by P. D. James
10
On Thursday, 20th July, three days after she had received her mother’s reply, Philippa took a day return ticket to York and travelled up on the nine o’clock train from King’s Cross. The brief information sheet which had been enclosed with her prison visiting order stated that the bus to Melcombe Grange left the York bus station at two o’clock promptly. She was in a state of restless excitement which drove her to action and movement. It would be easier to pass the waiting hours exploring York than to linger in London for a later train.
At the station bookstall at York she bought a guidebook, then checked the time of the return train. Then she walked indefatigably down the narrow paved streets of the walled city, Fossgate, Shambles, Petergate, between the timber-framed houses and the elegant Georgian façades, down secret alleyways and in and out of spice-smelling shops, through the eighteenth-century Assembly Rooms, the medieval Merchant Adventurers Hall, hung with the splendid banners of the Guilds, the portraits of their benefactors, through the remains of the Roman baths and into ancient churches. She walked in a medieval dream in which the varied delights of the city, colour and light, form and sound, imposed themselves on a consciousness which was simultaneously heightened yet detached. And so at last she passed under the statue of St. Peter, through the west door and into the cool immensity of the Minster. Here she sat and rested, looking up where the great east window stained the quiet air. She had bought a cheese and tomato roll for her lunch, and found herself suddenly hungry, but was reluctant to offend the susceptibilities of other visitors by eating it here. Instead she fixed her gaze where God the Father sat in majesty among His creation, glorified in the splendour of medieval stained glass. Before Him was an open book. Ego sum alpha et omega. How simple life must be for those who could both lose and find identity in that magnificent assurance. But for herself that way was closed. Hers was a bleaker and more presumptuous creed, but it was not without its comfort and she had no other. Now with myself I will begin and end.
She arrived early at the bus station and was glad that she hadn’t lingered over her lunch since the bus, a double decker, rapidly filled. She wondered how many of the passengers were visitors to the prison, how often the same people travelled month after month the same route. The destination board made no mention of the prison but stated simply that the bus went to Moxton via Melcombe. Some passengers seemed to know each other and called out a greeting or edged their way down the aisle to sit together. Most of them carried baskets or humped bulging tote bags onto the rack. About half the passengers were men and they too were laden. But it wasn’t a gloomy company nor, she thought, oppressed by any sense of stigma. Each might be carrying a private load of anxiety, but this afternoon, travelling through the bright air, each bore it more lightly. The sun burned through the windows, scorching plastic seats. The bus smelled of hot leather, bodies, newly baked cakes and the strong grass-scented summer breeze. Almost merrily it bore its chattering load through sparse villages, down green shadowed lanes where the laden boughs of the horse chestnuts scraped against the roof, then with a grind of gears, upwards to a high narrow road which ran between dry stone walls. On either side stretched the close-cropped fields, white with sheep.
Only three passengers on the lower deck seemed immune to the general air of cheerful well-being, a middle-aged grey-haired man, dressed with careful formality, who had taken his seat beside Philippa just before the bus moved off and who spent the journey gazing out of the opposite window and restlessly turning a plain gold ring on his third finger, and two middle-aged women who had settled themselves behind her and who talked for most of the journey, one of them in a querulous whine.
“It’s want, want, want with her, every bloody month. It’s all very well, I said, but I can’t do it. I’m keeping your bloody kids on the welfare, bread 20p a loaf and I can’t do it. It’s wool this month, if you please. Twenty balls! She’s knitting herself one of those jerkin things. George won’t visit anymore. He won’t put up with it, not George.”
Her companion said: “They got wool in Paggett’s sale.”
“That’s no bloody good. It has to be that new French wool. Eighty pence an ounce, if you please. And what about the kids? If she wants to knit, Darren could do with a pullover. I’ve got no bloody time for knitting, I told her, stuck in the house, three kids under eight. Pity they don’t let her out to look after them herself. I’m the one who’s in prison. I told her. I’m the one who’s been bloody well sentenced.”
And through it all the grey-haired man sat staring through the window, pulling on his ring.
From time to time she slipped her hand through the flap of her shoulder bag and touched the envelope containing her mother’s letter. It had arrived on Monday 17th July and had been posted two days previously. It was as short and businesslike as Philippa’s own and she knew it by heart.
“Thank you for your letter. Your offer is kind, but I think you ought to see me before you decide. I shall understand if you want to change your mind. I think you would be wise to change it. I have applied for a monthly visiting order for you and if you care to come I am of course always here.” It was signed simply Mary Ducton.
The note of sardonic humour in the last line intrigued her. But then, perhaps it had been meant to intrigue. She wondered if it was a self-protective device, a way of lowering in advance the emotional temperature of this first meeting.
Twenty minutes later the bus slowed to turn left down a narrower road into a valley. The signpost said “Melcombe—2 miles.” They drove through a village of stone houses, past the Melcombe Arms and a general store and post office, over a humped bridge spanning a shallow fast-running stream, then alongside an eight-foot stone wall. The wall was old but in an excellent state of repair, and it seemed to stretch for miles. Then suddenly it ended and the bus shook to a stop outside two immense wrought-iron gates. They stood wide open. On the wall the notice painted black and white was stark: “HM Prison, Melcombe Grange.”
It was, she thought, a not entirely unsuitable house for use as a prison for all its stolid domestic origins. It was a sixteenth-century brick-built mansion with wide projecting wings at whose junction with the centre block two heavy castellated towers rose like watchtowers. The rows of tall mullioned windows, coruscated by the sun, were secretive, transomed with stone bars. The doorway was formidable, its heavy ornate porch symbolic of strength and security rather than of the grace of hospitality. It was easy to see that the estate had been institutionalized. The sweep to the main door had been widened to provide a marked parking space for half a dozen cars, and to the right of the house she could see a row of prefabricated huts, craft rooms perhaps or extra dormitories. On the lawn to the left of the main path three women wearing bibbed overalls were tinkering, not very energetically, with a recalcitrant lawn-mower. They turned to stare at the stream of approaching visitors without apparent enthusiasm.
The openness, the absence of custodians, the beauty of the house stretching before her in its ageless calm disconcerted and confused her. The bus had gone on its way bearing the last few remaining passengers to the next village. She had forgotten to ask the time of the return journey, and she experienced a moment of irrational panic that, without this information, there could be no return journey, that she was condemned to be stranded here in this prison which was so alarmingly un-prisonlike. The visitors, sure of themselves, knowing what awaited them for good or ill, were streaming down the wide gravel path towards the house. Their shoulders dragged with the weight of their bags. Even the grey-haired man was carrying a bundle of books bound with a strap. Only she was coming empty-handed. She walked slowly after them, heart thumping. One of them, a coloured girl of about her own age, her hair minutely plaited and decorated with green and yellow beads, glanced back then waited for her. She said: “You’re new, aren’t you? Saw you on the bus. Who d’you want?”
“I’m visiting Mrs. Ducton. Mrs. Mary Ducton.”
“Mary? She’s in the stable block with my mate. I
’m going there. I’ll show you.”
“Oughtn’t I to report to someone?”
“You report to the warden’s office over at the stables. Got your VO have you?”
Seeing Philippa’s look of momentary incomprehension, she said: “Your VO. Visiting Order.”
“Yes, I’ve got that.”
Her companion led the way round the side of the house to a set of converted stables, across a cobbled yard and through an open door to a small office. There was a woman prison officer there in uniform. The coloured girl handed over her visiting order and dumped her bag on the small table. The woman officer rummaged through the contents with brief expertise. She said in a pleasant Scottish accent: “My word but you’re smart today Ettie. It beats me how you have the patience to thread in all those beads.”
Ettie grinned and shook her neatly decorative head. The beads danced and jangled, red, yellow and blue. The prison officer turned to Philippa. Philippa held out her pass.
“Oh yes, you’re Miss Palfrey. This is your first time, isn’t it? The Governor thought you’d like some extra privacy so I’ve put a notice on the sitting-room door. You’ll be all right there for an hour at least. You show Miss Palfrey the sitting room, will you Ettie, there’s a good lass, I can’t leave the desk just for a moment.”
The room was a little way down the corridor on the right. A cardboard notice with the word “engaged” was hung on the door. Ettie didn’t open it, but gave the door a gentle kick and said: “Here you are. See you on the bus maybe.” Then she was gone.
Philippa opened the door slowly. The room was empty. She shut the door and leaned against it for a moment, glad of the comforting strength of wood against her back. Like Miss Henderson’s office, this room had a spurious comfort. It was a transit lounge but without the ostentatious vulgarity of an airport waiting room, unpretentious, stuffy, overcrowded with furniture which looked as if it had been rejected from a dozen different homes. Nothing it contained was memorable. It was designed to be used and then mercifully forgotten. No transient would look back on this room with regret or be tempted to leave a humming chord of her misery or hope on the bleak air. There were too many chairs, assorted in size or shape, disposed around half a dozen small highly polished tables. The walls were plain and smudged in places, as if someone had cleansed them of graffiti. Over the fireplace was a print of Constable’s Hay Wain and below it on the mantelshelf a glass vase of artificial flowers. In the middle of the room was set a small octagonal table with two facing chairs. In contrast to the informality of the room they looked as if they had been specially arranged. Perhaps a helpful inmate, instructed to see that the room was tidy, had placed them there, seeing every visit as a formal confrontation across an invisible but impregnable grille.
The waiting minutes seemed to stretch for hours. Occasionally footsteps passed the door. It was as cheerfully noisy as school at mid-morning break. Philippa’s mind was a turmoil of emotions: excitement, apprehension, resentment, and finally anger. What was she doing abandoned here in this dreary room where the furniture was too clean, the walls too grubby, the flowers artificial? They had a large enough garden, surely they could at least provide fresh flowers. A cell would have been less disquieting to wait in. At least it didn’t pretend to be anything but what it was. And why wasn’t her mother here, waiting for her? She knew that she was coming, she must have known the time of the bus. What was she finding to do that was more important than being here? Her mind spun with grotesque images. Hair that had once been golden but was now dry as straw, dancing with threaded beads, her mother’s face sagging under the weight of make-up, a cigarette hanging from a slack mouth, hands with painted talons stretched out to her throat. She thought: “Suppose I don’t like her. Suppose she can’t stand me. We’ve got to spend two months together. I can’t get out of it now. I can’t go back to Caldecote Terrace and tell Maurice I made a mistake.” She walked over to the window and looked out across the cobbled courtyard at the second set of stables. She would make herself think about the architecture. Maurice had taught her how to look at buildings. This stable block was later than the house; it might even be neo-Georgian. But the clock turret with its swinging golden cock looked older. Perhaps they had re-erected it when the original stables were demolished. They had made a good job of the conversion. But where was her mother? Why didn’t she come?
The door opened. She turned round. Her first impression, but so fleeting that the thought and its rejection were almost simultaneous, was that her mother had sent a friend to break the news that she had changed her mind, that she didn’t want to meet her after all. It was stupid to have expected so much older a woman. And, at first, she looked so ordinary, a slight, attractive figure in a grey pleated skirt with a paler cotton shirt blouse and a green scarf knotted at the neck. All her grotesque imaginings fled like shrieking demons before a relic. It was like recognizing oneself. It was the beginning of identity. Surely if she had met this woman anywhere in the world she would have known herself to be flesh of her flesh. Instinctively they each slowly took a chair and regarded each other across the table. Her mother said: “I’m sorry I’ve kept you waiting. The bus was early. I didn’t want to watch out for it in case you didn’t come.”
Philippa knew now from which parent she had inherited her corn-gold hair. But her mother’s hair, shaped to her head like a cap and cut in a fringe above her eyes, looked finer and lighter, perhaps because it was streaked with silver. The mouth, wider than her own, had the same curved upper lip, but it was more resolute, the delicate droop at each corner less sensuous. But here was the pattern of her high cheekbones, her slightly arched nose. Only the eyes were different, a luminous grey faintly streaked with green. They held a look of half-startled wariness, of endurance, like those of a patient facing once more the inescapable and painful probing. Her skin might once have been honey-coloured, but now looked clear, almost bloodless. The impression was of a face still attractive, still young, but from which colour had been drained by a perpetual weariness, of watchful eyes which had seen too much for too long.
They didn’t touch each other. Neither stretched a hand across the table.
Philippa said: “What shall I call you?”
“Mother. Isn’t that why you’re here?”
Philippa didn’t reply. She wanted to say that she was sorry to have come empty-handed, but was frightened that her mother might reply, “but you’ve brought yourself.” It would be intolerable if their first meeting began with such banality.
Her mother said: “You do understand what I did, why you were adopted?”
“I don’t understand, but I do know about it. My father raped a child and you killed her.”
It seemed to Philippa that the air between them had solidified, had become the oscillating medium through which their words flickered and spun. Now it trembled, and her mother’s face was for a moment blank as if some tenuous link of perception had been broken. She said: “Did feloniously and with malice aforethought kill one Julie Mavis Scase. It’s true, except that they don’t use those words anymore and it wasn’t with malice aforethought. It wasn’t meant. But she’s just as dead as if it had been. And all murderers tell you that anyway. You don’t have to believe it. I don’t know why I said it. You must excuse me if I seem socially inept. You are my first visitor for nine years.”
“If you tell me, why shouldn’t I believe you?”
“But it’s irrelevant. You aren’t a romantic, are you? You don’t look as if you are. You haven’t come here with the idea of proving me innocent? You haven’t been reading too many crime novels?”
“I don’t read crime novels except Dostoevsky and Dickens.”
The noise from outside was louder now, the voices had become strident, feet were pounding down the corridor. Philippa said: “They’re a noisy lot, aren’t they? It’s rather like a boarding school.”
“Yes, a boarding school with strict discipline where they take difficult girls off their parents’ hands. This part is t
he old stable block converted into a pre-release hostel. Lifers have to live here for nine months before they let us out. We go out to work. There are a few liberal-minded employers in York with an interest in rehabilitating prisoners. After the prison authorities have deducted a contribution towards our keep and paid out pocket money they bank the surplus. I shall have two hundred and thirty pounds forty-eight pence when I leave. I thought—if you still want me—that the money could go towards the rent of the flat.”
“I can pay the rent of the flat. You’ll need your two hundred pounds. What do you do? I mean, what kind of job?”
She hoped she didn’t sound like a prospective employer. Her mother said: “I’m a chambermaid at a hotel. There wasn’t much choice of work. Murderers are easier to place than thieves or confidence tricksters, but with unemployment as high as it is the prison has to take what’s on offer. But it does mean that I’ve had my insurance card stamped.”
“Hotel work must be boring.”
“Tiring, but not boring. I’m not afraid of hard work.”
The statement seemed to Philippa out of character, pathetic, almost demeaning. It embarrassed her by its naivety. It was too close to an appeal, the Victorian kitchen-maid desperate to be taken on. Suddenly she thought of Hilda, bending over the kitchen table. The memory of Hilda at that moment was intrusive and disconcerting. She said: “Do we have to stay in here? It’s lovely in the sun. Can’t we go outside?”
“If you’d rather. The warden suggested that we might like to walk round the lawn. Visitors normally have to stay in the house, but she’s made an exception for you, for us.”
A gravel path, bordered with lime trees, circled the immense lawn. It was here that they walked. The gravel glinted in the sun and was as hot as cinders to the soles of Philippa’s feet. In the distance the bleached skeletons of denuded elms, stricken by Dutch elm disease, stood like pale distorted gibbets against the varying green of oak, beech, horse chestnut and silver birch. Occasionally their black shadows were broken by a path of green sward and she could see tantalizing vistas leading to a circular rose garden, a bulbous stone cherub. The skeleton of a dried beech leaf trembled momentarily on the path before being ground to dust under her feet. Even at the height of summer there were always some dead leaves. Someone somewhere was burning them: there was a sweet, pungent smell redolent of autumn. Surely it was early to be burning leaves. No one burnt leaves in the London parks. This was a country smell, raking memory back to forgotten autumns at Pennington, except that she had never lived at Pennington. The hard boughs of horse chestnut and oak, weighted with summer, the dead leaf, the smoky bonfire tang, the transitory spring sweetness of the lime flowers, all produced in her a momentary confusion, a sense of all seasons coming together in a moment out of time. Perhaps these two months, before she went up to Cambridge, would be similarly lived in a new dimension, not counted against her allotted years. Perhaps she would look back at this visit, uncertain whether it had been spring or autumn, remembering only the discordant scent and sounds, the single dead leaf.
