The Girl Below(3)
Peggy had been moved into Pippa’s old bedroom, close to the kitchen, closer to the front door if she needed to check out. The room was dark and cool, with blinds at half-mast and thick net curtains obscuring the warm summer sun. It took a few seconds to locate Peggy, and much longer to recognize her. She was on a trolley bed, wrapped in a cocoon of crisp hospital sheets, the pillows tilted to cradle her piplike head. From her left arm, a drip trailed, and her skin spread like tracing paper over a map of her bones. Most of her hair had fallen out; what remained was aubergine fluff. But she still had her stenciled eyebrows, arched in permanent surprise, and I realized with an odd sting of pity that they must be tattooed on.
Trying not to wake her, I shuffled toward the bed, but a floorboard creaked under my shifting weight and her eyelids flickered open. She had trouble focusing, and looked blurrily up at the ceiling.
“Hello, Peggy,” I said, softly. “It’s Suki. Suki Piper.”
At the sound of my voice she started, and I picked up her dry, weightless hand and squeezed it to reassure her. “We used to live downstairs in the basement flat. I’m Hillary’s daughter.”
My words did not register.
“We moved away a long time ago and I haven’t seen you since—at least, I don’t think I have. For some of that time, I’ve been living in New Zealand. My father, Ludo, went to live there when my parents separated. I think you saw Hillary a few times after that but she . . .” The end of the sentence got stuck in my throat.
Peggy blinked. “Hillary,” she croaked, her lips sticking together at the corners. “Darling Hillary.”
I tried to give her a drink of water, but most of it rolled down her chin, and I gave up, resting the glass on a side table next to a half-empty bottle of scotch. Alongside it sat a plastic measuring cup with a sticky brown residue on the rim.
When I picked up Peggy’s hand again, she pulled on mine, and her eyes danced a little, like they used to. “Lovely Hillary,” she said. “How wonderful to see you!”
“I’m not Hillary. I’m her daughter, Suki.”
“And how is Suki?” With great effort, Peggy lifted her hands to her face and made ring shapes around her eyes. “Pink glasses!” she exclaimed. “Always dancing. Wet the bed when she came to stay with us.”
After this, she collapsed, closed her eyes, and began to snore.
Mistaking me for Hillary meant Peggy didn’t know, or had forgotten, that my mother was no longer alive. When people forgot I often couldn’t bring myself to correct them. Sometimes they started reminiscing about Hillary’s beauty, the way she’d lit up a room with her grace, or her legendary abilities to sew and cook, and by the time they asked the appalling but inevitable question, “How is she, your dear mother, Hillary?” the weight of their admiration bore down on me so hard I told them what they wanted to hear. “She moved to Scotland to look after Grandma,” I’d explained to one old acquaintance, telling another that she’d gone to India in the midnineties to find herself and was still there on an ashram. Lousy fibs but much kinder on us all. Everyone had loved my mother—no one more so than I—and if I never said out loud that she’d died, then I sometimes believed that she hadn’t.
While Peggy dozed, I stroked her hand and took an inventory of her daughter’s old room. The dresser where Pippa had teased her hair and kohled her eyes for hours was in the same place, and so was the antique Victorian dollhouse, over in the corner by the window. Pippa had outgrown the dollhouse years before I came on the scene, but she’d remained proprietary of it, and had only begrudgingly tolerated my sticky fingers on its tiny antiques. Though the dollhouse was now dusty and faded, I had never encountered its equal, and I finally understood why she hadn’t wanted to part with it. Really, it belonged in a museum—or here in this flat that was so much like one.
I let go of Peggy’s hand and walked to the window, curious to see if our old terrace was visible from up here. Our basement flat had gone through from front to back, with a set of French doors opening out onto a patio. At first, I didn’t recognize the chalk paths and lavender pots—it had been remodeled in ersatz French Provincial—and then one or two features stood out as familiar: the way the patio was on two levels, the white gate that led out to the communal garden. But what I couldn’t locate—what I was, abruptly, desperate to see—was the pitted iron plate that marked the entrance to the air-raid shelter. This shelter was a relic from the Blitz, a deep concrete bunker where families had gone to sit out the bombings during World War II. My family had gone down there too—only once—but the experience had been so awful, so chilling, that the bunker had quickly come to represent the most terrifying thing in my world. Even now, I shivered to recall the narrow stone stairs that descended into the chamber, how frigid the air had been so far under the earth, how we had not been able to get out.