The Family Upstairs Read online

  Libby blinks slowly and then smiles. ‘You could have just asked.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Dido turns back to her laptop. ‘I just want to look out for you.’

  ‘Fine,’ says Libby, still smiling. ‘You can “look out” for me. I’m meeting him at seven. We’ll need to be on the six eleven. OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Dido, her gaze resolutely on her computer screen. ‘OK. And by the way’ – she looks up suddenly – ‘I’ve read every single Agatha Christie novel ever published. Twice. So I might even be quite useful.’

  19

  Lucy leaves the children sleeping with a note on the bedside table for Marco that says: ‘I’ve gone to sort out passports. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Give your sister something to eat. The dog’s with Giuseppe.’

  She leaves the house at 8 a.m. and takes the long route across town to the Gare de Nice. She stops for a while and sits on a bench, letting the soft morning sun warm up her skin. At eight forty-five, she boards the train to Antibes.

  Just after 9 a.m. she is in front of Michael’s house. A metal jacket of bluebottles sits on Fitz’s shit from the morning before. She smiles a tight smile. Then, very slowly, bile burning in the pit of her stomach, she rings on Michael’s doorbell.

  The maid answers. She smiles when she recognises Lucy and she says, ‘Good morning to you! You are the wife of Michael! From before! The mother of Michael’s son. I did not know before that Michael, he had a son!’ She has her hand clasped to her chest and she looks genuinely joyful. ‘Such beautiful boy. Come, come in.’

  The house is silent. Lucy says, ‘Is Michael available?’

  ‘Yes, yes. He is having a shower. You wait for him on terrace. Is OK?’

  Joy leads her on to the terrace and tells her to sit, insisting on bringing coffee with amaretti on the side, even when Lucy says water will be fine. Michael does not deserve such a woman, she thinks. Michael does not deserve anything.

  She puts her hand into her shoulder bag and pulls out her old passport, and the tiny wallet with the photos of Stella and Marco tucked inside. She drinks her coffee but leaves the amaretti which she cannot stomach. A colourful bee-eater sits in a tree overhead surveying the garden for snacks. She breaks up the amaretti and drops it on the floor for him. He doesn’t notice, and flies away. Lucy’s stomach rolls and reels. It’s half past nine.

  Then finally he is there, immaculate in a white T-shirt and pea-green shorts, his thinning hair still wet from the shower and his feet bare.

  ‘Well, my goodness me,’ he says, brushing her cheek with his on both sides. ‘Twice in two days. It must be my birthday. No kids?’

  ‘No. I left them sleeping. We had a very late night.’

  ‘Next time.’ He hits her with his big golden smile, sits and crosses his legs. ‘So, to what do I owe the pleasure?’

  ‘Well.’ She lays her fingertips on top of her passport and his eyes fall to it. ‘I need to go home,’ she says. ‘My friend is ill. Maybe dying. I want to see her, before she … in case … you know.’ A tear falls from her left eye and lands wonderfully on top of her passport. She wipes it away. She hadn’t planned to cry, but it had happened anyway.

  ‘Oh, honey.’ Michael puts his hand over hers.

  She smiles tightly and tries to look grateful for the gesture.

  ‘That’s terrible. What is it? Is it cancer?’

  She nods. ‘Ovarian.’ She takes her hand from under his and brings it to her mouth to stifle a small sob. ‘I want to go next week,’ she says, ‘but my passport, it’s expired. And I don’t even have any for the children. And I’m so so sorry to ask you. And you were so generous yesterday with the money for my fiddle. And I really wouldn’t ask if I had any other options. But do you still know the people? The ones who got me this passport?’ She runs a finger under her eyes and then looks up at him, pathetically, but hopefully still alluringly.

  ‘Well, gosh, not really. No. But, look, I’ll try.’ He pulls the passport towards him. ‘Leave it with me.’

  ‘Here. I brought photos. And, God, I know this might sound nuts, but I need one for the dog. He’s overdue some vaccinations so I can’t go the traditional route And God knows how long it would take, anyway …’

  ‘You’re taking the dog? To see a dying friend?’

  ‘I don’t really have any choice.’

  ‘Well, I could have him?’

  She tries not to look too appalled at the thought of her precious dog living here with this monster. ‘But what would you do with a dog?’

  ‘Er, gosh, I don’t know. Play with it? Walk it? Feed it?’

  ‘There’s more to it than that. You have to get up every morning and take them to the toilet. And you have to pick up their shit.’

  Michael rolls his eyes and says, ‘Joy loves dogs. She’d love having him around. And so would I.’

  Of course, thinks Lucy, Michael has people to pick up dog shit.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I’d rather take him with me. The children are attached to him, and so am I …’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he says. ‘I think dog passports are pushing the remit just a tad. But I’ll try.’

  ‘God,’ she says, eyes wide with feigned gratitude. ‘Thank you so much, Michael. I can’t tell you how relieved I am. I literally just got the message about my friend last night and I couldn’t sleep all night for worrying about how I was going to get to her. Thank you.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t done it yet.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know you haven’t. But still, I’m so grateful.’

  She sees his face turn from genial to creepy. ‘Really, really grateful?’

  She forces a smile. She knows where this is going; she was prepared for it. ‘Really, really, really grateful,’ she says.

  ‘Ah.’ He leans back into his chair and smiles. ‘I like the sound of that.’

  She returns his smile and runs her hand down her hair.

  His eyes reach to the shuttered windows overhead, towards the master bedroom suite, location of multiple marital rapes. Then they return to her and she stifles a shudder. ‘Maybe next time,’ she says.

  He cocks an eyebrow and slings one arm across the back of the chair to his right. ‘Are you incentivising me?’

  ‘Possibly,’ she says.

  ‘I like your style.’

  She smiles. And then she sits straight and picks up the straps of her handbag. ‘But right now,’ she says, ‘I need to get back to my sleeping children.’

  They both get to their feet. ‘When do you think …’ she says hesitantly.

  ‘I’ll get on the case right now,’ he says. ‘Let me have your number, and I’ll call you when I’ve got news.’

  ‘I don’t have a phone right now,’ she says.

  He grimaces. ‘But you just said you got a message last night, about your friend?’

  If sleeping on the beach for a week did anything for a person, it taught them to think on their feet. ‘Oh, that was on the landline, in the hostel. Someone left it for me. On a piece of paper.’

  ‘Right then, how will I get hold of you? Shall I call you at the hostel?’

  ‘No,’ she says coolly. ‘No. Give me your number. I’ll call you from the payphone. I’ll call on Friday?’

  He scribbles down his number and hands it to her. ‘Yes, call me Friday. And here …’ He puts his hand into his pocket and pulls out a folded wad of notes. He pulls off a few twenties and passes them to her. ‘Get yourself a phone. For the love of God.’

  She takes the twenties and says thank you. She has nothing left to lose now. She’s just signed her soul away for a passport.

  20

  CHELSEA, 1989

  Months and months passed. Phineas turned thirteen and grew an Adam’s apple and a small blond moustache. I grew an inch and finally got my hair long enough to flop. My sister and Clemency became more and more insanely bonded, sharing a secret language and spending hours in a den made of bedsheets and upturned chairs in the emp
ty bedroom on the attic floor. Birdie’s band released a terrible single which got to number 48 in the charts, she left the band in a huff, nobody in the music press appeared to notice or care and she began to teach fiddle professionally in the music room.

  Meanwhile, Justin turned my father’s garden into a commercial enterprise, selling his herbal remedies through classified adverts in the backs of newspapers, Sally taught us all, for four hours every day, around the kitchen table and David ran three weekly classes for his alternative therapies in a church hall in World’s End and came home with pockets full of cash.

  Phin had been absolutely correct in his prediction all those months earlier.

  The Thomsens were going nowhere.

  I can look back at those years in the house on Cheyne Walk with the Thomsens and see exactly the tipping points, the pivots upon which fate twisted and turned, upon which the storyline warped so hideously. I remember the dinner at the Chelsea Kitchen and seeing my father already losing a power struggle he was too weak to realise had begun. And I remember my mother holding herself back from David, refusing to shine for fear of him desiring her. I remember where it started, but I have no idea how we’d got from that night to the point nine months later when strangers had taken over every corner of our home and my parents had let them.

  My father feigned an interest in the various goings-on. He’d potter around the garden with Justin, pretending to be fascinated by his rows of herbs and plants; he’d pour two fingers of whiskey into two big tumblers every night at 7 p.m. and sit with David at the kitchen table and have strained conversations about politics and world affairs, his eyes bulging slightly with the effort of sounding as if he had a clue what he was talking about. (All my father’s opinions were either black or white; things were either right or wrong, good or bad: there was no nuance to his world view. It was embarrassing.) He’d sit in on our classroom lessons in the kitchen sometimes and look terribly impressed by how clever we all were. I could not work out what had happened to my father. It was as though Henry Lamb had vacated the house but left his body behind.

  I wanted desperately to talk to him about everything that was happening, the upending up of my world, but I was scared that it would be like pulling a scab off his last remaining hold on his own sense of significance. He seemed so vulnerable, so broken. I saw him one lunchtime in early summer, clutching his mohair cap and his jacket, checking the contents of his wallet at the front door. We’d finished lessons for the day and I was bored.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

  ‘To my club,’ he replied.

  Ah, his club. A set of smoky rooms in a side street off Piccadilly. I’d been there once before when my mother was out and our babysitter had failed to materialise. Rather than be stuck at home with two small, dull children to entertain, he’d put us into the back of a black cab and taken us to his club. Lucy and I had sat in a corner with lemonades and peanuts while my father sat smoking cigars and drinking whiskey with men I’d never seen before. I’d been enchanted by it, had wished never to leave, had prayed that our babysitters would fail to turn up for evermore.

  ‘Can I come?’

  He looked at me blankly, as though I’d asked him a hard maths question.

  ‘Please. I’ll be quiet. I won’t talk.’

  He glanced up the staircase as though the solution to his conundrum might be about to appear on the landing. ‘You finished school?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fine.’

  He waited while I put on my jacket; then we walked out on to the street together and he hailed a taxi.

  In the club he found nobody he knew and while we waited for our drinks to be delivered he looked at me and said, ‘So, how are you?’

  ‘Confused,’ I began.

  ‘Confused?’

  ‘Yes. About how our lives are turning out.’ I held my breath. This was exactly the sort of impudent approach that would have had my father grimacing at me in the past, turning his gaze to my mother and asking her darkly if she thought this sort of behaviour was acceptable, was this the sort of child they were bringing up.

  But he looked at me with watery blue eyes and said, simply, ‘Yes.’

  His gaze left mine immediately.

  ‘Are you confused too?’

  ‘No, son, no. I’m not confused. I know exactly what’s going on.’

  I couldn’t tell if he meant that he knew what was going on and was in control of it, or that he knew what was going on but could do nothing to stop it.

  ‘So – what?’ I said. ‘What is it?’

  Our drinks arrived: a lemonade on a white paper coaster for me, a whiskey and water for my dad. He hadn’t answered my question and I thought maybe he wouldn’t. But then he sighed. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘sometimes in life you get to a fork in the road. Your mother and I, we got to a fork in the road. She wanted to go one way, I wanted to go another. She won.’

  My brow shot up. ‘You mean Mummy wants all the people in the house? She actually wants them?’

  ‘Wants them?’ he asked grimly, as though my question was somehow ridiculous when it clearly wasn’t.

  ‘Does she want to live with all these people?’

  ‘Christ, I don’t know. I don’t know what your mother wants any more. And here, take my advice. Never marry a woman. They might look good, but they destroy you.’

  None of this was making any sense at all. What did marrying women – something I had no earthly intention of ever doing, but also something about which I thought there was no other option; if you didn’t marry a woman then who would you marry? – have to do with the people upstairs?

  I stared at him, willing him to say something clear and enlightening. But my father didn’t have the emotional intelligence or, indeed, since his stroke, the vocabulary to be clear or enlightening. He pulled a cigar from the pocket of his jacket and spent some time preparing it to be smoked. ‘Are you not keen on them, then?’ he said eventually.

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’m not. Will they ever go?’

  ‘Well, if I had anything to do with it …’

  ‘But it’s your house. Surely you have everything to do with it.’

  I caught my breath, worried I’d pushed him too far.

  But he just sighed. ‘You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?’

  His obtuseness was killing me. I wanted to scream. I said, ‘Can’t you just tell them to go? Tell them we want our house back. That we want to go to school again. That we don’t want them here any more?’

  ‘No,’ said my father. ‘No. I can’t.’

  ‘But why?’

  My voice had risen an octave and I could see my father recoil.

  ‘I told you,’ he snapped. ‘It’s your mother. She needs them. She needs him.’

  ‘Him?’ I said. ‘David?’

  ‘Yes. David. Apparently he makes her feel better about her pointless existence. Apparently he gives her life “meaning”. Now,’ he growled, opening up a newspaper, ‘you said you wouldn’t talk. How about you stick to your word?’

  21

  Miller Roe stands outside the house on Cheyne Walk, staring at his phone. He looks even more rumpled than he’d looked that morning in the café on West End Lane. He straightens when he sees Libby and Dido approach and he smiles.

  ‘Miller, this is Dido, my colleague—’ She corrects herself: ‘My friend. Dido, this is Miller Roe.’

  They shake hands and then all turn to face the house. Its windows glow golden in the light of the evening sun.

  ‘Libby Jones,’ says Dido, ‘good grief. You own an actual mansion.’

  Libby smiles and turns to open the padlock. She feels no sense of ownership as they cluster together in the hallway, looking around themselves. She still expects the solicitor to appear, striding ahead of them authoritatively.

  ‘I see what you mean about all the wood,’ says Miller. ‘You know, this house used to be full of stuffed animal heads and hunting knives. Apparently there were actual thrones, just here …�
�� He indicates the spots on either side of the staircase. ‘His and hers,’ he adds wryly.

  ‘Who told you about the thrones?’ asks Dido.

  ‘Old friends of Henry and Martina, who used to come here for raucous dinner parties in the seventies and early eighties. When Henry and Martina were socialites. When their children were tiny. It was all very glamorous, apparently.’

  ‘So, all those old friends,’ Dido continues, ‘where were they when everything turned dark?’

  ‘Oh God, they weren’t proper friends. They were parents of the children’s friends at school, transient neighbours, cosmopolitan flotsam and jetsam. Nobody who really cared about them. Just people who remembered them.’

  ‘And their thrones,’ says Libby.

  ‘Yes.’ Miller smiles. ‘And their thrones.’

  ‘And what about extended family?’ Dido asks. ‘Where were they?’

  ‘Well, Henry had no family. He was an only child, both parents were dead. Martina’s father was estranged, her mother remarried and was living in Germany with a second family. Apparently she kept trying to come over and Martina kept putting her off. She even sent one of her sons over, in 1992; he came and knocked at the door every day for five days and nobody ever replied. He said he heard noises, saw curtains moving. The phone line rang dead. The mother was racked with guilt that she hadn’t tried harder to access her daughter. Never got over it. Can I …?’ He’s veering to the left, towards the kitchen.

  Libby and Dido follow him.

  ‘So, this is where the children were taught,’ he says. ‘The drawers were full of paper and textbooks and exercise books.’

  ‘Who taught them?’

  ‘We don’t know. It wouldn’t have been Henry Lamb. He failed all his O levels and didn’t go into higher education. Martina didn’t have English as her first language, so it was unlikely to be her. So, one of the mystery “others”, we imagine. And most likely a woman.’

  ‘What happened to all the schoolbooks?’ Libby asks.