Libby’s thighs are chafing and she wishes she’d worn shorts instead of a skirt. She can feel sweat being absorbed by the fabric of her bra where the cups meet in the middle and she can tell that Mr Royle, in his tight-fitting suit and shirt, is finding the heat unbearable too.
‘Here we are,’ he says, turning to face a terrace of five or six red-brick houses, all of differing heights and widths. Libby guesses immediately which is hers, even before she sees the number sixteen painted on the fanlight in a curly script. The house is three floors high, four windows wide. It is beautiful. But it is, just as she’d imagined it would be, boarded up. The chimney pots and gutters are overgrown with weeds. The house is an eyesore.
But such a beautiful eyesore. Libby inhales sharply. ‘It’s very big,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ says Mr Royle. ‘Twelve rooms in total. Not including the basement.’
The house stands well back from the pavement behind ornate metal railings and an overgrown parterre garden. There is a wrought-iron canopy running towards the front door and to the left is a full-size cannon set on a concrete block.
‘Would you like me to do the honours?’ Mr Royle indicates the padlock securing the board over the front door.
Libby nods and he unlocks it, hefting the hoarding away by looping his fingers around it. It comes away with a terrible groan and behind it is a huge black door. He rubs his fingertips together and then goes through the keys methodically until he finds the one that opens the door.
‘When was the last time anyone was in this house?’ she asks.
‘Gosh, I suppose a few years back now when something flooded. We had to get in with the emergency plumbers. Repair some damage. That sort of thing. Right, here we are.’
They step into the hallway. The heat of outdoors, the hum of traffic, the echo of the river all fades away. It’s cool in here. The floor is a soft dark parquet, scarred and dusty. A staircase ahead has a dark wood barley-twist banister, with an overflowing bowl of fruit carved into the top of the newel post. The doors are carved with linen folds and have ornate bronze handles. The walls are half panelled with more dark wood and papered with tatty wine-red flock wallpaper, which has vast bald patches where the moths have eaten it away. The air is dense and full of dust motes. The only light comes from the fanlights above each doorway.
Libby shudders. There’s too much wood. Not enough light. Not enough air. She feels like she’s in a coffin. ‘Can I?’ She puts her hand to one of the doors.
‘You can do whatever you like. It’s your house.’
The door opens up into a long rectangular room at the back of the house with four windows overlooking a dense tangle of trees and bushes. More wooden panelling. Wooden shutters. More parquet underfoot.
‘Where does that go?’ she asks Mr Royle pointing at a narrow door built into the panelling.
‘That’, he replies, ‘is the door to the staff staircase. It leads directly to the smaller rooms on the attic floor, with another hidden door on the first-floor landing. Very normal in these old houses. Built like hamster cages.’
They explore the house room by room, floor by floor.
‘What happened to all the furniture? All the fittings?’ Libby asks.
‘Long gone. The family sold everything to keep afloat. They all slept on mattresses. Made their own clothes.’
‘So they were poor?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I suppose, in effect, they were poor.’
Libby nods. She hadn’t imagined her birth parents as poor. Of course she had allowed herself to create fantasy birth parents. Even children who aren’t adopted create fantasy birth parents. Her fantasy parents were young and gregarious. Their house by the river had two full walls of plate-glass windows and a wraparound terrace. They had dogs, small ones, both girls, with diamonds on their collars. Her fantasy mother worked in fashion PR, her fantasy father was a graphic designer. When she was their baby they would take her for breakfast and put her in a high chair and break up brioches for her and play footsie with each other under the table where the small dogs lay curled together. They had died driving back from a cocktail party. Most probably in a crash involving a sports car.
‘Was there anything else?’ she says. ‘Apart from the suicide note?’
Mr Royle shakes his head. ‘Well, nothing official. But there was one thing. When you were found. Something in your cot with you. I believe it’s still here. In your nursery. Shall we …?’
She follows Mr Royle into a big room on the first floor. Here there are two large sash windows overlooking the river; the air is stagnant and dense, the high corners of the room filled with thick curtains of cobweb and dust. There is an opening at the other end of the room and they turn the corner into a small room. It’s fitted as a dressing room, three walls of wardrobes and drawers decorated with ornate beading and painted white. In the centre of the room is a cot.
‘Is that …?’
‘Yes. That’s where you were found. Gurgling and chirruping by all accounts, happy as Larry.’
The cot is a rocking design with metal levers for pushing back and forth. It is painted a thick buttermilk cream with a scattering of pale blue roses. There is a small metal badge on the front with the Harrods logo on it.
Mr Royle reaches for a shelf on the back wall and picks up a small box. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘this was tucked away inside your blankets. We assumed, we all assumed, us and the police, that it was meant for you. The police held it as evidence for years then sent it back to us when the case ran dry.’
‘What is it?’
‘Open it and see.’
She takes the little cardboard box from him and pulls the flaps apart. It is filled with shreds of torn newspaper. Her fingers find something solid and silky. She brings it from the box and lets it dangle from between her fingertips. It’s a rabbit’s foot hanging from a gold chain. Libby recoils slightly and the chain slithers from her grasp and on to the wooden floor. She reaches down to pick it up.
Her fingers draw over the rabbit’s foot, feeling the cold deathliness of its sleek fur, the sharp nibs of its claws. She runs the chain through her other hand. Her head, which a week ago had been filled with new sandals, a hen night, her split ends, the houseplants that needed watering, was now filled with people sleeping on mattresses and dead rabbits and a big, scary house, empty but for a large rocking crib from Harrods with strangely sinister pale blue roses painted on the sides. She puts the rabbit’s foot back into the box and holds it, awkwardly. Then slowly she lowers her hand on to the mattress at the base of the crib, feels for the echo of her small, sleeping body, for the ghost of the person who last laid her down there, tucked her in safe with a blanket and a rabbit’s foot. But there is nothing there of course. Just an empty bed, the smell of must.
‘What was my name?’ she says. ‘Did anyone know?’
‘Yes,’ says Mr Royle. ‘Your name was written on the note that your parents left behind. It was Serenity.’
‘Serenity?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Pretty name. I think. If a little … bohemian?’
Suddenly she feels claustrophobic. She wants to run dramatically from the room, but it is not her way to be dramatic.
Instead she says, ‘Can we see the garden now, please? I could do with some fresh air.’
5
Lucy turns off her phone. She needs to keep the charge in case Samia tries to get in touch. She turns to Marco, who is looking at her curiously.
‘What?’ she says.
‘What was that message? On your phone?’
‘What message?’
‘I saw it. Just now. It said The baby is twenty-five. What does that mean?’
‘It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘It must mean something.’
‘It doesn’t. It’s just a friend’s baby. Just a reminder that they turned twenty-five. I must send a card.’
‘What friend?’
‘A friend in England.’
‘But you haven’t got any friends in England.’
‘Of course I have friends in England. I was brought up in England.’
‘Well, what’s her name?’
‘Whose name?’
Marco roars with frustration. ‘Your friend’s name, of course.’
‘What does it matter?’ she replies sharply.
‘It matters because you’re my mum and I want to know stuff about you. I like, literally, don’t know anything about you.’
‘That’s ridiculous. You know loads about me.’
He gazes at her wide-eyed and stupefied. ‘Like what? I mean, I know your parents died when you were a baby. I know you grew up in London with your aunt and that she brought you to France and taught you to play the fiddle and died when you were eighteen. So I know, like, the story of you. But I don’t know the details. Like where you went to school or who your friends were and what you did at the weekends or funny things that happened or anything normal.’
‘It’s complicated,’ she says.
‘I know it’s complicated,’ he says. ‘But I’m twelve years old now and you can’t treat me like a little baby any more. You have to tell me things.’
Lucy stares at her son. He’s right. He’s twelve and he is not interested in fairy stories any more. He knows there’s more to life than five major events, that life is made up of all the moments in between.
She sighs. ‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘Not yet.’