The Girl Below (13 page)

“Have you heard from him lately?” she said, more gently.

Peggy didn’t answer, but I saw, as Pippa knelt and carefully gathered up the pieces of broken china, that her jaw was clenched.

“Well, neither have I,” said Pippa, when she’d finished picking up the crockery. “Suki, would you mind getting a tea towel from the kitchen?”

I was still rifling in the cupboards looking for one when Pippa came in to throw out the broken cup.

“Is she well enough to go to Greece?” I said.

“It was her idea,” said Pippa. “She campaigned with her doctor to be allowed to go. But she enjoys being difficult. If we changed our minds and said she had to stay here, she’d want to go with us.” She pulled out a tea towel from perilously close to the moonshine flour bin and handed it to me. “Did you enjoy Mummy’s fantasy wall?”

At first, I didn’t catch on. “You mean the photographs? She told me she was an actress.”

“She was an understudy in a couple of plays,” said Pippa. “Eventually she became a theater publicist—a very good one too. That’s why she has got so many autographed photos, and why she isn’t in any of them.”

“Except for the one in the headdress,” I said.

“Costume party,” said Pippa. “She had plenty of those.”

“That’s what I remember most about her—the amazing clothes,” I said, feeling a rush of sadness and sympathy for Peggy’s failed ambitions. Perhaps it didn’t matter that she’d only acted the part of an actress. Flouncing around in Kabuki gowns had been a kind of performance. Who cared if it hadn’t been on a stage?

Pippa settled on a stool by the window, and didn’t look like she was in a hurry to go back to the drawing room. “I wish she’d let go of all that,” she said. “She hangs on to all those bloody gowns and some of them are worth a fortune. Soon they’ll be so ruined they won’t be worth a thing.”

Money troubles, it seemed, were all around me. “Couldn’t she sell this place? Move somewhere smaller?”

“She doesn’t own it,” said Pippa, as if this was something I should have known.

“But the rent must be astronomical!”

“It would be if she hadn’t been here since the sixties. She pays peppercorn rent, and no one can kick her out. She’s got absolutely no savings, and most of the time we have to help her out with bills. This place costs a fortune to heat.” Pippa sighed. “I shouldn’t be so hard on her. She made so many sacrifices when we were growing up. Harold’s education didn’t come cheap, nor did the trimmings that went with it.”

“You didn’t want to go to university?”

“Me? At university?” She sounded surprised that I’d even asked. “I was far too interested in makeup and boys—as I’m sure you remember.”

“You taught me everything I know about makeup. And I should have listened more to what you said about boys.”

Pippa laughed. “It was such a shame when you and your mother moved out of the flat downstairs. But I suppose I can understand why she wanted to get rid of it.”

“She didn’t want to—we moved because Dad wanted to sell the flat. That was the one time he got in touch.”

“What?” said Pippa. She looked like she had been slapped. “You mean he cut you off?”

I had never heard anyone describe it so harshly, but she was right, we had been severed. “Mum didn’t like to talk about it.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Pippa. “How awful.”

That night, Peggy asked me to read to her from one of the romances on the nightstand by her bed. I was about to start from the beginning of the slim volume when she snatched it from my hand and opened it near the end. “Start with the climax,” she said, getting comfortable against a bank of old feather pillows. “I can’t stay awake long, so you have to cut to the chase.”

I made the mistake of glancing at Madeline before I complied, and Peggy followed my gaze. “Isn’t she lovely?” she said. “She was a gift from my darling Laurie.”

“She’s very . . . lifelike,” I said, choosing my words carefully.

“I think so, but the others can’t see it. She’ll be out on the curb the minute I’m gone.”

“Wherever I go in the room,” I said, “I feel like she’s looking at me.”

“I know,” said Peggy, reaching out to stroke Madeline’s face. “I never feel lonely when she’s here.” She smiled. “Of course, it’s even better to have human company. Especially someone who isn’t in a uniform.”

From her corner, Madeline glared.

“Did you move her in here yourself?” I asked.

“Heavens, no. She weighs three times as much as I do. But Amanda came up with the ingenious idea of popping her in the wheelchair and trundling her down the hall.” Peggy pointed to the large dresser on the door side of her bed. “Only we couldn’t get the wheelchair past the dresser, so she’s sort of stuck behind the door.”

After I’d read a single page, Peggy was sound asleep, and I tucked the quilt into the small of her back. Standing away from the bed and looking at her sleeping body, I suddenly felt very alone, and realized that I’d enjoyed having company as much as she had. Being useful, feeling needed, had been nice, and I went back to the living room, acutely aware that I was neither.

There was no TV in the flat, only books and whiskey—at least I knew where that was hiding—and with Madeline tucked away in Peggy’s room, I felt relaxed enough to take a nightcap on the chaise longue with a 1978 issue of
Vogue
that I had found in a stack under the coffee table. But after only a couple of sips, and a dozen or so pages, my eyes began to droop.

I went to my room tired but sober. It was a silvery night, pretty, and after getting changed into summer pajamas, I opened the curtains and climbed into bed. The moon was out, a pale disk filmed over with smoke. No stars, but I’d stopped looking for them in London’s light-polluted skies. Harold’s room looked out over the communal gardens, and the rustle of oak trees was surprisingly loud considering the constant low hum of people and televisions and traffic underneath it. For an hour or more, I lay there with my eyes closed, waiting for sleep, but every time I came close to drifting off, some thought pulled me back to consciousness. Round and round these thoughts went, until my body drummed with restlessness. I was thirsty too, perhaps because of the whiskey, so I got up and walked through the quiet flat to get a glass of water, turning on lights as I went. The kitchen was empty, and smelled of the sweet tomato soup I’d heated up for our dinner. I drank a glass of water, and filled it again to take back to bed, then turned off the fluorescent bar in the kitchen, and returned to the hallway, where I did something uncharacteristic—I turned off that light too. It was very dark but in time my eyes adjusted, and I made my way through the shadows to Harold’s room. I had braced myself to feel constant fear in Peggy’s flat, where she and her little friend lived, but walking alone along the checkered hallway, I felt nothing except nostalgia, and the old familiar gnaw of unwanted solitude.

Back in Harold’s room, I put down the glass of water next to the bed and climbed in. Glasses off, I shut my eyes to sleep. I was calm, hydrated, warm, tired; I should have drifted off immediately, but could not. This time it was a noise that kept me awake, a scraping sound coming from the garden, as if someone was dragging a heavy iron spade along one of the concrete paths. The noise stopped, but then I was bothered by a deep absence of sound, as though I had descended to the bottom of the ocean. No oak leaves rustled, no traffic hummed; all the TVs and their owners had been switched off. So dense, so complete was the silence that I put on my glasses and went to the window to see what it looked like.

Everything below was incredibly familiar, like the scene in a postcard that’s been stuck to the fridge for too many years. There was the paved patio and white gate; the neat begonia beds with their border of pebbles; the barbecue area my father had built out of salvaged red bricks. On the tiny patch of lawn, someone had been ten-pin bowling and left the game out for the night—only they weren’t bowling pins, they were wine bottles. My gaze lingered on the flattened carcass of a Wendy tent—primary red and yellow with five or six tent poles sticking out like broken ribs.

When the truth about what I was looking at sank in, I sprang from the windowpane, and steadied myself against an adjacent wall. Nothing in the room had changed—the bed was messed up where I had been lying in it, and the glass of water on the bedside table was as full as it had been when I set it down. The thing that was wrong was outside, in the garden. Not just the tent, but in the seconds before I looked away I was sure I’d seen a rectangle of black beyond it, slightly larger than a cot mattress.

But how was that possible? I steeled myself to look again. Leaning carefully toward the glass, I gripped the sash window frame so hard that a splinter of chipped paint jabbed into the soft skin under my fingernail, but the pain of it was canceled by what I saw out in the garden in plain sight. There, at the end of the begonia beds, was the hatch to the air-raid shelter, peeled open like the lid of a sardine can.

Two or three times more, I experimented with moving away from the window for a moment, then looking back out to make sure that what I’d seen was actually there. It was, every time. There was no mistaking the layout of the garden, exactly as it had been when I was a child, no mistaking the rectangle of black or the debris that had been left out on the lawn the night after the party.

The windowpane was damp where I’d pressed against it, and I stood back and wiped away the condensation. Real moisture from my breathing, something you could run your finger through, unlike the mirage on the other side of the glass. I rubbed my eyes, but that made no difference. The old garden was still there, as alluring as it was filled with menace.

I decided to open the window. It had been so long since anyone had done so that it took some effort to force aside the half-moon catch between the two sides of the sash. The windowpane itself moved easily enough, but I soon discovered the sash cord was broken, and the weight of the glass in its frame bore down on my hands with tremendous urgency and pressure. Still, I got the thing open, and propped up the sash with a hardback Dickens omnibus from Harold’s schoolboy collection. With much trepidation, I leaned a little way out. The night air was still, but also sultry, humid. With one eye on Dickens—his long-windedness holding fast—I leaned out a bit farther and dared to look down.

One of the French doors—
our
old French doors—was open, and light spilled out onto the patio. A shadow fell across it and a male figure walked out, followed by another and another—three men in all—their laughter like gunshots on the still night air.

For a second or two, I watched with awed curiosity before I reacted physically to the ghastly spectacle—one of the men was my father—and reeled backward and upward, dislodging the book and sending the window frame downward with the force of a guillotine. The sound of it slamming was enough to wake the dead, and I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled, at great speed, toward the bed.

Once in it, I pulled the musty feather quilt over my head, but it wasn’t quite thick enough to block out the dreadful scraping noises of the hatch being closed, or the giddy, drunken voices, including my father’s, that accompanied the endeavor. The only mercy—and I was absurdly grateful for it—was that from four stories up, I could not make out a word they were saying. After a time the scraping, talking, and laughing all stopped and I guessed that the men had gone back inside, wherever that was, this world or another. The garden, the building, the room, fell quiet once more, not the thick silence of ten minutes earlier but the ordinary hum of late-night London. I could have climbed out of bed and gone to the window to see if sight matched sound, but by then I had run out of gumption, for that or any other task.

Chapter Nine

London, 1991

O
varian cancer: one of the most deadly, one of the most invisible. I didn’t see it coming. Not just because there was nothing to see, or because Mum hadn’t wanted me to find out, but because for most of the two years she was having aggressive treatment, I was trawling the lipstick counters and movie foyers of Notting Hill, lost in a haze of bus-stop crushes and top-forty pop hits. I was sixteen. The first few times she went to hospital and my grandmother came to look after me, I thought it was serious, but after Mum had been admitted half a dozen times and was, on each occasion, returned to me in one piece, her absence became routine. I was free to fixate on what all teenage girls fixate on—boys. In my case, I wanted to know why I had grown up to be one of those girls with whom they did not fall wildly in love. Cancer had nothing on that, and try as I might, I cannot go back to redress the oversight.

By that age, I had worked out that my rotten luck with boys had little to do with looks or even personality—plenty of plain, irritating girls in my class were met at the school gates by a different boy each week—and more to do with a hidden magnet you were either born with, or, tragically, born without. If the magnet wasn’t there, you couldn’t get one, or even pretend you had one; you just had to learn to live without it, to watch from the sidelines while girls with magnets made off with all the loot.

That year, Alana and I were hung up on noses. Every single boy we saw in the street, on the bus, in the park had to have his nose rated and classified according to a complicated set of criteria. At the bottom of the sliding scale was the worst kind of nose: large and bumpy and Roman, the sort a French lothario would sport (off the scale altogether was anything potato shaped or bulbous). At the top—the very pinnacle of proboscis perfection—was an RP: a pointed, girlish ski jump of a nose, as sported by the pointed, girlish actor River Phoenix, or “Riv,” as he was to us. To see an RP in the flesh was to fall instantly, swooningly in love, and warranted an immediate four-hour phone call to discuss the details of the nose and its owner. This would be followed by weeks of frustrated stalking in an attempt at further sightings.