Review: Losing your best friend – and your mind

Elizabeth Is Missing

Author: Emma Healey

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2014

Source: Library

Grade: A-

Maud Horsham’s best friend, Elizabeth Markham, is missing. She’s searched everywhere for Elizabeth – ringing her doorbell, even peering through the windows of her house, one of the “new houses” built after the Second World War, its lawn bordered by a wall topped with a distinctive pattern of colored pebbles. She’s called, sent letters, notified the police, even taken out an “advert” in the local newspaper, all without results.

Why doesn’t anyone take her concerns seriously?

Oh, right, it’s because Maud, now in her 80’s, is slipping ever deeper into dementia in Emma Healey’s 2014 debut novel, the psychological mystery, Elizabeth Is Missing.

Maud last saw her friend the night she walked out of Elizabeth’s junk-cluttered house to pursue her latest obsession, digging in the scruffy lawn of Elizabeth’s house, looking for – well, whatever it is has just slipped her mind.

Still, she’s found something. “The broken lid of an old compact, its silver tarnished, its navy-blue enamel no longer glassy but scratched and dull. The mildewed mirror is like a window on a faded world, like a porthole looking out under the ocean. It makes (her) squirm with memories.”

But what memories? Not of Elizabeth, but of the other missing woman whose disappearance has obsessed her for decades, her older sister Susan, her beloved Sukey. Like Elizabeth, Sukey and her shady husband Frank had slipped out of sight, in their case, during the tumultuous aftermath of war.

“One minute everything was fine, and the next she’d vanished. And Frank, too. . Dad tried the hospitals, thinking perhaps there’d been an accident, but neither Frank nor Sukey had been brought in.”

People disappear all the time, neighbors, even the police, say. People move to a different house, a different job, a different city. Sometimes wives even leave the husbands they married so hastily during the war. And Frank, the police, hint darkly, is a bad one, a husband a wife might well want to leave. Give her time, they say. Sukey will turn up.

But Maud, who was a girl when her sister disappeared, has grown old, and Sukey is still missing. And now, so is Elizabeth.

By turns funny, terrifying and achingly poignant, Elizabeth Is Missing follows Maud on her long slide into dementia as she jots endless scraps of notes to remind her of – what? To buy peaches, milk, eggs, chocolate; to ask her daughter, Helen, when to plant summer squash, like the ones Frank planted long ago in the lawn of the house where Elizabeth now lives; and to note, over and over, Elizabeth is missing.

I sometimes found myself annoyed at Maud’s convenient tendency to slip into an episode of dementia whenever she comes close to uncovering the truth about the disappearances of both Sukey and Elizabeth. And readers will guess the outcome far sooner than Maud herself – or her clueless family and caretakers. But Maud’s persistence in the face of her own hopeless situation, and her family’s agony at watching her slide ever further away from reality, remain vivid through the heart-rending last line of Elizabeth Is Missing, and beyond.

Adventure classics -- No heroes need apply in this dark tale

The Tree of Hands

by Ruth Rendell

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The buzz in the choir room after the sermon was shock--a pastor had publicly professed his fascination with the HBO network’s gritty and gory True Detective series. A soprano who admitted she’d taped the episodes defended her own choice. Wasn’t the answer obvious? It’s good versus evil, sometimes as hopelessly entwined as wheat and tares, as in Ruth Rendell’s 1984 The Tree of Hands.

Because in Rendell’s writing, who is good? And who is evil? In Rendell’s world, there are no heroes. The best we can hope for are people who do the wrong things for the right reasons. And whose actions save, or destroy, others they don’t even know.

I originally was a fan of Rendell’s police procedurals. It was my then teenaged daughter who persuaded me, decades ago, to go to the darker side of Rendell’s works. Darker than murder? What’s darker than the secrets of the human heart? Especially when delineated by the woman who has been a life peer since 1996 as the Baroness Rendell of Banbergh.

“Because I am the last person to whom I would tell a secret,” Rendell once said, “people tell me their secrets.”

In The Tree of Hands, the secrets entangle two unwed mothers. Carol Stratford has already relinquished custody of two unwanted children, and is on the way to killing a third, baby Jason, with abuse and neglect. In a nearby neighborhood, bestselling author Benet Archdale struggles to reconcile her schizophrenic mother Mopsa to the reality of her beloved young son James, whose birth Benet plotted along with her novel.

Mopsa, retired to Spain with Benet’s father, has returned to England for psychiatric tests. During her stay, James becomes ill with a childhood disease which turns unexpectedly deadly. The playroom of the hospital where he is admitted is decorated by “a piece of bizarre, the brainchild evidently of someone with a B.Ed.” a collage which Benet dubs a “tree of hands.”

“On the white paper base sheet had been drawn a tree with a straight brown trunk. . . And all over the tree, on the branches, nestling among the twigs, protruding like fungus from the trunk, were paper hands.”  The tree will become the symbol to Benet of James’s illness, death, and unlikely resurrection, as insane Mopsa steals a substitute child in an attempt to ease her daughter’s grief for James.

The abducted child’s physical resemblance to the dead boy, his name (the toddler calls himself “Jay”) and the history of abuse written in the scars and bruises on his small body conspire to reconcile Benet to the bizarre substitution.

Clearly, Jason will be endangered if he is returned to his “real” mother. But will Carol agree to give him up? Will an innocent man be arrested for Jason’s kidnapping, even for his murder? Will Benet be able to convince everyone around her that Jay is, in fact, her child? And will Jay’s knowledge of his real parentage, soon to be hidden in the unconscious mind of a toddler, return to haunt him?

Rendell will answer some questions. On others, she is silent, leaving us, the readers,
haunted as well.

For more about Rendell, her life and works, I liked Andrew Wilson’s March 10, 2013, profile,  “Open and shut case: Is Ruth Rendell finally ready to open up about her puzzling personal life?” at www.independent.co.uk/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics begins an April of mysteries with Crocodile on the Sandbank, by the late Barbara Mertz, writing as Elizabeth Peters.)