When I was a child, we often visited Tregardock Beach, in north Cornwall. My siblings and I called it “the scary beach”, on account of the precipitous walk down, the unusually brown sand, and the huge rocks that reared up from either sand or water, depending on the rapidly shifting tides. In August 1978, when Richard Beard was 11, he discovered just how dangerous Tregardock can be.
Towards the end of the day, as his family were packing up, he and his nine-year-old brother, Nicholas, crept to an area shielded from the main beach by rocks, and entered the water for “one last swim”. In the opening pages of The Day That Went Missing, Beard recalls what happened next: “I don’t know how, but suddenly he was out of his depth. I think I tried to push him back in, but the logistics are confused and I, too, am up to my neck. With my feet touching the sand my mouth is barely above the water. The instinct, because I’m not a good swimmer, is to walk back in towards the shore but when I feel with my toes the sand sucks out from beneath me.”
Beard realised that he couldn’t help Nicholas, that he had just one shot at saving himself. And so he did the unavoidable thing: “I decided to leave him.” By the time he made it back to his family, it was too late.
In the wake of the tragedy, a very English stoicism kicked in. Having returned home to Swindon for the funeral (which Beard and his two other brothers didn’t attend), the family repacked their bags, minus one set of clothes, and drove back to Cornwall. The rental still had a week to run, and guests had been invited – so why not resume the holiday? And why, for that matter, not return to Tregardock? None of this was deliberately gratuitous: it was a question, for Beard’s parents, of trying to maintain a semblance of normality, of “carrying on”. For a certain type of family at the time, such behaviour probably wasn’t abnormal.
Over the ensuing years and decades, however, this stiff-upper-lipped attitude hardened into something else: a conspiracy of silence, almost a project of erasure. Nearly 40 years on, Beard – now a well-regarded writer, known for his archly experimental fictions – realises how shamefully little he knows about his brother. Among family members, Nicholas’s name is rarely mentioned; Beard avoids visiting his grave, doesn’t even know the date on which he died. “This, surely, is the definition of ceasing to exist… I have unhitched him from time, from his precise span of existence.”
And so, belatedly, Beard resolves to find out all that he can about Nicholas, and to “conduct an inquest” into his death. The main body of The Day That Went Missing consists of this research: Beard rummages around in his mother’s attic (where he unearths old school reports and photos), visits the prep school they both attended (where a cricket scorebox erected as a memorial to Nicholas has been repurposed as a groundsman’s shed), and interviews everyone connected to the tragedy. He also pays several visits to Tregardock, where he spends a lot of time studying sun positions and tides, in the hope of working out the precise time at which he and Nicholas embarked on their fateful swim.
Perhaps inevitably, there’s a quality of hopelessness to these efforts. You can find out all there is to know about a dead person, but that won’t alter the dreadful irreversibility of their absence. It’s clear that no amount of ferreting around in the past is going to make up for the central tragedy of Beard’s life, which is that he wasn’t allowed to mourn his brother properly at the time. Yet it is precisely this too-late quality that makes The Day That Went Missing so oddly moving. This is a grief memoir with little actual grief in it: its true subject is denial. And ingeniously (though perhaps not surprisingly, given the tricksy bent of Beard’s fiction), the book’s form raises the question of whether, even now, that denial is being confronted or reinforced. By conducting an “inquest” into Nicholas’s death, is Beard emotionally reconnecting with his brother, or merely stage-managing his emotions?
One oddity, for me, is that Beard doesn’t say more about his present-day life. Near the start, he alludes to “troubles” he has been having, and he links these to the unexamined trauma of his brother’s death: “The older I get, the harder it is to pretend that denial works as a strategy for sustaining inner peace.” But that’s about it, so far as personal information goes. It’s his right, of course, to be discreet, and he may have sound reasons for being so. Yet I can’t help feeling that a little more candour would have made the links between past and present even more explicit – and potentially turned an interesting book into a truly excellent one.
• The Day That Went Missing by Richard Beard (Harvill Secker £14.99) is one of the Guardian Bookshop’s Ones to watch this April. To order a copy for £11.24 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
