Authors: Sebastian Faulks
It was noon by this time and I was also hungry, having not been able to face a solo breakfast at the Crown. I found a tea shoppe on the high street and ordered a toasted cheese sandwich with bacon. The back of the menu said something about Lymington being the ‘New Forest’s most popular town’. Did I have to face the possibility that Jennifer’s home town was not the paradigm of English Eden that I’d pictured, but a tourist resort? And if so, what on earth could people do here on their holidays? They couldn’t just eat cream teas and walk up and down the high street all day.
The sandwich was brought by a waitress in a ‘Victorian’ white paper cap with trailing streamers and a short black skirt. I thought Jen might have had her Saturday job here. I could picture local men ogling the skirt and the streamers – but then again they looked too old for that, the other customers. They talked loudly of their hospital appointments, their X-rays and their ‘tablets’. How could anyone seriously live in a place like this?
Something happened to this country, perhaps in the 1960s. We lost the past.
You’ve seen the pictures of the men queuing to enlist in 1915, their faces turned up in guileless hope beneath their hats. Those who came back found the same villages and towns, empty and with too many women, but still with a link that took them back through to the lives of their grandfathers and further – 200 years at least, to a life lived straight, sincere. Field, factory, office.
Even cars and buses didn’t really change it. When my father returned from the North Atlantic in 1946 it was to a country cold and poor and short of food – vindicated, glorious, foggy, broke and miserable. Still, for all he knew of bodies burning in the sea, bodies burning in the ovens of Treblinka, children in flames in wood-and-paper houses in Japan, for all the millions unburned, unburied on the Eastern Front, it was still Reading. It hadn’t changed (it had always been an unlovely town) and there was still a main line to the past.
How did we lose it? Now you walk those same streets and it seems as though it’s all a sham, a play or a quotation. When I looked through the window of the shoppe, I didn’t see people rooted in that town: I saw people floating through it, disconnected. Field, factory and office have gone. The fields are mostly set aside, not worked; the factories have closed and the offices are let to national out-of-town concerns. The residents think most about Bournemouth, London, the Algarve and Coronation Street. These are people in a dream, of whom only the very old have some embarrassing idea of ‘local history’, though even they can only speak of it apologetically, knowing that the thread is broken and that while the past is real enough – the
only
true reality – the present has insufficient depth to register it.
I left the tea shoppe and bought a local street guide in the newsagent – because I did, of course, know where I was really going. After all, I had the address.
I drove down to the small quay to look at the boats. There was all the usual boat stuff – chandlery, sail shops – but I couldn’t imagine Jennifer there. What would she do with her friends? There seemed nowhere for them to hang out.
No, there was nothing for me here. It was time to do what I had come for, though I felt for some reason reluctant.
I drove slowly along the side of the quay, past a private dock, to a public area with a green and a bandstand. I stopped again for a minute and looked at it.
The bandstand filled me with pain. I was half-remembering something – a day trip as a child, I suppose. I had gone to a seaside town, I had walked on the pier, I had been happy. There was a brass band. I had been lost, I had been beaten. I had been unhappy. I had felt the impotence and agony of childhood. I remembered, I did not remember. And the strange thing was, that, in the end, it came to exactly the same thing.
I drove round the end of the quay. Stanley Road, Westfield Road, a house called ‘Mariner’s Rest’. I looked at the street guide.
The roads went nowhere on the headland, but linked back onto themselves and into town. I was nearly there.
Was R.P. Arkland MA a sailing man, then? Why else live in this part of town? Maybe it was just the view he liked.
I was now in roads not quite suburban – outskirts is what you’d call them, I think. Detached houses of widely varying styles and sizes. Cheap post-War pebbledash, mock-Tudor with leaded lights, whitewashed villa. All had got their nameplates from the same supplier, whether wrought iron hammered into the wall by the drive or stencilled black-on-white with a single flower decoration. ‘Woodpeckers’. ‘Fairview’. It was the sort of area grand people would recoil from but if you came from Trafalgar Terrace you were daunted by.
Vitre Gardens, Rookes Lane. I checked the map. This was Jen country all right, this was the heart of it. Her road was a fraction grander than I’d expected. It had big views to one side over fields, and although some of the houses weren’t up to much, they were all widely separated by gardens and gravel drives. I pulled over and walked the last hundred yards.
R.P.’s house bore the marks of his profession: picture windows, skylights, yellow frames, parts knocked through and tinkered with; a sort of lean-to folly on the garden side. But it still looked all right. Presumably the planners hadn’t let him bugger it up completely. It still looked like a house where four girls could arrive home from school at slightly different times, throw down their bikes on the gravel and run inside.
I sat down on the grass bank opposite and looked at it. It was the house in the picture on her desk.
For a time I stared at the bedroom windows and tried to guess which one had been hers. I wished I’d had McCaffrey’s binoculars. Without disturbing anyone, I could have looked through and seen her wardrobe, the hanging clothes, the soft toys that the journalist woman had commented on. How come she’d been allowed to go in and look, when I, Jen’s real friend, had to sit on wet grass and imagine?
I sat with my head in my hands, looking. I thought of the passionate connections that a family like hers could make. I pictured family tea with four opinionated daughters. And old R.P. . . . no longer tired from sleepless nights when they were babies, but no longer young either. How he must have missed grown-up Jen when she went off to university; and now he must be wanting time to stand still before the others all deserted him as well. These hot ties of affection and circumstance that seem eternal to you when you’re young – he knew they weren’t. He knew that all such bonds dissolve with death or time and that in the end you are alone. No wife, no Jen, no parents, no other children. Quite alone.
There must have been a shop somewhere in this area, probably in a short parade on one of the new estates – ‘Oh, Jenny, just run and get some mint sauce, will you, before Dad gets home?’ ‘Why’s it always me?’ Because you’re the most reliable, the best.
The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What’s the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?
I went back to the car to get some Anadin, expecting to return and sit some more; but once I was inside the 1100, I couldn’t bear the thought of it, so I started the engine and drove away.
It was growing dark near Newbury and I suddenly thought I’d like to see Julie, so I took the motorway to Reading and parked in Trafalgar Terrace. I got a Chinese takeaway for the three of us and slept like a child in my old room.
It was late morning the next day when I strolled in through the main gate of my college and made my way towards Clock Court. I stopped by one of the cobbled triangles and looked over to the foot of my staircase, which was barred by blue and white tape. Two police officers stood either side of the door into the building.
‘What’s going on?’ I said.
‘You can’t go in. Police search. What’s your name?’
‘Engleby.’
‘Wait here.’
One of the men went upstairs. I waited.
‘What are they looking for?’ I asked the remaining plod. I was thinking of the high-level cistern in the toilet.
‘I’m not allowed to say. Just wait here.’
Eventually, the first officer came down again. ‘Come with me,’ he said.
I followed him to the top floor. Outside my room stood Inspector Peck and Dr Townsend.
‘Ah, Mike. You’ve met Inspector Peck, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’ I nodded at Peck.
‘He came to see me this morning. He has a warrant to search your room. It’s in connection with Jennifer Arkland. I looked for you, but we couldn’t find you. Where have you been?’
Jennifer’s house.
No. ‘I went to see my mother at home, in Reading. She hasn’t been well. Can I look inside my room?’
Peck said, ‘All right. Watch your step. We’ve taken up the boards.’
Inside was a man with rubber gloves and overalls – a pathologist, presumably – Cannon and another plain-clothes officer who was busy with screwdriver and scraper.
The carpet had been rolled up and was stacked on one end in a corner, next to some upended floorboards. I could see my floor joists and the ceiling of Dave Carling’s room below. The striped voids were full of dust. They’d gone into the wall behind the ‘drinks’ cupboard, through plasterboard, back to brick. You could see part of a timber diagonal behind the Chambéry and the gin from Arthur Cooper.
What were they expecting to find? The ghost of Jen? Bones? A bra?
Cannon came through from the bedroom. ‘What are all these pills for?’
‘I have difficulty sleeping.’
He looked at Peck meaningfully as he dropped them in a polythene bag. I suppose they were thinking that if the tablets made me sleep they could knock out someone else as well.
Since their last visit I’d got some old pill bottles that I’d had from the doctor in Reading (antibiotics, antihistamine) and transferred the Alan Greening stuff into them, so at least my name was on the labels.
The young officer was starting to lever up the floorboards in the small pantry.
‘Do you have to do that?’ I said to Peck. ‘What are you expecting to find?’
Peck didn’t say anything. He gave me a hard look as though to say things were serious now. There was no longer anything avuncular in his manner.
There was dust in the air from where Cannon had cut open the side of my mattress.
It was absurd.
I looked at Townsend, smiled and rolled my eyes. These plods, I seemed to say.
Townsend didn’t smile back. He was twisting his hands so violently he must have been burning the skin off them.
‘Careful,’ I said to Cannon, who was pulling down the Procol Harum poster. ‘Let me do that for you.’
I put it carefully on the desk while Cannon unscrewed the corkboard and ran his hand over the flat plastered wall behind it. He knocked a few times, trying to look knowledgeable, like a Caius medic listening to his first chest.
I laid the corkboard also on top of the desk. Julie’s funny little face grinned up at me from beneath her straw boater. She looked older than that now. She was thirteen. She had breasts, went to parties, listened to Queen – though I was pretty sure T. Rex were still her favourites. ‘Metal Guru/I-is it true?’ Oh, Jules.
Cannon was shining a torch onto the the ceiling – as though my idea of body disposal would be to bring all the plaster down, go up a ladder and stuff the jointed remains piece by piece between the beams, replaster, repaint and apply the right amount of dust so the cut sections blended in with the rest. Hope for no dropping bloodstains.
It’s true that during their last visit I’d given them the impression that I was pretty handy on the film set, but there are limits to my ability with fretsaw and chisel.
The young one was going through my clothes, holding them up to the 60-watt overhead bulb, looking for stains, I imagined. He put some shirts and underclothes in a large bin liner. They included a Donny Osmond tee shirt Julie’d given me as a joke for Christmas.
I was thinking about the eight ounces of dope that I’d replaced up the chimney when I’d got it back from Stellings. You really had to know the chimney, and how to bend your hand round on itself to reach the inner ledge.
‘I hope you’re going to tidy up when you’ve finished,’ I said.
‘Don’t take the piss out of me, you little shit,’ said Peck, sticking his face suddenly into mine. This was about as unavuncular as you could get. ‘We’re going to get whoever did this. If not today, tomorrow. But don’t you worry. We’re going to solve this crime. Barry, look in the desk.’
Dr Townsend was twitching so much he had to go out of the room at this point, while Cannon went through my papers. The desk was fairly empty, in fact. I’d left most of my work in my locker outside the biology labs.
There weren’t even any letters from girlfriends or from my mother in the drawers – though doubtless you could find even that absence suspicious if you were so minded.
‘So you went to this, did you?’ said Cannon. He was holding up the order of service from Jen’s college chapel.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Enjoy it, did you?’ said Peck.
‘It was a good service. But sad. Obviously.’
The other plain-clothes man was going through my books. I had wittily bought one called
The Grass Crop
from the ten pence second-hand shelf outside Galloway & Porter and cut a deep section from the middle pages to keep – well, grass obviously. I couldn’t remember if there was any in it, but I thought not because it only held a little and I didn’t deal in small quantities any more. It was the sort of title that might interest Townsend, I thought.
The Grass Crop: Uneven Distribution in Windborne Seeding
.