Elizabeth Is Missing (15 page)

I stare out at the garden again, feeling very lonely. I don’t know what I would have done without Elizabeth after Patrick went. Those silly games we played at the charity shop—buying up the ugly china and hiding the pricing gun so that Peggy couldn’t find it—and all the tea-drinking and crosswords and ploughman’s lunches: they kept me going. I struggle up from the wheelchair and stand in front of the key safe. Sixty years. That would make it 1952? I type it in. No luck. I press my forehead against the cool glass of the kitchen door and scrunch the note into a ball.

A dog barks in someone else’s garden; the bark has a rusty quality and I find I can’t bear the whine of it. I rattle the kitchen door handle, desperate to get away, and my stomach gives a lurch as the door opens into stillness. It was unlocked. I pause on the threshold, trying to think what it means, trying to separate the feeling of something being wrong from the memory of our own kitchen door when I was a child. Never locked until nighttime; always unguarded, just like this one.

Dull light filters through a floral blind, making the surfaces blotchy, and the kitchen smells of disinfectant. It gets me in the back of the throat. I open the top cupboards and the bottom cupboards and find they’re empty. The fridge is on, humming away, but it’s only got an old tub of margarine in it. I’m hardly sure the lack of food is significant, though. I often have to bring supplies to Elizabeth. Her son keeps her on starvation rations: cheap, tasteless food which she hates.

The dining room doesn’t look the way I expect and I see for the first time how shabby and downtrodden the carpet is. There’s something missing. I stare at the polished wooden table and try to remember what should be here, but I can’t think of anything in particular. I stand behind Elizabeth’s chair and look out of the window; watching the birds is something we often do together. Elizabeth can identify them just by their shape, she doesn’t need to see the colour or anything. Even now she can tell a sparrow from a robin in the twilight.

The blackbird spots me from across the garden and half hops, half flies towards me. He lands on the bit of concrete outside the glass and looks in, turning his head one way, then the other. He wants some raisins; Elizabeth keeps a box by her chair and feeds him from the window. He skitters away when I stand up, before coming back to stare up at me again. I can’t see raisins anywhere. I’ll have to have a check in the kitchen while I make Elizabeth a pot of tea. I wonder if I’ve remembered to bring any chocolate. I rummage in my handbag, taking out some tissues and an old prescription. I can’t find any. Elizabeth will be disappointed. I wish I had remembered. Perhaps I can make something, scrambled eggs or tomatoes on toast. I could lay the table now. Funny. There’s no tablecloth. No place mats or coasters, either. Elizabeth’s particular about those things. I’ll eat over my knees, in front of the telly, but Elizabeth likes to have everything nice. The salt and pepper are missing, too. And the mango chutney, salad cream, Branston Pickle. Elizabeth needs a lot of condiments to go with all the bland food her son gets her. Turning towards the door, I see the writhing shelf of majolica ware is gone, the vases of worms have wriggled away, the plates of beetles and millipedes scuttled off. I hear my breath quicken in the silent room. There’s something wrong here; I’m not just visiting. I take out my notes. Elizabeth’s name is written over and over:
Missing, missing, missing
.

An engine grunts into silence somewhere close by, and I shuffle into the hall, blinking at the light which pours through the bubbled glass in the front door. I can see the vacuum cleaner marks on the carpet, and on the mat there is a letter addressed to Elizabeth. I bend to pick it up, my hand shaking as I push it into my pocket. A car door slams.

“I’ll just get the rest of the boxes. You sit tight.”

It’s Elizabeth’s son. I know his voice, and I wonder who it is he is calling to. I hear the scrunch of his feet on the crumbling concrete drive, see the blur of a man through the bubbled glass. Should I run and hide? Or will he see me if I move? I stand hunched forward, waiting. The footsteps move away, round the house; there is the clunk of the side gate’s latch. I pull back a tiny bit of net curtain from the hall window. It must be Peter’s wife in the car, looking anxiously through the windscreen, but there’s no Elizabeth with her.

“Left the bloody door open. I’ll just have a quick check inside.” Peter again; he lays a bath seat in the boot of the car and comes back towards the house.

I look around in panic. I mustn’t be found here, I mustn’t be discovered. I hear the scrunch again of footsteps, the metallic screech of the greenhouse door. My heart pounds. Could I make it up the stairs in time? I am about to stand and brazen it out when I catch sight of the larder door. The wood creaks and judders against the frame as I pull it open, but the man is busy stumbling over something and shouting about pots left in the way. I throw myself inside and shut the door.

The larder smells of polish and stale chocolate and I’m squashed in against some things, some long thin things. One has a sponge on the end, one has a brush. I can’t think what they’re called. There is a vacuum cleaner here, too, with a name written on it. “Hoover Hurricane Cyclone System. Two thousand watt power edge cleaning.” I whisper the words to myself. It makes me feel better. Footsteps go past, padding on the carpet, sticking on the kitchen lino. I shut my eyes, hearing how jagged my breathing is, hoping it isn’t too loud. A fridge door opens and closes. The footsteps go past again and up the stairs. I keep my eyes shut and half crouch against the wall. It’s a familiar position. I used to hide in our larder when I was a child.

Ours was in a corner of the kitchen, and I especially liked it if there were other people in the room who didn’t know I was there. I remember the smell of it. Soil-covered vegetables and pickling spice. Children were always having secret breakfasts in the books I read, and I longed for the things they ate. Sausage rolls and fruit tarts and meat pies. I particularly liked pastry. But we never had so much of that sort of food that it would be left over in the larder. Occasionally I would open a jar of jam or a bowl of stewed apple and eat it with a spoon, or take a slice off the boiled ham. But it wasn’t the same. And I’d be in trouble if I was caught. Still, I liked being in there, where it was dark and cool and safe, and when Sukey went missing I started to linger there again. Breathing in the familiar smell, enjoying the fact that no one knew where I was.

I was standing inside one day, delaying going back to the sitting room, when I heard someone on the steps down from the hall. I knew it was Douglas straight away. He had a sort of loping walk, long strides, but strangely quiet. The scrape of a chair and the crack of a knee made me stare hard at a plate of carrot biscuits, trying to imagine what he was doing. It must only have been a few days after Sukey’s suitcase turned up, because it was still lying on the floor of the kitchen, waiting for its contents to be sorted and washed, and I distinctly heard the brass clasps snap as Douglas unfastened them.

I pushed lightly at the door then, not thinking that I’d give myself away, just desperate to know what he was doing. It opened half an inch, the catch nearly noiseless, and I could just see him, side on, pushing his hand into the tangle of clothes. His mouth was open and I could hear his breathing, uneven, like waves washing on to a beach. It made me worry that he might hear mine and I moved back from the door a little way, knocking into a shelf. The jars clinked and I gritted my teeth at the noise, but the wireless was on in the sitting room:
Lorna Doone
. I could hear music and West Country accents loud enough to cover my twitchings. Douglas kept flicking glances at the steps up to the hall and didn’t look in my direction.

After a while he pulled the case away from the dresser and opened it flat. He started to take out the clothes, draping them over a chair. A peach camisole, a shell-coloured slip, a pair of stockings. Everything seemed to be underwear. I couldn’t think what he was doing. Except that there had been something in the paper about a man stealing women’s knickers off washing lines, and for a second I wondered if Douglas had been that man. But then he started to feel around the sides of the case and I shook my head at my own thought. He was searching for something.

I lift my head from the wall. About time I got out of here. Ma will be wondering where I am.

“That’s the lot,” a voice says.

There are feet on the stairs above me. The noise gives me a jolt and I stop. My hand rests lightly on the door, not pushing.

“Everything else can wait for the clearance men,” the voice says.

I look round the larder. No jars of jam, no sacks of potatoes. Instead there’s a vacuum cleaner, a broom, a mop. Still, I can’t think where I am. A door slams and a car starts up somewhere outside and drives away. I breathe in slowly and step out. This is Elizabeth’s hall, Elizabeth’s house, but Elizabeth is not here. The stairlift is at the bottom of the stairs, so she can’t be up there. Or if she is, she’s trapped, because she can’t make it down without that machine. The top banister looms over me as I walk up, looking like prison bars, but when I reach the landing I find all the doors are standing open, and that makes me feel better, though I don’t know why. Elizabeth’s room smells of her rose talcum powder, and for a minute my brain is unreasonable. How can her scent be here and she not? How can one sense tell me she is near and another say I’m wrong? But there’s no wastepaper bin full of tissues, no Alka-Seltzer next to the bed, and the dressing table’s uncluttered surface makes me swallow against tears.

Elizabeth was burgled a few years ago. The police called it a distraction robbery. A woman kept her talking in the garden, saying she’d lost her cat, while someone else ran in and grabbed the jewellery off the dressing table. I remember exactly what they took: a gold chain, a cameo brooch, and an opal ring. Elizabeth hadn’t seemed to mind much about the things, although I think the ring was expensive. She said she thought that it brought bad luck anyway, being an opal. “Well, I hope it brings the thief plenty of bad luck,” I said, feeling quite fierce about it. She smiled at that, but she was nervous about being in the house on her own. I thought her son might take her to stay with him that night, but he was busy and thought she was fussing about nothing, as no one had actually broken in. I couldn’t take her home with me, it was too far for her to walk, so I stayed the night, sleeping on the other single bed, which had been her husband’s. We talked into the dark and sang old songs until we fell asleep.

I lower myself on to the bed now, digging a pen and a bit of paper from my bag:
Elizabeth’s house searched—DEFINITELY not there
. That’s something to show Helen. I tuck the note away, and find I am listening to something. I imagine my ears, pricked like a dog’s, pointing up and alert. A whirring has started somewhere close. I know the sound, so familiar, so associated with Elizabeth. A mechanical noise, one note gradually getting louder and nearer. It’s the stairlift. The stairlift coming up towards me. My mouth goes dry in panic. There is no one in the house. No one. So who is coming up the stairs? My heart beats harder and harder in my chest until I think it might give out, and my legs feel weak, but I make myself stand.

The lift stops. I don’t want to move, to betray the fact that I’m here. I stand for a long time, hardly daring to breathe. When nothing happens I drop a balled tissue on to the carpet, marking my place, and walk out on to the landing. The lift is empty. It has stopped two thirds of the way up and there is no one on it at all. I stare at it, my tongue sticky with fear. Shaking, I back away into Elizabeth’s room and shut myself in. I collapse back on to the bed and my hand touches something hard. The stairlift remote control. I was sitting on it. My breath rings out as I sink backwards and lie still, looking up at the ceiling, watching the shadows change. Every now and then a car goes by and I can hear the whoosh of it as it turns the corner in front of the house. I imagine the sea is just outside and the cars are waves. Or that I am holding a shell to my ear, listening to the rush of my own blood.

Eventually I get up, bring the stairlift to the landing with the remote control, settle into it, and ride down.

H
elen should be here soon. Any minute her car will drive up in front. If I kneel on the window seat, lean on one hand, and put the side of my head against the glass, I can see almost to the end of the street. I want Helen to come. I want to see her car drive up, hear the reassuring sound of tires scrunching on the tarmac outside the house. There’s nothing I need. I just need her, my daughter. I lean over again to look up the road. The wind catches the shrubs in the front garden, beating them against the gate post, and the noise of it—the rustling, the sharp shuffling—makes me shudder. I find I’m staring very hard at the gaps in the branches. A car comes by, the headlights swinging on to the house and the gate and the hedge, and for a second I think I see someone crouching amongst the leaves, a hand crushing the fragile stems, and a mouth open—to eat or shout.

I scramble backwards, the cushion slips from under me and I lose my balance, dropping on to the floor. There’s a sudden sharp pain in my thumb and a crunching sound. I whip my hand up in shock, letting out a wail and holding my thumb in the other hand. I hold it tight, and the pain subsides. I can’t think what I’ve done. “Hush, hush,” I say, cradling the hand. Helen used to hold my thumb when she was a baby. Sometimes she holds my hand now, but not very often.

There’s the sound of a car behind me and I turn in hope. But it only glides past, not stopping. It wasn’t Helen at the wheel, anyway. The streetlight shone on a fair-haired man. So the streetlights are on, but I didn’t notice it get dark. I stare out of the window and feel a hollowing of my insides. Helen doesn’t come this late. She isn’t coming tonight. Or perhaps—it’s unlikely, but perhaps—she has already been. And I’ve forgotten. I stare out at the empty street. Tears make the lights sparkle and I lift a hand to wipe them away, feeling a sharp pain in my thumb. I gasp in shock, but I can’t think what I’ve done to it. I look across to the telephone, but it seems miles away, far too far away for me ever to get to it. I seem to have this feeling more and more. I suppose it’s my age; it’s how I always thought getting old would be. But I remember this sort of tiredness from when I was ill the summer after Sukey disappeared.