The Drowning People (39 page)

Alone tonight, with nothing for company but a yellowed bundle of aging reviews, such arrogance jars sharply. Who am I to make such pronouncements? Who am I to say what I might have been? I am no one, it’s true; and hard though that is to make, it is an admission I cannot avoid. Pretense is no use now. But I know at least what I once was. And in remembering my life I have shared the credit for my playing; I have shared it in ways I could never have dreamed of doing—or of attempting to do—before today. And so I can say this without arrogance: that my recording of the Mendelssohn E Minor ranks with the best; and that such an achievement carries with it a certain responsibility. I could only have moved forwards after that, not backwards; I could not have permitted myself the dubious luxury of poor but continued performance. And I am lucky that I have always, deep down, been a good judge of my own efforts. Such knowledge saved me years ago from spoiling the one unsullied achievement of my life.

It is a blessing that my music—even later, when Sarah had taught me so well—was immune to self-deception. I knew when my playing died; I knew and I mourned it but I did not fight. When technical prowess was all I had to offer, when I was reduced to the status of master technician merely, I stopped. And I am glad that I did. Technical accomplishment can be learned and it must be practiced; but real playing—like real living, I suppose—requires feeling. And that is what I ceased to have.

I did not resent my loss then; and though I mourned it, I did not realize, as I have done now, that it was Sarah who deprived me of it. Perhaps dimly I suspected; perhaps dimly I knew that the bond between my wife and me could not have hoped to fuel my playing as either Ella or Eric, in their different ways, had done. But I did not know consciously; and if I had I would not have minded: for Sarah offered me a peace for which I would have sacrificed anything. And it was a peace, I think now, which stemmed from her capacity for stability. That—and the deception on which it relied—was central to Sarah’s creed; that and an hypnotic calm which encouraged the years to fade into one another; which blurred the greatest events with the smallest; which made emotional differentiation at once impossible and undesirable.

My violin was not the only sacrifice I made for a place in Sarah’s sanctuary. My friends, few but loyal in the years before my marriage, were given up also; and that I minded more. My wife did not share; certainly she would not share me. And one by one my friends—and even my family—gave way to the icy chill of her smile in welcome and accepted my invitations with less enthusiasm, inviting me instead to parties in London; parties which the duties of Seton life increasingly prevented me from attending.

Camilla Boardman, less enthusiastic at the news of my engagement than I had thought she would be, persevered the longest; she tried, I think, to make friends with Sarah in a way I might have told her was impossible. A frequent guest in our early years here, she was Margaret’s godmother, for my wife acquiesced easily in small things. And there was something comforting about Camilla’s consistency; about the way in which her curls stayed as tight, her breasts as prominent (though not perhaps quite as pert), her emphases as wonderfully pronounced in middle age and after as they had ever been in youth. At her last dinner here—I see it so clearly now—she talked loudly of her clients, for success had made her more indiscreet than ever, and she tried to make Sarah accept tickets for one of her charity shows.

“Now Mummy’s gone,
someone’s
got to take on the mantle, I suppose,” she said, pressing the envelope into Sarah’s hands. “And it’s
so
tiring having to endure the after-party on one’s own. You
must
help me.”

But such effusion only made my wife more severe; and under her cold stare even the energy of as lively a butterfly as Camilla found it difficult to endure. Gradually my friend found that the pressures of business kept her in London far more than she would like, though she continued to invite Sarah and me—and later Margaret—to anything she had or did with the social perseverance which was her hallmark.

“I
know
Sarah doesn’t like me,” she told me once, in her cups perhaps, at one of the few parties—I think it was again her birthday—to which I had been able to go. “And truth to tell I don’t like
her
much either.” And she took my hand with an affectionate squeeze. “But that’s
no
reason to see so much less of you, Jamie darling. Besides, there’s my
divine
goddaughter to think of. And who could
possibly
teach her to survive in London but me?”

“Who indeed?”

But even as I spoke I knew—and Camilla did also, I think—that the days of friendship we had known before my marriage were over and irreclaimable. Sarah’s price was loyalty: unquestioning and unbroken. And I needed her too much to break our unspoken compact.

Remembering all this brings my marriage back as it really was; in ways which I can understand only now, now that my bond with Sarah has finally been broken. Killing her has broken a spell; it has freed me. I see that now. And I see in what deep seclusion I have spent the last forty-five years: isolated not only from my music and my friends, but from myself. It is that self which the truth has allowed me to reclaim; and I see that painful though they have been to learn, the facts of yesterday have given me my freedom, a freedom I did not know I had lost.

My wife was subtle in her mastery; subtle and instinctive. And it is a tribute to her power that I heard of Ella’s death unflinchingly, unmoved almost.

I was in the garden; it was winter, I think. There were workmen to supervise. On a day of gray skies and squabbling gulls I stood by the cliffs, smelling the salt on the breeze, giving instructions, in the sting of the wind. I remember it all. And I remember Sarah, her hair in a bun, her face drawn—for maybe, at the last, her conscience pricked her; who is to say?—walking down the steep path from the castle: a quiet, somber figure; dark against the cloud.

“I need to speak to my husband,” she said; and the workmen, mindful of their manners, raised their caps and disappeared, leaving us.

“Yes, darling?”

She told me quickly; and in even tones she said that Ella was dead, that she had hanged herself in her cell the night before. “I had word from the warden this morning.”

It was almost lunchtime then.

“And he sent her personal things.”

There was silence. Perhaps I nodded.

Sarah stood, as though hesitating. “And two letters,” she said at last. “I’ve looked into mine. The same ravings as at her trial.”

“I see.”

“It would only upset you to read yours, darling.”

Again I did not speak. My wife walked towards me; towards the cliff. And I saw in her hand an envelope with my name on it in jagged brown letters.

“But of course the choice rests with you. Would you like to see it?”

And I know now that that was her supreme moment. That was the apex of her daring.

I was silent.

“I don’t think you should,” Sarah went on gently. “Believe me, I know. She was raving when she died. It’s no way to remember her.” She looked at me; and the request on my lips dissolved.

“In fact, there’s only one thing to do with it,” she said.

And in front of me, a yard or two away, she tore the letter, with slow deliberation, into little pieces. We watched them scatter downwards, into the sea.

“Let’s go in,” she said, linking her arm with mine.

CHAPTER 32

T
HERE’S LITTLE MORE TO BE SAID NOW
. All that remains are the loose ends; and those Sarah tied for me yesterday with chilling egotism. I am glad this telling is done; I want the end to come. And when my wife has been buried and I have watched her coffin slide slowly into the vault in the presence of a weeping family all will be over. There is something poignant in that, I think; something poignant in the fact that when I, too, have died we three will all lie together, united at last. Ella, Sarah and I, side by side in lead-lined coffins, decaying in harmony.

At my age such symmetries are pleasing.

By then there will be no outward signs of our tragedy; no hint—bar the reports of aging, inaccura$$$ pers—of the bonds that really bind us. And $$$ should be. Margaret must never know what $$$ did and she never will. Better far for her to think, however sadly, that Sarah ended her own life; that she was not, perhaps, as stable as she seemed. For the truth would destroy her; and thus our tragedy—mine and Ella’s and Sarah’s—would spill into generations in which it has no place.

Pretense, for so long the key to Sarah’s methods, must now become the key to mine.

And I was expert yesterday. Certainly the police will not suspect; and I say that without smugness. The coroner will be helped towards his verdict of suicide by an array of evidence which quite exonerates me: for my wife’s fingerprints are on the weapon that killed her; the gun itself was found in her hand, her grip already vise-like in rigor mortis. Earthly justice and its petty officers will have no hold over me; having failed to find the truth so long ago, they will have no chance now. And I shall go alone, unhindered, to the greater justice that is death.

But I anticipate myself again.

A day’s events are all I have left to tell; a week’s at most. And as I go over them now I am struck by the curious irony of it; by the fact that I might never have found her out, might never have stumbled on the truth, had Sarah been less considerate about the arrangements for my birthday party. It was her thoughtfulness that exposed her in the end; her thoughtfulness and the little signs by which she intended me to know that she was thoughtful. She liked her wifely duty acknowledged, you see; acknowledged and appreciated. And I have known for weeks that something was up. But I’m particular about parties. I don’t like the tenants invited; and I don’t like some of my wife’s more fawningly agreeable friends. Sarah did not collect equals about her but sycophants; and I had no wish to entertain them on my birthday. So it was only natural that I should have tried to consult a guest list, so that by hinting at least I could have made my wishes known. My wife was always receptive in that way; it was a part of her genius to acquiesce easily over trifles.

I chose last Monday afternoon to search her desk because she was out, supervising the extension to the ticket office. And quite by chance I found the drawer she has kept it in all these years: a tiny drawer, hidden in the scrollwork, opened by a secret spring.

It was an odd key: heavy, large, but made of shining steel that seemed too modern for its design; cut for an old lock. And for a minute or two I turned it over in my hand, wondering why it was there and for which room it was intended. It seemed strange that my wife should have put it in so secret a drawer; strange also that though ancient in design the key itself could have been no more than forty or fifty years old. And it bore the stamp of a London shop, though all the house keys are cut—as they have been for generations—by a firm in Penzance. Curious, though not very, I put the key in my jacket pocket, resolving to ask Sarah about it once my party was over and I could confess—in a moment of lightness—to having searched her desk for a guest list. For the best part of a week it remained there; for though the jacket is a favorite one of mine and I wear it frequently, I give little thought to what its pockets hold. They are always cluttered with things.

It was pure coincidence, really, which showed me the truth. But then life owes more to Chance than we often admit; and it has played too great a part in my story to go unacknowledged now. It was Chance which introduced me to Ella; Chance which brought Eric from Vaugirard on that dreadful night with my forgotten violin; Chance which made me choose this jacket as I changed yesterday for an afternoon of interviews and castle tours. Sarah and I are both particular about guides, you see; and before someone is taken onto the permanent staff we ask them to give a tour which one of us joins: a kind of final evaluation, if you like.

It was a young Miss Reid yesterday afternoon, I think; and I joined her tour, preoccupied a little by other estate business but pleasant, as I always am, to the group of tourists which joined it too. Pleasant but detached; for that is the way to be with them. And through the house we went: down the china gallery; past the staircase door, now locked, which leads to Ella’s tower room; through the King’s Bedroom with its nineteenth-century four-poster and Chinese screens; finally to the great hall. My mind elsewhere, for I had heard and overheard the tour a thousand times before, I paid little attention to the monologue being given; and it was only outside the great hall, where the group had gathered to examine the door, that I remembered my duties as observer and listened. The guide, correctly and confidently, was explaining the provenance of the lock, thought to be the oldest still in use in the county; and it was only as she finished and we moved again that I felt the key in my pocket. It was clanging against some change.

Remembering it, and remembering also—as Miss Reid was reminding me—that the lock of the great hall is the largest in the house, I took the key out and tried it in the door. Unthinking, unaware, completely unconscious of the significance of what I was doing, I took the key and tried it and was pleased when it fitted so easily. Yes, I was pleased; for I used to think it pleasant to have things neatly explained. And with a heavy effort—for yearly oilings were due but had not yet been done—I ground the bolts slowly back.

It was only as I did so that something stirred; and even then it was only the faintest Creaking of memory. Ella’s trial, like Eric’s death, belonged to the years before my marriage; and I had avoided thinking of them both with careful diligence. Not wanting to remember I had tried to forget; and by and large I had succeeded. But I have always had an eye for detail. And something stirred in me as I took that key from the lock yesterday: something deep within me shifted; shifted and refused to settle. As the tour proceeded I gradually fell back from it, troubled by something, grasping for a memory I could not quite define but which I knew was there. And slowly, obscurely, lines from a far-off court report recurred to me; and as I tried to make them out I heard a prosecution witness state his name and place of work and explain how most keys are the same but he had remembered this one. And it was then that I knew.