Her Fearful Symmetry

want to see the place. Don’t bore them with too much detail. He walked them to one of his favourites, a ledger-style tomb with a bas-relief of a weeper, a woman sitting up at night with the coffin. “Before modern medical technology, people had a difficult time determining when someone was really dead. You might think that death would be pretty blatant, but there were a number of famous cases in which a dead body sat up and went on living, and many Victorians got the jim-jams just thinking about the possibility of being buried alive.

“Being a practical people, they attempted to find solutions to the problem. The Victorians invented a system of bells with strings attached that went through the ground and into the coffin, so if you woke up underground you could pull on your bell till someone came to dig you up. There’s no record of anyone being saved by one of these devices. People made all sorts of odd stipulations in their wills, such as asking to be decapitated as insurance against an undesired revival.”

“What about vampires?”

“What about vampires?”

“I heard there was a vampire here in the cemetery.”

“No. There were a bunch of attention-seeking idiots who claimed to have seen a vampire. Though some people do say that Bram Stoker was inspired to write Dracula by an exhumation here at Highgate.”

Valentina and Julia hung back at the edge of the group. They were having decidedly different experiences. Julia wanted to leave the group and go exploring. She detested lectures and professors and Robert was making her itch. You’re just bloviating. Get on with it. Valentina was not following Robert’s commentary very closely because she was occupied with an idea that had been nudging at her since Jessica had introduced him: You’re Elspeth’s Robert Fanshaw. That’s how you knew us. She was disquieted by the thought that he must have seen them before without them knowing. I should tell Julia. Valentina glanced at Julia. No, better wait. She’s in a mood.

Robert turned and led them further uphill, stopping at the entrance to the Egyptian Avenue. Robert waited for the American couple to catch up; they tended to fall behind as they tried to photograph everything. You’ll never make it, folks, there’s 52,000 graves in here. One of the Japanese men said, “Wow.” He drew it out so that it sounded like whoooohow. Robert loved the drama of the Egyptian Avenue; it looked like a stage set for Aida.

“Highgate Cemetery, in addition to being a Christian burial ground, was a business venture. In order to make it the most desirable address for the eminent Victorian dead, it needed what every posh neighbourhood needs: amenities. In the late 1830s, when High-gate opened, all things Egyptian were quite popular, and so here we have the Egyptian Avenue. The entrance is based on a tomb at Luxor. It was originally coloured, and the Avenue itself was not so dark and gloomy. It was open to the sky, and there were none of these trees that lean over it now…

“The mausoleums in the Avenue can hold eight to ten people. There are shelves inside for the coffins. Note the inverted torches; the keyholes are upside down as well. The holes on the bottom of the doors let the gases escape.”

“Gases?” asked the quiet man with the binoculars.

“As the bodies decomposed, they gave off gases. They used to put candles in there with them to burn it off. Must have been rather spooky at night.” They went through the Egyptian Avenue and stood at the other end, the twins hugging themselves for warmth even in the strong sunlight. Robert looked at them and was hit by a memory of Elspeth standing in almost the same spot, her face tilted to catch the sun. Oh, you… He faltered. Everyone waited for him to continue. Don’t look at them. Don’t think about her. Robert stared at the ground for a moment and then pulled himself together.

“We are standing in the Circle of Lebanon. This was the most coveted address in the cemetery. It gets its name from the enormous Cedar of Lebanon tree you see up there above the mausoleums. The tree is approximately three hundred years old now, but even when Highgate Cemetery was founded it would have been impressive. The land was originally part of the estate of the Bishop of London, and when they came to make the Circle they cut down around the tree; it stands on what was originally ground level. Imagine trying to shift all that earth with 1830s equipment. The inner circle was made first, and it proved so popular that the outer circle was begun twenty years later. You can see the changing tastes in architecture, from Egyptian to Gothic.”

Robert led them through the Circle. This is not getting easier. He glanced at his watch and resolved to skip a few graves.

“This is the mausoleum of Mabel Veronica Batten and her lover, Radclyffe Hall…Here we have a columbarium. The name comes from the Latin columba, meaning ‘dove,’ and originally meant compartments for doves to live in…Follow me up these stairs, please… Right. This is the grave of George Wombwell, a famous menagerist. He got his start by buying two boa constrictors from a sailor…” Robert skipped over Mrs. Henry Wood, the Carter family’s faux-Egyptian tomb and Adam Worth and led the visitors around the top of the Circle to admire the view of St. Michael’s. He then herded them to stand between the Terrace Catacombs and the enormous Beer family tomb. The twins realised that they were looking at the huge mausoleum they could see from their bedroom window. They backed up, trying to see over the Catacombs, but although they could see Martin’s flat, their own wasn’t visible.

“Julius Beer was a German Jew who arrived in London with no money and made his fortune on the Stock Exchange…” Valentina was thinking about the fact that she had never exactly thought about death. The cemetery at home in Lake Forest was tidy and spacious. Jack’s parents were buried there in a modest plot with matching pink granite markers. The twins had never met any of their grandparents. We don’t know anyone who died. It’s hard to imagine not being here, or Julia not here… She felt a spasm of loneliness, or homesickness, she wasn’t sure which. Valentina watched Robert. He was ignoring her; he seemed to be deliberately focusing on the man with the binoculars. He knew Elspeth. He was her lover. He could tell us about her.

“…Julius Beer was unable to secure a position in Victorian society, because in addition to being a foreigner and Jewish, he had made his money rather than inheriting it. So he erected this rather large mausoleum where no one could possibly miss it. The Beer mausoleum blocks the view if you happen to be promenading on the roof of the Terrace Catacombs, as Victorian ladies liked to do of a Sunday afternoon.” Valentina thought of the green door in their back garden. She imagined herself and Julia wearing crinolines, strolling atop the hundreds of rotting bodies lying in the dark nasty Terrace Catacombs. Those Victorians sure knew how to have fun.

Robert led them along paths, past the Dissenters’ section; he showed them Thomas Sayers’ grave, where Lion the stone dog kept patient vigil; skipped Sir Rowland Hill, inventor of the Uniform Penny Post. He passed the Noblin family mausoleum without comment. Fifty yards on, Robert turned to say something to the group and saw that he had lost Julia and Valentina. They were standing in front of the Noblins, arm in arm, conferring. Robert parked the group in front of Thomas Charles Druce and jogged back to the twins.

“Hello,” he managed.

They went still, like rabbits looked at too directly. Valentina said, “You’re Robert Fanshaw, aren’t you?” Julia thought, What?

Robert’s stomach lurched. “Yes. That’s right.” A look passed between Valentina and Robert that Julia could not interpret. “We’ll talk after the tour, shall we?” he said, and walked with them back to the front of the group. He fumbled through Thomas Charles Druce’s exhumation, skipped murder victim Eliza Barrow and also Charles Cruft of dog-show fame. He somewhat regained his form while talking about Elizabeth Jackson and Stephan Geary, then fairly hustled the group down the Cuttings Path. Jessica was waiting for them at the gate with the green box. Robert said to her, “I’m just going to take the twins back and show them their family grave.” He half-hoped Jessica would refuse him, but she only smiled and waved him along.

“Don’t be long,” Jessica said. “You know we’re short-handed today.” As Robert walked towards Valentina and Julia he saw them framed together before the arch over the Colonnade stairs, two white statues radiant against the gloom. It seemed to him inevitable that he should meet them here.

“Come on, then,” he said. They followed him, alert and curious. He felt their eyes on him as he led them up the stairs and along the paths. The twins grew uneasy; on the tour Robert Fanshaw had seemed garrulous, eager to please; now he led them through the cemetery without comment. The sounds of the cemetery itself filled the silence: the squish of their boots on the path, the whisper and roar of the wind in the trees. Birds, traffic. Robert’s overcoat flapped behind him and Valentina recalled the retreating figure she had seen that day by the canal. She began to be frightened. No one knows we’re here. Then she remembered the duchess at the gate and felt reassured. They came to the Noblin mausoleum.

“So,” Robert said, feeling like an absurd parody of a Highgate tour guide, “this is your family’s grave. It belongs to you, and you can come and visit whenever you like, whenever the cemetery is open. We’ll make you a grave owners’ pass. There’s a key in Elspeth’s desk.”

“A key to what?” Julia asked.

“This door. You also have a key to the door between our back garden and the cemetery, though we’re asked by the cemetery staff not to use it.”

“Do you go in?”

“No.” His heart was pounding.

Valentina said, “We’ve been wondering about you. We wondered-why we didn’t see you. We thought maybe you were out of town or something-”

“Martin said you weren’t,” interrupted Julia.

“So we were confused, because Mr. Roche said you would help us…” Valentina looked up at Robert, but he was looking at his feet and it seemed like a long time before he replied.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He was unable to look at the twins, and they pitied him, although neither was at all sure why. Julia was amazed to see this man who had been so voluble, so eager to tell them more than anyone could possibly want to know about the cemetery, now standing inarticulate and frightened. His hair hung over his face; his posture was abject. Valentina thought, He’s just very shy-he’s afraid of us. Because Valentina was shy herself-because she had spent her life with an extrovert who never tired of mocking her timidity-since she had never met a person who seemed normal and was abruptly revealed to be acutely inhibited, because there was a profound intimacy in observing Robert’s fear, because she was emboldened by Julia’s presence: Valentina stepped closer to Robert and put her hand on his arm. Robert looked at her over the rims of his glasses.

“It’s okay,” she said. He felt, without being able to express it to himself, that something lost had been restored to him.