The Vanished Child

by Sarah Smith

  Anna Fen’s evidence

  Reisden faced Mrs. Fen in her private sitting room, with the low soft sofas and the ruffled chintz. She had answered the door herself; it was Sunday afternoon and there were no servants. Anything can happen on Sunday afternoon, her expression said. She was wearing a soft grey dress, low-cut but simple. Anything can happen on a Sunday afternoon: A man can change his mind.

  “You will have a great deal of courage to do this,” he said.

  She looked at him over the edge of her wineglass. “What does it mean, Mr. Knight, when a man asks a woman to be brave?”

  “Jay’s body is gone,” he said, cutting her short. “Charlie Adair saw it this morning; this afternoon it is gone. This morning I had evidence that Jay was dead. This afternoon,” he said, changing tones, “the only evidence I have is yours.”

  It was a plea. She put her glass down. “You want me to say I was with him, don’t you? But I won’t. ”

  “I don’t want you to unless you are very brave.” This was nonsense, clichés that Reisden’s mentor in diplomacy, Graf Leo, had saved for women and other deficients. “You can see that justice is done. You can do it quite privately, through a letter; your name won’t be used.”

  “My name—” She picked up her wine and took a long drink. “Annie Fen sleeps with a lot of men. I get talked about, but I still get invited to the parties. I like parties. I like babysitting Charlie’s little Shakespeare Club. Jay was a servant. How many times have you slept with housemaids? When you were in prep school? For practice?” She put the glass down on the table by the window and stood looking down at it with her back to him. “Have you ever slept with a woman who slept with her butler or her chauffeur?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Have you?”

  He had not.

  He knew she would turn around eventually. When she did she had unbuttoned the low neck of her dress. She lifted one of her breasts out of the V of the dress, holding it in the cup of her hand with her thumb over the nipple.

  “This is what I have.” She moved across the room toward him and pressed herself against him, moving her hand from her breast across and around his chest. With her other hand she was unhooking, unbuttoning, easing herself out of her bodice. “He wasn’t special, Jay wasn’t, just another lover.” She brushed her lips against his. “Sit down with me here on the sofa. Wouldn’t it be a shame if Annie Fen couldn’t sleep with all the men she wanted? Let me show you what they’d miss.”

  When he was eighteen he would have simply thrown her over the nearest sofa and made her happy. Making love to a woman, Graf Leo had said, is the only way to make them stop talking. And allowing oneself to be manipulated disarms the opposition. Now he was twenty-seven and listened, and had his doubts, and was not so sure that he was wiser; he was certainly more frustrated, because she had aroused him effortlessly and instantly. But all he did was hold the woman and tell himself, You might as well turn homosexual or cut it off for all the good it does you. He held her, responding to her gently, until she stiffened in his aims with anger instead of desire and began to cry.

  “He never gave a d—n about me. Why should I do anything for him?”

  She walked around the room, the bodice of her dress held up, not fastened, but covering her breasts. Her hair was half down, and when she brushed it away from her face the bodice fell away from her left breast and she pushed it up again quickly, a gesture half resentful and half shy.

  “I’ll write a letter to the police.” She added quickly, “I’ll sign it. They don’t have to tell everyone in the world, do they?”

  “Write to Daugherty. He’s private; he won’t use it unless he needs to. Have it witnessed.”

  She sat down at a little table. “G-d, no witnesses, I won’t have the nerve unless I do it now.” There were pen and paper in the drawer. “I’ll do one with witnesses later.” She scribbled something, looked at it, balled it up, and tried again. He looked over her shoulder.

  I came to visit at the Knights’ house the evening William Knight was murdered. I was in the same room with Jay French. He was still there when the first shot was fired. He went downstairs to see what was going on. There were a lot of shots. I think he got shot. I never saw him again.

  Anna Fen

  PS—Jay and I were playing cards.

  She rummaged through the drawer. Her dress fell off her shoulder again; she hitched it up, but a little more slowly than before. “I never have stamps. And my maid reads all my mail before she takes it to the post office.”

  “I’ll take it to Daugherty if you like.”

  “Would you?” she asked as if she had just thought of it. “If I keep it in the house I—I’ll tear it up or something.”

  He put it in his billfold. She turned around on her chair. She was sitting and he standing, and her eyes were just about on the level of his groin. She looked up at him deliberately and then leveled her gaze again.

  “Did I do all right?” she asked.

  He took her hand and drew her up out of her chair, standing next to him; the bodice slipped down again, and this time she didn’t bother to pull it up. He knew exactly what was going to happen, and it did. They made love standing up, quick and rough, face to face, breath to breath. He knew how to give women pleasure, but that was out of his reach today; he had never performed more quickly, or worse, or more regretted the act during the act itself. When it was done she held her dress around her like a bath towel and shook her hair out of her face, looking out the window where the last of the sunset was fading.

  “I'm sorry,” he said. He had thought of Perdita during it and all it had got him was that Mrs. Fen was not she. It was simply dangerous to Perdita to think that way.

  “You don’t care about me any more than I do,” she said quietly.

  He didn’t know what to say to her. It was true.

  She sighed. “Maybe I’ll go back to San Francisco. I don’t know. Things might be different there.”

  He was sorry for her, which he did not want to be.

  “Sometimes they are,” he said.

  Perdita won’t tell

  It was evening. Perdita sat with her head in her hands, thinking, in the room from which Richard Knight had disappeared. She had closed the door, and the hot air smelled flat, like old paper from the files in the next room. It was almost dark; the square of window light by which she had oriented herself was deepening past grey, and the rest was blind no-color.

  “Pet?”

  Harry didn’t like her sitting in the dark but she couldn’t find the light switch; she opened the door for him. Click, and the room filled with dim orange distracting shadows. He had switched on the light. He closed the door on the corridor outside.

  “Sit down,” he said. “I'm going to tell you who that man is.”

  She sat down on the floor the way she had been before. “Sit down on a chair,” he said, “like a real person, can’t you?” He scraped a chair out of the shadows and pushed her down into it.

  Then he told her all the story, from Charlie’s seeing Reisden on the platform.

  “He’s an atheist, Pet, you know that kind of person. He was supposed to find out what happened to Richard. Instead he’s stolen Richard’s body. He was supposed to make my uncle hate

  Richard. You don’t see that happening too well, do you? And,” Harry’s voice softened, “he was supposed to leave you alone. Because I love you. Instead he’s making a play for you. It’s like he thinks he could take over Richard’s money, but we know who he is, he’s not even an American, he’s signed a paper saying he’s not Richard. I don’t know what he wants to get away with, and that scares me.”

  Harry’s voice went on and on like a buzzing in her ears and she sat with her hands in her lap and heard only phrases. “Maybe he thought it would be fun to ruin you for me. Maybe he thought Gilbert wouldn’t like that.” Gilbert wanted her here. “Dazzled you, but it was easy to dazzle you, wasn’t it? You heard what you wanted to hear, piano music, and—
”

  No. She crossed her arms over her breasts. She didn’t know whether she was being stubborn or scared.

  “If you want to be my woman, act like it,” Harry said, and the door opened and closed.