A Taste for Death

by P. D. James

  Dalgliesh thought: I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to listen to their pain. That was what the consultant obstetrician had said to him when he had gone to take a last look at his dead wife with her newborn son in the crook of her arm, both of them composed in the secret nothingness of death. A chance in a million. As if there could be comfort, almost pride, in the knowledge that chance had singled out your family to demonstrate the arbitrary statistics of human fallibility. Suddenly the buzzing of the fly was intolerable. He said:

  “Excuse me,” and seized the copy of the Radio Times. He swiped at it violently, but missed. It took another two vehement slaps against the glass before the buzzing finally stopped and the fly dropped out of sight, leaving only a faint smear. He said:

  “And your son?”

  “Well, he couldn’t look after the baby. It wasn’t to be expected. He was only twenty-one. And I think he wanted to get away from the house, from us, even from the baby. In a funny way I think he blamed us. You see, we didn’t really want the marriage. Shirley, his wife, she wasn’t the girl we would have chosen. We told him no good would come of it.”

  And when no good had come of it, it was them he had blamed, as if their disapproval, their resentment, had hovered over his wife like a curse.

  Dalgliesh asked:

  “Where is he now?”

  “We don’t know. We think he went to Canada, but he never writes. He had a good trade, mechanic. He understood cars. And he was always clever with his hands. He said he’d have no trouble finding a job.”

  “So he doesn’t know that his daughter is dead?”

  Albert Nolan said:

  “He hardly knew she was alive. Why should he care now she’s dead?”

  His wife bent her head as if to let his bitterness wash over her. Then she said:

  “I think she always felt guilty, poor Theresa. She thought she’d killed her mum. It was nonsense, of course. And then her dad leaving her, that didn’t help. She grew up like an orphan, and I think she resented it. When bad things happen to a child, she always thinks it’s her fault.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “But she must have been happy here with you. She loved the woodlands, didn’t she?”

  “Maybe. But I think she was lonely. She had to go to school by bus and couldn’t stay for after-school activities. And there weren’t other girls of her age anywhere near. She used to love walking in the woods, but we didn’t encourage that, not on her own. These days you never know. Nobody’s safe any more. We hoped that she’d make friends when she started nursing.”

  “And did she?”

  “She never brought them home. But then there wasn’t much here for young people. Not really.”

  “And you found nothing among her papers, among things she left, to give you any idea who the father of her child could have been?”

  “She didn’t leave anything, not even her nursing books. She was living in a hostel near Oxford Street after she left Campden Hill Square, and she cleared the whole room, threw everything out. All we had from the police was the letter, her watch, the clothes she was wearing. We threw the letter away. No point in keeping it. You can see her room if you like, sir. It’s the one she had since she was a little girl. There’s nothing there, just an empty room. We gave everything here, her clothes and her books, to Oxfam. We thought that was what she would have wanted.”

  It was, he thought, what they had wanted. She led him up the narrow staircase, showed him the room and then left. It was at the back of the cottage, small, narrow, north-facing, with one latticed window. Outside the pine trees and silver birch were so close that the leaves almost trembled against the panes. The room held a green luminosity as if it were under water. A branch of climbing rose with drooping leaves and one tight cankered bud tapped at the window. It was, as she had said, only an empty room. The air was very still and held a faint smell of disinfectant, as if the walls and floor had been scrubbed. It reminded him of a hospital room from which a dead body had been removed, impersonal, functional, a calculated space between four walls, waiting for the next patient to bring his apprehension, his pain, his hope to give it meaning. They had even stripped the bed. A white coverlet was spread over the bare mattress and the single pillow. The shelves of the wall-hung bookcase were empty; surely they were too fragile ever to have held many books. Nothing else remained except for a crucifix over the bed. Having nothing to remember but grief, they had divested the room even of her personality and had closed the door.

  Looking down at the stripped and narrow bed, he recalled the words of the girl’s suicide note. He had read it only twice when studying the report of the inquest, but he had no difficulty in remembering it word for word.

  “Please forgive me. I can’t go on in so much pain. I killed my baby and I know that I shall never see her or you again. I suppose I’m damned but I can’t believe in hell any more. I can’t believe in anything. You were good to me but I was no use to you, ever. I thought when I became a nurse that everything would be different but the world was never friendly. Now I know that I don’t have to live in it. I hope that it won’t be children who find my body. Forgive me.”

  It was not, he thought, a spontaneous letter. He had read so many suicide notes since he was a young DC. Sometimes they were written out of a pain and anger which produced its own unselfconscious poetry of despair. But this, despite its pathos and seeming simplicity, was more contrived, the tone of self-regard subdued but unmistakable. She may, he thought, have been one of those dangerously innocent young women, often more dangerous and less innocent than they seem, who are the catalysts of tragedy. She stood on the periphery of his investigation like a pale wraith in her nurse’s uniform, unknown and now unknowable, and yet, he was convinced, central to the mystery of Berowne’s death.

  He had no hope now of learning anything useful at Weaver’s Cottage, but his instinct to search made him pull open the drawer of the bedside cabinet, and he saw that something of her remained: her missal. He picked it up and leafed casually through it. A small square of paper torn from a notebook fell out. He picked it up and found himself looking at three columns of figures and letters:

  R D3 S

  B D2 S

  P Dl S

  S-N S2 D

  Downstairs the Nolans were still sitting at the table. He showed them the paper. Mrs. Nolan thought that the figures and letters were in Theresa’s handwriting, but said she couldn’t be sure. Neither of them had any explanation to offer. Neither showed any interest. But they made no difficulty when he said that he would like to take the paper away.

  Mrs. Nolan went with him to the front door and, somewhat to his surprise, walked with him down the path to the gate. When they reached it, she looked across at the dark shadows of the wood and said with barely suppressed passion:

  “This cottage is tied to Albert’s job. We ought to have been out three years ago when he got really bad, but they’ve been very kind to us. But we’ll be leaving as soon as the local authority finds us a flat, and I won’t be sorry. I hate these woods, hate them, hate them. Nothing but the wind forever whistling, sodden earth, darkness pressing in on you, small animals screaming in the night.”

  And then as she closed the gate behind him she looked up into his face.

  “Why didn’t she tell me about the baby? I’d have understood. I’d have looked after her. I could have made Dad understand. That’s what hurts. Why didn’t she tell me?”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “I expect she wanted to save you pain. That’s what we all try to do, save those we love from pain.”

  “Dad’s so bitter. He thinks she’s damned. But I’ve forgiven her. God can’t be less merciful than I am. I can’t believe that.”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t think we need believe that.”

  She stood at the gate watching him. But when he had got into the car and fastened his seat belt he looked back at her and found that, almost mysteriously, she had gone. The cottage had returned to its secret re
ticence. He thought: There’s too much pain in this job. To think I used to congratulate myself, to think it useful, God help me, that people found it easy to confide in me. And what has today’s brush with reality brought me? A scrap of paper torn from a notebook with a few jottings, letters and digits which she may not even have written. He felt himself contaminated by the Nolans’ bitterness and pain. He thought: And if I tell myself that enough is enough, twenty years of careful non-involvement, if I resign, what then? Whatever Berowne found in that dingy vestry, it isn’t open to me even to look for it. As the Jaguar bumped gently back onto the road he felt a spurt of irrational envy and anger against Berowne, who had found so easy a way out.

  nine

  It was six fifteen on Sunday evening and Carole Washburn stood gripping the rail of the balcony and looking down over the panorama of North London. She had never needed to draw the curtains when Paul had been with her, even late at night. They could gaze out together over the city and know themselves unwatched, inviolate. Then it had been good to step outside, feeling the warmth of his arm through his sleeve, and stand there together, secure, private, gazing down at the busy preoccupations of a world patterned in light. Then she had been a privileged spectator; but now she felt like an outcast, yearning for this distant, unattainable paradise from which she was forever excluded. Each night since his death she had stood watching as the lights had come on, block by block, house by house, squares of light, oblongs of light, light glimmering through curtains of rooms where people were living their shared, or secret, lives.

  And now what seemed the longest Sunday she had ever endured was drawing to its close. In the afternoon, desperate to get out of the cage of the flat, she had driven to the nearest open supermarket. There was nothing she needed, but she had taken a trolley and pushed it aimlessly between the shelves, automatically reaching out for tins, packages, rolls of toilet paper, piling the trolley high, oblivious of the glances of her fellow shoppers. But then the tears had started to flow again, splashing over her hands, dropping in an unstoppable stream, splodging the packets of cereal, wrinkling the toilet rolls. She had abandoned her trolley laden with unwanted, unsuitable goods and had walked out to the car park and driven home again, slowly and carefully, like a novice driver, seeing the world blurred and disorientated, the people jerking like puppets, as if reality were dissolving in perpetual rain.

  By evening she had been seized by a desperate need for human companionship. It wasn’t the need to begin some sort of life for herself, to plan some sort of future, to cast out her unpractised net into the void she had made around her secret life and begin to draw other people close. Perhaps that would come in time, impossible as it now seemed. It had been a simple uncontrollable longing to be with another human being, to hear a human voice making ordinary, unremarkable human sounds. She had telephoned Emma, who had come into the Civil Service with her from Reading, and who was now a Principal in the Department of Health and Social Security. Before she became Paul’s mistress she had spent a fair proportion of her spare time with Emma, quick lunches at a pub or café convenient for both their offices, films, the occasional theatre, even a weekend together in Amsterdam to visit the Rijksmuseum. It had been an undemanding, unconfiding friendship. She had known that Emma would never give up the chance of a date with a man to spend an evening with her; and Emma had been the first victim to her obsessional need for privacy, the reluctance to commit even an hour of time which could be given to Paul. She looked at her watch. It was six forty-two. Unless Emma was spending the weekend out of town she would probably be at home.

  She had to look up the number. The familiar digits sprang from the page at her like the key to an earlier, half-forgotten existence. She hadn’t spoken to a human being since the police had left, and she wondered if her voice sounded as gruff and false to Emma as it did to her own ears.

  “Hello? Emma? You won’t believe it. This is Carole, Carole Washburn.”

  There was the sound of music, joyous, contrapuntal. It could have been Bach or Vivaldi. Emma called:

  “Turn it down, darling,” and then to Carole:

  “Good God! How are you?”

  “Fine. It’s ages since we met. I wondered if you’d like to see a film or something. Tonight perhaps.”

  There was a small silence, and then Emma’s voice, carefully uncommitted, surprise and perhaps a small note of resentment carefully controlled.

  “Sorry, we’ve got people coming in for dinner.”

  Emma had always said dinner rather than supper even when they were proposing to eat a take-away Chinese meal at the kitchen table. It had been one of those minor snobberies which Carole had found irritating. She said:

  “Next weekend perhaps?”

  “Not possible, I’m afraid. Alistair and I are driving down to Wiltshire. Visiting his parents, actually. Another time perhaps. Lovely to hear from you. I must fly, the guests are due at seven thirty. I’ll give you a ring sometime.”

  It was all she could do not to cry out: “Include me, include me! Please, I need to come.” The receiver was replaced, voice, music, communication cut off. Alistair. But of course, she had forgotten that Emma was engaged. A Principal at the Treasury. So he had moved into the flat. She could imagine what they were saying now:

  “Three years without a word, and she suddenly rings and wants to see a film. And on Sunday evening, for God’s sake.”

  And Emma wouldn’t ring back. She had Alistair; a shared life, shared friends. You couldn’t cut people out of your life and expect to find them complaisant, readily available, just because you needed to feel human again.

  There were two more days of her leave to get through before she was due back in the office. She could go home, of course, except that this flat was home. And it was hardly worth the drive to Clacton, to the square, high-roofed bungalow outside the town where her widowed mother had lived since her father’s death twelve years earlier. She hadn’t been home for fourteen months. Friday night had been sacrosanct; she could hope for a couple of hours with Paul on his way to his constituency. Sunday she had always kept free for him. Her mother, used to her neglect, seemed no longer to be particularly worried by it. Her mother’s sister had the bungalow next door, and the two widows, early acrimonies forgotten, had settled into a cosy routine of mutual support, their brick-boxed lives measured out by small treats: shopping, morning coffee at their favourite café, returning their library books, the evening television programmes, supper on a tray. Carole had almost given up wondering about their lives, why they had chosen to live by the sea when they never went near it, what they talked about. She could telephone now and her mother would be grudgingly acquiescent, resenting the chore of making up the spare bed, the interruption to the weekend programme, the problem of stretching the food. She told herself that she had trained her mother over the past three years to expect neglect, had been grateful that her time with Paul hadn’t been threatened by demands from Clacton. It seemed to her ignoble to telephone now, to rush home in search of a comfort for which she couldn’t ask and which her mother, even if she had known the truth, wouldn’t be able to give.

  Six forty-five. If this were a Friday he would have arrived by now, timing his entrance to ensure that there was no one in the hall to see him. There would be the one long ring, the two short peals on the bell which were his signal. And then the bell rang, one long insistent peal. She thought she heard a second and then a third, but that might have been her imagination. For one miraculous second, no more, she thought that he had come, that it had all been an idiotic mistake. She called: “Paul, Paul my darling!” and almost flung herself against the door. And then her mind took hold of reality and she knew the truth. The receiver slid through her moist hands and almost fell and her lips were so dry that she could hear them cracking. She whispered:

  “Who is it?”

  The answering voice was high, a female voice. It said:

  “Could I come up? I’m Barbara Berowne.”

  She pressed the bu
tton almost without thinking and heard the burr of the released lock, the click of the door as it closed. It was too late now to change her mind, but she knew that there had been no choice. In her present desperate loneliness she would have sent no one away. And this encounter had been inevitable. Ever since her affair with Paul had started, she had wanted to see his wife, and now she was going to see her. She opened the door and stood waiting, listening for the whine of the lift, the muted footfalls on the carpet, as she had once waited for his.

  She came down the corridor, light-footed, casually elegant, golden, her scent, subtle and elusive, seeming to precede her and then waste itself on the air. She was wearing a coat of cream broadcloth, its wide arms and shoulders pleated, the sleeves fashioned in some finer and differently textured cloth. Her black leather boots looked as soft as her black gloves and she carried a shoulder bag on a slim strap. She was hatless, the corn-coloured hair with its streaks of paler gold twisted at the back into a long roll. It surprised Carole that she could notice the details, could actually wonder about the material of the coat sleeves, speculate where it had been bought, how much it had cost.

  As she came in, it seemed to Carole that the blue eyes looked round the room with a frank, faintly contemptuous appraisal. She said in a voice which she knew, without caring, sounded forced and ungracious:

  “Please sit down. Would you like something to drink? Coffee, sherry, some wine?”

  She, herself, moved over to Paul’s chair. It seemed to her impossible that his wife should sit where she had been used to seeing him. They faced each other a few yards apart. Barbara Berowne looked down at the carpet as if satisfying herself that it was clean before placing her bag at her feet. She said:

  “No thank you. I can’t stay long. I have to get back. We’ve got some people coming, some of Paul’s colleagues. They want to talk about the memorial service. We shan’t have it until the police discover who killed him, but these things have to be settled weeks in advance if one wants St. Margaret’s. Apparently they don’t think he really qualifies for the Abbey, poor darling. You’ll come, of course; to the memorial service, I mean. There will be so many people there that you won’t be noticed. I mean, you needn’t feel embarrassed about me.”