The Girl Below Read Online Free PDF

in on Peggy like that. I had no idea she was so ill.”
    “Don’t be silly, she loves an audience,” said Pippa. “It’s being alone she can’t stand. Besides, she’s perked up since then, and if you hadn’t popped in to see her, you wouldn’t be here now.”
    A few more of my reservations dissolved. “Peggy’s better?”
    “Much better. Yesterday she ticked me off, for wearing jeans—she thinks denim is so working class—and I took that as a sign she was on the mend. Later on she even got out of bed. One of the doctors said she’d never walk again, but she made it as far as the booze cabinet before collapsing. I expect she wanted to prove him wrong.”
    “She didn’t hurt herself when she collapsed?”
    “No, no, she sort of fell into a nearby armchair, and went to sleep with the bottle in her hand. Business as usual there.”
    I chose this moment to offer up the bottle of plonk I’d bought from the off-license by the tube station. Pippa peered into the brown paper bag, then shrank from it, visibly disgusted.
    “I’m really sorry,” I said, mortified. “I couldn’t afford anything decent.”
    “Oh dear God,” said Pippa, squeezing my arm to reassure me. “It isn’t that. The thing is, we—Ari and I—don’t drink. And by that I mean we’re teetotalers, practically Mormons. We gave it up when the doctors showed us the state of Mummy’s liver. We tried AA but couldn’t handle all the praying, so now we just keep a sort of honesty calendar. If one of us falls off the wagon, we get a black mark. Don’t we, Ari?” She addressed the last part to the kitchen, where, presumably, Ari was hiding. “Suki’s here,” she said, more loudly. “She’s come all the way from Australia to see us!”
    “New Zealand,” I corrected.
    “New Zealand!” she shouted at the kitchen.
    I followed her in, where a huge man trussed in a small white chef’s apron stood with his belly jutting out to meet the stove. He was the very opposite of all the snake-hipped rogues Pippa had run around with back in the day, but so was almost any husband you could think of.
    “Ari,” said Pippa, prodding him to get his attention. “I said, Suki’s here.”
    Ari rested his wooden spoon on a tea towel and wiped his hands on his apron before backing away reluctantly from the stove. “Hope you’re not vegetarian,” he said, holding toward me a hand the size of a bear’s.
    “Meat is good,” I said, patting my stomach.
    He smiled vaguely and went back to his pots. Pippa swung open the fridge, giving me a clear view of the honesty calendar, which looked as though it had only just survived a violent game of noughts and crosses.
    “That’s all Ari,” said Pippa, noticing I’d seen it. “He refuses to cook anything without wine. I have to watch him like a hawk. Don’t I, darling?”
    At the stove, Ari huffed, and I thought, with a pang, of the seven quid I’d wasted on plonk, and how it had been a toss-up between that and my tube fare home. Was it rude, in the home of quasi-reformed alcoholics, to demand a glass of wine from the bottle you’d brought? I was starting to think I might need one.
    In the two months that had passed since I first called Pippa, my circumstances had bypassed bad and worse and arrived straight at desperate. I had no family in London anymore, no backstop, and since my arrival the city had been behaving in a way that was downright hostile. In the first month, I had tried to open a bank account in Kensington High Street—the same branch my parents had used—but had been told that I couldn’t open one until I’d lived in England for at least a year. “But I was born here and lived here for eighteen years,” I protested, to no avail. Ten years abroad had apparently canceled out the first eighteen in Britain. The same thing happened at the surgery of my old family doctor in Westbourne Grove, where I went to retrieve my National Health Service number. The receptionist informed me that after ten