The Girl Below(93)

“This one’s on the house,” he said, flustered that I was leaving. “We’ve barely had half a session.”

“Good-bye,” I said, quickly, and walked out of his office for the very last time, the only time I’d done so without feeling robbed.





Chapter Twenty


Skyros, 2003





My suspicions that Pippa hadn’t summoned me to Skyros wholly to atone for her guilt were confirmed the morning after I arrived when my duties began. She didn’t say as much, but it was obvious they needed an extra pair of hands—women’s hands. In times of sickness and death, women were still expected to cook, clean, and change soiled bedding, whereas men were permitted to invent reasons to be absent. Or they didn’t invent reasons but simply made themselves scarce, as Ari did, a little after nine in the morning, telling Pippa not to worry, that he wouldn’t need lunch—as though by eating out he was somehow doing her a huge favor. I didn’t know where Harold was, and cared even less, but the news that Caleb had also gone off for the day, to the beach, was a blow. I had wanted to talk to him, to attempt to tell him what had happened the night before. Just having to say out loud that I had gone back in time and visited the communal garden would make it seem like a thing that was impossible, and when Caleb laughed and dismissed it as nonsense, I would laugh too and think he was right.

Soiled sheets, at any rate, were a distraction, and directly after breakfast Pippa set me to work in the laundry at a cranky cast-iron washing machine that refused to spin clothes and shuddered off its support blocks in protest. Wet clothes had to be wrung out in a mangle, which is how they ended up if you didn’t feed the garments in at the correct angle and speed. One load took me two hours, and after I’d hung it all out in the sun to dry, my shoulders were almost as bent out of shape as Elena’s. I was sweating too, and cursing under my breath, when Pippa appeared at the end of the clothesline with a glass of iced water. After I had gulped it down, she said Peggy had asked to see me.

“Are you sure she asked for me by name? She always calls me Hillary, and I stopped trying to correct her.”

“Oh yes,” said Pippa, pulling us under the fig tree for shade. “She asked for the young woman who’d read to her so nicely—she remembered your name and also that you had taken a shine to Madeline.”

“I haven’t taken a shine to Madeline. She gives me the creeps.”

Pippa laughed. “It’s probably just another one of her stories. The other day she started going on about a fellow in the village square who had asked for her hand in marriage—I expect she was reliving something that happened years ago. She’s been babbling a lot about her old lovers, especially the gay one.”

“Peggy was a lesbian?”

“God no, but she was in love with a gay man. She probably showed you his photograph on her fantasy wall.”

I recalled the short, effeminate man with the big smile. “The one she calls the love of her life?”

“His name was Lawrence,” said Pippa. “They worked at the same theater. He was a raving queen, but in those days you got arrested for buggery, so they came to an arrangement.”

“You mean she was his beard?”

Pippa nodded. “Something like that. He was fond of her too, maybe not in the same way, but fond enough to get engaged.”

“But they never married?”

“No. It was a very sad business. Just before the wedding, he was arrested in the toilets on Hampstead Heath. He couldn’t face going to court and he hanged himself.”

“That’s so terrible,” I said, and felt that it really was a double tragedy. Not only had the suicide list won but Peggy had lost someone she loved dearly, knowing all the while that she had not been enough for him.

Peggy was dozing when we went in, but she still had her pinkie looped through the handle of a teacup that rested precariously on the counterpane. “Is that really tea?” I whispered, while Pippa tried to unhook Peggy’s finger from the cup without waking her. “She doesn’t normally take it black.”

Pippa shook her head. “I gave in,” she said. “It seemed mean to take away her best chum so near the end. But so as not to offend Elena, I made her pretend it was tea.”

Just then Peggy stirred, and her eyelids flicked open as though she’d had a fright. She stared at us both.

“Suki,” she said, perfectly lucid. “I thought you’d never get here.”

“It took a while, but here I am.” I took her hand, the coldest thing on the island, while Pippa turned to fiddle with the morphine pump. “And I brought all the stuff you asked for—even the fur coat. Your hands are freezing—perhaps you need it after all.”