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RACHEL
Halfway through the morning Nicky announced, ‘I’ve spoken to John. He wants us to go round to his
house so we can agree together on a design for a “Missing” flyer, and print some there. He’s got a
laser printer.’
I’d never been to John and Katrina’s new house. Not past the front door anyway. I’d spent plenty of
time standing on the gravel outside when I’d dropped Ben off for the weekend.
‘Will Katrina be there?’
‘I expect so, yes, but at this point I think you need to think of her as another pair of hands. She
wants to help and we need all the help we can get.’
I thought of the blog and the comments I’d read this morning.
‘Any port in a storm?’ I said.
‘Exactly!’ she said, and she smiled just a little.
It pleased Nicky when I said that because it’s what our Aunt Esther used to say. ‘You’d been
through a storm,’ she would say if we ever discussed the circumstances that had led us to live with
her. ‘A terrible storm, and I was your port.’
‘A safe haven,’ Nicky would say and Esther would agree.
Esther had taken us in after our parents’ death. She was our mother’s much older sister. She brought us
to her house immediately after the accident that killed our parents and we never left after that. She
sheltered us from gossip, which sometimes hung around us like a cloud of biting midges. She gave us
the chance to have a childhood, or her version of one.
It wasn’t a usual upbringing, because Esther was a spinster, who’d always lived alone. She taught
English Literature A level to the children of the local wealthy at a small private school and could
quote a huge amount of poetry by heart. She also played bridge and had a passion for growing roses.
She wore knee-length skirts and flat shoes, with simple cardigans, and had bobbed flyaway white hair
that she clipped back with kirby grips. She kept gold-topped milk in the fridge, which the birds had
invariably pecked at before she brought it in in the morning, so each lid had neat puncture marks in it
when it arrived on the breakfast table.
I don’t think Esther was a naturally maternal figure. She was unaccustomed to young children apart
from a regular annual visit she’d made to our family before our parents died, so when Nicky and I
arrived suddenly in her life she treated us as miniature adults, and shared her passions with us. She
surrounded us with art and music and books, she pointed out the possibility of beauty in life. Nicky
drank this up as if it were nectar, and fell into Esther’s arms gratefully.
I was different. When I was growing up I always felt like the baby that I’d been when we arrived
there, a bit of an addendum to their lives, too little to understand things properly, always in bed when
the proper conversations took place. It was ironic, as I’d never known our mother or father, that I was
the one who found it most difficult to accept Esther in her role in loco parentis, while Nicky, nine
years old when we arrived, wouldn’t leave her side.
As a teenager I’d meanly thought that Esther was fusty, tweedy and better suited to another era,
more like other people’s grandparents than their parents. I’d rejected her gentle offerings of culture
and knowledge because they hadn’t immediately bolstered me, or given me an obvious direction or
purpose. That came later in life, when I took up photography, when I sat beside John in St George’s
concert hall and fell in love with him and with classical music, and then I regretted that I’d never