She tried to imagine what this sleepy little town must have been like, that day Gerry Grove went walkabout with his semi-automatic rifle. The news reports from England had described how the quiet town had been shattered by the violence of the event, a rude awakening from its peaceful slumbers, and the rest of the cliches journalists loved so much. lt wasn't a painting on the lid of a box of candy, or a still from a romantic movie. People lived and worked here, brought up their kids, grew their flowers. Some fell in love, some beat each other up, some tried to make a living, some tried to do something useful in the community ... and one of them, a selfabsorbed and lonely youth with a string of minor offences behind him, had a thing about guns.
Teresa, of course, came from a country where a lot of people had a thing about guns. She too had a thing about guns. There was nothing in the idea that was itself shocking, but for it to happen here, probably the last place you would expect it, was one step beyond the expectable.
just as the tourists in Port Arthur, Tasmania, the schoolchildren in Dunblane, the students in Austin, Texas, wouldn't have expected it. All were nice places, quiet and livable places, the sort of small towns that people moved to
rather than from. There were dangerous cities, and all cities had areas where no one in their right mind would walk alone or after dark, but still there remained in most people a profound, instinctive belief that bad things only happened in bad places. Bulverton was the sort of place you searched for, so to speak, a kind of comforting ideal.
What was it? Staring down at the large area of the town she could see from this place, Teresa tried to isolate and identify what it was she was responding to. lt was not just Englishness, nor prettiness, because England didn't have a monopoly on pretty places, and anyway Bulverton was too much of a muddle to be simply pretty. The area around her hotel was grim enough, and although grim in a particularly British way it was a quality of grimness that was commonplace to her. It could have been in almost any town anywhere. Maybe it was a sense of proportion: one building set against the rest, each one in its turn built to blend with the others. Scale came into it too: this was a town that had grown up in and around a small valley. American architects would have vied with each other to build the biggest, brashest place and grab the best view, but here the buildings seemed to work organically within a kind of consensus of what Bulverton meant to everyone who lived there.
It all made for a simple naturalness, and although she had been in the place for only a few hours and had been trying to sleep for most of those she already felt more deeply about the town than she ever had about Washington or Baltimore or even her agreeable dormitory town of Woodbrlidge.
She crossed the park again and headed for the church she had seen. lt was called St Gabriel's, and was built on a low rise and fronted with a small churchyard. She tried to read some of the headstones but without exception they had been made illegible by erosion. The door of the church was
locked and no one was around to open it for her.
Next to the church was a small garden, fenced and gated, but unlocked. A sign on the fence described its circumstance:
CROSS KEYS GARDEN. This is the Site of the Cross Keys Inn, Destroyed by a German Bomb at around 1. 00 pm on 17th May, 1942. It being a Sunday Lunchtime the Inn was full and there were many Casualties. Eleven Residents of Bulverton died, and TwentySix more were injured, the worst Loss of Life in the Town in a Single Incident during the World War. The Names of the Dead are Inscribed on a Plaque at the rear of the Memorial Garden.
Teresa pushed open the gate and walked in. The garden had not been allowed to become overgrown, but it was obviously not given regular attention. The grass of the tiny lawn was in need of cutting, and long shoots drooped from the trees and shrubs. She found the commemorative plaque on the wall, and pushed aside a long thorny shoot from a rose bush that was growing across it. She regarded the names, trying to remember them for later, in case she came across anyone still living in the town who was related. Her memory was fallible, so she found her notebook and jotted down all the surnames.
Eleven dead; that was fewer than Gerry Grove's victims last year, but it had been a major disaster. lt would have felt just as devastating in its day, even during a war, something so terrible it would never be surpassed.
Bulverton today was still in the aftershock of Gerry Grove's shooting spree, but in half a century would there be any more lasting memorial than this?
A sidestreet led away from the church and the memorial
garden, and Teresa walked along it, emerging after a short distance into a broad shopping street. This was the High Street, a fact she elicited from a sign attached to a wall on one of the intersections. Many people were moving around, going about their shopping. She walked from one end of the street to the other, looking at everyone, feeling that although it was still only her first morning she had nevertheless been able to see many different facets of life in the town. She kept her notebook open, and while she walked along she wrote down the locations of the police station, the library, the Post Office, the banks, and so on, all places she would probably be needing in the days ahead.
At a newsagent's she bought a town map, and a copy of the local paper. She glanced quickly through the pages as she walked along, but if the massacre was still on people's minds that fact wasn't reflected in the local news.
Outside the council offices a modem block, but built to blend unobtrusively with the rest of the town she saw at last an explicit reminder of the massacre.
A large sign had been erected in the shape of a clockface. The legend above it said: Bulverton Disaster Lord Mayor's Appeal. Where twelve o'clock would normally be was the figure
£5,000,000, and instead of two hands only one large one swept around, signifying what had been collected so far. lt presently stood at about twentyto, or at just over £3,000,000, and a red band had been painted in behind it.
Wreaths were laid on the ground beside the door to the building. Teresa stood a short distance from them, unsure of whether to go over and peer at the messages, feeling this would be intrusive, but at the same time she didn't want just to pass by, as if she had not noticed. lt was beginning to seep into her at last: a constant, background sense of the disaster. Not just the wreaths, the memorials, but the fact she was always thinking about it, looking for some sign of it.
She realized she had been seeking it in the expressions on the faces of passersby, and bearing a hitherto unremarked surprise that there were no more physical scars on the town, or more specifically the fact that the people at the hotel hadn't said anything about it. But people hid pain behind calm expressions.
Teresa knew she too was acting like that. What she ought to do was get straight down to what she had planned. Find people, talk to them. Were you here in town on the day it happened? Did you see Grove? Were you hurt? Was anyone you know killed? She wanted to hear herself say it, wanted to hear the answers, wanted to release all the pain that was pent up in these people and in herself