The Sunlight on the Garden (7 page)

The morgue was little more than a squat concrete shed, stinking of formaldehyde and lined on one side with what looked like outsize, rusty refrigerators and on the other, mysteriously, with a row of upright chairs set out as though for spectators yet to arrive. Joy had been horrendously battered and bruised by the waves that had hurled her against the rocks. Her body was swollen and livid with a rainbow of colours – green, yellow, red, purple. Having made the identification, he had rushed outside into the searing sunlight, there to vomit beside a gaunt, straggly bush, a hand clutching its stem while two barefoot urchins in ragged clothes, a boy and a girl, watched him with dispassionate curiosity. The violence of his retching brought tears to his eyes.

In a corner of the attic there was a dilapidated chaise-longue. It had belonged to Joy's mother. Although it was in such bad condition, Joy had insisted that they keep it after her mother's death – ‘It has memories', she had said. What those memories were she had never specified and he had never asked. He had always felt vaguely uncomfortable with Joy's mother. He now felt uncomfortable even with her memory. He went over to the chaise-longue, sank down on it, and covered his eyes with his hands. But the images persisted.

‘Excuse me – is that your lady? Yes?' The Moroccan official with the dull, sleepy eyes, the lethargic gait and slurred intonation that had made Luke briefly wonder if he were drunk, had put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Yes?' the man had repeated.

Luke had wanted to say: ‘No, it's not my lady.' How could that swollen, lacerated mass of multi-coloured flesh be the woman to whom he had made love only the night before? But he had eventually nodded. ‘Yes,' he had whispered. Then, having cleared his throat, more loudly: ‘ Yes.'

Now he saw the image that, of all the many images, had shocked him the most. It was a close-up. In black and white. Teeth smashed, nose flattened. She had had such beautiful teeth, large, regular. They had given her ready smile its extraordinary radiance. Resting his head against the tattered, dusty grey velvet of the chaise-longue, he pressed his fingers against his eyeballs as though to squeeze out the ghastly ghostly image lodged behind them.

He heard the official ask: ‘Excuse me, sir. Your wife – did she go out alone?'

‘Yes, yes. There was something wrong with my camera – one of my cameras. I was trying to repair it. She said that she wanted to go for a walk.'

‘Perhaps she climbed up some rocks and fell into the sea.'

‘Perhaps. It would have been dark.'

‘It was foolish to go for a walk in the dark. A lady. Alone. That is not a good place in the dark.'

The questioning had continued, with other officials, some more sympathetic, some less so and some blatantly hostile, asking their questions. Why, why, why? He did not know why. They had not even had a quarrel before she went out. She had kissed him on the cheek and then on the forehead, bending over him. He had had the camera in his hands. The kissing had distracted him – and, yes, faintly irritated him. He must get the winding mechanism of that old Leica to work properly. Otherwise his holiday would be ruined. It was his favourite camera. If he could not fix it, then it was unlikely that he would find anyone in this little town who could do so.

With a tardiness that now, back in England, amazed him, it had taken him a long time to realise that all these seemingly random questions were directed to one monstrous end. Had he himself killed her? When they finally gave up, he knew that they had done so not because he had convinced them that he was innocent but because they could not prove that he was guilty.

Again, fingertips pressed against his eyes, he tried to stop the flicker of horrific image on image.
Think of something else
. All at once he thought of Lydia's postcard. He had looked at it for only a few seconds before tearing it into fragments, but miraculously he could remember every detail. That was how death should be: serene, resigned, even welcoming, with the waters showing no violence to the body consigned to them but only a tender acceptance. Yes, that was how it should be. Easeful death should be easeful. He opened his eyes and stared up through the skylight at the clear, pale-blue sky. For the first time since his visit to the morgue, he felt miraculously assuaged. He thought of his convulsive vomiting outside the morgue. It was as though a similar bout of vomiting had now at last relieved his body of all the poisons that had caused him so much agony and malaise over the past five weeks.

He sought out Millais on the internet, and was amazed that there should be so much about someone of whom he – an educated man, he liked to think – knew absolutely nothing. He even summoned up the image of the picture on his screen. Repeatedly he ran forefinger and middle finger over it, caressing now the pale face, now the pale hands, and now the body encased, as though after an embalment, in all that rich fabric. The screen felt hard to the touch. It felt cold when, in a moment of crazy abandon, he put his lips to the face at its centre.

He went to the Tate, not visited since the days when he and Lydia, both students, would go there on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon if, for one reason or another, they could not play the tennis that at that time was their chief recreation. The long, high-ceilinged room was empty except for the black male attendant at the far end of it and an elderly American woman, with coarse grey hair and a pronounced stoop, talking to him in a loud voice not about the pictures but about her problems with London Transport. Motionless, he stared fixedly at the white oval of the face, with the eyes open in what might have been a trance, not death. Again, as on that day when Lydia's postcard had arrived, the image had an extraordinarily consoling and assuaging effect on him. He would like to have touched it, as he had touched and then kissed the face on the computer screen. ‘ Yes,' he whispered. Then more loudly: ‘Yes, yes!'

The attendant and the woman halted in their conversation and, heads turned, peered down the long gallery at him. Then the woman shrugged, pulled a little face at the attendant and resumed what she had been saying.

From a book purchased on the internet from a second-hand dealer in Boston, he learned that Millais had painted the background of the picture by the Hogsmill River, near a place called Ewell. What had then been a remote village had now become a grindingly busy suburb of London. In search of the right setting for what many believed to be his masterpiece, Millais had taken up residence in the village with another painter, Holman Hunt, who, like Millais himself, had never been more than a name to Luke. Many years later Hunt had recorded how Millais for a whole day had ‘walked along beaten lanes and jumped over ditches and ruts without finding a place that would satisfy him'. Then he had come on exactly what he wanted: overarching trees, scarcely stirring waters, a richness of grass, reeds and flowers. He had cried out to his companion: ‘Look! Could anything be more perfect?' Hunt remarked, as many were to do, on Millais's luck in coming on the place on his first day of searching. Throughout his life Millais was generally acknowledged to be a spoiled favourite of luck.

Having learned all this, Luke was overcome by an obsessive longing to find the place. He planned to go on the very next Saturday, but then was obliged, because of the illness of a colleague, to agree at the last moment to show a Hampstead house, several months now on the market, to a prospective buyer from France. He was conscientious about his work. He knew that a partnership in the long established firm of estate agents was almost in his grasp. He must not jeopardise that.

He thought of the Sunday but Carrie was due to spend it with him, as she did once every four weeks. Couldn't he put her off? No. He was conscientious not merely about his work but also about his erratic and often clumsy relationship with this nine-year-old girl who could never forgive him for, as she saw it, abandoning not merely her mother but also herself. So it had to be the following Saturday.

Of course he took his two favourite cameras, the ancient Leica and the new digital Canon, a scientific miracle. In his biography, Millais's son had quoted from a letter written by his father to a woman friend. In it, the painter described how, day after day, he had sat in extreme discomfort under an umbrella, ‘being blown by the wind into the water', and so gradually becoming ‘intimate with the feelings of Ophelia when that lady sank to muddy death.' But as Luke stepped off the train at Ewell – a totally unremarkable place, he thought – there was not a breath of wind and the sun was hot and dazzling. He felt a surge of excitement flood through his body, making his cheeks flush and his finger-tips tingle. He might have been on his way to some long awaited, desperately wanted assignation.

He knew by now that a young and beautiful woman had lain for hours on end in an enamel bath tub filled with water inadequately warmed by a lamp placed beneath it, to model for Ophelia. She had caught pleurisy and it was thought that that might well have precipitated the pulmonary tuberculosis from which she had suffered for the rest of her cruelly short life. Nonetheless, Luke all but expected to come not merely on the reach of water that had provided Millais with his setting but also on Ophelia herself, her eyes wide open, her lips slightly parted, and one of those white, raised hands grasping a water-lily.

He repeatedly paused as he followed the winding course of what often became little more than a stream. Could this be the place? This? This? Each time he decided: No. One curve seemed exactly right. But in the distance some youths, most them stripped to their waists, were playing football, shouting to each other in a language that Luke could not understand or even identify. Their strident voices and the thud, thud, thud of the ball robbed the location of any intimacy or peace. It was the same at a stretch where the foliage was particularly green and luxuriant and the trees arched over the water exactly as in the picture. But on the opposite bank two people, a girl and a boy, were lying out on the lush grass with a transistor radio blaring out. A male voice seemed to be bawling ‘Wow, wow, wow!' endlessly over and over again. Luke hated that sort of music. As students and later in the first years of their marriage, he and Lydia had stood stoically evening after evening at Promenade concerts throughout a whole scorching summer. At each ‘ Wow!' something huge and cumbersome jarred within him, making him feel vaguely giddy and nauseous.

Then at long last, sweat darkening his pale blue shirt under the armpits and glistening on his forehead, he suddenly reached a place, shadowed by overarching trees and the grass almost waist-high, that made him at once say to himself, with a mingling of relief and triumph, ‘Yes, yes, this is it!' He had searched in vain in books and on the internet for the exact location at which Millais had sat on his stool before his easel. But he had absolutely no doubt that this was where it was.

Here the often narrow river was unusually wide as it curved in its negotiation of a dumpy hillock surmounted by three elder trees. The contrast between the emaciated near-nudity of those trees and the green luxuriance of the willows on the opposite bank was startling. Perhaps it was on that hillock that Millais had set up stool, easel and umbrella as the rain fell relentlessly and he no less relentlessly worked at his masterpiece. In the otherwise symmetrical curve there was another, far smaller curve, where a tributary stream – yes, the brook, the brook, he thought, of Gertrude's valedictory description – joined the river. Millais must have at once decided that that location was exactly right. That was what people had meant when they talked of his luck.

Hands on hips Luke stared from the coign of the hillock, with its dry, yellow grass and skeletal trees, across at the luxuriant arbour opposite. Then he glanced to right and left, on the other side of the bank. Far off to the right a tall, middle-aged man in a dark suit – how hot he must feel and how ridiculous to dress like that on a day like this! – was meandering along the tow path, a camera slung round his neck. A fellow photographer, perhaps even a rival. Nearer, to the left, a woman sprawled out in a deck-chair, a red bug of a car parked behind her in the shade. Two small girls, dressed only in what at this distance looked liked white knickers, were playing in the shallows. From time to time the wind carried their excited voices and laughter over to him. But the sounds did not disturb him in the least, as first the sounds of the thudding football and the foreign male voices and then of the blaring transistor radio had done.

He lowered his rucksack and took out the Leica. Bought second hand, it dated from a period when he had still not been born. By contemporary standards it was primitive. But it was the camera that he treasured the most. The difference between using it and the Canon was the difference between driving an ancient Rolls Royce with a manual gearshift and a new Honda with automatic transmission, he had often thought. In the first case, troublesome though it was, one had so much more control over precisely what one was doing.

But on this occasion he felt dissatisfied with the Leica. As he first calculated distance and then, holding out the meter, aperture and shutter speed, he realised that that leafy, flowery bower of the painting was too far away. He needed the Canon and its powerful telephoto lens. He sighed, replaced the one camera, took up the other. Then, as he gazed at the screen of the Canon, he all at once had the demented illusion that something at once devastating and exhilarating had happened. There, in the centre, a figure lay out for him on the quiet water, hands and face pale, eyes open as if in a trance, robes heavy around her and yet never dragging her down into the chilly depths and so out of sight. But the figure was not that of the beautiful, doomed woman who had lain for hours on end in lukewarm water in a bathtub. Instead, it was that of another beautiful, doomed woman, his wife, his Joy. He gasped. Then frenetically he began clicking. As he did so the figure slowly bled out of the image on the screen, until the arbour was once again no more than a stretch of water overhung by willows and surrounded by reeds and flowers. That he had suffered such an obvious hallucination alarmed him. It showed the depth and distraction of his grief.