The Sick Rose (9 page)

‘That’s discrimination, miss,’ said a boy called Curtis Goddard, who was big on human rights. ‘Not all of us know our dads.’

Paul thought that he would never know whether his father could roll his tongue, and although he tried to picture Dad’s face and recall whether he’d ever seen him pull this expression he couldn’t. In fact, his mind’s image of Dad’s face had taken on a hazy quality. The only way he could see him vividly was with his neck slashed and the blood pouring out. The tears seemed to come from nowhere and before he knew what was happening he was running from the classroom, blind with them.

Miss Grewal found him in the corridor where he gulped an explanation. Teachers weren’t supposed to touch you but she gave him a light hug. When she ushered him back into the classroom, a few boys at the back gave a wolf whistle, were immediately given detention and then looked at Paul as though it had been his fault.

‘That was a bit
gay
, Seaforth,’ said Curtis. All his friends were a little more distant with him that lunchtime but he probably would have recovered from that if it hadn’t been for the Abigail Burden incident a few days later. Their French teacher handed out a set of brand new textbooks whose pages had edges like razors. Abigail got a paper cut on her finger, deep and wide, the flesh parting like a little mouth. The scarlet stream was disproportionate to the size of the wound. Paul felt iron bands constrict around his chest. Afterwards he had not really been able to remember much about it apart from lying on the floor with a rushing noise in his ears. The other kids told him he’d been screaming for his daddy. From then on, he was on his own.

Grays Reach was dangerous without a force field of friends to protect you. The corridors were fine, you could just attach yourself to any random group of boys by walking close enough, but the walk to and from school was an assault course of lurking bullies. No matter how early he left in the morning or how late he left in the afternoon, they would always find him. If they didn’t get him in the underpass they’d find him on one of the footpaths. On a good day, it would be name-calling, threats, no-holds-barred descriptions of all the sex they were having with his mother, who apparently loved young cock, especially up the arse. On a bad day, it would get physical. There was nothing left for them to steal; he made his own sandwiches so he didn’t have to carry lunch money, but that didn’t stop them ripping his backpack from his shoulders and emptying the contents down the drain. After the bag, they’d start on him. He was surprised to learn that he did not mind blood so much when it was his own; when his own skin was broken, he felt a strange detachment that was the opposite of panic. He started getting up in the middle of the night to wash the stains out of his school clothes. While he was waiting for the tumble dryer to finish its cycle, he read, disappearing further and further into the fantasy worlds where friendship mattered more than anything else and codes of honour were unbreakable.

He longed for a friend, he prayed for one. Then, when he was thirteen, Daniel came.

Chapter 10

September 2009

Of course it wasn’t really him; she should have known that at once instead of skittering off into fantasy and superstition. The next time she saw him, in the canteen, she was ready for it, she had calmed down enough to see that it was only (only!) his doppelgänger, an uncanny likeness. The differences grew clear, like a picture being pulled into focus or seen through an eye adapting to different levels of light or dark. He was taller than Adam and broader, his cheekbones were softer and his eyes were green, not blue. But the hair was the same, strand for strand, curl for curl, and the mouth was Adam’s exactly, although the smile it formed was shy and uncertain, not the swaggering lopsided smirk that Adam had worn. Her starved eyes gorged themselves on the sight of him. Sometimes it was too much to look at him, and yet she could not turn away.

Louisa let her research slide again as she took to stalking him around the site, pushing an empty wheelbarrow to the places Paul was likely to be. She saw the lines of his body through his T-shirt and jeans, the perfect inverted triangle of his torso, the lean thighs, the belly as flat as his back. She found him alone, conducting a fingertip search of a newly cleared and freshly dug garden, picking out the sycamore seeds that littered the estate. It was painstaking, boring work, a job doubtless delegated by Ross, the classic initiation task. Once or twice she saw him pick up a sycamore seed just to let it spin to the ground like a helicopter. He looked very young.

He was eighteen, that much she had gleaned from listening in on conversations in the canteen. She had once believed in reincarnation and the dates were right: she had last seen Adam twenty years ago, just the right amount of time for the vagrant soul to find new flesh. That this chronology offered a more banal possibility did not occur to her until a week or two later. She was in the greenhouse, scrubbing the potting shelves with an organic fungicide, when the idea of Adam fathering a child with another woman came to her. The pain of betrayal, imagined, delayed, was as acute as it had been back then. Knowing Paul’s exact date of birth would set her straight. But how could she find out? Demetra wouldn’t let her see his file even if she could find a plausible reason for asking. She guarded her charges’ privacy fiercely.

Louisa was tormented by Paul’s proximity and what it might mean. There was no ritual to cast out this living ghost, no drink that would sink this spirit. If Paul was Adam’s son, what was he doing here? And if he wasn’t, what was he doing here? Who else from her past was about to trespass on her present? Would the Other Man, the witness or the man who had declared death, be next? Would his bandmates come and find her? Had they all been conspiring, waiting until she thought she was safe? The possibilities wheeled around her mind, the earthly menace and the unearthly omen. She was not sure which was the more terrifying.

She was surrounded by people all day every day but as soon as the last of them had left the site loneliness enveloped her like freezing fog. In the evening she would sit in the office, staring into space, wishing desperately for someone she could hold and confide in. The only person she could really say she was close to now was Miranda, and even her she only saw three or four times a year. There had been a time, six or seven years after it had happened, on Miranda’s son’s first birthday, when she had come close to telling her. After a raucous children’s party, their parents had taken a taxi back to Kensington and Dev, exhausted by catering the whole thing, had gone straight to bed. The sisters had stayed in the huge kitchen, ostensibly to clear up the mess, but they had ended up finishing one bottle of wine and then opening another. Miranda kept making clumsy attempts to wipe down surfaces and load the dishwasher, glass in hand the whole time.

‘Do you ever sit still?’ Louisa had asked. ‘Your life looks like such hard work.’

‘Ah, it’s worth it though,’ said Miranda. ‘You’ll find out one day, when you meet the right man.’ Louisa reached for the bottle as her sister went on, ‘Have you
really
never met anyone you wanted to settle down with?’ The question was asked in a kind of drunken innocent concern but Louisa felt her answer, detailed and incriminating, roar up out of nowhere. She actually got as far as drawing the breath that would fuel the words but the baby beat her to it, crying out for his mother from his cot. Miranda had leapt up to comfort the child, smashing a wine glass on her way out of the kitchen, shattering Louisa’s resolve to share. By the time Miranda came downstairs, the kitchen was clean and Louisa was making coffee, shaken by how close she had come to exposing herself.

It was four years after the near-miss in Miranda’s kitchen that she had met Laurence, the only man among Adam’s would-be successors whose face as well as body she could remember. Over the years she had lost count of the lovers she had taken, mostly one-night stands and a handful of fledging relationships whose wings she had clipped early on. Laurence had been different, the only other person she might ever have told. He had run a wine merchant’s in the small Hampshire town where she had briefly freelanced as garden designer for a big private house. He took her to a restaurant and then back to his flat; he elicited nothing like the passion she had had for Adam, for which she was grateful, but he was kind and tender and she felt a corresponding softening of something inside her. After just two or three times with him she began to think of him as her Dev, a steady, decent man with whom she could become a steady, decent woman. Her mistake had been to get complacent (drunk, again) and invite him back to the tiny unfurnished bedsit that was then her home. After Laurence had fallen asleep Louisa realised her mistake and had lain awake, staring at the starkness of the room, the jangling clothes rail and the conspicuous cardboard storage box that stored her memories. In the small hours she had hidden everything in the only fitted storage the studio had to offer, the kitchenette cupboard with its cutlery for one. She had tried hard to stay awake but the sleep she eventually surrendered to was so deep that Laurence, on waking, had gone looking for tea and cups. She awoke to find him sitting on the end of the bed, leafing through her scrapbook, and had screamed at him to stop looking through her things and to get the hell out of her flat, pushing him up the stairs. He had come round the next day to offer a bewildered apology through the letterbox, but she had stayed on the bed, scrapbook in her arms, locked in grief. She was mourning not only the loss of Adam but the death of the version of herself that was able to put down roots, find love, make a family, live a good life.

Louisa never went back to work at the big house. The weeks that followed had been some of the darkest she could remember; with no employment, she had only herself to live with and there had been some nights when even that company had been unbearable and she had considered – fleetingly and with terror, but considered it nevertheless – the ultimate release.

The job at Kelstice, advertised in a trade journal, had saved her from herself. The salary offered was incommensurate with the experience they were asking for, and this, she supposed, was why she was the only applicant. In the wreck of the site and the amateurish crew she recognised a place she could finally lose herself. For the first few months of the job she lodged with an elderly woman on the Leamington road and it was here that the others believed she still resided, although she had arranged to have her meagre post redirected to a post office box when she had bought the caravan. While she was settling into her four-wheeled home she was afraid the others would notice that her car was often parked in the same spot for days on end, that she was always the first one on site and the last to leave, but she had overestimated the curiosity of others. Demetra, despite the calibre of the young people they worked with, was the kind of person who just assumed everyone was telling the truth, all the time. Why would anyone lie about something like that? The young people, who all lived in the opposite direction of Coventry, showed even less curiosity about her private life. They only
really
saw each other, and she wondered if she had been like that when she was young. To deepen her cover (and because she no longer dared to drink in public) she became the site’s designated driver, always offering Ingram and Demetra and even Nathaniel lifts home when they needed them, dropping them at their doors and driving home the long way round, looping the country lanes until she ended up back at Kelstice, its unofficial porter, its secret sentinel. Every night she locked the door of the office and stood in the moonshadow of the Lodge. If the night was mild she took her time on the walk home, knowing that no one would be waiting for her.

Chapter 11

October 2009

Paul found that there was a different language at Kelstice, a centuries-old vocabulary. Much of the terminology that they used was to do with horses: the paths that cut through the New Wood were called gallops, and the wild rutted avenue that framed the house they called a ride, not a driveway. At the back of the site there was a stagnant mass of water known as the Mere. Smelly gas rose off it like something out of a horror film, and if you were unlucky enough to get downwind of it you had to breathe through your mouth. The intention was to clean and restore it to an ornamental lake, a job with which he wanted no involvement. The Mere was bordered on one side by Nathaniel’s nascent orchard and on the other, close to the perimeter wall, was territory colonised by real trees – as opposed to brambles, ivy and weeds – called New Wood, although it looked as ancient as the Lodge itself.

Very little seemed to be expected of him, and he suspected that he could have spent most of his days wandering around the site, but he didn’t want to get into trouble and have them throw him off the project, so whenever he found himself at leisure – or it was raining – he took himself back to the cabins to receive instruction.

One afternoon rain
and
idleness drove him to climb the stairs to the office. Louisa and Ingram were in heated conversation about some benches that Ingram had ordered, clearly to Louisa’s great displeasure. They had their backs to the door; that, and the thunder of raindrops on the roof meant that they did not hear him come in. After standing in the doorway for what seemed like entire minutes, cold rain finding its way down the back of his jacket, he decided to seat himself at the spare desk until they had finished arguing.

The desk was strewn with books, none new, some with desiccated spines that snapped in two when you opened them and threatened to disintegrate in his fingers. One account of a castle garden had previously been a library book; the stamp in the back revealed that it had been borrowed just once, in 1972. Tucked into its pages was a facsimile of a map of Kelstice in the 1850s, showing neat little parcels of land and a scattering of long-gone outbuildings. Louisa’s voice suddenly became clear and sharp.