Scanning over the evening’s conversation, it struck me that I couldn’t remember a single thing Alana had told me about her life. Not because drunkenness had wiped out my memory, but because she hadn’t told me anything. Then, with a mix of horror and shame, I realized that was because I hadn’t let her get a word in, that I’d done all the talking—all of it. I had been rabid, had frothed at the mouth. But it was too late now to go back and put a stopper in the bottle. I could only apologize, and try not to do it again. Over breakfast, I would make amends.
But by the time I woke up, Alana had gone. She hadn’t left a note, but I wrote one to her saying thanks for the bed, and then I called Pippa.
“I’m so pleased you’ll do it,” she said, the relief clear in her voice. “I think Peggy took a shine to you, and we had so much trouble finding a nurse she liked. Most of them weren’t posh enough and she complained about their ‘dreary accents’ when they were reading to her.”
“I have to read to her?” I hadn’t meant to sound rude, but reading aloud was the pits.
“Only if you feel like it. But it’s either that or listening to her stories, which can get a little . . . repetitive. You know what old people are like.”
“Not really,” I said. “My grandmother was more interested in telling people what to do than in boring them to tears.”
“I met her once, I think,” said Pippa. “Is she still alive?”
“I don’t know,” I said, truthfully. “So, can I start straightaway?”
“If you want.”
Pippa made arrangements for me to pick up a key from her place, and I was about to hang up when she said, “By the way, what on earth did you say to Caleb?”
Oh dear. Had he told her about my bunking advice? “Nothing much,” I said, tentatively. “We hardly spoke.”
“Are you sure?”
“I asked him a few questions, but he wasn’t exactly chatty.”
“Really?” she said, sounding surprised. “Because on the way home, instead of renting a game, he insisted on going to the library and getting out a stack of books. When we got home he went straight to his room and we haven’t seen him since—well, hardly, except for dinner, which he wolfed down in five seconds.” She paused. “He’s never wanted to read books before. I’m a little freaked out.”
It did seem like strange behavior, though I could guess what book he’d gotten out—along with a few decoys. “Did you see what he was reading?”
“He wouldn’t show me.”
Making my way to Notting Hill that night with my suitcase and a key, I felt like a gypsy. My sense that London owed me something had vanished. Maybe if I’d been born in another part of the world I could have returned there and felt like a native, but London wasn’t like that. It was too full to take back a stray who had carelessly given up her place.
And yet, for now, I had a key to our old building. It was shiny, freshly cut, and turned easily in the well-used lock. The heavy front door had a rubber skirt and shushed across the carpet in a satisfying, moneyed way. When I stepped into the lobby, a bright chandelier lit up overhead, and the brass central heating grille gleamed like a new Rolls-Royce.
I climbed the wide staircase one flight at a time, and just before I reached each new level the landing would be illuminated, the lights triggered by an invisible sensor. At first I was grateful for the ease—my hands were full with heavy suitcases—but as I climbed higher up the building, my pace slowed, and the lights began to time out before I reached the next floor and the next sensor. For half of every flight—then gradually more—I was plunged into a darkness that my eyes found hard to adjust to and was forced to walk blind up the stairs. I looked for a switch but found none. To keep abreast with the lights, I tried to pick up my pace, but the more I tried to rush with my heavy bags, the more out of sync I seemed to get. Finally, when I arrived at what I thought was Peggy’s floor, the lights didn’t come on at all.
In the dark, I put down my suitcases and groped in my bag for the key. It fit easily enough into the lock, was only a little sticky, but when I tried to turn it, the thing wouldn’t budge. For almost a minute, still in darkness, I persisted, twisting the key back and forth and trying to shift the door slightly in its frame to see if that would help. I looked up and down the shadowy staircase and out the window at a stand of muscular oak trees, their wide trunks dappled in the moonlight, and that was when I realized something was wrong. From Peggy’s floor you looked above oak canopies at the sky. Once more, I studied the door. It had no number, just a tiny metal eyehole in the center.
It wasn’t Peggy’s door. This was Jimmy’s floor. A spasm of fear radiated from my stomach and I tried to pull out the key, but I must have already turned it too far in one direction, and the jaws of the lock had clamped around it. Jimmy’s name hadn’t been on the list next to the buzzer and I had taken it for granted that he had moved out—but what if he hadn’t? My fingers plucked uselessly at the key as voices issued from the belly of the flat behind it, quiet at first, then shouting. Loud music started up, as rowdy as a fairground ride, and I jumped back, letting go of the key. It sat in the lock, reproaching me. I was being a scaredy cat, but knowing that didn’t help.
The music then changed abruptly to classical—the sound track to an ad I recognized. It was only the TV, rocking through a commercial break. Of course Jimmy didn’t live there anymore. The realization calmed me enough to have another go at the key, to tweak it with more patience until it released.
Halfway up the next set of stairs, the blessed lights came on, and stayed on until I reached the landing outside Peggy’s flat. My hands on the key chain were shaking, but I found the right key and turned it in the lock.
Chapter Eight
London, 2003
Once I had gained entry to Peggy’s apartment, what came over me first was relief. The lights worked, and the tatty interior was comforting, lived in. A hearty soup or stew had been warming in the kitchen, and the aroma of it was still in the hallway, canceling out the usual unpleasant smells. Pippa’s instructions had been to call out to Peggy as soon as I arrived, in case the old woman thought someone was trying to break in. Peggy was expecting me, but she had a leaky memory for comings and goings, and Pippa said it defaulted to paranoia if she was taken by surprise.
I put down my suitcases and called out her name once or twice, first in a quiet voice, then a little more loudly. When there was no answer, I assumed Peggy had gone to sleep. The door to her bedroom was closed, and I carried on down the hallway in search of a room that was empty—Pippa had told me to sleep in whichever one I could physically get into. Some rooms, she’d warned me, were entirely full of boxes. First, I came to what I thought had once been Peggy’s bedroom, and pushed open the door, or tried to, but something was blocking it, a small trunk or a piece of furniture. The door gave a little, but I didn’t want to force it open. I made my way down the hall and crossed the drawing room to get to Harold’s room, switching on as many lights as possible along the way. I meant not to look at Madeline, nor to think of her, to focus only on where I was heading, but before I could stop myself, I had looked in her direction—and looked again, because she wasn’t there. In the place she normally sat there was only a dark square on the floorboards where her dais had prevented the wood from fading.
Instead of relief that she wasn’t in her usual spot, however, I was transfixed by the idea that she had learned how to move and was following stealthily behind me, gliding even, just outside my line of vision. But when I looked behind me, the apartment was deserted.
I told myself to buck up, and carried on to Harold’s room. It was, as Pippa had predicted, almost impossible to fight my way through the abundant boxes, but I found too that most of them were stacked by the door, as if someone had gone a little way into the room, hurriedly dumped the cartons, and left. Once you got past them, the room was quite sparsely furnished, with a dresser and a double bed, sagging in the middle but heavenly compared to the couch I’d been sleeping on for
months. At first I meant only to test the mattress before getting up to clean my teeth and undress, but once I was lying down I didn’t want to move, and despite the strangeness of the situation, and all that was lurking outside, I pulled the eiderdown up around my shoulders and fell into a deep, untroubled sleep.
It was only the next morning that I saw the dust, lying thick on every surface of the room, including, I noticed with dismay, on the adjacent pillow. Some of it had gotten into my throat in the night, and the first thing I did when I sat up was cough. It was very early, only a gray film lit the morning, and I crept through the flat to get a glass of water. Peggy’s door was still closed and everything else appeared undisturbed since the night before.
In the kitchen, after pouring myself a drink from the tap, I poked around in the cupboards for a vacuum cleaner. I found one of those old-fashioned ones that resembled a set of bagpipes, and wheeled it down the long hallway to Harold’s room—far enough away that I didn’t think Peggy would hear it. Plugged in, the volume was impressive, but it had no suction, and its metal head was so huge that it was beyond maneuvering, especially through the death valley of Harold’s books and junk. Still, I gave it my best shot, and only came to a halt when the vacuum cleaner fell into a pothole. On closer inspection the hole turned out to be more extensive than I’d thought—in fact, a whole section of parquet floorboards was missing. Under the desk by the window, and along one wall, perhaps two dozen blocks of it had been pulled up and stacked to one side, leaving exposed an adventure playground for mice. When I went around the room a little farther, I saw that other patches of floor had been pulled up and replaced, but badly, so that pieces of parquet jutted out here and there at hazardous angles.
That was when I gave up on vacuuming, or any other sort of housework. Instead of cleaning Peggy’s flat I tried to clean myself in the decrepit bathroom. In place of a proper shower there was one of those hose devices that was meant to fit snugly over the bath taps, but instead sprayed water all over the bathroom. England was the only place I’d been where such devices were still in use—not only in use but overused and repaired, with duct tape and lengths of string. At least I wasn’t using it in winter when showering under it would lead to hypothermia.
By the time I had dressed, it was almost eight, and I made Peggy a cup of tea and knocked on her door. When there was no reply, I called out to her, “Peggy? It’s Suki. Are you awake?”
I thought I heard shuffling, and tentatively pushed open the door, but when I went in, her hospital bed was empty and she wasn’t in the room.
Back out in the hallway, I noticed a rattling sound from behind the door that had been wedged shut the night before, as though someone was trying to force it open from the other side, and by the time I got there Peggy had squeezed herself halfway out.
“Good morning,” she said. “I appear to be stuck.”
“Let me help you.” With a little undignified shoving and pulling, I got her through. Once she was out, I tried to open the door all the way, but it was still stuck. “Is there a wedge under the door?”
“A wedge?” she said, quite bewildered. “Whatever do you mean?” Her hair was wrapped in a turban, and a pink satin bathrobe fishtailed behind her—the 1930s movie star, waiting for her lover to drop round for cocktails and barbiturates. She saw the cup of tea I was carrying and brightened. “Is that for me? How lovely.”
I took her by the arm, and sat her down in a nearby chair, where she gulped her tea and asked for another, “With a spoon or two of sugar.” At the end of that cup, she said, “One more. I don’t quite feel strong enough to get up just yet.”
I was amazed that she could get up at all. Only a few months earlier she’d been on her deathbed, written off by her own nurse. Since then she’d filled out, and no longer resembled a living skeleton. But it was only after her third cup of tea that she finally revived enough to really notice me. Then she said, “Oh, you’re not Amanda.”
“No, I’m Suki. I came to visit you a few months ago. I used to live downstairs with my parents—Hillary and Ludo.”
“Why are you here?” she said, as though she hadn’t heard me.
“I’m going to help you for a bit while Amanda’s away. She’s coming in later to say good-bye.”
“Forty years on my own, I think I can go to the lavatory by myself. What did you say your name was?”
“Suki. Suki Piper.”
“Aha,” she exclaimed. “I knew your sister. She wore little pink glasses and was always dancing. Do you know she came to stay with us once and wet the bed?”
“I think you’re talking about me,” I said. “I don’t have a sister.”
Her face fell. “Oh dear. I’m so sorry. I just remembered what happened to her.” She took my hand. “Forgive me.”
“Forgive you for what?”
“I forgot your sister died of cancer.”
“She didn’t. But my mother did. Hillary.”
“Hillary had cancer?” She looked confused. “But I saw her a few months ago and she was fine.”
“That was me too, not Hillary.”
Peggy stared for a moment at the stuffed birds in their cage. One was hanging upside down from the perch, its feet bound by twine. “I think I might need an extra cup of tea this morning,” she said.
I was relieved to discover that I had only to escort Peggy to the door of the lavatory, but she insisted on going in alone. To conserve energy, she spent most of her time in a wheelchair, but could walk short distances when it suited her. At half past ten I found her in the kitchen, answering the siren call of her midmorning whiskey. The liquor brought a splash of color to her cheeks, and contrary to what I’d expected, she was much more lucid afterward. “This is our little secret, you hear?” she said, stashing the bottle in an old-fashioned flour bin. “It’s almost all gone, but I shall send you out later to replenish our stores.”
I did not appear to have a say in the matter. Soon after, Pippa arrived amid a bustle of plastic shopping bags, and put away groceries on low shelves where Peggy could reach them—cans of soup, mainly, plus a few packets of mouse-colored biscuits. Mother and daughter air-kissed on both cheeks, their skin not actually touching. Pippa had dyed her hair, I noticed, as did Peggy, who grabbed a swatch of it. “It looks a little brassy,” she said. “Did you do it yourself?”
“Mmm-hmm,” said Pippa, noncommittal.
“It’s the wrong shade for your complexion. Brings out the red in your face.” Peggy puffed out her cheeks to demonstrate. “You must always go to a salon. I have told you this before.”
“Thank you,” said Pippa, straining to be courteous. “Remind me to consult you next time.” She noticed that her mother’s cardigan was fastened incorrectly, and rebuttoned it while Peggy huffed discontentedly. In a schoolteacher voice Pippa added, “Why doesn’t Suki wheel you into the drawing room while I make us all morning tea? You can show her your photographs.”
At the mention of photographs, Peggy perked up. “Don’t push too fast, or it makes me feel giddy,” she said as I steered her out into the hallway. The wheelchair slid easily along the tiled floor, and it was an effort to slow the pace to one that suited Peggy. “I’ve always imagined having a wallah to do this,” she announced as we reached the end of the hall. “Like the maharajahs did in India. I don’t think they minded at all, the wallahs. In fact, I think they rather enjoyed it. So much better to be civilized than living in the jungle eating bananas, don’t you agree?”
She was too old to be dissuaded from her colonial fantasies, so I opted to play along. “Where to now, memsahib?”
She pointed to the far wall. “Over there.”
I had been in the drawing room dozens of times but had never scrutinized the wall of photographs directly opposite Madeline, probably because Madeline herself had always distracted me from doing so. “Did you get rid of the statue?” I asked, hopefully.
“Get rid of Madeline?” said Peggy, outraged that I had even asked. “Of course not. She’s like
a daughter to me.” She had stopped in front of a photograph of herself in a feathered headdress looking young and haughty, a small, impish boy trying to climb up her leg. “You remember dearest Harold, don’t you?” she said. “Such a sweet little boy. Liked to hang around backstage, waiting for Mummy to finish.” She pulled me closer to the photo so I could get a better look, then pointed to another picture of Harold in a suit and graduation gown. “So terribly bright. Do you know he graduated from Cambridge with a first class honors? Isn’t he handsome?”
I nodded, though I didn’t agree. Harold had shadowy, deep-set eyes, and his mouth was soured by a sneering expression. “I didn’t know you were an actress,” I said.
“Oh yes,” she said, sweeping her arm over the entire wall. “As you can see, I worked with all the greats. It was a marvelous time. Of course, they’re all dead now. And I’m almost there.”
Most of the photographs were black-and-white studio poses, with autographs scrawled across them, and there was only one other shot of Peggy, standing next to a short, dapper man.
“Is that Harold and Pippa’s dad?” I asked, recalling that their father had been an actor.
“Heavens, no! Their father was a scoundrel. You won’t find any photos of him here. I burned every single one.” Peggy stroked her finger across the photograph glass. “That’s Laurie,” she said, swooning at his name. “He should have been their father but he died.”
The man in the photo was intriguingly effeminate, with kind, amused eyes, and he and Peggy looked to be sharing a joke. I asked if he had died in the war, but Peggy ignored my question.
“You can stop gawking now.” She pushed off from the wall, obliging me to follow the wheelchair as it careened in the opposite direction. “I should like to sit by the window.”
The Girl Below Page 9