by Frances Pye
Sean had been fairly sure that things between him and his wife were over before she left; after three months without her, he was completely convinced. He filed for divorce. A year later, once he had agreed to give Isobel their house in Battersea as well as a large lump sum and had accepted her lawyer’s insistence on joint custody, he was free.
The money meant nothing to Sean compared to his boys. And he ended up having Mark and Ben much more than the custody agreement said he should; Isobel wasn’t really all that interested in them. As they got slightly older, she wanted them more—they were good-looking boys, perfect accessories to set off her slowly fading looks, both trained to behave like perfect little gentlemen, to light cigarettes and open doors for her friends—but still they spent most of their time with Sean.
Until Isobel began to feel her age. And fell in love with Steve Jones. And ran away.
In hindsight, Sean could see that his attempt to take Isobel to court to get full custody of Mark and Ben might have been ill-advised. If he’d done nothing, maybe she wouldn’t have fled with her lover. Maybe he’d still have his sons. But he couldn’t have ignored her leaving them alone while she went out to a nightclub with Steve Jones. The boys had been by themselves for five hours. They had been only seven and five. Anything could have happened.
“They are safe, aren’t they?” Sean stared hard at Ball, desperate for any kind of reassurance.
“Of course they’re safe, sir.”
Sean grabbed his cigarettes and lighter from the coffee table, fumbled a Camel out of the box, and lit up. “But how can you know that?” Sean snapped out the words. “Come on, how can you know? If she left them alone once, why won’t she do it again?”
“Mr. Grainger, she wants to stay hidden.”
“So?”
“Wherever they are, they’ll have neighbors. And the fastest way to be found is to be reported to the social services. From everything you tell me, she’s not stupid. She’ll be aware of the danger.”
“Maybe. I hope you’re right.” Sean ground out his cigarette. He felt useless. But what could he do? When the boys had first disappeared, he’d taken to driving around aimlessly, praying for any sign of them, knowing that the odds were infinitesimal. That he had more chance of winning the lottery and the pools on the same day than of just happening to run across Ben or Mark or even Isobel. But doing something had made him feel a bit better. And still, wherever he was, he searched the faces of strangers, hoping that one of them would be his ex-wife or his boys. But they never were.
He’d even prayed, really prayed, in church, for the first time since he was a teenager and had decided that all that mumbo-jumbo wasn’t for him, not if it meant he couldn’t touch the girl next door’s generously tempting breasts. He’d lit candles, attended Mass, even gone to confession for the first time in thirty years. In his mind, he’d been making his own deal with God. If this is what you want, I’ll give it to you, no problem, if you just let me have my sons back. But God hadn’t delivered and here he was, eighteen months later, no closer to finding Ben and Mark than he had been when he started. He was fast losing hope. Hell, if he was honest with himself, he’d already done so months ago. A year and a half was a very long time to keep the faith without any new leads or clues.
Sean looked over at the detective, who was waiting patiently. “Do you think I’ll find them?”
“Well, Mr. Grainger, miracles do happen.”
“And so do alien abductions according to half the population. Don’t give me that bullshit. What are the odds? The real odds.”
“Normally, if people aren’t found within six months of their disappearance, we never locate them.”
“Six months?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So you’re saying it’s hopeless?”
“Not hopeless, sir. Extremely unlikely. Unless she wants to be found.”
“But you’ll go on looking? Ball?”
“It would be a waste of your money.”
“It’s mine, isn’t it? I earned it. I can do what I want with it.”
“I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can do, Mr. Grainger.”
“I need you, Ball. Please. I can’t just give up.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“I’ll hire another detective.”
“That’s up to you, Mr. Grainger.” Ball’s tone spoke more clearly than words; a sixth private detective wasn’t going to succeed where five and the police had already failed. “I’m very sorry, sir.”
“Very sorry. And how does that help me?”
Ball was silent. There was nothing he could say that would make this any easier.
Sean leaned forward, his head in his hands, and stared at the floor as if the nicks and notches and flat-headed nails in the old boards were the most fascinating things in the world. Finally, he looked up at the obviously uncomfortable detective and took pity on him. After all, it wasn’t his fault that Sean’s ex-wife had stolen his sons and run off with her lover.
“You can go, Ball.” He knew he should thank the man for his efforts but the words stuck in his throat. He got up and stalked across the room to a wide, uncurtained, floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the canal. He stared out, silent and unmoving, watching the detective’s glass-distorted reflection gather up papers and shuffle out of the loft.
He’d already missed a year and a half of his sons’ lives. When he’d last seen them, they’d been seven and five. Little, smiling boys, waving good-bye to their dad, thinking they’d see him in a few days. Now Mark was already nine and Ben would be seven in a few weeks’ time. Eighteen months was a long time in a child’s life. A very long time. They would have grown. And they would look different. Kids that age changed so fast. But he would know them even if they were completely different from the way he remembered them. The arms that had held them as babies, the hands that had soothed away their hurts, the heart that had loved them would know.
However, he could feel himself losing hold of them. He used to carry around pictures of them in his head, but now their little faces had blurred and he needed to look at photographs to remember them properly. Once, he had known all their likes and dislikes, their favorite toys, the clothes they loved or hated to wear, the books they wanted him to read to them over and over again. Even now, when shopping for food, he found himself rejecting things for their reasons: Not that orange juice, it’s got bits in it. Ugh! Broccoli! Daddy. Red cheese, not yellow. So much time had passed. Maybe now they loved broccoli and yellow cheese and fresh-squeezed orange juice. Maybe everything he thought he knew about them was wrong.
And what about Mark and Ben? What had Isobel told them? Did they think their father was away, or busy, or just uninterested? Did they believe that he’d abandoned them? Or were they waiting for him to call? God, he hoped not. In fact, he hoped that Isobel had done the kindest thing and told them that he was dead. At least that way they wouldn’t blame themselves. Losing your father was hard any way it happened but it had to be easier to deal with if you didn’t think he was out in the world somewhere, enjoying a life that didn’t involve you.
Sean felt resignation setting in. Ball was right. He’d done all he could. There wasn’t any point in continuing to go over ground he’d already covered ten, twenty, thirty times with five different detectives. Nor in hiring another. Unless Isobel changed her mind or some billion-to-one chance allowed him to run into them, his sons were out of his life. He’d lost them.
four
“Give me one.”
Lily stopped pacing for a moment, reached over Raymond the production manager’s shoulder, and grabbed at his pack of Marlboros. The tips of her fingers had just touched the red-and-white cardboard box before Raymond snatched it away from her. “What?” she snapped.
“You’ve done four days. It’s only cos you’re drinking.”
“I know. I know,” Lily groaned, “and once I’m outside, I’ll be fine. It’s automatic. Drink. Smoke. They go together. I can do first thing in the mornin
g, I can do after dinner, but I can’t cope with alcohol. Come on, Ray. Just one.” Lily’s voice was distinctive, her native Illinois accent tempered by the English inflections she’d picked up during her years in London.
“No.” His refusal was reiterated by the other people sitting at their table in the pub, Charlie and Nick, the producers on her surprise-hit TV sitcom, We Can Work It Out, about bored mothers trying to cope with fat thighs and families. Jerry, the improbably camp director. Anna, his long-suffering assistant. They were in the middle of making the second series and had been in rehearsal all day, getting the third of seven episodes ready to be taped in front of a live audience next Friday.
“Mean bastards. Then I’ll buy my own.”
Lily walked over to the bar. Why was she giving up anyway? She was fine, fit and healthy, not coughing in the morning, and although smoking was supposed to make you old before your time, she still looked all right. Maybe there were a few lines here and there, but those were to be expected; she was inching up on forty, for God’s sake. And the combination of thick blond hair, long, slim legs, and a gamine little face seemed to please men as much now as it had when she’d first arrived in England.
No, it was just propaganda. Her aunt had smoked thirty a day for forty years and she was still alive, happily puffing away. Besides, what would happen when Lily was writing? When she was sitting at the computer, struggling to invent a character or searching her brain for a gag about treadmills? Or even worse, waiting to go onstage and perform? Like next week when they taped the latest episode of the sitcom? She’d be reaching for the nicotine, that’s what. So what was the point of going through this agony now? She should wait until she had a nice, peaceful, empty six months and then give it a go.
The success of We Can Work It Out had taken Lily by surprise. She hadn’t intended to appear in it herself when she wrote it—she’d been delighted enough to have sold a whole seven-episode series after years of slogging away writing individual comedy sketches for different producers on a variety of shows. But then Charlie, Nick, and Jerry had had trouble making up their minds who to cast as the eccentric aerobics teacher at the gym. Lily had given them a reading to show them what she thought the character should sound and act like, and that had been it. They’d decided that no one else would do. The production company put up a fight to begin with—no one had ever heard of Lily—but they’d given in when Charlie, Nick, and Jerry put enough well-known actors in the other roles.
Even then, the show was one of many. Lily hadn’t expected it to become a big hit. She felt blessed enough to be doing what she had always dreamed about. But not only was it funny, it had also hit a nerve with the public, and the first series, broadcast at the beginning of the year, had been huge. Lily had gone from being an unknown writer to being the new face of British comedy.
She smiled as the barman came over to her. While they’d been making the series, the Marquis of Granby had become their local hangout. They’d be in most evenings, lunchtimes too if things were going badly. Close to the office, it was the last unreconstructed pub in Covent Garden. The rest had all been modernized and renamed after unlikely pairs of animals, or closed and reopened as restaurants or clubs. But the Marquis of Granby was as old-fashioned as its name. Dark, antediluvian floral carpeting worn around the edges, wood paneling, chipped ashtrays on the stained tables. Not somewhere Lily would have chosen perhaps, but Charlie and Nick, both expatriate Glaswegians, felt at home there. Said it reminded them of where they’d had their first, underage pint.
She ordered another round, bought her cigarettes, and carried them and the drinks triumphantly back to the small grimy table. To cries of “Lily, don’t,” she removed the cellophane on the pack, pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and drew in deeply. She leaned back on her stool and exhaled slowly.
“That’s better. Oh, fuck.” Lily reached into the neck of her shirt, put her hand down her arm, and came out with a nicotine patch. “Perhaps I should take this off first?”
AN HOUR and a half later, a sleek silver Mercedes made its way past the Hampstead tube station, up Holly Hill, and stopped outside a row of five tall, redbrick houses on the far side of a tiny square. The driver, a dark-haired, stiff-backed man, climbed out and strode around the car, toward the back door. Just as he got there, it opened and Lily clambered out. A chauffeur-driven car to take her anywhere she wanted to go was one of the benefits of her recent success. She was trying hard not to get used to it, aware that We Can Work It Out could lose popularity as quickly as it had gained it.
“Thanks, Kevin. Okay for tomorrow?”
“Of course, Miss James.” Lily had given up trying to persuade Kevin to call her by her first name. He was an old-fashioned sort and it seemed to offend his sense of what was correct.
“If you’re sure. I hate to take up your weekends.”
“It’s no problem, Miss James. I could do with the overtime.”
“See you about eleven, then.” The producer who’d bought her first comedy sketch was getting married. Weddings weren’t her favorite occasions—they tended to raise uncomfortable memories of her own failed marriage—but she was fond of Roger and she’d promised. So she would go to the service and then the reception. If it was a buffet, she’d have a quick drink, a quick congratulations with Roger and his bride, and make a quick escape. Hopefully, no one would notice. She had those two scenes to work on. Of course, if it was a sit-down meal, then she was trapped….
Lily strode over to a pair of wrought-iron gates, pulled one side open, and walked into the long, rhododendron-edged front garden and up the stone-paved pathway toward the bottle-green front door of her beautiful house. She’d bought it two years before but still felt a thrill when she came home to it.
After a messy divorce from her rat of a husband, Clive, she’d wanted a refuge for herself and the twins. Even though Jack and Bella were then sixteen and settled away at boarding school, they still needed a place they could be pleased to come back to and proud to bring their friends. The moment she’d seen the glorious, warm redbrick house in the center of trendy, expensive NW3, she’d had to have it. It had taken every penny she’d just inherited from her much-loved, much-missed mother that was not already set aside for the children’s education, but it was perfect. It was not just a house, it was a home. And it had the extra added bonus of upsetting Clive, who’d always longed for a place exactly like that, in exactly that location.
Lily and Clive had fallen in love when she was still a young, eager drama student at Northwestern. She’d taken a trip to the Edinburgh Festival the summer between her sophomore and junior years and she’d met Clive, a BBC producer who was in Scotland doing the rounds of the shows. She’d been knocked out, unable to resist his well-muscled, six-foot-two-inch frame, his black hair and dark blue eyes, his smiling, handsome face. And overwhelmed by his acerbic wit, his smoothness, what she saw as his European sophistication.
Three years later, she’d found herself looking after twin babies in a nice but soulless apartment in a new block of flats on the edges of Hampstead and bored out of her mind, particularly after the kids started school. Not for the first time she’d wondered what it was she’d seen in Clive that made her give up her life, her family, and her dreams of a Lucille Ball–like glittering career and run across the Atlantic to be with him. The husband she’d once imagined to be a man of style, with charm coming out of his ears and talent oozing from every fingertip, wanted by everyone but possessed by her, had turned out to be a small-minded, greedy, work-obsessed cynic incapable of loving anyone or anything very deeply. Apart from himself and his career.
But she’d stuck with him. She couldn’t bear to deprive the twins of their father just because he hadn’t lived up to her expectations. When she talked to her girlfriends Terry and Jules about their experiences with their men, by comparison Clive didn’t seem so bad. Yes, he was a disappointment, but maybe most of them were after the first flush of excitement. At least he didn’t hit her. Or drink. Or disappear and ne
ver return.
However, she’d been determined to do something more challenging than the laundry to fill the hours between taking the twins to school and picking them up. She’d always dreamed of being a comedienne, but doing stand-up wasn’t practical with the kids and she didn’t have the confidence or the experience to attempt to be an actress. But she could try to write. Unsure how to go about it, not even certain what form the writing should take, she took day classes at the local community college and read everything she could find that was supposed to be funny, from Catch-22 to the Marx Brothers, from Monty Python to National Lampoon. Finally, insecure and terrified, her head full of other people’s ideas, she sat down to write.
It had been impossible at first. Everything she tried was either not very amusing or sadly derivative. She had always, even as a child, been able to make people laugh, but capturing that ability and putting it on paper in some recognizable, sellable form was much more difficult than it seemed. She stopped and started, sometimes leaving the writing alone for months on end. She even came close to giving up once or twice, but encouraged and nagged by her girlfriends, she persevered. And then finally found her voice in observing and writing about the small things in a mother’s life, the sometimes black comedy inherent in the stresses and strains of working and shopping, of school runs and potty training, of rushed sex and teenage rudeness.
She got her first piece accepted, a bit in the local newspaper about the indignities of childbirth. Then, using contacts made during her years with Clive, she’d sold a sketch to a late-night TV show about a mother competing with her daughter for everything. And in that way, an inch at a time, she’d begun to build a name for herself as a writer. And to make a bit of money.
