The Missing Marriage

Chapter 4

Laura was above her, barefoot, wearing pink and white velour shorts and a grey T-shirt, which had grass stains on the back and a Bugs Bunny transfer on the front – cracked because it was her favourite T-shirt and it had been over-washed. A light tan took the edge off the cuts and bruises running the length of her legs – legs that were swinging away from the branch Anna’s hands, hesitant, were reaching out for.

Anna wasn’t trying to catch up; she was concentrating all her efforts on keeping going – up; up – and she wasn’t barefoot like Laura. She was wearing red plastic basket weave slipons because she’d seen too many crawling things in the bark of the tree to want to go barefoot. The shoes had good grip – it wasn’t the shoes that were slowing her down, it was her constant need to peer up into the tree in an attempt not only to ascertain how she was going to get up it, but how she was going to get back down.

Laura didn’t need to do this – and only occasionally flicked her head upwards. She wasn’t interested in the views either as they got higher.

But Anna was.

Anna kept stopping to take in the Cheviot hills in the distance and, down below, their two tents pitched on the fringes of the tree’s shadow at the bend in the river. She could see Erwin, standing in the river with his trousers rolled up to his knees, fishing. Mary was lying on their green and blue check picnic rug on the bank, reading a book from the library – a wartime romance set in the backstreets of Liverpool. Anna could see the sun reflecting off her reading glasses.

The tree was oak.

They’d camped under it for the past two summers, but Erwin always forgot to mark the spot on the map so it took them a while to re-discover it each year. It was off the main road that cut across country to Jedburgh, down a single track road with four fords, and up a farm track. Anna had a feeling that Erwin forgot to mark it on the map on purpose because if they put a pencil cross on the Ordnance Survey map and gave the spot a grid reference it would somehow be bad luck and then it might really disappear. They’d found the spot by accident – if they left it alone, it would be there for them next summer.

The summer the Fausts took Laura with them and the girls climbed the tree turned out to be the last summer they’d ever go there, but they didn’t know that then.

Oaks make good climbers, but not even Erwin could reach the lower branches of this one so he’d driven into nearby Rothbury and bought rope from a hardware store, hanging it from the lowest branch and tying in knots for hand and foot holds. Once they were up, Laura started rhythmically swinging away from Anna, leaving her to follow.

Now Laura was at the top, sitting with one arm round the trunk that was almost narrow enough for her to hug. She was peering down through the tree, her hair hanging round her, too thick even for the sunlight to get through. Pleased with herself, she laughed suddenly and Anna saw Erwin, standing in the river, turn round and look up at the tree, his hand cupped against his forehead, shielding his eyes from the sun.

‘Come and look,’ Laura called out.

The sun was bouncing frantically off whatever it was she was holding in her hand – a penknife – then the next minute she leant into the tree and carved something into the trunk.

Anna started to climb again with renewed determination until a shadow – a large, loud, moving shadow – cut through the sunshine, and the branches at the top of the tree began to shake aggressively as if they’d suddenly woken up to the fact that two trespassers were among them. She heard shouting from below and, looking down, saw that Erwin was no longer in the river but on the grass, running towards the tree, his trousers rolled up at the knee still. Mary’s book lay open on the rug and she was standing staring helplessly up at the sky.

There was a helicopter hovering above them – it had come to take Laura away only Laura was too busy carving her initials into the trunk of the tree to notice.

Anna tried to call out, but the helicopter was too loud, getting louder . . .

She woke up suddenly, and thought at first that the sound was the wind turbines on the north harbour wall – then she remembered. The sound she could hear – the sound that had cut through her dream – was the sound of helicopters. It was Easter Sunday and they were searching for Bryan Deane because Bryan Deane had gone missing.

The light in the bedroom was dull, which made her think it was still early when in fact – grabbing at the pile of clothes by the side of the bed and shaking them until her watch and phone fell out – it was almost half ten.

Putting on the watch, she lay back on the pillow for a while, staring at the ceiling, then got out of bed, her legs heavy.

She walked to the window through the pile of clothes she’d dropped back on the floor and pulled up the blind. Pressing her forehead and the palm of one hand against the cold glass, she took in the rolling grey sky and sea, a fair part of which was taken up by one of the endless succession of super tankers either bringing coal from Poland or Norwegian wood pulp across the North Sea for the British press to turn into newspapers. Her mother, Bettina, used to work in the offices at South Harbour and Erwin, drunk, once told Anna that her father was a Norwegian from one of the ships.

It was dirty weather – squalid; nothing like yesterday – and the sea had an inhospitable rolling swell of about six feet.

A hard sea to survive in, Anna thought.

Through the glass she could hear the cabling on the trawlers moored to the quayside down below, ringing. The third trawler, Flora’s Fancy, was making its way between the pierheads and out into open sea past the wind turbines, which were turning today – all except the one second from the end on the left by the old coal staithes. There was always one that stood still and silent no matter how hard the others turned.

Just then a red Coastguard helicopter flew over the trawler and turbines, heading straight out to sea before turning and looping southwards back inland.

Anna went into the kitchen and poured herself a bowl of muesli – making a mental note to shop at some point – as another helicopter went overhead.

It wasn’t the Coastguard this time, but an RAF Rescue helicopter that would have come from the base at Kinross.

Then her phone started ringing.

She went into the bedroom where she’d left it – it was Laviolette, sooner than she’d expected. Forgetting what he’d said to her before slamming the door of the Vauxhall shut in the early hours of the morning, she asked quickly, ‘Has anything come in yet?’

‘Nothing. We’ve launched a full scale open search with MCA collaboration this morning. Conditions aren’t great, but they’re meant to be getting better. Boats have gone out from Tynemouth, Cullercoats and Blyth, and a couple of private fishing vessels have volunteered to assist.’ He hesitated as if about to ask her something then changed his mind. ‘But nothing’s come in yet.’

In the silence that followed there was the sound of furniture moving, a child whining and Laviolette’s voice, talking to the child, making an effort to soften itself.

‘I can hear helicopters – down the line. Where are you?’ he asked abruptly.

Caught off guard, she said, ‘My flat. I just saw the Coastguard and RAF helicopters go out to sea.’

‘You’ve got a sea view? South Harbour or Quayside?’

‘Quayside,’ she said, wondering how he knew she was in Blyth.

He paused, but didn’t comment on this. ‘I’ve got a feeling Martha Deane might try to contact you. If she does that I want you to let me know.’ Without giving her time to respond to this, he carried on, ‘Did you call Laura Deane yet?’

‘No.’ Anna wasn’t sure she was going to call Laura Deane.

‘Did she call you?’

‘No.’

‘Okay, well – we’ll speak, and don’t forget to call me if you get any visitors.’

Laviolette ended the call, and Anna, forgetting the half eaten bowl of muesli in the other room, decided to go for a run. She was about to leave the apartment when the phone started ringing again. This time it was Mary – Erwin had had a bad night, and wasn’t any better this morning.

‘Have you phoned the hospital?’

‘They say to come in, but he says he doesn’t want to. It’s his breathing, Anna.’

‘I’m phoning the hospital. I’ll see if they can send someone to you and if they can’t he’s going to have to go in. Does he have a patient number – reference number – anything I need to quote when I phone?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mary said, close to tears. ‘I don’t know any more. Don and Doreen have gone over to be with Laura – she still hasn’t had any news. It’s hard to believe –’ Mary broke off. The improbability of Bryan Deane’s disappearance had fractured her resolve with regards to Erwin’s cancer, and right now she wasn’t coping.

‘Smoker’s cancer’ was how her grandmother, Mary, had referred to the small cell lung cancer Erwin had been diagnosed with. After nearly forty years underground on twenty to thirty cigarettes a day, Mary wasn’t surprised, and implied that Anna shouldn’t be either. It was how women of Mary’s generation were used to losing their men. They hadn’t wanted to tell her, but –

‘But it might only be weeks, pet.’ Mary’s voice cracking ever so slightly.

It was the ‘pet’ that did it – not the news of Erwin’s imminent death, but the ‘pet’. Anna was crying; something she rarely did. Or at least, the tears were running, but she wasn’t making any sound.

‘I’m sorry, pet, but I thought you should know.’

Then came the hours of phone calls to the specialist and primary care team.

Erwin’s cancer was ‘metastatic’, the medical term for ‘hopeless’. There was no hope for Erwin. There was no point his having surgery or even radiotherapy because the cancer was no longer confined, but spreading. He’d been given the course of chemotherapy not as a potential cure, but to ease the pain of his ending.

According to the specialist, Erwin didn’t want any more chemotherapy so they were putting him on morphine tablets instead.

That was when Anna had left London and headed north for the first time in just over a year. She’d had extensive conversations with various cancer specialists and had driven up the M1 feeling vaguely determined and prepared. Mary’s phone call had enabled her to unplug herself from her London life in a way she’d been attempting but failing to for some months now, she realised.

As she pushed on at eighty miles an hour past Northampton, Nottingham, Leeds, York, Durham she wondered if this was what she’d been waiting for . . . an excuse to come back. But, come back to what?

When she pulled up in the late afternoon outside the council house that was her childhood home – number nineteen Parkview – Mary seemed confused, distant, and almost embarrassed.

She’d gone into the kitchenette to make tea and left Anna to face Erwin alone after calling out, ‘Anna’s here,’ making it sound like she’d travelled hardly any distance at all.

Erwin was sitting on the sofa in the lounge beneath the framed copper engraving of the Chillingham Cattle. He was watching Tom & Jerry cartoons, his mouth open – smiling. His clothes looked too big and his skin was grey. There were some specks of dried blood on his upper lip from an earlier nose bleed, and he was wearing a cap because of hair loss from the chemotherapy.

‘Granddad!’ By the time she said it, she’d been standing in the lounge doorway for what seemed like ages.

He’d looked up – reluctantly – from the cartoon, still smiling, still rubbing his hands together where the skin had gone dry between thumb and forefinger.

‘Alright, pet,’ he said automatically, as if she’d just come from upstairs or the kitchenette. He tried to engage in her, but he wasn’t really that interested. In fact, he was almost impatient, waiting for her to leave the room; the house . . . go back to London. The man who’d loved her all her life.

It struck Anna that neither of them wanted her here; that they were embarrassed about Erwin dying with her there. Alone, together, they knew how to behave with each other, and with death in the house, but they didn’t know how to behave with her there.

She didn’t know what to say and, leaving him in front of Tom and Jerry, went into the kitchenette, closing the door gently behind her.

Mary tensed, but carried on putting the teapot on the table next to the tea set that usually lived in the china cabinet in the lounge.

She sat down at the small drop-leaf table and poured their tea.

Anna noted, relieved, that the table was set for two.

Erwin, who’d never watched daytime TV in his life before, was left in front of Tom and Jerry.

‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ Anna said at last when Mary showed no signs of breaking the silence other than to ask if she’d had a good journey up, and how work was.

She finished her mouthful slowly, prudishly. ‘We didn’t know ourselves until recently.’

‘Well, why didn’t you tell me when you knew?’

‘What could you of done?’ Mary let out, angry. ‘What can you do now? What are you going to do? What are you doing here?’ she finished, exasperated and suddenly tearful. ‘He’s dying.’

‘I know,’ Anna said, angry herself now; raising her voice. Only she hadn’t known; not really; not until she’d seen him on the sofa just now in front of Tom and Jerry. The man who’d been a father to her, and who’d been so strong still even at the age of fifty when she was born; who she’d always thought of as invincible.