Missing, Presumed (15 page)

‘No. Getting the train to Bedford to pick the car up. Shouldn’t take long. I forgot to ask – how was Buckaroo with Elsie? Did she throw in a custard cream?’

‘Long,’ says Harriet, picking her bag up off the floor. ‘Very, very long. It’s not a game I’d recommend for someone with advanced-stage Parkinson’s.’

‘No, no, I can see hooking those little plastic …’

They both shake their heads at the thought of it.

‘I just didn’t think it through,’ Harriet says sadly. ‘I’m a complete fucking idiot sometimes. She wouldn’t give up, though, I’ll give her that.’

‘S’pose you should steer clear of Operation as well.’

‘Anyway, how was yours? Wild partying, I bet.’

‘I went to the movies instead. Swedish season at the arts cinema. Bumped into that dog walker, actually – chap who found Taylor Dent.’

‘Oh yeah? Davy mentioned his amazing barn. Said he fancied the pants off you.’

‘Oh,’ says Manon, flushing like a marzipan fruit. ‘I don’t think he did.’ And her inner world shudders as if a host of celestial doves were fluttering up inside her ribcage.

Her lonely bench, police blue, on a deserted Sunday platform; wondering what’s left in the fridge for tea. The problem of food for one: it symbolises everything. She wants delicious morsels yet cooking for herself is so defeating: a surplus of ingredients, the washing-up unshared, and the sense that it doesn’t matter – the production of it or whether it’s nice. The daily slog of being alone washes over her on the cold latticed bench, the sense of being unassisted in the minutiae: broadband down; washing machine stuck on spin cycle. Oh yes, people spoke of the freedoms – no one to answer to! – but there was such a thing as a surfeit of freedom, a sort of weightless free fall through nothing. She wonders what Alan Prenderghast is like at fixing things, or renewing roadside breakdown assistance. Masterful, if his Ford Focus is anything to go by.

There is a solitary fellow passenger two benches down, and as he turns to look at her, Manon is careful to turn her head away. Never catch their eye.

A songbird trills, curiously rural amid track and all the metal clutter overhead. The man gets up from his bench and starts towards her, carrying a holdall that looks as if it could be laden with half a torso or firearms but probably contains a mildewed towel and some unpleasantly brief Speedos. He reaches the bench next to hers just as the headlamps of their First Capital Connect train hoves in to view, screeching and puffing and crawling up the platform like an elderly sex symbol keeping the fans waiting. The brakes squeal, a gush of air from somewhere.

Manon waits for the man to choose his carriage so she can choose a different one. Never board first, otherwise they can follow you in.

The familiar blue tartan seats, the smell of warm air pumped through metal floor vents, and someone’s fast food.

In Bedford she stops at her car and looks at the orange glow through the drawn curtains of Bryony’s windows, imagining Bryony and Peter cuddled up on the sofa in front of the TV.

A new year and it feels so old, worn out and tin-rusted. 2011, fifteen days missing. Time pants away from her disappearance like a locomotive and the rawness of it dissipates, as if this might be an acceptable new status quo.

‘Right,’ she says to Rollo, gathering her keys from the kitchen table. ‘I’m off to see Jonti.’

Rollo is eating more toast. It’s Herculean, the loaves he can get through. ‘Say hi from me,’ he says through a full mouth.

Miriam’s journey to Jonti’s shop in Kensal Rise is typically vigilant. She searches every face these days, examines every doorway bed, sees Edith everywhere – the spun gold of her hair; her long slender neck; the back of her head, beloved oval, unaware and vulnerable.

Only yesterday, Miriam had hastened across the scratched grass of the Heath to the bench overlooking the ponds, stumbling happily, she was so sure it was Edith, thinking, Ian
will
be relieved. Edith in an unfamiliar coat, staring at the tall Parliament Hill houses across the water.

‘Oh,’ Miriam said, as the stranger’s face turned up to hers questioningly. She felt furious and frowned at the woman as if it were her fault.

She looks rough sleepers in the eye, where before she scuttled guiltily past them; she seeks out faces in the hot metallic air of the tube as commuters avoid her eye. She has visited soup kitchens in King’s Cross, the other volunteers mistaking her interest for just another dose of middle-class guilt – it being the time of year for it. She has joined a support group for parents of missing children, some of whom disappeared six years, ten years, fifteen years ago, looking at their dogged campaigns and catching herself thinking, Can’t you see they’re dead?

She is working her way through Edith’s childhood friends, for connections, clues, anything. Pointless, really, but she does it for the sense of contact with Edith, the chance to talk about her, and for the feeling of
doing something
.

‘Thought I might contact the EMFs,’ she’d said idly to Rollo. ‘Though God knows how.’

‘That awful bunch,’ he replied. And he was right, of course – the EMFs were awful, though Miriam would never have said as much to Edith. The group was given this moniker at school because they read everything by E. M. Forster and discussed it at length in cafés on Finchley Road, drinking lemon tea and smoking cigarettes. When Edith first fell in with them, Ian and Miriam were thrilled (Ian more so) – the intellectual set! Edith was full of literary zeal, so taken by
Howards End
and
A Room with a View
,
Maurice
and
Where Angels Fear to Tread
, that she travelled by train to Firenze and San Gimignano (with Rollo as her rather Forster-ish chaperone, Miriam had insisted), writing furiously in her diary while Rollo listened to pop music through headphones which appeared to be surgically attached to his head. The EMFs turned out to be very up themselves indeed, pretentious and competitive, especially Electra, whom Miriam had been sure was bulimic and who got a car for her seventeenth birthday.

Miriam preferred Christy from across the road – a few years older than Edith, who liked playing hairdressers and watching TV, and with whom Edith had a sisterly, nonchalant relationship. Last-minute sleepovers welcomed by her delightfully
laissez-faire
Spanish mother, and after-school teas in rumpled uniforms. These days, Christy has two tiny daughters, aged two and four, and a house in Golders Green.

Miriam had gone there a few days back. Christy was kind to her, of course, made her tea (
more tea
), handed her tissues, and apologised to Miriam – she hadn’t heard from Edith in years. And then there was the awkward silence when Miriam became tearful. She is growing used to those, too.

‘It worked out for you, all this,’ Miriam said in a watery voice, sitting at Christy’s pock-marked farmhouse table. Her fingers traced the grooves in the wood. ‘It could have worked out for Edith, that’s what I keep thinking. For Edith and Jonti.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Christy said. ‘She was awfully critical of him. Edith’s much more ambitious than Jonti.’

The bell rings above Jonti’s shop door, which is too minimalist to have a sign, and as it closes behind her, the roar of the buses outside is silenced. They plough up and down this thoroughfare, past frayed gold velvet chaises longues and Fifties Formica tables, tasselled lamp shades, beaten leather club chairs and flaking green-painted dressers – the wares of the antique shops that flank Chamberlayne Road.

Inside, she is greeted by the smell of sawdust and linseed, warmed through the broad shop windows. She runs a hand over one cabinet – oak, she guesses – and admires its slick surface and the triangular joints which lattice together like fingers. Jonti’s style is Shaker with something entirely his own. Blocky wooden rectangles with small pegs for knobs like blinking, honest eyes in a quiet face. Dressers without curls or pelmets. Stoic tables. Miriam is astonished at the craftsmanship. He has built all this from nothing. If only Edith could have had more faith.

‘Jonti,’ she says as he enters from the back, and she is overcome with fondness for him. He has a slight stoop, is wiping his hands on the back pockets of his trousers, and wears a ridiculous beanie hat in grey wool. It is not that he is without affectation (the very location of his shop is an affectation), more that he is without guile. Jonti doesn’t have a ‘side’ – he is as plain as his furniture.

‘Mrs … Lady Hind,’ he says, checking his hands before holding one out to her.

‘Miriam, please, Jonti,’ and she ignores his hand to hug him about the shoulders.

He had been a resident of her kitchen for long enough, an extra son when he and Edith were eighteen and going about together. When he was around – and he was around a lot – the atmosphere had a good-natured calm to it. He would lean against her kitchen worktop, his hands in the pockets of his mustard cords, and say, ‘Anything you want peeling, Mrs H?’ Or joke around on the computer with Rollo, waiting for Edith to get ready.

She liked Edith when she was with Jonti; it was as if he planed down her sharper edges. Edith would rush down the stairs in a great pummelling of feet, breathless and lively, saying, ‘We’re off out, Mum,’ dragging Jonti away by the arm, and Miriam would shout after them, ‘Have fun, you two.’

Ian, of course, viewed Jonti as a dropout, and it was true he smoked a lot of marijuana (or ‘blow’ as Edith and Rollo referred to it). He was a couple of years older, was training even then to be a joiner, as if rejecting his private school education, though that had been in the overtly liberal vein: children of singers and artists, no uniforms, and everyone calling the teachers by their first names.

When Edith got pregnant that summer, she’d already had her offer from Cambridge.

It would be quite wrong to suggest Ian made her get rid of it, but his silences over the dinner table forced them all to contemplate how seriously everything was hanging in the balance. Ian had a way of making his face say, ‘I am shattered by my disappointment,’ which could sting you to the heart. Ian was Edith’s raised bar. She strained to please him, and in that striving she did well, Miriam admiring the discipline of their work together because it counterbalanced the elastic feel of her love. Miriam was forever wavering, uncertain of where she should draw the line with the children, while Ian had been made of sterner stuff. ‘Never back down when it comes to children,’ he would say. ‘It’s the beginning of the end.’ And she thought, what
rot
. They’re people – why on earth shouldn’t they win sometimes? Have one over on you? Get away with it?

Edith got her four As and her place at Cambridge, and she had gone about with Jonti and got pregnant. Miriam stood silently beside Ian’s disapproval, not because she was angry, but because she felt a baby at eighteen was nothing to wish for. Edith’s ‘death instinct’, someone had said – was it Patty, who was doing a course on Freud? Miriam thought it was a more complicated mistake than that – more ambivalent, less destructive.

Miriam and Jonti sit amid the forest of turned wood in two rocking chairs. He has turned the ‘closed’ sign on the door and made her some green tea, which is foul but she sips it so as not to hurt his feelings.

‘I’m so sorry, Mrs H,’ he says, and she likes it that he’s calling her that again. She had liked being the mother of teenagers – their sweet, ungainly hulks taking up all of her kitchen, like little children in dressing-up bodies.

‘Thank you, Jonti. Your work – all this – it’s so impressive. How have you done it?’

‘Built it up slowly. I was an apprentice for a long time for a nice old chap in Whitechapel. I’ve only had this place a couple of years. There are still quiet periods where I think it’s going to go belly-up, but so far I’ve had a lot of return business and good word of mouth, so touch wood.’ He doesn’t have to reach far.

‘Well, I’m not surprised. I mean, the craftsmanship is extraordinary. I saw Christy yesterday. She said she was saving for a sideboard. Oh, Jonti, she’s got lovely children – two girls.’

His face darkens and she realises she has been insensitive. After the abortion, Edith had become dissatisfied with him. ‘No ambition,’ she’d told Miriam, and Miriam thought it was Ian talking. She witnessed Edith being cruel – putting Jonti down when they discussed politics or literature during family meals. ‘Like
you’d
know,’ she’d said to him when he’d once ventured an opinion on Iraq, and Jonti, in his mild way, had sloped off out of their lives, rather bruised but without rancour.

‘I’m sorry she was cruel to you,’ Miriam says now.

Jonti shrugs. ‘It’s in the past. I’ve made peace with it, Mrs H. I hope she’s all right, really, I do. I think about her a lot since it was on the news.’

‘You’ve not heard from her?’ she asks, though it is pointless.

He shakes his head. ‘I’d have told you straight away. Haven’t seen her since that summer. That was not a good time. It took me a long time to, y’know, process what happened and then to let it go.’ Jonti’s mother talking. Miriam remembers how she used to moo on about ‘emotional auras’, with her frizzy black hair and post-divorce depressed face. She was learning about aromatherapy and healing, and fed him nothing but lentils.

‘But you did,’ Miriam says sadly. ‘More’s the pity. I thought you two could have made a go of it.’

‘Did you?’ he says. ‘You never let us know that.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I didn’t, did I?’

Edith has missed out on this gentle man with his big hands and his slow pace and his tolerance. She could have had that sideboard in her lounge, for starters. He would have laid her a lovely floor, put up shelves. There are worse things.

They have fallen into silence and Miriam realises she and Jonti don’t have anything to talk about. That period is gone and they can’t even reminisce fondly, so sour did it turn. Another thing she has forgotten in the swim of nostalgia: Jonti is humourless. Perhaps it wouldn’t have worked out between him and Edith after all – you need a sense of humour to get through marriage.

For a time, she and Jonti sit among the herd of sideboards and chests of drawers, sipping horrid green tea as the buses rumble past outside.

The rain spits into Miriam’s face, spattering the shoulders of her beige Burberry mac, too thin a layer for January, and she squints into the wind, up Chamberlayne Road towards Kensal Rise station, relieved to have said goodbye to Jonti and the guilt.

The abortion had changed Edith. Even years later it cast its sad tint, like the spring when Christy was getting married, three or four years ago now. Edith went on and on about how sorry she felt for her friend, with eyes that held Miriam’s, pleadingly. ‘Far too young. She’ll come to regret it. You can’t know who you are in your twenties. I’d hate to be settling down right now.’

Miriam descends the steps to the overground station, for the train to Hampstead Heath, remembering times when the sadness lifted and Edith’s silly, girlish joy had been allowed to escape like bubbles up the side of a glass – like the time they’d shopped for outfits for the wedding in Fenwick’s. Miriam had stared at Edith in the changing rooms as she pranced and giggled, thinking how she loved the very flesh of her. You got used to that with children, love crashing over you like waves. But then Edith had picked out a shockingly expensive dress – £250 – and Miriam balked, not because she didn’t have the money but because it seemed inappropriate. She had a sense of obligation – to teach Edith the value of money, that she should not grow up profligate. And, as so often in her brief career as mother, Miriam had spoiled everything. She’d dithered – ‘I don’t know, Edith, it’s an awful lot’ – and in her hesitation, Edith read censure, or a limit on love, or some coldness which wasn’t there.

No, darling, my dear one, it wasn’t that.
The train is coming towards her, the tears mingling with the rain on her face
. It was my own stupid inhibition. I’d buy it for you now, Edie, love, a thousand times over.

Every fond memory is tinged like this, as if Edith can turn the atmosphere, even now. In Fenwick’s she had grown sullen, maintaining her dissatisfied stance towards the £80 dress that Miriam bought for her from the Oasis concession, even though she had the figure for it – Edith could carry off the flimsiest high-street fashions.

Yes, Miriam was inconsistent – she loved to buy her daughter things, to express love, but no, she couldn’t buy her everything all of the time. She frowns as she boards the train, in a silent argument with Edith or some notion of her righteousness. Well, she wasn’t going to smother her spontaneity – those times when Edith was little and she’d said, ‘Let’s go to the toy shop’ just because she delighted in delighting a small person, and small people were so easy to delight, so ready to join the ride. But she’d had to say no, too, and face down the hatred. This was her lot, to be so often in the wrong, and so it had been when they went dress shopping and she’d spoiled it all for Edith.