The Colonel's Daughter (6 page)

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.

Within hours, news of Garrod's death reaches Camden Police Station. Charles Ogden-Nichols looks grave in the manner of an idle poet as he privately notes that the charge will now be manslaughter. Charlotte is closed like a mollusc with her thoughts of prison-death. Months. Years. Prison-cancer. Release at fifty, old, obese, corrupted, idle, finished. And for what? It was fine, of course, the night of stars, the glint of flowers as she went in, the white face of the Duke of Abercorn watching her through time . . . And the Colonel is punished, her mother is punished at last – for their hearts empty of love and their heads full of silver knives and paperweights. Yet once more, because of them, she will be locked away. As a child, it was her head they imprisoned with sighings after royalty and debutante balls; now it is her body.

Charlotte sits. They allow her to sit. Already, Ogden-Nichols is composing the stirring sonnets of her case. He smiles at her, but she looks away. He and she are given cups of tea.

*

And at their Brighton mooring, Owen Lasky and his wife, Jessica-Lee, clamber out of their foam rubber bunks, twitch their elasticated curtains to let in a shaft of sun and put on their tin kettle to make coffee.

Until it was dark, they turned their boat in wider and wider circles, searching for the body of the man Jessica-Lee had seen for less than a second, lying with his mouth in the waves. Owen grumbled. What a stupid waste of time, this making of circles. But Jessica-Lee would not let them go back till they were dizzy and tired with their turning in the wind and all the lights had come on in the town. Then they limped in, moored the boat, took down the sails, went to their favourite pub to forget. Owen drank beer. Jessica-Lee drank gin fizzes. That night, they had dreams of Miami.

Jim Reese saw the boat. He saw it tack and turn, tack and turn. He knew that for the second time in twenty-four hours someone was trying to save him with clumsy, futile action. He laughed aloud in the gathering dusk, the laughter and the body that housed it still strong, still riding the water like a lover. He knew that the boat wouldn't find him. Darkness and his sea would cover and conceal him.

He remembered the exploding toys of John Ripley. One was a boat. You assembled it, piece by piece, deck by deck, around a central spring. You aimed amidships with your three-inch lead-painted torpedo. The boat burst into satisfactory fragments on the hearth rug. John Ripley laughed. Mother screamed a little scream. John Ripley said, don't worry lad, the whole point is you can't break it. You put it back together and then you have another go. Easy. Doddle! Like this, around the central spring . . .

The central spring . . . ? The boat tacks, turns . . . Lights come on in it. The central spring will, if you aim too often and over and over again at the area of greatest weakness . . . yes, even there on the hearth rug in front of the brittle white tubes of the gas fire . . . right there, with Mother looking on, arms folded, hip slightly jutted to one side, makeup on, smelling of Blue Grass . . . there, where all had once seemed so exceptionally safe and familiar and comforting and eternal . . .
there
, the central spring will one day snap. Yet all continues to tack, to turn, to make its habitual movement, just as if nothing had occurred. No one but you perceives that the spring is broken. You reassemble the boat. The boat is whole, deck on deck. Merely, it will no longer explode when hit. And Mother takes up the tea cosy stained by her greasy hands, pops it over the brown pot, struts out into the hall and calls John Ripley down to tea. You leave the dead toy on the hearth rug. You sit at the table and watch their mouths, runny with egg, oily with bacon. They talk and laugh and gobble and suck their tea. You want to say to them, the central spring went. You take a breath, to begin. Before any words come out, Mother reprimands you with her eyes: you have ceased to matter.

When the boat gave up its useless search and returned to harbour, the great depths of the sea began to beat like music in the ears of Jim Reese. The music invaded him, commanding his hands, his arms, his legs, his pelvis to keep time. Water streamed off his forehead and into his hair. The cold of the ocean became, with its new rhythm, a fierce heat. Never had movement been so exquisite a thing. Never in the turning multicoloured lights and the screaming dreams of Vegas had body and music been one as they were now one. And Jim Reese knew that it would last forever. The sky would fill with stars and it would go on and on. Dawn would come and daybreak and autumn and sighing and sunset, and still it would play. Because it was his. His own.

*

Franklin Doyle discharges himself from hospital and goes home to his flat. On the mat is a note in Margaret's handwriting. He picks it up, almost without curiosity, and takes it to his desk, where he telephones a glazier and asks for someone to come and mend his window.

Mrs Annipavroni had cleaned out the cat litter tray and scrubbed with Flash and Vim at the bloodstains on the kitchen floor. The whole flat smells of Vim. But it is tidy and quiet. Doyle re-enters it with a feeling of gratefulness. He telephones a florist and orders carnations and cornflowers to be sent to Kilburn, to Julietta Annipavroni, whose address begins: ‘Staircase B'. He feels grateful, too, that his own address doesn't begin with Staircase B. He imagines the Annipavroni family lugging their Italian life up and down dark concrete steps.

Doyle pours himself fresh orange juice and sits, stroking the cat. He ignores Margaret's note on the desk. His head is crammed with half-formed plans, jostling each other for place and meaning. His wound throbs. He is sweating slightly. He has a sudden longing to sleep. He imagines Charlotte's cold strong hands holding his head and laying it gently on her shoulder. She becomes the man, he the woman, content to lie safely at her side. He sleeps and offers himself. She is aloof in her hard body. She crushes him with her indifference, but his yearnings for her only increase.

The telephone wakes him. As he walks to the desk, he knows he has dreamed of Charlotte, yet the dream has left him. All he wants to hear, as he lifts the receiver, is Charlotte's voice. He is aware, in this instant, that he has fallen in love.

Margaret sounds close, as if she were calling from an adjoining room. She's been with Michael, she says. She thought she loved Michael, yet in his room, right there in his bed, she began to remember Doyle . . .

‘Oh, Margaret . . .' Doyle's voice is weary, irritated, ‘please don't bug me with this kind of thing.'

‘But it happened, Franklin. I wasn't consciously thinking about you and I suddenly started to miss you and regret –'

‘Regret what?'

‘I don't think I can leave you.'

‘You've left me. You left me!'

‘I know. But it's all wrong.'

Doyle sighs. He looks at his wound. Yesterday, he might have died for Margaret. Now, already, he has replaced her.

‘I think I need both of you, Franklin. Can you understand this? Franklin?'

‘Oh bullshit.'

‘What? I can't hear you, Franklin. Did you hear what I said about needing you both?'

He says nothing. His wound aches. He must buy painkillers. Then his dream comes back to him. He lies, arms and legs spread wide, and Charlotte's body is above him, moving gently, purposefully, yet almost invisibly in near darkness. Then she lowers her head and whispers to his mouth: ‘This isn't love. I'm giving you blood, that's all.'