Free Elsewhere in Success by Iris Lavell Page B

looks around the shops for an hour or so and chooses fish dinners from the frozen section of the supermarket. When she gets back, Harry hasn’t returned. She decides she’ll make an effort so she sets the table with a cloth and candles, before going out to the tree to see if she can find a usable lemon. One has fallen on the ground and a small snail is stuck to it. She could detach the snail but its shell is thin and would be crushed. She leaves the fallen lemon and picks a greenish one from the tree, but her heart is thumping. There are signs everywhere that Tom is still around.
    â€˜I know, Tom,’ she says to the air. ‘I remember everything.’ Her hands are trembling and a chill has spread over her body.
    One spring morning Tom discovered a snail under the lemon tree as they walked around her parents’ garden. He would have been about two or three. The snail was hiding by a fallen lemon beneath the tree. Tommy let out a squeal ofdelight and was about to stamp on it, but Louisa held him back.
    â€˜Don’t hurt the snail,’ she said. ‘Poor snail.’
    She rescued the snail and put it in some greenery, where it would have to deal with new challenges, she supposed. Even a snail deserves a fighting chance.
    Later when Tom told her mother that he had found a snail, her mother said she hoped he squashed it.
    â€˜No, Mummy saved it,’ he said.
    â€˜Yes, that sounds like Mummy,’ said her mother.
    These are the things she remembers. ‘Do you remember, Tom?’ she says. ‘You were too small.’ Her heart sinks a little.
    That day, Louisa realised that no big hand would come down from the sky and rescue her and the children. She would have to save herself. She would have to stop being passive. It took her another three or four years to work up the courage to leave. She was waiting for something bad to happen to her husband. She was waiting for him to get his just desserts.
    But that was wrong, and anyway the world doesn’t work like that. He had a right to live his life. Everyone has a right to live a life – to follow it through to its natural conclusion. Everything. She stares at the lemon picked green from the tree, remembers dinner, returns to the feel of her feet inside her shoes, hard against the brick paving, the shifting leaves on the rosebushes, the distant sound of traffic.
    She has just walked inside when she hears a familiar engine sound. The vehicle pulls up outside the front of the house and stops, with its engine still running. She goes to the window. The van is back. She jumps away from the window and sneaks a look from the side, trying to see what he is doing. The man, who she now recognises is a cross between Tom and Victor, is looking in her direction. His window fogs up. He wipes a patch clear, and continues looking in the direction of the house.
    She is unnerved. Her heart begins to beat irregularly, threatening to stop, and alternately racing to the point ofbursting. Her forehead is damp, and the back of her neck is prickling. She shivers. He is looking, at the house, at the window. The engine is running. She wonders if he can see her. She edges further into the corner and, holding the lemon like a hand grenade, drops to the floor, crawls along the wall beneath the sill, and takes cover under the coffee table. Her eyes are fixed on the passage that leads to the front door. She can hear the engine, louder now, revving. What if he is aiming to drive straight through the front wall? She crawls out from the coffee table, across the floor to the far corner of the room. The front wall will slow him down. He won’t get at her there in the corner, not if she makes herself small enough. Then what?
    Now her thoughts are spinning, winding tighter and tighter to the only possible conclusion – Victor. He has paid this man to do his dirty work. He knows where she lives. He’s got this man watching her, and he’s employed him because of