The Colonel's Daughter (7 page)

‘Franklin? Are you there?'

‘Yeah.'

‘I know it's difficult for you. Can I come round and talk to you?'

Doyle isn't concentrating. The pain of Charlotte in him is as acute as the pain of his unhealed arm.

‘I'm sorry . . .' he mumbles.

‘Can't I come round?'

‘I'm sorry, Margaret. Things have happened. I'm going to have to be away for a bit.'

‘I could come round now, Franklin. We need to talk.'

‘No. I'm sorry.'

‘Why d'you keep saying you're sorry? I'm the one –'

‘Yes, I know. I'll send on the things I didn't pack for you.'

He hangs up. He knows this is cowardly. He knows she will ring back. He goes quickly to the kitchen, opens a tin of food for the cat, then grabs a clean jacket from his wardrobe and a pad from the desk. His head is clearing now. He has set the visit to Brighton aside, because he doesn't want to go in search of Charlotte's lover: he needs Charlotte herself.

As he closes the flat door, he hears the telephone begin to ring. The sound follows him down the stairs. But moments later he has escaped it. He is out in the hot day. In the street, the air is warm and rich with the smell of privet. Sun gleams on the white fronts of houses and London is transformed into a kindly city. Doyle hails a taxi. His heart races with the engine as it whisks him towards the police station where, already, the reporters have begun to gather, and crews from the BBC and London Weekend Television are setting up cameras.

*

News is travelling in spirals and loops. Charlotte Browne, celebrity revolutionary, is for the third time in her life under arrest. The BBC's Home Affairs Correspondent, tanned from a holiday rather far from home, prepares to pass on to the nation facts known and unknown concerning the charges. Here, procrastination by the police is impeding the swift passage of information to the public at large, a public who, within a few hours, will know that Charlotte has robbed the house of her parents and been responsible for the death of an elderly servant. Reporters and camera crews shuffle and smoke and buy cheese sandwiches from Vincente's sandwich shop and wait in sprawled groups. Passers by, sensing life altering here in a Camden street, hang around to marvel or condemn. They are joined by Doyle, who thrusts himself forward, holding high his bandaged arm like a white flag and pleads with the nervous-seeming constable on the door to be allowed to see Charlotte. His subterfuge – that he is Charlotte's fiancé – is merely smiled upon. Up and down the country, police are looking for Jim Reese. Even the PC at the station door knows that this middle-aged American is not Jim Reese. Doyle is turned away.

And then, in an hour, the news of the tumbling ashore of the drowned body of Jim Reese comes echoing down the telephone. The fact is as yet kept hidden from Doyle and the gathered reporters. The fact is as yet kept hidden from Detective Inspector Pitt who waits at Sowby for the afternoon arrival of Colonel and Lady Amelia Browne. It is given, however, to Detective Chief Superintendent Bowden, the man who, with the facts of Charlotte's case slowly accumulating, is now ‘in charge'. Bowden is a lofty, remote man, with a thin moustache and flinty eyes. Articulate and bitter, he's known as a hard-liner. His favourite meal is shepherd's pie. Whenever he eats this dish, he takes pleasure in the picture that he conjures of his wife sitting down all day to grind lamb through the mincer. Bowden dislikes women. He makes love to his wife no more than six or seven times a year. Women like Charlotte he would willingly see hanged. What repulses him most about her in particular is her dignity.

So now he walks to her cell, where she and Ogden-Nichols are for the moment sitting in silence. Ogden-Nichols's long poet's face is gloomy with certainty; for all his cleverness, for all the limelight that will spill onto his carpeted office in Queen Anne Street, he knows he will fail to alter the verdict of the trial to come.

Charlotte's cell is unlocked for Bowden. He stares icily at her, sitting straight and calm on the hard bed. Ogden-Nichols stands up as he comes in. Charlotte doesn't move. Bowden gestures to Ogden-Nichols to leave the cell. Charlotte, for the very first time since she drove to Buckinghamshire, feels a tremor of fear. Ogden-Nichols senses it too. Something has happened.

Bowden knows that Ogden-Nichols is entitled to stay. He knows also that he will leave. Now, he is alone with Charlotte, face to face. She puts her hands round her knees, calming her fear with this quiet rearrangement of her physical strength. She is like the leopard or the lioness, Bowden privately decides: she is savage.

He tugs out a packet of cigarettes and offers her one. She refuses. He puts the cigarettes back in his pocket, but doesn't sit down, as she expects him to. He stands, folds his arms, clears his throat, announces: ‘Mr Reese has been found drowned at Brighton.'

Charlotte looks away from him, down at her hands. The knuckles are white, transparent she thinks, showing me the bone, the miraculous interior structure of me that will not decay when the flesh is gone. I must not allow myself to imagine the body of Jim on the sand. I must put the death aside and only fill my mind with this picture of hands – mine on his living body, touching, taking, soothing, his on my face and in my hair and on my breasts and at last in their ecstacy on the skin of the drums . . .

‘We have positive identification of the body, and we are assuming suicide.'

Suicide. Of course, suicide.

Well, come to me, she thinks, the women who light their communal fires on perimeter railings, the hard and gentle women with their banners and their protestations, come and absolve me of my failure and my trust in a man. So she is quiet, imagining the gathering of this precious congregation. She still stares at her hands and doesn't even move her head to look up at Bowden. He stands and waits. He unfolds his arms, puts them behind his back. I have, he thinks, enjoyed every syllable inflicted here. But he is waiting for the physical show of shock and grief. He needs these. He won't be cheated of them. ‘Come on, you cunt!' he wants to yell at her, ‘start crying!'

But still he waits and waits. Far away in Charlotte's mind, the bones of hundreds of women, still fleshed out and lit with life, begin to gather in clusters.

*

‘Poems, Duffy. Do you remember, she used to send us poems from boarding school?'

‘Did she?'

‘They were all about quite sentimental kinds of things, like dead baby birds.'

‘Don't think I read them.'

‘Yes you did, Duffy.'

‘Dead birds?'

‘That kind of thing. A lot of death.'

‘Trouble with my daughter, she's always considered herself clever.'

They are alone now. They are home. The bar of light glows over the white forehead of the Duke of Abercorn. Duffy has poured them strong drinks. It is the hour when Garrod would have entered the sitting room quietly, either to announce dinner or carrying their television suppers on identical trays. At Amelia's feet, Admiral is sleeping. His flank trembles and twitches in his old dog's dreaming. Amelia stares down at the dog. He is ancient, she notices suddenly, and smelly and weak. Age creeps on invisible, until one day . . .

‘I'd like to die, Duffy.'

She hasn't wept. She has held herself as cold and straight as an icicle. Her behaviour has won her the admiration of Pitt and of WPC Willis, whose cups of tea Amelia has stubbornly refused. But now she is alone. The truth of what has happened enters valves and arteries and begins to surge and stream through her. She gulps whisky, as if to dilute the truths inside her. Duffy stares at her: Amelia de Palfrey, great-niece of the seventh Duke of Abercorn, and what a slim beauty once, in her white gloves, smelling of pear blossom and gardenias . . .

‘Don't talk bunkum like that, Amelia.'

‘Though we ought to do something about flowers.'

‘What flowers?'

‘For Garrod. There should be a wreath. Something to lay on.'

‘Don't worry about it, old thing.'

‘You'll organise it.'

‘Yes.'

‘And one for me?'

‘We can send one, Amelia, from us both.'

‘I didn't say
from
me. I said
for
me.'

‘She dismays him now. Amelia de Paifrey. What an ideal wife she has made him over all the years. So good at choosing and arranging and reordering; she has furnished his entire existence. A simple man, he thinks, I am at heart a simple man and Amelia has perfectly understood me. Even at Christmas, in her choice of beige cashmere, she has never erred and in her peculiar love of mountains she has lifted me up.

‘I think,' he says earnestly, ‘we have to put all these tragedies out of our minds, Amelia, and try to go on as before.'

She doesn't answer. Her face looks slack, flattened almost, rearranged by some brutal palm.

‘Amelia?'

‘They were all about death.'

‘What were?'

‘Her poems. The deaths of one thing or another.'

‘Stop it, Amelia! Got to keep a grip.'

The dog is woken by Duffy's voice. It gets to its feet and shakes itself. ‘Siddown Admiral!' Duffy snaps.

Amelia pats the dog's head. It is, perhaps, the only thing left in need of her protection. Then she lifts her head and looks out. The evening is deep blue at the window and the room is getting dark. She remembers the day the rose garden was planted and a pedestal built for the sundial. How old was Charlotte then, she wonders. Four? Five? Too small to understand the symmetry of a rose garden. The child used to scrunch the perfect blooms in her fat little hand.

The sky is darkening, too, over Camden. The reporters have gone, notebooks and spools of film replete with facts released by the woman-loathing Bowden, too late for the nine o'clock news. In the morning, the popular dailies will lead with the story, in which they have already taken sides. Editors in search of imagery will invoke serpents' teeth and thankless children, the while aware of the gulf separating their readership from a work of literature Amelia Browne had only inadequately understood. Charlotte is friendless, alone with the suicide of Jim Reese. His death binds and binds her head, like her bandage. She refuses the supper brought to her. She can't eat while the body of her lover is unburied. Yet, like her mother silently taking leave of her senses in an armchair by an unlit fire, she doesn't weep. She has seen the challenge in Bowden's eyes. She will not cry. If she is alone with the drowned limbs of Jim Reese, so too is she alone with her strength. Jim has failed her. She will not fail herself. When, near dawn, she sleeps, she dreams of Sowby. Her parents, manacled together by the handles of their tennis rackets, go wading into the lily pond like adventurous boys. Goldfish and newts nose their legs, but they stand very still at the pond's centre, holding up their skirts and trousers with their free hands.

*

Margaret has telephoned Doyle twice since he returned to the flat, hungry and excited. He has answered neither call. Into his Answerphone she has stammered out messages of her confusion.

Doyle has visited an all-hours delicatessen, bought himself sesame bread, Russian salad, Italian salami and a bottle of wine and has eaten these watching the ten o'clock news, on which the first mention of Charlotte's crime appears, well supported with photographs and information about her involvement with pacifist and feminist groups and her previous convictions.

Doyle crosses the room and catches sight of himself in a gold-framed mirror. His beard is as long as the stubble growing through on Charlotte's head, his eyes are vast and bright, his cheeks are blotchy and feverish. Round his neck is the white sling which carries his arm. The ancient mariner slung with the albatross? The comparison slips into his mind and stays there while he stares at his altered image. The weariness in his limbs, the throbbing of his wound, the astonishing clarity of his eyes: all suggest some kind of journey. His rational self, the lazy, cautious Franklin Doyle, argues for sleep and rest. But he ignores the lazy, the rational. He simply removes himself from his own sight and goes almost hurriedly to his desk, where he sits down and begins to write. In no more than a few minutes, he covers a page with a minutely perceived description of Charlotte, focusing on the heaviness of her eyes, the seeming hard strength of her body, the wide spread of her hands. But then he sits back, gulps wine, slows his breathing, forces himself to think not of Charlotte but of himself. ‘Exile (Voluntary. American),' he begins, ‘Finds himself at centre of case which will shock this nation (in ways particular to this nation and its class system) more than far more terrible things, i.e. deaths in Lebanon. Or so I predict. Propose – yes, I do propose – to put myself in major role (for first time in life) in historic circumstance. Ways to go about this must include a) Visit to parents, b) Visit to parents of Jim Reese, if alive, c) Visit to all groups C. has worked or is working for, d) Access to press archives, e) Seeking legal ways to gain access to C. (NB phone Bob Mandlebaum). Eventual aim must be saleable screenplay and/or book like Mailer and Schiller's
Executioner's Song
.

But here he stops writing. He knows why he feels like a traveller, pain, excitement, fear, mingling in his blood. He knows why he will stay awake till dawn, planning, constructing, ignoring calls on his Answerphone, disdaining sleep: he has entered on the most perfect love affair of his life. In Charlotte, he has found both woman and livelihood, fortuitously joined. Charlotte Browne is not only herself, but her story. Her story will become his. He will make the two inseparable. It doesn't concern Franklin Doyle on this long summer night that Charlotte the woman has, by giving him this story, put herself beyond the reach of his body. Because his body, with its disappointments of forty-seven years, is already anointed by the brief touch of her in the hospital bed and he will not be denied her. She will be locked away from him, but he will remake her. To Charlotte, prisoner, he will offer the story of Charlotte; in Charlotte, remade as fiction, will he spend his love.