by P. D. James
To her astonishment the Frog was there. There was a large canvas suitcase on the bed, its battered lid open. The counterpane was covered with a tumble of shirts, pyjamas and underclothes, only his socks were neatly twisted into balls. It seemed to her that she was simultaneously aware of his look of horror at her eruption into the room and of the pair of pants, soiled at the crotch, which, following her gaze, he shoved with trembling hands under the lid of the suitcase.
She said: “Where are you going? Why are you packing? Are you leaving?”
He turned away from her. She could only just hear his words. “I’m sorry if I distressed you. I didn’t mean … I didn’t realize … I can see now that it was unwise, selfish of me.”
“What do you mean, distress me? What was unwise?”
She came into the room and, shutting the door, leaned against it, forcing him by an act of will to turn and look at her. But when he did, she saw on his face ashamed embarrassment and a desperate appeal for pity, which she knew was as much beyond her understanding as it was beyond her power to help. She was filled with a terrible apprehension, a fear for herself, which made her voice sharper than she realized.
“Distress me? You haven’t distressed me. What’s all this about?”
He said with a pathetic formality: “It seems that your father has misunderstood the nature of our relationship.”
“What has he been saying to you?”
“It doesn’t matter, nothing can be done. He wants me out of here. I’m to be gone before school starts.”
She said, knowing as she spoke that the words were empty, the promise meaningless: “I’ll speak to him. I’ll explain. I’ll put it right.”
He shook his head. “No. Please no, Venetia. It would only make matters worse.” He turned away and she watched as he folded a shirt and placed it in the case. She saw the trembling of his hands and heard the tone of ashamed acceptance in his voice. “Your father has promised me a good reference.”
Of course, the reference. Without that he would be without hope of another teaching job. It lay within her father’s power to do more than throw him out. There was nothing else to be said and nothing she could do, but she still lingered, feeling the need for some gesture, some word of farewell, some hope that they might meet again. But they never would meet again, and what she was feeling now was not affection but fear and shame. He was packing his volumes of the Notable Trials. The case was already over-full; she wondered if it would hold the extra weight. One volume still lay on the bed and he handed it to her. It was the Seddon case. He said without looking at her: “Please take it. I’d like you to have it.”
Still without looking at her, he whispered, “Please go. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.”
Memory was like a film of sharply focused images, the set arranged and brightly lit, the characters formally disposed, the dialogue learnt and unchangeable, but with no linking passages. Now, sitting with a book on contract law open but unread before her unfocused eyes, she was again in her place opposite her father in that over-furnished dining-room, smelling the pungent morning aroma of coffee, toast and bacon. Here again was that solid oak table with the drop leaf, which could be lifted to increase its length, pressing uncomfortably against her knees, the mullioned windows which excluded rather than admitted light, the sideboard with its ornate back and bulbous legs, the hot-plates and covered dishes. Her father had once seen a play in which the upper classes helped themselves to breakfast from a side table. It had seemed to him the epitome of gracious living, and he had introduced it at Danesford, although the choice was never more than bacon and egg or bacon and sausage. How odd that she should still be able to feel a prick of resentment at the silliness of the pretension and the extra work it had made for her mother.
She helped herself to bacon, sat down and forced herself to look at her father. He was eating solidly, his eyes moving from the heaped plate to The Times neatly folded beside it. His mouth, beneath the small scrubby moustache, was pinkly moist. He would cut off small squares of toast, spread them with butter and marmalade, and then cast them into that raw pulsating gap which seemed to have a voracious life of its own. His hands were square and strong, the backs of the fingers spiked with black hair. She was sick with fear of him. She had always been frightened of him and had known that she couldn’t look to her mother for support; her mother’s fear was greater than her own. He had beaten her as a child for every infraction of his petty household rules, his laid-down standard of behaviour and achievement. The beatings hadn’t been severe but they had been unbearably humiliating. Each time she would resolve not to cry out, terrified that the boys might hear. But the attempt at courage was futile; he would continue the punishment until she did. Worst of all, she knew that he enjoyed it. When she reached puberty he did stop. It was a small sacrifice on his part. After all, he still had the boys.
Now, sitting in silence in the library, she could see his face again, the cheekbones broad and mottled under eyes from which she could never recall receiving a look of tenderness or kindness. One of the mistresses at school, after she had received her speech-day prizes, had told her that her father was very proud of her. It had seemed an extraordinary statement at the time and it still did so now.
She had tried to keep her voice calm, unfrightened. “Mr. Froggett says he’s leaving.”
Still her father didn’t look up. He said, with his mouth chomping, “You were not meant to see him before he left. I trust you have made no promise to write or get in touch.”
“Of course not, Daddy. But why is he leaving? He said it was something to do with me.”
Her mother had stopped eating. She cast one frightened, imploring glance at Venetia, then began breaking her toast into crumbs. Her father still didn’t look up. He turned a page of his paper.
“I’m surprised that you need to ask. Mr. Mitchell thought it right to inform me that my daughter was spending literally every evening until late in the bedroom of a junior master. If you had no sense of your own position in this school, you might at least have considered mine.”
“But we weren’t doing anything, just talking. We talked about books, about the law. And it isn’t a bedroom, it’s his sitting-room.”
“I don’t wish to discuss it. I’m not even asking what went on between you. If you have anything to confide I suggest that you speak to your mother. As far as I’m concerned the affair is now closed. I don’t wish to hear Edmund Froggett’s name mentioned in this house again, and from now on you will do your homework here on this table, not in your room.”
Was it that day, she wondered, or later that she first realized what it had all been about? Her father had been looking for an excuse to get rid of the Frog. He worked hard, but he was a poor disciplinarian, unpopular with the boys, an embarrassment at school events. He was cheap, but not cheap enough. The school was losing money; only later did she realize how much. Someone had to go and the Frog was expendable. And her father had been clever. His accusation, unspecific no doubt in its details but horribly clear in its essentials, was one the Frog would never dare publicly to refute.
She had never seen him again, nor had she heard from him. The gratitude for what she acknowledged he had given her was overlaid always with the shame of her weakness and betrayal. She had been fascinated by the game they had played but never by him as a man. And she knew she would have been ashamed if any of her classmates had seen them together.
The knowledge that she hadn’t fought for him, hadn’t defended him with vigour, let alone passion, that she had felt more shame for herself and fear of her father than she had felt compassion, stayed with her to taint the memory of those evenings together. He came now only rarely into her mind. Sometimes she found herself wondering if he were still alive, and would have disconcerting and surprisingly vivid pictures of his hurling himself from Westminster Bridge with incredulous passers-by straining over the parapet at the seething river, or would watch as he crammed the aspirin tablets into his mouth and washed them down w
ith cheap wine, sitting on the single bed in some attic bed-sitting-room.
What, she wondered, had that fifteen-year-old child felt for him? Not love, certainly. There had been affection, need, companionship, stimulation and the sense that she herself was needed. Perhaps she had been lonelier than she realized. But she knew with shame what she had always known, that she had been using him. If she had met him in the street walking with her few friends after school, she would have pretended not to see him.
To a superstitious mind it might have seemed a judgement that after the Frog’s departure the school’s decline accelerated. It might have survived, however, might even have recovered some prosperity as parents, increasingly disenchanted with the local state school and seeking some imagined prestige, discipline and a show of good manners, saw Danesford as a reasonably cheap solution to family problems. But the suicide put an end to hope. The stretched neck of the young body hanging from the banisters in the annexe, the carefully written note with the spelling of “ahsamed” scrupulously corrected, as if the headmaster’s anger dominated even this last act of pathetic rebellion, were not things which could be covered up or explained away. It seemed to Venetia that, with the severing of that taut pyjama cord, more than the body was cut down. The weeks that followed, the inquest, the burial, the comments in the papers, the allegations of beatings and over-severity, became subsumed in the picture of departing cars, of small boys clutching their bulging cases and making their way, shame-faced or triumphant, to the waiting vehicles. The school died in a sickroom stench of scandal, tragedy and, by the end, almost relief that the agony was over, the undertaker’s van at last at the door.
The family moved to London. Perhaps, she thought, her father, like so many before him, had seen the great city as an urban jungle where loneliness at least walked with the safety of anonymity, where no questions were asked unless invited and where the predators had more satisfying prey than a disgraced schoolmaster. The school premises, now to be converted into a roadhouse and a motel, provided sufficient cash to buy a small terraced house behind Shepherd’s Bush and to furnish an income which augmented the pittance he occasionally managed to earn from casual work. After a few months he found an underpaid job marking papers for a correspondence school, a job which he did conscientiously, as he did all his teaching. When the correspondence school failed he advertised for pupils. A few recognized the quality of his teaching, others found too dispiriting the small dark front room, which neither Aldridge nor his wife found the energy to do anything about, and which Venetia wasn’t allowed to touch.
She walked daily to the local comprehensive school. It was one of the first established in London and was intended as a showcase for the new educational policy. Although the first heady years of doctrinaire optimism had been overtaken by the usual problems of a large urban school, it was one in which a clever industrious child could do well. For Venetia the change from the long-established provincial single-sex high school, with its slightly snobbish conventions and local traditions, was less traumatic than she had expected. It was as easy to be a loner at the new school as it had been at the old. She coped with the few bullies by a tongue which could lash them into silence; there was, after all, more than one way of making oneself feared. She worked hard in school, harder still at home. She knew precisely where she wanted to go. The three topgrade A levels gained her an Oxford place. The first-class degree was followed by an equally brilliant academic success in her Bar examinations. By the time she went up to Oxford she thought she knew all she needed to know about men. The strong could be devils; the weak were moral cowards. There might be men she would sexually desire, even admire, come to like and even want to marry. But never again would she put herself at the mercy of a man.
The door opened, recalling her to the present. She looked at her watch. Nearly two hours. Had it really been so long since the jury went out? Her junior tried to control his excitement.
“They’re back.”
“With a question?”
“Not a question. We’ve got a verdict.”
4
Slowly and with a careful avoidance of drama or obvious anxiety the court reassembled, waiting for the jury and the appearance of the judge. It was at this moment that Venetia remembered her pupil-master. He had been a traditionalist to whom the picture of a woman in a wig was an anachronism to be borne with stoicism, provided the face beneath the wig was pretty, the manner sweetly deferential and the brain no challenge to his own. There had been general surprise in Chambers when he had accepted a woman pupil; it could only be in penance for an infraction too grievous to be atoned for by less draconian means. When she remembered him it was with respect rather than affection, but he had given her two pieces of advice for which she was grateful.
“Keep all your blue notebooks after trial. Not just for the specified time, for always. It’s useful to have a record of cases and you can learn from early mistakes.”
The second had been equally useful: “There are moments when it is essential to look at the jury, moments when it is advisable to do so, and moments when you should avoid even a glance. One of the last is when they return with the verdict. Never betray anxiety in court. And if you’ve put up a good fight and they’re going against you, looking at them will only embarrass them.”
The latter advice was difficult to follow in Court One at the Bailey, where the jury box was immediately facing the barristers’ benches. Venetia fixed her eyes on the judge’s seat and didn’t glance across the court when, following the usual preliminaries, the Clerk to the Court asked the foreman of the jury to stand. A middle-aged, scholarly-looking man, more formally dressed than the others, got to his feet. He had, thought Venetia, been a natural choice for foreman.
The Clerk asked: “Have you arrived at your verdict?”
“We have, sir.”
“Do you find the accused, Garry Ashe, guilty or not guilty of the murder of Mrs. Rita O’Keefe?”
“Not guilty.”
“And that is the verdict of you all?”
“It is.”
There was no sound in the body of the court, but she heard from the public gallery a low murmur, somewhere between a groan and a hiss, which could have been surprise, relief or disgust. She didn’t look up. It was only after the verdict had been given that she gave a thought to the audience, to those closely packed benches where the relations and friends of the accused and the victim, the aficionados of murder, the casuals and the regulars, the morbid and the curious had sat and looked down impassively while, below them, the court played out its stately measure of advance and retreat. Now it was over and they would jostle down that bleak uncarpeted stairway and breathe the untainted air and relish their freedom.
She did not glance at Ashe, but she knew that she would have to see him. It was difficult to avoid at least a few words with a client who had been acquitted. People needed to express their pleasure, occasionally their gratitude, although she suspected that gratitude never lasted long, and for some no longer than the presentation of her bill. But it was only for the convicted clients that she felt even a trace of affection or pity. In her more analytical moments she wondered whether she might not be harbouring a subconscious guilt which after a victory, and particularly a victory against the odds, transferred itself into resentment of the client. The thought interested but did not worry her. Other counsel might see it as part of their job to encourage, to support, to console. She saw her own in less ambiguous terms; it was simply to win.
Well, she had won, and there came, as there so often did after the momentary exhilaration of triumph, a draining tiredness which was as much physical as emotional. It never lasted long but sometimes, after a case which had dragged on for months, the reaction of triumph and then exhaustion would come close to overpowering her and it would take an effort of will to collect her papers together, get to her feet and respond to the murmured congratulations of her junior and the solicitors. Today it seemed to her that the congratulations were muted. Her junio
r was still young and found it difficult to rejoice in a verdict which he thought wrong. Yet for once the tiredness was only momentary; she could feel the surge of energy and strength returning to muscles and veins. But never before had she felt such repugnance for a client. She hoped never to have to see him again, but this last encounter was unavoidable.
And now he came forward with his solicitor, Neville Saunders, in attendance, the latter wearing his usual schoolmaster’s expression of disapproval, as if about to warn his client against a recurrence of the events which had brought them together. Smiling his wintry half-smile, he held out his hand and said: “Congratulations.” Then, turning to Ashe: “You’re a very fortunate young man. You owe Miss Aldridge a great deal.”
The dark eyes looked into hers and she thought she detected for the first time a glint of humour. The unspoken message was clear: We understand each other. I know what got me off, and so do you.
But all he said was: “She’ll get what she’s owed. I’m on legal aid. That’s what it’s for, remember.”
Saunders, his face flushed, opened his mouth to expostulate, but before he could speak Venetia said, “Good afternoon to you both,” and turned away.
She had less than four weeks left of life. And she did not ask him then or later how he had known what spectacles Mrs. Scully had been wearing on the night of the murder.
5
On the same evening Hubert Langton left his Chambers at six o’clock. It was his usual time, and in recent years he had become obsessional about the small comforting rituals of life. But this evening there seemed no possible reason to return home, to the long lonely hours which stretched ahead. Almost without conscious thought he turned right, crossed Middle Temple Lane and passed under the arch by Pump Court and through the Cloisters to the Temple Church. It was open, and he entered through the great Norman doorway to the sound of the organ. Someone was practising. The music was modern, abrasive to his ears, but he sat himself in the stall on the cantoris side in which he had sat Sunday after Sunday for nearly forty years, and let the weariness and ennui which had threatened him all day take undisputed possession.