The Missing One (6 page)

And before I can change my mind, I press ‘Doug'. The room spins as it rings, twice, and he picks up.

‘Thank God, Kal. I've been calling and calling you! Why didn't you answer? Oh my love – are you OK? What's
happening down there? I've been going out of my mind – I can't believe you wouldn't let me come down, why … ' But I hold the phone away from my ear. I breathe in and out.

I can feel his guilt bouncing off the base stations towards me, and my body vibrates with it. I can't hear what he is actually saying because everything else is too loud. He has taken our small family and smashed it to pieces. The past eight years suddenly feels like a story that I made up because I needed to believe that love could be simple and constant and he has ripped it up now. This cannot be happening.

‘Stop,' I say.

‘What?'

‘I saw your phone. I saw it, Doug. Stop lying to me.'

A pause. ‘What did you see?'

‘You know.'

‘You mean … ? OK. OK. Now, OK – look … this isn't … '

‘I can't talk to you about this now!' I yell. ‘Jesus!'

‘No – listen to me, Kal … I … '

But I can't hear it. I hang up.

A moment later, it rings again. I throw it across the room and it bounces off the plasterwork, making a dent.

Finn looks up – his eyebrows are knitted, his eyes wide.

‘It's OK, sweetie, it's OK.'

For a while, I don't know how long, I sit and stare at the pier painting above the table, unable to move, or think, while Finn crashes the spoon on to my mother's redundant Le Creusets.

Then my father comes in. His face is still ashen against his white shirt and navy-blue jumper, his cords hanging
loosely off his long legs. He asks, slightly formally, whether Finn might like to come into the garden for a stroll. I bustle around, finding Finn's coat, hat and his red wellies. I wonder what my father overheard, and I am embarrassed, but also rather touched that he is stepping in like this. Then again, I suppose he knows all about infidelity.

The two of them go out the front door together, my father bending sideways like a tree in a gale, to reach Finn's small hand.

*

I sit at the kitchen table. I can't go home today, that's clear. The thought of confronting Doug makes waves of fury and fear rise inside me one after the other so I have to steady myself with both hands on the table edge. I just have to find a way to think clearly. All I want is to get as far away as possible from this mess. I can't think – or talk to Doug. I can't go home. But I can't stay here, surrounded by my mother's belongings, and all the memories of my complicated childhood and the ghosts of so many lost opportunities. I have to get away so I won't have to face this any more. I basically want to vanish.

I always thought there would be time. I never thought she'd die like this, before she even turned sixty. She always seemed younger and more intrepid than other people's mothers. She was fit and strong. She had odd, adventurous skills that did not fit a life of supermarket shops, dog-walking and painting. She could not only make a fish spear, but actually skewer a carp with it in the shallows of the River Ouse. She once taught me to start a fire like a Boy Scout,
using only twigs and a mirror. She had a witchy attitude to the countryside, gathering fungi and picking herbs for medicinal teas; she could name constellations and understood things about the moon and tides. She could tie nautical knots too. I'd forgotten that. A buried memory surfaces: summertime on the beach at Birling Gap, a brusque wind, me sitting in a towelling robe as she showed me different knots. As she manipulated the rope, she gave their names: the cleat hitch, the clove hitch, the bowline, the sheet bend, the square knot. The skin on her hands was weathered and hard – more farmer than artist. There was always a line of soil or oil paint under her nails.

She was just so physically robust. She never got sick, never made a fuss over cuts or bruises – ours, or hers. I remember one night she slashed into her palm, trying to cut wax out of a candleholder, and I came into the kitchen to find her twisting a pair of knickers into a tourniquet with one hand. There was blood everywhere, like a slasher movie. She hadn't thought to call for help even though I was next door watching TV, and Alice was upstairs doing homework. I called 999 and an ambulance came. She needed ten stitches.

She was supposed to be invincible but it all happened so fast – for us at least: diagnosis, decline, death. I never thought I'd have such a short while to make things right.

This is exactly what Doug warned me about on our Boxing Day visit, a year ago, before her diagnosis. As we drove out of the village, I remember him saying that he thought she was scared of me.

‘You're kidding.' I gave a dry laugh.

‘No,' he said. ‘Honestly. She sometimes watches you when you aren't looking, and she has this sort of anguished look, like she's desperate to get through to you, but too scared that you'll brush her off or something.'

‘She's the one keeping her distance, not me.' I felt the resentment rising again and I was surprised by how near the surface it still was. I had successfully protected myself against my mother for years, but now, with Finn, I was wide open again. I hadn't considered this when I was pregnant. I didn't realize that a baby shoots up the generations and ruches them together, like a strong thread. Having Finn had crushed me up against my mother again, and I couldn't do anything about it.

‘She isn't scared of me, Doug.' I tried to sound reasonable. ‘It's not fear that keeps her distant, it's a total lack of interest. Haven't you noticed what she's like with Finn? She hardly even looks at him. It's like he isn't there.'

‘Come on, that's just not true.'

‘Why are you defending her? I don't think she held him once today, not one single time. Even my dad held him for a bit and he has never liked babies. And they've never even been up to Oxford to see him, have they? I tell you what, Doug, she can come to us next time. I'm not going to keep driving down here like this.'

‘Kal … '

‘I expect she was like this with me as a baby too – uninterested. It explains a lot.'

‘I actually don't believe that, Kal. I mean, look how you are with Finn – she must have done something right with
you because all that love and patience you have with him – and your goodness and kindness –
you
 – all that doesn't just come out of nowhere.'

‘Do we have to do this?'

‘Why not? We haven't talked about you and your mother for years,' he said. ‘And there's Finn now and that's changed things. She bought that high chair, for God's sake. She's really not uninterested.'

His hands on the wheel were broad, strong and clean – hands to hold, hands to be held by, hands to keep things safe. I swallowed hard. I was not going to open all this up again. I turned and looked back at Finn in his car seat, gnawing on a teething ring. Seeing me, he let it drop and his face cracked into a great big grin. For a few seconds, my beautiful baby and I just smiled at each other, and the world was simple.

‘All I'm saying is I think she's sad that you two aren't closer.' He really wouldn't let it go. ‘I actually think she wants things to be better between you, but she doesn't know how. She might not want to hold Finn and coo at him, but she's totally aware of him. I saw her today, watching you while you were feeding him and talking to your father, and I think she was almost in tears. She really isn't uninterested, Kal. Whatever this is for her, it's definitely not lack of interest. Can't you just try talking to her?'

‘Doug. Stop. Just leave it. My mother and I are totally fine.'

‘But this is surely a chance to put things behind you and … '

I looked out the window, silently daring him to say ‘make a fresh start'. But he knew me better than that. ‘The two of you are complicated,' he said. ‘I get that.'

I stared at the expanses of ploughed clay, the bare oaks flicking by, then the chalk quarry looming above us like a giant's tooth. We turned onto the London road.

‘But don't leave it too late,' he said. ‘Or you might regret it one day.'

*

I should clean up breakfast – the cafetière, the mangle of Marmite and milk. I can't sit here thinking about my mother and Doug. I can't. While we had that Boxing Day lunch, her tumour was there already, growing in her breast, a deadly secret that she was hiding from us all.

It is also possible that Doug was keeping his horrible secret too, even then. Maybe he was already lying to me as he ate honey-glazed ham at my parents' table. A vivid image rises in my brain of a curtain of strawberry-blonde hair and Doug's broad hands pressing on pale flanks. All I want is to erase myself from this nightmare, completely.

A surge of nausea brings saliva into my mouth. I have to decide what to do next. But I can't think. These images are too much to hold in my head. I just want to get away.

I wonder what my father is doing outside with Finn. I imagine him leaning down and trying to explain the Victorian architectural features of the house to his small grandson. I pick up my mother's notebook. Holding it in my hands brings a sudden and unexpected comfort. Her handwriting, though younger, rounder, more girlish, is definitively hers. And it's
still here – still physically present. This small part of her is here and that must mean that she hasn't really gone.

*

Alice leaves, but I don't. After I have given Finn his bath, and read him three storybooks, and tucked him up in his sleeping bag, in the travel cot, then sung ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep' until, finally, he really is asleep, I creep back downstairs.

My father is in his study; I can see the crease of light under his door. I walk through to the kitchen and flick the kettle on. Her old notebook is lying on the kitchen table, where I left it, next to the jewellery box. I take it, make myself a cup of peppermint tea, then go through to the living room. I curl up on the old Habitat sofa.

It is chilly in this room, and the floor lamp gives off a yellowish light, casting long shadows up the bookcases. I pull a scratchy tartan blanket around my shoulders. The house is eerily quiet, except for the far-off moan of the wind and the occasional creak and tick of the radiator. I feel as if she might pop her head in at any moment, and ask why I'm sitting here, all alone. Is something wrong? Has something happened?

I open the notebook. Maybe there is something in here that will give me a clue about who she really was. Maybe this book will help me understand why the two of us were so twisted and knotty.

But it is just lists and scientific jargon. I flip through pages of incomprehensible notes, tables of numbers and columns consisting mainly of vowels. Then I realize that there are little scribbled comments dotted here and there.
They are often written vertically in the margins, or scrawled along the bottom of the page – little hints of a life outside the research. I flip from one to the next.

I notice that the initial ‘S' crops up frequently, but I can only find one reference to what could be my father:

The last fifth of the book is blank – old, empty lined pages, waiting for something that never came. I wonder if it stops because she got pregnant. Maybe this notebook represents her last days as a scientist. Is that why she kept it?

Then something connects in my head. This
S
could be Susannah, the postcard sender. There were thirty-seven annual postcards, which means Susannah started to send them the very first year my mother got to England.

If there are old friends out there, like this Susannah person, then maybe there is family somewhere too. My mother was an only child, her parents are long dead, but maybe there are cousins, or at least old family friends. There must be people out there who knew her as a young woman, as a child. Perhaps one day I could take a trip out to the Pacific Northwest and find the people who knew her.
Maybe it's not too late to understand my mother – and if I can understand her, then perhaps I will be able to let her go. Then something occurs to me. I could go – now. I could take Finn and get on a plane and go.

The metal band that has been clamped around my heart for days immediately feels less tight. Just the thought of getting away is a huge release.

And I could do this. I really could. Why not?

If I leave then I won't have to sit in our home and listen to the man I love explain how he fell for his ex-girlfriend all over again – or worse, how he has longed for her since college. I won't have to hear him tell me how motherhood has changed me, or how having Finn has exposed the cracks that were always there in our relationship, I just didn't see them. And I won't have to hear him tell me that he understands, now, that he never should have left her in the first place and that marrying me was a mistake. He doesn't love me in the right way. He loves her. He's so sorry.

I put my mother's notebook on the coffee table. My hands are shaking. An escape plan has dropped from the sky, and I must pick it up and use it before it shimmies away again.

I get up and go through to the kitchen and my laptop. I pour myself a large glass of red wine and take it back to the sofa, pulling the blanket back up as it falls to the floor.

My mother kept her maiden name, Halmstrom, slotted before my father's: Elena Halmstrom MacKenzie. I have no idea how people go about searching for family members –
there are probably millions of websites dedicated to this. But, not knowing where to start, I just google
Halmstrom, Seattle
.

Some long-ago Ellis Island slip must have turned a vowel because there are ninety-five Holmstroms in Seattle, but not a single Halmstrom. I feel the disappointment settle solidly in my belly. Maybe there really are no surviving members of my mother's family.