Downstairs, Ray didn’t know where to put himself. He’d refused Janet’s suggestion they call the police. He’d refused it at lunchtime, and he refused it now.
“I’m not getting them involved.”
“But Ray, she’s gone and lost our girl in the middle of I don’t know where.”
“I’ll go there myself,” he was already shoving his arms into the sleeves of his work jacket, a tan anorak with the broken zip that he always forgot was broken and tried to do up every time he put it on. He tried now, the zip uselessly whizzing up and down, achieving nothing.
“You haven’t got your shoes on.”
“Where are my shoes?”
“Has Bridget run away, dad?” Paul, who’d had the luxury of the VHS machine to himself all afternoon and had watched The Muppet Movie twice without stopping and would have put it on again if his mum and dad hadn’t turned on the news, had been disrupted from his play by his dad shouting his mum’s name. He’d followed the weird looking woman with hair the colour of orange squash up the stairs and thought about listening at the door in case she touched his stack of Beanos, and then thought about what she might be doing in there and felt disgusted and trotted down to his mum and dad who were rattling about the hall like one of his wind-up toys that bumped into the walls and fell off tables.
Annabel came downstairs as Janet was trying to get Paul to put his foot on the first step upstairs again. When she saw Annabel she changed her mind and went off down the hall with him, steering him to the kitchen instead, away from that art teacher who everyone said was trouble. Teachers at St Biddulph’s behaved like no one could see their little games, as if there were only children in that clattering dinner hall, as if the dinner ladies didn’t have eyes but Janet wasn’t blind. She’d seen how when Annabel was on lunch duty the other teachers sniggered about her. She’d thought she was all right until now, she’d even felt sorry for her, poor woman, no friends; at least she’d had the decency to look her in the eye when she held out her tray, to give Janet the time of day unlike them others who considered themselves a cut above. Janet would like to see the Geography teacher make mash for three hundred. But this was something else. You didn’t take someone’s daughter and lose them. She set Paul at the table with a glass of squash and Ray’s latest copy of Military Modelling.
Annabel looked set to cry when Janet got herself beside her husband again in the hall.
“It’s not a lesbian camp.”
“We saw it on the news,” said Janet.
“It’s a no-good bunch of ignorant women who should know better,” said Ray. “Clogging up the military when a bomb could come any minute, when those men need, we all need them to get on with the job and you lot think it’s perfectly respectable to go clogging up the gates with your dirty tents and opinions like a bunch of unwashed do-gooders who wouldn’t know one end of a bomb from another. You want to leave this business to the people who know.”
“The people who know have put us all in danger.” Every atom of Annabel was telling her now was not the time, but she couldn’t help it.
“So, you’ve thought it right and proper to go kidnapping our daughter.”
“I haven’t kidnapped her, Mr Reynolds. She told me she had permission. I told her she had to get the note signed by you.”
“To go to Trafalgar Square.”
“No,” Annabel shook her head.
Ray opened the door. He hadn’t done his shoelaces up. One lace trailed over the doorway. “Where are my keys?” He patted his jacket. His left foot trod on the right shoe’s lace, hurling him towards the gardenia bush that next door had planted despite him saying it cut over their path.
“Watch yourself, Ray,” cried Janet, trying to keep a hand on Paul who’d come straight out the kitchen the moment his mum had turned around.
“I’ll bring her back,” said Ray, righting himself.
“Keys.” Janet held them out.
“They don’t allow men,” said Annabel rushing after him.
“They’ll allow this man,” said Ray striding towards a low-slung blue Vauxhall Rover. Just as quickly he turned on his heel and returned to the front door. “Map.”
“I’ll get it, dad.” Paul raced into the front room.
Annabel stood on the path; a half-darkness lit by the glow from the Reynolds’ hall. She’d been hoping for a biscuit, an offer of tea, something to sustain her. Life had looked so wonderful this morning.
In the front seat of the car, Ray opened his map; fought to see in the dim interior light.
“It’s near Newbury.”
“I know where it is.”
“You take the M3”.
“We could have you arrested.”
Annabel felt sick all over again.
She’d thought if she showed her a world outside of St Biddulph’s, she’d see that a woman could be anything. She’d thought that all she needed was a shove, like the shove she’d had that had catapulted her out of secondary school and into a place at Goldsmiths, a brief glorious term where she’d painted nude men and had sex with nude women, a term when she’d felt beautiful before the mist came down and she was yanked unceremoniously into a life of corduroy skirts and hiding.
“I didn’t abduct her.”
Ray swung a corner; Annabel jammed her hand into the visor to stop herself lurching over the gear stick.
The girls in the playground, the wives in Safeway, the scant options between school and marriage that anyone could see falling out of the clubs in Kingston on a Saturday night, or what happens after he’s dead and you’ve spent a lifetime defined by him and now what, these options had beleaguered Annabel and she’d seen the same in Bridget Reynolds. She’d watched her grow from the tadpole eleven-year-old in her first year at Secondary, indistinguishable from all the others released into her art room, into a large and wary fifteen-year-old with hips and bosoms and nowhere to put them, as if she carried them like shopping she couldn’t put away.
When Annabel was fifteen, she’d had the opposite problem; she hadn’t grown anything but red golden hair on her top lip and a height that had kept on going until they called her bean pole and took delight in trying to pick things off her at lunchtime. She hadn’t fitted in. She’d needed a push, she’d had the assistant Sunday school teacher who’d taken her aside one day and shoved a copy of The Second Sex into her hands, who hadn’t just shown her where the door was but had fairly kicked it open. At her first opportunity she’d left her furious mother and depressed father to their Christian god and gone and found her own god at Goldsmiths. There she’d understood that a woman could be anything, she had been anything until a phone call from her sister told her their father was dead. She’d wound up at St Biddulph’s determined to be positive about the shift her life had taken, to view this chapter as her very own Prime of Miss Jean Brody without the fascism. She’d prided herself on being able to spot the ones that needed help, she’d daydreamed of switching on the light as the assistant bible studies teacher had with her. Bridget had been her project.
Ray had the map open on his lap. The little boy had come running out with a huge AA of Great Britain and Ray had sworn and gone to go back inside with it and changed his mind and set off down the path again, the map in his hand. The pages were too big to turn under the steering wheel and his finger, which he moved along the printed roads, one hand on the wheel, the other tracing their journey even though he wasn’t looking, was about to fall off the page.
“I can map read,” said Annabel.
One of the Vauxhall’s headlights didn’t work.
Ray ignored her.
This might be my favorite chapter yet - Ray, Janet, Annabel, and even Paul so perfectly themselves. Finally, Ray has a worthy project in his unsatisfying life, and he’s all dither and fumble.
Ray is worried about his daughter but also in his glory, a mission to conduct, map in hand.