The Daughter

by Jane Shemilt

  When I go in with my heavy bags, there is a tree in the hall entwined with silver-­sprayed ivy. Its base is buried in a bucket, wedged in with pebbles from the beach. There are lit candles on the windowsill nearby, in little glass holders. Sophie must have brought them.

  Ed has left a note on the kitchen table.

  Someone called Dan left the tree. Soph decorated it. Gone to pub.

  E and S

  The glow of candles on ivy is silvery soft. I’m still standing there, breathing in the green Christmas tree smell, when a low car glides quietly past the window on the snowy road, and turns into the driveway. The front door flings open and Theo is there, taller, broader, tanned. I want to weep with relief. As he bends to hug me hard, he smells different, something bitter and expensive. The warmth dissolves some of the hurt from the morning. He pulls back, turning aside.

  “Mum, this is Sam.”

  Sam looks older than Theo, taller, more wiry. He looks different from his photo; perhaps it’s the beard. The brown eyes behind his glasses are watchful.

  “Hello, Sam.”

  We embrace, awkwardly. Two kisses, one on each cheek, which always catches me out. He gives me a bunch of flowers with a practiced little bow. Theo chats about the journey, his recent exhibition, what it feels like to be here at the cottage. He has acquired a trace of an American accent. I stand close to him, listening to his voice rather than his words, then I pull myself together.

  “You must be starving.”

  There is the slightest pause.

  “Not really.” Theo gives me a quick hug. “Don’t be cross. We stopped for lunch at the Beach Hut.”

  “But you were so near home.”

  “We didn’t want to trouble you,” Sam answers smoothly.

  Did he need to get up courage before he met me? Does he want to show his power, that he can hold Theo back from us for as long as he wants? My mind touches these thoughts fleetingly.

  “Well, you’re here now, which is wonderful. You must be tired.”

  “I want to show Sam around. Which room?”

  “Ed and Sophie are in his old room, but yours is tiny; you could have Dad’s and mine?”

  “Don’t be silly. We’ll manage with mine. I don’t take up much space.”

  I sense Sam’s eyes on mine, gauging my reaction.

  “Fine by me.”

  “Thanks, Mum. Where is Ed?”

  “Gone to the pub with Sophie.”

  “Sophie. Gosh, all these changes.”

  “Good changes,” said Sam.

  Bertie appears, disturbed from his sleep by our voices, and runs to Theo, his tail wagging furiously.

  “Is this Bertie?” Sam sounds surprised. “He’s older than I thought.”

  “Bertie!” Theo kneels to hug Bertie. He looks up at Sam. “How dare you, he’s not old!”

  He is old, though. Theo noticed it too.

  “When’s Dad home?”

  I slip the cell phone out of my pocket, glance at it briefly. Still no text from Ted.

  “Tomorrow.”

  They go to unpack and then take Bertie with them to look for Ed and Sophie. I put my old blue apron on; there are fish to slice and poach waiting in the fridge with the gleaming gray shells of prawns. I start to chop celery with onions and garlic, then turn on the radio for the carols. The familiar music fills my mind and the guilt and regret recede a little.

  There’s a knock at the door. I rinse my hands quickly, then walk to open it, my eyes streaming from the onions. It must be Ted, and he’s lost his key. I feel slightly sick with anticipation, at the same time annoyed he will see me red-­eyed, smelling of onions. I wipe my hands on the apron and open the door.

  For a moment there is nothing to see in the dark, and then Dan steps forward into the semicircle of light. His face looks thinner than usual, sculptural in the shadow of his hood. There are deep hollows around his eyes. Without thinking I step forward and kiss him. He flushes darkly.

  “Thank you for the tree. It’s lovely.” I try to cover his embarrassment with my words. “Sophie decorated it—­she’s Ed’s friend. They arrived yesterday.”

  “Why are you crying?” he asks abruptly.

  “I’m not crying. It’s the onions—­I’m cooking supper. Come in. Have it with us.”

  “No, I . . . Thanks for the drawing.”

  He looks at me intently, and then he turns and is gone. Shoulders hunched, sad and angry at the same time. He’s escaping the family Christmas and has come looking for something. I feel I have failed him.

  I stir the onions again, add the fish and stock, saffron, wine. The phone buzzes a message in my pocket. I wipe my hands and take it out.

  Unable to make Xmas. Hope New Year. T

  Not sorry. No love. No message for Ed or Theo. I had promised myself that I would never again allow him to surprise me with hurt. Unable to make Xmas. If his plane has been canceled, why not explain? I put my phone down without texting back. Over the last year I had worked it so that what Ted did wasn’t important, and by now I thought I had made it true.

  BRISTOL, 2009

  SIX DAYS AFTER

  Ted’s infidelity wasn’t the issue. We would deal with it afterward, when we had time. It wouldn’t hurt then.

  I told myself that I was good at this. I prioritize all the time.

  Ted phoned from the police station later in the morning.

  “I told them,” he said briefly. “It wasn’t too complicated after all.”

  Perhaps they had been complicit at the police station. It’s a male thing, infidelity, they might have said to themselves; they probably thought that it didn’t really matter.

  When Ted reappeared in the kitchen, he looked better. There was even a glimmer of pleasedness about him, like a little boy who has done wrong but discovers he might get away with it. In another life I could have replayed back to him the practiced excuse of being at the hospital he had given me the night she disappeared, but I already felt we were very far from where I thought we had been then and there seemed no point. I was curious, though.

  “How come they believed you?”

  “They asked Beth to come in and . . .”

  “And?”

  “They phoned the restaurant where we tried to get a meal. They remembered telling us they were closed.”

  We. Us. I stood there, the words echoing in my mind as Ted watched me silently. I couldn’t let this matter. I wouldn’t allow it to get in the way.

  “I’ve made a list of what we need to do,” I said briefly.

  Ted looked away. “It was unimportant, Jenny. I was tired and drunk. A stupid lapse. It couldn’t matter less.”

  A lapse. Not a betrayal or a lie. After twenty years there were layers of how it mattered, but if I let go of where I was, I could get sucked into depths of minding.

  “I don’t want to talk about any of it now,” I said.

  “We can’t just pretend it didn’t happen.” His eyes looked puzzled.

  “That’s exactly what I’m going to do for now. When we find Naomi, we’ll deal with this.”

  “You don’t care if I was unfaithful?” He sounded incredulous.

  “What do you want, Ted? A scene?”

  “Well, it would be a natural kind of . . .” He didn’t know how to finish.

  “I’m not doing it. There isn’t time.”

  Something flickered at the back of his eyes. Disappointment? Triumph? Then he shrugged and spoke quickly. “You’re right. We’re losing time. What’s on the agenda today?”

  “Miss Wenham.”

  “Miss Wenham?”

  “The headmistress. We have an appointment at midday.”

  “Damn. I delayed my clinic to start at noon because I had to go to the police station.” He pulled his mouth down and spread his hands wide. Helpless
.

  Let it go. I can do it.

  “It doesn’t need both of us,” I said. “I want to see if anyone at school has thought of anything since they saw the police. Then I’ve made five hundred copies of her school photo with information about when she was last seen.”

  “I thought the police had done that.” He frowned as if he had missed something. “There’s one on the lamppost outside; the school must have lots, of course.”

  “It’s not for around here,” I said. “I’m going everywhere in Bristol—­clubs, pubs, railway station, bus station. Anywhere there’s a space, I’m going to put them up.” I was walking around the room as I spoke, collecting the file of pictures, Blu Tack, thumbtacks, hammer, nails.

  “I could help this evening; perhaps I could get off later this afternoon.”

  I found it difficult to look at him.

  “Michael will come with me.”

  “What do you think we should say to the boys?”

  “Nothing.”

  He looked relieved. “Really?”

  “They’ve got enough to deal with. You said it yourself; nothing important happened.”

  TED LEFT AND I had a bath. As I lay in the water, my body soothed by its warmth, unbearable images began to push themselves into my mind. Naomi dirty and longing for the comfort of a bath, her torn body crusted with dirt or, worse, covered with it. Soil in her ears and mouth. If she was dead, would her eyes be open? Would her mouth? I got quickly out of the bath, toweling myself dry fiercely. Think of something else, anything. Anything hopeful. The boys are coping. Jade is getting better. Survive, I told the white face in the mirror. Think of Naomi’s smiling face as it was after the play, when Ted hugged her. It wasn’t possible that I wouldn’t see her again. “Survive till then,” I whispered, but I wasn’t sure whether I was talking to Naomi or myself.

  I didn’t bother with a coat, though it was a cold gray late November day. Outside the front door a weary-­looking man in his forties pushed himself away from the garden wall, notebook in hand, a careful look of sympathy on his pudgy face. He started taking photos when it was obvious I wouldn’t reply to his questions. I turned away and began to hurry down the road; for a while I could hear him puffing after me. The school was only five minutes’ walk away. She had done this hundreds of times. Had she been watched in the last few weeks? Even as she was making a new relationship, was someone else tracking her, working out the times she came and went and when she was likely to be on her own?

  Miss Wenham was in her study. A bulky woman in her fifties, she stood up to greet me. Her appearance never changed; speech day or sports day, the iron-­gray hair was always neatly curled. She shook my hand.

  “Dr. Malcolm, I’m so terribly sorry. Such an anxious time. We as a school are doing everything we can to cooperate with the investigation.” As we sat down, her glance was searching. Not unkind, just curious.

  “Thanks. I just wanted to see you in case something had occurred to any of the staff, or perhaps”—­I could already see that she had nothing new to tell me, and I felt an overwhelming tiredness so that I could hardly finish my sentence—­“perhaps one of the children might know something and have told you since the police came, or . . .” It was pointless.

  She shook her head. “The police have been here three times now.” She went on: “However, Mrs. Andrews is Naomi’s homeroom teacher. She wanted to talk to you.”

  She gestured toward a chair. A pale young woman I hadn’t noticed until then stood up and walked forward to meet me.

  “Hello, Dr. Malcolm. I’m Sally Andrews.”

  Her hair had slipped from a clasp at the side of her head and was falling into her eyes. She took my hand in a weak grip and smiled awkwardly. “I’m very sorry for what’s happened.” She flushed. “I’ve been trying to think, since the police came. They said to say if anything out of the ordinary struck us. Last night it came to me. There had been something different about Naomi.” She sat down next to me on the sofa.

  “What do you mean, different?” I asked her, more sharply than I meant to.

  “For about two months she was a bit dreamy. I thought she was under the weather, actually. But she said she felt fine.”

  I was silent. Sally Andrews had noticed her pregnancy, though she hadn’t realized it. I was no further forward.

  She was carrying on: “I wasn’t worried about the dreaminess really, but she asked me something about leaving school, which struck me as odd at the time.” She swallowed. “She wanted to know if she could come back and finish her exams if she left early.”

  “Early?”

  “I thought she must mean if she left after the standard tests. She might have wanted to take a breather then. Some girls do, and then they come back for final exams afterward. But last night I was in my bath when they were talking about Naomi on the radio again.”

  I imagined her slender body floating in the bath, hair in a bath cap, while her husband padded in and out.

  “It came to me then that it was almost as if she’d known she would be leaving before the tests next summer. It’s just one of those funny coincidences, I expect, but when I heard you were coming today, I thought I must tell you what she’d said. In case.” She stopped talking; her cheeks looked pink.

  After I had shaken her hand again and thanked both of them, I left. On the way home I felt like running. Perhaps Naomi had planned this, after all; she might have collected money over weeks, and worked out what to do about the exams she would be missing. If she had left on purpose, it changed everything. She would be all right. She would come back.

  WHEN MICHAEL CAME to collect me, he looked surprised to see me ready in the kitchen, makeup on and the wad of photocopies in my hand.

  “All set?” he asked.

  I nodded and we left together. There was no trace of awkwardness as he opened the car door for me; he had obviously put that kiss aside easily. Could it be because he had done it before and he knew how to behave as if nothing had happened?

  I told him what Sally Andrews had said. I could see him carefully judging the significance of her words.

  “Naomi was pregnant,” he said. “She was thinking ahead. The baby would have meant time off and possibly missing the standard tests. I expect she wanted to know if she could take the exams later.”

  The hope I had felt started to drain away.

  “She doesn’t sound like the sort of girl who would cause her parents so much suffering. If this was planned, she would have let you know by now.” He glanced over at me. “Sorry, Jenny.”

  Would she, though? The streets slid by the car windows, full of ­people who weren’t Naomi. As I watched them walking along the sidewalks, alive and unhindered, I realized I hadn’t just lost her; perhaps I had lost her long before she disappeared and I had no idea who she was anymore.

  Chapter 21

  DORSET, 2010

  THIRTEEN MONTHS LATER

  Unto us a child is born.

  Unto us a son is given . . .

  The joyful morning voices escape through gray stone and stained glass, floating out over lichen-­covered graves. Strange how everyone is so glad that Jesus was born when they know how the story ends. Surely they realize that if the girl in the stable had been told what would happen to her baby, she would have been heartbroken.

  Naomi’s birth by Caesarean had been so easy compared with the physical anguish of pushing out the boys; it had felt like cheating. She was lifted out and given to me to hold, blood-­wet and burning against my skin. She had stared calmly into my face, her dark blue eyes serious, as if she recognized me. I didn’t want to let her go, but they wrapped her up and Ted held her in the hot peace of the delivery room while I was being stitched. They had looked totally absorbed in each other.

  Bertie sniffs at the church wall and cocks his leg. He trundles off down the bridle path with his head close to the ground. I f
ollow, trying to keep up; waiting for the children to come back from the pub last night, I’d fallen asleep in the chair, so I woke feeling stiff and my pace is slow. The bridle path leads us down to the beach. The story in the village is that this little track is an ancient smugglers’ way. At night, some in the village say, you can hear the crunch of booted feet on stone and horses whinnying, the echoes of oaths and the rumble of carts bearing caskets of rum. This morning there is only the delicate crack of ice below the snow under our feet. A male pheasant startles up from the hedge with his hollow rasping cry of alarm. Handel’s music fades behind us as I follow Bertie farther down the bridle path.

  We have come out onto the shingle; the sea churns with yellow foam. No one else is on the beach. As the sun rises, points of light shift and shine on the water; if I half close my eyes, I can almost make them like the city lights, which had seemed lit more brightly for Naomi’s first night. The bereavement counselor had said to leave some memories as if wrapped in tissue paper, for when I felt strong enough. I feel strong enough now. I remember the city landscape had spread out like a shining canvas in front of me. From where I had stood in front of the window in the hospital, even at midnight it dazzled with light, magical and mysterious. I knew that the roads were thudding with traffic and there would be vomit on the pavement, pigeon shit, and blown rubbish. But, from the distance of the fourth-­floor maternity unit, the streets had looked immaculate and celebratory. In the distance, Clifton Suspension Bridge blazed with lights, like birthday candles in a dark room. Her head was waxy under my lips, her hair like damp feathers. I had sat on a chair near the window, wincing as the catgut stitches dug into tender flesh. Naomi had stirred and whimpered. I had guided her head carefully, pushing in the nipple. As I fed her, I’d felt as connected to her as if she was still inside me. Ted had gone home to sleep. I imagined him facedown, head turned to my side of the bed, arm over my pillow. He would be peacefully snoring, and I remember smiling as I cradled her over my shoulder, her warmth reaching into my heart.