‘I’m not sure,’ she said, even though she wasn’t expecting him to come. ‘He’s very busy, Mum. You don’t get to be a QC by sitting around on your backside, you know.’
‘No,’ her mother said quickly. ‘No. I’m sure you don’t.’
Pip was pretty sure her mother didn’t know that QC stood for Queen’s Counsel, nor what a prestigious position that was to hold, but she had given up trying to explain how the bar worked a long time ago.
‘And his diary is full with non-work stuff, too, things that I would have been doing if I wasn’t stuck up here. You do realise, Mum, that we’re big news, Dominic and me? We get invited to all kinds of events, parties, shows, gallery openings. You name it. He can’t just drop all that because I’m not there to go with him.’ Pip sounded petulant, childish, but she didn’t care.
‘No, no, of course not,’ said her mother. ‘But you have been quite ill, Pip. I’d have thought he’d try to make a little bit more of an effort to come and see you. I hear him ring sometimes . . .’
Pip bristled. Did she have no privacy, even with her mobile? It was like being a teenager and having to sit on the stairs to use the landline whilst her mother earwigged.
‘。 . . but a phone call isn’t the same as actually coming to visit.’
But she knew her mother was right. Dominic’s trips to the farm had tailed off, and she missed him, missed the glimpse that he gave her of her old life. And when they did speak, she could feel him floating further away with every conversation. He seemed to struggle to find a connection with her when she wasn’t in London, as if a link in the chain that held them together had broken. He told her his news, but when she had almost nothing to say in return, the conversation fell flat. Pip knew she should trust that everything would work itself out when she got back home to London, but that was getting harder to do with each passing week.
‘No. Well, sometimes we all just have to make do with what we’ve got,’ Pip snapped.
Her mother seemed to recoil at the sharpness of her tone, and she felt guilty. Again. It wasn’t her mother’s fault she was in this situation, so it was hardly fair to take it out on her, but somehow Pip just couldn’t help it.
‘Are you going into the shop today?’ her mother asked in a voice not much louder than a whisper. She didn’t look up as she brushed a little straw and mud off the last of the eggs and popped it into a box.
Pip muttered a yes. What else would she be doing?
‘Audrey says you’re doing very well. I bumped into her in the Co-op yesterday.’
Pip could hear the pride in her mother’s voice, and she had to swallow her anger down even deeper. She was working in a charity shop. Of course she was doing well. It was hardly difficult. This time last year she had been appearing in the European Court of Human Rights and now she was folding other people’s cast-off clothes in a scruffy second-hand shop in Southwold. And which of these jobs did her mother seem to hold in the highest esteem?
Pip swallowed hard. ‘That’s nice,’ she managed. ‘Right. I’d better be going,’ she added, anxious to get away before the conversation descended into another argument.
‘But you still haven’t had any breakfast,’ she heard her mother objecting to her disappearing back.
3
It was a bright, fresh morning as Pip cycled along the narrow lanes to the Have a Heart charity shop. The zinging electric yellow of the rapeseed crop was just starting to bloom in the fields and birdsong rang out from the hedgerows, but Pip barely noticed any of it. She was entirely focused on getting herself from A to B without falling apart.
Obviously driving herself to the shop was not an option. She hadn’t driven anywhere since the accident and couldn’t imagine ever getting behind the steering wheel of a car again. Her father had suggested that they dig her old bike out of the shed, where it had lain quietly rusting for the last ten years. He had spent time lovingly cleaning it up for her, oiling its creaking chain and gears so it was almost as good as new. The frame was a shocking pink, a colour that felt so alien to her freshly minted London persona that Pip couldn’t quite believe she’d ever chosen it, and it had a creaking wicker basket that hung from the handlebars and made her feel even more provincial.
There had been no helmet with it, though. When she’d asked her father where it might be, he had looked first surprised and then incredulous.
‘The shop’s only down the road, Pip,’ he’d said. ‘What on earth do you need a helmet for?’ But then he remembered why she needed to use the bike and not her car and he’d shuffled uncomfortably from one foot to another. ‘But I’m sure we can get you one if you’d feel safer,’ he added, placing a large, rough hand on her shoulder and squeezing.