’t you show me where you keep your toys?” I asked.

“Teddy doesn’t have toys, Mummy,” Toby blurted out as Teddy eyed my hand suspiciously. “You know he only likes his stupid ball.”

“Well, show me your toys,” I said to Toby. “And Teddy can come and watch.”

Grant touched my arm and I turned back to him.

“Look, I’m sorry about that. I’m not myself at the moment. This is all going to take some getting used to. Will you be all right if I pop up into my study to catch up on some paperwork?” he asked.

I nodded, already feeling exhausted. The burns to Lauren’s
shoulder were beginning to chafe. “I’m sure the children will tell me where everything is,” I said, finding myself immensely relieved he wasn’t intending to be at my side every second of the day. “It’s not as if I’m really ill or anything.”

He looked hesitant, but I assured him we’d be fine so he strode off into another part of the house and disappeared from my thoughts. As soon as he’d gone I followed the twins into the playroom. Sophie and Nicole were watching a game show on the old television set, lounging on the beanbags in the middle of the room. Sophie pretended she hadn’t seen me, but Nicole sprang to her feet and came to hold my hand as I stood there wondering what to do.

It felt odd to be home in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, even if I ignored the strangeness of the rest of my situation. With my hand still imprisoned in Nicole’s, I walked with her to the window and looked out at the front garden and the road. Outside, the October sunshine beamed down and I thought how lovely it would be to walk Frankie on a day like this. The feeling that I was trapped descended like a cloud over me. I was used to being my own person and I needed my space.

Toby had already started zooming his cars around the road map on the floor, crashing every so often into the white-painted baseboard so that white flakes dropped off onto the carpet. He held up a yellow dump truck. “This is my best toy,” he said. “This and the digger.”

Nicole was looking at me anxiously. She seemed like a sensitive little girl who was desperate for my attention and I didn’t want to disappoint her. I squeezed her hand reassuringly, then turned reluctantly from the window and made a show of inspecting her brother’s toys closely.

“They’re very realistic,” I said. “Do you ever take them outside and dig real mud or sand with them?”

Toby’s mouth dropped open slightly and he shook his head. “You said toys aren’t allowed in the garden,” he replied.

“Well, I’ve changed my mind,” I said firmly, straightening up carefully. I put my shoulder discomfort to the back of my mind. “Come on all of you. Nicole, Sophie, you can show me the garden. And Toby, bring your digger and truck.”

I flicked off the television set, ignoring indignant moans from Sophie, and followed a grinning Toby out through a utility room into the back garden. There was a wide paved patio area, which hadn’t been visible from above, with a wooden table and matching chairs clustered round it. The patio steps led down onto the grassed lawn.

“What’s behind those fir trees?” I asked them, staring down the garden.

Sophie and Nicole exchanged looks as if to say “How can she be so stupid?” and Sophie said, rather condescendingly, “That’s where Jim puts the grass cuttings and stuff.”

“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 with 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.