The Girl Below(33)

Instead of relief that she wasn’t in her usual spot, however, I was transfixed by the idea that she had learned how to move and was following stealthily behind me, gliding even, just outside my line of vision. But when I looked behind me, the apartment was deserted.

I told myself to buck up, and carried on to Harold’s room. It was, as Pippa had predicted, almost impossible to fight my way through the abundant boxes, but I found too that most of them were stacked by the door, as if someone had gone a little way into the room, hurriedly dumped the cartons, and left. Once you got past them, the room was quite sparsely furnished, with a dresser and a double bed, sagging in the middle but heavenly compared to the couch I’d been sleeping on for months. At first I meant only to test the mattress before getting up to clean my teeth and undress, but once I was lying down I didn’t want to move, and despite the strangeness of the situation, and all that was lurking outside, I pulled the eiderdown up around my shoulders and fell into a deep, untroubled sleep.

It was only the next morning that I saw the dust, lying thick on every surface of the room, including, I noticed with dismay, on the adjacent pillow. Some of it had gotten into my throat in the night, and the first thing I did when I sat up was cough. It was very early, only a gray film lit the morning, and I crept through the flat to get a glass of water. Peggy’s door was still closed and everything else appeared undisturbed since the night before.

In the kitchen, after pouring myself a drink from the tap, I poked around in the cupboards for a vacuum cleaner. I found one of those old-fashioned ones that resembled a set of bagpipes, and wheeled it down the long hallway to Harold’s room—far enough away that I didn’t think Peggy would hear it. Plugged in, the volume was impressive, but it had no suction, and its metal head was so huge that it was beyond maneuvering, especially through the death valley of Harold’s books and junk. Still, I gave it my best shot, and only came to a halt when the vacuum cleaner fell into a pothole. On closer inspection the hole turned out to be more extensive than I’d thought—in fact, a whole section of parquet floorboards was missing. Under the desk by the window, and along one wall, perhaps two dozen blocks of it had been pulled up and stacked to one side, leaving exposed an adventure playground for mice. When I went around the room a little farther, I saw that other patches of floor had been pulled up and replaced, but badly, so that pieces of parquet jutted out here and there at hazardous angles.

That was when I gave up on vacuuming, or any other sort of housework. Instead of cleaning Peggy’s flat I tried to clean myself in the decrepit bathroom. In place of a proper shower there was one of those hose devices that was meant to fit snugly over the bath taps, but instead sprayed water all over the bathroom. England was the only place I’d been where such devices were still in use—not only in use but overused and repaired, with duct tape and lengths of string. At least I wasn’t using it in winter when showering under it would lead to hypothermia.

By the time I had dressed, it was almost eight, and I made Peggy a cup of tea and knocked on her door. When there was no reply, I called out to her, “Peggy? It’s Suki. Are you awake?”

I thought I heard shuffling, and tentatively pushed open the door, but when I went in, her hospital bed was empty and she wasn’t in the room.

Back out in the hallway, I noticed a rattling sound from behind the door that had been wedged shut the night before, as though someone was trying to force it open from the other side, and by the time I got there Peggy had squeezed herself halfway out.

“Good morning,” she said. “I appear to be stuck.”

“Let me help you.” With a little undignified shoving and pulling, I got her through. Once she was out, I tried to open the door all the way, but it was still stuck. “Is there a wedge under the door?”

“A wedge?” she said, quite bewildered. “Whatever do you mean?” Her hair was wrapped in a turban, and a pink satin bathrobe fishtailed behind her—the 1930s movie star, waiting for her lover to drop round for cocktails and barbiturates. She saw the cup of tea I was carrying and brightened. “Is that for me? How lovely.”

I took her by the arm, and sat her down in a nearby chair, where she gulped her tea and asked for another, “With a spoon or two of sugar.” At the end of that cup, she said, “One more. I don’t quite feel strong enough to get up just yet.”

I was amazed that she could get up at all. Only a few months earlier she’d been on her deathbed, written off by her own nurse. Since then she’d filled out, and no longer resembled a living skeleton. But it was only after her third cup of tea that she finally revived enough to really notice me. Then she said, “Oh, you’re not Amanda.”