by P. D. James
At nine-forty-five the maid appeared, bumping a shopping trolley up the basement steps. Then no one left or arrived until she returned two hours later, pulling its laden weight after her and manoeuvring it carefully down the basement steps. He went out and lunched on coffee and sandwiches at a coffee bar down a side street within fifty yards of the hotel, and was back at his post at a quarter to two. All the afternoon he kept watch but no one appeared. The man returned home shortly after six and let himself in at the front door.
He broke off his watch again at eight o’clock for dinner, but was back at the window by nine, and stayed there until the light faded, the street lights came on and, at last, it was eleven o’clock and then midnight. The first day was over.
And this was the routine of the next three days. The man left at nine-fifteen precisely in the morning. The maid, usually with her trolley, was out of the house by ten. It was on the following Monday, tempted by the sun, by the need for exercise and by frustration, that he decided to follow her. He had some idea that he might get into conversation, might at least learn whether Mrs. Palfrey was at home, might even think of some excuse for asking her where the girl had gone. He didn’t know how he would approach her, or what he would say, but the instinct to follow her was suddenly so immediate, so strong, that he was down the stairs and in the street almost as soon as she had reached the corner of Caldecote Terrace.
The first shop she visited was a local newsagent to pay the paper bill. And here the newsagent greeted her by name, and he knew who she was. He was irritated with himself; the facile assumption which had taken her for a maid had wasted three days. Glancing at her as he pretended to hesitate over his choice of newspaper it was difficult to associate this slight, depressed figure, this anxious face, with the confident girl he had seen in the train, or to see her as mistress of number 68. When she had settled the bill, he bought a Daily Telegraph, then followed her at a careful distance to her next call, the butcher. Here there was ham on the bone on display in the window, and he decided to buy a quarter of a pound and lunch on it in his room. He joined the queue behind her and waited patiently while she selected a shoulder of lamb. For the first time he saw her animated. The joint was displayed for her inspection and she and the butcher, confederates in expertise, contemplated it with loving care. She asked for it to be boned and he bore it off willingly, leaving his assistant to serve the queue while he obliged this discriminating customer.
After he had bought the ham he followed her through squares of stuccoed Victorian houses to a street market. Here she moved slowly from stall to stall, eyeing the produce with what seemed to him excessive anxiety, surreptitiously pressing the tomatoes and pears. Lastly she visited a delicatessen. He stood on the pavement, pretending an interest in the shrivelled fingers of dried sausages while she bought smoked salmon, watching while the shopkeeper laid his long knife against the pink flesh, and held drooping over the blade the first rich transparent slice for her inspection. Scase had never tasted smoked salmon and the price on the half fish displayed in the refrigerated window appalled him. They ate well, the Palfreys. The Ducton girl had done well for herself. On impulse he followed Mrs. Palfrey into the shop and bought two ounces. He would eat them before dinner in his room and discover what this unknown delicacy tasted like, knowing that her tongue would experience the same sensation, that these two slivers of veined flesh would bind them closer together.
And this was the pattern of his life for the next ten days. Pimlico was her village, and it became his, bounded by Victoria Street and Vauxhall Bridge Road, two flowing thoroughfares like unnavigable rivers over which she never ventured to pass. Twice a week she would walk to the Smith Street branch of the Westminster Library to change her books. He would go into the reading room and pretend to occupy himself with periodicals while he watched her through the glass partition, moving from shelf to shelf. He wondered what books she bore back to solace her in that basement kitchen. It seemed to him that she carried with her a climate of anxiety and loneliness, but it didn’t affect him. He couldn’t recall any recent time in his life more free from strain. She was easy to trail. Her preoccupations were personal and secret; she seemed hardly to notice the life around her except as it related to shopping and food. But he had no sense of hurry or of time wasted. He knew that this was where he was meant to be. In the end, before long, she would lead him to them.
The weather became warmer, the sun less fitful. On these high summer days she would take a sandwich and fruit to eat on one of the benches in the Embankment Gardens where the boughs of the plane trees dragged to sweep the water with their leaves. He had got into the habit of carrying a packed lunch himself, bought from a delicatessen in Caldecote Road, to be eaten either in a park or at the window of his room. They would sit distanced by twenty or thirty yards on their separate benches and he would watch as she stared over the parapet at the gritty fringes of the Thames, plumed with gulls, at the great barges as they grunted upstream, slapping the tide against the embankment wall. After she had eaten she would feed the sparrows, crouching patiently for as long as fifteen or twenty minutes with the crumbs on her outstretched palm. Once he did the same, and smiled when, after a few minutes of patient waiting, the sparrow fluttered down and he felt the commotion of its frantic wings and the scrape of its tiny claws on his palm. One warm turbulent morning when the high tide heaved in the throes of a spent and distant storm, she brought with her a bag of crusts to feed the gulls. He watched while she stood at the parapet, hurling the bread with stiff ungainly jerks of her arm. The rushing air was suddenly white with wings, spiked with beaks and claws, clamorous with high, desolate screams.
He was surprised how quickly he came to feel at home at the Casablanca. The hotel had few comforts, but it had no pretensions. There was a small and overcrowded bar in a room off the dining room and most evenings he would take a single dry sherry before his dinner. The meals were predictable: eatable, but only just. But occasionally the standard varied. It was as if the cook were engaged in a private game, judging when the customers were on the point of revolt and then confounding them with a dinner of unexceptionable excellence. But usually little cooking had been done. Scase was familiar with the taste of all the soups; he had opened these tins himself. The prawn cocktail consisted of tinned prawns, hard and salty, smothered with the cheapest of bottled dressing and reposing on a limp lettuce leaf; the pâté maison was commercial liver sausage; the potatoes were invariably served mashed since they were reconstituted from a packet. All his senses were sharpened since he had set out on his enterprise; he noticed these things now, but they didn’t bother him.
The Mario who had booked him in seemed to run the place. Scase saw no one else in authority. The other staff were parttime, including Fred, an elderly cripple who spent all night dozing in an armchair behind the counter and whose job it was to let in guests who arrived back after twelve-thirty. The regular clientele were mostly commercial travellers. With some of them Mario was friendly, joining them, white-jacketed, at their table for long intimate conferences. Their common interest was apparently betting. Lists and evening papers were consulted and money changed hands. But most of the trade was foreign package tours from Spain. With the weekly arrival of the morning coach the hotel came alive. Mario, galvanized into frantic activity, immediately became Spanish in speech and gesture; the hall was blocked with luggage and chattering tourists; the lift invariably broke down; and Coffee, the bitch, quivered with excitement.
The hotel was ideal for his purpose. No one bothered about him, no one was curious. The only way in which a visitor could attract interest at the Hotel Casablanca was by failing to settle the bill weekly in advance and in cash. If he felt the need for conversation, a brief craving for the sound of a human voice directed at himself, he would stop to chat to the blind girl. He learned that her name was Violet Hedley and that she was an orphan who had been educated in a residential school for the blind and now lived with a widowed aunt in a council flat off the Vauxhall Ro
ad. In exchange he told her nothing about himself except that his wife and only child were dead. She was the only person to whom he felt he could safely talk. Whatever her private imaginings of him might be, he knew that all his secrets, his past, his present purpose, even his ugliness and his pain, were safe from any probing by those sightless eyes.
On Friday morning, 25th August, he was led by Mrs. Palfrey across the newly created piazza and into the cool, incense-sweet immensity of Westminster Cathedral. He saw that she didn’t dip her fingers in the stoup of holy water; that she hadn’t apparently come to pray. This visit was just one more way of killing time. He followed her, attaching himself unobtrusively to a party of French-speaking tourists, as she wandered between the great square marble pillars, paused to survey each of the side chapels, bent to stare with repugnant fascination at the silver-encased body of St. John Southworth, small as a child in his glass case.
He had never before been in the Cathedral and its redbrick-bounded Byzantine exterior hadn’t prepared him for the wonder which lay beyond the west door. The rough unadorned bricks climbed upwards from great pillars of smooth marble, green, yellow, red and grey, to the black curving immensity of the domed roof. It hung suspended above him, darkness and chaos given a form and substance, and he felt that he crawled crab-like beneath its mystery. The completed Lady Chapel, gleaming with gold mosaics, pretty and sentimental, meant nothing to him. Even the smooth beauty of the marble pillars served only to draw the eye upwards to that curving wonder of the roof. He hadn’t expected to be so excited by any building. When the act was done, he would come back and walk here again. He would look up at that dark void and find a comfort which he would gain from no lighted candles, no stained glass. There would be other buildings to explore, perhaps even other cities to visit. There could be a life, solitary though it might be, that was more than mere existence. But now even to experience this wonder pricked him with guilt. He remembered the prick of the sparrow on his palm. That, too, had been a moment very close to joy. But to feel joy while Mary Ducton was still alive was a betrayal of the dead. Already he felt that he was being seduced by routine into a complacent lethargy. He would wait for only one more week. If in that time he hadn’t been led to the murderess, if the girl Philippa still hadn’t returned to Caldecote Terrace, then he would have to think of a plan, however desperate, to trick Mrs. Palfrey into betraying to him where they were.
9
When the ten days of freedom which they had promised themselves were up and it was time to look for a job, they avoided the Government Job Centre in Lisson Grove, which was too intimidatingly a reminder of officialdom and searched instead in the evening papers and on the display boards outside newsagents. They found advertisements for kitchen staff/waitresses at Sid’s Plaice off Kilburn High Road pinned to a board outside a stationer’s shop at the north end of the Edgware Road. The advertisement said helpfully “take 16 bus and alight Cambridge Avenue.” It added that the wages were one pound an hour plus food. They calculated that if they worked six hours a day for five days their living expenses should be comfortably covered. One free fish meal a day would be a bonus.
Sid’s Plaice was a double-fronted fish and chip shop with café attached, and looked and smelled reassuringly fresh. Sid himself, whom Philippa had pictured as small, swarthy and greasy, was discovered to be a blond, ruddy-faced, amateur boxer. He himself worked behind the counter, simultaneously directing operations on both sides of his establishment, crashing down the lid of the fish-fryer, plunging the wire baskets of chips into the sizzling fat, joking with customers at the counter as he wrapped their orders in greaseproof and newspaper, bawling demands at the kitchen staff and slapping fish and chips on plates to be shoved at the waitresses who regularly pushed their heads through the serving hatch and yelled out their orders. The din, to which Sid and his staff were apparently impervious, was constant and appalling. Philippa early decided that customers needed strong nerves although not necessarily a strong stomach to dine at Sid’s Plaice.
Sid’s girls took it in turn to wait at the tables, if taking the plates from the hatch and dumping them in front of the customers at the formica-topped tables could be described as waitress service. The job was preferred to washing-up, since there were the tips. Sid explained that most customers left something, and there was always the hope of unintended generosity from a visitor or recently arrived immigrant confused about the value of English money. This flexible use of his female labour, which saved him the expense of employing two categories of worker, was described by Sid as “mucking in together like one big happy family.”
He took on Philippa and her mother with alacrity, and if he were surprised that two apparently educated women were actually seeking work in his shop, he didn’t show it. Philippa told herself that this was a place of work where she could be in no possible danger of meeting anyone from her past life, and where no questions would be asked. She was wrong in that; questions were perpetually asked by her fellow workers, but no one cared whether the answers were true.
There were three other washers-up on the evening shift: Black Shirl, Marlene and Debbie. Marlene’s hair, spiked and dyed bright orange, looked as if it had been hacked off by shears. Two moons of bright red decorated each cheek, but Philippa was relieved to see that she had apparently jibbed at piercing her ear lobes with safety pins. Her forearm was covered with tattoos, two intertwining hearts pierced with an arrow and surrounded by a garland of roses, and a sixteenth-century galleon in full sail. It fascinated Debbie, who was happy to wipe up dishes for Marlene all evening so that she could see it sinking and rising in the detergent.
“Make it sink. Go on, Marl! Make it sink,” she would plead, and Marlene would plunge her arms in the detergent foam and let the bubbles froth around the little craft.
In the damp and ill-equipped kitchen behind the café, with its two sinks, they worked in pairs. They talked incessantly, usually about the previous night’s television, their boy friends, shopping up West. They were given to extraordinary swings of mood and terrifying bursts of temper. They walked out frequently, demonstrating a pathetic and fiercely guarded if illusory independence, and walked in again a few days later. They complained about Sid behind his back, and were alternately surly and outrageously flirtatious to his face. They discussed his alleged sexual inadequacies in anatomical detail and at length, although it was obvious to Philippa that all Sid’s energies were spent on the business, his occasional amateur boxing bouts, racing his greyhound and keeping Mrs. Sid happy. This lady, of a formidable smartness and vulgarity, appeared briefly once a day in the chippie, apparently to remind Sid and warn the others that she existed. Poor Sid, thought Philippa. He would probably have been afraid of his female helots if they had had enough sense to organize a united confrontation. But they waged their war of attrition with cunning and some success. They regularly stole small quantities of food from him, bread, butter, sugar and tea, and he knew they did. Perhaps this was regarded by both sides as one of the perks of the job; but Philippa saw that he took no chances with his till, which was closely guarded.
Debbie, waif-like, with pale transparent skin, looked as if her life were subcutaneously draining away. Her nose and fingers were perpetually pink-tipped, her anxious eyes swam in red pools and even the ridges of her ears, ragged as if they had been nibbled, looked about to ooze blood. She spoke in whispers and crept about the kitchen bestowing indiscriminately her sweetly inane smile. But it was Debbie who was the most violent. Sharing a sink with Philippa, Black Shirl said: “She knifed her ma when she was twelve.”
“You mean she killed her?”
“Bloody near thing. They put her in care. But she’s all right now as long as you don’t let her near your feller.”
“You mean she’d knife him?”
Black Shirl roared with laughter.
“Naw. She’d fuck ’im. She’s terrible she is. Lord, that girl, she’s terrible!”
Mechanically taking plate after plate from Shirl’s hands,
Philippa thought that if her father had encountered Debbie instead of Julie Scase, he would be alive now. There would have been no rape, no murder, no adoption. His only problem would have been to get rid of her, to stop another visit, but ten shillings and a bag of sweets would probably have done the trick. It was his bad luck to have met instead Julie Scase, that dangerous mixture of innocence and stupidity.
All three treated her mother with wary respect, perhaps because she was older, perhaps because there was something inhibiting about her quiet composure. Unlike Philippa, she seemed undisturbed by the irrational explosions of violence. Once when Debbie, washing a carving knife, suddenly pointed it at Marlene’s throat, she succeeded in persuading the girl to hand it over with no more than a quiet “Give it to me, Debbie.” But they were curious about her. One night, when her mother was on waitress duty and Marlene and Philippa were sharing a sink, Marlene said: “Been in the bin, has she, your ma? You know, a mental hospital?”
“Yes, she has. Why did you ask?”
“You can allus tell. My auntie was the same. You can tell by the eyes, see. All right now, is she?”
“Oh, yes, she’s fine. The doctor said she mustn’t be under any strain. That’s why we took this job. It isn’t exactly stimulating, but at least you can put it behind you when you go home.”
This was accepted in silence. They all had excuses for lowering themselves by condescending to take Sid’s job. Black Shirl, sloshing suds at the next sink, said, belligerent, suspicious: “Why do you speak posh?”
“It’s not my fault. My uncle looked after me when I was a kid, after my dad died. He and my aunt were particular. That’s why I ran away. That and my uncle trying to get into bed with me.”
Marlene said: “My uncle did that to me, too. I didn’t mind. He was all right. Used to take me up West Saturday nights.”