The Day She Disappeared Read online

  That Friday—the day Beth went off radar, as they thought of it later, the day she disappeared—Janine had clattered down at midday. Made up, hair fluffed and very pleased with herself, as usual: behind her Nat had seen Steve letting himself out the back door.

  Steve had just walked in one spring evening, a customer like any other, a good-looking truck driver scanning the bar to check out the barmaid—Beth had been in the back, invisible; his eyes had met Janine’s and that had been that. Love at first sight, Janine purred: chemistry. In the six odd months he’d been around, Janine spent the whole time bustling proudly in and out of the bar preening like she was the main attraction. Nat had to admit, Janine looked good on it even if the last thing on Nat’s own agenda, Tinder or no Tinder, was sexual satisfaction. The last bloke she’d gone for a drink with (two nights ago? Three?) had been lucky to get out of there without an ax in the back of his head.

  So why was she doing it? She didn’t know. Never again—but she’d said that before.

  “Thanks for coming in, babe,” said Janine, all fluffy angora and boobs as she slung an arm around Nat’s shoulders and squeezed.

  “S’all right,” said Nat, distracted still by the thought of Beth. “I could do with the cash.” Which was true. “And I get the weekend off, right?” Janine had pretended not to hear that one.

  Craig had looked relieved when he peered inside half an hour later and saw that he’d gotten Nat instead of Beth, maybe because he knew he wouldn’t be sweating it up and down from the cellar every five minutes. Craig was nineteen and monosyllabic. He had used to gaze at Beth as if she held the secrets of the universe for a while, but working with her—or something—seemed to have rubbed the edges off that.

  “I don’t understand though,” she said to Janine as they dried up. “Beth. Texting you, like, six hours before she’s supposed to be starting back at work?”

  And not a word to me.

  “You know our Beth,” said Janine, eyeing a glass critically. Someone came through the swing doors, letting in the warm dusty air.

  Nat stopped with her arms full of glasses. “But what about what’s-his-name, then? The guy who came in asking for her?”

  “And the rest,” said Janine, scanning the room.

  Beth didn’t talk to Nat about her love life, just came in humming to herself some mornings, in the same outfit she left in the night before. “Only causes trouble,” she’d said once. “Falling out over blokes. Not worth it.”

  “The rest?” said Nat warily now to Janine. Not wanting to think Beth would have told her what she didn’t tell Nat. Janine only shrugged, inscrutable. “No law against it,” she said. “Keeping her options open; not old yet, is she?” Then moved past Nat to serve the customer.

  Nat felt a stir of something, discontent. Was she worried, or jealous? She’d have liked to be reckless herself, once in a while; she’d have liked not to worry about consequences. But she’d had a mum to do that for her, and Nat’s rebellion had been to stick to the straight and narrow. Lying in a field with Jim when they were both seventeen and talking about getting married and buying a flat. Coming back had just been temporary, just while she applied for more jobs, internships, a bit of money and the river to sail on. Jim had been waiting, of course, like she’d always been going to come back. She loved him. Of course she did, how could she not—he was like family. She would never hurt him if she could help it. Thirteen years together. Sometimes you couldn’t help it.

  In the corner sat three girls from the caravan site with fluorescent scrunchies in their hair, each one staring down at a mobile screen. Long fingernails painted individually with stars and flowers, crystals and stripes. Nat got a good look at the nails, tapping out an irritable rhythm on the bar when she asked for the lead girl’s ID. Close on nineteen (if the ID wasn’t fake) and wearing pigtails—they made Nat feel old, what with one thing and another. They were, she overheard, in a tent there for a month in the hope of catching sight of one of the actors on the film set, some good-looking stubbled bloke whipping off his wig in the heat. No one Nat had ever heard of, but there it was. Past twenty-five was old. Bet they knew how to make Tinder work in their favor too: she heard a squeal and laughs of derision as a profile did the rounds.

  * * *

  Beth, Beth. The day of Beth’s appointment at the hospital came and went and Nat’s anxiety didn’t go away, it hardened, sitting there like a lump in her belly. It was mixed up with something else too. Beth had sat next to her in the pub’s back garden with both arms around her, telling her everything would be all right. And that they’d be friends forever. That hadn’t been her imagination.

  Janine’s view was that it was typical; she’d seen Beth’s type before and they let you down, every time. She didn’t know about the hospital but maybe she’d still think, typical. Beth had just dropped everything and walked, a different part of the country, a new bloke, clean slate, pure and simple.

  Would Beth’s mum tell her to make a new appointment? There was no way of knowing, because Beth had never talked about her.

  Then, Thursday night and busy, in she walked, planting her forearms heavily on the bar. Mrs. Hawkins, Beth’s landlady. Ex-landlady.

  “Where is she?” she said. A woman of seventy-odd who looked, on balance, more grumpy old bloke than female, square and unkempt. Beth hated her, Nat knew. “I’ve left notes. Three weeks overdue with the rent and she’s not answering the door.”

  “She didn’t say anything to you?” said Janine, all innocence.

  That was when Nat, reaching for the beer pump, felt the first whisper of something not right. “She’s gone, hasn’t she,” Janine informed the woman stiffly, turning back and pushing the drink down the bar to Paddy. He raised his head a moment to look past her at Nat. A sad smile: he knew how Nat felt about Beth. Tall and kind, Paddy was a quiet presence at the bar most nights, but he was shy: he took his pint and retreated from Mrs. Hawkins into his corner. “Up north to her mum’s.”

  The woman’s old prune of a mouth worked away as they watched her. “Well,” she said finally, having settled on something that satisfied her. “If she thinks she’ll see the deposit again she’s got another think coming. The state she’s left it in.”

  She went on for a bit longer, to anyone in earshot, but Nat wasn’t really listening. There was a flutter set up, a buzz in her head, something to do with the nasty old woman running on, complaint after complaint, filthy, more to do with Beth.

  It was the thought of Beth gazing abstractly into the spotted glass of the mirror in the back as she applied makeup to that little rash of bumpy scars you had to get close to see. The thought of her tugging carefully at her skirt to get it sitting just right, then leaning forward to smile across the bar—and with a dull thud Nat thought, all over again, Come back.

  And then the room felt full, hot, the sound of voices was too loud and there were too many faces she didn’t know. Where were they, the familiar ones? Paddy, Victor, Mary from the shop with her two glasses of port, and Beth’s lager-drinking admirers. Crowded out. Gone.

  “You all right?” said Janine, frowning. And the door was swinging shut behind Mrs. Hawkins and there was Paddy after all, looking at her, sorrowful, along the bar. “You should get home early, Craig can come in.” Worried now, guilt poking at her, Nat could see; Janine got bad-tempered when she felt guilty. An explosive sigh. “Go on then, take tomorrow morning off.”

  But Nat stood still, unable to reach for her bag and go, because she felt that thud all over again, the same one she’d felt when Janine first called her to say Beth wasn’t coming back. Because it didn’t make sense. Just didn’t.

  When Nat had left Jim, she’d come for the key to the cottage and Beth had been standing behind the bar, getting ready to open up. “Oh, love,” she’d said, watching Nat pile her bags and boxes inside the door. Then she’d shoved up the counter and come through it and hugged her, long and hard.

  And now she was gone and with her the sense of something gone forever: B
eth wouldn’t have wanted that, not to just—disappear, not for things to move on without her. But she was gone. And the prickle of something else, moving in.

  The feeling lasted, long after she turned out the light. She tried saying, over and over, “She’s gone, get over it,” but however many times she told herself, it didn’t sound right. Nat lay in the dark with the window open, watching the last glow leave the summer evening; listening for the river. If you waited it always came, the trickle and rush of the weir.

  Chapter Three

  Friday

  There was a little twinge, the old ache, as Victor climbed out of the narrow bed and headed for the stove. You couldn’t keep every little complaint on the radar, but he was so used to this one he might even miss it if it disappeared. Lower right quadrant, somewhere deep inside, not muscular. Somehow he knew it would not disappear. He need not fear.

  It wasn’t the bed: he rather liked the bed, and it wasn’t uncomfortable. It made him think of the navy, and the war, and the narrow bunks on the Belfast; he could even persuade himself the walls of the tin box that now was home were like a ship’s steel bulkheads. Not, of course, that wartime had been congenial, nor the RNVR either for an eighteen-year-old volunteer, but the older you got the warmer memories felt, and Victor didn’t have any terrible ones. He hadn’t forgotten for one minute what it was to be young, and the twinge didn’t have any effect on that.

  He lit the gas, set the kettle on to boil, and opened his little door.

  Victor had never been a big man, and he’d gotten smaller. A caravan—he never called it a mobile home, it didn’t have the right ring; to him, “caravan” at least spoke of nomads and the wide desert—suited his proportions pretty well, all things considered. Sophie, of course, had paled at the idea when it had become the only option available. She couldn’t offer to have him, he’d always known that. Richard wouldn’t allow it. Richard was never asked, but he wouldn’t have it.

  Where the twinge barely touched Victor, the thought of Richard weakened him, it turned his knees old and feeble. Steadying himself, he reached for the bobble hat Sophie had knitted him and adjusted it carefully to sit above his ears, then put a hand to the frame of the miniature door and took a deep breath of morning air. Heat, stubble, a holiday family cooking bacon on the far side of the site and the river underneath it all. Cautiously, Victor lowered himself to sit on the step, mug in hand.

  Sunny Slopes was full, it being August. More had rolled up last night, cheerful parent-voices at two in the morning. Victor didn’t mind that: there was very little left that he allowed himself to mind, and he decided that sleeplessness, at his age, was a chance to prolong life, or expand it. Time otherwise spent dead to the world. He missed his drink in the pub, his favorite corner too full this week with teenage drinkers, but the sleepy chatter of small children, car doors closing, the sounds of tired tearfulness and consolation, the memory of Sophie—the Sophy, my little sophist, my sophisticate—as a tiny creature, were all soothing. A round pale face looking up at him in wonder, or trust.

  He didn’t know how he could have let it happen. Let him happen: Richard. And now the baby cemented it, where once it might have been loosened. And Sophie nearly fifty and crying with happiness.

  Had it been his responsibility to step in, to say: Sophie, may I inspect this man before you ally yourself to him? His duty to say: Sophie, this is not the man for you? Tender-hearted Sophie, rescuer of spiders, Sophie of the stout little legs who cried over a rabbit dead in a field? He turned that idea over and over, not being one for regret, but sometimes regret was appropriate. In this case, Sophie could have done with his intervention. Would she have listened? He would never know now. He, her father, came on the scene too late, when Sophie’s head only turned to follow Richard around the room, to gaze at Richard as he held forth.

  Her mother, her mother now. She wouldn’t have let this happen, but Sophie’s mother was long gone. Joy, dead of cancer at fifty-one, in five minutes flat. One day she was frowning over her cookery books and the next she couldn’t form words. The girl he married.

  Victor got to his feet, creaking, the tea half cold. Better to do something than sit and turn it over and over. He tipped the tea away, washed the mug, frowned at the brown ring inside it he never seemed to be able to get rid of as Sophie could, with her dishwasher and her array of products. She had been once to the site, pregnant, dismayed, newly powerless. After that he had traveled on the train to meet her, halfway between here and there.

  But Victor loved it here. It might, to others—to Richard—be a seedy caravan park, but to Victor, with dreams of boyhood sailing adventures, it had a particular magic, the place where the sea turned into a river. Turn one way and it opened out gray to the horizon, turn the other and it narrowed, secret, blurred with nodding bulrushes, with hedges crowding the water. The sound of the weir hidden from sight.

  A walk. Down to the river, on the way to the red telephone box that still, against all the odds, stood and functioned in the lane. Richard would be at work, it was after nine, Sophie at home with the baby. Round-eyed, downy-headed Rufus who looked nothing like his father, who was all his Sophie, utterly his grandchild. Nearly three.

  Victor sat on the bench, in the sun that stood high now in the sky, so slowly had he made his way up from the site with the scent of the tide behind him.

  The bench had been cemented into the verge where the footpath came up from the river and joined the lane, out of sight of the water, inland. Victor could see the red flash of the phone box from where he sat, or could before he closed his eyes better to enjoy the warmth on his face. He didn’t object to this heat, not at all, it was being old. Among the many things he hadn’t known about being old was that it made you grateful for every heat source. Like an old lizard he liked to bask against hot stone, drawing up the warmth, breathing slowly, conserving energy. The hat comfortable around his ears. He could tell from the raised voices on the site that it didn’t agree with everyone, by no means, tempers frayed at night. The children liked it, running around till midnight and no reason to go to bed. Rufus: she could bring little Rufus here.

  There was a sound, down below him, down the path, the whisper of grasses parting. Take away one sense, the others sharpen. That was a thing about age too: capacities were removed, but shyly, apologetically, others tiptoed up, offering themselves. He might forget what whiskery Mary at the post office had said to him yesterday morning but he could remember Joy’s face as she leaned back against the pillow in some foreign hotel room. The light from the window, reflections of water on the wall.

  Eyes closed, Victor could hear the crunch of footsteps on the hard dry ground: slow, methodical steps. There was something, something that he hadn’t remembered. Was that a gift, a mercy—or the opposite? To know that something had struck you as worth remembering yesterday, the day before, two weeks ago, but for the life of you, you couldn’t lay your hands on it when you tried.

  A man’s footsteps.

  Richard. Richard. Victor had seen cruelty before, it wasn’t new to him. The pale-eyed lieutenant on that beach in Anzio, kicking a frightened man. Getting out his pistol. Seventy years ago, but he hadn’t forgotten that. Men in pubs, in offices, the occasional careless, shocking female. It was there if you looked, which he did not. He should have looked, and then he might have saved Soph.

  Eyelids trembling, Victor performed his favorite trick for soothing himself: sit quiet and think of all those you are fond of, have loved, felt affection for, been grateful to. Love must become an elastic thing, find it more readily, feel it more often, as it is more necessary the older you get, not less: you can love whiskery Mary because she remembers without fail to put your newspaper aside, and will post a parcel for you if you arrive before the counter opens. Soph sat comfortably at the top of the list and Rufus still a part of her, nestling in the crook of her arm, beaming.

  Then something altered in the air around him, and Victor found himself staying very still on his bench.

&
nbsp; Go away, Richard.

  He kept his eyes closed. Old man snoozing in the sun: old man playing dead. And then the warmth diminished, as though he was sitting in someone’s shade; there was a dimming through his papery closed eyelids. The memory swam, mysterious, a pike through the weeds: he let it. As with the pike, an encounter might not be desirable. He was holding his breath. He was afraid.

  The air hummed with it: danger, he knew it of old, like cruelty, there was no mistaking it. Victor sat for as long as he could, to let it pass, but he felt a strangeness creep up through his body and it seemed suddenly urgent that he open his eyes. He didn’t want to sit there, in his own dark, and wait for it. So he opened his eyes, and there was no one there. He looked up at the sky for some fugitive cloud, but it was clear.

  Sitting up on the bench, Victor cleared his throat carefully. He stood and turned carefully to keep confusion at bay, but there it was, down at the bottom of the lane, the dark shape of a man. He shifted so his back was to the lane, turned toward the telephone box as if he’d seen nothing.

  That was it. That was what he had forgotten, the thing he had seen, the feeling it had given him: a man walking up that lane toward him. How long ago? He waited for the small pleasure of remembering to spark, but something wasn’t responding.

  The phone box seemed a long way away now, and he did feel distinctly odd, but he would get there. He needed to talk to Soph. There were things he needed to tell her.

  * * *

  The wind picked up only when she got past the big old mastless yacht that had been wedged in the mud for twenty years, a good gust that filled the small square sail, and Nat settled back in the stern as she felt the small boat tilt and gather under her. It had been early when she’d called Paddy, and he had mumbled into the phone so softly she couldn’t hear him, then he shifted the phone to his good ear. Funny old Paddy: she’d noticed that habit. When he couldn’t hear, his voice dropped too, as if fearful of giving the wrong answer.