‘Hey!’ I called, and I saw her head tilt into the rushing water like a tired child’s into a pillow. No call, no wave, nothing. For an instant, I thought I’d imagined her, so unreal was the apparition. Then the realization hit me that this was no accident, no dream, but some poor desperate woman half a minute from muddy death, with only me to save her. And so I came running, as she knew I would, stripping off coat and jacket and shoes as I ran along the bank, my glasses slipping from my nose, panting and shouting; ‘Wait! Hey! Miss! Young lady!’ without drawing even a glance from her. I jumped in close to the bank, a few yards downstream from her as she drifted slowly towards me, bracing myself for the shock of the cold water. My bare feet touched mud at the bed of the river, but at least I was not out of my depth. I reached for her. My hands brushed her dress and clenched like a vice. The flimsy fabric ripped, but by then I had a good grip on the girl, who seemed to be only half-conscious, and with all my strength I held on to her as I tried to fight my way back to the bridge. I don’t know how long it took me, or how I managed to do it; I was never a man of action, but I suppose that in those days I had youth and ignorance on my side, and somehow I managed to use the uneven brick shoring of the river-bank to pull us both towards safe, still water. I hauled her out first and myself after her and for a while I had to lie on the bank, my breath coming in great, tearing gasps and my nose bleeding a little. She was lying as I had left her, her head thrown back and her arms flung wide, but her eyelids fluttered and her breathing was regular. My first thought was that she must be cold, and I retrieved my coat, the first in a line of garments discarded along the river-bank, and wrapped it clumsily around her shoulders, somehow embarrassed to touch her now that she was out of immediate danger, as if she might be angry at my familiarity.
My second thought, quite simply, was amazement at how lovely she was.
There was no lack of beautiful women in Cambridge in those days; you saw them at parties or at the theatre or at balls, walking arm-in-arm with their young men in the gardens or punting on the Cam. But this one, as soon as I saw her, seemed from another century. She was slim, and translucent, like very fine china, pale and tragic and delicate. Her cheekbones were high, her lips full, her features small and childlike. Her hair, I guessed, would be red when dry. But her beauty was not really any of these things. It was lambent, ardent, arrogant, as if it had looked upon ugliness only to become still more beautiful. She was one of those women, I knew it then, who are at their most lovely in rags; maybe King Cophetua had thought that too, the first time he looked upon the beggar maid. Then her eyes opened, a deep grey, almost lavender, blank at first, then fixing on my face with a wildness which wrenched at my heart.
‘I’m not dead?’ she whispered.
‘No, you’re not,’ I said, foolishly. ‘Everything will be all right.’
Well, of course, I didn’t know it then. I said it simply to comfort her. But things were far from being all right. That day, or ever again.
Two
THE TABBY JUMPED on to Alice’s knee, as if to remind her that she had been sitting in that chair doing nothing for nearly half an hour and that it might be time to do some work. Sighing, she kissed Cat’s furry head before she put her down on the floor.
Cat mewed and rolled over to play, paws frantically kicking the air. Alice grinned and glanced at her sketchpad, which showed the lively outline of a sleeping cat, firm pencil strokes for the body and paws, details half filled-in with brown ink.
Not a bad one, that, she thought, especially as it took no less than a miracle to get Cat to keep still for even a minute. But it wasn’t real work; it had been six months since she had painted anything worthwhile, and it was time to begin in earnest again. Last year she had had quite a successful exhibition at Kettle’s Yard which had resulted in a nice fat contract to illustrate a series of children’s folk tales, but since then, the ideas seemed to have run temporarily dry and it didn’t look as if she was going to have very much to exhibit this year. Well, that was how things went, thought Alice. Her pictures – the good ones – took time and thought, and the ideas either came or they didn’t. There was no point worrying about all that now; it would only slow things down even more. She glanced at the three official-looking envelopes tacked to her notice-board (even at a distance, she could read the flowery ‘Red Rose’ logo across one of them), and sighed. That was where the money came from, she thought drily. The magazines. The teen romances. They were the reason she wasn’t still sharing a flat with two other students at the rough end of Mill Road and claiming income support. A sudden wave of fierce resentment washed over her at the thought, and she stood up abruptly to face the window. Was this what she was reduced to doing? Illustrations for pulp romances? She deserved so much better than that. Celtic Tales had been her first really exciting project since her ‘Spirit of Adventure’ exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, and after that … Alice shrugged. Forget it, she told herself. There was no point sitting indoors feeling resentful.
She pulled on a sweatshirt over her jeans, then slipped on a pair of old, scuffed trainers. She tacked the half-finished sketch on to the notice-board, ran her fingers through her short brown hair in lieu of a comb, and, thus ready to face the world, stepped out into the sunny street. The warmth and the combined scents of wallflowers and magnolia hit her with a sudden wave of well-being, and she took a deep breath of the pleasant air.
It occurred to her that it had been some time since she had walked into Cambridge. Strange, thought Alice. When she and Joe had been students there, they had always liked the town centre with its shops and little galleries and its cobbled streets under the linden trees. Still, that was all a long time ago. Better not to think of Joe. Better not to remember him too clearly, not to imagine him standing beside her, squinting into the shop windows with his hands in his pockets.
Better not to remember him at all.
Suddenly, she felt depressed. It was thinking about Joe, she told herself. That and the heat and the Cambridge crowds with their cameras and their college scarves and their brittle camaraderie.
Her favourite tea-shop was just round the corner, and there she found a window-seat, began to order Earl Grey, and ended up, unaccountably, ordering hot chocolate with cream and a large slice of fudge cake instead. Something in Alice responded well to chocolate.
The Copper Kettle was a good place. As a student, Alice had spent hours there, drinking Earl Grey or hot chocolate with cream, watching the flow of people in a pleasant, timeless daydream. Sitting in the same window watching the same street with the smell of chocolate and old leather in the smoky air, Alice looked down King’s Parade, the Senate House reflecting the sunlight from its clean white stones, King’s warm golden façade, and to her far left, the red brick walls of St Catherine’s glowing behind its tall railings. The light in Cambridge was different to anywhere else Alice had ever seen; warm, sleepy, golden light, shifting like a Dali landscape over the floating spires, the sleeping gardens. Such a beautiful town, thought Alice, a town of illusions, ghosts and dreams. Even the students seemed vacant, somehow, for all their animated talk, as if in spite of everything they knew themselves to be transient, nothing but the dreams of those old and half-awakened stones.
Watching the students now, Alice felt old. She remembered herself, slimmer then and with long, untamed hair, wearing cut-off jeans and baggy pullovers, Indian skirts and beads. Riding her bicycle in the rain. Sneaking over the gates at night. Sleeping with Joe in his narrow bed. She tried to remember. Had they felt it then, she thought, that sense of destiny? The brevity of their time rushing past? That terrible awareness of death?
Alice closed her eyes, uneasy, and tried to think of nothing at all.
Suddenly, in the muted hubbub of the crowded tea-shop, she recognized a voice and her eyes snapped open in surprise, something tightening like a wire inside her heart, in spite of herself. She knew that voice well, with its northern accent, and remembered sitting there in the Copper Kettle listening to Joe talking
to her about his many enthusiasms: Jaco Pastorius and Roy Harper, and how Marxism was going to change the world …
She looked round, wondering whether she had imagined it. She had not seen him for three years, not since he had moved out. Ridiculous that she should still feel that sorry little jump of the heart. Ridiculous that she should look round, furtively, as if it were him. And if it were, then so what? He’d probably be with some girl.
She had almost persuaded herself that she had been wrong, that it had not been his voice at all, when she finally caught sight of him. He was sitting at a table in a corner of the room, his familiar face bent at a familiar angle which denoted attentiveness, a cigarette cupped in one hand, shoulders bent, hair falling messily over a narrow face, round wire glasses over piercing blue eyes. So he had started smoking again, thought Alice, remembering the smell of his cigarettes, how it used to get everywhere, in his clothes, in his hair.
Her heart sank. He was not alone. There was a girl with him and, though much of her face was in shadow, Alice could guess at a small, graceful frame, the curve of a perfect collar-bone beneath a sheaf of bright-red hair. Well, what did she expect, she thought? So what if he had found someone else? Surely, after all this time—
She caught the sound of his voice again as she pushed back her chair to go, and the wire in her heart twisted again.
She could not distinguish actual words, but the tone was enough. Smoke from his cigarette obscured his face, giving his features a disturbing transparency, but in the semi-darkness she could guess his smile.
A memory, long-stored in Alice’s mind, flipped over like a dead leaf. Suddenly the busy little tea-shop was nowhere near crowded enough and, trying not to catch his eye, Alice fled into the sunlight, tight-lipped and hating herself for caring, but caring anyway. Impelled by an anger she dared not admit she quickened her pace, making her way out of the town, so that more than an hour later she found that without meaning to she had walked as far as Grantchester. Alice was barely even surprised. Walking was her way of dealing with stress. In the weeks and months following the breakup with Joe, Alice had done a great deal of walking. She slowed down and looked around.
There was a church in front of her. A little round tower rising up from the trees. It was not a place Alice knew well, in spite of visits to Grantchester – but now the little church drew her, and the shady trees looked inviting. The grass in front was neatly cut, the graves well-kept and orderly. Around the church and its grounds stood a curving, solid-looking old wall. A little path twisted here and there between headstones and monuments, touching this one and that one, gently, like a friend. Alice followed the path a little way, reading the gravestones. Some of them were even older than she expected: under a tree she found one dated 1690, though most of the others seemed more recent. On reaching the other side of the church, Alice found the path leading her into the second churchyard, even more enclosed than the first, shaded by cedars and apple trees. A squirrel skittered across the path and over the ivy-covered wall. Alice followed it. At the end of the path there was an arch, with a door set into the arch, half-open, looking on to a third graveyard; a more modern one, sheltered from the road by the same wall and still half-empty.
It happens sometimes that people are led by chance to where they need to be; at other times, events touch each other like threads in a woven fabric, one picture overlapping another, the rough binding at the back of the tapestry joined together so that heroine bleeds on to villain, sea and sky merge in uneasy union, clean edges break up and become strange and disquieting boundaries to the other side. Whichever way she tried to look at it afterwards, Alice was sure that it was there that it all began, that from the moment she set eyes on that door, all her movements were accountable, all her thoughts a completion of something much greater, much older than she. The Tailor of Gloucester in Beatrix Potter’s little book nearly lost everything for the sake of a single twist of cherry-coloured silk; for want of a thread a whole embroidered coat and waistcoat, fit for the mayor, could not be finished. And looking back at events later, when the pattern of things began at last to emerge, Alice always imagined, in her mind’s eye, the long strand of silk leading to that little wooden door, leading her on to the other side of the picture, where no rules applied, and where something was about to awaken.
Of course, at the time she had no such thoughts. They came later, with Ginny and Joe. Only a sense of peace and a quiet pleasure in the still warm air as she pushed the door and went into the hidden churchyard. The graves there were beautifully tended, planted with shrubs and flowering trees. A couple of the headstones were crooked, half hidden in the undergrowth, but there was no sense of desolation about the place, only an air of dignity, as of tired old people sitting down in the grass. A couple of the graves were marked with flowers, planted perhaps by some relative; yes, it was a good place. Two trees stood at the very back of the garden, a hawthorn in bloom, and a dark yew in stark contrast, shadowing a grave half hidden by vegetation. She wondered whose grave it was, overgrown with long, ripe weeds, so beautifully and almost self-consciously framed by the two trees.
She took a closer look, and saw that there was no headstone, or visible name, but from its elegance she thought that it was probably a woman’s grave. A simple sculpture topped the slab. A gate, half open, allowed to swing loosely on its hinges, with an inscription on the outside:
Something inside me remembers and will not forget.
Experimentally, Alice pulled at the clinging ivy, trying to dislodge it. The roots were long, but dry, and they came free easily enough, leaving pale scars in the decaying stone, but the inscription began to appear, faintly at the foot of the slab. It was more modern than the state of the grave might have suggested, and read:
Rosemary Virginia Ashley
August 1948
Alice searched for some other detail: whether Rosemary had been married, what she died of, who the lover or husband had been who had promised never to forget, but there was nothing more to see. She covered up the inscription, once more replacing the ivy where she had found it. It would be somehow wrong, she felt, to leave the grave exposed, like a wound.
Her mind was wandering as she replaced the last of the trailing ivy, and, for a moment, she did not even notice the thin, piece of metal which brushed her fingers from beneath the leaves. At first, she thought it was the ring-pull from a Coke can; it was light, and had the same uneven sharpness at the edges. There was a hole in one end, as if it had once been attached to something, and there was moss clinging to one surface, but even then, Alice could read the inscription:
Rosemary
For Remembrance
Alice felt her heart beat faster. Surely this could be no coincidence. This tag had been hers, Rosemary’s, placed on her grave when she was buried. Maybe tied on to some wreath or plant. Somehow, just finding that little piece of metal made everything all the more real, all the more sad. She wondered for a moment whether to throw the tag back on to the grave, then she shrugged and hid it in her pocket, without really thinking what she was doing, without considering the implications; just as the cat had hidden the final twist of cherry-coloured silk from the Tailor of Gloucester.
As soon as she got home, Alice made a cup of tea, took it to her workroom (a table, a stool, an easel, a window facing north, a record player and a messy stack of albums), dragged a thick watercolour pad out of an overflowing cupboard and began to draw. The idea had come to her full-blown, had followed her home from Grantchester, had refused to let her be, and now it was growing, line by line, light and precise on the paper, gaining a depth as the lines grew thicker, gaining shadow, sunlight, greenery.
A girl’s figure, thin-shouldered, but with a pure half-profile half-hidden in a tumbling mass of hair, barefoot and dressed in a long white robe. She was sitting on the ground, hugging her knees, her head tilted away from the viewer at an odd, childish angle. Around her, long grass, flowers and weeds; in the background, two half-defined trees and a sketched-in figure, po
ssibly male, stooping slightly under the tree branches. Alice stepped back a pace to look at the finished sketch and smiled, liking it. It was deliberately Pre-Raphaelite in composition: the ordered disorder of the undergrowth contrasting with the quiescence of the girl, shrouded in her mystery, watching the river with that curious intentness, while the ill-defined figure in the background watched or waited.
She took a gulp of cold tea and began to think about colour. Then she put a record on to the turntable and deftly began to ink in the colours. A splash of reflection in the water … the girl’s dress undefined – she could airbrush that in later – the hair a single bright spray of colour among the muted greens and greys. Yes, quite good, Alice thought. But then again, she often did in the heat of creativity. Tomorrow might reveal it to be nothing special, after all. And yet it gave her a feeling she hadn’t had for a long time.
The light dimmed. She turned on the lights and carried on working. Side one of the record played twice before she noticed and turned it over, the other side three times. She heard a mewing at her door, indicating that the cats should be fed; she heard the telephone and ignored it. Acrylics replaced inks; she carefully painted on and peeled off masking gum while airbrushing the triangle of sky, the water, the girl’s dress; replaced her thin acrylic brush for an even thinner one, adding detail to the leaves, the grass, the texture of the girl’s hair; then she stepped back, dropped her brushes, and stared.
There was no doubt about it; it was good. Just simple enough to reproduce beautifully as a poster or the cover of a book, classic enough to hang in an airy gallery, peaceful enough to grace a church altar. Never had inks and acrylic produced such pure colours for her before; never had Alice managed a composition which had had quite the same intensity. You had to look at it; even Alice found herself speculating about who the girl was, what she was doing, wondering who the figure in the background might be.