The Drowning People (37 page)
Certainly the jury showed no signs of repeating my mistake.
Ella’s stubbornness alienated her from its sympathy; and her barrister—who advised her again in mid-trial to change her plea to one of temporary insanity—fought the last few days with only half-hearted enthusiasm. By the end of a fortnight it was clear that the maximum sentence was almost unavoidable. And in his summation the judge said that Ella’s was one of the most terrible cases he had encountered in all his years on the bench.
I went to the final day of Ella’s trial. I could not have stayed away. And I heard the verdict delivered and watched her being led from the court, back down to the cells from which she had come. In the crowded, overheated courtroom her face was pale, her eyes bloodshot; she was very thin. And I realized, almost to my surprise, that she had aged in the years since I had seen her last; that she was no longer the girl of my memory, or even of recent photographs, but a woman with a prematurely lined face and a broken walk. Moving unsteadily between the hulking policemen who escorted her she didn’t look at anyone, didn’t seem even to be aware of the long line of Harcourts in the front row of the visitors’ gallery. Her friends, if she still had any, had not come; all London, save the media, was eager to wash its hands of her, to rid itself of her taint. And I thought, as I watched her being led away, that Ella as a murderer made things easier: sadder, but easier. In dread of my guilt once more, I tried to believe that Ella’s conviction removed my responsibility for Eric’s death; that it made me a victim too. I told myself that I had been an innocent, led astray by this mad young woman; that Ella’s insanity cleansed me of my wrong; that my share of our joint guilt could be transferred to her. But I lacked the requisite tools of self-deceit then, you see. And try though I might I saw the future: sleepless and dark; relieved only by hard work. And I told myself it was all that I deserved.
As she reached the door to the cells Ella stopped and looked at the courtroom. Her eyes were dulled and red but they had something of their old essence nonetheless, something of their old magnetism. I watched them travel slowly over her family, as if locking their images in her brain for the last time; I saw Pamela look away from her. She took in the reporters, the public, Sarah sitting in the center of her family, her brown hair falling over the lapels of her coat. Finally her eyes met mine; and I knew that it was me she had looked for. For a moment we connected. And I didn’t look away; I couldn’t But I didn’t move either; I didn’t smile or mouth any words of endearment or pity. I looked at her and she looked at me.
Abruptly she turned and allowed herself to be led away.
I
N THE STREAM OF PEOPLE LEAVING
the court that day I saw Charles Stanhope, his face taut and unmoving. Standing still, lost in the crowd, he seemed to have no idea of what to do or where to go; and I felt for him as journalists brushed past to swoop on Pamela. I felt for him; but he was beyond my help, just as I was beyond his. I could not even meet his eyes. So pushing past the microphones and cameras, past the clusters of tourists shivering under their umbrellas, I walked quickly down the steps. And as the rain began in earnest I hurried down the street, eager for my violin, for the escape which only my practice and my playing could offer me now. And as I walked I told myself that I was alone in the world; and that the sooner I accepted this fact the better it would be for me. In the cold wind I pulled my scarf tighter round my neck and moved briskly, trying not to cry.
She caught me at the steps to the Underground, I think. Yes, I can see her by the rail now: long hair streaming over her shoulders; her face white; her shoulders shaking. She was shivering. Perhaps I returned her greeting. Perhaps I shook her hand or even kissed her. Perhaps…. But I can’t remember. That first meeting is hazy for me still in some respects, for it happened in the midst of so much else; and Sarah never encouraged me to remember. Even later, years later, we did not speak much of our early days together; and I came to take her silence as a tacit acknowledgment of my love for another, as a sign of the tactful understanding for which I came to value her so much. It was that reticence which first drew me to Sarah; that quiet sense she had that things were known and understood but not spoken. It was what I had once, mad with love for Ella, taken for awkwardness; but three hard years had taught me the shallowness of that judgment And I sensed, even that first afternoon, that I might safely rely on that reserve; that it was a better insulator than any I had yet devised myself.
My wife, as I was to learn, preserved a comforting silence on all painful things, a silence that at first relieved and then seduced me. And gradually she taught me to preserve that silence in my own mind, also; to preserve and to maintain it with diligence and care.
But I am wandering; moving beyond myself again. I keep wanting to explain before I have told; and I should have learned by now that truth comes only in the telling. Sarah’s silence must be broken at last; I know that and am resolved to my task. I am remembering. And it is the oddest things that recur first: the fact, for example, that her hair smelled clean as she hugged me in the rain; and that we ate frogs’ legs and steak at the lunch which she insisted we have together.
“I don’t want to be alone today,” she told me as she put her arms around me; and her look, so like Ella’s that I almost cried, was too much for me to resist.
So I let myself be led through the crowd to a small French restaurant where obsequious waiters whispered in comers and Sarah told me of the trauma of the past two months, her large pale eyes seeking and holding mine, her hands mutely asking to be held as they shakily lit her cigarettes. I noticed with surprise that she was no longer the severe figure she had been in the park, nor the chill young woman I had seen at Ella’s engagement lunch. In some way Ella’s trial seemed to have liberated her; and I thought, as I watched, that through her tears she seemed warmer.
She was a woman of many wiles, my wife; a sophisticate whose affects were as calculated as they were concealed. And I, a man, was no match for her; I admit that freely now. Perhaps I knew it even then. Perhaps even on that first day I found security in Sarah’s mastery: the kind of security which my life had lacked for so long. Certainly I succumbed to her with ease. Sitting at that comer table, as the rain streamed down on either side and the wine warmed us both, listening to her tell me of Pamela’s grief and her own, I was lulled by her smooth, round voice; moved by the tears which she could not hold back; thrilled, perhaps—as only now I can admit—by the way in which Ella seemed to have been returned to me. Human attraction is a complex thing; complex and powerful in ways even a lifetime cannot teach. At seventy, when I might be expected to have gained wisdom, I can only begin to understand its force, to make sense of its caprices; or at least to acknowledge them in a way I was too young to do at twenty-five. I begin to see that we are drawn to physical beauty in ways we cannot always know, and by subtle steps we cannot always trace. Recounting the events of my life I have come to see the truth in the idea that romantic love is bound intimately with its physical expression; and to know that my love for Ella was inseparable from my fascination with her body and her face.
It was that fascination that drew me to Sarah and she knew it. She knew it and she did not hesitate to use her knowledge. It was her body, more than her words, which sought out and offered itself to all that was most vulnerable in me that day; and remembering it now, from the distance of endless years, I find something fascinating in her calculation, something awe-inspiring in the way she bent my will to hers with the seeming gentleness of shared memory and sorrow.
We made love that afternoon, as Sarah had known that we would.
And as though drawn by an irresistible, yet invisible force, we left the restaurant and hailed a taxi in the pouring rain and went to my house and thence to the attic room which Ella had made her own years before. It seemed an appropriate place to banish old ghosts. And though it was Sarah who guided me, Sarah who leaned to kiss me as we stood on the steps in the wet and I fumbled for my keys, I was willing to be led; and our lovemaking, so different from mine and Ella’s, comforted me in its curious mixture of the familiar and the unknown. It comforted me and excited me and it made me think that perhaps I had been rescued; that perhaps all was not lost.
In the weeks that followed, missing her cousin in ways I could not admit, I came to rejoice in the sight of Sarah’s slender form; in the touch of her smooth, pale skin; in the feel of her lips on mine. I learned to watch as Sarah, rather than Ella, lit cigarettes with unconscious grace and looked at me from large blue eyes. I learned to find charm in her quiet, diffident humor; affection in the tranquil way she assumed control of my life. I found that her presence offered me security, as I had sensed that first afternoon that it would; and I was grateful to her for her willingness to rescue me from myself. Our times together were simple and calm: all that my life had not been for so long. And I sank into Sarah’s serenity with unthinking relief, hoping that in it I might find peace, knowing that in her strength I would find shelter. Though it is hard to remember now, and even harder to admit since illusion has succumbed to truth, I know that Sarah’s poise balanced me; that her control, and the first lessons in self-deception which she so unconsciously gave, protected me. It was she who lit the way to my forgetting; she who tempted me back to the safety of the shallows; and I was grateful.
In bed that first night she talked to me of Ella; and I can see her now, a sheet pulled over her breasts, leaning against the wall, smoking, speaking softly in the rounded tones I would come to know so well.
“You must have known how much she hated me,” was how she began. And her voice was quiet, soft, unassuming. “I think I told you once myself, in the park.”
And we both remembered a summer’s afternoon when I had bought her ice cream.
“Yes,” I replied, wondering how much Sarah knew of what had happened between Ella and me. “Yes, 1 knew.”
“And she told you I hated her too, no doubt.”
Watching her against the wall, absorbed by the curve of her breasts and the delicate bones of her wrist as she held her cigarette, I said nothing. Perhaps I hesitated, for almost the last time, before betraying so old a confidence of Ella’s.
“It’s all right,” said Sarah, sensing my reluctance and taking my hand. “You don’t need to tell me. She’s accused me of murder to my face. She can’t have said much worse than that to you.”
“No.”
There was silence. And I looked at her: at the outline of her nose in profile; at the curve of her nostrils as she blew out the smoke. Her skin was very pale against the white wall.
“Poor Ella.”
“Yes,” I said.
And my head burns as I think of it; I tremble with rage at the thought of Sarah’s sympathy that night. Remembering her face and the way her eyes looked sadly into mine has laid all uncertainties to rest; for I know suddenly, and beyond all doubt, that she deserved to die. My killing her was right; in some way it served a deeper, truer justice than the petty bureaucracy of earthly warders and jails would have done. God will judge her; only He is capable of it. And I, sitting here alone and old and unable to go back, can only wait for His judgment too, can only wait and remember.
In bed with Sarah that night I was beyond saving.
Let that calm me now; for I was trapped already by then. As surely as Ella herself was trapped, though not as cruelly. I could have done nothing, for Sarah was not fighting her equal; she never did. And we were playing on ground that she knew all too well and I not at all; that she had made it her business to know. Would it have helped me to have been warier of her calculated intimacy than I was? Would it have helped Ella? What chance did either of us ever really have against her? By that stage none, if truth be told. And though it shames me to say so I must. My wife was an instinctive manipulator, you see. With her dead and nearly buried, released from her influence, I can see that. I can see also that she had honed her powers with care; that she acted against her cousin only when she was ready, and that she brought to her campaign three tense years of stealthy observation. Sarah knew how people worked, you know; by then they seldom surprised her. And she had long been expert in her handling of them. I know that now. The truth, though it has come late in life, has helped me to see. I understand what Sarah did to me now in a way I could not have done until yesterday.
It is strange: how in twenty-four short hours my whole life should have disintegrated; how the foundations of forty-five years of married life should have given way in such a little time. Learning the truth has been destructive. In remembering I have undone Sarah’s work; I have removed the cornerstones of her edifice. And although I have hardly rebuilt—for there is nothing and no one left to do so with—I have come to understand, at least; to understand the power she had. My wife’s was a personality which never forgot an injury, which seldom forgave a foe, but which rewarded loyalty with a generosity which bound its recipient to her forever. Those were Sarah’s methods; and as I listened to her words that night I was unaware—and I swear that this is true—by what gentle, subtle stages I was being brought under her influence.
“I tried so hard to help Ella,” her cousin said with shy frankness. “I knew she needed help. You’ve no idea how much I wanted to prevent … what happened at Seton. I … I feel in some ways responsible.” And I think her eyes even filled with tears.
I remember how Sarah cried; how prettily she did it; how her tears made you want to touch the velvety skin beneath her eyes. I remember wiping them gently away that night as she kissed my fingers.
“Thank you,” she said, and stroked my hair.
“I tried so hard to warn people,” she went on, slowly. “But no one would listen. No one but Uncle Alex. He was the only one, apart from me perhaps, who recognized Ella’s condition. He had seen it in his mother and sister before, you see.”