Hidden Cottage (37 page)
Mia blinked hard and put a hand to her mouth to stop her lips from trembling. ‘Where’s Eliza?’ she asked. Again, that protective need to know where her children were. To know they were safe.
‘She’s in the garden with Mum,’ Madison said, turning round from where she was making a mug of tea. Mia watched the girl carefully carry it across the kitchen to where Jensen was sitting in the armchair by the French doors. He’d removed his black jacket and tie and was wearing a crumpled grey cardigan over a white shirt. He hadn’t shaved since the accident and his beard accentuated how haggard he was. He’d lost weight, far too much weight for one who couldn’t spare it, and he wasn’t sleeping well. Tattie had told Mia that he had terrifying nightmares and cried out in his sleep, that he woke shaking and bathed in sweat.
Mia knew that Jensen blamed himself for not being firmer with Daisy, for insisting that she didn’t speak to Scott on her mobile. And the seatbelt. He kept blaming himself for that, for forgetting she’d released it to reach for her phone and that he hadn’t realized what the pinging sound was; it had been the seatbelt alarm.
But Jensen wasn’t to blame for the accident that would scar their lives for ever. If anyone was to blame, Mia was. She had brought this tragedy on them.
Owen saw Mia come out of the kitchen and, watching her spot Tattie and Eliza amongst the mourners, along with Simon, he decided it was now or never to speak with her. Not since they’d been at the hospital had he had a chance to speak to her on her own. There had been no communication between them in the following days and weeks. Nothing.
‘Mia,’ he said quietly as he intercepted her. ‘How are you?’ He immediately regretted the question. ‘Sorry, dumb thing to ask. You probably feel like hell, don’t you?’
‘Something like that, yes.’ Her voice was low and husky and tugged at his heart. Her gaze was completely blank.
‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ he said. ‘Anything. Name it and I’ll do it.’
‘There’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing anyone can do.’ He suddenly wished he could get her alone and hold her. Just for a minute. One whole minute to let her know that he was there for her.
He hesitated fractionally, afraid of saying the wrong thing. ‘I just want you to know, that any time you want to speak to me, you can. It doesn’t matter what time of day or night it is, ring me. I mean it.’
For the longest moment she continued to look at him without speaking. Her gaze was so blank he wondered if she’d been prescribed some sort of medication. ‘Thank you for coming today,’ she said at last. ‘It was good of you.’
He tensed. It wasn’t that she was talking to him as if he were a casual acquaintance, or worse, a stranger, that scared him, it was the total absence of emotion in her face that unnerved him. The words
catatonic shock
echoed inside his head and he realized that the mask she was hiding behind was in place even for him – even he wasn’t permitted to see the depth of her anguish.
‘Mia,’ he tried one more time, with great gentleness, ‘I can’t bear to see you like this, suffering so much. Don’t shut me out, please.’
She swallowed. ‘I’m sorry, but I have to. It’s for the best. I told you once before that I couldn’t make a difficult situation any more complicated than it already was. Which means . . . whatever we thought we had was a mistake. I should never have done it.’
He looked at her in disbelief, knowing that while her eyes were pools of haunting blankness, his reflected the profound love he felt for her. ‘Don’t say that,’ he murmured.
‘You probably won’t understand,’ she said, ‘but I feel as if what I did with you brought this tragedy on my family.’
He tried not to show his dismay. Tried to reason with himself that, shattered by grief, she needed to make sense of a senseless catastrophe. It was a natural human response; there always had to be a reason. ‘Bad karma, you mean?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
He stared at her helplessly. What could he say? Now was not the time to tell her she was wrong. He had to do as she said and allow her to retreat deep into herself. For some people it was how they protected themselves from being hurt any more than they already were. And so he had no alternative but to mask his own feelings and walk away.
Which he did, resisting the urge to say that he was a patient man and would wait for her.
It was September and Madison had been at her new school for more than a fortnight now. She loved it. There wasn’t a day when she didn’t enjoy being there. Her teacher, Miss Atherton, was brilliant and made all their lessons really fun.
Last lesson today they’d started work on a harvest festival frieze that was going to be put in the main entrance hall, where everyone would see it when they came in. The part she had been given was to paint a picture of a ploughed field with a scarecrow and birds flying above it. She was glad she had something easy to do; Beth had been given a pot of glue and a load of pasta, rice and lentils and asked to make a mosaic picture of a basket with a pumpkin in it. At the end of the lesson, when Miss Atherton had said it was time to put everything away, Madison had helped Beth sweep the floor where most of the rice and lentils had ended up. The frieze had to be finished by next week, which was when they’d be having the special harvest festival assembly, when parents and grandparents would be invited as well. Madison had been picked to read out a poem she’d written. Mum and JC had said they’d be there and Mia had also said she’d come.
With school over now, Madison and Beth were on their way to Parr’s. Friday was the best day of the week for Madison; it was when she was allowed to spend some of her pocket money at the shop on sweets or an ice-cream and then, if the weather was fine, go and sit on the green with Beth. Later she had her piano lesson with Owen. It was just the most perfect day. But then everything about living in Little Pelham was perfect. Mum let her do far more things on her own here than in London, like walking to school without her, although sometimes Mum liked to come with Madison because she enjoyed meeting the other mothers. She was doing less of the Marilyn Monroe work now, preferring instead to spend more time on the eco party bags. She was talking about selling them not just online, but actually having a shop. That would be cooler than cool because then Madison would be able to help her there. Like she helped Mia in the barn.
They had to wait ages at Parr’s before they could choose what they wanted as just about everyone else from school had got there ahead of them, including Georgina with the twins, Edmund and Luke, who were
sooo
cute.
At last they were at the front of the queue and Madison was glad it was Bob Parr who was serving them and not his wife. Wendy always stared really hard at you with her eyes all tight and narrow, like she thought you were going to steal something. The more she stared at Madison, the more she felt like pinching something! Beth’s mum said Wendy was the worst gossip on the planet and if you wanted people to know anything you just told Wendy and within an hour everyone in the village would know.
Alone in the shop today, Bob was wearing a dark blue apron over a white shirt. It was his new look and he’d started wearing the apron after the shop had closed for three days while it was given a make-over. When it had reopened, Bob and Wendy had put on a small party – Mum had been there as Marilyn Monroe and had officially reopened the shop and had her photo in the local newspaper. That was when Bob had first worn his apron. JC said give it time and he’d be wearing a bow-tie and a straw boater and the price of everything would shoot sky high.
‘Hello, girls, what can I get you?’ Bob said cheerily. ‘Probably not warm enough for an ice-cream today, is it? Looks like rain. How about a mixed bag of sweets with a twist of sherbet thrown in?’
They both said yes and he reached behind him to a shelf where he had a small pile of bags ready made up. They gave him their money, said goodbye and were out on the pavement when they saw that it didn’t just
look
like rain, it
was
raining. A group of older boys from school who’d started a game of football on the green were scooping up their school sweatshirts, coats and bags and were leaving. Beth pulled a face. ‘Better make a run for it,’ she said. They parted at Cloverdale Lane – Beth to go straight on, and Madison to go left. By now it was raining hard, and, passing Muriel’s cottage, Madison ran doubly fast, her rucksack bouncing on her back.
When the hill got too steep for her to keep running she pulled her hood over her head and waved at the ginger cat sitting in the window of No. 14 – he was always there when she came home from school. In the cottage next door lived a small white dog called Angus and his owner let Madison play with him in her garden sometimes.
Lily Cottage was almost at the very top of the hill and wasn’t as old as some of the other cottages, but Madison thought it was easily the nicest. It had walls the colour of pale honey and in the summer lots of tiny pink roses had climbed up the front of the house, all the way to the bedrooms where pretty flowered curtains showed at the windows. Mum had made them and Mrs Richards in the cottage next door liked them so much she’d asked if Mum could make some for her.
When she got round to the back door, Mum was there with an umbrella. ‘I was on my way to find you,’ she said, taking her inside and removing her dripping anorak. ‘Just look at you; you’re wet through!’
‘You’ve been baking again,’ Madison said, not caring one little bit that she was wet, not now that she could see – and smell – the plate of scones on the table. Mum claimed that living in the country had given her the push she needed to learn how to cook properly. Madison didn’t really understand why where you lived affected how you cooked, but Mum had definitely got the hang of baking. Her wet things put in the small boiler room, Madison looked longingly at the scones. ‘Can I have one before I go to Owen’s, please?’ she asked.
‘That was the general idea,’ Mum said with a smile. ‘But first, can you go upstairs and tell JC you’re home? There’s something we want to talk to you about.’
Madison’s heart did a double beat. ‘Is it something bad?’
Mum looked serious. ‘Just go up and get JC while I put the kettle on and lay the table.’
Madison had a sudden and very bad feeling that their lovely new life was about to come to an end and they would have to move back to London, back to a place where she had no friends. Or worse still— But no, she didn’t want to think of what could be worse. She still had nightmares about the crash and often dreamt that it wasn’t only Daisy who had died.
When she’d been at the hospital with Mum and Mia and they’d been waiting for news about JC, she had felt sick with fear that he was dead. Then when they knew he was OK, she had actually been sick, all over the floor in the corridor. Some of it had splashed onto Owen’s shoes. She had been so embarrassed, but the nurses had been really kind and had given her a cup of sweet tea to make her feel better. It was while she was drinking the tea – with Owen looking after her in the waiting room – that Mum and Mia were allowed to see JC. She had been told she could see him the next day, when he would be feeling stronger. She hadn’t said that it was already the next day, that it was nearly four in the morning.
At the top of the stairs, giving herself time to think, Madison went into the bathroom. She sat on the loo and thought hard. How had Mum and JC been this morning at breakfast? She racked her brains trying to remember if there had been anything different about them. Mum was a good actress when she wanted to be, but JC wasn’t – his face always gave him away – so she focused her thoughts on him. All she could come up with was that he seemed quiet, lost in his own thoughts. But then since the accident he’d been like that a lot. Introverted, was what Mum called it. She said you couldn’t survive a crash like that and not become slightly introverted.
There was something else that he suffered from at times; Mum said it was called survivor guilt. It meant that he felt bad that he had lived and Daisy had died. Madison knew it was sad that Daisy had died, but if someone had to die in that crash, she was glad it was Daisy and not JC. She couldn’t bear it if JC died. There had been times, very soon after the accident, when Madison had felt angry with Daisy, because everyone knew you weren’t supposed to use your mobile phone when you were driving. Everyone knew it was dangerous and stupid and because of Daisy’s stupidity JC could have been killed. Madison used to be on at Mum all the time about having a mobile; now she never wanted to have one. Not ever.
She flushed the toilet and washed her hands, tried again to think what it might be that Mum and JC wanted to talk about with her. Was it something to do with her piano lessons with Owen? Had they decided they were too expensive? But they weren’t, were they? Owen had said he wouldn’t charge anywhere near the proper amount because he wasn’t a qualified teacher. Not yet, anyway. He was planning to do a teaching course, though, and maybe that’s what Mum and JC were worried about. Maybe they thought that once Owen was qualified his lessons would be too expensive. She really hoped that wouldn’t happen. And it wasn’t as if Owen needed the money. They all knew that he was super,
super
rich and didn’t need to work, that being a piano teacher was something he wanted to do because he liked the idea of teaching others something he loved.
Finished in the bathroom, she climbed yet more stairs, to the very top of the house, to what had once been the loft. The owners they rented the cottage from had turned the loft into a big bedroom with the tiniest bathroom next to it, and it was up here that Mum and JC had their office, where JC did his website work at one end of the room and Mum did her eco party bags at the other.
Her stomach churning with panicky dread, Madison tapped on the half-open door – just as Mum had insisted she did in case JC was on the phone.
When Madison’s face peered round the door, Jensen stopped what he was doing and took off his reading glasses – he’d only had them a few weeks and he was still getting used to using them. Tattie had been right about him needing to get his eyes tested. ‘I’m always right,’ she’d told him. ‘Get used to it, buddy.’