Downtime - Marc Platt [6]
But there was another past, older and more forbidding, that had to be dealt with.
She checked her watch. Five to two. Time for the tour of the West Cemetery again. This was the seventh time in six weeks. She had started to get looks from the guides.
She had already blocked off areas of the East Cemetery on a rough map, covering them systematically, checking the weather-worn inscriptions and devotions on the headstones, but there was no sign of the grave.
The first time she had come, dawdling down the hill from Highgate Village, half eager, very afraid, she had turned in through the gates and thought she was in the wrong place.
And it wasn’t the first time. How could she forget the real first time? In her memories, she saw spacious parklands and a broad cedar of Lebanon that rose like a giant out of the cold misty morning. She had been frightened of the huge horses, tossing their black plumes, as they stamped their hooves and snorted steam. There had been a shiny-handled casket, piled with flowers, which bore no relation to the warm and loving, sometimes sad person who, whatever they all imagined, was still her mother. It was just an object carried on the shoulders of men in black with long, sunken faces. At any moment now, Mama would appear, radiant in her summer visiting-dress, shaded by her parasol, smiling graciously as she apologized to the gloomy guests for arriving late at the burial.
It was a game wasn’t it? But the game was going all wrong.
Her father looked pale and clung to her hand as if he was afraid of getting lost in the throng. The other mourners stared: the gentlemen holding their top hats to their chests; the ladies dabbing at their eyes, whispering loud enough for her to hear that the poor child was the very image of her so-beautiful mother. And she had walked slowly, unable to cry, her wide black dress rustling across the dew-laden grass.
But now, nowadays, the funerary park was overgrown with a century of gravestones and statues, and the neglected lawns had run to seed under a jungle tide of undergrowth.
She had been just eleven when her mother had died of pneumonia – forced so suddenly to grow up in an age when children were already perceived as little adults. No longer in the charge of her governess, she’d been a dutiful daughter and housekeeper, while her father had buried himself in his scientific research.
That was all gone.
One hundred and twenty-five years had passed, time careering ever faster as the modern world shrank, and Victoria was still only twenty-eight. She had slipped by the century in between. There were graves here of people who had been born and grown old, and danced the charleston, and fought in terrible wars and died all in the hundred years that she had leapfrogged.
She had cheated time, or time had cruelly cheated her. And now she was ignoring what she had missed, spending time searching for what she had lost. She took the tour into the closed side of the cemetery and listened to the guide’s commentary on this grave and that memorial, as he led his group of tourists on a pre-ordained route.
But she’d heard all this before – the notable graves of lion-tamers and equerries to Queen Victoria. There were paths here that were ignored, that she must explore. She lingered, examining a crypt door in the mock Egyptian necropolis, until the group vanished round the next corner. Then she slipped through the sunlight into forbidden regions.
Shoulder deep in a sea of white cow-parsley, she saw butterflies that she had seen nowhere else. The very air seemed to hold its breath. She was certain that Mother’s grave was somewhere here and began to cast about, the matted grass tearing at her ankles. The afternoon heat was stifling her. She caught her shoe on a bramble and pitched headlong.
When she looked up, she saw a white pyramid rising above the long grass. It was smooth, untouched by the weather, and it threw back the light as if a cold