The Girl Below (2 page)

“Hello, Peggy,” I said, softly. “It’s Suki. Suki Piper.”

At the sound of my voice she started, and I picked up her dry, weightless hand and squeezed it to reassure her. “We used to live downstairs in the basement flat. I’m Hillary’s daughter.”

My words did not register.

“We moved away a long time ago and I haven’t seen you since—at least, I don’t think I have. For some of that time, I’ve been living in New Zealand. My father, Ludo, went to live there when my parents separated. I think you saw Hillary a few times after that but she . . .” The end of the sentence got stuck in my throat.

Peggy blinked. “Hillary,” she croaked, her lips sticking together at the corners. “Darling Hillary.”

I tried to give her a drink of water, but most of it rolled down her chin, and I gave up, resting the glass on a side table next to a half-empty bottle of scotch. Alongside it sat a plastic measuring cup with a sticky brown residue on the rim.

When I picked up Peggy’s hand again, she pulled on mine, and her eyes danced a little, like they used to. “Lovely Hillary,” she said. “How wonderful to see you!”

“I’m not Hillary. I’m her daughter, Suki.”

“And how
is
Suki?” With great effort, Peggy lifted her hands to her face and made ring shapes around her eyes. “Pink glasses!” she exclaimed. “Always dancing. Wet the bed when she came to stay with us.”

After this, she collapsed, closed her eyes, and began to snore.

Mistaking me for Hillary meant Peggy didn’t know, or had forgotten, that my mother was no longer alive. When people forgot I often couldn’t bring myself to correct them. Sometimes they started reminiscing about Hillary’s beauty, the way she’d lit up a room with her grace, or her legendary abilities to sew and cook, and by the time they asked the appalling but inevitable question, “How is she, your dear mother, Hillary?” the weight of their admiration bore down on me so hard I told them what they wanted to hear. “She moved to Scotland to look after Grandma,” I’d explained to one old acquaintance, telling another that she’d gone to India in the midnineties to find herself and was still there on an ashram. Lousy fibs but much kinder on us all. Everyone had loved my mother—no one more so than I—and if I never said out loud that she’d died, then I sometimes believed that she hadn’t.

While Peggy dozed, I stroked her hand and took an inventory of her daughter’s old room. The dresser where Pippa had teased her hair and kohled her eyes for hours was in the same place, and so was the antique Victorian dollhouse, over in the corner by the window. Pippa had outgrown the dollhouse years before I came on the scene, but she’d remained proprietary of it, and had only begrudgingly tolerated my sticky fingers on its tiny antiques. Though the dollhouse was now dusty and faded, I had never encountered its equal, and I finally understood why she hadn’t wanted to part with it. Really, it belonged in a museum—or here in this flat that was so much like one.

I let go of Peggy’s hand and walked to the window, curious to see if our old terrace was visible from up here. Our basement flat had gone through from front to back, with a set of French doors opening out onto a patio. At first, I didn’t recognize the chalk paths and lavender pots—it had been remodeled in ersatz French Provincial—and then one or two features stood out as familiar: the way the patio was on two levels, the white gate that led out to the communal garden. But what I couldn’t locate—what I was, abruptly, desperate to see—was the pitted iron plate that marked the entrance to the air-raid shelter. This shelter was a relic from the Blitz, a deep concrete bunker where families had gone to sit out the bombings during World War II. My family had gone down there too—only once—but the experience had been so awful, so chilling, that the bunker had quickly come to represent the most terrifying thing in my world. Even now, I shivered to recall the narrow stone stairs that descended into the chamber, how frigid the air had been so far under the earth, how we had not been able to get out.

Once more I scanned the terrace, looking for the trapdoor. Had I lost my bearings or was the air-raid shelter no longer there? Searching again, I found no trace of it, and surmised that it had been filled in or concreted over to prevent anyone’s falling in. Good job, I thought with immense relief, for a death trap such as that had no business being in a garden.

Peggy had stopped snoring, and her breathing was weak but regular. When I picked up her hand, she didn’t stir. The room had become stuffy, claustrophobic, and I decided I had been there long enough.

Out in the hallway, trying to remember my way to the bathroom, I felt drugged, disoriented, as though Peggy’s medication had leaked out through her skin. On the wall next to the phone was a list of emergency numbers, one of which was Pippa’s, and I wrote it down on a dog-eared receipt from my pocket. Many of the rooms between Peggy’s and the bathroom had been closed up, sealed off, but the door to one of the bedrooms was open, and I saw a mess of books and boxes spilling out. That must have been Harold’s old room. How careless and wasteful, I thought, to have so many disused rooms in such a nice flat, when all I needed was one.

It was passing back through the drawing room that I saw her, and froze immediately with the rigid fear of a five-year-old. How could I have missed her on the way to the bathroom? The statue of a young girl kneeling where she’d always knelt, on a dais between two faded velvet chaise longues that had once been cherry red. The dais was varnished mahogany, but the girl’s skin was the color of dirty cement. She was rough-hewn, abstract: her smooth granite eyes had no irises. Her tiny hands were folded in her lap, and her hair was in a bowl cut. She wore an old-fashioned smocked dress with a round pansy collar. Peggy had called her Madeline—referring to her by name, affectionately and often, as though she were her daughter or a little friend. She had been real to me too, though not in such a benign way.

As a child, I had refused to be left alone with her, and even in a room full of adults, Madeline could freak me out. It was partly the blankness of her stare, a gaze that nevertheless followed me wherever I went in the room. And partly, it was that she was the same age as me but was stuck being that age and would never grow up. It made me think that inside her was a thwarted adult, who had grown evil over time because she was trapped in a noose of perpetual childhood.

Once, at one of Peggy’s especially raucous parties, there’d been dozens of adults in the drawing room, dancing, drinking, laughing, and I was there too, up past my bedtime, and giddily lost in the forest of their legs. For a brief moment, those limbs had cleared, and there was Madeline, motionless but hunting me through the trees. My screams had been so hysterical that I had been taken home immediately—the party over for me and my parents.

On the sofa opposite Madeline’s dais, I sat down to observe her from a safe distance. I was curious to know if she’d still have any power over me at twenty-eight years old.

To begin with I was fine, in control, but then outside, clouds passed overhead, casting Madeline’s features into shadow. She had not moved, but my first thought was that it was Madeline who had taken all the light out of the room, and before I could reason against it, a sensation of quickening vertigo came over me. When I stood up to move away from her, I felt dizzy and also that I was physically shrinking. Around me, the room seemed to waver, but in a way that was too subtle to grasp. I looked down at my scuffed and ill-fitting trainers, bought in a size too big because I’d meant to use them for jogging but never had. The shoes appeared familiar, but I was sure that the feet inside them weren’t mine—that these feet were tiny impostors. I held my hands out in front of my face, spread the fingers and wiggled them, but even these looked counterfeit, rogue hands on the ends of absurdly slender limbs. My perspective had shifted lower down, and for a few seconds, I was a child again—a child who was pensive and scared.

I bit down hard on my tongue, and one by one, the walls of Peggy’s drawing room regained their density, and the weight of my adult feet sank into my shoes. Once more, I stood on solid ground, in a London apartment I had not been in for almost twenty years. An apartment so like a museum that briefly, I rationalized, it had pulled me back with it into the past.

That I’d imagined the whole thing was plausible but that didn’t change how unsettled I felt—especially when I turned to leave the drawing room and had the uncanny sensation that I was being watched.

Too late, I realized I had turned my back on Madeline, and when I swiveled round to face her, I fancied she was gloating. This amounted to nothing more than a dead-eyed stare—but then again, it never had. The year after next I’d turn thirty, but Madeline still had it over me. Her power was intact, had perhaps even grown. In the old, cowering way, I turned and walked out backward, hoping to catch the very last rays of that untimely summer evening.

Chapter Two

London, 1981

M
adeline was not the only little friend to dwell behind the stucco facade of Ladbroke Gardens. Downstairs in the basement flat, the boiler cupboard outside our bathroom was home to a hand.

This hand was just a hand—no body attached—and it liked to come out of the cupboard and untie the bows on the backs of my dresses. That was the only thing it liked to do: untie bows. If I was wearing dungarees, or a dress without a bow on the back, the hand did not come out. It did not come out for pajamas, or when anybody else was with me, and it especially did not come out when I wanted it to—though many were the times I climbed into the cupboard and looked for it. Where the hand went when it wasn’t in the cupboard, I never knew, but I do know that if it had been attached to a body, it wouldn’t have fit in there—the boiler took up too much room.

I was not afraid of this hand without a body. Never had it occurred to me to be afraid of it. The hand untied my dresses; that was the game it played and the sole reason it existed. Perhaps it helped that the hand reminded me of my mother’s: soft and feminine but also strong.

I knew what it felt like because I’d once made the mistake of grabbing it. I had been trying to show the hand to my mother, and one day when it appeared, I took hold of it and called out to her. Mum took her time getting to the boiler cupboard, and while she was on her way, the hand and I engaged in a tug-of-war. Strangely, even though I had been the one to grab the hand, once I had grabbed it, the hand started pulling back. Before long, we had traded places, with the hand trying to drag me into the cupboard, and me attempting to shake it off. I don’t remember who let go first, but by the time my mother got to the cupboard, I was sitting alone on the floor, rubbing at a red mark on my wrist.

Around the same time—my sixth or seventh year—my parents threw the only party they ever had, a bash so wild and debauched that it’s the party I’ve subsequently measured the success of all others by. They had reason to celebrate. We had literally moved up in the world, bought the flat above us and knocked through a staircase to create a maisonette—so much more posh sounding than a basement. For a while, and at the time of the party, we had two kitchens, two front doors, two bathrooms, and two boiler cupboards—though the hand never ventured to the one upstairs.

The party was in midsummer, a humid weekend in July, and my parents invited the neighbors, including Peggy and Pippa, plus a score of other friends I didn’t know they had. There was a costume-party theme, but no one told me what it was and I couldn’t work it out from the dozens of pilots, policemen, chambermaids, and slave girls who turned up. In a departure from her usual mild look, Mum donned a corkscrew blond wig and dressed up as Mae West. Eagerly, I helped her to get ready, pulling tight the laces on a corset she had rented for the occasion. She had bought new lipstick too, crimson red, and in the mirror I watched her apply it, then pull back to admire the transformation.

“You look really beautiful,” I told her. “Like a lady in a magazine.”

“I feel silly,” she said, wiping off a little of the lipstick. “And this looks completely wrong.” She removed from around her neck the simple oval locket she always wore, and I pounced on it immediately, fingering the silver and fiddling with its latch. She’d bought it in a flea market in Paris and loved it for its plainness—she told me the way it had slowly tarnished over the years made it feel like an extension of her skin.

“Can I wear it?” I said.

Mum hesitated. “Not tonight. I won’t be able to keep an eye on you.” She put the locket in her jewelry box, and selected another necklace made from dozens of diamantes that I had never seen her wear. “There,” she said, putting it on. “Now I look more like a tart.”

She pulled herself to standing and hobbled awkwardly out of the bedroom in five-inch stiletto heels, the only pair she had ever owned. When my father saw her, he wolf-whistled. “I might not go away so much if you dressed like that more often.” My mother blinked her heavy eyelashes at him but didn’t smile.

“Do you like my clown suit, Dad?” I said, sticking out my chest. I was hugely proud of the costume Mum had whipped up on her sewing machine in the week leading up to the party. Together we’d made pom-poms of yellow wool, cutting out cardboard circles and winding the yarn around them to make fat, woolly doughnuts. We’d folded another circle of card to make a pointed hat, topped with a pom-pom and tied under my chin with string. When my so-called friend Esther arrived in a Snow White costume from Hamleys, I was gutted. Suddenly, my clown suit looked homemade, all crooked pom-poms and collapsing hat. Esther’s parents were getting a divorce and my mother insisted that I invite her over out of pity. But broken home or not, Esther was mean; she called me four eyes when no one was around.

The most thrilling guests at the party were Jean Luc and Henri, who had come all the way from Paris by ferry and train. They were younger than my parents, perhaps in their early twenties, with long, raffish hair—though my dad had that too—and they smoked a ton of Gauloises. They told each other jokes in French that I knew were dirty from the way my mother made furious hand signals when they told them in front of me.