The Family Upstairs

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘What was my name?’ she says. ‘Did anyone know?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Mr Royle. ‘Your name was written on the note that your parents left behind. It was Serenity.’

  ‘Serenity?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Pretty name. I think. If a little … bohemian?’

  Suddenly she feels claustrophobic. She wants to run dramatically from the room, but it is not her way to be dramatic.

  Instead she says, ‘Can we see the garden now, please? I could do with some fresh air.’

  5

  Lucy turns off her phone. She needs to keep the charge in case Samia tries to get in touch. She turns to Marco, who is looking at her curiously.

  ‘What?’ she says.

  ‘What was that message? On your phone?’

  ‘What message?’

  ‘I saw it. Just now. It said The baby is twenty-five. What does that mean?’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘It must mean something.’

  ‘It doesn’t. It’s just a friend’s baby. Just a reminder that they turned twenty-five. I must send a card.’

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘A friend in England.’

  ‘But you haven’t got any friends in England.’

  ‘Of course I have friends in England. I was brought up in England.’

  ‘Well, what’s her name?’

  ‘Whose name?’

  Marco roars with frustration. ‘Your friend’s name, of course.’

  ‘What does it matter?’ she replies sharply.

  ‘It matters because you’re my mum and I want to know stuff about you. I like, literally, don’t know anything about you.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. You know loads about me.’

  He gazes at her wide-eyed and stupefied. ‘Like what? I mean, I know your parents died when you were a baby. I know you grew up in London with your aunt and that she brought you to France and taught you to play the fiddle and died when you were eighteen. So I know, like, the story of you. But I don’t know the details. Like where you went to school or who your friends were and what you did at the weekends or funny things that happened or anything normal.’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ she says.

  ‘I know it’s complicated,’ he says. ‘But I’m twelve years old now and you can’t treat me like a little baby any more. You have to tell me things.’

  Lucy stares at her son. He’s right. He’s twelve and he is not interested in fairy stories any more. He knows there’s more to life than five major events, that life is made up of all the moments in between.

  She sighs. ‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Then when?’

  ‘Soon,’ she says. ‘If we ever get to London, I’ll tell you everything.’

  ‘Are we going?’

  She sighs and pulls her hair away from her hairline. ‘I just don’t know. I’ve got no money. You and Stella don’t have passports. The dog. It’s all just …’

  ‘Dad,’ says Marco, cutting her off. ‘Call Dad.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘We can meet somewhere public. He wouldn’t try anything then.’

  ‘Marco. We don’t even know where your father is.’

  There is a strange silence. She can sense her son fidgeting edgily, burying his face into the dog’s fur again.

  ‘I do.’

  She turns again, sharply, to look at him.

  He closes his eyes, then opens them again. ‘He collected me from school.’

  ‘When!’

  Marco shrugs. ‘A couple of times. Towards the end of term.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell me?’

  ‘He told me not to.’

  ‘Fuck, Marco. Fuck.’ She punches the ground with her fists. ‘What happened? Where did he take you?’

  ‘Nowhere. Just sort of walked with me.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘What did he say? What is he doing?’

  ‘Nothing. Just on holiday. With his wife.’

  ‘And where is he now?’

  ‘Still here. He’s here for the whole summer. In the house.’

  ‘The house?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘God, Marco! Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘Because I knew you’d go mental.’

  ‘I’m not going mental. Look at me. Totally not mental. Totally just sitting here on the hard, wet ground under a flyover with nowhere to sleep while your father is a mile up the road living in the lap of luxury. Why would I go mental?’

  ‘Sor-ry.’ He tuts. ‘You said you never wanted to see him again.’

  ‘That was when I wasn’t sleeping under a motorway.’

  ‘So you do want to see him again?’

  ‘I don’t want to see him. But I need a way out of this mess. And he’s the only option. At the very least he can pay to get my fiddle back.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, cos then we’ll be really rich, won’t we?’

  Lucy clenches her hands into fists. Her son always puts the unpalatable bottom line into words, then slaps her round the face with it.

  ‘It’s the middle of July. All the UK and German schools will be breaking up about now. There’ll be twice as many tourists. It shouldn’t take long to make enough to get to the UK.’

  ‘Why can’t you ask Dad to pay for us to go? Then we can just go. I really want to go to London. I want to get away from here. Just ask Dad to pay. Why can’t you?’

  ‘Because I don’t want him to know we’re going. No one can know we’re going. Not even Mémé. OK?’

  He nods. ‘OK.’

  His chin falls against his chest and she sees the clumps of matted hair that have formed at the back of his head in the week that they’ve been homeless. Her heart aches and she cups her hand around the back of his slender boy neck, squeezes it gently. ‘I’m so sorry, my lovely boy,’ she says, ‘I’m so sorry about everything. Tomorrow we’ll see your father and then everything will start getting better, I swear.’

  ‘Yes,’ he snaps, ‘but nothing will ever be normal, will it?’

  No, she thinks to herself. No. It probably won’t.

  6

  CHELSEA, 1988

  Birdie came first. Birdie Dunlop-Evers.

  My mother had met her somewhere or other. At a do. Birdie played the fiddle in a pop band called the Original Version and was, I suppose, vaguely famous. There’d been a jangly single that had almost got to number one and they’d been on Top of the Pops twice. Not that I cared much about such things. I never really liked pop music and the deification of celebrities slightly disgusts me.

  She was sitting in our kitchen drinking tea out of one of our brown mugs. I jumped slightly when I saw her there. A woman with long thin hair down to her waist, men’s trousers tied round with a belt, a striped shirt and braces, a long grey overcoat and green fingerless gloves. She looked so wrong in our house, I thought. The only people who came to our house wore hand-stitched suits and bias-cut satin; they smelled of Christian Dior aftershave and l’Air du Temps.

  Birdie glanced up at me as I walked in, small blue eyes with thin pencil lines of eyebrow above, a hard mouth which didn’t close quite properly over a row of small teeth, a rather weak chin that appeared to have buckled under the joylessness of her face. I thought she might smile, but she didn’t.

  ‘Henry,’ said my mother, ‘this is Birdie! The lady I was telling you about, from the pop group.’

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘Hello,’ she replied. I couldn’t make sense of her. She sounded like my headmistress but looked like a tramp.

  ‘Birdie’s group want to use the house to film a pop video!’ said my mother.

  I admit, at this point I did have to feign disinterest somewhat. I held my features straight and said nothing, heading silently to the biscuit barrel on the counter for my daily back-from-school snack. I selected two Malted Milks and poured myself a glass of milk. Then and only then did I say, ‘When?’

  ‘Next w
eek,’ said Birdie. ‘We had a location chosen, but they had a flood or some such disaster. Bouf. Cancelled.’

  ‘So I said, come and look at our house, see what you think,’ my mother continued.

  ‘And here I am.’

  ‘And here she is.’

  I nodded casually. I wanted to ask when they were coming and could I take the day off school and could I help but I was not then, and never have been, a person to show enthusiasm for anything. So I dipped my Malted Milk biscuit in my milk, the exact way I always did, just to the T in ‘Malted’, where the end of the standing cow meets the end of the lying down cow, and ate it silently.

  ‘I think it’s brilliant,’ said Birdie, gesturing around her. ‘Better than the other place in fact. Just perfect. I think there’d be things to sign.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘You know, waivers, etc. In case we set fire to your house. Or one of your moose heads lands on one of us and kills us. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said my mother as if she had to sign waivers for accidental moose-head fatalities all the time. ‘That makes sense. And obviously I’d need to discuss it with my husband first. But I know he’ll be happy. He loves your music.’

  This I suspected was untrue. My father liked rugby songs and bawdy opera. But he did like fuss and attention and he did like his house and anyone who liked his house was always going to go down well with him.

  Birdie left a few minutes later. I noticed a small pile of dry skin pickings on the table by her mug and felt a bit sick.

  The shoot for the video lasted two days and was much more boring than I’d thought it would be. There was endless time spent finessing light readings and getting the scruffy band members to repeat actions over and over again. They were all dressed alike in brownish clothes that looked like they might smell, but didn’t because a lady with a clothes rail had brought them along in clear plastic bags. By the end of the day the song was embedded inside my head like a trapped fly. It was a terrible song but it went to number one and stayed there for nine long, dreadful weeks. The video was on every TV screen you passed, our house, there, on view to millions.

  It was a good video. I’ll give it that. And I got a minor thrill from telling people that it was my house in the video. But the thrill faded as the weeks passed, because long after the film crew had left, long after the single had dropped out of the charts, long after their next single dropped out of the charts, Birdie Dunlop-Evers, with her bead eyes and her tiny teeth, was still in our house.

  7

  Libby works for an expensive kitchen design company. She’s head of sales, based in a showroom in the centre of St Albans, near to the cathedral. She has two sales managers and two assistant sales managers beneath her and an assistant sales director, a senior sales director and a managing director above her. She’s halfway up the ladder, the ladder that has been the focus of her existence for the past five years. In her head Libby has been building a bridge towards a life that will begin when she is thirty. When she is thirty she will be the director of sales and if she is not then she will go elsewhere for a promotion. Then she will marry the man whom she is currently trying to find both online and in real life, the man with the smile lines and the dog and/or cat, the man with an interesting surname that she can double-barrel with Jones, the man who earns the same as or more than her, the man who likes hugs more than sex and has nice shoes and beautiful skin and no tattoos and a lovely mum and attractive feet. The man who is at least five feet ten, but preferably five feet eleven or over. The man who has no baggage and a good car and a suggestion of abdominal definition although a flat stomach would suffice.

  This man has yet to materialise and Libby is aware that she is possibly a little over proscriptive. But she has five years to find him and marry him and then another five years to have a baby, maybe two if she likes the first one. She’s not in a rush. Not yet. She’ll just keep swiping left, keep looking nice when she goes out, keep accepting invitations to social events, keep positive, keep slim, keep herself together, keep going.

  It’s still hot when Libby gets up for work and there’s a kind of pearlescent shimmer in the air even at eight in the morning.

  She’d slept all night with the bedroom window open even though she knew women were advised not to. She’d arranged glasses in a row along her windowsill so that if a man did break in at least she would have some warning. But still she’d tossed and turned all night, the sheets twisted and cloying beneath her body.

  The sun had woken her up from a brief slumber, laser bright through a tiny gap in her curtains, heating the room up again in minutes. For a moment everything had felt normal. And then it hadn’t. Her thoughts switched violently to yesterday. To the dark house and the linen-fold panels, the secret staircase, the rabbit’s foot, the pale blue roses on the side of the crib. Had that really happened? Was that house still there or had it turned to particles in her wake?

  She’s the second to arrive at work that morning. Dido, the head designer, is already behind her desk and has got the air conditioner running. The iced air feels exquisite against her clammy skin, but she knows in half an hour she’ll be freezing and wishing she’d brought a cardigan.

  ‘Good morning,’ says Dido, not looking up from her keyboard. ‘How did it go?’

  She’d told Dido yesterday in confidence that she needed the day off to visit a solicitor about an inheritance. She didn’t tell her about being adopted or the possibility of the inheritance being a house. She’d said it was an elderly relative and suggested that she might be in line for a few hundred pounds. Dido had got very excited about the possibility of a few hundred pounds and at the time Libby wasn’t sure she’d be able to face her reaction if she told her the truth. But now that she’s here, and it’s just the two of them and it’s Tuesday morning and she won’t be seeing her best friend April until the weekend and she hasn’t really got anyone else she can tell, she decides maybe it would be good to share, that maybe Dido, who is twelve years older than her, will have something wise or useful to impart to help her make sense of the whole ridiculous thing.

  ‘I’ve inherited a house,’ Libby says, running water into the Nespresso machine.

  ‘Ha ha,’ says Dido, clearly not believing her.

  ‘No. I have. It’s in Chelsea, by the river.’

  ‘Chelsea, London?’ says Dido, her mouth hanging open.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As in Made In?’

  ‘Yes,’ Libby says again. ‘By the river. It’s huge.’

  ‘Are you winding me up?’

  She shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says.

  ‘Oh my God,’ says Dido. ‘So you’re basically a millionaire?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘And yet here you are, at Northbone Kitchens on a Tuesday morning, acting like a normal person.’

  ‘I’m letting it sink in.’

  ‘God, Libby, if I were you I would be letting it sink in right now drinking champagne in the garden at St Michael’s Manor.’

  ‘It’s twenty to nine.’

  ‘Well, tea then. And Eggs Benedict. What on earth are you doing here?’

  Libby feels her seams loosen and begin to come apart at the thought that she need not be here, that the sturdy ladder she’s been gripping on to for dear life has just dissolved into a heap of golden coins, that everything has changed.

  ‘I only found out yesterday! I haven’t sold it yet,’ she says. ‘I might not be able to.’

  ‘Yeah, right, because nobody wants a house in Chelsea overlooking the Thames.’

  Roughly six or seven million pounds. That was the estimate that the solicitor had given her yesterday when she’d finally got up the nerve to ask. Minus, he’d said, expenses and fees owed to the firm. And then there would be inheritance taxes to pay. You’ll end up with about three and half million, he’d said. Or thereabouts.

  He’d given her a high five. Confused her with a young person like the ones he read about in the newspapers. It had been quite disconcerting.

 
‘It’s in a bad state,’ Libby says, now. ‘And it has a history.’

  ‘History?’

  ‘Yes. Some people died there. A bit shady. Distant relatives.’ She was about to mention the baby left behind in the cot but stopped.

  ‘No way!’

  ‘Yeah. All a bit shocking. So for now I’m just going to act like everything’s normal.’

  ‘You’re going to keep on selling kitchens? In St Albans?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Libby, feeling her equilibrium start to rebalance itself at the thought of nothing changing. ‘I’m going to keep on selling kitchens in St Albans.’

  8

  Marco and Lucy spent the night on the beach in the end. The rain had stopped at about 2 a.m. and they’d gathered their things and walked the twenty minutes across town to the Promenade des Anglais where they’d unrolled their yoga mats on the wet pebbles, tucked themselves under sarongs and watched shreds of spent grey rain clouds chase each other across a big pink moon until the sun started to leak through the line between the sea and the sky.

  At eight o’clock Lucy collected together all the cents from the bottom of her rucksack and the bottom of her purse and found she had enough to buy croissants and a coffee. They ate them on a bench, both stultified by lack of sleep and the awfulness of the night before. Then they’d walked back across town to Samia’s flat to collect Stella, and Samia had not invited them in for lunch despite the fact that it was midday and they had clearly not slept in beds. Stella had been bathed and redressed in clean clothes, her soft curls brushed out and pinned back with pink fluffy clips and, as they walked back across town yet again, Lucy pondered that it probably looked like she and Marco had kidnapped her.

  ‘I can keep her for another night,’ Samia had said, her hand on Stella’s shoulder. Lucy had seen Stella shrug against Samia’s hand, almost imperceptibly, a tiny shake of her head.

  ‘That’s kind of you, but I’ve found us somewhere to sleep tonight.’ She’d felt Marco’s eyes burning into her shoulder at her lie. ‘But I am so, so grateful to you. Really.’