The Anderson Question Read online

  She peered into the glass and tucked the stray strand of hair back in place. It was only then that she noticed the silence of the house, as you become aware, alone, of emptiness and threat. She looked at the grandfather clock – twenty-five to eleven. Quickly she ran upstairs to their bedroom, but the coverlet was as smooth as she had left it that morning. David’s small study was in darkness, but she flicked the switch and stared at the room as if it might offer a clue. His desk was tidy; two copies of The Lancet and one of The British Medical Journal lay open, with paragraphs marked in red biro. The last postcard from Paul lay on one side, and Eleanor felt the familiar itch to take her absent son on one side (just as she had so many times when he was at school) and remonstrate about the untidy handwriting. The blotter was decorated with countless tiny doodles: geometric boxes containing swirls and patterns like elaborate wrought iron, ending in stylised flowers and snakes. It was the one clue to a side of David Anderson’s personality only his wife knew (she thought now, tracing the patterns with her fingertip) and which found another expression in the rows of books behind the desk – well-thumbed collections of poetry, and cabinet editions of Victorian novelists, picked up in second-hand bookshops.

  When at last she heard the church clock strike eleven in the distance, followed a minute or two later by their own grandfather clock, Eleanor realised there was no one to telephone. After twenty years of praise, and people saying that David was the most popular G.P. in the area; after all the invitations to dinner and sherry and bridge (which he hated); after the yearly Christmas visit by the church choir who sang extra carols for their doctor, and the mass of cards she hung on ribbons down the walls … there was still no one Eleanor could telephone in the hope that her husband might conceivably be there. It astonished her; she had never given herself the time to think, what with the meetings and minutes and fundraising, and of course David himself to look after. The realisation that David had no close friends, apart from Conrad Hartley, was as great a blow to Eleanor’s self-confidence, and as great a shock, as that first telephone call from Sheila Simmonds earlier that evening. It was as if, out there in the darkness beyond this comfortable house they shared, was a totally alien world, or at least, one in which all the familiar friendly faces had snatched away their garish masks to reveal the strangers underneath.

  She took a breath, picked up the phone, and dialled. ‘I want to report someone missing.’ Her voice was steady; anyone listening would be excused for thinking her detached from the person causing concern. But her hand shook as it fiddled with the paper knife.

  ‘Yes, of course I’m sure. It’s Mrs Anderson speaking and my husband, Dr David Anderson, hasn’t been seen since lunch time … No, of course he wasn’t going anywhere …’

  The voice at the other end asked questions and she answered them methodically, knowing by heart the registration number of David’s car although he himself could never remember it.

  ‘He certainly wouldn’t have made any visits without telling me … no … No …’

  ‘Of course, madam, only sometimes …’ The west country accent seemed to add innuendo, with its sliding burr. Eleanor shivered.

  ‘Well, not in this case,’ she snapped.

  ‘There’ll be a call put out, Mrs Anderson, and someone’ll call to see you. Or would you rather leave that until the morning?’

  ‘Yes, yes, we’d better. It’s late.’ When she replaced the receiver Eleanor was conscious of an indefinable sensation, almost like shame.

  The loud ring of the telephone, immediately afterwards, made her jump, but as usual she allowed it to ring once or twice before picking it up. It must be David, at last. David, and perhaps …? For the first time images from novels and television plays swamped her mind, as if a dam had suddenly burst, carrying mud and twigs and broken fragments across the fields. In that instant she imagined herself here, alone; and somewhere else, somewhere lamplit and warm, there was David sipping whiskey with another person, a woman, not herself. It happened, she knew it happened; every day people who had been married for years suddenly obeyed the urge to push out the walls of their prison. Yet it was not a prison, not for her, not for David. Yet the somewhere else of her imagining was enticing and glamorous, her own house silent, neat, finished. Clearly all this had gone through the desk sergeant’s mind too – the oldest reason in his book. But not David …

  ‘Eleanor? I’m sorry to ring so late? Are you in bed? The phone was engaged.’

  Relief. So repelled was Eleanor by her own thoughts, that she breathed more easily because it was not David – not if he were ringing to tell her that. She made her voice sound normal. ‘It’s all right, Daphne, I’ve only just got in. Is something the matter?’

  ‘No, it’s just that we had the committee meeting tonight, remember? You couldn’t come to this one. I just want to check some details with you, because I have to take the poster to be done first thing in the morning.’

  Eleanor felt calmer. Daphne Ryan would breathe normality into a household of neurotics, because her own imagination, incapable of comprehending their problems, would transfer to them its own conventions. In a few seconds she drew Eleanor back from chaos, and supplied instead a vision of the perennial village concert committee, of which Mrs Anderson was chairman.

  Each year it happened in Winterstoke village hall, an event to which sameness gave grace. Since most of the performers had a limited repertoire, most of the acts repeated themselves, but nobody minded, and the hall was always full. Coffee and biscuits in the interval, a raffle, of course – and all the proceeds to the village hall fund and, on alternate years, the church roof fund: the concert still had to be recreated every twelve months, and the same bashful singers and instrumentalists cajoled, always by Daphne Ryan.

  A large woman her detractors called fat, Daphne still applied make-up in the way she had learnt when she was twenty-five, so that too much of pink and floury white clung to her downy cheeks and nestled in the lines. She lived with Enid, her older sister, in a Georgian house near the Rectory which she took a pride in cleaning herself, although she made a pretence of complaining that ‘you can’t get help nowadays’. Had Daphne known that the butcher’s boy and the paper boy laughed together about ‘them two old biddies’, mocking her breathless enthusiasms and little Christmas gifts of homemade fondants instead of cash for a round of drinks, it would not have upset Daphne unduly, as she half-expected disappointment. It was the price she paid. Even Enid’s ill-temper when her legs were worse than usual or when a black man read the news or ran for England, was accepted by her sister. Daphne had looked after their father, Colonel Ryan, after his stroke, and she would look after Enid until her death, but it was only late at night that she allowed the question of who might look after her, quickly pushing the anxiety aside, as if she had no right to expect.

  ‘It’s the name, really.’

  ‘What do you mean, Daphne, the name?’

  ‘Yes, well, it’s always been called Winterstoke Village Concert, but tonight one or two committee members, they said that perhaps it is time for a change, and it’s a bit, well, dull, for nowadays that is. We have to attract the young, you see. Some new names came up … Village Varieties was one. And Mrs Orton suggested we have a WI stall at the back selling things, and call it Summer Fayre – with a “y”, you know, something jolly, a cross between “fair”, and “fare” as in food.’ The voice lost its power, in anticipation of the response.

  Oh, that’s completely absurd. We can’t possibly change it to anything so vulgar. What would the village think?’

  ‘Well, some people said …’

  ‘Nonsense! Leave it exactly as it was last year. People don’t like things to change, not a bit!’ Eleanor paused, and her tone altered, ‘By the way, Daphne?’

  ‘Yes dear.’

  ‘You haven’t seen David this evening, have you?’

  ‘Goodness, no. But why? Isn’t he with you? I came straight back to make Enid’s rum and cocoa. Do you want me to come round?’


  Eleanor could hear her starting to fuss.

  ‘No,’ she said crisply, ‘everything’s perfectly all right, Daphne. I’m going to bed now. Goodnight.’

  Sheila Simmonds stared at the late-night news, her eyes dazzled by the enormous colour television set that was much too large for their tiny sitting-room. Without speaking she rose, and stepped over her husband’s feet which rumpled up the rug she had made herself. He said nothing to her. Upstairs she undressed and pinned a hairnet over her wavy hair, smoothing out her frown lines for a moment with Boots cold cream. In bed she turned to the wall, easing her body, from long habit, as far away as possible from Brian’s side of the bed. She lay with her eyes wide open.

  The surgery had been a nightmare, although she had taken a certain savage pleasure in noting how many of the so-called patients had found that their problems could wait once it became clear that Dr Anderson was not going to turn up, and the locum would be an hour in coming. Yet she had finally walked home up the High Street, turning right opposite The King’s Head, then left into the new estate, as if in a dream, feeling blamed by the village for Dr Anderson’s absence. It was as great a shock to her as if Mrs Anderson had suddenly decided to tell rude jokes at the village concert, or sing pop songs to an electric guitar. Impossible; nothing could be believed in now … and so she stared into the gloom, trying to paint a mental picture of the man for whom she had worked since the boys were babies. She saw his silhouette, tall and spare with oddly narrow shoulders, and rather large hands which sometimes dangled helplessly at his sides; and she could see the hair as well, a mixture of dark brown and grey, but still thick at the temples, not receding and greasy like Brian’s. But she could not visualise his features; the face had gone.

  Brian Simmonds came in, walked heavily over to the dressing table, farted softly, and started to pull at his clothes. She heard him scratch himself, as he stepped out of his trousers, leaving them on the floor.

  ‘You asleep then?’

  Disgusted, she feigned deep breathing, and he grunted. Although her husband did not come to look, she screwed her eyes tightly shut, to force Dr Anderson’s outline more deeply into her brain.

  What was it that fascinated, what could be so mesmerising in the thin crane’s legs, the lines of pedigree? Conrad Hartley smiled to himself, moving his wrinkled and slightly grubby finger down the faint photocopy of a parish register, sent to him by an enthusiastic member of the Royal Society of Genealogists. The network spread: people tracing, people searching, with widespread photocopying making the researchers’ lives much easier. Sometimes the work was frustrating, when the links could not be made, but it was right that it should be hard. Of course, there were young practitioners of his calling who knew how to make a good living from Americans who yearned for ancestors in the United Kingdom, and a gilded family tree to hang on walls in Connecticut or Texas. But were they truly gripped, Conrad often wondered, by the chains and the reasons, as he was? In the patterns of the past he found deep comfort, as if, in the registers of births, marriages and deaths, and the crabbed handwriting of ancient parish documents, there could be found an explanation for the brevity, and a justification too.

  This search would be the hardest of all, and he had been saving it for years. Alice’s family. She knew little about them; her parents had died young and were not the sentimental sort who kept proof of their own existence, let alone that of those before them. After Alice’s death Conrad had pinned all the photographs he could find on the soft plaster of his bedroom wall, and they were still there now, the drawing pins brown with rust. They were few: Alice aged five with her mother by a tree, Alice in her cap and gown, tight waves, tight smile, and a scroll of paper in her hand, Alice with their child upon her knee, and a fuzzy beach snapshot of the three of them. Conrad looking bored and uncomfortable because of the sun. (Not a good father, he sometimes thought with delayed guilt; I always wanted to be alone with Alice and my books, not disturbed by Angela’s whining demands.) A photograph of Angela as a pretty young woman, astonishingly like her mother; just one or two more, and that was all.

  That is all I need to know, he would think, shocked (in years past) by the sense that his wife’s premature death had left her a stranger to him, though a stranger mourned. It was too close then; now, used to his solitude, he felt able to discover her at last. Now the public record offices of the west country and the midlands had begun to yield up the secrets of Alice Ranshaw’s past, the past she had never known herself, but which had still shaped the shy, clever girl he had married. Each day he added to the outline in his mind. It was like finding a prize bloom in that garden of hers, now weeds.

  Margaret Ainslie carefully poured a ten-pence-size circle of Stone’s Furniture Cream on her duster, and rubbed it in widening circles into the wood of the dining room table. There were no scratches or stains on the surface; the room had not been used for weeks, but Mrs Anderson was very particular about her dining room so Margaret Ainslie took no chances. Today the chairs had all the more a look of waiting, and the fruit bowl on the mahogany sideboard was empty.

  She could hear the voices from the sitting-room but tried not to listen. Already half the village knew that Dr Anderson had missed his evening surgery. Margaret, who could not hear his name without remembering his kindness, the way his eyes narrowed when he told them about Todd, his bowed head in church slightly on one side as if pushed by an invisible weight – Margaret could not tolerate the near-delight in the tittle-tattle of the shop, the curiosity and glee that something had ‘happened’. Jack had said it all last night, as he chewed his tea of fluffy mashed potato, sausages and gravy. ‘If the doctor’s run off, like, Maggie, I’ll go and eat my spade, I will. Have you ever seen a happier man, Maggie? Why should he run away? Never! Only … he were upset about our Todd, weren’t he?’ Margaret had carried on knitting, ignoring the question, frowning. ‘I hope he hasn’t been murdered, or something, Jack. These things do happen, especially nowadays.’ She was not eating, and wondered that Jack’s appetite was undiminished. He had pushed his clean plate away at last, shaking his head, and murmuring that surely the Doctor must have lost his memory. Now Margaret nodded as she polished, thinking that he must be right.

  Eleanor sat in the wing chair, David’s favourite, her hands folded in her lap. She did not fidget, or move from place to place as they usually did, thought Police Constable Jennings, and her hair looked as though she had just come from the hairdresser. He had seen them in dressing gowns, in tears, distraught, and always looking ugly. Mrs Anderson reminded him of those politicians’ wives you sometimes saw on television, who looked as if they could do the job just as well as their husbands. He was daunted by the softness of the purple in her tweed suit. ‘Classy,’ he thought, and then, with a quick infusion of malice, ‘Serve her right if her old man’s skipped off with some tart.’

  The Woman Police Constable was doing the questioning, and PC Jennings listened with admiration. She was seven years older, with sharp features and curly hair; sometimes Steve Jennings sat next to her in their car fantasising about undoing the buttons of her uniform, and quite forgetting to listen to the calls, until she teased him, disturbing the pleasant reverie. WPC Dix was divorced from a CID man, now in Exeter, and had a reputation in the station of being ‘a bit of a girl’. Now she was using her best ‘You-can-confide-in-me’ interview voice which was invaluable for handling lost children and dirty old men who made nuisances of themselves.

  ‘When did you last see your husband, Mrs Anderson?’

  ‘Yesterday morning, I told you on the phone. He went to his surgery and said he wasn’t coming back for lunch as he had a busy afternoon. Then his receptionist told me later he only had one call – only one – and didn’t go anyway.’

  ‘That’s Mrs Simmonds?’

  ‘Yes, she’s the person who told me he hadn’t arrived at the evening surgery … Look, before you ask me, I have absolutely no idea of where David might have gone.’

  ‘Or why he lied to you
about having a busy afternoon?’

  Eleanor flushed. ‘Not a lie, probably a lapse of memory. He had been quite forgetful lately. Honestly, he led a quiet life, and didn’t have a wide circle of friends. He was happy to wear himself out doing his job well, and to read in the evenings. You can ask anyone in Winterstoke and they’ll tell you that he was the most reliable man you could meet. He wouldn’t just go off and miss surgery. It’s a complete mystery to me.’

  Her hands were still folded, making a loose ball. WPC Dix could not take her eyes off them. ‘So you can’t think of any reason why your husband might be missing?’

  ‘None at all.’

  The policewoman hesitated. ‘Might he, might there be an … association he hadn’t told you about?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you mean.’ Eleanor opened her eyes wide and looked at the younger woman with apparently genuine curiosity, which was observed with an inward groan by Steve Jennings. She really did not understand; this was going to be more difficult than usual.

  ‘Well sometimes, Mrs Anderson, in a case like this – a middle-aged man, no problems, no history of illness, suddenly missing – we find out that he has been seeing someone, and suddenly it’s all got too much for him. The deception. You know.’