‘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.
‘Are you sure this is the right house?’ says Marco. ‘How does anyone live here?’
‘No one lives here at the moment,’ she says. ‘But we’re going to go inside and wait for the others to arrive.’
‘But how are we going to get in?’
Lucy breathes in deeply and says, ‘Follow me.’
39
Libby awakes the next morning in a shaft of bright sunlight. She trails her hand across the floor beneath her bed and then across the top of the bedside table trying to locate her phone. It’s not there. The night feels furry and unformed. She sits up quickly and scans the room. It is a small white room and she is on a very low wooden bed with an enormous mattress. And so is Miller.
She instinctively clutches the sheet to her chest before realising that she is dressed; she is wearing the top she had on the night before, and her underwear. She vaguely remembers pulling off her shorts while Miller was in the bathroom and ducking under the cover. She vaguely remembers swilling with toothpaste and can feel it still stuck to her teeth. She vaguely remembers a lot of things.
She is in Phin’s flat.
She is in bed with Miller.
They are both dressed and sleeping top to toe.
Last night Phin poured them glass after glass of wine. And insisted, almost to the point of being a bit weird about it, that they stay.
‘Don’t go,’ he’d said. ‘Please. I only just found you. I don’t want to lose you again.’
And she’d said, ‘You’re not going to lose me. We’re virtually neighbours now. Look!’ And she’d pointed across the river at the noble row of houses where number sixteen sat.