Shadows in the Cotswolds (18 page)

Oliver assured the Button person that he would be perfectly all right to get himself back to Norfolk Square. She had insisted on knowing where he was staying and how he could be contacted.

‘I’ll be here again in the morning,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that enough for you?’

‘You’ve just had a shock, sir, in the middle of something that must already have been extremely stressful. You need to be gentle with yourself. Have an early night. It’s unfortunate …’ She tailed off with a little frown, before starting again. ‘It’s a pity you have to stand witness again tomorrow. Perhaps your counsel could get it deferred, in the circumstances.’ She spoke uncertainly, as if on shifting ground.

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ he said with feeling. ‘I’ve waited far too long already. There’s nothing I can do
for Melissa now. She was a good girl, with everything ahead of her. It’s a terrible thing for someone to have done. But I can get through another day of this before I let myself dwell on that.’

But he found he couldn’t. He found himself comparing the evil done to himself with that done to Melissa. For all the good he’d achieved in his life, for all the value he’d been to anybody, he might as well have been murdered in his youth, just as she had been. He had behaved like a dead man for much of his life. If it hadn’t been for the birds and the technical challenges he’d set himself in photographing them, he might have permitted himself to slide into some chronic sickness and early death, purely by abandoning all interest in living.

He supposed there must be a bus that traversed the route from the Strand to Paddington. There were probably several. Somewhere in his memory he knew which they were, if he made the effort to recapture it. The streets of London had been stencilled onto his mind as a boy and would remain there for ever. He knew the way without thinking about it, the diagonal clear before him, cutting off Oxford Circus and bringing him out at Marble Arch, from which it was a short stroll to the hotel. A bus would find itself snarled up at Piccadilly Circus, and then crawl jerkily along Oxford Street, even with the reduced traffic wrought by the congestion charge. He had been surprised at how little change that had made
to the progress of the buses, when it first came in.

He did not even consider the tube, despite the easy Bakerloo run virtually from door to door. He had never liked the underground and the strangers who stared blankly just past your shoulder. People were less uncomfortable to be with on a bus.

So he set out on foot, scarcely lifting his gaze from the pavement in front of him, not even thinking in any coherent way. He felt old and unnecessary. His effect on other people was to embarrass them at best and humiliate them at worst. His wretched brother was facing retrospective contempt and disgust that would overshadow his lifelong reputation as a caring professional. The one person who had genuinely enjoyed his company from time to time was now dead, killed within hours of his turning his back on Winchcombe. Poor Melissa, he kept thinking. That poor, poor girl.

He avoided Regent Street, which he had always found to be tiring, with its insidious long incline, and instead wove his way through the smaller streets and squares that he would normally relish seeing again. He had never lost his affection for London, with its constant cosmetic changes which only served to emphasise its permanence. Shopfronts modernised, and evolved into coffee bars or expensive restaurants; the method for disposing of rubbish swung from bins to bags to boxes, and back again, stacks of discarded materials of every sort cluttering the pavements. He
had noticed this especially in Norfolk Square and Sussex Gardens, where the hotels evidently created daily mountains of refuse which were noisily collected at first light. But he was still some way short of Marble Arch, and everywhere lights were on, as evening took hold. It was close to seven o’clock, he realised, and he ought to eat something. He would go to one of the small grocery shops in London Street, a minute away from his hotel, and eat it in his room. He tried to increase his speed, looking up at the street names at each junction, still aware of the glamour with which some of them were imbued. Grosvenor Square conjured indelible images from the sixties, with the anti-American protests, as he walked around it and into North Audley Street. Again, it had changed in many respects, and yet was essentially the same. He had taken no part in the Vietnam marches, but many of his contemporaries had, and he recalled the songs and the slogans quite vividly, despite never voicing them himself.

He emerged onto the western end of Oxford Street, with the cacophony of traffic and the complexities of scaffolding around the eternal remodelling of various buildings. Something massive and futuristic stood just to his right, which had certainly not been there last time he looked. But across the street the buildings were reassuringly familiar, especially the upper floors. He had often wondered what lay inside those
third- and
fourth-storey windows – did people live there,
or were they merely storerooms for the shops below? In other cities, they would all be dwellings. In Lisbon people lived in the very heart of things, keeping the place alive all day every day. He had liked that aspect of the place more than anything, on a rare moment of adventure when he was forty.

He passed the Marble Arch tube station, and turned right. Edgware Road had been stretched, it seemed, and strangely mutated into a small piece of Arabia. Women in long black burkhas, men smoking
hubble-bubbles
, the signs in Arabic – it came as a welcome distraction to observe this particular alteration to the London he remembered. Idly he wondered at the process by which it had happened, and what the area would turn into next.

Star Street was his goal. He had made a particular note of it as the most direct route to take. The instant change of atmosphere, with the absence of traffic and the houses with their deep basements and yellowing plants outside, was a relief. If he ever came back to London permanently, he thought, it would be perfectly acceptable to live in Star Street.

His feet grew heavier as he reached Norfolk Square and the big inviting garden in the middle. He could see the door of his hotel welcoming him with a bright light over its name, and he began to fumble in his pocket for the key they had given him. The prospect of buying food seemed suddenly burdensome, and he decided against it. He would eat the free biscuits in
his room and drink coffee and survive quite well till morning.

When the figure came out of the shadows of the public garden, he barely even saw it. ‘Oliver!’ came a voice, and he stopped. It was an old woman, hair silvery blonde in the streetlights, neat figure corseted and straight. ‘Oliver, it’s me, Sylvia.’

‘Sylvia?’ He had no idea who she was. ‘What do you want of me?’

‘You don’t remember me.’ She sounded sad. ‘Cedric’s wife. Your sister-in-law.’

‘Good God! Sylvia!’ He peered at her, searching for any familiar features. ‘I would never have known you.’

‘We only met a few times, after all. Weddings, funerals.’

‘How did you know where to find me?’

‘You’re a predictable man, Ollie. It was easy enough to guess you’d come here for a room. You stayed here when the old man died.’

‘Did I? Are you sure?’ He could not recall any of the organisational details at that time, ten years earlier.

‘Henry drove you back here afterwards. I’ve been waiting for hours. You took a long time to come back.’

‘I walked. And the police … Did you know about Melissa?’

‘What? Melissa who?’

‘Our sister. Thirty-one years old. Murdered on my land at the weekend. They couldn’t identify her until they asked me. They caught me at the end of the trial
business.’ He swayed on his feet, suddenly unbearably weary. ‘What do you want, Sylvia?’

‘Come and sit down, for heaven’s sake. You look ready to collapse. There’s a seat just inside the garden. It’s nice in there. This is a much more pleasant part of London now. Funny how it changes. I remember Paddington as awash with prostitutes and homeless drug addicts. Everyone seems quite respectable now.’

‘I was thinking something along those same lines,’ he agreed. He still couldn’t reconcile this person with the girl his brother had married so long ago. It was like a fairy tale, where the princess appears disguised as a crone. ‘Are you
really
Sylvia?’ he demanded pettishly. ‘I don’t recognise you at all.’

‘You’ll have to take my word for it. Sit down, Ollie, please.’

The relief was almost frightening. Surely he wasn’t so old that his legs could no longer manage a stroll through the West End? ‘You shouldn’t be being so nice to me,’ he objected confusedly. ‘You must loathe the very sight of me.’

‘It’s got beyond that,’ she said, sounding almost as tired as he felt.

‘So you’re not here to ask me to withdraw my accusations? To nobble me somehow, so I can’t testify tomorrow?’

‘Not really, no. It’s rather late for that. I wanted to try to make you understand that the whole business has come far too late. Cedric is unlikely to live more
than another year. He’s got prostate cancer, and his lungs are in an awful state.’

‘Why? He never smoked, did he?’

‘He had pleurisy about four times, in his forties. It left them damaged. Nothing to do with smoking.’

Oliver absorbed this information without emotion. ‘So he doesn’t know about Melissa?’

‘I don’t expect so – no. How would he?’

‘I think it’s been on the news.’

‘We don’t watch the news these days. You probably can’t imagine how it feels to see yourself and hear what they say about you, when it was all sixty years ago. It’s literally like the worst sort of nightmare – where everybody gets you completely wrong and you can’t do a thing about it.’

‘He did look very … shrunken,’ Oliver acknowledged. ‘But he’s eighty. What does he expect?’

‘And you’re not so much younger. Neither of you is the same person as when all that stuff happened. Your mother was useless; the war had knocked everybody sideways. Your father was a local hero and pretty well ignored you boys. Cedric went off the rails. It was horrible, what he did, but it wasn’t regarded as the unspeakable evil that it is now.’

‘It was by the victims,’ Oliver protested, while knowing this was not entirely accurate. It had all been so very much more complicated than that. Evil was beside the point. ‘And not being able to speak about it made it worse. You talk about nightmares – that’s
exactly how it was. Homosexual rape was regarded as completely unmentionable, even as a joke. Everybody pretended that such a thing could never happen, except perhaps in the most vile of prisons. Even the Nazis were never accused of that. They might bayonet babies and roast them on a fire, but the idea that they might rape young boys never even occurred to anybody. It was utterly taboo.’

‘Yes, all right,’ she shrank a few inches away from him. ‘That’s all true, I know.’

‘You
don’t
, though. You have no idea. You wouldn’t want to know what happens, what it does to an unwilling body. And that’s only a small part of it. Bodies heal. Minds very often don’t.’

‘Stop it, Oliver. Stop dragging it all up again. What good can it do? Cedric is ruined. He’s dying. What more is there to say?’

‘Nothing more. But it needs to be said loudly and often. Other men need to be deterred from doing it. I can’t afford to care about Cedric. As you say, it’s too late for that. He has been a dark shadow across my whole life, and yes, I really do dream about him, even now. The things that happen to you when you’re fourteen get branded into your brain for ever. They form the person you are for the rest of your life. That’s Cedric’s bad luck, as well, as it’s turned out. But he lived his life in the world, a success, admired by everyone, with a family and all the trappings. While I … well I’ve been a hollow shell for sixty years. He did that
to me. It’s no small crime, Sylvia, and it shouldn’t be hidden any longer.’

‘The shadow stayed with him, as well. That’s what I want to say to you, really. He was damaged by it, too. He married me in an attempt to change his nature and it worked up to a point. He was thrilled when Henry was born. A son was the outward sign that he’d achieved normality. He put everything that was decent and normal in himself into that boy. I think Henry was his atonement. That’s how he saw it. And now that the secrets of the past have been exposed, Henry has cut him off. He won’t speak to him. He’s appalled by the whole thing.’

Oliver had never considered his nephew’s reaction. He had come close to forgetting the man even existed. If he did think of him, it was as an adolescent who might be at some risk from his predatory father. ‘How old is he now?’ he asked.

‘Forty. He’s getting married in January. Or he was. He’s afraid his fiancée might change her mind, with the Meadows name so sullied. It’s taken him all these years to find a girl who didn’t object to being married to an undertaker.’ She sighed. ‘I’m not blaming you, Ollie, but I do want you to see what the damage is. How many people are being affected.’

‘It doesn’t change anything. What if I’d done this thirty years ago? When our father and mother were still alive, and Henry just a young boy? Would that have been better or worse?’

‘I don’t know. I just wish you hadn’t done it at all. Most people don’t, even now. It’s the
publicity
that’s so unbearable. I feel everybody’s looking at me. I want to move away – go to live in the Canaries or Florida or somewhere. And Henry thinks he won’t be able to keep the business going. Nobody’s going to come to Meadows & Son after this.’

Oliver hadn’t heard the family business referred to like that for a very long time. The ‘& Son’ referred to a family relationship that went back a century or more. But it still carried a resonance for him – his father had been Francis Meadows, Cedric his son, and Henry
his
son. The chain had continued unbroken, and now Henry had found a girl who might well produce another male Meadows to carry it on.

‘I hope that isn’t true,’ he said, genuinely shocked. ‘I must confess the publicity came as a surprise. It never occurred to me there’d be so much interest.’ In fact, he had been partly pleased by it, hoping that clandestine abusers would read and shiver with fear at this stark example of what could happen to them. The prospect of that had made the embarrassment worthwhile.