While Laura returned to the study to continue writing, Rachel took her coffee outside. As she had expected, the garden was impressive, with the generous lawn dominated, at its centre, by a classical stone fountain more than six feet high, although no water was cascading today over its three lichen-encrusted tiers. Harry and Keisha were playing down by the stream and took no notice of Rachel as she found a rickety wooden bench next to a rhododendron bush and sat down on it, positioning herself carefully between the many splashes of bird shit. Now that the sun seemed to have disappeared for good, it promised to be a cold afternoon. She shivered slightly.
It was an odd feeling, being here at her tutor’s house. Had she crossed a boundary, by coming? Had Laura crossed a boundary, by inviting her? She had not asked herself these questions before, and it was a bit late to be asking them now. Instead of welcoming her, Laura seemed to have viewed her arrival as an interruption, and for that matter the whole atmosphere of the house and the village made her feel like an intruder. The train ride to Didcot had taken only fifteen minutes and yet, thanks to the stillness and isolation of this place, the relative bustle of Oxford itself seemed already thousands of miles away. It wasn’t just a question of distance, either: Rachel felt, somehow, that in the last hour she had made a long journey through time, back to some far-off, half-forgotten era in her early life. To her childhood, even? This garden certainly bore no resemblance to her mother’s cramped old patio garden in Leeds; and it was at least three times the size of her grandparents’ garden in Beverley, where she had also spent a good many summers. No, these were not the images that were coming to mind this afternoon, as she sipped her coffee cautiously and looked around her. But still, there was an unmistakable aura of childhood about this place: not a badly off, urban, South Yorkshire childhood, such as Rachel’s had been, but a cosseted, Home Counties, 1950s childhood, of the sort with which Rachel was also familiar, if only in a second-hand way, through countless vintage children’s novels which had been her favourite choice of reading matter at the local library when she was growing up. It was all here: the spreading cedar tree which just cried out for a tree house to be built amidst the cluster of its lower branches; the shallow stream at the edge of the lawn, traversed by a footbridge, ideal for those long Sunday afternoon games of Poohsticks; the ramshackle shed which could, without too much effort or imagination, be converted into the makeshift headquarters of a junior detective club. And above all, that fountain: looking a little derelict and melancholy now, but otherwise the perfect centrepiece for a garden which felt eerily like a stage or a film set, on which idealized vignettes of a middle-class childhood were designed to be acted out. That would explain Rachel’s own growing sense of unreality, at any rate.
After another fifteen or twenty minutes, Laura beckoned her inside and showed her up to her room. It was on the second floor (she had not even realized there was a further floor) and turned out to be a low-ceilinged but otherwise spacious bedroom running the whole depth of the house, with windows looking out over both the front and the back gardens. The room should have been cosy but there was an airlessness about it, and a feeling of neglect. The books which spilled out from shelves ranged along every wall were sheened with a fine layer of dust. Glancing at them, Rachel could see that they were mainly devoted to cinema history and film theory.
‘Oh dear, it’s a bit cold in here, isn’t it?’ Laura said, laying a hand on the one small radiator. ‘I’ll get Keisha to bring up a fan heater. And what are these doing here? They should have been moved ages ago.’
She was referring to two large cardboard boxes, crammed to the brim with old VHS tapes. Her curiosity aroused by this display of antique technology, Rachel knelt down to look at the titles.
‘Wow. I’ve never heard of most of these,’ she said. The first tape she had picked up was labelled THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT BBC 2 24.2.85/THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN BBC2 3.10.87.
‘Well, you’re looking at my husband’s pride and joy,’ Laura said. ‘Or rather, a tiny portion of it. There are thousands more — and I do mean thousands — down in the cellar. Whether that’s a good place to keep them, I don’t know. I can’t think what else to do with them at the moment. Oh God, I’ve been looking for this one for ages.’
She plucked out another tape, its cardboard case torn and patched up with Sellotape. Rachel craned over to see the title.
‘What a Whopper?’ she said, amused and disbelieving. ‘What on earth’s that?’
‘Believe it or not, this is one of the films I’m supposed to be writing about. You certainly wouldn’t catch me watching it for pleasure. In fact it’s hard to believe that anybody ever did. Do you think you could help me take these down to the cellar as well? I don’t want them to be in your way.’
They picked up a cardboard box each and began the slightly hazardous business of carrying them down the narrow, uneven staircase.
‘Why are you writing about it, if it’s so bad?’ Rachel asked. ‘The film, I mean.’
‘Well, the plot — such as it is — involves the Loch Ness Monster. I haven’t got a clue what I’m going to say about it, but in this business you always win Brownie points for digging up something obscure. Roger was particularly good at that, I must say.’
And when they reached the cellar, it was easy to see why that might have been. It had been excavated to quite some depth, so that it was easy for both of them to stand upright. And it was filled with boxes: beneath the glare of the two naked lightbulbs that hung from the ceiling, Rachel could see at least thirty or forty of them, some filled with books or files or papers, but most simply crammed to the top with more videotapes and DVDs.
‘Wow,’ said Rachel. ‘He was quite a collector, wasn’t he?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Laura. ‘Roger never did anything by halves.’
They put their boxes down near the bottom of the stairs and then stood, for a while, in wordless contemplation of the scene of orderly profusion laid out before them. From somewhere in the cellar there emanated a faint, monotonous, electrical hum, which somehow seemed to accentuate the otherwise absolute silence. The light from one of the bulbs had started to flicker uncertainly. There was a damp, mouldering smell which made Rachel fear for the well-being of Roger’s collection, and a piercing chill which made her shiver not just with cold but with sadness. She was keenly aware that she was looking at more than just a jumble of files and boxes. These were the last remains of a human being: all that was left of Laura’s husband.
Laura’s only comment was: ‘What a mess. I’ve got to do something about it soon.’ And then: ‘Come on, it’s getting late. We’d better have this walk before it gets dark.’
She turned and led the way up the stairs, much to the relief of Rachel, who could not get out of there quickly enough. She had always hated cellars.
On the ground floor, Laura detoured into the kitchen, where Keisha was busy loading a full basket of washing into the washing machine.
‘Did you get the parcels ready?’ Laura asked.
‘On the table,’ Keisha answered, without looking up.
From the kitchen table, Laura picked up a large, eco-friendly canvas shopping bag, which seemed to be heavier than she was expecting.
‘Do you think you could take the other one?’ she said. ‘Sorry to be a bore, but this has become a bit of a weekend ritual.’
Rachel grabbed hold of another bag, and glanced down at the contents: tins and packets of food, a jar of instant coffee and some boxes of breakfast cereal.