“And then Belinda disappeared.
“One Thursday, at work, she hadn’t been well, thought she was coming down with tonsillitis, which she used to get quite often. She went to the doctor, got penicillin and a medical certificate excusing her from work Friday to Monday. She went home at about the usual time, and a neighbour was on the same tram with her that night and actually saw her come into the house.
“On the Sunday Mr Tate arrived from the farm, he’d sent a postcard as he usually did to say he was coming, and that arrived on the Saturday. When he got here in time for Sunday lunch Mrs T at once told him Belinda had gone to the beach that morning and hadn’t come back. The police got involved and the big 'abduction’ scare began.”
“I remember that bit too from the part of your book you sent me.”
“Oh, right. Yes. So I don’t have to explain that bit. The cops had to take the story seriously because of the Beaumont children disappearing the year before, and because the Tates weren’t, or didn’t seem, the sort of people who’d do anything wrong. It turned into a full-on search, a real dogs-and-divers job. My parents said it terrified the whole community, the whole country, come to that.
“A neighbour, a reliable witness, said she’d seen Belinda walking to the beach that Sunday morning, which is also why the abduction story got believed. My dad never believed it, which got him into a lot of trouble. He was busy finding out a lot about Belinda’s last few weeks here with Mrs T, and he didn’t like what he found out.
“And then the neighbour, the witness, rang the cops asking why everyone was still searching for Belinda when she’d come home. Of course it turned out that the girl she’d seen on the Sunday wasn’t Belinda at all, had nothing to do with her, didn’t know her. It was a genuine mistake by the old lady, the witness.
“So then Dad could point out that no one had actually seen Belinda since the Thursday night before she 'disappeared’, and he did a lot more investigating. He’d been suspicious of the Tates from the start, or at least of Mrs T, and now he’d heard all about the way she’d treated Belinda. He was able to get a search warrant for this house and its grounds, and for Mr T’s farm. And this time, with a proper forensic search, they found bloodstains and, oh, all sorts of things. They found a pink dress, the one Mrs T said Belinda had been wearing that Sunday, half-burnt in the backyard incinerator, and her watch too. Semen on Belinda’s bedspread. Bloodstains in Mrs T’s car. Most of all they didn’t find any fingerprints that could’ve been Belinda’s. The whole place had been cleaned.
“They took the Tates in for questioning, and Mrs T lost it, went tonto, had hysterics, three cops were trying to hold her as they took her out but she broke loose and belted my mother so hard she was sent flying against the front fence and broke several ribs and her jaw. By then word had got around and the media were waiting, they saw it all, filmed and photographed it all. The headline in the paper next day said 'Is This What Happened to Belinda?’
“Mrs T was charged with assaulting a police officer, and then she cracked up completely. Unfit to plead; shrinks; committal to a mental hospital. Mr T was never charged with anything. He died in what everyone agreed to call one of those farming accidents...
“So, although there was a lot of circumstantial evidence, no one found any proof that would stand up in court. And they never found any trace of Belinda. Mrs T had her own car, and neighbours had heard her driving out late at night on the Friday and Saturday, so she could’ve been dumping the body. But no body was ever found. And so no one knows what happened to Belinda.”
I’d read a lot of this on Wikipedia and some online articles, but hearing Marian recount it in her quiet voice made it an uglier story; being here where it had happened made it worse. In fact I wondered how she could live here. Abruptly I asked her. She gave a little shrug as she said, “I told you how Dad came to own the place. It’s a nice house. I didn’t know Belinda, if I had it might be different. But only brand-new houses don’t have some history. You live in a much older house – I googled it – Williamscourt – things must’ve happened there.”
I at once remembered the story, or legend, that an eighteenth century owner of Williamscourt had shot his wife and her lover there; if it ever really happened, it’d been thoroughly hushed up, but the tale lingered on. And there was that top floor room no one much liked going into…
Changing the subject, or at least jerking it through ninety degrees, I asked if she had any photographs.
“Of Belinda?”
“Or any of them.”
“A few. And a rather bad bit of an old home movie.” She went over to that crowded table and came back with another folder. “This is the one the Tates gave the police, of Belinda. Not much use, as you see.”
Yes, I saw. A fair-haired girl with a long, wonky nose and a neat chin, the rest of her face hidden by a fringe coming down to her eyebrows and, because she was looking down and away from the camera, her shoulders hunched defensively, by the fall of her hair. Another was even less use – shorter hair, but sunglasses, and again that refusal or unwillingness to look into the camera. There were what looked like police mug-shots of Mr and Mrs Tate. He’d been quite a nice-looking chap, very dark, his face curiously unlined but puckered in bewilderment. The missus had been a rather piggy-faced, fat old thing; plenty of lines on her face, lines of temper and discontent. As Marian shuffled through the other photographs, one slid out of the folder. I bent to pick it up. It was very old snap, blurred and amateur, faded black and white, about five centimetres square with a wide white border. It showed a plumpish baby with very fair curly hair, propped in a chair and squinting into the sun.
“That’s Belinda,” Marian said, “the day they got her. She was nearly four months old.”
“Isn’t that old for a baby to be adopted? I thought they were always taken away from their birth mothers and adopted out at once.” I turned the snap over and saw round, immature writing: “Our little Ruby, ours today!!!” and a date in June 1949.
“Ruby?” I asked.
“The day they got her would have been Mrs Tate’s parents’ ruby anniversary, so she insisted on calling the poor kid Ruby. She was sentimental like that. I know those sorts of names are coming back into fashion now but they were horribly out of date in 1949, and a bit down-market. Not even Mr Tate liked it. He chose Linda for a second name. She quickly became Belinda, everyone called her that.”
“Ghastly name, but better than Ruby.”
“Too right. As for why she was adopted so late – no one I’ve talked to seems sure but there was a story that Belinda’s birth mother, who was English, tried to keep her, but couldn’t. It was hard back then for what was called an unmarried mother.”
“Poor woman. I don’t think adoption’s right, do you?” Handing the photo back to Marian I said absently, “Cute baby. Reminds me a bit of someone – but unless they’re plug-ugly most babies look alike at that age, especially in old photos.”
“Yeah, you should see my baby photos, you can’t tell me from my older brother. And although it’s a different matter when children with no family left are adopted from Third World orphanages, I agree about the sort of adoption Belinda had, the sort where society said a single mother couldn’t keep her baby. These are photos of the house, as it was.”
Some were crisp, sharp, black and white snaps of rooms from various angles, and I guessed that these were official police crime scene photos, for in some I could see the black smudges of fingerprint powder. Others looked more amateur. A few were quite old, sepia or very faded, the rooms’ decoration dated, early 1900s at a guess – elaborate layers of curtains, parlour palms in brass or china pots, antique furniture, portraits in heavy frames.
“Mrs Tate’s parents were quite rich,” Marian said, “and the house was very posh in their day. I don’t suppose it changed much after Sir Edwin – Mrs T’s father – died in the 1930s. Lady Fanning left it in trust for Belinda, but Mr Tate just went ahead and flogged off all the furniture for about fifty pounds
then divided the house up into flats, rented two out and kept the back part, the bit that used to be the servants quarters, for themselves. He did most of the work himself, and since he never cared what things looked like... well, you see.”
I did see, as we strolled through this gorgeous house, comparing it to those photos, the older ones and the 60s ones. Of course you see these shithouse-to-palace renovations all the time on TV property shows, but those photos would’ve made Sarah Beeny recommend dynamite. The late and apparently unlamented Mr Tate had seen fit to enclose the house’s broad and elegant verandahs with what looked like particle board, wire screens and mismatched windows, so that you wouldn’t have known it for the same place. The front garden was threadbare gravel with a cheap wire fence. In every room gracious old fireplaces had been bricked in, their over-mantels gone along with the original shelves and the pretty carved banisters on the staircase. Everything had been painted what looked like a grubby grey or beige, or perhaps an uncared-for white. That big modern back room had replaced a rabbit warren of poky, dank-looking rooms – a slot of a kitchen here, everything nice or characterful removed. There was a concrete bathroom, an ancient loo with an overhead cistern and a pull chain.
“Where did they live? Belinda, I mean, and her parents?”
“Here.” She showed me on the photos. Mostly it was now that back room. Back then it’d been a bedroom cluttered with cheap old stuff, a tiny sitting room with too much furniture, and very nasty furniture at that, for its size, that miniature kitchen, the concrete bathroom. There was also what she called a 'sleep-out’, part of the enclosed verandah. I remembered that part of her book she’d sent me, with her WPC mother’s description, and yes, it looked like a poorhouse, a dump you’d put only the most desperate immigrants in.
“There was one nice room, though,” she said. “Upstairs. It’d always been Belinda’s when she stayed with her grandmother, and for some reason, probably because it was too much trouble to alter it, they let her keep it. I use it as a study now. The stairs used to run the other way, from up inside what’d been a sort of back lobby near the laundry. I’ll show you.”
As I followed her up the stairs I noticed how well those tight jeans suited her beautiful bum and legs. I know we’re not supposed to think that sort of thing, but I’m afraid men do. I was so intent on that gorgeous sight that I ran into her when she stopped at the top of the stairs to turn left into the room. Here most of the windows faced west, and were taking the full battering of the rain. Thunder pounded, lightning flashed across the black sky. Then again, and again. I could glimpse the sea, huge breakers running and thudding before the wind. I’m so used to theatrical effects and CGI that at first it didn’t seem real, then I felt the electricity in the air, lifting my hair. Lifting the pale down on Marian’s arms, making her curly hair crackle. She was leaning against the middle window, gazing out, rapt. “Don’t you love it? Or are you too used to storms? We don’t often get one like this.”
“No, it’s wonderful.” For it was, somehow. Almost too real, and exciting.
Exciting in more than one sense. I was sexually turned on. The storm, or Marian? I put my hand on her shoulder and felt her trembling. She turned to face me, the lightning eerie on her face, and then we were holding each other, clutching, grasping, kissing open-mouthed, and Jesus I’d never known anything like this, she’d brought me to life with the storm, the lightning and I don’t suppose Dr Frankenstein fucked his monster but she was clearly desperate to fuck me, and I was desperate for her. Clothes half-shed, we stumbled across the floor to the sofa, still kissing, touching, begging, demanding, and I still had one leg in my jeans and she was only half out of her sweater when we fell together down onto that sofa and I was inside her, and it was wonderful, unknown, perfect, wild, elemental, nothing gentle or considerate about this, we were fucking, not making love, all to the background of lightning and hammering thunder.
I’ve no idea how long it lasted. Hours or seconds. All I know is that the storm had spent itself before we had.
We lay there entwined, panting, listening to each other’s breathing gradually slow. I knew that whatever either of us said would be very important, but I seemed to have lost the power of speech, because I couldn’t say the words I wanted to. We stared into each other’s eyes, then with a gentle little sigh she moved, kissed me, put her head on my shoulder. I tightened my arms around her, and listened to the rain.
After a very long time she said, “That was… I don’t know what it was. Extraordinary.”
“It was wonderful. The best.”
“Perhaps it was just the storm –”
“More than that.”
“Perhaps.”
Her left hand was still in my hair. When she pulled away I thought she was going to leap up, dismiss the whole thing, tell me to leave. But all she did was reach down and pull a rug or something over us, and with a long sigh we settled and snuggled together.
“I don’t usually do that,” she said. “With men I’ve only just met, I mean.”
“I used to do it a lot. When I first started being famous. I was a teenager and horny all the time and I was offered a lot of quick sex and I always took it. Later, though, I found it was better if it was more than just a quick shag for the sake of it. I think I may be in love with you.”
“No –”
“Not just because of this. I thought it when you opened the front door.”
“I don’t think I believe in love at first sight.”
“Nor did I. It’s all right, I don’t expect you to feel the same.”
Long silence. At last she said, protestingly, “We’ve got nothing in common. We don’t know anything about each other. I know you’re twenty-nine, a very good actor, left-handed, not a vegetarian, have got a very beautiful voice, a hot body and you’re wonderful in bed. That’s it.”
“And I know you’re sexy, clever, can cook, are a historian, you’ve got two brothers, you…” I’d run out.
“You see?”
“It could be a start?”
“I – don’t know.”
“Well, tell me about yourself. Ever been married? In love? Do you prefer cats or dogs? What’s your favourite film? Favourite colour? Favourite food? Do you like your family? Why history? What’s your idea of, of, of – the best holiday? Favourite book? Music?”
“But those aren’t the things that matter! But… all right… I don’t watch many films but I like Hitchcock and… Never married, but almost was, once. Just in time I realised he was a spoilt, selfish shit. Cats. Blue. Smoked salmon. Uh – best holiday… Cuba, then Britain and Europe. Yes, I like my family. Do you? Why history – I dunno. Just always liked it. Why are you an actor?”
“I just always wanted to be since my parents took me to my first pantomime when I was four. I like it. I’m good at it. I like my family, most of the time. I like smoked salmon too. Why kickboxing?”
“How – oh, it’s on my Facebook page. Well, I learned a bit of karate, but a friend of mine got assaulted once and fought the bastard off, and I went straight out and started kickboxing lessons. What did you do at Cambridge? – sorry, you’d say 'what did you read?’”
“History, then mostly Shakespeare and Jacobean playwrights. What’s your favourite Shakespeare play?”
“I’m not sure I’ve got one. See? – I only like Shakespeare filtered through Kenneth Branagh. Or you. Or Dame Judi Dench or Sir Ian. We’ve got nothing in common.”
“We don’t need things in common – or not the things we like. It’s more important if we loathe the same things. Like – left or right in politics?”
“Left. My doctoral thesis was on fascist and Nazi groups in Australia in the thirties and forties. So, very definitely left.”
“Me too. See? We both dislike something. What film have you ever hated most?”
“Oh... The Wizard of Oz. Forrest Gump. Oh and Priscilla Queen of the Desert.”
“Me too. But –” Of course I thought of Toby – “why Priscilla, don’
t you like gays?”
“It’s not gays I don’t like, it’s drag. Female impersonators – except for Dame Edna Everage, but she’s a different case. Tell me about your family.”
So I did, vaguely, wonderingly. I kept Toby’s sexuality to myself because it was private, but I did tell her about Dad marrying Dawn and how that had come about. That she clearly didn’t approve of, although she liked the sound of Orlando and knew a fair bit about Down Syndrome – a close friend, she said. We talked on like that for a while, about nothing and anything, never mentioning love again, until after a long time she said, “All we’ve really got in common is your father was Belinda Tate’s pen-friend and his cousin met her. Not enough. Even for a start. Although…”
“Although what?” I said eagerly, but, frowning in thought she said,
“I did wonder – that cousin, Adrian Randall, he was quite rich, wasn’t he? I looked him up, but there’s not much online except that he was rich, and made a lot more out of property development and the publishing house and record company.”
“He was loaded, yes. Why’d you ask?”
“Well, I did just wonder… what if he lent Belinda some money to help her get away? Even five hundred dollars, in 1967, would’ve let her get to another city and find somewhere to live until she got a job.”
I considered that for a while. “No, doesn’t work. He met her in, what was it, late October? She was fine then, wasn’t she? All that trouble with her mother happened later, didn’t it? They only met that one time and then he went on to Sydney, I think it was. And my grandmother told me how she remembered him coming home from Australia that Christmas, 1967, and telling Dad about Belinda’s disappearance and showing him newspaper cuttings about it. He wasn’t very interested, I don’t think. And then he settled down to making more money, he set Randall Fyffe Randall on its feet first, and that’s how he met and married Mum, she worked there.”
Missing Christina Page 18