‘Golly gosh.’ Julia laughed. ‘Did you see that? Did you see that, Milly? Is that legal, Mr Brodie?’
‘Not really.’
‘Wouldn’t that be lovely,’ Julia said, ‘just to take off all your clothes and plunge into the water? The Neo-Pagans used to swim naked in Byron’s Pool. Couldn’t you just do that, Mr Brodie, strip off and dive in?’ Julia licked her top lip with her pink cat’s tongue and Amelia made an unattractive snorting sound. Jackson suddenly remembered Binky Rain saying that the Lands were ‘wild girls’. It was hard to believe Amelia had ever been wild, but Julia, definitely Julia. He thought he might quite like to swim naked with Julia.
‘What was he reading?’ Julia asked, and Amelia, who had given no sign of having even looked at the naked man, said, ‘Principia Mathematica,’ and glared at Jackson.
‘More tea, Mr Brodie?’ Julia asked, pouring the tea without waiting for an answer. ‘ “And is there honey still for tea?” Yes, there most certainly is and we shall have it on our scones. Milly, do you want honey on your scones?’
At least the tea in the Orchard Tea Rooms was decent, unlike Binky’s. Julia’s little finger had a scar, like a thin silver ring, that ran all the way round it. She had it crooked, in a very ladylike way, as she drank her tea. She caught Jackson looking at it. ‘Chopped it off,’ she said breezily. Amelia snorted. ‘Accidentally,’ Julia added. Amelia snorted again. ‘You’ll turn into a pig if you carry on like that, Milly,’ Julia said.
It struck Jackson that he’d asked Binky Rain about the Land girls but he’d never asked the Land girls about Binky Rain. ‘Binky Rain,’ Jackson said, ‘your neighbour, Victor’s neighbour?’ Julia looked vague. ‘Cats,’ Jackson said.
‘I was a tabby in the chorus,’ Julia said, ‘but I only lasted a few weeks, I got bronchitis. It was a shame, it was a number-one tour.’
‘No,’ Jackson said patiently, ‘Binky Rain, she keeps cats.’
‘The old witch,’ Amelia said suddenly, and Julia said, ‘Oh, her. We never went anywhere near her.’
‘We used to,’ Amelia said. ‘And then we didn’t.’
‘Why not?’ Jackson asked, but Amelia seemed to have lapsed back into her catatonic state.
‘Sylvia told us not to,’ Julia said. She frowned with the effort of remembering. ‘That was after Olivia, I think. She said the garden was cursed and if we went in there we’d be turned into cats. That all her cats were people who’d gone into her garden. Sylvia was always a bit strange, of course. Mrs Rain isn’t still alive, is she? She must be three hundred years old by now.’
‘Almost,’ Jackson said.
There was something undeniably pleasant about being sprawled in a deckchair beneath the trees. The hum of insects and tourists was soporific and Jackson could think of nothing he wanted to do more than close his eyes and drift off but Julia kept prattling on about Neo-Pagans and Wittgenstein and Russell.
‘Weren’t they all right-wing snobs?’ Jackson asked.
‘Oh, don’t spoil it by being all northern and socialist,’ Julia said.
Amelia remained a brooding presence, communicating in monosyllables.
‘Brooke used to run around with no clothes on,’ Julia said. ‘Maybe nudism is some kind of Cambridge thing.’
‘Rupert Brooke was just a proto-fascist,’ Amelia said suddenly, from somewhere beneath her sunhat, and Julia said, ‘Well, he’s dead and he was a terrible poet so he’s had his comeuppance,’ and Amelia said, ‘That’s a specious argument if ever I heard one,’ and Julia said— but Jackson was asleep by then.
Jackson retrieved his car from where it was still parked, in front of Binky’s house. A gold Lexus, not a vehicle (or a colour) that Jackson had any time for, was parked right up against the Alfa’s bumper and Jackson felt pretty sure it belonged to Quintus. He had no idea what was going on between them. Surely Quintus hadn’t attacked him?
He drove down Silver Street, listening to Gillian Welch’s Hell Among the Yearlings album. His taste in music was getting more depressive by the minute, if that was possible. He was on his way to a meeting in the Eagle with Steve Spencer, not that he had anything to report about Nicola, but his mind was still on Quintus when all of a sudden he found himself driving straight into the back of a Ford Galaxie that was stationary at traffic lights by Fitzbillies on Trumpington Street.
The front of the Alfa Romeo came off a lot worse than the back of the Ford Galaxie but things would have been more serious if Jackson hadn’t already been easing up for the red light. That wasn’t a fact that impressed the driver of the Galaxie, who leaped out and started yelling at Jackson that he had intentionally endangered the lives of her children. Three small, inquisitive faces peered out of the rear window of the Galaxie. When the traffic police rolled up, the woman was standing in the middle of the road, jabbing her finger at the ‘Child on Board’ sticker on her rear window.
‘The brakes failed,’ Jackson said to the older of the two traffic policemen.
‘Liar! Bloody liar!’ the woman shouted.
‘Jeez, Jackson,’ the policeman said, ‘you really know how to pick them.’
The crash had jolted something loose in Jackson’s head. His tooth felt less like a tooth and more like a knife being pushed through his gum. He didn’t think his body could take much more punishment.
The traffic cops breathalyzed Jackson, took down details of the accident and sent the Galaxie and its furious driver on their way. Then they called a police tow truck and had Jackson’s car taken to the police garage, where a mechanic looked it over. The older traffic cop owed Jackson a tenner from a Derby sweep three years ago and Jackson reckoned it was a debt paid in full now.
‘The brakes failed,’ Jackson said for the umpteenth time. The accident had unnerved him. He’d been in accidents before, skids and shunts, but he’d never been the one doing the shunting. He could still see himself gliding helplessly into the back of the Galaxie, magnetically drawn on by the Child on Board sign. ‘I think the brake fluid must have leaked,’ he said to the mechanic.
‘It leaked all right,’ the mechanic said, ‘leaked through the bloody great hole that was drilled in the reservoir. I think there’s someone out there who doesn’t like you.’
‘Christ,’ one of the traffic policemen said cheerfully, ‘that’ll make it hard to narrow down.’
‘Thanks.’ Perhaps he should mention Quintus Rain’s name to the eager young DC Lowther who had taken his statement in hospital.
A police car dropped him off outside his front door. He sensed he was beginning to lower the tone of the neighbourhood. It was nine o’clock and the smell of barbecue was everywhere on the air. He knew without looking at his mobile that it was full of messages from Steve Spencer wondering what had happened to him. He avoided thinking that the day couldn’t get any worse and was rewarded with a sight that suddenly made everything better. Shirley Morrison was sitting on his doorstep, two bottles of cold beer in her hand. ‘I thought maybe you could do with some nursing,’ she said.
Later, much later, when there was already light in the sky and the dawn chorus had struck up and it was Thursday (which was blue according to Julia and orange according to Amelia), Jackson turned and looked at Shirley’s sleeping face and tried to remember why he wasn’t supposed to sleep with her. Oh yes, because she was a client. Ethics. Nice one, Jackson. He wondered if he had crossed a line he was going to regret. It wasn’t so much that she was a client, or that he thought there was going to be anything between them. They’d swerved out of their orbits and collided, that was all. (Although it was nice to think there might be more.) It had been cataclysmic, extraordinary, but he didn’t see a future in it. It wasn’t that that was worrying Jackson, it was the fact that when Shirley was telling her awful story to him she had spent most of her time looking up to the right.
15
Theo
IT WAS VERY HOT IN THE CHURCHYARD. HIS FACE WAS dripping with sweat, and he imagined all the fat on his body was melting. Even though Little
St Mary’s was in the middle of everywhere Theo had never encountered another soul, living or dead, amongst its gravestones and wild flowers. Laura told him that she used to come here and revise, sitting on the grass with her books scattered around her, and so he had placed a bench here with a plaque, ‘For Laura, who loved this place’, and he felt closer to her – in some indefinable way – when he sat here. It was one of the stations of the cross for Theo, one of the places that were connected with Laura; her bones rested in the City Cemetery on Newmarket Road but the whole of Cambridge acted as a reliquary for her memory.
People scattered the ashes of their cremated relatives in the churchyard and a camomile lawn had been planted on the grey, gritty soil of the dead. On Laura’s grave, in the characterless municipal cemetery, Theo had planted snowdrops, her favourite flower. There were trees in the cemetery and Theo wondered if their roots had found Laura yet, whether they had twined their way through her ribcage, curled around her ankles and braceleted her wrists.
Jackson had been to London to see Emma. Theo’s memories of Emma were indistinct; he seemed to remember that she had been involved with a man and the whole thing had turned out badly in some way. Emma was working for the BBC, Jackson said. Theo never speculated about what Laura would be doing if she had lived. There was no future to imagine, her life was self-contained, 15 February 1976 to 19 July 1994. Her A-level results had arrived three weeks after she died, like an odd postscript. Theo had opened the big brown envelope addressed to ‘Laura Wyre’ and seen that she had four ‘A’ grades. He’d never thought to cancel her university place and a week into the autumn term someone rang up from the university administration office in Aberdeen and said, ‘Can I speak to Laura Wyre, please?’ and Theo said, ‘No, I’m sorry, you can’t,’ and then burst into tears.
Theo was too hot. Laura’s bench stood in a suntrap against the wall of the church. He could feel the sweat pooling in the fatty concave of his lower back. It wasn’t a good day to be here. Theo was allergic to almost every living thing that grew in the churchyard but he had pre-armed himself with sunglasses and Zirtek and had hoped to battle it out a little longer with the abundant flora of Little St Mary’s, but his eyes and nose had begun to stream with water and he knew he was going to have to make a move. He struggled to his feet. ‘Bye, bye, sweetheart,’ he said, because she was everywhere. And nowhere.
On Christ’s Pieces a man was cutting the grass, sitting on one of those little tractor mowers. Theo could hardly see for the tears rolling down his face. The handkerchief he was holding up to his nose was already sodden. People were giving him odd looks but he lumbered on regardless. The buses at the Drummond Street Bus Station roared their engines like mechanical beasts, and Theo swore he could taste exhaust fumes in his mouth. Who would build a bus station next to a green space? He could hear the breath in his chest, it sounded as loud as the lawnmower. To be allergic to summer seemed wrong somehow. His wife, Valerie, had never been sympathetic, seeing his allergies and asthma as another kind of character weakness. There’d been no pets in the house until Laura was fourteen and she’d wanted a dog so badly that he had finally given in and they drove to the dogs’ home and came back with Poppy. She was still only a few months old; someone had thrown her out of a moving car. How could anyone do that? What kind of person could inflict suffering like that? Laura said she was going to ‘smother’ Poppy with love to make it up to her. And Theo had gradually grown accustomed to the dog hair, until he could even let her sit on his knee and stroke her. He loved that dog too. It had been terrible when she was run over, a tiny premonition of what was to come.
Theo could feel his chest tightening. He began to wheeze and reached in his pocket for his Ventolin inhaler. It wasn’t in the usual pocket. He tried all his pockets and then had a sudden, clear picture of his inhaler sitting on the hall table, waiting to be transferred from one jacket to another. The panic was like a punch to the heart. His legs almost went from under him and he stumbled to a bench in the Princess Diana Memorial Rose Garden, trying to keep calm, trying to keep the terror at bay. The sunny day had already grown black round the edges and spots were dancing before Theo’s eyes. He could feel a knotty pain in his chest and wondered if he was having a heart attack.
He was fighting for breath. He should try to signal to someone that he needed help, that he wasn’t just some fat bloke sweating on a park bench, that he was a fat bloke who was dying. The panic was screwing up his chest, wringing it hard. He could hear the terrible noises he was making as he fought to find a breath. Surely someone could hear him?
This too shall pass, he thought to himself, but it didn’t. He would have expected that by now he would be feeling peace and acceptance, that the oxygen deprivation would have made him ready for death, but his body was still struggling with every nerve and fibre. Whether he liked it or not he was going down fighting.
There was a dark silhouette in front of him, a person, blocking out the sunlight, and he thought it must be Laura, come to take him home. He wanted to say her name but he couldn’t speak, couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. She was saying something to him but the words sounded as if they were coming from underwater. She touched his arm and her fingers felt icy. He heard her say, ‘Can I help you?’ the words booming and crashing in his ear like the surf and part of him wanted to say, ‘No, I’m fine,’ because he didn’t want to worry her, but another part, a stronger, insistent part over which he had no control, was clawing at the air, trying to convey his desperation. Now he could hear other voices. Someone thrust something towards his mouth and it took him a second to realize it was an inhaler.
Then blackness. Then the ambulance, where he felt nauseous and weak but the oxygen mask on his face was extraordinarily reassuring. The paramedic lifted it slightly so he could speak and he asked if he’d had a heart attack and the paramedic shook his head and said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ And then he slept.
And woke in a bed in a side ward. There was an old man in the other bed, hooked up to a lot of tubes. Theo realized that he was hooked up to a lot of tubes as well. When he woke the next time the old man had gone and when he woke the time after that he was in a different ward and it was visiting time, people flooding in with magazines and fruit and plastic carrier bags of clothes. Theo turned his head to follow the visitors’ progress and saw a girl sitting on a chair next to his bed. He realized two things at the same time: first, it was the beggar girl with the custard-yellow hair, and secondly, it had been this girl who had helped him on Christ’s Pieces. Not Laura.
She was there the next afternoon, perched cautiously on the edge of the chair as if she didn’t trust it to hold her weight although she was as thin as a stick. She hadn’t brought magazines or fruit or any of the things that the other visitors brought, but instead she pressed something into his closed hand and when he opened it he saw a pebble, smooth and still warm from her own dry, grubby hand, so that it seemed like a curiously intimate gift. Theo wondered if she was simple. He was sure there was a more politically correct term but he couldn’t remember what it was. His brain felt foggy and he supposed it was the drugs.
She wasn’t inclined to talk but that was all right because neither was he. She did tell him though that her name was Lily-Rose and he said, ‘That’s a pretty name,’ and she smiled a small, shy smile and said, ‘Thank you, it’s my own,’ which seemed an odd thing to say.
A nurse came by to take his temperature. She stuck the thermometer in Theo’s mouth and, smiling at Lily-Rose, said, ‘I think your dad’ll be discharged tomorrow,’ and Lily-Rose said, ‘That’s good,’ and Theo said nothing because he still had the thermometer in his mouth.
Jackson came in the evening and Theo was touched because he seemed genuinely concerned about him. ‘You’re going to have to look after yourself, big man,’ he said and he patted his hand and Theo felt tears prick his eyes because no one ever touched him except for probing medical fingers. And the cold touch of the yellow-haired girl. Lily-Rose. Jackson looked as if someo
ne had beaten him up again and Theo said, ‘Are you OK, Jackson?’ and Jackson looked pained and said, ‘That would very much depend on your definition of “OK”, Theo.’
She walked him to the taxi, holding his elbow as if she would prop him up if he fell although she didn’t look strong enough to support a lupin. The taxi-driver and a nurse helped Theo inside the taxi. The nurse held the door open for Lily-Rose. Lily-Rose’s dog jumped in but jumped out again when it realized she wasn’t following. Theo wanted to write down his address and telephone number for her but he didn’t have any paper. Lily-Rose said, ‘Here, use this,’ and gave him a small white card and it was only when he’d written down his address and phone number that he turned the card over and realized it was one of Jackson’s. He gave her a puzzled look and said, ‘You know Jackson?’ and she said, ‘Who?’ but the nurse shut the taxi door and the driver pulled away. Both the nurse and Lily-Rose stood on the pavement and waved at him. Theo waved back and thought how absurd it was that when he thought she was going to climb in the taxi with him his heart had given an extra little beat of joy.
* * *
He’d only been away for two days and yet his house had already begun to grow strange to him. His inhaler was still sitting on the hall table. The rooms smelt stale so Theo opened all the windows and thought he might buy a perfumed candle, an expensive one, not one of those that smelt of cheap vanilla and air freshener. He went upstairs to the spare bedroom, ‘the incident room’ Jackson had called it, and saw it through the eyes of a stranger for the first time, saw how macabre and frightening it might seem.
He sat down at the computer and went online to the Stationery Store and ordered storage boxes, pretty ones that had flowers printed on them, and thought he would box up everything and label it properly and then perhaps he would ask Jackson to give him a hand putting them up in the loft. Then he went to Tesco.com and ordered groceries but he didn’t go to ‘My Favourites’ because he knew his favourites were killers – frozen cheesecakes and ice cream, Danish pastries and full-fat yogurts, and instead he started a new list of skimmed milk and oatmeal, vegetables and fruit and wholemeal bread and large bottles of Evian, and thought it looked like a miserable shopping list. It wasn’t that Theo was feeling better or more cheerful or that he could see a positive future for himself, it was just that he kept thinking about the way he had clung on to life when it was being taken away from him, how he had fought to stay alive on Christ’s Pieces. Laura hadn’t been given the chance to fight but he had and maybe that meant something, although exactly what, he wasn’t sure.