The Gardens of the Dead (34 page)

16

Nancy stood in the yard by
the pile of bricks that she’d been collecting for the herb garden.

‘You
could have gone places.’

Mr
Lawton had said that because Nancy saw the connections between things. It was
insulting, she’d thought, because he was implying she’d wasted her life, when
all she’d done was work for him and marry Graham Riley.

‘We’ve
had a meeting.’

Babycham
had been fiery and protective and a friend — her oldest friend, in fact. There’d
been a meeting of the clerical staff and everyone was ready to support her. ‘Run
for it, girl,’ she’d said.

‘I once
had a son.’

Mr
Johnson had steamed like a tea bag on the draining board and Nancy had listened
with a hand over her mouth. She’d been desperate to know what had happened, but
her friend in the goggles had never been able to put words on it.

‘Our
son was killed by a bad man.’

Emily
Bradshaw had said that to Nancy not knowing who she was; just as Nancy had
spoken to George Bradshaw not knowing who he was. She’d listened to neither of
them. She’d run out of Aspen Bank chased by the sound of tapping on the window.

‘Maybe
your constancy will save him. But what about you?’

That
kind man had refused to give up. He’d circled the house, knowing she was
inside. He’d come with a cake from Greggs. He’d left his phone number.

They’d
all come — even Mr Wyecliffe, with his quip about tossed coins and their tails
— but Nancy hadn’t seen any of the connections. No, it was worse than that, far
worse. She
had
seen them. And she’d turned away in the name of trust.

‘My life rests on a heap of
lies,’ said Nancy She felt no emotion whatsoever, though she was crying all the
same. Her soul was like an arm gone dead, as when you wake up at night and find
this heavy thing, limp by your side. All you can do is wait for the tingling to
come and bring it back to life.

Nancy
knelt down and started counting the bricks, to see how many more were needed.

17

Nick paused at the bottom
of the slope. It was almost dark and extremely cold. In the distance he could
see the Thames like a black vein. Above it and beyond glowed the lights of
south London. To the west stood the motor works, immense and silent. Directly
before him, like pools of oil, were the Four Lodges. On the other side, stamped
against the skyline, sat Riley He was utterly still; his breath appeared as a
coarse mist.

Skirting
the water’s edge, Nick suffered a primal desire to run away He subdued it,
because the hunched figure had scared his father and possessed his mother. He
stopped by the end of a pool, well back from Riley but close enough to hear his
words.

A low
voice came out of a small fog. ‘Didn’t your mother tell you about me?’

‘No.’

Riley’s
elbows were on his thighs. His face and body were completely blacked out. ‘Who
gave you the photograph?’

Nick
angled his head, trying to see into the dark shape ahead of him, the moving
arms. The questions seemed planned, as if they were a test.

‘I don’t
know what you’re talking about.’

‘Did
you post it?’

‘No.’

After a
few moments Nick heard something fall to the ground near Riley’s feet with a
thump. A long exhalation of mist came from the lowered head. The voice became
curious and quieter. ‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-seven.’

‘What
do you do for a living?’

‘I’m a
doctor.’

A
doctor
…’ It was as though he’d never met one, but had heard of them from magazines
and television programmes. ‘What’s your father called?’

‘Charles.’

‘What
does he do?’

A
banker.’

A
banker
…’ They were another species from the same glossy pages, off the same
screen. Riley stood up and purposefully crossed the five yards between them. As
he passed Nick he slowed, saying, ‘Forget about the Pieman.’

Nick
turned on his heel, watching the stooped figure tread quickly along the lodge
bank, towards the path. ‘Where are you going?’ he called stupidly.

‘Brighton.’

Nick
stumbled after him, unable to see where he was going, aware only of a sheet of
glinting black water to his left. He grabbed Riley’s shoulder, sensing the
sheer physical difference between them. Nick was a big man, towering over a
bantam. ‘Tell me what I came here to find out.’

‘No.’
Riley pulled free with a swing of his elbow.

‘Who
was he?’

‘Go
home … just go home; go back to your patients.’ Riley began to trot, heading
up the slope, towards the night sky.

Nick
gave up. He cast an eye around Riley’s chosen meeting place: at the cold
marshes, the scattering of small lights, and, upstream, the brooding hulks. A
spasm of rage made him rebel against this embodiment of his mother’s conscience
— at the thought that she felt responsible for Riley’s twisted actions.

‘Before
you came along, she was happy’ he bellowed. ‘You shattered what was left of her
life.’ His voice bounced off the motor works, falling quiet as if the air had
soaked it up.

Riley
seemed to strike a wall. Slowly he turned around, and came back along the brick
ledge beside the water. When he was close, he halted, treading the ground, his
head bent and angled. Gusts of fog escaped his mouth as if he’d just run a
race.

‘Let me
tell you something you don’t know’ He seemed to be struggling, as if a shred of
pork were jammed between two teeth. A faint light touched his face, and Nick
finally glimpsed his features, judging the man to be not just ill, but
profoundly sick. ‘Before she met your father,’ said Riley as if he were forcing
out the words, ‘before she got her chance, she was on the street. I might have
kept the money … but she earned it.’ Riley looked up with pity, a far-off
emotion gathering like water on limestone. Quietly almost gently he said, ‘She
was no better than me.’

Riley
stepped back and groaned.

All at
once a bright light struck Nick’s face. Terrified, he raised his hands …
Slowly he let his arms drop. Stunned, feeling light-headed and sick, Nick
glared back at the unseen presence behind the torch. Riley must have been
observing him intently because he didn’t cut the beam, and, for a very long
time, he didn’t move. Then, after a snap, it was dark again.

The
last that Nick saw of Riley was of a sunken head, and limp arms against the sky
on the brow of a slope.

18

‘When the university term
was about to begin,’ said Sister Dorothy ‘I drove Elizabeth to Durham. We
strolled down a cobbled lane near the cathedral and she stepped into a charity
shop and bought a picture. I thought it was the frame, but I was wrong.

As in
many religious houses, the living room seemed to have been furnished
exclusively from the type of place where Elizabeth had bought her picture. A
mismatch of chairs were grouped around a fifties glass-top table. At its
centre, having a status somewhere between that of a relic and an ornament (said
Sister Dorothy), was an ashtray that had once been used by a pope. The carpet
was hard, without a pile, creating the durable look of a car showroom.

‘We
found a bench on Palace Green,’ said Sister Dorothy pushing stray silver hair
beneath her pakol. ‘There was a market with people milling all around, but
Elizabeth didn’t seem to notice. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the three
people in the picture. Rather sadly she began to imagine who they were, and
what their stories might have been. I joined in. Elizabeth came up with the mad
inventor dreaming of a smoke detector, and I added the wife, with her one joke
about a fire extinguisher. We both laughed … among all these real people,
with real lives.’ She sipped a glass of milk, resting it on her lap and the
tartan blanket around her legs. ‘And what of the little madam in the middle? I
said. Elizabeth touched the girl’s hair … as if she might reach through the
glass to the ribbons … and she said, “She’s got the whole of her life ahead
of her.” Even then, I didn’t see what she was planning. It was only when we
reached the gates of her college that she told me her decision … that we could
never meet again.’ Sister Dorothy sighed. ‘She wanted a fresh start. The story
we’d made up would become hers, because she could live with its tragedy She
would take the girl’s life and make something
wonderful
of it … Those
were Elizabeth’s words … something wonderful.’

With
permission, Anselm rolled himself a cigarette. Licking the paper, he said, ‘And
what of the girl whose tragedy was too painful to bear?’

Sister
Dorothy nodded knowingly She recognised the unlimited scope of the question,
Father Anselm’s plea to be told everything.

‘I met
her shortly after I came to Camberwell.’ She paused while Anselm’s match
flared. ‘In those days this place was a hostel for girls, an open door with no
questions asked. But it was one step removed from the street, and I wanted to
reach the kids who would never look in our direction, who might not know we
were here. I wanted to change the world with …
acts of mercy’
—she
sang the phrase with a raised fist — ‘so we tried something different. I’d jump
in a taxi — driven by Mr Entwistle, a friend of the community — and he’d drop
me off at Euston, so I could keep my eye out when the trains pulled in … You
see, there were lots of kids coming down to London from up north, to the
pavements of gold, to a better life … and we hoped to get them off the street
as fast as possible.’ She dropped her little fist and sipped her milk. ‘So, Mr
Entwistle would come back after half am hour and take me to King’s Cross, and
then Liverpool Street, and so it would go on, to all the mainline stations. I’d
mooch around, plucking up the courage to approach anyone I thought might have
nowhere to go. I confess in those days, we had our eye out mostly for girls.
And yet … Elizabeth’s story begins with a boy I met at Paddington.’ She
glanced sideways and said confidentially ‘Would you roll me one?’

‘Of
course.’ While Anselm made the cigarette, Sister Dorothy finished her milk.
Then she lit up with the panache of Lauren Bacall.

‘I saw
this boy in a man’s trousers stealing fruit from a barrow,’ said Sister Dorothy
sternly ‘I called to him, and, strangely I suppose, he came. We got talking and
he explained that he’d just left a burnt-out bank round the corner, a squat run
by a lad, a hard lad. When Mr Entwistle turned up, I took the fruit thief to an
hotelier I knew who kept a bed free, and then I went back to Paddington, to a
lane that ran by the tracks.’ With determination, but control, she slowly blew
out the smoke. ‘I stood beneath a street lamp watching these garden statues at
intervals along the pavement. That’s what I thought at the time. They were like
ornaments that could no longer spout water in the grounds of … a terrible
place. One by one, they drifted down the road, but none of the cars that came
ever stopped. So I remained there, too scared to step forward and too angry to
move back. A lifetime later, Mr Entwistle took me home. I went to the police.
They told me that so long as I frightened off the business, the kids wouldn’t
work, and without any evidence, there was nothing they could do. It was a
terrible irony All the same, I put myself beneath that light every evening,
from eight until ten, and that was how I met her.’

Sister
Dorothy reached for the ashtray on the coffee table and placed it between them,
on the arm of Anselm’s chair. ‘That’s how I met Elizabeth’, she repeated. At
night, a fifteen-year-old with white legs, long black hair and no socks …
bare feet in black, boardroom shoes. She was the only one who came anywhere
near me — about as far away as that chair. Close enough to deter any business,
and far enough to catch my voice. Every night I came to that lamp, and every
night she hovered within talking distance. That’s how I learned her name. She
taught me to smoke. Can you picture it, the two of us, by the kerb, sharing a
cigarette? We talked of the weather —anything, except why she was there and
where she’d come from. When Mr Entwistle arrived, I’d open the door, and she’d
just look at me and shake her head. And then, one night, she came.’

Anselm
felt his mind crowding with images of Elizabeth, none of them remotely similar
to the description he’d just heard. He saw himself as a pupil in chambers,
sharing a box of Jaffa Cakes with the best silk in her field. She’d picked him
out, in a way and started their conversations …

‘She
was standing closer to me than usual,’ said Sister Dorothy leaning towards
Anselm. At her feet was a small red suitcase, like you’d take on a weekend
break. And over her shoulder I saw someone edging along the pavement. He was
neither boy nor man, a wiry thing with his hands in his pockets. At that
moment the taxi pulled up … Elizabeth turned around, as if she’d known all
along that this creeping thing was there. “I’ve paid you in full,” she said,
very deliberately “and now I owe you nothing.” I opened the door, and she
picked up her little suitcase and climbed in. That hollow, haunted thing on the
pavement was Riley When I came back the next night, the street was empty and
the squat had been abandoned.’