Libby recognises the song immediately. She never knew what it was called or who it was by, but she knows it very well.
The video opens with the band performing in front of the river. They are all dressed similarly in tweed and braces and caps and DM boots. There are many of them, probably about ten members in all. Two of them are women, one of whom plays the fiddle, the other some kind of leathery drum.
‘There,’ says Phin, pausing the video and pointing at the screen. ‘That’s Birdie. Her with the long hair.’
Libby stares at the woman on the screen. A scrawny thing, weak-chinned and serious. She holds her fiddle hard against her chin and stares at the camera imperiously. ‘That’s Birdie?’ she says. She cannot equate this frail, unimpressive-looking woman with the woman in the story Phin told them last night, the sadistic woman who presided over a household of cruelty and abuse.
Phin nods. ‘Yup. Fucking evil bitch.’
He presses play again and the band are now inside a house, a glorious, riotous house filled with oil paintings and overblown furniture, red velvet thrones, gleaming swords and polished panelling, swagged curtains, moose heads, stuffed foxes and glittering chandeliers. The camera follows the band as they skip through the house with their instruments, posing on an ornate carved staircase, charging down wood-panelled corridors, play-fighting with the swords, modelling a knight’s helmet, astride the cannon in the front garden and in front of a huge stone fireplace full of burning logs.
‘Oh my God,’ says Libby. ‘It was so beautiful.’
‘Yes,’ says Phin drily, ‘wasn’t it? And that bitch and my father systematically destroyed it.’
Libby’s gaze returns to the image on the television screen. Ten young people, a house full of life and money and energy and warmth. ‘I don’t understand,’ she says quietly, ‘how it all turned out the way it did.’
42
The early afternoon sun is still hot against their skin as Lucy, the children and the dog walk around the corner to the block of flats behind number sixteen Cheyne Walk. They tiptoe quickly through the communal garden to the rickety door at the back and she gestures to the children to be silent as they pass through the woody area and out on to the lawn which is parched brown by the long hot summer.
She notices with surprise that the back door to the house is unlocked. A pane of glass is broken. The breaks in the glass look fresh. A shiver runs down her spine.
She puts her hand through the broken pane and turns the handle on the inside. The door opens and she breathes a sigh of relief that she won’t have to scale the side of the house to get in through the roof.
‘It’s scary,’ says Stella, following Lucy into the house.
‘Yes,’ agrees Lucy, ‘it is, a bit.’
‘I think it’s awesome,’ says Marco, running his hand across the top of a huge pillared radiator and gazing around the room.
As she shows the children around the house it feels to Lucy as if not one mote of dust or string of cobweb has moved since she was last here. It feels as though it has been in stasis waiting for her to come back. The smell, whilst musty, is also darkly familiar. The way the light slices through the dark rooms, the sound of her feet against the floorboards, the shadows across the walls. It is all exactly the same. She trails her fingertips across surfaces as they step through the house. In the space of a week she has revisited the two most significant houses of her life, Antibes and Chelsea, the two places where she was hurt, where she was broken, from where she was forced to escape. The weight of it all lies heavy in her heart.
After the tour of the house they sit out in the garden. The shadows cast by the overgrown foliage are long and cool.
Lucy watches Marco picking around the garden with a stick. He’s wearing a black T-shirt and for a fleeting moment she sees him as Henry, tending his herb garden. She almost jumps to her feet to check his face. But then she remembers: Henry is a man now. Not a boy.