Uphill All the Way (23 page)

Once she'd gained her balance, Wilma hotched her way down the hall that was carpeted in a funny shade of honey, pushing the walking frame out in front of her and shuffling to catch up to it, her handbag swinging from a hook at the front. 'Isn't it too dark to see the river?'

'They have lights shining on it. It's pretty.'

Wilma chuckled creakily and rattled her sweet against her dentures. 'Pretty wet! Is it raining?'

'No, not at the moment.' Molly's voice was made for reassurance. She took up station beside Wilma, ready to catch her arm if she wobbled. This was the way they usually divided the responsibilities: driving and wheelchair, Judith, giving an arm and being soothing, Molly.

'Is it going to?' Wilma persisted.

Judith wheeled the folded chair. 'Perhaps later.'

Her mother halted, and Judith almost ran her over. Wilma sucked vigorously. 'Do we want to go, if it's raining?'

'The car's right outside, I'll put your chair in the boot while you hang on here with Molly, then I'll open the car door. You won't feel more than two drops, even if it pours.'

Wilma didn't budge. 'Only I've just had my hair set. It was a new girl came round, and she's done it lovely, hasn't she?'

'Lovely.' Judith joined Molly in chorus, and successfully smothered a sigh. Making her mother happy was getting increasingly difficult. Wilma was losing her confidence about being taken out of The Cottage, but didn't always want to be left in it. She worried if her daughters phoned instead of visiting, but she admitted that their visits tired her.

'Do they do scones, at this new place of yours?'

'Yes!' Judith paused for effect. 'With
oodles
of jam.'

'One oodle will be enough, dear.' Spurred on by the promise of jam, Wilma set off again. Then, hovering in the doorway with Molly, she observed Judith's struggles to fit the wheelchair in her boot. 'Pity you didn't bring Adam, he's good at lifting the chair.'

And better at charming Wilma, Judith thought, exchanging a look with Molly. Molly, having long ago conquered any antipathy towards Adam, often teased him that Wilma had a crush on him. Wilma never seemed as tiring when Adam was there to make her laugh, and never checked her watch and wondered if she'd be back in time for cocoa.

'There,' she said, when she was settled. 'Now, Judith, how's Kieran? He hasn't been to see me for weeks.'

Molly rubbed her forehead as Judith pulled up outside the house at Fairbank Close. 'Gosh, Mum is exhausting these days! Not her fault, of course, bless her. Coming in for a cuppa?'

Although she'd planned to go straight home for a couple of hours with the latest Harlan Coben thriller, Judith found herself accepting the invitation. Home meant not only the seat-edge thrills of Harlan Coben, but a lot of time to think. About Alexia, the crucifix, and who it actually belonged to. About today's bijou funeral for a bijou life. About Kieran, his face floating before her eyes, empty, shattered.

She followed Molly into the dead neat, dead plain home decorated in beige and peach. She could certainly do with a cosy sisterly chat, she thought. If only she had a cosy sister rather than one who was convinced of her duty to deliver opinions on Judith whenever possible. They made for the kitchen – beige units, peach walls – Molly fussing over her long, wool coat as she slid it on a hanger and hung it in the cloaks cupboard.

Judith tossed the emerald cocoon over the newel post. 'Do you think I'm blokish, Moll?'

'Blokish?' Pausing in the act of washing her hands, Molly's eyes grew round. 'What,
butch
do you mean?'

Judith considered as she hopped up onto a stool. 'Not butch, exactly. But... unfeminine?'

Molly shrugged. 'Depends which definition of unfeminine.'

Judith felt her eyebrows fly up in horror that Molly hadn't shrieked in protest at 'unfeminine' and 'Judith' arising in the same sentence. 'Using any definition!'

Molly whipped a broderie anglaise apron around her waist and fastened it in a bow. 'You're very independent, of course, and you're often - almost always - natural.'

Judith's voice sharpened. 'What do you mean, 'natural'?'

'Without make-up or artifice. Also, perhaps because you're quite tall, you
stride
everywhere.'

'I have a naturally long step.'

'You hardly ever wear heels.'

'They'd make me taller!'

'You overtake a lot when you're driving.'

'And
overtaking
makes me blokish?'

Molly dropped two teabags into a pretty china teapot, white-and-peach. '
I
never said blokish! But it is manly to overtake, isn't it? I always queue behind any traffic, but men rush by, even when they can't really see what's tearing up to meet them.'

Judith sighed. If it was 'manly' to overtake, this conversation was never going to evolve as she'd like. 'I don't think I meant the way I drive or walk. Go back to
independent
.'

'Overly independent,' said Molly, thoughtfully, as the kettle made its first grumbles and hisses. 'Fiercely independent. Non-clinging. Clear. Not requiring advice. Some people call it being bloody-minded.'

'But it's good, isn't it, not to cling?' Judith ignored the bloody-minded bit.

Her sister shrugged shoulders that had grown plumper since she'd left Frankie although Frankie, conversely, looked thinner every time Judith saw him in town, undoubtedly because he had no one to cook him dinners and puddings each evening.

'Depends who you are and what you want. When I left Frankie there was no one I'd rather have had in my corner. You were encouraging and supportive, you have a built in scanner to detect lies and nonsense, and you're overawed by no one and nothing.' Molly used a small pair of scissors to slit open a packet of shortbread, the expensive, thick and delicious kind, and began to set it out on the plate like the hands of a clock.

'So? I still don't see the problem!'

Molly spaced out her wedges of shortbread with military precision. 'I didn't say there was a problem. I lean on you, Mum leans on you, Kieran does, even Tom still would, if you'd let him.'

'But?'

Molly sighed, and washed crumbs from her fingertips at the tap. 'But if I was a man who liked women to be frilly and girly, I suppose I wouldn't be yearning after a Judith. I'd be after something more malleable, someone who'd demand my attention, look to me to solve things for her.'

Judith's stomach clenched. 'You'd be looking for a Liza?'

'Oh gosh.' Molly's hands froze in mid-air, and she looked stricken. 'Sorry! That was a bit close to home, wasn't it? I didn't mean to go there.'

Judith pursed her lips. 'Anything else?'

Molly smiled, and passed her the biggest piece of shortbread. 'You could do with tidying up. But that's just you, Judith. Your hair needs cutting, you stride about in your jeans and boots, efficient and practical. But men's eyes still follow you!'

'Except men who like feminine women?'

Molly hopped up onto a stool and took the second-biggest piece of shortbread. 'Well, you can't expect to attract all of them.'

Chapter Twenty-one

'
There
! First exit from this roundabout... don't
miss
it, dummy!'

Cutting up the car behind Adam managed to turn in time, muttering darkly about signposts and 'dummy' and lifting an apologetic hand at an angry honk from a Toyota almost on his bumper. On the other side of the roundabout, the traffic braked once more to a halt. Adam muttered, and glanced at his watch.

From the mobile phone, Judith made an apologetic call to the day's victims, the Donlyns, a family in a mag feature about childhood sweethearts. Nigel Donlyn, the father, snorted into the phone. 'I took a half-day off work for this, you know.'

'I
know
.' Judith was gravely sympathy. 'We
do
appreciate your co-operation. But the M1 is closed and we're having to navigate the A roads along with all the rest of the motorway traffic. We won't be a
moment
longer than we need, I
promise
. I can only ask you to hang on just another half-hour for me.'

'You're an ace crawler,' Adam observed as she shut the phone as the traffic actually allowed the car up to thirty miles per hour. 'That bloke didn't stand a chance against your
for me
and
promise
in that soft, sexy voice you put on.'

'It's a talent,' she owned. 'When I was a surveyor I used to leave all the yelling to the men. I won more arguments with my syrupy voice than I lost.'

Adam launched the car onto yet another roundabout. 'I've had no problems with picture desks since you took over my queries. You just sugar them into submission.'

'More like saccharin,' she observed, cheerfully. 'Artificial.'

Finally, they arrived at a 1970s chalet bungalow, liberally clad with overlapping semi-circular tiles the colour of wet bark. 'Ugly,' Adam remarked, grabbing his case. Judith loaded her arms briskly with tripod, stands and umbrellas.

Nigel Donlyn flung open the door as they knocked. 'You only just caught me. I was going to give you up and go to work!'

Judith summoned her best smile. 'We can't thank you enough, we're so grateful. We would've flown if we could.'

Nigel Donlyn looked slightly mollified, stepping back to admit them to the house. 'Is it you what's been ringing me, then? You don't look how I thought.'

'Sorry, were you expecting a twenty-five-year-old dolly?' Judith made a comic face.

Mr. Donlyn looked discomfited. 'I didn't mean - '

In the sitting room, the other Donlyns waited, mother, Hayley, generous of figure and dark of hair, and two teenagers, Samuel, a loud show-off, and Jemma with a practised line in rolling eyes and petulant tuts. Both teenagers gazed open mouthed at Adam's right hand. Judith gauged by the deepening of his frown lines that he was uncomfortable with their stares.

But as he needed both hands so couldn't jam the right one in a pocket, he got straight down to work, moving the Christmas tree out of sight, shoving chairs around, murmuring, 'Jude, see if you can get Hayley's blouse and lipstick changed, or her skin tone's going to look horrible.'

While Adam got into conversation with the kids to try and put them at ease, Judith coaxed Hayley out of an unflattering lime green top and into a soft raspberry pink that brought out the roses in her creamy cheeks, and to replace her blood red lipstick with a toning mulberry.

'It's not you,' she promised reassuringly. 'But certain colours argue with the camera. We want you to be lovely, don't we?'

Next she chatted Nigel out of his England football shirt that rode up to exhibit the underside of his hairy paunch and into a hyacinth blue polo shirt that didn't.

Adam wanted shots of Nigel and Hayley washing up together in the kitchen. Hayley's disappointment with this idea was obvious. 'But the kitchen needs decorating!' she objected. 'Why can't we be taken in the lounge, like the children? The wallpaper's lovely, in there, and the suite's only a year old.'

'It's the spirit of the feature.' Judith turned up her palms, as if she totally agreed, but what could you do? 'To give the reader a glow, you know, the idea that you deal with everyday life together and stay happy.'

'I wouldn't be happy drying up in this shirt,' objected Nigel.

'You wouldn't be happy just 'cos you've got hold of the tea towel,' pointed out Hayley, comfortably. Then she launched into the story of how she and Nigel started going out together at the third-year Christmas disco and had never looked at another person, not neither of them.

Judith slotted a slave flash onto a stand while Adam got the couple laughing guiltily about how their parents had been outraged when they got engaged on Hayley's sixteenth birthday without seeking permission. The parents had accused Hayley of being pregnant. She wasn't, but they'd had their moments, heh, heh.

It was typical for the victims to believe that the photographer would want to hear their story, although that was obviously the province of the freelance writer who'd identified the Donlyns as a case history in the first place.

Then Judith's mobile phone went off with a loud rendition of a Mexican dance, distracting Nigel and Hayley just when Adam was beginning to get them relaxed and to forget they were the subjects of a photo shoot. He looked at Judith sharply, brows raised as she scrabbled for her phone. That, from Adam, was like a ferocious scowl from anyone else, and she felt herself flushing. 'Sorry, sorry,' she muttered. And whizzed out into the hall.

Immediately, she whizzed back. 'It's for you, Adam.' Her voice was solemn but her eyes danced as she offered him the phone. 'It's Matthias. He says, do you know your phone's off?'

With a curse, Adam swiped the mobile from her hand. 'It's switched off because I'm on a shoot, Matthias! No,
obviously
I haven't forgotten about tomorrow, son, and
obviously
I'll be on time! Whatever else you have to worry about, it's not me!' He switched the phone off. 'Flaming boy. Since when have I been a
wedding photographer
, anyway?'