by P. D. James
Then he smiled. He had a singularly sweet smile, but it was so transitory that those who saw it were left wondering whether there had indeed been that extraordinary transformation. He put down his unfinished drink, shook hands with one or two closest to him, and left them.
Back in the small room which he shared with two other clerks, he had already packed his few belongings in a plastic carrier bag; his cup and saucer carefully wrapped in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph; a ready reckoner and dictionary; his toilet bag. He gave a last look round. Nothing remained to be done. Making his way to the lift he wondered what they would have said, how they would have looked, if he had spoken quite simply what was in his mind.
“I have to retire early because there is something I must do in the next few months, a task which will take a great deal of time and planning. I have to find and kill the murderess of my child.”
Would the ring of nervously smiling faces have frozen into stark disbelief, the mouths set in their conventional smirks have broken into embarrassed laughter? Or would they have stood in a surrealist charade, still smiling, still nodding, toasting him in their cheap sherry, as if the dreadful words were as meaningless as Mr. Willcox’s pompous platitudes? The thought that he might actually hear himself speaking the truth had come to him during the last seconds of Mr. Willcox’s peroration. He hadn’t, of course, been seriously tempted to such folly; but it surprised and slightly offended him that so iconoclastic and so melodramatic a conceit should have entered his mind. He was not given to the grand gesture, either in thought or action. Killing Mary Ducton was a duty which he neither wanted to escape, nor could escape even had he wanted to. Certainly he planned to commit a successful murder, in the sense that he intended to avoid detection. It was justice, not martyrdom, that he sought. But never until this afternoon had it occurred to him to wonder what his colleagues would think of him as a prospective killer, and he felt obscurely denigrated, his serious purpose cheapened into melodrama, that the thought should have occurred to him now.
9
He took his usual way home over Westminster Bridge, across Parliament Square, down Great George Street and into St. James’s Park. The quicker way to Liverpool Street Station and the eastern suburban line was by Waterloo and the city line, but he preferred to walk each evening over the river and take the underground from St. James’s Park. Since Mavis’s death he had been in no hurry to get home. There was no hurry now.
St. James’s Park was crowded, but he managed to find room on a bench beside the lake. Carefully he lowered the holdall with his few belongings and placed it on the path beneath his feet. Staring at the lake through the boughs of a willow, he realized that he had sat in this identical spot eight months previously, in his lunch hour on the day after his wife’s death. It had been an unusually cold Friday in November. He could remember a smudged sun high above the lake like a great white moon, and the willow fronds slowly shedding their pale lances onto the water. In these burgeoning rose beds there had been a few tight red buds, blighted by the cold, their stems choked with dead leaves. The lake had been bronzed and wrinkled with, at its centre, a great salver of beaten silver. An old man, surely too old to be employed by the city council, had shuffled along the path past him, spearing the sparse litter. The park then had held an air of sad decrepitude, the handrail of the blue bridge worn by tourists’ hands, the fountain silent, the tea house closed for the winter. Now the air was loud with the staccato chatter of tourists, the shrieks and laughter of children. Then, he remembered, there had been one solitary child with his mother. The gulls had risen squawking before his harsh, cracked laughter, and he had stretched out his arms, willing their plump bodies to fall into his palms. Under the far trees patches of early snow had lain between the clumps of grass like the discarded litter of the dead summer.
Remembering that day he could almost feel again the November cold. He shut his eyes against the sunlit greenness of the park, the sheen on the lake; blotted out the calling voices of the children and the distant beat of the band; and willed his mind back to the hospital ward in which Mavis had died.
It had been an inconvenient day and time to die, the Thursday of the major operation list, and at four in the afternoon when the trolleys were coming back from the theatre. These things, he had sensed, were better managed at night when the patients were settled or asleep, when there was time for the nursing staff to turn aside from the battle and minister to those who had already lost it. The staff nurse in charge, harassed, had explained that normally they would have moved his wife into a side ward, but the four side wards were occupied. Perhaps tomorrow. There was the unspoken commitment that if she could die more conveniently then she could die with more comfort. He had sat by her bed behind the drawn curtains. Their pattern was forever fixed in his mind, small pink rosebuds on a pink background, cosy, domestic, a prettification of death. They were not completely drawn, and he could glimpse through the gap the business of the ward, trolleys being wheeled beside the waiting beds with impersonal efficiency, the long-gowned nurses steadying the swinging drip-bottles, voices and passing feet; from time to time a ward orderly put her head round the curtains and asked brightly: “Tea?”
He took the cup and saucer, thick white china with two lumps of sugar already dissolving in the spill of brown liquid.
Both her arms lay outside the coverlet. He held her left hand, wondering what dreams, if any, peopled the uplands of her valley of the shadow. Surely they couldn’t be as tormenting as the nightmares which, in the weeks following Julie’s death, had made dreadful her nights so that he would wake to her shrill screams, to the hot sweet smell of sweat and fear. The world she was inhabiting now was surely gentler, or why would she lie so still? The passing expressions of her face, which he watched with detached interest, were the transitory hints of emotions which she could no longer feel, a peevish frown, a sly unconvincing smile which reminded him disconcertingly of Julie as a baby when she had wind, a petulant frown, the illusion of thought. From time to time her eyes flickered and her lips moved. He bent his head to listen.
“Better use a knife. It’s more certain. You won’t forget?”
“No, I won’t forget.”
“You’ve got the letter?”
“Yes, I’ve got the letter.”
“Show me.”
He took it from his wallet. Her eyes focused on it with difficulty. She stretched her right hand trembling towards it and touched it as a believer might touch a relic. She tried to fix her eyes on it. Her jaw dropped and began to quiver as if the effort of concentrating on that oblong of creased white paper had released the final disintegration of muscle and flesh. He took her dry hand in his, and pressed it against the envelope. He said: “I won’t forget.”
He remembered when she had written the letter. It had been just one year before, when the cancer had been first diagnosed. They had been sitting together, distanced, on the sofa watching a television programme about the birds of Antarctica. After he switched off she had said: “If I don’t get better you’ll have to do it alone. That might not be easy. You’ll need an excuse for finding out where she is. And after she’s dead, if they suspect you, you’ll have to explain why you traced her. I’ll write a letter, a letter of forgiveness. Then you can say that you promised me on my deathbed to deliver it into her hand.”
She must have been planning that, thinking it out all the time they were watching the programme together. He could still remember the sudden jolt of disappointment and fear. Somehow he had believed that her death might release him, that he wouldn’t be expected to carry the burden alone. But there was to be no escape. She had written the letter at once, sitting at the kitchen table, and had placed it in an unsealed envelope remembering that he might need to show it to someone, someone in authority, someone who might let him know where the murderess was. He hadn’t read it at the time, and he hadn’t read it since. He had carried it with him in his wallet. Until this moment, so short a time before her death, she had never mentioned it
again.
She sank into unconsciousness. He sat on stiffly beside her, letting the dry hand rest beneath his. A lizard hand, inert, repellent, the loose skin sliding beneath his touch. He told himself that it had cooked for him, worked for him, cleaned his house, washed his clothes. He tried to picture these things, tried to stimulate pity. It meant nothing. He felt pity but it was a diffuse impersonal hopelessness at the inevitability of loss. The ward seemed loud with ineffective activity, meaningless suffering. He knew that if he wept it would be for all of them there, sick and healthy alike, but most of all for himself. He had to make an effort of will not to draw his hand away. He was helped by the thought that the staff nurse might draw back the curtains and would expect to find him sitting thus linked, dispensing the final consolations of the flesh. Love had died. The woman had throttled it to death when she throttled the life out of their child. Perhaps it hadn’t been very strong to die so easily and thus vicariously, but it had seemed strong. They had loved, as surely every human being did, each to the limit of his capacity. But they had failed each other at the end. Perhaps she had been the most culpable because the stronger. But somehow he should have been able to help her back to a kind of living. Now there was one way left in which he wouldn’t fail her. Their joint purpose must now be his alone. Perhaps the death of the woman would be both an expiation and, for him, a release into some kind of life, a justification of the long, lost years.
She had nourished grief and revenge like a monstrous foetus, ever growing but never delivered. Even her general practitioner, wearily drawing his prescription pad towards him and writing yet another letter for a psychiatric outpatient appointment, made it plain that he thought she had grieved long enough. Grief, after all, was an indulgence, having no merit, no social value, rationed out like coins to the deserving poor, a commodity the strong and self-reliant were too proud to need. Perhaps, he thought, the Victorian habit of formal mourning had its uses. At least it defined the accepted limits of public indulgence. A year in black for a widow, he remembered his grandmother had told him, then six months in grey, then in mauve. Those expensive conventions were not, of course, for her but she had observed them with approval in the large town houses in which she had served as a parlourmaid. How long in black, he wondered, for a raped and murdered child. Not long perhaps. In his grandmother’s time there would have been a replacement within a year.
How easily humanity subscribed to the universal commercial imperative: business as usual. You have your life to live, they had told Mavis, and she had gazed at them with huge uncomprehending eyes since, so obviously, she no longer had her life to live. You must think of your husband, her doctor had commanded, and indeed she had thought of him. Lying stiffly, speechlessly, side by side in the double bed of that back suburban bedroom, he had stared into the darkness and seen her thoughts, self-reproachful, like a darker cloud against the blackness of the ceiling, or a contagion spreading from her brain to his. Never once had she turned to him. She had occasionally stretched out a hand, but when he had taken it had withdrawn it as if the flesh which had impregnated her had become repulsive. Once, shy and with a sense of betrayal, he had made himself speak to their doctor. The answer, glib and professional, had done nothing to help. “She associates physical love with grief, with loss. You must be patient.” Well, he had been patient, patient unto death.
She was trying to speak again. He bent down and caught her breath, sour-sweet with intimations of decay, and had to resist the temptation to put his handkerchief to his mouth to shield him from contamination. He held his breath and tried not to swallow. But in the end he had to take her death into himself. It took her several minutes to get out the words, but when they came between the gibbering lips her voice was surprisingly clear, gruff and deep as it had never been in life.
“Strong,” she said. “Strong.”
He didn’t know what she meant by that word. Was it a final exhortation to him to stay strong in resolution? Or did she mean that the murderess was strong, too strong for him to overcome her if he came unweaponed to the kill. Standing there in the dock of the Old Bailey she hadn’t struck him as particularly tall or robust; but perhaps that court, so unexpectedly small, so anonymous, patterned in pale wood, diminished all human beings, guilty and innocent alike. Even the judge, scarlet-sashed under the royal coat of arms, had shrunk to a bewigged marionette. But the years in prison wouldn’t have made her less strong. They looked after you in prison. You weren’t overworked or underfed. When you were sick they gave you the best medical care. They saw that you got your exercise. When he and Mavis had talked together about the killing, they had planned to throttle the woman since that was how Julie had died. But Mavis was right. He was on his own now. He had better use a weapon.
He hadn’t wanted her to die like this, in bitterness and hate. This too the murderess had taken from them with so much else. Love; the solace of responsive flesh. Companionship, laughter, ambition, hope. And of course Julie. Sometimes to his surprise he almost forgot Julie. And Mavis had lost her God. Like all other believers she had made Him in her own image, a Methodist God, benign, suburban in his tastes, appreciative of cheerful singing and mildly academic sermons, not demanding more than she could give. The Sunday-morning chapel had been more a comfortable routine than an imperative to worship. Mavis had been brought up a Methodist and she was not a woman to reject early orthodoxies. But she had never forgiven God for letting Julie die. Sometimes Scase thought that she had never forgiven him. Love had died chiefly because of guilt; their joint guilt; her blame of him, his blame of himself. She would return to it again and again.
“We shouldn’t have let her join the Guides. She only agreed because she knew you were keen, that it would please you.”
“I didn’t want her to be lonely. I remember what it was like when I was a child.”
“You should have called for her every Thursday. It wouldn’t have happened if you’d called for her.”
“But you know she wouldn’t let me. She told us that Sally Meakin always walked home with her across the recreation ground.”
But Sally Meakin hadn’t. No one had, and Julie had been too ashamed to ask for him to call for her. She had been like him as a child, unattractive, solitary, introspective, coping as best she could with the irrational terrors and uncertainties of childhood. He had guessed why she hadn’t taken the short cut home across the recreation ground. It must have seemed limitless in its dark emptiness, the swings tied up for the night but creaking in the wind, the great upward sweep of the slide gaunt against the sky, the dark recesses of the shelter, smelling of urine, where in the daytime the mothers sat with their prams. So she had walked alone the long way round, down unfamiliar streets, made less frightening because they were so like her own, bordered with cosy, comfortable semidetached houses with their lighted windows, comforting symbols of security and home. And it was there in one of those dull streets that she had met her murderer. It must have been because the rapist and his house were both so ordinary that he had been able to entice her in. They had warned her punctiliously against speaking to strange men, accepting sweets, going away with them, and they had always thought that her timidity would protect her. But nothing protected her, neither their warnings nor their love. His guilt was less now. Time didn’t heal, but it anaesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much. He had read somewhere that even the tortured reached a point beyond which there was no more pain, only the thud of unregarded blows, a limbo beyond suffering that was almost pleasurable. He remembered the first cup of tea he had drunk after Julie’s death. He couldn’t have forced himself to swallow food, but suddenly he had been intensely thirsty, and the taste of the strong, sweet tea had been marvellously good. No tea before or since had tasted like that. She had only been dead a matter of hours and already the voracious, the treacherous body was able to experience pleasure.
Now, sitting in the sun with his few belongings on the ground between his feet, he accepted again the burden she had laid on him.
He would seek out his child’s murderess and kill her. He would try to do it without danger to himself since the prospect of prison terrified him, but he would still do it whatever the cost. The strength of his conviction puzzled him. The will for the deed was absolute, yet the justification eluded his questing mind. Surely it wasn’t just the need for revenge. That had long ago ceased to motivate him. His grief for Julie, at first almost as lacerating as Mavis’s, had long ago faded into a dull acceptance of loss. He could hardly now recall her face. Mavis had destroyed all their photographs of her after the murder. But there were pictures which he kept in his mind, recalling them almost as a duty, an aide-mémoire of grief. Taking his daughter into his arms for the first time, the infinitely small cocooned body, the gummed eyelids, the secretive meaningless smile. Julie toddling towards the sea at Southend, clinging tightly to his finger. Julie in her Guide uniform setting the table for dinner with anxious care, qualifying for her hostess badge. Nothing he did to Mary Ducton at whatever cost could bring her back.
Was it the need to keep faith with Mavis? But how could you keep faith with the dead, who by the very act of dying had put themselves forever beyond the reach of treachery or betrayal? Whatever he did it couldn’t touch Mavis, couldn’t harm or disappoint her. She wouldn’t return a querulous ghost to reproach him with his weakness. No, he wasn’t doing it for Mavis. He was doing it for himself. Was it, perhaps, that after nearly fifty-seven years of living he needed to prove himself, nonentity that he was, capable of courage and action, of an act so terrible and irrevocable that, whatever happened to him afterwards, he could never again doubt his identity as a man? He supposed that it might be so, although none of it seemed relevant to him. But surely it was ridiculous, this sense that the act was inescapable, preordained. And yet he knew that it was so.
The sun had gone in. A chill wind moved across the lake, shaking the willows. He felt under the bench for his holdall and made his way slowly to St. James’s Station and home.
