“Yeah, he has,” Viola said. She had no watch. Teddy had given her a neat little Timex when she passed her O levels but she had lost that long ago. Please let Dominic be dead, she thought.
If he had drowned out there in the sea she could start a new life. It would be such an easy way of breaking up with him, much easier than packing up and leaving. And besides, where would she go? And then there was the money. Dominic had a trust fund. She didn’t know exactly what that was, but he had “come into it” a few weeks ago. There was some complex legal reason (he said) why he couldn’t walk away from this money the way that he’d walked away from his “people.” But had he given any to her or her children? No, he was giving the money to the commune, signing it over to Dorothy! And worse—no, not worse, slightly less bad—she’d discovered a letter from his mother, who had used a private detective to find him, and in the letter she begged him to “heal the rift” between them and let her see her grandchildren “and their mother, who I am sure is wonderful.”
If Dominic was dead, Viola would get the trust fund (wouldn’t she?) instead of Dorothy and she could go and live in a proper house and have a normal life. If only she had married Dominic and made her right to his inheritance secure, now she would be a tragic young widow and people would have to be nice to her. She could even go and live with these unknown hunting, shooting, fishing in-laws. They thought she was wonderful, after all. Of course, once they met her they would probably revise their judgement, but, who knew, perhaps over time she could be accepted into their clan and become “people” herself. She could adopt their name. Viola Villiers, bit of a mouthful, like an elocution exercise, but nonetheless it had a ring to it, like those eighteenth-century actresses who became mistresses to the aristocracy and often ended up as duchesses themselves.
Sunny was probably the heir to an estate or something and for a moment she allowed herself to imagine swans on lakes and peacocks on lawns. She didn’t mind if they were fascists, she really didn’t, not as long as they had central heating and tumble dryers, and white bread instead of rye sourdough and soft mattresses instead of futons on the floor.
Should she alert someone? All three of them were exhausted, too tired surely for all the stuff that would follow the report of a missing person. But then how would they get home? She couldn’t drive. She sighed heavily.
“Mummy?” Bertie said. Bertie was finely tuned to Viola’s moods.
They trudged all the way back to the Lost Children tent. The motherly woman was still there. Sunny launched himself at her, hugging her round the waist, hanging on to her for dear life.
“Lost someone else?” she said cheerfully to Viola.
Sunny, Bertie, Viola and two burly policemen were all crammed into a panda car, being driven to Adam’s Acre. (“That would be Long Grove Farm, would it?” one of the policemen said.) The children, in the back with Viola, fell asleep immediately. They were slick with old suntan cream, except for their legs, which were stockinged with gritty sand. Their feet were still bare, Viola hadn’t had the energy to force sandals back on them. They were beginning to smell over-ripe.
Her children would probably be better off without her. She should have left them with that farmer’s wife, she thought, skilfully converting selfishness into altruism. She had a sudden memory of the geese in the yard and shuddered. She had been chased by a goose when she was small, pecked half to death, and had had a terror of them ever since. Her parents—she’d had both of them at the time—had laughed at her. Geese always sensed her fear, running towards her like a mob, crowding round her, pecking and honking. “Don’t be a silly goose, Viola,” Teddy used to say to her. Always telling her how to be, how not to be. (The Voice of Reason.) The Goose Girl, that was a story her mother read to her. It involved a decapitated talking horse, Viola seemed to remember.
Perhaps she could ask the police to keep on driving, all the way to York, and drop her off at her father’s house. She was surprised to find that she felt homesick. Not just for the narrow streets and medieval churches, for the Bar Walls and the great Minster, but for the suburban semi-detached that she had spent half of her life deriding.
“Mrs. Todd?” She had told the policemen that she was a “Mzzz” but they ignored this new-fangled idea. And she was the mother of children so they weren’t going to call her “Miss.”
“We’re here, Mrs. Todd. You’re home.” Not really, she thought.