‘Really never?’
‘I didn’t dare dream.’
‘Look, we can talk later. First we have to look through her papers.’
‘We? You’re the executor. I’m nothing.’
‘She’s gone, Eugene. She’s taken the past with her.’
‘Has she? Some of it is ours too, remember.’
We made three piles – papers to be dealt with urgently, ones that could wait, and others of no apparent significance. At first we worked without speaking. I thought she was thinking what I was thinking. But I was wrong. I should have had an inkling of it when she handed me a particularly dull-looking bundle to look through, and then noticed how carefully she scrutinised her own clutch of documents from a previously unopened drawer. When I looked at her again she returned my stare with an expression of such profound resignation that I set my own papers aside. I’d be proved right in thinking she’d made a discovery. But something about her made me stay silent.
So I said, ‘I think we deserve a break.’
‘You do?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Suggestions?’
The worm that had been squirming in my brain since we started the task – probably even before we left the chapel – seemed to speak to me. It’s now or never, it said. In an hour or so it will be dark. Piers will come for her and the opportunity will be lost for ever.
So, as casually as I could, I came out with it: ‘Why not a walk in the Gardens?’
‘Are you serious? With the snow still falling?’
‘I’m sorry. It was a silly suggestion.’
She turned her head towards the window. I rejoiced that her beautiful hair no longer had to be shared with Berenice. Once, during a quarrel, she had said to me, Eugene, how can you possibly be my brother, with that black head of your’s. But when I went to cry in my room, she came to find me.
The sky had lightened a little and the snow on the pagoda seemed almost sunlit. Then she turned to me and smiled.
‘No… no. Perhaps we should do it.’
I took her coat from the hall stand and wrapped it around her. Even with my eyes closed I knew the exact span of her shoulders and rightly anticipated the firmness of her arms.
‘Eugene, you can’t be shivering. It’s not that cold in here.’
She knew. I’m sure she knew.
Curiously, even in the snow there were people queuing to go into the Gardens.
‘Eugene! It’s eight pounds fifty to get in.’
‘When we used to climb over the wall for free.’
We did. There used to be a spot just out of sight of the entrance where the branch of a tree in the pavement grew over the wall, and we were agile enough to climb it in a few seconds flat.
Once we’d paid and gone inside, without a word we made for that stretch of wall and looked up. The branch – massive now – was still there. As I looked it became attenuated in my mind until it was barely the thickness of an arm, with Melanie desperately hanging there.
‘Help me Eugene. My skirt’s caught.’
‘Wait. I’ll climb back up to you.’
Then – just like now – I was flustered and clumsy.
‘You’ve torn it, you silly boy.’
‘I couldn’t help it.’
‘Mother will be livid.’
I do not think the playing in the chapel had ever left my mind. And as the sound intensified it evoked an episode that was not unfamiliar. Even Beethoven would have flinched at the violence of the struck chord, and the expletives that followed.
‘Eugene, what have you done?’
My sister was more rational. ‘It wasn’t his fault.’
‘Melanie. You’ll go to your room and remain there till dinner. As for you, Eugene… come here.’
As my cries faded in my memory into a concoction of like episodes and Beethoven, the branch we had been staring at regained its uncompromised girth.
Melanie said, ‘Look, I can almost reach it.’
‘Shall we then?’
‘Mm, not sure. But we could come back one day in old clothes.’
I wanted badly to tell her that my punishment at the hands of my mother had been no more than the blow; that being locked in the attic until the following morning had let me dwell undisturbed on the images of her body as I attempted to free her. The piece of torn cotton remains to this day between the leaves of my wallet – where it will stay. And the branch? Well, if one looks closely there is still a scar where I carved away the offending twig with my penknife. And I have that too.
I will not dwell on the years that followed. Melanie went to St Paul’s Girls’ School as a day pupil, and I to a far less meritorious boarding school near Taunton called Hatchett’s. After delivering me there, Berenice never came again. But Melanie did whenever she’d saved up enough pocket money. When holidays came our first thoughts were always to escape to the Gardens. Hours at a time we would have together, for Berenice never varied her practise routine. We knew the Gardens like we knew each other’s face: every path and shrubbery, almost every tree. And hours of dreaming of foreign lands, hidden in the lush vegetation of the greenhouses.
Our path led us between the great temperate glasshouse and the pond that, until the previous week, had hosted a skating rink. We ignored them. Our destination was that nearby little temple of sweltering heat where even in mid-winter huge water lily pads float in their tank above giant golden carp, and festoons of flowers fall to the surface from the roof. There was no doubt about our meeting of minds. The memories came flooding back.
‘Look, Eugene!’
‘Oh!’
I could not believe there was still a notice telling us that a single lily pad could support the weight of a child.
‘Help me up. I’m smaller than you. This one, near the edge.’
‘One, two, three… hup.’
‘I’m on.’
‘It’s true!’
‘Look at me, Eugene. I’m floating.’
‘Get off, quick. Someone’s coming.’
‘It’s moving away. Hold it, Eugene.’
There was tremendous splash, answered immediately by a voice from the door. ‘Hey, you kids. What do you think you’re doing?’
‘Run!’
We ambled on, two black figures against the white snow. There was no plan, but this was no aimless wandering. Like marbles rumbling in a bowl our destination was precisely determined. So at last we found ourselves looking up at the great pagoda – that relic of pre-empire, inert and seemingly impregnable in its red and green livery, that neither of us had dared mention.
In those days the door at its base had never been open but that had not deterred us, with a builders’ ladder nearby. On the third tier there was a panel that could be prized out. We went there several times, that last summer holiday, when I was back from boarding school and Berenice was on one of her tours. It happened the day she was coming back, and I suppose that might have precipitated it. I mean the knowledge that the opportunity might not come again. But we were too naïve to realise that our presence would not go unnoticed. The clattering of footsteps on the stairs below brought about a rapid semblance of decency. We recognised the red and perspiring face of one of the gardeners.
‘My God, what have you two been up to? How old are you? Right, get your coats on.’ Suddenly his eyes gleamed. ‘I’ve seen you two before, haven’t I?’
I don’t know what I would have done in his position. Nothing, I think. But he’d caught us once before picking flowers. He took us to the head gardener and a policeman escorted us home. Berenice had just returned and her bags were still unopened beside the piano. She could not recognise compassion – or did not choose to.