Missing Christina

  He blinked dully at me, struggling to keep his eyes open. “An’ i’ was all true, what you said before? That Tia was that girl in Stralia? Adrian saved her from something bad?”

  “All true.”

  “Yet I thought I was saving her.”

  “I know.”

  “And after all, if I hadn’t done it, she wouldna married Jon and you wouldn’t exist. None of you would.” He was silent so long, his eyes nearly shut, that I thought he was asleep, then he suddenly said, very clearly, “You won’t tell?”

  “I won’t tell anyone. And nor must you. No confessions to clear your conscience. Just go away.”

  “Go away. And never come here again? Yes... Got it all wrong. Thoughtless bastard. But I didn’t understand.” He began to struggle to his feet.

  He looked at me oddly, in a way that made me say almost under the my breath, “Or was it after all a case of 'each man kills the thing he loves’?”

  “No! NO! How dare you, he – I – no – I – I need some fresh air.” He certainly looked as if he did; he was gasping for breath and he had paled. He looked ill. He groped behind himself for the door handle, then cried out and began to collapse. For a moment he stared at me as if in disbelief, then began to make fish-mouths and to clutch at his chest.

  “Heart,” Dawn said from behind me. It’d been she I’d seen, with Marian. “Ring an ambulance. Do either of you know CPR?”

  “I do,” I said. I’d had to learn it for some film, and I’d taken the chance to learn it properly, to get a first aid certificate, but I doubted I could bring myself to touch Quentin. I certainly couldn’t put my mouth over his.

  But Marian said, “I do too. Jaques, ring for an ambulance then go and open the front gates.” And I’m sorry to say that I was more than glad to leave it to her and Dawn. I made the phone call, I opened the front gates and turned the lights on, roused Dad.

  The ambulance came, and to everyone’s relief Dawn volunteered to go with Quentin to the hospital.

  Quentin died on the way.

  We had waited up for news, with that blank feeling that we should. It didn’t feel right to go to bed until we’d heard something from the hospital. It was less than half an hour, though, before Dawn rang and told us. Massive heart attack, and not, she suspected, his first. Later, when his house was being cleared out, we found she was right and he’d had two minor heart attacks and also had a small tumour in his stomach. So almost certainly he would not have lived much longer anyway.

  But that night I felt numb, rather guilty and ashamed, and after Marian took me to bed I lay awake for a long time, thinking it all over and wondering how far I was to blame.

  “Not at all as far as I can see,” Marian said, and suddenly kissed me very hard.

  In the morning when no one else was around Dawn said much the same, adding, “Jaques, a person who has killed once will do it again. Or try to.”

  Catching on, I said, “Did he try – with you?”

  “Almost. But I’m not stupid. I watched him. He played with Orlando once, too roughly. He said he just wasn’t used to children, but...”

  “I love Orlando. So does Toby. You should have said.”

  “Oh, said what? He’s your cousin, silly old boozy Quentin, and I’m – I’m –”

  “My father’s wife. My brother’s mother.”

  For the first time ever she smiled properly at me, a wide, friendly smile. When she’d gone I said to Marian, “I think I recorded it all on my phone. I’ll copy it to my computer and then – we forget it?”

  “I think so. Yes.”

  “And you won’t tell anyone?”

  “No.” Then she slid her arms around me and called me a blithering idiot who needed a keeper. I asked her if she would take on the job, and she called me an idiot again, and I fell asleep with her arms around me and her fingers twined in mine.

  *

  Later we discovered that Quentin had changed his will just after Mum’s death. Before, he’d left everything to her. Now everything he owned was to be sold and the monies donated to an organisation for victims of crime. At his very firm and final request he was cremated without a funeral service. There being no one else to do it, Dad collected the ashes and had them buried next to Quentin’s parents and, not incidentally, near his aunt and my grandmother, Penelope.

  *

  But before that, the day after Quentin’s mad irruption and the telling of the story, there was the aftermath to get through. Matthew had come, tactfully leaving Hugo at home but bringing a lawyer his firm did business with. Once Matthew was fully up to speed, he and Silvia sat in the study eagerly reading Marian’s book on my laptop, while Dad and Gran and Toby did the same in the drawing room. Dawn had said, politely but firmly that she wasn’t very interested, thank you, and would wait until the book came out.

  I had frankly had enough of it all, and I still felt very strange about that confrontation with Quentin. “He wasn’t quite sane,” Marian gently pointed out when I wanted to go over it; she’d brought me a glass of wine, and we sat outside in a sunny bit of garden. “He’d lived with the guilt of it all his life – and he did feel guilty about it.”

  “All those years of pretending. Of coming here, being Mum’s fond and trusted cousin. When he’d done that.”

  “But you were right – he really didn’t understand what he’d done, that he’d got it all wrong.”

  “I know, but still...”

  “Are you,” she said shrewdly, “wondering if there’s a bit of looniness in his family? Thinking you might go off your rocker too?”

  “Sort of,” I admitted.

  “Don’t be a nong. I don’t for a moment condone murder, but he was a silly, jealous kid who thought he had a reason. You’re sane, and you’ve got too much imagination ever to do something like that.”

  “I hope so. What’s a nong?”

  “A twit, an idiot, a galah.”

  “What’s a galah?” It was Orlando who asked this, wandering unseen up behind us. I jumped, and Marian reached out and took my hand.

  “It’s a bird,” she told him, “but it’s also Australian slang for a silly person.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t know.”

  He was standing in front of us now, gazing at Marian; he seemed to have taken a liking to her. “Toby says Jaker’s in love with you.”

  “Toby should mind his own business,” I snapped.

  “But are you?”

  “Yes.”

  He turned a beady look on Marian. “Are you going to marry him?”

  For once I saw her really rattled. “I, er, I –”

  “She means no,” I said bitterly. It was a big day for beady looks, for now she gave me one too. Before either of us could say anything Orlando stepped up and punched her lightly on her upper arm.

  “You’re silly,” he said. “Jaker’s my brother and I love him and he’s nice, so you should marry him. He wouldn’t have to go and live in Staya with you, would he? I’d miss him.”

  “No he wouldn’t. Well, part of the time perhaps but I think I’d live here. But I haven’t decided –”

  “Silly. You’re pretty but you’re silly. He’s nice.” Then his face changed from stern encouragement to doubt. “Do you mean you won’t marry him cos of me?”

  “Of you?”

  “Cos I’m different,” he said sadly, almost humbly. “People call me names.”

  Marian dropped my hand, but only to haul Orlando onto her lap. “It’d be a dull world if we were all the same. We’re all different in some way. And who calls you names?”

  “Just people.”

  “Then they’re rude and stupid.”

  “Are they galahs?”

  “They are.”

  “Can I tell them that?”

  “I would.”

  “Okay.” He hopped off Marian’s lap. “If you don’t marry Jaker I’ll call you a glah.”

  “Ga-lah. Now go away, I have to talk to Jaques. Go on, hop along.”

&nb
sp; He did hop, which quite amused me. “Well,” I said, “my cats like you and so does at least one of my brothers. And my father, I think. What about you, though? I mean, how do the rest of them strike you? Any chance you could put up with them?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “I do. Yes, I do. But what if it doesn’t last?”

  “Give it a try?”

  “It’s worth a try, at least.”

  “Marian my darling, are you ever sentimental?”

  “Nup. Take it or leave it.”

  “I’ll take it, thanks.” I leaned over in my chair and kissed her, and after a moment we were standing up, swaying together, kissing deeply, breaking off to stare enchantedly into each other’s eyes, and we would have headed for the nearest bed, or nearest jeweller’s shop to buy a ring, except that back came my unlikely Cupid, red in the face with excitement and followed, most unwelcomely, by Lady Hyde-Howard.

  “We’re goin’ get a dog!” Orlando shouted. “Kingsley sent a puppy to, to, to Maffew’s mummy and we go and get it now! You come too!”

  “Do Mummy and Daddy know?” I demanded, joining the beady-look brigade.

  “Mummy does but it’s a sprise for Daddy, but it’s goin to be my doggie too. An we have to go now!”

  “It seems we do,” Marian said. And so we did. The dog was a Labradoodle puppy, a very friendly and kind dog if not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and both Dad and Martin cheered up quite fast after Orlando carried it triumphantly into the drawing room, where it promptly piddled on a priceless rug. It’s called Pat, because Lady Hyde-Howard told Orlando, “Pat the dog”, when we first saw it, and Orlando took that the wrong way.

  Twenty-three

  Well, the rest is all public information now. We took legal advice, and I went back to Adelaide with Marian and we saw all the right people in the police and legal worlds, and the story came out. There was the usual media and online song-and-dance, some of it unpleasant. I met Mum’s 'cousin’ Anne, and somehow I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that she’d had a fair idea of the story all the time. “Bel wouldn’t have just left me to wonder,” she said. “Was she happy?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “Good.”

  She was a nice lady, but the only one of the Tate connection who was interested in meeting me. One of them made a half-hearted attempt to stop Marian’s book, but it came to nothing.

  Marian’s publishers rushed the book out in time for Christmas, and it was something of a best-seller. Kathleen Fielke, who’d been sent a proof copy, let Marian use her sister’s name after all, and came, rather grimly amused, to the launch party. Later a pretty good TV doco was made from the book. Aunt Barbara and Aunt Ursula were horrified by the whole thing, and pretended it had never happened.

  Marian and I were married by the time the book came out. She’s always said she would have married me anyway, but we did it quickly because it turned out she was pregnant. It took Dawn, with whom Marian gets on very well, quite a long time to convince this woman with three university degrees that if women on the Pill get very sick, in the vomiting sense, say from flying on small planes, the Pill doesn’t necessarily work. When we told Dad he was delighted, but couldn’t resist saying with a smirk, “But why didn’t you use a condom, you fuckwit?” and all I could do was blush and say I’d forgotten; quite true, because the baby must have been conceived a few hours after we’d met Kathleen Fielke. Marian’s mother took a more strait-laced view, and I think has never quite approved of me. She has a withering way of saying the word 'actor’; to rhyme with ’scum’. Marian’s brother Charles gave her away at the wedding, for which my entire family flew to Adelaide, and Fleur designed her cream lace wedding dress.

  Our daughter Susanna, named for Shakespeare’s eldest, was born a few weeks later than Silvia and Matt’s daughter Chloe. A couple of years later they were just old enough to be flower girls (“a crowd”, or was it “cloud, of littlies”), when Marian’s brother Baz married my cousin Fleur. They live in Adelaide, and her wedding dress business is doing very well. Aunt Ursula finally forgave everyone enough to visit them in Adelaide, and has become very friendly with Baz and Marian’s mother.

  Really we all lived happily ever after. Marian has an excellent job at London University, but found time to give Susanna a brother, Nicholas, who so far looks exactly like Mum. Granny’s still alive and waiting for her telegram from the Queen, although they say that all you get these days is an email. Dad and Dawn stayed together, and Dad quit smoking. Orlando wants to be an actor. Dawn isn’t keen on this, but we’ll see. Toby’s about to marry that gorgeous waiter he met at Silvia’s wedding.

  What we will also see is what reception my screenplay of Mum’s story gets at tonight’s Oscars. It missed out at the BAFTAs, dammit. Of course I had to leave Adrian’s death as a mystery, and still no one has ever discovered who attacked those other men. I was asked to play Adrian, but I said no thanks. It would have seemed creepy – and anyway I was busy playing Simon Slaughter in the series finally made from Mum’s novels, and various vampires and bikers on US telly, and Lord Southampton, Shakespeare’s Golden Lad, in a smash hit play that became a film. I didn’t get the role in the upper-classes telly thing, thank God.

  What I do wonder is what Mum would have made of the way I began the screenplay, with an only slightly fictionalised version of the “assessment” made of the Tates as prospective adopters. In the circumstances the relevant government department had allowed me to see my mother’s adoption file. I’d touched the birth certificate filled in by my grandmother, and the forms she had signed to relinquish her child. I had read the character references given the Tates by their local church minister and a friend who was a teacher. Both used the term “good Christian couple” and spoke of the Tates as pillars of the community, regular churchgoers, good people willing to take in a deserving child. The social worker’s report, handwritten, took up only half a page. She had noted that the house was clean and tidy and that there was a separate bedroom, freshly painted, for the prospective child. The Tates were pleasant, well-off people, eager for a baby. She recommended that their application be approved. They would be good parents.

  There was a faint, pinkish smudge in the margin of this report. Not blood, although it had the look of a fingerprint, oddly mottled. When I peered more closely, holding it right up to my face, even after all those years it had a faintly sweet smell. Strawberry jam, a big spilt blob of it guiltily wiped. Home-made jam, the seeds giving it that mottled look. They’d shared tea and scones, or sponge cake, those symbols of respectability, as they played so blindly with people’s lives that Christina was missing for such a very long time.

  The End

  Author’s Note

  Synaesthesia/synesthesia is real, and not all that rare – studies vary, but perhaps one in every 2000 people have it. No one is sure what causes it, but it is genetically inherited. Synaesthetes perceive letters, numbers, days of the week, names and sometimes musical notes as coloured. I am writing this on a Monday, which to me is dark blue, and in May, which is blue and yellow. (Actually, blue, yellow and silver.)

  Adoption is a difficult issue. It often does great psychological harm to children who are adopted. The adoption by Westerners of Third World orphans with no surviving family is a rather different issue from the often 'forced’ adoptions of children born to unmarried mothers in the past, when it was believed that single women must be unfit to raise their children. In this novel, Belinda’s experiences as a child adopted by unsuitable people (suitable by the norms of the time) are similar to some of my own, including the “mother” wanting to return the child to the orphanage, and in my adoption file (which I was allowed to see when I discovered my biological family) the social worker’s report really did take up only half a hand-written page and said much the same things as the fictional one in this novel. Also, I learnt my birth mother’s name and origin in the same way as the girl in this novel does: the matron of the Home f
rom which I was adopted told my adoptive parents.

  For the South Australia government’s apology, and the memorial, see: www.premier.sa.gov.au/index.php/jay-weatherill-news-releases/861-state-government-unveils-memorial-to-past-forced-adoptions; http://www.rasa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/SA-Apology.pdf; http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-18/forced-adoptions-parliamentary-apology-south-australia/4137836.

  For the relinquishing mothers’ side of the story, see, e.g., the work of Evelyn Robinson at http://www.ccnm-mothers.ca/English/articles/Robinson.htm.

  The Beaumont children, Jane, Arna and Grant, really did vanish from Glenelg Beach in January 1966, and their disappearance remains a mystery to this day.

  It is therefore all the more important for me to emphasise that this book is a work of fiction. No person or place bears any similarity to a real one, and all the characters are entirely the products of my imagination.

  I have to thank the doctor with the yellow name, the doctor with the black name, my adoptees’ support group, and especially my daughter and several friends, most particularly Tania Milohis and Nick Grant, for reading this book in draft and making many useful suggestions and corrections, and for laughing at the jokes.

  Meredith Whitford

  Adelaide 2017

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