Devices and Desires

by P. D. James

  “Not in the least. Oh, I expect I’ll miss them when they’ve gone, but at present I keep thinking of all the work I’ll be able to catch up on. And I’ll be able to spend more time here, helping with the proofs. I don’t think I’ll be afraid. I can understand the fear and sometimes I find myself almost playing at being frightened, deliberately dwelling on the horror, as if I’m testing my own nerve. It’s all right in the daytime. But when night falls and we’re sitting there by the fire, I can imagine him out there in the darkness, watching and waiting. It’s that sense of the unseen, unknowable menace which is so disquieting. It’s rather like the feeling I get from the power station, that there’s a dangerous unpredictable power out on the headland which I can’t control or even begin to understand.”

  Alice said: “The Whistler isn’t in the least like the power station. Nuclear power can be understood and it can be controlled. But this latest murder is certainly a nuisance for Alex. Some of the secretaries live locally and bus or cycle home. He’s arranging for the staff with cars to take them and pick them up in the morning, but with shift work that means more organizing than you’d expect. And some of the girls are beginning to panic and say they’ll only be driven by another woman.”

  “But they can’t seriously think it’s a colleague, someone from the power station?”

  “They don’t seriously think, that’s the trouble. Instinct takes over, and their instinct is to suspect every man, particularly if he hasn’t an alibi for the last two murders. And then there’s Hilary Robarts. She swims almost every evening until the end of October, and sometimes through the winter. She still intends to swim. The chances of her getting murdered may be a million to one, but it’s an act of bravado which sets a bad example. I’m sorry about yesterday evening, by the way. Not a very successful dinner party. I owed a meal to Miles and Hilary, but I hadn’t realized just how much they dislike each other. I don’t know why. Alex probably does, but I’m not really interested enough to ask. How did you get on with our resident poet?”

  Meg said: “I liked him. I thought he’d be rather intimidating but he isn’t, is he? We walked together to the abbey ruins. They look so wonderful by moonlight.”

  Alice said: “Appropriately romantic for a poet. I’m glad you didn’t find his company disappointing. But I can never look at the moon without visualizing that litter of hardware. Man leaves his polluting mess behind him like metal turds. But it will be a full moon on Sunday night. Why not come here for a quiet supper when you get back from Norwich and we’ll walk to the ruins together. I’ll expect you at nine-thirty. It will probably just be the two of us. Alex usually goes into the power station after a weekend in town.”

  Meg said regretfully: “I’d love to, Alice, but I’d better not. The final packing and getting them off will be a formidable business, and by the time I get back from Norwich I’ll be ready for bed. And I shan’t be hungry. I need to make a high tea for them before we leave. I could only stay for an hour, anyway. Mrs. Duncan-Smith says that she’ll ring from Liverpool Street to say that they’ve arrived safely.”

  Uncharacteristically Alice dried her hands and walked with her to the door. Meg wondered why, in chatting about the dinner party and her walk with Adam Dalgliesh, she hadn’t mentioned that mysterious female figure glimpsed among the ruins. It wasn’t just that she feared to make too much of it; without Adam Dalgliesh’s corroboration she could so easily have been mistaken. Something else, a reluctance she could neither explain nor understand, held her back. As they reached the door and Meg gazed out over the curve of the sunlit headland, she experienced a moment of extraordinary perception in which it seemed to her that she was aware of another time, a different reality, existing simultaneously with the moment in which she stood. The external world was still the same. She saw every detail with a keener eye; the motes of dust dancing in the swathe of sunlight which fell across the stone floor, the hardness of each timeworn slab beneath her feet, every nail mark pitting the great oak door, each individual grass of the tussock at the fringe of the heath. But it was the other world which possessed her mind. And here there was no sunlight, only an everlasting darkness loud with the sound of horse’s hoofs and tramping feet, of rough male voices, of an incoherent babble as if the tide were sucking back the shingle on all the beaches of the world. And then there was a hiss and crackling of fagots, an explosion of fire, and then a second of dreadful silence broken by the high, long-drawn-out scream of a woman.

  She heard Alice’s voice: “Are you all right, Meg?”

  “I felt strange for a moment. It’s over now. I’m perfectly all right.”

  “You’ve been overworking. There’s too much for you to do in that house. And last night was hardly restful. It was probably delayed shock.”

  Meg said: “I told Mr. Dalgliesh that I never felt Agnes Poley’s presence in this house. But I was wrong. She is here. Something of her remains.”

  There was a pause before her friend replied. “I suppose it depends on your understanding of time. If, as some scientists tell us, it can go backwards, then perhaps she is still here, still alive, burning in an everlasting bonfire. But I’m never aware of her. She doesn’t appear to me. Perhaps she finds me unsympathetic. For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn’t believe that, I don’t think I could go on living.”

  Meg said her final goodbye and walked out resolutely over the headland. The Copleys, facing the formidable decisions of what to pack for an indeterminate visit, would be getting anxious. When she reached the crest of the headland, she turned and saw Alice still standing at the open doorway. She raised her hand in a gesture more like a blessing than a wave and disappeared into the cottage.

  BOOK THREE

  SUNDAY 25 SEPTEMBER

  1

  By 8.15 on Sunday night Theresa had finished the last of her long-deferred homework and thought she could safely put away her arithmetic book and tell her father that she was tired and ready for bed. He had earlier helped her wash up after supper, the last of the Irish stew, to which she had added extra carrots from a tin, and had settled as he always did in front of the television, slumped back in the battered armchair by the empty fire grate with his bottle of whisky on the floor by his side. Here, she knew, he would sit until the last programme had ended, staring fixedly at the screen but not, she felt, really watching those black-and-white flickering images. Sometimes it was almost dawn when, awake, she would hear his heavy feet on the stairs.

  Mr. Jago had rung just after 7.30 and she had answered the telephone and taken a message, saying that Daddy was in his painting shed and couldn’t be disturbed. It wasn’t true. He had been in the privy at the bottom of the garden. But she hadn’t liked to tell that to Mr. Jago, and she wouldn’t have dreamed of fetching her father, of knocking on the privy door. Sometimes she thought, with a curiously adult perception, that he took his torch and went there when he didn’t really need to, that the ramshackle hut with its cracked door and wide, comfortable seat was a refuge for him from the cottage, from the mess and muddle, Anthony’s crying, her own ineffectual efforts to take her mother’s place. But he must have been on his way back. His ears had caught the ring and, coming in, he had asked her who had telephoned.

  “It was a wrong number, Daddy,” she had lied, and from habit made a quick act of contrition. She was glad that he hadn’t spoken to Mr. Jago. Daddy might have been tempted to meet him at the Local Hero, knowing that it would be safe to leave her in charge for an hour or two, and tonight it was vitally important that he didn’t leave the cottage. He had only half a bottle of whisky left, she had checked on that. She would be gone for only forty minutes or so, and if there were a fire, the secret fear which she had inherited from her mother, he wouldn’t be too drunk to save Anthony and the twins.

  She kissed him briefly on a cheek which was prickly to her lips and smelt the familiar smell of whisky, turpentine and sweat. As always, he put up his hand and gently ruffled her hair. It was the only gesture of affection which he now made to her. H
is eyes were still on the old black-and-white screen, where the familiar Sunday faces could be glimpsed through an intermittent snowstorm. He wouldn’t, she knew, disturb her once the door to the back bedroom she shared with Anthony was closed. Since her mother’s death he had never entered her bedroom when she was there, either by night or day. And she had noticed the difference in his attitude towards her, almost a formality, as if in a few short weeks she had grown into womanhood. He would consult her as if she were an adult about the shopping, the next meal, the twins’ clothes, even the problem with the van. But there was one subject he never mentioned: her mother’s death.

  Her narrow bed was directly under the window. Kneeling on it, she gently drew back the curtains, letting moonlight stream into the room, seeking out the corners, laying its swathes of cold, mysterious light on the bed and across the wooden floor. The door to the small box room at the front of the cottage, where the twins slept, was open, and she passed through and stood for a moment looking down at the small humps closely curved together under the bedclothes, then, bending low, listened for the regular hiss of their breath. They wouldn’t wake now until the morning. She closed the door and went back into her own room. Anthony lay, as he always did, on his back, his legs splayed like a frog’s, his head to one side and both arms stretched high as if trying to seize the bars of the cot. He had wriggled free of his blanket, and she drew it up gently over his sleeping suit. The impulse to snatch him into her arms was so strong that it was almost a pain. But instead she carefully let down the side of the cot and, for a moment, laid her head beside his. He lay as if drugged, his mouth pursed, his eyelids delicately veined films under which she could imagine the upturned, unseeing eyes.

  Returning to her own bed, she pushed the two pillows down under the blankets and moulded them to the semblance of her body. Her father was very unlikely to look in, but if the unexpected should happen, at least he wouldn’t see in the moonlight an obviously empty bed. She felt beneath it for the small canvas shoulder-bag in which she had placed ready what she knew she would need: the box of matches, the single white household candle, the sharp penknife, the pocket torch. Then she climbed on the bed and opened wide the casement window.

  The whole headland was bathed in the silver light which she and her mother loved. Everything was transformed into magic; the outcrops of rock floated like islands of crumpled foil above the still grasses, and the broken, ill-kept hedge at the bottom of the garden was a mystic thicket woven from thin shafts of light. And beyond it, like a silken scarf, lay the wide untrammelled sea. She stood for a moment transfixed, breathing quickly, gathering up her strength, then climbed out onto the flat roof over the extension. It was covered with shingles and she crept forward with infinite care, feeling the grittiness of the stones through the soles of her plimsolls. It was a drop of only six feet and, with the help of the drainpipe, she made it easily, then scurried down the garden, stooping low, to the rotting wooden lean-to at the rear of her father’s painting shed, where she and her father kept their bicycles. In the moonlight streaming through the open door she disentangled hers, then wheeled it across the grass and lifted it through a gap in the hedge to avoid using the front gate. It was not until she reached the safety of the sunken lane where the old coastal railway had once run that she dared mount, and began bumping over the humpy grass northwards, towards the fringe of pine trees and the ruined abbey.

  The old railway track ran behind the wood of pines which fringed the shore, but here it was less sunken, no more than a gentle depression in the headland. Soon that too would flatten and there would be nothing, not even the rotting planks of old sleepers, to show where the coastal railway had once run, taking Victorian families, with their spades and buckets, their nursemaids, their great portmanteaux, for their summer holiday by the sea. Less than ten minutes later she was in the open headland. She switched off the bicycle lamp, dismounted to check that there was no one in sight and began bumping across the tough turf towards the sea.

  And now the five broken arches of the abbey ruins came into sight, gleaming in the moonlight. She stood for a moment and stared in silence. It looked unreal, ethereal, an insubstantial edifice of light which would dissolve at a touch. Sometimes when, as now, she came to it by moon-or starlight, the feeling was so strong that she would put out a hand and touch the stones and feel a physical shock at their rough hardness. Propping her bicycle against the low stone wall, she walked into the space where the great west door must once have been and into the body of the abbey. It was on calm moonlit nights like this when she and her mother would make their little expeditions together. Her mother would say, “Let’s go and talk to the monks,” and they would cycle here together and walk in companionable silence among the ruined arches or stand hand-in-hand where the altar must once have stood, hearing what those long-dead monks had once heard, but more remotely: the melancholy booming of the sea. It was here, she knew, where her mother liked best to pray, feeling more at home on this rough age-hallowed earth than in that ugly red-brick building outside the village where Father McKee visited every Sunday to say Mass.

  She missed seeing Father McKee, missed his jokes, his praise, his funny Irish accent. But since her mother’s death he visited only rarely and was never made welcome. She remembered the last time, the briefness of the visit, her father seeing him out of the door, Father McKee’s parting words.

  “Her dear mother, God rest her, would want Theresa to be regular at Mass and confession. Mrs. Stoddard-Clark would be glad to call for her in the car next Sunday, and she could go back to the Grange afterwards for lunch. Now, wouldn’t that be nice for the child?”

  And her father’s voice: “Her mother isn’t here. Your God has chosen to deprive her of her mother. Tess is on her own now. When she feels like going to Mass, she’ll go, and she’ll go to confession when she has something to confess.”

  The grass had grown high here, spiked with tall weeds and dried flower-heads, the ground so humpy that she had to walk with care. She moved up under the highest arch of all, where the great eastern window had once shone in an imagined miracle of coloured glass. Now it was an empty eye through which she could see the gleam of the sea and, above it, the sailing moon. And now, by the light of her torch and very quietly, she began her task. She went over to the wall, knife in hand, and began searching for a large, flat-surfaced stone which would form the basis of her altar. Within minutes she had found one and had prised it loose with her penknife. But there was something hidden in the crevice behind it, a thin piece of cardboard pushed deep into the crevice. She took it out and unfolded it. It was half of a coloured postcard of the west front of Westminster Abbey. Even with the right-hand side cut away, she recognized the familiar twin towers. She turned it over and saw that there were a few lines of message which she couldn’t read by moonlight and felt no particular curiosity to decipher. It seemed quite new, but with the date stamp unreadable there was no way of knowing how long it had lain there. Perhaps it had been hidden during the summer season as part of a family game. It didn’t worry her; indeed, preoccupied as she was, it hardly interested her. This was the kind of secret message her friends left for each other at school, hidden in the bicycle shed, slipped into a blazer pocket. She hesitated for a moment, started to tear it, then smoothed it out and put it carefully back.

  Working her way along the wall, she found another suitable stone and the few smaller ones she needed to prop up the single candle. The altar was soon complete. She lit the candle, the hiss of the match sounding unnaturally loud and the sudden flare of the light almost too bright for her eyes. She let the first blobs of wax fall on the stone, then wedged the candle into it, propped it up with pebbles. Then she sat cross-legged before it and gazed into the candle’s steady glow. She knew that her mother would come, unseen but known to be present, silent but speaking clearly. She had only to wait in patience and gaze steadily into the candle’s unflickering light.

  She tried to empty her mind of everything except the question
s which she was here to ask. But her mother’s death was too recent, the memory too painful to be shut out of her thoughts.

  Mummy hadn’t wanted to die in hospital and Daddy had promised that she wouldn’t. She had heard his whispered assurances. She knew that Dr. Entwhistle and the district nurse had opposed them both. There were snatches of conversation she wasn’t supposed to overhear but which, standing silently in the darkness of the stairs behind the oak door which led to the sitting room, came to her clearly as if she were standing by her mother’s bed.

  “You really need twenty-four-hour nursing, Mrs. Blaney, more care than I can give. And you’d be more comfortable in hospital.”

  “I am comfortable. I have Ryan and Theresa. I have you. You’re all so good to me. I don’t need anyone else.”

  “I do what I can, but twice a day isn’t enough. It’s a lot to expect of Mr. Blaney and Theresa. It’s all right saying you’ve got her, but she’s only fifteen.”

  “I want to be with them. We want to be together.”

  “But if they’re frightened … it’s difficult for children.”

  Then that gentle, implacable voice, thin and unbreakable as a reed, carrying the obstinate selfishness of the dying.

  “They won’t be frightened. Do you think we’d let them be frightened? There isn’t anything frightening about birth or death if they’ve been properly taught.”

  “There are things you can’t teach children, Mrs. Blaney, things you can only experience.”

  And she, Theresa, had done her best to convince everyone that they were all right, that they could manage. There had been small subterfuges. Before Nurse Pollard and the doctor arrived, she would wash the twins, put on clean dresses, change Anthony’s nappy. It was important that everything looked under control so that Dr. Entwhistle and the nurse couldn’t say that Daddy couldn’t cope. One Saturday she cooked buns and handed them gravely round on a plate, the best plate, her mother’s favourite, with the delicately painted roses and the holes in the border where you could thread a ribbon. She remembered the doctor’s embarrassed gaze as he said, “No thank you, Theresa, not just now.”