I Should Be So Lucky
Read I Should Be So Lucky Online
Authors: Judy Astley
About the Book
Viola hasn’t had much luck with men. Her first husband, Marco, companion of her youth and father of her only child, left her when he realized he was gay. Her second, Rhys, ended his high-octane, fame-filled life by driving his Porsche into a wall. No wonder her family always believes she needs Looking After, and her friends think she really shouldn’t be allowed out on her own ...
Which is why, at the age of thirty-five, she finds herself shamefully back at home, living with Mum.
Viola knows she has to take charge; she needs to get a life, and fast. With a stroppy daughter, a demanding mother and siblings who want to control her life for her, where is she going to turn?
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I don’t want to have a ‘Thanks-To’ list that sounds like an Oscar speech but there are several people who have, in their various ways, helped me to get this book written.
So, my thanks to:
Elizabeth Garrett for the most wonderful writing retreat week at Cliff Cottage, and to Katie Fforde and Catherine (Captain) Jones for being such fabulously fun retreat mates. We even managed to get lots of work done somewhere between the gin and the dolphin-watching.
To Chris Chesney and to Danny Relph for giving me a tour of Danny’s premises at Palmbrokers Ltd and essential information about the kind of film/TV/advertising-industry plant-hire that is the green stuff, not massive machinery.
To Susie Bould for permission to include her First-Date-Hell
experience
. May she for ever have boyfriends of utter delight.
To Sam Eades for letting me use the truly horrible Incident of The Bag. Top tip from this: if you ever get your handbag nicked and you then get it back, give it a good sniff before you use it again.
And as always, thanks to my fab agent, Caroline Sheldon, and to Linda Evans and Alison Barrow at Transworld, without whom, etc.
ONE
VIOLA KNEW IT
was time to go home when the many shades of pink in Charlotte’s sitting room made her think of the messier surgical events in
Casualty
. At the point where the claret-coloured sofa seemed to be morphing into a giant haemorrhaging liver, she stuffed that week’s book-group choice (
Sense and Sensibility
) into her bag with a firmness that Jane Austen, even at her most waspish, really didn’t deserve. The others were talking holidays and handbags now anyway, two subjects on which Viola didn’t have a lot to say, having bought neither that were worthy of discussion for a couple of years. The book had long since been dealt with, swiftly and without mercy; the Austen aspect having descended into a discussion about the fat-hiding quality of Empire-line frocks and whether sprigged muslin would ever again be an on-trend style statement.
Party’s over, Viola decided. With difficulty, she hauled
her
whirling brain back to reality and queasily tried not to picture Slit-Wrist Scarlet (contrast-feature wall, over fireplace) listed on Farrow & Ball’s paint chart as a bloody trickle instead of a neat rectangle, sandwiched between Picture Gallery Red and Dead Salmon. Charlotte must have been in a state of severe iron deficiency the day she chose the decor for this room.
‘Sorry, everyone, lovely evening but I have to go now. Curfew.’ She wobbled a bit as she got up. The massed perfumes of the seven assembled women in an overheated room were surely dangerously potent: what with that and the collective hair products they’d all go up in a whopping fireball if anyone lit a match. And of course once
that
thought had crossed her mind Viola immediately looked round nervously to make sure Lisa wasn’t casually lighting up a B&H and about to blast them all to pieces. That instant tension was what you got when you had the kind of life where the default setting was for everything to go as wrong as it possibly could. But Lisa was halfway out of her chair, taking Viola’s departure as a break opportunity, and nodding apologetically garden-wards, ciggies and lighter safely unlit in her hand.
‘Oh, Vee! What do you mean,
curfew
?’ Charlotte’s smile was a mocking one. ‘Come on, stay a bit longer; it’s only just gone ten. You’re nearly fort— I mean over
thirty
, not thirteen!’
Sometimes, I don’t like you an awful lot, Charlotte, Viola thought suddenly. Wouldn’t it be great to be able
to
say that out loud? But you didn’t do that, not to a woman from whom you’ve accepted an evening’s worth of hospitality and more than your share of luscious lemon drizzle cake. She stayed patient and polite but determined. ‘Can’t stay any longer, I’m afraid. I promised Mum I wouldn’t be late back.’
‘
Your mother?
Darling, it gets worse – you’re not
still
camping out at the old family homestead, are you?’ Charlotte was openly jeering now. The others (apart from sweet Amanda) smirked a bit but looked awkward. Jessica blew Viola a cheery goodbye kiss. Lisa waved through the back-garden window but the choices hung in the room’s hot air: humour your hostess or support her victim? Viola vaguely pondered this tricky social dilemma on their collective behalf. Then she caught Amanda firing a warning glare across to Charlotte, who looked instantly alarmed and clapped her hand to her mouth. She’d remembered. This happened a lot.
In the sixteen months since Rhys had died Viola had learned that she carried her youthful widowhood around like a big ugly disfigurement: something not to be mentioned but impossible to overlook. From the beginning it had made even those she was closest to overcareful of her, wary of saying the wrong thing in case they accidentally pushed Viola into shattering emotional meltdown. In fact, Charlotte’s unthinking teasing was a welcome change from being treated with
velvety
care. All the same, it didn’t make Charlotte any easier to love.
In the hallway, as Viola pulled her jacket from the heap draped over the banisters, she had a flashback to being
actually
thirteen, when getting ready for games in the school gym’s changing room meant exposing the awful truth – that her mother insisted she wear a vest under her uniform shirt to ward off chills, even in May, and even though she was also wearing a bra (albeit with not much in it). It was always the girls like Charlotte who had thought it fun to tease, to round up the others to point and laugh, knowing that they’d got plenty of backup in case you felt brave enough to retaliate. You’d ring a helpline for less than that these days, she thought as she put her jacket on quickly and called a brief goodbye through the sitting-room door to the rest of the group.
‘My mother is keeping an eye on Rachel for me, Charlotte,’ Viola said as Charlotte opened the front door. ‘I don’t want to push my luck there.’ She hesitated, more than half expecting Charlotte to point out that, at close to fifteen, the last thing Rachel would want or need was to be ‘kept an eye on’, which would then lead to explanations about the creaky, creepy, dark house, the unreliable door locks and rusting window catches. But Charlotte was glancing back into the room where the others had gone into shrieky-laughter mode, and she was eager to be in on the joke.
‘OK, sweetie.’ Charlotte air-kissed her briefly. ‘I know it must be difficult for you. We’re always here if you need us, you know, Vee. Don’t forget. Call any time. And I mean
any
time, for
any
thing. And, you know, I’m so glad you came out tonight. Shows you’re getting back to normal, which you so
need
. After all, make the most of it. Any of us could be run over by a bus tomorrow.’ Charlotte then squeezed her hand, giving her a deep, between-the-eyes sincerity look, but had shut the door firmly by the time Viola was down the steps.
People often said that ‘any time’ thing when there’d been a death. Viola had noticed that, since Rhys. It was kind and well meant but not particularly realistic. For what would happen if, in the middle of the night, she called Charlotte and said she had a raging migraine and would she mind coming round at seven in the morning to make sure that sleep-addicted Rachel got up and left for school in time, and that she’d got her violin, gym kit and lunch money with her? Exactly. It was the true awkwardness of asking friends for that kind of help that had sent Viola back to relying on the shelter of her family when things went wrong. And how horribly often they did … As for being run over by a bus, if Charlotte (breathtakingly tactless) had left that door open a few minutes longer, Viola would have been able to tell her that she’d already had a near-disastrous encounter of that kind, thank you very much: with a big red number 33, at the age of eleven, while cycling all
dreamily
careless across the road to the ice-cream van.
Naomi tiptoed across the parquet-floored hallway to lean her ear against the door that connected to the apartment at the side of the house where Viola and Rachel were currently living. Not a sound came from beyond the heavy oak door, which wasn’t good. Rachel was a teenager – surely there would be noisy music? Or the TV on at an unsociable volume? Or maybe she’d got those little white bud things clamped in her ears to listen to music, the way everyone on the streets did. If she’d got a boy in there with her, Naomi hadn’t seen him arrive. She rather wished she
had
seen one. If she had caught Rachel sneaking a boyfriend in for an evening of dangerous underage consorting, Naomi could have bustled into the flat quite legitimately, pretending she was just being good-manners sociable rather than guarding her granddaughter’s virtue. She wasn’t actually against teenage sexual activity: heaven only knew, the hormones kicked in with magnificent fury in those years, just as nature intended, but safe-ish sixteen was a good year away yet and she didn’t want Rachel being exploited by some crass young twerp with no clue what he was doing.
If Rachel wasn’t alone, she could take them some of the fairy cakes (she refused to call them cupcakes, as they now seemed to be known) that she kept a handy supply of, safe from marauding mice in a Queen’s
Jubilee
tin in the old spidery larder. She would have sat on the smaller of the two crackled leather sofas in there, across from the thwarted couple, grilling the poor boy about his school exams and listening to his accent to make sure he wasn’t the kind who said ‘innit’ every five seconds. Or worse, was one who sniffed. She detested sniffers. If she was close behind one in the Waitrose checkout queue he always got the sharp spike of her shopping trolley. On your own premises it was possibly acceptable to offer a box of tissues. Certainly, if Rachel had her mother’s luck in picking male friends, he’d be sure to be both an ‘innit’ boy and an incurable sniffer.
She thought about trying the door and just walking in. The company of Rachel would be welcome: television on Tuesdays wasn’t inspiring; she’d finished all her library books and there wasn’t an unread murder mystery left in the house. Or she could knock on the door. She
should
knock, of course. Just walking in would be wrong, even if it were a lot more fun. But it was part of the agreed deal of Viola and Rachel being on the premises – that they would keep separate households, have their privacy. Of course it was just possible Rachel had simply gone to bed. Didn’t she have exams coming up soon? Viola had said something about them, she was fairly sure.