The Missing Marriage

‘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 who answered the door, in blue and yellow pyjamas that made her look younger than she had in her riding clothes that morning. It struck Anna again how similar to Laura she was – apart from the eyes; the eyes belonged to Bryan. Her hair had been scraped back hurriedly into a pony tail and her face looked uneven from all the crying she’d done. She started to cry again now and, turning away from Anna back into the brightly lit hallway, allowed herself to be held by a uniformed female constable who must have been standing close but out of sight up until then.

‘I’m Anna Faust – a friend of the family,’ Anna said, stepping inside number two Marine Drive.

The ceiling was punctured with high wattage halogen bulbs whose light reflected harshly off the white walls and polished wood floors so that there were no dark corners, and no shadows. The inside of the house looked like the outside had led her to expect it would. There were no surprises, and nothing that stood out as personal, which – despite the obvious space – made Anna feel claustrophobic.

‘Friend of the family,’ the constable announced as Anna followed her and Martha into a spacious sitting room where there was another officer – male, late twenties, balding, and not in uniform – and two colossal sofas facing each other across a coffee table, fireplace, mirror, and fading white bouquet.

The constable sat down in one of the sofas, her arm round Martha’s shoulders still as Martha, sniffing in an attempt to stop crying, twisted her head so that she could watch Anna.

Laura Deane was sitting in the other sofa, curled in a corner with a small chestnut Spaniel over her feet – also watching Anna, whom she hadn’t seen since they were eighteen.

A faint trace of emotion crossed Laura’s otherwise immaculate face – a face that had had work done to it: Botox, for sure, possibly a chin tuck, and the nose was definitely thinner than Anna remembered.

Laura wasn’t sitting on the sofa so much as positioned in it, and she was positioned carefully with her legs, in loose linen trousers, pulled up under her. She was wearing a tank top the same bright white as the walls to set off her spray tan, and a loose cardigan over it that looked expensive. Light reflected off the heavy jewellery hanging from her wrists and neck and the overall effect was of somebody who either spent a lot of money on themselves or who had money spent on them – maybe a combination of both.

She was as immaculate as the house around her, and gave Anna the same impression of emptiness. It made her want to ask the woman sitting on the sofa in front of her where Laura had gone. Was she keeping her hidden in the attic? Was she up there screaming and banging on the door right now – desperate to be let out? Where had the girl with the mole on her thigh and skin that turned caramel in the real sun gone? Where had the girl with the long blonde hair that was forever getting knotted with twigs and bark and leaves from the trees she climbed gone?

Maybe Laura was thinking the same thing about her.

Maybe they’d just grown up, that was all.

Only Laura, taking in Anna – she did this by barely moving her eyes and remaining otherwise expressionless – had an air of triumph about her. As though she’d just discovered that she’d won the race after all – a race Anna wasn’t even aware they’d been running.

‘Why are you here?’

Anna turned to Martha – who’d pulled herself away from the stranger in uniform she had gone to for comfort instead of her own mother – and who was now sitting upright, her knees pulled into her chest.

‘I’ve known your mum a long time.’ Anna paused. ‘And your dad as well.’

‘So? I never saw you before this morning.’

‘How long has it been?’ Laura said, carefully. ‘Sixteen years?’

‘S-s-something like that.’

Anna exhaled with relief and opened her eyes, which shut automatically whenever she lost words. Only sporadically, and in extreme circumstances, did her childhood speech impediment come back. The moment had passed – and with it the feeling that she’d been standing, momentarily, in a precipitous place.

‘I heard you’d come back. I’m sorry about Erwin.’

‘And I’m sorry – about Bryan.’

The two women stared at each other, without sympathy, aware that the only reason Anna was here, inside number two Marine Drive, was because Bryan Deane wasn’t.

‘How did you know – about Bryan?’ Laura asked calmly.