The Hiding Place

by Jenny Quintana

  Victor appeared in the doorway with his shirtsleeves rolled up and three whisky glasses bunched in his hands. His hair was slicked as usual and she caught the cloying smell of his hair cream mixed with aftershave.

  ‘Connie,’ he said, grinning. ‘Fancy a nip?’ He put the glasses on the table, pulled out a hip flask and sploshed a measure into each. ‘Puts hairs on your chest.’

  She looked at her father.

  ‘We’re celebrating,’ he said sheepishly. She knew he would be hating every second of this visit but at the same time would consider he had no choice.

  ‘To our new tenant,’ said Kenneth, taking and holding up his glass. ‘Victor.’

  ‘Tenant?’ said Connie. ‘Why? Who’s leaving?’

  ‘Nobody,’ he replied. ‘The basement needs filling. The rent will rise if it isn’t, and since Victor here has misbehaved and been turfed out of his place . . .’

  ‘I didn’t misbehave,’ Victor protested, tossing back his whisky and refilling his glass. ‘I had a slight disagreement with the landlady.’

  ‘You mean the landlady’s daughter,’ said Kenneth, grinning.

  Connie glanced at her father again who made an apologetic face.

  Victor grimaced and shrugged.

  ‘Scarpered then,’ said Kenneth, raising his glass. ‘Since Victor has scarpered . . . and finds himself without a home, it seems he’s the ideal candidate. Here’s to getting away with it!’

  The men drank while Connie absorbed the news. She had managed to avoid Victor since he had propositioned her in the shop. It wouldn’t be as easy if he lived two floors down.

  She walked towards the kitchen, feeling the men’s eyes on her. Kenneth’s stare she didn’t mind so much. He watched everyone, storing the details. Victor’s gaze, though, made her shudder. Luckily, he was still focusing on Kenneth contradicting him about what had happened with his landlady. The two of them bickered constantly.

  Three dirty mugs stood in the sink and the tea strainer had been left on the side. She cleared away, burying her annoyance. The milk had been left out too and when she gave it a sniff her stomach heaved. Was it on the turn, or was it another sign? Opening the window, she took a breath.

  ‘Connie,’ her father called, ‘come and sit with us.’

  ‘All right, Dad. Just a minute.’

  She breathed deeply again and looked out at the shared garden, and beyond to the grey stone church on the next road, and the graveyard that backed onto their garden, where her mother was buried. At the funeral, her heart had broken watching her father throwing a handful of dirt into the grave.

  She forced her mind back to the present. To their garden, where weeds throttled the beds. The walls surrounding the lawn were patched and crumbling and smothered in ivy. There was a sprawling magnolia to the side and more trees in one corner, apple and pear, but no one bothered to pick the fruit, and every autumn it was devoured by wasps or left to rot on the ground.

  Tea towels were pegged on the line. A pile of rubbish had been left in one corner. At the end, bushes obscured a section of grass. Kenneth had a rose garden and there was an old shed that leaned precariously to one side. An arched doorway had been built into the far wall as access to the churchyard, the door a heavy, studded affair. Connie avoided going that way to her mother’s grave. She disliked the shadows and sudden transition from garden to tombstones, the oldest graves broken and lopsided, as if the dead were restlessly shifting beneath the earth.

  When she was small, before Kenneth began to grow roses, her mother had a vegetable patch in the rear section of the garden. Connie had helped her look after it, bending to heave out carrots and potatoes. It had amazed her that vegetables could grow in the dark, cold ground. It was a place for dead things, wasn’t it, like in the churchyard where bodies rotted and worms feasted? She had woken in the night, gasping with fear, her dreams full of bodies caught under that weight of earth, like the story she had found in the bookshop about the old man stuck beneath the floorboards, his tell-tale heart beating louder and louder.

  How cold must her mother be in the ground? Connie wanted to cover the grave with a blanket or lie on top of the stone as if her warmth might permeate the earth. She would do anything to have one more day, one more hour, a single moment with her mother. For the chance to touch her face, her hands, to smell her perfume and hear her voice.

  Suddenly, hands grabbed her waist and pinned her to the sink. Victor had come in so softly she hadn’t heard him.

  She brushed away her tears. Turned grief into anger. ‘Get off me,’ she said, pushing hard against him.

  He held her fast, nuzzled his nose into her neck.

  ‘Get off me,’ she hissed again, shoving at his hands. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ She jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow and whipped round. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Come on, Connie,’ he said, ‘are you so innocent you have to ask?’

  She resisted the urge to slap him.

  ‘Everything all right?’ called her father from the other room.

  They stared at each other, Victor smirking, Connie’s eyes blazing.

  ‘Fine,’ she called out quickly, and to Victor in a lower voice, ‘I’ll tell him.’

  ‘No, you won’t.’

  She hated his cockiness especially because he was right. Her fingers itched to grab the chopping board or the rolling pin to bring down on his head.

  ‘You could do worse.’

  ‘I could do better.’

  He laughed as she marched past him out into the passage and into her bedroom. Closing the door behind her, she pushed a chair against the handle and sat on the stool at the dressing table. She was trembling with rage more than fear. What right did he have to touch her? She considered her face in the mirror. She looked terrible – features blurred, face puffy. She felt her stomach but it was still flat. Maybe Doctor Franklin was right. She clung once again to the thought. She needed a tonic. Girls missed their periods for all kinds of reasons.

  But they weren’t sick most mornings.

  She leaned her elbows on the table and put her head in her hands. Only today she had vomited in the toilet bowl, turning up the volume of her transistor radio to drown out the sound.

  Stifling the sob that was rising inside her, she got up and crossed to the bed. Lying down, she focused on Johnny, imagining him in Paris. She tried to picture his face, but Victor’s smirk appeared instead. She could feel the imprint of his hands on her waist. He had bothered her for months, but he was going further and further every time they met. What if next time he touched her he felt the change in her body and guessed?

  She shivered even though it wasn’t cold.

  How could she think straight with a baby growing inside her? She saw it as a seed, throwing out shoots, tiny arms and legs, growing and ripening – and yet she knew nothing about having babies. What if it didn’t grow properly? What if it didn’t come out? She pictured the fruit rotting in the garden. No one clearing it away.

  She had to tell her father. Or else she had to get rid of the baby herself. Doctors were never going to help her. She must find a different way.

  From Mrs Kolinski’s flat upstairs came the sound of the piano. Chopin, a nocturne. The music soothed her, the notes tumbling, rising, spreading. She lay on her side on the mattress, absorbing the sound, trying to settle, but her mind whirled with contradictions and unsatisfactory solutions. From the other room, the clock chimed five.

  At last she heard the front door opening as the men exited. She heard their voices too, greeting Dorothy on the landing. An idea struck Connie as the door banged shut. She swung her legs over the bed and onto the floor. Johnny hadn’t sent her his address, but he might have sent it to his mother. Despite their furious rows, surely he would be in touch. Maybe Connie should ask her.

  She let the possibility simmer before storing it away. It might not come to that – any day her period could arrive. The tonic Doctor Franklin had given her would work. As if to ensure it, she took the bottle fro
m her drawer and measured out a spoonful. It was bright red, like blood, and it tasted as bitter as poison. It occurred to her that the doctor had given her a purge to get rid of the baby because even though she hadn’t mentioned being pregnant, he had somehow known.

  She shook her head. Not possible. He didn’t, couldn’t know. Nobody knew but Connie, and apart from her it was only Johnny who should know. Soon he would send a letter with his address and she would write back and explain what had happened. She could even turn up in Paris and surprise him. He had said she should come. Her heart danced. Imagine that. Imagine his face. What if she could find the money to pay for a ticket to Paris?

  The idea gave Connie energy. She sat at the dressing table and examined her face. It had more colour than before. The rest had done her good. She brushed her hair. When she was little, her mother had teased out the tangles with a comb. Now Connie saw her mother’s face in the mirror instead of her own, and there, further away, she imagined another girl with the darkest of hair, and another and another. A whole thread of generations stretching through the years.

  Later, she fried lamb chops and boiled potatoes for tea and sat with her father at the kitchen table. Mealtimes were pleasant but quiet. Her mother had been the joyful one, filling the flat with her voice and her laughter.

  While Connie dished up, her father sat at the table reading a letter from his sister. Maud lived in Whitby after marrying a policeman from Yorkshire down in London for a visit. The two of them had opened a sweet shop. The policeman had died of coronary disease, but Maud had stayed and Connie and her parents had visited every summer.

  ‘Maud wants us to come.’

  Connie stopped her thoughts. ‘When?’

  ‘In August – usual time.’ He looked at her over the top of his glasses. ‘What do you think?’

  They hadn’t been to Whitby since Connie’s mother had died. One summer had gone already and now another one loomed.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She sat down. ‘Would you like to?’

  He sighed and took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He hesitated. ‘The shop.’

  There was a silence. They both knew that wasn’t the real reason. ‘We closed it when we went before,’ Connie reminded him gently.

  ‘I know, but business . . .’

  ‘I can stay behind. I can deal with it.’

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? I’m seventeen. I know exactly what to do. You need a holiday. Think of Aunt Maud and all that home cooking.’

  He smiled at her fondly and picked up his knife and fork. ‘Your cooking is perfect, Connie.’

  Not true. The potatoes were over-boiled and the chops tough. She attempted dishes, but she didn’t have the knack, not like her mother, or Aunt Maud.

  She tried again. ‘What about the sea air? You need a holiday, Dad. You need to get away from the city.’

  He smiled again, his determination weakening. ‘You, my dear, get more and more like your mother every day.’

  Connie looked down at her plate. If she was like her mother she wouldn’t be in the fix she was.

  ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘we’ve got a few months to decide. Anything can happen in that time.’

  She nodded, her stomach churning. Anything could happen. Although some things were inevitable.

  After they had eaten and Connie had cleared away, she went to her room pleading tiredness. Unable to sleep, she stood at the window.

  A figure skulked in the dark, the tip of a cigarette dancing in the gloom. Kenneth – doing his yard exercise, as he called it. He headed away from the house. Connie followed his progress to the end of the garden and then watched as he stepped past the bushes and disappeared.

  Clouds covered the moon and the garden dropped into shadow. It struck Connie how tiny she was in comparison to the vastness of the sky.

  How odd to think that life would carry on when she had gone in the same way it had continued without her mother. Someone else would gaze from this same window and the church would still be there, but the graveyard would hold her mother and her father and herself, no doubt.

  She got into bed. She could hear her father moving about, rolling back the lid of the bureau. He would be checking the accounts, or writing a letter to Maud, or looking at photos of her mother. She lay with her hands on her belly. A girl, she thought as she drifted into sleep; a girl with dark hair like Eva Kolinski.

  5

  Marina

  January 1992

  Marina parks haphazardly, drags suitcases and bags from the car and dumps them at the bottom of the steps. It has been raining, the earth around the trunk of the maple tree is damp and patches of wet concrete glisten in the struggling afternoon light.

  She unbuttons her faux-fur coat slowly as she stares upwards at the house, peels off one fingerless glove and rakes at her knotted hair. She feels dishevelled after her journey, and stiff after being hunched at the wheel for so long, beetling on the motorway as fast as the Mini would take her, stopping once at a service station for coffee that tasted like flavoured water and then speeding away again, pushing aside all reservations as she drove.

  A tall, thin man, who looks around Marina’s age, leaps up the steps from the basement, shoes clanking on the metal. He has light hair, rectangular glasses with thick, black frames, and a cigarette tucked behind one ear. Despite the cold, he wears a short-sleeved shirt, with a battered looking leather jacket hooked on one finger and slung over his shoulder.

  He halts at the sight of her. ‘Can I help you?’

  She smiles brightly back at him. ‘I’m moving in.’

  He looks at her, incredulous brown eyes blinking behind his lenses. ‘Into this house?’ He jabs at number 24.

  ‘Well, yes. Flat 2.’ She holds out the letter from the estate agent as if to prove it.

  ‘Flat 2,’ he parrots. ‘But that flat . . .’ He stops, scratches his head.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, it’s empty.’

  ‘I should hope so.’ A light-hearted approach seems the best way to deal with this man who is looking at her as if she’s travelled in time.

  ‘I mean . . . it hasn’t been lived in for months. And months.’ He stops again, flustered.

  ‘It’s all right,’ says Marina. ‘I’ve seen the state of it and I also know what happened to the last tenant.’

  The estate agent had explained that an old man had lived – and died – in the flat previously, which was another reason it hadn’t been easy to let.

  ‘Right.’ He looks at her warily.

  ‘And I’m not afraid of ghosts.’

  ‘Ghosts?’

  ‘Seriously. I don’t believe in them.’

  ‘Don’t you? I mean, that’s good.’

  ‘Or just as well.’

  A smile curls on his lips at last. He is good-looking in a thin-faced, wolfish way, but there is nothing of the predator about him. He is too self-conscious, and even now he’s blushing as he grabs one of her bags and says, ‘Let me.’ Why not? They walk up the steps together.

  In the entrance, Marina pauses. The hall is exactly as it was when she did the tour with the estate agent, but somehow it’s still a shock to Marina that she’s here, and she gazes about her as if she’s never set foot in the place, taking in the single ceiling bulb – its push-button switch on an automatic timer – that illuminates the black and white floor tiles and walls painted ice blue; the bronze sconces, once elegant, now rusted, their sockets empty. The sun struggling through the rectangular stained-glass window above the front door is the only other source of light.

  The wide stairway dominates the space. A hundred years ago, it might have been a polished centrepiece. Now the red carpet running along the middle of the stairs is faded and threadbare, the visible treads and the bannister scratched and worn. The first flight hits a blank wall. The second angles away into darkness.

  On either side of the staircase are the doors to Flats
1 and 2. Flat 2 is on the right. Marina produces her set of keys and fits first one and then another into the lock until she gets it right. Cautiously, she pushes open the door and steps inside. The flat has a sour smell, a mix of ingrained sweat, mustiness and dirt. She wrinkles her nose and goes straight to the window. Pushing the net curtains aside she heaves up the sash.

  The man has followed her in. ‘I’m Ron, by the way,’ he says, setting her suitcase on a brown rug that looks like a flayed bear.

  She hesitates before telling him she is Zoe. In the end, although she’d signed her middle name on the contract, she couldn’t hide her first name on the photocopy of her passport. She told them she preferred to go by the name Zoe and nothing much was said. But here in the house, there is still the worry that someone might remember her story – Marina, the baby in blue, and she doesn’t want to draw attention to that before she’s had a chance to settle.

  He extends his hand and she removes her glove to shake it. His palm is as warm as hers is cold.

  ‘If you need anything,’ he says, ‘just ask.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He scratches his chin. ‘And sorry about my reaction out there. I’m not usually that unfriendly – or disbelieving. You took me by surprise. No one told us there was a new tenant and, to be honest, I didn’t think anyone would ever take this flat, people are a bit . . . well, you know . . .’

  ‘Superstitious?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Did you know him?’ Marina asks, thinking there’s no time like the present to start investigating.

  ‘The guy that died? No. Before my time.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Six months, but I’ve got something else lined up.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s not exactly the Ritz.’ He sweeps his arm around the room and grimaces.

  Marina grins. ‘I’ve seen worse. I once had rats for flatmates.’

  He frowns, not understanding. ‘You mean literally?’

  ‘Yes, literally. Rats. Under the stairs. Mind you I’ve lived with the human kind too.’

  She rattles out a story about a boyfriend at university. Three weeks she had lived in his dingy flat listening to the sound of rodents scrabbling behind the walls and beneath the floorboards. One day a larger creature in a fur coat had turned up claiming to be his girlfriend. ‘And that was the end of that.’