The Missing Marriage (9 page)

‘We heard rumours that Christmas – venison pie at the free cafés. So that was Bobby, was it?' Laviolette seemed to like the idea of Bobby as a poacher.

Anna was too shocked at the recollection to say anything. Now she realised it wasn't Bobby Deane she associated with the slaughtered deer, it was Jamie.

‘I found out today that Jamie Deane's about the only one who still visits his dad – although I'd call into question his motives. He's using Bobby's kitchen to cut his Methadrone in, and he's probably picking up his dad's pension and disability as well.' The Inspector paused. ‘What d'you know about Jamie Deane?'

Anna thought about Jamie Deane, whose name she hadn't heard in years. ‘Why are you asking me?'

‘No reason.'

‘He was put away, wasn't he? I don't know how long for.'

‘Twenty years. He killed a man, but never confessed to it. At the time people thought it was Bobby who probably did it and that Jamie was covering up for his dad.'

‘Bobby?'

Ignoring this, Laviolette said, ‘Jamie's been on probation for the past six months, and now his brother's missing.'

‘You think Jamie Deane's got something to do with Bryan's disappearance?'

‘Maybe. I don't know.'

‘And?'

‘Nothing. I just like talking to you – that's all. You don't trust me,' he added.

‘I don't need to. You've got your own Sergeant.'

‘Do you believe there's such a thing as a law-abiding citizen?'

‘I believe there are six degrees of separation between a person who commits a crime and a person who thinks about committing a crime. I've got nothing to do with Bryan Deane's disappearance, Inspector.'

‘I think we've all got something to do with it – just not in the way we think.'

There were no lights on at number nineteen Parkview when Anna pulled up outside, and nobody answered the door when she rang so she let herself in, automatically turning on the hall light and calling out softly for Mary. But there was no reply, and the house was full of an overwhelming stillness.

She ran up to the bedroom.

Thinking Erwin was asleep, Anna crept round the foot of the bed and sat down in the green G-Plan chair she'd sat in earlier.

After a while, she felt his hand, cold, trying to take hold of her. ‘It's me – Anna.'

Erwin nodded, and gave her hand a weak squeeze.

‘Are you in pain?'

‘Always,' he smiled.

‘Do you want more morphine?'

‘In a bit. But not right now – just you stay sitting there,' he trailed off, his mouth too dry to say anything else.

She sensed his fear, in the way he was watching her, and the way he held her hand, and at the same time how interminable his ending had become to him.

The house felt emptier each day as his presence in it receded in proportion to the collapse of his will, which had been so strong and which had seen him survive capture at the age of seventeen – after only six months in the Luftwaffe's signal corps – and internment, first in Belgium then in England.

Now Erwin was barely there.

‘Where's Nan?'

‘Out in the garden.' Erwin shut his eyes. ‘They say Bryan Deane's gone missing,' he whispered, slowly. ‘I remember you two up at the club – how old were you, eleven? Twelve? – Saturday afternoons . . .'

‘I don't remember that.'

‘We'd go to the market in the morning then Nan would come home for some peace and quiet and I'd take you to the club with me, and Bobby Deane was usually there, and you and Bryan would play. You'd play for hours.'

‘We would?'

‘You got your first kiss at the club.'

She ran two fingers inadvertently over her lips as she remembered, suddenly, the smoky carpet smell of the club. All those Saturday afternoons spent among men talking, mumbling and drinking slowly until one of them said something funny, which everybody was obliged to at some point, and they'd all laugh – before falling silent again over their Federation Ale.

And Bryan . . . kissing Bryan under the table among all those legs and shoes, and how he'd tasted of sherbet and cigarette and childhood still.

Her first kiss.

She could taste sherbet now just thinking about it, and she must have been smiling too because Erwin's mouth was attempting a smile in return.

‘You remember now, don't you?'

‘How did you see?' she said, laughing.

‘I wasn't at the table. I was at the bar getting in a round.'

Pouring herself a glass of water from the jug on the bedside table, she made an effort to transfer the memory of sweetness from sherbet to the lime and lemonades Erwin would buy her – as many as she asked for until she was nearly sick on the bus home.

‘Joyce,' she said, remembering the conductress who was always on the bus home – the thinnest woman she'd ever seen, with tight curls covering her head. ‘She liked you.'

‘Everybody liked me.'

‘That's why she used to let us on the bus for free, and we always had to sit downstairs because you were too drunk to make the stairs.'

‘I was never drunk.'

‘You were. Every Saturday without fail.'

They sat in silence after this until Erwin said with dif ficulty, ‘I need to tell you about Bettina. I need to tell you about her before –'

‘Granddad, it doesn't matter. Bettina doesn't matter to me.' She paused, slipping her hand out of Erwin's still cold grasp. ‘And I want it to stay that way. I don't want you to say something that's going to make her matter to me.'

‘You don't know what I'm going to say.'

‘I don't want to know.'

‘But that might change.'

They were silent, Anna wanting to leave now.

‘There's a photograph,' Erwin persisted, his voice a croaking whisper, ‘in the cupboard behind the dresser where the wallpaper's come away from the wall in the corner just under the coat rack.'

When Anna hesitated, he said suddenly, irritably, ‘Just get the bloody photo – it's the only one I've got left.'

She went into the built-in cupboard behind the dresser and found the piece of loose wallpaper he was talking about.

‘It's for you,' he said weakly when he saw that she had the photograph in her hand. ‘Anna,' he tried to call out after her as she left the room, crossing the small landing to the bedroom at the back of the house that used to be hers – and her mother, Bettina's, before that. She'd avoided going in there since coming back because childhood bedrooms were dangerous places for adults to return to.

The curtains weren't drawn and through the window she could just make out the dark mass of park and the signal lights on the Alcan railway tracks running along the top of the embankment.

She sat down carefully on the edge of the bed without turning on the lights, aware of the black cat with a pink ribbon round its neck – Erwin had found it on one of the buses he cleaned – on the pillow behind her next to a nightdress case she'd embroidered at school. Hanging from a hook in the wall, just to the left of the mirror above the chest of drawers, were the necklaces she'd worn to adorn her burgeoning teenage body in the hopeful, intact years between puberty and the loss of her virginity – to a boy on a campsite in the South of France, she remembered briefly.

Then she turned over the photograph, able to see enough in the orange light coming in through the open bedroom door.

She didn't recognise the girl – Bettina at the age of twenty; fourteen years younger than she was now – but she recognised where the photograph had been taken. Bettina was standing down on the beach at the mouth of the estuary a mile north of the Hartford Estate, her head turned towards the photographer – Erwin, Anna guessed – who must have been standing on the bridge above; the bridge that carried the road over the estuary and ran up to Cambois power station. It was only possible to walk on this stretch of beach by the estuary at low tide and people looking for sea coal went picking further up the coast making this stretch a lonely place – ideal for someone wanting to take a walk without being seen. Erwin must have followed her that day – maybe followed her every day at a distance, keeping his eye on her. Anna could imagine him doing that; it was the sort of thing Erwin would do.

Bettina's dress was ballooning around her – not because of the wind, but because of her pregnancy.

Bettina was pregnant with her, Anna, in the photograph and Anna was shocked at how protective she felt towards the heavily pregnant girl who had essentially abandoned her at birth and who she'd never known – less than a stranger to her because she should have been so much more.

Erwin and Mary had loved Bettina with all the abandon of parents whose union the world around them had been slow to accept. They'd been carefree in their love because – up until the moment they found out she was pregnant – they'd thought love was enough for a child. It wasn't.

Mary never got over her confusion – a confusion which manifested itself in the way she loved Anna.

While Erwin threw his heart to Anna with the same eager abandon as he had to Bettina, Mary – colder, wiser, afraid – loved sparingly; carefully. After Bettina's pregnancy and sudden departure it was Mary who was left to soak up public opinion, and Anna who – ironically – offered her her only chance of social redemption.

Mary became watchful and ambitious (despite her grand-daughter's speech impediment), hiring a tutor – a thin, precise man who objected to people like the Fausts, but who needed the money – to ensure that Anna passed the Eleven Plus. Anna would have passed the exam anyway, but it wasn't in the tutor's interest to point this out. He gave Mary muted progress reports throughout the ten months they paid him for – creating the impression that there was something lacking in Anna that only he, the indispensable Mr Dudley, could give her – and was happy to accept her tearful gratitude when the offer of a scholarship arrived in the post.

First time round, the only thing Mary had been interested in as a parent was her daughter's happiness. Second time round happiness had lost its credence and appeal. The essential thing, she realised, was to arm her granddaughter against adversity. The downside to this was that she spent so much of Anna's formative years aware of who she didn't want her to become that by the time the danger was over and Anna was about to leave home for university – she had no idea who she had become.

While Mary had never stopped loving Anna, the prouder she became of her granddaughter the less she understood her.

There was nothing written on the back of the photograph and Anna was about to fold it up and push it in her jeans pocket when she stood up instead, opening the wardrobe door. Inside she saw a box for an electric kettle Erwin and Mary had had for at least twenty years.

She put the photograph under the packaging in the bottom of the box because she didn't want to take Bettina with her. She didn't want the responsibility Erwin had bequeathed her and was angry with him for attempting to make her complicit in this secret legacy.

Pausing on the landing, she thought about going into Erwin's room again to tell him what she'd done with the photograph then changed her mind, and went downstairs instead – out into the garden.

It had stayed fine for the rest of the day, and the twilight – just settling now over the garden – was long and generous, but she still had trouble at first picking out Mary, standing in the semi-darkness of the wash house, staring out through the window.

She could tell – from Mary's posture and the lack of light – that Mary had been crying, and that this was where Mary came to cry. The secret emotional life of a whole generation of women had been lived out within the sturdy brick walls of these perfunctory outhouses built for laundry, tears and – as in the case of Rachel Deane – far worse things, and for the first time ever Anna had an overwhelming sense of this. To the extent that she felt like a trespasser as she knocked on the door and went inside.

There was Mary's old Hoover twin tub machine, preserved beneath a blanket but rubbing shoulders with the small automatic machine that had usurped it. There was a stack of used paint cans against the far wall and above them a calendar from the Blyth Allotment Association for the year 2000. Hanging from a nail in the wall was her old bucket and spade, and a three-foot doll that had once belonged to her mother, Bettina, and that Anna had been given when she was about the same height as the doll. Its eyes moved and it walked and talked. It had terrified her as a child. It still terrified her, she thought, turning away from where it stood in the corner, leaning back on its heels with its arms outstretched towards her.

‘Nan,' she said softly.

Mary, who hadn't turned round when she heard the door to the wash house open, turned round now, reluctantly. She stared at Anna, sighed, then turned back to the window while buttoning and unbuttoning the bottom button on the cardigan she was wearing.

‘Sorry – you weren't in the house, and –'

‘Just give me a few seconds.'

Anna was about to leave when Mary said suddenly, helplessly, ‘Look at me,' – as if her appearance was about to jeopardise everything. ‘I'm sorry –' She faltered. ‘I needed a bit of respite.'

‘It's fine,' Anna soothed her, kissing and holding her.

‘Don't you get lonely?' Mary said after a while.

‘I don't really think about it.'

‘You need someone, Anna. What happened to that Frenchman – Alec?'

‘We kept each other company, Nan, that was all. We enhanced each other economically and socially.'

‘Where's the harm in that? There's plenty of people who live their lives like that.'

‘What's so wrong in wanting to be with someone I know I'll be sitting holding hands with at the age of eighty while we listen to a doctor telling us that one of us is going to die?'

Mary shook her head, smiling.

‘I was twenty-two when I met Erwin, and marrying him was the single biggest act of rebellion in my life. I lost my family over him. This love you're talking about – it doesn't just give, it takes away. It forces you to make choices, and sometimes it can leave you stranded . . . lonelier than you've ever felt in your life before. So lonely, you wish . . .' She trailed off.

‘What?'

‘You wish you'd never had it in the first place. Erwin wasn't my first love,' Mary said after a while. ‘My first love was Bobby Deane. I never told you that before, did I?'

‘Bobby Deane,' Anna said, shocked.

‘You should of seen him back then,' Mary carried on, smiling openly at her – enjoying her shock.

‘Bobby Deane,' Anna said again.

‘It was before Rachel. I was tiny – sixteen or seventeen. It never meant anything much to him. Not like Rachel,' she finished, turning away to look out the window again.

Anna watched her cough into the sink then straighten up.

‘That reminds me. I found one of Bryan's drawings – them ones he used to do. It was up on the wall behind those blankets. The paper's got damp, but the drawing's not spoiled.'

It wasn't.

The brown and black ink drawing of a spider was intact, and underneath in unsure biro, was written: Agelena labyrinthica of Agelenidae family – 12 September 1986 by Bryan Deane.

‘The date on it – that's a year after Rachel died.'

‘You should keep it,' Mary said.

Anna sat down on the old stool Mary and Erwin used for decorating – staring at the picture.

‘He must of used a magnifying glass for that. The detail –'

Anna didn't respond. The magnifying glass again; magnifying glass . . . ‘The magnifying glass,' she said out loud to Mary. ‘I found it that day.'