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68
August 2019
Max Blackwood, the estate agent, stands outside the vicarage in St Albans on a cool August morning, wearing a sweater over his business shirt. ‘Good morning, good morning!’ he sings to Lucy as she steps out of her car. ‘It’s D-Day!’
Lucy waits to oversee Stella as she clambers out of the back, while Henry joins her from the passenger seat and Marco climbs out of his side and the four of them stand and survey the house.
‘Fuck me,’ Henry stage-whispers to Marco. ‘I see what you mean.’
‘I told you, didn’t I?’ says Marco, who hates the house with a passion. ‘Clapped.’
Stella meanwhile grabs hold of Lucy’s hand and squeezes it excitedly. The whole journey she has been clamouring to get hereso that she can see her room again. The children have been here only once before, just after the sales contracts were exchanged. Today is completion day and Lucy strides towards the estate agent and takes the keys from his outstretched hand.
‘Thank you so much,’ she says to him. ‘This is pretty much the most exciting day of my life. Can you believe it, forty years old and this is the first home of my own I’ve ever had?’
The estate agent beams at her and says, ‘Better late than never. And worth the wait I’d say. Such a beautiful house.’
They wave him off a moment later and just as he leaves, Libby and Miller pull into the driveway. Libby clutches a huge bouquet of flowers and Miller carries a bottle of champagne. ‘Happy house day!’ says Libby, running towards Lucy and hugging her.
Libby’s seen the house before but Miller hasn’t and he eyes it from the driveway and says, ‘Wow. It’s essentially beautiful, but God you’ll have your work cut out for you.’
‘Yes, well, I’m prepared for that. And as it happens, the best kitchen designer in Hertfordshire has already drawn up plans for the kitchen and it is going to look incredible.’
Dido is going to be overseeing most of the work. She’s assembled a squad of local interior designers and an architect to work with her on it. But first Lucy just wants to be in there, inside. Her first home. Her babies. All in one place. Finally. She turns the key in the door and feels a shiver of pleasure as the door opens under her hand – each time she’s seen the house before it’s been the estate agent’s hand on the keys, pushing open the door – and then they are inside the house and although it is scruffy, broken, badly modernised and falling apart, it fills her heart in a way that is beyond anything she ever experienced before.
Fitz scampers ahead of them and out towards the back door, beyond which he knows there is a two-hundred-foot garden that is all for him. Stella runs up the stairs and into her bedroom with Libby, and Lucy can hear her from here explaining to Libby exactly where her big bed with a ladder up is going to go and how she’s going to have tea parties under it with Freya G and Freya T when they come for sleepovers, which will be happening all the time according to Stella. Downstairs Lucy stands between Miller and Henry, surveying the house and talking about what will go where once Dido’s plans start to take shape. And then she turns and notices Marco standing quietly in the corner of the hallway, kicking at the skirting board with the toe of his shoe.
‘Is it too late to change our minds?’ he says.
‘Yes,’ says Lucy, who has had to put up with two months of Marco canvassing to be allowed to stay at Henry’s and at his central London school and not join them out here in the countryside. But then a moment later she notices that Marco is in the garden with the dog and that he has found a tennis ball from somewhere and is throwing it for Fitz, who scampers helter-skelter up and down the lawn chasing it and bringing it back and she sees a flush of colour pass into her son’s cheeks, and she knows that he will love it here. Eventually.
Libby orders in a stack of super-sized pizzas and they eat them in the garden with the champagne while Stella jumps up and down on the trampoline with the dog. The past couple of months have been stressful in so many ways. The story about Justin’s suicide and the dead pop star and the starving children locked in the Chelsea mansion had gone, somewhat predictably, viral. The papers couldn’t get enough of it for a few days. The story wasaccompanied by numerous pictures of Birdie, of the house, of Lucy leaving Henry’s apartment with the dog, of Libby and Miller leaving her house in St Albans, of Martina and Henry Senior when they were newlywed, of the Harrods crib with the blue painted flowers on it that Libby had been found in as a baby, of the camper van that Justin had been living in, of the pub where he was a regular.
There was even a photo doing the rounds of a young man called Jason Mott, a mud-larking guide on the Thames who had been the one to find the bones. He had a thick mop of strawberry-blond hair and a padded gilet with many pockets over a sleeveless vest. He said, ‘I’ve found some strange things over the many years I’ve been sifting through these mudbanks and shingle shores, everything from false teeth and golf balls to Roman coins and jewellery, but finding this bag of bones was the most shocking discovery of my career. Now a man is dead and I’m wishing I’d thrown them straight back in the river. If I had my time again I would.’
But the glare of the story is starting to fade now. The press has moved on; the public has moved on. Lucy has her house. Henry has his home back. They have been issued their original birth certificates and have reclaimed their given names – the deeds to this house are written out to Lucy Amanda Lamb – and now they are both free from the shadows that have followed them all their adult lives. Neither of them is hiding any longer. The house on Cheyne Walk is finally excised from their psyches. Their lives have begun again.
But there is still one missing piece and as the day spills over from early to late afternoon Lucy’s eyes keep going to the time onher phone and the driveway beyond the kitchen window and with every passing moment she becomes increasingly distracted, losing focus on the conversation wheeling around her.
But finally, at nearly five o’clock, there is a crunch of tyres on gravel and the doorbell rings.
‘Libby, can you get that for me?’ she calls out to her oldest child.
Lucy stands at the edge of the hallway and watches as Libby opens the door to a tall man with dirty blond hair, a scraggy beard and a shy smile.
Lucy’s heart lifts at the sight of him and she takes a few steps towards the door, but still keeps out of sight. There’s the sound of footsteps behind her and she sees Henry drawing close. She puts a finger to her lips, and he nods and stands behind her.
‘Hi?’ says Libby, a question in her voice.
‘Hello,’ says the man. ‘Are you Libby?’
‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘Are you—?’
‘I’m Phin.’
‘Oh.’ A tiny breathless syllable. ‘Wow.’
Lucy and Henry exchange a look. She feels Henry’s hand gently squeezing her shoulder and she takes it in hers.
