Diary of an Ordinary Woman

by Margaret Forster

  27 July

  Daphne turned up. She still has a key so there was nothing I could do to stop her barging in and finding me lying prone in bed. She flopped down on my bed not seeming to realise that the slightest thing causes me pain. You poor old love, she said, and asked if I wanted a cigarette, though she knows I haven’t smoked for years. But when she’d finished telling me about the furnishing of her new flat she did ask if there was anything she could do and I got her to go and buy some provisions, otherwise I’ll starve. She bought all the wrong things, taking no notice of my list, but it doesn’t matter, it’s food, it will do. And she did kindly buy some extra things she thought I should have, such as whisky and wine. The awful thing is that a slug of whisky does help. Maybe I will end up an alcoholic. What a pair we are, she said before she left, all alone in the world and no one to nurse us. I resented that, but said nothing. I am not all alone. But I don’t want the twins to have to look after me, ever. I won’t allow it. Fine words, but I mean them.

  31 July

  Postcard from Connie. She’s having a lovely time. Nothing from Toby. Managed to get out into the garden today, with great difficulty, but I made it and lay there, in the sun. It felt better than lying inside in bed. I lay and looked at the sky, blue all day, with tiny fluffy clouds scuttering across it, and thought how I do have time to stand and stare in this life so full of care. Well, lie and stare. My life isn’t full of care either. What is it full of? Housework. Shopping. A little teaching in term time. A pleasant enough life. If it ended, would it matter? It would, for the twins. Not a morbid train of thought, however it sounds. I’m not thinking about dying. I’m thinking, in all this enforced leisure, of the future, funnily enough, of when the twins won’t need me. I suddenly realised I ought to prepare myself and work out what I am going to do or else I will end up truly pathetic. Rightly or wrongly, I gave up my career when Tilda was killed and didn’t go back to it when I could have done. In four years’ time, when the twins reach 18 and go to college, I must do more than teach part-time. My brain hasn’t quite rotted away. I think for a long time I’ve been deluding myself that I’m quite happy, and also there has been a touch of martyrdom, making care of the twins the excuse to avoid facing up to the fact that I am going to have to motivate myself and find more meaningful work. Yet I doubt if I could return to being a social worker, and I don’t want to teach full-time.

  *

  Millicent is fully recovered and mobile by the middle of August, and able to go to the Festival of Britain on the South Bank. The preparations for it had fascinated her in the spring – just seeing all the rubble left after the wartime bombing cleared away cheered her – and she thoroughly approves of the whole idea of this celebration, copying into her diary the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury that ‘the chief and governing purpose of the Festival is to declare our belief and trust in the British way of life, not with any boastful self-confidence nor with any aggressive self-advertisement, but with sober and humble trust that by holding fast to that which is good and rejecting from our midst that which is evil we may continue to be a nation at unity in itself and of service to the world’. Millicent comments ‘My sentiments entirely.’ The Skylon impresses her, and she enjoys looking round the various pavilions, going twice, once on her own and once with Connie.

  Over the next few years, 1951–5, the twins grow more and more independent and provide much entertainment, though Connie causes Millicent some anxiety by staying out late on Saturday nights, secretly smoking and indulging in other mild forms of teenage rebellion. Toby is not so close to Millicent now, though his interest in current affairs makes Millicent once more try harder to pay attention to what is happening in the world in order to be able to talk with him. Harry returns from Korea in early August 1953 and visits them. Millicent is shocked by his appearance – he is gaunt and thin – and inevitably she suffers again for a while from nightmares about Robert. Toby is disappointed because Harry won’t talk about what happened to him, and Millicent hopes this will teach him that war is too terrible to describe.

  She shares Toby’s excitement when Everest is conquered by Hillary and Tensing (though curiously there is no mention whatsoever in the diary of either George VI’s death or of the coronation of Elizabeth II), and again when, in 1954, Roger Bannister runs a four-minute mile. She is anxious that the twins should both go to university and delighted when they both do very well in their O-levels. Toby gets five distinctions, passing ten subjects altogether, and Connie, who passes nine (but fails Latin) gets two. Just as, in 1955, both of them are preparing to go to university (Toby to Cambridge, Connie to Manchester) Millicent’s settled routine is disturbed by a family crisis.

  In 1952, Grace marries Will Baron, a fabric designer, in a quiet ceremony with Millicent as witness. A son, Sam, is born early in 1955. Grace and Millicent seem to see a good deal of each other, meeting regularly for lunch, and it gives Millicent real satisfaction to see how happy her sister is at last. Millicent likes Will, whom she considers ideal for Grace because he is so serious and dependable and quite a bit older than her. She thinks she need never again worry about Grace, and there are several entries on the lines of ‘all’s well that ends well’. Whatever happened to her sister during the war has long since been accepted as something she will never know. But then, just before the end of the school holidays in 1955, she gets a phone call from her brother-in-law Will.

  28 August 1955

  GRACE HAS DISAPPEARED. Will, when he telephoned, obviously expected to find her here, but I have not seen her since we all had lunch two weeks ago on Sunday and I haven’t spoken to her since last Thursday. It is most peculiar. She has left Sam behind. Claudia is on holiday with a schoolfriend’s family. She has simply vanished, leaving no note or any kind of message. She left the house to go to work at 9.30 a.m. as normal. Will came over soon after he’d called and I tried to calm him down. He says Grace has not been herself for some weeks, she’s been having nightmares and waking up screaming. He’s tried to get her to go to the doctor’s but she has refused, telling him these bad dreams happen from time to time and she gets over them. He asked if I knew about them. I had to say I did, and told him about Grace coming back from France and the state she was in then. I’d always assumed she’d told him about whatever happened there, but it seems he is no wiser than I am. You would have thought she would confide in her husband. She must surely have had to explain the existence of Claudia. I asked him if he hadn’t been curious about Claudia and he said no, not really, he’d just accepted that she belonged to Grace’s past and if Grace didn’t want to talk about it, that was her affair. He loves Claudia, he says, and adopted her officially soon after he and Grace married. He seemed frightened, I thought, more frightened than Grace’s absence yet warrants – she’s only been missing twenty-four hours and there may well be some simple explanation. She would never desert her children. I tried to comfort him by assuring him of this, but he wouldn’t accept that there was no need for alarm. I kept wondering, and still do wonder, if he has told me everything. When I asked what she had taken with her, he said that, so far as he knew, hardly anything: all her clothes seem to be in the wardrobes and no suitcase is missing. He hasn’t even thought to look for her passport and, as for money, he doesn’t know how much cash she might have.

  But my mention of her passport had him rushing back to look. He sounded relieved when he phoned later to say that it was still there, in the drawer in his desk where he keeps it. He has also rung all the hospitals in North London and there is no record of any admission of a woman answering to her description, and the police have no record of an accident. He has given her car number to the police, but I don’t know if that means they will make a search. He asked for George’s number, which I gave him, though quite sure she wouldn’t have gone there, and I promised faithfully to ring him if Grace contacted me, whatever time of night. I told him I was absolutely sure Grace would have done nothing foolish. I told him simply to await events.

  29 Aug
ust

  Still no news of Grace. Now I am beginning to worry. Will says Sam is crying for her and the nanny is finding him difficult to comfort. How lucky they have Eileen at all, and that she is so devoted to Sam. Went over to Will’s today, though there is nothing I could do. He asked me to look around the house for anything that might explain Grace’s absence. It felt embarrassing somehow, especially going into their bedroom, which I did not really want to do, and also into their bathroom, but Will insisted. Neither room revealed a thing. I looked at her clothes, such lovely clothes, and as Will had said they all seemed to be there, or at least all the garments I’ve ever seen her in. They are all so tidily arranged, each dress on a padded, scented hanger, the sort Mother used to make for sales of work, and everything arranged according to colour. She loves green, so many shades of green from the palest moss to a strident lime. On her bedside table she has a photograph of Mother, just a tiny snapshot in a silver frame, and another of the children, taken soon after Sam’s birth. There is a book, too, a novel, Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan. There is a bookmark in it, half-way through. Is that significant? Tempting to wonder, but I didn’t say anything to Will, who was following me around dementedly. The bathroom cabinet was full of her toiletries, talcum powder and scent and other things, all expensive and prettily packaged. I wonder where she manages to get them. There were aspirins, and veganin tablets, but otherwise no drugs or medication. Then I went to her little workroom, right at the top of the house, thankful that Eileen was calling for Will to take a phone call and he didn’t immediately follow me. I felt Grace more in that room than anywhere in the house, simply, I suppose, because it is a room entirely hers. She has her electric sewing machine set up on a small table in front of the window and a wicker basket beside it full of reels of coloured threads. Another table, at right angles to the sewing table, is obviously used for cutting out patterns. There is a pattern laid out on it, a Vogue pattern for a dress. It is pinned onto the material, a length of rich, ruby red wool. On the walls are black and white photographs of models in various poses. I peered at them, and saw that they are signed to Grace, from the models I presume. They must be modelling dresses she has made. I was about to leave when I noticed a drawer in the sewing-table. I felt uncomfortable to be opening it, though I recalled, in a curious flashback, how I’d never had any scruples prying into Tilda’s things. I opened it, expecting to find pins and suchlike. It was full of letters. They were airmails, all addressed to Grace at her old pre-war address, which had been crossed out and the Blockley address put on in a different hand. I hesitated. I looked at the date of the first – the letters appeared to be neatly placed in order – and the last. The first was dated June 1946, the last March 1950. I could hear Will coming up the stairs, so I closed the drawer, but not without secreting that last letter in my pocket. I met him on the stairs, telling him everything looked perfectly normal.

  We went down to the kitchen together. Eileen was feeding Sam, and Will made me a cup of tea. What do you think, Eileen? I asked her. Eileen shook her head and said she had no idea what could have happened, nothing had been unusual. Mrs Baron had seemed just as usual – it was a complete mystery. I thought Will looked relieved when she said that. He said he was going to report Grace as a missing person to the police. He’d already tried, but they’d said to wait at least twenty-four hours. I think now that he is right. Something is very wrong. I left his house feeling guilty about the letter in my pocket.

  30 August

  The police sent someone to see me today, a very bored young policewoman who could hardly muster the energy for the questions she’d been sent to ask, all very routine and obvious. She made it clear that some kind of domestic dispute was thought to be the most likely explanation for my sister’s disappearance – Usually is, she yawned. She wanted to know if I’d ever heard Mr and Mrs Baron arguing, and whether Mrs Baron had ever reported any fights to me. I said no, she hadn’t, and that I doubted if my sister and brother-in-law had ever seriously argued in their lives. Both, I said, were of a gentle disposition, neither of them in the least aggressive. All the time she was with me I was thinking about that letter I’d taken. It’s in French, and my French is rusty, but with the aid of Connie’s dictionary I think I’ve made out most of it and it shows Grace has more secrets than that of Claudia’s paternity. She certainly never mentioned this man, Henri, as he signs himself. He was obviously in love with her, and from what I can piece together they must have been lovers, but I don’t think he is Claudia’s father. He refers to other people who also want to know where Grace is, and there’s a bit about ‘all of us who suffered together in that terrible time having to bear the consequences’. But Henri says he is going to find Grace even if it takes him the rest of his life, so there is no point in her hiding. He says she has nothing to be ashamed of: everyone did what they had to do to survive. But that last letter, or the last in that pile, was written in 1950, five years ago. How can it have any relevance to Grace’s disappearing now? It can’t, surely. I wish there was someone I could discuss it with. Not Will, though maybe he knows all about Henri. Unlikely, considering he knows nothing about Claudia’s father, which suggests to me there have been no real confidences.

  31 August

  Esther phoned. The police have contacted her and George, part of checking known relatives. I ought to have told her before this but I didn’t want to worry her. We discussed the whole thing, and it was a relief to have someone to talk to. Esther may be irritating but at times of strain she is better than nobody, and surprisingly sympathetic these days, since Harry came home. That ghoulish side to her isn’t as evident as when she was young, maybe because after Harry’s experiences she knows now how people in distress feel. Anyway, we talked for ages. I didn’t tell her about the letters, though. Grace might want those kept private. In fact, I dread having to admit I found them, and that I have read one, but I’ll have to, when she gets back. As Esther pointed out, no bodies have been found so the worst cannot have happened. Oddly enough, I don’t for one moment think Grace is dead. I think Will entertains such horrific scenarios, though. He fears she’s been kidnapped or abducted. He says Grace would never be so cruel as to put him through this. I can’t help agreeing with that, but on the other hand I don’t agree with his kidnap or abduction fantasy. Who would kidnap her? Why? I tried to comfort Will by pointing out that kidnappers do it for money, and no one could have thought Grace was worth much, and even if they had, they would have sent a ransom note by now. There was nothing I could say to make abduction by some lunatic seem unlikely. But lunatics are lunatics. All I said was that there was not a shred of evidence that Grace had been captured against her will.

  1 September

  Grace’s car has been found in Dover. In perfect condition. No signs of any struggle. My heart contracted when I heard the word Dover – it made me think instantly of the cliffs – but no body has been found and the coastguards have assured Will, who thought the same as I did, that if she had thrown herself off the cliffs her body would most certainly have been found by now. In any case, the car was nowhere near the cliffs; it was in the town. It looks more and more as if Grace chose to drive off, for whatever reason, and that no one else is involved. The police are less interested now, not that they seemed terribly interested in the first place. They have towed the car away. Will has asked me to go with him down to Dover to search for Grace. Eileen will stay with Sam. I feel so reluctant about going but I don’t like to let him down. He wants to search every hotel and boarding-house in Dover, showing Grace’s photograph. He is now convinced she has had some sort of breakdown and may have forgotten who she is. At least this theory is preferable to the abduction one and tortures him less. So I am going to go, though it worries me that there will be nobody in my house if Grace should try to contact me, but I suppose that is not very likely as she hasn’t done so yet. And if Will is right, if she’s lost her memory, she’ll have forgotten I exist. I try to imagine not being able to remember anything at all and
I can’t. Memory is so much a part of identity. It’s eerie to think of having no memory. I felt, those months in Blockley, that Grace was working ferociously hard to kill certain memories, and that she thought she’d succeeded. If, now, she has indeed forgotten who she is, will she be in a state of terror and panic? But she drove her car, parked it neatly in a public place, and has survived three days without accident, so she is in some kind of control. Grace has my house key, she’s always had it, just as I have hers. I am going to write a note, saying where I’ve gone and why, and leave it prominently displayed, just in case she comes here. But how can she, if she has lost her memory.

  2 September

  Tense day with Will. We drove here, to Dover, and booked into an hotel, and then spent the whole afternoon going into all the other hotels, about twenty of them, showing Grace’s photograph. Reactions varied enormously. Some receptionists were most helpful, peered at it for ages, thought long and deeply, called for other staff to join them, and then regretfully shook their heads. Others were suspicious, or bored, or both, and I felt angry with them. I began to see why Will wanted me with him. I am the respectable middle-aged woman who makes his inquiry seem sincere, and I am calm whereas he is all too clearly distraught. I insisted that we paused to eat something after an hour of this – we’d left London at eight in the morning and had had nothing at all to eat or drink the whole day. Will just pushed his sandwich about but he drank the tea, and I think the break steadied him. Off we went again, until we’d visited all the hotels listed in the town guide. He wanted to go out this evening to search places of entertainment but I could see no sense in that. I cannot imagine that Grace, in whatever state, will be out on a dark autumn evening looking for entertainment. But he went. He can’t keep still. He feels better prowling around. I settled down here in this rather dismal hotel bedroom, wondering how long this will continue. I feel so detached and I think Will finds me cold and unsympathetic. He expects me to be in a state, as he is. He came near to accusing me of not caring about Grace but I didn’t bother to refute this suggestion. Grace knows I care, that’s all that matters. It is just that I cannot be doing with histrionics.