The Family Upstairs

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘Then one morning, about two years later, I woke up and Phin was gone. He left me a note that said, “Off to Nice”.’ Lucy sighs. ‘I stayed in Bordeaux for the rest of that summer, saved up until I had enough money for a coach to Nice. I spent weeks sleeping on the beach at night and trying to find Phin by day. Eventually I gave up. I had Josette’s fiddle. I played every night. I made enough money for a room in a hostel. I turned nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. And then I met a man. A very rich man. He swept me off my feet. He married me. I had a baby. I left the very rich man and met a very poor man. I had another baby. The poor man left me and then—’ She stops then and Libby studies her expression. There’s something unknowable, almost unthinkable in it. But the look passes and she continues.

  ‘And then it was your birthday and I came back.’

  ‘But why didn’t you come back before?’ Libby asks Lucy. ‘When you turned twenty-five? Did you not know about the trust?’

  ‘I knew about it, yes,’ she says. ‘But I had no proof that I was Lucy Lamb. I had no birth certificate. My passport was fake. I was in a terrible, terrible marriage with Marco’s father. It was all just …’ Lucy sighs. ‘And then I thought, you know, if Henry doesn’t come for the house and I don’t come for the house, then it will automatically go to the baby, to you, because everyone thought you were my parents’ baby. And I thought that’s what I’ll do. I’ll wait until the baby is twenty-five and I’ll come back for her then. When I got my first smartphone a few years ago, the first thing I did was put a reminder into the calendar, so I wouldn’t forget. And every minute of every day since then I’ve been waiting for this. I’ve been waiting to come back.’

  ‘And Phin?’ says Libby, desperately. ‘What happened to Phin?’

  Lucy sighs. ‘I can only assume he went somewhere that he would not be found. I can only assume that that is what he wanted.’

  Libby sighs. There it is. Finally. The whole picture. Apart from one piece.

  Her father.

  IV

  66

  Libby sits with her thumb over her phone. She’s on her banking app where she’s been refreshing her balance every fifteen minutes, since nine o’clock this morning.

  It’s completion day on the house in Cheyne Walk.

  They sold it a month ago, finally, after months of no viewings and then a flurry of offers when they lowered the price and then two abortive attempts at exchanging contracts until, at last, a cash buyer from South Africa, all done and dusted, signed and sealed within two weeks.

  Seven million, four hundred and fifty thousand pounds.

  But her balance still sits at £318. The last dregs of her last pay cheque.

  She sighs and turns back to the screen of her computer. Her final kitchen project. A nice little painted Shaker-style one with copper knobs and a marble worktop. Newlyweds’ first home. It’s going to look beautiful. She wishes she’d still be around to see it. But she won’t ever see it. Not now. Today is her last day at Northbone Kitchens.

  It’s also her twenty-sixth birthday. Her real twenty-sixth birthday. Not 19 June after all, but 14 June. So she’s five days older than she thought. That’s fine. Five days is a small price to pay for seven million pounds, a mother, an uncle and two half-siblings. And now she’s not climbing some spurious ladder in her head to some arbitrary birthday, who cares if she gets there five days ahead of schedule?

  She presses refresh again.

  Three hundred and nine pounds. A PayPal payment she made a week ago has come out of her account.

  It’s a beautiful day. She glances across at Dido. ‘Shall we go out for lunch? My treat.’

  Dido looks up at her over the top of her reading glasses and smiles. ‘Absolutely!’

  ‘Depending on whether this payment comes through by then or not, it’ll be either sandwiches and Coke, or lobster and champagne.’

  ‘Lobster’s overrated,’ Dido says before lowering her glasses and returning her gaze to her computer screen.

  Libby’s phone buzzes at 11 a.m. It’s a text from Lucy. She says, See you later! We’ve booked it for 8 p.m.!

  Lucy’s living with Henry now in his smart flat in Marylebone. Apparently they are not getting on at all. Henry, who has lived alone for twenty-five years, doesn’t have the stomach for sharing his space with children, and his cats hate the dog. She’s already been house-hunting. In St Albans. Libby herself has her eye on a beautiful Georgian cottage in half an acre just on the outskirts of town.

  She presses refresh again.

  Three hundred and nine pounds.

  She checks her email, in case there’s been some kind of notification of something having gone wrong. But there’s nothing.

  The money will go three ways once the inheritance tax has been taken care of. She’d offered to forgo any of the inheritance. It’s not her house. She’s not their sibling. But they’d insisted. She’d said, ‘I don’t need a third. A few thousand will be fine.’ But still they’d insisted. ‘You’re their granddaughter,’ Lucy had said. ‘You have as much right to it as we do.’

  At 1 p.m. she and Dido leave the showroom.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s still sandwiches.’

  ‘Good,’ she says. ‘I’m in the mood for sandwiches.’

  They go to the café in the park and take a table outside in the sunshine.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re leaving,’ says Dido. ‘It’s going to be so, well, I was going to say quiet, you’ve never been exactly loud, but it’s going to be so … utterly devoid of Libby without you. And your lovely hair. And your neat piles.’

  ‘My neat piles?’

  ‘Yes, your …’ She mimes a squared-off pile of paper with her hands. ‘You know. All the corners aligned.’ She smiles. ‘I’m going to miss you. That’s all.’

  Libby glances at her and says, ‘Didn’t you ever think about leaving? After you got left the cottage? And all the other stuff? I mean, surely you don’t have to work, do you?’

  Dido shrugs. ‘I suppose not. And there are times I’d just like to chuck it all in and spend all day at the stables with Spangles before he cops it. But, ultimately, I have nothing else. But you – now you have everything. Everything that kitchens can’t give you.’

  Libby smiles. There is a truth to this.

  It’s not just the money. It’s not just the money at all.

  It’s the people whom she now belongs to, the family who’ve encircled her so completely. And it’s the person she discovered she was underneath all the neat piles and careful planning. She was never really that person. She’d made herself into that person to counterbalance her mother’s inconsistencies. To fit in at school. To fit in with a group of friends whose values she never really shared, not really, not deep down inside. There is more to her than arms’ length friendships and stupidly proscriptive Tinder requirements. She is the product of better people than her fantasy birth parents, the graphic designer and the fashion PR with the sports car and the tiny dogs. How unimaginative she’d been.

  She presses refresh on her phone, absent-mindedly.

  She looks again. A stupid number sits there. A number that makes no sense whatsoever. It has too many zeros, too many everythings. She turns her phone to face Dido. ‘Oh. My. God.’

  Didi covers her face with her hands and gasps. Then she turns to face the front of the café. ‘Waiter,’ she says. ‘Two bottles of your finest Dom Pérignon. And thirteen lobsters. And make it snappy.’

  There is no waiter of course and the people at the table next to them throw them a strange look.

  ‘My friend’, says Dido, ‘has just won the lottery.’

  ‘Oh,’ says the woman. ‘Lucky you!’

  ‘You know,’ says Dido, turning back to her. ‘You really don’t have to go back to work after this. It’s your birthday. And you’ve just been given eleventy squillion pounds. You could, if you wanted, take the rest of the day off.’

  Libby smiles, screws up her paper napkin and drops it on the plastic tray. ‘No,’ she says.
‘No way. I’m no quitter. And besides, I’m pretty sure I left some paperwork slightly askew.’

  Dido smiles at her. ‘Come on then,’ she said, ‘three and a half more hours of normality. Let’s get it over with, shall we?’

  67

  Lucy has the flat to herself for another hour. She uses it to have a bath, to paint her fingernails, to dry her hair with a dryer and make it sit neatly over her shoulders, to moisturise, to put on make-up. She still doesn’t take these things for granted. It has been a year since Henry found her in the house in Cheyne Walk, since he brought Serenity to them, since they were all reunited. For a year Lucy has lived with Henry in his immaculate flat in Marylebone, where she has slept on a double bed under soft cotton sheets and had nothing more to do with her days than walk the dog and prepare delicious meals. She and Clemency meet up once a month and drink champagne and talk about their children and music and Henry’s idiosyncrasies and anything, in fact, other than what happened to them both when they were young. They will never be as close as they once were, but they are still the best of friends.

  Marco is thirteen now and enrolled at a trendy private school in Regent’s Park, which Henry has been paying for and where ‘everyone vapes and takes ket’ apparently. He has lost his French accent completely and, as he says, ‘I now identify as a Londoner.’

  Stella is six and in year one of a nice primary school in Marylebone where she has two best friends who are both called Freya.

  Yesterday Lucy took the tube to Chelsea and stood outside the house. The hoarding has been taken down and the for-sale sign outside has been swapped for a sold sign. Soon the house will be alive with the sound of drills and hammers as it is taken apart and put back together again to suit the tastes and needs of another family. Soon, someone else will be calling it home and they will never know, never suspect for even a moment the truth about what happened within those walls all those years ago, how four children were imprisoned and broken and then released into the world, damaged, incomplete, lost and warped. It’s hard for Lucy to remember the girl she was then, hard for her to accept an incarnation of herself that was so desperate for attention that she would sleep with both a father and a son. She looks at Stella sometimes, her tiny perfect girl, and tries to imagine her at thirteen years old giving herself like that just to feel loved. It makes her feel unimaginable pain.

  Her phone pings and she experiences as she always does, and probably always will, a shiver of unease. Michael’s murder has not been solved but has been widely accepted to have been the result of some unpaid debts to his associates in the criminal underworld. She saw one mention of herself in a French paper shortly after the murder hit the headlines:

  Rimmer, who has been married twice, is believed to have a child with his first wife, a Briton known only by the name of ‘Lucy’. According to Rimmer’s housekeeper, he and his former wife recently had a brief reunion, but she is not considered to be a suspect in the case.

  But she will never be truly relaxed about the possibility of being tracked down by some fresh-faced young detective, newly qualified and desperate to prove themselves. She will never, she suspects, be truly relaxed ever again.

  But it’s not a message from a rookie detective, it’s a message from Libby: a screenshot of a page from her bank statement accompanied by the word Kerching!

  There it is, thinks Lucy, and a shiver of relief runs through her. The end of this phase of her life. The beginning of the next. Now she can buy a place of her own. At last. A place for her and her children and her dog. A forever place that no one will be able to take away from her. And then, she thinks, then she will be able to discover exactly what it is that she should be doing with her life. She would like, she thinks, to study the violin. She would like to be a professional musician. And now there are no barriers in her way.

  The first half of Lucy’s life was tainted and dark, one struggle after another. The second half will be golden.

  She replies to Libby’s message.

  Champagne all round! See you later sweetheart. I cannot wait to celebrate with you. Everything.

  Libby answers: I can’t wait to see you either. Love you.

  Love you too, she finishes, then adds a long row of kisses and switches off her phone.

  Her girl is glorious: a gentle, caring soul, a blend of Stella and Marco in many ways but also so very much her father’s child in the way that she walks her own path and makes her own rules, that she is so entirely and utterly herself. And she is growing and changing so much, leaving behind some of the tics and compulsions that held her back, letting life show her her journey rather than imposing a journey on to her life. She has been worth every bad moment between leaving her in her cot and finding her again. She is an angel.

  Lucy picks up her phone again and she scrolls through her contacts until she gets to the Gs. She composes a message:

  Darling Giuseppe. This is your Lucy. I am missing you so much. I just wanted you to know that I am happy and healthy and well and so are the children and so is Fitz. I won’t be coming back to France. I have a wonderful new life now and want to put down roots. But I will think of you always and forever be so grateful to you for being there for me when my life was out of control. I’d be lost without you. My love, always, Lucy.

  68

  In the restaurant in Marylebone that evening Libby’s family awaits her.

  Lucy, Marco, Stella and Henry.

  Marco greets her with an awkwardly dramatic half-hug, his head knocking against her collarbone. ‘Happy birthday, Libby,’ he says.

  Stella hugs her gently and says, ‘Happy birthday, Libby. I love you.’

  These two children, her brother and sister, have been the greatest gifts of all.

  They are wonderful children and Libby puts that down entirely to the woman who raised them. She and Lucy have become very close, very quickly. The small age gap means that often Lucy feels a like great new friend, rather than the woman who gave birth to her.

  Lucy gets to her feet. She circles Libby’s neck with her arms and kisses her loudly in the vicinity of her ear. ‘Happy birthday,’ she says. ‘Proper happy birthday. This time twenty-six years ago. God. I thought I was going to split in half.’

  ‘Yes,’ agrees Henry. ‘She was mooing like a cow. For hours. We had our hands over our ears.’ Then he gives her one of his cautious embraces.

  Libby still can’t work Henry out. Sometimes she thinks about Clemency saying that she thought he had a streak of pure evil, and a shiver runs across her flesh. She thinks of what he did, the execution of four people, the mummification of a young woman’s body, the mutilation of a cat. But killing had never been his intention and Libby still believes that if the four children had turned themselves in to the local police that night and explained what had happened, how they’d been so mistreated, imprisoned, that it had been a terrible accident, that they would have been believed and rehabilitated. But that’s not how it had been and they had all made fugitives of themselves and taken their lives off on unimaginable tangents.

  Henry is odd, but then he is very open about the fact that he is odd. He still maintains that he did not intentionally lock them into the spare bedroom of his Airbnb rental that night, that he did not take their phones and delete Miller’s recording. He said, ‘Well, if I did I must have been even drunker than I thought.’ And Libby never did find a tracking or listening device on her phone. But then she never changed the passcode on her phone either.

  He also denies that he has had cosmetic procedures to make him look like Phin. He says, ‘Why would I want to look like Phin? I’m so much better looking than he ever was.’ He is impatient with the children and slightly flustered by the sudden influx of people into his tightly controlled little world, often grumpy but occasionally hilarious. He has a vague grasp of the truth and seems to live very slightly on the edges of reality. And how can Libby blame him? After everything he’s been through? She would probably live on the edges of reality too if her childhood had been as traum
atic as his.

  She opens his card to her and reads: ‘Sweet Libby Jones, I am so proud to call you my niece. I loved you then and I’ll love you always. Happy birthday, beautiful.’

  He looks at her with a slight flush of embarrassment and this time she doesn’t accept one of his cautious embraces. This time she throws her arms around his neck and squeezes him until he squeezes her back. ‘I love you too,’ she says into his ear. ‘Thank you for finding me.’

  And then Miller arrives.

  Dido was right.

  There was something there.

  Despite the fact that Roe double-barrels horribly with Jones, that his mother is rather distant, that his stomach wobbles, that he has too much facial hair, no pets and an ex-wife, there was something there that amounted to more than all of that. And what is a tattoo other than a drawing on skin? It’s not an ideology. It’s a scribble.

  Miller abandoned his story for Libby. After the night last summer when she was reunited with her family, he’d taken his notepad and he’d ripped out all the pages.

  ‘But’, she’d said, ‘that’s your livelihood, that’s your career. You could have made so much money.’

  He’d silenced her with a kiss and said, ‘I’m not taking your family away from you. You deserve them much more than I deserve a scoop.’