Authors: Sebastian Faulks
That ‘ex’ shook me up a bit. How fast other people had moved onward in their lives. I hadn’t been to see the Forres film because the word ‘edgy’ put me off. It’s code for ‘the men all swear a lot’. (‘Feisty’ means the women all swear a lot.) I hardly ever swear myself and find it irritating. Perhaps I was also jealous of Stewart.
Eventually, I stopped reading the coverage. I couldn’t stand another article about 1970s fashions, Abba or tank tops. This kind of decade-drivel used to be the territory of
Chick’s Own
or
Bunty
but has now run through whole sections of once-serious newspapers.
On the following Monday I was telephoned by Tony Ball at home, and this was unusual, in fact unprecedented. He was ringing to suggest I do a big ‘background’ piece on Jennifer for the following Sunday.
‘But you didn’t like the thing I did about the new Master.’
‘This is different, though. It’s more your line of country. I remember that great piece you did on the Ripper. All that footwork in Bradford.’
‘This isn’t a serial killer, Tony.’
‘How do we know?’
‘Because there aren’t any other bodies.’
‘Could be linked to other unsolved crimes. Just that they haven’t made the connection yet.’
‘It looks like a straightforward domestic. It’s bound to have been the boyfriend.’
I talked my way out of it, and for a time all went quiet. Ball still had no idea I’d been to the same university, let alone that I’d known Jen; and I certainly wasn’t going to tell him now.
Then, a little over a week after Jen’s body was discovered, Mrs Arkland made a statement for the television cameras. She read it in a comfortable-looking lounge, dimly lit by a couple of table lamps in front of drawn curtains. She had grown plumper over the years and her hair was grey.
You could still see in her face the happy housewife who had sent her eldest daughter off to university before turning her attention back to the three still at home, but her eyes were glaucous and bulky with pain.
‘My eldest daughter Jennifer would have been thirty-five,’ she said in a pitiless, accusing voice. ‘No day has passed since her disappearance without my first thought on waking being of her. Not a single day. I have felt her presence in everything I have done. I have heard her voice in all my thoughts. I have taken her back inside myself.’
She looked down at her paper through the bottom of her bifocals. ‘My husband died some years ago. He never recovered from the shock of losing Jennifer, from the agony of not knowing where she was. I thank God he did not live to see this dreadful day and to know the worst. My other daughters have suffered too. They have lost a sister and a father and I have not been the mother to them that I should have been.’
She looked down again and breathed in deeply. It was difficult to watch. I pictured people all over the country crying.
‘I shall not be giving any interviews to the press or making any further comment. I ask all of you to leave me and my family alone. You will get nothing from us.
‘We shall shortly be able to give Jennifer the funeral that has for so long been denied her. It will be a private ceremony at a private location. So we will bring this terrible story to a close. That much at least is a relief for us, and I would like to thank the police for their help and understanding both at the time of Jennifer’s disappearance and over the last ten days.’
It seemed as though she could hardly bear the weight of her own head. Although she read from a prepared script, her voice didn’t run smoothly; it seemed to have silted up with age, with the gravel of her fourteen years’ wait.
‘I would like finally to appeal to anyone who may know anything that might help us bring to justice the person or people who killed my daughter. I ask this not for revenge. It’s too late for that. But I hope that any parent listening will understand why it is important that whoever was responsible for this terrible deed should be apprehended. If only so that no other family may suffer what we have been through.’
She took off her glasses and stared into the camera. ‘I never stopped hoping. I never, ever gave up hope that one day Jennifer would walk up the drive, alive and well, with some explanation of where she’d been. Now I have finally despaired. I know that now we can be reunited only at my death. Good night.’
For several days I didn’t see anyone, even Margaret.
I felt that my life was on two paths. There was the one I knew about and understood: Margaret, the paper, Charlotte and her friends, work, people, drinks and all the stuff of living in London – Saturday afternoon, the football crowds on their way to Highbury, the kettle on, a film in the evening, Chinese dinner, having enough money. All this had grown slowly better. I’d become more adept at being with other people; I’d lowered my expectations of them and learned to let my mind drift into neutral when they spoke. That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach – I’m not sure I’d grasped that exactly, but I’d got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.
But then there was the second path or strand, which I didn’t understand at all, and I felt this was principally because I couldn’t remember parts of it. Here I was with a memory that others assured me was freakish in its recall of facts and dates and long passages of writing; yet actions and events in my own past that really should have been able to remember themselves without prompting from even a workaday, let alone a Rolls-Royce, memory – they weren’t there. They were not only unstored, unregistered, not indexed; it was as if these things had never happened.
So perhaps they hadn’t.
About two weeks after the police press conference, on a Sunday afternoon, I began to feel uneasy.
Then I started to have symptoms of panic, such as I had had in the course of
The Birthday Party
. I paced up and down my Bayswater flat. I put some music on, then took it off again.
I felt that events which should have been attached to given dates – however artificial and downright wrong it was to think of time in that way – had shaken themselves loose and were happening again, as for the first time. What we childishly called ‘the past’ was somehow present. And, as at that moment when I had run outside the old church, everything seemed to be happening at once – now.
I did what I always did: took pills and alcohol and tried to hold on. I went to sit on the bed, wrapping my arms tight round my ribs.
I’d had lunch at the Mill. I did know that. That much was sure. I went in there on my way back from the Sidgwick Site, where I’d been to a history lecture on Garibaldi and the unification of Italy. The lecturer was a woman called Dr Elizabeth Stich. I generally preferred the Anchor for its views and thought the Mill overrated, but for some reason, perhaps just for a change, I went in and sat at a table. I had a pint of bitter and ordered from the ‘baked potato with various fillings’ part of the menu. Probably with cheese. Good value. Jennifer was at the adjacent table with Robin Wilson. He leant forward to talk to her; they were having a conversation of the kind known as ‘heavy’ and didn’t want others to hear. I noticed his jacket and tee shirt ride up at the back. Jennifer sat back against the wooden settle in a slightly defensive posture; she wore a floral print skirt. I could see her bare legs. She had a sharp patella that gave a fetching inverted-triangle shape to the knee. She was smoking a cigarette and trying not to laugh, but her eyes looked concerned and vulnerable as Robin’s low voice went urgently on.
I have that picture of her with utter clarity. They talk of memories being ‘etched’ in the mind and you think of acid on a steel plate. That’s how fixed that image is for me. Yet it’s more living than the etching metaphor suggests. There’s blood and breath and movement and fleeting colour. She is alive, God damn it, she is alive. She looks so poised, with that womanly concern beginning to override the girlish humour. I will always remember that balanced, beautiful woman/girl expression in her face. She was twenty-one.
They left. She was so absorbed by what Robin was saying that she forgot to say goodbye either to me or to her friend Malini who was at the other end of the room. She went through the door, hoisting her brown leather shoulder bag up, the hem of the skirt fluttering for a second as she tripped down the step onto the cobbles. I went outside and stood for a moment opposite the end of Laundress Lane.
I had drunk three pints of beer by now and had taken a blue pill, but I didn’t feel good. I felt angry. I began to walk up the grey passage of Mill Lane with its high buildings. I felt trapped in a world that I couldn’t mould to my own desires. Others were in sunlight; I was in darkness.
I kept walking north up Pembroke, then Downing Street, past the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which made me wonder yet again at the nature of the anthropoid
Homo sapiens
, this functional ape with the curse of consciousness – that useless gift that allows him, unlike other animals, to be aware of his own futility. The story of Adam and Eve put it with childish but brilliant clarity: Paradise until the moment of self-awareness and then . . . Cursed. For ever cursed. (Christians called it ‘fallen’, but it was the same thing: the Fall was the acquisition of consciousness.) As I walked past Downing Place, I remembered reading, on Dr Woodrow’s recommendation, I think, Miguel de Unamuno, the Catholic philosopher from Spain, and finding the same thought there: ‘Man, because he is a man, because he possesses consciousness, is already, in comparison to the jackass or the crab, a sick animal. Consciousness is a disease.’
Then in the wider light of St Andrew’s Street, I saw Jennifer, arriving from the west, pushing her bike up on the pavement and sticking its front wheel through the railings outside Emmanuel. I stopped and watched her go in. I decided to steal her bicycle because if she was on foot she would be less independent.
I looked down at the menu in the window of Varsity, the Greek restaurant: dolmades, kleftiko, moussaka, the usual stuff, keenly priced for students. When I was sure she would have crossed the front court and be well out of sight I went over and pulled the bike out. She hadn’t locked it, the silly girl. She was trusting like that. I rode it quickly away towards the station, then doubled round and took it back to the sheds at my own college. I put it in the furthest corner, in an unnumbered rack. Where better to hide a bicycle?
This much I remembered.
Then . . . Then . . .
Malcolm Street wasn’t a street you went to very often, since it was merely a cut between King Street and Jesus Lane, two other places you had no reason to go. In fact, when I heard Jen mention its name to someone after a lecture, I had to look it up in the map on the front of my Heffer’s diary. Then I went to inspect. It was a street which appeared to be subject to various planning restrictions because all the houses were painted the same colour. They were of that Georgian design much admired by conservationists, though despite their value they were subdivided and let to students; you could tell by the many bells and entryphones.
Jen had mentioned a house number and the name of the people whose party it was. It was only two days after I’d taken her bike and I doubted whether she’d have got a new one already. I decided to crash the party. This was always easy enough to do, particularly if you took drink. I bought two bottles of wine from Arthur Cooper and went to the Bradford hotel to get drunk. I calculated that by eleven the little house would be so full that the door would be opened by a guest not a host and that two bottles and a confident attitude would get me in.
Why did I go to the party at all? Why didn’t I just wait for Jennifer to emerge? I don’t know. I had no conscious plans. The party was crowded, jostling, shouting, loud, difficult to tolerate. There was dancing in one room. It was pointless unless you were an anthropologist. A jackass or a crab might have had enjoyed working out what function the gathering performed in the social behaviour of the species. I stayed as long as I could stick it, then went back to the Morris 1100 in Park Street.
I drove it round into Jesus Lane and waited, listening to the radio. When the car was fuggily hot, I turned off the engine and the heating. I watched a few students coming up Malcolm Street towards me from the party house; I saw others go the opposite way, back into town. I watched to see if I recognised them.
I feared that Jennifer would be accompanied, though I hadn’t seen Robin at the party and anyway there were difficulties between them. But surely in his absence some opportunistic youth would have tried his luck . . . Or failing that, one of her many female friends would emerge with her.
But no. Eventually I saw that familiar walk – familiar to me, at least, from so much study. She turned and waved to someone going the other way, paused, and for a moment made as if to change direction; then she continued north towards me, running for a few paces to re-establish her course. She settled to a brisk and cloudy walk. I started the engine. She looked over the street, expecting to cross to my side, but was unsure if my car was going to move off. To be safe, she stayed on her own side of Jesus Lane and started to walk quickly eastward.
I pulled up opposite and wound down the window. I called out her name and she looked suspiciously across the road to see who I was. I offered her a lift and she glanced both ways up and down the street. She didn’t really want to get into the car with me, but she did so
for fear of seeming rude
.