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Chapter 15
Friday 5th February
The traffic eases as I get closer to Cheltenham, and I’m about half an hour from home when I suddenly decide to make a detour. It’s to somewhere I haven’t been for a very long time, and as I drive though the small, picturesque village of Thornton and pull into the parking area outside the cemetery, I feel a lump forming in my throat and realise I’m fighting back tears, memories more than a decade old racing through my mind, the emotions unexpectedly strong. Sometimes, these days, I think I’ve almost forgotten all about it – the fear, the pain, the long, dark months that followed that cold March day fourteen years ago, the day my life changed forever. But, deep down, I know that of course I’llneverforget it, not really.
How can I? Impossible.
I walk slowly through the graveyard, empty of living people right now, the path meandering past weathered, moss-covered headstones with indecipherable inscriptions and new, shiny black granite tombstones; long-dead Victorians and the recently deceased lying side by side. It’s peaceful here, a gentle breeze rustling the leaves of old oak trees, the rich, fluty call of a bird –a blackbird, maybe?– high above. And then, there it is. I haven’t been here for years, and yet it looks exactly as I remember it.
GREGOR ELLIS
1957-2007
Sail on, my love, sail on
I stand there, motionless, staring. He was just fifty when he died. No age, really, and with so much potential still ahead of him – so many books he could have written, so many screenplays. So many people he could have made happy with his words, his talent. The line on his headstone –sail on, my love, sail on– was the final line in his last novel, the one published just weeks before he died. It had seemed apt somehow, to also use them at his final resting place, a place which has now become somewhat of a … well,tourist attractionisn’t exactly the right phrase. Maybe pilgrimage site is more accurate. His fans certainly come here, hundreds of them a year, or so I’m told, leaving flowers, taking photos of themselves holding their Gregor Ellis paperbacks, his grave in the background. I’ve seen them online, these pictures, and I’ve never quite been able to decide if it’s weird and ghoulish, or rather sweet – a testament to the continuing, powerful impact of the work he left behind. But the photos, the fans, are one of the reasons I don’t visit here often; I haven’t, as I said, been here in years – three, maybe even four now. It’s the main reason I don’t use social media, either. I don’t want to be drawn into conversation, to be asked questions, to be gawped at.
The daughter. The one who survived.
My hand drifts to my left cheek, my fingers running over the scarred, lumpy skin, and although the afternoon is mild for February and I’m bundled up in a thick padded jacket, a scarf wound round my neck, I shiver. If I let myself, if I allow the memories to trickle back into my head, I can still hear the crackle of the flames, and feel the heat slamming into me, solid as a wall.
There’s a bench just a couple of metres away, at the edge of the path, and I sink down onto it, remembering. Remembering the house, not far from here. My father had rented Furnbury Hall for a year. He was even thinking of renewing the lease for a second year, which was remarkable for him, since he rarely stayed in one place for much more than six months. My mother, the love of his life, died of cancer when I was just three years old; months after her funeral, he sold the house in Connecticut where I’d been born, packed up everything including me, and moved us to Sweden. And that was it, for years; Germany, South Africa, Brazil, Italy … he never seemed to be able to settle anywhere for long, and for me that meant innumerable first days at new schools, and a rootless, lonely childhood. He said the travelling inspired him, that his creativity became stagnant if he stayed in one place for too long, but now, as an adult myself, I don’t believe that anymore. I think he was trying to outrun the pain, to somehow keep one step ahead of his anguish over my mother’s death, never able to truly find peace. He was a cold, angry man for nearly all of those final years, but in the final months of his life, something changed, just a little. A thawing maybe, of the icy hand of grief which had clutched at his heart for so long, the beautiful fifteenth-century manor house we were renting working some sort of magic on him. He was still cold and angry, but he was a cold, angry man who was thinking of staying in one place for a while, which was something.
And then came the fire. It started just after midnight, and it took hold horrifyingly fast. It took more than twenty hours for the fire service to completely extinguish the blaze, even though at its height there were more than a hundred firefighters tackling flames so high that the local newspaper reports said they could be seen three miles away. I shiver again, the memories coming back with a vengeance now: the shouts in the dark, shrill with terror; my panic, my heart thumping, my lungs burning, my hair on fire …
‘No! Stop it!’
I gasp and stand up abruptly, aware that I’ve just shouted the words out loud, and that I’m sweating now, my armpits clammy under my coat, my palms damp.
Don’t think about it, don’t …
I take a deep breath, then another, trying to steady myself, to slow my racing heartbeat, and look around, hoping I’m still alone here, hoping nobody is going to approach me to see why I’m shouting at nobody, at nothing, in this place of sanctity, but there’s no one here. Relieved, I swallow hard, take another breath, and move the few steps back to the edge of the grave.
The graves.
Because there are two of them here, of course. Gregor Ellis was not the only one to die in that fire. I crouch to pull a weed from between the cracks on the large York stone slab that covers his burial spot, then turn to look at the headstone on the right.
AMANDA ARCHER
1989 – 2007
It’s simple, unfussy Italian white marble, and I reach out a hand and run my fingers across the smooth surface, across the letters of her name.
Amanda Archer.
My friend – one of the few I’d ever had in the nomadic life I’d led back then. She’d been staying with us that night, the night the flames consumed Furnbury Hall; she was just eighteen, like me. We’d bonded in our first year of college over shared experiences – I didn’t remember my mother, and she had never known her father. And while I had struggled with my lonely, although massively privileged, childhood, travelling the world with a famous, wealthy single parent, she had known the same loneliness in very different circumstances. Her late mother had been violent, and a drug user, and Amanda had been in and out of foster care for years. Like me, she had found it hard to make friends, had been lonely, had craved a stable, normal life. She had finally left the care system and moved out into her own little bedsit in Bristol just weeks before that fateful night; starting her life, trying to plan her future. And then … the fire. The end of everything.
I’d insisted that she be buried here. She had no family; it was the very least I could do. I run my fingers over her name once more, and feel tears pricking my eyelids. I clamber to my feet, fumbling in my coat pocket for a tissue as I walk quickly along the path towards the cemetery gate, not looking back.
I shouldn’t have come here. Why did I? It always makes me so … so sad, I think, as I get back into my car, pulling my scarf from around my neck and tossing it onto the passenger seat. And right now, I know I can’t afford to feel like this; I can’t afford to get distracted. I need to concentrate, need to think, need to focus on the matter in hand, on this man, this person, who’s threatening my life, who’s already taken two, maybe more.
Because if this really is something to do with my father, the great Gregor Ellis, I could be holding a winning card, I think as I turn the engine on and move slowly back out onto the road.
I just have to figure out how to play it.
