‘Ah, there you are, Mr Kenyon!’ She held the door wide. The hall was in half-darkness; the brittle brightness of her voice might have been trying to make up for the want of light on her face. ‘Have you had a nice weekend?’
Had he? Back from a brief re-insertion into a vacancy which no longer seemed large enough for him, back to a desired but elusive right of domicile which had not yet fully admitted him, he couldn’t find much comfort anywhere. But he said yes, he had, all the more positively for the nagging of his doubts. What else can you say? Everybody’d been almost overglad to see him, and made all the fuss of him even he could ever have wished; that ought to add up to a nice week-end, according to his old standards.
‘We’ve missed you,’ said Mrs Beck, making a production of taking his coat from him and hanging it up. He unwound his college scarf, and was stricken motionless for a second in mid-swing, arm ridiculously extended, at a statement so disastrously off-key. She didn’t say things like that. She was too correct and practical, and they hadn’t so far, been on that kind of terms. It was then he began to feel the ground quake under him with certainty that something was wrong.
There was no Annet in the living-room, no glossy black head lifting reluctantly from her book to speak faint, warm, rueful civilities over his return. Only Beck, with his glasses askew and his lofty brow seamed and pallid, almost mauve beneath the light. Too ready with a rush of welcoming conversation, missing his footing occasionally in his haste, like his wife. But unlike his wife, lurching at every mis-step; and his eyes, distorted by the lenses of his glasses, liquefying at every recovery into anxiety and fear.
‘Annet working late?’ asked Tom, himself shaken off-course by this inexplicable disquiet.
If the pause was half a second long, that was all; if they did exchange a look across his shoulder, it touched and slid away in an instant.
‘No,’ said Mrs Beck, ‘she’s gone into Comerbourne with Myra, there was some film they wanted to see. One of these three-hour epics. They’d have to miss the end if they caught the last bus, they’ll stay overnight with Myra’s aunt in Mill Fields.’
She must have seen his face fall, if she hadn’t been so busy desperately holding up her own. But he accepted it; he swallowed it whole, and gave up expecting to see Annet that night. Flat and cold the evening extended before him; and if he hadn’t succumbed to his hideous disappointment and taken cravenly to flight from the prospect of keeping up appearances face-to-face with her parents through all those dragging hours, the course of events might have been radically changed. But he did succumb, and he did resort to flight. Better drive over to the local club in Comerford than sit here trying to keep his mouth from sagging. He made his excuses winningly, and had the discomfiting sensation of having hurled himself at an unlatched door when they received them almost eagerly, without even formal regret at being deprived of his company.
He withdrew himself thankfully as soon as supper was over; he’d have skipped that, too, if he’d been less hungry, or if there’d been much prospect of getting a meal in Comerford at this hour. In the hall he wound himself up again in his scarf, and then, remembering that he was wearing his scuffed driving shoes, opened the large clothes-cupboard to fish out some more presentable ones.
And suddenly something fell into place, a doubt, a premonition, a memory, whatever it was that put his own intended moves out of mind, and set him searching through the many coats on their hangers, looking for the dark gentian blue one with the large collar. Her best amber-gold one was there, the new one she had bought only a few weeks ago. Her second-best tweed raincoat was there. But not the blue. When did Annet ever go into town to the cinema in her everyday coat? He looked for the blue nylon head-scarf, that she used to drape casually over the rail, since it could hardly be creased even if one tried. He couldn’t find it. And her shoes, the shoes she had been wearing that rainy Thursday afternoon, strong half-brogue walking shoes suitable for such weather – where were they? Her more prized pairs she nursed carefully in her own room, but her walking shoes stayed down here. Where were they now?
Slowly he went back into the living-room. They both looked up at him with a quick, oblique uneasiness, and fastening on his face, calmed and stilled into a kind of resigned despair.
‘It’s a fine night,’ he said, with what sounded even in his own ears like horrible inconsequence. ‘Stars shining, not a sign of rain. Did she go off wearing her rain-hood, and her heavy shoes, a night like this?’
No one, apparently, noticed his effrontery in making deductions unasked about Annet’s movements, no one bridled at his asking these questions as though he had a right to an answer. The Becks looked at each other with a long, drear look, and crumbled before his eyes.
‘She isn’t out with Myra – is she?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Beck, and straightened her back and met his eyes wretchedly; not resenting him, almost grateful for him. As a pair they only depressed and de-gutted each other, those two, they grasped at a third, now that it was inevitable, like drowning men at a good solid log. ‘No, she isn’t.’ She dropped her hands in her lap, and let them lie, let the breath go out of her body in a great, helpless sigh.
Tom moistened his lips. ‘She went out on Thursday,’ he said, ‘just as I came in. She was wearing that blue coat she wears around, and those shoes, and the rain-hood. That makes sense, it was raining then. But where I’ve been it hasn’t rained again all the week-end. I don’t know about here. But the roads were bone dry all the way.’
‘It hasn’t rained here, either,’ said Mrs Beck in the same flat, drearily angry tone. Beck made an inarticulate sound of protest, and she rode over him, raising her voice. ‘What’s the use? He may as well know. At this rate everybody’ll know before long. Where’s the sense in thinking we can keep it quiet? She did go out on Thursday afternoon. She said she was going to post the letters and then have a quick walk before tea. She said she wouldn’t be long.’
‘Mother!’ said Beck in reproachful appeal. She turned her head for a moment and gave him a startled, wondering, almost derisive look in return for the incongruous word; but her eyes came back almost at once to Tom’s face. If she was pinning her hopes to anyone at this minute, he realised, it was to him. ‘And she never came home,’ said Mrs Beck.
Once it was out they could all breathe and articulate again, and by an appreciable degree the tension eased. Things admitted can be faced. They have to be, there’s no choice in the matter. But they were all trembling; and the relationship between them, that had been so decorous and neutral until that moment, would never be the same again.
Very carefully, so as not to unbalance himself and them, Tom asked: ‘Have you notified the police that she’s missing?’
They had not. They shook their heads mutely, eyeing each other, each willing the other – he should have foreseen it – to tell him the reasons that were so obvious to them and should have been incomprehensible to him. They imagined him seeing Annet, with her perilous beauty, dead in a ditch; they couldn’t know that he was seeing her rather as they saw her, alive, resolute and passionate, in the company of some other man. Or boy. Or whatever sixth-formers are these days, with their prodigiously advanced bodies and their struggling half-adult minds, so mutually hurtful, so impossible fully to reconcile. He almost went along with their instinct for concealment, and concealed his own knowledge; but then he shook off the temptation and slashed his way through to the truth. For what mattered was not their sensitivities but Annet’s safety.