by Rose Tremain
‘The bolt?’
‘Yes. I would have remembered the bolt.’
Detective Inspector Pitt looks at WPC Willis, who has turned on a little green-shaded lamp in the darkening bedroom. Pitt has, in twenty-two years with the police, never felt comfortable with remorse. His look is a signal for Willis to take up the questioning.
‘How long has Colonel Browne been away, Mr Garrod?’
‘Oh. A fortnight. Thereabouts. They’ve gone for three weeks – to Switzerland.’
‘And is it possible that Miss Browne was told about their holiday?’
‘I don’t think so. She wasn’t told what they did.’
‘Perhaps they go away every year at this time, do they?’
‘Now abouts. Lady Amelia loves the Alps. In summer.’
*
And Garrod is right. Amelia Browne does love to gaze, as she gazes now, at the first stars peeping through their light years at her scented body on the hotel balcony and sense the now unseen presence of the mountains shouldering off the sky. She has dined well. At dinner, Duffy made a very un-Duffyish little speech about companionship and love, and his reassuring large presence at her side, coupled with these resonant words, have helped to quell the flutter of anxiety she had earlier struggled with. She has made no attempt, although it occurred to her to do so, to talk to Duffy about Charlotte. In spite of her protected life, Amelia Browne is like a patient birdwatcher of suffering. She detects it where others detect nothing. And in the spreading woods and rambly thickets of her husband’s contented life she has often seen it, the camouflaged frail body of the bird, suffering. It has built nests in the once radiant part of him, in foliage the colour of her daughter’s hair. But he isn’t a wordy man. Duffy and words seem to be locked in a lifelong struggle – an iguana fighting with the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. So he has never been able to say that Charlotte has made him suffer, nor how, nor why. ‘I just don’t think about her, Amelia,’ he once snapped into his glass of port. Then drained the glass like a bitter draught. And Amelia saw it: some cuckoobird quite alien to him, yet lodged there, and in certain seasons repetitively calling.
Now he lies in the hotel bed, reading a new book about the Falklands War and waiting for Amelia to come in off the balcony. Slightly over-fed, he is content and sleepy. He admires Amelia for admiring the stars. He is indifferent to stars. He is beginning, lazily, to wonder what gulfs of the spirit still separate him from Amelia when the telephone at his elbow jolts him into concerned wakefulness. He picks up the receiver. Amelia’s face appears at the window and stares at him. From far away under the mountains, a dry English voice speaks in a tunnel of silence:
‘Colonel Browne?’
‘Yes.’
Amelia slips into the room. She presses a thin hand to her top lip.
‘Detective Inspector Pitt, CID, here, Sir. I’m calling from Sowby.’
*
It is morning. Doyle has slept well. He congratulates himself on his refusal to dream about Margaret. He feels well in his new blood.
He hears nurses’ voices whispering together over their dispensary trolley. He hears the words police . . . revolutionary . . . press . . . story . . . His scriptwriter’s heart pauses in its pumping to let these words stream through him like plasma. He feigns sleep. The nurses’ hands continue to measure out pills in little beakers. But over this measuring comes the almost inaudible conversation, patchy, like the shading of a face before the features are pencilled in:
‘Someone . . . hospital . . . told the newspapers . . .’
‘Sister Osborne . . . night duty . . .’
‘The same policeman?’
‘Yes.’
‘. . . in Alexandra Ward . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Charlotte Browne.’
Now they are at Doyle’s bed.
‘Mr Doyle . . .’
He opens his eyes and smiles at the nurses.
‘Sleep well, Mr Doyle?’
‘Yes. I didn’t dream, thank heavens.’
A thermometer is stuck into his mouth. One of the nurses examines the chart at the end of his bed, looks at Doyle, looks back at the chart. Doyle, silenced by the thermometer, wants to compliment them on the quality of the new blood they have given him. He has been replenished with curiosity.
The thermometer is taken out, held, shaken, replaced in a glass of disinfectant. Doyle awaits pills in a red beaker, but he’s given none and the nurses pass away from him, still whispering.
When they leave the ward, Doyle gets out of bed and stands up. In the bed next to his, a bald man who has dreams of tap-dancing is inserting his morning teeth. Doyle walks quietly over the lino to the swing doors of his ward, then out into the wide hygenic corridor where an Indian woman is polishing the floor.
‘Alexandra Ward?’ he asks.
The Indian woman, with a jewel-pierced nose, is a stooped and slow person. She examines Doyle’s bandaged arm, his hospital nightshirt, his hirsute legs beneath.
‘Left,’ she says blankly.
Doyle nods, turns left into an identical corridor. No one sees him yet. He comes to a waiting area, where plastic chairs of the kind which creaked under the pelvis of Sergeant McCluskie are lined up in two rows. To his left, now, he sees a green and white sign saying Alexandra Ward, Princess Anne Ward, Edith Cavell Ward. He has come to the women’s territory.
He hears footsteps approaching the reception area. Without hesitation, he opens the swing doors to Alexandra Ward and finds himself in a shadowy room, where the patients are still sleeping.
But at the far end of the room, he recognises her – the only one awake and staring at the window. He knows the name, the voice, the profile. He has even read her book, with its preposterous title, The Salvation of Man. The minute he sees her, he feels excitement stir, shamefaced, under the ludicrous night garment. He moves gravely towards her. She is, he summarises, one of the stars of dissent.
Still no one discovers him. The pink woman sleeps with her cherub mouth wide and her knitting folded on her feet. All the other Alexandrine women sleep, rasping through the discomforts of the short night. Only Charlotte sees him now, ridiculous in his gown, unshaven, pale and wild. She isn’t afraid. Charlotte is seldom afraid. She wants to laugh. He reminds her of a younger Jack Lemmon. Any minute, she knows, he will be carried off by the day-shift nurses beginning duty.
But the day-shift nurses allotted to Alexandra Ward are busy elsewhere. Burn victims of a tenement fire are being wheeled, screaming, into the hospital. Nurses are running, surgeons are hauled from sleep, lights are going on in anterooms and operating rooms, vents hiss and blow, in the sluice rooms water gushes. And so it is because of a fire, in which two people will have died, because of Sergeant McCluskie’s need to open his bowels after his dreary, caffeinated night, that Franklin Doyle is able to walk out of his ward and into Charlotte’s ward and sit on her bed for four minutes before McCluskie returns, sees him and hauls him away.
‘You’re Charlotte Browne . . .’ he whispers lamely.
She nods, lazily. In this one, unfrightened gesture, she has accepted the stranger on her bed.
‘Franklin Doyle,’ he states hurriedly, ‘scriptwriter, film-maker, bum . . .’
She smiles. In the grey light, she is superb.
‘I dare say that policeman will remove you.’
Doyle ignores this, hurries on: ‘Why are the press interested this time?’
‘Are they?’
‘I heard the press are here.’
‘They may be. They’re always interested.’
‘What have you done, Charlotte?’
‘Something. So I’ll do a stretch this time. Long.’
‘Want to tell it to someone who gets it right?’
‘To a bum?’
‘Sure. Who better?’
‘Then you find Jim Reese for me.’
‘Jim Reese.’
‘He might be in Brighton. Look there first. He’s a drummer, or was. Thirty-seven. Dark. V
ery thin. Wearing a vest probably. I expect there’s a warrant out. Try to find him first.’
‘Okay. Sure . . . I . . . who is he to you?’
‘No one any more. But if you find him, tell him love is probably stronger than springs.’
‘Springs?’
‘Yes.’
‘Spring as in the season?’
‘No. As in a coil of wire.’
‘With what significance?’
‘Just tell him – if you find him. And then,’ she looks away from him at the day beginning at the window and yawns, ‘you can tell everyone else the story, I suppose: I stole, but I stole nothing of true value. The true value of what I stole would have appeared in the currency I was going to convert it to. The owners of these so-called valuables are my parents. Neither of these people, my parents, have ever offered anything of themselves for the good of anyone but themselves. Even now, their selfishness is intact, so I’ve taken nothing from them. I carried a gun – my father’s, used to kill game for sport – but I wounded no one. Only myself. My sense of obedience which I tried to extinguish long ago had refused to die utterly, until now. I think it’s dead now. Yet its death wounds. Do you see? In a newly ordered world, I would be obedient to the law. I am, always have been, obedient to love. In a peaceful world, I would keep the peace.’
Charlotte pauses, looks away from Doyle, who is trembling.
‘Do you expect to be understood?’ he asks.
She smiles. The smile is gentle and sad. ‘No.’
‘By a few?’
‘Do you understand?’
‘Why did you need the gun? If it was your parents’ house . . .?’
‘There’s a servant there. He wasn’t harmed. He has the key to the safe.’
‘And your headwound?’
‘Nothing. I fell down some basement steps.’
‘Did the servant try to defend the house?’
‘No.’
‘Did you act entirely by yourself?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Jim Reese wasn’t part of it?’
Charlotte turns away again and stares at the cracks of light in the blinds. The day will be hot again. A heatwave is coming. As Charlotte, child, she climbs to the orchard at Sowby. The ancient gardener with his black-creased hands lifts her high into a plum tree. The plum she choses with her chubby hand is half eaten away by wasps.
‘What organisation are you working for now, Charlotte?’
‘Many.’
‘Is Jim Reese part of an organisation?’
‘No.’
‘Jim Reese is not working with you?’
‘No. He needed my help. I thought he did.’
‘With what? With a political set-up?’
‘No. He just used me as a shroud.’
‘A what?’
‘Over his past.’
Disturbed by the voices, the pink woman has woken. She is gawping with round scared eyes at Doyle and Charlotte and pressing her buzzer that will summon a nurse. Doyle feels dismay as acute as grief at the ending of this meeting.
‘Charlotte. Can I come and see you in prison?’
‘You won’t be allowed.’
‘If I find a way?’
She smiles again, touches his hand lightly. Then, with loathing, she whispers: ‘It might be ten years.’
‘No. No one was hurt. It won’t be . . .’
It takes Sergeant McCluskie and Staff Nurse Beckett less than ten seconds to cross the ward and seize Doyle by his arms. In their zeal to remove him, they forget the deep wound in his right arm, and as they lead him back to his ward it begins to bleed afresh.
*
In brilliant early morning sunshine, the hired car takes Colonel and Lady Amelia Browne down and down the mountain to the waiting plane. Neither has slept for long. They wear their sunglasses and sit in silence behind the Swiss chauffeur who drives with ease and politeness, trying not to jolt his passengers from side to side on the sharp corners.
As they leave the mountains and the road straightens monotonously, Amelia brings out a little scented handkerchief, blows her nose and sighs: ‘What an end, Duffy.’
Duffy coughs. His military mind had planned their holiday with the precision of a campaign. To sacrifice seven and a half days of that campaign has annoyed him deeply. And all night his mind has repeated the clipped utterances of Detective Inspector Pitt. Pitt – ‘whoever this damn Pitt is!’ – also annoys him deeply, because he, who prides himself on his knowledge of men, has marked Pitt for a dissembler. ‘You see,’ he explains now to Amelia, ‘the British police are utterly bamboozled in ninety per cent of British robberies, Amelia. They have no more clue as to who did what than your average orang-utang, your average Maasai warrior. Less, in fact. But in this case, Pitt knows.’
‘Knows what, Duffy?’
‘He’s trying to pretend he doesn’t, but he does.’
‘Does what?’
‘He knows who broke into Sowby. He just isn’t saying.’
‘Why not?’
‘That’s precisely it, Amelia.’
‘Well, I can’t see that it matters much who did it. They say they’ve found the paintings and the jewellery, thank goodness.’
‘So why is Pitt insisting that we cut short our holiday?’
‘Well, poor Garrod. They want to stop this kind of thing happening again.’
‘Oh don’t be silly, Amelia.’
‘Well, how do I know, Duffy?’
‘You mean you haven’t been working it out?’
‘Working what out?’
‘Who robbed us.’
‘How could I work it out? That’s the job of Pitt, or whatever he’s called. And I’m not even in England.’
‘I’ve worked it out.’
‘I can’t imagine how.’
‘It all fits: Pitt’s lying, the summons home . . .’
‘What fits?’
‘It was Charlotte.’
Amelia is rigid in the car. Her mouth is a little scar of puckered lines. Duffy looks away from this petrified face. Yet he feels relief. She had to know. He, not the policeman, had to be the one to tell her.
Minutes pass. The car sways on. Lush fields flank the road. Amelia blinks and blinks behind her glasses. No, she promises herself, this can’t be right. Because this would be it – the ending. The ending she has feared for years, the ending like a death, the death of all hope that the child she brought up in an English paradise would come home to thank her and save her. Save her from what?
‘Ohh . . .’ she wails, ‘Ohh, Duffy . . .’
From guilt.
From her terrible neglect.
From the useless buying of bronze statuettes.
From the language of cliché and cruelty.
From flower arrangements and servants.
From indifference.
From her proud blood . . .
‘Ohh . . . Duffy . . . I simply cannot believe that . . .’
Duffy puts a wide hand out to Amelia. He feels lumpen with dread, in need of comfort himself.
‘I could be wrong, old thing,’ he says in a choked voice.
So of course, in her agony, Amelia is cross: ‘Then why on earth did you even suggest it? How could you imagine Charlotte doing a thing like this? She’s not a criminal!’
Duffy sighs, removes the gift of his pink hand.
‘In this society,’ he says slowly, ‘she is.’
*
Death. As she leaves the hospital in the police car, Charlotte has not imagined death. To Jim Reese, she had wanted to offer a birthright. This offered birthright would, she had decided, engender a birth: a birth of self-respect, a birth of energy and purpose. In other words, a new life. Because in the basement rooms Jim Reese was sinking, fading, disappearing. In his fingers, in his knuckles, rhythms of his onetime visibility were occasionally heard. But, parted from the drums, from the absolution of his own music, he was thinning, flaking, becoming opaque. How many people, Charlotte wonders, as the police car passes
the Camden Plaza showing a black and white Italian film, are obscured by their own uselessness?
She hasn’t ‘saved’ Jim Reese. Pride and anger prevented this. She is punished for her arrogance. And he, in the flood of his male violence, has rendered her useless to the women she has worked with, worked for, when to them too she planned to offer more, on this Buckinghamshire night, than an act of daring. They will come to her in prison, she knows. In their tattered layers of clothes, some with backpacked babies, some spikey and pale in their fierce lesbian love affairs, some weathered and worn into grannies, somebody’s kindly nan in a woollen hat, holding a banner while the relations sneer and gasp at her picture on the nine o’clock news . . . They will circle outside the prison gates, sparrows of women, ravens of women, women with their dreams of peace. With the gold and the silver, they would have printed leaflets, bought newspaper space, funded crèches, financed a conference. Now, nothing is left for them from Charlotte, only her presence, soon, in the massive prison and the story of her crime, falling on them, asking them to stand responsible.
Charlotte is quiet as the car stops and starts in the dense morning traffic. She sends away her sad thoughts of women and focuses instead on the stranger at the foot of her bed, the man Doyle with his wounded arm. Laughingly, she imagines him travelling to the south coast in search of Jim Reese, wearing his hospital nightie. He has become precious to her because he, in all the questioning to come, will be her only secret.
But secret deaths are occurring. Unplanned. Unexpected. Handcuffed to WPC Beckett, Charlotte walks up the steps of the police station. At the same moment, her solicitor, Mr Charles Ogden-Nichols, locks the driver’s door of his BMW and prepares to walk into a limelight he has coveted for some years. At the same moment, Garrod dies.
Garrod dies. The struggle of his hands with a tangle of nylon sailcord is not unconnected with his death. While his hands struggled, his veteran’s heart made a salient in death’s lines. A few hours later, the salient became a bridgehead and his life goes teeming, streaming across the bridgehead, past and fast over the no man’s land of imaginary desert and tanks like mice, racing to death as if his own spirit were death’s batman. In the grounds of Sowby Manor, where a young constable called Arthur Williams is walking in Lady Amelia’s rose garden with Admiral, the dog pricks up its ears and lets out a peculiar whine. PC Williams jerks at its lead. Lady Amelia’s roses are funnelled by bees. A nurse comes running to the straight green line which is the technological death of Garrod. His desert is at last deserted.
