The Missing One Read online

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  California to London, January 1979

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Southern California, 1975

  Chapter three

  Southern California, 1975

  Chapter four

  Southern California, 1976

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Southern California, spring 1976

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  British Columbia, late spring 1976

  Chapter ten

  British Columbia, 1977

  Chapter eleven

  Chapter twelve

  Chapter thirteen

  British Columbia, late summer 1977

  Chapter fourteen

  Chapter fifteen

  Chapter sixteen

  British Columbia, spring 1978

  Chapter seventeen

  Chapter eighteen

  Chapter nineteen

  Chapter twenty

  Elena, 1976

  Acknowledgements

  First published in Great Britian in 2014 by

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2014 Lucy Atkins

  The moral right of Lucy Atkins to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  PB ISBN 978 1 84866 320 6

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 84866 321 3

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Lucy Atkins is an award-winning feature journalist and author, as well as a Sunday Times book critic. She has written for many newspapers, including the Guardian, The Times, the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph, as well as magazines such as Psychologies, Red, Woman and Home and Grazia. She lives in Oxford.

  For my mother, who is thankfully nothing like Elena.

  And for John.

  California to London, January 1979

  She knew she was walking because she was definitely upright, moving down a row of seated passengers, with the baby howling on her shoulder. She could hardly hear the cries, though she was aware on a primitive level that the sound was urgent. But everything was blurred and muted, as if she were deep under water and the world shimmering somewhere on the surface. It didn’t matter that people stared, or the baby yowled and writhed. Nothing really mattered.

  He gave her instructions and she followed them. He issued his conditions, itineraries and tickets, and she accepted them all. He would be waiting at the other end for her. This was the start of a new year and a new life. He would put them into his car and take them to the house he had bought in some English village, with an apple tree in the garden. ‘You belong with me,’ he had told her, before he got on his plane. ‘You always did – I love you, I’ve always loved you. And – where else could you go?’ He was right. So she did the only rational thing: she followed his instructions.

  She couldn’t feel the baby’s mouth tugging at her breast, and when she looked down she was startled to find that it had come away and was open-mouthed, red and wailing, the poor little face screwed up and purple with fury. And there was a smear of blood coming from her nipple, trickling over her white skin, and a rub of it on the baby’s chin, too. The nipple was raw and glaring, as if articulating everything she couldn’t feel. Gently, with the edge of her shirt, she wiped the blood off her baby’s stretched-out mouth. Two white teeth glimmered in the redness.

  As the plane taxied along the runway and Elena latched the baby on again, she knew she would never go back. But this was not an escape. She could never escape because nothing would change what had happened – not Graham’s kindness, not a new English life, not even this needy, upset baby, who should have been weaned months ago.

  As the plane lurched into the sky she felt the physical fact of everything she was leaving behind, and the loss was as solid and loud and squalling as the ten-month-old on her lap.

  Then, because she couldn’t think about what was down there any more, she closed her eyes, and as the plane nosed through the clouds she took herself back to their very first journey north. She travelled it again in her mind, because maybe once she got there she’d be able to rewrite the ending and something – anything – other than this could happen instead.

  The plane banked, and the baby yawled and writhed and fought, but she was in the camper van with the windows wound down and the two of them singing James Taylor songs, warm Californian air on their skin. There was twelve hundred miles of highway ahead of them, and his hands were wide and strong on the wheel.

  They crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in a fog, talking about whales, and then headed onwards, skirting the wild beaches of northern California, into Oregon. A night on Cannon Beach, with their sleeping bags laid on the sand under improbably bright stars; he twisted a strand of sea-grass round her ring finger. The next day, they drove on, further north, into Washington State, and then they saw the sudden towers of downtown Seattle, the glittering arc of Puget Sound, Bainbridge Island and Whidbey hunched to the west. Rain closing in now, they chugged on, with the Olympic Peninsula rising on one side, the Cascades crimped on the other.

  Windows up, they found sweaters and blankets; coffee and cigarettes by the roadside waiting for the tow truck; a shared diner meal in the rain; a night in a garage forecourt, then – starter motor fixed – they drove onwards, crossing the Canadian border in a hailstorm. They arrived at the port just as the sky cleared. Lining up by the water with dive-bombing seagulls, and freighters unloading, they clanked on to the ferry and away across the water, bouncing off islands like a pinball, passing between cedar-dense mountains that rose straight from the sea like fins; skirting the shorelines – a white flash of a deer’s tail, a lumbering brown bear – rows of crowded pine, cedar and hemlock; a slithering sea otter glimpsed; harbour seals basking on grey rocks.

  Then there was Dean – Jonas suddenly more boyish – and Dean’s big boat; hours more through a hushed sea mist, talking about the research and the summer ahead of them. The big belching boat shuddering to a halt; the men rolling up their sleeves, disappearing, coming back oil-smeared with puffed-up chests. As they chuntered towards the island, the mist cleared to reveal a towering totem pole on the headland – the Kwakwaka’wakw tribe, the men explained – and there, on the very top, Max’inux, the sea wolf. It is fitting that a killer whale should mark the spot where her life began – and where it ended.

  *

  On that flight to England, with her breasts bleeding into her baby’s mouth, she felt the totem of sorrow lodge itself inside her heart, stopping the blood flow and messing up the beat. She could not change what had happened, but a part of her would always be there – out on the water, listening, watching, making notes, moving through storms and sunsets and defying the facts of her life.

  Chapter one

  It turns out that it’s my job to locate the birth ce
rtificate.

  ‘Dad doesn’t know where it is,’ says Alice, ‘and I’ve looked everywhere else so it has to be in her studio.’

  She looks at me across the kitchen table and we understand each other: she can’t go up there, and I can.

  It is late, near midnight; Finn is sleeping in the travel cot upstairs and I am heavy-limbed and numb. But she is exhausted too and we both know that going up there would be worse for her than for me.

  *

  Our mother’s studio – a grand name for an old box room – is at the top and back of the house. I push back my chair and make my way up the two flights of stairs to the tiny landing. I peek into my old bedroom first. I can see him through the netting of the travel cot: his messy halo of hair and the lunar curve of his cheek above his sleeping bag. I tiptoe across and hover for a second, listening. At eighteen months, Finn is still my baby, still small enough that lurking somewhere in my maternal mechanism is the question of whether he will continue to breathe when I am not with him. I touch his forehead. I touch the back of his hand. He is warm despite the frigid air. I fold my cardigan tighter, hugging it around my body with both arms, and I gaze at him; he is perfect, curled on his side, breathing steadily, warm and safe. After a moment I go back out and cross the landing.

  It is intensely cold up here. I hesitate, with one hand on the door. Then I take a breath and push it open.

  There is an electric heater against one wall and a radiator, but clearly neither has been switched on for a long time. I pull the cardigan tighter, and go over to the window. The blind is rolled up and my face wavers back at me, eyeless and hollow-cheeked. My hair is witchy and mad-looking; I probably haven’t brushed it for days.

  I lean over the desk and press my face against the glass until it freezes the tip of my nose. In daylight there is a bird’s-nest view over the houses, out beyond the village across the river and the water meadows. And under the stars I can just make out the road, whispering up the hill between the hedgerows like a secret.

  I pull back. There’s a bottle of jasmine essential oil on the fireplace, an oil burner and two beach stones the size of babies’ fists. There are fragments of beach everywhere – driftwood, pebbles, shells; a vase filled with sea glass; a knot of rope. Night creeps through the objects and the scent of my mother seems to bloom in it – jasmine and turpentine; salt winds and garden soil.

  The cleaner has spruced things up, but there are still sketches and paintings in piles all over the place. I have no idea what we are supposed to do with all this art.

  Some canvases are stacked on the floor against the bookshelf. The one on the top is the ruined West Pier seen from Brighton beach. The skeleton juts from the waves. There is no walkway to reach or escape it; it is just a rusting core on insect legs. There is decay and stolen gaiety in the structure; a feeling of lost lights and bandstands, ghosts of girls in swing skirts. Even in the murky light I can make out how angry the sea is. It occurs to me that my mother was a really good artist.

  A memory surfaces even though I don’t want it in my head. It was a very long time ago and we were standing on Brighton beach, just the two of us, watching a swarm of starlings seethe through the sky, switching direction this way and that, before vanishing through the ribs of the ruined pier like a cloud of smoke sucked into a vortex.

  ‘Why don’t they crash?’ I asked.

  She looked down at me. ‘They do it by intuition,’ she said, ‘and trust.’ Then she knelt at my level and grabbed the tops of my arms. ‘Kali, I need … ’ She was breathing fast, as if she’d run somewhere. For a moment I felt as if she were really seeing me – just me – and I swelled into something important. But then the familiar cloud drew across her eyes and that good feeling crumbled as she dropped my arms. ‘No. It doesn’t matter.’ She turned away and then she just walked off up the beach, calling sharply over her shoulder for me to hurry or we’d be late to pick up Alice from ballet. I ran after her, up the steep bank, but the stones slipped under my boots and it was like one of those dreams where you can’t go any faster even though your life depends on it.

  I flick through her other paintings, almost all abstract oils of the Seven Sisters, sailing boats at Seaford, pebbles at Beachy Head. All she ever painted was the sea – almost forty years of waves and boats and shingle and gulls, even though our village is fifteen miles from the coast, rooted in Wealden clay, with oak trees, bluebell woods, cow parsley, hawthorn hedges and the line of the Downs changing with the light and the seasons. All perfect subjects for a landscape artist; all stubbornly ignored by my mother.

  Her easel sits in one corner and there are boxes of charcoals and paintbrushes everywhere. Tubes of paint overflow from a wooden crate. Her worn black boots sit in one corner – but I can’t look at those – and her green silk scarf is on the back of the door. It is the same shade as her eyes. I always wished I’d inherited her eyes, rather than my own, a sort of navy blue that Doug generously calls ‘violet’.

  But I can’t think about Doug. Not now. I just can’t. Not while I am doing this. Since I found his phone and everything torpedoed, I have been unable to think about Doug at all. Even if I try to think about what it means, my mind shuts down as if a blanket has been thrown over that part of my brain.

  When I heard his voice earlier that day the fury was so intense that my words came out strangled: ‘I have to stay down here, and help with the funeral.’

  ‘But I’ll drive down – I should be there … you shouldn’t do this alone. You can’t.’ I heard the guilt in his voice.

  ‘No!’ I barked. ‘I don’t want you to come.’

  There was a second of silence. And then I hung up.

  All I wanted was to run – to go far away where none of this could touch me. He would have put my inability to speak to him down to shock or grief, initially. Maybe he’d even have been relieved, on some level, that I was staying in Sussex with Finn. With us away, he could work longer at whatever vital meeting or conference or lecture he had scheduled and he wouldn’t have to stress about being back for bathtime or feel guilty that I was doing everything again. Or perhaps he would take off, to be with her.

  But I can’t think this sort of thought. Not now. The timing of all this is horrendous. I try to breathe. All I want to do is flee. Every single part of me is saying, ‘Run’. I want to be anywhere but here; I want to be gone, far away.

  I have to focus and get this done. There is nowhere to run to. It’s so late, my eyes hurt, as if they’re shrivelling inside my head. I just have to find her birth certificate and get out of this room.

  Then, as if my thoughts have made it all the way to Oxford, the phone buzzes in my jeans pocket. I tug it out and jab ‘ignore’. He has been trying to call all night, but I can’t hear his voice, his excuses or, worse still, his confessions. I can’t face either the truth or lies. I drop the phone on the ground and kneel in front of the filing cabinet, wrench it open. The phone rings again and I kick it under the desk. It bleeps and goes silent.

  I am here to find my mother’s birth certificate. When I’ve found it I will go and sleep next to Finn, and I will wake up in less than five hours with my baby laughing and singing and bashing his fists on the side of the cot, calling, ‘Mama! Mama? Mam-A!’ And I will keep going; I’ll keep moving through the next day and the next because whatever else I have lost, I still have Finn.

  *

  The hanging files are surprisingly organized. There are health folders containing her NHS card, some information about iron deficiency and an ironic all-clear from a mammogram three years ago. There must be a stack of hospital paperwork somewhere. I hope I don’t find that.

  I flick through the files – bank statements, random receipts. But no birth certificate. I pull out a file marked ‘Personal’ and tip the contents onto the carpet. There is a Mother’s Day card with a love heart that I made from stuck-on sequins when I was little, and hopelessly trying to win her over – or make her feel better. There is a painting of the apple tree by Alice, aged te
n, far more accomplished than any of my efforts, and some more Mother’s Day cards – mostly from Alice. Then there is an old blue airmail envelope with my mother’s name on it, and an address in California. I recognize my father’s handwriting. It is careful and controlled, with each letter perfectly formed.

  I look at it. I shouldn’t. But I can’t not. I unfold the blue paper into a single, crackling sheet.

  It is dated around the time he brought us to England from California. I would have been about ten months old.

  My darling Elena,

  In just two weeks you will be here – I hope you still have the paper I wrote out for you, with the flight times. Kris will drive you to the airport – you have his number on the paper. But before you come, I wanted to clarify a few things since I’m not sure how much you could take in when we spoke before.

  Please know that I will do my best to make you happy here in England. I will look after you, always, and do my best for Kali. The house is just about ready for you both, but I know you will want to make it your own so I kept it all very plain – white walls, neutral carpet throughout. I hope you won’t find it too plain but you can do whatever you want to it once you’re here – curtains and furnishings and such. There is a bedroom looking out at the apple tree that Kali might like. I like to picture her climbing that tree one day.

  Please also know that we must stick to the agreement we made on the beach – we have to go forwards from now on and not look back at all. This will be difficult for you, I know, it will take commitment from us both, but it is for the best because time will heal – we must have faith in that. Time will bring forgiveness and healing. We will have a good life together, I will make sure of that.

  I want you to know that I do understand that it will take a long time for you to get over what has happened. But I do – fervently – believe that recovery is possible. And you must too. As agreed, we will not talk about this any more – for all our sakes.

  I think you’ll like it here in Sussex. It is a lot as you have always imagined England to be – the village is pretty, and there’s a small school for Kali when she gets to that age. The house stands right at the bottom of the main street where the roads fork. From our bedroom window you look down on the signpost and the roundabout, which is why I called it Signpost House. It is a proud Sussex Victorian – red brick and flint, original sash windows, well-proportioned rooms though smaller and less airy, of course, than the Californian properties we are both used to. It has a pleasant (though rather small) garden, which I hope you will enjoy. It is a fine place to start a new life.