The Girl Below(13)

Just as I emerged from the bathroom, Pippa called from downstairs, “I’ve found it! Come and see this!”

She was crouched in front of the VCR, stabbing at the volume button. The images on-screen were high contrast and grainy, taken with a prototype video camera, and zoomed giddily around a party. The venue was magnificent, a ballroom of some sort with chandeliers and ornate molded ceilings. I recognized Pippa’s brother, Harold, crammed into a white shirt and bow tie, a red cummerbund looped around his alarmingly high-waisted pants.

“Harold’s twenty-first,” said Pippa. “Mummy hired a ballroom on Exhibition Road to impress his Cambridge chums.”

Jiving toward the camera, Harold twirled around, the birthday boy showing off. So he did like to participate, I thought, but only if he was the center of attention. In the next shot, he inhaled helium from a balloon and passed it round to his friends, who took turns speaking goblin. In the middle of a friend’s spot-on Monty Python impersonation, Harold snatched the balloon and pushed himself in front of the camera. “My turn, my turn!” he shouted, while his friends looked away politely.

The tape cut to dancing after that, and Pippa sashayed into the frame, cutting a rug with Peggy, queen of the party in peacock-feathered headdress and emerald kimono. The two of them jittered back and forth like birds, moving toward the camera when it appeared to be moving away from them. My mother appeared in a shot, unaware that she was being filmed. The bloom of a teenager was still on her cheeks and she wore no makeup, or none that I could see. Around her neck was the locket, a perfect match for her simple navy shift. She leaned toward Peggy and they shared a joke that was drowned out by loud music. When she saw the video camera she jerked away from it, putting a hand in front of her face. But the more she retreated, the more whoever was filming seemed determined to follow her.

“I’d forgotten she was so shy,” said Pippa. “The rest of us were so desperate for attention, but she always got it without even trying.”

My father came into the shot and put his arm around her, creating a barrier for my mother to hide behind. She rested her head against his neck and his hand floated up and casually brushed through her hair. Seeing them together, the way they touched each other so naturally, so lovingly, shifted a tectonic plate deep inside me. My jaw contracted painfully, the precursor to tears, and in a lame bid for privacy, I turned away from Pippa and tried to shield my face with my hand.

Pippa, however, had a mother’s keen sense of impending distress and drew closer to me, attempted to shush and pat me on the shoulder. At her touch, I reflexively shrank away, and we both saw me doing it but pretended we hadn’t. For a second, she hovered with her hand outstretched to try again before withdrawing it for good. The TV erupted in static, startling us both, and Pippa leaned forward to eject the tape.

“Forgive me,” she said. “I should never have put it on. Seeing your mother again must have been quite a shock.”

She said more, but I was so flooded with emotion that I heard none of it, and a few minutes later, when I found myself outside on the dusty street, I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten down the stairs—or even if I’d said good-bye.





Chapter Four


London, 1981





For as long as we’d lived in Ladbroke Gardens, I’d been as scared as I was drawn to the trapdoor that marked the entrance to the air-raid shelter. Even though Dad had explained to me that, forty years ago, it had been the only place safe from trawling Luftwaffe, I couldn’t imagine why anyone had willingly gone down there. On the few occasions I had run—nervously, experimentally—across the trapdoor’s pitted metal surface, my footsteps had echoed with a hideous boom, and I sometimes worried that at any moment, the entire garden might collapse into the hole. One night, very late, a tapping sound had awakened me and I had looked out into the garden and seen Jimmy over by the air-raid shelter. He had trespassed onto our patio, and was poking at the hatch with a long metal stick, trying to open it. On his head was a miner’s lamp, and when he switched it off, he disappeared along with the light. From then on, I thought of the bunker as his domain, that he was its guardian or gatekeeper.

“We can’t go down there,” I said after Jean Luc had asked, but no one listened.

Dad fetched a crowbar, along with the metal tools he used for basic plumbing and fixing the car. He oiled and coaxed the ancient bolts of the air-raid-shelter hatch, which had rusted shut after years of being trampled and rained on. It took all of Dad’s strength plus the wiry disco muscles of Jean Luc and Henri to lift the iron lid, and even then it scraped across the patio paving stones like a car without tires. Once the hatch was out of the way, they stepped back from the cavity and peered inside.