Page 3 of All Our Missing Pieces

Since writing the words, Beatrice had looked online and discovered her misspelling; now, she used her fountain pen to strike through the word and write it carefully again.

Spitalfields.

The wing of the plane dipped and Beatrice’s stomach lurched with fresh excitement. Through the window, she saw a glimpse of bleached blue sky and then, suddenly, the earth below – a margin of sea then stretches of green interspersed with the grey patches of buildings.

It all stretched out like her future – like a promise.

TWO

5 MARCH 2005

My first thought when I woke up this morning was, What have I done?

My second was, I need to write my Morning Pages. So here I am, marking this new start with a fresh page – though not a new notebook. If I’d started one with every new beginning over the past ten years, I’d have left hundreds of pages empty, and that would have been a shameful waste of the planet’s scarce resources.

As it is, I’ve filled almost fifty of them – a pleasing array they’d make, all more or less the same size but with different colours and bindings. They’re stashed away in a tea chest somewhere in the cellar, in this house where I am waking for the first time and filling my pages as I do every morning. Three pages of longhand writing, no more and no less, every single day.

I thought, after all the excitement – to put it kindly – of yesterday, I’d sleep like a baby. Not that babies sleep, according to those who know more about them than I do. Like a log, then. But I didn’t. The unfamiliar sounds of this house – the scrape of a tree branch on a windowpane, the shouts of a group of young people making their way back from the pub late last night, the intermittent drip, drip, drip of rain coming through the roof on to the floor of the attic above me – all kept me awake last night for hours and punctuated my dreams.

Not to mention the whistling of wind coming from across the room: I thought I’d closed the window tightly last night, but it appears I didn’t – or that the wooden frame is rotten, letting draughts through around the edges of the glass. Rotten, like so much in this house, from the ceiling joists to the floorboards and just about everything in between.

What have I done?

But what choice did I have? It has been bequeathed to me, as much a duty as a gift, and I already feel as if I have a responsibility to it – to nurture it, restore it, make it whole again. Because none of this – not the leaks or the rotting window frame or the disgusting bathroom – is the house’s fault. It’s no more to blame than a stray cat would be for wandering the streets scrawny and threadbare, its ears torn from fighting and its eyes rheumy. The house has been neglected too, unloved and uncared for, fifty years of tenants leaving clutter and botched renovations but no memories that I can discern.

Only the cellar is sound, if damp, so that is where I have stored the possessions I have accumulated over the years, as well as those Mr Murphy had shipped over to save on storage costs.

Already, for all its faults, it feels like home. It feels as if it has been waiting for me – which, of course, as a matter of actual fact, it has. More than that though – it feels as if I have been waiting for it. As if all those moves, from country to country, hemisphere to hemisphere, pillar to post, were all leading me back here.

I couldn’t just walk in, however. I had to wait for events to unfold, for the formalities to be completed, for Mr Murphy to track me down and tell me that it was mine. And so here I am, lying on a stained old mattress in the most habitable room of a house that would probably fall down if I let it. I’m not going to let it. I feel fiercely protective of it – almost maternal, which is an absurd way to feel about five storeys of bricks and mortar.

An absurd way for me to feel about anything.

And, of course, I have no more of an idea how to care for it than I would if it were a baby. Instead of feeding and nappy changing and winding and settling down for naps, it’ll need plastering and rewiring and rodent extermination and no doubt repointing and other things I can’t begin to understand. But first it’ll need a damn good clean, and I’ve filled three pages now so that is what I’m going to give it.

I will love this house. I swear I will – if only it will allow me to.

THREE

It would never have occurred to me that I’d live somewhere beautiful. I’d never put the thought into words – not, Beautiful places aren’t for the likes of you, Livvie, or anything like that – but it had still become somehow internalised. Besides, I already had somewhere to live – that is, until I came to the realisation that I’d rather live anywhere at all than there. Well, almost anywhere.

I’d been renting the top right-hand bedroom in a house just off Mile End Road for three months by then. In the room opposite mine, on the other side of the landing, was Samantha and often Samantha’s boyfriend, Gary. Half a flight of stairs down was the back bedroom that was Amanda’s.

Even though we didn’t know one another, it should have worked. We should have become mates, borrowing each other’s hair straighteners and comparing hangovers while we cooked fry-ups on Saturday mornings. Or even if that didn’t happen, we could have rubbed along, barring the occasional row about who’d left hair in the plughole and who was late with their share of the rent.

But we didn’t. Not from the beginning.

It started a week or so after I moved in and never really stopped; something had made Samantha decide that Amanda was her friend and I wasn’t. When I arrived home from work, I’d find Samantha in the kitchen, either with Gary or Amanda or both of them. And always, when I walked in, they’d stop talking about whatever they’d been talking about, look at me for a second, then laugh.

I didn’t know what I’d done wrong, but clearly it was something. I did my best to ride it out, to rise above it, and so it took until March before things went from tense to explosive.

One morning, when I managed to catch Amanda alone, I tried asking her about it. It was a Saturday; I’d slept in – or not slept so much as lain in bed, listening carefully to the sounds of the house, trying to judge when it was safe to emerge from the refuge of my room, use the bathroom and go downstairs.

When I eventually did, I found Amanda there, eating toast and peanut butter at the kitchen table, apparently engrossed in Heat magazine.

‘Morning.’ I smiled. ‘Tea?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m all right.’