‘That sounds about right,’ said Rachel. ‘But it’s sad.’
‘What’s sad about it?’
‘Losing your innocence. It’s just about the worst thing that can happen. Isn’t that what Paradise Lost is all about?’
‘Innocence is overrated,’ said Laura. ‘Anyone who hankers after lost innocence is … well, I don’t trust them.’ They had reached the edge of the woodland and were peering aimlessly into it, wanting to find meaning in its tangle of greenery and undergrowth. Harry was behind them, tugging at Laura’s coat, trying to get her attention, instinctively but for no particular reason. ‘Look at him, for instance,’ she said, glancing down at her son, whose eyes met hers in a plaintive but unspecific appeal. ‘He still has his innocence. Do you envy him for it? He still thinks his Christmas presents are brought by a big bloke in a red suit, in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. What’s so great about that?’
It was almost dark now. Putting her hands into her pockets and pulling her coat tighter, Laura started to lead the way back down the path towards the village.
‘I could tell you a story,’ she said, ‘about what happens when someone longs too much for innocence.’
Rachel looked down at Harry. Their eyes met and he shrugged: neither of them could guess what his mother was talking about. Rachel took his hand as they walked back down the hill.
*
Keisha had left a casserole in the oven for them: all Laura had to do was boil some rice. They ate in the kitchen, after which Laura went upstairs to put Harry to bed. It always took longer than she would like: when she came back down and joined Rachel in the sitting room, she found that she had managed to light a good fire, with a neat pyramid of logs already flaming on a nest of kindling wood and back issues of the Guardian. Now Rachel was sitting in one of the two sagging but comfortable armchairs placed on either side of the fire, her eyes fixed on the screen of her smart phone.
‘This is a bit harsh,’ she said, looking up only briefly to say thank you as Laura put a glass of red wine down on the table beside her. ‘“A film that makes you want to stab out your eyes with red hot knitting needles.” And that’s one of the better reviews.’
‘What are you looking at?’ said Laura, sitting down opposite her.
‘I’m on the IMDb, looking at reviews of that film you showed me earlier.’
‘What a Whopper?’
‘Yes. It doesn’t seem to have many fans on here. I think your husband must have been in a small minority.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that he was a fan, exactly. He knew rubbish when he saw it. But Roger responded to books and films in all sorts of different, contradictory ways. That was one of the nice things about him. And also one of the most frustrating. And of course, everything was grist to his mill as a critic. Look — I’ll show you something.’
She left the room and returned carrying a thick, leather-bound A4 notebook. When she opened it Rachel could see that page after page was covered with dense, spidery handwriting. It was a catalogue of films, in roughly alphabetical order, all of them glossed with Roger’s fragmentary, rather cryptic annotations.
‘What does he say about it in there?’ Laura asked.
Rachel turned to the ‘W’ section and soon found What a Whopper.
Lame British comedy, she read, about a bunch of beatniks who travel to Loch Ness to build a model of the monster.
1962. Sequel to What a Carve Up! (1961)? Not really. Two of the same actors.
*Sequels which are not really sequels. Sequels where the relationship to the original is oblique, slippery.
‘What does this mean?’ Rachel asked, pointing to the asterisk at the beginning of the last line.
‘Ah, that means that something had given him the idea for an article,’ said Laura, craning forward to take a closer look. ‘Yeah, he was always doing that. Always coming up with ideas for pieces. When we first got married I was convinced he was some kind of genius and one day he was going to turn all this obscure knowledge into some great book, some academic masterpiece. I thought that’s what was driving him. It never occurred to me that it might have been something as simple as … nostalgia.
‘Moving to this house — that was the thing that began to open my eyes to what he was really like. I was pregnant with Harry and we had this clichéd idea that if we were going to bring up a child it would be a good idea to relocate to the country. Somewhere not far from Oxford, obviously.
‘So we started looking, and then, early in 2006, we found this place. I remember the morning we drove out here to look at it. It was a pretty hard winter that year, and this was in the last week of January. The day before, there’d been a heavy snowfall, and since then there hadn’t been much in the way of a thaw. Well, of course, that was what sold us, in a way. You can imagine how pretty this village looked, can’t you, when it was covered in snow? And the cottage itself … well, it just looked beautiful. Enchanting. The owners brought us inside, and made coffee to warm us up, and showed us around the house. We were both … taken with it, certainly, although I wouldn’t say that either of us was exactly in raptures at that point. As you can see, it’s a bit on the boxy side, and there were quite a few problems to do with damp and so on — none of which have really been sorted out. I could tell that Roger was unconvinced, was maybe having second thoughts about the whole thing. But that was before he saw the garden …’
Laura smiled to herself when she spoke this word, and stared, reminiscent, into the dancing flames of the fire.
‘It was the last thing the owners of the house showed us. Roger and I went out to look at it together, and when we got out on to the terrace we held hands, as much for warmth as anything else, because neither of us was wearing gloves. And after a few seconds, I could feel him squeezing my hand. Squeezing it so tightly that it was actually hurting. I turned to look at him and I saw this look in his eye that I’d never seen before. It was … it was kind of faraway and intense at the same time. It rather scared me, to tell the truth. I could tell that some weird, powerful emotion had come over him. So I said, “Roger, what is it? What’s the matter?” And he turned to glance at me, but only for a second or two, because then he turned away again and looked across the lawn and he said something. Not to me — he wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to himself. And all he said, in little more than a whisper, was: “The Crystal Garden …”
‘It was the first time I’d ever heard him use that phrase. It certainly wouldn’t be the last.’
She fell silent, until Rachel felt obliged to prompt her once more: ‘So what did he mean by it?’
‘I wasn’t sure at first. It was only afterwards that he explained. You saw the fountain in the centre of the lawn? It’s not working at the moment, of course. The pump stopped working a couple of years ago and now it’s one of many things that I need to get around to fixing. But it was working back then, and it formed a proper centrepiece to the garden. That was the first thing your eyes were drawn towards. And that day, I remember, it looked particularly stunning. The water had frozen, you see — that’s how cold it was. So you had this cascade, this waterfall of ice, tumbling over the different levels of the fountain. It looked like some sort of chandelier in the ballroom of a fairytale castle. There were icicles hanging from all the trees, the stream itself was frozen, and the lawn was a shimmering blanket of pure white. It did look kind of … eldritch, do you know that word? It means uncanny. Other-worldly. Rather like it was made of crystal. I thought that’s what Roger had meant, at first. But it turned out there was more to it than that.