Page 11 of All Our Missing Pieces

Then Beatrice had an idea.

‘Tell you what,’ she said conspiratorially. ‘You can wear my scarf. Come on, up you get.’

Startled by the sudden change in Beatrice’s tone, Parker stopped screaming and scrambled to her feet.

‘Wait there.’ Beatrice hurried to the entryway and snatched the scarf from the closet. It was Givenchy, a silk and wool blend with the designer’s name woven in white on to a black background, and she’d picked it up in a thrift store in the Meatpacking District.

‘Scarf,’ Parker said, reaching out a hand to grab it.

‘Scarf,’ Beatrice confirmed. ‘Only we’re going to turn it into a coat. Now, let’s play mannequins. Arms out like this. Stand very still.’

Beatrice hunkered down again, looking from scarf to child and back again. This shouldn’t be too hard. She draped one corner over Parker’s shoulder, wound the length around her body like a sash, crossed it over the other shoulder, wrapped it around her waist and knotted the ends securely together.

Then she stood up and surveyed the result. Not terrible. She looked like a papoose, but she’d be warm enough.

‘Silver rain boots with that, I think,’ she said firmly.

‘Silver,’ Parker agreed meekly, her hands pressing into the soft fabric like starfish half submerged in sand.

‘Good girl. Come on then, let’s make a move.’

Hurrying now, Beatrice pushed her arms into her own coat, slung her purse over her shoulder and pushed the button to summon the elevator. A minute later they emerged on to the street, Parker’s small, sticky hand clasped tightly in Beatrice’s.

‘Four hours,’ she breathed to herself, like an affirmation. ‘Four hours, then I won’t have to see them again for two whole days.’

On Sunday, Beatrice woke up feeling almost human, having slept for twelve hours straight. She’d spent the previous day in bed, sleeping and mindlessly watching old episodes of Friends on the small, flickering screen of her hotel room television. She’d ventured out at lunchtime with her sketchbook, thinking she’d explore the local area a bit, but got no further than McDonald’s before returning to bed.

Was this what it was going to be like? Months and months of living in a country where she couldn’t learn to feel at home and a city she was too shattered to even see, all her hopes and intentions coming to nothing because she was simply too tired to actually live?

The weather helped: a glorious, sunny day, full of the warmth that spring had so far failed to deliver. Dressed in jeans, sneakers and a sweater, Beatrice walked away from the cluster of glass high-rise towers, following the bend of the river towards the City. She wanted to explore: to find the neighbourhood where the old men in Clonmara had told her the family’s house had been located. But also, she needed to find a place to live; two weeks in a hotel – even such a basic one – had eaten into her funds alarmingly, even with her parents’ contributions.

She didn’t get very far before hunger made her stop, and she went into a café and ordered a full English breakfast. Mopping up beans with her toast, adding three spoons of sugar to her tea – the only way to make it drinkable, she figured – and even sampling the scab-like disc of black pudding, she hoped she might be mistaken for a local.

But she wouldn’t, of course – no local would have an A–Z map book and a Rough Guide to London open next to them, studying it closely as they ate.

She could quite easily walk as far as the Tower of London, and check that out. She could get the Tube into central London and wander round Topshop and Selfridges. She could visit an art gallery or even the Fashion and Textile Museum.

But she knew she would do none of those things. She’d come here with a purpose: everything – the job that her parents had arranged for her, her insistence on taking a gap year before finding a proper job or a grad school programme, her insistence on refusing Peter and Frances’s offer of accommodation – had been for one thing.

Only now that she was here, she had no idea how to actually go about it.

She rooted in her purse, found her notebook and placed it on top of the open A–Z, flicking through the pages. She hadn’t added anything since arriving in London; the final entry was still there, the four words, one crossed out and corrected: Big house in Spitalfields.

She cast her mind back to that dingy, low-ceilinged room, its walls still stained yellow from the tobacco no one had been permitted to smoke for over a year. It was practically a miracle she’d managed to write it down at all, given how thick the men’s accents had been and how many glasses of peaty Irish whiskey they’d insisted on buying her.

They’d told her that, yes, there’d been a big house in the area, long ago, and that a wealthy family had lived there.

‘More than ten years ago, it would have been, since the old woman was taken into care.’

‘Her son died some twenty years ago and his wife had run off years before.’

‘He was one for the drink, and the ladies.’

Beatrice had done some rapid mental arithmetic. If the old woman had been old enough to go into a care home ten years ago, her son and daughter-in-law would surely have been too old to be of any relevance to Beatrice.

‘Did they have any children?’ she asked. ‘A daughter?’

‘Sure there was a girl.’ The speaker scratched his head. ‘But she went off to college in Dublin and no one ever saw her again.’