Lightspeed Magazine Issue 35

by Nina Allan

  If the child was not Hanne, then who was she? Had the photograph originally been used by mistake, with all its subsequent uses a simple repletion of that same mistake, or was there something more sinister behind it? Perhaps there was no surviving photo of the real Hanne, so a picture of a girl who resembled her had been used instead.

  Perhaps there was no Hanne at all.

  The thing that disturbed Terri most was the fact that Allis could not have been in ignorance of what had happened. Even if she had never read the articles, she would surely have seen her own book jacket. She would have known the child in the photograph was not her sister.

  But all the evidence suggested it had been Allis who supplied the photograph in the first place.

  Terri felt certain that, however inadvertently, she had stumbled upon something important, that the photograph and Allis’s disappearance were somehow connected. From the standpoint of the job she had come here to do, the thought of such a breakthrough was thrilling. And yet there was something—a darkness—that made her uneasy.

  The room was full of shadows. In her perplexed state of mind, Terri found it was all too easy to start thinking of them as ghosts. The sea whispered through the open window, and when she got up to close the curtains, she saw its surface was dancing with phosphorescence.

  In the end, she slept without realising that she slept, her conscious thoughts entwining themselves with the more lateral, instinctive thinking of her dreams. When she woke, it was full day. Her first thoughts were of the photograph. She wanted above all to see it, to prove to herself that she had not been mistaken. She pulled on a T-shirt and jeans and went downstairs. When she entered the office she knew at once that something was different, but could not work out immediately what it was. Then she realised it was the hat, the green straw boater. It was lying on the table next to her laptop.

  She reached for it cautiously, picking it up by the brim. She realised to her dismay that she could not say with one-hundred percent certainty that she had not put the hat there herself. She had been thinking about it, after all.

  The idea that she had left the hat on her desk and then forgotten having done so was after all less worrying than the alternatives. Which were either that the house was haunted or that someone had broken in during the night.

  She remembered the feeling she had had the evening before, that she was not alone in the house. She looked carefully around the room, aware that her palms were sweating and that her breathing had become more shallow. When she saw movement outside the window her heart knocked in her chest and she almost cried out. Her first thought was that it was Allis, come to pay her back somehow for trespassing on the past and all the secrets she had intended to stay hidden. Then she saw it was the woman from next door, watering the roses in her back garden.

  Terri dashed through to the kitchen, aware that she had not combed her hair and that she was wearing yesterday’s clothes but determined she should not let it matter. She knew she had to speak to Judy Whitton at all costs. She did not want to let her get away again until she had at the very least established contact.

  “Excuse me,” she called. She stepped out on to the overgrown lawn. The woman turned at the sound of her voice. She was wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt dress and the same navy moccasins that Terri had seen her wearing the week before. She was stouter than Terri remembered, the loose skin of her forearms mottled with liver spots. But her salt-and-pepper hair was neatly styled, and her lightly made up face looked alert and not unintelligent. She was as tidy and well kept as her house and garden.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” said Terri. “My name’s Terri Goodall. I’m the new tenant here. I was hoping I could speak to you for a moment.”

  “How can I help you, dear?” said Judy Whitton. “Everything all right for you, is it? I know the place is in a bit of a state. The doctor had to get the plumbers in at one point.” Her voice was clear and firm, with traces of an East London accent.

  “Oh no, thank you, the house is fine.” Terri smiled in a way she hoped was reassuring. “I’m writing an article about the woman who used to live here. I spoke to the letting agent, Alan Cahill? He seems to think you might remember her.”

  “Mrs Bennett, you mean?”

  “Yes, Allis Bennett. She was a novelist. She wrote books for children.” Terri didn’t like to hear Allis spoken of in this way, as Mrs Bennett, an ordinary housewife, indistinguishable from Whitton herself. She felt anxious to establish at once that Allis was different.

  “I don’t know too much about that. My kids are all grown and gone. But I helped Mrs Bennett’s nephew sort out the house, you know, after she left.”

  “Do you have any idea where she might have gone?” Terri felt like cheering aloud. Alan Cahill had been right: Judy Whitton had known Allis, had spoken to her. She had been living here at the time of Allis’s disappearance. The fact that she knew nothing of Allis’s writing might even be an advantage. She would have noticed other things, details that critical articles never mentioned. Her insights would be valuable and unique.

  “Not a clue. I went through all that with the police at the time. You’re not from the police, are you? If you are then I’ve got nothing to say.”

  Terri shook her head at once. She knew she had to calm down, that her rapid fire questioning was making Judy Whitton feel like a crime suspect. Much more of it and she was liable to clam up. But she sensed that Judy Whitton was the breakthrough she needed and it was difficult to restrain her excitement. “I’m not from the police. I’m a journalist. I read all Allis’s books as a child. I’m interested in what might have happened to her.”

  “Just bored sick of this place, I reckon. She was never exactly what you’d call settled.”

  “Really? I’ve heard she didn’t like to travel.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean in her mind. She didn’t join in much. She preferred her own company. Once her daughter moved up to Nottingham, she got even worse. I had a feeling she might have gone there, but the police said not.”

  “Her daughter?”

  “Yes, Joanne. She married a chap she met at college. There was some kind of row between her and her mum, I reckon. Not that Mrs Bennett ever said, but sometimes you just know these things, don’t you? It’s hard for a kid though, growing up without a father. There are bound to be problems.”

  Terri couldn’t think what to say. She felt stunned by what Judy Whitton was telling her. None of the articles had mentioned children. Terri felt she had been deceived in some way, although who had done the deceiving she could not tell. She had no reason to believe that Whitton was lying. What would be the point?

  It was as if the world had divided in two: on the one hand there was the Allis she had read about, the solitary writer with the dead sister and the tragic past, on the other there was Mrs Bennett and her daughter Joanne.

  Which of these women was real and why had Allis lied about her daughter? It came to Terri that both versions of Allis could be real, or neither of them, that the real Allis was the sum of the two. And just because Allis had chosen to remain silent about her daughter did not mean she had lied about her. Just because she had chosen to make some aspects of her life public in the form of novels did not mean that Allis had relinquished her rights to a private life.

  The business of biography was complex, more complex than Terri had known when she started out. She had begun with the idea of uncovering a mystery. Now she was starting to see that the act of unveiling was also an act of destruction. She had wanted only good things for Allis. By writing her article she had wanted in some measure to repay Allis for the pleasure and comfort her books had brought to her as a child. But what was happening now was something else. It was like tugging on a piece of loose wire and bringing the whole house down.

  She supposed she could stop now if she wanted to, but she knew she would not. If she cared more about the story than she cared about Allis that was something she would have to learn to live with.

  “Do you
think Allis felt isolated here? I’m sure you know about what happened to her during the war.” Terri knew that in order to get the most from her, she had to win Whitton’s confidence. She hoped that by asking Whitton’s opinion, she might start to open her up. People liked to say what they thought, much better than they liked to answer a direct question. That was something Terri had learned from her very first interview.

  “The little Jewish mite, you mean? I knew she was killed in the Blitz, but Allis was only a child then. Lots of people were killed in the bombing, and it wasn’t as if the girl was her real sister or anything. I don’t see how she could have felt isolated. Her grandparents lived here in Walmer, you know. Allis stayed with them every summer before the war.”

  “But that’s not possible,” Terri exclaimed. The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. “Allis Bennett was born in Warsaw.”

  “Not her.” Whitton said. She laughed through her nose, a kind of snorting chuckle, as if she was trying to suppress her amusement at something vaguely illicit. “You must have got your facts mixed up somehow. It was the little Jewish girl that was from Poland. Allis’s parents took her in just before the war started. They were running all kinds of schemes then, trying to help the children who had been transported. Allis didn’t have any brothers or sisters of her own and I suppose her mum and dad thought it would be nice for her, to have someone her own age to play with. Anyway, you see how it worked out.” She paused. “If you’re really interested, you should look in the attic. She left the place just as it was, you see. All her clothes and furniture and things, no one knew what to do with it all. We gave most of her clothes to Oxfam and her nephew sold a lot of the furniture but there was a whole load of other stuff we just packed into boxes and stuffed in the loft. I remember there were tons of old letters. So far as I knew they’re still up there.”

  “Thank you so much,” Terri said. “This is just what I needed.”

  “No need to thank me, dear. I doubt you’ll find anything much. She was just a normal woman, Mrs Bennett. She wasn’t mad or anything, not like some of these ones you read about. She just kept herself to herself.”

  “Do you think I could come round and see you? Once I’ve had a look at the letters, I mean? It’s so helpful, speaking to someone who actually knew her.”

  “That’s fine by me, dear. Just remember I’m out Tuesdays and Thursdays. That’s my WI.”

  Terri thanked her again and went back inside. She sat at the kitchen table, toying with a slice of toast and waiting for the kettle to boil. She made coffee, then poured it away after only three sips. If Whitton was telling the truth, then everything she had heard or read or believed about Allis Bennett until that morning had been an invention. Allis had treated her own life as one of her fictions: She had discarded the truth and fabricated a whole new past for herself based around the identity of the refugee child her parents had adopted during the war. Alicja Ganesh was just another character she had created, only this time with Allis Bennett’s own face and body.

  What Terri did not understand was why she had done this. Had the truth seemed so dull and inadequate that Allis had simply exchanged it for a story she liked better, stretching certain details to the limits of their believability the same way she did in her stories?

  Or had she rewritten her past to make it fit with the image of herself she liked to present to her readers through her books?

  She could not bring herself to believe she had done it for money. Terri realised she ought to boot up her computer and transcribe the conversation with Whitton, get the details down on paper before they were lost, but she knew she could not settle to anything until she had been into the attic. There was a set of steps in the understairs cupboard, pushed in against the wall behind the vacuum cleaner and an ancient wooden clothes horse. Terri dragged them out of the cupboard then carried them up to the landing and set them up beneath the loft hatch. She mounted the steps and pushed up the boards. The hatch was stiff, and made a dry cracking sound as it came away. Dust and small bits of debris cascaded down. Terri coughed, fumbling for the light switch on the central joist.

  The roof space was hot and smelled stale, reminding her of the way the house had been when she first entered it. The thickness of the dust made it obvious that no one had been up there in years.

  There were ten boxes in all, three wooden tea chests, the rest cardboard cartons from the local supermarket. It would be impossible to move them without help, the tea chests especially. Terri brushed dust from her hair and wondered whether it would be best to pay someone to help her or try and bring down the boxes’ contents bit by bit. She opened one of the tea chests at random. The hardboard lid had been secured with tin tacks but was easy enough to work free. The chest was full of clothes: a paisley dress, a woollen overcoat with an Astrakhan collar, a wedding gown. They smelled strongly of the mothballs they had been packed in. Terri replaced the lid. The sight of discarded clothes always made her think of dead people. The second chest was packed with ornaments. They were wrapped in pages from the Walmer Herald, all dating from the summer Allis had been declared legally dead. Terri unwrapped a china teacup, a cigarette case, a model horse. The horse was about six inches high and made of tin. The brightly coloured paint had worn away down to the metal in several places, and there was a small dent in one of its flanks. Terri recognised it at once as the tin horse in Bellony. It had belonged to Vronia’s dead sister Annabel.

  She thought briefly of asking Alan Cahill to help her, then dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Instead she called a man from the Yellow Pages, a number picked at random from the House Clearance section.

  “I don’t actually want a house cleared,” she said. “I just need to get some boxes out of an attic.” The man said it would cost her twenty pounds.

  Two hours later the boxes were out of the loft and lined up neatly in one of the back bedrooms. Terri spent most of the next three days going through them. She went to bed each night feeling physically drained yet so mentally preoccupied she found it difficult to switch off. The whole of the upstairs floor was now covered with piles of oddments and paper and bundles of letters, the scraps and tag-ends of what had once been the life of Allis Bennett. Even after she had showered and changed, Terri felt filthy with dust and newsprint. She barely stepped outside for the whole three days.

  Yet in spite of her exhaustion, she felt triumphant. She knew she had found what she had been looking for: a story so remarkable that no one had guessed at it, let alone written it down. She also felt buoyed up with the knowledge that this was precisely the kind of writing she wanted to do. She had thought of the project from the start as the search for a missing person and at the time she had meant that literally, but she now knew there was more than one way of going missing. Uncovering the truth about Allis was proving to be one of the most thrilling experiences of her life.

  Three of the boxes contained books, many of them Allis’s own first editions. Terri had purchased paperback reprints of those novels of Allis’s that were still available, but seeing the originals aroused in her a depth of emotion she could not have predicted. It would have been easy to lose herself in them for hours, but she forced herself to save them for later. The books and clothes and household effects were fascinating and they would add colour to her account, but they could not tell her much. They told her that Allis collected Victorian paperweights, that she read Shirley Jackson and Elizabeth Bowen, that the spinning top and the wooden monkey in The Carousel had material counterparts. They could tell her what Allis had liked but not what had happened to her. Terri knew she had to press on.

  There were more than two hundred letters from Joanne, a whole box of them. These ranged from the postcards Joanne had sent to Allis while on trips with her school right through to the brief notes posted from Nottingham after her marriage. These last letters were few in number and subdued in tone, entirely lacking the detail and spontaneity of the much longer letters written while Joanne was at college. The underlying tens
ion was palpable, although its source was never specified. There was no mention of Poland or the war, or even of Allis’s books. The Allis of Joanne’s letters was Mrs Bennett.

  In the box with Joanne’s letters was a crumpled white envelope containing a tortoiseshell hair slide, a Girl Guide badge, one half of a return train ticket from Walmer to Tenby and a bunch of loose photographs. One of the photographs showed a young man with floppy fair hair cradling an infant. Terri guessed that this must be Peter Bennett holding his daughter. Another photograph was clearly the original of the photocopied reproduction she had in her office downstairs, the picture of the girl wearing the Mickey Mouse watch. The photograph was in colour. A caption scrawled on the back identified the subject as Joanne.

  The other photographs were less interesting, snapshots of Walmer Castle and the bandstand at Deal. Like the books and ornaments, they told her very little. Terri had hoped there might be a picture of the Jewish girl, something that confirmed her existence, but all the photos had been taken long after the war.

  Terri feared she had come to a dead end after all. She stared at the contents of the last of the boxes with a mixture of disappointment and perplexity. In contrast with the others, which had been packed selectively and with care, this final carton appeared to contain a random assortment of stationery and other inconsequential bits and pieces. Terri could not understand what had made Judy Whitton and Allis’s nephew single out such rubbish for preservation. It wasn’t until she flipped open one of the notebooks that she realised that what she was looking at was the contents of Allis’s desk on the day she disappeared. Everything was there, right down to the last paperclip. Terri found it incredible that these things had remained in the house, that the police had not removed them long before. She supposed then that the police had not been much interested. There was no body and no sign of violence. Allis was an adult and had broken no laws; if she wanted to disappear, there was nothing to stop her.