The Missing One (5 page)

My heart turns over again: so she did keep a treasure from my babyhood. There is a box of Alice's baby things in the attic, but I didn't realize she had kept anything at all of mine when we left California. Gently, I lay the blanket fragment next to the box.

There is just one more thing now – a flat, grey stone, about the size of my thumb, and heart-shaped. It is smooth and almost weightless. I try to imagine my father giving it
to her on a Californian beach at sunset, all those years ago, when they met and fell in love. Before he betrayed her.

But this scenario feels unlikely. I can't actually imagine my father picking out heart-shaped stones on beaches. He doesn't belong on beaches at all, or in the Californian sun. He belongs in chilly northern cities, weaving through magisterial buildings in well-cut trousers, noting angles and lines with his architect's eye.

Alice leans over and pokes at the carving with an index finger. ‘What
is
that thing?' She still has a smear of Marmite on her nose, and for a second I want to reach out and hold onto my little sister. I want to stroke her hair and tell her that everything will be all right and that this grief won't always be so intense. Maybe things will be more straightforward between us now we don't have our mother to contend with. But this is not the way it works with us. The way it works is that Alice is sensible and holds everything together. She gets to worry about me, but I don't get to worry about her. I can't comfort her, even though, when she was little and had hurt herself, I'd be the one she'd run to first. But that all shifted as we got older, and my relationship with our mother deteriorated, and Alice became the peacekeeper, the smoother-over, the organizer.

She turns away now, and pours herself another coffee.

‘Alice?'

‘What?'

‘I'm sorry that I've been so crap, and I didn't come, and you had to take all the strain of her illness, and everything. I'm really sorry I haven't been here.'

‘Oh, right. No. That's OK.'

‘The thing is, I just didn't know if she'd want me to be here,' I say. But I know this is not the whole story. The truth is, I didn't know how to be here: I was scared that she would push me away when she only had weeks to live, and I knew there would be no deathbed reconciliations. Or perhaps it's even more messed up than that. Perhaps I couldn't face the thought that there would be a reconciliation – and then she'd die anyway. I have been a terrible coward.

Alice drains her coffee then puts the mug carefully on the table. It is an Emma Bridgewater mug, with a cockerel on it. We both look at the cockerel as if it might leap up and tell us what to do now.

‘Doesn't it stop you sleeping?' I ask.

‘What?'

‘All this coffee.'

‘It doesn't affect me at all.' She takes a sharp, efficient breath. ‘I sleep like a baby. You should try drinking more of it yourself, Kal. You might be more helpful if you were less out of it.'

I look at her. I want to tell her that babies do not, in fact, sleep – not mine, anyway. I have barely had an uninterrupted night in eighteen months. This might explain why my husband has … for a moment, the blood pounds in my ears.

‘Sorry,' she says. ‘No, sorry. God. I'm just … I'm tired too. I'm really, really tired.' She rests her forehead on the heels of her hands. Her fingers are long and tapering, with soft cuticles and delicate pads and perfectly filed nails. ‘This is bloody awful.'

‘I know.' We sit in silence for a moment. Finn chomps at his toast and kicks his heels against the high chair.

Our lives are so completely different. Alice spends her time in high-octane meetings and negotiations, flying business class to New York and Dubai and Singapore and Hong Kong, while I divide my time between Mummy and Me Music, Little Sunflowers Playgroup, Sainsbury's, the swings, and the office – where I am becoming increasingly superfluous.

‘So when are you going back to Oxford?'

‘I don't know. What about you?'

‘Well, I have to head back to London today. I have this thing going on at work … you know what it's like.'

I really don't, at least not any more, but I nod. ‘It's OK, you should go. You've done so much here already.' Finn has his sippy cup upside down now, and is pouring it onto the plastic table, then smashing his hand flat into the milk and sodden toast, splattering it across the floor.

‘Should he be doing that?' Alice says anxiously.

I get up and take the cup away. He wails and holds out both hands for it. I give him back the cup and he spurts it into my face. As I wipe milk out of my eye, I remember I have three recorded interviews in the car. I should have left them in the office for someone else to work on. But it all fell apart so fast.

I used to care about qualitative research into patient experiences. I used to put huge effort into getting the most truthful, enlightening story from each person I interviewed. But my work has been squeezed into one and a half days a
week and has, therefore, rendered itself almost pointless. The pay barely covers the babysitter. I leave things undone, half done, badly done – to be tidied up by others. But if I let my work go – the job I once loved, and worked so hard for – then what? I cannot see myself at home full time – I saw what that did to my mother. So the only answer is to work more, not less. But I can't do that because then I'd have to hand Finn over to the babysitter for even longer, and that feels wrong too. He is so small and he needs me. He needs to know that his mother is always there for him, always puts him first.

It would be easier if Doug's work were more flexible. But as my job has been crushed into fewer and fewer hours, Doug's has swollen, with the promotion to professor, the book, the global speaking invitations. Each month his schedule gets a little more demanding, with more travel, more meetings, more talks, readings, conferences, while my life is shrink-wrapped around Finn and our home. It is not clear how my years of education and ambition have funnelled me into Mummy and Me Music, but I do know one thing: there is a sharp red line leading from that to what is happening with Doug right now.

I can't believe that it's only a week since I tore through our wardrobe at five in the morning with him behind me saying, ‘Stop, stop, please – wait – I should come with you.'

I couldn't even look at him.

I had been up all night in the leather armchair downstairs while he slept. I had just about decided to go and wake him up and confront him with what I'd found when my
mobile rang. I wasn't really surprised to hear Alice's panicky voice telling me to come down to Sussex. I'd been waiting for her call all week.

I shoved some of Finn's clothes and nappies, his bunny, his sippy cup and his toy cars into a bag. Then I went into our bedroom to grab some of my own things before I woke Finn, wrapped him in blankets and coaxed him, gently, out into the January pre-dawn fog, and into his car seat.

Doug would have put my behaviour down to shock, initially, but at some point, after I'd gone, he would have noticed that his phone was downstairs on the leather chair. Then he would have known that I'd seen her other text, too. Maybe he thought I'd forget about it all, with my mother's death.

But of course I have heard his guilt behind every interaction we've had since that morning. I have felt it licking at my heart the whole time. His guilt is how I know that this is real and not just a made-up drama, a silly misunderstanding.

Alice is tapping at her iPad and Finn is battering his cup on the side of the table, singing a nonsense song to himself while drumming his heels.

‘That's a lovely song.' I sit back down.

‘Are you all right?' Alice says. ‘Are you actually OK?'

I look at her. ‘I'm not sure. Are you?'

‘Not really.'

We stare at each other. Finn goes quiet and watches us, perhaps concerned that we may be about to bawl again.

Then Alice takes a breath. ‘Kal – you don't have to answer this, but why didn't you want Doug here? I know you said
there was a good reason, but obviously … he wouldn't … I mean. This must be serious. What's going on with you two?'

I glance at Finn. I can't possibly explain all this to her with him sitting there, covered in milk and Marmite, his brown eyes fixed on our faces.

‘It's OK,' she says. ‘If you don't want to talk about it. That's OK too.'

I take a gulp of coffee then I lean over and with one hand I stroke the hair off Finn's face. ‘I can't really, at the moment.' His fringe really needs cutting. ‘I just can't really even think about it, to be honest.' I try to sluice the bits of soggy toast into a heap on his tray.

‘No. That's OK. Don't worry.' Alice pushes her chair back, gets up and starts scraping her papers together. I heave Finn out of his chair and put him on the floor. Drunk with freedom, he toddles off in his spaceman pyjamas towards the open dishwasher. ‘It's all right,' she says. ‘I can see why you wouldn't feel able to face anything right now. So. Look. You know what? I still can't find the bloody birth certificate.'

‘But we don't need it now, do we?'

‘I know, but I want to find it. It feels odd not to. It feels incomplete.'

This is why Alice is the high-earning city lawyer, and not me. ‘But maybe she never brought it with her from America in the first place,' I suggest. Finn is taking dirty cutlery out of the dishwasher and laying it out, quite neatly and slowly, on the tiled floor.

‘You can't become a British citizen without a birth certificate.'

‘Was she ever a British citizen? Do we even know that she was?'

Alice frowns. ‘I suppose not. I found their marriage certificate, though. Did you know they didn't get married till you were eight months old?'

I nod, surprised that I know something about my mother that Alice doesn't. ‘They got married just before Dad brought us to England.'

‘That's quite cool of them, when you think about it,' she says. ‘There must have been a lot of pressure to get married.'

‘Well, it was California in the seventies, maybe not.'

‘But from Dad's parents?'

‘Actually, that's true … '

The phone buzzes in my jeans pocket.

‘Kal!' Alice cries.

I follow her eyes to Finn. He is brandishing a Sabatier kitchen knife, feet apart like a warrior. The blade glints. I hurl myself across the kitchen and wrench it out of his hands. He looks up at me with startled eyes.

‘Dangerous!' I say, in a horrified voice, holding the knife high above us. ‘Dangerous! Knives are very, very dangerous!' I put it in the sink. My hand is shaking.

‘Mine!' He holds out both hands, outraged. ‘Minamineamine!'

‘No. Dangerous. It will cut you. Knives cut you. Ow!'

‘No. Mine. Mine!'

We wrangle for a bit, but eventually he settles for the soapy washing-up brush. I gather up the cutlery from the floor and close the dishwasher, aware of Alice behind me.

‘They're quite full-on, aren't they?' she says. ‘Toddlers.'

I sit down again, and watch Finn scrub the kitchen cupboard.

‘You're not tempted then?'

‘He's gorgeous.' She smiles. ‘But I'm quite glad he's yours.'

I don't know why Alice is single. She is so kind and clever, and immensely beautiful. Maybe she is just too busy for boyfriends. Or maybe she has someone, but hasn't told me. There is something so self-sufficient about Alice, though. I can't imagine her as part of a couple, even though she has had boyfriends in the past. Now does not seem to be the right time to ask her about her love life. I look at my phone. There are voicemails and texts, probably all from Doug.

I just want to be left alone.

‘Listen.' Alice glances at my phone then at me. ‘If you'd like to pick out some of her jewellery, before you go … '

‘No, it's OK. I don't want anything, I really don't. You can have it.'

‘What? Why? You should take something. I'm not having it all.'

‘No, really, Alice. You deserve it. I don't want her jewellery.'

‘Well, you can choose things when you're ready,' she says.

‘Look – how about you have the jewellery, and I'll keep this box.' I pull the blue box towards me. ‘It's got her American things in it. I'm the American-born one, so I get this, OK? You have the jewellery.'

She raises her eyes to the ceiling and sighs. Then she gathers the rest of the paperwork.

‘So I have to go back to London around lunchtime … I'm going to finish up here and … ' She walks to the door, pauses, then turns back to me. ‘Kal, whatever has happened with Doug, you two will work it out, won't you? You have to.'

I nod, but I can't speak. I swig the last of the coffee with my eyes shut, then I get a cloth and kneel down and wipe the Marmite off Finn's face. He squawks. I kiss him, push back my mess of hair and survey the carnage – milk and toast and smears on the floor by the dishwasher and all over the white kitchen cabinets. I hear the door close behind me and Alice's light feet on the stairs. Then I reach out and gather Finn's solid body tight in my arms. He smells of Marmite and milk and, somewhere beneath it, sleep. I squeeze my eyes shut so that stars appear. This is the only thing that really matters. How could Doug throw this away? Finn wraps his arms around my neck and presses his sticky face into my hair. ‘Mama,' he coos. ‘Mamamamamamamama.'

*

At some point I am going to have to confront Doug. I can't just run away from this. And then suddenly, with Alice's strong coffee buzzing through my head, I think I'll just do it. Now. Tell him that I saw the texts and that I know he's having an affair. I put Finn down, kiss him and get several pans and a wooden spoon from the cupboard. He seizes the spoon and begins to bash.