The Family Remains(98)
Rachel looks directly into Lucy’s eyes and after a beat of silence says, ‘I would have shot him.’
‘But I got there first?’
‘Yes. You got there first. And you, Lucy, you are my heroine.’
Rachel leans towards Lucy then and takes her into her arms. ‘Thank you,’ she whispers into her hair. ‘Thank you for what you did.’
‘But what about your father’s money?’ Lucy asks. ‘Did you ever get it back?’
Rachel nods and smiles. ‘The wealth management company who’d been holding it for Michael really did not want the bad publicity, so they paid it all back to my father, no questions asked. So. Happy ever after.’ She smiles again and slaps her hands against her bare legs. ‘Is ten thirty in the morning too early for champagne, do you think?’
Lucy blinks in surprise. Then she smiles and says, ‘I’m fine with that.’
They take the champagne out on to Rachel’s balcony and make a toast to each other, to safety, to bad things happening to bad people and good things happening to good people, and Lucy tells Rachel about the old vicarage in St Albans and Rachel says she’d love to see it and Lucy says she’ll invite her for drinks when it’s fit for visitors and Rachel tells Lucy about her designer jewellery business and shows her some exquisitely pretty pieces on her website.
‘I’ll make you something, Lucy,’ says Rachel. ‘Whatever you want. Just choose something and it’s yours.’ But Lucy shakes her head and says, ‘No. I don’t need anything.’
‘What about for Libby, then? For your daughter?’ and Lucy smiles and says, ‘Oh. Yes. Thank you,’ and they don’t talk about Michael because Michael is dead and they are alive and they are safe and the sun shines on them as the barges pass down below.
68
August 2019
Max Blackwood, the estate agent, stands outside the vicarage in St Albans on a cool August morning, wearing a sweater over his business shirt. ‘Good morning, good morning!’ he sings to Lucy as she steps out of her car. ‘It’s D-Day!’
Lucy waits to oversee Stella as she clambers out of the back, while Henry joins her from the passenger seat and Marco climbs out of his side and the four of them stand and survey the house.
‘Fuck me,’ Henry stage-whispers to Marco. ‘I see what you mean.’
‘I told you, didn’t I?’ says Marco, who hates the house with a passion. ‘Clapped.’
Stella meanwhile grabs hold of Lucy’s hand and squeezes it excitedly. The whole journey she has been clamouring to get here so that she can see her room again. The children have been here only once before, just after the sales contracts were exchanged. Today is completion day and Lucy strides towards the estate agent and takes the keys from his outstretched hand.
‘Thank you so much,’ she says to him. ‘This is pretty much the most exciting day of my life. Can you believe it, forty years old and this is the first home of my own I’ve ever had?’
The estate agent beams at her and says, ‘Better late than never. And worth the wait I’d say. Such a beautiful house.’
They wave him off a moment later and just as he leaves, Libby and Miller pull into the driveway. Libby clutches a huge bouquet of flowers and Miller carries a bottle of champagne. ‘Happy house day!’ says Libby, running towards Lucy and hugging her.
Libby’s seen the house before but Miller hasn’t and he eyes it from the driveway and says, ‘Wow. It’s essentially beautiful, but God you’ll have your work cut out for you.’
‘Yes, well, I’m prepared for that. And as it happens, the best kitchen designer in Hertfordshire has already drawn up plans for the kitchen and it is going to look incredible.’
Dido is going to be overseeing most of the work. She’s assembled a squad of local interior designers and an architect to work with her on it. But first Lucy just wants to be in there, inside. Her first home. Her babies. All in one place. Finally. She turns the key in the door and feels a shiver of pleasure as the door opens under her hand – each time she’s seen the house before it’s been the estate agent’s hand on the keys, pushing open the door – and then they are inside the house and although it is scruffy, broken, badly modernised and falling apart, it fills her heart in a way that is beyond anything she ever experienced before.
Fitz scampers ahead of them and out towards the back door, beyond which he knows there is a two-hundred-foot garden that is all for him. Stella runs up the stairs and into her bedroom with Libby, and Lucy can hear her from here explaining to Libby exactly where her big bed with a ladder up is going to go and how she’s going to have tea parties under it with Freya G and Freya T when they come for sleepovers, which will be happening all the time according to Stella. Downstairs Lucy stands between Miller and Henry, surveying the house and talking about what will go where once Dido’s plans start to take shape. And then she turns and notices Marco standing quietly in the corner of the hallway, kicking at the skirting board with the toe of his shoe.
‘Is it too late to change our minds?’ he says.
‘Yes,’ says Lucy, who has had to put up with two months of Marco canvassing to be allowed to stay at Henry’s and at his central London school and not join them out here in the countryside. But then a moment later she notices that Marco is in the garden with the dog and that he has found a tennis ball from somewhere and is throwing it for Fitz, who scampers helter-skelter up and down the lawn chasing it and bringing it back and she sees a flush of colour pass into her son’s cheeks, and she knows that he will love it here. Eventually.