When Flora was in bed, the bag, repository of her information and memory systems, remained in its allotted place on the top shelf of her bedside cabinet, so that when she woke up she had only to stretch out a hand immediately to access her bulging Filofax; change purse; wallet containing never less than one hundred pounds in twenties, tens and fives; credit cards; cheque book; paying-in book; building society pass book; house keys; car keys … Car keys!
She ran down the stairs, yanked open the front door, and, without stopping to close it, charged across the shingle to the detached stone double garage. The up-and-over door was locked. Cursing she ran back into the house, to the board in the kitchen where the spare keys lived. She grabbed the bunch neatly labelled ‘Garage’ and hurtled back to the pale green metal door. She inserted the small chromed key and twisted it in the lock. There was a squealing sound mixed with a metallic rumble as the steel panel began its ascent.
The smell that drifted out as the door opened was of damp concrete mixed with faint traces of oil and petrol. There was none of the scent she had feared, the acrid reek of exhaust gas. Within, to one side, stood a red VW Golf, two years old, and as shining clean as you would expect Flora’s car to be.
She dashed over to it and wrenched at the driver’s door. It was locked. Her head thrust close to the spotless glass of the side window. She could see, with overwhelming relief, that the interior was completely empty.
Other than the car, the garage contained a ride-on motor mower, three bicycles leaning against the rear wall, and a slotted metal shelf unit containing tins of paint, a plastic container of motor oil and a small metal tool box. Bill was not the type for hobbies, and even here Flora had been a dedicated enemy of clutter. Catriona thought of the garage which gave on to the lane at the back of her own house. An ancient rickety affair of timber and corrugated iron, it was stuffed from floor to ceiling with junk. Her car lived on the street.
She had returned to the house relieved but still confused. Wherever Flora had gone, she had not taken her car, and could not therefore be traced by reference to it. The cavernous spaces of the Old Mill’s principal rooms were as equally, blandly uninformative as to the fate of its chatelaine.
In the kitchen, sparkling granite work-surfaces, gleaming high-tech laminate cupboards up to the ceiling and shiny stainless steel appliances reflected only Catriona’s own pale, puzzled, anxious features. There were no unwashed pots. No jars or packets left out. The dishwasher was empty. The rubbish bin contained only a clean plastic liner. In anyone else, Catriona for instance, this absence of clutter and detritus might have seemed abnormal, but for Flora, this hospital-like functionalism was quite usual. Catriona had often joked with her sister that the Old Mill was the only place where one might literally eat one’s dinner off the floor.
Even beside the huge American fridge-freezer, at the table that Flora used as a sort of housekeeper’s desk, where there was a cordless telephone and a pin-board on the wall, there was no sign of anything other than routine domesticity. The message pad was blank. The cards stuck on the board were of tradesmen and local services. There were typed lists of numbers of friends and acquaintances. A copy of Charlotte’s lesson and homework timetable. A school bus schedule. Exactly what one could find in any bourgeois household anywhere in the country.
The other downstairs rooms – the vast, double-height, galleried sitting room; the dining room with its antique mahogany table at which Flora and Bill had given their elaborate dinner parties; Bill’s study with its bookshelves containing weighty scientific tomes, series of periodicals and digests, its shut-down computer and the satellite receiver and television on which Bill could watch sport from round the world, round the clock – they were also all clean, tidy, and orderly.
Only in Charlotte’s dormer-windowed bedroom on the top floor had there been anything approaching disorder. But even there, amidst the spilled stacks of CDs and the books scattered on the floor, the daughter was enough like her mother for it to show far more than in most girls her age. The single bed was neatly made. Her soft toys stared down in an orderly row from the top of the tallboy. The books on the shelves were in alphabetical order by author. On her desk, pens and crayons were gathered together in a jar. Her computer had been shut down. Underneath the combined TV and VCR stood a labelled row of videotapes.
It had been only as she stood in the doorway of this room – full of the expensive tools of modern materialist culture, yet redolent of that vulnerable innocence which even the most outwardly mature and sophisticated child carries at their heart – that Catriona’s tears began to flow. How, if the worst had happened, could she break it to Charlotte? Would she ever recover from such a blow? Desperately she had hoped that Flora would return, that this was only a passing episode.
In that hope there was some justification. The only clue as to Flora’s intentions that had emerged from Catriona’s search of the Old Mill was that Flora appeared to have taken her handbag. The dead need no luggage. If Flora had walked out of her house, in whatever clothes she stood up in, intending to go through with her suicide, but wishing to end her life in the countryside she loved, perhaps even with the fatal drug at that moment coursing through her veins, then surely even she would have regarded herself as free from the need to burden herself with earthly possessions. She could have gone without even a handful of coins to pay the ferryman across the infernal river. She would not have needed her handbag.
As she stood in the hall, ready to leave, Catriona stared up into the shadows where the staircase climbed. Aloud, she begged: ‘Please, Flora. Wherever you are. Please come home.’ But the silent empty house had absorbed her words, returning not the faintest echo.
For four days, she went about her normal life. The iron discipline ineluctably imposed by her rational nature caused her to function with her usual efficiency, and in fact she took a kind of pleasure in her ability to subdue the turbulence of her feelings beneath a mask of confidence. Morning, afternoon and evening, on every one of those days, she had telephoned the Gloucestershire number in case Flora should have returned. Every morning she had waited, in excruciating suspense, for the arrival of the post. Every evening, the first thing she rushed to do when she got back home was to check her answering machine.
For four days of grief and bitterness, she had considered what to do. Should she get in touch with Bill at his conference? If so, what should she tell him? The truth?
And what was that? Flora had threatened suicide, no, had stated in so many words how and when she was going to kill herself. That much her letter made plain. But then he would inevitably want to know about the contents of the letter, about Flora’s reasons for taking this extreme step, reasons about which hitherto he knew nothing. She could not, would not explain those to him. Whether to do that had been Flora’s choice, and she had chosen not to share her past – and thus her sister’s past – with the man with whom she shared her life, sparing him the anguish and the burden of that knowledge. Catriona, who shared her life with no one, had never been faced with that decision, had determined never to be faced with it. She could certainly never contemplate breaching a twenty-four-year wall of silence to Bill of all people, a man to whom she was not in the least close, whom she neither liked, nor trusted.
But the truth was also that there was as yet no body. And without a body there could have been no suicide. And without a suicide, there could only be an absence. But what was the nature of that absence? Had Flora thought better of what she had intended and simply gone away in distress? Would she return in a manner that made it clear that the idea of suicide was merely an episode, a fugue that had passed? In that event, the content of the letter was in the nature of a trust which it was incumbent on Catriona not to break, certainly not to a man who might react with anger and bitterness, a man who might reject her if he knew.
There was another explanation: that Flora’s departure was intended to be permanent. That she had deliberately abandoned Bill, Charlotte and Catriona. That somewhere she was adopting a new identity. That in that new life, she would no longer be Flora Jesmond, née Turville, but someone else entirely. Catriona shuddered at this thought.
Would she, could she have done that? Catriona then really would be entirely alone in the