Maud knows Elizabeth is missing, it is written on a scrap of paper, and that is how Maud remembers things now, her head being unreliable for that purpose. She tells her daughter, Helen, and the police, but no-one does anything about it.
Maud has to rely on herself to find Elizabeth, but it is hard to investigate when she cannot remember clues and her mind keeps slipping back seventy years to another disappearance, that of her sister, Sukey.
Sukey disappeared just after the war and never turned up again. She was not long married to Frank, who was a bit of a chancer mixed up in the black market. Did he do something to her? Could it have something to do with the young lodger, Douglas, who clearly held a torch for her? Or did the madwoman down the street do her in for no reason at all?
The stories of the missing Elizabeth and Sukey unfold in tandem, often mixed up in Maud’s mind, though her recollections of Sukey are the more reliable. It is Maud’s long-suffering daughter who must cope with Maud’s twin concerns, one real but historic and the other current but unsubstantiated.
Maud’s narrative gives an insight into what it may be like (who can tell how accurate) to have dementia, by turns funny and frightening. The seamless transitions from present to past to present again, losing and regaining names, locations, and the plot generally, all has an authentic feel that generates sympathy, for both Maud and Helen.
It is uncertain to
the end whether either disappearance will be resolved. And if one is, will Maud
even realise?
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