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Missing Christina

 

by Meredith Whitford

 

Synopsis/blurb

 

 

 

Christina Randall’s sudden death shatters her family. As they react in their various and sometimes shocking ways Jaques, her eldest son, an actor and narrator of the book, finds that his own grief is enough without having to take her place as the person everyone confides in and trusts to fix their troubles.

 

To distract himself, Jaques helps an Australian historian who is researching the 1967 disappearance of one of his mother’s childhood pen-friends. As the action moves from England to South Australia and back Jaques discovers a new love and the long shadows of old secrets. He has to keep family ties intact, but not everyone is being honest. Is there more than one mystery? And who is in danger?

 

 

With humour and unforgettable characters, Meredith Whitford uses her experiences as an adopted child, a writer, a publisher and a synaesthete to weave a heartfelt, gripping novel of the many different kinds of love.

 

 

Missing Christina is available in paperback and as an e-book from online and selected physical bookstores.

 

Published by Endeavour Media Ltd (UK) 2017

 

ISBN 9781549555053

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Missing-Christina-Meredith-Whitford-ebook/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Missing-Christina-Meredith-Whitford/

https://www.amazon.com/Missing-Christina-Meredith-Whitford

https://www.amazon.com.au/Missing-Christina-Meredith-Whitford

 

 

 

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Missing Christina Excerpt 2

I knew Toby wondered how I could face using Mum’s room, still full of her things, but her temporary residence I didn’t mind. Any ghosts would be waiting for me at home.

The room smelled of her Dior scent and cigarettes, and that indefinable hotel smell of stale air and cheap disinfectant and other people. If the maids had cleaned the room since Mum was last here, they had worked around her things. Her shoes lay toppled on the floor, and on the table a pile of letters, The New Yorker, and an open packet of cigarettes had been shuffled into a rough heap.

I was tired in that stressed way in which sleep’s no help, although I’d had little of that since Toby first rang with the news about Mum. I loved my mother, and I also liked her. She was often away, on business or holed up in her country house to write, and it still felt like that: she was just away. But it wasn’t quite like that. Loss filled me, a positive presence; it filled me with the knowledge of never again. She was fun. Amusing, witty. She knew how to be happy. She was a good companion, and she was my friend. That sounds like Norman Bates, “A boy’s best friend is his mother.”, but I’d no wish to keep her body embalmed in the cellar. But we were friends; we thought alike, understood in the same way, shared opinions. We stood up for each other. We could drive each other mad with irritation, we quarrelled a lot, snapping at each other; but never with malice or hurt. We laughed at the same things – and laughter is what I most associate with Mum; she was funny, entertaining, a good companion.

I felt so weird.

Try television.

I channel-surfed for a bit, hoping for at least The Simpsons or Law and Order. Surely they’re always on? Nup. Ah, MTV. But all these bands and singers I’d never heard of… I’m a bit more on the ball now, but I used to make a fool of myself by not knowing modern cultural references. In 1998, aged nineteen, I went to Cambridge never having heard of Oasis or Pearl Jam, or having set eyes on Madonna. Far as I knew, there were still five Jacksons, all black. I thought Homer Simpson had a cousin called OJ and Lorena Bobbit was a televangelist. I didn’t know Ice-T from Vanilla Ice. I’d never seen Eastenders or Neighbours, Home and Away or Seinfeld. I couldn’t tell Bono from Bon Jovi. I wondered why that American show about a basement pub was called Cheese. I was clueless. Why? One – I grew up in a leftish intellectual home where television was limited to a few British classics, and music stopped in 1980. Two – from nine to nineteen I was working ten hours a day, six days a week, and outside those hours I was a dreamy, incurious kid, a reader not a viewer.

I was a child star in a sit-com that ran forever. A child actor who became a star, the perky middle son in Relative Causes. I enjoyed it, I liked acting, I liked everyone involved in the show. What I didn’t quite understand at the time was how little real childhood I had, and how much of my own growing-up had been witnessed by so many people. On the show, as in real life (although the boy I played was a year younger than my own age) my voice broke, my skin broke out then cleared up, I grew thirteen inches in height and put on twenty kilos, I discovered girls, went to school, passed exams, whatever. People took me for Jeff, the boy I played, and until too late so did I. The show was syndicated and sold all over the world, and still often turns up on telly, so it’s not much exaggeration to say the whole world watched it and thought it knew me. When I went up to Cambridge people teased me relentlessly about that show, which by then had achieved cult status as an icon of post-modern ironic kitsch – but don’t they all, when people are too pretentious to admit they like watching junk.

As well as that show, I acted in classical stuff – I was one of the pillow-fodder little princes in Richard III, Macduff’s son in Macbeth, various other kiddie-winks in other plays. I was the young Jesus for a made-for-TV movie of sickening sugariness and historical inaccuracy. And so on. Since Cambridge I’ve done a lot more, good stuff too, some excellent plays and nine films. My mantelpiece is thick with awards. But to most people I was and am Jeff Foley. How I hated that little prick. Still, he earned me a lot of money, which my parents carefully invested for me. Enough that I’ll never need to work again unless I choose.

From the age of four (so I’m told) I’d said I was going to be an actor. No idea why, but my parents took me seriously and sent me to a stage school, which I loved. But I only got into Relative Causes because Mum and Dad knew the show’s writer and producer. The kid they’d cast as Jeff for the pilot didn’t work, and there I was, the right age, cute enough, talented enough. “Hey, kid, wanna be a star?” It was a joke, a bit of fun. No one had the faintest idea the show would run and run and run. But right from the start it had that indefinable something, it was anarchic and chaotic, it had edge. Middle class, yes, but seen through a prism etched with acid; I quote one of the reviews. My show had a witty, funny script, a skewed vision and a bloody good cast. It still holds its own, even against stuff like Malcolm in the Middle or Married with Children, or My Family or whatever, in these days when no TV family is mild and ‛normal’. In its second season, when I started to be the prettiest thing you ever saw, Jeff stopped being quite so perky and cute and became a minion from hell. Ratings soared when all the kids in the cast hit puberty. Jailbait heaven, that show. It went a season past its best, although it never quite jumped the shark. It just ran out of steam, we were all bored with it, there was nowhere for the family’s story to go any more, short of introducing new characters, which is the kiss of death. It ended properly, by which I mean the story was tied up nicely, Jeff off to university, Meg married, Django (I didn’t write this stuff) going to India, the parents moving house. So long, farewell, auf weidersehn, adieu, and I emerged blinking into the daylight of a world in which days no longer ran from six a.m. to ten p.m., with lessons fitted in around learning lines, rehearsing, filming, acting, darting from studios to theatres and vice versa.

Now, afraid that my own show would be on, I turned the television set off, and prowled the room. Books. I’d bought a novel to read on the plane, but I’d either finished it or left it somewhere. Mum had been reading the latest Phil Rickman, but I’d recently read it myself. I thought I’d do something useful, tidy up all the letters and stuff. It looked as if she’d got about halfway through the big padded envelope of letters forwarded by her secretary; fan mail she dealt with at home, so this lot were personal or business. There was a neat pile, face-down, which meant Mum had finished with them. I put them back in the big envelope to return to Gail, then wondered if I should look at the rest or simply give them all to her. But the top one on the  ‘unread’ pile had had coffee spilt on it, and was still faintly damp. That probably meant that Mum had, at that point, been tired or bored enough to be clumsy, and had decided to go out or have a sleep. She always believed in a brisk walk or a nap to clear the mind. Drying the letter with the bathroom hairdryer I couldn’t help reading it. Mum wouldn’t have minded because it was nothing personal; in fact it was addressed to “Chris Randall”, and no one ever called her Chris. It seemed that some woman in Australia was writing a book about “the disappearance/murder of Belinda Tate in 1967”. I am writing to you because your name and address, as given above, were listed in Belinda’s address book under ‛pen friends’. I realise it was a very long time ago, but if by any chance you still have any letters from her…

Once when we were teasing our parents about life in the Dark Ages – Toby had refused to believe that once there were no cash machines or email – they had talked about pen-friends. But it was very odd to think of my sophisticated mother as a girl, forty-odd years ago, sitting down to write letters to people on the other side of the world. Even odder to think that someone she’d written to had disappeared/been murdered. I wondered if she had ever known, until she got that letter from Marian Elder, BA (Hons.) (Adel.), MA (ANU). PhD (Flinders), who had enclosed a copy of the introduction to her book, to prove, she said, that her research was on a serious level.

I’d over-dried the letter. It was as crispy as a poppadum. I shovelled it, with all the rest, into the envelope for Gail.

I took a shower, staying under the water until I could bear it no longer. Apart from leaving me cleaner, it hadn’t helped.

I supposed I’d better sort out Mum’s things. It’d pass the time. Also I wanted to find her stash. Fear of flying, and chronic insomnia, meant there’d be a few Valium or sleepers somewhere.

Her suitcase held three black and three white t-shirts, pyjamas and underwear, shirts and jumpers, jeans. In the wardrobe was a black suit with matching trousers, green tweed ditto, two dresses. This was just Mum’s travel wardrobe and didn’t feel personal, so I’d no sense of invading her privacy. This was stuff to dispose of, to give to some charity. No point in taking it home.

Now for her bag, the leather-bound canvas tote she took everywhere when she travelled and which served as overnight bag, handbag, medicine cabinet, library. Her make-up purse held the usual stuff, and I dumped it all in the wastepaper basket, except the Valium and a pill bottle containing nine sleeping pills. Munching a Valium, I up-ended the tote over the bed. Maps and business cards showered down, several pens, reading glasses, a soft-pack of B&H and three cheap lighters. Tissues. Receipts. A laminated A5 copy of her American itinerary. A book of cryptic crosswords, half done. Also, of course, Mum’s current notebook. She always had these notebooks with her, in her bag or beside her bed, and she used them for reminders, ideas and notes for whatever book she was currently writing. There’d be no secrets here.

Only three pages of this notebook had been used. In Mum’s familiar scrawl were things like Buy gloves next stop. Ask airline if others found, and a list of amounts in dollars converted to sterling. Email accountant. Why American coffee so weak? Email agent re article re tour. Then a passage of what to anyone else would’ve been code: re SS. If R gay, what of P? Kill doctor. Child abducted/killed??? But what if P and B??? SS prom? (About time!) Bring back Lees of FTJ????? Colditz??? Don’t overlap with Foyle’s W.

This meant she was planning a new Simon Slaughter novel. One character, the doctor, was perhaps to be killed, and one was gay… DI Simon Slaughter was due for promotion, Mum had told us that quite lately. She’d been worried that Foyle’s War, a program she liked and admired, would overlap with her books. Lees was the crook whose escape had in Finish the Job taken Slaughter to the U.S. The rest of the notes I couldn’t figure out, and probably they’d never matter now.

I’ve never known why, after that first mega-seller about prisoners-of war, Mum turned to writing crime, but World War II was her thing, she was an authority, so it was natural as well as clever for her to set her Inspector Slaughter series in the 1930s and 40s. Readers liked that, I think they enjoyed returning to what, despite the war and the politics of the time, seemed a safer, more wholesome world. Even devotees of modern hi-tech thrillers found enough to satisfy them in Mum’s books. And, not incidentally, Mum wrote extremely well, she told a page-turning story and her characters were real. Nor did she flinch, as one reviewer put it, from the sensual. As Slaughter and his sidekicks edged towards war, romances developed, sex was had. Mum knew what she was doing, and to many readers that development of the main characters’ personal stories was the hook. Would Slaughter and his upper-crust, left-wing lady friend finally get it together? (After the war.) Or is she actually a German spy? (No.) Will he realise WPC Helmesley’s had the hots for him since 1937? (Possibly.) Oh, the letters and emails Mum got when young Jimmy, cop turned fighter pilot, died. How could you kill him off? they wailed. (Easily. She was bored stiff with young Jimmy. But she cried when she wrote his death.) Sending Slaughter to the USA in Finish the Job was a masterstroke, and it made Mum as hoooje in America as she already was in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Scandinavia and a dozen other countries. She never sold well in France, especially after Slaughter spoke his mind about the French surrender of 1940. Escape had done well there, though, but then, that book was a best seller and soon a classic worldwide. It’s never been out of print, which is good for the charities that receive all its royalties.

No more Simon Slaughter.

I binned anything that counted as rubbish, put the rest back in the bag and fastened it. Mum’s phone was out of charge, and I plugged it in, not really knowing why. Mine too. Another Valium and I could dispose of Mum’s bathroom things, toiletries and makeup.

Better eat something. I rang Room Service, ordered soup, watched telly again until the meal came. Valium kicking in nicely now. Decided I’d get into bed, read a bit, listen to Mum’s iPod with its eclectic collection of music. I said “Eclectic electric collection” aloud, because saying it made me happy.

On my way to bed – there were two double beds in this room, and Mum would’ve used the one nearer the window, so I took the other – I thought of Mum’s jewellery. At the hospital they’d given us her earrings, wedding and engagement rings in a little bag. Better get that put somewhere safe. Safe. Hotel safe. Where? Usually in the wardrobe. Yep. Combination – she had a knack for numbers, but she’d have used my birthday, 9.7.79, as requiring no thought.

I was right and I was in. Mum’s passport, and her wallet, plump with cash and cards and traveller’s cheques; once she got stuck in a blizzard in some remote town, all the ATMs and credit card machines out when the power went. An unopened bottle of 50 sleeping pills. Digital camera. Little suede jewellery box.

Sitting up in bed I opened the jewellery box. Cheap dangly earrings and matching necklace. Diamond ear studs and ring. Gold bracelet. An antique, or possibly just old, oval locket of filigreed gold. I’d never seen that before, although the rest was familiar. It didn’t look Mum’s sort of thing. After a bit of fiddling I flicked open the tiny catch at the side, and the locket opened out bookwise. On the left was engraved, in writing so small I had to hold it to a lamp: ‘Tout comprendre c’est tout pardoner. Darling C from A, ever.’ On the right was a photo of a young, handsome, fairhaired man I’d never seen before. Or had I? He did look vaguely familiar. But who was he, and why was my mother carrying his picture around with her?