Under the Harrow

by Flynn Berry

  • • •

  By the time the train arrives in Margate, I am drawn and exhausted. The station is on the edge of the city, and I shoulder my bag and walk along the main road to an old-fashioned seaside hotel. I climb three flights of a velvet staircase, gripping a key, which will lead me to a bed. With the window cracked open, I can smell the sea.

  I’ve never been here before. Paul can’t know where I am now, I realize. I pull the heavy curtain around my back to block the reflection of the room, and a view of Margate opens past the window. Pastel houses with tar roofs, blurry sodium lights, the sea in the distance. Strange that this city exists, that it would have existed tonight even if I hadn’t come.

  Her murderer is in custody. He is in a cell, and before I fall asleep I imagine saying to Rachel, It’s time, and leading her down a hallway, and turning a key, and letting her inside with him. She’s dressed simply and she isn’t carrying a weapon, but she doesn’t need one. She will be able to tear him apart with her bare hands.

  • • •

  Natasha’s mother came to stay with them for a few weeks after the birth of their second son, and during her visit she and Giles chatted sometimes, he told me. Her name is Diane Eaves. Giles didn’t have her address, but it’s listed.

  As soon as I wake, I find the bus route to her house on the city’s outskirts. Before the next one leaves, I walk toward the coast. The town smells of tar and salt, and a thin fog blows in from the sea. Ramshackle terraced houses and fishermen’s pubs line the roads. Nearly everyone I see is a teenager or in their twenties or thirties, and it reminds me of the part of Edinburgh near the art school. Tequila, doner kebabs, a dance studio.

  I reach the water, flat and dreary, the Margate sands sweeping an exhausting, defeating distance to the break line. The beach huts are very nice. Each one painted a different color, possibly by one of the art students I walked past. A thick bank of fog pours in from the water.

  Will they let Keith sleep? Did they interview him overnight? I imagine that now, Moretti, who always looks tired, won’t look tired. After sixteen hours with a suspect in custody, he will carry himself as though he could continue on indefinitely.

  I find a place on the harbor wall. I don’t want to go talk to his wife, and I won’t be able to look at her. She repulses me. After what he did, she shared a house with him.

  At the end of the pier, a cannon points toward the fog, as though at any moment a ship might appear. I can’t remember who invaded this stretch of coastline. Along with the cannon, I watch the swirling fog, listen for the splash of waves against a hull, wait for a bowsprit.

  Whatever happens now, I can still punish him. I can drive his dog into the woods and set her loose. I can collect his sons from primary school. Hello, I’m a friend of your mum’s, do you want to stop for ninety-nines on the way home? Keith would never know if they were alive or not, or where they had gone.

  • • •

  I board a bus bound south toward Ramsgate. As I walk down the aisle, the bus stirs, and the shops and houses of Margate begin to scroll by backward to either side.

  Natasha Denton’s mum lives in a subdivision near the main road. The houses are small boxes of white plaster with low clay roofs. Ragged brown palm trees blow in the gardens. Television aerials bob up and down.

  Natasha opens the door and at once I feel deluded, appearing on her doorstep so far from where she lives. She stares at a point on one of the roofs behind me. “I’ll get my coat. I don’t want her to listen,” she says, nodding into the house.

  She doesn’t speak until we round the corner. “After you came to see me, I went through his phone. I almost told him, I wanted to apologize. I didn’t have to search the house, the police already had weeks ago. They turned the place upside down.

  “The boys liked to play with a loose tile in our bathroom when they were younger. When you slide it off, there’s a little cave behind it. The police couldn’t have known. I almost convinced myself not to check, and I waited all afternoon before looking. There were photographs of her.

  “I brought the pictures to my friend’s house before I asked him about them. Wasn’t that clever? I thought he might try to burn them. He started to cry and said they had an affair but he didn’t hurt her and he didn’t know who did. He said he loved her. He asked if I was going to call the police and I said no because of the boys and then he went to work and I called the police.”

  “Did you suspect him before?”

  “No. You look so much like her. When I saw you just now, I thought you were her. I thought you had come to punish me.”

  “She wouldn’t punish you.”

  “Oh, I think she would,” she says. “She’d be furious.”

  “Was Keith in any of the pictures?”

  “No. I asked if he stole them and he said no. He got quite angry that I suggested it. We were in the kitchen and I remember looking at the knives and thinking he wouldn’t stab me. He couldn’t be bothered, with me.”

  “Has he ever been violent in the past?”

  “No, but he has a temper.”

  I planned to tell her that he hit me, but it doesn’t seem necessary. She’s already disgusted by him. “Was there anything else?”

  “After we heard about the murder, he asked me the last time I saw Rachel. It was just passing on the aqueduct, but he wanted to know everything about it. What she was wearing, what she said, where she was going. I thought he was in shock.”

  A woman pushes a pram toward us, and after she passes, Natasha says, “We’ll have to change our names. I don’t want the boys growing up with this.”

  “That’s probably wise.”

  I’m not sure of the way out of the subdivision, so she leads me back to the main road, as though through a maze. I wait for the bus into Margate. Natasha told me she was going to move, maybe abroad, for her sons. I wonder if any part of her finds this thrilling. She didn’t give the impression of having been particularly happy and now she can start over, find a different life that suits her better. The normal obligations don’t weigh on her anymore. I imagine her in the weeks before this thinking, Is this it? Is this how things will always be? And now the answer is no.

  46

  I TAKE THE TRAIN back to London the next morning. What at night was rounded and storybook (shape of barn, shape of tree) is now sodden, thin, and colorless. The fields are pale, the house paint faded against the bleached sky. After we pass Faversham, I call Lewis. “His wife thinks he did it,” I say.

  “Yes, she does. It looks like we’re going to charge him, Nora.”

  I wonder if the police have told my dad about the arrest. I hope they won’t be able to find him again. I don’t think I will be able to bear helping him in and out of the courtroom, watching him shuffle to his seat. I have a surge of anger then. Where’s my family? I think. Where’s my family?

  The detectives and a solicitor from the Crown Prosecution Service will assemble the case against Keith Denton. Lewis says the case will move to trial only if the prosecution has an excellent chance of winning.

  The next few days will be spent examining any weaknesses in the evidence, he says, and searching out possible defenses. The police will review the circumstances around the crime, the details that are not relevant to the trial but will help win the confidence of the jury. When they finish, the prosecutor will decide if the case will go to trial.

  I decide to wait for the news in Marlow, and the prospect turns me restless. In a room in Abingdon someone is going to sit down with a file and decide what happens next. I can’t go talk to this person. I can’t plead with her.

  At the Hunters, I find the names of the dozen prosecutors in Oxford who might have been assigned to her case, and consider approaching them. Their stakes are different from ours. I wonder how many cases Oxford CPS brings to trial every year. What would losing one mean? A bad day, a drink after work, at worst, a professional
review.

  None of their addresses are listed. They must not want certain people to know where they live. But I could follow them home from the CPS office or Abingdon police station. I imagine the thud of a car door, their polished shoes tapping on the walk, and following them through the open gate, saying, Excuse me.

  They wouldn’t listen, and my desperation might only make things worse. I can’t do anything for her. I remember her weight in my arms. The hours drag by. They have seven days to decide. Lewis is going to call me with the decision, and I try not to see portents everywhere.

  • • •

  Lewis calls me in the evening.

  “Have they made a decision?”

  “No, it’s something else,” he says. “The chief inspector has agreed to release her body. You can call the coroner to make arrangements.”

  47

  THE DRIVE TAKES six hours, and by the time I reach Polperro it is dark. I park on a steep, narrow road behind the Crumplehorn Inn and collect the box of ashes from the footwell. I wish we had done this differently, with a coffin and pallbearers. I shouldn’t be able to lift the box on my own, but I can, and then I am carrying it down the cobbled streets to the Green Man, a lime-washed inn by the harbor where I will spend the night.

  At dawn tomorrow I will scatter the ashes in the cove below the house we rented. I chose Cornwall because it is where she intended to go, five weeks ago. She had already rented a flat on the other side of the county. I have the address in St. Ives, but I think seeing it might tip me over some last, final barricade, and I don’t know what things would be like afterward.

  I can’t manage to think of them as her ashes. Instead the box is something she has entrusted to my care, and I am scared something will happen to me before I can complete the errand. On the M5 I thought I would crash and now, as I turn the corner and the Green Man comes into view, I am sure it will burn down with us inside. It wouldn’t be the worst thing. Her ashes would still end up in the ocean, floating with the cinders in long fingers of smoke over the sea.

  • • •

  Before dawn, I carry the box along the flagged stones of the quay. In the inner harbor, the tide is in, and sailing boats rock on the silvery water, their rigging clinking against the masts. The slate roofs seem to glow in the darkness. The sky is just beginning to lighten at the horizon as I circle around the inner harbor, and I can see the black outline of the two umbrella pines.

  I climb the coast path along the edge of the headland. At its highest point I turn to look back at Polperro. More lights have come on, and smoke curls from the chimneys. I look at the fisherman’s croft, nearly invisible against the rocks, and at the two square merchant’s houses. One white, the other tweed-brown, though in this light the white one is blue, and the tweed one black.

  The sand of the path crunches beneath my boots. Wind rustles the low sage pines on the headland. The coast doesn’t look very different from in summer, since so much of it is evergreen. I listen to the boom of the waves at the base of the cliff.

  After a half mile, the coast path curves around a familiar white oak. Its branches creak with a sound like a door opening.

  Another, shorter stretch and then a house comes into view, set down from the path by the edge of the cliff. Our house! I worried it wouldn’t be here anymore.

  The house is empty. The man who owns it spends most of the year in London. There are still colored buoys hanging from a tree at the edge of the property. There is the outdoor shower, its spigot foxed with mold, its crooked door on the latch. And the clothesline, a wire strung between two whitewashed poles. In this light the wire is invisible, the pegs floating in midair against the sea. I remember pegging up my swimsuit, with wet hair, wearing a blue dress sprigged with white flowers.

  The sense of recognition propels me forward until I stand on the back porch, facing the sea, and then it begins to fracture, so while I am surveying the house, I am also worrying about the prosecutor’s decision, and I am pleading for Rachel’s life, and I am thinking about how we planned to come back here. We wanted to come back for years and years, until we were both old.

  The staircase vanishes down the cliff to the sea, and I imagine that Rachel is climbing the steps. Forty years on. The sea below her, the rivulets in the cliff. A formidable old woman, with her hair wet from an early swim. She puts her hand on the railing and leans back to check if she can see her sister, her children, her grandchildren, if any of them has come to the edge of the lawn to wait for her.

  I cross the damp lawn and carry the box down the seventy-one steps to the beach. I remove my shoes and socks. I wait until the sun comes over the eastern headland, then twist the lid from the box and walk to the edge of the surf. The icy water stings my skin and soaks through my jeans. I throw handfuls of ash into the water. There is little wind and the things that I worried might happen do not. Most of the ash sinks below the water and the particles that float on the surface are soon roiled by the next wave. Sunlight floods the cove and the waves and the few offshore clouds with color. It takes me a while to recognize that what I feel is disappointment. I had hoped so much for a signal from her.

  When I finish, I kneel to rinse my hands and the box in the water. I hold my hands in the clear cold water for longer than necessary, until long after the last of the ash is rinsed away.

  • • •

  On the porch, I use a glove to wipe the sand and water from my blue feet. I pull on woolen socks and roll my sodden jeans down over them. My teeth chatter. My mind is blank. She’s gone.

  I zip my coat to my chin and rock back and forth. I am so cold that I go around the house to the outdoor shower. How good it would feel to take off my wet socks and jeans and stand under a jet of steaming water. I twist the tap but nothing happens. The water must be shut off to keep the pipes from freezing.

  I return to the porch, which has the most sun. The day will grow warmer as it rises. Behind me are the rooms where she slept for three weeks, the rooms where she cooked, the rooms where she read. During our trip, Rachel was reading Clarice Lispector and I was alternating between John Fowles and the soggy detective novels in the cabinet under the stairs. Every morning one of us walked to the bakery for almond croissants and I ate mine here with my book. I broke the horn of the croissant and licked out the marzipan. Ahead of me, trenches of ocean rose and fell for miles.

  At night I watched the stars from the hammock and was scared by the size of the universe as I hadn’t been since I was little. Rachel climbed in next to me, tucking my socked feet under her arm, pulling a blanket over her chest, and the two of us stared out.

  It was good to be so scared. The ocean was very large, as was the universe. Which contained the ocean. And the oceans on other planets, and other planets. The fear made the domestic rituals better. The almond croissant, the detective novel, the outdoor shower. Here I am, I thought, taking an outdoor shower in the universe.

  While we were here, I wanted to stay forever, but I was also already thinking of leaving. Always biding and always going, always at the exact same time.

  “What’s your favorite thing about Cornwall?” I asked her, but it wasn’t what I meant, I meant what’s your favorite thing about being alive.

  48

  IN POLPERRO, birds wheel over the masts of boats in the inner harbor. On the decks, a few men smoke as they ready their boats for the day, and I listen to their voices and the rigging clinking. I decide to stay in Cornwall for the next four days. There is no reason to return to Oxford until the prosecutor’s decision, and their deadline is five days from now.

  • • •

  For the next four days, I acted as though I were still scattering her ashes, and should visit only the places here she loved best. This meant a lot of driving.

  I visited the rivers Fowey, Fal, and Helford. I ate at St. John’s in Fowey at sunset, as the windows across the estuary in Polruan became shimmering brass squares. I ordered what
she would have ordered, which was rainbow trout. The drink was more difficult, and from her three favorites I chose a white Bordeaux.

  I visited Frenchman’s Creek. I visited the fishing town of Cadgwith. I tried to find the falls she had talked about on the Lizard Peninsula, but couldn’t. It may have dried up. No one I asked had heard of a dark pink lighthouse either. She may have told me the wrong color, or I remembered it wrong. I visited Porthgwidden and found the stall where she bought buttered crumpets.

  I visited Redruth. I visited Lostwithiel and Padstow. I rode the ferry across the bay. This was a pattern I could follow for the rest of my life. I could retrace her steps. I could visit the hostel where she stayed in Greece and try to track down the man she met there. She lost his number when she was on the train north, which she always said was a blessing in disguise, but maybe it wasn’t.

  One by one I could replace my tastes with hers. I don’t like mussels, for example, but I ordered them in a restaurant she liked in Cadgwith and finished the bowl. I could sleep with the men she would have slept with. I could become a nurse, even. It’s not like I already have a career.

  And maybe that’s what I would do, if she were in prison. If what happened that day was that she killed someone instead of the other way around. I would do what she wanted me to and then tell her about it in detail. We often confused memories. It was easy if you talked for long enough.

  • • •

  On my last night, I visited Mousehole, and on the drive back it began to snow. It almost never snows in Cornwall, and I held my breath, hoping it wouldn’t stop. I drove over hills, across the peninsula.

  At the edge of a town I hadn’t seen before was an old-fashioned Esso station, the two narrow pumps, the glowing lozenges atop them. Snow drifted over the empty filling station. The road was wet and black along its center and white at its edges, where the snow hadn’t been touched. The gothic spires of a church tower were almost invisible against the night sky. The glowing sign for a garage stood beside the filling station, and other signs—RAC Repairer, Community House—hung from wrought-iron hooks on the edges of the buildings. An old car sat with its headlights, two orbs mounted on the round wells of its tires, switched on.