And then she curses herself, because it goes against all her feminist principles – requiring her daughter, her clever, Cambridge-educated daughter, to wipe her wrinkly old bottom and bring her meals and audio books, probably while juggling toddlers and some pathetic attempt at a career. Her own career hadn’t recovered from having the children, those three days a week at the GP surgery feeling like time-filling in between bouts of household management.
Feminism, she thinks, has a long way to go before men take on the detritus of family life – not the spectacular bread and butter pudding, brought out to ‘oohs and aahs’ (which always has the whiff of ‘Man makes pudding! Round of applause!’), but ordering bin liners and making sure there are enough light bulbs. When the children were little, Miriam felt as if she were being buried under sand drifts from the Sahara: music lessons, homework folders, kids’ parties, thank-you notes, fresh fruit and meter readings. It silted up the corners of her mind until there was no space for anything else. Ian sidestepped it with strategic incompetence so that his mind remained free to focus on Important Things (such as work, or reading an interesting book). It was one of the biggest shocks of adult life – the injustice – and no one had warned her about it, certainly not her mother, who felt it was only right and proper that Miriam take on the more organisational tasks in life because she was ‘so good at them’. She’d better not think about it now, or she’ll get too angry.
She lifts the Le Creuset onto the white ceramic draining board, wondering why people rave about the things when they are almost un-lift-able and scratch everything they touch. Ian hasn’t made it home for lunch so she’s eaten the stew by herself, then struggling to lift the damn heavy pot in order to pour the remains into a Tupperware box and struggling also not to feel hard done by. She’s alone so much these days, in part because when the sand drifts receded, along with the departure of the children, they left an excess of time, while Ian’s existence maintained its steady course, which was essentially Rushing About Being Important. She has to fight, very often, not to take umbrage at the separations and also its converse, to retain some sense of herself in their togetherness. Wasn’t every marriage a negotiation about proximity?
The temptation she feels during periods when he’s very busy and she’s left alone a lot is to become defiantly independent, but then it’s hard to let him back in. She has to make herself de-frost in order to come back together. She wonders how far Edith has travelled on this rather arduous journey or whether she has even embarked on it with Will Carter. When you are in your twenties, the problem of dependence and independence can be swiftly resolved by ditching your boyfriend, and she has a feeling Edith might be on that brink.
She squeezes out a cloth and wipes the kitchen surface in slow, pensive swirls. It is a slog, marriage. How could she tell her daughter that without making it sound worse than it is? Built on hard work and tolerance, not some idea of perfection as Edith might have it. Miriam has had the thought in the past that Will Carter’s handsomeness is an emblem of Edith’s belief in perfection – or at least her belief in appearance. She hasn’t realised yet that looks count for nothing, that how things appear are nothing next to how they feel.
If she were here now, Edith would no doubt spout forth – rather self-righteously – on all the shortcomings that she, herself, would never put up with in a marriage, as if there were some gold standard from which she could not fall. She gets that from Ian, of course. Well, life isn’t like that. It is full of compromises you never thought you’d make when you were young. Marriage is good – that’s what she should say to Edith: that you get to an age when your attachments are so solidly stacked around you, like the bookshelves that reach to the ceiling in the lounge, and they are so built into the fabric of your life that compromise seems nothing next to their dismantling. Yes, she thinks, running the cloth under the tap and enjoying the warmth of the water through the rubber gloves, with age comes the recognition that one is grateful for love.
Looking out again to the garden and squeezing the cloth, she thinks back to their evening at the theatre last night; all their clever friends who loved to talk about books and philosophy. She’d wondered if they had more money and more sex (they couldn’t possibly have less sex) and better second homes or whether they were, perhaps, (well, one shouldn’t hope for these things) secretly miserable and having affairs.
‘Are we all here?’ Ian said, on the snowy pavement outside the Almeida theatre. ‘Ready to set off?’ Miriam looked at him, her handsome husband with his impeccable scarf in a cashmere double-loop. He was commanding – well, that’s Ian of course – but also vaguely distracted. Work, probably – it so often took over his mind. That was the cost of being married to The Great Surgeon and she noticed, then and there, a swell of pride.
They set off towards Le Palmier restaurant, talking and laughing, arms looped in arms. Miriam walked by herself, though she was at the centre of the group. She’d been crying – Lear always made her cry – and her body had a rather pleasurable spent feeling of release, while her stomach growled in hot anticipation of dinner. Someone took her arm – it was Patty, pressing her body close to Miriam’s. She got a blast of Patty’s perfume – Diorissima – even over the cold.
‘I thought that was just wonderful, didn’t you?’ said Patty.
‘Completely wonderful. I feel wrung out, in a good way,’ said Miriam. Thought Gloucester was a bit shouty though.’
‘Yes, quite. Why can’t they just say their lines? There’s a sort of Shakespearean delivery, which is so irritating. Ah, here we are. I’m starving.’
They handed their coats to the maître d’, who bowed slightly while draping them over his arm and then hung them in a wardrobe. Their table was broad and round and the spotlights twinkled off the glasses and highlighted bright circles on the starchy white tablecloth. Miriam felt happy with her very cold glass of something dry and Argentinian (Ian being the wine expert). She watched him across the table, feeling in his breast pocket and taking out a pair of reading glasses with leopard-print frames – a pair she’d bought for £4.99 at Ritz Pharmacy on Heath Street. He put them on the end of his nose in order to read the menu, while Roger talked away at him and Ian laughed at something Rog was saying. The glasses were small and feminine on his patrician face.
‘Darling,’ she said to him, reaching an arm across the table, but with her head turned to Patty, who was talking about the play.
‘Oh yes, sorry,’ he said and took off the glasses to pass them to her so she could read her menu. ‘Come on, everyone, are we ready to order? Nothing will come of nothing, after all.’
And everyone laughed.
Xanthie told the table she’d been re-reading Boccaccio’s Decameron. ‘It’s so witty! I mean, really, I’ve been laughing out loud on the bus.’ And the way she said ‘bus’ was like some glorious egalitarian experiment. Their laughter around the table had the tinkle of money in it.
Now Miriam is peeling off her rubber gloves as her thoughts return to her daughter, as if to a favourite refrain – her beloved topic. Yes, she hopes for more for her daughter than the things she anticipates for her. Now she frowns. It doesn’t make any sense. She wants Edith to fulfil her daughterly duties (thoughtful Christmas presents, regular phone calls, eventually home-cooked meals when Miriam’s in her dotage) yet at the same time she wants to liberate her; she wants for her total professional freedom and a truly feminist husband who empties the dishwasher without being asked. And mingled in, she wants her daughter to share in her suffering, the same sacrifices, and she doesn’t know why. Is it a hunger for fellow feeling or a fear that Edith might succeed where she failed? That Edith might actually throw off the shackles when Miriam … well, she’s spent thirty years effectively wiping the kitchen surfaces and doling out antibiotics for cystitis. It’s so complicated.
She reaches into the cupboard under the sink for a dishwasher tablet, thinking about her beautiful daughter who is still young, who has a flat belly and tight little arms, who
can still carry off a bikini, who has yet to fall in love, and she feels pricked with envy. Oh, Will Carter is all right, but he’s a bit up himself and she suspects he isn’t The One. Edith still has that ahead of her – all the pleasure and pain of it. Lucky thing. The older you get, the less choppy life becomes. But Miriam misses it too – the lurching outer edges of feeling that accompany youth. Nothing is exciting any more, though to listen to Xanthie, you’d think reading Boccaccio’s Decameron on the bus was euphoric. Perhaps it is only Miriam for whom life has become duller and sadder, like the silver hair on her head.
‘Where’ve you been? I woke up and you weren’t here,’ she says, smiling at Ian who is coming through the kitchen doorway carrying an orange Sainsbury’s bag and bringing the cold in with him. He is wearing his polo-neck sweater and tracksuit bottoms. He has that curious inability that the upper classes have to wear casual clothes convincingly. She wonders if he emerged from his mother’s vagina in a sports jacket.
He comes over to her at the kitchen counter, kisses her cheek and she smells the winter on him. ‘Got up early and went to the office – I’ve got a ton of paperwork hanging over me.’
‘Poor you,’ she says. ‘Shall I warm you up some stew?’
‘No, no. I’m fine.’
‘I can microwave it; it’s no trouble.’
‘No, I had a sandwich. Edie call yet?’
‘Not yet, no.’
‘Tell you what, let’s light a fire. It’s freezing outside.’
‘Good idea, that’d be lovely,’ she says, and the house feels complete again with him in it. His smell, his bigness, his company. Married love has been a revelation to Miriam – not the lurching outer edges of feeling, no, but the sheer depth and texture of it. All her memories – thirty years of them, especially the really vital ones, like having the children – involve him. And loving the children. He is the only person on earth who can talk about the children with the same exhaustive gusto that she does, as if they are both examining Rollo and Edith at 360 degrees. And she is wrong to be quite so consumed by feminist rage. It’s not as if he does nothing: the cup of tea, for example, he brings her in bed each morning; his final checks on the house at night (doors locked, lights off); the way he’ll run upstairs to find her slippers when she sighs exhaustedly and says, ‘Darling, would you …?’ These are small, repetitive acts of love.
They spend the afternoon in a Sunday-ish homely fug, the log fire spitting and then dying down in the lounge. It brings back the smoked, countrified scent of Deeping, where they will spend New Year. (Must buy light bulbs for Deeping, she makes a mental note to herself.) Miriam could watch those flames for hours until her face is cooked and her eyes dried out. Ian is in and out of his study, some Mozart piano concertos drifting through the house from his iPod dock. She potters about too, tidying up mostly, putting some washing on or reading the ‘Review’ section of the newspaper.
In the evening the doorbell goes and Miriam opens it to the florist delivering 300 stems of scented narcissi and the fresh holly wreath for her front door. This and her mulled wine spice, and the clove oranges she makes will fill the house with festive perfume. Just as she is closing the door against the night, the phone rings and she answers it, still holding the narcissi like an opera singer at her curtain call.
‘Calm down, Will … No, she’s not here … Since when?’ she says, as Ian joins her in the hallway, slightly stooped and craning to hear. ‘So you’ve just got home?’
‘What’s he—’ says Ian but Miriam frowns at him to shush.
‘Well, she’s probably out at a friend’s or gone to Deeping,’ she says into the phone while looking into Ian’s eyes.
Miriam listens, placing the flowers onto the hallway table, then she cups her hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. ‘He says he found the door open and the lights on. She’s left everything in the house – her keys, her phone, her shoes. Her car’s outside. Even her coat’s there.’
Ian nudges her aside to take the phone off her. ‘Will? It’s Ian. When did you last speak to her? Have you called Helena?’
She watches him frowning at the hall table, listening. Then he says, ‘Right, call the police. Straight away, Will. Tell them what you’ve told us. Then call us straight back.’ He puts the receiver down.
‘No,’ says Miriam, looking into Ian’s eyes and shaking her head, her hand clamped over her mouth. ‘No, no, no, no.’
Manon
Manon cries some more. It is the way Bryony listens, as if she has an arm around her, that makes Manon’s barriers dissolve.
‘Was he awful, then?’ asks Bryony. ‘As bad as the last one?’
‘No, that’s the thing, Bri, he was all right, but that’s the worst feeling, that it was just all right, nothing special. Just nothingy, like I can’t ever rise to the occasion.’
‘Maybe you need to give it more of a go. Nothing’s perfect, you know.’
‘He wanted me to pay more for the meal because I had wine.’
Bryony is silent.
‘He didn’t ask me anything about myself.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s just men, I’d say.’
Manon presses her fingers into her eyes. This is what she doesn’t want Bryony to say. People in couples, they always want you to settle for anything, as if you are a second-class citizen. Just because you’re lonely, you have to make do with the scrap ends.
‘You want me to make do with the scrap ends.’
‘We’re all making do with the scrap ends, Manon,’ says Bryony. ‘This is something you fail to grasp.’
‘The sex was quite good, unexpectedly,’ says Manon.
‘You what?’
‘Well, I thought it’d be rude not to.’
‘Don’t make a joke of it.’
Manon doesn’t reply.
‘You don’t need to do that, y’know,’ says Bryony, her voice full of disappointment.
‘No, I know.’
‘When’s the next one?’
‘Next week. Not sure I can stand it.’
‘Treat it like a job. It’s a game of numbers. Your lucky one will come up eventually. Only don’t shag them. Not all of them, anyway.’
Manon can’t stand to talk about it any more. ‘How are the kids?’ she says. ‘How was your Sunday?’
‘Freezing playground, 8 a.m. Started to sleet but we stayed there anyway. Me and Peter had a row. Lunch at 11 a.m. Bobby threw a cup of milk down me, then shat in his pants. The usual.’
‘Relaxing.’
‘I can’t wait to go to work tomorrow, just to have a sit-down. Canteen lunch? Whaddya say? I’ll buy you a watery soup to cheer you up. Or are you frontline officers too important?’
A familiar prod, beneath which is Bryony’s peevishness over all the excitement she thinks she’s missing out on. She’s an officer at Cambridgeshire too, but mostly desk-bound since the children – filing court papers or on disclosure.
‘My diary is remarkably free at the moment,’ Manon says. ‘Never know what the day’ll throw at me though. So yes, great. In theory. One-ish?’
‘Don’t know if I can hold out that long. I’m on toddler time. And Manon?’
‘Yes?’
‘You’ll be all right, you know. You’ll find him – the right man. I just know you will.’
Manon puts the phone down and shuffles under the duvet. She turns the dial on the radio, hears the reassuring murmuring which blends into the fuzz before sleep, when all her darkest ideas bubble up. ‘Victor Bravo, one-two, VB quite concerned by what we’ve got here. Can I have a supervisor please and can you notify on-call SIO.’
Manon opens her eyes and sits up. She knows what the gaps mean, what Oscar One in the control room is getting at, without being able to state it over the airwaves. Something serious. The balloon’s gone up. Senior Investigating Officer? That’s jumpy. Others will be hearing it too and start heading that way, but George Street is around the corner from her – five minutes if she jogs it. She hears DI Harriet Harper’s voice ove
r the radio, saying she’s on her way.
Manon can get this, it’s hers. She flings back the duvet, listening intently to the radio while she pulls on trousers with one hand, reaching for her phone with the other.
‘Missing female,’ says Harriet on the phone. ‘Signs of a struggle. Meet me there.’
The cold cuts into the short gap between Manon’s scarf and her hat, but the place it hurts most is her toes. Bloody Chelsea boots. She might as well have worn flip-flops, and she’ll likely be out in the cold all night, at best in a stationary car with a phone pressed to her ear. She digs her hands deeper into her pockets and hunches her shoulders up to her ears, hearing the clean squeak of her boots in the fresh powder. The trees hold lines of snow like sleeves on every branch. The snow has made a rather unprepossessing urban street (one of the routes out of town and close to the railway line) prettier than it is. As she turns up the garden path to number 20 – a neat little worker’s cottage, identical to its neighbours – she uses a gloved hand to free her mouth of scarf, but Davy speaks first.
‘High-risk misper; looks like it, anyway,’ he says, stamping in the snow. He claps his hands. The tip of his nose is glowing red.
‘Any sign of forced entry?’ says Manon.
‘Door was open, but not forced. There’s some blood, hallway and kitchen, not that much of it, to be fair, and the coats on the floor,’ says Davy. ‘Where’s your paper suit?’
‘Where’s your scene log?’ she says, looking past him into the house.
‘Shit, you got me,’ he says, smiling, and she is reminded how good it is to be around DC Davy Walker. His simple affable kindliness. If all men were like Davy, there would be no wars.
Missing, Presumed Page 2
