Her Fearful Symmetry

by Audrey Niffenegger

  There was very little traffic. The driver was talking in Hindi to someone on his mobile. They rode for several miles in awkward silence. As the cab crossed the Thames Robert said, 'Are you all right?'

  'I've made a decision,' Valentina said calmly. 'But I'm going to need your help.'

  Robert experienced a qualm. Later, he thought that he should have stopped the cab, sent her home without him; he should have abandoned her then, and run through the streets of south London until his heart failed. Instead he said, 'Oh?'

  Very quietly, so the driver would not hear, Valentina began to tell him about Elspeth's resurrection of the Kitten. Robert listened with increasing impatience. 'I don't understand,' he said. 'The Kitten is dead.'

  'That was another day - Elspeth was practising. The Kitten didn't like it and ran away, and Elspeth couldn't put her back in her body.'

  'Why on earth was Elspeth practising? Practising for what?'

  'That's what I wanted to tell you. We had a plan ...' As she explained the plan, in her soft American voice, almost whispering in the back of the minicab, Robert had a sensation of horror. He drew away from Valentina. 'You're mad,' he said.

  She laid her small hand on his knee. 'That's what Elspeth said, at first. But then she thought about it, and she worked out how we could do it. You should talk to Elspeth.'

  'Yes, I certainly am going to have a chat with her.' He removed her hand from his leg, then relented and held it. 'Erm, Valentina. You shouldn't ... It might not be good to let Elspeth call the shots.'

  'Why not?'

  'She's - clever. Her ideas have other ideas hiding inside them.'

  'She's been really nice to me.'

  Robert shook his head. 'Elspeth isn't nice. Even when she was alive she wasn't very ... She was witty and beautiful and fantastically original in ... certain ways, but now that she's dead she seems to have lost some essential quality - compassion, or empathy, some human thing ... I don't think you should trust her, Valentina.'

  'But you trust her.'

  'Only because I'm a fool.'

  They rode the rest of the way home in silence.

  Robert offered Valentina his own bed to sleep in, because she wouldn't go upstairs. He waited for her to fall asleep, then went up and knocked on the twins' door. Julia opened it immediately.

  'Come in,' she said. He stood in the front hall; he didn't want to sit down and risk a long conversation.

  'She's in my flat, sleeping,' he said.

  'Okay.'

  'Julia,' he said, 'has Valentina ever seemed ... suicidal ... to you?'

  Julia said quickly, 'She doesn't mean it.'

  Robert turned to go. 'I think she might. Just ... be careful.' He went downstairs. As he reached his own door he heard Julia closing hers.

  He let himself in and went to the phone. It would be almost seven o'clock in Lake Forest. He imagined the Pooles eating dinner together, pleasantly unaware that their daughter was plotting her own death and resurrection. He had picked up the receiver and was about to dial when he realised he didn't have the phone number. Could he ask Julia? Better not; he would get the number from Roche in the morning.

  Robert sat up most of the night, watching football highlights and a programme on American folk music with the sound turned off. At some point he fell asleep in his chair. When he woke Valentina was gone. He went upstairs and found the twins eating breakfast together, seemingly at peace. Valentina made him a cup of coffee.

  'What are you doing today?' he asked them.

  'Not much,' said Valentina.

  'Perhaps you could go to the supermarket.'

  'We've got plenty of food,' said Julia.

  'Or sightseeing.'

  'You want to talk to Elspeth?' Valentina said.

  'How did you guess?' he said sweetly.

  Valentina looked abashed but said nothing. After breakfast Julia went upstairs to see Martin, and Valentina took her tea to the back garden. Robert stood in the dining room and said, 'Elspeth. Come here.'

  He felt her cold touch against his cheek. He sat at the table with the pencil poised over the paper and said, 'Elspeth, what are you up to?'

  ME?

  'You and Valentina. She was telling me about this plan of yours.'

  IT'S ACTUALLY HER PLAN.

  'Valentina couldn't plan her way out of a wet paper bag. Elspeth, you know quite well that it won't work. For one thing, dead bodies are full of chemicals.'

  ASK SEBASTIAN NOT TO EMBALM HER.

  'No, I mean natural chemicals. There's all sorts of nasty stuff released by various glands to break down the body. There's gases, and bacteria--'

  KEEP THE BODY COLD. ALMOST FREEZING.

  'Elspeth, all of that is beside the point. There's no need for any of this. In six months Valentina can take her half of the estate and walk away. If she doesn't want to see Julia, she won't have to.'

  WHAT IF SHE KILLS HERSELF BEFORE THEN?

  'She's not going to kill herself.' He said this with more conviction than he felt.

  HAVE YOU REALLY LOOKED AT HER LATELY? SHE'S FANATICAL.

  'I'm going to call her parents. They can take her home.'

  I SUGGESTED THAT TO V. SHE WON'T GO.

  'Why not? Anyway, should she be making these decisions for herself? Edie and Jack can take her to hospital if need be - I don't have that authority.'

  NEITHER DO THEY.

  'Elspeth, I'm not going to help you do this, and you can't make it work without me.'

  IF WE DO IT YOU'D HAVE TO HELP, OR SHE WOULD STAY DEAD.

  Robert was struck silent by that. He put down the pencil, got up and began pacing around the dining-room table. Elspeth sat on the table and watched him orbit. You never change, she thought fondly. At last he sat down again. 'What's in it for you?' he asked her. 'Are you jealous of her?'

  NO.

  'Are you going to really kill her?'

  I COULD DO THAT NOW WITHOUT ANY FUSS AND NO ONE WOULD KNOW.

  'True.' Robert knew there was a question he should ask, the question that would lay bare the underlying contradiction inherent in the whole ridiculous plan, but he couldn't think of it. 'It's just ... wrong, Elspeth.'

  PERHAPS. BUT SHE IS VERY DETERMINED.

  'She's not going to kill herself.'

  BUT WHAT IF SHE DOES?

  He shook his head. Her logic was circular. Surely he could stand outside the circle and see another solution? 'Let's not do this,' he begged Elspeth. 'Let's both agree we won't, and she'll have to think again.'

  AND IF SHE KILLS HERSELF?

  He said nothing.

  AT LEAST LET ME EXPLAIN HOW IT MIGHT WORK.

  As Robert sat filling sheet after sheet with Elspeth's careful handwriting, he was engulfed by despair. I won't do it, he thought. But it was beginning to look as though he would.

  HE COMES UNDONE

  ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, after they had closed the cemetery, Jessica and Robert sat with James on the terrace overlooking the Bateses' back garden. It had been a frantic day - the magnificent June weather had brought the tourists in droves, and most of the guides were on holiday; Robert and Phil had been obliged to eject two extremely large and hostile filmmakers and their actors from the Eastern Cemetery; some grave owners had arrived from Manchester without the faintest idea of the location of their grandmother's grave. Now the Bateses and Robert sat drinking whisky and decompressing.

  'Perhaps we ought to make another sign to post at the gate,' said James. 'All uncertain grave owners please present yourselves during office hours when the staff can attend to your very time-consuming requests.'

  'We want to help them,' said Jessica. 'But they must call ahead. These people who pitch up on the cemetery's doorstep wanting us to do a grave search whilst they wait - it's beyond anything.'

  'They think the records are digitised,' Robert said.

  Jessica laughed. 'Ten years from now, perhaps. Evelyn and Paul are typing in the burial records as fast as their fingers can fly, but with one hundred and sixty-nine thousand
entries ...'

  'I know.'

  'Robert and Phil were quite valiant today,' Jessica told James. 'In addition to vanquishing the unwanted movie people they each gave four tours.'

  'My goodness. Where were the rest of the guides?'

  'Brigitte is visiting her mother in Hamburg, Marion and Dean are on holiday in Romania, Sebastian is working overtime at the funeral parlour because of that terrible bus accident in Little Wapping, and Anika caught flu from her little girl.'

  'It was just the three of us - Molly was on the Eastern Cemetery gate all day, poor girl.' Robert emptied his glass and Jessica topped it up.

  'Well,' said James, 'I suppose that's the principal difficulty of running a cemetery with volunteers. You can't exactly tell people they can't go on holiday because you'll be left short of guides.'

  'No,' said Jessica. 'But I do wish they would all make the cemetery a priority--'

  'They do, you know,' said Robert. 'They drive in from all over, week after week.'

  'Yes, I know. I'm just exhausted, that's all. It was a terribly long day.'

  Robert stretched his legs. 'On the upside, if I did four tours every day I might get a little fitter.'

  'You do look as though you've been left indoors a bit too long.' Jessica scrutinised him. 'You ought to get more vitamin D. You always seem tired.'

  'Maybe I should buy a laptop. I could sit in the Meadow amid the graves and write in the sunshine.

  "Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn

  Brushing with hasty steps the dews away

  To meet the sun upon the upland lawn."'

  Jessica smiled. 'How very Romantic. That would make a lovely advertisement for laptops.'

  'How is the thesis coming along?' asked James.

  'Reasonably well. I've been slightly distracted lately.'

  'Don't you have a deadline? I thought your thesis committee was getting restive,' James said.

  'The problem is the more I research, the more there is that ought to go into it. Sometimes I think my dissertation is going to be the size of Highgate Cemetery itself, grave by grave, year by year, every blade of grass, every fern--'

  'But Robert, there's no need for that!' Jessica startled him, she sounded so urgent. 'We need you to write what happened, and why it is significant - you don't have to completely recreate the place on paper. You're a historian - history has to pick and choose.'

  'I know. I will. But it's hard to stop gathering material.'

  Jessica pressed her lips together and looked away. James said, 'Can we help in any way? How long is your manuscript?'

  Robert hesitated before he replied. 'One thousand, four hundred and thirty-two pages.'

  James said, 'That's marvellous, then it's merely a matter of winnowing it down.'

  'No,' said Robert. 'Because I'm only up to the First World War.'

  'Oh,' said James. Robert looked at Jessica. She was gazing out at her garden, trying to restrain herself.

  'The cemetery has many histories,' Robert told them, 'not just one. There's the social and religious and public-health aspects. There are the biographies of the people buried there - the rise and fall of the London Cemetery Company. There's the vandalism and then the coming together of the Friends and all the work that has been done since then. All these things have to fit together. Then there are the supernatural things that people claim--'

  'Surely you aren't putting all that rubbish in!' Jessica sat up and turned to him.

  'Not as fact. But it is a part of the modern historical record--'

  'A very distasteful part.'

  'A small part. But all that craziness was the catalyst for forming the Friends. And I don't want to censor events just because we don't approve of them.'

  Jessica sighed. 'But "history is written by the victors". And in the Battle for Highgate Cemetery the Friends are most certainly the victors. So we ought to have some say in our history.'

  Robert had misplaced the reference; he thought that she was quoting Michel Foucault. He struggled for a moment with the cognitive dissonance of that, until James kindly said, 'Winston Churchill.'

  'Oh, right,' said Robert. But I'm a Marxist, he thought. He didn't try to explain, as Jessica had always had a slightly rueful attitude towards Karl Marx (at least in terms of his presence in Highgate Cemetery). Robert wasn't sure he was up to defending current trends in Marxist academic thinking at the moment. Instead he hurriedly set off on a tangent. 'I was thinking about the nature of memory. Of memorials ...'

  The Bateses exchanged glances but didn't say anything. Robert realised that he wasn't sure what he wanted to say.

  'The digitisation project,' he said finally. 'And cleaning the graves so the inscriptions can be read. And George in his workshop, carving the names onto new gravestones ...'

  'Yes?' said James.

  'Why do we do it?' asked Robert.

  'For the families,' said Jessica. 'The dead don't know the difference.'

  'And for the historians,' James added with a smile.

  'But what if the dead did know?' Robert asked. 'What if they're all there, or somewhere ...?'

  'Well ...' Jessica sat looking at him. Something is wrong with him. He's all nervy. 'Robert, are you all right? I don't mean to be a fusspot, but I am worried about you.'

  Robert looked at his lap. James said, 'Is everything all right with the twins? Stop us if we're prying, but we did rather think you had turned the corner ...' Robert looked up to find both Bateses peering at him with worried frowns.

  'The twins are coming undone. If I understand correctly, Valentina wants to leave Julia, and Julia wants Valentina to break things off with me. But that's not actually the problem.'

  He was aware of a resistance to telling them; he didn't want them to think badly of him and he knew he would not be believed. My head is going to explode if I don't tell somebody. Maybe they'll understand, even if they don't think it's true. The air was still, there on the terrace. He could hear one crow, far off, cawing. Then it stopped, and the three of them sat in the stillness, waiting.

  'I've come to believe that there is some sort of existence after death,' Robert said. 'I think it's possible for people to hang around ... or to get stuck, somehow ...' He took a breath. 'I've been talking to Elspeth. She's in her flat and can't leave.'

  'Oh, Robert.' Jessica sounded terribly sad. He knew it was sadness for him, sadness that he was losing his mind, not sadness at Elspeth's plight.

  Robert said, 'The twins talk to her too.'

  'Hmm,' said James. 'Would she talk to us, do you think? How do you communicate with her?'

  'Automatic writing, and Ouija board when we get tired. She's very cold, so it's hard to do the writing for very long.'

  'Can you see her?'

  'Valentina can see her. Julia and I can't, I don't know why.' I would give anything to see her.

  Jessica said, 'It doesn't seem to be having a very salutary effect on you.' She looked as if she wanted to say a great deal more.

  'No. It doesn't.'

  'Perhaps we should send you on holiday,' she said. 'A change of scenery might help. And some vitamins. Perhaps the cemetery isn't quite what you need just now.'

  'More whisky?' asked James.

  'Yes, please.' Later Robert wondered if they'd all had more whisky than they should have. He held out his glass. James added a little water and a generous pour from the bottle. 'But Elspeth isn't in the cemetery. I've never encountered anything in the cemetery except foxes and tourists and the occasional work party.'

  'That's good,' said James. 'I'd hate to think of everyone stuck out there in all weathers. Though it seems to me that the afterlife might be a bit dull if it consists of lounging about the house for all eternity with nothing to do.'

  'Apparently it started out that way. But lately she's been quite - active. Yesterday I watched Valentina playing backgammon with Elspeth. Elspeth won.'

  Jessica shook her head. 'Granting that what you tell us is true - and understand, please, that I find it
most unlikely - what good could come of it?'

  Robert shrugged.

  'It seems to put you in a difficult position,' James said. 'This situation never works out very well for the man.' Robert thought, What precedent could you possibly be citing? and looked at James quizzically. 'In literature. And myth. Eurydice, Blithe Spirit, that lovely story by Edith Wharton--'

  '"Pomegranate Seed",' supplied Jessica.

  'Thank you, yes. The lovers and husbands all end badly.'

  'I asked her to kill me, so I could be with her. She refused.'

  'I should hope so!' said Jessica, aghast.

  'This won't do,' said James. 'Let us help you. We'll take you on holiday.'

  'Who will run the cemetery?' asked Robert, smiling.

  'Who cares?' replied Jessica. How can he joke about this? 'Nigel and Edward will sort it out between them. Where shall we go? Paris? Copenhagen? We've never been to Reykjavik, they say it's marvellous this time of year.'

  'Let's go somewhere warm and sunny,' said James. The evening was becoming overcast. He felt tired, and the thought of travelling farther than Highgate High Street made his back ache. He held out his glass, and Jessica refilled it.

  'Spain,' said Jessica. She and James smiled at each other. 'Or perhaps the Amalfi Coast?'

  'That could happen,' said Robert. 'Any of it. It sounds fantastic.' Why not? he thought. I could just walk away. Let the three of them sort it out. The twins would reconcile, and live happily ever after with Elspeth ... He sighed. He knew he wasn't going anywhere. Still, it sounded so simple. 'Let's talk about it.'

  'We ought to eat something,' said Jessica. 'I feel my tummy flapping at my spine.'

  'I'll order takeaway from the Lighthouse, shall I?' said Robert. 'Scampi?' He stood up, unsteadily, and went inside to call.

  Jessica and James sat quietly, listening to Robert walking through their house. They heard him pick up the phone in the hall, his low voice ordering food.

  James said, 'Ought we to tell anyone? We could call Anthony ...'

  Jessica put her hands over her eyes. I am so tired. 'I don't know. What does one do when one's dear young friend is being haunted?'

  'Don't you think he told us so that we would do something?'

  'Have him committed, do you mean?'

  James hesitated. 'He talked of killing himself.'