Dryden heard the cathedral bell toll the hour and he thought of Laura in her hospital bed at The Tower. Later, he would visit, as he always did. The tiredness increased, fuelled by the cocktail.
‘I guess I should have a look round Alder’s yard then,’ he said.
Russell stood, conversation over. Clearly he charged by the minute.
Dryden considered his miniature umbrella. It was too early, he argued, to visit Laura. He feared long visits, the possibility that he might say what he sometimes thought: that he’d rather they’d both died that night in Harrimere Drain, rather than having to endure this carapace of a life, a shell in which he lived on one side of consciousness while she existed on the other. He was half-alive, tied to a woman who was half-dead.
He bought himself another drink and sat in the shadows watching Garry lose at pool. He thought about himself, about his nightmare self, dying in the tunnel on the beach, and about the PoW, lying in his tunnel for maybe sixty years.
‘Someone should care,’ he said out loud, so that Garry nodded in agreement to cover up his own embarrassment.
The archaeologists clearly saw the discovery as an inconvenience, a temporary setback in their attempts to uncover the Anglo-Saxon chariot burial. The police were little better, convinced a man who had lain unmourned for more than half a century could go quietly to a fresh grave. Dryden sank his cocktail and rang Humph on the mobile. Five minutes later he was outside in the smog, a wraithlike figure on the pavement edge, waiting for the Capri’s sickly orange headlights to emerge from the gloom.
6
Humph brought the Capri to a halt by a lone poplar, its black trunk reflecting the cold white light of the moon. Out on the fen, beyond the city, the evening was clear and brittle, the sky a planetarium turning slowly overhead, the vanished sun an amber smudge to the west. Dryden considered their destination gloomily, a line of buildings broke the horizon like an Atlantic convoy. The road sign, pointing drunkenly down into the black earth, read simply ‘Ten Mile Bank’. It looked like the kind of place that couldn’t afford a village idiot.
They were just twenty-five minutes from the centre of Ely, but they’d travelled back decades in time. A vestigial mist lay in the Forty Foot Drain, obscuring any small boats tied up by the village wharf. On top of the flood bank ran half a mile of intermittent civilization: tied cottages, a Methodist chapel, a supplier of tractors and heavy agricultural gear, and a featureless brick working-men’s club with a neon sign that didn’t flicker because it didn’t work. The club was subsidized by a large farming conglomerate which owned everything you could see, including the horizon.
At the end of the bank there was a T-junction where the village’s only street met a B road. Set back from the junction was the biggest local employer, a sugar beet factory dominated by three 120-foot metal cylinders you could see from the coast thirty miles to the north, trailing white smoke across the sky like the Queen Mary entering New York harbour. The moon caught the smoke now, three great plumes of spectral light obscuring the stars lying low along the edge of the distant sea.
Humph swung the cab into a lay-by opposite the factory gates and pulled up outside a roadside café. The temperature was falling fast, the sun long gone in the west. The café’s exterior was a brutal example of post-war utilitarianism: a single-storey concrete façade with a lone flourish – a carved stone block showing an Italianate scene of a Roman ruin overgrown by exotic flowers, below the just-discernible stencilled words Il Giardino – The Garden. Steam fogged its metal-framed windows, obscuring the interior.
‘Usual?’ said Dryden, climbing out and not waiting for an answer.
He’d known Humph for five years now, but it seemed more like a lifetime: a wasted lifetime. Since the crash Dryden had not driven a car, haunted by the claustrophobia and the panic which had swept over him as they’d slipped beneath the waters of Harrimere Drain. Humph had ferried him about in those weeks after the accident, waiting patiently outside The Tower Hospital on the outskirts of town while he sat by Laura’s bedside.
Eventually Dryden had taken the job on The Crow and dumped his Fleet Street career. Laura’s coma, the latest example of the newly diagnosed Locked In Syndrome, had dragged on for weeks, to months, and into years. Humph, meanwhile, had effortlessly evolved into Dryden’s informal chauffeur. Daytimes were spent dozing in the cab, but for Dryden’s occasional travel demands. They spent a lot of time going nowhere, but they were company for each other, like book ends.
So no need to wait for Humph’s reply. Three fried eggs, six rashers of bacon, one ciabatta sandwich. Sensible eating rules, which Humph made occasional efforts to enforce, did not apply after dark.
The interior of the café was a surprise for visitors. The tables had checked cloths and Chianti bottles held guttered candles. The walls were testimony to the impossible dream that Ten Mile Bank, and its disparate community of far-flung farms and smallholdings, could support an Italian restaurant. Pictures of Venice hung in gilt frames, plastic bunches of grapes decorated the beams along with cascades of garlic and chillies. A high shelf held a line of wine bottles. Dryden loved the place, chiefly because it reminded him of where he had met Laura, in her father’s north London Italian café.
Like a thousand other institutions attempting to introduce the British to fine food, Il Giardino had long ago resorted to the lucrative trade of supplying the Great British Breakfast. The counter was standard greasy spoon: Formica stained by a generation of spilt tea. And while a chalkboard offered spaghettial aglio, lasagne verde and Bolognese, an array of frying pans indicated that the all-day breakfast was indeed the best seller at £4.95, with tea and two slices of fried bread. Humph’s ‘usual’ was, Dryden noted with satisfaction, already bubbling on the grill.
The man behind the counter was always behind the counter. Dryden called him Pepe, as everyone did. Pepe Roma was, Dryden judged, in his mid to late thirties. Italian film-idol looks had been severely marred by a decade frying food under artificial lights and a lifetime of turnip-nipping Fen winters. He swept a scrubbed hand back through already thinning jet-black hair. The curve of his skull caught the neon light above the grill.
‘Dryden,’ he said. ‘What can I get you?’ Dryden was an erratic and eccentric eater, usually preferring to snack from provisions squirrelled away in his coat pockets.
He considered the chalkboard but let his eyes rest on the ancient, but still gleaming, espresso machine.
‘Corretto?’
Pepe went below the counter and reappeared armed with a murderous looking bottle of grappa. ‘You don’t drive, eh?’
There was only one other customer, a lorry driver with forearms like rolled pork joints, who sat reading yesterday’s Sun over a plate wiped clean with dunked bread.
Pepe looked at Dryden with eternally disappointed eyes: ‘Focaccia?’
Dryden was one of the few daytime customers who could be inveigled into eating something Italian. Usually he bought freshly baked bread, olives and cheese for his regular late-night meal at The Tower.
‘Sure. Join me for a drink?’
Pepe brought the bread over. It was a rich nutty brown and still warm. Dryden broke it and offered his host some. They ate in silence while Dryden slurped the corretto and Pepe sipped from a small glass of grappa. Outside, through an oval Dryden had cleared in the steam, Humph ate at the wheel of the Capri – a picture of manic concentration.