by P. D. James
The game had stimulated her mind and she knew that to go to bed now would only result in one of those nights of alternate restlessness and brief periods of sleep which brought her to the morning more tired than if she had never been to bed. On impulse she went to the hall cupboard for her warm winter coat then, putting out the light, opened the window and stepped outside on to the balcony. The night air smelt cold and clean with the familiar tang of the river. Grasping the rail she felt as if she were suspended, disembodied in air. A cluster of low cloud lay over London, stained pink like a lint bandage which had soaked up the city’s blood. Then, as she watched, the clouds moved slowly apart and she saw the clear blue-black of the night sky and a single star. A helicopter like a jewelled metallic dragonfly clattered upstream. This was how her father had stood night after night before going to bed. She would be busy in the kitchen after dinner and would come into the sitting-room to find it in darkness except for the one low lamp, and would see the dark shadow of that silent motionless figure standing there looking out over the river.
They had moved to number 12 in 1983 when the firm was expanding in one of its periods of comparative prosperity, and extra office space was needed at Innocent House. Number 12 had been let to a long-standing tenant who had conveniently died, freeing the property to be converted to provide a top flat for herself and her father and a smaller one at the bottom of the house for Gabriel Dauntsey. Her father had accepted the need to move philosophically, had indeed seemed almost to welcome it, and she suspected that it was only after she joined him in 1985 on leaving Oxford that he began to find the flat restrictive, almost claustrophobic.
Her mother, never strong, had died suddenly and unexpectedly of viral pneumonia when Frances was five and she had spent all her childhood with her father and a nurse in Innocent House. Only in adult life had she realized how extraordinary those early years had been, how unsuitable the house as a family home, even for a family diminished by death, to the two of them, father and daughter. She had had no young companions; only a few remaining Georgian squares in the East End which had survived the bombing had become fashionable enclaves for the middle classes. Her playground was the glittering marble hall and the forecourt and here, despite the protective railings, she was always closely supervised, permitted no bicycle or ball games. The streets were unsafe for a child and she, with Nanny Bostock, was taken, occasionally by the firm’s launch, across the river to a small private school in Greenwich where the emphasis was on gentility rather than the development of questioning intelligence, but where she had at least been given a good grounding. But on most days the launch was needed to pick up members of staff from the Thames pier and she and Nanny Bostock would be driven to the Greenwich foot tunnel, and always accompanied on their subterranean walk by the chauffeur or by her father for extra safety.
It never occurred to the adults that she found the foot tunnel terrifying and she would have died rather than tell them. She had known from early childhood that her father admired courage above all virtues. She would walk between them, holding their hands in a simulation of childish meekness, trying not to grasp the fingers too hard, keeping her eyes down so that they couldn’t see that they were tightly closed, smelling the distinctive tunnel smell, hearing the echo of their feet and picturing above them that great weight of slopping water, terrifying in its power, which one morning would break the tunnel roof and begin to seep through, at first in heavy drops as the tiles cracked and then, suddenly, in a thundering wave, black and evil-smelling, sweeping them off their feet, swirling and rising, until there was nothing between their fighting bodies and screaming mouths but a few inches of space and air. And then not even that.
Five minutes later, they would come up by the lift into the daylight to see the gleaming magnificence of Greenwich Naval College with its twin cupolas and gold-tipped weathervanes. For the child it was like coming out of hell and having her eyes dazzled by the celestial city. Here, too, was the Cutty Sark with her tall masts and slender lines. Her father would tell her about the East India Company’s monopoly of trade with the Far East in the eighteenth century and how these great clippers, built for speed, would vie with each other to bring to the British market in record time the perishable and valuable tea of China and India.
From her earliest years her father had told her stories of the river which for him had been almost an obsession, a great artery, endlessly fascinating, constantly changing, bearing on its strong tide the whole history of England. He told her of the rafts and coracles of the first Thames voyagers, the square sails of the Roman ships bringing cargo to Londinium, the Viking long boats with their curved prows. He would describe to her the river of the early eighteenth century when London was the greatest port in the world and the wharves and quays with their tall masted ships looked like a wind-denuded forest. He told her of the raucous life of the waterfront and the many trades which drew their life from this bloodstream; the stevedores or lumpers, the watermen who worked the lighters which provisioned the vessels as they rode at anchor, suppliers of rope and tackle, boat-builders, ships’ bakers, carpenters, rat-catchers, lodging-house keepers, pawnbrokers, publicans, marine store dealers, rich and poor alike, drawing their life from the river. He had described for her the great occasions: Henry VIII in the gold-crested royal barge being rowed up river to Hampton Court, the long oars sweeping upward in salute; Lord Nelson’s body taken up-river in 1806 from Greenwich in the barge originally built for Charles II; river festivities; floods and tragedies. She yearned for his love and approbation. She had listened dutifully, had asked the right questions, had instinctively known that this was an interest he assumed that she would share. But she realized now that the deception had only added guilt to her natural reserve and timidity, that the river had become the more terrifying because she could not acknowledge its terrors and her relationship with her father more distant because it was founded on a lie.
But she had made for herself another world and, lying awake at night in that glittering, un-cosy nursery, curled womb-like under the sheets, she would enter its gentle security. In this imaginary life she had a sister and brother and lived with them in a large country rectory. There was a garden with an orchard and a fruit cage and vegetables planted in rows separated by neat box hedges from the wide green lawns. Beyond the garden was a stream, only inches deep, which they could leap across and an old oak with a tree house, snug as a hutch, where they sat and read and scrunched apples. The three of them slept in the nursery, looking out over the lawn and rose garden to the church tower, and there were no raucous voices, no river smell, no image of terror, only tenderness and peace. There was a mother too; tall, fair, with a long blue dress and a half-remembered face, walking towards her across the lawn, arms outstretched for her to leap into because she was the youngest and the best-loved.
There was, she knew, the adult equivalent of this unfrightening world available to her. She could marry James de Witt and move into his charming house in Hillgate Village and have his children, the children she, too, wanted. She could rely on his lοvę, be certain of his kindness, know that whatever problems their marriage might bring there would be no cruelty and no rejection. She might have taught herself, not to desire him, since that was not susceptible to the will, but to find in kindness and gentleness a substitute for desire, so that in time sex with him would become possible, even agreeable, at its lowest a price to be paid for his love, at its highest a pledge of affection and of belief that love could in time beget love. But for three months she had been Gerard Etienne’s mistress. After that wonder, that astonishing revelation, she found that she couldn’t even bear James to touch her. Gerard, taking her casually, discarding her equally casually, had deprived her even of the consolation of the second best.
It was always the terror of the river, not its romance or its mystery, which had held her imagination and, with Gerard’s brutal rejection, these terrors, which she thought she had put away with childhood, reasserted themselves. This Thames was a dark ti
de of horror; that sodden algae-matted gate, leading into the fastness of the Tower, the thud of the axe, the tide lapping Wapping Old Stairs where pirates were taken and tied to the piles at low water until three tides – the Grace of Wapping – had flowed over them; the stinking hulks lying off Graves-end with their fettered human cargo. Even the river steamers butting upstream, their decks loud with laughter and brightly patterned with holiday-makers, brought back to mind unbidden the greatest of all Thames tragedies when, in 1878, the paddle-steamer Princess Alice, returning loaded from a trip to Sheerness, was mown down by a collier and 640 people drowned. It seemed to her now that it was their screams that she heard in the cries of the gulls and, looking down at night at the dark river splattered with light, she could imagine the pale upward faces of the drowned children torn from their mothers’ arms floating like frail petals on the dark tide.
When she was fifteen her father had taken her for her first visit to Venice. He had said that fifteen was the earliest age at which a child could appreciate Renaissance art and architecture, but she had suspected even then that he preferred to travel alone and that taking her was a duty which he could no longer reasonably defer, but a duty nevertheless which held some promise of hope for both of them.
It was their first and last holiday together. She had expected bright, hot sun, gaudily clad gondoliers on blue water, gleaming marble palaces, dining alone with him in one of the new dresses chosen for her by the housekeeper, Mrs Rawlings, for the occasion, drinking wine at dinner for the first time. She had longed desperately for the holiday to be a new beginning. It had begun badly. They had had to travel in the school holidays and the city was overcrowded. For the whole ten days the sky had been leaden with intermittent rain, its heavy drops pitting canals as brown as the Thames. Her impression was of constant noise, raucous foreign voices, the terror of losing her father in the crush, of dimly lit old churches in which the attendant would shuffle to switch on the light and illumine a fresco, a painting, an altarpiece. The air would be heavy with incense and the sour mustiness of wet clothes. Her father would edge her to the front of the jostling tourists and whisper to her, explaining the paintings, above the noise of discordant tongues and the distant calls of peremptory guides.
One picture remained strongly in memory. A mother nursing her baby under a stormy sky, a solitary male watcher. She knew that there was something to which she should respond, some mystery of subject and intention, and she longed to share her father’s excitement, to say something which, if it couldn’t be clever, would at least not cause him to turn away with the silent disapproval to which she had become accustomed. Always at the bad moments there were remembered words. ‘Madam was never the same after the child was born. That pregnancy killed her, no doubt about that. And now look what we’ve got landed with.’ The woman, her name and purpose in the house now long forgotten, had probably only meant that what they were faced with was a large unmanageable house without the controlling hand of a mistress, but to the child the meaning of the words had been plain and had remained plain. ‘She killed her mother and look what we’ve got in exchange.’
Another memory of that holiday remained sharp in the years to follow. It was on their first visit to the Accademia and, holding her gently by the shoulder, he had led her to a picture by Vittore Carpaccio, The Dream of St Ursula. They were, for once, alone and, standing beside him, aware of the weight of his hand, she had found herself looking at her bedroom in Innocent House. Here were the twin rounded windows with their top half-moons filled with discs of bottle-glass, the corner door ajar, the two vases on the window-shelf so like those at home, the same bed, a delicate four-poster with a high carved headboard and a tasselled fringe. Her father had said: ‘See, you sleep in a fifteenth-century Venetian bedroom.’
There was a woman in the bed, resting her head on her hand. Frances had asked, ‘Is that lady dead?’
‘Dead? Why should she be dead?’
She had heard in his voice the familiar sharpness. She hadn’t answered, had said no more. The silence between them lengthened until, with the hand still on her shoulder but pressing more heavily now, or so it seemed, he had turned her away. But she had failed him again. It had always been her fate to be sensitive to his every mood but without the skill or the confidence to meet that mood or respond to his need.
They were divided even by religion. Her mother had been a Roman Catholic, but how devout she neither knew nor had any means of discovering. Mrs Rawlings, a co-religionist employed a year before her mother’s death to be half housekeeper to the ailing woman, half child-minder, had been punctilious in taking her every Sunday to Mass but had otherwise ignored her religious education, giving the child the impression that religion was something her father couldn’t understand and could barely tolerate, a feminine secret best not spoken of in his presence. They seldom went more than twice to any church. It was as if Mrs Rawlings was a taster of religion, sampling the variety of ritual, architecture, music and sermons on offer, afraid of a premature commitment, of being recognized by the congregation, welcomed as a regular by the priest at the door, enticed into parish activities, perhaps even expected to receive visitors at Innocent House. As Frances grew older she suspected that finding a new church for Sunday morning Mass had become something of a private initiative test for Mrs Rawlings, affording a sense of adventure and providing a measure of variety to her otherwise monotonous week and a lively subject of conversation on their way home.
‘Not a very good choir, was it? Hardly up to Oratory standard. We must go to the Oratory again when I’ve got the energy. Too far for every Sunday but at least the sermon was short. I can’t be doing with long sermons. Very few souls saved after the first ten minutes, if you ask me.’
‘I don’t like that Father O’Brien. That’s what he calls himself apparently. Very poor attendance. No wonder he was so friendly at the door. Wanted to entice us back next week, I don’t wonder.’
‘Nice Stations of the Cross they’ve got. I like them carved. Those painted ones we saw at St Michael’s last week were too gaudy by half. And at least the choirboys had clean surplices, someone did a good job of ironing there.’
After one Sunday morning, when they had heard Mass at a particularly dull church where the rain had clattered like hailstones on the temporary tin roof (‘Not our class of person. We won’t be going there again’), Frances had asked: ‘Why do I have to go to Mass every Sunday?’
‘Because your ma was RC. That’s what your father agreed. The boys would be brought up C of E, the daughters RC. Well, he got you.’
He had got her. The despised sex. The despised religion.
Mrs Rawlings said: ‘There’s plenty of religions in the world. Everyone can find something to suit them. All you have to remember is that ours is the only true one. But there’s no point in thinking about it too much, not until you have to. I think we’ll go back to the cathedral next week. It’ll be Corpus Christi. They’ll put on a grand show for that, I shouldn’t wonder.’
It was a relief to her father and to her when, at twelve, she was sent to the convent. He had come himself to collect her at the end of the first term and she had overheard the Mother Superior’s words as she said goodbye to them at the door: ‘Mr Peverell, the child has had virtually no instruction in her faith.’
‘In my wife’s faith. Then, Mother Bridget, I suggest that you instruct her.’
They had with gentle patience done that for her, and much more. They had given her a brief period of security, the sense that she was valued, that it was possible she could be loved. They had prepared her for Oxford, which she supposed she ought to consider a bonus since Mother Bridget had frequently impressed on her that the intention of a true Catholic education was to prepare her for death. They had done that too, but she was less sure that they had prepared her for life. Certainly they hadn’t prepared her for Gerard Etienne.
She turned back into the sitting-room, closing the window firmly behind her. The sound of the river became fain
t, a gentle susurration on the night air. Gabriel had said to her, ‘He can have no power over you unless you give it to him.’ Somehow she had to find the will and the courage to break that power finally and for ever.
10
Mandy’s first four weeks at Innocent House, which began inauspiciously with a suicide and were to end dramatically in murder, seemed in retrospect one of the happiest months of her working life. As always, she adapted quickly to the daily routine of the office and with a few exceptions liked her fellow workers. She was given plenty to do, which suited her, and the work was more varied and more interesting than that which normally came her way.
At the end of her first week Mrs Crealey had asked if she was happy and Mandy had replied that there were worse jobs and that she might as well stick it out for a bit longer, which was as far as she ever went in expressing satisfaction with a job. She had rapidly become accepted at Innocent House; youth and vitality combined with high efficiency are seldom resented for long. Miss Blackett, after a week of staring across at her with repressive severity, had apparently decided that she had known worse temps. Mandy, always quick to recognize her own interest, treated Miss Blackett with a flattering mixture of deference and confidence; fetching her coffee from the kitchen, asking her advice although with no intention of taking it, and accepting some of the duller routine tasks with cheerful goodwill. Privately she thought the poor old thing was pathetic; you had to be sorry for her. It was obvious that Mr Gerard for one couldn’t stand the sight of her, and no wonder. Mandy’s private opinion was that Miss Blackett was for the chop. They were, in any case, too busy to spend time considering how little they had in common and how much each deplored the other’s clothes, hairstyle and attitude to senior staff. Nor was Mandy required to spend every day in Miss Blackett’s office. She was frequently called to take shorthand from Miss Claudia or Mr de Witt, and one Tuesday when George was away ill with a violent stomach upset she took over the reception desk and coped with the switchboard with no more than a few misdirected calls.