Without Her

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  “What about being kidnapped by gypsies?”

  “What about running away to sea?”

  “What about highwaymen, and you’re in a carriage, rushing through the night, and they stop you, your money or your life? What would you do?”

  “Which would you rather be, a prostitute or a nun?”

  “What about running away to another country? What about India? Nobody would ever find us.”

  We walked round and round the games field with its white goalposts and muddy hockey pitches until the sun set or the cold drove us indoors, that first winter at school, and began to talk about our secret lives.

  We began calling each other by code names, aliases, changing the code weekly, so that nobody would ever catch up. We wrapped our gloved hands in our green school cloaks, pulled these cloaks tight around us, saw our breath puff out on the dank air, stared out beyond the fence at the very edge of the field, where we were not allowed to go. We would be spies. The Russians would have us, they would love two intelligent girls who could put on disguises and slide into their dangerous world.

  You do what you can, when you are young, to make life livable; you seize on the slightest opportunity and make of it what you must. Children are heroic, and we were still children, our minds ruled by our imaginations, our hearts in our hidden lives.

  6.

  I call Philip in the morning to reassure him that I am on my way. He will meet me at the station at Avignon, he says. I hear the out-breath of his relief. He believes, against all likelihood, that I will somehow know where she is. I try to sound reassuring, even calm. At least he will not be alone; at least I can provide company. But Hannah? Who has ever known where she was, when she did not want them to? She was still a child when she perfected her sudden disappearances, her almost Houdini-like escapes. I am perhaps the only person alive who knew her that well, and that is why he has asked me, and why I am on my way south to try to find her.

  Hannah met Philip while we were still at Cambridge, in our third year. They met in Heffer’s, in the history section; more exactly, he was in the history section and she was twirling around in a roll-necked black sweater, her hair coming loose from its bun, waiting for me to buy Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. We tried to leave but our bikes were entangled with his, outside on the street.

  I heard him say to her, “I’ve seen you outside the Seeley, haven’t I? And maybe at the Arts?”

  Even then, it was a clumsy pickup by a man unused to such things. I recognized it and fell back, so that they could casually decide together to go for coffee at The Buttery, a conservative sort of café where serious students went and were to be seen wearing their black academic gowns even in the morning.

  I heard her say, laughing, “If you’ve seen me outside the Seeley Library, I must have been waiting for her.” Waving towards me. “So, you’re not a historian?” “No, English.” “Ah.” And they were off, for the next fifty or more years.

  He used to wear a tweed jacket and cavalry twill trousers until she laughed him out of this outfit; we were in jeans and black sweaters, all the rest of us, our group as we called it. It was the sixties at last, it was the time of revolt against everything our parents had done and told us to do. Our clothes, our hair, our taste in music, the way we smoked and drank and took dope, the way we stayed up late at night drinking instant coffee and listening to modern jazz, showed the world who we were—and showed us ourselves who we might be, too. It was a club just as rigid as any other, looked at from now, but at the time it was freedom, originality, flair. So, Hannah got Philip out of his conventional clothes almost as soon as she’d found him, but he still looked neat in his ironed jeans—who ironed them?—and a slightly shabbier version of the tweed jacket over a black sweater. He would wheel his bike, and she’d walk beside him down King’s Parade, or she’d wheel hers and he, gentleman that he already was, let her go ahead.

  He was not handsome, being very tall and thin and beaky-nosed, with flyaway hair, and I wondered what she saw in him at first, but he turned out to be so good-natured and simply kind that all of us—our little gang—warmed to him and took him in. Was that what it was, his sheer niceness? A man without malice, a man who had been brought up to be polite, especially to women. An old-fashioned Englishman. He got up in the morning and went to lectures, as we did not. He sent neatly written essays in on time, she reported. He was set to be an intellectual—not the sort we admired, with existentialist or Marxist credentials—but a solid, thoughtful, respected historian. He was bent on getting a first, and did so in Finals, without ever looking ruffled or overworked. What was it Hannah wanted of him? To be treated well, to be loved. She would tease him for being boring, and he simply smiled and took it, and she went about with him arm in arm, smiling too. She had found someone who accepted her just as she was, I think now, and relaxed into that ease, adopting his aura of pleasantness. He seemed unworried by her occasional flightiness; patiently, he waited for her to come back to him, even when, as she did, she let him down, or was seen with somebody else. What happened to all her other suitors, I did not know, but I sometimes glimpsed one of them bicycling hard up the hill towards our college as if in pursuit of something that eluded him; maybe it was his bicycle clips as well as his impatience to find her that had put her off.

  They were married in the early seventies, only a few years after we left university—he was a year ahead and had already gone down before us—and I went to her wedding in East Anglia, among buttercups and cruising swallows, in the pale light of that region where the sky cups the flat earth so completely that every human activity looks small. It was in a flint church, in summer, and there was a garden party afterwards, and I saw my hippie friend transformed into a bride among pages and little flower girls from her new husband’s family, all clutching bunches of wildflowers artfully arranged. I was in a floaty blue dress and broad-brimmed hat from Biba on Kensington High Street, and high boots.

  It was the year in which we went our separate ways: she into married life and I into the far reaches of North America. Each of us had disappointed the other; the shared life we had imagined, having salons, taking London by storm, had evaporated. But in our twenties we were too busy inventing our individual lives to be aware that this mattered, or to think it irreversible. You just moved on, as life took you with it, and nobody was supposed to complain. I couldn’t imagine then why she had decided to marry Philip, of all the young men who had crowded around her at Cambridge, with whom she had claimed, serially, to be in love. Was she in love now? I dared not ask, it was not something you could ask someone on her wedding day; it was far too late. Weddings imply a lot: they almost force you to accept a certain reality, that this woman and this man are in love, that he, she, is the “one,” that only one person exists in this world for you, for anybody, that it is “meant” to be, even, that it is all God’s idea, and suddenly people who haven’t mentioned God for decades are intoning and singing hymns and promising Him that they won’t let him down, or look at anybody else, in sickness, in health, for richer, for poorer; they are signing their lives away, old friends hardly count anymore, and this is the beginning of their Real Life. All this can go through the mind of an old friend, at a wedding, and it went through mine. I saw her move away from me as surely as if she were setting sail into an unknown sea. Later, I understood that she had felt the same way about me, when I told her I was leaving for America. If this was betrayal, it was also what was expected of us. In that era in England, you either married as soon as you could after graduating, or you got a job in television with the new channel, BBC2, or in publishing. Or you went to America. It was a foreseen part of growing up, becoming a real adult person; a parting of childish ways. We had set our sights on different lives, moved in different directions, I told myself, and that was that. Yet there was something in her guardedness with me when I saw her again, her rather tight little smile, that told me that perhaps marriage and a house in Eas
t Anglia did not quite match up to my American adventure and the freedom it brought me.

  On the day of her wedding, when I’d flown back all the way from California to be there with her, I surprised her on the stairs as she went up to change into her going-away suit, after the party. She was already unzipping her white satin that had grass stains around its hem. She had lost a contact lens, thought she might have left it in a wineglass. Her hair was falling in wisps out of its fluffed-out bun. I reached to help her, almost automatically, and she stopped me. “Careful with the zip, it catches easily.” I eased it slowly down her back and the white wedding dress slithered down, and she stepped out of it there on the landing and caught it up like laundry under one arm. She was wearing a garter belt, as we call it in America, and white stockings, and a push-up bra and lacy knickers—real honeymoon stuff—and I could see that she was embarrassed. We exchanged a glance, but no words. To me it said, don’t say anything, don’t you dare, you have no right to comment, I’m doing exactly what I want to do. But I could have been wrong.

  I have time to think about all this as the TGV speeds south, as I lean back in my seat and watch countryside change, brown cows give way to white cows, grassy fields to hills, suburbs to vineyards, gray roofs to red. I love train travel in Europe, and can’t believe that trains hardly exist in the US today, for all their lonely whistles blowing from the past. This is a journey I have made many times, but usually I have a book, or a copy of Le Monde, and I read to distract myself. Today, I can’t read, though I have the new Patrick Modiano I’ve been wanting to begin. Sometimes other people’s documented lives are fascinating; at other times, they feel like an intrusion. I think about our lives, mine and Hannah’s, as intensely as I can, in case there is a clue, a memory, a story that will turn out to be essential; in case, as Philip has suggested, I myself carry the answer to the riddle. I can’t risk Modiano’s own potent, seedy memories of postwar Paris getting in the way. I watch France rush past me, or that is how it feels. Really, I am being carried through France at an absurd speed, a speed we could never have imagined in the early days of our travels. I remember Hannah and myself, wriggling into couchettes, lying there pretending to sleep, too excited to close our eyes: seeing France pass and narrowly become Italy through a slit at the side of the blind, where it stretched and rattled against a window, and the mysterious sign that said E pericoloso sporgersi; the banging door of the toilet up the narrow corridor, and the pervasive stink. The swinging of the train carriages, the track glimpsed like suicide between the coaches that seemed so slightly linked together, the guard sleeping in his little closet. The train of memory, the train of youth.

  And then we’re there. I get off my fast twenty-first-century train at the futuristic new station in Avignon, the one that’s been set down like an airport or a supermarket in the middle of the red-earth countryside of Provence. I miss the old station, where I had to carry my bag through an underground tunnel to come up facing the high medieval walls of the old city; where Hannah used to meet me, and take me straight to a dark bar across the street where we would sit in a corner and sip vermouth and catch up, before driving out to the house. Here, I step out into blunt heat and see a parking lot full of cars flaring light from their windshields a short distance away. No sign of Philip. I stand and shade my eyes, wondering if he’s come, or if I should get a taxi. There’s a taxi stand down some steps with a number to call, and a little group of hot people with suitcases. But no, of course he’s here, I see a tall slightly stooping figure walking towards me, wearing a floppy hat, dark glasses, a droopy linen jacket, jeans, and espadrilles. His red cotton scarf somehow gives him away as English, and his blue eyes when he takes his glasses off that really do widen and lighten at the sight of me. He waves, “Claude! Claudia! Over here!” as if I haven’t seen him, and I walk towards him, pushing my wheeled suitcase beside me, my bag slipping down over one shoulder. The place feels mercilessly hot and dry, but the line of poplars by the parking lot and a farther stand of dark cypress, their tips just moving, remind me I am in Provence, where there will soon be shade, and a cool drink.

  “Claudia. How are you? You look marvelous. You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “It’s only been a year, Phil.” Though I suppose we do start to change overnight, these days. “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “I wondered if you’d be able to get here, with all the strikes they are talking about. Why didn’t you fly?”

  “Oh, I’ve had enough of flying, once I’ve crossed the Atlantic. I like fast trains. I had something to do in Paris, so I stopped over, caught up with a bit of the jet-lag, so I didn’t fall asleep on you as soon as I got here.”

  He’s pulling me towards him in an awkward one-armed hug, so I kiss him firmly on both cheeks as if we were French, and see him blush. We walk to where he has parked his car in the rows of others, a BMW with big English plates. We begin driving towards the city of Avignon, that lies to the right of us like a lion in its valley, couchant in the sun behind its ancient walls. The wide Rhône under its stone bridges. The dark ranks of cypresses, the willows and poplars glittering beside the water. On the left bank of the great river as we go towards Villeneuve-les-Avignon, with its jutting tower, I glimpse the restaurant with the faded striped awning where once we celebrated one of their wedding anniversaries—or was it a birthday?—years ago.

  The road divides and he sets off towards Pertuis and the Lubéron, where his house is.

  “So,” I say at last, “Phil, d’you want to tell me what has happened?”

  “Nothing has happened since we talked. She simply hasn’t contacted me, nobody knows where she is, and the French police appear to be doing nothing to find her.”

  “How infuriating. I’m so sorry, it must be awful for you.”

  “Frankly, I’m at my wits’ end.” He’s staring straight ahead, driving carefully, his profile unchanged but a certain angle to his neck that tells me he’s trying to keep control, not only of the car.

  “Have you told the children?”

  “Yes. Piers is coming on Saturday. Melissa’s trying to get away, but she’s still at work and needs someone for the children. They are both absolutely mystified, as I am.”

  Another silence. “But Claude—I know she isn’t dead, I feel it, so there’s some hope. I believe I would know it if she was dead.”

  I’m moved by this declaration. He has a humble man’s certainty about some things. He feels he knows his wife. But if she is simply elsewhere, as she has been before? Not dead, but willfully absent?

  “Well, that’s good. Philip—has she been odd in any way recently? I mean, is she mentally okay?”

  “I think mentally she’s fine. She hasn’t been very well physically, that’s partly why I wanted to come down here for a good part of the summer, so she could relax.” He glances sideways at me. We’re at the age now when things can go suddenly wrong; when the body, or the mind, can crack open and let life out. I see this new nervousness, which is making everything harder for him. His hands grip the wheel more firmly.

  “I only asked because you hear sometimes of people wandering off, you know, forgetting things, not knowing where they are.” Not for a moment do I think that my astute friend would be in such a state, but I wanted to cover all possibilities. “D’you mind talking about it while you’re driving? We could wait till we get there if you like.”

  “No, no, I want to use all the time we have. This is fine.”

  “So, do you know what was wrong with her physically?” I think, I have to start here.

  “I don’t, really. She’s been run down, complained of aches and pains, cramps in the night, that sort of thing. She’s been seeing a doctor in London, our local hospital leaves a lot to be desired, with all the cutbacks. But you know Hannah. She didn’t want to talk about it, so I didn’t ask. She seemed better, recently, more like her old self.”

  Her old self. How many old selves we have now. My own
include the rapt young woman hanging out on houseboats in Sausalito, the itinerant would-be filmmaker in Central America, a dozen others, as well as the girl who left London with two suitcases to follow a dream six thousand miles away. How many are there of Hannah’s old selves? I’ve been remembering how we got a night train down to Marseille to catch a cargo boat to Turkey, the summer of our second long vacation from college. All the way down the Mediterranean for twenty pounds, steerage. The Turkish musicians who played as we ate our dinner, and the slipping deck under our feet as we learned wild dances with young Turkish men. That old self? Or the old self of her wedding day, demure under a white veil, but swigging champagne with a devil-may-care look in her eye. Or the self with the quick glance, looking up through her hair one evening as I asked her—yes, I did—if she’d ever slept with Alexandre, and she’d said, “Claude, please. Trust me.”