Her Fearful Symmetry (21 page)

“Don’t be silly. I’ve got to meet them eventually.”

The twins watched them arrive. Julia elbowed Valentina. “Isn’t that the guy you met on the tube?” she whispered. Valentina nodded. She watched Robert tearing tickets, Jessica accepting £5 from each person. The twins were at the end of the row of benches. When she had taken the money from the American couple Jessica closed her money box and winked at them. Julia held out £10, but Jessica shook her head and smiled. The American woman gave them an annoyed look. Julia squeezed Valentina’s hand.

“Welcome to Highgate Cemetery,” Jessica said. “Robert will be your guide. He is one of our most Learned Guides, an historian of the Victorian Era, and is writing a book about this cemetery.
All
of our work is done on a voluntary basis, and every year we must raise over three hundred and fifty thousand pounds
just
to keep the cemetery open.” Jessica flirted with them as she spoke, and exhibited the green box. “As you leave, a volunteer will be stationed at the gate with this green box, and
any
help you can give will be Much Appreciated.” Robert watched the tourists fidget. Jessica wished them a Pleasant Tour and went back to the office. She felt a flutter of excitement.
Why?
She stood at the office window and watched Robert gather his group in front of the Colonnade steps. He stood two steps up and spoke to them, looking down, gesturing. From where they stood, the tourists could not see anything but greenery and the steps.
Those
girls look extraordinarily like Elspeth. How amazing life is. I hope he’ll be all right. He looked a bit pale.

Robert tried to clear his mind. He felt as though he were watching himself, as though he had separated into two Roberts, one of whom was calmly giving a tour, the other mute with nerves, trying to think what he might say to the twins.
Bloody hell, you’d think you were seventeen. You don’t have to talk to them. They’ll talk to you. Wait.

“At the beginning of the nineteenth century,” Robert began, “London’s graveyards were shockingly overcrowded. Burial in churchyards had been the custom for hundreds of years. People were flocking to the city: there was an industrial revolution going on, and the factories needed workers. There was no space left to bury anyone, yet people died anyway. In 1800, London’s population was approximately one million. By the middle of the century it was well over two million. The churchyards couldn’t keep up with the relentless pace of death.

“The churchyards were also a health hazard. They contaminated the groundwater and caused epidemics of typhoid and cholera. Since there was no space for more graves, corpses had to be disinterred so that the newly dead could be buried. If you’ve read your Dickens, you know what I’m talking about: elbows poking out of the ground, grave robbers stealing the dead to sell them to the medical schools. It was an absolute shambles.

“In 1832, Parliament passed a bill allowing the establishment of private, commercial cemeteries. In the next nine years, seven cemeteries were opened, situated in a ring around what was then the edge of the city. These became known as the Magnificent Seven: Kensal Green, West Norwood, Highgate, Nunhead, Brompton, Abney Park and Tower Hamlets. Highgate was opened in 1839, and it quickly became the most desirable burial ground in London. Let’s go up the steps, and you’ll see why.”

The twins were at the back of the group, so all they saw was other people’s legs as they ascended. When they got to the top, Robert was standing with the group ranged in a circle around him. They saw a dense clamour of large, tilting graves, crowded and encroached on by trees and greenery. Valentina had a powerful feeling of recognition.
I’ve been here before!-but not really; maybe I dreamed it?
A crow flew close over their heads and swooped across the courtyard, landing on the apex of the chapels’ roof. Valentina wondered what that would be like, to fly brazenly through the cemetery; she wondered what the crow thought about the whole thing.
It’s so strange, to put people in the ground and put stones on top of them.
She felt a surge of wonder that people should all agree to be put in the ground together.

Robert said, “We’re standing on top of the Colonnade. If you’ll look towards the chapels, there, where you came in: there were two chapels, Anglican and Dissenters’, joined together in one building, quite unique. We are in the Western Cemetery, the original part. There are seventeen acres, and two of those are set aside for Dissenters-that is, Baptists, Presbyterians, Sandemanians, and other Protestant sects. Highgate was so popular that by 1854 they needed to expand, and so the London Cemetery Company bought the twenty acres across Swains Lane to create the Eastern Cemetery. This led to a problem. Once the service had been conducted in the Anglican chapel, how were they to get the coffin over to the Eastern side without taking it off consecrated ground? They couldn’t consecrate Swains Lane, so instead they used typical Victorian ingenuity and dug a tunnel under the road. At the end of the service, the coffin would be lowered by a pneumatic lift down into the tunnel. The pallbearers would meet it and take it across, where it would ascend on the Eastern side in a touching allusion to the Resurrection.”

Julia thought,
He looks really pleased with himself, like he invented the whole thing.
She felt kind of crabby, cold and damp. She glanced at Valentina, who was staring at the guide with rapt attention. Robert ran his eyes over the group. Most of them had their cameras ready, itching to take photos, to move on. He saw Valentina staring at him and turned to the grave they were standing next to.

“This grave belongs to James William Selby, who was, in his day, a famous coachman. He was fond of driving fast and in all weathers. The whip and horn signify his profession, the inverted horseshoes tell us that his luck has run out. In 1888 Selby accepted a wager to drive from London to Brighton in less than eight hours. He made it in seven hours and fifty minutes, using seven teams of horses. He won a thousand pounds, but died five months later. We speculate that his winnings might have been used to buy him this very handsome memorial. Mind the path, it’s fairly bad today.”

Robert turned and began walking uphill. He could hear the tourists scrambling after him. The main path was rocky, muddy and full of tree roots and holes. He could hear cameras clicking like digital insects as they walked. His stomach was churning.
I wonder if I could park them all at Comfort’s Corners and just go and quietly puke in the shrubbery?
He soldiered on. He showed them the Gothic-style grave with the empty stone chair, signifying that the occupant was gone, never to return. He led them to the tomb of Sir Loftus Otway, an enormous family mausoleum which had once featured large panels of glass: “You could look down into the tomb and see the coffins. This wasn’t for our voyeuristic pleasure, mind you; many Victorians hated the thought of being buried six feet under, and quite a number of the burials in this cemetery are aboveground…” He told them about the Friends of Highgate Cemetery, how they had saved Highgate. “Before the First World War the staff included twenty-eight gardeners. Everything was tidy, spacious and serene. But all the able-bodied men went to fight, and things were never quite the same. The vegetation began to take over, they ran out of space to make new graves, the money stopped coming in…and in 1975 the western side was padlocked and essentially abandoned to Satanists, nutters, vandals, Johnny Rotten-”

“Who’s he?” one of the young Japanese men wanted to know.

“Lead singer of the Sex Pistols, used to live nearby, in Finchley Park. Right, so you may have noticed that the neighbourhood surrounding this cemetery is a bit posh, and the neighbours got alarmed about the grave-desecrating and the wrong element hanging round. A group of local people got together and bought Highgate Cemetery for fifty quid. Then they went about trying to put it right again. And they invented what they call ‘managed neglect,’ which means just what it sounds like: they didn’t try to make it all tidy and imitate what the Victorians had done. They work things in such a way that you see what time and nature have made of the place, but they don’t let it go so far that it gets dangerous. It’s a museum, in a sense, but it’s also a working Christian burial ground.” Robert glanced at his watch. He needed to get them moving; Jessica had spoken to him only yesterday about Getting the Tour Back in a Timely Manner. “This way.”

He led them at a faster pace to Comfort’s Corners, then began to tell the story of Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti. As always, Robert had to fight the urge to tell the group everything he knew; they would be here for days, gradually collapsing with fatigue and hunger while he went on and on.
They mainly want to see the place. Don’t bore them with too much detail.
He walked them to one of his favourites, a ledger-style tomb with a bas-relief of a weeper, a woman sitting up at night with the coffin. “Before modern medical technology, people had a difficult time determining when someone was really dead. You might think that death would be pretty blatant, but there were a number of famous cases in which a dead body sat up and went on living, and many Victorians got the jim-jams just thinking about the possibility of being buried alive.

“Being a practical people, they attempted to find solutions to the problem. The Victorians invented a system of bells with strings attached that went through the ground and into the coffin, so if you woke up underground you could pull on your bell till someone came to dig you up. There’s no record of anyone being saved by one of these devices. People made all sorts of odd stipulations in their wills, such as asking to be decapitated as insurance against an undesired revival.”

“What about vampires?”

“What
about
vampires?”

“I heard there was a vampire here in the cemetery.”

“No. There were a bunch of attention-seeking idiots who claimed to have seen a vampire. Though some people do say that Bram Stoker was inspired to write
Dracula
by an exhumation here at Highgate.”

Valentina and Julia hung back at the edge of the group. They were having decidedly different experiences. Julia wanted to leave the group and go exploring. She detested lectures and professors and Robert was making her itch.
You’re just bloviating. Get on with it.
Valentina was not following Robert’s commentary very closely because she was occupied with an idea that had been nudging at her since Jessica had introduced him:
You’re Elspeth’s Robert Fanshaw. That’s how you knew us.
She was disquieted by the thought that he must have seen them before without them knowing.
I should tell Julia.
Valentina glanced at Julia.
No, better wait. She’s in a mood.

Robert turned and led them further uphill, stopping at the entrance to the Egyptian Avenue. Robert waited for the American couple to catch up; they tended to fall behind as they tried to photograph everything.
You’ll never make it, folks, there’s 52,000 graves in here.
One of the Japanese men said, “Wow.” He drew it out so that it sounded like
whoooohow.
Robert loved the drama of the Egyptian Avenue; it looked like a stage set for
Aïda.

“Highgate Cemetery, in addition to being a Christian burial ground, was a business venture. In order to make it the most desirable address for the eminent Victorian dead, it needed what every posh neighbourhood needs: amenities. In the late 1830s, when High-gate opened, all things Egyptian were quite popular, and so here we have the Egyptian Avenue. The entrance is based on a tomb at Luxor. It was originally coloured, and the Avenue itself was not so dark and gloomy. It was open to the sky, and there were none of these trees that lean over it now…

“The mausoleums in the Avenue can hold eight to ten people. There are shelves inside for the coffins. Note the inverted torches; the keyholes are upside down as well. The holes on the bottom of the doors let the gases escape.”

“Gases?” asked the quiet man with the binoculars.

“As the bodies decomposed, they gave off gases. They used to put candles in there with them to burn it off. Must have been rather spooky at night.” They went through the Egyptian Avenue and stood at the other end, the twins hugging themselves for warmth even in the strong sunlight. Robert looked at them and was hit by a memory of Elspeth standing in almost the same spot, her face tilted to catch the sun.
Oh, you…
He faltered. Everyone waited for him to continue.
Don’t look at them. Don’t think about her.
Robert stared at the ground for a moment and then pulled himself together.

“We are standing in the Circle of Lebanon. This was the most coveted address in the cemetery. It gets its name from the enormous Cedar of Lebanon tree you see up there above the mausoleums. The tree is approximately three hundred years old now, but even when Highgate Cemetery was founded it would have been impressive. The land was originally part of the estate of the Bishop of London, and when they came to make the Circle they cut down around the tree; it stands on what was originally ground level. Imagine trying to shift all that earth with 1830s equipment. The inner circle was made first, and it proved so popular that the outer circle was begun twenty years later. You can see the changing tastes in architecture, from Egyptian to Gothic.”

Robert led them through the Circle.
This is not getting easier.
He glanced at his watch and resolved to skip a few graves.

“This is the mausoleum of Mabel Veronica Batten and her lover, Radclyffe Hall…Here we have a columbarium. The name comes from the Latin
columba,
meaning ‘dove,’ and originally meant compartments for doves to live in…Follow me up these stairs, please…Right. This is the grave of George Wombwell, a famous menagerist. He got his start by buying two boa constrictors from a sailor…” Robert skipped over Mrs. Henry Wood, the Carter family’s faux-Egyptian tomb and Adam Worth and led the visitors around the top of the Circle to admire the view of St. Michael’s. He then herded them to stand between the Terrace Catacombs and the enormous Beer family tomb. The twins realised that they were looking at the huge mausoleum they could see from their bedroom window. They backed up, trying to see over the Catacombs, but although they could see Martin’s flat, their own wasn’t visible.