Glancing at the taxi, and getting itchy feet, Nancy said, ‘When it’s all over’ — her heart began to run, and her face became warm; she’d turned all serious — ‘if I stick by my man … will God turn him away?’
The monk seemed mildly stunned, like Uncle Bertie when he checked the final results against his betting card. He reached for a pair of glasses and, thinking better of it, put them back.
‘Surely I can’t be less constant than God?’ she persisted.
‘No, you can’t,’ he said. He was staring at her, thinking through his own answer.
Nancy was surprised: she hadn’t expected to give a monk some guidance on his own turf. I mean, she thought, it’s all fairly obvious, isn’t it? But then again … Babycham had said, ‘He’s not worth it,’ and her dad had said, ‘There has to be give and take, and he doesn’t give.’ They were both right. But no one seemed to understand. It wasn’t about her gaining or him deserving.
Nancy wished the monk a very merry Christmas and clambered into the taxi.
‘Wormwood Scrubs,’ she said, leaning forward.
The driver frowned his disbelief. ‘The prison … in London?’
‘Yes,’ said Nancy gaily ‘my husband’s a guest on D-wing.’
‘It’ll cost you a bomb … it’s hours away.
‘I’ve got my problems,’ said Nancy with a sigh, ‘but money isn’t one of them.’
They pulled out of the monastery and Nancy’s chauffeur began to chat, just like Cindy at the hairdresser’s. Nancy was a ‘somebody’, of course. She was the wife of a villain. He wanted to know what he’d done, but was too scared to ask outright. But he’d get there, like Cindy long before they got to London.
According to Inspector Cartwright, Riley had already received one visitor: a lieutenant-colonel in the Salvation Army.
9
George didn’t look back after leaving Nancy He followed the path towards Larkwood with a growing sense of loneliness and loss. It was blinding, for he trudged on, losing sight of his surroundings, save for the small stones underfoot. Birds whistled in the trees that were banked tight against the verge.
When George looked up, he saw a woman coming towards him. At first he didn’t recognise her because she was out of place. A monastery was not her normal stamping ground, although, that said, The Sound of Music was her favourite film. He became confused in a terrible way a way that had come with the beating to his head. For there were times, now, when he doubted what he experienced, when he tramped through a world that he didn’t fully understand. Such is the importance of memory, and the things it saves; for, as George well knew, it’s only by remembering the lot that we can hope to grasp the lot. And when you cannot grasp the lot, you become very circumspect indeed. But Emily was there, right in front of him, advancing along the same imaginary line as if they were on the top corridor of the Bonnington. Father Anselm appeared behind her … he ran past him, asking of Nancy and George mumbled something, keeping his eyes on this apparition from his past that was crying.
In the same drunken spirit of doubting — and of terror that someone would shortly explain what was really happening — he said goodbye to a parade of monks as if he were the Pope. The boot of Emily’s car was open … robed figures carried a crate of apples, two bottles of plum brandy and some preserved pears. He was mumbling to himself while someone took his arm by the elbow The passenger door banged shut. He opened the window as if he needed the air to breathe. A small crowd smiled and waved and Emily was at his side unable to get the key into the ignition. Someone did it for her, and she laughed into a handkerchief. A long corridor of oak trees passed slowly as if the car were standing still. The lane opened out onto gentle hills with a scattering of houses, and the place that had given him shelter was gone.
‘Emily’ said George, very sure of himself now, ‘are we going home?’
‘Yes.’
He looked at the hedgerows, thinking of the other man he’d seen in Mitcham. ‘I tried to come back, once.
‘I know,’ said Emily She understood. ‘No one has ever taken your place. Peter was nothing more than a friend. He was to me what Nancy was to you. And God knows, George, we have needed friends, if only to bring us back together.’
Emily explained that the house would look very different, that it was new and clean. The neighbours hadn’t changed but someone round the corner had bought a dog that they let loose at night.
‘Why do you want me back?’ asked George, pulling at the sleeves of his blazer.
‘Because I found you again, in your notebooks,’ she replied, reaching for the gear stick, but not changing gear. ‘I don’t know how I could have ever let you go. Maybe I lost sight of the right and left of things, the front and back, the top and bottom … everything that brought us together. I didn’t only find you, George. I found myself.’
George slept — not the sleep of exhaustion through labour, or the fatigue of strong emotion. A great weariness had taken hold of him, as though a whole life had ended. He woke somewhere in London, unsure again of his senses until the car parked outside the home he’d left so many years ago. It was very dark.
‘Can we start again?’ asked Emily her voice heavy with hope.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
They both looked through the windscreen at the antics of a stray dog. George had strong views on dogs — especially those that barked.
‘Can we carry on from where we left off?’
‘That makes a lot of sense,’ said George. ‘Of course, I can’t remember what’s happened in between.’ He took her hand. ‘It’ll be as though nothing ever happened.’
That, of course, wasn’t true. It was a joke to bridge the distance between honesty and expectation. Emily unlocked the front door and George came home, as he’d gone, without any luggage. What did he have to show for it? Nothing you could put your finger on, he thought merrily except apples, plum brandy and some pears in ajar.
10
A long-forgotten Gilbertine once had the wild notion that Larkwood’s dead should be broken up by aspen roots. The proposal had been enthusiastically endorsed without a mole’s breath being spent on the implied logistics: the need to dig through the roots for each internment. But perseverance with the shovel won out. And so, years later, white wooden crosses lay sprinkled between the slim trunks, as if they’d grown with the dandelions. A railway sleeper had been sunk into a facing bank for the comfort of visitors. Anselm and the Prior sat in the middle, wrapped in their cloaks.
‘When I look at everyone involved in this case,’ said Anselm, ‘Mrs Dixon, Walter Steadman, Elizabeth, George, Nancy me … we’re all, in varying degrees, responsible for what happened; but in varying degrees were not to blame.’
‘You left out Mr Riley’
The omission had not been deliberate, which, thought Anselm, was telling. It showed that Anselm was undecided on something of great importance. Inspector Cartwright had, with a marginal lapse of propriety, shown the text of Riley’s interview to Anselm. There were hardly any questions. He just spoke into the tape machine, sometimes so fast that the transcribing typist couldn’t catch the words. Each page contained multiple ellipses. It was (in their joint experience) a unique mixture of honesty, insight, right thinking and, fundamentally a defining self-regard. At the end, when he’d recounted all he’d done, and how and (most strangely of all) why he said to the officers at the table, ‘Look, I’m crying.’ With a hand he’d touched his face as if it belonged to someone else. Inspector Cartwright said he kept saying it, looking around the room. It was as though he were announcing an achievement.