Not in the Flesh

14

The Sunday Times, News Review, 5 November 2006 Part Two of Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father

My mother knew he was dead. She knew it from that first day, the day we all went to the police together. She didn't say that to the police or to us, of course she didn't, but years later she told me she had known it from the first. There was no other explanation for his staying away for twenty-four hours without getting in touch with her. She knew when she was loved and she knew herself to be a sensitive, perceptive woman who would quickly have been able to tell if her husband was seeing another woman. It was this self-knowledge which perhaps made it worse when the rumor spread round our neighborhood, at our school, even at the church where Mum sometimes went, that Dad had run off with Denise Cole. There were other theories for his disappearance, of course: he was heavily in debt (he who had never owed anyone a penny), he was depressed because he felt himself a failure as a teacher (he who was a brilliant teacher and immensely popular), he had met someone in Lewes (at a funeral!) who had offered him a wonderful job at twice his present salary if he would leave at once, but the favorite one was that of his elopement.

Denise Cole isn't her real name. It would be unfair to give it. I'm sure she was quite innocent either of having designs on my father or of fostering the rumor. She was about twenty-five years old, rented a room in the next street to us, and was a checkout supervisor in a supermarket in Leyton High Road. She had left school at sixteen after getting half a dozen rather good O levels. Now she wanted to go to university and study for a psychology degree so that she could go into social work. Whether she ever got her degree and became a social worker I don't know, but I do know that she is married and living up in the north somewhere.

Dad used to coach her. She mostly came to our house for her coaching in biology, but sometimes they went to her room where she always had a friend of hers present. There wasn't so much danger then for a teacher to be accused of molesting a student he was alone with, but I suppose Denise and my dad thought it best to be on the safe side. The friend was also sitting for A levels, so Dad had two students to teach. No one ever suggested he was involved with Megan Lloyd. It was always Denise because it so happened that she had gone missing two days before he did.

I remember him going around to the house where she had a room and coming back rather cross to say that one of the other tenants had told him she'd done “a moonlight flit.” Megan hadn't been there either, but there was no question of her being missing. She just hadn't turned up because Denise had told her she owed £3,000 on her Visa card and meant to go off somewhere for a while “until it had all blown over,” whatever that meant.

Everyone began to believe that my dad and Denise Cole had gone off together. Well, not us and our friends, we didn't believe it. Even if Dad had been the sort of man who'd be unfaithful to his wife with a girl nearly twenty years his junior, we knew he'd never even been alone with her. Mum and Vivien and I were always in the house and Megan was always there when he went around to Denise's.

Did the rumor-and it grew into more than a rumor-influence the police not to look for him? Maybe they wouldn't have done anyway. Maybe he just didn't come into their category of vulnerable people. Up to a point we looked for him. Mum phoned every relative we had and wrote to those whose addresses we had, but her heart wasn't in it. As I've said, she knew he was dead. It was the only possible explanation.

But the insurance company didn't know. The building society with whom they'd got one of those arrangements that ensure that on a partner's death the other one gets possession of the property absolutely, they didn't know. Our house was only ours if Mum managed to go on paying the mortgage. Dad's pension was only hers if she could prove he was dead. Of course she could have gone on the benefit, but she wouldn't do that. She'd been a librarian before she married Dad and she managed to get a job working in a bookshop.

This was all months later and during that time we were living on what was in their joint account and her own savings. She knew it would be a good idea to sell our house and buy a flat which would be big enough for the three of us. But she couldn't sell the house. It didn't belong to her or, rather, it belonged to her and Dad, and Dad wasn't there to agree to the sale. To help make ends meet she let out one of the upstairs rooms, her own bedroom. We kept our room and she moved into Dad's study.

Before that happened it had to be cleared of what was in it. I ought to make it plain how dreadful all this was for her, how painful for all of us but specially horrible for her. To leave their bedroom to a stranger was bad enough but to go into Dad's study which she always looked on as somehow sacred to him, inviolable and absolutely private, to take it apart and empty it, that was agony to her, the ultimate sacrilege. But she did, she had to and we went with her. It wasn't that we asked to be there but that she asked us. I think she didn't want to be alone in there or she was afraid she might collapse in uncontrollable tears.

It sounds strange to say this, but we'd never been in that room before. I mean Vivien and I hadn't. Mum had, of course she had, probably when we were little and she and Dad were getting it ready to be his sort of sanctum. Later on we'd seen into it on our way to bed, for instance, when Dad had come out to say good-night and left the door open. The fact was we hadn't been all that interested. It was just an ordinary little room, the kind of place which in houses like ours was called the box room-because when the houses were first built and space wasn't at a premium people kept bags and suitcases in there? We looked in and saw a place not much bigger than a cupboard with a desk in it and a chair, a filing cabinet, bookshelves full of books, and an awful lot of paper. That's all there was room for. When we went in for the first time, six months after we lost our father and Mum her husband, there was only just room for us all to get in there and then it was only possible because we were small thin people.

There wasn't a computer. Vivien and I had got used to computers, we had them at school, though neither of us then possessed one, and we'd never before seen an electric typewriter.

Mum had to tell us what it was. It seemed to us as ancient, as antediluvian, as a fountain pen or a pound note. What did Dad use it for? we wanted to know. “Working for his postgraduate degree,” was the only answer she could come up with and then she said, “Researching. Writing his thesis.” If this was true, what happened to the thesis? Had he started it? Was it half-completed?

Whatever it had been, there was no trace of it remaining. For all we found, he might have sat up here reading and rereading the books on the shelves. Those books themselves gave no clue. There was the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, and Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, a Classical dictionary, Ovid's Metamorphoses in a new translation, Icelandic sagas, novels byJ.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula Le Guin and Terry Pratchett, Darwin's Origin of Species, books by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins.

We took the books downstairs and stacked them on top of the bookcase. There was no other space. The papers we put up in the loft and the blank sheets we kept to use for writing letters on. But we hardly wrote any letters, we had no one to write to, and the sheets of paper are still in the house where I have lived alone since Mum died. We found only one piece of paper that might have given us some hint as to where Dad went when he left Maurice Davidson's funeral, but it didn't. I don't really know why I thought it might. Maybe because it was the only thing we found in there in Dad's handwriting. Oh, there were check stubs, of course-he attended to business in that room, paying bills, completing forms, and that sort of thing-but this scrap of paper, half an A4 sheet, was the only thing he left behind that he'd written by hand. It was hard to escape the conclusion that he'd deliberately cleared the place of anything which might have provided a clue to where he was going and what he intended to do. I actually said this to Mum, but she wasn't having any of it. “He didn't know he was going to die,” she said, “and I know he's dead. I just know it.”

And the scrap of paper that was the only thing in his handwriting? It was a list of names of contemporary authors, mostly science-fiction writers, all of them still alive, along with a list of publishers. Underneath he had written “Fact-finding? Proofreading? Editing?”

Mum said it wouldn't help us find where he had gone that afternoon. Years before, she remembered, when they were short of money and she couldn't take a job because they had us, Dad had considered trying to get work as a publisher's reader. He knew such a thing was possible because publishers employed people to read manuscripts. But he never did. The pay would have been too little to make it worth his while. We actually phoned the publishing houses on the list, but none of them had ever heard of him. So that was no use. Don't they call it a red herring?

Meanwhile his study was cleared-he had been gone for over a year by then-and Mum moved in, leaving her bedroom for the lodger. Vera was a quiet tidy sort of woman, but Vivien and I never liked her. We resented having to share a bathroom with her, though we had never minded sharing with Dad. It must have been much more of a hardship for her sharing with us. We were coming up to the age when girls take over a bathroom, dropping towels on the floor and leaving messes behind them. She fried most of what she ate and our kitchen always reeked of chip fat. Mum minded that more than almost anything, more than sleeping in that tiny room, which, after all, must hourly have reminded her of Dad sitting in there in happy silence, more than having to sell the car and forgo summer holidays.

You can get used to anything, can't you? Our lives were utterly changed but we still had school, which we both loved, and our friends and the grandparents who were unendingly good to us. We didn't know it at the time, children aren't interested, but Mum told us later that Dad's mother and father paid the mortgage for two years and all the services bills. Our gran died when I was fifteen and Vivien was thirteen, and Grandad moved in with us. That was the end of Vera with her chip pan and the stink of cheap perfume she left in the bathroom, the end too of watching everything we spent and denying ourselves anything new. It was three years since my mother had even bought herself a sweater, still less a pair of shoes. Things were different with Grandad there. He had sold his own house for what Mum said was an amazing amount of money, he had a very good pension as well, and he brought his car with him.

We both loved Grandad. He was generous and easy-going and never intrusive, but I think the best thing about him was that he reminded us of Dad. This must have been painful for Mum, but it wasn't for me and I don't think it was for Vivien. His voice sounded like Dad's. He had the same build as Dad, though Dad was a bit taller, and he hadn't lost his hair, which was still quite dark. Sometimes I'd come home from school and go into our living room and Grandad would be there, sitting in an armchair reading. He was a great reader-like Dad. He'd turn to say hallo, put out a hand and kiss me, and then for a moment it was my dad, the same feel of the hand, the same dry firm lips.

So things got better for us. Or for Vivien and me they did. Mum had got very thin and the sadness in her face was permanent. She was in perpetual mourning. One evening, after Grandad had gone to bed and Vivien was in our room doing her homework, Mum said in a matter-of-fact way, “I would quite like to die.” No doubt she shouldn't have said that to a child of sixteen but I suppose she felt she had to say it to someone. I think she put in that “quite” to soften things a bit. “I've lived without him for four years,” she said, “and it hasn't got any better. If I'm in a crowd of people I see him, for a moment I know it's him, but of course it isn't. I was in the tube station the other day and I saw him coming down the escalator. I see him in photos in the paper and crowds on the television. I'd like to die so that that doesn't happen anymore.”

I didn't know what to say. It made me cry, but she didn't cry. She just sat there gazing in an empty sort of way across the room. “I haven't minded much about selling the car and having to have Vera and getting a job and all that. That was nothing compared to losing him.”

It was then I asked her if it would be easier for her if we knew what had happened to Dad, but she just said she didn't think it would. She had always known he was dead. I wanted to ask her how she thought he could have died, I mean what could have caused his death, if she was so certain, but I dared not say anything which might have hurt her more. Vivien and I had our own ideas of what might have happened to him. She favored drowning because Lewes isn't far from the South Coast, and her idea was that he had gone to Brighton or somewhere down there where all those white cliffs are and fallen into the sea. Considering it had been pouring with torrential rain that day I couldn't see why anyone would choose to go to the seaside. My idea was that Dad had had a heart attack in some lonely spot while walking to the station after Maurice Davidson's funeral. If he had been walking through a wood and died there his body might never have been found.

We had plans to go to Lewes, go to Carol Davidson's house, and follow the route Dad would have taken to the station. We never did. It was more a fantasy and a dream than a practicality. And things were different for us than for Mum. I had my A levels and Vivien her GCSEs. I had a boyfriend. Vivien was in the school tennis six and played the violin in the orchestra. Our lives began to be crammed with interests. We both worked hard at school, harder I think than we might have done if Dad had still been with us. We knew we'd need to get good jobs one day and we'd have to go to university first.

We always felt the loss of Dad, sometimes very painfully, but it wasn't like it was for Mum. When he went everything that meant anything to her went out of her life. Well, she had us and I think that was a comfort to her but not really a consolation. She said a deep sense of loneliness was with her all the time. I was eighteen and in my first year at the University of York when she became ill. I'd noticed how thin she'd got and she couldn't really afford to lose weight. When I came home for the holidays I told her she should go to her GP, it wasn't natural to be so emaciated, but she said she was fine apart from a bit of backache. I went back to York in October but came home for a weekend in the following month after a panicky phone call from Vivien. Mum had been diagnosed with breast cancer which had spread into the spine.

She hadn't gone to her doctor when I'd suggested she should and eventually when she had gone because the pain was so bad, they started chemo immediately. They told me at the hospital that it was too late and all they could do for her now was palliative care to keep the pain away. She was so thin that her rings dropped off her fingers. Smiling her death's head smile, she handed me the wedding and engagement rings and told me to keep them safe, one for me and one for Vivien to wear one day if we wanted to. She knew there was no hope for her. “Dad's wedding ring was the same as mine,” she said, “with the same engraving inside.”

I didn't say anything. I just sat there, holding her ringless hand.

“I think about him all the time,” she said. “I wish I believed we'll meet again, but I don't, I really don't.”

When I got home I read the inscription inside the wedding ring. It was a gold ring. Chased with leaves, and with Forever inside. Well, it did last forever, their forever. Mum died in the middle of January of the following year. I went home whenever I could, but Vivien was there with her all the time in her last months and saw her every day. “She knew what was wrong with her,” she said to me. “I know she did, though she never said. She'd found a lump in the left breast all of a year ago, but she didn't do anything about it. She only went to the doctor when the pain in her back got unbearable.”

I asked her what Mum was afraid of.

“Nothing,” she said. “She wasn't afraid of anything except of going on living. She did nothing about the lump because she wanted to die. She wouldn't kill herself but she knew this would kill her and that was what she wanted.”

So we lived on alone there with Grandad, who had lost his wife and his only child. He too died a couple of years later, but at eighty-two, which isn't a tragic age to die at, not like forty-four and forty-nine, though the loss of him was just someone else for us to miss. Grandad left us everything he had, enough to pay off the mortgage and have quite a bit for each of us. I bought Vivien out because she wanted to live in a flat with her boyfriend, and now I live in the house alone. But I won't sell it. I'm not like Mum, I don't think Dad is dead. One day he'll come back and I'll be here waiting for him. With all I have that was once his: the wedding ring he gave Mum and a scrap of paper with his writing on it. All that I have left of him.

Selina Hexham's memoir of her father, Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father, will be published in January 2007 by Lawrence Busoni Hill at £19.99.

Barry put the sheets of newsprint, these and the ones from the previous Sunday, into an envelope and drove over to Kingsmarkham with them. He had put in a covering note in case Wexford wasn't in, saying the cuttings were from him and out of the Sunday Times but nothing more. Wexford would know. His daughter Sheila answered the door, a baby in her arms. She didn't know Barry, but he of course knew her the way everyone did. Her face was one of those familiar to all television viewers and newspaper readers. She said her father was out, she didn't know where, but wouldn't he come in? They were just having coffee.

Barry said no, thanks, but it was very kind of her. Suppose this man Hexham was the body in the trench, he thought as he drove back to Stowerton, and he had found him? That would be something. He was angry too, in the way he thought Wexford might be. Someone, maybe one of those people he had talked to, maybe not, had killed this man and thrown his body into a trench, like they buried cattle dead of some disease. Barry thought of those girls and their mother and her parents. Not only had they a much-loved man to mourn for but privation to face, the hardship that comes when a death can't be presumed. One of those people had caused all this and probably for no other motive than gain or cowardice.

If it was Hexham.