Birmingham Friends (43 page)

I didn’t respond. Even now I couldn’t bear to see her.

I hope, Anna, that I have also given you enough of a sense of who your father was. Even had things been different, I don’t think we would have lasted in the end. He wanted to keep me like a cupboard full of starched white napkins and bring one out now and then to wipe his face on. Your generation would put up with that even less well than I did.

I’m sorry I couldn’t just tell you this face to face, but it goes too deep, and I find I am more like my own mother in some ways than I’ve always hoped. I’m even glad you won’t be able to question me about it. I know how ill I am, whatever they say to humour me, and that my life now measures in weeks.

But if you were to decide you needed to see Olivia, I should understand. Of course I haven’t seen her properly for over thirty years and I no longer know her. I’m sure she would wish you only good – really she always did – but I still can’t help feeling I want to pull you close in my arms and protect you from her as if you were still my tiny baby. This is quite irrational I realize. Even so, I would give you one warning: caution.

Now I have finished with all this I feel only sadness about the Kemps. About all of it. I’m sorry if you feel I cut Olivia’s truth in half and chose to give you only the more palatable slice. It was all I could do. And now all I want is peace for the remains of my life. I want to remember the loving parts. What is forgivable by me, I forgive. Anything else is probably God’s department.

I’m so very proud of you, my Anna. I hope you know that in all you have done you’ve been the greatest joy of my life. Go well, my darling.

ANNA

Warwickshire, 7 August 1981

‘You’re not going
in
there, surely?’

The ivy leaves snaking round the stone gateway were such a dark green that in the stormy light they looked almost black. Between them she could make out some of the carved letters:
Arden Mental Hospital
, and in Roman numerals, 1848.

The black cab growled rhythmically, wipers swishing away rain which was hammering on to the windscreen. The driver had spoken with his nose buried in his hanky.

‘Yes – I need you to wait please,’ Anna said, more sharply than she had intended. ‘I shan’t be long. ’Specially not in this.’ She pulled a navy beret over her straw-coloured hair.

So this was the place. They had driven for some time, winding between cornfields, seeing its gaunt shape growing nearer on the rise, until they reached the entrance further round the flank of the hill among the trees.

Arden.

Trying to control her nervousness, she asked, ‘When was the fire?’

‘Can’t remember exactly.’ The driver gave a sneeze which ended in a groan. ‘Late seventies sometime.’

‘Anyone hurt?’

‘Oh, crikey, yes. Killed twenty or more of ’em – terrible thing it was. They moved the rest out, didn’t think it was worth the cost of rebuilding. What the hell d’you want to go there for? Place gives me the creeps.’ He blew his nose again.

Her fingers were round the cold lever, poised to get out. ‘Just give me a few minutes.’

As she turned to slam the door he called nasally, ‘They’re all set to knock it down soon anyway.’

Anna strode away from the taxi, glad of a rest from him and his hayfever and lamenting nature. She cursed not having an umbrella. The days before had been so intensely hot it had been hard to imagine the possibility of rain like this. She was lightly dressed – black cotton jeans and a denim jacket – and the rain was falling steadily and hard. The sound of it was all around her and in minutes she was soaked. But she was relieved to be walking.

The main building was no longer visible from here, and the drive curved up and round to the right, disappearing into what looked like a soft wall of green until she moved close up to it and saw the path straighten out again in front of her. Its surface was fractured and heaved up by quitch-grass and dandelions, puddles collecting in the cracks. Foxgloves and brambles held sway in what had evidently once been tended beds at its edges and the branches of the trees on each side were overgrown and meshed together, creating a tunnel of interlocking stems filled with the smell of wet leaves, wet earth.

She followed it round the rightward curve, then to the left. The trees thinned, then stopped, the path opening out into an area which had been concreted over for a car park, now covered in tussocks like boils. She stopped. The building was there suddenly in front of her, shockingly black even against a grey sky.

It was lower than she had imagined, but very wide, with an impressive entrance at the centre, carved scrolls of stone above the lintel. The square brick water tower in the middle of the complex had escaped the fire, although it was blackened. The decay of the place was evident in its every line. The points of tapering brick which Kate had described adorning the parapet of the roof were now all knocked off leaving jagged edges. The windows on the ground floor were boarded up behind the rusted bars and though the upper windows were uncovered there was no glass left in the frames. Through those to the right, at the eastern portion of the building, she could see only sky. At the west end, the windows were dark, looking into the one whole remaining wing of the building. As she walked nearer, a pigeon, startled from behind clumps of thistles, lifted itself to the roof with slapping wings.

On her way along the west wing she saw a large sign nailed to the front of the building warning, ‘Danger, Falling Masonry’. For what seemed a long time she made her way down the side of the building, through rampant grass and thistles which sent cool shocks of water down her thighs with every step she took. There was nothing to see. No chink of the windows was left uncovered. About half way along were two wooden doors with large rusty keyholes, and she pushed against them, relieved when they refused to budge and she didn’t have to go inside.

Very little remained of the hospital’s east end and the fire had worked its way round and eaten into most of the middle wing which separated the two open quadrangles, but had stopped short of the water tower. These areas were cordoned off with flagging white plastic tape. Most of the rubble must have been taken away, leaving only some charred bricks which looked as if they had come loose since the clearance. Uneven sections of walls remained as partitions between the rooms.

Anna lifted the tape and stepped over one of the sections of wall, hearing the throaty sound of other pigeons unseen in their shelter among the ruins. She was standing in what must have been a long room. Whatever it had once been used for, its character now was quite lost. Had there been beds in this part, or were the wards only upstairs? Was this a dayroom? Squatting down at one end, she could see patches where the texture of the wooden floor showed through the silt of ash and plaster. She stroked the wet grain of it with her fingers, a tiny contact with Arden’s past. With Olivia.

Ignoring the tape, she scrambled over the remains of the inner wall into the quadrangle. The hospital had been arranged in two separate halves, the men’s and women’s sections, each with their own airing court for daily exercise. There was the remains of a circular path, now colonized by weeds and made from uneven segments of stone, a tree stump in the middle. Following the path round, she stumbled over tufts of grass and groundsel. She stood looking at the ruined walls and the slit-eyed water tower.

The airing court. Their light on the world, this enclosed rectangle of sky. Images from Olivia’s strange, disconnected account of herself filled her mind. How had she felt that June morning, moving along the drive towards this hospital? Was the sun shining, sky an exuberant spring blue and the leaves new and bright? She had not mentioned these things of course. Perhaps she had seen nothing. They arrived from Birmingham by ambulance, closed in, probably dark inside, Olivia sitting or lying in the juddering, gloomy space, watched over by iron-faced orderlies. Had she been tied in: strapped? How had they restrained her frail body? Perhaps they had already tamped her down with phenobarbitone so that she knew little of the journey. Or had her brown eyes had to face, wide awake, this place of lost souls, of strange cries and wild movements?

‘I thought, when they took me there’ – Anna heard the words in her mind – ‘that I was going to my death. They would have absolute control over me. They proposed to bury me alive . . .’

Anna began to cry, the sadness of the past days swelling in her at the sight of these remains: hundreds of square yards of stone and brick which had been the crucible of so many lives. Raindrops on her cheeks felt cold compared with her tears. She turned her face to the sky.

She had never seen Olivia, yet she had learned, through her childhood, to love her: her mother’s friend, beautiful and tragic, their affection for each other passionate and sparkling as a fairy story. The mention of her brought a special light in to her mother’s eyes. Kate and Olivia – best friends. Ordinary but magical. Olivia enshrined as something Anna longed for. She was more than a girl who had been a friend: she was friendship itself.

And now she was left with the legacy of their story, this telling of the other side of Olivia so long left hidden in blue shadow. This woman with whom she was so oddly linked. She had held Anna’s life in her hands and almost taken it away.

But even despite the worst Olivia had done, now Anna had seen Arden she could only feel an aching empathy with her. And coming here had not finished this as she had somehow hoped it might. Her mind was alive with questions that now only Olivia could answer. She felt the past clutching at her, filling her with a need she could barely even explain.

Her tears still coming, she folded her arms across the front of her wet denim jacket and turned away. The place had made her feel jumpy, nerves stretched taut, ready to run on hearing the slightest sound. But there was only rain falling from the low, grey sky.

Wiping her face with her hands, she headed for the drive. For a moment she turned and walked backwards watching the hospital recede, then hurried to the taxi and sat shivering on the rear seat.

‘Must be out of your flaming mind,’ the driver commented without turning round. His bald patch was round and pale like a peppermint. The radio was on, an over-bright voice beating from it.

They drove back through the Warwickshire countryside without speaking. Anna stared out through the streaks of water on the window, badly wanting to smoke, but a large sign in the back of the cab forbade it. She watched trees and hedges passing. Some of the corn had been flattened by the rain. Arden faded behind them like a mirage.

The night after the funeral, Anna hadn’t been to bed until well gone four. Apart from Richard’s phone call she didn’t speak to anyone. She cut slices of bread and cheese to eat with Patak’s pickles and sat on Kate’s velour sofa, feet up, reading and reaching for cigarettes. Every hour or two she pulled herself up and stretched, shivering a little, made coffee and ate Dairy Milk until it was all gone. Once she went to the back window and saw a bright sheet of moonlight across the golf course behind the house.

When finally she put Kate’s pages of writing down and went upstairs to bed, her eyes felt dry and sore, her head tight inside. But it took her a very long time to sleep, her nerves jangling from the caffeine, images from what she had just read swirling in her mind.

Late the next afternoon, as promised, she drove their dusty blue car to Coventry and let herself into their terraced house off the Kenilworth Road.

‘Richard?’

How silly. Of course he wouldn’t be there. It was very quiet, the air in the house stuffy, plants drooping on windowsills. A fly droned round the kitchen like a distant bomber and the tap with the dodgy washer was dripping into the quiet, down the side of the washing-up bowl. The bin smelled in the heat.

Richard had evidently worked his way through their supply of crockery for each meal without washing up any of it. Mugs waited on the draining board rimed with coffee. There were cereal bowls encrusted with muesli and two plates with grains of basmati rice congealed in grease. Saucepans with various dribbles down their sides were stacked drunkenly against the tiled wall. Richard’s ideals of intellectuals taking their turn at menial work never had quite translated into cleaning up after himself.

Anna automatically started to do what she had always done: restore order. She pulled the overflowing black bag out of the bin and tied the top. The yellow washing-up bowl was almost full of water ringed with orange grease. She tipped it away, cutlery crashing across the bottom of the bowl, and turned on the tap to run hot, staring at the bright thread of water. Then she thought, sod it, turned it off and went out to the tiny garden, to sit on the rickety bench with a bottle of beer from the fridge and a cigarette.

The house was squeezed into the long curve of the terrace, its window frames a muddy green, the built-on bathroom jutting out into the garden. The sight of it made her feel sad. She had spent too much time in there feeling low. It had been only days away from Christmas when she lost the baby. She was alone of course. Term was over for her, but Richard still had to work. The miscarriage had seemed such a violent thing: pain, blood, panic. Eighteen weeks pregnant and she had thought it was safe, established. Since then she had hardly let herself think about the child as it might have been. But now, suddenly, there was a pram in front of her on the baked paving stones, old fashioned and not the sort she would actually have had. She saw it moving, jerked by vigorous kicks from inside, tiny feet bare in the heat. And herself leaning over, lifting, holding warm flesh, a small head with hair moist in the heat. Tears stung her eyes. The house should not have been silent this summer. She thought of Olivia, what she must have felt.

After six, when she was already angry, the phone rang.