The Drowning People (36 page)

Ella as murderer changed everything. It made a lie of all we had had; a lie of which I could tell no one.

And I went up to the attic that evening and sat in the moonlight where she had sat, hearing her voice, watching her smoke her endless cigarettes. I remembered our meeting in the park; the announcement of her engagement to Charlie at Camilla’s birthday party; the way she had taken me to Seton. I saw her flick the hair out of her eyes and curl up on that window ledge above the sea. I heard her tell me of Blanche, of the history of her family, of Sarah. “This house has plenty of dark secrets,” she had said. I remembered her frightened eyes by the quarry with Eric; the clipped intensity of her voice as she told me to tell him the truth. I saw it all; heard it all. And I felt that some kind of spell had been broken; that the person I had loved had ceased to exist, if ever she had existed at all.

Reading of Alexander’s murder in the papers, in the hot and crowded ticket hall of an Underground station, I had clung still to some sort of crazy hope; to the blind faith that had made me draw short of condemning Ella in the years since Eric’s death. But listening to Camilla describe what she had seen, in a quiet voice I had not heard before, I came to see that I had been wrong. And later, alone in the room where I had played to her, where so recently I had written of love and of longing in the passionate language of naïve adoration, I felt a wave of disgust sweep over me. Eric’s body, heavy with water, returned in the darkness; I saw it swing jerkily up the sides of the quarry, to be laid out before me. I remembered the tears in Dr. Pétin’s eyes. And I thought with something like hatred that I had twice sacrificed myself for a girl who had killed her father. To earn her trust I had betrayed all notions of friendship; to see her again I had undermined three hard years of self-punishment. And as I cried I wept not for Ella, nor even for Eric, but for myself.

CHAPTER 29

E
VEN THE HORRORS OF THE PAST
deserve some recognition, I suppose; and the obstacles to her success were great. I can see that more than ever now. For a start, the access of guests to the house was strictly limited; and the great hall itself was locked (for all the most valuable objects in the open rooms were stored there for the night). It is only from the great hall that access onto the balcony is possible; and Cyril Harcourt had the only key to this room, a key later found secure and untouched in his desk by the police. When it happened there must have been more than two hundred people on the terrace: standing by the bonfire; talking and laughing; apparently preferring the fresh air, cold though it was, to the heat of the reception rooms. So more than two hundred people watched her do it; more than two hundred people, some of whom knew her well.

It is sad for me to trace the events of that night, sad because I know the house in which they happened so well now. Everything is so real. When Camilla told me the story I could only imagine how everything must have been; I had none of the feeling for the place which fifty years’ kinship has given me. Now I know precisely the layout of the terrace; precisely the angle at which one must tilt one’s head if one is to see the balcony which overlooks it far above. I know the smell of the sea in September; the color of the stone in bonfirelight. I can feel the chill of an Atlantic breeze on my neck. Recounting it now I can see it all; feel it all; and I watch for a sign which someone might have seen, a detail which someone must have overlooked. But all I can sense is the happy anticipation of the crowd; all I can hear are its sporadic cheers as Alexander and Ella appear.

But I am anticipating myself; losing the thread of events. And just once, however painfully, I must trace them precisely once again. Having come so far I can hardly turn back now. Slowly, dispassionately, I must remember all that Camilla told me; and to her account I must add the details established later by the police. With so many witnesses their investigation was hardly a challenging one, hardly a test of any great detective powers. But they were thorough. Uninspired, perhaps, but thorough. And one can hardly blame them; for they, like me, were out of their depth. So it is a clear, balanced narrative which I must attempt; and attempt it I will. It is the least she deserves.

The Setons’ guests arrived between seven and seven thirty. They were given champagne cocktails in the ballroom and many, as I have said already, strayed out onto the terrace. Between half and three quarters of an hour later, immediately before dinner was announced, Ella and her father appeared on the balcony above them, from which access is only possible through the windows of the great hall. According to the testimony of most present they seemed relaxed, though it was noticeable that the years had taken their toll on Alexander and he seemed older than many remembered him. An expectant hush fell and cries of “Speech!” were heard. Some people cheered. Ella in her dinner jacket moved behind her father and put her hands on his shoulders, a gesture which seemed sweetly affectionate. Standing behind the taller man, little of her was visible but the stylish cut of her sharply parted blond hair, and Lord Markham called, “Show yourself, Ella. Don’t be shy.” Someone laughed.

Alexander began to shuffle his notes.

And as he did so, with unhurried grace, Ella lifted her arms and brought them down with a crack on his neck. Her father cried out, startled, and dropped his papers. Some fluttered down into the crush below. People scrambled to catch them; one or two went into the bonfire. Some guests on the edges of the crowd, who could not see, began to laugh. But those in its center watched, increasingly confused, as Alexander turned in surprise towards his daughter, and as they watched they saw her bend down and lift his feet from under him in a quick and practiced movement, pushing him over the rail. Clutching wildly as he fell, he caught at the balustrade with one hand and for a sickening moment he hung there. Everyone stopped laughing. In the silence Ella bent over him, and it looked to some as though she were holding his arm, pulling him back to safety. A woman screamed. Then he fell. Alexander fell to his death with a long shout which ended sickeningly on the flagstones of the terrace below. Ella disappeared from the balcony.

When they found her she was in her father’s bedroom, calling for him, apparently quite unperturbed by what she had done. At first she seemed shocked to see the policemen; and when they made it clear that they had come to arrest her, she went “quite crazy,” as one of the officers described it at her trial: “quite crazy, like a mad thing.” Screaming, hysterical, she refused to be handcuffed. Calling for her father, for Pamela, screaming abuse at Sarah—who was in tears in the entrance hall—she was forcibly taken down the staircase and led out through the front door, watched by silent lines of shocked guests.

“You can’t
imagine
how awful it was,” Camilla said the next night. “That look in her eyes. The way she screamed. And when Sarah tried to get the policemen to treat her gently, she lashed out like you’ve never seen.”

On the other end of the telephone I heard my friend begin to cry.

“I’ve known Ella for seven years,” she said through her sobs. “Ever since she came back from America. And I can’t
tell
you how ghastly it was seeing her like that. Screaming abuse; calling Sarah a lot of unrepeatable things. Even saying that Sarah must have done it.” She blew her nose. “That was when I felt sorry for her, you know; if you
can
feel sorry for someone who’s done such an awful thing. It was when she tried to point the finger at someone else, in front of people who had watched her do it herself. There was something pathetic about the way she did that, Jamie. Something truly pathetic.”

I listened, sick at heart.

“Perhaps the papers were right after all,” Camilla went on. “You know about the madness in her family, don’t you?”

I said nothing.

“Don’t you, Jamie?”

There was silence.

“Yes,” I said at last. “Yes, I know all about it.”

And I listened as Camilla, whose mother had heard it from Pamela, told me how Ella had had to be sedated at Penzance police station: “Kicking and screaming like a wild thing,” my friend said.

In the ensuing search the police found a key in the pocket of Ella’s dinner jacket, a key later shown to be a replica of the one to the great hall, the original of which was found safe in her uncle’s desk. A London locksmith came forward and testified at the trial that she had had two copies made a fortnight before the party, and because the other copy was never found it was assumed that she had hidden it or thrown it into the sea.

“You’ve no idea how awful it was,” said Camilla. “Listening to Alexander scream. Watching her push him.”

And I went to bed that night with those dreadful words echoing endlessly in my head.
WatchingherpushhimWatchingherpushhim.

The next morning news of Ella’s arrest was all over the papers; and she did not leave the front page more than three times in two months. A trial like hers, I suppose, was not likely to go unnoticed. And the press, swooping like vultures on the story’s principals, scented in the details of Ella’s crime all the most beloved staples of popular journalism: celebrity, beauty, violence, death. No paper could resist such ingredients; and no one missed the fact either that the story added a spectacular new chapter to Sarah’s recently published family history. Insanity, in all its tragedy, became a national obsession; a glamorous accessory, almost. And for several weeks Ella’s fragile image stared out at me from billboards and magazine covers and I learned to harden my heart to her eyes and to her small face with its delicate bones and ivory skin.

Sick with bitterness, I was helpless as old demons returned. And through nights of wide-eyed wakefulness I heard again the shriek of Eric’s laugh, come back to haunt me with renewed force, to punish me for presuming ever to escape the consequences of what I had done to him. Impatient for daylight, for the fading of such sounds, I found when it came that in fact it brought no release: only newspapers bearing fresh news of Ella and her trial beneath courtroom sketches of her gaunt face and pursed lips. Sitting at breakfast, hunched over my coffee, I read of her case with a sort of morbid fascination; with horror and sadness also for a family I might once have claimed as my own. And alone once more, in new and doubly lonely isolation, I felt that I was being punished for my hubris; that nothing would save me now.

It was a strange, disjointed, lonely time; lonely because I had nowhere to turn, no one to tell. The irony was that only Ella or Eric might have shared my grief with me; and both were lost to me forever. I had no one And in my anger—for I was angry with Ella; mad with rage at the thought that she had tricked me, that she had never been true—I felt the first tremors of disillusion. Reading of my old love in the papers, seeing her trial progress and her guilt appear ever more conclusive, I grew to be disgusted with myself. And that disgust has lasted all my life. What self-belief I ever had, already so badly battered by Eric’s death, died that autumn and winter as Ella’s trial progressed I lost it forever. And I was only twenty-five.

She denied all charges, of course.

In recognition of the horror of the offense bail was denied and the defendant, I read in the papers, did not leave her cell except to appear in court. Ella saw no one but her barrister. No visitors came: no family; no friends. She wrote to me once: a long, rambling note of desperate defense and counter-accusation; but I hardly read it and I did not reply. I would be tempted by her no more, I decided; and when I didn’t answer she did not write again. On the witness stand she was unshakable; and the increasing hysteria with which she denied the charge, despite the insurmountable evidence of her guilt, did nothing to endear her to judge or to jury. In her statement she said that she had not known of her father’s death until told of it by the police. And although the prosecution produced witness after witness who had seen her on the balcony, she defiantly refused to change her unlikely story; refused even to make the plea of temporary insanity which commentators predicted with increasing confidence as each day passed.

From Camilla, who had it from her mother, I learned that Ella had broken down completely in prison, that she had descended into semi-articulate ravings about Sarah, about how Sarah must have done it. But Sarah, in her red dress, had been seen everywhere at that party; she had talked to everyone. And when not on the terrace she had been in the ballroom or the entrance hall or the kitchen; supervising the caterer’s staff, welcoming her uncle’s guests. Her alibi, though peripatetic, was unshakable. And so the police dropped their inquiries into her movements after a few hours of polite questioning and tearful cooperation.

In court Ella claimed to have received a note while she was dressing which had asked her to meet her father secretly in his room at eight o’clock and to wait for him if he was late. Under cross-examination she said that she had thought he wished to go over the notes for his speech; but she was unable to produce the note as evidence in her defense and was left saying weakly that someone must have taken it from her bedroom. The evidence of the court psychiatrists came next; evidence which sealed the matter. And I discovered, to my half-surprise, that Ella had told a court-appointed doctor all about her obsession with Sarah; had told him, in fact, all that she had told me in that circular tower room at Seton long ago. But her openness, if that is what she thought it was, only prejudiced her case. And her wild accusations against her cousin, made at the time of her arrest and once—disastrously—in open court, were cited as evidence of an ungovernable paranoia; the tragic but unsurprising consequence of earlier instability. Confronted by endless reports from endless expert witnesses, Ella’s explanation of her earlier breakdown as a feigned and foolish attempt to break an awkward engagement—the explanation she had given me also in Prague—sounded hollow and insincere. And I loathed myself for ever having believed it; for ever having been seduced by the disarming compliment of her crazy confidences.