Page 55 of Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests
Once she’s sure that her legs will hold her, Vivienne stands and walks slowly toward the sign in the churchyard. With every step, her legs feel heavier. OUR LADY OF THE ASSUMPTION AND ST. GREGORY CHURCH the sign announces. She knows this church. It’s just off Regent Street. Her old office is walking distance away. She used to come here sometimes, walk around the edge, admire the building. Vivienne takes tentative steps toward the nearest tube station.
***
Pulling her laptop onto her knees, Vivienne typesfugue statesinto the search bar. She takes a deep breath and imagines cogs inside her old laptop spinning and whirring as it collates the required information. Tristan once tried to explain how search engines work, but she struggled to concentrate when he started using expressions like “uniform resource locator.” Finally, some definitions appear on herscreen. Vivienne clicks on one:A rare phenomenon characterized by reversible amnesia in conjunction with unexpected wandering or travel. Vivienne clicks on the title “Causes.”Can be caused by physical trauma, a medical condition, or dementia. Then she searches for cures of fugue states. All she can find is,Treatment involves helping the person process the trauma causing the condition.
Sighing, Vivienne puts her laptop to one side. It isn’t just the fugue states that are worrying her. The shooting pains in her back and hips have definitely gotten worse over the last few months, regularly keeping her awake at night. Was this it? Had she finally run out of time? Was her number coming for her? And with her investigation no closer to uncovering the truth?
Following Gordon’s memorial lecture and her chat with Melvin, Vivienne hit a dead end. Despite her pleas for help, Melvin had ghosted her—as the young people say—in the last eighteen months. Perhaps she’d offended him with her suspicions, though he’d seemed characteristically unfazed at the time. Vivienne read through her notes over and again, even went back to Salvation Road, knocked again on the door of Serendipity’s but got no reply this time. Tristan hadn’t found anything about a Mr. Brookbanks or Brookham either. Then, as the months went by without any bad news, she forced herself to push her missing envelope from her mind and instead focus on finding happiness in the present day, on savoring the time she had.
“Vavi, look at this,” Charlie says, bouncing onto the sofa next to her. He’s holding out a complicated-looking vehicle he’s fashioned from LEGO. There are wings, four large wheels, and two tusks.
“Oh, wow, that is really something,” she says, and Charlie beams at her.
Vivienne hears keys in the front door and immediately closes her laptop.
“Mummy!” Charlie says, jumping up from the sofa.
Thankfully, Cat and Charlie were still sleeping when Vivienne crept in that morning. Over breakfast, Cat asked if Vivienne could watch Charlie while she did some jobs. Vivienne was still exhausted from her nighttime adventure, but she’d never say no to a morning with Charlie and his beloved LEGO bricks.
“Hiya,” Cat calls, shouting over the pile of boxes balancing precariously in her arms, towering over her head.
“Let me help,” Vivienne says, putting her laptop to one side and standing up as quickly as she can manage. She takes two of the empty boxes off Cat and sets them on the living room floor.
“Thanks,” Cat says, tossing the other boxes haphazardly onto the rug and then dashing straight to the downstairs toilet. She emerges minutes later with flushed cheeks and a relieved expression.
“The baby still tap-dancing on your bladder?” Vivienne smiles. “You really shouldn’t be doing all this in your state.”
“Oh, it’s just a few empty boxes. I’ve got to finish off packing, or I’ll be bringing the baby home here,” she says.
“I’ve told you I wouldn’t mind,” Vivienne replies, stepping into the kitchen to put the kettle on while Cat sits cross-legged in the armchair, knees forming a nest around her bump.
“You won’t be saying that when she wakes up every hourscreaming the place down,” Cat says. “What’s that you’re building there, Charlie Boy?”
As Vivienne waits for the kettle to boil, half listening to Cat and Charlie’s chat, she wonders if it’s time to come clean about her health concerns. She’s already told Cat about Serendipity’s, the numbers, and the sins. God knows, she’s helped Vivienne search the house numerous times for her missing envelope. Cat has finally given up on finding Vivienne a new man (“Too fussy, that’s your trouble!”), something Vivienne couldn’t be more thrilled about. Since meeting Ziggy, busking outside a tube station near her work, Cat has become a hostage of her own happiness. It was the last thing she’d expected when she’d tossed a pound coin into the open guitar case every Friday as she’d passed the man with shaggy hair and large brown eyes, bringing to mind a friendly chocolate Labrador. One day, she’d stayed a little late at work, and he was packing up as she passed. “Any special requests?” he asked. “You don’t have to pay me this time.”
“I thought,What a cheesy line,so I decided to challenge him and asked for Beethoven’s ‘Fur Elise.’ Well, he didn’t skip a beat and gave a perfect rendition. In fact, he kept going for a good ten minutes. My cheeks must have been luminous by the end; I was mortified,” Cat had told Vivienne that night. He’d persuaded her to join him for a drink the following afternoon, and three months later she’d fallen pregnant.
“I know I swore I wouldn’t rush in again, but…” she’d blushingly told Vivienne, who could only reflect her smile and pull Cat into a huge hug. Vivienne had had her doubts—as any surrogatemother would—but when she’d met Ziggy, watched the easy chemistry between them, Ziggy padding after Cat like a loyal puppy, she knew that Cat had done it: She’d found the one who had been looking for her.
Glancing from the open kitchen door to Cat leaning back in the old armchair, Charlie’s ear pressed against the bump now, Vivienne smiles to herself. As the pregnancy progressed, Cat despaired at how quickly her new addition had made itself known, how soon she’d had to give up her old skinny jeans and give in to “maternity tents” (her words), but Vivienne herself has relished watching Cat’s body change, grinning until her cheeks hurt as she spread her palm across Cat’s tummy, waiting for the baby to kick. That wonderful spark of life, safely cradled inside its mother’s body, with no idea of the love that awaits. Just like a proud grandma, she’d taken to picking up little onesies and impractical wooden toys whenever she went shopping, batting away Cat’s complaints about “the world’s most spoiled unborn baby.”
It was one evening, as Cat gushed over the cuddly octopus that Vivienne had bought in a chic little gift shop in Richmond, that the ending of her own story had burst from her. She hadn’t planned to tell Cat, hadn’t even been consciously thinking of him in the moment, but out it came regardless.
“I had a baby when I was eighteen,” she said. “It was James’s. I didn’t know what was happening until I was about six months along. My mother was horrified, took me to a hospital for unmarried mothers…”
“Oh, Vivienne,” Cat gasped, clutching the octopus to her bump. “What happened?”
“I went into labor early, had a baby boy, but he didn’t survive,” Vivienne told her, remembering her one and only cuddle with her son, her mother delivering the dreadful news before everything went black.
Tears soaked her cheeks, but Vivienne didn’t push them away this time.
“I’m so sorry,” Cat cried, matching Vivienne tear for tear. “You were so young to go through that.”
It felt good to release those words out into the world, to free all the sadness she’d bottled up for so many years. Afterward, they sipped hot chocolate and watchedLook Who’s Talkingon Netflix, Cat howling as John Travolta and Kirstie Alley celebrated their son’s potty training success with the “Pee-pee in the potty!” song.
That night, lying in bed, Vivienne pictured herself holding Cat’s baby, that first clutch from tiny hands, that first smile, that first word. So much to look forward to. She crossed her fingers.Please don’t let my number come before I meet the baby…Vivienne made a silent promise with herself that, after the baby came, she would make an appointment to see her GP about her aches and pains, even mention the fugue states, and then, if it was nothing serious, of course tell Cat. But until then, she saw no reason to put a blot on Cat’s happiness—or her own. Her doctor would no doubt dismiss her symptoms as the usual aches that aging brings, she told herself. Vivienne eventually drifted off to sleep, having still not shaken the creeping fear that her number was close.
Inevitably, Ziggy’s gain became Vivienne’s loss, and six months into the pregnancy, Cat gently broke it to her that she and Charlie were moving into his place in Blackheath (turns out, Ziggy had a very successful logistics business, and busking was just a hobby—with all proceeds going to charity). Over the last few weeks, Cat has incrementally deleted herself from Vivienne’s cottage. The colorful boxes of Charlie’s toys and Cat’s endless supply of shoes, cosmetics, and various animal-print accessories were paraded through Vivienne’s house and out the front door. Today, Cat’s and Charlie’s last few things would fill these boxes and they’d be saying goodbye. Not for good, of course. They’d already arranged to take Charlie to watch a film the following weekend and planned a trip to a health spa next month. But still. Vivienne would never wake up to the feeling of Charlie climbing into her bed, snuggling into her back, and telling her about his dreams of wolves, dark forests, and Peppa Pig. Or to the smell of coffee, emanating from her own mug plonked on her bedside table by a harried Cat, despite Vivienne insisting she didn’t need to. She’d never again wake up at 2:00 a.m. on the sofa, head-to-head with Cat after they’d dozed off while drinking their “one for the road.” But she could never deny Cat the hard-won unexpected happiness that has knocked at her door. And it’s not like Vivienne would be plunged back into her lonely life before they’d moved in. She has family now, even if they live on the other side of London. And she has Tristan too.
