Christmas on Primrose Hill

by Karen Swan

  They stood awkwardly at the door as she set the gardenia down on a desk – soil sprinkling onto the paperwork like cake crumbs – and opened a grey filing cabinet. The woman paused, staring at the ceiling as if for inspiration.

  ‘Sian . . .’ she muttered.

  ‘Watson,’ her father supplied.

  ‘Jones,’ the woman said at the same time. The woman immediately looked embarrassed at the conflict. She shrugged. ‘That’s the name she gave us.’

  ‘O-of course . . . I suppose she would,’ her father nodded, before taking to staring at his feet.

  Nettie took a step closer to him and rested her cheek against his arm, hoping to comfort him. The realization that her mother had taken a new surname was like a hard slap that left their ears ringing. Was it a manifest rejection of her old life? Of them? Or just an alias to hide behind and keep her new life a secret? After all, the police had checked her bank account almost immediately after she disappeared and it hadn’t been used since the day before she left. It would have been so easy to trace her if she’d kept her own name.

  ‘Right,’ the woman said, scribbling down an address on a piece of A4 paper. She held it out to Nettie’s father. ‘This is what she gave us. I can’t verify if it’s real or not.’

  ‘Thank you,’ her father replied, taking it with reverence, but he didn’t look at it. He was looking at the woman, conveying something of the significance of her actions.

  Hope was still alive, a flickering flame.

  ‘I hope you find her,’ she said more quietly as they turned to leave. ‘She kept herself to herself for the main part, but . . . well, she seemed like a nice lady.’

  They walked back through the narrow paths of the nursery, the shadows of the trees passing over their skin like spectres, the sheet of paper a sacrament in their hands.

  Not until they were standing on the pavement of Clifton Villas did they read its contents: 19a Shirland Road, W9.

  Nettie looked at him, aghast. ‘The same street as the shelter. I would have walked straight past there on Tuesday.’

  Her father nodded, smiling gently. ‘No doubt – but you weren’t looking for an address then – just a person who looked like your mum. You couldn’t check every flat in the city.’

  A taxi – its light on – turned into the road and her father shot out his hand, watching as it indicated and did a U-turn in the road to idle beside them.

  ‘Where to?’ the cabby asked.

  ‘Number 19a Shirland Road,’ her father said, opening the door for her to climb in.

  ‘But that’s just round the corner,’ the driver protested, calculating the paltry three-pound fare.

  ‘Exactly. We haven’t got a moment to lose.’

  Even with traffic, they were there in under two minutes, the cab pulling up outside a run of forbidding Victorian flats – four storeys high with dirty brickwork, a steep flight of steps up to the raised ground floor and another down to the basement flat, heavy painted lintels like bushy white eyebrows over the windows.

  She looked up at the building above as her father overpaid the driver for his trouble. The sash windows were tall and narrow, hung with limp nets or St George’s cross flags, the front doors an austere black.

  Nettie ran up the steps to read the names on the entry buzzer.

  She ran back down again, meeting her father at the halfway point.

  ‘It’s “B” to “F” up there. “A” must be the basement flat,’ she said, slightly breathless. Was this really it? The moment the past four years had been building towards?

  Her father took her hands on the steps, slowing her down, recognizing the haste in her actions. ‘Are you ready?’

  She swallowed. ‘Yes.’

  They stood like statues for a moment, poised between worlds – not up, not down, hovering somewhere in the middle. Then holding her hand in his, they walked down the steps to the pavement, turned and walked down to the basement. They stopped in front of another black door.

  Her father raised his hand to the door – she noticed how blanched he was – and knocked. The sound echoed inside and out, slowing time. Nettie looked around them. A wheelie bin stood in the corner by the steps, the black bags inside bulging beneath the lid; a slick of brown ice covering the small patch of bald concrete, weeds growing in the cracks of the walls, newspapers pasted to the lower halves of the windows . . .

  She turned back to the black door, her eyes scaling the building. But it had a roof, and walls. It was out of the wind, out of the rain, the snow, the ice. She flattened her palm to the cold bricks, grateful.

  The door opened.

  A slight woman with thin hair, blonde at the tips, dark brown at the roots, stared back at them. Her body was wiry but muscular, as though maybe she’d once been a gymnast, her skin sallow, with dark crescents hanging below her eyes.

  ‘Yes?’ She didn’t smile, suspicion hovering around her like a scent.

  ‘Is Sian here?’

  The woman looked between the two of them, taking in their clean, pressed clothes, shampooed hair, soled shoes, nourished complexions. ‘Who’s asking?’

  ‘Her husband and daughter.’

  The simplicity of the words was unnerving and the woman’s grip on the door tightened, her fingertips pressing to white.

  ‘No one of that name lives here.’

  Her father didn’t argue. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the photograph of him and his wife on their wedding day – she was looking up to him, her hands folded across his chest as he said something that made her laugh. The look in her eyes was one of absolute adoration, the bond between them as visible as a golden thread. It had been love, true love. The truest kind.

  ‘Then does this woman live here?’ He wasn’t going to be distracted with semantics.

  The woman at the door stared at the photo, her lips thinning slightly, her nostrils flaring by a degree. She didn’t meet their eyes as she span out the lie. ‘Never seen her—’ she said, just as a sudden crash emanated from inside the flat. ‘Oh my God, Charlie! What you doing?’ the woman cried, running back in.

  Her hand flung the door to swing closed as she disappeared, but Nettie’s father’s foot was already just over the threshold and it bounced back again.

  Without a word or a look to her, he walked in. Nettie followed, feeling her pulse quicken. She had never searched with her father before. In the early days of her mother’s disappearance, it had been more important to cover distance and they had split up, each searching pre-agreed areas they had blocked out on maps. As time had passed and their expeditions transitioned from active searches to general looking, they had each taken comfort in the solitude of their lonely walks, lulled by the repetitiveness of putting one foot in front of the other and feeling they were doing something. But this wasn’t a look or even a search; it was a hunt, and she was both proud and intimidated by her father – quietly determined, polite but dogged.

  They found themselves in a single room. The carpet was matted flat and stained, but the room was a reasonable size. A white sheet, which had been tacked up at the window, was pulled back on itself like a sail; three single mattresses were set back against the two side walls, a cot in the corner; and a kitchenette area was set up at the rear, just off the room and partitioned by a break in the carpet to lino flooring.

  The woman was in the kitchen, her back to them, and scooping up the fragments of a plastic plate that had been swept off the tray of the blue high chair before her, most probably by the impish-looking child sitting in it and staring back at them, his spoon raised like a sword.

  Nettie looked around the room again. Where was her mother in this set-up? She wasn’t here now, that was evident, but had she ever been? Had this woman been telling the truth? Was this just a random address her mother had given her employer at the nursery?

  The walls were bare save for a Banksy poster of a little girl releasing a heart balloon. There was a cardboard box at the end of one of the mattresses, filled with neatly folded
clothes. Another box contained some toys – a brightly coloured octopus with squeezable legs, a wooden bus, a cloth ball, a plastic doll with one eyelid closed shut.

  ‘Hey!’ the woman cried, turning as she stood up and found them standing in the room, assessing her home with ruthless, expert eyes. They knew how to look. ‘You can’t bloody come in here! Get out!’

  ‘We’re just trying to find Sian. We know she’s been living here. The nursery gave us this address.’

  ‘Who? Listen, I don’t know what you think you’re playing at, but you can’t go around barging into people’s houses like this! Get the hell out or I’m calling the police.’ Hostility shimmered around her like a heat haze, a jagged edge of plastic plate held in her hand.

  But Nettie’s father didn’t move – not an inch forward or back. ‘I know you recognized her. I saw it on your face when you looked at the photograph.’ His voice was calm, quiet, unthreatening. Nettie kept very still, even though her heart was fluttering like a wild bird trapped in a cage, only her eyes moving and taking in the patch of damp on the ceiling, the cracked cornicing . . .

  ‘You’re delusional, you are. Get out!’

  ‘We only want to see her, make sure that she’s all right.’

  ‘And I’ve already told you – I ain’t never seen her before.’

  ‘She’s missing, you see.’ Her father drew his own laminated copy of the ‘missing’ poster from his coat pocket, refusing to listen to her lies, to be drawn into her heat and shout back. ‘Four years last month. And we miss her very much. We love her very much.’

  The woman snorted suddenly, contempt in the gesture, her eyes landing on Nettie for just a moment before she looked away again.

  Nettie tensed, understanding immediately. She knew absolutely that her mother had been here.

  ‘Not my problem, mate,’ the woman muttered, her eyes on their feet now.

  Nettie turned away, her hand to her mouth as she kept the emotions dammed up. It was never going to end, this.

  Her eyes found the small postcard straightaway. Though it was small and almost hidden by the way the sheet at the window had been pulled back, its deep blues and greens, that streak of bitter orange, were stark against the neutrality of the room, and besides, she would have known it anywhere. She walked over to it as though drawn by a pulley – her fingers lifting it easily from the damp wall, the Blu-tack no longer sticky.

  ‘Or perhaps it is. Perhaps you’re missing too. Maybe there are people looking for you . . .’

  Her father’s voice sounded far away to Nettie. White noise had filled her head like a wind, her chest as tight as a tin box as she walked back to him and wordlessly pressed it into his hands.

  Silence rang out like a gunshot as he looked down at the image of Child with a Dove and saw the proof that her mother had been here, and she had run. There was no point in standing here, being here. She wouldn’t be coming back.

  It was a moment before anyone did anything. No one spoke or moved. The woman seemed to understand that some momentous shift had occurred in the small room.

  Nettie felt like she was suffocating as hope was gradually extinguished after all. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the woman again; she couldn’t bear to see the approbation in her eyes. She just wanted to go.

  But her father walked over to the woman; she shrank from him as he approached but automatically stepped in front of the high chair and shielded her son, her arms visibly trembling as she held up the edge of broken plate.

  He held out the postcard towards her. ‘She always loved this painting. We saw it together at the Tate before it left the country. It was one of the last things we did before she disappeared.’

  The woman looked ashen, fear blackening her eyes.

  ‘Take it,’ her father said.

  The woman didn’t move.

  He extended his arm closer still, the postcard just inches from her now. The woman flinched, before taking it from him, her body tensed as though she sensed a trick – perhaps fearing he would hit her as she reached out. Nettie wondered if that was why this woman was hiding too. Was there a man – a bad man – looking for her too?

  Her father stepped back. ‘If she comes back, please tell her we were here. And that we love her.’

  He turned and, taking Nettie by the elbow, walked towards the black door.

  ‘She won’t be coming back!’

  They faced her again. The woman was in the middle of the room now, shaking with anger, her eyes fixed on Nettie.

  ‘She upped and left ’cos of what you did.’

  What. You. Did. Each word was like a stab between the ribs and Nettie closed her eyes in pain; she knew it was true.

  The woman threw her arms in the air, indicating to the squalid flat, her voice broken. ‘We had a good thing going till you showed up there and ruined it all. Broke her heart you did.’

  ‘I . . .’ But Nettie couldn’t finish the sentence; she couldn’t even start it. How could she tell this woman she’d been frightened by the version of her mother she’d seen? That it had been her but not her?

  ‘Yeah. She said it was only a matter of time before you found her here.’ The woman’s face had twisted into a sneer, her hatred of Nettie a visceral force, because she knew, she instinctively knew that Nettie’s rejection of her mother in that moment had been a rejection of her – and people like her – too. ‘Well, you’ll never find her now. She said she couldn’t just sit here and wait for you to knock on this door . . . She’s gone, good and proper.’

  Her cruel laugh twisted the knife and Nettie looked at her father. ‘Let’s just go, Dad.’

  Her father looked at the woman again. He had diminished in size since they’d entered the room, as though his ribs had been compressed, a vertebra removed, his spine shortened. ‘If she comes back, tell her we love her,’ he said with a quiet stubbornness that refused to believe the finality of the woman’s words. ‘And that we’re sorry.’

  ‘Didn’t you—’

  ‘Both of us.’

  The woman lapsed into silence at his tone, before nodding at him. And grabbing Nettie’s hand, he walked them through the door and back out into the light.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  They were almost back at the square when they realized their error, the suddenly remembered prospect of the journalists round the corner a wake-up call to the reality facing them at home. They hadn’t said a word on the walk back, eyes barely seeing what was around them, sitting in silence in the cafe, their lunch untouched before them as they faced this, the one thing that even a good cup of tea couldn’t remedy.

  They had sat on the bus in mute shock. Several times Nettie had looked sidelong at her father, terrified of what she might see in his face. He would have every reason, every right to blame her, but she saw only grief, numbness, emptiness – everything he’d managed to hide from her for the past four years. It was all there now, her own desolation reflected right back at her. She’d got what she’d wanted at last, the affirmation that he felt the same despair; that it wasn’t just her, alone in this. But there was no companionship in grief; it didn’t halve her pain to see his, and she’d never felt more desolate.

  They stopped on the pavement, shielded by the corner house and feeling like refugees – frightened, exhausted, displaced. Their home had become a battlefield. Were they to walk the gauntlet past this army of reporters when they could barely support themselves from the day’s brutal discovery?

  The light had begun to fade, a banner of vivid purple streaking across the indigo-washed sky, and lamplit rooms were beginning to dot the facades of the houses.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ she asked.

  Her father sighed, depleted of this morning’s energy, robbed of this morning’s hope. ‘I’m fifty-eight. It’s not a good look for a man of my age to be shinning garden fences – as my hamstrings discovered to their cost this morning.’ He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘You go through the back. I’ll deal with this lot and open the back door for y
ou. They owe me an easy ride after those cups of tea yesterday.’

  Nettie shook her head, taking his hand. ‘No, we’ll go together. I’ve got to face them sooner or later. I’m not going to hide anymore.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  She nodded. ‘It’s not like we don’t know what they’re going to do. They’ll ask us questions about Mum and we just have to say, “No comment.” Who knows? Maybe once they see they’re not getting an interview out of me, they’ll push off.’

  ‘Quite right, Button. Fortune favours the brave.’

  They began walking again, turning the corner with inflated chests as they took a deep breath each – and immediately stopped walking again.

  Nettie couldn’t believe it, her eyes so wide the cold air made them water.

  ‘What the devil . . . ?’ her father murmured, his feet shuffling beside hers as they took in the sight, walking along the west side of the square. Their mouths were wide open as they walked in wonder, the hairs upright on the backs of their necks, as they tried to understand what they were seeing.

  They walked along the pavement, staring at the yellow ribbons that had been tied to every railing on every side, all the way round, a tea light in a jam jar placed on the ground below each one so that the entire square flickered.

  Nettie covered her mouth with her hand, eyes brimming with tears.

  ‘Who did this?’ her father asked, his voice a croak. ‘Why?’

  They rounded the corner to their side of the square and saw the quiet huddle of bodies swaddled in overcoats, gloved hands clasping steaming mugs as voices murmured quietly and feet were gently stamped to keep warm. But they didn’t belong to the journalists and photographers who’d made camp overnight – in fact, the only evidence there’d ever been there was the bin in the playground overflowing with takeaway coffee cups. These were faces they knew – Mrs Wilkins next door, Fred from the basement flat two along, Sheila who always collected for Marie Curie Cancer Care and knocked every March with her basket of daffodils, the new family with twins at number 18 . . .