by Helen Grant
I was silent for a little while. I stared at the picture with a strange mixture of emotions. I supposed this was good news. My father could not contact me; he could not try to claim me in any way. My mother had escaped him too. It was not as though Grandmother had brought me up to honour him; quite the opposite – she had seemed to shudder at the thought of him. But all the same: my father was dead. That was a very grave thing.
All the same, the fact that he had had to be declared dead in the way Tom had described bothered me. They’re declared dead, because they probably are, that was how Tom had put it. That word probably was an uncomfortable one; it meant there was a chance, however tiny, that the person wasn’t dead at all. If I had known my father, and loved him dearly, that might have been a comforting idea; I might have imagined him living a different life, in some far-off place. As it was, my father was a bogeyman, a threat hanging over my head. It made me uneasy to think that there was the slightest possibility that he might reappear. It wasn’t as though I would even recognise him if he did. He could be anywhere; he could be anyone.
I shivered, and Tom put an arm around me.
“I’m sorry. I sprang that on you. I didn’t think.”
I shook my head. “It’s not that. I just feel strange about him disappearing. It would be easier in a way if I knew he was really dead.”
“He is really dead,” said Tom firmly. “The court says so. His own brother says so. Anyway, look at the date of the article. That was 2007. Ten years ago. He’d been gone for seven years before they declared him dead, and there’ve been ten more years since then. If he was coming back, he’d have done it by now.”
I still stumbled sometimes trying to orient myself in 2017, otherwise I might have seen it more quickly. As it was, it took me a few moments to realise what Tom was saying.
2007. And he’d been gone for seven years.
“So,” I said slowly, “He disappeared in 2000.” I twisted in Tom’s embrace so that I could look up into his face. “When I was a baby. If my father vanished back then, why did Grandmother ever start lying to me?”
I saw the shock seep into Tom’s expression. His eyes widened, and for a moment he said nothing at all. Then he said, “Shit,” which I knew by now to be a bad word. We stared at each other.
I can’t bear it, I thought, remembering how I had hated Grandmother for what she had done, all the while I was mourning for her. I didn’t want to be dragged back into that maelstrom of misery and resentment. There had to be a reason for this, and I had to find it.
“Maybe she didn’t know,” I said at last, dismayed at the pleading tone in my own voice. “She never brought any newspapers home and we don’t even have a radio. How would she have found out he’d disappeared?” I studied Tom’s serious face and thought that I saw doubt there. “She hardly talked to people in the town,” I said. “We were hiding. Even Dr. Robertson said they hardly ever spoke, and he was the one who helped her when I was born.” Something else occurred to me. “Dr. Robertson didn’t know my father had vanished. He talked about him as though he was still alive. He said he was a very rich man. You wouldn’t say that about someone if you knew they had been dead for over ten years. If Dr. Robertson didn’t know, why should Grandmother?”
Tom was shaking his head. “It doesn’t make sense though. Wouldn’t she have tried to find out what he was doing – like whether he was looking for you and your mum? I mean, deciding to hide you for eighteen years in a place like Langlands, without any electricity or even a phone, keeping all those lies going all that time, that’s an extreme thing to do. Nobody would do that unless they were a hundred per cent sure there was no other option. Probably not even then. I mean, it’s insane...” Tom’s voice trailed off.
“She wasn’t mad,” I said stubbornly.
“I didn’t really mean that,” said Tom. “I just think she would have tried to find out. Anyone would have. And with a name like your dad’s, it wouldn’t be that difficult. I mean, look, it took me one evening to find that article.”
“Where did you look?”
Tom shrugged. “Online.”
“Well, Grandmother didn’t know anything about looking online,” I pointed out.
“She could have asked someone else to do it. The library has internet access. The staff would have helped her.”
“But then they’d have known what she was looking for,” I said. “She was so careful, Tom. I don’t think she would have risked asking a stranger to help.”
Tom sighed. “But – eighteen years? Even if she didn’t dare try to find out at the beginning, you’d think she’d have tried later on, when your dad would probably have stopped looking for you and your mum.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think she did.”
After that, we both looked at the papers laid out on the table in silence for a little while. I didn’t want to argue with Tom about Grandmother; it gave me a horrible feeling inside, as though there was a hard knot inside my chest, being pulled tighter and tighter until I could barely breathe. I knew that there was sense in what he was saying, but if I accepted it I would be back where I had been before I talked to Dr. Robertson: wondering whether Grandmother had had any good reason at all for what she had done to me – wondering whether mad was exactly what she was.
The other papers weren’t as interesting as the one about my father being declared dead. One of them seemed to be about the brother called Jacob. My uncle, I thought. The idea was almost shocking. I had living relatives; if my father’s brother were married, I might even have cousins. The text didn’t say anything about that, though.
Tom saw me perusing it and laid a finger on the paper. “It says Jacob started up a new business in 2008. Maybe that had something to do with declaring your dad dead – he probably wanted to wind up the old one or something. Maybe he inherited from your dad.”
None of that meant anything to me. “There’s nothing here about my mother,” I said, leaning over the papers.
“I’ll keep looking,” said Tom. “Dr. Robertson said she went abroad, right?”
I nodded.
“Well, even if that’s true, it still shouldn’t be a problem, if she has any kind of online presence as Elspeth McAndrew. If she’s changed her name, though, that could be a lot harder.”
“It sounds impossible,” I said, beginning to feel really dispirited.
Tom considered. “Do you know what your gran’s name was before she got married? If your mum’s changed her name, she might be using a family one.”
“Do you think so?”
“It’s somewhere to start.”
“I can’t remember what it was,” I said, “But there might be something in the safe with it on. I think her marriage certificate was in there.”
The passage to the hallway was very dark when we passed through it. In overcast weather, the interior of Langlands was always very gloomy. I could hear the wind rattling the window frames, and the unmistakable sound of water gushing from a broken gutter, spattering onto the gravel outside the house. Moving confidently ahead of me, Tom seemed startlingly vital amid the dust and decay, like the single living creature in a world of ghosts and shadows.
In the library, I went to the windows and pushed back the heavy velvet curtains to let in as much of the dull grey light as possible. The fabric felt threadbare in my hands, and I felt a strange sagginess to one of the curtains. I looked up and saw that part of it had come away from the brass curtain rings altogether. Was it my imagination, or had the condition of the house worsened in the time since Grandmother had vanished?
Perhaps, I thought, I’m simply noticing it more.
I opened the safe and the two of us began to lift out the contents. Tom seemed reluctant to handle the blocks of banknotes. He piled them up carelessly on the floor, as though too lengthy contact between the notes and his fingers would somehow contaminate them.
I f
ound the marriage certificate fairly quickly.
“Hepburn,” I said, showing Tom the name spelled out in faded ink.
“Okay. I’ll try searching for that.”
We sat back on our heels, contemplating the papers scattered all over the floor.
“There were letters,” I said. “I remember seeing them before. I didn’t read them all because I didn’t know who the people who wrote them were.” I began sorting through the heaped documents. “I read one or two and they were pretty boring. But I think some of them had foreign stamps on, and Dr. Robertson did say my mother was abroad.”
“Could any of the names have been Hepburn?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so, but I’m not sure.”
“Well, let’s look anyway.”
Tom fished out an envelope bordered with red and blue stripes. “Was this one of them?” He drew out the letter, and turned it over, the paper crackling in his hands. “It’s signed Marion. And... it’s dated 1985.” He read a few lines, his brows drawing together in a frown as he struggled to read the handwriting. “And you’re right, it’s boring.” He stuffed the letter back into the envelope.
I picked up a little bundle of letters fastened together with a fraying ribbon. It took me a while to unpick the double bow that secured them. These letters weren’t in envelopes, and although I riffled through them, looking at each one in turn, there was no address written at the top of any of them, and no year given in any of the dates, simply a month and day. They could have been written last year, or thirty years ago.
Out of time, I thought. Like me.
I was aware of a little prickle of excitement. I turned over the topmost letter and read the name Edith written at the bottom. That gave me a momentary pang of disappointment, but after all, anyone could sign any name they liked; it didn’t prove the letters weren’t from my mother. I turned over the whole stack and leafed through them again; all had the same signature.
“Tom,” I said, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice. “Look at these.”
I split the letters between us, and for a few minutes we both read in silence. Dear Rose, each of them began, and each of them ended with Best wishes, Edith. If I had been able to send and receive messages to my mother, I would not have been so formal. But perhaps that was on purpose; letters like these could not incriminate anyone, nor reveal their whereabouts. The contents were dull, too; the writer reported that she was well, and asked after Rose’s health, and described excursions into ‘the town’ without ever naming it. Either ‘Edith’ was a very dull person indeed, or else she was deliberately keeping her communications safe. It was very hard to decide which, except that there were a very few lines that made me think that there was more to the letters than there seemed to be; there was something under the mundane surface, barely glimpsed, like a muculent creature moving beneath the smooth glassy waters of a pond.
Please write again soon; I’m dying for more news, I read at the end of one of the letters. Dying was underlined with a brisk slash of ink.
That’s what I would say if I was desperate to know about someone I loved, I thought. The thin paper trembled in the grip of my fingers. Suddenly I was aware of the racing of my heart.
In a different letter, the writer said, You asked how I am coping. As well as can be expected, is all I can say. The past is better left buried, I think.
That was at the bottom of a page; I turned it over eagerly but there was nothing else in the same vein. ‘Edith’ had dropped the subject there, moving back onto more mundane matters.
“Listen to this, Tom,” I said, and read the words aloud to him. It was hard to keep the tremor out of my voice.
“Let me see,” he said, and I handed him the letter. He turned it over, as I had done. “That’s all it says?”
I nodded. “But don’t you think–” I stopped, hesitating to put my hopes into words.
“It could be your mum?”
I held my breath as Tom hesitated.
“Could be,” he said at last. “It makes sense.” Then he shook his head. “But none of the ones I’ve read have any date or address or anything. There’s nothing to say where they were sent from. What about the others?”
“The same,” I said.
Perhaps he saw my face fall, because Tom said, “The name could be useful, though. I’ll search for Edith as well as Hepburn, and I’ll try some other combinations, with McAndrew and Elspeth.” He grinned reassuringly, and all of a sudden my heart was racing again, but for quite different reasons. When Tom smiled at me like that, it was like stepping out of deep shadows into bright sunshine.
We went through the rest of the papers again after that, without finding anything more useful. I had looked at most of the documents before, and I didn’t expect to find anything new. Gradually I became more interested in watching Tom’s hands as he turned over sheafs of documents, or looking at his profile as he studied them – the straight line of his nose, the way he bit his lip when he was thinking. I wanted him to kiss me again.
Of course, he did kiss me again. After we had put everything back into the safe, we went back to the kitchen and Tom tried to make the tablet work, but he said it was useless; the heavy rain was making it worse than normal. He would have to carry on searching for my mother at home. The rain was expected to last until late in the evening, long after sunset.
“I should go before the track turns into a mudslide,” he said, so I began to walk with him down the passage to the hallway, but before we got there he turned and pulled me into his arms and kissed me. It was so gloomy that I could barely see Tom’s face. Emboldened by the darkness, I kissed him back, sliding my arms around his neck, my fingers in his hair. Clinging together, we stumbled back until my shoulder-blades touched the wooden panelling. My heart rate seemed to have accelerated to a dizzying pace. It was intoxicating, wanting something this much.
This time, it wasn’t Tom sliding his hands over my skin that made me break the kiss and step back. It was me – me wanting him to do that so much that I could hardly bear it.
I drew away, my breath coming in sharp little gasps. I could feel the warmth as the colour rose into my face.
We looked at each other for a moment. Then Tom stepped close to me again, but this time he didn’t try to kiss me on the mouth. He touched my face, gently.
“Ghost, you know...I love you.”
His voice sounded almost pleading. Suddenly all the breath went out of me; I didn’t have enough left to say a word. If Tom had kissed me again then, I would not have pulled away, whatever happened. But he didn’t. He said, “I’ll come back soon,” and then he walked away, down the dark passage, and when he got to the hallway he turned. In the light from the front windows I saw him smile at me, and then he was gone. I heard the great oak door bang shut.
I didn’t try to follow Tom. I waited in the darkness until I heard the sound of the motorcycle engine starting up, and I listened as it crunched away over the gravel, and then grew fainter and fainter until the sound could no longer be heard at all.
I love you. I had not said it back, although I had thought it a hundred times.
I went back to the kitchen. The sheets of paper Tom had printed out for me were still scattered about on the big pine table. I collected them up into a neat little sheaf, the one with Missing businessman declared legally dead on it uppermost. My father’s face, tiny and distorted by the mosaic effect of the photograph, stared up at me. I wished it had been a picture of my mother Tom had found, even if it had been as poor as this one. I wanted to see her face so much.
Declared legally dead. Perhaps it was the sinister meaning of those words that made me feel uneasy, as though there were something just outside the grasp of my conscious mind, a thought just out of reach, as a word may be on the tip of the tongue.
It was much later, when I was lying alone in my bed with the moonlight filtering in t
hrough the gap in the curtains and the wind and rain still clattering at the window, that I remembered.
The past is better left buried, I think. That was what the letter had said, the one written by a person calling herself Edith. Not such a very ominous thing to say in itself – just a figure of speech. But old Dr. Robertson, speaking of Grandmother, had told me, she said the past was better left buried.
It might be a coincidence, I said to myself. I turned over in bed, restlessly, turning my back to the silver streak of moonlight that bisected the room. It was no use; it gleamed off the glass in the picture frames on the opposite wall, too bright to ignore. I would have to get out of bed and close the curtains properly. Instead, I stubbornly squeezed my eyes shut. Just a coincidence. People probably say that all the time.
It was no use, though; the thoughts would come, welcome or not. Legally dead. Left buried. The shape of something was forming slowly in my mind, something as grim as the remains of a shipwreck seen through murky water.
My mother was gone; she had left me nearly eighteen years before and gone far away. Abroad, if Grandmother had not lied to Dr. Robertson and the old man had not lied to me. She had never come back for me, although there was nothing to stop her anymore.
My grandmother had hidden me, hidden all traces of my existence, until long, long after my father had vanished off the face of the earth and there was no reason to fear that he would claim me.
Dead. Buried.
Two women, one terrified and beaten down, the other afraid too, but fierce. A tiny baby, whom both of them were determined to protect. They would have done anything to keep that child out of the hands of the monster who came to claim it, anything at all. One of them might have done something so terrible that she had to go away – forever.
Dead, I said to myself. I chewed my lip and rolled around restlessly in the bed, willing myself to stop thinking, willing myself to drop into welcome unconsciousness, but the question would come.