The Gardens of the Dead (6 page)

‘That’s
fine,’ said Anselm. He was convinced it was nothing of the sort; that this was
not what Elizabeth had wanted. ‘I’ll just go back home.’

Mrs
Tippins seemed uncomfortable, as if the static of her clothing was giving her
tiny shocks. She opened the door for Anselm and then seemed to leap at an
opportunity. ‘Do you mind if I ask … but are you allowed out?’

‘Every
ten years.

‘Never.
How long for?’

‘Ten
minutes.’

‘Honestly?
You better be making tracks, then.’

‘I’m
joking.’

Mrs
Tippins narrowed her eyes, reluctant to abandon deep-rooted convictions.

Anselm berated himself all
the way back to Larkwood. Nicholas Glendinning had opened the box while Anselm
had been hiding in an apple tree. It would have appealed to the author of
Genesis: Nicholas now knew what he was not meant to know.

Mothers,
sons and secrets, he thought. They were an unhappy combination but often found
together. As if nudged, Anselm recalled the death of Zélie, his own mother, and
the secret he carried. Oddly enough, the circumstances had captivated
Elizabeth when he’d told her shortly after joining chambers. That was almost
twenty years ago.

They
were sitting in the common room on a Friday night. The wind kept triggering a
car alarm that seemed to pause when sworn at from a nearby window.

‘She’d
been in hospital for an operation,’ said Anselm. ‘Before she was discharged, my
father called us all together. He said that she wouldn’t be getting better and
that we weren’t to tell her. I was nine. A few days later she came home. I took
her a cup of tea, and she said, “I’ll be up and about before you know it,” and
I replied, “No you won’t. You’re going to die.”‘

‘Did
you tell the others that you’d broken rank?’

‘No.
They would have seen it as a betrayal.’

‘Betrayal?’
Elizabeth repeated, as if she were talking to an invisible third party.

‘Yes,
but from that moment my mother and I were free. We could grieve while she was
still alive. We could face what was coming in the absence of lies. I hadn’t
even realised that obeying my father would have left us trapped.’

‘Trapped,’
echoed Elizabeth again.

She was
talking to an imagined presence, but Anselm hardly noticed because turning over
the stone had uncovered forgotten emotion. His eyes prickled and he couldn’t
speak without his breath staggering. ‘Don’t get me wrong … this is no fairy
story about life winning out. Shortly before the end, she said, “I can hear the
sounds of a playground.” A kid was kicking a ball against our fence. She was
drifting off to sleep. But she let slip a confession. “It’s been a school for
death and I’ve hardly learnt anything.”’

Elizabeth
had been spellbound.

Anselm parked beneath the
plum trees and wiped his eyes, astonished by the power and freshness of
remembered grief. The siren faded, along with the protestations from an
upstairs window Presently Larkwood’s bells found their strike and birds
scattered over the valley.

While
the loss of his mother remained painful to Anselm, it had opened his child’s
heart to a very adult truth: what you would cling on to will pass away, like
grass. Several times Elizabeth had returned to this subject with a sort of
fugitive hunger, but only abstractly and when they were alone. They’d spoken of
honesty between parents and children, of loving by letting go, of this day’s
importance. Half the time, Anselm was lost in the forest of ideas, but it
seemed to help Elizabeth. He sensed she wanted a distant companion while she
made a very private passage. She’d always been one for conceptual clarity.

Anselm
had recovered by the time he reached the cloister. He always saw things clearly
after he’d cried. And he was now convinced that it was back then, on a Friday
night, that Elizabeth had decided, one day to seek his help — long before the ‘not
knowing and the not being able to care’ had become an accusation.

9

Elizabeth had found George
before he got his head kicked in. He still didn’t know how she’d traced him,
though he had his suspicions. The only person who knew about Trespass Place was
Nino. And everyone near the Embankment knew Nino. So George had pictured
Elizabeth beneath the bridges, tapping arms, lifting blankets, seeking the
whereabouts of a man named Bradshaw She must have been sent Nino’s way; and she
must have told him a great deal to make him reveal where George had gone to
ground.

A
pinprick of light had jigged in the distance, exposing the cobbles like scabs
in the asphalt. It grew larger, making her outline darker than the darkness.
She lowered the torch and he saw gold buckles on expensive shoes. The beam was
cut and she said, ‘You walked out of court, George.’

He
replied to the shadow ‘Yes, and I let Riley go.

‘We
both did.’

Elizabeth
sat down on the cardboard beside him. They looked out on the courtyard, the
drainpipes and the bins. She produced a flask of whisky and two silver beakers.
It started to rain. The drops pattered on the fire escape landing. They didn’t
speak; they just sipped the warming malt.

She
came frequently after that, always in the evening. They fell to talking of old
times. George told her what he’d done before the trial: baggage boy at the
Bonnington, then one of a team in a night shelter for the homeless, and finally
becoming its manager. He’d lost that job for gross misconduct after Riley was
acquitted. Elizabeth’s story couldn’t have been more different: boarding
school, Durham University and Gray’s Inn. After the trial she was made a deputy
High Court judge. Her life had gone up, his had gone down. She too had married;
they’d both had a son. Hers was called Nicholas; he was planning a trip to
Australia.

‘What
for?’

‘To get
away from me.’ She laughed. ‘He’s grown too quickly’ Distantly she added, ‘He’s
the very image of my father.’

Elizabeth
never urged George to find a hostel; she never asked about the home he’d left
behind, and the wife who couldn’t face him any more. She seemed to understand
that sometimes there was no going back; or at least, not until one’s
connections with the past had been changed. They just sat side by side beneath
the fire escape sometimes chatting, sometimes silent. Then she’d go home.

One
night she turned up with her work. It brought the ambience of the Old Bailey
into this, his hideaway While she read, marking the page and swearing, he was
sure she was ahead of him, waiting. Tension made him fidget. She asked him to
keep still. Suddenly he blurted out, ‘It couldn’t have been any different.’

‘I know.’
She carried on reading.

‘Not
after I was asked about my grandfather … the dropping of my first name.

‘I know’

‘I
never saw that coming.’

‘No one
did.’ She put her files and coloured pens in a bag and pulled out the whisky
and the beakers. After they’d drunk several shots, she spoke of John’s fall on
Lawton’s Wharf. The subject had hung in the air while she’d spoken of her own
son. George opened out a newspaper cutting of the inquest and gave it to
Elizabeth.

‘How
did Riley do it?’

George
couldn’t answer because — in truth — it was his fault. He’d sent his son to his
death with an aside uttered during
Countdown.
He saw the smiling
presenters; and he saw his boy fearful, stooping through a hole in the wire.
He was only seventeen.

‘I
suppose there’s no evidence.’

‘None.’

She
turned, drawing the fall of hair behind an ear. A diamond sparkled on the
lobe. ‘I’m implicated in what happened, George.’

‘No you’re
not.’

‘I let
Riley escape far more than you did.’ It didn’t sound condescending, just
private and adamant.

‘You
can keep the cutting.’ It was all he could do to reach her. She had almost left
the planet.

When Elizabeth next came
to Trespass Place she said her back couldn’t take it any more. She was very
specific. The problem was degenerative changes at L5 and L6. ‘There’s a café
round the corner.

They
found a table in Marco’s by the window Then Elizabeth went to the counter
without having asked him what he wanted. When she came back, he paled. She’d
bought hot chocolate and toast. She’d done it on purpose. She’d remembered.

Three
girls had given evidence against Riley It had taken guts, because they’d been
terrified of the Pieman. But George had persuaded them to come forward. It had
taken three attempts. And he’d done it over toast and cocoa. They’d said so in
their witness statements.

‘Eat
up,’ she said gravely.

George
looked at the plate and mug in horror.

‘Go on,’
she repeated. ‘Take a sip.’

When he
started eating, she said, ‘Have you ever wondered how evil can be undone?’

He
nodded.

‘Me
too.’

And
that was it. George waited for the follow-up, but they just sat and ate toast and
drank hot chocolate.

Elizabeth came back about
two weeks later. She stood beneath the arch into Trespass Place and waved.
George got up and followed her to Marco’s. By the same window they ate more
toast and drank more hot chocolate.

Elizabeth
said, ‘Do you remember Mrs Riley?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nancy
is her name. She listened to the prosecution opening and then left the court,
rather like you.’

George
remembered the hat — yellow with black spots —pulled down as if it were a steel
helmet.

Elizabeth
explained that Riley’s solicitor, Mr Wyecliffe, was a highly intelligent man.
She had asked him to interview Nancy with a view to obtaining a witness
statement upon Riley’s good character. The difficulty was that no one knew what
Nancy might say under cross-examination. Ultimately it was agreed that Nancy
would not go into the witness box: she would only reveal Riley’s anger towards
women.

George
said, ‘She’s crackers.’

‘She
trusts him, that’s all,’ said Elizabeth reprovingly ‘Maybe she sees a trace of
something, a remnant of what’s been lost.’

Neither
of them spoke for a while.

‘When I
first saw you under that fire escape,’ mused Elizabeth innocently ‘I didn’t
recognise you.

‘I’ve
been sleeping rough for years. It changes you.’

‘Even
in daylight you looked different,’ she continued. ‘Something’s gone, something
you can’t catch and put in your notebook. Riley wouldn’t recognise you either,
if you bumped into him.’

George
looked up quickly.

‘He’s
still a criminal, as he always was,’ she said, collecting toast crumbs with a manicured
finger. ‘Nancy is the way to proving it. Maybe we can all make amends. How does
that sound to you?’

When
Elizabeth had gone, George went back to Trespass Place and wrote it all down in
book thirty-five. There’d be one more volume before he got his head kicked in.

George sat beneath the
fire escape, his goggles in his hair, reading his account of that meeting It
was the beginning of a calculated scheme — although Elizabeth’s plans were
already formed. They just required his cooperation. From the moment he’d
written down her invitation it was as though every ill that had come to pass
since the trial might all be transformed by a greater conclusion. Elizabeth had
said, ‘If we get the ending right, we’ll change everything, right back to the
beginning. It’s almost magic. A monk told me.’

The
monk who hadn’t turned up, thought George, looking towards the arch at the end
of the courtyard. He hadn’t slept for days now. Giddily he counted the
scratches on the wall. Then he hauled himself upright, positioned his goggles
and tramped into the sunshine. His shoes were split and the laces frayed. They
fell off as he walked. On Old Paradise Street, he slumped forward onto the
pavement, one leg in the gutter. He heard the tread of feet: frantic high
heels, the measured clip of some army type, the squelch of trainers. Some
slowed, some stopped, some spoke; but the river of feet moved on, drawn towards
a sea of pressing obligations.

Among
the flowing George heard the steps of someone familiar, a dawdling coming close
… a pat-patting of small red sandals. He was dreaming. The ankles came into
view: white skin upon fine bones; blue veins summoned by a wind that lifted off
the waves. The boy’s copper hair danced. George lifted a hand off the pavement,
reaching out, and said, ‘Oh, John.’

The
waking dream unfolded. It was like watching a family video.

George took his son by the
hand on Southport Pier. It was a blustery day with gulls thrown around as
though attached to the railings by string. Occasionally they dropped like
stones, but landed lightly on discarded crusts of bread. George found a bench,
and John clambered beside him, banging one of his knees.