Missing From Home

by Mary Burchell

  Greg drove. Partly because it was natural for him to take the lead when they were together, and partly because she guessed he desperately wanted to be doing something—anything—specific towards the finding of their daughter.

  For a while there was silence. Not a difficult silence, oddly enough, and Clare took comfort from that too. Now that they had crossed the first bridge across the rift that had been torn in their lives, they seemed able to accept each other’s company with a naturalness she had never expected. She was content to sit there enjoying the fact.

  It was he who spoke first, when they were free of the most congested part of their route, and what he said was, “Did you hear what Marilyn said to me over the phone last night?—about thinking I didn’t really care much what happened to any of you.”

  “Yes, I heard. I was still in the room.” She could tell from his tone that he still felt shocked about it.

  “Clare, did you know that was how she—perhaps they—felt?”

  “I didn’t know until yesterday that she felt quite so strongly about it. She started to talk in that vein just before we phoned. It shook me too, Greg. I tried to reason with her—”

  “That was generous of you,” he interjected curtly. “Not really. For whatever she felt about your part in things applied—I’m not quite sure in what degree—to me too. You weren’t the only one who had failed them.”

  “You feel that was what we did?” He flashed her a quick glance.

  “Well, of course. Whatever our reasons—good or bad—we cut the secure ground of their home life from under their feet. Oh, I know it isn’t quite as simple as that. But I suppose—” she sighed involuntarily—“at their age life is simple. Or should be. It’s made up of a few things, but those few are vital. Perhaps I should have let them talk more about it, get it out of their system. But I felt that a lot of discussion wouldn’t be fair to you—to the one who wasn’t there.”

  “That’s more or less how I felt when Pat tried to talk to me about things in Munich.”

  “But you didn’t tell me she did that!” Clare exclaimed.

  “I hadn’t thought of its having any bearing on the present situation. And as for our talking in general terms, we haven’t had much opportunity for that, have we, Clare?”

  “No. But it disturbs me somehow that Pat should do such a thing. One wonders if that had something to do with her disappearance.”

  “Why should it? There was no sort of argument, you know. She merely said—” he stopped, then went on more deliberately—“she said how wonderful you were to them both, and that home was as nice as it possibly could be with only one parent there.”

  “Oh, Greg, did she? And what,” asked Clare curiously, “did you reply to that?”

  “I just made a few general comments.” He frowned. “I said I was sure that was so. I agreed that you were wonderful—to them.”

  “Did you have to make that pause there?”

  “It wasn’t intentional. It didn’t imply anything derogatory to you,” he protested. “I merely wanted to show that I went along with her statement just as far as I could. I wanted to be fair to you, just as, I’m sure, you wanted to be fair to me. I felt the less said, the better.”

  “So did I,” Clare said slowly. “And the result was, I suppose, that it must have seemed to them that the one thing no one would discuss frankly was the most important subject in their lives.”

  “Do you think that was how they viewed the—break-up? As the most important subject in their lives?” He sounded uneasy.

  “I don’t know, Greg. I’m just wondering. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder how well I—perhaps we—really know our daughters at all.”

  “Well, we’re going to know Pat a bit better after this morning,” he replied drily. “She must have something to explain to us when we find her.”

  “You’ll come in with me when I make enquiries at the hotel, won’t you, Greg?” she said anxiously.

  “Why, of course.” He looked surprised. “We’re in this together.”

  And the comfort of that stayed with her all the rest of the way, until they stood before the hotel enquiry desk, where a very co-operative but puzzled desk-clerk shook her head and said,

  “Miss Collamore? No, we’ve never had anyone of that name here. Certainly not in the last few months. I would remember. It’s an unusual name.” And she produced a neatly kept register in proof of her statement.

  In the first shock of disappointment Clare went so white that Greg instinctively put his arm round her, which slightly surprised them both.

  “Might she have used another name?” he asked quietly.

  “Oh, Greg, of course she might!” Her glance of grateful admiration actually made him tighten his clasp for a moment. “She’s very fair,” explained Clare, turning back to the desk. “A very pretty girl, really. She would have arrived late on Sunday evening in a hired car, and—”

  “Oh, you mean Miss Foster!” The clerk’s face cleared.

  “Miss—Foster?” repeated Clare, oddly dismayed to think of her child rejecting even her name in order to put a complete barrier between herself and the family she wanted to repudiate. “Is that the name she used? Could we see her, please?”

  “I’m sorry—” the clerk was genuinely regretful, for she would have liked to help this good-looking pair who seemed in such distress—“I’m afraid she’s no longer here. She left this morning.”

  “This—morning?” Utter dismay engulfed Clare again. “Where did she go? Did she leave a forwarding address?”

  “No. She had us call a taxi for her, and I heard her asking the man to drive her to the station.”

  “Did she have any visitor while she was here?” enquired Greg. “Any contact that you can remember?”

  “She stayed in her room a good deal. There was one visitor that I know of. Quite a young girl, who evidently knew her as Miss Foster, because she asked for her under that name. I was on duty at the time,” the woman explained. “Yesterday afternoon it was.”

  Greg and Clare exchanged a bewildered glance. Then Clare turned back to the woman and said pleadingly, “And there’s nothing else at all that you can tell us? She—she’s our daughter.”

  “Nothing. I’m so very sorry. If you like to leave your address—?”

  “Yes, of course.” Clare groped with trembling fingers for a card. “If you hear anything else at all—or remember the slightest detail which might be helpful—” She bit her lip, unable to complete the sentence.

  “Yes. Yes, indeed,” the desk clerk said, and she watched compassionately as the two went out slowly to the car once more.

  “Is it any good making enquiries anywhere else?” Greg said doubtfully. “The station, perhaps? Someone might remember her and which train she took. She’s an outstanding girl, with that pretty hair and—and—”

  Clare made a wordless little gesture which stopped him.

  “We can try if you like,” she said huskily. “But I don’t think it’s any good. I don’t think anything will be any good.”

  He persisted, however, and they drove to the station, where he went in and made painstaking enquiries. But, understandably enough, no one remembered even a very pretty girl among the morning rush-hour crowd.

  There was no need for him to say anything to Clare when he came back to the car. She saw from his face that the enquiries had yielded no result. And in silence he started the car and turned for home. Presently he realised that she was crying, quietly and hopelessly, beside him.

  “Oh, Clare dear—” There was a note of real anguish in his voice.

  “Don’t take any notice. Just drive on, Greg. There’s nothing you or anyone can do. I’ll be better presently.”

  But after a while he could stand it no longer, and he stopped the car in a quiet road.

  “Look, darling—” it was so long since he had called her darling that it gave her a queer little lift of the heart, in spite of all her wretchedness—“I know it’s desperately disappointing not to
have found her. But at least we know she’s well and safe. That woman had been speaking to her only an hour or two before.”

  “That’s just it! If we’d only been a few hours sooner!”

  “We couldn’t have been,” he reminded her practically. “We didn’t know the address in time, and evidently she left early.”

  “But why, Greg, why? There’s something dreadful about the way she persistently runs away from us. We love her, and we want only her good. And yet she goes to these incredible lengths to get away from us. It’s as though she were trying to escape something we represent.”

  “No, no, it’s not that.” Troubledly he put his lips against her cheek for a comforting moment. “God only knows what it is, Clare. But young things do sometimes get a mad urge to ‘live their own lives’ as the phrase goes—”

  “She could have lived her own life from home,” Clare interrupted eagerly. “I gave them both the utmost latitude. Truly, I did.”

  “I’m sure you did,” he said soothingly. “But she had to have something secret, it seems. At least it doesn’t appear to be an entanglement with a man. It was a girl who came to see her. That’s queer when you come to think of it. Who on earth could that have been?”

  “I don’t know.” Clare leaned her head wearily but quite naturally against him. “Someone who is going to help her to live the sort of life she wants, I suppose. Oh, Greg, I’m so thankful to have you to discuss it with! I don’t feel so bad now.”

  She even managed to smile at him then, and he said, “That’s my girl!” just as he used to when they were quite young and had surmounted some difficulty together.

  They drove on presently, the black depression lifting from Clare’s heart as she realised that he was taking the utmost pains to present the situation to her in a hopeful light. They did know Pat had come to no actual harm. They did know that she meant to keep some tenuous contact with them, even if only in the shortest of notes. And they did have each other as support in this difficult moment of their family life.

  This last, more than anything else, cheered Clare. As she sat beside Greg and remembered his calling her darling and kissing her, however passingly, she felt such an uprush of positive happiness that she wondered if it were not almost wrong to be so happy when she still had not solved the mystery of Pat’s disappearance.

  “I’ll call in at the hotel to see if there’s a message by any chance, before I drive you home,” he said, as they neared the centre of town.

  “You don’t need to drive me home,” she assured him, anxious not to appear to make demands upon him or his time. “I’ll come in with you, just to see if there is anything, and then I can drive myself home.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Dear Greg—” she laughed, and then wondered why she had used that expression—“I’m doing it all the time!”

  “Yes, of course,” he agreed hastily. And when they arrived at the Gloria he parked the car and they went into the big hotel together.

  With a nervous distaste for any more hotel enquiry desks, Clare let him go on ahead, and as she watched him cross the big foyer she thought, “He’s just as attractive as ever. More so, with that touch of grey in his hair. Oh, Greg—!”

  And then she felt her heart miss a couple of beats. For at that moment a good-looking, beautifully dressed woman turned from the reception desk and obviously gave some smiling exclamation at the sight of Greg. Clare was too far away to hear what was said. But there was no mistaking the possessive amusement and affection with which the woman reached up and kissed his cheek.

  CHAPTER V

  SOME instinct, quite inexplicable to her at the time, made Clare turn away and stare with the utmost attention at a display of elegant handbags in a showcase just behind her.

  His life was his own now, she told herself, as she gazed unseeingly at a gold mesh evening bag. Greg was entitled to kiss—or be kissed by—any woman without reference to her. Only she didn’t want him to start explaining or attempting to excuse what had happened. She could not discuss it with him. So long as she need not talk about it she could go on telling herself it was not her business. But if he said anything she simply could not trust herself to make the right reply.

  “If he thinks I just didn’t see—”

  “Clare!” He was beside her now, just a trifle out of breath. “I’m sorry I was so long. I ran into a friend from Munich who has just arrived in London.”

  “Did you really?” She managed to look at him with just exactly the right amount of passing interest. Nothing more, nothing less. “There wasn’t any message, of course?”

  “No, I’m afraid not. It wasn’t very likely, you know. Don’t be too disappointed.”

  “I’m not disappointed,” she assured him. And to herself she said, “It’s just that all the joy’s gone out of me again. And not only for Pat.”

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to drive you home?”

  “Quite sure, thank you. And I’m grateful for your coming with me this morning.”

  “It was the least I could do!”

  She supposed it was. Even if a beautiful, well-dressed woman from Munich also had claims upon his attention.

  “Besides, I wanted to come,” he reminded her urgently. “And we still have to decide what else we should do about Pat. I’ll come round this evening—or tomorrow, shall I?”

  “What else can we do?” She sounded bitterly dispirited again. “We know she’s in no physical danger, as you said. She’s gone away of her own accord. Presumably she will come back—if at all—in her own time.”

  “Don’t talk like that!” he cried in a shocked tone. “As though you’re almost resigned to her staying away.”

  “But if people choose to go away—and stay away—there isn’t very much anyone else can do about it, is there, Greg?”

  He looked uncomfortable, then a trifle resentful. “We could still go to the police,” he insisted. “She’s under age and still the responsibility of her parents.”

  “Oh, those phrases don’t cut so much ice as when we were young,” Clare exclaimed sadly. “Provided we have no reason to think she is in danger—”

  “We don’t know if she is in danger or not,” he cried, suddenly reversing all his comforting arguments of an hour ago. “We know she was physically capable of marching out of that hotel in Westcliff just an hour or so before we came in. But we don’t know where she is and why she went—or with whom she went. Anything could have happened, even since then. We can’t just leave things there. What’s the matter, Clare? It’s as though all the life and determination had suddenly gone out of you.”

  “Perhaps it has. I feel so—so tired and dispirited. I can’t think or make plans any more. I’ll feel better when I’ve had some lunch, I expect. It’s late and—”

  “Stay and have lunch with me here,” he said impulsively.

  But she experienced such a revulsion of feeling at the very idea of being under the same roof as that woman—perhaps having to meet her—that she cried, “Oh, no!” with such distasteful emphasis that he recoiled.

  “Well, of course not if you feel so strongly about it,” he said stiffly.

  “It isn’t that! Oh, Greg, I’m sorry.” Too late she put a placatory hand on his arm, but her confused air gave little support to her apology. “It’s just that I must go home to Marilyn now. She’ll be wondering what has happened. She too has her anxieties, poor child.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He followed her out of the hotel and saw her into the car. She wondered if she imagined, or actually detected, a faint degree of relief in his manner now that he was parting company with her.

  “I’ll come this evening,” he assured her. “Or, if not, I’ll phone and we can decide on a meeting tomorrow to discuss things.”

  “Very well.” She managed to smile faintly before she drove away. But she supposed that his “if not” covered alternative arrangements that he might very well make to spend the evening with the woman who had greeted
him so warmly.

  Marilyn was very sweet and sympathetic when she reached home. She had lunch ready and listened with utmost attention to Clare’s account of the abortive journey.

  “Oh, Mother, don’t be so unhappy about it. At least you know she is perfectly well and doing whatever she is doing of her own accord. It’s mysterious, rather than terrifying. Of course, I realise that you and Dad must get to the bottom of it,” Marilyn added hastily, in the interests of keeping her father on the spot. “But I really think you could relax a little and not take it so hard. You look all in, you poor darling.”

  “It was so unspeakably—disappointing.” Clare could not quite keep back the tremor of distress in her voice, but at least Marilyn would attribute that only to the scene at the Westcliff hotel, and not at all to anything which happened later.

  “I’m sure it was.” Marilyn gave her a well-meant if rather too hearty pat on the shoulder. “I know you don’t like me to criticise Dad, but I don’t think it would have hurt him to take you out and give you a spanking lunch, to cheer you up.”

  “He offered to,” Clare said quickly, in all fairness. “He wanted me to stay and have lunch with him at the Gloria.”

  “Oh, Mother! Why didn’t you?”

  “I—wanted to get back to you. I thought you would be waiting anxiously and—”

  “But, darling, how silly of you!” Marilyn looked really vexed, for it seemed to her that this had been a golden opportunity lost. “You could have phoned me quite easily.”

  “Well, I suppose I could.”

  “Of course you could. You probably disappointed poor old Dad badly. He is making some effort to retrieve his position as head of the family. I think you should encourage him a bit. It’s awful to make an effort to do something difficult and then have it brushed off, just as you’re feeling hopeful but unsure.”