Page 37 of All Our Missing Pieces

‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I’ll see if she’s in.’

He grunted a response and I turned back into the house. Orla might be up on the top floor; she’d been spending time there when the weather was dry, painting, because she said the light was better than anywhere else in the house, better even than her bedroom.

I ran upstairs, past the empty first floor and on up to the second. The doors to my bedroom, Luke’s and Beatrice’s were all closed. Orla’s was usually left ajar, so Maud could come and go as she pleased, but now it was closed too.

I knocked, but there was no reply.

‘Orla?’ I called, listening for the sound of footsteps coming from upstairs.

I listened but heard nothing.

Perhaps she was sleeping. I didn’t want to disturb her if she was having a rare lie-in or a mid-morning nap. Then I heard a sound from inside the room, like something heavy being pushed or dragged across the floor.

I knocked again, then pushed open the door.

Beatrice was there. She was crouched down by the neatly made bed, an unfastened suitcase in front of her, which she’d been in the act of pushing back beneath the bed.

Bizarrely, my first reaction was to smile at her. I didn’t even form the thought coherently, but I must have assumed that she’d overheard my conversation downstairs and come to look for Orla herself.

Almost immediately, I realised how absurd that was. Strange as she sometimes was, Beatrice would never have looked for our landlady under her bed – still less inside a suitcase that had been under it.

Even if the rational part of my mind hadn’t dismissed the idea, one look at Beatrice’s face would have done. She looked terrified. She looked embarrassed. She looked guilty as hell.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I heard myself burst out.

She sprang to her feet, kicking the suitcase under the bed. ‘What the fuck are you doing? Snooping around like that?’

‘Snooping? I wasn’t snooping. I was looking for Orla. I knocked. If anyone was snooping, it was you. What were you looking for?’

I was still too surprised to be properly angry – still anticipating that Beatrice would be able to explain her behaviour, that I had somehow made a mistake.

So the fury of her response blindsided me.

‘It’s none of your fucking business what I’m looking for.’ She stepped towards me, her face inches from mine. Her eyes were wide and her teeth literally bared, startling in the peachy smoothness of her face.

‘It is my—’ I began, then realised that, of course, it wasn’t. ‘You’ve got no business looking through Orla’s stuff.’

‘Right,’ she sneered. ‘Because you’re Orla’s – what? Her bodyguard? Her personal assistant? Her special pet? Only you get to decide what happens to her and her bedroom and her stuff?’

‘I didn’t decide anything,’ I said, bewildered. ‘No one has to decide that prying in someone’s personal things is wrong. It just is wrong.’

‘You think you’re so special, don’t you? With your sewing lessons and your paint roller and your boyfriend. I’ll tell you something right now, Livvie – you don’t own this house. You don’t now and you never will. You don’t get to make the rules here and tell me what I can and can’t do. All these months you’ve been acting like the queen fucking bee – you think I haven’t noticed?’

Unbidden, my mind flashed back to the actual bees I’d been watching just a few minutes ago, in the peaceful sunny garden where Luke was.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never said I owned the house, or Orla – or anything. I just live here, same as you. There are hardly any rules – you know that. But there’s just… I don’t know. Common decency.’

‘Common decency.’ She mocked my accent, making it sound prissy and uptight. ‘Is that what makes you use Orla like you’ve got some kind of right over her?’

‘Beatrice, you’re being daft. Of course I don’t do that – I don’t think that. I don’t understand why you’re so angry with me. I thought we were friends.’

She laughed – a hard, angry sound. ‘So did I. But I know better now. You’re just out for what you can get. Since you started fucking Luke and playing dressmakers with your precious Orla, you’ve barely bothered to speak to me.’

I felt my face flame. It wasn’t true – and yet, in a way, it was. Since before my first date with Luke – since going shopping with Orla, even before what had happened between Beatrice and Gary in the pub – I’d felt wary of Beatrice. Even though I’d barely acknowledged it even to myself, my growing relationship with Luke and my increasing fondness for Orla had allowed me to step back from her, and any gap I might have felt from doing that had closed over seamlessly.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, regretting it immediately. ‘I never meant to hurt your feelings. I want us to be friends – all of us.’

Again, I remembered the garden: how I’d allowed myself to imagine seasons and years elapsing in this house, everything peaceful, nothing changing.