The Girl Below(37)

Money troubles, it seemed, were all around me. “Couldn’t she sell this place? Move somewhere smaller?”

“She doesn’t own it,” said Pippa, as if this was something I should have known.

“But the rent must be astronomical!”

“It would be if she hadn’t been here since the sixties. She pays peppercorn rent, and no one can kick her out. She’s got absolutely no savings, and most of the time we have to help her out with bills. This place costs a fortune to heat.” Pippa sighed. “I shouldn’t be so hard on her. She made so many sacrifices when we were growing up. Harold’s education didn’t come cheap, nor did the trimmings that went with it.”

“You didn’t want to go to university?”

“Me? At university?” She sounded surprised that I’d even asked. “I was far too interested in makeup and boys—as I’m sure you remember.”

“You taught me everything I know about makeup. And I should have listened more to what you said about boys.”

Pippa laughed. “It was such a shame when you and your mother moved out of the flat downstairs. But I suppose I can understand why she wanted to get rid of it.”

“She didn’t want to—we moved because Dad wanted to sell the flat. That was the one time he got in touch.”

“What?” said Pippa. She looked like she had been slapped. “You mean he cut you off?”

I had never heard anyone describe it so harshly, but she was right, we had been severed. “Mum didn’t like to talk about it.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Pippa. “How awful.”

That night, Peggy asked me to read to her from one of the romances on the nightstand by her bed. I was about to start from the beginning of the slim volume when she snatched it from my hand and opened it near the end. “Start with the climax,” she said, getting comfortable against a bank of old feather pillows. “I can’t stay awake long, so you have to cut to the chase.”

I made the mistake of glancing at Madeline before I complied, and Peggy followed my gaze. “Isn’t she lovely?” she said. “She was a gift from my darling Laurie.”

“She’s very . . . lifelike,” I said, choosing my words carefully.

“I think so, but the others can’t see it. She’ll be out on the curb the minute I’m gone.”

“Wherever I go in the room,” I said, “I feel like she’s looking at me.”

“I know,” said Peggy, reaching out to stroke Madeline’s face. “I never feel lonely when she’s here.” She smiled. “Of course, it’s even better to have human company. Especially someone who isn’t in a uniform.”

From her corner, Madeline glared.

“Did you move her in here yourself?” I asked.

“Heavens, no. She weighs three times as much as I do. But Amanda came up with the ingenious idea of popping her in the wheelchair and trundling her down the hall.” Peggy pointed to the large dresser on the door side of her bed. “Only we couldn’t get the wheelchair past the dresser, so she’s sort of stuck behind the door.”

After I’d read a single page, Peggy was sound asleep, and I tucked the quilt into the small of her back. Standing away from the bed and looking at her sleeping body, I suddenly felt very alone, and realized that I’d enjoyed having company as much as she had. Being useful, feeling needed, had been nice, and I went back to the living room, acutely aware that I was neither.

There was no TV in the flat, only books and whiskey—at least I knew where that was hiding—and with Madeline tucked away in Peggy’s room, I felt relaxed enough to take a nightcap on the chaise longue with a 1978 issue of Vogue that I had found in a stack under the coffee table. But after only a couple of sips, and a dozen or so pages, my eyes began to droop.

I went to my room tired but sober. It was a silvery night, pretty, and after getting changed into summer pajamas, I opened the curtains and climbed into bed. The moon was out, a pale disk filmed over with smoke. No stars, but I’d stopped looking for them in London’s light-polluted skies. Harold’s room looked out over the communal gardens, and the rustle of oak trees was surprisingly loud considering the constant low hum of people and televisions and traffic underneath it. For an hour or more, I lay there with my eyes closed, waiting for sleep, but every time I came close to drifting off, some thought pulled me back to consciousness. Round and round these thoughts went, until my body drummed with restlessness. I was thirsty too, perhaps because of the whiskey, so I got up and walked through the quiet flat to get a glass of water, turning on lights as I went. The kitchen was empty, and smelled of the sweet tomato soup I’d heated up for our dinner. I drank a glass of water, and filled it again to take back to bed, then turned off the fluorescent bar in the kitchen, and returned to the hallway, where I did something uncharacteristic—I turned off that light too. It was very dark but in time my eyes adjusted, and I made my way through the shadows to Harold’s room. I had braced myself to feel constant fear in Peggy’s flat, where she and her little friend lived, but walking alone along the checkered hallway, I felt nothing except nostalgia, and the old familiar gnaw of unwanted solitude.