Devices and Desires

by P. D. James

  “Please have one. Daddy made them.”

  And as he left he had said to her father: “You may be able to bear this, Blaney, I’m not sure that I can.”

  Only Father McKee seemed to notice her efforts. Father McKee, who spoke so like an Irishman on the telly that Theresa thought he was doing it on purpose as a joke and tried always to reward him with a laugh.

  “My, and isn’t it grand the way you have this cottage shining. Couldn’t the blessed Virgin herself eat off that floor now? Made by your dad, are they? And very nice too. See, I’m putting one in my pocket for later. Now, you be making a nice cup of tea, that’s a good girl, while I chat to your ma.”

  She tried not to think about the night when they had taken her mother away: waking to hear those awful groaning noises, which had made her think that there was an animal in agony snuffling round the cottage; realizing that the noise wasn’t outside at all; the sudden terror; her father’s figure in the bedroom doorway commanding her to stay there, not to come out, to keep the children quiet; watching at the window of the little front bedroom with the twins’ frightened faces staring from the bed and seeing the ambulance arrive; the two men with the stretcher; that blanket-shrouded figure, quiet now, being carried down the garden path. It was then that she had rushed down the stairs and almost hurled herself at her father’s restraining arms.

  “Better not, better not. Get her inside.”

  She wasn’t sure who had spoken the words. Then she was breaking free and running after the ambulance as it turned at the bottom of the lane, beating her hands against the closed doors. She remembered her father lifting her in his arms, carrying her back into the cottage. She remembered the strength of him, the smell and roughness of his shirt, her impotently flailing arms. She had never seen her mother again. It was how God had answered her prayers, her mother’s prayers, to be able to stay at home, her mother who asked for so little. And nothing Father McKee could say would make her forgive God.

  The chill of the September night was seeping through her jeans and jumper, and the small of her back was beginning to ache. For the first time she felt a prick of doubt. And then, in a tremble of the candle flame, her mother was with her. Everything was all right.

  There were so many things she needed to ask. Anthony’s nappies. The disposable ones were so expensive and so bulky to carry, and Daddy didn’t seem to realize how much they cost. Her mother said she should use the terries and rinse them out. Then the twins didn’t really like Mrs. Hunter, who came and collected them to take them to the playgroup. The twins must be polite to Mrs. Hunter and not mind. She was doing her best. It was important that they kept going to the playgroup for Daddy’s sake. Theresa must tell them that. And then there was Daddy. There was so much to say about him. He didn’t go to the pub often because he didn’t like to leave them, but there was always whisky in the house. Her mother said that she was not to worry about the whisky. He needed it now, but soon he would begin painting again and then he wouldn’t need it so much. But if he really became drunk and there was another bottle in the house, she had better pour it away. She needn’t be frightened that it would make him angry. He would never be angry with her.

  The silent communication went on. She sat as if in a trance, watching while the wax of the candle slowly burnt down. And then there was nothing. Her mother had gone away. Before blowing out the candle, she scraped away the traces of wax from the stone with her knife. It was important that no evidence remained. Then she replaced the stones in the wall. The ruins held nothing for her now but a cold emptiness. It was time to go home.

  Suddenly she was overcome with tiredness. It seemed impossible that her legs would carry her as far as the bicycle, and she couldn’t face the thought of the bumpy ride across the headland. She didn’t know what impulse led her through the great east window to stand on the edge of the cliff. Perhaps it was the need to gather her strength, to look out over the moonlit sea and recapture for a moment that lost communion with her mother. But instead her mind was seized with a very different memory, as recent as that afternoon, and one that was still so frightening that she hadn’t spoken of it, even to her mother. She saw again the red car, moving at speed down the lane towards Scudder’s Cottage, called the children from the garden, bundled them upstairs and shut the sitting-room door. But later she had stood behind it and listened. It seemed to her that no word of that conversation would ever be forgotten.

  First Hilary Robarts’s voice: “This place was totally unsuitable for a sick woman who had to undergo long journeys for radiotherapy. You must have known she was ill when you took it. She couldn’t manage.”

  And then her father: “And I suppose you thought that after she’d gone I wouldn’t be able to manage either. How many months did you give her? You used to pretend that you were concerned, but she knew what you were at. Watching how much weight she was losing each week, more bone showing through, wrists like sticks, the cancer skin. ‘Not much longer now,’ you thought. You made a bloody good investment in this cottage. You invested in her death, and you made her life a bloody misery for her last weeks.”

  “That isn’t true. Don’t load your guilt on me. I had to come here, there were things I had to see. That patch of damp in the kitchen, the problem with rain coming in the roof. You wanted them seen to, presumably. You were the first to point out that I had obligations as a landlady. And if you won’t get out, I shall have to apply for a rise in the rent. What you pay is derisory. It doesn’t even cover repairs.”

  “Try. Go to the Rent Tribunal. Let them come and see for themselves. The freehold may be yours, but I’m the man in possession. And I pay the rent regularly. You can’t get me out, I’m not that daft.”

  “You pay the rent, but for how long? You could get by when you had that part-time teaching job, but I can’t see you managing now. I suppose you call yourself an artist, but what you are is a cheap hack painter turning out rubbish for undiscriminating tourists who think any fourth-rate original is better than a first-rate print. But they aren’t selling as well now, are they? Those four water-colours Ackworth has in his window have been there for weeks. They’re beginning to brown. Even tourists are getting a little particular these days. Junk doesn’t sell just because it’s cheap.”

  But the twins, tired of incarceration, began quarrelling, and she had to hurry upstairs to tell them it wouldn’t be long now, that they mustn’t come out until the witch had gone. Then she crept down again. But it wasn’t necessary to descend farther than the fourth step. The voices were shouting now.

  “I want to know if you sent that woman here, that bloody social worker from the local authority who came to spy on me and question my children about me. Did you send her?”

  The witch’s voice was cool, but she could hear every word: “I’m not required to answer that. If I did alert them, then it was about time someone did.”

  “My God, you’re evil, aren’t you? You’d do anything to get me and my children out of this cottage. They used to burn people like you four hundred years ago. If it wasn’t for the children I’d kill you. But I’m not having them taken into so-called care just for the satisfaction of putting my hands round your throat. But, by God, don’t tempt me, don’t tempt me. So get out. Get out of my cottage and off my ground. Take your rent and be thankful you’re alive to take it. And don’t ever interfere with my life again. Not ever, not ever.”

  The witch said: “Don’t be hysterical. That’s all you’re good for, threats and violence. If the local authority took those children into care, it would be the best thing for them. Oh, I dare say you’d like to kill me. Your sort always react to reason with threats and violence. Kill me and expect the state to support your children for the next fifteen years. You’re ridiculous and pathetic.”

  And then her father’s voice, not shouting any more but so quiet that she could only just catch the words: “If I do kill you, no one will lay their hands on me or my children. No one.”

  With the reliving of that last awfu
l encounter came anger, and the anger flowing into her legs seemed to give them strength. She could cope now with the ride home. And it was time she was leaving. And then she saw that the beach was no longer empty. Suddenly she began shaking like a young puppy and then backed into the shelter of the arch. To the north, running down from the pine trees towards the sea, was a woman, her dark hair streaming, her white body almost naked. And she was shouting, shouting in triumph. It was the witch, Hilary Robarts.

  2

  Hilary ate an early supper. She wasn’t hungry, but she took a French roll from the freezer and heated it in the oven, then made herself a herb omelette. She washed up and left the kitchen tidy, then took papers from her briefcase and settled down at the sitting-room table to work. There was a paper to be written about the implications of the reorganization for her department, figures to be collated and presented, an argument for the redeployment of staff logically and elegantly presented. The task was important to her and normally she would have enjoyed it. She knew that she could be faulted when it came to personnel management, but no one had been able to criticize her as organizer and administrator. Shuffling the papers, she wondered how much, if at all, she would miss it when she and Alex were married and in London. She was surprised how little she cared. This part of her life was over and she would relinquish it without regret, this overtidy cottage which had never been her own and never could be, the power station, even her job. And now there would be a different life, Alex’s job, her status as his wife, entertaining the right people in the right way, some carefully chosen voluntary work, travel. And there would be a child, his child.

  This overpowering need for a child had strengthened in the last year, growing in intensity as his physical need for her decreased. She tried to persuade herself that a love affair, like a marriage, couldn’t always be maintained at the same pitch of sexual or emotional excitement, that essentially nothing had changed between them and nothing really could. How much commitment, physical or emotional, had there been at the start of the relationship? Well, that had suited her all right at the time; she hadn’t wanted any more than he was prepared to give, a mutually satisfactory exchange of pleasure, the kudos of being his half-acknowledged mistress, the careful dissimulation when they were in company together, which was hardly necessary or successful and wasn’t seriously meant to be but which, for her part at least, had held a powerful erotic charge. It was a game they played: their almost formal greeting before meetings or in the presence of strangers, his twice-weekly visits to her cottage. When she had first come to Larksoken she had looked for a modern flat in Norwich and had, for a time, rented one close to the city centre. But once the affair began it was necessary to be near him, and she had found a holiday cottage less than a quarter of a mile from Martyr’s Cottage. He was, she knew, both too proud and too arrogant to visit her surreptitiously, sneaking out at night like a randy schoolboy. But no degrading pretence was required; the headland was invariably deserted. And he never stayed the night. The careful rationing of her company seemed almost a necessary part of the relationship. And in public they behaved as colleagues. He had always discouraged informality, too many first names, except to his immediate colleagues, too much easy camaraderie. The station was as disciplined as a tightly run ship in wartime.

  But the affair, begun with such discipline, such emotional and social propriety, had deteriorated into messiness and longing and pain. She thought she knew the moment when the need for a child had begun to grow into an obsession. It was when the theatre sister at that expensive and discreet nursing home, only half-concealing her disapproval and disgust, had taken away the kidney-shaped bowl with that quivering mass of tissue which had been the foetus. It was as if her womb, so clinically robbed, was taking its revenge. She hadn’t been able to conceal her longing from Alex, even though she knew that it repelled him. She could hear again her own voice, truculent, whining, an importunate child, and could see his look, half-laughing, of simulated dismay which she knew concealed a genuine repugnance.

  “I want a child.”

  “Don’t look at me, darling. That’s one experiment I’m not prepared to repeat.”

  “You have a child, healthy, living, successful. Your name, your genes will go on.”

  “I’ve never set store on that. Charles exists in his own right.”

  She had tried to argue herself out of the obsession, forcing the unwelcome images on her unreceptive mind, the broken nights, the smell, the constant demands, the lessening of freedom, the lack of privacy, the effect on her career. It was no good. She was making an intellectual response to a need where intellect was powerless. Sometimes she wondered if she was going mad. And she couldn’t control her dreams, one in particular. The smiling nurse, gowned and masked, placing the newborn baby in her arms, herself looking down at the gentle, self-contained face bruised with the trauma of birth. And then the sister, grim-visaged, rushing in and snatching the bundle away. “That isn’t your baby, Miss Robarts. Don’t you remember? We flushed yours down the lavatory.”

  Alex didn’t need another child. He had his son, his living hope, however precarious, of vicarious immortality. He might have been an inadequate and scarcely known parent, but he was a parent. He had held in his arms his own child. That wasn’t unimportant to him, whatever he might pretend. Charles had visited his father last summer, a golden-bronzed, hefty-legged, sun-bleached giant who had seemed in retrospect to blaze through the station like a meteor, captivating the female staff with his American accent, his hedonistic charm. And Alex, she saw, had been surprised and slightly disconcerted by his pride in the boy, attempting unsuccessfully to conceal it with heavy-handed banter.

  “Where is the young barbarian, swimming? He’ll find the North Sea an unwelcome change from Laguna Beach.”

  “He tells me he proposes to read law at Berkeley. There’s a place waiting for him in step-papa’s firm, apparently, once he qualifies. Next thing, Liz will be writing to say that he’s engaged to some socially acceptable sophomore, or do I mean preppy?”

  “I’m managing to feed him, by the way. Alice has left me a recipe for hamburgers. Every shelf of the refrigerator is stuffed with ground beef. His vitamin-C requirements seem abnormally high, even for a boy of his height and weight. I press oranges constantly.”

  She had squirmed in a mixture of embarrassment and resentment; the pride and the juvenile humour had both seemed so out of character, almost demeaning. It was as if he, as much as the typists, had been captivated by his son’s physical presence. Alice Mair had left for London two days after Charles had arrived. Hilary wondered whether this had been perhaps a ploy to give father and son some time alone together or whether—and more likely, from what she knew or guessed of Alice Mair—it had been a reluctance both to spend time cooking for the boy and to witness his father’s embarrassing excess of paternalism.

  She thought again of his last visit, when he had walked home with her after the dinner party. She had deliberately sounded reluctant to be escorted, but he had come and she had meant that he should. After she had finished speaking, he had said quietly: “That sounds like an ultimatum.”

  “I wouldn’t call it that.”

  “What would you call it, then, blackmail?”

  “After what’s happened between us, I’d call it justice.”

  “Let’s stick to ‘ultimatum.’ ‘Justice’ is too grandiose a concept for the commerce between us two. And like every ultimatum it will have to be considered. It’s usual to set a time limit. What’s yours?”

  She had said: “I love you. In this new job you’re going to need a wife. I’m the right wife for you. It could work. I’d make it work. I could make you happy.”

  “I’m not sure how much happiness I’m capable of. Probably more than I’ve any right to. But it isn’t in anyone’s gift, not Alice’s, not Charles’s, not Elizabeth’s, not yours. It never has been.”

  Then he had come over to her and kissed her on the cheek. She had turned to cling to him, but he ha
d put her gently aside.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “I’d like to announce it soon, the engagement.”

  “You’re not thinking of a church wedding, I suppose. Orange blossom, bridesmaids, Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March,’ ‘The Voice That Breathed o’er Eden.’”

  She had said: “I’m not thinking of making either of us ridiculous, now or after marriage. You know me better than that.”

  “I see, just a quick, painless turning-off at the local registrar’s office. I’ll give you my decision next Sunday night, after I get back from London.”

  She had said: “You make it sound so formal.”

  And he had replied: “But it has to be formal, doesn’t it, the response to an ultimatum?”

  He would marry her and, within three months, he would know that she had been right. She would win because, in this, her will was stronger than his. She remembered the words of her father. “There’s only this one life, girlie, but you can live it on your own terms. Only the stupid and the weak need to live like slaves. You’ve got health, looks, brains. You can take what you want. All you need is the courage and the will.” The bastards had nearly got him in the end, but he had lived life on his own terms and so would she.

  Now she tried to put thoughts of Alex, of their future, on one side and concentrate on the task in hand. But she couldn’t settle. Restless, she went through the kitchen into the small back parlour, which held her wine store, and brought out a bottle of claret. She took down a glass from the dresser and poured. Taking her first mouthful, she felt on the corner of her lip the minute scrape of a chip. It was intolerable to her to drink from a chipped glass. Instinctively she took down another and emptied the first glass into it. She was about to throw the defective glass away when she hesitated, her foot on the pedal of the refuse bin. It was one of a set of six that Alex had given her. The defect, unnoticed before, was slight, little more than a roughness on the brim. The glass could be used to hold flowers. She had a picture of them, snowdrops, primroses, small sprigs of rosemary. When she had finished drinking, she washed up both glasses and turned them over to drain. The bottle of claret she left uncorked on the table. It had really been too cold to drink, but in another hour it would be about right.