by P. D. James
—
Four years after her arrival in Alma Terrace, her aunt’s only brother came to visit from Australia. Physically, he and his sister were alike, the same stolid, short-legged bodies, the same small eyes set in square, pudgy faces. But Uncle Ned had a brash assurance, a cheerful geniality that was so alien to his sister’s unconfident reserve that it was hard to believe they were siblings. For two weeks he dominated the little house with his strident, alien voice and assertive masculinity. There were unfamiliar treats, dinners in the West End, a show at Earls Court. He was kind to the child, tipping her lavishly, even walking through the cemetery with her one morning on his way to buy his racing paper. And it was that evening, coming silently down the stairs to supper, that she overheard disjointed scraps of conversation, adult talk, incomprehensible at the time but taken into her mind and stored there.
First the harsh boom of her uncle’s voice: “We were looking at this gravestone together, see. ‘Beloved husband and father. Taken from us suddenly on March 14th 1892.’ Something like that. Marble chips, cracked urn, bloody great angel pointing upward. You know the kind of thing. Then the kid turned to me. ‘Daddy’s death was sudden too.’ That’s what she said. Came out with it cool as you please. Now, what in God’s name made her say that? It gave me a turn, I can tell you. I didn’t know where to put my face. And what a place to choose, the bloody cemetery. I’ll say one thing for coming out to St. Kilda—you’ll get a better view. I can promise you that.”
Creeping closer, she strained her ears vainly to catch the indistinct mutter of her aunt’s reply. Then came her uncle’s voice again:
“That old bitch never forgave him for getting Helen pregnant.
“No one was good enough for her precious only daughter. And then when Helen died having the kid, she blamed him for that too. Poor sod. Sidney bought a packet of trouble when he set eyes on that girl.”
Again the murmur of indistinguishable voices, the sound of her aunt’s footsteps moving from table to stove, the scrape of a chair. Then her uncle Ned’s voice again:
“Funny kid, isn’t she? Old-fashioned. Morbid, you might say. Seems to live in that boneyard, she and that damned cat. And the spitting image of her dad.
“It gave me a turn, I can tell you. Looking at me with his eyes and then coming out with it: ‘Daddy’s death was sudden too.’ I’ll say it was! Helps having such an ordinary name, I suppose. People don’t catch on. How long ago? Four years? It seems longer.”
Only one part of this half-heard, incomprehensible conversation had disturbed her. Uncle Ned was trying to persuade them to join him in Australia. She might be taken away from Alma Terrace, might never see the cemetery again, might have to wait for years before she could save enough money to return to England and find her father’s grave. And how could she visit it regularly, how could she tend and care for it, from the other side of the world? After Uncle Ned’s visit ended, it was months before she could see one of his rare letters with the Australian stamp drop through the letterbox without feeling the cold clutch of fear at her heart.
She needn’t have worried. It was October of 1966 before they left England, and they went alone. When they broke the news to her one Sunday morning at breakfast, it was apparent that they had never even considered taking her with them. Dutiful as ever, they had waited to make their decision until she had left school and was earning her living as a shorthand typist with a local firm of estate agents. Her future was assured. They had done all that conscience required of them. Hesitant and a little shamefaced, they justified their decision as if they believed that it was important to her. Her aunt’s arthritis was increasingly troublesome; they longed for the sun; Uncle Ned was their only close relation and none of them was getting any younger. Their plan, over which they had agonised for months in whispers behind closed doors, was to visit St. Kilda for six months and then, if they liked Australia, to apply to emigrate. The house in Alma Terrace was to be sold to pay the airfare. It was already on the market. But they had made provision for her. When they told her what had been arranged, she had to bend her face low over her plate lest the flood of joy be too apparent. Mrs. Morgan, three doors down, would be glad to take her as a lodger if she didn’t mind having the small bedroom at the back overlooking the cemetery. In the surging tumult of relief she hardly heard her aunt’s next words. Everyone knew how Mrs. Morgan was about cats. Blackie would have to be put to sleep.
She was to move into 43 Alma Terrace on the afternoon of the day on which her aunt and uncle flew from Heathrow. Her two cases, holding all that she possessed in the world, were already packed. In her handbag she carefully stowed the meagre official confirmations of her existence: her birth certificate, her medical card, her Post Office book showing the £103 painstakingly saved towards the cost of her father’s memorial. The next day, she would begin her search. But first she took Blackie to the veterinarian to be destroyed. She had made a cat box and sat patiently in the waiting room with the box at her feet. The cat made no sound, and this patient resignation touched her, evoking for the first time a spasm of pity and affection. But there was nothing she could do to save him. They both knew it. But then it seemed he had always known what she was thinking, what was past and what was to come. There was something they shared, some knowledge, some common experience she couldn’t remember and he couldn’t express. Now, with his destruction, even that tenuous link with her first ten years would go forever.
When it was her turn to go into the surgery she said, “I want him put to sleep.”
The veterinarian passed his strong, experienced hands over the sleek fur. “Are you sure? He seems healthy still. He’s old, of course, but in remarkably good condition.”
“I’m sure. I want him put to sleep.”
And she left him there without a glance or another word. She had thought that she would be glad to be free of the pretence of loving him, free of those slitted, accusing eyes. But as she walked back to Alma Terrace she found herself crying: tears, unbidden and unstoppable, ran like rain down her face.
There was no difficulty in getting a week’s leave from her job; she had been husbanding her holiday entitlement. Her work, as always, was up to date. She had calculated how much money she would need for her train and bus fares and for a week’s stay in modest hotels. Her plans had been made. They had been made for years. She would begin her search with the address on her birth certificate—Cranstoun House, Creedon, Nottingham, the house where she was born. The present owners might remember her father and her. If not, there would be neighbours or older inhabitants of the village who would be able to recall her father’s death, where he was buried. If that failed, she would try the local undertakers. It was, after all, only ten years ago. Someone would remember. Somewhere in Nottingham there would be a record of burials. She told Mrs. Morgan that she was taking a week’s holiday to visit her father’s old home, packed a holdall with necessities and next morning caught the earliest possible train to Nottingham.
It was during the bus ride from Nottingham to Creedon that she felt the first stirrings of anxiety and mistrust. Until then she had travelled in calm confidence, but strangely without excitement, as if this long-planned journey were as natural and inevitable as her daily walk to work, an inescapable pilgrimage ordained from that moment when a barefoot child in her white nightdress drew back her bedroom curtains and saw her kingdom spread beneath her. But now her mood changed. As the bus lurched through the suburbs she found herself shifting in her seat as if mental unease were provoking physical discomfort. She had expected green countryside, small churches guarding neat, domestic graveyards patterned with yew trees. These were graveyards she had visited on holidays, had loved almost as much as she loved the one she had made her own. Surely it was in such bird-loud, sanctified peace that her father lay. But Nottingham had spread out during the past ten years, and Creedon was now little more than an urban village separated from the city by a ribbon development of brash new houses, petrol stations and parades of shops. Not
hing was familiar, and yet she knew that she had travelled this road before and travelled it in anxiety and pain. When, thirty minutes later, the bus stopped at its terminus at Creedon, she knew at once where she was. The Dog and Whistle still stood at one corner of the dusty, litter-strewn village green with the same bus shelter outside it. And at the sight of its graffiti-scrawled walls, memory returned as if nothing had ever been forgotten. Here her father used to leave her when he brought her to pay her regular Sunday visits to her grandmother. Here her grandmother’s elderly cook would be waiting for her. Here she would look back for a final wave and see her father patiently waiting for the bus to begin its return journey. Here she would be brought at six thirty, when he arrived to collect her. Cranstoun House was where her grandmother lived. She herself had been born there but it had never been her home.
She had no need to ask her way to the house. And when, five minutes later, she stood gazing up at it in appalled fascination, no need to read the name painted on the shabby, padlocked gate. It was a square building of dark brick standing in incongruous and spurious grandeur at the end of a country lane. It was smaller than she remembered, but it was still a dreadful house. How could she ever have forgotten those ornate overhanging gables, the high-pitched roof, the secretive oriel windows, the single forbidding turret at the east end? There was an estate agent’s board wired to the gate; the house itself was empty. The paint on the front door was peeling, the lawns were overgrown, the boughs of the rhododendron bushes were broken and the gravel path was studded with weeds. There was no one here who could help her to find her father’s grave. But she knew that she had to visit, had to make herself pass again through that intimidating front door. There was something the house knew and had to tell her, something Blackie had known. She couldn’t escape her next step. She must find the estate agent’s office and get a permit to view.
She had missed the returning bus, and by the time the next one had reached Nottingham, it was after three. Although she had eaten nothing since her early breakfast, she was too driven now to be aware of hunger. But she knew that it would be a long day and that she ought to eat. She turned into a coffee bar and had a toasted cheese sandwich and a mug of coffee, grudging the few minutes it took to gulp them down. The coffee was hot and almost tasteless, but she realised as the liquid stung her throat how much she had needed it.
The girl at the cash desk was able to direct her to the house agent’s office, a ten-minute walk away. She was received by a sharp-featured young man in a pinstripe suit who, after one practised glance at her old blue tweed coat, the cheap holdall and bag of synthetic leather, placed her precisely in his private category of client from whom little could be expected and to whom less needed to be given. But he found the particulars for her, and his curiosity sharpened as she merely glanced at them and then folded the paper away in her bag. Her request to view that afternoon was received, as she had expected, with politeness but without enthusiasm. But this was familiar territory and she knew why. The house was unoccupied. She would have to be escorted. There was nothing in her respectable drabness to suggest that she was a likely purchaser. And when he briefly excused himself to consult a colleague and returned to say that he would drive her to Creedon at once, she knew the probable reason for that too. The office wasn’t busy and it was time that someone from the firm checked up on the property.
Neither of them spoke during the drive. When they reached Creedon and he turned down the lane to the house, the apprehension she had felt on her first visit returned, only it was deeper and stronger. Now it was more than the memory of an old wretchedness. This was childhood misery and fear relived, and intensified by a dreadful adult foreboding. The house agent parked his Morris on the grassy verge, and as she looked up at the blind windows she was seized by a spasm of terror so acute that momentarily she was unable to speak or move. She was aware of the man’s holding open the door for her, of the smell of beer on his breath, of his face, uncomfortably close, bending on her a look of exasperated patience. She wanted to say that she had changed her mind, that the house was totally wrong for her, that there would be no point in viewing it, that she would wait for him in the car. But she willed herself to rise from the warm seat and scrambled out under his supercilious eyes. She waited in silence as he unlocked the padlock and swung open the gate.
They passed together between the neglected lawns and the spreading rhododendron bushes towards the front door. And suddenly the feet shuffling on the gravel beside her were different feet and she knew that she was walking with her father as she had walked in childhood. She had only to stretch out her hand to feel the grasp of his fingers. Her companion was saying something about the house but she didn’t hear. The meaningless chatter faded and she heard a different voice, her father’s voice, heard for the first time in over ten years:
“It won’t be for always, darling. Just until I’ve found a job. And I’ll visit you every Sunday for lunch. Afterwards we’ll be able to go for a walk together, just the two of us. Grannie has promised that. And I’ll buy you a kitten. I’m sure Grannie won’t mind when she sees him. A black kitten. You’ve always wanted a black kitten. What shall we call him? Little Blackie? He’ll remind you of me. And then when I’ve found a job, I’ll be able to rent a little house and we’ll be together again. I’ll look after you, my darling. We’ll look after each other.”
She dared not look up lest she see again those desperately pleading eyes begging her to understand, to make things easy for him, not to despise him. She knew now that she ought to have helped him, to have told him that she understood, that she didn’t mind living with Grannie for a month or so, that everything would be all right. But she hadn’t managed so adult a response. She remembered tears, desperate clinging to his coat, her grandmother’s old cook, tight-lipped, pulling her away from him and bearing her up to bed. And the last memory was of watching him from her room above the porch, of his drooping, defeated figure making its way down the lane to the bus stop.
As they reached the front door she looked up. The window was still there. Of course it was. She knew every room in this dark house.
The garden was bathed in a mellow October sunlight, yet the hall struck cold and dim. The heavy mahogany staircase led up from gloom to a darkness which hung above them like a weight. The estate agent felt along the wall for the light switch. She didn’t wait. She grasped again the huge brass doorknob that her childish fingers had hardly encompassed and moved unerringly into the drawing room. The smell of the room was different. Then there had been a scent of violets overlaid with furniture polish. Now the air smelled cold and musty. She stood in the darkness, shivering but perfectly calm. It seemed to her that she had passed through a barrier of fear as a tortured victim might pass through a pain barrier into a kind of peace. She felt a shoulder brush against her as the man went across to the window and swung open the heavy curtains.
He said, “The last owners have left it partly furnished. Looks better that way. Easier to get offers if the place looks lived in.”
“Has there been an offer?”
“Not yet. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Bit on the large side for a modern family. Then too, there’s the murder. Ten years ago, but people still talk. There’ve been four owners since, and none of them stayed long. It’s bound to affect the price. No good thinking you can hush up murder.”
His voice was carefully nonchalant but his gaze never left her face. Walking to the empty fire grate, he stretched one arm along the mantelpiece and followed her with his eyes as she moved trance-like about the room. She heard herself asking: “What murder?”
“A sixty-four-year-old woman. Battered to death by her son-in-law. The old cook came in from the back kitchen and found him with the poker in his hand. Come to think of it, it could have been one like that.” He nodded at the collection of brass fire irons resting against the fender. He said, “It happened right where you’re standing now. She was sitting in that very chair.”
She said in a voice
so strained and harsh that she hardly recognised it, “It wasn’t this chair. It was bigger. Her chair had an embroidered seat and back and there were armrests edged with crochet and the feet were like lions’ claws.”
His gaze sharpened. Then he laughed warily. The watchful eyes grew puzzled, then the look changed into something else. Could it have been contempt?
“So you know about it. You’re one of those.”
“One of those?”
“You aren’t really in the market for a place. Couldn’t afford one this size anyway. You just want a thrill, want to see where it happened. You get all sorts in this game and I can usually tell. I can give you all the gory details you’re interested in. Not that there was much gore. The skull was smashed but most of the bleeding was internal. They say there was just a trickle falling down her forehead and dripping on to her hands.”
It came out so pat that she knew he had told it all before; he enjoyed telling it, this small recital of horror to titillate his clients and relieve the boredom of his day. She wished she weren’t so cold. If only she could get warm again, her voice wouldn’t sound so strange. She said through her dry lips, “And the kitten. Tell me about the kitten.”
“Now, that was something! That was a touch of horror. The kitten was on her lap, licking up the blood. But then, you know, don’t you. You’ve heard all about it.”