Her Fearful Symmetry (4 page)

As each piece of clothing settled onto his body, Martin felt increasingly secure, enveloped in the clean, worn fabric. He was very hungry, but he took his time. Eventually, Martin slid his feet into his shoes. The shoes were problematic. The brown oxfords were a sort of negotiation between his clean body and the always unnerving floor. He disliked touching them. But he did, and managed to tie the laces. Marijke had offered to get him trainers with Velcro straps, but Martin felt aesthetically repelled by the very idea.

Martin always dressed in sober, dark clothing; he exuded formality. He did not go so far as to wear a tie around the flat, but he always looked as though he had just removed one, or was looking for a tie to put on before he rushed out the door. Since he had stopped leaving the flat, his ties stayed on the rack in his wardrobe.

Dressed, Martin walked cautiously through the hall and into the kitchen. His breakfast was laid out on the kitchen table. Weetabix in a bowl, a small jug of milk, two apricots. He pressed the button on the electric kettle, and in a few minutes the water boiled. Martin had few compulsions associated with food (they mainly involved chewing things a certain number of times). The kitchen was Marijke’s domain, and she always made him take whatever was bothering him to another part of the flat. He tried never to turn on the stove, because he found it impossible to be sure that he’d turned it off again and would stand for hours with his hand on the knob, turning it back and forth. But he could make tea with the electric kettle, and he did so.

Marijke had left the newspapers next to his bowl of cereal. They were pristine, still neatly folded. Martin felt a little surge of gratitude-he liked to be the first to open the fresh newspapers, but he never got to them before she did. He unfurled the
Guardian
and went directly to the crossword.

Today was Thursday, and for Thursdays Martin always set a crossword with a scientific theme. This particular one concerned astronomy. Martin scanned it briefly to be sure that everything was correct. He was especially proud of the puzzle’s form, which sprawled across the grid in the shape of a rather boxy and completely symmetrical spiral galaxy. He then turned to the solution for yesterday’s puzzle, a strict Ximenean which had been set by his fellow compiler Albert Beamish. Beamish set under the name Lillibet; Martin had no idea why. He’d never met Beamish, though they spoke on the phone occasionally. Martin always imagined him as a hairy man in a ballet costume. Martin’s own setting name was Bunbury.

Martin opened
The Times,
the
Daily Telegraph,
the
Daily Mail
and the
Independent
and began combing through them for interesting news items. The crossword he was working on at the moment was about the history of warfare in Mesopotamia. He wasn’t sure if this was going to fly with his editor, but like any artist he felt the need to express his preoccupations through his work, and Iraq had been much on Martin’s mind lately. Today the news was full of an especially bloody suicide bombing in a mosque. Martin sighed, got his scissors and began cutting out the articles.

After breakfast, he washed up (in a fairly normal fashion) and stacked the papers neatly (though they had become somewhat lace-like). He went into his office, bent over to turn on the desk lamp. As he straightened up something brushed his face.

Martin’s first thought was that a bat had somehow got into the office. But then he saw the envelope, swinging gently on its thread, hanging from the ceiling. He stood and considered it. His name was written on it in Marijke’s bold handwriting.
What have you done?
His mind went blank, and he stood in front of the dangling envelope with his head bowed and his arms crossed protectively over his chest. At last he reached out and took it, gave a little tug that detached the thread from the ceiling. He opened it slowly, unfolded the letter, groped for his reading glasses and put them on.
What has she done?

Martin stood holding the letter.
The worst thing has happened.
He could not take it in.
She’s gone.
She would not come back.
Marijke.
He bent slowly at his waist, hips, knees until he was crouching on the floor in front of his desk, the harsh light shining on his back, his face inches from the letter.
My love. Oh my love…
All thought fled from him, there was only a great emptiness, the way the water draws back before a tsunami.
Marijke.

Marijke sat on the train, watching the flat grey land along the track from Schiphol Airport as it blurred past her. It had been raining, the sky was low.
I’m almost home.
She checked her watch. By now Martin must have found her letter. She took her mobile phone out of her bag and opened it. No calls. She snapped it shut. The rain streaked sideways across the train’s windows.
What have I done? I’m sorry, Martin.
But she knew she would not be sorry once she was home, and only Amsterdam could be home to her now.

R
OBERT HAD given a special tour of the Western Cemetery to a group of antiquarians from Hamburg, and now he stood under the arch by Highgate Cemetery’s main gate, waiting for his group to buy postcards and collect their belongings so he could shoo them out and lock up. In the winter there were no regular weekday tours. He liked the subdued, workaday quality the cemetery had on these quiet days.

The antiquarians straggled out of the former Anglican chapel that served as a makeshift gift shop. Robert shook the green plastic donation box at them, and they threw in their change. He always felt embarrassed at this little transaction, but the cemetery didn’t pay VAT on donations, so everyone at Highgate begged as enthusiastically as they could manage. Robert smiled and waved the Germans out, then turned the old-fashioned key in the massive gate’s lock.

He went into the office and put the key and the donation box on the desk. Felicity, the office manager, smiled and dumped out the contents. “Not bad, for such a dreary Wednesday,” she said. She held out her hand. “Walkie-talkie?”

Robert patted his mackintosh pocket and said, “I’ll bring it back.”

“Are you going out, then?” Felicity asked. “It’s starting to rain.”

“Just for a bit.”

“Molly’s on the gate across the way. Could you give her these?”

“Okay.”

Robert took the pamphlets from Felicity and an umbrella from the stand by the stairs. He headed across Swains Lane. Molly, a lean elderly woman who wore green dungarees and an anorak, sat on a folding chair inside the Strathcona and Mount Royal memorial, which lurked in pink granite splendour just beside the Eastern Cemetery’s gate. She peered out of the gloom patiently and took the pamphlets from Robert, tucking them into the little rack that sat beside her. The pamphlets featured Karl Marx on their covers; he and George Eliot were the star attractions among the dead on this side of the cemetery.

“D’you want to go in and warm up?” Robert asked her.

Molly’s voice was slow, raspy, sleepy; she had a slight Australian accent. “I’m all right, I’ve got the heater on. Have you had your visit?”

“No, I just got done with the tour.”

“Well go on, then.”

As he recrossed Swains Lane, Robert thought about the way Molly had said “your visit” as though it were now part of the official daily schedule of the cemetery. Perhaps it was. He thought about the way the staff had made space for his grief as if it were a tangible thing. Out in the world people drew back from it, but at the cemetery everyone was accustomed to the presence of the bereaved, and so they were matter-of-fact about death in a way that Robert had never appreciated until now.

The drizzle turned to rain as Robert came to Elspeth’s mausoleum. He put up his umbrella with a flourish and sat down on the steps with his back against the door. Robert leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Less than an hour ago he had walked right past this spot with his tour. He had been chatting to the group about wakes and the extreme measures the Victorians had taken for fear of being buried alive. He wished that the Noblin tomb was not on one of the main paths; it was impossible to give a tour without passing Elspeth, and he felt callous leading groups of gawking tourists past the small structure with her surname carved into it. It had never bothered him when it was only her family’s grave-but he had never met her family. For the first time he properly understood why Jessica was so adamant about decorum in the cemetery. He had been inclined to tease her about that. For Jessica, Highgate was not about the tours, or the monuments, not about the supernatural or the atmosphere or the morbid peculiarities of the Victorians; for her the cemetery was about the dead and their grave-owners. Robert was working, rather slowly, on a history of Highgate Cemetery and Victorian funerary practices for his doctoral thesis. But Jessica, who never wasted anything and was supremely adept at putting people to work, had said, “If you’re going to do all that research, why don’t you make yourself useful?” So he began to lead tours. He found that he liked the cemetery itself much better than anything he wrote about it.

Robert settled into himself. The stone step he sat on was cold, wet and shallow. His knees jutted up almost to shoulder height. “Hello, love,” he said, but as always felt absurd speaking out loud to a mausoleum. Silently he continued:
Hello. I’m here. Where are you?
He pictured Elspeth sitting inside the mausoleum like a saint in her hermitage, looking out at him through the grate in the door with a little smile on her face.
Elspeth?

She had always been a restless sleeper. When she was alive her sleep was punctuated by tossing and turning; she often stole all the blankets. When Elspeth slept alone she lay spreadeagled across the bed, staking her territory with limbs instead of a flag. When she slept with Robert he was often awoken by a stray elbow or knee, or by Elspeth’s legs thrashing as though she were running in bed. “One of these nights you’re going to break my nose,” he’d said to her. She had acknowledged that she was a dangerous bedmate. “I apologise in advance for any breakage,” she’d told him, and kissed the nose in question. “You’ll look good, though. It’ll add a certain hooliganish glamour to you.”

Now there was only stillness. The door was a barrier he could have passed through; there was a key in Elspeth’s desk in addition to the one in the cemetery office. Elspeth’s body sat in a box a few feet away from him. He chose not to imagine what three months had done to it.

Robert was struck once again by the finality of it all, summed up and presented to him as the silence in the little room behind him.
I have things to tell you. Are you listening?
He had never realised, while Elspeth was alive, the extent to which a thing had not completely happened until he told her about it.

Roche sent the letter to Julia and Valentina yesterday.
Robert imagined the letter making its way from Roche’s office in Hampstead to Lake Forest, Illinois, U.S.A., being dropped through the letter box at 99 Pembridge Road, being picked up by one of the twins. It was a thick, creamy envelope with the return address of Roche, Elderidge, Potts & Lefley-Solicitors debossed in glossy black ink and the twins’ names and address written in the spidery handwriting of Roche’s ancient secretary, Constance. Robert imagined one of the twins holding the envelope, her curiosity.
I’m nervous about this, Elspeth. I would feel better if you’d ever met these girls. You don’t have to live with them-they could be awful. Or what if they just sell the place to someone awful?
But he was intrigued by the twins, and he had a certain irrational faith in Elspeth’s experiment. “I can leave it all to you,” she’d said. “Or I can leave it to the girls.”

“Let the girls have it,” he had replied. “I have more than enough.”

“Hmm. I will, then. But what can I give you?”

They were sitting on her hospital bed. She had a fever; it was after the splenectomy. Elspeth’s dinner sat untouched on the wheeled bedside table. He was massaging her feet, his hands slippery with the warm, fragrant oil. “I don’t know. Could you arrange to be reincarnated?”

“The twins are rumoured to be pretty close copies.” Elspeth smiled. “I’ll make them come and live in the flat if they want it. Shall I leave you the twins?”

Robert smiled back at her. “That could backfire. That could be quite-painful.”

“You’ll never know if you don’t give it a whirl. But I want to give you something.”

“A lock of hair?”

“Oh, but it’s bad hair now,” she said, fingering her downy silver fuzz. “We should have saved a bit when I still had my real hair.” Elspeth’s hair had been longish, wavy, the colour of winter butter.