A fine, round oak table occupied the centre of the room. Next to the open curtains was a dainty-looking writing desk, and beside that were more filing cabinets. Yet, unlike those in the hall, they were well organized, and no paper spilt from outstretched drawers. They looked new and solid and were painted a uniform gunmetal-grey.
‘What a mess,’ Graves said, wincing, ‘and what’s that awful smell?’
‘Radiator’s leaked somewhere, I imagine.’
Graves drew his hand slowly along the glass of the French windows, tracing the pattern of the bricks on the other side. ‘What was the old man playing at?’ he said, staring with disapproval at his now-black fingertips and looking to me, for an instant, exactly like a school prefect examining a dorm room.
‘Go and check those cabinets.’
Graves crouched down and opened the nearest one. ‘Empty,’ he said.
‘Try the others. Look in all of them, and if they’re locked break them open as well.’
I turned and looked around. There was just too much stuff crammed into the living room. A lot of it crockery and wine glasses and boxes full of junk. I headed towards the writing desk. ‘Used to be a nice room, if I remember rightly,’ I said, sitting down. ‘Nice view of the garden anyway.’
I started to search the top drawers. There was nothing of any interest. I sighed, then pulled out a bottom drawer as far as possible before delving my hand in deep at the back of it. Dust, coloured writing paper and then something light at the back: just an old newspaper. I tossed it back towards the oak table. Of course it missed and the pages lay spread out on the carpet.
Absently, I began to pick at a loose thread on the corner of my shirt while glancing at a big brown leather armchair shoved into a corner of the room. Graves was once again staring at the huge bricked-in French windows, and I found that I was now doing the same thing, half expecting to see the snow falling outside.
Annoyed, and not at all sure what we were looking for, I stood with my hands at my sides, thinking vaguely that I might have a quick look upstairs. Graves opened another drawer. I wandered back towards the table and, without thinking, picked up the newspaper pages one by one and laid them on the table. I tensed when I saw the picture in the middle.
I quickly reassembled the paper into its right order. It was an old copy of the Cotswold Herald dated 14 December 1994. I pulled the torch from my coat pocket and shone it on to the pages at the back.
A black-and-white photograph took up almost half of one of the back pages. There had once been a lengthy column of text at the side of the photo and more text beneath it. But that text had been deliberately cut out.
The photo showed around thirty to forty schoolchildren posing and smiling into the camera. A school photo taken, by the looks of it, on the stage in a gym, which, I imagined, doubled as the assembly room. White rings had been drawn around the heads of two of the children, so that they seemed to have large halos behind their heads: boys of about twelve or thirteen, standing next to each other. They looked similar: both seemed rowdy-looking and one, the smaller of the pair, was pulling a cheeky face. I guessed that the photo had been taken to celebrate some prize awarded to a local school somewhere, and that the editor had had some purpose in picking out these two children for his readers. The only text that remained was a caption attached to the bottom of the photo. Two names: Ned and Owen Taylor.
They didn’t mean anything to me. I stared long and hard at the photo, and it wasn’t until a few minutes later that I realized that I was seeing someone I knew, or at least someone whom I thought I knew.
She was staring out at me from the bottom-right-hand corner of the page. She had a thin, pretty face. Hurst’s daughter? I couldn’t be entirely sure. If it was her, she would have been almost three years younger than when I’d seen her last. Like the majority of the faces in the picture, hers was not highlighted. I looked a little longer, thinking. There were bound to be other photos of her in the house. But so far I hadn’t seen any.
I left the newspaper where it was. As Graves continued to search the filing cabinets, I came out of the living room and trudged upstairs.
From somewhere far off, water started to hiss and spit as the rickety old boiler began to heat up. I found the corridor’s light switch and flicked it on: luminous strips along the ceiling, like those of a hospital ward, flickered on the length of the hallway. Hurst must have had them installed at some point as another security measure. Perhaps in case someone managed to get into his house and make their way up the stairs.
On my right I passed a door that was open: Hurst’s bedroom. I felt along the inside of the door and, as I expected, found two more sets of locks exactly like the ones in the kitchen. I found the light switch and discovered that Hurst had also felt it necessary to bar the windows of his own bedroom, so that his room looked like a cell.
The corridor dipped left and curved along towards the front of the house. I walked on, passing yet another barred-in window, wondering if Hurst had really ‘lost the plot’, as Graves had put it. I could only imagine what it must have been like to patrol these dark corridors night after night.
But, despite what was before my own eyes, I did not think Hurst had lost his mind. The bricked-in windows, the bars and the gun, although strange, had a logic to them and, combined, showed a definite sense of purpose. After all, Hurst’s paranoia had proved right in the end. Whoever was after him had waited ever so patiently, and the moment he left the safety of this place they had got him.
I had arrived at the far end of the house. I moved closer and saw that there was a much narrower corridor here, leading to a thick brown curtain. I stepped in and snapped on a light switch on the side of the wall. This hall was much cleaner than the rest of the house, and the reddish carpet that lined the floor felt thick and almost new. On the wallpaper, pink roses coiled gently towards the curtain. I walked along the corridor and pushed the curtain aside. Behind it was an immaculate white staircase, which curved right and out of view. I found that I couldn’t find the light to the stairs. So I took the torch out of my coat pocket again, switched it on and headed straight up.
There was a pale blue door at the top of the stairs. I pushed the handle and peeked through. For a moment the only thing I could see was what seemed to be an electric alarm clock somewhere at the back, giving out a narrow strip of light. Then the clouds outside the window cleared for a moment, and moonlight slowly began to fill the room.
I stared in. Objects in the room slowly took shape. A rocking chair beside an electric heater. Books stacked in neat piles on the floor. A snowglobe: a plastic cottage encased in a plastic dome.
Down below, I could hear Graves on the move. He walked through the corridor, pushed the curtain aside and walked up the steps. I turned around and shone the torch in his direction. In the sudden warmth of the narrow stairwell Graves took off his scarf and put it in his pocket. He had some files wedged under his other arm.
‘What’s up here, sir?’
With both of us now squeezed tightly in the narrow stairwell, I felt a sudden sense of claustrophobia and nearly told Graves to go back down. Instead I said, ‘His daughter’s room, I think.’ And, gently opening the door wider, I added, ‘He’s kept it just as she left it.’
‘God, how weird. Whatever for?’
I didn’t say anything. It didn’t seem to bother Graves that Hurst’s daughter had abandoned him, and that Hurst had no doubt died an appallingly violent death just hours ago. It was the disruption to the order of things that seemed to bother Graves the most. All this mess. The barred-in windows. Hurst’s failure to keep a gun safely secured in a gun cabinet as the law demanded.
I sighed. ‘So there was something in those cabinets?’ I said, looking at the files.
‘Yes, sir. Not in all of them, though. He kept letters and correspondence and loads of old bills. Never seems to have chucked anything out. Ever. Supermarket receipts, petrol receipts. All of it is really muddled up. These, though, were all together in one f
ile, and there was a bunch of old videotapes on top of them.’
‘Videotapes?’
‘Yep.’
‘Were they locked up?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And the files?’
‘Stuff from some kind of agency. A detective agency, I think. Looks like his daughter really ran out on him for good. And so he spent a packet on trying to find out where she had got to.’
I gestured towards the files and took them. Then I opened them up. There were three pale grey files and in all of them without exception the notes at the back had been written by the same hand. There were also several typewritten sheaves of paper bearing signatures in the same handwriting, along with invoices attached neatly with paperclips.
‘You want me to get any more? There’re loads of files like these downstairs.’
‘No, that’s probably enough for one day,’ I said, making up my mind. ‘We’ll take the tapes as well. And they definitely were locked up, you say?’
‘Yes,’ Graves said. ‘A boxful of them at least.’
‘He must have locked them up for a reason. We’ll come back tomorrow for the rest of it.’
I stayed where I was for a while longer. Disappointed. But what had I really expected to find here? I had been waiting a long time to have a proper look at Hurst’s house without O’Donnell interfering, and now I’d had the chance it seemed there was nothing in it. Caged darkness and locked doors. That’s all there was, really. That, and Hurst’s lingering presence.
We could have a better look tomorrow. All the same, it had been a mistake coming here in the dark and so late, and I knew it. Graves had been right. But I didn’t leave straightaway. Instead I stepped inside the room and found the light switch.
Hurst had clearly been at pains to keep his daughter’s room clean, and actually Graves was right about the room too: it was weird the way he had kept it as if frozen in time.
The space had obviously once been an attic and had, in fact, been turned into a suite of rooms that ran some distance through the top of the house. There was a bedroom, a small separate living room and beyond that a spacious bathroom. There were no bars on the window.
I took another few steps and my hair touched the upside-down V of the ceiling. The room was very neat. The bed had been made, and ornaments had been carefully arranged on a writing desk. Graves warily followed me in and the door closed behind him. For a moment he stood at the threshold, taking it all in. Like me, he had to crouch a little to avoid the ceiling as he moved across the sheepskin rug by the side of the bed.
I looked out of the single large window and stared at the snow-capped hill in the distance, stretching across the horizon in a solid sloping arc.
Outside, the snow was falling even faster, and after the dug-in darkness it was a relief to see the sky. Beyond, I could just make out a car inching its way along the curve of Meon Hill. A moth started beating against the window, its wings fluttering uselessly against the glass. I reached for the window and opened it: a stone fell and went tumbling down over the roof, and the moth flew outside. I had a sense of time stretching out. But that was really all that now remained in this room: time past. And then, as if to mark it, a clock began to chime from somewhere down below.
12
As usual, my house was very warm, with the radiators already blazing away by the time I got home. The moment I enter my house I always feel greatly at ease: my arms hang more loosely at my sides, and the English voice and aloofness inside my head slowly fade. The tension leaves my body. It’s as if I’m shedding my English skin as I take off my coat and hang it in the porch.
There was a knocked-about parcel from Carlos, wrapped in yellowish paper, waiting for me on the table of my porch. My brother has been sending me parcels just like it ever since I arrived in England over twenty years ago. I switched on the lights in the hall with my elbow and left the box of videotapes and files by the telephone at the bottom of the stairs. I picked up the parcel and walked to the kitchen to fix myself a drink.
I took a lemon out of the fridge, tossed it into the air and then cut it very neatly into quarters. I put one of the quarters into a long glass and poured myself a Fernet-Branca, a syrupy and very bitter Italian aperitif, which looks like engine oil and tastes like it until you get used to it.
Apart from the occasional plumber, builder or electrician, no one ever stepped inside this house apart from Powell. Certainly no women. None of that ever lasts for long anyway. They soon get fed up with me, and I can’t say I blame them.
I become more animated when I’m at home. If I’m watching football on television, I angrily curse and berate the players on the screen. I shout and scream; clutch my hands in horror when I watch them lose. I cajole and tease the cat. I pace more. Slam doors. Stalk through rooms. I drink mate out on my patio and cook huge asados, which keep me going in meat for about a week. I write long letters to my brother. I monitor the news back home via his letters and feel the same level of indignation and despair as my fellow Argentinians when my country lurches from one crisis to the next.
At home I’m more prone to sudden outbursts. I’m less reserved, and I’m far more direct. At work I know that I can sometimes seem flippant and detached. I’m careful not to give myself away. For years I told myself that this reserve of mine came from my English father and the occasional bouts of recklessness from my Argentinian mother. The theory had a nice feel to it, and I clung to it for a while. But it’s something else – something that runs much more deeply than that. From here, inside this environment, I have made impulsive decisions that trouble me later.
Sometimes, it’s as if a part of me has stubbornly refused to adapt. As if the young man who came here all those years ago is still essentially the same. And, strangely, I’m becoming more Argentinian as I get older. The longer I stay here, the less English I become. It’s a very Argentinian trait, this homesickness. It gives Buenos Aires its mournful appeal: the homesickness of the emigrant who can never go back is etched into the very fabric of the city itself. And it’s here, right here in this house as well.
I finished my drink, went upstairs, had a shower and changed into jeans and a thick, navy-blue jumper and then lit the fire in my study. I leant against my desk for a while, thinking about Hurst, then went downstairs and had another drink before making dinner. I opened my brother’s parcel while the water boiled and hissed, splashing a little on the hob.
The house on the inside does not look like any of the other houses around here. If you had asked me years ago whether I missed home and wanted to go back, I would have told you very firmly absolutely not. But the house of course tells a different story. It’s something about the light perhaps. There’re the green metal shutters I had installed on some of the windows years ago, which give the house a heavy, almost resentful silence, as if it somehow pines for boisterous noise from outside. And then there’re the thick-leaved tropical plants that stand in large pots in many of the rooms and line the hallway. There’s the very dark wood of the furniture that I’ve chosen and the faded rugs that cover the tiled floor of my downstairs hallway, giving it an almost rustic air. Upstairs, I stripped out most of the wall-to-wall carpets years ago to reveal the old wood beneath, which adds to the overall oaken darkness of the house.
I began to cook, listening to some old tango CDs. I hummed along, feeling quite cosy in the alcove of my kitchen. I took another sip of my drink. Enzo, my cat, was outside, scrabbling at the window above the sideboard, leaving muddy marks. For a while I ignored him, and then with a sigh I let him in and quickly closed the window. The cat, whose full name is (of course) Enzo Francescoli, dropped silently down from the sideboard to the floor and went straight towards the food bowl by the washing machine.
I tore away the paper from my brother’s package. First off the prized yerba mate – a drink like tea but much stronger. I held up the mate for a moment as if it were a trophy and felt its weight. Satisfied, I put it in the cupboard and threw out the old packet. Then came the u
sual articles that had been meticulously cut out of the local papers. As always, Carlos had included news of my old football club, which had gone up against Boca Juniors, their arch-enemy, the previous week and lost.
I read Carlos’s letter. First came the usual cheery heartfelt complaints about the economy (rising inflation across the board), corrupt politicians and increasing crime, which had culminated in a number of high-speed kidnappings that the press were now calling secuestro express. There was also another, new type of kidnapping called secuestro virtual, or virtual kidnapping, which was a sophisticated con being run by inmates out of local prisons in Buenos Aires. My brother is interested in that kind of thing, being a born conman himself.
I read the articles. More tales of political woe and unrestrained chaos. The country always seemed to be hovering on the brink of the abyss, especially since the devaluation of the peso last December and the run on the banks. Burning tyres blocking roads. Protests still everywhere. The subway workers on strike again. It was oddly reassuring in a way. A tango played. Astor Piazzolla. Quicker than the last. Absently, I began to go through some more of the clippings and froze when I came to the last one. It was an article cut out of El Correo showing a photo of an old man in the street, his arm trying to shield his face from the glare of a dozen cameras.
‘General Jorge Rafael Videla.’ I said the name out loud in the silence of my kitchen. Then I regretted saying it in the sanctity of my own home. I looked more closely at the photo: the old man seemed to be trying to get into an apartment building on the other side of the road. It was late at night, and that made sense if you thought about it. Surrounding him was a mob being kept at bay by a couple of tough-looking policemen. The old man, as he tried to push his way through the street, appeared furious and indignant. Someone had painted ASESINO right in the middle of the street in bright red letters.
The Drowning Ground Page 8