by P. D. James
“He was coming too fast! He was too bloody fast! Oh Christ, those fucking machines!”
He was lying there, dying so publicly, and her railing voice was the last sound he heard on earth. Involuntarily she had stepped towards him and his eyes had met hers. She had seen in them that same look, the rueful acceptance of a terrible knowledge. Afterwards she had hurried home to write it down, an exercise in the creative recollection of trauma. She had torn up the passage. She always did tear up such exercises. Her life was encumbered enough, the wasteland between imagination and reality already too nebulous. But she wished that she hadn’t recalled it now. This was a moment of small triumph, a time for planning and action. She hadn’t wanted to think about death.
They were simultaneously aware that Sheila Manning had come into the room. She was dressed and was carrying a jacket and a heavy, old-fashioned handbag. Ignoring Philippa, she spoke directly to Maurice: “You promised that it would be safe. You said no one would be here.”
She was making a brave attempt at dignity, but she couldn’t keep from her voice the note of querulous reproach. She sounded, thought Philippa, like Hilda when Maurice was late home for dinner. He wouldn’t welcome that peevish reminder of small delinquencies. There was only one way for her to carry off this debacle successfully, with humour and panache, but these weren’t in her armoury. And whatever she said, this would be the end of the affair. The girl was as humiliated and inept as a child caught out in her first sexual experimenting. This room, this moment, most of all this man would be remembered only with self-disgust. She knew that she herself was part of the humiliation, sitting there calmly on the bed by Maurice’s side in possession of more then herself.
She said: “I’m sorry. It was unintentional.”
She sounded insincere to her own ears. She would have despised anyone who believed her, and the girl didn’t.
“It doesn’t matter. You’ve done what you wanted to do.”
She turned away. Watching the drooped head, Philippa wondered whether she had started to cry. Maurice at once got up from the bed and went to her. He put an arm round her shoulders and said gently: “It was horrible for you. I’m so sorry. Please don’t worry. These things aren’t important, you know. In a few weeks you’ll be able to laugh about it.”
“It has never been important, not to you anyway. I shan’t come back.”
Perhaps she hoped, pathetically, that the threat would provoke some response from him: pain, anger, reproach. Instead he said, punctilious as a host: “I’ll see you out. Are you sure you’ve got everything?”
She nodded. They went out together, his arm still round her shoulder, and a minute later Philippa heard the closing thud of the front door. She waited for him in the bedroom, still sitting on the edge of the dishevelled bed. He stood at the door silently regarding her for a moment, then began to pace up and down the room. He said: “You are enjoying yourself? You look happy and you look well.”
“Yes. Yes I am. I suppose it’s the first time in my life that I’ve been able to feel important to another human being.”
“Indispensable, you mean. There’s nothing so intoxicating to the ego as the knowledge that happiness is in one’s gift. It’s the foundation of every successful marriage. The other person has to be capable of being made happy, of course, and that capacity is rarer than one might imagine. I take it that your mother is?”
“For most of the time, yes.”
“I suppose there are moments when she wonders whether she has the right to live.”
She said: “Why should she? The world is full of people who’ve killed a child: a wartime bomb released, a bullet in Belfast which hits the wrong target, a stamp on the car accelerator in a fit of impatience. And what about the drunken drivers, the incompetent doctors? They don’t spend their days wondering whether they’ve a right to live. And she has survived nearly ten years in prison. If anyone has the right to live, she has.”
“And how do you spend your days? I take it you’re enjoying the pleasure of patronage, giving her the benefit of your education.”
She thought: “You should know about that. You enjoyed teaching me.” She said: “We look at pictures. And I’m showing her London.”
“Didn’t she know London already? She and Ducton lived close enough.”
“I don’t know. We never talk about the past. She doesn’t want to.”
“That’s very wise of her. What, incidentally, have you come home for? It wasn’t a particularly propitious moment to choose, but I take it that this démarche wasn’t planned.”
“I came to get some money. The Press have found out where we are. We’ve got to get away, at least for a time. I don’t think they’ll be back, but my mother’s too upset to stay in Delaney Street. We’re going to the Isle of Wight.”
“So the running has started and she’s dragging you with her.”
“Not dragging. Never dragging. I’m going because I want to be with her.”
“For God’s sake why the Isle of Wight?”
“We think we’d like it there. She went there once as a girl, some kind of Sunday school treat.”
“There are cheaper bolt holes. I suppose you intended to help yourself from the safe. What I keep in there will just about get you across the Solent.”
“There are other things here I could take and sell. I thought of the caddy spoons. We only want enough cash for the first week or two. Then we can both get a job. That shouldn’t be difficult even at the end of the season. We’re not fussy what we do.”
“How did the Press discover where you were?”
“We met Gabriel Lomas at the Royal Academy exhibition. I think he put his boyfriend on to us. But first he must have phoned Hilda and got the address out of her. That wouldn’t be difficult, not for Gabriel.”
“You might have expected it from that decadent Tory with his high talking and squalid morality. Well, at least you’ve learned that betrayal isn’t the prerogative of the extreme left.”
“I never thought it was.”
“So now you’ve got a choice between blackmail and theft. Why don’t you sell the Henry Walton, by the way? You’ve got it. It’s yours.”
“We like it. We’re taking it with us. Besides, you owe us something.”
“Not any longer. You’re eighteen, you’re of age. When I adopted you I owed you a home, food, education, a reasonable standard of care. I owed you conscientious affection. Anything more isn’t within my gift. I don’t think there’s anything on the slate.”
“I’m not thinking about me. I’m thinking about my mother. You owe her my purchase price. You didn’t have to adopt me. You could have fostered me, become my legal guardian. You could have given me a home and education without taking me away from her forever. The experiment would have been the same—nearly the same anyway. You would still have been able to say: ‘Look what I’ve done. Look what I’ve made of this odd, difficult, uncommunicative child, the daughter of a rapist and a murderer.’ It’s not as if you ever cared about abstractions like justice or retribution. It’s not as if you really worried about what she’d done. And you’ve never had a high regard for criminal justice, have you? Magistrates’ courts, the Crown court; a formal system for ensuring that the poor and incompetent know their place, that the dispossessed don’t get their grubby hands on the spoils. The petty thief ends in prison, the financier who makes his fortune dealing in currency ends up in the Lords. I’ve heard you often enough. Slice through society—you even know the precise socio-economic point at which the cut should be made—and the top half sits in judgement under the Royal Arms, the bottom half stands in the dock. The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, law makes them high and lowly and orders their estate. So why didn’t she qualify for your kind of mercy? She was poor enough, disadvantaged, undereducated, all the things you preach excuse crime. So why not excuse her?”
He said calmly: “I’m not in the habit of confusing petty recidivism with murder and rape.”
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��But you know nothing about her! You don’t know what pressures drove her to kill that child. You never bothered to find out. You only knew that she had something you wanted—experimental material—me. Scarce experimental material, no, unique. A child who might have been specially bred for your purpose, to demonstrate that man is the creature of his environment. And there were incidental advantages, a child to keep your wife occupied while you fucked your students. No wonder you had to get your hands on me. But what about my mother? If she’d been hanged, if it had all happened before the death penalty was abolished, the hangman would have been more just. At least he’d have left her something. You were going to take me away forever. She would have come out of prison and we’d never have known each other, never even have met. By what right did you do that to us? And then you say that you don’t owe her anything!”
“Is this what she’s told you?”
“No. It’s what I’ve worked out for myself.”
He came over to her, but he didn’t sit beside her on the bed. Instead he stood over her, looking down. When he spoke his voice was harder. He said: “Is that what you’ve really felt all these last ten years, that you were experimental material? No, don’t answer hastily. Think about it. Be honest. Your generation make such a fetish of honesty. The more hurtful it is to others, the more necessary you appear to find it. When Hilda’s excellent food slipped down your gullet, did you really see yourself as an experimental animal being fed its nicely calculated ration of protein, vitamins and minerals?”
“Hilda is different. I wish I could love Hilda.”
He said: “I dare say we both wish that we could love Hilda.” He added: “She misses you.”
She wanted to cry out: “But what about you? Do you miss me?” Instead she said: “I’m sorry, but I’m not coming back.”
“And what about Cambridge?”
“I’m beginning to think that Cambridge isn’t as important as I thought it was.”
“Do you mean you’ll delay going up, wait a year?”
“Or not go up at all. After all, I’m going to be a novelist. A university education isn’t essential for a writer. It could even be a disadvantage. There are better ways of spending the next three years.”
“You mean with her?”
“Yes,” she said simply. “With her.”
He went across to the window and stood for a minute, parting the curtains, looking down into the street. What, she wondered, was he expecting to see? What inspiration did he hope for from those brightly painted doors, the elegant fanlights, the brass-bound tubs and window boxes of the opposite terrace? After a moment he turned and began pacing between the two wall windows, eyes on the ground. Neither of them spoke. Then he said: “There’s something I’ve got to tell you. No, that’s not strictly true. I don’t have to tell you. Until this afternoon I didn’t intend to tell you. But it’s time you stopped living in a fantasy world and faced reality.”
She thought: “He’s trying to sound reluctant, concerned, but what he’s really feeling is excitement, triumph.” Something of the excitement communicated itself to her and she felt, too, a spasm of fear. But it passed quickly. There was nothing he could say now which could harm her or her mother. Her eyes followed his careful pacing. Never before had she been so aware of his physical presence, of every breath he drew, of every bone of his head and hands, of every contraction of muscle; the air between them drummed with his heartbeat. And because of this intensity of awareness there was something else she knew, something that she couldn’t explain. If now he wanted to hurt her, it had nothing to do with Sheila Manning. How lightly he had taken that humiliation! What had changed him had been that blurted-out sympathy for the loss of Orlando. This moment was to do with her and him; but it was to do with Orlando too. She waited without speaking for him to begin. If he wanted to make a pretence of embarrassment, of reluctance, she wasn’t going to help him.
He said: “You’ve assumed that Hilda and I adopted you after the murder, that your mother let you go because she was serving a life sentence, had no real choice. I thought when you started living together that she might have told you the truth. Obviously she hasn’t. Your adoption order went through exactly two weeks before Julie Scase was killed, and we’d had you as a foster child for six months before then. The truth is quite simple: your mother let you go, because she didn’t want you.”
She wished that he’d stop his slow regular pacing, that he’d come over to her, sit beside her, look into her face, do anything except touch her. Instead he glanced at her, an artful, almost conspiratorial glance, so swift that she wondered whether she had imagined that slit-eyed momentary regard. Something, perhaps a speck of dust, was irritating his left eye. He took his handkerchief from his jacket pocket and rubbed it, then stood blinking. Satisfied, he started again on his slow perambulation. He said: “I don’t know what went wrong originally. She was pregnant when she married and it might have been that. I was told that she had a long and painful labour after a difficult pregnancy. That’s one of the diagnostic pointers to child abuse. Anyway, there was no bonding of mother and child. I gather that you weren’t easy. You were difficult to feed, an unresponsive, perpetually crying baby. She hardly slept at night for your first two years.”
He paused, but she didn’t speak. His voice was as cool and controlled as if this were a dissertation before his students, an exposition that he had given so many times before that he knew it by heart. He went on: “Things didn’t improve. The screaming baby became an unloving child. Both of you had violent tempers, but you, of course, were too young to injure her except psychologically. She, unfortunately, could do more damage. One day she struck out at you and gave you a black eye. After that she became frightened. She decided she wasn’t cut out for motherhood, so she went back to work and placed you with foster parents. I understand that it was a weekly arrangement; you came home for the weekends. She could stand you for two days a week.”
Philippa said quietly: “I remember. I remember Auntie May.”
“There were, no doubt, a succession of spurious aunties of various degrees of suitability and of responsibility. In June 1968 one of them brought you down to Pennington; it was supposed to be a treat for you, a day in the country. It was just before the house was sold and the woman was visiting her sister who was the pastry cook there. She’s retired now, of course. All the old servants have gone. I had to go down to Pennington to arrange about some of Helena’s things before the sale, and Hilda and I met you and your foster parent in the garden. Hilda talked to her. She was a relief, I suppose, from the people in the house. And that’s how we heard about you. Beddows was her name, Mrs. Gladys Beddows. She wanted to stop fostering you—you weren’t the easiest of children—but she was worried about letting you go back full-time to your parents. She wasn’t very bright and she didn’t even like you but she had some sense of responsibility.
“After that meeting I couldn’t get you out of my mind. The thought of you was like an irritation, something I would rather not have known but wasn’t able to forget. I didn’t want to get involved. I told myself that you were no concern of mine. I wasn’t even thinking then about adopting a child. Hilda had mentioned the possibility, but it wasn’t an idea that appealed to me. Certainly, I wasn’t looking for a child. I told myself that it would do no harm to find out what had happened to you. It was easy enough to trace Mrs. Beddows through her sister. She told me that you were back full-time with your mother. I nearly left it at that. But I was in the neighbourhood; it would do no harm to call. I didn’t even bother to concoct an excuse for the visit, which was unlike me. I don’t usually go into new situations unprepared. It was early evening by then and your mother had just come home from work. You weren’t there. You had been admitted two days earlier to King George V Hospital, Ilford, with a suspected fracture of the skull. And that was the most dangerous and the last time that your mother lost her temper with you.”
She said through bloated lips, not realizing what tense she was usi
ng: “Is that why the child could never remember anything that happened before she was eight?”
“The amnesia was partly the result of the injury, partly, I imagine hysterical, the mind’s natural reluctance to recall the unbearable. Neither Hilda nor I have ever attempted to cure it. Why should we?”
“And then what happened to her?”
“Your parents agreed that we should foster you when you came out of hospital, with a view to adoption if it worked out all right. There wasn’t a prosecution. The hospital apparently accepted your mother’s explanation that you’d fallen downstairs and cracked your head on the bottom banister. Those were the days before the Maria Colwell case and the authorities were less ready than now to suspect deliberate ill-treatment. But she told me the truth, she told me everything that June evening. I think she was glad to have someone, a stranger, to whom she could talk. You came to us straight from hospital and six months later we adopted you. Your parents both gave their consent without, I may say, any apparent reluctance. And that is the mother for whom you now propose to give up Cambridge, become a thief, and spend God knows how many years dragging after her from one watering place to another. The Scase murder, of course, is hardly relevant. She didn’t murder you after all, although I gather it was a pretty close thing.”
She didn’t cry out in vehement protest that he was lying, that it wasn’t true. Maurice only lied about important things, and then only when he could be certain that he wouldn’t be found out. This wasn’t important to him, and the truth could easily be proved. But she didn’t need to check. She knew that it was the truth. She wished that she didn’t feel so cold. Her face, her limbs, her fingers, were icy. He ought to have seen that she was shaking. Why didn’t he tug a blanket from Hilda’s bed and fold it round her? Even her lips were swollen with cold, stiff and numbed as if she had been given a dental injection. It was difficult to form words and her voice, when it came, sounded slurred.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”