Lightspeed Magazine Issue 35

by Nina Allan

  She had never spoken much of Hanne directly, but there was a surviving photograph of her. It was in sepia tint, and showed a girl of about thirteen wearing a dress with a round white collar and metallic buttons. The girl’s hair was cut in a pageboy, the front bangs secured with a tortoiseshell slide. The image was charmingly old fashioned, although Terri supposed that at the time Hanne’s hairstyle would have seemed rather daring and thoroughly modern. The idea that this girl had been deliberately killed, swept up by forces beyond her control and beyond any normal comprehension, that she had been smashed on the rocks of history, was still dauntingly horrific. It reminded Terri that Allis had also been a victim of these crimes. Her past had haunted Allis all her life, but the worst had already happened and she was not to blame for any of it.

  What more was there to run from? Terri knew there must be something. The very fact of Allis’s disappearance was proof of this. She knew also that there would have been clues. The clues would have most likely been in the house, because this was the last place that Allis had been seen. The police had been over the house many times, but it occurred now to Terri that if they had missed something, it would not have been through negligence, but because they hadn’t known what to look for.

  They would have been looking for signs of disturbance, of what was commonly referred to as foul play.

  But what if the clues to what happened had been more subtle?

  They needed someone who had known Allis better. Or another writer.

  She decided she should telephone Alan Cahill. She knew it would have been more polite to arrange a proper appointment, to go into the office, but she found she still felt hostile towards Cahill and didn’t want to see him face to face. She was aware that Cahill had done nothing to earn her dislike—if anything, it had been the opposite—but there were things about him that annoyed and repelled her. His conventionality, his boring good looks, his particular brand of masculinity, subtle yet patronizing—in Terri’s mind Cahill had become symbolic of everything about the town that was anti-Allis.

  It was Cahill’s secretary that answered the phone, but she put Terri through to Cahill almost at once.

  “I’d like to know some more about the house,” she said to him. “How long have you been the agent?”

  “Is something wrong?” said Cahill. “I did warn you it was in need of attention.”

  “The house is fine,” said Terri. “This is just some research I’m doing. Can you tell me how many people have lived here since the house has been on your books?”

  She could sense him tensing up almost at once, as if the very idea of research, of anything that could not be accommodated on a spreadsheet, aroused his suspicion.

  “I don’t think I can help you. The information we hold on our clients is confidential.”

  “I’m not talking about your clients. It’s the house I’m interested in. All I want is a bit of background.” She wished she could come up with a harmless rationale for her enquiry, something that would satisfy the agent without her having to tell him about Allis. She did not want to talk to Cahill about her project. “I’m writing an article about the town.”

  This at least seemed to make some sense to him. Cahill told her that he had taken over the business from his father ten years before, and that the house had been on their books throughout that period. There had been three sets of clients during his time as manager. The first, a family of four, had been there since his father’s time. The couple after that were Spanish, both teachers at a college in Dover. The most recent tenant had been a retired doctor.

  “He was only there for a couple of months,” said Cahill. “He needed somewhere to stay while he looked for a property to buy in the area. We found him a lovely little place in the end, just up the road on Prince Charles Terrace.” He sounded very pleased with this outcome, and Terri suspected it had been his sale. A mad thought came to her, that he hoped she would include this information in her article.

  “Do you think the doctor would mind if I had a word with him?” Terri asked.

  “I shouldn’t think so. He’s a nice old chap, very friendly. But I don’t think he’d be much use to you. As I said, he’s new to the area. If you really want to know about the house you should speak to the lady next door to you. Judy Whitton, her name is. She’s lived there for years. I know that because we employ her as a cleaner for our short-let properties. She’s completely reliable.”

  “That’s useful to know. Thank you.” She ended the call. She was beginning to feel guilty about Cahill, who had been perfectly pleasant to her and more helpful than he could have realised. She guessed that Judy Whitton was the woman she had seen in the garden the first evening she was there, taking down her washing from the rotary dryer. She tried to remember what she had looked like, but could recall only the way she walked, the stout figure oddly graceful in its navy moccasins. Terri supposed she had been in her sixties, older than Alan Cahill but younger than Allis.

  Terri went outside to the garden, vaguely hoping that the woman might be there again, but there was no sign of her or of anyone, not even a new crop of washing on the rotary dryer. She walked round to the front of the house and rang the bell. She waited on the doorstep for a couple of minutes, standing on tiptoe with her face to the glass, but when it became clear there would be no reply, she went back inside. She felt disappointed and frustrated, as if information was being kept from her deliberately, although she knew that Judy Whitton was probably just out shopping.

  She tidied the kitchen, washing up the plate and mug she had used for her lunch, then set out for a walk along the beach. She had grown used to taking a walk every day. She had developed the habit initially in imitation of Allis, who had stated more than once that her walks along the coastal path were essential to her working routine. But within a couple of days she found herself looking forward to the walks not only for the exercise but as a way of channelling her ideas and bringing her thoughts into order. She liked to think that this was how it had been for Allis too.

  Also, the landscape itself seemed to invite exploration. The level path, the glittering sea, the cliffs rising in the distance were for Terri an epitome of vanished freedoms, of the English summer and the urge to wander, exactly as they had been in Allis’s stories. She walked south towards Kingsdown, taking the well-worn path that would, if she followed it for long enough, eventually bring her to the ferry terminal at Dover. It came to Terri that if she were to board one of the ferries, it would in theory be possible to walk all the way from Allis’s house in Walmer to the house on Bellony in Warsaw. The idea was fascinating to her and a little frightening. It gave the sense that if you walked long enough and far enough you might travel back in time as well as distance.

  Terri smiled. She was beginning to think like Allis. She wondered whether Allis’s unconventional cast of mind, her compulsion to stretch an idea to the very limit of its credibility was a tendency she had been born with, or whether the war had permanently altered her view of things. More than one critic had suggested that it was her marriage to Peter Bennett and the feeling of safety it provided that had given Allis the confidence and security to begin expressing herself in writing, but Terri did not believe it. Allis might have loved Peter Bennett while he was alive, but he had produced no lasting impact on her work. Allis’s first subject was being alone, coming to terms with solitude and drawing strength from it. With his mousy hair and his clean shirts and his buttoned-up Englishness, Peter Bennett had been a brief and incidental accompaniment.

  She thought about the main character in Allis’s novel Orinoco, a boy called Toby who loved ships and lighthouses, anything to do with the sea. He had fallen in love with an angelfish, and drowned. It seemed at least possible that Toby had been modelled on Peter, but far more than any superficial similarities with her dead husband, Toby Chowne resembled Allis herself, or rather the quintessential Allis character: a shy and lonely child marooned in some strange aftermath of loss.

  Terri was beginning to reali
se that there was far more to Allis’s story than could be covered in a single article. She thought there was at least the possibility that she could persuade a publisher to commission her to write Allis’s biography. If this happened, it could be life-changing. So much for Noel’s sneering doubts about her ability to make a go of it alone.

  She stepped off the path and began walking across the beach towards the edge of the sea. A narrow white line of surf flowed back and forth over the pebbles at the tideline, robbing them of their protective opacity. They emerged jewel-bright from the water, glistening in the harsh white sunlight, the pearlescent greys, veined greens, and polished ambers of Murano glass. The stones tumbled and slid beneath her feet, their rolling clack and crunch as smoothly satisfying as the rattle of barley sugars shaken together in a jar. The sky was a vast blue vault. The surface of the sea flashed like tinfoil, its undulating meniscus a snare for the sun. The wind had dropped completely, and the rising heat of the day had begun to induce in Terri a mild euphoria. She had foolishly come out without a hat. She had one back at the house, a tatty green straw boater she had discovered hanging on a nail just inside the cupboard under the stairs. She had a feeling about the hat, that it might be one of the few things left in the house that had actually belonged to Allis.

  At Hope Point the path divided in two, climbing straight on towards the head of the Down or turning left to thread its way along the foot of the cliffs. Terri did not like the lower path. The sight of the sheer white cliffs towering above her made her afraid. She came to a standstill, thinking how easily a person might be caught by an encroaching tide.

  Could this be how Allis had died? She hated to think so. She could not bear to think of her terror, realising that she was trapped and there was no way round. She would have tried to swim, of course, only the sea would have driven her back into the cliffs. From where Terri stood, she could just make out the grey slate roofs of the first cottages on the road to St Margaret’s at Cliffe. The skyline was blurry with heat haze, and to Terri it seemed for a moment as if the cottages were floating in thin air. Their roofs were sharply triangular, rigid as stage sets, flat as the cardboard façade in a children’s theatre. There was a toy theatre in Allis’s novel The Carousel. Terri mopped at her face with the back of her hand. The sweat was pouring off her, strands of hair were plastered to her forehead and neck. She turned back the way she had come, cutting diagonally across the shingle and heading for the cracked strip of asphalt that ran up from the head of the beach towards the Kingsdown Road. The road was shaded by trees, and was much easier to walk on than the shingle. She was back at the house in a little under half an hour. She went straight upstairs to the bathroom and stepped into the shower. She turned the cold tap almost all the way over, letting the fierce, hard jets bombard her skin with coolness. She leaned against the wall, her eyes half closed, listening to the sound of the water striking the tiles. The feeling of distance that had assaulted her at the cliff edge gradually receded. It was as if she was absorbing reality through her skin along with the moisture.

  She dried herself and put on fresh clothes, then made herself a cup of tea and went to sit in her office. As she pushed open the door, she had the brief but strong conviction that someone was inside, waiting for her, but it was clear as she looked about her that the room was empty. She shook her head and the room seemed to spin. She supposed she was still feeling the effects of sun exposure. She opened the window as far as it would go, filling the office with the combined scents of bleached seaweed and exhausted buddleia. The afternoon heat was gradually beginning to subside. She noticed that the speedwell and ragwort she had placed in a jug on the windowsill had all wilted, and she felt a brief flash of annoyance at herself for being so thoughtless, for leaving the jug in the full glare of the sun. The jug was ugly, an Art Deco imitation she had found in one of the kitchen cabinets, its squat lines mitigated only by the modest presence of the wildflowers.

  She wondered if the house was getting to her, the self-imposed isolation. Apart from Cahill and the girl on the supermarket checkout, she had not spoken to anyone since her brief conversation with Noel the day she arrived.

  She briefly considered ringing Janet, but decided against it. Janet would be pleased to hear from her, but she would also see her call as an opportunity to bring Terri up to date with magazine gossip. Terri had no wish to hear it, at least not yet. To be drawn back into that world so soon after leaving it would only be a distraction. But neither did she want to talk to Janet about Allis. She felt proprietorial towards Allis, protective even. She had the sense that to talk about her to anyone else would be to betray her in some way, that it might even damage her ability to write about her.

  She had felt that way about her subjects before, but never so strongly. She decided she would have an early supper then make an attempt at redrafting the opening of her article. She straightened the papers that were already on her desk, separating the photocopied cuttings from the handwritten notes. As she was doing this, something slipped from between the pages and fell to the floor. When Terri bent to pick it up, she saw it was the photograph of Allis’s sister Hanne. The photograph of the girl in the white-collared dress was one of the few surviving images from Allis’s life before the war, and Terri had made an enlarged copy of it before leaving London. The picture had been used to illustrate almost every known article on Allis, and had also appeared as an inset on the book jacket for her final novel, East Wind, which had also been her only novel written for adults.

  East Wind was a strange book. It was presented as a novel, as fiction, but seemed to draw so heavily on Allis’s own experience that it was a memoir in all but name. Yet there were certain details that had been altered for no obvious reason, and other things that didn’t sound right, the way the uncle had joined the Nazi party, for instance. On the few occasions when she had mentioned them in public, Allis had invariably portrayed her family as vehement opponents of everything Hitler stood for.

  Terri had studied the photograph of Hanne so often she would have said she remembered it in every detail. Hanne in East Wind was characterised as a shy girl, but hugely intelligent, a mathematical prodigy who had already won a number of regional chess tournaments. Somehow this depiction of Hanne had never corresponded with the impression Terri drew from the photograph. The Hanne of the picture looked younger and less self-aware, a child with a Mickey Mouse watch and a tortoiseshell slide. The watch especially had struck her as odd. She had researched the detail, and discovered that the first Mickey Mouse watches had been manufactured by Ingersoll in 1933. It was therefore possible that Hanne had owned one, but now, as Terri prepared to return the picture to the folder where she kept all the other Allis photographs, something else occurred to her. The online article she read had informed her that there was not just one type of Mickey Mouse watch, but many hundreds, that the prototype had proved so popular that scarcely a year went by without Ingersoll, and later Timex, who took over the company, bringing out some new variant or design. There were enthusiasts who collected Mickey watches exclusively.

  The article had included pictures of several of the most popular designs, ranging from the original Steamboat Willie right through to a digital model from the 1990s. Something about one of them looked familiar, and although Terri had meant to check it, she never had.

  She booted up her laptop and navigated her way back to the watch site. The photograph of Hanne had lost some of its sharpness in the process of being enlarged, but the details were still quite clear, the design of the watch more easily discernible. With the photograph beside her on the table, she scrolled through the various images, searching until she came to the one that had reminded her of the watch Hanne was wearing in the photograph. She checked it against the picture, clicking on it to enlarge it until she was sure.

  The watch on the screen was a Mickey Mouse “Mod” watch, with a white strap and oversized buckle. It was identical with the watch on Hanne’s wrist.

  The caption that went with the picture
said that the Mickey Mouse “Mod” watch first appeared in 1968. Allis’s sister had died in 1944. Whoever the child in the photograph was, it couldn’t be Hanne.

  Terri felt herself overcome by a feeling of unreality, of dissociation, reminding her of how she had felt on the beach in the glare of the sun. None of this made any sense. She looked at the photograph again, and the idea came to her that it was Noel, that Noel had found the photograph and doctored it in some way. It would be easy to achieve if you knew Photoshop, and Noel did. He could have altered the photograph to frighten her or ruin her article. Perhaps he had even discovered where she was, and was hoping she would run to him for help.

  But that didn’t make sense either. Even if by some awful chance Noel had found out where she was, he knew nothing about her Allis project. So far as Terri could remember, the subject of Allis and her books had never once been mentioned between them.

  She needed time to think. She returned the picture to the file and went to make supper. Afterwards, she sat and watched television. Normally she judged television to be a waste of time, but on that evening she found some comfort in familiarity. The chat shows and sitcoms and home improvement programmes were inanely repetitive, but they were proof that the world was still out there, that she could rejoin it any time she chose.

  Terri wondered if that was what Allis had done, after all: simply rejoined the world, in another place and using another name, bored with the life she had made for herself and curious to try out another.

  She found it difficult to get to sleep. The house itself seemed wakeful, as if it too had been disturbed by her discovery. Terri had not looked at the photograph again before going to bed, but once she was there it was all she could seem to think about.