The Gardens of the Dead (37 page)

Please bring
George home as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely

Emily Bradshaw

He
folded up the paper and mumbled a prayer — giving God several options, like a
multiple choice — that George would make his way to Mitcham, or that someone
would read Larkwood’s address in his notebook, or that Mr Hillsden would strike
lucky once more. All the same, Anselm felt uneasy when he should have been
edging towards jubilation. It was the image of the Prior staring at the garth,
thinking tangential thoughts.

2

Nancy had the day to tidy
up the shop because Prosser was coming to barter with Riley at the close of
play This room of bumper puzzles would be sold. The sound of cars bashing the
hump near the bridge, the sight of the flints by the railway embankment, the
clang of the bell over the door: all this would pass. Riley was with the estate
agent, arranging the sale of the bungalow. The world she had known was coming
to an end. They were going to the seaside.

For
most of Nancy’s life Brighton had been the object of her dreams. Even the word
shone. It was the place of childhood memories of her mum and dad, of fish and
chips wrapped in newspaper, of warnings about Uncle Bertie’s wayward habits.
And now it was as though the pier had broken away and drifted out to sea, with
her memories giving chase, like dwindling gulls. She covered her face,
defeated: so much remained unresolved, undone and unspoken.

The
bell rang, and she turned.

‘I’ve
come to say goodbye, Nancy.’

Mr
Bradshaw’s overcoat was stiff and creased with frost. His beard had thickened
since she’d last seen him at the police station. There were no goggles and his
eyes were pale and defenceless.

‘Not
just yet, please,’ she entreated. ‘Warm yourself, one last time.’

Mr
Bradshaw sat in a small sewing chair while Nancy lit the gas fire. As the heat
drugged the air, the windows streamed, and George said what he couldn’t have
prepared (for, as Nancy well knew, he could do that sort of thing).

‘When I
first came here,’ he said, rubbing his hands, ‘it wasn’t to deceive you. I just
pretended to be someone else, but I’ve only told you the truth about myself.
There’ve been no lies between us.

‘Thank
you.’

Mr
Bradshaw inched his boots towards the fire and vapour rose off the caps. This
is how I shall always think of you, thought Nancy: steaming as if you’d been
hung out to dry.

An old
man once gave me a golden rule,’ continued Mr Bradshaw “‘Don’t be lukewarm, old
friend,” he said. “That’s the only route to mercy or reward.” It’s the reason I
came, Nancy I’d walked away from the trial, and this was my last chance to go
back, to make up. I might have failed, but something happened that I hadn’t
thought possible, and it has made losing worth the candle: I didn’t expect to
become your friend.’

‘Thank
you,’ said Nancy again, warmly Emotion wouldn’t let her say much more. She
glanced back at her life, at its many candles, and the burnt-out stubs. It was
like one of those big stands with tiers in a church. Was this really the Golden
Rule: to keep on lighting another wick, when the wax always melted? To keep on
hoping, no matter what? She mastered herself by making a confession.

‘You
left behind a plastic bag full of notebooks,’ announced Nancy ‘I’m afraid I
read some of them.’ To show that she’d made good the wrong, she added swiftly ‘I
also took the liberty of returning them to your wife.’

At
first Mr Bradshaw didn’t reply — he nodded at the first part and then shook his
head at the second, which Nancy took as a sort of quits, since one cancelled
out the other, like in the ledger at Lawton’s — but then he said, ‘I hope Emily
reads them.’

With a
slap of each hand on a knee, Mr Bradshaw stood up, and said, ‘Well, I’d better
be making tracks.’

‘Where
to?’ asked Nancy surprised by the worry in her voice.

‘I don’t
know’

‘Have
you ever been to Brighton?’ she blurted out.

‘No,’
said Mr Bradshaw, checking his buttons, ‘but I’ve heard of the pier.’

‘There’s
two,’ stammered Nancy ‘The West Pier, which is falling into the sea, and the
Palace.’ She wanted to share it with him, while it was still good, before it
was altered. She raced like a guide in a tourist office, telling Mr Bradshaw
what she’d told him many times before. He always listened as if it were new, as
if it were fresh. ‘I went there every summer, with my mum and dad and Uncle
Bertie. We stopped going after I got married. There was all sorts …
magicians, jugglers … the helter-skelter … a clock tower … and right at
the end a funfair with a ghost train. We’d walk around eating rock, wasting
pennies in the one-armed bandits. But it was the sea I liked most, now grey now
blue, stretching away lonely Long ago, I heard that the whole lot was slowly
falling to bits … like me’ — she smiled, looking down at her legs, the strong
veins behind the tights — ‘but it’s been completely renovated. Nowadays the
deckchairs are free.’

‘Magnificent,’
whispered Mr Bradshaw, sitting down again.

Boldly
but decisively Nancy said, ‘Would you like a holiday by the seaside?’

Mr
Bradshaw’s agreement was far more emphatic than his surprise at the forwardness
of the question. Nancy drew some directions that would take him along Limehouse
Cut to the agreed meeting place. She wrote down the time he should be there,
and she gave him her watch. Throughout he made a show of impatient nodding, as
if the mastery of such details was child’s play After Mr Bradshaw had gone,
Nancy tenderly thought: The great thing about someone who’s lost their memory
is that they’re so used to forgetting answers that they don’t ask too many
questions. And that was a help, because Mr Bradshaw hadn’t asked what Mr Riley
might think of her invitation; or what Nancy proposed to do with the options
that remained open to her; or how she, too, might take the route to mercy or
reward. It would have taken Nancy a very long time indeed to explain.

3

Perhaps Nick’s father had
dropped a hint along these lines: ‘He hasn’t come to terms with the passing of
his mother. He could do with a treat … something to take him out of himself.’
Or maybe it was simple generosity of spirit. Either way the tubby executive at
British Telecom — last seen sipping sherry at the funeral — had offered Nick a
treat closed to the general public for donkeys’ years: a view from the top of
the BT Tower. The executive was called Reginald Smyth.

‘One
hundred and eighty-nine metres high,’ he said, reverently, on the
thirty-fourth floor. ‘Sways twenty centimetres in a high wind.’

Reginald
was a plump and ponderous man with active eyes, and a commiserating manner. He’d
lost all his hair save for white curls above each ear. Standing with joined
hands, he ushered in fact after fact as if they might soothe the bruised and
broken. ‘As you can see, there are no walls, just windows and, of course, the
floor rotates, obtaining a full circuit in twenty-two minutes…’

Nick
missed the details about tonnage, nylon tyres and speed. He was already gazing
at the sprawling majesty of London. Sitting down, he picked out St John’s Wood,
hazy under the threat of snow and, with an alarming shudder, the floor began to
move.

From
this suburban pinnacle Nick looked upon recent events as if he were detached
from their happening and significance. It was calming; it was a treat. He
listened and watched while the world seemed to go round. Reginald, being a man
with a sense of moment, kept a respectful distance.

‘We had a long-drawn-out
argument,’ Charles had admitted, clinking more ice into more scotch. After the
visit to Doctor Okoye, Elizabeth wanted to tell Nick about Riley and his place
in her life.

‘I didn’t
know about the heart condition,’ said Charles, handing Nick a glass. ‘Your
mother only said that maybe it was time to retire, that the cut and thrust was
all getting a bit much for her valves.’

Husband
and wife toyed with selling up and fixing the tap in Saint Martin’s Haven. Led
by Elizabeth, they talked of all the things they agreed about, until Charles
realised she was trying to seduce him. Snapping a thumb and finger, he said, ‘No.’
He was against any disclosure of the past, not because he was ashamed, but
because he was frightened: for Nick.

‘There
was no need for you to know’ — he hunched his shoulders and squinted — ‘You’d
be shocked. You’d been protected. And what did it matter? She’d moved on,
wonderfully.’

That
notion of
protection
irritated Nick. It was demeaning. It was a kind of
pity that insinuated measurement: it cut love down to size — for Nick, not
knowing all, had therefore not
loved
all. He’d loved only partially His
father failed to realise that Nick’s heart was greater than his needs or
expectations; that the woman of his dreams was Sonia, the prostitute in
Crime
and Punishment.
But he hadn’t said that out loud.

The revolving deck groaned
suddenly on its rails, sending a stab of fear through Nick. He threw his eyes
to work, spying the Inns of Court, and further on, the Isle of Dogs, where
towers were being raised from the mist at Canary Wharf. Nick’s attention
shuddered to the east, to things known but out of sight, to Hornchurch Marshes
and the Four Lodges. He thought of the cold wind, the small shaved head, the
lingering torchlight; and he heard again the unnerving pity in that voice.

Nick’s
parents had never fully resolved the disagreement, though Charles won the first
round on points. While Elizabeth urged Nick to find a practice in Primrose
Hill, Charles pushed for paid indolence in Australia. (He wanted his son out of
the way while Elizabeth went after Riley. If it came to nothing, then Nick
would be left
unscathed.
Should an arrest become imminent, then,
perhaps, the matter could be re-examined.)

The
word ‘unscathed’ also irritated Nick, because it was the twin of ‘protection’.

The
second round began when Elizabeth turned to letter writing, those lures of
affection and melancholy while Charles (guessing the stratagem) countered with
more temptations of distance and wonder. This last had been a subtle ploy for
Charles was drawing on what bound father and son together: the dream of
escapades and foreign peril.

‘In the
end, she was several moves ahead,’ said Charles affectionately spilling whisky
as he poured from the decanter. He was weary, his sleeves rolled up and a
tartan tie askew A shirt-tail hung out like a waiter’s cloth. ‘I knew nothing
of the key or Father Anselm’s role as her unwitting understudy’ He paused as if
ashamed by the complaint in his own voice, the hint of resentment. ‘For your
sake, I’d hoped that this business would pass you by; as still it might.’

‘For
your sake,’ repeated Nick quietly As still it might?’

‘Let’s
get back to normal,’ said Charles, with a sudden note of beseeching. ‘Let’s …
let’s go to Skomer.’

Nick
laughed, not so much at what Charles had said, as his appearance: the red face,
the clothing in disarray and the precariously sinking glass. Charles took the
laughter for assent and joined in heartily.

London kept turning and
Nick kept watching, high above all that had happened, glad that it was over,
perhaps grateful — if he were honest — that he had a protective father. When
the twenty-two minutes had elapsed the floor stopped, and Nick was facing St
John’s Wood.

‘The
lift moves at six metres per second,’ said Mr Smyth, more relaxed, hands in his
suit pockets. Nick guessed that he was the sort of executive who liked to don
the hard hat and chat with the lads about the tricks of cable installation.

As the
narrow compartment plunged down to ground level, Nick ignored some more
statistics, marvelling rather at his father’s determination, his refusal to
compromise with his wife, the captain of matters practical. This time Charles
had taken the lead and called the shots, forcing his mother’s hand. It was the
sort of bull-headed drive the bank had wanted and never got.

‘Who’s
Mrs Dixon?’ Nick had ventured, before going to bed. ‘I haven’t the faintest
idea.’ Charles had rolled down his sleeves, pulled his tie up and dabbed at the
spillage with his shirt-tail. Nick watched him carefully … and he just couldn’t
be sure: was this the truth or another species of protection?

The
lift doors opened and Nick showered thanks on Mr Smyth. It was, he replied, the
least
he could do, adding, as if he hadn’t been heard the first time:

‘I must
say your mother was a quite re
mark
able woman.’

4

‘You’re a hard man, Riley’
said Prosser. He puffed on his cigar and nudged the peak of his cloth cap.

A fair
one.