This evening, as I negotiated the fence and walked up to the hotel across the lawn, I saw that Dad had come home on time for our meeting. The lights were on in our apartments and, walking into the living room, I saw that our visitor had already wedged herself uncomfortably into the smallest of our wicker bucket chairs.
She had put on a lot of weight since she had bedded me. Such generous breasts, such ungenerous nipples. While she talked, putting my father straight about the wiles of the female psyche, I imagined her great vampire breasts, sucking the lifeblood from the unwary feeder. What on earth was she thinking of, coming here in these circumstances? Well, she was the mouthpiece – this much I knew – of a local outfit which for the most part trawled the hinterland estates, persuading feckless teenagers into a termination. Here though she was purely ‘a friend of the family’ – this is what she said – someone Mum knew and whose hand she had held (all the while making eyes at Dad and, when that failed, at me). A self-appointed honest broker.
She seemed totally oblivious to me.
‘Because, painful as this is,’ she said, a dentist preparing a nervous patient, ‘I think we have to entertain the possibility that Sara felt threatened here. By you, Ben, I mean.’
Ben collected visits from missing-persons charities the way a lonely pensioner invites builders in to estimate for work he cannot afford. These endless interviews gave Dad the illusion of progress in his search for Mum. He imagined a network of intelligence radiating across the country.
I stayed out of the way of these visits as much as I could.
No one vanishes, a splash, then gone. No one. Impossible.
Mum’s rooms. Make-up and dresses and easels and unopened paints. Dad said, ‘If you’d rather I did this on my own, I’ll understand.’
In the end, after the first shock of her disappearance, Dad had settled in his own mind that Mum had absconded, fleeing the pressures of marriage and family. After so many years with her, I suppose he found it impossible to imagine a world without her in it. He packed Mum’s things up in boxes and carried them out to the garage.
Living with Dad, surfing the roll and spin of his moods, his grief, his sense of having been abandoned and his slow-building anger (he was learning, in his nervous, clumsy way, to hate the thing he had loved) I found it difficult to resist his version of events. I didn’t forget what had really happened – but it was hard for me to imagine that the episode was ever a part of my waking life. Dad’s anxious speculations were so much more believable. I would catch myself, from time to time, imagining what Mum was doing, away from us; among her Wiccan friends, perhaps, or in sheltered accommodation somewhere, free of what she had probably convinced herself by now was an abusive marriage.
I no longer spent all my free time by the river. One lazy weekend afternoon I got Dad’s walking maps down from the shelf and, spreading them out on the conservatory tiles, I found the river and I traced it with my finger, through towns and villages, round chalk hills and across reclaimed pasture, out to sea. Impossible.
How much easier to imagine that she was sitting in some B&B somewhere, extemporising her sexual and domestic oppression for the benefit of some credulous social worker.
We were free now, Dad and I. We were weightless. We were falling, and it felt good. I didn’t want it to end, and it didn’t end, it just went on and on. I no longer seemed to need any sleep. At night I lay awake, listening to the radio under the covers. I was never tired. Things acquired an unnatural clarity. The walk to school. The cool scratchiness of a clean shirt each school-day morning.
But things were flying apart and I could not pick and choose what I held onto and what I lost. Some nights, Dad didn’t come home at all. I didn’t know who he found to be with. I felt him shucking off shackle after shackle and I waited, with a growing calm, for the moment when he freed himself from me.
At the beginning of the spring term, over dinner, Dad had news. ‘There’s this new job,’ he said.
‘Right.’
He looked at me. I watched the anger rising within him: anger from nowhere. ‘We have to talk about this.’
‘We are talking about this. I’m sitting here. I am talking about this.’
He wanted a fight. After so long at Mum’s beck and call, so many years manning the safety valves, watching pressures rise and fall, he imagined that any particle of self-interest was bound to trigger a disaster. He needed the sound of breaking glass to convince him that he was getting what he wanted.
Dad had been invited to work as a technician at a private hospital, crafting new eyes for old. It would not pay well, though it was what he’d been longing to do for years. His hobby, he said finally, had at last thrown up the chance of a modest second career.
‘You want to take this job.’
He gaped at me, hopelessly. ‘The thing is,’ he said.
I said, ‘I don’t think we can keep living our lives as though Mum’s just going to step back through the door. Can we?’
Dad studied me, hunting for a clue, a cue. He was a hair’s breadth away from telling me not to speak so heartlessly. My chest was heavy, and heaving with the need to scream my confession in his face.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to sell the hotel.’
I stared at him. ‘The hotel?’
‘This new job, it’s a long way away and it doesn’t pay very well.’ He made a sound like a laugh. ‘It doesn’t pay well at all. And to afford it – well . . .’
‘But my exams—’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s all sorted.’
‘It is?’
‘You can go stay with Michel,’ he said.
SIXTEEN
‘Of course I remember your mother.’
Bryon Vaux’s office is as sumptuous as a living room, with a fire in the grate and a decanter of brandy at my elbow.
‘Sara.’ He casts his blindsighted eyes into the middle-distance. ‘I remember the soap she made. It made us feel so almighty hungry!’
Coconut, honey and beeswax scrub. God help me, it is him. There is no mistake.
Eventually, I find the strength to come out with it. What I saw. The railway station. The platform. The figure there. Albino-white hair. A canvas bag. Gabby found the records. The dates match up. There is no longer any doubt. No wriggle room. No avoidance.
‘And you’re sure it was me? I did have a canvas bag like that. A big canvas bag. I remember it. The station, though – I mean I remember the rail station, but heading off on my last day . . .’ He shakes his head. ‘Man, it’s more than twenty years ago, I can’t remember something like that.’
‘Of course you can’t. Of course. Forget about it.’
He cannot forget about it. ‘Sara. I remember her.’ He remembers whole conversations with her – conversations I never knew they’d had. Sara wasn’t an easy person. Not an outgoing person. Yet Vaux remembers her rooms: the gauzy scarves she’d throw over every surface. Her day-bed, and under it, bag after bag of unopened paints. ‘I always thought it was a shame, the way – hell, do you mind me saying this? The way her gears kept slipping.’
Who is he, that he remembers these things? What was he doing in her rooms?
When we’re done Vaux comes out with me, sees me to the atrium, and there, in time for his next appointment, sits Michel.
He looks different. Bigger. His face is weathered. He sees me and smiles, but it is not an easy smile. He walks over. ‘Conrad. Hi.’ He shakes my hand – an odd formality, but it’s not the gesture that surprises me so much as the feel of Michel’s palm. The skin is rough and broken. After ten years tapping and stroking glass, he has once again been working with his hands.