such heavy and bulky stuff back home.
Which made her remember again, in sudden acute anguish, the house standing empty in Woodbdidge by the Potomac, and then think of Andy, and then of why she was here in England.
Halfway along the parade of closed shops Teresa turned to the left and walked up the hill to pass the larger houses. This was a residential zone, and from the look of it the people who lived here were fairly affluent. Although cars were parked at the sides of the road, the lanes that ran in front of each row of houses were obviously intended for pedestrians only. From this relative eminence she gained a wider view of the town, which continued to enchant her with its simple prettiness. She knew nowhere at home that had this kind of effect on her. Directly in front of her, on the other side of the park, was a large church with a square tower. A cluster of houses surrounded it, but behind those she could see taller buildings, longer roofs. Further towards the sea, on the same side of the park as the church, Teresa could see the coloured canopies of an outdoor market; again, there were large recently built buildings behind them. In the distance, inland, there was a ridge of higher land, crusted with modern houses.
She tried to imagine what this sleepy little town must have been like, that day Gerry Grove went walkabout with his semi-automatic rifle. The news reports from England had described how the quiet town had been shattered by the violence of the event, a rude awakening from its peaceful slumbers, and the rest of the cliches journalists loved so much. lt wasn't a painting on the lid of a box of candy, or a still from a romantic movie. People lived and worked here, brought up their kids, grew their flowers. Some fell in love, some beat each other up, some tried to make a living, some tried to do something useful in the community ... and one of them, a selfabsorbed and lonely youth with a string of minor offences behind him, had a thing about guns.
Teresa, of course, came from a country where a lot of people had a thing about guns. She too had a thing about guns. There was nothing in the idea that was itself shocking, but for it to happen
just as the tourists in Port Arthur, Tasmania, the schoolchildren in Dunblane, the students in Austin, Texas, wouldn't have expected it. All were nice places, quiet and livable places, the sort of small towns that people moved to
rather than from. There were dangerous cities, and all cities had areas where no one in their right mind would walk alone or after dark, but still there remained in most people a profound, instinctive belief that bad things only happened in bad places. Bulverton was the sort of place you searched for, so to speak, a kind of comforting ideal.
What was it? Staring down at the large area of the town she could see from this place, Teresa tried to isolate and identify what it was she was responding to. lt was not just Englishness, nor prettiness, because England didn't have a monopoly on pretty places, and anyway Bulverton was too much of a muddle to be simply pretty. The area around her hotel was grim enough, and although grim in a particularly British way it was a quality of grimness that was commonplace to her. It could have been in almost any town anywhere. Maybe it was a sense of proportion: one building set against the rest, each one in its turn built to blend with the others. Scale came into it too: this was a town that had grown up in and around a small valley. American architects would have vied with each other to build the biggest, brashest place and grab the best view, but here the buildings seemed to work organically within a kind of consensus of what Bulverton meant to everyone who lived there.
It all made for a simple naturalness, and although she had been in the place for only a few hours and had been trying to sleep for most of those she already felt more deeply about the town than she ever had about Washington or Baltimore or even her agreeable dormitory town of Woodbrlidge.
She crossed the park again and headed for the church she had seen. lt was called St Gabriel's, and was built on a low rise and fronted with a small churchyard. She tried to read some of the headstones but without exception they had been made illegible by erosion. The door of the church was
locked and no one was around to open it for her.
Next to the church was a small garden, fenced and gated, but unlocked. A sign on the fence described its circumstance:
Teresa pushed open the gate and walked in. The garden had not been allowed to become overgrown, but it was obviously not given regular attention. The grass of the tiny lawn was in need of cutting, and long shoots drooped from the trees and shrubs. She found the commemorative plaque on the wall, and pushed aside a long thorny shoot from a rose bush that was growing across it. She regarded the names, trying to remember them for later, in case she came across anyone still living in the town who was related. Her memory was fallible, so she found her notebook and jotted down all the surnames.
Eleven dead; that was fewer than Gerry Grove's victims last year, but it had been a major disaster. lt would have felt just as devastating in its day, even during a war, something so terrible it would never be surpassed.
Bulverton today was still in the aftershock of Gerry Grove's shooting spree, but in half a century would there be any more lasting memorial than this?
A sidestreet led away from the church and the memorial
garden, and Teresa walked along it, emerging after a short distance into a broad shopping street. This was the High Street, a fact she elicited from a sign attached to a wall on one of the intersections. Many people were moving around, going about their shopping. She walked from one end of the street to the other, looking at everyone, feeling that although it was still only her first morning she had nevertheless been able to see many different facets of life in the town. She kept her notebook open, and while she walked along she wrote down the locations of the police station, the library, the Post Office, the banks, and so on, all places she would probably be needing in the days ahead.
At a newsagent's she bought a town map, and a copy of the local paper. She glanced quickly through the pages as she walked along, but if the massacre was still on people's minds that fact wasn't reflected in the local news.
Outside the council offices a modem block, but built to blend unobtrusively with the rest of the town she saw at last an explicit reminder of the massacre.
