Innocent Blood

by P. D. James

  “I should like to believe that it was because I didn’t want to hurt you. Perhaps it was. There are some cruelties which take courage. Mine are on a meaner scale. I did try to warn you. I told you to find out the facts, to read the Press accounts of the trial. Those would have told you the date of the murder. You already knew your date of adoption. It might also have struck you as odd that the Press reports made no mention of a child. But then you didn’t want to know the facts, didn’t want to talk to us about it; it seemed you were wilfully determined to be blind. It’s odd that over something so important you never once used your intelligence, you who have always relied on intelligence, have had such a respect for your own mind.”

  She wanted to cry out: “What else have I had to rely on? What else had I on offer?” Instead she said: “Thank you for telling me now.”

  “It needn’t make any difference. It’s an irrelevance. After all, you’re not concerned with conduct or responsibility or nurture. If the blood tie is all that matters to you, well that at least is intact. But I did have you for ten years. I may not be entitled to make any claims on you, but at least I’ve a right to express a view about your future. And I’m not letting you give up Cambridge without a struggle. The chance of those three years won’t come again, not now, not when you’re young which is when they matter.”

  He added drily: “I’ve also the right to my own Georgian silver. If you need money for her, sell the Henry Walton.”

  She said as humbly as a servant at the end of an interview: “Is there anything else you want to tell me before I go?”

  “Only that this is your home if you want it. This is where you belong. I’ve got an adoption order to prove it. And if that legalistic conveyance of possession lacks the emotional charge of the blood tie, hasn’t your family had enough of blood?”

  At the door she turned and looked back at him. She said: “But why did you do it? Why me?”

  “I told you. I couldn’t put you out of my mind. And I was afraid of what might happen to you. I hate waste.”

  “But you must have hoped for something: gratitude, diversion, interest, the gratification of patronage, companionship for your old age, the ordinary things?”

  “It didn’t seem so at the time, but I suppose I did. My demands have always been presumptuous. Perhaps what I hoped for was love.”

  Three minutes later he stood at the window watching her leave. There was something different about her, a sense of brightness dulled, of limbs uncoordinated. Perhaps it was the hunch of the shoulders, diminishing height, foreshowing how she might look as an old woman, or the way in which she scurried from the front door, furtive as an interloper surprised. At the end of the terrace she broke into a run, swerving from the pavement into the path of a taxi. He gasped; his heart skidded. When he could bear to open his eyes he saw that she was safe. Even from this distance he could hear the screech of brakes, the shouted abuse. Then, without a backward glance, she had half-run, half-shambled out of sight.

  He wasn’t sorry that he had told her, nor was he seriously concerned about her. She had survived those first seven years; she would survive this. And, after all, she wanted to be a writer. Someone had said—he couldn’t remember who—that an artist should suffer in childhood as much trauma as could be borne without breaking. And she wouldn’t break. Others would break, but not she. There would be tatters and torn flesh enough on the barbed wire guarding that untender heart. But he was aware of a nag of anxiety, irritating because he guessed that it might be difficult to rationalize away, and because, like all his anxieties, it was allied to guilt. He wondered what she would say to her mother. Whatever the nature of the tie between them, he didn’t suppose that she loved her mother in any sense in which he understood that ubiquitous word. After all, they had only been together for five weeks. She had lived with him and Hilda for ten years, undisturbed, apparently, by any need to love. He wondered what she would have said, how she would have looked, if sitting there on the bed in his post-coital depletion, he had spoken at least a part of the truth about Sheila Manning.

  “I took her from egotism, boredom, curiosity, sexual conceit, pity, perhaps even from affection. But she’s only a substitute. They’re all of them substitutes. When she was in my arms I was imagining that she was you.”

  He saw that the bedcover was crooked and he smoothed it. That was the kind of detail that Hilda, obsessive housewife that she was, would notice. Then he went into the bathroom to check that Sheila had left no trace of herself there. He needn’t worry that there would be an echo of her scent lingering in the bedroom. Before he had brought her to Caldecote Terrace for the first time he had warned her not to wear scent. She had replied: “I never do.”

  He remembered her face, blotched with embarrassment and hurt, that he shouldn’t have noticed that. The warning, revealing as it had a calculation of risk, born perhaps of previous embarrassments and discoveries, had denigrated their love in her eyes, reduced their first time together to a commonplace, sordid intrigue. It hadn’t been that; but for him it hadn’t been much more. Why, he wondered, was he driven into these petty expedients of lust? Boredom? The ennui of the male menopause? A compensation for his sterility? The need to reassure himself that he was still virile, still attractive to younger women? A search, which he knew in advance to be hopeless, for the lost enchantments of love?

  He felt physically and emotionally drained. He needed to cosset himself. He fetched a glass, a bottle of Niersteiner and the ice bucket and went to sit in the garden. The air was as heavy and oppressive as a sweaty blanket and he thought he could sniff the far-off metallic smell of thunder. He wished that the blanket would burst and the rain would fall, that he could lift up his face and feel the great cool sheets of it drenching his skin. He wondered why Hilda was so late, then remembered that she had said something at breakfast about late shopping in Oxford Street. He supposed that meant that they were to make do with a cold supper.

  He wasn’t distressed about Sheila Manning. Hilda was due to give up the juvenile Bench in two weeks’ time, and he had planned to use that as an excuse for ending the affair. This evening’s fiasco had saved him the protracted and emotionally wearing strategies, the appeals and reproaches, which usually accompanied the death of desire. The problem about wanting women who evoked his pity was that these were precisely the women who were the most difficult to get rid of. He wished he could be like some of his colleagues and take a succession of the guilt-free, experienced and cheerfully randy young who would ask nothing more of him than the occasional good dinner and the brief exchange of pleasure.

  He supposed he would have to let Hilda know about Philippa’s visit. He would tell the truth, merely editing out Sheila Manning. He could be confident that Philippa would never tell her, and it seemed to him not of immense importance if she did. Philippa would be coming home now and that should please Hilda. Life would go on as it had before. He supposed that that was what he wanted. He let his mind slip free of worry and guilt and closed his eyes. And in that moment of almost disembodied peace, the smell of wine and roses fused and he was back again, walking between the high hedges into the great circular rose garden at Pennington on a June day ten years ago. He was seeing Philippa for the first time.

  9

  He had never seen a child like her. She stood very still, a little apart from her keeper, a shapeless ungainly woman, querulous in the heat, and regarded him gravely with those extraordinary luminous green eyes under the curving brows. Her skin absorbed the mellow afternoon light, the shadowed green of the high hedge, so that it was like seeing her through water. Her hair was plaited corn drawn across her forehead in a mature, old-fashioned style which added to the contrast between the sixteenth-century Renaissance head held so proudly, and the childish body. He guessed that she was about seven. She was wearing a kilt too heavy for summer and reaching almost to her calves, with an immense safety pin bunching it on one side. Her pale arms, downy and glinting in the sun, stuck out from a shirt so thin that it clun
g to her bony chest, brittle as a bird’s. He could see her nipples, two pink delicate tags of flesh.

  Hilda began talking to the woman, learning that her name was Gladys Beddows, that she was at Pennington to visit her sister. He spoke to the child: “Isn’t it dull for you here? What would you like to do?”

  “Have you any books?”

  “Lots, in the library. Would you like to see them?”

  She nodded and they began walking across the lawn together, the two women following. She walked at his side, but distanced, her hands held in front of her, the palms folded together in a curiously formal, unchildish gesture. A few yards behind them Mrs. Beddows seemed to be confiding her difficulties to Hilda. That type of woman usually did. Hilda, herself uncommunicative, gauche, somehow invited confidences, or lacked the assurance and ruthlessness to reject them. Whenever he entered the kitchen on the two days a week when the daily help was there he would find the two women drinking coffee together, Hilda’s head docilely bowed under a spate of domestic disgruntlement. Now the whine of resentment came clearly to them, carried on the warm, rose-scented air.

  “Not as if they pay much. And I have her all day, some nights as well. She’s a difficult child. Never get a thank-you out of her. And talk about temper! Screaming tantrums some of the time. Nightmares too. Not surprised her mother can’t cope. Not what you’d call pretty, is she? Odd-looking child. Clever, mind you. Always got her head in a book. Oh, she’s sharp, that one! So sharp she’ll cut herself one of these days.”

  He glanced at the child. She must have heard. How could she help hearing? But she gave no sign. She walked on in her unchildish, hieratic dignity, but carefully, as if holding something precious between the clasped hands.

  The woman was right. She wasn’t a pretty child. But the fine bone structure of the face, the green eyes, gave promise of a spectacular if eccentric beauty. And she was intelligent, courageous and proud. These were the qualities he respected. Something could be made of such a child. He wanted to say to her: “I don’t think you’re plain. And I like clever children. Never be ashamed of being clever.” But glancing again at her set face he said nothing. Pity would be an impertinence to this proud, self-absorbed child.

  The southern aspect of Pennington stretched out before them, golden and serene, the great orangery shooting shafts of light so that his eyes dazzled. This was the view of the house he had seen when he had first visited Pennington with Helena. That, too, had been in high summer; but then he had been in love, intoxicated with the smell of roses and gillyflowers, with the wine they had drunk with their picnic on the drive down, with happiness, with the immensity of his prize. They had been coming to Pennington together to tell her father that they were to be married. Now walking that same lawn, the child’s shadow moving with his like a ghost, he could look back almost dispassionately, with pity as well as with contempt, to that poor deluded fool frolicking in a dead summer which now seemed to have held the concentrated sweetness of all summers, invincibly arrogant in the high renaissance of the heart. And so they walked across the lawn together, the child with her pain, he with his.

  The library was dark and cool after the glare of the sun. The books had been sold separately from the house, and already the archivists and workmen were there checking and packing the volumes. It should have pleased him that yet another aristocrat was reneging on his responsibilities, that this great house would no longer be the seat of a family, passing from father to son in the primogeniture of privilege, but would become institutionalized, debased. Instead, looking up at the fine stuccoed ceiling, and at the gorgeous Grinling Gibbons carvings on the bookcases, he was aware of a gentle nostalgic melancholy. If this room had belonged to him, he would never have let it go.

  The child stood at his side, both of them looking in silence. Then he led her across the room to the chart table where a miscellany of Helena’s books had been collected for him.

  He said: “How old are you? Can you read?”

  Her voice rebuked him: “I’m eight. I could read before I was four.”

  “Then let’s see how you do with this.”

  He picked up the Shakespeare, opened it and handed it to her. He was behaving like a pedant with no particular intention. The afternoon was hot, he was bored, the child intrigued him. She took the book into her hands with difficulty and began to read. He had opened it at King John.

  “Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

  Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

  Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

  Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

  Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.”

  She read to the end of the speech, faultlessly. She didn’t, of course, speak it in the cadence of blank verse. But she knew that it was poetry and she spoke it carefully in her childish, unemphatic voice, wary of unfamiliar words. It was the more poignant. He felt the tears stinging his eyes for the first time since he had learned that Orlando wasn’t his son.

  And that was how it had begun. It seemed to him that those two moments, so curiously linked by the memory of Orlando, the first in which he had watched the tears start from Hilda’s eyes, the second in which the child’s clear voice had brought tears to his, had been the only times in his life which had been free from self-regard. The one had resulted in his second marriage; the other in the adoption of Philippa. He wasn’t asking himself now if they had led to disappointment. He wasn’t sure what his expectations had been. The absence of expectation had been part of the purity of the moments, had brought them close to what he supposed some people might call goodness. He had almost forgotten the anguish of grief. Now it returned to him, less keen but more diffuse, embracing in one nostalgic melancholy the loss of Orlando, the unborn children he could never father, the stripped library at Pennington, and the child in her ridiculous skirt walking with him across the lawn in the mellow sunlight of a dead June day ten years ago.

  10

  For Philippa the journey from Caldecote Terrace to Delaney Street was a blank. Time was blotted out completely as if her mind were anaesthetized and her body was obeying some programmed instructions. Afterwards she could remember only one incident: running for the bus at Victoria and grasping the slippery rail, a moment of panic, and then the jerk of her armpit as a passenger on the platform caught her and hauled her aboard. Delaney Street was very quiet. The rain had begun to fall steadily in slivers of silver against the street lamps, and behind the patterned glass of the Blind Beggar the lights of the bar shone red and green. She turned her key in the Yale lock, closed the front door quietly behind her and walked up the stairs calmly without switching on the light. In the darkness she pushed the flat door, feeling under her palm the sharpness of the splintered wood. Her mother heard her and called out from the kitchen. She must be preparing supper, mixing the salad dressing; there hung in the air the sharp tang of vinegar. It was the same smell that had greeted her on her return to Caldecote Terrace, after her visit to Seven Kings, and the two moments fused together, the old pain reinforcing the new. Her mother’s voice sounded happy, welcoming. Perhaps she was getting over her panic. Perhaps she had decided that they needn’t move after all. She walked into the kitchen. Her mother turned, smiling, to greet her. Then the smile died, and Philippa watched as the face, so different yet so like her own, drained of blood. Her mother whispered: “What is it? What’s happened? What’s happened, Philippa?”

  She said: “Why don’t you call me Rose? You called me Rose earlier this evening. You had me christened Rose. I was Rose when you nearly killed me. I was Rose when you decided you didn’t want me. I was Rose when you gave me away.”

  There was a moment of silence. Her mother felt for a chair and sat down. She said: “I thought you knew. When you first came to Melcombe Grange I asked if you knew about your adoption. You said you did.”

  “I thought you meant did I know about the murder. I thought you were reminding me why it was that you had to give me up. You m
ust have known that’s what I thought.”

  Her mother went on as if she hadn’t spoken: “And afterwards, because I was so happy here, I said nothing. I told myself that the past wasn’t our past. They were two different people in a different story. I thought I might let myself have just these two months. Whatever happened afterwards, I should have something worth remembering. But I meant to tell you. I would have told you in the end.”

  “When you could be sure that I’d got used to having a mother. When I didn’t want to let you go. My God, you’re clever! Maurice warned me that you were clever. At least I’ve learned one thing about myself, where I get my scheming intelligence. And what about my father? Did he hate me too? Or was he too ineffective to stop you, too timid to do anything except rape a child? What did you do to him that he needed that act to prove his manhood?”

  Her mother looked up at her as if there was something which had to be explained, which could be explained.

  “You mustn’t blame your father. He wanted to keep you. I persuaded him to let you go. I was the one who thought it was better for you. And it was better for you. Where would you be now if you’d stayed with us?”

  “Was I such a nuisance, so much trouble? Couldn’t you have tried with me a little longer? Oh God, why did I ever find you!”

  “I did try. I wanted to love you. I wanted you to love me. But you didn’t respond, ever. You cried endlessly. Nothing I could do comforted you. You wouldn’t even let me feed you.”

  Philippa cried out: “Are you telling me that I rejected you?”

  “No, only that it seemed like it to me.”

  “How could I, a newborn child? I had no choice. I had to love you in order to survive.”

  Her mother asked with a humility which Philippa found almost unbearable: “Do you want me to leave at once?”

  “No, I’ll go. I’ll find somewhere. It’s easier for me. I don’t have to go back to Caldecote Terrace. I’ve got friends in London. You can stay here until the lease runs out. That’ll give you time to find another place. I’ll send for the picture. You can have the rest.”