Time to Be in Earnest

by P. D. James

  Bywaters had kept her letters and, had these been destroyed or not admitted in evidence, it is probable that Edith Thompson would have lived to an old age. As it was, they were damning and the judge made the most of them. Edith Thompson was effectively hanged for adultery not for murder. But although the case has always left an unpleasant stain on British justice, no relation ever campaigned for a pardon or for the conviction to be quashed.

  And what about Ruth Ellis, the last woman in England to be hanged? She was executed on 13th July 1955 for shooting her lover David Blakely shortly after she had suffered a miscarriage. A verdict of manslaughter would surely have been more just. If we are to retry the past, how shall we select the cases? By the apparent injustice of the original sentence or by family and public pressure? And at what year do we stop?

  The judge in the case of Major Armstrong of Hay-on-Wye was also biased to some extent against the prisoner. As he was leaving the box after cross-examination, the judge, Mr. Justice Darling, intervened and began to question him closely about the way the arsenic found in his possession had been divided up into twenty small packets. Armstrong was claiming that the arsenic was to kill dandelions in the lawn. Why then did he not merely sprinkle the weedkiller directly round each root? Armstrong was unable to give a convincing explanation and merely said feebly that it seemed the most convenient way of doing it at the time. It is possible, though not probable, that without this intervention Armstrong might have gone free.

  On the other hand there are instances of judges being sympathetic to the defendant and yet not influencing the jury towards an acquittal. William Herbert Wallace, sentenced to death on 25th April 1931 for the murder of his wife, is an example. This time Mr. Justice Wright summed up favourably to Wallace, pointing out what he described as “the loops and doubts” of evidence that was entirely circumstantial. But after only an hour’s absence the jury returned a verdict of guilty. The Court of Criminal Appeal subsequently quashed the verdict on the grounds that it was unsafe having regard to the evidence. This has remained one of the most fascinating cases in English law and still remains a mystery. My own view is that Wallace was innocent.

  The Prime Minister and Cherie Blair were at the party and said how much they enjoy my books, which is, of course, always disarming to a writer. He looked much younger than he does on television, and modestly vulnerable—an impression which is surely fifty per cent misleading. In our group around him was a woman professor of Law from America who used the opportunity to badger him about the defects of the proposed no-win, no-pay rule in cases which would previously have attracted legal aid. She said she would submit a paper and he promised to read it. I was told that the Lord Chancellor was expected but did not arrive; he would have been a more suitable candidate for her arguments.

  I continue to find Tony Blair puzzling. The problem is that I still have no idea what drives him and his government. What are the principles, if any, on which he operates? What aim has he beyond the strong intention of winning a second term? Beneath the charm and conviviality, and apparent vulnerability and the humour, what has he of force, intelligence and commitment? I believe he has conscience and sensitivity, qualities which, in a politician, are not always helpful in a crisis. I was left wondering whether he has the emotional and physical resilience to meet disaster if and when it comes. But the likeability will prove a great asset and not only in Britain. It is a rare enough quality in a politician. Admittedly it didn’t help John Major; but no country is governable with a majority of one.

  August

  SUNDAY, 2ND AUGUST

  Tomorrow I shall be seventy-eight and, by the time this fragment of autobiography is published, I shall be within sight of my eightieth birthday. If seventy-seven is a time to be in earnest, eighty is a time to recognize old age, accepting with such fortitude as one can muster its inevitable pains, inconvenience and indignities and rejoicing in its few compensations.

  Looking back at what I’ve written in the last twelve months has reinforced my conviction that I could never have sustained the daily chore of writing a diary. The one I’ve produced is incomplete, with more omitted than has been recorded. I still find scraps of writing which were obviously scribbled at the end of the day and intended for the diary. These notes of books read, people met, family occasions, talks and lectures given are now indecipherable and I can’t pretend that it matters. But at least I have an imperfect record of one year and of the life of which it was part.

  Youth is the time for certainties. In old age we realize how little we can be sure of, how little we have learned, how little—perhaps—we have changed. But looking back on my life I do know myself to be greatly blessed. I have met with little malice and much encouragement and kindness. I am sustained by the magnificent irrationality of faith. I have two daughters who have been a joy to me since the days of their birth, sons-in-law whom I respect and greatly love, and five grandchildren whose doings are a source of continued interest and amazement. I go into old age with the companionship of loving friends even though we all know that we can’t expect to travel the whole way together. And I have my work. I shall continue to write detective stories as long as I can write well, and I hope I shall recognize when it is time to stop. It gives pleasure to me and to thousands of readers. No other justification is needed.

  The cells of my body must have renewed themselves countless times since that eleven-year-old walked round Ludlow Castle carrying so carefully the letter which would open to her the delights and opportunities of a high-school education. I inhabit a different body, but I can reach back over nearly seventy years and recognize her as myself. Then I walked in hope—and I do so still.

  Appendix

  EMMA CONSIDERED AS A DETECTIVE STORY

  Jane Austen Society AGM

  Chawton, Saturday 18th July 1998

  It is both a privilege and a pleasure to give this talk at the Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society, although I accepted the invitation with some trepidation; there is nothing I can say about Jane Austen which will, I feel, be new to this audience of her devotees. I shall crave your indulgence before I begin. It is also a particular pleasure to be speaking at Chawton, where in Chawton Cottage Jane Austen lived for the last eight years of her tragically short life. The five years preceding the move to Chawton were unsettled with constant changes of residence and were artistically unproductive with her writing virtually at a stop. It could be argued, therefore, that, without this unpretentious final home in which she found that mixture of rural peace, ordered domestic routine and mild stimulation which best suited her character and her art, we might never have been given the greatest of her novels.

  My title this afternoon is “Emma Considered as a Detective Story.” It may seem presumptuous as well as a little eccentric to consider one of the greatest novels written in the English language with reference to the conventions of popular genre fiction. Apart from this presumption, the detective story is, after all, usually concerned with murder and there is no crime in Emma if we except the despoiling of Mrs. Weston’s turkey houses; few orthodox detective novels are so rural, so peaceable, so remote in spirit from the crime and violence of Jane Austen’s own age or of ours. But the detective story does not require murder; Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night is an example. What it does require is a mystery, facts which are hidden from the reader but which he or she should be able to discover by logical deduction from clues inserted in the novel with deceptive cunning but essential fairness. It is about evaluating evidence, whether of events or of character. It is concerned with bringing order out of disorder and restoring peace and tranquillity to a world temporarily disrupted by the intrusion of alien influences.

  Emma, most faultlessly constructed of all Jane Austen’s novels, is a story in which peace and reconciliation are produced out of discord, mysteries are elucidated and facts previously misinterpreted are at last seen in their true light. But there are other interesting parallels with the traditional detective story. The genre is often
at its most effective when the setting is self-contained and the people are forced into a sometimes unwilling proximity. Here in Emma we have a self-contained rural community in which virtually all the characters in the book either live in or near the village of Highbury or, like Frank Churchill, are concerned with it. Only Mrs. Elton comes in as a stranger when she marries the vicar. We know them all completely in the sense that we can imagine what they would say and how they would behave when we are not there. We know intimately the life of Highbury: the Crown Inn where the gentlemen congregate to conduct their business or play whist, and where the ball is held; Mrs. Ford’s shop and what she sells; the vicarage and the lane to it; the Bates’s apartment; Mrs. Goddard’s school; the shrubberies of Hartfield and the strawberry-beds of Donwell Abbey. The scene is set.

  Against this self-contained background is played out the drama of Emma, handsome, clever and rich, whose energy and powers of mind are fatefully underused so that she occupies herself in disastrous interference in the lives of others. Emma, in her zeal to manipulate and control, misinterprets facts, emotions, situations, relationships, and it is a fair guess that the nineteenth-century reader and the modern reader, coming to the novel for the first time, would be seduced by Jane Austen’s cleverness in inducing us to share Emma’s misconceptions and misunderstandings. At the end of the book, of course, chastened and penitent, she recognizes not only the truths of other people, but the truth of her own heart, and marries the one man who, loving her from her childhood, brings her from destructive imaginings to happy reality.

  What then are the mysteries in Emma? All of them centre on a human relationship. There is Frank Churchill’s secret engagement to Jane Fairfax. There is the hidden truth of Mr. Knightley’s love for Emma and Emma’s growing love for him. There is Emma’s misjudgement of Mr. Elton’s matrimonial intentions. There is the lesser mystery, or perhaps more accurately described as a misunderstanding, centred on Emma’s interfering and injudicious attempts to find a husband for her protégée Harriet, culminating in her horrified belief that Mr. Knightley is in love with Harriet and actually means to marry her.

  But the central truth cunningly concealed at the heart of the novel is, of course, the engagement of Frank Churchill to Jane Fairfax. We share the lively interest in Highbury in seeing Mr. Weston’s long-expected son, and we may perhaps agree with Mr. Knightley that the young man certainly should have come earlier to pay his respects to his father’s new bride, poor Miss Taylor that was, as Mr. Woodhouse would say. But it isn’t until Jane Fairfax comes to Highbury to stay with her grandmother and aunt, the Bateses, that Frank Churchill manages to free himself from his demanding stepmother and comes to visit his father. We should have spotted that clue. Mr. Weston brings him at once to see Emma but after sitting together for a short time they part; Mr. Weston has business at the Crown about his hay and a great many errands for Mrs. Weston to perform. Frank does not accompany him, but goes instead to visit Mrs. Bates and Miss Bates. It would perhaps be rather more natural if he stayed with his father, or went directly home to his stepmother, but at the Bates’s he will, of course, find Jane Fairfax, the main motive for his coming to Highbury. His excuse for the visit is that they had met at Weymouth, but it is perhaps a little surprising that he should place Miss Fairfax and her relations so high on his visiting list. And when there he stays much longer than a morning courtesy visit in those more formal days would normally demand. Next day he says to Emma:

  “Ten minutes would have been all that was necessary, perhaps all that was proper, and I had told my father I should certainly be at home before him—but there was no getting away, no pause, and to my utter astonishment I found … that I had been actually sitting with them very nearly three-quarters of an hour.”

  Emma asks how Miss Fairfax was looking and, mischievously and cunningly, Frank pretends not to admire her complexion:

  “Miss Fairfax is naturally so pale, as almost always to give the appearance of ill-health—A most deplorable want of complexion.”

  We are seduced into believing from the outset that Frank Churchill is no admirer of Miss Fairfax’s beauty. It is when Frank, Mrs. Weston and Emma are strolling together in Highbury that Emma asks the question which Frank must have known was inevitable, but which he must also have dreaded. Emma asks: “Did you see her often at Weymouth? Were you often in the same society?” Frank has only seen Miss Fairfax in the presence of her grandmother or aunt and they have had no opportunity to discuss privately what their story will be. It is a tricky situation for Frank, and this is how Jane Austen deals with it:

  At this moment they were approaching Ford’s, and he hastily exclaimed: “Ha! This must be the very shop that everybody attends every day of their lives, as my father informs me … If it be not inconvenient to you, pray let us go in, that I may prove myself to belong to the place, to be a true citizen of Highbury. I must buy something at Ford’s.”

  The diversion gives him time to think, but he knows that the question has to be answered. A little later he voluntarily returns to it and cleverly suggests that Emma should address it to Miss Fairfax, saying:

  “It is always the lady’s right to decide on the degree of acquaintance. Miss Fairfax must already have given her account. I shall not commit myself by claiming more than she may chuse to allow.”

  Miss Fairfax has not given her account and, reticent and secretive, nor will she.

  It is during this walk together that Frank asks Emma’s opinion of Jane Fairfax as a musician and the next day we have one of the strongest, perhaps most obvious, clues to the true relationship between Jane and Frank. Frank Churchill goes to London to get his hair cut. The excuse is, of course, not sensible, and he hardly troubles to make it credible; he would not have come to visit his new stepmother with his hair uncut. But he is of course going to London to purchase and arrange for the delivery of the pianoforte to Mrs. Bates’s house. It is not a grand pianoforte but a solid square one, suitable for the smallness of the sitting-room, which he has now seen for himself. We first hear of its arrival when Frank Churchill, with Emma and the rest of her Highbury friends, is attending the dinner party at the Coles’s. Here Frank colludes with Emma in her suggestion that the pianoforte comes not from Colonel Campbell, which is the general opinion, but from Mr. Dixon, who has married Miss Campbell but who is in love with Jane. And Frank, pretending to be convinced, finally admits that “I can see it in no other light than as an offering of love.” It is, indeed, an offering of love. The clue here could not be stated more plainly. It is at the same Coles’s dinner party that Emma detects Frank gazing fixedly across the room at his love, and when Emma notices this, he recollects himself and claims he cannot take his eyes away from Jane’s outré hairstyle. That Jane herself very well knows who sent the pianoforte is apparent to us from her embarrassment when it is referred to, an embarrassment which Emma attributes to Jane’s guilty love for her friend’s husband.

  Mrs. Weston, kind-hearted and musical, was particularly interested by the circumstance, and Emma could not help being amused at her perseverance in dwelling on the subject; and having so much to ask and to say as to tone, touch, and pedal, totally unsuspicious of that wish of saying as little about it as possible, which she [Emma] plainly read in the fair heroine’s countenance.

  Next day Emma and Harriet are walking to Highbury to buy ribbons in Ford’s when, looking down the Randalls road, they see Mrs. Weston and her son-in-law. Frank is, of course, again calling on Jane Fairfax. Mrs. Weston says:

  “My companion tells me that I absolutely promised Miss Bates last night, that I would come this morning. I was not aware of it myself. I did not know that I had fixed a day, but I am going now.”

  Mrs. Weston, of course, had not fixed a day, but Frank cannot wait to see his love again, and no doubt to see the pianoforte. He makes some little demur at the visit, but he obviously has every intention of accompanying Mrs. Weston to the Bates’s and not being diverted to Randalls.

  One of the strongest clues to t
he secret engagement is the amount of time Frank Churchill spends with the Bateses. Apart from being almost the first house at which he calls, he manages to devise opportunities of being with Jane on every possible occasion. When the ball at the Crown is mooted and the Westons and Emma are examining the possibilities of the room there, it is he who suggests that Miss Bates should be invited to join them. Mrs. Weston understandably is unconvinced the garrulous and too obliging Miss Bates will be able to offer any real assistance, but she is sent for and brings Jane with her, as Frank very well knew that she would.

  Then comes that moment, disagreeable to Emma but devastating to Jane, when Frank Churchill is called back to Enscombe. Here he calls on the Bateses before he comes to say goodbye to Emma. He almost tells Emma his secret, imagining that her quick wit has probably already divined it. The conversation is as follows. Emma says: