evaluated the situation and made a different decision. But I was so engorged with rage, not born just of being pushed into the freezing, filthy Thames, but of years of Phin blowing hot and cold at me, of giving me titbits of attention when it was in his interests to do so and totally ignoring me when it wasn’t. And I looked at him, and he was dry and beautiful and I was wet and ugly, and I turned and very firmly pressed my fingertip into the doorbell.
He stared at me. I could see him deciding whether to stay or to run. But a second later the door opened and it was David and he looked from me to Phin and back again and his shoulders rose up and his mouth tightened and he looked like a caged animal about to pounce. Very slowly and thunderously he said, ‘Get inside now.’
Phin turned then and began to run, but his father was taller than him, fitter than him; he caught up with him before Phin had even made it to the corner of the street and felled him to the pavement. I watched with my chin tipped up defensively, my teeth chattering inside my child skull, my arms wrapped around my body.
My mother appeared at the door. ‘What the hell is going on?’ she asked, peering over the top of my head. ‘What on earth have you been doing?’
‘Phin pushed me in the river,’ I stuttered through my chattering teeth.
‘Dear Jesus,’ she said, pulling me into the house. ‘Dear Jesus. Get in. Take off those clothes. What the hell …’
I didn’t go in and take my clothes off. I stood and watched David drag his fully grown son across the pavement, like a fresh kill.
That’s it then, I thought to myself, that’s it.
38
On Wednesday morning, after two nights in a rather basic B & B, and a choppy crossing over the remainder of the English Channel, Lucy hires a car at Portsmouth and they begin the drive to London.
It was winter when she’d left England and in her mind it is always cold there, the trees are always bare, the people always wrapped up against inclement weather. But England is in the grip of a long hot summer and the streets are full of tanned, happy people in shorts and sunglasses, the pavements are covered in tables, there are fountains full of children and deckchairs outside shops.
Stella stares out of the window in the back of the car with Fitz on her lap. She’s never left France before. She’s never left the Côte d’Azur before. Her short life has been lived entirely on the streets of Nice, between the Blue House, Mémé’s flat and her nursery school.
‘What do you think of England, then?’ Lucy asks, looking at her in the rear-view mirror.
‘I like it,’ says Stella. ‘it’s got good colours.’
‘Good colours, eh?’
‘Yes. The trees are extra green.’
Lucy smiles and Marco gives her the next direction towards the motorway from the Google Maps app.
Three hours later London starts to appear in flashes of shabby high street.
She sees Marco turn to face the window, expecting Big Ben and Buckingham Palace and getting Dixie Fried Chicken and second-hand appliance stores.
Finally they cross the river and it is a glorious sunny day: the river glitters with dropped diamonds of sunlight; the houses of Cheyne Walk gleam brightly.
‘Here we are,’ she says to Marco. ‘This is the place.’
‘Which one?’ he asks, slightly breathlessly.
‘There,’ says Lucy, pointing at number sixteen. Her tone is light but her heart races painfully at the sight of the house.
‘The one with the hoarding?’ says Marco. ‘That one?’
‘Yes,’ she says, peering at the house whilst also keeping an eye out for parking.
‘It’s big,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It certainly is.’
But strangely, it looks smaller to her now, through adult’s eyes. As a child she’d thought it was a mansion. Now she can see it is just a house. A beautiful house, but still, just a house.
It becomes clear that there is no parking to be had anywhere near the house and they end up at the other end of the King’s Road, in a space in World’s End that requires downloading a parking app on to her phone.
It’s thirty degrees, as hot as the south of France.
By the time they get to the house they are all sweating and the dog is panting.
The wooden hoarding is padlocked. They stand in a row and study the building.