The Whole World (20 page)

“Do you know where she is?”

Gwen didn’t answer. I guessed she was shaking her head. When she’s upset she forgets a person on the phone isn’t right in front of her.

“Look, Gwen, she’s probably with Stephanie, right? Stephanie and … what’s the other one?”

“Margaux.”

“Margaux. Right. They hang out together. I’ll bet they’re … shopping or something.” What do teenage girls do? “Have you checked her email?”

“Of course I checked her email. She doesn’t use the email we gave her. She probably uses one of those free ones you can check at a website.”

“All right, all right. Try a few. The computer might be set to remember her login. Try Hotmail. Try Yahoo.”

“She’ll hate us….”

Probably. I reasoned to myself that there was no reason to panic. If the condom was hers, she was either already in deep and today wasn’t any more important than tomorrow, or she was just playing at being a grown-up and there wasn’t any real worry at all.

“She’ll come home for dinner. Or she’ll call. You know she always does,” I said.

Gulping sounds, which I interpreted as more tearful nodding. Then: “You know, what I really want is a co-parent in this situation. What I really want is a partner, a real partner….”

I know, I know, I know…
.

“I know our daughter’s going to grow up, Morris. I know what’s part of that. I know. But I don’t want it so fast, and I don’t want to parent it alone.”

Sorry, sorry
. “I know.”

“She was so beautiful last night, Morris. She’s so beautiful….” She is. She looks like Gwen.

“I’ll come home for lunch. Will you make me lunch?” I felt a bit lord-of-the-manor saying that, but it would distract her.

“It’s late for lunch—” she said.

“I’ll come home,” I said.

The first time I’d met Gwen’s dad I’d been in a panic to impress him. I wore a tie. I bought new shoes. I brought flowers for her mother.

“Mum, Dad,” she’d said. “This is Morris.” It was such an announcement. “This” was Morris: newly a detective constable. New shoes. A tie that had been a despised Christmas gift.

Her dad had shaken my hand. “Gwen likes you,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re supposed to say how much you respect her,” he prompted.

“I do, sir,” I said. Nothing else would come out. What could I say to a dad? That I was hard all day thinking about her? That’s what everything came down to. Her prettiness, her love of animals, her kindness, her cleverness—everything I liked made me want her. That’s the way things are at that age.

The first time we’d done it, which had been a week after that dinner with her parents, I’d been too fast. I’d thought she wouldn’t see me again after that. I’d been drinking, and selfish, and stupid, and eager.

We got better matched over time. We were good together. We were.

Gwen stood at the door, waiting for me. “Oh, Morris,” she said, and started crying again.

I said, “She’s all right, you know. She’s all right.” And Gwen nodded. It really wasn’t the end of the world, was it? It really wasn’t.

“It’s just so early,” she said. “I thought we had years …”

“We have years,” I said, suddenly fierce. “We have years to be parents to a fine girl who’s becoming a fine woman, who’ll drive us crazy sometimes, and scare us sometimes, and make us proud sometimes. We have years of that ahead, so don’t spend all your energy on today. We have years, Gwen, we have years …” At that, she wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled herself tight to me. She almost lifted herself off the floor.

I didn’t know what to do with my arms. We’d been making love like usual, but we hadn’t embraced in a long time.

I put my hands on her back. “Oh, Morris,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”

I’d been away, that was sure. I just wasn’t certain I was entirely back.

“I’m sorry, Gwen, it’s been …” I didn’t know what it had been. Richard’s wedding?

She released herself and led me to the table. She’d set out sandwich fixings, and coffee. “I know yesterday was difficult for you,” she said.

I shook my head. “Dancing embarrasses me, but I wouldn’t call it difficult.”

She sighed elaborately but wouldn’t face me. “It was Alice,” she said. Why do people think I carry a torch for Alice? Has Carmen been pushing her ideas on Gwen?

“I don’t give a shit about either Alice, except in the most human, generic manner of wishing them both well,” I said.

She shrugged. We were at a stalemate again. The connection from the doorway was gone.

“Gwen,” I said, reaching across the table. “Gwen, I was never in love with Alice. I hardly knew Alice. I liked her, and I might have had something with her, but I didn’t. I had something with you.”

She ignored my hand. “I always knew I was second choice….”
Shit
. Where was this coming from? Sixteen years!

“All right, Gwen, all right. When I first met you, we weren’t serious, right? It wasn’t serious for you either. We were just having fun. And I thought about having fun with someone else too, with Alice. That’s ordinary. There’s nothing big there. So I tried to get off with her, and she said no. She said no. And you and me, we kept going on, and we became something, and here we are. This isn’t a contest with places. This is just … life. We went from not being together to being together. Here we are.”

“Yes, here we are,” she said. I wanted to eat to stop the talking but I couldn’t face food. She pushed on, “What can I do, Morris? Is there something I can wear or something I can do to make you look at me again?”

“What on earth would you wear?” I said, knowing it was incendiary as soon as it popped out. But what is it with women thinking how they dress is going to change something? “Stop crying,” I said. “Gwen …”

“Do you remember our first time?” she said.
Great
. One of my most embarrassing moments. “You made dinner at your flat, and we had strong red wine. I felt elegant, having wine instead of beer. I was nervous so I just kept sipping. I didn’t want the food because I was worried about garlic on my breath. I thought kissing the taste of wine would be nice. So I just kept drinking….” I’d just assumed she’d noticed that I’m a terrible cook. “I knew we were going to go all the way. I was—we knew, didn’t we? Without talking about it. We knew. Morris, I’d never felt so wanted. You were
… wild
about me. You were on me like …” She shook her head. She couldn’t find the best words. “You were so hungry for me. I’d never felt so perfect in my life.”

Dora interrupted. She’d pushed the door open with a hand full of shopping bags, and had heard the last sentences. “That’s disgusting, Mum. Keep it to yourself,” she said lightly. “Are you trying to corrupt me?”

Gwen pinkened. I jumped right in. “You don’t seem to need much help. What do you have a condom for?”

She froze. “Which one of you went into my things?”

“Not the point, Dora. Just tell us what’s going on.”

She put down the bags and joined us at the table, looking suddenly much younger. She stood holding the back of a chair, looking from one of us to the other. “Margaux and Spencer are doing it. They’ve been dating a year, right, and they think they’re in love.” She rolled her eyes at that, which made me glad. “So she gave one to me and one to Stephanie ‘just in case,’ right? She said it was great and we should be prepared. I put it in my drawer, ’cause what was I gonna do, carry it in my purse like an emergency tampon?” She rolled her eyes again.

I nodded. “All right. That’s a fine answer. In fact, that’s a great answer. I like that answer. But you can come to us when the answer is different too, all right?”

“Ew,” she said, and went upstairs.

I rubbed the back of my neck. Gwen tapped one finger on her cheek.

“Do you believe her?” she whispered.

“I do. I do,” I said. She nodded too.

“Oh, Morris,” she said, relieved and embarrassed, and still fragile.

“You were in a right tizzy,” I teased her.

“No more than you!” We laughed dodged-a-bullet laughs.

“Morris, I’m sorry. Maybe all this”—she said, waving a hand around—“is my fault. I’ve always felt like I was competing with what might have been, and then when Richard got engaged …” She shrugged. “I don’t know why that would have bothered me, but it did. It made me jealous. The newness of what they have. Their love is so … shiny. It’s shiny.”

“What, so their love is a puppy, and our love is an old, hairy, smelly, half-blind dog?” That made her laugh.

“We’re smelly old dogs,” she agreed.

“Aw, Gwen. You’ll always be one of those dumb yapping puppies to me.” I smiled hugely. She came ’round to my side of the table to swat me in the chest. I caught her wrists. “No, babe, no,” I said. “I’m a cop, you can’t get the better of me.” There we were, about to wrestle.

“You haven’t called me ‘babe’ in years,” she said, like she was going to cry again.

My phone vibrated. “Sorry,” I said. She knew my work-voice. It was Frohmann. I had to get to the station. She’d done something magic to get the bike owner’s name so fast.

“I’m proud of you,” Gwen said, seeing me out the door.

“I’ll be home tonight,” I said.

We kissed a kiss like we hadn’t since we were pissed on cheap wine and empty stomachs.

CHAPTER 8

“T
he river was low today,” Harry said. He slipped in beside me under the duvet, which puffed the scent of an aggressively floral detergent as it settled.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

His hollow in the mattress blended with mine. A tiny bead of birdseed rolled up against my thigh.

“They dredged the Cam. They didn’t find anything,” he explained.

Anything
. A body. They hadn’t found a body. “I wouldn’t expect them to.”

“Why? Where is he? A drowning would make as much sense as anything else—”

“It would make no sense whatever. Why are you telling me this?”

He didn’t answer immediately. “I thought you’d want to know.” He opened the book so hard that its spine cracked. I winced. “I thought you’d want to know if he was dead.”

“But you don’t know if he’s dead. You only know he’s not drowned.”

“Yes, he’s not drowned! Good news, I thought.”

“I never thought he was drowned in the first place.”

Was that a sunflower seed? I kicked my legs and brushed at the sheet under my knees.

“What?” he asked.

I threw back the duvet and sat up, legs over the side. There was no explaining it to him. He was inured to the hard little specks all over the house.

He put his hand between my shoulder blades and rubbed.

“Would you please just read the book,” I finally said.

“No.” Both of his hands were on my shoulders now. The book slid off his lap and a corner of it poked me.

“No,” I said too.

He dropped his hands. He slapped the book onto his nightstand.

Oh, for Heaven’s sake
. “Don’t pout,” I said.

“I’m going to sleep.”

I brought my legs back up onto the bed. I leaned across to his side. “Please.”

I hadn’t told him why the books mattered. He only knew that one of my avenues of research for the biography had been to track the effect of Linda Paul’s series character, Susan Maud Madison. Homage to her, with her three names, was obvious to spot. I’d written to several women of that name, to find out whether they’d been given it on purpose, and what it was their mothers had wished for them by doing so.

One of those, S. M. Madison, was a writer. Not famous, but reliably mid-list. This was one of S. M. Madison’s books. It wasn’t available in audio.

“Please, Harry,” I said again. I tried to wheedle with my voice, but I’ve never been much good at that.

“Gretchen,” he said, “it’s late.”

“No.”
It’s not too late
. That’s what I was discovering: It wasn’t too late.

The dust jacket crinkled as he opened it.

He read aloud with a fervour more suited to an undergraduate auditioning for a drama society. It was useless to direct him otherwise. I filtered out his tone and emphases to get at the words, the raw words:

“‘Gloria was swarmed by children: hot, fat, sticky ones, that had been eating with their fingers and clawing into garden soil. They nuzzled at every bend of her body: one in the crook of her arm, another behind the knees, a small neck slipped into the narrow of her waist. She put her fingers through the hair of that one, the one at her hip. They all breathed on her. It was overwhelming. This happened every afternoon, at the end of their trek home from school—’ Good God, that’s unpleasant.”

I tensed. “Please don’t comment.” It wrenched me out of the story.

He sighed.

This is exactly why I’d had to hire a student to work with the photographs.

He read on. A later scene put the protagonist on her front steps, while her neighbour, Gloria, was out.

“‘Lily, the smallest one, came to me when her mother didn’t answer the door. She wanted a drink. I denied having water, which made her laugh. The sound was frail and breathy and high; her fragility terrified me. Where was Gloria? Lily ran off; she grabbed a branch and swung herself up onto it. Where was her mother? I didn’t want to be responsible for this. These small creatures, so fast and so needy. So empty all the time. They consume the adults around them. That’s how they become adults themselves. They eat their parents up.’”

He stopped. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I assured him. “For God’s sake, get on with it!” But I had gripped the duvet tightly in my fists. I let it go and smoothed it out.

I’d already listened to others of her books that were more current. This one was her first. It was the only one of them that had a mother in it, any mother at all.

I suddenly remembered myself as a child, lying half-asleep on a kind of sofa bed, pressed against a warm female body: leftover perfume, a brushed cotton nightgown over free breasts. We were asleep together, and suddenly the light flashed on. It woke me; I can still see very bright light even today. Clicking heels against the wood floor, a vaporous smell of drink. I clambered out from under the smooth sheet and itchy blanket to fling myself at the woman who’d just walked in the door. I reached up as high as I could, so high I felt the beads in her necklace. I was between her and a man. The purse hanging off her wrist was at just the height to bounce hard into my head.

Behind me, the cotton sleeves pulled me back. That’s all I remember, being sucked into a suffocation of warm brushed cotton, under a cool sheet and itchy blanket. The woman in beads with the handbag walked through to the bedroom. I don’t know what happened to the man.

That was Linda Paul, my mother. The woman in the nightgown was my nanny. She raised me. She raised me when she was with Linda, and then she raised me without her.

Nick had discovered that my recently deceased mother wasn’t Linda Paul, and assumed that Linda Paul had never been my mother at all. But I knew, from research, that she had two relatives blind in the same way that I am. I was certain that Linda Paul had given birth to me.

Then she had given me away.

Nick hadn’t realised that’s what he’d shown me. I’d had to make him stop before he got that far himself. There’s a difference between a noise downstairs in the night and someone suddenly standing over your bed. They may amount to the same thing, they may both be the same intruder, but the moment it might be and the moment it undeniably is are different.

I didn’t notice that Nick had gone, truly gone, until the police came to talk to me. I was angry. This wasn’t my fault. What had he done to himself? I told the Inspector that he’d informally assisted with a research project; that was all. That he seemed to be a generally untroubled person. The Inspector asked me if I was worried about him. What kind of question is that? What would my answer matter in the investigation? I didn’t know if I was. Polly and her mother disturbed me more.

Most distracting of all, I knew who S. M. Madison must be. After Linda Paul abandoned me, where did she go? She wouldn’t stop writing, would she? She wouldn’t. That fantasy of sacrifice came from the nanny, a woman who’d never written anything. S. M. Madison had written a book every two years since 1963.

So I’ve known since the day Nick was gone.

I didn’t tell anyone, not even Harry. I didn’t know what he’d do if I did. He might try to protect me. He might close the book permanently. I couldn’t let him do that.

“Harry,” I said, truly begging, “please read it to me.” Unthinkingly, I rested my hand on his forearm. A static charge jolted us both, reminding me how long it had been since I’d touched him. “Please,” I said again. I meant it desperately.

So Harry read on.

In the end, Gloria died. The children moved. I’d made Harry read the entire book, every word, one by one. A review on the back of the jacket congratulated S. M. Madison’s bravery and originality in depicting an alternative to the self-sacrificing mother figure that society has colluded to perpetuate. Suddenly I, one of the first female Fellows at Magdalene and the first blind graduate of my college, was put on the defensive as a party to woman-stifling, antifeminist society. My eagerness to accept the fantasy concocted by the one who raised me, to see myself and the mothering of me as more valuable than anything else she might have done, made me an accomplice. Some feminists think men are the enemy, but I knew myself for what I was. Children are the enemy here. It’s not men who demand a woman’s undivided attention, it’s children. It’s the children who wake her up, and the children who come to her for everything, every little thing. It’s the children who can’t dress themselves or feed themselves or go on without her attention and approval. My anger was tempered into pity for my mother, and guilt. What had I done to her? What had my existence done?

Harry’s voice was parched. He asked me again, “Are you all right?”

Why couldn’t he stop that? What was wrong with the man?

“I’m going to sleep,” I said. I rolled onto my side. I didn’t hear the click of a switch, so he must have stayed up. He had books of his own to read.

Harry would have thought I’d gone out.

The next morning, I woke before he did, dressed, and drank my coffee at the kitchen table.

There was the scrape and thud of a magazine being thrust through our mail slot. I wanted to catch Lawrence, our postman, to hand him a card I needed mailed. Today was Richard’s wedding, and I had yet to post it.

We have a cluster of bells attached to our front door. I made those bells shake.

But it wasn’t Lawrence at the door. Of course not. It being Richard’s wedding, it was Sunday. The magazine-person was someone who smelled of cosmetics. That, and finding myself standing on a pile of yesterday’s mail, disoriented me. “I’m sorry,” I said, stepping back and bending to retrieve the mail from the floor. Both Harry and I must have used only the side door yesterday.

The magazine-person’s voice confirmed her gender. “So sorry to have disturbed you,” she said. “I’m an estate agent. Rebecca Phillips-Koster. I’m selling the house across the road.” She crouched with me. “I was just delivering these informational brochures around the neighbourhood.”

I assumed she was proffering one, but my hands were full of yesterday’s mail. She twigged soon enough that I don’t see, and compensated with a flourish of attempted assistance. She pulled at the letters in my hands, to aggregate them with her magazine. I was shocked enough that I let go. She layered them all into a neat pyramid, smallest mail on top, and returned the stack to me. We stood. “Shall I tell you who they’re from?” she asked loudly.

The pipes in the wall rattled; Harry was showering. He would only have heard the shaken bells on the door, not the obtuse Ms. Phillips-Koster exaggerating her pronunciation for my sake.

“Oh dear,” she said. “This one’s been opened.”

“Which one?” I’d felt a tear in one envelope, but had assumed it to have been an accidental mangle from some post-sorting machine.

“It was mailed from this house. It’s being returned. ‘No such person at this address.’ Tsk. Laziness—ripping open an envelope before bothering to glance at the name. Oh, look—” She plucked another from me. “There’s another being returned. This one hasn’t been opened.” She told me who they’d been written to, and handed them back to me.

“Thank you,” I said, meaning ‘good-bye.’ She chattered about how good I was to have sent my holiday letters out with so much time to spare, and that the same happened to her every year: returned letters due to changed addresses. “Not everyone,” she commiserated, “can be so organised as we—”

I closed the door.

I carried the stack of mail into my study, and overturned it on my desk. The two returns were now on the bottom, thoroughly covered and held down. It was important to keep them under control.

Now I knew where she was. The letters had told me.

I’d written to the few Susan Maud Madisons I’d discovered, including author S. M. Madison. I’d contacted her through her publisher; no personal information about her had been available. A Susan M. Madison lived in Cambridgeshire, at Rose Cottage on Cantelupe Road. Both had returned my letters unaccepted. But one had been opened. And the estate agent had noticed that “return to sender” had been written on each in the same terse handwriting. I’d found her.

I’d wait. I didn’t want to explain it to Harry. I didn’t want to say the words out loud. Soon, he’d come downstairs, drink coffee, and go out. Eventually. By patience, I could earn the means to go upstairs to the computer, uninterrogated. I could print directions to Rose Cottage, and phone for a taxi. I’d see her today. If I could just keep still, I wouldn’t have to speak to anyone else before I spoke to her.

So it was my fault that Harry thought I was out. He’d heard the door; I was quiet here. What else would he assume?

My study is a small room. It had been added on by the previous owners as a large cupboard, had no windows, and had never been rigged for electricity. I had a desk in there, with a chair tucked under it, and a chaise along the wall, too full of books to sit on. Our computer was of necessity upstairs, in a room full of power outlets. I worked up there. I used my study to read, and to be alone. With the door closed, there was no tell-tale line of light from under the door or sound of typing to indicate occupancy. Harry wouldn’t have known I was in there.