Dido smiles at her. ‘Come on then,’ she said, ‘three and a half more hours of normality. Let’s get it over with, shall we?’
67
Lucy has the flat to herself for another hour. She uses it to have a bath, to paint her fingernails, to dry her hair with a dryer and make it sit neatly over her shoulders, to moisturise, to put on make-up. She still doesn’t take these things for granted. It has been a year since Henry found her in the house in Cheyne Walk, since he brought Serenity to them, since they were all reunited. For a year Lucy has lived with Henry in his immaculate flat in Marylebone, where she has slept on a double bed under soft cotton sheets and had nothing more to do with her days than walk the dog and prepare delicious meals. She and Clemency meet up once a month and drink champagne and talk about their children and music and Henry’s idiosyncrasies and anything, in fact, other than what happened to them both when they were young. They will never be as close as they once were, but they are still the best of friends.
Marco is thirteen now and enrolled at a trendy private school in Regent’s Park, which Henry has been paying for and where ‘everyone vapes and takes ket’ apparently. He has lost his French accent completely and, as he says, ‘I now identify as a Londoner.’
Stella is six and in year one of a nice primary school in Marylebone where she has two best friends who are both called Freya.
Yesterday Lucy took the tube to Chelsea and stood outside the house. The hoarding has been taken down and the for-sale sign outside has been swapped for a sold sign. Soon the house will be alive with the sound of drills and hammers as it is taken apart and put back together again to suit the tastes and needs of another family. Soon, someone else will be calling it home and they will never know, never suspect for even a moment the truth about what happened within those walls all those years ago, how four children were imprisoned and broken and then released into the world, damaged, incomplete, lost and warped. It’s hard for Lucy to remember the girl she was then, hard for her to accept an incarnation of herself that was so desperate for attention that she would sleep with both a father and a son. She looks at Stella sometimes, her tiny perfect girl, and tries to imagine her at thirteen years old giving herself like that just to feel loved. It makes her feel unimaginable pain.
Her phone pings and she experiences as she always does, and probably always will, a shiver of unease. Michael’s murder has not been solved but has been widely accepted to have been the result of some unpaid debts to his associates in the criminal underworld. She saw one mention of herself in a French paper shortly after the murder hit the headlines:
Rimmer, who has been married twice, is believed to have a child with his first wife, a Briton known only by the name of ‘Lucy’。 According to Rimmer’s housekeeper, he and his former wife recently had a brief reunion, but she is not considered to be a suspect in the case.
But she will never be truly relaxed about the possibility of being tracked down by some fresh-faced young detective, newly qualified and desperate to prove themselves. She will never, she suspects, be truly relaxed ever again.
But it’s not a message from a rookie detective, it’s a message from Libby: a screenshot of a page from her bank statement accompanied by the word Kerching!
There it is, thinks Lucy, and a shiver of relief runs through her. The end of this phase of her life. The beginning of the next. Now she can buy a place of her own. At last. A place for her and her children and her dog. A forever place that no one will be able to take away from her. And then, she thinks, then she will be able to discover exactly what it is that she should be doing with her life. She would like, she thinks, to study the violin. She would like to be a professional musician. And now there are no barriers in her way.
The first half of Lucy’s life was tainted and dark, one struggle after another. The second half will be golden.
She replies to Libby’s message.
Champagne all round! See you later sweetheart. I cannot wait to celebrate with you. Everything.