Why Don’t You Come for Me (32 page)

Whenever Marcus came home she expected him to start harping on about the doctor again, and although he did not often raise the issue directly, she knew it was continually in his mind. They were mutually watchful. She was aware of his scrutiny, and felt that he was forever on the lookout for signs of instability, storing up a lot of little clues to use against her, yet more leverage with which to persuade her that she needed professional help. One morning when they were both in the office, she rummaged in a drawer to find a highlighter pen and came up with a pack of blank white postcards she had not known were there. It was one of those forgotten stationery purchases, like the bundle of coloured treasury tags which were never used for anything but no one ever got round to throwing away; except that when she looked up she saw that Marcus was watching her, and knew what he was thinking. The cards were burning her fingers, but she did not know what to do with them – returning them to the drawer or consigning them to the bin both seemed suspect. At one time, she might have said, ‘What on earth did we buy these for?’ but now the words remained unuttered. The last thing she wanted to do was invite comment, give him an opening.

The constant sense of being under observation made her nervous, so that she forgot things, became confused, lost her thread in the middle of sentences, offered him only garbled accounts of what she had been doing with her time.

There was a lot she did not tell him now. She had returned several times to Claife Station, half hoping that a visit by daylight might provide a clue. She wondered if Lauren had ever been there. Certainly the abductor must know the place, otherwise why choose it? The abductor must be somewhere near – which meant that Lauren was too. She changed the bedding in the spare room regularly and replenished the flowers. Soon Lauren would be coming home. That would change everything. Then she would show Marcus that she could be a real mother. She would be vindicated, and they could remake themselves into a real family. There would be fun and laughter in their lives again.

September finally brought another postcard. Jo had been surreptitiously lying in wait for the postman as usual, and seized on the card almost as soon as it hit the mat, clutching it to her chest and hurriedly retreating upstairs, so that Marcus, who happened to be at home that day, would be unaware of its arrival. She did not turn it over to read the message until she was safely behind the closed bedroom door.
I still have her
.

‘No, no.’ She wanted to beat her fists against the door. This was going backwards. It was hopeless. She had to take a few minutes to compose herself. Marcus must not find out about the postcard. At least it was some form of contact to hold on to. Maybe it was meant to reassure her, and presaged something more positive to arrive soon.

‘Why?’ she whispered. ‘Why are you torturing me? Why won’t you just give her back?’

When she returned downstairs, she felt Marcus watching her. Where once his glance might have been admiring, now he was just keeping her under surveillance.
He loved me so much
, she thought,
and I loved him – as much as I could give. But now we just circle around one another. Both our lives have become about something else
.

When Marcus and Sean were not there, her footsteps seemed to echo more loudly around the house. It reminded her of walking through rooms stripped of their furniture and ready for the decorators. The house had acquired that same hollow chill she associated with curtainless windows and bared floorboards. Everything in The Hideaway was still in its place, but it had faded, become insubstantial. She waited for the postman to arrive each day, then drove somewhere to escape the emptiness of her disappointment. She no longer began and ended her walks in Easter Bridge, since that opened up the possibility of having to stop and speak with neighbours. Often she just drove to a lay-by or a car park, where she sat watching people come and go, killing time until she felt obliged to return to the empty house, where the tune of ‘The Laughing Policeman’ sometimes crept into her head, as if it were being sung by some unseen maniac in another room.

Shelley’s books on the Pre-Raphaelites sat reproachfully on a chair in the hall. She had neither read them nor returned them. Shelley came to the house and rang the doorbell once, but Jo had seen her coming and hid in the office until she had gone. Groups came to stay in the old farmhouse for a week or a fortnight, but the weather kept all but the hardiest of them indoors. There were no incursions into the garden of The Hideaway, by dogs, Frisbees or nosey temporary neighbours exercising their ‘right to roam’. The stinky barbecue sat unused, dripping in the rain.

She occasionally saw the inhabitants of The Old Forge from a distance, usually passing in their car, occasionally out on foot. Once Rebecca had gone back to school, Gilda Iceton appeared to be as solitary as she was herself. Gilda, who had never managed to make any friends at school, ever the loner, footling about on her own, just as she appeared to be now. She had stood by while the other kids taunted Gilda for her differences, but maybe she and Gilda had not been so different as she had liked to believe. Maybe the real difference had been that Gilda would not sell her soul in exchange for cheap popularity. She had joined in when the others laughed at Gilda and mocked her for being ‘touched’ and ‘soft in the head’, although Gilda was clearly neither. Now it was not Gilda but herself whose faculties were being called into question – a sort of ironic justice, if you like. It had always been there, of course. Like mother, like daughter. If your mother is crazy, why not you?
Bad blood
. It didn’t always follow, of course. Insanity did not have to run in families.
No
, said a voice in her head.
It doesn’t need to run; it just creeps and crawls, but it gets there in the end
.

Jo tried to retreat from the memories of what they had put Gilda through – the name-calling, and worse. There were so many things she did not want to remember – and some she could not. Ever since the day of Aunty Joan’s funeral, she had been forced to question the reliability of her own recall. What was truth and what was fiction? If she had been incorrect about her father’s death, then maybe other mistakes had crept into the transcript of her life. Lately she had taken to waking suddenly in the early hours, desperately trying to remember something to do with Lauren’s disappearance. Something significant that she had noticed that day. Something important that had been overlooked.

The transition from summer to autumn occurred without any noticeable change in the level of precipitation. Green leaves which had been shiny with water for weeks and weeks lost their colour, faded and fell sodden to the ground. With Harry and Charlotte long since departed for Heswall, and Rebecca Iceton gone back to her boarding school, Sean was again the only person in Easter Bridge who was not old enough to vote. He continued to tread warily around his stepmother, who seemed ever more withdrawn. She had developed a habit of occupying a particular chair in the sitting room, maintaining the same position for up to an hour or more in an attitude of concentration, her eyes focused on a patch of carpet just beyond her feet. The first time he saw her like that he assumed she must be watching something – a woodlouse or a spider, perhaps. But in the weeks that followed, he encountered her sitting in the same position again and again. In spite of his better judgement, his curiosity was aroused.

One evening when supper was long over and his father was away as usual, Sean had ventured downstairs to organize a snack. On his way back to his room, he paused in the doorway of the sitting room and stood watching her. He had been there for about a minute before she became aware of him and looked up.

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to distract you if you were meditating or something.’

‘I was – sort of meditating – but it’s OK.’

‘I didn’t mean to disturb you.’ He edged away into the hall.

‘It’s OK,’ she repeated. ‘Did you want something?’

‘No. I just thought it was a bit funny, you sitting there like that. I wondered if you were ill.’

‘It’s OK,’ she said again. ‘I was trying to remember something, that’s all. It’s a technique I read about – on the internet.’ She would have elaborated, but Sean was already moving further in the direction of the stairs.

‘Whatever,’ he said.

Jo shrugged. A few months ago she might have been elated at the hint of a breakthrough – Sean pausing to see if she was OK – but now it hardly seemed to matter. She resumed her position. The trick was to be comfortable, relaxed – but not overly so – to keep your eyes open, but try not to concentrate too hard on what was in front of you,
leaving the way open for internal visualizations
was what the instructions said, the idea being that you
reconfigure the scene, detail by detail, until what you were seeing then, you are seeing in the here and now.
It was called The Doctor Heinsel Method. According to Dr Heinsel, everything you had ever seen or experienced was locked away in your mind, so that if you only went about it the right way you could remember everywhere you had ever been and everything that had ever happened to you – or at least, some people could. Dr Heinsel claimed that with appropriate training, everyone had the capacity to do this, providing they were prepared to put enough time into achieving what he called Dynamic Cognitive Memory State.

Jo had been following his Beginner’s Programme religiously. Dr Heinsel said that a trainee should not begin on troubling or traumatic episodes. According to his theories, the reason you had difficulty recalling them was because the mind invariably shied away from memories like these: so you had to start with happy memories, which the mind would
more willingly embrace
, working your way up to the scary stuff only when you and your mind had got to grips with the Heinsel Method. Thus Jo had started off with a very happy memory indeed – her first honeymoon, spent on the Isle of Wight in 1995. Saving for their deposit had not left them with sufficient funds for anywhere more exotic, but as Dom had said, ‘Who needs the Caribbean, when they have palm trees here?’

Dr Heinsel was big on working through things in chronological order. Apparently the untrained mind liked to jump about, flicking from one memory to another, thereby missing important bits out, so you had to find a starting point which was a recognizable beginning, then work forward from it. Jo had chosen the ferry crossing from Lynmouth, and been surprised to find that she could piece together quite a lot. The amount she could recall about their small hotel in Shanklin astonished her. There had been a china shepherdess on the dressing table in their bedroom, a room which they had reached by climbing the steep stairs lined with an odd mixture of cheap prints, everything from Millais’s
Boyhood of Raleigh
to dogs playing snooker. The hotelier had walked around at breakfast time, offering extra triangles of toast from a wicker basket lined with red paper napkins. Dominic had always accepted at least one extra slice.

On the first morning they had descended to the beach before breakfast, via a steeply sloping road which curved back on itself. The tide had left a band of flat wet sand where no one else had walked, so that their two sets of footprints might have marked new arrivals on a desert island. At night the stars had been astonishingly bright, and sometimes you could see the lights of big liners or cross-channel ferries, proceeding from left to right down the channel.

Each time you revisited the memory, you had to start right back at the beginning again, and try to recall a little more,
pausing to take in the scene
, Dr Heinsel called it, filling in the gaps. There had been stainless-steel dishes, one containing strawberry jam and one orange marmalade, on each of the breakfast tables. The chairs and tables had been made of dark wood, and each chair had a thin red cushion tied loosely on to it, which didn’t quite match the red paper napkins. If you opened the bedroom door too wide it bounced back off the side of the bed. She tried to picture the host with his basket in one hand and the stainless-steel tongs with which he distributed the toast in the other, but it was very hard to put a face to people you had not known well, or with whom you’d had only brief contact, such a long time ago.

Dom she could picture perfectly. If only he had not given up on her. Life could have been so different. They could have found Lauren together – Marcus had tried to be kind but he did not really understand. No one did.

In October Maisie held another fund-raiser, but Jo waited until she knew the Perrys were out – they always gardened at Holehird on Wednesdays – before slipping an envelope containing a scribbled apology and a ten-pound note through their letterbox. It was weeks since she had spoken to Shelley, whose books lay gathering dust on a chair in the office, where they had been placed in readiness for the short journey back along the lane which she somehow never got round to making.

Sean had been invited to spend half-term with his mother, the visit in summer having been a modest success. Marcus was away in Cornwall on the last Daphne du Maurier tour of the year, and with no reason to keep regular hours, Jo’s days lost any semblance of rhythm. The Hideaway again developed that sense of emptiness, through which Jo flitted like an insubstantial phantom.

One night she sat up until 3 a.m., concentrating on Dr Heinsel’s Method, working her way through the Isle of Wight trip, followed by Lauren’s first birthday. There had been a cake in the shape of a big number one, covered in white icing edged all round in pink. Lauren had blown out the candle and clapped her hands: little stubby fingers, each with a knuckle that went in like a dimple, instead of out in the bony pattern of ridges and furrows found on an adult’s hand. There had been cupcakes in spotted paper cases which peeled away to leave a sharp zigzag pattern in the icing, chocolate finger biscuits which disintegrated in small pink hands and dishes of ice cream and jelly. Later she had washed the chocolate off those little hands with a flannel, feeling each delicate digit as it wriggled and resisted the damp cloth.