The Girl Below (19 page)

“You will stay for dinner, won’t you?” said Ludo, impersonating a country squire.

“Is there anywhere else around here to eat?”

Ludo snorted then turned to Rowan. “Well, darling, it looks like word about your awful cooking has finally reached London.”

“It was a joke,” I said, wishing I hadn’t made it. “I was trying to say how remote this place was—this place is so remote that I’d be lucky to find anywhere else to eat.”

Ludo was laughing, but not Rowan. “Let me see what I can rustle up,” she said, trying not to show her hurt.

My father had been right about her cooking, but it was a good match for the conversation that was potholed with topics we were all anxious to avoid. Rowan and Dad talked cheerfully about their marriage as if it was Ludo’s first, as though he had come to Rowan with a clean slate, and when he talked about his family, his children, it was clear that in his mind he had two of them, not three. But I was no better. When Dad asked me to fill them in on the last ten years of my life, what I came up with was drier than a school prospectus. I couldn’t find a casual way to tell them the bleeding obvious—that my mother had died a few weeks earlier—but no sooner had I made the omission than I realized I had missed the most natural window in which to say it. Now if I brought it up, it would be a bombshell, a conversation stopper, everyone looking at me and wondering why I hadn’t brought it up earlier. I would look like a fool.

“I suppose you’ll be traveling around after this,” said Dad. “Isn’t there a sort of circuit that you young people take on your gap years?”

“I don’t plan to go bungee jumping, if that’s what you mean. It isn’t really my thing.”

“Oh, but you must,” said Rowan. “You haven’t been to New Zealand unless you’ve gone bungee jumping. And white-water rafting too.”

“Mum,” said Simon. “You told me those things were too dangerous and I could never do them.”

“I only meant that you were too young,” she said. “But Suki is old enough.”

“Sure,” said Simon. “Whatever.” He left the table in a huff.

By dinner’s end, I was tipsy, and so choked up on my terrible omission that I worried it might burst out of me in a stream of projectile vomit.

“Is the food really that terrible?” asked my father, noticing my untouched plate and no doubt greenish face.

“I’m a little tired, that’s all,” I said. “The bus really took it out of me.” I tried to smile at Rowan. We had not seen eye to eye on a single topic all evening, and I was unsure if it was a simple personality clash or if she had been disagreeing with me on purpose. If I told them about Hillary now, I could not count on her sympathy, and decided that it would be better to tell my father when we were alone.

That night I stayed on a daybed in Rowan’s sewing room. Long into the small hours, I was kept awake by the rise and fall of an argument, traveling down the corridor from Ludo and Rowan’s bedroom. They were still going at it when I fell asleep, though less ferociously than earlier.

At dawn, I went into the living room, where Lily was perched in front of the TV, eating Cheerios out of a cardboard box. When I sat down next to her, she pushed the carton under my nose. “Would you like some breakfast?” she whispered.

“Thanks, but it’s a little too early for me,” I said.

“Shhhhh,” she said. “You can’t make any noise until the little hand gets to the rabbit.” She pointed to a clock above the TV, where someone had put a rabbit-shaped sticker over the number 7.

“Only another hour to go,” I whispered.

Lily giggled. “I’m not allowed to pick my nose either but sometimes I do.”

“Me too,” I said. “It’s fine so long as you don’t eat it.”

She moved closer to my ear, and the
whoosh
of her breathing tickled my eardrum. “I do that sometimes too,” she said, and pulled away to see my reaction.

When I smiled, she put her finger into her nostril then licked it. “Yum!” she squealed, forgetting to be quiet, then remembering and covering her mouth. She snuggled into me and sighed, and for a few delicious moments I experienced what it would be like to have a kid sister, someone who trusted me implicitly, someone I could hug whenever I wanted. Then she wriggled away, shook the cereal packet in my face, and squawked, “Cheerios! Cheerios! Yum, yum, yum!”

Later that morning, Rowan left for work—her farewell businesslike, shot through with relief—and the nanny arrived to take the children swimming. After they’d left, Ludo came in and sat down at the table where I was eating toast, then got up and paced to the sink.

“Has anyone shown you round the stables?” he said.

“There wasn’t a tour,” I said, “when I arrived.”

In the long stable block, Ludo introduced me, by their names and breeds, to a series of twitchy mares and stallions that all stared back with disdain. In one of the stalls, a man in gumboots shoveled manure and nodded when he saw Ludo. The horses looked expensive, high maintenance, like certain kinds of women, and for the first time since I’d been on their property, it dawned on me that my father must be rich.

“Rowan represented New Zealand at dressage,” he said, stroking a shiny flank rather timidly, then backing off when the animal bristled. “But she missed out on going to the Olympics. She was sabotaged. By one of her teammates.”

“ ‘Sabotaged’?” The word was so Agatha Christie. “How?”

“She came down with food poisoning the night before the trials. She was the only one who got sick.”

“It wasn’t just bad luck?”

“She was the best rider by a mile. The rest of the team was jealous. Poor thing. It was a real blow. She gave up riding for a while. Went to England. Married me. Now she just rides for fun.”

“Went to England. Married you,” I repeated. “Just like that.”

“In a roundabout way, yes.” My father cleared his throat. “How’s your mother? I noticed that you didn’t mention her last night.”

We had come to the end of a row of stables, and the cat, Flea, was reclining on a bale of hay in the sun. My hand shook on her fur, and sensing tension, she sprang up and ran away. For a moment my fingers hovered above where the cat had been and I felt my throat constrict. I hadn’t answered Ludo’s question yet, and didn’t know if I could. I walked to the window, and watched a handful of chickens pecking at something that had been thrown on the ground. Still with my back to him, I said, “She had cancer.”

He didn’t say anything, and after a while, I turned round and glanced briefly at his face. He was processing what I’d said, noting my odd choice of words. His look was confused but still cheerful. I looked out the window again. The chickens had gone from the yard, leaving behind a square of mud. Why wasn’t my father saying anything? I opened my mouth to say one more sentence, one string of words that I had to get out, but gearing up to speak, a gulp of air caught in my windpipe. “She died,” I said, swallowing the words, so I had to repeat them. “She died and the funeral was a week ago.”

I heard what sounded like a sharp intake of breath and the word, “Christ.” When I turned around, Ludo was gazing in the direction of one of the horses but was transfixed by another scene, one that was playing inside his mind. His throat muscles were going crazy, gulping down an invisible drink. His eyes had filled with water, and he blinked to cover it. But he didn’t look at me, or move my way.

I left the stables and walked quickly into the house. I would have kept walking all the way to Auckland if I had known in what direction to go, but instead I went into the kitchen and packed up my things and waited for a lift.

Ten minutes later, Ludo drove me into Hamilton, back in control behind the wheel of his executive sedan. “I’m sorry about losing it earlier,” he said. “It was a terrible shock. I was once very much in love with your mother. She was so attractive.”

I wasn’t prepared for the anger that hit me like whiplash. “Is that why you loved her?” I spat out. “Because she was
attractive
?”

Behind the steering wheel, my father stiffened. “That was one reason,” he said. “But of course there were others.”

“Such as?”

“She was a great cook.”

“What?”

“And a great mum to you.”

“Was she?” I said. “She didn’t even tell me she was dying.” I didn’t know what I was saying—a lunatic ventriloquist was moving my mouth up and down.

“Perhaps she didn’t want to frighten you.” He surprised me then by laughing—as though he had just remembered something funny from long ago. “And to think she was always so worried that something would happen to you.”

Why did he think nothing had? And just like that, my anger turned to self-pity and free-flowing tears. I scratched at the threads in my jeans then stared out the window, trying to stop them. We had left the country behind, and were driving past car yards and lurid fast-food joints that were big enough to drive a truck through. I missed London, the compact scale of its streets and corner shops, all of it so much less vulgar.

Ludo was still smiling to himself, and when he noticed I was watching him, he looked guilty.

“What is it?”

He reddened. “I was just wondering if your mother, you know . . . if there was anyone else after me.”

I was appalled. “Are you asking if Mum had a boyfriend before she died?”

“It’s none of my business, I know.”

“You’ve got that straight.”

We were back at the bus station, where the winos were enjoying a breakfast of meth and glue. Ludo circled the car park and found a spot as far away from them as possible. He stood with me at the bus stop. My backpack looked funny next to his business suit. “I’m sorry about all that stuff with Rowan,” he said. “She doesn’t like to be reminded of the past.”

“Is that what I am?”

My father looked ever so slightly troubled. “It’s more that we came to New Zealand to start a new life. That’s why everyone comes here.”

“A new life,” I repeated. “Without the old one.”

Ludo plunged his hands into his pockets and looked at the ground. “It was your mother’s idea not to keep in touch. She thought it would be easier for everyone, and I went along with it.”

It was easier for him, I could see, to say that it had been her idea. And I would never know whether that was true or not.

My coach arrived, and Ludo carried my pack over to the luggage compartment. He pulled out a white envelope from his pocket and handed it to me. “Don’t open it until you’re on the bus,” he said. “I really am sorry about Hillary.”

I took the envelope and hoped for a moment that it held instructions for what I should do next, but it was too light, too thin, for that.

“It isn’t much,” he said. “But I hope it helps.”

The bus was almost empty, and I found a window seat and stowed my bag on the overhead rack. Ludo’s sedan was still in the car park, but as the bus pulled away, I couldn’t see him anywhere. I tore open the envelope as soon as I sat down. In it was a check for eight hundred dollars, made out to cash: an extravagant amount, a respectable charity donation. I folded the envelope carefully and pushed it to the bottom of my backpack, out of sight, but not entirely out of mind. I wondered what I’d buy with the money, or if I was the one being bought.

Chapter Twelve

London, 2003

W
hen alone in other people’s houses, I figured everyone snooped, even if just a little bit, glancing at a private letter, opening a drawer that was already ajar. I hadn’t meant to do so much of it at Pippa and Ari’s house while they were away, but I seemed to be so often bored, and the only one there. I was in their bedroom one afternoon when the phone rang and I jumped, feeling caught red-handed. I was shaking when I picked up the receiver and heard Pippa’s voice on the other end.

“It’s only me,” she said. “We’ve arrived on Skyros—though I’d hardly say in one piece.” The journey had been arduous. On the way, Peggy had fallen ill with a mysterious travel-related ailment—Pippa’s tone implying that it was all in the old lady’s head. In Athens, they’d taken Peggy to a doctor, but she’d pronounced his surgery unclean and had refused to be treated by him, forcing Ari to sneak back and beg him to write out a prescription for penicillin, codeine, tranquilizers—anything to stop her complaining. Since arriving in Skyros she’d made a miraculous recovery and was now spending her waking moments directing Ari’s mother and aunts in the shifting of furniture and beds. “I’m already exhausted,” said Pippa, coming to the end of her tale. “I think we shall just send Mummy back in a cardboard box.” She paused. “I don’t mean that, of course.”

She sounded disappointed when I told her Caleb was out, and said she’d call back in a day or two to speak him. “I’d get you to call us, but Elena doesn’t have a phone.”

Earlier in the day, Caleb and I had had a quarrel of sorts after he’d come into the kitchen, accidentally knocked a bottle of sweet chili sauce out of the fridge, then left the resulting red gunk and broken glass to seep across the floor. I had been walking around it for an hour when he reappeared downstairs with his jacket on.

“I’m going out,” he’d said.

“And the sauce?”

He’d looked at it, then at me. “What about it?” he said.

“Well, aren’t you going to clean it up?”

He had zipped up his jacket and was already heading for the door, but just before he got there, the little shit had turned around and said, “You should get out more.”

He was right about my getting out more, but instead I had mopped up the sauce then gone upstairs and wandered into Pippa and Ari’s room. It was promisingly messy but no intrigue was forthcoming. They did not seem to hold on to letters or even newspapers, and most of the paperbacks on the nightstand were dusty but unread. Under the bed, I’d found a decrepit rowing machine left over from some nineties fitness fad and a few odd socks, but nothing uncommon. Especially no diaries or journals. Married folk suffered angst, I was sure, but I supposed they couldn’t very well write it down in a notebook for their spouse to discover and read.

On the opposite side of the room from the bathroom, there was a walk-in closet, knee deep with piles of ground-down sneakers and stilettos, and more clothes on the floor than on hangers. I had been peering into it when the phone rang.