The Hiding Place Page 3

  Afterwards she calls a friend and suggests a night out. She pulls on her favourite black dress with lace sleeves and scalloped edges, brushes her hair and applies red lipstick. When she looks at herself in the mirror she frowns. It takes a moment before she realises what has unnerved her: she is exactly like the image she created of her mother so many years ago.

  4

  Connie

  April 1964

  ‘Peppermint?’ Doctor Franklin leaned across his desk and held out the tin.

  Connie took one. Outside the surgery, a robin landed on the window ledge. Some people believed the appearance of a bird was a supernatural message from a loved one, but to Connie, the robin just seemed like, well . . . a robin.

  The doctor folded his arms. He had a heavy build, a large, bald head and a nose that was too small for his puffy face. Connie noted the thick gold wedding band, his rough fingers with their hairy knuckles. How different from Johnny’s soft skin and smooth chest. Her breath caught in her throat as it always did when she thought about Johnny. She tried to focus and licked her dry lips. The room felt stifling. An electric wall fire was switched on full.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ said Doctor Franklin.

  How should she begin? She had rehearsed the conversation, speaking aloud to her reflection in the mirror, but each time the dialogue had turned out differently and she had no idea what to say.

  Time had gone by with no sign of her period. For a while she had tried to forget about it. She had worked in the bookshop, cared for her father, cleaned and cooked. Every day she had searched the post box, longing for a letter from Johnny.

  The days weren’t so bad because she had plenty to do, but at night she lay awake staring into the darkness, thinking, imagining. She told herself it would be all right. Her period would come. It was only a matter of time. But another night passed, and then another and there was no blood on the toilet tissue.

  One night, exhausted from lack of sleep, she had begun to cry. Quietly at first and then more loudly, until she was sobbing. She had tried to stifle the sound, knowing her father in the room next door might hear her, but part of her had hoped that he’d hear, and she had promised herself that if he came she would tell him the truth and accept the consequences. But he must have been sleeping soundly because he hadn’t appeared. Her tears had subsided and she had slipped into an uneasy sleep. In the morning, she had gone back to believing that it was nature playing tricks. Her period would come. Of course it would.

  But now, she could no longer pretend that her body wasn’t changing. It was the sickness she felt every morning; the heavy feeling in her breasts; the thirst; the need to rush to the toilet. She clung to the idea that they signified something else, but she had to check. She had to be sure. It was the only way to stop this panic that was spiralling through her, affecting everything she did.

  ‘Connie?’ The doctor said.

  She looked at the robin for guidance. It hopped and pecked and flew away.

  He coughed.

  ‘I’ve been off colour,’ she said.

  ‘Off colour,’ he repeated, his hand creeping towards the prescription pad. ‘What are your symptoms?’

  Connie swallowed. ‘I feel sick.’

  ‘Sick?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Anything else?’ His fingers rested on the paper. ‘Any aches or pains?’

  ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘Are you sleeping well?’

  ‘Yes,’ she lied. No point telling him how often she lay awake at night, missing her mother, missing Johnny, worrying about her predicament, her fear and loneliness so acute that it felt like pain.

  Doctor Franklin pulled the pad towards him. She had never liked him, and neither had her mother. Not that her mother had told her so directly. She would only mutter that he took more interest in his lunch than in his patients. Connie knew too that her father thought the cancer should have been detected sooner. He blamed Doctor Franklin for not diagnosing it in time.

  ‘Is it your period, perhaps?’ he asked, smiling a little.

  She gripped the sides of the chair, hating his tone. Maybe she should have gone to a different surgery, but where? If there were any other options, she didn’t know what they were.

  He blinked, glanced at the clock on the desk. It was two minutes after twelve. Lunchtime perhaps. As if to confirm the suspicion, his stomach rumbled.

  Connie’s gaze lit on a photo of the doctor’s wife and three children in a brass frame next to the clock. She remembered a story Harry had told her about his cousin’s friend. The girl had been made pregnant by her married neighbour. There had been talk that she had been forced, although nothing was proved, and regardless of that, Doctor Franklin had refused to recommend an abortion. In the end, she had gone to a backstreet. Hot water, carbolic mixtures, douches and knitting needles. The girl had nearly bled to death.

  Why would Doctor Franklin make a different decision for Connie? Besides, she knew his recommendation wouldn’t be enough. She wasn’t sure how getting an abortion worked. She only knew it wasn’t easy and would cost money and where would she get that?

  The doctor coughed again.

  Connie gathered herself. ‘Yes. I mean I don’t have it now, but . . .’

  ‘Ah.’ He rocked gently from side to side as if unsticking the seat of his trousers. A line of sweat had gathered on his upper lip. Connie could feel her own sweat pooling between her breasts.

  ‘You’re probably low on iron,’ he said. ‘It’s common in young girls. Are you eating well?’

  ‘Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.’

  Picking up his pen, he paused and gave her another look. ‘And you have no other symptoms?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘In that case . . .’ He scribbled a prescription, signed it with a flourish, tore off the sheet and handed it across. ‘This is a tonic,’ he said. ‘Take it three times a day and you’ll be as right as rain. Your diet is poor, that’ll be it. It’s not surprising without . . .’ He stopped, winced, glanced at his watch. ‘Give my best to your father, won’t you? Is he recovering, keeping busy?’

  It would take more than keeping busy to make her father stop missing her mother, but she told the doctor he was fine.

  Outside, she ran, her feet pounding on the pavement. How stupid she was. How cowardly. Seeing the doctor had been a waste of time. But if she hadn’t had the courage to confess to him, who could she tell?

  There was no one. If only her mother were alive. She would know what to do. She had been practical, no-nonsense. Connie had heard her talk more than once about the unfairness of women’s lives hanging in the balance as they waited for the doctors’ judgement. A solution was available only for girls who were rich, she had said, and could get themselves to Harley Street. Not that her mother had thought lightly about abortion, but she thought there should be a choice for those in desperate straits.

  Was Connie in desperate straits? She wasn’t sure. And perhaps she could solve the problem herself. She had heard that moving heavy furniture might bring on a miscarriage, or flinging yourself down the stairs. There were poisons that would flush the baby clean away. Or bleach, or alcohol. She pictured drinking a bottle of gin or tripping deliberately. She felt sick. Imagine doing that on purpose. How much blood would there be?

  She stopped, shivering despite the heat. The day Mrs Kolinski lost her baby there’d been so much blood. Connie had been on her way to meet Johnny in the attic when she’d found her neighbour collapsed on the stairs, her daughter Eva, who was only three years old, with her. Connie had raised the alarm, shouting and banging on doors and sprinting to the phone box to call for help. By the time she had got back, Johnny’s mother, Dorothy, was there, mopping up the blood. Dorothy had been a midwife once upon a time. According to Johnny she had given it up when he had been born. Now she took in laundry.

  Connie carried on walking. Her thoughts were muddled. Her brain foggy with indecision. She reached the High Road and veered into the chemist to pick
up her prescription. Afterwards, she walked more slowly until she reached Harrington Gardens. From the end of the street, she could see the bright red leaves of the maple tree marking where she lived, number 24. The door was wide open, but Connie lingered, reluctant to go in. The house had once been full of light and love. Now there were spaces where her mother and Johnny had been, and even her father was an outline of himself.

  She ran her fingers over the spiked railings and thought of all the other people who had done the same. Leaning forward she peered down the metal steps that led to the basement. The flat had been empty for months, windows boarded up after kids had broken in. Kenneth had caught them and chased them out of the house, but hadn’t involved the police. It was loyalty amongst thieves according to her mother: he was an ex-con, imprisoned for armed robbery, and had bought the house using funds from his life of crime – a stash that the police had missed; a stash which, it was rumoured, had been more than his fair share. Then he’d decided to switch his role from criminal to landlord, dividing the building into six flats for rental: one in the basement, two on the ground floor, two on the first floor and one on the second. The attic had been left as a storeroom.

  Connie’s mother had hated the fact that the building had been divided. Once upon a time, it would have been a home with walls covered in paintings and rooms crammed with porcelain and crystal. There would have been orchids and ferns, embalmed animals and gilded cages of captured birds. In the attic, there were still crates of discarded items – broken fossils, stuffed and moth-eaten owls and foxes. Her mother would occasionally rifle through them. Once she had found a skeleton – a pair of tiny conjoined monkeys, which she had taken to a museum.

  Now Connie stared at the house and the windows met her gaze. Each of them told a story of those inside. Kenneth lived in Flat 1 on the ground floor to the left of the massive front door. The curtains at his bay window were forever closed. People were nosey bastards, he said. The young couple in Flat 2, on the other side of the door, didn’t seem to care and never closed their curtains. They were actors – Eileen was American and Leonard was from Tooting, and in the evening, you could see them flouncing around with their scripts, gesticulating and pontificating.

  Johnny’s mother, Dorothy, lived on the first floor in Flat 3, which was above Kenneth. Alone now that Johnny had gone, Dorothy was a stickler for cleanliness and her windows sparkled more brightly than anyone else’s. She and Johnny had had furious arguments about being an artist versus working in a trade. Now her life was quiet.

  Connie and her father lived in Flat 4, across the landing from Dorothy. Their windows passed for clean and were hung with thick, blue, velvet curtains that were a little patchy and worn. At the top on the second floor, Mrs Kolinski lived with Eva. She had made their curtains herself. They were beautiful, striped in yellow and gold.

  Connie let go of the railings, walked along the path and climbed the stone steps to the front door. She tried to contain her thoughts, to stop them rising to the attic. It held too many memories and now was not the time to think of those. Late at night, when the house slept, that’s when she gave herself the luxury.

  Inside the hall, its familiarity soothed her. The black and white tiles, the smell of dust, the empty sconces, the cobwebs hanging from the light fitting – once a chandelier, now a single bulb – and the wide oak staircase that dominated the space which led to the first landing and then switched direction to the second. A red, patched carpet unfurled along the centre and a bannister, roughened by age, ran all the way up while matching panels lined the lower wall.

  Despite the wear and tear, the staircase gave an element of grandeur to the house and normally Connie liked to stand at its foot, imagining a procession of ghosts of all the people who had ever lived in the house. Now, though, she shivered at the idea and tried to think of something else but, despite her best intentions, her mind turned back to Johnny.

  That first day she had seen him. He and his mother were moving in. Connie had passed him on the stairs with an easel under his arm. She’d been intrigued by the easel, intrigued by him. Older than her, eighteen or nineteen. Tall and broad-shouldered with those brilliant blue eyes and dark, unruly hair. Like Heathcliff, or Rochester. Or any of those heroes (or anti-heroes) she loved so much in books.

  For a while, Connie had tried her best to coincide their exits and their entrances, but Johnny left at dawn and returned at a mysterious hour when she was still at school. Then her mother had become ill and Connie had stopped looking for him.

  One day, after her mother had died, and Connie had left school and started working in the bookshop, she was crossing the hall, shoulders heavy with grief, when she heard footsteps behind her and a voice. It was Johnny, saying he was sorry for her loss. She’d been touched by his words. It was a beginning and had grown into an exchange. The two of them had met regularly in a kind of rhythm, seeming to mirror each other’s movements in the house.

  He had told her he worked at Smithfield, which he hated because he wanted to paint. She had asked if she could see his paintings and he’d invited her to the attic where he had set up his easel in a corner away from the crates. That first time she had emerged from the staircase into the attic, it was like bursting from mist into sunlight. The sunbeams piercing the rooftop windows; the light and shade and texture of his paintings; the slashes of colour, the peacock blue and sunflower yellow. The space smelled of oil and turpentine and something dark and musky which Connie would soon learn was Johnny’s scent.

  She had looked about her in awe, admiring the beauty of his art, captivated by his talk. He had spoken endlessly about which painters he admired, how he wanted to live like them, study at the Slade like them. He would give anything to go to Paris. That was the place to be, or New York, but he had no chance of affording that. He had little chance of getting to Paris either, not with the amount he earned at the fucking meat market.

  Connie had listened to him swear. No one had ever sworn like that in front of her: not her mother, nor her father, nor her friends. Nor even Kenneth or Vincent. No one else swore so easily and openly, no one talked about life so darkly. It didn’t occur to her that he had never asked her about herself, and it didn’t occur to her to tell him that she had a dream too, that she wanted to travel and to be an author.

  She had stopped writing. She had stopped dreaming. She had stopped remembering how fervently her mother had told her not to stay still or to get caught out by a man. It had been enough to be with Johnny.

  When they were close, she felt her heart hammering in her chest. When he touched her, she felt a pull that started low in her stomach and spread right through her. He had whispered in her ear that it was all right, this was the sixties, everyone was doing it, weren’t they? She should see the parties he went to. No one cared and she shouldn’t either.

  She had known he would leave her and that her love could never match his dreams, but she had wrapped up her fears and kept them hidden. After all, how could she stop him? He was meeting people all the time, out there, wherever he went: painters, sculptors, a French woman who told him she would introduce him to artists in Paris. It had been so vague: the woman, where Johnny met these people, the rendezvous in cafes and studios in Soho. Connie didn’t know what was true and what was not, but she believed in him, and had given him all the money she had saved. She had even taken a necklace that had belonged to her mother and asked Harry to pawn it for her. She had helped to send Johnny away when all she wanted was for him to stay.

  ‘I won’t forget you,’ he had whispered on their last night together as they lay in each other’s arms on the pile of blankets they had brought to the attic for the purpose.

  She kissed him and told him that she would wait. Head on his chest, she listened to his excited heartbeat. He would be free, he told her, to live and to create. ‘And when I’m established you must come to Paris.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ she had replied, smiling and touching his face, although her insides were churning. Would
he remember? Would she see him again?

  Now, she reached the flat and pushed back her tears. Why hadn’t he written to her? She needed him more than she had ever needed anyone.

  Breathing deeply, she opened the door. Her heart sank. Kenneth and her father were talking in the living room and the air was thick with smoke. Connie tried not to think about how it would cling to the lace and the tapestries her mother had chosen, or the fact that, of the flowery armchairs the two men sat in, Kenneth had taken her mother’s.

  He was poised with one leg crossed over the other, in his habitual white shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, and dark trousers. She could see his prison tattoos, a mix of unintelligible numbers and shapes etched on his knuckles and along his arms. He’d been inside for more years of his life than not, although now, according to him at least, he was on the straight and narrow and had no intention of going back. No surprise, her father said, considering the enemies he’d made. He was forty, ten years younger than her father, although he looked older. Skinny, with hollow cheeks and furrows around his mouth, he walked with a dark wood cane topped with a silver handle – although most people said the cane was an affectation and there was nothing wrong with his legs.

  Her father sat mutely, his expression polite, as Kenneth rattled on about the latest scandal involving Princess Margaret. He was obsessed by the monarchy. His flat, Connie knew, was stuffed with mementos: plates and teapots, biscuit tins and sugar bowls, thimbles and pillboxes, emblazoned with the crown.

  She bent to kiss her father and he patted her hand: patience, his touch said; Kenneth would be gone soon. Connie knew he disliked Kenneth and so did she. He reminded her of a reptile, with his thin body and thin-lipped smile, although he’d been generous enough, waiving the rent. She couldn’t complain about that. So she smiled at her father and squeezed his arm, but when she straightened, she spotted a green and orange jacket draped across the sofa and her smile dropped.