Jago Jones is the model for a type of man Anne will use again in her writing. When Pitt first meets him he sees ‘the face of a man who followed his own conscience, whatever the law, whatever the cost’. He rises above his past, his spiritual doubts and the moribund institutions of his religion, and he makes a perfect contrast to the bullying, nouveau riche FitzJames family. Tallulah, Finlay FitzJames’s sister, breaks with family convention to admire Jago Jones ‘working all the hours there are, at giving away his goods to feed the poor … [and] his whole life in service’. Her dilemma is whether she will follow her family’s taste for affluent depravity or follow her heart and carry the true cross with Jago Jones.
Pentecost is the feast in the Christian liturgical year that commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples of Christ after the Resurrection, and there is something decidedly spiritual about the symbolism in this book. But Anne also writes of Emily’s smouldering boredom at being a society wife, and of the Pitts’ domestic life:
A marmalade-striped kitten came running in from the scullery, then stopped suddenly, its back arched, and took half a dozen steps crabwise, its tail bristling. A coal-black kitten charged in after it and there were squawks and squeals as they tumbled with each other, spitting and scratching harmlessly, to the children’s entertainment. Porridge was ignored, and no one argued.
During the summer of 1995 things began to heat up with regard to the filming of the Pitt and Monk series. After years there was an overwhelming rush of interest — some of it from the biggest players in British television. As Meg explained to Hope Dellon at St Martin’s, who still had a financial interest in the first 10 titles of the Pitt series, there were three possibilities: ‘Lynda La Plante Productions (she of course has been the champion of the books all along, and has a golden touch for getting drama series commissioned and broadcast); Meridian/Anglia (one of the major ITV companies); and Ardent (the joint managing director is Prince Edward) … I’m happy to discuss it with you at the end of the month, when we meet the three interested producers and look at the whole situation.’19 ‘Good luck,’ Hope replied. ‘I know the process of seeing books translated to the screen often seems endless, and I hope the results will finally repay all your efforts.’20
Although the BBC option on the Pitt series had lapsed, Alan Yentob contacted Meg to request an eight-week extension. At the end of September a new head of series would be appointed and there would be no major decisions on pilots or commissioning until then. But towards the end of August, Meg told Alan Yentob that she and Anne were sick of waiting: ‘[Anne] is aware of the changes which have taken place within the department during the three years in which the BBC have held the option, but still feels that this has been enough time to decide whether or not to go to a series.’21 They would be pursuing other possibilities.
The decision to go with Prince Edward’s company Ardent was difficult. Not only did it alienate some of the most significant — not to mention persuasive — people in British film and television, but Ardent was a relatively new and untested company. ‘The joint managing directors are a top ex-BBC lawyer and Prince Edward, and the other drama personnel are ex-BBC,’ Meg explained to the editor at St Martin’s. ‘The suggested deal here is a one-year option on THE CATER STREET HANGMAN only, but with the first opportunity to option the rest of the series on terms to be agreed.’ Their decision was made finally on the basis that Ardent ‘seem stylistically closest to Anne’s work and have undertaken to consult with her thoroughly from day one: also they happen to be the highest bidder’.22
Through this time, the ‘typhoon of interest in Anne’s personal story’ continued.23 Anne was contacted by Georgina Morley, the editorial director of Macmillan: ‘I wanted to write to say how very impressive I thought your appearance on Midweek was. It must be very difficult to have the media’s attention on you in the aftermath of a fictionalized account of your life and I do sympathize … I’d love to talk to you about the possibility of publishing your story.’24 Anne replied that she was not prepared to write an account of her life. Inevitably, it would involve recriminations and excuses, and would touch on other people’s lives, which she did not feel at liberty to discuss.
Among the requests that she accepted was one from Alison Parr’s National Radio Sunday Morning show in New Zealand. Meg was vigilant in her research, contacting Darron Leslie, publicity assistant at HarperCollins in Auckland, to ensure the request was genuine. ‘I’ve been trying to find out something more about the show. I had a nice talk with the (outgoing) producer, who’s assured me that they’ll be nice to Anne.’ She was hoping for further reassurance. ‘I may be being over-protective, but Anne’s had a rough ride with some of the interviews, and in fact hasn’t done any for New Zealand before, so I’m just a bit concerned for her.’25
Darron Leslie faxed back directly: ‘National Radio as a whole steers way clear of journalism of a tabloid or scandalous nature. [Alison Parr’s] show is well researched, well respected and is lively and informative radio. Basically, Meg, no need for concern, things will be fine.’26 Meg later confirmed an interview with Alison Parr on the basis that ‘they won’t touch on the “event” or film, which are still a bit sensitive, and which we feel has already been amply covered’.27
Anne’s interview experiences had been mixed. Some were open and transparent; others, more adversarial and accusatory. These were disturbing, as was some of the mail she received. Much of it was positive, but some was cruel and occasionally sick. One writer, who addressed the outside of the envelope to Anne Perry, began her letter ‘Dear Juliet’. She discussed an unhinged business proposition, then issued a challenge:
I’d like to put this to the test. You could pick me out in a crowd. I have something, I don’t know what it is. But I do have something. Leading public figures find me particularly attractive. In fact, anyone who is somebody always makes a beeline for me. Except for Germaine Greer who appears to have no sense of intuition. I walked out on her.28
At the end of 1995, Meg and Don were still waiting for Leona to make a decision on ‘Tathyr’. A reworked manuscript had been submitted yet again and Meg dreaded the outcome. ‘I can’t see our persevering (well, Leona persevering) with non-mysteries if this draft isn’t right,’ she told Don. She thought the outlook for Anne’s fantasy was bleak, and they might have to wait until — as Don had suggested in earlier correspondence — ‘any publisher will be grateful for a Perry novel’. Meg was concerned.
Anne’s confidence has taken such a knock with the previous disastrous draft, and it raises the stakes on whether she can write fantasy, but she must, and she’ll be sweating to have it published as soon as possible … Oh, mercy, maybe I’m just coming down with a cold.29
Anne continued to chalk up successes, while she waited for the reaction to ‘Tathyr’. Weighed in the Balance, her Monk novel for 1996, was a starred review in the Publishers Weekly: ‘Careful investigation and astute teamwork produce some astonishing revelations that presage the end of Victorian propriety and an era’s pretense of innocence.’ The New York Times Book Review was full of praise: ‘Scenes [are] described in lush, sensuous strokes … Monk, the dark and brooding hero … infuses this luxuriantly detailed series with its romantic soul.’30
Weighed in the Balance opens with Sir Oliver Rathbone sitting in his chambers in Vere Street, surveying with satisfaction the achievements of a life perspicaciously spent. ‘He was at the pinnacle of his career, and possibly the most highly respected Barrister in England.’ His knighthood is recent recognition of his services to criminal justice. But pinnacles can be dangerous. A miscalculation, a disastrous case, the unsteadying draught from opening one’s door to a disturbed client, can bring everything crashing down. Rathbone’s bête noir is Countess Zorah Rostova, who comes to his chambers to enlist his services in a civil case of slander. She is convinced that Friedrich, Crown Prince of the tiny German principality of Felzburg, has been murdered by his wife, Princess Gisela.
Theirs has been o
ne of the great love stories of their time. Twenty years ago, Friedrich was smitten by the gorgeous Gisela, and eloped to live with her in exile, establishing his court in Venice. Now, aged 42, Friedrich suffers a terrible hunting accident that leaves him with broken ribs, a broken collarbone and a leg smashed in three places. Gisela nurses him, but in her care he dies. Countess Zorah, convinced Gisela has poisoned her husband, tells everyone Friedrich has been murdered by his wife, even though she has not a scrap of evidence. Hester cannot believe it when she is told. ‘What on earth had possessed Rathbone to take up Zorah’s case? His knighthood had gone to his wits. When the Queen touched him on the shoulder with the sword she must have pricked his brain.’ It is not only Zorah’s reputation at risk here, but Rathbone’s too.
In Weighed in the Balance, Oliver Rathbone’s father, Henry, makes an appearance in his mentoring role when his son comes to him in search of stillness and contemplation. Henry is a mathematician and inventor whose telescope, even in retirement, is trained on the stars. ‘He was a tall man, taller than his son, square-shouldered and thin. He had a gentle, aquiline face and farsighted blue eyes. He was obliged to remove his spectacles to study anything closely.’ This is Anne’s father, Henry Hulme, fictionalized. He admires Oliver’s friend Hester, but will not interfere in his son’s life to push the relationship. Both Oliver Rathbone and Monk have a ‘deep regard for Hester’, but it is Monk — the more irked of the two by her independent personality — who begins to see her true worth.
Even at the very darkest moment, when she must have faced the possibility of his guilt, it had never entered her mind to abandon him. Her loyalty went beyond trust in innocence or in victory, it was the willingness to be there in defeat, even in one which was deserved.
The loyalty Hester extends to Monk is unconditional, an earthly parallel of the absolution offered to sinners by Christ. She is a virtuous presence in his life and her belief in him is redeeming, but she is also a realist made of flesh and blood. Oliver, she decides, ‘knew the law, few better, and he had certainly seen crimes of passion and even depravity. But had he really tasted any breadth of ordinary human life, with its frailty, complexity and seeming contradictions?’
After her slanderous remarks, Countess Zorah becomes implicated in the murder of Prince Friedrich herself — and Oliver Rathbone must defend her in what seems a hopeless case. He has to listen to jeering people calling for her execution and watch ‘journalists scrambling to escape with their reports’ at the end of each day’s trial, while ‘outside, crowds filled the pavements, jostling and elbowing to see the chief protagonists’. Courtroom and street scenes are brought vividly to life by Anne’s own memories, which came more freshly to her mind as a consequence of her interviews with Robert McCrum.
McCrum’s long-awaited biographical profile, ‘Memories of murder’, was published in the Guardian on 29 June 1996, but never in the New Yorker. When Don Maass asked Meg how the article was progressing, she responded: ‘The feeling I get from Robert McCrum [is that] he’s letting the facts and quotations speak for themselves, without adding speculation of his own … he’s making an attempt to be evenhanded — praise for Anne but also some critical comments, in the interests of sketching out her character.’31
In preparation for McCrum’s trip to Scotland, Meg outlined their expectations: ‘we recognise that you will need to touch on the murder case, but understand that your intention is to give a profile of Anne as a person and as a writer. Forgive me if I sound over-protective, but some interviews have been savage.’32
McCrum’s well-researched piece presented a fuller and larger picture of its subject than had been seen before, and it was both critical of and reflective about the woman he met and the myths surrounding her. He interviewed Anne at her home in Portmahomack, where he found the rooms, some still being renovated, ‘gloomy, half-furnished, and unlived in’. He recognized in Anne a person who had spent 40 years trying to ‘become someone else’, and identified this as a time of integration when she was obliged to bring two parts of a life together. ‘Now she has been forced to acknowledge that inside or alongside Anne Perry, the successful crime writer, stands the spectral figure of Juliet Hulme.’
But he found the joining incomplete and perhaps impossible. ‘I detect in her manner an unassuaged, inner despair. She is both like a child and like an adult, but the two parts seem not to connect’, and ‘there [is] something damaged about her; she has the wariness that comes from the fear of expressing trust’. His article gave a summarized but thoughtful account of the murder and trial, and set out what he described as ‘several, well-rehearsed justifications’: the side-effects of prolonged use of isoniazid and streptomycin for tuberculosis; her ‘agony’ for her father over the marriage break-up; the sense of being ‘backed into a corner’ by Pauline, who was suffering from an eating disorder and threatening suicide; and her gratitude to Pauline for standing by her when she was in the Christchurch sanatorium balanced against her sense of ‘profound debt of obligation’ to Pauline for visiting her there.
McCrum weighed up the value of these explanations and discounted Anne’s playing down of the relationship, finding instead ‘an adolescent friendship inching towards hysteria’. He made adept biographical links between her life and her books, describing Anne as ‘dogmatic’ in conversation and asserting that she ‘displays an exaggerated belief in the power of positive thinking’. McCrum’s observations were clever and astute.
‘Strangely, neither [Lin] Ferguson nor any rival reporter has made the same effort to unmask, or even to track down, Pauline Parker,’ McCrum observed. Towards the end of his stay in Portmahomack, he asked Anne: ‘What is your worst fear?’ ‘My worst fear about all this,’ she replied, ‘is that you will find Pauline.’
‘She continues to write, obsessively, perhaps in the hope that she can somehow bury her terrible past in a mountain of fiction’.33 There is undoubtedly a vein of truth in McCrum’s assertion, but the money and the success Anne’s writing brought her were probably even more compelling. Ashworth Hall, her Pitt for 1997, was very well reviewed. The Guardian described it as an ‘elegant period novel with a contemporary resonance … [that] remains utterly convincing’, while the New York Times perceptively observed: ‘this subtle play on sex roles, a constant in this rewarding series, may well be the secret of its profound appeal’.34 Ashworth Hall — the splendid home of Emily ‘sometime Viscountess Ashworth, now Mrs. Jack Radley’ — is the setting for personal and political intrigue when powerful groups of Irish Protestants and Catholics are brought to a conference there to tackle the Irish Problem.
Pitt’s connection to Emily gives him the perfect cover to be on hand to safeguard proceedings. His boss, Assistant Commissioner Cornwallis, insists that, to keep up the ruse, Pitt must take Charlotte to what will be, for the women, a house party. ‘Pitt felt a lightning bolt of alarm at the thought of what danger, or sheer chaos, Charlotte could get herself into. The trouble she might cause with Emily to assist her brought a word of protest to his lips.’ While Pitt reels at the thought of his interfering wife accompanying him on a delicate mission, Charlotte concentrates on working out where she can borrow some of the half-dozen dresses a lady might wear in a day, ‘not to mention jewelry, shoes, boots, an evening reticule, a shawl, [and] a hat for walking’.
Religious debate, Irish history and upper-class social mores provided Anne with rich material, alongside the tragedy that sits at the heart of this story. For it is not long before the gallant political hero Ainsley Greville, who is trying to broker an agreement between the opposing Catholic and Protestant camps, is found floating, dead, in the tub. It is an ignominious end, Pitt thinks. ‘This shell lying half below the bathwater was so familiarly him, and yet not him at all. In a sense it was already no one. The will and intellect were somewhere else.’
But it is Charlotte who operates most effectively in this, her familiar milieu, peeling back the layers of power and ritual to reveal a complex truth. In spite of his laudable façade,
it seems that Ainsley Greville was a brutal, corrupt man with more than one enemy. Among them is his future daughter-in-law, Justine Baring, who unsuccessfully attempts to kill him to prevent his exposure of her terrible secret to his son and her fiancé, Piers Greville.
‘Can you see the scene … Ainsley laughing at [Piers], telling him his precious betrothed was his father’s whore?’ says Justine to Charlotte. In the end, Justine must confess to Piers her murderous intentions and youthful prostitution with his father, and beg his forgiveness. He asks for time to think about it, and Charlotte sleeps with Justine to comfort her. ‘We bring a lot of our griefs upon ourselves … It doesn’t make it hurt any less. Lie down and get warm. Perhaps then you’ll sleep a while.’
When Piers offers Justine forgiveness and is prepared to make a new life with her in the United States, she replies:
I shall have to prove to you that I am what I am trying to be. There is no point in saying I am sorry over and over again. I will show it by being there, every hour, every day, every week, until you know it.
Not only does Ashworth Hall offer a powerful commentary on forgiveness and redemption through love and endeavour — which almost completely overwhelms the political machinations — but it also has a feminist subtext. Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones, writing about hard-boiled women detectives, argue that the female detective ‘actually “normalizes” a certain brand of feminism for readers who would not ordinarily read in this way’.35 Although Charlotte and Emily are a century and half a world away from being hard-boiled, they do normalize women as powerful figures who define and influence public as well as private outcomes. In spite of his reservations, ‘Pitt watched Charlotte with a sudden admiration which was oddly painful. She was so competent, so strong. She did not seem to need support from anyone else. If she was frightened, she hid it.’
The Search for Anne Perry Page 18
