The Evil Seed (2 page)

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY, CRISP AND
AUTUMN-CLEAR, THE ground bright with leaves, and the sky as round and as blue
as the sky beneath which the little train had raced so many years ago. There
were not many people: myself, Robert, a handful of others, all in black, their
faces a blur in the sunlight. Only Robert’s stands out in my memory, pale and
caricatured by grief. It hurt me to look at him.

‘White flowers only’,
had said the advertisement in the
Cambridge News
and that day there were
hundreds of them: lilies and roses and great shaggy overblown chrysanthemums,
lining the grave and the grassy path and crowning the coffin as it was lowered
into the ground. Their scent was overwhelming, but the dark smell from the
grave was stronger, and as the priest spoke the final words of the service I
backed away from that open hole as a man retreats from the side of a cliff,
feeling wretched for my friend but also strangely light-headed. Maybe it was
the flowers.

He had chosen a lovely
plot for her: right at the back of the churchyard, up against the wall, beneath
the combined branches of a hawthorn tree and a shady yew. The death-tree stood
arm-in-arm with the life-tree, their bright berries seeming to mock the grief
of the mourner, as if they had been in league with the sweetness of the day to
bedeck themselves in their most joyful colours to celebrate her passing. It
would be beautiful in summer, I thought to myself, shady and green and silent.
This year, the hemlock and the tall weeds had been cleared away for the funeral
but they would grow back.

Grow back.

The thought disturbed me
in some way, but I could not think why. Let them grow, after all, let them
invade that quiet place, overgrow the grave and the stone and the memory of
Rosemary for ever; let flowers grow from her blind eyes. If only this could be
the end, I thought. If only she could be forgotten. But Robert would remember,
of course. After all, he loved her.

It was in the spring of 1947 when Rosemary
first entered our lives. I was passing the weir at Magdalene Bridge, on my way
to meet Robert at a tea-shop before we went to the library. I was twenty-five,
a graduate student at the university; I was writing a doctorate paper on the
Pre-Raphaelites (a much-maligned school of painting at the time, which I hoped
to bring back into fashion). I existed in a world of books and absolutes; which
suited my withdrawn, and somewhat obsessive personality. The stones and cobbles
of Cambridge rested quiet, as they had done for centuries, an ideal backdrop for
my studies and a retreat for myself from the bewildering advances of the modern
world. I lived in the past and was happy there.

I had one good friend, a
very nice lodging by Grantchester way and a comfortable allowance from my
father, which supplemented my grant from the faculty. I had always assumed that
when my doctorate was finished I would join the university as a full-time
lecturer perhaps staying on at Pembroke, where my tutor, Doctor Shakeshafte,
had always had high hopes for me. My life was all planned out as neatly and
precisely as the gardens and lawns of Cambridge, and it never occurred to me to
question the plan, or to hope for something more.

On that particular day,
with the bright morning sun reflecting great panels of gold from the mullioned windows
of Magdalene College, I was feeling on top of the world. As I quickened my step
on the bridge, I was just beginning to sing to myself when I heard a sound
below me and stopped.

I sometimes wonder what
would have happened if I had ignored the sound, if I had run across the bridge
for dear life without looking back, but there was no question of that of
course. She had it all too well planned out. You see, it was the sound,
unmistakably, of something falling into the river.

It was spring, and the
Cam was at its highest. The weir rushed and snarled less than a hundred yards
away, and anyone who fell in at that point was likely to be caught in the
sluice and drowned. That was why punting was forbidden beyond the bridge; not
that anyone would have been fool enough to try it. For a moment I was still,
squinting over the parapet for the log or the broken punt or the piece of
floating debris which must have caused the sound; then I saw her, a pale blur
of a face over some kind of a pale dress ballooning out around her, hollows for
eyes, every feature a blur, as if she were already a ghost.

‘Hey!’ I called, and I
saw her head tilt into the rushing water like a tired child’s into a pillow.
No call, no wave, nothing. For an instant, I thought I’d imagined her, so
unreal was the apparition. Then the realization hit me that this was no
accident, no dream, but some poor desperate woman half a minute from muddy
death, with only me to save her. And so I came running, as she knew I would,
stripping off coat and jacket and shoes as I ran along the bank, my glasses
slipping from my nose, panting and shouting; ‘Wait! Hey! Miss! Young lady!’
without drawing even a glance from her. I jumped in close to the bank, a few
yards downstream from her as she drifted slowly towards me, bracing myself for
the shock of the cold water. My bare feet touched mud at the bed of the river,
but at least I was not out of my depth. I reached for her. My hands brushed her
dress and clenched like a vice. The flimsy fabric ripped, but by then I had a
good grip on the girl, who seemed to be only half-conscious, and with all my
strength I held on to her as I tried to fight my way back to the bridge. I don’t
know how long it took me, or how I managed to do it; I was never a man of
action, but I suppose that in those days I had youth and ignorance on my side,
and somehow I managed to use the uneven brick shoring of the river-bank to pull
us both towards safe, still water. I hauled her out first and myself after her
and for a while I had to lie on the bank, my breath coming in great, tearing
gasps and my nose bleeding a little. She was lying as I had left her, her head
thrown back and her arms flung wide, but her eyelids fluttered and her
breathing was regular. My first thought was that she must be cold, and I
retrieved my coat, the first in a line of garments discarded along the
river-bank, and wrapped it clumsily around her shoulders, somehow embarrassed
to touch her now that she was out, of immediate danger, as if she might be
angry at my familiarity.

My second thought, quite
simply, was amazement at how lovely she was.

There was no lack of
beautiful women in Cambridge in those days; you saw them at parties or at the
theatre or at balls, walking arm-in-arm with their young men in the gardens or
punting on the Cam. But this one, as soon as I saw her, seemed from another
century. She was slim, and translucent, like very fine china, pale and tragic
and delicate. Her cheekbones were high, her lips full, her features small and
childlike. Her hair, I guessed, would be red when dry. But her beauty was not
really any of these things. It was lambent, ardent, arrogant, as if it had
looked upon ugliness only to become still more beautiful. She was one of those
women, I knew it then, who are at their most lovely in rags; maybe King
Cophetua had thought that too, the first time he looked upon the beggar maid.
Then her eyes opened, a deep grey, almost lavender, blank at first, then fixing
on my face with a wildness which wrenched at my heart.

‘I’m not dead?’ she
whispered.

‘No, you’re not,’ I
said, foolishly. ‘Everything will be all right.’

Well, of course, I didn’t
know it then. I said it simply to comfort her. But things were far from being
all right. That day, or ever again.

Two

THE TABBY JUMPED ON TO ALICE’S KNEE, AS IF
TO REMIND her that she had been sitting in that chair doing nothing for nearly
half an hour and that it might be time to do some work. Sighing, she kissed Cat’s
furry head before she put her down on the floor.

Cat mewed and rolled
over to play, paws frantically kicking the air. Alice grinned and glanced at
her sketchpad, which showed the lively outline of a sleeping cat, firm pencil
strokes for the body and paws, details half filled-in with brown ink.

Not a bad one, that, she
thought, especially as it took no less than a miracle to get Cat to keep still
for even a minute. But it wasn’t real work; it had been six months since she
had painted anything worthwhile, and it was time to begin in earnest again.
Last year she had had quite a successful exhibition at Kettle’s Yard which had
resulted in a nice fat contract to illustrate a series of children’s folk
tales, but since then, the ideas seemed to have run temporarily dry and it didn’t
look as if she was going to have very much to exhibit this year. Well, that was
how things went, thought Alice. Her pictures — the good ones — took time and
thought, and the ideas either came or they didn’t. There was no point worrying
about all that now; it would only slow things down even more. She glanced at
the three official-looking envelopes tacked to her notice-board (even at a
distance, she could read the flowery ‘Red Rose’ logo across one of them), and
sighed. That was where the money came from, she thought drily. The magazines.
The teen romances. They were the reason she wasn’t still sharing a flat with
two other students at the rough end of Mill Road and claiming income support. A
sudden wave of fierce resentment washed over her at the thought, and she stood
up abruptly to face the window. Was this what she was reduced to doing?
Illustrations for pulp romances? She deserved so much better than that.
Celtic
Tales
had been her first really exciting project since her ‘Spirit of
Adventure’ exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, and after that … Alice shrugged.
Forget it, she told herself. There was no point sitting indoors feeling
resentful.

She pulled on a
sweatshirt over her jeans, then slipped on a pair of old, scuffed trainers. She
tacked the half-finished sketch on to the notice-board, ran her fingers through
her short brown hair in lieu of a comb, and, thus ready to face the world,
stepped out into the sunny street. The warmth and the combined scents of
wallflowers and magnolia hit her with a sudden wave of well-being, and she took
a deep breath of the pleasant air.

It occurred to her that
it had been some time since she had walked into Cambridge. Strange, thought
Alice. When she and Joe had been students there, they had always liked the town
centre with its shops and little galleries and its cobbled streets under the linden
trees. Still, that was all a long time ago. Better not to think of Joe. Better
not to remember him too clearly, not to imagine him standing beside her,
squinting into the shop windows with his hands in his pockets.

Better not to remember
him at all.

Suddenly, she felt
depressed. It was thinking about Joe, she told herself. That and the heat and
the Cambridge crowds with their cameras and their college scarves and their
brittle camaraderie.

Her favourite tea-shop
was just round the corner, and there she found a window-seat, began to order
Earl Grey, and ended up, unaccountably, ordering hot chocolate with cream and a
large slice of fudge cake instead. Something in Alice responded well to
chocolate.

The Copper Kettle was a
good place. As a student, Alice had spent hours there, drinking Earl Grey or
hot chocolate with cream, watching the flow of people in a pleasant, timeless
daydream. Sitting in the same window watching the same street with the smell of
chocolate and old leather in the smoky air, Alice looked down King’s Parade,
the Senate House reflecting the sunlight from its clean white stones, King’s
warm golden façade, and to her far left, the red brick walls of St Catherine’s
glowing behind its tall railings. The light in Cambridge was different to anywhere
else Alice had ever seen; warm, sleepy, golden light, shifting like a Dali
landscape over the floating spires, the sleeping gardens. Such a beautiful
town, thought Alice, a town of illusions, ghosts and dreams. Even the students
seemed vacant, somehow, for all their animated talk, as if in spite of
everything they knew themselves to be transient, nothing but the dreams of
those old and half-awakened stones.

Watching the students
now, Alice felt old. She remembered herself, slimmer then and with long, untamed
hair, wearing cut-off jeans and baggy pullovers, Indian skirts and beads.
Riding her bicycle in the rain. Sneaking over the gates at night. Sleeping with
Joe in his narrow bed. She tried to remember. Had they felt it then, she
thought, that sense of destiny? The brevity of their time rushing past? That
terrible awareness of death?

Alice closed her eyes,
uneasy, and tried to think of nothing at all.

Suddenly, in the muted
hubbub of the crowded tea-shop, she recognized a voice and her eyes snapped open
in surprise, something tightening like a wire inside her heart, in spite of
herself. She knew that voice well, with its northern accent, and remembered
sitting there in the Copper Kettle listening to Joe talking to her about his
many enthusiasms: Jaco Pastorius and Roy Harper, and how Marxism was going to
change the world…

She looked round,
wondering whether she had imagined it. She had not seen him for three years,
not since he had moved out. Ridiculous that she should still feel that sorry
little jump of the heart. Ridiculous that she should look round, furtively, as
if it were him. And if it were, then so what? He’d probably be with some girl.

She had almost persuaded
herself that she had been wrong, that it had not been his voice at all, when
she finally caught sight of him. He was sitting at a table in a corner of the
room, his familiar face bent at a familiar angle which denoted attentiveness, a
cigarette cupped in one hand, shoulders bent, hair falling messily over a
narrow face, round wire glasses over piercing blue eyes. So he had started
smoking again, thought Alice, remembering the smell of his cigarettes, how it
used to get everywhere, in his clothes, in his hair.