Читать книгу Who Killed Ruby? онлайн | страница 10
That had been two weeks ago. She’d not seen him since, had managed to avoid coming to her mother’s house until today. But as she and Cleo finally get to the door, Shaun appears at the top of the stairs. He stops, looking her up and down insultingly, and she feels a flash of cold dislike.
‘Going so soon?’ he says, sauntering down towards her.
She puts her hand on Cleo’s shoulder and steers her towards the door. ‘Yep, gotta run. Bye.’ She and Cleo go out into the night, and she closes the door firmly behind her, a shiver of disgust prickling her skin.
Their house is a twenty-minute walk from Stella’s, on the other side of the Rye, and Vivienne pushes Shaun from her thoughts as she links her arm through her daughter’s. ‘How was school today, love?’ she asks.
For a while they chat about a history project Cleo’s been working on and how she thinks her team will do in an upcoming football match, and Viv smiles down at her, her happy, popular child, always tumbling from one enthusiasm to the next. She’d been twenty-six when she’d become pregnant, a result of a brief and unhappy fling with one of the suppliers for her café, a handsome but feckless Irishman named Mike who was a few years younger than herself. He’d run a mile at the news of her pregnancy and had kept only sporadic contact with his daughter since. It had always been the two of them after that, and as a result they’d always been close – as close as Viv was to her own mother, in fact.
As they draw nearer to their street Vivienne shivers in the cold November night and murmurs, ‘Thank God it’s Friday. I can’t wait to get home. We’ll have spaghetti for tea, shall we?’
They pass beneath a street lamp just as Cleo looks up at her and smiles, and there is, again, something in the angle of her face, in the expression in her eyes, that takes Viv’s breath away. Her daughter looks in that split-second so exactly like Ruby that her sister is brought back to life with sudden, shocking force.
It’s a new thing, Cleo’s random expressions triggering this heart-jolting reaction in her. Out of the blue a memory will turn up, glinting and sharp, to stop Viv in her tracks. Tonight she’s transported back to the little house in Essex where she and Ruby spent their childhood, a white, ramshackle cottage on the edge of a stretch of fields. In this memory Ruby is sixteen and heavily pregnant, dressed in a blue cotton dress and standing by the window that’s crisscrossed with iron latticing, the light falling on her red-gold hair, her hand resting on her swollen belly.