The Drowning People

by Richard Mason

  “Now Mummy’s gone, someone’s got to take on the mantle, I suppose,” she said, pressing the envelope into Sarah’s hands. “And it’s so tiring having to endure the after-party on one’s own. You must help me.”

  But such effusion only made my wife more severe; and under her cold stare even the energy of as lively a butterfly as Camilla found it difficult to endure. Gradually my friend found that the pressures of business kept her in London far more than she would like, though she continued to invite Sarah and me—and later Margaret—to anything she had or did with the social perseverance which was her hallmark.

  “I know Sarah doesn’t like me,” she told me once, in her cups perhaps, at one of the few parties—I think it was again her birthday—to which I had been able to go. “And truth to tell I don’t like her much either.” And she took my hand with an affectionate squeeze. “But that’s no reason to see so much less of you, Jamie darling. Besides, there’s my divine goddaughter to think of. And who could possibly teach her to survive in London but me?”

  “Who indeed?”

  But even as I spoke I knew—and Camilla did also, I think—that the days of friendship we had known before my marriage were over and irreclaimable. Sarah’s price was loyalty: unquestioning and unbroken. And I needed her too much to break our unspoken compact.

  Remembering all this brings my marriage back as it really was; in ways which I can understand only now, now that my bond with Sarah has finally been broken. Killing her has broken a spell; it has freed me. I see that now. And I see in what deep seclusion I have spent the last forty-five years: isolated not only from my music and my friends, but from myself. It is that self which the truth has allowed me to reclaim; and I see that painful though they have been to learn, the facts of yesterday have given me my freedom, a freedom I did not know I had lost.

  My wife was subtle in her mastery; subtle and instinctive. And it is a tribute to her power that I heard of Ella’s death unflinchingly, unmoved almost.

  I was in the garden; it was winter, I think. There were workmen to supervise. On a day of gray skies and squabbling gulls I stood by the cliffs, smelling the salt on the breeze, giving instructions, in the sting of the wind. I remember it all. And I remember Sarah, her hair in a bun, her face drawn—for maybe, at the last, her conscience pricked her; who is to say?—walking down the steep path from the castle: a quiet, somber figure; dark against the cloud.

  “I need to speak to my husband,” she said; and the workmen, mindful of their manners, raised their caps and disappeared, leaving us.

  “Yes, darling?”

  She told me quickly; and in even tones she said that Ella was dead, that she had hanged herself in her cell the night before. “I had word from the warden this morning.”

  It was almost lunchtime then.

  “And he sent her personal things.”

  There was silence. Perhaps I nodded.

  Sarah stood, as though hesitating. “And two letters,” she said at last. “I’ve looked into mine. The same ravings as at her trial.”

  “I see.”

  “It would only upset you to read yours, darling.”

  Again I did not speak. My wife walked towards me; towards the cliff. And I saw in her hand an envelope with my name on it in jagged brown letters.

  “But of course the choice rests with you. Would you like to see it?”

  And I know now that that was her supreme moment. That was the apex of her daring.

  I was silent.

  “I don’t think you should,” Sarah went on gently. “Believe me, I know. She was raving when she died. It’s no way to remember her.” She looked at me; and the request on my lips dissolved.

  “In fact, there’s only one thing to do with it,” she said.

  And in front of me, a yard or two away, she tore the letter, with slow deliberation, into little pieces. We watched them scatter downwards, into the sea.

  “Let’s go in,” she said, linking her arm with mine.

  CHAPTER 32

  THERE’S LITTLE MORE TO BE SAID NOW. All that remains are the loose ends; and those Sarah tied for me yesterday with chilling egotism. I am glad this telling is done; I want the end to come. And when my wife has been buried and I have watched her coffin slide slowly into the vault in the presence of a weeping family all will be over. There is something poignant in that, I think; something poignant in the fact that when I, too, have died we three will all lie together, united at last. Ella, Sarah and I, side by side in lead-lined coffins, decaying in harmony.

  At my age such symmetries are pleasing.

  By then there will be no outward signs of our tragedy; no hint—bar the reports of aging, inaccura$$$ pers—of the bonds that really bind us. And $$$ should be. Margaret must never know what $$$ did and she never will. Better far for her to think, however sadly, that Sarah ended her own life; that she was not, perhaps, as stable as she seemed. For the truth would destroy her; and thus our tragedy—mine and Ella’s and Sarah’s—would spill into generations in which it has no place.

  Pretense, for so long the key to Sarah’s methods, must now become the key to mine.

  And I was expert yesterday. Certainly the police will not suspect; and I say that without smugness. The coroner will be helped towards his verdict of suicide by an array of evidence which quite exonerates me: for my wife’s fingerprints are on the weapon that killed her; the gun itself was found in her hand, her grip already vise-like in rigor mortis. Earthly justice and its petty officers will have no hold over me; having failed to find the truth so long ago, they will have no chance now. And I shall go alone, unhindered, to the greater justice that is death.

  But I anticipate myself again.

  A day’s events are all I have left to tell; a week’s at most. And as I go over them now I am struck by the curious irony of it; by the fact that I might never have found her out, might never have stumbled on the truth, had Sarah been less considerate about the arrangements for my birthday party. It was her thoughtfulness that exposed her in the end; her thoughtfulness and the little signs by which she intended me to know that she was thoughtful. She liked her wifely duty acknowledged, you see; acknowledged and appreciated. And I have known for weeks that something was up. But I’m particular about parties. I don’t like the tenants invited; and I don’t like some of my wife’s more fawningly agreeable friends. Sarah did not collect equals about her but sycophants; and I had no wish to entertain them on my birthday. So it was only natural that I should have tried to consult a guest list, so that by hinting at least I could have made my wishes known. My wife was always receptive in that way; it was a part of her genius to acquiesce easily over trifles.

  I chose last Monday afternoon to search her desk because she was out, supervising the extension to the ticket office. And quite by chance I found the drawer she has kept it in all these years: a tiny drawer, hidden in the scrollwork, opened by a secret spring.

  It was an odd key: heavy, large, but made of shining steel that seemed too modern for its design; cut for an old lock. And for a minute or two I turned it over in my hand, wondering why it was there and for which room it was intended. It seemed strange that my wife should have put it in so secret a drawer; strange also that though ancient in design the key itself could have been no more than forty or fifty years old. And it bore the stamp of a London shop, though all the house keys are cut—as they have been for generations—by a firm in Penzance. Curious, though not very, I put the key in my jacket pocket, resolving to ask Sarah about it once my party was over and I could confess—in a moment of lightness—to having searched her desk for a guest list. For the best part of a week it remained there; for though the jacket is a favorite one of mine and I wear it frequently, I give little thought to what its pockets hold. They are always cluttered with things.

  It was pure coincidence, really, which showed me the truth. But then life owes more to Chance than we often admit; and it has played too great a part in my story to go unacknowledged now. It was Chance which intro
duced me to Ella; Chance which brought Eric from Vaugirard on that dreadful night with my forgotten violin; Chance which made me choose this jacket as I changed yesterday for an afternoon of interviews and castle tours. Sarah and I are both particular about guides, you see; and before someone is taken onto the permanent staff we ask them to give a tour which one of us joins: a kind of final evaluation, if you like.

  It was a young Miss Reid yesterday afternoon, I think; and I joined her tour, preoccupied a little by other estate business but pleasant, as I always am, to the group of tourists which joined it too. Pleasant but detached; for that is the way to be with them. And through the house we went: down the china gallery; past the staircase door, now locked, which leads to Ella’s tower room; through the King’s Bedroom with its nineteenth-century four-poster and Chinese screens; finally to the great hall. My mind elsewhere, for I had heard and overheard the tour a thousand times before, I paid little attention to the monologue being given; and it was only outside the great hall, where the group had gathered to examine the door, that I remembered my duties as observer and listened. The guide, correctly and confidently, was explaining the provenance of the lock, thought to be the oldest still in use in the county; and it was only as she finished and we moved again that I felt the key in my pocket. It was clanging against some change.

  Remembering it, and remembering also—as Miss Reid was reminding me—that the lock of the great hall is the largest in the house, I took the key out and tried it in the door. Unthinking, unaware, completely unconscious of the significance of what I was doing, I took the key and tried it and was pleased when it fitted so easily. Yes, I was pleased; for I used to think it pleasant to have things neatly explained. And with a heavy effort—for yearly oilings were due but had not yet been done—I ground the bolts slowly back.

  It was only as I did so that something stirred; and even then it was only the faintest Creaking of memory. Ella’s trial, like Eric’s death, belonged to the years before my marriage; and I had avoided thinking of them both with careful diligence. Not wanting to remember I had tried to forget; and by and large I had succeeded. But I have always had an eye for detail. And something stirred in me as I took that key from the lock yesterday: something deep within me shifted; shifted and refused to settle. As the tour proceeded I gradually fell back from it, troubled by something, grasping for a memory I could not quite define but which I knew was there. And slowly, obscurely, lines from a far-off court report recurred to me; and as I tried to make them out I heard a prosecution witness state his name and place of work and explain how most keys are the same but he had remembered this one. And it was then that I knew.

  It is difficult to describe the first impact of that knowing; the way things fell so suddenly, so alarmingly into place. The quickness of it frightened me, I think; the speed with which so much disintegrated: my past; my marriage; my unthinking, unquestioned trust in my wife. I was not immediately angry; no, anger was not my first response. I was numb at first, I think; numb and disbelieving. I could not understand. And for the first few awful minutes that numbness shielded me; it allowed me to smile encouragingly at Miss Reid; to wait calmly until the tourists had left the room; to compose myself before returning to the corridor and nodding good day to the guards at its far end. The rage came later, as I walked back to my study, through the long corridors of the house which should have been Ella’s and mine. And alone in the sanctuary of my book-lined room the tears came; and I sobbed with the ugly retchings of a man no longer used to them.

  Sitting here now the events of yesterday afternoon seem an age away: further than Ella’s trial or Eric’s death. It seems years ago, though it was only yesterday; only yesterday that I sat crying at my desk amongst the scattered, silver-framed records of my and Sarah’s joint past; only yesterday that the realization came of what I had to do.

  It was much later that I went to her sitting room.

  And I was calmer by then; the hours had soothed me. I was soothed also by the thought that everything was in place; that I was properly equipped. I did not trust my nerve, you see; even then, knowing the truth as I did, I knew also my wife’s power to move me. And I knew that I could not hope to endure a night of tearful explanation without losing all resolve. If I was to act, I had to act soon; and I steeled myself with the memory of Sarah’s quiet voice telling me that Ella had hanged herself in her cell and that it would only upset me to read her letter.

  Waiting in her room, surrounded by her clutter, I looked at Sarah’s things: at her books and her papers and the pictures scattered about; at the photograph of Margaret’s christening which stood on her desk; at the one of me, so conscientiously kept, taking my final bow on the night of the Hibberdson final. And I could not believe that the woman to whom all these innocent things belonged, the woman with whom I had shared so many years of my life, for whose security I had sacrificed so much, could possibly have done such a thing. Even then I hoped I was wrong; even then I was willing to be persuaded. The consequences of Sarah’s guilt were looming already, you see; and already I was afraid of them. I had no wish to hear what she had done; to know for certain what had happened. And with more self-possession she might have fooled me still; for we were not equals yet. With more self-possession she might still have convinced me—in the face even of such damning evidence—that I had made a terrible mistake; that it was I, and not she, who deserved punishment.

  Waiting in her sitting room I heard the crash of the waves far below: relentless; eternal; relieved, at last, by the tap of her heels on the stone of the corridor; by the creaking of the hinges as she opened the door. And seeing me she smiled, surprised perhaps by my promptness. I am not usually the first at meals.

  CHAPTER 33

  IT WAS THE LOOK ON SARAH’S FACE that betrayed her; the way the color drained from her cheeks and her hands shook. Not greatly, and she stopped them quickly; but enough for me to know. And remembering it now, now that all else is clear—was, indeed, made clear by my wife herself—I find, beyond the knowledge of what she did, beyond the revulsion of it, a kind of … Incredulity? A fascination rather, I suppose; for there was daring in her horror. A distorted courage, even; the courage of which she was so proud. I haven’t the words to describe how I feel. At the end of this long day too much has been disturbed for me to find the rest I had looked for; hoped for. And I know now that understanding does not always bring peace; that knowledge does not always bring clarity.

  She was raving by the end, you see: moving restlessly about the room; talking quickly, almost eagerly; excitedly. And there was something mesmerizing in her intensity; in her lucidity even then. She was relieved to have found an audience at last, I think; relieved and resolved to claim the recognition she had never thought to have. It was that resolve which shocked me most; the pride with which she told me—hoping for what? for praise?-—of what she had done. I had expected denial, perhaps; or at least a show of remorse. I had hoped for both; I see that now. But she was unrepentant to the end; and it never occurred to her that I would have the strength to punish her for what she had done.

  But I am rambling again; trying to find some sense in all of this; some sign—and any would do—of a grander plan. For surely there is some purpose in our suffering: in mine and Ella’s; even in Sarah’s. There must be; I know there must be. But what it is I could not say.

  My wife began on the offensive, but her attack did not last long. “Is it customary for a husband to rifle through his wife’s desk?” was all she said.

  And when I did not reply she shrugged slightly, as if to admit that indignation was a clumsy defense, unworthy of one such as she; and patting her hair, which was straying from its bun, she came to the sofa and sat down—with every semblance of normality, her composure quite regained—at the tea table. Sarah had a gift for smoothing things over, you see; a gift she had used many times in forty-five years of married life. And perhaps she thought that she could work her magic again yesterday, for she began to pour, quite in her usual manner; an
d all that betrayed her agitation was the unusual clatter of the cups and saucers as she arranged them.

  “What is this?” I said quietly: said not asked; for I knew.

  “I beg your pardon, darling?”

  My wife did not look up, pretending to busy herself with the tea things. And I can see her now, her dark hair streaked with gray, her body as slender and as graceful as it had ever been, bending over the teapot, uncertain. It was that uncertainty which betrayed her; that sudden vulnerability which was not calculated and which exposed the pretty, manipulating tears of the past. Her façade, so long maintained, was cracking. I had pierced it; I knew that even then. And her strength, once seemingly so endless, drained through the puncture before me.

  Silently she poured the tea.

  And as it splashed into the cups I thought, inconsequentially, distractedly almost, that she had grown more beautiful with the years; that the fragile, misleading beauty which she had shared with her cousin suited the lines and straight-backed deliberation of age. She was wearing a long, old-fashioned dress of teal blue, a shade darker than her eyes. And her arms seemed thin as they lifted the heavy pot.

  “Tell me what this is,” I said again, but less insistently this time; for now that power was mine I found—as I had known that I would—that I had no idea how to wield it. Having deferred to her for so long; having in so many ways allowed my wife’s wishes to lead and to direct my own, I was uneasy with this upsetting of the balance between us; uneasy and confused. And some part of me— a part which feared that at the last I would succumb; that at the last I would lack the resolve to punish her as she deserved—was relieved that I had made my plans already. Even in my anger I pitied her, you see; and Sarah sensed from my voice that I did so and lifted her eyes to meet mine and looked at me silently with great art. She was expert in her affects even then; I realize that now. And it took all my strength to resist her mute appeal.