Never before had Chris come home to an empty flat. Her Mum was scared of the traffic, and of crowds. She had once said she was terrified of the height of the sky. She hadn’t been out for years. Now, when her Mum had needed Chris’s help, she wasn’t there for her. Chris slid to the floor, still holding the cat to her nose. She leaned against her Mum’s bed and stared at the wall, following the meandering line of a crease in the wallpaper until it petered out halfway up.
She should call the police and the local hospitals, but this was too drastic, it would make all the fear-pricking possibilities real. What did she and her Mum have to do with police? The reassuring familiarity of the bedroom had to be proof that things were normal? What did this peaceful room, with its picture by Wintz, of a village street leading to the sea, have to do with an intensive care unit, or worse, the hygienic silence of a morgue? Chris knelt over the bed and buried her face in the cotton. After a few minutes she slipped her hand under the pillow, groping for respite from her mounting dread in her Mum’s bedding.
Mum!
Where are you?
Chris realised that all her life she had known this moment would come. Sometimes she had wished for it to happen. To come home and find her Mum gone and herself released. Even in sleep, the idea was there, in the repeated images of rooms without doors. She burrowed into the bed clawing in anguish and atonement. The pillow smelt of the cream her Mum used and faintly, her perfume, so familiar it made her stomach uncoil.
There was something under the pillow.
Chris pulled out a padded envelope. It was addressed to herself, which made no sense. Then she recognised it as the envelope that had come with the copy of To the Lighthouse she had ordered off the internet a couple of weeks ago on the recommendation of her English teacher. Her Mum must have got it out of the dustbin. Her bloody mother was always in her wake, righting and retrieving things, getting her own way.
Not always.
Inside was a wad of cuttings. Chris saw they were from the newspapers her mother had recently asked her to buy. A creeping foreboding came over her. The stories were all about the Parkinson’s Disease specialist who had killed himself. She felt a clutch of terror and her insides became sand. Her mother was ill. She was at the hospital.
She was already dead.
Chris sat down on her Mum’s bed. Something stuck to her palm. She peeled it off. It was a return ticket to a place called Charbury, dated yesterday. The words meant nothing. It had been clipped. Chris tried to think of anything her Mum had done recently that might show that she was ill. She knew nothing about Parkinson’s Disease.
She became a ruthless detective, as she speed-read through the articles, some nine or ten in all once she had unfolded them. She went back to her bedroom and got a pen and notepad. She worked quickly to subdue her panic. Chris had always taken refuge in her work. Her talent for meticulous research and examination of the most insignificant clues would one day soon bear unwelcome fruit. Now she recorded the names that came up most often, although she didn’t think them important as proof her mother had something seriously wrong with her. At this point she dare leave nothing out.
Mark Ramsay, Isabel Ramsay, Jon Cross, Gina Cross…
Then she reached a cutting about a little girl who went missing in June 1968 and had never been found. Much later Chris described this moment as an epiphany. It seemed that time stopped still, there were no more noises outside, and the text before her eyes was subordinate to the pictures it conveyed to her. She heard her mother’s story-telling voice as she read:
The missing girl’s name was Alice, and if she had lived she would have been forty on the 25th of March 1999. This year. But one afternoon in June 1968 she had disappeared while playing hide and seek with a friend and had not been seen since. The article said that nowadays DNA would probably solve the thirty-year-old mystery, but no body had ever been found. Apart from a tramp who had been seen in the vicinity and was found drowned in the River Ouse a few days later, there had been no solid leads. Now it was a cold case.
Chris had made her mother’s card, using magazines, cutting up old birthday and Christmas cards, bits of newspaper and packaging to create a collage based around the numbers of her age. Alice had never liked celebrating her birthday, so she had been especially sulky about forty. Her birthday was on the 25th of March.
Chris didn’t hear the front door so she was nearly sick with shock when a voice called out ‘Goodbye’ to someone outside on the landing.
It was her mother.
Chris sprang to life. She shovelled the papers back into the envelope, tearing some, creasing others then pushed it back under the pillow. As she was getting up off the bed, her foot catching in the duvet and ripping the material, she saw the train ticket on the carpet. She slipped it into her jeans pocket just as Alice shut the door and crossed the hall to Chris’s bedroom. Chris beat out the indentation where she had been sitting, and forgetting the original unkempt bed, straightened the duvet. She leapt to the door. An expression of agitation can easily be translated into concern.
‘Where have you been? I’ve been really worried.’ It sounded like a lie.
‘I went down to the estate office!’
Alice made only a hollow attempt to express her sense of achievement about a phobia miraculously vanquished. Rendered cunning and so playing for time, Chris was determined to show no surprise. Alice would expect her to believe anything she told her, and clearly didn’t think she needed to make an effort. Now that she was watchful, Chris could tell the excuse was feeble, her Mum’s manner too relaxed.
Chris had been robbed of the life she had taken for granted only fifteen minutes earlier. Already the existence in which Alice’s announcement would have made Chris euphoric was a foreign land. Now she didn’t have any connection with the new Alice in the hallway confidently clinking door keys she had supposedly never used before and smiling like a mental patient.
Alice kicked the door shut behind her, oblivious of the bang. Chris felt no happiness at this joyful new being; lost and found. She was winded by a treachery without precedent. Yet her mind was busy and already a plan was forming. Until that moment, she hadn’t known what it was to truly hate someone.
Twenty-One
Chris walked round the side of the station and set off down the lane in the direction signposted to Charbury. She was the only person in the street. The absolute stillness was unsettling. She was further perturbed to find the village was oddly familiar. She knew it in the way she remembered places during dreams, with no association, just a tremulous familiarity. This must be because of the pictures in the newspaper articles she had found yesterday.
The lane was lined on both sides by detached cottages or larger houses, behind manicured gardens some fronted by neat hedges, or low whitewashed walls. Chris stopped by the steps of one house to examine a selection of blue plastic strawberry punnets and milk crates in which were jumbled weird looking vegetables, oversized cucumbers, misshapen potatoes. A pint mug had a label stuck on it offering ‘flowers for fifty pence’. These must have sold out, for now there were no flowers and the glass was filled with nasty brown water. A felt-penned notice next to an empty tray for duck eggs read ‘Egg Boxes Are Welcome’. Chris wondered dubiously whether this welcome would be extended to long-lost relatives. She regretted her spontaneous decision to find Kathleen Howland and tell her that her daughter was alive and living under an assumed name in London. It had initially been prompted by the desire to punish Alice. Now she was ashamed of this; she should have been thinking what it was like to be Kathleen, scared all these years that her daughter had been murdered. Now that she was in Charbury Chris didn’t feel equal to the task she had set herself.