The Drowning People (35 page)

Standing on the podium, the bronze laurels in my hand, my eyes flicked over row upon row of cheering faces and a blur of clapping hands; and as I bowed again I saw a slender, tilting neck and a smile that made the breath catch in my throat. I looked again; and surer now, reeling a little, smiling still, I moved along the stage, shaking hands with the other finalists, accepting their words of congratulation, thinking only of how to leave the concert hall, of how to escape into the night with the only person I wanted to see. Backstage there were television cameras and newspaper reporters and my agent telling me to go back on for another bow, to milk the applause; and as I did so the blood beat furiously in my head and my hands were wet with sweat from the fear that Ella might get lost in the crowd, that I might not find her after all.

I did not go on for a third bow but went straight to the finalists’ dressing room, where my fellow competitors were putting away their instruments and taking off their ties. In a frenzy, almost, I said my good-byes and put my violin into its case; and then I raced through cavernous corridors to the players’ entrance, hoping to slip out before the crowds arrived. But as I opened the door heard with quick exasperation the high-pitched shriek “There he is!” and I found myself in the center of a group of excited well-wishers and reporters, questions and autograph books flying.

Telling myself that Ella would find me, that in fact it was best for me to stay in one, obvious, place, I breathed deeply and faced the barrage of words and notebooks. My pulse racing, I took out my pen and began to sign my name, telling myself to be calm.

“May I join your devoted supplicants, James?”

I had seen her before she spoke; and the rounded vowels of an English accent made me pale with disappointment.

“My God … Sarah.”

She smiled up at me as I recovered myself. And as I took another program and automatically signed my name, I recovered sufficiently to ask her what she was doing there.

“Watching you, of course,” she replied, smiling still; and I noticed that she seemed less forbidding than I remembered her. “I thought I should demonstrate my acquaintance with the winner if I possibly could.”

“What?”

The din of the crowd drowned out her quiet voice.

“Congratulations,” she called, louder this time. And she leaned forward and kissed my cheek.

Someone took our photograph and a reporter asked who the lovely lady was. “Come on, give us your name!”

Sarah blushed and I thought with longing how beautiful her cousin was.

“It’s been such a long time,” she said as I began to push my way towards my car.

“Yes.”

“And how have you been since I saw you last?”

“Oh … well. Working hard.”

“Winning prizes.”

“Only one.”

“But what a prize.” She looked up at me and her blue eyes met mine as though we had known each other always.

“It was kind of you to come and seek me out,” I said finally. “I thought your family had a three-line whip on their presence at Seton.”

“I’ve been in London today, collecting a dress.”

“I see.”

She smiled at me again. There was a slight pause.

“Well good-bye,” she said at last. “Congratulations on tonight. I’m sure it will be the first of many.”

“Thank you.”

“And now that we’ve bumped into each other so unexpectedly, we mustn’t lose touch again.”

“Of course not.” My key was in my door now.

“Good-bye again, James.”

“Good-bye, Sarah.”

And I leaned down and kissed her cheek. As I did so I smelled her scent, a scent of different cigarettes, of unknown soap, of strange perfume: the smell I smelled yesterday afternoon, made richer then by the thick sweetness of warm blood, as I bent over her bleeding body.

CHAPTER 28

T
HE DAYS BETWEEN THE HIBBERDSON FINAL
and the Harcourts’ party were busy ones for me; and between the giving of interviews and the receiving of congratulations I had little time to myself. What time I did have I spent with my family, whose praise was reserved but wholehearted, or with Camilla Boardman, whose predictions of future glory knew no bounds. But the person I really wanted, of course, was Ella; and I chafed at the days which still separated us, though I understood why they must do so. I, like her, had no wish to be reunited under the watchful eyes of her family and our friends; and having waited so long, a week was nothing.

In any case my days passed in a haze of euphoria the like of which I had not thought to feel again.

For the first time in three years—and from a distance of fifty years I know this to be true—I had a sense of participating in life in some real way; a sense that in its details, in which I had feigned interest for so long, there was some meaning for me again. By writing to Ella I had admitted defeat; I acknowledged that. I accepted, in my own mind at least, that I had been unable to continue indefinitely in self-inflicted imprisonment for the part I had played in Eric’s death. And this acceptance freed me; Ella’s love, or rather the knowledge that she loved me still, liberated me from the past in a way which I was helpless to resist. Try though I might I could not silence a quiet, insistent voice which told me that life might be a fine thing after all; that perhaps there were better ways of making amends to Eric than the spiritual mutilation which had been my only recourse until then. And for six nights he disappeared from my dreams, his sightless eyes replaced by the sound of Ella’s laugh, the image of his soaking body by the warmth of her cheek against mine.

I almost told Camilla everything in my desire to share my happiness; but she was full of her own news and plans and no opportunity arose for me to speak. For too long I had assumed the role of appreciative listener; and the run-up to her night of glory was no time to choose to alter things.

“It’s
so
much work, darling,” she told me one evening on the telephone. “Even now people are coming for last-minute alterations. And you’ve never
heard
so much conversation about shoes. It’s enough to send the puritan in one insane.”

Camilla’s facility for martyrdom, be it social or commercial, had only increased with the passing of the years.

“You’ve no
idea
how draining it is.”

“None at all, I’m afraid.”

“Lucky old musicker. I’m sure playing old ditties on a fiddle can’t be
half
as difficult as advising Lady Markham on handbags.”

“Not half as difficult.”

“Don’t be
cheeky,
young man. We can’t all have just won the Hibberdson, you know.”

“Hmmm.” But I was thinking of Ella and of how she would congratulate me.

“Speaking of which,” my friend continued, “I’m taking you to dinner to celebrate next Wednesday. Eight thirty sharp. I’ll pick you up.”

And with that she rang off.

So three nights before the ball, over a dinner broken by frenzied interruptions from Camilla’s mobile phone (“It’s
so
tiresome, I know. But clients
must
feel that one is contactable.”), she told me several things: some important, some less so. Details, at any rate, which I must chase now and recapture if ever I am to do the planning of it all any justice.

I remember Camilla describing her clients to me
(“Terribly
indiscreet, I know, but
such
fun—and you’re quite trustworthy”). I remember the hushed tones in which she told me that Ella would not be wearing a dress at
all
but a suit of men’s evening clothes, especially cut. I remember her saying that Sarah Harcourt (“You remember her, don’t you, Jamie?”) had come to her for initial fittings but had finally chosen some
hideously
obvious red concoction from a rival designer.
“Such
a pity, darling, since she’s
actually
rather pretty and could have looked quite good,” whispered Camilla with more than a hint of pique. “But there’s no accounting for taste,
is
there?”

From her mother, my friend had learned details of the party’s arrangements; and she related these eagerly too as our food arrived. Over steamed asparagus I learned that there was going to be a bonfire (because Atlantic winds can be
freezing,
even in September) and fireworks and hothouse roses and a huge marquee. “They’re not letting the guests into much of the house itself,” said Camilla confidentially.
“Perfectly
understandable, of course, because there’re
so
many valuable things. And I think a marquee will do
fabulously
in any case.”

I nodded; and asked whether reports that an American film star was flying her hairdresser over for the night were true.

“Probably,
darling. That’s just the kind of stunt Mummy would dream up. You know how she is.”

I did know; and together we laughed.

I remember Camilla’s undisguised excitement; the eagerness with which she related her tidbits of pre-party scandal; the professional pride which lent a weight to her pronouncements which they had lacked in the early days of our friendship.

“You can count on it that everyone dressed by me will look
fabulous,”
she promised as she signed her receipt—for
she
was taking
me
; it was
her
celebratory treat—and kissed me good-bye. “I’ll show you the pictures when I get back. And I’ll tell you all then.”

Wishing that I had written to Ella sooner, for then we could have enjoyed the festivities together, thinking wistfully of how lovely she would look, I left the restaurant with my arm around Camilla’s shoulders and saw my friend into a taxi.

“Bye,”
she called from the back window. “See you soon with
lots
of news.”

“Good-bye,” I called after her, waving.

But it was not Camilla who told me of that party, though she filled in the details for me later, days later, when most of the events were a matter of public knowledge. It was not from her lips that I learned of what had happened; Fate permitted me no such civilities. I read it all on the front page of a fellow commuter’s newspaper in the heat of a crowded Underground train four days after our dinner.
PEER MURDERED AT SOCIETY FUND-RAISER
bellowed the headline; and my mouth dry, fear catching at my throat, I saw Ella’s father staring at me from the center of the page, his eyes smiling, his arm around his daughter’s dinner-jacketed shoulders.

In disbelief I left the train at the next station, moving slowly at first through the crush on the platform; then quickly, impatiently, brushing past the queues on the escalator, swearing at the broken barrier machine, running at last with the blood beating on my brain to the newspaper stall at the station’s entrance.

I was sitting at home, numb with disbelief, when Camilla called that afternoon, almost in tears. “Oh God, James,” she said. “Oh God. Have you heard?”

I had heard; of course I had. It would have been impossible for me not to have done. The story was in every paper; on every channel; by now it seemed the subject of every overheard conversation. In front of electrical shop windows people in their lunch hours watched the banks of television screens for news of it.

“Everyone
saw,
you see,” she said. “Hundreds of people watched her do it.”

And as I listened I thought inconsequentially, as one does think at times like that, that Camilla’s voice as she spoke was oddly expressionless for one with such a talent for colorful delivery; that she sounded distant, distracted, unlike her usual self. I listened to her story as though its characters were unknown to me, as though they formed no part of my life and never had done. I followed their fortunes as one might follow those of famous figures whose experience is far removed from one’s own. Only later, alone, did the delayed realization dawn that Ella was a murderer: that the girl I had loved, the girl for whom I had twice sacrificed my self-respect, the girl with the lilting voice and the bitten fingernails, was the person at the center of the story Camilla told; was the child who had killed her father in cold blood in front of more than two hundred witnesses.

“I couldn’t believe it, Jamie,” Camilla told me tearfully. “And I wouldn’t have believed it.” She paused. “But I saw her. I
saw
her do it. And in front of so many people. There was no way she could possibly have got away with it.”

I was silent.

“And she must have known that.”

“Tell me what you saw,” I said slowly.

And Camilla did. It is from her account and the fuller one given later at the trial that I learned the facts of that night; and recalling them now, even from a distance of fifty years, part of me can only marvel at how daringly it was executed; at how arrogantly it was done. Yes, it is her arrogance which shocks me now; her arrogance, more even than her callousness, which leaves the bitter taste.

But memory is rusty and its work slow. It is difficult for me to remember precisely what Camilla told me; to call to mind the whole wealth of ugly detail which emerged in the weeks which followed Alexander’s murder. Over fifty years I have taken care to bury the details of Ella’s trial with those of Eric’s death: far from the intrusive scrutiny of easy recall. I have not wished to remember; and I have had remarkable success in forgetting. I see that more than ever now. More than ever I understand my debt to Sarah; for it was she who was my teacher. It was she who showed me how self-deception might be achieved; she who taught me to insulate myself against anything which might ruffle the smooth calm of a placid inner life. My wife was so untroubled herself, you see; and her calmness was exemplary in its control.

Now I must remember. As I have done with Eric, so must I with Ella and her father’s death: I must open locked doors, exhume old ghosts. It is hard for a man of my age; hard because disillusion is the saddest of life’s scars. And there is self-pity in my anger now; for life, so recently offered to me again, was snatched from my grasp before I could sample it once more. And I cry for that man—he was a boy no longer—who sat, stupefied, as Camilla Boardman told him what Ella had done, what she had watched her do. I long to comfort him. But I cannot; and if I could, what would I say? There was nothing he could have done; no steps he might have taken. He was lost already; lost in ways he could neither have imagined nor understood.