Devices & Desires - Dalgleish 08

by P. D. James

  There was an unused scullery leading off a passage between the kitchen and the back door which was used as a collecting point for unwanted items from the headland; clothes, bric-a-brac, books and old magazines. Mr Copley took an occasional service at St Andrew's when Mr Smollett, the vicar, was on holiday, an involvement in church and village life which, Meg suspected, was as important to him as it was to the church. Normally, little jumble could be expected from the few cottages on the headland, but Alex Mair, anxious to associate the power station with the community, had put up a notice on the staff board and the two tea chests were usually fairly full by the time the October sale came round. The back door of the Old Rectory, giving access to the scullery, was normally left open during daylight hours and an inner door to the house locked, but Alice Mair had knocked at the front door and made herself known. The two women, close in age, both reserved, both independent, neither deliberately seeking a friend, had liked each other. The next week Meg had received an invitation to dinner at Martyr's Cottage. And now there was rarely a day when she didn't walk the half mile over the headland to sit in Alice's kitchen and talk and watch while she worked.

  Her colleagues at school would, she knew, have found their friendship incomprehensible. Friendship there, or what passed for friendship, never crossed the great divide of political allegiance and in the acrimonious clamour of the staffroom could swiftly deteriorate into gossip, rumours, recriminations and betrayal. This peaceable friendship, asking nothing, was as devoid of intensity as it was of anxiety. It was not a demonstrative friendship; they had never kissed, had never indeed touched hands except at that first meeting. Meg wasn't sure what it was that Alice valued in her, but she knew what she valued in Alice. Intelligent, well-read, unsentimental, unshockable, she had become the focus of Meg's life on the headland.

  She seldom saw Alex Mair. During the day he was at the power station and at weekends, reversing the normal peregrination, he was at his London flat, frequently staying there for part of the week if he had a meeting in town. She had never felt that Alice had deliberately kept them apart, fearing that her brother would be bored by her friend. In spite of all the traumas of the last four years Meg's inner self was too confidently rooted to be prone to that kind of sexual or social self-abasement. But she had never felt at home with him, perhaps because, with his confident good looks and the air of arrogance in his bearing, he seemed both to represent and to have absorbed something of the mystery and potency of the power he operated. He was perfectly amiable to her on the few occasions when they did meet; sometimes she even felt that he liked her. But their only common ground was in the kitchen of Martyr's Cottage and even there she was always more at home when he was away. Alice never spoke of him except casually but on the few occasions, like last night's dinner party, when she had seen them together they seemed to have the intuitive mutual awareness, an instinctive response to the other's needs, more typical of a longstanding successful marriage than of an apparently casual fraternal relationship.

  And for the first time in nearly three years she had been able to talk about Martin. She remembered that July day, the kitchen door open to the patio, the scent of herbs and sea stronger even than the spicy, buttery smell of newly baked biscuits. She and Alice had sat opposite each other, across the kitchen table, the teapot between them. She could remember every word.

  'He didn't get many thanks. Oh, they said how heroic he was and the headmaster said all the right things at the school memorial service. But they thought that the boys shouldn't have been swimming there anyway. The school disclaimed any responsibility for his death. They were more anxious to escape criticism than to honour Martin.

  And the boy he saved hasn't turned out very well. I suppose I'm silly to worry about that.'

  'It would be perfectly natural to hope that your husband hadn't died for someone second-rate, but I suppose the boy has a point of view. It could be an awesome responsibility knowing that someone has died for you.'

  Meg said: 'I tried to tell myself that. For a time I was -well, almost obsessed with that boy. I used to hang about the school waiting for him to come out. Sometimes I had the need almost to touch him. It was as if some part of Martin had passed into him. But he was only embarrassed, of course. He didn't want to see me or talk to me, he or his parents. He wasn't, in fact, a very nice boy, a bully and rather stupid. I don't think Martin even liked him although he never said so. He was spotty, too - oh dear, that wasn't his fault, I don't know why I even mentioned it.'

  And she had wondered how it was she was speaking of him at all. For the first time after all these years. And that business about her obsession with him; she had never mentioned that to a living soul.

  Alice had said: 'It's a pity your husband didn't leave him to drown and save himself, but I suppose that on the spur of the moment he didn't weigh up the relative value of a useful teaching career and pimpled stupidity.'

  'Leave him to drown? Deliberately? Oh Alice, you know you couldn't do that yourself.'

  'Perhaps not. I'm perfectly capable of irrational folly. I'd probably pull him out if I could do it without too much danger to myself.'

  'Of course you would. It's human instinct, surely, to save others, particularly a child.'

  'It's human instinct, and a thoroughly healthy one in my view, to save oneself. That's why, when people don't, we call them heroes and give them medals. We know they're acting against nature. I can't understand how you can have such an extraordinarily benign view of the universe.'

  'Have I? I suppose I have. Except for the two years after Martin drowned I've always been able to believe that at the heart of the universe there is love.'

  'At the heart of the universe there is cruelty. We are predators and are preyed upon, every living thing. Did you know that wasps lay their eggs in ladybirds, piercing the weak spot in their armour? Then the grub grows and feeds on the living ladybird and eats its way out, tying the ladybird's legs together. Whoever thought of that has, you have to admit, a peculiar sense of humour. And don't quote Tennyson at me.'

  'Perhaps it doesn't feel anything, the ladybird.'

  'Well, it's a comforting thought but I wouldn't bet on it. You must have had an extraordinarily happy childhood.'

  'Oh, I did, I did! I was lucky. I would have liked brothers and sisters but I don't remember that I was ever lonely. There wasn't much money but there was a great deal of love.'

  'Love. Is that so very important? You were a teacher, you ought to know. Is it?'

  'It's vital. If a child has it for the first ten years hardly anything else matters. If he hasn't, then nothing does.'

  There had been a moment's silence and then Alice had said: 'My father died, killed in an accident when I was fifteen.'

  'How terrible. What kind of accident? Were you there? Did you see it?'

  'He cut an artery with a billhook. He bled to death. No, we didn't see it, but we were on the scene soon afterwards. Too late, of course.'

  'Alex too, and he was even younger. How awful for you both.'

  'It had its effect on our lives undoubtedly, particularly mine. Why don't you try one of those biscuits? It's a new recipe but I'm not sure that it's entirely successful. A little too sweet, and I may have overdone the spice. Tell me what you think.'

  Recalled to the present by the cold of the flagstones numbing her feet and automatically aligning the cup handles, she suddenly realized why she had remembered that summer teatime in Martyr's Cottage. The biscuits she would add to the tray next morning were a later batch of the same recipe provided by Alice. But she wouldn't take them from the tin until tomorrow. There was nothing more to do tonight except to fill her hot-water bottle. There was no central heating in the Old Rectory and she seldom switched on the two-bar electric fire in her bedroom, knowing how worried the Copleys were by their fuel bills. Finally, hugging the bottle's warmth to her chest, she checked on the bolts of the front and back doors and made her way up the uncarpeted stairs to bed. On the landing she met Mrs Copley, dre
ssing-gowned, scurrying furtively to the bathroom. Although there was a cloakroom on the ground floor the Old Rectory had only one bathroom, a defect which necessitated embarrassed, low-voiced inquiries before anyone upset their carefully worked out rota by taking an unexpected bath. Meg waited until she heard the main bedroom door shut before going herself to the bathroom.

  Fifteen minutes later she was in bed. She knew rather than felt that she was very tired and recognized the symptoms of an overstimulated brain in an exhausted body, the restless limbs and inability to get comfortable. The Old Rectory was too far inland for her to hear the crash of the waves but the smell and the throb of the sea were always present. In summer the headland would vibrate with a gentle rhythmic humming which, on stormy nights or at the spring tides would rise to an angry moan. She slept always with her window open and would drift into sleep soothed by that distant murmur. But tonight it had no power to lull her into unconsciousness. Her bedside book, often reread, was Anthony Trollope's The Small House at Allington but tonight it could no longer translate her to the reassuring, comfortable, nostalgic world of Barsetshire, to croquet on Mrs Dale's lawn and dinner at the squire's table. The memories of the evening were too traumatic, too exciting, too recent to be easily assuaged by sleep. She opened her eyes to the darkness, a darkness too often populated before sleep by those familiar, reproachful, childish faces, brown, black and white, bending over her, asking why she had deserted them when they loved her and thought that she had loved them. Usually it was a relief to be free of those gentle and accusing ghosts, which in the last few months had visited her less often. And sometimes they were replaced by a more traumatic memory. The headmistress had tried to insist that she go on a racial awareness course, she who had taught children of different races for over twenty years. There was one scene which for months she had tried resolutely to put out of her mind, that last meeting in the staffroom, the circle of implacable faces, brown, black and white, the accusing eyes, the insistent questions. And in the end, worn down by bullying, she had found herself helplessly weeping. No nervous breakdown, that useful euphemism, had been more humiliating.

  But tonight even that shameful memory was replaced by more recent and more disquieting visions. She glimpsed again that girlish figure momentarily outlined against the walls of the abbey only to slip away like a wraith and be lost among the shadows of the beach. She sat again at the dinner table and saw in the candlelight Hilary Robarts's dark, discontented eyes staring intently at Alex Mair; watched the planes of Miles Lessingham's face fitfully lit by the leaping flames of the fire, saw his long-fingered hands reaching down for the bottle of claret, heard again that measured rather high voice speaking the unspeakable. And then, on the verge of sleep, she was crashing with him through the bushes of that dreadful wood, feeling the briars scratching her legs, the low twigs whipping against

  her cheeks, staring with him as the pool of light from the torch shone down on that grotesque and mutilated face. And in that twilight world between waking and sleeping she saw that it was a face she knew, her own. She jerked back to consciousness with a little cry of terror, switched on the bedside lamp, reached out for her book and began resolutely to read. Half an hour later, the book slipped out of her hand and she fell into the first of the night's uneasy periods of slumber.

  It took only two minutes of lying stretched and rigid on his bed for Alex Mair to realize that sleep was unlikely to come. To lie in bed wakeful had always been intolerable to him. He could manage with little sleep but that was invariably sound. Now he swung his legs out of bed, reached for his dressing gown and walked over to the window. He would watch the sun rise over the North Sea. He thought back over the last few hours, the acknowledged relief of talking to Alice, the knowledge that nothing shocked her, nothing surprised her, that everything he did, if not right in her eyes, was judged by a different standard from the one she rigorously applied to the rest of her life.

  The secret that lay between them, those minutes when he had held her shaking body against the tree trunk and stared into her eyes, compelling obedience, had bound them with a cord so strong that it couldn't be frayed, either by the enormity of their shared guilty secret, or by the small rubs of living together. And yet they had never spoken of their father's death. He didn't know whether Alice ever thought of it, or whether the trauma had erased it from her mind so that she now believed the version he had formulated, had taken the lie into her unconscious and made it her truth. When, quite soon after the funeral, seeing how calm she was, he had imagined that possibility he had been surprised at his reluctance to believe it. He didn't want her gratitude. It was degrading even to contemplate that she would feel an obligation towards him. Obligation and gratitude were words they had never needed to use. But he did want her to know and to remember. The deed was to him so monstrous, so surprising, that it would have been intolerable not to have shared it with a living soul. In those early months he had wanted her to know the magnitude of what he had done and that he had done it for her.

  And then, six weeks after the funeral, he had suddenly found himself able to believe that it hadn't happened, not in that way, and that the whole horror was a childhood fantasy. He would lie awake at night and see his father's crumbling figure, the leap of blood like a scarlet fountain, would hear the harshly whispered words. In this revised and comforting version there had been a second of delay, no more, and then he had raced for the house shouting for help. And there was a second and even more admirable fantasy in which he had knelt at his father's side, had pressed his clenched fist hard into the groin, quenching the spurting blood, had whispered reassurance into those dying eyes. It had been too late, of course; but he had tried. He had done his best. The coroner had praised him, that precise little man with his half-moon spectacles, his face like a querulous parrot. 'I congratulate the deceased's son who acted with commendable promptness and courage and did everything possible to try to save his father's life.'

  The relief of being able to believe in his innocence was at first so great that temporarily it overwhelmed him. He had lain in bed night after night drifting into sleep on a tide of euphoria. But he had known, even then, that this self-administered absolution was like a drug in the bloodstream. It was comforting and easy, but it wasn't for him. That way lay a danger more destructive even than guilt. He had told himself: 'I must never believe that a lie is the truth. I may tell lies all my life if it's expedient but I must know them for what they are and I must never tell them to myself. Facts are facts. I have to accept them and face them and then I can learn how to deal with them. I can look for reasons for what I did and call those reasons excuses; what he did to Alice, how he bullied Mother, how I hated him. I can attempt to justify his death at least to myself. But I did what I did and he died as he died.'

  And with that acceptance came a kind of peace. After a few years he was able to believe that guilt itself was an indulgence, that he didn't need to suffer it unless he chose. And then there came a time when he felt a pride in the deed, in the courage, the audacity, the resolution which had made it possible. But that, too, he knew was dangerous. And for years afterwards he hardly thought of his father. Neither his mother nor Alice ever spoke of him except in the company of casual acquaintances who felt the need to utter embarrassed condolences from which there was no escape. But in the family only once was his name mentioned.

  A year after the death his mother had married Edmund Morgan, a widowed church organist of mind-numbing dullness, and had retired with him to Bognor Regis where they lived on his father's insurance money in a spacious bungalow in sight of the sea, in an obsessive mutual devotion which mirrored the meticulous order and tidiness of their world. His mother always spoke of her new husband as Mr Morgan. 'If I don't talk to you about your father, Alex, it isn't that I've forgotten him, but Mr Morgan wouldn't like it.' The phrase had become a catchword between him and Alice. The conjunction of Morgan's job and his instrument offered endless possibilities of adolescent jokes, particularly when he and
their mother were on honeymoon. 'I expect Mr Morgan is pulling out all his stops.' 'Do you suppose Mr Morgan is changing his combinations?' 'Poor Mr Morgan, labouring away. I hope he doesn't run out of wind.' They were wary, reticent children, yet this joke would reduce them to screams of helpless laughter. Mr Morgan and his organ releasing them into hysterical laughter had anaesthetized the horror of the past.

  And then, when he was about eighteen, reality of another kind intruded itself and he said aloud, 'I didn't do it for Alice, I did it for myself, and thought how extraordinary it was that it had taken four years to discover that fact. And yet was it a fact, was it the truth, or was it merely a psychological speculation which in certain moods he found it interesting to contemplate?

  Now, looking out over the headland to the eastern sky already flushed with the first faint gold of dawn, he said aloud: 'I let my father die deliberately. That is a fact. All the rest is pointless speculation.' In fiction, he thought, Alice and I should have been tormented by our joint knowledge, distrustful, guilt-ridden, unable to live apart yet miserable together. Yet since his father's death there had been nothing between him and his sister but companionship, affection, peace.

  But now, nearly thirty years later, when he thought he had long come to terms with the deed and his own reaction to it, memory had begun to stir again. It had started with the first Whistler murder. The word 'murder' itself constantly on someone's lips, like a sonorous curse, seemed to have the power to evoke those half-suppressed images of his father's face which had become as unclear, as devoid of any life, as an old photograph. But in the last six months his father's image had begun to intrude on his consciousness at odd moments, in the middle of a meeting, across a boardroom table, in a gesture, the droop of an eyelid, the tone of a voice, the line of a speaker's mouth, the shape of fingers splayed to an open fire. His father's ghost had returned in the tangle of late-summer foliage, the first fall of the leaves, the tentative autumn smells. He wondered if the same thing was happening to Alice. For all their mutual sympathy, for all the sense he had of their being irrevocably bound together, this was the one question he knew he would never ask.