A Dark Devotion

by Clare Francis

  The drawing room. It had been called the living room when I’d first known it, but I could see how it had earned itself the more exalted title. Magnificently decorated in lemon yellow and pale blues, the walls were lined in what looked like silk and hung with portraits and landscapes which I had never seen before. The curtains—definitely silk—were looped open with tasselled tiebacks and fell in heavy folds onto a pristine carpet. The chintz sofas had puffy seats and a scattering of cushions, while the side tables were sprinkled with sporting magazines and a variety of small objets d’art. It was the sort of room where you always feel that however clean your shoes might be they are soiling the carpet.

  There were a number of silver-framed photographs arranged on a circular table, and two or three more on a bookcase. I recognized the one of Will’s father that had always stood in this room, showing a smiling man with a flop of dark hair over his forehead, pictured on a day so bright that his eyes were largely in shadow. He had been killed in a car accident when Will was four. I also recognized the picture of a young Maggie, taken in the Italian garden of her youth. Next to it was a studio portrait of an elegant fine-boned woman I took to be Grace’s mother, then a picture of Grace and Will sitting rather formally in a window, on their engagement perhaps, then a wedding picture in front of the church, Grace in a slim white dress, Will looking tall and rather tense in a morning suit. Then Will and Grace with Charlie as a baby. Then Charlie at five or six. Then Grace alone, a studio portrait.

  I picked up this last picture. The portrait showed a flawless Grace at nineteen or twenty, smiling wistfully, a gentle lost expression in her eyes, stating herself meekly to the world. This was the Grace I remembered from twelve years ago. I had met her only twice, but both times I had been struck by the delicacy of her beauty, the fragility of her tiny almost childlike body, and the way she had smiled, with great sweetness, the corners of her mouth curved shyly upwards. My parents had been equally struck. I remembered my father describing her as ‘an exquisite creature’, while my mother had used the word ‘glorious’. I hadn’t known what word to use; Grace had fallen outside my experience. I had never come into contact with anyone who dressed so perfectly, whose hair, immaculate and shining, radiated such colour and light, who moved with such effortless poise. Grace in name, grace in spirit and movement, someone who made the whole business of being feminine seem like a rare foreign language whose grammar and vocabulary was beyond my grasp. I had just sat my finals then and was preparing to leave on a Zoological Society field trip to Belize. I had an ugly short haircut and practical clothes and a scrubbed face and, after three years on a student diet of pasta and curries, was still eight pounds over my target weight. Grace made me feel as though I had come from an alien planet.

  Grace’s diary was lying on the flap of an antique bureau in the corner of the room. I approached it with mixed feelings. During my years as a lawyer I had seen into many people’s lives, had heard many of their most intimate and harrowing secrets, but until now it had been strictly professional. This was different, this was almost family, and it was hard to approach the examination of Grace’s life without a sense of intrusion.

  The diary was a large desk journal with two pages to a week. It had been left open at the week of Grace’s disappearance. Before examining this, I went back through the diary to its earliest pages at the beginning of December, to get some feel for the pattern of Grace’s life. Each day had three or four neat entries, with times and either initials or surnames, often with descriptions like ‘electrician’, ‘Aga man’. The telephone numbers of the tradespeople were entered next to their names in a meticulous hand. The people shown only by their initials were those she seemed to meet regularly. Many of these entries were carefully annotated with reminders such as ‘Take printer’s estimate’ or ‘NB: Times article’. On most days she had also listed the people she needed to phone, usually five or six. The overall impression was one of great neatness and efficiency.

  Many of the appointments were with AH, whom I took to be Anne Hampton, the joint organizer of the music festival, but there were at least two other people Grace, met regularly, marked only by the initials BG and SM, and I noted these down. In late December Grace had had a meeting with someone whose initials leapt out at me because they matched my brother’s: EW. Yet I couldn’t imagine what festival business Grace would have had to discuss with Edward, a confirmed philistine and proud of it. The initials could have been a coincidence.

  On one or two evenings a week Grace and Will dined out, and on at least two occasions in January they’d held dinner parties for eight or ten people. Grace had recorded the guests’ names and what she had given them to eat—meals which I, as a culinary dimwit, would only have attempted in a fit of insanity. One was a four-course dinner with wild mushroom salads beef en croute, cheese and two complicated puddings. Weekends were even more social, it seemed, with drinks parties at midday or six thirty, and regular Sunday lunches.

  I recognized quite a few of the names in Will and Grace’s circle: members of families I had known as a child, local notables and former patients of my father. There was a sprinkling of professionals, including a doctor from the neighbouring practice, plus an occasional local artist and writer. I noticed that Will and Grace had taken drinks before Christmas with a prominent landowner, and then, just after New Year, with the local earl at his Palladian mansion a few miles along the coast. These were people who were notoriously reluctant to move outside their own exalted circles, and I could only think that Grace had lured them over to talk about the festival.

  Between the start of the diary at the beginning of December and her disappearance, Grace had made six visits to London, three in December, two in January, and one in early February. On the first five occasions she had taken a train from King’s Lynn at eight thirty-five in the morning and arrived at King’s Cross at ten sixteen in time for an eleven o’clock appointment with her dentist in Wimpole Street. The first December visit showed no other entries for the day, and gave no indication of the train she had taken back. On four subsequent dates, however, she had gone from the dentist’s to a restaurant called La Brasserie, but the companion or companions she had met there at twelve thirty were not identified either by name or initials. Later in the afternoon she had gone shopping—the shops were carefully listed, places like Harvey Nichols and Peter Jones—before catching the four forty-five train home.

  On 5 February she’d taken a later train and gone straight to ‘lunch’—the restaurant unidentified. The afternoon had no entries except ‘Hat’.

  I moved on ten days to the beginning of the week when Grace had disappeared. There was nothing unusual in her entries. She had gone to a supermarket on the Monday and intended to make eight telephone calls to firms and tradespeople, as well as to AH and BG. On Tuesday she had met AH and BG, simultaneously this time, and two tradespeople had been due to call: someone to mend the gutter, and an oil delivery. On the Wednesday at two in the afternoon there had been a meeting with—the initials jumped out at me again—EW. I couldn’t imagine why Grace should have needed to meet my brother, but if this EW was indeed Edward then it occurred to me that he might have been one of the last people to see her—I caught myself thinking alive and amended it to: before she disappeared.

  Grace had planned to go to London on the Thursday, taking the usual eight thirty-five train from King’s Lynn for yet another appointment with her Wimpole Street dentist at eleven. At twelve thirty she’d had another lunch appointment at the Brasserie, again with person or persons unnamed. After that was written: 5.00 Mother, and below that an entry which had been crossed through with a single line: 6.30 AWP, with an address near Regent’s Park. There was no indication of which train she had intended to take home.

  I copied these details, such as they were, into my notebook, before going back through the diary to see if I had missed an earlier reference to the ‘AWP’ in the cancelled six thirty appointment, but there was nothing. A search through the weeks ahead was equally
unproductive, though I saw that the music festival was due to start on 2 June and last three days, and that the preceding weeks were packed with appointments and memos regarding marquees, caterers, flowers and sponsors.

  I closed the diary with the feeling that whatever else may have happened to Grace it was unlikely to be suicide. Her life was too full, too wrapped up in events of her own creation to allow time for introspection. The unremitting neatness of her handwriting suggested confidence and optimism, while her impeccable planning was the work of someone in effortless control of her life.

  Her bureau was a fine antique, Georgian or Queen Anne, with two ranks of pigeonholes, filled with the stuff of her existence: papers, letters, cheque books, leaflets, brochures, notebooks. I would have liked to go through the correspondence and maybe some of the cheque books too, but didn’t feel I could do so without permission. An address book was different, however; an address book was no more private than a diary. I glanced into a small notebook—it contained a collection of proverbs and sayings, copied out in Grace’s hand—and had moved on to a small leather-bound book—this had a list of birthdays—when I was distracted by footsteps on the stairs and a child’s piping voice answered by Maggie’s low murmur. Then Maggie called, ‘Would you like some breakfast, Alex?’

  When I went into the kitchen the boy was already eating. To my inexperienced eye he appeared older than eleven, more like twelve or thirteen, certainly closer to adolescence than childhood. In looks he was all Grace, so blond as to be almost white-haired, with the same finely drawn features. Only his eyes were different, paler or clearer, more grey than blue. He gave me a surreptitious glance before returning to his cereal, which he spooned into his mouth with concentration.

  Maggie said, ‘Charlie, this is Alex.’ When he didn’t respond, she touched his hand, ‘Charlie—say hello.’

  He looked at his grandmother, as though for a reprieve, before offering a brief glance in my direction. ‘Hello.’

  Maggie grinned at me. ‘Always hungry at breakfast time.’ And she gave a rather forced laugh, as if to remind me of the need for a light-hearted mood.

  Taking my cue, I smiled, ‘It’s been a long time since I sat down to breakfast in this house, Maggie.’

  ‘Ha!’ she declared. ‘I used to make good big breakfasts in those days, didn’t I?’ She had dressed in a long sweater and trousers, in matching dark burgundy, and pulled her hair into a coil at the back of her head. There was a trace of lipstick on her mouth, but far from lifting her colour it only seemed to accentuate the dullness of her skin. ‘I used to fry ham and eggs in those days, ha? Before we stopped eating these bad things that we liked so much. And me, who loves to eat what I want!’ This last remark was made as much to Charlie as to me, and, flashing a glance in my direction to signal what was clearly a set-piece, Maggie prompted the child, ‘Ha, Charlie? Granny likes her food, doesn’t she? Ha? Doesn’t she?’

  Charlie’s spoon paused, he glanced at Maggie in cold dread, willing her not to go ahead.

  ‘Hey, Charlie,’ Maggie urged in a softer voice, ‘what do I like? Ha?’

  The boy looked for escape and, finding none, recounted unhappily, ‘Pasta.’

  Maggie pressed her hands together with delight. ‘And why do I like pasta?’

  He stared at the table. He counted himself too grown up for this childish game.

  ‘Why does Granny like pasta?’ Maggie repeated even more brightly than before.

  ‘Get more on your plate.’

  Maggie threw back her head and laughed. ‘We have competitions to see who can get most pasta on their plate, don’t we, Charlie? And Charlie wins always. He builds castles.’ She made a show of clapping her hands high in front of her, as an Italian opera-goer might applaud a brilliant aria. ‘Bravo!’ she cried. ‘Bravo, caro mio!’

  Charlie’s mouth twitched slightly. Taking it as a smile, Maggie gave an exclamation of affection and, bending over the table, took his face in her hands and kissed him repeatedly on the forehead. When she pulled back, Charlie’s face had taken on a weary, troubled expression.

  Maggie began to chatter about the art class that Charlie was going to in a few minutes. As she talked Charlie finished his cereal, put his spoon down and stared out of the window.

  I asked, ‘You enjoy art, then, Charlie?’

  He gave what was probably a nod.

  ‘What sort of things do you do there? Painting? Drawing?’

  His eyes fixed determinedly on the table.

  ‘I always liked clay modelling the best.’

  A small spark of interest.

  ‘Making shapes. Getting mucky.’

  Unexpectedly he volunteered, ‘We make pots.’

  ‘Ah!’ I found myself sounding a little too bright, like Maggie. ‘Do you make them with a wheel or by hand?’

  He dropped his eyes. ‘Both.’

  ‘More skill by hand. And wheels can be tricky. The first time I tried a wheels I made a mess of it. Got out of control. Lumps and bumps all over the place. And then the top of the pot flew off. Landed on someone’s foot.’

  He examined my face to see if I was serious.

  ‘It only does that if you squeeze it really really hard.’

  He thought about this. ‘Are you meant to squeeze it?’

  ‘No! It’s strictly forbidden!’

  I was rewarded with a faint smile, and for a brief instant he became a child again living in the moment.

  ‘Have you got a pot I can see?’

  Maggie said, ‘There’s that lovely green one?’ Turning to look along the shelves, she missed the sudden tension that shot through Charlie’s body. ‘Where is it, Charlie?’ She glanced back and caught his expression. ‘Gone?’ she said hastily, then with realization: ‘Oh…broken?’

  Charlie’s lips tightened.

  ‘Oh, Charlie, you can make another. I insist you make another! Just for me. Yes?’

  Charlie’s face cleared, and the tension passed.

  ‘Time to go!’ Maggie cried, clapping her hands like a schoolmarm. ‘Come on, young man!’ She shooed him towards the door with sweeping movements of both hands. ‘Coats!’ Hats!’ As Charlie climbed dutifully to his feet and left the room, Maggie explained, ‘I drive him to a neighbour who will take him to the class.’ Taking a last gulp of coffee, she said in a voice that had lost all its false cheer, ‘If you feel like walking, you might find Will. I can’t tell you where he is. But on the marshes somewhere, or the meadows. He walks a different place every day, you understand. He covers each part, to make sure…’ She threw up a hand that was suddenly full of anger.

  ‘I’ll go and look for him.’

  Pausing on her way to the door, she said with agitation, ‘I wish they would get on and find her, Alex. I wish it was over. You understand this? I wish they would find whatever there is to find and be finished with it. This waiting, this hoping—it is killing Will, killing him. He is like some creature that has been run down and hurt, he must be put out of his agony. I wish…’ But dissatisfied with this thought, she abandoned it. ‘And Charlie.’ Drawing closer again, she lowered her voice. ‘It is terrible for him, Alex. He thinks somehow he is responsible for his mama going away. You understand—this is how children think. When something goes wrong, they think somehow that they could have stopped it.’

  ‘He’s been told she’s missing?’

  ‘He knows she’s gone away. Gone away—what does this mean to a child? It means that she has left him. Nothing else! Nothing, Alex! Children, they only understand that they have been abandoned. And he thinks, somehow it is his fault.’ She made a fierce exclamation of despair. ‘No, no! Better they find her soon. Even if it is bad.’ She gave me a look of sudden doubt, as if this had sounded harsher than she had intended. ‘You understand this, Alex?’

  ‘I understand that not knowing is almost the worst thing of all. But don’t give up hope, Maggie. She could be alive.’

  Maggie’s face emptied, her expression told me that I had understood nothing of the
importance of instinct in these matters.

  As soon as Maggie had driven Charlie away I took some walking shoes from the car, wrapped a woollen scarf around my head and went down to the water. No sight of Will, though this didn’t prevent my heart beating high in my chest, my nerves tautening.

  The morning was the colour of pewter. The marshes seemed very wide, almost as broad as the sky itself, which stretched in bands of light to the edges of the visible world. A wind had sprung up from the sea, an ice-wind that promised colder things to come. The tide was trickling in and the creeks and riverlets that criss-crossed the salt-marshes in silvery cords glimmered with chill light. To a stranger the marsh might seem bleak, a sombre expanse of flatland, but to me it contained all the life and colour of my childhood. I saw the myriad migrant birds which took refuge there each winter, and the skylarks which camouflaged their nests in spring, and the carpets of sea-lavender and sea-campion waiting for summer, and the canny uncatchable fish which flitted through the dark creeks.

  Striking out eastward along the bank that followed the edge of the salt-marshes, I made for the wide embankment that stretched out towards the dunes, marking the start of the freshwater lands. I met two sturdy ramblers with rucksacks and steaming breath, then no one. The bank snaked around a bend until, set back from the path on lowlying land, five cottages came into view, a huddle of four known as the Salterns, then, some thirty yards on, another called Reed Cottage, where Maggie had lived since leaving Marsh House.

  In 1953 there had been a terrible disaster, when a northerly storm of previously unimaginable force, well past the hurricane mark, had funnelled the waves into this corner of the North Sea on top of a high tide, creating a massive surge which had inundated miles of coast and cost hundreds of lives. At the height of the flood it was said that there had been nothing to see of these cottages but their roofs.

  This disaster had happened some ten years before I was born, but it had reverberated through my childhood, a brutal and revered thread to our history, a constant reminder to us of the power of the sea and the possibilities for luck and misfortune.