The Family Remains(48)
Now it is 8 a.m. and she and her children are standing in the check-in line at Heathrow, clutching small, hastily packed bags and fake passports. When Henry had first seen the passports that Lucy’s ex-husband had had made for them, he’d said they were some of the best quality he’d ever seen. But Lucy’s confidence in the passports wavers now, momentarily. The check-in woman seems to be looking incredibly closely at the passports of the family in front of them and Lucy’s heart races frighteningly in her chest; her palms sweat lightly.
Finally it is their turn and she slides the passports across the counter to the woman who opens each in turn and smiles warmly as her eyes find the face of the relevant child. She says, ‘Antoine?’ and Marco nods furiously. Then she says, ‘Céline?’ and Stella nods shyly. The woman opens Lucy’s passport, catches her eye but says nothing. Lucy holds her breath hard inside her lungs. Then the woman closes the passport and smiles. ‘Thank you,’ she says, sliding the passports back to Lucy. ‘Have a safe journey,’ and Lucy smiles back at her and says, ‘Thank you! You too!’ and realises a beat too late that she has spoken nonsense.
In the departure lounge they mill around anxiously. They are painfully early: their flight is not for over two hours. They eat breakfast and Lucy buys Marco a designer backpack from a sportswear shop and Stella a sequinned shoulder bag from Accessorize and she lets them fill them with snacks and trinkets, colouring-in books, sticker books, magazines, wireless earphones and phone accessories. And then their flight is boarding and it is time for Lucy to show the passports once again and her breakfast churns in her stomach and her head hums with blood and her mouth is dry and her heart is pounding but this time the woman doesn’t even look at their passports, merely slides their boarding passes under the scanner and waves them through, and they walk down the carpeted tunnel and Lucy feels a sense of nauseating lightness tinged with disbelief. Five minutes later they are in their seats and she is flicking through an in-flight magazine and passing objects to Stella and to Marco and a man across the aisle is smiling fondly at Stella and saying that he has a little girl at home who looks just like her and forty minutes after that they are in the air and through the window London grows tiny, impossible, and then is gone, behind a reassuring blanket of cloud.
Lucy is astounded to find herself in Chicago. She has never been to America before. As a child they went to the Black Forest in Germany every summer to stay with their grandmother. They went to Istanbul once or twice for family weddings on her grandfather’s side. One year her father took them to Bali. It was her mother’s idea; she’d seen an article about a luxury resort where there were rose petals on the beds and baths run with warm milk, and champagne served for breakfast and daily massages by limber-wristed young girls with begonias behind their ears, and had somehow persuaded Henry Sr to take them all there despite his great dislike of long-haul travel and of foreign food. And then, of course, the travel had stopped for many years until Lucy came to France at the age of fifteen. And now she is in America and the man at border control did not press a big red button at the sight of their passports but gruffly waved them through, and they are in the back of a taxi, moments away from the Dayville Hotel, moments away from Henry.
‘I miss Fitz,’ says Stella and Lucy squeezes her arm and says, ‘Yes. Me too.’
She really, really does. Fitz has been at Lucy’s side almost permanently for the past five years, since Stella was a baby. Fitz is with Libby. She’d offered to keep hold of the children too, but Stella suffers from severe separation anxiety so travelling without her isn’t an option and Marco, of course, wouldn’t have stayed home for all the money in the world.
‘Henry thinks he’s found Phin,’ she’d said to Libby, as casually as she could. ‘We’re going over to help Henry persuade him to come back to the UK. We won’t be gone long, just until we’ve found your dad, I promise. And if you can’t cope with Fitz, I know your lovely friend Dido would be happy to have him, she loves him so much.’
Lucy has no idea if Libby could hear the awful note of panic underlying her glib words, but frankly that is the least of her concerns, the very least of them right now.
‘Here you go, the Dayville.’
The driver pulls up outside and Lucy peers upwards through the window.
Henry, she thinks, Henry, we’re here.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Caron. I’m afraid we don’t have a Henry Lamb staying here.’
‘I think he may have checked in under another name. Here.’ Lucy shows the photo of Henry on her phone screen to the woman behind the desk. ‘This is Henry. Is he here?’
‘I’m not really supposed to …’ she begins cautiously, before glancing down at Stella and smiling indulgently at her. ‘Is that your daddy?’ she asks her.
Stella shakes her head shyly. ‘No,’ she says, ‘he’s my Uncle Henry.’
‘Your uncle?’ she says, smiling warmly. ‘I see. And yes. Your uncle was here actually. But under a different name.’
‘Was here?’ says Lucy.
‘Yeah, he checked out yesterday.’
‘Oh.’ Lucy’s stomach lurches with disappointment and vague panic. ‘Did he – did he say where he was going?’
‘Yes. He said he wanted to explore another part of town. But I’m afraid he didn’t say where, exactly.’