‘Mrs. Graham, are you all right?’
Andy’s hands were holding my shoulders from behind. Somebody moved towards me holding a chair, like a lion-tamer, as if I were dangerous. Everything fragmented and flew off into corners, then coalesced again onto a screen twenty-by twenty-two inches, with us all on it in miniature. I wondered if I were losing my mind, and gave my head a hard shake which ricked my neck painfully and brought me back to myself.
I sat down and said, ‘I’m all right.’
‘Can I ask you a few questions?’
‘Yes, but I’d like some tea if I possibly could.’
The policewoman ordered some tea and then sat down and asked her questions. They were apparently about David’s character, but subtly they swung round to being about our relationship. Had we quarrelled? Was there anyone he liked whom he might want to visit? Someone who for some reason I wouldn’t take him to see? I explained that his entire acquaintance, except John, lived in and around the village.
After a lot more questions, not only directed at me but at all the others, the policewoman came round to Amanda.
‘Now young lady,’ she said, and the moment she spoke I got the impression that she, like Jo, suspected her in some way. ‘Have you remembered anything that might be useful?’
‘No.’
Amm was sitting bolt upright on a chair, a prim, well-ordered little figure in her town dress and long white socks, her blonde hair pulled tightly back from a centre parting into two firm, turned-under plaits tied with neat black bows. Her eyes—Ted’s eyes, very blue and sharp, unexpectedly piercing between their sandy lashes, were fixed, wide open to the point of staring, at the detective; her hands were pressed together between her knees, the caps of which, I suddenly noticed, were white. She was tense all over; even the corners of her lips were marked with little pale spots of bunched muscle. Something jerked into perfect wakefulness inside me. She did know something. I felt it, knew it, with absolute certainty.
‘Amm!’
She was startled into looking at me for the first time. Yes, oh yes, there it was in her eyes, quite unmistakable. Amanda could be sly, like most little girls, she could be secretive; she had an inviolable sense of privacy. But she was not sufficiently devious to hide such a secret completely from people she loved; nor was she, despite the latent toughness of her character, insensitive enough to be able to look at the suffering she must be able to see in her mother’s face, and mine, implacably.
I found myself crouching beside her, holding her upper arms in a hard commanding grip so that she winced.
‘Amm?’
She dropped her eyes and, after a minute pause, shook her head.
‘Amanda! You’re lying!’
It was a pistol-shot from Jo.
Amm winced under my hands, and then I felt her stiffen.
I stood up. ‘Don’t,’ I said to Jo. It was an urgent signal, and she got it and stopped. I knew, and so did Jo (who better?) Amanda’s pride and stubbornness. She would not yield here, in front of a stranger. Nor would she yield anywhere to shouting and threats. I suddenly knew I could get it out of her—at least I knew there was something to get out. And if that were so, then that meant—a plan, some kind of design to the whole mystery, something rational within a child’s definition of rationality.
I turned to the policewoman. ‘May I have a word with you?’
She motioned me into an adjoining office, and closed the door after us.
‘Yes, Mrs. Graham?’
‘That child knows something.’
‘I thought so.’
‘It’s just not in David’s character to do something as—as big as this without confiding in someone. I wouldn’t have thought it was in him to do it at all.’ For just a moment, I had a ludicrous feeling of pride in him, for I had always privately thought him rather a timid, conventional child, and here he had worked out a whole scheme to run away, and had carried it out with obvious success, at the age of barely eight. Clearly I would need to reassess him when I had him back. ‘He and Amm are closer than brother and sister. I’m quite convinced, suddenly, that he’s cooked this whole thing up with her, and that she’s taken a vow of secrecy.’
‘Do you think you can get her to break it?’
‘I think I might. But just being as sure as I am that she does know what he’s up to, relieves me enormously. Clearly he hasn’t been kidnapped, anyway.’
‘No, well, I never really thought he had. Mrs. Graham—’
‘Miss,’ I said automatically.
The woman sat up in her chair and looked at me in a new way. There was a silence while she thought.
‘Miss Graham,’ she said slowly, ‘Mrs. Berkeley mentioned that David was fatherless. She didn’t tell me—forgive me, are you unmarried?’
‘Yes.’
‘So your boy is not fatherless, in the usual meaning of the word?’
I saw her drift immediately; and she saw my face alter. She leaned forward and said, ‘Could there be a possibility that he would try to reach his father?’
‘I—don’t know—it’s just possible—but so difficult to imagine! How could he—where would he begin looking for him?’
‘We’d better begin by finding out where he actually is. How would you begin looking for him?’
My mind raced. David had said he was going to make a film—there was some magazine—what was it he’d said? I strained to remember. At some studios. Something about a tree, there’d been some little joke in my mind, some mistake he’d made—Elm Tree—that was it! He’d said Elm Tree—
‘Elstree! Elstree Studios!’
It was odd to see how this little bit of information affected the slow-moving rather phlegmatic woman constable. It quite galvanised her. For ten minutes she had two phones in hand and as many assistants running to and fro to her instructions. She phoned Elstree first, but it was Sunday, so she could only speak to a security officer; but the police have their methods, and several phone numbers were eventually given of various people who might know about Terry. None of them did. None of them knew of any picture being made which had him in it. In fact, they’d never heard of him.
By this time one of the assistants, poring over suburban phone directories, had found a Boyden, T., listed with an address in Teddington.
The policewoman phoned the number and I heard a woman’s voice answer. The conversation was short and sharp and then the receiver went down; the constable, judging by her expression, had received a flea in her ear.
‘He’s left there,’ she said. ‘Six months ago. The woman seemed furious at the mention of him. She said she knew nothing about his whereabouts and cared less.’
‘An unpaid landlady, perhaps,’ suggested Andy.
She frowned. ‘I don’t think so. When I told her it was a police matter, she said, “I hope you damn well get him, whatever it’s for.” But she didn’t seem inclined to offer any complaint of her own.’
‘It’s his wife,’ I said with a sudden flash of certainty.
‘Yes, probably,’ she replied, and gave me a narrow look. ‘You might get more out of her than I could. Are you prepared to try?’
I dialled the number, feeling acutely nervous.
‘Hallo?’ The voice was sharp, tense and high-pitched.
‘Is this Mrs. Terence Boyden?’
‘No, this is Mrs. Grace Boyden. Who are you?’
‘My name’s Jane Graham, you don’t know me. I’m terribly anxious to see your husband. Can you possibly help me?’
‘He’s not my husband any longer. I haven’t seen him for months.’ There was a pause, during which I could hear her breathing, and then the breathing stopped for a second and she asked, in a tone still more shrill, ‘What did you say your name was?’
I said it again, and then she said: ‘Are you the dirty bitch whose brat he’s the father of?’
I can hardly describe how horribly these words, contrasting with her supposedly genteel accent, reached me. They seemed to cause a minor explosion in m
y brain before I could understand that by ‘dirty bitch’ she meant me, and by ‘brat’ she meant David. My first impulse was one of fury, but then I thought, no, she can’t be normal if she’s so angry about this thing that happened long before they met. In any case, I didn’t want to make her any angrier, if that were possible.
‘I’m the person you mean,’ I said as quietly as I could.
‘And what are you after him for? Run away from you now, no doubt. Perhaps you want him to poke another bastard into you?’
I swallowed and said, ‘I haven’t seen him for eight years.’
‘Oh, I’m sure! Very likely.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Don’t lie to me. When I turfed him out, he told me he was going straight to you and his bastard.’
In amazement I said, ‘But he didn’t.’
‘You liar,’ she said, in a voice low and vibrant with scorn and hatred. ‘He must have come to you, where else would he go? He’s certainly incapable of living by himself. He was going downhill fast enough even when I was still struggling to keep him on the rails. At least I kept him clean and fed and in work. Naturally as soon as he left me he lost his job. I suppose that was your idea—that he should go back into acting? He said he was going to change his life. He even changed his silly face. Imagine it, spending good money to put his teeth straight just to satisfy his insatiable vanity and get more of you tarts flocking round him . . .’ Her voice gathered speed till the words fell over each other. ‘Not doing so well with his great film career, I notice, that film he was going to be in was bunged on the shelf and him with it. Was it your idea, the TV commercials? Just about his level, flashing his new teeth at the women and telling them to buy Snow and get their undies whiter . . . Tell me,’ she went on conversationally, ‘does he bite you on the shoulder and on the breasts? He said women were supposed to like it but how can you like pain? It’s just a justification men use so they can do what they like with you, and then blame you for being frigid and sterile if you don’t enjoy it. But perhaps you’re a masochist. And how’s he making out as a family man? He always bleated for kids. It’s a bit of a joke really, bastard father and bastard son . . . You can have him for my part, I don’t give a damn—’
I hung up. Jo was watching me.
‘Mad?’
‘Yes.’ I was feeling sick.
The policewoman had been listening in. Now she stirred uneasily. ‘Been keeping it bottled up.’
I said nothing. I was thinking about Terry. How long had she been like that, and how long had he stuck it? He’d given me a strong hint, during that phone conversation two years ago, that she was neurotic, but this was something more. I couldn’t help wondering if he had not been the cause of part of it. If a woman can’t have children, what sort of husband keeps on ‘bleating’? If a woman doesn’t like being bitten, what kind of man keeps biting her and telling her she’s frigid? A nine-year-old memory returned to rouse the heat in my face. Perhaps it was that trick of his that had so effectively put me off, made David’s conception such an occasion of non-pleasure . . .
‘We’re by no means beaten yet,’ said the policewoman. ‘The wife said something about his making commercials. We’ll get onto the people who make Snow and see if we can’t trace him through them . . .’
It took an hour just because it was Sunday. Phone call after phone call, and eventually a police car had to be sent out to track down the personnel officer of the commercial film-makers which made the advertising films for Snow.
‘I can’t see what help this is going to be,’ I kept saying. ‘If we’re having this much trouble finding him, how could David possibly find him all by himself? We’re not even sure he’s looking for him.’
‘It’s the only line we’ve got to follow at the moment,’ the policewoman answered soothingly. But I was not soothed. If David had really run away from Jo with the intention of finding Terry, which seemed to me the only reason he could have for doing it, it was almost beyond belief that he would not have asked a policeman how to get to Elstree, or Elm Tree, or wherever he thought Terry was. Perhaps, picking his way at waist-level through the shuffling thousands who swarm along Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon, he might have failed to find a policeman, and asked passers-by . . . Who might he not have asked? Might it not as easily be some vicious opportunist who would grab him, as an indifferent stranger who would brush past without stopping to notice him? It might, by the same token, have been some kindly, imaginative person who would stop and stoop and listen, and, realising that something was wrong, have taken him straight to the nearest police-station.
But nobody had done this . . . in twenty-four hours.
The waiting was terrible. We’d been sitting in the same room now for over three hours. I was watching Amanda, more and more sure she knew something, if only from the way she was avoiding my eyes. Suddenly I said:
‘Are we on the right track, Amanda? Surely you can tell us that without breaking your promise—like playing “hot” and “cold”. Are we getting warm?’
Everything became very quiet and the full focus of attention fell on Amm. She didn’t say anything, and I felt a cruel anger rise up in me. I wanted to grab her and shake her until the secret, lodged in her throat like a half-swallowed bead, flew out. It was in there somewhere, inside that stubborn little body . . . For a moment I hated her.
‘Come on, Amm! Look at all of us wasting time! Is he looking for his father? Was that the plan?’
But my voice was too peremptory, it made her angry and fearful at once, so that she said ‘I don’t know’ on a note of finality, and clamped her lips shut.
At that moment the phone rang. The policewoman pounced on it. She barked ‘Yes—yes—’ into it several times and hung up. ‘They’ve got it,’ she said. ‘It’s in Southwood Lane, Highgate. No phone, it’s been cut off. Come on, we’d better go out there.’
The imminent terror of facing Terry was dimmed by the sudden jangling of some little, far-off memory-bell. Southwood Lane, Highgate. Highgate . . . I shook my head. I couldn’t remember that I’d ever been to Highgate. Yet somehow it was achingly familiar, not a big ache, but a little nagging one, a tiny association connected with a whole chain of events that had followed it.
I was to go in Andy’s car. The others climbed into the big police limousine which was waiting at the door, while Andy, after squeezing my hand, walked off to bring his car from its parking place. The police car pulled away, and I was left standing on the pavement. Again, without warning, the sense of unreality seized me. How was it possible that that elusive address to which we were going had become, in my thoughts, part of a sort of molecular pattern? Somewhere I’d heard a theory that time spirals; that one arrives back at the same places but on different levels. There was something circular about this journey to that address. I found myself clutching the edges of my coat in sudden panic. The same place, but higher on the spiral, or lower, for of course you could never go back exactly, or the whole thing could be lived again, altered, rearranged . . . I looked round wildly for Andy, but he was out of sight. All around me was a Lob’s Wood of concrete, twisting and assuming fierce shapes. I felt as if I might faint, I wanted to, but it was no use—I knew I wouldn’t because I never do faint, I never can. I wanted to put back my head and let out long desperate howls, and they would not, at that moment, have been for David or the fear of what might be happening to him, but for myself, only for myself, for the horrifying blankness ahead of me, across which, like some cabalistic symbol, was written that address, Southwood Lane, Highgate. . . .
Chapter 2
BY the time Andy’s car drew up and he jumped out to open the door for me I had passed through some sort of crisis and emerged, cold and shaken but lucid, into something like a rational state. As I passed close to him I looked into his face for the first time since my return, saw it as if at a distance, and marvelled that so much could happen and change in such a very few days. Once that same face had been so dear to me, so intimately familiar
; now I knew I would have to strive all over again to reach it.
He felt some of this, too, but his reaction was to close the gap physically, and when we were together in the car, he put his arm round me and pulled me close to him and held my face against his coat. We had no words for each other, and truthfully I had no special feeling for him then—I was too numb with shock and anxiety. But there was something there, something I needed—a purely bodily warmth which enveloped me for a moment and gave me comfort, like a drink of whisky. Shakespeare talks about ‘the faint cold fear that almost freezes up the heat of life’. Fear is really like that, and the closeness of another human body can thaw the cold for just a moment, proving that the fear is not invincible.
Then he drew away, and we drove north.
We were not far behind the others, and we caught them up on the way. I could see Amanda sitting in the back and caught myself thinking what a kick David would get out of that, riding in a police-car with the blue light turning on the roof.
We were climbing now, rising out of Kentish Town, up on to the beautiful heights of Highgate Hill. I was looking out at the little shops and elegant cottages, only half aware of them, my mind groping ahead, when I saw a bus pull out in front of us from a bus-stop and suddenly it clicked.
I drew myself together with a sudden startled, shrinking movement which caught Andy’s eye and made him glance at me sharply.
‘What is it, darling?’
‘I’ve remembered. I’ve been to—this house we’re going to—I’ve walked along this road from that bus-stop—I know the way. You turn right here, then left.’ The police driver had missed the turning, or perhaps he knew another way, but Andy silently obeyed my directions. After a few more moments of driving, I pointed. ‘There. It’s that house, with the yellow door.’
Still the same. The yellow which had been crocus-colour was now faded and peeling, but that was not surprising; the paint had not been quite fresh when I had walked slowly past the house nine years ago. I remembered noticing the colour particularly, it had had some association which escaped me now but which had been significant at the time . . . It had all been significant, how much so I had had no notion of then. Parked now, and sitting motionless looking at that same neglected front garden, the dingy frontage, I was carried straight back to the moment when I had strolled, as if by accident, past that house, glancing at it casually lest he should look out and see me, dreading it and wishing for it at the same time. Terry Boyden, whose ill-planted seed grew into David inside me because I had looked at this house nine years ago and decided, subconsciously, to throw myself in his way again.