Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon (29 page)

But the grandparents had offered, and now here they were, moving about the house slowly, as if too much vigour might propel Rose out of the shadows where she’d been lurking, and into some otherworld.

When the phone rang, Gran jumped visibly. She and Grandad looked at each other; Gran said in a whisper, ‘I’ll go.’ She went through to the hall, closing the door behind her. Anna turned her eyes back to the TV, to a cartoon that normally she’d have sneered at as babyish. A dog with ears flapping like streamers was loping along a road in big bouncing strides, not seeing the steamroller coming along behind. The steamroller caught up, flattening the dog into a cut-out shape on the road, like Mum’s paper dress patterns – a meaningless cartoon death that was forgotten next moment when the dog stood up and shook itself back into shape and carried on running. Anna didn’t look round when Gran came back into the room. As long as she kept staring at the screen, she could hold back the moment of knowing.

‘It’s not Rose. It’s not her. Oh, lovey.’ Gran stooped and gathered Anna into her arms, expecting her, Anna supposed, to cry with relief. Anna felt no urge to cry. She struggled free and ran out into the back garden. When she looked up at the sky there were stars pushing through the blackness, more and more of them as her eyes adjusted, till the sky was a pincushion pricked with dots of light. The stars were bigger than she was. She wanted to shout to them, leap up and catch one. The Seven Sisters were somewhere out there, the Pleiades, blurring and dancing together, uncountable.

There was still a poor drowned girl lying under that sheet, someone’s daughter, someone’s sister perhaps, but she wasn’t Rose. She had taken Rose’s place. Her death confirmed that Rose was alive and running.

Chapter Seventeen

The narrow, carpetless flight of stairs and the lingering smells of fat and smoke from the café underneath would have deterred Anna, but the young couple – a girl of about eighteen and her amiable-looking boyfriend – followed her up without comment. The flat on the second floor consisted of a living room with a kitchen at one end, a bathroom and one bedroom; the furnishings were worn but clean. The bedroom window, north-facing, looked out on an expanse of rain-washed brick wall, drainage pipes, and – if you craned your neck – a glimpse of grey sky.

‘Oh, it’s lovely,’ said the girl, who had the air of being ready to be pleased with anything offered to her. ‘Isn’t it, Jace?’

‘Yeah,’ said Jace, slipping his arm round her waist. Anna looked at their bright faces and knew that they were picturing themselves here, cosily watching TV from the sofa; they were thinking of all the sex they were going to have in this bleak narrow bedroom. For a moment, remembering herself and Martin in the Lewisham flat that first time, Anna envied the transparency of their desires. Were they runaways? Did anyone know they were in Leytonstone, looking for a flat? This girl – Kylie, had she said, or Keeley or Kayleigh? – looked wan and undernourished. Well, the café downstairs might be handy for feeding her up.

‘We can afford it, can’t we?’ said the girl, looking appealingly at Jace, her arms draped round him.

‘Course we can,’ said Jace, and Anna saw in the swell of his chest how he wanted to be the man, the provider. ‘We like it,’ he told her. ‘A month’s rent for deposit, right?’

Anna nodded. ‘Good. We’ll go back to the office and sort out the paperwork.’

She was intrigued by such brushings against other lives, always at a point when changes were being made or contemplated, where a new house or flat promised transformation into a different person – happier, more confident, more successful. People imagined that they could leave their old lives behind, moving into new selves with a change of habitat. Often they mentioned their reason for moving – a change of job, a wish to be nearer central London – but with some there was furtiveness, making her suspect that they were evading responsibilities, or trying to escape.

Whenever a missing person reached the headlines and relatives pleaded for information, Anna felt herself reluctantly linked to these desperate seekers, like members of a club. Around them, watching like a host of angels in a medieval painting, were the missing. They talked and whispered together, debating whether or not to return to the human world, bestowing joy and tears of relief on the ones who waited, trapped in limbo. Whenever one of them did come back, Anna felt resentful. The parents or sisters or partners in waiting ought to have served their full sentence alongside her. They had cheated; their lost person, returning, had taken a place that was rightfully Rose’s, as if only a limited number of hostages could return from the underworld.

Over the years, Anna found in every teenage girl a potential Rose. It had become a habit, gazing at them, wondering where they came from, where they were going, who cared for them and what they expected from their lives. As Anna matured, girls of eighteen looked younger and younger, until, now, they were a different generation, a separate, exotic breed. Girls in groups, girls on the Underground, girls out shopping together, girls aware of their sexiness and the glances they attracted. With their glossy hair, their smooth skin, their supple bodies, their distinctive fashions, they assumed a confidence Anna couldn’t recall in herself at that age. They intimidated her, the way they kept coming, year by year, wave upon wave of teenage girls pushing her aside. They jostled and giggled, elbowing Rose’s ghost out of their way.

Waking in her room at Rowan Lodge, Anna was puzzled first by the absence of another body, then by the flowered curtains, the window in an unfamiliar place, the silence.

The room was cold; she felt the chill at her neck and shoulders as she stirred, looking at her watch. A quarter to eight. About to scramble up in panic, she remembered that it was Monday, and her day off, as she’d worked on Saturday. She huddled the duvet around her for a few minutes more, then got out of bed, wrapped herself in her dressing gown and pushed her feet into slippers. Opening the curtains, she rubbed at the windowpane with her sleeve and stared in surprise at the garden trees all ghostly with frost, the grass whitened and crisp. For a moment she thought that it had snowed overnight; but no, it was hoarfrost, misting the air, blurring the horizon so that the parkland beyond the garden rose whitely into cloud. So still; so quiet. She caught her breath at the unexpected beauty. Tracks left by some small animal crossed the lawn and headed under the shrubs; a blackbird landed on a tree-branch and particles of frost descended in a shower.

‘Are you mad?’ Martin had asked, when she phoned to tell him she was moving here. ‘Why maroon yourself in a godforsaken hovel miles from anywhere, when you could be at home?’

‘It’s hardly a hovel. And I
want
to be miles from anywhere.’

‘Miles from me, at any rate – that’s obvious. Why not do the whole thing and take yourself off to a Buddhist monastery?’

‘Great idea! Thanks. I’ll try to find one.’

Martin huffed. ‘What’s behind all this? If you’ve met someone else, for God’s sake why not say so?’

‘I haven’t!’ She felt stung by this. ‘If I had, d’you think I’d move him into Ruth’s mum’s house?’

‘Anna – it’s quite beyond me to predict what you are or aren’t likely to do. Let me know when you’ve had enough and I’ll come and fetch you home.’

She felt impatient with him. Why was he being so tolerant? How far would he let himself be pushed, before saying
That’s it, then – we’re finished
, and cutting off the possibility of return? Was that what she was waiting for – Martin to make the decision, so that she didn’t have to?

Ruth had been concerned that Anna would find the cottage too isolated, but instead she relished her solitude. Between them they had finished clearing the main bedroom and had bought paint; Anna planned to get on with stripping the wallpaper today, but after making toast and coffee she decided to go out walking instead; the frozen beauty of the landscape was a gift that needed acknowledging. Among Bridget’s remaining books she had found a large-scale Ordnance Survey map; she had only trainers to wear, no walking boots or wellies, but the ground was too frozen to be muddy.

For more than two hours she walked, frosted grass crunching underfoot, her breath clouding in the air. She found her way along bridleways and across fields, and along hedgerows where startled pheasants whirred clumsily into flight. She paused to study her map, scanning for the next stile, the next marker post; she walked along a single-track lane where a horse and rider were the only traffic to pass, steam rising from the horse’s clipped flanks. A thin, wheedling call of birds caught her attention and she looked across the whited-out fields to see a flock of birds flying low, their wing-tips rounded and dark, flicking black-white-black as they wheeled and landed. Lapwings. Peewits. They reminded her of the holiday in Blakeney, the pleasure she’d taken in the abundant birdlife and had since forgotten. Only the distant motorway hum reminded her that she was less than an hour from central London. It was years since she’d done this, and she realized that it filled a need she’d been unaware of: to be alone, walk among trees, see the sky uncluttered by buildings; to feel space around her and in her.

Unhurried, she returned along the edge of a ploughed field that was frozen into hard ridges and furrows. She let herself into Rowan Lodge, and the warmth that had built up in her absence, and felt oddly at home.

After changing her damp socks – her trainers had proved inadequate – and putting on the kettle, she prepared to start work on the bedroom walls, paying her debt to Ruth. It was only when the postman arrived, bringing two letters and a catalogue addressed to Bridget, that she remembered it was Monday, and there was nothing to stop her from phoning the Plymouth school. She made herself wait until lunch time, hoping to reach Michael Sullivan in person rather than leaving a message. It might not be the same person anyway; it wasn’t an unusual name, as her Google search had proved. If she drew a blank with him, she’d try harder to find Jim Greaves.

Damping the wallpaper, pulling it off in shreds and tatters, she rehearsed what to say, but still, when at last she made the call and a receptionist answered, found that her voice had gone husky and hesitant.

‘Who shall I say is calling?’

‘Anna.’ Her surname would give too much away; she didn’t want him (if it was him) to be alerted.

‘Anna from …?’

‘From Heinemann Publishing,’ Anna improvised.

The receptionist said that she’d try the staff room, and there was an interminable wait before a male voice answered.

Anna sounded to herself like a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. ‘Are you the Michael Sullivan who used to teach at Oldlands Hall in Sevenoaks?’

‘Yes, yes I am. Who is this?’

‘It’s Anna Taverner.’

A pause, then: ‘Anna Taverner?’

‘Yes. I think you knew my sister Rose.’

‘Has something happened?’

Anna was thrown by that. ‘Happened? I expect you know that Rose disappeared, twenty years ago. I know you were at the school then.’

‘What’s this about?’

‘I’m trying to trace her. Nothing’s been heard of her in all that time. I wondered if you might remember something – anything – that might give me a lead.’

There was such a long silence that Anna would have thought she’d been cut off, except that she could hear staff-room chat and laughter in the background, and the chink of crockery.

Then Michael Sullivan said, ‘I’ll have to get back to you. I can’t talk now. Can you give me your phone number?’

Sitting on the bedroom floor, on the sheets of newspaper she’d spread over the carpet, Anna went over and over this brief conversation, weighing every nuance.

Has something happened?
What had he meant by that? Was he simply asking whether Rose had been found? In which case he didn’t know. But there had been no preamble, no
Oh yes, I remember
, or
What a terrible business
or
So, still nothing, after all this time
– which had been Jamie Spellman’s reaction; nor was it the fear of hearing something grisly, which had been Christina’s. He hadn’t denied knowing Rose.
I think you knew my sister Rose
, she’d said, and he’d replied with that quick, defensive
What’s this about?
That wasn’t the response of someone who had known Rose merely as a pupil he hadn’t even taught. Someone who hadn’t thought about Rose for two decades.

He knew something. Otherwise why offer to get back to her?
Would
he return the call? Anna saw herself waiting and waiting, clutching her silent mobile. Of course he wouldn’t ring back. He had something to hide.

What now? She imagined herself phoning the police, of squad cars racing to the school, leading Michael Sullivan away in handcuffs for questioning. Ludicrous. What did she have against him? That he’d refused to dance with Rose, and had looked at a painting five years later?

She kept hearing his voice: a deep voice, softly spoken, with the trace of a southern Irish accent. She remembered that: an attractive voice, she’d have said. But she felt chilled now, hearing his words over and over again, alert to how incriminating they sounded. She heard all the things he hadn’t said.