The Drowning Ground (11 page)

Hurst had clearly been at pains to keep his daughter's room clean, and actually Graves was right about the room too: it
was
weird the way he had kept it as if frozen in time.

The space had obviously once been an attic and had, in fact, been turned into a suite of rooms that ran some distance through the top of the house. There was a bedroom, a small separate living room and beyond that a spacious bathroom. There were no bars on the window.

I took another few steps and my hair touched the upside-down V of the ceiling. The room was very neat. The bed had been made, and ornaments had been carefully arranged on a writing desk. Graves warily followed me in and the door closed behind him. For a moment he stood at the threshold, taking it all in. Like me, he had to crouch a little to avoid the ceiling as he moved across the sheepskin rug by the side of the bed.

I looked out of the single large window and stared at the snow-capped hill in the distance, stretching across the horizon in a solid sloping arc.

Outside, the snow was falling even faster, and after the dug-in darkness it was a relief to see the sky. Beyond, I could just make out a car inching its way along the curve of Meon Hill. A moth started beating against the window, its wings fluttering uselessly against the glass. I reached for the window and opened it: a stone fell and went tumbling down over the roof, and the moth flew outside. I had a sense of time stretching out. But that was really all that now remained in this room: time past. And then, as if to mark it, a clock began to chime from somewhere down below.

12

As usual, my house was very warm, with the radiators already blazing away by the time I got home. The moment I enter my house I always feel greatly at ease: my arms hang more loosely at my sides, and the English voice and aloofness inside my head slowly fade. The tension leaves my body. It's as if I'm shedding my English skin as I take off my coat and hang it in the porch.

There was a knocked-about parcel from Carlos, wrapped in yellowish paper, waiting for me on the table of my porch. My brother has been sending me parcels just like it ever since I arrived in England over twenty years ago. I switched on the lights in the hall with my elbow and left the box of videotapes and files by the telephone at the bottom of the stairs. I picked up the parcel and walked to the kitchen to fix myself a drink.

I took a lemon out of the fridge, tossed it into the air and then cut it very neatly into quarters. I put one of the quarters into a long glass and poured myself a Fernet-Branca, a syrupy and very bitter Italian aperitif, which looks like engine oil and tastes like it until you get used to it.

Apart from the occasional plumber, builder or electrician, no one ever stepped inside this house apart from Powell. Certainly no women. None of that ever lasts for long anyway. They soon get fed up with me, and I can't say I blame them.

I become more animated when I'm at home. If I'm watching football on television, I angrily curse and berate the players on the screen. I shout and scream; clutch my hands in horror when I watch them lose. I cajole and tease the cat. I pace more. Slam doors. Stalk through rooms. I drink
mate
out on my patio and cook huge
asados,
which keep me going in meat for about a week. I write long letters to my brother. I monitor the news back home via his letters and feel the same level of indignation and despair as my fellow Argentinians when my country lurches from one crisis to the next.

At home I'm more prone to sudden outbursts. I'm less reserved, and I'm far more direct. At work I know that I can sometimes seem flippant and detached. I'm careful not to give myself away. For years I told myself that this reserve of mine came from my English father and the occasional bouts of recklessness from my Argentinian mother. The theory had a nice feel to it, and I clung to it for a while. But it's something else – something that runs much more deeply than that. From here, inside this environment, I have made impulsive decisions that trouble me later.

Sometimes, it's as if a part of me has stubbornly refused to adapt. As if the young man who came here all those years ago is still essentially the same. And, strangely, I'm becoming more Argentinian as I get older. The longer I stay here, the less English I become. It's a very Argentinian trait, this homesickness. It gives Buenos Aires its mournful appeal: the homesickness of the emigrant who can never go back is etched into the very fabric of the city itself. And it's here, right here in this house as well.

I finished my drink, went upstairs, had a shower and changed into jeans and a thick, navy-blue jumper and then lit the fire in my study. I leant against my desk for a while, thinking about Hurst, then went downstairs and had another drink before making dinner. I opened my brother's parcel while the water boiled and hissed, splashing a little on the hob.

The house on the inside does not look like any of the other houses around here. If you had asked me years ago whether I missed home and wanted to go back, I would have told you very firmly absolutely not. But the house of course tells a different story. It's something about the light perhaps. There're the green metal shutters I had installed on some of the windows years ago, which give the house a heavy, almost resentful silence, as if it somehow pines for boisterous noise from outside. And then there're the thick-leaved tropical plants that stand in large pots in many of the rooms and line the hallway. There's the very dark wood of the furniture that I've chosen and the faded rugs that cover the tiled floor of my downstairs hallway, giving it an almost rustic air. Upstairs, I stripped out most of the wall-to-wall carpets years ago to reveal the old wood beneath, which adds to the overall oaken darkness of the house.

I began to cook, listening to some old tango CDs. I hummed along, feeling quite cosy in the alcove of my kitchen. I took another sip of my drink. Enzo, my cat, was outside, scrabbling at the window above the sideboard, leaving muddy marks. For a while I ignored him, and then with a sigh I let him in and quickly closed the window. The cat, whose full name is (of course) Enzo Francescoli, dropped silently down from the sideboard to the floor and went straight towards the food bowl by the washing machine.

I tore away the paper from my brother's package. First off the prized
yerba mate
– a drink like tea but much stronger. I held up the
mate
for a moment as if it were a trophy and felt its weight. Satisfied, I put it in the cupboard and threw out the old packet. Then came the usual articles that had been meticulously cut out of the local papers. As always, Carlos had included news of my old football club, which had gone up against Boca Juniors, their arch-enemy, the previous week and lost.

I read Carlos's letter. First came the usual cheery heartfelt complaints about the economy (rising inflation across the board), corrupt politicians and increasing crime, which had culminated in a number of high-speed kidnappings that the press were now calling
secuestro express.
There was also another, new type of kidnapping called
secuestro virtual,
or virtual kidnapping, which was a sophisticated con being run by inmates out of local prisons in Buenos Aires. My brother is interested in that kind of thing, being a born conman himself.

I read the articles. More tales of political woe and unrestrained chaos. The country always seemed to be hovering on the brink of the abyss, especially since the devaluation of the peso last December and the run on the banks. Burning tyres blocking roads. Protests still everywhere. The subway workers on strike again. It was oddly reassuring in a way. A tango played. Astor Piazzolla. Quicker than the last. Absently, I began to go through some more of the clippings and froze when I came to the last one. It was an article cut out of
El Correo
showing a photo of an old man in the street, his arm trying to shield his face from the glare of a dozen cameras.

‘General Jorge Rafael Videla.' I said the name out loud in the silence of my kitchen. Then I regretted saying it in the sanctity of my own home. I looked more closely at the photo: the old man seemed to be trying to get into an apartment building on the other side of the road. It was late at night, and that made sense if you thought about it. Surrounding him was a mob being kept at bay by a couple of tough-looking policemen. The old man, as he tried to push his way through the street, appeared furious and indignant. Someone had painted
ASESINO
right in the middle of the street in bright red letters.

I pushed away my plate, suddenly not hungry. I saw the General in person once but from far off. It had been during the World Cup in Buenos Aires in 1978. I had been seventeen years old. Videla had been out of his general's uniform for a change and was wearing a blue suit. As President it had fallen to him to present the cup to the Argentinian captain, Daniel Passarella, who had looked as if he wasn't sure whether he wanted to take it from him. Much later, I had learnt that, less than a mile away from the stadium, hundreds of Argentinian citizens, hooded and handcuffed to beds in clandestine detention centres, were listening to the match along with their captors on the radio.

To me the old General had always seemed a little bit like an untrustworthy and seedy-looking accountant. One who had just been caught cooking the books. And he still had that absurd Adolf Hitler moustache.

I slammed my fist hard on the table, so that Enzo jumped and scurried off, and my knife fell off the table. The bastard was supposed to be in jail. I read the article, remembering now in growing dismay. The courts had decided to let him serve out the rest of his sentence from the comfort of his own home back in 1998. According to the article, Videla had a history of heart problems, and a few weeks ago the authorities had bundled him out in the middle of the night to see his doctors and run some tests. The relatives of those whom he had made disappear while he had been in power had got word of it and been ready for him when he got back.

I was glad of the reception he had received, but the article had made me angry, and I knew I was going to start thinking about home again and raking it all up. Thinking about what happened is useless, and with a great effort of will I blocked it out. I imagined the past as something small and black and inconsequential and crushed it beneath my heel, and, just to make sure it wouldn't come back, before I went to bed I settled down to some more work. I took the box of files and tapes into my study and emptied them out on to my desk. As I went through them, I thought not of home and people like Videla but of Hurst lying stone cold on a mortuary slab and that horrible gashing wound in his neck. I thought of Hurst's house standing there, dark and impenetrable like some kind of bunker.

I thought of those dark corridors at night and of the elegant gun clutched in Hurst's hands. In my mind, Hurst, as he had patrolled those corridors, was a man white-faced and afraid. The dog, sensing his fear, was at his heels, its ears pressed tight against its head. Then I thought of all those empty rooms gathering dust, and of his daughter's room kept so immaculate that it must look exactly as it had the day she ran out on him. Hurst had definitely been trying to find her.

The last letter in the third file was dated April 2001 and had an invoice attached. Bray's Detective Agency was embossed on the head of each typed sheet, along with an address in Warwick. I didn't recognize the name or the address. It looked as if Hurst believed she had been in London, and that's where he had sent Bray to find her.

Bray had personally carried out the investigation himself. Visits to hotels and youth hostels. Inquiries made at employment agencies where Hurst's daughter might have applied for work. Bars and restaurants and letting agencies. Possible leads, and where he had planned to look for her next. A thorough job. But he had not been able to find her. I went through the files a second time, and then I went to bed, leaving the box locked up in a filing cabinet in my study.

I closed my eyes, and after what seemed a very long time I was able to think about something other than Frank Hurst and the weird emptiness of his house. I began to remember a holiday with my parents a few years before they'd had their accident. I remembered swimming towards a big black rock in the sea.

My father, an engineer for the railways, had been granted an entire month's holiday from the British company where he worked. I remembered my mother, brown and slender, lying in the sun. I couldn't be sure now where it had been. Mar de las Pampas or perhaps Mar del Plata. Somewhere along the Atlantic coast. The water had been very cold. I remembered reaching the rock and suddenly becoming frightened by what lay waiting for me, because I couldn't see the bottom any more. I had swum out too far.

I had waved to my father on the beach for reassurance, but my father, indifferent as usual, with his head buried deep in the paper or a book, hadn't seen me. And it was while I was thinking of my father and mother and of the cold water that I finally started to drift off to sleep. My mind fixed on one random object after the other; images flickered and vanished. And then I began to dream.

I dreamt that I was back at Hurst's house. In my dream it was winter, but I was sitting on a deckchair in front of Hurst's swimming pool. Hurst was with me, and, past his shoulder, young girls dressed identically in school uniforms were lining up near the metal stairs that led to the pool on the far side. They were all wearing hairpins in the shape of broken flowers. One after the other, they jumped into the swimming pool in the cold, frosty afternoon. But the pool was dirty and dark and full of rotting leaves and rubbish. Bottles and plastic shopping bags floated on its white, scum-covered surface, while oily black branches bobbed and were churned by some strange current below. But the children did not seem to notice. They disappeared one by one beneath the surface and did not come back up.

In my dream, there was something dark in the water – something below the surface, sliding about, waiting for the children to jump in. I wanted to stop them, but found that I could not. I wanted to scream out, warn them against whatever terrible fate was down there.