I Should Be So Lucky by Judy Astley Page B

tellings-off?
    ‘Well, hey – here’s something that can’t go wrong.’ Amanda sounded comforting. ‘My cousin’s band is playing at a pub in Chelsea on Friday night, blues covers, that sort of thing – quite good, actually. I thought you might like to come along with Leo and me? I’ll drive – so you won’t have to worry about ending up in the trees with a flat tyre again. You can have a glass of wine, relax, forget all about these students and their idiocy. What do you think?’
    Viola pondered for a moment, feeling mildly suspicious, thinking of Charlotte’s plan to get her hooked up with a new man. But Amanda’s pretty, wide-eyed face was looking perfectly innocent: not at all sparkly and overkeen as if trying to pretend there wasn’t a hidden agenda. All in all, it did sound like a good idea; a social life hadn’t exactly been a priority over the past months. She’d fended off quite a lot of invitations because they usually sounded like carefully chosen mercy missions, such as films with absolutely
no
love interest, as if she needed sensitive handling. It didn’t make for comfortable outings, having people look sideways at you any time long marriages or death were mentioned, or noticing someone being nudged hard when there was gossip about other charmless, cheating actors. Music, though – good noisy stuff in a darkened room and no one paying attention to what she was thinking . That could be just what was needed. And hey, if it turned out to be a set-up, she could always plead a headache and do a runner.
    ‘Yes, thanks – actually I’d love to,’ she decided. ‘Rachel’s going to be staying over with Marco and James that night, so that kind of works out really well.’
    A night out, good sounds, a couple of glasses of wine. She closed her eyes as the thought breezed past quickly: just like normal people.
    It was funny how you could live for years in one area and still have to look at a map to track down undiscovered corners, unexpectedly rural ones, barely twelve miles from the centre of London. Viola had been out and about in these magically wild bits of the district with Kate many times during the past year, Kate calling round on sunny weekends and dragging her out to stop her brooding in the flat, making her walk the poodle for hours with her across fields and woodland completely out of sight of any houses, and with no one around except other dog-walkers and the occasional jogger. It reminded Viola of being a small child again, when Naomi would persuade (and probably pay) the teenage Kate to take her out for hours on Sunday mornings or late summer afternoons, walking the family spaniel and letting Viola pick huge bunches of buttercups that would have lost most of their petals by the time they got them home. The two of them would sit by the river throwing the dog’s ball into the water for her to swim out and retrieve, while Kate, for lack of someone else to offload to, would chat on about whichever boy she was pursuing, who was usually one who was inconveniently pursuing some other girl. Even Rob, Viola remembered, had been engaged to someone else when Kate had met him, and had taken his time disentangling himself from the fiancée.
    Viola had found the post-Rhys walking as therapeutic as Kate had insisted it would be, being able to let fresh, clean air in to breeze away the gloom and having nothing to think about except where to put her feet so as not to slide over in a muddy puddle. Kate would talk away just as she had as a teenager, not requiring any response, chatting about her clients, such as the woman who had gone all nineties retro and was having festoon blinds everywhere, and about being asked to make bedroom curtains from a toile de Jouy pattern so pornographic she’d had to lock the workroom door against uninvited visitors. If Viola started to try and talk about Rhys’s accident, about those unknown details such as who had his new woman, this sudden absolute love of his life,