Читать книгу The Missing Marriage - Sarah May - Страница 6

Chapter 1

It was almost midnight when Doreen Hamilton stepped through the front door to number seventeen Parkview and pulled it shut behind her. Holding onto the latch, she swung her body – buttoned up from throat to ankles in a quilted dressing gown that had been a Christmas gift from her daughter, Laura – away from her home of over fifty years into the night. Panting, she peered blindly through the retreating fret at the only thing she could see – the streetlight growing out of the pavement on the other side of the garden wall – and let go of the latch.

Keeping the orange streetlight to her left, she shuffled in slippers – which predated the dressing gown by a year and which had a navy blue fleur de lys Doreen had never seen embroidered on them – along the front of the house, feeling her way.

When she ran out of house, she turned left – the orange light was ahead of her now – following the path until she reached the gate. It was a relief to feel its solid wood beneath her hands, and she stood there for a moment running her fingers nimbly over the edges of a sign made for them by their granddaughter, Martha, in more innocent times. She’d never seen the sign – she’d never seen the pink and yellow patio tiles paving the garden either or the stone wishing well and oak barrel planter where a relatively robust looking dwarf conifer was growing, circled by primroses – but she knew what it said: No leaflets or junk mail.

Her breath was quick and hissing. She could hear it – a sound close by – as she clicked up the latch and opened the gate. Out on the pavement there were other sounds – sounds that didn’t belong here on the edges of the Hartford Estate where families wanting to stay afloat above the tide of social debris put in for transfers to; where vegetables were grown, laundry dried outside, and windows cleaned. The sounds came from the centre of the estate – a primitive black hole with severed amenities, boarded-up windows and bonfires burning day and night – where things had gone bad.

Feeling suddenly fretful, Doreen felt out the gate to the house next door, number nineteen, where the Fausts lived. The Fausts and the Hamiltons had been among the estate’s first residents in 1954, and so proud of their new council homes that they threw parties for less fortunate friends and family still consigned to the damp, crowded miners’ rows.

There was a nail on the left hand post she remembered not to snag the sleeve of her dressing gown on; she also remembered that the Fausts’ gate had sunk on its hinges and needed lifting slightly. She remembered all this despite the succession of low-strung whimpering sounds she was making as she shuffled blindly – the orange streetlight was behind her now – up the garden path to number nineteen Parkview, her hands moving in slow nervous arcs.

She had no idea how long the journey between houses had taken her. Since losing her sight, things needed to be sought out, felt out . . . translated. Things took time.

She rang on the bell to number nineteen, her right palm flat against the door, overcome by the physical reverberations of relief at reaching her destination. She listened – and thought she heard the sounds of a bed giving up its sleeper; uncertain footsteps. Crouching down awkwardly, she opened the letterbox and shouted hoarsely through it – ‘Mary, it’s me – Doreen!’

She could smell the new gloss on the front door; she could even smell the green in it as she straightened up slowly, her left hand pulling on the collar of her dressing gown. The last time she’d knocked on Mary Faust’s door at midnight – on anyone’s door at midnight – was the night Laura was born. She’d been told she couldn’t have children, then in 1974 – unexpectedly at the age of forty-two – she became pregnant. She never did make it to the hospital. Laura was born on the bathroom floor at number nineteen – delivered by a shaking, incredulous Mary.

The door to number nineteen opened then and the quality of light changed.

Mary Faust, in a dressing gown not dissimilar to Doreen’s – the small tight curls on her head flattened by the hair net she was wearing – peered with concern, and just a shiver of hostility, at her virtually blind neighbour.

Doreen was clutching the collar of her dressing gown. Her mouth looked like broken knicker elastic and the hair on the right-hand side of her head – hair tinted with just a suggestion of purple – was flat with sleep still. Mary wanted to ask her why she wasn’t wearing a hair net, but it was midnight and Doreen didn’t look like she was up to having an opinion on hair nets right then.

‘Doreen?’ Mary patted her own hair, satisfied. Doreen was staring straight through her, panting strangely. ‘Doreen, pet?’ Mary prompted her. The ‘pet’ was condescending, but she felt that Doreen’s frailty, virtual blindness and possible dementia warranted it.

‘It’s Bryan –’ Doreen said at last.

Mary stared at her, trying to work out whether she was sleepwalking. It was difficult to tell with a blind person. ‘Bryan?’

‘Laura’s Bryan. He’s gone missing. She’s just phoned. The police are there now.’

‘Bryan?’ Mary said again. It seemed impossible to her, given all the Deanes had achieved – Laura Hamilton had become Laura Deane when she married Bryan. Achievements such as theirs – they owned and lived in a four-bedroom detached house, and ran two cars – were meant to safeguard against tragedy. ‘Missing how?’

‘I don’t know. Laura said he never came home.’

‘From where?’

‘I don’t know. Something to do with a kayak. He was in the sea, and – I can’t help thinking –.’

‘Don’t think,’ Mary commanded. ‘It’ll give you vertigo, and you’ll feel it in your joints. Where’s Don?’ Mary couldn’t see the car where it was usually parked beneath the street light.

‘He’s driven over there. He took Martha with him.’

Martha was Laura and Bryan’s fifteen-year-old daughter. She stayed with her grandparents most weekends.

‘You’d better come in,’ Mary said, taking hold of Doreen’s arm and pulling her into the house.

‘I didn’t mean to bother you. Not with Erwin ill . . .’

‘He’s out cold. Morphine.’

Mary was almost cheerful now as she pushed Doreen gently into the living room, guiding her to the sofa beneath the copper engraving of the Chillingham Cattle.

Doreen poised rigidly on the edge, her left hand curled in her lap, her right hand gripping the armrest as if anticipating motion. She could smell carpet and the wood of the sideboard – as well as Lily of the Valley vapours from a bath Mary had taken earlier. She was breathless with disbelief still – even after telling Mary, who she could hear now making tea in the kitchenette.

There were other sounds – a man and woman making love – coming through the wall behind her from next door where a young family lived; a nice family, just trying to make their way in the world. Doreen felt briefly glad for them, then the panic set in again as she thought about Laura, who used to be such a happy little girl. Shocked, Doreen realised that subconsciously she must have noticed that lately Laura hadn’t been happy; Laura hadn’t been happy at all, but this wasn’t something they ever talked about because they didn’t talk about much these days.

She felt a sudden, inexplicable resentment towards Laura then, which had something to do with the dressing gown she was wearing and how much she’d always disliked it. She’d disliked it for being exactly what it was – an ugly, synthetic body bag she was meant to express senile thanks for because she was at the end of her life. It had been chosen carelessly and at the last minute – from the racks of a shop Laura would never have bought anything for herself in. When had she, Doreen, ever given the impression that silk had lost its meaning now she was over seventy? Doreen started to cry.

Mary stood in the kitchenette – her hand on the teapot; about to pour – on the phone to her granddaughter, Anna. Not only because Anna was police, but because she, Laura and Bryan had all grown up together here on the Hartford Estate.

Laura and Anna had lived next door to each other since birth, and as both of them remained only children a friendship would have been natural enough, but it had been more than friendship. They sought each other out intentionally and, growing up, they were inseparable – their own world – until the summer after the eleven plus, which Anna passed and Laura didn’t.

Mary had been telling herself for the past twenty-three years that it was the eleven plus that came between Laura and Anna, but it wasn’t – that same summer, the summer of ’85, the Deanes moved onto the Hartford Estate. They moved into number fifteen Parkview, next door to the Hamiltons. Bryan Deane was twelve at the time – a year older than Anna and Laura.

As she came off the phone, she heard crying on the other side of the frosted glass door separating the kitchenette from the living room.

She went through, her feet silent in the carpet’s thick pile.

Doreen’s skin was too loose and thin to absorb the tears whose run-off was cascading from the edge of her chin onto her dressing gown.

‘I’ve come out without my keys and there’s nobody at home. I’m locked out, Mary,’ she said – as if this failing on her part far outweighed her son-in-law’s disappearance. ‘Stupid – stupid,’ she moaned, distraught with anger, thumping her left fist into her lap.

Anna Faust slowed down, steering the yellow Ford Capri, in which she’d driven north the previous Saturday, into the small Duneside development outside Seaton Sluice where the Deanes lived. A wind was picking up, making the flags ring on their masts at the entrance to the estate while shifting the sea fret that had come in with the tide that afternoon – a dense, rolling blanket of fog this stretch of the north-east coast was famous for.

It was Easter Saturday and unnaturally quiet after London – something she hadn’t got used to yet.

Marine Drive was a road of four- and five-bedroom detached homes whose uniform banality could only be described as ‘executive’ – a marketing ploy that explained nothing and promised everything. The houses backed onto the main road, but had sea views.

The Deanes’ house – the first one, number two – was as honey-coloured as the rest of the houses on Marine Drive, which all gave the impression that they’d been tailored to suit the needs of their owners when in fact it was the owners who’d been trained – by forces far greater than themselves – to fulfil the requirements of the houses. Requirements including, but not limited to – Anna took a glance at number two and its immediate neighbours – a household income of at least eighty thousand, and a minimum of two cars to fill the double garage and drive. Preferably children – definitely pets.

After more than a decade in London ‘eighty thousand’ had lost its meaning, but up here it was still hard to come by – still currency.

She cast her eyes instinctively over the puddles of architectural foliage in the front garden of number two, then back up at the honey-coloured façade, aware that she was looking for signs of Bryan in all this.

Anna hadn’t seen Bryan or Bryan’s wife, Laura, since she and Laura were eighteen when Laura Deane had been Laura Hamilton still. But she knew all about the Deanes and their house at number two Marine Drive – Mary had described it in such breathless detail – because Mary approved of the Deanes and the way the Deanes lived their lives in a way she didn’t approve of Anna.

At Friday’s Methodist Church coffee morning, Mary would talk loudly and insistently about her granddaughter, Anna, and while she was talking, still loudly, still proudly, she was trying simultaneously to fathom why it was Anna lived so far away, and why it was Anna lived alone.

She’d always been ambitious for her granddaughter, but Anna’s achievements didn’t translate into anything she – or anybody else at the Methodist Church coffee morning – understood. While Laura Deane had a four-bedroom house with a conservatory and separate utility room. She had a beautiful kitchen with an in-built microwave the size of an oven. People understood these things, and such recognisable achievements were given their due reverence by the Friday morning audience.

Unlike the Hartford Estate – where Anna, Laura, and Bryan had all grown up and where Anna’s grandparents and Laura’s parents still lived – Marine Drive didn’t often see police squad cars, but tonight there was one parked on the drive to number two, sandwiched between two other cars. One of those Anna recognised as belonging to Laura’s father, Don Hamilton, and the other one had to be Laura’s.

Don – like Erwin Faust – used to work at Hartford Pit, and when that closed down Don got work at Bates and Erwin, who was near retirement, got work cleaning the buses at the Ashington Depot. He was still referred to locally as ‘the German’ by the older generation because he’d spent most of the war as a POW in Camp Eden, Stanton.

As she got out of her car, sensor-triggered security lighting suddenly illuminated the driveway and front garden of number two and she saw Don Hamilton walking towards his car.

‘Don!’

He stared at her, not recognising her for a moment. ‘Anna?’

‘Nan’s just phoned – about Bryan.’

As if embarrassed at this disturbance of the peace his family was responsible for, Don shook his head, which had been sporting the same Teddy boy haircut for as long as Anna had known him.

He’d put on a shirt, pressed trousers, sports jacket and loafers – with buckles that shone under the security lighting – in order to face the unexpected tragedy of his son-in-law’s disappearance. It disturbed Don profoundly because he didn’t think things like this happened to people who lived in four-bedroom detached houses. He thought his daughter was safe from harm inside number two Marine Drive, but here was a police car parked on the drive where Bryan’s 4x4 should have been.

‘You didn’t have to come over.’

‘Don, it’s fine.’

Anna didn’t tell him she’d come to give a statement because when Mary phoned just after midnight, it occurred to her – beyond the shock – that she was probably the last person to have seen Bryan, that afternoon on the beach.

‘The police are in there speaking to Laura – asking questions.’

‘They’ll just be routine ones,’ Anna reassured him. He looked like he needed reassuring. He looked, in fact, as though someone had been stamping all over his face, and he was trying hard not to bear any grudges.

‘They sounded bloody weird to me – some of them.’

‘It’s not easy, I know, but they have to ask them.’

Don wasn’t listening any more. ‘They wanted to search the house as well.’

‘It’s just routine – standard procedure. It’s what they do.’

‘Well, I didn’t think it was right for Martha to hear all of that. I wanted her to wait in the car with me, but she wouldn’t. She said she wanted to be there when they were speaking to Laura. They asked her questions as well – Martha.’

Anna had seen the Deanes’ fifteen-year-old daughter for the first time that morning – dressed in riding clothes with a brown velvet hat hooked under her arm, hitting lightly at the side of her boots with a crop. A tall, shy girl, who had stood possessively close to Bryan on the pavement outside number seventeen Parkview on the Hartford Estate.

Don stared helplessly at Anna. ‘She’s in her pyjamas still. I drove her over in her pyjamas. Saturdays she stays with us – I take her to Keenley’s Stables.’ He ran his tongue nervously round his mouth. ‘Laura and Bryan have to work Saturdays, but I suppose it gives them a bit of time together afterwards – just the two of them,’ he finished, uncertain.

Anna gave his elbow a squeeze, surprised to find, standing next to him, that they were the same height. She’d always thought of Don as a towering man. ‘You get on home. This business with Bryan will sort itself out.’

She stood on the drive and waited for him to put the car into gear and reverse, then move off slowly up the street, obedient to the twenty miles per hour speed limit – and not because she was watching. Don was the sort of man who stuck to the rules even when there was nobody watching.

Just the two of them.

Anna had a sudden image of Bryan turning sharply onto the drive she was standing on, laughing, Laura leaning heavily into him. She saw them kissing and touching each other then Bryan switching off the engine and pulling Laura out of the car towards the silent house – Laura holding onto him as he fumbled with the key in the lock.

All three of them – Bryan, Laura, and Anna – knew what it was like to grow up in a mining community after the mass pit closures of the sixties through to the eighties and the Strike of ’84–5. What they’d seen growing up had given them a knowledge, and this knowledge had become an appetite for escape.

The two things everybody had plenty of in Blyth by the mid-nineties were despair and heroin, but Bryan, Laura and Anna – in their different ways – clung onto their appetites and watched for a way out. Anna’s appetite led her down to King’s College, London. Bryan’s led him to white collar work and a monthly salary, and Laura – well, Laura only had an appetite for one thing, and that was Bryan. They’d all achieved what they set out to, which was to make the unaffordable things in life affordable, and ensure that their children would never know what it was like to go hungry.

Just the two of them.

Anna crossed the drive to the front door, her finger pressing hard on the buzzer.

She’d been bewildered – when she first arrived a week ago – to find herself at this latitude again. It didn’t feel like her country any more, although it was unreasonable of her to expect it to after so many years away. Did she even want it to? She didn’t look like these people and she didn’t speak like them anymore. But she had given them her childhood and she felt, pettishly, that this should have at least entitled her to a temporary sense of belonging.

Maybe the fault didn’t lie with them, but with her – and anyway none of this mattered now.

With Bryan’s disappearance she was no longer in their world – they were in hers.