The Day That Went Missing Read online

  On these last two occasions I was making up the numbers, offering moral support to my mum. She shouldn’t have to confront so much family sadness on her own, I thought, not in that church and that graveyard. Or such was the story I told myself as I knotted my funeral tie (black but with silver squares, to cut through the glum…). I’ve become my mother’s funeral buddy. At short notice I will polish my black shoes to remember the dead at All Saints Liddington, where I’ll carefully omit to visit my brother’s grave.

  Now, on a windy late afternoon in May, I’m here for this reason only. I will make a close study of the gravestone, though I’m in no obvious hurry.

  I remember, I delay. My grandfather was once the churchwarden here. On Sunday mornings we’d pop a coin into his velvet collection bag, as if God were family. His was my favorite of the funerals, during a storm in 1995 with the priests dark against the hill, hoods up on their black robes, rain from the Dark Ages whipping in as the February light gave out. I have no mental picture of the weather for a funeral in July or August 1978, because I wasn’t there. Where I was I have no idea, or if it was a better place to be.

  After so many years I put off the moment a little longer. I realize I’ve forgotten his birthday. Sometime in March but this, surely, is the definition of ceasing to exist—in my mind my brother Nicholas has no date of birth and no date of death. He wasn’t born and he didn’t die; I have unhitched him from time, from his precise span of existence.

  I’ve read every Church Notice in the porch, and should probably strike out for the boneyard. I ignore the path and take a direct route over unmown grass to the family plot, where the first stone is an unshaped reddish boulder for Edward William Beard, 1878–1982. This is my great-grandfather, a man I knew, and whose longevity features in Guinness World Records. He died four years after my brother, and I didn’t go to that funeral, either, but the point of my great-grandfather is that Beards are designed to live (and work) forever.

  Longest Working Career

  Career: Builder

  Holder (nationality): Edward William Beard (UK)

  Working Span: 1896–1981

  Years: 85

  Guinness World Records 2008, p. 120

  The Beard family has internationally accredited genes for endurance, and historically we have exploited our superpowers to build extensions in Swindon.

  A few meters behind my great-grandfather (104) is my brother (9). He has a rough gray Celtic cross, dappled with white lichen. Lichen is among the slowest-growing living things. And behind Nicky again, slightly to the left, is a gloss-white Celtic cross that Mum commissioned for Dad. Same stonemason, different results:

  COLIN ANTHONY BEARD

  29-12-1939–15-7-2011

  ONE MORE STEP

  IS ALWAYS POSSIBLE

  The family motto is a recent invention, conjured up for Mum’s tapestries of the family tree, which she updates every five years with names of the latest dogs and grandchildren. Our disparate lives are stitched together by the ever-present motto, and its hopeful appeal to a common family purpose, or stubbornness. One More Step. Always possible, whether we like it or not.

  Nicky’s cross. I’m in the churchyard, lest I forget, to look properly at his unchanging gravestone. I can take a photo on my phone, and carry with me forever after the date I’ve blocked out so efficiently. But however I attempt to frame the lettering on the screen, my dad’s headstone encroaches into the background. I narrow and then spread the focus, but some edge of Dad’s white cross always intrudes. I take the photo anyway.

  IN

  LOVING MEMORY

  NICHOLAS

  PAUL

  BEARD

  1969–1978

  His actual dates aren’t recorded. Nicholas Paul Beard, in loving memory, exists as a floating notion between unfixed points in 1969 and 1978. I feel resentful on his behalf—not much love in a vague loving memory. He died on a particular date. No use denying it, yet even the gravestone omits the details. I hadn’t noticed until now, and hadn’t cared—I have truly not been paying attention.

  Nicky has a second memorial, in addition to the stone. The last time I saw it was in 1984, because aged seventeen I took a girl I liked on a winter date to an empty school, and tramped round the deserted playing fields. We came upon the closed-up cricket scorebox, and I lingered there blowing on my fingers until she saw the plaque commemorating my brother, dead for the past five years.

  Oh, poor me. Poor, poor me. By then I was indifferent to death, and also to broken hearts, because I’d enrolled dead Nicky into a strategy. The girl, beautiful and perplexed, would see the tragic plaque and feel sincere emotion on my behalf, which I fully intended to exploit. She’d appreciate me afresh for the silence of my suffering, then sleep with me to comfort or to save me, or out of pity. Any of these motivations was acceptable.

  However cynical the use I was making of a sadly dead brother, the point is that my ploy at the scorebox is how I know there’s another memorial in rural Berkshire. The plaque on the cricket-scorebox door will tell me the date.

  Out of term-time, the main building at Pinewood School, at the end of a curved tree-lined drive, remains familiar. Pevsner gives the building a brief entry in Buildings of England—Berkshire : Pinewood, formerly Bourton House, Tudor and gabled is by F. W. Ordish and the tender in 1845 was for £6,650.

  So the school, once a private house, was built in the early Victorian era to look Tudor. Nothing here is quite as it seems. In the 1970s, for example, we experienced a style of education from at least twenty years earlier. The headmaster, Geoffrey “Goat” Walters, had started as a Pinewood teacher in 1942.

  According to the 1975 prospectus, Pinewood had “a complement of 100 pupils and a staff of 9,” and the brochure met the main cause of parental worry about boarding schools head-on: Of course he may experience the odd bout of homesickness initially, but this is perfectly natural. Boys quickly settle down. Numbers were dwindling, possibly because parents in the Seventies wanted more for their children than the frigid settling down of the Fifties. Social expectations were changing, and emotional sensitivity had its place in a rounded education.

  Vladimir Nabokov, a novelist with a taste for memoir, wrote that everyone is at home in their past. He never went to an English boarding school. I’m at school in my past, and on a sunny day, more than thirty years after I left, during summer half-term I was greeted at the school’s main double doorway, implausibly, by a music teacher who’d once taught me piano. Mr. Field arrived at Pinewood in 1977. Now his job was mostly to charm visitors like me. Or not like me, because my reason for being here was unlike anyone else’s. I could still see the younger Mr. Field in the man he’d become, and after some initial pleasantries, I hoped he might be able to help.

  “What do you remember about Nicky?”

  He remembered Nicky as dead. No one was going to forget that, but of the living schoolboy he recalled a mood rather than details.

  “He was unsettled. He was a boy who didn’t settle well.”

  I interpreted this as schoolmaster code for a boy racked with grief when his parents abandoned him, but that was unfair. I was moving too fast, too soon. I should find out the date of his death before making guesses about his character.

  Mr. Field offered a tour of the school, and I couldn’t resist, but inside the old building so much had changed that the place was barely recognizable. Classrooms had been reconfigured with false walls, and connected by rerouted corridors like pathways in a new brain, one that didn’t make sense to me. Upstairs, I followed Mr. Field through the dormitories, but the corners and squat sit-on radiators had gone, the places where boys used to cry. I, too, had my moments of not settling well.

  They didn’t last long. Sport, friendship, and routine would take over, and back inside these walls memories of gray shorts and sweaters brush against me, but no more than that: I feel a trace of sensation from older stonework, a glimmer of my past life in a wall of faded tiling I’d have seen day in, day out, so many
years ago. I stop at a wooden stairwell, each step worn and discolored by the tread of buckled brown sandals. At the top stair the wooden banister is smooth from the touch of a thousand small hands, and I’m a boy in an Aertex shirt filing down from the dormitories to breakfast. One among many. I hear days soundtracked by tunes from Grade 2 exam books, the music played without sufficient expression.

  We leave through the back of the house and walk down a steep grass bank to the playing fields. Nicky’s memorial scorebox used to be on the far side of the First XI cricket pitch, but now the scorebox is off to the right, beside a new pavilion. The box is unlocked so I search inside and out. No sign of a plaque. I take some photos anyway, from a sense of obligation, before realizing one cricket scorebox looks much like another. I spy a similar black box at the farthest corner of the fields, close against a barbed-wire fence between the grounds and farmland.

  Mr. Field is getting old now, so I make the trek alone.

  The second scorebox is being used as a groundsman’s shed, and the outside has been protected several times over with layers of clumsy black creosote. A small brass plaque is screwed to the door, the edges overpainted:

  THIS SCOREBOARD WAS PRESENTED TO THE SCHOOL

  BY MEMBERS AND FRIENDS OF THE BEARD FAMILY

  IN MEMORY OF NICHOLAS

  (PINEWOOD 1977–1978)

  Again, no date. And here Nicholas Beard is remembered as having only a single meaningful year of life: Pinewood 1977–1978. He had more to him than that, I’m sure of it, but at least the memorial exists, albeit at the very edge of school property and no longer keeping the score for the members and friends of the Beard family.

  I consider stealing the plaque, because soon this box is going to be useless even for storage. Whoever chose the memorial must have known the gesture wouldn’t last—wooden cricket scoreboxes don’t become listed buildings. Though judging by our talent for forgetting, a perishable monument may have been part of the attraction. The school chapel was also available if we’d wanted something more permanent.

  The chapel has gone, converted into an extension of the primary-school staffroom and an extra classroom. Scribbled infant pictures cover the wall where the hymn numbers used to hang. In place of the wooden-eagle lectern, the classroom has beanbags. All that remains of the building’s past is an annex: the former entrance to the chapel preserved as a “lady chapel.” This is a tiny space, an awkward, durable portion of the past. The old school altarware is kept here, along with a wooden plaque carved with a cross:

  In Memory of Nicholas Beard Summer 1978.

  “Summer.” His life gets shorter with each memorial, until he’s remembered in a permanent season of sunshine. Not good enough, for an inquest. Nicky died on a specific numbered day, the date I still don’t have.

  Mum will know. I presume the dead boy’s mother will remember the date he died, so I phone ahead to warn her I’m coming. I don’t say why, but aim the Mazda across out-of-town roundabouts into Swindon itself, and then toward Mum’s new bungalow, which isn’t that new anymore. We grew up in a house in the next street, and by car I feel like I’m going to the same place, until at the last minute I’m not.

  Dad died in the main bedroom here, and now it’s just my mum; her territory, her rules. In the lounge I hold back the big question, because first we have to set up camp, make our safe and central place. Tea, biscuits, the tray on a table between sofas. We sit at right angles to each other, with the dogs in baskets by the television. Mum waits. She knows I want something, and I hesitate to describe my own mum as she sits on a sofa while the tea brews. She looks at the dogs, at the squirrels out the window, but in the end mums are like anyone else. They get older as you get older, and they have problems too. More importantly, mums are there from the beginning. They were there.

  I eat a chocolate biscuit, then another. I’m stuck for an opening line because I’ve spent so many years not asking this question. The gold carriage clock above the fireplace goes tick-tock, an engraved present to my dad’s parents for their golden wedding (1931–1981). The names of their children and grandchildren are engraved on the sides and back of the pedestal. Nicky’s name is absent, unrecorded, nonexistent.

  I tell Mum I’m having trouble at home. I realize I’m preparing the terrain, casting myself as a serious individual with serious concerns. I have troubles. I’m an adult, married but at the next stage beyond even that, with a marriage in danger of failing. In other words, I’m in the mood for straightening stuff out.

  “I’ve been behaving strangely,” I say. “I’m not feeling emotions very deeply.”

  “You have such wonderful children,” Mum says, choosing the road more traveled. She is on solid ground here, and we recognize the scenery of a familiar conversation. We know where we are with biscuits and the wonderful children.

  “Mum. I have a couple of things I’d like to chat about.”

  What I mean is we have an annex to our lives that as a family we pretend isn’t there. If I can enter that neglected space, I might discover why I increasingly feel that life is empty and worthless.

  But old habits die hard. My default strategy for avoiding these memories is to allow stories to take their place. For the sake of the story, a narrative interdiction here would be perfect. I’ll explain my inquest into Nicky’s death, but Mum will insist there’s nothing special to know. You’re wasting your time, she’ll say. She’ll warn me off, and threaten to talk to my brothers, while hinting darkly at disinheritance. To create tension, she should raise the narrative stakes.

  “I want to talk about Nicky’s death.”

  Mum talks. No interdiction, no problem. She has wanted to open up about Nicky for years, she says, and barely knows where to start. At the butcher’s, as it happens, that’s where her mind goes first. One of the hardest times, she tells me, was after Nicky died and back from our holiday in Cornwall Mum forced herself out to the shops, to Eastcott Smith in Wood Street.

  “Five lamb chops,” she said, hating the sound of the number. “Five chops, please.”

  Five, not six. The lamb-chop moment, the first time she came home from the shops without any dinner for Nicky, almost broke her heart.

  But I’ve heard it, know it. The trip to Eastcott Smith’s for five lamb chops is the one allowed story, which doesn’t make it any less true or sad. More likely, I think, is that this single domestic memory stands in for every sudden grief, large or small, that has since been denied or suppressed. The denial started early.

  “Mum, I don’t know the date.”

  “August the eighteenth,” she says.

  18th August 1978—fact. Finally, I have the date.

  The fact itself, the specific information, doesn’t break me. I check but no, I’m not falling apart. The inquest has begun and the past can be pulled back into being, even if during the years since 18th August 1978, until about yesterday, Mum kept Nicky alive by telling her story about chops. Occasionally she would say his name. Not often, but conspicuously enough for us to recognize the vacuum of silence that always followed. She made sure his black-and-white photo was on the piano, that he had his place beside the color-fast grandchildren.

  “I always talked about him,” she says, but I remember the photo appearing on the piano after a certain amount of time had passed, measurable in years. Maybe at first I avoided noticing the photo, but I don’t think so.

  “He was a difficult child,” Mum says, “a naughty child. He was either going to be a banker or a murderer.”

  Why would Mum say that? I don’t know what she’s saying.

  “He wasn’t like you,” she goes on, unstoppable now. “He was hopeless at games, and not very brainy. At cricket he tried, but he was out first ball. I’d go to watch his match, and he’d drop a catch.”

  Which might help explain why he died. He wasn’t physically competent. He didn’t have the muscle coordination to fight back against the water. Though mostly he was young, so very young. Nine years old in a battle with the Atlantic.


  “He looked completely different to you three,” Mum says, “huge brown eyes and thin black hair.”

  I let a pause develop, because I can be unkind. It is one of the symptoms of being insufficient in feeling. Nicky looked physically different from his three brothers, and according to Mum was unlike us in his talents and temperament. Which could account for his death being erased from the family memory. He wasn’t genuinely one of us—a reason for forgetting him that would make sense, in a novel.

  “Your dad was definitely his father,” my mum says, understanding exactly what my pause is designed to suggest. “You can be sure of that.”

  We’ve departed solid ground for the uncertain past, but out of habit we look for a safe way back. I can be unkind but I prefer to be comfortable, and this has been true for as long as I remember.

  “It’s good to talk,” I say, more as an attempt at appeasement than because I honestly believe it. “Get these things out in the open.”

  We’ve shut away so much. After all this time I have a miserable lack of factual information. Off the top of my head I’d say we have eleven, maybe twelve photographs, in total, that survive of Nicky. Roughly half are Nicky in a family group in the back garden of my grandparents’ house. My Swindon grandfather was a keen photographer, with his own darkroom (top of the stairs, turn right). At least twice a year he’d pose the four of us boys on the steps beside the rock garden. The steps stayed the same while the children aged and grew.

  Otherwise I knew of a few holiday snaps, and a couple of photos of Nicky playing cricket, as well as the statement picture on the piano. Inside his special silver frame, Nicky on the piano in black and white is none too real. He sits on a gray grass bank in his summer school uniform, perfect for the shot because everything he wears is gray, his socks, shorts, shirt, sweater. Physically Nicky is a thin boy, wiry, a string bean. He has black hair and brown eyes, and in the photo this is what he does: he sits on a grass bank with his legs crossed at the ankle.