The Girl Below Read Online Free PDF Page B

years without patient activity, they had destroyed my health records. Inland Revenue had just done the same. I found such efficiency hard to believe in a country renowned for its grinding bureaucracy but was told that if I’d come back earlier there’d still have been a trace of me left in the system. As things stood, I felt like the recently deceased.
    Pippa took a carton out of the fridge and poured me a large glass of orange juice. “Now,” she said, guiding me back to the living room, “the last time we saw you was at the funeral. Next thing we heard, you’d gone to live with your father in New Zealand.”
    “I didn’t live with him.”
    “How silly of me,” Pippa said. “You were too old. What were you, eighteen or nineteen?”
    “Eighteen, but that wasn’t it. He lived in the country and—”
    Pippa laughed. “I can’t imagine the disco king ever living in the country—how absurd.”
    She talked about my father in a jocular way and I wondered how well she had known him, how much he’d had to do with what I’d seen that night at the party. But it wasn’t something I could ask about. “His new wife,” I said, “is fully into horses.”
    She looked as though a light had come on. “Good lord, that’s right. Rowan was horse mad.”
    “You knew Rowan?”
    “Not well, no,” said Pippa, adding, “only what Hillary told me about her.”
    For a moment, I was silent, taken aback. My mother had never mentioned Rowan to me by name, or in any other way, and I’d assumed it was because she didn’t know anything about her.
    “I wish I’d made more of an effort to help you and your mother after you left Ladbroke Gardens,” said Pippa. “You do know that, don’t you?”
    She’d said as much on the phone but I wondered why she felt the need to repeat herself. “You did what you could,” I said, parroting what I told everyone who felt bad about not seeing Mum enough toward the end, as if they might have been able to stop her from dying. “Besides, she didn’t tell anyone how sick she was. Not even me.”
    “You didn’t know she was dying?”
    “I knew she was ill.” An edge of defensiveness crept into my voice. “But I didn’t know it was terminal.”
    “Who knows what any of us would do in that situation?” said Pippa, in such a way that I knew she would have done the opposite. “It’s a mother’s worst fear—well, second-worst fear—and she probably didn’t want to scare you.”
    “What’s a mother’s worst fear?” I said, feeling stupid that I didn’t know.
    “One that she can’t even bring herself to say out loud.”
    “Oh,” I said, feeling even thicker than before.
    For a while we talked about old times, but what Pippa remembered and what I remembered did not seem to converge. She laughed when I told her about Madeline, how after all this time the statue still gave me the creeps.
    “Are you sure it has a name?” she said. “Harold and I used to call it the Midget. I tried to convince Mummy to sell it a few years ago to knock off a few bills and what not but she insisted on keeping the bloody thing. Said she’d rather sell her kidneys. I told her no one would want those, they’d be as pickled as her liver. Of course, she didn’t find that at all funny. According to her, I don’t have a sense of humor. Only Harold has one of those.”
    From the kitchen came the hopeful clatter of plates, but when Pippa asked how far away dinner was, Ari only grumbled that it would be ready when it was ready. My stomach grumbled back. For weeks I had eaten only as much as I could afford, which was never enough to fill me up.
    When we had exhausted the topic of old times, Pippa asked about my current situation—a subject I’d been dreading. Instead of saying I was unemployed, I came up with some rot about being at a career crossroads, unsure of what to do next, and was relieved when she responded, “That’s a generational thing, isn’t it?” because it meant I could nod in