Unable to believe his luck, he brought Marcella back to Ashcombe and introduced her to his children. April was by this time six years old, Maddy five and Jake four. It was risky, but it had to be done. Marcella hadn’t been scared off when he’d told her of their existence; indeed, she had declared that she loved kids, but saying it and actually meaning it were two different things. There was no guarantee that it wouldn’t all go horribly wrong.
It hadn’t. The bond between Marcella and Robert’s children had been instantaneous, irrevocable and touching to behold. Marcella had adored all three and made her feelings so plain that they in turn had adored her. A fortnight after that first meeting, Maddy and Jake had asked their father why Marcella couldn’t live with them. The following weekend she moved in, and by the end of the month all three children were calling her Mummy. Three months after that, they were married.
Marcella’s arrival in Ashcombe caused a bit of a stir. Some of the older residents got quite het up about it, never having seen a black person in the flesh before. But most of the villagers, sympathetic to the family’s tragic past and delighted to see Robert smiling again, welcomed Marcella with genuine warmth. Marcella herself, with her natural enthusiasm, exuberance and dazzling smile, soon won over the rest, the ancient old farmers who seemed to expect her to start smoking spliffs in the pub and turn Ashcombe into a den of vice, and those doubters who whispered that she had only married Robert Harvey for his money.
Not that he had any, but that was the first rule of small-town tittle-tattle: when stuck for a spurious excuse, make one up.
But who could doubt Marcella’s genuine love for her new family when, at that year’s summer fête, April was crowned carnival queen. Nobody could have been prouder than Marcella, who had spent weeks sewing sequins onto the Barbie-pink dress she had painstakingly made by hand.
The little girl, who suffered from cerebral palsy and had never won anything before in her life, had insisted on making her own faltering speech at the crowning ceremony, and Marcella had applauded with tears of joy in her eyes.
Eight years later, the unthinkable happened. Tragedy struck again one sunny Saturday afternoon in May. April left the cottage and made her way up Gypsy Lane to visit a friend. A car, losing control as it rounded a bend at speed, mounted the pavement and catapulted April fifty feet into the air. According to the coroner at the inquest, she was probably dead before she hit the ground.
Robert and Marcella were inconsolable. Their grief was compounded at the trial when it was suggested that April’s handicap had contributed to the accident, that she had been wandering in the road when the car had rounded the bend.
‘April never wandered in the road,’ Marcella stormed. ‘She always kept to the pavement. How dare they say that, just to try and get that snivelling little fucker off the hook?’
In the end it didn’t, and the seventeen-year-old snivelling little fucker — Kerr McKinnon’s younger brother — was found guilty of dangerous driving. Den McKinnon was sentenced to two years’
imprisonment, which didn’t pacify Robert and Marcella one bit.
‘Two years,’ Marcella wept on the steps of the court, so incandescent with rage she could barely get the words out. ‘Two years ... how can that make up for killing our beautiful girl? If I ever see that murdering bastard again, I’ll kill him with my bare hands, I swear I will.’
Marcella had done a lot of swearing during those dark days, not least when a rumour spread through Ashcombe that the mother of the teenage driver had been heard outside the courtroom pointing out that it wasn’t as if the Harveys had lost a normal child, everyone knew the girl wasn’t all there.
When Marcella heard this, she had to be physically restrained. ‘Jesus Christ, are these people human?
What are they saying, that April had cerebral palsy so they’ve actually done us some kind of favour? That killing her was on a par with running over an animal? Is that it? Am I hearing this right?’ Wild-eyed with grief, she was almost literally tearing her hair out. ‘So what do they think we should do to cheer ourselves up, buy a cute little rabbit?’
But as the months passed, the family gained strength from each other. Love pulled them through. Somehow they survived and learned how to be happy again. Marcella and Robert devoted themselves to making the remainder of Maddy and Jake’s childhood idyllic and when Maddy wrote in a school essay that she had the very best mum and dad in the world, she knew that — unlike all the other kids in her class, who only thought they had — she was writing the absolute truth.
Estelle had reached Heathrow in plenty of time to meet her daughter off the flight from New York.
Now, waiting at the arrivals gate for Kate to appear, she found herself being jostled by an excited family unfurling a huge homemade Welcome Home banner. Touched by the sight of them, Estelle wondered how Kate would react if she emerged through the doors to find her mother waving a Welcome Home banner.
Well, maybe not. It wasn’t the kind of gesture Kate would appreciate. Somehow, they just weren’t that kind of family.
The toddler in the pushchair next to her spat his dummy out on Estelle’s shoe. Retrieving it and handing it back to him, she was rewarded with a face like thunder, as if it was all her fault. Strongly reminded of Kate at that age — the haughty attitude, the indifference — Estelle straightened up and quelled the butterflies in her stomach. She loved her daughter, of course she did, but she was also slightly afraid of her.
Oh Lord, that was an awful thing to even think. Not afraid, intimidated. Kate had inherited her father’s somewhat aloof manner, and the emotional distance had been furthered by the school she had attended. Estelle hadn’t been convinced that sending her to super-expensive Ridgelow Hall was necessary, but Oliver had insisted. ‘Can you imagine how she might turn out if we dumped her in the nearest comprehensive?’ he’d demanded. ‘Good heavens, woman, are you out of your mind?’ So Estelle had capitulated, thinking that maybe she was wrong after all, but the long-suppressed doubts had come back to haunt her. And as for the local comprehensive, well, it hadn’t seemed to do Maddy and Jake Harvey any harm. They may not have PhDs and stratospheric careers, but they were thoroughly nice people and had grown into the kind of young adults of which any parent would be proud. Plus, of course, they adored their mother. Despite all the truly terrible things that had happened to Marcella over the years, Estelle secretly envied her.
‘There he is! Dad, Dad, over here!’ The family at her side began screaming and Estelle was forced to dodge out of the way to avoid getting entangled with their frantically flapping banner. Dad, letting out a roar of delight, raced over and hauled several small children into his arms. As they showered him with kisses and he told them how much he’d missed them, Estelle saw him catch his wife’s eye and mouth: Love you. The wife, who was forty if she was a day, beamed like a teenage bride and blew him a kiss, happy to wait her turn.
Estelle’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. Now she was reduced to envying total strangers –
total strangers waving the kind of banner her own daughter would sneer at and pronounce naff.
She wouldn’t mind betting this couple would be having fabulous sex tonight.