Turning his collar up against the cold, he would march down city streets to my flat. Walk up the steps and rap on my door. Hold his ear against it when there was no answer. The silence inside sounding like it had taken time to build. An uninhabited place.
Nothing in the world removes the ills a wife causes like the balm of a mistress. Even as Archie listened for me, he thought if I were to swing the door open and welcome him inside with a seductive smile, I’d be nothing but a poor substitute, the satisfaction I offered him temporary, fleeting. Only enough to carry him through this terrible grief until his wife was found.
My door sat sealed, the room on the other side of it soundless. My neighbour, old Mrs Kettering, opened the door. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen Archie and she frowned at him as she always did. He responded with a placating smile. People like her, who’d witnessed us together, might be trouble down the road.
Still the question bubbled up inside of him, impossible not to ask. ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Kettering. I wonder, have you seen Miss O’Dea?’
‘Not for days,’ she said. ‘More than a week, I’d say. Not a glimpse of her nor a peep from her. Here’s hoping she’s run off with some bloke her own age.’ She bestowed one last, hawk-like glare before slamming the door behind her and stamping down the stairs. There are too many women in the world helping men with their dirty work. But so many more taking each other’s side in unexpected moments.
Equally unexpected, Archie would find the moment of reprieve he’d wanted. For the first time in days, his mind went blank with sheer perplexity. The question eclipsed emotion, for just one moment. Where had Nan gone?
He hurried down the stairs to the street. Walked quickly, his breath coming out in gusts. Willing his hands not to rise and cover his face. Any tears in his eyes could be explained away by the cold. Miles away in Harrogate, I wasn’t thinking of Archie. Hardly a bit. Hardly at all.
While he was thinking: How peculiar, and what has precipitated this? The Age of Disappearing Women.
The age of disappearing women did not begin with Agatha Christie. It had begun long before Agatha hopped into a car and motored away from Newlands Corner with Finbarr. And it would continue for quite a bit longer. We disappeared from schools. From our hometowns. From our families and our jobs. One day we would be going about our business, sitting in class, or laughing with friends, or walking hand in hand with a beau. Then, poof.
What ever happened to that girl? Don’t you remember her? Where did she go?
In America we went to Florence Crittenton homes. In England to Clark’s House, or any of the various homes run mostly by the Anglican Church. In Australian hospitals, babies were taken from mothers who were drugged, incapacitated, unwilling. And, of course, some of us didn’t go anywhere at all. We bled to death on butchers’ tables. We jumped off bridges.
The age of disappearing women. It had been going on forever. Thousands of us vanished, with not a single police officer searching. Not a word from the newspapers. Only our long absences and quiet returns. If we ever returned at all.
Before Agatha disappeared, before I knew Finbarr had returned to Britain, the plan I’d authored was well underway. In the Owens’ house, in the borrowed bed, my arms wrapped tight around Archie. The overriding element was mercenary, true. But there were other elements.
‘I love you, Nan,’ Archie said, as if he couldn’t say it enough, as if the words needed to be repeated ad infinitum until the world conspired to let this moment last, the delicious, breathless secret of it.
I loved him too. If that’s what you’d like to call love.
The Disappearance
Day Eight
Saturday, 11 December 1926
IN THE MIDST of all the maelstrom, Agatha’s work was another place for her to go. A world to visit apart from her own. She could lose herself there no matter what occurred. In the Timeless Manor the typewriter keys clicked and clacked. Let them search. Let Archie worry. When her fingers flew over the typewriter keys it was the whole world that vanished. Not her.
I was not so lucky. In Harrogate, in the moments without Finbarr, my mind assaulted me with fear, worry and misgivings. I tried to concentrate on reading the novel Chilton had given me. I’d barely fought my way to the second chapter when a rap came on my door. I opened it to find Mrs Leech.
‘There’s a man downstairs to see you.’ I knew from the way her brow cocked, not sure of the propriety, that it was Finbarr, and my face changed so suddenly – lighting up – that Mrs Leech smiled.
‘You’re not really married, are you, Miss O’Dea?’
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘I’m not.’
‘There, there.’ She patted my shoulder to comfort me. Anyone who’s been in love knows it’s a state that requires comforting. ‘You go on downstairs. Tell him to cheer up, that’s all. And you mustn’t bring him to your room. We’re not that kind of hotel.’
‘Of course. Thank you, Mrs Leech.’
In the lobby Finbarr sat on the settee, his pea coat open, rubbing his hands across his knees. He stood, and we walked outside together into the cold, where I stepped into him, sliding my hands into his coat pocket. I felt a square of paper, glossy against my fingertips, and pulled out the photograph I’d sent him, years ago. It was bent and battered, tearing around the edges. Tiny holes at its corners gathered upon themselves, indicating it had been pinned to more than one wall.
Have you ever looked at a picture of someone – from when they were very young – and thought: how sad? All that promise, all that hope. The girl looking back at me from that photograph may have known sadness (her broken mother, stiff upper lip, bringing her to have the picture made) but she didn’t know where her own road would lead. She grieved for her sister but felt sure no such fate would ever befall her. She knew the war was on but didn’t quite believe it. How could any war reach English shores? Impossible. If I had presented that girl with any of the obstacles approaching her – as predictions – she would have offered intractable solutions to each one. The face staring back at me believed better things lay ahead. Making a picture for a soldier, who’d return from the war exactly as he had been, to marry her, escorting her off to Ireland and perpetual happiness.
‘I wish I had a picture of you from that time,’ I said. ‘Why is it girls send pictures to soldiers but not the other way round?’
‘Listen to me, Nan.’ Finbarr took the picture back from me carefully, a precious relic, and returned it to his pocket. ‘Come away with me now and I won’t carry this with me anymore. We’ll have a new one taken. We’ll put this one in a book to show our children.’
‘But then I’ll never be able to show myself again. To our child.’
‘We’ve both become things we never saw for ourselves,’ he persisted. ‘I never wanted to go to war. I never wanted to fall sick. I never wanted to leave my own country, or even Ballycotton. What I never wanted most of all were the things that happened to you.’