Innocent Blood
By P.D. James
3.5/5
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About this ebook
"As a crime novel," wrote the London Times, Innocent Blood is "the peak of the art." "Flawlessly crafted...profoundly, masterfully moving," Cosmopolitan concurred.
P.D. James
P. D. James (1920–2014) was born in Oxford in 1920. She worked in the National Health Service and the Home Office From 1949 to 1968, in both the Police Department and Criminal Policy Department. All that experience was used in her novels. She won awards for crime writing in Britain, America, Italy, and Scandinavia, including the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award and the National Arts Club Medal of Honour for Literature. She received honorary degrees from seven British universities, was awarded an OBE in 1983 and was created a life peer in 1991.
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Reviews for Innocent Blood
327 ratings21 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a long a detailed book, but I still read it in two days. James steps out of her police and detective series constraints here for a stand-alone story, not really a mystery, but more an elaborate journey toward a resolution for characters who started out unlikable, but grew on me as the story progressed. Crimes, legal and otherwise, direct this book, from bad marriages, betrayals, an adoption with odd motive into a dysfunctional family, to horrific historical crimes, acts of revenge and reunion. Phillipa Palfrey finds a mother, loses a family, begins to develop a feeling for other people as she attempts to find out who she really is. Excellent.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Another great book by PD James; she writes about life more than about crime! Highly recommended.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Very tedious read. None of the characters were particularly likable. Not really a mystery per se. Just not a very engaging read. I'd much prefer going back to Adam Dagleish.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is one of PD James's best books, although for some reason it is not held in the same high esteem as her other detective-led novels. It concerns the search by an adopted daughter for her mother, and her mother turns out to be a convicted murderer.
There's an intensity and urgency to the writing here that, however well stylised and characterised her other books, is sometimes lacking in her other work. I think this is to do with the fact that the device used to bring the protagonists together is less contrived, less artificial than in some of the Dalgliesh books. The tension and drama, the narrative drive emanates from the characters in a more realistic way. This could be called a 'straight' novel (along with her other, sometimes less-well-regarded, Children of Men), but it has all the hallmarks of James at her best - tight plotting, believable characters and a commentary on broader issues such as loss, pain and parent-child relationships. Make sure you read this.
© Koplowitz 2012 - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The sheer number of tags I felt I had to use for this book illustrates the number of themes it covers. If it has a central motif, it is something to do with where our sense of identity and self comes from. Is it our blood, our upbringing, our intrinsic nature, crisis events in our history? The question is never answered but it is explored from different perspectives in an illuminating, disquieting but sometimes not very subtle way. Will bear rereading I think, though others may find it a bit obvious?
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Despite the rubric 'Queen of Crime' splayed across the cover, this is not really a crime story in the true sense. Philippa has always known that she was adopted and, when the law is changed to allow her to find her birth parents, she grabs the opportunity with both hands. Dad is dead but, the mum that she had been told was deceased is alive and soon to be released from prison, where she has been detained for the murder of a young girl that her father had raped. She takes a flat for two months, with her estranged mum, whilst waiting to go to university but, unbeknownst to both, the father of mum's victim is tracking them down, intent on revenge (with it so far?).P.D. James is good at drawing characters from the middle class but her attempts here to create working class people somewhat falls down. I fully expected George, the greengrocer, to touch his cap and say, "Gore blimey missus!" at some stage during the story: sadly, I was disappointed, but never totally disavowed of the prospect.Thanks to James' eye for detail, this book is perhaps most interesting as a social history of life in the late 1970's: a time before mobile phones, computers and so much more. Reading this review, I have been a little mean; despite the aforementioned shortcomings, I did enjoy the book.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Story ok, but Tediously long winded
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is not a true mystery book, more a suspense novel with excellent character elaboration. Everything about this book is a bit weird, dark, almost Victorian: the scenery, the plot, and most of all the characters. They are so realistic, depicted with all their negative sides and flaws, and here I mean not just their ugly looks, but despicable behaviour and relationships, as well. I like books which are not conventional, which have their own value and style. The only thing that I found a bit disappointing is too much time dedicated to the first part of the book and too little to the final and ultimate ending. But, nevertheless, I found this book really good and definitely worth reading.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Interesting - not your average crime novel. Different than I was expecting - makes me want to hunt up some other books by this author.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The late Baroness for once dispensing with the usual apparatus of the detective story and taking her time to explore the repercussions of a terrible crime on the lives of the people involved, many years later. Interesting, and there are some very nice bits of description and character analysis, but the pacing didn't feel quite right (dawdling unconscionably in some spots, then rushing through implausible transitions elsewhere). I also got the impression that James had changed her mind at some point about which decade we were supposed to be in: the London street where a lot of the action in the "present day" (i.e. late 1970s) story is supposed to be set often sounds much more like something out of the immediate post-War period, twenty years earlier.I haven't looked it up, but my guess would be that James must have had this lying in a drawer unfinished for a long time, and only reworked it for publication when her detective stories started to become a success.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I just finished this book and I am not really sure how I feel about it. Overall- I was pretty pleased with the ending... except for one last mention at the very end concerning Phillippa's relationship with her adoptive father . It was one of those moments where I just thought to myself - "my goodness why even go there at this point??") . Otherwise this book is a purposely slow moving book - an experiment for PD James in writing a different kind of mystery.... i will say that it kept my attention - but not on the same compelling level that her other books have.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Reread. Psychological mystery about a young woman, adopted, who traces her parents and finds that they murdered a child. Her mother is about to released from prison and she suggests they rent an apartment together for the months before she goes to Cambridge. There is more going on that she doesn’t know.This is a great, suspenseful thriller but I have to say that the emotions of many of the characters are really weird and don't make a lot of sense. The ending, emotion-wise, was a mess that strained credulity, and I'm not talking about the sex. I didn't notice this the first time I read it. Because of this I gave it 3 stars, down from 5 midway through. Oh yeah there is a carefully knitted, meaningfully given sweater that is destroyed in a fit of anger which bothered me more than the child murder.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Not a typical crime thriller, yet has a fantastic ending. James has described London beautifully
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Philippa takes advantage of her right to find her birth parents the minute she turns 18. The story she has been told her whole life about her mother being a maid in a great manor house and her father being a gentleman is found to be completely untrue. The horrifying truth sets her on a collision course with human nature and sets her up to learn more about life in one summer than she has learned in 18 years. PD James’ descriptions are so masterful that I can see and hear and feel the settings of her books, which is one of the things I like about her writing.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very good thriller, finely drawn characters,with a real feel for 1960's England (not the swinging sixties but the suburban sixties)
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Interesting if vaguely disturbing book about murders aftermath.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5If you are a believer, this bleak novel will strengthen your gratitude. If you're still alone, and if you grasp James' brilliance, you'll be left with the question whose answer passeth all understanding.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a strange but well-written book (it is PD James, after all). It reads like your ordinary cozy English mystery, with a stab at the inhumanity of some people. The strangeness of the story makes me think it is based on real court records. Anyway, I gave it only 3 stars because apart from being well-written, it has no redeeming value. I can't say it was a waste of time, but I wish it presented people in a more hopeful light.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Philippa Palfrey has just turned 18 and is eager to learn about her past life. But then she learns that she is the daughter of a rapist and a muderer. At the same time, the father of the daughter that her mother killed wants revenge. This is the start of slow, drawn-out tale that could only end in death and disappointment. On the way we are treated to the daily grind and struggle of life in London in the 1970s. At times, I could forget that a murder had occurred as I followed Philippa and her mother. But then there was the torturous search by the man intent on revenge - a man who couldn’t forget. How could it end? The twist at the end was surprising, but I also felt that it was too neat. In my opinion, the writing is excellent, as it should be for a successful crime writer, but I thought that the ending resulted in a less than perfect story. I gave it 4 stars out of 5.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I like her straight mysteries well enough, but this is a psychological suspense novel in the manner of Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell) which means I like it a lot.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I see this as James' attempt to write "Literature." Her murder mysteries always have an intense bent towards the psychological analyses of her characters, which has always made for better writing than the average mystery novel, where the focus is on getting the clues revealed slowly enough that the reader can take a shot at figuring out the culprit.In this novel, we don't step entirely away from the murder theme, but we're introduced quite soon in the book to the prospective murderer, so there's no mystery involved. We watch as he carefully makes his plan, mapping out each step, and we follow the victim as she goes about her day oblivious to her danger. But the emphasis is certainly on the relationships between the characters, and their ambiguous and complex motives for their actions. It's all very literary.Probably why I didn't care for it much. Bring back Dalgliesh.
Book preview
Innocent Blood - P.D. James
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Praise for Innocent Blood
P. D. James has burst the bounds of her territory … and written a novel that is subtle, rich, allusive, most cunningly plotted… . We are held in tingling suspense.
—The New York Times
Flawlessly crafted … profoundly, masterfully moving!
—Cosmopolitan
As a crime novel, it is the peak of the art.
—The London Times
James’s descriptive powers are of the highest order; she sets her scene perfectly… . Her prose is sharp and excellent, her wit keen.
—The Washington Post
Real psychological penetration and considerable artistry.
New York magazine
Praise for P. D. James
Mystery writers often deploy stereotypes in similar ways—but not P. D. James. She gives her people fully rounded life, never sacrificing character to plot, and makes deft fun of conversation.
—Newsweek
Ms. James is simply a wonderful writer.
—The New York Times Book Review
That ability to haunt has earned P. D. James the title ‘Queen of Crime.’ Long may she reign.
—Chicago Sun-Times
If we’re lucky, there will always be an England and there will always be a P. D. James.
—Cosmopolitan
One reads a P. D. James novel in something like the spirit that one reads a novel by Zola, Balzac, Thackeray, or Dickens.
—The Christian Science Monitor
James delivers the pace and tensions of a mystery yarn better than any other living writer.
—People
P. D. James … writes the most lethal, erudite, people-complex novels of murder and detection since Michael Innes first began and Dorothy Sayers left us."
—Vogue
The best practitioner of the mystery novel writing today.
The Boston Globe
Innocent Blood, by P.D. James, ScribnerBOOK ONE
Proof of Identity
1
THE SOCIAL WORKER was older than she had expected; perhaps the nameless official who arranged these matters thought that graying hair and menopausal plumpness might induce confidence in the adopted adults who came for their compulsory counseling. After all, they must be in need of reassurance of some kind, these displaced persons whose umbilical cord was a court order, or why had they troubled to travel this bureaucratic road to identity? The social worker smiled her encouraging professional smile. She said, holding out her hand, My name is Naomi Henderson and you’re Miss Philippa Rose Palfrey. I’m afraid I have to begin by asking you for some proof of identity.
Philippa nearly replied: Philippa Rose Palfrey is what I’m called. I’m here to find out who I am,
but checked herself in time, sensing that such an affectation would be an unpropitious beginning to the interview. They both knew why she was here. And she wanted the session to be a success; wanted it to go her way without being precisely clear what way that was. She unclipped the fastening of her leather shoulder bag and handed over in silence her passport and the newly acquired driving license.
The attempt at reassuring informality extended to the furnishing of the room. There was an official-looking desk, but Miss Henderson had moved from behind it as soon as Philippa was announced and had motioned her to one of the two vinyl-covered armchairs on each side of a low table. There were even flowers on the table, in a small blue bowl lettered a present from Polperro.
It held a mixed bunch of roses. These weren’t the scentless, thornless buds of the florist’s window. These were garden roses, recognized from the garden at Caldecote Terrace: Peace, Superstar, Albertine, the blossoms overblown, already peeling with only one or two tightly furled buds, darkening at the lips and destined never to open. Philippa wondered if the social worker had brought them in from her own garden. Perhaps she was retired, living in the country, and had been recruited part-time for this particular job. She could picture her clumping round her rose bed in the brogues and serviceable tweeds she was wearing now, snipping away at roses which were due for culling, might just last out the London day. Someone had watered the flowers overenthusiastically. A milky bead lay like a pearl between two yellow petals and there was a splash on the table top. But the imitation mahogany wouldn’t be stained; it wasn’t really wood. The roses gave forth a damp sweetness, but they weren’t really fresh. In these easy chairs no visitor had ever sat at ease. The smile which invited her confidence and trust across the table was bestowed by courtesy of section twenty-six of the Children Act 1975.
She had taken trouble with her appearance, but then she always did, presenting herself to the world with self-conscious art, daily remaking herself in her own image. The aim this morning had been to suggest that no trouble had in fact been taken, that this interview had induced no special anxiety, warranted no exceptional care. Her strong corn-colored hair, bleached by the summer so that no two strands were exactly the same gold, was drawn back from a high forehead and knotted in a single heavy plait. The wide mouth with its strong, curved upper lip and sensuous droop at each corner was devoid of lipstick, but she had applied her eyeshadow with care, emphasizing her most remarkable feature, the luminous, slightly protuberant green eyes. Her honey-colored skin glistened with sweat. She had lingered too long in the Embankment Gardens, unwilling to arrive early, and in the end had had to hurry. She wore sandals and a pale green open-necked cotton shirt above her corduroy trousers. In contrast to this casual informality, the careful ambiguity about money or social class were the possessions which she wore like talismans: the slim gold watch, the three heavy Victorian rings, topaz, cornelian, peridot, the leather Italian bag slung from her left shoulder. The contrast was deliberate. The advantage of remembering virtually nothing before her eighth birthday, the knowledge that she was illegitimate, meant that there was no phalanx of the living dead, no pious ancestor worship, no conditioned reflexes of thought to inhibit the creativity with which she presented herself to the world. What she aimed to achieve was singularity, an impression of intelligence, a look that could be spectacular, even eccentric, but never ordinary.
Her file, clean and new, lay open before Miss Henderson. Across the table Philippa could recognize some of the contents: the orange and brown government information sheet, a copy of which she had obtained from a Citizens Advice Bureau in north London where there had been no risk that she would be known or recognized; her letter to the Registrar General written five weeks ago, the day after her eighteenth birthday, in which she had requested the application form which was the first document to identity; a copy of the form itself. The letter was tagged on top of the file, stark white against the buff of bureaucracy. Miss Henderson fingered it. Something about it, the address, the quality of the heavy linen-based paper apparent even in a copy, evoked, Philippa thought, a transitory unease. Perhaps it was a recognition that her adoptive father was Maurice Palfrey. Given Maurice’s indefatigable self-advertisement, the stream of sociological publications which flowed from his department, it would be odd if a senior social worker hadn’t heard of him. She wondered whether Miss Henderson had read his Theory and Technique in Counseling: A Guide for Practitioners, and if so, how much she had been helped in bolstering her clients’ self-esteem—and what a significant word client
was in social-work jargon—by Maurice’s lucid exploration of the difference between developmental counseling and Gestalt therapy.
Miss Henderson said, Perhaps I ought to begin by telling you how far I’m able to help you. Some of this you probably already know, but I find it useful to get it straight. The Children Act 1975 made important changes in the law relating to access to birth records. It provides that adopted adults—that is, people who are at least eighteen years old—may if they wish apply to the Registrar General for information which will lead them to the original record of their birth. When you were adopted you were given a new birth certificate, and the information which links your present name, Philippa Rose Palfrey, with your original birth certificate is kept by the Registrar General in confidential records. It is this linking information which the law now requires the Registrar General to give you if you want it. The 1975 Act also provides that people adopted before the twelfth of November 1975, that is, before the Act was passed, must attend an interview with a counselor before he or she can be given the information. The reason for this is that Parliament was concerned about making the new arrangements retrospective, since over the years many natural parents gave up their children for adoption and adopters took on the children on the understanding that their natural parentage would remain unknown. So you have come here today so that we can consider together the possible effect of any inquiries you may make about your natural parents, both on yourself and on other people, and so that the information you are now seeking, and to which you have, of course, a legal right, is provided in a helpful and appropriate manner. At the end of our talk, and if you still want it, I shall be able to give you your original name; the name of your natural mother; possibly—but not certainly—the name of your natural father, and the name of the court where your adoption order was made. I shall also be able to give you an application form which you can use to apply to the Registrar General for a copy of your original birth certificate.
She had said it all before. It came out a little too pat. Philippa said, And there’s a standard charge of two pounds fifty pence for the birth certificate. It seems cheap at the price. I know all that. It’s in the orange and brown pamphlet.
As long as it’s quite clear. I wonder if you’d like to tell me when you first decided to ask for your birth record. I see that you applied as soon as you were eighteen. Was this a sudden decision, or had you been thinking about it for some time?
I decided when the 1975 Act was going through Parliament. I was fifteen then and taking my O-levels. I don’t think I gave it a great deal of thought at the time. I just made up my mind that I’d apply as soon as I was legally able to.
Have you spoken to your adoptive parents about it?
No. We’re not exactly a communicative family.
Miss Henderson let that pass for the moment.
And what exactly did you have in mind? Do you want just to know who your natural parents are, or are you hoping to trace them?
I’m hoping to find out who I am. I don’t see the point of stopping at two names on a birth certificate. There may not even be two names. I know I’m illegitimate. The search may all come to nothing. I know that my mother is dead so I can’t trace her, and I may never find my father. But at least if I can find out who my mother was I may get a lead to him. He may be dead too, but I don’t think so. Somehow I’m certain that my father is alive.
Normally she liked her fantasies at least tenuously rooted in reality. Only this one was different, out of time, wildly improbable and yet impossible to relinquish, like an ancient religion whose archaic ceremonies, comfortingly familiar and absurd, somehow witness to an essential truth. She couldn’t remember why she had originally set her scene in the nineteenth century, or why, learning so soon that this was nonsense since she had been born in 1960, she had never updated the persistent self-indulgent imaginings. Her mother, a slim figure dressed as a Victorian parlor maid, an upswept glory of golden hair under the goffered cap with its two broderie Anglaise streamers, ghostlike against the tall hedge which surrounded the rose garden. Her father in full evening dress striding like a god across the terrace, down the broad walk, under the spray of the fountains. The sloping lawn, drenched by the mellow light of the last sun, glittering with peacocks. The two shadows merging into one shadow, the dark head bending to the gold.
My darling, my darling. I can’t let you go. Marry me.
I can’t. You know I can’t.
It had become a habit to conjure up her favorite scenes in the minutes before she fell asleep. Sleep came in a drift of rose leaves. In the earliest dreams her father had been in uniform, scarlet and gold, his chest beribboned, sword clanking at his side. As she grew older she had edited out these embarrassing embellishments. The soldier, the fearless rider to hounds, had become the aristocrat scholar. But the essential picture remained.
There was a globule of water creeping down the petal of the yellow rose. She watched it, fascinated, willing it not to fall. She had distanced her thoughts from what Miss Henderson had been saying. Now she made an effort to attend. The social worker was asking about her adoptive parents.
And your mother, what does she do?
My adoptive mother cooks.
You mean she works as a cook?
The social worker modified this as if conscious that it could imply some derogation, and added, She cooks professionally?
She cooks for her husband and her guests and me. And she’s a juvenile court magistrate, but I think she only took that on to please my adoptive father. He believes that a woman should have a job outside the home, provided, of course, that it doesn’t interfere with his comfort. But cooking is her enthusiasm. She’s good enough at it to cook professionally, although I don’t think she was ever properly taught except at evening classes. She was my father’s secretary before they married. I mean that cooking is her hobby, her interest.
Well, that’s nice for your father and you.
Presumably that hint of encouraging patronage was by now too unconsciously part of her to be easily disciplined. Philippa gazed at the woman stonily, noted it, took strength from it.
Yes, we’re both greedy, my adoptive father and I. We can both eat voraciously without putting on weight.
That, she supposed, implied something of an appetite for life, not indiscriminate, since they were both appreciative of good food; perhaps a reinforcement of their belief that one could indulge without having to pay for indulgence. Greed, unlike sex, involved no commitment except to one’s self, no violence except to one’s own body. She had always taken comfort from her discernment about food and drink. That, at least, could hardly have been caught from his example. Even Maurice, convinced environmentalist that he was, would hardly claim that a nose for claret could be so easily acquired. Learning to enjoy wine, discovering that she had a palate, had been one more reassuring affirmation of inherited taste. She recalled her seventeenth birthday; the three bottles on the table before them, the labels shrouded. She couldn’t recall that Hilda had been with them. Surely she must have been present for a family birthday dinner, but in memory she and Maurice celebrated alone. He had said, Now tell me which you prefer. Forget the purple prose of the color supplements, I want to know what you think in your own words.
She had tasted them again, holding the wine in her mouth, sipping water between each sampling, since she supposed that this was the proper thing to do, watching his bright, challenging eyes.
This one.
Why?
I don’t know. I just like it best.
But he would expect a more considered judgment than that. She added, Perhaps because with this one I can’t distinguish taste from smell and from the feel of it in the mouth. They aren’t separate sensations, it’s a trinity of pleasure.
She had chosen the right one. There always was a right answer and a wrong answer. This had been one more test successfully passed, one more notch on the scale of approval. He couldn’t entirely reject her, couldn’t send her back; she knew that. An adoption order couldn’t be revoked. That made it the more important that she should justify his choice of her, that she should give value for money. Hilda, who worked for hours in the kitchen preparing their meals, ate and drank little. She would sit, anxious eyes fixed on them as they shoveled in their food. She gave and they took. It was almost too psychologically neat.
Miss Henderson asked, Do you resent them for adopting you?
No, I’m grateful. I was lucky. I don’t think I’d have done well with a poor family.
Not even if they loved you?
I don’t see why they should. I’m not particularly lovable.
She hadn’t done well with a poor family, of that at least she could be certain. She hadn’t done well with any of her foster parents. Some smells: her own excreta, the rotting waste outside a restaurant, a young child bundled into soiled clothes on its mother’s lap pressed against her by the lurch of a bus, these could evoke a momentary panic that had nothing to do with disgust. Memory was like a searchlight sweeping over the lost hinterland of the self, illuminating scenes with total clarity, the colors gaudy as a child’s comic, edges of objects hard as blocks, scenes which could lie for months unremembered in that black wasteland, not rooted, as were other childish memories, in time and place, not rooted in love.
Do you love them, your adoptive parents?
She considered. Love. One of the most used words in the language, the most debased. Heloise and Abelard. Rochester and Jane Eyre. Emma and Mr. Knightly. Anna and Count Vronsky. Even within the narrow connotation of heterosexual love it meant exactly what you wanted it to mean.
No. And I don’t think they love me. But we suit each other on the whole. That’s more convenient, I imagine, than living with people that you love but don’t suit.
I can see that it could be. How much were you told about the circumstances of your adoption? About your natural parents?
As much, I think, as my adoptive mother could tell me. Maurice never talks about it. My adoptive father’s a university lecturer, a sociologist. Maurice Palfrey, the sociologist who can write English. His first wife and their son died in a car crash when the boy was three. She was driving. He married my adoptive mother nine months afterward. They discovered that she couldn’t have children, so they found me. I was being fostered at the time, so they took over the care of me and after six months applied to the county court and got an adoption order. It was a private arrangement, the kind of thing your new Act would make illegal. I can’t think why. It seems to me a perfectly sensible way of going about it. I’ve certainly nothing to complain of.
It worked very well for thousands of children and their adopters, but it had its dangers. We wouldn’t want to go back to the days when unwanted babies lay in rows of cots in nurseries so that adoptive parents could just go and pick out the one they fancied.
I don’t see why not. That seems to me the only sensible way, as long as the children are too young to know what’s happening. That’s how you’d pick a puppy or a kitten. I imagine that you need to take to a baby, to feel that this is a child that you want to rear, could grow to love. If I needed to adopt, and I never would, the last thing I’d want would be a child selected for me by a social worker. If we didn’t take to each other I wouldn’t be able to hand it back without the social services department striking me off the books as being one of those neurotic self-indulgent women who want a child for their own satisfaction. And what other possible reason could there be for wanting an adopted child?
Perhaps to give that child a better chance.
Don’t you mean, to have the personal satisfaction of giving that child a better chance? It amounts to the same thing.
She wouldn’t bother to refute that heresy, of course. Social-work theory didn’t err. After all, its practitioners were the new priesthood, the ministry of unbelievers. She merely smiled and persevered, Did they tell you anything about your background?
Only that I’m illegitimate. My adoptive father’s first wife came from the aristocracy, an earl’s daughter, and was brought up in a Palladian mansion in Wiltshire. I believe that my mother was one of the maids there, who got herself pregnant. She died soon after I was born and no one knew who my father was. Obviously he wasn’t a fellow servant; she couldn’t have kept that particular secret from the servants’ hall. I think he must have been a visitor to the house. There are only two things I can remember clearly about my life before I was eight; one is the rose garden at Pennington, the other is the library. I think that my father, my real father, was there with me. It’s possible that one of the upper servants at Pennington put my adoptive father in touch with me after his first wife died. He never speaks about it. I only learned as much as that from my adoptive mother. I suppose Maurice thought that I’d do because I was a girl. He wouldn’t want a boy to bear his name unless he were really his son. It would be terribly important to him to know that a son was really his own.
That’s understandable, isn’t it?
Of course. That’s why I’m here. It’s important for me to know that my parents really were my own.
Well, let’s say that you think it important.
Her eyes dropped to the file. There was a rustle of papers.
So you were adopted on the seventh of January 1969. You must have been eight. That’s quite old.
I suppose they thought it was better than taking a very young baby and having broken nights. And my adoptive father could see that I was all right, physically all right, that I wasn’t stupid. There wasn’t the same risk as with a young baby. I know that there are stringent medical examinations, but one can never be quite sure, not about intelligence, anyway. He couldn’t have borne to find himself saddled with a stupid child.
Is that what he told you?
No, it’s what I’ve thought out for myself.
One fact she could be sure of: that she came from Pennington. There was a childhood memory more clear even than that of the rose garden: the Wren library. She knew that she had once stood there under that exuberant seventeenth-century stuccoed ceiling with its garlands and cherubs, had stared down that vast room at the Grinling Gibbons carvings richly spilling from the shelves, at the Roubiliac busts set above the bookcases, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. In memory she saw herself standing at the great chart table reading from a book. The book had been almost too heavy to hold. She could still recall the ache in her wrists and the fear that she might drop it. And she was certain that her real father had been with her; that she had been reading aloud to him. She was so sure that she belonged at Pennington that sometimes she was tempted to believe that the earl had been her father. But the fantasy was unacceptable and she rejected it, faithful to the original vision of the visiting aristocrat. The earl must have known if he had fathered a child on one of his servants, and surely, surely he wouldn’t have rejected her totally, left her unsought and unrecognized for eighteen years. She had never been back to the house, and now that the Arabs had bought it and it had become a Moslem fortress she never would. But when she was twelve she had searched in Westminster reference library for a book on Pennington and had read a description of the library. There had been a picture too. The confirmation had jolted her heart. It was all there, the plaster ceiling, the Grinling Gibbons carvings, the busts. But her memory had come first. The child standing beside the chart table holding the book in her aching hands must have existed.
She scarcely heard the rest of the counseling. If it had to be done, she supposed that Miss Henderson was making a good enough job of it. But it was no more than a statutory nuisance, the way in which uneasy legislators had salved their consciences. None of the arguments so conscientiously put forward could shake her resolve to track down her father. And how could their meeting, however delayed, be unwelcome to him? She wouldn’t be coming empty-handed. She had her Cambridge scholarship to lay at his feet.
She said, wrenching her mind back to the present, I can’t see the point of this compulsory counseling. Are you supposed to dissuade me from tracing my father? Either our legislators think I have a right to know, or they don’t. To give me the right and at the same time officially try to discourage me from exercising it seems muddled thinking even for Parliament. Or do they just have a bad conscience about retrospective legislation?
Parliament wants adopted people to think carefully about the implications of what they’re doing, what it could mean for themselves, for their adoptive parents, for their natural parents.
I have thought. My mother is dead, so it can’t hurt her. I don’t propose to embarrass my father. I want to know who he is, or was, if he’s dead. That’s all. If he’s still alive, I should like to meet him, but I’m not thinking of bursting in on a family party and announcing that I’m his bastard. And I don’t see how any of this concerns my adoptive parents.
Wouldn’t it be wise, and kinder, to discuss it first with your adoptive parents?
What is there to discuss? The law gives me a right. I’m exercising it.
Thinking back on the counseling session that evening at home, Philippa couldn’t remember the precise moment when the information she sought had been handed to her. She supposed that the social worker must have said something: Here, then, are the facts you are seeking
was surely too pretentious and theatrical for Miss Henderson’s detached professionalism. But some words must have been said, or had she merely taken the General Registrar Office paper from the file and passed it over in silence?
But here it was at last in her hands. She stared at it in disbelief, her first thought that there had been some bureaucratic muddle. There were two names, not one, on the form. Her natural parents were shown as Mary Ducton and Martin John Ducton. She muttered the words to herself. The names meant nothing to her, stirred no memory, evoked no sense of completeness, of forgotten knowledge resurrected at a word to be recognized and acknowledged. And then she saw what must have happened.
She said, hardly realizing that she spoke aloud, I suppose they married my mother off when they found out that she was pregnant. Probably to a fellow servant. They must have been making that kind of tactful arrangement for generations at Pennington. But I hadn’t realized that I was placed for adoption before my mother died. She must have known that she hadn’t long to live and wanted to be sure that I would be all right. And, of course, if she were married before I was born the husband would be registered as my father. Nominally I suppose I’m legitimate. It’s helpful that she did have a husband. Martin Ducton must have been told that she was pregnant before he agreed to the marriage. She may even have told him before she died who my real father was. Obviously the next step is to trace Martin Ducton.
She picked up her shoulder bag and held out her hand to say good-bye. She only half heard Miss Henderson’s closing words, the offer of any future help she could give, reiterated advice that Philippa discuss her plans with her adoptive parents, the gently urged suggestion that if she were able to trace her father it should be done through an intermediary. But some words did penetrate her consciousness.
We all need our fantasies in order to live. Sometimes relinquishing them can be extraordinarily painful, not a rebirth into something exciting and new, but a kind of death.
They shook hands, and Philippa, looking into her face for the first time with any real interest, seeing her for the first time as a woman, detected there a fleeting look which, had she not known better, she might have mistaken for pity.
2
SHE POSTED HER application and check to the Registrar General that evening, 4 July 1978, enclosing, as she had done previously, a stamped addressed envelope. Neither Maurice nor Hilda was curious about her private correspondence, but she didn’t want to risk an officially labeled reply falling through the letter box. She spent the next few days in a state of controlled excitement which, for most of the time, drove her out of the house, afraid that Hilda might wonder at her restlessness. Pacing round the lake in St. James’s Park, hands deep in her jacket pockets, she calculated when the birth certificate might arrive. Government departments were notoriously slow, but surely this was a simple enough matter. They had only to check their records. And they wouldn’t be coping with a rush of applications. The Act had been passed in 1975.
In exactly one week, on Tuesday, 11 July, she saw the familiar envelope on the mat. She took it at once to her own room, calling out to Maurice from the stairs that there was no post for him. She carried it over to the window as if her eyes were growing weaker and she needed more light. The birth certificate, new, crisp, so much more imposing than the shortened form which had served her, as an adopted person, for so long, seemed at first reading to have nothing to do with her. It recorded the birth of a female, Rose Ducton, on 22 May 1960 at 41 Bancroft Gardens, Seven Kings, Essex. The father was shown as Martin John Ducton, clerk; the mother as Mary Ducton, housewife.
So they had left Pennington before she was born. That, perhaps, wasn’t surprising. What was unexpected was that they should have moved so far from Wiltshire. Perhaps they had wanted to cut themselves off entirely from the old life, from the gossip, from memories. Perhaps someone had found him a job in Essex, or he might have been returning to his home county. She wondered what he was like, this spurious, accommodating father, whether he had been kind to her mother. She hoped that she could like or at least respect him. He might still live at 41 Bancroft Gardens, perhaps with a second wife and a child of his own. Eighteen years wasn’t such a long time. She used the telephone extension in her room to ring Liverpool Street Station. Seven Kings was on the eastern suburban line and in the rush hour there were trains every ten minutes. She left without waiting for breakfast. If there were time, she would get coffee at the station.
The 9:25 train from Liverpool Street was almost empty. It was still early enough for Philippa to be traveling against the commuter tide. She sat in her corner seat, her eyes moving from side to side as the train racketed through the urban sprawl of the eastern suburbs; rows of drab houses with blackened bricks and patched roofs from which sprang a tangle of television aerials, frail crooked fetishes against the evil eye; layered high-rise flats smudged in a distant drizzle of rain; a yard piled high with the glitter of smashed cars in symbolic proximity to the regimented crosses of a suburban graveyard; a paint factory; a cluster of gasometers, pyramids of grit and coal piled beside the track; wastelands rank with weeds; a sloping green bank rising to suburban gardens with their washing lines and toolsheds and children’s swings among the roses and hollyhocks. The eastern suburbs, so euphoniously but inappropriately named Maryland, Forest Gate, Manor Park, were alien territory to her, as unvisited and remote from the preoccupations of the last ten years as were the outer suburbs of Glasgow and New York. None of her school friends lived east of Bethnal Green, although a number, unvisited, were reputed to have houses in the few unspoiled Georgian squares off the Whitechapel Road, self-conscious enclaves of culture and radical chic among the tower blocks and the industrial wasteland. Yet the grimy, unplanned urban clutter through which the train rocked and clattered struck some dormant memory, was familiar even in its strangeness, unique despite its bleak uniformity. Surely it wasn’t because she had been this way before. Perhaps it was just that the scenery flashing by was so predictably dreary, so typical of the gray purlieus of any large city, that forgotten descriptions, old pictures, and newsprint, snatches of film jumbled in her imagination to produce this sense of recognition. Perhaps everyone had been here before. This drab no-man’s land was part of everyone’s mental topography.
There were no taxis at Seven Kings Station. She asked the ticket collector the way to Bancroft Gardens. He directed her down the High Street, left down Church Lane, then first on the right. The High Street ran between the railway and the shopping arcade of small businesses with flats above, a launderette, a news agent, a greengrocer, and a supermarket with shoppers already queuing at the checkouts.
There was one scene so vividly recalled, validated by smell and sound and remembered pain that it was impossible to believe she had imagined. A woman wheeling a baby in a pram down just such a street. Herself, little more than a toddler, half stumbling beside the pram, clutching at the handle. The square paving stones speckled with light, unrolling beneath the whirling pram wheels, faster and faster. Her warm grip slipping on the moist metal and the desperate fear that she would lose hold, would be left behind, trampled and kicked under the wheels of the bright red buses. Then a shouted curse. The slap stinging her cheek. A jerk which nearly tore her arm from its socket, and the woman’s hand fastening her grip once more on the pram handle.