The Evil Seed Read online

  She looked at the picture for a long time before she took the brush again and signed it. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, in her delicate, precise calligraphy, she wrote the name of the picture underneath her own:

  Remembrance: The Madness of Ophelia

  By now she was exhausted; looking at her watch, she realized with something of a shock that it was almost ten o’clock, and that she had worked through half the afternoon and most of the evening, but it was a good exhaustion, as if working had cleansed her of all her worries and negative thoughts. Already, her mind was racing. Maybe, after such a long time without painting anything worthwhile, she had hit a new lode of creation within herself; maybe there would be more Ophelia paintings, maybe a whole series of them which would be exhibited at Kettle’s Yard that summer. The new ideas spun like carnival wheels, and ravenously hungry all of a sudden, she made herself a late snack, fed the cats, went to bed and slept like the dead for the rest of the night.

  One

  I NEVER THOUGHT to come back to her grave. For the three months after her funeral I deliberately stayed clear of Grantchester, as if, by my very presence, I might fill that place with unquiet ghosts. If she rested easy, then so much the better but, thought I, I would not be the one to watch over her rest. In the nervous and despondent state in which her passing had left me, I saw her often; or thought I did. A girl in black, profile slightly averted, stepping into a cab. A girl in the rain, face hidden beneath a dark umbrella. Once, a girl walking by the river, red hair fiery-bright beneath a pale scarf. No, I was not haunted, but she mocked me, touching every part of my life with her delicate, spidery hand, walking with me wherever I went.

  Or so I thought. I think I fell ill; the doctor told me that overwork and overworry had led to a poverty of the blood, prescribed a rich diet with plenty of wine, advised me to stop working for a week or two. I made my own secret diagnosis, took the doctor’s advice concerning the wine a little too literally, contracted pneumonia and nearly died.

  When I resumed interest in life a couple of months later (my landlady had nursed me lovingly throughout my illness in a sweet half-life free from troubles or disturbing realities), it was already too late. Robert had been dead for more than two weeks, buried in the same churchyard as Rosemary while I slept and tossed and whined, thinking of myself as usual, when he needed me most. Not that the act really surprised me, when I came to think about it; the moment I saw her watching him the day of the funeral, I should have guessed that that was what she had in mind. Her smile was possessive, protective, indulgent, horribly knowing. In the same way does the Blessed Damozel in Rossetti’s painting look down upon her tormented, stricken lover; patiently, silently, with the hint of a smile. I could never look at that picture afterwards without a shudder, for though I could never see any physical resemblance to Rosemary in it, there was something – something in the smile, perhaps, or maybe simply the witchlike outsizedness of the blessed lady in comparison to her doomed lover – that reminded me too sharply of her. I wrote a book, fifteen years later, a rewriting of my dissertation paper on the Pre-Raphaelites, in which I examined Rossetti’s fascination for beautiful witchlike women; I dedicated it on paper to my college art lecturer, but I knew that I wrote it for Rosemary, to Rosemary, about Rosemary. I called it The Blessed Damozel. I believe it still sells.

  It took me five days of guilt and self-loathing before I went to Robert’s graveside. By that time the wreaths and ribbons had been removed, and all that was left was the little mound of earth and some shrubs in a stone trough at the foot of the grave. Small green plants, no flowers. There was a label on the thin stem of one of the shrubs, one of those metal tags you see on the stems of prize rose bushes at garden shows, and I flipped it over to read it.

  Rosemary

  For Remembrance

  I think I kept my calm well enough then, despite the first onrush of panic which threatened to overwhelm me. I had already seen too much to be terrified by a cheap practical joke. I already knew she was there. It would take more than that to hurt me – in fact, I foolishly thought that with Robert gone, I had nothing else to fear. She was gone, I said to myself, gone, buried, forgotten. I laid my little bunch of mistletoe and holly at the head of the grave and turned to go.

  Poor Robert.

  Suddenly, I felt her there, her presence filling the churchyard. Her hate, and with it, amusement. The scent of rosemary wafted up from the little row of shrubs in front of me, warmed by the slanting winter sun, sweet and oddly nostalgic, the scent of country kitchens, of drawers filled with clean white linen, of country girls combing rosemary oil through their long hair. I was absolutely convinced that if I were to look up I would see her there, watching me from beneath her heavy eyelids, face pale, her tragic mouth curling in something not quite like a smile … I was so convinced that she was there that when I raised my eyes I actually saw her standing in the shade of the hawthorn tree, then she was only a jumble of light and shade on the bare path, where a patch of brown and frozen weeds nodded almost imperceptibly over a gravestone I had never noticed before.

  For a moment I stared stupidly. It was a simple enough idea: a flat stone set into the mossy ground with a small cast-iron sculpture rising above it, maybe two feet high. A frame, like a door-frame, with a kind of crest on the top, within which stood what looked to me like a little door or gate, set against the frame with hinges. As I looked, a gust of wind pushed against the little gate and it blew open with a tiny sound, then clicked shut as the wind released it. At the head of the grave was a shallow stone trough, in which a few small green shrubs nodded and whispered.

  Of course. This must be her grave; this the remembrance Robert had spoken of. His idea. I don’t know why I approached it then; I should have known that it would do me no good. It may be that I wanted to know what had been in my friend’s mind before his suicide, as if my penance before Rosemary’s grave might help his tortured soul to rest. Maybe I felt some stirring of guilt. Because I killed her, you know, or at least, I did the best I could. Or maybe I went for the same reason that the young girl looks into Bluebeard’s chamber, for the same reason that the two children go to the gingerbread house, or that the boy lets the genie out of the bottle …

  I read the inscription, of course. After all, that was why it was there.

  Something inside me remembers and will not forget.

  Rosemary Virginia Ashley

  August 1948

  Something inside me remembers … I came there often after that, not able to help myself, fascinated and repelled and terrified all at once. Something inside me remembers … Only I really understood those words. Everyone else took it as a message from Robert, proof of his love for his dead wife.

  But I knew Robert better than that. He may have been weak, but he was not maudlin. He may have died a little when Rosemary was buried, but he would not have laid his heart open like that for lovers to gawp at as they took their romantic walks in Grantchester churchyard. He was a practical man, and practical men are the ones who suffer the most from love, when it comes their way. And whatever the evidence, I know he didn’t kill himself. That was a message to me from her. A defiant cry from beyond the grave. She isn’t dead, and she wants me to know it. She has all the time in the world. And she still remembers.

  But I’m not afraid. I’m safe. I still have my final trick to play, the last card which will keep me safe. And do you know what my last card is? It’s you, friend. You don’t believe me? You will. As you read this diary you’ll hate me, despise me, but you won’t disbelieve me. It’s all right, you don’t have to do it all at once; put the book away in a drawer, forget it for a while, for years if you like, but you’ll come back. I know you will. You’ll have to come back sooner or later, because she’s here. She’s waiting for you. Just as she was waiting for me. So be careful.

  When the time comes, much may depend upon which way I turn you.

  Two

  ALL THAT DAY Alice had been restless. Now she nibbled her way thro
ugh a packet of biscuits, turned the television on. A black-and-white film, a chat-show, a Russian cartoon … she turned it off.

  She made some tea, sat down, let the tea go cold, poured it down the sink, put on a record, played it twice without hearing it, took it off.

  Then she reached for the letter from her contact at Red Rose and tried to re-awaken her interest in the illustrator’s job they had offered her. It was a fairly easy one – six line-drawings and a book jacket for a teen romance called Heartbreak High. It should have been easy, Alice thought; and yet she had wasted most of the day filling the waste-basket with half-finished sketches, until finally she admitted to herself that it was seeing that girl with Joe that had done it, hearing his voice so unexpectedly.

  Not that it mattered now of course. It was over. End of topic.

  And yet tonight, it felt lonely. Just for tonight, it might be good to hear the phone ring. A fleeting query from her subconscious (something inside me remembers …); but who would remember her if she disappeared tomorrow? Her mother, keeping the faith for her vanished ones two hundred miles away? Her contact at Red Rose? The only friends she had had were also Joe’s friends; she had lost them when she lost Joe. And while times had been good, she had not felt the need for anyone outside him. Damn. A sudden rage at herself overpowered Alice. Why couldn’t she let it go? Part of it was seeing that gravestone, the inexplicable sense of envy for the dead girl whose lover would not forget.

  She considered ringing up her mother in Leeds, the only person outside her work from whom she ever received phone calls, then she shrugged and sat down again. No. It would be nice to hear her mother’s voice, but ringing her would simply open the doorway to all the usual reproaches and criticisms and enquiries: ‘When are you going to come and visit us?’ ‘Have you got a job yet?’ (As if what Alice was doing for a living were some kind of a hobby in preparation for ‘real work’.) ‘Are you sure you’re looking after yourself?’

  Poor Mother, thought Alice, Mother who had grown harder and sharper with the years after the cancer finally got Dad, Mother whose sweetness had become buried under all the extra flesh she had put on since turning fifty, and who always spoke in the same careful code, never quite saying what she meant, perhaps never quite finding the words.

  She had been bright once: black-and-white photographs showed a dark, narrow-waisted girl with a lovely smile, arm-in-arm with the handsome young man Dad had been before he lost his hair so early. She had been romantic enough to call her little girl Alice after Alice in Wonderland. ‘Because,’ she said, ‘you had just the same kind of wide astonished eyes.’ But now she was a disappointed fat woman, coarsened and faded not by grief but by the constant erosion of joyless days passing; and the worst of it was that, some day, Alice was terribly afraid that she might look into the mirror and see her mother’s face staring out at her.

  Alice sighed and looked at the clock. Half past ten. She supposed she ought to go to bed soon, but didn’t feel tired. She reached across to the bookshelf, chose a paperback at random, hoping to put herself to sleep by reading a few pages. There might be some leftover chocolate ice-cream in the ice-box, she thought; she couldn’t remember. She went to the fridge to check, thinking vaguely that she was eating too much nowadays and that she ought to try and cut down. She suppressed the image of her mother, sitting in the lounge in their old house soon after Dad died, eating packets of prawn cocktail crisps with a blank-eyed, ferocious energy.

  Bottles clinked inside the fridge door, and the four cats materialized, seemingly from nowhere, to investigate the promise of milk. Alice felt the warm, wriggling bodies around her legs and felt herself relax a little.

  Rogue memories of Joe. Joe in the upstairs bedroom practising endless riffs on his guitar, frightening the cats. Joe frowning over a pile of manuscript paper and an overflowing ashtray. Joe at the head of a peace demonstration carrying a big banner with ‘Bum the Bomb’. Joe arguing with a policeman, Alice tugging at his arm. Joe rolling a joint one-handed, Joe frowning over one of Alice’s paintings, saying: ‘The lines are too weak. It doesn’t stand out at a distance.’

  Alice: ‘It’s perfectly all right, you Philistine. It’s supposed to look ethereal, like a Rackham.’

  Alice sneaking back to her studio later that night to change the picture and sharpen the lines.

  Joe playing in his first band, blind drunk, but never a wrong note.

  The binges; making love on an unmade bed with dozens of wine bottles and chocolate wrappers and pizza boxes piled up on the floor. The quarrels, screaming at each other in Joe’s music-room as Alice found success and Joe didn’t. His jealousy, his sudden flashes of bitterness at everything: the band which never managed to get a contract, never having enough money, never having been given a chance. As they grew older, watching the students come and go, knowing that the whole world belonged to them, and finally having to accept that he was ten years older and that a new generation had sprung up beneath him. Youngsters who were strong and smart and who knew exactly where they were going. People who wore the right clothes. Who went to see the right bands. And with that realization came a kind of helplessness and a kind of anger, against the kids, the government, all the bloodsuckers who were killing him by degrees.

  Alice smiled, remembering. If only he had known how to stay friends. If only he hadn’t been so afraid.

  Still, her choice was made now. The regrets were few. She checked the ice-box. The chocolate ice-cream was there after all. That would help a lot, she thought.

  Suddenly, the phone rang, and Alice knew that it was Joe.

  ‘Alice?’ his voice was breathless, so that she had difficulty placing it. Then the memory locked into place with a jolt, like changing gears on an old bicycle.

  ‘Joe! How are you?’ She fought for control; seeing him, then thinking about him, and now hearing his voice on the phone gave her a strange sensation, something like dizziness, as if a long-stopped wheel had begun to turn.

  ‘I’m fine.’ His voice was slightly unsteady, as it sometimes was when he was particularly excited or angry; Alice, straining over the poor line, could not tell which.

  ‘Still playing the blues?’ she asked, stalling for time and automatically slipping into the old pattern of their conversations, that light, brittle humour which masked so much intensity.

  ‘That’s me, the mean guitar machine.’

  A pause.

  ‘What about you, Al? I saw your book. It was pretty good. Kids’ stuff, but still … I always knew you’d make it, you know. And I saw your exhibition. You’ll be at the RA next time I look.’ He gave a little laugh which tugged at her heart. ‘I see you still have that trouble with outlines, though.’

  ‘Flattery gets you anywhere, Joe.’

  ‘Me, I’ve got a new band. We call ourselves Fiddle the Dole. We’ve been going for near to a year, now. Electric folk, covers and original songs. We play the Wheatsheaf every Saturday. You should come to listen to us some day. We’re good.’ A pause. ‘So how’re you doing?’

  ‘Fine, Joe. Yes, I’m—’

  ‘Jess told me about—Are you OK—’

  ‘You talked to my mother?’ said Alice. ‘When?’

  ‘Hey, relax. I met her by accident. We were playing the university in Leeds. She said you’d been ill. She was just trying to find out how you were.’

  ‘I wasn’t ill,’ said Alice flatly. ‘I just went out of circulation for a while.’

  ‘Well, I’m back here to stay now,’ went on Joe. ‘I’ve got a flat on Maid’s Causeway, I told the landlady I was a grad student and she believed me. She’s deaf as a post, and lets the band practise in her cellar. She says she likes Irish music because she’s a lapsed Catholic. Just as long as she doesn’t listen to any of the lyrics.’

  Alice smiled in spite of herself. ‘That bad, eh?’ she asked.

  He made a non-committal sound. ‘Could be better,’ he admitted. ‘Still, we manage all right on income support, and once we start playing the colleges, you nev
er know, we might begin to get a core of discerning followers. You know, the kind that throw full cans at you instead of empty ones.’

  ‘Joe …’ said Alice carefully. ‘It’s late. Why are you phoning me now? It’s been over three years—’

  ‘Does there have to be a reason?’ His voice was almost aggressive now. ‘You always did try to find hidden meanings in everything. Why don’t you loosen up a bit? I felt like catching up, that’s all. Maybe we could go for a walk, have a pizza, anything. You might even want to see me play.’

  The anger, if it had been there at all, was gone from Joe’s voice now, and the idea suddenly seemed not just possible, but attractive. A pause, during which Alice looked out of the window at the magnolia nodding in the orange street-light. Then Joe went on in a strange tight voice: ‘So how’re you doing these days, Al? You’ve not gone and married the boy next door?’

  ‘You were the boy next door,’ she said. ‘And you? Have you found the L-word yet? Does she play the cello? You always fantasized about a girl who could play the cello.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t play the cello,’ said Joe, with a low laugh. ‘But …’ Underneath the light tone Alice thought she could hear anxiety. ‘I met her quite by accident. You’d never have expected to see her there, in a dive like the Sluice … you know the place? They drink the beer, then they eat the glass. Anyway, there was this girl there, sitting right at the front, all by herself, watching me all the time. Did you ever hear of anyone going to see a gig and watching the bass player all the time? The lead singer, yes. That’s the pretty one with the long blond hair and that kind of fetching undernourished look. But me? I mean, who am I? I went to the bar to get a beer and she watched me all the way there as well. It made me feel weird. As if she could see right through me. So I kept looking away, right? Thinking, pretty soon she’ll get bored and move off. But she never did. And so I took another look at her, and then I went in for a closer look. And she was waiting, as if she knew. The rest, as they say, is history.