The Skull Beneath the Skin

by P. D. James

  “Yes, we were introduced on the boat.”

  “Find him, will you, and tell him there’s time for him to have a swim before lunch. There’s no point in his trailing round the castle with us. You’ll probably find him hiding in his room. It’s two down from your own.”

  Cordelia thought that the message could more suitably have come from Clarissa. But she reminded herself that she was supposed to be a secretary-companion, whatever that meant, and that the job probably included running errands. She knocked on Simon’s door. He didn’t call out but, after what seemed an inordinate delay, the door slowly opened and his apprehensive face appeared. He blushed when he saw who it was. She gave him Clarissa’s message, suitably edited, and he managed a smile and a whispered, “Thank you” before quickly closing the door. Cordelia felt rather sorry for him. It couldn’t be altogether easy, having Clarissa as a stepmother. She wasn’t sure that it would be any easier having her as a client. For the first time she felt some of her euphoria drain away. The castle and the island were even lovelier than she had pictured. The weather was glorious and no change threatened in this balmy resurgence of summer. It promised to be a weekend of comfort, even of luxury. And, above all, the envelope in her pocket confirmed that the job was real, that she would pit her brain and her wits against a human adversary at last. Why then should she have to struggle against a sudden and overwhelming conviction that her task was doomed to disaster?

  3

  “And now,” announced Clarissa leading the way down the staircase and across the great hall, “we’ll end with a visit to Ambrose’s private chamber of horrors.”

  The tour of the castle had been hurried and incomplete. Cordelia sensed that the sun-warmed terrace beckoned and that the thoughts of the party were less on Ambrose’s treasures than on their pre-luncheon sherry. But there were treasures, and she promised herself that if she had the chance she would enjoy later and at leisure what was a small but comprehensive museum of the artistic achievements and spirit of Victoria’s long reign. The tour had been too rushed. Her mind was a confusion of form and colour; porcelain, pictures, glass and silver jostled for place: pottery exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851, jasper, Grecian ware, terracotta, majolica; cabinets of painted Wedgwood dishes and delicate pâte-surpâte made by M.–L. Solon for Minton; part of a Coalport dinner service presented by Queen Victoria to the Emperor of Russia and decorated with English and Russian Orders surrounding the Russian royal crown and eagles.

  Clarissa had floated on ahead waving her arms and producing a stream of doubtfully accurate information. Ivo had lingered when he was allowed to and had said little. Roma stumped behind them with an expression of careful uninterest and from time to time made an acid comment about the misery and exploitation of the poor represented by these glittering monuments to wealth and privilege. Cordelia felt some sympathy with her. Sister Magdalen, who had taught nineteenth-century history at the Convent, hadn’t shared the views of some of the sisters that since the pleasures of the world were to be rejected so might some of its vicarious sorrows, and had attempted to instil a social sense into her privileged pupils. Cordelia couldn’t see a picture of that pudding-faced matriarch with her plain, discontented-looking children around her without seeing also the wan, aching-eyed seamstresses working their eighteen-hour day, the factory children half asleep at their looms, the bobbin lace-makers bent double over their cushions, and the steaming tenements of the East End.

  Cordelia had found more to interest her than to admire in Ambrose’s collection of pictures. Everything that she most disliked in high Victorian art was here, the strained eroticism, the careful naturalism which had nothing to do with nature, the vapid anecdotal pictures and the debased religiosity. But he did have a Sickert and a Whistler. As they passed along the gallery Roma said to her: “There’s a William Dyce in my room called The Shell Gatherers. Not badly painted, rather good, in fact. A crinolined group of ladies examining their finds on a Kentish beach. But what’s the reality? A group of overfed, overclad, bored and sexually frustrated upper-class females with nothing to do with their time but collect shells to make their useless shell boxes, paint insipid watercolours, entertain the gentlemen after dinner at the pianoforte, and wait for a man to give status and purpose to their lives.”

  It was while she and Roma were standing in front of a Holman Hunt, neither of them finding anything to say, that Ambrose had come up to them.

  “Not perhaps one of his best. The Victorians may have got their money from the dark satanic mills but they had a passionate craving for beauty. It was their tragedy that, unlike us, they understood only too well how far they fell short of achieving it.”

  The tour was now almost at an end. Clarissa led them down a tiled passageway to Ambrose’s business room. Here, apparently, was the promised Chamber of Horrors.

  It was a smaller room than most in the castle and looked out over the lawn which faced the eastern entrance. One wall was hung with a framed collection of Victorian popular gallows literature, the crudely printed and illustrated broadsheets which were sold to the mob after a notable trial or execution. Roma seemed particularly interested in them. Murderers, looking remarkably slim and elegant in their breeches, sat penning their last confessions under the high barred window of the condemned cell, listened in the chapel at Newgate to their last sermons with their coffins placed at hand, or drooped from the rope end as the robed Chaplain stood, his book in hand. Cordelia disliked the pictures of hanging and moved to join Ambrose and Ivo who were examining a wall shelf of Staffordshire figures. Ambrose identified his favourites.

  “Meet my notorious murderers and murderesses. That pair are the infamous Maria and Frederick Manning, hanged in November 1847 in front of Horsemongers Lane Gaol before a riotous crowd of fifty thousand. Charles Dickens saw the execution and he wrote afterwards that the behaviour of the crowd was so indescribable that he thought he was living in a city of devils. Maria wore black satin for her part in the entertainment, a choice which did absolutely nothing for its subsequent fashionable appeal. The gentleman appropriately clad in a shooting jacket is William Corder aiming his pistol at poor Maria Marten. Notice the Red Barn in the background. He might have got away with it if her mother hadn’t repeatedly dreamed that her daughter’s body was buried there. He was hanged at Bury St. Edmunds in 1828, also in front of a large and appreciative audience. The lady next to him in the bonnet and carrying a black bag is Kate Webster. The bag contains the head of her mistress whom she beat to death, cut into pieces and boiled in the kitchen boiler. She is said to have gone round the local shops offering cheap dripping for sale. She was turned off, as they used to say, in July 1879.”

  Leaving the business room, they paused at two elegant rosewood display cases which stood one each side of the door. The left-hand one contained a clutter of small objects which were all neatly labelled: a doll and a solitaire set with small coloured marbles, both of which had belonged to the Queen as a child; a fan; early Christmas cards; scent bottles in crystal, silver gilt and enamel; and a collection of small silver objects, waist hook, chatelaine, prayer-book and posy-holder. But it was the right-hand case which drew their eyes. Here were less agreeable mementos, an extension of Ambrose’s museum of crime. He explained:

  “That tag end of rope is part of the executioner’s rope which hanged Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, the Lambeth poisoner, in November 1892. The stained linen nightdress with the broderie anglaise frills was worn by Constance Kent. It’s not the nightdress she had on when she slit the throat of her small stepbrother but it has a certain interest all the same. That pair of handcuffs with the key were used on young Courvoisier who murdered his master, Lord William Russell, in 1840. The spectacles are a pair which belonged to Dr. Crippen. As he was hanged in November 1910 he’s really nine years out of my period but I couldn’t resist them.”

  Ivo asked, “And the marble of a baby’s arm?”

  “That hasn’t any criminal interest as far as I know. It should be in Memento Mo
ri or in the other cabinet but I hadn’t time to rearrange the exhibits. But it doesn’t look out of place among the props of murder. The man who sold it to me would approve. He told me that he kept imagining that the limb was oozing blood.”

  Clarissa hadn’t spoken and, glancing at her, Cordelia saw that her eyes were fixed on the marble with a mixture of fear and revulsion which none of the other exhibits had evoked. The arm, a chubby replica in white marble, lay on a purple cushion bound with cord. Cordelia herself thought it an unpleasant object, sentimental and morbid, useless and undecorative, and to that extent not untypical of the minor art of its age. Clarissa said: “But it’s perfectly hateful! It’s disgusting! Where on earth did you pick it up, Ambrose?”

  “In London. A man I know. It may be the only extant copy of one of the limbs of the royal children made for Queen Victoria at Osborne House, said to be by Mary Thornycroft. This one could be poor Pussy, the Princess Royal. It’s either that or a memorial piece. And if you dislike it, Clarissa, you should see the Osborne collection. They look like the remnants of a holocaust, as if the Prince Consort had descended on the royal nursery with a machete, as he may well have been tempted to do, poor man.”

  Clarissa said: “It’s repulsive! What on earth possessed you, Ambrose? Get rid of it.”

  “Certainly not. It may be unique. I regard it as an interesting addition to my minor Victoriana.”

  Roma said: “I’ve seen the Osborne pieces. I find them repulsive too. But they throw an interesting light on the Victorian mind, the Queen’s in particular.”

  “Well, this throws an interesting light on Ambrose’s mind.”

  Ivo said quietly: “As a piece of marble, it’s rather well done. It’s the association you find unpleasant, perhaps. The death or mutilation of a child is always distressing, don’t you think, Clarissa?”

  But Clarissa appeared not to have heard. She turned away and said: “For God’s sake don’t start arguing about it. Just get rid of it, Ambrose. And now I need a drink and my lunch.”

  4

  Half a mile from the shore Simon Lessing stopped his slow and regular crawl stroke, turned on his back and let his eyes rest on the horizon. The sea was empty. Faced with that shuddering waste of water, it was possible to imagine that there was emptiness also behind him, that the island and its castle had gently subsided under the waves, silently and without turbulence, and that he floated alone in a blue infinity of sea. This self-induced sense of isolation excited but didn’t frighten him. Nothing about the sea ever did. Here was the element in which he felt most at peace; guilt, anxiety, failure washed away in a gentle and perpetual baptism of redemption.

  He was glad that Clarissa hadn’t wanted him tagging along behind her on the tour of the castle. There were rooms he would be interested to see, but there would be time enough to explore on his own. And it would give him another excuse to keep out of her way. He couldn’t swim more than twice a day at most without it seeming odd and deliberately unsociable but it would seem perfectly natural to ask if he might wander off to explore the castle. Perhaps the weekend might not be so terrifying after all.

  He had only to thrust himself upright to feel the bite of the cold undercurrent. But now he floated, spread-eagled under the sun, feeling the sea creep over his chest and arms as softly warm as a bath. From time to time he let his face submerge, opening his eyes on the thin film of green, letting it wash lightly over his eyeballs. And deep down there was the knowledge, unfrightening and almost comforting, that he only had to let himself go, to give himself up to the power and gentleness of the sea and there need never again be guilt or anxiety or failure. He knew that he wouldn’t do it; the thought was a small self-indulgence which, like a drug, could be safely experimented with as long as the doses were small and one stayed in control. And he was in control. In a few minutes it would be time to turn and strike for the shore, to think about luncheon and Clarissa and getting through the next two days without embarrassment or disaster. But now there was this peace, this emptiness, this wholeness.

  It was only at moments like this that he could think without pain of his father. This was how he must have died, swimming alone in the Aegean on that summer morning, finding the tide too strong for him, letting himself go at last without a struggle, without fear, giving himself up to the sea he loved, embracing its majesty and its peace. He had imagined that death so often on his solitary swims that the old nightmares were almost exorcised. He no longer awoke in the darkness of the early hours as he had in those first months after he had learned of his father’s death, sweating with terror, desperately tearing at the blankets as they dragged him down, living every second of those last dreadful minutes, the stinging eyes, the agony as he glimpsed through the waves the lost, receding, unattainable shore. But it hadn’t been like that. It couldn’t have been like that. His father had died secure in his great love, unresisting and at peace.

  It was time to turn back. He twisted under the water and began again his steady powerful crawl. And now his feet found the shingle and he pulled himself ashore, colder and more tired than he had expected. Looking up, he saw with surprise that there was someone waiting for him, a dark-clad, still figure standing like a guardian beside his pile of clothes. He shook the water from his eyes and saw it was Tolly.

  He came up to her. At first she didn’t speak but bent and picked up his towel and handed it to him. Panting and shivering he began patting dry his arms and neck, embarrassed by her steady gaze, wondering why she was there. Then she said: “Why don’t you leave?”

  She must have seen his incomprehension. She said again: “Why don’t you leave, leave this place, leave her?” Her voice, as always, was low but harsh, almost expressionless. He stared at her, wild-eyed under the dripping hair.

  “Leave Clarissa! Why should I? What do you mean?”

  “She doesn’t want you. Haven’t you noticed that? You aren’t happy. Why go on pretending?”

  He cried out in protest.

  “But I am happy! And where can I go? My aunt wouldn’t want me back. I haven’t any money.”

  She said: “There’s a spare room in my flat. You could have that for a start. It isn’t much, a child’s room. But you could stay there until you found something better.”

  A child’s room. He remembered hearing that she had once had a child, a girl who had died. No one ever spoke about her now. He didn’t want to think about her. He had thought enough about dying and death. He said: “But how could I find somewhere? What would I live on?”

  “You’re seventeen, aren’t you? You’re not a child. You’ve got five ‘O’ levels. You could find something to do. I was working at fifteen. Most children in the world start younger.”

  “But doing what? I’m going to be a pianist. I need Clarissa’s money.”

  “Ah yes,” she said, “you need Clarissa’s money.”

  And so, he thought, so do you. That’s what this is all about. He felt a surge of confidence, of adult cunning. He wasn’t a child to be so easily fooled. Hadn’t he always sensed her dislike of him, caught that contemptuous glance as she set down his breakfast on those days when she and he were alone in the flat, watched the silent resentment with which she gathered up his laundry, cleaned his room. If he weren’t there she wouldn’t need to come in except twice a week to check that all was well. Of course she wanted him out of the way. Probably she expected to be left something in Clarissa’s will; she must be ten years younger even if she didn’t look it. And she was only a servant after all. What right had she to upset him, to criticize Clarissa, to patronize him, offering her sordid little room as if it were a favour. It would be as bad as Mornington Avenue; worse. The small, seductive devil at the back of his mind whispered its enticement. However difficult things might be at times he would be crazy to give up the patronage of Clarissa, who was rich, to put himself at the mercy of Tolly, who was poor.

  Perhaps something of this reached her. She said, almost humbly but with no trace of solicitation: “You’d be und
er no obligation. It’s just a room.” He wished she would go. Yet he couldn’t walk away, couldn’t start dressing while that dark, oppressive figure stood there seeming to block the whole beach.

  He drew himself up and said as stiffly as his shivering body would permit: “Thank you, but I’m perfectly happy as I am.”

  “Suppose she gets tired of you like she did your father.” He gaped at her, clutching his towel. Above them a gull shrieked, shrill as a tormented child. He whispered: “What do you mean? She loved my father! They loved each other! He explained to me before he left us, mother and me. It was the most marvellous thing that had ever happened to him. He had no choice.”

  “There’s always a choice.”

  “But they adored each other! He was so happy.”

  “Then why did he drown himself?”

  He cried: “It isn’t true! I don’t believe you!”

  “You don’t have to if you don’t want to. Just remember it when your turn comes.”

  “But why should he do it? Why?”

  “To make her feel sorry, I suppose. Isn’t that usually why people kill themselves? But he should have known. Clarissa doesn’t understand about guilt.”

  “But they told me that there was an inquest. They found that it was accidental death. And he didn’t leave a note.”

  “If he did they didn’t see it. It was Clarissa who found his clothes on the beach.”

  Her eyes fell to where his own trousers and jacket were jumbled under a stone. A picture came unbidden into his mind, so clear that it might have been memory. The gritty sand, hot as cinders, an alien sea layered in purple and blue to the horizon, Clarissa standing with the wind billowing in her sleeves, the note in her hand. And then the tattered scraps of white, fluttering down like petals, briefly littering the sea before floating and dissolving in the surf. It had been three weeks before his father’s body, what was left of it, had been washed up. But bones and flesh, even when the fish have finished with it, lasted longer than a scrap of paper. It wasn’t true. None of it was true. As she had told him, there was always a choice. He would choose not to believe.