“Maybe I didn’t want you to think badly of me. That I … tolerated it.” His voice cracked. “It isn’t that I tolerated it.” And now it was ragged, helpless. “I didn’t have any choice.”
Nat sighed, not ready to be understanding, not yet. How did you read this bloke? Or any of them, come to that; since Beth had gone they’d all started looking like aliens. Thinking of Jim on the phone, Jim losing it, Jim who’d always had plans, Jim the big kid, lower than she’d ever heard him. His plans all gone to nothing, a failing boatyard and no one to come home to.
Dowd’s face was set, now. “It’s not … they were never my area of expertise,” he said. “Relationships.” Angry now. His face changing, like clouds chasing over the sky, he was nervy, he was arrogant, he was insecure, he was self-righteous. She imagined the whirlwind Beth must have been in his life, scattering his charts and his test tubes. She did that: wrought havoc. Was there something he was hiding? Camped out in the woods, away from prying eyes.
“Look,” she said, “we want to know where she is, and if she’s all right, don’t we? Is that why you came? Is that why you’re telling me this now?”
He looked pale. “Yes … I—”
“Not to make yourself look better? More … understanding? More the victim?”
Because she didn’t need this. Him coming here to confess to something she already knew. Asking for sympathy, or to say she had it coming.
His eyes dark. “You don’t … I don’t think you understand—” Choking up.
Nat held her gaze steady. “It would be more useful,” she said, not letting him off the hook, “if you knew who any of these guys were she was seeing. Where she met them, that kind of stuff. Tinder? Here? It’s not like she had a lot of nights off.” He twisted awkwardly, as if he was trying to get out from under her gaze. “The bloke she went to see on Mondays was her brother, for the record,” she said quietly and he flushed.
In the corner Sophie was still talking to Paddy: an odd couple. Her round and nervy and sweet, him dusty and shabby. Rufus almost asleep between them.
Leaving Dowd at the bar, Nat went over to Janine with a tray and took some glasses off her. The middle-aged lads were shuffling on their bench seat, with her there standing over them: Janine’s tried and tested method of nipping trouble in the bud was just to stand there with her arms folded giving them one of her looks. As if on cue Steve had appeared behind the bar from upstairs, yawning, ready for action.
“Look,” Nat said, “I know I’ve been off all day, but”—looking at Sophie and Rufus—“I promised them dinner, it’s been a long day for them. Victor—”
Janine looked from her to Steve, cheery behind the bar and already straightening the bar cloths, not quite listening. There was something on her mind, Nat could tell. “Go on then,” she said, tightly. “Not far off closing, anyway.” Hesitant. As Nat reached behind herself to untie her apron, Janine put a hand out to her arm, keeping her there.
“You watch yourself, though,” she said. “I’m not happy about this. You’re a worry.” Glancing over at the bar, a warning look. “Steve agrees.”
“What? Has something happened?”
Janine looked evasive. “People have been talking.” She stepped away from the table with her load of glasses and from the men starting to look at them, to listen to their lowered voices. “Half the time you’re so … angry. Shouting the odds. Interrogating the punters. Never mind Jim … You’re not exactly in control, are you, Nat?”
Nat stared at her. “I’m trying … I’m trying…,” she said, but what was the point? I’m trying to hold it all together, and no one’s listening. “I’m sorry, Janine,” she said. On the other table Paddy was still talking to Sophie, Rufus tucked under her arm now, she was listening, nodding. Watching his face.
“Apparently the police have been asking around,” said Janine. “They’ve been talking to people.” And Nat was quite certain in that moment that she was hiding something.
“What people?” she said.
Janine shrugged. “Punters. You hear stuff.”
Nat scanned the room, but no one was looking her way, all of a sudden. “What did they want to know about me?”
“Nothing, nothing much. Just … you know. You and Beth, what kind of friends you were, how you got on.”
“What d’you mean?” Her voice was brittle, she couldn’t help it.
“Well, you were chalk and cheese, weren’t you? You and Beth. Some people were saying … well, not me, mind, but—” She broke off, and from the way Janine looked around the busy bar, not looking at Nat, Nat was pretty sure it had been her.
“Saying what?”
“Saying she were a bad influence. That since Beth turned up you … well. You were a different person. Leaving Jim, and that.”
“That wasn’t Beth,” said Nat. Her head on Beth’s shoulder, the only one who knew what it felt like. “That was me. She didn’t tell me to do it.”
Beth hugging her.
Janine sighed, avoiding her eye. “Them friendships … you know. They never end well. One girl’s the outgoing one, gets all the lads, the other one—”
“Oh, right,” said Nat, dangerous now. “So I was jealous of her, or what?”
Janine backed off, mumbling. “Just wanted to let you know, it’s not all one way. Once you start talking to the cops.” And her face closed, then, end of conversation; she hugged the glasses to her chest and turned away, searching for Steve’s face. “You get off,” she said over her shoulder. “You get off to your friends.”
* * *
“You’d better stay, don’t you think?”
They looked at Rufus, who had climbed obediently onto the sofa and promptly fallen asleep again. They were all dead tired. It had been a relief not to be coming back alone down the quiet lane: everything felt different. Nat could listen to the sounds in the hedges, smell the dry grass and warm foliage, without being on her guard. Rufus had walked unsteadily between them, footsteps weaving, one hand in each of theirs, sticky, surprisingly trusting. Nat tried to remember at what age you pulled your hand away, when a strange adult reached for it. He had walked ahead of them into the house.
Sophie pulled off his shoes and he didn’t stir.
“I’ll carry him up,” said Nat. “The staircase is tricky.” He was heavy and warm, and she climbed steadily, adjusting to the weight. “You can have my room, the sofa will do me fine.” Sophie barely protested, she looked so knackered, and Nat laid Rufus down on the lumpy double bed under the eaves, hoping Sophie wouldn’t notice the boxes still awaiting unpacking and the total failure to turn the place into anything resembling a home. Tomorrow, thought Nat. Wouldn’t do any harm to put a few things away.
They ate tuna salad and drank some warm wine at the table opposite each other. Sophie looking around the low-ceilinged room, laughing at Janine’s horse brasses, protesting over how uncomfortable the sofa looked.
“You were getting along well with Paddy,” said Nat, eyeing her over her glass.
To her surprise Sophie just smiled, completely at ease. “Isn’t he absolutely lovely?” she said. “He said such clever things about my dad, and I felt so sad for him, his wife dying, only two years of marriage, and he would have liked children—” She stopped. “What?”
Nat could feel herself staring. “I never knew—” Paddy had been married? She felt herself grow warm with shame, at never having asked.
Sophie just shrugged. “Well, we just got talking,” she said, bent over her plate. “He’s easy to talk to. He loves you.” Said quite simply, as if they both knew what she meant.
“Paddy’s a good friend,” said Nat.
“That’s what he said,” said Sophie. “People you can trust are rare, he told me. He trusts you.” She could have been a different woman from the woman standing submissively with Richard’s hand on her shoulder. “The consultant did talk about a place, with residential places for the elderly,” she said then, as if she knew what Nat was thinking. “In a nearby village
. Richard thinks it’s a good idea.” Brandon, it turned out, on the same site as Moorsom House. At the thought of Victor out there, Nat felt a lump in her throat. Laying down her knife and fork carefully, Sophie blurted, “I wish I could have him at home. I wish. I wish I could be close to him. But—”
“It’s Richard,” said Nat. “I can see that.”
Sophie’s eyes flicked up to meet hers, didn’t look away.
“There could be a solution,” said Nat steadily. “You don’t have to be rushed into things. Victor doesn’t.”
“He wants to leave that hospital,” said Sophie. “He thinks it’s dangerous in there.”
“Dangerous?” Nat’s voice was sharp.
Sophie moved her shoulders uneasily. “I wasn’t sure what he meant,” she said slowly. “At first I thought perhaps he meant that people die in hospitals.” Her face was pale. “You know, MRSA, that sort of thing.”
“He’s probably right,” said Nat, wanting to be reassuring.
“Old people can’t fight those things off—and he is so old, so old—”
“He’s very tough,” said Nat, defensive. “We do need to get him out of there. But you think there’s something else to it? Something specific that worries him? Someone?”
“Oh, the man, the man he thought he saw.” Now she was the flustered Sophie again.
“He is afraid, Sophie. Of that man. He told the police about him.”
“Yes, I…” Sophie’s face crumpled. “You mustn’t say—Richard would think … he already keeps hinting that … well, dementia—”
“If he’s afraid of someone, maybe he has reason to be.” She took hold of Sophie’s hand across the table. “No one could be less demented than Victor.” Sophie nodded, subsiding, but she took her hand back and stood up. “You need to remember that, Sophie,” said Nat. “We’ll get him out.”
“I’d better get some sleep,” said Sophie, retreating. Nat retrieved a quilt for the sofa and lay there in the dark, listening to the small sounds from upstairs, Sophie’s feet padding to and from the bathroom, a little cry from Rufus, a murmured exchange, the creak of the bed. Then it was quiet, a quiet that crept around the house, up the stairs, erasing the visitors until the old sounds asserted themselves. The soft rumble of the boiler, the creaking of old wood settling. The sounds outside: a window was open somewhere, perhaps just a crack, but Nat could smell the night air and gradually, gradually, the noises. A distant car, something rustling in the hedge, something softer than a rustle, padding on grass.
And then the distinct sound of a footstep on gravel, that stopped. She could hear breathing. She strained, and suddenly her heart was thumping so hard she could feel it in her throat, in her ears. The steps again, and they were close, they were right at the back door.
“Nat?”
And she was off the sofa, trailing the duvet, her face was pressed against the door. A shadow moved behind the small diamond-paned window beside the door, across the moonlit washing-up on the draining board. No sound from upstairs.
“Nat.” The voice wandering, hopeless.
She hesitated, her fingers over the key, then she turned it. Carefully she lifted the latch, and before the door was even half open, he was through it, falling against her, clinging. She held on to the doorframe with one hand.
“I’ve lost it,” he said. “I don’t know … I don’t know what I’m doing anymore, Nat.” So heartbroken, so sorrowful, she couldn’t do anything but put one hand up to his hair, stroke it.
“Jim,” she said, helpless.
He stood there, arms hanging at his sides, while she locked the door again, the bolt too. She pulled the diamond-paned window to and bolted it as well. She saw him looking around the room: he didn’t seem to be able to move. “It was me,” he said.
“I know,” she said, but he didn’t seem to hear her.
“I did put the plate out. I just wanted … I wanted it to be—”
“I know what you wanted.” Patiently, wearily.
And knowing for absolutely certain that it wasn’t the right thing to do but then maybe sometimes there was no right thing, there was only trying to dodge the catastrophic thing, the wrong thing, the cruel thing, she took hold of his hand and led him to the sofa. She took off his shoes, just like Sophie had taken off Rufus’s, and she lay down beside him. And when his hands wandered up and across her body, stroking her breasts, her body slid into its old place, her belly against his, her mouth against his, and it couldn’t be prevented, like breathing. You could only hold your breath so long.
“This isn’t—” she tried to say at one point. “Jim, this doesn’t mean—” But he wasn’t listening.
* * *
He slept as if he’d been sedated afterward, so deeply Nat had to be glad for him. Why? Why had she done it? she pleaded with herself. So as not to send him away in the dark. So he won’t think he’s a fuckup, so he knows someone’s there.
When you do something—out of guilt, out of pity, not wanting to see that look on his face—that you know was a mistake, what do you do next? Beth would have an answer, but Beth wasn’t there.
When he rolled away before dawn and sat a moment with his head in his hands, before fumbling for his clothes, Nat didn’t move. She watched him get up and stumble to the door, let him unlock and unbolt it. She felt the rush of cool green air and heard the birds. Summer was on the way out, she thought, but still she said nothing, she didn’t move until the door closed and she heard his footsteps receding across the gravel.
Then she got up and locked it behind him.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Thursday
Victor had already been up on his walking frame and to the bathroom when Lisa appeared at the foot of the bed, and though he had had moments of breathless fear—leaning against the cubicle door, lowering himself to the seat—that something would happen, he had gotten there and back without disaster.
Not quite daring to be triumphant, though, because the fear was still there. Was it rational? To feel his heart flutter, to be so aware of the weakness of his legs, to see too clearly how easy it would be for the whole ramshackle operation of a body nearly a hundred years old simply to fold up and put itself away, was in fact in a certain light all too rational, but not for Victor. He had never been a panicker before, he had over a lifetime rehearsed the argument that panic was not sensible, he had not been afraid of his inevitable death. But that was not quite all he was afraid of now. There was someone to be afraid of now, and here. And there were others to consider.
“Well,” said Lisa, with a kind of gasp, surprised, pleased and anxious all at once. “Really, Victor, you are … you’re quite something. There are patients who’d be glad of the rest.”
He thought she looked tired herself: creases at the corners of her eyes—night shifts, he supposed, and the strain of patients like him, stubborn and foolish, falling out of bed, hiding in bathrooms, although she knew nothing about that, as far as he could tell. He murmured something about it, and with a sigh she sank to the bed.
Victor wasn’t sure when he had understood, or how, that women liked to talk to him: the only explanation he could come up with was that he did like listening. The world of women seemed to him largely comforting, or perhaps that was his age. There was so much that was practical in it, things made or cooked, clothes chosen, philosophy unfolded, who to love? Whether to have a child or to travel, what to cook for supper.
Lisa was talking about her husband, they never saw each other, shift work was like that, when would they have a baby, what would happen to her patients if she stopped. Fiddling with her wedding ring and half forgetting she was talking to anyone but herself.
“I loved my wife,” he said and her eyes were on him, quiet. “We never spent a night apart until she became ill.” She fidgeted, anxious. “Perhaps you should change things, Lisa.”
Victor was surprised at himself because he didn’t usually dispense advice so openly, but there was something about being in this bed and so close, pe
rhaps, to seeing her again, his darling—not that he believed in any afterlife, but still—that made it seem too important. He had dreamed, in the three hours or so he had slept deeply, he had dreamed of the house they had brought Sophie back to from the hospital, he and Joy. He had dreamed of the sitting room, the low sofas with dark velvet cushions and wicker arms, the windows crowded with foliage and the baby folded in a white blanket in her basket, glowing pale as a pearl in the dim green room.
Lisa bobbed her head down again and Victor laid his back on the pillow.
“A baby—a child—a child is…” What was it that he wanted to say? A child is everything. He didn’t have the energy to bring out the qualifications he knew good manners and kindness required: one can have a good life without a child, of course one can. One can fulfill oneself, one can look after others, one can … He closed his eyes. “My Sophie—when we knew we were having…” And he found he perhaps should not say anything else, because if he dwelt on Sophie he might quite possibly tremble or cry, and Lisa might worry about him. She might find reasons to keep him in.
Had he made a mistake in bringing Sophie out here? And Rufus? They were in danger from Richard, was that it, the nagging guilty anxious feeling that thoughts of Sophie trailed behind them? Or from something else? Or were the two connected, Richard and the man not Richard, walking up into the light? Shorter than Richard? Victor couldn’t be sure, from the angle he had looked, down the slope. More hair, a different set to the shoulders?
Of course, he had always known the man in the lane with blood on his arm was not Richard, who had been a hundred miles away at the time, possibly even in a courtroom, hadn’t he? They only made him feel the same way: afraid. But the exercise of analyzing why he knew this man had not been Richard had sparked something, had restored the image, given the man more shape. He could see him a little more clearly now.
Short-term memory’s a luxury at your age. Victor opened his eyes: who had said that? Lisa was on her feet, looking worried, so he smiled at her. It had been the accident and emergency registrar, when he had first been brought in, hadn’t it? Victor’s smile broadened, not because the remark had been funny—on the contrary, it had struck him as careless, although he hadn’t been able to say so—but because again he had reached for the information and there it was. Remembered.
The Day She Disappeared Page 21