The Family Upstairs(84)

Lucy sighs. ‘I can only assume he went somewhere that he would not be found. I can only assume that that is what he wanted.’

Libby sighs. There it is. Finally. The whole picture. Apart from one piece.

Her father.





IV





66


Libby sits with her thumb over her phone. She’s on her banking app where she’s been refreshing her balance every fifteen minutes, since nine o’clock this morning.

It’s completion day on the house in Cheyne Walk.

They sold it a month ago, finally, after months of no viewings and then a flurry of offers when they lowered the price and then two abortive attempts at exchanging contracts until, at last, a cash buyer from South Africa, all done and dusted, signed and sealed within two weeks.

Seven million, four hundred and fifty thousand pounds.

But her balance still sits at ￡318. The last dregs of her last pay cheque.

She sighs and turns back to the screen of her computer. Her final kitchen project. A nice little painted Shaker-style one with copper knobs and a marble worktop. Newlyweds’ first home. It’s going to look beautiful. She wishes she’d still be around to see it. But she won’t ever see it. Not now. Today is her last day at Northbone Kitchens.

It’s also her twenty-sixth birthday. Her real twenty-sixth birthday. Not 19 June after all, but 14 June. So she’s five days older than she thought. That’s fine. Five days is a small price to pay for seven million pounds, a mother, an uncle and two half-siblings. And now she’s not climbing some spurious ladder in her head to some arbitrary birthday, who cares if she gets there five days ahead of schedule?

She presses refresh again.

Three hundred and nine pounds. A PayPal payment she made a week ago has come out of her account.

It’s a beautiful day. She glances across at Dido. ‘Shall we go out for lunch? My treat.’

Dido looks up at her over the top of her reading glasses and smiles. ‘Absolutely!’

‘Depending on whether this payment comes through by then or not, it’ll be either sandwiches and Coke, or lobster and champagne.’

‘Lobster’s overrated,’ Dido says before lowering her glasses and returning her gaze to her computer screen.

Libby’s phone buzzes at 11 a.m. It’s a text from Lucy. She says, See you later! We’ve booked it for 8 p.m.!

Lucy’s living with Henry now in his smart flat in Marylebone. Apparently they are not getting on at all. Henry, who has lived alone for twenty-five years, doesn’t have the stomach for sharing his space with children, and his cats hate the dog. She’s already been house-hunting. In St Albans. Libby herself has her eye on a beautiful Georgian cottage in half an acre just on the outskirts of town.

She presses refresh again.

Three hundred and nine pounds.

She checks her email, in case there’s been some kind of notification of something having gone wrong. But there’s nothing.

The money will go three ways once the inheritance tax has been taken care of. She’d offered to forgo any of the inheritance. It’s not her house. She’s not their sibling. But they’d insisted. She’d said, ‘I don’t need a third. A few thousand will be fine.’ But still they’d insisted. ‘You’re their granddaughter,’ Lucy had said. ‘You have as much right to it as we do.’

At 1 p.m. she and Dido leave the showroom.

‘I’m afraid it’s still sandwiches.’

‘Good,’ she says. ‘I’m in the mood for sandwiches.’

They go to the café in the park and take a table outside in the sunshine.

‘I can’t believe you’re leaving,’ says Dido. ‘It’s going to be so, well, I was going to say quiet, you’ve never been exactly loud, but it’s going to be so … utterly devoid of Libby without you. And your lovely hair. And your neat piles.’

‘My neat piles?’

‘Yes, your …’ She mimes a squared-off pile of paper with her hands. ‘You know. All the corners aligned.’ She smiles. ‘I’m going to miss you. That’s all.’

Libby glances at her and says, ‘Didn’t you ever think about leaving? After you got left the cottage? And all the other stuff? I mean, surely you don’t have to work, do you?’

Dido shrugs. ‘I suppose not. And there are times I’d just like to chuck it all in and spend all day at the stables with Spangles before he cops it. But, ultimately, I have nothing else. But you – now you have everything. Everything that kitchens can’t give you.’

Libby smiles. There is a truth to this.

It’s not just the money. It’s not just the money at all.

It’s the people whom she now belongs to, the family who’ve encircled her so completely. And it’s the person she discovered she was underneath all the neat piles and careful planning. She was never really that person. She’d made herself into that person to counterbalance her mother’s inconsistencies. To fit in at school. To fit in with a group of friends whose values she never really shared, not really, not deep down inside. There is more to her than arms’ length friendships and stupidly proscriptive Tinder requirements. She is the product of better people than her fantasy birth parents, the graphic designer and the fashion PR with the sports car and the tiny dogs. How unimaginative she’d been.