Hindsight

by Peter Dickinson

  No, I’m sorry, that won’t do. The thing is, I’m out of my depth, emotionally as well as intellectually. I don’t know how to cope, and feel the only hope is to consult somebody who is used to evaluating historical events. Since you already know most of the facts (if facts they are), you’re the obvious person. So, though in one sense I’m perfectly happy for you to read this as a sort of botched sketch of a conclusion to my novel, in another sense I’d be grateful if you could think about it seriously.

  Look, suppose you’d been writing a life of Molly Benison, and suppose the events in my novel and what I’m now going to add to them had come to you in the form of the reminiscences of some witness of doubtful veracity, how would you evaluate them?

  I ought to be able to do the job myself, but I can’t. I’m too confused, too involved, too shaken, I suppose. It seems absurd to suggest that shock can be delayed forty years, but that’s how I feel. It’s why I can’t do the job myself. I wouldn’t bother you if I could think of anybody else.

  The intellectual difficulty is obvious. Practically all the evidence I have comes from the chapters of my novel. It didn’t exist as a conscious memory until I wrote it down. What’s more, a number of vital points are of even shakier stature—I actually put them in as clues to my fictional plot. There are quite straight-forward literary reasons for me to have invented them. (There are also, let me admit it, other and less straightforward reasons for my having invented the whole rigmarole, a set of psychological loadings which nudged my imagination in that direction. I won’t go into these now. They can also be deduced from the novel. I confess they are there, probably.)

  All I can answer is this: I have long believed that one registers all one’s experience, but only notices about five per cent of it. The rest is there, stored in usually inaccessible memory banks. But fragments emerge unpredictably to prove that the banks exist. Every smell I have known, every face I have seen, every dream I have dreamed is in them. Writing my novel made me feel—as I’ve several times tried to explain to you—as though I had chanced on the code which gave me access to that bit of the banks.

  But it’s not just sensations which are in them. There are ideas too, glimpses of knowledge, connections made forty years ago between fact and fact. I was quite a clever child, you know. Not brilliant, but quick. In a sense, that was my peak period. I don’t think, for all its acquired experience, my brain has ever functioned as efficiently as it did then. It seems to me quite possible that I not merely perceived things, but began to make connections between them. I began to realise that Molly had been involved in something unspeakable, but never let the knowledge surface because I wanted to be able to go on adoring her. But the knowledge remained, half-formed, uncompleted business waiting its time. Then, when the chance came, when I was not only thinking about Paddery, but looking for individual details to knot into a network around a crime, it presented me with these long-hoarded, long-frustrated frets.

  Do you follow me? Do you believe me? Do I believe me? Emotionally yes, intellectually no. Intellectually I have to accept that Christopher Wither was nearly certainly killed by a rogue stag (which was what the inquest decided), and that my attempt to think otherwise is self-delusion, an effort to glorify one of my fancy worlds with the status of fact, a long dissatisfaction with the worthwhileness of what I write finally released into action by my correspondence with you.

  But at the emotional level I cannot get away from the conviction that there is something there, something that caused the emotion in the first place, caused my extreme involvement with this particular book, caused me to let it get so badly out of hand, caused me to find it impossible to write apparently promising sections and then to feel a great sense of release as I coped with other bits which weren’t really part of my plan at all—my original plan, that is—but which then turned out to have more and more relevance as the plot of my novel changed to bring it steadily closer to what I now think—now feel, I mean—was the truth.

  One point which you may not appreciate—I don’t imagine you find time to read much of my sort of book. The ‘solution’ I am going to give you would, if it occurred in a modern detective novel, seem ludicrously old-fashioned. I’m not much of a hand at plots, but I think my fingers would recoil from the keys rather than type out in a MS some of what you’re going to read. It is genuinely not something I would choose to invent as an author anxious for his reputation. Why, then, each time I picked up some fresh detail and saw how it slotted into place, did something in me give it a very powerful ‘Yes’? But it did. And said ‘No’ to aesthetically much more satisfying notions. These yeses and noes are things I am now compelled to account for just as much as if they were so many bloody thumb-prints. When I adduce details of my novel as evidence for my theory, will you accept that however fictional it may seem each of these details had such a ‘Yes’ behind it? That’s the most I can ask.

  My very first point is doubly internal—something inside me when I wrote my last instalment nine days ago, and something else inside me forty years back. If you look at that episode you will see that when Paul reaches the Temple he is overcome by a wave of terror whose central element is that the business of Daisy’s ‘going mad’ had been arranged to get him there. I do remember thinking this. Truly. And I now think that both the idea and the terror represent one of those childhood perceptions of a truth, half understood and then promptly buried, about which I wrote just now. It is perfectly clear to me, and I’m sure was to you when you read it, that the passage in my book about Daisy ‘going mad’ in fact describes her reaching her fighting-drunk stage; and it’s almost as clear that Molly was waiting for this to happen. But neither of these now obvious points were present in my mind when I wrote those pages. They didn’t occur to me till I was driving home from seeing Smith and was struck by the way what he had told me about Daisy’s seduction of Steen in the studio echoed the incident in the conservatory. Reflected, rather than echoed. Mirror-images. In the studio, Daisy was sober when she was assumed drunk; in the conservatory ‘mad’ (i.e. drunk) when she was assumed sane (sober); in both places with Molly’s connivance, with deception over the drinks, and with a hideous deed as the end-product.

  Have you any doubt that in the conservatory episode Daisy was drunk? Didn’t you tell me that Apollinaire or someone had seen her at a party drunk and throwing things ‘as usual’. Now Smith has confirmed this trait. But she reached this stage that afternoon when all she’d had to drink for some while was, apparently, tea. Molly was pouring the cups out at the drinks table, by the teapot. Molly had organised things so that the tea-drinking went on longer than usual. The only explanation I can see for Daisy’s behaviour is that Molly got her drunk, deliberately, by lacing her tea with gin.

  Why? For fun, do you think? To watch her beat up the sailors? But she needed the sailors to keep her in gin. The only outcome I know of is that Annette was prevented from keeping her appointment with Wither, or rather, delayed in doing so for about an hour.

  I’d better deal with Annette. Here, at least, are some facts from outside the novel. She married Smith. His first serious remark to me expressed strong anxiety that she should not be ‘pestered’, and was accompanied by the assertion that she had never seen Steen. Who, in that case, would want to pester her? Anyway, they have been reasonably well off—the rent of those flats must always have been highish—but are now short of money. There is a strong suggestion that they have been living on copyrights which expired a little while ago. Smith actually mentioned 1977 as the date of expiry of the Steen copyrights. Molly was getting an income from that source before the war but not after it, and even while she was getting it she was hoarding like a manic squirrel. Smith used an odd phrase to me in describing what Steen did after the studio episode: ‘All he could do was take his revenge in his own way, though few would have recognised it as such. Very effective it turned out to be.’ After his break with Steen Smith left at once for the Far East, didn’t he, and only
re-surfaced—as far as we know—in 1940. Will you accept the implication that the last few words probably refer to what he discovered when he arrived at Paddery, to wit that Molly and Daisy were still living together, Daisy in a permanent mild stupor?

  There is one reference inside the novel to a likeness between Annette and Daisy, not in appearance but in the use of a gesture. When I put this in it carried no plot weight—it was just a remembered event. But I’m now pretty well certain that Annette was Daisy’s daughter, probably by Steen, or if not then represented to him as being so. I think Steen devised his trust with its strange set-up with the deliberate aim of binding Molly and Daisy together in a state of mutual parasitism. The money theoretically went to Daisy, for the child, and would then go to Annette herself when she was twenty-one. Steen can’t, of course, have foreseen precisely how the relationship would evolve, but you told me he believed strongly in the corruptingness of money; he set up a trust in which the effect would have maximum chance to operate. (I would guess that Molly took Daisy at her most awful along to meet the trustees; in my experience such men would be only too grateful to have the mess of dealing with such a person removed from them—Molly would have been able to charm them blind, anyway.) Presumably there would have been some kind of accounting when Annette was twenty-one, but Molly would have been able to hang on to most of what she’d salted away, claiming it as rent and living expenses for the three of them over the years.

  Do you know, for all the physical horror of the events in the studio and the Temple, this now seems to me the most appalling—I mean Molly’s treatment of Daisy. It’s like a female version­ of Ugolino and the Archbishop in the ninth circle—not just that Molly was prepared to enslave Daisy by keeping her in a gin-haze (‘Not too little, not too much, but just right’—remember­ that?) but herself enduring for the sake of a little money the moral squalor of living with such a person in such circumstances. I wonder what they did when they were alone? Do you happen to know what became of Daisy after 1941? She was still around when I left Paddery for the last time in July that year. I used to write to Molly from Eton, but she hardly ever answered and I gave up. Then she was mostly in Paris, wasn’t she, after the war, still in and out of the gossip columns, I remember. Did Daisy stay with her, or did Molly put her into a home? Or let her drink herself to death? Or did she actually need Daisy, for her own mysterious reasons? Which would be worse? Ugh. Anyway, that’s why she had to keep conjuring gin out of the navy.

  I’m supposed to be writing about Annette. She doesn’t, I’m aware, make a strong impression in the novel, presumably because she didn’t on me. I was intending to work her up in the second draft, give her a bit more solidity. But all I really have is an idea of a clumsy, plain girl, reserved and nervy. There is one short passage in which I suggest a yearning to get away, a point which ‘came’ as I was writing, in a manner which makes me think it was a genuine impression; a sense of difficulty in her dealings with Molly, a sort of distrust, perhaps; I am able to form no picture at all of how she coped with Daisy. In a fictional world I would need to get this into the open somehow, but I can’t. Possibly my failure indicates another area of childhood half-awareness, still buried—something to do with my own closeness to my mother until her re-marriage? So it’s not much use saying that sort of girl wouldn’t throw herself into the arms of an elderly and unlovely suitor, so soon after the nasty death of a lover. I don’t know. But suppose she really did long to get away; suppose Wither was at bottom just a chance to do so; suppose also that such a girl, nurtured by sinister matriarchs, should be more than susceptible to the attractions of a father-figure … It seems to have worked, that’s all I can say.

  As for Smith himself, the problem with him is quite different from that with Annette. He made a vivid—violent, almost—impression on me when I was a child, and reconfirmed it yesterday. Externally I know him well—not just his appearance, but the sense of his presence. Still, I have no confidence in guessing what he might, in a given circumstance, actually do. Take the remark which put you on to him—the one about being wanted by the police of five countries—and suppose it’s true. This implies that he had no scruples about committing crimes, and also that he had by no means always got away with it. It is a gambler’s remark. Not a gambler at calculated odds, either, but one who after long periods of stillness and apparent patience, suddenly acts, and with unpredictable violence. There is still a feral smell (I don’t mean that literally) about him. I felt yesterday that I had gone not into a room, but a lair, where a big predator brooded among old bones. (Is this more hindsight? Am I, having decided he might be such a creature, now creating imaginary intuitions about what I felt at the interview? You’ll have to make up your mind. I can’t.)

  Suppose such a man, driven home by the war, middle-aged, after a life of seedy and unsuccessful adventuring, decides the time has come to settle down. Suppose he goes to Paddery to see whether anything can be made of his knowledge of Molly, and there finds that she has, apparently, a source of income. Suppose he then deduces its nature, as I have. Might he not then decide that he could solve his financial problems by marrying this convenient heiress? He would be in no hurry. He knew Molly wouldn’t let the affair with Wither come to anything, and he could then catch Annette on the rebound. And Molly wouldn’t be able to veto that marriage because of what Smith knew. Meanwhile he would work to become in Annette’s eyes a safe friend, a source of counsel and comfort.

  The plan went wrong. I now think I actually saw two stages of this happening, on the day when I cut the football match. You will find a brief passage of talk in which I took Captain Smith to be referring to my father’s war experiences; in fact he could just as well have been talking about Annette’s father—this would explain his spurt of rage at my mention of Molly’s acquaintance with my father, when the image he had in his mind was that of Steen. He then took Annette aside while I was ringing the bell and told her that he had known her father. She was thrilled, because I believe nobody had ever told her anything about her parents. And later that day he must have told her more of the story, including the fact that Daisy was her mother. Now she was appalled. I saw them at this stage on the path towards the gardens, if you remember. Annette’s vague yearning to escape from Daisy and Molly suddenly became an urgent need. But Smith had precipitated the crisis far too soon for his own purposes, because at that point Annette had somebody else to turn to, somebody with whom she at least imagined herself to be in love. He even had a motor-car, and extra petrol. And there was also a traditional and well-used technique for minors wishing to escape from parents or guardians with the man they loved. Remember? They went to Gretna Green and got married under Scots law. I’ve just got hold of a press report on the inquest on Wither, and apparently this was what they were planning to do on the night Wither was killed.

  You may remember that according to school rumour Wither had had a row with The Man that afternoon and left for good, in his car. He was a very decent chap, you know. He would have recognised the moral compulsion to rescue Annette as over-riding, but at the same time would not have wanted to let The Man down by simply disappearing with Annette. I think he would have gone and asked for time off. The Man, not unnaturally, refused, but to judge by your account of his relations with his junior staff he could well have done so in a manner sufficiently intolerable to cause Wither to blow up and resign. (By the way, when I wrote this passage about the row I thought it was going to be part of a red herring to do with Wither having reported one of the senior staff for buggery, but I didn’t invent it for that purpose.) I don’t think that at that stage they had planned to run off that very night, but having precipitated matters Wither decided to carry them through. He arranged to come back and meet Annette at the Temple when she was supposed to be walking me home across the park. It was a more sensible place to meet than it may seem. I may not have made the geography clear, but it was half-way between the path from the conservatory to the school and the drive where h
e would naturally park his car.

  I don’t know how Smith knew of the sudden plan, but I believe Annette may simply have told him. If I am right about their relationship at that time, she would.

  What does Smith do? Try to dissuade her? Tell Molly? Give up? I don’t think any of these. I believe he had already made up his mind that he was going to marry Annette. She was his bride. It was not just a matter of her becoming his meal ticket for the rest of his life, though it’s clear to me from my interview with him that this was what in fact happened: for forty years, thanks to her income, he has been able to live in the manner in which he chose. That is quite a powerful motive, but I believe there was a stronger and stranger one. Long ago, barely an hour after Annette had been conceived, he had laughed at her father, and in doing so betrayed the one man of all the human race whom he had ever positively admired. Now he was going to make amends through the daughter, by taking care of her, and seeing that she had a life as satisfactory to herself as he could achieve. (He seems to have brought this off, too. ‘Marvellous’ she called it.) And now, suddenly, she looked like preventing any of that happening by marrying a particularly naïve and ineffectual member of a despicable profession’.

  Is this—are these—sufficient motive for murder? For you and me, probably not, but for Captain Smith? We are tame animals—at least I know I am. But with a man like that you can never be sure, any more than a zoo-keeper can of how far he can trust the caged bear he looks after. I don’t mean Smith was (is?) a psychopath, just that his compunctions are not ours. I believe things like this had happened before to him, but have no evidence, only the sense of danger I felt as a child. You don’t get that from a man who has never done anything to evoke the feeling.