The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (17 page)

Frances said quietly, ‘This could have been such a happy day. Do you think really they’ll be all right, Maggie and Nicholas?’

‘Yes. Absolutely. They’ll just be lost. The day may be interrupted but the show is open until autumn; we can come back. Perhaps without children?’

He smiled at her, trying to reassure her without sounding glib.

‘Still,’ she said wearily, detaching herself from his arm, ‘they’re not here.’

‘Let’s go back to Eleanor and Patrick,’ he said. ‘It’s possible Maggie will have found her way back to them or back to David. And Julian should have spoken to the police by now.’

‘I suppose for them it’s all in a day’s work,’ Frances said. ‘Probably people lose their children every hour.’

‘Probably,’ he said, nodding. ‘I’m sure they must.’

‘I can’t imagine what David was thinking,’ she said.

‘Perhaps he just couldn’t see it through their eyes—how huge the space is, how vast the crowds. Even Nicky will have seen more crowds than Maggie.’

He could see Eleanor, now sitting on a bench a few yards from King Tut’s Treasures, and Patrick leaning against the palisade beside her. Julian had joined them and looked more alert, though scarlet-faced. None of them had yet seen Laurence and Frances. Patrick was smoking. Eleanor had her head back, eyes closed, but even as Laurence watched, her head snapped forward and she looked around her, spotting him immediately. He started shaking his head from a distance and hated seeing a brief look of hope leave her face. Frances took both Eleanor’s hands as she reached her, but again it seemed as if Eleanor was the comforter. Patrick had lost his usual air of confidence.

‘The police have told their patrols to look for Nicky,’ Julian said gruffly, ‘but they weren’t the slightest bit bothered by Maggie having gone astray, once I’d convinced them she was unlikely to have kidnapped Nicholas. They say she’s fifteen and not their concern. And quite obviously they think, given that Nicholas is likely to be with her, there’s not much to worry about.’

As he spoke Julian glanced uneasily at the two women.

‘They seem quite certain they will turn up, saying they have twenty or so missing children every day.’

It seemed to Laurence that once Maggie and Nicholas had failed to rendezvous here, looking for them was more or less like searching for a needle in a haystack. He was about to suggest that the women went to have tea when he caught the eye of the man on the cockerel roundabout. The ride was just stopping and children were being lifted off. As he crossed the worn turf, he knew the man had seen him. As he stepped up to the booth, the man came out of it. The armpits of his shirt were dark with sweat as he swung himself down; his forearm revealed that his badly executed tattoo was a regimental crest. Laurence wasn’t sure whether the man recognised him from his brief exchange earlier, but he looked ready to speak.

‘Summat up?’ he said.

‘We’ve lost a child. Two children...’ Laurence began.

‘Kiddies always going missing here,’ the man said.

“I just wondered if you might have noticed them. They were supposed to meet us here but we were late and they’ve gone. A small boy of six. An older girl, fifteen.’

Even as he spoke, two children of much that age hovered, examining the price board. He realised how impossible it would be to identify Nicholas and Maggie. There were hundreds of Nicholases and Maggies here. His mind had moved on and he almost missed what the man said next.

‘I might just have done.’

Laurence was instantly alert. The man was obviously trying hard to remember. Laurence didn’t want to push him.

‘Yep,’ the man said. ‘Nicely spoken lad in a sailor suit, young woman—I thought she was his nursemaid—west country by the sound of her?’

‘Dark-haired? The boy?’

The man shook his head a little less certainly and Laurence’s heart sank. As he half turned away he could see Eleanor and Frances watching him.

‘Tell you what, this lad, his name was Nicko. Nicholas—I’m sure of it. My boy’s called Nicko so I notice it. They sat where your lady friends are sitting now. Then the boy came over and wanted a ride. That’s when I heard his name. The girl was telling him he’d have to ask his ma and to keep his sunhat on. In the end she let him have a ride. She only had two bob on her, no change. I let him ride for free.’

Laurence, his attention fully on the man, felt in his pocket for coins. So this was just an attempt to get money. But to his surprise the man held his hand up, palm outwards.

‘Nah. It’s done.’

‘And then what?’

‘Then he got off. They went back to sitting.’ He nodded towards the bench. ‘He did, any rate. Next time I looked, he was on his own. Next time.’ He pushed back his grimy cap. ‘Nah, I didn’t see him again. Talking to a gent, maybe? Maybe not? The afternoon rush. Queuing for my fine birds, they were.’

He reached out to the massive flank of the nearest cockerel and stroked it tenderly.

‘Lads aren’t great ones for sitting long, are they?’

He looked over to a pair of anxious mothers who were pushing forward reluctant children. A hefty boy was already climbing on a stationary creature.

‘Nothing else to tell you,’ the man said, walking away. He gesticulated at the boy. ‘Geroff with you, yer too big.’

Then, just as Laurence was about to walk back to Eleanor, the man seemed to remember something.

‘Hang on. He
was
talking to a bloke. Not so much talking as the man was shouting. He sat down on the same bench. I was staring meself. He had one of them masks.’ The man touched his own face with stained fingers. ‘Creepy, I call ’em but you can’t help but feel sorry for the blokes who have to wear them. You know ... metal things? Painted with eyes and all.’

Laurence did know. Of all of war’s ugly legacies, the copper masks with their exquisitely painted features covering the most ruined faces, where nothing remained to shape flesh around, were the most grotesque. When he had seen men in them, he had thought they were as brave to go out in them as to deal with whatever devastation lay beneath. To know yourself repellent: how could a man live with it?

‘The boy was scared. He was staring and then he was moving away. The bloke noticed and shouted at him and the lad ran off. Up there,’ he pointed between two rows of stalls, ‘I think. Like I say, things got busy.’

‘It must have been them surely?’ Eleanor said when Laurence had repeated the account, leaving out the man’s memory of the masked man’s anger at Nicholas’s fear. ‘But why did Maggie leave Nicky by himself? Why did David leave both of them?’ Before anyone could answer she exhaled deeply. ‘Why did
I
leave them? Nicky could have come to lunch with us.’

Frances turned her head away.

‘I mean, I was taking him to my sister’s to go to the seaside with them, and coming back to Easton without him.’

‘He would have been bored stiff,’ Patrick said. ‘It was probably boredom, which sent him, or them, wandering off.’

Frances’s eyes were screwed up against the sun.

‘If Maggie had gone off for some reason—it might even have been to the lavatory or something quite run-of-the-mill—and Nicholas had got bored, where would he have gone?’

‘Can he read well enough to get around?’ Julian asked.

Eleanor’s usual spirit flared up. ‘He’s six. Of course he can read. But not signs. Just little books...’ Her lower lip moved slightly in a tiny spasm.

Laurence and Patrick exchanged glances. Patrick peered at his watch.

‘We have to decide how long we’re going to stay here,’ he said. And when Eleanor and Frances looked up, startled, he said, ‘It’s been over an hour and a half now. Should some of us stay here and some of us go on home? Sooner or later we’ll have to decide.’

For all his calm words, he held his cigarette case in his hands, snapping it open and closed while making no effort to remove a cigarette.

Laurence glanced at Eleanor. Her pupils seemed huge.

‘Let’s have one more walk,’ he said, ‘in case you see anything we might not. Something that might take Nicholas’s eye. The others can watch out for him here.’

She looked dazed but she followed him as he took the route Nicholas had apparently taken when scared by the injured man. They came out in a circle of food stalls and souvenir kiosks.

‘He didn’t have money for any of this,’ Eleanor said despondently.

‘Let’s go as far as the main buildings. Perhaps he tried to find you. Would he know where you were lunching?’

‘No. Yes. Perhaps,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

‘That’s easy then,’ Laurence said, guiding her forward.

By the gates of the funfair was a tent advertising a magical show:
DeVine and Maguire. Magicians to the crowned heads of Europe.

Eleanor gave a weak smile. ‘Before or after the war, do you think?’

Two sides of the tent had been half raised, presumably to allow circulation of air, but it also enabled a handful of onlookers to peer in without paying. A fat, shiny-faced woman was remonstrating with them as she turned to let down the canvas. The gawpers moved away. Laurence bent and looked through to see a man in evening dress and a woman in satin tunic and tights, with feathers in her hair, spin a box over a void. There was a rather feeble drum roll and the front fell open. A small boy was standing inside.

‘Good Lord,’ Laurence said, standing up straight. Eleanor took one look at him and then ducked into the tent, despite the fat woman shouting, ‘Not without a ticket, you don’t.’

‘Please. It’s my son. That’s my son.’

The satin-clad assistant lifted Nicholas down from his box and at her nudging he bowed deeply. The crowd clapped. Before Eleanor could reach the stage, Nicholas had bowed again.

As she returned to the open air, pushing her son before her, the crowd was still clapping. Laurence could see that, although she was close to tears, Nicholas looked cross.

‘I’m a saucer’s apprentice,’ he said.

‘Sorcerer’s,’ Eleanor said, squatting down to his level. ‘Oh Nicky, where have you been? What happened? Where’s Maggie?’

‘There was a nice man who bought Maggie and me an ice cream and said where were we from and talked about cars and what car we had and could I drive it. But then there was a nasty man,’ Nicholas said, suddenly holding on to his mother. ‘He had a face like a bad puppet and he shouted. So I ran away and then I was trying to see magic so I went in the tent and I was watching disappearing balloons and the lady getting sawed but she wasn’t and the pretty lady said I could be in the next trick. And everybody liked it and clapped.’ He looked resentfully at Eleanor. ‘I didn’t like the other man but I did like being magic. I’d like to be magic when I grow up and make people disappear.’

Eleanor suddenly bent down and hugged him. ‘Don’t ever run away again.’ Her voice was breaking. ‘I thought I’d lost you.’

‘I wasn’t running away.’ His voice was muffled and he was attempting to extricate himself from his mother’s tight embrace. ‘I was waiting like Maggie said but I was frightened by the man with the horrid face.’

Laurence thought that on such a hot day the man underneath the mask must have been burning; no wonder he raged at a staring child.

‘Where’s Maggie?’ Laurence asked. ‘Did she say?’

Nicholas looked at them as if they were stupid.

‘She went to see somebody. She’s probly not coming back today. She said she would soon be back or she’d write a letter and you wouldn’t mind if I sat still and waited and not to be cross.’ His face fell. ‘I wish she hadn’t gone.’

The others, standing by Tutankhamun’s Tomb, looked up and caught sight of them. Frances rushed over. She too seemed close to tears and tousled the boy’s hair with a false insouciance.

‘Oh I’m glad to see you,’ she said.

‘Maggie left him to meet someone,’ Laurence said, and saw concern on Frances’s face.

Nicholas said, ‘It was a secret before.’ He smiled shyly up at Patrick. ‘That’s why she was looking nice. Like a film person. She’d saved the pretty ribbon Mr Easton gave her for special.’

Frances stared at Julian in surprise but it was clear he was puzzled.

‘He means me,’ Patrick said, after a second’s pause. ‘I gave her the ribbon, for God’s sake, to try and make her feel pretty. She’s fifteen years old. She’s got nothing, not even a future.’ He looked angry. ‘No wonder she’s run off at the first sight of the real world, or of any damn place but Easton.’

PART TWO

Chapter Nine

Laurence got back to his London rooms late and grimy after the abortive day at Wembley. Relief had exhausted him and he almost slept through the clattering of his alarm clock the next morning but he was just in time to catch the train back to Swindon. All his connections went smoothly. A very subdued David was waiting at the station. He drove in near silence, answering questions in monosyllables. Only when they arrived at Easton did he speak properly.

‘I never dreamed for a minute she’d leave him alone,’ he said in an agitated voice. ‘It was the sun, I wasn’t feeling right. Couldn’t be doing with the crowds. I thought they’d be quite safe. She’ll only have gone off as girls do, won’t she?’

He wouldn’t look Laurence in the face.

‘I was talking about her dad—I knew him a bit as a lad.’ His words tumbled out. ‘Not her mum. I was married meself by then and had gone away. I knew that he’d been a brave man. Maggie seemed to like my talking about him. I never meant to upset her.’

Laurence crossed the courtyard and went in through the stable door. It seemed as if nobody was at home except Mrs Hill who was disconsolately dismembering rabbits.

‘Young Maggie,’ she said, ‘turned out to be just like her ma. Susan’s gone back home—she’s in a proper state about it.’

He walked on through the house; the doors and windows were thrown wide. From the terrace he could see the wide hose now leading to the yew plants which showed a deep green in contrast to the parched lawn. William, wearing a white hat, sat supervising the watering, with Julian standing next to him. For once even Scout looked subdued by the heat, her tongue lolling.

‘I’ve been to the river. It’s worse each day,’ Julian said, looking perplexed. ‘Thousands of dead fish. It stinks down by the Mill. The narrower stretches are scarcely more than mud. I’ve never seen it like this. It could be from drawing too hard on the aquifers to provide for Swindon. I always said it was going to cause problems. We’ll have to shut down the generator, close the sluices. We can’t take water out when there’s so little of it.’