Engleby. Part 9

I parked on the severely sloping high street. People greeted one another, stopped and talked. No one knew me. No one came up to me and said, 'This is Jentown. We're all so happy to live here.' I was invisible.

I saw it all through her eyes. The weathered red brick with the faded lettering of long-gone enterprises: 'Rand and Son, General Drapers, Ladies and Children's Outfitters', and next to it another clothes shop with union flags on poles at 45 degrees, like something from Victoria's jubilee. And halfway up the street a detached Queen Anne building, fortnightly home of the Rotary Club, a solicitors' office. Doubtless her father had dealt many times with them as client or antagonist. On the railings in front was a poster for the Lymington Choral Society. Had what that girl Susan called her sense of humour limitation extended to Lym Chor Soc? Had she sung her off-contralto in the second row?

At the summit of the street was a bell tower with a clock, part of the church. I scanned the war memorial next to it. Almost one hundred Lymington men had died in 191418, mostly in the Hamps.h.i.+re Regiment, but no Arklands (the first name alphabetically was Backhurst, F. I remember such things easily).

I walked round the graveyard for a bit. The tombstones were lichened-over and illegible. Many were tilting or fallen. 'Remembered Always' they claimed, but it wasn't true. You can't recall someone whose name has worn away. In the far corner was a pile of chipped and broken headstones ready to be carted off. Newer burials were marked with small tablets flat in the gra.s.s, though you had to walk over the old graves to reach them. There was no escaping the arithmetic of the dead and the fact that the cemetery with its horse chestnuts and holly trees was unable keep up with them.

I couldn't sense Jen in any of this. I walked on, down an alley beside the cricket pitch and the town football club. There were obscene graffiti on the fence.

What is a town then? How should I know? Where did she live, where did she walk? Little Jen, did you linger in the doorway of Fox & Sons estate agents, wondering, like me, how any grown-up ever found the money to buy even these poky bungalows? Did you hang around the Pick'n'Mix in Woolworths? Where was the action, where the clubs, the discos, pubs you went to with the girls from school? Where was your first kiss, grope and party?

Did you walk on Thomas Street and survey those Georgian brick buildings? What are they? Retirement homes, museums? Or were you like most kids indifferent to your surroundings oblivious in your hurry to excitement?

I wandered on and on, expecting to see a schoolgirl in the derided games clothes or an undergraduate on holiday in corduroy skirt and boots. Then I was tired.

It was noon by this time and I was also hungry, having not been able to face a solo breakfast at the Crown. I found a tea shoppe on the high street and ordered a toasted cheese sandwich with bacon. The back of the menu said something about Lymington being the 'New Forest's most popular town'. Did I have to face the possibility that Jennifer's home town was not the paradigm of English Eden that I'd pictured, but a tourist resort? And if so, what on earth could people do here on their holidays? They couldn't just eat cream teas and walk up and down the high street all day.

The sandwich was brought by a waitress in a 'Victorian' white paper cap with trailing streamers and a short black skirt. I thought Jen might have had her Sat.u.r.day job here. I could picture local men ogling the skirt and the streamers but then again they looked too old for that, the other customers. They talked loudly of their hospital appointments, their X-rays and their 'tablets'. How could anyone seriously live in a place like this?

Something happened to this country, perhaps in the 1960s. We lost the past.

You've seen the pictures of the men queuing to enlist in 1915, their faces turned up in guileless hope beneath their hats. Those who came back found the same villages and towns, empty and with too many women, but still with a link that took them back through to the lives of their grandfathers and further 200 years at least, to a life lived straight, sincere. Field, factory, office.

Even cars and buses didn't really change it. When my father returned from the North Atlantic in 1946 it was to a country cold and poor and short of food vindicated, glorious, foggy, broke and miserable. Still, for all he knew of bodies burning in the sea, bodies burning in the ovens of Treblinka, children in flames in wood-and-paper houses in j.a.pan, for all the millions unburned, unburied on the Eastern Front, it was still Reading. It hadn't changed (it had always been an unlovely town) and there was still a main line to the past.

How did we lose it? Now you walk those same streets and it seems as though it's all a sham, a play or a quotation. When I looked through the window of the shoppe, I didn't see people rooted in that town: I saw people floating through it, disconnected. Field, factory and office have gone. The fields are mostly set aside, not worked; the factories have closed and the offices are let to national out-of-town concerns. The residents think most about Bournemouth, London, the Algarve and Coronation Street. These are people in a dream, of whom only the very old have some embarra.s.sing idea of 'local history', though even they can only speak of it apologetically, knowing that the thread is broken and that while the past is real enough the only only true reality the present has insufficient depth to register it. true reality the present has insufficient depth to register it.

I left the tea shoppe and bought a local street guide in the newsagent because I did, of course, know where I was really going. After all, I had the address.

I drove down to the small quay to look at the boats. There was all the usual boat stuff chandlery, sail shops but I couldn't imagine Jennifer there. What would she do with her friends? There seemed nowhere for them to hang out.

No, there was nothing for me here. It was time to do what I had come for, though I felt for some reason reluctant.

I drove slowly along the side of the quay, past a private dock, to a public area with a green and a bandstand. I stopped again for a minute and looked at it.

The bandstand filled me with pain. I was half-remembering something a day trip as a child, I suppose. I had gone to a seaside town, I had walked on the pier, I had been happy. There was a bra.s.s band. I had been lost, I had been beaten. I had been unhappy. I had felt the impotence and agony of childhood. I remembered, I did not remember. And the strange thing was, that, in the end, it came to exactly the same thing.

I drove round the end of the quay. Stanley Road, Westfield Road, a house called 'Mariner's Rest'. I looked at the street guide.

The roads went nowhere on the headland, but linked back onto themselves and into town. I was nearly there.

Was R.P. Arkland MA a sailing man, then? Why else live in this part of town? Maybe it was just the view he liked.

I was now in roads not quite suburban outskirts is what you'd call them, I think. Detached houses of widely varying styles and sizes. Cheap post-War pebbledash, mock-Tudor with leaded lights, whitewashed villa. All had got their nameplates from the same supplier, whether wrought iron hammered into the wall by the drive or stencilled black-on-white with a single flower decoration. 'Woodp.e.c.k.e.rs'. 'Fairview'. It was the sort of area grand people would recoil from but if you came from Trafalgar Terrace you were daunted by.

Vitre Gardens, Rookes Lane. I checked the map. This was Jen country all right, this was the heart of it. Her road was a fraction grander than I'd expected. It had big views to one side over fields, and although some of the houses weren't up to much, they were all widely separated by gardens and gravel drives. I pulled over and walked the last hundred yards.

R.P.'s house bore the marks of his profession: picture windows, skylights, yellow frames, parts knocked through and tinkered with; a sort of lean-to folly on the garden side. But it still looked all right. Presumably the planners hadn't let him b.u.g.g.e.r it up completely. It still looked like a house where four girls could arrive home from school at slightly different times, throw down their bikes on the gravel and run inside.

I sat down on the gra.s.s bank opposite and looked at it. It was the house in the picture on her desk.

For a time I stared at the bedroom windows and tried to guess which one had been hers. I wished I'd had McCaffrey's binoculars. Without disturbing anyone, I could have looked through and seen her wardrobe, the hanging clothes, the soft toys that the journalist woman had commented on. How come she'd been allowed to go in and look, when I, Jen's real friend, had to sit on wet gra.s.s and imagine?

I sat with my head in my hands, looking. I thought of the pa.s.sionate connections that a family like hers could make. I pictured family tea with four opinionated daughters. And old R.P.... no longer tired from sleepless nights when they were babies, but no longer young either. How he must have missed grown-up Jen when she went off to university; and now he must be wanting time to stand still before the others all deserted him as well. These hot ties of affection and circ.u.mstance that seem eternal to you when you're young he knew they weren't. He knew that all such bonds dissolve with death or time and that in the end you are alone. No wife, no Jen, no parents, no other children. Quite alone.

There must have been a shop somewhere in this area, probably in a short parade on one of the new estates 'Oh, Jenny, just run and get some mint sauce, will you, before Dad gets home?' 'Why's it always me?' Because you're the most reliable, the best.

The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?

I went back to the car to get some Anadin, expecting to return and sit some more; but once I was inside the 1100, I couldn't bear the thought of it, so I started the engine and drove away.

It was growing dark near Newbury and I suddenly thought I'd like to see Julie, so I took the motorway to Reading and parked in Trafalgar Terrace. I got a Chinese takeaway for the three of us and slept like a child in my old room.

It was late morning the next day when I strolled in through the main gate of my college and made my way towards Clock Court. I stopped by one of the cobbled triangles and looked over to the foot of my staircase, which was barred by blue and white tape. Two police officers stood either side of the door into the building.

'What's going on?' I said.

'You can't go in. Police search. What's your name?'

'Engleby.'

'Wait here.'

One of the men went upstairs. I waited.

'What are they looking for?' I asked the remaining plod. I was thinking of the high-level cistern in the toilet.

'I'm not allowed to say. Just wait here.'

Eventually, the first officer came down again. 'Come with me,' he said.

I followed him to the top floor. Outside my room stood Inspector Peck and Dr Townsend.

'Ah, Mike. You've met Inspector Peck, haven't you?'

'Yes.' I nodded at Peck.

'He came to see me this morning. He has a warrant to search your room. It's in connection with Jennifer Arkland. I looked for you, but we couldn't find you. Where have you been?'

Jennifer's house.

No. 'I went to see my mother at home, in Reading. She hasn't been well. Can I look inside my room?'

Peck said, 'All right. Watch your step. We've taken up the boards.'

Inside was a man with rubber gloves and overalls a pathologist, presumably Cannon and another plain-clothes officer who was busy with screwdriver and sc.r.a.per.

The carpet had been rolled up and was stacked on one end in a corner, next to some upended floorboards. I could see my floor joists and the ceiling of Dave Carling's room below. The striped voids were full of dust. They'd gone into the wall behind the 'drinks' cupboard, through plasterboard, back to brick. You could see part of a timber diagonal behind the Chambery and the gin from Arthur Cooper.

What were they expecting to find? The ghost of Jen? Bones? A bra?

Cannon came through from the bedroom. 'What are all these pills for?'

'I have difficulty sleeping.'

He looked at Peck meaningfully as he dropped them in a polythene bag. I suppose they were thinking that if the tablets made me sleep they could knock out someone else as well.

Since their last visit I'd got some old pill bottles that I'd had from the doctor in Reading (antibiotics, antihistamine) and transferred the Alan Greening stuff into them, so at least my name was on the labels.

The young officer was starting to lever up the floorboards in the small pantry.

'Do you have to do that?' I said to Peck. 'What are you expecting to find?'

Peck didn't say anything. He gave me a hard look as though to say things were serious now. There was no longer anything avuncular in his manner.

There was dust in the air from where Cannon had cut open the side of my mattress.

It was absurd.

I looked at Townsend, smiled and rolled my eyes. These plods, I seemed to say.

Townsend didn't smile back. He was twisting his hands so violently he must have been burning the skin off them.

'Careful,' I said to Cannon, who was pulling down the Procol Harum poster. 'Let me do that for you.'

I put it carefully on the desk while Cannon unscrewed the corkboard and ran his hand over the flat plastered wall behind it. He knocked a few times, trying to look knowledgeable, like a Caius medic listening to his first chest.

I laid the corkboard also on top of the desk. Julie's funny little face grinned up at me from beneath her straw boater. She looked older than that now. She was thirteen. She had b.r.e.a.s.t.s, went to parties, listened to Queen though I was pretty sure T. Rex were still her favourites. 'Metal Guru/I-is it true?' Oh, Jules.

Cannon was s.h.i.+ning a torch onto the the ceiling as though my idea of body disposal would be to bring all the plaster down, go up a ladder and stuff the jointed remains piece by piece between the beams, replaster, repaint and apply the right amount of dust so the cut sections blended in with the rest. Hope for no dropping bloodstains.

It's true that during their last visit I'd given them the impression that I was pretty handy on the film set, but there are limits to my ability with fretsaw and chisel.

The young one was going through my clothes, holding them up to the 60-watt overhead bulb, looking for stains, I imagined. He put some s.h.i.+rts and underclothes in a large bin liner. They included a Donny Osmond tee s.h.i.+rt Julie'd given me as a joke for Christmas.

I was thinking about the eight ounces of dope that I'd replaced up the chimney when I'd got it back from Stellings. You really had to know the chimney, and how to bend your hand round on itself to reach the inner ledge.

'I hope you're going to tidy up when you've finished,' I said.

'Don't take the p.i.s.s out of me, you little s.h.i.+t,' said Peck, sticking his face suddenly into mine. This was about as unavuncular as you could get. 'We're going to get whoever did this. If not today, tomorrow. But don't you worry. We're going to solve this crime. Barry, look in the desk.'

Dr Townsend was twitching so much he had to go out of the room at this point, while Cannon went through my papers. The desk was fairly empty, in fact. I'd left most of my work in my locker outside the biology labs.

There weren't even any letters from girlfriends or from my mother in the drawers though doubtless you could find even that absence suspicious if you were so minded.

'So you went to this, did you?' said Cannon. He was holding up the order of service from Jen's college chapel.

'Yes, of course.'

'Enjoy it, did you?' said Peck.

'It was a good service. But sad. Obviously.'

The other plain-clothes man was going through my books. I had wittily bought one called The Gra.s.s Crop The Gra.s.s Crop from the ten pence second-hand shelf outside Galloway & Porter and cut a deep section from the middle pages to keep well, gra.s.s obviously. I couldn't remember if there was any in it, but I thought not because it only held a little and I didn't deal in small quant.i.ties any more. It was the sort of t.i.tle that might interest Townsend, I thought. from the ten pence second-hand shelf outside Galloway & Porter and cut a deep section from the middle pages to keep well, gra.s.s obviously. I couldn't remember if there was any in it, but I thought not because it only held a little and I didn't deal in small quant.i.ties any more. It was the sort of t.i.tle that might interest Townsend, I thought. The Gra.s.s Crop: Uneven Distribution in Windborne Seeding The Gra.s.s Crop: Uneven Distribution in Windborne Seeding.

I had hoped that Townsend might intercede on my behalf, but he seemed hypnotised by the activity around us. When Peck addressed him, he was deferential.

'Very well, Inspector. Certainly.' Then he tried to establish his superiority with some donnish phrases: 'Do by all means proceed. I'm quite sure the means are proportionate to the end.'

Peck looked at him as though he was mad.

Eventually, after we'd stood around for about two hours, Peck called off the search and the officers all gathered at the door.

'Right,' said Peck to Townsend. 'This staircase is out of bounds until further notice. You'll have to find rooms for the other students until we've finished.'

'How long will that be?'

Peck looked at the pathologist. 'Two days at least.'

'I shall tell the Senior Tutor at once.'

We walked through Clock Court and on to the main gate.

'Goodbye, Inspector. Good luck with the investigation,' said Townsend, risking a light irony now that all seemed safe.

'We'll be back at seven in the morning,' said Peck, not returning the winsome smile. 'Tell the porter.'

When they'd gone, we went to the domestic bursar's office and sorted out which college guest room I could live in till they'd finished with mine. Then we went back to the porters' lodge to sign a book and get the key.

Outside, looking over Front Court, I said to Townsend, 'I feel a bit anxious about all this. Could I ask you to-'

'I'm sure it'll be fine,' said Townsend tightly. He looked at his watch. 'Oh dear. Supervision.'

He ran away over the lawn in the middle of Front Court (only Fellows were allowed on the gra.s.s, but I'd never seen one run before); he cantered pretty quickly, as it happened, with a high-stepping action, till he vanished in the shadows of the Hawksmoor cloister.

That night I went to the Kestrel, but my headache was so bad I couldn't enjoy it, and I had to go back to my guest room, where I listened to the radio. I tried to do some work, but it was hard to concentrate. I looked in on the TV room, where I'd seen Robin Wilson's performance, but there was nothing worth watching. I ended up in the college bar, not a place I normally go outside Folk Club. I once worked a s.h.i.+ft on the bar with Dave Carling when Brian, the professional, went home at nine. After we'd shut up at eleven, Dave and I stayed behind and drank a shot of every drink on sale. By midnight the only ones we hadn't got through were gin and Newcastle Brown. So we did them together in a half-pint mug, and that's not a mixture that I'd recommend.

The bar was full of amateur drinkers with halves of ga.s.sy keg bitter, playing table football and smoking No. 6. It wasn't fun.

When I got back to my guest room, on the ground floor of Dr Woodrow's staircase, oddly enough, I felt detached from what was going on. I began to inspect the surfaces of the room closely, though I felt alienated by their texture. Wood, cloth, Formica, carpet, enamel.

It was a little like that time in Izmir. I felt I was beginning to unravel. It was as though all the molecules that made the ent.i.ty known as 'Mike Engleby' had been kept in place by some weird centripetal force which had unaccountably failed. Now those particles were flying outward into chaos.

I suppose all human 'personalities' are at some level makes.h.i.+ft or provisional, but it's unusual to feel oneself come apart in such a molecular way.

The next forty-eight hours were bad. I was taking four of those blue ten-milligram pills a day as well as some Tuinal I'd found in my sponge bag. Yet I'd still hardly slept.

Eventually, Peck and his men cleared out of my staircase. I didn't immediately return but stayed an extra night in the guest room so Mrs Lumbago could get in and tidy up the mess they'd left. She was indignant about this extra work, even though she'd had three days off completely.