The Missing Wife

by Sheila O'Flanagan

  Perhaps, even with the Plan, it was too tall an order.

  She walked towards the bay, where hundreds of sailboats bobbed on waves that sparkled beneath the clear blue sky, and was overcome by a sense of déjà vu, of having been on this exact spot looking at the exact same boats before. It was entirely possible, she supposed. Did she recall it, or was she just imagining someone pointing at the land on the other side of the water and telling her that it belonged to Spain and not France, and was a completely different country, with a completely different language.

  ‘But still Basque country,’ she recalled someone else saying. Had it been Madame? Or Monsieur Delissandes himself? She knew he had Basque heritage, and that was why the family stayed there every summer. The house had been … She frowned as she tried to remember. His family home passed on from his grandparents? Or a great-aunt? Something like that at any rate. There had been lots of talk about it during various summers. But she couldn’t recall the actual conversations.

  As she gazed across the water, more long-buried memories began to emerge, even though she couldn’t be sure if they were real or not. She thought she remembered sailing in one of the boats. She and Oliver and Charles wearing bright orange life jackets and leaning over the side while Carol watched them anxiously and Monsieur Delissandes adjusted the sails. Had that happened? She was almost sure it had.

  But she was absolutely certain that they’d raced along the wide expanse of beach in front of her. She definitely remembered doing her best to keep up with the Delissandes boys, which was impossible because they were older than her as well as being stronger. Carol had suggested a race where Imogen would have a head start, but she refused. She’d wanted to beat them on equal terms. But she never had. She’d always lost, while Oliver was usually the winner, although occasionally he slowed down at the end and allowed Charles to pass him. Those times Charles would raise his arms over his head and jump around in excitement while Oliver watched him with an amused expression. Imogen sometimes wondered whether Oliver would have allowed her to win if she’d managed to get in front of Charles. Somehow she doubted it. There was a rivalry between them that was different to the one he had with his younger brother.

  There were a lot of tourists on the beach. She watched as men drove spikes into the sand for the beach umbrellas, while children whooped their way into the sea. It was like any holiday resort in the world. But she’d lived here. No matter how jumbled and unreliable her memories, she’d been a part of it for almost five years, and she hadn’t wanted to leave.

  She walked along the Boulevard de la Mer, dividing her attention between the sea and the houses on the other side of the road. It wasn’t as though she expected to spot the Villa Martine among them. But she was alert to the possibility.

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake!’ She surprised herself by speaking the words out loud. ‘It doesn’t matter whether you ever see it again or not. You came here to move on. And that’s what you’re going to do. Right now!’

  She deliberately turned away from the beach and back into the town. She wandered through the streets, pausing outside a variety of shops, looking at the summer offerings, deliberately blocking out the memories that tried to surface. Her stomach grumbled, and she sat at a pavement café and ate a tuna salad, the sun warm on her back and a soft breeze whispering across her neck.

  A new start, she said to herself. I’ve done it lots of times before. I can do it again. I’ve already made the decision. And I definitely know how to be tenacious.

  Chapter 5

  It was late in the afternoon when Vince arrived home, but he’d made good time, which pleased him.

  He parked in the driveway, then took his overnight bag out of the boot of the Toyota and unlocked the front door. The house was quiet and deserted. He went upstairs. Everything was still and undisturbed. Even the tie he’d rejected before leaving for Cork was where he’d left it, on the chair beside the bed.

  He frowned. Imogen always hung up his discarded clothes. She knew he liked everything in its place. Why hadn’t she done what she usually did and put the tie away? Why hadn’t she answered his phone calls and texts? What the hell was going on?

  He put his bag beside the bed and opened the curtains. It was one of his rules to leave the curtains half closed when they were out of the house, and Imogen followed it faithfully. Yet although everything was exactly where it should be, Vince was beginning to feel more and more uneasy. He was uncomfortably aware of the silence around him, and would have preferred to see a sign of Imogen’s more disorderly habits to reassure himself that she’d been here.

  He told himself that he was being stupid. She’d come home very late, fallen into bed, got up and gone to work. She hadn’t had time to either disarrange things or put his tie where it should be. Although, he thought, hanging up the tie should have been second nature to her. Perhaps she’d planned to do it before he got home. Silly, but, knowing Imogen, entirely possible.

  He went back into the bedroom and looked in the laundry basket. There was a white blouse as well as some of her underwear in it, but he wasn’t sure if it had been there previously or not. He opened the drawer in the dresser where she kept her blouses. They were arranged in neat piles of blue and white, the colours he preferred her to wear to work. There were too many and they were too alike to know if any were missing. A thought struck him, and he looked under the bed. He frowned at the dust beneath it. And then again because her travel bag wasn’t there. He felt his jaw tighten.

  He walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. The red mug he’d used for his coffee the day before was still on the draining board. His jaw tightened even more. Another rule was to put things back in the cupboard as soon as they’d dried. She should have done that at least.

  He took out his phone and called her.

  ‘Hi, this is Imogen. I’m currently away at a business exhibition. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you on my return.’

  He took a deep breath and replaced the phone in his pocket. Why hadn’t she called him? Why hadn’t she put away the things that needed putting away? What the hell was she doing?

  The missing bag was a worry. Did it mean she hadn’t come home at all? Or was it that she hadn’t wanted to spend the night on her own and, despite the lateness of the hour, had gone to her friend Shona’s instead? Vince felt his shoulders relax. It was the most likely answer. She’d done that once or twice before when he was away. A girls’ night in, she called it. Dedicated to wine-drinking, make-up-sharing and gossiping. He didn’t exactly approve, but he couldn’t object when he was away himself.

  He dialled Shona’s number.

  ‘Hi, this is Shona. Leave a message blah blah blah.’

  ‘It’s Vince,’ he said. ‘Did Imogen stay with you last night? Call me.’

  He waited, but there was no immediate response. Shona worked as a gym instructor, so she probably didn’t even know she had a message yet.

  He picked up the phone and dialled again.

  ‘Welcome to Chandon Leclerc. This is Imogen. I’m not at my desk at the moment, but please leave a message and I’ll return your call.’

  Vince jabbed at the disconnect button and dialled a different number.

  ‘Welcome to Chandon Leclerc. Please choose from one of the following options.’

  When the automated voice stopped at option five, the chance to speak to a real person, Vince selected it.

  ‘Hello, this is Janice. How may I help you?’

  ‘Hello, Janice.’ Vince had never spoken to her before. He tried to keep his voice steady, even though he was already irate over yet another voicemail from Imogen and the automated phone system. ‘This is Vince Naughton. I’d like to speak to Imogen, please.’

  ‘Imogen?’

  ‘Imogen Naughton. My wife. Conor Foley’s PA.’

  ‘Oh, right. Hold on a moment.’

  The line went silent. Vince wondered if the stupid receptionist had cut him off. He tapped his fingers on the table, feeling the anger bubble up i
nside him, although it was tempered by concern. When she answered, he’d let some of the anger show. She deserved to know how much she’d upset him. There was a sudden series of clicks and the phone was answered again.

  ‘Welcome to Chandon Leclerc. This is Imogen. I’m not at my desk at the moment, but please leave a message and I’ll return your call.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ Vince roared at the phone. The stupid girl had simply put the call through to Imogen’s desk and her voicemail had picked it up. It was no wonder the company was in trouble. (Which, according to Imogen, it was. That was part of the reason Conor had been eager to go to the exhibition. To see and be seen. To align the Irish distributor to the French owner.)

  He debated for a moment before leaving the house and getting into his car again.

  He was going to fetch his wife and bring her home.

  Chapter 6

  On her walk back to the Hotel Atlantique, Imogen bought herself an ice cream. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d walked along a street with an ice cream cone in her hand. Maybe it was the last time she was here. Carol might have bought one for her from the very same shop and she could have walked the same pavement more than twenty years before. Although that was unlikely. The shop had been bright and new, while her memories were vague, impressions of colours and sounds, light and shade. And of people lifting her and talking to her and kissing her on the cheek and telling her that she was très, très jolie.

  But the memory of arriving at the Villa Martine was still razor sharp. She couldn’t recall Denis Delissandes collecting her and Carol from the airport, or getting into his car (although the smell of sweet tobacco would ever afterwards bring the image of a dark green Renault Espace to her mind), but she very clearly remembered pulling up outside the gates and Monsieur Delissandes using a remote control to open them. Carol had squeezed her hand at that point and Imogen had squirmed away from her, eager to watch the gates opening as if by magic.

  The car had moved forward and then stopped almost at once because a football bounced off the windscreen, and Monsieur Delissandes slammed on the brakes and got out, leaving Imogen and her mother sitting in the back seat staring at each other.

  ‘Are you out of your minds!’ they heard him yell. ‘Get into the house this instant. And wait for me there.’

  He got back into the car and, without another word, drove it up to the house, where he cut the engine and got out again. He opened the door for Carol, and Imogen scrambled out with her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Monsieur Delissandes said. ‘This isn’t the best welcome to our home. The boys know they shouldn’t be playing football in that part of the garden. I’ll deal with them later.’

  Imogen had exchanged an anxious look with her mother, wondering how the boys, whoever they were, were going to be dealt with. Carol had winked at her in return and squeezed her hand again. Then the front door of the house had opened and Lucie Delissandes had come out to greet them. Imogen’s first impression of her was of an angel, because she was blond-haired and blue-eyed, and was wearing a long white dress trimmed with broderie anglaise, which floated around her legs in the gentle breeze. She was also barefoot, her toenails painted a brilliant gold.

  She kissed her husband on both cheeks and spoke quietly and rapidly to him. Neither Carol nor Imogen could hear what she was saying, but Denis Delissandes snorted and stomped into the house. Then Lucie stretched out her hand to Carol, kissed her in the same fashion as her husband, and after that hunkered down on her knees in front of Imogen.

  ‘You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen,’ she said. ‘And it is so lovely to have a pretty girl in a house full of men. Come in, come in. You’re both very welcome.’

  At the time, Imogen hadn’t really understood their role in the Delissandes household. She’d thought it was the same as at the Maison Lavande in Provence. There, they’d lived with Carol’s sister-in-law Agnes, Agnes’s partner Berthe, and Berthe’s widowed mother, who ran the place as a small guest house. They were part of the family and were treated very much that way, although only Berthe called her mother Maman; everyone else, including Imogen, addressed her as Madame Fournier, because she had a certain presence that seemed to demand it.

  All of them worked together to keep the guest house running smoothly. As a baby, Imogen’s job was to charm their visitors, and she’d apparently been very good at it. Whenever she’d crawl or toddle into a room, they’d invariably smile at her and tell her what a good girl she was, and how pretty. She allowed them to pat her on the head, or lift her on to their laps, or brush her silky brown hair, because they liked it, and even then, she knew that it was important to keep the guests happy.

  She sometimes wondered how her life would have turned out if she and Carol had stayed in Provence. Carol often talked about the sun-kissed days and warm evenings, the faint scent of lavender and lemons, and the house filled with laughter. But things changed: at seventy-two years old, Madame Fournier met a man she wanted to marry and decided to sell the guest house. Although Agnes and Berthe had considered buying it, a job offer for Agnes in New York at almost the same time was too good to turn down, and so she and Berthe left for the States together. They’d suggested that Carol and Imogen might like to come too, but it would have been almost impossible for Carol to get a work visa, and besides, she was uneasy about raising her daughter in New York. It was Madame Fournier who found her the housekeeper’s job in the Delissandes’ holiday home in Hendaye, seven hundred kilometres away.

  There had been tears at their departure, but Imogen didn’t remember them. She didn’t remember the flight to Biarritz. No matter how hard she tried, her first clear memory was of the gates of the Villa Martine opening and of Denis Delissandes yelling at his sons.

  The sudden sound of a mobile ringtone startled her so much that she jumped and instinctively put her hand into her bag, before remembering that her phone was in its component parts and scattered around France. At the same time, a man walking out of a doorway took his own phone from his jacket pocket and started talking. Imogen pinched her nose with her fingers as her heartbeat slowed down again.

  How did I let it get to this? she asked herself as she leaned against a wall for support. How did I become the kind of person who jumps at the slightest thing? And will being here really turn me back into the Imogen I was before?

  The hotel reception area was busy with new arrivals when she returned. She skirted around them and walked out into the garden, where a few sunbeds and garden chairs were dotted around the small swimming pool. A teenage girl in the skimpiest of skimpy bikinis was tapping at her iPad as she lay on one of the sunbeds, while a small boy splashed happily in the pool under the watchful eye of his parents. The partly watchful eye, Imogen noted, because both of them were scrolling on their smartphones. I’m completely divorced from the modern world without my phone, she thought. I wonder, will I be able to last?

  She sat at one of the tables and stretched her long legs out in front of her. She was hot and tired after her tour of the town, and her feet were aching. She wished she’d thought to pack a swimsuit. But if Vince had seen it, he’d have asked questions about a business trip that also included swimwear. She could have lied and said it was for the hotel swimming pool (if indeed it had one), but then he would have freaked out at a trip that allowed her time for swimming. He probably would have checked to see if the hotel had a pool too, and if it hadn’t … She shuddered. I can buy a swimsuit, she told herself as she watched the boy diving into the pool, then hauling himself out and diving in again. I can do whatever I want. That’s why I left, isn’t it?

  ‘Joel, can’t you read the sign?’ The woman spoke to him in English.

  ‘I don’t need to read it,’ he said. ‘It’s a picture.’

  ‘It’s a picture that says no diving,’ his mother pointed out. ‘So stop it.’

  ‘Nobody minds,’ said Joel.

  ‘You don’t know that,’ said his mother. ‘And whether they mind or not is irrelevant. You�
�re not supposed to be doing it.’

  Joel heaved an enormous sigh and began running around the garden, his arms outstretched as though he was an aeroplane. An aeroplane that, not watching where it was going, tripped over a garden hose and landed spreadeagled in Imogen’s lap.

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Joel!’ his mother cried out. ‘For heaven’s sake!’

  She jumped up from her sunbed and hurried over to where Imogen had steadied him.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, noticing that his wet body had effectively soaked Imogen’s dress. ‘Joel, you’re a total menace. Apologise.’ She looked at Imogen. ‘Um … Madame, um … je regrette … mon fils … we’re both sorry.’ She gave a helpless shrug.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Imogen. ‘I speak English.’

  ‘Oh good.’ The woman beamed at her. ‘I’d hoped you might. It’s awful, isn’t it, how we English expect everyone to understand us. Especially in a place like this which is a little less touristy, you know?’

  Imogen nodded.

  ‘Are you actually English then?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Irish.’

  ‘It’s just I heard you talking French at reception earlier and I thought … you speak it very well.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Imogen.

  ‘Anyhow.’ The woman caught her son by the arm. ‘Joel, say you’re sorry to the lady for falling all over her.’

  ‘Sorry,’ muttered Joel.

  ‘Now get back in the pool, and no more diving.’ His mother turned back to Imogen. ‘He’s a good kid really, but you know how it is when they’re on holiday. Look, can I buy you a drink? To apologise.’

  ‘There’s absolutely no need,’ said Imogen. ‘He ran into me, that’s all. He didn’t hurt me.’

  ‘I’m getting one for myself,’ said the woman. ‘So I might as well get one for you too.’