The Gardens of the Dead fa-2

by William Brodrick

  The Gardens of the Dead

  ( Father Anslem - 2 )

  William Brodrick

  The Gardens of the Dead

  William Brodrick

  Sleep is well for dreamless head,

  At no breath astonished,

  From the Gardens of the Dead.

  Walter de la Mare, ‘Dust to Dust’

  PREAMBLE

  Elizabeth Glendinning QC walked purposefully beside Regent’s Canal in Mile End Park towards a trestle-table covered with junk from the houses of the dead. Behind it, his jaw working as if he’d tasted ash, sat Graham Riley, lolling in a camp-chair. To her right, sausages and onions sizzled on a hotplate; steam rose from an urn; clothing hung jammed on racks; bits of houses were laid on a blanket by a sign that read Architectural Reclamation’; tools from yesteryear, rusted, robust and manly, stood propped against a dinted van. Elizabeth passed them all, not quite looking, keeping her eye rather on the calm of the waterway to her left, and away from Graham Riley.

  Despite years of handling tension, Elizabeth found the strain this morning unbearable: she had devised two grand schemes to bring this man from the camp-chair to the courtroom, that he might answer to his many victims. The first of these, after months of preparation, was about to be fulfilled.

  Riley looked up, across the autumn fair, in utter disbelief.

  Elizabeth was dressed in courtly black. She wore no make-up. Her hair had been precisely cut at quite fantastic expense. Through anxiety, her skin was pale and her lips peculiarly bloodless.

  Riley’s jaw was still. He looked like a wasted, frightened boy surrounded by broken toys. But Elizabeth had travelled a long way beyond pity; she’d climbed to the mysterious and airless place where justice and mercy met. Holding her breath, at this the culmination of so much effort and sacrifice, she picked up a set of Edwardian spoons.

  Feeling a sudden giddiness and a race of contractions in the heart, Elizabeth stumbled back the way she’d come, beside the smooth, green canal. She slumped in the driver’s seat of her lemon-yellow VW Beetle, stunned at her carelessness: she’d mastered the facts, but had failed to consult the law On the passenger seat was the orange flyer that had led her to Riley’s stall. She crumpled it with one shaking hand and forced the ball into an ashtray. She began to sweat and her breath fell short. Feeling a strange sense of moment – as when a train, out of view, hums on the lines – she unhooked her mobile phone off the dashboard and called Inspector Cartwright, being careful to leave only a message. She then rang Mrs Dixon. A rush of wind seemed to come, and Elizabeth dropped the phone mid-sentence. In the sluggish seconds left to her, Elizabeth found a last, winning smile.

  Yes, she was inconsolable. She would never behold Charles, her husband, again… he was at Smithfield Market, fretting over the morrow; or Nicholas, her unwary son.., he was probably on the Barrier Reef, among the brightly coloured fish; or George, her friend and accomplice, who was waiting beneath a fire escape. And, yes, in terms of these grand designs of hers, death had come too soon. It was, as ever, the spoiler. But Elizabeth could laugh, and did. She’d devised contingency arrangements for precisely these circumstances. And there was one scheme left untried – the most far-reaching, and the most grave.

  Her heart became wonderfully still.

  All at once Elizabeth felt cold. It seemed that she was high above the clouds, coming down to earth at last. As she tumbled in the sunlight, she thought: Now is the hour of the unsuspecting friend, of the puzzled monk to whom I gave the key.

  PART ONE

  the story of a key

  1

  Anselm returned to Larkwood, weaving through the apple trees in Saint Leonard’s Field. The scooter skipped over tufts of grass, and Anselm bent his head, thinking of Steve McQueen at the end of The Great Escape. He could see the fence ahead. In a vivid reverie he saw himself soaring over the barbed wire, away from fiends who would cart him off to the cooler.

  Whistling to himself, Anselm pushed the bike into the old woodshed, where he met Brother Louis, the choirmaster.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Anselm. ‘How was it?’

  Appalling.’ He’d been on a ten-day residential counselling course. ‘I had to talk about myself Eye-to-eye stuff.’

  ‘Oh hell.’

  Louis sat on a stump. He was tall and seemed to fold himself up. His eyebrows were copper and straight, as if they’d been electrified. Anselm rolled two cigarettes, obedient to a wink.

  ‘From the global perspective,’ said Louis, pensively ‘I found some relief’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. My parents aren’t to blame after all.’ He slowly pushed out the blue smoke. ‘I am.’

  ‘Don’t be deceived.’

  Louis tilted his head towards the scooter. ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Buying wood to bank the Lark.’

  ‘I hope you’ve got a receipt.’

  Anselm had thrown it in the bin. ‘Why?’

  ‘Cyril’s gone round the bend. It’s that time of the year, I’m afraid. He’s doing the books and he can’t account for twenty-eight pence.’

  As the cellarer, Cyril was responsible for the financial affairs of the monastery; he was the commercial brain behind various industries derived from apples and plums. An amputee after an industrial accident sustained before joining Larkwood, he had the appearance and character of a one-arm bandit chock-full of fruit and numbers.

  ‘Speaking of madness,’ resumed Louis, rummaging in a habit pocket, ‘the elderly Sylvester put this in my pigeonhole.’

  Anselm unfolded the slip of paper: ‘Elizabeth called. Roddy is dead.’

  Roderick Kemble QC, Anselm’s old head of chambers, a friend and guide from those half-forgotten days. ‘Oh, God.’

  He ran to reception, where Sylvester struggled with buttons to get an outside line. Anselm hovered, itching to grab both the receiver and Sylvester’s larynx – it was a common problem at Larkwood – but shortly he made the call and a growing suspicion was confirmed. ‘I am still here,’ said Roddy ‘but Elizabeth is not.’

  Anselm stepped into the sunlight. He looked towards Saint Leonard’s Field as if he’d been warned; and he thought of the key.

  Anselm made for a quiet place beside the river – the place he’d brought Elizabeth when she’d turned up, all of a sudden, three weeks ago. A narrow flowerbed ran along a wall to an arch. Passing through, he turned right and sat on a bench of dressed stone – remnants of the medieval abbey, turned up by one of the tractors. The Lark splashed in front between the shoring of black timbers. Elizabeth had sat beside him. ‘I need your help,’ she’d said, quietly.

  Thinking of that conversation now, Anselm recalled an earlier impromptu meeting ten years earlier – their last, in fact, before he’d left the Bar. Within a month he’d be at Larkwood. He’d been at home in Finsbury Park listening to Bix Beiderbecke knock out ‘Ostrich Walk’ when the doorbell rang (Anselm was a fiend for all jazz prior to an indefinable but tragic moment some time in the 1950s). It was Elizabeth, clutching a box of Milk Tray.

  ‘I don’t expect you’ll taste such delights in a monastery,’ she said. They sat in Anselm’s small garden eating chocolates, and reminiscing, while Bix moved on to ‘Goose Pimples’. They talked of the job and its strange compromise.

  ‘We always stand on an island,’ she said, ‘the cold place of not knowing, and not being able to care.’ Her hair fell forward: it was straight and black and cleanly cut, like a queen’s in the days of pharaoh. A silver streak marbled one side. It had appeared quite recently almost overnight. ‘We never know if they’re guilty, and we can’t care if they’re innocent. The terms are, of course, interchangeable. And yet, we do care; more than most. But we�
�re marooned from our conscience.’ She looked at her hands, checking the palms. ‘I’m sure there’s a trial out there for each of us, which could slip between the not knowing and the not caring and pull us off that beach.’

  Anselm reached for the praline and Elizabeth smiled thinly.

  Then and now Anselm was struck by her forcefulness, for Elizabeth, like many prosecutors, had been inclined to perceive guilt in anyone who’d been charged. It was a sort of infection, caught through excessive exposure to flimsy defences. ‘You’re lucky to be called away from it all,’ she said, adding cheekily ‘Did you hear a voice?’

  A quiet one,’ replied Anselm. ‘I’ve had to learn how to listen.’

  Her question had been a joke, but she’d become serious. ‘How?’

  ‘It sounds through your desires.’

  Elizabeth thought for a while, as though examining the pointing on the yard wall. ‘You listen by heeding what you want to do?’

  Tentatively Anselm explained what he’d learned. ‘Yes. But it’s deeper than any desire. It won’t let you go. And even then you need a guide who knows the ways of the heart, in case you’re deceiving yourself.’

  Elizabeth seemed to snatch a thread. ‘Someone to help you understand a voice that won’t be stilled.’ It was as if she’d decided to become a nun. She knew the score already.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And to ignore it would bring a kind of death?’

  Smiling, Anselm studied the curtain of hair with its strands of silver. This was a wind-up, after all. She must have been reading a manual on the spiritual life.

  Elizabeth went on, ‘So you don’t have a choice?’

  ‘Not really’ This was no prank. Anselm wanted to revive the cheekiness that had fled. ‘I get the impression God isn’t that keen on dialogue. It comes with the territory of always knowing what’s for the best.’

  She took the praline from the second layer. ‘Are they a strict lot, these monks?’

  ‘Not especially… Well, they are.., but about things most people wouldn’t care about.’

  ‘So you can pop out on little errands?’

  ‘It’s up to the Prior.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  Anselm thought of the various things he could say: that he didn’t talk much, that he was always one step ahead of you, but he said, ‘He pops your illusions.’

  At the door she kissed him on the cheek and said, ‘I shall miss our little chats.’

  It was a truth neither of them had ever named: on a Friday they’d often been the last to leave chambers. For fifteen minutes or so, they’d sit, feet on the table in the coffee room, going over life, prodding its verrucas. But it showed up a peculiarity in Elizabeth’s personal relations. The different aspects of her life – the Bar, the family, the Butterfly Society, and so on – were screened off from each other like beds in a hospital ward. As far as Anselm was aware they were never brought together round the one table. He had only heard of the others. It had made their chats significant while keeping him at a distance.

  Anselm went to bed uncomfortably sure that Elizabeth, like all examining barristers, had wanted to find out something, without letting him know what it was. And while he’d been talking, Anselm hadn’t been able to dispel the notion that Elizabeth wanted to speak herself, and that the inclination had ebbed away. For days afterwards he thought of that silver streak in her hair. She was, he concluded, very attractive. It was as though he’d never noticed before.

  ‘I need your help,’ she’d said, quietly, ten years later.

  Again she’d come unannounced. Anselm brought her to the stone bench by the Lark. The long flowerbed was bright with planted daffodils and wild poppies. She’d hardly changed. Though she was in her late fifties, her hair remained jet black with that dash of silver, less bright now.

  ‘I once asked if you’d be free to do errands, do you remember?’

  Anselm nodded.

  She reached into her bag and pulled out a box of Milk Tray ‘You can have the praline in caramel.’ Bix seemed to be with them, blowing ‘Ostrich Walk’ in the distance.

  Anselm said nothing. Monastic life had taught him this much at least: to know when to be quiet.

  With a delicate gesture, Elizabeth placed the fall of hair behind an ear. Her profile was exquisitely drawn against the pink blur of Larkwood. Looking towards the river, she began to speak. ‘I’ve been tidying up my life. It isn’t easy But there’s always something we can do, don’t you think?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘We can’t be lukewarm. That’s the only way to mercy or reward.’

  Absolutely’ He’d use that one on Sunday He waited, silent again. Elizabeth took an envelope out of her pocket, turned to him and said, ‘Could you do something for me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It holds a key and an address.’

  Anselm took the envelope.

  ‘If I should die – it does happen – use it.’ She looked around, at the river, the herb garden, the arches of the old abbey ruin. ‘It opens a safety deposit box. Inside you’ll find what you need to know.’

  She rose and walked to the bank of the Lark. Anselm followed, keeping slightly back, puzzled by her solemnity and his new responsibility. They listened to the chattering water. It was autumn. Aelred had lined up potted plants on the other bank, as if they might like the view, but most had turned away to face the sun. Quietly Elizabeth said, ‘You mentioned once that to ignore a voice would have left you bereft.’ She added, with regret, ‘You listened. I turned away.’

  Lamely Anselm said, ‘It’s never too late.’ It sounded awful.

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘We can salvage anything.’ That was worse. He didn’t even know what he meant, but it was encouraging. He tried a serious kind of joking. ‘Don’t be lukewarm.’

  Elizabeth nodded thoughtfully, her gaze fixed on the Lark.

  Lightly, she said, ‘You can’t always explain things to your children. If need be, will you help Nicholas understand?’

  ‘Yes, of course.

  They walked side by side to the car park among the plum trees. The fruit was soft, ready to fall. Elizabeth quickly kissed him goodbye and rummaged for her keys to avoid his attention. Once again Anselm sensed she’d come to say something but had stepped back. After she’d driven away, he retraced his steps to collect the unopened box of chocolates.

  Anselm stayed by the river brooding over these two encounters – impulsive actions, linked it appeared, despite the interval of so many years. Before he could trawl his imagination for the explanation, Larkwood’s bells began to peal, calling him to vespers. Nipping through the cloister, he saw a huddle of monks in the South Walk. He paused and listened to their muted conversation. A policewoman – someone called Cartwheel – had arrived a few minutes ago and was talking to the Prior. Sylvester had been putting out leaflets on the table near the door (that was always his excuse for eavesdropping) and he’d overheard the word ‘murder’. The considered view of everyone was that Sylvester had, yet again, got it wrong.

  2

  Nick Glendinning hid in the pantry.

  The funeral had flown by but the reception seemed without end. Guests were still in the lounge and corridor, being sympathetic, asking questions about everything but his mother. A tubby executive high up in British Telecom (a client and friend of Charles, his father) was the last to tread the worn route:

  ‘I understand you’ve been in Australia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very nice. Hot?’

  ‘Tremendously.’

  The tubby executive took a sip of sherry. His eyes couldn’t keep still and, as if to match, he had white curls above each ear that wouldn’t lie flat. Discomfort made him shuffle. ‘Did you see any kangaroos?’

  ‘Lots of them,’ replied Nick. ‘And koalas – funny fat little things that cuddle you.’

  ‘Good Lord. They live in eucalyptus trees, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ma
rvellous.’ He looked around, as if for help. ‘It’s unfortunate you didn’t get back in time, given… what happened.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I must say your mother was a quite re maaark able woman. He’d shaken his shiny head and Nick made for the pantry.

  Where he also shook his head. He’d been away about a year. He’d planned to travel since he was eleven but hadn’t actually got on a plane until he was twenty-six. And he was already back, hiding in the family home in St John’s Wood from people he barely knew. The endless ceremonial of accepting sympathy required patience and gratitude and he had neither. He had a headache. It had been non-stop movement across time zones: the train to Sydney, the flight to Singapore, the long haul to Manchester, the hop to London – a crazy sequence to get him home as fast as possible. When he had finally embraced his father two days ago, his body was still in Queensland. He’d come home to a fantastic absence in the heart of the familiar. Sitting on a footstool, he wondered how he could ever have been drawn away.

  The first impulse to travel grew by the fireside with his father who, on cold evenings, would read out tales of adventure, of expeditions financed by some committee dedicated to Humanity and Knowledge and Geography This was the world of men who’d grown beards for the journey who wore khaki and had machetes. The romance of entering the darkness had filled his boyish soul, and would not be displaced – even by education, an appreciation of colonial oppression and the advent of the aeroplane.

  Perhaps it was the spirit of the great philanthropists that pushed Nick towards a career in medicine. In fact, while an undergraduate at Edinburgh, he had considered setting up (eventually) a clinic on the banks of the Amazon – a thought he kept to himself – which itself disclosed that ‘ordinary life’ held out few attractions for a man whose footing belonged in a canoe. Nick saw his future with Medecins Sans Frontieres or at the side of Mother Theresa, and not in a high-street surgery.