The Red Room

by Nicci French

  “I got her schoolwork out of the chest a few days ago and looked through it all, all the exercise books with the subjects written across the top right-hand corner, with a ruled line under her name and class. It seems like yesterday. There were things I could remember her doing, like the drawings of herself she did when she was tiny, with scribbled yellow hair and a pink semi-circle mouth. Children always draw themselves smiling, don’t they, although Philippa wasn’t a great smiler, you know. Then, later, the pencil diagrams of flowers, with their pistils and stamens. Planets. The six wives of Henry VIII. Algebra. Je m’appelle Philippa Vere et j’ai onze ans.” Pam Vere’s French accent was impeccable. “And there were her school diaries. They used to write diaries on a Monday morning—what I did at the weekend, that type of thing, you know?” I nodded. I didn’t want to say anything that might stop her. “And I read through them. And do you know what? I was in all of them. She always wrote about what she did with Mummy. Mummy and me went to the shops, Mummy and me went to the playground, Mummy got me a kitten and its name is Blackie, Mummy took me to the museum. I suddenly realized that there was almost nobody else in her diaries except me and her. I didn’t know how solitary she was until I read those entries. She never complained.”

  She turned fully to face me. “You’re asking yourself why on earth I am telling you all of this, aren’t you?”

  “You need to say it to someone.”

  “I’m an old woman now. Oh, I’m not really old, I know. I’m only in my sixties and I could live for another thirty years. But I feel old now. I feel twice as old as I did a year ago. You don’t have children, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a mother still?”

  “No. My mother died when I was very young.”

  “That’s why, then.”

  “Why what?”

  “Why it was you I wanted to talk to. She was even a good girl when she was a teenager. She made a few more friends, sometimes she went out on a Saturday night. She would have a few drinks, not many. She didn’t smoke. She didn’t take drugs. She was very pretty but she didn’t realize it and I think that meant that other people didn’t really notice how pretty she was. She wasn’t showy or pushy or flirtatious. I always thought she was the loveliest girl I knew, but then I was her mother, so I would think that, wouldn’t I? And fourteen- and fifteen- and six-teen-year-old boys don’t look properly, do they? I was thankful for that—I always told her not to worry about what her friends were up to, she had plenty of time. Time.” She smiled grimly. “She didn’t have plenty of it, after all, did she?” She came to an abrupt halt.

  “Then what?” I asked, quietly.

  “Then she met someone. A boy. Well, a man, really, older than her. She was only fourteen when she met him. He looked at her properly. Suddenly she no longer seemed like a young girl, she was on the verge of womanhood. I just thought she was growing up. I find it hard to believe now, but I really didn’t have any idea what was going on. I only found out about it afterwards. She was so innocent, my quiet little daughter. She thought that she was in love with him. And that he was in love with her, more to the point. If I had realized at the time, I could have warned her.”

  She smiled at me. “You see now, I’m not just talking to you like this because I need to talk to someone about Philippa. A secret is a terrible thing. The only way to stop it being terrible is to tell it, but you mustn’t. He left her, of course, it only lasted a few weeks. And she was heartbroken, though I still knew nothing.”

  She turned back to the canal once more, then said: “And pregnant.”

  I walked over to where she was and stood beside her, looking into the depths where Doll’s fish lurked. “She had the baby?”

  “I found out that she was pregnant when she was twenty-seven weeks and five days gone. So she had the baby. It was all done very secretly. I made sure of that. Nobody knew, just Philippa and me.”

  “A girl?”

  “Yes. A girl who would have been eighteen a few months ago.”

  “Lianne?” She had been older than I’d thought, then.

  “I told the school Philippa had glandular fever. We went away to France together while she waited. She was very quiet, as if she was in shock, but she did what I said. There wasn’t really any choice. They took the baby away almost at once. Philippa wanted to hold it—her—first. She cried and sobbed and begged. She went almost mad. But I wouldn’t let her. I didn’t want her to get attached. She couldn’t have a child, for God’s sake, she was only a child herself. I wanted her to have a life, a husband, all the things I’d been planning for her. So I wouldn’t let her hold the baby. She cried solidly for two days, you’ve never seen so many tears, it was like a dam bursting, all the tears she’d been too eager and helpful to cry all her life. And then she seemed to pull herself together. Her milk dried up, her tummy gradually got flat again. She went back to school and did her exams and went on to sixth-form college. She never talked about it again.”

  “Mrs. Vere…”

  “I held the baby, though. Tiny, shriveled, red thing with baggy skin and gummy blue eyes. She put her fist round my finger and wouldn’t let it go, as though she knew.”

  “Knew?”

  “That I was her grandmother. Her family. Her home. Her last chance. I unpinned her strong little fingers one by one and handed her over.”

  “And then she was taken away for adoption?”

  “Adoption, yes, I suppose so. I didn’t want Philippa to know. I thought it was best if the door was shut firmly on the whole episode. Of course, she would have been able to find out where she really came from five months ago, when she turned eighteen.”

  “Those phone calls.”

  “I didn’t know at first, of course, not until then, when I heard about the calls, the calls between Philippa and… and her. I wasn’t withholding evidence. I suppose you’d say that I didn’t want to know. But for eighteen years not a week’s gone by when I haven’t thought about that little baby gripping my finger and staring at me. And I wonder if an hour went by without Philippa remembering, too. We never spoke. Not even after Emily, we never told each other what we felt.”

  She looked at me at last. “That’s why I wanted to see you, to know if my granddaughter suffered.”

  So this whole sad tale had been about a daughter looking for her mother, a mother searching for her daughter.

  “I wonder if they ever found each other, before they were killed,” I said at last.

  “Sometimes I comfort myself by imagining that they did. That Philippa was allowed to hug and hold her baby at last. But we’ll never know, will we?”

  “No. We’ll never know.”

  We were just about to part when Pam Vere put her hand on my sleeve. “I was going to ask,” she said, “whether it might be possible for my granddaughter to be buried in the same grave as my daughter. Do you think it might be?”

  “Lianne was cremated,” I said. “And her ashes were scattered.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Pam. “Well, that’s that, then.”

  __________

  I walked back home. Up the steps away from the canal, along the shabby streets. Through the windows I could see people leading their own particular lives: a man holding a violin, bow poised; a woman on the phone, animated, hand lifted in the air; a naked little boy sitting in an upstairs room, looking out over the street with a doleful expression. I looked at people’s faces as I passed them. No faces are ordinary. All faces are beautiful if you look at them in a certain way.

  Julie was waiting. There was the smell of garlic coming from the kitchen, and a vase of fresh yellow roses stood on the table. Her rucksack was by the door, bulging, fastened up, an airline label attached to its strap. I sat at the table and I took out the photograph of my mother and laid it before me. She smiled up at me, gleaming through all the years of missing her. Her clear gray eyes shone with promise. The sun touched her young and happy face. I felt very peaceful and very sad. I’ve never been good at partings.
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  eBook Special Feature:

  Excerpts from

  Nicci French’s

  Killing Me Softly

  Beneath the Skin

  and

  The Land of the Living

  KILLING ME SOFTLY

  He knew he was going to die. And he knew dimly, somewhere far inside himself, that he ought not to want to die. He should do something to save himself but he couldn’t think what. Perhaps if he could make sense of what had happened. If only the wind and snow would slacken. They had battered him for so long that he could hardly distinguish the sound from the cold and the stinging on his face. Always there was the struggle—the last struggle, really—to breathe oxygen from this air of eight thousand meters above sea level, where humans weren’t meant to live. His oxygen cylinders were long since empty, the valves frozen up, the mask nothing but an encumbrance.

  It might be minutes, more likely hours. But he would be dead before the morning came. That was all right, though. He was drowsy and calm. Under his layers of windproof nylon, Gore-Tex, wool, polypropylene, he could feel his heart beating at twice its normal rate, a prisoner hammering frantically at his chest. Yet his brain was sluggish, dreamy. Which was a mistake, because they all needed to stay awake, keep moving, until they were rescued. He knew he should sit up, stand up, clap his hands together furiously, wake his companions. He was too comfortable. It was good to lie down and rest at last. He had been tired for such a long time.

  He no longer felt cold, which was a relief. He looked down to where one of his hands had slipped from its mitten and lay at a curious angle. It had been purple, but now—he leaned forward curiously—it was a waxy white. Strange that he should be so thirsty. He had a bottle in his jacket that was frozen and useless to him. He was surrounded by snow, which was equally useless. It was almost funny. Lucky he wasn’t a doctor, like Françoise.

  Where was she? When they had reached the end of the line, they should have been in the Camp Three col. She had gone ahead and they hadn’t seen her again. The others had stayed together, and blundered around, lost all sense of direction, any feeling about where on the mountain they were, and had nestled hopelessly into this excuse for a gully. And yet there was something he had to remember, an object lost in his mind, and not only did he not know where it was, he didn’t know what it was.

  He couldn’t even see his feet. This morning, when they had set out, the mountains had shimmered in the thin air and they had inched their way up the tilted sea of ice toward the summit in fierce sunlight that had spilled over the rim of the mountains and glinted off the blue-white, bulletproof ice and pierced their aching heads. There had been only a few cumulus clouds drifting toward them and then suddenly this swirl of stony snow.

  He felt a movement beside him. Someone else was conscious. He turned laboriously to the other side. Red jacket, so it must be Peter. His face was entirely obscured by a thick layer of gray ice. There was nothing he could do. They had been a sort of team but were all in their separate worlds now.

  He wondered who else was dying on the mountainside. It had all gone so wrong. Nothing to do, though. He had a syringe in a toothbrush holder inside his snowsuit, full of dexamethasone, but grasping a syringe was beyond his powers now. He couldn’t even move his hands to unstrap his backpack. What would he do, anyway? Where could he go from here? Better to wait. They’d find them. They knew where they were. Why hadn’t they come yet?

  The world beyond, the life before, these mountains, all that had now sunk beneath the surface of his sluggish consciousness, until only traces were left. He knew that every minute he lay up here, in the oxygen-deprived death zone, millions of his brain cells were being erased. A tiny part of his mind was watching himself die and was terrified, full of pity and horror. He wished it was over. He just wanted to sleep.

  He knew the stages of death. He had watched almost with curiosity as his body protested against its environment here on the final ridges below the summit of Chungawat: the headaches, the diarrhea, the gasping shortness of breath, the swollen hands and ankles. He knew he could no longer think clearly. Perhaps hallucinations would come to him before he died. He knew that frostbite had invaded his hands and feet. He couldn’t feel any of his body, except for his charred lungs. It was as if his mind was the last thing that was left, still burning dimly inside his finished carcass. He was waiting for his mind to flicker and die out.

  Pity he had never gotten to the summit. The snow felt like a pillow against his cheek. Tomas was warm. At peace. What had gone wrong? It should all have been so simple. There was something he had to remember, something wrong. There had been a wrong note. A piece of the puzzle didn’t fit. He closed his eyes. The darkness felt healing. Life had been so busy. All that effort. For what? Nothing. He just had to remember. Once he had remembered, nothing else would matter. If only the howl of the wind would stop. If only he could think. Yes, that was it. It was so stupid, so simple, but he understood. He smiled. He felt the cold spread through him, welcoming him into the darkness.

  * * *

  I sat very still in the hard-backed chair. My throat hurt. The strip-lighting flickered and made me feel dizzy. I put my hands on the desk between us, fingertips lightly together, and tried to breathe steadily. What a place for it all to end.

  Phones were ringing around us and conversation hummed in the air like static. There were people in the background, men and women in their uniforms passing busily by. Occasionally they would look toward us, but they didn’t seem curious. Why should they be? They saw so many things in here, and I was just an ordinary woman, with a flush in her cheeks and a ladder running up her tights. Who could tell? My feet ached inside their uncomfortable ankle boots.

  Detective Inspector Byrne picked up a pen. I tried to smile at him with all of my last hope. He looked across at me patiently, eyebrows bunched, and I wanted to cry and ask him to save me, oh, please. It had been such a long time since I had cried properly. If I started now, then why should I ever stop?

  “Where were we, do you remember?” he asked.

  Oh, yes, I remembered. I remembered it all.

  ONE

  Alice! Alice! You’re late. Come on.”

  I heard a soft resistant grunt and realized it was coming from me. Outside it was cold and dark. I wriggled deeper into the bunched-up duvet, closed my eyes in a squint against the dim glimmers of winter light.

  “Up, Alice.”

  Jake smelled of shaving foam. A tie hung loose from his collar. Another day. It’s the little habits rather than the big decisions that make you into a real couple. You drift into routines, inhabit complementary domestic roles without deciding to. Jake and I were the world trivia experts on each other. I knew that he liked more milk in coffee than in tea, he knew that I liked just a drop of milk in tea and none at all in coffee. He could locate the hard knot that formed near my left shoulder blade after hard days in the office. I didn’t put fruit in salads because of him, and he didn’t put cheese in salads because of me. What more could you want from a relationship? We were shaking down into a couple.

  I’d never lived with a man before—I mean, a man with whom I was in a relationship—and I found the experience of assuming household roles interesting. Jake was an engineer and was limitlessly capable with all the wires and pipes behind our walls and under our floors. I once said to him that the one thing he resented about our flat was that he hadn’t actually built it himself on a greenfield site, and he didn’t take it as an insult. My degree was in biochemistry, which meant that I changed the sheets on the bed and emptied the swing-bin in the kitchen. He fixed the vacuum cleaner but I used it. I washed the bath, except if he had shaved in it. I drew the line there.

  The odd thing was that Jake did all the ironing. He said that people didn’t know how to iron shirts anymore. I thought that was deeply stupid and I would have gotten offended except that it’s hard to stay offended as you lie watching TV with a drink while somebody else does the ironing. He bought the paper and I read it over
his shoulder and he got irritated. We both shopped, although I always took a list and ticked everything off, while he was haphazard and far more extravagant than me. He defrosted the fridge. I watered the plants. And he brought me a cup of tea in bed every morning.

  “You’re late,” he said. “Here’s your tea, and I’m leaving in exactly three minutes.”

  “I hate January,” I said.

  “You said that about December.”

  “January’s like December. But without Christmas.”

  But he’d left the room. I showered hurriedly and put on an oatmeal-colored trouser suit, with a jacket that came to my knees. I brushed my hair and coiled it into a loose bun.

  “You look smart,” said Jake as I came into the kitchen. “Is that new?”

  “I’ve had it for ages,” I lied, pouring myself another cup of tea, tepid this time.

  We walked to the underground together, sharing an umbrella and dodging puddles. He kissed me at the turnstile, putting the umbrella under his arm and holding my shoulders firmly.

  “Good-bye, darling,” he said, and I thought at that moment: He wants to be married. He wants us to be a married couple. With my mind on that arresting idea, I forgot to say anything back. He didn’t notice and stepped onto the escalator, joining the descending crowd of men in raincoats. He didn’t look back. It was almost as if we were married already.