by P. D. James
She recalled Hilda’s face bending over her to tuck her in at night.
“Where am I when I’m asleep?”
“You’re still here, in bed.”
“But how do you know?”
“Because I can see you, silly. I can touch you.”
Only, of course, she very seldom did touch. The three of them lived distanced. That hadn’t been Hilda’s fault. When Philippa was tucked in at night she had lain rigid, rejecting the final, and in the end merely dutiful, kiss, hating that moist encounter of the flesh more than the rough tickle of the blanket which Hilda always drew from under the sheet and tucked against her face.
“But you know you are here because you can see and touch me. When I’m asleep I can’t see or touch anyone.”
“No one can when they’re asleep. But you’re still here in your bed.”
“If I went into hospital and had an anaesthetic, where would I be then. Not my body, where would I be?”
“Best ask Daddy.”
“When I am dead where will I be?”
“With Jesus in Heaven.”
But Hilda had spoken that heresy against Maurice’s atheism without conviction.
She was drawn again to the bookcase. Here, surely, if anywhere, an answer was to be found. And here, ranked together, were the first editions of Maurice’s books, all inscribed in his hand with the name he had bestowed on her. It was surprising in view of this industry that no university had offered him a Chair. Perhaps others prominent in his discipline detected in him a dilettantism, a less than wholehearted commitment to his subject. Or was it simpler than that? Perhaps the rebarbative arrogance of some of his public criticisms irritated or repelled them, as she suspected it might do his pupils. But here they were, the most recent fruits of his intellectual preoccupations, elegantly written for a sociologist, impeccable in scholarship and style, or so the critics said, the books which partly explained Maurice. Now, of course, she saw that they explained her too. Nature and Nurture: Genetic and Environmental Interactions in Language Development. Tackling Disadvantage: Social Class, Language and Intelligence. Genes and Environment: Environmental Influences on the Concept of Object Permanence. Schooled to Fail: Class Poverty and Education in Great Britain. Had he planned one day to add another? Adoption: A Case Study in the Interaction of Heredity and Environment.
Last of all she comforted herself with a long look at her most prized possession, the Henry Walton oil painting of the Reverend Joseph Skinner and family which she had chosen as Maurice’s gift for her eighteenth birthday. It was an extraordinarily attractive and competent painting with none of the slightly sentimental charm of some of his later works. Here was all the elegance, the order, the confidence and the formal good manners of her favourite period in English history. The Reverend Skinner and his three sons were mounted, his wife and two daughters were seated in a barouche. Behind them was their solid decent house, before them their carriage drive, their shadowed lawn set with oaks. They could have had no crises of identity. The long Skinner faces, the high-arched Skinner noses proclaimed their lineage. And yet they spoke to her, telling her only that they had lived and suffered, endured and died. And so in her time would she.
6
Harry Cleghorn who, at forty-five and already balding, still managed to retain his reputation as an up-and-coming politician, looked to Philippa so like a successful Tory backbencher that she supposed his political career to have been inevitable. He was strongly muscled with a smooth, high-coloured skin, hair so black that it looked dyed, and a moist, rather petulant, mouth whose lips, red at the outlines as if lipsticked, revealed when he spoke an under-bleb of soft pale pink. As far as Philippa could see, he and Maurice had nothing in common except their appearance together as members of the same television chat show and their status as television personalities. But what else did they need to have in common? Differences of background, temperament, interests or political philosophy all faded in the unifying glare which the television studio lights shed on the company of the elect.
Nora Cleghorn faced her across the table, her over-made-up face softened by the candlelight. She must have been attractive when she was twenty to those who liked fair dolllike prettiness, but hers was a beauty which faded early, depending as it did on a pert perfection of skin and colouring, and not on bone structure. She was a silly woman, excessively proud of her husband, but few people disliked her, perhaps because there was something endearingly naïve about a belief that membership of the House of Commons represented the summit of human aspiration. She was, as usual, overdressed for an informal dinner party, gleamingly metallic in a sequined, sleeveless top over a velvet skirt. As their shoulders brushed in the doorway she smelled to Philippa of hot moist coins which had been steeped in scent.
If Nora Cleghorn were overdressed, so was Gabriel Lomas, since he was the only man wearing a dinner jacket. But with Gabriel one knew that sartorial eccentricity was deliberate. Maurice apparently liked him despite—or could it be because of—his affectation of an extreme right-wing Toryism. Perhaps it made a change from the majority of his students. For his part, Gabriel sometimes seemed to Philippa to be excessively interested in Maurice. It was from Gabriel that she had learned most of what she knew about Helena Palfrey. Since she had almost total recall of any conversation which really interested her, she could perfectly remember one snatch of conversation.
“Your father is like all rich Socialists, there’s a Tory inside which he’s struggling to keep down.”
She had replied: “I don’t think Maurice qualifies as a rich Socialist. You shouldn’t be misled by our lifestyle. He inherited this house and most of the furniture and pictures from his first wife. Maurice’s background is perfectly respectable from the Comrades’ point of view. Dad was a Post Office supervisor, leading light in the union. Maurice hasn’t rebelled, merely conformed.”
“He married an earl’s daughter. I don’t call that conforming. Admittedly an eccentric earl who is somewhat of an embarrassment to his class, but there’s nothing suspect about his lineage, no Victorian creation there. Admittedly, too, knowing Lady Helena, people wondered why marriage, until she produced a baby seven months later, the only seven-month prem to weigh in at eight and a half pounds.”
“Gabriel, how on earth do you get to know these things?”
“An addiction to petty gossip acquired during childhood, long summer afternoons in Kensington Gardens listening to Nanny and her cronies. Sarah, grossly overdressed, sitting up in the huge, shabby family pram, me trotting by the side. God, the suffocating boredom of those perambulations round the Round Pond! Be grateful, privileged little bastard that you are, that you were spared them.”
Now as they started on their artichokes, Gabriel was indulging in a minor Maurice tease, pretending to believe that a recent Labour Party political broadcast by a group of Young Socialists had been put out by the Tory Party.
“Naughty of them, although I don’t think it will make them any converts. And if they wanted to scare us I think they rather overdid it. Surely even the young Comrades don’t actually mouth such a risible combination of spurious philosophy, class hatred and discredited economic theory. And where on earth did they find those singularly unattractive actors? Positively scrofulous most of them. I don’t think there’s been any research to examine the correlation between acne and left-wing opinions. It might be rather an interesting project for one of your postgraduate students, sir?”
Nora Cleghorn said wonderingly: “But I thought it was supposed to be a Labour broadcast.”
Her husband laughed. “You’d certainly be well-advised, Maurice, to keep the young Comrades under wraps until after the election.”
The political discussion was under way as was inevitable. Conversation between Maurice and Harry Cleghorn, thought Philippa, was seldom memorable, being usually either a reiteration of their previous television encounter, or a rehearsal for their next. She detached her mind from arguments which she had heard so often before and glanced
across the table at Hilda.
Ever since early adolescence, Philippa’s reaction to her adoptive mother had been an urge to alter her, to upgrade her, to make her over as she might a dull but still serviceable winter coat. In imagination she applied make-up as if by the judicious application of colour the face could be given definition, rescued from its pallid inconsequence. She had a half-shameful vision of confronting Maurice with a wife transformed, presented with her compliments for his approval, a procuress of his pleasure. Even now she hardly ever looked at her adoptive mother without mentally changing her hairstyle, her clothes. About a year ago, when Hilda had needed a new evening dress, she had tentatively suggested to Philippa that they should shop for it together. Perhaps the invitation had conjured up for her an idealized relationship of mother and daughter, a feminine excursion, half frivolous, conspiratorial. It hadn’t been a success. Hilda hated all shops other than those which sold food, was embarrassed by the presence of smarter customers, confused by too abundant a choice, over-deferential to the assistants, shy about undressing. The last store to which Philippa in desperation had taken her had had a large communal dressing room. What inhibitions of the flesh, she wondered, had caused Hilda to shrink desperately into one corner, trying with ridiculous prudery to undress under cover of her coat while all around her girls and women stripped unselfconsciously to their bras and pants. Philippa had foraged out, desperately hunting among the rails. Nothing looked right on Hilda. Nothing could, since she wore it without confidence, without pleasure, a mute uncomplaining victim offering herself to be adorned for some sacrificial dinner party. In the end they had bought the black woollen skirt she was wearing now, topped by an over-fussy and ill-cut Crimplene blouse. It was the last time they had gone out together, the only time that she had tried to be a daughter. She told herself that she was glad that she need never try again.
Harry Cleghorn’s slightly hectoring voice—all his utterances had the resonant boom of the hustings—broke into her comforting disparagement of Hilda, Hilda whose only skills were cooking and deceit.
“Your Party claims to understand the so-called working class, but most of you haven’t a clue about what they’re feeling. Take an old woman living south of the river and holed up on the top of one of your tower blocks. If she can’t go out to shop or collect her pension because she’s afraid of being mugged, she isn’t free in any real sense of that word. Freedom to move about safely in your own capital city is a damned sight more fundamental than the abstractions that the civil liberties lobby prates about.”
“If you could explain how longer prison sentences and tougher detention centre regimes would make it safer.”
Nora Cleghorn licked sauce vinaigrette from her fingers.
“I do think that they ought to hang murderers.”
She spoke in a brightly conversational voice as though, thought Philippa, she were referring to a neighbour’s unaccountable omission to hang curtains. There was a moment of complete silence as if she had dropped something precious. In her mind Philippa heard the tinkle of smashing glass. Then Maurice said evenly: “They? You mean we ought. As it’s not a duty I personally would care to perform, I can hardly expect someone else to do it on my behalf.”
“Oh, Harry would do it, wouldn’t you darling?”
“There are one or two I can think of I wouldn’t exactly flinch at launching into eternity.”
And this led them, as Philippa knew it would, to a discussion of the century’s most notorious child murderess, the name which came up whenever people discussed capital punishment, the touchstone by which liberals tested their response to the death penalty. Philippa wondered if her own mother had served for a longer than normal time because her early release might have stimulated agitation on behalf of that other, more notorious child killer. She glanced across at Hilda, but Hilda’s face, half hidden by the two swathes of hair, was bent low over her plate. Artichokes were a convenient starter to an embarrassing meal. They required careful attention.
Cleghorn said: “Having decided that it is wrong to hang murderers, we are now waking up to the fact that they don’t conveniently die in prison or just fade away. We’re also waking up to the fact that someone has to look after them and that if we don’t pay society’s custodians properly for a disagreeable job we won’t find anyone willing to do it. But obviously, sooner or later, the woman will have to be paroled. I suggest that it might be later.”
Nora Cleghorn said: “But isn’t she supposed to have got terribly religious? I think I read somewhere that she wants to go into a convent or nurse lepers or something.”
Gabriel laughed. “Poor lepers! They seem always to be selected as the sacrificial victims of someone’s contrition. You’d think they had enough troubles already.”
Cleghorn’s moist lips fastened on the succulent heart of his artichoke, like a child’s on a dummy. A trickle of sauce ran down the side of his mouth. His voice was half muffled in his linen napkin.
“I don’t mind who she nurses as long as she keeps away from their children.”
His wife said: “But if she has really reformed, she wouldn’t be agitating to get out of prison, would she?”
Cleghorn spoke impatiently. Philippa had noticed before that he was indulgent to his wife’s inanities, but became irritated when she spoke sense.
“Of course she wouldn’t. That’s the last thing she’d be worried about. After all, if she’s hankering to do good, a prison is as suitable a place as any. All this talk about contrition is nonsense. She and her lover tortured a child to death. If she ever comes to an understanding of what she’s done, I don’t see how she could bear to go on living, let alone start planning for a life outside.”
Gabriel said: “So we must hope for her own sake that she is unrepentant. But why all this public interest in the state of her soul? I suppose that society has a right to punish her to deter others, and to demand what assurances are possible that she’s no longer dangerous before letting her out. What we haven’t the right to demand is repentance. That’s a matter between her and her god.”
Philippa said: “Of course. It’s as arrogant as me, a Gentile, proclaiming that I’ve forgiven the Nazis for the Holocaust. The statement has no meaning.”
Maurice said drily: “As little meaning as the statement that repentance is between her and her god.”
Cleghorn laughed: “Now Maurice, leave the theological argument for your encounter with the Bishop. What are they paying you for the new series, by the way?”
The conversation turned to contracts and the foibles of television producers. There was no more talk of murder. The meal dragged on through the veal, the lemon soufflé, and finally to the leisurely coffee and brandy in the garden. It seemed to Philippa that she had never lived through a longer day. She had woken that morning as a bastard; how short but how endless the hours which had legitimized her into horror and disgrace. It was like experiencing birth and death simultaneously, each separately painful yet both part of the same inexorable process. Now she sat, drained, under the patio lamps and willed the Cleghorns to go.
She was beyond tiredness. Her mind was preternaturally clear yet it fastened on unimportant details which it invested with an egregious significance: Nora Cleghorn’s bra strap slipping down a sequined shoulder, her husband’s heavy signet ring biting into his little finger, the peach tree gleaming silver under the patio lamp; surely if she stretched out her arm and shook the trunk its leaves would tinkle down in a shower of glistening pellets.
By half past eleven the talk had become disjointed, perfunctory. Maurice and Cleghorn had completed their academic business and Gabriel, with his half-ironic formality, had taken his leave. But still the Cleghorns lingered in what seemed an obstinate endurance, long after a damp chill had crept across the garden and the purple sky was stained with the arteries of the dying day. It was nearly midnight before they reminded each other that they had a home, said their protracted goodbyes, and made their way through the garden gate to the mews garag
e and their Jaguar. Philippa was free at last to go to her room.
7
The letter was more difficult to write than even the most challenging of her weekly school essays. It was astonishing that a short passage of English prose should take so long to compose, that even the most ordinary words should carry such a charge of innuendo, condescension or crass insensitivity. The problems began with the superscription. “Dear Mother” seemed a startling, almost presumptuous beginning; “Dear Mrs. Ducton” was offensively, almost aggressively formal; “Dear Mary Ducton” was too obviously a trendy compromise, a confession of defeat. In the end she decided on “Dear Mother.” That, after all, was the relationship between them, the primal, unalterable, biological tie. To admit the fact needn’t imply that it was any more than that.
The first sentence was comparatively easy. She wrote: “I hope that it won’t distress you to receive this letter, but I exercised my right under the Children Act 1975 to apply to the Registrar General for a copy of my birth certificate. Afterwards I went to Bancroft Gardens and learned from a neighbour who you were.”
There was no need to say any more. In that last sentence infamy was plucked from the past, briefly held, then dropped. The words were bloodstained. She went on: “I should very much like to meet you unless you would much rather not; I could come to Melcombe Grange on any visitors’ day if you would let me know when it would be convenient.”
She deleted the second “much” and hesitated over the last five words, but decided on reflection to leave them in. The sentence didn’t satisfy her, but at least it was short and the meaning clear. The next part was more difficult. The words “released,” “paroled,” “licensed” or “set free” were pejorative but it was extraordinarily difficult to avoid them. Quickly she scribbled an alternative draft: “I don’t want to force myself on you, but if you haven’t anywhere to go … anywhere to stay … if you haven’t finally decided on your plans after you leave Melcombe Grange, would you care to come to me?”