by Unknown
‘Where are the children?’
She stared at him. There were specks of dandruff on his shoulders. He shouldn’t wear dark shirts. ‘Wrong day apparently,’ she said.
Something had happened to her face.
‘I got some good news today,’ he said and fetched the letter from the floor by the couch. He handed it to her. ‘It appears that I have been invited . . .’
She looked past him towards the kitchen and shook her head again. ‘I can’t find my glasses.’
‘What?’
‘My glasses. They must have fallen out in Katharine’s car.’
She walked past him. The skin on her forehead was moving all by itself and her fingertips tingled. He followed her into the kitchen and Beethoven died away without conclusion.
‘They’re leaving for London this weekend.’
Frank held the letter limply in one hand. ‘Who?’
‘Katharine and the children. She just told me.’ Bea filled the kettle because she had better be good and have a cup of tea although what she really wanted was a double vodka and tonic. She sniffed the air and turned round to look at him. ‘Have you been drinking?’
‘They’re leaving?’
‘Yes.’
‘But that’s very sudden.’
‘We knew it was on the cards.’
She leant against the worktop and looked at her discarded shoes. Grass cuttings and mud smeared the soles and now all Tuesdays would be like this. Just the two of them in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil and batting questions to each other. Any minute now Frank would put on his but-that’s-ridiculous-face and say, ‘You mean they’re moving?’
‘You mean they’re moving?’
‘The children have places in schools starting Monday.’
She poured water into the pot and looked out into the garden. A squirrel bounced and hopped on the grass beneath the squirrel-proof bird table. She would plant no more bulbs this autumn or any other. Last year the bloody squirrels dug up every single one of them. A dozen daffodils, six lilies and ten hyacinths. She could murder the little bastards.
‘Monday? But they haven’t even sold their house.’
Bea decided not to offer him a cup of tea. She was always making him tea and finding it hours later, cold and untouched. He could pour his own. She put the pot on the kitchen table and unzipped her laptop.
‘Their house will sell in a day.’
She ought to make a start on some work. There was so much to do before the inspection tomorrow that she had no idea how she was going to get it all done.
‘But I haven’t said goodbye to Adrian and Laura.’
‘You’ll see them at Mum’s party.’
‘What?’
‘You did tell Lance, didn’t you?’
‘When?’
It would probably take hours. When she printed out the budget summaries before leaving the office, she noticed to her horror that the figures still didn’t tally. She had brought everything home, all the figures and reports going back three years.
‘In a couple of weeks.’
‘What, here? How many?’
‘Well we can’t use the front room because you’re in there, Frank.’
‘How many are we expecting?’
‘About ten.’
Frank looked at the kitchen table that sat four, then squinted at Bea, who had gone to the window again and was preoccupied by something in the garden. It was impossible to tell if she suspected anything. Not that anything had happened. Photography was just a way of earning a bit of money, but all the same . . .
Bea banged hard on the window with her hand. ‘Wanda’s helping,’ she said.
There was a silence as they watched the squirrel climb the squirrel-proof pole of the bird feeder and swing itself up to the seed on the platform like a trapeze artist.
‘You bastard,’ muttered Bea.
Late
THE NEXT morning, Precious, armed with an extra layer of purple lid shimmer and a thorough slicking of lipstick, got to work early. It was 7.15 and she knew she would find Bea already at her desk, looking terrible and preparing the final papers for the Spectres. There were no errant smokers by the wall, no Nertili mopping the floor, and on reception, Archie had been replaced by a woman in what appeared to be a prison officer’s uniform. Louise and Angela were in the lift looking pale and ragged and Jonathan had less of a leap in his stride when he made a run for it as the doors closed. ‘Good luck,’ they whispered to each other, avoiding eye contact, whenever someone got out. Up in Land Registry, Covenants and Deeds, Precious found Karen, bound from head to toe in black and perched on Bea’s chair. She peered at the computer screen and gave Precious a guilty look.
‘What you up to?’ said Precious.
‘I’m looking for the work Bea did yesterday.’
‘Leave that to Bea. You’ll bring up the wrong file. She took them home to check.’
‘But she’s not here.’
‘It’s half past seven in the morning, girl. Give the woman a chance.’
‘The thing is, Barry Charles wants everything on his desk by eight.’
‘Yes, we know. Bea will do that.’
‘He asked me to do it.’
‘You what?’ Precious delivered a withering look. She took a pair of glasses from her drawer, checked the arms and lenses, and laid them on Bea’s desk.
Karen swallowed. ‘He asked me to. Yesterday. He told me to bring the papers up to him and . . .’
‘And what?’
‘Make sure everything was in order.’ Karen looked wretched. ‘Sorry.’
‘Get off.’ Precious flicked her away from Bea’s chair. ‘Bea will be here any minute.’
At 8.15, Barry Charles’s PA rang and asked where the papers were. Precious said they would be with her shortly. She asked to speak to Bea. Precious told her Bea was away from her desk. She asked to speak to Karen. Precious told her Karen was also away from her desk at the moment. When Precious put the phone down, Karen’s lips had gone white.
‘Was that a good idea?’
Precious went to Bea’s computer, opened a file and began printing a document. ‘I tell you what would be a good idea.’
‘What?’
‘It would be a good idea if you fast-tracked your sorry arse down to the photocopier and ran off a copy of this.’
‘But you said it wasn’t the latest version.’
‘It’s an inspection. Nobody actually reads any of this stuff. Now go. Double-sided and stapled at the spine.’
At 9.17, Precious picked up the phone and dialled Bea’s home number. It rang for a long time and then switched to the answer machine. She put the phone down and dialled again. Karen’s face appeared over the dividing screen. She communicated silently with eyes, lips and hands. They’re coming. Precious had the phone to her ear and stared back at Karen, one finger up in the air.
‘Hello, it’s Precious Mtandwa here. Mtandwa. From Bea’s office. Hello? Is that Frank?’
Karen took a swift look behind her. Barry Charles was down the other end talking to Sunita and the Spectres. The whole office was subdued, everyone at their desks, no chat, no phones. She gripped the metal edge of the screen. Sparks flew and static crackled.
‘Ahh!’
‘Shh!’ said Precious. ‘Frank? What time did she leave?’
Karen needed the toilet urgently. She held her palm to her shrunken belly and watched as Precious listened to Frank. Precious’s body was wrapped in bottle green with a slice of black-spotted magenta silk that dived down to her capacious bosom. Karen thought that Precious was watermelon while she herself was celery. She half wondered what it might be like to eat for pleasure. Precious put her hand over the mouthpiece and said to Karen, ‘He doesn’t know when she left. He was asleep.’
‘Well we are a bit worried, yes. It’s so unlike Bea to be late and not call . . .’
Karen held her fingers to her lips and smelt the cigarette she’d smoked on the way in. She whispered, ‘What abo
ut her mobile?’
Precious shook her head. ‘Stolen,’ she mouthed.
‘Did she leave her laptop at home, Frank? Bags and things?’ She closed her eyes and tilted back her head while she waited for him to look.
‘He’s still in bed,’ she said.
Karen looked at her watch.
‘He’s a writer,’ Precious explained.
‘They’re going,’ said Karen, giving a little clap. ‘They’re going into Barry’s office!’
Barry’s face appeared over the screen. His forehead gleamed in the strip lighting.
‘Well?’
‘We can’t find Bea,’ Karen told him, sliding on to her chair and beginning to type.
He clenched his jaw and strained his neck up, away from the punishing grip of his collar. This was the problem. This was precisely the problem. Hang on to substandard staff who have been in the job too long and they always let you down. Beatrice Kemp should have been put out to grass years ago. His eyes wandered absent-mindedly over Karen’s body. He glanced over to his office, where the inspectors had retired and shut the door.
‘Has she phoned in sick?’
‘No, just nothing. There’s been no word from her at all.’
Precious put her hand up to quieten them. Frank was back on the line.
She listened and then said, ‘Of course it’s strange. She’s left for work with her laptop and folders and she hasn’t arrived in the office.’ She looked pointedly at Barry Charles. ‘Bea is never absent and she’s never late . . . Yes, why don’t you do that. And then call us back.’
Precious put the phone down and said, ‘Something’s not right.’ She told them what Frank had told her. That Bea was stressed about work last night, said she had a lot to do, and he thought he ought to give her some space.
Barry looked at his watch. Karen looked like she might cry.
‘And he didn’t take her a cup of tea this morning even though he knew it was the inspection.’
‘So what’s the plan?’ asked Barry.
‘He’s going to retrace her route to work and ring her mother and her sister. I think we should call the police.’
Barry nodded. The woman might well have fallen under a bus or jumped in the river or something. What with the Investors in People review coming up next month, it was best to do everything by the book.
‘The police?’ said Karen and hurried to the toilets.
FRANK PUT the phone down and scratched his head. He hummed a few bars of Beethoven’s Fugue in B Flat Major but found it was near impossible to imitate the demented flight of the violins at the start of that piece. From the kitchen window he scanned Bea’s small garden, its curve of patchy lawn, its unhappy shrubs and border plants. He saw that she had raked the first fall of leaves into a pile near the patio and that some potted flowers were lined up ready for planting. They had argued about that patio. He thought there was no sense in having one, seeing as the garden faced north-east, but she insisted and got some friend of Wanda’s to lay it for next to nothing. A spade stood up out of the soil where she’d been digging at the weekend.
He wandered out into the hall and looked up the staircase. The house felt unpleasantly still. Had she seemed herself when he last saw her? Well that did rather presume a notion of character that he didn’t subscribe to, especially where women were concerned and most particularly where Bea was concerned, for Bea was nothing if not inconsistent. How had she seemed last night? He could hardly tell Precious about the evening before. They had barely spoken until much later, when he was ready for bed. He went into the kitchen to find her packing away her laptop and he said something like ‘All right?’ He was trying to be nice, trying to offer an apology of sorts. He didn’t see her face and she didn’t answer at first, but then she gave a funny little laugh and said, ‘Not dead yet.’
He thought of the bedroom door shut at the top of the stairs. Fear coiled up inside him. He dug his fingers hard into the ache in his back and climbed the stairs, a sick excitement in his brain. He opened the bedroom door and looked in. The bed was neatly made, as always, the old patchwork quilt sewn by Bea as a teenager a jangle of tiny colours and angles like something broken and glued back together. There in the alcove was her egg cup collection, over fifty of them arranged on three shelves – china, metal, Bakelite, plastic, porcelain, glass. They stood huddled together: curvaceous, expectant, empty. Frank felt the bedroom was no place for egg cups. Along the floor and on two chairs were bags of clothes, shoe boxes, her hairdryer, the television, a basket of ironing, a tower of videos and DVDs, books and more bags of God knows what.
By her bed lay the books she’d been reading. ‘Has Bea read the script you’re writing?’ Adrian asked him the other day. Frank shook his head. ‘Bea is not a reader,’ he said, by which he meant that Bea was a woman reader. She read women. He bent to examine the titles, turning them towards him as he did so. P.D James, Stephen King, Marion Keyes, a biography of Holbein, and on the top, her spare reading glasses folded on its cover, Dickens’s Bleak House. The book was distended and swollen as if it had been in the bath. He picked it up and opened it where a card was tucked inside the pages towards the end. It was a photograph of a man with thick curling hair and a tanned face. The face was out of focus as if he were moving his head forward when the camera caught him. In the foreground, the back of a woman’s bronzed shoulders, short, pale curls shining in the light of the flash. The man’s eyes were laughing and his mouth was pursed, kissing the air.
A pulse started up at the corner of Frank’s eye and the pain in his lower back made him lower himself carefully on to the edge of the bed. The photograph was of them, taken with the Polaroid by the pianist on the Oriana. He looked down at the open page of Bleak House, surprised that Bea had apparently persevered with such a novel. It was years since he had read any Dickens and he remembered it as dense and deadly dull. He read the lines at the top of the page, a letter from Lady Dedlock: ‘I have done all I could do to be lost . . .’ That was the thing about Dickens – always resorting to letters, which was rather a lazy narrative device in Frank’s opinion. ‘I have nothing about me by which I can be recognised . . .’ And here again, very typically, was plot, plot, plot, as if lives really were lived with such—
He peered at the page. The words wobbled and seemed terribly small. He reached for Bea’s glasses and put them on. Something was exploding quietly inside his chest, small detonations occurred in his throat and shoulders and it was hard to see. He could not remember the last time he had wept.
Missing
FRANK OPENED the front door on to a heavy grey day and smelt the river. Oyster Row led down to the edge of Stourbridge Common, a stretch of rough pasture that ran with the river, north-east, away from the city and towards the fens: Fen Ditton, Fleem Dyke, Devil’s Ditch. There were no tourists or colleges in this direction; no pinnacles or minarets, no King’s, Christ’s, Trinity or Jesus; instead there were the remnants of an industrial age – the towering chimney of the old pumping station and the ironwork bridge that carried the railway line over the river.
He stopped at the end of the road and looked the other way, westwards, the way that Bea’s walk to work would have taken her, beneath the flyover, over Midsummer Common and on up into the city. A boy rode at him on a bike, cycling in lazy swerving loops, both hands in his pockets. Frank dithered in the middle of the road, stepped first one way, then the other so that they nearly collided. The boy swore and shouted, ‘What you think you doing, you wanker?’ and Frank thought, I am retracing her steps, a thought so preposterous that he nearly shouted it out loud after the boy. Really, wasn’t this a job for the police? He hadn’t had the courage to say that to Bea’s work colleague. There was something in her voice that gave him no option. She didn’t sound like the kind of woman you could say no to. So, while he didn’t really have the time himself to go wandering about Cambridge, he would have to go through the motions for appearance’s sake. After all, it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that the poli
ce were watching him. The end of Lupa would have to wait for the time being, despite the fact that he had planned on getting a good morning’s writing done and then sending off a few emails. There was his agent, Lancashire Arts . . . Frank stopped. He had reached the underpass beneath the flyover and he suddenly thought he should look for Bea’s car. Sometimes she drove to work if she was late and had a lot to carry. He looked around him at the parked cars, then behind him the way he had come. Damn it. If he was going to follow the car lead he would have to go back to the house and start again. He set off in the direction he had come, feeling really rather irritated with Bea, the police and the woman from her office. Quite how he had got himself into this situation he didn’t know. He had spent a lot of his time recently going backwards and forwards looking for her. Now that was an idea, he thought as his feet hit the path. It could be the solution he was looking for with Lupa. He would start the narrative again in the middle, after the wolf came out of the forest. We see Marsha’s face in the window, we see Peter’s shadow by the tree, we see . . . not the attack but cut to black then close-up of Marsha’s laughing face when she’s three years old and playing near the wood! Brilliant. Frank quickened his pace and found himself outside the house. Damn it, it was so hard to keep the creative mind focused on the here and now, and here was Bea’s car so that theory was out the window and now he had better get going again.
Back he went, hands dug deep into his coat pockets, down towards the river and off towards Midsummer Common. He kept his eyes on the ground for clues and occasionally he stopped and surveyed the common, the benches and the river, the trees and rough patches of bramble and weed. He noted the names of shuttered and silent houseboats: Chubasco, Awol, Kestrel. A couple of ducks and a swan hung about for bread and a solitary rower glided downstream, her oar strokes a whisper like the rhythm of a sleeper’s breath.
‘Robbers Beware. Police Operate in this Area.’ Frank paused at the sign on the tree. He tried to imagine the scenario: Bea walking this path, early this morning, laptop and bags weighing her down. He thought of her inert body on the gravel of Katharine’s drive last Christmas. He’d tried to get her to her feet but she was a dead weight so he left her there to sleep it off. He winced and looked around him. Unfortunate that Richard and Katharine had arrived home from the Seychelles very early the next morning and found her prostrate by the sundial. ‘I couldn’t lift her off the ground,’ he’d told them when they gave him the third degree. ‘You mean to say you left her outside? All night?’ Katharine was tossing that long face of hers, all chestnut and tanned, whinnying and baring those higgledy-piggledy teeth, while Richard in his crumpled linen suit stood watching as though hanging in the air, a heavy sadness around him. It didn’t look good, Frank understood that, and he was sorry that Adrian and Laura had seen their auntie in a heap in the dark. ‘What the hell kind of a husband are you, Frank?’ Katharine had jabbed her finger at him. Jab, jab. And then she’d given him a push on the chest with the flat of her hand, which she shouldn’t have done. No, she shouldn’t have done that. Violence bulleted up through him then, obliterating fear, hangover and shame. Richard had led her away; had told the children to go upstairs and check whether Bea needed anything.