by Nina Allan
Allis arrived in London soon after the war. She was taken in by relatives in Highgate, where she met and married an Englishman, Peter Bennett. Peter Bennett was a keen weekend sailor, and it was his idea that they should move out of London. After a couple of months’ searching and some minor disagreements, they finally agreed to settle on the house in Walmer. Two years later, Peter Bennett was drowned in a sailing accident.
Allis stayed on in Walmer, which she said she had grown used to. By then she had sold her first novel, which was published to favourable reviews and some small success. She could perhaps have made more of this, but her strong dislike of publicity made her a difficult author for the publisher to promote. She disappeared soon after her fiftieth birthday. Of those who were interested, most believed that, like her husband’s, her death had been from misadventure. Allis liked to walk along the foot of the cliffs, and it was easy to get caught by the tide unless you were careful. A small number of people suggested that she might have walked into the sea deliberately, but in the end the speculation died down. Allis’s books had been popular for a time, but she had never been famous. The quietly abandoned house, with its ordered rooms, left no hint of violence.
When seven years had passed and she had not returned, Allis was declared legally dead. The house in Walmer was sold, and the money divided equally between the relatives in Highgate.
The new owner was a Turkish businessman based in London. Like Peter Bennett, he was keen on sailing, and bought the house as a weekend retreat, but he soon found that he was too busy to spend much time there. It took longer to get to Walmer than he had bargained on, and he spent enough time on the road as it was. He decided the most sensible thing would be to rent the place out.
Terri moved in on the Wednesday. She had spent the weekend packing up her flat in Camden. Some of her stuff went into storage, but most of it she found she was happier getting rid of. She wanted to make a fresh start. She arranged to sub-let the flat to Janet, who had been her best friend on the magazine. Once the six-month tenure ran out, Janet could either renew it in her own name or let the flat go. Terri had decided she wouldn’t go back there, whatever happened. The place would always mean Noel to her. If she wanted to return to London, she would find somewhere else.
She travelled down to Kent by train. She had thought about hiring a car, but in the end had decided not to. Allis had never learned to drive, and for the next couple of weeks Terri wanted to put herself in Allis’s shoes. Knowing she would have to carry everything had made her selective about the things she brought with her. It was surprising how much she had been able to fit into a rucksack and two large holdalls. Walmer station was closest to the house, but there was the matter of the keys, which she had arranged to collect directly from the estate agent. It was only a short walk from Deal station to the agency office and, even though her luggage was heavy, Terri managed without too much difficulty, but Alan Cahill reacted to her arrival on foot with a kind of incredulous amusement, as if she had just stumbled in from China.
“If you hold on just a moment, I’ll run you down to the house,” he said. “You can’t possibly walk.”
He glanced again at the bulging holdalls. He looked to be in his early fifties. Terri noticed he was wearing cufflinks, and had the blandly smooth good looks of a host on a television chat show. Terri could tell that he was curious about what she was doing there, that for people like Cahill the very fact of her being alone and without a car would give cause for suspicion.
She wondered if people in the town had looked at Allis in that same way when she first arrived. Terri had managed to find a photograph of her from that time, a small, nervous-looking woman in a badly fitting plaid dress, her dark hair tugged back from her face in a bedraggled bun. Later photographs showed her looking more acclimatized, her hair clipped in a neat gamine crop, her figure fuller and her face less gaunt. She seemed altogether less foreign.
Terri’s first impulse was to tell Cahill she would prefer to make her own way out to Allis’s. But the thought of lugging the holdalls was not appealing and so she gave in. She was thankful it was just a short drive. She was uncomfortable with the agent, and had no wish to become more closely acquainted with him. She gazed determinedly out of the window for the entire journey, refusing to respond in more than monosyllables to his hopeful gambits about the weather, the comfort or otherwise of her train journey, the shortage of available parking.
“Would you like a hand with your stuff?” Cahill said as he brought his car to a standstill in front of the house.
Terri did her best to smile, then shook her head. “No thank you,” she said. “You can drop me here.” She wished he would just go. She most emphatically did not want the agent inside the house with her.
“Well, you know where we are.” He handed her the keys, four of them on a key ring, the house’s number scrawled in bold indelible pencil on the cardboard fob.
She hauled her luggage out of the boot and on to the drive. Cahill backed his car and then turned it around, manoeuvring with difficulty in the narrow access road. Terri waved to him briefly, waiting until he was out of sight before approaching the house. Once the car was gone, it was perfectly quiet. The tide was far out, the horizon blurred by heat haze. Now that she had returned here to live, the place felt different, subtly enchanted, as if it had decided to trust her with some of its secrets.
There was no one at all to be seen. Suddenly she found it easy to imagine that Allis was close by, watching. She would be an old lady now, but that was no reason to presume that she was dead.
The front door would not open at first, and for a moment Terri thought Cahill had given her the wrong set of keys. But suddenly the lock gave way and she was inside. The hallway was stuffy with heat and the air smelled stale. Dust motes danced in the angle of light from the open door. There was a pile of junk mail on the doormat. Terri carried her things inside and shut the door.
There were eight rooms in total, arranged over the two floors: a sitting room at the front, with two smaller reception rooms and the kitchen downstairs, three bedrooms and a bathroom on the storey above. The place had been hoovered and cleaned, but there was a down-at-heel air to everything and she could see at once that the house was in need of many minor repairs. The furniture was a depressing mix of nineteen-forties utility and modern flatpack. Terri went from room to room, feeling vaguely disappointed and wondering how much of this junk, if any, had been in the house when Allis was still living there.
As well as the front door key, there was a key to the kitchen door at the back, and another, smaller key that opened the gate to the side access passage where the bins were stored. There was a fourth key, which seemed not to fit anything. For the first time since deciding to rent the house, she asked herself what exactly she had hoped for in coming here. The house was just a shell, after all; by itself, it could tell her nothing. She wondered if she had invested it with too much power, if she had talked herself into believing it was the key to a mystery in order to give herself an excuse for running away from London and all the painful decisions of the last few months.
As if to press home the point, her mobile started ringing. The room’s sparse furnishings made it sound aggressively loud.
She flicked it open and glanced at the screen. The caller was Noel. She felt immediately flustered, at a disadvantage. In her mind, Noel had already receded into the past. The idea that he might call her here hadn’t entered her head. She wished she had thought to block his number.
As it was, she picked up, knowing that if she didn’t, he would call again.
“Where are you?” he said. He gave no greeting, not even a simple hello, but Noel was like that. He said what was on his mind, regardless of whether you needed or wanted to hear it.
“It doesn’t matter where I am,” Terri said. “I needed to get out of London for a couple of weeks.”
“Is it true that you’ve quit your job? I phoned the office first, but Janet said you left last week.”
; “Yes, it’s true. I should have left ages ago.” She wanted to say it had been him, or more accurately put her final row with him, that had finally given her the courage to hand in her notice. The prospect of going freelance had terrified her and she kept finding excuses not to do it. Splitting up with Noel had turned out to be easy by comparison. Once that had been accomplished, she found she was able to take care of the other business as well.
“You’re not serious?” Noel said. “How on earth are you going to manage?”
“I’ve got some jobs, pieces to tide me over. And I’m working on new stuff already. Anyway, I’ll be fine.” She felt angry at herself for answering his questions, for feeling she had to justify herself in front of him. She felt like asking him what the hell it had to do with him, but if she did there would be a row and as far as she was concerned that part of her life was over. She hated what he was doing, trying to make out that nothing had changed, trying to draw her back into his life by the simple expedient of ignoring everything she said.
It was what he always did, a kind of inverted bullying.
“Can I come and see you in your bolt hole?” he said. “I’m sure it’s very cosy.”
“No, Noel, you can’t,” she said. “Goodbye.”
She broke the connection. Her heart was racing. The thought that he might find out where she was, was appalling.
After a couple of seconds, she switched off the phone. If shaking Noel loose meant she had to cut herself off from the world for a while, then it was a price worth paying. It occurred to her that Allis would not have had a mobile phone, and that if she was serious about trying to re-enter Allis’s world, then she should give up her mobile also.
For all her love of the place, as a foreigner and a writer Allis Bennett must have been isolated here. Had she welcomed that isolation, or had it been forced upon her? Did she have any friends in the town at all? One of the difficulties of writing about Allis was that no one seemed to have known her very well.
Allis had never remarried and rarely travelled. It was as if her life had been divided into two acts: there was before-Walmer, where she had lived in the world and terrible things had happened to her, and then there was Walmer, where everything came to a standstill and her life appeared to enter a cul-de-sac. There had been a third act also, of course: the event or sequence of events that had brought about Allis’s disappearance from Walmer and whatever it was that had happened after that. Action, reaction, synthesis. Terri found she could hardly imagine what it must have been like for Allis, to arrive in a foreign country among a host of strangers who could have had only the shallowest understanding of what had happened to her. For most people, the present becomes the past only gradually, but for Allis there had been this sudden and irrevocable division, potently symbolized by her final, one-way crossing of the English Channel.
Had Allis taken to writing as a way of coming to terms with her life, or had writing been a part of her life already? Terri had no idea. She hoped that this was something she would find out in time.
She opened one of her holdalls and took out the small folder of photographs and newspaper clippings that was all the material on Allis she had been able to amass so far. She dug around in it until she found the photograph of Allis as a new immigrant, the Allis of the plaid dress and untidy bun. She propped the photo on the mantelpiece in the smaller of the two back sitting rooms, the room she had already decided would serve as her office. The room overlooked the garden, and seemed private from the rest of the house.
She wondered which room Allis had worked in, where she had written her novels. Once again, Terri hoped she could find out.
She spent the next couple of hours unpacking her things and trying to give the house a feeling of home. There was a gateleg table in the front sitting room, which was sturdy enough to be used as a writing desk yet small enough to be easily moved. She dragged it through to her new office and set up her laptop, arranging her books and papers on the melamine shelves that lined the chimney alcove. Because of the problems of transporting them, she had been forced to severely ration her choice of books, but the sight of those she had brought made her feel immediately uplifted. The room now had a purpose to it. She could even begin to believe she might succeed, not only in this assignment but as a freelance writer.
Once everything was unpacked, she ventured outside. As she deposited her few bits of rubbish in one of the dustbins, she noticed there was a side door in the access passage, an alternative entrance to the house that from its position should have led directly into her office. Terri knew already that no such doorway existed, at least not on the inside of the house. The door had a lock, and Terri tentatively tried it with the last key on her key ring, the odd fourth key she had been unable to find a use for. The key fitted but it would not turn. She decided that the door must have been sealed, the doorway bricked and plastered over from the inside. Such things were commonplace, especially in older houses. At least she now knew what the fourth key had been for.
The discovery pleased her. It was small and it was meaningless, but it was something about the house she had found out for herself. At the very least, it felt like a start.
It was getting towards evening. The sky was a mottled pink. The back garden was badly overgrown, a chaotic mass of blackberry thorns and nettles and seeding grasses. Among the waist-high scrub there were stands of goldenrod and speedwell and cow parsley, the same kniphofia she had seen on the beach. Terri smelled the scents of wild meadows, the dry-grass, pollen-rich aroma of so many lost summers. She thought of the way she and Melinda had drifted apart. There had been tears, and there had been letters, and then there had been the slow, cruel erosion of time. This gradual dissolution of their closeness was something Terri still found painful and shocking, even in retrospect. In it, she could see everything she needed to know of transience and eventual mortality.
She remembered an image that often came to her when she thought about this, the image of two trains stopped at a station on opposite platforms. There was a girl looking out of the window of one of the carriages, catching the eye of a girl looking out of the compartment opposite. They held each other’s gaze for a long moment, a moment in which worlds arose and possibilities extended. Then the trains moved off in opposite directions and they never saw each other again.
The image was from one of Allis’s books, The Hurdy Gurdy Man. When Terri had first read it, she cried, because it seemed to describe exactly what had happened to herself and Melinda.
She turned to go inside, thinking she should get herself something to eat. She saw with a start that she had not been alone, that there was a woman in the next-door garden, taking washing off a rotary clothesline and placing it into a yellow plastic basket. The woman nodded to her briefly and then disappeared indoors.
Terri made supper, then spent the rest of the evening going through her Allis file, arranging the material she had in date order, then dividing it between four new files. Each of the files related to a different aspect of Allis’s life. She hoped eventually to fill these files with new material.
At some point she realised she had completely forgotten about Noel’s phone call. Thinking about him directly brought him no closer, and she found that to get any sense of him she had to conjure him up, like a character in a book she had read some time ago and mostly forgotten.
She went to bed late, choosing the main bedroom at the front of the house, which had a wonderful view of the sea and that she felt certain must have been Allis’s. She listened to the midnight news, the sound of the waves through the open window as constant as radio static.
It was a hot night. She tossed and turned for a while in the unfamiliar bed, then fell soundly asleep.
Arranging and rearranging the facts, Terri came to the conclusion that Allis’s disappearance had one of three causes: she had met with sudden death, she had gone off with a new lover, or something unwelcome had emerged from her past.
Terri did not believe that Allis had been murdered or drowned
; the former was too bizarre, and in the case of the latter her body would have been bound to come ashore eventually. The same was also true of the suicide theory.
It was more likely that Allis had met a new man, but this still did not explain why she had abandoned her home and all her possessions. The evidence showed that Allis had left the house suddenly and without preparation. There had even been a load of washing still in the machine.
Aside from a few book signings in London, Allis had rarely left the town. Her life spoke of order and planning, not random impulse. It seemed unlikely to Terri that she would have altered her behaviour so radically, even for a new lover, unless some crime had been committed.
She entertained brief visions of Allis falling for a murderer, a bank robber, some man on the run, but then supposed her imagination was getting away with her. This left only the past. Terri made a list of the most likely reasons a person might have for wanting to disappear. There were many possibilities, but most of these could be categorized under one of three main headings: love, money, and fear. She had already discounted the man theory, and it was also a matter of record that Allis had not been in debt. It was one of the first things the police had looked into, and it had been shown that, although Allis was by no means rich, she was certainly comfortable. Her books brought her in a reasonable income, especially since the most popular, The Carousel, had been adapted for film by the Children’s Film Foundation. She owned the house in Walmer outright. Her accounts all stood securely in the black.
The police had kept a track on her bank accounts for several months after her disappearance, waiting to see if there were any withdrawals. There were none. Allis’s money, along with her house, had passed duly into the hands of the Highgate cousins.
What could have frightened or disturbed Allis Bennett so badly that she had made herself disappear without a trace?
It was true that Allis’s past was filled with tragedy, that she had lost her parents and her sister at a young age. As she reread Allis’s stories and studied the background to her life, it became increasingly clear to Terri that the loss of her sister Hanne had been the defining event of Allis’s life, and that most if not all of her books were to some extent attempts to come to terms with it.
