Schwarzenberg down through the suburbs to the Zentralfriedhof, and plodded round the avenues between the graves, wondering if she was waiting for me there, if I'd glimpse the red of her coat somewhere ahead of me through the trees. But I didn't. She wasn't there. Or anywhere else I tried. And the longer I remained the weaker grew the visual impression she'd left on the only places where I'd ever seen her.
I flew back to England and the onset of a relentlessly wet February. I moved my few belongings out of Tim's house despite his assurances that I didn't have to and rented a bed sit over a pizza parlour in Notting Hill Gate. It wasn't much of a place, but then it didn't need to be. I didn't intend to spend much of my time there. It was just a base for my search operation.
But where was the search to start? I reckoned I had two admittedly imprecise clues. Marian had said the house she lived in had been in her husband's family for generations. That sounded rural, if not manorial. And Esguard was a highly unusual name. It should be possible, given enough time and effort, to track it down. She'd also said there was no problem getting from there to Lacock. That implied a drive of an hour or so, maybe two at the most. I allowed seventy miles as a maximum distance and checked a map to see what lay within that radius of Lacock. Most of the southern half of England was the answer: Exeter in the west, Birmingham in the north, London in the east, Bournemouth in the south. Not much of a help, but it marginally narrowed the field.
I scoured the telephone directories covering areas inside the circle and drew a blank. No Esguards. Then I went through those for the rest of the country with the same result. That left me back at the beginning and eager to try my luck on the ground. My reluctance to take photographs, whatever their origin, had an even stranger partner in the sudden loss of my horror of driving. Maybe it was just a matter of necessity. Faith was no longer available to ferry me around. And I wasn't going to get far on foot or public transport. Somehow everything even the memory of that wet night on Barnet Hill when I'd taken a stranger's life in a moment of carelessness -had faded into insignificance compared with the task I'd set myself. Tim had said I had a streak of obsessive ness But he was wrong. Extremism was nearer the mark. About photography. About Marian. About finding her.
I bought a second-hand car and gritted my way back to competence with a saturation dose at the wheel. The pattern of my search became a compulsion in its own right. I headed out of London along the radial routes, starting with the A23 down through Surrey and Sussex, working my way slowly west. Each route took several days to cover as I diverged either side, stopping at every town and village to ask the locals if they knew anyone living in the neighbourhood by the name of Esguard. I tried the pubs, post offices and estate agents as well. Nobody could help, but I went on asking, pushing to the back of my mind the fear that nobody would ever be able to. There was a kind of logic to it. If she'd lied to me, I'd never find her. But if she'd told me the truth .. .
February faded into March with nothing gained except a desperate kind of equilibrium in my life. As long as I was looking for Marian I didn't have to acknowledge the futility of what I was doing. My pursuit of her was also a flight from myself: from what my wife and daughter thought of me, from the sick joke I'd doubtless become among friends and colleagues and anyone who'd known me as a competent level-headed professional.
I wonder now if I'd ever have stopped, if eventually I'd simply have widened the circle as often as I needed to in order to sustain the search. To have given up would always have seemed worse than carrying on. There's no way to tell how and when it might have ended. Defeat, once admitted, would have been terminal, I'm sure of that. That's why it was bound to be so long
I flew back to England and the onset of a relentlessly wet February. I moved my few belongings out of Tim's house despite his assurances that I didn't have to and rented a bed sit over a pizza parlour in Notting Hill Gate. It wasn't much of a place, but then it didn't need to be. I didn't intend to spend much of my time there. It was just a base for my search operation.
But where was the search to start? I reckoned I had two admittedly imprecise clues. Marian had said the house she lived in had been in her husband's family for generations. That sounded rural, if not manorial. And Esguard was a highly unusual name. It should be possible, given enough time and effort, to track it down. She'd also said there was no problem getting from there to Lacock. That implied a drive of an hour or so, maybe two at the most. I allowed seventy miles as a maximum distance and checked a map to see what lay within that radius of Lacock. Most of the southern half of England was the answer: Exeter in the west, Birmingham in the north, London in the east, Bournemouth in the south. Not much of a help, but it marginally narrowed the field.
I scoured the telephone directories covering areas inside the circle and drew a blank. No Esguards. Then I went through those for the rest of the country with the same result. That left me back at the beginning and eager to try my luck on the ground. My reluctance to take photographs, whatever their origin, had an even stranger partner in the sudden loss of my horror of driving. Maybe it was just a matter of necessity. Faith was no longer available to ferry me around. And I wasn't going to get far on foot or public transport. Somehow everything even the memory of that wet night on Barnet Hill when I'd taken a stranger's life in a moment of carelessness -had faded into insignificance compared with the task I'd set myself. Tim had said I had a streak of obsessive ness But he was wrong. Extremism was nearer the mark. About photography. About Marian. About finding her.
I bought a second-hand car and gritted my way back to competence with a saturation dose at the wheel. The pattern of my search became a compulsion in its own right. I headed out of London along the radial routes, starting with the A23 down through Surrey and Sussex, working my way slowly west. Each route took several days to cover as I diverged either side, stopping at every town and village to ask the locals if they knew anyone living in the neighbourhood by the name of Esguard. I tried the pubs, post offices and estate agents as well. Nobody could help, but I went on asking, pushing to the back of my mind the fear that nobody would ever be able to. There was a kind of logic to it. If she'd lied to me, I'd never find her. But if she'd told me the truth .. .
February faded into March with nothing gained except a desperate kind of equilibrium in my life. As long as I was looking for Marian I didn't have to acknowledge the futility of what I was doing. My pursuit of her was also a flight from myself: from what my wife and daughter thought of me, from the sick joke I'd doubtless become among friends and colleagues and anyone who'd known me as a competent level-headed professional.
I wonder now if I'd ever have stopped, if eventually I'd simply have widened the circle as often as I needed to in order to sustain the search. To have given up would always have seemed worse than carrying on. There's no way to tell how and when it might have ended. Defeat, once admitted, would have been terminal, I'm sure of that. That's why it was bound to be so long
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