right now. She’d sat in April’s back garden on Saturday night flirting mildly with Danny – who was not really all that hot, had a face like an eight-year-old boy and very small hands – and she’d looked around for someone she could talk to about the crazy things happening to her, about the house and the magazine article and the dead parents and the person coughing in the attic. But all she’d seen was people like her, normal people, with normal lives, people who still lived at home with their parents or in tiny flats with partners and friends, people with unpaid-off student loans, unexceptional jobs, unexceptional dreams, fake tans, handbag dogs, white teeth, clean hair. She’d felt caught between two painfully disparate places and had left before eleven, come home to her laptop and back to the internet’s take on what had happened to Serenity Lamb.
But this had raised more questions than it had answered and she’d finally slammed down the lid of her laptop at 2 a.m. and gone to bed where her sleep had been disturbed, her dreams filled with strange leitmotifs and encounters.
‘I need some advice,’ she says to Dido now. ‘About the Chelsea thing.’
‘Oh yes,’ says Dido, rubbing the oversized silver disc that hangs from a chain around her neck. ‘What sort of advice?’
‘Well, just to talk about it, really. You know about … houses. I thought you’d know about houses.’
‘Well, I know about a house. Not houses in general. But sure, yes, why not. Come for supper.’
‘When?’
‘Tonight?’
‘Yes,’ Libby says, ‘yes, please.’
Dido’s cottage is beautiful. It’s double-fronted with leaded windows, tiny pink roses growing across the doorway and there, outside, her shiny black Fiat Spider with its tan convertible roof. The car complements the cottage and the cottage complements the car and Libby can’t help herself from taking her phone from her bag and photographing it for her Instagram page. Dido greets her at the door in wide floral trousers and a black vest top. Her hair is held from her face by large red sunglasses and she is barefoot. Libby has only ever seen her in clumpy work shoes so it’s a surprise to see two small, white, perfectly pedicured feet with rose-pink nails.
‘This is so lovely,’ she says, stepping through the small door into a white hallway with a terracotta tiled floor. ‘Just beautiful.’
Dido’s house is full of what Libby assumes must be heirlooms and inheritances; nothing here from TK Maxx. The walls are hung with bright abstract art and Libby remembers Dido once mentioning that her mother was also an artist. Dido takes them through French doors at the back of the cottage and they sit in her perfect little country garden on old-fashioned Lloyd Loom rattan chairs, upholstered with floral cushions. It occurs to Libby as she takes in the back of Dido’s beautiful house that maybe Dido doesn’t actually need to work. That maybe her job designing posh kitchens is just a nice little hobby.
Dido brings out a bowl of quinoa and avocado salad, another bowl of buttered potatoes, a loaf of dark bread and two champagne glasses for the Prosecco that Libby brought with her.
‘How long have you lived here?’ Libby asks, buttering some of the dark bread.
‘Since I was twenty-three, when I moved back from Hong Kong. It was my mother’s cottage. She kept it for me. My brother, of course, was set to inherit the house, but then, well, things changed …’
Libby smiles, blankly. ‘The house’. ‘The cottage’. Another world entirely. ‘So sad,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ Dido agrees. ‘But the house is a curse. I’m glad it’s nothing to do with me.’
Libby nods. A week ago she’d have had no notion of big beautiful houses being curses, now she is closer to understanding.
‘So, tell me about your house? Tell me everything.’
Libby sips her Prosecco, places the glass on the table and then leans back into her chair. ‘I found an article,’ she begins, ‘in the Guardian. About the house. About my parents. About me.’
‘You?’
‘Yes,’ says Libby, rubbing at the points of her elbows. ‘It’s all a bit bizarre. You see, I was adopted as a baby, when I was nearly a year old. The house in Chelsea, it belonged to my birth parents. And according to the article I was born into a cult.’
The word sounds horrible leaving her mouth. It’s a word she’s been trying her hardest to avoid using, to avoid even thinking about. It’s so at odds with the pathetic fantasy she’d spent her