The Family Upstairs(13)

She immediately finds a link to an article in the Guardian from 2015. She clicks it. The article is called: ‘The Mysterious Case of Serenity Lamb and the Rabbit’s Foot’.

Serenity Lamb, she thinks, that was me, that is me. I am Serenity Lamb. I am also Libby Jones. Libby Jones sells kitchens in St Albans and wants to go salsa dancing. Serenity Lamb lies in a painted cot in a wood-panelled room in Chelsea with a rabbit’s foot tucked inside her blanket.

She finds it hard to locate the overlap, the point at which one becomes the other. When her adoptive mother first held her in her arms, she imagines. But she wasn’t sentient then. She wasn’t aware of the transition from Serenity to Libby, the silent twisting and untwisting of the filaments of her identity.

She takes a sip of her Coke and starts to read.





11


The house in Antibes is the colour of dead roses: a dusty, muted red, with shutters painted bright blue. It is the house where Lucy once lived, a lifetime ago, when she was married to Marco’s father. Ten years after their divorce she can still barely bring herself to use his name. The feel of it on her tongue, on her lips, makes her feel nauseous. But here she stands, outside his house, and his name is Michael. Michael Rimmer.

There is a red Maserati parked on the driveway, leased no doubt as Michael is many things but as rich as he thinks he should be is not one of them. She sees Marco’s gaze hover intently on the car. She can see the naked desire written on his features, his held breath, his awe.

‘It’s not his,’ she mutters, ‘he’s just renting it.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I just do, all right?’

She squeezes Stella’s hand reassuringly. Stella has never met Marco’s father before, but she knows full well how Lucy feels about him. They approach the door and Lucy presses the brass bell. A maid comes to the door, wearing white overalls and latex gloves. She smiles. ‘Bonjour, madame,’ she says.

‘Is Mr Rimmer at home?’ asks Lucy, using her best and clearest English accent.

‘Oui,’ says the maid. ‘Yes. He is in the garden. Wait one minute.’ She pulls a small black Nokia from the pocket of her overalls, pulls off one of her latex gloves and dials a number. She glances up at her. ‘Who shall I say is here?’

‘Lucy,’ she says. ‘And Marco.’

‘Sir, Mr Rimmer, there is a lady here called Lucy. And a boy called Marco.’ She nods. ‘OK. Yes. OK. OK.’ She hangs up and slips the phone back into her pocket. ‘Mr Rimmer says to bring you to him. Come.’

Lucy follows the tiny woman through the hallway. She averts her gaze as she walks, away from the spot at the foot of the stone staircase where she’d ended up with a broken arm and a fractured rib when Michael pushed her when she was four months pregnant with Marco. She averts it from the spot on the wall in the corridor where Michael banged her head repeatedly because he’d had a bad day at work – or so he explained an hour later when he was trying to stop her from leaving because he loved her so much, because he couldn’t live without her. Oh, the irony. Because here he is, married to someone else and utterly and entirely alive.

Lucy’s hands shake as they near the back entrance, the one she knows so well, the vast wooden double doors that swing open into the tropical splendour of the garden, where hummingbird moths sip from horn-shaped flowers and banana trees grow in shady corners, where a small waterfall trickles through a flowery rockery and a sparkling rectangle of azure-blue water sits in the southernmost point, basking in the afternoon sun. And there he is. There is Michael Rimmer. Sitting at a table by the pool, a wireless headpiece in one ear, a laptop open in front of him and two phones, a small bottle of beer belying the hectic business-guy act he’s clearly portraying.

‘Lucy!’ he says, beaming, getting to his feet, sucking in his tanned stomach, trying to cover up the fact that at forty-eight he no longer has the gym-sculpted physique of the thirty-eight-year-old man she’d escaped from ten years earlier. He pulls the earpiece from his ear and heads towards her. ‘Lucy!’ he says again, with added warmth, his arms outstretched.

Lucy recoils.

‘Michael,’ she responds circumspectly, moving away from him.

He takes his outstretched arms to Marco instead and gives him a bear hug. ‘So you told her then?’

Marco nods.

Michael gives him a mock-withering look.

‘And who is this?’ says Michael, turning his attention to Stella who is clinging to Lucy’s leg.

‘This is Stella,’ says Lucy. ‘My daughter.’

‘Wow,’ says Michael. ‘What a beautiful little girl. Lovely to meet you, Stella.’ He offers his hand for her to shake and Lucy resists the temptation to pull Stella from its path.

‘And this is?’ He peers down at the dog.

‘This is Fitzgerald. Or Fitz for short.’

‘For F. Scott?’

‘Yes, for F. Scott.’ She feels the small shot of adrenaline: the memory of the question-and-answer sessions he’d once subjected her to, to show her that she was stupid and uneducated, unworthy of him, lucky to have him. But there had always been something small and hard and certain at her very core reminding her that he was wrong, reminding her that one day she would find her escape and that once she did she would never ever look back. And now here she is nervously answering his questions, about to ask him for money, almost back where she started.