Elizabeth Is Missing (32 page)

“Yes, I’m sorry,” he said, not sitting down but looking as though he might drop. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think. I . . .” He had the flowers in his hand. A bedraggled bunch, wilting in the heat of the kitchen, petals falling with every twitch of his body. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said, holding them up to us. He swayed on his feet, and Ma waved a hand at me to do something.

“What’s happened?” I asked, getting up and pushing my chair into his legs, to make him sit.

“My mother,” he said. “She died this afternoon.”

I flinched. Ma looked worried, spooked even. We must both have thought he’d gone off his head, lost his memory, something.

“Your mother’s already dead, dear,” Ma said. “There was a bomb, d’you remember?” She waved her hand again, towards the kettle this time, and I filled it with water and put it on the range, adding fuel.

“No,” Douglas said. “No, she survived that. I hadn’t known at the time, but she survived. And then, remember you saw her, Maud? She chased you.”

“What, you mean the mad—” I stopped myself and rattled the kettle to cover the words I’d nearly said. “But how could she be . . . ?”

He ducked his head and set the flowers down. I supposed he had collected them for his mother and I wondered whether to fetch a vase, but it hardly seemed worth it for such a sorry-looking gathering of roadside weeds.

“I thought perhaps you’d have known about Mother already,” Douglas said. “Sukey knew. I told her. She was so kind, tried to help, made up parcels of food. I had begun to think everything would turn out all right. I don’t know how I could be so dense, but I thought it just might be all right.”

“But, Douglas, your mother,” Ma said. “I don’t quite understand.”

“She’d always been delicate,” he said, his eyes shut against the maddening light. “Ever since my sister died. Dora was run over by a bus, before the war.”

We nodded and urged him on because, of course, everybody knew that.

“And then my dad went to France in 1940 and never came home again. That’s when she got a lot worse. Used to be out all hours, didn’t sleep, didn’t eat, not properly anyway. She got into trouble with our neighbours—that was when we lived on the other side of town. The police were fetched. Several times I had to go and ask for her at the police station.”

“That’s how Sergeant Needham knew you.”

“Did he? Yes, I suppose that’s how. Anyway, in the end we had to move. Did a moonlight flit and used my milk cart to shift everything. I’m not proud of that. But at least it meant no one knew us, I thought that was a blessing. I avoided our new neighbours, and kept hold of our ration books so the shopkeepers wouldn’t know Mother’s name, wouldn’t connect her to me. I don’t think anyone even knew she lived with me, she kept such odd hours, and she used to sneak about the back gardens rather than use the road. In any case, we’d only moved in a few weeks before those bombs were dropped. I thought she’d gone in the raid. I’m ashamed to say I almost found it a relief, but then it turned out she was living in the wreck of the house. I tried to help her, but she was so difficult. You couldn’t make her see sense. She only wanted to stay in the house, bombed as it was, because Dora’s dolls and her Woolworth’s handbag and her
Rupert
annuals were still inside somewhere.”

“Poor woman,” Ma said, looking about the kitchen and somehow not letting her eyes rest on anything.

The kettle had started to boil and I poured hot water over some beef-tea granules, sliding the cup towards Douglas. The smell of it clouded the kitchen and made my mouth water.

“We were with her,” Ma said. “In the road. Did they tell you?”

Douglas sipped his tea in answer, and I took his plate from the oven and set it in front of him. He sat stiffly in his chair, the flickering light giving him a false animation.

Ma turned a knife and fork his way and pushed them across the table. “She didn’t seem in pain. Just slipped away.”

He nodded and then began to eat, neatly and quickly, not looking at us when he spoke. “When they started to clear the rubble from our house she went and slept in that boarded-up shack on the beach. Then I lost her again for a while, until I found she’d been hanging about at Frank’s, living in the old stables. I think she wanted to be near Sukey. You see, she looked a bit like my sister.” He took another sip of the tea. “So do you, Maud.”

I wondered whether that was what had made her chase me. “You had her umbrella,” I said. “I saw it in your room.”

He paused over a curl of onion, perhaps wondering what I’d been doing in there, and I suddenly realized I’d left the “Champagne Aria” on the gramophone and I wondered if he’d notice later.

“I took the umbrella off her,” he said. “She . . . she got into your room when you were ill, and I was nervous of what she might do.”

“I thought I’d seen her,” I said. “But then I thought I’d seen a lot of people.”

“She got in here, and she took food, too,” he said. “I should have told you, but I was ashamed. And she didn’t take anything else, anything valuable.”

“But the records,” I said. “Smashed in the garden. That must have been your mother.”

“No, that was me, I’m afraid. I’d put them aside for Sukey, and, well, anyway, one night she got into Frank’s house—my mother, I mean. I don’t know how, or why, but she did, and Frank was out and Sukey got a fright and came running here. It was about ten o’clock and I was coming home from the pictures and I met her in the street. We had a row. She was angry, having been so frightened, and I was angry because she said things about my mother. They weren’t meant to be cruel, but I was hurt all the same. And then Sukey went off home, back to Frank, and I went up to my room and smashed the records and, not knowing what to do, put them at the end of the garden, and you discovered the bits before I could move them.”

“‘Please let us be friends again,’” I said, quoting Sukey’s letter aloud without thinking.

“What?”

I shook my head. “Did she tell Frank? About your mother?”

“She wanted to tell him, but I asked her not to,” he said. “I didn’t want that brute to know. He’d have used it against me.”

Douglas carefully finished his last mouthful and I took his plate to the sink, staring at the pale underside of a moth, its body lit up and exposed against the glass.

“What did Sukey say,” Ma asked, “that made you so angry?”

“She told me I should send my mother away somewhere, to an institution. But I couldn’t do that. It was bad enough the old house being gone, and then my sister’s things were buried beneath the rubble of the new house. I couldn’t lock Mother away, too. All she ever wanted was to go home, to touch the things my sister had touched.”

I
want to go home,” I say. But there’s no one around and the words dissolve in the empty air, muffled by high, thick shrubs and deep turf and precisely clipped trees. I’ve got a tiny sort of shovel in my hand and I’d use it to make some noise if I could find anything else hard to bash it against. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know how I got here. There’s a smell of cut grass, but there are no flowers. “Please,” I say again. “I want to go home.”

Beyond the hedge someone is walking, bobbing along. I try the tiny shovel on the trunk of a tree, but it only makes a faint thud, so it’s no surprise whoever it is doesn’t hear me. I wonder if I’m supposed to dig my way out, I seem to have been given the tool for it; but how do you start a tunnel? I never paid much attention to all those old films, never thought I’d have to escape from Colditz myself. I walk across the lawn towards the street and stop by the hedge, plucking off leaves and holding them in my hands. I fold them up and rip them into bits and scatter them on the grass. But I’m not going to eat them, no matter what anyone says. A woman crosses the road; she waves and I duck down behind the hedge, landing sorely on my knees.

“Hello, Mum,” she says, leaning over, making the hard strands of glossy leaves bow and bristle. “What are you doing down there?”

She has short blond curls, this woman, and freckles in her wrinkles. I get up slowly from the grass, pushing my arms into the hedge for support. My trousers are covered in little bits of leaf and my hands are stained with green.

“I’ve come to take you home,” she says. “Was it okay?”

I ignore her and peer at the houses opposite. I don’t recognize any of them. They are too new, too clean, for my street. There are a lot of builders in shiny jackets on one side and a great mound of that stuff, sharp gritty stuff. It makes me think of the beach and Sukey and bleeding fingernails. It makes me think of before the war when I was seven or eight and Sukey buried me up to my neck. I tried to dig myself out, but I couldn’t and the grains got pushed into my fingernails and my wrists were sore and I was so panicked that I worked my way further down into the stuff and it covered my mouth and I was choking.

“I know you’re very angry with me,” the woman says, “but I’ll make it up to you.”

“Very angry,” I say. “I was so angry I went home and smashed all her records and buried them in the garden.” I can feel the anger now and see the records, but somehow the two things don’t fit together.

“I thought we could visit Elizabeth.”

“Elizabeth,” I say. “She’s missing.” The words are correct, familiar, but I can’t think what they mean.

“No, she’s not, though, is she?”

The hedge makes another bow at the words and the shimmer of it frightens me. I don’t trust this woman and I can’t see her below chest height because this plant has grown too tall. I study her face but I can’t remember what people look like when they’re lying. “You’ve been feeding her,” I say, and I pull a leaf off the plant.

“No, I haven’t. She was in hospital, Mum. A stroke unit, remember? Remember we talked about it? Again and again and again.” She says the last bit through her teeth. “And we went to visit her, didn’t we? When you sprained your thumb. Anyway, she’s still at the rehabilitation unit, because she’s not swallowing properly, but we can visit her again now, if you like. Do you want to visit her?”

I don’t know what this woman’s talking about and I can’t see her arms or legs. I begin to wonder if she has any. “What do you call this?” I say, holding up the tiny shovel.

“It’s a trowel.”

“Ah ha! I thought you’d know that,” I say. “I’ve caught you out there, haven’t I?”

“Mum? Do you understand? Peter said you can go and see Elizabeth. But remember last time—it might be a shock. Elizabeth doesn’t look the way you remember her, does she? She’s still the same person, though, and she does want to see you.”

The woman smoothes a hand over her hair, and I can see one arm now. I keep saying the word “trowel” in my head; I have a feeling it will be important later.

“We can go today if you want. I can call Peter. Would you like that? I’m so sorry I had to leave you here, Mum,” she says, starting to walk along the hedge. “I want to make it up to you.”

I can see all of her once she is standing behind the garden gate; it’s made of thin iron bars, and she can’t hide behind it. I can see her navy blue wellingtons and grubby jeans. I can’t think why she’s here; I can’t think of her name. She’s like one of those people you mistake for someone else, one of those people you think is the person you want it to be. I always want it to be my daughter now, but it never seems to be her. I used to want it to be Sukey, and I saw her everywhere: in the precise movement of a shopgirl as she pressed powder to her nose, or the dancing step of an impatient housewife in a grocer’s queue. I carried on seeing her in other people long after I was married and settled, and a mother. She was still in the smudge of a face seen from a car.

There is a car now and driving, and a bird flying up from the road, and someone sits on a bench by a shop and a dog is tied to a lamppost. “Helen . . .” I can’t think what else I want to say, I pull the seat belt away from my body and let it snap back. There’s something important. “Trowel.” That wasn’t the thing. Not even close. Images blur together, words, too. The bandstand in the park, the ugly green-and-yellow house.

“Oh, Mum. Cheer up. I’m taking you to see Elizabeth.” She looks at me quickly and then back through the windscreen. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

Light bounces off a mass of cars and I feel dizzy. And then somehow we’re in a long, white corridor and a man is squeaking by. His shoes seem to make a tune from long ago. A song about lilacs. And, as if they are part of the same production, two people carry bunches of flowers past us. “Those for me?” I say, and they laugh as if I’ve made a joke. We walk along corridors, corridors, each one the same, and I think we must be going round in circles. “Are we lost?” I say. But it seems we aren’t. We’ve arrived. It’s a room full of people in bed. “All these people should be made to get up,” I say. “Can’t be good for them, just lying there.”

“Don’t be silly,” Helen says. “And keep your voice down. They’re poorly.”

The room is very bright, with white sheets and big lights and railings everywhere like a sort of indoor park. My mind won’t focus.

“Mum?” Helen says.

I can only think of one word, and it isn’t right, I know it isn’t right. “Bandstand,” I say. “Bandstand.”

Helen walks towards a bed. And there, that tiny little thing with the crumpled face, that’s Elizabeth. Her eyes are closed and she looks scrunched up and withered. Has she always looked like that? I stand by the curtain for a few minutes, staring. And then I move closer and pull the curtain round us, closing us in, hiding us. A man is standing over the bed. He has a very raw-looking throat.

“She had a rough night,” he says. “But she’ll wake up in a bit. Just be quiet.”

I sit down quietly. Very quietly. I don’t want to disturb her. Elizabeth is here. I smile at her, but she doesn’t smile back. She is tucked tight into a huge bed. “Yes, have a rest,” I whisper. In a minute we’ll have a cup of tea. I might even have some chocolate in my bag. Or perhaps I could make some cheese on toast. You’ll need something, Elizabeth. That son of yours keeps you on starvation rations.

“Starvation?” the man says. “Rations?”

And then you can tell me which bird is which, just by looking at their shadows, and I can dig up the broken records from the garden and we can listen to the “Champagne Aria.”