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When the room began to spin, she lay down with her pre-prepared ice-cold face towel to place on her forehead so she would not vomit and therefore survive. She carried on counting, carried on breathing and then, ever so slowly, stopped.
Bob was slightly later home than usual, wanting to leave everything squeakily efficient at work so he could concentrate on keeping Vera afloat the next day. It was breezy and orange and yellow leaves swirled in the bowels of The Willows as he placed his key in the door. It was quiet and he could not detect any signs of food being prepared. He shouted her name, climbed the stairs and as he reached the landing he smelled the whisky fumes. He paused, he couldn’t blame her. He badly wanted a drink too. He tapped lightly on the bedroom door before opening it.
He did not panic upon surveying the scene. Part of him was instantly envious. His wife had escaped the torment. He was not sufficiently calm, though, to take her pulse. He was loath to leave her to go downstairs to the phone so he opened the bedroom window. The curly-haired twins were throwing conkers at each other.
‘Hey!’ he shouted. They looked up. He asked them to knock on the Harpers’ door. They looked at each other quizzically before running off towards their own house. Exasperated, Bob ran down to the phone, made a call he later had no memory of making, left the front door open, then ran back to Vera.
Her face cloth had slipped onto the pillow leaving it wet as if soaked in her tears. He placed his head on her stomach, hoping she would reach down and run her fingers through his hair. When the ambulance crew arrived Vera’s blouse was damp too, and Bob, for the first time since his daughter died, was unable to stop sobbing.
Vera (#ulink_6dc3efb3-4bb2-5585-9a24-acdc961d6461)
Vera awoke in a panic. She had dreamed she had taken pills and it had been so vivid. She clutched at her flabby stomach but she felt fine, just disorientated. Bob walked in holding their baby.
‘I’m glad you were able to nap, love,’ he said, ‘but she needs a feed.’
Vera wriggled herself upright against the pillows. It was the most beautiful thing in the world to feed little Hope, and the most emotionally cruel. Hope had been conceived in a frenzy of desperate, angry, escapist lovemaking after the death of Lauren. She had promised herself she would kill herself if she could not have another child and she had doubted it would happen, but it had. The sibling had come along. She was too late to be a real sibling. But she was real.
She looked like Lauren but not too much for constant tears. Hope made everyone happy. Vera and Bob had asked Karen and Julian to be godparents and they had cried and cried and cried about it for days afterwards. Debbie ran endless, unnecessary errands for Vera. Aunt Suki had moved in for a fortnight to ease the load, which meant she made lots of tea and toast and answered the phone and the door and reluctantly pegged out washing.
‘Oh, Bob, I’m so grateful and so angry all at the same time,’ Vera said, ‘and I’m worried Hope will know, she will be scarred or withdrawn or frightened of me or something.’
‘Nah,’ said Bob, smiling. ‘She’s the most loved child in Cheshire and we’ll tell her about her big sister in the right way, of course we will.’
Hope needed to be loved. Her name had the ring of optimism but was drenched in tragedy. Her full name was Hope Lauren Pailing.
Hope’s christening was in the same church as…
That was how they all spoke of it. ‘It’s in the same church as…’ There was no need nor desire to finish the sentence. The service was intimate, and conducted at pace, as if those present were pushing against a great weight and they could only hold their arms aloft for so long to avoid being crushed.
There were more guests back at the house, where Vera was complimented on how slender she looked in her new dress. She even summoned a little twirl for Debbie, who was particularly entranced by the crêpe fabric that fell Hollywood style to reach the floor and the way ribbons of silvery silk were woven through it.
‘You look so lovely in your silvery silky dress,’ Debbie told Vera, in a low voice to avoid making her own mother jealous and she wondered why, when she said so, Vera had blinked rapidly.
Later, sat on the edge of her bed, Vera ran her fingers along the dress which now lay across the bedspread like a willing bride. The silver ribbons glistened in the light from the pair of chintz bedside lamps and she closed her eyes. She had bought the dress three weeks ago. Now she remembered that seven years ago, maybe eight, Lauren had mentioned a silvery silky dress.
Vera smiled sadly. She did not know it while in the shop but she had bought the dress to please Lauren. To fulfil her daughter’s idealised image of her, perhaps. To keep their relationship a tangible thing, not just a painful memory.
Peter Stanning drove over with a hand-carved rocking horse and bundles of strawberry jam. He would have done more, but for the fact that he went missing when Hope was three months old.
Vera and Bob had no idea how helpful Peter Stanning had been until he disappeared from their lives.
‘You know what, Bob,’ Vera said when Peter’s vanishing was less of an intriguing piece of gossip and more a fear for the man’s life. ‘Lauren would have cared about what happened to him. She was so mature, so caring, and she loved a puzzle. She would have been asking us every day, “Any news about Peter Stanning?”, wouldn’t she?’
Bob accepted all his wife’s reminiscences regardless of whether they tallied with his own, but in this instance he really did agree. Lauren would have been fascinated, he was sure of that.
Hope grew up loving her big sister. It was a peculiar kind of love, the sort a teenager has for a distant pop star she has never met. Hope celebrated Lauren’s birthday with enthusiasm, blowing out the candles her sister could never breathe over, eating the cake her sister could never taste, singing the songs her sister could never hear. Her favourite bedtime stories where the ones in which Lauren played a starring role. ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ became ‘Little Lauren in a Red Cloak’. Rapunzel had a name change too. And every night Vera would hold out a photograph of Lauren for Hope to kiss before kissing it herself.
Aunt Suki thought it all sickly sweet and unhealthy, but said nothing. She had kissed a photograph of her niece just the once and it had made her maudlin, uneasy and embarrassed. The role of the dead was unclear, especially when it was a child that had died. There was something both touching and terrible in the way Hope would randomly grab at a framed picture in the lounge and plant wet kisses on the face of her sibling. But it made Vera and Bob smile, so Aunt Suki said nothing.
Lauren (#ulink_8b1155d2-23f5-5199-9d01-50f7e857405b)
There was a long queue for brunch in the refectory. It was the queue of friendship. So many art students that first Saturday morning made lifelong pals while waiting for eggs and muffins. Lauren gazed about her. She noticed a tall slim man with wild dark hair wearing a crisp white shirt, its sleeves rolled up, and over it a tightly fitting woollen waistcoat. There were girls with dyed hair and spiked hair, girls with long skirts with wacky hems; one girl, Indian perhaps, who glided about as if in her own palace. Everyone had an identity. There was something distinctive about them all. She looked down at her ballet pumps and her simple dress. Maybe her ordinariness was her shtick.
Lauren’s first queue friend was Ski, a serious boy of Russian descent who was adored by his mother. His father was less impressed by Ski’s desire to study art. But it was Nina, a couple of weeks later, who rechristened Lauren ‘Loz’. Nina was a livewire chatterbox and managed to spread the name Loz as quickly as the wind catches hold of wildfire in a dry forest. Lauren did not mind. She needed an interesting name to compensate for her nondescript image.
Lauren took an instant dislike to her tutor. He was five years too old for his tight green T-shirt and it took a good deal of willpower not to stare too hard at his thick rubbery lips. His name was Ossie Thomas-Blake and he held before him Lauren’s portfolio.
‘I like this,’ he said confrontationally.
He was looking at Peter Stanning is Missing which Lauren had refined – but which was still, essentially, the work of a sixth-former.
‘Too many students fail to find the narrative before they create,’ OTB said. ‘It is not enough to see a pretty sunset and want to capture it. Why do you want to capture it? That’s what matters.’
Lauren nodded. She wanted to say that any cartoon strip would have a narrative but held her tongue.
‘Is he still missing?’
‘What? Oh, yes, he is. It’s the biggest news to hit my village,’ she said.
‘Good,’ OTB said. ‘Relevant. You should try to find him.’
‘I should?’ Lauren was struggling now, wondering if OTB was winding her up, if this was a sort of initiation.
‘Jeez, I don’t expect you to actually find him but you should try to and then put the adventure into your work. Cartoon strips, abstracts, portraiture; anything that feels right.’
‘Is that my first-year project?’
OTB smirked.
‘That’s your first-year project.’
Lauren left his studio bewildered. She had not come to London only to have to trek back home to Cheshire. She almost stamped her foot in frustration. London had been dizzying for the first week but now she felt addicted to the noise and the light, the fact you could buy a hot meal at any time of day or night. There was art everywhere, and theatre, and cinema and live music. Men would kiss while standing in front of posters that told them not to die of ignorance. In the student bar the chat would veer from AIDS to condoms to whether anyone would dare travel through a Channel Tunnel, or to snog Neil Kinnock, the Prime Minister so beloved of most of the students, or shake hands with Jeffrey Archer. Being in London was to be at the centre of the universe. Nothing was taboo. Her fellow students could believe in any god they chose to or believe in nothing at all. The only heated exchange she had witnessed was about the role of photography in a degree portfolio. The art the students produced ranged from overtly sleekly commercial to angry and minimalist and in between there was room for those who used oils and captured light as beautifully as Vermeer.
By contrast, Peter Stanning’s absence had become boring, even the police seemed bored when they embarked on one of their shopping-centre blitzes, asking passers-by if they recalled anything unusual, had they seen this man behaving strangely? Had they seen this man? But perhaps that was the point: to be honest about an event that everyone was supposed to be worried or sad about. Or maybe she could jazz it all up, put Peter Stanning into all kinds of outcomes? Hiding in the Australian bush, living with another woman in Wales or dead in the boot of an abandoned car, the victim of mistaken identity.
Vera and Bob were as excitable as toddlers that Lauren came home for a long weekend before the end of her first term.
‘I’ve come home for inspiration,’ she said, ‘and to see you, of course.’
Lauren made sure she pronounced the word ‘inspiration’ in a mock-Home Counties voice. She did not want her parents thinking art school had turned her head, given her ideas above her station, as Aunt Suki might say.
It was more difficult than she had imagined, explaining to her parents that OTB had made the disappearance of Peter Stanning her first-year project. It made her feel tacky and insensitive.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
Bob patted her arm. ‘No, I think maybe your tutor chap might have a point. Anyway, you don’t have to go around upsetting anyone, do you?’
‘No, but you’re probably tired of it all now, Dad; the last thing you want is me asking you questions about him.’
Bob beamed. ‘But you can ask them over a meal at Mr Yee. It’ll be a treat for us, really it will.’
Mr Yee had a fresh poster featuring Peter Stanning in his window, which seemed to Lauren to be a sign that her project was current affairs, not old news.
‘Fire away, love,’ Bob said as he stirred his wonton soup.
‘Well, I’d like to know what you really truly think happened.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I keep changing my mind about that.’
‘Right now then, what’s your best theory?’
Lauren was aware that Mr Yee was listening, above them, at the raised counter where he prepared the bills. She could already envisage Mr Yee making a cameo appearance in her next cartoon strip.
Bob nodded and Vera, sitting across the table, tilted her head. Mr Yee held his breath.
‘I think he had a secret, not necessarily a terrible secret, but something that took him away from where he could have been expected to be so the police have not looked anywhere relevant yet.’
Bob raised his hand. ‘And. And, I think he was probably hit by a car and rolled down a bank to a place that can’t be seen easily. He’ll be found one day but it might take years. And. And, I don’t want that to be what happened. I’d rather he ran away to a remote paradise and was happy but I don’t think that was his style.’
Vera nodded, Lauren frowned and Mr Yee exhaled.
‘Do you see his wife ever?’ Lauren asked after the silence that followed. She knew Peter had been her dad’s boss and not his friend but, still, it was strange that his wife was invisible to them all.
Bob swallowed a wonton. ‘Never – and never did really. She was always busy with her horses as far as I could tell.’
Vera did not like horses, so it seemed to her perfectly likely that Peter had been having an affair with a woman who did not wear jodhpurs while smelling of manure. Otherwise, she agreed with Bob’s scenario.
So did Mr Yee – with a slight variation. Mr Yee was convinced that Peter Stanning had been on his way to his establishment, keen for some Peking Duck pancakes and plum sauce, before being diverted to an ugly fate.
Lauren decided there and then that her theme would be about the ‘not knowing’ and the empty space Peter Stanning’s absence represented in the lives of those left behind. OTB surely did not expect her to speak to the police or to Mrs Stanning. Before they left, however, she smiled at Mr Yee and asked him if Peter had been a regular customer.
‘Best customer. Many Fridays,’ he said. ‘Such a nice man.’
‘Did you speak to the police about him,’ she asked.
‘No, not police, not ever,’ Mr Yee said which left Lauren feeling she had uncovered a clue; a tiny one, but enough to work with artistically.
When back in London she began to sketch Mrs Stanning, a woman she had never met and yet whose face she knew. A face which, for reasons Lauren couldn’t understand, she pictured illuminated by April sunshine, smiling as she watched a horde of children aged from three to sixteen hunt for chocolates eggs and ribbon-wrapped five-pound notes. And Lauren framed the drawings with tiny bicycle wheels which she found time-consuming yet oddly soothing. The more wheels she drew the deeper she fell into a reminiscence of something that had never happened. Something to do with sunshine and bicycles that were not in use, and which were now just there as a giant art installation.
Ski did not live like other students. He knew people outside of college, he had money and he rented a basement flat that boasted a central living space big enough for parties. He preferred to lie on giant cushions with selected friends, smoking dope. Tentatively, Lauren joined in. She liked Ski and she did not want to be the one labelled as his prudish pal. She coughed, she spluttered, she laughed and finally she relaxed. Ski recited poetry and his accent became increasingly hysterical. Lauren recited a recipe for coq au vin and Ski giggled uncontrollably. Nina recited a list of all the boys she could bear to sleep with and Lauren began to feel fretful. There was someone else in the flat, watching them.
‘Who is it?’ she whispered to Ski.
‘It’s me,’ he said, spluttering with laughter as a thin metal rod pierced his neck.
He did not flinch. Lauren crawled closer, confused, and as she reached out to touch it something made her stop. Something made her tilt her head and peer into the strange piece of taught shiny string. Nina screeched.
‘Loz has gone, she’s off,’ she laughed. ‘Loz is going to bite you, Ski.’
Lauren did not hear her, she was looking at a basement flat without any cushions and with Ski having his jeans pulled down by an older muscular man. She gasped and fell back onto her bright orange bean bag.
‘Déjà vu, vu, vu,’ Lauren said, her head spinning. ‘I feel all déjà vu.’
Nina screeched again.
‘I’m nicking that, Loz. That’s my theme. Fuckin’ brilliant. Déjà vu means the same image repeated. Lazy art becomes clever art.’
Lauren sighed. ‘I’m so jealous, I have to solve a bloody unsolvable crime and you get to paint one thing and make copies.’
‘You’ll just have to shag OTB, almost everyone else does,’ Nina said and Lauren stumbled, disgusted, to the bathroom.
Lauren decided cannabis could not be her friend. Ski and Nina had just been extra jolly and relaxed while she had seen strangeness and felt strangeness. The beam bothered her a lot. It felt both peculiar and familiar and the vision she had glimpsed was as sharp as a cinema production. Most odd of all was that she felt possessive about it. It had been her beam, meant only for her, and she had not even wondered if Ski or Nina had noticed anything.
She tried to sketch it but it was impossible. The materials did not exist for her to convey the way the shimmering turned reflective and then transparent. The materials most certainly did not exist for her to convey how she was both fearful and transfixed, how she felt knowing as well as surprised.
She worried about Ski contracting AIDS like the men in the adverts even though she had no evidence, beyond what she had seen through the beam, that he might engage in sex with men. Even when he started dating the diminutive and blandly pretty Coral Culkin, an American student with seemingly wealthier parents than him, Lauren still was concerned for his health. She wondered if the seers and witches of old witnessed the sudden arrival of magic string and were similarly cursed with knowledge they did not want.
Try as she might, Lauren could not convince herself that the image was purely the product of smoking pot. It began to annoy as well as unsettle her. So she devoted herself to the missing Peter Stanning.
‘Would be weird, Mum, wouldn’t it, if he just turned up again?’ she said to Vera over the phone on the wall of the kitchen she shared with those on her floor and which was so clogged by fat fumes and errant marmalade that the dial hiccupped its way back to zero which made making calls a long-winded process. She had been worried about the lack of privacy at first but there was always so much background bustling noise from chitter-chatter and music and the lift clanging and the kettle whistling that she could dial home unperturbed about eavesdroppers.
‘Well, it would for his wife,’ Vera said, ‘as she is supposed to be dating a famous showjumper I’ve never heard of.’
Lauren decided to ignore this as she could not draw horses very well. Instead she produced a painting. Fuchsia reds and russet reds and one small white square representing Peter Stanning. OTB liked it but said it was a bit ‘obvious’.
She returned to her desk and turned the white square into an opened window behind which was an image of a Santa hat. She smiled at the memory of Peter Stanning in costume, with a silky fake white beard, at the Christmas party in her father’s office. She knew now what she would paint next; an advent calendar full of versions of Peter’s fate, building to the climax of crucifixion. It was blasphemous, but she knew that OTB would adore it.
Bob (#ulink_86d359f6-bc68-5e54-a1f7-06aae3a8858d)
In a bleaker world in which Peter Stanning was not yet missing, and Lauren and Vera were not out shopping, not anywhere at all, Bob was alone in the house that had become the dark house on The Willows. Even the twins would edge away from its driveway. Nobody knew what to say. No one except Peter Stanning, who had seen it coming but had no way of warning Bob, none at all.
One day, Peter drove over with a small casserole prepared by his wife. He fiddled with the oven.
‘Right, that will be warmed though in half an hour so, so in the meantime, let’s look at our options.’
Bob blinked through bleary medicated eyes.
‘I have one option, top of the list,’ Bob said bitterly but not nastily.
‘Yes, of course you have, Bob,’ Peter said stoically and firmly but not unkindly. ‘But allow me to talk through some others.’
He opened a notebook and cleared his throat.
‘One. Sell up, buy a small flat closer to the office, work when you feel like it, come to supper at our place, let the staff be kind, find a new life. Slowly. With our help.
‘Two. Family. You have a sister, anyone else? Maybe family abroad, maybe friends abroad? Sell up and travel to them, see the world, anyway. Find a reason to enjoy life.
‘Three. New career. Leave us if it helps, work for yourself or a new company where they don’t know you. Or retrain, take an Open University course, become a teacher or a librarian or an architect or a permanent student.
