‘And what?’ Even to her own ears, her voice sounds slow and far away. Her limbs feel light and Marina puts one hand on the table for balance.
‘You look so much bloody like her.’
She sits slowly, not taking her eyes off him. There is a churning inside her stomach and she is struggling to focus her mind. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Exactly that.’ He leans back, frustrated. ‘You look so much like her, you could be her daughter.’ He frowns. ‘Are you?’
‘What?’ Her voice is no more than a whisper.
‘Connie Littleton’s daughter?’ His mood changes; his voice is desperate now. He shoots out a hand and grabs her wrist. ‘If you are, you must tell me where she is.’
‘What?’
‘Where’s Connie? Tell me. I need to know what happened to her. Why didn’t she come home?’
30
Marina
January 1992
The truth pours from Marina and Harry listens, looking from her face, to his hands, to the pavement outside the window.
She tells him her real first name and about being abandoned at 24 Harrington Gardens. She tells him she has been through phases of searching for answers, but that she has always given up. She tells him it’s only now she has lived inside the house that she has found the courage to keep trying.
At the end of her speech, he stays silent, brow furrowed. Then he says, ‘But you’re so much like her.’ His voice is incredulous.
‘What did she look like?’
‘She was beautiful,’ he says. ‘She had thick dark hair which hung about her face – like yours.’
Marina feels dizzy. It’s the second time someone has talked about her hair. She grips the table again, steadying herself. Has she found her mother at last?
‘But . . . she wasn’t pregnant,’ Harry continues. ‘You are so much like her, but you can’t possibly be her daughter. Maybe you have her blood. Maybe that’s it – maybe you’re related; perhaps by a cousin or something.’
‘Did she have a cousin?’
He scratches his head. ‘No. No, she didn’t.’ He speaks more slowly, carefully. ‘But she wasn’t pregnant when I saw her a few days before she went away.’
‘Before she went to Paris to join Johnny?’
Harry sighs and Marina detects the ghost of an emotion: envy. Harry, Victor and Johnny. All of them in love with this Connie.
A silence falls between the two of them and, for want of normality, Marina reaches for her coffee and takes a sip. It’s cold but she finishes it and replaces the cup on its saucer. The cafe has quietened around them. The waitress has switched on more lamps.
‘What kind of person was she?’ Marina asks.
Now Harry smiles. ‘She was clever and kind. She read books and poetry. She dreamed of buying a typewriter. A black and silver Remington. When the shop closed down, I bought it, only I never had a chance to give it to her because by that time she had gone.’
‘But,’ says Marina slowly, ‘if Connie left only days before I was found, isn’t that a coincidence?’
He interrupts her. ‘If Connie was pregnant, then no one knew about it and that’s just not possible. I would have known. Her father would have known and so would other people. The police asked questions, obviously, but they didn’t pursue it. Why would they? Everyone said she had gone to Paris. She left a note for her father. She told people. Me. Eileen Clarke. And she looked the same as she ever did. She couldn’t possibly have hidden a full-term pregnancy. I mean, at the start she might have done, of course – but I saw her about a week or two before the baby was left in the house.’
Marina, though, has read stories about girls who hid the truth from their families out of shame or fear, binding their expanding bellies, eating less to keep down their weight. Girls who gave birth in hotels, or in car parks, or in woods, all alone. How terrifying must that be?
‘Are you certain that she actually left?’
‘Yes,’ Harry says firmly. ‘I remember, her father was staying with his sister at the time. In Whitby. I helped her . . .’ He hesitates. ‘I pawned some of her mother’s jewellery so that she could buy the ticket to Paris. I promised I would check on the bookshop and she gave me the keys. She trusted me. She would have told me if she was pregnant.’
‘How do you know she actually went? Maybe it was all a ruse and she was in her flat. Hiding.’
He looks away guiltily. ‘She gave me her keys and said I could spend time there if I wanted. So that’s what I did. It made me feel close to her . . . You know, sitting in the space that she used to sit in, touching the things she touched too. I know, it’s odd . . . But I loved her. I missed her.’ He shrugs. ‘She definitely wasn’t there. She was gone.’
Marina sighs. She pulls at her hair, releasing a strand and swirling it about her fingers.
Harry smiles sadly. ‘But you do look so damn like her.’
A lump rises in Marina’s throat. She speaks slowly, deliberately. ‘Do you believe that if Connie had been my mother she would have abandoned me?’
‘Honestly? I could no more see her doing that than I could see her abandoning her father. But who knows? She left – left him – and she didn’t come back. Not even for his funeral . . .’
Outside, the streets lamps are flickering on. One by one their yellow light struggles to brighten the dusk. The waitress turns the sign to closed.
Later, when she gets home, Marina passes Mrs Hyde on the stairs. If she looked small before, she seems positively shrunken now, clutching at the bannister for support.
There is something distasteful about Dorothy and the pink lipstick that bleeds into the crevices around her mouth. After an initial nod of greeting, Marina steps into her flat, closes the door with relief and breathes deeply.
That night she wakes, disturbed by a sound. She lies for a moment, listening. It’s freezing in the room, worse than usual. The curtains flare and she realises she’s left the window open.
Getting up, she stares into the darkness, searching the garden for a clue, but there are the same shrouded shapes as always. Nothing has changed. She closes the window and moves into the living room. Here she finds the source of the noise that must have woken her. Another sizeable chunk of plaster has fallen, clattering onto the table below. Marina glances anxiously at the ceiling for signs of more damage.
For once, the house is silent. Marina pictures Eva, gazing from her window. She thinks of the strange Mrs Hyde, and Selena and her family, and the Italian musician, Giovanni, who she still hasn’t seen or heard. He must have gone away. No one can stay hidden for so long.
Thoughts like these skate through her mind and knowing that she won’t sleep now, Marina heats milk, takes it to bed and settles beneath the covers. Her mind is aflame with the story of a young woman who ran away to be with her boyfriend, leaving one man heartbroken, and maybe a second too, if her intuition about Victor is correct. She was loved by so many and yet she stayed away even when her father died.
Connie Littleton. Marina says the name out loud and it has a rhythm to it, a sound of the past. She is building a picture. Connie Littleton who once upon a time lived in this house, in the flat above her now. A young girl whose mother died from cancer, whose mother’s name was Sarah, whose father sold books. She wanted to write and to travel. She loved poetry.
Poetry. Her mind turns to the volume that Selena gave her. She would like to fetch it, but she is too cold and soon she is drifting into a glassy, shivering kind of sleep.
In the morning, she meets Giovanni Gaetti at last, the mysterious occupant of Flat 1.
She has run out of milk and is on her way to the shop. He is coming into the house as she is going out. Late-thirties, dishevelled, in a rumpled black suit and white shirt and an empty space where his concert bow tie should be. He has black hair and dark eyes and deep lines on his forehead.
Their eyes meet as they pass on the steps. She wears her old coat and fingerless gloves. She has messy hair and smells of sleep. They murmur a greeting and she thin
ks he exists, which for some reason gives her a huge sense of relief.
Home again, she makes coffee and toast and stands at the window watching the street. It’s a windy day. Leaves chase each other across the pavement. Branches whip and snap. A mother passes with her small daughter, the two of them running, laughing. They have identical hair, Marina notices, a golden-brown, the colour of autumn. Poetry is on her mind. Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’. She recites a few lines. It’s a mournful poem about death and regret.
She finishes her toast, turns away from the window and sits in the armchair thinking about Connie. What if Harry was wrong and she was pregnant? Did he know her that well? Her gaze dwells on the photo of Ruth and David. Her parents. Yet not her parents. She remembers Ron commenting that she looked like David. People see what they want to see. If Harry loved Connie, and was jealous of her relationship with Johnny, the last thing he’d want would be for her to be pregnant. The last thing he’d want to see would be her pregnancy.
Truth and how we see – or fail to see – it. Marina smiles wryly. The poets all had a go at trying to explore truth. She leans across, picks up the volume lying on the table in front of her and holds it carefully, imagining Connie leafing through.
Those lines again, running through her head.
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
She finds Donne in the contents page and then runs her fingertip down the titles of the poems, searching, until one of them chimes – ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’. Turning to the right page, she reads the words to herself and then selects other, equally familiar poems and murmurs them aloud.
The brown dust has settled on her fingertips again and it occurs to Marina that the dust is like ashes and that the book is decaying. She turns the pages more carefully and reaches the end. An envelope is stuck to the inside of the back cover. No name on the front, the paper is yellowing. Did Connie put this here? Gently, she opens the flap. Carefully, she slots her fingers inside. Slowly, she pulls out a single sheet of folded paper and her stomach roils.
And now.
She opens the sheet of paper.
She smooths it out on the table.
It’s a letter, blotched and smudged, written in blue ink with a fountain pen.
She starts to read.
By the time she has finished, tears are streaming down Marina’s face.
She sits stock still in the tatty armchair.
Away in the kitchen, a tap drips into the porcelain sink. Above her Selena is pacing. There is a scratching at the window. Laughter in the street.
A letter. A letter from Connie to Johnny explaining she is pregnant. A letter that, after all these years, confirms who Marina is.
She draws a breath that turns into a sob. She wipes her face with her sleeve, but it isn’t enough. She rises, fetches tissues, resumes her place, tries to make sense of what she has read. So many questions.
How hard it must have been for Connie to keep her secret. Yet her mother was dead, her lover absent. Who could she have confided in? Who would have known her well enough to spot the signs, if she were determined to hide them?
In the hall, Marina hears a door opening and a cough. Giovanni is on his way out – to a concert, presumably. She goes to the window. He walks slowly as if in pain. Has he been ill? Is that why she hadn’t seen him before? Had he been in his room all this time?
Marina’s breath catches inside her throat. People may not have seen Connie in the house, but it didn’t mean that she wasn’t there, or at least somewhere close. What is it they say? Hiding in plain sight. Perhaps Connie was doing precisely that. Not in the flat, because Harry had visited, but the attic, maybe. It was a perfect hiding place.
And what does it mean – the fact that Connie wrote but didn’t send the letter to Johnny? According to the letter, she planned to travel on 7 August. Had she hoped to have the baby in Paris? Or to have the baby and then travel to Paris? She wouldn’t, presumably, have booked a ticket near to the baby’s due date, but that was assuming she knew the due date. Marina has always been told she was a small baby, born early.
As the questions multiply in Marina’s mind, fresh tears rise, thinking about Connie alone and pregnant. Frightened, not knowing what to do. Marina scrubs at her face with the tissues. Connie is her mother. She is certain. It’s simply the logistics she needs to work out. And she will work them out and then she will find her. She will search the whole of Paris, if necessary. She imagines the record offices she will scour, the town halls she will enter, the officials she will talk to, the red tape she will work through until she unearths an address, a boulevard, an apartment. Then she will knock on the door.
She stands abruptly and strides to the window. Somebody must know something. A baby can’t be born and survive even for a few days without help. Who had been there for Connie? Her mother was dead. Her aunt lived on the other side of the country. She had no siblings and no cousins according to Harry, and no grandparents as far as Marina knew.
What about on Johnny’s side? What about his mother? If Connie had been desperate, might she have confided in her? And then it strikes Marina. Harry saw the resemblance. Who else has seen it too? Victor? She thinks back to when they first met. She remembers that he held her hand a little too long, but can’t recall a flash of recognition. So perhaps not Victor – and, besides, if it’s all about her hair, she had deliberately worn it up both times they met, wanting to appear business-like. But Dorothy . . . She remembers the woman’s – what was it? Hostility? Shock? – when she first saw Marina. Yes. Dorothy is obvious. She definitely reacted oddly and was also the mother of Connie’s boyfriend.
Another thought comes to Marina. Dorothy is Johnny’s mother, which means, of course, she is also Marina’s grandmother.
Strange how she has always assumed that she would know her family if she met them, that she would look into their eyes and feel a warmth. There is nothing warm about Dorothy. She has the air of a woman eaten up by disappointment – or is it guilt?
31
Eva
January 1992
Eva looks at the clock. It is eight o’clock and she calculates that she has had approximately two hours’ sleep.
She yawns and gets up, makes hot chocolate and sweetens it further by eating Turkish Delight.
The petals from the rose have fallen now. She gathers them in the palm of her hand. They are brown-tinged, but still beautiful. She touches them gently, and without warning, she is struck by a flash of memory.
Little Eva pressing flowers: pansies and violets and dahlias. Someone is showing her how to do this, but it’s not her mother. The face of a young woman appears, smiling and kind. Dark-haired like the woman downstairs.
Eva shakes her head, sips her drink, eats more Turkish Delight. The woman downstairs had been kind. What was it about her that had caused Eva to confide?
Moving to the window she spots a figure approaching and recognises the landlord, Kenneth Quip. She shivers as if cold.
Kenneth stops outside the house. His gaze moves from the basement all the way up to the gables and the finials. Eva feels as if she is inhabiting his mind. Seeing what he sees. Living vicariously.
Precariously.
She clutches the windowsill. Her fingers press into the wood as if her life depends on it.
Life depends on it. Whose life?
She closes her eyes. The memory comes. Little Eva is jumping on the stairs. The young woman gives her a rose. A perfect rose. Watch out for the thorns. Suddenly, the name comes to her. It slips into her head like a detail in a dream. Connie. It’s Connie who is leading her home to where her mother is playing Chopin. It’s Connie who gives her the rag doll called Sarah. It’s Connie who helps her press flowers and who hands her the rose when they reach the landing. And it’s Connie who whispers Don’t tell anyone. Not a word. It’s our secret.
The reel of memory leaps. Little Eva is skipping out of
her flat. She is standing at the top of the stairs and looking down. There is a man. He is leaning over Connie. Something is wrong. Connie is frightened. She thinks of her mother when the boys threw stones. She thinks of her father stepping in front of a bus. She thinks of her mother again, crying on the stairs when the woman with the bright blue eyeshadow delivered a lump from her body. A tiny baby. Too small to live in the world.
There is no blood now, no nasty boys, no red buses, but Little Eva feels the same cold fear.
From her position on the landing, she sees Connie looking up at her. She wants to call out, but Connie’s eyes say no.
She puts her hands over her mouth and traps her words. Warm liquid runs down her legs. Tears trickle down her face. She runs inside and to her room where she changes her knickers and her dress.
Later her mother will find the wet clothes, but she won’t shout because she never shouts. Even when Eva wets herself for many nights after that, her mother will change the sheets and wash them and tell her not to worry.
Eva misses her mother. You can never get over losing your mother. Her grip on the windowsill loosens as she gives in to the dizziness and slips to the floor.
32
Marina
February 1992
It’s a misty day; the sun shines weakly through the window; yet Marina has an urge to be away from the claustrophobic house. She pulls on her coat and goes into the hall, pausing for a moment as the familiar prickling crawls across her skin. Shaking off the sensation, she opens the front door and heads around the building towards the garden gate. Considering she has been here for a month, she has spent little time outside. From the lawn, she can see into Ron’s kitchen window. There is no sound or movement. He must be sleeping still, or perhaps he is with Eva. Marina has a feeling they will be back together soon.
It’s quiet beneath the white-grey sky, and mist curls eerily around the bare trees. Silvery spiderwebs glitter amongst blades of grass. At the far end, beyond a tangled curtain of shrubs, a dilapidated shed leans against a moss-covered wall. A flat patch of ground is covered in grass and weeds and dead rose bushes.
The Hiding Place Page 21