The Evil Seed (3 page)

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 break-up 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, possibly 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.

She looked at the
picture for a long time before she took the brush again and signed it. Then,
after a moment’s hesitation, in her delicate, precise calligraphy, she wrote
the name of the picture underneath her own:

Remembrance: The
Madness of Ophelia

By now she was
exhausted; looking at her watch, she realized with something of a shock that it
was almost ten o’clock, and that she had worked through half the afternoon and
most of the evening, but it was a good exhaustion, as if working had cleansed
her of all her worries and negative thoughts. Already, her mind was racing.
Maybe, after such a long time without painting anything worthwhile, she had hit
a new lode of creation within herself; maybe there would be more Ophelia
paintings, maybe a whole series of them which would be exhibited at Kettle’s
Yard that summer. The new ideas spun like carnival wheels, and ravenously
hungry all of a sudden, she made herself a late snack, fed the cats, went to
bed and slept like the dead for the rest of the night.

One

I NEVER THOUGHT TO COME BACK TO HER GRAVE.
FOR THE three months after her funeral I deliberately stayed clear of
Grantchester, as if, by my very presence, I might fill that place with unquiet
ghosts. If she rested easy, then so much the better but, thought I, I would not
be the one to watch over her rest. In the nervous and despondent state in which
her passing had left me, I saw her often; or thought I did. A girl in black,
profile slightly averted, stepping into a cab. A girl in the rain, face hidden
beneath a dark umbrella. Once, a girl walking by the river, red hair
fiery-bright beneath a pale scarf. No, I was not haunted, but she mocked me,
touching every part of my life with her delicate, spidery hand, walking with me
wherever I went.

Or so I thought. I think
I fell ill; the doctor told me that overwork and overworry had led to a poverty
of the blood, prescribed a rich diet with plenty of wine, advised me to stop
working for a week or two. I made my own secret diagnosis, took the doctor’s
advice concerning the wine a little too literally, contracted pneumonia and
nearly died.

When I resumed interest
in life a couple of months later (my landlady had nursed me lovingly throughout
my illness in a sweet half-life free from troubles or disturbing realities), it
was already too late. Robert had been dead for more than two weeks, buried in
the same churchyard as Rosemary while I slept and tossed and whined, thinking
of myself as usual, when he needed me most. Not that the act really surprised
me, when I came to think about it; the moment I saw her watching him the day of
the funeral, I should have guessed that that was what she had in mind. Her
smile was possessive, protective, indulgent, horribly knowing. In the same way
does the Blessed Damozel in Rossetti’s painting look down upon her tormented,
stricken lover; patiently, silently, with the hint of a smile. I could never
look at that picture afterwards without a shudder, for though I could never see
any physical resemblance to Rosemary in it, there was something — something in
the smile, perhaps, or maybe simply the witchlike outsizedness of the blessed
lady in comparison to her doomed lover — that reminded me too sharply of her. I
wrote a book, fifteen years later, a rewriting of my dissertation paper on the
Pre-Raphaelites, in which I examined Rossetti’s fascination for beautiful
witchlike women; I dedicated it on paper to my college art lecturer, but I knew
that I wrote it for Rosemary, to Rosemary, about Rosemary. I called it
The
Blessed Damozel.
I believe it still sells.

It took me five days of
guilt and self-loathing before I went to Robert’s graveside. By that time the
wreaths and ribbons had been removed, and all that was left was the little
mound of earth and some shrubs in a stone trough at the foot of the grave.
Small green plants, no flowers. There was a label on the thin stem of one of
the shrubs, one of those metal tags you see on the stems of prize rose bushes
at garden shows, and I flipped it over to read it.