The Colonel's Daughter by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online Page B

a new life. Because in the basement rooms Jim Reese was sinking, fading, disappearing. In his fingers, in his knuckles, rhythms of his onetime visibility were occasionally heard. But, parted from the drums, from the absolution of his own music, he was thinning, flaking, becoming opaque. How many people, Charlotte wonders, as the police car passes the Camden Plaza showing a black and white Italian film, are obscured by their own uselessness?
    She hasn’t ‘saved’ Jim Reese. Pride and anger prevented this. She is punished for her arrogance. And he, in the flood of his male violence, has rendered her useless to the women she has worked with, worked for, when to them too she planned to offer more, on this Buckinghamshire night, than an act of daring. They will come to her in prison, she knows. In their tattered layers of clothes, some with backpacked babies, some spikey and pale in their fierce lesbian love affairs, some weathered and worn into grannies, somebody’s kindly nan in a woollen hat, holding a banner while the relations sneer and gasp at her picture on the nine o’clock news . . . They will circle outside the prison gates, sparrows of women, ravens of women, women with their dreams of peace. With the gold and the silver, they would have printed leaflets, bought newspaper space, funded crèches, financed a conference. Now, nothing is left for them from Charlotte, only her presence, soon, in the massive prison and the story of her crime, falling on them, asking them to stand responsible.
    Charlotte is quiet as the car stops and starts in the dense morning traffic. She sends away her sad thoughts of women and focuses instead on the stranger at the foot of her bed, the man Doyle with his wounded arm. Laughingly, she imagines him travelling to the south coast in search of Jim Reese, wearing his hospital nightie. He has become precious to her because he, in all the questioning to come, will be her only secret.
    But secret deaths are occurring. Unplanned. Unexpected. Handcuffed to WPC Beckett, Charlotte walks up the steps of the police station. At the same moment, her solicitor, Mr Charles Ogden-Nichols, locks the driver’s door of his BMW and prepares to walk into a limelight he has coveted for some years. At the same moment, Garrod dies.
    Garrod dies. The struggle of his hands with a tangle of nylon sailcord is not unconnected with his death. While his hands struggled, his veteran’s heart made a salient in death’s lines. A few hours later, the salient became a bridgehead and his life goes teeming, streaming across the bridgehead, past and fast over the no man’s land of imaginary desert and tanks like mice, racing to death as if his own spirit were death’s batman. In the grounds of Sowby Manor, where a young constable called Arthur Williams is walking in Lady Amelia’s rose garden with Admiral, the dog pricks up its ears and lets out a peculiar whine. PC Williams jerks at its lead. Lady Amelia’s roses are funnelled by bees. A nurse comes running to the straight green line which is the technological death of Garrod. His desert is at last deserted.
    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