Once more I scanned the terrace, looking for the trapdoor. Had I lost my bearings or was the air-raid shelter no longer there? Searching again, I found no trace of it, and surmised that it had been filled in or concreted over to prevent anyone’s falling in. Good job, I thought with immense relief, for a death trap such as that had no business being in a garden.
Peggy had stopped snoring, and her breathing was weak but regular. When I picked up her hand, she didn’t stir. The room had become stuffy, claustrophobic, and I decided I had been there long enough.
Out in the hallway, trying to remember my way to the bathroom, I felt drugged, disoriented, as though Peggy’s medication had leaked out through her skin. On the wall next to the phone was a list of emergency numbers, one of which was Pippa’s, and I wrote it down on a dog-eared receipt from my pocket. Many of the rooms between Peggy’s and the bathroom had been closed up, sealed off, but the door to one of the bedrooms was open, and I saw a mess of books and boxes spilling out. That must have been Harold’s old room. How careless and wasteful, I thought, to have so many disused rooms in such a nice flat, when all I needed was one.
It was passing back through the drawing room that I saw her, and froze immediately with the rigid fear of a five-year-old. How could I have missed her on the way to the bathroom? The statue of a young girl kneeling where she’d always knelt, on a dais between two faded velvet chaise longues that had once been cherry red. The dais was varnished mahogany, but the girl’s skin was the color of dirty cement. She was rough-hewn, abstract: her smooth granite eyes had no irises. Her tiny hands were folded in her lap, and her hair was in a bowl cut. She wore an old-fashioned smocked dress with a round pansy collar. Peggy had called her Madeline—referring to her by name, affectionately and often, as though she were her daughter or a little friend. She had been real to me too, though not in such a benign way.
As a child, I had refused to be left alone with her, and even in a room full of adults, Madeline could freak me out. It was partly the blankness of her stare, a gaze that nevertheless followed me wherever I went in the room. And partly, it was that she was the same age as me but was stuck being that age and would never grow up. It made me think that inside her was a thwarted adult, who had grown evil over time because she was trapped in a noose of perpetual childhood.
Once, at one of Peggy’s especially raucous parties, there’d been dozens of adults in the drawing room, dancing, drinking, laughing, and I was there too, up past my bedtime, and giddily lost in the forest of their legs. For a brief moment, those limbs had cleared, and there was Madeline, motionless but hunting me through the trees. My screams had been so hysterical that I had been taken home immediately—the party over for me and my parents.
On the sofa opposite Madeline’s dais, I sat down to observe her from a safe distance. I was curious to know if she’d still have any power over me at twenty-eight years old.
To begin with I was fine, in control, but then outside, clouds passed overhead, casting Madeline’s features into shadow. She had not moved, but my first thought was that it was Madeline who had taken all the light out of the room, and before I could reason against it, a sensation of quickening vertigo came over me. When I stood up to move away from her, I felt dizzy and also that I was physically shrinking. Around me, the room seemed to waver, but in a way that was too subtle to grasp. I looked down at my scuffed and ill-fitting trainers, bought in a size too big because I’d meant to use them for jogging but never had. The shoes appeared familiar, but I was sure that the feet inside them weren’t mine—that these feet were tiny impostors. I held my hands out in front of my face, spread the fingers and wiggled them, but even these looked counterfeit, rogue hands on the ends of absurdly slender limbs. My perspective had shifted lower down, and for a few seconds, I was a child again—a child who was pensive and scared.
I bit down hard on my tongue, and one by one, the walls of Peggy’s drawing room regained their density, and the weight of my adult feet sank into my shoes. Once more, I stood on solid ground, in a London apartment I had not been in for almost twenty years. An apartment so like a museum that briefly, I rationalized, it had pulled me back with it into the past.
That I’d imagined the whole thing was plausible but that didn’t change how unsettled I felt—especially when I turned to leave the drawing room and had the uncanny sensation that I was being watched.
Too late, I realized I had turned my back on Madeline, and when I swiveled round to face her, I fancied she was gloating. This amounted to nothing more than a dead-eyed stare—but then again, it never had. The year after next I’d turn thirty, but Madeline still had it over me. Her power was intact, had perhaps even grown. In the old, cowering way, I turned and walked out backward, hoping to catch the very last rays of that untimely summer evening.