by Alyson Rudd
* * *
Lauren’s office on Charlotte Street was airy, her immediate boss a short compact serious man in his thirties whose shirts were beautifully ironed, and her workmates were bustling and busy but they smiled and were welcoming. On the streets outside people wore acid-washed denim and big jumpers but in the office the staff were either impeccably suited or wore stylistically independent T-shirts with clever slogans over expensive leather skirts. The only faux pas was to not know what your own style was. One night, a few days in, she joined them for after-work drinks before travelling home for Luke’s Thursday-night pasta. Even my knee is happy, she thought, having spent an entire day without noticing even a twinge.
Jeffers opened a bottle of port to toast her first four days in gainful employment and the fact that Thursday was the new Friday. As she drifted towards drunkenness a beam of silvery light cut across the big sagging sofa. Lauren lurched forward and then stopped, filled her glass with water and drank it quickly, refusing to be drawn towards the apparition. She drank another glass and another and then made coffee. As she sobered up the metallic light ebbed and she was filled with an indescribable sorrow. She had let someone or something down, and she went to bed confused and unhappy. In the morning, though, she remembered none of it, except that she was a maudlin drunk and needed to limit her alcohol intake.
Vera
Lauren had been such a talented artist, Vera couldn’t help but think, upon being presented with Hope’s latest creation. Hope was hopeless at drawing but besotted with trying. She would endlessly present her parents with pictures of stick men with fried red hair and trees with giant apples and tiny branches. And every time it hurt. Every time Vera would remember the grace of Lauren’s earliest attempts to depict a house or a garden or a cat, the way she coloured in so neatly and always added her own little flourish to even a join-the-dots page.
She bought her a miniature keyboard to encourage a different passion, but Hope was uninterested. She encouraged her to help make cakes, but Hope’s inquisitiveness faded quickly. One evening, though, as Bob sat with a large cumbersome calculator at the kitchen table, Hope sat on his lap and began to ask questions about numbers.
‘I wish the tooth fairy could bring me a calculator,’ she told Vera a few days later. Much to the annoyance of the parents of her peers, that was exactly what the tooth fairy brought Hope on her next visit, and Vera and Bob’s maths prodigy was unleashed.
Or, at least, they had a child that liked numbers – but Vera was prone to exaggeration and given her still-evident grief no one reined it in. One lazy Saturday morning Vera found Hope staring into the middle distance and slowly moving forward.
‘Don’t do that,’ she said sharply and Hope burst into tears.
‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, naughty Mummy, silly Mummy,’ Vera said breathlessly, bundling Hope into a giant guilt-ridden cuddle.
Vera waited for Hope to say it, to start speaking about another mummy, but she said nothing other than she had spotted peppermint creams in the cupboard and could she have one pretty please.
It helped, though. It helped Vera accept Hope as Hope, a slightly dumpy child with a beaming smile, a desire to please and a fondness for the times tables. Aunt Suki breathed out properly for the first time in years. Hope could be Hope. The endless comparisons were coming to an end.
‘I’ve asked George Stanning to come over for supper,’ Bob said abruptly. They did not entertain much. Vera was not cross, just surprised.
‘Why?’ she said, but not acerbically. ‘I mean, I didn’t even realise you knew him.’
Bob frowned. He did not know either why he had invited Peter’s eldest son over. George had been in the office and had been asking questions about the business that had turned into questions about his father and it had dawned on Bob that he, of all the people in the building, had known Peter the best or at least the longest. Peter had been such a rock after Lauren’s death and in return he had offered nothing to George or the rest of the family when Peter had gone missing. He groaned a little as he recalled taking George for a pint and how the poor boy had to mature fast. ‘Missing presumed dead’ was not a phrase much used in Cheshire. Like everyone else, Bob had refused to contemplate what such a state of limbo would mean to Peter’s family and they had certainly not really discussed it in the pub. It had been, now he thought about it, more a case of George cheering Bob than of Bob cheering George; and he remembered how typically male they’d been, reminiscing rather than addressing the future.
‘And anyway why would a teenager want to spend an evening with us?’ Vera added.
‘He’s not a teenager, he’s twenty-one,’ Peter said, ‘and, well, he said he wanted a proper chat about the business, and from what I can gather he does not get on with his mother’s new man and well, why not, eh?’
Hope appeared. She had started watching Coronation Street and treated it as a documentary, as a way to see into the lives of grown-ups.
‘Was Lauren divorced?’ she asked and Vera, instead of stifling a sob, laughed out loud and planted a kiss on her daughter’s forehead.
‘Oh, Bob, you explain what divorce is.’
Bob, smiling, told Hope about grown-ups and weddings and breaking friends and as his daughter became bored and wandered away, he took hold of Vera’s hand and repeatedly kissed it as she laughed and laughed to make up for all the laughter their home had lacked for so long. It was fortuitous happiness because George brought his girlfriend, which rattled Vera, but she hid it so well that Bob felt a surge of protective pride. Vera avoided any young women of a parallel age to Lauren yet somehow here was one in her living room drinking the gin Bob had somehow known to buy in for their guests. Worse still, it soon became clear that it was Vera’s job to talk with Felicity while Bob and George discussed the future of the firm. It all threatened to become too much to bear when Hope crept down the stairs in her fluffy pale blue pyjamas, stood before Felicity and sleepily said, ‘Are you my big sister?’
Vera gasped involuntarily and blinked rapidly at Bob for help, but none was needed. Felicity had been well briefed and she scooped Hope onto her lap and stroked her hair.
‘Hello, pretty one,’ she said. ‘I’m not your sister but I’d like very much to be your friend. My name is Felicity. Would you like me to read you a story in bed, to help you get back to sleep?’
Hope beamed and nodded as did Vera and the pair of them ascended the stairs hand in hand.
‘Fels loves kids,’ George said. ‘She’s training to be a nurse. She’s amazing.’
Later, as she cleared the table, Vera felt a small burst of liberation. She had room for warmth towards Felicity. After all, she looked nothing like her Lauren would have looked by now, and Lauren would not have gone into nursing. And George, who had his own troubles, adored her, needed her, perhaps.
‘Have you spoken to George about his father?’ Vera asked Bob as they lay in bed, the last people in The Willows to retire, it not being the sort of enclave that saw much in the way of midweek entertaining over supper.
‘A little,’ Bob said. ‘But more about the practical side of things. I think he must sometimes feel angry that Peter just vanished, I mean angry towards him, leaving them all like that.’
Vera chose never to think about Lauren’s funeral, partly because it was a blur, but she knew it must have helped her come to terms with reality. Meanwhile poor George had had no father to bury, and must always be wondering if there could be a chance Peter might be found, alive if not necessarily well. In the darkness, as if he could tell she was trying to make sense of all their grief, Bob took Vera’s hand.
Bob
After a small civil ceremony, Bob and Rachel set up home not far from the sea. The house was a detached Victorian villa of blackened brick which Rachel told him was classy. She was attentive and happy. She was always busy but would fall into his lap in the evenings and knead his shoulders as if he had been hunched too long over paperwork. Which he rarely had. Bob deliberately kept his workload modes
t. He liked to go for bracing walks and watch nature at work. The sight of a washed-up jellyfish would put him in a good mood for hours. The beige foam at the water’s edge made him grin. And when he came home, Rachel and Suki would be chatting away and he wondered how he would feel if he had to walk into a cold house with no noise, no people, no family. He would joke to clients that Suki and Rachel were the married couple and he was a convenient alibi. Sometimes a client would smile, sometimes a client would look puzzled and sometimes a client would sneer with a salacious glint in his eyes.
There was a girl with a whippet most days in the sand dunes. She wore a bobble hat and a denim jacket through the autumn and early winter and, once Christmas was over and the winds started to bite, she wore a ludicrously huge baby-blue woollen scarf. Sometimes she smiled a tight wary smile if he was close by and sometimes he did not even notice she was there. Then the scarf came off and then the hat and one still, windless day in March 1988 notable only for being the last day of tin mining in Cornwall, she plopped herself down next to Bob as he sat on top of a dune gazing out towards Blackpool Tower on the horizon.
Without the hat he would not have recognised her, but the whippet jogged his memory.
‘Do you know, we are often the only people on the beach,’ she said.
‘That won’t last long,’ he said, not turning to face her. ‘There’ll be kite flyers, paddlers and ice-cream munchers galore soon.’
She studied his profile and guessed he was around forty. She glanced at his left hand and saw that he did not wear a ring – which could mean anything, of course. Still, she liked his voice and his thick dark hair, so decided not to ask the question – and vowed to have a full-blown kiss with him before…
‘April Fool’s Day,’ she said.
‘Is it?’ he said.
‘No, you daft beggar, it’s the sixth of March.’
‘Thought so,’ he said which was, to Andrea, the girl, both annoying and intriguing. Still, she had to stand up and leave before he did so she placed the lead on the whippet and walked for a few yards before turning round. Bob was still not looking at her. He had forgotten her. He had forgotten everything. He felt cleansed here, free of the past, free of the present. He could stare at the changing light, the rolling clouds, the twinkling movement of the water and think of nothing at all.
Three days later, the temperature dropped and the skies were a steel grey. Andrea, back in her bobble hat, ran close to the water’s edge, her dog seemingly disappointed in how little competition she provided over their hundred-metre dash. She knew he was there, high up, not really looking at her and she weighed up the pros and cons of turning her back to the sea to stand and wave at him. She decided she could not resist so swivelled on her heels which made her sink into the wet sand and lose her balance just as an extra-large wave hit the shore.
Her backside was wet now and cold but she remained on the muddy sand, annoyed enough to punish herself. Suddenly he was there holding out his hand. She had no choice but to take it. This was not part of the fantasy she had concocted.
He was frowning.
‘Everything all right?’ he said.
‘S’pose,’ she said. ‘It’s your fault.’
‘Of course it is,’ he laughed.
‘I was turning to wave to you, you know, to be friendly, and now I look an idiot.’
‘You should get home, have a hot bath,’ he said.
‘Yeah, I guess,’ she said. ‘I’m Andrea, by the way.’
‘Hello, Andrea, I’m Robert,’ he said, and in that moment he knew there was a germ of flirtation or subterfuge. He had not called himself Robert since his wedding day.
Wedding days, he said to himself. Wedding days.
Lauren
‘I will never drink port again,’ she said to Luke the next day as they stared at the toaster waiting for the ping.
‘Jeffers is always doing that,’ Luke said. ‘He’ll give us anything but wine. It’s his thing.’
She watched him butter his toast and noticed how graceful he was, how beautiful, beautiful enough to be someone in fashion or film but he was probably off to save a life.
Jesus Christ, I am in love with him, she thought, and kept on thinking all day.
Luke was, she concluded, unattainable. She was not in his league in terms of looks or in terms of integrity but there was something else, a much larger obstacle. He was diffident, he floated as if totally blind to his appealing qualities while simultaneously possessing a composure that only comes with being self-aware. She imagined him as a spoilt, irresistibly cute child, winning trophies, captaining the school team, never suffering self-doubt. Perhaps he could come to love her gradually if she learned to bake cakes and took him to the cinema.
Their toaster moment became a precious and rare one. Days and evenings passed when she simply never saw him. When he did sit down to eat with them he did so distractedly and Kat and Amy excused him for failing to produce a single pasta dish for a month. They knew him much better than Lauren did and their adoration only served to deepen her attachment to him.
Lauren began to construct fantasies that would make him want her. As Christmas approached, she pictured him confessing he had nowhere to spend it and imagined that they would travel to Cheshire together as the snow began to fall, forcing them to stay in a quaint hotel with a real fire in the last available bedroom. He was the least needy person she had ever met, however, and would probably happily spend Christmas Day by himself in the London house.
Sure enough, when the time came, she was sat on the packed train alone, then soon holding a glass of sherry at the Harpers’ house and being asked the same three questions over and over.
‘No, no one special. Yes, it can be glamorous but mostly it’s lots of hard work. I know they miss me, I miss them too.’
The Harpers had carols playing from speakers she could not see and there were plenty of people milling around she could happily never speak to again, and yet she was expected to make small talk with them once a year. Debbie had found herself a boyfriend and was in Truro with his family. It was the first Christmas Debbie had been absent from The Willows and Lauren missed her terribly, even though she had barely thought about meeting up with her again beforehand.
A balding man in a bright red jumper decorated with snowmen told her about his time at university and how he rejected a job in London to be able to help his ailing mother. He acted as if he knew her well and yet she did not even remember his name or which house he lived in. She nodded, feigning interest, hoping the terrible twins would knock over a plate of mince pies and create a diversion.
‘Are the twins coming?’ she asked Mr Harper as he replenished her glass.
‘Twins?’ he said. ‘Not aware of any. You’ll have to ask my good lady wife.’
She was about to tell him that he must know the twins but then she realised she could not recall what they looked like or their names or even if they were part of The Willows. Perhaps they were in a book, she thought, and she might have been bewildered by her confusion but her father squeezed her hand tightly and asked if she wanted to stay or leave with them. She rolled her eyes and linked arms with him.
As she and her parents left, Mrs Harper called out to Lauren.
‘Good luck, my dear,’ she said almost wistfully.
Lauren waved her thanks and stopped to look at the Harpers’ Christmas decorations. Having a small pine tree planted in their front garden certainly helped and it was bedecked with large red bulbs and heavy glass baubles. Lauren smiled at the earnestness and enthusiasm of it all. She cocked her head slightly as her gaze drifted towards their large stained-glass window.
‘It wasn’t always a dove,’ she said to Vera who was stood alongside her. ‘What happened to the wheat?’
Vera squinted.
‘It’s always been a dove,’ she said. ‘You had me worried there for a minute.’
Lauren was not convinced, but she let it go. Maybe I’ve just outgrown the cul-de-sac, she thought to herself.
She used that theory as the explanation for everything that felt strange. Each time she walked into the kitchen she felt as if something were missing; each time she walked into her bedroom it felt as if she were trespassing. The fact her parents had done nothing to remove the brown stain in the bathroom sink annoyed her. She let her fingers run along the thick golden tinsel on the Christmas tree in the living room and told herself to be less snobby about her loving home.
Later, Vera produced a photograph of Lauren, aged seven, dressed as a shepherd for the school nativity play.
‘Look what I found,’ her mother exclaimed.
Lauren gazed at the picture and shook her head.
‘You know, Mum, I don’t remember it at all.’
‘Well, you were only seven,’ Vera said, ‘and you didn’t want to be an angel for some reason.’
Lauren smiled weakly and gazed at the tree that was weighed down by miniature Christmas crackers, its foilwrapped chocolate reindeer and yards and yards of tinsel.
As a break from the endless turkey and stuffing sandwiches, they drove to Mr Yee’s. The poster depicting Peter Stanning was still there and, when there was a quiet moment as the number of customers thinned out, Mr Yee tapped Lauren on the shoulder. She followed him to his desk and he pulled out a large grey scrapbook.
She thought for a moment that he might be a shy artist, keen for someone who had attended art school in London to deliver an encouraging verdict but Mr Yee had collected cuttings, all of them about the disappearance of Peter Stanning.
‘Very nice man,’ he said.
Lauren turned the pages carefully. She had read most of the reports since his disappearance and seen most of the available photographs but she paused before a double-page spread which showed scenes from the Stanning home that she had not come across before. There was a beautiful landscaped garden, stables and a large outhouse, its huge doors wide open revealing a discarded wheelbarrow and a row of bicycles of differing sizes. Without thinking, Lauren counted them with the tip of her fingernail.