The Gardens of the Dead (22 page)

At High Holborn Anselm
bumped into a nun who wasn’t looking where she was going. Struck by a sensible
idea, he turned round and went back to Gray’s Inn. Not knowing quite where to
place his enquiry, he went to the library situated on South Square. A short
woman behind the main desk, it transpired, was used to helping those who were
baffled.

‘The
archives of the Inn are extensive,’ she said, ‘and not everything has been
stored on computer. We’re working backwards.’

‘Of
course,’ replied Anselm. ‘You should never start at the beginning.’

He’d
meant to be agreeable, but it came out dreadfully Being wise in small respects,
he said nothing more. And she, being perceptive, smiled.

‘The
point is,’ she resumed, ‘material on Mrs Glendinning could be anywhere. If you
leave me a contact number, I’ll dig around this afternoon. In the meantime, I
suggest you have a browse through some back numbers of
Graya.
’

This
publication covered various happenings in the lives of the Inn’s membership. It
was an obvious place to look. Anselm wrote down the Hoxton fax number and then
settled himself at a table adjacent to the relevant volumes. For over an hour
he chased any reference to Elizabeth. He found a small piece upon her becoming
a QC, and a longer biographical item following her appointment as a deputy High
Court judge. All the background material coincided precisely with what Sister
Dorothy had said: birth in Manchester, schooling in Carlisle, university at
Durham.

Anselm,
however, was disappointed, for he trusted his unruly intuitions. And they had
been ruffled. Something wasn’t quite right. Standing in a phone booth outside
the library, he rang the administration section of Elizabeth’s former
university. He related the details gleaned from
Graya.
Almost
simultaneous with his speaking, he heard a soft tapping followed by the bang of
the return key and then a pause.

‘Sorry,’
said a man evenly ‘No one called Elizabeth Glendinning attended the university
between those dates.’ The tapping began again. ‘In fact, we’ve never had a
student by that name.

Anselm
crossed Gray’s Inn Square as if Father Andrew were by his side.
Find the
child who grew up to wear a gown that was too heavy f or her shoulders.

Neither
of them had considered switched identities, or a burned history.

11

The closer George came to
Mitcham, the heavier his body became. He pushed himself along his own street,
past the lit windows of Aspen Bank. The televisions were on and the curtains
were drawn against evening. Opposite George’s home, across a patch of grass in
shadow, was a children’s play area. A low fence and a tiny gate gave it a sense
of shape and importance. George sat on a merry-go-round, one leg trailing on
the asphalt. He watched Number 37 as though it weren’t really there; as though
it might vanish if touched. Emily was upstairs. George could see her shadow,
thrown large across the chimney-breast wall. She was moving about quickly.

A quite
extraordinary stillness settled upon him. It was a solemn moment — one he would
like to have shared with Nino: his life on the street was about to end; he’d
walked around the world and made it back to his point of departure. With a
shove of one foot, the merry-go-round began to spin, wobbling gently on its
axle. George saw his home, the trees, the distant tower blocks, the lights on
Aspen Bank and then his home again. Round and round he went, slowly building up
the courage to cross the patch of grass and the empty street.

The
light upstairs went off.

The
light downstairs came on.

George
dragged his shoe as a brake and the merry-go-round clinked to a halt.

The
front door of Number 37 opened and Emily stepped onto the garden path. She
walked a few steps, threading a handbag along one arm. Her hair was different,
but the movements of her body its tiny hesitations, were the same.

George
stood up and quietly cried, ‘Emily’ He couldn’t get his mouth and lungs to
work. He was spent. He could only lift and drop his feet.

Suddenly
the light from the open door was blocked. A large man appeared, jangling a set
of keys. He angled them to the light, to find the one he was after.

‘Have
you got everything?’ he said wryly.

Emily
nodded. She was looking up at the stars.

George
couldn’t stop his legs. His eyes swam and his hands were joined. He was still
in shadow and about to enter the pale orange light.

The
door banged shut and the big man placed a heavy arm around Emily His keys
jingled again and two headlights flashed. George stepped off the grass but
veered aside with a groan. He tripped on a paving stone but kept his balance,
heading back along Aspen Bank — the way he’d come, a few minutes earlier, and
the way he’d gone a few years before.

An
engine coughed and tyres began to turn. A few moments later they drove slowly
past him and for an instant George saw his wife. She was straining forward in
the passenger seat, her face framed in the wing mirror. But he couldn’t read
the expression because the car moved on, gathering speed. He watched the
indicator blink at the end of the road and then he was alone.

Where
do I go now? he thought. Nino had said nothing about this sort of thing.

12

All those years ago, Mr
Wyecliffe had called to tell her the good news.

‘We’ve
won,’ he exclaimed, and his beard scratched against the receiver.

Feeling
sick, she waited on the doorstep for her man. When he arrived, he wasn’t
smiling and he said nothing about how the case against him had fallen to bits.
He just pulled her into the sitting room and asked her if she trusted him.
Staring back, she said, ‘I do,’ with all her soul and with all her might, and
he quickly kissed her on the cheek, as if there were people waiting to clap.
Then he drove off.

Riley
put Quilling Road on the market. He decorated the bungalow He quit his job.
Within the week, Mr Wyecliffe was in the sitting room dishing out advice over a
spam fritter: ‘You might give constructive dismissal a run.

Riley
did. He took Mr Lawton to court
for
sacking him.
It was another
triumph and the company had to pay him thousands. Nancy never got her head
around that one, but Mr Wyecliffe knew his onions. No one seemed to realise
that this second victory was Nancy’s loss. She could hardly stay on as Mr
Lawton’s bookkeeper. She handed in her notice. Mr Wyecliffe deemed it ‘prudent
but outside the compass of economic redress’.

With
all that money her man bought a shack on a bed of crushed cinders opposite a
crummy fish and chip shop.

‘What
do you want that for?’ asked Nancy.

‘We’re
going into business,’ said Riley as if they were emigrating. He was edgy. It
was as though he were destroying everything behind him.., except for Nancy He
didn’t even ask her what she wanted. She was part of him, like his hands or
feet. They were man and wife.

As for
Riley he bought a big van without windows. He lined it with thick plywood —
floor, roof and sides — and he put up shelves and straps. He put an advert in
the local papers offering to clear houses. And he made good. In fact, two years
on he’d had to rent some garages for storage. If you came with a voucher from
the Salvation Army you could take what you liked. He was a good man, was Riley
in his own way.

So that
was where all the pieces landed after her man came back from the Old Bailey Day
in, day out, Nancy sat by a gas fire, working her way through a bumper book of
puzzles. It was a long way from the banter with Babycham at Lawton’s. That was
when she’d started thinking of a house by the sea in Brighton, going back to
the place of childhood holidays on the pier, back to the bright lights of the
Palace, to the magicians and the rousing bands. But her man wouldn’t hear of
it. They had a new life: Riley on the road, and Nancy in the shop. He had to
keep moving, and she had to keep still. If this is what it means to win a
trial, she often thought, I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose.

A few months later,
feeling guilty but resolved, Nancy bought Stallone, her first hamster: guilty
because she was satisfying an ache in her heart; resolved because Riley couldn’t
heal the injury. He had, after all, caused it. As she stood at the counter,
with her new friend, a cage and a bag of dried corn, she didn’t even feel
humiliated. On the contrary, she almost trembled with excitement, because
something so small, so unnoticed, was going to receive the
simplicity
of
her affection. The complex stuff would go to her man.

The
trouble was, Riley was no fool. He sensed the division of Nancy’s warmth. And
he was jealous…
jealous of a hamster.
Nancy would have enjoyed being
the nub of competition if she hadn’t known, deep down, that the situation was
pitiful. It was also, in practice, distressing because unfortunately hamsters
don’t last that long. (Stallone made it to three, but Mad Max and Bruce dropped
tools at two and a half.) And you can’t let on that you’re grieving, not
without looking a fool. Pretending she felt nothing, she’d attend to the burial
and then pop down to the pet shop for another one. It was unseemly. But there
was nothing else to be done.

Riley
watched the hamsters come and go without saying anything — except once.

After
Nancy found Bruce on his side, she said wistfully ‘Aww. Where’ve you gone?’

‘Nowhere,’
said Riley from a rocking chair in the next room. ‘What do you mean?’ said
Nancy sharply She didn’t like this kind of talk.

‘We
came from nowhere, out of nothing, and we end up nowhere, back to nothing
again,’ he replied, like an old-timer whittling wood, ‘and in between we’re
alive.’

Nancy
glanced at Bruce, wanting him to survive in another place… along with Uncle
Bertie, her mum and dad, everyone she loved… even though none of them had
been on speaking terms.

‘What’s
the point?’ asked Riley quietly.

There
was an odd excitement about him, and Nancy wondered what he could do — what
anyone might do — if it were true, if you didn’t have
any
beliefs that
made sense of being alive (not necessarily the whole package, of course, but at
least the wrapping). But that was Riley He didn’t really mean it. He said one
thing and did another. He loved Nancy — though he’d never said it, though he
couldn’t show it.

Riley
stomped off to work and Nancy went and bought Arnold. Thinking of her man, she
said (not for the first time), ‘How did he end up like that?’ But she asked the
question mechanically without any real interest in the answer. It wasn’t
important to her. If there were a book called
The Secret to Graham Riley,
she
wouldn’t have bought it. The contents would have nothing to do with why she
actually loved him.

And why
did she love him? There weren’t answers to questions like that. If there’d
been a list of ‘reasons’, Riley’s conduct would have torn it up years ago.
Lists were for the likes of Mr Wyecliffe. Ultimately nothing could explain why
his constant testing of Nancy’s attachment had opened her heart rather than
closed it. It was very simple: what she saw she loved. Babycham hadn’t been
able to understand her —and she’d said so (she’d always spoken her mind).
Sitting in the Admiral on a Friday night, at one of their last gatherings as a
group, Nancy had struggled to find the words, fiddling with her glass. She’d
blushed and a slot machine went ding. Finally she’d said that to see Riley as
Nancy saw him, you needed Nancy’s eyes.

13

Anselm walked from Hoxton
to Shoreditch, and to a tower whose hotchpotch of lit windows rose like Braille
against the night sky Here and there, laundry dangled across a balcony The
lifts were out of order, so Anselm trod cautiously up a concrete stairwell,
past confessions of love and hate, persuaded that the whole damp edifice was
being sucked into the ground.

Mrs
Dixon peered above a door chain. She was stooped and suspicious, squinting
through large glasses. ‘Are you from the Council?’

‘No,’
replied Anselm gently ‘I’m a friend of Mrs Glendinning.’

The
door closed, and the latch rattled and slid. It opened again, letting loose the
sweet and sour of meals on wheels.

‘When’s
she coming back?’ said Mrs Dixon anxiously ‘I’ve missed her … The stories,
the cakes and all that …’

Mrs Dixon fell back into
an armchair before a crowded coffee table. A dinner plate with swirls of gravy
lay in the centre. A button nose and pink cheeks suggested a rag doll. Her hair
was curled and faintly blue.

Anselm
said, ‘I’m here to tell you that Mrs Glendinning won’t be coming any more. I’m
very sorry.

Mrs
Dixon lined up her knife and fork. ‘She’s dead?’