Something Might Happen (2 page)

He’s not that worried, not yet. Alex is practical. He doesn’t worry until he needs to. But it’s not like Lennie—she isn’t
the type to take off and go somewhere without telling him. That’s him—he’s the one who does that.

In October the night dew gets so heavy it feels like rain. You can smell woodsmoke and, yes, if you breathe in hard enough,
the larger smell of sea. Alex looks but he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He shines the light into the black tangled
hedgerows, lets it move across the pale grit of the road—not perhaps wanting to think of why he is doing it, but doing it
all the same.

Well, I couldn’t just sit there, he tells me later. I had to get up and do something and I didn’t know what else to do.

He sees nothing, hears nothing.

He thinks of leaving the boys asleep and setting off on foot up to the school but knows Lennie will think that’s irresponsible.
What if a fire starts? What if Connor has one of his dreams and wakes in a panic to find the house empty?

In the end he goes back in and calls the Farrs. Geoff answers—no, it’s fine, they’re not in bed yet. He gets Maggie. Who sounds
surprised. And then worried. She can only confirm what Alex realises he already knows. That Lennie left the meeting an hour
ago—at least an hour in fact, since she wasn’t even the last to go.

Alex feels his stomach start to slide. He holds off calling for as long as he can bear it. Then he rings the police. And me.

* * *

He is standing outside in the drive when I get there. Next to him, a police car—sour stripes in the fuzzy dark. The dirty
moon of the porch light shining, not yet dawn, not even close—the lane still grey, the hawthorn hedge a smudge of black at
the bottom of the lawn.

I heave Livvy’s seat up over one arm. She’s getting heavy, the plastic digs into my arm, rubs against my hip. For a second
her eyes flick open, unseeing, then back shut again.

You should have called, I tell him.

I did.

No, I mean sooner—straightaway.

He looks blank.

What could you have done?

I can’t bear his face.

Been here with you—

He rubs his eyes.

I feel bad enough getting you up now—

Oh Al—don’t be stupid, I tell him, shivering.

And Mick—?

Mick’s asleep.

He looks at me.

Tess—I mean, how could you have known—?

I didn’t, I tell him again, I don’t—

But—what you said?

I shake my head.

You know what you said.

I’ve no idea why I said it, I tell him.

Tess—

OK, I say, I felt afraid.

What d’you mean afraid? Of what?

I don’t know, I tell him, I mean it, Al. I don’t know what of.

We stand in silence for a moment. I hear the crunch of footsteps by the back door. Police.

Do you think she has left me? he says.

I try to laugh.

No, I say. No Al, I don’t.

A policeman comes out of the house and nods at us.

I watch him cross the gravel to the car and lean in to speak into the radio.

Lennie would never leave, I tell him, though it’s only as I say it that I know it’s true. She never would. Not just go.

The policeman comes over.

All right? he says.

Alex takes a quick breath.

We’re going to the school.

You’ll call me?

I pick up Liv’s seat. He nods.

They’re going to search the creek and the marshes, he says. If they get nowhere at the school.

Pure terror on his face.

She wouldn’t go anywhere, I tell him again. Not willingly. I just know she wouldn’t.

Sometimes there are things that I know.

Sometimes at the clinic, treating a patient, I feel my fingers slip in between the usual rhythms and catch something
else, something I wasn’t looking for. It might be something I don’t want to know—superfluous to the treatment. It’s possible
in my work to have too much information—to have it all come flying so hard at you that you lose focus.

What bollocks, says Mick as he sorts the washing on the kitchen floor. What sort of things, anyway?

I don’t know, I say, just things.

You mean if someone’s going to move house or get divorced or win the lottery?

No, I’ll say. For fuck’s sake, Mick. You know I don’t mean that.

Well what then? If they’ll live or die?

I’ll flush.

I don’t know.

And he laughs. Not because he doesn’t understand, but because of the opposite: he thinks he understands too well. I can’t
surprise him any more. All these years together and what is there left to discover?

So I keep quiet. When I pick up on Ali Ledworth’s pregnancy long before the doctors do (two tests in a row come back negative),
I say nothing about it at home. And when poor Janey Urbach is knocked down in Bury on a one-way street by a car going the
wrong way and suffers appalling spinal damage, I know better than to mention to Mick that the last time I treated her I felt
something—a heavy weight hanging over her—as unmissable as a cloud blotting out the sun on a hot day.

And when I tell Alex I feel that Lennie will be OK, it’s a lie. I don’t. Not at all. Ever since that moment in The
Polecat her presence—normally solid and resilient and unremarkable—has been unfurling and undoing itself, snagging, tearing,
falling apart.

Anne Addison types out the minutes from that night’s meeting. She tells me it feels almost wrong, putting down on paper what
amount to Lennie’s last words, her last recorded comments—made only an hour or so before she died. She types them up and copies
them, but does not circulate them yet, out of respect for the family, she says.

There is a report on the Quiz Night—Lennie recorded as saying she’s disappointed by how little was raised and querying the
amount spent on food. Maybe we should just get people to bring stuff next time? she suggests. Nothing fancy, just maybe quiches
and baguettes and cheese and maybe a dip or two?

One or two people disagree. They feel that, for the price of the ticket, a hot meal is expected. Lennie’s shrug is not minuted
of course, but I can see it, clear as anything—her sitting back, blonde head bent, picking intently at her nails, deciding
not to push her comments any further.

Lennie is good—better than me—at knowing when to shut up. Which is a good thing because there’s always a bit of trouble at
these meetings. There’s always someone disgruntled, someone who resents the way someone else says something, someone who refuses
to cast a vote.

There’s a brief discussion about the Carnival Parade, which is going to be the last week of June along the sea front. Last
year I took this on, but this time Lennie’s agreed
to do it. Someone suggests a competition at the school to design a Carnival poster—Maggie says great, she has a book-illustrator
friend who would judge it. Maybe his publisher would even donate prizes? I know there would have been a murmur of pleasure
at that. But Barbara Anscombe, who likes to get her oar in, ignores Maggie and says the post office should also be approached—see
if they’d be willing to provide balloons and maybe smaller prizes for runners-up.

Then there’s the usual argument about who the proceeds should go to. Barbara says Marie Curie.

What? Again? says Sally Abrahams, whose son is on his gap year in Nepal. Shouldn’t we be raising awareness of something beyond
the town—Christian Aid, Action Aid, something a little more multicultural?

Cancer affects people in all cultures, says Barbara firmly and Polly Dawson points out that many people in the town know someone
who has died of cancer, though no one dares look at John who lost his wife so recently.

But Lennie agrees with Sally, that it might be nice to have a change. She knows, for instance, that the WI in Westleton are
raising money for African farmers (a snort here from Barbara)—and what’s to stop them going back to Marie Curie at Christmas?

All of this, except Barbara’s brief snort of derision, is minuted by Anne Addison.

Later, shocked, baffled, interviewed by police, everyone who attended the meeting agrees that Lennie behaved quite normally,
that there was nothing strange or different about
her behaviour at all. A bit tired, perhaps, they all concede, but then who isn’t tired on a Monday night after a day’s work
followed by feeding the kids before rushing out again?

At a quarter to ten, the meeting is declared closed and Lucy, Lennie, Polly, Sue Peach, her daughter Sophie and Maggie lay
out a selection of crudités, tortilla chips and dips. Bottles are opened, paper cups pulled from their cellophane.

Sue lets drop that she’s thinking of doing an Open University degree, now that her youngest has started full-time school.
And Lucy says something along the lines of how terrific and that if she had her time all over again she just knows she’d study
with a whole lot more passion.

And Lennie laughs and says, Ah but isn’t that what being a student is all about? Taking life for granted? Living in the moment
and for the moment and with no sense of what the future holds?

Everyone—Sue, Maggie, Polly, Sophie, Charlotte, Sally, Lucy, Barbara, John, Anne—remembers this comment of hers. They all
mention it in the police interviews. No one can bear to think that, less than an hour later, the person who made it is dead.

WHEN YOU LIVE RIGHT BANG UP CLOSE TO SOMEONE, IT
can be hard to get far enough back to see them clearly. Or maybe your eyes do look, but your brain can’t take it in. Like
you never notice your own kids growing, or your own baby getting proper hair.

When Alex tries to give the police a physical description of Lennie, he gets confused. He goes almost crazy trying to think
what she had on—earlier for instance when she screamed at Max about the state of his room, or kicked the washing-machine door
shut and swore because it hurt her foot, or made the boys’ tea in a hurry and upset Connor by slightly burning the frilled
edges of his second fried egg. He knows she did these things, but he can’t see her doing them.

This shocks him.

Like she’d already gone from our lives, he tells me later.

You were in a panic, I say. It’s not your fault. You couldn’t think.

I say it but I know it’s meaningless. And he just looks at me—just screws up his eyes and rips the skin from the ragged side
of his thumbnail and I know what he’s thinking: he’s trying to imagine the last time he saw her, trying to retrieve it from
the deadest, most faraway part of his mind.

He tells the police he thinks she may have had on a red shirt, a shiny one.

Satin? they say.

He nods.

Something with a sheen anyway. Satin or silk, he says. Is there a difference?

Al shuts his eyes.

And jeans, he says. Jeans and slip-on trainers, blueishgrey ones, the type with the knobbly sole—

After clothes, they ask him about other things. The state of his marriage. He tells them it’s fine, it’s normal—no, no rows
recently, not that he can think of. Nothing major anyway. And does Mrs Daniels have any history of depression or other illness
such as seizures or fits?

No, Alex tells them, relieved that this part at least is completely true. Never, no. Lennie’s a fit and healthy person, never
ill, never down, nothing like that.

He explains that she’s a potter, a ceramicist—that she’s just had an exhibition in London. That a couple of big stores have
bought her stuff—that she’s doing well. They ask him
what he does and he tells them he makes furniture. And maybe he smiles because he knows how it must sound. The potter and
the furniture maker in their cottage by the sea. They ask him how his business is doing and he says, Good—thinking it a strange
question—good enough, he says. Trying to stop his stupid hands from shaking so hard.

She would never go off without telling me, he adds then, hating the small whine of helplessness in his voice. But they seem
to accept this and he relaxes. It’s only when the officers step outside for a moment that he finds himself overwhelmed by
the lingering tang of their aftershave and rushes to the downstairs toilet to be sick. A quick, odourless and painless throwing
up, like a dog or a baby.

Almost six. I crouch on the edge of the musty sofa and feed Liv by Alex and Lennie’s gas fire in the half-dark. She’s not
hungry—just gums my nipple in a kind of half-dutiful way, then relaxes her lips and lets it slip away off her tongue. You
think that babies are these fragile little creatures, at everyone’s mercy, but they’re not. I know that and Liv knows it too.
She knows what she wants from life and she’s learning the knack of how to get it.

I pull my bra back up and replace the pad and at that moment hear the upstairs toilet flush and then Max’s voice saying something
cross. Then the creak of the stairs.

Not just Max, both of them.

Where’s Mum and Dad? Why’re you here? Is it a school day? Connor wants to know, one hand in his mouth, the other down his
pyjama bottoms.

Mum broke down somewhere, I tell them, and Daddy’s had to go and pick her up and sort out the car—

He can’t fix cars, says Max straightaway.

No, I say, I mean, get it to a garage or whatever.

But Max looks suspicious.

So—you mean she broke down and stayed in the car all night?

No. I think she stayed at Maggie’s, I tell him.

That’s weird, he says, frowning.

Is it?

You know it is. Why wouldn’t she just walk back here?

I search for an answer but it’s not necessary, I’ve lost him. He’s already switched on the TV and is holding the remote and
staring intently at the screen.

Are you allowed TV in the mornings? I ask him. He shrugs and turns it off, chucks the remote on the sofa. He’s a good boy
really.

He won’t be long, I say.

How long? Connor asks. How long will he be?

He pours himself a bowl of Coco Pops. Some have spilled on the table and he leans over and thumbs them straight into his mouth.

I ask Max to get some milk and he does.

Not semi-skimmed, says Connor quickly.