Even if she had believed him, this is worse than she’d have imagined and the degradation starts within their own building. Evie wants to shrink and disappear.
Daniels is watching her confusion and attempts a smile of reassurance but it lacks power. He pushes open a door and gestures for her to precede him into a stairwell.
As she descends, she avoids looking at the walls, which are sprayed with ugly writing and in one place what could be the crude drawing of giant sexual parts. The ripe sweet smell of decay is like from the kitchen waste bin waiting in the sun to be taken out for composting.
She has never been down so many steps in one go and other than the ladder in the library, never steep ones like this. She holds on tightly, grateful for Daniels’s woollen mittens which, although turning her hands into great paws, mean she does not need to touch the sticky metal rail.
The stairway reaches a half-landing and then switches back to continue its descent. Daniels’s boots bang hollowly.
‘When we get outside,’ Daniels says over his shoulder, ‘if we come across anyone, I’ll do the talking.’
They reach the ground floor and before he opens the door, he stops and appraises her from head to toe, tugging her cap down her forehead, so that the peak hides her brows. She could be a boy-soldier being sent to the front. ‘We’re going to have to think of a story for you,’ he mutters, ‘something that we can tell people.’
She gazes up at him. The answer is obvious but she is hesitant to propose it, in case it offends him, hoping he will come to it himself. When he remains silent, she murmurs, ‘I could pretend to be your daughter.’
She hears Simon quietly huff – it is why she did not run it past him – but it is a plausible narrative nonetheless. Besides, for the last hour Simon has offered no piece of useful guidance so has no right to judge or criticise when Evie is doing her best on her own.
Daniels blinks and for a moment the determined expression on his face slips. Her proposition appears to have moved him. It is a peculiar thing how the years have pressed on their relationship, slowly shifting it from one thing into quite another. Taking a buttoned-down longing on his part, that could never have been realised, and changing it into something rooted in mutual affection.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘we’ll go with that.’ Then adding gruffly, locking away his feelings, ‘We’ll work out the details as we walk. We’ve a few miles ahead.’
He slowly opens the door onto the lobby and, peering around, turns to her with a finger over his lips. ‘Follow me.’
The full-height glass doors to the outside provide her with her first view of the street. The snow is still falling. The lobby is unlit and the only illumination comes from the window of the shop opposite – flashing yellow and pink neon tubes twisted into a female hourglass outline – dress on / dress off. The entrance alongside is masked by a ragged curtain through which glows a red light. If it really is a retailer of women’s clothing, which is the only thing she can imagine it to be, it is an uninviting place.
Daniels presses a button and the doors click. He opens one with his shoulder, forcing back a wedge of snow.
Outside, a breeze funnelled by the buildings smacks her face. Flakes of snow cling to her hat and scarf.
As they descend the steps to the road, her shoe collides with something under the snow. It stirs and rises, shedding ice. A bearded face with deep-set eyes and toothless mouth leers up at her. An emaciated hand grabs for her ankle but she jumps back and its fingers only brush her shoe.
Daniels takes Evie by the elbow and guides her around its head.
‘Who was that?’ she whispers, horrified. She glances behind. The man watches them go, then collapses back with a groan.
‘Some homeless devil,’ he mutters.
‘How can he survive in this?’
‘He likely won’t.’
They pause to stare as the grey shape merges back into the snow. The possibility that someone could freeze to death only yards from her home is the most disturbing thing she has seen so far.
Daniels hesitates at the foot of the steps, before climbing back. He works the keypad and pulls the door fully open, jamming it against the wall. Together they watch the man become conscious of the chance being given to him, raise himself onto his knees and crawl inside.
10
Reaching the corner, Evie and Daniels turn into another small road and from there onto a broader one, passing the frontage of a mosque and the husk of a burnt-out library. The wind is lifting the snow and tumbling the crumbs along at ground level. ‘At least our prints will be covered,’ Daniels says.
Evie has seen roads from above from Matthew’s window, and at night they have appeared to thread the city like bright embroidery but at street level it is all different. It feels as if she is travelling within an inflexible high-sided and dimly-lit conduit.
She trudges with her head down, passing, without looking up, a row of what would have once been elegant villas facing onto a small garden square enclosed by iron railings topped with barbed wire.
They turn another corner, marked by the limbless trunk of a tree, and cross over a carriageway wide enough for several cars to pass at once. ‘This is Horseferry Road,’ he says, making an effort to divert her. They are getting close to the river and the snow, driven by the east wind, is bitter.
‘Do all the roads have names?’ she asks, attempting to be responsive, despite how she feels. Under different circumstances her curiosity would be insatiable.
‘Yes, everything has a name. This area is Pimlico, as you may already be aware. Do you know what that is?’ He points towards the tip of a tower poking above the trees. Massive green numbers – 03:17 – luridly smear the clouds.
‘Big Ben,’ she replies. In the right mood, she could win a quiz on the names of everything it is possible to see from her husband’s room.
‘Very good. The old clock that once struck the hours is still up there but no longer works. You used to be able to hear it in the garden when the wind was right.’ They were both already thinking and referring to their home in the past tense.
‘Yes, Matthew told me,’ she says. ‘He said it was a national disgrace that they gave up on it.’ They had laid her husband’s body on his bed and covered his face with a blanket. There was so much blood that in the end she had to take the risk and use the shower to get her skin and hair clean. The blood had stained the grout a murky pink.
‘Yes, it was the sort of thing he cared about, but that’s what they did. It stopped working and the government of the day got it into its head that it was a symbol of the injustices of the past. Besides, they’d already moved where parliament sat after the original building started to slide into the river and no one had the will to spend the dollars required to shore it up when the country was so poor. People at the time were divided as to whether replacing the old clock was a good idea but a bold new holo-digital display was presented as embracing the future. I bet now most can’t remember what the argument was all about.’ Daniels’s chatter has a brittle quality and she suspects his need to talk is as much to distract himself as her.
‘You know what that is?’ He is pointing at the carcass of a huge vertical disk the other side of the river.
She shakes her head. It makes her think of a giant water wheel, but one that was mounted too high for the water, even at evening flood, to turn.
‘Princess Charlotte Wheel. Built over a hundred years ago. People used to pay to go up in it for the view. Hasn’t operated for quite a few decades – too expensive to keep running when the tourists stopped coming. There were observation pods to stand in as it revolved but they were removed last century and repurposed as pre-fab housing. All turned into a bit of a horror unfortunately when after the fanfare of moving dozens of grubby inner-city families to the green fields of Essex, quite a lot of the pods were washed away and sank with said families inside them. Huge uproar as you can imagine. Big court case but the developers got off scot-free as they always do. The high tide was apparently an Act of God and not something they could have been expected to have foreseen. You can still see some bobbing in the marshes, if you search hard enough, and a few have ended up as upmarket houseboats in places like Kew and Richmond.