The Family Upstairs

by Lisa Jewell

  I knew what I had to do and it does not cast me in a good light. But I was a child. I was desperate. I was trying to save us all.

  The drugs were surprisingly easy to administer. I made sure to cook for my mother as much as possible. I made her herbal teas and vegetable juices. I laced everything I gave her with the things listed in the chapter in Justin’s book entitled ‘Natural Termination of Unwanted Pregnancies’. Tons of parsley, cinnamon, mugwort, sesame seeds, chamomile and evening primrose oil.

  As I passed her a glass of juice she would stroke my hand and say, ‘You are being such a good boy, Henry. I feel very blessed to have you taking care of me.’ And I would flush a little and not reply because in some ways I was taking care of her. I was making sure that she didn’t get shackled to David for evermore. But in other ways I was not taking care of her in the least.

  And then one day, when she was about five months pregnant and the baby was proper and real and had begun kicking and wriggling and moving about, my mother came downstairs and I heard her talking to Birdie in the kitchen and she said, ‘The baby has not moved. Not today at all.’

  The consternation grew over the course of the day and I felt a terrible dark sickness in the pit of my belly, because I knew what was coming.

  Of course no doctors were called, no trips to A & E were embarked upon. Apparently David Thomsen was a fully qualified gynaecologist on top of all his other myriad skills. He took charge of everything, sent people running off for towels and water and pointless homeopathic tinctures.

  It took five days for the baby to come out after it had died.

  My mother wailed for hours. She stayed in her room with David and Birdie and the baby, making noises that could be heard throughout the house. We four children huddled silently together in the attic room unable to properly process what had just happened. And then finally, much later that day, my mother brought the baby downstairs wrapped in a black shawl and David made a grave for the baby at the far end of the garden and the baby was buried in the dark of night with lit candles all around.

  I sought out my father that night. I sat opposite him and I said, ‘Did you know that the baby died?’

  He turned and stared at me. I knew he wouldn’t answer the question because he couldn’t speak. But I thought there might be something in his eyes to let me know what he was thinking about the events of the day. But all I saw in his eyes was fear and sadness.

  ‘It was a little boy,’ I said. ‘They’re calling him Elijah. They’re burying him, now, in the back garden.’

  He continued to stare at me.

  ‘It’s probably just as well, isn’t it? Don’t you think?’

  I was seeking redemption for my sins. I decided to read approval into his silence.

  ‘I mean, it probably would have died anyway, wouldn’t it? Without medical assistance? Or even worse, Mum might have died. So, you know, maybe it was better this way.’ I glanced at my reflection in the dark glass of the window behind my father. I looked young, and foolish. ‘It was very small.’

  My voice caught on this last word. The baby had been so very small, like a strange doll. My heart had ached at the sight of it. My baby brother.

  ‘Anyway. That’s what’s been happening. And now, I suppose, we can all try and get back to normal.’

  But that was the problem. Because there was no normal. My father’s life was not normal. Our existence was not normal. The baby had gone, but I still didn’t have any shoes. The baby was gone but my father still sat in a chair all day staring at the wall. The baby had gone but there was no school, no holidays, no friends, no outside world.

  The baby was gone, but David Thomsen was still here.

  48

  It’s nine o’clock. Lucy and the children are settled for the night in her parents’ old bedroom. The walls of the room dance with candlelight. Stella is already asleep, the dog curled up in the crook of her knees.

  Lucy opens a small can of gin and tonic. Marco opens a can of Fanta. They knock their cans together and say Cheers to London.

  ‘So,’ he says quietly. ‘Are you going to tell me about the baby now?’

  She sighs. ‘Oh God.’ She draws her hands down her face. ‘I don’t know. It’s all so …’

  ‘Just tell me. Please.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she says, stifling a yawn. ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow. I promise.’

  Marco finally falls asleep a few minutes later and then it is just Lucy, awake, in this blighted house that she swore she would never return to. She carefully lifts Marco’s head from her lap and stands. At the window she watches the sun setting in the windows of the shiny new apartment blocks on the other side of the river. They weren’t there when she lived here. Maybe if they had been, she ponders, someone might have seen them, someone might have known, someone might have rescued them and spared them all their sorry fates.

  She falls asleep some time after 3 a.m., her mind stubbornly refusing to shut down for hours before, suddenly, she is in her dreams.

  And then, just as suddenly, she is awake again. She sits up straight. Marco sits up too. Her phone tells her that they have all slept late into the morning.

  There are footsteps overhead.

  Lucy puts one hand over Marco’s and touches her lips with tip of her index finger.

  It’s silent again and she begins to relax. But then she hears it again, the definite sound of footsteps, floorboards creaking.

  ‘Mum …’

  She squeezes his hand and gets slowly to her feet. She tiptoes across the room towards the door. The dog awakes and raises his head, uncurls himself from Stella’s body and follows her to the door. His claws are loud against the wooden floorboards and she picks him up. She can feel a growl forming in the back of his throat and shushes at him.

  Marco stands behind her and she can hear his breathing hard and heavy.

  ‘Stay back,’ she hisses.

  The growl in Fitz’s throat is building and building. There’s another creak overhead and then Fitz lets rip.

  The creaking stops.

  But then there comes the sound of footsteps, sure and steady, coming down the wooden staircase that leads to the attic bedrooms. She stops breathing. The dog starts barking again and struggling to get out of her arms. She pushes the door shut and throws her body against it.

  Stella is awake now and stares at the door with wide eyes. ‘What’s going on, Mama?’

  ‘Nothing, darling,’ she whispers across the room. ‘Nothing. Fitz is just being silly.’

  The door on to the first-floor landing creaks, then bangs shut.

  Adrenaline courses through her.

  ‘Is it the baby?’ Marco asks in an urgent whisper, his eyes wide with terror.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replies. ‘I don’t know who it is.’

  Footsteps come up the landing and then there is someone breathing on the other side of the door. The dog goes quiet, his ears pinned back, his lips open over his teeth. Lucy moves away from the door and pulls it open a crack. Then the dog leaps out of her arms and forces his way through the crack of the door and there’s a man standing outside their room and the dog barks and snaps around his ankles and the man looks down at the dog with a small smile, offers him his hand to sniff. Fitz quiets and sniffs his hand and then lets him stroke the top of his head.

  ‘Hello, Lucy,’ says the man. ‘Nice dog.’

  III

  49

  Libby lies stretched out on the hotel bed with its familiar strip of aubergine-coloured fabric draped across the foot. A Premier Inn hotel room is a happy place for Libby; she associates them with hen nights and city breaks and weddings in distant cities. A bed in a Premier Inn is familiar and comforting. She could stay here all day. But she has to meet Miller in the lobby at 9 a.m. She glances now at the time on her phone. Eight forty-eight. She pulls herself off the bed and has a very quick shower.

  It had been a long journey from London the night before and she’d learned a lot about Miller in the five hours they�
�d spent together.

  He’d been in a car accident when he was twenty-two and spent a year in a wheelchair and being rehabilitated. He’d been very thin and sporty when he was younger but never regained his former lithe physique. He has two older sisters and a gay dad and was brought up in Leamington Spa. He studied politics at university where he met his ex-wife, whose name was Matilda, or Mati for short. He showed Libby a photo of her on his phone. She was extraordinarily pretty with dark red hair and full lips and a blocky, hipster haircut that would look dreadful on 99 per cent of other people.

  ‘Why did you split up?’ she’d said. Then added, ‘If you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘Oh, my fault,’ he’d said, putting a hand to his heart. ‘My fault entirely. I prioritised everything over her. My friends, my hobbies. But mainly my job. And mainly’ – he pauses to smile wryly – ‘the Guardian article.’ He’d shrugged. ‘Lesson learned though. I will never put my work before my personal life again.

  ‘And what about you?’ he’d asked. ‘Is there a Mr Libby somewhere in the picture?’

  ‘No,’ she’d replied. ‘No. That is an ongoing project.’

  ‘Ah, but you’re still young.’

  ‘Yes,’ she’d agreed, forgetting for once her usual sense of running out of time to achieve all her arbitrary goals. ‘I am.’

  She redresses in yesterday’s clothes and gets to the lobby at two minutes past nine where Miller is already waiting for her. He has not changed or, it seems, showered. He looks dishevelled, every bit like a man who has not seen his own bed for forty-eight hours. But there is something pleasing to behold about his shagginess and his carewornness and she has to resist the temptation to arrange his hair for him, to straighten the neck of his T-shirt.

  He has, of course, partaken of a hearty Premier Inn breakfast and is just downing the dregs of a coffee when she appears. Now he smiles at her, puts down his cup and together they leave the hotel.

  Sally’s practice is on the high street of Penreath in a small stone building. The shopfront houses a spa called the Beach. Sally’s rooms are up a flight of stairs on the first floor. Miller rings the bell and a very young girl answers.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Hello,’ says Miller. ‘We’re looking for Sally Radlett.’

  ‘I’m afraid she’s with a client at the moment. Can I help?’

  The girl is pale and naturally blonde and shares the same well-formed bone structure as Sally. For a moment Libby thinks that this must be Sally’s daughter. But that can’t be right. Sally must be at least sixty, probably older.

  ‘Erm, no, we really do need to speak to Sally,’ says Miller.

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘sadly not. It’s something of an emergency.’

  The girl narrows her eyes slightly and then turns her gaze to a leather Chesterfield sofa and says, ‘Would you like to take a seat, while you’re waiting? She won’t be much longer.’

  ‘Thank you so much,’ says Miller and they sit side by side.

  It’s a tiny room; they are close enough to the girl, who is back behind her desk, to hear her breathing.

  A phone call breaks the awkward silence and Libby turns to Miller and whispers, ‘What if it’s not her?’

  ‘Then it’s not her,’ he says, shrugging.

  Libby gazes at him for a split second. She realises that he doesn’t see life the way she sees it. He’s prepared to be wrong; he doesn’t always need to know what’s going to happen next. The thought of living life as Miller lives his life is strangely appealing to her.

  A tall woman appears. She is wearing a grey short-sleeved dress and gold sandals. She says goodbye to a middle-aged man and then catches their eyes, giving them an uncertain look. She turns to the girl behind the desk and says, ‘Lola?’

  The girl looks at them and says, ‘They asked for an emergency appointment.’

  She turns back to them and smiles uncertainly. ‘Hello?’

  It is clear that she does not like people walking in asking for emergency appointments.

  But Miller is unfazed and gets to his feet. ‘Sally,’ he says. ‘My name is Miller Roe. This is my friend Libby Jones. I wonder if you might be able to spare us ten minutes or so?’

  She glances back at the girl called Lola. Lola confirms that Sally’s next appointment is not until eleven thirty. She beckons them into her office and then closes the door behind them.

  Sally’s consulting room is cosy in a Scandinavian style: a pale sofa with a crocheted blanket thrown across it, pale grey walls, a white-painted desk and chairs. The walls are hung with dozens of framed black and white photographs.

  ‘So,’ she says. ‘What can I do for you?’

  Miller glances at Libby. He wants her to start. She turns back to Sally and she says, ‘I just inherited a house. A big house. In Chelsea.’

  ‘Chelsea?’ she repeats vaguely.

  ‘Yes. Cheyne Walk.’

  ‘Mm-hm.’ She nods, just once.

  ‘Number sixteen.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she says with a note of impatience. ‘I don’t—’ she begins. But then she stops and narrows her eyes slightly.

  ‘Oh!’ she says. ‘You’re the baby!’

  Libby nods. ‘Are you Sally Thomsen?’ she asks.

  Sally pauses. ‘Well,’ she says after a moment, ‘technically, no. I reverted to my maiden name a few years ago, when I started this practice. I didn’t want anyone to … well. I was in a bad place for quite some time and I wanted a fresh start, I suppose. But yes. I was Sally Thomsen. Now listen,’ she says, her tone suddenly becoming clipped and officious. ‘I don’t want to get involved in anything, you know. My daughter, she made me swear never to discuss anything about the house in Chelsea. Never to talk about it. She suffered from years of PTSD after what happened there, and really, she’s still very damaged. It’s not my place to say anything. And as much as I’m glad to see you here, alive and well, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you both to leave.’

  ‘Could we, maybe, speak to your daughter? Do you think?’

  Sally throws a steely gaze at Miller, the asker of this question. ‘Absolutely not,’ she says. ‘Absolutely not.’

  50

  CHELSEA, 1992

  My mother never really recovered from losing the baby.

  She slowly withdrew from community life. She also withdrew from David. She began to spend more time with my father, just the two of them sitting quietly side by side.

  I of course felt completely responsible for my mother’s unhappiness. I attempted to remedy the situation by feeding her concoctions from Justin’s books that claimed to cure people of melancholia. But it was virtually impossible to get her to eat anything, so nothing I did made any difference.

  David seemed to have abandoned her. I was surprised. I would have expected him to want to be involved in her rehabilitation. But he was distant with her, virtually cold.

  One day, shortly after my mother lost the baby, I asked David, ‘Why aren’t you talking to my mother any more?’

  He looked at me and sighed. ‘Your mother is healing. She needs to follow her own path towards that.’

  Her own path.

  I felt a wave of fury begin to build inside me. ‘I don’t think she is healing,’ I responded. ‘I think she’s getting worse. And what about my father? Shouldn’t he be getting some kind of care? Some kind of treatment? All he does is sit in that chair all day. Maybe in the outside world someone could do something for him. Maybe some kind of therapy. Maybe even electric shock therapy or something like that. There might be all sorts of medical advances being made for stroke victims that we don’t even know about because we’re all just stuck in here …’ I’d begun to shout and as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I’d passed into a bad place and then there it was, the cold, sharp skin of his hand, hard against the side of my jaw.

  I tasted the metallic sting of blood inside my mouth, felt a numbness building up around my lips. I touched
the blood with a fingertip and looked at David in horror.

  He stared down at me, his big shoulders hunched up around his ears, a vein throbbing on the side of his head. It was incredible how quickly this quiet, spiritual man could turn into a raging monster. ‘You have no right to talk about these things,’ he growled. ‘You know nothing about anything. You are an infant.’

  ‘But he’s my father. And ever since you came you’ve just treated him like shit!’

  His hand came back, this time across the other side of my face. I had always known this was going to happen. I had known from the moment I first saw him that David Thomsen would strike me if I confronted him. And here it was.

  ‘You ruined everything,’ I said in a nothing-to-lose-now rush of emotion. ‘You think you’re so powerful and so important but you’re not! You’re just a bully! You came into my home and you bullied everyone into being what you wanted us to be. And then you made my mum pregnant and now she’s sad and you don’t care, you don’t care at all. Because all you care about is yourself!’

  This time he hit me hard enough to throw me across the floor.

  ‘Get up!’ he yelled. ‘Get up, and go to your room. You are in isolation for a week.’

  ‘You’re going to lock me up?’ I said. ‘For talking to you? For telling you how I feel?’

  ‘No,’ he snarled. ‘I am locking you up because I cannot bear to look at you. Because you disgust me. Now, you can either walk or I can drag you. What’s it to be?’

  I got to my feet and I ran. But I didn’t run to the stairs, I ran to the front door. I turned the handle and I pulled and I was ready, ready to fly, ready to flag down a stranger and say, God help us, we’re trapped in a house with a megalomaniac. God help us please! But the door was locked.

  How had I not known this? I tugged and tugged and then turned to him and said, ‘You’ve locked us in!’