This compelling and imaginative story by Emma Healey is unusual in featuring a main character, Maud, who is in her early 80’s. Her memory is heavily clouded, but not entirely erased, by slowly advancing dementia. It is Emma’s first novel and was published to great critical acclaim before she reached the age of thirty. What gives the work its unique literary and narrative quality is the writer’s uncanny ability to get inside the head of an elderly character and convey her increasingly confused thought processes as a stream of consciousness, which comes across as both realistic and convincing – and at times amusing.
Maud lives on her own with the support of her daughter, Helen and a regular visiting carer, Carla. Maud’s muddled state of mind is epitomised by her compulsive purchasing of tinned peaches and her constant reciting of the mantra, ‘Elizabeth is missing’. Hardly surprisingly, Helen is increasingly convinced that her mother is not really coping on her own at home and as the story unfolds she persuades her to move in with her and her family, having quietly arranged the sale of her home.
Maud is convinced beyond reason that her dear friend and neighbour, Elizabeth, has gone missing, but her obsession overlays another much deeper mystery buried deep in the past. While Maud’s grasp of the present is becoming increasingly tenuous, in common with many dementia sufferers, she does enjoy moments of complete lucidity in relation to her earlier life. Through a series of flashbacks scattered among descriptions of her increasingly chaotic present life, she is able to recall significant incidents and conversations from her early teenage years at the end of the Second World War. Maud lives with her parents and their young lodger, Douglas, a milkman who has come to live with them after his mother’s house is destroyed in a German bombing raid, with his mother presumed dead.
Meanwhile, Maud’s older sister, Susan, known as Sukey, has recently moved out and got married, although she still lives nearby. Her husband, Frank, has inherited his parents’ house, which also serves as the base for the removal business he has also inherited. Frank is handsome and raffish and Sukey is swept away by his charm and by the little luxuries he treats her to, despite rationing and the other privations of the period. Frank is somehow able to supply his wife and selected neighbours with plentiful supplies of groceries and other goods which rationing has made scarce and there is more than a suspicion that he is involved in shady, black market dealings.
One day Frank goes off on one of his regular and mysterious trips to London and while he is gone, his wife, Sukey, suddenly vanishes, leaving everyone frantic with worry. Despite extensive enquiries by both her family and the local police, no one is able to discover what has happened to her.
Three months after her disappearance, though, one clue does come to light: a brown leather suitcase that Sukey had bought for her honeymoon, discovered by the police at the local Station Hotel. Maud is much taken with her missing sister’s beautiful clothes and starts wearing some of them, a fact which does not go down at all well with their lodger, Malcolm.
Gradually Maud is able to make sense of all her flashbacks and this eventually leads to her uncovering – with the help of her daughter, Helen – the shocking truth about what really happened to her sister over 70 years earlier.
This is a gripping and fascinating story which skilfully weaves together events from two very different periods to create an outstanding novel, which is part thriller and part dementia diary. I felt compelled to read the book a second time in order to identify all the clues and piece together exactly what did happen to Sukey. With a lot of authentic period detail and a convincing portrayal of a mind being slowly dislocated by dementia, it should appeal to anyone who grew up in the Second World War and, more widely, to anyone who enjoys a good mystery story.
Highly recommended.
