Читать книгу Who Killed Ruby? онлайн | страница 24
Stella had read the letter in silence. ‘Well,’ she said neutrally, when she’d finished. ‘Looks like you’re going to be rich.’
‘But why didn’t they leave it to you?’ Viv had asked incredulously. ‘They didn’t even know me!’
Stella dropped the letter to the table and said, ‘I don’t want their bloody money.’
In the silence that followed they heard Margo walking to and fro in her bedroom above and Vivienne saw her mother’s whole bearing tense at the sound. ‘What happened between you and your parents?’ she asked her tentatively. ‘Why did they treat you so badly?’ It was a question she’d tried to ask her mother many times over the years, but had never received a satisfactory answer.
But to her surprise Stella said, ‘I didn’t do what they wanted – university, a career, a good marriage. I was so young when I fell pregnant with Ruby. I let them down. They couldn’t forgive me.’
‘And they punished you forever after?’ Viv said hotly. ‘Well, they were bloody bastards, then! I don’t want their money either!’
‘Take it.’
‘No way. Or if I do, we’ll share it.’
And though it had taken her a long time, eventually Stella had been persuaded, and at eighteen, Viv had found herself in the astonishing and very dangerous position of having more money than she knew what to do with. Now, as she waits for Cleo’s football match to start, she pushes the memory away. What had followed had been one of the darkest times of her life and wasn’t something she liked to dwell on.
After the muddy, wet and interminable football match, Viv and Cleo return home, Viv to make a start on lunch, Cleo to get straight on the phone to invite her friend Layla over. ‘To help me with my English essay,’ she explains, somewhat unconvincingly.
Viv’s peeling potatoes when Layla arrives. She pops her head around the door on her way up to Cleo’s room and Vivienne waves hello. ‘How’s it going, sweetheart? Nice to see you.’ Layla and Cleo have been friends since nursery school. She’s a slight girl, with neat tight cornrows, lavender-framed glasses and a terrifyingly high IQ. Layla holds strong views on everything from fracking to the Gaza Strip and isn’t afraid to air them. Though her parents – a jolly, extrovert couple from Mozambique – run a dry-cleaner’s and her older sister Blessing is training to be a beautician, Layla intends to be a human rights lawyer when she grows up, and Viv has absolutely no doubt whatsoever that this will happen one day.