‘I know about that last time,’ he said. ‘I know why you kept it quiet. But what does that matter, when she may be in trouble worse than that? Someone has to find her. And they’ve got the best chance, the best facilities. You’ll have to go to them.’
‘Yes,’ said Beck, grey as cobwebs, ‘I suppose we shall. But you see, once before she went off of her own will – or tried to. And now again. People will say – they’ll call her— We didn’t want that. No more scandal round her name, not if we could avoid it. What will her life be like, if—? It’s for her own sake!’
‘And ours, too,’ said his wife flatly and coldly. ‘Because we know we’re to blame, too. We’re out of touch with her, we don’t know how, we don’t know why. We’ve no influence over her. But that makes it our fault as much as hers. Where did we fail? Where did we lose contact with her?’ She turned her rigidly-waved head and looked at Tom with fierce, helpless eyes. ‘Who told you? Are people still talking?’
‘No. Not the way you mean. Someone told me rather with the opposite intention, to soften the effect if anyone else should gossip, that’s all. But I can see that you hoped she’d just come home in her own good time, or write to you, and nobody else any the wiser. Did you look for her?’
A fool’s question; or maybe a lover’s, someone who can’t trust anyone else to value his divinity or exert himself for her fittingly. Of course they’d looked for her. Beck had tramped the lanes and combed Comerford all the evening and half the night, and then gone off by bus to his sister’s house in Ledbury, and his cousin’s Teme valley small-holding, in case she had turned up there; Mrs Beck had sat at home over the telephone, calling up with careful, ambiguous messages anyone who might, just might know anything, anyone who had a window overlooking the railway station, or a teenage son who could, in some way, be brought into the conversation and eliminated from the enquiry. But there were plenty of mothers of young sons with whom she wasn’t on telephoning terms, plenty of dancing partners who didn’t move in her orbit at all. And she had got nowhere.
‘And Mrs Blacklock? Hasn’t she been on the line wanting to know where her secretary’s got to?’
‘Regina’s away. She’s been away all the week-end at some conference in Gloucestershire – something about child psychology. She gave Annet the whole week off. If Annet came back now, no one would know – no one but us three. Mrs Blacklock won’t be back until tomorrow night.’
She offered that as a life-line, and as such he clutched at it. Because if that was the case, Annet also might come back tonight, or tomorrow, in time to be stonily in her place when next Regina looked for her. That was if this was not final; if she meant it only as a fling, a gesture, a statement of her own will and her determination to go her own way. That was what her mother was hoping for, he saw that. Damage there would still be, irreparable after its fashion; but the worse damage is the known damage, and this, barring the last cruelty of fate, wouldn’t be known. If he hadn’t been so acutely tuned to everything that touched Annet, not even he need have known it.
‘She’s clever,’ said Mrs Beck strenuously, ‘and strong-willed, and capable about practical things. She can take care of herself, and she’s no fool. We thought she’d come home in time. We did what we could to find her ourselves, but we didn’t want to start a hue and cry. If we did, she’d be ruined.’
‘You must see that,’ said Beck, pleadingly. He might have been an old man in his dotage, looking to his son to save something for him out of his life’s wreckage.
‘I do see it, I can understand it. But it’s five days! And no message, no letter, nothing!’
‘Nothing!’
‘And what if it isn’t what you think? Haven’t you been afraid of that? What if she’s come to some harm through no fault of her own, while we’re writing her off as her own casualty? We’ve got to go to the police. What matters now is to find her.’
Deliquescing, disintegrating before his eyes, they owned it. They dwindled, leaning on him. If he could bring her back safely and keep them their faces and their respectability through this they would give her to him gladly. Only he didn’t want her given, he wanted her to come of her own will, as of her own will she had turned her back on him. All manner of perversity he read into her actions, but he would have cut off his own hand to have her back intact, whether she ever came his way or no.
‘I saw her,’ he said deliberately. ‘Last Thursday, when I left. I was driving along the lane past the farm, and the sun came out on the Hallowmount. I saw Annet then. She was climbing up the side of the hill, towards the top. I saw her go over the crest and disappear. Do you know what she could have been doing there?’
Staring at him without comprehension, almost unbelievingly, they shook their heads. But even at that straw they clutched eagerly.
‘Are you sure? Then she couldn’t have been heading for the station, or the bus. And she had no luggage,’ said Mrs Beck, her face flushing into life and hope again.
‘Not with her then. But she could have left a small case somewhere to be collected.’ How could they, how could he, talk of her like that? Not some common little delinquent, but Annet, whose erect, flaming purity he saw now for the first time. And yet she was gone, and surely not alone. Why should she go at all, if she was alone? She knew very well how to seal up her solitude against all comers, she needed no distance between herself and men. But what could he do but go on fighting for her in these small, corrupt, prosaic, impertinent ways? She was in the world, they must reckon with the world if she would not.
‘It was Miles Mallindine last time,’ he said. ‘At least I can go and see that he’s safely at home this time. Bill won’t mind my dropping in, I can make some excuse.’ They were on ‘Bill’ terms then, he was welcome in their house whenever he dropped around, and they wouldn’t know he was riding herd on their son, he’d see to that. Eve, who hadn’t blamed the boy, wouldn’t blame the girl too much, either. Eve had a fair, sweet mind. He wished Annet had had her for a mother, and Miles for a brother. There might have been no problem then.
‘We ought to go to the Hallowmount,’ said Beck, astonishingly. And as they stared at him blankly: ‘She went there. It’s the last we know of her. There might be something to speak to us. How can we be sure there isn’t? We ought to go. At least to look where she went.’
‘We can look,’ said Tom without enthusiasm, for if there was one thing certain it was that they wouldn’t find her there. Whatever she had wanted on that solitary hill, it was over long ago. Her case? But why there?
‘Please! On our way to the Mallindines’, it wouldn’t take us long. There’s a moon.’
And they went, the two men together, in the light of the newly-risen moon, whiter than daylight and almost as bright.
‘You’ll stay in the car at Mallindine’s,’ said Tom firmly, rolling the Mini out on to the bone-white ribbon of the lane.
‘Oh, yes, I will. They won’t know.’ He would have promised anything. He was shaking like an old, old man. He loved his daughter, after all, or else he was sensible of some secret dismay of guilt, and heartily afraid.
‘She was here,’ said Tom, calf-deep in the bleached autumn grass, panting from his climb. ‘When I first saw her, that is. About here. And she went on climbing on this line. Fast.’
He climbed. The hog-back of the hill heaved above him, white in the moonlight; here and there an encrustation of heather, but most of it pale, withered grass, dehydrated, dying. Like fair, tangled, lustreless hair. The night was still, starry above, bone-naked in its pallor below. And yet a little curl of wind spiralled upward in front of his feet, coiling through the grass on the path Annet had taken up the steep. Coiling, twining, bending the strawy stems, just in front of his feet all the way. Some trick of displacement of air, alien humans intruding on the filled and completed spaces of the night. What else could it be? Or a small groundwind that never reached his knee. Or something light going before him, inviting, showing the way, itself unseen. Showing the right way, or the wrong?