Cuckoo by Julia Crouch Read Free Book Online Page A

It’s like living in a vice grip, being in that family. We’re better off out. Anyway, she can come and visit us here when we’re settled. It’s not the end of the earth. And she’s got Elena’s lot now. Five boys, God save them. No, I’m not going back there. Not even for a visit.’
     
    Polly got up and wandered across the kitchen. She stopped and stroked the chrome bar in front of the stove. ‘Oh, an Aga. How very nice.’
     
     
    Gareth came through when Rose rang the supper bell. It had been a camp joke to have a handbell to summon the family to dinner – ‘to call the swains from the far corners of the estate,’ Gareth had said. But under Polly’s gaze, Rose felt the thing to be something of an affectation.
     
    As she carried the stew over to the table, she looked at Polly, who was already seated, waiting to be served. She was casting her eyes around the objects in the room, as if she were making some sort of mental calculation.
     
    Polly never could keep her mind still and, as with Rose, the years had seen her childhood character crystallise. She had always been a wild, restless little elf, whereas Rose saw herself as slightly bovine, more easily contented. She was home, and Polly was away. She wondered which sat better on a woman in her mid-to-late thirties.
     
    She went back to the workbench to dress the salad, and Gareth bent down and hugged Polly.
     
    ‘It’s great to see you, Polly,’ he said, holding her tight. ‘I can’t say how sorry I am about Christos. He was the guy.’
     
    ‘He was that,’ she looked up at him.
     
    ‘I only wish I’d managed to have gotten out to see him,’ Gareth went on, helping himself to wine and sitting down. ‘It’s hard to think the last time I ever saw him was five years ago.’
     
    ‘When he came to England on his own,’ Polly said, looking into her glass.
     
    ‘Yeah.’
     
    ‘Things weren’t too good between us back then,’ Polly said.
     
    ‘Yeah, he said.’
     
    ‘But they got better again,’ she said, looking up, tears in her eyes. ‘They did, Gareth.’
     
    Gareth reached across and took her hand. ‘They did, Polly. I know that.’
     
    Rose, who had worked hard to stop herself from intervening during this exchange, was impressed at the warmth Gareth had summoned for Polly. She reckoned that he had probably realised how mean-spirited his initial reaction had been to her coming to stay. And, of course, he did realise how important she was to her.
     
    To be fair to Gareth, he had tried to make an effort back in the early days. Perhaps Polly had been right and it was due to his jealousy at her taking his best friend. Rose’s theory was more simple: she thought it was because Polly rubbed him up the wrong way. She was, after all, an acquired taste.
     
    Once, as an attempt to smooth things out between them, Rose had set up a get-together for Gareth and Polly in a pub in Hammersmith. It was a chance, she said to them both separately, to work out what it was that stood between them.
     
    After all, these were the two people she loved most in the world (three, if she counted Christos, although she tried not to), and she couldn’t bear it if they hated each other.
     
    Rose stayed home in Gareth’s flat in Elephant and Castle, watched a video of Pulp Fiction and drank a bottle of wine. At eleven o’clock, he came back, a little more pissed than she was, and smelling of beer and outdoors.
     
    ‘How did it go?’ she asked.
     
    ‘Jeez. I’m glad to be home,’ he said.
     
    And that was it. After that, he seemed to dislike Polly even more intensely. Rose’s plan had failed, and the two of them hadn’t spoken to each other again. And now, here he was, in their kitchen, holding her hand, offering her comfort.
     
    He was really trying.
     
    ‘Where are those boys, then?’ Gareth broke away and tapped the table, breaking the moment.
     
    ‘Gareth has been ever so excited about meeting Nico and Yannis,’ Rose said as she carried