The house was empty when he bought it and he spent years and thousands filling it with what he used to call objets: moose heads looming off panelled walls, hunting swords hanging crossed above doorways, mahogany thrones with barley twist backs, a medieval-style banqueting table for sixteen, replete with scars and wormholes, cabinets full of pistols and bullwhips, a twenty-foot tapestry, sinister oil portraits of other people’s ancestors, reams of gold-blocked leather-bound books that no one would ever read and a full-size cannon in the front garden. There were no comfortable chairs in our house, no cosy corners. Everything was wood and leather and metal and glass. Everything was hard. Especially my father.
He lifted weights in our basement and drank Guinness from his own private keg in his own private bar. He wore £800 handmade suits from Mayfair that barely accommodated his muscles and his girth. He had hair the colour of old pennies and raw-looking hands with tight red knuckles. He drove a Jaguar. He played golf although he hated it because he wasn’t designed to swing a golf club; he was too solid, too unyielding. He went on shoots at the weekends: disappeared on Saturday morning wearing a tight-fitting tweed jacket with a boot full of guns and came home on Sunday evening with a brace of wood pigeons in an ice box. Once, when I was about five, he brought home an English Bulldog he’d bought from a man on the street using the mint-fresh fifty-pound notes he kept rolled up in his jacket pocket. He said it reminded him of himself. Then it shat on an antique rug and he got rid of it.
My mother was a rare beauty.
Not my words. My father’s.
Your mother is a rare beauty.
She was half-German, half-Turkish. Her name was Martina. She was twelve years younger than my dad, and back then, before they came, she was a style icon. She would put on a pair of dark sunglasses and take herself off to Sloane Street to spend my father’s money on bright silk scarves and gold-encased lipsticks and intense French perfume and she would be photographed sometimes, her wrists encircled with bag handles, and put in the posh papers. They called her a socialite. She wasn’t really. She went to glamorous parties and wore beautiful clothes but when she was at home she was just our mum. Not the best mum, but not the worst, and certainly a relatively soft spot in our big, masculine, machete-adorned Chelsea mansion.
She’d once had a job, for a year or so, introducing important fashion people to each other. Or at least that was my impression. She had little silver business cards in her purse, printed with the words ‘Martina Lamb Associates’ in hot pink. She had an office on the King’s Road, a bright loft room over a shop, with a glass table and leather chairs and a telex machine, rails of clothes in clear plastic, a vase of white lilies on a plinth. She would take me and my sister into work with her on school holidays and give us crisp piles of tantalisingly white paper from a ream in a box, and a handful of Magic Markers. The phone would ring occasionally, and Mummy would say, ‘Good morning, Martina Lamb Associates.’ Sometimes a visitor would be buzzed in via the intercom – my sister and I fighting over whose turn it was to press the button. The visitors were shrill, very thin women who only wanted to talk about clothes and famous people. There were no ‘associates’, just our mother and the occasional wide-eyed teenage girl on work experience. I don’t know what happened to it all. I just know that the loft office disappeared, and the silver business cards disappeared, and Mummy just carried on being a housewife again.
My sister and I went to school in Knightsbridge – quite possibly the most expensive school in London. Our father was not afraid of spending money then. He loved spending money. The more the better. Our uniform was shit brown and bile yellow with knickerbocker-style trousers for the boys. Thankfully, by the time I was old enough to be humiliated by the attire, my father had no money left to pay for school fees, let alone for corduroy knickerbockers from the Harrods school uniform department.
It all happened so slowly, yet so extraordinarily quickly, the change to our parents, to our home, to our lives after they arrived. But that first night, when Birdie appeared on our front step with two large suitcases and a cat in a wicker box, we could never have guessed the impact she would have, the other people she would bring into our lives, that it would all end the way it did.
We thought she had just come to stay for the weekend.
4
Libby can hear the whisper of every moment that this room has existed, feel every breath of every person who has ever sat where she is sitting.
‘Seventeen ninety-nine,’ Mr Royle had replied in answer to her earlier question. ‘One of the oldest legal practices in the capital.’
Mr Royle looks at her now across his heavily waxed desk top. A smile flickers across his lips and he says, ‘Well, well, well. This is some birthday present, no?’
Libby smiles nervously. ‘I’m still not convinced it’s really true,’ she says. ‘I keep expecting someone to tell me it’s a big wind-up.’
Her choice of words – big wind-up – feels wrong in this venerable and ancient setting. She wishes she’d used a different turn of phrase. But Mr Royle doesn’t seem concerned. His smile stays in place as he leans forward and passes Libby a thick pile of paperwork. ‘No winding up, I can assure you, Miss Jones.
‘Here,’ he says, pulling something from the pile of paper. ‘I wasn’t sure whether to give this to you now. Or maybe I should have sent it to you. With the letter. I don’t know – it’s all so awkward. It was in the file and I kept it back, just in case it didn’t feel right. But it does seem the right thing to do. So here. I don’t know how much your adoptive parents were able to tell you about your birth family. But you might want to take a minute to read this.’
She unfolds the piece of newsprint and lays it out on the table in front of her.
Socialite and husband dead in suicide pact
Teenage children missing; baby found alive
Police yesterday were called to the Chelsea home of former socialite Martina Lamb and her husband Henry after reports of a possible triple suicide. Police arrived at lunchtime and found the bodies of Mr and Mrs Lamb side by side on the floor of the kitchen. A second man, who has yet to be identified, was also found dead. A baby, believed to be female and ten months old, was found in a room on the first floor. The baby has been taken into care and is said to be in good health. Neighbours have observed that there had been numerous children living in the house in recent years and there are varying reports of other adults living at the property, but no trace was found of any other residents.
The cause of death is still to be ascertained, but early blood samples tested appear to suggest that the trio may have poisoned themselves.
Henry Lamb, 48, was the sole beneficiary of the estate of his father, Mr Harry Lamb, of Blackpool, Lancashire. He had suffered from ill health in recent years and was said to be wheelchair-bound.
Police are now trawling the country for sightings of the couple’s son and daughter who are described as roughly fourteen to sixteen years old. Anyone with any information about the whereabouts of the children is invited to contact the Metropolitan Police at the earliest possible juncture. Anyone who may have spent time living at the property with the family in recent years is also of great interest to the police.
She stares at Mr Royle. ‘Is that …? The baby left behind – is that me?’