Her Fearful Symmetry Read Online Free PDF

that. For Jessica, Highgate was not about the tours, or the monuments, not about the supernatural or the atmosphere or the morbid peculiarities of the Victorians; for her the cemetery was about the dead and their grave-owners. Robert was working, rather slowly, on a history of Highgate Cemetery and Victorian funerary practices for his doctoral thesis. But Jessica, who never wasted anything and was supremely adept at putting people to work, had said, “If you’re going to do all that research, why don’t you make yourself useful?” So he began to lead tours. He found that he liked the cemetery itself much better than anything he wrote about it.
    Robert settled into himself. The stone step he sat on was cold, wet and shallow. His knees jutted up almost to shoulder height. “Hello, love,” he said, but as always felt absurd speaking out loud to a mausoleum. Silently he continued:
Hello. I’m here. Where are you?
He pictured Elspeth sitting inside the mausoleum like a saint in her hermitage, looking out at him through the grate in the door with a little smile on her face.
Elspeth?
    She had always been a restless sleeper. When she was alive her sleep was punctuated by tossing and turning; she often stole all the blankets. When Elspeth slept alone she lay spreadeagled across the bed, staking her territory with limbs instead of a flag. When she slept with Robert he was often awoken by a stray elbow or knee, or by Elspeth’s legs thrashing as though she were running in bed. “One of these nights you’re going to break my nose,” he’d said to her. She had acknowledged that she was a dangerous bedmate. “I apologise in advance for any breakage,” she’d told him, and kissed the nose in question. “You’ll look good, though. It’ll add a certain hooliganish glamour to you.”
    Now there was only stillness. The door was a barrier he could have passed through; there was a key in Elspeth’s desk in addition to the one in the cemetery office. Elspeth’s body sat in a box a few feet away from him. He chose not to imagine what three months had done to it.
    Robert was struck once again by the finality of it all, summed up and presented to him as the silence in the little room behind him.
I have things to tell you. Are you listening?
He had never realised, while Elspeth was alive, the extent to which a thing had not completely happened until he told her about it.
    Roche sent the letter to Julia and Valentina yesterday.
Robert imagined the letter making its way from Roche’s office in Hampstead to Lake Forest, Illinois, U.S.A., being dropped through the letter box at 99 Pembridge Road, being picked up by one of the twins. It was a thick, creamy envelope with the return address of Roche, Elderidge, Potts & Lefley-Solicitors debossed in glossy black ink and the twins’ names and address written in the spidery handwriting of Roche’s ancient secretary, Constance. Robert imagined one of the twins holding the envelope, her curiosity.
I’m nervous about this, Elspeth. I would feel better if you’d ever met these girls. You don’t have to live with them-they could be awful. Or what if they just sell the place to someone awful?
But he was intrigued by the twins, and he had a certain irrational faith in Elspeth’s experiment. “I can leave it all to you,” she’d said. “Or I can leave it to the girls.”
    “Let the girls have it,” he had replied. “I have more than enough.”
    “Hmm. I will, then. But what can I give you?”
    They were sitting on her hospital bed. She had a fever; it was after the splenectomy. Elspeth’s dinner sat untouched on the wheeled bedside table. He was massaging her feet, his hands slippery with the warm, fragrant oil. “I don’t know. Could you arrange to be reincarnated?”
    “The twins are rumoured to be pretty close copies.” Elspeth smiled. “I’ll make them come and live in the flat if they want it. Shall I leave you the twins?”
    Robert smiled back at her. “That could