Near And Dear Page 6

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘While you’re telling them all about it, he’ll turn up.’

  ‘I’ll murder him when he does!’ said Jane. ‘For getting me into this state.’

  ‘He’ll have been held up . . . got involved somewhere,’ said Marie. ‘You know what men are like, they get talking and forget the time.’

  ‘I’ve phoned all his usual drinking haunts and no one’s seen him.’

  ‘He’ll be propping up a bar somewhere, though, you can bet your life on it, especially as he hasn’t got the car with him,’ said Marie, keeping her mood light so as not to alarm Jane, though she genuinely believed there was no cause to worry at this stage. She was annoyed with her brother for causing his wife such anxiety, though. He’d made Jane far too dependent on him, which made her panic when he wasn’t around. ‘He was probably feeling a bit down because the insurance money hasn’t come through and decided to go on a bender. He’ll be back when he’s sobered up.’

  Loyalty to Mick prevented Jane from telling Marie the truth about the insurance money.

  ‘He’s never been out of touch for this long before,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, well, he’s been under a strain since the fire, hasn’t he?’ Marie pointed out. ‘It’s changed him. The way he carried on at Davey’s birthday party is proof of that.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Why don’t you make yourself a nice cup of coffee and watch the telly, love?’ suggested Marie. ‘It might help to take your mind off things.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Give it a try. It’ll calm you down and help you to sleep.’

  ‘Sleep . . . you must be joking!’

  ‘The best thing you can do is go to bed at your usual time and forget about him, Jane,’ Marie strongly advised.

  ‘How can I?’

  ‘Relax. You know Mick. He’ll be there beside you in the morning, large as life and sleeping off a giant hangover. ’

  ‘You could be right, I suppose,’ said Jane, sounding doubtful.

  ‘He’ll be there,’ said Marie. ‘I know my brother, he’ll come home when he’s ready.’

  Jane didn’t go to bed. She wandered around downstairs, in and out of the silent rooms, then sat rigid in an armchair waiting for him, every creak inside the house and rustling sound outside jarring her nerves. When tension made it impossible for her to sit still, she got up and stood by the window, staring out into the avenue at the dark shadowy trees swaying gently in the breeze in the pale glow of the street lights. The beauty of the night with its starry sky and pearly moon only added to her pain as she stood there, aching to see Mick striding towards the house and silently begging the telephone to ring.

  In one way time seemed to stand still as she waited for the silence of the night to end. But every hour that passed without news, passed too quickly. Mick wouldn’t stay out this long without contacting her unless something was terribly wrong.

  When the sky lightened with the dawn, Jane knew she could no longer pretend that this was an ordinary situation. With fear and desolation in her heart, she telephoned the police.

  ‘He could be dead or dying in a ditch somewhere,’ she told a policeman that same afternoon, her nerves in shreds after what had been the most terrible day of her life.

  ‘Try not to let your imagination run away with you, Mrs Parker.’

  ‘It’s difficult not to!’

  ‘I know,’ he said sympathetically. ‘But getting into a panic won’t help anyone.’

  Policemen had been coming and going all day to keep her informed. Every time Jane saw a uniform she braced herself for the worst. But there had been no news of Mick at all. They were searching the neighbourhood, apparently, and the Chiswick police were looking for him in the Berrywood Estate area. But they had been honest with her and admitted that it was a very difficult task, finding a missing person in a place as heavily populated as London.

  She had answered so many personal questions about her life with Mick, she was beginning to think the police suspected her of doing away with him. Having not slept at all the previous night, she couldn’t think straight by now and her eyes and head were sore. Her legs were aching, too, because she was too tense to sit down for any length of time and had been walking about aimlessly for hours.

  Marie was looking after the children. Jane had taken them to her place straight from nursery school to protect them from the drama here at home. Her sister-in-law had offered to have them for the night but Jane thought they needed the security of their mother’s presence. Eddie was bringing them home later on because Jane was afraid to leave the house in case there was some news.

  ‘Are you sure he hasn’t just, er . . . left?’ the policeman was saying.

  ‘There isn’t another woman, if that’s what you’re getting at.’

  ‘I wasn’t . . . not especially.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. But he might just have gone off. You said he’d been under stress since the fire, mentioned finding tranquillisers . . .’

  ‘If my husband were alive and well, he’d have been in touch with me,’ she stated categorically.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I know so. He would never just go off and leave me and the children . . . we’re his whole life. He wouldn’t have me worrying like this if he was all right.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time a man has left home without any word of warning,’ said the policeman, meaning to be kind and keep things in perspective because the lady’s imagination seemed to be running riot. ‘It happens every day . . . a chap goes out for a packet of fags and doesn’t come back.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Jane, brushing her tired brow with her hand. ‘My husband and I are very close. We’ve been together since we were teenagers and we don’t have any marital problems.’

  ‘Even so . . . sometimes things get too much for people and they feel the need to go away for a while. Often they turn up after a few days,’ said the policeman, wanting to reassure her. But this case had all the classic signs of a straightforward desertion. In these cases the abandoned party often had no idea, or didn’t want to admit, that anything was wrong with their marriage.

  ‘Something’s happened to him, I know it has,’ said Jane, her voice quivering with emotion. ‘You have to find him . . . please.’

  ‘We’re doing everything we possibly can, my dear,’ he said patiently.

  ‘For how long will you go on looking?’ she asked, picking at her finger-nails nervously.

  ‘Until we think there’s no point in continuing,’ he replied. ‘But your husband will be put on the missing persons’ list so he won’t be forgotten.’

  She moistened her lips which were dry and chapped.

  ‘You can’t call off the search!’ she declared, her voice rising hysterically, anguish making her unreasonable. ‘It’s your job to find him. It’s our taxes that pay your wages.’

  ‘I’m aware of that. But we don’t have unlimited manpower, ’ he explained calmly. ‘There are other cases to be attended to. We can only give this case priority for so long.’

  ‘Yes, of course, I’m sorry,’ she said, holding her throbbing head.

  ‘Try not to worry, Mrs Parker. Our chaps are out there looking for him as we speak,’ said the policeman, moving towards the door. ‘We’ll let you know as soon as we have any news.’

  ‘Thank you, you’re very kind,’ she said, seeing him out.

  When Eddie brought the children back, they wanted to know when their daddy was coming home.

  ‘When he’s finished the job he’s doing in another place,’ fibbed Jane, catching Eddie’s eye and detecting a hint of disapproval.

  ‘What should I have said to them?’ she asked as he joined her for a cup of tea in the kitchen while the children played in the garden on this warm evening. ‘That I’ve no idea where their father is . . . that he’s probably lying dead somewhere?’

  Eddie was a down-to-earth type of man, thickset with straight bro
wn hair and honest grey eyes. He looked grave because he was worried about Jane and the children. He’d never had any time for his wife’s brother. Mick Parker was too fond of himself for Eddie’s liking.

  ‘No, of course not, but . . .’

  ‘But?’

  He hated to be harsh with Jane but thought that for her own sake she ought to face up to the most likely explanation for Mick’s disappearance. There was no point in deluding herself.

  ‘Shouldn’t you prepare yourself and them for . . . the other alternative?’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That he’s simply walked out and won’t be coming back.’

  ‘Oh, no, Eddie,’ she said with a vigorous shake of the head. ‘Mick would never do a thing like that. You’re as bad as the police. That’s what they’ve been suggesting.’

  ‘It must have occurred to you?’

  ‘Not for a moment,’ said Jane, and it was true. ‘I’m surprised you can even think such a thing . . . you know how close Mick and I have always been?’

  ‘Yes, I do know that.’

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘I can look at the situation objectively,’ he said. ‘You can’t and neither can Marie because she and Mick have always been so close.’

  ‘And the situation as you see it is . . . ?’

  ‘Well, Mick is young and healthy so he isn’t likely to have dropped down dead somewhere. And if he’d been in an accident or been taken ill the hospitals would know about it. Even if he has no identification on him, they’d know from the description you’ve given the police. That leaves murder and we both know that really is delving into the realms of fantasy. So what else is there except desertion?’

  ‘Okay, Eddie, I accept you have a point,’ Jane conceded. ‘But why would he leave us?’

  ‘I don’t know, Jane,’ he replied gently. ‘I really don’t know.’

  The next morning, while the children were at nursery school, Jane had a visit from Mick’s bank manager. Having been unable to contact Mick by telephone, he had decided on a personal visit because of the serious nature of this business. Jane had been too distracted to do more than tell callers that Mick wasn’t at home when she’d answered the phone this past couple of days. The last thing on her mind was his funding for the new business.

  But when she admitted the awful truth to the bank manager, that Mick had gone missing, he was honest with her too. He told her that the bank could no longer support her husband. As from today his bank account would be frozen - no more payments would be made, no more cheques honoured.

  In her husband’s absence Jane was thoroughly enlightened about the parlous state of his finances. The bank manager had no choice since she was about to become homeless and destitute.

  For a long time after he’d left, she sat by the french windows, staring into the garden and trying to make the dreadful news sink in, too stunned to move. She cast her eye over the pretty patio fringed with potted geraniums, the neat lawns edged with roses and marigolds, all tended by a gardener. She glanced around the expensively furnished room and through the wide archway to the dining room where a polished suite stood resplendent, a blade of sunlight striking the solid silver candelabra at the table’s centre.

  None of this had ever been theirs. It all belonged to people foolish enough to lend her husband money. The man she had so admired for having the courage and tenacity to better himself had proved to be of no real substance, so greedy for the glory of material success that he’d been spending money he didn’t have on the strength of a business he hadn’t even bothered to insure! Even if the fire hadn’t happened, they would have lost all of this eventually because he was hopelessly over committed. The bank manager had been very definite about that.

  It was the deceit that hurt. The fact that he’d lied to her even when he’d known they were on the brink of disaster. Most painful of all was the fact that he’d left her to discover the truth in such a humiliating way and to face the problems alone.

  There must be another explanation, her heart told her. Mick would never be that cowardly. Perhaps he was trying to put things right and would be back when he’d done so? But she knew she was clutching at straws. The man she had thought she’d known so well now seemed like a stranger to her.

  No wonder he was on tranquillisers! He’d known how close they were to losing everything and had not been man enough to tell her. But he wouldn’t have lost her, he must have known that. She’d already told him it wasn’t the money that mattered to her, just him and the children. No matter how great the hardship, there was nothing she couldn’t face with Mick by her side.

  But he wasn’t here. He’d known how much she loved him and hadn’t cared enough to stay and see this through with her. As agonising as it was, she forced herself to face up to the truth: that Mick had run away from troubles of his own making and wasn’t coming back.

  After years of protecting her so completely, he’d gone without a word. Left her feeling frail and helpless without him. That was his gift to her - total vulnerability. She hated him for that. But she hated him even more for leaving his children. How could a man who had professed to love his family do a thing like that?

  A sudden memory surfaced with such clarity it startled her. It was so vivid she could smell his spicy aftershave and taste the tang of his exotic cigarettes when he’d kissed her before going out on the evening of the fire, the night that had proved to be such a watershed. He’d been singing the Beatles hit ‘We Can Work It Out’ as he’d gone out of the door, she remembered it well. That was the last time they’d been happy.

  Recalled to the present by the realisation that it was time to collect the children from nursery school, she wiped the tears from her eyes and left the house, painfully aware that her pleasant daily routine was at an end. Along with everything else they had enjoyed in Maple Avenue, expensive luxuries such as nursery school were no longer available to the Parker family.

  There were fresh tears in her eyes as she greeted her children, her love for them even stronger in the knowledge that their father had abandoned them. Deserted and vulnerable she may be but she was all Davey and Pip had.

  Somehow she had to find the strength to bring them up alone and make a good life for them. She bent down and held them close, feeling their soft skin against hers as she put her face to theirs. Then she helped them into the car and headed for home, to the beautiful house they would soon be forced to leave.

  Chapter Four

  ‘Stop bothering your granddad, you two,’ commanded Jane, hurrying into her father’s living room from the kitchen, having perceived a definite note of irritability in his response to the children’s relentless efforts to capture his interest. ‘He’s trying to watch the telly.’

  ‘Will you play a game of I-spy with us, Granddad?’ asked Davey, disobedient in his dogged pursuit of attention.

  ‘Not now, son,’ said Joe, looking harassed because he had just got home from work and was hoping for a peaceful half-hour in his armchair to watch the early-evening news.

  ‘Oh, please, Granddad!’ Pip chimed in.

  ‘No,’ said Jane’s father more sharply. ‘Now, please be good children and go and amuse yourselves while I watch the news.’

  ‘Come into the kitchen with me while I get the supper,’ intervened Jane, riddled with guilt for having disrupted her father’s life by moving in with him, and exhausted from constantly being on edge about the children’s destroying his much-needed relaxation.

  ‘I wanna go outside to play,’ declared Davey in recalcitrant mood, lingering by his grandfather’s armchair.

  ‘You know very well you can’t do that,’ replied Jane through clenched teeth. ‘You’ve been living here long enough to know that Granddad doesn’t have a garden. So go and get something to play with and come in the kitchen with me.’

  ‘I wanna play in the street!’

  ‘No, Davey.’

  ‘We wanna go outside,’ whined Pip, uniting with her brother against authority. ‘There’s nothing
to do in here.’

  ‘You are not going out,’ said Jane, clinging tenaciously to her overtaxed patience.

  ‘Why?’ asked Pip.

  ‘Because of the traffic. It’s too dangerous for you to play out there. I’ve told you a hundred times . . .’

  ‘Other children play out there, we’ve seen them,’ announced Davey knowingly.

  ‘They’re older than you.’

  ‘Not all of them.’

  ‘Some of them are smaller than us,’ argued Pip petulantly.

  Jane was so tense, her shoulders ached and her throat was constricted. She could understand her father’s being tetchy. It couldn’t be easy to adjust to the noise and exuberance of young children about the place at his age, especially in a small flat like this one. But she felt sorry for Davey and Pip too, being so restricted after what they’d been used to. The upheaval had certainly taken its toll on their behaviour. They never used to be this difficult.

  ‘You are not playing in the street,’ she hissed at them. ‘And I don’t want to hear another word about it! Either come into the kitchen with me or go and play in the bedroom. But leave your granddad to watch television in peace.’

  ‘I don’t like you,’ whined Pip, tears forming. ‘I want my daddy.’

  ‘I hate Daddy,’ said Davey, pausing as though digging around for the most effective insult before adding, ‘He smells.’

  Joe released a loud eloquent sigh then got up and marched over to the television set and turned up the volume.

  Jane hastily grabbed her children, took them forcibly into the kitchen and closed the door.

  ‘Now listen to me, both of you,’ she said, keeping her voice down, ‘Granddad’s tired when he gets home from work and likes some peace and quiet for a while. So leave him alone.’

  ‘I hate living here,’ moaned Pip. ‘I wanna go back to the house with the garden . . . where Daddy lives. I wanna ride my bike.’

  ‘We can’t go back there, silly,’ said Davey, ‘Mummy’s told you we can’t. Anyway, Daddy doesn’t live there any more. He’s gone away.’