Nick has made a list from his conversation with Edward at Missing Overseas. We divide up the tasks. I begin calling round friends and family so people hear directly from us before it’s made public. I find it easier to keep the calls brisk as I tell her friends, Erin, then Amy, that Lori is officially missing, and ask them to spread the word. Jake’s voicemail is on so I leave him a message.
There’s no one really on my side of the family to notify: I’m an only child, parents both dead now. My mum’s brother Norman lives in Oxfordshire but he was too frail to make her funeral. His daughter, my cousin Adrienne, and her brother, Curtis, are still around somewhere but I only have Norman’s details. He is very deaf so I won’t ring. Instead I type a letter and address it to Adrienne, c/o Norman.
Edward has sent us a template for a press release and Nick is cutting and pasting text into it.
I ask Nick if he’ll speak to his parents in Nottingham. They are in sheltered accommodation, still independent but increasingly prone to falling over and the diseases of old age – glaucoma, arthritis, osteoporosis. Nick checks the time. They won’t answer the phone before six because of the expense, even though we’d be paying. It doesn’t matter whether we’ve a price plan that includes free or cheap calls to their number, the habit is ingrained. Betty washes and reuses baking foil and darns Ron’s socks. One teabag does for two cups.
Nick’s brother, Philip, lives near to them and has tea there every Sunday. Philip is a bit of a recluse, never married; he worked on the railways as an engineer for twenty years before going long-term sick with cirrhosis. He has a drink problem. Some insurance policy from his trade union means he can just about manage without having to go on benefits.
I wonder now, as Nick is deliberating over whether to call him first, if Philip is depressed, if that’s behind the drinking. Which came first? Then I feel awkward, knowing how much Nick would hate any comparison between himself and Philip, or any pop psychology about genetics and depression.
And this isn’t depression, I think, not really. Depression is not being able to get out of bed, literally. It’s trudging through one dead grey hour after another; it’s complete self-obsession, self-loathing and pain. Isolation. It is grief as deep as the earth. I know these things from stories I’ve read and documentaries I’ve seen but also because Tom’s mother has been clinically depressed for much of her life. And most of his. Hospitalized for years on end. She couldn’t come to our wedding. We took Lori there once, when Daphne was at home. I’d nagged Tom about visiting, letting her meet her grandchild, until he relented. I had seen photographs of her, tall and blonde, like Tom, but very pale-skinned. She did some modelling in the sixties. There are shots of her wrapped in white fur with bare feet and smouldering eyes. When she married Francis, she found herself installed in a crumbling Georgian house, in a Sussex village, expected to take care of the interior design and socializing and, once Tom came along, the childrearing, while Francis spent his weeks in London at his insurance company, living in the flat he kept there.
