The Disappearance of Emily Marr

by Louise Candlish

  There was a succession of interviews, in the event, in which the chronology of my affair with Arthur was documented, our plans to live together resurrected, my phone conversation with Sylvie reconstructed in an official statement. I did my best to give the investigator a true and full account. Gwen kept me up to date. As I had feared, she said it had now been established that I was the last person Sylvie had spoken to on the phone, possibly the last person at all besides her sons, and I would certainly be called as a witness at the inquest. The coroner would want to understand her state of mind when she set out on the morning of the accident and my ‘background information’ could be crucial.

  They did not say if Arthur knew this or not.

  ‘Am I… am I in some sort of trouble?’ I asked her.

  ‘No, you’ve been very helpful and we’d like to thank you for that. The coroner’s job is not to determine criminal liability in any way. He wants only to establish the facts in order to give a verdict on the cause of death.’ Gwen added that the coroner had now issued the authority permitting the three bodies to be buried, and that this in itself signified that no criminal charges were likely to be brought against anyone.

  I did not ask where and when the funerals were to take place. Under no circumstances could I show my face on those occasions. Sustained though I was by then entirely on the hope of seeing Arthur again, even for me the thought of watching him lay his sons to rest was unspeakable. I had a vision of Sylvie’s family standing in a horseshoe around a grave, glaring at me with murderous loathing. I knew of the existence of her sister already, the recipient of the yellow dish, and of the niece who had helped Sylvie paint it, but there were probably parents still alive too, other siblings, nieces and nephews, cousins to the boys. Not to mention the relatives on Arthur’s own side. The momentousness of the tragedy overwhelmed me once again and tears spilled down my face.

  ‘Do I have to attend the inquest?’ I said. ‘What would happen if I said no?’

  There was the sound of an exhalation, not quite a sigh. Gwen was too tender-hearted to let on that she was bored or irritated by the protests she must encounter day in, day out. ‘I know it’s upsetting, Emily, but there’s nothing to be afraid of. To answer your question, you can either come voluntarily or we can issue a formal summons.’

  I banished the row of faces, the branches on the family tree. There was no question that I would refuse. ‘Of course I’ll come, if you think I can help.’

  She said there was a very good support service for witnesses and, if I wished, someone would accompany me on the day.

  ‘I don’t need that, thank you,’ I said. ‘When will it be?’

  ‘We’ll let you know the date as soon as it’s set. It will be the new year at the earliest, depending on the complexity of the investigation.’

  I felt as if I’d been struck in the chest: the new year at the earliest! The idea of reaching January of the following year, months away, was unthinkable, like being asked to swim the Atlantic. To have to swim the Atlantic before I could see Arthur again… I admit I cried even harder after the call ended, hopelessly sorry for myself. At least it was in the morning and I was still at home, free to lie on my bed sobbing and writhing till the torment subsided. Had I taken such a call at work, I would have had to put down the phone and pretend I was not in the middle of a waking nightmare. For I had to continue working, of course. I had to or I’d very quickly be destitute.

  Charlotte had accepted my excuse on the Saturday of the accident that I’d been consoling a neighbour, having become drawn into the crisis on my way to the dentist’s. She’d already heard news of it and was prepared to give me the benefit of the doubt. But from the Monday, I had no choice but to behave as if as personally unaffected as she was, for I could hardly explain my true involvement and expect any sympathy. To excuse my facial swelling I told her I’d suffered an allergic reaction to a mosquito bite, which seemed to work, but when I lost control and was found in tears while washing up the chocolate fountain, I had to improvise and say my father had had a relapse. I felt the additional misery of the lie as heavily as if it were true.

  ‘Oh, poor you,’ she said. ‘You know how close I am to my father. I can’t think of anything worse to have to deal with.’

  I could.

  ‘Except that poor guy who lost his whole family,’ she added. ‘The surgeon. I guess that’s worse. You can tell something terrible’s happened, can’t you? I mean locally, right down the road.’ Since our adult customers talked of little else but the ‘triple tragedy’, conspicuously shielding their children’s ears from their gossip, this was stating the obvious. ‘It’s a relief when someone comes in from out of the area and doesn’t know anything about it. But even then, there’s just this weird atmosphere.’

  Perhaps it was me; perhaps it descended when I arrived and lifted when I left.

  ‘I wonder if she ever came in here,’ Charlotte mused. ‘Sylvie Woodhall.’ Her attitude of compassion was agonised, for no one embodied better than her the emotion of ‘There but for the grace of God go I’. While a minute ago she had been beside herself with relief that she was not the one with a parent dying in hospital, now she counted her blessings that it was Sylvie Woodhall who’d lost control of a speeding vehicle and not her.

  ‘I did see her in here once, actually,’ I said. ‘She did a plate, a yellow one, for her sister’s birthday.’

  ‘Wow,’ Charlotte marvelled, ‘you’ve got a good memory.’

  My brother rang me when he discovered that for two weeks in a row his regular weekend visit to the hospital had been the only one Dad had had all week. ‘They say you haven’t been up for a while,’ he said. ‘Is anything wrong?’

  ‘There’s been something I’ve had to deal with here,’ I said. ‘It’s been… upsetting.’

  ‘I thought you split up with Matt ages ago?’

  ‘Not Matt.’ Oh, the innocence of an amicable break-up with a single man!

  Phil paused, not one to pry.

  ‘I will go and see Dad,’ I told him. ‘I hadn’t realised how long I’d left it. I’ll go this evening. How was he when you saw him?’

  ‘The same.’

  So something was the same in this upturned world, but it was hardly heart-warming news. ‘It’s not the same, though, is it, Phil?’ I cried, and after that words came tumbling from me before I could scoop them back: ‘He’s not the same. He’s unrecognisable. It’s unbearable, don’t you think? All those years he sacrificed everything for us and now we’re older and in a position to give something back, we can’t. There’s nothing he wants. He doesn’t know what he wants, he doesn’t know us!’

  There was a moment of cold shock, for this statement of helplessness was years out of date. Like me, Phil had grown expert in pretending, at least in conversations between the two of us. Perhaps he bared his true torment to his wife Julie, as I did – had – to Arthur. ‘He wouldn’t want you to think like that,’ he said, voice determinedly steady. ‘Don’t crack up, Em. It’s actually good that he’s stable at the moment and not deteriorating.’ Another pause. ‘You know what we just talked about?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You. When you used to have nightmares.’

  ‘Cheery stuff.’

  ‘Oh, come on, we were laughing about it. The third bunk, remember?’

  ‘The third bunk?’ I willed myself to get into the spirit of this, but I was out of practice. I knew what he was talking about, though. For months after Mum died, I’d had terrors in the night and become frightened of the dark, of sleeping in my room alone, and so Dad had moved me to the lower bunk in Phil’s room. It was a tiny cabin of a space, every breath amplified, and all that happened now was that my crying woke him up and set him off. So Dad laid out a mattress of sleeping bags for himself next to my lower bunk, the three of us sleeping in a space not much bigger than an airing cupboard. And it worked well enough, until one morning Phil sprang down from the top bunk, forgetting about our new roommate, and landed on Dad’s head. S
omehow Dad managed to hide his pain from us and get us to school. Years later, he admitted he’d taken the morning off work to go to A&E to be treated for concussion.

  ‘He didn’t actually remember,’ Phil confessed. ‘But he enjoyed hearing about my clumsy, pubescent phase.’

  At last I managed a chuckle, if only to end the call on a warmer note. Scenes from our childhood were like make-believe now, at best fables, instructive to the listener – if only for a minute or two.

  Chapter 15

  Emily

  As I say, Arthur had to all intents and purposes dispossessed me. He’d also made it impossible for me to contact him. Having discovered that the mobile line on which I had always reached him was no longer in service, I called his secretaries at St Barnabas’ and the Harley Street clinic. Both parroted the official line: he had taken compassionate leave for an indefinite period and they were not able to promise that any message would be returned. They were sure I would understand.

  For the first time I turned on the old laptop Matt had left when he moved out and began checking for email from Arthur – sometimes, at weekends, obsessively, several times an hour – but there was never anything, of course. I went back to the beginning and tried the options again: mobile phone (out of service), hospital extensions (the party line), email (nothing) – an eternity ring of futility.

  I had, by then, all but given up on the possibility of seeing him on the Grove or anywhere else in the neighbourhood. He had moved out of his house, at least temporarily, that was the only conclusion I could draw after I’d passed it several times a day for weeks – not only to and from the bus stop to work as of old, but also late at night, when I would find myself attracted against all reason uphill to the pavement outside number 11. Every time, without exception, I found it dark and unchanged, the blinds at his study windows that had been pulled low to conceal me never again opened. Occasionally I would go to the door and ring the bell – its abrupt grind penetrated my soft tissue like a death knell – but no one came, of course, and I would scuttle away, fearful of catching the eye of a neighbour or mourner. There were numbers of the latter at any given time – often teenagers standing in pairs or clusters, the girls weeping openly – and there were bouquets of flowers in various states of decomposition. Little messages I couldn’t bear to stop to read, and even drawings, had been tied to the railings with ribbon.

  Somehow, partly by lingering inside my front door and listening like an animal for signs of life on the other side of the wall, I avoided running into Sarah and Marcus. I did see Nina once. We were walking towards each other in the street and I scurried to the kerb well in advance of any potential collision, my guilty eyes kept low. Of course a guiltless person would have stopped the best friend of the dead woman to offer her heartfelt condolences, but I was not guiltless; I was the offender who had repeated ‘it’s every woman for herself’ back to the victim, no longer sure whether I had meant it in sincerity or mockery. It was a horrible coincidence that when Nina and I passed we were in easy sight of the Woodhalls’ house, all those wilting flowers at the railings. She did not speak to me, but if she had, she would have said, ‘This is your fault. I don’t care what the coroner decides, you are the cause of death.’

  The cause of three deaths. The magnitude of that defeated me: I could not absorb it. Two boys, one only eighteen, the other still at school and young enough for his mother to have begged for his father to stay to parent him to adulthood. Sons and heirs, pride and joy, apples of eyes, they must have been those things to Arthur and yet I knew so little about them, having either suppressed my interest or not considered it necessary to have any in the first place. I knew from photographs I’d seen in the house that they’d taken after their mother physically, both fair-haired and blue-eyed; I knew that Alex had been the adventurer, Hugo more introspective, both equally high-achieving academically and headed for universities that would make Arthur and Sylvie proud. But what else? Were they popular? Did they have girlfriends? Had they been virgins? What were their hobbies and passions? Were they alert before they died or dozing, having been awoken against their will and herded into the car in what was supposed to be only their holiday cut short, not their lives? How many friends and classmates and teachers wept for them, for the monstrous robbery of youth and potential? Many more, I supposed, than the ones I’d seen outside the house. Their school would be in mourning, the summers of a hundred or more families darkened by the horror of this. When Hugo’s class returned for the new term, it would be all anyone talked of; they’d offer the students counselling, beseech them to stop thinking, as every last one of them surely had, That could have been me. And Alexander’s class, off to university or gap-year travels. What a bitter send-off they would endure, were they to continue with their plans at all.

  My fault: at least some of it and maybe all of it.

  Other than Gwen at the coroner’s office, only one person made contact regarding the Woodhalls: Toby texted me some weeks after the event to say that the family appreciated my help on the morning of the accident and that Arthur was coping as well as could be expected. Frustrated by the stock phrases and by the absence of any coded personal message, I rang the number back, but when connected to the voicemail service I could not think how to express myself.

  Tell him I love him and miss him. Tell him he’s my whole life. Tell him I’m sorry for what I said to her. I wish I’d said…

  No, better to say nothing.

  Though Arthur’s absolute silence during this period could be interpreted only as absolute rejection, I persisted with my phone calls to his office, and at last the available information altered: he had returned to work at St Barnabas’. I found out which day he was next seeing patients and, discovering that the hours overlapped with my lunch break, I went to the clinic myself.

  It surprised me that any Tom, Dick or Harry was free to walk straight into the Ophthalmology Department without a security check, though I suppose the assumption was that no one in his right mind would want to unless they had an appointment, for it was bedlam down there in the basement unit. Every wall of the corridors leading from the stairs and lift to the reception desk was lined with plastic seats, every seat taken. The surplus patients stood or squatted, while new arrivals continued to press towards a desk staffed by a single figure acting as both receptionist and porter; with every second enquiry, he would leave his station to help or accompany an elderly, half-blind arrival to safety, having to negotiate each time for a seat already occupied. The only other authority figure I could see was an interpreter for an Asian woman, who spoke rapidly and anxiously in a language I could not identify. The clinic was plainly oversubscribed; it reminded me of bus stations in developing countries or a logjam at airport immigration lines when too many flights have touched down at once.

  As I waited in the queue for reception I became aware of various medical staff emerging every so often from an adjoining corridor, calling out patient names and shepherding the chosen ones off into examination rooms. Arthur was not among those who appeared, but twice I left the queue to collar one of them, hoping to discover which room he was in and present myself unannounced. Both times I missed my chance, the patient already having begun to bombard the staff member with questions, and I was waved back to the same queue I’d left.

  After twenty minutes, I reached the desk. ‘I don’t have an appointment,’ I told the receptionist. ‘I’m here to speak to Arthur Woodhall, the consultant.’

  ‘He told you to come without an appointment? He doesn’t normally do that. What’s your name?’

  ‘Emily Marr, but no, he isn’t expecting me. I just need you to tell him I’m here – or if you could show me which room he’s in, I could —’

  He cut me off. ‘I can tell you now that if you haven’t got an appointment he won’t be able to see you today. Yesterday’s clinic had to be cancelled and we’re running that alongside today’s post-op – you can see how crazy it is.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ I tried to smile. I
’d forgotten by then that I used to be considered very pretty, that I’d once caught male eyes routinely and been able to extract myself from trouble on that basis alone. ‘I’m a good friend of his. He’ll know my name. I don’t mind waiting right till the end, when everyone’s been seen. Shall I just do that?’

  But I no longer had the power to charm. The receptionist looked only wary and irritated by my suggestion. ‘I’ll have to check his schedule with his team upstairs…’

  ‘No, please. Could you just tell him I’m here? Please.’

  At last he made the call, not connecting directly to Arthur, I gathered, but at least passing on my name and request to a member of his office staff. ‘Yep, I’ll hold.’ I waited to the side of the desk, watching him check in patients one-handed, hardly able to contain myself when his phone exchange resumed: could this be it, finally? Would I be summoned to the phone and permitted to hear Arthur’s voice, or directed along that overcrowded corridor to the room that held him? He could be twenty feet from me, right this minute! The yearning to be physically close to him was so strong I felt on the verge of levitation as I stood there on the tips of my toes, ready to hasten wherever I was summoned.