The Girl Below(9)

He looked up from the bowl. “A bath?” he said, his voice in ruins. “Why in God’s name would I do that?”

I looked at Mum, who was looking at Dad as though she didn’t want him to eat the cake mix. “I don’t know,” I said. “But some people were taking a bath and I thought maybe—”

“He didn’t take a bath,” said my mother, shooing me out with uncharacteristic force. “No one did.” When the bedroom door had closed behind me, I heard a surge, and Mum exclaiming, “Oh no, the bowl isn’t big enough!”

By lunchtime, most people had gone home, but Jean Luc and Henri were still there, smoking cigarettes and coughing while they slugged down small cups of coffee that they’d made in a funny machine on the stove. In the communal garden, they played a rowdy game of hide-and-seek, running between plane trees and diving into bushes, but their rules were haphazard and they didn’t seem to care whether they found each other or not. When they tired of that game, they progressed to wrestling, puppylike, on the lawn, rolling and grabbing at each other’s pants and untucked shirts. In the early afternoon, they discovered the hatch to the air-raid shelter and Jean Luc asked if we could open it up and go down.





Chapter Three


London, 2003





I had copied Pippa’s phone number off the wall at Peggy’s and had rung her the next day, but nearly two months passed before she got around to inviting me to dinner. I didn’t suppose Pippa had even noticed it was that long because life had filled the gap, whereas in my case—drifting and friendless—each day I’d felt a little more snubbed. When the invitation finally came, I almost could not go through with it. She’d been brisk with me on the phone, and afterward I’d realized that my adoration of her had been entirely one way. To her, I was probably just a kid she had looked after for pocket money. On top of that, I had fallen for the irresistible lure of a reunion  , so cozy when imagined, so stilted in reality.

Pippa had only moved round the corner from her childhood home, to a few hundred meters past the Westway on Ladbroke Grove. Back in the day, the arches of the Westway had been where junkies went to score drugs, the structure itself serving as an unofficial marker between good real estate and bad. Nowadays, the area beyond it was a precinct where fashion designers had workrooms and hipsters bought their first flats. Pippa’s building was one of the shabby ones, its Victorian facade battered from traffic fumes and dust. At the front door I hesitated, and wished I’d never called her, never arranged this meeting.

Then, on the third-floor landing, my reservations evaporated in a riot of Mediterranean aromas. I was starving, and in no position to turn down a free meal, especially when the host was married to a chef. Ahead of me, the front door was wide open and Pippa rushed out to embrace me, her green eyes huge and flashing. I’d forgotten she was an exact physical replica of her mother, and though neither woman was conventionally beautiful, through sheer force of personality they conjured up a much more powerful charisma. There were also the breasts—so bountiful that even a woman’s eye was drawn to stare.

“Suki, darling!” she exclaimed. “It’s so wonderful to see you!” Her voice was louder than I remembered, and more musical. Through her thin clothes, she jangled and pulsed, as if plugged into an electric socket.

“You too,” I said, trying not to tense up. It was the first time in almost a year that anyone had hugged me. “I feel so bad about crashing in on Peggy like that. I had no idea she was so ill.”

“Don’t be silly, she loves an audience,” said Pippa. “It’s being alone she can’t stand. Besides, she’s perked up since then, and if you hadn’t popped in to see her, you wouldn’t be here now.”

A few more of my reservations dissolved. “Peggy’s better?”

“Much better. Yesterday she ticked me off, for wearing jeans—she thinks denim is so working class—and I took that as a sign she was on the mend. Later on she even got out of bed. One of the doctors said she’d never walk again, but she made it as far as the booze cabinet before collapsing. I expect she wanted to prove him wrong.”

“She didn’t hurt herself when she collapsed?”

“No, no, she sort of fell into a nearby armchair, and went to sleep with the bottle in her hand. Business as usual there.”

I chose this moment to offer up the bottle of plonk I’d bought from the off-license by the tube station. Pippa peered into the brown paper bag, then shrank from it, visibly disgusted.

“I’m really sorry,” I said, mortified. “I couldn’t afford anything decent.”