The Black Tower

by P. D. James

  “You mean he killed himself?”

  “Well, he was in his wheelchair ten feet from the cliff-edge and either he slipped the brakes and let himself be carried over or Dennis Lerner, the male nurse with him, pushed him. As Dennis hasn’t the guts to kill a chicken let alone a man the general feeling is that Victor did it himself. But as that notion is distressing to dear Wilfred’s feelings we’re all busy pretending that it was an accident. I miss Victor, I liked him. He was about the only person here I could talk to. But the rest hated him. And now, of course, they’ve all got bad consciences wondering if they may have misjudged him. There’s nothing like dying for putting people at a disadvantage. I mean, when a chap keeps on saying that life isn’t worth living you take it that he’s just stating the obvious. When he backs it up with action you begin to wonder if there wasn’t more to him than you thought.”

  Dalgliesh was spared the need to reply by the sound of a car on the headland. Maggie, whose ears were apparently as keen as his own, sprang from her chair and ran outside. A large black saloon was approaching the junction of the paths.

  “Julius,” Maggie called back to him in brief explanation and began a boisterous semaphoring.

  The car stopped and then turned towards Hope Cottage. Dalgliesh saw that it was a black Mercedes. As soon as it slowed down Maggie ran like an importunate school-girl beside it, pouring her explanation through the open window. The car stopped and Julius Court swung himself lightly out.

  He was a tall, loose-limbed young man dressed in slacks and a green sweater patched army fashion on the shoulders and elbows. His light brown hair, cut short, was shaped to his head like a pale glinting helmet. It was an authoritative, confident face but with a trace of self-indulgence in the perceptible pouches under the wary eyes and the slight petulance of the small mouth set in a heavy chin. In middle age he would be heavy, even gross. But now he gave an immediate impression of slightly arrogant good looks, enhanced rather than spoilt by the white triangular scar like a colophon above his right eyebrow.

  He held out his hand and said:

  “Sorry you missed the funeral.”

  He made it sound as if Dalgliesh had missed a train. Maggie wailed:

  “But darling, you don’t understand! He hasn’t come for the funeral. Mr. Dalgliesh didn’t even know that the old man had snuffed out.”

  Court looked at Dalgliesh with slightly more interest.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Perhaps you’d better come up to the Grange. Wilfred Anstey will be able to tell you more about Father Baddeley than I. I was at my London flat when the old man died so I can’t even provide interesting death bed revelations. Hop in both of you. I’ve got some books in the back for Henry Carwardine from the London Library. I may as well deliver them now.”

  Maggie Hewson seemed to feel that she had been remiss in not effecting a proper introduction; she said belatedly:

  “Julius Court. Adam Dalgliesh. I don’t suppose you’ve come across each other in London. Julius used to be a diplomat, or is it diplomatist?”

  As they got into the car Court said easily:

  “Neither is appropriate at the comparatively lowly level I reached in the service. And London is a large place. But don’t worry, Maggie, like the clever lady in the TV panel game, I think I can guess what Mr. Dalgliesh does for a living.”

  He held open the car door with elaborate courtesy. The Mercedes moved slowly towards Toynton Grange.

  II

  Georgie Allan looked up from the high narrow bed in the sick bay. His mouth began to work grotesquely. The muscles of his throat stood out hard and taut. He tried to raise his head from the pillow.

  “I’ll be all right for the Lourdes pilgrimage won’t I? You don’t think I’ll be left behind?”

  The words came out in a hoarse, discordant wail. Helen Rainer lifted up the edge of the mattress, tucked the sheet neatly back into place in the orthodox hospital approved style and said briskly:

  “Of course you won’t be left behind. You’ll be the most important patient on the pilgrimage. Now stop fretting, that’s a good boy, and try to rest before your tea.”

  She smiled at him, the impersonal, professionally reassuring smile of the trained nurse. Then lifted her eyebrow at Eric Hewson. Together they went over to the window. She said quietly:

  “How long can we go on coping with him?”

  Hewson replied:

  “Another month or two. It would upset him terribly to have to leave now. Wilfred too. In a few months’ time both of them will be readier to accept the inevitable. Besides, he’s set his heart on this Lourdes trip. Next time we go I doubt whether he will be alive. He certainly won’t be here.”

  “But he’s really a hospital case now. We aren’t registered as a nursing home. We’re only a home for the young chronic sick and disabled. Our contract is with the local authorities not the National Health Service. We don’t pretend to offer a full medical nursing service. We aren’t even supposed to. It’s time Wilfred either gave up or made up his mind what he’s trying to do here.”

  “I know.” He did know, they both did. This wasn’t a new problem. Why, he wondered, had so much of their conversation become a boring repetition of the obvious, dominated by Helen’s high didactic voice.

  Together they looked down at the small paved patio, bordered by the two new single-storey wings which contained the bedrooms and dayrooms, where the little group of remaining patients had gathered for the last sit in the sun before tea. The four wheelchairs were carefully placed a little apart and faced away from the house. The two watchers could see only the back of the patients’ heads. Unmoving, they sat looking fixedly toward the headland. Grace Willison, her grey untidy hair ruffled by the light breeze; Jennie Pegram, her neck sunk into her shoulders, her aureole of yellow hair streaming over the back of her wheelchair as if bleaching in the sun; Ursula Hollis’s small round poll on its thin neck, high and motionless as a decapitated head on a pole; Henry Carwardine’s dark head on its twisted neck, slumped sideways like a broken puppet. But then, they were all puppets. Dr. Hewson had a momentary and insane picture of himself rushing on to the patio and setting the four heads nodding and wagging, pulling invisible strings at the back of the necks so that the air was filled with their loud, discordant cries.

  “What’s the matter with them?” he asked suddenly. “Something’s wrong about this place.”

  “More than usual?”

  “Yes. Haven’t you noticed?”

  “Perhaps they’re missing Michael. God knows why. He did little enough. If Wilfred’s determined to carry on here he can find a better use for Hope Cottage now. As a matter of fact, I thought about suggesting that he let me live there. It would be easier for us.”

  The thought appalled him. So that was what she had been planning. The familiar depression fell on him, physical as a lead weight. Two positive, discontented women, both wanting something that he couldn’t give. He tried to keep the panic from his voice.

  “It wouldn’t do. You’re needed here. And I couldn’t come to you at Hope Cottage, not with Millicent next door.”

  “She hears nothing once she’s switched on the TV. We know that. And there’s a back door if you do have to make a quick get-a-way. It’s better than nothing.”

  “But Maggie would suspect.”

  “She suspects now. And she’s got to know some time.”

  “We’ll talk about it later. It’s a bad time to worry Wilfred just now. We’ve all been on edge since Victor died.”

  Victor’s death. He wondered what perverse masochism had made him mention Victor. It reminded him of those early days as a medical student when he would uncover a suppurating wound with relief because the sight of blood, inflamed tissue and pus was so less frightening than the imagination of what lay beneath the smooth gauze. Well, he had got used to blood. He had got used to death. In time he might even get used to being a doctor.

  They moved together into the small clinical room at the front of the building. He went to t
he basin and began methodically sluicing his hands and forearms as if his brief examination of young Georgie had been a messy surgical procedure requiring a thorough cleansing. Behind his back he could hear the clink of instruments. Helen was unnecessarily tidying the surgical cupboard yet once more. With a sinking heart he realized that they were going to have to talk. But not yet. Not yet. And he knew what she would say. He had heard it all before, the old insistent arguments spoken in that confident school prefect’s voice. “You’re wasted here. You’re a doctor, not a dispensing chemist. You’ve got to break free, free of Maggie and Wilfred. You can’t put loyalty to Wilfred before your vocation.” His vocation! That was the word his mother had always used. It made him want to break into hysterical laughter.

  He switched on the tap to full and the water came gushing out, swirling round the basin, filling his ears like the sound of the incoming tide. What had it been like for Victor, that hurtle into oblivion? Had the clumsy wheelchair, heavy with its own momentum, sailed into space like one of those ridiculous flying contraptions in a James Bond film, the little manikin secure among his gadgets, ready to pull the lever and sport wings? Or had it twisted and tumbled through the air, bouncing off the rock face, with Victor coffined in canvas and metal, flailing impotent arms, adding his screams to the cry of the gulls? Had his heavy body broken free of the strap in mid-air, or had the canvas held until that final annihilating crash against the flat iron rocks, the first sucking wave of the relentless unthinking sea? And what had been in his mind? Exaltation or despair, terror or a blessed nothingness? Had the clean air and the sea wiped it all away, the pain, the bitterness, the malice?

  It was only after his death that the full extent of Victor’s malice had been known, in the codicil to his will. He had taken trouble to let the other patients know that he had money, that he paid the full fee at Toynton Grange, modest though that was, and wasn’t, as were all the others except Henry Carwardine, dependent upon the benevolence of a local authority. He had never told them the source of his wealth—he had, after all, been a schoolmaster and they were hardly well paid—and they still didn’t know. He might have told Maggie of course. There were a number of things he might have told Maggie. But on this she had been unaccountably silent.

  Eric Hewson didn’t believe that Maggie had taken an interest in Victor simply because of the money. They had, after all, had something in common. They had both made no secret that they hated Toynton Grange, that they were there of necessity not of choice, that they despised their companions. Probably Maggie found Victor’s rebarbative malice to her liking. They had certainly spent a great deal of time together. Wilfred had seemed almost to welcome it, almost as if he thought Maggie was at last finding her proper place at Toynton. She had taken her turn at wheeling Victor in his heavy chair to his favourite spot. He had found some kind of peace in sight of the sea. Maggie and he had spent hours together, out of sight of the house, high on the edge of the cliff. But it hadn’t worried him. He knew, none better, that Maggie could never love a man who couldn’t satisfy her physically. He welcomed the friendship. At least it gave her something to occupy her time, kept her quiet.

  He couldn’t remember exactly when she had begun to become excited about the money. Victor must have said something. Maggie had changed almost overnight. She had become animated, almost gay. There had been a kind of feverish and suppressed excitement about her. And then Victor had suddenly demanded that he be driven to London for an examination at St. Saviour’s Hospital and to consult his solicitor. It was then that Maggie had hinted to him about the will. He had caught something of her excitement. He wondered now what either of them had hoped for. Had she seen the money as a release merely from Toynton Grange, or also from him? Either way, surely, it would have brought salvation for them both. And the idea wasn’t absurd. It was known that Victor had no relatives except a sister in New Zealand to whom he never wrote. No, he thought, reaching for the towel and beginning to dry his hands, it hadn’t been an absurd dream; less absurd than the reality.

  He thought of that drive back from London; the warm, enclosed world of the Mercedes; Julius silent, his hands resting lightly on the wheel; the road a silver reel punctuated with stars slipping endlessly under the bonnet; road signs leaping out of darkness to pattern the blue-black sky; small petrified animals, fur erect, briefly glorified in the headlamps; the road verges drained pale gold in their glare. Victor had sat with Maggie in the back, wrapped in his plaid cloak and smiling, always smiling. And the air had been heavy with secrets, shared and unshared.

  Victor had indeed altered his will. He had added a codicil to the bequest which left the whole of his fortune to his sister, a final testimony of petty malice. To Grace Willison, a bar of toilet soap; to Henry Carwardine, a mouthwash; to Ursula Hollis, body deodorant; to Jennie Pegram, a toothpick.

  Eric reflected that Maggie had taken it very well. Really very well indeed; if you could call that wild, ringing, uncontrolled laughter taking it well. He recalled her now, reeling about their small stone sitting-room, helpless with hysteria, throwing back her head and baying out her laughter so that it echoed harshly back from the walls, like a menagerie, and rang out over the headland so that he was afraid they would hear it as far as Toynton Grange.

  Helen was standing by the window. She said, her voice sharp:

  “There’s a car outside Hope Cottage.”

  He walked over to her. Together they looked out. Slowly their eyes met. She took his hand, and her voice was suddenly gentle, the voice he had heard when they had first made love.

  “You’ve got nothing to worry about, darling. You know that, don’t you? Nothing to worry about at all.”

  III

  Ursula Hollis closed her library book, shut her eyes against the afternoon sun and entered into her private daydream. To do so now in the brief fifteen minutes before teatime was an indulgence, and quick as always to feel guilt at so ill-disciplined a pleasure, she was at first afraid that the magic wouldn’t work. Usually, she made herself wait until she was in bed at night, wait even until Grace Willison’s rasping breath, heard through the unsubstantial partition, had gentled into sleep before she allowed herself to think of Steve and the flat in Bell Street. The ritual had become an effort of will. She would lie there hardly daring to breathe because the images, however clearly conjured up, were so sensitive, so easily dispelled. But now it was happening beautifully. She concentrated, seeing the amorphous shapes and the changing patterns of colour focus into a picture, clearly as a developing negative, tuning in her ears to the sounds of home.

  She saw the brick wall of the nineteenth-century house opposite with the morning sun lighting its dull façade so that each brick was individually distinct, multi-colored, a pattern of light. The pokey two-roomed flat above Mr. Polanski’s delicatessen, the street outside, the crowded heterogeneous life of that square mile of London between Edgware Road and Marylebone Station had absorbed and enchanted her. She was back there now, walking again with Steve through Church Street market on Saturday morning, the happiest day of the week. She saw the local women in their flowered overalls and carpet slippers, heavy wedding rings sunk into their bulbous toil-scarred fingers, their eyes bright in amorphous faces, as they sat gossiping beside their prams of second-hand clothes; the young people, joyfully garbed, squatting on the kerbstone behind their stalls of bric-à-brac; the tourists cheerfully impulsive or cautious and discerning by turns, conferring over their dollars or displaying their bizarre treasures. The street smelt of fruit, flowers and spice, of sweating bodies, cheap wine and old books. She saw the black women with their jutting buttocks and high barbaric staccato chatter, heard their sudden deep-throated laughter, as they crowded round the stall of huge unripe bananas and mangoes as large as footballs. In her dreams she moved on, her fingers gently entwined with Steve’s like a ghost passing unseen down familiar paths.

  The eighteen months of her marriage had been a time of intense but precarious happiness, precarious because she could ne
ver feel that it was rooted in reality. It was like becoming another person. Before, she had taught herself contentment and had called it happiness. After, she realized that there was a world of experience, of sensation, of thought even, for which nothing in those first twenty years of life in the Middlesbrough suburb, or the two and a half years in the Y.W.C.A. hostel in London, had prepared her. Only one thing marred it, the fear which she could never quite suppress that it was all happening to the wrong person, that she was an imposture of joy.

  She couldn’t imagine what it was about her that had so capriciously caught Steve’s fancy that first time when he had called at the enquiry desk in the Council offices to ask about his rates. Was it the one feature which she had always thought of as close to a deformity; the fact that she had one blue and one brown eye? Certainly it was an oddity which had intrigued and amused him, had given her, she realized, an added value in his eyes. He had changed her appearance, making her grow her hair shoulder length, bringing home for her long gaudy skirts in Indian cotton found in the street markets or the shops in the back streets of Edgware Road. Sometimes, catching a glimpse of herself in a shop window, so marvellously altered, she would wonder again which strange predilection had led him to choose her, what possibilities undetected by others, unknown to herself, he had seen in her. Some quality in her had caught his eccentric fancy as did the odd items of bric-à-brac on the Bell Street stalls. Some object, unregarded by the passers-by, would catch his eye and he would turn it to the light this way and that in the palm of his hand, suddenly enchanted. She would make a tentative protest.

  “But darling, isn’t it rather hideous?”

  “Oh, no, it’s amusing. I like it. And Mogg will love it. Let’s buy it for Mogg.”

  Mogg, his greatest and, she sometimes thought, his only friend, had been christened Morgan Evans but preferred to use his nickname, regarding it as more appropriate to a poet of the people’s struggle. It was not that Mogg struggled greatly himself; indeed Ursula had never met anyone who drank and ate so resolutely at other people’s expense. He chanted his confused battle cries to anarchy and hatred in local pubs where his hairy and sad-eyed followers listened in silence or spasmodically banged the table with their beer mugs amid grunts of approval. But Mogg’s prose style had been more comprehensible. She had read his letter only once before returning it to the pocket in Steve’s jeans, but she could recall every word. Sometimes she wondered whether he had intended her to find it, whether it was fortuitous that he had forgotten to clear out the pockets of his jeans on the one evening when she always took their dirty clothes to the washeteria. It was three weeks after the hospital had given her a firm diagnosis.