The Day She Came Back(71)

A sleek, shiny train pulled in and Victoria watched the commuters pile on and the doors close. It left, leaving them on an almost deserted platform.

Sarah nodded at her. ‘That sounds wonderful. And you’re not going to university? Bernard did tell me that,’ she added with a little humour.

‘No, I didn’t think it was for me.’

‘Didn’t – so you might think it is for you after all? Have you had a change of heart?’ Sarah twisted on the seat to face her.

‘No, not exactly. I guess I’m just questioning my reasons for deciding not to go . . . and besides, everything is up in the air.’ Victoria looked skyward, as if that was where the answers might lie: questioning her choices that had been based on a set of facts that were now no longer relevant.

‘What were those reasons?’

She quashed the memory of Flynn asking a similar question.

‘I . . . I didn’t feel good about leaving Prim alone. I mean, she was fine and not ill or anything, there was nothing she couldn’t do if she went at the right pace, but I worried about her and I didn’t want to miss out on being with her or have her struggle or be lonely or a million other things.’

‘Shit.’ Sarah kicked at the floor.

‘What?’

‘That responsibility – it was mine but you, you took it on.’

‘I had no choice, I was all she had – or so I thought. Anyway, I didn’t mind – I loved her.’ This the truth, despite her battling emotions. ‘Plus . . .’ Victoria queued up the words on her tongue. ‘I was a bit scared of . . .’

‘Bit scared of what?’ Sarah pushed.

‘I was a bit scared of the thing that happened to you happening to me.’

Sarah gave a nervous laugh. ‘What do you mean? How . . . what thing . . .?’

‘Prim always said you were studious and happy until you started at university, where you went off the rails, started taking heroin and then you died. It sounded like a straightforward progression and it scared me. I didn’t want that to be how I ended up and I thought I might be like you.’ There, she had said it. Sarah looked aghast as some of the colour drained from her face.

‘But . . . but that’s not how it was. Not at all.’ Sarah shook her head. ‘I was already “going off the rails”, as you put it, trying to carve a path, escape if you like, and I had that kind of personality – I wanted more and more and more. Which is okay if what you crave is spinach, binge-reading or walking outdoors, but for me it was hard drugs; not good.’

‘No. Not good,’ she agreed.

‘You don’t need to worry, Victoria. Mine were a unique set of circumstances. I would hate my past mistakes to affect how you live your life.’

‘Are you kidding me right now? I am paying a huge price for how you lived your life; I always have!’ The words erupted from her without too much thought of how they might land.

Sarah looked crestfallen. Her mouth fell open.

‘I shouldn’t have said it like that.’ Victoria positioned her bag on the floor, feeling horribly uncomfortable. She didn’t want to have this conversation in public. ‘I didn’t mean it how it came out. Can we change the subject?’

‘Sure.’ Sarah rallied a little and there was a beat of readjustment while the topic was indeed changed. ‘I envy you and Daksha; I always planned on travelling with Granny Cutter’s money after university.’

‘Granny Cutter’s money?’ What money?

‘Yes! She set up a trust fund for me, and then Mum and Dad set up one for you, so that when we got to a certain age we would have an income, a very good income. Her father, your great-great-grandpa, was a wealthy industrialist who moved to Surrey to open a paper mill. He gave Granny Cutter the money for Rosebank and she bought it outright, quite a thing for a woman back in the day.’

‘I didn’t know that. I don’t seem to know much, do I?’ Just another secret, another aspect of my life to be kept secret . . . ‘The lawyer, Mr Dobson, was sorting all the paperwork and he gave me the run-down. I think I missed a lot of the detail – I was still very numb when I saw him.’

‘I think maybe Mum might have been anxious about talking about family and history and things in case she let slip anything about me. You would only have to look at the paperwork to see that I have received my trust allowance every month since I was twenty-four.’

Victoria felt weakened by the fact that every apparent revelation only served to throw up more questions and, with it, more deceit. She wasn’t sure how she felt about a trust fund, having always found the idea of earning her own money and making her way the most exciting, along with a healthy dollop of guilt at having survived financially a little too easily. Flynn’s words came to her now, uttered from his beautiful, lying, cheating, lopsided mouth:

‘Easy, I guess, when you don’t have to worry about where your next meal is coming from . . .’

‘You know, Sarah, I thought that maybe part of the reason you gave me up to Prim and disappeared was because you didn’t have any money and that you thought you might struggle to care for me financially in the long term, and believe it or not, whilst it didn’t excuse the lies, I understood that a little. But the fact that you had an income, a good income, just waiting for you . . .’ She shook her head. ‘You could easily have afforded me.’ She felt the wobble to her bottom lip; it was hard trying to contain all that threatened to burst from her, not least of which the idea that it made her sound like a commodity to be bought and sold, a thing. A thing which Sarah had let slip through her fingers. And it hurt.