Elizabeth Is Missing (11 page)

Dad took his hands out of his pockets and rubbed them over his face, and Ma turned and leant back against the sink, gripping the edge behind her. I wondered why Sukey would tell Douglas anything and why she hadn’t told me. I wondered if it was true. “When did Sukey say that?” I asked, not meaning to. Immediately, Dad told me I should go upstairs.

“This is no discussion for you,” he said.

I left the table, but lingered at the top of the steps up to the hallway. The kitchen looked cosy and bright, the light from the range competing with the overhead lamp. I could almost believe it was a normal family tea, with the cups out and the teapot steaming. Except, of course, there was a policeman in Ma’s usual place, finishing off the cake and writing things down in a little book.

“Yes, when
did
she tell you that?” he asked Douglas, turning a page of the notebook.

“Lots of times. She told me lots of times, Sergeant,” he said. “Over the summer . . .” I could only see a section of him, from chest down, but his arm moved and I guessed he’d shrugged.

“What, when she came for dinner?” Ma asked, her legs still visible against the cupboard under the sink. “I never heard her.”

Douglas’s pink jaw jutted out below the top of the door frame as he bent forward, and I thought he was going to say something, but the sergeant swallowed the last dregs of his tea and scraped back his chair.

“Time I was off,” he said. He pushed his cup away, wrote something in his notebook, and stood up. “Thanks for the tea, Mrs. Palmer. I will let you know if anything presents itself. But don’t worry. People are moving around all the time at the moment. Can’t keep still. More than likely they’ve gone off to try another town for a bit and will be back when they realize everywhere’s the same. Anyway, the law’ll catch up with Frank before long.”

He stood on the spot for a few more seconds, facing Douglas, before following Dad to the front door. I moved quickly into the sitting room and heard Ma say something to Douglas about not having any cake left.

“That was the last of the dried fruit Frank got for me,” she said, and I imagined the face Douglas would make at the mention of him. “How was your film?” she asked, changing the subject before he could start on Sukey’s marriage. There was a murmured answer too low to catch.

“What?” Ma said. “I thought that one was supposed to be funny. Weren’t you paying attention?”

Meanwhile, Dad was thanking Sergeant Needham for coming.

“Not a problem. I’ll let you know if Gerrard turns up, or that suitcase he was carrying.”

They stopped at the door to look back down the hall and allow the sergeant time to brush the crumbs from his trousers. “That boy reminds me of someone,” I heard him say as he left. “Just can’t think who.”

I have chucked all the notes on Elizabeth into the wastepaper basket. It looks like a tub of confetti. I feel terrible, abandoning her like this, but what can I do? There’s nothing to “go on,” as they say, and no one who can help. I have been to the police station four times. I know because I have it written down. Four times, and they will do nothing. They think I’m a dotty old woman. I think they might be right. I look out a big sheet of paper and a red pen and I make a notice to put on my sitting-room wall:
Elizabeth is not missing
. Even if I don’t believe it now, I might in a few hours. Sooner, perhaps. I don’t want to be drawn back into looking for her. It’s useless. No one will believe me and I’ll only drive myself mad if I carry on. Anyway, there’s so much I can’t remember, perhaps I have got it completely wrong, perhaps Elizabeth is at home and I’ve been fussing over nothing.

Carla sees the notice when she arrives and nods approvingly. “Quite right,” she says. “You concentrate on keeping safe and well. Better safe than sorry, eh?” She bustles about as usual, telling me of muggings and armed robberies. I try to keep up, but I feel it doesn’t really relate to me any more. “The elderly are just very bad with safety,” she is saying. “They don’t see their locks are turned properly or their windows are shut tight. It’s because you grew up in a different time. I bet you knew everyone then, huh?”

“Don’t be daft,” I say. “The town was full of all sorts when I was a girl.” Men just demobbed getting drunk in the pubs, American and Canadian soldiers waiting to go home, evacuees from London or Birmingham with no home to go back to, and convalescents hoping for a cure from the sea air. Carla disappears upstairs to do my bedroom before I can finish the thought, and I wander into the kitchen. My sandwich hasn’t been made yet so I put some bread in the bread-heater, the bread-browner, and get out the butter.

“How much toast d’you think you eat?” Carla says, suddenly reappearing. “You must get through a loaf a day.”

“Well, there’s no cake left because of the sergeant,” I say.

“If there’s no cake it’s because you’ve had it,” she says, running the tap and whisking Fairy Liquid into a mountain of foam.

I don’t much like her tone. I move out of her way and check the front door before going to sit down. Carla comes into the sitting room to give me my pills; I don’t know what they’re for.

“And then, of course, there’s the key safes,” she says as she stands by the coffee table, writing in the carers’ folder. “You have to have them so us care workers can get in and that, but it would only take one bad lot, wouldn’t it? Someone tells someone the code, and the criminal doesn’t even have to break in.” She puts her hands to her head and then lifts them into the air.

“They can’t be that dangerous,” I say. “Or they wouldn’t make everyone have them. Even Elizabeth has one.” My mind rushes to tell me something. Elizabeth has a key safe. Key safes make it easy to get into a house. I write it down and put Elizabeth’s name next to it. “Elizabeth has a key safe,” I say again. “If someone had got in . . .”

“Not that again,” Carla says. “I thought you’d given it up?” She points to the sign on the wall.

“Oh, yes,” I say, laying down my pen. I feel disappointed, as if I’ve lost something valuable.

“Okay. Bye.” She goes to the door. There is the sound of her trying to open it. It bangs as if it’s stuck. “Hey!” she calls. “You’ve locked it. Where’s the key?”

I get up and show her the little pot on the radiator shelf where I keep it. “You said to check the locks,” I say, showing Carla the note I wrote on the subject.

She stares at me. “But you don’t check them while I’m still here.”

When she’s locked me in again I go and look for my sandwich; there’s a piece of toast on the sideboard and I put down my handful of notes to get the butter, but I can’t find any in the fridge. There’s a big sign above the stove telling me not to cook anything, but I really fancy an egg with my toast. Surely boiling an egg is allowed. That’s hardly cooking at all.

I turn on the gas and fill a saucepan with water. While I’m waiting for it to boil I pick up my notes to read:
Key safes make it easy to get into a house
. Elizabeth’s name is next to it. I read it several times. There’s something significant about it, I just don’t know what. I’ve also written:
Would only take one bad lot
. But that’s true of everything. And anyway, you can’t go around being afraid of everyone. You have to let some people into your home.

Sukey was the one who suggested Douglas as a lodger. She was working in the NAAFI canteen, which had been set up in a hotel on the clifftop, and Douglas was doing milk deliveries until he was old enough to join the army. The canteen was on his route, and Sukey liked him. They used to chat before she opened in the morning, mostly about films, she said.

I met him one day when Sukey took me to work. It was the week after our school had been hit in a night raid. They hadn’t got the facilities for us to join the boys’ school yet and Ma didn’t want me hanging around at home all day. We had to get up really early and I was still half asleep when we arrived. Sukey sat me down in the kitchen while she weighed tea and coffee into white cloth bags and ran backwards and forwards to check the hot-water urn. I thought she looked funny in her blue overalls and little cap, but she didn’t seem to mind. There was a lovely smell of cooking and she gave me beans on toast and a sausage to eat.

“Shouldn’t really,” she said as she passed me the plate. “Only meant to be for the Yanks.”

It was mainly American soldiers they served there then, and I kept listening out for an accent as I ate. I was just finishing when I heard one.

“Sure thing,” it said, and, “That’ll be just fine.”

I looked round and saw Sukey come in with a boy. He carried a crate of milk bottles and set them on the counter in front of me. I was surprised at seeing an American milkman and stared at him.

“This is Doug, Mopps,” Sukey said, a hand on his shoulder. “Say hello.”

“Hello, Doug,” I said, looking past him as Sukey picked up a couple of milk bottles and went back out of the kitchen.

“Hello . . . Mopps,” he said, frowning a little at the name. His eyes followed Sukey as she walked away.

I laughed. “That’s not my real name, silly,” I said.

He looked annoyed at that and turned to me. “What does she call you that for then?” he said. His accent was no longer American and I wondered if Sukey knew he’d been pretending.

I put the last bit of sausage into my mouth. “It’s a nickname,” I said, chewing.

“Bit stupid, isn’t it?” he said, still frowning.

I shrugged and rested my fork against the side of my plate. “Bet Doug isn’t your real name.”

“ ’Course it is,” he said, his eyes sliding back over to Sukey as she came in and dropped another bag of tea on to the scales.

“Isn’t it short for Douglas?”

His mouth flattened and he looked down at the milk bottles, pulling them from their crate jerkily.

“Isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“So Doug is a nickname then?”

He stopped what he was doing and looked at me. “You’ve beaten me there,” he said, and he blushed and flicked another look at Sukey. I’d embarrassed him, and I felt sorry.

“Doug’s a good name,” I said, trying to make it up. “I like it.”

That made him smile, and I felt even more sorry. He was nice-looking, Douglas, with a soft, oval face and brown hair and very straight eyebrows. He was tall, but he stooped and ducked his head when he spoke, and he looked at you sideways, so people didn’t always notice his height.

“I hope you’re being nice to Doug,” Sukey said, coming over to put the empty bottles down on the table.

I nodded, trying to think of something to say. “Hey, we saw the mad woman outside,” I said, because we had, though only briefly.

“Hush, Maud,” Sukey said. “Don’t call her that. You don’t know who she might be. Imagine if Ma did something funny and someone called her mad. And you weren’t listening to me. Doug’s going to be our new lodger.” She ruffled his hair in the way she usually ruffled mine, and he blushed again. “D’you want something to eat?” she asked him.

“No, I’d better be getting on,” he said, and he quickly filled the crate with empties, carrying them out and waving awkwardly when Sukey called cheerio.

“Has Ma ever done anything funny?” I said to Sukey as soon as he’d gone.

“ ’Course not, silly,” she said, gathering up the bottles of milk. “You should just be a bit less quick to judge, that’s all. Do you like Doug? Ma’s been looking for someone to take the room since old Miss Lacey went to her niece. I meant it, though. Be nice. His mum’s just died. Bomb dropped on their house.”

I felt even worse about the nicknames thing then, and I promised I’d be kind to him. I meant it, too. But I thought of the way Sukey had ruffled his hair and offered him food, looking after him the way she looked after me, and I wondered whether I ever stared at her the way Douglas did.

There’s a funny smell coming from somewhere. I look round the sitting room, pick up a cushion, and sit down on the window seat. I can’t see anything. I can’t work out where the smell’s coming from. I’ve been digging a whole lot of my notes out of the wastepaper basket, wondering how they got there. I’ve rescued a scratched blue-and-silver compact lid from the bin, too, so that makes twice it’s been dug up. I’m just getting the energy to go and see what’s causing that awful smell when Helen walks in.

“Mum! You’ve left the gas on!” she shouts. “I’ve told you not to use the oven. You could have blown the whole bloody house up! Ugh, you can smell it in here, too.”

She stands in front of me and leans past to open the window, wafting the air with the curtain. I look at the underside of her chin. It’s very soft-looking. Vulnerable. “I’m sorry about the nicknames,” I say.

Her chin folds into itself as she looks down at me. “What?”

“No, I don’t know,” I say. I wonder if she will get me a cup of tea in a minute. But we might not have any milk, because I upset the milkman. Oh, everything is so muddled. There is a breeze from the window; it gets me right in the lower back and makes me shiver.

“Couldn’t you smell it?” Helen says.

“I thought I could smell something, yes,” I say, pulling a bit of material over my knees for warmth. “Sausage and beans and—what did you say it was?”

“Gas.”

“Oh. Has there been some kind of leak, then?” The material in my lap won’t lie flat, I try to smooth it down, tuck it round me, but it keeps moving. When I look up, Helen is still waving the curtain about. The movement makes me blink.

“No, Mum,” she says. “You left the oven on. This is why you mustn’t cook.”

“I don’t cook, usually, Helen,” I say. “There’s a sign in the kitchen—”

“I know there’s a sign. I wrote it.” She drops the curtain and pushes her fingers into her hair.

“But I can do a boiled egg,” I say.

“No! No, you can’t. Mum, this is what I’m saying.” She makes her hands into fists, pulling at the roots of her hair. I can’t work out why she’s so upset. “Do you understand? You really mustn’t try to cook anything.
Anything
.”

“All right. I won’t,” I say, watching her walk about the room. “I’ll have a bit of cheese or something instead.”

“D’you promise?” she asks. “Will you write it down?”

I nod and take a pen from my handbag. There’s a jumble of coloured paper on the table next to me and I make a note under a list which starts:
Compact
,
summer squash
.