by P. D. James
Yelland fixed his gaze on her as if assessing whether such ignorance deserved a reply. Oliver kept his eyes on his plate. Yelland said, “Over eighty per cent of experiments are on rats, and some people do feel affection for them. The researchers do.”
Jo persisted. “All the same, some of the protesters must be motivated by genuine compassion. I don’t mean the violent ones who are just getting a kick out of it. But surely some of them genuinely hate cruelty and want to stop it.”
Yelland added dryly, “I find that difficult to believe, since they must know that what they’re doing with their violence and intimidation is to force the work out of the United Kingdom. The research will continue but in countries which haven’t our statutory protection for the animals. This country will suffer economically, but the animals will suffer a great deal more.”
Oliver had finished his guinea fowl. Now he placed his knife and fork carefully side by side on the plate and got to his feet. “I think the evening has provided sufficient stimulation. You will excuse me if I leave you now. I have to walk back to Peregrine Cottage.”
Maycroft half rose from his chair. “Shall I order the buggy for you?” He knew that his voice was propitiatory, almost servile, and hated himself for it.
“No thank you. I am not yet decrepit. You will, of course, remember that I need the launch tomorrow afternoon.”
Without a sign to the company, he left the room.
Yelland said, “I must apologise. I shouldn’t have started this. It isn’t what I came to Combe for. I didn’t know Oliver was on the island until I arrived.”
Mrs. Plunkett had entered with a tray of soufflés and was beginning to collect their plates. Staveley said, “He’s in a strange mood. Obviously something’s happened to upset him.”
Jo was the only one eating. She said easily, “He lives in a permanent state of being upset.”
“But not like this. And what did he mean by asking for the launch tomorrow? Is he leaving or isn’t he?”
Maycroft said, “I profoundly hope he is.” He turned to Mark Yelland. “Will his latest novel create difficulties for you?”
“It will have its influence, coming from him. And it’ll be a gift to the animal-liberation movement. My research is seriously at risk, and so is my family. I haven’t any doubt that his so-called fictional director will be taken as a portrait of me. I can’t sue, of course, and he knows it. Publicity is the last thing I want. He was told things which he had no right to know.”
Staveley said quietly, “But aren’t they things we all have a right to know?”
“Not if they’re used to jeopardise life-saving research. Not if they get into the hands of ignorant fools. I hope he does intend to leave the island tomorrow. It’s certainly not big enough for the two of us. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I won’t wait for coffee.”
He crumpled his table napkin, threw it on his plate and, with a nod to Jo, abruptly left. There was a silence broken by the sound of the lift door.
Maycroft said, “I’m sorry. That was a disaster. Somehow I should have stopped it.”
Jo was eating her soufflé with evident enjoyment. “Don’t keep apologising, Rupert. You’re not responsible for everything that goes wrong on this island. Mark Yelland only booked in for dinner because he wanted to confront Nathan, and Nathan played along with it. Get started on the soufflés, they’ll go flat.”
Maycroft and Staveley took up their spoons. Suddenly there was a series of booms like distant gunfire, and the logs in the fireplace flared into life. Jo Staveley said, “It’s going to be a windy night.”
8
* * *
When his wife was in London, Guy Staveley disliked stormy nights; the cacophony of moans, wails and howling was too like an uncannily human lament for his deprivation. But now, with Jo at home, the violence outside the stone walls of Dolphin Cottage was a reassuring emphasis of the comfort and security within. By midnight the worst was over and the island lay calm under the emerging stars. He looked over to the twin bed where Jo was sitting cross-legged, her pink satin dressing gown tight under her breasts. Often she dressed provocatively—occasionally shamelessly—without seeming aware of the effect, but after lovemaking she covered her nakedness with the careful modesty of a Victorian bride. It was one of the quirks which, after twenty years of marriage, he found obscurely endearing. He wished that they were in a double bed, that he could reach out to her and somehow convey the gratitude he felt for her unquestioning and generous sexuality. She had been back on Combe for four weeks and, as always, she returned to the island as if she had never been away, as if theirs were a normal marriage. He had fallen in love with her from the first meeting, and he was not a man who loved easily or was capable of change. There would never be another woman for him. He knew that for her it was different. She had set out her terms on the morning of their marriage, before, defying convention, they had left the flat together for the registry office.
“I love you, Guy, and I think I shall go on loving you, but I’m not in love. I’ve had that and it was a torment, a humiliation and a warning. So now I’m settling for a quiet life with someone I respect and am very fond of and want to spend my life with.”
At the time it had seemed an acceptable bargain, and it did so still.
Now she said, her voice carefully casual, “I went into the practice when I was in London, and saw Malcolm and June. They want you back. They haven’t advertised for a replacement and they don’t intend to, not yet anyway. They’re terribly overworked, of course.” She paused, then added, “Your old patients are asking for you.”
He didn’t speak. She went on, “It’s all old history now about that boy. Anyway, the family have left the district. To general relief, I imagine.”
He wanted to say, He wasn’t “that boy,” he was Winston Collins. He had a bloody awful life and the happiest grin I’ve ever seen on a boy.
“Darling, you can’t live with guilt for ever. It happens all the time in medicine—in every hospital, for that matter. It always did. We’re human. We make mistakes, wrong judgements, miscalculations. They get covered up ninety-nine times out of a hundred. With the present workload what else do you expect? And the mother was an over-anxious, demanding nuisance, as we all know. If she hadn’t called you out unnecessarily time after time, her son would probably be alive. You didn’t tell that to the inquiry.”
He said, “I wasn’t going to push the responsibility onto a grieving mother.”
“All right, as long as you admit the truth to yourself. And then all that racial trouble, accusations that it would have been different if he’d been white. It would all have died down if the race warriors hadn’t seized on it.”
“And I’m not going to make unfair racial accusations an excuse either. Winston died of peritonitis. Today that’s unforgivable. I should have gone when the mother rang. It’s one of the first things you learn in medicine—never take chances with a child.”
“So you’re thinking of staying here for ever, indulging Nathan Oliver in his hypochondria, waiting for one of Jago’s rock-climbing novices to fall off a cliff? The temporary staff have GPs in Pentworthy, Emily is never ill and is obviously set to live to a hundred, and the visitors don’t come if they’re not fit. What sort of job is that for someone with your ability?”
“The only one at present I feel I can cope with. What about you, Jo?”
He wasn’t asking what use she made of her nursing skills when she returned alone to their empty London flat. How empty was it? What about Tim and Maxie and Kurt, names she occasionally mentioned without explanation and apparently without guilt? She would speak briefly of parties, plays, concerts, restaurants, but there were questions which, fearing her answer, he did not dare to ask. Whom did she go with, who paid, who saw her back to the flat, who spent the night in her bed? He found it strange that she didn’t intuit the force of his need to know, and his fear of knowing.
Now she said easily, “Oh, I work when I’m not here. Last time it was in
A and E at St. Jude’s. Everyone’s overstressed, so I do what I can, but only part-time. There are limits to my social conscience. If you want to see life in the raw, try A and E on a Saturday night—drunks, druggies, broken heads and enough foul language to blue the air. We’re depending a lot on imported staff. I find that inexcusable—administrators swanning round the world in comfort, recruiting the best doctors and nurses they can find from countries that need them a bloody sight more than we do. It’s disgraceful.”
He wanted to say, They’re not all recruited. They’d come anyway for more money and a better life, and who can blame them? But he was too sleepy for political discussion. Now he said, not greatly caring, “What’s happening about Oliver’s blood? You heard, of course, about the furore at the harbour, that idiot Dan dropping the sample overboard.”
“You told me, darling. Oliver’s coming tomorrow at nine o’clock to give another sample. He’s not looking forward to it and nor am I. He hates the needle. He can thank his lucky stars I’m a professional and like to get a vein first time. I doubt you’d manage it.”
“I know I wouldn’t.”
She said, “I’ve watched some of the medical staff taking blood in my time. Not a pretty sight. Anyway, Oliver may not turn up.”
“He’ll turn up. He thinks he could be anaemic. He’ll want the test done. Why wouldn’t he turn up?”
Jo swung her legs off the bed and with her back to him let slip her robe and reached for her pyjama top. She said, “If he’s really planning to leave tomorrow, he may prefer to wait and get the tests done in London. It would be sensible. I don’t know, it’s just a feeling I have. I wouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t see Oliver at nine o’clock tomorrow.”
9
* * *
Oliver took his time returning to Peregrine Cottage. The anger which had possessed him since his encounter with Miranda was exhilarating in its self-justification, but he knew how quickly he could fall from its enlivening heights into a slough of hopelessness and depression. He needed to be alone and to walk off this energising but dangerous tumult of fury and self-pity. For an hour, buffeted by the rising wind, he paced to and fro on the edge of the cliff trying to discipline the confusion of his mind. It was already past his normal hour for bed, but he needed to watch until the light in Miranda’s bedroom was finally switched off. He gave little thought to the dispute with Mark Yelland. Compared to the treachery of his daughter and Tremlett, that argument had been a mere exercise in semantics. Yelland was powerless to do him harm.
At last he went quietly through the unlocked door of the cottage and closed it behind him. Miranda, if not asleep, would take care not to appear. Normally, on the rare occasions when he was out alone at night, she would be listening, even if in her bed, for the click of the door latch. A low light would have been left on for him, and she would come down to make a hot milky drink. Tonight the sitting room was in darkness. He contemplated a life without her watchful care but convinced himself that it wouldn’t happen. Tomorrow she would see sense. Tremlett would be made to go, and that would be the end of it. If he had to, he could manage without Tremlett. Miranda would realise that she couldn’t give up security, comfort, the luxury of their overseas visits, the privilege of being his only child, the prospect of her inheritance, for Tremlett’s salacious and no doubt inexpert fumblings in some dingy one-bedded flat in an insalubrious and dangerous area of London. Tremlett couldn’t have saved much from his salary. Miranda had nothing except what he gave her. Neither was qualified for a job which would make enough to enable them to live even simply in central London. No, Miranda would stay.
Undressed and ready for bed, he drew the linen curtains across the window. As always, he left half an inch of space so that the room wasn’t completely dark. As the bedclothes settled around him, he lay quietly, exulting in the howling of the wind until he felt himself slipping down the plateaux of consciousness more quickly than he had feared.
He was jerked into wakefulness with a high, thin scream which he knew was his own. The blackness of the window was still dissected by the line of light. He stretched out an uncertain hand to the bedside lamp and found the switch. The room blazed with a reassuring normality. Fumbling for his watch, he saw that it was now three o’clock. The storm had spent itself and now he lay in what seemed an unnatural and ominous calm. He had woken from the same nightmare which year after year made his bed a centre of horror, sometimes recurring in clusters, more often visiting so rarely that he began to forget its power. The nightmare never varied. He was mounted barebacked on a great dappled horse high above the sea, its back so broad that his legs had no power to grip, and he was being violently swung from side to side as it reared and plunged among a blaze of stars. There were no reins, and his hands scrabbled desperately at the mane, trying to gain a hold. He could see the corner of the beast’s great flashing eyes, the spit foaming from its neighing mouth. He knew that his fall was inevitable and that he would drop, his arms helplessly flailing, to an unimagined horror under the black surface of the waveless sea.
Sometimes when he woke it was to find himself on the floor, but tonight the bedclothes were half-tangled round him. Occasionally his awakening cry would alert Miranda and she would come in, matter-of-fact, reassuring, asking if he was all right, whether there was anything he needed, whether she could make them both a cup of tea. He would reply, “Just a bad dream, just a bad dream. Go back to bed.” But tonight he knew that she wouldn’t come. No one would come. Now he lay staring at the strip of light, distancing himself from horror, then gradually edged himself out of bed and, stumbling over to the window, opened the casement to the wide panoply of stars and the luminous sea.
He felt immeasurably small, as if his mind and body had shrunk and he was alone on a spinning globe looking up into immensity. The stars were there, moving according to the laws of the physical world, but their brilliance was only in his mind, a mind that was failing him, and eyes that could no longer clearly see. He was only sixty-eight, but slowly, inexorably, his light was fading. He felt intensely lonely, as if no other living thing existed. There was no help anywhere on earth, nor on those dead spinning worlds with their illusionary brightness. No one would be listening if he gave way to this almost irresistible impulse and shouted aloud into the unfeeling night, Don’t take away my words! Give me back my words!
10
* * *
In his bedroom on the top floor of the tower, Maycroft slept fitfully. At each waking he switched on the light and glanced at his bedside clock, hoping to find that dawn was near to breaking. Two-ten, three-forty, four-twenty. He was tempted to get up, make himself tea and listen to the World Service on the radio, but resisted. Instead he tried to compose himself for another hour or two of sleep, but it didn’t come. By eleven o’clock the wind had risen, not to a prolonged gale but blowing in erratic gusts which howled in the chimney and made the lulls between the onslaughts less a relief than an ominous period of unnatural calm. But he had slept through more violent storms than this in the eighteen months since arriving on the island. Normally the constant throbbing of the sea was soothing to him, but now it swelled into the room, a pounding, intrusive bass accompaniment to the howling of the wind. He tried to discipline his thoughts, but the same anxieties, the same foreboding, returned with renewed force with each waking.
Was Oliver’s threat to live permanently on the island real? If so, how legally could he be stopped? Would the Trustees see Maycroft as responsible for this debacle? Could he have handled the man better? His predecessor had apparently coped with Oliver and his moods, so why was he finding it so difficult? And why had Oliver ordered the launch for today? Surely he must intend to leave. The thought momentarily cheered him, but for Oliver to leave in anger and bitterness would be an unhappy augury for the future. And it would be seen as his fault. After the first two months his appointment had been confirmed, but he felt himself to be still on probation. He could resign or be asked to leave at three months’ notice. To fail at
a job which was generally regarded as a sinecure, which he himself had seen as a peaceful interlude of introspection, would be ignominious both personally and publicly. Despairing of sleep, he reached for his book.
He woke again with a start when the hardback of The Last Chronicle of Barset thudded to the ground. Fumbling for his watch, he saw with dismay that it was eight-thirty-two, a late start to the day.
It was nearly nine before he rang for his breakfast, and half an hour later before he took the lift down to his office. He had by now partly rationalised the nagging anxieties of the night but they had left a legacy of unease amounting to foreboding which, even as he went through the normal comforting rituals of breakfast, couldn’t be shaken off. Despite his tardiness, Mrs. Plunkett had arrived with his breakfast within five minutes of his ringing her: the small bowl of prunes, the bacon fried crisply but not hardened—just as he liked it—the fried egg on its square of bread fried in bacon fat, the jug of coffee and the hot toast which was brought in at precisely the moment he was ready for it, the home-made marmalade. He ate, but without relish. The meal in its perfection seemed a wilfully contrived reminder of the physical comfort and harmonious routine of his life on Combe. He wasn’t ready to make yet another fresh start and dreaded the inconvenience and exertion of finding a property and setting up home on his own. But if Nathan Oliver came to live permanently on Combe, in the end that was what he would have to do.
As he entered the office he found Adrian Boyde at his desk tapping out figures on his calculator. He was surprised to find him at work on a Saturday but then remembered Boyde mentioning that he would come in for a couple of hours to complete work on the VAT return and the quarterly accounts. Even so, it was an unusual start to the day. Both men said good morning and then silence fell. Maycroft looked across at the other desk and suddenly felt that he was seeing a stranger. Was it his imagination that Adrian looked subtly different, the face more tautly pale, the anxious eyes shadowed, the body less relaxed? Glancing again, he saw that his companion’s hand wasn’t moving over the papers. Had he too suffered a poor night? Was he infected by this ominous foreboding of disaster? He realised again, but with renewed force, how much he relied on Boyde: the quiet efficiency, the unspoken companionship when they worked together, the common sense which seemed the most admirable and useful of virtues, the humility which had nothing to do with self-abasement or obsequiousness. They had never touched on anything personal in either of their lives. Why, then, did he feel that his uncertainties, his grief for his wife—whom he could forget for days at a time and then suddenly yearn for with almost uncontrollable longing—were understood and accepted? He didn’t share Adrian’s religious belief. Was it simply that he felt himself in the presence of a good man?