Tower of Silence

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘In so far as the entrants have doubtless had enough judgement for one lifetime,’ it said, ‘we prefer to think we assess their contributions. So we look for imagination, verve and insight; writing which makes us stop and think. We cannot pretend it is always a joy to read; on the contrary, the outpourings of distress are frequently overwhelming. There are the tragedies of a thousand violent childhoods, loss and death; even the approach of release and freedom is sometimes recorded with a sense of fear.’

  The outpourings of distress…The tragedies of a thousand violent childhoods…Yes.

  Koestler Prize goes to Mary Maskelyne…the headlines would read, or maybe it should be ‘Prestigious’ Koestler Prize…Yes, that was even better. And–Astonishing confession of a child helplessly enduring the selfish cruelties of parents worshipping at the shrine of a dead daughter…Betrayal and deceit from those she had trusted…

  Mary could see the headlines as clearly as if they were already written. But it was necessary to appear modest and unassuming for the moment, and so when Joanna Savile asked if Mary was thinking of attempting a novel, Mary said, ‘Well, I do know a novel’s a big undertaking,’ and smiled uncertainly. Was she sounding sufficiently diffident? She might as well embellish it a bit. She said, ‘I expect a novel’s what everyone wants to do eventually though, isn’t it? But I thought I might start with some short stories. To get into training.’

  ‘Short stories are very good discipline,’ said Joanna March, smiling at Mary. She had a lovely smile, the bitch. Ingrid used to smile a bit like that, in the days when Mary still trusted her, in the days when Ingrid could still be trusted, in the days when Ingrid had still had a mouth that could smile and a tongue that could tell lies—

  Ingrid…

  Ingrid had not smiled on the night that Darren Clark died. She had not come to Mary’s bedside until the next morning–until long after Mary had made her carefully hysterical accusation of rape, and long after the painful examination had been made. And this time there was no humiliating off-hand reference to no penetration, and this time there was no slighting instruction to mark her medical records as ‘virgo intacta’.

  Ingrid had looked white and shocked that morning. She stood at the side of Mary’s bed in the infirmary wing and looked down at her, her eyes unreadable. Funny how, when so much else had slithered from her memory, Mary could still remember Ingrid’s eyes on that morning: bleak and hard. And Ingrid’s mouth, the mouth that had done all those intimate things to Mary’s body, had been thin and stern.

  ‘You stupid, silly bitch,’ she had said, speaking very softly so that the infirmary attendants in their little glass-walled office could not hear. ‘What the fuck were you trying to do?’

  ‘He raped me,’ said Mary, staring at the unforgiving eyes. ‘I wasn’t trying to do anything. He made me go into the men’s dormitory with him–he forced me there–and then he raped me. He hurt me a lot. I didn’t know they could get as big as that; he was huge. I’m still bleeding from it.’ Had there been a slight softening of Ingrid’s expression at that?

  ‘You killed him, though. Mary, you killed him.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to kill him. I was trying to defend myself. There was a Coke bottle—Listen, if you’d had that huge horrid thing rammed into you, making you bleed, you’d have grabbed anything handy and smashed it into him.’

  ‘But you do know what you did to him afterwards, don’t you, Mary?’

  ‘Yes, I killed him. You’ve told me that.’ Mary hunched a shoulder and turned her back on Ingrid. ‘I can’t remember it all,’ she said, muffling her voice into the pillow. ‘It’s patchy, the things I remember. But I do remember that I was frightened. I’m still frightened if you want to know. I might be pregnant and that’s very frightening indeed.’

  ‘It’s not that much of a possibility, surely—’

  ‘Yes, it bloody is! He came inside me! I felt him!’ It was unexpectedly embarrassing to say these things to Ingrid; Mary was glad that she was still burying her face in the pillow. ‘What if I’m pregnant?’ she said, mumbling the words.

  ‘Oh, it wouldn’t be a problem. They’ll do a pregnancy test in a week or so, and if it’s positive, they’ll give you a D and C more or less automatically.’

  ‘What?’ Mary sat up in the bed and stared at Ingrid. ‘You mean an abortion?’

  ‘Mary, you wouldn’t want—’

  ‘They’ll make me have an abortion,’ said Mary, clenching her fists, feeling the hot fury start to rise. ‘That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’

  Ingrid said, very gently, ‘Yes, Mary, that is what I mean.’

  An abortion. And those hoped-for headlines, that new wave of interest in the infamous Mary Maskelyne who had been raped and who had given birth as a result, would never happen. All that would happen would be a squalid half-hour on some surgical table, and presumably a note on the medical record–another hateful belittling note!–and life would drag tediously and despairingly on.

  It was at that moment that Mary began to hate Ingrid.

  The pregnancy test was done one week later, and the result was positive. Good. Thank you, Darren Clark, poor bled-out body, stupid dickless corpse, lying in a cemetery somewhere. Thank you. A pity you never knew what you did for me, but there you are, life’s a bitch and then you die.

  Mary was allowed out of the infirmary after Broadacre’s psychiatrists had finally stopped poking and prodding at her mind–‘Why did you feel you had to mutilate him, Mary?’ ‘Because he fucked me, you wankers, why else d’you think?’–and after the other doctors had eventually stopped poking and prodding at her body.

  ‘I’m going through with this,’ she said to Ingrid. ‘I’m not having an abortion, not at any price.’ Nor am I giving up those headlines, said her mind. Teenage murderess gives birth to child after vicious rape…

  Ingrid said, ‘But Mary, sweetheart, even if you could persuade the doctors to let you have the baby, once it was born they’d take it away and get it adopted. You couldn’t possibly keep it. Not in here.’ She took Mary’s hand. ‘They’ll bring such a lot of pressure on you. Mostly because they’ll all be afraid for their reputations. Rape in a government institution—If that got out, it would create such a row.’

  ‘Oh, would it?’ Innocent eyes, remember to give her the innocent-eyes look. (Yes, but hold on to those headlines, Mary, because that’s what this is all for…The notorious Mary Maskelyne yesterday gave birth to a son–a daughter…New episode in the tragic life of Sixties icon, Mary Maskelyne… ‘I know I will never see my child again,’ said Miss Maskelyne bravely, in an exclusive interview…)

  ‘I don’t think they could actually force an abortion,’ said Ingrid, after a moment. ‘But they might make it very difficult for you to keep refusing.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mary slowly, not saying that what she really saw was that Ingrid was not prepared to put her head on the chopping block for Mary’s sake. ‘Yes, I see.’

  To begin with, Broadacre’s governor and Broadacre’s doctors tried over and over to persuade Mary into what they called a termination.

  ‘No,’ she said, clinging to that one word. ‘No.’

  ‘Have you talked to your personal adviser?’ they said. ‘Really talked to her?’

  ‘Personal advisers’ were a new thing; an experiment of the Home Secretary’s, who had gone on television to tell anyone who was interested that people in secure psychiatric units and asylums should be assigned personal advisers, each adviser taking on eight or ten inmates. This was a marvellous innovation, said the Home Secretary unctuously; it was the way forward for mental institutions and criminal asylums, and it was the humane way to treat hundreds of poor unfortunate souls. Most of the attendants and doctors at Broadacre who had listened had said, Jeez, what a lot of crap, the Home Secretary no more cared about being humane than Adolf Hitler: all he was doing was angling for a knighthood when he retired next year.

  But the support Mary had wanted from Ingrid (and failed to get from the cold-hearted
bitch!) came, in the end, from a totally unexpected quarter. It came from the prison chaplain.

  To the chaplain, abortion, for whatever reason, was total anathema. He came to see Mary, talking to her for long hours, yacking on about the sanctity of human life, and about how only God, who bestowed life in the first place, had the right to take it back. He was ugly and tedious and it was a pity nobody had told him how distasteful it was to have hairs growing down from his nose, but he talked about sin and about restitution, and he gave Mary the argument she had needed to screw down the sanctimonious prigs who only cared about saving their careers and preserving their reputations.

  Repentance. That was the reason she used to shut the clacking doctors and governors up when they came at her again with their representations and their persuasions. They wanted to hush everything up, of course; Mary knew that. But she donned the most innocent and the most hesitant of all her innocent and hesitant guises, and she said she understood, at last, how wicked she had been, and that she saw the birth of the child as a way to redress the balance. She had killed her parents, she said, and she knew now that it had been a truly evil thing to do. But with the chaplain’s help she was presently groping her way towards some kind of forgiveness. Some kind of cleansing. Would they, then, have her kill again? she said.

  It discomfited them, because these days a professing of religious beliefs did discomfit people. But it worked. She was allowed to continue with the pregnancy.

  ‘But you do know that they’ll take the child away for adoption?’ said Ingrid. ‘Mary, you do know that?’

  Mary said slowly, ‘The thing is that I’ve never had anything that was really and definitely my own. I never even had a dog or a cat. I’d like to know that I had a little boy or a little girl growing up somewhere in the world.’ She took Ingrid’s hand, moving her fingers intimately against the palm. ‘We might even be together one day, you and I. They might let me out one day, and I might be able to have a share in the child.’ She took a deep breath, and said, ‘They might even let you adopt the child right from the start.’

  ‘Mary, that wouldn’t be possible—’

  ‘Why not? People have children and careers these days. I read about it. There are day nurseries and things. You could do it if you really wanted to.’

  ‘It simply wouldn’t be allowed.’

  ‘I thought you meant all those things you said to me,’ said Mary, thrusting out her lower lip petulantly and snatching her hand back. ‘About loving me. About wanting to be with me properly–a little house together somewhere, where we could grow old together.’ Load of sentimental bollocks, said her mind; I wouldn’t live with you if I was destitute and starving, you stupid ineffectual old dyke! Never had a man, and wouldn’t know what to do with one anyway!

  ‘Oh, Mary, sweetheart, of course I meant them! But—’

  OK, time for a change of tactics. Mary said, very softly, ‘Listen, Ingrid, if you don’t do this for me–if you don’t find a way to adopt this baby–I’ll tell them all what we do together. I’ll describe what you did to me that first time–up against the bathroom wall with the door locked. I’ll say you forced me to do all those things.’

  Ingrid’s fear was instant and unmissable. She turned white, and the pupils of her eyes contracted to pinpoints. She’s remembering Darren Clark, thought Mary. She’s remembering what I did to him. In a tight, breathy voice, Ingrid said, ‘Mary, don’t threaten me—I’ll do whatever you want. Of course I will.’

  ‘I knew you meant what you said really,’ said Mary. ‘And I didn’t mean to threaten you, it’s only that I so long to be with you and to have the child—I’d do anything to have that, Ingrid.’

  She saw with resignation the darkening of Ingrid’s eyes that signalled a flood of emotionalism. Oh God, and now I’ll have to go through one of those tedious sessions in a locked bathroom somewhere, or maybe the linen cupboard on the dormitory landing…

  But there was a price to be paid for most things, and by this time she was good at faking things with Ingrid. And at least afterwards she felt surer of Ingrid, and she could whisper, ‘You did mean it, didn’t you? About taking the child?’

  There was an almost imperceptible pause. But then Ingrid said, ‘Yes, Mary. Yes, I’ll take the child.’

  The birth, when it finally came, was far worse than anything she had ever imagined. Agony. Hours and hours of unremitting pain. Grinding waves of torment so that she began to believe the child so easily conceived was biting and clawing its way out of her body.

  They had put Mary in a little side ward off the main infirmary, because it would be more private. Really, she should have been taken to the nearby hospital, they said, but it happened that one of Broadacre’s nurses had trained in midwifery not so long ago, and no complications were anticipated.

  Only Christabel’s presence enabled Mary to cling to her resolve. Freedom, whispered Christabel, as Mary writhed and moaned on the bed. The attention of the world once again. Maybe even escape from this tedious place. We wove the dreams and we laid the plans, Mary, but there’s always a price, remember? There’s always a price, Mary, every time, and this is the price we have to pay this time.

  All very well for Christabel to say that. It was not Christabel who was gasping with agony in a bed, or whose hair was becoming stringy and sweat-soaked with the pain, and it was not Christabel who was humiliatingly sick during the birth, not once but several times, so that they had to prop her up in the bed and hold the basin under her mouth.

  Dreadful. Disgusting. Yes, but hold on to the plan, Mary, remember the plan. It was announced today that Sixties killer Mary Maskelyne gave birth to a son–a daughter–the result, it is thought, of a secret liaison with another inmate of Broadacre…

  Would that one work? Would people believe the story of a ‘secret liaison’? Would they say, Oh, the poor creature, she found some love in her life at last, but even that was taken away from her?

  Just as, after one final unbelievable cleaving of agony when she thought they were sawing her body in two, they took the child away from her…

  ‘A daughter,’ they said when at last the agony began to recede. ‘A fine little girl. Dark hair and blue eyes. Six and a half pounds.’

  Mary knew quite well that all new-born babies had blue eyes and she did not care how much the thing weighed. When they asked would she not like to hold the child, or suggest a name, she turned her face away, tears in her eyes, and the nurses murmured to one another that she was being so brave, poor thing. They gave her something to help her to sleep; it spun her down into a deep, velvety unconsciousness.

  But just before she toppled over the end of oblivion, she heard quite clearly one of the nurses say, ‘Shall I take the baby now, doctor? The foster parents have filled in all the forms. They’re expecting us to phone them as soon as we can–I’ve got the home number and the husband’s office number in London as well.’

  And the doctor replied that yes, the phone call had better be made, but that the wife, rather than the husband, should be telephoned. Apparently as an afterthought he asked if they were aware of the child’s parentage.

  ‘Not the names, of course,’ said the nurse. ‘But they do know it’s the child of a long-term prison inmate, and they don’t mind in the least.’ Her voice was muffled for a moment as she leaned over to wrap the baby more carefully. ‘Poor souls, they can’t have children themselves, and they’ve been so anxious to adopt.’

  Parents. A husband with a London phone number. The words etched themselves into Mary’s brain as if they were being traced in acid, and as she fell helplessly into the drug-induced slumber her last thought was that Ingrid had betrayed her.

  The next night Mary asked for the sleeping pills again, and the night after that as well. The infirmary people thought she was grieving for the child, and gave them to her without question. Sleep was healing, they said.

  You only had to be inside places like Broadacre and the youth place for a week to find out how to put pills under your tongue
and pretend to take them. Mary had never done it before, but she managed it without any trouble, hiding the pills in a rolled-up tissue under her pillow.

  The plan worked exactly as Mary had hoped. When Ingrid came to visit her in the little side ward two days later it was easy to offer the bitch a drink of orange juice from the plastic bottle on her bedside table.

  ‘We have to drink to the child,’ said Mary, pouring out two glasses. ‘We could pretend it’s champagne, couldn’t we?’ Please, said her eyes. Do this for me, Ingrid. I’ve had to give up my daughter.

  Ingrid, the silly emotional cow, fell for it. ‘We’ll drink to her happiness,’ she said, taking the glass from Mary’s hands, not even looking at it, not seeing the faint cloudiness from the crushed sleeping pills.

  Mary waited until Ingrid slumped back in the wooden visitor’s chair, and then pounced.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  As Krzystof and Patrick walked through the bleak corridors, unlocking and relocking doors as they went, Krzystof asked how Mary Maskelyne came to be in Moy.

  ‘An English inmate in a Scottish unit?’ said Patrick. ‘That’s what you mean, is it? It’s partly to do with a research project I’m heading. I managed to screw a grant out of one of the Edinburgh faculties last year, and then St Thomas’s Hospital in London came up with some funding as well. That’s made it possible for us to get quite a number of likely case-studies transferred here. The various government departments rather latched onto that.’

  ‘Putting all the bad eggs into one basket?’

  ‘Yes. It might sound a bit calculating to work like that–as if we take a begging bowl round–but it’s the only way we can keep going with the research. That’s a vital part of the job, for me. There’s still so much we don’t know about this kind of mania, or any kind of mania, and it’s a sad fact of life that we need sordid dosh to study it.’