Elizabeth is Missing

Maud is enjoying a family outing with Helen, Katy, Maud’s son Tom, and his family. Although Maud can’t follow the conversation, she’s happy to be there: “Still, I laugh along with the others; it doesn’t matter what the joke is, it’s nice to laugh. My face aches from smiling” (113).

Helen and Tom squabble about who will take Maud home, and Helen voices her resentment about Tom living in Germany while she cares for Maud. The argument dims Maud’s happiness: “I wonder whether to shout that I’m not an imbecile” (114). Maud compliments her granddaughter Anna’s socks: She tells Anna that she had socks like that as a child and remembers walking along the beachfront with her parents when she was wearing them.

Maud’s memories take her back to the day she visited the seaside with her parents. While her parents argued about whether Frank had anything to do with Sukey’s disappearance, Maud stayed behind to examine a dilapidated beach hut. When she peered inside, Maud saw an eye looking back at her. A voice whispered about glass smashing, birds, a van, soil, summer squash, and then shouted, “I’m watching you. I’m watching you” (117). As Maud ran away, she realized that it was the mad woman.

After the evening out, Tom takes a tipsy Maud home. Maud insists on getting out of the car early and makes her way to Elizabeth’s house. Maud, thinking about buried broken records and Sukey’s compact, starts digging in Elizabeth’s garden. When her nail catches on a stone, she stops and wonders what she’s doing. She notices a key safe on the wall and tries to remember the significant dates that Elizabeth might have used as a code. She pulls bits of paper from her pockets, but they are no help. Finally, she tries the kitchen door and is surprised to find that it’s unlocked.

Once inside, Maud notices there’s no food in the refrigerator and items are missing from the kitchen. She hears Peter outside and hides herself in the larder. This reminds Maud of her childhood when she used to hide in the larder. She remembers hiding there one day, watching Douglas go through Sukey’s suitcase, looking for clues.

When Peter’s car drives away, Maud steps out of the larder and goes upstairs, looking for Elizabeth. Maud remembers that someone once stole jewelry from Elizabeth, and Maud had spent the night with her so she wouldn’t feel alone. When Maud hears Elizabeth’s stairlift, she’s terrified that someone is coming up the stairs but later realizes that she was sitting on the remote. 

Maud is looking out the window at home waiting for Helen to arrive: “There’s nothing I need. I just need her, my daughter” (129). When Maud leans over to look up the road, she falls and hurts her thumb. She notices that the streetlights are on and worries that Helen may not be coming after all. Maud feels exhausted, which reminds her of how she felt when she got ill the summer after Sukey disappeared.

After several sleepless nights, Maud collapsed on the pavement on the way to school one morning. She spent weeks in bed trying to recover. In her delirium, Maud talked in her sleep and had strange visions. She saw Sukey asking for a comb, “hundreds of snails all over the ceiling” (131), and the mad woman leaning over her bed with “her teeth bared and her umbrella raised” (131).

In the next scene, Maud tells Helen how nice it is to be back in her “own home after all this time” (131). Helen tells her she was only at the hospital for a few hours, but Maud insists that it was a much longer visit. Helen lets it drop and tells Maud, “I thought you’d feel better after a visit. […] I know it was a bit sad, but at least you can stop worrying now” (132). Maud’s unsure what Helen’s referring to and says she wants to take off her bandages. Helen tells her she must keep them on until her sprain heals.

When Helen tells her that the nurse wants her to cut down on bread a bit, Helen looks at the note the nurse has left for her, reminding her not to make toast if she’s not hungry. When she notices a list of nursing homes under the nurse’s reminder, Maud wonders if Helen is planning on sending her to one of them. When she stands up, the bits of paper fall to the ground, and Maud takes off her bandages so that she can more easily pick up the notes.

When Helen returns, she’s dismayed to see that Maud has removed her bandages, and Maud’s notes are scattered on the floor. Helen reminds Maud that the list is from when she was looking for Elizabeth. Although Helen tries to throw the list away, Maud insists on holding on to it. Having forgotten their earlier conversation about eating too much bread, Maud asks Helen to bring her toast with her tea.

The talk of toast leads Maud to remember the summer after Sukey disappeared, when Maud was ill and her mother gave her toast and broth until she started to recover. One evening, her mother said that Maud snuck half a loaf of bread with jam after breakfast. Maud insisted that it wasn’t her. After thinking it over, they wondered if Douglas had been sneaking food.

While cleaning soil that Maud has left on her walls, an exasperated Helen tells Maud that she mustn’t call the police when caregivers come to her house. Maud tells Helen that anyone who found the code to her key safe could get into her house and says, “You’ve left me open to attack here” (137). Maud finds a letter addressed to Elizabeth in her old bag, opens it, and discovers that it is only an overdue notice from the library. Maud feels guilty about opening it and observes, “Post is property, and opening it is like breaking and entering. My postman father was always very definite about that, and he’d be furious if he could see me now” (138).

This reflection leads Maud to remember the time her father almost caught her trying to steam open a letter that Sukey sent to Douglas. The letter arrived only a week after she’d last seen Sukey. When Douglas came back from the movies, Maud asked him which one he saw and caught him in a lie.