Elizabeth Is Missing (7 page)

The windows to the cellar had been bricked up, with just grilles in the front for air. I tried to get a look through, but of course it was too dark to make anything out, so I went round to the yard behind, where Frank kept his vans. The dog’s bark was louder here, and the sound moved with the direction of the wind, so it seemed as if the animal was circling the house. Only one van stood on the frost-polished cobbles, and it didn’t look like it had moved for a while.
GERRARD
’
S REMOVALS
had become
RRARD
’
S REMO
under the dust. I licked my finger and was uncovering the
G
from its cloak of grime when I heard a noise, a faint squealing somewhere above me, and looked up at the windows of the old stables.

For a moment I thought I saw fingers, the tips pressed against the glass, the skin flattened and white as they squeaked down towards the bottom of the pane. Coming closer, though, I saw the fat peach fringe of a standard lamp, resting flutteringly on the inside window ledge, and, knowing that the stables, too, were full of furniture, I guessed the squeaking had been mice nesting in amongst it. Even so, I started up the outside staircase, determined to get a better look. The door at the top was locked, or had something heavy resting against it, so I peered through its small window, squinting at the dark, dusty interior.

And then I saw it. A face looking back at me from deep in the room. I slapped a hand to the glass, shouting, before I realized what it was. My own reflection in a dressing-table mirror, which had been left on its side against a four-poster bed. Dad had come running at my shout, but drifted away again when he saw I was all right. And I was glad he didn’t come up. Something else I could see, through the grimy glass panes, was a box of rations stamped
BRITISH ARMY
.

I made my way back down the stairs, and in the quiet following my own voice I listened again to the hoarse bark of the dog and looked over the fences of the nearby gardens to see if I could locate it. Dad had his hands in his pockets and was staring at the ground when I came round the house, and he didn’t bother to comment on the absence of Frank or Sukey. Of course, he had come and knocked before, had stood and waited before, had searched and peered and then come home alone before. After a few moments he got out a pencil and wrote a note on the back of an envelope; he always carried a little bundle in a rubber band. I didn’t read it before he pushed it through the letterbox.

“Hello?” It’s a man’s voice, thick and slurred. I’m on the sofa in my sitting room. The phone’s just stopped ringing and it’s pressed against my ear.

“Hello. Who is it?” I say.

“Peter Markham. Who’s
this
?” The words are clearer now; there’s a whine to the voice.

Peter Markham: I know that name. “Is that Elizabeth’s son?” I ask.

“My mother’s name is Elizabeth. What do you want?”

“Oh, did
I
call
you
?” I say.

“ ’Course you phoned me.” He says something under his breath. “Bloody” something. “What is it you want?”

“Perhaps Elizabeth asked me to call you,” I say.

“Asked you? Why?” he says. “Where are you calling from?”

“I don’t know why,” I say. “It must be important.”

I hold the receiver away from my ear and pause to think, gripping the phone until the plastic creaks. When did I see Elizabeth? And what did she ask me to call about? I can’t remember. I rest the receiver on the arm of my chair and flick through the bits of paper on my lap, shuffling past the number for Peter Markham, a shopping list, and a recipe for gooseberry crumble. The drone of a car somewhere in the distance is like a fly buzzing under glass, like a memory flinging itself at the surface of my brain. I pick up the phone and hold the next note under the lamp:
Where is Elizabeth?
My stomach drops. “She’s missing,” I say aloud.

There’s a crackling noise as Peter breathes hard into the mouthpiece. “Who is this?” he says, his voice sharp.

“My name’s Maud. I’m a friend . . . of Elizabeth’s,” I say. “I had your number and I was a bit worried about your mother.”

“It’s the middle of the night, for fuck’s sake.”

I look at the clock above the gas fire; it says three o’clock. It’s not daytime. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m not so good with time now. Oh, dear, I am sorry. I’ll leave you in peace. As long as Elizabeth is all right.”

The voice begins to sound muffled again, groggy. “I already spoke to your daughter. Yes, Mum’s all right. I’m going to put down the phone now, okay?”

There is a click at the end of the line, and a long beeping noise. He has hung up. I quickly retrieve my pen.
Elizabeth all right says son
, I write.
Said fuck on phone
, I add, though I’m not sure why it’s significant.

I replace the receiver carefully and find I’m thinking about Mrs. Winners. I haven’t thought of her for years. She was the first person on our street to get a telephone. It was solid and beautiful, with a polished wooden base. She was very proud of it and always stood by the window when “ ’phoning” so everyone could see, waving as you went by and pointing to the receiver. The shallowest pretext moved her to invite people in to use the phone, and I was amazed at the things she could find out through it. Not only news about her family—there were always stories about her cousin in Torquay and her sister in Doncaster—but things about the town, about the war. It seemed you could find anything out by telephone, and I wondered who it was she spoke to and how she remembered all the information. She rang lots of people for us when Sukey disappeared, always telling my mother to keep her spirits up, and sometimes I’d come home from school to find her in the kitchen with Ma, drinking tea and passing on crumbs of hope, and I would sit and listen, too, refilling the teapot when Ma asked.

I put my notes aside and make a pot of tea now. I don’t do this very often, as tea is quite tricky. But this time I remember to warm the pot and put in just three spoons of tea. As it’s only for me. I carry it through to the sitting room and put it on the coffee table, curving my sleeve-covered hands around it for warmth. Steam rises from the spout and clings to the underside of my chin. The feeling is so particular, so familiar, and yet I can’t think what it signifies. I try not to move, hoping the meaning will curl into my mind, but all I can think of is Dad putting something in the outside bin.

I’ve brought the tea cosy which Elizabeth gave me into the sitting room, but I never usually use it. I’m afraid it’s rather ugly, and bits of wool come off and get into the tea. It begins to feel like drinking a cloth pulp. Elizabeth’s own tea cosy is similar, but she has somehow managed to stop the wool from shedding. “I’ve drunk the excess wool away,” she told me. “It’s probably expanding inside my internal organs.” I make her a pot of tea whenever I’m at her house and she reminds me how to do it if I get lost halfway. She says it’s a luxury for her, as she’s too weak to lift the teapot herself now. Her carers sometimes make a pot, but they never stay long enough for her to drink more than one cup, and she can’t refill it after they’ve gone. And of course Peter never gets her anything. He just comes in, dumps her shopping, and leaves.

Elizabeth tells me he barely says a word to her and spends most of the time in another room. The kitchen or greenhouse. It’s cruel, when she’s stuck in the house all day and what she wants most is company. And then she said something recently. Something about him lying to her. There were things going missing, and then he lied. I wish I could remember the details. I pick up my notes again:
Elizabeth all right says son
. Somehow I don’t feel reassured. I fetch the tea cosy and put it on, fitting it neatly over the pot, no wrinkles. I don’t care about the shedding. It’s nearly four o’clock in the morning and I’m not drinking the tea anyway.

There was a lot of not eating and not drinking in the weeks after Sukey disappeared. And a lot of not talking, too. Ma and Dad barely spoke in front of me, but I overheard bits of their conversation when they thought I was out of earshot. The word “police” came up a lot.

One Sunday we were sitting at the kitchen table, not eating lunch and not looking at each other, the light beginning to dim outside, when Dad got up.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ll go and ask the neighbours.”

He swung his jacket on to his back and held the kitchen door open for me. I remember looking at Ma still sitting at the table; she didn’t turn to watch us go. She had already spoken to Sukey’s next-door neighbour, a woman who used the same greengrocer as us, but all she’d had to say was that there were some funny types around nowadays.

“You never know, someone might know something,” Dad said as we jogged along towards Sukey’s road.

The laundry had its doors open and there was something almost heady and luxurious about the scent of the soap. But it was a false smell, and somehow it made Sukey seem further away. We began at the house next to Frank’s yard. Dad knocked on the door, and it opened quickly, as if the man had been standing behind it. A head poked out: “Yer?”

The head was shaggy and a bad smell came from the dark corridor, souring the scent of the laundry.

Dad cleared his throat. “I was hoping you might . . . I wanted to ask . . .” He paused, took a breath. Moss was growing along the brick by the door frame and I curled my fingernails into its soft dampness.

“I’m looking for Susan Palmer. I mean”—Dad shook his head—“Susan Gerrard. She lives at number twenty-three. Have you seen her?”

“Never seen her.” The head shook its unwashed hair. “What—gone missing, has she?”

Dad nodded.

“What’s it to you?”

“She’s my daughter,” Dad said.

“Oh, right. Well, Frank’s at twenty-three, and she’s all right if she’s with him, I should think.”

“He’s not there, either.”

“There you are then. Taken her off somewhere.” A smile appeared under the hair; there were gaps in the teeth and a tongue was rubbed into each space.

Dad cleared his throat again. “She would have told us. I mean, they’re married,” he said. “She would have said if she were going off with him.”

“Oh, they’re married?” He sounded disappointed. “Then I couldn’t speculate, I’m afraid.”

We tried the next house along. While Dad knocked, I leant over the string that had replaced the railings and looked at the rubbish that had collected below street level. The old man at that address hadn’t seen Sukey, either, but he knew Frank.

“Lots of women going off now,” he said. “Seen it in the papers. Don’t seem to like it when their husbands come home, and so they’re off to London or some other ungodly place. Frank’s a good’un, she should be happy with him. He moved my sister down from Coventry, didn’t ask a penny. Said he had another job and could put her things in with it. My sister wouldn’t have been one to leave her husband, if she’d ever had one, that much I
can
tell you.”

Dad carried on down the street. I stood and watched him make his way to the end of the road. The sky was grey and the red of the bricks dulled, but it wasn’t cold.

“No one’s seen anything,” Dad said, coming back to me. “Or they’re not saying if they have. ‘Careless talk’ and all that. You’d think the war was still on. Shall we go home?”

I thought about the dress pattern that Sukey had started for me. I could picture it spread out on my bedroom floor. I couldn’t help thinking that she would walk in any minute and pick up the scissors. I hadn’t touched it since she’d cut out the sleeves, and I couldn’t bear the idea of going back to look at it.

“Let
me
knock at one,” I said and stepped up to a thickly painted door. The blue paint had run and then set in drips as if it were rain, and I traced the bumps as I waited for an answer. “I’m looking for my sister, Sukey,” I blurted out when the door opened. “She lived just down there. I don’t know what’s happened to her. She didn’t say she was moving away, and I can’t find her now. There’s no one at her house. Have you seen her? She’s got a comb like this.”

I was close to crying, felt embarrassed and childish, and wished I hadn’t knocked on the door at all. The woman, wearing a hairnet and standing just inside the door frame, looked quickly along the street.

“How many doors’ve you knocked on then?” she asked.

“I don’t know, maybe ten. No one’s seen her.” I breathed against the tears.

The woman shot another look towards Sukey’s house. “What number was your sister at?”

“Twenty-three.”

She nodded. “No, they wouldn’t have said, prob’ly. Look, I don’t know where they went—I wasn’t sure they’d gone, to be honest—but they had some trouble, I know that much. All sorts in and out of that house. And one night she runs out screaming.” She paused to let me gasp. “But it was quiet the next day and I sees her in the street, right as rain. So . . .”

“When was that?” Dad said, coming to stand behind me.

The woman looked over my shoulder at him. “Few weeks ago? Not sure. Seen
him
carrying a case since. Thought I saw her, too, but like I say, can’t be sure. And before you ask, no I don’t know where they were going.”

Dad was quiet for a bit after the door had closed, and then he turned to me. “Right,” he said. “You can do the talking from now on, seeing as how you got that woman to tell you something.”

He pushed me forwards to the house at the corner.

“Yes?” A man opened the door and stood with his shirt open. Its creases were sharp and it gave off the warm smell of freshly ironed cotton.

“I’m looking for my sister,” I said. “She lives at that house.” I pointed a finger, my arm shaking. “But she’s not there now. I thought she might have left a . . . forwarding address, or something?”

The man stepped over the threshold and leant over to look at Frank and Sukey’s front door, as if he needed reminding that there was a house there at all.

“Sister? Oh. Dark hair? No, no, I can’t say that I know where she’s gone. Had a bit of a row, though, I think. I remember something of the kind, anyway. Missing her, are you? I’m sure she’ll be back. Though now I think about it, it’s been weeks since I saw Frank.”