‘And what about the train driver?’ said Connie hotly.
‘Yeah, well.’ Victor grimaced. ‘I never said anything about what happened to him. It’s the entrepreneurship I admire.’ He flipped open his lighter, changed his mind and snapped it shut. Leaning forward, his eyes shining with approval, he said, ‘You know the farmhouse – the gang’s hideout after the robbery?’
She nodded. After the men had gone, the police had been tipped off. Searching the building, they’d discovered tins of soup and corned beef, bags of sugar and slabs of cake. There had even been a Monopoly board with the men’s fingerprints on it. Imagine playing Monopoly with real money.
‘Well,’ said Victor, ‘I heard the owners of the farmhouse charged half a crown to look round – a shilling for kids. Now that is genius.’ He pocketed his lighter and gave her another sly look. ‘So, is he?’
‘What?’
‘Your boyfriend. Is he a bank robber?’
‘No! Of course he isn’t. He worked at Smithfield, you know that.’
‘I’m a salesman, but it doesn’t mean I’m not cut out for a different job.’ He tucked the cigarette behind his ear. ‘I know I’m older than you, but that means I’ve got experience. And maybe I could help you and your father out.’ He waved an arm about, indicating the shop.
Connie took in his meaning and shook her head in disgust. No amount of money Victor could provide would compensate for his personality. The landlord had already waived their rent for this month, but better Kenneth Quip than Victor Wallace.
‘We’re doing fine,’ she said.
‘You seem worried.’
He rested his hand on her wrist and her fingers itched to grab the paperweight and bring it down on his knuckles.
‘I’m not worried. And if I was, I wouldn’t come to you.’
His face darkened and he tightened his grip. ‘That’s not nice. I’m only trying to help.’
She snatched away her hand as her father appeared holding a bundle of notes. Connie’s heart constricted again as she pictured him scrabbling at the back of the safe, or in the petty cash tin, gathering together enough money to pay Victor. He filled in the details of the invoice, using a fountain pen her mother had given him. The shop held countless memories like that: her mother’s presence filled the space, even now.
He finished writing and tore off the sheet. Connie turned her head away, hating to see Victor signing the piece of paper and taking the notes. She held herself stiffly as he brushed past, saying his goodbyes, giving her a leer, tempered by a wink.
The door banged shut. She wanted to ask questions, to check that Victor had charged a fair price, but her father was already absorbed, scratching the new titles into his book.
She looked at him with a fondness tinged with concern. For an intelligent man, he was remarkably ignorant of business matters. Her mother had been the one who did the accounts, checked the outgoings and incomings, balanced the figures and insisted on fair prices.
‘Shall I make tea?’ she offered.
‘Lovely,’ her father replied, without looking up. ‘There’s digestives in the tin.’
She gave him another fond look before retreating to the back room, and while the kettle boiled she rubbed her wrist where Victor had grabbed it. He had left a faint mark, branded her like cattle. Her mind darkened. How dare he touch her? He had overstepped the mark. What would her father say? Not that she would tell him. He couldn’t fall out with his best supplier because eventually Victor might find a prize amongst the cast-offs he came across, a rare edition, a literary gem. For the sake of her father she had to put up with him.
She sighed and gazed through the barred window at the courtyard. The crooked houses that fronted it leaned precariously. One day, the buildings would lean so far, they would crush the bookshop. Mind you, if more money didn’t come in, the business would fail anyway. The last thing they needed was another mouth to feed. She mustn’t be pregnant. It would be a disaster for everyone. Pushing away the foreboding that rose so urgently inside her, she turned to make the tea.
3
Marina
November 1991
Marina reads Agata’s manuscript. Early recollections: snow falling, goldfish swimming. My brother racing into the kitchen saying we had to leave.
She’s finding it hard to concentrate, though. It’s been like this since she returned from London – memories competing for attention, intrusive thoughts and suppositions. She sighs, twiddles her pencil, fiddles with the mess of papers on her desk: receipts, invoices, notes.
Grabbing a piece of honey cake from a plate, she crams it into her mouth. Sticky and sweet, it’s the only food she has eaten all day. Last week, Agata sent her home with a Tupperware box full of cakes and pastries, recipes passed down through generations. Marina wonders what kind of cook her own mother would have been.
Throwing down her pencil, she strides to the window. Snow has given way to rain, and the sky is overcast, smeared with grey. Without any morning sunshine, the fields are dulled to yellow, and the trees and hedgerows seem more black than green. Beyond the church spire on the hill is the Westbury White Horse. It is mythical and magical. Marina imagines the horse taking off and galloping across the plain.
Ruth had told Marina from the beginning how she and David had come to adopt her. That Marina had been abandoned, left in the hallway of a shared house, dressed in a gown and a neatly pinned nappy, wrapped in a shawl of the deepest blue. Ruth said her birth mother must have loved her very much because she had put her somewhere safe where she would be found.
The media had run the story, nicknaming her Baby Blue. It was a Spanish nurse who had called her Marina, which came from the Latin and meant ‘of the sea’: with the blue shawl and her dark looks, it seemed to fit. David and Ruth had agreed. Naturally, they’d added their stamp, naming her Marina Zoe Alexander – Zoe for ‘life’.
Marina had listened to these stories of her birth with her knees drawn up and her face serious. She had stored away the details and conjured an image of the woman who was her mother, imagining her with thick, dark hair like her own and dark eyes too. A tragic figure always intending to return.
Ruth had saved dozens of newspaper articles and had kept them in a box in her wardrobe. Marina liked to sneak into her bedroom and study the photos of the house, which seemed like a mansion compared to the cottage they lived in.
When she was older, Marina had read the articles more closely. She had made notes, gathering information about the tenants mentioned and making a plan of who had lived where in the house. A pregnant woman had been spotted nearby. Could that have been her mother? Where had she gone? Marina had searched newspaper archives for unexplained deaths, but there were no dead young women reported, only the corpse of a man who had been dragged from the lake on Tooting Common.
For want of anything better to do, Marina eats more cake. In a few hours, she is due for lunch at her parents’ house. She thinks about meeting a friend for coffee beforehand. It’s Saturday so someone will be free, but while she is searching for a dress to wear the temptation fades and dies. She will arrange a drink for later. Now, she makes a strong cup of coffee, adds two teaspoons of sugar and takes it to her desk.
But she can’t concentrate, and not for the first time she debates whether editing is what she wants to do. Maybe she should go back to teaching. She had lasted twelve months at a comprehensive school in Bristol teaching French and German. It wasn’t the kids that had drummed her out; it was the strict policies staff were expected to abide by. One day, she had downed her chalk and given in her notice. She had ended up in Warsaw for a year, working in a bar and learning Polish to add to her repertoire of languages.
A spontaneous act. Like dyeing her hair auburn when she was a teenager to make herself look more like Ruth. Like visiting a psychic and asking about her mother. Like taking a detour through London streets at midnight to look for a mysterious house. Maybe she’ll spend the rest of her life lurching from one decision to the next,
living hand to mouth.
Ruth says Marina will settle eventually, but she’s twenty-seven, and with no full-time job or relationship on the horizon, there’s no sign of it happening any time soon.
She ransacks a drawer looking for cigarettes. Finding an old packet of Marlboro, she lights up, shoves open the window and leans into the cold air. She hasn’t smoked for months and the cigarette tastes stale and makes her feel shaky. Still, she draws harder and steadies herself, fixing her eyes on the White Horse.
In the street, a neighbour is unloading shopping from the boot of his car. He waves cheerily at Marina and she smiles at him. They’ve been out for drinks a few times. He’s good-looking in a strong-jawed way, owns a cafe, enjoys travelling. Her friends joke they would make beautiful babies together. Maybe so, but Marina isn’t ready for that. Besides, it’s too late. There’s a blonde woman sitting in the passenger seat of the car. One more opportunity lost.
At her desk, she spots a typo, a misspelling of a Polish town, and smiles wryly. Languages are her strength. Her mind works well piecing together the rules and regulations of grammar and syntax, weighing up words, producing sentences that make sense. Circling the mistake, she scans the rest of the page. One of the tenants at Harrington Gardens had a Polish surname. Marina chews the end of her pencil, remembering. Kolinski.
A draught of cold air slips through the open window. She lifts her head and looks around the room. Most of her stuff is in boxes. The walls are virtually empty, as they were when she moved in.
‘What does that tell you?’ she asks herself, lighting a second cigarette, not bothering this time to lean out of the window. The other night at the house, she’d seen the estate agent’s fallen sign, its message half hidden by the maple tree. To Let. Flat 2. The wisp of an idea rises like the smoke from her cigarette.
She fiddles with a paper clip, turns a page and picks at the polish of her red-painted nails. What if she made an appointment to look around? Simple curiosity. She shakes her head, tells herself not to be stupid and to focus on the manuscript, but the thought won’t go away.
Slowly, she draws the telephone towards her, then taps out the number which she has, without even meaning to, memorised. A woman answers on the third ring.
Marina closes her eyes, opens them again. ‘Hello. I’m enquiring about Harrington Gardens.’
‘Harrington Gardens?’ The woman sounds surprised. There is a pause, and then, ‘Can you hold, please?’
‘Yes.’ Marina drums her fingers on the desk. She can hear the woman talking in the background, conferring.
She considers replacing the receiver. No harm done. But it’s too late. ‘Sorry to keep you. My colleague, Wayne, is dealing with that property, but I’m afraid he isn’t here right now. Can I take your name?’
‘Zoe Alexander,’ she says, using her middle name on impulse. Marina is unusual and the last thing she wants is to trigger a memory of her story.
A fast drive across Westbury. Careless parking in the drive. Hugs and smiles. They sit at the table. Ruth has made moussaka even though David hates aubergines. She has done it for Marina who loves them.
David eats without complaining. In his sixties, he’s a retired housing officer and a part-time musician who plays the cello in a local orchestra. An ordinary man, with dark hair turned grey, and a soft, kind face marked with two deep lines, one on either side of his mouth.
Ruth mentions a new position at the National Trust. She’s a tour guide, but promotion would mean working in the office.
‘Should I take it?’ she asks. ‘Is it time for a sedentary life?’
David smiles. Marina shakes her head and laughs. There is zero chance of Ruth accepting a job like that and they all know it.
The clock on the mantelpiece chimes. The dining room is reassuringly familiar. The same dark orange curtains and green geometric wallpaper. David’s cello leans in the corner. An old gramophone stands on the parquet floor, its surface covered with photos of Marina doing ballet and music and art; attached to climbing ropes and suspended on a rock face; wearing a wet suit ready to plunge into a lake; visiting Stonehenge with Ruth and her friends one Midsummer’s Eve.
Ruth cuts into her thoughts. ‘How about that second-hand boutique you like?’
Marina looks blank. What has she missed?
‘I knew you weren’t listening. I was suggesting a shopping trip.’
‘Do you mind if we don’t? I need to get on with the work I told you about.’
‘Ah yes. The Polish lady in Tooting Bec.’
David sets down his cutlery and glances across at the two of them.
‘So, how did it go?’ says Ruth evenly.
‘It went well, thanks.’ She keeps her tone casual, paying attention to her food, transporting a forkful to her mouth.
‘And did you go to Harrington Gardens?’
David coughs. Marina fidgets. ‘Yes,’ she admits, ‘I wanted to see how it looked.’ Her eyes shine and she waits for the guilt. It’s always been like this – a feeling of ingratitude whenever she alludes to her birth mother.
‘I knew that’s what you’d do.’ Ruth’s voice is soft and that makes it worse. ‘Are you planning to go again?’
Marina lowers her eyes. ‘Yes, maybe, but only if you don’t mind.’
There is a pause before Ruth stands. She walks around the table and rests her hand on Marina’s shoulder. ‘Of course I don’t mind.’
Marina leans back, catching the familiar scent of sandalwood. David comes over too. ‘Do what you need to do,’ he says, before kissing her cheek and leaving the room.
They hear him walking through to the kitchen, opening the door. He will work in the garden as he always does, leaving Marina and Ruth to talk.
Ruth gestures for her to follow and they go into the bedroom where they sit together like they used to on the huge brass bed. ‘Do you remember,’ says Ruth, taking her hand, ‘that time you went to London?’
Fifteen years old. A wet and miserable day in November. She had left without telling anyone, caught the train to Paddington, the Circle line to Embankment, the Northern line to Tooting Bec. She’d never been to London alone and had felt like a runaway hurtling through the Underground. At Tooting Bec she’d followed her A–Z to Harrington Gardens, cold and tired, yet buoyed up by the idea she would learn about her past simply by dint of being there.
She hadn’t – of course – and had returned home with a sense of failure. It had taken twelve years before she had visited again.
‘You felt so guilty,’ says Ruth, ‘when you told me where you’d been, but it was natural then for you to want to know and it’s natural now.’ Her voice breaks and she pauses.
‘It’s only curiosity.’
Ruth shakes her head. ‘That’s not true. It’s far more and so it should be. You are my daughter and I love you more than anything in my life.’ She stops and smiles. ‘That moment when I held you in my arms and looked into your face – a missing piece clicked into place. Yet I knew from the start that you weren’t completely mine. I knew there would always be a part of you that belonged to someone else.’
Tears brimming, Marina closes her eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You mustn’t be. And now I have something to show you.’ She fetches the box of articles from the wardrobe, lays it on the bed and takes out an envelope. ‘I’ve told you about the nurse at the hospital. The Spanish lady, Sofía.’ Marina nods. ‘I’ve told you that she lived on St Michael’s Road, which is parallel to Harrington Gardens, and that we exchanged letters until she moved to Ireland. The point is she wrote to me again not long ago to say she had gone back to her old address in London. I was debating when to give this to you and now seems like a good time.’
She hands Marina the letter. David appears in the doorway. His hair is thinning, lines have deepened. Time passes quickly. Marina goes to him and he tucks her into his embrace, but her mind clouds as she rests her head on his chest, as he strokes her hair like he always does. Familiar feelings collide:
gratitude and frustration. Guilt, again. How lucky Marina was to have been found. If only she could banish the uncertainty that follows her around.
It is late afternoon by the time Marina returns home. Ruth gave her the box as well as the letter and she carries it up the stairs to her flat.
The phone is ringing as she opens the door. She hurries across the room and snatches up the receiver.
‘Is that Zoe Alexander? This is Wayne from Castle Estate Agents. My colleague tells me you’re interested in the flat in Harrington Gardens.’
She pushes the receiver hard against her ear. ‘I’d like to look around if that’s possible.’
‘Yes, of course,’ says Wayne. He tells her about the rent. ‘It’s low for the area. Very low.’ He gives her a figure. ‘And now you’re probably wondering why.’
She is silent, letting him fill in the blanks.
‘The building is a little tired.’ He pauses. ‘The upkeep hasn’t been . . . efficient.’
‘How long has the flat been available?’
‘Two years.’
‘Two years?’ She frowns. ‘Why?’
‘Well, there’s the decoration as I mentioned.’ He pauses as if resigned to her rejection. ‘We have other properties, of course, if you’d prefer a smarter option. There’s a flat in Clapham Common, non-smoking, professional required, only the landlord is insisting on references and wants a deposit and two months in advance. Or there’s a maisonette in Tooting Broadway that only needs a lick of paint.’
Marina rubs her temples and looks out the window. In the dusk, the horse glows ghostly white. If she squints she can almost see its legs moving, ready to gallop across the plain. A foolish fantasy. The horse is tethered, but she is not.
‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘but I’d like to look at Harrington Gardens.’
‘Lovely! Right!’ A few more exclamations and they arrange to meet on the following Wednesday.
The Hiding Place Page 2