After about an hour we were both very tired and I thought it would be a good idea if we took a break. But Roger had a feverish glint in his eyes and would not suspend the hunt, even for a few moments. I offered to fetch him another cup of coffee, but he said he didn’t want one, so I just went to get one for myself.
I had been sitting on the bench by the reception desk for about ten minutes, drinking my coffee and attending to some emails, when I heard his cry. I have never heard such excitement, such exaltation — bordering on ecstasy — in a human voice before. ‘James!’ he called. ‘James — I think I’ve found it!’ Those were his words, but my impression was more that he was giving out a primal scream of joy. I put down my coffee, sprang to my feet and ran towards the cupboard but I had not been moving for more than five seconds before I heard a different kind of scream — the most terrible scream of fear — followed by a terrific crash. Or rather a series of crashes: three or four of them, each one louder than the last, culminating in what sounded almost like an explosion, the dying echo of which filled the warehouse like a reverberation, leaving behind it a shocking silence. In a few more seconds I was at the door of cupboard Number 11, where Horst was also standing, and where a scene of chaos confronted us. Half the contents of the cupboard were outside, in the corridor where we had been stacking them. Inside the cupboard itself was a vision of total disarray, with boxes, books, items of furniture and shattered crockery and glassware everywhere, forming a huge disordered pile, at the very bottom of which, crushed by the weight of all this junk, lay poor Roger’s already lifeless body.
The man from the reception desk came to hear what the noise was and then he went straight to phone for an ambulance. Horst and I began clearing away the debris that had crushed Roger’s body. We worked like demons now, tossing things to one side without looking at them, not bothering about whether we broke them or not as we did so.
I don’t know what else to tell you. The medics arrived on the scene quickly and Roger was pronounced dead as soon as they looked at him.
The next few hours are a blur. I remember only one detail, which is that in the course of digging through the junk in order to reach him, I spotted the item that he must have seen, and that must have inspired him to call out to me. It would have been at the very bottom of the pile, but in his eagerness to put his hands on it, he must have tried to pull it out from underneath, and that was what caused the huge, towering stack to tumble down. It was a metal can of the sort which might have contained a 16 mm film, and on the side of it was a label, upon which was written, in faded capital letters — more than seventy years old — Der Garten aus Kristall.
I opened up the can. It was full of old tobacco tins, most of them containing Deutschmark coins in small denominations. Also some buttons and ribbon and needle and thread and other things for sewing.
Perhaps it’s a good job he never saw that. Perhaps if he had, he might have died another kind of death.
*
Rachel was an early riser, and she was the first to get out of bed the next morning, although when she came down to the kitchen, Keisha had already arrived: she was making coffee and preparing Harry’s breakfast. Not wishing to disturb her, and finding the thought of conversation awkward, Rachel went out into the garden.
She sat on the old wooden bench again, as she had done the afternoon before. Once again, her eyes were drawn to the silent, broken-down fountain at the centre of the lawn. It was a shame that it didn’t work. Laura should really get it repaired. The garden still seemed attractive to Rachel, but no longer magical, no longer unreal.
After a few minutes Laura came out to join her. She was wearing bedsocks, and a jumper over her pyjamas, and a thick dressing gown over her jumper, and she was carrying two mugs of coffee.
They sat for a while drinking their coffee in silence.
‘Are you going to get the fountain fixed, then?’ Rachel asked.
‘I don’t think so. I think I’m going to put this place on the market.’
‘And move back to Oxford?’
‘Maybe. Or maybe London. I’ve been applying for professorships.’
Laura shivered, and leaned forward on the bench. It was far too cold to be sitting outside.
‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘I don’t want Harry to turn out like Roger.’
Rachel wasn’t sure how to interpret this.
‘Obsessive, you mean?’
‘Oh, he can obsess as much as he likes, as long as he obsesses over something useful.’
‘You mean, something other than the broadcast dates of old black and white films?’
Laura corrected her quickly. ‘I mean something other than the past.’ She sipped her coffee, and gripped the mug in both hands, warming her fingers. ‘Like a lot of people, Roger was convinced — even if he never really admitted it, even to himself — that life was better, simpler, easier, in the past. When he was growing up. It wasn’t just a hankering for childhood. It was bigger than that. It was to do with what the country was like — or what he thought it had been like — in the sixties and seventies.’
‘Before I was born.’
‘A long time before you were born. The culture was different back then. Very different. For Roger, it was about welfarism, and having a safety net, and above all … not being so weighed down by choice all the time, I suppose. He hated choice. The very thing that Henry Winshaw — and every government minister after him — said we should have more of was the thing Roger hated most. I mean, think about it. Think about that image, the one he kept coming back to, over and over.’
‘The crystal garden?’
‘Not just the garden. Everything about the memory of watching that film. The whole … texture of it. Waiting for his father to come home from work — from the same place he worked for forty years. His mother in the kitchen, cooking dinner — the same dinner she always cooked on that night of the week. Can’t you see how secure that must have felt? The beautiful, blanketing safety of it? Even the fact that the film came on television that afternoon and he happened to be watching it. That wasn’t his choice, you see. Somebody else had made that choice for him. Some scheduler at ATV, or Chris’s grandfather — it doesn’t matter who it was, the only thing that matters is it wasn’t Roger. The whole thing that defined that situation, and the whole beauty of it, as far as he was concerned, was passivity. Other people were making choices for him. People he trusted. He loved that. He loved the idea of trusting people to make decisions on his behalf. Not all of them. Just some. Just enough so that you were free to live other parts of your life the way that you wanted. I suppose, apart from anything else, that’s one of the definitions of a happy childhood, isn’t it? But Roger also thought he could remember a time when we all felt that way. A time when we trusted the people in power, and their side of the deal was to treat us … not like children exactly, but like people who needed to be looked after now and again. As I suppose many of us do.’
‘It seems … a bit naive,’ Rachel ventured.
‘Yes,’ said Laura, crisply. ‘It is. Life’s not like that. In fact it gets less and less like that all the time.’ She glanced at Racheclass="underline" a sly, rapid glance. ‘I know that you’ve noticed how I talk to Harry. You think I’m too tough on him.’
‘A bit,’ Rachel had to admit.