The Family Upstairs(58)

She notices with surprise that the back door to the house is unlocked. A pane of glass is broken. The breaks in the glass look fresh. A shiver runs down her spine.

She puts her hand through the broken pane and turns the handle on the inside. The door opens and she breathes a sigh of relief that she won’t have to scale the side of the house to get in through the roof.

‘It’s scary,’ says Stella, following Lucy into the house.

‘Yes,’ agrees Lucy, ‘it is, a bit.’

‘I think it’s awesome,’ says Marco, running his hand across the top of a huge pillared radiator and gazing around the room.

As she shows the children around the house it feels to Lucy as if not one mote of dust or string of cobweb has moved since she was last here. It feels as though it has been in stasis waiting for her to come back. The smell, whilst musty, is also darkly familiar. The way the light slices through the dark rooms, the sound of her feet against the floorboards, the shadows across the walls. It is all exactly the same. She trails her fingertips across surfaces as they step through the house. In the space of a week she has revisited the two most significant houses of her life, Antibes and Chelsea, the two places where she was hurt, where she was broken, from where she was forced to escape. The weight of it all lies heavy in her heart.

After the tour of the house they sit out in the garden. The shadows cast by the overgrown foliage are long and cool.

Lucy watches Marco picking around the garden with a stick. He’s wearing a black T-shirt and for a fleeting moment she sees him as Henry, tending his herb garden. She almost jumps to her feet to check his face. But then she remembers: Henry is a man now. Not a boy.

She tries to picture Henry, but she can’t. She can only see him as she saw him that last night they were all together, the set of his jaw against the shock of what had happened, the candlelight flickering across his cheeks, the dreadful silence of him.

‘What’s this?’ Marco calls to her.

Lucy puts her hand to forehead and peers across the garden.

‘Oh,’ she says, standing and moving towards him. ‘It’s an old herb garden. One of the people who used to live here grew medicine out here.’

He stops then and holds the stick like a staff between his feet and looks up at the back of the house. ‘What happened in there?’ he asks.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, I can just tell. The way you’ve been since we got here. Your hands are shaking. And you always just said your aunt brought you to France because you were an orphan. But I’m starting to think that something really, really bad must have happened to make her bring you. And I think it happened in this house.’

‘We’ll talk about it later,’ she says. ‘It’s a very long story.’

‘Where are your mum and dad?’ he says and she can see now that bringing Marco here has opened up the dams to all the things he never thought to ask her before. ‘Where are they buried?’

She pulls in her breath, smiles tightly. ‘I have no idea. No idea at all.’

Lucy used to write it all down, constantly, when she was younger. She’d buy a lined notepad and a pen and she’d sit somewhere, anywhere, and she’d write it and she’d write it and she’d write it. Streams of consciousness. Phin tied to a pipe in his bedroom, the adults dead, the van waiting in the shadows with its engine rumbling and the long dark drive through the night, the shell-shocked silence, and then the waiting and the waiting for the thing to come and it never did come and now, twenty-four years later, she’s still waiting for it to come and it’s so close she can taste it on the back of her tongue.

This was the story she wrote over and over again. She’d write it and then she’d tear the pages from the notepad, screw them into a ball and toss them in a bin, into the sea, into a dank lightwell. She’d burn them or soak them or tear them into shreds. But she needed to write it down to make it into a story instead of the truth about her life.

And all the time the truth jangled at her nerves, squeezed at her stomach muscles, played drums on her heart, taunted her in her dreams, sickened her when she awoke and stopped her from sleeping when she closed her eyes at night.

She’d always known that the only thing that would bring her back to London, to this place where so many terrible things had happened, was the baby.

But where is she? She’s been here, that much is clear. There is evidence around the house of recent activity. There are drinks in the fridge, used glasses in the sink, the hole in the back door.

Now she just has to wait for the baby to come back.





43




CHELSEA, 1992


The next thing that happened was that my mother fell pregnant.

Well, clearly it wasn’t my father’s baby. My father could barely get out of his chair. And the announcement, when it came, was curiously unsurprising. Because by this stage it had already become hideously clear to me that my mother was obsessed with David.

I’d seen her the night he first arrived, pulling back from him, and I’d known then that it was because she was attracted to him. And I’d seen that initial attraction turn to infatuation as my father grew weaker and David’s influence grew stronger. I could see that my mother was under David’s spell entirely, that she was willing to sacrifice everything for David and his approval, including her family.