On Wednesday morning, after two nights in a rather basic B & B, and a choppy crossing over the remainder of the English Channel, Lucy rents a car at Portsmouth and they begin the drive to London.
It was winter when she left England and in her mind it is always cold there, the trees are always bare, the people always wrapped up against inclement weather. But England is in the grip of a long hot summer and the streets are full of tanned, happy people in shorts and sunglasses, the pavements are covered in tables, there are fountains full of children and deck chairs outside shops.
Stella stares out of the window in the back of the car with Fitz on her lap. She’s never left France before. She’s never left the Côte d’Azur before. Her short life has been lived entirely on the streets of Nice, between the Blue House, Mémé’s flat, and her nursery school.
“What do you think of England, then?” Lucy asks, looking at her in the rearview mirror.
“I like it,” says Stella. “It’s got good colors.”
“Good colors, eh?”
“Yes. The trees are extra green.”
Lucy smiles and Marco gives her the next direction toward the motorway from the Google Maps app.
Three hours later London starts to appear in flashes of shabby high street.
She sees Marco turn to face the window, expecting Big Ben and Buckingham Palace and instead getting Dixie fried chicken and secondhand appliance stores.
Finally they cross the Thames and it is a glorious sunny day: the river glitters with dropped diamonds of sunlight; the houses of Cheyne Walk gleam brightly.
“Here we are,” she says to Marco. “This is the place.”
“Which one?” he asks, slightly breathlessly.
“There,” says Lucy, pointing at number sixteen. Her tone is light but her heart races painfully at the sight of the house.
“The one with the hoarding?” says Marco. “That one?”
“Yes,” she says, peering at the house while also keeping an eye out for parking.
“It’s big,” he says.
“Yes,” she says. “It certainly is.”
But strangely, it looks smaller to her now, through adults’ eyes. As a child she thought it was a mansion. Now she can see it is just a house. A beautiful house, but still, just a house.
It becomes clear that there is no parking to be had anywhere near the house and they end up at the other end of the King’s Road, in a space in World’s End that requires downloading a parking app onto her phone.
It’s eighty-six degrees, as hot as the south of France.
By the time they get to the house they are all sweating and the dog is panting.
The wooden hoarding is padlocked. They stand in a row and study the building.
“Are you sure this is the right house?” says Marco. “How does anyone live here?”
“No one lives here at the moment,” she says. “But we’re going to go inside and wait for the others to arrive.”
“But how are we going to get in?”
Lucy breathes in deeply and says, “Follow me.”