Page 21 of All Our Missing Pieces

And then I saw them. Gary and Beatrice, on the dance floor. Their bodies were pressed close together, and their mouths were, too. His hand was high on her bare leg, snaking beneath her dress. I stopped, the music and my own blood pounding in my head. Behind me, I heard the toilet door slam.

I saw Beatrice break away from the kiss, glancing towards me. I knew she’d seen me, and seen Samantha behind me – and I knew Samantha must have seen her.

Beatrice raised a hand to me in a thumbs-up gesture, then she broke away from Gary and headed towards the exit, laughing. Samantha pushed past me, through the throng of people towards her boyfriend, shouting something, her voice shrill with rage.

And I realised that Beatrice had done that for me. For me – but also maybe for fun, and just because she could.

FOURTEEN

9 JUNE 2005

Something has changed between the girls. And between them and Luke too – or more specifically between Livvie and Luke. I can sense it when they are in the room with me – which Livvie and Luke increasingly are not. I notice the two of them going out into the garden together after dinner, having hastily and dutifully done the washing up, and on weekends Livvie ostensibly helps Luke with his work, but I hear drifts of laughter coming from them where before there were only the busy sounds of honest toil: questions, instructions and occasional obscenities.

With Livvie and Luke I sense a romance could be on the cards; between Beatrice and Livvie it is something else – a power play, perhaps? They talk to each other like friends, they disappear into one or the other’s bedroom at times, emerging wearing each other’s clothes or make-up, and yet there’s a crackle of tension between them that is quite different from the magnetism I can see Luke and Livvie beginning to feel for each other.

Could Beatrice be jealous of Livvie and Luke? It would not surprise me – not that she would want Luke in particular, but that she wouldn’t want someone else to have what she cannot. She is a young woman who is used to getting her own way – I remember the casual fashion in which she asked me to cook meat for her evening meals, as if there was no question of me refusing because it is against my principles.

Also, she makes very little effort to help around the house. Not that I’d expect her to, exactly – but the others do. When she sees them hoovering or tidying or taking a load of washing to the launderette, she’ll reluctantly put the clean dishes away in the cupboard or flick a duster around – the most pointless chore ever, in this building site where dust breeds like the rabbits did on the hills around my grandmother’s house – before sitting down again with her magazine or going to lie outside in the sun, basking among the weeds like Maud does.

Well – I can’t object to it. I signed up for this when I had the idea of taking lodgers, even though part of me bristles and longs to snap that I am her landlady, not her servant.

And there’s something else I have just signed up to. Today I’ll be attending a meeting of the Spitalfields Preservation Trust, a bunch of local do-gooders intent on conserving the architectural heritage of the area. I think they imagined I might have plans to knock the house down and replace it with flats, and sometimes I wish I could! But in return for my turning up in smart clothes and sitting before a committee like some kind of dancing monkey, they may ‘offer me a grant’ to assist with the renovations. And God knows I need all the assistance I can get, so turn up and dance I will.

I suppose I will have to go out and buy an ironing board and an iron – which will probably result in Beatrice asking me to press her blouses for her.

My God. Writing that has brought back a memory of my grandmother overhearing me asking our maid to do just that. She exploded with rage. Don’t you think Colleen has better things to do, with this entire house to sweep and the beds to make? What did your last slave die of? You’ll iron that yourself, young lady – it’s time you learned.

Colleen left us shortly afterwards, because we could no longer afford to pay her, so my grandmother was right – it was indeed time I learned.

That has made me realise why I resent Beatrice sometimes, with her entitlement and her indolence. She is like I was at that age. Just like me.

FIFTEEN

As soon as she opened the door, Beatrice could hear laughter. She paused in the hallway, listening. She couldn’t detect Luke’s voice at all, only Orla’s and Livvie’s. Slowly, she walked towards the kitchen. Every muscle in her body felt leaden with tiredness; the previous night, she’d been up until three in the morning going through the last filing cabinet of papers on the first floor, but had found nothing of any value to her.

The house on Damask Square, it appeared, had once been home to a firm of accountants that had done the books for various local businesses, and Beatrice had spent a fruitless three hours looking through the ledgers of an Indian restaurant, a company that imported silk fabric from Vietnam – she’d felt a leap of excitement when she saw this, but it had subsided almost immediately; the names were wrong, the dates were wrong, everything was wrong – and a law firm that appeared to specialise in defending local gangsters.

The papers might have been interesting, but Beatrice had been able to make little sense of the endless columns of credit and debit, especially by the dim light of her tiny torch. At last, her head drooping and her eyes burning with fatigue and dust, she’d abandoned her search and gone to bed.

That was it, now. There was nothing left on that floor for her to investigate. She’d wasted whole nights – almost three weeks’ worth of nights – and found nothing, and now she didn’t know where to go next.

Nothing but the painting. She’d looked at it again and again, in daylight, admiring its quality and confirming – not that she needed to confirm – that it was indeed the pub in Clonmara. The hills were different now, their sides scarred with houses and small industrial estates. But the pub was still there, unmistakable. Beatrice wondered whether the painting showed the view from the big house where the Doyle family had once lived, now demolished.

She could, of course, ask Orla. The painting was unsigned – had it been in the house when Orla moved in? Had she bought it from one of the market stalls? Had she even – the thought made goosebumps rise on Beatrice’s neck – painted it herself? But Orla had never mentioned art to Beatrice, even though she’d seen her out in the garden with her own sketchbook, drawing the cat as she lay sprawled in the sun.

Besides, she never saw Orla alone. Beatrice left the house in the mornings before anyone was up, and by the time she got home at night Livvie was almost always there, chatting to Orla in the kitchen as she was now.

Silently, Beatrice walked through the dark hallway. Next to her was what had once been the dining room – a cavernous space, littered now with cans of paint, a pasting table, bags of plaster and Luke’s power tools. She hadn’t been in there yet; there was nothing to see. Then she felt a draught on her arm, a current of cool air in the otherwise warm house.

She stopped and looked. A door beneath the stairs, which had always been closed before, almost invisible against the layers of paint that covered the panelling, was standing ajar. She nudged it, stopping almost immediately when its hinges let out a creak of protest.

But it had opened wide enough for her to see that behind it, a steep flight of wooden stairs led downwards.

There must be a cellar. Of course, a house this age would have one – coal would have been stored there, probably, back in the day. Beatrice shuddered, imagining the grimy darkness beneath her feet. Searching the first floor had been bad enough; down there it would be horrible. There’d be rats and Beatrice had a terror of rats.

A sudden thump on the floor behind her made her jump and she spun around, but it was only Maud, hopping down the final stair from the first floor on to the bare boards.

Her mind made a snap connection: cat, rats. She remembered overhearing Orla, half-laughing and half-revolted, telling Luke she’d found the head of a squirrel on the landing outside her bedroom. If Maud was capable of that, rats would be a piece of cake in comparison.