by P. D. James
She said: “I thought you said once that you found Caroline sexually cold.”
“Did I? Surely not. That would suggest a degree of personal experience. I think I said I couldn’t imagine ever finding her physically attractive. A PA who is personable and highly efficient but not sexually tempting is the ideal.”
She said dryly: “I imagine that a man’s idea of the ideal secretary is a woman who manages to imply that she would like to go to bed with her boss but nobly restrains herself in the interests of office efficiency. What will happen to her?”
“Oh, her job’s secure. If she wants to stay at Larksoken there will be plenty of competition to get her. She’s intelligent as well as tactful and efficient.”
“But presumably not ambitious, else why should she be so eager to remain at Larksoken?” She added: “Caroline may have another reason for wanting to stay in the area. I saw her in Norwich Cathedral about three weeks ago. She met a man in the Lady Chapel. They were very discreet, but it looked to me like an assignation.”
He asked, but without real curiosity: “What kind of man?”
“Middle-aged. Nondescript. Difficult to describe. But he was too old to be Jonathan Reeves.”
She said no more, knowing that he wasn’t particularly interested, that his mind had moved elsewhere. And yet, looking back, it had been an odd encounter. Caroline’s blond hair had been bundled under a large beret and she was wearing spectacles. But the disguise, if it was meant as a disguise, had been ineffective. She herself had moved on swiftly, anxious not to be recognized or to seem a spy. A minute later she had seen the girl slowly walking along the aisle, guidebook in hand, the man strolling behind her carefully distanced. They had moved together and had stood in front of a monument, seemingly absorbed. And when, ten minutes later, Alice was leaving the cathedral, she had glimpsed him again. This time it was he who was carrying the guidebook.
Alex made no further comment about Caroline, but after a minute’s silence he said: “Not a particularly successful dinner party.”
“An understatement. Beta-minus, except, of course, for the food. What’s the matter with Hilary? Is she actually trying to be disagreeable or is she merely unhappy?”
“People usually are when they can’t get what they want.”
“In her case you.”
He smiled into the empty fire grate but didn’t reply. After a moment she said:
“Is she likely to be a nuisance?”
“Rather more than a nuisance. She’s likely to be dangerous.”
“Dangerous? How dangerous? You mean dangerous to you personally?”
“To rather more than me.”
“But nothing you can’t cope with?”
“Nothing I can’t cope with. But not by making her Administrative Officer. She’d be a disaster. I should never have appointed her in an acting capacity.”
“When are you making the appointment?”
“In ten days’ time. There’s a good field.”
“So you’ve got ten days to decide what to do about her.”
“Rather less than that. She wants a decision by Sunday.”
A decision about what? she wondered. Her job, a possible promotion, her future life with Alex? But surely the woman could see that she had no future with Alex.
She asked, knowing the importance of the question, knowing, too, that only she would dare ask it, “Will you be very disappointed if you don’t get the job?”
“I’ll be aggrieved, which is rather more destructive of one’s peace of mind. I want it, I need it and I’m the right person for it. I suppose that’s what every candidate thinks, but in my case it happens to be true. It’s an important job, Alice. One of the most important there is. The future lies with nuclear power, if we’re going to save this planet, but we’ve got to manage it better, nationally and internationally.”
“I imagine you’re the only serious candidate. Surely this is the kind of appointment which they only decide to make when they know they’ve got the right man available. It’s a new job. They’ve managed perfectly well without a nuclear supremo up to now. I can see that, given the right man, the job has immense possibilities. But in the wrong hands it’s just another public-relations job, a waste of public money.”
He was too intelligent not to know that she was reassuring him. She was the only person from whom he ever needed reassurance or would ever take it.
He said: “There’s a suspicion that we could be getting into a mess. They want someone to get us out of it. Minor matters like his precise powers, who he’ll be responsible to and how much he’ll be paid have yet to be decided. That’s why they’re taking so long over the job specification.”
She said: “You don’t need a written job specification to know what they’re looking for. A respected scientist, a proven administrator and a good public-relations expert. They’ll probably ask you to take a TV test. Looking good on the box seems to be the prerequisite for anything these days.”
“Only for future presidents or prime ministers. I don’t think they’ll go that far.”
He glanced at the clock. “It’s already dawn. I think I’ll get a couple of hours’ sleep.” But it was an hour later before they finally parted and went to their rooms.
5
Dalgliesh waited until Meg had unlocked the front door and stepped inside before saying his final good night, and she stood for a moment watching his tall figure striding down the gravel path and into the darkness. Then she passed into the square, tessellated hall with its stone fireplace, the hall which, on winter nights, seemed to echo faintly with the childish voices of Victorian rectors’ children and which, for Meg, had always held a faintly ecclesiastical smell. Folding her coat over the ornate wooden newel post at the foot of the stairs, she went through to the kitchen and the last task of the day, setting out the Copleys’ early-morning tray. It was a large, square room at the back of the house, archaic when the Copleys had bought the Old Rectory and unaltered since. Against the left-hand wall stood an old-fashioned gas stove so heavy that Meg was unable to move it to clean behind it and preferred not to think of the accumulated grease of decades gumming it to the wall. Under the window was a deep porcelain sink stained with the detritus of seventy years’ washing-up and impossible adequately to clean. The floor was of ancient stone slabs, hard on the feet, from which in winter there seemed to rise a damp, foot-numbing miasma. The wall opposite the sink and the window was covered with an oak dresser, very old and probably valuable, if it had been possible to remove it from the wall without its collapse, and the original row of bells still hung over the door, each with its Gothic script: “drawing room,” “dining room,” “study,” “nursery.” It was a kitchen to challenge rather than enhance the skills of any cook ambitious beyond the boiling of eggs. But now Meg hardly noticed its deficiencies. Like the rest of the Old Rectory, it had become home.
After the stridency and aggression of the school, the hate mail, she was happy to find her temporary asylum in this gentle household where voices were never raised, where no one obsessively analysed her every sentence in the hope of detecting racist, sexist or fascist undertones, where words meant what they had meant for generations, where obscenities were unknown or at least unspoken, where there was the grace of good order symbolized for her in Mr. Copley’s reading of the church’s daily offices, Morning Prayer and Evensong. Sometimes she saw the three of them as expatriates, stranded in some remote colony, obstinately adhering to old customs, a lost way of life, as they did to old forms of worship. And she had grown to like both her employers. She would have respected Simon Copley more if he had been less prone to venial selfishness, less preoccupied with his physical comfort, but this, she told herself, was probably the result of fifty years of spoiling by a devoted wife. And he loved his wife. He relied on her. He respected her judgement. How lucky they were, she thought: secure in each other’s affection and presumably fortified in increasing age by the certainty that if they weren’t granted the grace of death on t
he same day there would be no lasting separation. But did they really believe this? She would have liked to ask them, but knew that it would have been impossibly presumptuous. Surely they must have some doubts, have made some mental reservations to the creed they so confidently recited morning and night. But perhaps what mattered at eighty was habit, the body no longer interested in sex, the mind no longer interested in speculation, the smaller things in life mattering more than the large and, in the end, the slow realization that nothing really mattered at all.
The job wasn’t arduous, but she knew that gradually she was taking on much more than the advertisement had suggested, and she sensed that the main anxiety of their life was whether she would stay. Their daughter had provided all the labour-saving devices: dishwasher, washing machine, spin-dryer, all housed in a disused stillroom near the back door, although until she came the Copleys had been reluctant to use them in case they couldn’t turn them off, visualizing the machines whirling away all night, overheating, blowing up, the whole rectory pulsating with an uncontrollable power.
Their only child lived in a manor house in Wiltshire and rarely visited, although she telephoned frequently, usually at inconvenient times. It was she who had interviewed Meg for the Old Rectory, and Meg now found it difficult to connect that confident, tweeded, slightly aggressive woman with the two gentle old people she knew. And she knew, although they would never have dreamed of telling her, perhaps didn’t even admit it to themselves, that they were afraid of their daughter. She bullied them, as she would have claimed, for their own good. Their second-greatest fear was that they might be forced to comply with her frequently telephoned suggestion, made purely from a sense of duty, that they should go to stay with her until the Whistler was caught.
Unlike their daughter, Meg could understand why, after retirement, they had used all their savings to buy the rectory and had in old age burdened themselves with a mortgage. Mr. Copley had in youth been a curate at Larksoken when the Victorian church was still standing. It was in that ugly repository of polished pine, acoustic tiles and garish, sentimental stained glass that he and his wife had been married, and in a flat in the rectory, living above the parish priest, that they had made their first home. The church had been partly demolished by a devastating gale in the 1930s, to the secret relief of the Church Commissioners, who had been considering what to do with a building of absolutely no architectural merit serving a congregation at the major festivals of six at the most. So the church had been finally demolished and the Old Rectory, sheltering behind it and proving more durable, had been sold. Rosemary Duncan-Smith had made her views plain when driving Meg back to Norwich station after her interview.
“It’s ridiculous for them to be living there at all, of course. They should have looked for a two-bedded, well-equipped flat in Norwich or in a convenient village close to the shops and post office, and to a church, of course. But Father can be remarkably obstinate when he thinks he knows what he wants, and Mother is putty in his hands. I hope you aren’t seeing this job as a temporary expedient.”
Meg had replied: “Temporary, but not short-term. I can’t promise that I’ll stay permanently, but I need time and peace to decide on my future. And I may not suit your parents.”
“Time and peace. We’d all be glad of that. Well, I suppose it’s better than nothing, but I’d be grateful for a month or two’s notice when you do decide to go. And I shouldn’t worry about suiting. With an inconvenient house and stuck out on that headland with nothing to look at but a ruined abbey and that atomic-power station, they’ll have to put up with what they can get.”
But that had been sixteen months ago and she was still here.
But it was in that beautifully designed and equipped, but comfortable and homely kitchen at Martyr’s Cottage that she had found her healing. Early in their friendship, when Alice had to spend a week in London and Alex was away, she had given Meg one of her spare keys to the cottage so that she could go in to collect and forward her post. On her return, when Meg offered it back, she had said: “Better keep it. You may need it again.” Meg had never again used it. The door was usually open in summer, and when it was shut she would always ring. But its possession, the sight and weight of it on her key ring, had come to symbolize for her the certainty and the trust of their friendship. She had been so long without a woman friend. She had forgotten—sometimes she told herself that she had never before known—the comfort of a close, undemanding, asexual companionship with another woman. Before the accidental drowning of her husband four years earlier, she and Martin had needed only the occasional companionship of friendly acquaintances to affirm their self-sufficiency. Theirs had been one of those childless, self-absorbing marriages which unconsciously repels attempts at intimacy. The occasional dinner party was a social duty; they could hardly wait to get back to the seclusion of their own small house. And after his death it seemed to her that she had walked in darkness like an automaton through a deep and narrow canyon of grief in which all her energies, all her physical strength, had been husbanded to get through each day. She thought and worked and grieved only for a day at a time. To allow herself even to think of the days, the weeks, the months or years stretching ahead would have been to precipitate disaster. For two years she had hardly been sane. Even her Christianity was of little help. She didn’t reject it, but it had become irrelevant, its comfort only a candle which served fitfully to illumine the dark. But when, after those two years, the valley had almost imperceptibly widened and there was for the first time, not those black enclosing cliffs, but the vista of a normal life, even of happiness, a landscape over which it was possible to believe the sun might shine, she had become unwittingly embroiled in the racial politics of her school. The older members of staff had moved or retired, and the new headmistress, specifically appointed to enforce the fashionable orthodoxies, had moved in with crusading zeal to smell out and eradicate heresy. Meg realized now that she had, from the first, been the obvious, the predestined victim.
She had fled to this new life on the headland and to a different solitude. And here she had found Alice Mair. They had met a fortnight after Meg’s arrival, when Alice had called at the Old Rectory with a suitcase of jumble for the annual sale in aid of St. Andrew’s Church in Lydsett. There was an unused scullery leading off from a passage between the kitchen and the back door which was used as a collecting point for unwanted items from the headland: clothes, bric-a-brac, books and old magazines. Mr. Copley took an occasional service at St. Andrew’s when Mr. Smollett, the vicar, was on holiday, an involvement in church and village life which, Meg suspected, was as important to him as it was to the church. Normally little jumble could be expected from the few cottages on the headland, but Alex Mair, anxious to associate the power station with the community, had put up a notice on the staff board and the two tea chests were usually fairly full by the time the October sale came round. The back door of the Old Rectory, giving access to the scullery, was as a rule left open during daylight hours and an inner door to the house locked, but Alice Mair had knocked at the front door and made herself known. The two women, close in age, both reserved, both independent, neither deliberately seeking a friend, had liked each other. The next week Meg had received an invitation to dinner at Martyr’s Cottage. And now there was rarely a day when she didn’t walk the half-mile over the headland to sit in Alice’s kitchen and talk and watch while she worked.
Her colleagues at school would, she knew, have found their friendship incomprehensible. Friendship there, or what passed for friendship, had never crossed the great divide of political allegiance and in the acrimonious clamour of the staff room could swiftly deteriorate into gossip, rumours, recriminations and betrayal. This peaceable friendship, asking nothing, was as devoid of intensity as it was of anxiety. It was not a demonstrative friendship; they had never kissed, had never indeed touched hands except at that first meeting. Meg wasn’t sure what it was that Alice valued in her, but she knew what she valued in Alice. Intelligent, well read
, unsentimental, unshockable, she had become the focus of Meg’s life on the headland.
She seldom saw Alex Mair. During the day he was at the power station, and at weekends, reversing the normal peregrination, he was at his London flat, frequently staying there for part of the week if he had a meeting in town. She had never felt that Alice had deliberately kept them apart, fearing that her brother would be bored by her friend. In spite of all the traumas of the last three years, Meg’s inner self was too confidently rooted to be prone to that kind of sexual or social self-abasement. But she had never felt at home with him, perhaps because, with his confident good looks and the air of arrogance in his bearing, he seemed both to represent and to have absorbed something of the mystery and potency of the power he operated. He was perfectly amiable to her on the few occasions when they did meet; sometimes she even felt that he liked her. But their only common ground was in the kitchen of Martyr’s Cottage, and even there she was always more at home when he was away. Alice never spoke of him except casually, but on the few occasions, like last night’s dinner party, when she had seen them together, they seemed to have the intuitive mutual awareness, an instinctive response to the other’s needs, more typical of a long-standing successful marriage than of an apparently casual fraternal relationship.
And for the first time in nearly three years she had been able to talk about Martin. She remembered that July day, the kitchen door open to the patio, the scent of herbs and sea stronger even than the spicy, buttery smell of newly baked biscuits. She and Alice had sat opposite each other, across the kitchen table, the teapot between them. She could remember every word.
“He didn’t get many thanks. Oh, they said how heroic he was and the headmaster said all the right things at the school memorial service. But they thought that the boys shouldn’t have been swimming there anyway. The school disclaimed any responsibility for his death. They were more anxious to escape criticism than to honour Martin. And the boy he saved hasn’t turned out very well. I suppose I’m silly to worry about that.”