The Missing Years

by Lexie Elliott

  None of this is new to me, exactly, but it’s the first time I’ve ever had it delivered straight. I can’t quite pin down how I gathered the information I do know. I have hazy memories of the first few days after he went missing, of being sent to another room when somber hard-faced men came to speak to Karen, of flattening myself against the wall near the doorway to listen in silently. I suppose I also asked my mother later what they said, though I can’t imagine she was very forthcoming. I know I must have read the newspapers; there was a particular line that got tangled in my seven-year-old brain: The police are appealing to anybody with information to come forward. The somber hard-faced men were the police that were appealing, my mother said, but they didn’t seem very appealing to me. I worried that anybody with information would be too frightened to come forward.

  Probably one of those men was Glen, come to think of it. I find I’m rubbing my forehead between my eyebrows, as if trying to erase the faint frown line I’ve recently noticed I’m developing. I drop my hand to my lap. “So, what do you think happened? Did you have a theory? An accident? Foul play?”

  “No grand theory.” He’s frowning himself, now. “Often you get a pretty good idea of what’s happened; it’s just whether or not you can prove it. You’d be surprised how seldom the police are surprised.” I suspect he’s used that line before. For all that he seems to eschew frivolity, I can sense a touch of the showman. “But on this one . . .” He shakes his head slowly. “I dinnae think he left. Not voluntarily. I think if your dad could be here now, he would be. So . . . aye, accident or foul play, one or the other.” He eyes me carefully again. “He’d be right proud of you, I bet. Fiona says you’re a big shot in television.”

  His words trip me up, robbing me of the questions I had waiting in line. It seems an oddly personal thing for him to say among this no-frills discussion of my father’s disappearance. And . . . really? How can he tell my father would be proud? Of course he would be, in the versions of my father’s life where he’s the man Glen describes. But there are all the other versions I’ve considered, jostling for space in my head, where Glen is simply another person who didn’t understand the true nature of my father. I choose to step right over that quagmire. “I’m in television, yes. Not a big shot, though. More of an air rifle than a cannon.”

  A bark of gravelly laughter escapes him, and I find a smile for him. I like that he tried to be kind, I realize. Though he makes me feel a bit like a schoolgirl again, craving approval from authority. By the time I was at university, my antiestablishment tendencies had come to the fore, and I had no such esteem for authority. Or maybe it was my mother’s antiestablishment tendencies bubbling up inside me. The thought throws me off-balance. I want to feel that I am me, created from pure air, my genes unsullied by ancestry. I want to feel that my thoughts and reactions and decisions are mine and mine alone. But being here, in Scotland, in the Manse of all places, has me feeling the weight of my DNA, of the history and memories and behavioral patterns it carries. Of the impact it has had, or might yet have, on what I think of as me.

  “You have a sister, I hear.”

  I take it he thinks we’ve exhausted the subject of my father, and in truth, I’m not sure there is anything left for me to ask. Nothing he can answer, at any rate. “Yes, Carrie. Half sister, actually. But of course you would know that.”

  He nods. “Aye. Do you get on?”

  “Em, yes. I guess.” It’s not a question I was expecting. “Living under the same roof as adults is . . .” I think of our argument, of Carrie’s threat to leave. I think of all the things I know about her now, the trail she leaves behind her, of open doors and objects, proof of where she has traveled. I think of her need for company and noise, the way they transform her: I’m not like you; I’m a people person. I wonder what she would say in my place. “Well, it’s new for us. But . . . yes, I guess mostly we do.”

  “That’s good.” He looks at his empty plate for a moment then nods, a tiny motion, as if it’s for himself alone. “That’s good. That’s something.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I try to call Jonathan from the car park of the hotel before I leave. It’s an utterly stupid thing to do, because it’s the crack of dawn in Washington DC. I realize that just in time to hang up before voice mail kicks in. Though hearing his familiar BBC English on his voice mail would have been better than nothing. I’m craving some kind of lifeline to the present—the past seems to be all but swallowing me up. Instead I drive slowly and carefully back along the winding road to the Manse, pondering the fact that for once in my life I have too much time to think, and yet I’m not using it to think about anything productive. I should be working through where I want to take my career or using this time apart from Jonathan to try to untangle how I feel about him, about us, about the future, and instead I’m rummaging around in events of the past, and worrying about flies and birds and intruders that may or may not exist outside my brain. I park up in front of the Manse, eyeing it mutinously, but it doesn’t take the bait. It’s just a pile of bricks, after all.

  A pile of bricks with a dead bird on its doorstep. Only—the carcass is no longer there. I look around, somewhat nonplussed, in case an animal has dragged it and dropped it somewhere else in the vicinity, but I can’t see any sign of it. I start to poke in the overgrown flower beds at the end of the front lawn before the absurdity of that strikes me—am I really spending time hunting down a maggot-ridden carcass that I didn’t want to have to dispose of in the first place? I still have the echo of Carrie’s dispassionate assessment in my ears—That’s fucking disgusting—and I can just imagine her reaction to its unexpected disappearance: Good riddance! I should be considering it a bonus that I don’t have to clear it up. It’s not like with the bin bags; those were inside. Surely some animal has taken it and is currently delighted with the ready meal. I scan the garden one more time, but a black heap of feathers fails to suddenly appear, so I give up and head into the Manse. It’s not like with the bin bags. It’s not.

  My father lives on the streets in Nice. The weather is generally warm, which is kinder to rough sleepers, though in latter years he has seen a growing threat from the influx of violent gangs from eastern Europe. On the days when he is able, he draws chalk pictures on the pavements, copies of old masters created from memory, although he couldn’t tell you where or when he learned to love these paintings. He couldn’t tell you much about himself at all. The chalk drawings can win him enough to buy a decent lunch or a bottle of wine, but the days when he is able to draw occur less and less frequently. There’s a fog that has invaded his mind, that’s been there for a great many years, growing and expanding to cloak more and more of his synapses with every passing week. One day he will lie down to sleep on a bench, and only his heart, not his mind, will wake up.

  FOURTEEN

  The next evening we spend together, I show Carrie the inscription, and she shocks me by saying, “Mum told me about this!”

  “What?” I’ve climbed into one of the high-backed dining chairs, my feet tucked under me.

  “I’d completely forgotten about it.” She reaches out a finger to touch it, to trace it, a half smile on her face. Like me, she stops before she makes contact. “She said she lived in a house with a strange inscription, that the man she was living with was obsessed by it.” She glances at me, realization dawning. “Oh my God, she meant your dad.”

  It had never occurred to me that Mum would have talked to Carrie about the Manse, even obliquely. “What else did she say?”

  “I don’t know . . . that it was a strange house. She couldn’t sleep properly in it. She said she first started painting in that house—here, I suppose—because she couldn’t sleep.” She looks at the inscription again. “A furnace of the soul,” she murmurs dreamily. “That’s the kind of love I’d like.” She cocks her head as she looks at me, a wicked gleam in her eye. “Does Jonathan make a furnace of your soul?”
>
  “No, thank God! It doesn’t sound terribly . . . sustainable.”

  “Sustainable! Aren’t you the die-hard romantic!” Carrie is laughing at me, as I meant her to, but I’m not being entirely flippant. A furnace surely can’t last. It makes me think of the newsroom phrase: burned out. Like the oil rig, like the missing kirk, until all that is left is a blackened husk of the original, all energy and passion and ability to care vaporized by the infernal fire. “Seriously, though, did you never just meet someone and know? Who they were inside and that you were right for each other? Someone you’d trust to be on your side come what may?” Is she talking about something current, or in the past? I wonder. There’s something around her eyes . . . I can’t tell if she’s wishing or remembering.

  “I kind of like to know the whole story first.”

  Carrie shakes her head, amused. “Nobody ever knows the whole story. Not even the people in it.” She looks at the inscription again, and I see a distorted reflection of her dreamy smile in the old, uneven glass of the window. I get up to close the curtains before darkness can take its hold. “This house,” she says, shaking her head. “Everybody I meet round here is always talking about it. Like they can’t leave it alone.”

  Like picking a scab, I think. “Well, hopefully that will translate into offers when I put it on the market.”

  “Do you have any idea of what it’s worth yet?”

  “I spoke to a couple of agents again today. They both said roughly the same price”—I name a figure that widens her eyes—“but it depends very much on the market. It’s such a specific property. It could get zero interest or it could end up in a bidding war.”

  “Well, for that kind of money, I can see how it might stick in Ali’s throat.”

  I shake my head. “Ali’s? Why Ali’s throat?”

  “Well, because . . .” She sees my blank look. “Shit, I thought you knew.” She takes a deep breath. “He’s Ali Jamieson. His family owned the jewelers.”

  “Jamieson & Sons.” I groan aloud—I’ve been rather slow on the uptake. I remember Ali’s truculent emphasis during our introduction. It didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but it should have. Once again I have the feeling that the world is narrowing to exactly the pinhead that I’m dancing on. “Fuck. Who told you?”

  “I overheard that bitch in the village shop saying something, and I asked Fi about it.”

  “What did she say? The woman from the shop, I mean.”

  Carrie is squirming a little. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t suppose she’s a barometer for public sentiment; she’s just a busybody. I guess you already heard the kind of things she says about Fiona.” I don’t know what she means, but it seems wiser to keep my mouth shut. Though it does suggest that perhaps Jamie was a little wide of the mark about the local loyalty to his sister . . . “She can go on for hours about each and every resident, and none of it is nice.”

  “Still, out with it.”

  She tries to meet my eyes, but can’t, and abruptly caves. “She said . . . she said it’s disgusting you being here. Flaunting your life of Riley up at the big house at the expense of good honest folk like the Jamiesons.”

  “She said that to you?” I’m truly appalled.

  “No, not to me. I don’t think she realized I was there.”

  “Life of Riley?” For a moment I can’t think what on earth this charming-sounding woman could have meant, and then I twig. “Oh, I see. Hardly. Life of squalor, more like, at least until Mum started selling paintings. We’d hardly have been squatting if we had half a million’s worth of diamonds to live off.”

  “Did you really have to squat?” asks Carrie quietly, almost apologetically, but I’m on a different track.

  “Oh God. My lawyer told me that the firm went bust after . . . afterward. The insurance company found a technical loophole to wriggle out of and wouldn’t pay up, so they had to file for bankruptcy.” I hadn’t considered it from their angle before. Jamieson & Sons lost an employee and the diamonds, and then their whole business. Even if they didn’t believe my dad was a thief, they would have to be pretty hacked off at the way things had turned out. “No wonder Ali doesn’t like me.” He certainly hasn’t improved in any of our subsequent encounters; I’ve seen him a few times, and he’s been no better than grudgingly civil.

  “He just needs to get to know you,” she says with unexpected loyalty. Then she more or less contradicts herself by adding, “But the Manse is the thing, though. Everyone thinks it’s a real prize and you’re sitting pretty in it.”

  “Some prize. It hardly rents at all, and I can’t even sell it yet.”

  “Even so, it’s part of local legend round here. I’m not sure you’re going to want to know this, but . . .” I can see she’s going to tell me anyway.

  “But what?”

  “I think half the locals around your age lost their virginity in the Manse.”

  “What?”

  “One of the stable girls was laughing about it when I went to the equestrian center. Did you know Mum didn’t rent it out for the first decade or so? It was just empty, and not terribly well secured; all of that got sorted once she decided to rent it, but until then it was apparently a piece of cake to get in. So if you were a pair of horny teenagers looking for a place to be alone . . .” She lifts her eyebrows expressively, amusement radiating from her gray eyes.

  I look around involuntarily, as if I might see a couple of spotty-faced, loved-up teens going at it behind us. “Fuck!”

  “Quite.” Suddenly we are both giggling. “Apparently the man at the estate agent said that Mum’s decision to rent out the Manse did more for lowering the teenage pregnancy rate round here than any school sex education program could have.”

  “Christ.” I shake my head, still smiling. There’s something oddly reassuring about the idea of the Manse as a haven for hormonal teenagers seeking to indulge their sex-obsessed tendencies. It’s so normal it’s almost wholesome, and that makes the Manse seem wholesome too. I can’t imagine any level of hormones would entice teenagers to undertake their initiation into the delights of sex in a place that feels sinister. Though that suggests once again that it’s all in my head . . . I shake off that disquieting thought. “Do you think that counts for or against it in an open-market sale?”

  She grins. “Definitely for.” Then she cocks her head. “Have you considered not selling?”

  “What, staying here?”

  “Yes. It’s not like you really stay in London, is it? You don’t really live anywhere.”

  I leave a small pause before I answer her. “I live with Jonathan.”

  Even as I’m saying it, I can see the holes in the sentiment. Carrie looks like she’s about to say something but thinks better of it. Instead she turns back to the inscription. “A furnace of the soul,” she says again, barely audibly, and I’m almost sure there’s something she’s not telling me. Many things, perhaps. We’ve been eating together, and watching television together most nights—the news or a film—and we’ve been talking, but never about anything important. I wonder if the pitfalls we’re each avoiding are the same ones. Maybe we’re not navigating the same landscape at all.

  * * *

  • • •

  Days pass. Then weeks, and we develop a rhythm, Carrie and I. Fragile, to be sure; and nascent, but nonetheless a rhythm. I pick Carrie up from the station, we might or might not go to the leisure club, we have dinner together (Carrie cooks; I wash up) then watch some telly or occasionally we meet some combination of Ben, Ali, Fiona, Piotr and Jamie in the pub. But abruptly that fledgling pattern is broken. Carrie rings, as she always does, and instead of discussing her day, instead of waiting for me to offer a lift, she tells me she’s staying up in Edinburgh for the night, doing something with some of the cast. I’ll be on my own in the Manse tonight.

  I place my phone carefully down on the dining room table a
fter she’s disconnected, and look around me thoughtfully. I’ve taken to doing any necessary admin in here, partly on account of the practicality of the big table on which to spread out all my papers, and partly because of the view. This room looks across the rear garden, toward the lawn that acts as a welcome mat to the wood that I am growing to love, but more crucially it looks away from the valley floor and the spectacular mountains that rear beyond it, their very impassivity somehow drawing the eye and refusing to release it.

  She sounded different, Carrie. It wasn’t a conversation in which I felt questions were welcomed—probably there was someone with her. I wonder if there’s one cast member in particular that she’s more keen to spend an evening with. There’s a hint of . . . something. I don’t know what. A softness round her mouth when she’s thinking and doesn’t realize I can see her. Perhaps someone has indeed lit a furnace in her soul . . . Perhaps these nights in Edinburgh will become more frequent, and I’ll be spending evenings alone more often than not. It’s an unsettling thought. The Manse is different with Carrie in it. It keeps time better, it hides its other faces, the bathroom door stays closed and the boiler flame doesn’t snuff out. It behaves like the mere pile of bricks it ought to be.

  God, I will have to cook.

  I head to the fridge and eye up the contents despairingly. It’s by no means bare, but everything in it requires effort: chopping or prepping or frying or grilling or possibly all of those; Carrie would know. But the fridge door has been open too long; it begins a low accusatory beeping. I close it and consider my options.