Out of Mind

by Catherine Sampson

  “Why wouldn’t I?” she asked, as though she had never had a day of illness in her life. She likes to pretend that there is nothing wrong and never has been, which drives my mother up the wall.

  Tanya has a pretty blond look that is softer than Lorna’s dramatic beauty. She wears pinks to Lorna’s purples and big baggy sweaters in pastel colors that swamp a figure she thinks is too plump.

  My mother was to fly in the middle of the week, so we were having Sunday lunch together. Even Finney had submitted to the family mealtime, so momentous was the occasion. He turned up just as we were about to eat, cutting it close as he always does on such occasions. He was looking weary. He’d been at work on a case until the early hours, and he grumbled that there had been precious little progress to show for it.

  “We should go away, too,” he told me as he stepped inside. “Don’t you want a holiday?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, kissing him, not paying attention. Finney hadn’t taken a break in all the time I’d known him, but he liked to talk about holidays.

  My mother had produced an unconventional lunch, a strange vegetable risotto with a vast but wilting salad and a thick, unidentifiable soup. We all looked at it warily, and Tanya’s eldest, Chloë, grimaced and rolled her eyes.

  “I needed to use up the food in the house,” my mother explained. “I’ve been trying all week to wean myself off meat. I just can’t make myself like tofu.”

  Lorna had brought a bottle of champagne, which she poured into tumblers, the only glasses my mother had.

  “To welcome you back in one piece—just,” Lorna said, handing me one, “and launch Ma on her way to California.”

  My mother gave her oldest daughter a look that said—confirming what I suspected—that she would not be going to California at all if it were not for the fact that Lorna had made her too angry to stay. Lorna is the one who has embraced the return of my father after more than thirty years of absence. Embracing my father means offending my mother. Gilbert, my father, scuttled out when I was four years old, his pockets filled with a substantial amount of money that did not belong to him. For more than thirty years, we thought he was dead. Or at least Tanya and I did. It emerged that Lorna had kept in touch with him secretly all that time. When he’d turned up again nearly two years earlier, as if from a crack in the wall, he’d churned up a third of a century of trouble.

  My mother raised her glass, then replied to Lorna’s toast.

  “How sweet of you, Lorna, to wish me so happily on my way to the far ends of the earth. Would that you had done so with your other parent.”

  Lorna opened her mouth to respond but thought better of it. The rest of us raised our glasses with our mother and draink to her rapier slash of a toast. Finney fought to control an evil grin. There was silence as we shoveled the rice busily into our mouths.

  It was my mother who eventually broke the silence, asking after my friend Jane, who is hugely pregnant. Jane, I said, was terrified of childbirth.

  “Well, she’s a control freak,” Lorna commented. “Control freaks hate the unpredictability of childbirth.”

  “Takes one to know one,” Patrick muttered.

  For the rest of the afternoon, none of us mentioned Gilbert, my father. There are other taboos, too, of course. No one asks Lorna how Father Joe is, because she’s touchy about her relationship with the American priest I introduced her to. Although anyone who has seen them together knows that they are in love. No one asks Lorna how she’s feeling, because she likes to pretend she’s not sick anymore. No one asks Tanya or Patrick about work, because their jobs nursing at the hospital leave them exhausted, underpaid, and disillusioned. I had a sense, that afternoon, that sometimes my family’s hearth is as alien as any foreign country.

  I left the children at my mother’s house for the evening while I took Finney out. He had to be dragged.

  “Do we really have to go to the ballet?” He looked mournful.

  “It’s modern dance, not ballet,” I told him. “It may even be contemporary dance. I’m not sure I know the difference. You’ll enjoy it.”

  Half an hour later, seated in a small theater in Islington, I was still confused, but I thought the fact that the dancers were all but naked would at least cheer Finney. I’d seen the choreography reviewed as “witty,” although I wasn’t sure what the joke was. At the intermission, I elbowed Finney awake and came clean, pointing at Jacqui Darling’s name in the program.

  “You see?” I said. “Mike Darling’s daughter.”

  He squinted dozily down at the photographs in the program. “Which one is she?”

  “This one.” She was a small, girlish woman with pale tea-colored skin, long dark hair in rows of tight plaits, and a body like flexible steel. You could see the rest of them working as though it were heavy labor, all this jumping and pounding and twisting. But she had a natural grace, and she was flirtatious, too.

  Finney shook his head. “You made me sit through this because of her?”

  Around us, the audience was filtering back to their seats. A woman squeezing past looked with disgust at Finney.

  “I’m just curious,” I said in a low voice. “Justin told me she’s dancing with this company, and I’ve heard so much about her, so when I saw the advert . . . Her father was the last—”

  “For God’s sake, just stay out of it.” He was irritated, and he spoke more loudly than was strictly necessary. “Will you just for once, for me, stay home and look after your kids, and . . .”

  The lights dimmed, and the theater fell suddenly silent. His voice trailed off.

  “And look after you?” I finished for him, whispering in his ear.

  “I was going to say, And look after yourself,” he murmured back.

  “Oh,” I mouthed in the dark.

  I reached for his hand, and we sat there, our fingers entwined, and watched as the dancers trotted back onstage. I have never had a relationship with a man that lasted, from my father onward. I could see the attraction of waking up in the same bed as Finney every day and retiring to the same bed at night. But I wasn’t sure how these things were supposed to work. Did one live in the expectation of betrayal? Was every day a succession of compromise and concession? Finney once saved my life. When we talk about it, I pretend, of course, that I’d have survived without him, that he was simply incidental. But the fact is that without him I probably would be dead and my children orphans, which is a hefty debt, and one that I’m not sure how to repay. I know I can’t hand over my independence. Of course, I’m not sure that he requires it.

  Within moments I felt the grip of Finney’s hand relax, and I knew he was asleep.

  Chapter Seven

  I scoured the building for films that Melanie had made. It was a scattershot approach, no method to it. I raided the archives and came back with an armful of tapes. Dave frowned at me as I half dropped, half dumped, the mountain of videos on his desk.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m looking for the film that goes with the photograph,” I told him.

  He touched his hand to his goatee and scanned the labels on the video boxes: Kosovo, Macedonia, Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan.

  “For Christ’s sake, Robin, you’ll slit your wrists if you watch all that straight off.”

  “Want to help?”

  He shook his head.

  “Dave, no one else has done this.”

  “All right,” he said slowly, “I suppose I can run through some video for you. Off the top of my head, I’d say it looked like a desert environment, but a ditch is a ditch, there’s not much to go on.”

  “Can you think of anyone else who’d watch through a couple of hours of film for me? Like you said, there’s an awful lot of it.”

  “Some of Melanie’s friends might help out.”

  That afternoon, I sat in the editing suite. Three times there was a knock on the door, and three times it was a colleague of Melanie’s. Each time, I parceled out a video or two and a copy of the photo
graph that I’d run off on a color copier, and each time it was I who received thanks, as though each of them was grateful someone had given them something to do to help.

  “So you think this Mike Darling killed her?” one of Melanie’s colleagues said as he was about to leave.

  “I doubt it,” I replied, trying to sound cool, “but he may be able to help answer some questions about Melanie’s last hours.”

  After that exchange, I began to worry about how widely Dave had been advertising this exercise. It might be best, I thought, not to shout about the fact that I was pursuing the investigation of one man, Mike Darling, when I had no evidence that he was involved in Melanie’s disappearance. Except, of course, that he had lied to everyone, including the police.

  The next time there was a knock at the door, I reached for a videotape from my stack, ready to dole it out, but it was Maeve who walked in.

  “Robin . . .” Her tone was icy. I’d been ignoring her instructions, hoping she’d just let it go. She perched her bottom—or the bony surface that passed for her bottom—against the desk. She stretched out a manicured hand complete with red talons to pick up a videotape from the stack, glanced at its spine, then replaced it. I thought how terribly thin she had become. Her ankles looked as though they might snap just from the stress of standing. The lines across her forehead had become so deep that she looked permanently worried, and when she ran her hand anxiously through her helmet of black hair, I saw that the roots were almost white. I was suddenly concerned about her. Only illness or extreme stress, surely, could take this toll.

  “If you choose to ignore my warning, that is of course your business,” she said. Her tone was controlled but furious. “But please do me the courtesy of acknowledging that I work in your best interests. You are making me look ridiculous and it doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that I may actually have been trying to spare you from getting involved in something that you really don’t want to be involved in.”

  “I don’t,” I told her slowly, “know what you’re talking about.”

  “I mean that you are trying to help Melanie, if she can still be helped, but you might not be doing that.”

  My face must have betrayed my confusion.

  “Let me get this clear. You think I’m in some way harming Melanie?”

  “Well, I’m not the one who’s going to explain it to you. You’ve effectively gone over my head. And so . . .” And here her tone of voice said, “Now your father will deal with you,” but she actually said, “Now Ivor Collins wants to see you.”

  Maeve as good as frog-marched me to Collins’s office, although I told her I knew the way perfectly well. I had the feeling she was determined to be in on whatever conversation took place.

  “Robin, thank you for coming to talk to me again. I do appreciate it.” The long, narrow face peered up at me from his desk, the snowy hair and blue eyes striking me afresh.

  I nodded and glanced across at Maeve, who was leaning lightly against the wall. Indeed, she would have been incapable of leaning heavily.

  “Conversation, I always find, is worth more than a mountain of memos. Maeve”—he turned to my boss—“would you like to leave us on our own for a minute?”

  Without thinking, Maeve shook her head violently. “No,” she said, the hurt painfully obvious. “No. I think it would be useful for me to sit in.”

  A little smile crossed Collins’s face, and for once I felt like jumping to her defense. Maeve might as well have come to him to beg for a Band-Aid for her finger. She didn’t want to be left out, she wanted to be in the loop. The survival of her career depended on it.

  “That’s fine by me,” I said.

  “I think, Maeve,” Collins said slowly, with what was almost a hiss, “that it might be a good idea to find something else to do, don’t you?”

  Maeve flinched. “Of course.” And she fled like a will-o’-the-wisp through the door. She scarcely had to open it.

  “Maeve told me about the plans for your series on missing people,” Collins said the moment she was gone. “As you know, my respect for Maeve is very profound. And my respect for Melanie. Do you understand all this?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t.”

  Collins gazed at my face and smiled. “Very well,” he said, still speaking in a low, dry voice. “In stark terms, I’ve brought you here to tell you you’ll be pulling the Melanie Jacobs content from your series.”

  I stared at him, speechless. I had never been expressly forbidden to cover a story. He continued to speak.

  “There are simply elements of the story that you do not know, and that you will inevitably have to report if you do your job properly. To do so, in fact, would be to invade the privacy of Melanie Jacobs if she is still alive. Believe me, she would not thank you.”

  “So you’re appointing yourself her guardian.”

  “Yes.” He leaned back in his chair, and it swung with his weight. “Yes, I am. Within the Corporation, at least. I think that is legitimate. She is not here to defend herself. . . .”

  “Defend?”

  “You don’t think you’re attacking her,” he said, “but you are going at this like a bull in a china shop.”

  “What are we talking about?”

  “Would you choose to have all your personal and professional information shared if you went missing?”

  “Isn’t that what journalists do? Dig up things people don’t choose to make public?”

  Collins didn’t answer. Instead he got up from his seat and went and opened the door for me.

  “I’m sure I have your cooperation,” he said.

  I didn’t reply. I didn’t move. And when he saw the expression on my face, Collins changed his mind and pushed the door closed again.

  “You misunderstand,” he said softly, turning back toward me. “You simply won’t make the program. I’m speaking on behalf of Melanie Jacobs. Regard it as an instruction from beyond—”

  He broke off and for the first time in the conversation looked genuinely shaken.

  “Beyond what?”

  “From Melanie, that’s all I meant.”

  I returned to the office feeling physically sick. I didn’t want to hurt Melanie. But I thought it was also entirely possible that Collins had his own agenda. Without more information, I found it impossible to know what to do.

  Sal wasn’t in the office. The darkness of the afternoon had worked its way inside the room. I turned on the light and went over to gaze out the window. The Corporation offices look out over the shops and restaurants of London’s West End. It was pouring with midsummer rain again, but the streets were busy, and there weren’t many umbrellas in evidence. It had been such a wet summer that people seemed to have gotten used to it. They hardly even ran for cover anymore. It was as though the entire population had turned into mermaids and mermen, swimming through the streets as naturally as they walked. There were a couple of girls on the corner eating out of fast-food wrappers in the rain, apparently perfectly happy to eat chips that were slopping around in half a gallon of water. I felt as though I were looking through the glass of a goldfish bowl. I turned away. One surefire way to tell you’d gotten too mashed up in Corporation politics was when the outside world began to look like an alien universe.

  I sat at my desk and checked through my e-mail. Guiltily, I opened some of my dozens of missing persons e-mails. There was one from a woman whose husband left for work one morning and hadn’t been seen since. She and her sons were still reeling. There was a second e-mail from the police in Salford. Another of my missing people had been found dead, and his family wanted to withdraw from the documentary. I had already done several interviews with them, and I hoped they would change their minds, but I would understand if they did not.

  I would be kidding myself if I thought anyone had agreed to take part in the making of this series if it was not in the hopes that they would be reunited. There’s a whole world of television that specializes in fairy-tale endings, even if they have to pay the fa
iries. So it’s hard to explain to people that I can’t change anything. There are people who simply don’t want to be found, and there are people who walk away from everything for good reason. It’s not my job to decide who deserves to be reunited and who does not.

  I checked the Web site that was set up by Melanie’s mother. There was a photograph of Melanie, a full description and the details of when she had gone missing and from where. Nothing new.

  My mobile rang. It was Q, short for Quentin, the Corporation’s political editor and my friend Jane’s husband-to-be (Jane had resisted marriage until Quentin could prove that he was willing and able to father a child for her).

  “We’ve got a little girl,” he said breathlessly. “ She’s perfect. Six pounds, brown eyes, bald as a golf ball. Jane says you’re to come and see her now.”

  At St. Thomas, I found Jane and Quentin, both exhausted, and a little scrap of a girl wrapped in soft cotton and placed in a crib at the end of the bed.

  “She’s gorgeous,” I exclaimed. “So tiny.”

  “We’re calling her Rosemary. It’s just such a pretty name we couldn’t resist.”

  I had never heard Q talk like this. I handed Jane the package I’d stopped off to buy on the way.

  “She’s such a wee thing.” Jane was fretting. “I should have eaten more carbohydrates.”

  “She’s going to be fine,” Q comforted her. He was waving a champagne bottle at me and a paper cup. “It was an easy birth; it might have been harder if she was bigger.”

  “Q,” Jane said sharply, jabbing my gift in his direction, “doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and missed every prenatal class he signed up for, and should shut up if he knows what’s good for him.”

  It was a pleasure to see two professional giants shrunk to human size by one baby. Jane is the editor of Controversies, a late night news analysis program that she has managed to turn into an institution—no easy matter in an era of rolling twenty-four-hour news and insta-analysis on the Web. The program could have been named for her. She was born with the urge to stir, and she’s still doing it nearly forty years later, only now she’s getting paid for it. She looked pale against the pillows. Her dramatic black hair, which is usually sculpted and pinned, had fanned out around her head. Her lips were almost white and her Chinese skin opalescent. Jane grew up in Perthshire and has the accent to match, but her parents fled North China to escape Mao.