The Girl Below(70)

By early afternoon, Harold had returned with two cardboard boxes of books and papers he’d picked up from Peggy’s. He’d found the key to her flat on the same chain as the car keys and had gone for a spontaneous visit. I was in the kitchen when he got back, lethargically making myself an instant coffee—I had mainlined the last of the espresso that morning—and he saw what I was doing and said, “That’s it. We’re going to Holland Park Café. Now.”

I was too taken aback to refuse, and seven minutes later found myself scurrying after him up the steep cycle track to Holland Park. “There’s absolutely no point whatsoever in strolling,” he said, when we reached the café. “If your heart’s not racing, it doesn’t count as exercise.”

We sat in a fenced-off enclosure, on sturdy wooden furniture that was crusted in places with lichen. The day was crisp, with a breeze that flurried nearby leaves and blew my hair into my face. It wasn’t bright enough for sunglasses, but the light had a penetrating quality that made the pores on Harold’s nose stand out. I wished I had not looked at them so closely, for afterward the lunch felt too intimate. Harold had been talking about the visit to Peggy’s flat, how morbid it was, and I was only half listening until he mentioned that someone had ripped up the floorboards in his old room.

I told him I had seen them when I stayed there. “Do you think it was Peggy?” I asked. “I saw her cutting up curtains.”

“It could have been. But there were a couple of strange incidents a while back with her neighbor Jimmy.”

I was immediately intrigued, but at that moment our lunch arrived and Harold started banging on about his twenty-first birthday. He had found the old videotape at Pippa’s and watched it that morning. He told me that Peggy had taken out a huge loan to pay for the extravagance. “That was how she operated,” he said. “She handed you the moon and stars then expected you to spend the rest of your life being grateful.”

“She took out a loan just to pay for a party?” I said, shocked.

“It was the same with my education. She sent me to all the best schools and reminded me every day of her sacrifice.” Over the next thirty-five minutes I got an in-depth account of Harold’s Cambridge years—term-time escapades with what he referred to as “the sons and daughters of the ruling elite,” and interludes at home with his alcoholic mother. “She always wanted to know who I’d met and what I’d done with them, and when they were going to offer me a job—even when I was only halfway through my degree.” He said he would never have gone to Cambridge if Peggy hadn’t forced him. His education had been nothing but a burden, creating enormous expectations he couldn’t possibly live up to. And so it went on. He seemed to have a chip on his shoulder about almost everything. He didn’t fit into the upper echelons he had been educated alongside but had been rejected by everyone else for being overeducated, too posh. He was, he said, virtually unemployable. In his mind, all his misfortune, his sense of alienation, was Peggy’s fault and hers alone. At least those had been the bits I could follow.

While I digested what he’d said, it occurred to me that Harold was trapped in a version of his life story that had ended decades ago—or would have, if he’d let it. The thought of ending up like him when I was in my forties, still stewing over what my parents had or hadn’t done to me as a child, was dismal, and it struck me that there had to be a cut-off point, where it all stopped being their fault and started to become my own. “It’s definitely going to rain,” I said, standing up and feeling the first drops on my face.

Harold stood too. “Mind if we check out the old loggia before going back? I haven’t been there for years.”

I minded, but he was already halfway across the lawn, so I followed him. The rain began its promised assault, first in fat, cold droplets, then in squalling sheets, forcing us to take shelter on a stone bench in a secluded alcove. In different company, the circumstances might have been romantic, but as they were, I felt horribly trapped. Harold’s monologue had moved on to his divorce, the long, slow, ordinary breakdown of his marriage—the kids got older; they grew apart; had affairs; tried counseling, didn’t work—and as the tale went on, I had one of those terrible epiphanies in which you see an aspect of your own personality that has hitherto been hidden: I suddenly saw myself having swapped places with Harold, carrying on like he was, complaining about my life to Alana and a host of others before her. I didn’t have to worry about ending up like Harold in my forties; I had already been like him for years.