Cool Repentance

by Antonia Fraser

  Death of a Seagull

  Ketty's sharp tapping interrupted a very long train of thought in Jemima. It had been punctuated - unpleasantly - by bursts of music from a radio played much too loudly in the room above. Pop music. Somewhat against her will Jemima recognized the tunes because they had once been so colossally popular that it had been impossible to avoid contact with their demanding monotonous beat. One of these tunes which she recognized was 'Cool Repentance'.

  Was it the Iron Boy record being played? She could pick up - could not really fail to pick up whether she liked it or not - the repeated long-drawn-out first syllable 'coo-oo-ool, oh so cool repentance', but she could not recognize the voice of the singer. Some of the other Iron Boy hits were played, including 'Daring Darling' and 'Iron Boy' itself, but then she could also hear some of the Rolling Stones' numbers. During the brief pauses, however, when she could hear the disc jockey talking, Jemima found it was 'Cool Repentance' which stayed beating in her head and would not go away.

  It was not a soothing experience. Lying back on the chintz-covered chaise-longue in the sitting-room, Jemima contemplated asking Mrs Tennant to have the offending radio turned down: on reflection she decided that the unfortunate manageress had endured enough for one day. Then it occurred to her that the chambermaid Marie had been installed in the empty room above her to recuperate. Marie too had had an unpleasant experience. If pop music on the hotel-room radio contributed to her recovery, then perhaps she should be allowed to play it. Even loud.

  Feeling virtuously fair-minded - and also rather cross - Jemima set her mind back to work, to the tune of the loud beats coming from above. It was a question of the past, and of things in their proper order.

  Where had it all begun? It had begun, properly, with the moment when Christabel had confided her fears to Jemima: how she would only be safe again back on stage, 'with the eyes of the world upon me ... Oh, Jemima, I've been so terribly, terribly frightened ... Locked away at Lark. It's so dangerous ...' Then Gregory had arrived with Ketty and the girls. So Jemima had never really discovered where the mysterious danger lay, beyond the fact that it was clearly somewhere close at hand - connected with Lark Manor itself.

  After that there had been the picnic. She passed certain images back through her mind, as though replaying the key moments of a television programme. Christabel, with Nat Fitzwilliam at her feet, the young man talking away, the older woman's attention wandering. Jemima had spotted an oddly upset glance in the direction of Gregory, himself chatting cheerfully away to Filumena Lennox.

  Gregory, who had tried to warn Jemima off originally at their first bizarre encounter on the sea-shore: 'Why don't you just chuck this programme? ... Have you thought of its effect on people with something to hide?' He had pretended that he had been trying to protect Christabel's privacy. Had it after all been Gregory himself who had something to hide? Was it possible that it was Gregory whom Christabel had feared all along?

  Gregory had been in Larminster on the night of Nat's death - had no subsequent alibi beyond swimming as Matt Harwood had scornfully told her - and it was certainly feasible for Gregory to have entered the Royal Stag last night, since security, under Mrs Tennant's easy-going eye, was lax to non-existent. In many ways Gregory fitted the bill very well - all too well for Jemima, since she discovered in herself considerable reluctance to postulate Gregory's guilt (she hoped that this reluctance could be attributed to instinct - the right kind of instinct).

  Gregory had disliked Nat Fitzwilliam: he had made no secret of the fact. Gregory was a successful playwright, with no visible dependants, who had plenty of money to spare to support Old Nicola in her chosen retirement. So far, so good. Or rather, so bad.

  But all of this had to be based on a foundation-stone of hatred - hatred not of Nat, nor yet of Nicola, but of Christabel. Was it really possible for Gregory Rowan to hate Christabel Cartwright? Hate her so much that he had planned to drown her? And in so doing had tragically and mistakenly put an end to the life of a young girl - a girl with whom he had been openly flirting only an hour before?

  'Come with me and see pre-revolutionary Paris.' Jemima had overheard his offer. Most of the rest of the picnic must have heard it too. Gregory of all people had not expected Filly - rather than Christabel - to be wearing the magpie hat. For it was Gregory who had tried to persuade Filly to swim and, as he thought, failed. He had strode away towards the west cliff to swim by himself - wearing nothing but a pair of tennis shoes, no doubt. Or had he? Was this what Nat had seen through his binoculars? At one point it had seemed that Nat must have focused on something connected with Mr Blagge and his boat; now Mr Blagge's boating expedition had turned out to be quite innocent - just what it purported to be, a rescue expedition in choppy waters, at his wife's suggestion. So what had Nat seen - not seen - through his binoculars? 'I saw nothing where I should have seen something.' Gregory not under the west cliff at all ... for Gregory was by now cutting through the waters to the east like a black shark . .. Was this - 'just a little discrepancy between text and sub-text' - what Nat had tried to discuss 'several times with the person concerned' receiving an answer, which 'wasn't satisfactory either'. Old Nicola too, she had glimpsed something as she sat on the beach - an unknown 'helper' or 'cuddler' there in the water close to Filly; she had never referred to the incident again - was it Gregory Old Nicola had observed?

  Another image flashed on to her personal screen: Gregory in his cottage, telling her with perfect good-humour: 'It sounds ridiculous but at first I felt quite violent ... She only showed one pang of emotion and that was when we had to tell her her dog Mango had died ... For one terrible moment, I wanted to do her some frightful physical injury. I almost wanted to kill her for all the suffering she had caused . . .'

  'Coo-oo-ool, oh so cool repentance' beat and wailed and rocked above her for the second time: that really must be Iron Boy singing it. She thought: was it really possible for anyone to come back as Christabel had done, abandoned first by Iron Boy, then by the world, and not arouse devastating murderous passions in the injured?

  Jemima began to list them to herself. First of all, her children, but was Regina really for all her literary allusions to be classed as a potential matricide? A modern version of Electra, perhaps, with Christabel as Clytemnestra? She decided to hold on that one and passed on to Regina's sister. Blanche had evidently been most resentful of her mother when Jemima first visited Lark and theoretically the Nina incident should not have helped their relationship; yet she had the impression that mother and daughter had seemed much closer lately. Jemima thought of Blanche, over-heated in her Annie Hall outfit on the night of her birthday, and in any case physically most ill-suited to such a parody of masculine clothing: she had certainly improved since then.

  Jemima decided to hold on Regina and Blanche and pass on to the rest of the Lark Manor circle. Jemima was patiently reviewing the various characters involved: the Blagges ... after all, no. Ketty - in love with Julian Cartwright, said Gregory, hating Christabel's return which had demoted her in the household ... yes, perhaps ... All of a sudden the music above her head came to an abrupt halt.

  Footsteps were heard instead. Then voices. Then a door banged.

  Evidently Mrs Tennant had come to claim Marie, or at any rate restore peace to her hotel.

  The shock of the sudden silence, for one instant quite as shocking as the endlessly reverberating noise had been, had a most surprising effect on Jemima. It was as though she had suddenly seen everything exactly reversed: silence was shocking, noise the norm ... She began, with rising excitement, to look at all her own images from exactly the opposite point of view, to ask herself a whole new set of questions, questions which she knew at last were getting close to the heart of the mystery.

  Cool repentance ... but was it really possible in any couple for a wife to be quite so bad, a husband quite so good, as Christabel and Julian Cartwright seemed respectively to the outside world? Was Christabel really so complacently composed, Julian really so
doggedly adoring as they appeared in public? Had she really felt no shame at what she had done to him, her loving husband of so many years, the younger man who had married her when Gregory would not? More to the point, was a man, any man, really going to accept such flagrant behaviour and for so many years. She thought - nostalgically, as she lay on the chintz chaise-longue -of Spike. Chauvinist Spike who had not been able to understand Julian's husbandly meekness: 'I'd give her a proper going-over.' In vain Jemima had responded: 'It would drive me quite mad to have to come back to Lark as penitent Magdalen.' Suppose that secretly...

  Following this train of thought proved very interesting indeed to Jemima Shore.

  She conjured up a whole new set of images. She remembered the Sunday lunch table. Julian giving the orders. Julian, the lord of the manor, very much in command of his household. She reviewed again, still patiently, the picnic on the shore. She concentrated on Julian's assiduous control of absolutely every detail of the picnic, the melancholy which seemed to underlie Christabel's attitude to him, more than melancholy, almost a feeling of shrinking from him.

  She remembered Gregory's words: 'I was very surprised. She always said he was not her type: she called him her rich young man. Security, I suppose.' 'Not my type,' Christabel Herrick had said of Julian Cartwright ...

  She ran through still more of her conversation with Gregory in her mind. His surprise when Julian had agreed to fetch Christabel, the guilty woman, down to Lark immediately. Why had he rushed up to London so promptly? Why had he brought her down to secluded luxurious Lark, the house she had willingly abandoned? Gregory had given his own explanation: Christabel had been 'totally destroyed', 'scarcely sane', when Julian had fetched her - for Gregory was Julian's friend as well as Christabel's. 'Julian Cartwright,' he had loyally told Jemima, 'is much the nicest character of the Cartwright family.'

  Jemima wondered about other things. The death of Nat Fitzwilliam. Nat who had intended to focus his binoculars on the sea-shore from the Watchtower to view the production 'as a whole' and to concentrate on the character of Arkadina in particular: until Christabel had jokingly suggested that there had been enough concentration on Arkadina for one production, and that focusing on Blanche and Ollie, Filly and Gregory, or even Cherry and Julian, might provide more useful insights - into the characters of Konstantin, Nina and Trigorin ...

  The death of Nat Fitzwilliam, and that figure in the shadows. That figure - a man - alluded to by Mr Blagge, who knew well where to find the key, because the topic had been discussed in Flora's Kitchen: and knew also just as well as Mr Blagge how to throw it away afterwards so it would never be found. A man who noticed when the Cartwright family and their attachments were ostensibly upstairs in the Royal Stag finishing off Blanche's birthday elebrations, but in fact proved on examination to have been widely dispersed as the evening wore on. All this at a time when beady-eyed Old Nicola, also installed on the first floor near the service stairs, could easily have witnessed an unscheduled flitting from the hotel. Aroused by the noise on the service stairs, she could have looked out of her little back window and seen someone - who? - leaving the hotel by the back entrance and the car-park . . . basis for blackmail later. Old Nicola: who was expecting someone 'who can well afford to do so' to provide for her for the rest of her life. 'Someone who can well afford to do so, plenty of money, when you think how Old Nicola herself has to live.'

  And then at last Jemima saw it all: instinct helped her to take the last step, where first instinct, then reason, had guided her originally along her path of discovery. She saw it all in one appalled and appalling glimpse in which past and present combined.

  Plenty of money. Lark Manor. The lap of luxury. Julian Cartwright. Regina Cartwright. Blanche Cartwright. It all came down to this: could Christabel be forgiven for what she had done to her husband and family? Hadn't Christabel said it herself on their second meeting in Flora's Kitchen: 'It's too late. One can never go back.'

  It was at this point that Jemima heard Ketty's imperative knocks. Still startled, slightly shaking in view of the new path along which her thoughts were rapidly carrying her, Jemima undid the door. She took a step back.

  Ketty was an astonishing sight: her dark-red hair, normally strained back into its thick bun, was falling round her shoulders. Her eyes were hardly touched with their usual garish eyeshadow; her quivering mouth was quite devoid of its harsh red lipstick. She was wearing a cardigan over her dark dress which was misbuttoned: everything about Ketty's outfit, in contrast to her usual style, had the air of being very hastily assumed.

  'Miss Shore, let me in. It's urgent. Really urgent. Otherwise I wouldn't have come. I've driven from Lark. I took the Jaguar - he's got the Land-Rover. I've never driven it before. It's outside. Not very well parked. Oh, my God—' Ketty sat down suddenly on the chaise-longue. A glass of white wine was on the table beside her. She drained it. She did not seem to notice it was not water.

  This new defenceless Ketty, looking at least ten years younger than the formidable governess of Lark Manor, was such a surprising apparition, that it took a moment for Jemima to rally her thoughts. Then she realized the full import of what Ketty had just said:

  'Who's got the Land-Rover?'

  'He's got the Land-Rover. Julian. Mr Julian. He's going to the theatre. I know he is, and oh, Miss Shore, you've got to help us.' Ketty was by now trembling violently as though in delayed reaction to her drive.

  'How do you know he's going to the theatre?'

  'Where else would he go? But to her.' Ketty looked up desperately to Jemima, her large face incongruously framed by her mass of rippling auburn hair like the hair of a forties film star: her eyes were imploring. Yes, there was no doubt about Ketty's feelings for Julian Cartwright. 'And that's not the worst of it,' she went on. 'His pistol's gone. That's the worst of it. That's why I came to you. I know where he keeps it and it's gone. The drawer in the study was open after he left, when he rushed out of the house—' Ketty gave a sob.

  'Oh, Miss Shore, he's been so patient, so terribly terribly patient through it all. I'm frightened—'

  'I'm frightened too,' said Jemima grimly. 'Come on. We're going to the theatre.'

  Taking Ketty's hand, she guided her down the staircase and out of the hotel, ignoring Mrs Tennant's bewildered face behind the reception desk. With Ketty's hand in hers, Jemima felt for one absurd moment like the Red Queen tugging at Alice: but she was well aware that the situation in which they were all involved was tragic not absurd.

  Together they walked, half-ran and then ran across the pretty little square which separated the hotel from the theatre.

  The glass of the pentagonal theatre was thoroughly illuminated. Across its central facade hung an enormous white banner. It concentrated on essentials: TONIGHT, it read, CHRISTABEL HERRICK IN 'THE SEAGULL'. There was no mention of such details as the author's name, the director, let alone the names of any of the other actors in the King Charles Theatre Company.

  But when Jemima entered the theatre itself - rushing past the surprised attendant who exclaimed: 'I thought you telly people were all gone' - Christabel Herrick, the star of the occasion, was not visible on the stage. Jemima shoved Ketty down into a vacant seat on the left-hand aisle (she thought it must have been one of Megalith's unused seats, but it had in fact been vacated at the first interval by Father O'Brien, who had returned home to watch one of his favourite programmes on television). Jamie Grand, the powerful editor of Literature, was sitting in the same row: as usual when he was at the theatre - as opposed to reviewing a book - there was a pleased expression on his face; an unknown blonde girl was next to him. Neither of them took their eyes off the stage for a moment but Jemima saw another face look up at her with a frog-like air of injured astonishment at the disturbance. She recognized a London critic, come down to Larminster to witness the return of Christabel Herrick to the stage. There was no sign of Julian Cartwright in the crowded and darkened auditorium - but that was not where she expected to find him.

  Try
ing to catch her breath, Jemima surveyed the stage. Emily Jones was at the beginning of Nina's last speech: 'I'm a seagull ... No, that's not it. I'm an actress ... I'm a seagull. No, that's not it again ... Do you remember you shot a seagull? A man came along by chance, saw it and destroyed it...' She was ploughing on gamely and not unsuccessfully, if much faster than had been planned at rehearsals. Ollie Summertown as Konstantin was sitting listening to her.

  There was still time, time to get round to the back of the stage.

  'Slow up, Emily, slow up anyway for your sake as well as mine,' Jemima prayed desperately. 'Nina does not gabble.' And she turned and ran back out of the theatre, round to the Stage Door, in past an equally stunned door-keeper - 'Well, hello there Miss Shore, I thought—' But Jemima did not stop. She knew now exactly what had happened, what might happen. She got to the wings of the stage. Still she did not see the man she was looking for, Julian Cartwright, nor the woman, Christabel.

  Emily had reached the end of her speech and ran down the steps which, for lack of a proscenium arch, stood for french windows on the set. Konstantin was still tearing up his manuscripts: ending his work preparatory to ending his life. In the absence of a desk, he had to take them out of a seaman's canvas bag. It was a long-drawn-out process. Jemima noticed that Ollie's hands were trembling.

  At that moment there came a loud report from the direction of the dressing-rooms. A look of amazement followed by slight embarrassment crossed Ollie's face: as though he feared that he had somehow shot himself prematurely and would get into trouble for still being on stage tearing up manuscripts when he should be officially dead off-stage. There was a faint disconcerted rustle in the audience as though some of those who prided themselves on being Chekhovian cognoscenti were having the same reaction.

  But Jemima had no further time to consider what was happening on stage. She looked round frantically. She still could not see any sign of