Her Fearful Symmetry

loved her roundness, he loved the warmth and heft and curve of her under the covers. She snored sometimes, softly, and Martin listened in the dark until he could almost hear her small snores drifting through her Amsterdam bedroom. He would say her name over and over until it devolved into meaningless sounds- mah REI kuh, mah REI kuh-it became an entry in a dictionary of loneliness. He thought of her alone. He never allowed himself to wonder if Marijke might have found someone else. He could not bear to even frame the question in his mind. Only when he had imagined her quite completely, the folds of her face against the pillow, the hump of her haunch under the blankets; only then could Martin let himself sleep. He often woke to find that he had been crying.

As each night passed he found it more difficult to evoke Marijke precisely. He panicked and pinned up dozens of photographs of her all over the flat. Somehow this only made things worse. His actual memories began to be replaced by the images; his wife, a whole human being, was turning into a collection of dyes on small white rectangles of paper. Even the photographs were not as intensely colourful as they had once been, he could see that. Washing them didn’t help. Marijke was bleaching out of his memory. The harder he tried to keep her the faster she seemed to vanish.

Night in Highgate Cemetery

ROBERT SAT at his desk with the lights off, watching through the front windows as Vautravers’ tangled front garden disappeared in the dusk. It was June, and the light seemed to hang there, as though the garden had fallen out of time and become an enormous image of itself. The moon rose, almost full. He got up and shook himself, gathered his night scope and a torch and walked through his flat to the back door. He slipped down the steps quietly; Martin worried about intruders. Robert avoided the gravel path through the back garden, instead squishing across the mossy earth to the green door in the garden wall. He unlocked it and passed through the wall into the cemetery.

He was standing on asphalt, the roof of the Terrace Catacombs. There were steps leading to ground level at both ends of the catacombs; tonight he took the western steps and headed towards the Dickens Path. He didn’t use the torch. It was dark under the thick canopy of leaves, but he had done this route in the dark many times.

He liked Highgate Cemetery best at night. At night there were no visitors, no weeds to pull, no enquiries from journalists- there was only the cemetery itself, spread out in the moonlight like a soft grey hallucination, a stony wilderness of Victorian melancholy. Sometimes he wished he could stroll with Jessica along the dim paths, enjoying the evening noises, the animals that called out to each other in the distance and stilled as he passed. But he knew that Jessica was at home, asleep, and that she would certainly exile him from the cemetery if she knew about his night sojourns. He rationalised, telling himself that he was patrolling, protecting the cemetery from vandals and the self-described vampire hunters who had plagued it in the 1970s and ’80s.

Robert did sometimes meet other people in the cemetery at night. Last summer, for a short while, there had been a railing missing in the spiked iron fence that ran along the southwestern edge of the cemetery. It was during this period that Robert began to see children in the cemetery in the evenings.

The first time, Robert was sitting in the midst of a cluster of graves from the 1920s. He had cleared a place for himself in the tall grass and was sitting very quietly, looking through his video camera with the night vision scope on, hoping to videotape the family of foxes whose burrow was just twenty feet from where he sat. The sun had set behind the trees, and the sky was yellow above the silhouettes of the houses just beyond the fence. Robert heard a rustling sound and turned his camera in that direction. But instead of foxes, the view-finder suddenly filled with the spectre of a child running towards him. Robert nearly dropped the camera. Another child appeared, chasing the first one; little girls in short dresses, running between the graves silently, breathing hard but running without calling out. They were almost upon him when a boy shouted, and they both turned and ran to the fence, squeezed through the gap, and were gone.

Robert reported the broken railing to the office the next morning. The children continued to play in the cemetery in the evenings, and Robert occasionally observed them, wondering who they were and where they lived, wondering what they meant by the strange games they silently played among the graves. After a few weeks a man came and put the fence right again. Robert walked along the street that evening and felt a bit sad as he passed the three children gathered there with their hands on the railings, peering into the cemetery, not speaking.

Robert’s PhD thesis had begun as a work of history: he imagined the cemetery as a prism through which he could view Victorian society at its most sensationally, splendidly, irrationally excessive; in their conflation of hygienic reform and status-conscious innovation, the Victorians had created Highgate Cemetery as a theatre of mourning, a stage set of eternal repose. But as he did the research Robert was seduced by the personalities of the people buried in the cemetery, and his thesis began to veer into biography; he got sidetracked by anecdote, fell in love with the futility of elaborate preparations for an afterlife that seemed, at best, unlikely. He began to take the cemetery personally and lost all perspective.

He often sat with Michael Faraday, the famous scientist; Eliza Barrow, who had been a victim of the notorious serial murderer Frederick Seddon; he spent time brooding over the unmarked graves of foundlings. Robert had whiled away a whole night watching as falling snow covered Lion, the stone dog that kept watch over Thomas Sayers, the last of the bare-fisted prizefighters. Sometimes he borrowed a flower from Radclyffe Hall, who always had an abundance of blooms, and relocated it to some remote and friendless tomb.

Robert loved to watch the seasons revolve in Highgate. The cemetery was never without some green; many of the plants and trees had symbolised eternal life to the Victorians, and so even in winter the haphazard geometry of the graves was softened by evergreens, cypress, holly. At night stone and snow reflected back moonlight, and Robert sometimes felt himself become weightless as he crunched along the paths through a thin coverlet of white. Occasionally he brought a ladder from Vautravers’ garden shed and climbed up to the grass in the centre of the Circle of Lebanon. He would lean against the three- hundred-year-old Cedar of Lebanon, or lie on his back and watch the sky through its gnarled branches. There was seldom a visible star; they were all hidden by light pollution from London’s electric grid. Robert watched aeroplanes blinking through the Cedar of Lebanon’s leaves. At such times he felt a powerful sense of rightness: under his body, beneath the grass, the dead were quiet and peaceful in their little rooms; above him the stars and machines roamed the skies.

Tonight he stood by the Rossettis and thought about Elizabeth Siddal. He had rewritten the chapter devoted to her numerous times, more for the pleasure of thinking about Lizzie than because he had anything new to say about her. Robert fondled her life’s trajectory in his mind: her humble beginnings as a milliner’s girl; her discovery by the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who enlisted her as a model; her promotion to adored mistress of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Unexplained illnesses, her long-awaited marriage to Rossetti; a stillborn daughter. Her death by laudanum poisoning. A guilt-ridden Dante Gabriel, slipping a unique manuscript of his poems into his wife’s casket. Seven years later, the exhumation of Lizzie at night, by bonfire light, to retrieve the poems. Robert relished all of it. He stood with his eyes closed, imagining the grave in 1869, not so hemmed in by other graves, the men digging, the flickering light of the fire.

After what seemed to him a long time, Robert followed the obscure path back through the graves and began to wander.

He was unable to believe in heaven. In his Anglican childhood he had imagined a wide, spacious emptiness, sunlit and cold, filled with invisible souls and dead pets. As Elspeth began dying he’d tried to revive this old belief, digging into his scepticism as though belief were simply an older sediment, accessible through strip-mining layers of sophistication and experience. He reread Spiritualist tracts, accounts of hundred-year-old seances, scientific experiments with mediums. His rationality rebelled. It was history; it was fascinating; it was untrue.

On these nights in the cemetery Robert stood in front of Elspeth’s grave, or sat on its solitary step with his back against the uncomfortable grillwork. It did not bother him when he stood by the Rossetti grave and couldn’t feel the presence of Lizzie or Christina, but he found it disturbing to visit Elspeth and find that she was not “at home” to him. In the early days after her death he’d hovered around the tomb, waiting for a sign of any sort. “I’ll haunt you,” she’d said when they’d told her she was terminal. “Do that,” he had replied, kissing her gaunt neck. But she was not haunting him, except in memory, where she dwindled and blazed at all the wrong moments.

Now Robert sat at Elspeth’s doorstep and watched as dawn came over the trees. He could hear the birds stirring, singing, rioting and splashing across the street in Waterlow Park. Every now and then a car whooshed past along Swains Lane. When there was enough light for him to read the inscriptions on the graves across from Elspeth, Robert got up and made his way towards the back of the cemetery and the Terrace Catacombs. He could see St. Michael’s, but Vautravers was invisible beyond the wall. He walked up the steps at the side of the Terrace Catacombs and across the Catacombs’ roof to the green door. Fatigue clutched him. It was an effort to make it all the way into his flat before sleep overtook him. Outside, the cemetery assumed its daytime aspect; dawn gave way to day, the staff arrived, phones rang, the natural and the human worlds spun on their separate but conjoined axes. Robert was asleep in his clothes, his muddy trainers beside the bed. When he presented himself, noonish, at the cemetery’s office, Jessica said, “My dear boy, don’t you look all in. Have some tea. Don’t you ever sleep?”

Sunday Afternoon

LONDON WAS baking under a cloudless July sky. Robert reclined on a decrepit wicker chaise longue in Jessica Bates’s back garden, a gin and tonic sweating in his hand. He was watching Jessica’s grandchildren preparing to play croquet. It was Sunday afternoon. He had a vague sense of being in the wrong place; usually he and Jessica would both have been at the cemetery. On a glorious Sunday like this there would be loads of tourists