Without Her

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  After they had gone, Alexandre said, “I had thought of it, of course, with the two of you staying with me, but not then, not like that, I mean, just because we were awake and talking and you were asleep.”

  “Oh,” I said again. “But you’d thought about it.”

  “Of course. It’s normal, no?” The way he said it, c’est normale, made me want to laugh.

  I remembered a conversation Hannah and I had, that first year we were at Cambridge, about sex and friendship. It was the beginning of the summer term. We’d been lying in long grass, at the edge of one of the Girton lawns, under a tree. We had our textbooks with us—mine Stubbs’s Charters, hers Gawain and the Green Knight—but it had been too hot to read, and our minds were elsewhere. Which do you think most important, sex or friendship? Her question to me. I said, oh, I should think sex, it’s such a driving force, don’t you think, it overrules everything else, it carries you away. And she said, oh, friendship. Because when you are old it is what is left. At the time, I was a virgin and so I presumed was she. All we knew about sex was from reading, and films. But when I did lose my virginity, later that summer, it was such an anticlimactic act that I wondered what D. H. Lawrence and all the others were talking about. I was on a bed with a boy I quite liked, who had suddenly, after a party in Emmanuel, taken me to his room and become very urgent about making love to me—passionately, as he put it, I want to make passionate love to you—and I’d thought, well, here goes, this is the moment then, and I can’t wait to tell Hannah in the morning. It was nothing like what I’d imagined, as I’d touched myself to orgasm under the boarding-school sheets. It hurt, and I bled, and he got apologetic, and then we had to scramble to get me out of his college because if we were discovered, we could both be sent down, and he didn’t know about me, but it would kill his parents.

  It’s normal, said Alexandre in his practical French way, of course I’d thought about it. And yet, when he had the opportunity, lovely brown Hannah with her long fair hair and her body fined and strengthened by all that walking about Italy, he’d turned it down.

  And then she’d left, and given him to me

  It was a few years later, when he’d moved to the sixième, a chambre de bonne on the rue du Dragon, just round the corner from the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He had given up the arts, and decided to become a lawyer, to everyone’s surprise. He was studying law at the Sorbonne. We were in our early twenties, a time when several of my college friends had already married and were pregnant; we all believed then that you could do this and still lead a bohemian life.

  I went to Paris to find him, in the end, having tried sex a couple more times with young men with floppy hair in London, and an American hippie who had showed up from California and called me his old lady. I bought a plane ticket this time, arrived at Orly, got on a bus. It’s all a very long time ago, but what strikes me now is how we draw the patterns in our life when we are young, and there they remain, to be ignored or acted upon—there is still that choice—but never quite to go away. I am still buying plane tickets to Paris, getting on buses and trains, going to see Alexandre. It seems to have been the most stable, as well as the most secret, aspect of my life.

  We hardly left his “maid’s room,” except to forage for food in the then fairly cheap neighborhood of Saint-Germain, where now there are expensive shoe shops and designer boutiques. We pleased each other enormously. We fitted. We knew what to do. Our bodies greeted each other with a kind of sober recognition. We were almost embarrassed by our pleasure in each other. Sex as a memory is as elusive as a dream you don’t write down because you think you will never forget it. But something of it, our early fire, our young shyness, lives on. The body has its own memory, its own agenda, quite apart from any common sense. Perhaps the only way to have lifelong sexual pleasure with a man, as I do with Alexandre, is to see him only once a year: it’s always the first time and, now, always the last.

  12.

  Hannah’s twins arrive in a large rented car driven by Piers, who has picked up his sister from the airport in Marignane. I hear the automatic gates grind open and the wheels crunch across gravel, and Phil’s voice, and their voices, raised; I look down from my window onto a cluster of heads and see: a family. This is what Hannah, my Hannah, has made. A husband and two adult children, their names as posh English as you can get, who are now about to make plans to find her, flush her out, and bring her back. I dread the conversations we will have, the stridency of the young knowing they are right. I wish that Hannah may have run off with a lover, hitchhiked across Europe, taken a plane to Patagonia, emigrated to Australia—I wish for her, seeing her family down there, only escape. Melissa is taking her father’s arm and apparently shouting at him, though I can’t hear what. Piers is getting suitcases out of the back. This is the scene that Hannah has made, in being absent. This is her fault. Her legacy.

  I go down to greet them, and am surprised when Melissa, who was only about seventeen the last time I saw her, comes to hug me hard and thank me for being here. Am I a stand-in for her mother? She is close to tears. This is what it is to have a daughter—someone who minds this fiercely that you are not there. Piers, who has Hannah’s straight fine hair, now growing around a bald patch like his father’s, is a tall, round-faced rosy man, wearing a denim shirt and dark trousers. Melissa has the same hair, but hers is up in a bun, rather severe, and she is wearing white linen pants and a blue top. With their blue eyes, their fairness, they are as English as could be, as English as Hannah and I tried hard not to appear when we were young.

  Melissa says, “Claudia, how wonderful of you to come and keep Daddy company. Oh, it’s been ages, hasn’t it? Too bad we had to wait for such a sad time, to meet.”

  I say, “Lovely to see you. Yes, I’m glad to be here.” What else can I say? Piers is handing a bottle wrapped in white paper to his father. “I thought we should all have something good to drink. Can’t hurt, anyway.” I spy a gold clamped top. Champagne, when their mother has gone missing? It was always—is—Hannah’s favorite drink.

  Melissa says it, “Should we be drinking champagne, when she’s—well, we don’t know where she is? Isn’t it rather heartless?” She holds out her glass, all the same, and we clink glasses, all four of us—am I standing in for Hannah, here?—and we drink, to her safe return.

  “Mum, wherever you are, come back to us,” Melissa says.

  “Come back to us,” Philip intones. We all stand there in the immaculate salon with the huge black screen of the TV emphasizing absence, and the sky outside, blue with a scattering of birds in the wind, a long way away. Do they think that a champagne toast will miraculously bring her back? I don’t know. I don’t know these people. But I know, or used to know, Hannah.

  As if reading my thought, Melissa turns to me, plumper in the face than her mother ever was, and with her straight hair more emphatically blonde. “Claudia, you’ve known her longer than any of us, nearly all your lives, haven’t you? What do you think, where do you think she might have gone?”

  I hold my champagne flute like someone at a wedding and look at Hannah’s daughter, who was a baby, then a schoolgirl, and who is now a woman in early middle age. She’s emptied out by the absence of her mother; she wants reassurance. Her father and brother won’t, can’t provide what she wants. So I try. A little carefully, I say, “You know, she used to do this sometimes when we were young—just vanish, without much or any of an explanation. She always came back. I think she may have had, all her life, a need to be absent.”

  Melissa says, “But she isn’t young now.” She sounds indignant: the old have no right to such foibles. “And you say she came back. But what if she’s in danger? What if she’s lost? What if she’s lost her memory, doesn’t know where she is?”

  I say, “I don’t think it happens as suddenly as that, losing one’s memory. When did you last see her?”

  “Oh, at Easter, I think. I took the kids over for the
day. Yeah, she seemed okay. A little vague, maybe. She was getting a little vague.”

  How scrupulous, how careful, this vetting of aging parents by their offspring. I’m glad that nobody is examining me like this for signs of senility.

  “Vague, how?”

  “Well, she seemed to have forgotten that we’d said we’d come for lunch. There wasn’t any. So we had to go out to the pub.”

  Ah, so Hannah has given up providing for these greedy creatures, has she? “Perhaps she didn’t feel like cooking. Or thought the pub would be a nice change.”

  Melissa looks severe. Mothers aren’t allowed to not feel like cooking, even now. “We had the kids with us. They more or less had to live off crisps for lunch. She had forgotten that we were coming.”

  Like Hannah, she has a way of looking at you while she’s speaking and then staring out into middle distance, as if something else has caught her attention.

  “Mel,” says Piers now, “it isn’t a crime. And it isn’t a sign of having lost her marbles. Come on. She was perfectly fine when we last talked, and it was only a few weeks ago.”

  Philip says, “She hasn’t lost her marbles. She isn’t getting senile. She was just supposed to get the train south last Wednesday, and she didn’t arrive. Come on, finish up your drinks, we should eat.” The champagne has lost its easy appeal. We are a distracted little group as we sit down at the table, perfectly laid, with tablecloth and napkins, and Marie-Laure’s soup, a soupe au pistou today, to be followed by beetroot salad and a fish terrine.

  All at once, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be a surrogate part of this family that has lost its director, its raison d’être. I feel sorry for them, but I don’t belong with them. I want to be with Hannah, wherever she is now. No, I want to be with Hannah in the past, before any of them, when we were alone together, before we had to grow up. Before we met Alexandre, even; in the innocence and wildness of our youth.

  I think of the note she left me, all those decades ago: Chère amie, forgive me … Surely Philip deserves similar consideration. Is there a note somewhere that he has not found? What would be an obvious place, their house in East Anglia, her study, her desk, his desk—it’s a house of desks—propped in the bathroom, written on a mirror, left behind a pot of flowers? No, notes are not part of this twenty-first century. A message, on his computer, on his phone, in a memory stick, perhaps? Was he too panicked to look?

  People go missing all over the world, and here in Europe, surprisingly, and whatever Alexandre says, tens of thousands of people, adults, manage to go missing every year. At a time when increasingly the whole continent is worrying about people appearing, out of the sea, out of unsafe boats, swimming ashore from other countries, desperately seeking sanctuary, nobody except perhaps the police is concentrating on people who disappear. The vast migrations from countries wrecked by war and hunger and violence of all sorts are beginning to enter Europe; appearing, not disappearing, is this year’s concern. Of the disappearances, the nameless numbers swallowed up by the Mediterranean, we hardly dare speak. Disappearance means tragedy; appearance in a new place, survival. Shouldn’t we all feel relieved at the ones who do reappear?

  One woman vanishing is not a big story. Perhaps nobody is even looking for Hannah. Perhaps nobody except her immediate family cares. I saw a photograph recently of an elderly woman sitting weeping on a rock on a shore in Greece, having been persuaded by her children to take the uncertain journey from Syria towards a new life in Europe. Was she simply wishing that she had stayed at home? The old do not migrate easily. Habits grow and settle throughout lifetimes. What could it be like to be old and leave everything, one’s house destroyed, one’s family on the run? She was someone’s mother, someone’s grandmother, she was once loved, and safe. Now, she was lost and far from home.

  Life will go on without Hannah. As if she had gone down beneath a wave, beneath a wrecked boat. It is what life does. It is in the nature of things, and people. It is our heartlessness.

  In the salon, Philip is talking to the police on the telephone. Or rather, the police seem to be talking to him.

  I hear him stumbling over a couple of phrases in his awkward schoolboy French. There are long silences, and he paces up and down. I look down on the balding top of his head, and come down the stairs. He gives me a look of annoyance, pulls a face, holds the telephone away from his ear. “Oui. Merci. OK. Merci. À bientôt. Oui.”

  “They don’t seem to get that it’s urgent. I don’t know what they are doing. Nothing, it seems, except stare at their screens and ask for things to be signed in triplicate.”

  “Perhaps they have too much to do.”

  “They say lots of people disappear. That’s hardly the point, though, is it? Is that what they say in murder investigations, lots of people get killed?”

  “If I can help?” I don’t say, my French is better than yours, and I’m not in such a state.

  “They just keep saying they are doing their best. And that they are desolé, monsieur. I ask you. D’you think we’d do better in England?”

  “Well, you might try in England. But if she got on the Eurostar, she’s more likely to be here.”

  “Not that I trust them to be any more efficient, but at least they might make more of an effort.” He huffs and puts the phone back, the landline that they keep here in case of emergencies. “They keep on about how many people are already missing in France. French people. People who have a right to be here. You’d think we weren’t part of Europe, the way they go on.”

  I think of the stories of men who go out to buy a pack of cigarettes and never come home. That happens often, at least in the stories. My husband said he was just going to the corner shop for cigarettes, and that was that. We never saw him again. But women? Do we do that? Do women like us, like Hannah, with comfortable homes, jobs, friends and in her case, children and grandchildren, just get up and go? And where would we go to? A hotel, an ashram, the center for some cult, to another country to start again in our sixties? Do we ever just want to go missing from our lives? Hannah, were you lacking some vital ingredient of life—sexual, spiritual, intellectual, something that you simply had to have before you die? Have you a secret lover, waiting for you in India, in Australia, in Japan? Have you joined some religious order? Are you locked up somewhere, captive, and we don’t know? Have you lost your reason, are you unable to find your way home?

  The swallows swoop around the house and the sky changes color outside. We will sit down to another meal together, all of us with our unanswerable questions. Philip with his misery, Melissa with her anger, Piers with his disdain; I, with my lifetime knowledge of their missing spouse and mother, unable to offer a theory, a reason, even a clue. I’ve been here twenty-four hours, and in this time we have received no new information about Hannah at all.

  Philip says, “Maybe I should just get in the car and go and look for her.”

  I can hear that he wants to be contradicted, that he wants us to stop him.

  Piers says, “Dad, that would just mean that we lose you too.”

  Melissa says, “Didn’t the police say anything?”

  Philip drums his fingers on the table, pushes his plate aside with its pâté and salad half-eaten. He looks harassed, as if the questions annoy him. “I’ve told you what they said.”

  “What about the house in England? Is anybody there? Might she have called, left a message?” My suggestion, as I hope to calm them all.

  Piers wants life to turn out right; to be explicable. He hates to be baffled. We can’t maintain this, I see: we are breaking up.

  “I listen to the messages every day. Twice a day. Nothing.”

  “Daddy, we can’t just sit here and wait.” It’s Melissa again, angry at her mother—for the missed lunch, the unfed grandchildren, or does it go much further back? She wants a solution too, and she wants her father to find it. To be active, reassuring, once
again a parent.

  Piers says, “What else can we do? We can’t rush around looking for her. We can put something out on the Internet, on Facebook, ask her to contact us, or anybody who sees her, to get in touch. That might work. Social media, really effective.”

  “Facebook,” says Philip with scorn. “Only children look at that, surely.”

  “Now, it’s only their parents,” says Piers, “Kids find it old-hat. They’re all into Twitter and all the rest. Instagram. But anyway, what does it matter what age the person is, if they have had a sighting of Hannah, or any contact with her? Someone, somewhere, is bound to have seen her.”

  “I suppose it’s worth a try.”

  Lunch is abandoned, apart from Melissa and me. We sit on at the table as if in protest. Philip goes off with his son, to plug in computers and start the search for Hannah in the endless looping maze that is the Web. It gives them something to do, that isn’t just waiting. I hear Piers ask, “Dad. Do you have her email password?” Presumably not.

  I say to Melissa, “Your parents seem to live very separate lives.” She looks alarmed, and I wish I had not said it. Here, she is a daughter, vulnerable, momentarily pushed back into the uncertainties of life. She needs to see her parents a certain way, and no longer can.

  We look at the debris of lunch, the stained plates and half-full glasses. Should we clear this away?

  “D’you want to walk outside a bit?” She wants to confide, or at least talk. I stack a few plates and carry them to the kitchen counter, leaving the table with its wine-stained glasses and bread crumbs. We go out between the heavy sliding glass doors on to the terrace, flagged with local stone, and down the garden to where Philip has planted fruit trees and olive trees, all of them now surrounded by iron spikes like trees in parks, to keep them safe from the wild boars from the mountain. The grass is dry underfoot, as he has not yet turned on the sprinklers, and the gardener has not been up from the village for days. We pause to feel the velvety but still hard flesh of apricots. The shadow of the mountain falls upon us. The water in the pool behind us is for the moment dark, with falling spirals of light.