Missing Rose

by Linda Newbery

  Unhurried, she returned along the edge of a ploughed field that was frozen into hard ridges and furrows. She let herself into Rowan Lodge, and the warmth that had built up in her absence, and felt oddly at home.

  After changing her damp socks – her trainers had proved inadequate – and putting on the kettle, she prepared to start work on the bedroom walls, paying her debt to Ruth. It was only when the postman arrived, bringing two letters and a catalogue addressed to Bridget, that she remembered it was Monday, and there was nothing to stop her from phoning the Plymouth school. She made herself wait until lunch time, hoping to reach Michael Sullivan in person rather than leaving a message. It might not be the same person anyway; it wasn’t an unusual name, as her Google search had proved. If she drew a blank with him, she’d try harder to find Jim Greaves.

  Damping the wallpaper, pulling it off in shreds and tatters, she rehearsed what to say, but still, when at last she made the call and a receptionist answered, found that her voice had gone husky and hesitant.

  ‘Who shall I say is calling?’

  ‘Anna.’ Her surname would give too much away; she didn’t want him (if it was him) to be alerted.

  ‘Anna from …?’

  ‘From Heinemann Publishing,’ Anna improvised.

  The receptionist said that she’d try the staff room, and there was an interminable wait before a male voice answered.

  Anna sounded to herself like a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. ‘Are you the Michael Sullivan who used to teach at Oldlands Hall in Sevenoaks?’

  ‘Yes, yes I am. Who is this?’

  ‘It’s Anna Taverner.’

  A pause, then: ‘Anna Taverner?’

  ‘Yes. I think you knew my sister Rose.’

  ‘Has something happened?’

  Anna was thrown by that. ‘Happened? I expect you know that Rose disappeared, twenty years ago. I know you were at the school then.’

  ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘I’m trying to trace her. Nothing’s been heard of her in all that time. I wondered if you might remember something – anything – that might give me a lead.’

  There was such a long silence that Anna would have thought she’d been cut off, except that she could hear staffroom chat and laughter in the background, and the chink of crockery.

  Then Michael Sullivan said, ‘I’ll have to get back to you. I can’t talk now. Can you give me your phone number?’

  Sitting on the bedroom floor, on the sheets of newspaper she’d spread over the carpet, Anna went over and over this brief conversation, weighing every nuance.

  Has something happened? What had he meant by that? Was he simply asking whether Rose had been found? In which case he didn’t know. But there had been no preamble, no Oh yes, I remember, or What a terrible business or So, still nothing, after all this time – which had been Jamie Spellman’s reaction; nor was it the fear of hearing something grisly, which had been Christina’s. He hadn’t denied knowing Rose. I think you knew my sister Rose, she’d said, and he’d replied with that quick, defensive What’s this about? That wasn’t the response of someone who had known Rose merely as a pupil he hadn’t even taught. Someone who hadn’t thought about Rose for two decades.

  He knew something. Otherwise why offer to get back to her? Would he return the call? Anna saw herself waiting and waiting, clutching her silent mobile. Of course he wouldn’t ring back. He had something to hide.

  What now? She imagined herself phoning the police, of squad cars racing to the school, leading Michael Sullivan away in handcuffs for questioning. Ludicrous. What did she have against him? That he’d refused to dance with Rose, and had looked at a painting five years later?

  She kept hearing his voice: a deep voice, softly spoken, with the trace of a southern Irish accent. She remembered that: an attractive voice, she’d have said. But she felt chilled now, hearing his words over and over again, alert to how incriminating they sounded. She heard all the things he hadn’t said.

  What was he doing now? Had he gone back to his classroom, to teach his next lesson quite normally? Or was he panicked into flight, knowing that his cover had been blown?

  She could take a day off work and catch a train, find her way to the school, and confront him. She imagined herself storming into a classroom, yelling Where is she? What have you done to my sister?

  She’d give him twenty-four hours. If he didn’t phone back she would set off for Plymouth.

  The shop has a new display of shoes for babies and toddlers, a whole side window full of them, arranged on shelves and stands with yellow ducks and chicks and daffodils scattered among them. There are sturdy little boots, bar shoes, trainers; ballet pumps, shoes with appliqué flowers on the toes; shoes in poster-paint colours. On her way from the car park to the post office, Cassandra stops outside, with a little gasp. She feels like a child in a sweetshop, gazing hungrily. The fluffy toys call to mind a larger yellow duckling she made from felt, years ago, a memory she pushes away. But the shoes! They tug at her; she feels a wrenching ache that is almost pleasurable. She wants to hold and touch them. She wants all of them.

  A woman with twins in a buggy stops too; she smiles at Cassandra. ‘Adorable, aren’t they? So tempting. Pricey, though. More than I can afford.’ And she moves on, a young woman of Anna’s age, busy with her babies and her bags of shopping.

  I can, though, Cassandra thinks. I can afford a pair and I’m going to buy some, for Zanna. Why shouldn’t I?

  She pushes open the door; there’s a cheerful donging, and an assistant looks up from the counter. There are yet more shoes inside, three shelves full, for very young children. Cassandra walks wonderingly along the shelf, touching, stroking. She picks up a miniature white boot; holds it to her cheek, inhales the smell of new leather. How to choose?

  ‘Aren’t they gorgeous?’ The assistant has come to stand beside her. ‘Are you looking for something special? Is it for a grandchild?’

  Cassandra’s mind blanks for a moment, then she says, ‘Yes. Yes, it is.’

  ‘Little boy or little girl?’

  ‘Girl,’ says Cassandra.

  ‘Lovely. What sort of colours do you think she’d like? Are you looking for a dainty little-girl shoe, or something more chunky, like these boots? Oh, I love these. I bought a pair for my nephew.’

  Eventually Cassandra chooses a pair of purple bar shoes, the smallest size, with white stitching, and button fastenings in the shape of a green and white daisy. The assistant wraps them in layers of tissue paper, and puts them into a small blue carrier with silky cord handles. ‘You can always exchange them if they don’t fit.’ She is waiting for the card machine to print out its receipt. ‘What’s she called, your granddaughter?’

  Cassandra smiles. ‘She isn’t born yet.’

  ‘Oh – and will she be your first? How exciting.’

  Cassandra hugs the secret excitement to her. It’s like being a member of a club, a secret grandmother club, a new phase of her life. When she gets home with her purchase – only now does she remember that she’d been heading for the post office with Don’s parcel, which is still in her bag – she lifts out the shoes and places them side by side on the kitchen table. She imagines small feet in them, standing squarely; sturdy little legs, and white ankle socks with frilled edges. But how will she ever see? She won’t know, and it will be a new loss; everything is loss. She fastens the daisy buttons on one of the shoes, and holds it to her mouth; tears prickle her eyes.

  Then it occurs to her that she’d better hide them. Up in the bedroom, she tucks the bag to the back of the wardrobe shelf she uses for storing presents.

  18

  Sandy, 1967

  Sandy never spoke to Phil again. He phoned, once, and she put down the receiver quickly, terrified by that time that her parents would find out. He mustn’t know. He must never know.

  Travelling back from the strange pilgrimage, she had wanted to copy Roland’s song into her notebook, but Phil wouldn’t let her. Instead, back at home, she wrote
down the title, and the phrases she remembered. She also had Roland’s handwritten song lyrics in the folder she had taken from his room, and his desk diary. The brand-new diary was empty apart from exam dates and the Merlins’ few bookings for January and February. There were no Merlins any more. Phil had told her on the train that he couldn’t think of continuing without Roland, and that Mick and Dempsey were forming another group.

  The first time she missed a period, when the date marked on the calendar was two days past, the thought darted across her mind that it would be weird if she was pregnant – weird, but surely not probable. Hardly even possible. Some of the girls at school said that you couldn’t get pregnant by doing it just once. And … the doing it, herself and Phil, in a haze of sorrow and desperation, could hardly be the same act that the girls giggled about in the cloakroom, discussing how close they had come, how tempted, how insistent their boyfriends had been. There was a pill now that could stop you getting pregnant, and the papers said that this would lead to a huge rise in immorality if unmarried women were allowed to have it. You could simply take a pill each night and never have to worry again. You could go off and sleep with ten different boys, Susan Morgan said, in her airy way of speaking, as if from vast experience.

  As the days passed, and the fear of pregnancy lodged itself firmly in her mind, Sandy longed for the cramping pain that would signal the start of a period, usually such a nuisance. Her body couldn’t betray her like this. If she stopped thinking about it, everything would be all right. Instead, each day that passed added to the sick feeling of inevitability. How had she let it happen? She was so ignorant, so naïve, as everyone said. There were ways of dealing with it, weren’t there? Jumping down stairs, or drinking gin? But remedies like that belonged in lurid stories like Up the Junction, a copy of which had gone round the fifth form like a virus, increasingly battered as it passed from hand to hand. Sandy pretended to find it risqué and exciting, but was shocked by the currency in which Nell Dunn’s girls traded – sex in exchange for a couple of beers – and by how utterly unromantic the sex was, in doorways and the backs of vans. They were cynical and reckless, those girls; bad girls who knew what they were doing but took risks all the same, and faced the consequences. There was no magic wand that could solve the problem of a pregnancy. Rube in the story had gone to a dubious older woman for help, and something horrible had been done with a syringe, but still Rube had ended up screaming in pain, and everyone knowing.

  Another day went by without the longed-for bleeding, another week. Eventually a second X on the calendar passed without incident. Something will happen, Sandy told herself. It will be all right. Her body might have been someone else’s, holding on smugly to its secret workings.

  Her mother, discovering that the supply of sanitary towels in Sandy’s dressing-table drawer was undepleted, broached the matter. They’d better make a doctor’s appointment. Periods could be missed for a variety of reasons: stress and upset, she said, were among the most likely. It wasn’t surprising that Sandy was suffering from delayed shock.

  Dr Jennings said the same thing, but also that pregnancy was the most common reason: had Sandy had sexual intercourse?

  Her mother smiled tolerantly. ‘Well, I hardly think—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sandy.

  Dr Jennings tapped the tip of his biro on his notebook. Ah. In that case, a pregnancy test would be the first step to take.

  ‘Cassandra!’ her mother said outside the surgery, in a horrified whisper. ‘Were you telling the truth? Can you really have been so – so – Where did this happen? Who’s the boy?’

  Sandy had prepared for this, concocting a vague story about a party, gatecrashers, herself drinking too much to be quite sure of what she was doing. She added reckless details, seeing each new shock register on her mother’s face. There might have been more than one boy; she hadn’t found out names; she’d been drunk on vodka and must have passed out.

  The test was positive. She knew, by then, that it would be. Disastrous though this was, she felt oddly distanced from her situation, as if reading about someone else, or watching a film. Her mother was tearful, her father cold and appalled.

  ‘Let me get this absolutely clear.’ They were having what her mother called a family meeting, sitting at the dining table; things had to be sorted out, decisions made, and it would be her father who did the deciding. ‘You’ve behaved so disgracefully that you’re unable to tell us the name of the boy responsible? A well brought-up girl like you, showing no more sense than that? Not a thought for the consequences?’

  He sat rigid, hardly looking at her. Sandy had seen this when he berated Roland for neglecting his studies. This was worse, far worse. Her mother kept giving him anxious glances; she was frightened of him, Sandy saw, when he was like this, as if he’d turned into a stony-hearted stranger. Rarely had Sandy been the one to receive the brunt of his anger. Now, as she realized Roland had done, she was finding a retreat inside herself, so that his words floated over and past her. You don’t know how it was. You don’t understand. It was for Roland. She couldn’t begin to explain; had no wish to try. The scene on the beach with Phil – his voice breaking over Roland’s words, the pebbles they’d thrown into the sea, and their coming together, so roughly, so tenderly – was stored in a secret place in her mind, enclosed and sealed like a glass dome she’d been given once in her Christmas stocking, a wintry scene that blurred into a snow shower when she turned it upside-down and then righted it. Theirs was a dome of sea-murmur and wind-salt and tide-washed sand. Maybe it was oddly fitting that their sorrow for Roland should create a new life.

  ‘So you’ve nothing to say for yourself, not a word of apology or regret?’ Her father’s voice wavered alarmingly. ‘There doesn’t seem to be a shred of decency in you.’ He balled his fists on the table. As he stood up, she saw that his face had reddened and his eyes had gone puffy. ‘I can’t bring myself to look at you. I can’t bear it. I’ll never get over losing my son, my boy … never …’ His mouth quivered; he struggled for control. ‘And now you … this …’

  Sandy and her mother sat silent and dismayed while his footsteps hurried upstairs, and the bedroom door slammed.

  ‘Oh, darling, he doesn’t mean it!’ Sandy’s mother got up from her chair, giving her an awkward hug. ‘It’s terrible news for him, on top of everything else. We’ll have to make allowances.’

  A plan was made. Sandy’s parents’ priority was that no one should know; Sandy would be removed from view before her pregnancy became evident. The family must not be tainted. A place would be found in a home for unmarried mothers; the baby would be given up for adoption, and Sandy would pick up her normal life and try to forget her disgrace.

  With this all determined, the torment of uncertainty removed, she began to feel curiosity rather than revulsion about what her body was doing; even pride, that it could work so silently and smoothly to create a new human being. About the end of the process she could hardly think at all. Meanwhile she went to school, revised for her O-Levels, kept her secret. She hated the thought of people guessing, talking behind her back, speculating. She would feel like one of those Up the Junction girls.

  The library became her sanctuary. Every afternoon, when lessons ended, she spent an hour there before it closed, usually with Delia, who did homework until her mother collected her by car on her way home from work. At first Sandy did this to avoid the jostle and chatter on the bus, but gradually found pleasure in those afternoon hours: light slanting through high windows, the alcoves between tall shelves, walled on both sides by book-spines in dull colours; the creak of floorboards as Miss Stopford, the librarian, moved around the bays with her trolley. Sandy worked methodically, taking notes, underlining headings, sorting through algebra exercises. There were few people in the library at this hour, herself and Delia and a handful of sixth-formers preparing for A-Levels. Sometimes they would glance up and acknowledge her with a faint smile before returning to their books. It made her feel like one of them, pa
rt of an exclusive club, for whose members the narrowing tunnel of revision and exams was the only future that needed considering. Occasionally she thought of telling Delia her secret, but always stopped short. If no one knew, she could pretend it wasn’t happening, that the funnel of exams was the only thing that concerned her, and afterwards there would be freedom.

  Occasionally, inevitably, she saw Phil. On a bright June morning, sitting on the lower deck of the bus on her way to her first maths paper, she saw him waiting at his stop with two other boys: blazerless, his tie loosened and collar open, eyes narrowed into the sunlight as he gave a grimacy smile at something one of the others said. He didn’t see her. But, her eyes fastened on the street ahead, she was acutely aware of every sound as the three of them boarded, clumping up the stairs to the top deck. When the bus pulled up at the Grove Park stop she turned to watch as they jumped down and headed through the school gates; she saw the sharp angles of his shoulders, the swing of his walk, his hair falling straight, almost to his shoulders. He carried the same canvas bag he’d taken to the Isle of Wight, with his marijuana and Roland’s lyric in the side pocket. Now the bag seemed more familiar to Sandy than its owner. He was as remote as when she revered him as the lead singer of the Merlins, the beautiful boy she had gazed at in church halls and youth clubs, whose voice had seared itself into her brain. It was impossible now to believe that he had anything to do with the life growing obstinately inside her. Envying him the careless arrogance of being young and male, she watched until the bus pulled away and he was lost from view.

  19

  Spring 1995

  In her last year at school, Anna spent hours in the art rooms. She liked the quiet concentration, the smell of dust and acrylic paint, the sense of working for something other than exams. In addition to double periods twice each week, she was drawn there at odd times when she had a free lesson, to work on her project, browse through art books or stare out of the window. It didn’t feel quite like school, somehow, up there on the top floor where two rooms took up the whole of what had once been an attic. High windows were set into the eaves, and beams running across were used to hang mobiles or textile work. The art department was the domain of Mr Greaves and his younger colleague, Alys Hardcastle. Mr Greaves – Jim, to the sixth form – was a painter first, teacher second, and it was no secret that he preferred his A-Level groups to the raucous younger classes with their wide extremes of talent and ineptitude, compliance and bolshiness. Five years ago he had taught Rose; he was one of the few teachers Rose and Anna had in common. Rose liked him, mainly because he didn’t so much teach as guide, encourage and understand.