The Day That Went Missing: A Family’s Story, by Richard Beard

In The Day That Went Missing: A Family’s Story (2017), novelist Richard Beard tries to recover the memory and the reality of his younger brother Nicky, who drowned in 1977. Beard was in the water with Nicky when he drowned. This book is an exploration both of his efforts to recover his brother’s memory and to understand why his family suppressed the boy’s memory for four decades. The Beard family itself is an emblem of what Beard sees as the repressive British character: Don't show emotion. Keep a stiff upper lip. Always forge ahead.

Beard blames himself for suppressing his brother’s memory and feels deep guilt for his failure to save him. The author was 11 years old at the time, and he couldn't swim well enough to save the boy, who was 9. He watched his brother struggle, called to him, but after his head went under the surface of the water he turned back to the shore to save himself and ran to tell his parents. Beard constantly revisits the memory of this moment, only fragments of which he can recall when he forces himself to think about it.  His efforts to recover evidence of his brother's short life gradually fill in the gaps in his recollections.

This is a good book, but it isn't pleasant to read. Beard blames himself and his whole family for losing the drowned boy. In particular he blames his father for his failure to enter the water and rescue the boy (even though his father had cancer). He goes through his father's papers, notebooks, letters, looking for some sign of grief or sorrow over Nicky's death, but he finds nothing. Even as his father lies dying many years later, the author is unable to get him to say anything about the death. He blames his father's repressive, mechanical attitude and the way he goes about his life afterwards as if nothing has happened. Yet his mother insists that Nicky’s death affected his father deeply.  In general Beard resents his father’s cold and distant nature.  He rubs his face in the guilt he feels, in his resentment of his family, his parents, his brothers. He barely concedes that his parents did the best they could given the circumstances.  Nicky’s death was a tragedy (a term he mocks because people use it as a cliché in their letters of sympathy), maybe it could have been avoided if the parents had paid more attention, if the author had gone deeper into the water, if the family had visited another beach, if they'd arrived at the beach before the tide started coming in.

Beard is angry that his brother is gone. He is almost lost to time, faded from memory, life has moved on. That cruel realization drives much of Beard’s anger.

The Day That Went Missing is about Beard's efforts to uncover the facts of his brother's death and life. Different family members have different recollections of the boy and of the day he disappeared. He tries to reconcile these differences by going to the spot on the beach where the drowning occurred, by interviewing the lifeguard who pulled the body out of the water, the coroner, the police, teachers, headmasters, anyone else he can locate who might have some knowledge of the boy and his death. He interviews his brothers and most especially his mother. He often seems to blame her for not remembering Nicky as he does, and for her behavior following his death. He finds it unsettling that the family, after a week of mourning and grief and the funeral, return to the beach house for another week to continue the vacation. His mother explains that there was one week remaining on the beach house lease. The parents must have thought this was a way of grieving, of restoring normalcy. But Beard finds it highly disturbing.

In the beginning of the book he describes himself as someone who has difficulty feeling and expressing emotions. He connects this problem back to his brother's death and to the way that his family repressed that death over the years. In the process of researching his brother’s life and death, at times he becomes highly emotional. In the final pages of the book, he revisits on the fortieth anniversary of his death the site on the drowning. Using maps and tidal tables he tries to calculate the exact minute.  He reimagines and even reenacts events that followed. There is a pathetic quality to his obsession with his brother. It becomes a way of displacing problems in his own life, in his own marriage which he says might be failing, in his inability to express emotion. An uninvolved reader can wallow in someone else's grief only for so long. It's difficult to separate private grief from public understanding. As a reader who felt deep sympathy for the writer and his family, I grew tired of the constant wallowing in misery, grief, guilt. Of course, had if been me, I too would've wallowed. If it had been my child, I hardly think I could have survived. It's a wonder Beard's parents did as well as they did in the days and weeks following the death.

This is also a book about memories—how they are created, preserved, lost, and altered.  Beard has studied scientific theories about memory, and he brings them to bear in his recollections.  In the beginning he can barely bring himself to think about his brother’s death, and he has lost many details.  By the end, through his research and interviews he has learned enough to recover the moment and confront it. The narrative moves in a fluid way back and forth in time, always returning in direct and glancing ways to the drowning, always driving forward to the final scene.

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters

In Henry James short novel The Turn of the Screw, either the ghosts are real or they’re the neurotic imaginings of a paranoid governess.  This narrative scheme set the form for many future ghost stories: are the ghosts real or psychotic delusions? Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger describes an upper-class country English family in decline, the Ayres: once wealthy and proud, when we meet them in this novel, shortly after the end of World War II, the husband has been dead for years, the mother mourns a child who died twenty years ago, the farm is failing, and there’s no money. The family home, Hundreds Hall, is falling apart. We’re left with Mrs. Ayres, her daughter Caroline, in her late 20s, and a son, Roderick, wounded in the war, suffering some form of PTSD. The narrator is a doctor, Faraday, from the nearby town.  (Does he have a first name?) He visits the family to treat various ailments and gradually becomes a family friend. He’s unmarried and mindful of the fact that the family which summons him out to treat a young servant girl once employed his mother as a servant.  Class differences are a major factor, though they’re mainly addressed indirectly.

Things begin to go wrong.  The servant girl Betty is afraid of the house and finds it spooky.  Roderick Ayres is increasingly unbalanced and anxious.  Strange writings appear on the walls.  A visiting child is attacked by the usually gentle family dog. A mysterious fire.  A horrifying encounter on the abandoned upper floor of the house. Dr. Faraday is a rationalist who tries to explain away what family members increasingly believe are supernatural manifestations.  The brother, sent to a mental asylum, is convinced the house is “infected.”  The daughter Caroline begins to agree.  The mother believes her dead daughter has returned. The doctor believes he is in love with Caroline and makes plans for their marriage, though she goes along halfheartedly with the idea. (She continues to address him as Dr. Faraday well into their relationship). He pursues the marriage with the eagerness of a stalker and begins to talk of what he will do when he is in charge of the house. People die. Caroline believes that the deranged mind of someone close to the family has produced a supernatural entity that is possessing the house and its inhabitants.  At a coroner’s inquest, Betty testifies that a “spiteful ghost . . . wanted the house all for its own.” In the end, Waters hints at the identity of this someone in a way that is ambiguous but satisfying.

The conflict of reason with the supernatural, the focus on deviant psychology—these are aspects of modern ghost stories so common that they can seem hackneyed.  Though Waters at first seems to hint at such a conflict, it is mainly a tease.  Class conflict is a more pertinent source of tension, along with the narrating Dr. Faraday. Waters largely avoids the pitfalls and stale formulas of ghost stories set in decaying family mansions. 

There is a problem with pacing.  It takes a hundred pages or so for anything supernatural actually to occur, and as the doctor and Caroline and others try to account for what happens in the house, the narrative drags.  I enjoyed and remained interested in the story throughout but was relieved when it ended.