Читать книгу Who Killed Ruby? онлайн | страница 16

In a matter of months, the life Viv had always known would be gone forever, though she didn’t know then the changes that were to come. Meanwhile, neighbours and kindly villagers helped take care of her. They looked at her with misty-eyed pity, picking her up from the village primary and taking her home with their own kids; to warm, busy, noisy houses with Danger Mouse on the telly and fish fingers in the oven. Your mum just needs a bit of time, they’d say. She’ll be all right, you’ll see. Later, Viv would be taken back home, to where the temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees and the silence pressed against the walls, to where Stella hadn’t seemed to move from her position at the kitchen table in weeks.

Stella never went back to her job at the care home. The letters from the letting agency piled up on the doormat amongst brown ones with ‘Final Demand’ stamped upon them. When bailiffs pounded on their door Stella behaved as though she couldn’t hear them and Viv was too afraid to let them in herself. Similarly, she learned not to pick up the phone when, relentlessly, it rang, and neither of them noticed when the line was finally cut off.

Only one day stands out from the grinding darkness of those weeks. On an April morning five months after Ruby’s death, Vivienne came downstairs in her uniform ready for school to find a surprising sight. Her mother, up and dressed and ready to go out. ‘Put your coat on, Vivienne,’ she said without looking at her.

Viv hadn’t moved. ‘Where are we going?’

The reply had been astonishing. ‘To see your grandparents,’ Stella had said.

The journey had been a long one, taken first by train then coach to a faraway rain-drenched city and followed by another journey by bus to a small village. She could tell by the look in her mother’s eye that it wasn’t the time for questions, so she’d sat quietly next to her, holding her hand, trying not to worry. She’d never met her grandparents before and she wondered what they might be like. Her mother had only ever told her that they lived far away, and that she hadn’t seen them for a long time, and something had made Viv know not to push for more.