by P. D. James
Ashe took a key from his pocket and opened the back door, then put out his hand for the light. The kitchen sprang into view, unnaturally bright. She saw a small stone sink, the cheap dresser with half of its hooks missing, the table with its stained plastic top peeling, the four insubstantial chairs. And here the smell was different, older, staler, the smell of years of inadequate cleaning, of rotting food, of unwashed dishes. She could see that he had made attempts to clean up. She knew how meticulous he was about order. How this place must have disgusted him. He had used disinfectant—the stink of it lingered. But the other smells were not so easily wiped away.
She didn’t know what to say, but he seemed to expect no comment and made none. Then he said: “Come and see the hall.”
The hall light was from a single bulb hung high and unshaded. When Ashe pressed down the switch, Octavia gave a gasp of wonder. The walls on both sides of the passage had been pasted with coloured pictures obviously cut out from books and magazines, a rich collage of shiny images which, as she gazed amazed from side to side, seemed to close in on her in vibrant, shimmering colour. Pasted over the gentle views of mountains, lakes, cathedrals, piazzas, were naked women, legs parted, naked breasts and buttocks, pouted lips, and male torsos with the genitalia caged in shiny black pouches, the whole superimposed on garlands of summer flowers, formal gardens with their vistas and sculptures, cottage plots, animals, and birds. And there were faces, grave, gentle and arrogant, cut from reproductions of the world’s great paintings, faces so placed that they seemed to regard the jumble of crude sexual images with distaste or patrician disdain. No inch of the walls was uncovered. Ahead was the front door, its glass panel boarded from outside. The door was fitted with heavy bolts at top and bottom, inducing in Octavia a moment of claustrophobic unease.
After the first shock of surprise, she said: “It’s crazy, but it’s wonderful. Did you do all this?”
“Auntie and I did it. I worked out the pattern but it was her idea.”
It was odd the way he spoke always of Auntie, no name, just Auntie. Something about the way he said it struck a note of subtle disparagement, of falsity, of a stronger emotion carefully controlled. And there was something more: he spoke the word as if it were a warning.
She said: “I like it. God, it’s clever. It’s really clever. We could do something like this in the flat. But it must have taken months.”
“Two months and three days.”
“Where did you get all the pictures?”
“Magazines mostly. Auntie’s men brought them in for her. Some I stole.”
“From libraries?”
She remembered reading about two men who had done that, a playwright and his lover. They had covered their flat walls with prints from stolen library books and had been found out. Hadn’t they gone to prison?
He said: “Too risky. I stole the books from bookstalls. Safer, easier and it takes less time.”
“And soon they’ll be pulling it all down. Doesn’t that worry you? I mean, after all this work.”
She could picture it, the great ball swinging against the walls, the billows of grit and dust rising in a choking cloud, the images cracking apart like a broken jigsaw.
He said: “It doesn’t worry me. Nothing about this house worries me. It’s time it was pulled down. Look in here. This was Auntie’s room.”
He opened a door to the right and put out his hand for the switch. The room was bathed in a red light. It came not from a central bulb but from three lamps fitted with ruched shades of scarlet satin and set about the room on low tables. The air was suffused with redness. It was like breathing blood. When she glanced down at her hands she expected to see the flesh stained pink. The heavy curtains drawn across the barred windows were of red velvet. The walls were covered with a patterned paper of pink roses. The long sagging sofa in front of the window and the two armchairs on each side of the gas fire were covered with throws of Indian cotton in rich reds, purple and gold. Against the wall opposite the fire was a divan covered with a grey blanket, a single sombre piece among the garish extravaganza. On a low table in front of the fire was a pack of playing-cards and a glass globe.
He said: “Auntie told fortunes.”
“For money?”
“For money. For sex. For amusement.”
“Did she have sex in this room?”
“On that couch. This was her place. Everything happened here.”
“Where were you? What did you do? I mean, where were you when she was in here having sex?”
“I was here too. She liked me to be here. She liked me to watch. Didn’t your mother tell you? She knew. It came out at the trial.”
It was impossible to tell from his voice what he was feeling. She shivered. She wanted to say, “And did you like that? Why did you stay? Were you fond of her? Did you love her?” But she couldn’t have spoken that word. Love. She had never been sure what it meant, only that until now she had never known it. What she did know was that it had nothing to do with this room.
She asked, almost in a whisper: “Is this where it happened? Is this where she was killed?”
“On the couch.”
She looked at it, fascinated, and said with a kind of wonder: “But it looks so clean, so ordinary.”
“It was covered in blood, but they took away the mattress cover with the body. If you lift that blanket you can still see the stains.”
“No thank you.” She tried to make her voice light. “Did you cover it with that blanket?”
He didn’t reply but she was aware that he was looking at her. She wanted to move close to him, to touch him, but she sensed that this would be unwise, and perhaps more than unwise, that he might even repel her. She was aware of her own quickened breathing, of a mixture of fear and excitement, and something else which was as exhilarating as it was shameful. She wanted him to carry her over to that couch and make love to her. She thought, I’m frightened but at least I’m feeling something. I’m alive.
He was still looking at her. He said: “There’s something else I could show you. Upstairs, in the dark-room. Do you want to see?”
Suddenly she needed to get out of the sitting-room. The redness was beginning to hurt her eyes.
She said casually: “OK. Why not?” Then added: “This was your home, where you lived. I want to see everything.”
He led the way upstairs. The stairs were carpeted in an indistinguishable pattern, the pile matted with grime and in parts worn through, so that once she caught her foot in a tear and had to grasp the banister to save herself from stumbling. Ashe didn’t look back. She followed him into a room at the rear of the house, small enough to be a box room but perhaps meant to be a bedroom. The single high window was covered with a thick black cloth nailed to the wooden frame. Beneath it were three shelves. To the right, mounted above a bench, was a large piece of equipment, which reminded her of a giant microscope. The bench itself held three rectangular plastic trays filled with liquid. She was aware of the smell, a mixture of ammonia and vinegar, slightly gaseous.
He said: “Seen a room like this before?”
“No. It’s the dark-room, isn’t it? I don’t know what it’s for.”
“Don’t you know anything about photography? Didn’t you have a camera? Your kind always has a camera.”
“The other girls at school did. I didn’t want one. What was there to photograph?”
She had always hated those special days—speech days, the summer fête, the Christmas-carol service, the annual play. She could picture the garden in high summer with Reverend Mother laughing with two of the parents, old girls with daughters now at the school, the jostle round them of jumping children with the cameras pointed. “Look this way, Reverend Mother. Oh please! Mummy, you’re not looking at the camera.” Venetia hadn’t been there; Venetia was never there. There was always a court attendance, a meeting in Chambers, something which couldn’t be put off. She hadn’t even been part of the audience when Octavia had been chosen to play Paulina in The Wi
nter’s Tale.
She said: “We didn’t have a dark-room at school. The pictures went off to Boots or somewhere to be developed. Did your aunt give you this?”
“That’s right. Auntie paid for the camera, and the room, and the equipment. She wanted me to take pictures.”
“What sort of pictures?”
“Pictures of her having sex with her lovers. She liked to look at them afterwards.”
She said: “What happened to them, the pictures you took?”
“My solicitor had them. They were exhibits for the defence. I don’t know where they are now. They were used to prove that Auntie had lovers. And the police saw them. They tried to trace the men to exclude them from the inquiry. They only found one of them and he had an alibi. I don’t think they looked very hard for the others. They’d got me, hadn’t they? They’d built up their case. They weren’t going to waste time looking for evidence they didn’t want to find. That’s how the police work. They make up their minds and then they look for the evidence.”
She had a sudden picture, vivid, indecent but shamefully exciting, of that garish sitting-room beneath them, of two naked bodies humping and groaning on the couch, of Ashe standing above them adjusting the lens, moving around, crouching, to get the pictures he wanted. She almost said, “Why did you do it? How could she make you?”, but she knew that they were questions which she couldn’t ask. She was aware that he was looking at her closely with a concentrated, unsmiling gaze.
He rested his hand on the equipment and asked: “Know what this is?”
“Of course not. I told you, I don’t understand about photography.”
“It’s an enlarger. Do you want to see how it works?”
“If you like.”
“We’ll be in the dark for a time.”
“I don’t mind the dark.”
He moved over to the door and switched off the light, then came back to where she stood and lifted his arm. A red bulb glowed, a stocky candle of translucent scarlet staining his fingers. Now another light, small and white, shone from the enlarger. He took from his pocket an envelope and withdrew a short strip of film, a single negative.
He said: “Thirty-five millimetre. I’m putting it into a frame and the frame into the enlarger.”
An image which she couldn’t decipher fell on a white board crossed by bands of black metal like rulers. She couldn’t make sense of it, while he peered at it through what looked like a small telescope.
She said: “What is it? I can’t see anything.”
“You will presently.”
He switched off the enlarger light and now they were in darkness except for that glimmering red pillar. She watched while he took a sheet of paper from a box on the lowest shelf and fitted it into the frame, adjusting the black rods.
She said: “Go on, tell me what you’re doing. I want to know.”
“I’m deciding on the size.”
He switched on the light in the enlarger, it seemed for only six or seven seconds. Then he quickly put on a pair of plastic gloves, lifted the frame and tossed the paper into the first bath, gently agitating the fluid. It began swaying and moving, snakelike, as if it were alive. She gazed at it fascinated.
“Now watch. Keep looking.” The words were a command.
And almost at once the image began to come up, a pattern in stark black and white. There was the couch, but covered now with a bedspread patterned in squares and circles. And on the couch was the body of a woman. She was lying on her back, naked except for a thin négligé which had fallen open to reveal the black smudge of pubic hair and breasts white and heavy like giant jellyfish. The hair was a tangled frizz against the whiteness of the pillow. Her mouth was half open, the tongue slightly protruding, as if she had been strangled. The eyes were open, black and staring, but they were dead eyes. The knife wounds in the chest and belly gaped like mouths from which the blood was oozing like black sputum. There was a single gash across the throat. And here the blood had gushed, seemed as she looked to be gushing still, a spurting fountain of blood flowing over the breasts, dripping from the divan to the floor. The image pulsated in the tray until she could almost believe that the blood was seeping from it to stain the fluid red.
Octavia could hear the rhythmic thudding of her heart. Surely he must hear it too. It seemed to power the claustrophobic little room like a dynamo. She said in a whisper: “Who took it?”
He didn’t reply for a moment. He was scrutinizing the print as if to check its quality.
Still gently agitating the fluid, he said quietly: “I did. I took it when I got back and found her.”
“Before you phoned the police?”
“Of course.”
“But why did you want it?”
“Because I always photographed Auntie on that couch. That’s what she liked.”
“Weren’t you afraid that the police would find it?”
“A strip of film is easy to hide, and they had the photographs they wanted. They weren’t looking for it. They were looking for the knife.”
“Did they find it?”
He didn’t reply. She asked again: “Did they find it, the knife?”
“Yes, they found it. He’d chucked it in a front garden four houses down, hidden under the privet hedge. It was a cooking knife from the kitchen.”
With his gloved hands he took the print from the fluid, dropped it into the second dish and then immediately transferred it to the third. He switched on the overhead light. Taking the print from the dish, he held the dripping edge over a canister and almost ran with it out of the room. She followed him into the bathroom next door. Lying in the bath was another dish and flowing gently into it was cold water from a rubber shower hose attached to the tap.
He said: “I have to use the bathroom. There’s no water laid on next door.”
“Why do you use gloves? Is that fluid dangerous?”
“It’s not the stuff to get on your hands.”
They stood together as the picture in its stark uncompromising horror swayed and shifted under the cleansing stream. He set all this up before he called for me this evening, Octavia thought. He must have done. He wanted me to see it. He meant it as a test.
She turned her eyes away and tried to concentrate on the room, the narrow, comfortless little cell, its stained bath with its rim of dirt and grease, the curtainless window of opaque glass, the brown linoleum curling round the base of the lavatory pedestal. But always her eyes came back to that gently moving image. She thought: But she was old. Old, ugly, horrible. How could he bear to live with her? She remembered her mother’s voice. “His aunt wasn’t a pleasant woman but something held them together. Almost certainly they were lovers. He was one of many, but in his case, no doubt, it came free.” She thought: It isn’t true. She was saying it to turn me against him. But there’s nothing she can do now. He’s shown me this, he trusts me, we belong together.
Suddenly there were voices, loud shouting, a crash from the back door as if someone were trying to kick it in. Without a word, Ashe rushed downstairs. Octavia, in panic, grabbed the print and dropped it into the lavatory bowl. Under the water she tore it in two, then tore again, and jerked down the handle of the flush. There was a gurgle, a thin trickle, then nothing. With a sob of desperation she jerked the handle again. After a second the water gushed and the segments with their glossy image swirled out of sight. With a gasp she ran downstairs.
In the kitchen Ashe was forcing a young boy against the wall, holding a kitchen knife to his throat. The boy’s eyes swivelled to hers in a mixture of terror and appeal.
Ashe said: “If you or your mates get over that fence again I shall know. And next time I cut. I know a place where I can bury your body and no one will ever find it. Do you understand?”
The knife moved a fraction from the throat. The boy, terrified, nodded. Ashe released him and he disappeared out of the kitchen so quickly that he skidded into the doorpost.
Ashe calmly replaced the knife in a drawer. He said: “One
of the kids from the estate. They’re all barbarians.” And then he saw Octavia’s face. “God, you look terrified. Who did you think it was?”
“The police. I tore up the picture, flushed it down the loo. I was afraid they’d find it. I’m sorry.”
Suddenly she was frightened of him, of his displeasure, of his anger, but he shrugged and gave a short mirthless laugh. “It wouldn’t matter if they did see it. I could sell it to a Sunday paper and there’s nothing they could do. You can’t be tried twice for the same offence. Didn’t you know that?”
“I suppose I did know. I just didn’t think. I’m sorry.”
He came over to her and, taking her head in his hands, bent and kissed her on the lips. It was the first time. His lips were cold and surprisingly soft, but the kiss was firm, his mouth closed. She remembered other kisses and how she had hated them: the slobbery taste of beer and food, the wetness, the tongue thrusting down her throat. This kiss, she knew, was an affirmation. She had passed the test.
Then he took something from his pocket and lifted her left hand. She felt the coldness of the ring before she saw it, a heavy band of old gold with a blood-red stone encircled with clouded pearls. Octavia gazed down at it while he waited for her response, and then she shivered and caught her breath as if the air had become icy cold. Her veins and muscles tightened with fear, and she could hear the thud of her heart. Surely she had seen the ring before, on his dead aunt’s little finger. The photograph swam up again before her eyes, the gaping wounds, the slashed throat.
She knew that her voice sounded cracked. She made herself say: “It wasn’t hers, was it? She wasn’t wearing it when she died?”
But now his voice was softer, gentler than she had ever before heard it.
“Would I do that to you? She had one like it but with a different-coloured stone. I bought this especially for you. It’s an antique ring. I thought it was one you’d like.”