They were sitting in the common room on a Friday night. The wind kept triggering a car alarm that seemed to pause when sworn at from a nearby window.
‘She’d been in hospital for an operation,’ said Anselm. ‘Before she was discharged, my father called us all together. He said that she wouldn’t be getting better and that we weren’t to tell her. I was nine. A few days later she came home. I took her a cup of tea, and she said, “I’ll be up and about before you know it,” and I replied, “No you won’t. You’re going to die.”‘
‘Did you tell the others that you’d broken rank?’
‘No. They would have seen it as a betrayal.’
‘Betrayal?’ Elizabeth repeated, as if she were talking to an invisible third party.
‘Yes, but from that moment my mother and I were free. We could grieve while she was still alive. We could face what was coming in the absence of lies. I hadn’t even realised that obeying my father would have left us trapped.’
‘Trapped,’ echoed Elizabeth again.
She was talking to an imagined presence, but Anselm hardly noticed because turning over the stone had uncovered forgotten emotion. His eyes prickled and he couldn’t speak without his breath staggering. ‘Don’t get me wrong … this is no fairy story about life winning out. Shortly before the end, she said, “I can hear the sounds of a playground.” A kid was kicking a ball against our fence. She was drifting off to sleep. But she let slip a confession. “It’s been a school for death and I’ve hardly learnt anything.”’
Elizabeth had been spellbound.
Anselm parked beneath the plum trees and wiped his eyes, astonished by the power and freshness of remembered grief. The siren faded, along with the protestations from an upstairs window Presently Larkwood’s bells found their strike and birds scattered over the valley.
While the loss of his mother remained painful to Anselm, it had opened his child’s heart to a very adult truth: what you would cling on to will pass away, like grass. Several times Elizabeth had returned to this subject with a sort of fugitive hunger, but only abstractly and when they were alone. They’d spoken of honesty between parents and children, of loving by letting go, of this day’s importance. Half the time, Anselm was lost in the forest of ideas, but it seemed to help Elizabeth. He sensed she wanted a distant companion while she made a very private passage. She’d always been one for conceptual clarity.
Anselm had recovered by the time he reached the cloister. He always saw things clearly after he’d cried. And he was now convinced that it was back then, on a Friday night, that Elizabeth had decided, one day to seek his help — long before the ‘not knowing and the not being able to care’ had become an accusation.
9
Elizabeth had found George before he got his head kicked in. He still didn’t know how she’d traced him, though he had his suspicions. The only person who knew about Trespass Place was Nino. And everyone near the Embankment knew Nino. So George had pictured Elizabeth beneath the bridges, tapping arms, lifting blankets, seeking the whereabouts of a man named Bradshaw She must have been sent Nino’s way; and she must have told him a great deal to make him reveal where George had gone to ground.
A pinprick of light had jigged in the distance, exposing the cobbles like scabs in the asphalt. It grew larger, making her outline darker than the darkness. She lowered the torch and he saw gold buckles on expensive shoes. The beam was cut and she said, ‘You walked out of court, George.’
He replied to the shadow ‘Yes, and I let Riley go.
‘We both did.’
Elizabeth sat down on the cardboard beside him. They looked out on the courtyard, the drainpipes and the bins. She produced a flask of whisky and two silver beakers. It started to rain. The drops pattered on the fire escape landing. They didn’t speak; they just sipped the warming malt.
She came frequently after that, always in the evening. They fell to talking of old times. George told her what he’d done before the triaclass="underline" baggage boy at the Bonnington, then one of a team in a night shelter for the homeless, and finally becoming its manager. He’d lost that job for gross misconduct after Riley was acquitted. Elizabeth’s story couldn’t have been more different: boarding school, Durham University and Gray’s Inn. After the trial she was made a deputy High Court judge. Her life had gone up, his had gone down. She too had married; they’d both had a son. Hers was called Nicholas; he was planning a trip to Australia.
‘What for?’
‘To get away from me.’ She laughed. ‘He’s grown too quickly’ Distantly she added, ‘He’s the very image of my father.’
Elizabeth never urged George to find a hostel; she never asked about the home he’d left behind, and the wife who couldn’t face him any more. She seemed to understand that sometimes there was no going back; or at least, not until one’s connections with the past had been changed. They just sat side by side beneath the fire escape sometimes chatting, sometimes silent. Then she’d go home.
One night she turned up with her work. It brought the ambience of the Old Bailey into this, his hideaway While she read, marking the page and swearing, he was sure she was ahead of him, waiting. Tension made him fidget. She asked him to keep still. Suddenly he blurted out, ‘It couldn’t have been any different.’
‘I know.’ She carried on reading.
‘Not after I was asked about my grandfather … the dropping of my first name.
‘I know’
‘I never saw that coming.’
‘No one did.’ She put her files and coloured pens in a bag and pulled out the whisky and the beakers. After they’d drunk several shots, she spoke of John’s fall on Lawton’s Wharf. The subject had hung in the air while she’d spoken of her own son. George opened out a newspaper cutting of the inquest and gave it to Elizabeth.
‘How did Riley do it?’
George couldn’t answer because — in truth — it was his fault. He’d sent his son to his death with an aside uttered during Countdown. He saw the smiling presenters; and he saw his boy fearful, stooping through a hole in the wire. He was only seventeen.
‘I suppose there’s no evidence.’
‘None.’
She turned, drawing the fall of hair behind an ear. A diamond sparkled on the lobe. ‘I’m implicated in what happened, George.’
‘No you’re not.’
‘I let Riley escape far more than you did.’ It didn’t sound condescending, just private and adamant.
‘You can keep the cutting.’ It was all he could do to reach her. She had almost left the planet.
When Elizabeth next came to Trespass Place she said her back couldn’t take it any more. She was very specific. The problem was degenerative changes at L5 and L6. ‘There’s a café round the corner.
They found a table in Marco’s by the window Then Elizabeth went to the counter without having asked him what he wanted. When she came back, he paled. She’d bought hot chocolate and toast. She’d done it on purpose. She’d remembered.
Three girls had given evidence against Riley It had taken guts, because they’d been terrified of the Pieman. But George had persuaded them to come forward. It had taken three attempts. And he’d done it over toast and cocoa. They’d said so in their witness statements.
‘Eat up,’ she said gravely.
George looked at the plate and mug in horror.
‘Go on,’ she repeated. ‘Take a sip.’
When he started eating, she said, ‘Have you ever wondered how evil can be undone?’
He nodded.
‘Me too.’
And that was it. George waited for the follow-up, but they just sat and ate toast and drank hot chocolate.