The Family Upstairs Page 7

  He tossed his fringe once more and then glanced up at me disinterestedly as I descended, his eyes falling immediately back to his book. I wanted to ask him what he was reading but I didn’t. I felt awkward, not sure where to put myself or how to stand. But others quickly appeared: first my mother and father, then the girl called Clemency, who was with my sister, the two of them already chatting easily with each other, then Sally, then Justin and Birdie, and then finally, and virtually encased in a circle of light at the top of the staircase, David Thomsen.

  What can I tell you about David Thomsen from my perspective then, as a young boy? Well, I can tell you that he was very handsome. Not in the soft, almost feminine way that his son was handsome, but in a more traditional way. He had a dense five o’clock shadow that looked as if it had been painted on, a heavy, defined brow, an animal energy, a potent power. He had a way of making anyone who stood next to him appear somewhat lesser than him, even when they weren’t. I can tell you that he appalled me and fascinated me in equal measure. And I can tell you that my mother acted strangely in his presence, not flirtatiously but, if anything, more guardedly, as though she didn’t trust herself around him. He was both puffed-up and down-to-earth, warm yet cold. I hated him, yet I could see why others loved him. But all that was yet to come. First of all was that very first dinner on that very first night when everyone was showing their very best selves.

  We sat squashed around a long table in the Chelsea Kitchen, which was really only meant for eight. The children had all been put at one end which meant I found myself elbow to elbow with Phineas. I was so electrified by my proximity to him, my nerve endings so raw, my body so primed and aching for something that I was too young to even begin to understand, that I had no choice but to turn my back to him.

  I glanced down the length of the table towards my father who sat at the head.

  At the sight of him I felt something inside me plummeting, like an untethered lift hurtling down a shaft. I didn’t quite understand what I was feeling, but I can tell you now that what I had experienced was a terrifying moment of prescience. I had seen my father suddenly rendered short in the company of David Thomsen, who was unusually tall, and I had seen that his hold on the head of the table, once so unquestionable and defined, was flimsy. Even without the damage that the stroke had caused, everyone at the table was cleverer than him, even me. He was dressed wrong, in his too-tight jacket, the flourish of a dark pink handkerchief in his breast pocket that clashed with the rust of his hair. I saw him shuffle in his seat; I saw the conversation dash across the top of his head like clouds on a windy day. I saw him stare at the menu for longer than was necessary. I saw David Thomsen lean across the table towards my mother to emphasise a point and then lean back again to observe my mother’s response.

  I saw all this, I saw all this, and I knew already on some subliminal but incredibly uncomfortable level that a power struggle had started under my very nose and that even then, at moment zero, my father was already losing.

  15

  On Monday morning Libby gets into work twenty minutes late.

  Dido looks up at her in surprise. Libby is never late for work.

  ‘I was about to call you,’ she says. ‘Is everything OK?’

  Libby nods, takes her phone out of her bag, then her lip balm and her cardigan, tucks the bag under her desk, unties her hair, ties it up again, pulls out her chair and sits down heavily. ‘Sorry,’ she says eventually. ‘I didn’t sleep last night.’

  ‘I was going to say,’ says Dido. ‘You look awful. The heat?’

  She nods. But it wasn’t the heat. It was the insides of her head.

  ‘Well, let me get you a nice strong coffee.’

  Normally Libby would say no, no, no, I can get my own coffee. But today her legs are so heavy, her head so woolly, she nods and says thank you. She watches Dido as she makes her coffee, feeling reassured by the sheen of her dyed black hair, the way she stands with one hand in the pocket of her black tunic dress, her tiny feet planted wide apart in chunky dark green velvet trainers.

  ‘There,’ says Dido, resting the cup on Libby’s table. ‘Hope that does the trick.’

  Libby has known Dido for five years. She knows all sorts of things about her. She knows that her mother was a famous poet, her father was a famous newspaper editor, that she grew up in one of the most illustrious houses in St Albans and was taught at home by a governess. She knows her younger brother died when he was twenty and that she hasn’t had sex for eleven years. She knows that she lives in a tiny cottage on the edge of her parents’ estate and that she still has the horse she rode as a teenager and that that horse is called Spangles. She knows that the illustrious house has been left in Dido’s parents’ will not to her but to the National Trust and that she is fine about that.

  She knows that Dido likes PG Tips, Benedict Cumberbatch, horses, Gianduja, coconut water, Doctor Who, expensive mattress toppers, Jo Malone Orange Blossom, stir fries, Nando’s and facials. But she has never been to Dido’s house or met Dido’s family or friends. She has never seen Dido outside of work hours apart from at the annual Christmas party at the posh hotel up the road and the occasional leaving drinks. She doesn’t actually know who Dido is.

  But she looks at Dido now and it is suddenly, blindingly obvious to her that Dido is exactly the person she needs right now. She’d sat in April’s back garden on Saturday night flirting mildly with Danny – who was not really all that hot, had a face like an eight-year-old boy and very small hands – and she’d looked around for someone she could talk to about the crazy things happening to her, about the house and the magazine article and the dead parents and the person coughing in the attic. But all she’d seen was people like her, normal people, with normal lives, people who still lived at home with their parents or in tiny flats with partners and friends, people with unpaid-off student loans, unexceptional jobs, unexceptional dreams, fake tans, handbag dogs, white teeth, clean hair. She’d felt caught between two painfully disparate places and had left before eleven, come home to her laptop and back to the internet’s take on what had happened to Serenity Lamb.

  But this had raised more questions than it had answered and she’d finally slammed down the lid of her laptop at 2 a.m. and gone to bed where her sleep had been disturbed, her dreams filled with strange leitmotifs and encounters.

  ‘I need some advice,’ she says to Dido now. ‘About the Chelsea thing.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ says Dido, rubbing the oversized silver disc that hangs from a chain around her neck. ‘What sort of advice?’

  ‘Well, just to talk about it, really. You know about … houses. I thought you’d know about houses.’

  ‘Well, I know about a house. Not houses in general. But sure, yes, why not. Come for supper.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Yes,’ Libby says, ‘yes, please.’

  Dido’s cottage is beautiful. It’s double-fronted with leaded windows, tiny pink roses growing across the doorway and there, outside, her shiny black Fiat Spider with its tan convertible roof. The car complements the cottage and the cottage complements the car and Libby can’t help herself from taking her phone from her bag and photographing it for her Instagram page. Dido greets her at the door in wide floral trousers and a black vest top. Her hair is held from her face by large red sunglasses and she is barefoot. Libby has only ever seen her in clumpy work shoes so it’s a surprise to see two small, white, perfectly pedicured feet with rose-pink nails.

  ‘This is so lovely,’ she says, stepping through the small door into a white hallway with a terracotta tiled floor. ‘Just beautiful.’

  Dido’s house is full of what Libby assumes must be heirlooms and inheritances; nothing here from TK Maxx. The walls are hung with bright abstract art and Libby remembers Dido once mentioning that her mother was also an artist. Dido takes them through French doors at the back of the cottage and they sit in her perfect little country garden on old-fashioned Lloyd Loom rattan chairs, upholster
ed with floral cushions. It occurs to Libby as she takes in the back of Dido’s beautiful house that maybe Dido doesn’t actually need to work. That maybe her job designing posh kitchens is just a nice little hobby.

  Dido brings out a bowl of quinoa and avocado salad, another bowl of buttered potatoes, a loaf of dark bread and two champagne glasses for the Prosecco that Libby brought with her.

  ‘How long have you lived here?’ Libby asks, buttering some of the dark bread.

  ‘Since I was twenty-three, when I moved back from Hong Kong. It was my mother’s cottage. She kept it for me. My brother, of course, was set to inherit the house, but then, well, things changed …’

  Libby smiles, blankly. ‘The house’. ‘The cottage’. Another world entirely. ‘So sad,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ Dido agrees. ‘But the house is a curse. I’m glad it’s nothing to do with me.’

  Libby nods. A week ago she’d have had no notion of big beautiful houses being curses, now she is closer to understanding.

  ‘So, tell me about your house? Tell me everything.’

  Libby sips her Prosecco, places the glass on the table and then leans back into her chair. ‘I found an article,’ she begins, ‘in the Guardian. About the house. About my parents. About me.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Libby, rubbing at the points of her elbows. ‘It’s all a bit bizarre. You see, I was adopted as a baby, when I was nearly a year old. The house in Chelsea, it belonged to my birth parents. And according to the article I was born into a cult.’

  The word sounds horrible leaving her mouth. It’s a word she’s been trying her hardest to avoid using, to avoid even thinking about. It’s so at odds with the pathetic fantasy she’d spent her life wallowing in. She sees Dido bristle slightly with excitement.

  ‘What!’

  ‘A cult. According to this article there was a sort of cult in the house in Chelsea. Lots of people lived there. They were all living spartanly. Sleeping on the floor. Wearing robes that they made themselves. Yet …’ She reaches into her bag and pulls out the printout of the article. ‘Look, this was my mum and dad, six years before I was born, at a charity ball. I mean, look at them.’

  Dido takes the article from her hands and looks. ‘Gosh,’ she says, ‘very glamorous.’

  ‘I know! My mother was a socialite. She ran a fashion PR company. She was once engaged to an Austrian prince. She’s just stunning.’

  Seeing her mother’s face had been extraordinary; there was something reminiscent of Priscilla Presley about the dyed black hair and piercing blue eyes. Her mother had lived up to every one of her childhood fantasies, right down to the job in PR. Her father … well, he was very well dressed, but smaller than she’d imagined, shorter than her mother, with a slightly arrogant tilt to his chin but something oddly defensive in the way he looked at the photographer, as though expecting trouble of some kind. He held his arm around Martina Lamb’s waist, the tips of his fingers just visible in the shot; she gripped a silk shawl around her shoulders with ringed fingers and the edges of her hip bone made indents in the fabric of her evening dress. It was, according to the article, the last photo taken of the ‘socialite couple’ before they disappeared from view, only to be found dead on their kitchen floor seven years later.

  ‘I had a brother and sister,’ she says, feeling the fresh shock propelling the words from her mouth too fast, leaving no gaps between them.

  Dido glances up at her. ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘No one knows. The solicitor seems to think they might be dead.’

  And there it is. The heaviest of all the extremely heavy facts that have been weighing her down for days. It lands between them, heavy as a thrown hammer.

  ‘God,’ says Dido. ‘That’s … I mean, how can that be?’

  She shrugs. ‘The police came after a call from a neighbour. They found my parents and some other man dead in the kitchen. They’d committed suicide, some kind of pact. And there was me, ten months old, healthy and well in a cot upstairs. But no sign of my brother and sister.’

  Dido falls back into her chair, her mouth agape. She says nothing for a moment. ‘OK.’ She sits forward and clamps her temples with the heels of her hands. ‘So, there was a cult. And your parents carried out a suicide pact with some random man …’

  Libby nods. ‘They poisoned themselves with plants they’d grown in the garden.’

  Dido’s jaw falls again. ‘Yes,’ she says drily. ‘Of course they did. Fuck. Then what?’

  ‘There’d been other people living in the house. Possibly another family, with children. But when the police got there, there was nobody. Just the dead bodies and me. All the children had just … disappeared. Never been heard of since.’

  Dido shivers and puts a hand to her chest. ‘Including your brother and sister?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘They’d barely been seen in years. The neighbours assumed they were away at boarding school. But no school ever came forward to say they’d been a student there. And one of them must have stayed on in the house after my parents died, because apparently someone had been looking after me for days. My nappy was fresh. And when they took me out of the cot, they found this.’ She takes the rabbit’s foot from her bag and passes it to Dido. ‘It was tucked into my blankets.’

  ‘For luck,’ says Dido.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Libby replies.

  ‘And the other guy who died,’ Dido asks, ‘who was he?’

  ‘Nobody knows. There was no paperwork to identify him, just his initials on the suicide note. No one reported him missing, no one recognised him from police sketches. The theory is that he was an itinerant. A gypsy, maybe. Which would perhaps explain that.’ She gestures at the rabbit’s foot in Dido’s hand.

  ‘Gypsies.’ Dido massages the word with relish. ‘Gosh.’

  ‘And the house, it’s weird. It’s dark. And I was there, on Saturday morning, and I heard something. Upstairs.’

  ‘What sort of something?’

  ‘Well, a someone. Someone moving. A cough.’

  ‘And you’re sure it wasn’t the neighbours?’

  ‘I suppose it could have been. But it really sounded like it was coming from the top of the house. And now I’m too scared to go back there. I feel like I should just put it on the market and get rid of it and move on. But …’

  ‘Your brother and sister …?’

  ‘My brother and sister. The truth. My story. It’s all bound up in that house and if I sell it, I may never find out what really happened.’

  Dido stares for a moment at the newspaper article. Then she looks up at Libby.

  ‘Here,’ she says, tapping at the top of the newspaper article with her fingertip. ‘Him. The journalist.’ She squints at the byline. ‘Miller Roe. He’s your man. You need to get in touch with him. Just imagine how amazed he’ll be after all his months of investigative journalism to suddenly find you in his inbox. Serenity Lamb herself. Complete with actual rabbit’s foot.’

  They both fall silent then for a moment and let their gazes drop to the rabbit’s foot where it sits on the garden table in a pool of soft dappled evening light.

  Libby takes the article from Dido’s hand and finds the byline. ‘Miller Roe’. An unusual name. Easy enough to google. She pulls her phone from her bag and types it in. In under a minute she has his contact email address at the Guardian. She turns her phone to show it to Dido.

  Dido nods sagely. ‘Good work,’ she says. Then she lifts her glass of Prosecco and holds it towards Libby. ‘To Serenity Lamb,’ she says, ‘and to Miller Roe. May one beget the truth about the other.’

  16

  Lucy is awake at five thirty the next morning. She slides carefully off the bed and the dog jumps down and follows her to the kitchenette, his claws clacking against the linoleum. Giuseppe has put teabags, granulated coffee and a plastic bag of chocolate brioche fingers on the counter. There is also a bottle of milk in the fridge. Lucy puts a pan of water on to boil and
then sits for a while on the plastic chair in the corner staring at the curtained window. After a moment she stands and tugs open the curtain, then sits and stares at the building opposite, the dark windows reflecting the orange of the early dawn, the grey walls briefly turned pink. The sky overhead is detergent blue and filled with circling birds. The traffic has not started yet and the only noise is the steady rumble of the water coming to the boil, the whine of the gas flame beneath.

  Lucy looks at her phone. Nothing. The dog is staring at her meaningfully. She opens the door to her apartment, quietly opens the back door on to the street and gestures to the dog to go outside. He passes her, lifts his leg against the outside of the building for half a minute, then runs back inside.

  Indoors, Lucy pulls her rucksack towards her and unzips an inside pocket. In there is her passport. She flips it open. As she’d suspected, it expired three years earlier. The last time she’d used it was when Marco was two and she and Michael had taken him to New York to meet Michael’s parents. They’d split up shortly afterwards and Lucy hadn’t used it since.

  Michael had originally got the passport for her. He’d been booking their honeymoon in the Maldives. ‘Give me your passport, honey,’ he’d said, ‘I need the details.’

  ‘I don’t have a passport,’ she’d said.

  ‘Well, you’re going to need to renew it, asap, or there’ll be no honeymoon.’

  She’d sighed and looked up at him. ‘Look,’ she’d said. ‘I don’t have a passport. Full stop. I’ve never had a passport.’

  He’d stopped then and gazed at her for a moment, the machinations of his mind visible in the space between his top and bottom lips. ‘But …’

  ‘I came to France as a passenger, in a car. When I was much younger. No one asked to see my passport.’

  ‘Whose car?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just a car.’