For Stephen, Amelia and Olivia,
with love
CONTENTS
1: Marina
2: Connie
3: Marina
4: Connie
5: Marina
6: Eva
7: Connie
8: Marina
9: Connie
10: Marina
11: Connie
12: Marina
13: Eva
14: Marina
15: Connie
16: Marina
17: Eva
18: Connie
19: Marina
20: Connie
21: Marina
22: Connie
23: Marina
24: Connie
25: Marina
26: Connie
27: Eva
28: Connie
29: Marina
30: Marina
31: Eva
32: Marina
33: Connie
34: Marina
35: Eva
36: Marina
37: Connie
EPILOGUE: Marina
Acknowledgements
1
Marina
November 1991
The house is still, like a crypt. Only the maple tree moves, branches swaying in the night breeze, leaves trembling and then brightening as a light in the top window flicks on.
Marina parks opposite and switches off the engine. Heart thudding, she opens the door and steps into the street. The midnight air whips her face. Her breath is wispy, like the remnants of a ghost. In the distance, traffic speeds along Streatham High Road. A siren wails.
She has been in Tooting Bec visiting an author whose manuscript she’s editing. Agata is Polish and is writing her memoirs, focusing on the Second World War. Setting off for the drive home to Wiltshire, Marina has taken a detour, speeding through the network of suburban streets, along past the common and into Harrington Gardens.
It’s an ordinary street in a nondescript part of London, with the air of a place battened down for winter. Hedges are scruffy, tendrils trail from the tops of hanging baskets. Rubbish nudges the lids of dustbins. On one path, a rusty pram stands discarded along with a broken cot.
The houses are mostly semis but number 24 is different. Detached. It’s a double-fronted Victorian home with two gables topped with arrowed finials. Spiked iron railings, with gates either side, contain the front garden with its modest patch of earth, single maple tree and geometric path. Stone steps lead to a massive front door; metal stairs to the entrance to the basement. To the right, a public footpath separates it from the house next door. An estate agent’s fallen sign rests on the ground. Flat 2. To Let.
Automatically, Marina compares the reality before her to the photographs she’s seen in newspapers. But those grainy images were mere reproductions, while this building is solid and stamps its importance on the street.
Marina crosses the road. The house is in darkness save for the light on the second floor and a cobwebbed lantern above the front door, but it’s enough to notice the crumbling cornices and cracked stained glass. The bricks need repointing, the ledges need repainting and the maple tree needs cutting back.
Three floors and five windows and then the basement.
The light in the top window is turned off. Marina shivers and buttons her faux-fur coat. Her hair hangs abundantly around her face – rich and dark and warm. She wears thick clothes, boots and fingerless gloves, but still the chill of the night creeps inside her bones. Flexing her fingers, she moves beneath a street lamp as if it might give her heat.
Above her, the sky is heavy. Stray snowflakes are falling. She should go home. She should get into her Mini, turn the heating on full blast and speed away from London.
But she does not.
Warily, she steps forward and peers more closely at the house. Along with the set of doorbells – five, she counts, for five flats, there’s a separate bell for the basement – she takes in the original details: the lion-head door knocker with its gaping mouth; the metal bell pull that hangs like a noose; the guillotine blade of the boot scraper.
She considers the people who have lifted the knocker, jangled the bell or scraped their shoes: tenants and visitors. She imagines the figure of a lonely woman, creeping like a spectre up the steps, pushing open the door and leaving her baby inside.
Who would do that?
A weight forms inside her chest. It’s an old question and yet Marina’s body bows beneath the hurt because she knows she was the baby and the woman was her mother.
2
Connie
April 1964
It can’t be true, thought Connie, breathing deeply as she hurried along the pavement of Harrington Gardens. She had missed another period and this morning she had been sick. Deep, retching spasms before she’d even eaten.
She knew it was a sign because Mrs Kolinski had been sick when she was pregnant. Not that she’d had her baby. She’d lost it, just as she’d lost her husband three weeks before that. Some people, said Connie’s father, had the luck of the Devil and some had no luck at all.
Despite the warmth of the morning, Connie shivered. Having no luck didn’t come close to what might happen next. To have a baby at seventeen. Her father would be devastated, worrying about how they’d manage to look after it, and fretting about money. His eyes would reproach her. What about your mother? What would she have said?
Yet, to have a baby, a miniature version of him . . . Would it be so bad? She paused in her stride, thinking about Johnny. His blue eyes, his dark hair.
She quickened her pace, knowing her father would be waiting in the bookshop with a list of jobs. The shop opened at nine, but he arrived early. Sometimes he left the flat before she was even awake.
A line of sweat trickled down her neck. She lifted her dark hair and twisted it into a ponytail, securing it with the band she found in the pocket of her dress. Her favourite dress, short and bright yellow with black polka dots. She smoothed the front, checking to see if it was visible yet, but her stomach was as flat as ever. That was something. Maybe she was wrong and had miscalculated her dates. Perhaps the way she felt now was because her period was due. The blood would come and the cramps would start. She would be annoyed by the inconvenience and laugh at herself for being dramatic.
Still. Perhaps she should see Doctor Franklin. She envisaged sitting in his surgery and shuddered at the thought. How could she explain to the man she had known since childhood that she suspected she was pregnant? The same man who had seen her with pigtails, had told her she had chickenpox, had pronounced she would grow out of eczema. It was he who had diagnosed her mother. He knew everything about their family.
Walking faster, almost running, she reached the end of Harrington Gardens and turned onto Streatham High Road. People strolled on the common. It was a bright morning, the sky a canvas of blue and white strokes. Johnny had painted sunrises and sunsets, copying the postcards they had bought at the National Gallery. Connie imagined him using words such as textured and intense and she saw herself listening and yet not listening, captivated by his eyes and the way his face fell into a frown. He rarely smiled. But when he did. When he did. Well, that was why she had got into this position in the first place.
Grimacing, she hurried along past the common before turning off and waiting on the kerb as a bus and a few cars rattled past. Further along, a milk float whirred to the depot. She crossed, dodging the boy on his bike heading for the grocer’s where he worked, a few doors down from the bookshop. Harry – seventeen, skinny as a post, wearing drainpipes and a shirt, with a bowler hat perched on his head. Grinning, he lifted both hands from the handlebars and said, ‘Connie. You’re killing me.’
He said it every time he saw her
and she laughed because she liked him and because he had been kind to her mother, Sarah, especially in those last few weeks, when she had insisted on shopping alone. Harry had carried her bags and accompanied her home. Connie had waited and watched them from the window of their flat, her heart filling as her mother’s diminished frame rounded the corner, with Harry walking beside her.
The cancer had been quick. Her mother had lain beneath the covers with her long hair spread across the pillow while Connie and her father had kept vigil beside her. Forty years old. Too young – everyone said. She’d died in the middle of the night. Only when the doctor had come and the body been taken, had Connie slipped out of the house and onto the common, where she’d stood beneath the cold moon and the indifferent stars and allowed herself to weep.
A year ago. Connie could hardly believe she’d been alone – motherless – for so long.
Crossing another road, she stifled her sadness and focused on Johnny. She remembered his cool hands on her body, and afterwards, the spark of his frustration each time he talked about his painting and what he wanted to achieve.
Now he was gone. He’d taken the boat train to Paris to start a new life without her. Yes, he’d promised to write once he’d settled, but that had been in January and now it was April and she still hadn’t heard.
The bookshop stood on a side street squeezed amongst a row of shops and cafes. Two storeys, it had darkly painted walls and a rusty sign that read:
THOMAS LITTLETON BOOKSELLER
BOOKS BOUGHT AND SOLD
RARE AND SECOND HAND
The window on the ground floor was so crammed with books it was difficult to see inside. Fairy lights circled the pane and a forgotten nativity scene nestled in the corner, giving the impression of a shabby Christmas card or an old-fashioned etching in a book.
Connie opened the door. She blinked, letting her eyes get used to the gloom. Her father leaned at the counter, and so did Victor Wallace. She considered slipping away, but decided against it. If her father was conducting business with Victor, it was better that she stayed.
The shop smelled of ink and old paper. It was narrow, with a wooden counter along the rear wall and, behind that, a doorway to the back room. At the far end of the counter, on the right, a staircase led to the first floor. A fairly reliable grandfather clock and a small cabinet of rare books stood next to the staircase. Black and white photographs hung on the wall to the left, showing south London through the decades.
Nostalgia, according to Connie’s father, encouraged the buying of books, and so did free biscuits: often Connie would arrive to find groups of customers reminiscing about closed-down dance halls and tea rooms and wartime rations as they ate digestives and drank cups of tea. Whether they bought any books was another matter, but their talk was a distraction for her father and that was important, especially since Connie’s mother had gone.
There were books everywhere. They spilled out from the shelves that covered two walls, were stacked on the floor, the counter, the window seat. It seemed like chaos, but her father catalogued and treasured every volume, no matter how valuable or otherwise. Every hardback or paperback – poetry, play, fiction, non-fiction, popular or literary – needed a home, and if it didn’t have one, her father would keep it safe. If they ran out of space in the shop, he would store them in the attic at Harrington Gardens. Many books had been in the shop for years – like her mother’s favourite, A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain. Volume the Fourth. Inside you could read Donne and Fletcher in the smallest of print, on the thinnest of paper. Her mother had pencilled at the front Not to be sold, as she always had if it was a book she particularly prized.
Victor turned first and grinned. He gathered books from house clearances or other sources, and there, on the scratched-up counter, next to a sheaf of bills secured by a paperweight, a pile of tattered paperbacks signified his latest haul.
‘Ah, Connie,’ said her father, smiling. ‘See what Victor has brought us.’
Her father was dressed in his usual waistcoat and white shirt, his face adorned by a pair of half-glasses, hair greying and needing a trim. Connie’s chest tightened. She should tell him to go to the barbers. He never did anything for himself unless she pushed him, which both irritated and pleased her.
Now he held up a volume of poetry by Emily Dickinson. Connie took it with a tingle of anticipation and noticed with surprise that the rest of the books were by female authors too: Sylvia Plath, Shirley Jackson, Virginia Woolf.
‘What do you think?’ said her father eagerly.
She smiled, touching the spines. Oh, to be one of these women, to let her thoughts run and slide on every page. She’d wanted to be a writer for as long as she could remember, scribbling stories at an early age. Her parents had read them and taken her ambition seriously, nodding gravely, offering advice. She still wrote, but her ideas were small, her settings confined to south London. She wished she could travel the world and feed her imagination, that she could go to exotic places like Marrakesh and Cairo and absorb the sights and the smells and the sounds. Next door in the second-hand shop, a Remington typewriter had been in the window for months. Gleaming, black and silver and compact. One day she would buy it. She imagined herself clacking away at the keys on a train headed for Venice, shooting back the carriage with a ding.
‘They’re perfect,’ she said, averting her eyes from Victor’s grin.
Victor was twenty-five. Good-looking, light-eyed, smooth-skinned with tawny coloured hair, it was his mouth that spoiled the effect, with lips that were overred, always damp. They parted when he looked at her, showing pointed teeth like a wolf’s. Today he wore an ugly green and orange checked jacket, yet he still managed to look slick. Slick. That was the word to describe Victor. Or sleazy. Even though he was the best-read person she knew – apart from her father. Now he leered at her in the way he always did, his gaze travelling over her body. She crossed her arms to cover her chest, regretting her short yellow dress.
‘Can you guess who owned these books?’ said her father, waving A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in front of her eyes.
Connie smiled. ‘No. Who?’
‘A suffragette, or at least a relation to a suffragette and a very famous one at that. Have you heard of Emily Davison, the lady who died on the track at the Epsom Derby?’
‘Of course!’ Connie replied.
It was her mother who’d taught her about the suffragettes. She’d also said that women should want more than to be yoked to their houses and their husbands. Head for the horizon, she said. Don’t be satisfied with standing still.
‘Which relation?’ she said, looking directly at Victor.
‘I cannot divulge the identity of my client.’ He spoke with mock secrecy and tapped the side of his nose.
She rolled her eyes. Victor was a past master at exaggeration and deceit. He knew well enough that his claim about these books would determine the deal for her father.
In the corner of the room, the grandfather clock struck ten. ‘Right,’ said Victor, ‘Time and tide and all of that. Are we agreed?’
‘Indeed we are,’ said Connie’s father, rubbing his hands and grabbing a scrap of paper. Connie tried to see the scribbled figures, certain Victor would trick them if he could, but her father was already heading into the back room. Connie watched him sadly. His once confident stride had turned into a shuffle. He had become hunched, weighed down by grief. He looked so much older than he was.
She reached for the copy of Mrs Dalloway. Opening the book, she read the first line. Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. What kind of flowers had she had in mind? Lilacs perhaps, like the ones her mother used to fill vases with. Daffodils like those Connie had laid on her grave. Or violets like the drooping bunch Harry had given her that time they’d gone to the pictures. She smiled at the memory. She suspected he had pinched them, but she hadn’t cared. Johnny had never given her flowers although he’d painted enough sunflowers. Sunsets and sunflowers and the oc
casional attempt at a portrait.
Victor spoke. ‘I like your dress. Yellow suits you.’
She was tempted to throw the book at his head, but that was no way to treat any book, let alone Mrs Dalloway. She ignored him instead.
‘Don’t be shy. I don’t bite.’ He smiled in that way he had, drawing back his lips, showing his pointy teeth. Fumbling in his pocket, he pulled out a hip flask and offered it to her. She shook her head mutely. He took a swig. ‘You know, it isn’t easy to make conversation with a girl who doesn’t speak.’
‘I have nothing to say.’
‘Ha!’ He held up one finger. ‘But you have.’ He looked at her for a second more and then asked after her boyfriend.
‘I don’t have a boyfriend,’ she snapped. Automatically, she moved her hands across her stomach and then immediately crossed her arms.
‘Because if that was the case, I’d understand, but seeing as you don’t have a boyfriend – or so you say – I’m bewildered.’ He pocketed the flask. ‘I’m not saying every girl falls for me, but . . .’
‘I told you, I don’t have a boyfriend, not that it’s any business of yours.’
‘What about the boy in your building? I’ve seen you together. You can’t deny it.’
True. They had been in the attic which was where Johnny did his painting. He’d been working on a sunset over Waterloo Bridge, feeling frustrated because everything he did was wrong: the colours, the lines, the light and shade. They had argued. He had told her that she had no appreciation of art – like his mother. She had defended both herself and his mother. Afterwards, he was tearful and apologetic, and when they were leaving, Victor was sauntering up the stairs on his way to see her father.
Victor had a knack for turning up uninvited in their flat. Her father welcomed him because he believed in generosity and respect, but Connie hated every second of his presence.
‘He’s gone,’ she said, finally answering his question.
‘Where’s he gone?’ Victor patted his pocket and pulled out a pouch of tobacco.
‘Paris.’
He gave a low whistle. ‘Nice. Expensive. Has he robbed a bank? He’s not one of those train robbers, is he, and now he’s done a bunk?’ He rolled his cigarette and licked the edges. ‘Two and a half million. Wish I’d thought of a stunt like that.’
The Hiding Place Page 1