The Evil Seed (4 page)

Rosemary

For Remembrance

I think I kept my calm
well enough then, despite the first onrush of panic which threatened to
overwhelm me. I had already seen too much to be terrified by a cheap practical
joke. I already knew she was there. It would take more than that to hurt me — in
fact, I foolishly thought that with Robert gone, I had nothing else to fear.
She was gone, I said to myself, gone, buried, forgotten. I laid my little bunch
of mistletoe and holly at the head of the grave and turned to go.

Poor Robert.

Suddenly, I felt her
there, her presence filling the churchyard. Her hate, and with it, amusement.
The scent of rosemary wafted up from the little row of shrubs in front of me,
warmed by the slanting winter sun, sweet and oddly nostalgic, the scent of
country kitchens, of drawers filled with clean white linen, of country girls
combing rosemary oil through their long hair. I was absolutely convinced that
if I were to look up I would see her there, watching me from beneath her heavy
eyelids, face pale, her tragic mouth curling in something not quite like a
smile … I was so convinced that she was there that when I raised my eyes I
actually saw her standing in the shade of the hawthorn tree, then she was only
a jumble of light and shade on the bare path, where a patch of brown and frozen
weeds nodded almost imperceptibly over a gravestone I had never noticed before.

For a moment I stared
stupidly. It was a simple enough idea: a flat stone set into the mossy ground
with a small cast-iron sculpture rising above it, maybe two feet high. A frame,
like a door-frame, with a kind of crest on the top, within which stood what
looked to me like a little door or gate, set against the frame with hinges. As
I looked, a gust of wind pushed against the little gate and it blew open with a
tiny sound, then clicked shut as the wind released it. At the head of the grave
was a shallow stone trough, in which a few small green shrubs nodded and
whispered.

Of course. This must be
her grave; this the remembrance Robert had spoken of. His idea. I don’t know
why I approached it then; I should have known that it would do me no good. It
may be that I wanted to know what had been in my friend’s mind before his
suicide, as if my penance before Rosemary’s grave might help his tortured soul
to rest. Maybe I felt some stirring of guilt. Because I killed her, you know,
or at least, I did the best I could. Or maybe I went for the same reason that
the young girl looks into Bluebeard’s chamber, for the same reason that the two
children go to the gingerbread house, or that the boy lets the genie out of
the bottle…

I read the inscription,
of course. After all, that was why it was there.

Something inside me remembers
and will not forget.

Rosemary Virginia
Ashley

August 1948

Something inside me
remembers…
I came there often after that, not able to help myself,
fascinated and repelled and terrified all at once.
Something inside me
remembers…
Only I really understood those words. Everyone else took it as
a message from Robert, proof of his love for his dead wife.

But I knew Robert better
than that. He may have been weak, but he was not maudlin. He may have died a
little when Rosemary was buried, but he would not have laid his heart open like
that for lovers to gawp at as they took their romantic walks in Grantchester
churchyard. He was a practical man, and practical men are the ones who suffer
the most from love, when it comes their way. And whatever the evidence, I know
he didn’t kill himself. That was a message to me from her. A defiant cry from
beyond the grave. She isn’t dead, and she wants me to know it. She has all the
time in the world. And she still remembers.

But I’m not afraid. I’m
safe. I still have my final trick to play, the last card which will keep me
safe. And do you know what my last card is? It’s you, friend. You don’t believe
me? You will. As you read this diary you’ll hate me, despise me, but you won’t
disbelieve me. It’s all right, you don’t have to do it all at once; put the
book away in a drawer, forget it for a while, for years if you like, but you’ll
come back. I know you will. You’ll have to come back sooner or later, because
she’s here. She’s waiting for you. Just as she was waiting for me. So be
careful.

When the time comes,
much may depend upon which way I turn you.

Two

ALL THAT DAY ALICE HAD BEEN RESTLESS. NOW
SHE NIBBLED her way through a packet of biscuits, turned the television on. A
black-and-white film, a chat-show, a Russian cartoon.., she turned it off.

She made some tea, sat
down, let the tea go cold, poured it down the sink, put on a record, played it
twice without hearing it, took it off.

Then she reached for the
letter from her contact at Red Rose and tried to re-awaken her interest in the
illustrator’s job they had offered her. It was a fairly easy one — six
line-drawings and a book jacket for a teen romance called
Heartbreak High.
It
should have been easy, Alice thought; and yet she had wasted most of the day
filling the waste-basket with half-finished sketches, until finally she
admitted to herself that it was seeing that girl with Joe that had done it,
hearing his voice so unexpectedly.

Not that it mattered now
of course. It was over. End of topic.

And yet tonight, it felt
lonely. Just for tonight, it might be good to hear the phone ring. A fleeting
query from her subconscious
(something inside me remembers…);
but who
would
remember her if she disappeared tomorrow? Her mother, keeping the faith for
her vanished ones two hundred miles away? Her contact at Red Rose? The only
friends she had had were also Joe’s friends; she had lost them when she lost
Joe. And while times had been good, she had not felt the need for anyone
outside him. Damn. A sudden rage at herself overpowered Alice. Why couldn’t she
let it go? Part of it was seeing that gravestone, the inexplicable sense of
envy
for the dead girl whose lover would not forget.

She considered ringing
up her mother in Leeds, the only person outside her work from whom she ever
received phone calls, then she shrugged and sat down again. No. It would be
nice to hear her mother’s voice, but ringing her would simply open the doorway
to all the usual reproaches and criticisms and enquiries:

‘When are you going to
come and visit us?’ ‘Have you got a job yet?’ (As if what Alice was doing for a
living were some kind of a hobby in preparation for ‘real work’.) ‘Are you sure
you’re looking after yourself?’

Poor Mother, thought
Alice, Mother who had grown harder and sharper with the years after the cancer
finally got Dad, Mother whose sweetness had become buried under all the extra
flesh she had put on since turning fifty, and who always spoke in the same
careful code, never quite saying what she meant, perhaps never quite finding the
words.

She had been bright
once: black-and-white photographs showed a dark, narrow-waisted girl with a
lovely smile, arm-in-arm with the handsome young man Dad had been before he
lost his hair so early. She had been romantic enough to call her little girl
Alice after Alice in Wonderland. ‘Because,’ she said, ‘you had just the same
kind of wide astonished eyes.’ But now she was a disappointed fat woman,
coarsened and faded not by grief but by the constant erosion of joyless days
passing; and the worst of it was that, some day, Alice was terribly afraid that
she might look into the mirror and see her mother’s face staring out at her.

Alice sighed and looked
at the clock. Half past ten. She supposed she ought to go to bed soon, but didn’t
feel tired. She reached across to the bookshelf, chose a paperback at random,
hoping to put herself to sleep by reading a few pages. There might be some
leftover chocolate ice-cream in the ice-box, she thought; she couldn’t
remember. She went to the fridge to check, thinking vaguely that she was eating
too much nowadays and that she ought to try and cut down. She suppressed the
image of her mother, sitting in the lounge in their old house soon after Dad
died, eating packets of prawn cocktail crisps with a blank-eyed, ferocious
energy.

Bottles clinked inside
the fridge door, and the four cats materialized, seemingly from nowhere, to
investigate the promise of milk. Alice felt the warm, wriggling bodies around
her legs and felt herself relax a little.

Rogue memories of Joe.
Joe in the upstairs bedroom practising endless riffs on his guitar, frightening
the cats. Joe frowning over a pile of manuscript paper and an overflowing
ashtray. Joe at the head of a peace demonstration carrying a big banner with ‘Bum
the Bomb’. Joe arguing with a policeman, Alice tugging at his arm. Joe rolling
a joint one-handed, Joe frowning over one of Alice’s paintings, saying: ‘The
lines are too weak. It doesn’t stand out at a distance.’

Alice: ‘It’s perfectly
all right, you Philistine. It’s supposed to look ethereal, like a Rackham.’

Alice sneaking back to
her studio later that night to change the picture and sharpen the lines.

Joe playing in his first
band, blind drunk, but never a wrong note.

The binges; making love
on an unmade bed with dozens of wine bottles and chocolate wrappers and pizza
boxes piled up on the floor. The quarrels, screaming at each other in Joe’s
music-room as Alice found success and Joe didn’t. His jealousy, his sudden
flashes of bitterness at everything: the band which never managed to get a
contract, never having enough money, never having been given a chance. As they
grew older, watching the students come and go, knowing that the whole world
belonged to
them,
and finally having to accept that he was ten years
older and that a new generation had sprung up beneath him. Youngsters who were
strong and smart and who knew exactly where they were going. People who wore
the right clothes. Who went to see the right bands. And with that realization
came a kind of helplessness and a kind of anger, against the kids, the
government, all the bloodsuckers who were killing him by degrees.

Alice smiled,
remembering. If only he had known how to stay friends. If only he hadn’t been
so afraid.

Still, her choice was
made now. The regrets were few. She checked the ice-box. The chocolate
ice-cream was there after all. That would help a lot, she thought.

Suddenly, the phone
rang, and Alice knew that it was Joe.

‘Alice?’ his voice was
breathless, so that she had difficulty placing it. Then the memory locked into
place with a jolt, like changing gears on an old bicycle.

‘Joe! How are you?’ She
fought for control; seeing him, then thinking about him, and now hearing his
voice on the phone gave her a strange sensation, something like dizziness, as
if a long-stopped wheel had begun to turn.

‘I’m fine.’ His voice
was slightly unsteady, as it sometimes was when he was particularly excited or
angry; Alice, straining over the poor line, could not tell which.

‘Still playing the
blues?’ she asked, stalling for time and automatically slipping into the old
pattern of their conversations, that light, brittle humour which masked so much
intensity.

‘That’s me, the mean
guitar machine.’

A pause.

‘What about you, Al? I
saw your book. It was pretty good. Kids’ stuff, but still … I always knew you’d
make it, you know. And I saw your exhibition. You’ll be at the RA next time I
look.’ He gave a little laugh which tugged at her heart. ‘I see you still have
that trouble with outlines, though.’

‘Flattery gets you
anywhere, Joe.’

‘Me, I’ve got a new
band. We call ourselves Fiddle the Dole. We’ve been going for near to a year,
now. Electric folk, covers and original songs. We play the Wheatsheaf every
Saturday. You should come to listen to us some day. We’re good.’ A pause. ‘So
how’re you doing?’

‘Fine, Joe. Yes, I’m—’

‘Jess told me about— Are
you OK—’

‘You talked to my
mother?’ said Alice. ‘When?’

‘Hey, relax. I met her
by accident. We were playing the university in Leeds. She said you’d been ill.
She was just trying to find out how you were.

‘I wasn’t ill,’ said
Alice flatly. ‘I just went out of circulation for a while.’

‘Well, I’m back here to
stay now,’ went on Joe. ‘I’ve got a flat on Maid’s Causeway, I told the
landlady I was a grad student and she believed me. She’s deaf as a post, and
lets the band practise in her cellar. She says she likes Irish music because
she’s a lapsed Catholic. Just as long as she doesn’t listen to any of the
lyrics.’

Alice smiled in spite of
herself. ‘That bad, eh?’ she asked.

He made a non-committal
sound. ‘Could be better,’ he admitted. ‘Still, we manage all right on income
support, and once we start playing the colleges, you never know, we might begin
to get a core of discerning followers. You know, the kind that throw full cans
at you instead of empty ones.’

‘Joe …’ said Alice
carefully. ‘It’s late. Why are you phoning me now? It’s been over three years—’

‘Does there have to be a
reason?’ His voice was almost aggressive now. ‘You always did try to find
hidden meanings in everything. Why don’t you loosen up a bit? I felt like
catching up, that’s all. Maybe we could go for a walk, have a pizza, anything.
You might even want to see me play.’

The anger, if it had
been there at all, was gone from Joe’s voice now, and the idea suddenly seemed
not just possible, but attractive. A pause, during which Alice looked out of
the window at the magnolia nodding in the orange street-light. Then Joe went on
in a strange tight voice: ‘So how’re you doing these days, Al? You’ve not gone
and married the boy next door?’