The Anniversary

by Hilary Boyd

  ‘Of course not,’ Jack said dully.

  No one spoke for a long time. Then Eve said, her voice low but passionate, ‘Tell me, Dad … Mum. Please tell me what happened. Please just talk about it, will you? I know it must be the hardest thing for you both. But it’s so long ago now …’

  Is it? Stella asked herself. In actual years, maybe, but still a second away in her thoughts.

  She waited for Jack to speak, but Eve turned to her and said, ‘Mum? Say something. Please. Someone.’

  ‘You know what happened,’ Stella said quietly, the words forced from unwilling lips. ‘I told you.’

  Eve’s face was tense with trepidation. She looked as if she were bracing herself, compelled to ask the questions she knew neither of them wanted to answer.

  ‘I know that Jonny died, obviously. But not much more.’

  Jack still said nothing, his head bowed, so Stella felt obliged to respond, although she wanted desperately to run away. ‘What more do you want to know, Eve? It was a terrible thing. And it happened before you were born. Why do you suddenly need the details?’

  Eve frowned. ‘Because you’ve never, ever properly spoken about it, Mum. Not for my whole entire life. Neither of you has. And it’s the first time I’ve got you both alone together, you and Dad, since … well, since forever. I’ve always avoided asking before, because I knew it would upset you and I didn’t want to do that. But not knowing what really happened to my own brother is weird, don’t you think? We ought to be able to … as a family … after all this time …’ She tailed off.

  Stella looked at Jack. For a split second he met her eye. Was it resignation she saw, or just the old, familiar pain?

  ‘OK,’ Jack said, ‘OK, sweetheart. I’m sure you’re right.’

  11

  June 1990

  Jack

  ‘Hey, where have you been?’ Jack turned as he felt a hand on his back and found his wife and son next to him. He’d had one too many glasses of wine and was feeling expansive, buzzing with the conversations he’d been having with various guests. They were, as he’d suspected, an interesting crew.

  Stella handed Jonny over to him. ‘We’ve been pottering,’ she said. He thought she looked particularly beautiful today, ‘blooming’, he supposed, with the pregnancy, her skin flushed, eyes soft, her breasts rounded under the pale-blue sundress. He bent to kiss her. ‘They’re serving lunch inside,’ he said.

  The three of them followed the trail of guests to the dining room, where a buffet was laid out in the cool, dim room. The decoration was old-fashioned and traditional: a large mahogany sideboard, a gold-framed French mirror above the empty fireplace, a stiff white-linen cloth covering an oval table, the walls William Morris in muted green, rust and cornflower blue. Very Tory MP, Jack thought, with a smile, eyeing the plentiful buffet with relish.

  The room was full, people standing about holding dinner plates in one hand, wine glasses in the other, everyone being careful not to push as they jostled to fill their plates. It was clear the Morrisons had done this plenty of times before. Jack noticed an air of practised calm as Giovanna brought more bread through. Miles, their teenage son, stood like a sentinel at the door with a bottle of white and red wine in each hand to catch the guests for refills, and Alice, their daughter, wielded a large silver spoon to dole out coronation chicken to any takers.

  ‘What would Jonny like?’ he asked Stella.

  Henry was carving an enormous ham at the far end of the table, lifting the slices with the point of his knife on to a blue-and-white charger beside it. There was a glass bowl of potato salad; another of sultana-studded rice salad; a terracotta dish of tomatoes and onions in dressing, parsley sprinkling the surface; halved hard-boiled eggs with deep-yellow yolks; tiny round beetroots and fresh green salad leaves in a gnarled wooden bowl. The dishes were accompanied by English mustard and mayonnaise, a jug of dressing, saucers of butter and a French loaf cut into chunks in a wicker bread basket lined with a white napkin. Cutlery and napkins were in piles on the sideboard, alongside a whole, round Brie, decorated prettily with grapes.

  Stella smiled. ‘Well, they’ve managed to get all his favourites,’ she said, pointing to include the ham, the eggs, the potato salad and the French bread. Jonny was not a fussy eater, Jack knew, which he put down to Stella’s no-nonsense attitude to their son’s upbringing. Something for which he could not take much credit, he was guiltily aware.

  He settled in the sunshine with Stella and Jonny on one of the tartan rugs laid outside on the lawn. Jonny had a piece of buttered bread in one hand, a slice of ham in the other.

  ‘Do you think the mouse is awake now, Mummy?’ he asked, looking up at his mum with eyes whose colour exactly matched her own.

  ‘What mouse?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Over there,’ Jonny pointed with his bread, ‘under the tree. He’s sleeping. Mummy said not to wake him up.’

  He saw Stella frowning behind their son’s back, running her finger across her throat and pulling a face.

  Jack controlled his grin. ‘Better to leave him, then.’

  His son nodded thoughtfully. ‘But mouses like to be waked up sometimes.’

  Both his parents laughed at the hopeful note in Jonny’s voice.

  ‘Can we go and see him now, Mummy?’

  ‘After you’ve finished your lunch,’ Stella said firmly.

  Henry came over with a jug of water in which ice and lemon slices floated.

  ‘Everyone got what they need?’ he asked, waving the jug towards them, the ice chinking against the glass. ‘You know you can put Jonny down for a nap in Alice’s room if you like? It’s quiet up there.’

  ‘Thanks, Henry,’ Jack said, ‘but he slept in the car. He should be OK for a bit.’

  Their host smiled and moved on.

  ‘I could do with going down for a nap in Alice’s room,’ Stella whispered.

  ‘Go on, then. Why not? You have the perfect excuse,’ Jack said.

  She laughed, rubbing her belly lovingly. ‘You think?’

  ‘Sure. Go on. I’ll look after Jonny.’ He pulled his son on to his knee and snuggled him, giving him a sloppy kiss on his hot little cheek. ‘We can go and see your mouse, eh?’

  Jonny nodded enthusiastically, his mouth full of bread and butter. But Jack could see his wife hesitate. ‘Will you keep a proper eye? You can’t get distracted by a gripping conversation.’ She paused and shook her head. ‘There’s probably no point. I won’t sleep.’

  Jack never knew, looking back, how it happened. It was nearly four o’clock, although he was not aware of this fact until much later when he reviewed, over and over again, the events of the afternoon. He could see Stella, sitting cross-legged on the tartan rug, talking intently to a blonde girl, who he thought was attached in some way to his friend Mark, a foreign correspondent. Stella and the other girl were both eating strawberries and cream from glass dessert dishes. He had supervised Jonny’s consumption of strawberries and sugar earlier, while Stella lay back on the rug and dozed in the sunshine.

  Jack was not particularly fond of strawberries. He was standing a few feet away from his wife, a plate of Brie and grapes in hand, talking to Wally Myers, the deputy editor of a tabloid newspaper. They were laughing at the idiocy of the agriculture minister, John Gummer, feeding a potentially BSE-infected burger to his four-year-old daughter the previous month.

  ‘Taking fucking loyalty to Mrs T a step too far,’ Wally said, swigging red wine from his smeared glass. Jack knew Wally well, and the man, as always, was two sheets to the wind; his reputation as a boozer was legendary. But the older man was obviously good at his job – that, or he knew where too many bodies were buried to lose it. ‘Would you give your little lad there cheap beef right now?’ Wally asked, waving his empty glass towards Jonny and Tanny – the four-year-old daughter of another guest – as the children circled the stone sundial positioned to the left of the house near the yew hedge. They were looking at each other warily, but both were entirely absorbed in th
e process.

  Jack turned back to Wally. ‘Not a chance.’

  ‘Quite right,’ the other man said. ‘Going to find a refill. Get you anything?’

  Jack shook his head, ‘Nah, had too much already. Got to drive back later.’ Wally shrugged and moved off towards the house, leaving Jack on his own. The garden had filled up, there must have been upwards of twenty-five people on the lawn and sitting about on the stone terrace. He glimpsed Jonny, still with Tanny, now running in and out of the bushes that flanked the lawn, both squealing with delight. Then Henry appeared.

  ‘Come and meet this Shackleton fellow, Jack. He’s heading up an EU committee on parliamentary procedure. Right up your street, no? He’s from the other side of the House, but you’ll probably forgive him for that more than I do!’ He laughed, knowing Jack was a staunch Labour supporter. Henry took hold of his arm, shepherding him towards a small man – probably in his late forties – balding, with black-rimmed spectacles that swamped his thin face, dressed in a white shirt and carefully pressed jeans.

  Jack doesn’t remember. Not that day, nor twenty-seven years later, whether he saw his son alive for the last time before or after he was introduced to Tom Shackleton. Did he check on him as he walked across the lawn in his host’s wake? Did he turn and watch him while Tom – a self-important bore – banged on about Brussels? Was Jonny even in his mind? In the coming decades he would pick over the moments that lay in shards about his brain, but he could never quite put the pieces together.

  Stella

  Stella, unlike Jack, does remember. Perhaps because she had not consumed the better part of a bottle of wine by that point in the afternoon, perhaps because she was Jonny’s mother, tied to him by a long, maternal thread of vigilance. Whatever the reason, she remembers distinctly the last time she saw her son alive. He was waving at her, shouting, ‘Mummy, look … look at me!’ as he and Tanny balanced on the small brick wall that surrounded a raised flowerbed containing purple and pink azalea bushes – now past their best. Stella watched as the two children jumped off, then immediately climbed back up again – little legs stretched, barefoot, flush-faced, giggling – and jumped again. She knew they would probably go on doing this for hours.

  She laughed and waved back from the rug, where she was sitting next to a blonde woman whose name she didn’t catch. ‘Fantastic, sweetheart. Clever boy,’ she called to her son, as the woman rattled on, giving Stella a wealth of unwanted detail about her budding relationship with one of Jack’s colleagues.

  The next time she looked over – seconds later, no more, surely – Tanny was alone, sitting on the wall, examining something in her hand. She looked around, searching between the bodies on the lawn, not yet anxious.

  ‘Jonny! Jonny!’ She called when she couldn’t see him. The noise of chatter might mean he couldn’t hear her, she realized, so she got to her feet. Her companion was staring at her, obviously surprised to be interrupted.

  ‘Jonny!’ She crossed the lawn as she called her son’s name, hurrying towards the brick wall where he had been playing a second ago. ‘Where’s Jonny?’ she asked the girl, who looked startled by her abrupt tone. ‘Did you see where he went, sweetheart?’

  Stella remembers that at this point her heart had begun to race.

  ‘He went to look at the mouse,’ the girl said, pointing to the path Stella and Jonny had wandered down earlier in the day. With a sigh of relief, she hurried after him, laughing to herself at the child’s obsession with the dead rodent. Now she would have to explain that the bloody thing wasn’t going to wake up any time soon. But when she got to the ash tree there was still no sign of Jonny. Maybe he was with his father.

  Running back to the house, still calling him, she barged through the guests until she found Jack.

  ‘Where’s Jonny?’ she demanded, breathless.

  Jack stared at her blankly. ‘Over there?’ he pointed towards the azaleas. ‘He’s with a little girl.’

  ‘Tanny. No, he’s not. I’ve been calling and calling and he’s not answering.’

  Frowning, Jack said, ‘I’m sure he’s around somewhere. I mean, where could he go?’

  ‘I don’t know, but he’s not here, Jack. I can’t find him.’ She was almost shouting at her husband. He didn’t seem to get it.

  The people around them were alerted by her raised voice.

  ‘He’ll be hiding,’ one said.

  ‘He’ll be in the house,’ another said.

  ‘He can’t be far.’

  And suddenly everyone in the garden seemed to be searching for Jonny Holt. She was aware of the din as his name was repeated over and over, echoing up into the air, across the sunny garden. People looked under things, behind things, over things, in things – often ridiculous places into which a small boy would be incapable of squeezing. Like a game. That’s what you do when you’ve lost something: you search where it couldn’t possibly be found.

  But even when Henry organized teams, sending groups of family and guests into the house, the garden, out into the road to search the cars, there was no sign of the child.

  Stella was beside herself. Literally outside of her body. She seemed to have super-human energy as she watched herself rushing from group to group, answering well-meaning but pointless questions as to whether her son liked to hide, to play pranks, to run off. And Jonny was an adventurous child. He was curious, like most three-year-olds, but he wasn’t boisterous or naughty. More a dedicated potterer, never happier, as Stella had witnessed earlier, than when watching a snail or a mouse or woodlice shooting out from under a stone.

  ‘He has to be here somewhere.’ Henry, distraught, held up a hand to shade his eyes against the light and bit his lip as his gaze panned across the garden. ‘Think, think,’ he was talking more to himself than Stella, ‘where could he possibly have gone?’

  Some of the other guests seemed to have given up and were standing round, faces anxious, talking quietly, others were still calling her son’s name, searching, searching for a child they had probably barely noticed. Clouds had blown in and the hot afternoon was cooling fast.

  ‘He went to see the mouse, Tanny said,’ Stella told Henry, not for the first time. ‘He must be down there somewhere. Maybe he’s fallen and hurt himself …’

  Henry nodded, and the two of them went down the path yet again – leaving Jack to another search of the cars and the lane – and stood by the spindly tree in silence. The dead mouse was still there, a reproachful symbol of all that had gone wrong with the afternoon.

  ‘OK … systematic search. A small boy, so at this level …’ Henry got down on his hands and knees, head bent, looking around. The yew hedge was a few feet away, and her host began crawling towards it, pushing aside leaves and undergrowth as he went, bending under bushes. Stella trailed behind, still intermittently calling her son. She couldn’t comprehend that anything really bad had happened to him. How could it, in this sleepy Kent garden, surrounded by people? It’s not like there were – and here Stella listed all the dangers her traumatized brain could think of – wild animals, snakes, hunters with shotguns, traps, deep wells into which he could fall, lurking paedophiles. What worried her most was that Jonny was frightened, stuck somewhere, unable even to call out.

  She watched as Henry came to the hedge. There was a small gap where the two-foot-thick yew had died back to a skeleton brown. Pulling aside the dry branches, Henry looked up. ‘Could he get through here?’

  Relief flooded Stella’s body.

  ‘Maybe … yes, yes, he might have. He’ll be next door, then.’

  Henry got to his feet, but she saw none of her own relief on the man’s face.

  ‘OK.’ He said nothing more as he raced up the garden and through the house, pursued by Stella. ‘They’re not down this weekend,’ Henry called over his shoulder. ‘Patrick said they were going to Valencia for a friend’s wedding.’

  There was a gravel path leading down the side of the converted barn, then a heavy, very new wooden gate – Henry’s height –
bolted shut, which led into the back garden. The bolt slid back easily to his touch.

  The garden was Mediterranean in style, a bit out of place in the Kent countryside, perhaps, but low maintenance for weekenders. It looked pristine, almost new. Clearly a lot of money had been spent on its construction. White gravel paths intersected clipped topiary and shaded brushed-steel benches; a high stone fountain in the shape of a plump cupid was placed centrally, the water now off; terracotta pots of all sizes lined the terrace, filled with pelargonium and lantana, various herbs; the rock garden displayed lavender plants, euphorbia and the spiky yucca. As yet, no warmth or personality, beyond the garden designer’s, was apparent in the space.

  Henry forged ahead along a path leading down to the right-hand corner of the garden, where Stella, heart in her mouth, suddenly saw the pool. Reaching the wrought-iron railings that fenced it off on two sides – the yew hedge flanked the other borders – she heard Henry taking a deep breath.

  ‘Thank God,’ he said, ‘the cover’s on.’ He sounded relieved, yet he kept on staring.

  They both stood, hands on the waist-high railing, in silence, watching the thick, azure layer of spongy plastic that lay across the rectangular pool, undulating lazily in the growing breeze. It was fixed to a long metal roller at the far end and fitted exactly inside the concrete surrounds.

  Henry saw it before she did: a speck, just a small speck of primrose yellow. It was poking between the cover and the edge, about halfway down the yew-hedge side. He tensed, glancing at her, face drained of colour. ‘Stay here,’ he said, as he vaulted over the railings into the enclosure, striding along the paved pool surround towards …

  Primrose yellow. GAP. She’d bought it for him only last week.

  Stella, when she thinks of that moment – which never properly leaves her thoughts – can, to this day, feel the cool iron of the railings pressing horizontally into her palm as she clings to it.

  She doesn’t know what went through her mind – you can’t think the unthinkable. She knows Henry is shouting. She senses rather than sees other people pushing past her. But, just as she clings to the rail, she clings to the knowledge that it’s completely impossible for that to be Jonny, under the cover. It can’t be her son, because everything she has ever known or believed rejects that possibility.