“She was a very credible and respectable witness, and although her evidence didn’t prove Belinda hadn’t been abducted, it did prove she’d left her parents’ house on the Sunday, just as Mrs Tate had said.
Blah blah blah. This was telling me nothing. I flipped through the few remaining pages, and came to one bit about the police investigation.
Hoaxers and well-meaning but mistaken people took up a great deal of police time. Many people were, I think, unconsciously bringing up what had seemed like ʻclues’ in the Beaumont case and said that Belinda had been seen at Glenelg beach with a blond ʻsurfie’-looking man; getting into a white car; buying food at the bakery where the Beaumonts had bought lunch on the day of their disappearance. And so on. Apart from the neighbour who definitely saw Belinda walking down her street to the beach on the Sunday, there were no definite sightings or leads at all.
A surfie-looking blond man? Did I really suppose Adrian Randall had returned from Sydney to murder Belinda Tate?
Just the same, if I ever met Marian Elder, I might ask her for details of suspects. A word-search of her document turned up nothing useful; but then of course her book wasn’t complete.
I was still bored enough with life, though, to read another bit she’d sent me. This was an interview she’d done recently with Belinda’s cousin Anne, present surname withheld.
Of course I remember the police coming to see me that first day, the Monday after Belinda disappeared. I still use that word, ʻdisappeared’, because despite everything I’ve never been able to make up my mind about what happened to her. No, I’ve certainly never heard from her or seen her or anything since then, so I think she’s dead. I mean, I think that whether she was abducted or tried to run away or whatever Auntie Winsome did to her, she ended up dead.
What you have to know about this whole case is that Bel and Auntie Winsome hated each other. I don’t mean just the usual teenage grumpy dislike on Bel’s part, I mean they really loathed and resented each other. Auntie Winsome was a bitch, to everyone, I mean, but especially to Bel. She treated her really very badly. She hated her and didn’t care what she did or said to her. No one could stop her. No one could ever stop Auntie Winsome doing exactly what she wanted, until the end. Uncle Alf was a nice old chap but weak, much too weak to control her. Sometimes he did try to stand up for Bel, and once or twice he really put his foot down and then Auntie Winsome would do what he said, but Bel always paid for it in the end.
Why did they hate each other? Well, Auntie Winsome hadn’t had any children of her own so she adopted Bel because she believed that women who adopted always got pregnant with their own child – and actually I think that does often happen, but it didn’t for Auntie Winsome. So you see, Bel was like her possession, as if she’d bought her for a specific purpose, and she’d failed, so Auntie Winsome didn’t have any more use for her. I was too young to remember it but apparently she said so one Christmas, in front of everyone, she actually said she wanted to send Bel back to the orphanage. Yes, Bel was there, she was only about four and although she never mentioned it to me I don’t suppose she ever forgot it. Auntie Winsome’s mother actually slapped her, Auntie Winsome I mean; my mother told me. I don’t think Bel ever really trusted or loved anyone after that, except perhaps me when we were old enough to be friends. There were other things too, like Bel being so much smarter than Auntie Winsome, and knowing how to make her look stupid and letting her know she hated her. Bel could be very funny, you see, witty, I mean, and it was easy to make Auntie Winsome look ridiculous. That was risky, though, because Auntie Winsome had all the power and could do anything to Bel. She was always very violent to her, as well as not letting her do anything she wanted to, and spoiling everything she enjoyed and always insulting her and putting her down.
And when the cops came to see me that day I was incredulous, as anyone would’ve been, and very upset about Bel, and I didn’t know what to think. When the cops told me what they’d got from Auntie Winsome, I’m afraid I burst out laughing. Of course they wanted to know what was so funny, and I told them not to trust a word Auntie Winsome ever said about Bel. She, Auntie Winsome I mean, lied about everything, she was a pathological liar and as I’ve said she hated Bel. I didn’t put it quite like that to the cops, but at least I was able to tell them the truth.
The truth was, to start with, that Bel had grey eyes and blonde hair, was five foot five and weighed eight stone dripping wet, and although I don’t think she was exactly pretty she was certainly attractive. Far from being 'not very bright’ or however Auntie Winsome put it, she was highly intelligent, a member of Mensa and an intellectual. She should have gone on to university but they wouldn’t pay the fees, Uncle Alf didn’t believe in education – he was an ignorant man who’d only had a few years at primary school, and I’m afraid he thought he knew everything – and Auntie Winsome would never let Bel do anything she wanted to. They’d made her leave school when she was sixteen and go to some dim secretarial school so she could be a shorthand-typist. In a way she didn’t mind because what she wanted most was to get a job so she could get away from Auntie Winsome. She used to say she’d go to uni when she was 21.
Auntie Winsome wouldn’t have let Bel get away from her, ever, except that that was one time Uncle Alf did put his foot down. Bel had finished school, and she’d got a good job in the public service, and he arranged for her to live in that hostel, Auntie Winsome wouldn’t let her share a flat with me, or live in the Glenelg flat, although that would have been a lot cheaper than that hostel, and Auntie Winsome had to go back and live on the farm again and be his wife. He’d put up with being alone on the farm except in holidays all the time Bel was at high school, and now he put his foot down. I think he did it for his own sake but also for Bel’s sake, because I and my mother (Uncle Alf’s sister) told him it was high time someone got Bel away from Auntie Winsome, or she’d go mad. Bel would, I mean, not Auntie Winsome; though as it turned out she really was pretty insane.
When Bel first left home she was still rather immature in lots of ways, and she found it hard to get on with people because she was so used to Auntie Winsome putting her down and picking on her that she thought everyone was doing it, she expected people to dislike her and be nasty to her. But she got over that quite quickly, she grew up fantastically fast that year. She’d always been very bright, and that year she matured in other ways too, if you see what I mean. I think it was because she did so well in her job, and made friends there, and at last she was able to look nice, I mean she grew her hair and bought some nice clothes and could use make-up, which Auntie Winsome had always forbidden. She got on very well with her room-mate Kathleen at the hostel, they became very close friends and I think Kathleen helped her confidence a lot by liking her and admiring her intelligence, and standing up for her and making her a bit more worldly wise, so that she didn’t think people were picking on her and so on. I saw a lot of Bel that year and we got on very well, and I saw how much she grew up and changed.
One reason I didn’t think Bel had simply run away from home was that she didn’t have much money, and also she wouldn’t really have known how to. I mean, she was clever but not what we’d now call street-wise, and I can’t think of anyone who would have helped her get away – I mean, I would have if she’d asked, but she didn’t ask, and anyway I didn’t have a lot of money of my own. Kathleen wouldn’t have had much money either – and Bel would’ve needed enough to get to Melbourne or Sydney or somewhere like that, then to find somewhere to stay, even if she got a job straight away, and Bel hadn’t taken any money out of her bank account. Anyway, the cops checked at the bus station and railway station and I think even the airport and no one had seen Bel. I would’ve said she was too sensible to hitch-hike, but I know she was desperate to get away from Auntie Winsome.
Boyfriends – no, no one special. Bel would’ve told me, we were close enough to talk about that sort of thing. Yes she went out with various chaps when she was living at the hostel, but there was no one speci
al. And, you see, Bel didn’t like it when boys tried to get sexy with her, she didn’t mind a kiss but anything else was too much, and that was because of Uncle Alf. I hate remembering it, but he used to touch her. Today we’d say he was ʻinappropriate’ with her – with just about any girl or woman he got his hands on, but especially with Bel because there was nothing she could do about it. When he tried it with me I stood on his foot with a stiletto heel and he got the message, but Bel was stuck. And by ʻtouching her’ I mean he was always groping her and feeling her up. He’d say, “Give your old dad a hug” and pull her against him and kiss her, slobber all over her, and his hands would be everywhere. He started it when she was about eleven. Remembering it gives me the creeps. He did it quite openly, and if anyone tried to tell him it was wrong he’d either laugh or be offended and say they had dirty minds. And I don’t think Bel ever had a bath or a shower when he was around without him coming in to perv at her and touch her. Once I had to stay with them overnight, and I shared Bel’s room, and Uncle Alf came in to 'tuck her in’ and that was just an excuse to lie on top of her and grope her under the bedclothes. After she ʻdisappeared’ and the cops finally saw through Auntie Winsome’s ’abduction’ story and searched that Glenelg flat, it wasn’t only bloodstains they found, but semen on Bel’s bedspread, and although they didn’t have DNA testing back then they could tell it was from someone with Uncle Alf’s blood-type. Part of what’s so horrible about it all is that these days there would’ve been people to look after Bel and take her away from those so-called parents, Uncle Alf wouldn’t have been able to molest her or Auntie Winsome to beat her up and do all the things she did, but back then there was no one Bel could go to for help, there was no one to save her. Anyway, she always kept things to herself, she never complained or told anyone.
I found out later that the reason Auntie Winsome ran away from the farm and went back to the city and dragged Bel out of that hostel to live with her was that Uncle Alf wanted sex. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. My brother Rodney was living with them because Uncle Alf had taken him into partnership running the farm, and he told me. After our cousin Tim’s funeral Auntie Winsome got very weird for a few days, Rodney said, throwing worse tantrums than usual, and finally she had a huge fight one night with Uncle Alf. Next day Uncle Alf went off to one of his camps right down at the other end of the farm, several miles away, to do some work ready for harvest, or so he said, and the minute he’d gone Auntie Winsome came out with a suitcase and told Rodney, ʻI’m not going to stay here to be his mistress!’ and drove off in her car. Rodney thought it was quite funny, until he heard what’d happened to Bel. She rang him up, Bel did, I mean, about three weeks later, to tell him to tell Uncle Alf that she couldn’t stand another minute with Auntie Winsome, and Rodney told her why Auntie Winsome left. Apparently she’d told Uncle Alf that she’d found out after Tim’s funeral that Bel was ’running wild’ and had to be supervised. That was her excuse, and she told a lot of other people the same thing. I don’t know if anyone believed her. Rodney was quite worried about Bel after she rang up that time, and it was only just after that that we heard Bel had disappeared. I didn’t tell the cops at the time about the sex business with Auntie Winsome, because in those days it wasn’t the sort of thing you talked about to strangers, and anyway I didn’t think they’d believe it.
And those last few weeks she had to live with Auntie Winsome, Bel went through hell. The cops found out all about that. So I did wonder if Bel had committed suicide and Auntie Winsome had hidden her body, which would’ve been typical of her because people might’ve wondered what she’d done to drive an eighteen-year-old girl to suicide. But on the whole I think I agreed with the cops who thought Auntie Winsome had killed her in one of her violent tantrums. So no, I don’t think I ever believed in the abduction story but it used to give me nightmares thinking about it, because the thing was, it just could have happened. I don’t mean Bel was silly enough to get in a car with men she didn’t know or anything like that, but she could have been snatched off the street or something like that. After all, she wasn’t very big, she couldn’t have fought a man off.
I didn’t want to read any more of this. I’d never be able to tell Dad about it, because it was everything he hated most and he’d wonder if he somehow would have been able to help his little penfriend.
I closed Marian Elder’s document and decided to forget it for a long time.
Helping me to forget it was the family meeting about the wedding.
*
Right. A family get-together to plan a wedding. How hard can it be?
Toby and I got there in good time for lunch, but the forecourt was already crowded with cars – Lord and Lady Hyde-Howard’s very grubby Discovery, Aunt Ursula’s Volvo, the van belonging to PoorMatthew’s brother Peter, who with his wife Emma had managed to have five children under the age of six, and a Prius from which PoorMatthew’s sister Lucinda was awkwardly climbing.
Orlando came running out as soon as he heard my car. Since that first time we’d met him Dr Kildare had stopped dressing him, or Dad had stopped her dressing him, in those clunky clothes, and perhaps because he’d settled in at Williamscourt and gained confidence, he was a lot less babyish, and no longer scared of the dogs. When, a little while ago, I’d tactfully remarked on this to Dad he’d confided that getting away from Dawn’s mother had done him good. Mrs Wright was, Dad had said diplomatically, a little old-fashioned and had babied Orlando because she thought Down Syndrome = retarded = unfit for everyday life. Now, too, Orlando had a part-time nanny to give Dr House more free time, a cheerful Australian girl who’d got Orlando into the local Under 12s football team as well as into a new school. So now Orlando was wearing jeans, a Simpsons t-shirt, and sneakers, and had old Kingsley trotting at his heels.
Lucinda trailing behind us, we went inside and followed the sound of voices to the dining room. I heard Lady Hyde-Howard saying, in the rather piercing voice of the slightly deaf, “…still think it would be so nice to have all Matthew’s little nieces and nephews – and your cousins’, of course, if you liked, as attendants. A cloud of littlies always looks sweetly pretty, don’t you think?”
“Mum,” said PoorMatthew, “we’re not discussing the wedding till after lunch.”
“And the last wedding I went to where they had a 'cloud of littlies’,” said Silvia, sounding as if she needed a drink, “one of the littlies dropped her pants and took a sweetly pretty crap in the chancel.”
“Well, really, Silvia!"
“Hello!” Toby and I said in tones of manic goodwill. We kissed Granny, then asked if lunch was ready. It was, and the serving and eating of it kept everyone quiet for the next forty minutes. I didn’t know how well Dr No and Yvonne were getting on these days, but in one thing they clearly saw eye-to-eye: they weren’t going to give the Hyde-Howards anything to complain about. We strung it out as long as we could, talking to Granny about the garden, to Lord Hyde-Howard about politics, to Peter about hedge funds and the financial situation and so on, until everything had been eaten and cleared away, coffee served and drunk, and on the dot of one o’clock the dining room became Wedding Central. Out came laptops, folders, clipboards, writing pads. It was on.
“Dresses,” Lady H-H opened the batting.
“Fleur is doing the dresses,” Silvia surprised me by saying. I was even more surprised that I hadn’t really noticed Fat Fleur in the crush, partly because she wasn’t Fat Fleur any more, she’d lost a good twenty pounds since I’d seen her at Mum’s memorial service, she was Only A Little Chubby Fleur now, and she had a new haircut, she looked fashionable and quite pretty. Nodding briskly, and obviously in cahoots with Silvia, she said the dresses were under control.
“Not white, of course,” said Lady H-H, “not in the circumstances.”
“Not white,” said Fleur.
“Then what –”
“Oh. Well, not a veil, of course, and I hope nothing straple
ss.”
“Certainly not,” said Dad, who doesn’t much like agreeing with Lady H-H but likes strapless wedding dresses, at least in church, even less.
“No, not strapless,” Fleur agreed.
There was a pause that would have irritated Pinter, then Lady H-H took the hint and changed tack. “Invitations.”
“All under control,” said PoorMatthew.
“Oh? But I wonder if you’ve considered… after all, it’s a matter of the wording. After all, in the circumstances you can’t say 'Lord and Lady Randall request the pleasure…’ I mean, er, Donna here is only Silvia’s stepmother, and you can’t say… Perhaps if you said 'The Viscount and Dowager Viscountess request…’, you know, so it’s Jon and dear Molly who are doing the inviting. These things do matter, you know.”
Dr Doolittle looked as if she’d been slapped. “Who’s Donna?” Toby asked innocently.
“You mean Dawn, Mummy,” said PoorMatthew through clenched teeth, “and the invitations will just say 'The pleasure of your company is requested at the marriage of…’ We’ve had the invitations designed already.” He swivelled his laptop around so his mother could see the screen. She fumbled for her glasses, peered, looked doubtful then said, “But you’ll have to have them printed, you know; people don’t know what’s on your computer.”
There was a communal sigh, and Dad lit a cigarette while PoorMatthew explained. I, who have never smoked, almost asked him for one; I was getting little stress pains behind my ears.