From Higher Places
From
Higher
Places
Roger Curtis
Copyright © 2017 Roger Curtis
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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Contents
By the same author
HIGHTOWER
May 1987
1
ST CATHERINE’S
April 1981 – July 1982
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
SHIRLEY HILLS
May 1986 – May 1987
9
10
AFTERMATH
May – September 1987
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
HATOMI CAMP
September – December 1987
18
19
SUBURBIA
December 1987 – July 1988
20
21
22
23
PEVERELL HESSETT
June 1993
24
By the same author
Murchison’s Fragment
and Other Short Plays for Stage and Radio
HIGHTOWER
May 1987
1
It was the click of the car door that lodged itself most vividly in her memory. Not the knife, not the footfall on the stair, not even the imagined expression of hate behind the stocking mask: just a simple everyday sound that would have been multiplied in innocence a dozen times during the course of that warm May afternoon.
In reality Sarah-Jane – for that’s what she was called then – had heard nothing, being content with herself before the dressing table mirror. But when the police came she had overheard Marguerite’s casual remark to them, and during the days that followed her mind had worked on this benign observation and the image had come to assume terrifying significance
Marguerite had been in the room to place her mistress’s laundered clothes in the stacked white drawers on either side of the king-size bed. It might have been the sound of the car that caused the girl to turn towards her mistress. More likely, though, it was the urge to compare her pert Latin features side by side in the mirror with Sarah-Jane’s more delicate profile: to savour and scorn the ten years or so that separated them, yet at the same time to envy a quality of beauty that years alone could not efface.
Sarah-Jane saw the girl’s reflection in the mirror and patted the red-gold curls that just caressed her own bare shoulders.
‘Tell me honestly, Marguerite, should my hair be up or down this evening?’
‘What dress, Miss?’
‘The black one, with the lace collar.’
‘Then up, of course, so we can see the lace.’
Sarah-Jane smiled, reassured. Not by the advice – the reverse of what she had already decided – but by the hint of jealous disdain that her question had elicited, and her own flush of self-gratification that resulted from it. She could afford to be intimate again with her outspoken domestic. Still, there was a subtlety about the girl that she found oddly, and unexpectedly, attractive.
‘Would you please unfasten me?’
The olive hand touched the skin of her neck, and lingered for a moment before pulling down the fastener. The gesture was worth a response: a crumb, at least, from her well stocked table.
‘Mr Preston will be at home this weekend,’ Sarah-Jane said.
‘That will be nice!’
‘For me or for you?’
‘For both of us I think.’
Sarah-Jane glanced towards the younger woman, seeking evidence of a developing conspiracy, but finding none. Marguerite turned her back and resumed packing the drawers with a vigour that threatened the integrity of the exquisite lingerie.
From somewhere near the gate to the road Sarah-Jane heard the scrunch of gravel. Until the week before the surface of the drive had been grey tarmac, cracking but undeniably serviceable. For Sarah-Jane it had simply not been right. It didn’t fit, for example, with the keeping of her three horses – Gemma, Pitta and Pasta – in the red cedar stables behind the house. Only when she – or rather Mark under protest – had changed it did she think to look more closely at the other houses in the Dell, each with its pristine approach between manicured lawns. As Mark agreed later, theirs had not been consonant. That was partly why she remembered the footsteps on the gravel.
Sarah-Jane angled her body to the window and thought for a moment. She saw Marguerite pause in anticipation; she would know from experience what kind of morsel might be coming her way.
‘If you like you can ride with us on Sunday,’ Sarah-Jane said.
What a barbed hook that was! There was a long pause before the girl replied, ‘I would like that very much.’
Sarah-Jane knew that Marguerite disliked animals, and horses in particular. They didn’t come naturally to a girl raised in the back-streets of Marseille, and from a family whose macho males thought nothing of tossing an errant cat – or so Marguerite had led her to believe – through an upstairs window. Determination and the language school in Cambridge had done something to dispel the effects of such influences, but the residues were hard to shift. So she knew the inner conflict that her invitation had caused. Marguerite would consider the possibility that Sarah-Jane might have one of her migraines and withdraw at the last minute. There were certainly precedents for that.
Had she not seen it from the beginning? Did it not begin one Sunday a year back when she and Mark had taken their new charge to Hever Castle and Sarah-Jane had responded to the flame of a young photographer claiming to represent Vogue magazine? But although her eyes had flashed with the thought of gracing that illustrious cover, they had not failed to notice the touching of fingers as her husband and the girl receded stealthily into the background. And that, like the crunch of the gravel, she would never quite forget.
Sarah-Jane pushed these thoughts aside, following with her ears the footsteps up the drive. Suddenly, inexplicably, she was concerned.
‘Are you expecting someone, Marguerite?’
‘No, Miss.’
‘Then why has the door just banged?’
‘Perhaps it’s Mr Preston…’
‘He always drives the Mercedes to the door. Besides, he rang from town only an hour ago.’
‘Then I don’t know!’
Marguerite pressed heavily on the clothes in the drawer, pushed it shut and marched out, slamming the door behind her.
The duty delegated, Sarah-Jane relaxed and smiled at herself in the mirror. Then she looked out of the window.
It was still, at that moment, a perfect day.
On the golf-course beyond the trees lining the road she could see figures motionless around the final green, their shadows like black torpedoes. They peered at the hole with the devotion of the couple in the hand-crafted reproduction of Millet’s Angelus on the chimney-breast in the drawing room. No duty weighed more heavily upon them than the execution of the final putt. Some days she would look for Mark amongst them. She could easily pick out his angular frame and sense in the set of his shoulders the same strength and purpose that he brought to his business dealings. Or, as Brian had once put it, the vanquishing of his adversaries.
Brian. There was an enigma. He was her husband’s friend. Once he had been her friend too, almost. But that was five years before, after she graduated at St Catherine’s. When she married Mark and left medicine, Brian had said, ‘He may have stolen you from me but I have gained the ambition you have shed to add to my own.’ And at the time that seemed strange. Ambition was something that both men had in common and in abundance. As with like poles they should have repelled one another, but they did not. Mark, the more transparent of the two, had said jokingly, ‘You never know when we might need a really good medic.’ But, looking from the other side, she could see no similar advantage for Brian. It was a subject to which she had given much thought. Still, he would be at the dinner tonight, probably without Alice, as usual. After dinner, for amusement, she might pair him up with Marguerite. Perhaps even arrange a double act with the horses on Sunday. That could be amusing.
Then she thought again and wondered if that was really what she wanted.
It seemed that at this moment the sky had darkened and the birds had stopped singing.
The silence was broken by Marguerite’s scream from somewhere on the stairs.
Sarah-Jane became frightened. She stared into the mirror – this time not at herself, but at the reflection of the solid oak door with its gold plated handle, willing it not to open. Her hand reached desperately for the squirrel pendant that had once been her sister’s. Pots and bottles crashed to the floor, spewing their contents.
She turned her face to him as he came, making everything easy.
The blade of the knife entered her cheek half an inch from the corner of her left eye and continued downwards in a gentle curve, taking in the extremities of both lips and emerging just above her chin. There was no pain, then; just a taste of iron in her mouth.
It seemed that for a moment he stopped to inspect his workmanship. That was before the blood began to flow, but by then he had gone.
ST CATHERINE’S
April 1981 – July 1982
2
Sarah thrust the gear lever into third and put her foot down to take the gradient. At the brow the trees on either side gave way like parting curtains to the pasture-green vale of Oxford. On a bright day the city would be shining in the distance to cheer her. Today though, under a squally April sky, it was an ochre smudge.
She drew into the picnic area set there for tourists to admire the view before continuing on to spend their cash in the city; but the coaches of summer were still weeks away and the place was deserted. She angled the car so that she could look along the line of trees to the north and switched off the engine. Across the valley, at a similar elevation, the village of Peverell Hessett peeped through greening trees that would soon obscure it. A handful of rooftops nestled around the squat tower of St Peter’s Church. Beyond them rose the bare dome of Beacon Hill, incongruously prominent for the northern edge of the Chiltern Hills.
From the glove compartment she took out her cosmetic case. Then she lowered the mirror, dabbed powder on her cheeks and patted a few stray hairs into place. None of it was necessary. Replacing the mirror and the case, she folded her hands in her lap and stared again at the village. This was a ritual that took place whenever she returned home, a delaying tactic to give space to prepare; and to reassure herself that she would be back in London by nightfall. Except that today – the occasion of her father’s funeral – things would be different.
A week before she had sat at this same spot, guiltily savouring a new-found sense of freedom that she couldn’t quite explain. That morning her mother had telephoned the hospital and it had taken an hour for the message to reach her that her father had gone. Ignoring the ambiguity and guessing the worst, she had high-jacked her friend Alice’s car and sped up the M40 to do what was needed for an ailing woman confused – grieving would be too strong a word – after the death of her husband from cancer. Now, as the rain-clouds rolled in from the west and drops spattered the windscreen, that sense of release had gone. In its place was an irrational foreboding. Closure – but against what? – would not come quite so easily.
Could she bring herself to think of him kindly? It was difficult. Her thoughts drifted back to the clamping down of the coffin lid. Not that she’d witnessed it, of course. She did not regret ignoring her mother’s entreaty to take one last look. ‘He’s peaceful now,’ Betty Potter had said. Was that an idle throw-away or an insightful realisation that her daughter was now safe? No, that was an exaggeration; perhaps beyond influence was a more charitable way of expressing it. Whatever, she had to press on. Her mother would need protection from well-meaning helpers assembling right now at Laurel Cottage.
The engine started fitfully, as well it might given Alice’s lack of empathy with anything mechanical. Sarah took one last look across the valley. In its depths a blanket of mist obscured the ancient stone bridge over the river. How symbolic that bridge had become: a kind of Check Point Charlie separating her London life as a medical student at St Catherine’s from what had gone before – and rumbled on since. One day, returning home, she had taken her pulse before crossing it, then again in the lay-by on the other side. The magnitude of the increase had surprised her.
Across the bridge the road led upwards towards the village. The turning into Tippett’s Lane – an evergreen tunnel leading to Laurel Cottage – appeared on the right. On an impulse she ignored it and continued on, past the ironmongers and the butcher’s shop, to stop at the village store a hundred yards further on. They sold newspapers and there might just have been time for an obituary in the villages edition of the local rag. It seemed sensible to be informed. The young woman across the counter eyed her warily. ‘Not yet, Sarah, I looked,’ she said, handing her the paper. The steel blue eyes fixed Sarah’s. ‘Quite a stranger these days, aren’t we?’
‘Not really, Julie. I get back when I can.’
‘And finals soon, your mother was telling me. Then we’ll have to watch our Ps and Qs.’ She turned to occupy herself with the shelves behind her. ‘ Sorry I won’t be with you after the funeral, with the shop to think of – it’s the post office bit, you see. He was such a lovely man, your father.’
‘Yes, wasn’t he.’ She hadn’t intended it to sound sarcastic and maybe that was only in her mind. But just in case she added, ‘The village will miss him.’
The woman looked round, half-hiding a wry smile, saying nothing.
Sarah had known Julie Bradwell since primary school, where they had been in the same class and inseparable. Then Sarah had gained a place at the grammar school in the city, leaving Julie – to some the brighter of the two – to fester (her words) in the local comprehensive. The problem for Julie was that her elder brother Jonathan was already there: to greet and, in her eyes, be exploited by Sarah. The girls’ friendship dissolved in a single night of acrimony, leaving a permanent aftertaste of mistrust. For Sarah, the relationship with Jonathan – now an accountant in Aylesbury but still living in the village – had smo
uldered on after they left school. She’d tried to extinguish it, but not hard enough, because there had been times – admittedly not often or recently – when she’d found herself short of male attention. He was likely to be at Laurel Cottage after the funeral; it amused her to think what his excuse would be, having had no regard for her father.
The annoying tinkle of the bell as she left the shop made her pause and look round. Julie had come from behind the counter to stand behind her. In as flat a tone as she could manage the woman said, ‘It’s nice they’ll be buried close together, don’t you think?’
Sarah did not have to think. The realisation came with a flood of frustration that might have expressed itself physically if Julie hadn’t retreated to the safety of the counter. How could this woman know of Sarah’s insistence that the grave should be where all recent burials had been, in common ground with nothing to single it out as special? Her mother had shown no wish for it to be otherwise when they’d seen the vicar together. Julie’s words had one meaning only: that he was, instead, to be buried next to Elizabeth, her sister. Not in the open, sunlit area east of the chancel that now served the modern village, but in the ancient leafy enclave at the foot of Beacon Hill that for Sarah had become a place of seclusion and reflection. It was the only place where she ever cried. Her instinct was to go there now, but they would be waiting for her at Laurel Cottage, and she was needed.
She tossed the paper onto the back seat, alongside the hatbox, whose pink stripes seemed more appropriate to a birthday cake than a funeral. ‘Make sure it’s a nice one,’ her mother had pleaded. She’d gone along with that, and bought a simple round confection in straw, uniformly black, with a wisp of a veil. The night before, setting it at a rakish angle, she’d assured the figure in the mirror that come what may her behaviour would be above reproach. Stay calm regardless of how you might feel, then get away with no-one the wiser, once the duty’s done. At any rate, that was the intention.