After more than a decade in London ‘eighty thousand’ had lost its meaning, but up here it was still hard to come by – still currency.
She cast her eyes instinctively over the puddles of architectural foliage in the front garden of number two, then back up at the honey-coloured façade, aware that she was looking for signs of Bryan in all this.
Anna hadn’t seen Bryan or Bryan’s wife, Laura, since she and Laura were eighteen when Laura Deane had been Laura Hamilton still. But she knew all about the Deanes and their house at number two Marine Drive – Mary had described it in such breathless detail – because Mary approved of the Deanes and the way the Deanes lived their lives in a way she didn’t approve of Anna.
At Friday’s Methodist Church coffee morning, Mary would talk loudly and insistently about her granddaughter, Anna, and while she was talking, still loudly, still proudly, she was trying simultaneously to fathom why it was Anna lived so far away, and why it was Anna lived alone.
She’d always been ambitious for her granddaughter, but Anna’s achievements didn’t translate into anything she – or anybody else at the Methodist Church coffee morning – understood. While Laura Deane had a four-bedroom house with a conservatory and separate utility room. She had a beautiful kitchen with an in-built microwave the size of an oven. People understood these things, and such recognisable achievements were given their due reverence by the Friday morning audience.
Unlike the Hartford Estate – where Anna, Laura, and Bryan had all grown up and where Anna’s grandparents and Laura’s parents still lived – Marine Drive didn’t often see police squad cars, but tonight there was one parked on the drive to number two, sandwiched between two other cars. One of those Anna recognised as belonging to Laura’s father, Don Hamilton, and the other one had to be Laura’s.
Don – like Erwin Faust – used to work at Hartford Pit, and when that closed down Don got work at Bates and Erwin, who was near retirement, got work cleaning the buses at the Ashington Depot. He was still referred to locally as ‘the German’ by the older generation because he’d spent most of the war as a POW in Camp Eden, Stanton.
As she got out of her car, sensor-triggered security lighting suddenly illuminated the driveway and front garden of number two and she saw Don Hamilton walking towards his car.
‘Don!’
He stared at her, not recognising her for a moment. ‘Anna?’
‘Nan’s just phoned – about Bryan.’
As if embarrassed at this disturbance of the peace his family was responsible for, Don shook his head, which had been sporting the same Teddy boy haircut for as long as Anna had known him.
He’d put on a shirt, pressed trousers, sports jacket and loafers – with buckles that shone under the security lighting – in order to face the unexpected tragedy of his son-in-law’s disappearance. It disturbed Don profoundly because he didn’t think things like this happened to people who lived in four-bedroom detached houses. He thought his daughter was safe from harm inside number two Marine Drive, but here was a police car parked on the drive where Bryan’s 4x4 should have been.
‘You didn’t have to come over.’
‘Don, it’s fine.’
Anna didn’t tell him she’d come to give a statement because when Mary phoned just after midnight, it occurred to her – beyond the shock – that she was probably the last person to have seen Bryan, that afternoon on the beach.
‘The police are in there speaking to Laura – asking questions.’
‘They’ll just be routine ones,’ Anna reassured him. He looked like he needed reassuring. He looked, in fact, as though someone had been stamping all over his face, and he was trying hard not to bear any grudges.
‘They sounded bloody weird to me – some of them.’
‘It’s not easy, I know, but they have to ask them.’
Don wasn’t listening any more. ‘They wanted to search the house as well.’
‘It’s just routine – standard procedure. It’s what they do.’
‘Well, I didn’t think it was right for Martha to hear all of that. I wanted her to wait in the car with me, but she wouldn’t. She said she wanted to be there when they were speaking to Laura. They asked her questions as well – Martha.’
Anna had seen the Deanes’ fifteen-year-old daughter for the first time that morning – dressed in riding clothes with a brown velvet hat hooked under her arm, hitting lightly at the side of her boots with a crop. A tall, shy girl, who had stood possessively close to Bryan on the pavement outside number seventeen Parkview on the Hartford Estate.
Don stared helplessly at Anna. ‘She’s in her pyjamas still. I drove her over in her pyjamas. Saturdays she stays with us – I take her to Keenley’s Stables.’ He ran his tongue nervously round his mouth. ‘Laura and Bryan have to work Saturdays, but I suppose it gives them a bit of time together afterwards – just the two of them,’ he finished, uncertain.
Anna gave his elbow a squeeze, surprised to find, standing next to him, that they were the same height. She’d always thought of Don as a towering man. ‘You get on home. This business with Bryan will sort itself out.’
She stood on the drive and waited for him to put the car into gear and reverse, then move off slowly up the street, obedient to the twenty miles per hour speed limit – and not because she was watching. Don was the sort of man who stuck to the rules even when there was nobody watching.
Just the two of them.
Anna had a sudden image of Bryan turning sharply onto the drive she was standing on, laughing, Laura leaning heavily into him. She saw them kissing and touching each other then Bryan switching off the engine and pulling Laura out of the car towards the silent house – Laura holding onto him as he fumbled with the key in the lock.
All three of them – Bryan, Laura, and Anna – knew what it was like to grow up in a mining community after the mass pit closures of the sixties through to the eighties and the Strike of ’84–5. What they’d seen growing up had given them a knowledge, and this knowledge had become an appetite for escape.
The two things everybody had plenty of in Blyth by the mid-nineties were despair and heroin, but Bryan, Laura and Anna – in their different ways – clung onto their appetites and watched for a way out. Anna’s appetite led her down to King’s College, London. Bryan’s led him to white collar work and a monthly salary, and Laura – well, Laura only had an appetite for one thing, and that was Bryan. They’d all achieved what they set out to, which was to make the unaffordable things in life affordable, and ensure that their children would never know what it was like to go hungry.
Just the two of them.
Anna crossed the drive to the front door, her finger pressing hard on the buzzer.
She’d been bewildered – when she first arrived a week ago – to find herself at this latitude again. It didn’t feel like her country any more, although it was unreasonable of her to expect it to after so many years away. Did she even want it to? She didn’t look like these people and she didn’t speak like them anymore. But she had given them her childhood and she felt, pettishly, that this should have at least entitled her to a temporary sense of belonging.
Maybe the fault didn’t lie with them, but with her – and anyway none of this mattered now.
With Bryan’s disappearance she was no longer in their world – they were in hers.
Chapter 2
It was Martha Deane