The hotel room at the George is overheated in the way hotel rooms often are. Airless, the windows impossible to open, the curtains like lead. They’d pushed dinner around their plates out of a vague respect for life’s little routines, but eventually left the dining room when their awareness of the television and newspaper reporters sitting at adjacent tables became too much: constant furtive glances, the way conversation dropped when they walked by, and the lowered gazes when she accidentally met their eye. It was dirtying.
When she’s not crying, she feels disconnected, as if the hubbub is happening to someone else: the news reports, the cameras outside Edith’s house, the sheer drama of it. She is discombobulated when they are in the public eye, walking in and out of the police station or up the hotel steps, white lights shining in her face, camera flashes exploding. She allows herself to be carried along by Ian’s hand on her arm. Propelled by him. She doesn’t know what she’d do without him commanding everything.
After dinner she had a bath and, lying there, had thought about what she should wear for the television appeal. Is it wrong, that she cares about what to wear to appear on national television? She found herself wondering which outfit was more slimming – the navy jacket or mustard waterfall cardigan? How could she think about any of this (even idly wondering which seemed more grief-stricken)? Yet the mind must chew on something, else it will chew on itself.
Lying in the bath, she heard Ian on the phone to various people – to Rollo, about how soon he could fly back from Argentina (‘I’ll pay for a first-class ticket, if that’s all that’s available. Yes, yes, OK. So you’ll be home by Wednesday evening? Yes, I wish it were sooner.’). She got out of the bath at this point, wrapped a towel around herself, and took the phone from her husband.
‘Is that really the earliest you can come, darling?’ she said to Rollo. ‘I’ll feel so much better when you’re home. Did she say anything to you? No, well, OK, till Wednesday then. And Rollo? I love you, darling boy.’ Just the sound of his voice was a bolster to her tremulous heart.
Then Ian spoke to DI Harper and to Rosemary from the practice, telling her he wouldn’t be working for the foreseeable future and not to talk to the press.
Ridiculous trains of thought, wondering if she has somehow caused this. Was this her fault? Had she been remote as a mother? Because Edith was always over-dramatising her feelings, as if to make herself heard over a din. And this … event seems to Miriam somehow typical. Her eldest had never realised that a simple statement of fact was enough; it had to be ‘the worst time ever’ or ‘literally a nightmare’. Edith was always poorer, ill-er, more unhappy than the next person. It had made Miriam all the more aware of Rollo’s understatement; when he rather queasily said as a child that he didn’t feel quite right, she would rush to feel his fevered brow. When Edith wailed that she was dying, Miriam rolled her eyes and packed her off to school. And so are our children formed and yes, it was always going to be Edith at the centre of a drama – a police hunt, for Christ’s sake.
She screws her eyes tight, her head tipped back, and tears squeeze from their corners, because she loves the bones of Edith and is critical only as if she is a part of herself. This separation is like a rending of her flesh.
She sits up. We have to do something. She hears a sound and looks across the bed, sees Ian’s back through the charcoal dark. He is sitting on the side of the bed in his vest. He has his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and he is crying. Quietly, so as not to wake her.
She climbs over the bed to him and rubs his back.
‘I thought she’d be at Deeping,’ he says. ‘Lying on her bed with headphones in her ears, reading a book. That she’d look up and wonder what all the fuss was about.’
‘Let’s go there now, see if she’s turned up,’ says Miriam. ‘I can’t stand doing nothing. I’ve just got this feeling – that house, she loves it there. It would draw her, if she were in trouble, I mean.’
‘The police don’t want us there. Forensics are all over it.’
‘What if she’s been run over, what if she’s injured somewhere? And we don’t know. Ian, we don’t know.’
‘That’s why they’ve used sniffer dogs, to locate her by the scent of blood.’
‘You know an awful lot all of a sudden,’ she says, and it comes out more harshly than she intends.
‘We’ve got to think. Where could she have gone?’ They are both prone to this, thinking their way out of their predicaments, as if sheer force of intellect could control the random world.
‘France? I mean, I know we haven’t been for years and years, but she does speak the language.’
He shakes his head. ‘Border control – she hasn’t got her passport, remember? You should ring Christy and Jonti.’
‘Yes. They won’t know anything, but yes. She hasn’t seen Jonti in years. Does Rollo have any ideas?’
‘No, he says not, but he says he’s setting up a Find Edith Facebook page or something. I wish it didn’t take so long for him to get here. Miri,’ he says with a sudden gasp.