by Lisa Jewell
I was suddenly overcome with the feeling that we could get out of this. We could get out of here and not go to jail and Phin could get better and Lucy could keep her baby and everyone would be nice to us.
And then Lucy said, ‘Henry. You know Serenity isn’t David’s, don’t you?’
My God, what a gullible idiot, I still didn’t see it. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, well, then whose could it possibly be?’
And then it fell into place. I laughed at first. And then I wanted to be sick. And then I said, ‘Really? You? And Phin? Really?’
Lucy nodded.
‘But how?’ I asked. ‘When? I don’t understand.’
She dropped her head and said, ‘In his room. Only twice. It was like, I don’t know, a comfort thing. I went to him because I was worried about him. Because he seemed so ill. And then we just found ourselves …’
‘Oh my God. You whore!’
She tried to placate me, but I pushed her away. I said, ‘Get away from me. You’re disgusting. You are sick and you are disgusting. You are a slut. A dirty, dirty slut.’
Yes, I laid it on with a trowel. I have rarely been as disgusted by another human being as I was by Lucy that day.
I couldn’t look at her. I couldn’t think straight. Every time I tried to think about something, tried to decide what to do next, my mind would fill with images of Lucy and Phin: him on top of her, him kissing her, his hands, the hands that I had held that day on the roof, all over my sister’s body. I had never felt a rage like it, never felt such hatred and hurt and pain.
I wanted to kill someone. And this time I wanted to do it on purpose.
I went to Phin’s room. Lucy tried to stop me. I pushed her away from me.
‘Is it true?’ I screamed at him. ‘Is it true that you had sex with Lucy?’
He looked at me blankly.
‘Is it?’ I screamed again. ‘Tell me!’
‘I’m not telling you anything,’ he said, ‘until you untie me.’
He sounded exhausted. He sounded as if he was fading away.
I immediately felt my rage start to dissipate and went and sat down at the foot of his bed.
I dropped my head into my hands. When I looked up his eyes were closed.
There was a moment of silence.
‘Are you dying, Phin?’ I asked.
‘I don’t. Fucking. Know.’
‘We need to get out of here,’ I said. ‘You have to get it together. Seriously.’
‘I can’t.’
‘But you have to.’
‘Fucking just leave me here. I want to die.’
It did occur to me, I have to confess, that I could put a pillow over his face and push down, hold my face next to his to draw in his dying breath, whisper soothing words into his ear, overpower him, snuff his life force, take his power for myself. But, remember, apart from my mother’s unborn baby – and I have googled this extensively over the intervening years and really, it would be very hard to abort a healthy pregnancy using parsley – I never killed anyone deliberately. I am a dark person, Serenity, I know that. I don’t feel the way that other people feel. But I am capable of great compassion and great love.
And I loved Phin more than I have ever loved any other person since.
I untie his wrist from the radiator, and I lay down next to him.
I said, ‘Did you ever like me? Even for a minute?’
He said, ‘I always liked you. Why wouldn’t I like you?’
I paused to consider the question. ‘Because of me liking you? Too much?’
‘Annoying,’ he said, and there was a note of wry humour in his fading voice. ‘Very annoying.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can see that. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for letting your dad think you’d pushed me in the Thames. I’m sorry for trying to kiss you. I’m sorry for being annoying.’
The house creaked and groaned around us. You were asleep. Lucy had set you down in the old cot in my parents’ dressing room. I had been awake for thirty-six hours by this point and the silence, the sound of Phin’s breathing, lulled me into an immediate and rapturous sleep.
When I awoke, two hours later, Lucy and Phin had gone, and you were still asleep in your cot.
63
Libby looks at Lucy, this woman surrounded by loving children whom she has brought all the way from France to England. She has even brought her dog. She clearly is not the sort of woman to leave behind people she loves. She says, ‘Why did you leave me?’
Lucy immediately starts to shake her head.
‘No,’ she says, ‘no. No. I didn’t leave you. I never left you. But Phin was so ill and you were so healthy and well. So I put you down in your cot, waited until you fell asleep, and I went back to Phin’s room. Henry was asleep and I managed to persuade Phin to stand up, finally. He was so heavy; I was so weak. I got him out of the house and we went to my father’s doctor’s house. Dr Broughton. I remembered being taken there when I was small, just around the corner. He had a bright red front door. I remembered. It was about midnight. He came to the door in a dressing gown. I told him who I was. Then I said’ – she laughs wryly at a memory – ‘I said, “I’ve got money! I can pay you!”
‘At first he looked angry. Then he looked at Phin, looked at him properly and said, “Oh my, oh my, oh my.” He went upstairs quickly, grumbling under his breath; then he came back down fully dressed in a shirt and trousers.
‘He took us into his surgery. All the lights were off. He turned them on, two rows of strip lights, all coming on at once. I had to shield my eyes. And he laid Phin on a bed and he checked all of his vitals and he asked me what the hell was going on. He said, “Where are your parents?” I had no idea what to say.
‘I said, “They’re gone.” And he looked at me sideways. As if to say, We’ll get to that later. Then he called someone. I heard him explaining the situation to them, lots of medical jargon. Half an hour later a young man appeared. He was Dr Broughton’s nurse. Between them they did about a dozen tests. The nurse went off into the middle of the night with a bag of things to take to a lab. I hadn’t slept for two days. I was seeing stars. Dr Broughton made me a cup of hot chocolate. It was … crazy as it sounds, it was the best hot chocolate of my life. And I sat on the sofa in his consulting rooms and I fell asleep.
‘When I woke up it was about five in the morning and the nurse was back from the lab. Phin was on a drip. But his eyes were open. Dr Broughton told me that Phin was suffering from severe malnutrition. He said that with plenty of fluids and some time to recover, he’d be fine.
‘I just nodded and said, “His father’s dead. I don’t know where his mother lives. We have a baby. I don’t know what to do.”
‘When I told him that we had a baby, his face fell. He said, “Good Lord. How old are you exactly?”
‘I said, “I’m fifteen.”
‘He gave me a strange look and said, “Where is this baby?”
‘I said, “She’s at the house. With my brother.”
‘“And your parents? Where have they gone?”
‘I said. “They’re dead.”
‘He sighed then. He said, “I had no idea. I’m very sorry.” And then he said, “Look. I don’t know what’s going on here and I don’t want to get involved in any of this. But you have brought this boy to my door and I have a duty of care towards him. So, let’s keep him here for a while. I have the room for him.”
‘And then I said I wanted to leave, to go back for you, but he said, “You look anaemic. I want to run some tests on you before I let you back out there. Give you something to eat.”
‘So he fed me, a bowl of cereal and a banana. He took some blood, checked my blood pressure, my teeth, my ears, like a horse at market.
‘He told me I was dehydrated and that I needed to spend some time under observation and on fluids’
Then Lucy looks up at Libby and says. ‘I’m so sorry, so, so sorry. But by the time he said I was OK to leave the house, it was all over. The police had been, social se
rvices had been, you were gone.’
Her eyes fill with tears.
‘I was too late.’
64
CHELSEA, 1994
I was the one who looked after you, Serenity. I stayed behind and gave you mashed-up bananas and soya milk and porridge and rice. I changed your nappies. I sang you to sleep. We spent many hours together, you and I. It was clear that Lucy and Phin weren’t coming back and the bodies in the kitchen would start to decompose if I stayed much longer. I suspected that someone might have gone to the authorities by now. I knew it was time for me to go. I added a few lines to the suicide note. ‘Our baby is called Serenity Lamb. She is ten months old. Please make sure she goes to nice people.’ I placed the pen I’d written the note with into my mother’s hand, removed it and then left it on the table next to the note. I fed you and put you in a fresh Babygro.
And then, as I was about to leave, I felt in the pocket of my jacket for Justin’s rabbit’s foot. I’d put it in there for luck, not that I believe in such things, and it had clearly brought me no luck at all since I’d taken it from Justin’s room. But I wanted the best for you, Serenity. You were the only truly pure thing in that house, the only good thing to come out of any of it. So I took the rabbit’s foot and I tucked it in with you.
Then I kissed you and said, ‘Goodbye, lovely baby.’
I left through the back of the house, in one of my father’s old Savile Row suits and a pair of his Jermyn Street shoes. I’d tied the bootlace tie around the collar of one of my father’s old shirts and combed my hair into a side fringe. My bag was filled with cash and jewels. I strode out into the morning sun, feeling it golden upon my tired skin. I found a phone box and I dialled 999. In a fake voice I told the police that I was worried about my neighbours. That I hadn’t seen them for a while. That there was a baby crying.
I walked up to the King’s Road; all the shops were still shut. I kept walking until I got to Victoria Station and there I sat outside a scruffy café in my Savile Row suit and I ordered a cup of coffee. I had never had a cup of coffee before. I really wanted a cup of coffee. The coffee came and I tasted it and it was disgusting. I poured two sachets of sugar into it and made myself drink it. I found an anonymous hotel and paid for three nights. Nobody asked my age. When I signed the register I used the name Phineas Thomson. Thomson with an O. Not Thomsen with an E. I wanted to be almost Phin. Not completely Phin.
I watched the TV in my hotel room. There was a small news article at the end of the bulletin. Three bodies. A suicide pact. A cult. A baby found healthy and cared for. Children believed to be missing. Police search under way. The photos they had were our school photos from our last year at primary school. I was only ten and had a short back and sides. Lucy was eight and had a pageboy cut. We were unrecognisable. There was no mention of Phin or of Clemency.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
And so then what? What happened between then, sixteen-year-old me in my underwear on a nylon coverlet in a cheap hotel room watching the news, and middle-aged me now?
Do you want to know? Do you care?
Well, I got a job. I worked in an electrical repair shop in Pimlico. It was owned by a mad Bangladeshi family who couldn’t care less for my back story so long as I turned up to work on time.
I moved into a bedsit. I bought coding books and a computer and studied at home alone at night.
By then there was a proper internet and mobile phones and I left the electrical repair shop and got a job at a Carphone Warehouse on Oxford Street.
I moved into a one-bedroom flat in Marylebone, just before Marylebone became unaffordable. I started to dye my hair blond. I worked out. I built some bulk. I went to clubs at night and had sex with strangers. I fell in love, but he hit me. I fell in love again, but he left me. I got my teeth whitened. I got tropical fish. They died. I got a job at a new internet company. There were five of us at first. Within three years there were fifty of us and I was earning six figures and had my own office.
I bought a three-bedroom flat in Marylebone. I fell in love. He told me I was ugly and that no one would ever love me again and then he left me. I had a nose job. I had eyelash extensions. A tiny bit of filler in my lips.
Then in 2008, I went to the solicitor named on the letterhead of my parents’ original last will and testament. For so long I’d tried to put Cheyne Walk and what happened there to the back of my mind, tried to forge a new life with a new (if slightly borrowed) identity. I wanted nothing to do with pathetic little Henry Lamb or his history. He was dead to me. But as I got older and more settled, I started to think of you, more and more; I wanted to know where you were and who you were and whether or not you were happy.
I knew from the news reports that it had been assumed you were the child of Martina and Henry Lamb. My ‘suicide note’ had been taken at face value and no DNA tests had been run to disprove the assumption. And remembering the terms of my parents’ will it occurred to me that maybe one day you would come back into my life. But I had no idea if the trust was still lodged with the solicitors. And if it was, whether David had done anything to alter its terms during the time he had my mother entirely under his control.
I was in my thirties by now. I was tall, blond, buff and tanned. I introduced myself as Phineas Thomson. I said, ‘I’m looking for some information about a family I used to know. I believe you were their solicitors. The Lambs. Cheyne Walk.’
A young woman shuffled through some papers, clicked some buttons on her keyboard, told me that they managed a trust for the family but that she was not at liberty to tell me any more.
There was a cute boy there. I’d caught his eye when I sat in reception. I waited outside the office until lunchtime and then I caught up with him as he left the office. His name was Josh. Of course. Everyone’s name is Josh these days.
I took him back to my flat and cooked for him and fucked him and, of course, because I was only using him, he fell totally in love with me. It took less than a month of pretending I loved him too, to get him to find the paperwork, copy it and bring it to me.
And then there it was, in black and white, just as my parents had decreed when I was a tiny baby and Lucy was not yet even in existence. Number sixteen Cheyne Walk and all its contents to be held in trust for the descendants of Martina and Henry Lamb until the oldest reaches the age of twenty-five. David had not managed to get his hands on it after all and neither, it seemed, had Lucy reappeared to make a claim. The trust was still sitting there, ready and waiting, waiting for you to turn twenty-five. Someone more cynical than you might think I came to find you simply as a way to get my hands on my own inheritance. After all, I had no proof I was Henry Lamb so there was no way I’d be able to claim it for myself, and with you in my life I’d stand a chance to get what was rightfully mine. But you know, it really wasn’t about the money. I have plenty of money. It was about closure. And it was about you, Serenity, and the bond I shared with you.
So, in June this year I rented the Airbnb across the river. I bought a pair of binoculars and I kept watch from the terrace.
One morning I scaled the back of the house on Cheyne Walk and spent a whole day on the roof dismantling Birdie’s skeleton from its mummified casing. Pulling apart her tiny little bones. Dropping them into a black plastic bag. By the dark of night, I dropped the bag into the Thames. It was surprisingly small. I spent the night on my old mattress and returned to the Airbnb the following morning. And then, four days later, there you were. You and the solicitor. Heaving back the hoarding. Opening the door. Closing it behind you again.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
Finally.
The baby was back.
65
Libby stares at Lucy. ‘What happened to Phin? After you left him at Dr Broughton’s? Did he, I mean, did he get better?’
‘Yes,’ says Lucy. ‘He got better.’
‘Is he still alive?’
‘As far as I’m aware. Yes.’
Libby covers her mouth with her hand
s. ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since I was about eighteen. We were in France together for a few years. And then we lost touch.’
‘How did you both end up in France?’ asks Libby.
‘Dr Broughton took us. Or at least, he got someone he knew to take us. Dr Broughton seemed to know everyone. He was one of those people – a facilitator, I suppose you’d call him. He always had a number he could ring, a favour he could call in, a man who knew a man. He was the private physician to some very high-profile criminals. I think he’d been woken in the middle of the night before, stitched up some gunshot wounds in his rooms.
‘And once he saw that we were on the news he just wanted us gone and away. A week after I’d knocked on Dr Broughton’s door, he said we were well enough to leave. A man called Stuart squashed us into the back of a Ford Transit van and took us through the Eurotunnel, all the way to Bordeaux. He took us to a farm, to a woman called Josette. Another contact of Dr Broughton’s. She let us stay for months in return for working the farm. She didn’t ask who we were or why we were there.
‘Phin and I, we didn’t … you know. What happened between us, before, it was only because of the situation we were in together. Once we were free from all of that we fell back into being just friends. Almost like brother and sister. But we talked about you all the time, wondering how you were, who was looking after you, how pretty you were, how good you were, how amazing you’d grow up to be, how clever we were to have made you.’
‘Did you ever talk about coming back for me?’ asks Libby, pensively.
‘Yes,’ replies Lucy. ‘Yes. We did. Or at least, I did. Phin was more circumspect, more worried about his future than the past. We didn’t talk about the other stuff. We didn’t talk about our parents, about what had happened. I tried to, but Phin wouldn’t. It was like he’d just completely blanked it all out. Shut down. It was as if none of it had ever happened. And he got so well over that first year. He was tanned and fit. We both were. And Josette had an old fiddle she didn’t play, and she let me use it. I’d play for her, in the winter, and then in the summer when her farm filled up with students and itinerants, I’d play for them too. She let me take the fiddle into the local town and I’d play on Friday nights and Saturday nights and I started to earn some money. I saved it up thinking that I’d use it to get Phin and me back to London, to come and find you.’