everything about having Victor here was turning out to be harder than I’d envisaged without him getting into drugs on my watch.
Chapter Seven
I spent the rest of the morning unable to dispel the odd feeling that Faye was annoyed with me, despite me staying up half the night with her vomiting offspring. I kept looking at my phone, hoping for a text saying ‘Sorry about last night and thank you for looking after Georgia. By the way, I didn’t mean to lecture you earlier, I was just worried and you’re doing a great job. Am coming to the rugby match so will see you later.’ I wondered how many people in the world knew exactly where their mobiles were because they were living in hope of a beep to smooth over an awkward moment without the need to have the conversation in person.
I tried to discuss Faye’s attitude with Patrick after lunch.
He put the newspaper down, but I could tell he was itching to get back to it. ‘She was probably just a bit embarrassed because Georgia had shown herself up and was trying to put the spotlight on someone else.’
I leaned forwards on the table and brought my face close to his. ‘But she did kind of pluck the idea out of nowhere. That because Victor’s lost his mum, we need to be on drug alert.’
Patrick took a slurp of his coffee. ‘She does have a point. Some kids do go right off the rails when they’ve suffered a trauma. And Lee and Faye can be a bit preachy about parenting. They think they’ve got all the answers.’
‘It really gets up my pipes that she can’t ever look at her kids and accept they might actually be the ones at fault. Instead her answer is to start making insinuations about everyone else.’
Patrick sighed as though I was losing myself in a teacup. ‘Why don’t you tell her that her comments really annoyed you, then?’
There he had the ultimate trump card to which I could only huff and puff. I was a coward. I didn’t know how to confront people without being afraid of them hating me for speaking up.
Now Ginny was gone, I wasn’t awash with good friends. I didn’t have Patrick’s confidence, the assumption that any group would part slightly to make way for me. It took me ages to make a close friend. It had only really happened with Faye through the girls being in the same class at primary school. We’d spent a lot of time together, whispering through recorder concerts, catching each other’s eyes at parents’ evenings and volunteering at the same school events so we could have a bit of fun. I couldn’t afford to lose her.
I took myself off for a walk, trying to concentrate on the autumn colours, the birdsong, the shapes of the leaves, the things that historically soothed my brain. Ginny had always mocked my default to nature in troubled times. ‘What you need is to get yourself into town where there’s a bit of life.’ I did love visiting her in Cardiff, the sheer vibrancy of the place, but I was always glad to get back to the village, to my cottage backing onto the cemetery, full of names like Herbert, Gladys and Hector, where the horse chestnut trees outside my bedroom window walked me through the seasons.
I sat on a bench in the churchyard. My longing to speak to Ginny was overwhelming. I’d barely had time to examine the hole she’d left in the whirlwind of getting Victor settled and keeping Phoebe clinging to the straight and narrow. I closed my eyes and turned my face to the weak sunshine glinting off the church tower. For the first time since her funeral, I lifted the tiniest corner of the lid I’d jammed down on the great big messy emotions surrounding my grief.
The rawness of her absence, the desire to hear her say, ‘You need to stop being so damn nice’ engulfed me. And I surrendered to it, crying my heart out between Ernest (1899–1951) on my left and Nell (1897–1961) on my right. They’d both lived longer than she had and they were born in the nineteenth century when they were probably mainlining heroin for toothache.
Ginny would be furious if she saw me shuffling through life like someone who was afraid of disturbing the air around her rather than attacking every day with fierce determination.
With that thought in my head, I said goodbye out loud to Ernest and