The Colonel's Daughter Read online

  Within hours, news of Garrod’s death reaches Camden Police Station. Charles Ogden-Nichols looks grave in the manner of an idle poet as he privately notes that the charge will now be manslaughter. Charlotte is closed like a mollusc with her thoughts of prison-death. Months. Years. Prison-cancer. Release at fifty, old, obese, corrupted, idle, finished. And for what? It was fine, of course, the night of stars, the glint of flowers as she went in, the white face of the Duke of Abercorn watching her through time . . . And the Colonel is punished, her mother is punished at last – for their hearts empty of love and their heads full of silver knives and paperweights. Yet once more, because of them, she will be locked away. As a child, it was her head they imprisoned with sighings after royalty and debutante balls; now it is her body.

  Charlotte sits. They allow her to sit. Already, Ogden-Nichols is composing the stirring sonnets of her case. He smiles at her, but she looks away. He and she are given cups of tea.

  *

  And at their Brighton mooring, Owen Lasky and his wife, Jessica-Lee, clamber out of their foam rubber bunks, twitch their elasticated curtains to let in a shaft of sun and put on their tin kettle to make coffee.

  Until it was dark, they turned their boat in wider and wider circles, searching for the body of the man Jessica-Lee had seen for less than a second, lying with his mouth in the waves. Owen grumbled. What a stupid waste of time, this making of circles. But Jessica-Lee would not let them go back till they were dizzy and tired with their turning in the wind and all the lights had come on in the town. Then they limped in, moored the boat, took down the sails, went to their favourite pub to forget. Owen drank beer. Jessica-Lee drank gin fizzes. That night, they had dreams of Miami.

  Jim Reese saw the boat. He saw it tack and turn, tack and turn. He knew that for the second time in twenty-four hours someone was trying to save him with clumsy, futile action. He laughed aloud in the gathering dusk, the laughter and the body that housed it still strong, still riding the water like a lover. He knew that the boat wouldn’t find him. Darkness and his sea would cover and conceal him.

  He remembered the exploding toys of John Ripley. One was a boat. You assembled it, piece by piece, deck by deck, around a central spring. You aimed amidships with your three-inch lead-painted torpedo. The boat burst into satisfactory fragments on the hearth rug. John Ripley laughed. Mother screamed a little scream. John Ripley said, don’t worry lad, the whole point is you can’t break it. You put it back together and then you have another go. Easy. Doddle! Like this, around the central spring . . .

  The central spring . . . ? The boat tacks, turns . . . Lights come on in it. The central spring will, if you aim too often and over and over again at the area of greatest weakness . . . yes, even there on the hearth rug in front of the brittle white tubes of the gas fire . . . right there, with Mother looking on, arms folded, hip slightly jutted to one side, makeup on, smelling of Blue Grass . . . there, where all had once seemed so exceptionally safe and familiar and comforting and eternal . . . there, the central spring will one day snap. Yet all continues to tack, to turn, to make its habitual movement, just as if nothing had occurred. No one but you perceives that the spring is broken. You reassemble the boat. The boat is whole, deck on deck. Merely, it will no longer explode when hit. And Mother takes up the tea cosy stained by her greasy hands, pops it over the brown pot, struts out into the hall and calls John Ripley down to tea. You leave the dead toy on the hearth rug. You sit at the table and watch their mouths, runny with egg, oily with bacon. They talk and laugh and gobble and suck their tea. You want to say to them, the central spring went. You take a breath, to begin. Before any words come out, Mother reprimands you with her eyes: you have ceased to matter.

  When the boat gave up its useless search and returned to harbour, the great depths of the sea began to beat like music in the ears of Jim Reese. The music invaded him, commanding his hands, his arms, his legs, his pelvis to keep time. Water streamed off his forehead and into his hair. The cold of the ocean became, with its new rhythm, a fierce heat. Never had movement been so exquisite a thing. Never in the turning multicoloured lights and the screaming dreams of Vegas had body and music been one as they were now one. And Jim Reese knew that it would last forever. The sky would fill with stars and it would go on and on. Dawn would come and daybreak and autumn and sighing and sunset, and still it would play. Because it was his. His own.

  *

  Franklin Doyle discharges himself from hospital and goes home to his flat. On the mat is a note in Margaret’s handwriting. He picks it up, almost without curiosity, and takes it to his desk, where he telephones a glazier and asks for someone to come and mend his window.

  Mrs Annipavroni had cleaned out the cat litter tray and scrubbed with Flash and Vim at the bloodstains on the kitchen floor. The whole flat smells of Vim. But it is tidy and quiet. Doyle re-enters it with a feeling of gratefulness. He telephones a florist and orders carnations and cornflowers to be sent to Kilburn, to Julietta Annipavroni, whose address begins: ‘Staircase B’. He feels grateful, too, that his own address doesn’t begin with Staircase B. He imagines the Annipavroni family lugging their Italian life up and down dark concrete steps.

  Doyle pours himself fresh orange juice and sits, stroking the cat. He ignores Margaret’s note on the desk. His head is crammed with half-formed plans, jostling each other for place and meaning. His wound throbs. He is sweating slightly. He has a sudden longing to sleep. He imagines Charlotte’s cold strong hands holding his head and laying it gently on her shoulder. She becomes the man, he the woman, content to lie safely at her side. He sleeps and offers himself. She is aloof in her hard body. She crushes him with her indifference, but his yearnings for her only increase.

  The telephone wakes him. As he walks to the desk, he knows he has dreamed of Charlotte, yet the dream has left him. All he wants to hear, as he lifts the receiver, is Charlotte’s voice. He is aware, in this instant, that he has fallen in love.

  Margaret sounds close, as if she were calling from an adjoining room. She’s been with Michael, she says. She thought she loved Michael, yet in his room, right there in his bed, she began to remember Doyle . . .

  ‘Oh, Margaret . . .’ Doyle’s voice is weary, irritated, ‘please don’t bug me with this kind of thing.’

  ‘But it happened, Franklin. I wasn’t consciously thinking about you and I suddenly started to miss you and regret –’

  ‘Regret what?’

  ‘I don’t think I can leave you.’

  ‘You’ve left me. You left me!’

  ‘I know. But it’s all wrong.’

  Doyle sighs. He looks at his wound. Yesterday, he might have died for Margaret. Now, already, he has replaced her.

  ‘I think I need both of you, Franklin. Can you understand this? Franklin?’

  ‘Oh bullshit.’

  ‘What? I can’t hear you, Franklin. Did you hear what I said about needing you both?’

  He says nothing. His wound aches. He must buy painkillers. Then his dream comes back to him. He lies, arms and legs spread wide, and Charlotte’s body is above him, moving gently, purposefully, yet almost invisibly in near darkness. Then she lowers her head and whispers to his mouth: ‘This isn’t love. I’m giving you blood, that’s all.’

  ‘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.