Tell Me Where You Are

by Moira Forsyth

  ‘It happened before Christmas but I never said anything in case I couldn’t stick with it. I know you think I’m weak.’

  ‘I never said that!’

  ‘You’ve got very high standards. Anyway, this time it is over.’ She sighed. ‘It’s not easy though. So – will you meet me in Aberdeen?’

  ‘I’ve just got home from Aberdeen , and Kate’s here. Anyway, I’m back at work tomorrow.’

  Gillian sighed. ‘I’m getting carried away, I suppose.’

  ‘No, it’s all right – I’m worried too. Maybe once Kate’s gone home – let me think about it.’

  ‘It is weird, isn’t it – both of us thinking we saw Susan?’

  ‘Very odd.’

  ‘She’s still our sister, no matter what she’s done.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Frances said, but not as if she meant it.

  After supper, Frances drove over to Kenny’s house and spent the evening with him, mainly in bed.

  ‘I mustn’t doze off,’ she said eventually, rousing herself.

  ‘Stay a bit longer.’ He tugged her back into the comfortable nest of his arms.

  ‘Ten minutes.’

  ‘This was a nice surprise,’ he told her. ‘Thought you’d be too tired to bother.’

  ‘Back to work tomorrow,’ she reminded him. ‘Things are rather difficult at the moment. I needed a treat.’

  He laughed. ‘Glad to oblige.’

  She slipped from him so easily he sensed he was no more than that: an interlude, a bit of cheer in her life. Calmly, she put up her hair in front of his mirror, still naked, but no longer vulnerable and tender as she had been in his bed.

  ‘Your beautiful hair,’ he murmured.

  She considered her reflection. ‘I was thinking I might have it cut.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, we all need to change, don’t you think? I’ve been stuck for a long time with this image.’ She turned to him as she pulled on her clothes with swift economy. ‘I’m not mad, am I?’ she asked, as if this were a reasonable question. ‘No-one in our family has ever been anything but sane and sensible. And yet – ’

  He propped himself up on one elbow. ‘Is something wrong?’

  Frances dipped her head first to one side then the other, fastening earrings. ‘I was thinking about my sister Susan. Somewhere in our childhood, or more likely adolescence, there must have been clues, something to indicate she would become the way she seems to be now. Odd, at least. To go and leave your daughter without a word …’

  ‘But she left all her family years ago, didn’t she, without a word?’

  ‘I suppose she did,’ Frances admitted. ‘Was she ill then, I wonder. Poor Alec. What a vengeance for Fate to take.’

  ‘What – to find you’ve left a beautiful sane wife to go off with an inferior model who turns out to be crackers?’

  Frances flushed ‘Well, I wouldn’t put it like that myself. Anyway,’ she countered, ‘Susan was stunning.’

  She crossed to the bed and leaned over him, to kiss the top of his greying head, where the springy hair was thinning. She patted his stomach. ‘Back on the diet,’ she suggested.

  ‘Aye, aye.’ He reached up and pulled her close, his hand warm on the back of her neck. ‘See you soon, eh?’

  Driving home, she thought how lucky she was to have him there, undemanding and kind.

  Alone in his cottage, Kenny got up and pulled on his old corduroy trousers and a jersey, and went to make himself a mug of tea. Changing his mind, he poured a dram instead and settled in front of the television, the dog at his feet.

  ‘Lucky Kenny,’ his friends said. ‘Beautiful woman, plenty of sex, no going round Tesco on Saturdays.’

  ‘Aye,’ he agreed. ‘A fine life.’

  Later, going out with the dog to let it have its last pee of the day in the lane, he had no memory of what he had just been watching. The sky was clear and full of stars and he smelt the sharp tang of frost in the air. Briefly, turning indoors after the dog, which felt the cold now in old age and was hurrying back to the fire, he longed for a warm woman still to be in his bed, and company that would last the whole night through.

  After her unsatisfactory conversation with Frances, Gillian could not settle. Always before, in this sort of restless empty space, she had turned to Steve, even on Sundays when he was with his wife and children and not supposed to be contacted. She had left messages on his mobile phone and he had often picked them up when he strolled along to the pub in the evening. Sometimes he even came round to see her. Then, if he had forgotten to switch it off, the mobile rang again while they were in bed and it was Carol, asking him to bring her something from the corner shop on his way home. When this had happened two or three times they realised she had guessed what was going on, though she had never known who Gillian was, or (thank God) where she lived. For several weeks their affair became much more intense and passionate. Then that too changed and Gillian knew there must have been some kind of confrontation. Carol had used the children against him, Steve said.

  She knew it had to end; he would never leave his family. For months, they went on without even mentioning Carol or his children. They existed in a vacuum. Perhaps he had reached some sort of accommodation with his wife. Some kind of payoff had been exacted, Gillian guessed. Her own bargain with him, which she had always felt left room for change, closed in, and she lost hope.

  ‘End it,’ her friends advised. Eventually, two weeks before Christmas, she did. He took it well. Rueful, he gave her a silver bracelet she put at the back of her dressing table drawer. ‘I’ll miss you’ he said, ‘so much. I wish it could be different’’

  She realised now that he had expected her to relent after a while, as she so often had before. Eventually it would all start up again. They’d had several passionate ‘last nights’ together; this time, determined it would be the last, she abandoned caution, making the most of it. She had a pinch of anxiety about it. The last time. So evocative, the ache of loss before it has happened.

  So here was Sunday evening again with no Steve, no phone calls. She must turn to something else, call a friend, go for a drink. Instead she went to the cupboard in her bedroom and began to delve into the boxes and papers heaped on the bottom shelf. She was sure she had an album of photographs from their childhood. Five years ago she had gone to a school reunion. Everyone had been asked to bring photographs of themselves at school so she had raided her parents’ collection.

  ‘Bring back that album,’ her mother had reminded, more than once. She had not mentioned it for a while so perhaps she had forgotten Gillian still had it. It was full of photographs of all three of them.

  As she hunted, the telephone began to ring. Steve. In her haste to answer it, she knocked her ankle on the door frame without noticing the pain, wondering next day what had caused the bruise. It was not Steve. It was nobody. Silence, and a click, then the dialling tone. She dialled back without recognising the number, an Edinburgh one. It rang sounding hollow, but no-one answered.

  She hung up and went back to the cupboard. The album had fallen onto the floor. She took it into the living-room and poured herself a glass of wine. The telephone rang again, but again there was no-one. She checked the number and it was the same. If this kept on happening, she would call the police. Two women had been attacked by an intruder in their own houses in Edinburgh recently. She put the chain up on the door then went back to her glass of wine and the photograph album.

  There were a number of loose pictures stuffed between the pages. She tipped them onto the sofa beside her and they spread to a fan of memories.

  It struck her that Susan was rarely set in the middle as she was in the family, and in the studio photograph she had picked up first. There, they were all facing the camera, smiling. There was something stiff about the pose and the smiles held too long, the neatly arranged dresses, skirts spread out with a glimpse of net petticoats and the hair brushed smooth, held by ribbons tied in perky bows. Susan looked particularly wooden.
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br />   The snapshots taken in the garden, on beaches or in parks, during weekends and holidays, were less clear, the faces tiny, eyes screwed up as they faced into the sun, but they were full of movement. We are real in those, Gillian thought, our ribbons undone, socks slipping down, caught for a moment, but fidgeting to be off again.

  It was Susan who seemed to move furthest and fastest, to be least in evidence, her face turned away or obscured by tangles of fringe. She slipped to the edge, almost out of the frame altogether.

  Later, black and white changed to Kodacolour. They had longer legs and hair, shorter skirts. That was on the last few pages. If there was in their parents’ house another, later album, Gillian knew that Susan dropped out of that one at the same time as Frances, but not because like Frances, she had married. She had dropped out of their family life. Several years of escalating rows over cigarette packets found in her room, the smell of drink on her breath as she came in later and later every weekend, had climaxed in her abrupt departure to live with Adam. The unreliable, still married and ultimately absconding Adam. At the same time she had abandoned university and taken a series of short-lived jobs in shops and cafes. All of that was jumbled together in Gillian’s memory, since now she could hardly remember what triggered the moment of despair when she realised she had to leave home too, if she was to have any life at all.

  Why on earth do I want Susan to turn up again, Gillian asked herself. She caused me nothing but misery.

  This was not quite true. What neither the vague family snaps nor the storm of Susan’s leaving home revealed was that Susan had been the kind of girl in whose shadow you would gratefully fall. She was always surrounded by other girls when she was a child, and by girls and boys when she began to grow up. She was the one they all flocked round and longed to be noticed by. There was something magical about the aura she cast, something magical about Susan. And Gillian, the little sister growing up behind her, had basked in Susan’s brief bursts of affection, her generosity, her confidences. You’re the only one who knows. Don’t tell anyone else, promise. Swear. So she promised, she swore fidelity, and was left, when Susan had whirled off on another adventure without her, with a sense of excitement so enervating it was like lust or shame. She had gathered Susan’s secrets to her like jewels.

  Susan had not told her everything about Adam. It had been as much of a shock to her as to Frances when they discovered Susan was living with someone five years older, a man who had left his wife.

  Gillian turned over the photographs, dreaming. When the telephone rang again she did not hurry to answer. When she eventually picked it up, she was sure she heard breathing.

  ‘Who is this?’ she demanded, then called loudly, as if to someone else in the room. ‘Steve – it’s that crank again. Come here, would you?’

  The dialling tone. She was shaking. Some crank, some pervert. And yet, as if compelled, she dialled the number again. It rang and rang, sounding hollow and far away. As it went on ringing, she turned slowly towards the sofa, and saw lying, face up, a clear photograph of herself with Susan and Frances on either side. The three Douglas girls.

  On and on, in an empty call box on the other side of Edinburgh, the telephone went on ringing.

  As Frances let herself into the house, her telephone was ringing too. She struggled with boots and coat, hurrying through the kitchen from the back door, but it stopped as she reached it. Then she realised someone had picked up her bedroom extension. Andrew appeared at the top of the stairs.

  ‘It’s him again,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll take it upstairs, I’m going to bed in a minute anyway.’

  ‘I want to see a film that starts at half past ten,’ Andrew said.

  ‘You’ll never get up in the morning.’

  ‘It’s one of these teacher training days tomorrow,’ he reminded her. ‘We’re not going in till Tuesday.’

  ‘Where’s Kate?’

  ‘In bed, I think.’

  He thought. They were living separate lives in the same house. Of course they were – Jack and Andrew had different friends and interests. She wondered if Alec was calling to say he was coming to take Kate home.

  ‘Any news?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really. Gill called me.’

  ‘I know, I’ve spoken to her.’

  ‘Did she say – ’

  ‘I think we’ve got Susan on our minds, that’s all. I thought I saw her in Aberdeen. Wishful thinking – we both want to believe she’s all right.’ He began to answer but she interrupted. ‘When are you coming for Kate?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Alec, what is she supposed to do here?’ I’m back at work tomorrow, then Andrew will be at school – it’s no use.’

  ‘Could she enrol where Andrew is? Which school does he go to?’

  ‘Dingwall. As you ought to know.’

  ‘Oh yes, sorry – ’

  ‘Are you going to take Kate home or not?’

  A pause lengthened to uneasy silence. Frances waited.

  ‘She’s better with you. I’m at the restaurant all the time. You’ve no idea, it’s a twenty hour a day job. I just can’t keep an eye on her, and she needs it. Needs a mother, but – look, I’ll send money, it needn’t cost you anything – ’

  ‘For God’s sake. It’s not the cost, it’s just that it’s wrong. She’s your responsibility.’

  She halted, aware of the ambiguity of this, the fragility of his relationship with all of them, not just Kate. If he had run from his own sons, what was to keep him with Kate, if Susan was no longer there?

  ‘Why don’t you ask Kate?’ he said, meek now, as he could well afford to be. He knew Frances. She would not say no, in the end.

  ‘I will. She’s not a child, she has to decide for herself.’

  She was a child though, that was the trouble, a minor, and if anyone had to take responsibility for making the right decision, it was not Kate.

  ‘Give me a ring when you’ve spoken to her.’

  ‘She’s in bed. I’ll call you tomorrow night.’ She put the receiver down, not waiting for a response.

  When she tapped on Kate’s door there was no reply, only a stillness that seemed like absence. But when she pushed the door open, the light from the landing showed the girl on her back, eyes shut and mouth open a little, hair spread on the pillow. She looked much younger in the vulnerability of sleep, and with a rush of tenderness which she could not prevent, she went in and quietly straightened the bed covers. Kate moaned a little, rolling away from her, curling up tight. Frances went out and closed the door.

  Part II

  The Right to Choose

  1

  ‘How are things in the far north? It’s freezing in Edinburgh. How’s Kate – does she like the Academy?’

  ‘Do teenagers ever like school? She’s out at some girl’s house tonight, so that’s a good sign I suppose.’

  ‘What’s happening at Easter? Are Mum and Dad visiting?’

  ‘They haven’t mentioned it, and Spring still seems a long way off.’ Frances looked out of her bedroom window. Gillian’s call had come while she was half-heartedly getting ready to go out. It was still light after six but the sky was overcast and a sleety rain had been falling for the last hour. The grey garden with its corners of banked up snow was fading from sight.

  Six weeks of the New Year had passed. Work had claimed Frances. Susan had not come home. Alec called weekly and Frances’s conversations with him, at first about Susan, and Kate’s welfare, had begun to stray into other, neutral, subjects in a perfunctory but amicable way. Sometimes Kate was out when he called but Frances always knew, or believed she did, where she was. As far as she could tell Kate was at school during the hours she was supposed to be.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said to Gillian, ‘how are you?’ Gillian’s voice was brave and bright, a bad sign. Still, better to ask. Who else was Gill going to turn to? Frances could hardly imagine the people her sister worked with, her frenetic world. She was always building up to some confe
rence or seminar, or rushing around during it, or suffering the anti-climax afterwards and fretting about what had not been perfect.

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘You’re not, I can tell. Has Steve resurfaced?’

  ‘No, you should be proud of me. Still single.’

  ‘Nobody new?’

  ‘I did go out with this guy – but no, nobody new.’

  ‘You probably need some time on your own.’

  Gillian did not answer this so Frances felt rebuked. I’m not sympathetic enough, she thought, I don’t make allowances for people being different.

  ‘I think I might come up next weekend. I’ve got a clear Monday for once, so I could take a break. Would that be all right?’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘You’ve got a spare bed, haven’t you, if Jack’s not home?’

  ‘Yes, but you’re usually so busy.’

  ‘I need a break.’

  Jack’s bed was stripped, the room clean and aired. ‘No trouble’, Frances always said, when people came to stay, though of course it was, but she did want to see Gillian. Between them their missing sister hovered and must be caught. Only they could do it, only between the two of them could she be understood.

  Kate was to call when she was ready to come home. Frances had said she would collect her from a village about four miles away where the new friend lived. ‘Not later than ten,’ she had warned, ‘since it’s a school night.’ It was after ten already.

  Andrew reached the phone when it rang, since he was passing at the time. He had hung up by the time his mother got there.

  ‘Was that Kate?’

  ‘She’s at 6 Mackenzie Place.’

  ‘Do you know where that is?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You’d better come with me.’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘Yes.’