*
It is Toni who brings Rees home. He is very excited to have a lift in a police car. He clings to me like a bush-baby for ten minutes and then snaps out of it, jumps down, runs around the house, from room to room shouting at things, the way he used to do whenever we came back from holiday.
I look at Toni. ‘How is David?’ I ask.
She looks back at me, with a gaze I cannot fathom. We are standing in the hallway and she gestures into the kitchen.
As we descend into the kitchen, she asks for a drink of water, then watches me while I fill a glass at the tap. When I have handed it to her, she takes a sip, then puts the glass down, says quietly, ‘Laura, when was the last time you had any contact with Chloe?’
I look back and say, ‘I don’t know, the wake, I suppose. I saw her at Willow’s wake.’
‘Have you spoken to her on the phone since then?’
I have to think about this one. There have been the withheld calls, the silent messages, the sigh, but no, I haven’t spoken with Chloe. ‘No, no… I’ve spoken with David obviously.’
‘I understand he told you a bit about Chloe’s problems.’
‘The post-natal depression, yes.’
‘Did he tell you anything else about their relationship?’
‘Only that he was worried about her.’ Any minute now, I think, she is going to flip open a notebook. But she doesn’t write anything down. She just asks me questions in that plain, direct voice, looking at me with that plain, direct gaze.
Rees charges into the kitchen and jumps up at me. I catch hold of him, lift him, and he kicks his legs with glee. Toni turns to go, then turns back. ‘Harry, the baby,’ she says to me, ‘how old is he?’
She must know the answer to this. ‘Eight months?’ I suggest, ‘Thereabouts.’
She nods, and turns to leave.
*
Chloe’s disappearance relegates the news of Ahmetaj’s downgraded charges to page three of the local paper. It is Chloe who is the front-page story. The photo they run of her is not flattering – her delicate features do not reproduce well, making her appear pinched. Her hair is drawn back in the photograph. Although she is in a party dress and it is clear the photograph was taken at a social occasion, she is not smiling. There is a quote from David, about his distress. There is another quote, from the police, saying they are keeping an open mind, but the fact that her handbag was left in the car is naturally a cause for concern and, reading the piece as if I know nothing about it, I know what conclusion I would draw.
On page three of the paper, there is a long column about Ahmetaj and the fact that a large group of the clifftop-site residents have moved on. Immigration officials have expressed concern that some of the group have moved on to avoid detention. Ahmetaj had not yet been informed that he was about to be charged with failing to stop at the scene of an accident. Now the charge has been issued and he has gone, there is a warrant out for his arrest.
I know they won’t find him. I saw it in his eyes, the night he came to my house, that here was a man who knew how not to be found.
*
Rees and I attempt to re-establish some sort of routine. It is so good to have him back, and now I do, I miss him far more than I did when he wasn’t here. I take him to nursery with the greatest of reluctance and only because I think it’s important for him to stick to the routine. When he is home, I can hardly bear to be in a different room from him and follow him if he runs off to his bedroom. I realise that I have got through the time without him by blanking him out, using my grief and anger as a smokescreen – but in the face of the compact, joyful reality of my boy, the smoke clears at last. Here is my son, my beautiful, living son. I have so much to make up for to him.
When he is back from nursery, in the afternoons, I am more attentive than I have been at any time since we lost Betty. We go on walks together – the weather is improving enough to make that an enticing prospect. We go shopping, go to cafés. He begins to talk to me about Betty in a way that is different from before. He hasn’t used the past tense yet, but it is apparent he has absorbed that his big sister will not be returning, that he has lost his unknowingness. Once or twice, I catch him with a distracted air, staring at nothing, and I think how this is one of the many beauties of children his age, the way their thoughts flit across their features, how you can almost hear the cogs turning. I wonder at what point we learn to withhold ourselves – gradually, over a period of time, I suppose – the capacity to manipulate must come to us in pieces, before we even understand what that capacity is and just how much it can achieve.
One afternoon, as Rees and I are having an early supper together in the Captain’s Fish Table, I raise the subject of Chloe. Rees has had chicken nuggets from the children’s menu and I have ordered haddock and chips even though I know that after a few bites, my stomach will turn. I have lost the capacity to digest grease. I have just peeled the batter off my haddock and placed pieces of fish on Rees’s plate, quietly, while we talk. There is a chance he will eat it by mistake. I look at the fish on his plate surreptitiously, the tiny black veins in the white flesh. My mouth corrupts me. I pick up a chip with my fingers and try to dunk it in the small bowl of ketchup between us but it is already cold and when I push it into the sauce, it buckles.
‘Did you like living with Daddy and Chloe?’ I ask, with my mouth full in order to make the question sound casual.
Rees looks at me suspiciously. ‘Chloe cried a lot but she let us have Cheerios. Every morning.’
‘Us?’
‘Me and Daddy.’
‘I didn’t know Daddy likes Cheerios.’
Rees nods solemnly, pleased to have superior knowledge of his father’s breakfast habits.
‘Why did Chloe cry?’
Rees shrugs. Why do grown-ups do anything?
‘Did they talk about Betty at all?’
‘Not really,’ he says. ‘They talked about how when Harry did a poo once it came out of the sides on to his sleepy-suit.’
After this, Rees talks about Harry for the rest of the meal. He put a Smartie in Harry’s mouth and Chloe started shouting and Daddy said No, Rees, no, and it wasn’t his fault, he didn’t know babies weren’t allowed Smarties. When Daddy put his finger in and pulled the Smartie out then Harry started crying so he must have liked it and he thinks they were being mean not to let him have it. Harry sits up, and can clap, but you still have to put a cushion behind him in case he falls backwards. He likes watching TV. He claps a lot then. He likes Rees best of all. Rees can make him laugh even when Daddy and Chloe can’t.
Rees is clearly besotted. ‘When can we see Harry?’ he asks no less than three times during the meal.
‘Do you miss Chloe, now she’s gone away?’ I ask casually, after we have finished our first course and are waiting for his ice cream and my coffee.
He frowns, shrugs. ‘She’s quite nice. She’s good at drawing. Her spaghetti has bits in. It’s too spicy. She gave it to me once. I could taste spice.’
*
David is off work and could, in theory, be accompanying Rees and me on some of these outings, bringing Harry along, but I don’t push it. I know he will be absorbed in the hunt for Chloe, in talking to her friends and family, helping Toni, so I wait for him to contact me. The poster appeals round town, the police enquiries – so far, nothing has yielded results. The follow-up reports in subsequent editions of the local paper hint at Chloe’s personal difficulties. David rings me most days, ostensibly to talk to Rees and to update me on what is happening but I know he needs me and eventually pluck up the courage to say, ‘Why don’t we take the boys out together tomorrow?’
Gradually, over the next couple of weeks, we begin to spend more time together. We take the boys for walks on the beach. We avoid the cliffs. We discover that eight miles away, in a village called South Ketton, there is a new playground with climbing frames made of old wooden planks and tyres on ropes.
*
One day, I go with David to the police
station. Toni has asked David to drop in so that she can update him about the search for Chloe and for some reason she has asked me along. It is an awkward, unproductive conversation. We sit either side of a table in a small interview room. To the right of the table is a television on a stand. Rees and Harry are with us and Rees keeps looking at the television and nudging me, wanting me to ask Toni if he can watch something. I keep shushing him, shaking my head – under other circumstances, I would make a joke about it but the situation is too serious. Chloe had other bank and credit cards apart from the ones in her purse that day but no money has been withdrawn from any of her accounts. Nothing has turned up in the coastguard reports. The weather was very bad – fog out at sea, and icy rain – there have been no reports of anyone seeing her leave the car park or walk along the cliffs. David keeps his face very still as Toni tells us this. Sitting next to Toni is a male police officer in plain clothes who says nothing but when I glance at him I have an odd, uncomfortable feeling, as if he is watching me but has looked away in the second before I look at him.
I find Toni’s formality with us disconcerting, considering how close she got to us in the wake of us our losing Betty. I wonder if she thinks it is inappropriate for me to be with David so much immediately after Chloe’s disappearance but she was the one encouraging us to spend more time together, after all. I realise, with a flush of disappointment, that although she knows I am still bereaved, in her head she has moved on, to the next, more pressing thing. In that sense, she is just like everyone else. Everyone else has moved on in their heads, in one way or another. Only David and I are still stuck on Betty, only we understand how we always will be. David and I have not spoken of this.
It is only as we all rise from our chairs that the solemnity of the interview breaks down, a little. Rees hops from my lap and goes over to the television. David has been holding Harry on his shoulder but as he stands up, he passes him to me. He is a plump lump, Harry, soft and heavy and sweet-smelling, an easy baby, he seems to me. He smiles a lot. Automatically, I do that thing that all parents do when they are handed an infant, start to sway gently from side to side, even though Harry is quiet and not in need of pacifying.
David takes a step towards the television, where Rees is making faces in its blank grey screen. ‘Do you know why they have a television in here?’ he asks Rees.
Rees glances at Toni, who smiles at him. ‘Is it so that they can watch programmes when they are bored of people talking?’
David shakes his head. ‘It’s so that they can show people CCTV films, you know, those cameras that they have in shops so that if people steal something they are on the film.’
‘We waved at one!’ Rees shouts, thinking of a shop he and I visited the previous day, delighted to think that Toni and the other policeman might have seen him on television.
‘Yes, young man,’ says the male policeman, who has a northern accent, ‘and what some thieves don’t realise is that when they come in here and we ask them if they stole something, it’s no good them saying they didn’t because we’ve got it right here and can show them how we know.’
Rees is very impressed. Toni and the other officer smile at each other, pleased to have impressed him.
‘How did you know that?’ I ask David as I move Harry to the other shoulder so I can pick up my handbag from the table. ‘No, it’s okay.’
David has reached out his hands to take Harry but drops them when I shake my head. ‘Toni told me when I was in here before,’ he says, ‘after Betty, when we were talking about how to deal with the press. They were everywhere in town for a bit.’
The male officer has opened the door and Rees has charged off down the corridor. David follows him swiftly.
As Toni holds the door open for me, I say to her, ‘I didn’t realise David had been here before.’
‘He did a lot,’ she says, without looking at me. ‘He protected you, you know.’
I give her a look.
She throws the look back at me. ‘You know what the newspapers are like. One of them, unbelievable, he actually said to me, okay, we’ll lay off the mum if you can give us the dad.’
We follow the others out into the corridor. I shift Harry on my shoulder again and he gives a little grizzle. David, Rees and the other officer have disappeared around a corner but as I go to follow them, Toni puts a hand on my arm, lightly. ‘You know,’ she says casually, ‘I’m still your liaison officer too. If there was anything troubling you, about Betty I mean, you can still ask, I mean, if you were concerned about whether or not we’ll find him. I’m sure we will.’ She is looking at me.
‘You mean Ahmetaj?’
She nods, and as she does, Rees sticks his head round the corner, ‘Mum-ee!’
‘I’m coming,’ I call.
Toni is watching me in a way I cannot fathom.
*
David has parked his car on the street, directly outside the station. I buckle Harry into his seat – that’s one thing I haven’t forgotten how to do. As my fingers slip and click the metal into place, I think how comforting that small sound is, the sound that tells you your children are strapped in tight, safe. Rees is wriggling on his booster seat and I lean over Harry to pull his seatbelt across. As I do so, Harry arches his back, as much as he can do against the strap, grizzles more.
‘Is he hungry?’ I ask David as I sit down in the passenger seat.
‘No, tired,’ he says. ‘He woke up early. It would be good if he stayed awake until we got home though, so I can take him out in the buggy. If he falls asleep in the car then one of us will have to sit with him for an hour.’
I turn in my seat. ‘Rees, see if you can make Harry laugh.’
It is only a ten-minute drive to David’s bungalow and thanks to Rees making noises and me turning to tickle Harry’s feet, we keep him awake. David lifts him and takes him inside. Rees and I follow.
‘Daddy, play battleship with me!’ Rees shouts, jumping up and down, before he even has his shoes off.
‘In a minute,’ says David. ‘I’ve just got to take Harry for a walk to get him asleep in his buggy.’
Rees is crestfallen. He kicks the radiator.
‘I’ll take Harry out,’ I say.
‘No, it’s okay.’ David’s voice is exhausted. He hasn’t said anything about what Toni and the other officer told us – or, rather, how little they had to tell us – but I can tell from the way he speaks that he is only holding it together by going through the motions. I wonder how much he thinks of Chloe, if he has decided, inside his head, what has happened. I have been careful not to ask.
‘No, let me do it,’ I say. ‘Come on, it’s okay, you haven’t had Rees to yourself much, I don’t mind, honestly.’
David looks at me and says, ‘You’ll freeze.’
It makes me smile. He always used to do that in the early days, notice what I was wearing, worry about me being cold – his gallantry, it outlived his love. He’s right, though. I am wearing a denim jacket. There was a glimmer of sun when I left the house that morning and I was overly optimistic.
‘Here,’ says David. He turns and lifts a coat from the row of hooks on the wall. It is one of Chloe’s. It is a waterproof but a very smart, stylish one, not at all sporty, made of a deep blue fabric with a shimmer to it. It is lined with fleece and has a high collar with a fake fur trim. I feel as much as see how expensive it must have been, as soon as I put it on. I am a little taller than Chloe but we are the same build. It fits just fine. It’s very snug.
Harry is howling openly now, thrashing in his buggy. David tucks a blanket round him and says, ‘He’ll be out cold by the time you get to the path.’ He has not taken a proper look at me wearing Chloe’s coat.
‘I’ll walk around a bit to make sure.’
*
Pushing the buggy, I take a tour of the estate. It is blank and neat and empty, and I think again of how strange these new places are, as if they house new people, with no secrets, no lives. The road slopes away, downhill, from David a
nd Chloe’s place. No cars pass by and there are few cars on the dark tarmac fore- courts. Everyone is at work, or school, it is the middle of the day. Harry’s howls quickly diminish to snuffles and sighs. As David predicted, he is out quickly. I wonder if we should have changed his nappy first.
*
I walk around for about fifteen minutes, then head back up the rise to the bungalow. I am a few feet away from the door when it happens. Behind me, a car door slams hard but there is nothing unusual in that and I don’t turn. As I lift my hand to ring the doorbell, there is the sound of footsteps skittering up the path behind me but I have no more than a second or two to register the unusual haste of them when there is a heavy thump upon my shoulder. I bend, letting out a shocked cry, but whatever sound I make is drowned by a high-pitched shriek. I turn with my arm raised to protect myself and see a woman in her sixties, shorter than I am and with tight, curly hair and glasses. I only get a glimpse of her face, mouth open, contorted with rage, before I have to turn sideways again to protect myself. She is raining blows on my arm and shoulder and letting out shrieks of inarticulate fury. Her fists are clenched – a blow strikes the side of my head and I stagger back against the door, momentarily afraid I will fall. Between her inarticulate cries she begins to say, ‘You… you… you!’
The front door opens and David is upon us. He gets between me and the woman and uses an arm to lever her backwards, away from me. Her fists are still flailing and she is still shouting inarticulately. Baby Harry is sleeping through it all.
‘Edith!’ David is shouting. ‘Edith, stop it!’ Then, firmly, with depth, the kind of shout that warns of physical reprisal: ‘Stop it now!’
She stops and falls back a step or two, her breath heaving inside her small frame. As I straighten, I see that her glasses are crooked. My hair is awry across my face and I clear it back with one hand, tuck it behind my ear, and stare at the woman who is still beside herself, spitting with fury. ‘How dare you!’ she shouts, looking me up and down. ‘You, of all people.’
Whatever You Love Page 26
