Devices and Desires

by P. D. James

  He said: “We make love. Or, if you prefer it, we copulate.”

  “Honestly, Alex, that’s disgusting. I think that word is really disgusting.”

  “And do you do it with him? Sleep, go to bed, make love, copulate?”

  “No, I don’t. Not that it’s any business of yours. He thinks it would be wrong. That means he doesn’t really want to. If men want to they usually do.”

  He said: “That has been my experience, certainly.”

  They lay side by side like effigies, both staring at the sky. She seemed content not to talk. So the question had at last been put and answered. It had been with shame and some irritation that he had recognized in himself for the first time the nagging of jealousy. More shaming had been his reluctance to put it to the test. And there were those other questions he wanted to ask but daren’t. “What do I mean to you?,” “Is this important?,” “What do you expect of me?” And, most important of all, but unanswerable, “Do you love me?” With his wife he had known precisely where he was. No marriage had begun with a more definite understanding of what each required of the other. Their unwritten, unspoken, only half-acknowledged prenuptial agreement had needed no formal ratification. He would earn most of the money, she would work if and when she chose. She had never been particularly enthusiastic about her job as interior designer. In return his home would be run with efficiency and reasonable economy. They would take separate holidays at least once every two years; they would have at most two children and at a time of her choosing; neither would publicly humiliate the other, the spectrum of marital offences under this heading ranging from spoiling the other’s dinnerparty stories to a too-public infidelity. It had been a success. They had liked each other, got on with remarkably little rancour, and he had been genuinely upset, if principally in his pride, when she had left him. Fortunately marital failure had been mitigated by the public knowledge of her lover’s wealth. He realized that to a materialistic society losing a wife to a millionaire hardly counted as failure. In their friends’ eyes it would have been unreasonably proprietorial of him not to have released her with a minimum of fuss. But to do her justice, Liz had loved Gregory, would have followed him to California money or no money. He saw again in memory that transformed laughing face, heard her ruefully apologetic voice.

  “It’s the real thing this time, darling. I never expected it and I can still hardly believe it. Try not to feel too bad, it isn’t your fault. There’s nothing to be done.”

  The real thing. So there was this mysterious real thing before which everything went down, obligations, habit, responsibility, duty. And now, lying in the dunes, seeing the sky through the rigid stalks of marram grasses, he thought about it almost with terror. Surely he hadn’t found it at last and with a girl less than half his age, intelligent but uneducated, promiscuous and burdened with an illegitimate child. And he didn’t deceive himself about the nature of her hold on him. No lovemaking had ever been as erotic or as liberating as their half-illicit couplings on unyielding sand within yards of the crashing tide.

  Sometimes he would find himself indulging in fantasy, would picture them together in London in his new flat. The flat, as yet unsought, no more than a vague possibility among others, would assume dimensions, location, a horribly plausible reality in which he found himself arranging his pictures carefully on a nonexistent wall, thinking over the disposal of his household goods, the exact location of his stereo system. The flat overlooked the Thames. He could see the wide windows giving a view over the river as far as Tower Bridge, the huge bed, Amy’s curved body striped with bands of sunlight from the slatted wooden blinds. Then the sweet, deluding pictures would dissolve into bleak reality. There was the child. She would want the child with her. Of course she would. Anyway, who else could look after it? He could see the indulgent amusement on the faces of his friends, the pleasure of his enemies, the child lurching, sticky-fingered, about the flat. He could smell in imagination what Liz had never let him know in actuality—the smell of sour milk and dirty nappies—could picture the dreadful lack of peace and privacy. He needed these realities, deliberately emphasized, to bring him back to sanity. He was horrified that even for a few minutes he could seriously have contemplated such destructive stupidity. He thought: I’m obsessed by her. All right, just for these last few weeks I’ll enjoy my obsession. This late summer would be brief enough, the warm unseasonable days of mellow sunshine couldn’t last. Already the evenings were darkening. Soon he would smell the first sour tang of winter on the sea breezes. There would be no more lying in the warm sand dunes. She couldn’t visit Martyr’s Cottage again; that would be recklessly stupid. It was easy to convince himself that with care, when Alice was in London and no visitors expected, they could be together in his bedroom perhaps even for a whole night, but he knew that he would never risk it. Little on the headland was private for long. This was his St. Martin’s summer, an autumnal madness, nothing that the first cold of winter couldn’t wither.

  But now she said, as if there had been no period of silence between them, “Neil’s my friend, OK? Why do you want to talk about him anyway?”

  “I don’t. But I wish he’d civilize his living arrangements. That caravan is in direct line of my bedroom windows. It’s an eyesore.”

  “You’d need binoculars to see it from your windows. And so is your bloody great power station, an eyesore. That’s in everyone’s direct line; we all have to look at that.”

  He put out his hand to her shoulder, warm under the gritty film of sand, and said with mock pomposity: “It’s generally agreed that, given the constraints imposed by its function and the site, the power station is rather successful architecturally.”

  “Agreed by whom?”

  “I think so, for one.”

  “Well, you would, wouldn’t you? Anyway, you ought to be grateful to Neil. If he didn’t look after Timmy I wouldn’t be here.”

  He said: “That whole thing is primitive. He’s got a wood stove in there, hasn’t he? If that blows up you won’t last a minute, all three of you, particularly if the door jams.”

  “We don’t lock it. Don’t be daft. And we let the fire go out at night. And suppose your place blows up. It won’t be just the three of us, will it? Bloody hell, it won’t. Not only humans either. What about Smudge and Whisky? They’ve got a point of view.”

  “It won’t blow up. You’ve been listening to his scare-mongering nonsense. If you’re worried about nuclear power ask me. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  “You mean while you’re poking me you’ll explain all about nuclear power? Oh boy, I’ll certainly be able to take it in.”

  And then she turned to him again. The pattern of sand on her shoulder glistened and he felt her mouth moving over his upper lip, his nipples, his belly. And then she knelt over him and the round childish face with its bush of bright hair shut out the sky.

  Five minutes later she rolled apart from him and began shaking the sand from her shirt and jeans. Tugging the jeans over her thighs, she said: “Why don’t you do something about that bitch at Larksoken, the one suing Neil? You could stop her. You’re the boss.”

  The question—or was it a demand—shocked him out of his fantasy as crudely as if, unprovoked, she had suddenly slapped his face. In their four meetings she had never questioned him about his job, had seldom mentioned the power station except, as on this afternoon, to complain half-seriously that it spoilt the view. He hadn’t made a deliberate decision to keep her out of his private and professional life. When they were together, that life hardly entered into his own consciousness. The man who lay with Amy in the dunes had nothing to do with that burdened, ambitious, calculating scientist who ran Larksoken, nothing to do with Alice’s brother, with Elizabeth’s ex-husband, with Hilary’s ex-lover. Now he wondered, with a mixture of irritation and dismay, whether she had deliberately chosen to ignore those invisible keep-out signs. And if he had been unconfiding, then so had she. He knew little more about her now than when they had fir
st encountered each other in the abbey ruins on a blustery August evening less than six weeks earlier, had for a minute stood and gazed and had then moved silently towards each other in a wordless, amazed recognition. Later that evening she had told him that she came from Newcastle, that her widowed father had remarried and that she and her stepmother couldn’t get on. She had moved down to London and lived in squats. It had sounded commonplace enough but he hadn’t quite believed it, nor, he suspected, did she care whether or not he did. Her accent was more Cockney than north-east. He had never asked about the child, partly from a kind of delicacy but mainly because he preferred not to think of her as a mother, and she had volunteered no information about Timmy or his father.

  She said: “Well, why don’t you? Like I said, you’re the boss.”

  “Not over my staff’s private lives. If Hilary Robarts thinks she has been libelled and seeks redress, I can’t prevent her from going to law.”

  “You could if you wanted to. And Neil only wrote what was true.”

  “That is a dangerous defence to a libel action. Pascoe would be ill advised to rely on it.”

  “She won’t get any money. He hasn’t got any. And if he has to pay costs it will ruin him.”

  “He should have thought of that earlier.”

  She lay back with a little thud and for a few minutes they were both silent. Then she said, as casually as if the previous conversation had been trivial small talk which was already half-forgotten: “What about next Sunday? I could get away late afternoon. OK by you?”

  So she bore no grudge. It wasn’t important to her, or if it was, she had decided to drop it, at least for now. And he could put from him the treacherous suspicion that their first meeting had been contrived, part of a plan devised by her and Pascoe to exploit his influence with Hilary. But that, surely, was ridiculous. He had only to recall the inevitability of their first coming together, her passionate, uncomplicated animal gusto in their lovemaking, to know that the thought was paranoid. He would be here on Sunday afternoon. It might be their last time together. Already he had half-decided that it had to be. He would free himself from this enslavement, sweet as it was, as he had freed himself from Hilary. And he knew, with a regret which was almost as strong as grief, that with this parting there would be no protests, no appeals, no desperate clinging to the past. Amy would accept his leaving as calmly as she had accepted his arrival.

  He said: “OK. About four-thirty, then. Sunday the twenty-fifth.”

  And now time, which in the last ten minutes seemed mysteriously to have halted, flowed again, and he was standing at his bedroom window five days later watching the great ball of the sun rise out of the sea to stain the horizon and spread over the eastern sky the veins and arteries of the new day. Sunday the 25th. He had made that appointment five days ago and it was one that he would keep. But, lying there in the dunes, he hadn’t known what he knew now, that he had another and very different appointment to keep on Sunday 25 September.

  8

  Shortly after lunch Meg walked across the headland to Martyr’s Cottage. The Copleys had gone upstairs to take their afternoon rest, and for a moment she wondered whether to tell them to lock their bedroom door. But she told herself that the precaution was surely unnecessary and ridiculous. She would bolt the back door and lock the front door after her as she left, and she wouldn’t be gone for long. And they were perfectly happy to be left. Sometimes it seemed to her that old age reduced anxiety. They could look at the power station without the slightest premonition of disaster, and the horror of the Whistler seemed as much beyond their interest as it was their comprehension. The greatest excitement in their lives, which had to be planned with meticulous care and some anxiety, was a drive into Norwich or Ipswich to shop.

  It was a beautiful afternoon, warmer than most in the past, disappointing summer. There was a gentle breeze and from time to time Meg paused and lifted her head to feel the warmth of the sun and the sweet-smelling air moving against her cheeks. The turf was springy beneath her feet and to the south the abbey stones, no longer mysterious or sinister, gleamed golden against the blue, untroubled sea.

  She did not need to ring. The door at Martyr’s Cottage stood open, as it often did in sunny weather, and she called out to Alice before, in response to her answering voice, moving down the corridor to the kitchen. The cottage was redolent with the zesty smell of lemon overlaying the more familiar tang of polish, wine and woodsmoke. It was a smell so keen that it momentarily brought back the holiday she and Martin had spent in Amalfi, the trudge hand-in-hand up the winding road to the mountaintop, the pile of lemons and oranges by the roadside, putting their noses to those golden, pitted skins, the laughter and the happiness. The image experienced in a flash of gold, a flush of warmth to her face, was so vivid that for a second she hesitated at the kitchen door as if disorientated. Then her vision cleared and she saw the familiar objects, the Aga and the gas stove with the nearby working surfaces, the table of polished oak in the middle of the room with its four elegantly crafted chairs, and at the far end Alice’s office with the walls covered in bookshelves and her desk piled with proofs. Alice was standing working at the table, wearing her long fawn smock.

  She said: “As you can see, I’m making lemon curd. Alex and I enjoy it occasionally and I enjoy making it, which I suppose is sufficient justification for the trouble.”

  “We hardly ever had it—Martin and I, that is. I don’t think I’ve eaten it since childhood. Mother bought it occasionally as a treat for Sunday tea.”

  “If she bought it, then you don’t know what it ought to taste like.”

  Meg laughed and settled into the wicker chair to the left of the fireplace. It was pale green and closely woven with arms and an elegant, high curved back. She never asked if she could help in the kitchen, since she knew that Alice would be irritated by an offer which she knew to be impractical and insincere. Help was neither needed nor welcomed. But Meg loved to sit quietly and watch. Was it perhaps a memory of childhood, she wondered, that made watching a woman cooking in her own kitchen so extraordinarily reassuring and satisfying? If so, modern children were being deprived of yet one more source of comfort in their increasingly disordered and frightening world.

  She said: “Mother didn’t make lemon curd, but she did enjoy cooking. It was all very simple, though.”

  “That’s the difficult kind. And I suppose you helped her. I can picture you in your pinafore making gingerbread men.”

  “She used to give me a piece of the dough when she was making pastry. By the time I’d finished pounding it, rolling it and shaping it, it was dun-coloured. And I used to cut out shaped biscuits. And, yes, I did make gingerbread men, with currants for their eyes; didn’t you?”

  “No. My mother didn’t spend much time in the kitchen. She wasn’t a good cook, and my father’s criticism destroyed what little confidence she had. He paid for a local woman to come in daily to cook the evening meal, virtually the only one he ate at home except on Sundays. She wouldn’t come at weekends, so family meals then tended to be acrimonious. It was an odd arrangement, and Mrs. Watkins was an odd woman. She was a good cook but worked in a perpetual lather of bad temper, and she certainly didn’t welcome children in her kitchen. I only became interested in cookery when I was taking my degree in modern languages in London and spent a term in France. That’s how it began. I found my necessary passion. I realized that I didn’t have to teach or translate or become some man’s overqualified secretary.”

  Meg didn’t reply. Alice had only once before spoken of her family or her past life, and she felt that to comment or question might cause her friend to regret the moment of rare confidence. She leaned comfortably back and watched as the deft, familiar, long-fingered hands moved confidently about their business. Before Alice on the table were eight large eggs in a blue shallow bowl and, beside it, a plate with a slab of butter and another with four lemons. She was rubbing the lemons with lumps of sugar until the lumps crumbled into a bowl, when she w
ould pick up another and again begin patiently working away.

  She said: “This will make two pounds. I’ll give you a jar to take to the Copleys if you think they’d like it.”

  “I’m sure they would, but I’ll be eating it alone. That’s what I’ve come to tell you. I can’t stay long. Their daughter is insisting that they go to her until the Whistler is caught. She rang again early this morning, as soon as she heard the news of the latest murder.”

  Alice said: “The Whistler’s getting uncomfortably close, certainly, but they’re hardly at risk. He only stalks at night, and all the victims have been young women. And the Copleys don’t even go out, do they, unless you drive them?”

  “They sometimes walk by the sea, but usually they take their exercise in the garden. I’ve tried to persuade Rosemary Duncan-Smith that they’re not in danger and that none of us is frightened. But I think her friends are criticizing her for not getting them away.”

  “I see. She doesn’t want to have them, they don’t want to go, but the friends, so-called, must be propitiated.”

  “I think she’s one of those masterful, efficient women who can’t tolerate criticism. To be fair to her, I think she’s genuinely worried.”

  “So when are they going?”

  “Sunday night. I’m driving them to Norwich to catch the eight-thirty, getting into Liverpool Street at ten-fifty-eight. Their daughter will meet them.”

  “That’s not very convenient, is it? Sunday travel is always difficult. Why can’t they wait till Monday morning?”

  “Because Mrs. Duncan-Smith is staying at her club in Audley Square for the weekend and has taken a room for them there. Then they can all drive down to Wiltshire first thing on Monday morning.”

  “And what about you? Will you mind being left alone?”