Free Flight by Isabel Ashdown Page B

them. He pointed to a large striped music tent, from which the whine and screech of a sound-check filled the air. ‘Wait for us here. Don’t move!’
    Twenty minutes later, Lisa and Rob returned to announce they were leaving. Lisa looked traumatised.
    ‘What?’ Wren looked at Laura, confused, wondering guiltily if perhaps they’d pushed them a bit far.
    ‘The loos are disgusting !’ Lisa gasped. ‘They’re insanitary! There isn’t even a separate ladies’. It’s like a concentration camp!’
    Laura covered her mouth again and Wren tried not to join in, instead focusing hard on the toes of her dusty boots.‘Well?’ Rob asked impatiently, finally managing to look at Wren too. ‘Are you coming or staying?’
    Wren and Laura silently consulted each other and nodded, resigned to the idea. ‘Alright,’ said Wren softly. ‘Come on, why don’t we look for somewhere else to camp nearby?’
    ‘Oh, yes – that way we can still visit the stones, but without having to use the death camp facilities.’ Laura threw Lisa a patronising smile. ‘Perhaps we’ll find a Caravan Club site along the way.’
    Poor Rob; the relationship was doomed from the outset. When it fizzled out after just two or three weeks, Wren was relieved. ‘She’s not right for him,’ she told Laura after an evening dissecting the ins and outs of his brief love life.
    ‘Agreed,’ Laura replied. ‘He doesn’t know how lucky he is to have us looking out for him.’
     
    Wren wakes early and returns to her task of clearing out the wooden trunk. She fills a large garden bag with the clothes and oddments she sorted through yesterday, and settles on the floor to tackle the rest of the box. She had another fitful sleep last night, dreaming of the journalist turning up on her doorstep in the black of night, bringing Robert with him. Robert had been young, the Robert she’d known in college, only he’d looked broken and pale. I’m sorry , she’d said, not letting either man cross the threshold of Tegh Cottage. She recalls the rhythmic sigh of the waves clawing against the shore below, the chill of the midnight air as she stood in the doorway, barring their entry with her hostility. I forgive you , Robert had replied, his eyes growing darker, older. You wouldn’t , Wren had answered, closing the door on them. Not if you knew the truth of it . Sweating and breathless, she’d forced herself up from the dream and left her bed, to check the locks were secure on the front and back doors before returning to sleep.
    Now, in the back room, she lifts a shoe box from the trunk and places it on the stone floor in front of her. The box itself is pristine, containing a pair of gold Italian sandals, expensive and strappy with a kitten heel – a gift from Robert after the birth of Phoebe. A cold flush floods through Wren’s veins, as she allows herself to conjure up her child’s name, her daughter’s name for the first time in twenty years. Phoebe : bright and pure; god of light; a flycatcher in springtime. Phoebe was the name Wren had always had in mind for a girl, though they still spent hours poring over the baby name books. Try as they might, there was nothing that they could agree upon for a boy, and when their baby arrived and was a girl it was a relief to find the name suited her instantly. ‘God knows what we would’ve done if we’d had a boy,’ Robert joked. ‘We’d have had to call him Eric, after the anaesthetist.’
    Wren lifts one of the shoes from its pink tissue paper, and turns it over in her hands. In her old life she would have regarded it as a thing of beauty, with its shimmering straps and dainty curves. But now the sight of it disgusts her; its frivolity reminds her of the Victorian butterfly display in the Natural History Museum – beautiful, selfish, cruel. Carefully, she places it back beneath the tissue and adds the box to the rubbish pile.
     
    From their earliest days together, Wren suspected that Rob’s feelings towards her