The Hiding Place

by Jenny Quintana

  Ron laughs. ‘Then this will seem like a palace.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  There’s another pause. Ron taps his foot. ‘I’ll get some more bags.’ He is gone before she can stop him.

  Alone, she looks around the room. It was two months ago that she met Wayne, the estate agent, a young man in a suit and shoes so pointed they were almost winklepickers. His first utterance had been an apology for the state of the decoration; his second, a promise that he could reduce the already low rent still further. They had climbed the steps together, him still talking, her breath caught so hard she couldn’t have answered if she had tried. Her head had pounded and his voice had faded into the background until she eventually gave up all hope of following or remembering what he said.

  The hallway was imprinted on her memory, but the rest of the visit had been a haze as she simply went through the motions. Still, she must have registered something, because she recognises the black painted fireplace with its chipped pink and blue surround, and she recalls how when she had emerged from the building, she had felt as if a spell had been lifted. How surprised Wayne had been when she’d told him she would take the flat and there was no need to bother the landlord about decorating because she would do it herself. Wayne hadn’t even minded when she’d explained she must delay moving in because she couldn’t afford double rent.

  ‘That’s fine,’ he’d said, beaming and pumping her hand, ‘and don’t worry if anyone else comes forward, I’ll tell them the flat’s reserved.’

  As if either of them thought that would happen.

  ‘Where do you want them?’ says Ron, returning with a suitcase in one hand and a rucksack in the other.

  ‘Anywhere, thank you, but you don’t need . . .’

  Too late: he disappears again, bounding away for the rest of her things, reminding Marina more of a rangy puppy than the wolf she compared him to at first.

  The room is dark and claustrophobic after her flat in Wiltshire and she drags back the net curtains again to let in the fading light. There is a chemical smell, but already patches of mould are showing beneath the window.

  Ron returns with the final bag and finds her peering at the wall. ‘I get that too,’ he says. ‘Bleach works. You can borrow mine.’

  ‘Thanks,’ says Marina, straightening. ‘I brought a bottle with me, but by the looks of this I’ll need a whole lot more. Don’t you complain?’

  ‘No point. Landlord’s a lazy bastard.’

  ‘I gathered as much.’

  He stands without speaking, scratching his chin. She’s busy looking out the window. Apart from the maple tree, the view is parked cars, bricks and mortar. There’s a pair of semi-detached houses opposite. One is boarded up, the other has a window box waiting for spring.

  ‘Is it always this quiet?’ she says.

  ‘Pretty much, especially at the weekend.’

  ‘No children?’

  ‘It’s an old people’s road. People come and they stay. Apart from me, I suppose.’

  Marina nods absent-mindedly. How long will she be here? In the end, she had told Ruth and David the truth about taking the flat in Harrington Gardens. She couldn’t just disappear with no forwarding address. They had questioned and worried but, as always, had supported her and even lent her money. Together with the cheap rent, her earnings from Agata’s editing job and a few more projects in the pipeline, it means she’ll survive for a while.

  ‘Is there anything you need to know?’ Ron ventures. ‘Bins, post, communal spaces, fascinating stuff like that?’

  She smiles. ‘Thanks, but no, the estate agent was thorough. Anyway, weren’t you on your way out?’

  ‘Pint at the local. Want to come?’

  Marina indicates the mouldy wall. ‘I should stay and attack this.’

  He shrugs. ‘OK. Let me know, though . . . about the bleach, I mean.’

  She closes the door behind him and surveys the room. A sense of audacity threatens to overwhelm her and she suddenly laughs out loud. The thought of it . . . moving into the place where she began. Might have begun. The correction sobers her. She steadies herself and takes in the reality instead. A grubby, neglected flat. A lonely quest to find her mother. A perfectly loving family left behind.

  The bedroom is at the rear of the house. It’s stuffy and smells of dust. Marina pulls the net curtains aside and peers out. Ahead of her is a walled garden, edged with fruit trees and shrubs and an overgrown magnolia. It’s not well kept, but it’s not shocking either. The lawn is mowed; the borders neat. At the far end is a section partially obscured by overgrown bushes.

  The grey stone church rises beyond like a spectre. No wonder people were reluctant to rent this place with a graveyard practically in the garden. A man dying in the flat itself and bodies in the backyard is macabre, not to mention the neglected state of the place. Still, she won’t let a small issue like dirt and death put her off. She has a mission: to find those who were here in 1964, and who might remember a baby abandoned in a hallway.

  The devil is in the detail. The saying comes to her as she unhooks the net curtains and rolls them into a grubby ball. What does it mean exactly? Small clues that make a difference. But do those clues complicate or reveal? She isn’t sure.

  In the kitchen, she unpacks cleaning materials and scrubs the cupboards that date from the fifties. The lingering scent of disinfectant suggests an effort has been made, but still she unpicks bits of old food from the corners, gathers up dead flies and earwigs, sweeps away the cobwebs.

  This is what you get for the sake of a very cheap rent she thinks, grimly regarding the pull-down worktop-cum-breakfast-table. It is scratched and stained and by the look of it entirely forgotten by whoever made the half-hearted effort to clean the flat ahead of her moving in. She uses a knife to scrape away a smear of what could be dried egg or custard or pea soup. The cooker and fridge are ancient but serviceable, though the metal guards around the gas rings are stained. She removes the guards and puts them in the sink to soak. Nothing about this old-fashioned kitchen is quaint and no amount of bleach will get rid of the brown streaks caused by the endlessly dripping tap. At least the old boiler works, after a fashion: the water is scalding, the radiators lukewarm.

  Shoving the provisions she brought with her into the fridge, she heads to the bedroom and there, trying not to picture who slept on it last, heaves the mattress over, quickly covering it with her own bedding. She dusts and hoovers, hangs her clothes in the ungainly wardrobe and then moves onto the bathroom where she grimaces again at the chipped bath and stained toilet bowl, the rusty cistern and chain. She won’t think of whoever lay in this bath before her. She won’t think of them sitting on the toilet seat. She won’t think of the man who died, or wonder where or how. It’s no wonder that this place is cheap.

  The living room gets the same treatment and she cleans the mouldy wall with bleach. Delving into her bags, she drags out a pile of books and sets them on a shelf. There is a telephone directory and, oddly, a copy of the New Testament already there. She finds a framed photo of Ruth and David standing by the White Horse and places it on the mantelpiece. It was taken last summer on her birthday, 7 August. Only that isn’t her real birthday. It’s the date she was found. A tiny baby, the doctors had said she must have been early. Two or three days old. Nobody was sure.

  Marina finishes arranging the room and has a cigarette, standing at the window. She contemplates the street, watching the comings and goings, which as Ron has said are few and far between. While she stands there she sees a man pulled along by a German Shepherd, a young woman riding her bike, an elderly couple walking hand in hand.

  Keen to escape the stench of bleach, she steps out of the flat and into the hall. The house is eerily quiet. No clatter of pans or rising smells of onion and garlic or frying meat signifying evening meals, no hungry people rushing home. There is only the musty scent that pervades her flat, and the shifts and groans of the building. She pushes the light-switch. The light is dim. She looks up
the stairs and the darkness thickens.

  Beside her, the front door is ajar and the detail strikes a chord in her memory: she recalls a clipping she read, an interview with the landlord, Kenneth Quip, who had lived on the premises at the time she was discovered. In the interview, he had mentioned that the door was often left open by neglectful tenants. On that particular morning, when Baby Blue – Marina – was found, he was certain it had been ajar. How easy for a woman to come into the house, to place a bundle on the floor and disappear.

  Where would she have left the baby?

  Marina’s gaze falls on the alcove by the door. Now it’s a mess of abandoned boots and brollies. An old bike leans against the wall. But there is space. It’s a perfect place: safe and hidden. She crouches and touches the tiles with the flat of her hand. Was it here where she lay? She closes her eyes, searching for answers to her questions. Had she been sleeping, or had she cried for her mother? How long had she been there alone? She shivers, afraid of the answers, and stands slowly, looking about her, sensing a chill like the breath of a ghost. The timer stops and the light goes off.

  Marina steps outside; it’s a relief to escape the disquiet inside her head, to warm her cold face in a patch of weak sunlight. What a miserable day to have arrived here. She flexes her fingers, fumbles for her gloves in her pocket and pulls them on. Standing there, she rakes over the information she has gleaned through the years. She pictures the plan she once drew of the tenants who had lived here in 1964, at least the ones who had come up in the newspapers: the basement flat, occupied by Victor Wallace; Flat 1, Kenneth Quip, the landlord; Flat 2, Leonard Crisp and Eileen Clarke, who were actors, apparently; Flat 3, Dorothy Light; Flat 4, Thomas Littleton; Flat 5, Natalia Kolinski.

  Marina’s mind returns to the story of the pregnant woman spotted by a tenant. The tenant was Mrs Kolinski and, according to her, the woman had appeared several times in the months leading up to the abandonment. Who was she? Why hadn’t the police tracked her down?

  The street lamp in front of the house flickers and comes on. Sickly yellow, it shines on the branches of the maple tree. The tree is spindly and tired-looking, giving the same impression of neglect as the house.

  Inside the hall again, she switches on the light then closes the front door, crosses to the far wall and examines a set of five metal letter boxes nailed side by side. She goes through a present-day roll call.

  FLAT 1: GIOVANNI GAETTI

  Flat 2 is hers, unlabelled.

  FLAT 3: HYDE

  FLAT 4: MR AND MRS HAMILTON

  FLAT 5: KOLINSKI

  Kolinski. A connection, the only one, reaching back into the past. Natalia, or a relative?

  The silence of the house is broken by a piano. Chopin. The notes drift and, like soft chains, shackle Marina in the hallway. The music stops and she is released, but drawn to its source. The original light has clicked off, but she turns on another – a switch near the stairs this time – and heads up, one hand on the rough bannister, going slowly, taking everything in. The paint is the same cold blue as in the hallway, showing the occasional warm tone of dark green underneath. In places, chunks of plaster have dropped from the ceiling, leaving layers of fine white dust. The house is neglected inside and out, with cracks in the walls and cobwebs in the corners. The landlord should be ashamed, letting the place fall in on itself like this.

  The light is weak and barely lasts the climb to the first floor before there is a popping sound. Darkness returns. Fumbling for a switch, Marina discovers another button on a timer, just as in the hall below. She pushes hard and the mechanism whirrs.

  The landing is an empty rectangle with bare, dusty boards. Straight ahead is the next flight of stairs. The doors to Flats 3 and 4 sit squarely opposite each other. Marina listens at each one, but there is no sound or movement. She has an odd sensation of having been here before, but knows that she hasn’t, not even with Wayne. It’s a trick of her imagination, or else she has seen this part of the house in a newspaper clipping and has forgotten.

  The music starts again – coming from above. The next flight that leads to the second floor is in darkness. Finding another button, Marina pushes firmly and looks around. Warily, she follows the sound. This stairway is narrower than the first. It’s steeper too. Perhaps once upon a time this was the servants’ quarters.

  She goes slowly and by the time she reaches the second-floor landing, which is much smaller than the one below, the light has clicked off again. However, there’s a tiny window set high in the wall on the side of the house, and the late-afternoon sunshine spills weakly through. Marina can see the door of Flat 5 to the right, but there’s a door opposite too. She moves across, twists the handle and it swings open. A staircase leads to what must be the attic, high in the eaves. The bare wood steps are stained and splintered and she’s about to climb them when the music stops.

  On impulse, she turns to Flat 5 and knocks softly. A moment goes by and she raps a little louder. Leaning her head closer, she listens. Nothing. She imagines a woman, although it could be a man, standing a foot away, the two of them separated by the door. Marina plumps for a woman. Is she there, deciding whether to admit this unexpected visitor? Is her hand on the latch? A narrow hand with long fingers and trimmed nails: a pianist’s hands. Is she old or is she young? Can Marina hear breathing, in time with her own?

  A few more moments pass and the door remains resolutely shut. Reluctantly Marina leaves. This person, Kolinski, doesn’t want to be disturbed.

  On the way down, the door to Flat 3 opens abruptly and out steps a short woman in a plain brown coat, a matching hat with a pin, and a handbag hooked over one arm. Seeing Marina, she startles and raises a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh,’ she says. Her face pales.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Marina immediately. ‘Did I startle you?’ She smiles. ‘You must be Mrs Hyde. I’ve just moved into Flat 2 and I saw your name on the post box.’

  The woman doesn’t answer, only gawks at Marina. In her late sixties, she has a smear of pink across her lips, but she’s missed the edges, and her powder accentuates the lines on her face. Her features are sharp, eyes small. Wisps of white hair escape from her hat. Her pose is still, her gaze steady. Marina apologises again for making her jump. Her voice sounds loud in the quiet of the house.

  The woman recovers, nods and turns to fiddle with the lock. ‘I hope you’ve settled in,’ she says over her shoulder. Her voice is rasping, almost inaudible.

  ‘Thank you,’ Marina replies. ‘I heard the piano and was curious. The player is very talented.’ She hesitates, hoping Mrs Hyde will provide information, but the woman doesn’t seem the gossiping type. Quite the contrary, in fact. Ignoring the comment, she opens her handbag, drops the keys inside and closes it with a snap.

  Now Marina sees that she has a bible in her hand. ‘Off to church?’ she says, anxious to be friendly. It isn’t Sunday. Perhaps she has a bible class.

  Mrs Hyde grimaces and nods and then heads towards the stairs.

  ‘Have you lived here long?’ Marina calls after her.

  No answer. Maybe she’s hard of hearing. There’s certainly nothing wrong with her mobility. Marina hurries to keep up as the older woman scuttles down the stairs. In the hall, she asks again.

  Mrs Hyde pauses and blinks. ‘For a while,’ she says, ‘and now if you’ll excuse me . . .’

  She disappears through the front door – leaving it open – and Marina is left with a precarious sensation, as if she’s been set adrift. She can still smell the woman’s scent, a mix of cold cream and eau de cologne, and she breathes it in like a hunter following a trail.

  6

  Eva

  January 1992

  Eva scrutinises the piano keys. She has made mistake after mistake with this piece. Is she ever going to get it right?

  She flexes her fingers, examines her nails. She has been off colour for weeks, ever since she saw the woman in the lamplight, staring at the house. Midnight, awake as usual, she had made hot chocolate and stood a
t the frosty window warming her hands. How unnerving it had been, seeing the figure standing there like a beautiful statue with the snow settling on her thick, dark hair. Intrigued, Eva had switched off the light and watched.

  Two months later and the woman had moved into the building. Eva had recognised the old Mini first and then the woman emerging from the car and hauling out bags. Faux-fur coat and fingerless gloves. That hair. There had been no mistaking it was the same person. Ron had helped and Eva had watched him buzzing around with a tinge of jealousy that she had quickly stifled. After all, it had been her fault that she and Ron had broken up. She had rejected him.

  She remembers when Ron had moved in. Her mother, Natalia, had met him first, outside on the pavement; had rushed to tell Eva how good-looking he was, how interesting too. He worked in a museum. Natalia had been impressed by that. She liked the kind of people who were interested in history, or the arts – or music, of course. And she had been excited in a way Eva hadn’t seen for a while.

  A few months later, Natalia had had a heart attack. How difficult Eva had found that to comprehend when her mother had always been so slim, so active. She had walked everywhere, to the shops, to the houses of the ladies she sewed for and of the pupils she taught. And she’d had stamina, staying up late at night to perfect her piano pieces or to finish the clothes or the curtains that she made. It had been a real shock. Her beautiful mother gone – just like that. Some days Eva had hardly been able to get out of bed, and there was no way she could leave the house. It was as if she had drifted back to the dark days when she was a child, suffering from vertigo and panic attacks.

  Everyone had been kind. Selena Hamilton, the lady below in Flat 4, had brought her food. Her mother’s ex-pupils and their parents had dropped round with flowers and commiserations. There were no relatives alive. Not that Natalia had known about, anyway, and that in itself made Eva feel alone. What would she do? The flat was only rented. Her mother had no money to speak of, which was why they had never moved, and Eva had no qualifications or prospects. She could teach piano, but that was about it. She couldn’t even sew.