by P. D. James
“Yes, don’t you? All the evidence is there.”
“But I don’t want to have to deduce facts from evidence in a realistic novel. I want to be told. I know that the Victorians couldn’t be explicit, but surely they needn’t have been quite so timid.”
Philippa said: “Timid is about the last adjective I’d associate with George Eliot. But if you’re feeling critical about Victorian writing, why not indulge yourself with Victorian art? It might be fun to go to the exhibition of great Victorian paintings at the Royal Academy this morning. I think it closes on the seventeenth. Afterwards we could go on as planned to the Courtauld Institute, if that won’t be a surfeit of painting.”
“I don’t think I could have a surfeit of anything now, not even of pleasure.”
And so, at last, they met someone from Philippa’s past. That didn’t, in itself, matter. She had always known that it was inevitable. What did matter was that it should be Gabriel Lomas.
He came up behind them quietly while they were in the inner gallery, standing in front of Alma-Tadema’s The Baths of Caracalla and studying the catalogue note. He was alone, which was surprising; but it was surprising that he should be there at all. There was no way in which Philippa could have avoided the introduction and she had no intention of trying. She touched her mother’s arm and said: “This is a friend of mine, Gabriel Lomas. Gabriel, my mother. She’s in London and we’re spending the day together.”
He hid his surprise admirably. For a second—no more—his arrogant mobile face froze and his hands tightened on the catalogue. Then he said easily: “How pleasant for you both. But why not tear yourselves away from these glittering eyeballs and recover with lunch at Fortnum and Mason? Afterwards I thought of going to the Tate. The Henry Moore exhibition is finished, but one doesn’t need an excuse for visiting the Tate.”
His mouth smiled, his voice held exactly the right mixture of interest and pleasure, but his eyes, carefully avoiding too keen a scrutiny of her mother, were the eyes of an inquisitor. Gazing steadily at his face, Philippa said: “No thank you, Gabriel. We’re going on to the Courtauld Galleries and lunching later. We’ve planned rather a full day.”
He would, she knew, be both too well bred and too proud to insist or to force his company on them. He said: “I telephoned your adoptive mother a couple of weeks ago. She told me that you’d gone to earth. She was intriguingly mysterious.”
“She needn’t have been. Didn’t she explain that I’m spending three months in London on my own? I’m trying to find out if I can support myself in anything approaching the manner Maurice has accustomed me to. And I’m gaining experience for a book.”
That second explanation sounded pretentious and it was one she would have preferred not to make. But unlike the first, it rang true. Half the upper sixth were probably even now picking up experience for a first novel, as if experience lay like litter on the comfortable surface of their lives.
He said: “What about Paris, Rome, Ravenna? I thought you said you’d be saving to embark on the Grand Tour before Cambridge.”
“Not so grand. The mosaics at Ravenna will wait. I have a lifetime to see them. But this experiment is now or never.”
“Why not take an evening off from it and come to the ballet—both of you?”
The flick of his eyes towards her mother was amused, inquisitive. She said: “No thank you, Gabriel. I’m seeing no one. The whole thing will lose its point if I see friends whenever I’m lonely or go home as soon as I’m uncomfortable.”
“You don’t look at all comfortable now. On the other hand you’re obviously not lonely.”
Her mother had moved a little apart, ostensibly studying her catalogue, dissociating herself from them. He glanced at her; this time with overt curiosity and something like contempt. He said: “Until Cambridge, then.”
“Until Cambridge.”
“Can I drive you up?”
“Oh Gabriel, I don’t know! It all seems so far ahead. Perhaps I’ll be in touch.”
“Ah well, abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit. Give my love to the Sisley.”
“What Sisley?”
“Snow at Lucienne. That is, if you’re really on your way to the Courtauld. And good luck with the experiment.”
He raised one eyebrow and made a small rueful grimace which might have been intended to express regret, but in which she thought she detected a hint of complicity. Then he turned and bowed to her mother and was gone. Philippa went up to her and said: “I’m sorry about that. I thought he was out of London. Actually he’s the last person I should have expected to find here and alone. He affects to despise Victorian art. But we were bound to run across someone I knew sooner or later. I don’t mind if you don’t.”
“I mind your not being able to invite them home.”
Invite them home. The words conjured up suburban tea-time in the front room, homemade scones on doilies, fish-paste sandwiches, the best tea service brought out so that she wouldn’t be disgraced by the family in front of this unknown, eligible young man. Since she had never sat in such a room, it was odd that she knew precisely how it would be. She said: “But I don’t want to. We’re perfectly cosy on our own. I shall have three years of Gabriel at Cambridge. You’re not bored are you?”
“No. Not bored. Never that.”
“What did you think of him?”
“He’s very good-looking, isn’t he? Good-looking and confident.”
“He can afford to be. Nothing has ever happened to him to dislodge him from the centre of his universe.”
But one small thing had happened. She felt a twinge of anxiety. Had he really accepted that sexual failure philosophically? Wasn’t he a man who would need his small revenge? As if echoing her thoughts, her mother said: “I think he could be dangerous.”
“He’d be flattered to hear you say so; but he’s no more dangerous than any other young male animal, and he’s not dangerous to us. No one can be.”
Donne’s words came into her mind, but she did not speak them aloud: “Who is so safe as we where none can do Treason to us, except one of we two.”
She wondered whether her mother had read Donne. She said: “Forget him. He hasn’t spoilt the day for you, has he?”
“No, he couldn’t do that. No one could.” She paused as if wondering whether to speak, and then added: “Do you like him?”
“We don’t seem able to stay apart from each other for long. But I don’t think that what we have in common has anything to do with liking. Forget Gabriel. Let’s fight our way into the coffee bar before it gets too crowded, and then go on to the Courtauld. I want to show you some real pictures.”
3
That evening, just after half past six, the strident ring of the telephone set Hilda’s heart jumping. She had never liked answering it and during the day it seldom rang. Most of Maurice’s colleagues telephoned him at the university and he or Philippa would answer it when they were at home, taking it for granted, she supposed, that the call wouldn’t be for her. But since Philippa had left she had grown to dread that insistent, broken summons. She was tempted to take off the receiver, but then there might be a call from the court about one of her sittings, or Maurice might ring to say that he would be late home or was bringing a colleague back for dinner. She could think of no possible excuse why he should find the number continually engaged.
It was difficult to forget that the telephone was there. The house seemed infected with instruments. There was one on the table in the hall and another by their bed. Maurice had even had an extension fitted to the wall in the kitchen. Occasionally she would let it ring unanswered, standing stock-still, hardly daring to breathe, as if the instrument held its own secret, sinister life and could detect her presence. But the accusing silence after the final ring, the niggling guilt at her own inadequacy and weakness, were harder to bear than the fear of what she might hear. She hardly knew what it was she dreaded. She only knew that some catastrophe lay waiting in the future and that it would be heralded by this impe
rious ring.
Now she wiped her hands on her apron and took off the receiver and heard at the other end, the coin being shot home. Her palms were moist and she felt the receiver slipping through her fingers. She steadied it with her other hand and spoke the number. To her relief it was a voice she knew.
“Mrs. Palfrey? It’s I, Gabriel Lomas.”
As if she knew a dozen Gabriels; and anyone less pedantic would have said “It’s me.” She had always been a little in awe of him. He had taken too much trouble with her, confusing her with his easy charm. Sometimes his eyes had met hers in a mocking conspiracy, as if to say: “You know that you’re not worth bothering about, I know it, so what are we both up to, my dear, delightful, dull Mrs. Palfrey?” But at least this was a familiar voice, a lively voice, not the voice of a stranger, mysterious, heavy with imagined malice. She said: “How are you, Gabriel?”
“Fine. Look, I’ve seen Philippa and her mother. I met them at the Arts Council exhibition of great Victorian pictures at the Royal Academy. They were looking at those two Abraham Solomon oils Waiting for the Verdict and The Acquittal. I oughtn’t to have been surprised to meet her there. Philippa has always been fascinated by the Victorians. I must say I adore the peculiar awfulness of high Victorian art. Every picture tells a story. And what a story! A positively decadent feast of colour, my dear. Imperial confidence, pathos, Victorian eroticism and dreadful warnings about the horrid fate which awaited unfaithful wives. Have you seen the exhibition?”
“No, not yet.”
He must have known that she didn’t go to exhibitions. Maurice fitted in those that he wished to see during his lunch break and on the way home. Philippa went on her own or with her friends. Sometimes she had gone with Gabriel. Only once, in an effort to interest Hilda in art, she had taken her to an exhibition of paintings from the Prado. It hadn’t been a success. There had been an uncomfortable crush of people. The pictures had seemed to Hilda very dark. She remembered only the long, gloomy Spanish faces, the dark heavy robes. It had been difficult to simulate interest. None of the pictures had, she felt, any relation to her or to her life. She strained to hear Gabriel’s voice, which seemed suddenly to have got fainter. Then she heard it: “It was unnerving. The pictures, I mean, not the encounter. Although that was unnerving too, in its way.”
“How did she seem, Gabriel? Was she happy?”
“Philippa? Who can tell? No one is better at disguising emotion. She wanted to talk, but we only had about five seconds. Her mother moved tactfully away; at least I thought she was being tactful, giving us the chance for a private word, but now I’m not so sure. It may have been embarrassment. Anyway, she moved to the other wall and began rather ostentatiously studying Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England. Well, if one had to look at any picture that was the one most worth attention. It’s an extraordinary situation, isn’t it? Philippa and her mother, I mean.”
Puzzled and confused, Hilda asked: “Did Philippa tell you?”
“Oh yes, just the essentials. We only had a second. She wants me to visit her on Thursday at their place. Apparently the mother is going out. She said that there were things she wanted to talk over.”
Hilda was aware of a transitory pain that Philippa should have confided her secret so casually, after all her careful and insistent instructions that no one was to be told under any circumstances. No one. But perhaps Gabriel was special. She had sometimes felt that he might be. But how much had she told? And what was that he had said earlier about a verdict and acquittal? She said: “What things? Is she all right?”
“She isn’t ill, if that’s what you mean. A bit strained, perhaps, but that might have been a touch of the Alma-Tademas. They were on their way out when we met. As I said, there really wasn’t time for confidences other than the main one, where her mother had been all these years.”
So she had told him, he did know. Confused, she said: “She told you that?”
“Well, I more or less guessed. There is a certain wariness about the eyes. I took one look and thought: either hospital or prison. I’m not sure that taking her to view high Victorian art is exactly calculated to adjust her to contemporary London. I did try to lure them to the Tate, but I got the impression from her mother that my company wasn’t exactly welcome.”
“How did they seem to you? Are you sure that Philippa’s all right?”
“I’m not altogether sure that the experiment is working, if that’s what you mean. I take it that that’s what she wants to see me about.”
“Gabriel, try to persuade her to come home. I don’t mean permanently if she doesn’t want to. Just to come and talk to us.”
“That’s what I had in mind. It’s silly cutting herself off. It’s this thing she has about the biological tie. It’s completely irrational. You’re her mother in any real sense of the word.”
He didn’t believe that. She didn’t believe it. And it wasn’t important anyway. Why should he need to tell her lies? Why did they all lie to her; obvious, commonplace, childish lies which they didn’t even take the trouble to make convincing. But at least he had seen Philippa. At least she would be getting some news. Then she heard his voice again.
“I’m supposed to be there next Thursday at six. The trouble is that I’ve lost the address. I scribbled it down on the back of my catalogue and now I can’t lay my hands on it. The name too.”
“Ducton. The name’s Ducton. And they’re at 12 Delaney Street, northwest one. It’s off Mell Street.”
“I remembered Mell Street and the number of the house. And of course, she introduced her mother as Ducton. It was Delaney Street I couldn’t remember. Have you any message for her?”
“Just my love. Give her my love. Perhaps you’d better not say that we’ve spoken, but Gabriel, try to persuade her to come home.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “She’ll come home all right.”
When she had put down the receiver Hilda’s heart was lightened. She felt something very like happiness. After all, if they were visiting exhibitions, things couldn’t be too bad. They would hardly be looking at pictures together if life were intolerable for them. And at least Philippa had got in touch with a friend, one of her own age group. Gabriel would ring her back and give her the news. She wouldn’t tell Maurice that he had rung. She knew that he was anxious about Philippa, but she knew too, that it wasn’t an anxiety he was willing to discuss. But, after next Thursday, she would get some news. Perhaps Philippa was ready to come home. Perhaps everything was going to be all right after all.
As she rinsed and dried her hands and went back to chopping the onions, she wondered briefly and totally without anxiety why Gabriel had troubled to telephone from a public box.
4
His plan was basically simple, although he knew that carrying it out would be trickier. He would lift the key ring from Monty’s jacket pocket while, at the same time, dropping from his hand a bunch of keys roughly equal in size. Monty would be aware, even if only subconsciously, of the weight and jangle of the keys against his thigh. Simply to steal them would mean almost immediate discovery. Once the keys were in his possession he would have to get the two Yales copied as quickly as possible, preferably somewhere close but where there were plenty of customers so that one face might not be particularly remembered. Then the genuine keys would have to be returned and the substitutes recovered. It would mean two appearances at the shop within a comparatively short time. And there would be other customers, he would have to choose his moment carefully. But first he must get a close look at the key ring and the number and weight of the keys.
On the first day, Monday 11th September, he stationed himself at his watching post on the wasteland at eight-forty-five, binoculars at the ready. The greengrocer arrived on his bicycle at three minutes past nine, felt in the pocket of his close-fitting denim jacket and unlocked the door. But his back was firmly towards the street and it was impossible for Scase to get a glance at the keys. Two minutes later the shopfront was cranked open and Monty began
the business of dragging forward the crates of fruit and vegetables from the back of the shop, and arranging his display. He had exchanged his blue jacket for the shabby fawn working coat which he wore open. It had two large side-pockets, the left-hand one slightly ripped at the seam. The door between the shop and the ground-floor passage of the house was open.
Shortly after ten past nine a small van stopped outside the shop and the driver and a lad clambered down from the cabin and began lugging crates of fruit and vegetables onto the pavement. The street door was closed. Monty’s hand went into his left pocket and he pressed something into the boy’s palm. Then he began helping the driver to unload while the lad unlocked the door, wedged it open with a net of Spanish onions and began to hump in the crates of fresh produce. For a few seconds the key was left in the door, the bright ring of metal and the pendant keys hanging against the wood. But the driver, carrying a box of apples, moved across obscuring the view. Then the boy’s hand fastened on the keys and he tossed them back to Monty. Scase glimpsed nothing but the flash of metal and Monty’s hand snatching at the air.
For the next three days the routine was the same. Scase stayed all day at his post, fortified at mid-morning with sandwiches, but was still unable to get a close look at the keys. Monty worked alone. At midday he went over the road to the Blind Beggar and brought back a brimming pint-mug of beer, then dragged an upturned crate from the back of the shop and sat beside the stall drinking the beer and eating an immense roll of what looked like cheese and tomato. Occasionally during the morning he would go over to the pub. When this happened the wizened little man from the junk shop temporarily took over the stall. Scase guessed that they had this arrangement; that Monty would keep an eye on the junk from time to time while his neighbour covered his visits to the Blind Beggar. During the whole of the three days the connecting door between the shop and the rest of the house was left ajar, except when Monty was about to leave, when he would firmly close it. Focusing his binoculars with some difficulty through the slit in the fence, Scase was able to see that this door, too, had a Yale lock and he guessed that Monty would be equally punctilious about closing the connecting door before finally leaving at night.
