Elizabeth Is Missing (21 page)

Katy’s brought a flat silver computer with her. Its mass of wires stick out like an uncared-for shrub hastily planted in the middle of the kitchen table. She fusses about with speakers and other things, trying to get them to work, and I try to focus on the booklet in my hand. It’s got pictures of brains and simple thick-lined drawings of old people leaning on each other and smiling. I know I’m supposed to read it, make sense of it, but I can’t concentrate. There’s a new loaf in the bread bin.

“Mum thought you’d like to hear some old music,” Katy says, pushing the teeth of a plug into the wall. She clicks a button and Vera Lynn blasts out, making meeting again sound like some kind of threat.

“Good God,” I say, covering my ears.

“Sorry.” Katy quickly jabs at a button, lowering the volume. “There. How about that? Does it jog any memories?”

“Not really,” I say, flicking through the pages of this little book. It’s not much of a story and it’s a bit unconventional for children. There are pictures that show someone’s brain cut through. I don’t think it’s suitable for Katy really, and I wonder if Helen knows what it’s about.

“But it’s nice to hear the song again?” Katy asks.

I nod, and let my eyes drift back to the bread bin. Perhaps she wants me to tell her about the war. That would be a first. She’s always stared into space when I’ve mentioned anything in the past. But there is something I wanted to ask her, or possibly Helen. I was waiting for Helen to arrive. I’ve underlined her name on my note, but I can’t remember what it was about now. The song comes to an end and I’m just about to suggest a piece of toast when the next one starts. The bread, soft with a crusty top, is ready sliced, but now I see there’s a notice above it:
No More Toast
.

Katy is grinning at me, moving her head to the music. I sit still. I don’t sigh. I don’t roll my eyes. I look carefully at every page of the little book. But I don’t think about it. I don’t want to. I hate the sight of the squiggly lines spidering over the brains. And the word “plaque” makes me angry. I put the booklet under a sheet of newspaper.

“I think I’ve heard this song in a film,” Katy says. “Or on an advert maybe.”

“Where’s your mother?” I say. “I’ve something to tell her.”

“Erm. She’s showing someone the house, but you’re not supposed to know that.”

“Showing them? What for?” I picture Helen unhinging the front of the house for huge people who peer in as if we were the Borrowers. That’s just what it was like with Douglas’s house. When you walked past you could look up and see the furniture and knick-knacks set out neatly. You could see him, too, sitting there in the half-room, drinking tea and listening to his gramophone, and Sukey would be there, checking the time on the mantel clock. “But how would they have got there?” I ask Katy. “When the stairs had been blasted away?”

She turns the music up and looks intently at the screen of her computer. “This is fun, isn’t it? Mum said the doctor said she should play you music.”

So that’s what this is about. “Did he?” I say. I nod, and it seems like the right response, but I never did like Vera Lynn. I remember reading once that she’d never had a singing lesson in her life. Doesn’t surprise me. Lot of rubbish her songs. Whoever heard of a bluebird at Dover? Anne Shelton was the one we liked best. You never hear her any more.

The music stops.

“Grandma!” Katy says. “Lot of rubbish? You can’t say that about Vera Lynn.” She looks shocked and I can’t tell if she’s serious. “I can’t believe you don’t like it.”

“Well, Katy, it’s just—”

“You’re a traitor to your generation,” she says. “Imagine if I didn’t like . . . er . . . Girls Aloud or someone.” She gasps. “I don’t like Girls Aloud. Am I a traitor to my generation, too?”

Now I know she’s joking and I start to smile.

“I bet you don’t even like watching
Dad’s Army
,” she says. “I bet you just pretend to laugh at the jokes. Don’t deny it. I’m on to you now, Grandma.”

Two strangers appear at the top of the kitchen steps. They gaze down at us, nodding, as if we are part of the fittings. “Who are you?” I say.

Helen pops up behind them, waving her hands, making some sort of sign. I can’t tell what it’s supposed to mean.

“Anyway,” Katy suddenly says in a loud voice, “is there something you’d rather listen to? I can find anything.” She stretches her fingers over the computer’s keyboard and makes a false sort of laugh. Something is going on.

“Ezio Pinza,” I say.

She looks at me blankly, so I tell her about the “Champagne Aria.” I tell her about lying on the floor and the dust and sunlight. The song is found easily, in seconds, and Pinza’s voice expands into the kitchen. Katy presses something that makes the song start again every time it ends so that the laughing almost seems to come at the beginning of the song, and she lies on the floor at my feet.

“Ha-ha-ha. Yes, I see what you mean,” she says. “It is fun. I’m not sure about
you
lying on the floor, though. We might never get you up again.”

Strands of her hair mingle with a mess of crumbs, but she doesn’t seem to care. And she does look a bit absurd holding her hands over her stomach like that. I start to feel embarrassed for the child I once was. She closes her eyes and I reach over the top of her head for a slice of bread. Katy doesn’t seem to notice. And she doesn’t notice when I get the butter out of the fridge. The sign says no toast, so I’ll just have bread and butter. I can’t think where the plates are for a moment, and there’s no time to search, so I lay the bread on a sheet of the
Daily Echo
.

“Ha-ha-ha,” Katy says, hands on her stomach, as I get out a knife. “Ha-ha-ha,” as I’m digging a thick wedge out of the butter. “Ha-ha-ha,” as I run the side of my tongue along the soft, salty, buttery bread.

“Ha-ha-ha,” I say, when I’ve finished, and I begin to squeeze the newspaper up into a ball, but it won’t scrunch properly. There’s some sort of booklet between the pages. The feel of the stiffer paper refusing to crumple makes me think of clearing out the range, of the sweet but unpleasant smell of prunes heating in gravy, of getting home after seeing Frank at the pub.

I had heard the clock in the sitting room chiming five as I opened the kitchen door and I thought I’d get a row when I walked in, but there was no one about. The range was alight and Ma had left a note on the table saying she and Dad would be home at six o’clock and asking me to add a few potatoes to the hot pot. It was an amalgam of two different stews, one with prunes, and I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. The smell as it started to warm up in the stove was sweet and starchy, and I was glad Ma was out so I could help myself to something first. I cut a finger-thin slice off the loaf and, as Ma didn’t like me to waste precious butter, I used the last of the margarine instead, putting a tiny knob of it on to a dish and sliding it into one of the warming ovens for a moment, to soften it and make it go further. When I pulled it out again several old sheets of newspaper came with it.

There was practically a whole
Daily Echo
, I thought, as I spread the marg on my bread and took a bite, Ma or I having left a sheet there every time we’d laid something inside for keeping warm or softening. I began to wrap the spare sheets around the potato peelings on the table, but found that there was a springy square inside which wouldn’t crumple. It was the apple-stewed letter, the still-gummed envelope, brown at the edges. The address, to D. Weston at our house, was blurred but distinguishable and I traced Sukey’s handwriting with my finger for a few moments without thinking. It was only as I was following the zigzag of the W again that I got a jolt. The words were readable.

I’d checked the envelope several times in the days after I’d half drowned it in the apples, peering between the sheets of paper while Ma’s back was turned, but the address had been totally indecipherable, the ink just watery blotches. Whatever had been inside was lost, and the dismay had made me put it from my mind. Then, what with collecting “clues” from the local streets, and being ill, and following Douglas, I’d forgotten it altogether. And somehow those months of heat, the drying and browning and crisping of the paper, had made the words rise up again, blue like a flame. I felt a balloon of hope inflate inside me. What if the letter had news of Sukey? What if it told us where she’d gone? It seemed possible in that moment that she might just have gone away, run off to be a pilot in Australia, or a mannequin in Paris, or anything.

I crammed the rest of the bread and marg into my mouth and picked up the butter knife, slitting open the envelope as I chewed. The paper inside smelled strongly of apples where it had been soaked in the stewing fruit, but the words were readable.

          
Doug—

          
So sorry. So silly and wrong of me. So glad you wrote
.

          
Please let us be friends again. But I really must tell Frank
.

          
He will understand, I promise
.

Sukey

I was still reading the words when Ma and Dad walked in. I pushed the paper into the pocket of my skirt, realizing at the same moment that Douglas was in the house. His gramophone was on upstairs and the “Champagne Aria” was in my head. I wondered how long the music had been playing, how I hadn’t noticed it before. The knowledge that Douglas had been nearby when I’d thought I was alone gave me a sudden chill, and I only half heard my parents tell me they’d been to see Frank. He was out of jail, they said. Which of course I knew, though I kept quiet about meeting him, knowing Dad would have had a row with me for going into a pub.

“ ’Course he wasn’t at home when we got there,” Dad said. “But we met him in the street on the way home. Tight. Which is hardly remarkable.”

I felt a little nervous glow of secrecy at Dad’s words. So, I thought, Frank hadn’t stayed too long after I’d left, just long enough to get really drunk. I wondered if he’d gone home to have dinner, or to get the nylons he’d promised that woman. “And what did he say?” I asked.

Dad half huffed, half laughed in response. “Says he thought Sukey was staying with us.” He tapped at the edge of the sink. “With her own house half a mile down the road. Can you credit it?”

Ma had her head turned away. Dad must have been going on and on all the way there and back. She’d probably had enough. Six o’clock struck; the music on the floor above was silenced and Douglas started down the stairs for dinner. I felt for Sukey’s letter inside my pocket. “So glad you wrote,” she had written, as if she couldn’t speak to Douglas directly any time she liked. As if there was something between them that had to be kept secret. I listened to his footsteps descending, light and uneven. Could he have been her lover? Was that possible? Even thinking the word “lover” seemed ridiculous. But, I thought, didn’t that explain everything? Sukey’s strange behaviour at that last dinner, Frank’s jealousy, the neighbour telling me that Douglas was at her house all the time. Perhaps even the broken records in the garden. She or Douglas might have smashed them in a fit of pique after they’d had a row. “Let us be friends again.”

Ma looked in the oven to check the stew and, finding it was there and cooking, patted my arm. Dad sat down at the table without taking his overcoat off and talked to the range more than us.

“Three months, and he doesn’t think to check on his wife? I don’t believe a word of it. And if he had to drive a load up to London, why did he come back on the train? That’s what I don’t understand. Where’s the van he drove up in?”

Douglas’s steps had stopped in the hallway, and I could see him looking at himself in the mirror as I slid over to the dresser to get forks and spoons and clear away the knife I’d used for the margarine. He was a nice-looking boy, Douglas, but he was just a boy. Even I could see that. It was too fantastic to think Sukey might have loved him. Too fantastic. And yet, as I laid the table, I couldn’t help feeling that the crinkling of the letter in my pocket was a kind of answer.

Ma took the hot pot from the oven and sat down holding it in front of her as if she wasn’t sure what to do with it now. I went and guided her hands to the table, taking the dishcloth and ladle in order to serve.

“Unshaven, Frank was, and no collar,” she said to me, letting her hands go limp. “I don’t see how he can have become so dishevelled in so short a time. But I suppose that’s jail for you. It must be hard, and the food’s bad, I’m told. ’Course it’s not much better on the outside, with flour been put back on rationing. And now they say bread will be, too! And there’s no cooking fat in the tin, despite the tiny amounts I’ve been using. We’re only halfway through the month. But we’ve got nothing left.”

She stared at the stew as I served it out, and I moved carefully, feeling the letter against my thigh as if it were as hot as the dish I was holding. Douglas still stood in front of the mirror and I had a sudden idea that we were all of us standing behind some sort of glass wall, unable to reach each other any more. Dad didn’t move when I asked for his plate.

“Question is,” he said, “did he take her to London with him or did something happen here?”

I
wish you’d tell me what it is you want.”

Helen stands behind her car, one gardening glove on, calling from a distance as if I were a dangerous animal. Apparently I was very angry when she came near me earlier, and she has a pinch mark on her arm which I am trying not to notice.

“I want the thing,” I say, the tang of cut grass in my throat, the threads of leaves and green skin under my fingernails. “The other half of the thing that will lead me to . . .” It’s gone. I fold a stalk over itself until it snaps. “Tell me. Tell me who it is. Who’s missing, Helen? Who am I looking for?”

She says Elizabeth’s name, and hearing it is like falling into a soft bed. Bits, bits fall from the stem of a hydrangea as I run my hand down it. I put some of the leaves into my pocket before weaving my arms amongst the flower heads, holding my breath against the sour-milk smell of the sap.