The Skull Beneath the Skin

by P. D. James

  Suddenly, she asked: “What do you think of Simon’s playing?”

  “I’m not really qualified to judge. Obviously, he has talent.”

  She was about to add that he might make a more successful accompanist than solo performer, then thought better of it. It was perfectly true: she wasn’t competent to judge. And she had the feeling that, ignorant though she was, some kind of decision might depend on her answer.

  “Oh, talent! That’s common enough. One doesn’t invest six thousand pounds or so in mere talent. The thing is, has he the guts to succeed? George thinks not, but that he may as well be given his chance.”

  “Sir George knows him better than I do.”

  Clarissa said sharply: “But it isn’t George’s money is it? I’ll consult Ambrose, but not until after the play. I can’t worry about anything until then. He’ll probably damn the poor boy. Ambrose is such a perfectionist. But he does know something about music. He’d be a better judge than George. If only Simon had taken up a stringed instrument, he might eventually try for a place in an orchestra. But the piano! Still, I suppose he could always work as an accompanist.”

  Cordelia wondered whether she should point out that the job of a professional accompanist, so far from being an easy option, required a formidable combination of technical ability and musicality, but she reminded herself that she hadn’t been employed to advise on Simon’s career. And this talk of Simon was wasting time. She said: “I think we should discuss the messages and our plans for the weekend, especially tomorrow. We ought to have spoken earlier.”

  “I know, but there hasn’t really been time what with the rehearsal and Ambrose showing off his castle. Anyway, you know what you’re here for. If there are any more messages, I don’t want to receive them. I don’t want to be shown them. I don’t want to be told about them. It’s vital that I get through tomorrow. If I can only get back my confidence as an actress, I can face almost anything.”

  “Even the knowledge of who is doing this to you?”

  “Even that.”

  Cordelia asked: “How many of the people here know about the messages?”

  Clarissa had finished cleaning her face and now began removing the varnish from her nails. The smell of acetone overlaid the smell of scent and makeup.

  “Tolly knows. I haven’t any secrets from Tolly. Anyway she was with me in my dressing room when some of them were brought in by the doorman, the ones sent by post to the theatre. I expect Ivo knows; there’s nothing happens in the West End that he doesn’t get to hear about. And Ambrose. He was with me in my dressing room at the Duke of Clarence when one was pushed under the door. By the time he’d picked it up for me and I’d opened it, whoever it was had gone. The corridor was empty. But anyone could have got in. Backstage at the Clarence is like a warren and Albert Betts used to drink and wasn’t always on the door when he should have been. They’ve sacked him now, but he was still working there when the note was delivered. And my husband knows, of course. Simon doesn’t, unless Tolly has told him. I can’t think why she should.”

  “And your cousin?”

  “Roma doesn’t know and, if she did, she wouldn’t care.”

  “Tell me about Miss Lisle.”

  “There’s not much to tell and what there is, is boring. We’re first cousins, but George has told you that. It’s quite a common story. My father made a sensible marriage and his younger brother ran off with a barmaid, left the Army, drank and made a general mess of his life, then expected Daddy to help out. And he did, at least as far as Roma was concerned. She was always staying with us when I was a child, particularly after Uncle died. Poor Little Orphan Annie. Glum, badly dressed and perpetually miserable. Even Daddy couldn’t stand her for long. He was the most marvellous person, I adored him. But she was such a bore, and so plain, worse than she is now. Daddy was one of those people who really couldn’t bear ugliness, particularly in women. He loved gaiety, wit, beauty. He just couldn’t make himself look at a plain face.”

  Cordelia thought that Daddy, who sounded like a self-satisfied humbug, must have spent most of his life with his eyes shut, depending, of course, on his standard of ugliness. Clarissa added: “And she wasn’t a bit grateful.”

  “Should she have been?”

  Clarissa seemed to feel that the question deserved serious thought, or as much as she could spare from the business of filing her nails.

  “Oh, I think so. He didn’t have to take her in. And she could hardly expect him to treat her the same as me, his own child.”

  “He could have tried.”

  “But that’s not reasonable, and you know it. You wouldn’t behave like that so why expect him to. You really must guard against becoming just a bit of a prig. Men don’t like it.”

  Cordelia said: “I don’t much like it myself. Someone once told me that it’s the result of having an atheist father, a convent education and a non-conformist conscience.”

  There was silence between them, not uncompanionable. Then Cordelia said on impulse: “These notes—could Miss Tolgarth have anything to do with them?”

  “Tolly! Of course not. Whatever put that idea into your head? She’s devoted to me. You mustn’t be put off by her manner. She’s always been like that. But we’ve been together since I was a child. Tolly adores me. If you can’t see that you’re not much of a detective. Besides, she can’t type. The messages are typed in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  Cordelia said gravely: “You should have told me about her child. If I’m to help I need to know anything that might be relevant.” She waited, apprehensive, for Clarissa’s response. But the hands, busy with their self-ministrations, didn’t falter.

  “But that isn’t relevant. It was all a mistake. Tolly knows that. Everyone knows it. I suppose Ivo told you. That’s typical of his malice and disloyalty. Can’t you see that he’s sick? He’s dying! And he’s eaten up with jealousy. He always has been. Jealousy and malice.”

  Cordelia wondered whether she could have asked the question more tactfully, whether it had been wise to ask it at all. Ivo hadn’t asked her not to betray their conversation but presumably he had hoped for discretion. And the weekend promised to be difficult enough without setting two of the guests at each other’s throats. Direct lying had never been easy for her. She said cautiously: “No one has been disloyal. Obviously I did some tactful research before I arrived here. These things do get talked about. I have a friend in the theatre.” Well that was true enough anyway even if poor Bevis was more often out than in. But Clarissa was uninterested in putative theatrical friends.

  “I’d like to know what right Ivo has to criticize me. Do you realize how many careers he’s ruined by his cruelty? Yes, cruelty! I’ve seen actors—actors mind you—in tears after one of his reviews. If he could have resisted the impulse to be clever he might have been one of the great British critics. He could have been a second Agate or a Tynan. And what is he now? Dying on his feet. He’s no right to come here looking as he does. It’s like having a death’s head at table. It’s indecent.”

  It was interesting, thought Cordelia, the way in which death had replaced sex as the great unmentionable, to be denied in prospect, endured in a decent privacy, preferably behind the drawn curtains of a hospital bed, and followed by discreet, embarrassed, uncomforted mourning. There was this to be said about the Convent of the Holy Child: the views of the Sisters on death had been explicit, firmly held and not altogether reassuring; but at least they hadn’t regarded it as in poor taste.

  She said: “Those first messages, the ones that came when you were playing Lady Macbeth, the ones you threw away. Were they the same as the later ones, typed and on white paper?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. It was a long time ago.”

  “But you can’t have forgotten?”

  “They must have been the same, mustn’t they? What does it matter? I don’t want to talk about it now.”

  “It’s the only chance we may get. I haven’t been able to see you alone today and tomorrow isn
’t going to be any easier.”

  Clarissa was on her feet now, pacing between the dressing-table and the bed.

  “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t kill her. She wasn’t properly cared for. If she had been she wouldn’t have had the accident. What’s the point of having a child—a bastard too—if you don’t look after it?”

  “But wasn’t Tolly at work, looking after you?”

  “The hospital had no right to phone like that, upsetting people. They must have known that it was a theatre that they were calling, that West End curtains rise at eight, that we’d be in the middle of a performance. She couldn’t have done anything if I had let her go. The child was unconscious, she wouldn’t have known her. It’s sentimental and morbid, this sitting by the bedside waiting for people to die. What good does it do? And I had three changes in the Third Act. Kalenski designed the banquet costume himself: barbaric jewellery; a crown set with great dollops of red stones like blood; a skirt so stiff I could hardly move. He meant me to be weighed down, to walk stiffly like an over-encumbered child. ‘Think of yourself as a seventeenth-century princess,’ he said, ‘wonderingly loaded with inappropriate majesty.’ Those were his words, and he made me keep moving my hands down the sides of the skirt as if I couldn’t believe that I was actually wearing so much richness. And of course it made a marvellous contrast with the plain cream shift in the sleepwalking scene. It wasn’t a nightgown, they used to sleep naked apparently. I used it to wipe my hands. Kalenski said, ‘Hands, darling, hands, hands, that’s what this part is all about.’ It was a new interpretation, of course, I wasn’t the usual kind of Lady Macbeth, tall, domineering, ruthless; I played her like a sex-kitten but a kitten with hidden claws.”

  It was, thought Cordelia, a novel interpretation of the part, but surely not altogether consonant with the text. But perhaps Kalenski, like other Shakespearean directors whose names came to mind, didn’t let that bother him. She said: “But was it true to the text?”

  “Oh, my dear, who cares about the text? I don’t mean that exactly, but Shakespeare’s like the Bible, you can make it mean anything. That’s why directors love him.”

  “Tell me about the child.”

  “Macduff’s son? Desmond Willoughby played him, an intolerable child. A vulgar Cockney accent. You can’t find a child actor now who knows how to speak English. Too old for the part too. Thank God I never had to appear with him.”

  One biblical text came into Cordelia’s mind, brutally explicit in its meaning, but she didn’t speak it aloud:

  Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

  Clarissa turned and looked at her. Something in Cordelia’s face must have pierced even her egotism. She cried: “I’m not paying you to judge me! What are you looking like that for?”

  “I’m not judging you. I want to help. But you have to be honest with me.”

  “I am being honest, as honest as I know how. When I first saw you, that day at Nettie Fortescue’s, I knew I could trust you, that you were someone I could talk to. It’s degrading to be so afraid. George doesn’t understand, how could he? He’s never been afraid of anything in his life. He thinks I’m neurotic to care. He only went to see you because I made him.”

  “Why didn’t you come yourself?”

  “I thought you might be more likely to accept the job if he asked you. And I don’t enjoy asking people for favours. Besides, I had a fitting for one of my costumes.”

  “There wasn’t any question of a favour. I needed the job. I probably would have taken almost anything if it wasn’t illegal and didn’t disgust me.”

  “Yes, George said that your office was pretty squalid. Well, pathetic rather than squalid. But you aren’t. There’s nothing squalid or pathetic about you. I couldn’t have put up with the usual kind of female private eye.”

  Cordelia said gently: “What is it that you’re really afraid of?”

  Clarissa turned on Cordelia, her softly gleaming, cleansed, uncoloured face looking for the first time, in its nakedness, vulnerable to age and grief, and gave a sad, rather rueful smile. Then she lifted her hands in an eloquent gesture of despair.

  “Oh, don’t you know? I thought George had told you. Death. That’s what I’m afraid of. Just death. Stupid isn’t it? I always have been: even when I was a young child. I don’t remember when it began, but I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn’t see the skull beneath the skin. Nothing traumatic happened to start it off. They didn’t force me to look at my Nanny, dead in her coffin, nothing like that. And I was at school when Mummy died and it didn’t mean anything. It isn’t the death of other people. It isn’t the fact of death. It’s my death I’m afraid of. Not all the time. Not every moment. Sometimes I can go for weeks without thinking about it. And then it comes, usually at night, the dread and the horror and the knowledge that the fear is real. I mean, no one can say ‘Don’t worry, it may never happen.’ They can’t say ‘It’s all your imagination, darling, it doesn’t really exist.’ I can’t really describe the fear, what it’s like, how terrible it is. It comes in a rhythm, wave after wave of panic sweeping over me, a kind of pain. It must be like giving birth, except that I’m not delivering life, it’s death I have between my thighs. Sometimes I hold up my hand, like this, and look at it and think: Here it is, part of me. I can feel it with my other hand, and move it and warm it and smell it and paint its nails. And one day it will hang white and cold and unfeeling and useless and so shall I be all those things. And then it will rot. And I shall rot. I can’t even drink to forget. Other people do. It’s how they get through their lives. But drink makes me ill. It isn’t fair that I should have this terror and not be able to drink! Now I’ve told you, and you can explain that I’m stupid and morbid and a coward. You can despise me.”

  Cordelia said: “I don’t despise you.”

  “And it’s no good saying that I ought to believe in God. I can’t. And even if I could, it wouldn’t help. Tolly got converted after Viccy died so I suppose she believes. But if someone told Tolly that she was going to die tomorrow she’d be just as unwilling to go. I’ve noticed that about the God people. They’re just as frightened as the rest of us. They cling on just as long. They’re supposed to have a heaven waiting but they’re in no hurry to get there. Perhaps it’s worse for them; judgement and hell and damnation. At least I’m only afraid of death. Isn’t everyone? Aren’t you?”

  Was she? Cordelia wondered. Sometimes, perhaps. But the fear of dying was less obtrusive than more mundane worries: what would happen when the Kingly Street lease ran out; whether the Mini would pass its M.O.T. test; how she would face Miss Maudsley if the Agency no longer had a job for her. Perhaps only the rich and successful could indulge the morbid fear of dying. Most of the world needed its energies to cope with living. She said cautiously, knowing that she had no comfort to offer: “It doesn’t seem reasonable to be afraid of something which is inevitable and universal and which I shan’t be able to experience, anyway.”

  “Oh, those are just words! All they mean is that you’re young and healthy and don’t have to think about dying. To lie in cold obstruction and to rot. That was in one of the messages.”

  “I know.”

  “And there’s another for you to add to the collection. I’ve been keeping it for you. It came by post to the London flat yesterday morning. You’ll find it at the bottom of my jewel case. It’s on the bedside table, the left-hand side.”

  The instruction as to the side was unnecessary; even in the subdued light and amid the clutter of Clarissa’s bedside table, the softly gleaming casket was an object that caught the eye. Cordelia took it in her hands. It was about eight inches by five, with delicately wrought clawed feet, the lid and sides embossed with a representation of the judgement of Paris. She turned the key, and saw that the inside was lined with cream quilted silk.

  Cl
arissa called: “Ambrose gave it to me when I arrived this morning, a good luck present for the performance tomorrow. I took a fancy to it when I saw it six months ago but it took a time before he got the message. He has so many Victorian baubles that one less can’t make any difference. The casket we’re using in Act Three is his, well, most of the props are. But this is prettier. More valuable too. But not as valuable as the thing I’m keeping in it. You’ll find the letter in the secret drawer. Not so very secret, actually. You just press the centre of one of the leaves. You can see the line if you look carefully. Better bring it here. I’ll show you.”

  The box was surprisingly heavy. Clarissa pulled out a tangle of necklaces and bracelets as if they were cheap costume jewellery. Cordelia thought that some of the pieces probably were, bright beads of coloured stone and glass intertwined with the sparkle of real diamonds, the glow of sapphires, the softness of milk-white pearls. Clarissa pressed the centre of one of the leaves which decorated the side of the box and a drawer in the base slid slowly open. Inside Cordelia saw first a folded cutting of newsprint. Clarissa took it out: “I played Hester in a revival of Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, at the Speymouth Playhouse. That was in 1977, Jubilee Year, when Ambrose was abroad in his year’s tax exile. The theatre’s closed now, alas. But they seemed to like me. Actually, that’s probably the most important notice I ever had.”

  She unfolded it. Cordelia glimpsed the headline. “Clarissa Lisle triumphs in Rattigan revival.” Her mind busied itself for only a second on the oddity of Clarissa’s attaching so much importance to the review of a revival in a small provincial town and she noticed, almost subconsciously, that the cutting was oddly shaped and larger than the space taken by the notice. But her interest fastened on the letter. The envelope matched the one handed to her by Mrs. Munter from the morning post-bag but the address had been typed on a different and obviously older machine. The postmark was London, the date two days earlier, and like the other it was addressed to the Duchess of Malfi but at Clarissa’s Bayswater flat. Inside was the usual sheet of white paper, the neat black drawing of a coffin, the letters R.I.P. Underneath was typed a quotation from the play.