The Missing Marriage

The air cleared after that and Mary had been happy to take Anna through the small pharmacy lined up under the key rack – a gift from a school trip to Scarborough – on the kitchen bench beside the microwave: the slow-release morphine tablets, anti-inflammatory tablets, anti-sickness tablets and laxatives.

All the labels on the pots had been turned to face outwards. Mary was almost proud of them, and was waiting for some comment from Anna, who tried to think of something to say but couldn’t.

Instead she got up to pour herself a glass of water at the sink, and saw through the nets at the window that it was the garden where the cancer had taken its toll. The house was as still and immaculate as always, but the garden . . . Erwin’s shed was the only thing to rise out of the debris with any semblance of its former self. The plot that had fed the Fausts, their freezer, and many neighbours was laid to waste. The shed looked embarrassed – as though it was just about holding onto its dignity with the help of the crocheted curtain, white still at the tiny window.

Looking out at the garden, Anna finally felt afraid; afraid of what was happening here at number nineteen Parkview, and afraid of what was going to happen. Erwin and Mary had been there all her life; they brought her up when her mother disappeared off the face of the earth – grandparents who became parents again. She wasn’t losing a grandfather; she was losing a father.

Erwin had an appointment at the hospital the next day, and although they let Anna drive them because she was there, she knew they’d have preferred to go on the bus like they usually did.

They weren’t doing any tests – it was just a consultation to see how things were going to be at the end, as Mary put it, re-arranging the brooch in her scarf.

Anna was left outside in a waiting area, on a blue chair next to a water dispenser and wire rack full of cancer care leaflets.

Erwin and Mary had gone into Dr Nadafi’s room – Mary had long since got over her agitation at being assigned a ‘coloured’ man – and sat down in front of his desk. Before the door shut, Anna saw them taking hold of each other’s hands beneath the desk, and her heart broke suddenly for them.

The waiting room, which had been empty, soon filled with young couples, children, a teenage girl and her parents.

Unnerved, Anna stood up to get herself some water from the dispenser, her hands shaking, aware that people were staring. She felt them wondering about her, briefly, then went to wait in the corridor – standing against an old radiator whose heat she could feel through her jeans.

‘You didn’t have to hang about,’ Mary said when they came out, verging on angry.

‘For C-christ’s sake, Nan!’ Anna was angry herself now. ‘We could have got the bus home,’ Mary persisted. ‘I want to be here. Just let me be here.’

Erwin, looking stunned still from the consultation, said nothing.

‘I need the toilet.’ Mary set off down the corridor. ‘Where’s she going?’ Erwin asked Anna, in a panic at the sight of Mary’s retreating back.

‘Just the toilet.’

Erwin nodded as Mary called back over her shoulder, ‘Take him down to Out-Patients – we’ve got a prescription to pick up from the pharmacy.’

Anna started walking towards the stairs when Erwin grabbed hold of her suddenly and pulled her back, staring intently at her and chewing rapidly on the inside of his cheek.

It felt like the first time he’d even noticed her since she’d arrived the day before.

‘Whatever she says – I want you to be here, you know, at the end.’

She cut him off. ‘Granddad.’

‘Please,’ he insisted, keeping a tight grip on her arm, his breath rasping. ‘I mean it.’

He hadn’t really spoken to her until now, and, listening to him, she was aware of his accent – how German he sounded.

‘Not for me,’ he added. ‘For Mary. You have to be there for her because I’ll be leaving her alone.’

Anna put her hand over his, which was still gripping her upper arm. ‘You know I will. You know that.’

‘Hearing’s the last thing to go,’ he started to mumble, more to himself than her, ‘isn’t that strange? You’ve got to carry on talking to me even when I lose consciousness, even when you think that might be it. You’ve got to keep on talking because I’ll still be able to hear you.’

‘I will.’

He nodded and they carried on walking down the stairs, following the blue signs to Out-Patients.

Mary stood by the bedroom window at number nineteen Parkview, looking out for the nurse the hospital was sending them. Her poise of earlier weeks was shattered after having spent an entire night lying next to someone she was convinced was dying. When Anna, angry, asked her why she hadn’t phoned earlier, all she could think to say was, ‘What was the point?’ – unsure even what she’d meant by that.

‘Where’s the nurse?’ Mary said irritably.

Anna, sitting in a G-Plan chair that was as old as the house and still upholstered in its original Everglade green, shut her eyes. She held on tight to Erwin’s hand. His face was turned towards her, his mouth open – rasping. As soon as she so much as started to loosen her grip, his hand slid away from her down the side of the bed, and that scared her. The furniture in the room, like the carpet she remembered from childhood with its dense pattern of ferns, was still in good condition so had never been replaced. Neither Erwin nor Mary would have dreamed of growing tired of these things before they became threadbare.

Everything in the house had been earned and that’s why the television set was covered with a blanket to protect it from dust when it wasn’t being used; why the stereo was kept in the box it came in unless it was being played. Even now, the house was as clean and tidy as it had always been because for Mary and Erwin’s generation cleanliness and tidiness were the only things separating them from the lost and the damned: the drinkers, the fornicators, the unemployed and the hungry.

‘How was Laura last night?’ Mary asked after a while.

Anna hadn’t been expecting this. ‘In shock.’

‘It’s funny – you can’t have seen her in, what – fifteen years or something?’

‘Sixteen.’

Mary turned away from the window to look at her, pausing. ‘And yet, you and Laura, when you were growing up, you were like this,’ she said, twisting her fingers together in spite of the arthritis. ‘You were close to Bryan as well – at one time. He used to wait for you coming home from school – off the Newcastle bus, d’you remember?’

Anna did. She could see him now – waiting on the flower troughs outside the station, next to the Italian café, Moscadini’s. They’d walk back from the station down to Hartford Estate together, sometimes talking, sometimes not – Bryan in something barely resembling a uniform and Anna in her navy blue and red Grammar School colours, the beribboned hat pushed in her bag. She’d been glad of the company – and the protection – because it was a risky and unpleasant business getting home to Parkview in a Grammar School uniform.

‘He was forever in our back garden, drawing some miniscule insect with his magnifying glass.’

Anna stared at Mary. She’d forgotten that Bryan drew, and she’d forgotten all about his magnifying glass as well, which had a resonance for her she fought to remember, but couldn’t right then.

‘Have you got any of his pictures still?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Probably. Somewhere. I’m sure I put some up in the wash house. That poor child,’ she added, lost in thought and barely aware now of Erwin’s rhythmic rasping. ‘He was as good as orphaned – the Strike on one side and suicide on the other. It was Bryan who found her, you know.’

‘Found who?’

‘His mother – Rachel. What a thing to come home from school to. You won’t remember –’

But Anna did remember. She remembered because it had been a Monday – wash day – and Bryan had come running through all Mary’s sheets, hanging from the line she had propped cloud high, and Mary had yelled at him until she’d seen his face, and the dark patch on his trousers where he’d wet himself.

Mary took him inside number nineteen and ran a bath – and that was the first time Anna saw Bryan Deane naked; at the age of twelve, the day his mother died.

‘It was hard on Bryan – he was Rachel’s favourite. They said all sorts of things about Bobby Deane after that, but I don’t think Bobby ever laid so much as a finger on Rachel, she was just lonely that’s all – you know, that real loneliness; the sort you can’t escape from. Bobby was a Union Official – he was working twelve hours a day and more. They said all sorts about Rachel as well,’ Mary carried on, ‘about how Bryan wasn’t even Bobby’s because there was a darkness to him that none of the other Deanes had.’ She sighed.

‘Bryan?’

Mary nodded. ‘During the Strike, Rachel took to spending a lot of time with somebody Bobby sang with on the colliery choir. She liked to sing as well. I think it was just companionship, but it wasn’t something you did back then. Men and women weren’t friends. You stayed in your own home . . . your own backyard. You didn’t take to wandering, however innocent that wandering might be. There were rules – and Rachel was never very good at rules; she used to say she felt suffocated.’

‘So who was Rachel’s friend?’

Mary hesitated. ‘A widower, but a widower still counted as another woman’s husband if you were married yourself, and Rachel was. He was a safety engineer at Bates.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He died in an accident. You’ve got no colour,’ she said suddenly to Anna.

‘I’m not sleeping well.’

‘I can tell. That’s what make up’s for, you know – the bad days.’ Her eyes moved, disgruntled, over Anna’s running clothes – noting them for the first time – before she turned to look out the window again.

An optimistically red Nissan was busy parking on the street below, and a woman was getting out and glancing up at the house.

‘That hair.’

‘What about my hair?’ Anna patted her head.

‘Not yours.’

‘Whose hair, Nan?’

Short term memory loss and lack of concentration were meant to be side effects of the morphine they were giving Erwin, but if anything it was Mary who was suffering these symptoms on his behalf. The thought that Mary might be siphoning off some of Erwin’s morphine crossed Anna’s mind – and not for the first time either.

‘Laura could have had anyone with that hair, and yet she chose Bryan Deane.’

‘Or he chose her.’

‘Maybe, but if you’d asked me all them years ago who was most likely to end up with Bryan Deane, I’d have said you were. Don’t look at me like that. I used to see you together. You didn’t grow up alone. I was there as well, remember?’

She glanced at Erwin, whose head had rolled back onto the pillow, exhausted, his mouth open and the breath rattling through it still.

‘He stopped breathing last night, and I was so angry with him,’ she said, becoming increasingly distressed. ‘I was angry with him for making me that afraid. I’m angry with him for dying, Anna. I’m just – angry. I feel angry the whole time. Love hangs on strange threads,’ Mary concluded, making an effort to control the tears.

Anna left Erwin – and Mary – with the nurse, Susan, who was in her late forties and who entered the Fausts’ lives with fortitude, humour, the re-issued eau de toilette of Poison, and a portable oxygen canister.

Within minutes of her stepping inside number nineteen Parkview, normality had been restored and the terrors of the night vanquished. By the time Anna left, Erwin was breathing normally and Susan was sitting at the drop-leaf table in the kitchenette with Mary.

Anna got into her car and paused for a minute – pressing her forehead hard into the steering wheel before turning on the engine and driving out of the estate past the parade of shops where Mo’s used to be. Curious about the shop that had featured so prominently throughout her childhood, she parked the car.

There were only two shops still open on the Parade – a fish and chip shop called The Seven Seas, and the convenience store that used to be Mo’s – although this wasn’t immediately apparent given the caging across the windows on the outside of both.

There was no longer a post office inside Mo’s, but the security glass had been retained – behind which there was a till, an overweight girl in a tracksuit, a child, and most of the shop’s alcoholic stock.

‘Milk and eggs?’ Anna asked, not particularly hopeful.

‘Back of the shop – in the fridge.’

She felt the girl’s eyes on her as she made her way towards the back of the shop, which smelt of underlying damp and rotten lino.

Anna recognised the lino – it had been there in Mo’s time when there had been a baker’s, butcher’s, grocer’s, hardware store, chemist and hairdresser’s owned by Mo’s twin sister on the Parade. It was where all the women on the estate used to go to get their hair done, including Anna when she was small. She hated getting her hair cut so much that Mary used to have to bring one of Erwin’s belts with her to the salon so that they could tie her into the chair in order to keep her still.

She and Laura used to spend most of their summers walking between Mo’s shop, the park and home. Anna could even remember the way Mo’s used to smell – of sherbet, newsprint and hairspray from the salon next door. There had been a pink and green rocket outside whose presence it was difficult to justify given that nobody she knew ever had ten pence to spend on a rocket ride – the pennies they pooled together went on sweet things.

They would walk sluggishly, tipping back sherbet, towards the park the houses on Parkview overlooked to the rear. A park that had been in perpetual decline, and whose play equipment – erected on concrete in the hedonistic days before health and safety – was painted metal that got chipped and rusted, a fall off which resulted in broken teeth, fractured elbows, hairline cracks to the skull and tetanus jabs.

Anna would sit behind Laura on the metal horse as the sun moved across the sky, not speaking, surrounded by roses that never seemed to bloom, the horse’s rusting saddle dying their thighs a feint red – until the big boys crawled up out of the sewage outlet where they kept their stash of pornography and sniffed glue. When the big boys appeared it was time to go home, but if they were out of glue, and walked in a straight line still with eyes that weren’t red, they let Laura and Anna play chicken with them on the railway line that ran between the Alcan aluminium smelting plant to the north, and Cambois power station to the south – the power station whose four chimneys would have filled the horizon through her apartment windows at the Ridley Arms if they hadn’t been demolished in 2003.

Until the summer Jamie Deane, Bryan’s older brother, put his hand up Laura’s skirt and Anna and Laura stopped going to the play park.

The memory took Anna by surprise, and for a moment she forgot what she was doing and stood staring into the fridge at the back of the shop. She’d forgotten all about Jamie Deane.

‘You alright?’ the girl shouted out.

Anna jerked in reaction to this, getting the milk and eggs out of the fridge and walking back towards the glass booth at the front. Distracted, she pushed the money across the counter, took her change and was about to leave when she said, ‘You’re not by any chance related to Mo are you?’

‘Daughter.’ It was said without hesitation, and without interest – as if nothing she ever heard or said would change her fate; this included.

‘Say hi to her for me, will you? Hi from Anna – the German’s granddaughter.’

‘She’s dead,’ the girl said, without expression.

Anna quickly left the shop with an acute sense of depression – not only at the demise of Mo’s empire, but at her lineage as well. Mo herself had been a large, bright, singing woman with a sense of humour that could cut you in two.

The same couldn’t be said of her daughter.

She was about to get into her car when something caught her eye – a burgundy Vauxhall, parked outside one of the bungalows arranged in a semi-circle round the green that the Parade backed onto. Retirement bungalows – most of them in pretty good repair still, the gardens well tended.

While outdated burgundy Vauxhalls weren’t exactly unique – especially not here on the Hartford Estate – Anna was certain that the one parked in front of the bungalows opposite was the one she’d been in the night before; the one belonging to Inspector Laviolette.

She got into her car and phoned Mary.

‘You’re not back at the flat already?’

‘No – I stopped at Mo’s.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Milk. And eggs. Nan, you know the bungalows behind Mo’s?’

‘Armstrong Crescent?’

‘I don’t know. Nice gardens –’

‘Armstrong Crescent,’ Mary said again.

‘Do you know anybody who lives there?’

Mary hesitated. ‘It’s where they re-housed Bobby Deane. After he started drinking.’ She hesitated again, as if about to add something to this, but in the end changed her mind.

Chapter 5

Bobby Deane, whose face had been all over the Strike of 1984 – 85, was sitting in one of the few pieces of furniture in the bungalow’s lounge – an armchair that smelt of urine. The entire bungalow, in fact, smelt of urine, but it was strongest in the immediate vicinity of the armchair, which led Inspector Laviolette to the assumption that the armchair was the source, and if not the armchair then the man sat in it. Either way, the Inspector wasn’t visibly bothered.

Bobby Deane watched Laviolette with moist, alert eyes, brightly sunk into a swollen, purple face. He had no idea who Laviolette was, and couldn’t remember whether or not he’d spoken yet or how long he’d been in the house for – he only knew he was police. Bobby had no recollection of Laviolette’s arrival either – he could have been there for years – and not knowing what else to do, simply stared at the man in the green coat making his way slowly round the room, sometimes smiling to himself sometimes not.

Laviolette was smiling as he sat down on the microwave against the wall opposite Bobby Deane’s armchair – the only other available seating in the room – that no longer worked, but was still plugged in. ‘Off out somewhere, Mr Deane?’

The tone was pleasant, but Bobby knew what police ‘pleasant’ meant.

He stared blankly at Laviolette then down at himself. He was wearing a padded blue Texaco jacket, shiny with neglect. His eyes ran over his legs then down to the floor where they picked out something purplish among the carpet’s pile – his feet. Those were his feet down there, bare and without shoes.

He became aware of Laviolette’s eyes on his feet as well. ‘Sorry to interrupt – this won’t take more than a couple of minutes.’

Where had he been going?

‘Have you seen Bryan at all recently, Mr Deane?’

‘Bryan,’ Bobby echoed, thinking about this.

‘Your son, Bryan?’

Bobby looked down again at the anorak he was wearing, and remembered – briefly. He’d put the anorak on because of Bryan, but when was that? It could have been years ago – he hadn’t seen Bryan in years. All he remembered was sitting in the chair when he’d heard a car pull up outside. He’d gone to the window, lifted the yellow net and seen Bryan. He’d gone out into the hallway, slipping over something and bruising his left knee badly – he remembered the pain and the way he’d shouted out, ‘Just coming!’ as though Bryan was already in the house, speaking to him. Then he’d put the anorak on, and was about to open the front door when he’d looked down and realised that he didn’t have any shoes or socks on.

So he’d gone into the bedroom to look for some socks – checking out the window to see that Bryan was still there.

The sun had been bright – he had a vague memory of brightness – and the bedroom windows even more filthy than the ones in the lounge, but he’d been able to see Bryan’s big silver car parked on the road still and made out Bryan inside it. Only Bryan’s posture was odd – his arms holding the steering wheel and his head resting on it – and Bobby had known instinctively then that Bryan was trying to decide whether to ring on the door or not.

Then Bobby had sat down on the mattress in the bedroom and fallen into one of the black holes he was more often in than out of these days, and forgotten what it was he was doing. He’d forgotten all about Bryan outside as well. At some point he’d got up again and gone to the window, without knowing why. His subconscious had taken him to the window to check and see whether Bryan was still parked there. Consciously, however, he had no idea what he was doing standing at the window or what it was he was looking out for because there was nothing out there as far as he could see – apart from a large girl in a pink tracksuit, smoking a cigarette on the green just behind the shops, staring at his house. When was that? Only yesterday? Had he been barefoot in his anorak since yesterday?

But Bobby didn’t mention any of this, partly out of habit – because the man sitting opposite was police and it was his policy not to answer any questions put to him by police – and partly because he was already in the process of forgetting.

‘What’s that? Did you just say something?’

‘Have you seen Bryan recently?’ Laviolette asked again, aware that Bobby Deane’s vulnerability was making him uncomfortable.

‘Bryan’s my youngest son,’ Bobby said slowly, uncertain.

‘That’s right,’ Laviolette agreed. ‘Have you seen him lately?’

‘He’s got a little girl of his own,’ Bobby carried on, ignoring the question. ‘What’s her name?’ he appealed, half-heartedly to the Inspector.

Laviolette smiled patiently. ‘Martha.’

This time, the smile seemed to relax Bobby. ‘Martha. He brought her here once. It was a Saturday – he takes her to the stables at Keenley’s, Saturdays.’ There was spittle on his chin; the recollection was making him reckless – despite the fact that his audience was police – because he might lose it at any moment. There couldn’t be anything wrong in this recollection – surely grandchildren were allowed to go horse riding if they chose, and sons were allowed to visit their fathers without breaking any laws.

‘Did Bryan come yesterday?’

‘I haven’t seen Bryan in years. What was yesterday?’

‘Saturday,’ Laviolette responded, debating whether to be more specific or not. ‘Easter Saturday,’ he said after a while.

‘It’s Easter?’ At first Bobby looked surprised – then resigned.

‘Yesterday was Saturday. Did you see Bryan yesterday, Mr Deane?’

Bobby shook his head, running his left hand down the greasy chair arm and starting to pick at the foam. ‘No. He never came in.’

‘He never came in,’ Laviolette repeated gently. ‘So he was – where? – outside?’

‘I don’t remember,’ Bobby said, suddenly deflated. ‘I don’t remember anything.’

‘Mr Deane, your son’s wife reported him missing yesterday – Easter Saturday – and we’re trying to find him, that’s all. We’d like to find Bryan so that he can go home.’

‘You don’t know where Bryan is?’

The Inspector got up, sighing. ‘Well, if you do see Bryan – if you even think you see Bryan, will you give me a call?’

He gave Bobby Deane his card, waiting for him to read it.

Bobby sat turning it over between his thumb and forefinger.

‘Is it alright if I use your bathroom?’ Laviolette asked.

As he disappeared out of the lounge and Bobby Deane’s mind, Bobby sat clutching the air with his left hand. He was holding a piece of leather in his hands – reins, attached to a harness, attached to a pony he was pulling towards the sand dunes rising in front of him.

The pony, so sure of itself underground, was hesitant up here on top – it kept stumbling and stopping even though it was blinkered, bewildered. Bobby would have to pull hard then to get her to move, and yell irritably – until he remembered that the black and white pit pony was the reason for his own day up top as well, and then he’d give her neck a belligerent stroke. All the same, he couldn’t understand why she hadn’t gone running off – this was her one day a year up top. But then one day probably didn’t make the other three hundred and sixty-four any better, he reasoned – in fact it probably made them worse. This reasoning didn’t lessen his own disappointment, however. He’d so wanted to see the pony run. In the end, frustrated, he’d tethered it to a hawthorn and run up onto the dunes with the rest of the boys. He must have been – how old? – as old as Bryan’s daughter the last time he saw her. So he ran with the others up onto the dunes, cutting his feet, which were bare, in the thick blades of dune grass.