by Unknown
She drove in circles, up and down the narrow, low-ceilinged concrete vault, eventually coming to a ramp that pitched down sharply at a T-junction. EXIT LEFT. Terror reared up in her and she braked violently. A few feet in front of her the concrete floor vanished in an abruptly sheer drop into darkness, like the surface of an underground lake. She gripped the steering wheel and leaned forward, heart hammering at her ribcage. What she was looking at was the glassy surface of water that had flooded and filled the dip between two ramps. She glanced up. The shallow water was reflecting the angles of the concrete roof and had given the illusion of a drop. Reluctantly, she inched the car forwards, sitting high up in the seat, half expecting the lurch and fall into darkness.
Shaken, Katharine drove nervously, the world suddenly a fearful and unfamiliar place where disaster waited to ambush her at every turn. And now, in addition to the Bea-shaped void that obscured her vision, she was aware of a lumpen figure in yellow, herself in pigtails aged eleven, first in the queue to go out to play, turning her back on Bea sitting alone in the dinner hall, hands on her head before an uneaten plate of fish and beetroot. She checked the mirror and accelerated, an ugly sense of her own badness lurking at the back of her head. She pressed the central locking, checked her speed and relaxed into the leather embrace of the driving seat. Career, Children, House, John Lewis, Missing Sister, Mother, Hastings. She could handle this.
It was Monday morning. She had got up early, long before the children or Richard, and had driven to London to get things in order at the hospital before dashing into John Lewis for curtains, carpets, sofas, wardrobes for their new house. Now she was en route to Hastings, where she would find Bea before returning to Cambridge late that night. The drive to Hastings could be done in just over two hours if she pushed it and was lucky with the traffic. At least it could last time she went, which was a few years ago, because, really, all four of them traipsing down to Hastings for the day was rather impractical when it came down to it. It worked much better when her mother came up and stayed with them. And anyway, Bea visited once a month because Bea had the time.
Katharine found herself a few feet from the bumper of a Renault that didn’t understand that the middle lane was not for cruising at sixty-five; it was for overtaking. She flashed her lights and pulled out, glaring at the driver dithering at the wheel of the other car. The Salvation Army woman was full of statistics. She said that the average age of persons sought was forty-eight years; that the department’s success rate was eighty-five per cent, which was about ten reunions a day; and that a record reunion took place in 1999 between sisters who had not seen each other for eighty-three years. Katharine jiggled her shoulders and tried to relax her jaw. How people could be as careless as that was beyond her, frankly, but still, these numbers reassured her. It was going to be all right. The Salvation Army were on the case and prayers were being said for Bea. Yes, prayers! Bea would probably laugh at that and it had made Katharine feel a bit odd, but Richard was all for it. It always amused her to be reminded of Richard’s faith. She thought of it in the same way as his school motto that he was so fond of quoting. Arcane and completely irrelevant. Still, they had quite liked Major Whatever-her-name-was. At least she had until they got up to leave, when the question of a fee for the Family Tracing Service was mentioned and then the suggestion about donations. It was absurd in her opinion, although of course Richard went overboard and wrote out a cheque, then a monthly tax-free pledge for God knows how much. And she hadn’t liked the last thing the Major had said to her as they left. ‘Please remember,’ she said, ‘that although we have an eighty-five per cent success rate, it’s not always a happy ending.’ Patronising, thought Katharine. That was the trouble with religion.
And Missing People, the other organisation devoted to the thousands of the lost, were on the case too. From what she could tell from their website and from Hazel, the woman she had spoken to on the phone, they seemed to have all kinds of contacts and means of obtaining information that even the police didn’t have. The police, it turned out, could not even get information from a GP if the GP chose not to give it. But Hazel was very warm and reassuring. In all likelihood Bea had simply done a runner, would at some point pitch up in Hastings, and after a chat and a cup of tea and a bit of chivvying along would come back to Cambridge and they could all get on with their lives happily as before.
Katharine imagined a sisterly reunion as she drove. The door would be opened by her mother, a look of mild surprise on her face. In the kitchen, she would see the expanse of sea through the window, moiled and grey, the photos on the windowledge: her parents’ wedding, her own wedding to Richard, and a faded photo of the two of them with their father on the cliffs at Fairlight, the wind snatching at their hair and skirts. And round the corner, sitting at the scratched Formica table, would be Bea, her hand in her hair, that rueful look on her face. The kitchen would smell of pie and tea and she would go over and hug her and say, ‘Oh, Bea.’ No need for questions or explanations.
The next road sign that hurtled past informed her that the turnoff to the A21, the Hastings road, was in a hundred metres. She checked her rearview mirror and knew she couldn’t make it, and sailed on in the fast lane of the M25 headed west.
Damn! A whole new section of motorway appeared to have been built since she last drove down here.
House
‘JUST IN case.’
That’s why Richard was working at home for the day. He hadn’t pressed Katharine with just in case what exactly. Presumably she had some idea that Bea might turn up or call or that the police might come by. She felt that the house should be occupied while she looked for her sister in Hastings. And so Richard had spent the day working from home, which he never normally did, and had found the experience something of a challenge. With no meetings, no lunches, no Claudia to pass on messages, calls, appointments and reminders, his day was alarmingly formless. He kept checking his phone for calls and emails but there were none. He had printed out hundreds of pages of documentation but had not been able to concentrate sufficiently to make head or tail of them. He wandered for the hundredth time into the kitchen and gazed out into the garden, which was looking a little neglected what with one thing and another. The children’s climbing frame, unused for years now, looked ugly and the grass beneath the apple trees was littered with rotting fruit. The cleaner was vacuuming upstairs somewhere and half their belongings had been packed into boxes. He thought wistfully of the marble and glass of his office in Canary Wharf, the view of the Thames from his window; he thought of his desk of chrome and leather, which must look abandoned like the bridge of a ship. Several times during the day he rang Claudia, his secretary.
‘Richard here.’
‘Oh, good morning, Richard. Any news?’
‘No, I’m just manning the phone, so to speak, at this end.’
‘Of course.’
‘Everything going to plan?’
‘Oh absolutely. I’m at your desk now as a matter of fact. I’ve rescheduled Tokyo and Louise is meeting with Bonn.’
‘Right. Shouldn’t we cancel and set up another?’
‘We did suggest but they have Mergers and Acquisitions all next week and wish to put things in place well ahead of time.’
‘Accounts have done their homework, I presume?’
‘Oh yes, I have it all here. They’ve done an excellent job as usual.’
‘And will Legal be present?’
‘Yes, Legal, Accounts and Marketing will be there.’
‘Oh, good. Good.’
There was a pause.
‘Shall I call you after the meeting, Richard?’
‘Yes, yes, do. Unless you think we should set up a conference call.’
‘We could do that, but . . .’
‘Too late to synchronise all the others, I suppose.’
‘A little late, yes, but if you would like . . .’
‘No, no, no, I’m sure it’ll be fine.’
‘Don’t worry. It will.’
>
There was another pause in which Richard could just hear the drone of a helicopter approaching and the ping of the lift that opened directly on to Claudia’s office. He heard her clear her throat.
‘Was there anything else, Richard?’
‘Er, no, I don’t think so.’
‘Well, I’d better get off to the fourteenth floor then.’
‘Oh, there was one thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘Who’s chairing the meeting?’
He heard the bong of her computer saving a document.
‘I’m chairing and Louise is doing the presentation.’
‘Oh. Right. Yes. Excellent.’ The cat came and sat at his feet and stared up at him. What in heaven’s name could it want? ‘Get back to me when you can.’
The cat followed him around and mewed continuously. Richard looked at the list of things Katharine had left for him to do. There was nothing about the cat. He trawled the various missing persons internet sites and he phoned Jim and Pete at the police station. He wandered round the house, half of which was packed up in boxes and the other half of which was on hold until the business with Bea was sorted out. He checked with their solicitors that the vendors in Chiswick hadn’t taken fright at the delay. He looked out at the garden and tried to remember why they were uprooting themselves. He liked coming home to this place. He liked the commute, the Docklands Light Railway to King’s Cross, the train to Cambridge, the taxi home. It barely took an hour and it was like a series of debriefings or airlocks that allowed him to reacclimatise on re-entry to domestic life.
He had got in a muddle in the morning about school uniform as it was the first time he had been in the house on a school day when the children left. Usually he was out by six thirty and the house was still sleeping. He had some memory that Laura was supposed to wear a tie, but this she denied. He was also not convinced that the odd way she had rolled the waistband of her skirt over and over so that it sat on her hip bones and ended barely below her bottom, nor the way she had tied her shirt in a knot above her navel was adhering strictly to school rules, but Laura told him it was fine, and anyway his daughter was a mystery to him; that he was prepared to admit to anyone who cared to ask. It’s just a stage, Katharine kept saying, but there were no stages in his own childhood for himself or his siblings that involved rudeness and the vast consumption of chocolate and American television shows. He thanked the Lord that Adrian was a gentle giant, a gentle genius by all accounts. There had been times, when the boy was little and slept with that rare stillness peculiar to children, when he entertained the extraordinary notion that in Adrian resided the spirit of Sophie.
Richard tripped on something in the darkened hallway and looked down to see Laura’s coat. She must have left it behind in the rush to leave the house. He picked it up and hung it neatly on a peg by the front door. When she had finally left for school that morning it was half an hour after Adrian because she was waiting for Chanel to knock. Even then he had to call her back because she had forgotten her school bag and her lunch, which Katharine had made for her the night before. He had stuffed the lunchbox in the bag and dashed down the road after them, calling Laura’s name and waving the bag above his head like a rugby ball. Laura had screamed back at him from the other side of the road: ‘I don’t need it, Dad! I don’t need it on a Monday!’
When he went back inside and looked properly in her school bag he found it was completely empty. Katharine was right. Laura probably did need to attend a school where the Protestant work ethic was not a cause for embarrassment. Adrian, bless him, probably needed to attend a university. Yes, Richard’s and Katharine’s genes had merged to form a powerful conglomerate in Adrian’s DNA but something had gone awry where Laura was concerned. He unwrapped Laura’s lunch and began to eat the evidence. Hummus and cucumber. Not bad. Laura perhaps had received a little too much of whatever Bea had in her chromosomes, a lack of application and cerebral fission, which, when combined with Katharine’s fierce determination, made for a volatile mix. He started on the rice cakes with honey, which were dry but not unpleasant. Still, he thought, giving the cat a series of encouraging small kicks away from his clean trousers, no doubt she would turn out all right in the end. He swallowed hard. Although endings, as he knew well enough, were not necessarily something to be hoped for, much less the ever or the after that came with them.
Flat
TAMARISK STEPS in Hastings was steeper and narrower than Katharine remembered, and she had to get her breath back at the top before she knocked on her mother’s door. When there was no answer, she let herself in with her key. She found Margaret standing in the hallway dressed in a fluffy lemon dressing gown and a pair of gold slippers. She looked smaller than the last time Katharine had seen her. The flat smelled of bleach.
‘Hello, Mum.’
‘Katharine?’
Katharine gave her a kiss and looked in the sitting room. The flat was tiny. How could a person survive in such a confined space?
Margaret felt annoyed. She so wished the children would phone before they turned up. Now here she was, looking a fright, no doubt, and they’d be fussing and telling her she had to decide about things. She knew perfectly well what they thought. They thought she was losing her marbles. Well the fact was, she was merely giving them away. She had far too many in the first place. It was a blessed relief to be rid of some of them.
‘This is a surprise.’
Katharine ignored the froideur and went into the kitchen to make tea.
‘I tried to ring you,’ she said. ‘Is there something wrong with the phone?’
Margaret shuffled back down the hall and closed her bedroom door. She didn’t want anyone prying in there. So what did this one want now? Something about the birthday, probably.
‘Is it today?’ Margaret said, standing at the kitchen table.
‘Is what today?’
Oh here we go, round and round. Why couldn’t people just be straight with her? She was so terribly tired of all this nonsense.
‘My birthday.’
She had written it down somewhere because Bea had told her to. Where exactly she had written it escaped her right now. Katharine was washing two cups under the tap. She kept rubbing round and round them with the spongy thing, peering inside and then back under the blessed tap again. If her birthday party was today then that was just too bad. She would have to give it a miss. She wasn’t going to any party without a visit to the hairdresser.
‘But we cancelled your birthday, Mum. You asked us to. Just till we find Bea. I’ve come down in case she’s popped in to see you.’
‘Well of course she did. She was here yesterday . . . was it yesterday? No, it was last week sometime. She was with her coloured friend.’
Katharine put down the cups.
‘Thank God. Oh, thank God.’ She cursed herself for not coming earlier.
It was all going to be all right. They would celebrate with a wonderful party, all of them, down here. Why not? Wanda could help. Perhaps Wanda and her friend could even come and decorate the flat. They’d make it a party to remember. And they would sort out some sort of arrangement to look after Mum. Perhaps Wanda might like a different sort of job, here in Hastings.
Her mother sat folding and unfolding a paper napkin. ‘Oh, she went again.’
Margaret watched her daughter opening and shutting cupboards. Always a fusspot, this one. Never satisfied. To be honest, it was easier when Bea came to visit, not Katharine. And today, well, it wasn’t the most convenient of times. There was so much to do. Sorting and clearing. And always the dust.
Katharine gave up making the tea and smiled. Through the window, beyond the wooden roofs of the net sheds, the sea shone and glittered and she felt happiness soar inside her. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt this way. Bea was here somewhere and Richard was right – she had found herself someone else or she was making a fresh start. A gull dropped from nowhere inches from the window, dangling a chip in its beak.
&
nbsp; Margaret said, ‘Are you staying long?’
Katharine spoke carefully; she kept her voice slow and level, kept a pleasant smile on her face. ‘Mum, Bea’s missing, you know that, don’t you? She’s left home as far as we can tell. I just need to know she’s all right and perhaps leave a message for her.’
She would make her mother something to eat and then go out and . . . She looked in the cupboard next to the cooker. Nothing but tinned pies and cans of peas. It didn’t smell too good in there. And were those mouse droppings? Bea was right. They couldn’t leave their mother living alone any longer. Something would have to be done.
‘She’s shot up, hasn’t she?’
‘What?’
‘She’s taller than me now.’ This was the trouble with visitors. They always said they’d be no trouble, but as soon as they stepped through the door they wanted feeding and watering morning, noon and night, whereas left to her own devices she could go weeks without going to the shop. Well she wasn’t going out in this wind.
‘Mum, Bea’s been taller than you since she was fourteen.’
‘Not Bea, the other one. It’s her daughter I’m talking about.’
Katharine’s scalp prickled. ‘Laura?’ she said.
‘Laura, that’s the one.’
‘Laura’s my daughter, Mum.’
Margaret swept this detail to one side with a vague wave of her hand. She shrugged. She would like a lie-down now.
‘Are you telling me Laura was here yesterday?’ Katharine’s mind slalomed through yesterday’s events. She couldn’t recall Laura in any of them. ‘With Bea?’
‘You see, there aren’t any coloureds in Hastings.’ What was she going on about Bea for?