The Colonel's Daughter (3 page)

Jim Reese gazes at the ribbon of blood threading her golden hair. And breathes.

*

A blue ambulance light turns. Four thousand miles from the ancient, restless mother he is dreaming of, Franklin Doyle is driven to hospital covered with a red blanket. All night, blood from his flayed arm flowed onto the vinyl floor of his kitchen, where he had stumbled in search of cloths with which to bind it, and where, as he began to wrap it round with a faded jubilee tea towel, a deep unconsciousness tipped him head-first into violent and useless dreaming. He lay with his head in the cat litter tray. The cat (a London stray who lent permanence to his long sojourn in the city) came and sniffed at his nostrils, sniffed at his blood, put a probing paw into it, licked the paw, then went to her milk saucer and drank, leaving a fleck of blood in the little saucer of milk. She urinated feebly near to Doyle's hair, then wandered to the sitting room, where she went to sleep on the sofa. Mrs Annipavroni, who made a tiny income cleaning the homes of exiles like herself, found Doyle at eight-thirty and rang for an ambulance. By that time, he was near to death. This would be the first time in Mrs Annipavroni's life that she could claim to have saved a life – unless you included her children, whose lives she saved in her mind many times a day.

As Doyle is received by the hospital, sunlight falls into the gunroom, where the dog, Admiral, has begun a violent barking and tearing of the door, a yowling and whimpering which express its desolate confusion. Its bladder is full. It is yowling for the damp and earth and shiny leaves of the rose beds, yowling for Garrod, jailor and deliverer.

Garrod is lying in the hall. The yellow bar of light over the Duke of Abercorn's portrait is still on, though the sun is flooding in and glimmering on the dead scales of the stuffed marlin and the post has crashed into the wire basket fitted to the inside of the letter box. It is at this moment when, if Colonel Browne were at Sowby Manor, he would be relishing a substantial breakfast and Lady Amelia toying with an insubstantial one. Then they would separate, he to his study to write letters and orders concerning the estate, she to hers, where she would spend considerable time rearranging her snuffbox collection before settling down at her bureau to ‘tidy up a few odds and ends'. But the thoughts of Colonel and Lady Amelia Browne are not with Sowby. They are certainly not with Garrod, lying under the light of the Duke of Abercorn in the thick pyjamas he's had for eleven years. Their thoughts are with the Swiss morning that has broken so exquisitely, with such purity of light, on the thirteenth day of their holiday.

‘Lunch at that nice high-up place with the fat owner?' says the Colonel as he dresses.

‘The Glochenspiel?'

‘That's it. Fancy that, do you?'

Lady Amelia has put on a lilac dress and new lilac shoes. She feels weightless, young.

‘So pretty, the Glochenspiel.'

‘Cold lunch at the Tannenbaum, if you prefer?'

‘No, no. The Glochenspiel would be lovely, Duffy. What a heavenly day!'

So they go out – the large man and the thin, meagre-breasted woman – into the ‘heavenly day', while Admiral pees in zigzags onto the gunroom floor and Garrod's doleful breaths confirm the pattern of his life: through seventy years he has rendered service and found none in return.

*

But Mrs Annipavroni and Jim Reese are doing the ultimate service – saving lives. Charlotte's head is bound so thickly the brilliant hair is hidden to all but Jim who mourns it, knowing it will be shaved when the head is stitched. Like Doyle, Charlotte rides to hospital under a red blanket. Like Doyle's dreams, hers are of her mother. And it is through the same hospital doors that Doyle has been wheeled only moments ago that Charlotte now travels, along the same corridor, nurses pushing, hastening, flat, bright light tingeing her palor with green, Jim Reese, a frayed tweed jacket put on over the vest he has slept in, jogging and pushing with the nurses till green swing doors open and receive Charlotte on the trolley and close on Jim, while a surgeon holds his hands up for the sterile gloves, moistens his mouth before the mask is tied round it. Jim stares at the closed doors. Only then, as Charlotte is snatched from him, does he remember the diamonds, the silver spoons, the gold and onyx boxes that still littered the floor when the ambulance men arrived to take her away.

*

Just before mid-day on this Saturday which is warm in the Swiss Alps, warm in Buckinghamshire and stickily hot in London, the police arrive at Charlotte's flat. The door is unlocked and they walk in: Sergeant McCluskie and Police Constable Richards. A voice growls on McCluskie's intercom. He snatches it and speaks quietly to it, like a man calming a dog: ‘Delta Romeo X-Ray two five McCluskie. Arrived Flat Nine, Five Zero Ballantine Road. Er. Valuables. Liberal quantity of. Pictures and gun in Citroen car. No sign of residents, over.'

By 12.10, Charlotte's hoard has been returned to the suitcase which is wrapped in a polythene sack like a corpse and placed with the gun and the paintings in the boot of McCluskie's Granada. Delivering the treasure into the surprised hands of Camden Police HQ, McCluskie is then ordered to find Jim Reese and bring him in for questioning. McCluskie sends PC Richards to buy him a cheese sandwich from Vincente's Sandwich Shop. Vincente Fallaci is a cousin by marriage of Mrs Annipavroni, who has recently saved the life of Franklin Doyle. But such is the fine mesh of the British judicial system that this extraordinary fact entirely escapes it, and the relatedness of Julietta Annipavroni and Vincente Fallaci swims away from detection like a tiny glimmering sardine.

McCluskie and Richards drive to the hospital. Charlotte Browne is in no danger, they are told. However, the head wound is more than superficial. She is weak. She is sleeping. She cannot talk to them, and no, Mr Reese, who accompanied her in the ambulance, has not returned. Nobody can remember seeing him leave, yet he isn't there. McCluskie says he will wait and parks his heavy, muscular body on a plastic chair which creaks under his buttocks. Richards is ordered back to 50 Ballantine Road, to ‘clobber' Jim Reese if and when he returns there. Meanwhile, police at Camden are sifting the diamonds, the lapis lasuli boxes, the bronze statuettes of naked women with fishes and trying to trace their origin. Meanwhile, Charlotte and Garrod and Doyle lie in pools of light and dream of their loneliness.

It's lonely, lonely utters Charlotte child to her parents on a sand-dune, to be sliced as I have been sliced with Timothy Storey's metal spade, lonely, lonely to feel the blood of my buried leg flow into the sand as Timothy Storey runs away to his Nanny in a deck chair. I call out – to you, to Timothy Storey's Nanny with her crochet, to anyone – but no one comes to the bleeding leg in its tunnel of sand, no one comes because I am no longer here, I have slithered away in my own blood and the same tide that washes away the crochet pattern inadvertently dropped by Timothy Storey's Nanny will wash away the shiny crimson puddle that was once a girl, only child of a Colonel, a girl with hair the colour of the sand which now receives her life.

Far away on the dunes, the wind clutters through the pages of Colonel Browne's
Daily Telegraph
, slaps through Lady Amelia's copy of
The Day of the Tortoise
which she is reading for the first time. Above and below and round and inside the wind, all is silence.

Garrod has turned. He lies face up to the sun. The stone in his back has turned and grown in size and weight and sits on his white chest. Heat floods his head. His head drips with the pain of the boulder flattening his heart inside the light and brittle rib casing. His heart has become a moth, beating its wings in a glass bottle. Far away where the tanks are massing, where the lads cool their skulls on their ice-blue visions of Rommel's eyes, a dog called Admiral is yowling for the battles to come, and the dead.

In slatted light, blood drips and fills, drips and fills. The body of Franklin Doyle is returning, drip by drip, from the death gathered up in the wide arms of Julietta Annipavroni and exchanged by this exile for an exile's life. Doyle is enjoying his journey back to existence. The way is littered with hope. This hope takes the form of glittering stones and flints as dazzling as jewels. He picks his way among their sharp surfaces, treading softly, walking on, on to the beat of a muddled verse twanged out by an old man whose skin has the colour and texture of rust:

Only the hand holding his is missing, the quiet hand of a girl called Margaret with shiny eyes and a fawn summer coat. She is hiding somewhere. She refuses to come out and introduce herself to the rusty man, his father, singing his rhyme. She is waiting, out of sight. Why waiting? Doyle doesn't know. But he walks on. Happy.

*

Colonel Browne leads his wife onto the cool terrace of the popular mountain restaurant, the Glochenspiel.

‘It's so perfect,' sighs Amelia, ‘don't you think?'

All,
all
that day is singing and yodelling with joy in the heart of Amelia Browne.

‘They know how to do things up here,' smiles the Colonel.

Down below, in the basement of number fifty Ballantine Road, Constable Richards, alias Delta Romeo X-Ray two four Richards, picks up scattered papers, some torn, some stained with blood, and begins to read an article entitled
Eve and the Weapons of Eden
by Charlotte Browne. Constable Richards's A-level results enable him to understand that the article is talking to him about the oppression of women and their children, born and unborn, by the militaristic souls of the descendants of Adam. Constable Richards takes out a slice of Dentyne from his heavy blue pocket and chews on this anxiously, perplexed as he follows the jumpy words, the capital letters of which keep leaping up above the line, but which begin to reveal to him patterns, looping, diving, zigzagging, the mighty capitals standing over them like irregular trees, patterns of thought for which his A-levels, his obligatory studies of Marx and Mao, his months at the Police Academy have not satisfactorily prepared him. Into the hands of women, say these orchards of words, we commend the salvation of mankind. Constable Richards bites on the Dentyne, sighs, sets the papers down, rubs his eyes.

‘Frightening muck!' he whispers to himself. But one sentence lurks in his mind. He has arranged this sentence into a rectangle which looks roughly like a door with no handle:

For several minutes he stares at the door, drawing and redrawing its lines in his head. Then he picks up the receiver of a green telephone that sits on Charlotte's desk near to her typewriter and makes an important call to Camden HQ. Detective Inspector Pitt, CID, a smart, quiet stick of a man, offers Richards his curt congratulations.

*

And a clean blond waiter arrives. His hand is golden in the tableau of white cloth, crystal glass and green wine bottle that settles picturesquely into Amelia's mind. Beyond the high terrace, the sun is very hot. Blue butterflies flutter above a bank of euphorbia blooms.

‘I think,' says Amelia, ‘that these mountains simply must have been the original Garden of Eden. Don't you, Duffy darling?'

*

Jim Reese is on the move. As the train hurtles towards Brighton, he makes a simple plan for the recovery of himself.
Easy
. Everything's easy when you take control and stop the other fuckers shaping your life. Especially women. First his mother: ‘I know you'll understand, Jimmy, I need the money and our Mr Ripley's a
very
good resident, so I see no alternative, now that it's a question of a long stay, to giving him your room . . .' Then, years later, Charlotte: conning him he could be something because of a caseful of stolen glittery shittery richness. The gall. The temerity! The dumb insensitivity! Jim Reese pummels the armrest of the British Rail seat. Strong women. How he has come to fear the smell and flesh and the souls of strong women. Never again will any woman matter to him. They will simply
be
matter: thighs, breasts, cunt. Dispensible. Uncherished. Sheer matter. And yet, perhaps not even that . . .

‘Ticket!' snaps the train guard. Jim Reese returns to the stuffy carriage and the fleeting summer fields outside it. As he hands the guard his ticket for clipping, he decides that on arrival he will go straight to the beach.

It is late afternoon when he arrives. Families with rugs and towels and windbreaks on the pebbly sand are kindly lit by the deepening sun. Children make a bobbing and jumping line to the ice-cream van with its little jangle of Italian music. Posters advertise a costume exhibition from some TV Classic Series at the Pavillion. From the stately white houses at the east end of the front, dogs are harnessed for teatime walks by retired people in baggy clothes. Brighton. Jim stares. The sea rolls in, majestic but calm. He fills his lungs and begins to walk towards it.