Elizabeth Is Missing (22 page)

“Elizabeth,” I say to the globe of petals. “Elizabeth.”

I throw empty stalks over the gouged lawn and then follow roots through the soil with my hands, pulling ragged wool-like strands out, one after another. The rich feel of the earth is glorious and the movement is soothing, until I get to a long, pale strand that won’t budge. I tug it as far as I can, shaking it violently in frustration, and then I push my fingers into the dirt to try to loosen its grip.

Helen cries out as if it’s some part of her I’m trying to loosen. “Please, Mum. Not the choisya. Dad and I planted that, and you always say it smells lovely.”

I leave the shrub alone. Here by the gate is a box of glass things, those things for drinking and jams. They are all open and for the taking and, although I can’t think why you’d want one I reach in, the glass ringing and squeaking. One has
BRANSTON PICKLE
on the label and I get a sudden vision of Elizabeth’s dining room. Of salad cream and white pepper and majolica plates hung on the walls. Of ceramic lizards and turtles and stag beetles scrabbling from ferns and grasses towards the ceiling. Of Elizabeth laughing at my disgust when she brings out a teapot with its spout shaped like a snake. I cradle the jar in my arms. It still has its lid, though many of its brothers don’t, and I have to unscrew it to drop in the thing for hair that I’ve got in my pocket, a ring thing to tie up your hair. It’s wet, as if it’s been on the ground, and there’s a broken Polo mint stuck to it, and I’ve got a little plastic frog here, too. They all go in together.

On the edge of the pavement is a snail, slowly suckering along, and I prise it from the ground as a woman with a long black ponytail comes out of my house. Her hair thing is just like the one in my jar.

“I’ve put the medication on a plate,” she says. “But I really have to get to my next lady now.”

“I know,” Helen says. “Thank you. Thank you for calling me.”

The woman stops by a small, roundish car. “Will you be all right?” She isn’t talking to me.

I drop the snail into the jar and watch as it bubbles its juices against the glass. I can make my own majolica ware.

“Yes,” Helen says. “I’ll just stay with her.”

“You’ll have to call someone else if—”

“I know. Thanks.”

The woman looks back at the lawn. “At least you know about plants. So you can put it right later, maybe.”

Helen laughs, not very happily, and the woman gets into the car and drives off. I walk in the same direction, going into other front gardens, gathering things. Masses of things. A bottle top, a plastic cameo brooch, a beetle lying with its legs in the air, a handful of sand and some cigarette ends. I put them in the pickle jar and shake, catching sight of the name
BRANSTON
over and over. And I think of Elizabeth over and over, and it’s like a pain pulsing through my skin with every heartbeat. I can see Helen two houses back, watching as I sink my hand into a mound of sand piled up by a fence. Someone is cementing over their garden. Elizabeth’s son is always threatening to do that. How horrid that would be, what a terrible thing. “No birds will come,” I told her. “It will be like a desert.” And how would we ever get at the ground beneath? It would be lost for ever.

I walk past the ugly house and the tea dregs and the acacia, the way I’ve always walked, and then further on, until I can hear the sound of trains. I stare hollowly across the street. On the opposite side is the Station Hotel. It’s an old people’s home now and I read the name aloud: “Cotlands Care Home.” It’s a tall Victorian building, still stately even with its change of purpose. The care-home sign is loose on its screws. They seem to have been pushed out by the brick, as if the old building were rejecting its new title. I remember when I was young how it seemed to bristle at the smears of coal dust over its stone front. I always stared at it in those days. It’s where Sukey’s suitcase was found.

I’d been there once before, just after the case arrived on our kitchen table. I’d gone to stand against the railings of the station, staring at the dozens of windows, and wondering what Sukey had been doing in a hotel in her own town, wondering if she was somehow still living there, hoping she might look out and see me and come running. Of course, she didn’t, and I went home to another silent dinner.

But finding the letter again, reading it, and having the word “lover” jostling next to Douglas’s name inside my head made me think more sharply: a hotel—wasn’t that the very place people went to have affairs? Hadn’t I seen that a dozen times at the pictures? And so I made my way back there one lunchtime, instead of going home, stooping to pick up a discarded ticket stub as I went through the doors.

Inside, the hotel seemed to be just one long staircase, winding round and round—as if the people who stayed there didn’t do enough travelling. From the bottom it looked like a well, like the rabbit hole in
Alice in Wonderland
. I thought Sukey could easily have fallen down it and never found her way back. And I walked up slowly, looking down at the station from the windows, at railway passengers and porters with laden carts. The scent of onion soup drifted up from the hotel kitchens, mixing with the smell of the acrid banister polish. The combination made me feel strangely hungry and I felt in my pocket for a carrot biscuit, knowing I had none, and finding only the ticket stub and Sukey’s slow-roasted letter again. Every now and then a nonstopping train would hurtle through the station and cause a whirl of steam to fly up above the building, and I lingered at the top landing, to watch as the paperboy struggled to hold on to his wares and his hat.

Along the corridor the numbered doors were shut and I couldn’t bring myself to try the handles, so I squinted in the dim light at the worn carpet and peeling wallpaper. Had Sukey and Douglas met here? Had they whispered to each other? Exchanged kisses? It seemed so unlikely. And yet I couldn’t help a stabbing jealousy at the possibility that I’d been left out of it all, not trusted with the truth. I picked at a piece of wallpaper, curled over itself by a light switch, tearing it carefully away from the plaster and putting it into my pocket. On the way back to the stairs a man passed me; he opened a door and I caught a glimpse of someone inside. She had soft, dark hair and a blue suit, neatly fitted to her figure. Something coiled fast and tight inside me and I stared, hardly hearing the man as he spoke.

“Get back from the door, will you?” he said, his eyes too big for their lids.

I didn’t move, couldn’t even swallow, but I took him in now, thin and dusty-looking, his slight frame hardly able to block my view into the room. And then the woman turned. But her nose was heavier than I expected, her lips fleshier, her cheeks flatter, and the coil became a lump in my stomach. I fell back against the wall.

“What on earth’s the matter?” the woman said, coming out and taking my wrist, her fingers plumply pressing at my pulse. “Looks like she’s seen a ghost.”

At the woman’s voice the man seemed to shake off his dust and his eyes fitted better into their sockets. “Lord help us, girl,” he said. “You gave us a fright, looking in like that. What is it? Don’t like my face?”

I withdrew my wrist from the woman’s hand and slinked away to sit at the top of the stairs, listening to the station guardsmen make announcements on the wind. I couldn’t find the energy to get up, so I lay back, my legs extending the length of the short flight, and let the rumble of trains vibrate through me. I made a study of the sand that had been trodden into the carpet, imagining I could taste sea salt on the air, until the woman from the room discovered me.

“You again?” she said, doing a little two-step of surprise as she reached the landing above. “What are you lying there for? Are you hurt?”

“Not really,” I told her, getting up.

“Are you a guest?”

“No. I just came in. Sorry.”

“Just came in to lie on the stairs?” She began to walk down past me, and I followed.

“No, it’s just—I thought you were someone else.”

“Who did you think I was?”

I didn’t answer, and she asked me if I thought I was in shock.

“I know
I
am,” she said. I told her I supposed I might be and she suggested I have a small glass of brandy. “I’m having one, at any rate.”

She left me in the hallway while she went into the bar. This wasn’t the Fiveways, and they’d never tolerate a girl in there. “Poor thing came in to have a shock,” I heard her say, catching glimpses of the blue suit through the swing doors as people went in and out. Even after seeing her face I couldn’t help but imagine she was Sukey. She pointed towards the foyer, and several men turned to look at me. One of them was Frank.

He saw me of course and a moment later was pushing the bar door open. I’d hardly thought of him until that moment, and had only imagined what Sukey and Douglas might have been to each other. I felt a sharp pain on Frank’s behalf, the pain he might have felt if he’d known about them. And then I wondered if he did know. If Sukey had told him, like she’d said she was going to in the letter. I remembered the way he’d spoken about Douglas, calling him a “rat-faced idiot,” and that made me think he did know. And what did that mean? What might he have done if he’d found out? I couldn’t face him and turned to run back into the stairwell.

“Maud?” he called after me.

“Oh, Frank,” I heard the woman say. “Is she with you?”

I rushed up the stairs, higgledy-piggledy, turning and turning until my thighs burned and I was back at the top landing, looking for the runs of sand in the steps’ creases. Frank had started on the first flight and then given up. I saw his face appear between two landings directly below me as he leant backwards over the handrail.

“Come down here, will you?” he said, his voice spiralling up after me. “I can’t be doing with these bloody stairs.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked, sending the words down through the floors.

“Having a drink. Not a crime, is it?”

“But why here? Where her suitcase was found?”

“You’re talking about Sukey, aren’t you?”

“Of course I’m talking about Sukey. Who else would I be talking about?”

“All right. What was the other bit?”

I realized he was what Dad would call “tight” and so I repeated my words slowly. “Sukey’s. Suitcase. Was found. Here.”

He opened his mouth, but looked away as the woman came to the bottom of the stairs, a glass in her hand. “Want to come down and have this, then?” she said, her voice echoing.

I did want it: the liquid was honey-coloured and I imagined it would be sweet and warming and that I might somehow learn something from drinking it, but I’d never had spirits before. “I’m not sure I ought to,” I said.

“Suit yourself.” She knocked the whole thing back before disappearing again into the bar. I was disappointed, and it was only years later that I finally tasted brandy for the first time, and the burning unpleasantness made me glad I hadn’t bothered that day.

“How does that woman know your name?” I asked Frank.

“Who? Nancy? She works here. Her husband’s an ex-POW. Poor bastard, touched, he is. Can’t bear to live at home, so they live here. I gave them some bits of furniture a while back, to make it more homely.”

I laughed. It was Dad’s “I might’ve known” laugh. “Seems there’s hardly a person in the town you haven’t done some sort of favour for.”

“That’s a bit of a push,” Frank said. “Who else have I done favours for that you know of?”

“People on your street.”

“Who wouldn’t do their neighbours a good turn if they could?”

“It’s
why
you did the favours that I wonder about.”

“What’s got into you?” he asked. His head disappeared a moment and his hand slid up the banister. I wanted him to stop, to stay where was and not come any closer. I needed to think, to unmuddle my head, to remember the questions I most wanted to ask. I thought about running to the POW’s room.

“Does she work at the desk?” I said. “Nancy? Is she the one that wrote Sukey’s name in the register?”

“What are you talking about, Maudie?” Frank asked, just a hand on polished wood slowly following the curve of the staircase. His voice curled towards me, sinister and momentous without a body, and I felt the banister like a conductor, sending a current of electricity from his hand to mine. “What are you doing here? Did you come to find me?”

“No.”

“But you’re angry with me.” The hand disappeared and he took the few remaining flights at a run. They weren’t too much for him, after all. “What is it? What’s happened? You’ve discovered something?”

I stepped back, disturbed at having to look up at him instead of down, and crumpled the letter in my pocket in answer.

“What have you got there?” he asked with a half-smile, as if I were a child playing a game.

“A letter.”

“From who?”

“Sukey. She sent it before she disappeared.”

I had expected a conversation, I thought he’d ask what the letter said, that I’d have time to question him, but I didn’t even see his expression change before he lunged at me. With a single movement I found I was bent back over the banister, and he was trapping me there with one hand on my collarbone. The sudden strength of him was a shock. I squeezed my fist around the letter and pushed deep into my pocket, the fabric grazing my skin. He gripped my wrist and tried to jerk it upwards, dragging my skirt up with it.

“The letter says she was going to tell you something,” I said, clamping my arm to my side, determined to ask my questions anyway. “
Did
she tell you something?”

“Give me the letter, Maud.”

His hand slid above my elbow, forcing it to bend, and my arm rose helplessly. “Tell me,” I said, trying to hang on to my thoughts, to remember what I was supposed to be asking. It seemed odd to be talking still when I was so like a ragdoll in his hands.

“How can I when I haven’t read it?” He had clenched his teeth and was twisting my arm back, his skin hot through the material of my school blouse. That moment, I scrunched the letter into a ball and dropped it over the banister the way you’d drop a penny down a well.

Frank swore as it fell, and tried to snatch it from the air. The action forced me further over the banisters, and my feet left the floor. I tried to catch at the handrail, but missed. Sickness rushed up as I felt the ground far below do the same, and then Frank’s hands were on me again. He pulled me roughly on to the landing, and it took a moment before I realized I was safe, not falling.