The Day That Went Missing

by Richard Beard

  Various awkward moments are endured, as after any death. I am so glad that you felt you had done the right thing by going back to the cottage, writes the owner of The Mill on 12th September, but then adds a reminder about the electricity bill.

  Unfortunately I neglected to take the meter reading before leaving, replies my dad eight days later, revealing a brief window in which he wasn’t himself, distracted from common chores like reading the meter, or replying promptly to his correspondence. I must leave you to let me know a reasonable charge. Business complete, there follows a more surprising second paragraph: We did hear in the village that the Mill property was being offered for sale. If this is indeed true either now or in the future I would be tentatively interested just to know the details.

  So for a short while, Dad fantasized about owning the house we were renting when Nicky drowned. If he’d followed this through, we might have been better equipped to keep the memory of Nicky alive. Every trip south would have been a memorial, of sorts, and a challenge to the tyranny of moving on. We might have found a healthier way of dealing with grief. As it was, Dad’s tentative interest faded, or Jim and Bertie got in first. We heard no more about it.

  Through until Christmas 1978, Nicky does what he can to make himself a nuisance. A school bill is sent in error marked N. P. Beard for Autumn 1978: after 18th August that year Nicky had not spent £9.08 on his Matron’s Account, including garters at thirty pence and a couple of haircuts at a pound each. He had no use for a pair of laces or a term’s worth of sweets or toothpaste and toothbrush (£1), not in the autumn term of 1978.

  On 25th September, in a letter to Harrods, Dad specifies that we have arranged to return two pairs of trousers to Mr. Bates of your Schools Department when he visits Pinewood this term. Never take the future for granted—Nicky’s new school trousers were returned unworn.

  Elsewhere, the rest of the year is not exclusively Nicky. From one of the trunks in the attic, burrowing for relics of the period, I salvaged a Woman’s Weekly from October 1978. Two months after the event and Mum is reading magazines, feet tucked up on the sofa, midafternoon, nice cup of tea, licking her finger to turn the pages. Had she no heart?

  I would happily, in retrospect, impose a ban on trivial magazines for at least twelve months. The existence of this magazine makes me sympathetic to Victorian ideas of isolation, the better to assimilate grief. Children would be granted a leave of absence from school. No games, no TV—Dad had the mood about right, we should sit in chairs and show some respect.

  Instead, Mum has her nose in Woman’s Weekly, “Famed For Its Fiction.” I flip through, and the magazine combines love stories and stitching, short-term relief from the horrors of existence at twelve pence a week. In October 1978 Mum cut out the coupon for Exclusive Tights, and read adverts for chunky soup in tins. She too was making her effort at normal, at whatever solace might be taken from an eighteen-piece smoked-glass tea set.

  “At the time there was a pervasive attitude,” Mum says. “It happened. Get on with it.”

  She’d have chosen weekday mornings, with Dad at work and the light at its best, to pick the stitches from the name tapes in Nicky’s clothes. Most of them could be saved for Jem. The tracksuit top from the holiday, the pajamas left beneath the pillow. I tense even now at the horror of these tiny vast adjustments.

  “I did break down,” Mum says, “about three months later.”

  At last, I think, the crash had to happen. I’ve read the October 1978 Woman’s Weekly cover to cover, and the minor lifestyle options are no match for a precious child dead for eternity and the nights drawing in.

  “One day I stopped what I was doing,” Mum says. “I can’t remember what it was, and I cried for a couple of hours.”

  I picture her unstitching the name tapes, or maybe up in the attic, the photographs she wants to hide dropping from her suddenly useless hands. I’ve made her recall this crisis and I feel relieved on her behalf that once, at least, the grief flooded out. I can imagine how much that hurt at the time. “And then? How did you feel?”

  “You have to take a deep breath and get on with it.”

  In the Final Order for Winter Term 1978, slipped inside the end-of-term reports, R. J. Beard comes eighth out of a class of eight, by a fair distance. Richard has not had much visible success this term, though no need to panic. His time will come. This remorseless optimism is like an affliction, with the stiff upper lip as its physical symptom. The school is positive about moving forward because a bracing sense of momentum can disguise or even replace any number of more troubling emotional states. Though if we’d stopped, and looked, strong feeling might have been less troublesome than feared. He should not be too worried over his position in the form—I believe in time he will flourish.

  The teachers wanted to be kind, but weren’t equipped to give any more than that. Mr. Boddington and Ted Childs devoted their working lives to independent prep schools and, in their combined experience, Nicky was the only close-up death. A parent would die occasionally, but Nicky was unique. Mr. Boddington’s only regret about the immediate aftermath is that he didn’t organize a service in chapel, but by the cricket season of 1979 the memorial of choice is up and running: A magnificent new scorebox overlooks the cricket field—a kind gift from members and friends of the Beard family in memory of Nicholas, and we are very grateful to all who contributed to it.

  The grief has been isolated from the event and secured in a box, closed up at night and in winter, destined to weather in a Berkshire field. With the grief enclosed supposedly once and for all, my time to flourish did arrive, just as the teacher had predicted. By Spring Term 1980 I make the opening page of the magazine, reserved for important announcements: Richard Beard, Captain of the Blues and Captain of the School. Nicky is nowhere to be seen.

  Forever After

  I am tough and stupid, as Nicky observed in writing, the perfect combination of qualities to make repression stick. We deny, and we forget, and we stumble unfeeling through this great testing. Mr. Boddington places Dad’s final cancer operation around Easter 1979, because it coincides with a schools Rugby Sevens tournament. As our team leaves the field he delivers me the news that the surgery has been successful. This will be the last of the traumas, or nearly.

  We managed the first Christmas without Nicky, then the first birthday on 23rd March 1979. We skipped the first summer holiday—that’s the general consensus, and I check Dad’s diaries in which there’s no indication of holiday time taken. I went back with Tim to the Christian summer camp, safe in the arms of Jesus. It wasn’t the same, and from 1980 we resumed taking family holidays like everyone else, with color photos to record the fun. Me and Tim fully clothed on a beige Irish beach, slouching along with hands in pockets. Very much smaller, on his own, Jem. Some of these holidays were beside the sea; none were in Cornwall.

  The tracksuit top that Nicky was wearing at Tregardock, with white stripes down the arms and the GO patch on the breast, I found early on in the attic. Inside the neck, the name tape says J. I. Beard.

  “Most of the clothes were passed on to Jem when he was big enough,” Mum says. “The attitude was: it happened, get on with it.”

  “I know. You already said that.”

  The clothes and hats and the cricket bat are swallowed into family life, losing their unique personal significance. I tell Jem about Nicky’s tracksuit top. “It has your name tape in it.”

  The two of us are taking time out from a summer day, sitting on a bench with a view of green fields. He leans forward and pinches his eyes shut, index finger and thumb blocking the light. He massages his eyeballs, working over this idea of the hand-me-down clothes. Jem was a small boy who didn’t shoot up until his teens, and Nicky’s clothes would have fit him until he was eleven, twelve. He lived for years with Nicky on his back.

  “That seems desperately sad,” Jem says. “Fuck.” He catches my Tourette’s, an infection passed by strong emotion from one carrier to another in the family. “Fuck.”
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br />   He’d forgotten about the clothes, or never knew, but he sees Nicky’s tracksuit top from the perspective of the parent he now is. The passing-down and doubling-up is desperately sad. He’s right.

  “Every time they looked at me,” he says, “they must have seen him.”

  “They could have bought a new top.”

  Jem sits up from the sadness, and we agree that any of the explanations are brutal. Mum must have recognized the tracksuit with its distinctive green patch saying GO. Nicky was wearing it at Tregardock: he unzipped it and dropped it at the camp before our one last swim, but Mum consciously changed the name tape and passed on the top as soon as Jem was big enough. She wanted Nicky alive again. That’s sad. Then she watched Jem in Nicky’s tracksuit top, carefully, perhaps too carefully, safely through nine years old and beyond.

  Another explanation, equally sad: Mum recognized the top but didn’t think the connection with Nicky important.

  Or least likely of all, since the tracksuit surfaced in the attic so many years later, she never recognized Nicky’s top for what it was, and sewed on Jem’s name tape unthinkingly. Jem and I mull over the long years of silence, of never asking questions like these.

  “We weren’t supposed to talk about what happened,” Jem says, “or find out anything about it. It was too complicated.”

  I’m always relieved when someone else’s memory corresponds with mine, and Jem agrees that the photo of Nicky on the piano appeared suddenly, after a certain amount of time had passed. Nicky wasn’t always a feature in the living room.

  “Mum and Dad would have been different people,” Jem says, meaning if Nicky had scrambled out of the water, as I did. I think the consequences were as severe for Jem as anyone. He was left with an emptiness ahead of him, a daunting void between his six-year-old self and his big-boy brothers. Also, he left home for school after Nicky’s death and not before. He would come to have strong feelings against boarding school—the conformity, the entrenched injustices—that as a family we chose to ignore. It was because he was physically small, we thought. We refused to believe he needed his home and family, because we’d blocked out those needs in ourselves.

  We didn’t remember, and we didn’t talk. Sometimes the pressure had to be released in nonverbal ways, and as a teenager I was sent away from school: behaving badly had replaced nightmares as my unheard cry for help. On the morning of my great disgrace, Dad came to pick me up in the new Jag, and I made the walk of shame to the car. He didn’t say anything, not a word, out of the school, onto the main road, halfway back to Swindon.

  “We’ll say no more about it,” he eventually said.

  We made it home in silence, saying no more about it. And then we never said anything about it, ever.

  Jem says: “It sounds cowardly not to ask your own dad about your own brother’s death.”

  “I know.”

  “We never got past not being able to ask.”

  After 1978 Dad steadfastly avoided the subject, which made it okay for us to avoid it, too. He became distant, absent, a champion of hard-core English repression, a talent that Nicky’s death allowed him to explore to the full: one week after Nicky drowned he led us back to The Mill in Port Isaac. Not a problem. We’ll deal with the feelings some other time.

  Holed up in Dad’s study, I search through his files and letters for a hidden inner life. I’m looking for the pain he never expressed, but I can’t find much of a tortured soul in the bills from LIMMEX, HOME OF HARDWARE. I pick through his credit-card statements like a jealous lover—pubs, car repairs, bookshops, huge bills for medical insurance. I find the medical file: in 1979 the hospital consultant delivers a clean bill of health and looks forward to seeing Dad on the golf course.

  With the cancer in remission, Dad makes freer use of his credit cards. He presses Nicky from his mind with bulk orders to wine merchants, his total drinks bill disguised across a range of suppliers: Justerini & Brooks, Windrush Wines, Majestic. From 1979 onwards Dad drank—and why wouldn’t he? In March 1990, as an example, he spent £228.99 at Windrush Wines Ltd on half a case of sherry (six bottles, Medium Dry Oloroso), a case of white wine, a case of red wine, half a case of Gordon’s, half a case of Bell’s, and six bottles of Dry Martini. Which might appear an unexceptional stocking-up, only there’s a similar order in February, with a change in the style of sherry (Medium Dry Amontillado) to add a spurious sense of discernment.

  In his Graham Greene phase, Dad drank like Greene—J&B whisky because the paler color allows for a stronger mix that’s imperceptible to others. In his Winston Churchill phase, he drank like Churchill—whisky and soda in the evening, with a slow-burning Havana cigar. I once borrowed one of Dad’s many Churchill biographies, and discovered Churchill had lost a daughter. He therefore encouraged his secretary to have four children: One for Mother, one for Father, one for Accidents and one for Increase. Nicky was number three, for accidents. Churchill and my dad had got it right, and could therefore celebrate with uncounted nightcaps before bed, everything in the war room under control.

  Drink wasn’t Dad’s problem, but eventually we came to call it his problem because that was the easier explanation. Through denial, like the rest of us, he attempted to erase the agony of Nicky’s death. We blamed the drink, but the problem was the hole the drink was filling.

  Deep into Dad’s personal correspondence, between letters about golf-club membership and charitable contributions, I start to notice his letters of complaint. They begin in earnest from early 1979, to travel agents, oven manufacturers, to taxi companies and train operators, to the credit-card supplier. He expends excessive emotional energy on a seething complaint to a solicitor, and despairs that the local newspaper—the Swindon Evening Advertiser—is, despite its name, now outrageously delivered in the mornings.

  I feel very strongly that… At least he felt strongly about something. He complains in writing, time and again, about his fate. He fights against an appalling world in which children die and seat reservations go unconfirmed and books arrive unordered from Reader’s Digest. I return your letter and statement and suggest that you deal with your incoming correspondence.

  As the years close over, Nicky fades. My grandfather stops insisting on his ritual family photographs on the steps beside the rockery: too much of a reminder that Nicky is missing, and can’t be replaced. But the ache is there, the constant unspoken wish that we could somehow turn back the clock.

  “I remember the babies coming,” Jem says. “I don’t know why they came.”

  After Nicky died we often came home from school to a newborn baby. Tim, as the oldest son, is taken into confidence by adult friends of the family: “Your parents are wonderful people.” First he heard how terrible their life was, after the drowning. Now he learns how wonderful they are, because of how they’re moving on.

  “I must have spent a lot of time with adults,” Tim says. “I don’t know why they chose to talk to me, but they did.”

  In the attic I found a torn-out page from a spiral notebook:

  BABY CLARK

  Born 24 12 79

  At 2.29 p.m.

  By Cesarean Section

  FEEDS 4 ozs × 4 hourly

  S. M. A. Gold

  Birth Weight 4000 grams 8.13 ozs

  Leaving hospital 3900 8.7 ozs

  This is how the substitute babies arrived, wrapped in statistics and a hospital blanket, and the fostering had started by the end of 1979. That’s earlier than I’d have guessed.

  “Someone else suggested it,” Mum says. “The Church of England Children’s Society. They needed foster mothers. I used to be a nurse.”

  However the arrangement came about, foster babies require the same attention as all babies, possibly more, and without Nicky our life began to change. Our family took on a different shape, with a new brother or sister every six weeks or so, though sometimes if they were handicapped or black they stayed for longer.

  “We couldn’t go out in the car because the pram wouldn’t fit,” Tim s
ays.

  Nowadays, Tim and I can arrive at the obvious conclusion that each foster baby was a stand-in for Nicky. At the same time, the babies in their white blankets slotted into the house as a new set of human concerns, helping us to avoid our own. A cheeky baby in a carriage-built pram provided a facsimile of a happy family starting over. Mum and Dad had a new child, we had a replacement sibling, and this time we’d try to keep an eye on where everyone was.

  “The babies didn’t work as a replacement,” Tim says. “Not for me. The babies were in the way and the dogs were in the way.”

  The school holidays were short and time together as a family was precious, but when the fostering started no one kicked up a fuss or caused a scene or asked the simple questions. Of course we didn’t—that would have involved an emotional response, which felt indulgent. At school we’d learned to do without.

  “It wasn’t our family anymore,” Tim says. “I wanted it just to be the three of us.” Or preferably the four of us, but Nicky’s absence was the new reality to which we had to adjust.

  Personally, I don’t remember being troubled by the babies. They made me feel old, an old thirteen-year-old, but they didn’t intrude on my imaginary adventures, my own way of learning to cope. I constructed epic daydreams from thin air and the sets of Elvis Presley movies. Teenage American girls could save me from anything.

  In this distracted haze, aged fifteen, I signed my first official document, a consent form for my sister’s adoption. The fostering stopped and legally we had a sister, then another sister. I was leaving home and they were so much younger, and handicapped. They were part of the family but a different story; even so, I have to believe that at some level Nicky was implicated in the decision to adopt. Mum isn’t keen on this idea, but she’d lost a son. She and Dad gained two daughters, and whether we like it or not Nicky was still involved. Gone he may be, but he will always influence the way we act.