It looks like she bought several papers, different ones every day. Did she cut these out at the time, or later, years afterwards, as a way to keep hope alive, to keep him alive? I had no idea it was such a big story. I hadn’t connected, until right now, the reporters milling at the gates with any kind of national infamy. Of course, I realize now why they were there, the reporters; why the story ran and ran, getting fewer and fewer column inches as the months went on, until it disappeared altogether. Children shouldn’t just vanish without trace. That’s the worst fear, worse even than finding the body, perhaps. Having no answers, having no idea. Poor Meredith. She was his grandmother, after all. She was meant to be looking after him.
I am staring, staring hard at a grainy, enlarged photo of Henry. A school photo, neat and tidy in a blazer and stripy house tie. Hair combed; toothy, decorous smile. That photo on posters in the shop window, on telegraph poles, on newspaper pages, in doctors’ waiting rooms and supermarkets and garages and pubs. No websites back then, but I remember seeing this photo all over the village. The one in the shop window was in color. It quickly faded in the sunshine, but it was bright when I first saw it. Can I go to the shop? No! You’re to stay indoors! I couldn’t understand why. Mum went with me in the end, and held my hand, and politely asked the reporters to let us through, to not follow us. A couple of them did anyway, took some pointless shots of us emerging from the shop with orange ice lollies. One tiny cutting from late August, 1987. A full year later. The regretful last line: Despite an extensive police investigation, no trace of the missing boy has yet been found.
There’s an ache in my ribs and I realize I’ve been holding my breath. As if in anticipation; as if the story could have had any other ending. I notice the rain falling faster, louder. Eddie is out in the woods. He’ll be soaked. It seems so unreal, reading about Henry in the press, reading about that summer. Unreal, and at the same time all the more real. All the more terrible. It did happen, and I was there. I put the clippings back in the box, careful not to crease them. I will keep these, I think; in the very same box, so coffin-like, that Meredith put them in twenty-three years ago.
I pick up the pile of photographs and flick through them, shaking off the shadow of the newspaper clippings. Random family portraits and holiday shots for the most part-the sort of thing Mum was after. A small black-and-white photo of Meredith and Charles on their wedding day-my grandfather Charles, that is, who was killed in World War II. Charles wasn’t in the armed forces, but he went up to London on business one week and a stray V2 found its way to the club where he was having lunch. The best shots of their wedding day are on the piano in the drawing room, in heavy silver frames, but in this little shot Meredith is bent at an odd angle, twisting to look back over her shoulder, away from Charles, as if the hem of her dress has caught on something. They are emerging from the church, coming out of the dark into the light. In profile Meredith’s face is young, painfully anxious. Her hair is very fair, eyes huge in her face. How did such a lovely girl, such a nervous young bride, ever become Meredith? The Meredith I remember, cold and hard as the marble shelves in the pantry.
Only one other photo arrests me. It’s very old, battered around the edges; the image surfaces from a sea of fox marks and fade. A young woman, perhaps in her early twenties, in a high-necked dress, hair pinned severely back; and on her lap a child in a lace dress, not more than six months old. A dark-haired baby, its face slightly smeared, ghostly, as if it wriggled just as the exposure was taken. The woman is Caroline. I recognize her from other pictures around the house, although in none of them does she look as young as this. I turn it over, read the faint stamp on the back: Gilbert Beaufort & Son, New York City; and hand written, in ink that has almost vanished, 1904.
But Caroline did not marry Henry Calcott, my great-grandfather, until 1905. Mary was seized by a genealogy fad a few years back-traced the Calcott family lineage that she was so proud to have married into and sent us all a copy in our Christmas card that year. They married in 1905, and they lost a daughter before Meredith was born in 1911. I frown, turn the picture to the light and try to find any more clues within it. Caroline stares calmly back at me, her hand curled protectively around her baby. Where did this child go? How did it fall from our family tree? I slip the photo into my back pocket, begin to pick through the jewelry, hardly seeing it. A brooch pin catches my fingertip, and I sit there a while, tasting my blood.
After dinner Eddie escapes from the table to watch TV. Beth and I sit among the dirty plates and bowls. She has eaten a little. Not enough, but a little. When she senses Eddie watching her, she tries harder. I steal one last potato from the bowl and lean back, feel something stiff in my back pocket.
“What’s that?” Beth asks, as I pull out the photo of our great-grandmother. She hasn’t spoken to me much since I asked her about Henry, and now her voice is slightly stiff. But I know an olive branch when I see one.
“I found it up in Meredith’s room-it’s Caroline,” I tell her, passing it over.
Beth studies the young face, the pale eyes. “Gosh, yes, so it is. I remember those eyes-even when she was ancient, they stayed that bright silver color. Do you remember?”
“No, not really.”
“Well, you were pretty small.”
“I used to be so scared of her! She hardly seemed human to me.”
“Were you really? But she never bothered us. Never paid us much attention.”
“I know. She was just so… old!” I say, and Beth chuckles.
“That she was. From another era, well and truly.”
“What else do you remember about her?” I ask. Beth leans back from the table, pushes her plate away from her. Half of her slice of quiche is still on her plate, untouched.
“I remember that look Meredith used to get on her face whenever she had to feed her, or dress her. That look of such careful neutrality. I always remember thinking she must have been having terrible thoughts, such terrible thoughts to have been so careful not to let them show on her face.”
“But what about Caroline? Do you remember anything she said, anything she did?”
“Well, let me think. I remember the time she went mad at the summer party-when was it? I can’t remember. Not long before she died. Do you remember it? With the fireworks and all the lanterns strung along the driveway to light the way up to the house?”
“God! I’d totally forgotten about that… I remember the fireworks, of course, and the food. But now you remind me I do remember Meredith wheeling Caroline inside, because she’d been shouting something about crows… what was it about? Can you remember?” I ask. Beth shakes her head.