The Girl Below

by Bianca Zander

  On our way past the chaise longues, I examined the dark patch of wood where Madeline’s dais had stood. Long scratch marks on one side showed the direction she’d been dragged in but the marks stopped abruptly, as though she had been lifted up off the floor.

  As we neared the windows, Peggy’s reptilian hand gripped my arm. “Ahh, Hillary, I do so love the sun! What a gorgeous day.” She nodded her head around the room, surveying her kingdom. “Tell Pippa to brew the tea for longer. She always makes it too weak.”

  Pippa appeared in the doorway with tea and biscuits, a formal arrangement on a tray. “Last time you said it was too strong.”

  “Well, it was,” said Peggy, surveying the tray. “Is that shortbread?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know I don’t eat biscuits.”

  “So don’t eat any.” Pippa poured a splash of milk into each of three teacups.

  “I prefer not to have things like that in the house.”

  “You don’t normally have any food in the house, Mummy. Only grog.”

  “Not anymore,” said Peggy. “You won’t let me.”

  Pippa sighed. “And I’m sure you’ve found ways to get around that.”

  Peggy shot her an indignant look. “Just what are you implying?”

  “Nothing, Mummy, nothing at all.”

  For half a minute, everyone sipped tea as starchily as ladies in an Edwardian costume drama. The sun obliged our charade and added its summery warmth, but it was too bright for Peggy and she held her hand up to her face.

  “Hillary, do be a darling and fetch my sunglasses,” she said to me, an order, not a request. “They’re in my room, on the dresser, I should think.”

  I stood up to obey. “The room you got stuck in this morning?”

  “I believe I said, ‘in my room,’ didn’t I?”

  “You did.”

  “Stop it, Mummy,” said Pippa. “She isn’t your servant.”

  They continued to bicker as I left the drawing room. In the hallway, I came to the door of Peggy’s room—her original bedroom—and tried to push it open but met with the same resistance I had the night before. I was bigger than Peggy and wasn’t sure if I’d be able to squeeze through the gap, so I pushed a little harder to see if the door would give way. Inch by inch, whatever was behind the door slowly moved, until the gap was wide enough for me to fit through.

  The room was dark, unnaturally so for such a bright day, and I stood still, just inside the door, while my eyes adjusted. I didn’t think I’d ever been into Peggy’s real bedroom before, and it was both larger and messier than I expected. Clothes and shoes sprouted from every piece of furniture and lolled about on the floor—not really clothes at all, I saw on closer inspection, but costumes: piles of slippery silk and feathers and winking diamantes. No wonder I had never been allowed in here as a child—it was little-girl heaven, a giant dress-up box filled with vintage treasures. I would have broken things, accidentally on purpose, just like I had ruined my mother’s treasured locket.

  So overwhelmed was I by all the finery that I forgot to look behind the door to see what had been blocking it, and when I finally did look, I wished that I hadn’t. There was Madeline, parked next to the bed, kneeling beside it, in fact, close enough to be petted by whoever was sleeping there. Her granite head was being used as a hat stand, and a satin undergarment was draped from her shoulder, but the indignity made her no less menacing. I should have guessed it would be her behind the door, but instead I felt ambushed, as though Madeline had won the first round in a blindfolded parlor game.

  In different circumstances, I would have taken hours to find the sunglasses, handling as many gowns as possible along the way. But with Madeline watching, my hands were paddles, swiping blindly at things and sending piles of necklaces and garter belts flying in all directions. I was so flustered that after a time I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for, and had displaced so many of Peggy’s things that it looked like the dresser had been savaged by a dog. Finally, I saw a pair of ridiculous sunglasses—huge and round, like dinner plates—poking out from the top drawer, and I grabbed them in my shaking hands and fled.

  Out in the hallway afterward, my reaction at seeing Madeline seemed about as credible as being strangled by a psychotic feather boa, and I recovered almost as soon as the door was shut. I’d had a panic attack; that was all.

  “You took your time,” said Peggy when I returned. “But I suppose a little snooping won’t hurt anyone.”

  Pippa laughed. “She wasn’t snooping—have you seen the state of your room? I’m surprised she found anything in there. I’m surprised you can even find the bed.”

  Their sniping sounded gentler than it had when I’d left, and I guessed a truce between them had been reached. Either that or they’d worn each other out. I handed Peggy her sunglasses, which obscured most of her face and made an indentation on her papery cheeks. She looked glamorous though too, a skeletal version of Jackie O in her Greek phase.

  “You look ready for our bon voyage now,” said Pippa.

  “I don’t know why you’re so excited,” said Peggy, looking out over the top of her sunglasses. “It’s one of the lesser Greek islands.”

  “Which means it’s unspoiled.” Pippa wiped a dribble of tea from her mother’s chin. “You’ll absolutely love it. Ari’s family can’t wait to make a fuss over you.”

  “What makes you think they won’t put me to work in the taverna like the rest of you?”

  “We’ll only be working some of the time,” said Pippa. “The rest is a holiday.”

  “And what if I get sick again?” Peggy’s mouth turned down at the corners. “I don’t suppose they have proper medical facilities.”

  “Don’t be so morbid. It’s the middle of summer.” Pippa wiped a finger of dust off the windowsill. “It’ll do you good to get away from your museum.”

  “Harold will look after me. I’ll ring him tonight in Australia.”

  “Canada, Mother. He lives in Toronto, remember?”

  “Well, they’re both part of the Commonwealth,” said Peggy. “And there’s no need to shout.” She tried to take a sip from her cup, but it slid out of her hand and smashed on the floor in a pool of milky tea. At the calamity, Peggy started, and Pippa put out a hand to steady her.

  “Have you heard from him lately?” she said, more gently.

  Peggy didn’t answer, but I saw, as Pippa knelt and carefully gathered up the pieces of broken china, that her jaw was clenched.

  “Well, neither have I,” said Pippa, when she’d finished picking up the crockery. “Suki, would you mind getting a tea towel from the kitchen?”

  I was still rifling in the cupboards looking for one when Pippa came in to throw out the broken cup.

  “Is she well enough to go to Greece?” I said.

  “It was her idea,” said Pippa. “She campaigned with her doctor to be allowed to go. But she enjoys being difficult. If we changed our minds and said she had to stay here, she’d want to go with us.” She pulled out a tea towel from perilously close to the moonshine flour bin and handed it to me. “Did you enjoy Mummy’s fantasy wall?”

  At first, I didn’t catch on. “You mean the photographs? She told me she was an actress.”

  “She was an understudy in a couple of plays,” said Pippa. “Eventually she became a theater publicist—a very good one too. That’s why she has got so many autographed photos, and why she isn’t in any of them.”

  “Except for the one in the headdress,” I said.

  “Costume party,” said Pippa. “She had plenty of those.”

  “That’s what I remember most about her—the amazing clothes,” I said, feeling a rush of sadness and sympathy for Peggy’s failed ambitions. Perhaps it didn’t matter that she’d only acted the part of an actress. Flouncing around in Kabuki gowns had been a kind of performance. Who cared if it hadn’t been on a stage?

  Pippa settled on a stool by the window, and didn’t look like she was in a hurry to go back to
the drawing room. “I wish she’d let go of all that,” she said. “She hangs on to all those bloody gowns and some of them are worth a fortune. Soon they’ll be so ruined they won’t be worth a thing.”

  Money troubles, it seemed, were all around me. “Couldn’t she sell this place? Move somewhere smaller?”

  “She doesn’t own it,” said Pippa, as if this was something I should have known.

  “But the rent must be astronomical!”

  “It would be if she hadn’t been here since the sixties. She pays peppercorn rent, and no one can kick her out. She’s got absolutely no savings, and most of the time we have to help her out with bills. This place costs a fortune to heat.” Pippa sighed. “I shouldn’t be so hard on her. She made so many sacrifices when we were growing up. Harold’s education didn’t come cheap, nor did the trimmings that went with it.”

  “You didn’t want to go to university?”

  “Me? At university?” She sounded surprised that I’d even asked. “I was far too interested in makeup and boys—as I’m sure you remember.”

  “You taught me everything I know about makeup. And I should have listened more to what you said about boys.”

  Pippa laughed. “It was such a shame when you and your mother moved out of the flat downstairs. But I suppose I can understand why she wanted to get rid of it.”

  “She didn’t want to—we moved because Dad wanted to sell the flat. That was the one time he got in touch.”

  “What?” said Pippa. She looked like she had been slapped. “You mean he cut you off?”

  I had never heard anyone describe it so harshly, but she was right, we had been severed. “Mum didn’t like to talk about it.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Pippa. “How awful.”

  That night, Peggy asked me to read to her from one of the romances on the nightstand by her bed. I was about to start from the beginning of the slim volume when she snatched it from my hand and opened it near the end. “Start with the climax,” she said, getting comfortable against a bank of old feather pillows. “I can’t stay awake long, so you have to cut to the chase.”

  I made the mistake of glancing at Madeline before I complied, and Peggy followed my gaze. “Isn’t she lovely?” she said. “She was a gift from my darling Laurie.”

  “She’s very . . . lifelike,” I said, choosing my words carefully.

  “I think so, but the others can’t see it. She’ll be out on the curb the minute I’m gone.”

  “Wherever I go in the room,” I said, “I feel like she’s looking at me.”

  “I know,” said Peggy, reaching out to stroke Madeline’s face. “I never feel lonely when she’s here.” She smiled. “Of course, it’s even better to have human company. Especially someone who isn’t in a uniform.”

  From her corner, Madeline glared.

  “Did you move her in here yourself?” I asked.

  “Heavens, no. She weighs three times as much as I do. But Amanda came up with the ingenious idea of popping her in the wheelchair and trundling her down the hall.” Peggy pointed to the large dresser on the door side of her bed. “Only we couldn’t get the wheelchair past the dresser, so she’s sort of stuck behind the door.”

  After I’d read a single page, Peggy was sound asleep, and I tucked the quilt into the small of her back. Standing away from the bed and looking at her sleeping body, I suddenly felt very alone, and realized that I’d enjoyed having company as much as she had. Being useful, feeling needed, had been nice, and I went back to the living room, acutely aware that I was neither.

  There was no TV in the flat, only books and whiskey—at least I knew where that was hiding—and with Madeline tucked away in Peggy’s room, I felt relaxed enough to take a nightcap on the chaise longue with a 1978 issue of Vogue that I had found in a stack under the coffee table. But after only a couple of sips, and a dozen or so pages, my eyes began to droop.

  I went to my room tired but sober. It was a silvery night, pretty, and after getting changed into summer pajamas, I opened the curtains and climbed into bed. The moon was out, a pale disk filmed over with smoke. No stars, but I’d stopped looking for them in London’s light-polluted skies. Harold’s room looked out over the communal gardens, and the rustle of oak trees was surprisingly loud considering the constant low hum of people and televisions and traffic underneath it. For an hour or more, I lay there with my eyes closed, waiting for sleep, but every time I came close to drifting off, some thought pulled me back to consciousness. Round and round these thoughts went, until my body drummed with restlessness. I was thirsty too, perhaps because of the whiskey, so I got up and walked through the quiet flat to get a glass of water, turning on lights as I went. The kitchen was empty, and smelled of the sweet tomato soup I’d heated up for our dinner. I drank a glass of water, and filled it again to take back to bed, then turned off the fluorescent bar in the kitchen, and returned to the hallway, where I did something uncharacteristic—I turned off that light too. It was very dark but in time my eyes adjusted, and I made my way through the shadows to Harold’s room. I had braced myself to feel constant fear in Peggy’s flat, where she and her little friend lived, but walking alone along the checkered hallway, I felt nothing except nostalgia, and the old familiar gnaw of unwanted solitude.

  Back in Harold’s room, I put down the glass of water next to the bed and climbed in. Glasses off, I shut my eyes to sleep. I was calm, hydrated, warm, tired; I should have drifted off immediately, but could not. This time it was a noise that kept me awake, a scraping sound coming from the garden, as if someone was dragging a heavy iron spade along one of the concrete paths. The noise stopped, but then I was bothered by a deep absence of sound, as though I had descended to the bottom of the ocean. No oak leaves rustled, no traffic hummed; all the TVs and their owners had been switched off. So dense, so complete was the silence that I put on my glasses and went to the window to see what it looked like.

  Everything below was incredibly familiar, like the scene in a postcard that’s been stuck to the fridge for too many years. There was the paved patio and white gate; the neat begonia beds with their border of pebbles; the barbecue area my father had built out of salvaged red bricks. On the tiny patch of lawn, someone had been ten-pin bowling and left the game out for the night—only they weren’t bowling pins, they were wine bottles. My gaze lingered on the flattened carcass of a Wendy tent—primary red and yellow with five or six tent poles sticking out like broken ribs.

  When the truth about what I was looking at sank in, I sprang from the windowpane, and steadied myself against an adjacent wall. Nothing in the room had changed—the bed was messed up where I had been lying in it, and the glass of water on the bedside table was as full as it had been when I set it down. The thing that was wrong was outside, in the garden. Not just the tent, but in the seconds before I looked away I was sure I’d seen a rectangle of black beyond it, slightly larger than a cot mattress.

  But how was that possible? I steeled myself to look again. Leaning carefully toward the glass, I gripped the sash window frame so hard that a splinter of chipped paint jabbed into the soft skin under my fingernail, but the pain of it was canceled by what I saw out in the garden in plain sight. There, at the end of the begonia beds, was the hatch to the air-raid shelter, peeled open like the lid of a sardine can.

  Two or three times more, I experimented with moving away from the window for a moment, then looking back out to make sure that what I’d seen was actually there. It was, every time. There was no mistaking the layout of the garden, exactly as it had been when I was a child, no mistaking the rectangle of black or the debris that had been left out on the lawn the night after the party.

  The windowpane was damp where I’d pressed against it, and I stood back and wiped away the condensation. Real moisture from my breathing, something you could run your finger through, unlike the mirage on the other side of the glass. I rubbed my eyes, but that made no difference. The old garden was still there, as alluring as it was filled with menace. />
  I decided to open the window. It had been so long since anyone had done so that it took some effort to force aside the half-moon catch between the two sides of the sash. The windowpane itself moved easily enough, but I soon discovered the sash cord was broken, and the weight of the glass in its frame bore down on my hands with tremendous urgency and pressure. Still, I got the thing open, and propped up the sash with a hardback Dickens omnibus from Harold’s schoolboy collection. With much trepidation, I leaned a little way out. The night air was still, but also sultry, humid. With one eye on Dickens—his long-windedness holding fast—I leaned out a bit farther and dared to look down.

  One of the French doors—our old French doors—was open, and light spilled out onto the patio. A shadow fell across it and a male figure walked out, followed by another and another—three men in all—their laughter like gunshots on the still night air.

  For a second or two, I watched with awed curiosity before I reacted physically to the ghastly spectacle—one of the men was my father—and reeled backward and upward, dislodging the book and sending the window frame downward with the force of a guillotine. The sound of it slamming was enough to wake the dead, and I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled, at great speed, toward the bed.

  Once in it, I pulled the musty feather quilt over my head, but it wasn’t quite thick enough to block out the dreadful scraping noises of the hatch being closed, or the giddy, drunken voices, including my father’s, that accompanied the endeavor. The only mercy—and I was absurdly grateful for it—was that from four stories up, I could not make out a word they were saying. After a time the scraping, talking, and laughing all stopped and I guessed that the men had gone back inside, wherever that was, this world or another. The garden, the building, the room, fell quiet once more, not the thick silence of ten minutes earlier but the ordinary hum of late-night London. I could have climbed out of bed and gone to the window to see if sight matched sound, but by then I had run out of gumption, for that or any other task.

  Chapter Nine