The Missing One (23 page)

This is how marriages unravel. It is a creeping process. Each night Doug and I slotted another brick into the invisible wall that was growing between us, and we didn't even know we were doing it. We were just so tired all the time. All we wanted was some sleep.

But I wonder, now, whether Doug was lying in the spare room all those nights, thinking about her. Was he trying to work out how to leave me and be with her? Or have I got this all wrong? He was trying to tell me what happened and I wouldn't let him. It all feels bamboozling, like a dream where you are being given complex information, but none of it makes sense. I just need time. I will be able to face him, and listen to whatever he wants to tell me. But not now.

I can't sleep now. I sit up and hug my knees. This is agony. If Doug is having an affair then nothing in the past – no memory or feeling – has the same meaning any more. Doug was good, solid, true, and now maybe he isn't. Maybe I don't know who he is at all. But of course I know who he is. It's Doug. He would never do this to me.

I shove his jumper off the bed, lean over and find my phone. The screen is blank. I get the charger and plug it in. I
have to talk to him. This is insane. For a moment I see myself with complete clarity: I have been acting like a lunatic child. Running away with my hands over my ears – ‘La, la, la, I can't hear you.'

The phone flickers briefly to life, but there is no signal – and I remember that there is no reception out here. I put it down, slump back and shut my eyes.

*

When I wake up, my mouth is dry. I stare at the ceiling and listen to the far-off crash of the waves, wind thumping like flat hands on the windowpane, and the spooky sound of the wind chime. Then I think,
Finn!

I hurry through the cold living room to the kitchen, dragging my inadequate pullover over my head. The kitchen is clean and tidy, no sign of life. Susannah's boots aren't there by the French windows and the dog baskets are empty. The deck is empty too. Greyish clouds scud across the sky.

She wouldn't have taken him down those steps again, to the rocks, would she? Surely not. I wrench open the doors and the waves and wind are deafening for a second – overwhelming, blaring. I run out onto the deck, slipping, and righting myself, like before, heavily against the wooden railings. I peer over. The tide is in and angry waves beat at the black feet of Isabella Point.

I look around. The cold is biting into my bones already. A path runs round the back of the house and disappears into the pine trees. I have never seen trees so colossal. They seem to be powering themselves skywards, stabbing at the clouds. ‘Susannah?' I go to the edge of the deck. ‘Susannah!' The
wind howls in through the tree tops and sweeps my voice away.

High above the house, a gull cries, emptily. I have to stop panicking. They'll be inside. I didn't even check the rest of the house. And if they're not inside, she probably has him out front. She's a mother. She knows how to keep a toddler safe. She'll know to hold his hand, and not let him run off along this slidy deck, or go anywhere near those steps. She'll know to watch him every second. Not to turn her back, even for a moment.

I hurry back into the house and down the corridor to what I think might be her bedroom. I knock. ‘Susannah?' Nothing. I try the handle, ‘Susannah? Finn?' I peek in. A big white bed. Huge windows. I close the door again.

I don't know if I slept for minutes or hours. But it's OK. They'll be around here somewhere. I open the coat cupboard, opposite her bedroom door. His suit isn't there. Right. So they're outside. I go and open the front door and stand at the top of the stone steps leading down to the drive. The hire car is parked behind an old Subaru.

‘Susannah?' I bellow. My socks are wet and my feet are freezing. The seagulls call above, and the wind thrashes at the pines. Far off I can still hear the waves crashing on the rocks. The house is completely hemmed in by trees. ‘Susannah! Finn?'

My wet socks slither on the icy deck. It seems to run all round the building. I follow down the side of the house.

And then I see them.

Finn has his back to me, and is standing in front of the
big windows, bundled in his red suit, boots on this time, and gloves and a hat. He is looking off down the deck, standing completely still, staring intently at something low down. Susannah crouches by his side, her arm protectively round his belly. She is looking at the same thing. I don't think I've ever seen my son stand so still. Then I spot what they're looking at. Just feet away from Finn is a large grey squirrel. It is giant, cat-sized. It has a nut or something in its paws and is nibbling on it, tail tip twitching.

At home, Finn has a Squirrel Nutkin board book, an awful dumbed-down version that would make Beatrix Potter spin in her grave, but he loves the pictures and likes to point at them and get me to say the names. He must feel, right now, as if his book has burst to life in front of him.

I want to go to him, but I mustn't spoil the moment. Then Susannah notices me. She turns her head, unsmiling, and her eyes are the colour of the palest sea glass. At the movement, the squirrel shoots off and Finn lets out a shout – part objection, part thrill.

Susannah stands up and takes Finn by the hand. He turns and sees me.

‘Mama!' He pulls away from her and runs towards me and I hug him and pick him up; his definite weight in my arms brings relief flooding through my body. My feet are numb, and the wind eats into my back, but Finn is as warm as a blanket. He presses a cheek against my face.

‘Squoll,' he says, his brown eyes bright. ‘Squoll!'

I kiss him. ‘I know! That was a really big squirrel. And it was eating a nut, wasn't it? Like Squirrel Nutkin.'

Susannah comes up behind him. She holds herself stiffly, and there is something hostile in the tilt of her chin, as if she has been thinking about me while I've been asleep, and has found me wanting.

‘Thanks for looking after him,' I say. ‘He's obviously having the time of his life.'

‘Yeah. Feeling better?'

‘Much. Thanks, Susannah. It's so good of you to do this. I'm not sure what time it is – did I sleep for a long time?'

‘Almost two hours.'

‘Oh my God – two hours!' No wonder she is angry. ‘But you should have woken me up. You wanted to work!'

She stares at me for a second, her head slightly on one side, and then she reaches out a hand as if she's going to touch my face. Instinctively, I lean away from her hand. She drops it to her side.

Finn wriggles to be put down, then runs back to where the squirrel was. ‘Squoll!' he calls, in an old-fashioned ‘cooee' voice. ‘Squo-oll?' He squats, holding the railings with both hands, and peering into the trees.

She watches him, and a gust whips a few strands of her silvery hair across her cheek. It is the look of a grandmother – tender, proud, tinged with longing. Then she turns her eyes back to me and the warmth drains from them. ‘Go back inside, Kali. We'll come in, in a second. Put the kettle on. Go on – you're cold – go.'

I glance at Finn. He is still squatting, hands on the deck railings, still calling ‘Squo-oll?' He'll have a fit if I try to drag him inside. This is exactly what he should be doing,
breathing sea air, discovering wildlife. I shiver and wrap my arms around myself, but still I hesitate, moving from one frozen foot to the other.

‘Go inside, Kali,' she snaps, and I can tell she means it. She wants me gone.

*

There isn't an electric kettle, just a green enamel one that goes on the stove. As I put it there, I see a little Post-it, on the countertop, next to the range.

I stand there for a few moments, staring at the Post-it. Now I feel silly, rushing around like that, with panic rising. What did I think she was going to do to Finn?

Her cramped writing is familiar from the postcards in my mother's drawer back in Sussex.

But why? Why on earth was Susannah thinking of my mother every year on the same day in May? I haven't asked. She isn't an easy person to question. But of course I must ask. Before I leave, I must find out what else she knows about my mother.

*

Through the archway I can see the tall windows on the
other side of the front room, and through these I can see Finn's bright red suit out on the deck, with Susannah bending next to him.

She really is remarkably good with him. It's really not what you'd expect. She seems like the kind of woman who would be impatient and dismissive of small children, but she is intensely focused on Finn, as if she really does have a biological claim to him.

Perhaps there is a grand-maternal body clock too. If so, then hers is ticking like a time bomb. And she is right to disapprove of me: what sort of mother has a moment of lunacy and gets on a plane to Canada? What sort of mother turns up with her toddler unannounced at a stranger's house on a winter's night? What sort of mother sleeps for two hours during the day, leaving her child on a cliff edge with someone she barely knows? No wonder Susannah is hostile. Then again, if she is that annoyed at being left in charge of Finn for so long, why did she send me inside? Why not just hand him back? Perhaps she feels he needs protecting, from me.

I realize that I'm doing it again – it's the old fear of inadequacy. From the moment Doug and I decided to try for a baby I began to be afraid that erratic mothering is passed down in the blood. And I have certainly been distracted here – I think about the vase, Finn's panicky wails and the slammed-shut door. I really haven't been properly tuned into what he needs, not really. Maybe this is how it starts: little moments of neglect that multiply and join up and swell into full-on bad mothering.

But I'm being ridiculous. I may not be the perfect mother but I would never – ever – allow myself to treat Finn the way she treated me – loving him, then turning away; being there – then not. Right now, I am his fixed point; I am his, completely. And just for these few years, while he is small, he is mine, too. The image of a yin-yang ball pops into my head: the two of us curled around each other, forming one smooth sphere. I will not ever abandon him the way she abandoned me.

It suddenly occurs to me – genuinely for the first time – that Doug might have felt a bit left out. I've been trying so hard to be there for Finn, to be a better mother, that I have sealed Doug out of our little sphere. I have given all my constancy to Finn and left Doug in the cold. If anything, I loved Doug even more after we had Finn – but day to day I have failed to show him this. Instead, I have resented him for working. For sleeping. For still having a career. Whatever has happened between us, I've definitely played my part.

I need to talk to him. When they come back in, I'll ask to borrow the house phone.

While the kettle heats up, I wander through to the living room and look at the shelves behind the Chihuly sculpture: big white cubes filled with books and objects. A ficus trails down from one of the highest shelves. Most are packed with books, but in one there's just a wooden Buddha and a framed Tibetan prayer. Another cube contains three large, smooth white pebbles, an oil burner and a carved wooden box containing essential oils: bergamot, lavender, jasmine. In another cube there is a beautiful pottery plate decorated with blue fish.

I browse the cubes that contain her books. There are novels, many in hardback: Pulitzer Prize winners, household names, mostly women – Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Forster, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, E. Annie Proulx. There is a large section of art history: two big cubes of it. In another, there's a whole chunk of poetry, everything from Milton to Sylvia Plath. One slim book, low down, catches my eye because I've seen it so recently. Its pale blue spine leaps out at me.

I pull it out. And then I just sit for a moment, and stare at it in my hands. It's the exact same edition. I turn it over. There is postcard marking a page. Before I even open it I know what page it will be.

Not a eulogy from a daughter, and definitely not a wedding poem.

I flick to the front of the book. ‘Susannah Gillespie.' There is no date.

I reread the poem. I wonder if Susannah sent this book to my mother, or the other way around. I look at the back. It's the same edition as the one in our house in Sussex, and it's Canadian. So, yes, Susannah must have sent it to my mother. And then I realize what I've been missing – of course. I can't believe I didn't work this out right away. They were on a Californian campus in the seventies surrounded by protests, feminist consciousness-raising groups, love-ins, streaking, psychedelic drugs. They were lovers.

It's like staring into a kaleidoscope, twisting the end and waiting for the tiny fragments to shift and clatter and roll into their final coherent pattern. And yet, this pattern doesn't quite feel right, either. Or does it? I just don't know.

I'm just going to have to ask Susannah outright.

I hear movement by the front door, then the dogs' scuffling claws. A shriek rises from the kitchen and for a second I think it's a bird, trapped inside the house, then I realize it's the kettle's panicky whistle. And then I hear the front door open, the dogs burst past me to their food bowls, and Susannah is talking to Finn about squirrels. One dog laps water noisily in the kitchen.

‘Hi!' I shove the postcard back in its place, thrust the book back on the shelf and leap up. ‘The kettle's just boiling!' I run over and take it off the hob, and I hear Finn's voice, chattering nonsense back to Susannah as they open the cupboard to put away his red suit and wellies.