Elizabeth Is Missing (17 page)

The letter to Douglas came about a week after we’d last seen Sukey, about a week before my parents started to worry. I was surprised no one had noticed the writing, and when Douglas didn’t pick it up on his way out to the pictures, a terrible curiosity overcame me.

I was stewing apples for the morning and I had to lay down the spoon to feel the envelope. It was just paper inside, folded once, I thought; perhaps twice. I held it to the light with one hand, stirring the apples with the other, but I couldn’t see anything; the paper of the envelope was too patched with labels over labels, to make it last longer. “Paper is a Weapon of War—save every scrap.” It was difficult to forget the warning, though there was no war any more to need weapons for. I’d meant to drop it back on the table, but for some reason I turned to the pan and, without really deciding to, angled the letter into a wave of steam. The apples simmered away, giving out their fruity, spicy smell, and I kept still, watching the paper buckle slightly with the moisture. My face was damp from standing over the saucepan, and soon the hand holding the letter was, too. The edge of the envelope flap started to come loose and I helped it along with my little finger, and in a few minutes it was halfway undone. That was when Dad walked in.

I hadn’t heard his footsteps on the stairs and in a panic I dropped the envelope into the saucepan and stirred. He opened the kitchen door to put something in the outside bin, and the cold air found my damp skin, making me shiver. Dad took Ma’s shawl from a chair on his way back in and put it round my shoulders.

“Must be nearly done now,” he said, tapping the handle of the pan.

I nodded stiffly, praying he wouldn’t look in it. When he walked back up to the sitting room I sagged against the stove in relief and then lifted the letter out with a spoon. It was a soggy mess, and there was no way I’d be able to draw it apart without tearing the paper. I pressed it between two sheets of newspaper and laid it on a shelf in one of the top warming ovens to dry, hoping that the ink hadn’t blurred too much, hoping no one would notice the faint blue tinge to the stewed apples when we had them at breakfast the next day.

Douglas got home as I was washing up the pan. Ma had come down to the kitchen to say good night and she asked him how his evening had been. He was as vague as ever about the film he’d seen.

“Er, it was one where . . . it was one of those ones with fancy costumes. It wasn’t very good.”

“
The Wicked Lady
, was it?” I said, turning with soapy hands to watch his face.

“Yes, that was it.”

“That’s not showing any more.”

He swung stiffly towards me, but his eyes didn’t lift from his shoes. “That can’t have been it then. I must have got it wrong.”

The hurt in his pose reminded me so much of the first time I’d met him, the blushing and embarrassment at his being caught out with the nicknames, that I felt a flood of guilt. Water dripped from my hands on to my slippers. Why was I always so cruel to him? I didn’t think I meant to be. I almost told him about the letter then, but thought that admitting I’d been trying to read his post might not make him feel any better.

I
hate this place and hardly ever come here. I hate the smell of the books, musty and unclean, and I never borrow books myself. So often you open one and find it stinks of cigarette smoke or has the remains of someone’s dinner smeared over the pages. Of course, I don’t read now, so it hardly matters.

“Mum, please keep your voice down,” Helen says. “You’re the one who asked to come.”

She edges away slightly and I walk over to the desk, feeling in my pockets. I can’t think why I’d have wanted to be taken here; I’ve got a slip from the library, but it’s addressed to Elizabeth, not me. The man behind the desk sweeps his fringe from his eyes, and I feel panicked for a moment, by his expectation, by the thousands of books on their shelves. Even if I knew what I wanted, how could I ever find it? “I’m looking for something,” I say to the man. “I just can’t recall, you know.”

“A book?”

I say I suppose it must be, and he asks what sort of book it is, but I don’t know. He asks if it’s fiction.

“Oh, no,” I say. “It’s a true story, only no one will believe me.”

His brow wrinkles and he smoothes his fringe over the lines. “What’s the story about?” he says. “Perhaps I will know it.”

“It’s about Elizabeth,” I say.

“Elizabeth. Could that be the title?”

I watch as he taps at letters on his computer.

“There’s something with that name in the crime section,” he says, and points me in the right direction.

Helen is rummaging through some papers, so I go over to the shelves alone. There aren’t so many books here as there used to be. A lot of space has been given over to computers. They look very bright and enticing, but I’ve tried a few times and I just don’t think I’ll learn now. This set of shelves has the word
CRIME
pasted over it, and there are lots of books with bones on the covers, or dripping blood. Mostly they are black books with neon writing. Something about them feels oppressive, frightening, and I don’t think I’d like to enter any of the worlds inside them, but I take one anyway and read the blurb. It’s about a woman on the run from a serial killer. I put it back. There are four books with cream covers next to it, mysteries set in Russia. I don’t think I’m quite up to that. I have enough mystery in my life as it is.

Helen comes quietly over to look with me. “I can’t be bothered with these,” I say. She shushes me and looks round, but there’s practically no one here. “We used to press flowers in books,” I say. “Sukey and I, when I was young.”

We always meant to make a picture, but never got round to it. And years later I found the dried and flattened celandines and forget-me-nots, violets and buttercups, stuck between the pages of my father’s old set of Mrs. Radcliffe romances. We pressed grasses, too, and clover leaves.

“And, Helen, that last time she came to dinner, I remember, I gave her a comb and she put it inside a hardback book and pressed the covers together until the comb inside crunched and all the delicate little amber teeth fell out. And she said, ‘It’s beautiful, thank you, darling,’ and kissed me before she slipped out the door. And I had her lipstick on my forehead.” I think that’s how it was. But Helen doesn’t think so, and she doesn’t want to argue about it here, and do I want a book, otherwise we’ll go.

There’s nothing I want, so we start to walk out, past the desk. The man there has strange bendable fingers and he sweeps his fringe to the side as he looks at me. His fingers, I think, are like a fringe themselves, like the peach fringe of a standard lamp. For a moment I expect to see bookcases and clocks and empty plant pots jumbled against the desk, but there is only a trolley of books.
The Mysteries of Udolpho
is waiting to go back on to a shelf. I pick it up, weigh it in my hands, and then, holding it by its hard covers, I shake it to see if anything falls out. The spine makes a creaking noise.

“Hey! Hey!” the man at the desk says. “What are you doing? You can’t treat the books like that.”

“Sorry,” I say, dropping it on to the trolley. “I was just checking.” I leave it where it lies and walk out to the street. Helen walks with me. “Are we going home?” I ask. She doesn’t answer, and I suppose this means we are and she can’t be bothered to tell me again. I squint at her, but I can’t tell if she makes any gesture. The sun’s in my eyes and it’s difficult to see. The shape of her is distorted by the light, circles of her silhouette removed as if by a pastry cutter. She walks in front, getting further ahead, and I struggle to keep up, struggle to make out which way she’s going. I shut one eye and keep the shadow of Helen ahead of me, I just need to concentrate on that, and not worry about directions or people or cars or the sun. Just focus on the shadow. I mustn’t let it get away. It might lead me to Sukey.

“Mum! Wait.”

I turn to look behind and the light shines straight on to my daughter’s face. How did she get here? And was she always so wrinkled? I can see where freckles melt into the lines around her mouth. She’s outdoors too much, and that’s bad for the skin; it ages you. I can’t think how old she is, though; I ought to know.

“Who were you following?” she says.

I think for a moment, trying to make sense of the words. “Douglas,” I say. “I was following Douglas.”

It was his loping shadow falling across the bramble hedge that told me he had come home early. And a moment later I heard the creak of the larder door and the scrape of a spoon on glass. I was up and dressing before his shadow fell again across the hedge, not wanting to miss the opportunity to follow him as he left the house. For weeks I’d lain ill in bed, going over everything in my mind, knowing he was up to something, what with searching Sukey’s suitcase and calling to the mad woman in the park. Now food was going missing and I was determined to find out why. I ran quietly, in his wake, slinking along the wall like ribbon on a spool.

Being out of bed was a shock and my legs protested at the sudden exercise. The outside air was full of the sharp scent of freshly cut pines, and the low sun shone in my eyes, forcing me to walk against it as if it were a strong wind. I was used to the dimness of my curtained room, and the light felt like a blast of sand. Douglas was a dark blur some way ahead and I focused on that rather than try to see where I was. He paused once to look at the wreck of his old house, but it was only when we turned on to Sukey’s street and blue shade washed over me that I could look about properly, only then that I knew where we were going. I followed him up the lane by Frank’s house, keeping close to the wall so as not to be too near the hawthorn hedge, always suspecting that the mad woman might be there, leaning into it.

At the turning to the yard I stopped, sagging, hot and tired, against the wall, and pressed the toe of my shoe into the flesh of a leaf which lay on the ground. The mark, so definitely my doing, gave me courage, and I moved one eye slowly to the very edge of the building, my cheek brushing the brickwork. The sun was again blinding at this angle, and so I crept out, molelike and praying that I wouldn’t be seen. But the yard was empty, except for the same old van that was always there, and I went to rest against it, shifting my shoulder blades against its hot metal wall. I hadn’t expected the answering shifting inside. It was like a foot dragged along a floor, and fear had propelled me halfway across the yard before the doors opened and Douglas stepped out.

“What? In there?” I said, hardly coherent with the exhaustion of being out of bed after so many weeks of illness.

“Maud,” Douglas said, trying to block my view into the van. “How did you . . . ?”

My steps slid back across the cobbles and I looked past him to see a mess of broken furniture, tea chests, and dust sheets jumbled against the wooden supports. There was a smell like old hedge cuttings and there were crumbs on the floor.

“Someone lives in there,” I said.

Douglas ducked his head.

“Who? Douglas, who is it? Is it Sukey?” I felt a rush of something through me; my heart seemed to beat up through my shoulders, my neck, as if it was trying to escape through my head.

Douglas put a hand out, steadying me as I staggered. “No. No, Maud, it’s not Sukey.”

For a moment I wasn’t sure I believed him, I didn’t want to believe him. “Tell me the truth,” I said, jerking away from his hold. “I know Sukey was in a van. The mad woman told me. She told me before I got ill.”

“Did she? It was nonsense,” he said. “Ravings. It’s she who’s in the van. This is where she’s been living.”

I shivered at the thought, seeing now the scattering of stripped hawthorn stalks and the bundle of packing blankets that she must have been using as bedding. I thought for a moment that I could smell liquorice. There was a piece of cracked mirror wedged behind one of the upright slats. Did she look into that, I wondered? And if so, what did she see? I crawled into the van, wanting to look in the same bit of glass, and saw Douglas’s hand, framed by the mirror, a crinkled package of newspaper visible between his fingers.

“What’s that?” I said, whirling round, reminded of the reason I’d been following him. “You’ve been feeding her. You’ve been feeding the mad woman.”

He looked for a moment like he might deny it.

“Ma’s noticed the food going missing,” I said, and he grimaced. “Why? Why are you giving her our rations?”

“She’s been living here a while. Perhaps before Frank went to London, before Sukey disappeared. I think it’s possible she saw something.”

“Saw what?”

“What happened to Sukey, or where she went. Sometimes I think she’s trying to tell me.”

The smell of the mangled leaves and stalks was sickening in the heat and I began to shift towards the doors. “You mean you talk to her? You have conversations?” I thought he must be nearly as mad as the mad woman.

“Don’t look like that. She’s not an animal, she can speak.”

“I know,” I said, though it seemed so strange to be talking about her, to be allowed to actually talk about her. It was like discussing an animal, but a mythical one perhaps, a griffin or a unicorn. “I know, only she usually shouts. About watching people and smashed glass and vans and summer squash and flying birds.”

“And about Sukey?”

I stopped in my outward scramble. “Once, perhaps. I thought she said Sukey’s name once. What does that matter?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he climbed into the van beside me and pointed towards the wall. The sharp broken teeth of a comb grinned out under the mirror. It was deformed now, but I knew that comb, and I reached for it.

“How did she get this?” I said. “Where did she get it? What’s happened to my sister?”

“Give that to me!” I shout. “Get off the phone.”

Helen turns to look at me, curling a hand against her chest.

“It’s not yours. Give it back.”

She shakes her head and waves me away. I shout her name and she frowns, half stands. I rush over, yank the wire out of the wall and push the coffee table over, sending everything flying on to the carpet.