by P. D. James
“Right. Now get out. If you write a word, I’ll complain to your paper and to the Press Council that you forced your way in here, broke down the door and threatened to betray us to everyone in the neighbourhood unless we gave you an exclusive story.”
He backed against the wall, his eyes fixed on the chisel. His voice shook. He said in a hoarse whisper: “You crazy bitch! Who’s going to believe you?”
“More people than will believe you. Can you afford to take the risk? I’m eminently respectable, remember. Are you? And do you think a reputable newspaper will welcome that kind of publicity? My mother may be beyond compassion, but I’m not. I’m the dutiful daughter, risking my future to help her. Cambridge scholar in backstreet hideout. ‘She’s my mother,’ says Mary Ducton’s daughter. That’s the kind of emotional muck you had in mind, isn’t it? I qualify for pity. Do you seriously believe that anyone will believe that I broke down that door myself?”
“It isn’t my chisel! Why should I come here with a chisel?”
“Why indeed, except perhaps to force open a door. It’s a perfectly ordinary chisel. New, as you see. No distinguishing marks. Prove it isn’t yours if you can. And remember, it’s two against one. You seem to know who my mother is, what she did. Do you suppose a lie would stick in her throat? Not if it’s going to destroy your career it won’t.”
He said, with a kind of wonder: “Christ, I believe you’d do it!”
“I’m her daughter. If this didn’t succeed and you got away with it, how long do you think I’d let you last?”
There could be no doubt now of his terror. She could smell it, rancid as vomit. He backed towards the door as she advanced, chisel in hand, the point at his throat. Then he was gone and they heard the clatter of his frantic feet on the stairs.
Her mother moved along from the wall, feeling it with outstretched hands like a blind woman. Philippa went to her and led her to the bed. They sat side by side, their shoulders touching. Her mother whispered: “You frightened him.”
“I did, didn’t I? They won’t print anything, and he won’t write anything. Not yet anyway. Even if he tells, they’ll check with their lawyers first.”
“Couldn’t we go away? Not for long, just for a few days so that he’ll think he’s scared us off. We could go to Ventnor, in the Isle of Wight. I went there once for a Sunday school treat when I was nine. There are cliffs and sand and little Victorian coloured houses. Once he finds we’ve gone he won’t keep coming back.”
“He won’t come back at all. He won’t dare. He knows that I wasn’t bluffing. The Clarion is the last paper to print the kind of sentimental muck he had in mind. Even if they did print a story, they wouldn’t identify either of us or print the address. They have their liberal conscience to preserve. They won’t see it as their business to hunt you down. After all, as a lifer out on licence, in their eyes you’re practically a protected species.”
She was surprised that her mother was so shaken. She had seemed so strong when she first came out of prison. But perhaps nothing had mattered very much to her then. Perhaps it was only when she had stood on the canal bank in the green watery twilight, watching that shabby case finally topple out of sight, that she had laid herself open to the pain of living. She moved closer to her mother and put her arm round the shaking shoulders. She laid her cheek against her mother’s cheek, flesh against colder flesh. Then she kissed her. It was all so easy, so beautifully easy. Why had it taken her so long to learn that there was nothing to be afraid of in loving? She said: “It’s going to be all right. Nothing dreadful is going to happen. We’re together and no one can touch us.”
“But suppose he goes to another paper?”
“He won’t, not while he’s working for the Clarion. And if he does, we’ll destroy his career. All you have to do is to confirm what I tell them. If you seem frightened—well that would be natural. All it needs is the capacity to lie.”
“I don’t think I’d be very good at lying.”
“I don’t see why you should worry about lying. Telling the truth didn’t do you much good. But you won’t have to lie. I tell you, he’s not coming back.”
“The door. How can we lock it?”
“I’ll buy a bolt tomorrow and we can use that at night until I can get a new lock fixed. That isn’t important, it’s the least of our worries. He won’t come back, and there’s nothing worth stealing except the picture. A professional thief wouldn’t bother with this kind of place. He certainly wouldn’t take the Henry Walton. We were burgled once at Caldecote Terrace. What they like to pick up are small, the easily disposable valuables. There’s nothing here that anyone could want.”
She watched her mother’s hands restlessly moving together. Her own fingers, long, bony, the nails strong and narrow, but on her mother’s hands. Wringing her hands. It wasn’t an expression one would ever write, too trite, too imprecise; but apparently it did happen except that “wringing” wasn’t the right word for this rhythmic pressing together of the palms. The hands seemed to be comforting each other. She was staring fixedly ahead, apparently oblivious of those kneading palms. Perhaps she was recalling the heavy smoothness of a sea-washed stone rolled between her hands, seeing in memory the layered sea, stretching to infinity, the mottled wave curving to crash in shingled foam against her naked feet. Then her eyes blinked again into the present. She said: “How did he know?”
“Gabriel Lomas told him. Gabriel can smell out scandal, secrets, fear; it’s a talent he has. He couldn’t resist telling him. I can understand that. It was too important to him. Like me and the pregnant wife. In the end we think of no one but ourselves.”
“What pregnant wife?”
“No one you know. Someone I did down. Someone who needed this flat.”
“He seems a strange friend for Gabriel Lomas, a different class.”
“Oh Gabriel has a personality like a hexagon. People need touch only one side for an illusion of closeness. Forget about him. Perhaps it would be a good idea to get out of London for a time. Ventnor is as good a place as any, but you mustn’t expect to find it the same. No place ever is. And we’ll need some money. I’ve something left in the bank but we must keep a small reserve for when this lease runs out. It won’t be easy to find work in the Isle of Wight, not immediately, not at the end of the season.”
Her mother turned to her with the eyes of a pleading child.
“I’m sure you’ll like it there. And we needn’t be away long.”
Philippa said: “And you could change your name you know. It would make things easier.”
Her mother shook her head.
“No, I couldn’t do that. That would be defeat. I have to know who I am.”
Philippa got up from the bed.
“We’ll go tomorrow, just as soon as I’ve got the door mended and a new lock fixed. But first I have to go to Caldecote Terrace. I won’t be away long, not more than an hour. Will you be all right?”
Her mother nodded. She said, trying to smile: “I’m sorry I’m being so stupid. Don’t worry. I’ll be all right.”
Philippa slung her bag over her shoulder and made for the door. Suddenly her mother called her back. She said: “Rose! You won’t take anything that isn’t yours?”
“Don’t worry,” she answered. “I shan’t take anything that they don’t owe us.”
8
The things to take were the silver caddy spoons. They were small, portable, easily disposed of; silver was fetching a high price. Maurice had over a hundred in his collection. About half were kept in the wall safe in his dressing room and the others on display in an eighteenth-century rosewood cabinet in the drawing room. The cabinet was always kept locked, but she knew that the key was in the safe, and she knew, too, the combination. From time to time he would change the ones on display although, once they were arranged on the purple velvet, he seldom looked at them again. As a child she had enjoyed helping him to set them out, had liked the feel of their smooth bowls, their delicate balance in her fingers. H
e had taught her to recognize the hallmarks, handing the spoons to her as he took them from the box and asking her to guess their date and the name of the silversmith. Yes, it was right that she should take the caddy spoons. And it wouldn’t be difficult. If Maurice hadn’t changed the combination of his wall safe, and she thought this unlikely, there wouldn’t even be a need to break the cabinet lock. It was a pretty object. It would have been a hurtful necessity to have had to damage it. It never once occurred to her to make the theft look like a burglary. She would take as many spoons as she needed to sell to keep herself and her mother without working for about a month. Maurice would know that it was she who had taken them, and one day she would tell him why. She knew which were the rarest and which, therefore, the most valuable. Even quite ordinary ones in Church Street market were fetching thirty pounds. She need only take twenty of the best and their immediate problems would be over. There wouldn’t be any difficulty in getting rid of them provided she offered them singly and in the right shops. She wouldn’t get what they were worth, but she would get enough.
Because she was in a hurry to get the job done and return to her mother, she decided on the extravagance of a cab from Marylebone Station. She paid it off at the corner of Caldecote Road, an instinctive precaution which, as soon as the taxi moved away, struck her as silly and unnecessary. The basement kitchen was in darkness, as she knew it would be. This was Thursday, Hilda would be in court. But she turned the key in the lock and shut the door behind her with extreme care, holding her breath, as if afraid to wake an echo in the white, clean-smelling hall. She was a stranger here, and it seemed to her that the house knew it. Then she ran lightly upstairs to the front bedroom. As she put her hand on the door, the second before she turned the knob, she knew instinctively and with absolute certainty that she wasn’t alone. She stopped dead in the doorway, then slowly pushed the door open.
They were both on the bed, Maurice and the girl, half reclining, transfixed by that first sound of her footsteps on the landing. They had finished making love. The rumpled bed, the spread towel, told their own story, and she thought she could sniff in the air the unmistakable, doughy smell of sex. Maurice was wearing only his pants, but the girl was naked. She shoved herself clumsily from the bed and with a little cry began gathering up her clothes from the chair. Philippa stood at the door, half-aware of Maurice’s unembarrassed, ironic gaze, while the girl, scarlet-faced, diminished by shame, tried to cover herself with her skirt, and bent in an ungainly display of buttocks to scrabble under the bed for her shoes. Philippa knew that she had met her before, but for a moment she couldn’t recall when or where. Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically it both revealed and diminished identity. She made herself stare at the girl’s face, and then remembered. She was one of Maurice’s students. The name came to her a second later. Sheila. Sheila Manning. Eighteen months ago she had come to dinner; it was an evening when Gabriel had also been invited. She had been an uncomfortable guest, voluble in her nervousness, alternately aggressive and aggrieved, treating them to a rehashed version of Maurice’s latest seminar on the cycle of disadvantage. Gabriel had taken trouble with her, resisting the frequent temptation to wit or sarcasm, steering the conversation from Marxist dogma to such innocuously boring subjects as food and holidays. It hadn’t, Philippa thought, been done through kindness. Like most men, he reserved kindness for women who, beautiful or successful, had the least need of it. She had decided that he was acting either to disoblige her, or in obedience to some nursery dictate that it was the responsibility of a guest to attempt to rescue from social disaster even the most unpropitious dinner party. The girl, as had been painfully apparent, was in love with Maurice even then. Had it really taken her eighteen months to get into his bed?
Now they were face to face, and she stood silently to one side to let the girl pass. She was clutching a bundle of clothes to her chest. Encountering Philippa’s disparaging stare she dropped her shoes; scarlet-faced she scrabbled for them, letting slip the rest of the bundle. Philippa noticed the strong body, curiously disproportionate to the etiolated neck and the thin face. Her breasts were as heavy as a nursing mother’s, the nipples jutting like miniature udders from their brown concave aureoles. How could he have chosen to take them into his mouth? She thought complacently of her own high tight breasts, the delicately furled nipples, only slightly raised. She was glad she approved of her body, even if, as yet, she hadn’t taught it how to give her pleasure.
She came into the room and closed the door. She said: “I would have thought you’d have had more pride than to bring her here, to fuck her on your own bed.”
“Whose bed are you suggesting I should more properly use? Don’t be predictable, Philippa. Do you have to react like a character in a second-rate TV soap opera?”
“But it’s that kind of situation, isn’t it? Commonplace. Farcical.” And so, she thought, is this conversation. Like everything we say to each other, it’s contrived.
He sat on the bed and began knotting his tie. She was surprised that he hadn’t first reached for his trousers. To be trouserless was surely to be vulnerable, ridiculous, the stock butt of bedroom farce. His pants were very short, white and narrowly striped with blue. She had seen Hilda pulling them out of the washing machine often enough. A tangle of male clothes. He was fastidious. Everything was clean every day. He said: “It might seem farcical and commonplace—but doesn’t it occur to you that I might be fond of her, might love her?”
“No. You’re like me. We don’t know how.”
Once she had been afraid that she would never learn, but not now, not anymore. She watched him dress. How long had it been going on, she wondered. Weeks, months, years? Had it perhaps started as soon as Hilda was appointed to the Bench? It must have seemed an ideal opportunity, the same day with the house free every week for three months. How many girls? A new one for each academic year? They would have to avoid arriving together, but that wouldn’t be difficult. He could come home through the mews service road leading to the garden door, then open the front door to her ring. The street was very quiet in the afternoon; but it wouldn’t greatly matter if she were seen. After all, he was a lecturer, he had students to supervise. She asked: “Where is she now?”
“I haven’t the least idea. In the bathroom, I imagine.”
“As long as she isn’t drowning herself. That would take some explaining away.”
“Oh, I don’t think she’s suicidal. Insecure and emotionally a bit intense, but not suicidal. But you’d better go and find out if you’re worried.”
“She’s your responsibility, not mine. She’s rather wet isn’t she? I shouldn’t have thought that she was your type. Is she really the best you can find?”
“Don’t underrate her.”
“That would be difficult, judging by her dinner conversation. She was so stupid with her talk about property and theft. Second-hand jargon and third-hand ideas. I got tired of waiting for her to make an original or amusing remark. No wonder you’re reduced to fucking her. Anything would be less boring than listening to her conversation.”
He had finished dressing now and was putting on his jacket, carefully transferring odd items from the dressing table into his pockets. He said: “Oddly enough, it was after that evening that we became lovers. I felt sorry for her. With me that’s always dangerous.”
“Is that why you married Hilda?”
As soon as the words were out she regretted them. But all he said was: “No, that was because she was sorry for me.”
She waited for him to explain, but he said no more. And suddenly, she thought of Orlando. She had never spoken his name to Maurice, but now she was filled with a sympathy which had to find expression. She said: “I forgot about Orlando. I always do forget. I suppose it’s because you’ve never talked about him, never even shown me a photograph. And I’ve never told you that I’m sorry he died. Until now I don’t think I was particularly sorry. If he hadn’t died I wouldn’t be here. And I ne
ver knew him; if one can ever know a child. But you’ve lost him more completely than my mother was ever in danger of losing me. At least she’d have known that I was alive somewhere.”
He didn’t reply, but his hands ceased their careful busyness with his jacket. She looked at his face. In one second it had become as vacant as the face of a spent actor’s in repose, all emotion, even the lines, smoothed away. Then there passed over it a look so momentary that she almost missed it, of pain, regret, of the rueful acceptance of defeat. She had seen that look once before. The picture came vividly to her mind, limned with the colour of blood. The screech of tyres followed immediately by a crash like an explosion. The young motorcyclist, helmetless, lying on the kerb at the junction of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road. The wheels of his motorcycle spinning in the air. A second of eerie silence, absolute, the air holding its breath. Then the babble of voices, cries. A woman with a face like lard, a cardigan stretched across her bolster of a chest, yelling in anger and remembered pain.
