Original Sin (12 page)

There was, she knew, the adult equivalent of this unfrightening world available to her. She could marry James de Witt and move into his charming house in Hillgate Village and have his children, the children she, too, wanted. She could rely on his love, be certain of his kindness, know that whatever problems their marriage might bring there would be no cruelty and no rejection. She might have taught herself, not to desire him, since that was not susceptible to the will, but to find in kindness and gentleness a substitute for desire, so that in time sex with him would become possible, even agreeable, at its lowest a price to be paid for his love, at its highest a pledge of affection and of belief that love could in time beget
love. But for three months she had been Gerard Etienne’s mistress. After that wonder, that astonishing revelation, she found that she couldn’t even bear James to touch her. Gerard, taking her casually, discarding her equally casually, had deprived her even of the consolation of the second best.

It was always the terror of the river, not its romance or its mystery, which had held her imagination and, with Gerard’s brutal rejection, these terrors, which she thought she had put away with childhood, reasserted themselves. This Thames was a dark tide of horror; that sodden algae-matted gate, leading into the fastness of the Tower, the thud of the axe, the tide lapping Wapping Old Stairs where pirates were taken and tied to the piles at low water until three tides—the Grace of Wapping—had flowed over them; the stinking hulks lying off Gravesend with their fettered human cargo. Even the river steamers butting upstream, their decks loud with laughter and brightly patterned with holidaymakers, brought back to mind unbidden the greatest of all Thames tragedies when, in 1878, the paddle steamer
Princess Alice
, returning loaded from a trip to Sheerness, was mown down by a collier and 640 people drowned. It seemed to her now that it was their screams that she heard in the cries of the gulls and, looking down at night at the dark river splattered with light, she could imagine the pale upward faces of the drowned children torn from their mothers’ arms floating like frail petals on the dark tide.

When she was fifteen her father had taken her for her first visit to Venice. He had said that fifteen was the earliest age at which a child could appreciate Renaissance art and architecture, but she had suspected even then that he preferred to travel alone and that taking her was a duty which he could no longer reasonably defer, but a duty nevertheless which held some promise of hope for both of them.

It was their first and last holiday together. She had expected bright, hot sun, gaudily clad gondoliers on blue water, gleaming marble palaces, dining alone with him in one of the new dresses chosen for her by the housekeeper, Mrs. Rawlings, for the occasion, drinking wine at dinner for the first time. She had longed desperately for the holiday to be a new beginning. It had begun badly. They had had to travel in the school holidays and the city was overcrowded. For the whole ten days the sky had been leaden with intermittent rain, its heavy drops pitting canals as brown as the Thames. Her impression was of constant noise, raucous foreign voices, the terror of losing her father in the crush, of dimly lit old churches in which the attendant would shuffle to switch on the light and illumine a fresco, a painting, an altarpiece. The air would be heavy with incense and the sour mustiness of wet clothes. Her father would edge her to the front of the jostling tourists and whisper to her, explaining the paintings, above the noise of discordant tongues and the distant calls of peremptory guides.

One picture remained strongly in memory. A mother nursing her baby under a stormy sky, a solitary male watcher. She knew that there was something to which she should respond, some mystery of subject and intention, and she longed to share her father’s excitement, to say something which, if it couldn’t be clever, would at least not cause him to turn away with the silent disapproval to which she had become accustomed. Always at the bad moments there were remembered words. “Madam was never the same after the child was born. That pregnancy killed her, no doubt about that. And now look what we’ve got landed with.” The woman, her name and purpose in the house now long forgotten, had probably only meant that what they were faced with was a large unmanageable house without the controlling hand of a mistress, but to
the child the meaning of the words had been plain and had remained plain. “She killed her mother and look what we’ve got in exchange.”

Another memory of that holiday remained sharp in the years to follow. It was on their first visit to the Accademia and, holding her gently by the shoulder, he had led her to a picture by Vittore Carpaccio,
The Dream of St. Ursula
. They were, for once, alone and, standing beside him, aware of the weight of his hand, she had found herself looking at her bedroom in Innocent House. Here were the twin rounded windows with their top half-moons filled with discs of bottle glass, the corner door ajar, the two vases on the window-shelf so like those at home, the same bed, a delicate four-poster with a high carved headboard and a tasselled fringe. Her father had said: “See, you sleep in a fifteenth-century Venetian bedroom.”

There was a woman in the bed, resting her head on her hand. Frances had asked, “Is that lady dead?”

“Dead? Why should she be dead?”

She had heard in his voice the familiar sharpness. She hadn’t answered, had said no more. The silence between them lengthened until, with the hand still on her shoulder but pressing more heavily now, or so it seemed, he had turned her away. But she had failed him again. It had always been her fate to be sensitive to his every mood but without the skill or the confidence to meet that mood or respond to his need.

They were divided even by religion. Her mother had been a Roman Catholic, but how devout she neither knew nor had any means of discovering. Mrs. Rawlings, a co-religionist employed a year before her mother’s death to be half-housekeeper to the ailing woman, half-child-minder, had been punctilious in taking her every Sunday to Mass but had otherwise ignored her religious education, giving the child the impression that religion
was something her father couldn’t understand and could barely tolerate, a feminine secret best not spoken of in his presence. They seldom went more than twice to any church. It was as if Mrs. Rawlings was a taster of religion, sampling the variety of ritual, architecture, music and sermons on offer, afraid of a premature commitment, of being recognized by the congregation, welcomed as a regular by the priest at the door, enticed into parish activities, perhaps even expected to receive visitors at Innocent House. As Frances grew older she suspected that finding a new church for Sunday morning Mass had become something of a private initiative test for Mrs. Rawlings, affording a sense of adventure and providing a measure of variety to her otherwise monotonous week and a lively subject of conversation on their way home.

“Not a very good choir, was it? Hardly up to Oratory standard. We must go to the Oratory again when I’ve got the energy. Too far for every Sunday but at least the sermon was short. I can’t be doing with long sermons. Very few souls saved after the first ten minutes, if you ask me.”

“I don’t like that Father O’Brien. That’s what he calls himself apparently. Very poor attendance. No wonder he was so friendly at the door. Wanted to entice us back next week, I don’t wonder.”

“Nice Stations of the Cross they’ve got. I like them carved. Those painted ones we saw at St. Michael’s last week were too gaudy by half. And at least the choirboys had clean surplices, someone did a good job of ironing there.”

After one Sunday morning, when they had heard Mass at a particularly dull church where the rain had clattered like hailstones on the temporary tin roof (“Not our class of person. We won’t be going there again.”), Frances had asked: “Why do I have to go to Mass every Sunday?”

“Because your Ma was RC. That’s what your father agreed. The boys would be brought up C of E, the daughters RC. Well, he got you.”

He had got her. The despised sex. The despised religion.

Mrs. Rawlings said: “There’s plenty of religions in the world. Everyone can find something to suit them. All you have to remember is that ours is the only true one. But there’s no point in thinking about it too much, not until you have to. I think we’ll go back to the cathedral next week. It’ll be Corpus Christi. They’ll put on a grand show for that, I shouldn’t wonder.”

It was a relief to her father and to her when, at twelve, she was sent to the convent. He had come himself to collect her at the end of the first term and she had overheard the Mother Superior’s words as she said goodbye to them at the door: “Mr. Peverell, the child has had virtually no instruction in her faith.”

“In my wife’s faith. Then, Mother Bridget, I suggest that you instruct her.”

They had with gentle patience done that for her, and much more. They had given her a brief period of security, the sense that she was valued, that it was possible she could be loved. They had prepared her for Oxford, which she supposed she ought to consider a bonus since Mother Bridget had frequently impressed on her that the intention of a true Catholic education was to prepare her for death. They had done that too, but she was less sure that they had prepared her for life. Certainly they hadn’t prepared her for Gerard Etienne.

She turned back into the sitting room, closing the window firmly behind her. The sound of the river became faint, a gentle susurration on the night air. Gabriel had said to her, “He can have no power over you unless you give it to him.” Somehow she had to find the will and the courage to break that power finally and for ever.

Mandy’s first four weeks at Innocent House, which began inauspiciously with a suicide and were to end dramatically in murder, seemed in retrospect one of the happiest months of her working life. As always, she adapted quickly to the daily routine of the office and with a few exceptions liked her fellow workers. She was given plenty to do, which suited her, and the work was more varied and more interesting than that which normally came her way.

At the end of her first week Mrs. Crealey had asked if she was happy and Mandy had replied that there were worse jobs and that she might as well stick it out for a bit longer, which was as far as she ever went in expressing satisfaction with a job. She had rapidly become accepted at Innocent House; youth and vitality combined with high efficiency are seldom resented for long. Miss Blackett, after a week of staring across at her with repressive severity, had apparently decided that she had known worse temps. Mandy, always quick to recognize her own interest, treated Miss Blackett with a flattering mixture of deference and confidence; fetching her coffee from
the kitchen, asking her advice although with no intention of taking it, and accepting some of the duller routine tasks with cheerful goodwill. Privately she thought the poor old thing was pathetic; you had to be sorry for her. It was obvious that Mr. Gerard for one couldn’t stand the sight of her, and no wonder. Mandy’s private opinion was that Miss Blackett was for the chop. They were, in any case, too busy to spend time considering how little they had in common and how much each deplored the other’s clothes, hairstyle and attitude to senior staff. Nor was Mandy required to spend every day in Miss Blackett’s office. She was frequently called to take shorthand from Miss Claudia or Mr. de Witt, and one Tuesday when George was away ill with a violent stomach upset she took over the reception desk and coped with the switchboard with no more than a few misdirected calls.

On the Wednesday and Thursday of her second week she spent two days in the publicity department helping to organize a couple of publicity tours and a signing session and was introduced by Maggie FitzGerald, Miss Etienne’s assistant, to the foibles of authors, those unpredictable and oversensitive creatures on whom, as Maggie reluctantly conceded, the fortunes of Peverell Press ultimately depended. There were the frighteners, who were best left to Miss Claudia to cope with, the timid and insecure who needed constant reassurance before they could utter even one word on a BBC chat show and for whom the prospect of a literary luncheon induced a mixture of inarticulate terror and indigestion. Equally hard to handle were the aggressively overconfident who, if not restrained, would break free of their minder and leap into any convenient shop with offers to sign their books, thus reducing the carefully worked-out publicity schedule to chaos. But the worst, Maggie confided, were the conceited, usually those
whose books sold the least well, but who demanded first-class fares, five-star hotels, a limousine and a senior member of staff to escort them and who wrote furious letters of complaint if their signings didn’t attract a queue round the block. Mandy enjoyed her two days in publicity: the youthful enthusiasm of the staff, cheerful voices calling against the perpetual stridency of the telephone, travellers vociferously welcomed, homing in for a gossip and an exchange of news, the sense of urgency and impending crisis. She returned to her seat in Miss Blackett’s room with reluctance.

She was less enthusiastic about requests that she take dictation from Mr. Bartrum in charge of accounts who, she confided to Mrs. Crealey, was boring, middle-aged, and treated her like something the cat had brought in. The accounts department was in number 10 and, after a stint with Mr. Bartrum, Mandy would escape upstairs for a few minutes of chat, flirtation and the ritual exchange of insults with the three packing staff. They inhabited their private world of bare floors and trestle tables, of collapsible brown cartons, Sellotape and immense balls of twine, of the distinctive and exciting smell of books fresh from the press. She liked them all: Dave of the bushranger hat who, despite his size, had arm muscles like footballs and could shift extraordinary weights; Ken who was tall and lugubrious and silent; and Carl, the warehouse manager who had been with the firm since he was a boy. “They’ll do no good with this one,” he would say, slapping a hand on a carton.

“He can’t go wrong,” confided Dave admiringly. “He can tell a bestseller from a dud just by smelling it. He don’t even ’ave to read ’em.”