Under the Harrow

by Flynn Berry

  When I go out again later the shops and pubs are still closed, their owners out in Brightwell. I imagine the young men I saw outside the church standing on the lawn in front of the lodge and smoking.

  36

  KEITH HAS GAINED WEIGHT. He looks like a different man from the one who approached me on the aqueduct.

  We are drawing closer. Today, he did leave a checkout line when I stood behind him. He put a full basket of food down and fled. People noticed, and after he had gone a number of them stared at me, as though they wanted to ask me what had just happened and what it meant.

  • • •

  Early in the evening, I run into Lewis on Meeting House Lane. “Want to go for a walk?” he says. “I could use a break.”

  I nod, though it’s not really a break for him, anytime he talks to me he is working. I wonder what he thinks he might still discover. His legs are longer than mine, but he walks slowly, like we’re only out for a stroll.

  “Where are you from?” I ask.

  “Brixton.”

  “I like Brixton.”

  “All of you like Brixton,” he says.

  “Fuck off,” I say, but he’s smiling, and I remember that he knows about how we grew up. I can’t tell him about Paul Wheeler, not until I’ve decided what to do. I wish I could stop seeing his face.

  “Where in Brixton?”

  “Loughborough.”

  “I can see Loughborough from my flat.”

  “How did you know what it was?”

  “I wanted to know what I was looking at.”

  We walk past the rill, which is frozen now. You could walk on it instead of on the planks laid across it.

  “Why did you become a policeman?”

  “For a day job,” he says. “I was a musician. You have a lot of time on your own as a constable. A lot of time walking. I spent it composing songs.”

  “Were you in Brixton?”

  “No, Barnes, where nothing ever happened,” he says.

  “What’s your first name?”

  “Winston.”

  “If I look you up, will I find any of your music?”

  “No,” he says, “definitely not.”

  I wonder what confidences he expects in exchange for this, but I don’t have any. I wish I did. We both know he shouldn’t have told me that, he should have said he wanted to help people.

  “Do you miss London?” I ask.

  “Yes. Do you?”

  “I don’t know.” We start down the high street. “I was jealous of Rachel for living here. I hate London sometimes.”

  “Centuries of people,” says Lewis, his low voice cresting up and down, “have hated London.”

  The town is quiet. A few people are running errands. Coming calmly out of shops, unlocking their cars or walking down the pavements. Behind us is the rosy light in the church tower.

  “Do you?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. We walk past the bakery, and the queue inside it for bread and cakes. “I hate this.” We walk past the wine shop and the building society. “No grit. No culture. It’s boring.”

  We reach the train station and return to the common on the north side of the road.

  “It’s placid.”

  “Exactly,” he says.

  We walk past the chip shop. I stare in its window and then down the road, astonished. “It’s like Snaith,” I say. “It’s like the town where we grew up.”

  “We always repeat our mistakes,” says Lewis.

  “I never realized before. It’s like Snaith but farther south.”

  “And with money,” says Lewis, and I nod. The only difference is that time has been kind to this town and not to Snaith.

  “Why did she move here?” I ask.

  Lewis doesn’t answer. He already has, in a way. “What do you hate about London?” he asks.

  “The noise.”

  “The noise is the best part,” he says.

  We walk past the Miller’s Arms. In this light its awning is the color of paper.

  “Not in Kilburn.”

  “You can wear headphones. Do you know what you can’t do anything about? The rain,” he says, so the word turns long and threatening.

  • • •

  After Lewis returns to the station, I walk through the village again. I miss Snaith. The Vikings and the bakery. The Norman church, especially in winter, with snow falling over it and the poplars in its yard.

  I can’t believe I never noticed before. I walk around the common but I see the common in Snaith. The towns are like twins.

  I walk past the Chinese restaurant where Lewis and I ate two weeks ago. There was one in Snaith too, though it was called, embarrassingly, Oriental Chop Suey, and this one is the Emerald Gate.

  I don’t know anyone else who moved to a small town. Rachel said she wanted to be close to the hospital, but Oxford would have been closer. It’s as if she never left our village. I stand on the station platform and see the station in Snaith. I don’t know if they have updated the trains on the Leeds line. When we lived there the seats were made of blue carpet and you could open the windows.

  37

  I BICYCLE DOWN the Bristol Road, past the white cross marking the site of Callum’s accident, toward the service station. Ahead of me, the red Esso globe rises above the flat countryside.

  Louise is still working at the café. She wears the same clothes as last time, a navy shirt and black canvas skirt under an apron. “Hello again,” she says. “Is that your bike?”

  “Sort of.” I don’t think anyone will miss it. I found it in the shed behind the inn. Its gears are rusted and both its tires needed air.

  “Do you want to bring it around back so it doesn’t get wet?”

  The rain has stopped but the clouds are low and ragged. Louise leads me outside and I wheel the bike around the building to a covered parking bay. You can’t see the white cross from here, which is probably good. Rachel showed it to me a few weeks ago. We were on our way to Didcot, and she pointed and said, “That’s where Callum’s car spun off.” I remember thinking it was strange, since there weren’t any turns or obstacles. It was a straightaway. He must have thought he saw something in the road, a fox maybe.

  The lorry bay smells of stone. I lower the kickstand and follow Louise around the building. Cars rumble down the Bristol Road. “Thanks,” I say.

  “Not a problem,” she says.

  “He beat her,” said Rachel.

  Louise swings open the door and holds it for me. I pass so close I can smell that she wears scent with some vetiver in it.

  “How did you know her injuries came from him?”

  “She told me,” said Rachel.

  Louise finds a breakfast menu and follows me to a table.

  “Do you live around here?”

  “Kidlington,” she says. I wait for her to add more. I expect she is moving soon. I watch her cross the restaurant and picture a room with a friend in Camden. For some reason my image is about forty years out of date. They have a gas ring and a record player, and they go to the trattoria on the corner for a liter of red wine and bucatini.

  You should move to Camden, I want to tell her. You should move to Camden in about 1973.

  I wish we could talk. I want to ask her about Callum, and the accident. I can’t see a way to do this without bringing Rachel into it, though I wouldn’t mind that. I’d like to know what their encounter was like. But it would also mean revealing a violation of patient rights. Rachel should never have told me about Louise’s injuries, or how she got them.

  • • •

  I finish the ebelskiver, a sort of pancake filled with jam, and pay the bill.

  “Do you want to wait it out?” asks Louise. Heavy rain falls on the countryside, and we both watch as the wind blows an opaque curve of water across the road.

 
“It’s not far. I’m staying at the Hunters in Marlow.”

  “Still,” she says, but she doesn’t ask what I am doing in Marlow. I don’t think she knows I’m Rachel’s sister.

  I want to tell her about the moment between opening the door of the house and understanding what had happened, when what I felt was wonder. It was an incredible feeling, golden and drugged. I would like to know if she experienced that, when the car first jerked, maybe. I wouldn’t mind living my whole life in that gap, when I knew the rules had somehow been upturned, but not how.

  I pedal down the Bristol Road. I don’t think I will see Louise again. I want to ask her why she hasn’t quit already. She must find it difficult to drive past the accident site twice a day. Maybe she forces herself, as a reminder of something.

  • • •

  In Marlow, people have started hanging wreaths on their doors. Square and round wreaths of bay leaves and holly.

  There are trees for sale at the repair garage. Last year Rachel took the tree down on Twelfth Night. “You don’t want to anger the Holly Man,” she said.

  • • •

  A bouquet of white roses has been propped in front of my door. I bend down and carry them into my room, and the soft, creamy petals fill the air with scent. I’ve never been given white roses before, or bought them for myself, and in the dim room they look rare and precious. I fill a glass with water for them. Someone sending condolences. Martha’s family, maybe. The card is from a florist’s shop in Oxford.

  It says, Nice to meet you again. Paul.

  • • •

  I sit on my heels in bed holding the carving knife. My body is stiff with fear. The manager sleeps in a set of rooms on the floor below mine, and I don’t know if sounds can reach her from here. It’s only the pipes, the building settling. It’s nothing, I imagine Rachel saying to herself on Friday, there’s no one there.

  38

  MORETTI CALLS THE NEXT morning to say that officers will be returning to her house to conduct another search of the property. He won’t tell me why exactly, but I assume for the murder weapon. They still haven’t found the knife.

  “Are you sure Stephen was in Dorset that day?”

  “Why? Did Rachel ever say she was frightened of him?”

  “No.”

  “Was he ever violent toward her?”

  “No.”

  “Stephen was at work until seven on the day of the murder. He placed calls from the restaurant, and he’s on the security film.”

  “After her funeral, he said if she’d married him she would still be alive.”

  “And you think he was confessing?”

  “No. It just seems like a strange thing to say.”

  I struggle not to tell him about the roses. The card was written in cursive, as though dictated, and the florist’s shop confirmed that he placed the order and a courier delivered them. But he still knows where I am, and to find me in Marlow, he had to know Rachel’s name. Mine doesn’t appear in any of the articles about her. I think he assumed I would be at the Hunters because it’s the only inn in town, though he may have learned some other way. Maybe he followed me.

  I can’t ask Moretti for advice. Instead, I say, “Do you have brothers or sisters?”

  “One brother.”

  “Are you close?”

  “No.” He probably makes the trip to Glasgow out of duty exactly once a year, and hates every moment of it. He must be able to use his work to get out of family occasions. I can so clearly see him taking a phone call, in a house in Dalmarnock or Royston, and saying, “Sorry, I’ve got to go.” His family must know better than to ask. It could be important.

  “Have you ever been to the Whistlestop in Paddington station?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you made any purchases?”

  “I bought wine on my way to Rachel’s sometimes. Why?”

  “Just a loose end,” he says.

  39

  RACHEL SAID THERE WAS something wrong with the town. I still don’t know what she meant. I’ve hardly left its center, and today I walk north away from the lanes and the high street toward the tennis court, a strange empty box in the pines. The gate is padlocked, and cracks splinter across the court. There are still names from last season on the clipboard hanging from the fence. I walk closer. The paper has turned stiff and crinkled, and the black ink is now burnt umber. I run my finger down the page until I land on her handwriting, then stumble away from the fence.

  We played tennis in August. Rachel wrote our names and we waited for the court to be free. We watched other people play, and the balls arcing back and forth over the net. The court is set in chalk, surrounded by scrub pines. I felt like we were at the beach. A turquoise sky arched above the court and the pines had squiggly tips, like cypresses.

  I hurry away. The track curves so when I turn around again the court is hidden. No one has driven here recently. Weeds have sprouted from the road, and down its center they form a hedge of thistle, campion, bloody cranesbill.

  Rachel borrowed the rackets, I remember. She went to get them while I waited by the Hunters. It was hot and the white canvas umbrellas were open alongside the inn.

  “Where did you get those?” I asked.

  “Keith,” she said. I didn’t ask who that was. My stomach turns, and I can’t believe I didn’t remember until now.

  She went down the high street and came back with two rackets. I sat at one of the wooden tables outside the inn and waited for her.

  He told me he barely knew her. By the time I reach the common, it’s raining. I can see one of the twins inside the hardware shop. I turn down Bray Lane and stop in front of the shingled house. I wonder if Rachel ever went inside it.

  His van is in the drive, but the house is dark. There is a fireman’s decal in an upstairs window, in one of the children’s rooms. I wait, but I don’t want to talk to him in front of them or his wife.

  I can’t remember what Rachel said about returning the rackets. I don’t remember her returning them that day, which would imply she was going to see him later. I have no idea. I remember what we ate that afternoon. Runny cheese and bread and swing-top bottles of dandelion and burdock.

  This was the sort of thing she hated me for.

  • • •

  The Duck and Cover is full for the Arsenal and Chelsea match, and I push through the crowd until I find Keith. “Can I speak to you outside? It won’t take a minute.”

  His eyes are glassy. He wants to tell me to fuck off, but people around us are listening, and he follows me outside. The painted-wood buildings creak in the wind, and the hanging sign of the pub rocks back and forth.

  “She borrowed tennis rackets from you,” I say.

  “Did she?” He wears the same long coat as before and a rolled orange hat.

  “This past summer.”

  “I never knew if she ended up using them. I left them out by the back door for her.”

  “Why?”

  “She said she wanted to play and I said she could borrow them anytime.”

  “Where? Where were you when she said that?”

  “Her house. She wanted an estimate on external piping.”

  “What for?”

  “An outdoor shower,” he says. “She said it was a birthday present for you.”

  I laugh. The dark street seems to slip and keel.

  “She needed rackets, and I told her we always have that sort of thing lying around.”

  The rackets were new. I remember the smell of them and the tacky rectangle where a label had recently been scraped away.

  40

  I PULLED LAST NIGHT. There was a man alone at the bar at the Mitre in Oxford, and I chose him. As a precaution, I told myself, to distract me from doing something stupid. We drank gin and tonics and talked at the bar, and I remembered how to turn the lights on, how to di
spense the right amount of warmth and cruelty. On the bar were silver bowls filled with ice and bottles of cava with horned yellow labels. He was handsome, and the encounter was surreal, and jolly, as they can be sometimes, as though we had a snow day when everyone else had work. He was in town from London for a wedding, the first of his friends to arrive. They had rented a house for the weekend near Somerville College. We fucked on the stairs and in the bedroom. Because I’d had enough to drink and because the sex went on for long enough, I was able to lose where I was.

  In the morning, he said, “Do you want to come to the wedding tomorrow night?”

  I laughed, and he said, “No, I’m serious.”

  “I have work,” I said.

  41

  AT THE HOLIDAY MARKET on the common, the residents of Marlow tread muddy paths in the snow. Above the yews, the sky is gray. The stalls are all open, their Dutch doors flung wide. I move down the row. Soap and candles, mostly. A banner on the village hall announces the holiday fund-raiser.

  “What are they raising money for?” I ask a woman selling cups of pear cider.

  “The bridge.”

  “What’s wrong with the bridge?”

  “It’s falling down.”

  People can’t possibly use as many soaps and candles as they buy, yet here they are, buying soaps and candles. At least there are food stalls. The first one sells pies. The second sells preserves and clary wine from a farm in Cirencester.

  The next stall sells taper candles made by nuns in France, and I imagine a nun dipping the wick into a cauldron of hot wax. How do the monastic orders decide what to make or train? Saint-Émilion, Chartreuse, Saint Bernards. At the monastery in Valais, the dogs are trained to perform rescues in pairs. I am thinking of the Saint Bernards, and trying to do this without also thinking of Fenno, when a woman pats my arm.

  “Rachel was truly a beauty,” she says, and then she looks at me to see how I will take it. I sigh. I was jealous of her, but not for the reason everyone assumes. The woman is still watching me with that look, curious and a little mean, familiar to every sister of an exceptionally appealing woman. I can’t think what to say. The yew branches lift and stream in the wind.