Missing Rose

by Linda Newbery

  ‘Guessed what? Is it Elaine?’

  ‘Elaine? No.’ He was laughing at her, not unkindly; maybe he was laughing at himself. ‘You’ve got no idea, have you?’

  Sandy shook her head. It was like this at school, when remarks went to and fro over her head like taller people passing at netball, arcing the ball over her head while she grappled hopelessly at the air. Roland took some while choosing another record; when it started she recognized his favourite Rolling Stones single, Paint It Black, with its troubled, urgent rhythm.

  ‘Come on, then,’ she tried. ‘You’ve got to tell me now.’

  ‘All right then. But you might not like it.’ He looked at her. ‘And for God’s sake don’t tell Mum and Dad. Promise?’

  ‘OK, but why’s it such a big secret?’

  Roland gave his inward, private smile. ‘Because – it isn’t a she.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘What I said. It isn’t a girl. It’s Phil.’

  ‘What is? I don’t get it.’ She sat up, cross-legged. ‘It’s Phil who writes the songs? But I know he doesn’t. I’ve heard you making them up.’

  ‘Oh, Sand, you’re so naïve! Listen. There isn’t a girl, real or imaginary. I write the songs. About Phil. And he sings them back to me. Do I have to spell it out?’

  ‘You mean you— Oh, but that’s—’ Sandy bent forward to clasp her knees, head reeling; that’s disgusting was what she’d been about to say. ‘D’you mean you – you and him …’

  ‘No. Whatever you’re thinking, the answer’s no.’ Roland went back to the sofa and flopped down on his back, gazing at the ceiling. ‘Some things I keep to myself.’

  ‘So it’s just the songs? You haven’t told him? Why not?’

  Roland’s mouth twisted into a smile. ‘Why d’you think? I don’t want to spoil it. He’d run a mile.’

  ‘I don’t blame him. It’s perverted.’

  ‘It isn’t, Sand. It’s the most beautiful thing there is. I thought you might try to understand.’

  ‘I am trying. It’s a bit much to take in.’

  She wasn’t sure she believed him; was he making this up, to tease her? In a way, yes, of course it was obvious that he and Phil were close, in the way footballers were, or the Beatles, or the boys that pushed and armlocked each other at the bus stop, ignoring everyone else – it didn’t have to mean they were like that. It was only recently that Sandy had become aware of homosexuality, through jokes passed around at school; jokes she hadn’t understood. ‘Did you hear about the two Irish queers?’ That was one of Elaine’s, relayed in the form room one rainy break time. ‘John Fitzpatrick and Patrick Fitzjohn.’ A beat of silence, then shrieks of laughter from the other girls, hands clapped to mouths: ‘Elaine, you’re awful!’ Nonplussed, Sandy had looked from one to the other, concealing panic beneath a hesitant smile. ‘You don’t get it, do you, Sandy?’ mocked Susan Morgan. ‘Someone explain.’ Someone did, with gestures; aghast, Sandy tried to pretend she’d known all along, but convinced no one. ‘She’s so naïve,’ she heard Susan hissing to Elaine, as they took their maths books out of their desks. Now Roland had called her that as well. It seemed to be the worst kind of condemnation.

  ‘But it’s against the law. You could go to prison.’ She knew that much, from Elaine.

  ‘That’s because the law’s stupid. How can it be against the law to love someone?’

  Her own brother was telling her he was one of them, and not ashamed, and calling it beautiful, and talking about love, not the sexual things people joked about. At least, if they saw her now, Susan and the others would have to credit her with sophistication: drinking vodka and discussing such matters with her rock musician brother. What did they know, after all? All their posing was nothing but talk.

  ‘Are you sure, though? That you’re – you know – like that?’ she ventured. ‘And sure Phil isn’t?’ Maybe she could get used to the idea; if Phil were like Roland he’d be more unobtainable than ever, but she would never need to be jealous of another girl.

  Roland gave a humourless laugh. The vodka was nearly finished now; he drank straight from the bottle, upending it for the last drops. ‘Yes, and yes, I am sure. It’s girls with Phil. He’s the one who fancies your friend Elaine, if you want to know.’

  Sandy closed her eyes, feeling this as a physical pain in her chest; it was only right that she should share Roland’s hurt. Hazily she thought of it as a diagram, like the vectors they did in maths at school, with angles and arrows: I love Phil, and Roland loves Phil as well, but Phil fancies Elaine, and Elaine loves Roland. No one loves me. It lacked symmetry; it toppled under its own weight. In her mind, these diagonals made a rickety kite; tweak any corner and it would twist out of shape.

  11

  All through Tuesday morning Anna found it hard to concentrate on work. She kept glancing at her watch, as jittery as someone anticipating a first date.

  What could Jamie Spellman tell her that she didn’t already know, or that he hadn’t told the police twenty years ago? This would be nothing but a pointless ordeal. The obstinate part of her argued that there must be something Jamie could give her, something of significance only to herself.

  At least ten minutes earlier than necessary, she was in the cloakroom, brushing her hair, checking her appearance in the mirror. She had dressed plainly, distancing herself as far as possible from the gauche teenager of their last meeting: hair swept up and held in a comb, her black suit, silver ear-studs. What change would Jamie see in her? But to follow that train of thought meant summoning memories that threatened her resolve.

  The pub was busy, a large male group clustered round the bar, all tables occupied, but as Anna entered and stood inside the door she saw Jamie looking her way, getting up from his seat at a corner table. Even though she’d seen his Facebook photos, she was surprised: he was older than she’d imagined, a grown man with the teenage Jamie’s quick glances. Far too old for Rose, she found herself thinking; a different generation.

  Threading her way towards him, Anna wondered about the etiquette for meeting someone under these circumstances. A kiss would be too familiar, a handshake too ridiculously formal. Jamie solved the problem by stepping forward, putting a hand on her arm and guiding her towards the seat he’d saved. ‘You made it,’ he said, a remark that needed no answer. ‘What can I get you?’

  Anna asked for a glass of house white, and busied herself with unwinding her scarf, taking off her coat and draping it over the chair-back. He returned with the drinks surprisingly quickly, given the press at the bar: Anna’s wine, and a second half of beer for himself to follow the unfinished pint already on the table. He sat forward, looking at her. In contrast to her studied formality, he was casually dressed in jeans and a collarless shirt with a white T-shirt showing at the open neck. His face was thinner than she remembered, lined around the eyes; short untidy hair and a stubbled jaw gave him a rakish appeal, especially when he smiled. Anna felt herself blushing, and was immediately angry with herself. There was friendliness in his glance, and sympathy, cutting straight through the aloofness she had tried to summon.

  ‘So. Rose. Still nothing.’ He was serious now, looking down at his clasped hands. ‘Awful. So you’ve no idea?’

  ‘We don’t know any more than we did then.’

  ‘All these years. You know, I used to think you looked a bit like her, but now I can’t see it at all.’

  Anna took this to mean that while Rose was beautiful, she was ordinary. ‘There’s no reason why we should look alike. Rose wasn’t – isn’t a blood relation.’

  ‘No, she was adopted, wasn’t she?’

  ‘You knew that? Did Rose tell you?’

  ‘Yes, she talked about it, but Mel told me first.’

  ‘Oh, of course. How is Melanie?’ Anna asked, glad to be sidetracked for a moment.

  ‘Yeah, she’s fine. Married, with a baby boy. She lives in Horsham now. You’re not in touch, then?’

  ‘No. It’s my fault, I expect. I’ve never
been good at keeping up with people.’

  ‘But something’s made you start looking for Rose again, after so long? Why now?’

  ‘Well … it’s like nothing’s really changed for twenty years. My parents too – they’re still in the same house. They’ll never be able to leave. My mother, at least. It’s like we’re all stuck. Waiting. Me especially, only I don’t know what for.’ It seemed an oddly intimate thing to be saying to someone she hardly knew. ‘Does that sound silly?’

  ‘No. No, it doesn’t.’ Jamie took a deep swig of beer. ‘Her real mother – presumably the police followed that up? Rose didn’t run away to be with her?’

  ‘No. That seemed a likely explanation at first – I mean, better than some of the other things that could have happened. But the police checked, and there’d been no contact. Rose said she didn’t want to meet her birth mother, didn’t even want to know who she was. There was no way she could know the mother’s name, let alone how to find her, without going through the adoption agency. She’d had her eighteenth birthday the March of that year, so she could have done it then. But she didn’t. The agency confirmed that there’d been no contact.’

  ‘So – why this? What did you think I could tell you that might be any use?’

  Anna shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. I just thought there might be something you’d remembered. Something she said, even hinted at. She must have told you things she didn’t tell anyone else.’

  Jamie looked doubtful, but said nothing. He drained his first glass and began on the second, almost absent-mindedly.

  ‘For instance – you stopped going out with her, before you both took your A-Levels, didn’t you?’ Anna prompted. ‘And you thought Rose had met someone else, but no one knew anything about that.’

  Jamie gave a one-sided smile. ‘She was the one who finished it. I wouldn’t have.’

  Anna remembered a morning in the kitchen, her mother saying something about Jamie, and Rose’s casual, ‘Oh, I’m not going out with him now,’ as if Jamie meant nothing to her at all.

  ‘Well, love, it’s sensible to concentrate on your A-Levels,’ was their father’s response. ‘You only get one chance.’

  It was Anna who had been dismayed; how could Rose? Anna had thought Jamie was a fixture. But Rose had refused to say any more; she sat eating cereal, looking so demure that Anna knew that this wasn’t her reason at all; doing well in her A-Levels had nothing to do with it.

  ‘If she didn’t actually tell you she’d met someone new, what made you think that?’ Anna asked, daunted by the impossibility of unravelling this at such a distance.

  ‘Gut feeling.’

  Anna thought back to all the questions, the police at the house, the sympathetic WPC, the gentle but persistent probing. Who were Rose’s friends? Her boyfriends? Of course they’d interviewed Jamie. Had she made any new friends recently? Who had she been seeing since the end of term? No one knew of Rose having another boyfriend in those last weeks. Chrissie would surely have known if she had.

  ‘Someone from school?’ Anna suggested. ‘Someone in the sixth form?’

  Jamie made a search me face. ‘She went all mysterious. Made like she had a secret she couldn’t tell me. She was like that – well, you’d know well enough. She loved drama.’

  ‘So what did she tell you?’

  ‘Nothing at all. It was like she was dangling something in front of me, then snatching it away.’

  ‘Who could he have been? Why would she keep it secret? Even her best friends didn’t know. Or – was it a he? You’re not thinking—’

  ‘No, no.’ Jamie smiled, ducking his head as if the joke was too private to be shared. ‘It was a he all right.’

  ‘How can you know?’ Anna asked sharply. ‘What did she tell you?’

  ‘Nothing. It was—’ He looked directly at her for a moment. ‘Something about her. She wanted me to think she’d moved on from schoolboys into a different league.’

  Anna had picked up a beer-mat, turning it in her fingers. The words jammed in her throat, but she had to ask. ‘There was an idea that Rose might have been pregnant – but was it true, what you said, that it couldn’t have been you, if she was?’

  She was definitely blushing now; she could feel the hot rush to her face. Jamie must have noticed; he looked embarrassed too, angling himself slightly away from her.

  ‘Mm. I never got that far. God knows I tried hard enough, but it never happened. I’ll tell you one thing, though. I think she was sleeping with him.’

  ‘What makes you say that? She can’t have told you?’

  Jamie took another swallow of beer. ‘No. But the last time I saw her, a couple of weeks after we’d left school, there was something different about her. A sort of pride, a sort of – awareness. It was like she was flaunting it, wanted me to know. It’s nothing I could prove. A feeling, that’s all. That’s why it’s no real help. But I’m not making it up. At that age – I don’t know about you, but I had antennae for that sort of thing. Knowing when someone wanted to put me down. And she was putting me down, making like she wanted to spare my feelings.’

  ‘But this was after you’d stopped seeing her? The split happened earlier, didn’t it – before the exams?’

  ‘Mm. She came round to my house, to dump me, basically. We were in my bedroom. We used to go up there a lot – listen to music, do homework, sometimes, or just lie on my bed, and a couple of times in it, but she’d go so far and no further. That time, she sat on the end of the bed, facing me – God, I remember this so well – and she wouldn’t let me touch her. She told me it was over. She didn’t want to go out with me any more.’

  ‘And that was it?’

  ‘Yes. I tried to change her mind – to tell you the truth, I cried. I was completely gutted. It was the first time for me – first love, and now the first time I’d been dumped. It hit me incredibly hard – things do, at that age. My world had caved in. D’you know what I mean?’

  Anna nodded, thinking of the pear tree, the absence of Rose; the dread-filled days that followed. ‘So you told the police all this?’

  ‘Well, some,’ said Jamie, putting down his glass, ‘and I won’t forget that, either. I don’t know if I was chief suspect, but I certainly felt like it.’

  Could Jamie have invented the new boyfriend, as a way of diverting attention from himself? But Anna rejected this. She believed what he’d said; besides, why agree to meet, if he had something to hide? He might have had reasons for obscuring the truth then, but not now.

  ‘But you must have kept seeing her at school,’ she said. ‘All through the exams.’

  ‘Yes, and it was a wonder I managed to do anything at all. I remember in the art room, our life-drawing exam, the model. I kept looking at Rose, but she never even glanced at me. There was a leavers’ ball, but I didn’t go to that. Rose and I bumped into each other in town once, and had a couple of drinks in the pub. We’d both applied for art foundation at Ravensbourne, so we’d be seeing a lot of each other, at least I thought so. But that was the last time. I tried to talk her round. Told her I still loved her. See, I can say these things now. It hurt like hell at the time.’

  ‘And what did she say?’

  Jamie made a wry face. ‘She laughed.’

  ‘Laughed?’

  ‘I don’t mean nastily. In a sort of … older sister way. Like she’d grown out of me. Said she’d always like me as a friend, but no more.’

  ‘Always,’ Anna repeated.

  Jamie looked at her. ‘I know. There hasn’t been any always, has there? It must have been a huge thing to get over, losing your sister.’

  ‘Yes, it—’

  There was sympathy in his gaze, and a warmth of understanding. Anna found herself thinking wildly: we could go off somewhere, find a hotel. We could console each other for Rose; forget Martin, forget Jamie’s wife and kids. It would be different, now. We both know so much more. She looked down at his hands, and imagined them unfastening her clothes. A rush of des
ire tingled through her.

  Jamie put down his empty glass. ‘You live with a partner, you said?’

  It felt like a rejection. Get a grip, for God’s sake. She composed her face, and told him a bit about Martin, the flat, her new job, making it all sound happy and permanent; in return she asked about his family, his work. Time was running out; they both needed to get back to their offices.

  ‘I don’t know if I’ve said anything the slightest bit useful.’ Jamie shrugged himself into the long coat she’d seen in the Facebook picture, turning up the collar.

  ‘I don’t know either. But thank you.’

  ‘Good luck. I hope you find what you’re looking for.’

  It was bitterly cold outside, sleety rain starting to fall. Anna wrapped her scarlet scarf around her neck and pulled out her umbrella. They stood on the pavement, about to go their different ways. Last time they parted, she had yelled at him to fuck off.

  ‘When you cried,’ Anna said on an impulse, ‘how did she react?’

  ‘Oh …’ Jamie gazed across the road, shaking his head slightly. ‘She was sympathetic, but – well – triumphant. That’s the only way I can put it.’ He looked at her with the self-deprecating smile that allied them as Rose’s victims. ‘You know how to get in touch, if there’s anything else.’ He kissed her on the cheek: a perfectly ordinary, sociable kiss, but it sent guilt and shame flooding through her. It was Rose’s fault. Of course. Everything was Rose’s fault.

  ‘Thanks. It was nice to …’ she faltered.

  Jamie nodded. ‘Sure. Keep in touch. Why not send Mel a message? She’s on Facebook. She’d love to hear from you.’

  ‘Great. I’ll do that,’ Anna said, knowing she wouldn’t.

  As she walked towards the Underground, her feeling was of relief: she’d done it, got through, apart from that ridiculous moment of self-indulgence. If she met him again, it would be less difficult, now that their younger selves had been pushed out of sight. If this had been their first meeting, she’d have liked him instinctively for his honesty and directness. Before, it had been impossible to see him as he was, with Rose in the way. How did anyone survive being a teenager? Exposed, relentlessly, at school, to everyone’s scrutiny and speculation; opinions and tastes shaped round those of others, endlessly adapting to what was considered cool, or not; the air prickled with the electric tensions of admiring, envying, despising, rebuffing, jostling for supremacy. But Rose had survived, Anna was sure. Rose was a survivor. Didn’t everything about her say that?