‘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 life wallowing in. She sees Dido bristle slightly with excitement.
‘What!’
‘A cult. According to this article there was a sort of cult in the house in Chelsea. Lots of people lived there. They were all living spartanly. Sleeping on the floor. Wearing robes that they made themselves. Yet …’ She reaches into her bag and pulls out the printout of the article. ‘Look, this was my mum and dad, six years before I was born, at a charity ball. I mean, look at them.’
Dido takes the article from her hands and looks. ‘Gosh,’ she says, ‘very glamorous.’
‘I know! My mother was a socialite. She ran a fashion PR company. She was once engaged to an Austrian prince. She’s just stunning.’
Seeing her mother’s face had been extraordinary; there was something reminiscent of Priscilla Presley about the dyed black hair and piercing blue eyes. Her mother had lived up to every one of her childhood fantasies, right down to the job in PR. Her father … well, he was very well dressed, but smaller than she’d imagined, shorter than her mother, with a slightly arrogant tilt to his chin but something oddly defensive in the way he looked at the photographer, as though expecting trouble of some kind. He held his arm around Martina Lamb’s waist, the tips of his fingers just visible in the shot; she gripped a silk shawl around her shoulders with ringed fingers and the edges of her hip bone made indents in the fabric of her evening dress. It was, according to the article, the last photo taken of the ‘socialite couple’ before they disappeared from view, only to be found dead on their kitchen floor seven years later.