‘Hello.’ Kathleen was surprised at the strength in her voice.
The woman stared at her.
‘It is you, isn’t it?’ It wasn’t a question, Kathleen was certain. The last time she had seen her was in black and white, but it had been enough to know for sure.
‘Mrs Howland.’ She avoided looking at Kathleen.
‘Oh, don’t call me that. It’s Kath, please.’
Kathleen took a couple of steps nearer and then she could see her properly. A fine mesh had been thrown over her face making it puckered and lined. There were dark bags under her eyes and tiny red marks flecked her grainy cheeks, which sagged, softening her jaw line. Thick grooves on each side of her mouth appeared to pull it down at the corners despite her efforts at a bright smile that did not extend to her eyes. Her blonde hair was dry and brittle and dark at the roots.
Jackie Masters must be about fifty-five, but she looked older. ‘How are you, love?’ Kathleen touched Jackie’s sleeve.
‘I shouldn’t have come. But I couldn’t resist…’ Jackie abruptly adjusted her glasses back over her eyes and retreated a couple of steps towards the gate. Kathleen gave a slight nod.
‘I’m sure he would have been glad.’ If only the dead could know how much they were cared for in life. Kathleen started to tell her about Doctor Ramsay’s CCTV film but Jackie interrupted:
‘Oh, I didn’t…’ Jackie tailed off suddenly curt. ‘Actually, I’m in a tearing hurry as always.’
Just as Jackie raised a peremptory hand in farewell, she hesitated and Kathleen was looking at the young woman who she had last seen in her kitchen three decades earlier, fussing with a dishcloth over the draining board. Jackie relented and said:
‘I’ll ring.’
This time Kathleen knew enough to understand that Jackie would never ring. But now she didn’t need her to. It was a chapter closed. What she had seen in the film was none of her business.
Kathleen turned to the gravestone Jackie had been reading. There was nothing special about it. A man called Leonard had died aged eighty-one, two years after Alice had gone missing. The inscription read that he was reunited with his wife who had ‘fallen asleep’ over forty years before him. The name rang a bell, but as with so many things, Kathleen couldn’t place it.
She was tired and could do with falling asleep herself. She leaned against the warm buttress and waited until everyone had left and she was alone, listening once more to the organist, and shutting her eyes to better hear the bell tolling for the doctor. Then before her drugs wore off and her feet already beginning to stick to the ground, she made her way out to the lane.
If Kathleen had trusted her balance enough to turn round and look behind her, she would have seen an inconspicuous figure in dark clothes climbing over the low wall under the oak tree, and then keeping their head down, make off across the triangular field towards the station.
Twenty
Eventually, far off in the future, Chris would come to think of Tuesday 29th June as the start of her new life. But most of the day had been the same as any other. The only difference was that she had to go home on foot because two cars had collided under the Eurostar Bridge at Waterloo and traffic was snarled up right to the Old Kent Road. She had jogged most of the way, passing eight stationary buses as she raced along. Carbon monoxide fumes made her eyes smart and every few paces she slapped dribbles of sweat from her cheeks and forehead. She invented tricks and games with herself to ward off the distance, dividing the route into gaps between lampposts and the numbers of idling cars as she dodged between them. She promised herself the manageable target of ‘just to that office furniture shop’, ‘only around this bend’ and ‘seven steps times three into the subway and up again’. At last she reached the archway to the flats, spurred on by the promise of an imminent cold shower.
As Chris unlocked the door, the cool passageway was almost reviving and for once she didn’t bemoan the lack of light in the flat. She faintly registered the ease with which the door opened. There was no draught excluder.
‘I’m back!’ She swung her bag on to her bed and had the usual brief inner tussle: bathroom or living room. Pushing back a sweat-soaked fringe Chris went to her mother.
The living room was empty.
Chris frowned at the armchair and clasped her hands in quelled disappointment. Alice must be ill. She hurried down the passage and paused outside her Mum’s door. No sound as she turned the handle.
She gasped.
The curtains were tied back and the window was open. This in itself was extraordinary; her Mum kept her bedroom window shut, disturbed by any noise, with the curtains closed because the view of the storage units depressed her. When Chris was small, there had been a disused goods station on what had been a railway line from London to Dover. Chris could just remember how the orange-pink of the setting sun picked out the castellated roof canopy, and how she had imagined making up a bunch from the wild flowers widening the cracks on the deserted platforms.
Her Mum had said it reminded her of a place she had once been to when she was a child, but the way she told it made Chris think it was one of her made-up stories. They had sat at her dressing table imagining the trains waiting at the platforms. Sometimes her Mum would press a finger to Chris’s lips and, cosy conspirators, they would pretend to hear the sneezing of a far off steam engine.
Then the station was pulled down. They couldn’t bear to watch as the great stone ball pendulumed into the sides, and slabs of wall tumbled away from twisting metal supports in huge clouds of dust. Soon in its place there was a warehouse of corrugated aluminium that gave the bedrooms a thin, insistent light. The silver cladding with its featureless surface had no magic to offer. Now, as Chris scanned the stunted view, somewhere on the industrial estate beyond the warehouse she could hear voices. Men were shouting to each other, a lone instruction reaching her above the scrambled sound of a distant transistor radio:
‘…find the hole, and pump it with mastic…’
Her Mum’s bed was unmade, a corner of the duvet flung back; she must have got up in a hurry. Chris became aware of the bedside clock ticking and heard a quick succession of car horns from the street on the other side of the building.
There was no sign of her Mum.
Although she knew she was alone, Chris checked every room, banging doors open and shut, kicking up the mats as she stormed up and down the passage in rising distress. Now she was looking for a note, a clue, any sign. If her Mum had got ill surely someone would have tried to call her, at the school, on her mobile? Why hadn’t a neighbour appeared at the front door to tell her? Chris dashed back to her bedroom, and shook her bag until everything was on the floor. She checked her mobile. The battery was charged. There were no missed calls, no messages.
Chris gravitated back to her Mum’s bedroom. With her hands on her hips, she took stock as she willed the room to yield an explanation. The objects around her had acquired a vibrancy emphasising the emptiness. Alice’s procession of Russian pottery animals on the dressing table mocked Chris. The tortoise was in the lead, speaking for her Mum’s belief in the strength of the apparently least able. The glass fronted box holding a tableau depicting a sea-battered groyne with a seagull stuck on the third strut and string coiled around the base of the second, was testimony to her Mum’s model making abilities. She had made it for Chris ten years earlier, and it had returned to her, not so much rejected as reclaimed. This was flanked by a London bus commemorating the Silver Jubilee, a red paint-chipped Citroën DS 19, and a 1930s model of the Eiffel Tower. Chris lifted up the mouse-size, furry cat dressed in knitted pantaloons and sniffed it. Her Mum.