ONE
It was late August, and had been one of those long, lazy hazy days of summer when the sun rose slowly and lingered late into the evening. Victoria had moaned about the fierce heat, knowing full well that on chilly winter days she would give anything for a glimpse of the sun. It took all of her strength to lift a hand and swat the darned fly away from the front of her face. In this balmy clime, Rosebank, their large square red-bricked Edwardian home on the outskirts of Epsom, with its rolling Downs and only a short train ride from the hubbub of the capital, felt closer to an African savannah than the suburbs. Especially if that savannah had a Pizza Express, a Waitrose and a roaring social scene based around the horse-racing calendar. Not that Victoria’s social life was roaring. The truth was it didn’t even mewl.
She and her gran, Prim, had mostly spent the day lying on the wide wooden veranda that ran along the back of the house, with buttons undone, shorts rolled or skirts lifted, and with wide-brimmed hats askew on their heads in the hope of shielding their pale, freckled skin from the harsh sun. Victoria, in a familiar pose, held a book close to her face, squinting behind her sunglasses. Her long curly chestnut hair, shot through with gold, was tied loosely at the nape of her narrow neck. While Prim prayed aloud to the ‘Good lord above’ for a breeze.
‘Does he ever actually answer your prayers, Prim?’ Victoria asked, lifting her eyes briefly from the pages of her novel.
The older woman looked wistfully out over the wide bowl of the lake, which her grandparents had, by all accounts, dug out by hand, wielding shovels and two rickety wheelbarrows for a whole summer, long before the days of regulated planning permission.
‘Yes, sometimes. But not always.’ Prim took a slow intake of breath and pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve, as she was wont to do from time to time when her grief bubbled to the surface and caused ripples of sadness, even on a glorious day like this. ‘I do miss him.’
‘I know.’ Victoria reached out and laid her palm over the crêpey back of Prim’s hand. The old lady nodded and sniffed. Victoria now abandoned her book entirely. ‘I always think how unfair it is that you lost my mum and then Grandpa.’
‘Well, life isn’t fair, is it? And besides, I got you, so it wasn’t all bad. And now, my darling, you have finished school and are, I believe, almost fully formed, no longer precocious, but mature; an industrious coper, the very best kind of person!’ Prim smiled and returned the slightly moistened handkerchief to the depths of her sleeve. ‘But yes, you are right. It is monstrously unfair.’ She removed her hand and flattened the double string of pearls at her neck, before adjusting the brim of her hat so it covered more of her face.
It made Victoria smile, how her gran, despite her advancing years, still wore pearls on an ordinary day and shielded her skin from the sun’s glare. With her hair coiffed, her teeth sparkling and her lipstick always within reach, Prim was glamorous and beautiful – age had nothing to do with it.
Discussions about her mother were rare, and this, too, Victoria understood. If her own measurable pain was for a woman she had never known and a life she could only imagine, then how bad must it be for Prim, who had had Sarah in her life for so long? Her daughter. Her only child. It was beyond sad that Sarah had had so little time on Earth, when her potential had been so huge. She had died during her second year at Durham, where she was studying law, shortly after meeting Marcus Jackson, who had, according to the story Victoria had been told, introduced her to the drug that would prove to be her downfall. If Sarah was rarely mentioned, then Marcus was never so, and Victoria’s questioning about the pair had waned over the years, mainly because the one source of information she had was the reluctant, tight-lipped Prim. Victoria was certain that had Marcus not taken his own life before she even came into the world, Prim, after the loss of Sarah, and no doubt aided by Grandpa, would have hunted him down.
Sarah: a name, which was of course familiar to Victoria and yet was without substance, no more than an idea, a dream. Her pretty mum, whose photographs sat inside a variety of silver frames dotted around the house. There she was each night as Victoria climbed the stairs to bed, sitting on the windowsill of the half landing, smiling, captured for eternity in her glorious youth. It was one of Victoria’s favourite places to sit, with the summer sun streaming in through the square bay window set high in the wall, the stained-glass panels of which cast purple, blue and yellow squares on to the honey-coloured carpet. She liked to sit there in the corner and chat to the Sarah in the photographs, hoping her mother might understand. They were of a similar age, after all.
‘So there’s this boy I’m quite keen on, not that he likes me, probably doesn’t even know my name. He’s in my chemistry set . . . in fact, I more than quite like him, I really, really like him . . .’
‘It must be time for a cup of tea, darling, surely?’ Prim drew her from her thoughts. Victoria stood and shook the creases from the cream linen shirt that had been doubling up as a pillow on the sun lounger, before slipping her narrow arms into it.
‘Daks is on her way. I think we’re going out, but I’ll make you one before we go.’ Victoria bent down and kissed her gran’s forehead. ‘And where you are concerned, I think we both know it’s “always the right time for a cup of tea!”’ She repeated her gran’s favourite saying.
‘Earl Grey.’ Prim raised her finger.
‘Gran, I have made you a million cups of tea – you think I don’t know it’s Earl Grey by now? I know everything about you.’
‘Well, you say that and yet still you have not learned, apparently, how much I detest the word “Gran” – makes me sound ancient.’
‘You only don’t like it when I call you Gran in front of Gerald!’ she teased. Gerald was her gran’s dapper toy boy, who at seventy-four was ten years younger than her and who accompanied Prim on regular trips to the theatre and out to dinner and was a dab hand with a hoe when the need arose.
Prim wrinkled her eyes in amusement. ‘Well, that might be true . . .’
‘There’s no “might” about it. And by the way, I hate to break it to you, but you are ancient.’
‘Only compared to you. Good lord, eighteen! What wouldn’t I give to be eighteen again!’
Victoria liked the small spread of a smile on Prim’s face, as if a memory had hooked itself to the outer extremities of her eyes and mouth and lifted them up. She loved spending time like this; she’d miss her gran when she and Daksha went travelling, which was the plan for six months’ time, give or take.
‘What was so great about being eighteen?’ Victoria asked dismissively. Based on her own rather mundane existence, eighteen was nothing special. Once, when she had complained about her rather bland, mannish face as she looked in the mirror, her gran had informed her reliably and without sentiment that all Cutter women looked like potatoes until they blossomed, and suddenly one day they would look in the mirror and realise they had evolved into a chip.
In fairness, it offered little solace.
Victoria, aware of her low ranking in the Instagram-worthy world of her peers, did very little other than study and spend time with her one good friend, Daksha. In truth, life scared her – or rather, making the same mistakes as her mum scared her. Not that she voiced this, and certainly not to Prim. But it bothered her nonetheless. What was the thing that turned Sarah from a bookish scholar into an out-of-control junkie? And if it was something in her mother’s DNA, what was to say Victoria didn’t possess it too? It was a frightening thought, and as a result she had up until this point lived a rather solitary, buttoned-up existence in the shadow of the popular set. The ones who cluttered up the corridors of school, seemingly more concerned with perfecting the swing of their hair extensions and capturing the best selfie than actually getting an education. All that, however, was about to change, as she and Daksha were off to see the world! The plan was to take twelve months, but the reality was they would be away until their funds ran out, which could happen a lot sooner.