Unspoken (39 page)

I would have watched him, hunched over his books, demanding eggs and coffee, while he told me jokes, held my wrist as I wiped his table, breathed warm words into my ear as I delivered his food.

‘Mary,’ he would say, ‘I’m learning about lovesickness. Can you recommend a cure?’

I would stare fondly, using the tea towel as a buffer between us, wiping my hands over and over while he tormented me with his eyes and a grin that showed a trace of his crooked tooth, before flicking him on the shoulder and walking away, my own smile widening once my back was turned.

I bumped into a young girl, a pretty teenager obviously in a hurry.

‘Sorry,’ I said, spinning a half-circle from the collision, but she didn’t reply. Her hair spread as she tossed it back, just like mine would have done. She stepped inside the café, breathless, beautiful, hopeful. I watched through the window as she wove a seductive dance through the tables. She arrived at David’s side, her face lighting up as she sat beside him. She left a kiss on his unanimated lips. David stared blankly ahead in just the same way he would often ignore me, hoping I would tease out the reason for his bad mood.

That was the first time I saw them together. I wondered if the girl might be his daughter, but the passion stitched into her expression showed me she was run aground with love for him – a love that no girl should have for her father. David continued to be cautious, nervous, as if someone was watching him. Perhaps, deep down, he knew.

 

My mother was content. Finally there was going to be a baby in the house. I’d strayed so far from my parents’ plan of marrying a local boy, becoming a farmer’s wife, rearing dozens of happy children alongside a prize-winning herd of dairy cows or acres of wheat, that being raped and getting pregnant, shaming the family and bringing the child up alone, was by then a perfectly acceptable alternative.

‘No matter.’ Mother said this about pretty much everything, from a broken cup to my shattered life. ‘You can live here with us.’

And so that’s what I did. My life in Cambridge, my foray into the world of academia, my attempt at snatching a slice of it for myself, became a rancid memory consigned to the back of my mind. No one ever spoke of it, and my plight was protected from discovery by the anonymity law. My name hadn’t been in a single newspaper. Plus, my mother made it her life’s work to shield the world from my disgrace. She became adept at fabricating stories about my condition. Each time someone asked, she told a different version so that no one ever really knew the truth.

‘Mary’s poor husband was the victim of a hit-and-run accident.’ This usually shocked those interested into silence.

‘The baby’s father was killed in action.’ No one ever asked where, for fear of not knowing about a far-off war.

‘Mary’s an agoraphobic, don’t you know?’ Most people didn’t.

‘He left her for another woman. And with a baby, too.’ Instantly, my absent husband was dirty scum.

‘She has to cope with a new baby
and
a terminally ill husband in a hospice.’ This was reserved for the local shopkeeper and spread, in various forms, within hours of its release.

But with the help of the vicar and the circle of women that my mother set up around me as a steely barrier of maternal strength, a more realistic back-story was used to explain my sorry situation. ‘Mary fell in love with a man who betrayed her.’ It kept their questions at bay; it matched and explained my demeanour; it allowed me to grieve while taking the support of other women – in particular the mother of a pair of children named Murray and Nadine. Without her help, I don’t think I’d have got through my pregnancy.

‘Breathe like we practised,’ Shauna said through the cotton of her mask. Her eyes were wide above it. She had rushed to Northmire when my mother called to tell her the time had come.

Shauna pulled the mask off her face and showed me how to breathe, patiently timing each inhalation to coincide with a contraction. I followed her instructions as best I could. For hours and hours she bathed my face with rosewater. She allowed me to squeeze her hand until it nearly burst and took nothing personal from the insults and screams of hate and pain I threw her way.

‘It’s a baby girl,’ Shauna exhaled as the final contraction spewed out my daughter into the midwife’s hands a full day and a half after I had gone into labour. The baby was placed on my deflating belly but I couldn’t stand to look at her. As a reminder of that dreadful night, as a permanent receipt of my relationship with David, how would I ever be able to hold or love or care for my baby?

But, I later thought, being a girl, being so innocent, perhaps she wouldn’t look too much like her father. If I’d delivered a son, I doubt I could have taken him as my own. As the minutes rolled into hours and the pain of childbirth, indeed the pain of the last nine months, diminished with every wail of my poor neglected baby, I mustered the courage to sit up and peek into the crib. The midwife pottered around, unwilling to leave until I showed some maternal instinct.

‘Go on. She’s beautiful,’ Shauna said, encouraging me to take a look. She’d cleaned me up, made a tray of tea, washed and dressed the baby while telling me about every tiny feature, every finger and toe, every hair on her head and lick of the air as her perfect mouth searched for my milk. I lay there with my eyes closed until finally intrigue and instinct won over anger and bitterness.

‘She
is
beautiful,’ I whispered. My daughter had the palest skin gilded on to a squirming body. Her tiny fingers haphazardly scrutinised the soft blanket wrapped around her, while her feet, balled up in wool, kicked against cloth instead of my womb. ‘Truly the most beautiful baby alive.’

At the sound of my voice, her huge eyes lolled up at me. For the briefest moment, we fell into each other’s minds. Mother and daughter locked up for ever, just like that. ‘I will call her Julia,’ I said, and reached into the cot. I gently picked up my baby. ‘Shhh, be quiet, hush now,’ I whispered in her ear, and later, when we were quite alone, I told her who her father was, and promised I would never let him hurt her.

 

Julia and Murray and Alex blow into the kitchen like litter on a squall. They are exhausted, bereft, frustrated and angry. Flora is still missing. I am desperate with worry yet unable to help. What must Julia think of me, sitting here doing nothing?

‘Mum, are you OK?’ Julia says in a breathy way that tells me she has forgotten all about me. My heart aches for her. A moment later and Ed lets himself into the kitchen, and by now we are quite a crowd because Brenna and Gradin have come to see who’s here. ‘Ed wants to talk to you, Mum. I do as well. We all do.’

Julia’s words are brittle. Her eyelids fold down over her pupils and I imagine for a moment what it would have been like to lose her when she was a child. They don’t notice, but the skin on my arms dapples with goose bumps. Losing my daughter would have been a waste of all my pain. What I went through is only justified by her existence.

‘Mrs Marshall, I need to take a statement from you regarding your granddaughter. I know you’re not well, but we would greatly appreciate your help.’ Ed has always been formal with me when we’ve met at family gatherings. Once, maybe twice a year at most – Easter or a birthday. He pulls up a chair. ‘As you know, Flora is still missing—’

And it’s just then, just at that point where everyone is holding their breath, waiting for me to provide all the answers, that Gradin rips the kitchen apart.

‘
Nooo-ooo!
’ he yells over and over, tearing down the generations of family life that make up the room. The patchwork of memories is snatched from the walls or smashed on the floor or toppled from a height. Gradin whips round the kitchen like a tornado without a weather warning, kicking and ripping and breaking up everything in his path. In a moment his hands and face are bleeding, but this doesn’t stop him hurling a wooden chair through the old paned window above the sink. Everything he can lay his hands on gets thrown into the courtyard, and it takes Murray and Ed several minutes to catch, restrain and calm the boy. Alex huddles terrified beside me.

‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God . . .’ Julia wails as she crunches through the wreckage. Gradin has pulled down the dresser and with it at least twenty place settings of crockery. ‘I can’t stand any more of this, no, no, no . . .’ And my daughter is on the floor, crying with the same needy emotion as when she slithered from my womb.

As Ed and Murray deal with the boy, I recall the day when Brenna and her brother first came to stay at Northmire. I accused them of stealing thirty pounds. If tipping up the table was his reaction to a false accusation before, then I wonder what he has done to warrant this extreme explosion.

‘That’s it, young man. You’re under arrest.’ Ed straightens from the kick he received in the leg, and he doesn’t know it but there is a cut beneath his left eye. ‘I am arresting you for criminal damage and assaulting a police officer. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you fail to mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say will be given in evidence.’

‘Baby?’ Gradin is shivering, quiet now, and his doleful eyes – as calm as they have ever been – hang heavy in his face. ‘Help me, Baby. Don’t let them put me in prison.’ His words are laboured and without any trace of comprehension. Ed snaps handcuffs closed behind Gradin’s back.

‘You done it now, you stupid idiot. What you go and do that for?’ Brenna leans on the door frame and gestures at the mess. She’s trying to detach herself from her brother, his actions, their lives, herself. Brenna doesn’t know how to help him, but like me, she knows this is bad. She knows that Gradin is disturbed by a secret he’s struggling to keep to himself. It was the guilt, not Gradin, that did this to my kitchen.

Ed uprights a kitchen chair and bends the teen on to it. ‘Stay there and don’t move.’ Gradin is so scared he can’t even breathe, let alone run for it. Murray stands guard, but I can see he really needs to help Julia, who is still on the floor. Ed crouches at my side and takes a deep breath. ‘Mary . . . Mary,’ he pleads.

In my head, I sing:
Quite contrary
. . .

I pick up her shoe. I pick up her bracelet, likewise her cardigan, her hairband and the pile of snotty tissues that lie strewn around her. Then, piece by devastated piece, I pick up Julia.

‘Mummy, are you OK?’ Alex always calls her ‘Mum’. He strokes her limp wrist. Julia flinches briefly.

‘Mummy’s upset about Flora,’ I tell him, and swallow the knot of fear that’s worked its way up my gullet since Ed left Northmire with Gradin. ‘And all this mess doesn’t help either.’

‘I can clean it up,’ Alex offers, and briefly I smile.

Instructing Alex to take charge – because I believe in second chances – I shrug into my coat. ‘Look after your mother, son. Keep her and your grandma warm and make them a drink. If you can find a cup. Don’t answer the door unless it’s me or Uncle Ed, and stay near the telephone. I’m going to find your sister.’ I pat his shoulder, then opt for a kiss on the head.

‘Go, Dad!’ Alex cheers as I leave the house. A second later I return for the car keys. I wink at Alex and blow a silent kiss at Julia. It gives me the shock of my life, but she blows one right back.

 

Ed is in his office, alone, smoking, bent over his computer as it rattles through a search. He looks up when I walk straight in. ‘Is the desk sergeant asleep again?’

‘It’s all right. He did his job.’ I sit down opposite, entering Ed’s frustrated cop zone of smoke and despair. ‘You look nearly as bad as me.’

‘I have an entire team out there searching for Flora. It’s headed by one of the area’s best detectives. I’ve requested special police abduction experts to join the case. They’ll be here in the morning. And Murray, I’m ordering a wider search of the river for tomorrow afternoon.’ Ed hangs his head.

‘She’s not dead,’ I say.

‘It will have been a couple of days by then, and if she did have an accident and fall into the water, then . . .’ he looks away, ‘then decomposition will bring her to the surface. It’s the earliest we could expect that to happen. I’m sorry, Murray.’

No one should be sorry. Not yet. That word, that single word, brings me to my feet with my hands slammed firmly on Ed’s desk. ‘She’s alive,’ I say, my voice as tight as a noose. ‘Just find her.’ And as if by magic, Ed’s computer ceases its rattling search and spews up a list of names. At the very top of it is Dr David Carlyle.

I pull the small metal flask from my jacket pocket but it’s empty. I chuck it on the desk and it skids on to the floor. ‘There’s some Scotch in the filing cabinet if you’re in need.’ Ed looks like he could use one himself.

‘No. Nothing. I don’t need anything.’ My body is screaming for a drink. It will help me concentrate. It will help me piece all this together with Ed, who has agreed to let me stay on at the station. Any news about Flora and we’ll be the first to know. ‘Tell me again what the computer searched for.’ A grizzled batch of eighty-four known criminals and suspects slides up and down Ed’s monitor as he plays with the mouse, thinking, pondering.