by P. D. James
Dalgliesh said, “They’ll have to watch it and cope with it once they’re priests.”
“Oh they’ll learn, I dare say. They’re good lads.” Dalgliesh asked, “Mrs. Pilbeam, did you like Ronald Treeves?” The woman waited before answering.
“It wasn’t my place to think whether I liked him or not. Well, it wasn’t anyone’s place really. In a small community it doesn’t do to have favourites. That’s something Father Sebastian has always been against. But he wasn’t a popular boy and I don’t think he felt at home here. He was a bit too pleased with himself and too critical about other people. That usually comes from insecurity, doesn’t it? And he never let us forget that his father was rich.”
“Was he particularly friendly with Mrs. Munroe, do you know?”
“With Margaret? Well, I suppose you could say he was. He used to call there quite a bit, I do know that. The students are only supposed to go to the cottages by invitation, but I have a feeling he used to drop in on Margaret. Not that she ever complained. I can’t think what they found to talk about. Maybe they both liked the company.”
“Did Mrs. Munroe ever speak to you about finding the body?”
“Not much and I didn’t like to ask. Of course it all came out at the inquest and I read about it in the papers, but I didn’t go. Everyone else here was talking about it, though not when Father Sebastian was within earshot. He hates gossips. But I suppose I got all the details one way or another not that there were many to get.”
“Did she tell you that she was writing an account of it?”
“No, she didn’t, but I’m not surprised. She was a great one for writing, was Margaret. Before Charlie was killed she used to write to him every week. When I came in to see her she’d be sitting at the table writing away, page after page. But she never told me she was writing about young Ronald. Now why would she want to do that?”
“You found her body, didn’t you, when she had her heart attack? What happened then, Mrs. Pilbeam?”
“Well, I saw her light on when I went over to the college just after six. I hadn’t seen her for a couple of days not to talk to and I had a bit of a conscience. I thought I’d been neglecting her and that she might like to come in and have a bite of supper with me and Reg, and maybe watch television together. So I went over to her cottage. And there she was, dead in her chair.”
“Was the door unlocked or had you a key?”
“Oh, it was unlocked. We hardly ever lock our doors here. I knocked and when she didn’t answer I went in. We always did that. And that’s when I found her. She was quite cold, sitting there in her chair, stiff as a board with her knitting in her lap. One of the needles was still in her right hand, pushed into the next stitch. Of course I called Father Sebastian and he rang Dr. Metcalf. Dr. Metcalf had come to see her only the day before. She had a terribly bad heart so there wasn’t any problem about the death certificate. It was a good way for her to go really. We should all be so lucky.”
“And you didn’t find any paper, any letter?”
“Not where you’d see them, and of course I wouldn’t go rummaging around. What would I be doing that for?”
“Of course you wouldn’t, Mrs. Pilbeam. I just wondered whether there was a manuscript, a letter or a document on the table.”
“No, nothing on the table. There was one odd thing though. She couldn’t have been knitting, not really.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, she was knitting a winter pullover for Father Martin. He’d seen one in a shop in Ipswich and described it to her and she thought she’d knit it for Christmas. But it was a really complicated design, a kind of cable with a pattern in between, and she told me how difficult it was. She wouldn’t be knitting it without the pattern open in front of her. I’ve seen her many a time and she always had to refer to the pattern. And she was wearing the wrong spectacles, the ones she puts on to watch television. She always wore the gold-rimmed ones for close work.”
“And the pattern wasn’t there?”
“No, only the needles and the wool in her lap. And she was holding the needle in a funny way. She didn’t knit like I do, she told me it was the continental way. Very odd it looked. She used to hold the left needle kind of rigid and worked the other one round it. I thought at the time it was funny, seeing the knitting in her lap when she couldn’t have been knitting.”
“But you didn’t speak to anyone about it?”
“What point would there be? It didn’t matter. Just one of those odd things. I expect she was feeling ill and just reached for her needles and the knitting and sat down in her chair forgetting about the pattern. But I miss her. It’s odd having the cottage still empty and it seemed as if she disappeared overnight. She never talked about any family, but it turned out she had a sister living in Surbiton. She arranged for the body to be taken to London for cremation and she and her husband came down to clear up the cottage. There’s nothing like death for bringing the family on the scene. Margaret wouldn’t have wanted a Requiem Mass, but Father Sebastian arranged a very nice service in the church. We all had a part to play. Father Sebastian thought I might like to read a passage from St. Paul, but I said I’d rather just say a prayer instead. Somehow I can’t take St. Paul. Seems to me he was a bit of a troublemaker. There were those little groups of Christians all minding their own business and getting along all right, by and large. No one’s perfect. And then St. Paul arrives unexpectedly and starts bossing and criticizing. Or he’d send them one of his fierce letters. Not the kind of letter I’d care to receive, and so I told Father Sebastian.”
“What did he say?”
“That St. Paul was one of the world’s great religious geniuses and that we wouldn’t be Christians now if it hadn’t been for him. I said, “Well Father, we’d have to be something,” and asked what he thought we’d be. But I don’t think he knew. He said he’d think about it, but if he did he never told me. He said that I raised questions not covered by the syllabus of the Cambridge Faculty of Theology.”
And those, thought Dalgliesh after he had refused her offer of tea and cake and left, were not the only questions Mrs. Pilbeam had raised.
Dr. Emma Lavenham left her Cambridge college later than she had hoped. Giles had taken lunch in hall and, while she completed her packing, had talked about matters that he said needed to be settled before she left. She sensed that he had been glad to delay her. Giles had never liked her termly absences when she went to give three days of lectures at St. Anselm’s College. He had never openly objected, probably sensing that she would have seen this as an inexcusable interference in her private life, but he had more subtle ways of expressing his dislike of an activity in which he had no part and which took place in an institution for which, as a proclaimed atheist, he had little respect. But he could hardly complain that her work in Cambridge suffered.
The late start meant that she didn’t escape the worst of the Friday night traffic, and the periodic hold-ups left her with a resentment against Giles for his delaying tactics and an irritation with herself for not resisting them more effectively. At the end of last term she had begun to realize that Giles was becoming both more proprietorial and more demanding of time and affection. Now, with the prospect of a Chair in a northern university, his mind was turning towards marriage, perhaps because he saw it as the likeliest way of ensuring that she went with him. He had, she knew, definite ideas of what for him constituted a suitable wife. Unfortunately it seemed that she filled them. She resolved for the next three days at least that she would put that and all the problems of her university life firmly out of mind.
The arrangements with the college had started three years ago. Father Sebastian, she realized, had recruited her in his customary fashion. Feelers had been put out among his Cambridge contacts. What the college required was an academic, preferably young, to give three seminars at the beginning of each term on “The Poetic Inheritance of Anglicanism’, someone with a reputation or in the process of making it who could relate to the
young ordinands and who would fit in with the ethos of St. Anselm’s. What that ethos was, Father Sebastian hadn’t thought it necessary to explain. The post,
Father Sebastian had later told her, had arisen directly from the wishes of the founder of the college, Miss Arbuthnot. Strongly influenced in this, as in other matters, by her High Church friends in Oxford, she had believed it was important that the newly-ordained Anglican priests should know something of the literary inheritance which was theirs. Emma, aged twenty-eight and recently appointed a university lecturer, had been invited to what Father Sebastian had described as an informal discussion about the possibility of her joining the community for those nine days a year. The post had been offered and accepted with the only proviso on Emma’s part that the poetry should not be limited to Church of England writers nor restricted in time. She had pointed out to Father Sebastian that she would wish to include the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins and to extend the period covered to include modern poets such as T.S. Eliot. Father Sebastian, having obviously satisfied himself that she was the right person for the job, seemed content to leave the details to her. Apart from appearing at the third of her seminars where his silent presence had had a somewhat intimidating effect, he had taken no further interest in the course.
Those three days at St. Anselm’s, preceded by a weekend, had become important to her, eagerly looked forward to and never disappointing. Cambridge wasn’t without its tensions and anxieties. She had gained her university lectureship early perhaps, she thought, too early. There was the problem of reconciling the teaching which she loved with the need to produce research, the responsibilities of administration and the pastoral care of students who increasingly spoke first to her about their problems. Many were the first of their family to attend university. They came laden with expectations and anxieties. Some who had done well in A level found the reading lists dauntingly long, others suffered from a homesickness they were ashamed to admit and felt inadequately equipped to confront this intimidating new life.
None of these pressures was made easier by the demands of Giles and the complications of her own emotional life. It was a relief to be part of the beautifully ordered and isolated peace of St. Anselm’s, to be talking about the poetry she loved to intelligent young men who weren’t faced with the weekly essay, the half-acknowledged wish to please her with acceptable opinions, and who were un shadowed by the prospect of Tripos. She liked them and, while generally discouraging the occasional romantic or amorous approach, knew that they liked her, were pleased to see a woman in college, looked forward to her coming and saw her as an ally. And it wasn’t only the students who welcomed her. She was greeted always as a friend. Father Sebastian’s calm, somewhat formal welcome couldn’t conceal his satisfaction at having once again picked the right person. The other fathers showed their more demonstrative happiness at her return.
While her visits to St. Anselm’s were an anticipated pleasure, her regular and dutiful returns home to her father were never undertaken without a heaviness of spirit. Since relinquishing his Oxford post he had moved to a mansion flat near Marylebone station. The red brick walls reminded her of the colour of raw meat and the heavy furniture, the dark-papered walls and net-shrouded windows created a permanent atmosphere of internal gloom which her father appeared never to notice. Henry Lavenham had married late and had lost his wife to breast cancer soon after the birth of their second daughter. Emma had been only three at the time and it later seemed to her that her father had transferred to the new baby all the love he had felt for his wife, reinforced by pity for the helplessness of the motherless child. Emma had always known herself to be the less loved. She had felt no resentment or jealousy of her sibling but had compensated for the lack of love by work and success. Two words had reverberated from her adolescence: brilliant and beautiful. Both had imposed a burden, the first the expectation of success which had come to her too easily to deserve credit; the second a puzzle, sometimes almost a torment. She had grown into beauty only in adolescence and would gaze into the mirror trying to define and evaluate this extraordinarily overvalued possession, already half aware that, while good looks and prettiness were benisons, beauty was a dangerous and less amenable gift.
Until her sister Marianne was eleven the two girls had been looked after by a sister of her father’s, a sensible, undemonstrative and conscientious woman who was totally devoid of maternal instinct but knew her duty when she saw it. She had provided a stabilizing, unsentimental care but had departed into her private world of dogs, bridge and foreign travel as soon as she thought Marianne had been old enough to leave. The girls had seen her go without regret.
And now Marianne was dead, killed by a drunken driver on her thirteenth birthday, and Emma and her father were alone. When she returned to see him he showed her a scrupulous, almost painful courtesy. She wondered whether their lack of communication and avoidance of any demonstrative affection which she could hardly call estrangement since what had they been other than strangers? was the result of his feeling that now, over seventy and bereaved, it would be demeaning and embarrassing to demand from her the love which he had never previously shown any sign of needing.
And now, at last, she was nearing the end of her journey. The narrow road to the sea was seldom used except on summer weekends and this evening she was the only traveller. The road stretched before her, pale, shadowed and a little sinister in the fading light. As always when she came to St. Anselm’s she had the sensation of moving towards a crumbling coast, untamed, mysterious and isolated in time as well as space.
As she turned north along the track leading to St. Anselm’s and the high chimneys and tower of the house loomed blackly menacing against the darkening sky, she saw a short figure trudging about fifty yards ahead and recognized Father John Betterton.
Drawing up beside him she let down the window and said, “Can I give you a lift, Father?”
He blinked, as if for a moment not recognizing her. Then he gave the familiar sweet and childish smile.
“Emma. Thank you, thank you. A lift will be welcome. I walked further than I intended round the mere.”
He was wearing a heavy tweed coat and had his binoculars slung round his neck. He got in, bringing with him, impregnated in the tweed, the dank smell of brackish water.
“Any luck with the bird-watching, Father?”
“Just the usual winter residents.”
They sat in companionable silence. There had been a time when, briefly, Emma had found it difficult to be at ease with Father John. That had been on her first visit three years ago when Raphael had told her about the priest’s imprisonment.
He had said, “Someone is bound to tell you at Cambridge if not here, and I’d rather you heard it from me. Father John confessed to abusing some young boys in his choir. That’s the word they used, but I doubt there was much real abuse. He was sent to prison for three years.”
Emma had said, “I don’t know much about the law, but the sentence seems harsh.”
“It wasn’t just the two boys. Another priest from a neighbouring parish, Matthew Crampton, made it his business to rake up further evidence and produced three young men. They accused Father John of worse enormities. According to them it was his early abuse that made them unemployable, unhappy, delinquent and antisocial. They were lying but Father John still pleaded guilty. He had his reasons.”
Without necessarily sharing Raphael’s belief in Father John’s innocence, Emma felt a great pity for him. He seemed like a man who had partly withdrawn into a private world, precariously preserving the core of a vulnerable personality as if he were carrying within himself something fragile which even a sudden movement might shatter. He was unfailingly polite and gentle and she could only detect his private anguish on those few occasions when she looked into his eyes and had to turn hers away from the pain. Perhaps he was also carrying a burden of guilt. Part of her still wished that Raphael hadn’t spoken. She couldn’t imagine what his life in prison must have been. Would any man,
she wondered, willingly bring that hell on himself? And his life at St. Anselm’s couldn’t be easy. He occupied a private apartment on the third floor with his unmarried sister who could charitably be described as eccentric. Although it was obvious to Emma on the few occasions when she had seen them together that he was devoted to her, perhaps even love was an added burden rather than a comfort.
She wondered whether she ought to say a word to him now about the death of Ronald Treeves. She had read a brief account in the national papers and Raphael, who for some reason made it his business to keep her in touch with St. Anselm’s, had telephoned with the news. After some thought she had written a brief and carefully worded letter of condolence to Father Sebastian and had received an even briefer reply in his elegant handwriting. It would surely be natural to speak of Ronald now to Father John, but something held her back. She sensed that the subject would be unwelcome, even painful.
And now St. Anselm’s was clearly in sight, roofs, the tall chimney stacks, turrets, tower and cupola seeming visibly to darken with the dying of the light. In front the two ruined pillars of the long-demolished Elizabethan gatehouse gave out their silent ambiguous messages; crude phallic symbols, indomitable sentinels against the steadily-advancing enemy, obstinately enduring reminders of the house’s inevitable end. Was it, she wondered, the presence beside her of Father John or the thought of Ronald Treeves choking his last breath under that weight of sand that caused this upsurge of sadness and vague apprehension? She had never come to St. Anselm’s before except with joy; now she approached it with something very close to fear.