The First Time Lauren Pailing Died

by Alyson Rudd

  He set a fresh bowl of water down for the dog and then looked for her. She was sat on their bed, holding the snow leopard tightly against her stomach. Rachel did not often look vulnerable but in that moment she seemed years younger, hurt, almost scared.

  ‘You were my second chance, Bob,’ she said, ‘and I thought I was yours. I would have done anything to help you get over your grief. When you are quiet I don’t try to jolly things up, I let you be what you need to be. I am a good person, Bob, I don’t deserve this.’

  She was not crying but her voice wavered. She was pale apart from two small dots of pink indignation high on her pronounced cheekbones. He realised he had not been in love with her before now. Right now, he thought, I think I love her. He was startled. He had thought he would accept his fate passively, as passively as he had accepted their marriage, but he wanted them to survive.

  ‘I’m going to make you even angrier but I have to say something,’ he said gently.

  Her eyes flashed venomously, she swallowed with an evident gulp of anxiety, but she said nothing.

  Gingerly he sat on the bed.

  ‘I’ve only just this moment realised I love you,’ he said. ‘You’re right, I have been defined by my grief. Andrea was about my grief. I am a mess and I don’t have any right to expect you to care any more, but I want you to care.’

  Rachel had not been expecting this.

  ‘Why on earth did you marry me, then?’ she asked.

  ‘Because that was where we were heading. I was grateful, I suppose; you gave me hours when I didn’t brood. I felt lucky instead of cursed. I knew you were beautiful but I didn’t feel it. I feel it now, Rachel, so if you want to get revenge you can hurt me really easily.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No, I can’t,’ she said. ‘You’ve had the worst pain there can be. I can’t compete with that. I was stupid to think I mattered to you and I thought, really I did, that you might just disappear one day because the pain was too bad but I never, I never ever thought you’d go off shagging a girl half your age. That is shitty of you, Bob, really fucking shitty.’

  There was silence.

  ‘And she’s pregnant. Let’s really stick the knife into no-kids Rachel, shall we?’

  Bob wanted to stroke her hair, place his arm around her, but, sensing imminent physical contact, Rachel squeezed her arms tight against her ribs.

  ‘I’d like you to go, leave the house. Leave me alone. Please.’

  Bob was struggling not to openly weep. He felt he was drowning in a disgusting mix of self-pity, fear and desperation. He had no one he could turn to yet he knew Rachel’s request was reasonable. And perhaps he needed to leave the house anyway before he unravelled in front of her. His only friend had been Peter, and Peter was still missing. As he thought of Peter, he remembered how George, his son, had filled the space left by his former boss.

  Bob wiped his nose, incredulous that only now in this abject state, he was remembering the kindness of his friend Peter, and then George, a young man whose life had been thrown into chaos, who had been the subject of incessant gossip, and had tried to fulfill his father’s obligations. And Bob had been an obligation of sorts. Peter had saved Bob and Peter’s legacy meant that George had to invite him over, phone him and, when a little older he had driven to see him, when older still had offered advice, only leaving him be when it was clear that Bob was not about to throw himself in front of a train. How easy it would have been for George, getting to grips with his father’s company, to have forgotten about Bob when he became self-employed or grown resentful that he had started up alone. Instead, in those in-between years when George was barely a man and Bob was barely existing, the pair would share a pint and talk about the old days.

  Now, he did not even know if George would still be with his old company but he found himself booking a taxi to take him there. He had already lost Suki to his wife, even before this crisis, he had no one else to save him other than Peter. Memories of Peter becalmed him. He was light-headed due to skipping the day’s meals and wrecking the lives of two women. He began to forget Peter had gone, mainly because he needed him again.

  While he waited for the cab, he filled Pascal’s other brandnew bowl with food and washed some glasses that were next to the sink. All he took with him when the car arrived were his wallet and his house keys. He patted Pascal’s head and wondered if he would see him again.

  As he leaned back in his seat, he closed his eyes and imagined a world in which Peter had returned without him knowing it. He recalled Peter’s determination to do the right thing. How could such a man vanish? He would be back by now, yes, he would be back. Had he not been so hurt and guilt-ridden already, Bob would not have had the guts to face a back-from-the-grave Peter, or his son, but he was in a twilight world of emotion by now; a crazed man with a machete running towards him would not have given him cause for alarm. He was drained.

  It was dark when the taxi dropped him at his old office and most of the staff had headed home, but George was still there, a tall, slender figure, a more handsome version of his father but still bearing a striking resemblance to him.

  He stood and shook Bob’s limp hand.

  ‘You look awful,’ he said. ‘Please, sit here.’

  George pointed to a sofa against the back wall of his office and Bob fell into it, too full of self-loathing to feel any embarrassment.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ Bob said, ‘but I thought, your father saved me once, and so did you, and I thought you wouldn’t want it to go to waste.’

  Bob blurted out the story of his wrecked life, not noticing that George was expensively dressed, that the building was larger and grander than in his day, that George did not recall his name at first. Bob did not notice how busy George was or that deep down George knew he would have to do what his father would have done. George was living every day in honour of a father he had loved and was not sure he was supposed to still love. How do you love the missing?

  George left the room and wandered towards the small kitchen his PA used for preparing the hot drinks and simple lunches for him and any guests. She was there, checking to see what was left in the fridge.

  ‘Ah, Miranda, I have a small problem,’ he said.

  She noted that he seemed flushed and felt an enormous urge to help make things right. She always felt that way, whether the problem was the fact they had run out of milk or a client had been accused of fraud.

  Now, once again, her self-imposed rule never to leave the office before 6 p.m. was bearing fruit. Even so, she struggled to not gape as George explained that there was a man in his office who was potentially suicidal and expected George to help him.

  Miranda wanted to tell him not to get involved but she was reasonably intuitive and surmised that George was under some sort of obligation or at least believed he was.

  ‘I don’t want to take him home, Hannah will –’ he paused; he had been about to say something unkind ‘– well, she will, you know, prefer me not to.’

  There seemed to Miranda to be an obvious solution. Mrs Stanning still lived in the family home which, especially with her younger son at university, was a glaringly big enough house to absorb the man on the sofa.

  ‘Would you phone Hannah?’ he asked. ‘Not with the details, but, you know… Tell her I’ll be a bit late.’

  He drove Bob to his mother’s. There were a few lights on and the kitchen was warmed by the Aga but his mother was not there.

  ‘It’s terrible, Peter,’ Bob said, shuffling into the kitchen. ‘An absolute bloody mess.’

  ‘Peter’s not here,’ George said gently. ‘When did you last eat?’ he asked.

  Bob shrugged. He was not sure he had even been able to eat breakfast. He had already been nervous that morning about meeting Andrea. Life had become somewhat even less palatable since then.

  George opened a tin of chicken soup. He had liked it when he was unwell as a child and then he remembered that sweet tea was supposed help someone in shock and perhaps Bob
was in shock.

  Bob dunked some bread and ate his soup that way, morosely, his eyes glazed; reflecting a form of trauma.

  ‘What’s wrong with me, Peter?’ he asked. ‘What’s the point?’

  George worried that his mother might walk in and become upset or indignant at Bob’s refusal to accept Peter was not in the house. Actually, his mother might be annoyed that Bob was there in the first place. George felt an enormous responsibility towards his mother but was slightly scared of her. He always had been.

  ‘You’re being hard on yourself, Bob,’ he said. ‘You’re not the first bloke to screw around. It happens.’

  ‘But she’s pregnant,’ Bob said, ‘and my wife can’t have kids. I might as well have kicked her in the stomach.’

  George was out of his depth so he did what he always did in such circumstances and remained quiet while maintaining eye contact.

  ‘She wants an abortion,’ Bob hissed.

  ‘Right, and that is bad idea because…?’ George paused, wondering if Bob was a Catholic.

  ‘I can’t kill another child, I just can’t.’

  ‘Ah,’ George said. ‘Look, you’re in a bit of state right now. I’m going to give you one of Mother’s sleeping pills and we’ll sort this out in the morning.’

  He showed Bob the guest room which had an en suite bathroom and a sheepskin rug on the floor next to the bed which made Bob sob uncontrollably.

  George knew he was considered mature for his age and he felt old, too, having little in common with his old school friends beyond Barney Browning, who had also lost his father, albeit in the more conventional manner of a fall from a ladder, and taken on the family’s building business. This, though, was different. This was raw desperation. Not once had he seen his mother this upset, not even when the policeman had told her she ought to assume the worst. How can he know what the worst is, George had thought, surely the worst is the ignorance? Better than the presumed worst would be finding a body, being able to bury his father.

  Limbo was the worst.

  It made him almost envy Bob and his catalogue of real, tangible disasters. But Peter had guided Bob out of the depths once and George knew he was here, with Bob, for his father’s sake. Just in case he was alive. Just in case he was dead.

  George wrote a note for his mother, telling her an old friend of Dad’s was sleeping off a trauma and he would pop back early the next morning before she was up and needed to worry about any of it.

  Bob stirred before dawn, his head felt heavy and he could not work out where he was for a few minutes. As the events of the day before began curdling in his head, he pulled the blankets over his face and forced himself back to sleep so that when George arrived he was properly in the grips of slumber. George shrugged. He had to get to the office. He tapped on his mother’s door but there was no answer. He gently turned the handle and peered inside but the bed was neatly made and no one was there. He would send Miranda over later. It was all he could think to do.

  * * *

  Andrea and Walter braved the morning drizzle. She pretended it was sea spray, it was less unenjoyable that way. The weather kept the shore deserted. A top-heavy woman in a tent of a windcheater lasted ten minutes with her golden retriever and then disappeared. Andrea stared out towards Blackpool but could not see the tower. Neither could she see Robert, the man who had begged her to be here on their beach.

  ‘Maybe his wife murdered him,’ she told Walter. ‘Or, more probably, he’s being a cowardly dickhead.’

  She rubbed her belly in a sudden state of panic. It was growing. It was growing and she had done nothing about it. She had not seen a doctor or visited a clinic. She had not confided in a friend or told her parents. She was waiting for Robert to sort it all out and he was nowhere to be seen.

  She tilted her face towards the wind, and the rain drifted onto her tongue as she called out his name. It was strangely soothing and she could not be sure if she hated him or hated needing him or simply just missed his company.

  Lauren

  She decided it did not count. If Tim made the all the decisions but she was happy with them then that did not count as domineering or bullying or sexist or unthinking or selfish. Tim was controlling, she supposed, but not out of nastiness or even insecurity. He was driven, fearful of empty minutes. The only downside was that his energy and certainty made her feel, now and again, insipid and dull.

  He was a man jam-packed with rhetorical questions.

  ‘We’ll take Mum to dinner on Sunday, shall we?’ was a decision not a debate.

  Lauren wondered how long they would last if she really would rather stay in on Sunday but she was content in a gurgling clear-water-stream sort of way to always nod her agreement.

  He even said, one Saturday morning, ‘Big winter coat. You don’t have one, let’s get you one today.’

  She wondered if that was even normal, for a man to have noticed, let alone want to go shopping. It was as if he had an internal list and if he did not make ticks alongside at least six items every day, he would explode.

  Yet if she were to be asked why she loved him, she would say this was the quality that set him apart, made him desirable. He was more demanding of himself than he was of her and there was a fundamental goodness to him. He was not showing off, he simply believed so many things needed to be done.

  He was particularly fond of working late enough to warrant going to dinner before reaching home, and as Gregory was similarly dedicated, it meant that Lydia and Lauren made up a regular foursome. Lauren was glad Lydia at least did not work for the agency otherwise the day would bleed into the night without a break from advertising talk.

  Gregory held his knife like a pen and tapped the tip of it on the table.

  ‘I was thinking, because I passed by a “missing” poster this morning, about the portfolio you showed us when we first interviewed you,’ Gregory said. ‘Didn’t you have a missing person in that?’

  ‘I did indeed,’ Lauren said, ‘and he’s still missing to this day.’

  Lydia, remembering she was a writer and this might be creatively useful, sat up straight.

  ‘I don’t know about this, tell me.’

  Lauren sighed. She had always felt a little uncomfortable at the way she had exploited the Stanning family misery.

  ‘My dad’s boss disappeared when I was, oh, fifteen or something, and it was big news, really big news for my village, and Dad was sort of in the middle of it all even though he knew nothing. I drew a cartoon strip about it and my tutor at art college got excited and it became a running theme through my degree. Which is weird, I know, but on the other hand it is unusual for a man running a successful company to simply vanish.’

  ‘You should find him,’ Lydia said casually.

  ‘A lot of people have said that,’ Lauren said. ‘Maybe you could write a detective series where the sleuth is an artist who only paints crimes and clues.’

  ‘Seriously, though,’ Gregory said. ‘What clues were there? Are the police still looking for him?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Lauren said. ‘He was declared dead; his elder son runs the company now – but it must be odd. I mean his wife must think, deep down, that he could walk back in at any moment.’

  ‘Unless she murdered him,’ Lydia said.

  ‘Well, obviously,’ Lauren said.

  ‘Did you do any prying?’ Tim asked.

  ‘You know, I thought I would, I was tempted. I remember asking the man who owns my parents’ favourite Chinese restaurant about it and he said the police hadn’t interviewed him about Peter Stanning even though he was, it seems, their best customer, and I thought perhaps the investigation was corrupt or inept or something but then I probably got diverted by what to wear for the next disco.’

  ‘So he ate at the Chinese all the time? Do you think the owner knew something?’ Gregory asked.

  ‘I don’t know… I mean, he was definitely a regular, he and his wife went there all the time, so it might have been worth the police checking it ou
t.’

  There was silence as all four of them briefly pondered the mechanics of tracking down the missing.

  ‘Is it tougher,’ Gregory asked, ‘to find someone who wants to be missing but is alive or someone who is dead?’

  ‘Someone who wanted to be dead,’ added Lydia, ‘or someone who was murdered?’

  ‘Most people think there was an accident. No suicide, no murder, no abduction, nothing deliberate at all,’ Lauren said, ‘and those are the hardest to track.’

  ‘Can I see the stuff you produced for your college degree?’ Lydia asked.

  ‘Sure,’ Lauren said feeling she had perhaps outgrown it all, ‘you’ll have to come over for a drink and I’ll root it out.’

  The evening wore on. Lydia usually started off the evening as a vibrant, engaging creature, keen to clutch Gregory’s arm as she argued her point but before coffee came she would turn angry, sometimes even spiteful – or else she would become silent and superior, distracted and bored.

  This became Lauren’s burden for as soon as the tide turned, Tim would turn to Gregory and dissect the minutiae of office business leaving the women to themselves. Lauren had tried all manner of ruses to improve Lydia’s mood and made little progress. It fascinated her, though, the way Gregory seemed not to mind, that he refused to become agitated or embarrassed or weary of her transformation.

  ‘Aren’t you ashamed, Lauren,’ she said now, hissing, ‘of being British?’

  ‘No. Are you?’

  ‘Of course I bloody am,’ Lydia said. ‘We are the oldest democracy and yet how close are we to having a woman prime minister? No. Where. Near. And yet America with its gun laws and electric fucking chairs finds a way to elect a female president. I tell you, I am embarrassed by that.’

  This was a good topic, a meaty topic, but Lydia imbued it with so much venom it became painful.

  ‘Would you rather a bad female president or a good male one?’ Lauren asked, stoking the flames but seeing no other option. ‘I mean, there was that stroppy Maggie Someone, she was tipped to be PM and she was nowhere near a feminist.’