Mr Darcy

"I doubled it on my mother's doorstep. I did not decide to. By then it was simply the way I spoke."

The gravel on my mother's path had been the same gravel since I was four years old.

It went up from the gate in a long shallow curve between the camellias and it made a sound under a shoe that I could have picked out of a hundred, and my father raked it every Sunday of his life and complained about it every Sunday of his life, and Rowena would stand at the bay window with a cup of tea watching him do it and say, to nobody in particular, that the man had married a piano and taken up gardening.

Nobody raked it now. It had gone thin along the middle and the weeds were coming through at the edges, and in five years I had never once mentioned it to her.

The house came up over us as we walked, the way it always did. It was built in 1878 by a man who wanted the whole of Battery Point to know precisely how well he had done, and it had gone on doing that job without a single day off ever since — two storeys of brick and a bay window and an iron lace verandah that cost more to restore than our entire kitchen — and I grew up inside it, and I came up that path in the cold with my son's hand in mine and felt exactly nine years old.

Sammy was going like a machine.

"Is Mr Darcy going to be there? Is he? Mummy. Mummy. Is Mr Darcy going to be there?"

"Mr Darcy lives there, mate. He's always going to be there."

"But is he going to be awake."

And that was the entire substance of my son's morning. Not his father. Not the police in our hallway, or the dog who had not come when he called her. Whether a Burmese cat who had never in nine years shown him one moment of affection was going to be awake.

The door came open before we were up the steps.

She had been watching for us. She had been standing behind that door in the hall with her hand on the latch, listening for the gravel — and I knew it, and she knew that I knew it, and neither of us said one word about it.

And she had done her face.

The pearls. The good blazer. The hair, which she did herself and which did not move. The night before, my mother had come up off my living-room floor with her hair down one side of her head and nothing at all on her face, and now she was standing in her own doorway looking like a woman on her way out to give a masterclass — and I stood at the bottom of her steps in yesterday's jeans and looked up at her and understood exactly what it had cost her to do that, and I never told her so.

"Sammy! My darling prince!"

And she was down. Sixty-two years old, both knees onto that verandah, arms out.

"Grandma!"

He hit her like a bus. She caught him and stood up with him — she still stood up with him, she would still be doing it at eighty and it would kill her — and he had his face in her shoulder and both arms round her neck and he was already telling her about the cat.

And over the top of my son's head, she looked at me.

And there was nothing on her face at all. Not concern. Not curiosity. Not one flicker of the thing she had been doing to me on my own driveway the night before — and my mother was not capable of that, and never had been. She had not once in her life been able to look at another human being without an opinion coming out of her. And she stood on her own verandah with my son on her hip and gave me a face like a shut door.

She had made a decision. Somewhere between my kitchen and hers, my mother had sat down and worked out exactly what she was going to be that morning, and she had put it on along with the pearls.

Sammy got himself down off her and went past the pair of us into the house at a flat run, shouting for the cat.

And then it was the two of us on the verandah in the cold.

I held out the backpack.

"I've packed him some fruit, his water bottle, and Teddy's in there too."

She took it. She looked at it, and then she looked at me, and she did not say a word.

And that was worse than anything she could possibly have said. My mother had an opinion about the way I packed a bag. She had an opinion about the fruit. If I had come up those steps on any other Sunday of my life with that backpack in my hand she would have had the zip open and been through it with her thumb before I got to the top step.

She held it up against her chest and said nothing at all, and the silence went on too long — and behind her, down the hall, through the open drawing-room door, I could see the piano.

The lid was down.

I stood on that verandah in my coat and looked past my mother's shoulder at a closed piano.

She did not close that lid. Not ever. Not once in the whole of my life. It stood open with the music up on the stand and a pencil lying in the tray, and it had stood open through every Christmas and every argument and every single thing that had ever happened inside that house.

It had been shut once. Eleven months, in 2013. And I had let myself into that hall every Tuesday for eleven months and looked at the closed lid and gone straight past it into the kitchen and said nothing.

And it was shut again.

My mother had driven home from my house the night before and she had not played.

She saw me see it. I knew she had, because something went across her face very fast and she took it away again — and not one word was said by either of us.

"You'll call me if you need anything, won't you?" I said.

And it came out of me thin and small and about nine years old, and I hated it.

"Of course."

She put a hand out and rested it on my arm. Two fingers and a thumb, on the sleeve of my coat.

"You'll sort this out, Jenny. You always do."

And she meant it as a kindness. She meant it entirely as a kindness — and it came down on me like a bar out of the flies, because I did not want to sort it out. I wanted somebody else to sort it out. I wanted, standing on my mother's verandah at thirty-two years of age, to be told that it was all in hand, that there was a man in a coat already working on it, that I could go and lie down somewhere and be woken when it was over.

And she was right. I always did sort it out. It was what I was for.

"I'll try not to be too long," I said. "I'm going to the police station in town to demand they open a missing person report immediately."

Her chin came up.

"That's my girl." And there it was: the small dry smile, with the blade laid in flat underneath it. "Always demanding."

And I let it go past me.

I had not let one of those go past me since I was fifteen years old. She teed it up and put it straight down the middle of her own verandah, and there was a version of that morning in which I picked it up and the pair of us went eleven rounds on the front steps — and I stood there with my keys in my fist and let it go by, and I watched her register that as well.

She looked down at the backpack. She changed her grip on it.

"Jenny..."

And her voice had gone.

"Are you sure that's the best course of action?"

And I looked up at my mother.

Because that was not a criticism. I had been taking my mother's criticisms since before I could read and I knew the exact shape of every one of them, and that was not one of them. There was no edge on it. There was no lesson standing in the wings behind it waiting to come on. My mother was in her own doorway with my son's bag held against the front of her good blazer, asking me — quite genuinely, and with nothing underneath it — whether I ought to walk into a police station and demand things.

She was frightened.

I had never once heard it out of her. Not in thirty-two years. Not when my father was in the Royal with the curtain pulled round the bed. Not at St George's, where she stood up at the front and delivered the eulogy without a tremor anywhere in it, and then went home and made everybody sandwiches.

My mother was frightened, and she was asking me to be careful, and she had no language for saying that to me — so she said it in the only one she had.

"Yes," I said.

And then I did it.

"I've called everyone I can think of—his work partner, some of his clients. No one has spoken to Nial in over forty-eight hours."

And I heard it come out of my mouth.

Forty-eight hours.

It was twenty-four. I had said goodbye to that man through a fogged shower screen the previous morning with my hair full of shampoo. Twenty-four hours — and I stood on my mother's verandah and doubled it, and I did not stumble on it, and I did not blink, and I did not hesitate for so much as a quarter of a beat.

I did not decide to do it. It was not a plan and I did not weigh it up. It simply arrived in my mouth fully formed and correctly weighted and delivered on the front foot — because twenty-four hours had got me two children in uniform, a cup of tea, and the name of a lawyer.

I wanted a man with a torch.

Two days. That was all it had taken. Two days, and I could not open my mouth any longer without arranging the contents of it first.

And my mother did not know. She stood there and took it, and it went into her, and I stood on her verandah and watched my own mother do the arithmetic on a number I had made up.

"Well," she said. "You'd better get going then."

"Thank you."

I got a smile out from somewhere. It was not a good one and I did not much care.

"Call me immediately if anything happens." And I had hold of her arm by then — the two of us standing out there in the cold, each with a hand on the other's coat sleeve — and my voice was going on me. "Anything at all—if you hear from Nial, if something happens with Sammy, anything."

"I will," she said.

And I went.

I got down those steps and onto the gravel and I did not look back into that house, because Sammy was somewhere inside it under a chair with a cat, and if I had gone in after him to say goodbye I would not have come out again.

He did not say goodbye to me. He did not come to the door. He had gone off down that hall after Mr Darcy without one backward glance and he had no idea that I was leaving, and he would not have minded if he had — and I had held on to that boy in my own hallway until my arms ached with it, and I had done every last bit of it in the wrong place, and the parting itself was nothing at all.

That was how it should be, and I knew that it was how it should be. He ran off without looking back because he was not frightened of anything in this world, and I had spent every waking hour since Saturday afternoon working to keep him that way.

It was still unbearable.

I was nearly at the gate when she called out.

"Do be careful, won't you?"

And I stopped on my father's gravel with my hand on my keys.

My mother did not say things like that. My mother said you'll be late, and she said that colour does nothing for you, and she said well, you'd better get going then. She had stood in that doorway for the whole of my adult life and watched me go down that path a thousand times, and she had never once — not one single time — told me to be careful.

I turned round.

She was up on the verandah with my son's red backpack still held against the front of her good blazer, and she had both arms round it.

I could not say anything to her. If I had opened my mouth I would have gone down on that gravel and stayed there.

So I nodded at my mother, and my mother nodded back at me, and I went out through the gate.

The car was cold, and it smelled of him.

It always smelled of him. He had taken it on the Thursday to run a load out to Cambridge, and there was a bottle of aftershave that had lived in the glovebox since 2016, and none of that had changed since Friday and none of it was going to.

And the passenger seat was still all the way back.

He put it there on Thursday night. He is six foot two, and he shoves that seat back as far as it will go and drops it flat, and I have been getting into that car and slamming it forward again every single time for eleven years, and it drives me completely mad, and I have told him so several hundred times.

I sat in my own car outside my mother's house with my hands in my lap and looked at that empty seat lying all the way back.

And I did not move it.

I put both hands on the wheel and drove into town to make them look for him.