Under the Harrow: (12 page)

W
HEN I RETURN TO
Marlow, I go to the library. On the landing, there is a drawing of the meeting house, a white lodge on a great lawn. It had a portico with columns and segments of shade, and benches facing the village. I wonder if anyone died when it burned down.

“Why didn’t they rebuild it?” I asked Rachel.

“They all left. They moved to America.”

I climb the stairs to the children’s collection. I choose a book of Italian fairy tales with a green cover and carry it home. As I come up the stairs, I stub my toe on the chair on the landing. Pain bursts up my calf, and I drop the book. I lift the chair and thrash it against the wall. Across the landing the heavy gold mirror rattles. Dust rises from the plaster. My face is wet and my mouth gapes open as I grunt with the effort.

 • • • 

When I leave my room again, the book of Italian fairy tales has been smoothed and left in front of my door. On the landing, I kneel and brush the plaster dust into my hand. The exterior walls of the Hunters are made of stone. There is a chance no one will notice the dents in the plaster. Someone has already cleared away the broken chair.

That night, in my room, I try to read the Italian stories, but even they are beyond me. For a long time I sit with the book on my lap and my head tilted back in pain. When I finally stand to go to bed, I notice the illustration that has been open on my lap.

There are two rows of pleached hornbeams on a lawn that leads to a forest. A woman in a hooded robe walks purposefully toward the woods, between the hornbeams. A greyhound trots ahead of her.

My head droops toward the painting. It bewilders me, after today. I can’t believe such things exist, both the painting and the things in it. The greyhound and the hooded robe. I want to know where the woman is going, and I want to be in her place with an urgency that surprises me, and that I would have thought I had outgrown.

My hands are still white with plaster dust. There are still black spots on the wall from the bottle of wine that exploded the night before her funeral.

R
ACHEL AND I VISITED
the Tate last year. I like Tate Modern better. At its bar you can drink a white wine or a mineral water and look down at the cloudy river and St. Paul’s and the people on the bridges. I didn’t try to explain this to Rachel. She would fixate on the mineral water, which I rarely bought and always with a sense of disappointment in myself.

The mineral water fits, I wanted to tell her. It fits there.

We looked at medieval Flemish paintings. One of them was a triptych of a pilgrimage, and the path curved far back into the picture field. Looking at it is supposed to be like going on a pilgrimage yourself, said the placard, which I thought was overstating the matter. But it was mesmerizing, and I did find that I really wanted to be there, not here. Walking past, apparently, all manner of things. A hydra in the courtyard of an inn. Dogs chasing a leaping stag. A tavern on stilts in a pond.

Rachel came over and I leaned against her and said, “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Mm.”

I followed her into the next room, where there was an oil painting of Judith and Holofernes. Holofernes was the general of an invading army. Judith seduced him and maneuvered her way into his tent. She slaked him with wine and cut off his head.

“Then what happened?” I asked, but the placard didn’t say and Rachel was already in the next room.

T
HE NEXT DAY,
there are cars parked in double rows along the common, and all the shops on the high street are closed. The Duck and Cover is closed, and the Miller’s Arms. The only open office belongs to the town solicitor, who tells me that today is Callum Hold’s funeral.

I don’t have anything else to do, so I find a bench on the common. From here, there is no sign of the two hundred people inside the church. Its wooden doors are closed. Every so often a twist of smoke rises from its chimney. The garden beside it, with thin stone tablets under the cedar elm, is quiet. The church looks cold and empty, the stained glass black and glossy as oil.

Above me the yews creak in the wind. The town didn’t shut down for Rachel. Or maybe the shops did close. I wouldn’t have noticed. The day is bleak, and I stuff my hands in my pockets and pull my scarf over my mouth.

I think about the Cross Keys and the red half-height doors in the toilets. I still can’t remember what happened there. Every time I think of it, my stomach drops, as it does when I remember something shameful.

With a sound like a gate being lowered, the church doors open. The family appears to be the first to come out. They’re down from Stoke, said the town solicitor. There isn’t a coffin.

Callum died in September. The solicitor told me the family waited to have the funeral until his best friend returned from a tour in Afghanistan. I can’t tell who he is. The best man, in
a way. There are a lot of men around Callum’s age, and they all look gutted.

More and more people exit the church. They spill onto the common, near where I sit. I unwind my red scarf and stuff it in my pocket since it marks me out too much. I listen to the voices, which are low and somber. Some of the men and women are still crying freely. People form groups near the open doors of the church, on its lawn, in the middle of the road along the common. I don’t see Louise. I wouldn’t go either, if I were her.

The reception is in Brightwell. Someone has rented the manor lodge. I know the building, which is long and low, with three turrets. When they host weddings, they fly white pennants from the turrets. I wonder if there will be flags today, and what color they will be.

When I go out again later the shops and pubs are still closed, their owners out in Brightwell. I imagine the young men I saw outside the church standing on the lawn in front of the lodge and smoking.

K
EITH HAS GAINED WEIGHT.
He looks like a different man from the one who approached me on the aqueduct.

We are drawing closer. Today, he did leave a checkout line when I stood behind him. He put a full basket of food down and fled. People noticed, and after he had gone a number of them stared at me, as though they wanted to ask me what had just happened and what it meant.

 • • • 

Early in the evening, I run into Lewis on Meeting House Lane. “Want to go for a walk?” he says. “I could use a break.”

I nod, though it’s not really a break for him, anytime he talks to me he is working. I wonder what he thinks he might still discover. His legs are longer than mine, but he walks slowly, like we’re only out for a stroll.

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“Brixton.”

“I like Brixton.”

“All of you like Brixton,” he says.

“Fuck off,” I say, but he’s smiling, and I remember that he knows about how we grew up. I can’t tell him about Paul Wheeler, not until I’ve decided what to do. I wish I could stop seeing his face.

“Where in Brixton?”

“Loughborough.”

“I can see Loughborough from my flat.”

“How did you know what it was?”

“I wanted to know what I was looking at.”

We walk past the rill, which is frozen now. You could walk on it instead of on the planks laid across it.

“Why did you become a policeman?”

“For a day job,” he says. “I was a musician. You have a lot of time on your own as a constable. A lot of time walking. I spent it composing songs.”

“Were you in Brixton?”

“No, Barnes, where nothing ever happened,” he says.

“What’s your first name?”

“Winston.”

“If I look you up, will I find any of your music?”

“No,” he says, “definitely not.”

I wonder what confidences he expects in exchange for this, but I don’t have any. I wish I did. We both know he shouldn’t have told me that, he should have said he wanted to help people.

“Do you miss London?” I ask.

“Yes. Do you?”

“I don’t know.” We start down the high street. “I was jealous of Rachel for living here. I hate London sometimes.”

“Centuries of people,” says Lewis, his low voice cresting up and down, “have hated London.”

The town is quiet. A few people are running errands. Coming calmly out of shops, unlocking their cars or walking down the pavements. Behind us is the rosy light in the church tower.

“Do you?” I ask.

“No,” he says. We walk past the bakery, and the queue inside it for bread and cakes. “I hate this.” We walk past the wine shop and the building society. “No grit. No culture. It’s boring.”

We reach the train station and return to the common on the north side of the road.

“It’s placid.”

“Exactly,” he says.

We walk past the chip shop. I stare in its window and then down the road, astonished. “It’s like Snaith,” I say. “It’s like the town where we grew up.”

“We always repeat our mistakes,” says Lewis.

“I never realized before. It’s like Snaith but farther south.”

“And with money,” says Lewis, and I nod. The only difference is that time has been kind to this town and not to Snaith.

“Why did she move here?” I ask.

Lewis doesn’t answer. He already has, in a way. “What do you hate about London?” he asks.

“The noise.”

“The noise is the best part,” he says.

We walk past the Miller’s Arms. In this light its awning is the color of paper.

“Not in Kilburn.”

“You can wear headphones. Do you know what you can’t do anything about? The rain,” he says, so the word turns long and threatening.

 • • • 

After Lewis returns to the station, I walk through the village again. I miss Snaith. The Vikings and the bakery. The Norman church, especially in winter, with snow falling over it and the poplars in its yard.

I can’t believe I never noticed before. I walk around the common but I see the common in Snaith. The towns are like twins.

I walk past the Chinese restaurant where Lewis and I ate two weeks ago. There was one in Snaith too, though it was called, embarrassingly, Oriental Chop Suey, and this one is the Emerald Gate.

I don’t know anyone else who moved to a small town. Rachel said she wanted to be close to the hospital, but Oxford would have been closer. It’s as if she never left our village. I stand on the station platform and see the station in Snaith. I don’t know if they have updated the trains on the Leeds line. When we lived there the seats were made of blue carpet and you could open the windows.

I
BICYCLE DOWN
the Bristol Road, past the white cross marking the site of Callum’s accident, toward the service station. Ahead of me, the red Esso globe rises above the flat countryside.

Louise is still working at the café. She wears the same clothes as last time, a navy shirt and black canvas skirt under an apron. “Hello again,” she says. “Is that your bike?”

“Sort of.” I don’t think anyone will miss it. I found it in the shed behind the inn. Its gears are rusted and both its tires needed air.

“Do you want to bring it around back so it doesn’t get wet?”

The rain has stopped but the clouds are low and ragged. Louise leads me outside and I wheel the bike around the building to a covered parking bay. You can’t see the white cross from here, which is probably good. Rachel showed it to me a few weeks ago. We were on our way to Didcot, and she pointed and said, “That’s where Callum’s car spun off.” I remember thinking it was strange, since there weren’t any turns or obstacles. It was a straightaway. He must have thought he saw something in the road, a fox maybe.

The lorry bay smells of stone. I lower the kickstand and follow Louise around the building. Cars rumble down the Bristol Road. “Thanks,” I say.

“Not a problem,” she says.

“He beat her,” said Rachel.

Louise swings open the door and holds it for me. I pass so close I can smell that she wears scent with some vetiver in it.

“How did you know her injuries came from him?”

“She told me,” said Rachel.

Louise finds a breakfast menu and follows me to a table.

“Do you live around here?”

“Kidlington,” she says. I wait for her to add more. I expect she is moving soon. I watch her cross the restaurant and picture a room with a friend in Camden. For some reason my image is about forty years out of date. They have a gas ring and a record player, and they go to the trattoria on the corner for a liter of red wine and bucatini.

You should move to Camden, I want to tell her. You should move to Camden in about 1973.

I wish we could talk. I want to ask her about Callum, and the accident. I can’t see a way to do this without bringing Rachel into it, though I wouldn’t mind that. I’d like to know what their encounter was like. But it would also mean revealing a violation of patient rights. Rachel should never have told me about Louise’s injuries, or how she got them.

 • • • 

I finish the ebelskiver, a sort of pancake filled with jam, and pay the bill.

“Do you want to wait it out?” asks Louise. Heavy rain falls on the countryside, and we both watch as the wind blows an opaque curve of water across the road.

“It’s not far. I’m staying at the Hunters in Marlow.”

“Still,” she says, but she doesn’t ask what I am doing in Marlow. I don’t think she knows I’m Rachel’s sister.

I want to tell her about the moment between opening the door of the house and understanding what had happened, when what I felt was wonder. It was an incredible feeling, golden and drugged. I would like to know if she experienced that, when the car first jerked, maybe. I wouldn’t mind living my whole life in that gap, when I knew the rules had somehow been upturned, but not how.

I pedal down the Bristol Road. I don’t think I will see Louise again. I want to ask her why she hasn’t quit already. She must find it difficult to drive past the accident site twice a day. Maybe she forces herself, as a reminder of something.

 • • • 

In Marlow, people have started hanging wreaths on their doors. Square and round wreaths of bay leaves and holly.

There are trees for sale at the repair garage. Last year Rachel took the tree down on Twelfth Night. “You don’t want to anger the Holly Man,” she said.

 • • • 

A bouquet of white roses has been propped in front of my door. I bend down and carry them into my room, and the soft, creamy petals fill the air with scent. I’ve never been given white roses before, or bought them for myself, and in the dim room they look rare and precious. I fill a glass with water for them. Someone sending condolences. Martha’s family, maybe. The card is from a florist’s shop in Oxford.

It says,
Nice to meet you again. Paul.

 • • • 

I sit on my heels in bed holding the carving knife. My body is stiff with fear. The manager sleeps in a set of rooms on the floor below mine, and I don’t know if sounds can reach her from here. It’s only the pipes, the building settling. It’s nothing, I imagine Rachel saying to herself on Friday, there’s no one there.