You Don't Have to be Good (26 page)

There would be millions of her atoms and molecules in here; he was inhaling them right now. Where was she? There had to be a trail, a trail of molecular particles. The police had used a heat-seeking helicopter yesterday when they searched the meadows and the common. They had used sniffer dogs too, but none of that was any use, it seemed to Adrian, because the world was too full of heat and too full of smells. If there was some way of identifying her molecules here in the wardrobe, magnetising them in a centrifuge and then putting them in a canister . . . He bit his knee and thought about this. It should be possible then to call the other molecules back to the canister of collected ones like iron filings or like the way that starlings or bees will swarm and flock together. If he inhaled enough of her here, in this wardrobe, he could become the canister himself and just start walking, see where she led him, because the trail could not be entirely cold yet. It wasn’t that she had disappeared; that was obviously irrational, because everyone knew that matter could be neither created nor destroyed. It was just that they couldn’t see her. It was just that other things were obscuring her, like water over a stone or clouds across the sun.

She always said she loved the sun. He told her about Venus, how Venus was known as Earth’s evil twin because it was born the same time as Earth, composed of the same stuff as Earth and had a similar diameter but had evolved differently. The problem with Venus, he told her, was that it had no magnetism to protect it from the solar winds. Venus lost hydrogen and oxygen through the wake. ‘The wake?’ said Bea, who seemed to listen but didn’t always look like she did. ‘The wake the orbit leaves – like the wake on a boat.’ She was interested in the planets, she said. He told her that on Venus the runaway greenhouse effect meant it was 450 degrees, which would melt lead, and you wouldn’t like the sun if you lived there, he told her. On Venus the clouds were made of sulphuric acid and it had a slow rotation the
wrong way
, which was very unusual. ‘Is it?’ said Bea. Yes, he explained. It was retrograde and no one knew why, but
Venus Express
, the European Space Mission, would be launched in 2012. It was going to try and find out if Venus was Earth’s future in 2.6 billion years, and
Mars Odyssey
would find out if Mars was Earth’s past 3.8 billion years ago, and if only he was a bit older he could help.

His nose tickled and his foot had gone numb. Perhaps she didn’t want to be found. Perhaps she was hiding. He had lost all feeling in his bottom. Laura was squawking his name. He should be full of Bea particles by now. He opened the wardrobe door and climbed out.

D
OWNSTAIRS
,
THE
party mood had evaporated and the bonfire had gone out. Wanda and Richard were clearing up and Katharine was arguing with Frank. Laura had done something strange to her face and looked a little like a prostitute, but Adrian knew better than to comment because he understood that fourteen was a fragile time for girls, what with negotiating their sexual identity and everything. In the front room, Frank Sinatra was silent and Lance and Margaret were sitting side by side on the couch.

It was late. Katharine wanted to leave, but before she did, she wanted to punish Frank. Laura and Adrian hovered. Laura just slumped in a space in the room and waited, while Adrian slid slowly back and forth along the wall, his eyes fixed on the floor between his mother’s feet and Frank’s.

‘But you’re always taking snaps,’ said Katharine, her face blotchy from wine.

‘I’m not that kind of photographer,’ said Frank.

Inexplicably, she had no photographs of Bea since the wedding and had assumed that Frank would have plenty. She needed a couple for the Mispers people, for the Salvation Army Family Tracing Service, for Missing People and for more posters. Frank of course had been worse than useless, pulling out stacks of old papers and files from the ruin of his workroom, complaining that the police had left everything in a mess and failing to find anything resembling a recent photo of his wife. The posters that Precious had made used the photo from Bea’s staff pass that resembled the mug shot of that woman who drove her children into a lake in New Jersey. That was who people were currently looking out for along the Cam and around the marketplace. No wonder there was no news of her.

Katharine jangled the car keys and called to Richard that they were leaving. The party had been a mistake, of course. What they had all been thinking of, she had no idea. Now that Bea had failed to turn up to her own mother’s surprise birthday party, the situation seemed much more serious than before. Richard asked whether she was all right to drive and Katharine said she would just have to be seeing as he had been drinking all evening as far as she could see. Outside, torn strands of police tape dangled from the gatepost. Richard put his hand on Frank’s back and said goodbye. The children waved ineffectually. Katharine revved the engine and switched on the headlights. She looked at Frank. He was wanting sympathy, she could tell, but she had none to give him. Not only did he have no recent photographs of his wife but he was also clueless as to the whereabouts of her passport, which meant she might have left the country. No financial activity might mean one thing and no passport might mean another. It didn’t make sense. And Frank, it turned out, had not even slept in the same bed as Bea the night before she went, which meant that Bea might have been missing since Tuesday night, not Wednesday morning. He looked a pathetic figure to her, in the dying front garden, fiddling ineffectually with the plants on the windowsill. She felt enraged by him.

She leant across Richard and said, ‘Frank, I’m putting up posters, setting up a website, arranging a television appeal. What are you going to do?’

Frank took a step back and scratched his head. ‘Well, I’m going to wait here in case she comes back.’

Katharine said, ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ and released the handbrake.

He came over to the car. He looked diminished in the sodium glow of the streetlight, grown old suddenly, and Katharine wondered if this was how Bea had seen him.

He put one hand on Richard’s open window and said, ‘When are you moving?’

Richard said, ‘Well . . .’ and looked at Katharine.

‘Oh, all that’s on hold now,’ Katharine snapped as she put the car into gear. She looked at him and regretted her tone.

‘Be in touch,’ she said.

Frank watched the Jeep glide away and saw its brake lights glow at the bottom of the street. As he was turning back to the house, the car reversed angrily towards him.

Richard smiled sheepishly as he climbed out.

‘Forgot to say goodbye to Margaret,’ he said.

Frank realised he had forgotten Margaret too. And Lance. He felt a little better suddenly. Lance could have his room tonight and Margaret could sleep in the children’s room. He followed Richard and Katharine back into the house. Tonight he was going to sleep in their bed, his and Bea’s.

N
OVEMBER BROUGHT
storms that felled three trees along the river, a poplar on Stourbridge Common and two willows at Grantchester. In December it started to rain and didn’t stop. The days shuffled by, numbered and noted on the calendar by Katharine. Bea’s fiftieth birthday came and went. Headaches and back pain nagged and worried at Katharine and she couldn’t for the life of her remember what it was exactly that she had been good at in her job. Saving tiny babies, tubed and patched and wired up, seemed absurd to her now. More than once she had found herself standing in the neonatal unit, gazing over at the incubators bathed in their gentle uterine glow and wondering what on earth the point of it all was. Why all this effort to hold life together when to let it go at this stage could not really be so very terrible, could it? The fragile bird-like creatures in their tanks had barely weight nor substance enough to make a mark on the lives of others, not the way they could when they were grown, when years had spread their roots wide and deep, not the way she’d imagined the full six-footedness of her father had filled a whole side room and needed six men to carry it into the chapel. Not like the way the Bea-shaped vacuum threatened to pull in everyone standing at its edges.

The hospital where she worked had been very understanding and allowed her to keep an office even though her replacement had arrived. She went in most mornings and tried to finish a paper she had started in the summer, but mostly she trawled the internet for news of Bea and checked with the various agencies that there were no developments. What little media interest there had been in Bea’s disappearance was dwindling and dying away. Katharine knew and dreaded this and typed Bea’s name into Google several times a day. She had a file of news about her that she hated to look at but did look at in case it held some clue she had missed. ‘Middle-Aged Woman Vanishes’, ‘Mystery of Missing Council Worker’, ‘River Search Draws a Blank’ and the one that she hated most of all: ‘Missing Woman Probably Dead Say Police’, although Jim told her they had said nothing of the sort; that was local papers for you. Pete said it was harder to remain hidden when you were dead than it was when you were alive. Bodies had a habit of making themselves known eventually. Jim apologised for Pete’s lack of tact but Katharine was glad for this information. It gave her hope.

The hospital in London where she had been due to take up her job was being less understanding. She had spoken to them of the circumstances and her start date had been delayed twice. They had explained their staffing difficulties, their teaching commitments and had written to her again. Richard had tried to persuade her it might be better for all of them if the family moved to London, but Katharine could not agree to this. She couldn’t leave Cambridge until something had been resolved, discovered, understood. It would feel like a betrayal, an abandonment of Bea. Richard muttered something that sounded like, ‘I think that’s already happened,’ and left to play squash with Paul. The house, which had been packed and ready to leave, now became partially unpacked and felt like a waiting room. More and more the children kept to their rooms or stayed over with friends. Katharine’s eczema had flared up, something that hadn’t happened since she was a girl. She lay in salt baths and smeared cortisone on her skin. When the vendors of the house in Chiswick found other buyers, Richard kicked the cat.

They looked out into the blackness of the garden where the cat had fled and listened to the rain. The children had gone to bed.

Katharine said, ‘For God’s sake, Richard. That cat may very well not come back again, you know.’

Richard said, ‘I know how it feels.’

Katharine looked around at the packing cases and stacked furniture and felt a migraine coming on.

‘I found this in Frank’s pocket.’ They looked up to see Laura standing in the doorway holding a crumpled parcel. Adrian stood behind her and gave her a shove into the room.

‘Why aren’t you asleep?’ Katharine asked.

‘It’s for Bea. I’m afraid to open it.’ Laura put the parcel on the table and Katharine recognised her mother’s writing. She sighed with irritation.

‘Mum’s been having one of her clear-outs. I got one of those recently and do you know what was in it?’

They looked at her. Adrian said, ‘Money?’

‘Yes! How did you guess? She sent the piggy bank I’d had since I was five. It was full of pennies!’

Richard laughed.

‘I mean, what a useless thing to send through the post. And now of course the money’s worthless. Ten years of savings. Must have been at least—’

‘Open it.’ Laura thrust the parcel at her mother.

Adrian helped, using a penknife to slice the layers of tightly taped paper. He tugged and tore until a plastic bag and three small red notebooks fell on to his mother’s lap. She stared down at them and drew her hands away.

Laura darted forward and emptied the bag on to the floor. A bunch of keys, rusted and heavy with age, a pair of bicycle clips and some balsawood tied with string. Adrian flicked through the notebooks. They were densely filled with carefully inked drawings, speech bubbles and captions. They were graphic novels drawn in meticulous detail. Laura snatched one and opened it greedily. She saw a tall man wearing trousers tucked into cycle clips and a young girl in wellingtons on a beach. Another scene was of a museum with the girl next to a dinosaur skeleton. Further down the page, a mammoth with wild swooping tusks sank into the mud. She read the caption: ‘Hastings One Million Years Ago’.

‘That’s Bea.’ Laura pointed at the girl in the pictures. The skill and effort of the artwork bewildered her. ‘I never knew.’ She searched through the pages and looked up angrily at her mother. ‘When did she do all this?’

Richard got down on his knees and took one of the books in his hand. ‘These are really very good. I had no idea she had such talent, did you?’

Katharine shook her head. She leant down and picked the cycle clips up off the floor.

‘
The Fossil Hunters
by Beatrice Kemp,’ read Adrian from the title page. ‘For Daddy.’

‘
H
OW MUCH
do you know about Bea and Patrick?’ asked Precious.

Katharine was sitting at Bea’s desk. She had come to collect her personal belongings. No one had asked her to but it was nearly Christmas and she was running out of places to look and things to do.

‘I know that it went on for a long time.’ In the beginning, she had warned Bea countless times about getting involved with a married man. Then she had stopped talking to her about it at all. She pulled open the desk drawers. ‘And I know they went abroad once. What was he like, anyway?’

‘Patrick Cumberbatch is a lovely man, as a matter of fact,’ said Precious. ‘Very popular here when he was running the place. A good “people person”.’

‘Evidently. Did his wife know?’

Precious gave a gentle shrug. ‘It’s hard to believe that a wife
doesn’t
know, don’t you think? I mean, if she ever looks at her husband, or listens to him, or smells him. But who knows what goes on?’