Before the Ruins

by Victoria Gosling

  The episodes were held in check by the presence of the vicar and Patricia, but I could feel them stacking up, like a series I had committed to watching that would run for years and years. I gave the Whites the answers they wanted—a short period traveling, followed perhaps by a course of some kind. I helped the vicar set up a Facebook page for the church. In the evenings, I returned to aimlessly clicking and scrolling, feeling a sickening lurch as I resumed my role as an investor in the attention economy, the rewards small—those tiny dopamine hits—the losses imperceptible, but cumulatively significant.

  I wanted David, knew it, but my fear of falling off a cliff was nothing compared to the fear of giving myself to another person. I couldn’t think of romantic love as anything other than a wild speculation, an investment in an economic bubble that would inevitably burst.

  I considered love’s economy—its currency of gestures, its debts and crashes. I thought of girls in summer dresses wheeling barrows full of worthless notes. I thought of couples exchanging foreign notes with one another. I thought of love’s bad checks and black market, its lost fortunes and bubbles. I thought of men staring up at screens in devotion, watching love’s market value rise and fall. I thought of love’s vault, its gold reserves, its overdrafts and exchange. Love’s loans and repayment plans. Its bankruptcies and defaults.

  A risky business, a bad investment. I had done the sums, over and over, and they did not add up.

  But love is not money … I heard a quiet voice say. To compare love with money is a great mistake.

  * * *

  England was playing football. A big game, the biggest for years. The roads were empty, and as I took the lane into the Savernake, from somewhere far off I thought I heard cheering. Deer had eaten the green bark from some of the younger trees, leaving torn patches. Their hoofprints patterned the mud at the side of the road. A van approached and I stood aside to let it pass.

  It slowed to a halt and the passenger window rolled down.

  “Get in,” Marcus said.

  I only hesitated for a moment before opening the door and climbing inside. The van was new. It had that smell. On the dash there was a screen. Digital radio, USB ports, air con, the works. Marcus was listening to Radio Six these days. I closed the door and he pulled away, eyes on the road ahead into the forest.

  “Did you get the tape?”

  Marcus seemed to flinch at my voice, then he nodded. He was beefy now, thick about the neck and shoulders. You could see his uncle in him.

  “I wish you’d leave us alone.”

  “I thought you might want to have it. She made it for you.”

  “I have a family. A wife, children. You can’t come back stirring it all up.”

  “I was looking for Peter.”

  “Did you find him?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you can go then.”

  “What makes you think you can tell me what to do?” A knee-jerk reaction.

  Abruptly, Marcus pulled in, to the side of the road, to one of the widenings that allowed cars to pass one another. He turned off the radio.

  I had thought of things to say to Marcus. There was a speech I’d given in my head. In it, I thanked him for the care he’d taken of me. I acknowledged that what had always been wrong between us had been my fault. That he had tried, and I had failed, but I hadn’t known better, and we had been so young. When I’d pictured it, Marcus had nodded and let me say sorry for being such a nightmare—for the rage and depression, for cheating on him, for not loving him better and not letting him go so he could be with Em. The way I’d pictured it, I hadn’t imagined Marcus saying anything back, speeches were not his style, just him letting me speak, the sense of a weight lifting. I wondered if we might talk about Em. Not about what had been between them, but her, how she had been, that we had loved her, and missed her.

  Met with reality, the fantasy evaporated. Marcus had a way of not letting you speak, if what you had to say wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

  Beneath his jaw, the skin of his throat was throbbing, like there was something in there, threatening to hatch. In the back, I caught sight of a tarp. A long wooden handle was protruding out from under it.

  And I knew. All of a sudden I knew.

  I put my hand to the door handle. When it wouldn’t open, I slammed my shoulder against the door.

  “Don’t bother. It’s got child locks on.”

  It did something to me. Being in a car with a man, not being able to get out. Like someone pinching my windpipe. I stopped moving and went very still inside. I looked down at my hands. On the floor, peeping out from under the seat, was a cuddly toy, a little pink pig I recognized from the Facebook photos, and I wanted nothing more than to go, Wee, wee, wee, all the way home.

  “She’d had enough. Back off to London, wanted to be making quilts out of sanitary towels or whatever it was they were doing up there.”

  Suddenly I didn’t want him to tell me. Not only because he’d come out with a tarp and a spade in the back of the van, but because there are some things you just don’t want a share in.

  “After the shoot, after I got hit by those pellets, I went over to see her. Promised I was going to leave you. Promised me and her could give it a proper go. Won her round. That’s why I wanted to go to the manor when those pricks asked us. What Em and I had was normal. It was how people are supposed to feel. You and me, the way I felt about you, it was a fucking disease. But I never hit you, did I?”

  “No, not once.”

  “But I hit her—just that one time.”

  “Peter said to ask you about Mrs. Duncan.”

  “Surprised he remembers that,” Marcus said slowly.

  “Remembers what?”

  “We bumped into her once. Me and Pete. I’d bought another necklace from that charity shop she worked in, just like the first. She was asking me if my girlfriend had liked it, and I tried to pretend I didn’t know what she was on about.

  “I wanted to get rid of David that summer. Knew if he thought we’d found the real ones, he’d be off quick smart with them, and you’d see him for what he was. I hid the second necklace. The statue of Athena. But he was gone before we could play and I forgot all about them. Only he did find them, three fucking years later. Em knew they weren’t the ones she hid. At first, she said she thought David had moved them. But then later, she went back and fetched our diamonds from the fountain where she’d put them. The icicles, remember? That’s where they were. So now there’s two sets. Everyone had gone to bed and she came to me. Excited. Eyes shining. Thinking we might have found the real ones. I had to tell her, only I hadn’t told her before. At first she was just disappointed but then she was angry. She got it in her head I was hiding things from her, not being straight. She said she’d had enough. Took it as a sign. I said I’d leave you, but I’d said it before. Half the night. Going round and round. We’d all been drinking, hadn’t we?”

  “For a while, I thought it was Peter. I thought Peter … maybe he thought it was me. She was wearing my coat. It was dark.”

  Marcus’s hands were tight on the wheel. “She stormed off. I let her go. Then I changed my mind. I went downstairs. I heard you. I heard you and David. I was just this mug, not just to you, but to all of you. After that I don’t know. It was black as pitch, like a nightmare. I was looking for her … blundering around all those rooms.” Marcus turned to me. His eyes were still that hardwood brown. “I heard the front door click. I couldn’t find a pair of boots that fit. By the time I got them on, she was halfway down the drive.”

  He shook his head like a man trying to free himself from a dream. “I caught her up. I got hold of her arm. She said to let go. She said it was too late. She said it was over. And I hit her. Just once. She went down and smacked her head. She was lying very still. It was so quiet. They said it wasn’t immediate, but Christ she seemed dead to me. Floppy. All the heat leaving her. It was like, I just couldn’t take it in. I … I literally tiptoed away. I went back to bed and got under the
covers and went straight to sleep. Like a child who thinks when they wake up, it won’t have happened. Didn’t sleep another night after for years. And now again. I can’t sleep. Can’t work.”

  “Why didn’t you tell? It was an accident.”

  Marcus frowned. “No. I hit her. It wasn’t an accident. I lost control. Just for a second, and then I ran away and left her there. I couldn’t tell anyone that. I couldn’t have my mum know I did that. I just couldn’t do it to her. Not after everything she’d been through with my old man. And Darren, you know what he was like. I’d have been dead to him. I want it over. I want it over. It’s like you always had this hold over me. Even now. It was your fault. This … this is your fault.”

  “That’s what Joe used to say.”

  Marcus wasn’t looking at me anymore, but staring out through the windscreen at a thick patch of brambles beneath a beech tree. Maybe he was thinking it would be a good spot to hide my body. A vein was popping in his temple.

  Afterward I would wonder if what Marcus told me was just a dream he’d had that night at the manor, or in the years since. Guilt for having loved her, for not having saved her. But in the van, I believed him and I knew he meant me harm.

  “Can’t let you threaten my family. Not Lisa, not Nick, not Maggie.” I had the sense I was listening to a track he had going on repeat in his head. Instinct told me not to move, not to speak. Then the fight kicked in.

  “The only thing that is going to threaten your daughter is men like you—” I had a lot more to say, nearly three decades’ worth of fury.

  Marcus lunged for me, but the seat belt held him back. He moved to undo it, fumbling with the buckle, as I shrank back, pressing myself against the window.

  The phone rang. It was connected by USB to the van and the name Lisa flashed up on the screen on the dash. Before Marcus could stop me, my hand flicked out and accepted the call.

  “Marc, Marc, where are you? Maggie’s lost her pig. She’s creating seven kinds of hell. Are you watching the game? I know it’s a pain in the arse, but she seems to think it’s in the van.” Lisa’s voice softened, became more intimate. “If you’ve got it, would you be the world’s best dad … Marc?”

  At the sound of her voice, Marcus had frozen. As she chatted on, he sat there blinking like a man ripped from a dream. I don’t know why I didn’t say something. Now all I can think is that we had always kept one another’s secrets, Peter, Em, Marcus, and I.

  Slowly I reached down, picked up the toy, and placed it gently in Marcus’s lap.

  “Marc, can you hear me? Fucking football. Your daughter’s going mental. She’s desperate for the pig. She’s like Genghis Khan today.” In the background, a scream, starting low, ascending through the octaves.

  At the sound of his daughter, Marcus snapped to. “I’m on my way.” He turned the keys in the ignition. The van jumped forward. Marcus made a U-turn, swerving half off the road, leaving ruts in the leaf mold.

  “You won’t be long, will you?”

  “Fifteen minutes tops.”

  “All right then, love. Thanks.” Lisa hung up. I sat there not moving or saying a word, willing him to keep driving with every ounce of my being.

  When we got to the bottom of Postern Hill, clear of the forest, I told him to let me out. Because of the child locks, he had to come round. Many years ago, I had always kissed him before saying goodbye. But I would never kiss Marcus again. I made an effort not to touch him as I got out. He was trembling. I wavered for a moment and I thought he might have something more to say to me. In the event, he said nothing at all, got back in the van, and drove off. When he was out of sight, my knees went and I crumpled to the pavement in a daze, hyperalert giving way to stupor.

  Very soon the doubts would start. It had been something else in the back under the tarp, not a spade at all. Or Marcus had been off to do a bit of gardening at his mum’s. He hadn’t planned to do me ill. His hands hadn’t been reaching for my throat.

  That’s still what I’d like to think. But it’s not what I believe.

  CHAPTER 23

  INVITATION TO A GAME

  The email sat innocently in my in-box, the address a string of numbers. I was about to send it to spam, but there was something, something familiar.

  I looked at the numbers. 4203417. It was a call, a call to a number that no longer existed, the number of the telephone box. The email contained nothing but a link. I clicked and a new tab opened to an article, now some years old.

  The story was about a man who, while walking his dog in the South of France in the 1950s, had discovered a system of caves, secret within mountains of limestone. The dog—a black-and-white photograph showed a border collie, eyes laughing as if at a marvelous joke it had perpetrated—had disappeared. The man had called and called, eventually following the dog inside a narrow crack in a cliff wall. The crack had led to a passageway, the passageway to a chain of caves, each darker than the one before, each heading deeper into the mountain, as in a fairy tale.

  In his pocket, a torch. Imagine the moment of illumination, the darkness coming to life! The animals streaming across the stone walls pursued by hunters, woken from their sleep after thirty thousand years. Even in photographs, the cave paintings were urgent, muscular, twitching with life. Another image showed ocher handprints, child sized, found in the deepest recesses of the furthest caverns. Looking at them, I had the sense that they were pressing forward, as though emerging from within the walls and, sitting at the desk where Peter had once so diligently done his homework, I itched to lay my palm against them.

  Another email, another link to another article, again about the caves, about the dark cells within the honeycomb of limestone, sacred places reserved for ritual purposes. Once I could have gone and seen them, but now they were closed; the breath of the present would obliterate the past. But there were more, the article said, inevitably more caves, more paintings, yet to be discovered.

  The next contained another set of links—to a documentary by a famous German director, to articles that speculated about the role of the paintings in Paleolithic society, what they might have meant, beautiful speculations about rituals and hunting grounds and Ice Age star maps, description of great cathedrals under the earth, with wild beasts in the place of saints: bison, stags, ibex, deer, bears, and big cats. There was a basilica, an apse, a hall of bulls, a painting of an aurochs five meters high. Next, I received a link to a Flickr album, photographs of rivers and forests, ruined castles, gigantic limestone escarpments.

  David. But why didn’t he speak to me? Because he was incapable of sticking to his word, because all of his promises were made to be broken? Enchantment, seduction, disillusionment. They were the stations and the train only went in one direction, and disillusionment was the end of the line, a final station at the foot of a mountain of impassable rock. But I kept looking.

  Then, for a few days, there was nothing. And the fear I had, the fear of a return to the old paralysis, was replaced by terror that the emails would stop. I knew the panic well: the phone was ringing in my bag, the life-changing call from someone who would ring once and withhold their number.

  Another email: A link to a map. A train station. A date. I wouldn’t go. I would. I wouldn’t. I deleted all the messages and went to the manor.

  It was a warm day. The sky was thick with dense white clouds that trapped the heat. After I had signed him out, Darren and I walked around the grounds in silence. We paused before the fountain. Someone had scrubbed off the moss, but the cherubs were still there, still beckoning.

  “Peter told me what happened with Joe. Where is he? Where did you put him?” But Darren only mumbled something about an invoice.

  It was entirely possible that Mortimer’s diamonds were still here. Faintly, as though from very far away, I thought I heard their call. Perhaps the price of some things staying buried was that there were others you would search for and never find.

  When it came time for me to leave, I kissed Darren’s cheek, and he smil
ed, a sweet vacuous smile, the kind a toddler gives to its mother.

  That night I dreamed again. Em and I were on the Ridgeway, hurrying along the track in broad daylight. She was two steps ahead and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t draw level with her.

  “We’re not going to the manor, are we?”

  She shook her head, half turning toward me so that I caught a glimpse of her face in profile.

  “Where then?”

  “You’ll see.” In her voice, I heard the smile I could not see.

  But Em went ahead, her feet barely touching the earth, till she was ten steps in front, then a hundred, then a thousand. And no matter how I struggled I couldn’t keep up.

  * * *

  The day before I left, I found the vicar in his study among his books. Patricia was out. The years hung on him. There was talk of a bungalow. Always spare, his long limbs put in mind dry branches. I put a cup of tea down beside him and he looked up from the page.

  “Are you leaving, Andy?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Ah. A holiday then?”

  “To France, to see a friend.”

  “We will miss you. Patricia and I are very fond of you.” He closed the book. Plato. He had always had a weakness for the ancient Greeks. Patricia had referred to them as his old pagans, as though they were a rabble of unshaven, rowdy pub drinkers.

  “I never felt quite up to Patricia’s standards.”

  “Well, that goes for all of us.” He picked up his book and then put it down again. What alcohol had been to my mother, books were to the vicar. Always the sense that even when he was with you, he was aching for them. He sighed and his eyes wandered away out over the lawn.