Missing Christina

  We found the keys in a kitchen drawer.

  Upstairs, here, the 1960s still reigned. The bedroom’s carpet was ivy green, very thick and velvety, strewn with Chinese rugs. The walls were papered in a pattern of huge stylized poppies, silver and white on a pale gold background. Covered in a patchwork quilt of brilliant satins, the double bed had a tall, curvy wicker headboard, vaguely Eastern – I think they were called peacock beds. The chair beside the window was the same sort of thing. Along the side wall was a stripped pine wardrobe, ornately carved. Opposite was a matching dressing table, draped with a couple of silk scarves and strings of beads. Under the window stood a splay-legged piece of furniture which I recognised as a radiogram; when I was very small we’d had one like it at home. Those fabric panels in the front were speakers, those chunky knobs controlled the radio. I lifted the lid and saw the turntable and reel-to-reel tape recorder. The album on the turntable was 'Dark Side of the Moon’. Above the bed hung another Hockney, and on the side wall a Burne-Jones print in a gold frame. Nothing dates faster than people’s ideas of luxury, but this room had retained a kind of dignity, it wasn’t silly or tasteless.

  Unlike the bathroom. A miracle of black tiles and faux marble, it was a 1960s idea of James Bond decadence, so hideous that I hoped it had been like this when Mum and Adrian bought the house. The black tub was in the middle of the room, set into a rectangular stepped plinth covered with peach carpet. Starburst chrome taps, black glass shelves, black lavatory and basin, the mirror set in a silver starburst. Some men’s toiletries stood on a shelf, but except for a new-ish roll of lav paper there was no sign that this room had been used in years; it was clean but dusty and airless.

  We trailed back to the bedroom. It smelt of the sea, of Old Spice and the memory of a woman’s perfume. It had been aired, if not used, recently. I hoped not used. I turned back the counterpane – the white sheets and ironed pillowcases were clean but had that musty bottom-of-the-linen-cupboard smell. Between the pillows snuggled a very old, battered teddy bear, leering at us with his one eye.

  Silvia opened the dressing table drawers, said, “Empty – no, there’s this,” and brought out a pink suede jeweller’s box. Inside was a single string of seed pearls and stud earrings. She moved past me to open the wardrobe. Here was the source of that Old Spice smell – some men’s clothes hanging on the rail. A long Afghan coat, a cricket sweater, a patchwork blazer, a striped silk dressing gown. When I looked I saw what I’d expected, school-type Cash’s woven nametapes saying G. A. L. Randall. At the other end of the rail was a woman’s coat of black fur, chinchilla I thought and very evidently the real thing. Beside it was a shorter coat of what Silvia said was mink. There was also a white silk dress with a matching jacket, sixties-looking in a dull way.

  “This must have been their room, Mum and Adrian’s room.”

  “You reckon?” I said unpleasantly, and she kicked me.

  “I suppose we get rid of all this stuff too?”

  “I suppose so. Yes. Do you want those pearls? After all, Mum’s will said all her jewellery to you.”

  “I wouldn’t mind. They’re rather good.”

  She never wore fur, and when I suggested sending everything, coats and all, to charity she said charity shops wouldn’t take furs any more. But I knew a theatre company who’d gladly have them, would have the lot, in fact. We looked through all the drawers and found nothing, but at the last moment Sylvia spotted a long white box on top of the wardrobe, and lifted it down.

  A wedding dress, the one we’d just seen in that DVD. With it were the headdress and veil, matching shoes in a pink satin bag, even filmy white silk stockings and the petticoats necessary to keep the skirt’s line.

  “Charity shop?”

  “Yes.”

  Then – “What about Teddy?” It would have felt like abandoning a pet animal, to give him away. And he might have been Mum’s.

  “I’ll have him for Hugo. I’d like that blue patchwork quilt from the little bedroom too, for when he moves from a cot to a bed.”

  “Right.”

  Rather quickly we left the room, and locked it and the bathroom behind us. Silvia collected the quilt, and we bundled everything up.

  “It is a bit creepy, though,” she suddenly said. “Keeping that room as it was – his things. Morbid?”

  “I don’t know. Do you keep things from thirty years ago? It seems a bit disloyal to Dad.”

  “Ye-es… but she didn’t keep everything. I think perhaps there are always a few things you can’t bear to get rid of, from someone you loved.” I instantly thought of the hideous scarf and East 17 CD at the bottom of my chest of drawers at home, souvenirs of losing my virginity. And a single glove, stolen from a girl I’d loved at Cambridge and who’d never noticed my existence. They’d go, the moment I got home.

  “Jaques?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You don’t think Mum used to come down here and… sleep in that bed or… wear his clothes?”

  “No,” I said very firmly indeed to conceal the fact that I’d had the same thought. “No, she just kept a few things. After all, the poor guy was murdered, it must have been a horrible shock. It’s not as if they divorced or anything like that.”

  “True. But… how did Dad cope, if she never forgot Adrian?” She drew in a very long breath and let it out slowly. “Jaques, it’s not all that late, let’s keep busy, let’s start on Mum’s study.”

  “Good thinking.” It would be tedious but hopefully tiring, and we’d work until we couldn’t stay awake, leaving no time for morbid imaginings. So we took a can of Diet Coke each, Silvia changed into sweatshirt and jeans, and we got stuck in.

  We quickly discovered that there was a filing cabinet drawer per book – original MS, typescript in the case of the older novels, proof copies, notebooks, then the final version in hard copy and on floppy disk or CD, and relevant correspondence, copies of contracts and so on. Easy. All we had to do was sort through each drawer, bundle up the contents, label it and put it in a box. There was nothing personal or extraneous in these drawers; all was business. The last cabinet held fan mail, and again it was carefully sorted into one file per book. I’d never realised how many people wrote to Mum about her novels, but there must have been thousands of letters here. The file for Escape held the most, an entire drawerful in fact; unsurprisingly, most of the letters were from ex-PoWs. I flicked through some of them – Mum had got it exactly right, completely wrong, understood perfectly, didn’t have a clue, claimed to have made up an incident known only to the writer of the letter and one other person, now dead, so who’d told her?, knew fuck all, knew things that were official secrets: please explain. Nineteen men wrote asking if (s)he was the Chris Bryant they’d known in Stalag this, that or the other. Women wrote thanking her for rendering so exquisitely the experiences of the mothers, wives, sisters, lovers at home with nothing to do but wait, worry, hope. One old boy with a Pythonesque title, Colonel Blank (ret’d), wrote so angrily that in places his pen had torn the paper, damning the impertinence of a mere woman writing about sacred male experiences. Several asked how dare she put a homo in the book, there’d been none of that sort of filth in any PoW camp. One woman wrote to say that she didn’t quite count as a PoW, but she had survived Ravensbrück, and thought Mum understood certain things.

  Mum had replied to every single letter she ever got about her books; the carbons or photocopies were stapled to the originals. Sometimes she’d written only a couple of lines, 'Thank you for your kind words, yes there’ll be another Slaughter/no there’ll be no sequel to Escape. When the writer raised interesting points, or had simply taken her fancy, she’d sent quite a lengthy reply; some people had written to her when each new book was released, and had become friends. If someone pointed out a mistake, or what they thought was a mistake, they’d get a form letter (“I will go into the point you raise, and correct any errors in the next edition”) and there’d be a note made, 'follow up and correct/I was right, NFA. Morons who wrote aski
ng her to read their manuscripts/find them an agent/get their book published/admit she had (apparently by telepathy or dirty work by her publisher) stolen their unique idea, got a different form letter, polite but stiff and in the third person (“Chris Bryant regrets…”). Abusive letters got destroyed, threatening ones referred to the police.

  We worked solidly and for the most part in silence for a long time, making and filling the archive boxes, sealing them, labelling them, updating the inventory spreadsheet, taping a copy to each box. Finally Silvia said she’d had enough, her back was killing her and she needed a bath, and with surprise we realised it was nearly three in the morning. But where were we to sleep? That single bed was not made up, and we were too tired to hunt for sheets and blankets. Not for anything in the world would I have slept in that Adrian room.

  “Don’t be a twit,” said Silvia, “we’ll share Mum’s bed. Don’t look at me like that, we’ll pretend we’re kids again. Have a midnight feast, if you like.”

  It was the practical solution, but I still felt odd about it, without quite knowing why. But she shoo’d me off to have a shower, and then I put on the tracksuit in which I sleep in winter and got into the double bed, trying to take up as little room as possible. While Silvia had a bath I put on Die Hard – we’d both seen it, of course, and it would be just distracting enough to put us to sleep. When Silvia finally came in I discovered that my haughty, sexy, internationally famous model sister slept in blue flannel jammies with a bunny pattern, and thick knitted bed socks.

  “Glamorous.” I wondered what she wore with PoorMatthew

  “And the horse you rode in on.” She began massaging fruity smelling cream into her face.

  “You OK with this?” I asked, gesturing at the TV.

  “Fine.”

  “Want a sleeping pill?”

  “Yes.” I doled out one each. Bruce Willis shot a bad guy. “Jaques?”

  “Mmm?”

  “I feel a bit differently about Dad now. I mean that if… perhaps he always felt second best… if he asks us again to go to Williamscourt, I think I will. Come too?”

  “OK. And Silve? – we won’t tell Toby about what we found?”

  “No,” she agreed, “it’s not his sort of thing, it’d worry him. What about telling Dad?”

  “Play it by ear.” About five minutes went by before she said, “Jaques?”

  “Still here.”

  “If I tell you something will you promise, seriously swear, not to tell another living person?” She was trying to sound light about it, but something in her tone spoke of childhood secrets and promises, the things that really matter.

  “I won’t tell anyone. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “Ta. Well, it’s… about me and Matt… you all wonder why I won’t marry him… You remember Ethan Villiers, at Cambridge?”

  Of course I did. Poser, pseud, fraud, social climber – handsome, making the most of a slight resemblance to Hugh Grant, to whom he claimed to be related, but without Hugh’s wit and intelligence. But he had something. Charm? If so, it was the synthetic sort, made in China. Glamour? I don’t know. But it was enough to have him always surrounded by a cloud of eager first-year sycophants (by second year most people had seen through him), always apparently at the centre of the fun thing, the glamorous thing, the dangerous thing, adroit at reflecting people back at themselves. I remember him always in black, tossing a lock of dark hair out of his violet eyes. He was apparently very rich and well-connected, and his conversation was peppered with references to famous people. He was on my staircase, and was of course eager to suck me into his web, if sucking is what spiders do. He liked to bask in my fame and at the same time cleverly (he thought) belittle me. “Our little soap star,” he liked to call me. It really burnt him up that, my father being a viscount, I’ve the courtesy title of Honourable, and to annoy him I used it on every possible occasion. (Anyone higher up the aristocratic ladder wouldn’t have anything to do with him.) Being used to theatrical types it took me a nanosecond to realise that his hair was dyed, the violet eyes were coloured contacts, and that without the lifts in his shoes he was barely of average height. Being used to genuinely witty and educated people, it took me another nanosecond to realise that his “wit” was either second-hand, or a sarcastic putting-down of anything anyone else admired or liked. It took me slightly longer, like five minutes, to discover that his real name was Evan Wilson and that his parents were perfectly ordinary, probably nice, lower-middle class people who’d made a bundle out of lavatory seats or lawn furniture, something like that, and that they lived in a stockbroker Tudor house on a new estate. Their house had a name, not a number. Dunroamin’? Dunflushin’? The Laurels? No – Sundowners, that was it.

  Anyway, his posing and posturing amused me for a while, but he was solid shit, through and through. I did once ask him to a party, for the pleasure of watching him try to patronise my parents. At the end of my second year the ADC did Hamlet, a mistake in my opinion, and I begged for the role of Osric, and did it as a parody of Evan Wilson.

  So now I said to Silvia, “Of course I remember the little shit. What about him?”

  “I fell in love with him,” she said and began to cry.

  Oh bloody hell. I bit back the obvious questions or remarks, and slid my arm under her quaking shoulders. “And?”

  “And he was such a shit, you’re quite right. I saw through him but it didn’t stop me being hopelessly in love with him.” She snatched a tissue from the box on the nightstand and gave her nose the sort of great honking blow that comes from real, heartfelt tears. “I was only just eighteen,” she snuffled.

  “But –” At eighteen she’d been beautiful, sexy, sophisticated and already quite famous as a model. She really did know everyone. She was the real thing, and Ethan Villiers was as tawdry as his made-up name.

  “Oh, but but but. What’s commonsense got to do with love?”

  “Nothing, I suppose.”

  Another raucous nose-blow. “That’s right. And he treated me like shit. Revenge for your Osric.”

  “Oh fuck, Silve, I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault. I didn’t realise for ages. He took to his college’s May Ball. I was ecstatic. He took me to his rooms and told me he loved me and fucked me. And by the way it’s not true about his nine-inch dick, not true by half. And then we went out to the ball again and I think he spiked my drink. Well, I’m sure he did. Roofies, I think. And… his friends, his set… they all did me too, and took photos. They said they’d sell them to one of the tabloids or put them up on the internet.”

  “Oh, Silve. Poor Silve.” Useless words. I’d kill the little cunt, painfully. And his pals. “What – what did you do? Christ, I wish you’d told me.”

  Another noseblow, then she relaxed against my arm. “I told Mum. I couldn’t tell Dad. You know.” Our parents loved us all equally, but she, the only girl, had been Dad’s pet. Daddy’s little girl. He’d have been furious on her behalf, active in revenge, but something would have been spoiled. She and Mum had never been quite so close in the same way, and she would have known Mum was undisillusionable.

  “And what did Mum do?”

  “She was lovely. She said everyone’s got one irresistible shit in their history and I was lucky to get it over with bright and early. She comforted me and she understood and didn’t think any worse of me. Then… I don’t know, but she had… friends. Ethan – Evan – didn’t just leave Cambridge, he was sent down, ʽunder a cloud’ as people used to say. And one day Mum just quietly handed me a smashed digital camera and said not to worry any more. She said she 'knew people’.”

  In-ter-est-ing. “Well, if it’s any comfort, Evan Wilson is working for McDonald’s now. Not flipping burgers in a cardboard hat, no; worse – he’s in their management program. He wears a short-sleeved shirt and a plastic badge. He’s in one of the Birmingham branches.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. But Silve – Matthew?”

  “Oh, I met him later.
And he’s so nice and decent and kind and sweet, and he loves me so much and I did love him in a way but in the way you’d love a dear old affectionate Labrador. Hugo,” she added quickly, “wasn’t quite an accident, I wanted him. But marrying Matt – I’m not in love with Ethan any more, but… and yet now I do really love Matt, and he knows about Ethan. It’s just… not… I can’t explain. Then at Christmas he changed and got tough and sent me home – I told you about that. So perhaps he’s stopping loving me, and then what will I do?”

  I hadn’t a clue. “I don’t think he’s stopping loving you. He does love you. But perhaps he’s getting sick of you playing him up. Perhaps he feels second best. Silvia, lots of women would give their eye-teeth for Matt and the way he loves you.”

  “Should I marry him?” she asked in a very small voice.

  “God, how would I know? I’d say yes, but I’m the last person to ask.”

  “Not the last. Jaques, do you think Adrian was Mum’s irresistible shit?”

  I was still pondering that when she fell asleep, snoring lightly. I turned off the TV, and lay listening to the surge and ebb of the sea, wondering if I’d ever get to sleep, and then I smelt coffee and Silvia was shaking me and saying it was time to get up, it was after nine and we had work to do.