The Disappearance of Emily Marr (37 page)

But I couldn’t help her even if I wanted to. I could hardly stop people from harassing her when I could not stop them from harassing me. The siege came to a head that same afternoon when another ‘admirer’, a middle-aged man, rang and rang the bell, at first calling up, ‘I love you, Emily!’ but, when I failed to appear, turning aggressive and shouting horrible insults, calling me a fucking whore and threatening to break down the door. Sarah Laing stormed out of her house then and, unable to beat the madman, decided to join him, screaming up at my window, ‘Can you
please
do something about this, Emily! I’ve got kids next door who don’t need to hear this filth!’ – as if I didn’t know she had children and hadn’t once been entrusted with their care. ‘And while we’re on the subject, if you don’t get rid of that disgusting graffiti, I’ll do it myself! I’ll do it right this minute!’

I didn’t have a clue what she meant by this and in the time I’d searched online and found a photograph of my garden wall daubed with the words
DIE
,
SLUT
, she was already standing in the street with tin of emulsion and paintbrush, a look of righteous fervour on her face. Conscious that the whole scene would be reported by my personal press corps, I called the police before she could.

Presently, two male officers arrived and persuaded the admirer/abuser to leave. They then spoke in pacifying tones to Sarah, whose voluble complaints had drawn other neighbours to the gate, all of whom evidently had gripes of their own to share, before at last ringing my bell and asking to come up.

I was interested to see if either of the officers might be the one who’d been sent to break the news to Arthur that morning – I even remembered his name, PC Matthews – but of course neither was. I don’t know what I thought I would have gained by that: solace in the tiniest of remaining affinities, perhaps; the brief company of someone who had seen us in the same room at the same time and could vouch for our having once been together.

‘This is reaching the point where you need to think about your own safety,’ the older of the two policemen told me. He was about Arthur’s age, I thought. He had probably never planned to leave
his
wife for trouble like me.

‘Oh, there aren’t as many photographers now,’ I said. ‘If anything, I’d say it’s getting better.’

‘It’s not because of the photographers that you phoned us,’ he reminded me. ‘In situations like this, members of the public can be more threatening than the press. They’re interested for personal reasons, not professional ones. They feel a connection that isn’t there on your side. You have to be very careful. Are you living here alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is there anyone you can go and stay with for a while? Anyone we can phone for you?’ The words, if not the tone, recalled those I’d heard in Arthur’s kitchen that morning long ago.

‘This is where I live,’ I said, but not as defiantly as I might have in previous days. ‘I won’t be hounded out. I can sit it out.’

I could sit it out, but I still couldn’t sleep. Only when, late in the second week, I began slipping out early in the morning to travel across the city to Hertfordshire to see my father, making the journey home again after dark, only then did the nervous energy involved in evading detection exhaust me enough to guarantee proper sleep.

Though I dressed unobtrusively for those public forays, I did not want to alter my appearance too radically for fear of confusing Dad. Since my hair was the chief giveaway, I wore a knitted hat to cover it up, tucking the strands inside it like a swimming cap and keeping it on even on the stuffy Underground. Passing a charity shop, I picked up a pair of glasses with uncorrected lenses, hoping I looked merely unstylish rather than hopelessly badly disguised. In the hospital toilet, I ditched the hat and frames, combed out my hair and added a little of the make-up Dad was used to seeing me in. I would then reverse the process before departure. In the context of my new, fugitive existence, it was not nearly as absurd as it sounds.

Once on the ward, I was able to recover a sense of perspective (there couldn’t have been many other places in the land that made being the object of mass hatred look like a marginal concern). Dad was fading again and no one was pretending it was ground that might be recovered. This, too soon and yet at last, was the final stage of the disease. There was so little of him left, hardly anything recognisable: no voice, no spirit, no humour. In having been robbed of the last vestiges of personal identity – his sense of place and his position in time had gone long ago – he had also been robbed of his last physical likeness to himself.

‘Dad,’ I would say to his motionless, emaciated figure, and sometimes ‘Daddy’, an infant again. ‘I love you very much, and I need you. Please get stronger.’ Please make everything better again, like you used to.

But he hardly responded to me now, either as a daughter he knew or a desperate stranger he did not. I could see my words had no meaning whatsoever and it would have broken my heart, had not my heart been already pulverised.

During one visit, one of the last I would make, his consultant took pity on me and arranged for me to see one of the hospital psychiatrists, who wrote me a prescription to collect from the pharmacy on site. (Going to the GP was impossible during this period, as was any situation in which I was required to say my name aloud or have it called out in public.)

The medication came only just in time, for by then I was breaking, pieces of me coming loose and floating out of reach. Even when I wasn’t being harassed I imagined that I was. Once, when I was leaving the hospital and walking to the station, I had a very strong sense I was being followed; by the time I reached the platform I had convinced myself someone was going to dash forward and push me under the approaching train. At home, I started to believe there was someone hiding in my bathroom or behind the sofa. I thought I could hear someone breathing on the other side of the flat door, would suspend my own breath for a minute at a time to try to catch the sound. I had reached the point where I didn’t know what was real and what was imagined.

It began to feel only right and natural that Dad no longer recognised me, for I did not recognise myself by then, either in the media’s depiction of me or in the altered woman in the mirror before me. I felt as if I was dissolving, disappearing. It was as if Emily Marr no longer existed.

Only Arthur could bring me back to life.

The day my father died, I travelled across London in absolute, if not blissful, ignorance, believing only that I was headed for a routine visit with him. For once, Phil and I would be there at the same time and I might have to face some awkward questions from him, but that was my only source of apprehension, most of my energy having been diverted in any case to the now customary imperative of not being identified by strangers. There were delays on the Northern Line, but I had a Sunday paper with me to while away the minutes. Indeed, I had time to read every word of a five-page profile of myself in its magazine.

It was the third weekend since the ‘story’ had broken and I was pleased to see that I was already being written about in the past tense. The article was headed
WHATEVER
HAPPENED
TO
EMILY
MARR?
. This, I learned, was a clever dual reference, first to my current status of having gone ‘into hiding’ and second to my childhood, for the journalist had taken the line that I’d begun life an innocent girl and been made degenerate and dishonest by family circumstances. ‘A series of events pushed a carefree, fun-loving girl into premature adulthood… From an early age Marr was familiar with domestic upheaval… The loss of her mother caused a wrenching insecurity that would soon manifest itself in the search for an older protector…’
And so it went on.

They’d
sort
of got it right, I suppose. It was a bit like one of those early drawings of exotic animals done by someone who has never actually seen his subject. The features were there, there were the right number of limbs, but the scale was off, the markings misjudged. The tail was in the wrong place.

No stone had been left unturned in this ‘under-the-skin’ portrait, but there was some satisfaction that not all yielded dirt. Phil ‘could not be reached’, for which I was grateful, while Matt, now with a new, ‘less capricious’ girlfriend, played down our relationship. ‘I didn’t see her very much before we split up. I had no idea any of this was going on.’ Charlotte, sadly, believed she did: ‘She used to be very conscientious, but after she met Arthur she got flaky. She started walking out without completing her duties, she constantly called in sick, and she had more dental appointments in six months than I’ve had in ten years. The weird thing was that in the days after those poor people were killed, she was no different from usual. When I think about it now, she must have had ice in her veins.’

There was truth in this from her perspective, I supposed, and it hurt to know it.

An employer from five years ago, whose face I struggled to recollect, offered this: ‘I always got the feeling she didn’t know what it was she wanted. She always seemed a bit lost to me. To be honest, because she was so pretty I think she’d got used to relying on her looks to get her through life.’

I didn’t know which was more peculiar: learning the opinion of an unremarkable colleague from years ago or knowing that a nation of readers would that very day be sharing it.

Nina, of course, had been interviewed and was both more interesting and more articulate than anyone else:

Sylvie knew she was dangerous the first time she met her. I think we both did, not only because Arthur had a history of infidelity and liked her physical type, but also because she’s one of those women who you instinctively know will use her sexuality to her advantage. Women like her exist for men, not for women. She’d perfected that sexy-but-vulnerable Marilyn Monroe thing, the child-woman. And she didn’t seem to have anything else in her life, either, not a career or a strong social circle, no moral structure. I’m not saying she’s a sociopath, but I think events prove that she found it all too easy to disregard other people’s feelings when it suited her. The problem is that when enough people behave individualistically like this, society breaks down. Eventually, lives are lost, precious lives that should never have been sacrificed. 

There was a sense that Nina had stepped back from the feeding frenzy that was my character assassination, as if she had not been the one to start it in the first place. Now, her interest was intellectual, her focus widening to the bigger picture, to the moral welfare of British society as a whole. The feature included a photograph of her standing with the Prime Minister and his wife at a drinks party.

Whatever her own complaints of harassment, it seemed to me she was doing very well out of this story.

The journalist commented next on my status as a Luddite:

One of the oddities of Emily Marr is that she rarely used the myriad social networking sites that characterise her generation. Her last contribution to her Facebook account was almost a year ago. For this reason we have relatively few images of the woman whose dangerousness lay in her physical allure. 

‘She was really into vintage clothes, and that ran into other things,’ says a friend. ‘She was a bit of a throwback. She only had the most basic mobile phone and hardly used that. She didn’t have a clue what Twitter was.’ 

Almost all those quoted spoke of me as if I were deceased, though the writer kept his options open in his closing remarks (I thought of journalists as amateur barristers: always they put the case for the prosecution):

It is a central irony of this affair that Miss Marr’s one official public appearance, at the inquest into the deaths of Sylvie, Alexander and Hugo Woodhall, became of interest only after it had taken place, and therefore we do not have a single photograph of her entering or leaving the coroner’s court (by law, photography is not permitted inside). Miraculously, she continues to evade journalists and photographers, who have since spared her none of the doorstepping treatment afforded other attractive young women in the media spotlight. One of the few recent images we do have, in which her face is partially concealed by a hat, was taken outside the Hertfordshire hospital where her father is a long-term patient in the dementia unit. There is no evidence of the trademark blond mane and sex siren styling, the bewitching beauty that we must take others’ word for. The Emily Marr who wrought havoc, the overnight sensation, seems to have vanished as suddenly as she appeared. 

This was borne out when I phoned the hospital and was told that visits to her father’s bedside had fallen away notably in the last month. ‘I haven’t seen Emily in quite a while,’ the ward sister admitted. Have intrusions into her private life caused her to curtail contact with her ill father? This is certainly the view of Matt Piper. ‘I think everyone should just give her a break and let her get on with her life,’ he comments. ‘She hasn’t actually done anything illegal, as far as I can see.’ 

But others, Nina Meeks and the bereaved Woodhall family among them, are quick to suggest that a more likely reason for Miss Marr losing interest in her father’s care is that another man has entered her life. 

If so, we can only hope that her new romance is an altogether quieter one than the last. 

At the very time I was reading this strange work of half-truth, half-fiction, Dad had passed away. Phil was already at the hospital, had been with him at the end, and I was very grateful for that. Having previously deferred to me in all arrangements for Dad’s care, he now took one look at me and reversed our roles.

‘Come with me, Em.’ He slipped a hand under my elbow and held it firmly. ‘I’ve just been told we can see him.’

I’d heard that to see a dead man was like seeing him sleeping, but it was not; it was like seeing him dead. Absence of life compressed the room with its cold magnetism, our two intruding figures obscenely thermal, glowing hyper-real. Hard as I tried, I could not keep thoughts of the three Woodhall deaths at bay, even this personal tragedy of my own was contaminated by theirs: my own father versus a woman I’d met twice for two minutes and two boys I’d never met at all. Of course, I felt guilty for weighing them up like that, but guilt consumed so much of my existence at that time, it was a feeling that had lost all shape and size. Every thought I had felt wrong then; I could not trust my sanity.