Without Her Read online

  Trust me, she must have said to Philip, trust me to be a good wife, a mother, a companion, trust me to stay with you, trust me to be respectable. Trust me to arrive where and when I said I would, and not let you down. To me, her oldest friend, she had only said it once, that evening when I suspected her, and apart from that one time we had based our friendship on such trust, over years, over decades. She could trust me, but could I trust her? Could anybody, over a lifetime of questions left unanswered—did you sleep with him, where were you, where are you now?—trust another human being this much? Like Philip, I feel betrayed by her disappearance. Could she not have told me, I have a rendezvous, I had to get away for a bit, you know, you understand. I feel demoted, somehow, by her not having told me anything. And heaven only knows what Phil must be feeling—insulted as well as worried, angry as well as perplexed? Leaving someone, a husband, with no explanation must feel like such an insult to the person left: you are not important enough for me to tell you what I’m doing. In a way, an accident or even a kidnapping would feel less degrading: it would not be his fault. I wonder now if she has some plan, or project, that will let him know that life with him, this marriage, this car, this house in France, this use of what is left of her life, is not and cannot be enough?

  Plane trees flicker past us; we come down into the flood plain, turn at the T-junction, and go through the shuttered village where the few remaining shops are closed up for lunch, no one sits out on the street, and probably the church is locked. To reach the house, there’s a narrow unpaved road along the canal, with a bridge over it and bamboo growing thickly along one side, so that Philip’s big car hardly passes. It’s years now since they bought this house, at a time when it was easy for English people to buy houses in France and do them up, or have local contractors do it for them. Their house, on the outskirts of the village, built against one of the foothills of the Vaucluse, is an Englishman’s idea of what living in France means: living free of having to work at anything in particular, or be near a school, or even have a supermarket nearby. It’s a luxury house—not big, not full of expensive furniture, but a luxury in that most of the things that ordinary people need to live are not present. You have to have a car to live here, and the Internet of course, and someone to look after the place when you are away, and a gardener for the big garden, a pool-person for the pool, probably a woman to come in and clean. You have to have made your money somewhere else. You have to not care about local politics, which are mostly right-wing and nationalist these days, and you should be able to vote elsewhere. You have, in short, to be a rich, mobile foreigner with another place in your own country to retreat to, even if you also have a French bank account and credit card. But it’s a beautiful stone four-square house with a rose garden and honeysuckle and a courtyard with a paved terrace and a swimming pool and a mountain behind it, and a view of the further mountains of the Lubéron. They have made it very comfortable, considering that it was once a ruined farmhouse, and I’m always happy to step inside it and be told to make myself at home.

  The electronic gates open to admit the car, which crunches across the gravel. The garden is planted with oleanders, roses, lavender, and the table and chairs on the terrace are scattered with small leaves blown in the wind. It is where they have given parties; where we have sat out on so many evenings, drinking aperitifs. Today, it has an abandoned look: nobody has had time or inclination to sit out here.

  “Your usual room?” says Philip, opening the doors, and I pull my suitcase up the winding shallow stairs—“No, let me, I can do it”—to my room on the first floor with its view of the hill behind us. He follows, anxious. “I did ask Marie-Laure to make the bed, I hope she has.” The bed is smoothly made with clean white sheets and topped by a green and white duvet. The white curtains flutter a little in the breeze from the open window. The broad tiles under my feet are polished. The chest of drawers is oak, its top covered by a lace runner. A vase of peonies stands on the dressing table, their blunt heads not yet opening; they must have been picked this morning. Marie-Laure, I think. I put down my suitcase, and feel Philip hovering behind me. “Everything all right? Come down for a drink, and then we’ll have lunch. You haven’t had lunch, have you? I’m starving.”

  I smile at his almost absurd Englishness, the schoolboy enthusiasm and exaggeration, the way he longs to make me comfortable, make it all completely right. “I’ll be down in a minute!” And when I’ve washed and combed my hair, I go back down the wide oak staircase into the open-plan room they have made of what was a farm kitchen. How did Hannah end up here, I wonder once again. Or has she decided not to end up here, not to come back at all, but to take up her life somewhere completely different?

  I meet Marie-Laure on my way down, as she is taking off her apron and finding her car keys, to go home for lunch. She’s younger than I am, but has a grown family: her son works in a bar in Avignon, her daughter lives in Nîmes with a husband and children; she often shows us photos. Today, she looks worried, and raises her eyebrows at me, jerks her head slightly in Philip’s direction.

  We kiss on both cheeks. “How are you? Good to see you.”

  “Well, I’m fine, madame, but this is all very worrying, don’t you agree? That poor man, he is beside himself. What can have happened?”

  “I hope we’re going to find out.”

  “It’s wonderful that you could come. It will make such a difference. Men. They are lost without us. Now, I’ll be back tomorrow, but if you need anything, call me.” She slips into her light jacket, jingles her keys. Her new little red Peugeot sits outside in the drive, next to Phil’s car. She waggles her fingers at me as she leaves.

  Philip has poured himself a pastis and is getting food out of the refrigerator for our late lunch. I sit down on the white sofa with the Moroccan rug thrown across it. “Yes, pastis, that would be fine.” We are, after all, in the south, and I’m thirsty. I fill my glass to the top and the water clouds.

  He puts out the plates from the pottery in Aubagne—I went with Hannah to buy them, years ago, when we loaded the car with green and yellow Provençal plates and enormous pots. We sit at the glass-topped table and face outward towards the garden, the oleander and roses, sunflowers and clumps of lavender, and young olive trees with their gray-green leaves. The light is the familiar yellow light of Provence, and I find it hard to summon any anxiety as I relax into its warmth.

  But what will we do? Eat lunch, talk about Hannah, wait for her to appear? It’s as if she might come downstairs, smiling, at any minute. I realize that Philip has no idea, that he has reached the end of his imagination, because he has never for a minute imagined that she might leave him—probably, she has never given him cause—so what is happening now is the unimaginable, it is outside reality.

  “I don’t really want to talk to the police again,” he says. “They ask all the wrong questions and somehow everything”— he smiles apologetically at me—“gets lost in translation. She was the one who could always make people understand.”

  He has relied on her, for so many things. For his life, for it all working as it does, for the fact of his children, for the framework she has given them all. What nobody would ever have expected of restless Hannah: to become a faithful wife, effective mother, good housekeeper, keeper of the status quo.

  “I’m so glad you’re here, Claudia. It makes all the difference. I’m afraid I’ve been feeling terribly alone with it all, these last few days, and I’m sorry if that sounds very feeble. The truth is, I don’t know how to live without her.”

  I reach across and pat his knee, and he taps my hand briefly and swallows the rest of his pastis. “I mustn’t get maudlin. But with you, at least, I can tell the truth.”

  Part of my job here, I see, is to listen to him while he talks about Hannah, about his feelings, their life together, how she can’t possibly be dead or in harm’s way: to hear him out while he convinces himself. The other part is presumably to think of somet
hing we can do, some way to find her. That I have no clue how to do. But a drink and lunch is a good start, as I’m hungry again, having eaten nothing on the train. Marie-Laure has made soup, he tells me; we only have to heat it up. Like orphaned children, we are being mothered by a woman who comes in and cleans, makes soup, and then goes out of sight; one of the invisible helpers who keep life on track.

  Spooning up the soup he’s heated in a big copper-bottomed saucepan that must have cost at least a couple of hundred euros, he says, “You know her so well, Claudia. I’m sure you’ll be able to find out where she is, what she’s doing. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you’re here.”

  “I’m glad to be here,” I say. The soup is delicious, home-grown tomatoes, I guess, with basil from the herb garden outside. Nothing I have tasted in the last year has had this freshness and flavor; it’s like seeing a black-and-white film suddenly turn to color. “Now, tell me how life has been since I last saw you, how Hannah was, what you did together, and about this illness, what do you think it was?”

  It’s the last sentence I speak over lunch, apart from asking the occasional question; he has been waiting for my arrival to pour it all out. I hear his misery, his confusion, his embarrassment at feeling this way, but he does not sound angry with Hannah. He slurps his soup sideways out of the spoon, drinks often from both water and wineglasses, tells again the story he must have told to the police, to his children, but to me he tells it unadorned by the fierce self-control he must have been imposing on it till now. “She wasn’t on the train. I went to meet her. She simply wasn’t there, and she wasn’t on the next one either, and her cell phone was switched off, and what was I to do? I simply came back here, waited for a few hours, tried her phone again, and then called the police. I don’t know, Claudia; I have no idea. I am at my wits’ end. Thank God you are here.”

  I sit catty-corner to him and notice how familiar he is—that profile, somehow Roman—and yet how changed by his present tension. We have known each other, not well, but for all this time, because of Hannah. I don’t think I’ve ever been alone with him for more than a few minutes in all the years.

  “Well, I don’t know what I can do, but maybe talking it over may help. I’m sure she’ll come back, Phil. I know, it must feel awful. But I’m here to listen, and do anything I can.”

  I think, maybe it just makes a difference that I am another human being, to sit here, to hear him. Maybe that is all. For I don’t have an answer, either; I have no idea. We sit as if at some terminal, beyond which we can’t go. But we go on eating, drinking, crumbling bread between our fingers, as if this, life in its smallest details, is what must go on.

  7.

  Hannah and I used to spend weeks of the school holidays in each other’s houses. The strangeness of other families fascinated me. The way they lived, what they ate; the smells of their houses, their bathrooms, especially their bedrooms. It was like visiting another, alien tribe. Her mother wore ankle socks over her nylons; they sometimes had wine at dinner; her father used to leap up halfway through a meal because the gadget he wore at his waist had let him know that some child was dying. Often, he was not at breakfast because he had been up all night with a child patient. He seemed to be entirely devoted to other children, the ones in the hospital we never saw; but he was kind, if vague, and used to ruffle my hair and tell me I was a genius, on no evidence at all that I could see; and he’d kiss his daughter and wife absent-mindedly and go gangling and urgent, his shirt outside his trousers, tie loose, out through the door.

  At my parents’ house, Hannah was made welcome as if she were a refugee.

  “Are you a lonely child, really?” my brother Calum asked her when she first arrived. My mother, laughing, covering up, told him that the phrase was “an only child” and that it was nothing to be worried about. The boys, Calum and Chris, were careful and thoughtful around her, though, as if that first adjective “lonely” was really the right one. They could not imagine having nobody else, no other child to play with—partly being twins, I suppose, but also because everything they knew was to do with being one of a crowd. We, in our family, were a crowd, a clan, a gang, even if most of the time I wasn’t at home and they were four years younger: we existed plurally in a way that Hannah’s absent family did not. The presence of the latest baby, my year-old sister Joanna, even hinted that there might be more to come. Babies could appear when you were not paying attention, taking your parents’ time and devotion and letting you know that you were to get on with your own life now.

  I went to stay with her and her family, that first summer we knew each other, on the east coast, at Aldeburgh in Suffolk. There is something about that time, that holiday—but what? Hannah’s parents, like mine, slept in twin beds. Yet in Aldeburgh, at the house on the sea front, there was only one bed for them, a saggy double. I once passed the door in the morning and saw Hannah’s mother’s white breast emerge from her slippery-looking nightgown as she reached for a cup of tea that Hannah’s father handed her. I looked, and went on fast and silently downstairs. There were more aspects to people’s lives than you ever knew. There was the surface, what you saw every day, and then there was this secret geography of bodies; this ballet of flesh behind closed doors. I needed to know how other people really lived, beneath their surfaces: what adults did when they were alone. I sniffed up their secrets like a trained dog.

  Hannah’s parents spent a lot of time at the Yacht Club, where they had friends who sailed and kept a boat. For some reason, Hannah and I were never invited out on these trips. I think now, they involved drinking, and maybe flirting; laughing a lot with other couples, anyway, and coming home late to stand propped against the kitchen counters, talking over late cups of tea or cocoa, their faces flushed. But we were happy on our own, Hannah and I, striding together through the town, marching to the seawall, sitting there to gape at the vastness of water and hear the roar of the shingle dragged back down the beach. We liked our solitude, and were censorious to each other about adult activities we considered stupid.

  They gave us money to buy fish-and-chips suppers, and, sometimes, for the cinema that was rigged up for the summer behind the Moot Hall, where we watched Buster Keaton and Chaplin and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The sun went down late over choppy water, and nobody was left on the beach except ourselves.

  I took photographs with the box Brownie I had been given for my birthday; but they have been left somewhere behind me, those gray-and-white images with their thick white borders and crinkled edges, the two of us sitting on a slant wall in a photo taken by someone else, our feet in sandals, our legs bony and scarred, or Hannah alone, a strand of escaped hair blowing across her face, against the background curl of the sea. I wanted, even then, to preserve these times, to make something of them that would say more than words can, even without the fluidity of film. Even then I knew that you could preserve an image, make it reach out into the future; I took my undeveloped film to the chemist’s shop in a passion of anticipation, to see what I had made. I knew that already there was a gap between the photograph and the original image; in this gap, an ache opened that I did not know how to fill.

  She was just twelve, I nearly thirteen. The sea was beside us always and there were the long slow sunsets over the town and the marshes, the Moot Hall, and the alleyways where nets were stretched. We took our warm paper packets from the fish shop and carried them to the seawall, where the tide moved all the pebbles up the beach. Every evening, when her parents had gone out, the same expedition. Our feet slipping on cobbles, the smell of hot newspaper soaked in grease and vinegar; we made our way to the seawall and sat, dangling our legs, to bite up the scalding chips and break off pieces of battered fish in our fingers, as the sky darkened slowly over the North Sea and the lights came on one by one, and the lighthouse beam turned.

  We went in to that cold sea daily, hobbling over pebbles, the east wind rushing in over the land; afterwards we had hot baths, to wash th
e salt off, and I sat with my knees up against my chest, so that nobody could see I had breasts. She was flat-chested, her nipples flat as coins, like a boy’s, and she was afraid they would never grow. In the afternoons, we went to hit tennis balls against a wall, whacking them with old wooden rackets, for something to do. The sea and the sky were huge. I’d never seen so much sky. Just one summer, and then others, but it’s that first time I remember, when we hung out with our hair in rattails and our brown legs dangling, on the seawall, tasting freedom. We were outside normal life—outside the rigidity of school, the ordinary routines of home. We were at an edge, a margin, we were in some liminal space together that felt wild and free and unpredictable. There was no agenda for us, and we had none ourselves. We were guileless, because here there was no need for guile.

  My parents thought we had been neglected. I loved being neglected, I loved the fish and chips and the late evenings and the skies we watched slowly change and darken, the red stripe of sunset late over the marshes. I loved the space, the silences, the sound of the sea, and being up late in the evening. We didn’t talk much. There was only school, and we didn’t want to talk about that, and there was everything left behind in the land to the west of us, everything in this free place, this margin between childhood and adolescence, when we didn’t know who we’d become, only I was Claudia and she was Hannah, and we were sealed, sure, proud, and certain, little girls still before the chaos of puberty, and there were only my secret small breasts under my striped T-shirt to remind us that we would ever be anything else; so I hid them, I pretended. We sang, and marched up and down, and told jokes, and hit tennis balls against a wall. When it rained, we got out her father’s chessboard and she tried to teach me to play, but the moves confused me, her long silences as she contemplated a move were too long, and we resorted more often to two-handed Scrabble and Monopoly. We curled in the big old stained bathtub together, she at the tap end because I was the guest, and her mother looked in our ears to see that we had washed away the sand, and scrubbed our backs red. We slept in a high-up room in the rented house on the seafront, and the sound of the sea was in everything we did, even when we were asleep.