by Diane Janes
The Perrys had pushed their furniture back and placed as many chairs as they could fit around the sides of the room. There were only three people seated inside: a couple who had positioned themselves near the fireplace, and Gilda Iceton, who was sitting alone at the opposite end of the room. Gilda’s appearance was very much that of the woman one does not readily sit next to. Her hair was drawn back into an elastic band, and she was wearing a shapeless pale blue sweatshirt which had the shadow of an old stain on the front. Her brown trousers appeared to have been designed for someone shorter and exposed wide expanses of pale unshaven leg, which vanished none too soon into ankle socks and bus-conductress shoes.
As Jo stood hesitating in the doorway Maisie breezed in from the kitchen, bearing a tray of tea. ‘Jo, lovely to see you. Why don’t you sit here, next to Gilda, as you already know each other?’
With no obvious means of escape, Jo took the chair Maisie had indicated. It was one of a quartet of dining chairs which had been pushed so close together that only her denim jeans and Gilda’s polyester trousers separated their flesh. When Jo shifted to one side, Gilda’s thighs merely seemed to overflow further on to her chair.
The trio of ladies whose car had been the subject of Fred’s needless arm-waving bobbed in out of the rain, so Maisie made some introductions – the three ladies were friends from the WI, while the couple by the fireplace were fellow members of the Lakeland Horticultural Society. ‘And this is Gilda,’ Maisie was saying, ‘our newest resident in Easter Bridge, who has very kindly said we can use her yard for overflow car-parking if we need it. Excuse me while I go and get some tea.’
Jo said hopefully, ‘Can I come and help you carry things through, Maisie?’
‘No, no. There’s only room for one at a time in my little kitchen. You stay here and get to know our new neighbour a bit better.’
Jo reddened. She had been caught off guard by the presence of Gilda, and could not bring herself to look at the woman, let alone initiate a conversation with her. After Maisie had futtered out there was an awkward silence, while everyone else waited for Jo to say something. It was eventually broken by one of the WI ladies, who addressed Gilda: ‘So, you’re a newcomer to the Easter Bridge. Where were you living before you moved here?’
‘I spent the past few years in Essex, but I’ve moved about a lot.’
‘And what brought you to Cumbria?’ Another of the ladies helped the interrogation along.
‘I wanted to move nearer to my daughter’s school. She’s a boarder at St Aelfric’s.’
‘How old is your daughter?’ asked the first WI lady.
‘She was twelve in April.’
Jo swivelled round to stare at the woman beside her. Maisie had told her that Gilda’s daughter was thirteen or fourteen.
‘The same age as your daughter would have been.’ Gilda turned to look her full in the face. ‘There was only a couple of months difference between them.’
Jo winced as if she had been slapped. Maisie chose that moment to reappear, evidently having only half heard what had been said. ‘Oh, no – Jo hasn’t got a daughter,’ she put in, clearly thinking to correct a newcomer’s minor gaffe. ‘Just a stepson, Sean.’
‘I’m sorry, I thought everyone would have known …’ Gilda left the words hanging in the air, pregnant with the implication that there was more to be said.
Jo stood up so suddenly that she almost upset a nearby pot plant. ‘I’m sorry, Maisie, but I have to go. Here –’ she fumbled in her purse and withdrew a five pound note ‘– please put this in the kitty.’
‘Jo, dear …’ Maisie was caught on the hop, encumbered with another laden tray.
As Jo all but ran down the hall she could hear Gilda saying, ‘I’m so sorry, I assumed that everyone knew.’ Outside, she ignored the curious glances of the people in the garden and Fred’s attempt to speak to her, not pausing until she had crashed in through her own front door. She knew she had made a dreadful fool of herself in taking flight. Gilda would have told them by now. Maisie Perry would know that she was the Joanne Ashton whose child had disappeared and whose husband had jumped off a cliff – and Maisie knowing was as good as taking out a full-page advertisement in the Evening News. You might as well hire a megaphone and tour the district.
She saw the car keys lying on the hall table and grabbed them, glimpsing Sean’s surprised face coming downstairs just as she headed back out of the door. ‘I won’t be long,’ she shouted, although she had no idea whether he heard her or not. Worse and worse, she thought as she climbed into the car, Gilda knew about her mother. Everyone from her schooldays knew about it, but by the time of Lauren’s disappearance she had been living in a different part of the country and had acquired a new name: it had been almost a decade since the death of her father briefly made the headlines, so no one had made the connection. She had been extremely lucky in that although a lot of people from her past must have recognized her in the papers and on TV, none of them had gone to the press. What happened in 1998 had been bad enough – the thinly veiled suggestions that she had made away with Lauren herself. If the wider public had known about her mother …
A car came at her as she rounded the bend below the bridge, forcing her to swerve into the side of the road, only narrowly avoiding a collision. Thank goodness there happened to be a verge just here, rather than a solid stone wall. The near miss shook her, because although the other driver had been travelling too fast, she knew that she had not been concentrating. As she steered the car back on to the road, she had to grip the wheel harder to stop her hands from shaking.
Gilda would tell them everything – she would take a malicious pleasure in it. Oh, I’m sorry … I thought everyone knew.
Well, they did now.
She had managed to create a wide gulf between herself and her childhood, but Gilda would span the gap in the space of a few short minutes. If only Marcus could be persuaded to move away, start again somewhere; but then there was the postcard, the shells, Lauren … She had answered ‘yes’ to the card, and it was only a question of sticking it out until the next message came.
She realized that she was driving without any purpose. When she reached the main road, she turned east towards Newby Bridge. The A590 was busy with holiday traffic – Saturday was changeover day. She felt sorry for these newcomers, trying to put a brave face on it as they switched on their wipers and scanned the sky above the estuary, hoping in vain to spot a break in the clouds.
This time next week the school holidays would have begun. Sean would be at home all day, every day, lying in bed or closeted in his room with his computer games. Of course Harry would probably be around – his family generally came up in the school holidays – and then it occurred to her that Gilda’s daughter would be back too.
Was it really so outrageous – the idea that Gilda might have abducted Lauren?
‘Stop it,’ she said aloud. She knew it was her own voice, but it could have been Marcus, travelling alongside her like an extra conscience. She could almost hear him talking about doctors again – or maybe actually talking to a doctor. ‘My wife has developed an obsession with a woman who lives nearby. There’s a history of animosity between them, and my wife has become convinced not only that this woman is watching and following her, but even that the woman has her missing daughter.’
She drove in the direction of Bowness, but that was a mistake. The roads around Windermere crawled with holiday traffic, and there were no free parking spaces to be had. The mountain tops were hidden by low cloud. Everywhere you looked there were figures shuffling along in damp cagoules, probably wishing they were somewhere else. Café windows were misted by a combination of hot drinks and tourists’ breath, while the colourful window boxes outside bed-and-breakfasts drooped in the rain. From Windermere she drove to Ambleside, and from Ambleside back to Grizedale. The pointlessness of the excursion made her slam her hands on the steering wheel in frustration. What was the point of running away, and where did she imagine she was running to? N
o doubt Sean would be reporting her abrupt departure to Marcus when he arrived home, and then Marcus would want to know where she had been. She would either have to invent some lame-sounding excuse, or else admit that she had been upset, both courses leading inexorably to another episode being filed under ‘irrational behaviour’.
The car clock reminded her that it was after 4.30 p.m., which meant that Marcus should be home fairly soon. He was calling in to see his mother, but that didn’t usually delay him too much. She half expected to find his car on the drive when she reached the house, but it was not there, and when she got inside, her eye was immediately caught by the blinking light on the answering machine. She pressed the button and waited while the nasal voice of the machine informed her, ‘You have one new message. Message one.’ The voice turned into Marcus: ‘I’m calling to say I won’t be coming home tonight. My mother’s taken a turn for the worse, so I’m staying here with Sandra.’
She tried to call him on his mobile but it was switched off.
‘Sean,’ she shouted up the stairs. ‘Didn’t you hear the phone earlier?’
‘Yeah. The machine got it.’
‘Why didn’t you take it?’
‘It’s never for me – and the machine has always cut in by the time I get there, anyway.’
Jo let out a small scream of exasperation. If Marcus was staying over, that must mean his mother was finally dying. For once there had been an opportunity for her to be supportive, but she had not been there for him. He had reached the answering machine instead … ‘because you were needlessly driving halfway round the South Lakes,’ an inner voice chided her. She slammed her hand down hard on the telephone table to quiet the voice, then ran up the stairs.
‘Sean,’ she said angrily, accompanying his name with a brisk rat-tat on the door.
‘Don’t come in. I’m getting changed.’
Something in his voice told her that this was not true. ‘Why?’ she called.
‘Why what?’
She could tell from his voice that he was moving across the room. ‘Why are you getting changed?’
‘I felt like it. I was trying something on.’
She knew he was lying. She had been planning to remonstrate with him about ignoring the phone, but this now became secondary to wondering what he was up to behind the bedroom door. She reached for the handle, then hesitated. There had probably been enough time for him to hide whatever it was by now. No point in provoking a scene.
‘In future, can you please answer the phone instead of letting the machine get it. That was your dad to say that your grandmother is very poorly and he won’t be able to come home tonight, so it would have been nice if he had been able to speak to one of us.’
‘Oh – OK – sorry.’ From his position behind the door, Sean listened as the stairs creaked beneath her descent. His heart was still thumping, as it had been ever since that banshee shriek from downstairs had sent him diving for his knife. Now he wondered if he would have had the guts to use it – if she had burst into the room, as he thought she was going to. He replaced it carefully in its latest hiding place, behind the box sets of Star Wars and Lost. He was a lot more careful about hiding places since that time she had almost caught him out.
It got to supper time, and she had still heard nothing further from Marcus. She made a special effort with Sean – whose grandmother was dying, after all – encouraging him to have a second helping of the chorizo and sweet potato bake, which she knew he liked.
Sean seemed willing to meet her halfway, complimenting the meal and remarking a propos of nothing in particular, ‘Some people stopped to look at your sculpture today.’
‘Really? Did they? Who?’ She tried to keep the excitement out of her voice.
‘Just some family who were out walking.’
‘With children?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Boys or girls?’
Sean eyed her a little uneasily. ‘I didn’t really notice. They’d all got waterproofs on, so you could hardly tell. I saw some scouts looking at it once, too. One of them took a picture over the wall with his digital camera.’
‘Oh.’ Marcus had been right, of course. It would attract random interest from all sorts of people, not just the ones it was meant for. Sean had almost finished his second helping. She tried a different line. ‘Summer holidays next week. Do you know if Harry and his family are coming up?’
‘I think so.’
‘And now there’s that new girl, too. The one across the road, who’s at boarding school.’
‘She’s only twelve,’ said Sean dismissively. ‘Charlie might want to hang around with her.’
Sean had known her age all along. For the first time it occurred to Jo that Sean might be a valuable source of information. ‘Did you meet her when she was home last holidays?’
‘Yeah, a couple of times.’
‘How about her mother? She’s a bit weird-looking, isn’t she?’
‘Who – the woman you thought was following us that day?’
Jo flushed. Sometimes she forgot that Sean was neither blind nor deaf. ‘I’m sure she wasn’t really following us. But she does look a bit odd, don’t you think?’
‘Don’t know. She looks a bit old to have a daughter.’
‘That’s only because she doesn’t do anything with her hair, and the way she dresses. She’s actually the same age as me.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Oh – it came up.’
He left the table soon afterwards. She had been so enthused by this burst of communication that she wanted to prolong it, to say, ‘Don’t go upstairs – let’s watch a DVD together or something. You can choose,’ but she knew her offer would be rejected. It was only a partial thaw, not the coming of spring.
She was clearing the table when the phone rang again. She raced to pick it up, but it was a recorded message, offering her no-win, no-fee representation in the event that she had had an accident. As she was replacing the receiver it occurred to her that she could ring the hospital. That would show she cared. She had to go into the office to root out the ward number. She tried the back of the telephone book, where they usually kept numbers acquired on loose bits of paper, but then she saw that both the ward and telephone number had been pinned to the cork notice board next to the big wall chart which showed with coloured stickers who was out on tour at any given time. Her eye fell on the chart, where her little yellow stars had all been annotated with the initials of whichever guide had been deputed to pick up her tours while she was ‘taking a break’. Marcus’s green dots and Melissa’s red triangles sat smug and unsullied while the defaced stars mocked her. A red triangle and a green dot were snuggled up next to one another in the box marked with today’s date, but there were no symbols at all in tomorrow’s square. Marcus’s and Melissa’s tours had both finished that morning. She flopped into the leather office chair and continued to stare at the two little symbols. They had been stuck on at the beginning of the year – she could not even remember who had done the chart this year – but instead of keeping a decent distance, the green dot and the red triangle were almost touching: you couldn’t have got the edge of a ten-pence piece between them.
She reached for the telephone and keyed in the direct line for the ward. It rang for quite a long time before being answered by a young female voice.
‘I’m ringing about Mrs Handley,’ Jo said. ‘I’m her daughter-in-law. I was wondering how she is.’
‘She’s comfortable.’
‘Well, yes … but has she got any worse?’
‘She’s about the same. I’m sorry, who did you say you were again?’
‘I’m Mrs Handley, too. I’m her daughter-in-law. My husband is there now. Could you let him know that I rang, please?’
‘I will if I see him.’
‘He’s there now,’ Jo said, a touch crossly. ‘He’s sitting by the bed.’
‘There’s no one by the bed at the moment. I can see it from here.’
‘Oh … th
ank you.’ Jo put the phone down. It had become quite dark in the office. No one looking at the rain-streaked windows would have guessed that it was July. Her eyes were irresistibly drawn back to the wall chart. It was too dark now to make out the initials etched on to each of her yellow stars; the symbols representing Marcus and Melissa were turning an identical shade of muddy brown in the dusk, becoming no more than a series of dark blots against the shiny white background. His mobile was switched off, and he was not at the hospital. She picked up the phone again and pressed the speed-dial code for Melissa’s home number. The phone rang out half a dozen times, before Melissa’s ‘Hello?’ sounded at the other end of the line. Jo instantly cut the call off.
A minute went by and then the phone began to ring. The caller display lit up with Melissa’s name. Jo let the machine take it. ‘Hello – I think you just called me. Is everything OK, Jo? Call me if you need anything, otherwise I’ll just assume you hit my number by mistake. Byeee.’ The line went dead.
Jo stepped into the hall and replayed the message, turning up the volume in a vain attempt to detect any sounds in the background. Then she rewound the tape and listened twice more. Jo. How had Melissa known that it must be herself and not Marcus on the end of the phone? She grabbed her fleece from the peg in the hall and yelled up the stairs as she pushed her arms into the sleeves, ‘Sean – I’m going out.’ She picked up her bag and ran to the door without bothering to wait for his reply. By way of an afterthought, she turned back to the kitchen and grabbed the largest knife out of the block.
As she gunned the engine into life her fury increased. How many times had they contrived to be away together this year already? Joint tours and nights off which coincided … She worked through the coming confrontation in her mind; what she would say to them, what they might say to her and what she would do. She had to force herself to focus on the road. The rain was driving down in straight lines, a million tiny silver javelins in the headlights. It was not yet nine o’clock, but already dark as an autumn night.
She had not gone very far before she saw the loom of an undulating blue light above the walls and hedges. She quickly realized that it was static – a police car or an ambulance, pulled up some little way ahead. Then she rounded a bend in the lane and was waved to a halt by a policeman in a dayglo yellow waterproof coat. As he approached the car, she experienced a momentary wave of panic. Did he know what she was thinking, and why she was heading for Melissa’s house? Without taking her eyes off the approaching officer, she tried to see whether the knife was visible in the passenger foot well. She lowered the window as he reached the car, noticing the way water cascaded from the peak of his cap as he bent down to talk to her, holding her breath – but he had merely come to tell her that the road ahead was closed due to an accident.