The Day We Disappeared

by Lucy Robinson

  ‘Daddy!’ Ana Luisa shouted. There she was, all done up in a posh little blouse and ruby-coloured trousers. ‘Mummy’s made me wear stupid clothes,’ she grumbled, throwing her arms around Mark’s legs. ‘I think we need to get one of those stylists,’ she added, and Mark laughed loudly.

  ‘How do you know what a stylist is?’ He reached down to scoop up his daughter.

  ‘Anyone who’s anyone knows what a stylist is,’ Ana Luisa said, and Mark hugged her hard.

  ‘You’re mad,’ he said. ‘I’m so happy to see you!’

  ‘It’s Mummy who’s mad,’ Ana Luisa said. ‘I hate these clothes! Can I wear Stumpy’s instead?’

  ‘He’d be delighted to lend you a rug, I’m sure.’ Mark kissed her head. ‘How come you’re back early? Is everything okay?’

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ Ana Luisa said. ‘Mummy just said we had to come back to take care of business. You know what she’s like.’

  ‘But where is she? Who are you here with?’

  ‘Monica,’ Ana Luisa said airily.

  ‘Monica?’

  ‘She works for that German man with the weird name.’

  ‘Jochim?’

  ‘Yes. Daddy, I need some different clothes.’

  ‘Why did she leave you with Jochim Furst’s groom?’

  He has no idea, I thought.

  I put Stumpy into his stable and rugged him up for the evening, smiling as Mark and his daughter discussed the merits of horse blankets as human clothes, but fuming as I thought about Maria. Leaving her daughter with Jochim’s groom while she went off for a shag? What kind of mother behaved like that? I tried to imagine how I’d have felt if my own mother had pulled such a stunt but gave up because it was so inconceivable that she’d have been so bloody selfish in the first place. Ana Luisa was six! Six years old! And it was nearly dark!

  Where the hell was she?

  ‘I came to make sure you ran Stumpy on the cross-country tomorrow,’ Maria purred, arriving just at that moment. With the click of her leather-heeled boots came a swampy fug of expensive perfume.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ Mark said. He made to kiss her cheek but she moved away. ‘You cancelled your holiday?’

  ‘I cut it short,’ she replied. ‘My father asked me to. He did not want to leave matters to chance.’

  ‘Leave what matters to chance?’

  ‘Matters such as you doing the wimp-out and not letting Stumpy run the cross-country,’ Maria said, as if talking to a challenging child. ‘I know what you are like, obsessing about problems that do not exist.’

  Mark took a deep breath. How he stayed calm around her I had no idea. ‘Stumpy’s warm fetlock definitely existed,’ he said. ‘And it was only three weeks ago. So forgive me for exercising caution.’

  ‘The horse is fine,’ Maria snapped. ‘He just hit his fetlock on something. The swelling went down within the day! We will not have you threatening your place in the World Equestrian Games team because of minor thing that happen months ago.’

  ‘Three weeks ago,’ Mark repeated, but I could tell he’d given up. ‘Look, I’m planning to run him. He’s passed his vetting, he’s passed the trot-up, he’s been perfectly sound and he did a beautiful dressage test. Of course I’m planning to run him. But obviously I’d pull him straight away if I didn’t think he was up to it.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Maria snapped. ‘Why you always look for the negative? Why you always look for excuses not to run my horses?’

  ‘Can you not swear in front of our daughter?’ Mark asked. ‘Just for five minutes? Have you heard her language recently?’

  ‘Oh! Now you worry about your daughter! Now you step in to be good father!’

  I stroked Stumpy’s neck. I was going to have to get out of there at some point, and I strongly suspected that Ana Luisa would want to escape this. But I was scared of Maria, too.

  Then: Sod her, I thought. I’m Kate Brady and I won’t stand for this.

  ‘Hi, Maria,’ I said, emerging from the stable. ‘How are you?’

  Maria barely glanced at me. ‘Fine.’

  ‘Mark’s taking great care of your horse,’ I said. ‘Which is why he should be fine to run tomorrow.’

  She turned to look at me. Too far?

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Definitely too far.

  ‘I said, Mark’s taking great care of your horse.’

  Maria’s nostrils flared. ‘I’m sure you have things to do,’ she said softly. ‘We are busy here.’

  ‘Fancy a hot dog?’ I asked Ana Luisa.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And an ice cream, and a burger, and maybe some sweets.’

  ‘Deal.’

  As I walked off with his daughter, I felt Mark smile, even if the gesture hadn’t quite made it to his face. You’re welcome, I thought. I’d do anything for you.

  And that, I knew, as I took Ana Luisa’s hand, was very frightening. What about Becca? And Maria? And this confident little girl powering along beside me?

  If you don’t get this under control you’ll have to resign, I told myself shakily.

  But where would I go?

  The smooth, moneyed voice on the Tannoy told me that Mark Waverley and Distant Thunder were clear of the Outlander Bank and heading towards the Gatehouse New Pond. Only one jump until they were in my line of vision, tackling that most hideous of obstacles. My heart was thumping loudly in my ears. Stewards were blowing warning whistles and the public crossing was closed to clear the way for my boss and his horse.

  And there they were. My beautiful, beautiful Stumpy, nostrils flared pink, sweat foaming over his breastbone, yet so strong, so fast, so confident as he galloped up the green slope. Mark sat light as a feather in his saddle, face set on the jumps ahead, already reining in Stumpy to make sure he was on the right stride. Adrenalin lifted me high above the crowd and I hovered there, tremulous and sick, as everyone turned to follow Mark over the first part of the jump.

  Stumpy leaped as if the jump were nothing, Mark crouched over him. I began to smile as they flew through the air. Thank God!

  Then Stumpy stumbled on landing. He stumbled and, in slow motion, began to somersault.

  For a split second I didn’t believe it. Didn’t believe that, of all the horses and riders in this competition, of all the jumps on this course, my horse and rider should have an accident. Right there, in front of my eyes.

  No.

  But Stumpy was flying right over in a dreadful somersault and Mark was rocketing off him.

  No.

  Mark was thrown forward, but not far enough. Half a tonne of horse landed on him with a sickening cracking sound, then everything went quiet. My vision tunnelled; my breathing stopped.

  Stumpy did not move. And, underneath him, neither did Mark.

  I was running. A steward tried to stop me but I threw her off as if she were made of paper. As I arrived by his side Stumpy made a terrible noise and managed to roll off Mark, who lay still on the ground, bent at all the wrong angles. Next to his beloved horse, he was like a child’s broken doll, forgotten in the grass. ‘HELP!’ I heard myself screaming. ‘HELP THEM! SOMEONE HELP THEM!’

  Finally, as the stewards and the vet’s Land Rover arrived at the fence, I was dragged away. Terror sawed right through me. This couldn’t be happening. Not here, not in front of me.

  An ambulance 4×4 came tearing over the hill. Two of the stewards held me at a distance, sobbing and pleading, as a white tent was erected over Stumpy and the paramedics surrounded Mark.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Annie

  The day after I returned to London I dragged my weary body up to a damp Derbyshire to see Dad. I felt like a shameful old tramp, arriving on his doorstep after five steamy days in France, but I’d promised to spend the weekend with him and was already a day late, having lost my passport and then having to spend a day at the British consulate in Bordeaux getting an emergency permit to travel.

  I hugged myself all the way up to Chesterfield, still barely able to believe t
he last few days. But the closer I got to home, the sadder I felt. I want Daddy to have this, I thought. I want him to fall in love again. Let go. Be happy.

  ‘Some people get many loves,’ Dad often told us, ‘but not me. Georgie was my one and only. My girl.’ There was a picture of them on honeymoon by his bed. He was all shy and handsome in shorts and a linen shirt, Mum beautiful in a cotton tunic covered with a swirling Indian print. Apparently she’d made him try some mushrooms and they’d had a wild night running around a tiny Greek village chasing giant imaginary squirrels. From what I could tell, Dad would have done almost anything Mum asked of him.

  ‘Hello, Flannie.’ He held out his arms at the front door. When Lizzy was little she’d called me Flannabel or Flannie and Dad had loved it so much he’d never given it up.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’ I grinned into his shoulder. I felt his tickly beard on the side of my face and forgot everything for a moment. I loved my daddy so much. ‘It’s so nice to see you.’

  ‘Likewise, my love,’ he said cheerfully. A spot of rain landed on my nose and he shook a fist at the sky. ‘Come in, come in. Let me give you some money for the taxi.’

  I took it, because I knew it made him feel better about not being able to collect me from the station any more, but I felt a great tug of regret as I did so.

  ‘How are you, Dad?’

  ‘Very well, very well. Getting the window boxes ready for autumn.’ I smiled right through the sadness this news brought me. In his time Dad had been a wonderful gardener; Lizzy and I had loved digging up potatoes with him and reaching for runner beans that spiralled up tall canes into the sky. But his grief and trauma seemed to have grown over the years, rather than diminished, and these days Dad was pretty much trapped in his own house. Even venturing into the garden was too much.

  ‘And work?’ I asked brightly. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘I’m on a pig of a project, darling. An absolute honker!’

  Dad translated literary Spanish novels into English. He and Mum had met in Barcelona at a party thrown by one of his authors, which Mum, passing by on a pedal bike, had wandered into. That was typical of Mum, he said.

  Luckily for Dad, Mum had been backpacking for the last three years and was a little tired of living out of a rucksack. She gave in quickly to his repeated pleas for her to marry him, and within three months Georgie Whelan had become Georgie Mulholland. She had moved into his house in a village called Great Longstone near Bakewell and painted beautiful murals and patterns on the walls.

  She had borne Lizzy and me, managed to persuade Dad that we should all go travelling round Africa for a year, then been raped and murdered on my seventh birthday.

  Just like that. The record stopped, the future cancelled.

  Dad said Lizzy and me had given him a reason to carry on but we both knew that a large part of him had died with Mum, a part that could never come back. He’d been a wonderful father, rolling up his sleeves and suffering princess role-play and fairy-cake baking sessions; he’d taught himself to cook so he could feed us properly and, in later years, would insist on picking Lizzy up from nightclubs at two or even three in the morning, rather than have her come home with a dodgy cab driver. When, at the age of sixteen, I ended up in a psychiatric ward he was by my side all day, every day, and if he was frightened by what had happened to his little girl he never showed it.

  He was our rock, our friend, our daddy. But there was a hole in him that nothing and nobody could fill, or would fill, ever again. And that was just how it was. We accommodated his increasing list of neuroses and fears, we allowed him to abandon hope of ever writing his own novels, and we never shamed him.

  Privately, of course, it broke our hearts. His life became smaller every time we visited.

  We sat in the kitchen, which seemed a lot tidier than it had been in recent months. Dad served homemade lemon cake on an old willow-pattern plate with chips in the glaze that was probably only in circulation still because it had been one of Mum’s favourites. We chatted while the house-martins scrabbled around in the low eaves and the clouds disgorged thick sheets of rain on to the Peaks.

  Dad told me about the book he was translating, a ‘somewhat wanky but rather beautiful’ novel about a man who bought an abandoned church in the Andean foothills in Chile, and I told him about the new lease of life I’d taken on with work. ‘I’m thinking of going to Tibet soon,’ I told him, ‘to do some more training. I had incredible massages there. And I’m going to talk to them about having one afternoon per week reserved for reiki. I love it, Dad!’

  ‘Wonderful,’ Dad said. ‘I can’t tell you how happy that makes me, pet. Another piece of cake?’

  Dad passed the plate to me, then rested his chin in his hands, watching me with a twinkle in his eye.

  I watched him back. I noticed that his eyebrows, which had begun to go a bit sprouty in recent years, had been tamed. And he was wearing a new shirt, a lovely navy thing with orange stitching that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a cool young man. Or indeed – my stomach flipped ecstatically – on Stephen.

  The mutual watching continued.

  ‘Where did you get that shirt?’ I asked him.

  ‘The internet, of course.’ Dad grinned. ‘Enough about my shirt. Anything you want to tell me?’

  ‘Eh?’

  He laughed, leaning back in his chair. ‘About the man?’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘The man who’s making your face go bright red, Flannie.’

  I didn’t want to tell him about Stephen. Not yet. But –

  ‘GAH! Oh, Daddy! You’re a pain!’

  Dad nodded. ‘And I’m your dad. You didn’t think I wouldn’t notice, did you?’

  ‘Evil,’ I muttered.

  ‘I’m just your old dad, Flannie,’ he repeated. ‘And I can see you’ve met someone. Are you going to tell me, sweetheart? Or am I going to have to work it out for myself?’

  So I told him.

  I told him almost everything, save for the bit when Stephen and I had had sex three times in a darkening vineyard, or the bit where we were spotted kissing passionately in a corridor at two a.m. by a big gay chef, who had bellowed, ‘Quel scandale!’ and had to be given a bottle of wine worth five hundred euros to keep his silence. Neither did I tell Dad that Stephen had told me he was in love with me. Even I – high as a kite, and declaring the very same right back – knew that that was a bit fast.

  It didn’t make it any less real, though. I was hooked right up to that drip. ‘And that’s about it,’ I said. ‘Still early days, Dad. No need to write a wedding speech yet.’

  Dad frowned. ‘I’m not so sure,’ he replied. ‘You’re like a live wire. I’ve never seen you like this about anyone, Flannabel.’

  I tried not to do the mad smile of the smitten but it was impossible. ‘Argh,’ I whimpered.

  Dad chortled. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘It’s worse than I thought!’ He sat back again, cradling his coffee cup against his chest. ‘Sweetheart,’ he began hesitantly. ‘He’s a good man, isn’t he? A decent man?’

  I thought about the expensive flowers Stephen had sent me when I got back from Heathrow, even though he’d had to spend six hours with me in the British consulate at Bordeaux while I’d waited for the emergency travel permit. And the texts he’d sent me this morning, wishing me a lovely day with my dad and just being generally sweet and completely like nothing I’d ever imagined a CEO to be. ‘Yes, he’s decent. He’s lovely. The genuine article, Dad, I don’t think even you could find fault with him.’

  Dad looked slightly embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I hate the idea of you seeing me as an interfering old granny …’ His beard wobbled slightly.

  ‘I don’t think that, Dad,’ I said. ‘Not at all. I know how much you worry about me and Lizzy, and I completely understand why.’

  ‘I just want to be sure that he’s a nice man. Who’ll keep you safe. Never harm you.’ A tear fell from his eye and my heart twisted savagely. Even more than I wanted ha
ppiness and freedom for myself, I wanted it for my dad.

  I smiled. ‘He’s great, Dad. You don’t need to worry about him at all.’

  ‘Do you have friends in common? Do you know all about his past? No children, ex-wives, nothing like that?’

  I sighed. ‘Dad, come on. Of course I don’t know everything about him. As I said, it’s early days. But if he has an ex-wife and child he’s lied to my face, and Stephen’s a very heart-on-sleeve sort of a guy. I think his problem is more that he’s incapable of being dishonest!’

  ‘Some men are good at lying,’ Dad insisted. I could tell he hated himself for this.

  ‘Stop it. You don’t need to worry about me, Daddy. I’ve met a really, really lovely man. He makes me laugh, he’s humble, he’s generous and he has this really strong moral code. I’ve found a good ’un.’

  Dad stared at his hands, and I went over to crouch next to him. ‘Nobody on earth is more obsessive about my safety than me,’ I said. ‘If there was a whiff – so much as a particle – of trouble with Stephen, my radar would have gone off weeks ago. Come on, Dad, you know that.’

  He sighed, and into me swung the great weight of his grief and fear. ‘Okay,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m sorry, darling. I love you so much, I just want you to be all right.’

  Later on, as we sat listening to records in the sitting room with all of Dad’s cosy lamps on I noticed – rather to my amazement – that he had Facebook up on his laptop. ‘Really?’ I said, as he went off to wash up. ‘Facebook?’

  Dad stuck his head out of the kitchen. ‘I know! Who’d have thought? I’ve decided to enter the world of social media.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

  ‘Straight up,’ he called. ‘I’m rather enjoying it, you know, Flannabel. All sorts of funny stuff out there!’

  Maybe, after nearly thirty years, things were on the move.

  ‘You should use your new-found internet skills to try a bit of dating yourself,’ I said gingerly, as Dad came back.