a tangible thing, not just a painful memory.
Peter Stanning drove over with a hand-carved rocking horse and bundles of strawberry jam. He would have done more, but for the fact that he went missing when Hope was three months old.
Vera and Bob had no idea how helpful Peter Stanning had been until he disappeared from their lives.
‘You know what, Bob,’ Vera said when Peter’s vanishing was less of an intriguing piece of gossip and more a fear for the man’s life. ‘Lauren would have cared about what happened to him. She was so mature, so caring, and she loved a puzzle. She would have been asking us every day, “Any news about Peter Stanning?”, wouldn’t she?’
Bob accepted all his wife’s reminiscences regardless of whether they tallied with his own, but in this instance he really did agree. Lauren would have been fascinated, he was sure of that.
Hope grew up loving her big sister. It was a peculiar kind of love, the sort a teenager has for a distant pop star she has never met. Hope celebrated Lauren’s birthday with enthusiasm, blowing out the candles her sister could never breathe over, eating the cake her sister could never taste, singing the songs her sister could never hear. Her favourite bedtime stories where the ones in which Lauren played a starring role. ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ became ‘Little Lauren in a Red Cloak’. Rapunzel had a name change too. And every night Vera would hold out a photograph of Lauren for Hope to kiss before kissing it herself.
Aunt Suki thought it all sickly sweet and unhealthy, but said nothing. She had kissed a photograph of her niece just the once and it had made her maudlin, uneasy and embarrassed. The role of the dead was unclear, especially when it was a child that had died. There was something both touching and terrible in the way Hope would randomly grab at a framed picture in the lounge and plant wet kisses on the face of her sibling. But it made Vera and Bob smile, so Aunt Suki said nothing.
There was a long queue for brunch in the refectory. It was the queue of friendship. So many art students that first Saturday morning made lifelong pals while waiting for eggs and muffins. Lauren gazed about her. She noticed a tall slim man with wild dark hair wearing a crisp white shirt, its sleeves rolled up, and over it a tightly fitting woollen waistcoat. There were girls with dyed hair and spiked hair, girls with long skirts with wacky hems; one girl, Indian perhaps, who glided about as if in her own palace. Everyone had an identity. There was something distinctive about them all. She looked down at her ballet pumps and her simple dress. Maybe her ordinariness was her shtick.
Lauren’s first queue friend was Ski, a serious boy of Russian descent who was adored by his mother. His father was less impressed by Ski’s desire to study art. But it was Nina, a couple of weeks later, who rechristened Lauren ‘Loz’. Nina was a livewire chatterbox and managed to spread the name Loz as quickly as the wind catches hold of wildfire in a dry forest. Lauren did not mind. She needed an interesting name to compensate for her nondescript image.
Lauren took an instant dislike to her tutor. He was five years too old for his tight green T-shirt and it took a good deal of willpower not to stare too hard at his thick rubbery lips. His name was Ossie Thomas-Blake and he held before him Lauren’s portfolio.
‘I like this,’ he said confrontationally.
He was looking at Peter Stanning is Missing which Lauren had refined – but which was still, essentially, the work of a sixth-former.
‘Too many students fail to find the narrative before they create,’ OTB said. ‘It is not enough to see a pretty sunset and want to capture it. Why do you want to capture it? That’s what matters.’
Lauren nodded. She wanted to say that any cartoon strip would have a narrative but held her tongue.
‘Is he still missing?’
‘What? Oh, yes, he is. It’s the biggest news to hit my village,’ she said.
‘Good,’ OTB said. ‘Relevant. You should try to find him.’
‘I should?’ Lauren was struggling now, wondering if OTB was winding her up, if this was a sort of initiation.
‘Jeez, I don’t expect you to actually find him but you should try to and then put the adventure into your work. Cartoon strips, abstracts, portraiture; anything that feels right.’
‘Is that my first-year project?’
OTB smirked.
‘That’s your first-year project.’
Lauren left his studio bewildered. She had not come to London only to have to trek back home to Cheshire. She almost stamped her foot in frustration. London had been dizzying for the first week but now she felt addicted to the noise and the light, the fact you could buy a hot meal at any time of day or night. There was art everywhere, and theatre, and cinema and live music. Men would kiss while standing in front of posters that told them not to die of ignorance. In the student bar the chat would veer from AIDS to condoms to whether anyone would dare travel through a Channel Tunnel, or to snog Neil Kinnock, the Prime Minister so beloved of most of the students, or shake hands with Jeffrey Archer. Being in London was to be at the centre of the universe. Nothing was taboo. Her fellow students could believe in any god they chose to or believe in nothing at all. The only heated exchange she had witnessed was about the role of photography in a degree portfolio. The art the students produced ranged from overtly sleekly commercial to angry and minimalist and in between there was room for those who used oils and captured light as beautifully as Vermeer.
By contrast, Peter Stanning’s absence had become boring, even the police seemed bored when they embarked on one of their shopping-centre blitzes, asking passers-by if they recalled anything unusual, had they seen this man behaving strangely? Had they seen this man? But perhaps that was the point: to be honest about an event that everyone was supposed to be worried or sad about. Or maybe she could jazz it all up, put Peter Stanning into all kinds of outcomes? Hiding in the Australian bush, living with another woman in Wales or dead in the boot of an abandoned car, the victim of mistaken identity.
Vera and Bob were as excitable as toddlers that Lauren came home for a long weekend before the end of her first term.
‘I’ve come home for inspiration,’ she said, ‘and to see you, of course.’
Lauren made sure she pronounced the word ‘inspiration’ in a mock-Home Counties voice. She did not want her parents thinking art school had turned her head, given her ideas above her station, as Aunt Suki might say.
It was more difficult than she had imagined, explaining to her parents that OTB had made the disappearance of Peter Stanning her first-year project. It made her feel tacky and insensitive.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
Bob patted her arm. ‘No, I think maybe your tutor chap might have a point. Anyway, you don’t have to go around upsetting anyone, do you?’
‘No, but you’re probably tired of it all now, Dad; the last thing you want is me asking you questions about him.’
Bob beamed. ‘But you can ask them over a meal at Mr Yee. It’ll be a treat for us, really it will.’
Mr Yee had a fresh poster featuring Peter Stanning in his window, which seemed to Lauren to be a sign that her project was current affairs, not old news.
‘Fire away, love,’ Bob said as he stirred his wonton soup.
‘Well, I’d like to know what you really truly think happened.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I keep changing my mind about that.’
‘Right now then, what’s your best theory?’
Lauren was aware that Mr Yee was listening, above them, at the raised counter where he prepared the bills. She could already envisage Mr Yee making a cameo appearance in her next cartoon strip.
Bob nodded