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.
15
“Should I have my solicitor here?”
He was surprised she knew of such a requirement. Then he remembered all the law and police programs on television that the housebound watch. He shook his head, thought of saying, “Not yet,” but said nothing. Was he eventually going to arrest her?
This Sunday morning she was no less pathetic. She hadn't been alone when he left her the evening before. He had insisted on her having someone with her before he went, and she had phoned her cleaner, who agreed to come. It seemed to him dreadful that the only companion she could find was a woman not particularly sympathetic to her whom she would have to pay. She wouldn't, of course, have said why she wanted the cleaner but only that she wasn't feeling well and was nervous about being alone.
