Half Moon Street

by Anne Perry

  She plunged on. “It should leave one emotionally wrung out and yet deepened in experience, and perhaps with more compassion and understanding than before.” Unwittingly the old lady came to her thoughts again. Horror for endless pain could change one’s own life immeasurably, cast so much in a different view.

  For the first time Cecily looked at her directly and without any mask of emotion. “You are most surprising,” she said at length. “I could have sworn you had not a revolutionary idea in your head, much less your heart. And here you are recommending that we stir up the complacent society out there by making them feel Clytemnestra’s passions!” She smiled. “You will provoke letters to the Times and thunder from the Archbishop, not to mention disfavor from the Queen, if you suggest that to murder your husband can even be acceptable!” The edge of mockery was back in her voice again.

  She swiveled around. “Joshua darling, you had better be careful how you treat your wife’s daughters!” She gestured to Caroline. “You do have daughters, don’t you? Yes, of course you do—one of them is married to that policeman with all the hair. I remember him. For heaven’s sake, darling, don’t sacrifice them to the gods, or you may end your life abruptly with a knife in your heart. There sleeps a tiger inside that calm and dignified-looking wife of yours.”

  “Yes, I know,” Joshua said smugly. He placed his hand very lightly on Caroline’s arm just for a second, but it was a gesture of possession, and Caroline felt the warmth ripple through her. The door opened and Bellmaine came in, still dressed in his Polonius robes, the smudges of greasepaint on his face lending him greater gravity rather than detracting from it.

  “Wonderful!” he said radiantly. He spoke to all of them, but it was Orlando his eyes rested on. “Wonderful, my dears. You surpassed yourselves. Cecily, you had Gertrude to perfection! I had never seen her in such a sympathetic light before. You made me believe in her unaware-ness of what she had done—until it was too late—a woman caught in the mesh of her own passions. I wept for her.”

  “Thank you,” she accepted graciously, smiling at him, but there was a curious brittleness in her stare. “If I can move you to tears for Gertrude, I feel as if I can do anything.”

  Bellmaine turned to Orlando. His expression softened to one of pure joy.

  “And you, my dear boy, were sublime. I hardly know what to say. I feel as if I have never really seen Hamlet before tonight. You have taken me along a new path, shown me a madness and a sense of betrayal that transcend the magic of Shakespeare’s words and take me into a reality of feeling that has left me exhausted. I am a different man.” He spread his hands as if he could say no more.

  Caroline knew exactly what he meant. She too had been shown a new and wider experience. She found herself nodding her agreement. It was born of honesty; she could do no less.

  Cecily turned to her, an edge to her voice. “So you are happy to be harrowed up in such a way, Mrs. Fielding? I thought from your previous visit that you were in favor of at least some censorship. Excluding the irresponsibility of shouting ‘Fire’ where there is none, and causing a panic, or of advocating crime or falsely speaking of someone else, would you agree that the limiting of ideas is an unmitigated evil? Art must be free if man is to be free. Not to grow is the beginning of death, albeit slow death, perhaps taking a generation or more.” She looked very directly at Caroline. It was a challenge no one in the crowded room mistook. Perhaps it was made because of Orlando’s success, a need to assert herself. One did not give up center stage easily.

  Everyone was waiting for Caroline.

  She glanced at Joshua. He was smiling. He would not step in and take away her chance to answer. She must speak honestly. She hoped he would not be disappointed in her, or embarrassed, but to say other than what she believed would lay a foundation for misery later. She thought of her daughters, of Jemima, of the old lady sitting hunched up in bed at home.

  “Of course not to grow is death.” She felt for the right words. “But we grow at different speeds, and sometimes in different ways. Don’t try to make the argument in general as justification for doing it your way in particular.”

  “You have been preparing this!” Cecily said quickly. “You will give me a game for my money after all. So what are you going to censor . . . in general and in particular? You have already said you will allow husband murder in Clytemnestra, a child murder in Medea, and a man to marry his mother and beget children upon her in Oedipus. Great heavens, my dear, what can it be you disapprove of ?”

  Caroline felt her face flush hot.

  “These are all tragedies, and depicted as such. One feels a terrible pity for the protagonist, an insight into how such things could have come about, and perhaps an admiration for the courage or the honesty with which in the end they meet their fate—good or bad.”

  “So it is all right, so long as the values are kept?” Cecily said with wide eyes.

  Caroline saw the trap. “Whose values?” she asked. “Is that not what you are going to say?”

  Cecily relaxed in a smile. “Exactly. If you are going to answer me that it is society, civilization, or even God, then I will ask you whose God? Which part of society? Mine? Yours? The beggar’s in the street? The old Queen, God bless her? Or Mr. Wilde . . . whose society is certainly different from most people’s!”

  “That is your own judgment,” Caroline replied. “But the values we adopt will be the ones the next generation will live by. I am not sure if anyone can decide for you. But no one can relieve you of the responsibility for what you say, in whatever form. And the better you are at it, the more beautiful or powerful your voice, the greater the burden upon you to use it with wisdom and a great deal of care.”

  “Oh my God!” Cecily said, a trifle too loudly.

  “Bravo!” Orlando gave a little salute of praise.

  Caroline turned to look at him. His face startled her, it was so full of emotion, his eyes wide, his lips slightly parted, a kind of rigidity in his body.

  Joshua was staring at her.

  Bellmaine stood motionless, but his face was filled with amazement and a kind of painful relief it was impossible to interpret. Caroline was startled to see his eyes filled with tears.

  “The greatest power sometimes lies in not doing a thing,” she finished; her voice suddenly dropped, but she would not leave the rest unsaid. “It is so easy to use a skill simply because you have it, and not look two . . . three steps ahead to see what it will cause. People listen to you, Miss Antrim. You can move our emotions and make us reconsider all kinds of beliefs. That is very clever. It is not always wise . . .”

  Cecily drew in her breath to say something in rebuttal, then looked at Joshua’s face and changed her mind. She turned to Caroline with a dazzling smile.

  “I apologize for having thought too little of you.” She said it with utmost sincerity. There was no doubting that she meant it. “I think I should have listened to you rather better. I promise I shall in future.” She turned to the others filling the room. “Now, shall we send for the champagne and toast Orlando? He has deserved all the praise we can give . . . and all the rejoicing. Tomorrow all the world will be congratulating him. Let us be the first, and do it tonight!”

  “More than all,” Bellmaine agreed fervently. He raised his hand. “Orlando!”

  “Here, here, Orlando!” everyone responded eagerly. Only Orlando himself seemed still bemused. Caroline looked across at him and wondered how exhausted he was. His young face was pale, and his eyes still held the look of Hamlet’s haunted madness. It was not a role one could assume so wholly, live its passions and be destroyed by them, and then cast it off as if it had been a garment and not a skin.

  She would have liked to comfort him, but she had no idea how. This was his world, not hers. Perhaps all great actors felt like this? Could one give such a performance merely on technique and skill, rather than by also pouring oneself into it until it became, for a time, one’s own reality?

  She looked to Joshua, but he was speakin
g to one of the other actors and she could not interrupt.

  There was a knock on the door, and someone came in with champagne and a tray of glasses.

  On the way home through the quiet streets, sitting beside Joshua in the hansom, Caroline was tired, but there was a degree of peace inside her that she had not felt in a long time. She realized now, with surprise, how long it had been. She had spent far too much time looking in the mirror and seeing what she disliked, being frightened of it, and projecting onto Joshua emotions born of that fear.

  He had been very patient in enduring her self-centeredness. Or perhaps he had not noticed? That was a far uglier thought. Could she hurt so much, and he be oblivious to it?

  Of course! Why not? She had been oblivious to his feelings. Had she for an instant wondered how hard it was for him to be the new-comer in her family, to see her children and grandchildren and know he could never have his own? They might learn to love him, but that was not the same. There was an essence of belonging that . . . that what? Mariah Ellison belonged, and she had lived all her adult life imprisoned in an icy hell of loneliness beyond anything Caroline could imagine. She had glimpsed its horror, but she had no concept of what it would do to her over time. Time was a dimension one could not create in the mind; it was change, exhaustion, the slow dying of hope.

  She understood so much more of why the old lady had become the person she was, but what had made Edmund Ellison seek his pleasures in cruelty? What devils had crawled into his soul and warped it out of human shape?

  She would never know. The answer was buried with him, and best let go now, left to drift into the darkness of the past and become covered over with other memories.

  “He was brilliant, wasn’t he?” Joshua’s voice came softly out of the shadows beside her. Through the weight of her cloak and his coat she could feel his body stiffen.

  “Oh yes,” she agreed honestly. “But I wonder if it will make him happy.”

  He was silent for several minutes before finally asking her, “What do you mean?”

  She must word this exactly as she meant it, no carelessness, no fumbling for the right way and missing it.

  “He conveyed a dreadful understanding of Hamlet’s pain,” she began. “As if he had looked at a kind of madness and seen its face. I am not sure if I believe one can portray that simply from imagination. Turn one horror into the image of another, probably, but not call it up without a kind of experience, some taste of its reality. It was still there in him long after the curtain had fallen.”

  They were moving faster through the darkness, only occasional lights from other vehicles moving past and disappearing.

  “Do you think so?”

  There was no denial in his voice.

  She moved closer to him, so slightly only she was aware of it.

  “What my mother-in-law told me made me see many things I had not understood before. One of them is the kind of damage that cruelty can inflict, especially when it is held secret where it cannot heal. To be clever is a great gift, and certainly the world needs its clever people, but to be kind is what matters. To be clever or gifted will make people laugh, and think, and perhaps grow in certain ways; but to be generous of spirit is what will bring happiness. I would not wish anyone I loved to be a success as an artist if it meant that he was a failure as a human being.”

  He reached out his hand and slid it over hers, gently, then tightened it.

  The hansom swayed around a street corner and straightened again.

  He turned in his seat and leaned forward. Very gently he kissed her lips. She felt his breath warm on her cheek, and put up her gloved hand to touch his hair.

  He kissed her again, and she clung tighter to him.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Pitt received Caroline’s letter with the address of the second seller of photographs and postcards, also in Half Moon Street, and with a deep anger inside him, he went with Tellman to see the man.

  “No!” the man protested indignantly, standing behind his counter and staring at the two policemen who had intruded into his place of business and were already costing him good custom. “No, I don’t sell no pictures except proper, decent ones as yer could show to a lady!”

  “I don’t believe you,” Pitt said tersely. “But it will be easy enough to find out. I shall post a constable here at the door and he can examine every one you sell. And if they are as good as you say, then in four or six weeks we’ll know that.”

  The man’s face went white, his eyes small and glittering.

  “And then I’ll apologize to you,” Pitt finished.

  The man swore venomously, but under his breath so the words were barely audible.

  “Now,” Pitt said briskly, “if you will take another look at this picture you can tell me when you got it in, how many copies you have sold and to whom, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Hadfield. . . . An’ I can’t remember ’oo I sold ’em ter!” His voice rose to a squeal of indignation.

  “Yes, you can,” Pitt insisted. “Pictures like that are sold only to people you know. Regular customers. But of course if you can’t remember who likes this sort of thing, then you’ll just have to give me a list of all of them, and I’ll go and question them—”

  “All right! All right!” Hadfield’s eyes burned with fury. “Yer a vicious man, Inspector.”

  “Superintendent,” Pitt corrected him. “It was a vicious murder. I want all your customers who like this sort of picture. And if you leave any out, I shall presume you are doing it to protect them because you know them to be involved. Do you understand me?”

  “ ’O course I understand yer! D’yer take me fer a bleedin’ fool?”

  “If I take you at all, Mr. Hadfield, it will be for accessory to murder,” Pitt replied. “While you are making me a list, I shall look through the rest of your stock to see if there is anything else that might tell me who killed Cathcart and who knew about it . . . possibly even why.”

  The man flung his arms out angrily. “Well, there y’are! Seein’ as I can’t stop yer. An Englishman’s ’ome not bein’ ’is castle, like, anymore, yer’d best ’elp yerself. Cheap way o’ getting yer ’ands on pictures an’ lookin’ at ’em for nothin’, if yer ask me!”

  Pitt ignored him and began to go through the drawers and shelves of pictures, postcards and slim volumes of drawings. Tellman started at the other end.

  Many of them were fairly ordinary, the sort of poses he had seen a hundred times before in the last week, pretty girls in a variety of flattering clothes.

  He glanced at Tellman and saw the concentration in his face, and now and again a slight smile. Those were the sort of girls he would like. He might well be too shy to approach them, but he would admire them from a distance, think them attractive and decent enough.

  He bent back to the task, and pulled out a new drawer with small books in it. He opened the first one, more out of curiosity than the belief that it would be relevant to Cathcart’s death. They were drawings in black and white. There was a kind of lush, imaginative beauty about them, and the draftsmanship was superb. They were also obscene, figures with leering faces, and both male and female organs exposed.

  He closed it again quickly. Had they been more crudely drawn, they would have been less powerful and less disturbing. He had heard that nature could become so distorted as to do this to people, but this was not the representation of the tragedy of deformity, it was a salacious artistic comment on appetite, and he felt soiled by it. He understood why men like Marchand crusaded so passionately against pornography, not for the offense to themselves but the strange erotic disturbance to others as well, the degrading of all emotional value. In some way it robbed all people of a certain dignity because it touched upon humanity itself.

  He did not bother to open the other books of drawings. Cathcart dealt only in photographs. He moved to the next drawer of cards.

  Tellman grunted and slammed a drawer shut.

  Pitt looked up and saw the distress in the sergeant’s fa
ce. His eyes were narrowed and his lips drawn back a little as if he felt an inward pain. In spite of all his experience, this confused him. He expected something higher of artists. Like many of little learning, he admired education. He believed it lifted men above the lowest in them and offered a path out of the trap of ignorance and all the ugliness that went with it. This was a disillusionment he did not expect or understand.

  There was nothing for Pitt to say. It was a private distress, at least for the moment better not put into words. In fact Tellman would find it easier to deal with if he did not even realize Pitt was aware of it.

  The next drawer of pictures was much the same as the last, pleasant, a few rather risqué, but nothing more than the art of young men seeing how far they dare go in putting their fantasies into expression. Some were the usual rectangular professional plates, slick, showing the same, rather repetitive use of light and shade, angle or exposure.

  There were also several of the round pictures which held considerably more individuality, although they were also less skilled. Sometimes the form was not as sharp, the balance less well disposed. These were the amateur ones, taken by the likes of the camera club members he had interviewed.

  One or two of them were good, if a trifle theatrical. He recognized poses that seemed to be taken directly from the stage. There was a fairly obvious Ophelia, not like Cecily Antrim but alive and disturbingly frantic, on the borders of madness. And yet it was a fascinating picture. She looked no more than twenty at the most, with dark hair and wide eyes. Her lips were parted and faintly erotic.