Elizabeth Is Missing (30 page)

“Where did you used to take Sukey dancing?” I asked, wishing I hadn’t told him about the letter, wanting to make up, wanting to get back on to old ground.

“The Pavilion. Why? You going to tell that lunatic you’ve got a thing for?”

I flinched at his tone and he let out a long breath, flicking his second cigarette away and coming to stand in front of me. I’d given in and unwrapped the chocolate bar again, and when he leant down to take my hands in his, it began to melt between us.

“We always went to the Pavilion,” he said. “And she even used to make me dance before the interval. I’d never done that before. One thing I remember that you don’t, eh?” He shook my hands lightly, and one side of his mouth curled up in a smile.

I smiled back, like always. “I remember now,” I said. “Perhaps I’ll go there to look, then.”

He let go of me, and the chocolate bar landed on my lap, a little lick of it blotting my skirt.

“Why can’t you leave it alone?” he said.

And I thought he meant the chocolate, and answered: “You brought it for me,” before I realized he was talking about my search for Sukey.

But I couldn’t leave it alone, and I wore Sukey’s green scalloped dress to the Saturday-night dance at the Pavilion Ballrooms. There was a chance, I thought, if Sukey was still in the town—even if she didn’t want to contact us, didn’t want to know us—there was a chance that she wouldn’t be able to resist going out dancing. It was as good a bet as anything. And I thought I would just go there to watch and see who turned up, making sure she wouldn’t spot me by curling my hair into a new style and bringing a copy of Ma’s
Britannia and Eve
magazine to hold in front of my face.

The Pavilion Ballrooms had a large foyer with red velvet benches and palms in big china pots. There were wicker chairs dotted around the pillars, but they seemed more conspicuous than the benches. Anyway, when I arrived, all the free ones faced away from the door, so I wouldn’t have been able to watch who was coming in. I sat on a bench in the corner and held the magazine up. The dance was due to start in the main ballroom, and occasionally people came into the foyer to sit and wait, chatting to each other, laughing, or jiggling their legs in anticipation. The air began to fill with a mix of perfume, shoe polish, and mothballs from all the dresses left in wardrobes during the week. I’d got there early so I could watch for Sukey and had a quarter of an hour until the orchestra started. I half read an advert for Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills and half watched the door. My heart was beating hard and each beat seemed to send the blood straight to my arms so that it was difficult to keep the magazine steady.

At one point a man came in and paused on the threshold, scanning the room. He was tall and had a blond moustache, and his clothes looked as though they belonged to a fatter man. I sat up a little, watching him as a neat woman in a violet dress came out of the ballroom and called his name. Her voice seemed familiar and her hair was a soft, dark colour. I hardly dared look at her, breath pooling in the top of my lungs. The man waited till she was near and then put an arm round her shoulders, and the woman helped him across the foyer to a wicker chair. He limped badly and I thought he must have damaged his leg in the war. As they came closer I could see the woman was plump, and more motherly than Sukey, and though she was light on her feet she wasn’t as elegant. I was numb to the disappointment for nearly a minute, before it began to pinch, like a stitch in my side.

I pretended to myself that it was hunger and searched for the last of the chocolate Frank had given me, but I must have left it next to my bed or in the pocket of my school coat, because I couldn’t find it. It was nearly six and the light from outside was very yellow. The colour was reflected on to everyone’s clothes and hair by great mirrors fixed to the walls. The corners still had bits of brown paper stuck to them where they had been covered to protect them from air raids. I was sitting near the bottom-left corner of one mirror, and, feeling desolate, I turned and raised a hand to pick at the brown paper. It was satisfying, tearing it from the smoothness of the glass, and I’d removed about an inch of it when someone came up behind me.

“Sukey?” a voice said, and I turned.

It was Douglas. He closed his eyes when he saw it was me. His mouth opened and his chin jutted out.

“Maud,” he said. “I should’ve known.”

He dropped on to the bench next to me, stretching his legs out, and the limping man in the wicker chair glanced across at him. I waited for Douglas to say something, but he just stared at his feet.

“Why are you here?” I asked finally. “Did the mad woman tell you to come?”

“I come every evening there’s dancing,” he said. “In the hope—”

“Yes,” I said, not wanting him to finish the sentence. “You come here instead of going to the pictures. In the hope.”

“That’s why you’re here, too.”

I nodded.

“Wearing her clothes. Sure you’re not meeting Frank?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Doug,” I said. “It’s not for Frank. And even if it were, what business is it of yours?”

He gave me a brief, bitter glare and I huffed and tutted, repeating my sentence, muttering it to myself, trying to be angry with him. “How long will you go on coming here?” I asked.

“As long as I can bear it.”

We faced away from each other towards the sudden bustle of the foyer. The dance was starting and people were heading in.

“I don’t know where else to look,” he said. “I don’t know what else to look for.”

I nodded, studying the side of his face. I really loved him then. Loved him for carrying on, for caring enough to carry on when Frank had given up.

“Doug,” I said, needing to know one more thing. “You and Sukey.”

“She was kind to me, that was all,” he said, gazing intently at the departing dancers. “Gave me somewhere to go, someone to talk to.”

I wanted to ask what it was they talked about, but I didn’t know how to without it sounding like a challenge. I always seemed to worry at Douglas, taunting and nitpicking, though it was never what I meant to do, and I didn’t want to risk saying the wrong thing now. I also couldn’t help feeling left out and resentful, despite it being far too late for that. Douglas looked blankly at the backs of jackets and cocktail dresses, and I watched the way the colour came and went in his cheek and the way his soft hair ruffled in the draught from the door. And I smiled at him, though he didn’t see it.

I meant to go back with him the next Saturday, but when I suggested it he didn’t seem keen and I missed him leaving, or I was out, or busy. I tried the next week, after I’d been to my friend Audrey’s for tea—Ma and Dad had gone up to London again to try to talk to someone about Sukey’s case—but Audrey had pinched a bottle of gin from her father and insisted we drink it despite us both hating the taste. By the time I arrived at the ballrooms the dancing was finished and Douglas was long gone.

The sky darkened as I walked home. It had been raining and the pavements by the new houses were shiny, and snails were making suicide dashes from every neat front garden. The smell of wood stain was in the air, curling off the freshly constructed fences. Soon I couldn’t see the ground in front of me and I was stiff with the fright of crushing a shell. I could already feel the way it would collapse under my shoe, hear the crunch.

When I was younger I would have edged forward slowly, picking up each snail and carrying it to the safety of a garden, or at least to an opposing shrub, but I’d grown out of that, I suppose, and so I just watched for the glint of syrupy flesh as I walked, and followed the silver stream of their tracks, trying not to commit my feet to any area of ground. I’d made it halfway down the road when I heard the first hollow grind against the pavement. But I hardly had time to curse, barely a moment for that sick feeling—a mixture of sorrow and disgust—to envelop me, because in the same instant I saw the mad woman.

She was the other side of a car, the only one parked on the street, standing in the wet road and peering through two windows’ worth of glass. Her fingers curled uselessly against it, her scratching unable to find purchase. It was the light from a house, switched on suddenly, that had exposed her, sending her shadow slipping towards me. A man had come out into his front garden and was shouting, and people had started to collect around him. He stood by his garden wall, running his hands over the top of it, where he, or someone, had cemented on a lot of coloured pebbles. Neighbours had come to hear him, and he shouted all the louder, but I could hardly concentrate on his words because of the mad woman, who was tapping on the car’s window.

She seemed to shiver in the light, her white hair fluttering like a moth. We stared at each other through the glass and I wondered how long she’d been there, whether she had followed me along the road or had been waiting there, hiding. I wondered what her plan was, whether she had a plan. I felt paralysed, my foot still suckered to the pavement by the snail carcass, and I thought for a moment the man was shouting at her, but I was wrong.

Someone had been trying to dig up his summer squash, he said, and they’d nearly got away with it. He was a prize squash grower and his crop was just swelling to perfect size. He was certain it was sabotage. He’d even seen the back of the digger as he’d run away, and he could swear it was old Mr. Murphy, who was his chief rival.

“It was the white hair gave him away. It gleamed in the moonlight,” he said, making the gleaming itself sound like a crime. “I could tell his hair anywhere, I could. Bastard.”

Some ladies muttered, and he apologized for swearing. A man suggested they go and knock up Mr. Murphy and get him to show his hair. There were chuckles and the murmuring of people fast losing interest. In a moment it would be pitch black and quiet again, and yet I still couldn’t move. The mad woman’s eyes were fixed on me, her fingers tapping out some kind of demented Morse code, but it was the sight of her hair shining that made me shudder. It was she who had been digging in that man’s garden, I thought, it was her white hair he’d mistaken for this Mr. Murphy’s, and I imagined her out there in the dark, fingernails full of dirt, pressing the flesh of the summer squash against her teeth.

There was a call of “Good night! Good night!” as most of the women went back inside to tend to children and wirelesses and hair curlers, their men following. But a straggler with a kind of winking voice suggested that the culprit was one of these summer-squash addicts, and a shout of disproportionate laughter made the mad woman turn, just for an instant. And I ran. Along the street and past the squash grower, maiming more snails as I went and not even lamenting their injuries, knowing I would find splinters of shell and gluey flesh on the bottom of my shoes the next morning.

M
y house is dark when I get there. Ma and Dad are out looking for Sukey. I stand in the front porch, trying to find my keys, checking my bag and each of my pockets twice. The keys aren’t there. My stomach seems to float into my chest, and my heart beats against it. I breathe carefully in, and turn out my pockets, shaking everything on to the ground. The rattle of the contents hitting concrete is mixed with that old familiar sound of my front door opening. The click of the latch, the heavy creak of the hinge. Someone, who isn’t Ma and isn’t Dad, is opening the door. It’s a man, youngish, small and fair, who stops just inside and stares at me. He seems startled, as if he didn’t expect me home. He doesn’t look like a burglar. I stare back, disbelieving. I don’t think I recognize him, but I don’t trust myself. “Douglas?” I say.

“No, I’m Sean,” he says, backing into the house. My house. “Stay there,” he calls.

But I’ve no intention of waiting outside while he does God-knows-what inside, and so I follow him into the dark hallway. There’s something funny going on: everything’s different. The shelf above the radiator’s gone and there’s a bike propped against the wall. I can’t think where I am. There’s a smell of vinegar, and the man is on the phone. He smiles at me, showing off, just like Mrs. Winners.

“Do you need to sit down?” he says, covering the mouthpiece with his hand.

“They won’t be able to hear you like that,” I say.

He nods and takes his hand away, says something into the phone and puts it down. “Would you like to come into the kitchen? We’ve just had fish and chips. Lots of chips left.”

A small child slinks up the steps, keeping close to the wall, and studies me from behind her father.

“Poppy,” the man says, “this is the lady who used to live here.”

“Don’t you live here any more, then?” I ask.

The girl squirms into laughter.

“Well, shall we go through?” He walks down the steps, and the girl twists away and runs down before him.

I’m not sure what to do. I can see a light on in the kitchen, but I can’t think how to get there. It all seems so familiar, as if it should call up memories, but I can’t reach them. There’s a layer of other people’s lives on top. I look at the front door, still open. It’s just like mine—the same glass in the windowpanes—and it makes me think I should be getting home, only I’m stranded on this bit of carpet and there’s no way out. I feel in my pockets for notes, but there’s nothing there, just a few threads and emptiness. I’ve no notes at all. The lack makes me feel sick; I’m cut loose and whirling about in the wind. I wring the fabric of my coat, scrunching up and down in panic. And then, inside the ripped lining, I find one small blue square with my writing on it:
Where is Elizabeth?

“Elizabeth is missing!” I shout. I shout so the part of my brain that forgets will stop forgetting. “Elizabeth is missing!” I shout it again and again. When I look over my shoulder there is a small girl holding on to the banister, half hidden under a mass of those things for winding round your neck. Wool and silk, long and deadly, they hang limply over the newel post, like clever snakes, pretending to be asleep. The girl widens her eyes at me and then shoots up the stairs. I shout in her direction.

And then I feel a hand on my shoulder. The weight of it makes me hunch into the front door.