Late Season Read online

  ‘No,’ said Justine, ‘I don’t believe you, that’s just Tom, being sweet.’

  Lucien snorted.

  ‘And Evie had that effect on all sorts of people, anyway. And what about Louisa? Tom loves Louisa.’

  ‘All right,’ said Lucien, impatiently. ‘Whatever you say’ He took his hand away. ‘Let’s leave it, then, shall we?’ And he closed his eyes.

  As she lay beside him in the darkness Justine thought of how physically irresistible Evie had been; there had been a time when she had longed, hopelessly, to have Evie’s sweet-smelling hair, the curve of her waist, her wide dark-blue eyes, her radiant smile. It hadn’t saved her, though; who knows, it might even have killed her. She thought of Evie, hollow-eyed and pale as she had stood in her kitchen, Dido in her arms. There were things she had been afraid of. They had never asked. Justine sighed and turned over in the darkness, waiting for sleep to come.

  Not everyone was in bed; the children were, Dido with a hand flung up over her head on to her pillow and Martin lying straight beneath his single quilt like a knight on a tomb, hands folded on his chest. But behind the house Tom was sitting beside the dead embers of the previous night’s fire, leaning forward in the darkness, with his elbows on his knees and an almost empty wine bottle by his side. He seemed to be looking down the hill towards the sound of the river, through the motionless columns of the trees, to where the mist came creeping silently up from the valley floor, and he was crying.

  11

  Evie had taken her passport with her, Martin said, and that was what had given them hope; not that it had occurred to them that she might, as was later suggested in the inquest, have been suicidal. What Justine and Louisa were afraid of was that harm might have been done to her. The papers at the time were full of murder, or at least that was how it felt to Justine in the newsagents every morning, where the tabloid headlines seemed to shriek violent death at her: a child abducted, a young mother, bludgeoned to death in her bathroom, a whole family immolated by an estranged father.

  Justine had been alone in the house that whole week, at the chilly end of a long, empty summer. Lucien had been away on one of his courses, and she had felt panic creeping towards her every night as she lay awake listening to the slurred voices raised in the street outside and the crash of broken glass on the corner as the pub closed. Lucien had phoned eventually. He had a Luddite streak, or something, and had scorned mobile phones then; Justine had to wait for him to call her from a phone booth in a crowded bar somewhere. When he heard what had happened Lucien had asked her if she wanted him to come back, but Justine had said no, wanting to appear more self-sufficient than she felt. Now, though, she wondered if she shouldn’t have allowed Lucien to see how she was really feeling; after all, what harm would it have done? She was beginning to feel weary of her role, so proudly vaunted by Lucien, as a tower of strength.

  Martin had said the passport was gone, there was no mistaking it. They kept all the family documents together, driving licences, passports, Dido’s birth certificate, and Evie’s had gone. The police did try to hint that it wasn’t definitive, that it might have been taken to disguise Evie’s intentions and that her failure to withdraw any money from their joint account was, after a month, a more ominous sign. The passport was on her when she was found; Martin said they’d discovered it tucked into an inside pocket; in her nightmares Justine had imagined its pages, swollen and blurred by salt water, Evie’s image leaching from it into the muddy estuary.

  Her car had been found weeks earlier, only days after her disappearance, in the windswept long-stay car park of a ferry terminal in Harwich, locked and empty. They had almost rejoiced then, because it was found at so quintessentially a point of transit, not a final destination, not even, surely, for a suicide. There were no cliffs in Harwich, there was no lovers’ leap, only bleak, silvered mud flats, a brown trickle of water at low tide, a slew of identical articulated lorries awaiting embarkation. Justine had found it hard to imagine Evie in such a place, setting off on a rusty ferry full of booze-cruisers for a container-port in Holland or a closed-up, off-season Belgian seaside resort. But perhaps, if what she had wanted was escape, or anonymity, it might have seemed a perfectly symbolic point of departure. That, at any rate, was what Justine persuaded herself at the time.

  Those four fraught weeks passed like an extraordinary and disturbing dream, while each of them tried to make sense of Evie’s disappearance, imagined her with a new identity, in America, or New Zealand, or Italy, starting her life again somewhere thrilling and foreign. Living with someone else. With a shock Justine noticed bland little paragraphs about Evie in the papers, no more than a sentence or two and buried away at the tail end of the news pages. Mother’s Mystery Disappearance. They must have been placed by the police press office, because certainly Martin had nothing to do with the newspapers. For a brief moment Evie became ‘School Run Mum’, and once a paper used an old photograph of her, laughing at a student party fifteen years earlier.

  Whenever Justine saw such a piece her stomach would churn, as though Evie had been stolen from them not by a rapist or murderer, but by the reproduction of the grainy image, the smudged newsprint, the inaccurate details of her life. They tracked down an ex-boyfriend – not one Justine remembered – to say she was promiscuous, although he denied it later, and they got Dido’s name wrong. One or two journalists appeared in the late summer drizzle outside their terrace in North London, and for a while Martin took Dido to stay with a cousin, to get away. But Evie’s disappearance was not big news; she wasn’t young or vulnerable enough, and eventually the journalists and their umbrellas evaporated.

  Martin was in and out of the police station – more than once Justine had been asked to collect Dido from school because the detective in charge of the case wanted to interview him yet again. He seemed to keep his cool; he always arrived to collect Dido calm and unruffled, only maybe a little tired. Justine had tried to ask him, once, what they said to him; only because she couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be confined in a police interview room, interrogated or cajoled, to know that you are suspected and to be helpless. Martin had just shaken his head, just a trace of contempt in his voice.

  ‘They don’t know anything,’ he’d said simply. ‘All that manpower, all that time – they find nothing.’

  And Justine had just nodded, wondering whether he had misunderstood her, was deliberately evading her question, or was subtly letting her know that she was intruding.

  For a few weeks after Evie’s disappearance, as summer turned into autumn and the leaves began to coat the London pavements, Justine and Louisa had phoned each other often, as if they were as close as ever. They skirted around the subject of Evie’s disappearance; instead they talked about old times. The three years they’d spent in and out of each other’s rooms in that West London mansion block loomed large; they reminisced over every essay crisis, every boy invited back for a barbecue in the communal gardens, every coffee-fuelled late-night soul-searching session. Justine and Louisa, although they never said so, both felt that they could have done without each other better than they could manage without Evie. She was the catalyst, the live wire, the exotic; she was fierce, determined, she would do something one day. Without her they would have been nothing: suburban, timid, domestic specimens. That was what they were struggling against now she had disappeared.

  Every day of that month Justine had woken with an odd, lost feeling; a small, insistent tug that told her something was missing, that there was a puzzle needed solving. She couldn’t talk to Lucien about Evie; whenever Justine began to wonder aloud in his presence what Evie might have been thinking, he grew oddly impatient, didn’t want to know Lucien had never been one for introspection; perhaps he thought it self-indulgent, feminine. One early evening after work, on impulse Justine had taken the tube out to Hammersmith instead of her usual bus back to Lucien in Notting Hill, to see Louisa and Tom.

  Louisa was there, of course, having given up full-time work once she’d
had the children. Tom let Justine in; he seemed distracted, and Justine thought perhaps she’d disturbed him in the middle of writing a piece. He gestured vaguely towards the kitchen before heading back upstairs, slowly.

  Louisa was baking muffins in the kitchen for the children’s lunchboxes the next day; just looking at her made Justine, coming through the door after a day at work and an hour on the underground, feel weak. She sank on to a chair, and waited for Louisa to finish.

  Although the two were poles apart, Justine liked sitting in Louisa’s kitchen as much as she liked sitting in Evie’s; perhaps the only kitchen she never felt quite comfortable in, she reflected as she sat there, was her own. Or rather, Lucien’s. Where Evie’s was all creative chaos, Louisa’s represented order, and absolute control; there was no mess, no clutter; not even a dusting of flour despite the baking going on. It was all pale wood and slate, with an Aga, a butcher’s block and a butler sink, secret drawers and carousels all tucked away behind handmade cupboards, all researched, chosen and saved for by Louisa.

  Louisa smiled over at her, the muffins in her oven-gloved hands; she slid them into the Aga, shut the heavy door, clicked on the kettle, dropped her apron in a laundry bin and then, finally, she came around the table to kiss Justine. Justine inhaled her scent, a faint whiff of lily of the valley mingled with vanilla. Louisa sat down, and they both sighed together.

  ‘This is a nice surprise,’ said Louisa. ‘Is everything OK?’

  ‘Mmm,’ Justine nodded, uncertainly. ‘Sort of. How about you?’

  ‘Oh, well,’ Louisa said. ‘It’s a worry, isn’t it? I can’t get it out of my head. Have the police been to see you?’ The kettle boiled; she got up and went over to make the tea.

  They hadn’t. What would Justine have said? ‘I didn’t notice anything unusual?’ She shook her head. ‘How about you?’

  Louisa frowned. ‘Yes. Twice. But we couldn’t tell them anything. What does one say?’ She seemed distracted suddenly, and looked over at the oven. ‘Can you smell burning?’ she asked vaguely. Justine couldn’t smell anything.

  Louisa went on. ‘It would just have been guessing, after all, wouldn’t it? Martin’s a dark horse, perhaps something was up in the marriage? I think that would be irresponsible. Nothing more than gossip. And how do you explain what kind of person Evie was, to some – some – adolescent policeman? I do think they’re getting younger. Policemen.’ She sighed again.

  She had a point. Evie’s life wasn’t – consistent. Had never been. They would never have predicted, after all, that the Evie they had first known, with her adventurous sex life and romantic, globetrotting past, would have been the first to settle down. And if they had, that she would have stayed put for long, in a North London terrace with a child and a husband, all her passion invested in something so small-scale as family life. Ironically enough, Justine remembered that she, Justine, had been allocated that fate when they were all girls together, talking about the future. Perhaps because she was from a large family herself, they had predicted that she would be the first to produce a child. Justine looked down at her hands against the kitchen table, beginning to show signs of age against the smooth, pale wood. She looked up.

  ‘I wonder where she’s gone,’ she said, repeating the old, obvious question without thinking. ‘She could be anywhere. She could have just run away, couldn’t she? That’s what’s hard to explain, to someone who didn’t know her. A policeman. Didn’t you always think, however long she’d been settled down, she could still just make a break for it? Being Evie.’

  Louisa pursed her lips, just a little. ‘Well, I don’t think she ever took her responsibilities that seriously, do you? Marriage, children, that kind of thing; you just can’t go on living just as you always did. Taking holidays in term time – do you remember when they all went to New York when Dido was five? I mean, New York!’

  ‘Yes, but –’ Justine began to protest; she remembered the trip; it had seemed quite natural at the time, the way Evie had described it, the Museum of Modern Art, the Bronx Zoo, the Staten Island Ferry. But she couldn’t tell Louisa about the other Evie, not lighthearted at all, clinging to her baby as though to save herself from drowning. Vulnerable and desperate. ‘That doesn’t mean she was a bad mother.’

  Grudgingly Louisa shrugged. ‘No, no. I didn’t exactly mean that. But she was never quite – domesticated. Was she? And frankly, family life, well, it’s not a romantic adventure, is it? Evie always wanted it to be, carried on as if it was. It’s hard work. Perhaps she finally realized that. She did seem – I don’t know, a bit down. Last year.’

  Justine nodded. That much was true; there’d been a while, a matter of months, when Evie had gone quiet, stopped phoning, had refused an invitation to a launch party for one of Justine’s authors, at the Chelsea Arts Club, her favourite place. Justine thought back now to the telephone conversation, and the dullness, something like fear in Evie’s voice when she’d said, no. I can’t, leapt at her from out of the past. She felt a coldness in the pit of her stomach; guilt. Why didn’t I hear that, then? Or did I just ignore it?

  Justine bit her lip, and looked up at Louisa. ‘But I thought,’ she began, anxiously, ‘I thought she was coming out of that. It started to seem like just a blip. I mean, she was at your party, the Christmas before, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ mused Louisa, ‘without Martin, though. Wasn’t she?’ Justine felt a tug of sadness somewhere, remembering Evie at that party, drifting out into the frosty garden without even a cardigan, telling Lucien about some plan she had, for a holiday or a trip, to somewhere like India or Zanzibar. She’d been full of plans.

  ‘Besides,’ Louisa changed tack, ‘the timing would fit. Wouldn’t it? Dido’s quite grown up now. I mean, if she and Martin were – drifting apart? Is that what they say?’ Justine had stared at her, aghast at the implication. Is this how it happened, when marriages broke down? Could no one else tell, could the presence of children, of the child Evie had loved so passionately, matter so little? She thought of Martin, the way his eyes followed Evie around a crowded room, an invisible thread joining them, and she couldn’t imagine him allowing Evie to drift away, casually. He’d never let her go. Slowly she shook her head.

  ‘I can’t see it,’ she said bluntly. ‘And I can’t see her leaving Dido, either.’ And then Louisa had turned away, and sighed, not in reproof, this time, but something more like hopelessness, a note so uncharacteristic of Louisa that Justine listened.

  ‘Oh, Justine,’ she had said. ‘I’m sorry to say this, but you really don’t know, until you’ve had children, what you are capable of. Good or bad. You lose control. That kind of love – can be too much. Sometimes you just want things to be simple again.’ Then Louisa had fallen abruptly silent, as if she’d given away too much.

  Justine had finished her tea without saying anything, setting the empty cup down in the sink. ‘Sorry, Louisa,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have just turned up. Thanks for the tea.’ Louisa nodded. ‘Lovely to see you,’ she said, vaguely, her mind somewhere else.

  In the lemon-painted hall, full of the smell of late roses, Justine paused, her hand on the door, and turned to say goodbye. It was very quiet, she realized, no sound of Tom bashing away upstairs as usual, still unable to believe his word processor wasn’t the old manual typewriter that had always required force. She opened her mouth to make some light-hearted remark about it, but something in Louisa’s expression dissuaded her, a warning look.

  ‘Bye, then,’ Justine said. ‘Bye.’

  All the way back on the tube Justine had tried to put the pieces together, but they refused to fit; Evie wanted freedom, but she loved her family. They had wanted Evie to be starting a new life, in New Zealand or Spain or Morocco, drinking mint tea in a blue-tiled hammam, but there in the stuffy, neon-lit underground train such a picture seemed ridiculously naive. With a chill of foresight she understood that Evie’s life belonged to the dull-witted, adolescent policemen now, to their files and notes and mugshots. What had happe
ned to Evie might have been horribly random, might have had nothing to do with her character, her longings and dreams; she’d become a crime statistic; a newspaper report. Missing.

  There had been a post-mortem, of course, and an inquest. Justine had gone alone, Louisa had come with Tom, who appeared red-faced and blurry with drink and unhappiness. Evie had drowned; her lungs had been full of seawater. There were some areas of bruising, but nothing definitively indicating foul play, no marks of strangulation or restraint. The coroner had questioned Martin quite closely about Evie’s state of mind, making very little allowance for his own unhappiness, Justine thought. She had wanted to explain to the coroner that Martin was not good at showing his emotions, that it was clearly an agony to him to be standing there discussing Evie with a coroner’s court full of strangers. There’d been an implication that she might have been neurotic; Martin had said, stiffly, that he didn’t believe that his wife was suicidal.

  There was a fuzzy image from the closed-circuit cameras in the ferry terminal. It was a lonely-looking place, grey and draughty at the tail end of August in the North Sea wind; the passengers were not for the most part dressed up for glamorous travel as they might have been in the bright, warm cocoon of an airport departure lounge. The terminal was not considered a major terrorist target, and their security measures were basic, the cameras a long way from cutting-edge technology. The still the police had showed Justine, when they came to interview her, had shown Evie standing at the ticket desk, filmed from above, her face a pale indistinct oval, her body foreshortened and blurred. To Justine she had looked fearful, and uncharacteristically hesitant, but perhaps that was just hindsight.

  If Evie had been boarding an aircraft perhaps more information might have been available about her intentions; someone would have looked into her face and asked about her luggage, whether she had packed it herself, whether she wanted to check something in. There might have been others in the queue to remember her. But no one seemed to travel by ferry any more and the place was half empty. There was no proof that she had even embarked on the crossing for which she had bought a ticket; one or two passengers on the boat thought they might have seen her, standing alone at the rusted metal rail, but they couldn’t be certain. She might have fallen, she might have been pushed; she might have walked into the sea or jumped silently from the town pier; a coastguard gave evidence that any of these could have been consistent with the location of her body.