The Girl Below (4 page)

Chapter Three

London, 2003

I
had copied Pippa’s phone number off the wall at Peggy’s and had rung her the next day, but nearly two months passed before she got around to inviting me to dinner. I didn’t suppose Pippa had even noticed it was that long because life had filled the gap, whereas in my case—drifting and friendless—each day I’d felt a little more snubbed. When the invitation finally came, I almost could not go through with it. She’d been brisk with me on the phone, and afterward I’d realized that my adoration of her had been entirely one way. To her, I was probably just a kid she had looked after for pocket money. On top of that, I had fallen for the irresistible lure of a reunion, so cozy when imagined, so stilted in reality.

Pippa had only moved round the corner from her childhood home, to a few hundred meters past the Westway on Ladbroke Grove. Back in the day, the arches of the Westway had been where junkies went to score drugs, the structure itself serving as an unofficial marker between good real estate and bad. Nowadays, the area beyond it was a precinct where fashion designers had workrooms and hipsters bought their first flats. Pippa’s building was one of the shabby ones, its Victorian facade battered from traffic fumes and dust. At the front door I hesitated, and wished I’d never called her, never arranged this meeting.

Then, on the third-floor landing, my reservations evaporated in a riot of Mediterranean aromas. I was starving, and in no position to turn down a free meal, especially when the host was married to a chef. Ahead of me, the front door was wide open and Pippa rushed out to embrace me, her green eyes huge and flashing. I’d forgotten she was an exact physical replica of her mother, and though neither woman was conventionally beautiful, through sheer force of personality they conjured up a much more powerful charisma. There were also the breasts—so bountiful that even a woman’s eye was drawn to stare.

“Suki, darling!” she exclaimed. “It’s so wonderful to see you!” Her voice was louder than I remembered, and more musical. Through her thin clothes, she jangled and pulsed, as if plugged into an electric socket.

“You too,” I said, trying not to tense up. It was the first time in almost a year that anyone had hugged me. “I feel so bad about crashing in on Peggy like that. I had no idea she was so ill.”

“Don’t be silly, she loves an audience,” said Pippa. “It’s being alone she can’t stand. Besides, she’s perked up since then, and if you hadn’t popped in to see her, you wouldn’t be here now.”

A few more of my reservations dissolved. “Peggy’s better?”

“Much better. Yesterday she ticked me off, for wearing jeans—she thinks denim is so working class—and I took that as a sign she was on the mend. Later on she even got out of bed. One of the doctors said she’d never walk again, but she made it as far as the booze cabinet before collapsing. I expect she wanted to prove him wrong.”

“She didn’t hurt herself when she collapsed?”

“No, no, she sort of fell into a nearby armchair, and went to sleep with the bottle in her hand. Business as usual there.”

I chose this moment to offer up the bottle of plonk I’d bought from the off-license by the tube station. Pippa peered into the brown paper bag, then shrank from it, visibly disgusted.

“I’m really sorry,” I said, mortified. “I couldn’t afford anything decent.”

“Oh dear God,” said Pippa, squeezing my arm to reassure me. “It isn’t that. The thing is, we—Ari and I—don’t drink. And by that I mean we’re teetotalers, practically Mormons. We gave it up when the doctors showed us the state of Mummy’s liver. We tried AA but couldn’t handle all the praying, so now we just keep a sort of honesty calendar. If one of us falls off the wagon, we get a black mark. Don’t we, Ari?” She addressed the last part to the kitchen, where, presumably, Ari was hiding. “Suki’s here,” she said, more loudly. “She’s come all the way from Australia to see us!”

“New Zealand,” I corrected.

“New Zealand!” she shouted at the kitchen.

I followed her in, where a huge man trussed in a small white chef’s apron stood with his belly jutting out to meet the stove. He was the very opposite of all the snake-hipped rogues Pippa had run around with back in the day, but so was almost any husband you could think of.

“Ari,” said Pippa, prodding him to get his attention. “I said, Suki’s here.”

Ari rested his wooden spoon on a tea towel and wiped his hands on his apron before backing away reluctantly from the stove. “Hope you’re not vegetarian,” he said, holding toward me a hand the size of a bear’s.

“Meat is good,” I said, patting my stomach.

He smiled vaguely and went back to his pots. Pippa swung open the fridge, giving me a clear view of the honesty calendar, which looked as though it had only just survived a violent game of noughts and crosses.

“That’s all Ari,” said Pippa, noticing I’d seen it. “He refuses to cook anything without wine. I have to watch him like a hawk. Don’t I, darling?”

At the stove, Ari huffed, and I thought, with a pang, of the seven quid I’d wasted on plonk, and how it had been a toss-up between that and my tube fare home. Was it rude, in the home of quasi-reformed alcoholics, to demand a glass of wine from the bottle you’d brought? I was starting to think I might need one.

In the two months that had passed since I first called Pippa, my circumstances had bypassed bad and worse and arrived straight at desperate. I had no family in London anymore, no backstop, and since my arrival the city had been behaving in a way that was downright hostile. In the first month, I had tried to open a bank account in Kensington High Street—the same branch my parents had used—but had been told that I couldn’t open one until I’d lived in England for at least a year. “But I was
born
here and lived here for eighteen years,” I protested, to no avail. Ten years abroad had apparently canceled out the first eighteen in Britain. The same thing happened at the surgery of my old family doctor in Westbourne Grove, where I went to retrieve my National Health Service number. The receptionist informed me that after ten years without patient activity, they had destroyed my health records. Inland Revenue had just done the same. I found such efficiency hard to believe in a country renowned for its grinding bureaucracy but was told that if I’d come back earlier there’d still have been a trace of me left in the system. As things stood, I felt like the recently deceased.

Pippa took a carton out of the fridge and poured me a large glass of orange juice. “Now,” she said, guiding me back to the living room, “the last time we saw you was at the funeral. Next thing we heard, you’d gone to live with your father in New Zealand.”

“I didn’t live with him.”

“How silly of me,” Pippa said. “You were too old. What were you, eighteen or nineteen?”

“Eighteen, but that wasn’t it. He lived in the country and—”

Pippa laughed. “I can’t imagine the disco king ever living in the country—how absurd.”

She talked about my father in a jocular way and I wondered how well she had known him, how much he’d had to do with what I’d seen that night at the party. But it wasn’t something I could ask about. “His new wife,” I said, “is fully into horses.”

She looked as though a light had come on. “Good lord, that’s right. Rowan was horse mad.”

“You knew Rowan?”

“Not well, no,” said Pippa, adding, “only what Hillary told me about her.”

For a moment, I was silent, taken aback. My mother had never mentioned Rowan to me by name, or in any other way, and I’d assumed it was because she didn’t know anything about her.

“I wish I’d made more of an effort to help you and your mother after you left Ladbroke Gardens,” said Pippa. “You do know that, don’t you?”

She’d said as much on the phone but I wondered why she felt the need to repeat herself. “You did what you could,” I said, parroting what I told everyone who felt bad about not seeing Mum enough toward the end, as if they might have been able to stop her from dying. “Besides, she didn’t tell anyone how sick she was. Not even me.”

“You didn’t know she was dying?”

“I knew she was ill.” An edge of defensiveness crept into my voice. “But I didn’t know it was terminal.”

“Who knows what any of us would do in that situation?” said Pippa, in such a way that I knew she would have done the opposite. “It’s a mother’s worst fear—well, second-worst fear—and she probably didn’t want to scare you.”

“What’s a mother’s worst fear?” I said, feeling stupid that I didn’t know.

“One that she can’t even bring herself to say out loud.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling even thicker than before.

For a while we talked about old times, but what Pippa remembered and what I remembered did not seem to converge. She laughed when I told her about Madeline, how after all this time the statue still gave me the creeps.

“Are you sure it has a name?” she said. “Harold and I used to call it the Midget. I tried to convince Mummy to sell it a few years ago to knock off a few bills and what not but she insisted on keeping the bloody thing. Said she’d rather sell her kidneys. I told her no one would want those, they’d be as pickled as her liver. Of course, she didn’t find that at all funny. According to her, I don’t have a sense of humor. Only Harold has one of those.”

From the kitchen came the hopeful clatter of plates, but when Pippa asked how far away dinner was, Ari only grumbled that it would be ready when it was ready. My stomach grumbled back. For weeks I had eaten only as much as I could afford, which was never enough to fill me up.

When we had exhausted the topic of old times, Pippa asked about my current situation—a subject I’d been dreading. Instead of saying I was unemployed, I came up with some rot about being at a career crossroads, unsure of what to do next, and was relieved when she responded, “That’s a generational thing, isn’t it?” because it meant I could nod in agreement and say, “Yes, we Gen-Xers are very restless.” When she asked if I had a boyfriend, I tried to feign the same indifference, but no one was fooled.

A question formed on Pippa’s lips, but she must have sensed this was a touchy topic and didn’t ask it. “Would you like another juice?” she said after a time.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m walking.”

It had been a nervous joke, but Pippa took it literally. “Walking to where?”

“Willesden Green. I’m dossing on a friend’s couch. I’d love to get a flat around here but it’s a little too . . .” I hesitated.

“Pricey?” offered Pippa. “Trust me, if we hadn’t bought this place in the eighties, just before the property boom, we’d be living in Willesden Green too.” She told me they had the top two floors and had managed to convert the attic and build a small roof terrace. “The attic floor is Caleb’s territory—where parents fear to tread. Did you ever meet him?”

“Your son?”

“My darling boy.”

“I’m not sure.” I remembered something about a huge baby, a difficult birth, and months of surgery, nothing appropriate to mention. “Maybe when he was little?”

“Heavens!” said Pippa. “I can’t believe you haven’t seen him since then.”

She went to the foot of the stairs and called out, “Caleb! Caaaaaay-leb!” There was no reply, only the same dull bass line that had been reverberating from up there all evening. “Wait here,” she said, setting off for its source.

I went into the kitchen, unnoticed by Ari, and I watched him pour cooked pasta into a colander then lean back as a cloud of steam clipped his face.

“Would you like me to set the table?” I offered.

“Cutlery’s in there,” he said, pointing with his tongs.

The drawer opened on a junkyard of knives, forks, and spoons, and I searched for matching sets.

“You won’t find two the same,” said Ari. “She buys them in jumble sales. Don’t ask me why. They’re cheaper at Asda.”

“But not as charming,” I said, smiling at the muddle.

“Charming?” said Ari. “More like mad.” He carried the pot to the table and handed me a spiked spaghetti spoon. “Dig in.”

“Shouldn’t we wait for the others?”

“I’d start if I were you. It could take hours to coax his lordship down here.”

He didn’t need to ask twice. I spooned a pile of noodles onto my plate and breathed in the salty aroma of anchovies. The pasta was perfectly al dente and the sauce tasted better than anything I’d ever made, or eaten, and I was embarrassed by the appreciative noises that escaped as I ate. “This is amazing. You’re a chef, right?”

“We used to own an Italian restaurant,” said Ari. “But we sold it a couple of months ago. It’s being turned into a Pilates studio.” He said the word “Pilates” as though it was solely to blame for the sale.

“I thought you were Greek?”

“Yeah, but Italian food is more popular. Or was. Nobody eats pasta round here anymore, too many carbs. They want sashimi, egg-white omelets, bottled air.”

“It’s working though,” I said. “People who live in Notting Hill are the skinniest in the world. They make the average New Zealander look like a whale.”

“Really?” he said, for the first time looking interested in something I’d said. “Too much export-quality lamb?”

“And milk, butter, cheese, bacon, eggs. But they’re much more sporty too. Always playing touch rugby and training for triathlons.”

“How exhausting,” said Ari.

“There isn’t a lot else to do.”

Pippa appeared in the living room, flustered and short of breath. “He absolutely refuses to come down.”

“Tell him he has to,” said Ari.

“I did. He called me a stupid cow, and other things I won’t repeat.”

Ari found this funny, but not Pippa. She spooned spaghetti onto a plate, picked up a knife and fork, and carried it to the foot of the stairs, at which point Ari laid down his own cutlery in disgust. “No wonder he won’t come down if he gets bloody room service.”

“He can’t skip meals. He’s still growing!” Pippa shot back.

“If he starves, that’s his problem,” countered Ari.

“And yours,” said Pippa. “Although you’d probably expect me to deal with that too.” She marched upstairs with the plate.