The Colonel's Daughter Read online

  ‘Frightening muck!’ he whispers to himself. But one sentence lurks in his mind. He has arranged this sentence into a rectangle which looks roughly like a door with no handle:

  For several minutes he stares at the door, drawing and redrawing its lines in his head. Then he picks up the receiver of a green telephone that sits on Charlotte’s desk near to her typewriter and makes an important call to Camden HQ. Detective Inspector Pitt, CID, a smart, quiet stick of a man, offers Richards his curt congratulations.

  *

  And a clean blond waiter arrives. His hand is golden in the tableau of white cloth, crystal glass and green wine bottle that settles picturesquely into Amelia’s mind. Beyond the high terrace, the sun is very hot. Blue butterflies flutter above a bank of euphorbia blooms.

  ‘I think,’ says Amelia, ‘that these mountains simply must have been the original Garden of Eden. Don’t you, Duffy darling?’

  *

  Jim Reese is on the move. As the train hurtles towards Brighton, he makes a simple plan for the recovery of himself. Easy. Everything’s easy when you take control and stop the other fuckers shaping your life. Especially women. First his mother: ‘I know you’ll understand, Jimmy, I need the money and our Mr Ripley’s a very good resident, so I see no alternative, now that it’s a question of a long stay, to giving him your room . . .’ Then, years later, Charlotte: conning him he could be something because of a caseful of stolen glittery shittery richness. The gall. The temerity! The dumb insensitivity! Jim Reese pummels the armrest of the British Rail seat. Strong women. How he has come to fear the smell and flesh and the souls of strong women. Never again will any woman matter to him. They will simply be matter: thighs, breasts, cunt. Dispensible. Uncherished. Sheer matter. And yet, perhaps not even that . . .

  ‘Ticket!’ snaps the train guard. Jim Reese returns to the stuffy carriage and the fleeting summer fields outside it. As he hands the guard his ticket for clipping, he decides that on arrival he will go straight to the beach.

  It is late afternoon when he arrives. Families with rugs and towels and windbreaks on the pebbly sand are kindly lit by the deepening sun. Children make a bobbing and jumping line to the ice-cream van with its little jangle of Italian music. Posters advertise a costume exhibition from some TV Classic Series at the Pavillion. From the stately white houses at the east end of the front, dogs are harnessed for teatime walks by retired people in baggy clothes. Brighton. Jim stares. The sea rolls in, majestic but calm. He fills his lungs and begins to walk towards it.

  *

  The sunlight is slipping from the hall at Sowby Manor when Garrod leaves Rommel’s desert at last, leaves his old comrades with their ice-cold visions of German eyes and wakes in the light of the Duke of Abercorn. He is lying with his head on the first stair. Inside his pyjamas, the pain is lessened. Slowly, tremblingly, he pulls a shaky old hand from under him and lets it knead his chest, exploring for pain and stones and weights. Under his hand, now, is his mothflutter of a heartbeat, irregular and thin. His hand sends no message of reassurance, only of confusion. His head lolls on the stair. Inside his head is, far away, the crying of an animal. He stares up. The Duke of Abercorn gazes above his head, out towards the fanlight of the front door and the tender sky beyond.

  Garrod sucks his lips, removes his hand from his chest and presses it, palm down, to the cold wood floor. He pushes with this hand and arm till all the top half of his body is raised and leaning on the stair. His body feels empty and cavernous and dark. His heart flaps feebly like a bat inside this cave of flesh. He listens – to his heart, to the dog’s yowling. He knows, yet cannot remember why he is alone in the house. Only the dog, perhaps, is in it somewhere, in a room too far away to find. The grandfather clock chimes six.

  ‘M’lady,’ he mumbles. Yet he knows she isn’t there. He is merely inviting this cool, once beautiful woman to save him from the desert of his dreams. And there it is, about to form around him again: the terrible sun, the tanks like insects, a circling bird, higher than unimaginable height. So he fights it. He clings to the banister, holds fast to the shape and feel of the banister. The desert blurs, recedes, Garrod is panting, drenched with effort. Yet the banister is there, solid, real, a lighthouse, a mast . . . And the lifeboat is coming closer, closer. Onto the gravel of the drive bounds Detective Inspector Pitt’s white Rover. Beside him, held tightly to herself by her inertia reel seatbelt is WPC Verna Willis.

  ‘Beautiful house, Sir,’ ventures WPC Willis.

  ‘Yes,’ snaps the dry Pitt.

  And they come on.

  *

  Doyle is stitched, bandaged, replenished. He wakes and stares at the bottle of blood sending its drip drip of life into his arm. He does not yet know that Julietta Annipavroni saved his life, yet senses that hours ago, in a featureless darkness, it may have needed saving.

  He is grateful. A young nurse is bending over him and he takes her smile into his head.

  ‘Okay, Mr Doyle?’

  The nurse has a fine, thin mouth and an olive complexion. She might belong rightfully to India or even to Italy. Doyle cannot yet say.

  ‘My oh my!’ he says. His mouth feels parched, like an old man’s mouth. The nurse lifts him with ease, holds a drinking cup to his mouth. He sucks water, his head nudging the nurse’s breast. He lies back on his pillow and tries a smile. The smile cracks him. He feels the need to apologise.

  ‘Did I say anything about a gas station?’ he asks.

  The nurse smooths his sheet. Her arm is covered with a fluff of dark hairs.

  ‘I didn’t hear it.’

  ‘Had a hell of a dream – ’bout my Dad. He died in ’63.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Did I miss a day or anything?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What day is this?’

  ‘Saturday.’ And she examines the watch pinned to her starched apron. ‘Six ten in the evening.’

  It is then that Doyle remembers Margaret. Margaret is miles away on the other side of London, snoozing with her new lover, Michael, in her new lover’s new double bed. These bodies are hot and gentle and drowsy, but down the corridor from the room in which Doyle has just woken is the body of Charlotte Browne, cold and formidable under the shaven head, wide awake and angry. She plucks at her bandages. The wound burns like ice. A pink, floppy-breasted woman wearing lipstick is staring at her from the next-door bed. She smiles while readjusting the neckline of her pink nightie.

  ‘Is there a telephone?’ asks Charlotte.

  ‘Yes,’ smiles the pink woman, ‘in the corridor, opposite the first of the men’s wards.’

  But then Charlotte remembers, she has no money, no handbag, no clothes. She opens her locker and looks inside. It’s empty. Her anger with Jim Reese is infecting her wound and making her body ache.

  ‘Was anyone here?’ she asks the woman, ‘A man?’

  ‘Only the policeman. You were sleeping.’

  ‘Policeman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  So the phone call is useless. She knows Jim has gone, gone heaven knows where, in spite of her will to give his life purpose and shape. Only her strength is left now and she senses that this has ebbed, like Samson’s, with the shaving of her hair. She would like to kill Jim Reese, for the wounding, for his presumption that he could rob her of her will. She remembers triumphantly her drive in the dusk to the great manor smelling of polish and flowers; she remembers the pathetic whining of the old dog in the gunroom, then the feel and weight of the gun, the cottagey smell of the woollen balaclava with which she covered her face, and the scuttling obedience of the servile man, Garrod, going shivering before her down the cellar steps, opening the safe with the same timid hands that have worn gloves to preside at the gross and formal richness of Ascot dinners, Jubilee parties, election night suppers, standing to one side in his thick night attire, head sad and limp as her memory selects the items of greatest value and she arranges them unhurriedly in the big suitcase. She remembers her sorrow for Garrod as she sits him
down on the polished parquet of the hall, gags him with a soft scarf and ropes him to the banisters with nylon sailcord. How long, she wonders, will he sit and mourn his failure to protect his employers’ precious things? Before someone comes. A charwoman? A cleaning slave with a key? In her childhood, there were four living-in servants at Sowby. Time has passed. Sowby still stands, protected and protector, yet depleted. Charlotte drives fast away from it, away from the scent of catmint and childhood and trifling obedience to cruel ways. I, she says aloud as she flies down the chestnut avenue, have committed no crime. The fearful unkindnesses of genteel lives make wounds deeper than any I have inflicted. All I have done is to snatch the weapons of tomorrow – for use today. She feels then a rising in her of terrible excitement. She drives badly, blindly, fast, then she stops the car in a quiet lane, walks into the darkness and listens to the whispers of the momentous night. The past is dismembered, like a body, and inhabits only the space of a suitcase; the present is this warm, ripe darkness; the future is growing steadily in her and needs only the slow light of morning to begin.

  Yet in the morning, the future changed. It was altered, as the future so very frequently is, by anger. The pink woman takes up some pink knitting. Charlotte senses that underneath the lump of bedclothes this woman is pregnant. She yawns at the terrible boredom of life’s patterns. She curses the ebbing of strength. Jim Reese has beaten her, yet for what? For that drooling dog, pride? For that nameless stray, freedom? She sees his narrow white wrists on her bony shoulders, pressing her headful of understanding into his belly. Probably he loved no one, nor ever would, yet in her weakness, now, she begins to cry for the loss of him. She lies back on the clean pillows and lets her tears fall silently. The pink woman looks away. A ward sister appears at the door, unseen by Charlotte. The ward sister crosses to Charlotte’s bed and, without speaking to her, draws the curtains round it. Charlotte stares at the flowery curtains and asks in a quiet voice to be left alone. The ward sister doesn’t reply. She lifts Charlotte up and forward, plumps the pillows, sets her back on the plumped pillows and says coldly: ‘Alright, Miss Browne. A police sergeant is here. I shall now permit him to question you.’

  *

  Having woken so early on the ‘heavenly day’, Amelia Browne feels tired by the long walk down from the Glochenspiel. Her lilac dress is now a little crumpled and there are moist patches under her arms which she feels are ‘most dreadfully common’.

  ‘You have a swim, Duffy dear,’ she says in the cool of the hotel foyer, ‘I think I’m going to have a bit of a rest.’

  Colonel Browne knows he can snooze pleasantly in the sun by the pool, so he changes into his bathing trunks, takes his bathing towel and his airmail copy of the Telegraph, leaving his wife to rest her papery body in the silence of their room.

  Amelia Browne doesn’t sleep, however. She lies still and examines her thoughts for the source of a minute trembling of anxiety that flutters round her stomach. She thinks of her Duffy, his heavy body on the pool lounger, his bald head shiny as a conker in the late afternoon sun. She knows Duffy is alright. His war wound has been mercifully quiet lately; there has been no recurrence, thank heavens, of the prostate trouble which threatened a year ago. He is healthy and jolly and she loves him for his health and jollity. No, it isn’t Duffy causing the anxiety. So she searches. For a brief and uncomfortable space of time, she summons Charlotte to her mind. The anxiety is not lessened nor satisfied. Yet Amelia Browne feels glad that she has allowed herself, in this cool, pretty room, to confront this strange and vexing only child, to look at her as she must be now after seven years of absence and seven grim years of silence. She cannot distort or change her picture of the golden hair that scarcely darkened after childhood. She cannot believe that this has altered. But the face? The face will have aged a little, grown more severe no doubt, just as, from the little she ever hears, the life is of horrendous severity, unimaginable, alien, discomforting and cruel.

  Amelia’s emotional repertoire is ‘not up to tragedy’, as she once wittily said while eating profiteroles at Government House, Rhodesia. If it were, she might place herself in the role of Lear, more sinned against than sinning by the fierce daughter she has never allowed herself to understand. She has, of course, asked the genial Duffy several times: ‘Where did we go wrong, Duffy sweet?’ But the Colonel mistrusts all analysis, philosophical and psychological in particular, so cannot answer this bewildering question, except to state: ‘We’re not the ones who went wrong, Amelia. Blame the reds. Blame the Trotskyites or the Mao Tse Tungites or the heaven-knows-whatites. But don’t blame us.’ Yet Amelia is not comforted. Her memory returns very often to a windy day at Broadstairs – or was it Woolacombe? – when some loathesome little boy stuck a metal spade into her daughter’s thigh, and the wind took her cries out to sea as she sat with Duffy in the dunes, and when they came at last to the child, the sand was crimson with her blood. She blamed the wind for taking the crying away into the ocean. She blamed the Nanny for allowing the boy to stray from her side. She did not blame herself. But now she suspects, though she doesn’t mention it to Duffy, that other wounds may have been inflicted on Charlotte without her noticing them. Certainly Rhodesia seemed to wound her daughter, though nobody could understand why when it was such a paradise then. But when asking to be flown back to England, Charlotte had used peculiar words: ‘I want you to release me,’ she had said.

  The sun nears the edge of the mountain that will extinguish it. The Colonel gets up, feeling chilly, and goes back into the hotel. Amelia Browne sleeps at last for a short while.

  *

  And on the beach at Brighton, the sun is getting lower. Canvas windbreaks are tugged up and folded away. The tops of thermoses are screwed on. Children are held and dried. Out in the deep middle distance, a well fitted and elegant yacht makes headway in the evening offshore breeze. The captain and owner of this yacht is a ginger-haired bank manager called Owen Lasky. His wife, Jessica-Lee Lasky, is American by origin and still fond of cocktails. As Owen urges his boat towards the horizon, Jessica-Lee is hauling on ropes and thinking about manhattans.

  Jim Reese is swimming. Brought up on the edge of that piece of ocean, sometime pale-limbed member of the Under Elevens Neptune Club, he swims well and strongly, enjoying the immensity of the water. Of water, of this sea, he wants to say: here is my element. He rolls onto his back and floats. The gentle swell is kinder to his head than any pillow or woman’s breast because it moves him forward. Man breaks from the kind fluids of the womb and is dried and wrapped, tottering out his futile years on two dry legs. But the pain of those thousands of days of standing upright! The longings to lie down and be rocked by love or purpose or adulation! Earth. The wrong element. An evolutionary mistake. The root cause of all oppression and the abandonment of children in cupboard rooms smelling of damp laundry mangles and mothballs. WE ARE NOT PEOPLE OF DUST! He mouths this to the clear sky and the wind. A seagull shrieks. He sits up in the wonderful sea and it shows him the beach, grey-yellow, the white houses, the cliffs like crumbly coconut-ice. The people are not even blobs or dots. The people are not there.

  So he lies back, comforted. Then he rolls over, holds the fathoms in his arms like a lover and each second the body he rides hurls him forward with its own changing shape. So begins the love affair of Jim Reese with the sea. As the sun sinks and the colours of the sun spread through the water, it grows more intense and harder to relinquish. From the stern of her husband’s yacht, Jessica-Lee Lasky, holding an imaginary cocktail glass in her left hand, sees it for one piercing second: the flesh and dark head of Jim Reese embedded in the body of the ocean. She calls to Owen Lasky: ‘Owen! I saw a man!’ And Owen traipses to the jolting aft section of his boat and stares with his wife at the empty water. They stare and stare. Jessica-Lee Lasky forgets cocktails and starts to feel afraid. Owen pats her shoulder and says in his bank manager’s voice: ‘You must have imagined him, dear.’ But no, Jessica-Lee feels certain that she saw him, this person holding fast t
o the water itself as if to a raft, and asks her husband to turn the boat round.

  *

  Detective Inspector Pitt and WPC Verna Willis have carried Garrod to a bedroom which he, yet not they, recognises as Colonel Browne’s own bedroom. In this lofty bed, the old man is becoming for the second time in his life the returning war hero, the lad who showed courage and initiative, the lad who came through . . .

  ‘Sailcord,’ he says in a disdainful, tired voice, ‘she tied me with sailcord. There’s give in sailcord, you see, Sir.’

  The ambulance has been called. WPC Willis, who did a year’s nursing training before she joined the force, has taken Garrod’s pulse and listened to his heart and both these manifestations of life are fluttery and feeble. She looks concerned as Pitt ploughs on with his questions.

  ‘Did you recognise the woman?’

  ‘No, Sir.’

  ‘We have reason to believe the woman was Colonel Browne’s daughter.’

  ‘I never met the daughter. I came to this house in ’76. She was on the television that year or the next. Some demonstration. She had red hair. But I never met her.’

  ‘But this woman was about her age, was she?’

  ‘I don’t know, Inspector. Her face was covered. And the hair.’

  ‘How had she got into the house?’

  ‘Well. She walked in. There wasn’t any noise.’

  ‘So she had a key to the front door?’

  ‘I reckon.’

  ‘The door wasn’t bolted?’

  Garrod winces. Now the returning war hero remembers the unfastened safety catch on the rifle, the puncture in the spare tyre of the jeep . . . The circling bird begins its far off turning and Garrod is silent.

  ‘Mr Garrod? Was the front door not bolted?’

  Garrod’s head lolls. He whispers: ‘Dunno how she could have known . . .’

  ‘Known?’

  ‘I’ve been ill, Sir. Laid up.’

  ‘And you believe the woman knew this?’

  ‘Or I would have remembered the door . . .’