Jubilee (7 page)

Then Miss Fernham took the cake off to slice it into pieces for handing round. With her brother she hoisted the cardboard box of mugs on to the trestle table. One of the cardboard squares at the
top of the carton was now empty, I noted. The children’s names were called out: youngest first and upwards in age so that Jessamy and I came roughly halfway through the list. Each child
trotted back to its place clutching a mug.

‘Jessamy Winter.’ Mr Fernham looked towards Evie and me. Evie shrugged. ‘Rachel Parr.’ I took my mug from him and muttered a thanks. His gaze lingered on me for a second.
Perhaps I had an orange-squash moustache. I walked back to my aunt, wiping my mouth.

‘I really thought she’d be back in time to get her mug.’ Evie sounded tense now.

Jessamy had already cleared a space on the dresser shelf so that there’d be room for the new Silver Jubilee mug beside the Queen’s Coronation mug.

‘Have you any idea where she might have gone?’ Evie asked.

I shook my head.

A muscle twitched in the side of Evie’s face. ‘I’m going to ask Mr Fernham to put out an announcement over the loudspeaker.’

‘Not yet!’ Something about the idea of an announcement made Jessamy’s disappearance suddenly seem frightening.

‘Why ever not?’

‘It’s too soon.’

‘We need his help, darling.’ She sounded curt. Probably thought I was behaving like an idiot.

Evie and I went to the stewards’ tent and Evie explained about Jessamy. Mr Fernham was very calm and picked up his loudspeaker to issue a short message asking Jessamy Winter to report to
the stewards’ table by the tea tent. So strong was the confidence which he injected into this broadcast that I turned my head to look for Jessamy running across the park towards us. But she
didn’t.

Now my slight impatience at her absence was growing into concern because of all the trouble she’d be in if she didn’t return, rather than because I thought something bad had happened
to her. My aunt was tolerant of Jessamy’s whims but I could tell by the small vein pulsing on one temple and her tight grip on my arm that Jessamy wouldn’t just get away with a few
cross words. It would be bed with just a piece of toast for her: lights out and no talking. How could she have been such a fool? But then that baton sliding out of my hand onto the grass shot back
into my mind. This was all my fault.

I could feel my aunt’s tension in the fingers she kept wrapped around my arm. I thought of Uncle Matthew, barely remembered now except as a kind and silent presence around the farm.
He’d scooped me up many times when I’d fallen off the bicycle I’d been learning to ride in the yard and had let me hold the new lambs. I wished he’d been around this
afternoon to soothe my aunt. I was aware of how feeble any attempts on my behalf to do this would be. Dad should be here to support his sister but he was in Majorca building a marina and holiday
apartments.

We waited. It was time to sit down at the trestles for sandwiches and cake and people began to amble over. One or two cast sympathetic glances at us as they passed. ‘Not found her yet?
Little minx.’ ‘You’ll have something to say to her when you get her back.’

I refused to join the other children, superstitious that if I sat down with them I was accepting that my cousin wouldn’t be back this afternoon. I stood with my aunt beside the
stewards’ tent. The balloons tied to the awnings and table legs had started to deflate. Paper cups and plates littered the grass and some of the smaller children were rubbing their eyes and
whining. I kept expecting Jess to run across the grass in that easy loping gait of hers to join us. ‘Where’s my mug?’ she’d ask. ‘Hope you saved me a piece of Jubilee
cake.’ I stared at the gate until my eyes ached with the effort of making out an outline of her figure that wasn’t there. I closed them, counted to ten and then opened them, hoping
she’d be there.

But she wasn’t.

Mr Fernham appeared with two plates of the sliced cake for us. ‘Fiona made it. It’s very good.’

Evie crumbled off a piece and put it into her mouth but I murmured an apology.

People were starting to push back their chairs, their meal complete. In a moment they’d start moving slowly towards home, happy to put their feet up and watch the TV coverage of the
celebrations in London, weary after an afternoon of rich food and games. Evie and I would walk through the fields to the house and Jessamy would be sitting in the kitchen. Evie’d tell her
off, but not harshly; she’d gone beyond anger now. I felt her anxiety pulsing from her in little waves. But Jess would be back at home. She’d look stricken for exactly one second and
then she’d give that shrug of hers, say she was sorry, and mean it, and accept whatever punishment her mother gave her without a word of complaint. I’d say sorry too for dropping that
baton. Jess didn’t bear grudges.

‘I could run back to the farm,’ I offered. ‘See if she’s there and then run back here.’

‘No.’ Evie clutched my shoulder. ‘Stay with me.’ She had something wound around her hand and wrist; I couldn’t work out what it was at first. Then I recognized it
as Jessamy’s egg-and-spoon medal. The red ribbon was cutting into Evie’s slender fingers. The red matched the polish she’d put on her nails that morning.

It seemed Evie needed me as much as I needed her. The realization made me feel strange, as though the grass beneath my plimsolls was tilting and threatening to tip me over. Again I wished that
there was someone else here with me, an adult.

Volunteers were stacking chairs and clearing plates. Mr Fernham reappeared. ‘I think we should organize a search for Jessamy.’ He shook his head at Evie. ‘Nothing too serious,
but we could knock on doors, check whether she’s playing somewhere inside.’

‘I don’t think she’d leave the party willingly,’ my aunt said.

‘And who would she go with?’ I put in, my eyes sweeping the green. ‘Everyone’s here.’

Mr Fernham scratched the back of his head and went off to organize the search party. Evie turned to a neighbour to ask her to check her garden for Jessamy.

While Evie’s back was turned. Martha approached me. ‘Nobody would harm that precious child.’

I pressed my lips into an expression resembling a smile, wishing I found her words more reassuring, and walked on, remembering the half-conversation between Evie and Martha I’d overheard
that morning in the farmyard.

‘Martha’s completely mad,’ Jessamy had told me once. ‘She’s the great-great granddaughter of one of the last Welsh drovers, the men who herded the animals along the
drove-ways before the railway was built. He was crazy. That’s what they say at school, anyway. And so’s she. But she’s nice to me.’

Everyone always was.

Evie had finished the exchange with the neighbour. ‘Let’s go home and wait, Rachel. Oh.’

‘What?’

‘I forgot about the pony.’

‘Pony?’

‘I bought another pony. So you can have one each when you ride. And he’ll be company for Starlight. I arranged for him to be delivered while we were out.’ Evie bit her lip.

I felt a little ashamed at how my excitement about the new pony intruded on my worry about Jessamy and prayed it didn’t show.

Evie gasped. We’d turned a bend and in front of us stood a girl in a dress the same yellow colour as Jess’s, back to us. I felt my aunt stiffen and my own heart pump.

Then the girl turned and we saw her round, spectacled, face and blonde curls. Not Jess. Evie’s breath came out in the form of a long sigh and her grip crushed my hand so that I cried
out.

Evie

October 1977

On an afternoon as golden and still as this Evie could still hope for the best. Children did turn up months after they’d vanished, it wasn’t impossible, the police
had said. Evie should keep her hopes alive.

‘Alive,’ she repeated silently to herself. She pushed her hands into the pockets of the old duffel coat she wore. The word seemed almost incomprehensible now; she’d said it to
herself so many times.
Jessamy is still alive, somewhere she is
alive.

‘I’m pleased to plant this tree in honour of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Coronation of Her Majesty the Queen.’ Jonathan Fernham drove his spade into the earth and
brought up a clod. It smelled sweet, almost tangy, like something you might want to eat. No frosts so far this autumn and still plenty of golden leaves on the oaks and beeches. Warm enough not to
need a coat. Jessamy had left the Jubilee party four months ago without as much as a jacket, wearing just that flimsy cardigan over her primrose-yellow summer dress. On a day like this it
wouldn’t be nearly warm enough. Evie tried to push the image of her daughter shivering out of her mind. Impossible. She shouldn’t have come today but some foolish hope inside her
believed that Jessamy might somehow find out that the Jubilee tree was to be planted, might manage to make her way back to the village green.

No signs of a struggle back at the party in June, the police had concluded. No reports of a child being dragged off the field. And heaven knows, there’d be witnesses enough, with the
celebration still in full swing. ‘Your daughter has seemingly vanished off the face of the earth,’ the sergeant had told her the afternoon following Jessamy’s disappearance.
‘Is there nothing more you can tell us? Nowhere she might have gone? What about other family?’

And she’d run through the family tree with them again: Matthew, her husband, dead. Her brother Charles and his wife. ‘So it was just you and the other little girl at the
party?’ the sergeant had asked.

‘That’s right, Rachel, my niece.’

‘And she doesn’t know where Jessica is?’

‘Jessamy. No.’

He’d looked displeased at the correction. ‘No quarrel between Rachel and Jessamy?’

‘Jessamy was a little annoyed that a baton had been dropped in a relay race at the party, but that was as much her fault as Rachel’s.’ Evie knew Jessamy had felt anger only for
herself. ‘They’ve always got on well.’

The sergeant didn’t even bother to write this in his notepad.

‘Nothing going on at home?’

‘Nothing.’ She thought of the TB. ‘We had some cattle slaughtered earlier in the week. Jessamy was upset about that but she’s grown up on the farm, she’s used to
things going through hard patches.’

The sergeant’s pencil remained motionless in his fingers.

‘Did she have her own passport or was she still on yours?’

‘On mine.’

‘Good.’ He wrote something. ‘Any other family?’

‘Only my brother now. He’s divides his time between the south of France and Surrey. He came to collect Rachel at lunchtime.’

‘We’ll need to speak to him.’

She gave him Charlie’s number in Weybridge.

‘No trouble with the gypsies?’

She shook her head.

‘Nothing stolen?’ He gave her a knowing look. ‘That’s not what your neighbours say.’

‘Sometimes eggs go, the odd hen, too. A saddle disappeared from the stables a week or so back. But that could be anyone.’ There were occasional whispers in the village of stolen
dogs, too, sometimes. Evie had no doubt that some of the rumours were justified, the Jacksons were no saints, but stealing a child? The small surviving part of her still governed by logic knew it
would be insane for them to do that. And why would they? They had no particular reason to dislike the Winters and Jessamy and Rosie played together at school.

‘Maybe.’ He closed his notepad and stood, muttering something about detectives coming to talk to her later. She watched him tramp up the lane. He’d be going to speak to
Martha.

When his footsteps had faded Evie had let herself slide off the chair on to the quarry stoned floor, where she’d pulled her knees up under her and huddled like an infant, trying to hide
away from it all. She’d stayed there, motionless, until darkness had fallen and the range had gone out and the dog came to sniff her, begging to be fed. Thank God Rachel hadn’t still
been here to see her like this. Charlie had begged Evie to let him stay at Winter’s Copse with her but she’d almost pushed him out of the door, superstitiously believing that Jessamy
would return to her in the dark and quiet, when her mother sat alone with the dog at the kitchen table.

But she hadn’t.

‘You all right?’ Freya Barnes’s dark eyes were focused in a look of deep concern. ‘You don’t have to do this, Evie, if it’s all too much. I’ll go back
to the farm with you if this is all too much.’

‘I’m fine.’ Thank God for Freya. People had muttered about the West Indian woman when she’d first arrived a year ago. Freya was ignoring all the whisperings and had even
managed to get a part-time job in the school. She would have been teaching Jessamy this term.

Evie watched Jonathan Fernham insert the sapling into its hole and remembered a time, years back, when she had planted trees – pear and damson – in the garden. Jessamy had still been
in a pushchair then, her cheeks creamy and smooth as the flesh of a hazelnut against her brown hair. A hazelnut, safe in its shell. Never so safe again. Matthew had still been alive then, too, a
quiet, comfortable presence around the farm.

Freya gave her a complicit grin and winked. Freya had never shown any embarrassment on the subject of Jessamy and perhaps that was why she and Evie had become close friends over the last
months.

Even Freya could never be told Evie’s nightmares; how she sometimes dreamt of a ghostly blacksmith descending the down the afternoon of the Silver Jubilee party and stealing Jessamy in
reprisal for a night Evie and Charlie had once spent in his magical smithy. Or of a band of shadowy drovers sweeping her daughter off as they herded monstrously formed animals along the Ridgeway to
some hell that no human could penetrate.

Mr Fernham trod in the earth round the planted sapling. The little tree looked like a thin young girl, liable to be blown away in the first autumn gale. Evie felt a pang for its tender roots and
slight waving boughs.

Jessamy lived, she surely lived. Evie closed her eyes briefly and spoke silently to her daughter, begging her to come back.