The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘“They think it’s all over, it is now!” You’re too young to remember that. The football commentator said it at the end of the England v Germany game when we won the World Cup. The thirtieth of July 1966. The nation was on top of the world. Thirteen days later Harry Roberts and his gang smashed our dreams. On the twelfth of August the sun went out.’

  ‘You were a baby too.’ Cashman wasn’t much older than her.

  ‘I called Karen about Roberts coming out.’ Cashman mimed a telephone receiver. ‘She said it wasn’t me that caught him so why wasn’t I stressing about splitting up instead of going on about him?’ He scratched his stubbly chin. ‘She said it’s inhumane to keep a prisoner locked up indefinitely and rob them of hope. Can you credit that?’

  ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right.’ Terry’s voice echoed from far off. Perhaps Karen Cashman had a point.

  ‘Where are you living?’ Stella flushed. He might take the question to mean she would put him up. She did have a spare room.

  ‘On Alan Fry’s living-room floor, a guy I trained with at Hendon. In Barons Court – isn’t that where Mrs D. lives?

  ‘Yes.’ Stella and her mother had moved to a flat by Barons Court Underground station when her parents split up. A few weeks ago, vacuuming the stair carpet of what was her dad’s old house and was now hers, she had recalled the day they separated in detail. Sitting on the top stair, winded by the memory, she had seen the little girl lugging a pink suitcase out of the front door. Not that she believed in ghosts. Cashman’s voice roused her.

  ‘...higher up you go the less detection you do.’

  Stella nodded, although thinking he was talking about altitude, she didn’t know what he meant.

  ‘...the penalty of promotion.’ Cashman got up. Detectives wore plain clothes but, unlike Stella whose Clean Slate fleece with the company name embroidered on her shoulder – as on a police polo shirt – stated she was a cleaner, Cashman didn’t need a uniform for his job to be identifiable. Suzie Darnell said that if Terry had been a stick of rock, ‘the Met’ would run right through him.

  Perhaps because Cashman had brought Terry to mind, Stella was unwilling to say goodbye. Jackie had once said that if he weren’t spoken for, he would be Stella’s Mr Right. Whatever: she could talk to him, or rather she didn’t have to talk, which suited her fine.

  Outside on the Broadway, raising his voice above the traffic, Cashman said, ‘Fancy a drink one night?’ He beat his palm with the rolled-up newspaper.

  About to say yes, Stella checked herself. Jackie would say Cashman was on the rebound and, Mr Right or not, would advise her to ‘steer clear’.

  ‘This Kew contract means long hours,’ she mumbled.

  He smiled stiffly. ‘You’re with the big players now!’ The phrase that Tina had used that morning.

  ‘I won’t dance.’ Stella had won the Kew job without doing the foxtrot.

  ‘Not dancing, just a drink.’ Cashman looked puzzled. ‘Another time maybe.’

  It was wrong to deny a person hope. ‘Maybe.’ Stella’s reply was lost as a lorry roared past.

  On her way back to the office, Stella popped into the mini-mart to get her supper. Dariusz was unloading ready meals into a chiller cabinet. Seeing her, he called, ‘Jackie told me Kew Gardens is yours! Congratulations, Stella Darnell! Have this on the house!’ He handed her a bottle of champagne and a microwavable shepherd’s pie.

  Chapter Eight

  June 1976

  ‘The Cat in the Hat is for babies!’ Bella Markham slit the stem of a daisy with her thumbnail and threaded another daisy stem through the slender gap. The chain was a metre long, owing less to Bella’s tenacity than to her ennui. In the searing heat of the late-afternoon sun, all three girls were as limp as the flowers. They had come to Kew Gardens after school and had flopped out on the parched grass in front of the Palm House. Behind them, ethereal in sunlight, the sheets of curving glass seemed as if fashioned from ice. The dark blue skirts of their uniform absorbed the heat and their white shirts, sticky and crumpled, were untucked. Their ties hung loose around their necks. Bella and Chrissie sat cross-legged facing each other. Only Emily was at home in the heat; she sprawled on her back, her denim hat, Brownie badges sewn around the brim, tipped over her face to protect her from the sun’s blistering rays.

  ‘Anyone can read it,’ Chrissie maintained while privately agreeing. Bella had asked them to name their favourite story. Emily’s had been something called Jane Air. Chrissie didn’t read books, but had come up with one that her dad was reading her at bedtime. She was struggling with how to tell him she was too old for the story and too old to be read to. Her triumph at having a ready answer for Bella vanished.

  ‘The Cat in the Hat is for kids who can’t read,’ Bella insisted.

  ‘I loved it.’ Emily’s voice was muffled under the denim hat. ‘’Specially the Things.’

  ‘Yeah, well, they were all right,’ Bella conceded. She nipped another stem with her teeth.

  ‘Would you lie to your mum?’ Emily sat up and flapped her hat in front of her face in a futile attempt to cool herself. ‘The children in the story have to decide what to tell their mum when she comes home. She won’t believe that a cat with a hat called. If a cat had called on you, what would you tell your mum?’ She was looking at Bella.

  ‘My mum never believes what I tell her.’ Bella was gruff.

  ‘My mum would believe me if I said a cat had visited.’ As she said this, Chrissie realized it was true. Her mum believed anything she was told. ‘I would tell her the truth,’ she decided.

  ‘What’s your dad’s job?’ Bella changed tack. Her question like a punch in the stomach because Chrissie had no planned answer.

  Since Chrissie had started at the prep school for ‘young ladies’ in Kew, her dad kept telling her, ‘That school costs a fortune, so don’t go saying your mum’s a cleaner or I’m a cabbie – you won’t get friends.’

  ‘He draws flowers.’ It was Thursday and her drawing lesson with Mr Watson was in less than an hour. She looked at Bella’s daisy chain and observed to herself that Mr Watson must have made a mistake: the brown shrivelled thing he had made her draw wasn’t a proper daisy. Could she take one of these daisies along and explain that to him? Like telling her dad she was too old for stories about a cat wearing a hat, this wasn’t feasible.

  ‘No one draws flowers for a living!’ Bella held up her daisy chain, frowning.

  ‘My dad does,’ Chrissie asserted. Then, because her dad was always saying that the best form of defence was attack: ‘Are you allowed to pick flowers in Kew Gardens?’

  One afternoon Chrissie had spotted Bella leaving school in a taxi. Her dad drove a taxi! Chrissie had found something they could share. The next day she told Bella that her dad looked nice and was about to say about her dad having a new taxi when Bella had exclaimed, ‘He wasn’t my dad! My father’s a barrister. Sometimes I’m fetched in a cab to save taking buses.’ Emily Hurst’s father went off to wars in foreign places and sent back writing for newspapers which to Chrissie was as strange as drawing flowers, although Bella didn’t seem to think so.

  Despite her slip about Bella’s father, after that Bella had insisted Chrissie ‘go round’ with her and Emily. Chrissie told her dad that she had made friends.

  ‘There’re lots more daisies.’ Bella pulled up several more as if to make her point. She asked carelessly, ‘Does he sell his pictures? Your dad.’

  ‘He makes them for botanists.’ Chrissie called on her one botany illustration lesson. She hadn’t expected to go into detail, supposing that Bella would be impressed and that would be that.

  ‘That’s stupid.’ Bella examined her daisy chain. The entwined flowers were limp and dead.

  ‘It’s nice that he gives his pictures away.’ Emily was back under her hat. A stick-thin girl with blonde hair, her floaty manner led Chrissie to vest her with the power of mind reading. Emily would know she was lying. She sought to change the subject and rounded on Bella:
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br />   ‘It’s stupid that your dad wears a wig to work if he has his own hair.’

  ‘That shows how much you know.’ But Bella frowned as if this notion was new to her.

  ‘I have to go.’ Dumbfounded by heat and the effort to maintain an ever-growing fiction, Chrissie hadn’t kept an eye on the time. Her lesson with Mr Watson was in twenty minutes. Hopes that she could escape the other two were dashed when Bella and Emily said they would walk with her.

  Ranged outside the Palm House were the Queen’s Beasts: a series of mythical animals carved in stone. Chrissie liked one called the White Greyhound. The size of a telephone box, he sat on his haunches like Chrissie’s family Sealyham – Smash – begging for a biscuit. Without thinking she said, ‘If he were real he would tear us to smithereens.’

  ‘Shreds.’ Bella’s daisy chain hung around her neck. ‘You rip things to shreds, not smithereens; that’s glass.’

  ‘I know,’ Chrissie said, although she hadn’t known.

  The girls toiled around the lake, across browned grass, crispy and springy under their feet, and out of the Elizabeth Gate on to Kew Green.

  The sun was baking; Chrissie’s legs were so heavy that they didn’t work properly and her head was thumping. It was twenty-five minutes past four. She had to be there at half past. Her dad would kill her for being late. He said Mr Watson’s time was precious. He might have a meter that made time into money like the one in her dad’s taxi.

  ‘Why does your dad draw pictures for botanists? Can’t they do them for themselves?’ Bella persisted.

  ‘He’s good at it and they’re not.’ Chrissie was dismayed that the girls were still with her. She had expected them to go off in taxis. She wished she hadn’t agreed to go to Kew Gardens after school. She only had to please her dad. Now she was trapped.

  ‘Fancy drawing flowers!’ Bella snorted.

  Chrissie was frustrated. Echoing something she had overheard her dad say to her mum, she blurted out, ‘His wife has more money than she knows what to do with.’

  ‘His wife?’ Bella was looking at Chrissie with gimlet eyes. ‘You mean your mother?’

  Chrissie felt herself grow hotter. ‘Yes. We live in a big house,’ she plunged on irrelevantly. ‘Only some people can do drawings.’ Her lie was out of control.

  ‘He should take a photograph. That’s what my dad would do,’ Bella said.

  This had struck Chrissie when Mr Watson was explaining drawing, but she couldn’t agree with Bella. ‘There are particular reasons for not doing that and they are secret,’ she announced.

  ‘How does he draw them? The plants?’ Bella asked airily.

  ‘It’s too complicated to explain now.’ Dimly Chrissie sensed that Bella, fingering the daisies around her neck, actually wanted to know.

  ‘I’m hot.’ Emily was fanning her face with her hat.

  Mired in untruths, Chrissie didn’t see that Emily was trying to defuse the situation. Snatching at a fragment from Mr Watson’s lesson she said, ‘My dad draws all the different parts of a plant. The parts are’ – she counted them on her fingers – ‘roots, stems, scales, the calyx and the corolla. The fruit and the seed... and there’s more. I don’t have time to say them all.’ Ahead, the railings around Kew Pond shimmered in the heat as if they too were made up.

  ‘How does that help a botanist?’ Bella hid that she was impressed.

  ‘A photograph would only show one plant and not all of it.’ Chrissie dredged up what Mr Watson had said. ‘Mr Wat— My dad has to draw a plant’s character, that’s what you call it, and then the botanist decides which family the plant belongs to. He needs the drawing to give a plant a name or the plant doesn’t exist.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’ Bella rallied. ‘The plant must exist or he couldn’t draw it.’

  ‘If something doesn’t have a name you don’t know what to call it.’ Emily was tightrope-walking along the kerb, her hat low over her face.

  ‘If you don’t have a name, you can’t exist.’ Chrissie was steadfast. ‘Not properly,’ she added. The railings got no nearer.

  ‘I didn’t have a name when I was born, but I was still there,’ Bella said.

  ‘How do you know?’ Chrissie demanded.

  ‘There’re photographs.’

  ‘Of you being born?’ Emily tilted her head to look at Bella under the brim of her hat.

  ‘No! That’s disgusting.’

  ‘So how do you know that you existed?’ Emily pursued.

  ‘This is mad.’ Bella hugged her satchel to her chest and then she rounded on Chrissie. ‘What do you need for drawing plants?’

  Chrissie had to think fast. She conjured up Mr Watson’s studio. Her mind was fuzzed by the image of a large piece of chocolate cake scattered with hundreds and thousands. She grimaced. ‘A pencil that must be sharpened. A pen with ink, but not the sort you write with. Um, a knife. Not like a knife and fork. It’s called something else that I’ve forgotten.’

  Bella appeared to be listening. Behind them, on the other side of the road, St Anne’s Church clock struck half past. The children, enervated by the broiling heat, straggled up to Kew Pond.

  ‘This is where I live.’ Chrissie stopped by the Watsons’ double-fronted villa and, for good measure, placed a proprietorial hand on the gate. ‘Goodbye then.’

  ‘Where’s your key?’ Hands on hips, Bella didn’t move.

  ‘I don’t have one.’ Chrissie didn’t have a key to her parents’ flat so this much was true.

  ‘It’s a massive house!’ Emily exclaimed.

  ‘Not once you’re in it.’ Chrissie’s blithe manner hid fear. Lying had unexpected ramifications. Like the creeping tendrils of an octopus, lies crept everywhere. ‘I’m not allowed a key until I go to the big school,’ she spluttered out the truth.

  ‘What is a “big school”?’ Bella was spiteful, her eyes glittering.

  ‘It’s a secondary school,’ Emily explained cheerfully. ‘I call it that too. Let’s hope we all go to the same big school.’

  ‘I’m going to Cambridge and I’ll row in the boat race,’ Bella snapped.

  ‘You have to go to a big school first,’ Emily said kindly.

  ‘I might not get a key even then because my sister lost hers and my dad won’t let her have another.’ Chrissie was learning to lace her lies with truth for added plausibility.

  ‘I’ve got a key!’ Bella flourished a copper-coloured Yale from which dangled a troll with purple eyes and two-toned pink frenetic hair. ‘I’m allowed to make a cup of tea with no one in the house and I can cut bread with the bread knife and make soup out of a tin.’ She stamped her foot. Neither of the other two guessed that she was lying: Emily because she supposed that everyone told the truth, while Chrissie was bound like a fly in her web of deceit and couldn’t think straight.

  ‘I can do what I like when I’m inside there.’ Chrissie gestured at the black front door. She was three minutes late for her lesson.

  ‘Prove it.’ Bella drummed a beat on the iron gate.

  ‘Stop it, Bella,’ Emily said.

  ‘She has to prove that her mum and dad live here. We don’t know anything about her; she could be anyone.’ Bella sounded reasonable.

  ‘Chrissie, there’s your mummy.’ Emily tugged at Chrissie’s arm. ‘There we are!’ She rounded on Bella.

  A woman was coming down the path. Her mauve trouser suit sparkled in the sunshine. Chrissie clutched the gate. Blood roared in her ears.

  ‘Yes,’ she managed to say and, with clumsy fingers, fiddled with the latch. She rushed through and slammed it shut before Bella could follow. She blundered up the path. At all costs Mrs Watson must not get to the gate. Then Bella would find out that she wasn’t her mum and that Chrissie didn’t live in the big house and that her father didn’t do botanical illustrations. Then, like the dead material that had no name, Chrissie would not exist.

  ‘Christina, we were beginning to wonder if you’d fallen into the crater on the Great West Road! I’ve made a chocolate cake w
ith hundreds and thousands.’ Mrs Watson ushered her inside.

  Chrissie had no idea what crater Mrs Watson was talking about. When they were in the dark hallway, she looked back. Emily was hopscotching away, her figure blurred in the heat haze. By the gate the White Greyhound stood on its haunches, stony eyes watching her. Despite the searing temperatures, Chrissie shivered and her teeth began to chatter. The White Greyhound was saying something. Two words carried on the still air:

  Prove it.

  Chapter Nine

  October 2014

  Stella emerged from the lift into the carpeted corridor and wheeled out her cleaning cart with Stanley beside it. If Tina was in her flat, Stella would say that there wasn’t time to dance. Yet dimly she found the possibility of a foxtrot appealing.

  She shut the flat door and, stooping, unclipped Stanley’s lead. The little poodle pottered along, snuffling at skirting boards, wending his way back and forth across the path of the cart.

  ‘Walk on,’ she commanded. She was vaguely uneasy that Stanley hadn’t made straight for the living room where Tina had laid a square of fake lamb’s wool on his old place by the sofa. Her unease grew as she became aware that she couldn’t smell the lingering scent of Tina’s perfume and that instead the hallway was tainted with the stale smell of cigarette smoke. She didn’t have to be a detective to work out that this meant that Tina, after months of giving up, was smoking again. This was extraordinary, because Stella had grown to trust that when Tina made her mind up to do something, she never failed to do it. This was a quality that the two women had agreed they shared.

  Stella strode around the flat and, despite the cold outside, flung open every window to dispel the smell.

  Tina had stopped smoking for sufficient time to become revolted by the habit in others – the cloying odour of smoke on the clothes and breath of a smoker even if they weren’t smoking at that moment. She complained at the smell clients left in her office and how it made a person appear dirty and unattractive regardless of their looks or hygiene habits. Now Tina was a smoker again.