packing a case.’ Leo shook her head as a vivid memory hit her. She was sitting silent and speechless downstairs while her dad was banging around upstairs. Neither of them had tried to comfort the other. She had been too distraught to understand what was going on. Her father had bundled her in the car, and that’s when she had started to cry. She felt as if she was leaving her - leaving her mum - and that didn’t seem right.
‘My dad did try to talk to me, but I wasn’t listening.’ Leo looked at Tom with a smile. ‘My mum was great. A real hippy chick, and loads of fun.’
Leo remembered feeling as if she had been broken into tiny pieces. As if bits of her were splintering off. But that was too much to share with Tom. Better to stick to the facts.
‘I refused to listen to anything my father was saying. I think I sensed that I wasn’t going to want to hear it, and I couldn’t understand why he was taking me away. He was bringing me here. To Little Melham, and to Willow Farm.’
Leo swallowed as the memories rose in a huge bubble to the surface, escaping from the black hole where they had been buried for years. She recalled that the journey hadn’t been a long one, but her dad had given up trying to speak to her. They had finally pulled up at the very bottom of the drive, and he had forced her to look at him.
‘Listen, L,’ he’d said. He had always shortened her name from Leonora to L. ‘This is going to come as a bit of a surprise, but I need to explain to you that I have another wife. She lives here. She doesn’t know about you, but I’m sure you’re going to get on fine.’
Leo didn’t understand. What did he mean, another wife? And whose was this house? A tiny part of her mind registered her confusion, but the rest was too full of grief to cope with the intrusion of other emotions. Her dad had walked into the house. She hadn’t really taken in what he had said. All she could see in her mind was her mother’s body.
She had leaned her head against the car window, her sobs having subsided into irregular juddering hiccups, and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her jumper.
‘He asked me to wait in the car while he went to talk to his wife. God knows what he told her, or what excuses he gave. I was still sitting there not knowing what was happening when there was a piercing scream from the house, full of anger and anguish, as if it were coming up through someone’s feet and reverberating through every inch of their body. It didn’t take me long to realise it was my stepmother’s response to having a ten year old child that she knew nothing about foisted on her. That, and finding out that her husband was a bigamist.’
Tom was propping his chin up on the clenched fist of one hand, his eyes a picture of concern.
‘I’m so sorry I asked, Leo. I had no right to push you to talk about all this stuff.’
Don’t give me sympathy, Leo thought. I might not be able to finish and that would somehow be worse than never starting.
‘If I hadn’t told you, somebody else would. You must know by now what they’re like in this village.’ Leo mentally gritted her teeth as she continued her story. ‘When I eventually went into the house there was this girl, standing by her mum and looking as bewildered as I felt, but that was nothing to the look I got from my stepmother. It was a look of pure malice, as if somehow this was all my fault. From then on, she treated me as a drudge, and had no compunction about slapping me around. But not much more than that. My father took no interest. I think he loved my mum, but was stuck with Ellie’s mother - The Old Witch, as Max always called her. But my father was a disgrace. He did nothing to protect me - simply handed me over and lived his own life. I barely spoke to him after that, and he came and went all the time. We never knew where he was or when he’d be back, and nobody ever told us. I left home as soon as I thought I would be