To restore some sense of reality, I occasionally looked downwards. Little movement there, through the heat-haze, but after a while the loudspeaker called our attention to the fact that we were over Rhodes, and soon a plethora of little nuts appeared, strewn on the blue floor—the Greek Islands, Hydra among them, and somewhere on Hydra, Chris, the water-boy . . . In some unfathomable fashion, the thought of him and his way of life, detached utterly from the reality I was struggling to grasp, sank a small grapple into me as I hung above him in the glittering infinity of the sky and seemed to pull me gently, un-insistently, but inevitably back to earth. Through Chris to Andy, my thoughts performed two sides of a square, straight down and along the surface of sea and land to England. My heart gave a sudden, tangible leap in my chest and began to beat more persistently, as if to pump my blood faster and give me greater vigour. Andy would have heard; Jo would surely have told him. I would not be arriving back to a vacuum of terror and emptiness; Andy would be there. I was holding John’s hand, and I gave it a sudden convulsive squeeze. I loved John, more than ever now that we had shared this strange multi-faceted adventure; but my impulse of love at that moment was born of contrast, of the recognition of Andy as a real man who would know how to help and sustain me in a powerful, practical way, as distinct from John, who was my equal in everything, including, in many ways, womanliness . . .
During our stopover in Athens, we were sitting in the lounge there, an island of strained silence amidst all the bustle and noise, when John suddenly stood up and said, ‘I’m not goin’ to England.’
I stared at him flabbergasted.
‘I goin’ back to the island,’ he said.
I stood up and faced him. I was on the edge of panic anyway; the thought of being deserted by John knocked the last bit of stuffing right out of me; yet even as I opened my mouth to lash into him, I remembered my thoughts in the plane—disloyal thoughts. Had he picked them up, as he so often did in his uncanny fashion? I shut my mouth again and stared at him speechlessly.
‘I know what you thinkin’, he said. ‘I leavin’ you just when you in trouble. But listen, Jane, I be no help to you at all back there. Look at me, I just got to think of David lost, I begin cryin’ straight away. Back there you got Andy, he look after things—he’s the sort of man you need now, not a half-man thing like me.’
I swallowed and moved my head as if my throat were sore.
‘Look,’ he went on with difficulty. ‘I don’t want no England now. You goin’ to get married, and not to Toby, and that break something in me that kept me goin’ a long, long time. I never be welcome at your house like I been till now. No, don’t deny it, you know it’s so. Wouldn’t matter who you married, exceptin’ Toby, I can’t be part of you no more after it. As for David, well, it been all right while he’s a child, but when he grow up, he soon see what I am and one day I’d have to look at him and see some new idea of me comin’ into his face . . . like he’d see I was an old black faggot, and maybe he’d hate me for it. Ain’t no future for me with you from now on, Janie. I been thinkin’ about it all the time since—oh, since you bust up with Toby, then we heard about David goin’ lost and I nearly changed my mind, but now I decided it don’t make no difference. You find him okay, and then I’ll have come away from my island for nothing and maybe not find the courage to go back and make a new world for myself . . . That’s what I want now, Janie.’
‘But—but—but—I thought the island was all spoilt for you by what happened to you!’
‘I thought about that a whole lot, too. Was my own fault, trying to be what I knew I wasn’t. There’s boys there that are like me, and nobody thinks they’re freaks. I’m older than them, but that’s okay, I can be kind of like—I can look after ’em a bit, like I did with you two when we was all together in Fulham. I’d like that. And there’s music, and swimmin’ . . .’ He suddenly grabbed my hand hard in both his big paws, submerging it in a big, hot, black ball of flesh. ‘Let me go, Janie. You finished with me. We always keep part of each other. Please.’
I nodded slowly, my eyes full of tears. I knew suddenly that, however unacceptable it seemed to me now, he was right.
‘And will you still love me?’ he said.
‘Always.’
‘Yes, that’s right. You and Toby. Always.’
We stared at each other in silence for a long moment, our hands clenched together in a black-and-white jumble. Then he pulled me against him roughly and kissed me with his thick, soft lips. He had hugged me often, but he had never kissed me before. I threw my arms round him and sobbed once. Then I forced myself to draw back, be English, blow my nose, be practical, even when my life seemed to be tearing apart.
‘Come on now,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to find out how to get your luggage off the plane.’
The last I saw of him was his tall figure, apparently in silhouette although the sun was full on him, standing on the roof of the airport building. I turned once as I crossed the tarmac, and waved to him; then as I got to the top of the aircraft steps, I turned again. He lifted his guitar above his head with both hands. He looked tremendous beside all the little Greeks, a giant among pygmies. His guitar moved up and down twice, like a signal. That’s how I shall always remember him. That, and the strange a-sensual touch of his mouth on mine.
PART THREE
DAVID
Chapter 1
I WAS not tired. I felt, on the contrary, charged with energy, so much of it, so needful of an outlet, that as I hurried through customs I felt it tingling in my wrists and fingers and humming in my ears, bursting to get to grips with this thing that had happened.
As I emerged into the great concourse of the Queen’s Building, I saw Jo immediately, with Andy just behind her, waiting in the front of the crowd. Jo reached up and waved, a sharp, almost spastic movement, a jerk of breaking nervous tension. Andy stood perfectly still, his eyes fixed on me as if to read my thoughts as I half-ran up to them. As I got close, I suddenly saw that Amm was there too. This astonished me somehow, until I realised that Jo had probably had no-one to leave her with.
When I reached them, there was a full three seconds of complete silence between us, a moment charged with feeling and with unspoken questions. Jo looked at me, and I at her. Her green eyes, as wide open as her swollen eyelids allowed, snapped from one of my eyes to the other, and I thought: she expects me to accuse her, if only in my thoughts. But it wasn’t true. I knew Jo, I knew what infinite care she took of her own child and all that belonged to her; I knew her sense of responsibility and how much greater care she would have taken of another woman’s child, entrusted to her . . . Who can guard against every eventuality, who can prevent a child running away when it is the last thing anyone would expect? I embraced her, swiftly and hard.
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything yet, except one thing—it wasn’t your fault.’
Jo made no move to touch me, but I felt her whole body jerk in my arms. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said in a harsh, low voice. ‘I was in charge of him—’
‘Come on, I’ve got the car waiting outside,’ said Andy. ‘Let’s not talk here.’
In the car Amm sat in the front next to Andy, while I sat at the back with Jo.
Jo, although she was by no means a cold-hearted person, was not usually emotional in her behaviour. I had never before known her to cry, except once or twice, very privately, after Ted’s death when she and Amm first came to live with us. And she was seldom demonstrative, even to Amm; whereas I am constantly kissing and cuddling David, and Amm too, though she is a rather spikey child. I hardly ever remember seeing Jo really hugging Amm, and she certainly never kissed me, the way Dottie, for instance, quite often used to if she were in an ebullient or affectionate mood. So it was strange and frightening now to see how the tears poured down Jo’s face, and even more so when she reached out and gripped my hand with her little hard bony one. It was as if she had forgotten how to manage about crying; the tears just flowed, her nose ran; she did nothing to disguis
e or minimise it, she only gave great sniffs which obliged her to clear her throat every few moments with a sound like a groan. She even seemed inept at holding hands, for her long nails dug into me. I couldn’t look at her; the crying made her look so old and vulnerable, like a miserable, sick, ageing monkey.
I wanted to comfort her, to say, ‘It’s all right . . .’ But it wasn’t all right. There was Amm, sitting in front, her neat blonde head next to Andy’s dark one, and the sight made me cringe, for that was David’s place.
I disengaged my hand and found Jo a Kleenex. She used it inexpertly, like a three-year-old child, mopping and wiping with the thing unfolded like a face-flannel.
‘Jo, tell me.’
Another sniff; she put her free hand up to shield her face from me. It trembled. But her voice, though muffled, was her own voice, and under rigid control.
‘We were in London,’ she began.
I could not conceal a gasp of horrified surprise. Never once had I imagined that he might have got lost in London. All my palliatives about how he could find his way home, or be noticed and brought back, in the neighbourhood of the village, fled away. London! Its whole amorphous black maze-like monstrousness unrolled before me like some science-fiction horror, a devourer of children . . .
‘London—’ I whispered. ‘What were you doing in London?’
Jo bent over and pressed her face into her hands, almost on her knees.
‘They begged and badgered me to take them to see that accursed film, what’s it called—’
‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,’ supplied Amanda, without turning her head.
‘They badgered me. So we went up in the morning—’
‘Yesterday?’
‘Was it only yesterday? Saturday—yes. I drove them up and we left the car in Hammersmith and took the bus downtown—’
‘We rode on top, in the front,’ said Amanda. But her voice was without its usual excited lift, and when Andy said, ‘Be quiet now, Amanda, let your mother talk,’ she subsided at once.
‘We went to the zoo and had a sort of picnic in Regent’s Park. I can’t understand it!’ she interrupted herself shrilly. ‘If he’d wanted to run away, he had every opportunity earlier—they wandered round in the aquarium, in the dark, by themselves. I wasn’t watching them all the time. Anyhow, after lunch we went to the cinema and while we were watching the film, right in the middle David said he wanted to go to the loo . . . I asked if he wanted me to take him, and he said—sort of scornfully, you know—that he didn’t want to come to the ladies’; he pointed to the gents’ sign and said, “Don’t worry if I’m rather long, I have to do big jobs and it takes me ages.”’ This was true, he was capable of sitting in there for twenty minutes at a time, singing to himself; but this was not to say he was incapable of hurrying when something interesting was going on. It was inconceivable that he would dawdle long in a cold, unfriendly lavatory when he was missing a film.
‘So what happened?’
‘After about fifteen minutes I got worried . . . I left Amanda in her seat and went along to the gents and knocked on the door. No-one answered, so I went in. It was empty. I asked an attendant if there was another gents, and he showed me one upstairs, but he wasn’t in that one either . . . I went to the kiosk in the lobby where they sell sweets and drinks, and they hadn’t seen him, so then I began to comb the whole cinema. Some ushers flashed their torches along every row in the place in case he hadn’t been able to find his seat again and had just sat down somewhere else. By this time the film had ended and the lights came up so I went and got Amanda and we went straight to the office of the manager and he made an announcement over the loudspeaker. If David had still been in the cinema, I know he would have come to me . . . Anyway I stood in the foyer for another half-an-hour while every member of the staff combed the place from top to bottom. At the end of that time I was in such a state I could hardly think straight, so the manager gave me a drink and then we decided to call the police.’
All this had come out in a muffled way through her hands; now she straightened up, but with her face turned away from me.
‘The police questioned me and all the staff and especially the woman at the box-office as to whether she’d seen him going out alone. But in any case there was a way out right next to the gents which led into an alley beside the building, and that led to the main road and the buses.’
‘Did he have any money with him?’
‘Yes. I gave them five bob each to spend at the zoo, and I know he hadn’t spent any of that because I thought it odd at the time, with Amanda scoffing ices and buying bits and pieces; he said he wanted to save it. Then when the police really started questioning us, Amm remembered that she’d knocked over David’s money-box on the Friday night and that it was empty. She even knew how much there’d been in it a few days before, because they were comparing notes. He’d had over a fiver.’
David had developed a passionate interest in money at the age of five and been hoarding ever since.
‘And what have the police done?’
‘They’re treating it as a case of running away. Of course they can’t rule out the possibility that he was lured or—or taken, but really everything points the other way. They want to question you of course, for instance I wasn’t sure how carefully you’d warned him about talking to strangers and so on—if you have, then they’re pretty sure he went off by himself, because it’s almost unthinkable that someone could have carried him off in broad daylight against his will.’
I racked my brains. Of course I’d warned him about strangers—sometime or other. But I hadn’t stressed it as firmly as I would if we’d been living in London. In the village and its environs, one seldom if ever saw strangers, and in any case . . . somehow one doesn’t worry about such things much in the country. Why alarm him or make him suspicious when there seemed so little danger? David was an outgoing, friendly child. I hadn’t ever wanted to inhibit that by putting him in fear of every unfamiliar face. There had not been a serious crime in our village since 1923 . . .
‘I’m not sure if . . . Have you warned Amanda?’
‘Oh yes. But then I’m such a city person basically, and in the city you have to.’
She couldn’t have realised how her words underlined my worst terrors.
‘Where are we going now?’
‘To the police station where they’re dealing with it.’
She hesitated minimally with the ‘with’, long enough for me to realise that she had nearly said ‘with the case’. David’s disappearance was a case to them. A newspaper board flashed past the tails of my eyes and I snapped round automatically to look at it . . . Too late, it had gone. Would it, within the next few days, carry David’s name in huge cold black print? Would it be another in the unending nose-to-tail series of child-disappearance cases, some of which ended so hideously?
Another newsboard, and this time I looked in time to read ‘MIDDLE EAST. On The Brink.’ A moment later we passed another: ‘Sinai: Nasser’s Tanks Move Up.’
‘There is going to be a war out there,’ I said dully.
Nobody said anything. Another few blocks, crawling now through the traffic in Kensington, and then Amanda, who had held her peace far longer than her nature normally permitted, turned her head and said to me, ‘David’s being very naughty, isn’t he?’
‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘We don’t know.’ I turned to Jo. ‘I suppose Amm doesn’t know anything?’
She gave me a strange quick sideways look.
‘I’ve questioned her, Andy’s questioned her, the policewoman who’s dealing with it has questioned her. If she does know anything, she’s keeping it to herself.’
‘I don’t know anything, Mummy! I’ve told you I don’t!’
Jo looked at her with red-rimmed eyes, and said in a high-pitched voice, almost strangled suddenly with the effort to keep it under control: ‘You can’t imagine how much I want to believe you. But if I ever find out you’ve been hiding something—’
She looked and sounded so ‘on the brink’ herself that I put my hand over hers quickly and said, ‘Sh, Jo, of course she’s not, why should she?’ Again the quick sideways look, a mad look it seemed to me at that moment. It frightened me. I didn’t recognise her eyes.
We reached the police station and were shown into an office so familiar from television series that I had a moment of déjà vu. Come to that, the whole surrealistic situation somehow had an uncanny underlying familiarity, as if I had lived through it, or something similar, not once but many times before. Even the policewoman, when she came in and shook hands with me, reminded me of someone, or rather several people, I had watched on the set in Jo’s living-room going through this self-same polite, solemn, yet basically business-like rigmarole in a dozen TV plays.
‘We didn’t think you’d manage to get back so quickly. Now please do try not to worry too much. We’ve no reason as yet to suppose that any harm has come to David . . .’
The usual scripted platitudes . . . I felt that I’d been cheated. Television had prepared me in some way for this situation until it was robbed of its reality; it wasn’t as true or new or shocking as it ought to be. I was merely wandering in the footsteps of writers and actors who had hacked out the paths through this desperate personal jungle ahead of me. I felt confused and disorientated, struggling helplessly against an illusion of fiction, having to remind myself every moment that we were not acting.
‘What’s been done so far?’
‘David’s description has been circulated to all the local police-stations and registered with our central bureau of missing persons at Scotland Yard. We’ve made enquiries among all the constables who were on duty around Marble Arch yesterday.’
‘Have you told the press?’
She smiled faintly. ‘You don’t have to tell the press, as a rule. They just pick it up. If it weren’t for the war situation in the Middle East, there’d probably have been something about it in the evenings.’
Abruptly my mind turned white and blank in a long flush of fear, because into my mouth had come the automatic telly-question concerning hospitals and I couldn’t speak or move for about a minute.