Devices and Desires

by P. D. James

  It was time for her swim, just after nine, and tonight she wouldn’t bother with the news. Upstairs, in her bedroom, she stripped naked, put on the bottom half of a black bikini and over it her blue-and-white track suit. On her feet she wore old sandals, the leather stained and toughened by sea water. From the hall peg she took down a small steel locket on a leather thong just large enough to hold her Yale key, which she wore round her neck when swimming. It had been Alex’s gift for her last birthday. Touching it, she smiled and felt, strong as the metal against her fingers, the certainty of hope. Then she took a torch from the drawer in the hall table and, closing the door carefully behind her, set off for the beach, her towel slung over her shoulder.

  She smelt the resin of the pines before she passed between their slim, spiky trunks. There were only fifty yards of sandy path, thick with their fallen needles, between her and the shore. It was dimmer here, the moon glimpsed fitfully, sailing in majestic splendour above the high spires of the trees now seen and now obscured, so that for a few seconds she had to switch on her torch. And now she passed out of the shadows and saw before her the white moon-bleached sand and the tremble of the North Sea. Dropping her towel in her usual place, a small hollow on the fringe of the wood, she slipped off her track suit and stretched her arms high above her head. Then she kicked off her sandals and began running, over the narrow band of shingle, over the dusty sand above the watermark, over the smooth, sea-washed eddies of the foam, splashing through the small waves which seemed to be falling without a sound, to hurl herself at last into cleansing peace. She gasped at the coldness of it, fierce as a pain. But almost at once that passed, as it always did, and it seemed to her that the water gliding over her shoulders had taken on her own body warmth and that she swam cocooned in self-sufficiency. With her strong rhythmic crawl she struck out from the shore. She knew how long she could safely stay in: just five minutes before the cold struck again and it was time to return. And now she stopped swimming and lay for a moment on her back, floating, looking up at the moon. The magic worked again as it always did. The frustrations, the fears, the anger of the day fell away and she was filled instead with a happiness which she would have called ecstasy, except that “ecstasy” was too ostentatious a word for this gentle peace. And with the happiness came optimism. Everything was going to be all right. She would let Pascoe sweat for another week, then withdraw her action. He was too unimportant even to hate. And her solicitor was right, possession of Scudder’s Cottage could wait. It was increasing in value every month. The rent was being paid, she was losing nothing. And the daily irritations of the job, the professional jealousies, the resentments, what did they matter now? That part of her life was coming to an end. She loved Alex, Alex loved her. He would see the sense of everything she had said. They would be married. She would have his child. Everything was possible. And then for a moment there came a deeper peace in which even none of this mattered. It was as if all the petty preoccupations of the flesh were washed away and she was a disembodied spirit floating free, looking down at her body spread-eagled under the moon, and could feel a gentle, undemanding sorrow for this earth-grounded creature who could find only in an alien element this sweet but transitory peace.

  But it was time to get back. She gave a vigorous kick, twisted herself over and began her powerful crawl towards the shore, towards that silent watcher waiting for her in the shadow of the trees.

  3

  Dalgliesh had spent Sunday morning revisiting Norwich Cathedral and St. Peter Mancroft before lunching at a restaurant on the outskirts of the city where he and his aunt two years previously had eaten an unpretentious but excellently cooked meal. But here too time had wrought its changes. The exterior and the décor were deceivingly the same but it was quickly apparent that both proprietor and chef had changed. The meal, arriving with suspicious promptness, had obviously been cooked elsewhere and heated up, the grilled liver a grainy slab of indistinguishable grey meat blanketed with a synthetic, glutinous sauce and accompanied by potatoes which were underdone and cauliflower which was a mush. It was not a luncheon to deserve a wine, but he fortified himself with cheddar and biscuits before setting out on the afternoon’s programme, a visit to the fifteenth-century Church of St. Peter and St. Paul at Salle.

  During the last four years it had been rare for him to visit his aunt without driving with her to Salle, and she had left with her will a request that her ashes should be strewn in the churchyard there without ceremony and by him on his own. He knew that the church had exerted a powerful influence on her, but she had not, as far as he knew, been a religious woman, and the request had a little surprised him. It had seemed so much more likely that she would have wanted her physical remains thrown to the winds on the headland, or that she would have left no instructions, regarding this as a simple matter of expedient disposal requiring neither thought on her part nor ceremony on his. But now he had a task to perform, and one of surprising importance to him. In recent weeks he had been visited by the nagging guilt of a duty unfulfilled, almost a spirit unpropitiated. He found himself wondering, as he had before in his life, at man’s insistent need for ritual, for the formal acknowledgement of each rite of passage. Perhaps this was something his aunt had understood and in her quiet way had made provision for.

  He turned off the B1149 at Felthorpe to take the country roads across the flat country. It was unnecessary to consult the map. The magnificent fifteenth-century tower with its four pinnacles was an unmistakable landmark, and he drove towards it along the almost deserted roads with the familiar sense of coming home. It seemed strange that his aunt’s angular figure wasn’t beside him, that all that remained of that secretive but powerful personality was a plastic package, curiously heavy, of white grit. When he reached Salle he parked the Jaguar a little down the lane and made his way into the churchyard. As always, he was struck that a church as magnificent as a cathedral could be so isolated yet seem utterly right among these quiet fields, where its effect was less of grandeur and majesty than of an unpretentious and reassuring peace. For a few minutes he stood quietly listening and heard nothing, not even a bird song or the rustle of an insect in the tall grasses. In the frail sunlight the surrounding trees were flushed with the first gold of autumn. The ploughing was over, and the brown crust of the crumbled fields stretched in their Sunday calm towards the far horizon. He walked slowly round the church, feeling the weight of the package dragging at his jacket pocket, glad that he had chosen a time between services and wondering whether it might not have been courteous, perhaps even necessary, to obtain the consent of the parish priest before carrying out his aunt’s wishes. But he told himself that it was too late to think of that now, glad to be spared explanations or complications. Making his way to the eastern fringe of the churchyard, he opened the package and tipped out the ground bones like a libation. There was a flash of silver and all that remained of Jane Dalgliesh sparkled among the brittle autumn stalks and the tall grasses. He knew the customary words for such an occasion; he had heard them often enough on his father’s lips. But the ones which came unbidden to his mind were the verses from Ecclesiastes carved on the stone outside Martyr’s Cottage, and in this timeless place beside the dignity of the great church it seemed to him that they were not inappropriate.

  The west door was unlocked and before leaving Salle he spent fifteen minutes in the church revisiting old pleasures: the carvings on the oak stalls, peasants, a priest, animals and birds, a dragon, a pelican feeding its young; the mediaeval wineglass pulpit, which after five hundred years still showed traces of its original colouring; the chancel screen; the great east window, which once had glowed in the glory of red, green and blue mediaeval glass but which now let in only the clear Norfolk light. As the west door clanged gently behind him, he wondered when he would return or if he would return at all.

  It was early evening before he got home. What he had eaten of lunch had been stodgily filling, so that he was less hungry than he had expected. He heated up the last of ye
sterday’s homemade soup and followed it with biscuits and cheese and fruit and then kindled the fire and sat on the low chair before it, listening to Elgar’s Cello Concerto and making a start on the job of sorting out his aunt’s photographs. Tipping them out of their faded envelopes he sorted them with his long fingers on the low mahogany table. It was a task which induced a gentle melancholy from which an occasional scribbled identification on the back of a print, a remembered face or incident would stab him into pain. And the Elgar was an appropriate accompaniment, the plaintive notes evoking those long, hot Edwardian summers known to him only from novels and poetry, the peace, the certainty, the optimism of the England into which his aunt had been born. And here was her fiancé, looking ridiculously young in his captain’s uniform. The photograph was dated 4 May 1918, only a week before he was killed. He gazed for a moment intently at that handsome, debonair young face which, God knew, must by then have seen enough of horror, but it told him nothing. Turning it over, Dalgliesh saw that it bore a pencilled message written in Greek. The young man was to have read classics at Oxford, and his aunt had studied Greek with her father. But he knew no Greek; their secret was safe enough with him and soon would be safe forever. The hand which had formed these fading characters had been dead now for seventy years, the mind that had first created them for nearly two thousand. And here in the same envelope was one of his aunt herself at about the same age. It must have been one she had sent to her fiancé at the Front or given to him before he left for war. One corner was stained browny-red with what must be his blood. Perhaps the photograph had been returned to her with the rest of his effects. She stood in her long skirt with the high-buttoned blouse, laughing, her hair in two wings on either side and bound above the temples. Over the years her face had always had distinction, but he saw almost with a shock of surprise that once she had been beautiful. And now her death had freed him for a voyeurism which in her life would have been repugnant to them both. And yet she hadn’t destroyed the photographs. She must have known, realist that she was, that other eyes than hers would eventually see them. Or did extreme old age free one from all such petty considerations of vanity or self-esteem as the mind gradually distanced itself from the devices and desires of the flesh? It was with a sense of irrational reluctance, almost of betrayal, that eventually he threw both photographs into the fire and watched them curl, blacken and finally flare into ash.

  And what was he to do with all these undocumented strangers, the women, sloping-bosomed, under immense hats piled with ribbons and flowers, the cycling parties, the men knicker-bockered, the women with their long, bell-shaped skirts and their straw boaters; the wedding parties, bride and bridesmaids almost hidden behind their immense bouquets, the chief participants grouped in recognized hierarchy and staring into the lens as if the click of the shutter could for a second halt time, hold it in thrall, proclaiming that this rite of passage at least had importance, binding the ineluctable past to the unseeable future? As an adolescent boy he had been obsessed with time. For weeks before the summer holidays he would feel a sense of triumph that now he had time by the forelock and could say, “Go as quickly as you like and the holiday will be here. Or, if you must, go slowly, and the summer days will last longer.” Now, in middle age, he knew of no contrivance and no promised pleasure which could halt the inexorable thudding of those chariot wheels. And here was a photograph of himself in his prep-school uniform, taken in the rectory garden by his father, a stranger ridiculously overclad in cap and striped blazer standing almost to attention, facing the lens as if defying the terror of leaving home. That, too, he was glad to see the end of.

  When the concerto was finished, the half-bottle of claret empty, he shuffled the remaining photographs together, placed them in the bureau drawer and decided to shake off melancholy with a brisk walk by the sea before bed. The night was too calm and beautiful to be wasted in nostalgia and futile regrets. The air was extraordinarily still, and even the sound of the sea was muted as it stretched, pale and mysterious, under the full moon and the bright pattern of stars. He stood for a moment under the soaring wings of the mill, then began walking vigorously over the headland towards the north, past the fringe of pines, until, three-quarters of an hour later, he decided to make for the beach. He half-slid down the sandy decline and saw before him the great square hunks of concrete half-buried in the sand, the curls of rotting iron springing from them like bizarre antennae. Moonlight, strong as the last light of the setting sun, had changed the texture of the beach, so that each grain of sand seemed separately illuminated, every pebble mysteriously unique. Suddenly he had a childish impulse to feel the sea washing over his feet and, taking off his shoes and socks, he stuffed the socks in his jacket pocket and, tying the laces, slung the shoes round his neck. The water, after the first sting of cold, was almost blood-warm, and he splashed vigorously along the fringe of the waves, pausing from time to time to look back at his footprints as he had as a child. Now he had reached the narrow strip of pine trees. There was, he knew, a narrow path which cut inland through them past Hilary Robarts’s cottage to the road. It was the simplest way of regaining the headland without having to scramble up the friable cliffs to the south. Sitting on a ridge of shingle he tackled the familiar problem of the paddler: how, with an inadequate handkerchief, to rid the spaces between his toes of the gritty dusting of tenacious sand. That achieved, socks and shoes replaced, he trudged through the pebbles to the shoreline.

  When he reached the powdery sand on the upper reaches of the beach, he saw that someone had been here before him: to his left was a double line of naked footprints, the mark of running feet. These, of course, would be Hilary Robarts’s. She must as usual have taken her nightly swim. Subconsciously he noticed how distinct they were. She must have left the beach nearly an hour and a half ago, yet on this windless night the indentations were as plain in the dry sand as if they had just been made. The path through the trees lay in front of him, leading out of moonlight into the enclosing shadows of the pine wood. And the night was suddenly darker. A low blue-black cloud had momentarily covered the moon, its ragged edges silvered with light.

  He switched on his torch and played it over the path. It caught the gleam of something white to his left, a sheet of newspaper, perhaps, a handkerchief, a discarded paper bag. Feeling no more than mild curiosity, he stepped from the path to investigate. And then he saw her. Her distorted face seemed to leap up at him and hang suspended in the bright glare of the torchlight like a vision from a nightmare. Staring down, and for a moment transfixed, he felt a shock in which incredulity, recognition and horror fused into a second which made his heart leap. She was lying in a shallow depression of flattened marram grass, hardly a hollow but deep enough for the grasses on each verge to shield her body until he was almost on top of her. To her right, and partly beneath her, was a crumpled beach towel, striped in red and blue and above it, placed precisely side-by-side, a pair of open sandals and a torch. Beside them, neatly folded, was what looked like a blue-and-white track suit. It must have been the edge of this which had first caught his eye. She lay on her back, the head towards him, the dead eyes upturned as if they had been fixed on him in a last, mute appeal. The small bush of hair had been pushed under the upper lip, exposing the teeth, and giving the impression of a snarling rabbit. A single black hair lay across her cheek and he had an almost irresistible impulse to kneel and pluck it away. She was wearing only the bottom half of a black bikini, and that had been pulled down over her thighs. He could clearly see where the hair had been sliced away. The letter L precisely in the centre of the forehead looked as if it had been cut with deliberation, the two thin lines precisely at right angles. Between the splayed and flattened breasts with their dark areolae and pointed nipples, milk-white against the brown skin of her arms, rested a key-shaped metal locket on a chain. And as he gazed down, slowly moving the torchlight over her body, the cloud moved from the face of the moon and she lay stretched out before him clearly, the naked limbs pale and bloodle
ss as the bleached sands and as clearly visible as if it were day.

  He was inured to horror; few manifestations of human cruelty, violence or desperation were unfamiliar to his practised eye. He was too sensitive ever to view a violated body with crude indifference, but only in one recent case, his last, had this sensitivity caused him more than momentary inconvenience. And with Paul Berowne at least he had been warned. This was the first time he had almost stumbled over a murdered woman. Now, as he looked down on her, his mind analysed the difference between the reaction of an expert summoned to the scene of the crime knowing what to expect and this sudden exposure to ultimate violence. He was interested both in the difference and in the detachment which could so coolly analyse it.

  Kneeling, he touched her thigh. It felt icy cold and as synthetic as inflated rubber. If he prodded it the mark of his fingers would surely remain. Gently he ran them through her hair. It was still slightly damp at the roots but the ends were dry. The night was warm for September. He looked at his watch: 10.33. He remembered being told, he couldn’t recall when or by whom, that it was her practice to take her nightly swim shortly after nine o’clock. The physical signs confirmed what he thought most likely, that she had been dead for less than two hours.