What Time Devours (32 page)

For a moment he saw the girl—and perhaps those with her in the picture—trying to get out as the school hall filled with stifling smoke, and then he pushed the image away and, in the same instant, stooped to the diary that rested by the bed.

He took a deep breath, eyes closed.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

Then he opened it and began to read.

CHAPTER 65

Thomas put the book down after reading thirty days of entries from the first six months of the year and then all of the June entries, which ended abruptly on the sixteenth. The rest of the book was empty. He sat in the girl’s desk chair in silence, and by the end he felt only absence—hers—and failure—his.

There was nothing of value in the diary. It was a catalog of trivia: who was on
Top of the Pops
, what movies were on TV, who was going out with whom, what clothes she was buying or hoping to buy, an occasional glimpse of political feeling. It was a series of snapshots of the life of an ordinary sixteen-year-old middle-class English girl. Occasionally there were flashes of intellectualism—little tentative references to books she was reading (everything from James Herriot to Dickens), expressed with the teenager’s uneasy mixture of pretentious bluster and excited discovery so familiar to Thomas from his own students. At the same age, his jottings would have been much the same, he thought—a good deal less clothes, and correspondingly more sport—but otherwise about the same. She agonized more about her body, her hair, but probably less than most girls her age, though Thomas didn’t know what would have been normal in England then.

Alice wrote in a fat, open cursive full of flourishes, and all her dots—both periods and those above her
i
’s—were tiny circles. Her vocabulary was bland and slang-ridden, all things falling into three categories: the “total crap,” the “alright” (much of this), and the rarer but more fully expounded “ace,” “magic,” or “excellent.” A lot of things were “a doss,” which seemed to mean both easy and fun (watching movies with her friends was “an ace doss”), and less-satisfying experiences were marked with the deadpan “O Tragedy.”

Despite these minimal hints of personality, what really came off the page was the sense of community: a core group of high school girls whose names, or nicknames, appeared even on days Alice didn’t see them. “Didn’t get to see Pippa today,” she wrote. “Had a good laugh with the gang, but Liz was having her hair done and couldn’t come property shopping.”

What would that have been? Records? Clothes? The pretension of shopping for “property” was ridiculous and touching. They were just kids playing at being grown-ups.

“Debs and Nicki spent the whole day at Bruno’s: when me and Pippa came out of the pictures they were still there and had only bought two cups of coffee between them!” “Went scouring the horse with Pippa which was ace, but Liz, Debs and Nicki couldn’t get away. Their loss. It was brilliant. Beyond brilliant.”

And so it went on. The name that cropped up the most was Pippa. She was Alice’s best friend, the person who most clearly shared her politics and, more important, her taste in music. They went record shopping together and spent hours listening to their albums and singles: Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Yazoo, Elvis Costello, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Madness, Spandau Ballet, Blondie, Haircut 100, and New Order. Top of the list, of course, were XTC, who were edgy, clever, and local. Much of the diary was dominated by the extraordinary trajectory of the band’s career: the massive success of
English Settlement
and the appearance of their anthemic “Senses Working Overtime” single, followed by rumors that something had gone badly wrong with their foreign tour.

Alice had clearly picked over the music papers with a fan’s devotion, trying to build a clear sense of what was happening with what was supposed to be XTC’s world-conquering tour. This was to be, it seemed, their time. They had built a core audience over their previous albums, particularly
Drums and Wires
and
Black Sea
, and were the darlings of the music press. In March, her confidence seemed to stall a little, and a week into April it was clear that something terrible had happened. “They say Andy has stage fright,” she wrote. “How can Andy Partridge—one of the great performers in pop music today—have stage fright?” But she never found a satisfactory answer, and though she plaintively hoped that the cancellation of the tour was only a temporary problem, she seemed to recognize that the beloved local boys would never get the glory they deserved.

Thomas found himself smiling with nostalgia. If she had lived, Alice would have been about his age, and though her taste was, perhaps, eclectic to a fault, they shared a lot of common ground. Many of her favorite bands he had known and loved, and utterly forgotten. He liked her better for it, and because that faulty eclecticism gave the lie to some of her snooty pontificating about books and politics. She was smart, and the arguments she had with her friends about which was The Jam’s finest song, or whether Adam Ant was doing anything different from the New Romantics, and whether either amounted to a new kind of music, were serious discussions based on actual thought, albeit spiced with the mania of fandom. In these opinionated rants he heard her real voice, not the faintly moralistic posturing she inhabited when she talked literature and Labour Party politics. In the end she was just an ordinary kid as he had been, brighter than most, perhaps, more serious, but otherwise a typical teenager. It was hard to think of her dying at this age, harder still to think that the girls she talked about—the gang—were as likely as not to be those who had perished with her.

He was about to replace the book when it fell open and he realized that the diary went from mid-June—Alice’s last entry—to the end of July. An entire month had been razored out of the journal, and with them had gone any sense of what Alice had been doing in the weeks leading up to her death.

Thomas was considering this when he heard footsteps on the stairs outside.

CHAPTER 66

There was nowhere to hide. The box spring of the bed barely cleared the carpet, and the closet was too full of boxes. He scanned the walls quickly, but all he saw were windows.

They were old fashioned, with metal frames and wrought-iron hand latches. One of the three was all diamond panes in a lead lattice. Thomas crossed to it, opened it, and—pulse racing—was halfway out when he heard the footsteps at the door stop. He threw both legs out and lowered himself gingerly onto the ledge below, pushing the window shut behind him. He heard the rattle of the handle, then the creak of the door, but by then he was out.

The problem was that there was nowhere to go. He was standing on a ribbon of stone trim that ran around the sides of the turret. Thomas inched toward the corner to avoid blocking the sunlight as it filtered in through the window, but there was only the irregular stone and thin frame of the window frame itself to hold on to. He had pushed the window closed as calmly as he could, but he couldn’t latch it from the outside. For five seconds he stood out there in space, holding his breath, waiting for the window to kick open, sending him falling to his death as it did so.

He heard movement inside, then silence.

Thomas had half expected an ornamental balcony or a venerable old drainpipe that he could shin down, but there was nothing. In front of him was the long drive through fields and hedgerows, then the jagged, rust-colored fragments of Kenilworth Castle. He risked a look down and saw only the sheer sides of the turret, then the gravel forecourt.

Thirty-five, maybe forty feet
, he thought
. Broken legs at the very least if you try to jump. Or fall
.

A breeze whipped suddenly over his face, and he pressed his back into the building, flattening himself against the tower.

This could end very badly
. . .

Thomas had never been good with heights.

Should have tried to talk your way out
, he thought.
Or just hit him and run.

Both of which could have led to his being arrested.

Right
, he thought dryly
, and this lunatic high-wire act is way better . . .

He glanced down at the ledge again. It was maybe four inches wide. At a push he might edge his way around the tower, find his way onto the roof of the house proper, but one misstep—or one bad gust—and he’d be off and down. There was still no sound from inside. Thomas used his right hand to grip the thin metal frame above the window, and tried to get some purchase on the stone with the splayed fingers of his left. Slowly, with absolute caution and feeling the stone digging into his back, he turned his head toward the window and craned his neck.

The glass was beveled and cloudy, but he could make out a human shape, sitting on the bed, his back to the window. A man, he thought, though he couldn’t be sure. He was quite still. Thomas shifted fractionally, and a new leaded diamond of glass presented itself. This one was clearer in the center.

It was the steward, and he was reading Alice’s journal.

Then he was up, moving swiftly, turning. Thomas snapped his head away from the window. The action almost threw him off balance, and for a dizzying second he seemed to be leaning out into nothingness.

At the same moment, the window opened.

Thomas shrank flat against the wall and held his breath. He could see the steward’s pale hand on the window latch. If he leaned out and turned a little, he would see Thomas and then . . .

God knows what then
.

He was still thinking this when the window closed suddenly. A moment later the latch snapped shut. Then came the muffled creak and click of the door closing. Thomas twisted his head again and found the pane of glass he had used as a peephole.

The steward was gone, and he had taken Alice’s journal with him.

Thomas pressed his right hand to the window, but it didn’t give. He might be able to punch out a pane or two with his elbow, but the leading was so tight that he would still never get his hand in to free the latch without tearing out half the panes. Even if he could do that without falling, it would make one hell of a noise. If the steward caught him in the act, any kind of scuffle would send Thomas falling to his death.

Better work your way around the turret to where it joins the roof
, he thought.

He swallowed hard, staring fixedly off toward the castle remains, then took a single inching sidestep toward his left. Doing so stretched his right arm—still gripping the window frame—as far as it would go. He turned his head to look to the corner. A right angle. He couldn’t get around that with his face out. He’d never make it. The only way was to turn around so his face was against the stone, and to do that, he was going to have to let go of the window.

CHAPTER 67

It sounded easy, turning around to face the wall, but faced with the logistics of actually doing it on a four-inch ledge forty feet in the air, it suddenly seemed impossible. He began by turning his left foot, pivoting on his heel till he got his foot pointing toward the corner, all the while keeping his left palm flat to the wall. He was still gripping the metal edge of the window frame with the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand. There wasn’t much to hold so it was more a stabilizing influence than something that gave him real purchase. If he started to fall, he would not be able to stop.

Next he started to rotate his hips counterclockwise very slowly, keeping flush to the wall. As his shoulders began to follow the movement, rolling around to his left, he felt his arm twist along its length. His right shoulder was leaning out now, well over the ledge, and he felt the sickening sensation of the ground swimming up to meet him. His injured shoulder groaned, then shrieked with pain.

He unwound back to his former position, spine to the wall, and caught his breath. He waited, counting silently to ten. Then began the process again.

This time, when he reached the point where his left shoulder was against the wall, he began to walk the fingers of his left hand in toward his body. He had to get his arm between his side and the turret. That meant creating a space between his body and the house that was wide enough to pass his arm through.

He had started to sweat. He could feel the skin of his face cold in the wind. He took a deep breath, then counted down from three.

Two.

One.

He let go of the window, swung his aching right arm through the empty air as he leaned out and pulled his left arm through. He pivoted onto his toes, his right hand reaching for the corner as his left stabbed blindly for the window frame.

For a terrible moment he thought he’d missed it. There was just nothing there. Then his slashing, desperate fingers found that edge of metal trim and he seized it like Dumbo’s feather.

Except that Dumbo didn’t really need his feather, did he? So it’s a bad analogy. Because without your feather, you’re a stain on the flagstone forty feet below
.

Always helpful.

Still, he almost laughed. His face was mashed against the chill stone and he was still balanced precariously on a four-inch ledge, but it seemed like a triumph. A second later he began to inch toward the corner, which meant letting go of the window.

He suspected that holding on was not really helping his actual balance much at all. It was in his mind, that sense of stability through contact. Letting go wouldn’t make that much difference.

He got a grip on the corner with his right hand, and that helped. As he started to negotiate his way around, he was struck again by the rightness of what he had done. There was no way he could have done this with his back to the wall. Once around he could see his goal, a glorious ten feet away: the roof, tiled with ancient mossy slate and a row of chimneys. He was nearly there. Then—surely—he’d find that missing drainpipe. Or maybe some
Romeo and Juliet
-style ivy that, if old enough, would be as good as a ladder . . .