told her she was the most beautiful fiddler he’d ever seen, who’d brought her to his elegant rose-pink house and handed her soft towels to dry herself with after half an hour in a shower cubicle tiled with gold mosaic, who’d combed out the wet strands of her hair and made her shudder when his fingertips brushed against her bare shoulders, who’d handed her grimy clothes to his maid to be washed and pressed and returned to her in an origami fan upon the counterpane of her bed in the guest suite. Back then he’d been nothing but soft touches and awe and gentleness. Of course she’d trusted him.
So she’d told him everything, the whole story, and he’d looked at her with shining hazel eyes and said, ‘It’s OK, you’re safe now. You’re safe now.’ And then he’d got her a passport. She had no idea how or from whom. The information on it was not entirely accurate: it was not her correct name, nor was it her correct date of birth or her correct place of birth. But it was a good passport, a passport that had got her to the Maldives and back, that had got her to Barbados and back, to Italy and Spain and New York and back without anyone ever asking any questions.
And now it has expired and she has no means of getting another one and no means of getting back to England. Not to mention the fact that there are no passports for the children nor a pet passport for the dog.
She closes her passport and sighs. There are two ways around this obstacle and one of them is dangerous and illegal and the other is just plain dangerous. Her only other alternative is not to go at all.
At this thought her mind fills with images of leaving England twenty-four years ago. She replays those last moments as she’s replayed them a thousand times: the sound of the door clicking behind her for the very last time, whispering, I’ll be back soon, I promise you, I promise you, I promise you, under her breath a dozen times as she ran down Cheyne Walk in the dark of the middle of the night, her heart pounding, her breath catching, her nightmare both ending, and beginning.
17
CHELSEA, 1988
It was almost two weeks before Phineas Thomsen deigned to talk to me. Or maybe it was the other way round, who knows. I’m sure he’d have his own take on it. But in my recollection (and this is of course entirely my recollection) it was him.
I was, as ever, hanging around the kitchen with my mother, eavesdropping on her conversation with the women who now seemed to live in our house. I’d subliminally determined at this point that the only way to really know what was going on in the world was to listen to women talk. Anyone who ignores the chatter of women is poorer by any measure.
By now Birdie and Justin had been living with us for almost five months, the Thomsens for nearly two weeks. The conversation in the kitchen on this particular day was one that operated on a kind of forty-eight-hour rotating cycle: the vexing matter of where Sally and David were going to live. At this point I was still clinging pathetically to the fallacy that Sally and David were only staying for a short while. Every few days a possibility would appear on the horizon and be talked about at length and the feeling that Sally and David were about to move on would hang briefly, tantalisingly in the air until, pop, the ‘possibility’ would be found to have an inherent flaw and they’d be back to the drawing board. Right now the ‘possibility’ was a houseboat in Chiswick. It belonged to a patient of David’s who was going backpacking for a year and needed someone to look after her bearded dragons.
‘Only one bedroom, though,’ Sally was saying to my mother and Birdie. ‘And a tiny bedroom at that. Obviously David and I could sleep on the berths in the living room, but it’s a bit cramped because of the vivariums.’
‘Gosh,’ said Birdie, picking, picking at the dry skin around her nails, the flakes landing on the cat’s back. ‘How many are there?’
‘Vivariums?’
‘Whatever. Yes.’
‘No idea. Six or so. We might have to find a way to pile them up.’
‘But what about the children?’ my mother asked. ‘Will they want to share? Especially a double bed. I mean, Phin’s going to be