A Surrey State of Affairs (40 page)

2 P.M.

I woke early this morning, cold, with the sheets pushed off over the side of the bed. I noticed once again that I had small red crescents imprinted into the palms of my hands from where I had dug my nails in my sleep. This was hardly surprising, given that I could clearly remember dreaming that Ivan and Jeffrey were fighting a duel with old-fashioned pistols, while Sophie looked on wearing a wedding dress (one of those horrible strapless, tarty ones) and a publicist in dark glasses filmed it all on his mobile phone with a grin on his face. When the shots rang out, Darcy, my beloved Darcy, suddenly fell from the sky and I woke up with tears in my eyes.

I went to church and kneeled until my legs hurt and prayed. Then Rupert came around with a new copy of
Hello!
magazine and a box of Belgian chocolates, and although he was clearly worried too, he sat and chatted about this and that, so I almost forgot to worry about Sophie for half an hour. As soon as he left, however, I found myself staring at the framed photo of Sophie that was taken on her twelfth birthday: her hair is platinum blond and she is squinting a little in the sun, standing in front of the glossy petals of the magnolia tree with her hands jammed in the little pockets of her pink checked birthday dress.

Where is she now?

5 P.M.

Just as I thought today could not get any worse, Natalia showed up on the doorstep. It took me a few moments to recognize her: she’s bleached her long brown hair a peculiar shade of
yellowish white and lost quite a bit of weight. She was wearing a denim miniskirt to show off her scrawny, orange legs. “Can I coming in?” she said, and as soon as I remembered my manners I said, “Yes, of course, how lovely to see you again,” all the while hoping that she wasn’t going to demand her job back and frighten off Boris, who is such a thorough cleaner that he has formed an almost emotional bond with the vacuum cleaner. I needn’t have worried. She had come to collect some things she had left behind, which I had packed into her peeling gold-colored suitcase and left in the spare room. Once I had handed this over to her, she asked if Jeffrey was home—I suppose she wanted to say hello to him as a courtesy. When I said he was away and wouldn’t be home that evening, she left without even saying good-bye. Thank heavens I have a replacement with better manners.

  
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1

Bank holiday Monday. There is rain dribbling down the windowpane, and the wind is lashing the magnolia tree, scattering the last dead petals across the lawn like dirty confetti. On the television, the news shows footage of a six-mile traffic jam on the M5, caravans stacked behind cars with bikes and boats on the back, families who thought they would be building sand castles staring at the windshield wipers scraping back and forth.

Why should I pity them? At least those gridlocked parents don’t have a daughter who has absconded with a middle-aged nine-toed semialcoholic Russian. At least they haven’t had to suffer a visit from Harriet, who took my hand, smiled, and shook her head slowly in pity, then asked if there hadn’t been something amiss with Sophie’s character right from the beginning, as evidenced when she stole a fairy cake from Laura’s sixth birthday party.

  
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2

A new month, a new school year. I remember how much Sophie used to love choosing a new pencil case and sharpening all her coloring pencils before the first day back. She would test them out by drawing colorful mustaches on the serious men in Jeffrey’s newspaper. Once she gave John Major red and green dreadlocks. Where did that little girl go?

That is the question that poor Jeffrey, in the most literal sense, is desperately trying to resolve. Every day he calls, and every day his voice sounds more dull and mechanical. He says that at least work is so quiet he’s hardly missing anything—I suppose that’s one advantage to this seemingly endless recession. He’s managed to glean from Ivan’s business contacts that the unspeakable man is still in London, and probably staying somewhere in the West. Jeffrey spends his days driving in circles, asking at hotels, loitering in vodka bars.

And if he finds her, what then? I know Sophie’s temper, and her stubborn streak. How will he persuade her to come home? I should have given him a Topshop voucher to take with him as bait.

It seems my best hope is that Ivan will grow bored of her. This is a terrible thing for a mother to say, but I want my daughter to have her heart broken in two.

  
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3

Jeffrey came home this morning. He did not bring our daughter, but he did bring Fergie. For a while, I felt too bitter to report this. He has now left again. He spoke as little as possible, and drank only two sips of the iced tea I handed him.

He discovered the ill-fated mynah in a bus shelter in Shepherd’s Bush, on the same street as a dry-cleaning business where,
according to a tip-off, Ivan was meeting a business contact. Both cage and bird were daubed with graffiti. It has taken Boris two hours of work with a prewash Vanish stick to clean her feathers. Inside the cage was a note: “Pls sum1 look after Fergie! She doeznt bite! Xx” and a half-open packet of dry-roasted peanuts, which had been pecked at. When I recognized Sophie’s handwriting, I cried.

Fergie is now recovering in the conservatory. Darcy is cagey, as I suppose is a parrot’s prerogative, but he will just have to learn to cope with the cruel realities of life, like the rest of us. Jeffrey has gone back to London.

Earlier, as I was towel drying Fergie, I looked into her dark eyes and recognized a fellow victim of Ivan’s callousness and Sophie’s fecklessness. She blinked. With her eyes shut, she is not quite so ugly. I have fed her some linseed to improve her plumage.

  
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4

Does anyone else get the feeling that Armageddon is upon us? Glaciers are melting, wildfires are rampaging through California, my son is gay, my daughter has run off with a Russian, and now, to top it all, Fergie the mynah bird has begun to speak.

It is an eerie sound, and an eerie sight. Every few minutes she scrunches up her wings (which still bear traces of spray paint), shuts her eyes, opens her beak, and belches out a few hoarse, indistinct syllables. It sounds a little like “Nothing, kill, hate.”

I had no idea mynah birds could be so nihilistic. I’m not the superstitious type, as you well know, but my nerves are frayed at the moment and Fergie’s horrible utterances are adding to my sense of foreboding and dread.

I have covered her up with a tea towel. I hope she finds the scenes of rural Kent soothing.

11 P.M.

At last, another clue! I was on the phone earlier with Bridget, who, unlike Harriet, can always be relied on to keep calm and say the right thing. She made sympathetic noises as I told her everything that had happened, mixed with just the occasional muted gasp, but when I got to Fergie and her grim pronouncements, she went suddenly quiet. Then she said, “Constance, perhaps she’s trying to say Notting Hill Gate.”

I’ve alerted Jeffrey.

  
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5

Another breakthrough! Rupert called. He has finally managed to access Sophie’s Facebook page, by setting up a false account in the name of one of her distant school friends, with a kitten as the profile picture, and asking her to add him as a friend. She did so today. He can confirm that her status is
in london, baby!!
More important, she had added a photo of the pool at the hotel where she and Ivan are staying, to show off to her friends. Rupert managed to zoom in on a monogrammed towel, which read “Abbey Court.” He had checked online; there is indeed a hotel of this name in Notting Hill Gate. He has called Jeffrey, who is driving there as I type.

  
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6

Sophie is back home. It is with giddy relief, once again tempered by lingering anger, that I write this.

Jeffrey called yesterday afternoon to inform me that Sophie was in the back of the car and that he was driving her home. I still do not know all the details of how this came about.

I paced back and forth as I waited for them to get back, trying to work out whether I would feel more like hugging her or throttling her. First I asked Boris to tidy her room and put a vase of
fresh-cut flowers from the garden on her desk, then I took it away and replaced it with an unopened letter from the Bristol University accommodation office. Then I took this away and put the flowers back.