I stared at him, willing him to say something clear and enlightening. But my father didn’t have the emotional intelligence or, indeed, since his stroke, the vocabulary to be clear or enlightening. He pulled a cigar from the pocket of his jacket and spent some time preparing it to be smoked. ‘Are you not keen on them, then?’ he said eventually.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’m not. Will they ever go?’
‘Well, if I had anything to do with it …’
‘But it’s your house. Surely you have everything to do with it.’
I caught my breath, worried I’d pushed him too far.
But he just sighed. ‘You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?’
His obtuseness was killing me. I wanted to scream. I said, ‘Can’t you just tell them to go? Tell them we want our house back. That we want to go to school again. That we don’t want them here any more?’
‘No,’ said my father. ‘No. I can’t.’
‘But why?’
My voice had risen an octave and I could see my father recoil.
‘I told you,’ he snapped. ‘It’s your mother. She needs them. She needs him.’
‘Him?’ I said. ‘David?’
‘Yes. David. Apparently he makes her feel better about her pointless existence. Apparently he gives her life “meaning”。 Now,’ he growled, opening up a newspaper, ‘you said you wouldn’t talk. How about you stick to your word?’
21
Miller Roe stands outside the house on Cheyne Walk, staring at his phone. He looks even more rumpled than he’d looked that morning in the café on West End Lane. He straightens when he sees Libby and Dido approach and he smiles.
‘Miller, this is Dido, my colleague—’ She corrects herself: ‘My friend. Dido, this is Miller Roe.’
They shake hands and then all turn to face the house. Its windows glow golden in the light of the evening sun.
‘Libby Jones,’ says Dido, ‘good grief. You own an actual mansion.’
Libby smiles and turns to open the padlock. She feels no sense of ownership as they cluster together in the hallway, looking around themselves. She still expects the solicitor to appear, striding ahead of them authoritatively.
‘I see what you mean about all the wood,’ says Miller. ‘You know, this house used to be full of stuffed animal heads and hunting knives. Apparently there were actual thrones, just here …’ He indicates the spots on either side of the staircase. ‘His and hers,’ he adds wryly.
‘Who told you about the thrones?’ asks Dido.
‘Old friends of Henry and Martina, who used to come here for raucous dinner parties in the seventies and early eighties. When Henry and Martina were socialites. When their children were tiny. It was all very glamorous, apparently.’
‘So, all those old friends,’ Dido continues, ‘where were they when everything turned dark?’
‘Oh God, they weren’t proper friends. They were parents of the children’s friends at school, transient neighbours, cosmopolitan flotsam and jetsam. Nobody who really cared about them. Just people who remembered them.’
‘And their thrones,’ says Libby.
‘Yes.’ Miller smiles. ‘And their thrones.’
‘And what about extended family?’ Dido asks. ‘Where were they?’
‘Well, Henry had no family. He was an only child, both parents were dead. Martina’s father was estranged, her mother remarried and was living in Germany with a second family. Apparently she kept trying to come over and Martina kept putting her off. She even sent one of her sons over, in 1992; he came and knocked at the door every day for five days and nobody ever replied. He said he heard noises, saw curtains moving. The phone line rang dead. The mother was racked with guilt that she hadn’t tried harder to access her daughter. Never got over it. Can I …？’ He’s veering to the left, towards the kitchen.