The Family Upstairs

by Lisa Jewell

  Samia had tilted her head slightly and narrowed her eyes, processing some silent account of Lucy’s situation. Lucy had held her breath, awaiting some damning pronouncement on her appearance, her parenting, the part she’d played in Samia’s precious son’s moonlight flit. Instead Samia had moved slowly towards the table halfway up the hallway and pulled a small purse from her shoulder bag. She’d peered into the purse and pulled out a twenty-euro note which she passed to Lucy.

  ‘It’s all I have,’ she’d said. ‘There is no more.’

  Lucy had taken it and then leaned into Samia and hugged her. ‘Thank you,’ she’d said. ‘God bless you.’

  Now she and the children and the dog are walking along the Promenade des Anglais in the burning afternoon sun with a bag full of clean clothes from the laundromat and bellies full of bread and cheese and Coca-Cola. They head towards one of the many beach clubs that line the beaches here in Nice: le Beach Club Bleu et Blanc.

  Lucy has eaten here, in the past. She has sat at these tables with Marco’s dad, worked her way through piles of fruits de mer, a glass of champagne at her elbow or a white wine spritzer, whilst being cooled by intermittent puffs of chilled water squirted from tiny nozzles. They wouldn’t recognise her now, those jaded old waiters in their incongruously trendy blue and white polo shirts. She’d been a sight for sore eyes twelve years ago.

  A woman sits on a perch at the entrance to the restaurant. She is blonde in that way that only women in the south of France can be blonde, something to do with the contrast between vanilla hair and darkly toasted skin. She glances at Lucy, indifferently, taking in the state of Lucy and Marco and the dog, before returning her gaze to her computer screen. Lucy pretends that she is waiting for someone to join her from the beach, cupping her eyes with her hand and peering towards the horizon until the woman is distracted by a party of five people arriving for lunch.

  ‘Now,’ she hisses, ‘now.’

  She collects the dog into her arms and pushes Stella ahead of her. Her heart races as she strides as nonchalantly as she can down the wooden platform that runs behind the restaurant towards the shower block. She looks straight ahead. ‘Keep moving,’ she hisses at Stella as she stops, inexplicably, halfway down. Then finally they are there, in the dank, humid gloom of the shower block.

  ‘Reserved exclusively for the use of patrons of le Beach Club Bleu et Blanc’, say numerous signs nailed to the wooden walls. The concrete floor is sandy and damp underfoot; the air is fusty. Lucy guides Stella to the right. If they can get through the wooden saloon doors to the showers without being spotted, then they will be fine.

  And then they are in. The showers are empty. She and Marco strip off their clothes for the first time in nearly eight days. She finds a bin for her knickers. She never wants to wear them again. She pulls shampoo and conditioner from her rucksack, a bar of soap, a towel. She takes the dog in with her, massages shampoo all through his fur, under his tail, under his collar, behind his ears. He stands steady and still, almost as though he knows that this is needed. Then she passes him to Stella who is waiting outside. He shakes himself off and Stella giggles as she is splattered with droplets from his fur. And then Lucy stands under the flow of warm water and lets it run over her head, into her eyes and ears, under her arms, between her legs and toes, feels the hell of the past week start to dissolve along with the dust and the mud and the salt. She shampoos her hair, pulling her fingers through the length of it until it squeaks. Then she passes the bottle under the stall to Marco. She watches their combined suds meeting in the gap between them, the sad, grey tinge of it.

  ‘Really get into the hair at the back of your neck, Marco,’ she says. ‘It’s all clumpy there. And armpits. Really do your armpits.’

  After, they sit side by side on a wooden bench, wrapped in towels. They can see people passing by on the other side through gaps in the wood, see slices of shimmering blue sky, smell sun-warmed wood and fried garlic. Lucy sighs. She feels unburdened, almost, but still not quite ready to do the next thing.

  They put on clean clothes and deodorant and Lucy rubs moisturiser into her face and gives the children sun cream for theirs. She has a small bottle of perfume in the bottom of her toiletry bag which she sprays behind her ears and into her cleavage. She twists her damp hair into a roll at the back of her head and clips it with a plastic claw. She looks at herself in the mirror. Nearly forty years old. Homeless. Single. Penniless. Not even who she says she is. Even her name is fake. She is a ghost. A living, breathing ghost.

  She puts on some mascara, some lip gloss, adjusts the pendant of her golden necklace so that it sits in her sun-burnished cleavage. She looks at her children: they are beautiful. The dog looks nice. Everyone smells good. They have eaten. This is as good as things have been in days.

  ‘Right,’ she says to Marco, shoving her dirty clothes back into her rucksack and pulling it closed. ‘Let’s go and see your dad.’

  9

  CHELSEA, 1988

  I’d been watching from the stairs, so I already knew. A man with dark curls, a hat with a brim, a donkey jacket, tweed trousers tucked into big lace-up boots. Old suitcases that looked like props from an olden-days movie and a wickerwork cat box held together with a worn leather strap. And Birdie standing by his side, in a dress that looked like a nightie.

  ‘Darling!’ I heard my mother call out to my father. ‘Come and meet Justin!’

  I watched my father appear from the drawing room. He had a cigar clenched between his teeth and was wearing a hairy green jumper.

  ‘So,’ he said, squeezing the man’s hand too hard, ‘you’re Birdie’s boyfriend?’

  ‘Partner,’ Birdie interjected. ‘Justin is my partner.’

  My father looked at her in that way he had when he thought someone was deliberately making him look a fool, as though he was considering violence. But the look passed quickly and I saw him push through it with a smile. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course. That’s the modern way, isn’t it?’

  Birdie had told my mother that she and her partner needed somewhere to stay for a few days. Their landlord had kicked them out because they’d got a cat – what sort of idiot gets a cat without checking the terms of their lease? I was not even eleven years old and had never lived in a rental and I knew that much – and Birdie hadn’t known whom else to turn to. As an adult man now of forty-one years old I have often used this refrain to get people to do what I want them to do. I didn’t know who else to turn to. It gives the person you’re trying to manipulate nowhere to go. Their only option is to capitulate. Which is exactly what my mother had done.

  ‘But we have so many rooms,’ she’d said when I complained about the upcoming arrangement. ‘And it’s only for a few days.’

  My mother, in my opinion, just wanted a pop star living in her house.

  My sister passed me on the stairs and stopped with a small intake of breath when she saw the cat basket in the hall. ‘What’s it called?’ she said, dropping to her knees to peer through the grille.

  ‘It’s a girl. She’s called Suki,’ said Birdie.

  ‘Suki,’ she said, tucking the knuckles of her fingers between the bars. The cat pushed itself against her hand and purred loudly.

  The man called Justin picked up his stage prop suitcase and said, ‘Where shall we put our things, Martina?’

  ‘We’ve got a lovely room for you at the top of the house. Children, show our guests to the yellow room, will you?’

  My sister led the way. She was by far the more gregarious of the two of us. I found grown-ups relatively terrifying whereas she seemed to quite like them. She was wearing green pyjamas. I was wearing a tartan dressing gown and blue felt slippers. It was nearly nine and we’d been on a countdown to bedtime.

  ‘Oh,’ said Birdie as my sister pushed open the hidden door in the wood panelling that led to the stairs to the top floor. ‘Where on earth are you taking us?’

  ‘It’s the back stairs,’ my sister said. ‘To the yellow room.’

 
‘You mean the servants’ entrance?’ Birdie replied sniffily.

  ‘Yes,’ my sister replied brightly because although she was only a year and a half younger than me she was too young to understand that not everyone thought sleeping in secret rooms at the top of secret staircases was an adventure; that some people might think they deserved proper big bedrooms and would be offended.

  At the top of the secret staircase there was a wooden door leading to a long thin corridor where the walls were sort of wonky and lumpy and the floorboards warped and bouncy and it felt a bit like walking along a moving train. The yellow room was the nicest of the four up there. It had three windows in the ceiling and a big bed with a yellow duvet cover to match the yellow Laura Ashley wallpaper and modern table lamps with blue glass shades. Our mother had arranged yellow and red tulips in a vase. I watched Birdie’s face as she took it all in, a sort of grudging tilt of her chin as if it to say: I suppose it will do.

  We left them there, and I followed behind my sister as she skipped down the stairs, through the drawing room and into the kitchen.

  Dad was uncorking wine. Mum was wearing her frilled apron and tossing a salad. ‘How long are those people staying for?’ I couldn’t help blurting out. I saw a shadow pass across my father’s face at the note of impudence I’d failed to mask.

  ‘Oh. Not for long.’ My mother pushed the cork back into a bottle of red wine vinegar and placed it to one side, smiling benignly.

  ‘Can we stay up?’ my sister asked, not looking at the bigger picture, not looking beyond the nose on her face.

  ‘Not tonight,’ my mother replied. ‘Tomorrow maybe, when it’s the weekend.’

  ‘And then, will they go?’ I asked, very gently nudging the line between me and my father’s patience with me. ‘After the weekend?’

  I turned then as I sensed my mother’s gaze drift across my shoulder. Birdie was standing in the doorway with the cat in her arms. It was brown and white with a face like an Egyptian queen. Birdie looked at me and said, ‘We shan’t be staying long, little boy. Just until Justin and I have found a place of our own.’

  ‘My name is Henry,’ I said, hugely taken aback that a grown-up in my own home had just called me ‘little boy’.

  ‘Henry,’ repeated Birdie, looking at me sharply. ‘Yes, of course.’

  My sister was staring greedily at the cat and Birdie said, ‘Would you like to hold her?’

  She nodded and the cat was placed into her arms where it immediately twisted itself round 180 degrees like a piece of unfurled elastic and escaped leaving her with a terrible red scratch on the inside of her arm. I saw her eyes fill with tears and her mouth twist into a brave smile.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said, as my mother fussed over her, dabbing at her arm with a wet cloth.

  ‘Henry, fetch some Germolene, will you, from my bathroom cupboard.’

  I threw Birdie a look as I passed, wanting her to see that I knew she hadn’t taken enough care passing the cat to my sister. She looked back at me, her eyes so small I could barely make out their colour.

  I was a strange boy. I can see that now. I’ve since met boys like me: slow to smile, intense, guarded and watchful. I suspect that Birdie had probably been a very strange little girl. Maybe she recognised herself in me. But I could tell she hated me, even then. It was obvious. And it was very much mutual.

  I passed Justin as I crossed the hallway. He was holding a battered box of Black Magic and looking lost. ‘Your parents that way?’ he asked, pointing in the general direction of the kitchen.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘In the kitchen. Through that arch.’

  ‘Merci beaucoup,’ he said, and although I was only ten I was old enough to know that he was being pretentious.

  We were sent to bed shortly after that, my sister with a plaster on the inside of her arm, me with the beginnings of an upset stomach. I was one of those children: my emotions made themselves felt in my gut.

  I could hear them shuffling about upstairs later that night. I put a pillow over my head and went back to sleep.

  The Black Magic sat unopened on the kitchen table the next morning, when I came down extra early. I was tempted to unpeel the cellophane and open them. A small act of rebellion that would have made me feel better in the short term but way, way worse in the long. I felt a movement behind me and saw the cat squeezing through the door behind me. I thought about the scratch on my sister’s arm and remembered Birdie’s impatient tut: ‘It was an accident, she wasn’t holding her properly, Suki would never scratch on purpose.’

  A bubble of hot red anger passed right through me at the memory and I hissed loudly at the cat and chased it out of the room.

  It was almost a relief to go to school that day, to feel normal for a few hours. I’d just started my last term of primary school. I would turn eleven the following month, one of the youngest boys in my year, and then I would be moved on to a bigger school, closer to home, with no knickerbockers. I was very fixated on it at this point. I had very much outgrown the knickerbocker school and all the children I’d grown up with. I could tell I was different. Completely different. There was no one like me there and I had fantasies about going to the big school and finding myself surrounded by people like me. Everything would be better at the big school. I just had ten weeks to get through, then a long boring summer, and then it would all begin.

  I had no idea, none whatsoever, how different the landscape of my life would look by the end of that summer and how all the things I’d been waiting for would soon feel like distant dreams.

  10

  Libby sits at her kitchen table. Her back door is open on to her courtyard, which is overcast in the late afternoon sun, but still too humid to sit in. She has a Diet Coke poured into a tumbler full of ice to hand and is bare-footed, her sandals cast aside moments after walking into her flat. She flips open the lid of her rose-gold laptop and brings up her Chrome browser. She is almost surprised to see that the last thing she’d browsed, four days ago, before the letter had arrived and upturned everything, was local classes in salsa dancing. She can barely imagine what she’d been thinking. Something to do with meeting men, she supposes.

  She opens up a new tab and slowly, nervously, types in the words Martina and Henry Lamb.

  She immediately finds a link to an article in the Guardian from 2015. She clicks it. The article is called: ‘The Mysterious Case of Serenity Lamb and the Rabbit’s Foot’.

  Serenity Lamb, she thinks, that was me, that is me. I am Serenity Lamb. I am also Libby Jones. Libby Jones sells kitchens in St Albans and wants to go salsa dancing. Serenity Lamb lies in a painted cot in a wood-panelled room in Chelsea with a rabbit’s foot tucked inside her blanket.

  She finds it hard to locate the overlap, the point at which one becomes the other. When her adoptive mother first held her in her arms, she imagines. But she wasn’t sentient then. She wasn’t aware of the transition from Serenity to Libby, the silent twisting and untwisting of the filaments of her identity.

  She takes a sip of her Coke and starts to read.

  11

  The house in Antibes is the colour of dead roses: a dusty, muted red, with shutters painted bright blue. It is the house where Lucy once lived, a lifetime ago, when she was married to Marco’s father. Ten years after their divorce she can still barely bring herself to use his name. The feel of it on her tongue, on her lips, makes her feel nauseous. But here she stands, outside his house, and his name is Michael. Michael Rimmer.

  There is a red Maserati parked on the driveway, leased no doubt as Michael is many things but as rich as he thinks he should be is not one of them. She sees Marco’s gaze hover intently on the car. She can see the naked desire written on his features, his held breath, his awe.

  ‘It’s not his,’ she mutters, ‘he’s just renting it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just do, all right?’

  She squeezes Stella’s hand reassuringly. Stella has never met Marco’s father before, but she knows full we
ll how Lucy feels about him. They approach the door and Lucy presses the brass bell. A maid comes to the door, wearing white overalls and latex gloves. She smiles. ‘Bonjour, madame,’ she says.

  ‘Is Mr Rimmer at home?’ asks Lucy, using her best and clearest English accent.

  ‘Oui,’ says the maid. ‘Yes. He is in the garden. Wait one minute.’ She pulls a small black Nokia from the pocket of her overalls, pulls off one of her latex gloves and dials a number. She glances up at her. ‘Who shall I say is here?’

  ‘Lucy,’ she says. ‘And Marco.’

  ‘Sir, Mr Rimmer, there is a lady here called Lucy. And a boy called Marco.’ She nods. ‘OK. Yes. OK. OK.’ She hangs up and slips the phone back into her pocket. ‘Mr Rimmer says to bring you to him. Come.’

  Lucy follows the tiny woman through the hallway. She averts her gaze as she walks, away from the spot at the foot of the stone staircase where she’d ended up with a broken arm and a fractured rib when Michael pushed her when she was four months pregnant with Marco. She averts it from the spot on the wall in the corridor where Michael banged her head repeatedly because he’d had a bad day at work – or so he explained an hour later when he was trying to stop her from leaving because he loved her so much, because he couldn’t live without her. Oh, the irony. Because here he is, married to someone else and utterly and entirely alive.

  Lucy’s hands shake as they near the back entrance, the one she knows so well, the vast wooden double doors that swing open into the tropical splendour of the garden, where hummingbird moths sip from horn-shaped flowers and banana trees grow in shady corners, where a small waterfall trickles through a flowery rockery and a sparkling rectangle of azure-blue water sits in the southernmost point, basking in the afternoon sun. And there he is. There is Michael Rimmer. Sitting at a table by the pool, a wireless headpiece in one ear, a laptop open in front of him and two phones, a small bottle of beer belying the hectic business-guy act he’s clearly portraying.