by P. D. James
Turning from the High Street into Church Lane was stepping from drab commercial suburbia into leafy privacy and cosy domesticity. The narrow street, its verge planted with plane trees, curved gently. Perhaps before the First War it had indeed been a lane leading to an ancient village church, a building long since demolished or destroyed by bombing in the Second War. All she could see now was a distant stunted spire which looked as if it had been fabricated from slabs of synthetic stone, and topped by a weathervane instead of a cross because of some understandable confusion about the building’s function.
And here at last was Bancroft Gardens. Stretching out of sight on either side of the road were identical semi-detached houses, each with a path running down the side. They might, she thought, be architecturally undistinguished, but at least they were on a human scale. The gates and railings had been removed and the front gardens were bounded with low brick walls. The front bay windows were square and turreted, a long vista of ramparted respectability. But the uniformity of the architecture was broken by the individuality of the residents. Every front garden was different, a riot of massed summer flowers, squares of lawn meticulously cut and shaped, stone slabs set about with urns bearing geraniums and ivy.
When Philippa reached number 41 she stopped, amazed. The house stood out from its neighbours by a garish celebration of eccentric taste. The yellow London bricks had been painted a shiny red outlined with white pointing. It looked like a house built with immense toy bricks. The crenellations of the bay were alternately red and blue. The window was curtained with net looped across and caught up with satin bows. The original front door had been replaced by one with an opaque glass panel and was painted bright yellow. In the front patch of garden an artificial pond of glass was surrounded by synthetic rocks, on which three gnomes with expressions of grinning imbecility were perched with fishing rods.
As soon as she had pressed the doorbell—it let out a musical jingle—Philippa sensed that the house was empty. The owners were probably at work. She tried once more, but there was no reply. Resisting the temptation to peer through the letter box, she decided to try next door. At least they would know whether Ducton still lived at 41 or where he had gone. The house had no bell and the thud of the knocker sounded unnaturally loud and peremptory. There was no reply. She waited a full minute and was lifting her hand again when she heard the shuffle of feet. The door was opened on a chain, and she glimpsed an elderly woman in apron and hairnet who gave her the unwelcoming suspicious stare of someone to whom no morning visitor at the front door bodes other than ill.
Philippa said: “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I wonder if you can help me. I’m looking for a Mr. Martin Ducton who lived next door ten years ago. There isn’t anyone at home there and I thought you might be able to help.”
The woman said nothing, but stood transfixed, one brown claw-like hand still on the door-chain, the only visible eye staring blankly at Philippa’s face. Then there were more steps, firmer and heavier but still muffled. A male voice said: “Who is it, Ma? What’s up?”
“It’s a girl, she’s asking for Martin Ducton.”
The woman’s voice was a whisper, sibilant with wonder and a kind of outrage. A chubby male hand released the chain, and the woman stood there, dwarfed by her son. He was wearing slacks topped with a singlet. On his feet were red carpet slippers. Perhaps, thought Philippa, he was a bus driver or conductor relaxing on his rest day. It hadn’t been a good time to call. She said apologetically: “I’m sorry to trouble you, but I’m trying to trace a Mr. Martin Ducton. He used to live next door. I wondered whether you might know what happened to him?”
“Ducton? He’s dead, isn’t he? Been dead best part of nine years. Died in Wandsworth Prison.”
“In prison?”
“Where else would he be, fucking murderer? He raped that kid, and then he and his missus strangled her. What’s he to do with you then? You a reporter or something?”
“Nothing. Nothing. It must be the wrong Ducton. Perhaps I’ve mistaken the name.”
“Someone been having you on more likely. Ducton he was. Martin Ducton. And she was Mary Ducton. Still is.”
“She’s alive then?”
“As far as I know. Coming out soon, I shouldn’t wonder. Must’ve done near ten years by now. Not that she’ll be coming back next door. Four families have had that place since the Ductons. It always goes cheap, that house. Young couple bought it six months ago. It’s not everyone fancies a place where a kid’s been done in. Upstairs in the front room it was.”
He nodded his head towards number 41, but his eyes never met Philippa’s face. The woman said suddenly: “They should’ve been hung.”
Philippa, astonished, heard herself reply: “Hanged. The word is hanged. They should have been hanged.”
“That’s right,” said the man. He turned to his mother. “Buried the kid in Epping Forest didn’t they? Isn’t that what they did with her, Ma? Buried her in Epping Forest. Twelve years old she was. You remember, Ma?”
Perhaps the woman was deaf. His last words were an impatient shout. She didn’t answer. Still staring at Philippa, she said: “Her name was Julie Scase. I remember now. They killed Julie Scase. But they never got as far as the forest. Caught with the kid’s body in the car boot they was. Julie Scase.”
Philippa made herself ask through lips so stiff that she could hardly form the words: “Did they have any children? Did you know them?”
“No. We weren’t here then. We moved here from Romford after they were inside. There was talk of a kid, a girl, weren’t it, who was adopted. Best thing for the poor little bugger.”
Philippa said: “Then it’s not the same Ducton. This Ducton had no children. I’ve been given the wrong address. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”
She walked away from them down the road. Her legs felt swollen and heavy, weighted bolsters which had no connection with the rest of her body, yet which carried her forward. She looked down at the paving stones, using them as a guide like a drunkard under test. She guessed that the woman and her son were still watching her, and when she had gone about twenty yards she made herself turn round and gaze back at them stolidly. Immediately they disappeared. Alone now in the empty road, no longer under surveillance, she found that she couldn’t go on. She stretched her hands towards the brick wall bordering the nearest garden, found it and sat. She felt faint and a little sick, her heart constricted like a hot pulsating ball. But she mustn’t faint here, not in this street. Somehow she must get back to the station. She let her head drop between her knees and felt the blood pound back into her forehead. The faintness passed but the nausea was worse. She sat up again, shutting her eyes against the reeling houses, taking deep gulps of the flower-scented air. Then she opened her eyes and made herself concentrate on the things she could touch and feel. She ran her fingers over the roughness of the wall. Once it had been topped with iron railings. She could feel the coarse grain of the cement-filled holes where they had pierced the brickwork. Perhaps the railings had been taken away in the war to be melted down for armaments. She gazed fixedly at the paving stone under her feet. It was pricked with light, set with infinitesimal specks, bright as diamonds. Pollen from the gardens had blown over it and there was a single flattened rose petal like a drop of blood. How extraordinary that a paving stone should be so varied, should reveal under the intensity of her gaze such gleaming wonders. These things at least were real, and she was real—more vulnerable, less durable than bricks and stones but still present, visible, an identity. If people passed, surely they would be able to see her. A youngish woman came out of the house two doors down and walked towards her, pushing a pram with an older child trotting beside it and holding on to the handle. The woman glanced at Philippa, but the child dragged his steps then turned and gazed back at her with a wide, incurious gaze. He had let go of the pram handle and she found herself struggling to her feet, holding out her arms towards him in warning or entreaty. Then the mother stopped and called to him and the child ran up to her
and grasped the pram again.
She watched them until they turned the corner into the High Street. It was time to go. She couldn’t sit here all day fastened to the wall as if it were a refuge, the one solid reality in a shifting world. Some words of Bunyan came into her mind and she found herself speaking them aloud: “ ‘Some also have wished that the next way to their father’s house were here, and that they might be troubled no more with either hills or mountains to go over; but the way is the way, and there is an end.’ ”
She didn’t know why the words comforted her. She wasn’t particularly fond of Bunyan and she couldn’t see why the passage should speak to her confused mind in which disappointment, anguish and fear struggled for mastery. But as she walked back to the station she spoke the passage over and over again as if the words were in their own way as immutable and solid as the pavement on which she trod. “The way is the way, and there is an end.”
3
When he was working, and that was most of the year, Maurice Palfrey used his room at college. The sociology department had swelled since his appointment as senior lecturer, borne on the sixties’ tide of optimism and secular faith, and had overflown into an agreeable late eighteenth-century house owned by the college in a Bloomsbury square. He shared the house with the Department of Oriental Studies, colleagues notable for their unobtrusiveness and for the number of their visitors. A succession of small, dark, spectacled men and saried women slid daily through the front door and disappeared into an uncanny silence. He seemed always to be encountering them on the narrow stairs; there were steppings back, bowings, slant-eyed smiles; but only an occasional footfall creaked the upper floor. He felt the house to be infected with secret, mice-like busyness.
His room had once been part of the elegant first-floor drawing room, its three tall windows and wrought-iron balcony overlooking the square gardens, but it had been divided to provide a room for his secretary. The grace of the proportions had been destroyed and the delicately carved overmantel, the George Morland oil which had always hung in the business room at Pennington and which he had placed above it, the two Regency chairs looked pretentious and spurious. He felt the need to explain to visitors that he hadn’t furnished his room with reproductions. And the conversion hadn’t been a success. His secretary had to pass through his room to get to hers and the clatter of the typewriter through the thin partition was so irritating a metallic obbligato to his meetings that he had to tell Molly to stop working when he had visitors. It was difficult to concentrate during meetings when he was aware that she was sitting next door glowering across her machine in sullen, ostentatious idleness. Elegance and beauty had been sacrificed for a utility which wasn’t even efficient. Helena, on her first visit to the room, had merely said: “I don’t like conversions” and hadn’t visited again. Hilda, who hadn’t appeared to notice or care about the room’s proportions, had left the department after their marriage and had never come back.
The habit of working away from home had begun after his marriage to Helena when she had bought 68 Caldecote Terrace. Walking hand in hand through the empty echoing rooms like exploring children, folding back the shutters so that the sun came through in great shafts and lay in pools on the unpolished boards, the pattern of their future together had been laid down. She had made it plain that there would be no intrusion of his work into their domestic life. When he had suggested that he would need a study she had pointed out that the house was too small, the whole of the top floor was needed for the nursery and the nanny. She was prepared, apparently, to wash and cook with the aid of daily help, but not to look after her child. She had enumerated their necessities, the drawing room, dining room, their two bedrooms and the spare bedroom. There had been no study at Pennington; the suggestion seemed to her eccentric. And there could hardly be a library. She had been brought up with the Wren library at Pennington, and to her any other private library was merely a room in which people kept books.
Now, when he had long ago worked through his grief—and how accurately some of his colleagues had described that interestingly painful psychological process—when he could distance himself even from humiliation and pain, he was intrigued by the moral eccentricity which could, apparently without compunction, father on him another man’s child, yet which was outraged by the thought of abortion. He recalled their words when she had told him about the child. He had asked: “What do you want to do about it, have an abortion?”
“Of course not. Don’t be so bourgeois, darling.”
“Abortion can be thought of as distasteful, undesirable, dangerous or even morally wrong if you think in those terms. I don’t see what’s bourgeois about it.”
“It’s all those things. Why on earth should you suppose I want an abortion?”
“You might feel that the baby would be a nuisance.”
“My old nanny is a nuisance, so is my father. I don’t kill them off.”
“Then what do you want to do?”
“Marry you, of course. You are free, aren’t you? You haven’t a wife secreted away somewhere?”
“No, I haven’t a wife. But my darling love, you can’t want to marry me.”
“I never know what I want. I’m only really sure of what I don’t want. But I think we’d better marry.”
It had been the commonest, the most obvious of cheats, and he the most gullible of victims. But he had been in love for the first and only time, a state which he now realized didn’t conduce to clear thinking. Poets were right to call love a madness. His love had certainly been a kind of insanity in the sense that his thought processes, his perception of external reality, even his physical life, appetite, digestion, sleep, all had been disturbed. Small wonder that he hadn’t calculated with what flattering speed she had singled him out during that short holiday at Perugia, how short the time between that first appraising look across the dining-room table to getting him into her bed.
It was true that she only knew what she didn’t want. Her needs had seemed to him reassuringly modest, her unwants had all the force of strong desire. He was surprised that they had found the house in Caldecote Terrace so quickly. All districts of London were apparently impossible for her. Hampstead was too trendy, Mayfair too expensive, Bayswater vulgar, Belgravia too smart. And they had been restricted in choice by her refusal to contemplate a mortgage. It was useless for him to point out the advantages of tax relief. A nineteenth-century earl had once mortgaged Pennington, to the embarrassment of his encumbered heirs. A mortgage was bourgeois. In the end they had found Caldecote Terrace in Pimlico and here she had given him, however casual the gift, the four happiest years of his life. Her death, Orlando’s death, had taught him all he knew about suffering. He was glad now that no premature knowledge had despoiled those first few months of grief. It hadn’t been until two years after his marriage to Hilda, seeking medical advice on their childlessness, that he had learned the truth; that he could never father a child. That period of mourning for a woman who hadn’t existed, for a son who wasn’t his son, now seemed to him a debt discharged, not without honour, a secular grace.
He had grieved more for Orlando than for Helena. Helena’s death had been the loss of a joy to which he had never felt entitled, which had never seemed quite real, which he had hoped, rather than expected, would last. Some part of his mind had accepted her loss as inevitable; death could not part them more completely than could life. But for Orlando he had mourned with an elemental violence of grief, a wordless scream of anguish. The death of a beautiful, intelligent and happy child had always seemed to him an outrage, and this child had been his son. His grief had seemed to embrace a cosmic fellowship of suffering. He had indulged no inordinate hopes for Orlando, fostered on his child no high ambition, had asked only that he should continue to exist in his beauty, his loving kindness, his peculiarly uncoordinated grace.
And it was because Orlando had died that he had married Hilda. He knew that their friends found the marriage an enigma. It was easily explained. Hilda was the only one amo
ng his friends, his colleagues, who had wept for Orlando. The day after his return from the funeral at Pennington—the depositing of Helena and Orlando in the family vault had symbolized for him the final separation, they lay now with their own kind—she had come into his office with the morning post. He could remember how she had looked, the white schoolgirl’s blouse, the skirt which she had pressed that morning, he could see the impress of the iron across the front pleat. She stood there at the door looking at him. All she said was: “That little boy. That little boy.” He had watched while her face stiffened and then disintegrated with grief. Two tears oozed from her eyes and ran unchecked over her cheeks.
She had only known Orlando briefly on the few occasions when his nurse had brought him into the office. But she had wept for him. His colleagues had written and spoken their condolences, averting their eyes from a grief they could not assuage. Death was in poor taste. They had treated him with sympathetic wariness, as if he were suffering from a slightly embarrassing disease. She only had paid Orlando the tribute of a spontaneous tear.
And that had been the beginning. It had led to the first invitation to dinner, to their theatre dates, to the curious courtship which had merely reinforced their misconceptions about each other. He had persuaded himself that she was teachable, that she had a goodness and simplicity which could meet his complicated needs, that behind the bland gentle face was a mind which only needed the stimulus of his loving concern to break into some kind of flowering, what he was never precisely sure. And she had been so different from Helena. It had been flattering to give instead of to take, to be the one who was loved instead of the one who loved. And so, with what to some of his colleagues had seemed indecent haste, they had come to that Registry Office wedding. Poor girl, she had hoped for a white wedding in church. That quiet exchange of contracts could hardly have seemed to her or her parents like a proper marriage. She had got through it in an agony of embarrassment, afraid perhaps that the registrar had thought that she was pregnant.