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It was hardly high to begin with, thought Will. His father was miserable; his Auntie Camay was sniffy about the food because on the rare occasions that his father offered to pay, they wouldn’t be going to a James Martin restaurant. Uncle Ward wasn’t interested in contributing to any conversation either; he was just there to bulldoze his way through three courses and a bottle of house wine like a bloated locust.
Chris answered the question anyway in his best don’t-care tone. ‘No, I haven’t.’
‘What have you done with all her things?’ asked Ward, spitting gravy as he spoke.
‘Nothing. They’re all still in the room upstairs,’ Chris replied.
‘I’d have made a big bonfire. Very cathartic,’ said Camay with a huff.
‘She’ll come back with her tail between her legs eventually,’ said Chris.
‘Or someone else’s,’ snorted Ward, causing Camay to jab him hard with her elbow.
‘Surely you won’t take her back?’ Shauna was horrified at the thought.
‘She’d have to have a brass neck to even try,’ said Camay, spearing a chip with a viciousness that suggested she was stabbing at something living.
She’d have to have a screw loose to even consider it, thought Will, although he didn’t want to think that he wouldn’t ever see Polly again. She’d always been so kind to him. He referred to her as his step-mum, though Shauna never did.
‘Have you tried ringing her, Dad?’
‘What do you take me for?’ said Chris indignantly. ‘I think it’s up to her to make the first move. She’s hedging her bets because her post is still coming to the house; she hasn’t redirected it. Today she got a letter from her “creative writing” class’ – he drew the inverted commas in the air – ‘asking if she was all right as she hadn’t been recently.’
‘Crafty bitch,’ said Shauna with relish.
‘Precisely,’ said her father.
‘Crafty how?’ asked Will, confused by that comment.
‘Well, she never told me she was going to creative writing classes,’ Chris answered in a way that suggested Will must be a bit dense for not seeing it. ‘So what else was she lying about? I think we know the answer to that one. Ha.’ He nodded the full stop at the end of his sentence.
‘Maybe,’ said Shauna, wagging her fork, ‘just maybe, she got someone to write that letter to make Dad worry.’
‘Or she might have been attending creative writing classes and hadn’t been for a while and so people genuinelyareworried. How about that as an option, Columbo?’ said Will, crossly.
‘Whose side are you on?’ Shauna threw at him.
‘Stop this now,’ commanded Camay, banging a teaspoon on the table. ‘This is exactly what she’d love – to be the starring role in our evening and ruining it. We might as well have set a ruddy place for her at the table. I for one hope she never comes back. She’s playing games. She’s screwing with our minds.’
‘By doing absolutely nothing?’ said Will.
‘Precisely,’ said his Aunt Camay. ‘Now let’s all have a toast. To Chris, who is today a forty-six-year-old eligible bachelor. Happy birthday, baby brother.’
Will raised his glass but not with the same gusto as everyone else. For his own peace of mind he needed to find out that Polly was all right. If she was and she wanted nothing to do with any of them, including himself, that would be her prerogative, but a cloud of worry was now just starting to drift into his peripheral vision.
When Will dropped his dad off after the miserable birthday party, he asked for Polly’s mobile number. He rang it but there was nothing, no dialling tone, no forwarding to voicemail, zilch.
‘Well, she must have changed her number,’ was Chris’s explanation.
‘It’s not proof she has though,’ said Will, who felt now that he did need proof.
He asked to see the letters Polly had been sent and he took photos of them so he could do some detective work at home this weekend. He didn’t say to his dad that he hoped he’d discover Polly was living her best life with a lover. There were a few alternative scenarios running through his head now, after reading those two letters, that he really didn’t want to contemplate, and doing the dirty on his dad by running off with another man at least meant she was still alive.
A late-night search on the internet to find the creative writing group that Polly supposedly belonged to yielded nothing. There was no address, email or telephone number on the letter, just a lino-cut-type stamp at the top of the A4 sheet of a quill and underneath it the words: ‘Millspring Quillers’. So he parked it until the morning.
The second letter Polly had received was from a company called Business Strength telling her she was reinstated, which didn’t make sense because Polly didn’t work for them. She’d worked for the same company since she left college. Or had she? Polly just didn’t seem the sort of person to have so much intrigue surrounding her. Will was half-expecting to discover she was really an MI6 agent.
He shouldn’t have left it this long to make sure she was okay. He was annoyed with himself that he’d accepted the ‘Occam’s razor’ easiest answer to where she was. But now, for a reason he couldn’t explain other than it being intuition, he no longer believed it.
