Cuckoo by Julia Crouch Page A

Rose said, pouring everyone another glass of wine. ‘Is it?’ She turned to Gareth.
     
    ‘Of course not,’ Gareth said, looking at Polly. ‘I was just wondering if you have any plans.’
     
    ‘Not really.’ Polly leaned back in her chair and folded her arms.
     
    ‘It’s early days . . .’ Rose said.
     
    ‘Yeah, all that,’ Polly said. ‘But I’m sure a plan will emerge, and as soon as it does I’ll let you know.’
     
    Rose reached across and took Polly’s hand. She wanted to calm her down a bit. They had all drunk a fair bit of wine, and she didn’t want anything to upset this first night, not after it had been going so well.
     
    In Rose’s own warm fingers, Polly’s felt like dry sticks. Rose saw what Polly was doing. This shell, this apparent insouciance, was all a load of armour. This was a woman in shock. Not just anyone, either, but Polly. Her Polly. And she determined there and then that she was going to do everything in her power to bring her back to life.
     
    Polly needed her help.
     
    Unaccustomed as she was to playing the leading role in the drama of herself and Polly, Rose couldn’t help but feel excited, even a little relieved. In the years they had spent apart, she had become used to being in charge of her own world. She didn’t think she could ever slip back into how things used to be between the two of them.
     
    Flossie had slept so solidly since the car journey that Rose had nearly forgotten that she had left her in the living room in her car seat. But she quickly reasserted her presence by setting up a wail that was in danger of bringing down all the new ceilings and smashing the triple-glazed windows.
     
    Rose gave Polly’s hand a squeeze, knocked back her wine, then went to find her book so that she could give her poor baby a good, long feed. This one, the last of the night, was the stocking up that Flossie needed to see her through her six-hour sleep. Rose knew she should really start to think about moving her on to solids, but something in her was resistant to the idea. She was a little guilty about the amount of wine she had drunk, but she knew it had the benefit of making babies sleep that little bit deeper.
     
    ‘We’ll go upstairs,’ she called to Gareth and Polly. ‘We don’t want to get Floss all over-excited.’ She also thought that it might be a good move to leave the two of them downstairs alone together, to give them a chance to relax a bit into each other’s company without her getting in the way. She knew she was only trying to smooth things out, but it was the grown-up thing to step away, to trust Gareth and Polly to their own devices.
     
    As she carried Flossie up the stairs, she smiled to herself. At least she didn’t have to worry about Gareth being drawn to Polly in the way that most men seemed to be. Apart from the fact that she trusted him completely, his former loathing for Polly was so far away from attraction that she knew that wild horses wouldn’t pull him in that direction.
     
    Up in Rose and Gareth’s bedroom, Flossie fed and sucked and murmured like a hungry little beast. Rose tried to read, but her eyes kept blurring over the same paragraph, and she couldn’t take in a single word. Her mind kept going back to that look Polly had given her at supper, to the weight it contained.
     
    Rose edited her past meticulously for public consumption. She had to. Only Polly, sworn to secrecy, knew it all. Had there been danger in that look?
     
    She closed her eyes and tried not to think back, tried not to remember running for her life. As a teenager, she had possessed a talent for provoking extremes in her father. Mostly, she managed to get away and lock herself in a bathroom until whatever it was he was feeling subsided. But sometimes he got to her before she could escape, and he would rain his fists down on her until she screamed so loudly that he had to stop, for fear that the paying guests might hear.
     
    The last time this had happened,