Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

Barbara had got into the habit of bringing a little something with her on these biweekly visits to Hawthorn Lodge where, for the past two months, her mother had been living with two other elderly women and Mrs. Florence Magentry — Mrs. Flo — who cared for them. Barbara told herself that she did it for the joy of seeing her mother’s face brighten at the sight of a gift. But she knew each package served as coin to purchase her freedom from guilt.

She said again, “You like it here with Mrs. Flo, don’t you, Mum?”

Mrs. Havers was watching the toddler in the round-about. She was swaying to some interior tune. “Mrs. Salkild messed her pants last night,” she said confi dentially. “But Mrs. Flo didn’t even get crossed, Barbie. She said, ‘These things happen, dearie, as we get older so you mustn’t worry yourself to bits.’ I didn’t mess my pants.”

“That’s good, Mum.”

“I helped as well. I got the washing fl annel and the plastic basin and I held it just so, so Mrs. Flo could clean her. Mrs. Salkild cried. She said, ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t tell. I didn’t know.’ I felt bad for her. I gave her some of my chocolates after. I didn’t mess my pants, Barbie.”

“You’re a big help to Mrs. Flo, Mum. She probably couldn’t get along without you.”

“She does say that, doesn’t she? She’ll be sad when I leave. Am I coming home today?”

“Not today, Mum.”

“Soon though?”

“But not today.”

Barbara sometimes wondered if it would be better to leave her mother in Mrs. Flo’s more-than-capable hands, if she should simply pay her expenses, disappear, and hope that her mother would forget in time that she had a daughter not far away. She did continual fl ipflops on the efficacy of these visits to Greenford. She went from believing they did nothing more than put momentary plasters on the sores of her own guilt at the expense of disrupting Mrs. Havers’ routine to convincing herself that her steady presence in her mother’s life would keep her from complete mental disintegration. There was no literature available on either position as far as Barbara knew. And even if she had tried to find it — which she couldn’t bring herself to do — what difference would some conveniently removed social scientist’s theories make? This was her mother, after all. She couldn’t abandon her.

Barbara stabbed her cigarette into the ashtray on the kitchen table and counted the stubs that lay crushed there already. Eighteen cigarettes she’d smoked since this morning. She had to quit. It was unclean, unhealthy, and disgusting. She lit another.

From her chair, she could see down the corridor all the way to the front door. She could see the stairway to the right, the sitting room to the left. It was impossible to avoid noticing how far along the renovation of the house had moved. The interior was painted. New carpet was laid. Fixtures were repaired or replaced in the bathroom and the kitchen. The stove and oven were cleaner than they had been in twenty years. The linoleum fl oor still needed to be stripped completely and then rewaxed, and wallpaper still waited to be hung. But once those two jobs were taken care of, along with washing or replacing the curtains which hadn’t been touched as far as Barbara knew since her family’s move to the house in her childhood, she could turn her efforts to the exterior.

The back garden was a nightmare. The front garden was nonexistent. And the house itself needed massive effort: There were gutters to replace, woodwork to paint, windows to wash, a front door to refi nish. And while her savings were rapidly dwindling and her own time was limited because of her job, things were still moving slowly forward according to her original plan. If she didn’t do something to slow down the wheels of this entire project — initially taken on to guarantee she would have sufficient funds to keep her mother at Hawthorn Lodge indefi nitely — the time for being on her own would be fast upon her.

Barbara wanted that independence, or so she kept telling herself. She was thirty-three years old, she’d never established a life of her own unattached to her family and their infi nite needs. That she could do so now ought to have been a cause for jubilation at a release from bondage. But somehow it wasn’t and it hadn’t been since the morning she’d driven her mother to Greenford and settled her into a crisp, new life with Mrs. Flo.

Mrs. Flo had prepared for their arrival in a way that should have set every worry to rest. A welcome sign draped over the narrow stairway’s banister, and there were flowers in the entry. Upstairs in her mother’s room a porcelain carousel spun round slowly, playing “The Entertainer” in light chiming notes.

“Oh Barbie, Barbie, look!” her mother had breathed, and she rested her chin on the chest of drawers and watched the tiny horses rise and fall.

There were flowers in the bedroom as well, irises in a tall white vase.

“I thought she might need a special moment,” Mrs. Flo said, smoothing her hands against the bodice of her pin-striped shirtwaister. “Ease her in gentle so she knows we mean to make her welcome. I’ve coffee and poppy seed cakes down below. Bit early for elevenses, isn’t it, but I thought you might have to be off fairly quick.”

Barbara nodded. “I’m working on a case in Cambridge.” She looked round the room. It was so clean, crisp, and warm, with the sunlight falling across the daisy carpet. “Thank you,” she said. She wasn’t referring to the coffee and cakes.

Mrs. Flo patted her hand. “Don’t you worry about Mum. We’ll do right by her, Barbie. May I call you Barbie?”

Barbara wanted to tell her that no one but her parents had ever used that name, that it made her feel childlike and in need of care. She was about to correct her, saying, “It’s Barbara, please,” when she realised that to do so would be to break the illusion that somehow this was home and these women — her mother, Mrs. Flo, Mrs. Salkild, and Mrs. Pendlebury, one of whom was blind and the other another victim of dementia — constituted a family into which she herself was being offered membership if she cared to accept it. And she did.

So it wasn’t so much the prospect of permanently abandoning her mother that caused Barbara to drag her feet from time to time as it became more apparent that her dream of being on her own was about to become reality. It was the prospect of her own abandonment.

For two months now, she had been coming home to an empty house, something she had longed for during the years of her father’s lingering illness, something she had deemed completely indispensable when she found herself left to deal with her mother after his death. For what seemed like ages she had sought a solution to caring for her mother, and now that she had one apparently designed by heaven — God, was there another Mrs. Flo anywhere else on earth? — the focus of her plans had shifted from dealing with an ageing parent to dealing with the house. And when the house offered her nothing more to deal with, she’d be face to face with dealing with herself.

Alone, she would have to start thinking about her isolation. And when the King’s Arms emptied of her colleagues in the eve-ning — when MacPherson went home to his wife and five children, when Hale went to do increasingly dubious battle with the solicitor who was handling his divorce, when Lynley dashed off to have dinner with Helen, and Nkata drifted off to take one of his six squabbling girlfriends to bed — she’d meander slowly to St. James’s Park Station, kicking at rubbish that blew in her path. She’d ride to Waterloo, change to the Northern Line, and hunch on a seat with a copy of The Times , feigning interest in national and world events to disguise her growing panic at being alone.