You and Me

by Nicola Rayner

  ‘What happened?’ Caroline asks. ‘Why did you fall out?’

  I look over at the globe in the corner of the room. I’d come back from work early. It was a bright, wintry day. The sun low through the window in the front room overlooking Great Western Road. Light pooling on the sofa. Ellie pulled away from him when she saw me and pushed down her dress. I caught a glimpse of her belly as swollen as a loaf. It seemed sacrilegious, that she would do that with my niece so big inside her. Disgusting. My rage was unlike anything I’d ever known.

  ‘We fought over a man,’ I say simply.

  Daisy tries to stand, clinging to her mother’s fingers as she does. If Caroline guesses who the man is, she doesn’t say. She keeps her focus on her child.

  ‘And you haven’t seen her since?’

  ‘No, I know she’s been back in London from time to time – she leaves me things: flowers, that footprint in the icing sugar. But I’ve never seen her, never met Rose. That’s my punishment.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’ Daisy falls flat on her bottom and begins to cry. Caroline scoops her up and kisses her cheek. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Sometimes I think I deserved it,’ I say quietly beneath Daisy’s wails. ‘Because of what I said.’

  Ellie hit me. I deserved that too. A sharp blow to the side of my head that left my ear ringing. I liked the pain. It was better than the suffocating weight of my fury.

  I’d said the thing I knew would hurt her most. I hadn’t rehearsed it – it had been instinct – sisterly instinct. I’d always known.

  She was weary when we came to this point, weary of the argument, of her pregnancy. Weary of all the words.

  ‘He’s a friend,’ she said for what seemed like the millionth time. ‘Charles and Fiona both are. You know that.’

  She still hadn’t said much; hadn’t confirmed or denied what I’d seen. She wouldn’t be drawn. She evaded my questions, turned away then, dismissive.

  ‘I can’t help it if I get that sort of attention,’ she added, exasperated.

  Sometimes dismissiveness can be the hardest thing to bear. Sometimes it can be worse than open hostility. Or was she just trying to get away from me before the argument became poisonous? I wanted her full attention. I needed something that would get it. As if I had something sharp hidden in my hand, I had always known what could do the most damage.

  ‘Maybe you ask for it.’

  Was I talking about Charles? What he did? Well, yes, but there was the other thing behind it, too. The thing, years before, she had crawled into my bed to talk about. The thing she never asked for.

  I knew it was terrible to say it, but I said it anyway. And then she hit me.

  There was a moment or two of ringing pain, of almost enjoyable self-pity – but the buzz didn’t last long. By the time it had worn off, Ellie was in her room, throwing things into an overnight bag. I hovered outside as she packed, called her name in a weak voice – a voice that wasn’t really expecting an answer – and then I left her alone.

  If I had my time again, I wouldn’t have loitered at the doorway. I would have gone in and shouted over the abyss between us, I would have apologised, I would have hugged her. She would have forgiven me. She never would have left.

  ‘She packed in such a rush,’ I say to Caroline now, glancing upstairs. ‘And then she was gone. I still keep her room for her. Just in case she comes back.’

  Caroline strokes Daisy’s cheek. ‘Can I see it?’

  I look at her, trying to work out what she wants. She says she doesn’t believe Ellie is behind Dickie’s death, but is that really true? Perhaps, whatever she thinks, she suspects Ellie is the key to finding out what happened to her husband. If so, her goal is the same as mine: I need to find Ellie too – and Caroline might be able to help me. So far, she’s been a useful ally.

  ‘It’s pretty empty,’ I say, but I lead the way upstairs.

  She follows me with Daisy on her hip. I switch the light on in Ellie’s room and am struck by how bare it looks. Caroline gazes around her, taking in the poster on the wall, the duvet cover on the bed.

  ‘Have you searched through her stuff?’ Caroline asks.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘For any indication of where she might be?’

  ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘Not really.’

  There have been times when I’ve felt restless or curious, or I’ve just missed Ellie and Rose so badly I haven’t known what to do with myself, and I’ve come to her room with the vague intention of looking for something. I’ve opened her cupboard and stared at the clothes she left behind – a couple of pairs of old jeans, a few woolly jumpers, her old dance shoes and leotards – as if they held an answer.

  Ellie wasn’t a hoarder, nor a reader like Mother and me, and there’s not much in the way of paperwork or books. Only a dance textbook or two, one on photography and a couple of travel guides stacked up on a shelf above the desk.

  I pull the drawers out of the desk, one by one, in part to satisfy Caroline. The first contains a bunch of old receipts, a packet of AA batteries, a small torch. In the second, a deeper drawer, there are some old bank statements, tax forms and other papers. Ellie was terrible at staying on top of her admin. As I pull the drawer out to have a closer look, something at the back of the desk, wedged between drawers, plops onto the dusty carpet. I pick it up.

  ‘What’s that?’ says Caroline, her voice sharp, curious.

  I can tell that she already knows, that she’s already spotted it, but I say it anyway. ‘It’s Ellie’s passport.’

  I open it up and look at the photograph of her pulling a serious face for the camera. The expiry date is July 2015, the year after she left. She must have lost it and applied for another one. Unless she never left the country.

  51

  In the passport photograph, Ellie’s hair looks like a living thing, just as it always did. I touch the picture with my thumb, remembering how her curls used to feel when she was a child, as light and fragile as moth wings.

  ‘Can I have a look?’ Caroline asks.

  I hesitate. I feel as if I haven’t had long enough with it: that there’s something it can communicate to me, something I might be missing. After a moment or two of flicking through the pages, remembering certain trips Ellie took – the one to Thailand in 2012, India the following year – I hand it over.

  ‘Could Ellie have got another one before she went away?’

  ‘Yes, she could have,’ I say. ‘But it’s the kind of thing she would have mentioned. It’s such a hassle getting a new passport and, because of her dyslexia, she hated forms – she usually asked me to help her with stuff like that.’

  We’re silent for a moment, perhaps both mulling over the other options. Could Ellie have travelled without a passport – on a boat, perhaps, or a private jet? Even on a fake one? But those options seem too fantastical. Something from a spy story.

  ‘There are so many pictures,’ I think aloud. ‘On Facebook and Instagram. So many landmarks – the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal.’

  ‘Let’s think.’ Caroline sits on the bed, still staring at the passport in her hands. ‘What do we know? That she’s not at the address she gave you in France; that she didn’t travel on this passport, though she might have got another.’ She pauses to consider. ‘You haven’t seen her since the night you quarrelled – but how about other people? Has anyone else stayed in touch?’

  Fiona standing on the doorstep at Honeybourne all those weeks ago when I delivered the fruit basket. What had she said then? Something about Ellie being in the country.

  ‘I think perhaps Fiona sees her – Fiona and Charles – when she’s back.’

  ‘Well, let’s give her a ring and find out when that last was.’

  The three of us return downstairs. Caroline asks if she can prepare a snack for Daisy and I leave her in the kitchen, stepping into the hallway with my phone. It would be much more natural for me to call Charles but I remind myself of Fiona’s recent kindness, and she’s the one w
ho mentioned Ellie being back, after all.

  ‘Hello Fiona, it’s Fran,’ I say, when she picks up.

  ‘Fran.’ Her voice is warm. ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘Well, it’s been difficult really.’

  ‘I’m sure it has,’ she says. ‘I bet you’ve heard from the police and all sorts.’

  In the background, their dog is barking at something. There’s the squeal of children’s voices. I can picture Fiona, her bare feet against the slate of their kitchen floor, the phone sandwiched to her ear while she efficiently sees to another task.

  ‘Not the police,’ I say. I don’t add, Not yet. ‘But there’s been a journalist investigating – she’s desperate to talk to Ellie – so I was wondering …’ I pause. I hate that it has come to this. That I am begging Fiona to tell me where my sister is. ‘I was wondering,’ I begin again, ‘when you last saw her?’

  ‘Just a second, Fran,’ says Fiona.

  I hear her voice lowered as she says something to one of the children.

  ‘Now,’ she says, returning to the phone, ‘when I last saw who?’

  ‘Ellie,’ I say patiently.

  ‘Oh gosh,’ says Fiona, ‘we haven’t seen Ellie in years.’

  52

  I take a deep breath and hold the phone away from my ear. Next door, in the kitchen, Caroline coos as she feeds Daisy. It seems odd to me that everything is continuing as normal. I have the sensation I’m falling. Tumbling down a steep hill, rather, trying to clutch anything that will save me.

  The closer I think I’m getting, the further away my sister seems to be.

  I try to remember exactly what Fiona had said about Ellie. She slipped it into conversation so casually but then perhaps she wouldn’t have known how it’d affect me to hear my sister’s name mentioned in such a throwaway fashion when we were estranged.

  ‘But you said …’ The words sound childish. Impudent. ‘You said you’d seen her.’

  ‘I’m sorry to have given you that impression,’ Fiona says. ‘But we don’t. We’re in touch by email occasionally, and on Facebook, but we never actually see her.’

  ‘Has Charles …?’

  ‘No, neither of us,’ Fiona says smoothly. ‘What’s going on?’

  I hesitate, pulling at the corner of my cardigan, unsure of how to continue.

  ‘We found her passport,’ I say in the end. ‘We don’t know what to make of it.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Caroline and I. She’s here, with Daisy.’

  ‘How peculiar. I suppose Ellie must have got another one.’

  ‘Yes, you would think,’ I say uncertainly.

  ‘She must have done,’ says Fiona. ‘How else would she have travelled abroad?’

  She sounds so confident that I’m reassured for a moment. That’s Fiona’s way. In spite of myself, I think again that she must be a comforting person to have on your side. So logical; so certain of herself.

  ‘Ask her when you next speak to her.’

  ‘Well, she’s not really replying to anything at the moment.’

  ‘She’s probably just trying to get her head straight after everything that’s happened. Give her a day or two.’

  ‘It’s strange that you haven’t seen her.’ I pull at a thread on my cardigan. ‘I really thought you had.’

  ‘No.’ Fiona’s voice is cooler. ‘I can only apologise for giving you the wrong impression.’ She sighs and says more kindly: ‘Sometimes we just convince ourselves of things because we want to believe them.’

  After she hangs up, I think of how wrong she is – how I would never want to believe that Ellie preferred her company to mine. I imagine Fiona going to find Charles, wherever he is in the house – by the fire in the living room or maybe upstairs in their bedroom – and relaying the conversation.

  I’m left feeling disorientated. I half-wish Caroline weren’t here so I could gather my thoughts on my own. In the front room, she and Daisy are sitting on the sofa eating Marmite rice cakes. Caroline looks up eagerly when I return.

  ‘What did she say?’ she asks.

  ‘She hasn’t seen her.’ I perch on the armchair. ‘Not for ages.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Caroline. ‘I thought you said she had.’

  ‘No, I got it wrong.’ I look down at my hands. ‘She’s only been in touch through email and Facebook.’

  Caroline is quiet, watching Daisy as she sucks on a rice cake. ‘Is there a reason she’d be avoiding everyone? Did she have anything to fear?’

  ‘To fear?’

  ‘I don’t know – is Rose’s father possessive?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’ I try to recall the few conversations that Ellie and I had had about Roberto. ‘He was older than Ellie and married, but I think he was always happy to admire her and Rose from a distance.’

  It occurs to me that perhaps Roberto is a watcher, like me. Voyeur, Charles said, but I don’t like that word and its connotations.

  ‘He always showered them with money,’ I add. ‘That made me worry. That he wanted something in return.’

  Everyone wants something in return. I can’t bring myself to tell Caroline that I owe this stranger my home; that he paid off our mortgage. It’s too much. Too humiliating.

  ‘Does he live in the UK?’ Caroline asks, reaching over to take the disintegrating rice cake from Daisy.

  ‘Yes, as far as I know.’ I fetch her a piece of kitchen roll. ‘I’ve never met him – only seen him on Facebook.’

  ‘Can you show me?’

  On my laptop, I show Caroline Roberto’s profile. He doesn’t post often but his account gives an impression of the life he leads – yachts, skiing, family photographs. Four daughters with the same Mediterranean looks as him and a wife who could have been mistaken for one of them. I don’t know how Rose would have fitted in – the odd one out, pale and mousy-haired, at the end of the litter – but he doesn’t seem to have any interest in seeing her.

  Yet there’s no escaping it – it’s his money Ellie and Rose are living off. His money, too, that has kept me in my home. Not blood money, exactly, but certainly guilt money.

  ‘That must be hard for Ellie,’ says Caroline, looking at the family photograph.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘She never seemed bothered – she wasn’t really jealous in that way.’

  ‘It might be worth getting in touch with him,’ she suggests. ‘To ask when he last saw her. If you’re sure he’s not any kind of threat.’

  It’s funny, I think, but don’t say: Ellie didn’t seem to be scared of Roberto, but the only time she seemed spooked, back then, was when she’d seen Dickie.

  She came in one November afternoon, shutting the front door carefully. I heard her as I sat on the loo, where I’d been fretting about our latest money worries. I didn’t know then that Ellie had plans to pay off our mortgage. I found her, as I came out, sitting on the staircase like someone who barely had the strength to climb it. She was so big by that stage. I could hardly believe that someone so slight had the strength to carry that enormous belly around.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  The lights were switched off in the hall, so I couldn’t see her properly, but she was holding her head in her hands.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said quietly. ‘Just had a shock.’ She moved along the step so I could sit next to her. ‘I saw Dickie Graham,’ she said. ‘Ran into him on Wimpole Street.’

  ‘Oh.’ I couldn’t think of anything better to say. ‘What were you doing in that part of town?’

  She waved a hand. ‘Doctor’s appointment. I had a scan.’

  ‘That’s fancy,’ I teased, trying to hide my stung feelings. I’d have loved to have gone with her to one of her scans, to hold her hand as we heard the baby’s heartbeat, but no matter how many hints I dropped she never asked me. ‘Did Dickie recognise you?’

  She nodded. ‘And he looked at my belly; he could see.’

  Over the years, I’d thought about that night in the swimming pool so much that sometimes I felt the burn of
chlorine in my own sinuses, the tightness in my lungs. I’d imagined it so many times that there were days when it almost felt as if it had happened to me, but perhaps that’s just what love is like. We can’t separate the other’s pain from our own.

  ‘Did Dickie say anything?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Just my name.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I ran away like a coward.’

  ‘You’re the bravest person I know.’ I took her hand in mine. It felt icy and limp. ‘And you’re safe now. He can’t do anything to hurt you.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have gone out.’ She pulled away from me. ‘Roberto keeps saying I should take it easy.’

  ‘He can’t confine you,’ I said.

  She laughed nastily then. ‘For the money he’s paying he can do what he wants.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ I said guiltily. ‘We’re behind with a couple of our bills.’

  ‘How much do you need?’ she asked. ‘You only have to say.’ She struggled to her feet. ‘Please don’t hide them from me – I can help now. Or Roberto can.’

  It was a short spell of intimacy during the tricky period of her pregnancy. Nothing much – just the briefest of interludes. That night, as I dozed, she crawled into my bed. I felt the nudge of her belly next to me, tight like a drum.

  ‘I wish I hadn’t seen him,’ she said. ‘I wish he didn’t know.’

  Usually Ellie was so pragmatic, so down-to-earth, but she seemed particularly spooked that night – as if seeing Dickie had been some kind of curse for her and her baby.

  Maybe it was.

  53

  After Caroline and Daisy leave, I do as she suggests and write Roberto a message. The first to the father of my niece in all these years.

  Dear Roberto, We’ve never met but you might know that I’m Ellie’s sister. I’m trying to get hold of her with some urgency. Are you in touch? When did you last see her?

  As I pause to decide what to write next, my mind races to Dickie and Tom. The impact of the train against Dickie’s body, Tom’s floating in the water. Horror-film images, too lurid to seem true. I can’t bring Roberto into all of that. It’s important to keep it simple. Finally, I add: