by P. D. James
The drive home seemed very short through the deserted streets. No one had seen them go. Tomorrow George would open his shop and wonder why they were so silent, where they had gone. No one would miss them for long.
At Caldecote Terrace there was a light on in the hall and in the drawing room but the kitchen was in darkness. The door opened to them before Maurice had time to fit his key in the lock. Hilda stood there, anxious-eyed, wearing her blue quilted dressing gown. Maurice said to her quietly: “She’s all right. Don’t worry. Everything’s all right. Her mother’s dead. Suicide.”
She was smothered in Hilda’s padded arms. She heard her say: “Your room’s still waiting for you, darling,” as if it might have taken off and vanished during her absence. And then she heard a dog barking and Hilda’s face was suddenly tender with concern.
“You’ve woken Scamp. I’d better go down to him.”
At the bottom of the stairs he took the blanket from her shoulders and tossed it aside. When she came down next morning it would be gone. Even an old blanket from Delaney Street wouldn’t be allowed to contaminate memory. He followed her upstairs, his footsteps firm behind her faltering ones. She felt like a prisoner under escort. But the room to which her feet weakly but unhesitatingly led her was white and peaceful and the single bed looked comfortable. It had nothing to do with her; she didn’t belong here. But she thought that the girl who did wouldn’t mind if she used it. She peeled off her dirt-stained shirt and filthy trousers, let herself drop face downwards on the bed grasping the pillows with her hands and felt Maurice drawing the blankets over her shoulders. She hadn’t bathed; but that didn’t matter, she didn’t think the girl would mind. Just before she fell asleep she remembered that there was someone for whom she needed to weep. But she had no tears left, and she had never found it easy to cry. And that didn’t matter either. She had a lifetime ahead of her in which to learn how.
BOOK FOUR
EPILOGUE
Sunday afternoon evensong was over. The packed congregation, released from their role of silent participants in the music, joined with cheerful abandon in the concluding hymn. The boy choristers, their calm candlelit faces rising translucent as flowers from their ruffs, had closed their books and were filing from their stalls. Philippa rose from her knees, shook free her hair, twitched the pleated cotton more comfortably on her shoulders and joined the small band of similarly white-gowned members of college who were following the procession out through the carved screen and into the cool, light-filled immensity of the antechapel.
She saw him almost immediately, but then she would have recognized this insignificant little man anywhere in the world. He was standing in his neat over-pressed suit at the end of the first row, diminished under the marvel of Westell’s surging vault, but with his own small human dignity. His hands, those well-remembered hands, were resting on the back of the chair in front of him. As she came within touching distance, the knuckles tightened into shining pebbles. Their eyes met and he looked steadily at her with what she thought was a mute appeal that she shouldn’t escape him. It never occurred to her to try; nor did she believe for one moment that this encounter was by chance. After she left the chapel she lingered at the south porch until he came up quietly beside her. They didn’t greet each other but turned, as if by mutual consent, and began pacing the sunlit path beside Gibb’s Building. She said: “How did you find me? But I’d forgotten; you’re an expert at tracking people down.”
“It was your book. I read the reviews and two of them said that you were a student at King’s. You published it under your name, Philippa Ducton.”
“Ducton’s my name. I dropped the Rose. It didn’t suit me. I thought I was entitled to one small personal preference of identity. But you didn’t come here, surely, to congratulate me on the novel. Did you read it?”
“I asked for it at the library.”
She laughed, and looking at her he flushed and said: “Is that the wrong thing to say to a writer? I suppose I ought to have bought it.”
“Why should you? And you couldn’t have welcomed it—the name Ducton on your shelves. Did you enjoy it?”
She could see from his face that he wasn’t sure whether she was teasing him. At last he said, surprisingly: “It was clever, of course. Some of the critics said that it was brilliant. But I thought that it was harsh, unfeeling.”
“Yes it was. That’s just what it was, unfeeling. But you didn’t take all this trouble to track me down just so that we could have a literary discussion.”
Looking at his face, she said quickly: “I’m not sorry to see you. You had to leave suddenly when we last met. I’ve had that feeling, too, that there’s unfinished business between us. I’ve wondered from time to time about you, what you were doing, where you were.”
She wanted to add: “And whether you were happier knowing that my mother was dead.” But looking at his calm, untroubled face, that was a question which she didn’t need to ask. Perhaps that was why revenge was so satisfying: it worked.
He answered her eagerly, as if he were glad to be telling her.
“I left London after the inquest on your mother and travelled about England and Wales for about eighteen months. I stayed at cheap boarding houses in the summer and moved into better-class ones in the autumn and winter. You get special rates out of season. I spent my time looking at places, buildings, thinking about myself. I wasn’t unhappy. Six months ago I returned to London and went back to the Casablanca. That’s the hotel where I took a room when I was tracking you down. I’m not sure why I went back, except that I felt at home there. It was just the same; the blind telephonist, the one you saw me with in Regent’s Park, was still there. Her name’s Violet Hedley. We started going out together on her free afternoons. We’re going to get married.”
So this was why he had come. She said: “And you don’t know how much you ought to tell her?”
“She knows about Julie, of course. And I told her that both the Ductons were dead. But I’m not sure whether I ought to tell her what I tried to do. There’s no one in the world but you I can talk to about it, no one else to consult. I had to find you.”
She said: “If you’re marrying a blind woman, I shouldn’t advise you to tell her that you once twisted a knife in another woman’s throat. It could be unsettling.”
The shock and the hurt on his face were as palpable as if she had struck him. Even the physical manifestation was the same. He flushed, and then became very pale, except for one scarlet lash on his cheek. She said more gently: “I’m sorry. I’m not a kind person. I try to be sometimes, but I’m not very good at it yet.” She nearly added: “And the person who could have taught me now is dead.” She went on: “It’s your bad luck that you’re stuck with me as a confidante. But the advice is still sound. We none of us know another human being so well that we can be absolutely sure about him. I can’t see what you gain by telling. Why distress her?”
“But I love her. We love each other. Doesn’t that mean that I ought to be honest with her?”
She said: “This conversation between us is honest as far as I can make it. That doesn’t mean that either of us likes it the better. You have the whole of your past life to be honest about. One incident in it isn’t important.”
“It was an important incident to me. And it brought us together. I wouldn’t have been at the Casablanca, wouldn’t have met Violet, if I hadn’t tried to kill your mother.”
She could have replied that his child and her mother would both have been alive if he had kept his daughter at home on a foggy January night twelve and a half years ago. But what point was there in tracing back the long concatenation of chance. She said, interested: “How are you going to manage? Have you a job?”
“I’ve lived simply during the last two years. I’ve got about twelve thousand pounds left from the sale of the house. That will be enough to put down on a cottage somewhere. And my local-authority pension starts in a few months’ time. We should be all right. We don’t want a large plac
e, just somewhere with a garden. Violet loves the smell of roses. She became blind when she was eight; before that she could see, so she has some memories, and if I describe things to her carefully, buildings, the sky, flowers, it helps. I have to look at things differently now, more carefully, so that I can remember them. We’re so happy together, I can’t believe it.”
She wondered if the happiness included going to bed together. Probably it did. He wasn’t sexually repulsive, this poor little murderer manqué. And even Crippen had had his Ethel Le Neve. The unlikeliest couples found their way to that irrational joy. She remembered the feel of his hair under her hand, silkier than her own. And his skin was soft, unblemished. Besides, his Violet wouldn’t have to see him. It must be strange to be blind, making love always with one’s eyes shut. She caught a glance at his smile, secret, reminiscent, almost lubricious. He had come to her with his anxieties, but that wasn’t one of them. Remembering the girl she had seen in the park, she wondered whether his Violet was young enough to have a child. As if his mind had flowed with hers, he said: “She’s much younger than I am. If she has a baby I could help look after him. There’s nothing we can’t manage together.”
He turned to her.
“Do you ever feel that you don’t deserve happiness? The time I first went out with her, the day you saw us in the rose garden, I was exploiting her, making use of her blindness. I was lonely and she was the only person I could feel safe with, because she couldn’t see.”
How early he must have learned that primeval lesson, the distrust of joy. Touch wood, cross fingers, light a candle, please God don’t notice that I’m happy. She wanted to say: “I used my mother to avenge myself on my adoptive father. We all use each other. Why should you expect to be less corrupt than the rest of us.” Instead she said: “Why not learn to be gentle with yourself, to accept the possibility of happiness? Forget about my mother and me. That’s over.”
“But suppose Violet found out? She’d find it hard to forgive, the deception or what I did.”
“There’s nothing for her to forgive. It wasn’t her throat. Besides, we can forgive anything as long as it isn’t done to us. Haven’t you learned that? And how could she find out? You needn’t worry about me. I shan’t ever tell.”
“But you’re a writer; you might want to use it one day.”
She nearly laughed aloud. So that was what was worrying him. He must have borrowed her novel from the library in trepidation. What, she wondered, had he been expecting? Some lurid Gothic romance with himself as a pathetic Eumenides? But he would hardly be expecting a dissertation on the nature of the creative imagination. She said: “Some writers can only write about their own direct experience. That’s not the kind of writer I am or want to be. I said that we all use each other, but I hope to use people with rather more subtlety than that.”
He said, tentatively, as if venturing on dangerous ground: “Do they know about your mother here? After all, you do call yourself Ducton.”
“Some of them know and some of them guess. It’s hardly a subject that comes up naturally in conversation.”
“And does it make any difference, to you I mean?”
“Only, perhaps, to make them a little afraid of me. For someone who values privacy that’s no bad thing.”
They had reached the bridge over the Cam. Philippa paused and gazed down at the water. He stood beside her, his tiny hands grasping the parapet. And then he asked: “Do you miss her?”
She thought: “I shall miss her every day of my life.” But she said: “Yes. I’m not sure that I really knew her. We only lived together for five weeks. She didn’t say very much. But when she was there she was more there than anyone I’ve ever known. And I was there too.”
He seemed to understand what she meant. They walked on, again in silence, and then he said: “I’ve wondered about you. I’m grateful to you for what you did for me. I’m frightened of authority, frightened of being locked up. If you’d called the police that night I know I would never have been able to cope. And I would never have met Violet again. I’ve wondered many times how things were with you, what happened after I left you, whether your mother—I mean Mrs. Palfrey—is well.”
He could have been asking after any casual acquaintance. She said: “She’s very well. She has a dog now. His name is Scamp. And nothing very much happened to me. My adoptive father arranged everything; he’s a great fixer. Afterwards he took me on a long holiday to Italy. We went to see the mosaics at Ravenna.”
She didn’t add: “And in Ravenna I went to bed with him.” She wondered how he would have looked, what he would have said, if she had responded to his confidence with that gratuitous news. And it wasn’t, after all, important. What, she wondered, had it meant exactly, that gentle, tender, surprisingly uncomplicated coupling; an affirmation, a curiosity satisfied, a test successfully passed, an obstacle ceremoniously moved out of the way so that they could again take up their roles of father and daughter, the excitement of incest without its legal prohibition, without any more guilt than they carried already? That single night together, the windows open to the smell of cypresses, to the warm Italian night, had been necessary, inevitable, but it was no longer important. She said: “My mother insured her life for five hundred pounds so that she could pay her share of the flat. There wasn’t a suicide prohibition in the policy—I don’t suppose they bothered with so small a sum—so I got the money. She must have arranged it secretly soon after we started living together, perhaps when she went to see her probation officer. No one knows for certain how she got hold of the distalgesic but she must have been secreting those tablets away for months. I tell myself that it shows that she was thinking of killing herself even before she came out of prison, that her death had nothing to do with me. There are so many expedients for getting rid of guilt. You’ll find one for yourself in time.”
He said nothing more. He seemed satisfied. Suddenly he stopped and held out his hand. She shook it. The gesture seemed to be important to him. Then he walked on alone down the avenue in the spring sunshine, under the tender green of chestnuts, beeches and lime trees, between the bright grass patterned with gold and purple crocuses. Just before he reached a turn in the avenue he paused and looked back, not, she thought, at her, but at the chapel, as if to fix it in his mind. She stood watching him until he was out of sight. If it is only through learning to love that we find identity, then he had found his. She hoped one day to find hers. She wished him well. And perhaps to be able to wish him well with all that she could recognize of her unpractised heart, to say a short untutored prayer for him and his Violet, was in itself a small accession of grace.
P. D. James is the author of twenty-one books, most of which have been filmed for television. She spent thirty years in various departments of the British Civil Service, including the Police and Criminal Law Departments of Great Britain’s Home Office. She has served as a magistrate and as a governor of the BBC. The recipient of many prizes and honours, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991 and was inducted into the International Crime Writing Hall of Fame in 2008. She lives in London and Oxford.
