The Sick Rose (10 page)

‘Ingram, if you want a suburban back garden I can make you one, but you hired me to recreate a historically accurate Tudor garden and you can’t go around undermining my designs like this.’

‘The visitors have to sit somewhere,’ said Ingram.

‘Yes, but on these? They’re going to make it look like a fucking Essex patio!’ Paul felt a little surge of indignation on behalf of his home county. ‘We’ll be a laughing stock.’

‘But I’ve ordered them now,’ protested Ingram, passing her a catalogue flagged with sticky notes.

‘
How
much?’ Louisa cried when she got to the relevant page. ‘That’s the last time I let you lecture me about budgets. I don’t spend my life in that greenhouse coaxing things to life from seed to save money so that you can blow it all on patio furniture!’ Ingram flounced to his desk and hid behind his computer, his hair a pale aureole.

‘I’m not having them in my garden,’ Louisa shouted in his direction, then turned back to the room. When she saw Paul sitting at the spare desk she gasped as though he had ambushed her, putting her hand on her chest and taking a step backwards.

‘Sorry,’ he said, not because he had done anything wrong but because he was still mindful of the way he’d frightened her on their first meeting. ‘I haven’t got anything to do,’ he continued, by way of explanation for his presence. She sank into her chair, flushed and silent.

‘You might try and get that desk into some kind of order,’ called Ingram. ‘It’s a disgrace. Some of those books are out of print, rarities, not that you’d know the way
she
handles them.’

A hostile atmosphere settled over the office, with Ingram making little indignant parping noises from behind his screen and Louisa alternately glaring at Ingram and looking at Paul as he shifted the books around the desk, wishing that he had stuck to doing nothing in the rain. He tried to break the tension with a question.

‘Why do they call it New Wood?’ he said.

‘Well, it was new once,’ said Louisa, whose complexion had gone back to normal. ‘It was planted just after the war.’

‘That’s mad, that it can get so wild after, like . . .’ he mentally calculated ‘. . . nearly seventy years?’

‘The
Civil
War,’ said Louisa. She lowered her Mona Lisa eyelids and smiled to herself, and in that moment there was a schoolgirl haughtiness about her that evoked someone else, someone it took him a while to identify as Emily.

In the first week of October a furious gale blew and winter came suddenly, like turning the page of a calendar. Paul went home from Kelstice on Friday night in a long-sleeved T-shirt but on Monday morning he needed a fleece under his jacket, the navy blue one with the Veriditas logo embroidered on the breast that was the nearest thing they had to a uniform. The trees had shrugged off their remaining clothes, meaning that the journey to work went from golden to silver in a weekend. The only plant tenacious enough to hold its leaves was the one which literally covered the site, the rampant weed that Louisa and Nathaniel called fleeceflower, the rest of them called Japanese knotweed and everyone regarded as a cross between a triffid and radioactive waste. It towered above Paul’s head and to his eye it was rather beautiful in a wild, jungly sort of way, with little chandeliers of white flowers that hung against flat, vivid leaves. But apparently it was a weed, so virulent that it was classed as toxic refuse. You couldn’t compost it; every bit of the plants, from leaf to root, had to be burned in giant braziers that they kept in the centre of the Lodge, so that sometimes it looked as if the ruin’s crumbling chimneys were once again the conduits for smoke. Cutting it down and removing the roots was like wrestling a bear. He stopped seeing the permanent ache in all of his muscles as punishment and started to view it as reward. The novel sensation of pride and satisfaction after a day’s hard physical graft made him feel connected to his father and had the added benefit of knocking him out at night. On the days when he had to work in the office, sitting in a swivel chair, answering the phone and trying to decipher Ingram and Demetra’s haphazard filing system, his brain went into overdrive to compensate for the lack of physical activity. Those were always the nights when he found it hard to sleep, tortured by thoughts of Daniel. He would hang out of his bedroom window and look down at the late-night stragglers on the High Street, reflecting guiltily that Daniel would give anything to have even such a meagre view as this.

Their progress was steady but slow. When the trees were nude you could see more: the density of the brambles that clawed at your ankles like man-traps; the distance yet to be cleared. The day he found the cable he was working on his own, tidying up the space around the cabins. All the electricity on site came from a single source; the cabins were connected to it by thick green cables. There were six cabins but seven cables, one of which abruptly disappeared underground. Intrigued, Paul followed its path. He nearly lost it a couple of times – whoever had buried it had done a good job. It threaded along the edge of the car-park site, which was still a choppy sea of clay and hardcore, and then followed the perimeter wall where it surfaced to trail alongside the bricks dividing Kelstice from the farmland that locked around it like puzzle pieces. Paul had no idea whether the walls were as old as the Lodge itself, but they had weathered better, almost entirely intact. In the few tumbledown breaches, the neighbouring landowner had erected a snarl of barbed wire that reached to the waist. Paul peered through one gap and was alarmed to find himself almost nose-to-nose with a masticating cow, her hide the same deep terracotta as the local stone. The longer the wall went on, the more he wondered if he wasn’t somehow going round in a huge circle, about to find himself back where he had started.

He knew when the cable vanished under the gate that this was not the case. Even without the cable as a marker, he would have remembered something like this strange portal, with its crumbling brick frame and its rotting green wood. Even the iron bolts and hinges looked frail. He nudged gently at the door. It almost gave, but he was worried about barbed wire or worse on the other side and decided not to push it. He gave the wall itself a good kick. It seemed sturdy and, using worn-away bricks for hand and footholds, he climbed. He found himself looking at the dull silver roof of a motorised caravan. The brow of the vehicle jutted like a frown. Its paintwork was greying and lime-coloured moss grew around the door and aluminium window frames like a velvet trim. It had obviously been driven here, but not recently; there were no tracks, one tyre was flat and grass grew in between the fat spokes of the wheels. The porthole windows were blind with books, pages to panes. Outside, there was a square patch of tilled land with little sticks in it and shoots sprouting up here and there, a miniature version of the big garden they were building on the other side of the wall. Gas canisters lined up like soldiers and sheaves of lavender, neatly arranged in muddy trugs, sent up a sickly-sweet smell.

Paul dropped to his feet on the other side of the wall, making sure to bend his knees to absorb his bodyweight like Daniel had taught him, but his fall was intercepted by nature’s barb; his jeans were pierced and the flesh on his arms was ripped by what felt like hot needles. He found himself lying on the ground in a tangle of stems and branches, fat white flowers all around him, and saw that he had pulled the plant clean away from the wall it was trained on and had severed it, almost at the root. His skin, when he rolled up his sleeve, looked like it had been studded with rubies. He leaned the rambling rose back against the wall. To his inexpert eye, it looked all right. Suddenly he was desperate to leave. He did not even know whether this was still Kelstice land, but he felt acutely ashamed of his intrusion, like a voyeur. This thief of electricity clearly did not want to be found and he had more cause than most to respect that. He made an easy exit through the gate, which he now saw was operated by a couple of simple latches, then retraced his steps to the car park. The journey seemed much shorter this time, as return trips usually do.

There was nothing more to tidy up. He was still afraid to take the initiative when it came to vegetation, convinced that he would clear a patch of ‘weeds’ only to find he had destroyed a precious cultivation. All of the cabins were empty. He walked around the site looking for someone to tell him what to do but found no one. He used the break to call his mother. Her phone gave out the flatline beep of the unobtainable number, which puzzled him. When Troy’s phone made the same sound, Paul was instantly on high alert. Years ago, Daniel had said that in the event of Paul ever crossing him, it was Natalie he would target. Afraid of what he might learn, he called the landline for the first time. The sound of her voice made him feel drugged with relief.

‘Hello, baby!’ said Natalie. ‘When are you going to come down and see me?’

‘Soon, when I’m properly settled.’

‘I can’t bear to think of you going through all that on your own, living in the middle of nowhere. I should never have left you behind with those people, I blame myself . . .’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Paul. ‘I’m fine here, I’m making friends. What’s wrong with your mobile?’

‘It got nicked out of the van when I went back to Grays Reach.’

‘Mum! You went back there! What the bloody hell for?’

‘I had to, to the dentist to get my filling mended. I can’t get an NHS dentist down here yet, although they’d have to if I was pregnant and I’d get all my treatment for free.’

‘Are you mad? Carl could have seen you, or anything!’

‘It’s OK, Troy was with me.’ Paul suppressed a snort. ‘The little fuckers took my handbag, my purse, a hundred quid’s worth of fertility drugs and . . .’ Her voice faltered. ‘They took that picture of you and me and your dad the day you were born. It was the only copy.’

Paul knew the photograph she meant, an overexposed snapshot of the new family in the hospital ward that she kept in a little leather frame. He hadn’t known she still carried it around; the knowledge made him feel warm, like a cuddle, until he heard that his mother was crying. Troy took the receiver.

‘Sorry, Paul,’ he said. ‘She’s been really cut up about that photo. She’s missing you a lot and . . . she reckons that losing it was like losing your dad all over again.’ He said it without resentment or jealousy. ‘I’m going to go and look after her now, we’ll call you soon.’ Paul gave Troy his new number; it was repeated back to him twice, no questions asked.

‘Well, I’d better get back to your mum. Take care,’ he said. The more Paul thought about Troy, the more he came to view him as a kind of saint. No way would
he
be able to tolerate being a substitute for the real love of someone’s life.

Chapter 12

April 1989

Twenty-three nights, nineteen of them together. For the first time it wasn’t enough to lie there, be beautiful and receive pleasure. Adam demanded reciprocal worship.

‘I recognised you as soon as I saw you,’ he said, his hands pinning hers to the bed. ‘We’re two of a kind, you and me. Do you know how rare that is? Sometimes it frightens me.’

‘Me too,’ she whispered into his mouth.

‘I like it,’ he said, gripping her wrists so tightly that she cried out. ‘Scary’s good. It reminds me I’m alive.’

The most ridiculous things about him turned her on. The sound of his ring as he set it down on the glass of her bedside table. The way his pelvis seemed made to tessellate with hers. Sometimes she looked down at her breast expecting to see a pulsating cartoon loveheart that she would have to catch and stuff back into her ribcage.

Adam liked the fact that no one in his world knew about her and no one in her world knew about him.

‘When I’m with you no one else exists,’ he said.

‘It’s a shame that feeling can’t last forever,’ said Louisa.

‘Can’t it?’

‘Real life has to intrude at some stage. You’ll meet my parents, I’ll meet the band.’

‘I won’t meet your parents,’ he said with a vehemence that surprised her. ‘I don’t do family.’

‘Well, at least I’ll get to know the band, I hope.’

‘I just hate to burst the bubble. This bit. Like we’re the only man and woman on the planet. Hey, do you know what that means? If I’m Adam, that must make you Eve.’

‘
God
, that’s cheesy. You can do better than that.’

‘Why? I like it. That’s going to be my new name for you: Eve.’

‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’

‘You
are
all the girls.’

Three afternoons and two nights a week he rehearsed. On those nights he did not come to her. If he could, he called, late, to say goodnight. He didn’t have a telephone at his bedsit, not even a payphone. He had a pager instead. Her parents carried pagers, only they called them bleepers. When they were on call they took them everywhere, even to bed, and when the bleep came, they dropped everything. Of course no one was depending on Adam Glasslake to step in and save a life, which was fortunate as Louisa soon learned that the gap between leaving a message and hearing back from him could be hours. Most of the telephone booths on his street in Shepherd’s Bush had been vandalised, he said, sometimes he had to walk for miles to find a working one, and moreoever there was a band rule that rehearsal time was uninterruptable. She was reluctant to leave her room until she had heard from him, pulling the extension next to her bed just so that she could ignore it for a few seconds when finally it rang. The longed-for conversations were fraught, on her part if not on his; even when he said beautiful things to her, she imagined she heard the chirrup of female laughter in the background. She felt imprisoned, like some fairy-tale princess in her tower, or a mistress in her married lover’s pied-à-terre.