by P. D. James
Lastly, he took the second set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door leading into the shop. As he pushed it open, the rich smell of earth, the zest of lemons and oranges, met him so strongly that it caught at his breath. The darkness was absolute. No chink of light from the street lamps shone through the metal shutters, and if there were a window at the rear of the shop it must have been boarded up. No drawn curtains could so effectively exclude the sky. He leaned back against the door, staring into the blackness, breathing freely for the first time since he had entered the house. Even if the women returned early, they would have no key to this room. Here he could be sure of safety. Emboldened, he switched on his torch and swept it slowly over the shop, over the stall of potatoes and fruit, the folded trestle table, the rolled mat of synthetic grass, the piled boxes of tomatoes, apples and lettuces waiting for the morning, the sacks of potatoes and the meshed bags of onions humped against the wall. At the rear and under the shuttered window was an old porcelain sink; one of the taps was missing, from the other a continuous bead of water formed, then fell. He had to resist the urge to turn it off, to stop the regular soft dripping. To one side his torch illumined a wooden table with a formica top on which was a gas ring, a kettle, and a brown stained teapot. Underneath the table was an orange box turned on its side, containing two blue-rimmed mugs, a tin marked “sugar” and a tea caddy with a coronation picture of King George V and Queen Mary.
He propped his torch against one of the boxes. Then, illumined by the single beam of light, he put on the long mackintosh and the gloves, drawing them up over the tucked-in cuffs of the sleeves. Lastly he took the knife from the bottom of the rucksack. He squatted against the strong wooden upright at the back of the stall, knees bent under his chin, his thin buttocks hard against the unyielding floor, holding the sheathed knife in his hand. It wouldn’t happen tonight. He knew that with complete certainty, although he was unable to say why. But he felt obscurely that the mackintosh and the gloves were some protection against leaving a trace of himself for Monty to find, and it was right that he should thus formally garb himself for his task, should be prepared in case, by some miracle, the murderess returned alone. He sat on in the darkness, waiting, counting the regular dripping of the tap, smelling the warmth of the plastic mackintosh superimposed on the loamy scent of the shop, holding his white-gloved hands before him, palm to palm, like the hands of a priest.
It was just before midnight when at last they returned and he heard the firm closing of the front door. He thought he could detect a low murmur of voices and the creaking of the stairs, but he wasn’t sure. But then they were overhead. The house had not been built as two flats and there were only the joists and the wooden floor between them. The timbers creaked loudly as their feet struck them, and occasionally the wood cracked like a shot. Then his heart would leap and he would stare, petrified, at the ceiling, as if afraid that a foot would descend through the boards. He could hear every move. It seemed impossible that his presence, the very smell of him, the warmth of his spent breath, should not penetrate through to them. He could identify the two sets of footsteps, one lighter than the other. That would be the murderess; the girl was taller and walked with more confidence. Then the footsteps separated; they were moving about in different rooms. The quieter footfalls were in the front of the house; so the murderess must sleep in the bedroom overlooking the street. After about five minutes he heard her footsteps across the ceiling and, a few minutes later, there was the flush of the lavatory cistern and the muffled roar of the gas boiler. So the murderess was in the bathroom. This, if all else failed, could give him his chance. But he needed to know whether, with no one in the house at night except another woman, she would bother to lock the door, whether the door to the flat itself was propped open or closed when either of them went to the bathroom. Perhaps it would be instinctive to close both doors. If, in the end, he had to kill her in the bathroom, these were the facts it would be important to know.
By half past twelve the last sounds had died away, but still he sat on, the wood of the upright hard against his backbone. The loamy smell of freshly turned earth from the sacks of potatoes was stronger than ever. He found himself trying to hold his breath against memory. But it was no use. Suddenly he was standing again with Mavis by the covered heap of red earth at the edge of Julie’s grave in that vast east London cemetery, watching the small white coffin jerking slowly downwards into darkness. They had been the only two mourners; Mavis had insisted on a private funeral. They had always kept themselves to themselves; why should they be generous in grief? Why now should they expose themselves to the avid, salacious eyes of their neighbours? Their own minister had been ill and the young substitute had worn unpolished shoes. Mavis had kept her eyes on them throughout the words of committal. Listening to her complaints afterwards he had said: “But he took the service very nicely dear, I thought he spoke very well.”
And she had replied in the grudging, obstinate voice with which he was to grow so familiar: “He should have cleaned his shoes.”
He fixed his mind on the murderess sleeping overhead. Within a few days she would be dead. Perhaps he and the girl would be dead too. In that moment it seemed to him not to be important if they also died. There might be a necessity which he couldn’t yet foresee or understand, but which, when the time came, he would be powerless to prevent. That the three of them should die together even had a certain rightness, a completion, an avoidance of future complications which he could almost welcome. For himself, he feared death less than he feared imprisonment. Perhaps it was the possibility of his own imminent death, which he faced now for the first time, more than the certainty of hers, which drove his thoughts back to the past. On his mind there clicked a series of bright, disjointed images, like pictures flashed on a screen. The tinsel Christmas tree on the bar of the Goat and Compasses, glimpsed through the open door; the seaweed hanging in swathes from the girders of the pier, moving in slimy tentacles beneath the green onrushing tide, the grating dampness of the sand as he scuffed it over a stolen purse; Mr. Micklewright, holding a knight between his first and second fingers and sliding it towards him across the board; Eli Watkin spooning out the cat food and hissing endearments at his squawking brood; Julie in her new Girl Guide uniform; Julie sleeping in her pram under the apple tree on the lawn of Magenta Gardens; Mavis glancing at him across the scarred desk of the local secondary school where they had first met at evening classes in French. Why, he wondered, had they chosen French? Neither had ever been to France, neither had ever had any particular wish to go. But that had been the beginning. Nothing that had happened between them afterwards had ever persuaded him that he was lovable; only that, by some miracle of chance, Mavis had found him so.
From time to time he dozed, then woke and stretched his cramped legs. At last, before the dawn, he got slowly to his feet, took off his gloves and mackintosh and replaced them with the sheathed knife in his rucksack. His vigil was over; this was a new day. He wouldn’t return that evening; it was important to stay at the Casablanca on alternate nights, to ensure that he kept his senses fresh and alert, that he didn’t go too short of sleep. But he would come back on Thursday and on alternate nights after that until his chance came. Optimism had been reborn. He knew that the wait wouldn’t be long.
He closed the shop door with infinite care, then crept down the few yards of the passage. There was still the front door to shut, but he didn’t fear that that quiet click would wake the sleepers overhead. Even if the murderess still lay awake or stirred in her sleep, so small a sound would hardly disturb her. This was an old house; old houses were full of mysterious nocturnal noises. And by the time she switched on the light and got to the window he would be out of sight. The door closed behind him and he set off for Baker Street Station to wait for the first Circle line train.
7
It was mid-afternoon on Thursday 21st September, and Philippa was sitting in the basket chair at the open window of her room. She and her mother had just retur
ned from a visit to Brompton Oratory to see the Mazzuoli Marbles and there was an hour before they needed to set out for work. Her mother had said that she would make the tea. From the kitchen Philippa could hear small noises like the scrapings of a secretive domestic animal, delicate tinklings, an occasional soft footfall. The sounds were extraordinarily pleasurable. The door of her mother’s room was open, but Thursday was early closing and no sounds came up from the street. The voices which drifted in through her own window seemed faraway shouts of joy from another world. It had been a hot oppressive day with the threat of thunder, but in the last half-hour the sky had lightened and now the room was filled with the strong mellow light which comes before the dusk.
Philippa sat absolutely still in the silence, and there began to flow through her a sense of tingling delight, entrancing in its strangeness. Even the inanimate objects in the room, the air itself, were suffused with this iridescent joy. She fixed her eyes on the geranium on the windowsill. Why had she never before realized how beautiful it was? She had seen geraniums as the gaudy expedient of municipal gardeners to be planted in park beds, massed on political platforms, a useful pot plant for the house, since it throve with so little attention. But this plant was a miracle of beauty. Each flowerlet was curled like a miniature rosebud on the end of its furred, tender stem. Imperceptibly but inevitably as her own breathing they were opening to the light. The petals were a clear, transparent pink, faintly striped with yellow, and the fan-like leaves, how intricately veined they were, how varied in their greenness, each with its darker penumbra. Some words of William Blake fell into her mind, familiar but new. “Everything that lives is holy. Life delights in life.” Even her body’s flux, which she could feel as a gentle, almost controlled, flow, wasn’t the inconvenient and disagreeable monthly discharge of the body’s waste. There was no waste. Everything living was part of one great wholeness. To breathe was to take in delight. She wished that she knew how to pray, that there was someone to whom she could say: “Thank you for this moment of happiness. Help me to make her happy.” And she thought of other words, familiar but untraceable to their source: “In whom we live and move and have our being.”
She heard her mother calling her from the front room. There was a smell of cut lemons and freshly brewed China tea, and the pot with their two special cups, the Worcester and the Staffordshire, were on a papier mâché tray on the bedside table. Her mother was smiling and holding out to her a tissue-wrapped package. She said: “I made it for you.”
Philippa took it and shook out from its folds a polo-necked jumper in a variety of soft browns and fawns, and with two oblongs of apple green, carefully placed above the right breast and at the back. The jumper had been constructed from every kind of knitting stitch, and the variety of textures between the panels, the subtle blending of colours, gave its basic simplicity such distinction that Philippa, tugging it over her head, exclaimed aloud with pleasure: “It’s lovely! Lovely! You are clever, but when did you knit it?”
“In my room, late at night. I didn’t want you to see it until it was finished. It’s quite simple really. The sleeves are just oblongs grafted onto the dropped shoulders. Of course, it’s too warm to be worn now, but come the autumn in Cambridge you will be glad of it.”
“I’m glad of it now. I’ll always be glad of it. It’s beautiful. Everyone will wonder where I bought it. I shall like saying that my mother knitted it for me.”
They looked at each other, two faces transformed with pleasure. “I shall like saying that my mother knitted it for me.” She had spoken the words spontaneously, without embarrassment. She couldn’t remember in her private, self-conscious, fabricated life when she had been able to speak so simply what was in her heart. She tugged her mane of hair free from the rolled collar and shook it free. Stretching both arms widely, she spun round in pleasure. In the oval glass which she had set between the two windows, she watched her spinning image, gold and fawn and brown and flashing green, and behind her the still flushed face of her mother, bright-eyed and alive.
The peal of the front doorbell, strident and peremptory, broke their mood. Philippa stopped spinning and they gazed at each other with surprised and anxious eyes. No one had rung that bell since the probation officer’s last visit. Her mother said: “Perhaps George has come back for something and has forgotten his key.”
Philippa went to the door. She said: “You stay here. I’ll go.”
The bell had rung again before she reached the bottom of the stairs. And with that second ring she knew that this was trouble. She opened the door.
“Miss Palfrey? I’m Terry Brewer.”
The voice was cautious, almost apologetic. He was proffering a card. He must have had it ready in his hands as he heard her coming down the stairs. She didn’t look at it. The police had cards too. There was a card for every purpose: warrants, authorizations, identity cards, licences, passes. They said: “Let me in. I exist. I am authorized, safe, respectable.” She didn’t need a card to know what business he was in. She kept her eyes on his face.
“What do you want?”
He was very young, not much older than she was, with strong, tightly curled hair low on his forehead, a heart-shaped face with a neatly cleft chin, jutting cheekbones and a delicate, moistly pouting mouth. His eyes were large and luminous, pale brown speckled with green. She made herself look into them.
“Just a chat. I’m a feature writer, a freelance. I’ve been asked to do an article for the Clarion. About lifers and their readjustment to the world outside prison. Nothing sensational. You know the Clarion. They’re not interested in morbid sensationalism. What I’m after is the human interest, how you discovered who your mother was, what it’s like living together after all these years, how she survived her time in prison. I’d like to interview you both. Of course, the name will be changed. I shan’t mention Ducton.”
It was hopeless to try to close the door in his face. Already his foot was jammed against the wood. She said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t want to see you.”
“Oh, but I don’t think you’ve got much choice, have you? Better me than a dozen others. One interview, exclusive, and I leave you strictly alone. No address printed. No names. The others might not be so accommodating. You don’t need me to tell you that.”
It was a lie about being a feature writer or a freelance. She doubted whether he were even a reporter. More likely he was a trainee journalist or had some minor job on the Clarion and he saw this as his first big chance. But someone must have tipped him off and there could be only one person. She asked: “How did you find us?”
“I’ve got friends.”
“One friend particularly. Gabriel Lomas?”
He didn’t answer, but she knew at once that the guess had been correct. His muscles were too undisciplined, the face too mobile for dissembling. So Gabriel must have telephoned Caldecote Terrace, choosing his time so that Hilda would be likely to be there alone. Maurice would have sniffed danger and deceit over the line, but Hilda, silly, innocent Hilda, was a predestined victim. She wondered by what guile Gabriel had extracted the truth from her and how much of it he had learned. He would have lied about their meeting, of course; even if it weren’t strictly necessary he couldn’t have resisted at least one lie. And then he would have done his research. He was to read history at Cambridge. He would have been meticulous about ascertaining the facts. And it wouldn’t have been so very difficult. There weren’t many crimes for which a woman would be imprisoned for nearly ten years. He would only have to study the press cuttings for 1968 and ’69. She was surprised that it had taken him as long as a week to discover who her mother was. But, then, he might have had more important matters on his mind. Perhaps this small betrayal hadn’t been given top priority.
Watching Brewer’s predatory, ingratiating smile, she could understand why Gabriel had been attracted. Singularity and strangeness in a face had always drawn him. Why else, at first, had he bothered with her? He picked people over
like bric-a-brac, people could be discarded if he made a bad buy. This face would have intrigued him. The farouche good looks, the hint of corruption and danger, the spurious vulnerability. He was trying to look deprecatory, harmless, but she could almost smell his excitement. He was rather too carefully dressed and not altogether at ease in his clothes. This must be his best suit, kept for job interviews, weddings, seduction, blackmail. It was a little too well-cut, the lapels too wide, the cloth, more synthetic than wool, already creasing. It was odd that Gabriel hadn’t done something about his clothes. But he held himself well, he fancied himself, this common little pouf with his false, ingratiating smile.
“Look you’d better let me in. Get it over with. I’ll only be back. And I don’t want to discuss it here. I don’t want to start shouting. After all, someone from the street might hear us. They think your mother is called Palfrey, I suppose? Better keep it that way.”
Her mother had appeared at the top of the stairs. She whispered: “Let him in.”
Philippa stepped aside and he slid through the door. Her mother was standing at the open door of the flat and he pushed past her and moved into the front room as confidently as if he had been there before. They followed, side by side, and stood in the doorway regarding him. How eagerly he had pranced up those narrow shabby stairs, despising their poverty, their vulnerability! Now he was frankly surveying the room, keen-eyed as a creditor pricing their few possessions, his glance resting at last on the Henry Walton. The picture, which even to Philippa’s eyes looked suddenly out of place, seemed momentarily to confuse him.
It was an abomination that he should be there. Anger flowed through her. She was lifted exhilaratingly on a tide of passionate rage in which inspiration and action flowed together.
“Wait,” she said. “Wait.”
She ran into the kitchen and dragged the toolbox from the cupboard under the sink. Grasping the largest and strongest chisel, she walked past the front room with only a glance at Brewer’s face, stupid and vacant with astonishment, then went out shutting the door of the flat behind her. Then she inserted the blade of the chisel in the narrow gap between the lock and the door-jamb and worked away at the lock. She had no energy to waste on wondering what was happening inside the flat; all her strength, all her mind were concentrated on the task in hand. The lock didn’t break. It had been made to resist any such crude assaults. But the door itself was more fragile. It had never been intended as a front door and it had been there for over eighty years. She worked away, grunting with effort, and soon she heard the first creaks, saw the first splintering of the wood. After about two minutes it finally cracked and broke away. She gave a little moan and the door burst open under her hands. And now she was in the front room facing him, breathless, the chisel in her hand. When she could speak her voice was perfectly controlled.
