by P. D. James
He was suddenly aware of his restlessness. He walked across to the tall window and looked out over the dishevelled square. Although the slight rain had now stopped, the plane trees were bedraggled and scraps of sodden litter lay unmoving on the spongy grass. This slow dripping away of the summer matched his mood. He had always disliked the hiatus between academic years when the detritus of the last term had scarcely been cleared away, yet the next was already casting its shadow. He couldn’t remember when the conscientious performance of duty had replaced enthusiasm, or when conscientiousness had finally given way to boredom. What worried him now was that he approached each academic term with an emotion more disturbing than boredom, something between irritation and apprehension. He knew that he no longer saw his students as individuals, no longer had any wish to know or communicate except on the level of tutor to student, and even here there was no trust between them. There seemed to have been a reversal of roles, he the student, they the instructors. They sat in the ubiquitous uniform of the young, jeans and sweaters, huge clumpy plimsolls, open-necked shirts topped with denim jackets, and gazed at him with the fixity of inquisitors waiting for any deviation from orthodoxy. He told himself that they were no different from his former students, graceless, not very intelligent, uneducated if education implied the ability to write their own language with elegance and precision, to think clearly, to discriminate or enjoy. They were filled with the barely suppressed anger of those who have grabbed for themselves sufficient privilege to know just how little privilege they would ever achieve. They didn’t want to be taught, having already decided what they preferred to believe.
He had become increasingly petty, irritated by details, by the diminishing, for example, of their forenames, Bill, Bert, Mike, Geoff, Steve. He wanted to inquire peevishly if a commitment to Marxism was incompatible with a disyllabic forename. And their vocabulary provoked him. In his last series of seminars on the juvenile law they had talked always of “kids.” The mixture of condescension and sycophancy in the word repelled him. He himself had used the words “children” and “young people” punctiliously and had sensed that it had annoyed them. He had found himself talking to them like a pedantic schoolmaster to the lower third: “I’ve corrected some of the grammar and spelling. This may seem bourgeois pedantry, but if you plan to organize revolution you’ll have to convince the intelligent and educated as well as the gullible and ignorant. It might be worthwhile trying to develop a prose style which isn’t a mixture of sociological jargon and the standard expected from the C stream of a comprehensive school. And ‘obscene’ means ‘lewd,’ ‘indecent,’ ‘filthy,’ it can’t properly be used to describe Government policy in not implementing the recommendations of the Finer Report on one-parent families, reprehensible as that decision may be.”
Mike Beale, chief instigator of student power, had received back his last essay muttering under his breath. It had sounded like “fucking bastard” and might indeed have been “fucking bastard” except that Beale was incapable of an invective which didn’t include the word “fascist.” Beale had just completed his second year. With luck he would graduate next autumn, departing to take a social-work qualification and find himself a job with a local authority, no doubt to teach juvenile delinquents that the occasional minor act of robbery with violence was a natural response of the underprivileged to capitalist tyranny and to promote political awareness among those council-house tenants looking for an excuse not to pay their rents. But he would be replaced by others. The academic machine would grind on, and what was so extraordinary was that essentially he and Beale were on the same side. He had been too publicly committed and for too long to renege now. Socialism and sociology. He felt like an old campaigner who no longer believes in his cause but finds it enough that there is a battle and he knows his own side.
He stuffed into his briefcase the few letters he had found waiting for him in his cubbyhole that morning. One was from a Socialist Member of Parliament enlisting his help with the General Election which he took for granted would come in early October. Would Maurice talk on one of the television party political broadcasts? He supposed he would accept. The box sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted. The other was yet another appeal to him to apply for the Chair in social work at a northern university. He could understand the concern among social workers about the Chair. There had been a number of recent appointments outside the field of social work. But what the protesters couldn’t see was that what mattered was the quality of the academic work and of the research, not the discipline of the applicant. With the present competition for Chairs sociology needed to demonstrate its academic respectability, not pursue a spurious professionalism. He was becoming increasingly irritated by the sensitivity of colleagues, unsure of themselves, feeling morbidly undervalued, complaining that they were expected to remedy all the ills of society. He only wished that he could cure his own.
He put away the last few papers and locked his desk drawer. He remembered that tonight the Cleghorns were coming to dinner. Cleghorn was one of the trustees of a fund set up to investigate the causes and treatment of juvenile delinquency, and Maurice had a postgraduate student who was looking for a research job for the next couple of years. The advantage of giving regular dinner parties was that when one was angling for a favour an invitation to dine didn’t look too blatant a ploy. Closing the door, he wondered without much curiosity where Philippa had been going that morning so early, and whether she would remember the Cleghorns and get home in time to do the dining-room flowers.
4
When she finally got back to Liverpool Street, Philippa spent the rest of the day walking in the city. It was just after six when she returned to Caldecote Terrace. The rain had nearly stopped and was now so fine that it fell against her warm face as a drifting mist needled with cold. But the pavement stones were as tacky as if it had fallen heavily all day, and a few shallow puddles had collected in the gutter into which occasional dollops dropped with heavy portentousness from a sky as thick and grey as curdled milk. Number 68 looked just as it did when she returned from school on any dull summer evening. This homecoming was outwardly no different from any other. As always the basement kitchen was brightly lit and the rest of the house was in darkness except for a light shining from the hall through the elegant fanlight of the front door.
The kitchen was on the lower ground floor at the front of the house. The dining room, which was at the back, had French doors to the garden. The whole of the raised ground floor was taken up by the drawing room; this, too, had access to the garden by a flight of delicately carved and moulded wrought-iron steps. On summer evenings they would carry their coffee down to the patio to the chairs under the fig tree. The walled garden, only thirty feet long, enclosed the scent of roses and white stocks. The patio was set about with white-painted wooden tubs of geraniums glowing blood red in the peculiarly intense light before the setting sun, then bleached as the patio lamps were turned on.
The light was always on in the north-facing kitchen, yet Hilda never drew the curtains. Perhaps she had never realized that, to the upper world, she moved on a lighted stage. She was there now, already starting on the dinner. Philippa crouched down, clutching the railings, and peered through at her. Hilda cooked with a peculiar intensity, moving like a high priestess among the impedimenta of her craft, consulting her recipe book with the keen unblinking scrutiny of an artist examining his model, then briefly laying her hand on each ingredient like a preparatory blessing. She cleaned and tidied the rest of the house obsessively, but as if nothing it contained had anything to do with her, only here in the organized muddle of her kitchen was she at home. This was her habitat. Here she lived doubly caged behind the protecting iron bars on the windows and the spiked railings above, seeing the world pass as a succession of desultory or hurrying feet. Her pale lank hair which normally fell forward over her face was strained back from her eyes with two plastic combs. In the white apron which she invariably wore s
he looked very young and defenceless, like a schoolgirl, preoccupied with a practical examination, or a newly engaged maid coping with her first dinner party. And it wasn’t because she worked in the kitchen that she looked like a servant. All but the wealthiest of the mothers of the girls at school did most of their own cooking. Cookery had become a fashionable craft, almost a cult. Perhaps it was the white apron, the worried eyes which seemed always to expect, almost to invite a rebuke, which made her look like a woman precariously earning her keep.
Philippa had forgotten that the Cleghorns and Gabriel Lomas were coming to dinner. She saw that the meal was to begin with artichokes. Six of them, solidly ornamental, were ranged on the central table ready for the pot. The kitchen, under the glare of the twin fluorescent lights, was as familiar as a picture on a nursery wall. The one wicker chair with its shabby patchwork cushion. It had never been necessary to buy a second since neither Maurice nor Philippa made it a habit to sit in the kitchen chatting with Hilda while she cooked. The shelf of paperback recipe books with their greasy crumpled covers, the calendar hanging beside the wall-mounted telephone with its garish blue picture of Brixham Harbour, the portable television set, black and white since the one colour set was in the drawing room. Philippa couldn’t remember ever seeing Hilda sitting alone in the drawing room. Why should she? It wasn’t her drawing room. Everything in it had been chosen by Maurice or by his first wife.
Philippa had never heard Maurice speak of Helena, but it never occurred to her that this was because he continued to grieve for her or because he was sensitive to Hilda’s feelings. She had long ago decided that he was a man who kept his emotions in compartments. That way there could be no messy spillage from one life to another. From time to time she had felt a vague curiosity about Helena Palfrey, glamorized and dignified as she was forever by an early and dramatic death. Only once had she seen a picture of Maurice’s first wife. It had been at a bring-and-buy sale held at school in aid of Oxfam. One of the parents had donated a bundle of glossy society magazines. They had sold well, she remembered. People were happy to give a penny or two for the brief pleasures of nostalgia and recollection. They had flicked through them giggling.
“Look, here’s Molly and John at Henley. My dear, did we really wear skirts that length?”
Browsing through a bundle displayed for sale, she had seen with a shock of surprise and recognition, Maurice’s face. It was a younger Maurice, strange yet utterly familiar, wearing the startled, half-fatuous smile of a man suddenly caught by the camera who hasn’t had time to decide what expression to assume. It had been taken at a wedding. The caption said: “Mr. Maurice Palfrey and Lady Helena Palfrey chatting to Sir George and Lady Scott-Harries.” And there they were, not chatting to anyone, but staring into the lens, champagne glasses in their hands, as if toasting this second of their joint lives ephemerally recorded in microdots. Lady Helena Palfrey, smiling, stood taller than her husband in her wide-brimmed hat and ridiculously short skirt. Dark hair framed a face which looked no longer young, bony, almost ravaged, heavy-browed. Philippa had torn out the cutting and had kept it, secreted in one of her books, for almost a year. From time to time she had taken it over to the light of her bedroom window to peer at it obsessively, willing it to disclose some clue to the woman’s character, to their love, if love there had been, to their joint life together. Eventually, frustrated, she had torn it up and flushed it down the lavatory.
And now, with an equal intensity, she peered through the railings at Maurice’s living wife. She was bent over the central table, carefully rolling out fillets of veal. It looked as if the dinner guests were to have veal in wine and mushroom sauce. They would praise the meal, of course; the guests invariably did. Philippa remembered having read that it was the last war which had finally killed the English reticence about the quality of a meal. Now most of the women, and sometimes the men, praised, inquired, exchanged recipes. But with Hilda the praise became effusive, strained, almost embarrassingly insincere. It was as if they needed to reassure or propitiate her, to give her worth in her own eyes. For the whole of her marriage her husband’s guests had treated her as if cooking were her only interest, the only topic she could talk about. And now perhaps it was.
There were footsteps coming down the street. Philippa scrambled to her feet, wincing at the pain in her cramped legs. She felt suddenly faint and had to grasp at the spikes of the railings for support. She remembered for the first time that she had walked for nearly seven hours through the streets of London, round the parks, in and out of the City churches, along the Embankment, without stopping to eat. Painfully, she made her way up the steps to the front door.
She turned her key in the lock and passed through the inner porch with its twin panels of Burne-Jones stained glass, an allegory of spring and summer, into the pearl-grey quietness of the hall. She smelled the usual faint smell of lavender and fresh paint, so faint that it was almost illusory, a conditioned response to the familiar objects of home. The delicate banister rail in polished pale mahogany supported by elegant balustrades, unwound from its scroll and curved upwards drawing the eye to the stained glass of the landing window. The two panes were a continuation of the ones in the porch, a garlanded woman with a cornucopia spilling the fruits of autumn, bearded winter with his faggots and stave. By an earlier taste their self-conscious aestheticism and period charm would have been despised; now Maurice, who didn’t particularly like them, wouldn’t have dreamed of having them removed, probably knowing to a pound the value they added to his property. But the rest of the hall was his taste, his or that of his first wife; the low shelf with his collection of Staffordshire historical groups, bold against the shiny white wood; a pale elongated Nelson dying black-booted in Hardy’s arms; Wellington, Field Marshal’s baton on his hip, mounted on his charger Copenhagen; Victoria and Albert with their blond idealized children grouped before the Grand Exhibition; a lighthouse rising from a turbulent sea of unchipped waves, with Grace Darling straining on her oars. Above them, in incongruous proximity but looking somehow right since both combined strength with delicacy, were Maurice’s three nineteenth-century Japanese prints in their curved rosewood frames: Nobukazu, Kikugawa, Tokohumi. Like the Staffordshire, which as a child she had been allowed to dust, they were part of her childhood, ferocious warriors with their curved swords, pale moons behind delicate blossomed boughs, the soft pinks and greens of the slant-eyed women in their kimonos. Had she really only known them for ten years? Where then had been those other hallways, forgotten except in nightmares, with their dark dados, the lank greasy mackintoshes hanging inside the door, the smell of cabbage and fish, the claustrophobic horror of the black cupboard under the stairs?
Without taking off her coat she went down to the kitchen. Hilda came out of the pantry, a box of eggs in her hand. Without looking at Philippa she said: “I’m glad you’re back. We’ve got the Cleghorns for dinner. Can you do the table and the flowers, darling?”
Philippa didn’t answer. She felt very calm, light-headed with tiredness, her anger spent. She was glad that she had no need to discipline her voice, that she was in complete control. She closed the kitchen door and leaned her back against it as if barring Hilda’s escape. She waited until Hilda, getting no answer, looked up at her. Then she said: “Why didn’t you tell me that my mother was a murderess?”
But she needed to discipline herself after all. Hilda looked so ridiculous, stuck there speechless, mouth gaping, eyes wide with fright, the personification of stage horror, that she had to make a conscious effort to stop herself breaking into nervous laughter. She watched while the box of eggs dropped from Hilda’s parting hands as if she had willed them to fall. One bounced free and cracked open, spilling an unbroken dome of yellow, shivering in its glutinous pad of white. Instinctively Philippa stepped towards it. Hilda cried out sharply: “Don’t step in it! Don’t step in it!”
Moaning she seized a cloth and dabbed at the yolk. There was a splurge of yellow over the black and white tiles. Still knee
ling, she muttered: “The Cleghorns, they’re coming to dinner. I haven’t done the table yet. I knew you’d find out! I told him. I always said so. Who told you? Where have you been all day?”
“I applied for a copy of my birth certificate under the Children Act. Then I went to 41 Bancroft Gardens. There was no one in, but a neighbour told me. Then I spent the day walking in the City. After that I came home, I mean I came back here.”
Hilda was still scrubbing at the tiles, smearing the yellow mucus. She said wildly: “I don’t want to talk about it, not now! I’ve got to get on with dinner. The Cleghorns are coming. It’s important to your father.”
“The Cleghorns? How can it be? If they want something from him they’ll hardly complain if the food isn’t up to expectations. And if he wants something from them, then he’s wasting his time if their decision can be swayed by whether the veal is the best they’ve eaten since they found that intriguing little inn in the Dordogne.” She explained patiently: “Look, they don’t matter. I matter. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“How could we? A thing like that. They killed that girl. Raped and murdered her. She was only twelve! What good would it have done, your knowing? It wasn’t your fault. It was nothing to do with you. I don’t want to think about it. It was horrible, horrible! There are things you can’t tell a child, ever. It would have been too cruel.”
“More cruel than letting me find out?”
Hilda turned on her with a sudden flash of defensive spirit.
“Yes, cruel and wrong! You don’t mind so much now. At least you’re grown up. You have your own life, your own personality. It can’t destroy you now. You wouldn’t be talking like this if you really cared. You’re excited and angry, and I suppose you’re shocked, but you aren’t really hurt. It isn’t real to you. You stand outside life and look at it as if you aren’t really part of it. You watch people as if they’re acting on some kind of stage. That’s how you were looking down at me just now. You thought I didn’t know you were there, but I did. You don’t really care what your mother did to that child. It doesn’t touch you. Nothing does.”