Sister Page 3

  She was looking at my engagement ring, which I hadn’t thought to take off. “It’s mine, Mum.” I was absurdly hurt that she hadn’t noticed it before. I took the large diamond solitaire off my finger and gave it to her. She zipped it into her handbag without even looking at it.

  “Does he have any intention of marrying her, Beatrice?”

  Maybe I should have been kind and told her that Emilio Codi was already married. It would have fueled her anger with you and kept icy terror away a while longer.

  “Let’s find her first, Mum, before worrying about her future.”

  2

  The police film unit was set up near South Kensington tube station. I—the star of this little film—was given my instructions by a young policeman in a cap rather than a helmet. The trendy director-policeman said “Okay, go.” And I began to walk away from the post office and along Exhibition Road.

  You’ve never needed the confidence boost of high heels so I had reluctantly traded mine for your flat ballet pumps. They were too large for me and I’d stuffed the toes with tissues. Remember doing that with Mum’s shoes? Her high heels used to clatter excitingly, the sound of being grown-up. Your soft ballet shoes moved silently, discreetly, their soft indoor leather sinking into ice-cracked puddles and soaking up the sharply cold water. Outside the Natural History Museum there was a long fractious queue of impatient children and harassed parents. The children watched the police and the camera crew, the parents watched me. I was free entertainment until they could get in to see the animatronic Tyrannosaurus rex and the great white whale. But I didn’t care. I was just hoping that one of them had been there the previous Thursday and had noticed you leaving the post office. And then what? What would they have noticed then? I wondered how anything sinister could have happened with so many witnesses.

  It started to sleet again, the iced water hammering down onto the pavement. A policeman told me to keep going; although it was snowing the day you disappeared, sleet was near enough. I glanced at the queue outside the Natural History Museum. The buggies and prams had sprouted plastic carapaces. Hoods and umbrellas were covering the parents. The sleet forced them into myopia. No one was looking at me. No one would have been watching you. No one would have noticed anything.

  The sleet soaked the wig of long hair and ran in a rivulet down my back. Beneath my open jacket your fine cotton dress, heavy with icy water, clung to my body. Every curve showed. You would have found this funny, a police reconstruction turning into a soft porn movie. A car slowed as it passed me. The middle-aged male driver, warm and dry, looked at me through the windshield. I wondered if someone had stopped and offered you a lift—was that what happened? But I couldn’t allow myself to think about what had happened to you. Wondering would lead me into a maze of horrific scenarios where I would lose my mind, and I had to stay sane or I would be of no help to you.

  Back at the police station, Mum met me in the changing room. I was soaked through, shivering uncontrollably from cold and exhaustion. I hadn’t slept for more than twenty-four hours. I started to take off your dress. “Did you know that smell is made up of minute fragments that have broken away?” I asked her. “We learned about it at school once.” Mum, uninterested, shook her head. But as I’d walked in the sleet I’d remembered and realized that the smell of your dress was because tiny particles of you were trapped in the fine cotton fibers. It hadn’t been irrational to think you close to me after all. Okay, yes, in a macabre sort of way.

  I handed Mum your dress and started putting on my designer suit.

  “Did you have to make her look so shabby?” she asked.

  “It’s what she looks like, Mum. It’s no good if nobody recognizes her.”

  Mum used to neaten us up whenever our photo was taken. Even during other children’s birthday parties she’d do a quick wipe of a chocolaty mouth, a painful tug with a handbag-sized brush over our hair as soon as she spotted a camera. Even then she told you how much better you would look if “you made an effort like Beatrice.” But I was shamefully glad, because if you did “make an effort” the glaring difference between us would be clear for everyone to see, and because Mum’s criticism of you was a backhanded compliment to me—and her compliments were always sparse on the ground.

  Mum handed me back my engagement ring and I slipped it on. I found the weight of it around my finger comforting, as if Todd were holding my hand.

  PC Vernon came in, her skin damp with sleet and her pink cheeks even pinker.

  “Thank you, Beatrice. You did a fantastic job.” I felt oddly flattered. “It’s going to be broadcast tonight on the local London news,” she continued. “DS Finborough will let you know immediately if there’s any information.”

  I was worried a friend of Dad’s would see it on TV and phone him. PC Vernon, emotionally astute, suggested the police in France could tell Dad “face-to-face” that you were missing, as if that was better than us phoning, and I accepted her offer.

  Mr. Wright loosens his polyester tie, the first spring sunshine taking centrally heated offices unawares. But I’m grateful for the warmth.

  “Did you speak anymore to DS Finborough that day?” he asks.

  “Just to confirm the number he could reach me on.”

  “What time did you leave the police station?”

  “Six-thirty. Mum had left an hour earlier.”

  No one at the police station had realized that Mum can’t drive, let alone owns a car. PC Vernon apologized to me, saying that she’d have driven her home herself if she’d known. Looking back on it, I think PC Vernon had the compassion to see the fragile person under the shell of navy pleated skirt and middle-class outrage.

  The police station doors swung shut behind me. The dark, ice-hardened air slapped my face. Headlights and streetlights were disorientating, the crowded pavement intimidating. For a moment, among the crowd, I saw you. I’ve since found out it’s common for people separated from someone they love to keep seeing that loved one among strangers—something to do with recognition units in our brain being too heated and too easily triggered. This cruel trick of the mind lasted only a few moments, but was long enough to feel with physical force how much I needed you.

  I parked by the top of the steps to your flat. Alongside its tall pristine neighbors your building looked like a poor relative that hadn’t been able to afford a new coat of white paint for years. Carrying the case of your clothes, I went down the steep icy steps to the basement. An orange streetlamp gave barely enough light to see by. How did you manage not to break an ankle in the last three years?

  I pressed your doorbell, my fingers numb with cold. For a few seconds I actually hoped that you might answer. Then I started looking under your flowerpots. I knew you hid your front-door key under one of the pots and had told me the name of the occupying plant, but I couldn’t remember it. You and Mum have always been the gardeners. Besides, I was too focused on lecturing you on your lack of security. How could anyone leave their front-door key under a flowerpot right by their door? And in London. It was ridiculously irresponsible. Just inviting burglars right on in.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” asked a voice above me. I looked up to see your landlord. The last time I’d seen him he was a storybook grandpa—stick a white beard on him and he’d be a regular Father Christmas. Now his mouth was drawn into a hard scowl, he was unshaven, his eyes glared with the ferocity of a younger man.

  “I’m Beatrice Hemming, Tess’s sister. We met once before.”

  His mouth softened, his eyes became old. “Amias Thornton. I’m sorry. Memory not what it was.”

  He carefully came down the slippery basement steps. “Tess stopped hiding her spare key under the pink cyclamen. Gave it to me.” He unzipped the coin compartment of his wallet and took out a key. You had completely ignored my lecture in the past, so what had made you suddenly so security conscious?

  “I let the police in two days ago,” continued Amias. “So they could look for some clue. Is there any news?” He
was near to tears.

  “I’m afraid not, no.”

  My mobile phone rang. Both of us started—I answered it hurriedly. He watched me, so hopeful. “Hello?”

  “Hi, darling.” Todd’s voice.

  I shook my head at Amias.

  “No one’s seen her and she’s been getting weird calls,” I said, startled by the judder in my own voice. “There’s going to be a police reconstruction on TV this evening. I had to pretend to be her.”

  “But you look nothing like her,” Todd replied. I found his pragmatism comforting. He was more interested in the casting decision than in the film itself. He obviously thought the reconstruction an absurd overreaction.

  “I can look like her. Kind of.”

  Amias was carefully going back up the steps toward his own front door.

  “Is there a letter from her? The police say she bought airmail stamps just before she went missing.”

  “No, there was nothing in the mail.”

  But a letter might not have had time to reach New York.

  “Can I call you back? I want to keep this phone free in case she tries to ring.”

  “Okay, if that’s what you’d prefer.” He sounded annoyed and I was glad you still irritated him. He clearly thought you’d turn up safe and sound and he’d be first in line to lecture you.

  I unlocked the door to your flat and went in. I’d only been to your flat, what, two or three times before, and I’d never actually stayed. We were all relieved, I think, that there wasn’t room for Todd and me so the only option was a hotel. I’d never appreciated how badly fitting your windows are. Squalls of sleet-cold air were coming through the gaps. Your walls were impregnated with damp, moist and cold to touch. Your ecofriendly lightbulbs took ages to throw off any decent light. I turned your central heating up to maximum, but only the top two inches of the radiators gave off any heat. Do you simply not notice such things or are you just more stoical than me?

  I saw that your phone was disconnected. Was that why your phone had been engaged when I’d tried to ring you over the last few days? But surely you wouldn’t have left it unplugged all that time. I tried to cool my prickling anxiety—you often disconnect the phone when you’re painting or listening to music, resenting its hectoring demand for undeserved attention; so the last time you were here you must have just forgotten to plug it in again.

  I started putting your suitcase of clothes away in your wardrobe, welcoming my customary surge of irritation.

  “But why on earth can’t you put your wardrobe in the bedroom, where it’s designed to go? It looks ridiculous in here.”

  My first visit, wondering why on earth your tiny sitting room was full of a large wardrobe.

  “I’ve made my bedroom into a studio,” you replied, laughing before you’d finished your sentence. “Studio” was such a grand name for your tiny basement bedroom.

  One of the things I love about you is that you find yourself ridiculous faster than anyone else and laugh at yourself first. You’re the only person I know who finds her own absurdities genuinely funny. Unfortunately, it’s not a family trait.

  As I hung up your clothes, I saw a drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe and pulled it out. Inside were your baby things. Everything in your flat was just so shabby: your clothes were from charity shops, your furniture third hand, and these baby clothes were brand-new and expensive. I took out a pale-blue cashmere baby blanket and a tiny hat, so soft my hands felt coarse. They were beautiful. It was like finding an Eames chair in a bus stop. You couldn’t possibly have afforded them, so who’d given you the money? I thought Emilio Codi had tried to force you to have an abortion. What was going on, Tess?

  The doorbell rang and I ran to answer it. I had “Tess” in my mouth, almost out, as I opened the door. A young woman was on the doorstep. I swallowed “Tess.” Some words have a taste. I realized I was shaking from the adrenaline rush.

  She was more than six months pregnant but despite the cold, her Lycra top was cropped, showing her distended belly and pierced tummy button. I found her overt pregnancy as cheap as her yellow hair color.

  “Is Tess here?” she asked.

  “Are you a friend of hers?”

  “Yes. Friend. I am Kasia.”

  I remembered you telling me about Kasia, your Polish friend, but your description didn’t tally with the reality on the doorstep. You’d been flattering to the point of distortion, lending her a gloss that she simply didn’t have. Standing there in her absurd miniskirt, her legs textured by goose bumps and the raised veins of pregnancy, I thought her far from a “Donatello drawing.”

  “Me and Tess met at clinic. No boyfriend too.”

  I noted her poor English rather than what she was saying. She looked up at a Ford Escort, parked by the top of the steps. “He came back. Three weeks.”

  I hoped my face showed its complete lack of interest in the state of her personal life.

  “When will Tess home?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows where she is.” My voice started to wobble, but I’d be damned if I’d show emotion to this girl. The snob in Mum has been healthily passed on to me. I continued briskly, “She hasn’t been seen since last Thursday. Do you know where she might be?”

  Kasia shook her head. “We’ve been holiday. Majorca. Making up.”

  The man in the Ford Escort was leaning on the horn. Kasia waved up at him and I saw she looked nervous. She asked me to tell you she’d been to see you, in her fractured English, and then hurried up the steps.

  Yes, Miss Freud, I was angry she wasn’t you. Not her fault.

  I went up the basement steps and rang Amias’s doorbell. He answered it, fiddling with the chain.

  “Do you know how Tess got all those expensive baby clothes?” I asked.

  “She had a spree in the Brompton Road,” he replied. “She was really chuffed with—”

  I impatiently interrupted him, “I meant how did she afford it?”

  “I didn’t like to ask.”

  It was a reprimand; he had good manners, but I did not.

  “Why did you report her missing?” I asked.

  “She didn’t come and have supper with me. She’d promised she would and she never broke her promise, even to an old man like me.”

  He unhooked the chain. Despite his age, he was still tall and un-stooped, a good few inches taller than I am.

  “Maybe you should give the baby things away,” he said.

  I was repelled by him and furious. “It’s a little premature to give up on her, isn’t it?”

  I turned away from him and walked hurriedly down the steps. He called something after me, but I couldn’t be bothered to try to make it out. I went into your flat.

  “Just another ten minutes, and we’ll call it a day,” Mr. Wright says, and I’m grateful. I hadn’t known how physically draining this would be.

  “Did you go into her bathroom?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you look in her bathroom cabinet?”

  I shake my head.

  “So you didn’t see anything untoward?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  I felt exhausted, grimy and bone cold. I longed for a hot shower. It was still two hours till the reconstruction was on TV, so I had plenty of time but I was worried that I wouldn’t hear you if you phoned. So that made me think it was a good idea—following that logic which says your crush is bound to turn up on the doorstep the minute you’ve put on a face mask and your grungiest pajamas. Okay, I agree: logic is hardly the name for it, but I hoped having a shower would make you phone. Besides, I also knew my mobile took messages.

  I went into your bathroom. Of course there wasn’t a shower—just your bath with its chipped enamel and mold around the taps. I was struck by the contrast to my bathroom in New York, an homage to modernist chic in chrome and limestone. I wondered how you could possibly feel clean after being in there. I had a familiar moment of feeling superior and then I saw it: a shelf with your toothbrush, toothpaste, co
ntact lens solutions and a hairbrush with long hairs trapped among the bristles.

  I realized I’d been harboring the hope that you’d done something silly and studentlike and gone off to whatever festival or protest was on at the moment, that you’d been your usual irresponsible self and hang the consequences of being more than eight months pregnant and camping in a snowy field. I’d fantasized about lecturing you for your crass thoughtlessness. Your shelf of toiletries crashed my fantasy. There was no harbor for hope. Wherever you were, you hadn’t intended to go there.

  Mr. Wright switches off the tape machine. “Let’s end it there.” I nod, trying to blink away the image of your long hairs in the bristles of your hairbrush.

  A matronly secretary comes in and tells us that the press outside your flat has become alarming in number. Mr. Wright is solicitous, asking me if I’d like him to find me somewhere else to stay.

  “No. Thank you. I want to be at home.”

  I call your flat home now, if that’s okay with you. I have been living there for two months and it feels that way.

  “Would you like me to give you a lift?” he asks. He must see my surprise because he smiles. “It’s no trouble. And I’m sure today has been an ordeal.”

  The printed polyester tie was a present. He is a nice man.

  I politely turn down his offer and he escorts me to the lift. “Your statement will take several days. I hope that’s all right?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “It’s because you were the principal investigator as well as being our principal witness.”

  “Investigator” sounds too professional for what I did. The lift arrives and Mr. Wright holds the door open for me, making sure I get safely inside.

  “Your testimony is going to seal our case,” he tells me, and as I go down in the crowded lift, I imagine my words being like tar, coating the hull of the prosecution boat, making it watertight.

  Outside, the spring sunshine has warmed the early evening air, and by cafés white mushroom parasols sprout from hard gray pavements. The CPS offices are only a couple of streets away from St. James’s Park and I think that I will walk some of the way home.