Before the Ruins

by Victoria Gosling

  I cried out, “Peter!” I think I cried it out more than once. A charge volted through me from the roots of my hair to my fingernails. Peter was lost. Peter might be hurt. Where was Peter? I wanted Peter.

  I barged my way forward and knelt. It was a man, a man in a beautiful navy-blue cashmere coat. There was quite a big pool of blood. The rain was falling upon it. I reached out a hand and touched the man’s hair. It was dark, but it was not Peter’s hair.

  “Don’t touch him,” someone said. “You’re not supposed to—”

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  “But you have to wait. You can’t move them. An ambulance is coming.”

  “Do you know him then?” A woman this time.

  “No.” I stood up.

  One of the men was looking upward. “He came off the top,” he said. “And he came all the way down.” He was a big, bald man. He spoke almost with reverence. There was the approaching throb of a siren.

  As children, Peter and I had dreamed of coming across a great mystery, a puzzle that only we could solve by means of deciphering various clues. What was in it for us? What reward had we expected?

  More recent arrivals pressed forward. There was the urge to see. The man was hidden again from sight by the crowd. The ambulance—or was it the police?—drew nearer. Either way, soon the real detectives would arrive. They would get their tape out and seal off the area. Out would come the notebooks, the pencils to take down the answers to their questions. I had seen it all before.

  * * *

  The phone at the Whites rang and rang. I hung on grimly, estimating the time it would take for either the vicar or Patricia to lay aside their book, put on their slippers, and descend the long and winding vicarage stairs. Eventually, Patricia picked up.

  “Peter?” Her voice was flustered, hopeful. I imagined her hurrying down in her flannelette, gripping the bannister, thinking I was her son. I felt bad for not waiting till the morning.

  “No, it’s me. It’s … Andy.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry it’s so late.”

  “Is there news, dear?”

  “No, not yet. Listen, are you sure you can’t remember who Peter was working for?”

  “No, I told you. I thought I had it written down, but I’ve been through everything, everything in the bureau, and all of Richard’s papers in case I’d … It was … it was two names and one of them was a foreign—” She was as close to tears as I had ever heard her.

  “But you do have Peter’s address? Thing is, I thought I’d pop round. I mean, it’s late but he’s likely to be home now. If he’s not gone away, that is.”

  I waited while she fetched her address book and made her repeat it to me until I had it by memory. Birthday cards, Christmas cards, thank-you cards—to Patricia, they were what separated us from the beasts. I didn’t doubt she still sent cards to people she hadn’t seen in fifty years.

  “He might be cross. Do you think he’ll be cross, Andy? When he was still at home, he’d have the most frightful rages if I went near his room. His bed would be full of toast crumbs and there wouldn’t be a teacup left anywhere else in the house…” She trailed off. “You’ll let us know, won’t you?”

  I said that I would. As I waited for the taxi to arrive, I tried to remember Peter’s “frightful rages” but couldn’t really. What temper Peter had, he kept in check around me. When I looked back it was always me throwing my weight around, losing my rag. But Peter? Peter had gone underground. He had been evading me for so long, it was hard to say exactly when it’d started.

  The cab pulled up and I got in. As soon we pulled away, I realized I had neither my umbrella nor my shopping, but I didn’t think for a moment of turning back. I felt it, bone deep, the sudden conviction that Peter was not dead, that Peter was hiding, and I was going to find him, really find him, as I always had in our games of hide-and-seek—crouched behind the holly bush, or lurking in one of the Hacketts’ calf pens. I heard it faintly, a far-off cry echoing down the years, Coming Peter, ready or not!

  * * *

  His flat was in Vauxhall, not far from the station. The building was twenty stories high, new, its surface sheer and glassy. Most of the apartments were owned by foreign investors and left empty, nest eggs, to minimize tax liabilities and be turned into cash when the need arose. A few apartments were illuminated, but the majority were dark.

  I presented myself to the doorman as Peter’s cousin, Peter’s worried, trembly voiced cousin, sweet and uncertain. The doorman buzzed Peter’s flat.

  “Mr. White is not answering.” He was reading The Abuja Inquirer online and, as I leaned in over the desk, I saw he had his shoes off. A half-eaten ham roll was sitting in an open drawer. He looked at it guiltily and slowly rolled the drawer shut.

  “Do you know if he is there? Have you seen him today? Recently then?”

  A shake of the head. “But I do nights. Eleven till six. I haven’t seen your cousin in some time, but that doesn’t mean he’s not here.”

  “His mother asked me to come. She doesn’t want to call the police yet, but we’re all so worried. He might be in there. He might be sick.” My voice suggested the edge of tears, it suggested that upstairs my cousin was dying, his phone just out of reach. The doorman’s name tag said Adewale. I could see the word “mother” affected him. I tried it again. “You have to let me in so I can see if he’s all right … for his mother.”

  From my handbag, the statement handbag that I had placed on the desk with the globally recognizable logo pointing right at him, I took out my phone. “You know what my cousin looks like, you’ve seen Peter?” I showed him the selfie I had taken of us at the wedding. “Me and Peter.” He looked down at the picture as though an answer would be found there. “Come up with me. If he isn’t there, no one will know you ever let me in. If he is, then he’s in trouble and you’ll have done the right thing.”

  I waited while he put his shoes back on. He looked frightened. It was the fear of getting things wrong, of getting in trouble. I pressed on before he could think of someone he should call. I had the sense he was a newcomer, to the job or the city. I knew how that was, the shallowness of the hand- and footholds. Only I had been able to assimilate, to make myself indistinguishable from those who ran things.

  “You have keys, don’t you? Keys to the apartments?” He fetched a bunch from the drawer.

  “I can’t be gone for long.”

  “We’ll be quick.”

  The lift rose up into the night sky. I could see the doorman’s face reflected in the glass. A struggle was going on inside him, and without saying or doing anything, I focused on exerting my will over him.

  The lift opened onto a corridor, pale and empty.

  “It’s so quiet. Does anyone live here?”

  He nodded. At one of the apartments, he took out the key and slipped it into the door. Then he stopped, wide-eyed. “Maybe he isn’t alone.” He paused. “Your cousin has visitors sometimes. Visitors at night.”

  So we knocked and called his name through the door. Then, “I am opening the door, Sir. Your cousin and I are coming in.” But the doorman, Adewale, lingered on the threshold. We had seen too many films, the both of us. We knew how it went, the corpse like an unwrapped gift, the blood spray up the wall. Gay men, like women, were most likely to be killed by the people they had sex with. Perhaps that was why we bonded so well over cosmos.

  I tottered inside, calling Peter’s name. The room was vast, white walled, except for the expanse of glass that faced out over the river. On a sunny day it might have been lovely, but now the darkness pressed against the pane, as though it was peering in. There was a tang in the air I couldn’t place, that was neither cleaning product nor food. Three rooms led off the main room: a bathroom, a bedroom, and a study or second bedroom that was totally empty. Peter was not there, nor were there many signs that Peter had ever been there. Where were the books? Where were the records? Peter had liked to express himself through content, back when we didn
’t call it content: well-thumbed copies of yellowing paperbacks, videos of foreign films taped off Channel 4 after midnight, vinyl when everyone else was showing off their CDs. All hoarded up in the hope that someone, the right someone, would see them and know him for who he really was. I was the one looking, the one paying attention, but I was never the right person for Peter.

  In the wardrobe, there were expensive shirts still in their wrappings. In the bathroom cabinet, a half-empty box of antidepressants. In the shower, hotel soap and shampoo. In the fridge, a flat bottle of tonic and an array of condiments.

  Peter slept on a mattress thrown in the middle of the floor, a few short steps from the gleaming black kitchen. The bed was unmade, the sheets in need of a wash. Among the pillows, I spotted a bag of mint imperials and a smile came unbidden: a geography teacher, Mrs. Haines, catching him at it, week after week. Her back to the class as she wrote notes on the board:

  “Mr. White, I hope you’ve got enough of those for everyone.”

  Until the week he replied that he supposed he did, actually, and she had him get up and divvy them out, only hardly anyone ate them, because they were Peter’s.

  The dishwasher had a hint of foulness. I stared into its mouth, and into the pristine oven and the empty bin, and I ran my fingers over the cutlery in the drawer and banged it shut, so that Adewale looked at me in alarm.

  An armchair was placed by the window. Was this where Peter had his cornflakes in the morning? Or where he sat in the evenings, at night even, before or after his visitors had come and gone? Upon the glass, an oblong smear. I sat down in the chair and leaned forward to rest my forehead against the window. Below me, the glutinous river snaked toward the sea. When I drew back, some inches below the first smear was now another. And I thought, Oh Peter, this is not what we planned. This is not what we planned at all.

  Which was when, looking down, I saw it, at the foot of the chair, as incongruous as a dream image: a red telephone box, six inches high and made of molded plastic, the kind sold in the tourist traps around Piccadilly alongside models of busby-hatted soldiers and teapots in the shape of Big Ben.

  This one had been customized. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand. The windows of the telephone box were blackened and in places the plastic had melted and twisted. As I turned it this way and that, a sooty, oily residue came off on my fingers. It smelled poisonous, like the bonfires Mr. Hackett used to have at the back of the cowsheds, old tires and baler twine smoldering away in a metal drum.

  To almost anyone else it would have meant nothing. But I knew it. I knew what it meant. It spoke volumes to me, and I waited there, holding it in my hands as the minutes stretched out.

  Later I would wonder why I was so convinced, how I had taken off so keenly down the wrong path on the basis of such a small thing. Perhaps because it chimed with certain thoughts I’d had over the years, certain suspicions. That melody on the piano, Peter’s face when I came in the morning we found the body. The possibility that in the book written by Peter’s angel was an entry I’d do anything not to read.

  Or perhaps it was because—unable to imagine a future, little better than asleep in the present—there was something I had lost among the ruins of the past, something of myself that I had to retrieve. That, in the end, the clue said nothing about Peter and everything about me.

  CHAPTER 8

  DIAMONDS

  Like all children, I kept a list of the things my mother didn’t give me. Mine was more substantial than most: a father, siblings, family in fact of any kind, answers to the most basic of questions. What I had was Peter, and to some extent the Whites—usually good for a roast dinner after church, despite Patricia’s mixed feelings about me—and I had Mrs. East. Mrs. East, who made me cups of tea, and doled out fags and sponge cake, and told me things. Like, when I was a babe in arms, my mother had turned up with me one day in a taxi. Colin, Mrs. East’s husband, had come out to see if he could help with the bags and she’d told him to piss off.

  And she told me that during the hours of wakefulness, in the night, in the gray dawn, she would time travel, reenter the past in reverie, that there was a trick to it, like threading a needle with your eyes closed. Done right, she could live it again, certain moments, certain days, not as herself, but as a witness, a will-o’-the-wisp, shadowing younger Mrs. Easts, reliving days fifty, sixty years old:

  “I was out at the castle. I used to go there to watch them come home, the bombers, to count them in like hens into the coop. Listening out for their engines. Scanning the skies. I used to think if I could be there to count, I could keep them safe, stop the fox from getting them. I was wearing the lilac cardigan and my brown shoes. The bomber made a funny noise as it came in, the engine stuttering. On the airfield, the men came running. Tiny, they were. The noise stopped, the engine noise, and they were coming down. I felt my heart stop. It stopped in my chest. All the birds lifted from the fields below. They came up and the plane came down over my head, so close I could see the bullet holes.”

  We were standing at her back window, watching the day leaving. Late September sunset: a rollout of radiant pink, the sun offering a rose-gold wreath to the earth; the light touched the mist rising from the harvested fields, and the vapor became corporeal, the body of a god as a shower of golden light. Her head lay on my shoulder. She made a gesture with her hand, the one that would have also belonged to one of her parents and charmed those who loved her, a sort of circling indication meant to firm up meaning, to locate it in the ether, when she felt her words were not enough.

  “Andy, I think sometimes of all the jobs people don’t have anymore: cartwright, and plowman and lamplighter, coalman, quarryman. It’s like even the words are becoming ghosts, are vanishing into the mist. It’s like souls dying.”

  The last times I saw her, in the hospital in Oxford—my third year in London, fourth?—she took my hand and told me that she was sorry she hadn’t done more. “I should have stuck a carving knife in him, Andy my love. That Joe. It’s the only thing I regret.”

  “You still haven’t got a nine at Countdown, Mrs. East.”

  “I did so.”

  “‘Seraphims’ isn’t a word, my darling.” And I kissed her bony hands, and the creases on her cheeks, and when I fell asleep in the chair I thought I heard her say something, one last thing, but my eyelids were too heavy and I missed it, I missed the last thing Mrs. East ever told me.

  But on the subject of the diamonds, Mrs. East should have kept her mouth shut.

  * * *

  From Mrs. East, the bones—a famous theft, a prominent local family, an unsolved mystery. Mrs. East remembering the newspaper reports from the year she was twelve, the gossip raging for months in town, the sightseers who came down from London to stand at the manor’s gates and gawp, before heading to The Polly Tearooms for scones. The flesh we added from books Peter found or ordered from the library, a guide to local history, a compendium of unsolved crimes, a biography of Lady Mary Ashton, the owner of the diamonds. The case we assembled went like this:

  In 1936, a diamond necklace is stolen at the manor. The manor, then as now, is three stories high, built of redbrick and sandstone. A small portion belongs to the sixteenth century, most to the seventeenth, and of course there are the later additions: the outbuildings and stables, the Georgian folly of a Greek temple in Portland stone down by the lake. There are sixteen bedrooms on the two upper floors, not including those in the servants’ quarters. On the ground floor, there is a library and a drawing room, a dining hall and a room for billiards. There is a boot room and a run of sculleries and pantries.

  The road that passes in front of the house is at the time little more than a cart’s width wide. Even in 1936, it’s a rare day that sees more than a handful of motorcars, which is to say cars are noticed.

  The manor’s heyday is long gone. It is the same all over the country. The estate is being sold parcel by parcel to pay taxes and death duties, to make up for investments gone south with the Wall Str
eet crash. The family cannot get the staff. There are factories in Swindon and Oxford where the wages are higher, where the young people don’t have to bow and bob, where there are bosses, not betters. Still, the staff—all old hands (too old it is lamented), all trusted faithfuls, no newcomers, no one who can’t be vouched for—do a fine job, the all-important appearances are maintained.

  The manor has been in the family since Queen Anne. They won’t sell it until they have to. In 1936, having to is twelve years off, when the Denfords’ boy is dead and Lord Denford, shunned from 1940 onward for his vocal support of Hitler in the years before the war, for having stood up in the House of Lords and sung “Land of Dope and Jewry” to the tune of “Land of Hope and Glory,” finally accepts that the writing is on the wall.

  Back to the manor: Beyond the grounds, there is a small wood that rises to the horizon; the surrounding farmland is made up of rolling fields which grow wheat and barley. There are racing stables and gallops and, on the higher ground where the Downs are steep, flocks of sheep. Just to the south, there is a hamlet that bears the same name as the manor. It has an inn and a small church with a graveyard where those who have lived in the house are usually buried, those who did not die in foreign wars or marry into families who claimed them for their own.

  We are close to the Ridgeway here and not far from the White Horses, the stone circle at Avebury, various long barrows and Iron Age earth fortifications. Marlborough is three miles as the crow flies; the nearest train station is in Kendon, two miles to the north.

  On the night the diamonds go missing, all is swathed in snow. Overnight a thick layer has fallen to blanket the house, the fields, the lichen-speckled graves. All is white, save the shadows, which are blue, and the lake, which is black in parts and gray where the ice is spreading, growing over the surface like a cataract forming over an eye.