Flynn Berry - Under the Harrow

At the Hunters, I find the names of the dozen prosecutors in Oxford who might have been assigned to her case, and consider approaching them. Their stakes are different from ours. I wonder how many cases Oxford CPS brings to trial every year. What would losing one mean? A bad day, a drink after work, at worst, a professional review.

None of their addresses are listed. They must not want certain people to know where they live. But I could follow them home from the CPS office or Abingdon police station. I imagine the thud of a car door, their polished shoes tapping on the walk, and following them through the open gate, saying, Excuse me.

They wouldn’t listen, and my desperation might only make things worse. I can’t do anything for her. I remember her weight in my arms. The hours drag by. They have seven days to decide. Lewis is going to call me with the decision, and I try not to see portents everywhere.

• • •

Lewis calls me in the evening.

“Have they made a decision?”

“No, it’s something else,” he says. “The chief inspector has agreed to release her body. You can call the coroner to make arrangements.”

THE DRIVE TAKES six hours, and by the time I reach Polperro it is dark. I park on a steep, narrow road behind the Crumplehorn Inn and collect the box of ashes from the footwell. I wish we had done this differently, with a coffin and pallbearers. I shouldn’t be able to lift the box on my own, but I can, and then I am carrying it down the cobbled streets to the Green Man, a lime-washed inn by the harbor where I will spend the night.

At dawn tomorrow I will scatter the ashes in the cove below the house we rented. I chose Cornwall because it is where she intended to go, five weeks ago. She had already rented a flat on the other side of the county. I have the address in St. Ives, but I think seeing it might tip me over some last, final barricade, and I don’t know what things would be like afterward.

I can’t manage to think of them as her ashes. Instead the box is something she has entrusted to my care, and I am scared something will happen to me before I can complete the errand. On the M5 I thought I would crash and now, as I turn the corner and the Green Man comes into view, I am sure it will burn down with us inside. It wouldn’t be the worst thing. Her ashes would still end up in the ocean, floating with the cinders in long fingers of smoke over the sea.

• • •

Before dawn, I carry the box along the flagged stones of the quay. In the inner harbor, the tide is in, and sailing boats rock on the silvery water, their rigging clinking against the masts. The slate roofs seem to glow in the darkness. The sky is just beginning to lighten at the horizon as I circle around the inner harbor, and I can see the black outline of the two umbrella pines.

I climb the coast path along the edge of the headland. At its highest point I turn to look back at Polperro. More lights have come on, and smoke curls from the chimneys. I look at the fisherman’s croft, nearly invisible against the rocks, and at the two square merchant’s houses. One white, the other tweed-brown, though in this light the white one is blue, and the tweed one black.

The sand of the path crunches beneath my boots. Wind rustles the low sage pines on the headland. The coast doesn’t look very different from in summer, since so much of it is evergreen. I listen to the boom of the waves at the base of the cliff.

After a half mile, the coast path curves around a familiar white oak. Its branches creak with a sound like a door opening.

Another, shorter stretch and then a house comes into view, set down from the path by the edge of the cliff. Our house! I worried it wouldn’t be here anymore.

The house is empty. The man who owns it spends most of the year in London. There are still colored buoys hanging from a tree at the edge of the property. There is the outdoor shower, its spigot foxed with mold, its crooked door on the latch. And the clothesline, a wire strung between two whitewashed poles. In this light the wire is invisible, the pegs floating in midair against the sea. I remember pegging up my swimsuit, with wet hair, wearing a blue dress sprigged with white flowers.

The sense of recognition propels me forward until I stand on the back porch, facing the sea, and then it begins to fracture, so while I am surveying the house, I am also worrying about the prosecutor’s decision, and I am pleading for Rachel’s life, and I am thinking about how we planned to come back here. We wanted to come back for years and years, until we were both old.

The staircase vanishes down the cliff to the sea, and I imagine that Rachel is climbing the steps. Forty years on. The sea below her, the rivulets in the cliff. A formidable old woman, with her hair wet from an early swim. She puts her hand on the railing and leans back to check if she can see her sister, her children, her grandchildren, if any of them has come to the edge of the lawn to wait for her.

I cross the damp lawn and carry the box down the seventy-one steps to the beach. I remove my shoes and socks. I wait until the sun comes over the eastern headland, then twist the lid from the box and walk to the edge of the surf. The icy water stings my skin and soaks through my jeans. I throw handfuls of ash into the water. There is little wind and the things that I worried might happen do not. Most of the ash sinks below the water and the particles that float on the surface are soon roiled by the next wave. Sunlight floods the cove and the waves and the few offshore clouds with color. It takes me a while to recognize that what I feel is disappointment. I had hoped so much for a signal from her.

When I finish, I kneel to rinse my hands and the box in the water. I hold my hands in the clear cold water for longer than necessary, until long after the last of the ash is rinsed away.

• • •

On the porch, I use a glove to wipe the sand and water from my blue feet. I pull on woolen socks and roll my sodden jeans down over them. My teeth chatter. My mind is blank. She’s gone.

I zip my coat to my chin and rock back and forth. I am so cold that I go around the house to the outdoor shower. How good it would feel to take off my wet socks and jeans and stand under a jet of steaming water. I twist the tap but nothing happens. The water must be shut off to keep the pipes from freezing.

I return to the porch, which has the most sun. The day will grow warmer as it rises. Behind me are the rooms where she slept for three weeks, the rooms where she cooked, the rooms where she read. During our trip, Rachel was reading Clarice Lispector and I was alternating between John Fowles and the soggy detective novels in the cabinet under the stairs. Every morning one of us walked to the bakery for almond croissants and I ate mine here with my book. I broke the horn of the croissant and licked out the marzipan. Ahead of me, trenches of ocean rose and fell for miles.

At night I watched the stars from the hammock and was scared by the size of the universe as I hadn’t been since I was little. Rachel climbed in next to me, tucking my socked feet under her arm, pulling a blanket over her chest, and the two of us stared out.

It was good to be so scared. The ocean was very large, as was the universe. Which contained the ocean. And the oceans on other planets, and other planets. The fear made the domestic rituals better. The almond croissant, the detective novel, the outdoor shower. Here I am, I thought, taking an outdoor shower in the universe.

While we were here, I wanted to stay forever, but I was also already thinking of leaving. Always biding and always going, always at the exact same time.

“What’s your favorite thing about Cornwall?” I asked her, but it wasn’t what I meant, I meant what’s your favorite thing about being alive.