The Gardens of the Dead (5 page)

At Liverpool Street Nick
took the Underground to St John’s Wood, musing upon a chain of intuitions:
there was a link between the evolution of Elizabeth’s secret and her desire to
keep Nick close to home; at the same time, Nick’s father had been urging him to
visit Australia. Did he know of his wife’s subterfuge? Nick had little doubt:
he did not. His father was guileless. His unthinking candour had compromised
numerous commercial transactions spanning several continents — the last of
which had led to his enforced retirement. He could not be relied upon — least
of all with the truth. It made another question all the starker: how might
anything be so important to Elizabeth that she could not share it with the man
she trusted most?

Once
home he walked straight to the Butterfly Room determined to confirm his father’s
exclusion from the meaning of the key Charles looked up from an armchair as if
he’d seen a well-loved moth. He had an empty glass in his hand.

‘Where’ve
you been?’ His face was flushed and he was tipsy.

‘I just
went walkabout.’

‘Me
too.’

‘Whereabouts?’
Nick noticed the bow tie, a remnant from his father’s banking days. He’d worn a
bowler hat to work. His suits had been cut from heavy cloth that made him
perspire. But he’d looked the real shilling — as if he were hot with responsibility.

‘Regent’s
Park. And you?’

‘Sudbury.’

‘Where?’

‘Suffolk.’

‘Good
God.’

Nick
studied his father’s wounded face. The dear man knew nothing. What had he
thought about in Regent’s Park? It was easy to surmise: his wife’s evasiveness
and stealth, which, of late, he had noticed; the manner of her going; and
consolation from a police officer whom he did not know He was bewildered and
Nick could not help him — because he held the key It gave him knowledge, but of
a kind he couldn’t share.

Nick woke and listened to
the rubbish truck and the antics of the binmen. He swung his legs out of bed
and reached for his mobile. After considerable hesitation, he rang a monastery.

7

Blind George, as he was
known, woke up on a traffic island. He was lying on a bench. Marble Arch
towered huge and white behind a litter bin. A flag fluttered, its line slapping
against the pole. Above, the sky was misty blue. An aeroplane crossed in
silence, like an ant on lino. George sat up, with a groan, and opened his
notebook. A thumb with a cracked black nail smoothed back the pages. He read
out loud:

I am
going to Mile End Park to confront Riley.

Wait
beneath the fire escape in Trespass Place.

The explanation for Inspector Cartwright is in your left inside
jacket pocket.

There’s
fifty pounds in your right trouser pocket.

Elizabeth.

For
years George had kept a record of days gone. Nino, a former traffic warden, had
insisted upon the practice. It had been part of his instruction when teaching
George about life on the street. Since leaving the world of parking tickets,
Nino had moved around the libraries of London, still clutching a floppy pad. He
had his own chair in most of the reading rooms. One of them had his name on it
— stuck on with tape by the management. He had a habit that drove them to distraction,
and kept him on the move: in one place he’d put in a request for a book that
was held in another. So all these books were flying about London after Nino,
when all he had to do was keep still.

‘Don’t
think,’ he’d said. ‘Just write, starting at the beginning, and keep going. You’ll
only understand the story looking backwards. If you start thinking, you’ll
write the story you want, not the story you’ve got.’

‘Oh.’

‘The
street is the place of stories,’ he’d concluded gravely Black, tangled hair
covered his face and his skin was grey ‘Stories of harm and stories that heal.’

George
had obeyed, because traffic wardens have a peculiar authority. When one
notebook was full he’d start another. They were numbered on the cover. He had
thirty-eight of them. George’s whole life was laid out in order, all sixty-four
years, as best as he could remember them. Almost every day he’d sat on a park
bench or in a café, and he’d scribbled with haste, not pausing to choose his
words. Once he’d got something down, he was like an archaeologist with a
toothbrush: he gently brushed away the dirt; he’d change a word or phrase,
cleaning up what had been saved. It could take months to get it right.

George’s
earliest memory was of an outing in a pushchair. He was sitting behind an
improvised cover to keep out the rain. His mother had made it. There was a
polythene window sewn into a sort of waxed cotton tent that covered his upper
body His protruding legs were warm, covered by a blanket; but he couldn’t see
anything because of the condensation. He could hear only the rain and his
mother’s feet on the path. They were on their way to see Granddad, whose first
name he bore. David. He’d stopped using it a long time ago, out of shame. He’d
become George. That burst of anguish took up the first pages of book one, which
now lay with all the others in a plastic bag. All them had been filled with a
similar, honest desperation: to preserve both the good and the bad. That was
something else Nino had said:

‘Don’t
decide what to keep. It all counts. Sometimes it is the worst things that turn
out to have delivered what is best.’ He’d been solemn again. ‘It only appears
when you write it down.’

Filling
up these notebooks had a dramatic effect on George. It made him a compassionate
observer — not just of himself, but of everyone he’d known. But the scribbling
had also made him uneasy about the spoken word, because he’d gone through hell
choosing the right ones to keep on paper. Ultimately, the precision had
brought him close up to his more recent failures, but without the distortion of
self-pity. And then, clear-eyed and calm, he’d scrambled into a skip.

He’d
seen two black discs among the wood and bricks: a pair of welding goggles.
Instinctively he put them on and pretended to be blind. On the face of it he’d
gone mad. But it made sense to George. There were things in his life he could
not look upon, and he didn’t want anyone else to either. The street might be
the place of stories, but his was going to remain untold. Once the goggles were
in place, hardly anyone spoke to him any more. It was as though he wasn’t
there. They called him Blind George.

So at
first George wrote down his life in order to understand it; but the time came
when he did so to keep it together. Long after Elizabeth had found him, and
when their project to trap Riley was well underway George got his head kicked
in. His memory was sent flying over Waterloo Station like a cloud of pigeons.
The details, with Elizabeth’s help, were set down towards the end of book thirty-six.
That was after he’d woken to discover that a kind of lake had entered his mind:
on the far shore everything was clear, up to the week he’d fallen under those
swinging feet; but on this side, where he played out his life, events were like
globules of oil. If he didn’t confine them on paper, they could separate, drift
off and come back when they felt like it — heavily familiar but
incomprehensible. He could hold on to faces, geography and snippets of talk,
but he’d found himself in a world where everyone else knew all the missing
pieces. People would speak, expecting him to understand. And sometimes he did,
but often it was a lottery in which he could make no choices. But it was the
keeping of the notebooks that saved him and held everything together. Every
page helped to bridge the lake. He just carried on plotting the course of each
completed day.

Elizabeth had written a
great deal in books thirty-six to thirty-eight. She’d recorded everything they’d
said and done after his mind went loose. He’d watched her while drinking hot
chocolate or whisky. She’d always been careful. She’d treated words like
coins. And in her last entry she’d told him to wait.

After
Elizabeth had gone to Mile End Park in the morning, George had sat in his
sleeping bag beneath the fire escape at Trespass Place. He’d waited until
nightfall, counting the hours, his eyes on the arch at the end of the
courtyard. But she hadn’t come. Then, like a bubble popping at the surface of
his mind, he’d heard something she’d said more than once: ‘George, if anything
should happen to me, don’t worry. A monk will come.

A what?’
he’d said, the first time.

‘An old
friend. He’s forever puzzled, but he gets there in the end.’

George
had read his notebook again. She’d written ‘Wait … not ‘Wait for me.’

The
next morning, George looked to the arch, hoping to see a different shape,
perhaps someone fat with a white rope around his waist. He watched and waited,
through the day and through the night. But when another morning broke, George
rose and hurried through the streets. He crossed the river and crept like a
thief into Gray’s Inn Square.

George
stood outside Elizabeth’s chambers reading the list of gold names on a long
black panel. Men and women slipped past him, flushed and serious. He became
paralysed by the grandeur of it all. Then through the glass of a door he saw a
round man with an orange waistcoat. The eyebrows rode high above piercing,
kind eyes. He stepped outside.

‘I’m
Roddy Kemble, who are you?’

George
panicked. ‘Bradshaw, sir.’

Mr
Kemble thought for a moment. He didn’t move, but he looked like a man rooting
through a cardboard box, lifting this, lifting that. Abruptly he said, ‘May I
ask your first name?’

‘George.’

The man’s
arms fell by his side. He seemed to have found what he expected and didn’t
want. Quietly, he said, ‘Elizabeth is dead.’

George
adjusted his goggles. His mouth went dry and he nodded appreciatively.

‘In any
other circumstances,’ said Mr Kemble, ‘I’d offer you a cigarette. But I’ve
given up. Would you like a Polo?’

George
nodded again.

Mr
Kemble peeled back the silver paper. ‘Her heart gave out.’

For a
while they stood awkwardly crunching mints, then Mr Kemble said, ‘Have you seen
Elizabeth since the trial?’

‘Yes,
sir.’

‘Frequently?’

‘Yes,
sir.’

Mr
Kemble looked like a man whose house had just been burgled. He put a heavy hand
on his shoulder and said, ‘It’s time to forget everything, George. Move on, if
you can.

‘I
stopped going anywhere a long time ago, sir.’

George
backed away clumsily Mr Kemble raised an arm, as if he were giving a blessing
or launching a ship. If it weren’t for the orange waistcoat, George would have
thought he looked sad.

George
stumbled up High Holborn and then found his way to Oxford Street, bumping into
people and things, until he reached the roundabout and Marble Arch — where he’d
last seen Nino, months back, in the summer. They’d sat on a bench and his guide
had told him a strange story about right and wrong. George went to the same
bench, looking hungrily at the monument, wanting his friend to emerge from
beneath one of the portals, his blue and red scarf trailing in the wind. Sleep
crept upon him. He woke and saw the arch, the flag and the ant crawling across
the sky, and he reached for book thirty-eight.

George left the traffic
island and began the long walk to Trespass Place. He thought of Elizabeth,
whisky in hand. She’d foreseen her dying and had prepared for it. George had to
wait because a monk would come. Another of her phrases floated by; it filled
him with hope: ‘No matter what happens, Riley can’t escape.

George
made haste, and he beckoned Nino’s story about right and wrong, but it wouldn’t
come. All he could recall was the end, because Nino had spoken it with such
force. His gaze had been wide as if he were waiting for eye-drops. ‘Don’t be
lukewarm, old friend. That’s the only way to mercy or reward.’

When he’d
told Elizabeth, she’d scribbled it down on the back of an envelope.

Beneath
the fire escape George picked up a sharp stone. On the wall he scratched a few
neat lines, one for each of the days he’d been waiting. By extension it was
another lesson from Nino: to diligently keep an account of anything that might
easily slip away.

8

Perhaps Anselm’s
sensibilities had been over-roused, but he could have sworn that the woman at
BJM Securities viewed him with both fascination and terror.

‘You’ve
never come before,’ said Mrs Tippins, as if he’d let her down.

‘I’m
sorry, was I expected?’

‘No.’

Anselm
couldn’t imagine the foundation for reproof ‘Well, I’m here now.’

‘I can
see that, but you’re too late.’

Mrs
Tippins explained that the son of the deceased had taken possession of a small
red valise.