by Penny Feeny
Rachael threw a shocked glance at Dan who had his thumb in his mouth. ‘No of course not! Why would we think that?’
‘Quite. We wouldn’t want to alarm you. Perhaps we should speak to her next of kin.’
Rachael wasn’t feeling well disposed towards Bel. She didn’t even know whether she was in, beached on her bed in the attic playing the invalid card, or whether she’d gone out again to engage with undesirable youth. And what use would she be?
‘You mean my husband?’ she said. ‘Right, I’ll ring the office.’ But Reception told her Matt was in a conference, which meant his phone would be switched to silent. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said helplessly to the police. ‘I can’t get hold of him until he’s finished work.’
‘Will you ask him to contact us when he gets in?’
‘Yes of course… I suppose I could also try Julia’s mobile myself.’
‘The friends she was staying with have already done that, but they couldn’t get through. You may have more luck.’
‘She probably ran out of charge or something,’ said Rachael. ‘Though she’s quite an efficient person usually.’ She scrolled through her contact numbers under what felt like intense scrutiny. Her call went straight to answerphone.
2
The Alarm
Matt’s spirits rose as he approached his home. His spirits always rose at the prospect of his wife – not only at the sight of her lithe limbs, the feel of her silky hair, but at the scents she carried with her too. These ranged from the sharp pungency of garlic and rosemary to a pleasant wafting (like today) of vanilla sugar and hazelnut. It was as if she glided around in a personal fragrance factory. In a matter of weeks she had transformed the kitchen that he’d only ever known as a perfunctory fuelling stop.
When he was growing up, food was never foremost in anyone’s mind but his own. There was no pleasure in raiding fridge or pantry to be met with frozen pizzas and bland packs of yogurt. Pocket money went on chocolate bars and chips after school but, by God, he’d spent most of his adolescence hungry. Not now. Rachael’s shelves were full of unusual pickles and elaborate pies; there’d be gravadlax curing in the fridge, stock simmering on the stove. Most of these treats were labelled and spoken for, but to come home to view the feast and sample a few leftovers could put a gloss on the most frustrating of days.
He shrugged off his jacket as he mounted the steps to the front door. His stomach growled a little in anticipation. It came as a surprise to find Rachael’s demeanour didn’t match the vision of milk and honey he’d conjured up. She was in the sitting room, hovering in front of the six o’clock news as if expecting a fearful announcement. He dropped his briefcase beside the oak bureau his mother had left behind. The television screen was filled with a fleet of planes lined up on airport tarmac. He leaned his arm across Rachael’s shoulder and kissed her cheek. ‘Crazy isn’t it,’ he observed. ‘Half the world grounded in this day and age.’
‘They’re changing the guidelines,’ she said ‘They’re going to let the airlines fly after all. They’ve decided the ash isn’t as much of a threat as they thought.’
‘They’re losing too much money, that’s why.’ He patted her arm. ‘Is Danny in his room? I’ll go and find him. Can I smell custard?’
‘No, meringues. Listen, Matt…’
‘What?’
‘No, you go and change. I’ll tell you later.’
‘Rach, what is it?’
Her head swayed and she chewed her bottom lip. ‘The police were here, looking for you. I’m sorry, I was trying not to tell you till after you’d set yourself up with a drink. It’s about your mother.’
‘My mother!’ He nearly said: what’s he done this time? Julia had spent much of Matt’s youth rescuing his stepfather, Leo, from irate publicans, taxi drivers and – more than once – a police station. But she wasn’t married to Leo any more. ‘Why?’
‘She seems to have vanished.’
‘Vanished!’
‘Stop repeating everything I say, Matt.’
‘But you’re talking bollocks,’ he protested. ‘She’s on holiday in France.’
Rachael, much as he loved her, had a disconcerting ability to freeze into an ice maiden. One moment she’d be warm and luscious as a ripe melon and the next an invisible sheet would solidify between them and she’d cast him one of her noli me tangere looks. She did this now and his homecoming fantasy of a welcoming kiss and a delicious snack evaporated.
‘Don’t you realise this is serious? The police turned up HERE. They were waiting for me and Danny. I thought something had happened to YOU.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They’d been contacted by the French authorities because her hire car had been found abandoned. That’s true of lots of other cars too but mostly the drivers have been traced. And that’s the odd thing about Julia. She’s not at the Culshaws and her phone’s switched off.’
‘Have you rung the flat?’
‘I left a message on the answering machine. Even if the builders were there, I don’t suppose they’d know anything.’
‘She’s probably just lost in the travel chaos, people rerouting their journeys and trying to get on ferries and so on. What does Bel reckon?’
‘I haven’t told her yet.’
He’d been loosening his tie. His hand curled around the knot and tugged it. ‘Why ever not?’
‘Because she wouldn’t know what to do. You will.’
‘Will I?’ he wondered, touched by the trust placed in him, but as much at sea as the next person. They were interrupted by a skidding on the stairs and across the floor. Dan hurtled into the room and ambushed his father’s knees; Matt nearly lost his balance. ‘Hey, big boy, how goes it?’ He swept up the child until their faces were level and they rubbed noses. Dan giggled.
‘The police came here, Daddy!’
‘Yes, I heard.’
‘I think you should ring the Culshaws,’ said Rachael.
Peter and Dorothy Culshaw were long-standing family friends who’d recently restored an old farmhouse in the Dordogne and turned it into a B&B. This was the first year they had opened for business and Julia was an early visitor. It was as good a place to start as any. Reluctantly Matt set down his son, pulled out his phone and tapped on their number.
After a pause there came a long foreign trill. Another pause. Then: ‘Bonsoir. La Maison Verte.’
‘Dorothy? It’s Matthew Wentworth.’
‘Matt. Oh, goodness!’ Dorothy’s voice had never lost its breathy girlish pitch. She always looked the same too: like a gawky overgrown elf, with ears poking through flyaway hair she maintained at a shade between rhubarb and carrot. (Though Matt, being colour-blind, had to take this on trust.) ‘How is she?’
‘Bel? Oh, she’s recovering. But our concern now is my mother.’
‘I was talking about Julia,’ said Dorothy. ‘Is she not back yet?’
‘No. And you heard about the abandoned car?’
‘Yes… we didn’t know what to think.’
‘When did you last see her?’
‘Saturday. I mean, we expected her to stay until Wednesday but she just upped and left four days early. To be honest, her behaviour was a little odd while she was here. A little distrait. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly… But I do recognise that sense of anti-climax you get when your working life comes to an end and you don’t have the same status any more and you’re at a bit of a loss.’ Dorothy was known for her tendency to gush, to skirt around issues without ever getting to the point. Julia was the opposite. Matt was surprised to hear her described as ‘at a bit of a loss’.
‘Did she say something to you? Drop any hints?’
‘Not specifically. It was entirely her choice to leave so we didn’t want to make an issue of it.’ She paused, lurched onto a different track. ‘I hadn’t realised, Matt, that she’d given away her house!’
Matt looked around the large room with its assortment of artefacts from two quite different lifestyles: was this to become his
albatross? To Dorothy he said, ‘She was finding it too big, so we swapped. There’s nothing sinister in that.’
He wandered into the kitchen and took a beer from the fridge. Evening light slanted through the back door, open because Dan had run into the garden.
‘It wasn’t only us,’ Dorothy said. ‘Leo was bothered too.’
‘Leo? Why?’
‘Well he’s here and he thinks—’
‘Leo is with you?’
Rachael returned his surprised glance with a grimace. Matt knew she didn’t much care for his stepfather. When they’d first met, Leo had greeted Rachael with ‘All hail the domestic goddess!’ which she found patronising. Later, on their wedding day, he hadn’t improved his reputation by getting disgracefully drunk.
‘Yes,’ said Dorothy a little sheepishly. ‘We’re planning to run courses, you see, as added value for our guests. And painting’s one of the most popular. We had another artist lined up actually, but he got gallstones and had to drop out at very short notice. Leo has been such a dream, came for Easter and stepped into the last-minute breach…’
‘Did Julia know he was going to be there?’
Dorothy was defensive. ‘We’d been trying to persuade her to come out here for ages and we didn’t want her to change her plans. One never quite knows how to play these things and, I confess, we may have made a misjudgement on this occasion.’
The mystery was beginning to make more sense. Typical Dorothy, he thought. Soft-centred as a marshmallow. Probably trying to get them back together again. ‘So Leo’s the reason she left ahead of time?’
‘If you want to put it like that.’
How else could he put it? Rachael was peeling an onion, prising off the golden papery skin with her fingernails. He was tempted to lift her hair and kiss the hollow of her collarbone. Then the onion fell to her knife. He loved watching her chop and slice, the speed with which she flashed the blade through the white flesh. The house had been noisy when Julia and Leo lived in it, alight with recriminations. Now, in contrast, it was blissfully calm: the sizzle of oil in the frying pan, the murmur of music from the radio, and outside his son playing with his truck, the clatter of its wheels on the paving.
Dorothy was saying. ‘It’s true they had a slight disagreement, and you know he likes to be provocative: he made some reference to King Lear. But all Julia told us was that she wanted to go touring by herself for a bit. Explore more of France. Only…’
‘What?’
‘I’ve known Julia for twenty-five years, Matt. She’s always been so organised. And I think she’s behaving out of character. Like a cat.’
He snapped the top off his bottle of San Miguel. Through the doorway he saw a ginger tom squirm through a hole in the hedge. ‘A cat?’
‘Or any mammal,’ said Dorothy. ‘When they’re ill they crawl away, don’t they, craving solitude.’
Matt was confused. Bel was the person who’d been sick and his sister had never in her life craved solitude.
‘My mother’s ill?’ he said now. ‘With what?’
‘Nothing that she told us about, but goodness, Matt, she’s a doctor! She’d know, wouldn’t she?’
‘Know what?’
‘Well, if her blood count was down or something.’
‘You think she’s got leukaemia and is keeping it to herself?’
Rachael’s head jerked up; the onions were sweating gently, becoming soft and transparent.
‘I didn’t want to worry you,’ said Dorothy as firmly as her high girlish voice would allow. ‘Obviously one would expect a person to give their family important news – good or bad – before they’d let on to a friend. It’s just that, coupled with everything else…’
‘What else?’
‘I mean giving away her home and now this disappearing act. It makes you think, doesn’t it?’
Matt thought Dorothy was being decidedly fanciful. ‘Perhaps I ought to speak to Leo.’
‘Actually I’m not sure he’s here. He’s been a bit elusive.’
‘Him too?’
‘I think he only went down to the village. Do you want me to get him to call you?’
Matt sensed his shirt sticking to his back, even though the weather was no more than mild. He needed to rip off his clothes and stand under a pounding, purifying shower. ‘Yes, please. Urgently.’
3
The Visitor
When the phone blasted into her sleep Bel was dreaming she was back in Sudan, caught in a sudden storm: raindrops bursting like shot on her head and shoulders, making a terrifying rattle on corrugated roofs, driving the squealing shiny-faced children she was teaching to seek cover. Afterwards, with the earth fizzing yet dry as a bone, she wouldn’t have believed it had rained at all if her hair hadn’t been plastered, sopping wet, to her skull.
The clamour persisted, drilling into the effects of the Temazepam (hospital turned you into a pill popper, she’d found). Her hand floundered on the bedside table, seeking the off button. She pressed answer instead and nearly tumbled onto the floor.
‘Hiya, sweet.’
Bel righted herself, clutched the phone to her ear, adjusted her pillows. She shivered and wondered if she would ever be warm again. She recognised now that she was under the eaves, in the cool white attic. These rooms, opened up years before to create a studio space for her father, had been deemed her quarters. Her quarter. The rest of the property was Matt and Rachael’s.
‘Bel?’ said the voice, a touch impatiently.
‘Dad! I’ve been trying to get hold of you for ages.’
‘You have?’
‘Since last night, anyway. You didn’t pick up!’ Frustratingly, Leo wasn’t as attached to his phone as she was to hers. He could forget where he’d put it or forget to switch it on or, worse, ignore it altogether, claiming it sapped the creative impulse.
‘So how are you?’
She shifted position, trying to get comfortable. ‘How I am is not the point. Everybody here is in a total state about Mum.’
‘Ah… yes.’
Matt had stalked up and down, rumpling his hair, as he’d told her about the visit from the police. No cause to jump to conclusions, he’d said. Since half the continent was in travel chaos they didn’t yet need a manhunt. But an image of the abandoned car had hooked into Bel’s brain, though she tried to dismiss it. ‘Good grief! Aren’t you worried too?’
‘I’m sure Julia knows what she’s doing,’ said Leo.
Bel recognised his tone of withdrawal. ‘What’s been going on? Why did she leave the Culshaws’ early? Was it because she was pissed off to find you there too? Or was it something you said? You do goad her sometimes.’
‘You know Julia,’ said Leo. ‘That tendency to seethe below the surface.’
‘So you did have a row?’
‘Darling, she just blew up.’
‘Are you going to tell me what it was about?’
There was a long silence, then a snort. She imagined him putting the mobile down, staring at the screen for a few moments before picking it up again. He refused to conform to other people’s expectations. Another snort. Then a bark. ‘You.’
When Bel was growing up, her mother used to be exasperated by her knack of finding trouble (or rather, trouble finding her). Matt was pretty good about helping her get out of it, but her father’s sense of fun sometimes made it worse. One time, giggling together, he’d painted her all over with red spots so she could pretend to have measles and stay off school. Although Julia couldn’t have been taken in for a minute, she was furious. She’d exploded at Leo, castigated him for being so juvenile, for getting acrylic paint on Bel’s tunic, which would never come out, for turning a deadly disease into a joke. ‘Lighten up, woman, for God’s sake,’ Leo had shouted. And then he’d slammed out of the house and Bel had to endure having the spots rubbed crossly from her skin.
When she’d arrived back from Sudan to find her room occupied, she’d carted her possessions to her father’s flat and settled there to lo
ok for work. As a freelance graphic designer most of her contacts were in London and they needed to be reminded she was available again. Except she wasn’t, because within days she’d collapsed with a high temperature. Leo had sent her home to Liverpool, to her mother. Real illness was alien to him and he preferred not to deal with it.
‘Me!’ she exclaimed now. ‘This is my fault?’
‘I was keeping out of her way,’ said Leo. ‘I mean, why wouldn’t I? I had a job to do. I’d been busy over Easter. But Julia let rip. She certainly knows how to lay into a person when she thinks they haven’t done their duty. She accused me of not caring for you properly, claimed you cramped my style so I stuck you on the train and left her to pick up the pieces.’
‘But, Dad, that’s what you did.’
‘Because I thought it was the best course of action! I wasn’t in a position to look after you and she was. I mean, Christ, malaria. What a fucking wild card that was. Why didn’t you take the fucking tablets?’
‘I did but they had these horrible side effects, remember? I was hallucinating and everything. I didn’t have any choice. I had to change to another sort.’
It had been a sly undercover assault, the mosquito bite – literally, for she had used a mosquito net. There was no single occasion to which she could pinpoint the infection. She’d been told, too often in her view, how lucky she was to be treated in England; how lucky she wasn’t holed up in some base camp clinic on the edge of the desert. Well that was true, and she was grateful. But what people didn’t realise was that being ill stank. Being ill was a complete, utter, unbearable, depressing, grinding pain in the arse. It knocked the spontaneity as well as the stuffing out of you.
‘Anyway, we’ve been through all that. Have I got this right? You’re saying it’s because of me that you and Mum fell out?’
Leo grunted.
‘And she left the Culshaws’ to get away from you? And it’s because she’s pissed off in general that she’s ignoring our calls? You don’t think she’s had her phone robbed or there’s anything suspicious going on?’
‘I doubt it very much,’ said Leo. ‘I’d let her go her own sweet way.’
