The Missing Sister

by Dinah Jefferies

  I grip the door frame and although I feel dizzy with anxiety I step out on to the landing. Then, leaning on the bannister rail, look down the stairwell. An internal door closes and the hall empties – it’s completely silent. I breathe a sigh of relief and go back to my room. Maybe the man is one of Douglas’s colleagues and nothing to do with me.

  This top-floor room with sloping walls has become my prison – or perhaps a source of solace? Either way, I am safe up here. If I swallow the tablets our housekeeper gives me with a glass of water morning and evening, they say I am not a danger to myself … or anyone else. I smile. If I remember to swallow and don’t merely put them under my tongue …

  I hear voices again and tiptoe back to the landing. From my vantage point I see the man who had been wearing the navy-blue mackintosh. Now he is staring up at me. He smiles, inclines his head and begins to climb the stairs.

  Despite the fog in my brain there is one thing I am sure of.

  I am not ready to go.

  13.

  Belle stopped outside a temple and stared. She could see a large space inside where red pillars, decorated with Chinese script and imagery, held up a wooden-raftered roof. She glanced over to where Rebecca had gone on ahead.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘Chinese temple. Go in if you want.’

  Belle nodded and took a few steps inside but was instantly assaulted by an overwhelming smell of incense and smoke rising from bowls stuffed with joss sticks. She coughed and spluttered as she tried to acclimatize, eyeing a golden canopy surrounding images of Chinese lions and various idols she couldn’t identify. Maybe Confucius and Buddha? Yellow and red chrysanthemums stood in vases on carved ebony tables and, above them, lanterns in the same colours hung from the rafters.

  A man in robes approached Belle and, in broken English, asked if she’d like her fortune told. Encouraged by Rebecca’s vigorous nods, she agreed, and was told to frame a question. She hadn’t been able to forget the note, so asked if there was anyone she should not trust in Rangoon. Telling her fortune turned out to be a complex business involving wooden sticks and a round object made of red painted wood composed of parts that looked like the segments of an orange. The answer was simply that she had asked the wrong question and she would soon be going on a journey.

  She exchanged looks with Rebecca, who only shrugged and said, ‘Lucky you.’

  Leaving the temple, they ignored the street-corner tea shops and food stalls, eventually reaching the noisy area behind the waterfront, where Gloria had told her the Chinese lived. As she encountered the maze of hidden alleyways, thick with the scent of jasmine and fried rice, Belle couldn’t help remembering the older woman’s warning.

  One takes one’s life in one’s hands.

  ‘Is it safe?’ Belle asked, feeling nervy among the swell of people crowding the steaming, claustrophobic streets.

  Rebecca laughed and tossed her blonde hair. ‘On your own perhaps not but stick with me. It’ll be fine, I promise.’

  ‘Why are we here?’

  ‘For one, you are going to taste the best Chinese food you’ve ever had and, for two, you are going to treat yourself.’

  Belle didn’t say she had never in her life eaten Chinese food.

  She stared at the many shuttered shophouse blocks where narrow wooden houses squashed up against each other, most with a shop on the ground floor – selling cooked food, vegetables, fish, ornaments and so on – with living quarters above. Confused by the unfathomable high-pitched language of Chinese street hawkers, she watched as squawking chickens and squealing piglets sealed in bamboo cages added to the din. As they dodged the many dogs snaking the streets in search of scraps and the reckless children racing between bicycles and the legs of pedestrians alike, the whole place pulsed with life.

  Once they dived into the heart of the quarter, the fragrance of jasmine faded and now the streets sweated beneath the mixed odours of burning charcoal, fried fish and drains. Rebecca was striding ahead without glancing back and again Belle worried if she really could trust her room-mate. What if she were to vanish and leave Belle stranded here? But then Rebecca stopped and took a bow in front of a tiny shop tucked inside a backstreet threading behind a wider alley.

  ‘Tra-la!’ she said with a grin and a flourish.

  Belle gazed at the window, astonished to see row upon row of neatly folded, brilliantly coloured silk, ranging from the colour of a Burmese sunset, shimmering in rose pink and yellow, to gentle pearly blues.

  ‘It’s the best but also the cheapest in Rangoon. The British don’t like it here so they pay over the odds at Rowe’s. Shall we?’

  ‘You bet.’

  Rebecca pushed open the intricately carved wooden door and a small bell tinkled.

  Inside Belle stood transfixed, then trailed her fingertips over the bales of patterned silk, her senses on fire.

  ‘I’d love some, but what would I do with it?’

  ‘That’s where I come in. I have a Chinese friend who works as a waitress in the Silver Grill … have you been there yet?’

  Belle shook her head.

  ‘Well, we must go, but the thing is, this friend of mine introduced me to the owner of this shop and her daughter is a brilliant seamstress. She can copy anything the top designers come up with.’

  ‘And where is she?’

  Rebecca laughed. ‘Upstairs. And she has loads of magazines. She’ll give you local rates too, or very nearly. You go up, choose the style, she tells you how many yards to buy and then you pick your fabric.’

  ‘We can go up now?’

  ‘Knew you’d be keen. I haven’t told the other girls about this place.’

  ‘Why tell me?’

  ‘You were so miserable. There’s nothing like a new dress is there, especially if it doesn’t cost the earth. No guilt. And I wanted to make it up to you.’

  Belle could have hugged her.

  They climbed the narrow wooden staircase and upstairs Belle met Mai Lin, the seamstress. After flicking through several editions of Vogue, she settled on a sheath-like halter-neck dress, cut on the bias, gently skimming the hips and revealing a daring, completely bare back. She chose an evening jacket to match in a sweet boxy shape, for cooler evenings or after-show drinks.

  After being served green tea in tiny porcelain cups, Belle was measured, and then they went back downstairs to choose her silk. Bewildered by all the gorgeous colours, Belle couldn’t decide. After much deliberation and several changes of mind, she chose a plain but beautiful silvery silk shot through with the palest blue.

  ‘Now for the food,’ Rebecca said, as soon as Belle had paid.

  ‘Aren’t you buying fabric today?’

  Rebecca shook her head. ‘Not this time. I only paid for a new dress last week.’

  As they left the shop, Belle surveyed the street.

  ‘Come on, slow coach,’ Rebecca called out, already ahead, but something had caught Belle’s eye, or rather someone. On the opposite side of the road Edward was walking with a red-haired woman. Belle was about to lift a hand and wave to him but, deep in conversation, he hadn’t seen her. As they walked on, Belle felt there was something familiar about the woman but couldn’t quite put her finger on it. And then she realized the woman reminded her a little of her mother. But was that all? Could there be the slightest chance? Could it be possible she might be Elvira? She dismissed the thought as far too unlikely.

  14.

  On Wednesday Belle wore a kingfisher-blue cotton dress and laughed when Oliver turned up in an identically coloured shirt that made the blue of his eyes sing. They took the tram and reached the tree-lined stretch of road where her parents had once lived. As they passed large colonial houses built all along one side and facing woodland on the other, she was keeping up with Oliver’s long strides in silence. The buildings had been developed at the turn of the century for the great and the good and were set well apart from each other in extensive gardens with high fences. Through the gated driveways Belle s
aw Indian gardeners watering the lawns, while young Chinese women swept the terraces and wiped down wicker garden furniture.

  ‘Did you see Norman Chubb?’ Oliver asked suddenly, giving her one of his lopsided smiles.

  She shook her head. ‘He wasn’t there. I spoke to an Inspector Johnson.’

  ‘Ah, not too helpful, I imagine.’

  ‘He told me a fire had destroyed all their records.’

  He snorted. ‘How convenient.’

  ‘You don’t believe it?’

  He shrugged. ‘What do you think?’

  They had reached number nineteen.

  ‘Almost there,’ he said. ‘Twenty-three, you said?’

  As they walked on she nodded but couldn’t speak. It felt weird to know her parents must have once walked down this street precisely as she was doing. What part, if any, was she about to play in their story?

  When twenty-three loomed into sight, she stood rooted to the spot.

  ‘But it looks abandoned,’ she said, gazing at the tall palms shading the front of the house. ‘I hadn’t expected this.’

  ‘I’ll try the gate,’ Oliver suggested, but closer inspection revealed a rusty padlock holding the ornate but heavily corroded iron gate in place. ‘Another entrance, maybe?’

  ‘Someone might still be living here.’

  He puckered his chin. ‘I guess, though it looks pretty unlikely.’

  They both took in the blistering paintwork of the doors and windows and the stained plaster of walls that must have once been pristine white. A first-floor veranda circled the upstairs, now shattered in places, and wooden shutters hung at awkward angles, no longer protecting the grimy windows. In fact, they looked as if they had not even been closed when her parents departed.

  ‘Must have been stunning once,’ Belle said, and felt a wave of sadness.

  ‘A mansion. They lived well.’

  She glanced across at him and could see it in his eyes. ‘I know you don’t approve.’

  ‘It isn’t about individual people, it’s the system I don’t like. We come to these countries and take over, as if with a God-given right.’

  She watched him walk beside rusting railings overgrown with greenery. After a moment he called out, ‘There’s an opening here.’

  Uncertain about following a man she barely knew into this deserted place, a man with a reputation at that, her footsteps slowed. She had expected to see an occupied, immaculately maintained residence like all the others, had expected to observe it from the street.

  ‘Will you go in first?’ she said.

  ‘Sure.’

  This forgotten place unsettled her, but eventually she moved towards the opening through which Oliver had now vanished.

  ‘Careful,’ he called out. ‘Brambles.’

  She spotted he’d made something of a pathway through and, though she couldn’t see him, he was now urging her to follow. Still she hesitated and after a few moments he burst back on to the street again.

  She stared at him. ‘You know, it seems wrong. As if I’ll be spying on my parents’ past life.’

  He walked towards her and held out a hand. ‘You can go through or we can turn back. Either way it’s okay.’

  She took a deep breath, while thinking, and then exhaled slowly. ‘Let’s go in.’

  Entering the garden, they went up to and then stood on the steps leading to a once-grand but now sun-bleached front door: hardwood but in desperate need of oiling. At the top of the steps Oliver knocked and then thumped the door.

  No answering sounds from within.

  Suddenly energized, and jumping from the steps, Belle set off at speed, glancing back at him only once. ‘Come on! I’m going to look round the back.’

  He caught up and they ran, side by side, along a pitted gravel path leading right round the house. A dry pond followed its contours, completely choked by weeds, and at the back of the house they found a wide terrace overlooking extensive gardens.

  ‘Dear God,’ she said, stopping and staring at them. ‘It’s a jungle.’

  Oliver was now peering through the one unboarded dusty window. Like the rest, it must have been boarded up too, but somebody had already prised the boards away. ‘We’re not the first, it seems.’

  ‘Can you see anything?’

  ‘Still some furniture inside.’

  She joined him. ‘Surely nobody can be living here?’

  He glanced at her questioningly. ‘I’ll try one of these back doors. Okay?’

  She acquiesced and he went for the larger one and then another smaller one to the side of the building. He turned the handle, but it didn’t budge, so he put his shoulder to the peeling door and gave it a hard push. This time it shifted.

  ‘Not locked,’ he said. ‘Jammed. I think I can free it.’

  She gave him an encouraging smile.

  He pushed several times and eventually the door flew open with a shrill creak.

  ‘Come.’ He held out a hand, but she hung back, pulling a reluctant face.

  ‘There’s nobody here,’ he added. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘It’s not that … I don’t know. I feel as if I’m prying.’ She shrugged and gave him a wry smile.

  ‘Like I said before, we can leave. And it may not have been your parents who last lived here.’

  She shook her head. ‘Something tells me it was.’

  They entered the gloomy room.

  ‘A torch,’ he said, and dipped into his pocket. Suddenly a beam of light lit up a wall of grimy shelves at the back. As he pointed the light towards different parts of the room, Belle gasped. Cobwebs hung in heavy drapes from the ceiling light and darkened the corners too. A few broken chairs rested haphazardly on a rickety table and a heap of rubbish had accumulated on top of them. The tiled floor, blackened with a thick layer of dead insects and dust, needed scrubbing. Old newspapers, odd shoes and some filthy packaging lay abandoned, and the air smelt musty. Dead.

  They wandered through the ground-floor rooms where plants from the exterior had invaded the interior, climbing and winding across the window frames. Exotic bindweed, Belle thought, or at least something that had been able to force its way through the narrowest cracks. So hard to imagine how this place must have looked before. The wooden flooring would have once been polished to a sheen but now they stepped over missing floorboards and had to watch out for the rotten ones. Forgotten furniture lined the walls of the high-ceilinged grand rooms at the front, heavy, difficult-to-shift stuff, so nobody had bothered. Here the windows hadn’t been boarded and they could see that anything portable, like coffee tables or lamps, was gone. They spied more weeds creeping through small cracks in the internal plaster of the stained walls.

  The smell of mildew and decay followed them from room to room and in each one Belle stood sniffing the air. Sad. So inexplicably sad. As soon as she’d realized the house was abandoned, she’d expected a place packed full of secrets which, considering how many years had passed, had been unlikely. But there wasn’t even a hint of the awful tension that must have flooded the place, only a lingering melancholy.

  Oliver had gone ahead but now came bounding back to her full of enthusiasm, and she found herself smiling as he ran a hand through his unruly hair. I can’t help liking him, she thought, whatever Rebecca had said about him being one for the women. He was so alive. Freer, more open than the British colonials with their duty and honour and doing the right thing. For a moment she considered telling him about the anonymous note.

  She glanced around again. It looked as if her parents had left in a hurry. Perhaps they’d had to flee? The thought gave her the shivers.

  ‘All right?’ Oliver said, and she saw that despite his easy-going manner there was a tenderness in his smile.

  They were now standing in the huge entrance hall facing a sweeping staircase.

  ‘Mahogany,’ he said. ‘Awful to see it like this. Shall we go up?’

  She nodded.

  Gingerly they made their way up to a large galleried land
ing with six open doors leading to sunlit rooms.

  ‘This is better,’ she said with a smile.

  In the first room the windows were smeared with grime, but the place was still furnished with a large bed, no mattress, and two heavy-looking wardrobes. Belle imagined one of these rooms must have been her parents’ bedroom. In the second room she saw glass doors opening on to the veranda. Maybe this was the one? She tried the handle and as the door opened with a squeak she stepped out, taking care to avoid holes in the veranda floor. The view was fabulous, and Belle visualized her parents standing in exactly the same spot while gazing out at what had once been their beautiful garden.

  Back inside, Oliver had opened a door at the side of the room. ‘Come and see,’ he said.

  She walked over and stood at the threshold of a small empty room leading to a bathroom. Could this room have been the nursery? There had been no sign of her mother in the house so far, but this? This was different. Here she felt her mother’s presence so strongly it was hard to believe she wasn’t there. There was something about it. Something scented.

  Oliver had opened the fitted cupboard doors but found nothing within except some dried petals and leaves. He crushed them between his fingers and as they crumbled and fell, there was the scent.

  ‘Herbs, I think,’ he said, ‘and roses, maybe.’

  She joined him and surveyed the cupboard.

  ‘What about that?’ She bent down and pulled at the ivory handle of a narrow drawer at the bottom. It appeared to be locked. He took out a pocketknife from his jacket pocket and after a few minutes of jiggling managed to open the drawer. He pulled it partly open.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Let me try. I’ve got smaller hands.’ Belle reached right into the back of the drawer and felt something soft that appeared to have been jammed there. She pulled gently and then more vigorously and brought out what must have once been a baby’s white muslin square, yellowing now, and wrapped around something solid.