He Comes Undone

ON SUNDAY afternoon, after they had closed the cemetery, Jessica and Robert sat with James on the terrace overlooking the Bateses’ back garden. It had been a frantic day-the magnificent June weather had brought the tourists in droves, and most of the guides were on holiday; Robert and Phil had been obliged to eject two extremely large and hostile filmmakers and their actors from the Eastern Cemetery; some grave owners had arrived from Manchester without the faintest idea of the location of their grandmother’s grave. Now the Bateses and Robert sat drinking whisky and decompressing.

“Perhaps we ought to make another sign to post at the gate,” said James. “All uncertain grave owners please present yourselves during office hours when the staff can attend to your very time-consuming requests.”

“We want to help them,” said Jessica. “But they must call ahead. These people who pitch up on the cemetery’s doorstep wanting us to do a grave search whilst they wait-it’s beyond anything.”

“They think the records are digitised,” Robert said.

Jessica laughed. “Ten years from now, perhaps. Evelyn and Paul are typing in the burial records as fast as their fingers can fly, but with one hundred and sixty-nine thousand entries-”

“I know.”

“Robert and Phil were quite valiant today,” Jessica told James. “In addition to vanquishing the unwanted movie people they each gave four tours.”

“My goodness. Where were the rest of the guides?”

“Brigitte is visiting her mother in Hamburg, Marion and Dean are on holiday in Romania, Sebastian is working overtime at the funeral parlour because of that terrible bus accident in Little Wapping, and Anika caught flu from her little girl.”

“It was just the three of us-Molly was on the Eastern Cemetery gate all day, poor girl.” Robert emptied his glass and Jessica topped it up.

“Well,” said James, “I suppose that’s the principal difficulty of running a cemetery with volunteers. You can’t exactly tell people they can’t go on holiday because you’ll be left short of guides.”

“No,” said Jessica. “But I do wish they would all make the cemetery a priority-”

“They do, you know,” said Robert. “They drive in from all over, week after week.”

“Yes, I know. I’m just exhausted, that’s all. It was a terribly long day.”

Robert stretched his legs. “On the upside, if I did four tours every day I might get a little fitter.”

“You do look as though you’ve been left indoors a bit too long.” Jessica scrutinised him. “You ought to get more vitamin D. You always seem tired.”

“Maybe I should buy a laptop. I could sit in the Meadow amid the graves and write in the sunshine.

‘Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn

Brushing with hasty steps the dews away

To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.’”

Jessica smiled. “How very Romantic. That would make a lovely advertisement for laptops.”

“How is the thesis coming along?” asked James.

“Reasonably well. I’ve been slightly distracted lately.”

“Don’t you have a deadline? I thought your thesis committee was getting restive,” James said.

“The problem is, the more I research, the more there is that ought to go into it. Sometimes I think my dissertation is going to be the size of Highgate Cemetery itself, grave by grave, year by year, every blade of grass, every fern-”

“But Robert, there’s no need for that!” Jessica startled him, she sounded so urgent. “We need you to write what happened, and why it is significant-you don’t have to completely re-create the place on paper. You’re a historian-history has to pick and choose.”

“I know. I will. But it’s hard to stop gathering material.”

Jessica pressed her lips together and looked away. James said, “Can we help in any way? How long is your manuscript?”

Robert hesitated before he replied. “One thousand, four hundred and thirty-two pages.”

James said, “That’s marvellous, then it’s merely a matter of winnowing it down.”

“No,” said Robert. “Because I’m only up to the First World War.”

“Oh,” said James. Robert looked at Jessica. She was gazing out at her garden, trying to restrain herself.

“The cemetery has many histories,” Robert told them, “not just one. There’s the social and religious and public-health aspects. There are the biographies of the people buried there-the rise and fall of the London Cemetery Company. There’s the vandalism and then the coming together of the Friends and all the work that has been done since then. All these things have to fit together. Then there are the supernatural things that people claim-”

“Surely you aren’t putting all that rubbish in!” Jessica sat up and turned to him.

“Not as fact. But it is a part of the modern historical record-”

“A very distasteful part.”

“A small part. But all that craziness was the catalyst for forming the Friends. And I don’t want to censor events just because we don’t approve of them.”

Jessica sighed. “But ‘history is written by the victors.’ And in the Battle for Highgate Cemetery the Friends are most certainly the victors. So we ought to have some say in our history.”

Robert had misplaced the reference; he thought that she was quoting Michel Foucault. He struggled for a moment with the cognitive dissonance of that, until James kindly said, “Winston Churchill.”

“Oh, right,” said Robert. But I’m a Marxist, he thought. He didn’t try to explain, as Jessica had always had a slightly rueful attitude towards Karl Marx (at least in terms of his presence in Highgate Cemetery). Robert wasn’t sure he was up to defending current trends in Marxist academic thinking at the moment. Instead he hurriedly set off on a tangent. “I was thinking about the nature of memory. Of memorials…”

The Bateses exchanged glances but didn’t say anything. Robert realised that he wasn’t sure what he wanted to say.

“The digitisation project,” he said finally. “And cleaning the graves so the inscriptions can be read. And George in his workshop, carving the names onto new gravestones…”

“Yes?” said James.

“Why do we do it?” asked Robert.

“For the families,” said Jessica. “The dead don’t know the difference.”

“And for the historians,” James added with a smile.

“But what if the dead did know?” Robert asked. “What if they’re all there, or somewhere…?”

“Well…” Jessica sat looking at him. Something is wrong with him. He’s all nervy. “Robert, are you all right? I don’t mean to be a fusspot, but I am worried about you.”

Robert looked at his lap. James said, “Is everything all right with the twins? Stop us if we’re prying, but we did rather think you had turned the corner…” Robert looked up to find both Bateses peering at him with worried frowns.

“The twins are coming undone. If I understand correctly, Valen-tina wants to leave Julia, and Julia wants Valentina to break things off with me. But that’s not actually the problem.”

He was aware of a resistance to telling them; he didn’t want them to think badly of him and he knew he would not be believed. My head is going to explode if I don’t tell somebody. Maybe they’ll understand, even if they don’t think it’s true. The air was still, there on the terrace. He could hear one crow, far off, cawing. Then it stopped, and the three of them sat in the stillness, waiting.

“I’ve come to believe that there is some sort of existence after death,” Robert said. “I think it’s possible for people to hang around…or to get stuck, somehow…” He took a breath. “I’ve been talking to Elspeth. She’s in her flat and can’t leave.”

“Oh, Robert.” Jessica sounded terribly sad. He knew it was sadness for him, sadness that he was losing his mind, not sadness at Elspeth’s plight.