The Girls (18 page)

Leo collected his shopping bags and greeted Adele with a smile when he saw her waiting for him on their terrace. ‘Hello, lover.’

She smiled thinly. Tyler had always had an affectionate relationship with Leo. She’d been one of those children who climbed on to people’s laps without invitation, fiddled with people’s hair, insisted on games of peekaboo with strangers, who instinctively sought to beguile and ensnare. And Leo had long been a favoured object of her widespread affections.

But Tyler was thirteen now. Was it still appropriate for him to maintain that kind of physical relationship with her?

‘What’s going on with Tyler?’ she asked, following Leo into the kitchen, helping him to unload his shopping bags.

‘Boy trouble, I think. She didn’t really want to talk about it.’

She watched her husband as he unpacked his shopping and started assembling things for making a soup. As she watched something vile hit the back of her throat. A sluice of something spicy she’d eaten earlier mixed up with the large glass of white wine she’d poured for herself half an hour ago.

‘Poor little Tyler,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Leo. ‘Poor lost soul.’

Seventeen

Adele loved the entrance to Rhea’s mansion block: double doors, wood panelling, claret carpets, the smell of beeswax and the click and whirr of the ancient elevator with its concertina doors polished to a high shine. She took the stairs to the second floor and Rhea greeted her at her front door.

‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ Rhea said, gesturing at her outfit of pilled orange polo neck, baggy grey leggings and ancient sheepskin slippers. ‘I’m not in my Sunday best.’

‘You look lovely, Rhea. You always look lovely.’

She clutched at her throat and her earlobes. ‘I feel naked without my bling,’ she said, laughing. ‘Give me a minute!’

She ushered Adele into her living room, where she’d already laid out gilt-rimmed teacups and saucers and plates of chocolate-topped biscuits, cheese puffs and sugared almonds.

Her giant rabbit sat in a fleece-lined bed staring at Adele impassively, his nose twitching. And all around were the trophies of Rhea’s life: framed family photos filled every inch of every wall, at least half a dozen different graduation photographs from three different decades, formal portraits and collaged arrangements of sun-faded snaps. Every surface was covered with some kind of lace topping, including the backs of her block-cut velour sofas. Upon her carpeted floor lay a patchwork of extraneous rugs of varying shapes and textures. French doors on to her balcony framed the most exquisite view of the gardens. From here you could see virtually the entire sweep. Adele stepped on to the balcony and looked down.

A group of young mothers with their toddlers and babies was sitting just there, in the very spot where Phoebe’s body had been found twenty-three years earlier.

Rhea returned, a huge gilt-rimmed teapot in one hand, another packet of biscuits in the other, her neck adorned once more with ropes of gold.

‘This weather!’ said Rhea. ‘It can’t last! Surely!’

‘Apparently we’re set for a long hot summer,’ said Adele.

‘Well, that would be nice for a change.’ She laid the pot on the table, her hand shaking slightly, then sat down next to Adele and appraised her warmly. ‘How are your family?’

‘They’re fine, thank you,’ Adele replied.

‘Your beautiful girls?’

‘They’re doing great.’

‘And your handsome husband?’

‘Still handsome.’

‘And what about your father-in-law? I hear he is your guest for now?’

‘Yes.’ Adele sighed. ‘For my sins.’

‘Ah, that man. You know, Adele, it may not be my place to say this, but I would not be happy to have that man in my house. With my daughters.’

Adele raised her brow. ‘Oh, Rhea. He’s not
that
bad. He’s always had a wandering eye but he’s not about to commit incest.’

‘Well, still, you should keep an eye on him. Once a dog,
always
a dog. A leopard cannot change his spots.’

‘Thank you, Rhea. I’m sure it’s fine. But thank you.’

‘Here, have some cheesy puffs. These are the best ones. Waitrose own brand. Have you tried them?’

‘No, I haven’t tried them. But I won’t, thank you.’

Rhea put the bowl down with a shrug that said:
Your loss
.

‘Listen, Rhea, I’ve had something playing on my mind for a few weeks. Since I read your memoir.’

The deep dimple in Rhea’s cheek disappeared and she looked momentarily distraught. ‘Oh, no! Please, what is it?’

‘It’s just, well, I hadn’t realised until I read your book that Leo and Cecelia had had a fling together, that summer.’

‘The summer of Phoebe?’

‘Yes, the summer of Phoebe. And it took me a bit by surprise because, of course, she was only thirteen and Leo was almost eighteen – you know, virtually an adult.’

‘Well, look, I don’t know if it was a fling. I don’t know what it was, Adele.’ Rhea shrugged apologetically, as though she felt bad for bringing it up at all.

‘It
was
a fling. I asked Leo about it and he told me. I just wondered … did you ever think – I mean, even just as a crazy theory – that Phoebe’s death might have had something to do with Leo and his brothers?’

Rhea’s dark eyes widened. She clutched her gold chains with her fingertips. ‘Adele! What a question!’

‘I know, it’s just … I was talking to Gordon yesterday and he said something weird, about how his boys were to blame for her death, how children turn into animals in that garden.’

‘Well, there he might have a point. Children left to their own devices can be wild. But your Leo? Killing that girl?’

‘Well, that’s not quite what Gordon was implying. The implication was more that Leo had somehow caused it. He and his brothers.’

‘Crazy!’ Rhea said. ‘That man is absolutely crazy!’

Adele nodded. ‘I know. He really is. But, still, when you think about it, Phoebe had to have died for some reason. Maybe it did have something to do with Leo and his brothers? In an indirect way? To do with all the romantic complications? You know, kids, they feel things so strongly. Everything is magnified at that age.’

‘Adele.’ Rhea put a hand over hers and squeezed it. ‘Phoebe was not your average fifteen-year-old. Phoebe was like a time bomb waiting to go off. It was just a matter of time, and there was nothing anyone could have done about it.’

‘But in what way? The world is full of messed-up teenagers drinking and taking drugs and having sex and they don’t all end up dead at fifteen.’

‘Indeed. This is true. But there was something else about that girl. Behind the good-time girl, behind the fun and the frivolity. This sadness in her eyes. Like she’d seen all the bad things in the world and given up all hope for mankind. For herself. And you know, that is a look I know better than most.’

‘Yes. I know.’ Adele moved her hand on to Rhea’s and stroked it. ‘Why do you think she was like that?’

‘Her mother. Oh,
her mother
.’ Rhea rolled her eyes heavenwards.

Adele had heard about Phoebe and Cecelia’s mother many times over the years, through Leo, through Gordon, through anyone who’d lived on the garden at the time. Her name was Marian and she’d been the headmistress of the private girls’ school up the road for twenty years. Her husband had been Frank, a milkman who’d retired due to ill health in his thirties and then died at forty of a heart attack when the girls were still small. Marian had quickly remarried, leaving the garden community fairly certain that the relationship had begun long before Frank’s early demise. The new husband was not interested in children. Marian was only interested in the children at her school and Cecelia and Phoebe were left roaming the garden all day and all night. And then, as Rhea reminded her now, ‘When Marian
was
at home, the screaming and the crying and the banging and the smashing would start and he’d be there’ – she pointed to the other side of the garden – ‘smoking a cigarette out of the window, until it had all blown over. Then, slam, you’d hear the window go down, and it would be quiet again. An unhappy woman. Unhappy husband. Unhappy children. And now …’ She sighed. ‘… that Cecelia. She is repeating all the patterns. All the mistakes of her own mother. And I look at her daughter and I see the same thing in her eye that Phoebe had. The same look of hopelessness.’

‘Tyler?’

‘Yes. Tyler.’

Adele thought of the odd, brittle, affectionate, energetic, stroppy and fun-loving girl she’d known since she was a baby.

‘You don’t think …? I mean, she won’t go the same way as Phoebe, will she?’

‘I hope not, Adele. I really do hope not.’

Adele thought of Leo’s thumb lifting Tyler’s chin yesterday and of Gordon’s bizarre declaration. Then she thought of thirteen-year-old Cecelia sitting on Leo’s lap, wearing his chain, his adult lips on her childish ones. Her head spun. Her stomach lurched.

Clare turned left outside the tube and brought up Google Maps on her smartphone. She was dressed strangely for the warm summer weather, in jeans and a loose-fitting black cotton jacket that belonged to one of the girls, her blond hair covered by a baseball cap. She was in Walthamstow, with Lovestruck Roxy’s address programmed into her mobile. She didn’t really know why. It was probably a stupid thing to do. But it had been nagging and nagging at her. And in a strange way she felt she owed it to Leo, for his kindness and his concern.

Roxy’s flat formed part of a small terraced Victorian house on a nondescript, distinctly ungentrified street. The front garden was cemented over and filled with weeds, used to house numerous bins and recycling containers. There were three bells by the front door. Clare walked past the house four times. She’d been hoping she might be able to find a spot to stand and observe for a while, but on a quiet street like this she’d have stood out conspicuously. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. Roxy would be at work. And if Chris was here, he’d no doubt be lying low. She was about to pass for a fifth time when she heard an internal door slam shut. Then she saw a shadow pass across the opaque glass panels of the front door. She inhaled and pulled herself back slightly, pretending to be looking for something in her handbag. She saw a young woman appear in the doorway of the house. She was very small and slim with her hair cut into a sharp black bob. She was wearing a black asymmetric dress with calf-height leather strappy boots and her arms were heavily tattooed. She was talking to someone standing in the hallway; Clare could see a large hand grasping the doorframe, a male knee in faded black trousers, a huge, socked foot. She heard a male cough.

Moving slightly closer, she heard the young woman say, ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Maybe three if they keep me back for the second session.’

Then, as each hair on her arms stood up in turn, she heard her husband’s voice, loud as an actor upon a stage, saying, ‘OK, Rox. And good luck. Not that you’ll need it.’

She watched Roxy lean in to her husband and accept a brief hug. She saw a flash of his hair, shorter than it had ever been before, a wildly bearded chin, a grey hoodie. And then Roxy turned to go and her husband closed the door and Clare stood, her feet rooted to the pavement as though set in concrete, watching Roxy walk away from her and thinking,
My husband is in that house my husband is in that house my husband is in that house
.
And he’s wearing socks.
For a whole minute she did nothing. And then, finally, she straightened herself, and walked, circumspectly, back to the tube station.

‘Mum?’ Pip was sitting at the kitchen counter on a bar stool. She’d been doing her homework, but now she’d put down her pen and closed her exercise book. ‘When are they going to tell us where Dad is?’

Clare jumped slightly. Pip hadn’t mentioned Chris for a few days. It seemed strange that she should do so on the very same day on which Clare had seen him, alive and kicking, with short hair and a beard, living with a tattooed lady called Roxy in the dog end of London E11.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Can you ask them?’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve got things to send him.’

‘What things?’

‘Just letters. It feels weird writing to him and not sending them anywhere. It’s like he’s disappeared off the face of the earth. Like he doesn’t exist any more.’

Clare thought of the large hand clutching the door-frame, the booming voice. ‘Well, I can assure you, he does exist and he’s still trying to get better.’

‘But, Mum, it’s been more than six months. I mean, what are they doing? What are they actually doing in there? Why isn’t he better yet? I don’t understand.’

‘No. I don’t understand either.’

‘Can you call them? Please? Call them and find out what’s happening? Can you do it now?’

‘Pip, it’s late. All the office people will have gone home now.’

‘Well, will you call tomorrow?’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Why “try”? Why can’t you just do it? It’s not fair. He’s my dad and I know you’re still really cross with him and scared of him and everything but I love him and I haven’t see him for so long and I don’t understand why I can’t!’

Clare sighed and pulled her hair back off her face with the palm of her hand. ‘You’re right. You’re absolutely right. It isn’t fair. And I will call them tomorrow and see what I can do. But I can’t promise anything, OK?’

Pip’s face softened and she smiled a small smile. ‘OK.’

Clare checked the time on the oven. Fifteen minutes until the lasagne was ready. She stood behind Pip and squeezed her middle-section, savouring the substance of her, the yielding softness around her belly, the solid warmth of her.

‘What would I do without you?’ she said.

‘You’d probably just die,’ said Pip, drily.

‘Yes,’ said Clare, ‘I probably would.’

‘I love you,’ said Pip.

‘I love you too.’ She pulled away and smiled. ‘Right, I’d better go and find your sister.’

‘Can’t you just call her?’

‘Well, I could, but I fancy some fresh air. And it’s so lovely out there. Will you lock the door behind me?’

Pip rolled her eyes. ‘Seriously, Mum, what do you think is going to happen?’