Page 5 of Letting Go of Yesterday
She’d been so sure back then that she was doing the right thing for Bella and Theo, and nothing that James, Pippa or Odette could say had dented that belief. She’d held on to that certainty through handing in her notice and applying for new jobs all over Cornwall. It had sustained her through the interview at the same village school she’d attended as a child, overriding her fears about taking such a huge step back in her career. She’d accepted the job and would be starting after the holidays, having rented a house in Port Agnes, still certain it was right for her children. But now, looking at her daughter’s reflection in the rear-view mirror again, she was suddenly far less certain.
‘Okay sweethearts, we’re here.’ Rowan forced a smile as she pulled up outside the place that would be their home for at least the next six months and turned to look at her children. Usually they’d have bickered about which one of them got to sit in the front seat, but they’d both been determined to sit in the back, despite the fact that on every other trip to Cornwall Bella had insisted it made her feel sick.
‘I want Daddy.’ Theo stuck out his bottom lip and his sister reached for his hand.
‘Me too, but he said he’ll come and see us as soon as he can.’ Bella threw her mother a look of undisguised disgust. ‘As soon asshelets him.’
Digging her nails into her palms to stop herself from reacting, Rowan let go of a long breath. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t badmouth James to the children, no matter what. She knew better than anyone how harmful that could be to a child and she’d never forgotten her father saying that her mother couldn’t possibly love her, not really, not when she’d been willing to choose Dean over her. Part of her had always believed he must be right and she didn’t want Bella or Theo to ever feel that way, even if the children thought all of this was Rowan’s fault.
‘Let’s go and have a look at your new bedrooms, shall we? Then you can FaceTime Daddy and let him see them too.’ Keeping the smile firmly fixed on her face, Rowan refused to give into the tiredness that felt as if it was seeping into her bones. She had to make the best of this for the children and keep reassuring them that it was all going to be okay. She had no idea if that would turn out to be true, but the ‘fake it until they made it’ approach was the only option right now. All Rowan had to do was hold it together until they were both in bed tonight. Only then would she give in to the doubts that had crept in more and more the closer they got to Port Agnes, and the tears that would inevitably fall when she did.
* * *
The day after Rowan and the children arrived in Port Agnes, she woke up at 5a.m. to a cacophony of sound. The seagulls screeching out to one another were so loud that she wouldn’t have been surprised if a couple of them had been perched at the foot of her bed, their beady yellow eyes trained on her face. Thankfully the only thing at the end of the bed were suitcases. She’d done her best the night before to unpack everything they’d brought with them and to make the house feel a bit more like their home, and less like the holiday let it usually was. There’d been room in her parents’ houses for her and the children to have been able to stay, and she’d received offers from both of them. But she’d have felt like she had to justify choosing one over the other and that was something she definitely didn’t feel up to doing. There was also the risk if she stayed with her mother that something would be said about the ending of her marriage, which she didn’t want the children to overhear. And if she stayed with her dad, he might start asking too many awkward questions that she didn’t feel ready to answer either. So, despite the extra cost, renting somewhere had felt like a far better option.
The cottage was furnished, so making it feel like their home mostly relied on putting up some photographs and a few carefully selected ornaments, like the little wooden horse they’d bought on a family holiday to France. She’d included photos of James amongst the selection, knowing how important it would be to the children. Even though seeing his smiling face, as he played the devoted husband and father in the pictures, made her want to hurl the photo frames against the wall and watch them smash into a thousand tiny pieces.
The dawn chorus from the seagulls hadn’t been all bad. Waking up early had given her a chance to rearrange a few things downstairs and move the furniture around in the lounge so that it had a similar layout to the house at Membory Grange. Rowan had laid claim to a few select smaller items from the family home, as well as some of the wall art, but the cottage wouldn’t accommodate much and the rest had been left behind with James. He was due to drive down with a van before the end of the school holidays to see the children and bring the stuff Rowan had said she wanted but couldn’t fit in the car, and she was already dreading seeing him. She was glad in a way that there wasn’t much room for stuff from the old house. All of the things they’d accumulated over the years were reminders of a life she thought they’d built together, but her husband had only ever been pretending. She didn’t want to look at those things every day, but she knew the children needed some reminders of the only home they’d known, at least for a while. Hopefully, before too long, they’d build up new memories and the reminders of their life at Membory Grange would become far less important. When that happened, Rowan would know they were finally healing from this. In the meantime, she was doing the one thing she always tried to do: put the children first.
They had a six-month lease on Sea Mist Cottage and she hoped that would be long enough for the children to start seeing Port Agnes as home too, so that they could put down some permanent roots. It would give James enough time to get his act together and maybe it would be a good thing if he found a parish nearby. Not in the same village, that would be the last thing she’d want, but close enough for the children to be able to see him whenever they wanted. Six months would give them all space and hopefully alleviate the doubts that wouldn’t stop nagging at her brain.
The children would both be starting at the village primary school, where Rowan was the new headteacher. Bella would be going into Year 6 and she desperately hoped her daughter would make friends, and build the kind of relationships that would ease her transition into secondary school when the time came. She felt awful that Bella was missing out on her final year in the lower school at Membory Grange. There were so many things she’d been looking forward to, including the Year 6 trip to Paris, a rite of passage that Bella had witnessed older pupils of the school enjoying every year. She’d been talking about ‘when I go to Paris’ from the time she was in Year 3. Of course, Rowan could take her there instead, but it wouldn’t be the same. None of the things that Bella had looked forward to doing in her final year of primary education would be the same as she’d anticipated. When she went to secondary school, that would be completely different from the experience she’d have had at Membory Grange too.
Worst of all was that Bella wouldn’t start secondary school with a set of ready-made friends. Membory Grange hadn’t just been Bella’s school, it had been her home too, for almost her entire life. And it had been Theo’s since before he was even born. Part of Rowan had wished that she could have held out for another year, for Bella’s sake. But even the months she’d clung on for had almost killed her. She doubted there would ever have been a right time anyway. Theo would still have had to leave before he finished at the lower school, and she’d still have had to wrench the children away from their home to a new house, 130 miles away from their father. Her children hadn’t wanted any of those things, but James had left her no choice. Or at least that’s how it had felt. As Rowan turned at the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs and saw the look of sadness on her daughter’s face, the fury she felt towards her estranged husband surged up inside her again. But she painted on a smile, so there was no chance of her own sadness making Bella feel any worse than she already did.
‘You’re up early, sweetheart. Did you sleep okay?’
‘My room smells funny, like old ladies.’ Bella wrinkled her nose as she delivered the verdict on her new bedroom and Rowan laughed, because it was preferable to crying.
‘And what exactly do old ladies smell like?’
‘Lavender and wee.’ The line was delivered with such conviction that Rowan’s next laugh was genuine for the first time in what felt like forever. She knew she shouldn’t laugh at what her daughter was saying, but she hadn’t been able to stop herself and she had to admit it felt good.
‘What exactly are you basing that conclusion on?’
‘Everyone says it.’
‘I don’t think they do, because it isn’t true.’ She gave her daughter a level look. ‘And what do you mean by old anyway?’
Bella shrugged. ‘Sixty.’
‘Nanny Kat and Marion are both in their sixties and neither of them smell of lavender or wee, do they?’ Another genuine smile crept over Rowan’s face at the thought of what their reactions would have been, if they’d heard Bella describing them that way.
‘S’pose not.’ Her daughter pouted and pulled away from Rowan when she reached out to try and hug her. ‘But my room does. It stinks of wee.’
‘It probably just needs a bit of airing. We’ll go down to the shops as soon as they open and get one of those plugs-ins that smell like jasmine or vanilla, and some nice bits and pieces to help it feel more like home until the rest of our stuff arrives.’
‘It’s never going to feel like home. Not without Dad.’ Bella fired the words at her like bullets and Rowan’s heart twisted in her chest. She’d known this wasn’t going to be easy, but she was beginning to think she might have underestimated just how hard it was going to be. All she wanted was for her children to be happy again. She wanted it for herself too, but that wasn’t her priority, because she was never going to be happy until her children were.
‘I’m starving.’ Theo walked into the room rubbing his eyes. They’d had takeaway pizza the night before, because they’d all been too tired to face doing a food shop once they’d unpacked, and none of the big supermarkets delivered to Port Agnes.
‘Why don’t we walk down to the harbour and we can go into Mehenick’s for breakfast? We can get a few essentials and I’ll go out and do a proper shop later, when Nanny Kat comes over to babysit.’
‘I’m ten years old.’ Bella gave a curl of her lip. ‘I don’t need a bloody babysitter.’
‘Bella! We don’t use language like that, do we?’
‘You called Dad a lying shit.’ Bella held her gaze, daring her to say otherwise and Rowan felt as if someone had punched her. Shehadsaid that, more than once, in the months since discovering that her husband had been lying to her for years, possibly for their entire relationship. She wished Bella hadn’t overheard what she’d said and there was nothing she could do to defend herself, not without making things even worse and breaking the pact she and James had made about waiting until the children were ready. But she wasn’t going to lie to Bella either, her children needed to know they could trust her if they were ever going to feel secure again.
