The Girl Below(55)

Ludo was laughing, but not Rowan. “Let me see what I can rustle up,” she said, trying not to show her hurt.

My father had been right about her cooking, but it was a good match for the conversation that was potholed with topics we were all anxious to avoid. Rowan and Dad talked cheerfully about their marriage as if it was Ludo’s first, as though he had come to Rowan with a clean slate, and when he talked about his family, his children, it was clear that in his mind he had two of them, not three. But I was no better. When Dad asked me to fill them in on the last ten years of my life, what I came up with was drier than a school prospectus. I couldn’t find a casual way to tell them the bleeding obvious—that my mother had died a few weeks earlier—but no sooner had I made the omission than I realized I had missed the most natural window in which to say it. Now if I brought it up, it would be a bombshell, a conversation stopper, everyone looking at me and wondering why I hadn’t brought it up earlier. I would look like a fool.

“I suppose you’ll be traveling around after this,” said Dad. “Isn’t there a sort of circuit that you young people take on your gap years?”

“I don’t plan to go bungee jumping, if that’s what you mean. It isn’t really my thing.”

“Oh, but you must,” said Rowan. “You haven’t been to New Zealand unless you’ve gone bungee jumping. And white-water rafting too.”

“Mum,” said Simon. “You told me those things were too dangerous and I could never do them.”

“I only meant that you were too young,” she said. “But Suki is old enough.”

“Sure,” said Simon. “Whatever.” He left the table in a huff.

By dinner’s end, I was tipsy, and so choked up on my terrible omission that I worried it might burst out of me in a stream of projectile vomit.

“Is the food really that terrible?” asked my father, noticing my untouched plate and no doubt greenish face.

“I’m a little tired, that’s all,” I said. “The bus really took it out of me.” I tried to smile at Rowan. We had not seen eye to eye on a single topic all evening, and I was unsure if it was a simple personality clash or if she had been disagreeing with me on purpose. If I told them about Hillary now, I could not count on her sympathy, and decided that it would be better to tell my father when we were alone.

That night I stayed on a daybed in Rowan’s sewing room. Long into the small hours, I was kept awake by the rise and fall of an argument, traveling down the corridor from Ludo and Rowan’s bedroom. They were still going at it when I fell asleep, though less ferociously than earlier.

At dawn, I went into the living room, where Lily was perched in front of the TV, eating Cheerios out of a cardboard box. When I sat down next to her, she pushed the carton under my nose. “Would you like some breakfast?” she whispered.

“Thanks, but it’s a little too early for me,” I said.

“Shhhhh,” she said. “You can’t make any noise until the little hand gets to the rabbit.” She pointed to a clock above the TV, where someone had put a rabbit-shaped sticker over the number 7.

“Only another hour to go,” I whispered.

Lily giggled. “I’m not allowed to pick my nose either but sometimes I do.”

“Me too,” I said. “It’s fine so long as you don’t eat it.”

She moved closer to my ear, and the whoosh of her breathing tickled my eardrum. “I do that sometimes too,” she said, and pulled away to see my reaction.

When I smiled, she put her finger into her nostril then licked it. “Yum!” she squealed, forgetting to be quiet, then remembering and covering her mouth. She snuggled into me and sighed, and for a few delicious moments I experienced what it would be like to have a kid sister, someone who trusted me implicitly, someone I could hug whenever I wanted. Then she wriggled away, shook the cereal packet in my face, and squawked, “Cheerios! Cheerios! Yum, yum, yum!”

Later that morning, Rowan left for work—her farewell businesslike, shot through with relief—and the nanny arrived to take the children swimming. After they’d left, Ludo came in and sat down at the table where I was eating toast, then got up and paced to the sink.

“Has anyone shown you round the stables?” he said.

“There wasn’t a tour,” I said, “when I arrived.”

In the long stable block, Ludo introduced me, by their names and breeds, to a series of twitchy mares and stallions that all stared back with disdain. In one of the stalls, a man in gumboots shoveled manure and nodded when he saw Ludo. The horses looked expensive, high maintenance, like certain kinds of women, and for the first time since I’d been on their property, it dawned on me that my father must be rich.