Over

by Margaret Forster

  She said he would have been discharged by the doctor tomorrow anyway, so it didn’t really make much difference. I asked if he was well enough to go, and she said yes, but of course he needed to be sensible and eat and drink properly or he’d faint again. He’d been advised to go and see his GP and keep having his blood pressure monitored, and he’d been given a prescription for iron tablets and vitamins to take to the hospital pharmacy. ‘You’ll probably find him at home when you get back,’ the sister said. ‘He’ll have passed you on the way without realising. He should have phoned, shouldn’t he?’ I said yes, he should have, and left, clutching the fruit.

  And now here I am wondering what to do. Writing this down should have cleared my mind, but it doesn’t seem to have done.

  *

  Three days have passed, and no one has heard from Don. We ring him, but his mobile is switched off. We tried to discover his landline number at the address he’d given Finn, but there was none registered. I rang all the North London hospitals, just to check he hadn’t collapsed again and been admitted. There was nothing for it but to go to Green Lanes and find the house or flat or room where he lives, something I didn’t want to do but, as time went on, felt I couldn’t avoid. Finn went with me. I didn’t ask, or expect him to do so, but without making a fuss about it, he volunteered and, since I dreaded what I might find, I let him come.

  The house was at the busiest end of that long, ugly road. To the left of the battered-looking front door – by the look of the bottom panels, which were splintered, it had been kicked repeatedly – there was a row of bell pushes, eight of them, each with a name alongside it. Don’s was not one of them. But three of the names had been crossed out, so I assumed he hadn’t bothered to put his name on whichever was his bell. He wouldn’t have anticipated visitors, or wanted them – it would have suited him to be unnamed. Finn and I wondered what to do, which bell to ring first in the hope that we would hit lucky and it would be Don’s, but as we were deliberating the front door opened and a tall, bearded, wild-looking man came out. He was as startled as we were. We stood back as he hesitated, pulling the door behind him. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘but do you know if Don Roscoe lives here? Which is his bell?’ He shook his head and said, ‘No, no,’ repeatedly, then made a run for it, his long coat flapping in the wind.

  It was such a lost opportunity. We cursed ourselves for not being quick enough actually to get into the house when the door had opened. It was no good just standing there, so I pressed the first of the bells which had a crossed-out name beside it. We couldn’t hear if it was ringing or not – maybe none of these bells worked. I rang again, hard, then after what I thought a long enough wait I rang the next one. Immediately, a window opened on the top floor and a woman stuck her head out and yelled, ‘What? What?’ ‘I’ve come to visit Don Roscoe,’ I shouted back. ‘Do you know which is his bell?’ ‘Never heard of him, and I was asleep, get it? Asleep!’ I apologised and began to describe Don, but she had slammed the window shut again and, presumably, gone back to bed, though it was four in the afternoon.

  The last crossed-out name was at the very bottom. Finn pointed out that this probably meant it belonged to a ground-floor room and that we might be able to peer through the window and maybe we’d spot some sign that it was Don’s. I rang the bell just in case. There was no response. Both ground-floor windows had dirty-looking net curtains across them, and one had heavy curtains, almost closed, over them. These windows were quite high up, for ground-floor windows, and Finn looked around for something to stand on. He was just carrying over an empty dustbin when a postman arrived, a young man dragging a trolley on wheels full of post. ‘Breaking and entering, eh?’ he said, very cheerfully, and then ‘Forgotten your key?’ I nodded, not sure what to say. He was sorting out letters. They all looked like bills, except for one, which I could see had a foreign stamp. Finn nudged me – he’d seen what I’d seen – and I said quickly, ‘That’s my husband’s.’ He gave it to me without a second thought – looking such a respectable middle-aged woman has its advantages. He shouldn’t have given me Don’s letter of course. I imagined it might get him into serious trouble, but no one need find out. The address of the sender was on the back. I recognised it. It was from Holland, where else. I put it in my pocket. It would keep.

  Meanwhile, Finn was standing on the upturned dustbin and peering into the window to the left of the door. He reported that the room was empty. We’d definitely heard the sound of the bell coming from there so if it was Don’s room, and if it was empty … well, that was good.

  ‘Good,’ I said aloud.

  ‘Why?’ asked Finn.

  ‘Means he hasn’t collapsed again on the floor,’ I said, quickly.

  ‘He might have collapsed somewhere else. That would be worse,’ Finn said, getting down.

  ‘If he has, someone will call an ambulance and he’ll turn up in some hospital again. But he hasn’t so far, or we’d know. I’ve rung the North London hospitals already.’

  ‘What are we going to do now, then?’

  ‘Go home.’

  And here I am, still endlessly trying Don’s mobile, still waiting for him to contact one of us, still with the letter in my pocket.

  *

  I should tell Molly. It isn’t right to keep her in the dark, but I so hate worrying her. What can I tell her? That her father fell – fainted – in the street, spent a night in hospital, discharged himself and then disappeared? What would be the good, when she is so far away? And she sounds so happy and busy, her e-mails and text messages full of detail about what she’s doing. ‘Don’t tell her,’ Finn said, ‘it’s pointless.’ I think he’s right.

  *

  The class has quietened down, thank God. We had a good day today. It was Parveen’s birthday and her father has come from Iran, where she was born. He looks emaciated, with long hair and beard, a hollow-eyed, suffering appearance. Naomi, Parveen’s mother, carefully following what she’s seen is the custom among the mothers in our class, brought in a cake, definitely home-made, which I cut up and we all had a piece. It was an odd-tasting cake – ‘Yuk!’ said Paige, and spat it out – made, I guessed, with some kind of strongly scented honey. Parveen is proud of her father having come. ‘I have a father,’ she told me, ‘see?’ and she pointed at him as he waited at the door. ‘He don’t live with you,’ Paige said, accusingly. ‘My dad lives with me, all the time. That’s what dads do.’ ‘Not all dads, Paige,’ I said. ‘Every family is different.’ He was quite a striking man, a powerful presence, even though so frighteningly thin. I could see Parveen was shy with him. He stood at the open door and held out a hand, but didn’t smile, or bend down to her level. His eyes met mine over her head. ‘She has been good?’ he asked. ‘No trouble?’ I laughed, and said Parveen was never any trouble, her behaviour was impeccable, she was a pleasure to have in the class. ‘And me,’ Paige said, still at my side, but I ignored her. ‘I am Zahid,’ he said, ‘her father.’ I said I was pleased to have met him, and off they went, Parveen holding his hand. I watched them from the window as they crossed the playground. He did not speak to her, or look at her, just held her hand and walked with his head in the air like a kind of God.

  It worried me. I wonder if anything will emerge in Parveen’s behaviour to indicate how important her father is to her, or what his visit has meant to her. It’s always easy to see how important mothers are to my pupils, but often harder to calculate the influence of their fathers.

  *

  Judith thinks that we should inform the police of Don’s disappearance. Four days without any of us hearing from him, and with no reply from his mobile, is too long. Is it? I don’t know. I pointed out to her that more than four days have often passed without any of us being in touch with Don. These long breaks in communication are part of a fairly regular pattern lately. But it’s true, as Judith pointed out, that he hasn’t been ill before. We haven’t in the past been worried about him collapsing. I said I thought we should wait a little longer before going to the p
olice. Don could be abroad, on ‘investigations’.

  I’d thought, just briefly, that when Finn and I went to Green Lanes we might find that Don had … well, I don’t like writing down my morbid fear. Afterwards, it had seemed something that he might end up doing, so extreme was his grief, but rage and his quest for justice (as he thought of it) kept him from doing anything silly. Silly? It wouldn’t have been silly. It would have been tragic, compounding the tragedy we were already suffering. He did, though, about six months afterwards, say one night that he couldn’t go on, there was no point. I thought he meant go on with his investigations and it was a relief to hear him say this. But that wasn’t at all what he meant, though it took me a while to register this. When I did – he said he just wanted to ‘have done’ with everything – I was appalled.

  There has always been this streak in Don, this melancholic undertone to his apparently gentle, cheerful nature. Very few people glimpse it. I’m quite sure that no one at work ever suspected it existed. It would overwhelm him sometimes, what he called the hopelessness of life, and he had to struggle to control his gloom. If he had been a woman, I’m sure hormones would have been blamed, but as it was it seemed a mystery. They didn’t last long, these moods, though they were more than mere moods – a couple of days, and then he’d be back to normal. I learned how to deal with them. Oddly enough, distraction was not the key, that was my mistake in the early years of our marriage, believing that he needed to be jollied out of his depression. He didn’t. He needed the opposite, the seclusion I’d thought the worst possible thing. Sometimes it meant letting him stay in bed. I’d phone the office and say he had a stomach bug, or flu, or something, and I’d tell the children the same. Everyone accepted this. He always looked convincingly pale and shaken when he emerged, seemingly confirming the truthfulness of my explanation.

  Judith told me he had had what her mother had called these ‘turns’ as a boy. They started when he was twelve. He wouldn’t go to school, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t speak, but because he was back to his usual cheerful self so quickly, within a day or two, no doctor was ever consulted. Their mother thought he was just being a sulky teenager and that he’d grow out of it which, since he learned how to conceal his ‘turns’ from her, she always believed he had done. Judith herself thought that marrying me had ‘cured’ him, but she was quick to see through my protective lies when I had to tell them. She challenged me once when I said we couldn’t come to supper after all because Don had a chest infection and had to stay in bed. ‘What does the doctor say?’ she asked me, and when I hesitated, she said, ‘It’s one of his old turns, isn’t it?’ There wasn’t much point in saying no.

  Don always worried that one of our children would inherit his depressive tendency but none of them have done so, though for a year or two it did look as if Miranda might. She was very moody and easily upset around puberty, but then lots of girls are, and I reassured Don her behaviour was quite normal. He watched her anxiously, though, whereas Molly never came under such close scrutiny. I did sometimes wonder if Don’s reaction to Miranda’s death was stronger than it would have been to Molly’s or Finn’s. It was unfair, but I couldn’t help this suspicion that it was because it was Miranda, his favourite, who had died that he wanted to die too. Parents are not supposed to have favourites among their children, or at least not to acknowledge that they have, but Don admitted it, though only to me. He put it rather well. He said he loved them all equally, but that he identified most with Miranda because she seemed like him. I’m not sure that this was really true, but Don believed it was. Life without Miranda became simply less precious to Don.

  But, of course, part of the reason why I was so shocked by what Don had said was because I had been tempted myself. Not seriously – I assured myself I had never seriously allowed myself to have this appalling thought – but it had floated before me in the middle of many a miserable night. Just to have done with this anguish, that was all. To stop the pain, the endless suffering and distress. I never imagined actually doing it, killing myself. I never contemplated how I might do it. It was more that I imagined sleep, a real, deep, everlasting sleep, then a blankness – how beautiful it would be. I never thought of this as a way of joining Miranda – nothing like that. But then always I saw Molly’s and Finn’s faces and was ashamed and angry with myself. All that guilty anger went into attacking Don when he spoke of what I had kept silent about.

  I remember trembling as I sat up in bed and put the bedside light on. I couldn’t go on lying beside him. I got out of bed and went round to his side and looked down at him lying there, his eyes closed, his arms behind his head. ‘Look at me,’ I ordered him. ‘Look at me, Don, look at me!’ He didn’t open his eyes and I reached out and struck his shoulder and repeated my words. He sighed and turned his head away but opened his eyes. I forced his head back towards me and held his face in my hands. I was weeping by then, but his eyes had no tears in them. They were tired eyes, red-rimmed, frighteningly without expression. ‘Never,’ I said, ‘never, never do this to us, never!’ He closed his eyes again and sighed, and I let go. I stood for a while, shivering, half with cold, half with fear, and then I tamely got back into bed and curled up on my side and tried to sleep.

  This was at the most dangerous time, six months afterwards. Everything was black to him, no glimmer of light anywhere. I don’t flatter myself that I prevented him from doing anything dramatic. No, it was shame did that. The next morning, I could see he was ashamed. It happened to be a frosty, sparkling January morning. I got up, aching all over after my sleepless night, most of which I’d spent weeping in a particularly weak way, the tears just endlessly, silently flowing, and as I opened the curtains the sun lit the frosted garden and I said out loud, ‘Oh, look! How lovely!’ Don came up behind me, and put his hands on my shoulders, and looked. The leafless trees were glittering with a fine powdering of snow which had set hard and was now caught by the sun, and all the shrubs were wrapped in thick white canopies making them bow to the ground. The bird house had icicles hanging from its roof and on the frozen water in the bird bath a leaf lay caught at the edge by the ice, half-submerged, half free. The holly tree was heavy with berries still and the red stood out, clusters of colour contrasting with the purity of all the white. But most beautiful of all was the lawn, an unbroken, unmarked white, sweeping its way between the brick walls to end in a great bank of snow on the little hill at the bottom where the gate leads into the tennis courts. Everything was serene, innocent. Or so it seemed.

  We didn’t speak of what he had told me. I was determined not to speak to him at all until he gave me some sign that he realised how unforgivable his confession had been. I think I was frightened that morning, of what he might really do. I wanted to break down myself and say I couldn’t go on, but there was Finn to think of, wanting to know if I knew where his bus pass was, and my own things to get ready for school, and the humdrum nature of the morning rituals carried me along. But before he left for work, Don paused at the door and said, ‘I wasn’t feeling so well, I’ll be fine now.’ ‘Stomach bug?’ I said. His smile was feeble, but at least it was attempted. ‘Stomach bug,’ he said.

  *

  I told Ruth about Don disappearing, the first person I have told. She rang to see how I enjoyed my holiday with Lynne, and I told her. ‘Poor man,’ she said. That slightly annoyed me, but I managed to agree, if a bit half-heartedly. I told her Don had lost his job too. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’s very bad news.’ It was at least easy genuinely to agree with that. ‘So,’ said Ruth, ‘he’s wandering round somewhere with no job and in a weakened state and not answering phone calls … It’s serious, Lou. You’ll have to do something. His sister’s right.’ I said I knew that, but going to the police seems so drastic. ‘You just report him as a missing person, that’s all,’ said Ruth. ‘You never know, he may just have lost his memory.’

  I wanted to say that Don had been a missing person for a long time now, ‘missing’ even when with me. And as for loss of memory, he
suffered from the opposite. His memory was acute. It tormented him. He thought only of Miranda and her death and his investigations. There was no room for anything else in his memory.

  *

  I opened the letter to Don. It was wrong of me, but I excused myself on the grounds that it might tell me where he had got to. I didn’t try to open it so that it could be sealed up again – no, I ripped it open. It was a very short letter, merely thanking him for his latest letter and saying that it was being dealt with and had been put on file with the others. He would, as ever, be informed of the outcome of their enquiries into the particular matter in due course.

  He has scores of such letters from a wide variety of people. Each time a letter with that foreign postmark arrived his face would first light up with hope and then darken, after he’d read it, with disappointment. I grew to hate the post arriving and learned to absent myself after it had. His silence always told me everything.

  *

  I stopped reading newspapers, afterwards. We still had them delivered but I never even turned the pages. But somebody must have done. They got lifted up from the mat behind the front door and later I’d find them in the recycling box. For a long time, I didn’t watch the news on television either but sometimes I heard it on the radio, which I listened to a lot – radio seemed so much less demanding than television. I’d catch items which, at one time, would have shocked me, and had me aching with sympathy for the people involved. Boys swept out to sea, I heard once, while fishing from rocks, and not seen since; a British teenager drowned trying to cross a stream, swollen by flash floods, somewhere on the Aegean coast; a young sportsman, at the beginning of a great football career, smashed to pieces in a horrific car accident. I felt nothing that first year afterwards. Nothing.