Page 49 of The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge
There was so much about parenting she didn’t know. She drew the curtains against the darkness, thinking how exhausting it was and perhaps she wasn’t cut out to be a mother. She kissed Jess goodnight, plugged in the nightlight and withdrew, careful to leave the door ajar at Jess’ insistence.
Downstairs, there was an atmosphere of gloom. Pippa, grey-faced, sat curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea. She looked up briefly at Stef’s entrance and enquired after the twins in a distracted fashion while their mother watched her, dismayed. Stef sat down gingerly next to her sister and said mildly, ‘So what’s all this about?’, at which point Pippa dissolved into such a flood of tears it was as though a dam had broken.
Her story poured out. She and Rob rarely saw one another. He lived another life in London during the week, a more exciting one, while she was left in Norwich looking after the kids. She didn’t know what he was up to but worried that there might be someone else. And she’d met someone at the gym – not that she’d let it go anywhere, mind you, but it was nice to flirt. Anyway, Rob had arrived home early this evening and found the house in a mess and they’d had aterrible row. He’d said he didn’t understand what she did all day while he was earning the money to pay for everything, and she’d said she didn’t have a life any more while he had all the fun. What fun was that? he’d asked. She’d shouted something stupid at him, she couldn’t remember what, then he’d reached for his coat and walked out of the house. So she’d bundled up the kids and come here.
This utterly predictable tale sounded so individual and distressing the way Pippa told it that Stef was deeply saddened. Pippa was in real agony, lost, heartbroken.
‘But Pippa, darling,’ their mother put in, bewildered. ‘Surely he’s right, he is paying for everything. I thought you wanted to stay at home and look after the twins.’
‘I did, I did. But I’m so miserable. Why am I so miserable?’
‘Poor Pips,’ Stef said, touching her sister’s arm. ‘You can both sort it out, though, can’t you?’
But Pippa could not be comforted. Shortly afterwards, she went upstairs and they heard her run a bath. Eventually, her bedroom door closed and there was silence.
Nobody understands a marriage except the two people in it, Stef told herself later, as she sat in bed, failing to take in the words of the novel she was reading. On the other hand, when you were in the middle of a crisis it was hard to see things clearly. She of all people knew that and her heart went out to her sister, who’d often seemed so lost. She remembered Pip and Rob’s wedding, only five years ago, how the couple appeared quietly fond of one another and the bride really did look radiant. Everybody had sighed with relief at Pippa’s apparent‘happy ever after’ following the turbulence of her teens and her directionless early twenties.
Both the sisters had been upset by their parents’ separation, but Stef had recovered quickly, glad that the tension in the house was gone. Pippa had been closer to their father, his ‘little bird’, and adjusted less easily. Then, at fourteen, she’d got in with a bad lot at school and by the time her mother noticed it was too late to detach her. There was a particular boy Pip hung out with who wrecked her confidence by repeatedly picking her up, then dropping her. Jed Burns, he was called.
Stef, at seventeen and a late developer as far as boys were concerned, was both envious and disapproving. Sixteen-year-old Jed was undoubtedly gorgeous, with a raven’s wing of glossy dark hair and a bad boy sideways glance that played havoc with Stef’s insides if she encountered him in the kitchen at home or on the stairs at school, but as her best friend Gemma said pompously, he had trouble written all over him. After Jed lost interest in tormenting Pippa and dropped her altogether, Pippa stopped going to school for a while and wouldn’t eat. There followed weeks of visits to the doctor and counselling sessions until gradually she recovered, but the rest of her teens were by all accounts a rackety affair, which Stef, glad to get away to university, hadn’t witnessed at first hand.
Now she wished she didn’t feel so helpless, that she’d taken more interest in her sister, been more kind, could understand her better. Surely whatever was wrong in her marriage was fixable, she thought, giving up on the book. She switched offthe lamp, but when she rolled over to get to sleep she noticed a line of light shining under the door. Annoying. She blinked at it, frowning. It was stronger than the kids’ nightlight. The landing light, then. She sighed and stumbled out of bed. After turning it off, she stood for a moment in the soft glow from the twins’ nightlight, puzzling at a strange sound. It was coming from Pippa’s room. She padded soundlessly across the landing and listened at the door. There it was again. A sob. Pip was crying. She raised her hand and knocked softly. ‘Pip, are you okay?’ No answer. Should she go in? ‘Pip?’ she whispered again, but there was only silence and an abyss that could not be crossed. She returned to bed and tried to sleep, but the thought of her sister crying alone in the darkness was too much to bear. If Pip couldn’t sleep, then she shouldn’t, either. It was a lonely, senseless vigil, and she was tired. Soon, she slipped into troubled dreams.
Twenty-Eight
Early the next morning, she was rudely awoken by the sound of the television on high volume and hurried downstairs to find the twins sprawled on the sofa eating the chocolate cereal her mother had left out and watching cartoons. She seized the remote to turn the sound down, greeted them as cheerfully as she could manage, then went into the kitchen. There, Stef mopped up spilt milk, swept up scattered chocolate krispies and let an agitated Baxter into the garden. The clock said eight, but of Pippa and their mother there was no sign, so she switched on the kettle and, as she waited for it to boil, yawned repeatedly.
She’d been here in Norfolk a whole week, she reflected, and so much had happened in that time that she felt a different person. As for today… she wondered what horrors it might bring. Perhaps it would be a good idea to take the twins off somewhere and give Pippa time to sort herself out.
As she made a cup of tea, she remembered her suggestionto Aaron about doing something with Livy, if the child was well enough, and felt an uplift of happiness for it meant seeing him again. Curious, she thought, given how annoying he was being about Nancy. And that sent her thoughts scurrying to the interesting problem of how she should use Nancy’s story in her book, given what Aaron had said about the mysterious litigious male scientist. She would wait till she’d heard the whole story and then ask Nancy’s advice, she decided. Maybe Aaron was overreacting.
Baxter trotted in from the garden and sat pointedly by his food bowl. ‘You, too?’ she remarked in the same fake-cheery voice she’d used with the twins. ‘No peace. Everybody needs Stef today!’Actually, when you live on your own, she thought as she reached for a bag of kibble,it’s rather nice to feel needed for a change.
Both the twins were tired, unsurprisingly. When Pippa finally appeared, in a silky dressing gown, her children fixed on her like limpets, moaning and squabbling over who should sit in her lap on the sofa. Stef placed a cup of tea for her nearby, took another upstairs to her mother and went outside to ring Aaron.
He agreed enthusiastically to her tentative suggestion of a boat trip. She dressed the twins in yesterday’s outfits, then, rather than mess about changing over car seats, herded them firmly on the short walk to the staithe. She was surprised and enchanted by the dozens of moored boats of different shapes and sizes bobbing on the water, by the gaily painted boathouses and the bright metallic sounds of the wind in the rigging.
They spotted Aaron and Livy waiting by a wooden jetty. The soldierly man with wispy silver hair whom she’d spoken to at church the previous Sunday emerged from the nearest boathouse. His name was Geoffrey Stuart, she remembered. ‘Hello, Mr Stuart.’ She waved. ‘Could we hire one of your boats?’
‘Five of you, are there? I’ll be with you in a moment.’ He smiled and disappeared inside his boathouse.
The twins and Livy were initially shy with one another, but bonded over a blank refusal to put on the buoyancy aids Mr Stuart brought over.
‘I don’t need one. I can swim,’ Livy told him in an adult voice. She was less tired this morning but a little tetchy.
‘Livy…’ Aaron began warningly.
‘I don’t want it, too,’ Jess whined, rubbing her eyes.
‘Look, the grown-ups are having them,’ Stef said brightly, taking the life vest that Mr Stuart passed her.
‘Nobody’s going on the water without one, young ’uns, it’s the law,’ the older man growled and such was the wildness of his white hair and the fierceness of his gaze, the children obeyed.
‘Have you driven one of these things before?’ Stef whispered to Aaron as they handed the children down into the little boat. ‘I’ll have a go, but my experience is limited.’
‘My stepfather used to take me out in one,’ he replied. While Stef settled the kids on the benches, he slid behind the wheel, clipped the kill cord to his belt, and soon they were puttering out over the Broad, a cool breeze in their faces.
The sky was cloudless and the light beautiful, clear and sharp, as though the world had been washed clean by yesterday’s rain, and the boat carved through the water setting off wavelets that rolled outwards and rocked the floating flocks of geese in a comical fashion. The children, awed at first into silence, soon began to point out wildlife and landmarks: the jetty, tiny behind them in the distance, an odd-shaped buoy that they passed, which had a mournful clanking bell. Soon, they were nearing the far side, where the water was fringed with reeds, then Aaron turned the motor right down and the boat glided into a narrow channel.
