Devices and Desires (21 page)

But the affair, begun with such discipline, such emotional and social propriety, had deteriorated into messiness and longing and pain. She thought she knew the moment when the need for a child had begun to grow into an obsession. It was when the theatre sister at that expensive and discreet nursing home, only half-concealing her disapproval and disgust, had taken away the kidney-shaped bowl with that quivering mass of tissue which had been the foetus. It was as if her womb, so clinically robbed, was taking its revenge. She hadn’t been able to conceal her longing from Alex, even though she knew that it repelled him. She could hear again her own voice, truculent, whining, an importunate child, and could see his look, half-laughing, of simulated dismay which she knew concealed a genuine repugnance.

“I want a child.”

“Don’t look at me, darling. That’s one experiment I’m not prepared to repeat.”

“You have a child, healthy, living, successful. Your name, your genes will go on.”

“I’ve never set store on that. Charles exists in his own right.”

She had tried to argue herself out of the obsession, forcing the unwelcome images on her unreceptive mind, the broken nights, the smell, the constant demands, the lessening of freedom, the lack of privacy, the effect on her career. It was no good. She was making an intellectual response to a need where intellect was powerless. Sometimes she wondered if she was going mad. And she couldn’t control her dreams, one in particular. The smiling nurse, gowned and masked, placing the newborn baby in her arms, herself looking down at the gentle, self-contained face bruised with the trauma of birth. And then the sister, grim-visaged, rushing in and snatching the bundle away. “That isn’t your baby, Miss Robarts. Don’t you remember? We flushed yours down the lavatory.”

Alex didn’t need another child. He had his son, his living hope, however precarious, of vicarious immortality. He might have been an inadequate and scarcely known parent, but he was a parent. He had held in his arms his own child. That wasn’t unimportant to him, whatever he might pretend. Charles had visited his father last summer, a golden-bronzed, hefty-legged, sun-bleached giant who had seemed in retrospect to blaze through the station like a meteor, captivating the female staff with his American accent, his hedonistic charm. And Alex, she saw, had been surprised and slightly disconcerted by his pride in the boy, attempting unsuccessfully to conceal it with heavy-handed banter.

“Where is the young barbarian, swimming? He’ll find the North Sea an unwelcome change from Laguna Beach.”

“He tells me he proposes to read law at Berkeley. There’s a place waiting for him in step-papa’s firm, apparently, once he qualifies. Next thing, Liz will be writing to say that he’s engaged to some socially acceptable sophomore, or do I mean preppy?”

“I’m managing to feed him, by the way. Alice has left me a recipe for hamburgers. Every shelf of the refrigerator is stuffed with ground beef. His vitamin-C requirements seem abnormally high, even for a boy of his height and weight. I press oranges constantly.”

She had squirmed in a mixture of embarrassment and resentment; the pride and the juvenile humour had both seemed so out of character, almost demeaning. It was as if he, as much as the typists, had been captivated by his son’s physical presence. Alice Mair had left for London two days after Charles had arrived. Hilary wondered whether this had been perhaps a ploy to give father and son some time alone together or whether—and more likely, from what she knew or guessed of Alice Mair—it had been a reluctance both to spend time
cooking for the boy and to witness his father’s embarrassing excess of paternalism.

She thought again of his last visit, when he had walked home with her after the dinner party. She had deliberately sounded reluctant to be escorted, but he had come and she had meant that he should. After she had finished speaking, he had said quietly: “That sounds like an ultimatum.”

“I wouldn’t call it that.”

“What would you call it, then, blackmail?”

“After what’s happened between us, I’d call it justice.”

“Let’s stick to ‘ultimatum.’ ‘Justice’ is too grandiose a concept for the commerce between us two. And like every ultimatum it will have to be considered. It’s usual to set a time limit. What’s yours?”

She had said: “I love you. In this new job you’re going to need a wife. I’m the right wife for you. It could work. I’d make it work. I could make you happy.”

“I’m not sure how much happiness I’m capable of. Probably more than I’ve any right to. But it isn’t in anyone’s gift, not Alice’s, not Charles’s, not Elizabeth’s, not yours. It never has been.”

Then he had come over to her and kissed her on the cheek. She had turned to cling to him, but he had put her gently aside.

“I’ll think about it.”

“I’d like to announce it soon, the engagement.”

“You’re not thinking of a church wedding, I suppose. Orange blossom, bridesmaids, Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March,’ ‘The Voice That Breathed o’er Eden.’”

She had said: “I’m not thinking of making either of us ridiculous, now or after marriage. You know me better than that.”

“I see, just a quick, painless turning-off at the local registrar’s office. I’ll give you my decision next Sunday night, after I get back from London.”

She had said: “You make it sound so formal.”

And he had replied: “But it has to be formal, doesn’t it, the response to an ultimatum?”

He would marry her and, within three months, he would know that she had been right. She would win because, in this, her will was stronger than his. She remembered the words of her father. “There’s only this one life, girlie, but you can live it on your own terms. Only the stupid and the weak need to live like slaves. You’ve got health, looks, brains. You can take what you want. All you need is the courage and the will.” The bastards had nearly got him in the end, but he had lived life on his own terms and so would she.

Now she tried to put thoughts of Alex, of their future, on one side and concentrate on the task in hand. But she couldn’t settle. Restless, she went through the kitchen into the small back parlour, which held her wine store, and brought out a bottle of claret. She took down a glass from the dresser and poured. Taking her first mouthful, she felt on the corner of her lip the minute scrape of a chip. It was intolerable to her to drink from a chipped glass. Instinctively she took down another and emptied the first glass into it. She was about to throw the defective glass away when she hesitated, her foot on the pedal of the refuse bin. It was one of a set of six that Alex had given her. The defect, unnoticed before, was slight, little more than a roughness on the brim. The glass could be used to hold flowers. She had a picture of them, snowdrops, primroses, small sprigs of rosemary. When she had finished drinking, she washed up both glasses and turned them over to drain. The bottle of claret she left uncorked on the table. It had really been too cold to drink, but in another hour it would be about right.

It was time for her swim, just after nine, and tonight she wouldn’t bother with the news. Upstairs, in her bedroom, she
stripped naked, put on the bottom half of a black bikini and over it her blue-and-white track suit. On her feet she wore old sandals, the leather stained and toughened by sea water. From the hall peg she took down a small steel locket on a leather thong just large enough to hold her Yale key, which she wore round her neck when swimming. It had been Alex’s gift for her last birthday. Touching it, she smiled and felt, strong as the metal against her fingers, the certainty of hope. Then she took a torch from the drawer in the hall table and, closing the door carefully behind her, set off for the beach, her towel slung over her shoulder.

She smelt the resin of the pines before she passed between their slim, spiky trunks. There were only fifty yards of sandy path, thick with their fallen needles, between her and the shore. It was dimmer here, the moon glimpsed fitfully, sailing in majestic splendour above the high spires of the trees now seen and now obscured, so that for a few seconds she had to switch on her torch. And now she passed out of the shadows and saw before her the white moon-bleached sand and the tremble of the North Sea. Dropping her towel in her usual place, a small hollow on the fringe of the wood, she slipped off her track suit and stretched her arms high above her head. Then she kicked off her sandals and began running, over the narrow band of shingle, over the dusty sand above the watermark, over the smooth, sea-washed eddies of the foam, splashing through the small waves which seemed to be falling without a sound, to hurl herself at last into cleansing peace. She gasped at the coldness of it, fierce as a pain. But almost at once that passed, as it always did, and it seemed to her that the water gliding over her shoulders had taken on her own body warmth and that she swam cocooned in self-sufficiency. With her strong rhythmic crawl she struck out from the shore. She knew how long she
could safely stay in: just five minutes before the cold struck again and it was time to return. And now she stopped swimming and lay for a moment on her back, floating, looking up at the moon. The magic worked again as it always did. The frustrations, the fears, the anger of the day fell away and she was filled instead with a happiness which she would have called ecstasy, except that “ecstasy” was too ostentatious a word for this gentle peace. And with the happiness came optimism. Everything was going to be all right. She would let Pascoe sweat for another week, then withdraw her action. He was too unimportant even to hate. And her solicitor was right, possession of Scudder’s Cottage could wait. It was increasing in value every month. The rent was being paid, she was losing nothing. And the daily irritations of the job, the professional jealousies, the resentments, what did they matter now? That part of her life was coming to an end. She loved Alex, Alex loved her. He would see the sense of everything she had said. They would be married. She would have his child. Everything was possible. And then for a moment there came a deeper peace in which even none of this mattered. It was as if all the petty preoccupations of the flesh were washed away and she was a disembodied spirit floating free, looking down at her body spread-eagled under the moon, and could feel a gentle, undemanding sorrow for this earth-grounded creature who could find only in an alien element this sweet but transitory peace.

But it was time to get back. She gave a vigorous kick, twisted herself over and began her powerful crawl towards the shore, towards that silent watcher waiting for her in the shadow of the trees.

Dalgliesh had spent Sunday morning revisiting Norwich Cathedral and St. Peter Mancroft before lunching at a restaurant on the outskirts of the city where he and his aunt two years previously had eaten an unpretentious but excellently cooked meal. But here too time had wrought its changes. The exterior and the décor were deceivingly the same but it was quickly apparent that both proprietor and chef had changed. The meal, arriving with suspicious promptness, had obviously been cooked elsewhere and heated up, the grilled liver a grainy slab of indistinguishable grey meat blanketed with a synthetic, glutinous sauce and accompanied by potatoes which were underdone and cauliflower which was a mush. It was not a luncheon to deserve a wine, but he fortified himself with cheddar and biscuits before setting out on the afternoon’s programme, a visit to the fifteenth-century Church of St. Peter and St. Paul at Salle.

During the last four years it had been rare for him to visit his aunt without driving with her to Salle, and she had left with her will a request that her ashes should be strewn in the churchyard there without ceremony and by him on his own.
He knew that the church had exerted a powerful influence on her, but she had not, as far as he knew, been a religious woman, and the request had a little surprised him. It had seemed so much more likely that she would have wanted her physical remains thrown to the winds on the headland, or that she would have left no instructions, regarding this as a simple matter of expedient disposal requiring neither thought on her part nor ceremony on his. But now he had a task to perform, and one of surprising importance to him. In recent weeks he had been visited by the nagging guilt of a duty unfulfilled, almost a spirit unpropitiated. He found himself wondering, as he had before in his life, at man’s insistent need for ritual, for the formal acknowledgement of each rite of passage. Perhaps this was something his aunt had understood and in her quiet way had made provision for.

He turned off the B1149 at Felthorpe to take the country roads across the flat country. It was unnecessary to consult the map. The magnificent fifteenth-century tower with its four pinnacles was an unmistakable landmark, and he drove towards it along the almost deserted roads with the familiar sense of coming home. It seemed strange that his aunt’s angular figure wasn’t beside him, that all that remained of that secretive but powerful personality was a plastic package, curiously heavy, of white grit. When he reached Salle he parked the Jaguar a little down the lane and made his way into the churchyard. As always, he was struck that a church as magnificent as a cathedral could be so isolated yet seem utterly right among these quiet fields, where its effect was less of grandeur and majesty than of an unpretentious and reassuring peace. For a few minutes he stood quietly listening and heard nothing, not even a bird song or the rustle of an insect in the tall grasses. In the frail sunlight the surrounding trees
were flushed with the first gold of autumn. The ploughing was over, and the brown crust of the crumbled fields stretched in their Sunday calm towards the far horizon. He walked slowly round the church, feeling the weight of the package dragging at his jacket pocket, glad that he had chosen a time between services and wondering whether it might not have been courteous, perhaps even necessary, to obtain the consent of the parish priest before carrying out his aunt’s wishes. But he told himself that it was too late to think of that now, glad to be spared explanations or complications. Making his way to the eastern fringe of the churchyard, he opened the package and tipped out the ground bones like a libation. There was a flash of silver and all that remained of Jane Dalgliesh sparkled among the brittle autumn stalks and the tall grasses. He knew the customary words for such an occasion; he had heard them often enough on his father’s lips. But the ones which came unbidden to his mind were the verses from Ecclesiastes carved on the stone outside Martyr’s Cottage, and in this timeless place beside the dignity of the great church it seemed to him that they were not inappropriate.