Missing From Home

by Mary Burchell

  MISSING FROM HOME

  Mary Burchell

  The Collamore family had been happy and normal for years, until the parents, tragically, decided to separate. Then unhappiness seemed to pile up, when the elder daughter, Pat, failed to return home from a holiday.

  CHAPTER I

  CLARE COLLAMORE watched the Continental boat train snaking its way into Liverpool Street Station, and she experienced an involuntary thrill of pleasure and excitement at the thought of seeing Pat again. She had not actually promised to meet her daughter. In these days most seventeen-year-old daughters liked to think they could get about the world very well on their own. But, after the night journey from Munich and the day-long crossing from the Hook, Pat would probably be pleased enough to find her mother—and the car—waiting to take her the rest of the way home.

  Not, Clare admitted to herself, that she was concerned only with Pat’s reactions. What made this homecoming very special was the fact that her daughter would be bringing with her the first personal news of Gregory since he had walked out of the house after that last blazing row. And, however much Clare told herself she had now put a line under her broken marriage, personal news of Greg was not something she could contemplate with indifference.

  The train drew to a standstill and immediately doors flew open, porters rushed into action and people began spilling out on to the platform. Clare walked slowly down the length of the train for, since Pat was not actually expecting her, it would be necessary to keep a sharp lookout in order not to miss her.

  Once she thought she saw the familiar smooth, silver-blonde head. But then the girl turned and, even at a distance, Clare saw the features were not at all the almost classically beautiful features of her elder daughter. The girl was quite ordinary. And in Clare’s partial view—sharpened by the three weeks’ absence of her dear, though sometimes difficult, child—Pat was anything but ordinary.

  It was a long train and a full one. Clare quickened her pace slightly, though still examining the members of each chattering, exclaiming, laughing group intently. Near the end of the platform was a big crowd of excited youngsters and she half expected to find Pat there. For, classical though her looks might be, Pat was a sociable girl, very popular with most of her kind.

  Even here, however, there was no sign of her. Instead, Clare found herself at the end of the train with no other face to scan.

  “I must have missed her!” Disappointment and vexation were so sharp that she said the words aloud, and a pleasant-looking man in slacks and a pullover remarked,

  “It’s easy enough on such a crowded platform. Anyone you can describe?”

  “Oh, thank you!” She was surprised and a little amused at the friendly offer of help. “It’s my daughter, Pat. She was on her own and not actually expecting me, so no doubt she’s really—”

  “Very fair girl, with nice grey eyes? Good features. Cherry-red beret and an off-white coat?”

  “Yes, that’s Pat!” She was astonished at the detailed accuracy of the description.

  “She must be somewhere about.” The young man stretched to his considerable height and craned his neck to see over the heads of the people near. “We talked quite a lot together on the boat and exchanged names. But I lost her at Harwich.”

  “Then at least she got the boat all right,” exclaimed Clare. “Thank you for that information. I’ll find her all right.”

  And, much more rapidly now, she retraced her footsteps, glancing eagerly once more at the now thinning groups, alert for the red beret and the off-white coat rather than a hatless Pat.

  But in a very few minutes she was back at the barrier again. And there had been no sign of her daughter.

  It was the most extraordinary thing! Unless, of course, there was a relief train—or she had been unaccountably delayed at the Customs. Clare found a responsible-looking official and enquired about relief trains.

  “Not at this time of year.” The man shook his head. “The regular service can cope unless it’s the real tourist season. Missed someone, have you?”

  “Yes, my daughter. Could she have been kept back at the Customs for any reason?”

  “Not unless she was smuggling in a big way,” the man grinned.

  “No, she wouldn’t be doing that.” Clare smiled too, for though Pat had her annoying deviations from the path of good sense, this was hardly likely to be one of them.

  “It’s easy enough to miss anyone in the first rush,” the man said consolingly. “Was she expecting to be met?”

  “No, but—”

  “Well, that’s it, then! She made a quick getaway and was lucky with a taxi.” The man lost interest in something which he probably saw repeated every other day of the week, and now moved off. Clare hung about for a few minutes longer—long enough for the young man who had spoken about Pat to catch up with her again.

  “Hello. You didn’t find her?”

  “No.” Clare shook her head. “She must have rushed for a taxi.”

  “And how right she was!” With a laugh he indicated the long queue now waiting for the few taxis which bothered to make for Liverpool Street Station on a showery Sunday evening. “I’d better join that lot myself.”

  “I have my car here.” Clare spoke impulsively. “I meant to collect Pat and her luggage. Can I drive you anywhere, if it’s reasonably on my way?”

  “But isn’t it bothering you?” He hesitated. “Baker Street Station, as a matter of fact, but—”

  “I practically pass it,” she assured him. And a minute or two later his luggage was stowed away in the boot of her green Hillman and they drove out into the deserted City streets.

  “Funny how dead the place looks at the weekend,” he remarked.

  “Yes.” Her thoughts were still on Pat.

  “Well, tomorrow morning I’ll be back among it all.” He laughed ruefully. “With my holiday half forgotten.”

  “Do you work here, then?”

  “At the top of that big building over there.” He indicated one of the faceless blocks which disfigure London these days. “Right on the top floor. At least the view is marvellous.”

  “It must be,” she agreed.

  She was just making polite conversation, really, while at the back of her mind an illogically keen sense of anxiety about Pat nagged away. Surely it was quite obvious that she had just missed the child in the general rush? There couldn’t be any other explanation. And yet she was so sure—

  Greg had once declared that her certainty that she must be right about everything was one of the things which made her impossible to live with. No need to remember that just now. But perhaps she was being rather stupid to suppose that she could not have been mistaken.

  “You’re not still worrying about Pat, are you?” asked the young man kindly at that point. And she was struck afresh by surprise at the way her daughter’s near contemporaries exchanged Christian names on no more than an hour’s acquaintanceship.

  “Not really,” she assured him hastily. “It’s just that—”

  “I’m sure you needn’t,” he interrupted heartily.

  “She seemed to me to be very well able to look after herself.”

  Clare laughed and said she supposed one could describe Pat that way and had they talked very much?

  “Quite a bit. We had a coffee together. She said she’d been visiting—” he stopped, looked suddenly a little embarrassed, and then added—“her father.”

  “Yes, that’s right. He lives abroad.”

  She did not, naturally, offer to say why Pat’s father lived abroad and her mother so obviously in London. Anyway, Baker Street Station now loomed in sight and there was no need for more conversation.

  He thanked her profusely, hauled his luggage out of the boot as though
it weighed no more than the odd pound or two, and finally bent down to say through the open window,

  “Thanks again. And don’t worry. You’ll find Pat sitting at home wondering where you’ve got to.”

  “I expect so.” She laughed on a note of genuine relief and drove off, telling herself what a nice boy he was and that when she got home she would ask Pat his name.

  But when she got home Pat was not there.

  The taxi must have been less lucky with the traffic than she had been, Clare assured herself, and put on the kettle to make some tea. Half an hour later she was telling herself that of course Pat had arrived back much too spent-out to indulge in a taxi, and had made straight for the Underground. It would have been a struggle with her luggage, but probably someone carried it for her. People tended to carry things for Pat.

  An hour later she had passed from anxiety to fury. Obviously the child had gone to some friend’s house without even bothering to phone to say she would be later than expected. It was insufferably thoughtless of her, cruelly unthinking! The sort of thing one had no right to inflict on one’s parents.

  “Greg used to say that Pat was like me,” she thought bitterly. “But I’d never, never have worried my mother like this. I’d never have heard the last of it if I had, either,” she reflected wryly. And for a moment she was almost comforted by the recollection of her own slightly conventional, safe, well-regulated home, where the behaviour of nearly everyone was soothingly—if sometimes boringly—predictable.

  Sometimes over the years she had wondered why she—the typical product of such a home—had fallen so instantly and irretrievably in love with Gregory Collamore. But of course the explanation was really very simple. His slightly flamboyant good looks, his tremendous animal vitality, his incredible capacity for seizing and holding the centre of the scene, combined to give him the quality of sheer novelty which had captured her.

  He was already a successful commercial artist when she first met him. Her parents had not minded the “commercial” bit, but they instinctively distrusted the word “artist” in connection with the serious business of making a living and supporting a wife and family. However, he had been able to demonstrate beyond question that he could give their daughter a very reasonable degree of comfort, with the prospect of something like luxury one day, and they had a trifle reluctantly given their consent. What would have happened if they had not given their consent was something Clare had never really allowed herself to consider.

  Gregory had married her and swept her off to London, to live in a charming little flat in Hampstead. They had been happy there, so radiantly, warmly, heart-searchingly happy that even now she dared not recall those days too clearly lest she should find herself weeping fruitlessly for them.

  There the two girls had been born, within little more than a year of each other, and there Clare had made the discovery that for her, happiness could easily be contained between four walls, provided those she loved were with her. She was keenly interested in Greg’s world and his work, she entertained unpretentiously but charmingly for him, and it worried her not at all that, while she was being a busy, happy mother to the girls, he lived an energetic, demanding, interesting life quite separate from the parenthood which sat lightly, if lovingly, upon him.

  Most people who knew them described them as an exceptionally happy family, and in this they were right.

  It was difficult to say when the first subtle signs of change began to come. When the girls first went to school Clare found she had more time for herself, of course, but this was soon absorbed in their move to a much bigger house. Greg was doing extremely well by now in his business. But, in addition, he took to portrait painting almost as a hobby and, before he knew where he was, he had become “fashionable,” as the term is.

  He was not in the top flight of portrait painters, but his work was in demand among stage people and near-celebrities of the day, and his social life expanded in consequence. No one rejoiced more than Clare. No one was prouder of him. Unless it was his two daughters who considered him, quite simply, to be the most marvellous man in the world.

  The first real flare-up had almost an element of the ridiculous in it. Clare went with him to quite an important party, where the half social, half professional elements made her specially eager to do him credit. Unusually for her, she was even a little nervous about the affair, though he was a trifle impatient when she confessed as much to him.

  “There’s nothing in it. They’re all interesting and charming people. I know them nearly all personally.”

  He might, of course. But she did not, and she took the greatest pains to look her very best. And then, by the most disastrous quirk of fate, she arrived at the party dressed in identically the same dress as her hostess.

  It was one of those occasions that can be laughed off (though with difficulty) between friends. But between acquaintances it can be infuriating and embarrassing in the extreme. Their hostess took it extremely well. She was quite amusing about it all, perhaps because the dress on her looked stunning, while on Clare it looked charming but unremarkable.

  It was a miserable evening for Clare and she could hardly wait until they were on the way home before she actually burst into tears of chagrin and disappointment. Greg made things no better by saying, in the manner of husbands, that “it didn’t really matter.”

  “Of course it mattered!” cried Clare. “I never felt such a fool in my life. And I suppose she felt the same.”

  “I doubt it. She has remarkable poise and self-possession. That’s why it’s going to be fun discovering the real woman behind all that when I paint her portrait,” he added absently.

  “You’re—doing her portrait?”

  “Yes. But not in that dress,” Greg replied, with a flash of ill-timed amusement.

  “I should think not! Whatever you say, she probably feels as I do—that she never wants to see that dress again.”

  “Why should she? It was absolutely her dress. I thought she looked stunning,” was the careless reply.

  Clare felt as though someone had hit her under the chin.

  “Did you think—I looked stunning too?”

  “You looked sweet—as usual,” he assured her airily. “But—I tell you—it just happened to be her dress. You needn’t wear yours again, darling. I’ll buy you a new one,” he promised with careless generosity.

  “Thank you,” said Clare, for the first time in her life feeling icy fury towards her husband. “I’ll buy my own clothes, even if they don’t always meet with your approval.”

  He was furious too then. But hotly furious. And they had the first terrific row of their married life. There had, of course, been minor upsets and disagreements before, but nothing at all like this.

  At one point Clare thought, in stunned dismay, “We’re quarrelling about another woman! Oh, about the stupid dress, too. But mostly because he admits finding another woman more attractive than me—in exactly the same dress.”

  They papered over the cracks next morning, of course. They even told each other they had both been ridiculous and such a thing would never happen again.

  But it did. For one thing—unreasonably, she saw now—she tried to persuade him not to do that particular portrait. And he took this as unwarrantable interference in his professional life. Neither of them had ever been specially touchy about this issue before, but suddenly it became an enormous bone of contention. He declared she was getting bossy and offensively jealous. And she thought—and unfortunately said—that there was more to this than met the eye, and she had possibly been stupidly blind and complacent all these years.

  There were still times when everything was almost all right again and when they almost recaptured the early happy relationship. Almost—but never quite. The happy times grew fewer and the angry disputes more frequent.

  They managed to keep most of it away from the children, largely by a tacit acceptance of the fact that, after all, the girls might be happier at boarding-school. This had not been t
heir original intention at all. But, almost without discussing it, they came to the shared conclusion that “as things are” it might be better so.

  Once the girls had gone, Clare found time hung heavily on her hands. But both she and Greg had lost the way back to each other by then. And, instead of sharing his life and interests in her unexpected leisure hours, she began to make a life of her own.

  It was not a particularly empty or over-social life. She did a certain amount of voluntary work for charities, she became a governor of a local boys’ school, and she even revived a modest talent for journalism to the extent of selling the occasional article or short story in the second-line market. But none of this had any connection with—or, indeed, interest for—Greg. And by the time they came to the last quarrel, nearly a year ago, they were almost strangers saying unforgivable things to each other.

  That was the point at which Greg had walked out.

  He made adequate—even generous—financial arrangements for her and the girls. Then he left the country, with the avowed intention of finding some real peace and quiet in an extended walking tour through Germany and Austria.

  It had been less difficult than she expected explaining things to Pat and Marilyn. For one thing, Greg had already written to them, giving a brief but admirably impartial statement of the situation. He neither accepted nor bestowed blame. It was just “one of those things.” Both he and their mother loved them as dearly as ever and wished the separation to disturb them as little as possible. Inevitably, it would be with their mother that they would continue to live, but his own ties with them remained as strong as ever, and he hoped it would not be long before he was able to see them again.