The Sick Rose (34 page)

At the end of the ride she saw the shape of him, long legs, top-heavy with a rucksack, coming in and out of focus through the blizzard. He put his hand to his eyes as though dazzled by the sun and she waved at him. He broke into a run and her paranoia dispersed as quickly as it had formed. His embrace toppled her, his snowy clothes dampening her dry ones, snow crunching underneath their weight. When he pulled her up there was a single body-shaped impression in the snow, an ice-and-water version of the cop-show corpse outline.

‘You wouldn’t
believe
the journey I’ve had,’ he said eventually. ‘Let’s go home.’

She locked up the cabins and together they made their way to the caravan. Snow made a fairy-tale garden of their wasteland. A half moon threw eerie white light back in their faces. They had no need of a torch but it was hard to get their bearings in this new landscape. Instead of Louisa’s usual path through the thicket they took Paul’s way along the wall. Chattering branches dislodged clumps of snow into her hair, which froze into icicles, and the only noise was the scrunch of snow beneath their feet.

‘If this was a book, the monster would know exactly how to find us,’ he said.

She glanced back at the prints their boots had made. ‘They’ll be gone by the morning.’

Inside the caravan, their icy fingers and mouths found the warmest parts of each other. Afterwards, when they had swapped stories about their Christmases and she had silently noted the utter incompatibility of their families, he grew silent the way he sometimes did when he was working his way up to saying something important.

‘What would be the best news you could have?’ he said. It was an ominous question, despite his confident smile and playful tone. Did he still not understand that news of any kind was anathema to Louisa? ‘While I was stuck in Goring I did a bit of detective work.’

‘I asked you not to,’ she said. She drew the covers tighter.

‘Hear me out, it’s good.’ He was excited now, smug almost. ‘I’m just going to come right out and say it. Adam wasn’t killed by the car, he didn’t die.’

Louisa felt her history warp and reshape itself around her.

‘Did you hear me?’ His delight was turning to confusion. Her dry lips tried to form words but she felt stripped of her vocabulary.

‘But, but, but, but . . .’ she eventually managed, unsure whether she wanted to hear him out or clap her hand over his mouth.

‘I found this website that has all the newspapers going back years. And I did a bit of research. When Adam was hit by the car, he had a serious head injury and he went into a coma. He was in it for months, and when he recovered, he was brain-damaged. Not, like, a vegetable or anything, just a bad memory and stuff.’

‘But that man, the one who came out of his house . . . he said Adam was dead. I heard him. He took Adam’s pulse and he said, “He’s dead.” ’

‘Well, he was wrong,’ shrugged Paul, as though this were an insignificant detail. ‘He wasn’t a doctor, was he? He was just some bloke. Louisa, Adam didn’t die in that accident. You didn’t kill him. Do you even get what I’m saying? I thought you’d be
happy
.’

‘I am,’ she lied.

‘You don’t seem it. Bloody hell, if I thought I was a murderer and then someone said I wasn’t it’d be the best news I could have. Don’t you get what this means, Louisa? You’re free, not just physically but properly . . .’ He looked around the caravan as though he was searching for the right word on the spines of her books. ‘. . .
spiritually
free.’ His previous guise of age fell away and he was a child again, wanting instant admiration and petulant when it didn’t come. ‘I went to a lot of trouble for you. Don’t you want to know the details?’

Details were the last thing she wanted; the big picture was painful and confusing enough. ‘If he’s alive, where is he now?’ she managed.

‘I didn’t say he was still alive, I said you didn’t kill him.’ The new possibilities bounced off the edges of her mind like pinballs.

‘Paul, don’t play games.’

‘I traced him up to about ten years ago. He was alive then. And then I tried to trace him further but he’s just vanished off the face of the earth. He’s a registered missing person. That’s the next thing we need to find out but I thought we could do that together. I thought you’d be happy,’ he repeated sullenly. ‘I wish I hadn’t bothered now.’

‘I don’t know what I want, I don’t know what I think,’ she whispered.

‘How can you not . . . ? What’s to think about? Let me know when you decide, will you?’ said Paul, and rolled over in a sulk. She wanted him out of her home so much that she was tempted to tug her end of the blanket and roll him naked into the snow. In an act of unwitting complicity, he was asleep within minutes. Then she was torn between waking him up and shaking the details out of him and letting him sleep so that she could try to come to terms with what she had heard.

He thought that he had released her from her prison of guilt; how little he had understood her after all. She could still feel Adam’s chest against her palms and the force of the temper that had pushed him away from her. In that split second she had wanted him dead as much as any weapon-wielding hitman. And that, she knew, was what counted. That was what Paul didn’t
get
. She wished she had thrown his facile, stupid, ‘spiritually free’ back in his face to drive home that she would always be a killer even if Adam lived to be a hundred and died a peaceful natural death. In all the ways that counted she would always have killed him. The thought was as evil as the deed, wasn’t that what the Bible said? Adam would have known.

An idea rinsed around her head; it wasn’t a nice idea, she could tell by the way it rushed away whenever she tried to pounce on it. It finally crystallised just as she was about to drop off, and shook her awake. In bringing Adam back to life, Paul had unwittingly killed hope. If Adam survived, she thought, then why didn’t he come back for me? In vengeance or love, why didn’t he find me?

Chapter 45

July 1989

Her world dwindled to the footprint of her home. She left her room only to eat and shower, and some days she did neither. She kept the curtains open all night, taking in the view, such as it was, while she could. Elvira had given up on her. Angie and Ben made good on their promise to stay away. News of Adam’s death must have reached them by now, but they had not passed it on to her. Perhaps the police, when they found him, had not gone to his current home but straight back to his mother, the next of kin. If they knew, she wondered if they had been to his funeral, and if he had been buried with his father. She was able to hold this projected narrative in her head quite separately from the events leading up to it and wondered how long the respite of numbness would last.

Over time, it became apparent that they were not going to come for her and the reality of what she had done receded. Gradually, her focus switched from how she was going to get through the next hours to how she was going to live out the next fifty years. She felt that her story had ended with Adam’s death. Now there were only endpages to fill.

She never made it to the hairdresser’s. She let the holes in her right ear close over. The idea of putting make-up on seemed completely alien to her. The clothes she had not given to the charity shop she shredded with scissors, making rags of lace and leather. That was the point at which Miranda finally told their parents the extent of her concern for her sister. They immediately diagnosed depression; after all, there was no external explanation for this sudden shift in their daughter’s looks, energy and character. Had they known Adam, they might have understood the depth of the change; as it was, only she knew about the profound and terrible metamorphosis that had taken place in a part of her the mirror could never reflect. They wanted her to have lunch – at home, no pressure – with a family friend she had always known as Uncle Mervyn, although it was clear that he was being summoned in his capacity as a clinical psychologist and there was nothing avuncular about their proposed get-together. Nick had mentioned that exercise might help to lift her depression and Leah had gone one further and said not to rule out medication, that new treatments were sophisticated and that they would see to it that she had only the best. ‘Just a sticking plaster, something to buy you some mental space while you heal,’ she said. The thought of taking any kind of drug terrified Louisa. She wasn’t even drinking wine with dinner any more. She was aware of a tiny compulsion to tell the truth, minute but constant and always moving, like a mutant cell in her bloodstream. What if these antidepressants magnified it?

‘I’m not depressed,’ she said.

Still, she found her brave face somewhere in the attic of her spirit and began to wear it whenever she had company. She agreed to take an hour’s fresh air every day. The only place she could breathe was in the Roof Gardens; it had been her sanctuary before she had met Adam and her relationship with the place was solid enough to still offer a corner of the comfort it had once given her. She went there most days with the herbology books she no longer had any real interest in, and was aware only of their weight in her lap. One morning, so early that the gardeners were still clearing up from a party the night before, she found herself stopping one of the flamingos from eating a cigarette butt that had fallen down the crack between two stones in the Spanish garden. She handed it to the gardener who was dredging more of the same from the pond.

‘To think I trained for three years just to pick yuppies’ fag-ends out of a pond,’ he said. Something about his off-the-cuff remark resonated with Louisa. She had never thought of gardening as the kind of thing you trained for; rather, that they were all auto-didact hobbyists who kept learning until some kind of mysterious tipping point was reached and they felt able to charge for their services.

‘Where did you train?’ she asked. He gave the name of a small private horticultural college in Hertfordshire.

‘Best thing I ever did. It felt like someone was showing me a parallel universe.’

That’s just what I need, thought Louisa. Later that day, she called Directory Enquiries to find out the number of the college. Because they were a private college, their only stipulations were that she could pay the fees upfront and that she was enthusiastic. Over the phone, she promised that she could deliver on both counts. She was confident of the former, knowing that her parents would support her; and as for the latter, if by enthusiasm they meant was it the only thing she could think of that didn’t make her recoil in fear then yes, she supposed she could bring enthusiasm to the course. The forms were faxed to Nick’s machine, a cheque was written and posted, and by the middle of the next day she had a confirmed place. As well as meeting the fees, Leah and Nick also paid a year’s lease on a little cottage a mile away from the college.

Her remaining clothes barely filled one case: at the bottom of her wardrobe she found the crumpled ball of her blue velvet dress. She held it in her hands for a moment or two before stuffing it in with the shirts and jeans. She packed her essential oils in an old wooden sewing case and arranged for her books to be sent on. She packed her scrapbook, tucking the Roof Gardens photograph of her and Adam into the flyleaf. She took the Glasslake cassettes and the video that she had cobbled together from the live tapes (those she threw into a rubbish bin on the Cromwell Road). She knew she should have thrown everything away – after all, they connected her to a dead man and she could not believe that she would ever watch or listen to them again – but leaving them behind would have felt like killing him all over again.

The first time she performed her ritual was on the anniversary of his death. The summer solstice was rushing up towards her like a runaway train and she was tied to the tracks. On the 20th of June she got as far as the steps of her local police station but never made it to the door. There was a pub directly opposite. It has been a year now, she thought, surely it is safe to drink. After the first glass of wine, she decided it would be safe to see his picture again, and bought a bottle to take home. The next thing she knew she was wearing her old clothes and weeping her apologies to his moving image. Afterwards, she didn’t leave the cottage for a week.

She fell into heritage gardening by accident, the first internship she was offered being at a National
Trust property in Sussex where they were restoring their Elizabethan maze. She liked the idea of recreating gardens that had fallen into neglect. It chimed with her unmeetable need to undo the damage in her own past. She earned a reputation for bringing long-lost landscapes back to life, for being able to coax rare, endangered, unfashionable plants into leaf from a handful of hard-sourced seeds. She was astonished to find there was always work for her; she never quite lost her Londoner’s amazement at the number of private estates in the English countryside. No job ever took her more than three years. Friendships threatened to establish themselves, but she never kept in close touch with people after she had left a project. Like harvests or frosts, she had good years and bad years. In the annual cycle of growth and death she found something approaching peace. In her achievements her family arrived at something approaching pride. She did not return to London until Miranda and Dev moved into their big house in Wimbledon, and it was there she spent most of her holidays. She would tend and till, read and research, plant and sow for as long as she lived, knowing all the while that she would not find ultimate peace until her own body was returned to the earth.