The Private Patient

by P. D. James

  They walked on. Chandler-Powell could see now that much of his life was going to be planned for him. The thought caused him no disquiet and much satisfaction. He would have to work hard to keep both the London flat and the Manor, but he had always worked hard. Work was his life. He wasn’t entirely sure about the restaurant, but it was time that something was done to reinstate the stable block and the restaurant customers wouldn’t need to enter the Manor. And it was important to keep Dean and Kimberley. Helena knew what she was doing.

  She said, ‘Have you heard anything about Sharon, where she is, what job they’ve found for her?’

  ‘Nothing. She came out of nothingness and went back to nothingness. She isn’t my responsibility, thank God.’

  ‘And Marcus?’

  ‘I had a letter yesterday. He seems to be settling down well in Africa. It’s probably the best place for him. He couldn’t hope to recover from Candace’s suicide while working here. If she wanted to separate us, she certainly went about it the right way.’

  But he spoke without rancour, almost without interest. After the inquest they had rarely talked about Candace’s suicide, and always with unease. Why, she wondered, had he chosen this moment, this walk together, to revisit the painful past? Was it his way of making some kind of formal closure, of saying that it was now time for the talking and speculation to stop?

  ‘And Flavia? Is she, like Sharon, out of your mind?’

  ‘No, we’ve been in touch. She’s getting married.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘Someone she contacted on the Internet. She writes that he’s a solicitor, widowed three years ago with a daughter aged two. About forty, lonely, looking for a wife who loves children. She says she’s very happy. At least she’s getting what she wanted. It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.’

  They had left the avenue now and were re-entering the west door. Glancing at her, he caught her secret smile.

  She said, ‘Yes, she was very wise. That’s how I’ve always acted myself.’

  2

  Helena had broken the news to Lettie in the library. She said, ‘You disapprove, don’t you?’

  ‘I have no right to disapprove, only the right to be fearful for you. You don’t love him.’

  ‘Perhaps not now, not yet totally, but it will come. All marriages are a process of falling in or out of love. Don’t worry, we shall suit each other very well in bed and out, and this marriage will last.’

  ‘And the Cressett flag will be raised again over the Manor, and in time a child of yours will choose to live here.’

  ‘Dear Lettie, how well you understand me.’

  And now Lettie was alone, thinking over the offer that Helena had made to her before they parted, pacing through the gardens but seeing nothing, and now at last, as so often happened, walking slowly down the lime walk to the stones. Looking back at the windows of the west wing, her mind turned to that private patient whose murder had changed the lives of all who, innocent or guilty, had been touched by it. But wasn’t that what violence always did? Whatever that scar had meant to Rhoda Gradwyn – an expiation, her personal noli me tangere, defiance, a memento – she had, for some reason which no one at the Manor knew or would ever know, found the will to get rid of it and change the course of her life. She had been robbed of that hope; it was the lives of others that would be irrevocably changed.

  Rhoda Gradwyn had been young, of course, younger than she, Lettie, who at sixty knew that she looked older. But she might have twenty relatively active years ahead. Was it time to settle for the safety and comfort of the Manor? She contemplated what that life would be. A cottage she could call her own, decorated as she chose, a garden that she could make and cherish, a useful job that she could do without strain with people she respected, her books and music, the library at the Manor available to her, daily to breathe English air in one of the loveliest of counties, perhaps the pleasure of seeing a child of Helena’s growing up. And what of the remote future? Twenty years perhaps of useful and relatively independent life before she began to become a liability, in her eyes and perhaps in Helena’s. But they would be good years.

  She knew that already she had become used to viewing the wider world beyond the Manor as essentially hostile and alien: an England she could no longer recognise, the earth itself a dying planet where millions of people were constantly moving like a black stain of human locusts, invading, consuming, corrupting, destroying the air of once remote and beautiful places now rancid with human breath. But it was still her world, the one she had been born into. She was part of its corruption as she was part of its splendours and its joys. How much of it had she ever experienced in those years of living behind the mock-Gothic walls of the prestigious girls’ school at which she had taught? How many people had she really engaged with other than her own kind, her own class, people who shared her own values and prejudices, who spoke the same language?

  But it wasn’t too late. A different world, different faces, different voices were out there to be discovered. There were still places rarely visited, paths not hardened by millions of pounding feet, fabled cities which were at peace in those quiet hours before the first light and the visitors swarmed out of their hotels. She would travel by boat, train, bus and on foot, leaving the shallowest of carbon footprints. She had saved enough to spend three years away and still have enough to buy a remote cottage somewhere in England. And she was strong and well qualified. In Asia, Africa and South America there could be useful work for her. For years, travelling with a colleague, she had had to journey in the school holidays, the worst and busiest time. This journey, taken on her own, would be different. She would have called it a voyage of self-discovery, but rejected the words as more pretentious than true. After sixty years she knew who and what she was. This would be a voyage, not of self-confirmation, but of change.

  Finally, she turned at the stones and walked briskly back to the Manor.

  Helena said, ‘I’m sorry, but you know best, you always did. But if I need you…’

  Lettie said quietly, ‘You won’t.’

  ‘None of the usual platitudes need saying between us, but I’ll miss you. And the Manor will still be here. If you get tired of wandering you can always come home.’

  But the words, genuine as they knew them to be, were perfunctory. Lettie saw that Helena’s eyes were fixed on the stable block where the morning sunlight was moving over the stone like a golden stain. Already she was planning how the reconstruction could be carried out; seeing in imagination the guests arriving, consulting with Dean over the menu, the possibility of a Michelin star, perhaps two, the restaurant well in profit and Dean ensconced for ever at the Manor to George’s content; standing there happily dreaming, looking to the future.

  3

  In Cambridge the wedding service was over and the guests were beginning to move into the antechapel. Clara and Annie stayed seated, listening to the organ. The Bach and Vivaldi had been played and now the organist indulged himself and the congregation with a variation on a Bach fugue. Before the service, waiting in the sunshine with a small group of other early arrivals, people had introduced themselves, including a girl in a summer dress with short light-brown hair framing an attractive and intelligent face. She had come forward smiling to say that she was Kate Miskin, a member of Mr Dalgliesh’s squad, and to introduce the young man with her, Piers Tarrant, and a handsome young Indian who was a detective sergeant in Adam’s squad. Others had joined them, Adam’s publisher, fellow poets and writers, a few of Emma’s college colleagues. It had been a happy and friendly group, lingering as if reluctant to exchange the beauty of stone walls and great lawn lit by the May sunshine for the cool austerity of the antechapel.

  The service had been short with music but no homily. Perhaps bride and groom had felt that the age-old liturgy said all that was necessary without the competition of the usual commonplace injunctions, and Emma’s father had been seated in a fron
t pew, clearly having rejected the old symbolism of the passing of possessions into another’s keeping. Emma, in her cream wedding dress, a chaplet of roses in her gleaming upswept hair, had walked slowly up the aisle alone. At the sight of her composed and solitary beauty, Annie’s eyes had filled with tears. And there had been another break with tradition. Instead of facing the altar with his back to his bride, Adam had turned and, smiling, had held out his hand.

  And now only a few guests remained listening to the Bach. Clara said quietly, ‘As a wedding I think this can be counted a success. One tends to think of our clever Emma rising above common female conventions. It’s reassuring to find that she shares the apparent ambition of all brides on their wedding day, to make the congregation catch its breath.’

  ‘I don’t think she was bothering about the congregation.’

  Clara said, ‘Jane Austen would seem appropriate. Do you remember Mrs Elton’s comments in the last chapter of Emma? Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business!’

  ‘But remember how the novel ends. But in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.’

  Clara said, ‘Perfect happiness is asking for a lot. But they will be happy. And at least, unlike poor Mr Knightley, Adam won’t have to live with his father-in-law. Darling, your hand feels cold. Let’s join the others in the sunlight. I need a drink and some food. Why does emotion make one hungry? Knowing the bride and groom and the quality of the food from the college kitchen, we shan’t be disappointed. No limp canapés and warm white wine.’

  But Annie wasn’t yet ready to cope with fresh introductions, the meeting of new people, the babble of congratulations and the laughter of a congregation released from the solemnity of a church wedding. She whispered, ‘Let’s stay until the music ends.’

  There were images she needed to face and thoughts which had come unbidden which she needed to deal with here in this austere and peaceful place. She was back with Clara at the Old Bailey. She thought of the young man who had attacked her and of that moment when she turned her eyes to the dock and faced him. She couldn’t remember what she had expected, but it was not this ordinary-looking lad, obviously ill at ease in the suit worn to impress the court, standing there without apparent emotion. He pleaded guilty in a sullen unemphatic voice and expressed no remorse. He didn’t look at her. They were two strangers linked for ever by one moment of time, one act. She could feel nothing, not pity, not forgiveness, nothing. It wasn’t possible to understand him or to forgive, and she didn’t think in those terms. But she told herself that it was possible not to cherish unforgiveness, or find vengeful consolation in the contemplation of his imprisonment. It was for her, not him, to decide how much she had been harmed by him. He could have no lasting power over her without her connivance. And now a verse of scripture remembered from childhood spoke to her with a clear note of truth: Whatsoever thing from without entereth into the man, it cannot defile him; Because it entereth not into his heart.

  And she had Clara. She slipped her hand into Clara’s and felt the comfort of her responsive squeeze. She thought, The world is a beautiful and terrible place. Deeds of horror are committed every minute and in the end those we love die. If the screams of all earth’s living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. But we have love. It may seem a frail defence against the horrors of the world but we must hold fast and believe in it, for it is all that we have.

  Author biography

  P. D. James was born in Oxford in 1920 and educated at Cambridge High School for Girls. From 1949 to 1968 she worked in the National Health Service and subsequently in the Home Office, first in the Police Department and later in the Criminal Policy Department. All that experience has been used in her novels. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Society of Arts and has served as a Governor of the BBC, a member of the Arts Council, where she was Chairman of the Literary Advisory Panel, on the Board of the British Council and as a magistrate in Middlesex and London. She has won awards for crime writing in Britain, America, Italy and Scandinavia, including the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award and the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature (US). She has received honorary degrees from seven British universities, was awarded an OBE in 1983 and was created a life peer in 1991. In 1997 she was elected President of the Society of Authors.

  She lives in London and Oxford and has two daughters, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

  Also by P. D. James

  COVER HER FACE

  A MIND TO MURDER

  UNNATURAL CAUSES

  SHROUD FOR A NIGHTINGALE

  AN UNSUITABLE JOB FOR A WOMAN

  THE BLACK TOWER

  DEATH OF AN EXPERT WITNES

  INNOCENT BLOOD

  THE SKULL BENEATH THE SKIN

  DEVICES AND DESIRESE

  A TASTE FOR DEATH

  THE CHILDREN OF MEN

  ORGNAL SIN

  A CERTAIN JUSTICE

  DEATH IN HOLY ORDERS

  THE MURDER ROOM

  THE LIGHTHOUSE

  non-fiction

  TIME TO BE IN EARNEST

  A Fragment of Autobiography

  THE MAUL AND THE PEAR TREE

  The Ratcliffe Highway Murders 1811

  (by P. D. James and T. A. Critchley)

  Copyright

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2008

  by Faber and Faber Limited

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2008

  All rights reserved

  © P. D. James, 2008

  The right of P. D. James to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 978—0—571—24679—3 (epub edition)